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...community likely have extremely serious grievances against the Bush regime (most of which we all share), I wouldn't so easily dismiss the theory of a Bush Cartel black op to "plant" WMDs in Iraq. I've worked on this theory quite a bit, and have done a lot of thinking about it, and it seems to hold up rather well, especially when it comes to some of the mysteries around Treasongate (like, why did they do it, I mean why really--why put so many top Bushites at great risk of treason charges--just to punish an ex-diplomat for a dissenting article? Or, what was all that Niger business about, the forgeries, the Wilson trip, the Niger allegation getting into Bush's SOTU? Or, what was Judith Miller's role as Rumsfeld's "embed" in the "hunt" for WMDs in Iraq that they all knew weren't there?).
And I am not at all sure that the Joint Chiefs would have been told about it. Think of the various ways that Cheney and Rumsfeld have done end runs around normal channels of information and chains of command; their purges of independent thinkers, and favoritism toward yes men; their manipulation of information, their excessive secrecy, and so on. They are also closely tied into, and favor, private corporate/military interests, the use of mercenaries, and rogue military operations (think, Iran-Contra, and covert arms and drug dealing).
As a matter of fact, it is precisely because a group like the Joint Chiefs would likely veto such an extra-legal and very high risk black op, done purely for political considerations, that Rumsfeld, Cheney, Libby and the rest developed their own ad hoc intel and command structures.
The whole war has that extra-legal, ad hoc, unprofessional, ill considered feel to it: a completely trumped up war against the advice of a lot of top military and intelligence professionals, with the real purposes of the war being covert: getting private Bush Cartel control of the oil fields and creating Roman Empire II, and shoveling billions and billions of dollars into the pockets of Bush/Cheney buds in private war-related corporations (the latter probably the chief purpose, in my opinion--greed). The war in truth had nothing to do with defending the U.S. against "terrorists" or any other threat; and in fact is very counterproductive on security, and ruinous for the military in many ways, not the least of which are the violations of the UCMJ, with the detention and torture policy. And the war that military commanders had to sell to the troops was a war for freedom --a total and complete lie.
So, a plot to plant WMDs in Iraq fits right into this entire facade of lies and manipulation, in a war run by thieves and traitors.
A plot to plant WMDs in Iraq completes the arc of Treasongate. It provides the REASON for Treasongate, by relating it to what was happening in Iraq and also in Britain. Here it is:
The neocon criminals (Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al)--the cabal--set up Joe Wilson, with a wild goose chase trip to Niger, based on forged documents (the cabal all knew there were no nukes there), with the intention of discrediting the CIA, when the nukes that the cabal were intending to "plant" in Iraq were "found" by Judith Miller (who was running around Iraq with the U.S. troops hunting for WMDs that the cabal also knew weren't there, on a special "embed contract signed by Donald Rumsfeld himself). This "find" of planted WMDs would not only transform the political landscape, "proving" the war was justified, it would also "prove" that the CIA was wrong, uninformed, foolish and a danger to world peace, in its disbelief in Iraq nukes and opposition to the Iraq war.
That is part one of the theory: There was a long term plan to discredit the CIA, of which planting WMDs in Iraq was a component.
Someone foiled this plot (prevented the nukes from being planted.) There were two credible-sounding news reports out of Iran and Pakistan in March 2003, to this effect: that a covert U.S. effort to plant phony WMD evidence had been spotted in one place (Basra) and had met with "friendly fire" in another.
David Kelly, the Brits' chief WMD expert--who was an old hand at Iraq WMDs, an excellent scientist and legendary tough guy, with friends and contacts in Iraq--got word of these reports, investigated, and thus kicked over this Bush Cartel plot. It angered him (he was an honest guy), and prompted his anonymous whistleblowing to the BBC starting in late May 2003. (He had wanted Saddam ousted; why would he then take action to undermine the war politically, after the fact? He needs a motivator, and this fits him to a tee. He hated deceit.)
The Blairites panicked. They hunted him down within the government (this became big news in England at the time); he was mysteriously outed to his bosses (see Judith Miller paragraph, below*), and then wrote them a letter saying it was him. They interrogated him for days in a "safe house," threatened him with prosecution, outed his name to the press, and sent him home without protection. (They also viciously attacked the BBC.)
And here, the Plame/Kelly dates get interesting. The Kelly outing occurred right about the time that Judith Miller was first meeting with Scooter Libby about Plame's identity--late June. Their plot to plant WMDs in Iraq had been foiled (possibly more than once). They were not sure who was foiling them. They likely were still hoping to achieve it. And Judith Miller was intending to write the article on Wilson, outing Plame (BEFORE Wilson published his article on the Niger lie)--that's what her June 23 notes are about--because that was the plot, in essence: get Wilson to commit in public, disclose his ties to the CIA, "find" the planted nukes, and make the CIA into fools, never to be trusted again. (The cabal would then have a free hand for purging the CIA.) This long term plot, of course, goes back to the Niger forgeries and how/why the disproved Niger allegation got into Bush's SOTU speech. It was put there as bait.
Wilson said in an interview that he had called Condi Rice (circa spring '03) to get the regime to back off of the Niger allegation, and she told him, through intermediaries, that she was not interested in his information, but, if he was so concerned about the matter, why didn't he publish it?
Sure sounds like she was baiting him. In any case, they knew Wilson's article was coming. It was not a surprise. Rice knew about it. Miller was prepping to answer it--which makes their next actions (the hasty and foolish riskiness with which they outed Plame) hard to figure, unless it is connected to Kelly.
(*Note on Judith Miller: Her first meeting with Libby coincides with the time period in which Kelly was mysteriously outed to his bosses. Late June. He says a friend told him that his bosses had learned he was the BBC whistleblower--or he heard it on the grapevine. Some such statement. He had been corresponding with Miller. They were colleagues. She had used him as a major quoted source in her book, "Germs." And it was to Miller that Kelly wrote his last email, on the day he died--later released by his family, not by Miller--warning of the "many dark actors playing games." The bitter irony may be that this colleague whom he apparently still trusted may have been one of the "dark actors," perhaps the one who outed him. She was certainly being a "dark actor" to Plame and her covert CIA network, at the very same moment.)
On July 7, 2003, according to the Hutton report, Tony Blair was informed that David Kelly "could say some uncomfortable things." Not HAD said. COULD say. So, he knew something more than he had been whistleblowing to the BBC about (the "sexed up" intel). At a later date, Kelly said he promised them he wasn't going to reveal any "state secrets." So, presumably he knew some. Also, given the highly suspicious circumstances of Kelly's death, we have to consider what he might have known that could have gotten him killed. All in all, I think a Bush Cartel plot to plant WMDs in Iraq is a pretty good guess. Among other things, it explains why the Blairites were so freaked out about him. "Sexed up" intel--a controversy about words and emphasis--seems insufficient reason for how everyone behaved.
Another argument in favor of the WMD plot is the way both the Bushites and the Blairites primed the public to expect a find of WMDs, and this set up with Judith Miller so eagerly desiring "the scoop" and pumping up everyone's expectations. Were they all just sitting around HOPING she would find some? Not likely. And, of course, both Bush and Blair were probably COUNTING ON that false evidence for their political fortunes.
Blair was informed about what Kelly knew; and called AF-1, and warned them. This is what I think triggered the foolish, panicky Plame outing--with the Bushites contacting at least SIX reporters (six journalist witnesses to treason), circulating the Plame memo on AF-1 for many eyes to see, and putting numerous top Bushites at great risk of treason charges. The two events--the Kelly whisteblowing/outing, and the Wilson/Plame story--intersected on July 7, with the Blair warning. The next day, on July 8, the Plame memo (probably prepared for the original plot) gets taken onto AF-1, and Miller meets again with Libby that day, and talks to him on the phone on July 12. Their whole scene is basically falling apart, and they are scrambling to pick up the pieces. No WMDs in Iraq. And they are now threatened with exposure that they tried to plant them. They don't know who knows, how far it's gone, or when/where revelation might come. And they probably have strong suspicions, or some evidence, that it was Plame/BJ/CIA who had foiled them.
Plame was outed a week later, on July 14 (by Novak). Four days later, on July 18, Kelly was found dead, near his home, on the route of his normal afternoon walk, under a tree, with one slit wrist, and some painkillers scattered around, apparently having bled to death all night out in the cold and the rain. (Hardly a scientific way to kill yourself--but I won't go into that evidence. Suffice it to say, I'm 99% certain he was killed in a staged suicide, and so are a lot of other people.)
His office and computers were searched. And four days after that, the entire CIA WMD monitoring program (Brewster/Jennings) was outed (also by Novak), disabling all projects and putting all covert agents and contacts at risk of death. (I don't know why Miller didn't write the article outing Plame. Perhaps she'd taken on enough risks already with Kelly, and everything else.)
Presumably--if this theory is anywhere near correct--they found something in Kelly's computers that confirmed Plame/BJ/CIA involvement in foiling their dirty rotten scheme, which made Plame/BJ/CIA not just a hated opposition, to be destroyed for their dissent, but a great legal danger to all Bushites who were involved in the nuke-planting plot, starting (at least) with Cheney.
The outing of Brewster/Jennings on July 22 is further evidence that the Plame outing was not triggered by the Wilson article (July 6) but rather by the Kelly disclosure from Blair (July 7). The BJ outing doubled their legal risks, and accomplished nothing as to "punishing" Joe Wilson for his dissenting article. Talk about overkill. And there it is nakedly in cold print. It's not even subtle. This is so stupid. There must have been a million other ways to punish Wilson, or even to destroy BJ. It all points to haste, panic, rush. They wanted to silence, disable, disrupt, punish and endanger Plame and her whole network NOW, and had no time for subtler methods and little time to cobble together cover stories.
The Rovian revenge story has always seemed odd to me--that Wilson being the husband of a covert CIA WMD expert somehow discredits him as an emissary to Niger on nuke material; it would seem to do just the opposite--enhance his mission. This cover story apparently had a couple of purposes, all mixed up together, one of them being to point away from Cheney as the architect of the Niger mission, but it's such a confused tale that I was thinking something got lost in translation--from Cheney to Libby to Rove, Miller and others; but now I think: haste, panic. They DIDN'T HAVE TIME to put anything better together. Why the rush? And, for that matter, why not just let Wilson's article sink into oblivion from entropy, as the war profiteering corporate news monopolies would certainly let it do, if they were ordered to.
David Kelly and a Bushite plot to plant WMDs in Iraq makes a lot of things make sense. That's why it's a good working theory. I haven't had time to put together an annotated version. There are refs for many of the points in this tale. But it is a tale, a theory, a narrative, a speculation, on the whole--a valid and necessary thing to do, in looking at a complex crime like this one. As I said, it completes the arc of Treasongate: from the U.S. to Britain to Iraq; from the scientists and intel professionals to the political spinners to the public; from lying about WMDs, to planting WMDs, to covering up the planting of WMDs, to committing other crimes to cover up the cover ups. It also suits these criminals. It fits their M.O., that they would attempt such a deceit.
Back away from it a bit and ask yourself: What the hell is the entire Bush regime doing before a Grand Jury, for trying to discredit and shake off a dissenter from their war policy? Isn't that some underling's job? Why the full court press? Why risk everything for it? It was just words, after all--from their point of view, a propaganda game, a game they had been playing well, as had Blair in England. The great majority of people didn't believe them anyway. It was a game of illusions, and short attention spans, and lapdog corporate news monopolies. Why take such risks over a dissenting article, or even a book, or a few relatively mild disclosures to the BBC?
It doesn't add up--unless you add in David Kelly and the WMD plot. Fear and panic were at work, not just arrogance. Arrogance would have ignored Wilson, and maybe very quietly destroyed his bank credit or something. Instead, they turned what could have been a quickly forgotten annoyance into their downfall. Why?
I don't mean to dis Wilson in any way. I think he is an incredibly courageous man, brilliant and highly principled, and one of the great patriots of our time. I'm just trying to look at it from the Bushite point of view. If you want something to go away, you don't make a great fuss about it. You might try to kill it with ridicule (which they tried to). But then you cold shoulder it; you act as if it's nothing--a disgruntled former insider. You don't out somebody's CIA wife--over an article! And you for sure don't endanger your entire administration over it.
It wasn't the article. It was something else, something worse. And this theory seems quite plausible as the answer.
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