A minor sidelight: The Niger documents, whatever their source,

[Jackpine Radical]

were incredibly crude. As someone commented, anybody who knows how to use Google could have debunked them, based on anachronisms alone, in about 2 minutes. So here's my question:

What about those Niger documents? WHY were they so crude? It's so...well, Roveian, like the Rather AWOL documents that seem to have been designed explicitly to be blown apart.

One theory was that they were created by the CIA (or acquired by them from the Italians) as sting bait intended to embarrass or even destroy the OSP stovepipe mechanism, to sow distrust in the inner sanctums of the White House, but the plan got away from them when the WH group was to stupid or self-deluded to recognize them as obvious forgeries.

So wat's your best guess at present, with all the newly available data and perspectives that are coming boiling out of Plamegate?

[blm]

1. LeDeen had them made by his fascist contacts in Italy.

.

[Jackpine Radical]

4. But why so crude? Those docs were just asking to be exposed.

If Ledeen paid good money for those things, he either got ripped off really badly or he got what he ordered-docs that can't stand even cursory examination by anybody who knows anything.

[blm]

7. Maybe it was a rush job? Or whoever he trusted in Italy

double-crossed him?

[seemslikeadream]

5. Yes 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.uruknet.info/?p=m16578&l=i&size=1&hd=0

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.

[ewagner]

2. Didn't Rove

earn his stripes with the Republican party by stealing Democratic Campaign letterhead and forging a letter offering booze and woman at a Dem fundraiser? He also gave them out to wine-o's and street people....strikes me it was done in Florida along with his partner, Lee Atwater.

[Jackpine Radical]

6. As someone pointed out elsewhere (was it you, Ed?),

Rove has been playing with forgeries for years. I do think I recall hearing about the case you're citing.

[ewagner]

9. I was thinking

it was from McGovern's campaign office in West Palm Beach.....

I was on Guam when it happened and didn't hear about it until after I got home in December...then it was related to me by other friends.

I could be wrong about that.

[symbolman]

8. It was in Chicago and it was Dixon's office

KKKarl broke into the office and stole letterheads, created invites and then handed them out to people in the Red Light Districts and soup kitchens..

Since he's a one trick pony and keeps doing the same things over and over like a junkie, I don't think it's too much of a stretch to realise that Rove's "Plumbers" did it, and the plumbers aka Nixon's were Ledeen, Rhode, Franklin, SISMI folks and a FORGER..

Pretty simple really and that's what I expounded in my film "Rove's War" (and why I called it that) at my site Takebackthemedia.com, 2 DVD's of RED MEAT at 150 minutes... I've got LOTS of goodies in there, including a Chronology..

People NEED to know WHO was doing all this, who the players are and I think I've helped in that regard.. plus my films/flash work are fun, educational, and enlightening..

HINT: Jon Stewart clips in it that SLAY these guys and keep the film rolling along, and from being another boring documentary :)

Good catch!

[applegrove]

3. A neocon cabal. The real neocons. Not Cheney & Rummy who

are neocon patsies but don't seem to know it - even now. The first rule of neocons is to use myth to change the world. They sold that myth (in late night surprise visits to immature power-hungry hawks in Alexandria or Chevy Chase - one by one). Then they continued to fuel the "movement" with lies and set ups like Chalabi or Niger forgeries.

Remember these are people who said in the 1960s they needed a prissy, patrician protestant to be their presidential patsy - and they found it in W.

Cheney & the like assume the neocons are telling the "truth to them". Is there any evidence the "real neocons" have ever told them to truth? Or succeeded at anything they tried?

It is the opposite thinking to real intellectuals - who really would "not want to be a member of a club that would have me". The Club comes first. Then the "thinking". And at every level - people are told they are in an exclusive club - from the Cheney's were bought in - to the religious right wing pastors who think abortion issue will actually be legislated against (and who in Bush found someone who was actually going to do that with appointments like Miers - to the horror of the neocons, to the families who think their family is special and their marriage even more special than what the Liberals are doing.

You ask who started this "myth"? Why some level of neocon of course.