RAWSTORY: It's CHENEY AIDE JOHN HANNAH

[gp]

CHENEY AIDE COOPERATING WITH LEAK
PROBE, THOSE FAMILIAR WITH CASE SAY
PAPER: 'SENIOR COOPERATING WITNESS'

http://www.rawstory.com/

[savemefromdumbya]

1. is this the guy who took a vacation? nt

nt

[hang a left]

5. The spokesperson that got sent to Iraq?

I doubt it.

[hang a left]

2. Well Libby for sure is a target....

any guesses.

[Nickster]

7. But what if he cut a deal to save his skin?

[hang a left]

12. I don't think that Libby would be offered immunity he is in too deep.

Maybe they worked a deal to cop a plea but. in my mind, he is just as guilty as Cheney for sending us to war on a pack of lies.

[longship]

3. Story is taliking about Hannah

Somebody around here predicted Hannah.

[indie_voter]

11. D'OH!

I was wrong.

[hang a left]

20. Who is Hannah.

snip>

While Libby is a towering aspen, whose fall will make a rather loud noise, others in the same stand have already met a similar fate, and what we have here is a sort of domino effect. John Hannah, Cheney's special assistant for Middle East affairs, was fingered early on in this investigation. Last year, Richard Sale of UPI reported a rare leak from the investigators:

"'We believe that Hannah was the major player in this,' one federal law-enforcement officer said. Calls to the vice president's office were not returned, nor did Hannah and Libby return calls. The strategy of the FBI is to make clear to Hannah 'that he faces a real possibility of doing jail time' as a way to pressure him to name superiors, one federal law-enforcement official said."

Hannah has an interesting background. In the early 1990s, he served as head of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a think tank associated with the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC). As Middle East scholar Juan Cole pointed out, Hannah was a key figure in the intelligence manipulation effort that legitimized phony "evidence" of Iraq's WMD cooked up by Chalabi. Hannah, like the other aspens in the grove, turned with the rest of the cluster when it came to U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East:

"The WINEP pro-Likud network, which includes Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith in the Pentagon as well as Libby and Hannah at Cheney's office, has virtually dictated Bush administration Middle East policy. Wilson's debunking of one of its central claims might well have led Cheney to fire Hannah or to disregard his opinion. The WINEP crowd takes no prisoners and is very determined, over decades, to get its way. (Josh Marshall notes that they are already trying to protect Hannah with denials he could possibly have been involved, presumably meaning that they would be willing to throw Libby to the dogs.) Wilson had to be punished, from their point of view, and if possible marginalized, to protect Hannah's position."

Hannah may have thrown Libby to the dogs, just to save his own skin. This wouldn't be any more surprising than the actions of former Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin, who will plead guilty to spying for Israel in return for leniency in sentencing – and for testifying against his handlers, Steve Rosen, who for 20 years served as AIPAC's foreign policy director, and Keith Weissman, AIPAC's top Iran specialist. Rosen and Weissman pumped Franklin for classified information and handed it over to Israeli "diplomats" stationed in Washington. The trial is scheduled for January.

While Hannah, the former director of AIPAC's thinktank, was deeply involved in exposing a vitally important U.S. intelligence asset – Plame worked undercover in the CIA's WMD proliferation unit – AIPAC officials Rosen and Weissman were sneaking around Washington, meeting Franklin in train stations, and handing over U.S. secrets to Israeli spies.
snip>

[hang a left]

18. yes they did, and it was yesterday.

[Nickster]

4. Ohhhh, Libby anyone?

Darth must not be very happy today.

[blitzen]

6. John Hannah n/t

[Nickster]

9. That would work for me. Gives us a nice Bolton tie in as well.

[blitzen]

10. link

http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Cheney_aide_cooperating_with_CIA_outing_1018.html

[maine_raptor]

8. Lynne?

[hang a left]

19. lol

[Pirate Smile]

13. Here is more from the article:

"Individuals familiar with Fitzgerald’s case tell RAW STORY that John Hannah, a senior national security aide on loan to Vice President Dick Cheney from the offices of then-Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs, John Bolton, was named as a target of Fitzgerald’s probe. They say he was told in recent weeks that he could face imminent indictment for his role in leaking Plame-Wilson’s name to reporters unless he cooperated with the investigation.

Others close to the probe say that if Hannah is cooperating with the special prosecutor then he was likely going to be charged as a co-conspirator and may have cut a deal.

-snip-
“John Hannah and David Wurmser, mid-level political appointees in the vice-president’s office, have both been suggested as sources of the leak …Mid-level officials, however, do not leak information without the authority from a higher level,� Wilson notes.

-snip-
Fitzgerald may be looking at a broader conspiracy case of pre-war machinations by the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) and by the Pentagon’s ultra-secret Office of Net Assessment, the former operating out of Dick Cheney’s office and tasked with “selling� the war in Iraq, and the latter operating out of Defense Under Secretary for Policy, Douglas Feith’s office and tasked with creating a war to “sell,� as some describe. "

Who is this guy?

[Walt Starr]

14. I'll bet Matalin turned on Hannah

who is now turning on everybody else.

Bolton included.

[Catherine Vincent]

16. I hope they all turn on each other.

Crooked bastids!

[TahitiNut]

15. John Hannah can implicate both Cheney and Bolton.

Here's hoping he spills ALL the beans. :popcorn:

[Just Me]

17. A neoCON turning on fellow neoCONs. Holy shit!!!

If true, they are in such deep, deep caa caa!!! :rofl:

[oregonindy]

23. because true americans know that the neo-con agenda

is just fascism with a new name

[mmonk]

21. He's been targeted and started co-operating

early on. I thought this was going to be something new. I had speculated earlier that he left Libby out to dry. I'll be glad when some stories aren't recycled. Messes with the mind.

[mmonk]

22. I posted this earlier

from Justin Raimondo.http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=7490

24. some info on John Hannah from leftcoaster

Excerpt:

So who is John Hannah? Well, John Hannah is a senior national security aide to Dick Cheney. And he is also none other than someone who is one of the chief suspects for having outed Valerie Plame.

As Juan Cole put it: Hannah had fingers in all three rotten pies from which the worst intel came--Sharon's office in Israel, the Pentagon office of Special Plans (for which Hannah served as a liaison to Cheney), and fraudster Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress. Hannah had probably been the one who fed Cheney the Niger uranium story, triggering a Cheney request to the CIA to verify it and thence Joe Wilson's trip to Niamey in spring of 2002, where he found the story to be an absurd falsehood on the face of it. Geeze, isn't that nice? Hannah could be responsible for breaking the law in his outing of a CIA agent and was also the principle conduit for the faulty intelligence that fed our VP. Both the Plame investigation and the Chalabi affair are being investigated by the FBI. So do you think things might be getting a little hot for him now?

Update: The NY Times has a story that emphasizes how highly classified the information passed by Chalabi and crew to Iran was. The FBI won't have too many people to check out. I suspect it will be harder to suppress or slow down this case than is has been for finding who outed Valerie Plame.

http://www.theleftcoaster.com/archives/001791.php