CONTROVERSIAL NEOCON ADMITS He Worked at Magazine That Found Niger Docs

[kpete]

American who advised Pentagon says he worked at magazine that found forged Niger doc uments
Larisa Alexandrovna
Published: January 17, 2006


A controversial neoconservative who occasionally consulted for the Bush Defense Department has confirmed that he was a contributor to the Italian magazine Panorama, whose reporter first came across forged documents which purported that Iraq was seeking to obtain uranium from Niger.

The bogus documents became the basis for the infamous sixteen words in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union Address, in which he detailed his case for war. Their origin has been one of the most persistent mysteries in how American intelligence on Iraq was so wrong.

In an email to RAW STORY, occasional Bush foreign affairs advisor Michael Ledeen confirmed that he was, "several years ago," a regular contributor to Panorama. Leeden would not provide more specificity.


While most Americans have yet to hear of Ledeen or Panorama, the confirmation of his work with the publication adds yet another dimension to the Niger forgeries scandal and possible U.S. government involvement in pre-war intelligence manipulation.

Ledeen denies that he was involved in the Niger forgeries. He says he has no knowledge of the documents or how they came to be provided to the U.S. government.


http://rawstory.com/news/2005/American_who_consulted_for_Pentagon_says_0117.html

[Skidmore]

1. Ledeen

"denies that he was involved in the Niger forgeries. He says he has no knowledge of the documents or how they came to be provided to the U.S. government."

Bet that magazine agrees with him too.

[grasswire]

2. this is huge news

A full investigation of the shadowy Ledeen is in order. And a review of his daughter's spending habits would be useful, too, considering that she was in charge of a lot of the "reconstruction" money that went to Iraq and was never accounted for. She's a FR freeper, by the way.

[seemslikeadream]

10. yes Simone Ledeen

[DoYouEverWonder]

12. Ledeen's daugher is a freeper!

Oh isn't that special.

What's her screen name? Any idea?

[grasswire]

27. hmmm

I can't remember. I do remember reading her posts from Iraq, when she was gushing over Bush's visit the day he took the troops a plastic turkey.

Here's a previous link to a DU thread with some info about Ledeen.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=576439&mesg_id=576439&listing_type=

[schmuls]

21. I need to know more about the theft of Iraq's reconstruction

money by Simone Ledeen. What are your sources?

[Kablooie]

37. EVERYTHING is huge news ...

but it makes no difference.

A dog down a well gets more attention and response.

[blm]

3. Keep this baby UP and crosspost to other forums.Maybe SOME media will

pick it up. What's left of the honest media, anyway.

[mod mom]

7. you mean Keith Olbermann?

[blm]

14. Pretty sad when we can name honest journalists on one hand in this country

.

[Octafish]

33. The rank & file still have a few who give a damn.

The young ones, taking their places? Most like their video and medication, unfortunately.

[blm]

KandR - all the way.

.

[mod mom]

4. On Ledeen's colorful past:

Ledeen has a colorful track record, which has produced substantial grist for the conspiracy mill: He was allegedly tied to the Italian P2 Masonic Lodge, a violent right wing group that was involved in a number of terrorists attacks in Italy in the 1970s the 1980s; in the late 1970s, while P2 was doing its dirty work, Ledeen was working as a consultant to Italian intelligence on terrorism issues; as a consultant to the National Security Council in the 1980s, Ledeen acted as a go-between for Oliver North in the early stages of the Iran-Contra affair, working with the Israeli spy David Kimche to gain the release of U.S. hostages in Beirut through an Iranian arms dealer, Manucher Ghorbanifar; he helped promote the "Bulgarian Connection" theory that the KGB was behind the assassination attempt on the pope in 1981; and, more recently, the Sydney Morning Herald reported (August 8, 2003) that Ledeen worked with Pentagon staffers to redevelop the channel to arms dealer Ghorbanifar in support of resistance efforts in Iran. Reported the Herald: " Rhode recently acted as a liaison between Feith's office, which drafted much of the Administration's post-Iraq planning, and Ahmed Chalabi, a former Iraqi exile groomed for leadership by the Pentagon. Mr. Rhode is a protege of Michael Ledeen, who was a National Security Council consultant in the mid 1980s when he introduced Mr. Ghorbanifar to Oliver North, a NSC aide, and others in the opening stages of the Iran-Contra affair. It is understood Mr. Ledeen reopened the Ghorbanifar channel with Mr. Feith's staff." (9, 10)

http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/1261

[Skidmore]

8. This man is a true psychopath.

[SeattleRob]

5. very interesting,,,

yet another piece to the puzzle.


Great work by the folks at Raw Story!

[seemslikeadream]

6. Ledeen

http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2005/10/index.html#008117

HADLEY NAMED. La Repubblica has a dynamite series this week on the origin of the yellowcake forgeries. Laura Rozen reports:
With Patrick Fitzgerald widely expected to announce indictments in the CIA leaks investigation, questions are again being raised about the murky matter that first led to the appointment of the special counsel: namely, how the Bush White House came into possession of discredited Italian intelligence reports claiming that Iraq sought uranium "yellowcake" from Niger.
The key documents supposedly proving the Iraqi attempt turned out to be crude forgeries on official stationery stolen from the African nation's Rome embassy. Among the most tantalizing aspects of the debate over the Iraq War is the origin of those fake documents and the role of the Italian intelligence services in disseminating them.

In an explosive series of articles appearing this week in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, investigative reporters Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d'Avanzo reveal how Niccolo Pollari, chief of Italy's military intelligence service, known as SISMI, brought the Niger yellowcake story directly to the White House after his insistent overtures had been rejected by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2001 and 2002.

Today's exclusive report in La Repubblica reveals that Pollari met secretly in Washington on September 9, 2002, with then–Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. Their secret meeting came at a critical moment in the White House campaign to convince Congress and the American public that war in Iraq was necessary to prevent Saddam Hussein from developing nuclear weapons.

The La Repubblica article quotes a Bush administration official saying, "I can confirm that on September 9, 2002, general Nicolo Pollari met Stephen Hadley."

Laura will have more on this story later today.


and this
http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=7256


JANUARY 2001 BREAK-IN AT NIGER EMBASSY

At night, between the first and second of the January 2001, a mysterious thief came to the embassy of Niger in Rome and into the residence of the counselor in charge. It turned out that some letterhead and seals (see photocopy) were missing. A second dossier on Niger-Iraq trade soon came into Martino’s hands, one that included references to uranium trafficking. Martino claims he got it from embassy personnel and that he thought it was authentic.


http://nuralcubicle.blogspot.com/2005/10/berlusconi-behind-fake-yellowcake.html

Double-Dealers and Dilettantes--the Men Behind Nigergate Were All Italians.

The military intervention in Iraq was justified by two revelations: Saddam Hussein attempted to acquire unprocessed uranium (yellowcake) in Niger (1) for enrichment with centrifuges built with aluminum tubes imported from Europe(2). The fabricators of the twin hoaxes (there was never any trace in Iraq of unprocessed uranium or centrifuges) were the Italian government and Italian military intelligence. La Repubblica has attempted to reconstruct the who, where and why of the manufacture and transfer to British and American intelligence of the dodgy dossier for war.

They are the same two hoaxes that Judith Miller, the reporter who betrayed her newspaper, published (together with Michael Gordon) on September 8, 2002. In a lengthy investigative piece for the New York Times, Miller reported that Saddam could have built an atomic weapon with those aluminum tubes. These were the goods that the hawks in the Bush administration were expecting.

The "war dance" which followed Judith Miller’s scoop seemed like "carefully-prepared theater” to an attentive media-watcher, Roberto Reale of Ultime Notizie (The Latest News).

Condoleezza Rice, who was then White House Security Advisor, said on CNN: We don’t want the smoking gun to look like a mushroom cloud. A menacing Dick Cheney told Meet the Press that We know with absolute certainty that Saddam is using his technical and commercial capacities to acquire the material necessary to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon. This was the beginning of an escalation of fear.

26 September 2002: Colin Powell warns the Senate: The Iraqi attempt to acquire uranium is proof of its nuclear ambitions.

19 December 2002: The information on Niger and the uranium is included in the three-page President’s Daily Briefing prepared each day by the CIA and the Department of State for George W. Bush. The ambassador to the United Nations, John Negroponte, added his stamp of approval: Why is Iraq dissimulating its purchase of Niger uranium?

more

http://crookedtimber.org/2005/10/25/la-repubblica-scoop

....

It’s a fact that on the eve of the Iraq war, and under the supervision of the diplomatic advisor to the Foreign Ministry, Gianni Castellaneta (today ambassador to the USA), the director of SISMI organized his agenda in Washington with the staff of Condoleeza Rice, who was National Security Adviser to the White House at that time. La Repubblica is able to document this two track process between the government and Italian intelligence. At least one of these ‘barely official’ meetings of Pollari’s was, according to secret service agents, the ‘creation of a system’ that would bring together government, intelligence and public affairs .

To summarize: Nicolo Pollari’s SISMI wanted to substantiate the the Iraqi acquisition of raw uranium to build a nuclear bomb. The game-plan was rather transparent. ‘Authentic’ documents relating to an attempted acquisition in Niger (old Italian intelligence from the 1980’s) were the dowry of the second-in-command of CISMI’s Roman headquarters (Antonio Nucera). They were bundled together with another fabricated document … through a simulated burglary on the Nigerien embassy (from which they had gotten headed notepaper and seals). The documents were shown by Pollari’s men to CIA station agents, and at the same time, a SISMI ‘postman’ by the name of Rocco Martino was sent to Sir Richard Dearlove of MI6 in London.

turning to the second chapter of the Great Swindle, organized in Italy, to build the case that military intervention in Iraq was necessary. … the Italian report on uranium …

… The CIA analysts thought the first report ‘very limited’ and ‘without the necessary details.’ INR analysts in the Department of State assessed the information as ‘highly suspect.’ … The immediate impact on the American Intelligence community wasn’t very gratifying for Pollari … Gianni Castellaneta advised him to look in ‘other directions’ too, while the minister of Defence, Antonio Martino invited him to meet ‘an old friend of Italy’s.’ The American friend was Michael Ledeen, an old fox in the ‘parallel’ intelligence community in the US, who had been declared an undesirable person in our country in the 1980’s . Ledeen was at Rome on behalf of the Office of Special Plans, created at the Pentagon by Paul Wolfowiz to gather intelligence that would support military intervention in Iraq. A source at Forte Braschi told La Repubblica : “Pollari got a frosty reception from the CIA’s station head in Rome, Jeff Castelli, for this information on uranium. Castelli apparently let the matter drop . Pollari got the hint and talked about it with Michael Ledeen.’ We don’t know what Michael Ledeen did in Washington. But at the beginning of 2002, Paul Wolfowitz convinced Dick Cheney that the uranium trail intercepted by the Italians had to be explored top to bottom. The vice-president, as the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence tells it, once again asked the CIA ‘very decisively’ to find out more about the ‘possible acquisition of Nigerien uranium.’ In this meeting, Dick Cheney explicitly said that this piece of intelligence was at the disposition of a “foreign service.”

… Forte Braschi says that “Pollari was incredibly cunning – he knew that it wasn’t enough to rely on the CIA to push the uranium story. It was necessary to work, as Palazzo Chigi and the Department of Defence had indicated, with the Pentagon and with the National Security Adviser, Rice. … An administration official has told La Repubblica “I can confirm that on September 9 2002, General Nicolo Pollari met Stephen Hadley, the deputy to the National Security Adviser, Condoleeza Rice.”… SISMI’s ‘postman,’ Rocco Martino contacted a journalist for a weekly newspaper – edited by Carlo Rossella – to sell her the documents at issue. … Panorama had a worldwide scoop. Title “The War? It’s already begun,’ it spoke of ‘half a ton of uranium.’ … The government asked. The intelligence service gave. The media spread it. The government confirmed it. It was an old disinformation technique from the Cold War. Exaggerate the danger of the threat. Terrify and convince public opinion of it.

more
http://nuralcubicle.blogspot.com/2005/10/sismis-war-in-iraq-iranian-connection.html


Monday, October 31, 2005
SISMI's War in Iraq: The Iranian Connection

Carlo Bonini and Giuseppi d'Avanzo are at it again. Another three-part blockbuster exposé on the involvement of Italian Military intelligence inside Iraq.

Part I: From Chelabi to Iranian Agents--SISMI's War in Iraq
A strategic summit in Rome with the Pentagon.

ROME: He’s another politico-military intelligence chief. He’s a SISMI man. He makes his way slowly down the narrow hallway of the bar at the Hotel Eden in via Ludovisi. He stops to admire the sky and the attractive skyline of Rome in the April sun (it is 22 April 2003) through the hotel’s large windows. He looks elegant in his Chairman's Committee grisaille. . He selects a table at the center of the terrace. The waiter walks over and solicitously takes his order. The gentleman orders a freshly-squeezed orange juice and a double espresso. The Anglo-American invasion of Iraq began on the night of 19-20 March, thirty-three days earlier.

Today, as Silvio Berlusconi reveals that he never supported the military intervention in Iraq, it is fitting to tell the story of how our country, Italy, although allegedly opposed to war as our Premier now claims, was an active protagonist in war preparations and operations.

We will reveal the different arrangements and plans of action, as well as who planned them and with whom they were planned.

For us Italians, recounts the high-ranking SISMI official to La Repubblica, the war on Iraq was already underway in the days before Christmans, 2002. He smiles. He is animated with a glint of excitement in his eyes and for once seems seems to have no qualms about letting his personal satisfaction slip from behind a frozen mask.

Our man is too disciplined to crow about his successes and too stubborn to be discouraged by defeat. He tells us: It was a novelty, a revolution for our intelligence services. Never before in its history has SISMI been so prominently involved in military ground operations and a major role in planning a war campaign, to boot. The Italian Government? Of course our work was authorized by the Italian Government—are you joking? It was real war, not an exercise! The twenty men we sent to Iraq were risking their lives. He pauses. The espresso arrives. He sips it slowly, his eyes half-closed with satisfaction.

He continues. Twenty men from three SISMI departments were involved: Intelligence, Operations and Counterterrorism. They were divided into small groups which were to operate in and around the areas of Kirkuk, Baghdad and Basrah using outlandish disguises. Each unit was unaware of the identities and the mission of the others. Each unit was ordered to operate within a sector of territory and to work with intelligence “assets” who had already been selected and trained. The objectives were twofold: To identify Iraqi defenses and to evaluate the readiness of the Iraqi armed forces.

If combat was less intense than expected, it is due to the job we did—and we didn’t do it alone. If we won the war before firing a shot, it was due to our successes at infiltration and intelligence-gathering.

The story of Italian military intervention in Iraq begins when the resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, Michael Ledeen, sponsored by Defense Minister Antonio Martino, debarks in Rome with Pentagon men in tow to meet a handful of “Iranian exiles.” The meeting is organized by SISMI. In an Agency “safe house” near Piazza di Spagna (however, other sources have told us it was a reserved room in the Parco dei Principi Hotel).


"Reid: Cheney Obstructing Investigation"

http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/002979.html

Reid: Cheney Obstructing Investigation
From Laura Rosen at War and Piece...

Reid on Fire

The New Republic has more on what I reported last month: that Cheney has intervened with chairman Pat Roberts to obstruct the Senate Select Intelligence committee's investigation of the Bush administration's use of Iraq intelligence. TNR write:

...--More dramatically, Reid also made it clear that he believes the delay in the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation of prewar Iraq WMD--the underlying issue behind Tuesday's closed session--is entirely attributable to Vice President Dick Cheney. "Nothing happens regarding intelligence gathering ... unless it's signed off on by the Vice President," he said. " Roberts couldn't do it"--i.e., Roberts couldn't conduct a full investigation without Cheney's approval. When I asked Reid whether he meant to state so flatly that Cheney was personally and directly stalling the Intelligence Committee's work, he didn't pause a beat. In fact he almost stood from his chair. "Yes. I say that without any qualification ... Circle it." ...

I don't understand why we haven't heard Pat Roberts complaining more vociferously about the obstruction he's experienced from the Veep. Why would the Senator stand for the administration bucking oversight and Congressional reporting requirements on Iraq intelligence, torture, black site prisons, etc.? (Via Tapped's Ezra Klein).



http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20051103/pl_afp/usital ...

But committee staff sources say that before the cooperation ceased, the committee had received from Feith’s office internal memos suggesting that the office may indeed have been conducting unlawful activities. In particular, Democratic staffers are interested in a secret December 2001 meeting of two Feith deputies, Larry Franklin and Harold Rhode, with Ghorbanifar in Rome. The meeting also included members of a foreign intelligence service (Italy’s SISMI). The catch is that it wasn’t reported in advance to the intelligence committee or the CIA, in possible violation of Section 502 of the National Security Act, which says that anyone conducting intelligence activities must inform the committee and the agency



"Italy MPs probe Niger-Iraq claim"

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4402594.stm

Italy MPs probe Niger-Iraq claim

The director of the Italian military intelligence agency (Sismi) is due to give evidence over allegations that Iraq sought to buy uranium from Niger.

Nicolo Pollari is testifying before a parliamentary committee over reports that Italy wilfully gave the US and UK evidence that turned out to be false......


The Italian hearing into the claims is being held behind closed doors, but some details were expected to emerge later.

Italian newspaper La Repubblica says Italian agents gave the false dossier to British and American intelligence services........


"Niger Uranium Forgeries: Excavating a Roman Mystery"


One has to wonder how Laura can have such certain knowledge of what Fitzgerald has or has not requested. Ah, but if there is no such report -- and she cites the head of the Italian intelligence oversignt committee, one Enzo Bianco, denying it -- then how can Fitzgerald have requested it? There is, here, perhaps some confusion as to the nature of the "report" -- is it official, or is it just a transcript of a hearing? I think this guy, whoever he is, has the right idea.

Giovanni D'Avanzo, writing in La Repubblica , poses a few questions to Senor Bianco's oversight committee, and in the course of them avers:

"Sometime after October 9, 2002, a team of SISMI agents are ordered to keep Rocco Martino under close surveillance ... Why was no surveillance memo or report issued to judicial investigators on Rocco Martino, who is investigated by the Rome Public Prosecutor’s office in 2003, until the fall of 2004?"

So there was an investigation, albeit not by the Italian parliament but by Rome's public prosecutor. It could be that this is what both Walker's and my own sources are referring to.

Laura cites several other skeptics, including a reporter for La Repubblica and "a former U.S. official recently in Italy," who say this story is "the echo of a rumor put out by people back the States." She also cites Vince Cannistraro, "who at one time heard rumors of such a report from Italian sources," and who

"Now says there doesn't appear to be a parliamentary report either. 'There is no published report,”'Cannistraro told me Monday. 'If there is a report, we might expect it would have some analysis and conclusions. There is no report, at least not a published report. …I think this stuff is just getting circulated.'"

Of course it isn't published -- that's the whole point.

Yes, it's true, as Laura says, that the Italians aren't too eager to have the blame pinned on SISMI -- but that doesn't mean SISMI isn't involved. And some Italians -- the left-wing opposition coalition, for example -- might be understandably eager to expose the scandal in the run-up to Italy's elections scheduled for next year.

Laura goes into the Italian role in creating and disseminating these documents, referring to the La Repubblica series on the subject, but somehow neglects to mention the crucial American angle -- and the key role of American neocons, i.e. Michael Ledeen, in funneling the information contained in the Niger forgeries to Washington. Someone legitimized these fake documents by doing an end run around the CIA and the mainstream intelligence community, and injected a fabrication into the American intelligence stream. Who was it? La Repubblica fingers the Office of Special Plans, and names names, including Ledeen, Harold Rhode, and Larry Franklin, the confessed spy for Israel.

...

I trust my source, and I furthermore think it's unimportant whether this information is coming from the Italian parliament or Rome's public prosecutor: the point is that the information is there, and it's getting out. Antiwar.com stands by its story.


"Open the Ledeen Dossier!"

http://www.larouchepub.com/other/editorials/2005/3 ...

The stakes involved in the Ledeen dossier are much more significant than the particular incident around the yellowcake. As EIR documented at great length, Ledeen is not just a nasty American political operative, but had been brought into the service of one of the remnant fascist organizations of the Mussolini era, the Propaganda Two (P-2) freemasonic lodge. P-2, which was founded by avowed wartime fascist grandmaster Licio Gelli, is an outgrowth of the Venetian synarchist bankers network which runs international terrorism, and proceeds from the avowed aim of destroying all nation-states, particularly the United States. The P-2 network has been exposed over the past 20-plus years as the real center of international terrorism, including the left and right wings of the "strategy of tension" which carried out such atrocities as the 1980 Bologna bombing, and the assassination of former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro.

Italian political life is riddled with assets, if not outright agents, of the P-2. Notable among them is Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi himself, whose membership card is a matter of public record. Given the prominence of P-2 influence in Italy, it should be no surprise that the Italians, under a Berlusconi government, were the ones who provided the cover of the forged Niger yellowcake documents, to support the Cheney-Bush war drive.

The question raised here is a fundamental one. The role of former P-2ers Ledeen and Berlusconi in promoting the war, underscores the reality that the drive for empire and world dictatorship, for which Cheney is a frontman, is in fact the project of an international synarchist oligarchy, the direct descendants of those banking families who funded Hitler and Mussolini, and created World War II. Cheney is undoubtedly a fascist thug, eager to carry out whatever wars, torture, and economic genocide are on the agenda of the desperate synarchist bankers. But the brains for these operations come from the top level of the heirs of the Venetian banking system, who know that they will destroy the United States as a republic by carrying out these plans.

The prime objective for all those patriots and world-citizens who wish to save this planet from a descent into a New Dark Age, is, of course, to remove Dick Cheney from office. But exposing the roots of Cheney policies in the global Venetian synarchist banking system, is a crucial concomitant, if we are to get the alternative, FDR-like policy put into effect.


http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/nolan-m2.html

How would the neocon think tanks view martial law? Michael Ledeen, a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, and close and trusted White House adviser, has this to say on p. 173 of his book Machiavelli on Modern Leadership: Why Machiavelli’s Iron Rules Are As Timely and Important Today As Five Centuries Ago: “Paradoxically, preserving liberty may require the rule of a single leader – a dictator – willing to use those dreaded 'extraordinary measures,' which few know how, or are willing, to employ."

According to the Boston Globe, Ledeen in a 2003 speech to the American Enterprise Institute, asserted our nation’s insatiable lust for war by claiming that "All the great scholars who have studied American character have come to the conclusion that we are a warlike people and that we love war. . .What we hate is not casualties but losing." Did anyone in the media ever challenge an administration spokesman to defend Ledeen’s staggeringly wrongheaded, anti-American values? Did any of the (self-described) scholars at AEI that day ask why the GD fool would say such a thing? President Bush, for his part has personally offered these congratulations to the AEI: “At the American Enterprise Institute, some of the finest minds in our nation are at work on some of the greatest challenges to our nation. You do such good work that my administration has borrowed 20 such minds.”

The leaders of the War Machine – with their gulags, their lies, their senseless, immoral war – do not treat enemies and purported enemies terribly well. In the event of martial law, it would be naïve indeed to suspect that they would treat Americans any better. Patriots – left, right and center – should unite under the American flag to stop the War Machine today while they still can. The impeachment of Bush and Cheney is the obvious place to start. We, the people, should demand it of the US Congress, just as statesmen and citizens of their time demanded the Bill of Rights. Congress should be ordered, as well, to act responsibly and responsively and in the best interest of the sovereign Republic of the United States of America, not in the interest of neocon warmongers.


"Italy's Top Spy Names Freelance Agent as Source of Forged Niger-Iraq"

... Uranium Documents


http://www.nytimes.com/glogin?URI=http://www.nytim ...

Italy's Top Spy Names Freelance Agent as Source of Forged Niger-Iraq Uranium Documents

November 4, 2005 by ELAINE SCIOLINO and ELISABETTA POVOLEDO

ROME, Nov. 3 - Italy's spymaster identified an Italian occasional spy named Rocco Martino on Thursday as the disseminator of forged documents that described efforts by Iraq to buy uranium ore from Niger for a nuclear weapons program, three lawmakers said Thursday.

The spymaster, Gen. Nicolò Pollari, director of the Italian military intelligence agency known as Sismi, disclosed that Mr. Martino was the source of the forged documents in closed-door testimony to a parliamentary committee that oversees secret services, the lawmakers said.

Senator Massimo Brutti, a member of the committee, told reporters that General Pollari had identified Mr. Martino as a former intelligence informer who had been "kicked out of the agency." He did not say Mr. Martino was the forger.

The revelation came on a day when the Federal Bureau of Investigation confirmed that it had shut down its two-year investigation into the origin of the forged documents.


http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/002983.html

Laura Rozen: "The (Niger forgeries) Report that Wasn't"

For weeks in the run-up to the Libby indictment last Friday, reports swirled in the blogosphere and some wires. They contended that CIA leak prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald had “widened his probe” to include investigating the origins of the Niger yellowcake forgeries themselves. They spoke of Fitzgerald getting ahold of a secret Italian parliamentary report that reportedly fingered a gang of American neoconservatives and aides to Ahmad Chalabi as being behind the Niger forgeries.

...

There’s just one problem: Not only has Fitzgerald not received such a report or even indicated he has any interest in one. There is no Italian parliamentary report, published or unpublished, on the Niger forgeries. In fact, until today, there has been no Italian parliamentary investigation of the Niger forgeries, or the claim promoted by the Italian military intelligence organization Sismi to the CIA and other western intelligence agencies that Iraq was seeking vast quantities of yellowcake uranium in Niger.

...

A reporter with the Italian newspaper Repubblica, which published a blockbuster series on the origins of the Niger forgeries last week, said that he heard rumors of such a report while in Washington this past summer, and went back to Italy and checked them out with his sources. He was left scratching his head. Not only is there no such report, there is as yet no such Italian parliamentary investigation. Sismi’s director Nicolo Pollari was interviewed by the Italian parliamentary committee overseeing the intelligence services on Thursday, in a closed-door session.

...

The Italian military intelligence organization Sismi reported that Iraq had signed a contract to purchase 500 tons of yellowcake uranium from Niger to the CIA in October 2001 and February 2002. It also reported those claims to Britain’s foreign intelligence service, the MI6, which reported them back to Washington. A motley crew including a senior Sismi officer, a former Sismi officer turned intelligence peddler (Rocco Martino), and a Sismi asset at the Niger embassy in Rome were identified by Repubblica as having collaborated to assemble the Niger forgeries, after staging a robbery on New Year’s Day 2001 to get official Niger embassy letterhead and a diplomatic codebook. Martino reportedly sold the dossier of forgeries to the French, the British, attempted but failed to sell them to the American embassy in Rome, and to an Italian reporter working for a Berlusconi owned magazine.


Lets hope Fitzgerald really does stay un-compromised, period because everyone knows from reading it Cheney deflected the blame to Italy.

The real forgers were NOT mentioned ie Duane Claridge so you can immediately see it.....total fucking whitewash in progress and its going to take a huge entity/army to get this bastard once and for all.

Notice how there was never any mention of....MICHAEL LEDEEN, mossad etc....

More about the Whitewash....you can spot them a damn mile away now.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20051103/wl_mideast_af ...

"no one here has any recollection of Niger and uranium being discussed"


http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com /

QUESTION: Thank you. Any more explanation of the Berlusconi-President discussion about Italian intelligence on Iraq -- is this to say that Mr. Fitzgerald's finding that the Niger claim had its genesis in Italian intelligence was wrong?
SCOTT McCLELLAN: Mr. Fitzgerald's -- I'll have to look back at what his finding was. I don't recall the specifics of that.

QUESTION: Fitzgerald found that what we had been calling British intelligence, the document -- the forged document --

SCOTT McCLELLAN: Maybe I missed that. I don't think so. I don't think so.

QUESTION: -- alleging an Iraq --

SCOTT McCLELLAN: Okay, I don't think he did.

QUESTION: I'm wrong on this?

SCOTT McCLELLAN: Maybe I'm wrong. But I don't think he --

QUESTION: That's not ringing any bells.

SCOTT McCLELLAN: Yes.

QUESTION: It's not ringing any bells with other people either.

QUESTION: No, it is, it is. And I can't remember if it's Fitzgerald or somebody else, but there's this is the central issue is --

QUESTION: The central issue was --

QUESTION: -- the source of the --

QUESTION: The source of the forged document was Italy, who handed it to --

SCOTT McCLELLAN: No, the -- we actually briefed on the source of the information back in July of 2003, and the source was the National Intelligence Estimate and British Intelligence. That was the basis for the reference in the President's State of the Union address.

QUESTION: Fitzgerald found an Italian tie, and I presume this is what the discussion between the President and Berlusconi was about.

SCOTT McCLELLAN: Yes, they -- like I said they -- Prime Minister Berlusconi brought it up, and as they indicated, that there wasn't any documents that were provided to us on Niger and uranium by --

QUESTION: Wait, no documents or no intelligence?

SCOTT McCLELLAN: I'm sorry?

QUESTION: The press report out of Italy is a transcription -- it's a transcription of the forged documents, not the actual documents themselves. But Berlusconi said yesterday was, no information passed from Italy to the United States.

SCOTT McCLELLAN: Yes, I think he was accurately reflecting what he indicated in the meeting.

QUESTION: So that accurately characterizes the President's position, that the United States never received any intelligence --

SCOTT McCLELLAN: Well, Prime Minister Berlusconi was reflecting that within the meeting, and we've previously said in regards to a question that came up about a meeting here at the White House that no one here has any recollection of Niger and uranium being discussed at that meeting, much less any documents being provided.



http://neworleans.cox.net/cci/newsnational/nationa ...
Italian Lawmaker Says Country's Secret Service Warned U.S. That Iraq Uranium Documents Were Fake


"Hadley told a press briefing that he had briefly met the head of Italy's SISMI secret intelligence service, Nicolo Pollari, on September 9, 2002 in a "courtesy call" aimed at getting to know his new colleague.

"There was a meeting in Washington on that date. I did attend a meeting with him," Hadley said in response to a question about a report published last week in the Italian center-left newspaper La Repubblica, which disclosed the meeting.

"It was, so far as we can tell from our records, about less than 15 minutes. It was a courtesy call. Nobody participating in that meeting or asked about that meeting has any recollection of a discussion of natural uranium, or any recollection of any documents being passed. And that's also my recollection," he said."
AFP News
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20051103/pl_afp/usital ...

Well Hadley, I'm sure there was a meeting....and I'm also sure you took the Niger forgeries to Frederick Fleitz.

I mean, you wouldn't LIE about everything would you? And attempt to get executive priveledge to save your ass? Nah, not you Hadley, who lied about going to Italy to begin with!

http://www.counterpunch.org/leupp11012005.html

November 1, 2005

Berlusconi's Halloween Visit
The Plame Affair Leads to Rome
By GARY LEUPP

"All roads lead to Rome," and it seems that Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation into the Plame Affair, and more broadly the lies used to hoodwink the American people into supporting a criminal war on Iraq, will also trudge down the Appian Way lined this Halloween with the ghosts of crucified Iraqis.

The Italian newspaper La Repubblica has recently published an exposé alleging in essence that the Italian military intelligence agency SISMI (Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militare) at the specific behest of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi provided bogus intelligence to the Bush neocons in order to curry favor with the U.S. and to abet the relentless drive for war between 9-11 and the March 2003 invasion. This follows an Italian parliamentary report released in part to the public in July concerning the forged Niger uranium documents at the heart of the Plame Affair. These, which purport to show a deal between Baghdad and Niger for the purchase of huge quantities of yellowcake, were it seems produced in the Italian capital.

The report names four men as the likely forgers of the documents (Michael Ledeen, Dewey Clarridge, Ahmed Chalabi and Francis Brookes) and suggests that the forgeries may have been planned at December 2001 gathering in Rome involving Ledeen and SISMI chief Nicolò Pollari. Also in attendance at that meeting: Larry Franklin, Harold Rhode, Manucher Ghorbanifar, Antonio Martino and others including a former senior official of the Revolutionary Guard in Iran. Here is a true rogues' gallery.

Michael Ledeen: neocon columnist, National Review Online contributing editor, specialist on the thought of Machiavelli and on Italian fascism, former employee of the Pentagon, the State Department and the National Security Council, was involved in the transfer of arms to Iran during the Iran-Contra affair. Active in the American Enterprise Institute, Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), and Center for Democracy in Iran (CDI). Advocates regime change by force in Iran and Syria.

Nicolò Pollari: Author of many publications on legal and economic matters, investigation techniques and intelligence. Tax law Professor at the Mediterranean University of Reggio Calabria. SISMI head since October 2001.

Dewey Clarridge: former CIA operative, famous in mid-1980s for his role in the Iran-Contra Affair. Head of CIA's Latin America division 1981-84, directed the mining of Nicaragua's harbors and helped organize the Contras. Indicted in November 1991 on seven counts of perjury and false statements, pardoned by first president Bush Christmas Eve 1992.

Ahmad Chalabi: convicted swindler, leader of U.S.-funded Iraqi National Congress, neocon ally, presently one of two deputy prime ministers in Iraqi government.

Francis Brookes: member of the "Rendon Group," a "public relations" body formed by the Pentagon engaged to promote Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress.

Larry Franklin: colonel in USAF reserve, subordinate to Douglas Feith in Defense Department, Middle East specialist, under arrest for espionage for Israel.

Harold Rhode: Pentagon official, Middle East specialist, Ledeen protégé, American Enterprise Institute, heavy neocon.

Manucher Ghorbanifar: Iranian exile, arms dealer, one-time CIA operative distrusted by CIA since 1980s. Key figure in the Iran-Contra scandal.

Antonio Martino: Founding member of Forza Italiano (Berlusconi's political party), Professor of Economics, adjunct scholar with the Heritage Foundation, Italian Defense Minister.



"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.



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


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/2005/10/19/14555 ...

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.

http://www.yuricareport.com/Dominionism/MichaelLedeen.html


"Everything You Need to Know About Michael Ledeen"


April 7, 2005

Everything You Need to Know About Michael Ledeen
By Katherine Yurica

Would you be surprised to find that a man who was deeply involved in the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan Administration, a man who is the darling of the Bush White House and is an adviser to Karl Rove, a man who loves Machiavelli and studies him, a neo-conservative who has close ties to one of America’s leading “Christian” Dominionists—Pat Robertson, and a man who called Pearl Harbor “lucky” and a providentially inspired event—may be the man who is behind the forging of the Niger documents that convinced America to launch a preemptive strike against Iraq?

<snip>

It would be foolish for America’s political strategists and congressional leaders to ignore Michael Ledeen and his interpretation of Machiavelli. Mr. Ledeen speaks from the cutting edge of a group of men and women who desire nothing more than to reconstruct America in their own image. This nation is in grave danger. Ledeen belongs to a group of men, including Harry Jaffa, Pat Robertson, Willmoore Kendall to Allan Bloom, who, according to Shadia Drury, scholar and author of Leo Strauss and the American Right, share “the view that America is too liberal and pluralistic and that what it needs is a single orthodoxy that governs the public and private lives of its citizens.”<1>

The belief in a single voice that governs the public should cause all Americans to understand these men want to convert this nation to a permanent dictatorship. Their inspirer was Leo Strauss, a professor who taught Machiavellian methods to many of them at the University of Chicago. In fact, Paul Wolfovitz earned his doctorate under Strauss and many of the neo-cons in the White House studied under him. Strauss believed every society needs a “single public orthodoxy.” As Drury put it, “a set of ideas that defines what is true and false, right and wrong, noble and base.” Strauss believed that the role of religion was indispensable to the political success of a nation. For a political society had to hold together and act as a unit in lock step with the leader. Strauss believed that religion was the means to inculcate the desired ideas into the minds of the masses. He didn’t care what religion—just as long as it was a religion that could link itself to the political order.

[Marie26]

17. Lots of info! Thanks for posting. nt

[Cults4Bush]

19. Wow! Incredible post! A must read primer on this evil neocon!

Thanks SLAD, your work is astounding.

[Octafish]

34. Missed one.

No. You got that one, too.



I'll never say you've forgotten more than I'll ever know, because you never forget. Ever.

[seemslikeadream]

35. There ARE a few things I will never forget

[salin]

41. What state dept official met two times, without approval, w/Italians

in this same time frame? Vaguely remember the story - and believe Leeden was part of it. Was it Bolton? Whoever it was received rebukes for not disclosing the first visit and was prohibited, I believe, from uncleared consults in the future - but was involved in a second one (despite being told by superiors not to do so.)

[Emit]

44. The first meeting

In Rome, Dec. 2001 included: Harold Rhode, Larry Franklin, Mansur Ghorbanifar, and Nicolo
Pollari (director of SISMI). Ledeen denies being at this meeting, but sources say he arranged/brokered it.

Second meeting, in Paris, June 2002 included: Rhode, Ghorbanifar, Franklin, Reuel Marc Gerecht (ex-CIA/AEI/PerleAsst.) and Mujahedin al-Kahlq (Iranian exile).


This information came from a U.P.I. article by Richard Sale, "DOD spy's arrest imminent", August 30, 2004 Monday

(no link, I got it from LexisNexis, although I think you can google it)


I have read other sources that stated other exiled Iranians participated.

Maybe Rhode is who you're thinking about?

(edited to correct source info and content)

[Emit]

45. Various reports about the participants of the meetings

can be found at Cooperative Research (great resource):

http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:x_pcHZM37EwJ:www.cooperativeresearch.org/entity.jsp%3Fentity%3Dmichael_ledeen+Mujahedeen+Khalq+Michael+Ledeen&hl=en

~snip~
December 9, 2001 Events Leading to Iraq Invasion


The Bush administration sends two defense officials, Harold Rhode and Larry Franklin, to meet with Iranians in Rome in response to an Iranian government offer to provide information relevant to the war on terrorism. The offer had been backchanneled by the Iranians to the White House through Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian arms trader and a central person in the Iran-Contra affair, who contacted another Iran-Contra figure, Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute. Ledeen passed the information on to his friends in the Defense Department who then relayed the offer to National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. Hadley expressed no reservations about the proposed meeting and informed George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, and Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage. According to officials interviewed by the New York Times, the United States Embassy in Rome was not notified of the planned meeting as required by standard interagency procedures. Neither the US embassy nor CIA station chief in Rome learns of the three-day meeting until after it happens (see December 12, 2001). When they do catch wind of the meeting, they notify CIA and State Department headquarters in Washington which complain to the administration about how the meetings were arranged. In addition to Ghorbanifar, Ledeen, Franklin, and Rhode, the meeting is attended by Nicolo Pollari, head of SISMI, and Antonio Martino, Italy's minister of defense. According to the Boston Globe, either at this meeting, a similar one in June (see June 2002), or both, Ledeen and Ghorbanifar discuss ways to destabilize the Iranian government, possibly using the Mujahedeen-e Khalq, a US-designated terrorist group, as a US proxy. Additionally, according to an unnamed SISMI source, Pollari speaks with Ledeen about intelligence his agency has collected (see October 15, 2001) suggesting that Iraq made a deal with Niger to purchase several tons of uranium. SISMI already sent a report to Washington on the matter in mid-October (see October 15, 2001). Reportedly, Pollari has also approached CIA Station Chief Jeff Castelli about the report, but Castelli has since indicated he is not interested in the information. ~snip~

[robertpaulsen]

48. Question for you & everyone: what's up with Stephen Hadley & Italy?

You've done an incredible job detailing everything about Michael Ledeen and his treasonous activities. :applause: Now I'm curious about looking at Stephen Hadley. Look at how many times his activities cross over with Ledeen concerning Italy:



December 2001 US confrontation with Iran
The Bush administration sends two Defense officials, Harold Rhode and Larry Franklin, to meet with Iranians in Rome in response to an Iranian government offer to provide information relevant to the war on terrorism. The offer had been back-channeled by the Iranians to the White House through Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian arms trader and a central person in the Iran-Contra affair, who contacted another Iran-Contra figure, Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute. Ledeen passed the information on to his friends in the Defense Department who then relayed the offer to National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. Hadley expressed no reservations about the proposed meeting and informed George J. Tenet, the director of the CIA, and Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage. According to officials interviewed by the New York Times, the United States Embassy in Rome was not notified of the planned meeting as required by standard interagency procedures. Neither the US embassy nor CIA station chief in Rome learn of the three-day meeting, apparently attended by both Ghorbanifar and Ledeen, until after it happens. When they do catch wind of the meeting, they notify CIA and State Department headquarters in Washington which complain to the administration about how the meetings had been arranged.
People and organizations involved: Larry Franklin, George Tenet, Stephen Hadley, Michael Ledeen, Manucher Ghorbanifar, Harold Rhode, Condoleezza Rice

snip


December 9, 2001 Events Leading to Iraq Invasion
The Bush administration sends two defense officials, Harold Rhode and Larry Franklin, to meet with Iranians in Rome in response to an Iranian government offer to provide information relevant to the war on terrorism. The offer had been backchanneled by the Iranians to the White House through Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian arms trader and a central person in the Iran-Contra affair, who contacted another Iran-Contra figure, Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute. Ledeen passed the information on to his friends in the Defense Department who then relayed the offer to National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. Hadley expressed no reservations about the proposed meeting and informed George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, and Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage. According to officials interviewed by the New York Times, the United States Embassy in Rome was not notified of the planned meeting as required by standard interagency procedures. Neither the US embassy nor CIA station chief in Rome learns of the three-day meeting until after it happens (see December 12, 2001). When they do catch wind of the meeting, they notify CIA and State Department headquarters in Washington which complain to the administration about how the meetings were arranged. In addition to Ghorbanifar, Ledeen, Franklin, and Rhode, the meeting is attended by Nicolo Pollari, head of SISMI, and Antonio Martino, Italy's minister of defense. According to the Boston Globe, either at this meeting, a similar one in June (see June 2002), or both, Ledeen and Ghorbanifar discuss ways to destabilize the Iranian government, possibly using the Mujahedeen-e Khalq, a US-designated terrorist group, as a US proxy. Additionally, according to an unnamed SISMI source, Pollari speaks with Ledeen about intelligence his agency has collected (see October 15, 2001) suggesting that Iraq made a deal with Niger to purchase several tons of uranium. SISMI already sent a report to Washington on the matter in mid-October (see October 15, 2001). Reportedly, Pollari has also approached CIA Station Chief Jeff Castelli about the report, but Castelli has since indicated he is not interested in the information.
People and organizations involved: Antonio Martino, Harold Rhode, Larry Franklin, Michael Ledeen, Manucher Ghorbanifar, Nicolo Pollari, George Tenet, Harold Rhode, Stephen Hadley

snip


January 30, 2002 Events Leading to Iraq Invasion
Stephen Hadley, Condoleezza Rice's chief deputy on the National Security Council, instructs former Iran-Contra figure Michael Ledeen and officials in Douglas Feith's office to cease their dealings (see December 2001) with Manucher Ghorbanifar.
People and organizations involved: Manucher Ghorbanifar, Douglas Feith, Michael Ledeen, Stephen Hadley

snip


July 2002 Events Leading to Iraq Invasion
Michael Ledeen contacts Mel Sembler, the US ambassador to Italy, and informs him that he will be traveling to Rome again (see December 2001) to continue “his work” with the Iranians. Sembler passes this on to Washington, and National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley sends word to Ledeen reminding him that he is not to deal with the Iranians.
People and organizations involved: Mel Sembler, Michael Ledeen, Stephen Hadley

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/entity.jsp?entity=michael_ledeen

Quite a bit of activity. Here's some more alarming news:


NSC Chief Hadley asked Italy for Syria Replacement Name

National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley asked the Italians to help with regime change in Syria:

I have it on good authority that Steven Hadley, the director of the US National Security Council, called the President of the Italian senate to asked if he had a candidate to replace Bashar al-Asad as President of Syria. The Italians were horrified. Italy is one of Syria's biggest trading partners so it seemed a reasonable place to ask! This is what Washington has been up to. -- Joshua Landis

Let's take this in. Hadley is calling the Italians, asking for a name as a replacement figurehead? Stunning.

more...

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/10/23/114355/06


Taking all this in, let's look again at the Raw Story report on Hadley from the OP:

After investigating the documents for an article and finding them to be suspect, Burba suggested to her editor, Carlo Rossella, that she take a trip to Niger to investigate further. Rossella diverted her to the U.S. embassy in Rome instead. She never ran the article. Burba dropped off the forgeries to the US embassy on Oct. 9, 2002.

But as Burba was investigating the veracity of the documents, head of Italian intelligence Nicolo Pollari was meeting with then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley.

The meeting, which took place in September 2002, is alleged to be brokered by Ledeen, although the only U.S. official Pollari claims to have met is George Tenet, whom he also met in October 2001. Questioned about the meeting, Hadley has said no one involved in the meeting had "any recollection of a discussion of natural uranium, or any recollection of any documents being passed."

Burba delivered the forgeries to the U.S. embassy a month after the Pollari and Hadley meeting.

http://rawstory.com/news/2005/American_who_consulted_for_Pentagon_says_0117.html


Natural uranium? Who the hell accused anyone in Iraq of getting "natural uranium"? Sounds like dissembling, to put it lightly.

[stop the bleeding]

51. All right I'll take a swing - Have you guys already seen this article??

it?

Who was behind the Niger uranium documents?-by Philip Giraldi,The American Conservative 11/25/2005 issuue
Philip Giraldi, a former CIA Officer, is a partner in Cannistraro Associates, an international security consultancy.

Enter the ususal Suspects

The first suggestion that Iraq was seeking yellowcake uranium to construct a nuclear weapon came on Oct. 15, 2001, shortly after 9/11, when Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and his newly appointed chief of the Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militare (SISMI), Nicolo Pollari, made an official visit to Washington. Berlusconi was eager to make a good impression and signaled his willingness to support the American effort to implicate Saddam Hussein in 9/11. Pollari, in his position for less than three weeks, was likewise keen to establish himself with his American counterparts and was under pressure from Berlusconi to present the U.S. with information that would be vital to the rapidly accelerating War on Terror. Well aware of the Bush administration’s obsession with Iraq, Pollari used his meeting with top CIA officials to provide a SISMI dossier indicating that Iraq had sought to buy uranium in Niger. The same intelligence was passed simultaneously to Britain’s MI-6.

~snip~

Enter Michael Ledeen, the Office of Special Plans’ man in Rome. Ledeen was paid $30,000 by the Italian Ministry of the Interior in 1978 for a report on terrorism and was well known to senior SISMI officials. Italian sources indicate that Pollari was eager to engage with the Pentagon hardliners, knowing they were at odds with the CIA and the State Department officials who had slighted him. He turned to Ledeen, who quickly established himself as the liaison between SISMI and Feith’s OSP, where he was a consultant. Ledeen, who had personal access to the National Security Council’s Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley and was also a confidant of Vice President Cheney, was well placed to circumvent the obstruction coming from the CIA and State.

~snip~

On Jan. 28, 2003, over the objections of the CIA and State, the famous 16 words about Niger’s uranium were used in President Bush’s State of the Union address justifying an attack on Iraq: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Both the British and American governments had actually obtained the report from the Italians, who had asked that they not be identified as the source. The UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency also looked at the documents shortly after Bush spoke and pronounced them crude forgeries.

President Bush soon stopped referring to the Niger uranium, but Vice President Cheney continued to insist that Iraq was seeking nuclear weapons.

The question remains: who forged the documents? The available evidence suggests that two candidates had access and motive: SISMI and the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans.

~snip~

At this point, any American connection to the actual forgeries remains unsubstantiated, though the OSP at a minimum connived to circumvent established procedures to present the information directly to receptive policy makers in the White House. But if the OSP is more deeply involved, Michael Ledeen, who denies any connection with the Niger documents, would have been a logical intermediary in co-ordinating the falsification of the documents and their surfacing, as he was both a Pentagon contractor and was frequently in Italy. He could have easily been assisted by ex-CIA friends from Iran-Contra days, including a former Chief of Station from Rome, who, like Ledeen, was also a consultant for the Pentagon and the Iraqi National Congress.

It would have been extremely convenient for the administration, struggling to explain why Iraq was a threat, to be able to produce information from an unimpeachable “foreign intelligence source” to confirm the Iraqi worst-case.

The possible forgery of the information by Defense Department employees would explain the viciousness of the attack on Valerie Plame and her husband. Wilson, when he denounced the forgeries in the New York Times in July 2003, turned an issue in which there was little public interest into something much bigger. The investigation continues, but the campaign against this lone detractor suggests that the administration was concerned about something far weightier than his critical op-ed.

*****

OK now me talking again, we know that based on L.A.'s reporting that Silvio Berlusconi is connected to Ledeen based this:

****************************

http://rawstory.com/news/2005/American_who_consulted_for_Pentagon_says_0117.html

It was Burba's editor at Panorama, Carlo Rossella, who allegedly told her to take the documents to the U.S. embassy, despite her own requests to travel to Niger to further investigate the claims.

It was also Rosella who intervened when Burba requested to contact the White House after hearing the infamous "16 words" in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address, dissuading her from contacting U.S. officials.

Rosella, intelligence sources say, could have been acting on the orders of Panorama's owner, Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's equivalent of Rupert Murdoch. Berlusconi -- who also happens to be the current Prime Minister -пїЅ was a supporter of President Bush leading up to the war.

Berlusconi was not immediately available for comment.

********************************************

now in last section of article this statement jumps out at me.

He could have easily been assisted by ex-CIA friends from Iran-Contra days, including a former Chief of Station from Rome, who, like Ledeen, was also a consultant for the Pentagon and the Iraqi National Congress.

Who is this?? The ex-CIA Rome station chief. I have tried the almighty google and nothing I also tried wikipedia and whiffed.

I did reaquaint myself with the Iraqi National Congress via wikipedia and Chalabi and John Rendon(especially interesting with Panama and Gulf I) pop up on the Radar but nothing about a former Chief of Station from Rome.

So last question is this important or is this old news and I have just missed it in the mountain research?

[stop the bleeding]

52. Here is what I found when Googling Hadley and Castelli - follow up on

post # 51:


I have only included relative parts of the research, I suggest you all go an read the entire thing. I have bold faced important parts and put even more important parts in red. Let me know what you all think. I know it looks long and some of you have already read this but I did put some important notes/questions in the middle of my post.

Stephen Hadley from Cooperative Research

Jan 2001

The National Institute for Public Policy (NIPP) publishes a report arguing for a “smaller, more efficient, arsenal” of specialized weapons. The report claims that developing a new generation of smaller, tactical nuclear weapons is necessary for the US to maintain its deterrent. The report suggests that nuclear weapons could be used to deter “weapons of mass destruction (WMD) use by regional powers,” deter “WMD or massive conventional aggression by an emerging global competitor,” prevent “catastrophic losses in conventional war,” provide “unique targeting capabilities” (such as the use of “mini-nukes,” or “bunker-busters,” to destroy deep underground/biological weapons targets), or to enhance “US influence in crises.” Many of the report's authors are later appointed to senior positions within the Bush administration, including Linton Brooks who becomes head of the national nuclear security administration overseeing new weapons projects, Stephen Hadley who is appointed deputy national security adviser, and Stephen Cambone who becomes undersecretary of defense for intelligence. The document is said to influence the Pentagon's controversial Nuclear Posture Review that is submitted to Congress a year later (see January 8, 2002).
People and organizations involved: Stephen Hadley, Linton Brooks, National Institute for Public Policy (NIPP), Stephen A. Cambone

~snip~

April 30 2001

The Bush administration finally has its first Deputy Secretary-level meeting on terrorism. According to counterterrorism “tsar” Richard Clarke, he advocates that the Northern Alliance needs to be supported in the war against the Taliban, and the Predator drone flights need to resume over Afghanistan so bin Laden can be targeted. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz says the focus on al-Qaeda is wrong. He states, “I just don't understand why we are beginning by talking about this one man bin Laden,” and “Who cares about a little terrorist in Afghanistan?” Wolfowitz insists the focus should be Iraqi-sponsored terrorism instead. He claims the 1993 attack on the WTC must have been done with help from Iraq, and rejects the CIA's assertion that there has been no Iraqi-sponsored terrorism against the US since 1993. (A spokesperson for Wolfowitz later calls Clarke's account a “fabrication.”) Wolfowitz repeats these sentiments immediately after 9/11 and tries to argue that the US should attack Iraq. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage agrees with Clarke that al-Qaeda is an important threat. Deputy National Security Adviser Steve Hadley, chairing the meeting, brokers a compromise between Wolfowitz and the others. The group agrees to hold additional meetings focusing on al-Qaeda first (in June and July), but then later look at other terrorism, including any Iraqi terrorism. Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby and Deputy CIA Director John McLaughlin also attend the hour-long meeting.
People and organizations involved: John E. McLaughlin, Taliban, Paul Wolfowitz, al-Qaeda, Northern Alliance, Osama bin Laden, Central Intelligence Agency, Stephen Hadley, Richard ("Dick") Cheney, Richard A. Clarke, Promis, Bush administration, Richard Armitage

~snip~

Shortly after 09/11/01 Feith Sets Up the Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group

Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith and Middle East specialist Harold Rhode recruit David Wurmser, the director of Middle East studies for the American Enterprise Institute, to serve as a Pentagon consultant. Wurmser is a known advocate of regime change in Iraq, having expressed his views in a 1997 op-ed piece published in the Wall Street Journal (see November 12, 1997) and having participated in the drafting of a 1996 policy paper for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu called “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” (see July 8, 1996). Wurmser works at Feith's office, where he and F. Michael Maloof, a former aide to Richard Perle, head a secret intelligence unit, named the Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group, or the “Wurmser-Maloof” project. Neither Wurmser nor Maloof are intelligence professionals. The four- to five- person unit, a “B Team” commissioned by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, uses powerful computers and software to scan and sort already-analyzed documents and reports from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and other agencies in an effort to consider possible interpretations and angles of analysis that these agencies may have missed due to deeply ingrained biases and out-of-date worldviews. The Pentagon unit's activities cause tension within the traditional intelligence community. Critics claim that its members manipulate and distort intelligence, “cherry-picking” bits of information that fit their preconceived conclusions. “There is a complete breakdown in the relationship between the Defense Department and the intelligence community, to include its own Defense Intelligence Agency,” a defense official will tell the New York Times. “Wolfowitz and company disbelieve any analysis that doesn't support their own preconceived conclusions. The CIA is enemy territory, as far are they're concerned.” Defending the project, Paul Wolfowitz will tell the New York Times that the team's purpose is to circumvent the problem “in intelligence work, that people who are pursuing a certain hypothesis will see certain facts that others won't, and not see other facts that others will.” He insists that the special Pentagon unit is “not making independent intelligence assessments.” One of the cell's projects includes sorting through existing intelligence to create a map of relationships demonstrating links between militant Islamic groups and state powers. This chart of links, which they name the “matrix,” leads the intelligence unit to conclude that Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and other groups with conflicting ideologies and objectives are allowing these differences to fall to the wayside as they discover their shared hatred of the US. The group's research also leads them to believe that al-Qaeda has a presence in such places as Latin American. For weeks, the unit will attempt to uncover evidence tying Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 attacks, a theory advocated by both Feith and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. The group is later accused of stovepiping intelligence directly to the White House. Former DIA chief of Mideast operations, Pat Lang, later tells the Washington Times: “That unit had meetings with senior White House officials without the CIA or the Senate being aware of them. That is not legal. There has to be oversight.” According to Lang and another US intelligence official, the two men go to the White House several times to brief officials, bypassing CIA analysts whose analyses they disagreed with. They allegedly brief White House staffers Stephen Hadley, the deputy national security adviser, and Lewis “Scooter” Libby, chief of staff for Vice President Richard Cheney, according to congressional staffers. According to unnamed Pentagon and US intelligence officials, the group is also accused of providing sensitive CIA and Pentagon intercepts to the US-funded Iraqi National Congress, which then passed them on to the government of Iran. David Wurmser will later be relocated to the State Department where he will be the senior advisor to Undersecretary Of State for Arms Control John Bolton.(see September 2002).
People and organizations involved: Stephen Hadley, Lewis ("Scooter") Libby, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser, Harold Rhode, Richard Perle, F. Michael Maloof, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz

~snip~

09/12/01 Bush to Clarke: ‘Look into Iraq’

US President George Bush speaks privately with White House counterterrorism advisor Richard Clarke in the White House Situation Room. According to Clarke, Bush tells him to investigate the possibility that Iraq was involved in the attacks. “I want you, as soon as you can, to go back over everything, everything,” Bush says. “See if Saddam did this.” When Clarke responds, “But Mr. President, al-Qaeda did this,” Bush replies, “I know, I know, but... see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred.” Clarke insists that the CIA, FBI, and White House already concluded that there were no such links. As he exits the room, Bush “testily” says again, “Look into Iraq, Saddam.” During a “60 Minutes” interview, Clarke will say that Bush's instructions were made in a way that was “very intimidating,” and which hinted that Clarke “should come back with that answer.” “Now he never said, ‘Make it up.’ But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this.” Clarke's account is later confirmed by several eyewitnesses. After his meeting with Bush, Clarke works with CIA and FBI experts to produce the report requested by the president; but they find no evidence that Iraq had a hand in the attacks. It gets “bounced by the national-security advisor, or deputy,” according to Clarke. “ It got bounced and sent back, saying ‘Wrong answer .... Do it again.’ ”
People and organizations involved: Richard A. Clarke, Scott McClellan, George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice, Stephen Hadley

~snip~

09/25/01 – Weldon can’t find his ass in tin can box – what a f#@k up.

Rep. Curt Weldon (R) later claims that about two weeks after 9/11, he is given a chart by friends of his from the Army's Information Dominance Center, in cooperation with special ops. The chart indicates various al-Qaeda cells that were identified by a military intelligence unit called Able Danger. Early in 2000, this unit identified, amongst others, an al-Qaeda cell based in Brooklyn, New York, which included Mohamed Atta and three other future 9/11 hijackers (see January-February 2000). Atta's name is said to be on the chart given to Weldon. Shortly after being given the chart, Weldon meets with Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, and shows the chart to him. Weldon claims, “Hadley looked at the chart and said, Congressman, where did you get that chart from? I said, I got it from the military. ... Steve Hadley said, Congressman, I am going to take this chart, and I am going to show it to the man. The man that he meant ... was the President of the United States. I said, Mr. Hadley, you mean you have not seen something like this before from the CIA, this chart of al-Qaeda worldwide and in the US? And he said, No, Congressman. So I gave him the chart. ” However, a spokesman for Hadley later disputes this account, and says, “Mr. Hadley does not recall any chart bearing the name or photo of Mohamed Atta. staff reviewed the files of Mr. Hadley as well as of all personnel... That search has turned up no chart.” Rep. Dan Burton (R) later recalls attending the meeting and remembers the chart, but can't recall if Atta was on it or not. Curt Weldon also later claims that the copy of the chart he gives to Hadley is his only one. However, apparently contradicting this, Weldon will give a speech in 2002 showing the chart (see May 23, 2002).
People and organizations involved: al-Qaeda, Stephen Hadley, Dan Burton, Able Danger, Mohamed Atta, Information Dominance Center, Central Intelligence Agency, Special Operations Command, Curt Weldon

~snip~

December 2001

The Bush administration sends two Defense officials, Harold Rhode and Larry Franklin, to meet with Iranians in Rome in response to an Iranian government offer to provide information relevant to the war on terrorism. The offer had been back-channeled by the Iranians to the White House through Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian arms trader and a central person in the Iran-Contra affair, who contacted another Iran-Contra figure, Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute. Ledeen passed the information on to his friends in the Defense Department who then relayed the offer to National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. Hadley expressed no reservations about the proposed meeting and informed George J. Tenet, the director of the CIA, and Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage. According to officials interviewed by the New York Times, the United States Embassy in Rome was not notified of the planned meeting as required by standard interagency procedures. Neither the US embassy nor CIA station chief in Rome learn of the three-day meeting, apparently attended by both Ghorbanifar and Ledeen, until after it happens. When they do catch wind of the meeting, they notify CIA and State Department headquarters in Washington which complain to the administration about how the meetings had been arranged.
People and organizations involved: Larry Franklin, George Tenet, Stephen Hadley, Michael Ledeen, Manucher Ghorbanifar, Harold Rhode, Condoleezza Rice

~snip~

12/09/2001

The Bush administration sends two defense officials, Harold Rhode and Larry Franklin, to meet with Iranians in Rome in response to an Iranian government offer to provide information relevant to the war on terrorism. The offer had been backchanneled by the Iranians to the White House through Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian arms trader and a central person in the Iran-Contra affair, who contacted another Iran-Contra figure, Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute. Ledeen passed the information on to his friends in the Defense Department who then relayed the offer to National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. Hadley expressed no reservations about the proposed meeting and informed George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, and Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage. According to officials interviewed by the New York Times, the United States Embassy in Rome was not notified of the planned meeting as required by standard interagency procedures. Neither the US embassy nor CIA station chief in Rome learns of the three-day meeting until after it happens (see December 12, 2001). When they do catch wind of the meeting, they notify CIA and State Department headquarters in Washington which complain to the administration about how the meetings were arranged. In addition to Ghorbanifar, Ledeen, Franklin, and Rhode, the meeting is attended by Nicolo Pollari, head of SISMI, and Antonio Martino, Italy's minister of defense. According to the Boston Globe, either at this meeting, a similar one in June (see June 2002), or both, Ledeen and Ghorbanifar discuss ways to destabilize the Iranian government, possibly using the Mujahedeen-e Khalq, a US-designated terrorist group, as a US proxy. Additionally, according to an unnamed SISMI source, Pollari speaks with Ledeen about intelligence his agency has collected (see October 15, 2001) suggesting that Iraq made a deal with Niger to purchase several tons of uranium. SISMI already sent a report to Washington on the matter in mid-October (see October 15, 2001). Reportedly, Pollari has also approached CIA Station Chief Jeff Castelli about the report, but Castelli has since indicated he is not interested in the information.
People and organizations involved: Antonio Martino, Harold Rhode, Larry Franklin, Michael Ledeen, Manucher Ghorbanifar, Nicolo Pollari, George Tenet, Harold Rhode, Stephen Hadley

Repeat for clarity on this:

" Neither the US embassy nor CIA station chief in Rome learns of the three-day meeting until after it happens (see December 12, 2001). When they do catch wind of the meeting, they notify CIA and State Department headquarters in Washington which complain to the administration about how the meetings were arranged."

"Pollari speaks with Ledeen about intelligence his agency has collected (see October 15, 2001) suggesting that Iraq made a deal with Niger to purchase several tons of uranium. SISMI already sent a report to Washington on the matter in mid-October (see October 15, 2001). Reportedly, Pollari has also approached CIA Station Chief Jeff Castelli about the report, but Castelli has since indicated he is not interested in the information. "

This does not make sense seems like this CIA station chief has his dates mixed up, because how could he not be interested when he does not know about the meeting until 12/12/01?????

I was clued into Castelli by this:

Who was behind the Niger Documents?- by Philip Giraldi,The American Conservative 11/25/2005 issuue
Philip Giraldi, a former CIA Officer, is a partner in Cannistraro Associates, an international security consultancy.

……"At this point, any American connection to the actual forgeries remains unsubstantiated, though the OSP at a minimum connived to circumvent established procedures to present the information directly to receptive policy makers in the White House. But if the OSP is more deeply involved, Michael Ledeen, who denies any connection with the Niger documents, would have been a logical intermediary in co-ordinating the falsification of the documents and their surfacing, as he was both a Pentagon contractor and was frequently in Italy.He could have easily been assisted by ex-CIA friends from Iran-Contra days, including a former Chief of Station from Rome, who, like Ledeen, was also a consultant for the Pentagon and the Iraqi National Congress."


Thanks to Emit we were able to find out that Castelli is/was the the CIA Chief for Rome.

post # 82 – Jeff Castelli?



Continued..

Jan 2002

Stephen Hadley, Condoleezza Rice's chief deputy on the National Security Council, instructs former Iran-Contra figure Michael Ledeen and officials in Douglas Feith's office to cease their dealings (see December 2001) with Manucher Ghorbanifar.
People and organizations involved: Manucher Ghorbanifar, Douglas Feith, Michael Ledeen, Stephen Hadley

~snip~

July 2002

Michael Ledeen contacts Mel Sembler, the US ambassador to Italy, and informs him that he will be traveling to Rome again (see December 2001) to continue “his work” with the Iranians. Sembler passes this on to Washington, and National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley sends word to Ledeen reminding him that he is not to deal with the Iranians.
People and organizations involved: Mel Sembler, Michael Ledeen, Stephen Hadley

~snip~

August 2002

White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. forms the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG, which aims to “educate the public” about the alleged threat from Iraq. A senior official involved with the group later describes it as “an internal working group, like many formed for priority issues, to make sure each part of the White House was fulfilling its responsibilities.” Members of the group include Karl Rove, Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin, James R. Wilkinson, Nicholas E. Calio, and policy advisers led by Condoleezza Rice and her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, and I. Lewis Libby. They meet weekly in the White House Situation Room. A “strategic communications” task force under the WHIG is charged with planning speeches and writing white papers. According to an intelligence source interviewed by the New York Daily News in October 2005, the group, on “a number of occasions,” will attempt “to push the envelope on things,”—“The would say, ‘We just don't have the intelligence to substantiate that.’” An important part of the WHIG strategy is to feed their messages to friendly reporters such as New York Times reporter Judith Miller. James Bamford, in his book A Pretext for War, writes: “First OSP supplies false or exaggerated intelligence; then members of the WHIG leak it to friendly reporters, complete with prepackaged vivid imagery; finally, when the story breaks, senior officials point to it as proof and parrot the unnamed quotes they or their colleagues previously supplied.”
People and organizations involved: Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin, James R. Wilkinson, Condoleezza Rice, Karl Rove, Andrew Card, White House Iraq Group, Stephen Hadley, Lewis ("Scooter") Libby, Mel Sembler

~snip~

09/09/2002

Nicolo Pollari, chief of SISMI, Italy's military intelligence service, meets briefly with US National Security Council officials. Present at the meeting are National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice; her deputy, Stephen Hadley; and other US and Italian officials. This meeting is not reported until 2005, when Italy's La Repubblica reports that a meeting—arranged through a backchannel by Gianni Castellaneta, the Italian prime minister's diplomatic advisor—took place between Pollari and Hadley on this date. The report is refuted by Italy which insists it was actually a short meeting between Pollari and Rice. Hadley, Italy says, was present but not really part of the meeting. The Bush administration also insists the meeting was of little importance. Frederick Jones, a National Security Council spokesman, describes the meeting as a courtesy call of 15 minutes or less. He also says, “No one present at that meeting has any recollection of yellowcake being discussed or documents being provided.” It is not clear from the reporting, however, if the meeting acknowledged by Italy and Washington, is in fact the same meeting reported by La Repubblica.
People and organizations involved: Condoleezza Rice, Stephen Hadley, Nicolo Pollari, Gianni Castellaneta

~snip~

09/16/2002

Two days before the CIA is to issue an assessment (see (August 2002)) on Iraq's supposed links to militant Islamic groups, Pentagon officials working in the Office of Special Plans give a briefing directly to the White House; Vice-President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby; and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice's deputy, Stephen Hadley. The briefing says that there were “fundamental problems” with CIA intelligence-gathering methods and includes a detailed breakdown of the alleged April 2001 Prague meeting between Mohammed Atta and Iraqi diplomat Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani.
People and organizations involved: Lewis ("Scooter") Libby, Stephen Hadley

~snip~

10/05/2005

The CIA's Associate Deputy Director for Intelligence sends a four-page memo to Bush administration officials, including Bush's deputy national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, and the chief speechwriter, Michael Gerson, expressing doubt over claims that Iraq had attempted to obtain uranium from Niger. On page 3 of the memo, the ADDI advises removing the allegation from the draft of Bush's upcoming speech in Cincinnati. “emove the sentence because the amount is in dispute and it is debatable whether it can be acquired from the source. We told Congress that the Brits have exaggerated this issue. Finally, the Iraqis already have 550 metric tons of uranium oxide in their inventory.” Despite the warning, draft seven of the speech, completed later in the day, contains the passage: “he regime has been caught attempting to purchase substantial amounts of uranium oxide from sources in Africa.” Stephen Hadley will later claim in July 2003 that he did not brief Condoleezza Rice on the memo. (WTF he gets this memo and still writes the SOTU speech for 2003???????????)
People and organizations involved: Stephen Hadley, Condoleezza Rice, Michael Gerson, Central Intelligence Agency

~snip~

10/06/2002

The CIA's Associate Deputy Director for Intelligence receives draft seven of Bush's upcoming speech in Cincinnati and sees that the speech writers have failed to remove the passage on Iraq's alleged attempt to purchase uranium from Niger, as the CIA had advised the day before (see October 5, 2002). He informs Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet who personally calls White House officials, including Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, with the CIA's concerns. The ADDI reportedly tells Tenet that the “president should not be a fact witness on this issue” because the agency's analysts consider the reporting “weak” and say it is based solely on one source. The allegation is finally removed from the speech. Later in the day, to press its point even further, the CIA faxes another memo, summarizing its position on the Africa-uranium claim. The memo states: “ore on why we recommend removing the sentence about procuring uranium oxide from Africa: Three points (1) The evidence is weak. One of the two mines cited by the source as the location of the uranium oxide is flooded. The other mine cited by the source is under the control of the French authorities. (2) The procurement is not particularly significant to Iraq's nuclear ambitions because the Iraqis already have a large stock of uranium oxide in their inventory. And (3) we have shared points one and two with Congress, telling them that the Africa story is overblown and telling them this is one of the two issues where we differed with the British.” The memo's recipients include National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley. (WTF Hadley has been warned 3-4 times now and he still writes the SOTU speech for 2003???????????)
People and organizations involved: Condoleezza Rice, Central Intelligence Agency, George Tenet, Stephen Hadley

~snip~

February 1, 2003-February 4, 2003 Events Leading to Iraq Invasion

On February 1, Secretary of State Colin Powell begins rehearsing for his February 5 presentation to the UN Security Council (see 10:30 a.m. February 5, 2003) in which he will argue that Iraq represents a serious and imminent threat to the US. Powell is assisted by members of his staff, including his chief of staff, Larry Wilkerson, and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. Several members of the White House Iraq Group drop in during the pre-speech sessions, includingCondoleezza Rice, Stephen Hadley, and Lewis Libby. George Tenet and his deputy director, John McLaughlin, are also present at times. Cheney's staff continues to pressure Powell to include several unsubstantiated and dubious allegations. The allegations that are most contested are the ones dealing with Iraq's alleged ties to terrorism. For example, the group insists that Powell “link Iraq directly to the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington” and include the widely discredited allegation (see October 21, 2002) that Mohammed Atta had met in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence officer (see April 8, 2001). But Powell and his staff reject a good portion of the hawks' material. At one point, Powell reportedly says, “I'm not reading this. This is bullsh_t.” An official later recalls: “On a number of occasions, ... simply said, ‘I'm not using that, I'm not using that, that is not good enough. That's not something that I can support.’ And on each occasion he was fought by the vice president's office in the person of Scooter Libby, by the National Security Advisor herself, by her deputy , and sometimes by the intelligence people—George and John .” “e fought tooth and nail with other members of the administration to scrub it and get the crap out,” Larry Wilkerson, Powell's Chief of Staff later tells GQ. In some instances, material rejected by Powell occasionally reappear in subsequent versions of the speech. “One of the most outrageous ones was the Mohammed Atta meeting in Prague. Steve Hadley on one occasion it back in. We cut it and somehow it got back in. And the secretary said, ‘I thought I cut this?’ And Steve Hadley looked around and said, ‘My fault, Mr. Secretary, I'll put it back in.’ ‘Well, cut it, permanently!’ yelled Powell. It was all cartoon. The specious connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, much of which I subsequently found came probably from the INC and from their sources, defectors and so forth, training in Iraq for terrorists. ... No question in my mind that some of the sources that we were using were probably Israeli intelligence. That was one thing that was rarely revealed to us—if it was a foreign source.”
People and organizations involved: Stephen Hadley, Larry Wilkerson, Condoleezza Rice, George Tenet, John E. McLaughlin, Richard Armitage, White House Iraq Group, Lewis ("Scooter") Libby, Colin Powell

Also from CoopResearch on Jeff Castelli not much but it is something

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/searchResults.jsp?searchtext=Jeff+Castelli+&events=on&entities=on&articles=on&topics=on&timelines=on&projects=on&titles=on&descriptions=on&dosearch=on&search=+Go+

Shortly after September 11, 2001 Events Leading to Iraq Invasion

In the wake of the September 11 attacks, the CIA station chief in Rome, Jeff Castelli, reportedly asks SISMI to provide the US with any useful intelligence it might have.

People and organizations involved: Jeff Castelli, SISMI

[Emit]

53. stb, I'm posting this here as well for others following this thread

Did you notice, by the way, that the article on Castelli that I posted says that Castelli, aside from his involvement in the Niger forgeries, is also being investigated for the abduction of Abu Omar (Eqyptian who was CIA informant)?

Here's a recap of the article I posted. I think the date of this article is 12/27/05, but I am uncertain:

Jeff Castelli, the former top intelligence agent in Italy, is accused of devising the operation.
MILAN – The former head of the CIA in Italy is under investigation for the abduction of Imam Abu Omar. Jeff Castelli, an American citizen with distant Italian origins, is under investigation by the public prosecutor’s office in Milan as the alleged deviser and planner of the spectacular Abu Omar abduction. The kidnapping was the first case in Italy of extraordinary rendition, the illegal arrest strategy that has been at the centre of controversy for months. On 17 February 2003, when Abu Omar was kidnapped in Milan, Mr Castelli was CIA head of station in Rome, the man in charge of American intelligence in Italy. It is likely that Mr Castelli himself suggested the surprise move.

~snip~

http://www.corriere.it/english/articoli/2005/12_Dicembre/27/Cia.shtml


And here is an article, published July 3, 2005, that details the abduction and asks some interesting questions:

Abducted imam aided CIA ally
Last month, Italian authorities charged 13 CIA operatives with kidnapping an Islamic cleric known as Abu Omar. Now former Albanian intelligence officials reveal that the imam was once an informant valued by the CIA.

~snip~

Why would the U.S. government go to elaborate lengths to seize a 39-year-old Egyptian who, according to former Albanian intelligence officials, was once the CIA's most productive source of information within the tightly knit group of Islamic fundamentalists living in exile in Albania?

~snip~

What mystified the Italian authorities was why the CIA would want to take Abu Omar out of circulation--especially since they were sharing with the CIA the fruits of their electronic surveillance of Abu Omar--and why the Egyptians would want him back.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/specials/chi-0507030272jul03,1,7388165.story?page=1&coll=chi-newsspecials-hed



Notice, also, Lady was involved in this abduction. From a 09/30/05 article:

~snip~

Italian investigators working on the case have found images and documents they describe as "decisive", including a photograph of Abu Omar on the street where he was kidnapped, taken 33 days before he was taken. It was found in the computer of Bob Lady, the former head of the CIA station in Milan. He has been wanted since June 24 this year when he fled Italy. His wife deleted all the files on his computer, Corriere della Sera reports, but police have managed to rebuild the hard drive, and found evidence that he had run searches for the shortest route from the Milan street where Omar was kidnapped to Aviano. A list of the luxurious hotels in Milan the agents accused of being involved in the kidnapping stayed in was also found in the rubbish bin in his garage.

~snip~

http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:8mut0980Q80J:www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10473.htm++Betnie+Medero&hl=en

[stop the bleeding]

54. cool I replied to you in the LBN thread, but this could always use a good

:kick:

[robertpaulsen]

55. Emit, you and stb are kicking ASS in the research department!

You're both definitely on the right track looking into Castelli. I haven't read all your links, just browsed, but here's something else in case you haven't come across it:

In an overlooked column in Il Riformista, dated July 23rd, 2003, the anonymous author declares that Jeff Castelli, the Rome CIA station chief, had just been recalled to Langley by Tenet allegedly because of his misconduct. The article states that according to anonymous intelligence sources, Castelli had not handled the Burba Niger forgeries correctly.

Apparently Castelli had dismissed the forgeries right off as the same old stuff and had not bothered to forward them to Langley until February 2003.

However, the forgeries had been immediately sent to the Europa State desk which fowarded to State in Washington. This occurred at the beginning of October. But back in Rome, Jeff Castelli did not receive the forgeries until October 19th.

If we are to give any credit to the Riformista reconstruction, it appears that Castelli had already dealt with Niger forgeries before. But what may strike the reader in the light of recent developments is that the sexed-up edition of the Niger forgeries only went to State and not to the CIA. It was State that went public on December 19th, 2002, with the accusations against Niger- accusations promptly denied by the Niger Minister of Mines, Rabiou Hassan Yari, and PM Hama Amadou, yet totally ignored by the MSM.

http://www.eurotrib.com/story/2005/7/20/2096/60605


So how much is real and how much is propaganda? A poster on this thread named deGondi asks a pertinent question:

What tweaked my curiosity in the above diary was the coincidence of Castelli's "removal" from the Rome office with the explosion of the Niger case. On July 6th Wilson came out with his famous article, just as Bush and his entourage were leaving for Africa. Around the 16th of July la Repubblica began publishing its scoop. One week later la Riformista published an anonymous article naming the Rome CIA station chief. And revealed that the crucial Niger forgeries went only to State. Period. Not to the CIA. Not to the OSP. And State used those docs to do the damage we know.

Perhaps I'm disingenuous, but who exactly prepared the December 19th, 2002, memo asserting that there was an African yellowcake deal, given that the State's Bureau of Intelligence and Research had long since dismissed the matter as false?
by de Gondi on Thu Jul 21st, 2005 at 06:22:00 PM EDT

[Emit]

56. funny you should mention this la Repubblica reference...

I just read it earlier today, including a google translation of the la Repubblica story--which was an odd translation, but I did get the gist of it--and found it interesting, especially in light of the fact that both Castelli and Lady were then subsequently found to be under investigation by Italian authorities for their hand in the Abu Omar abduction.

As far as how Castelli fits in to the forgeries themselves, I asked lala about how this blogger's rendition of the story might pan out:

http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:4j0T6mwKLcIJ:nuralcubicle.blogspot.com/2005/11/berlusconis-men-doctor-niger-uranium.html+Langley+Rome+&hl=en

SISMI is familiar with the spectacularly phony dossier on the Niger uranium, fabricated “by private motivation for lucre” by three characters on SISMI’s payroll (Rocco Martino, Antonio Nucera and La Signora, who worked at the Embassy). SISMI is aware of the information contained the dossier. SISMI "doctors" the mistakes and absurdities contained in the documents. It does not entrust the dossier to the CIA but instead to a “field officer” of the Agency stationed in Rome, who is permitted to “view” the documents. The US agent scribbles a few notes which results in the first report prepared for nWashington. When the (false) news that Saddam is moving to acquire the bomb causes consternation (or joy) in the US intelligence community, Nicolò Pollari’s SISMI prepares a second report confirming the first, this time with the inclusion of a transcription of the Niger-Iraq agreement confirming “the credibility of the source (La Signora)”. With a third cable comes the announcement that finally, “500 tons of uranium have already been shipped to Iraq.” In the Nigergate affair, this is precisely what took place. Yet the Italian Government and the SISMI director stubbornly clings to the claim that Rome never sent a single document to Washington. They admit to having "shared" information with their American ally, but the point is this: Exactly what information did Italy share with the United States? It can be documented that our intelligence people, with the consent of the Italian Government, presented to the United States information which it knew to be not only falsified but so sloppily forged that was it necessary to hide some errors and to doctor others using the routine magic of clandestine services.

~snip~

The attention of several Democratic Senators’ offices has been turned lately to the observations found in a little radical blog (www.theleftcoaster.com): Why does the Senate Report attribute a letter written by Allele Dihadj Habibou to Nassirou Sabo? Who is disinforming whom?

We have seen that Habibou hasn’t been a member of the cabinet for a decade. So this needs a little touchup. The signature of Sabo (that on the letter of 30 July 1999) is transferred to the message of 10 October 2000 because, rightly, Nassirou Sabo is Foreign Minister from 2000 to 2001. The dossier is now ready but it must still be treated with care. It’s too dangerous to hand it over to the CIA. Could they discover the signature manipulation? What should be done then?

So here is SISMI’s expedient in the testimony of Thielmann, recorded shortly after he resigned as director of the Office of Strategic, Proliferation, and Military Affairs in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), the intelligence arm of the US State Department.

The CIA field officer stationed in Rome informed Langley that he had seen (but was unable to duplicate), thanks to the cooperation of Italian military intelligence, certain letters which document the attempt by Iraq to acquire, at the beginning of 2001, more than 500 ton of pure uranium from Niger.

It is the October 15, 2001, report prepared by the Italians. The CIA agent “in the field” hurriedly jots down a few notes on the dossier he has just been shown: the 1999 telex, the Niger State Court, the letter written by Mamadou Tandja to Saddam Hussein. He observes that the letter of 10 October 2000 is signed by Nissirou Sabo (the signature of Allele Dihadj Habibou was substituted in an ass-covering move). When the cable arrives in Langley, the chief of the Directorate of Operations jumps up on the table. Is he holding in his hand the thing he has been looking for: the “smoking gun.”?

Note that she doesn't include Castelli by name, but, is Castelli the one she refers to him as "field officer"? Anyway, just another scenario to ponder.

Also, when I had read that translated la Repubblica article, I also read this one:

http://www.repubblica.it/2005/e/sezioni/cronaca/islamici/sismisapeva/sismisapeva.html

Where Michael Scheuer (the once anonymous author of Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror and Through Our Enemies' Eyes) is interviewed in relation to the Abu Omar story. In another article, I think it was this CNN article that quoted la Repubblica, Scheuer is mentioned as well. Somewhere, in one of these I read today, an article states that he knows Castillo personally (I think it was this la Repubblica article). Anyway, wonder what the chances of Raw Story getting an interview with this guy, Scheuer, are? Seems he's dead set on the fact that nothing like this (Abu Omar abduction) would have ever happened without full knowledge of SISMI. He might be able to fill in some of the gaps where Castelli is concerned, and even some of the other people involved. Just a thought.

Lastly, since Castelli seems to have been involved in the Abu Omar abduction, which occurred around the same time (February 2003), and that pissed of the Italian authorities, maybe that had something to do with his "removal"?

On a final note, we may never uncover the truth to this matter. I am especially amazed at the web of deceipt in looking at the details of these characters involved. Damn. It all reads like a friggin' spy novel. The fact that this disinformation op played such a major role in Bush & Co.'s rush to war at the hands of what appears to be what Bill Moyers refers to as the Secret Government should truly alarm all.

The Secret Government is an interlocking network of official functionaries, spies, mercenaries, ex-generals, profiteers and superpatriots, who, for a variety of motives, operate outside the legitimate institutions of government. Presidents have turned to them when they can’t win the support of the Congress or the people, creating that unsupervised power so feared by the framers of our Constitution...

~snip~

The men who wrote our Constitution tried to make it hard to go to war. Human life was at stake, they knew, as well as the character of this republic. War should be soberly decided, publicly debated, and mutually determined by the people's representatives. It is the people, after all, who must fight, pay, and die once the choice is made. The Constitution was to protect them from dying for the wrong reasons. It was to protect them from killing for the wrong reasons....

~snip~

It doesn't have to be. The people who wrote this Constitution lived in a world more dangerous than ours. They were surrounded by territory controlled by hostile powers, on the edge of a vast wilderness. Yet they understood that even in perilous times, the strength of self-government was public debate and public consensus. They knew too that men are fallible, themselves included, and prone to abuse great office. They left us safeguards against men whose appetites for power might exceed their moral wisdom.

To forget this-to ignore the safeguards, to put aside our basic values out of fear, to imitate the foe in order to defeat him- is to shred the distinction that makes us different. For, in the end, not only our values but our methods separate us from the enemies of freedom. The decisions we make are inherent in the methods that produce them. An open society cannot survive a secret government. Constitutional democracy is no romantic notion. It's our defense against ourselves, the one foe who might defeat us.

Bill Moyers, Excerpts from The Secret Government

edited for clarity

[stop the bleeding]

59. Directorate of Operations - Stephen Kappes - the same one called off

of Weldon's expedition in the spring of 2003(Rawstory)- part 2 of a 3 part series so far.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=2046689#2048464

***********************************************


From the site you referenced above the same site that has the link to the 120+ page PDF Plame time line - 1998 forward.

"When the cable arrives in Langley, the chief of the Directorate of Operations jumps up on the table. Is he holding in his hand the thing he has been looking for: the “smoking gun.”?"

But while Goss was widely expected to shake the place up, the departure of Kappes and his deputy, Michael Sulick, stunned intelligence veterans in Washington, who saw the pair as the most qualified team to lead the CIA's Directorate of Operations in years. "The planets lined up," says Milt Bearden, a 30-year CIA veteran who ran the agency's arming of Afghan rebels in the Soviet war. "You had the right guys in the right job at the right time." Ironically, the two men shared Goss's critique of the CIA's shortcomings. Says a former top CIA official who worked with Kappes: "These guys weren't in denial that 9/11 and Iraq were intelligence failures."

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/041129/29intell.htm


***************
I wonder why Kappes resigned was he pissed that he was misled after all this guy was a Marine and Bush's point man on the WMD Libya deal.

repeat :

"When the cable arrives in Langley, the chief of the Directorate of Operations jumps up on the table. Is he holding in his hand the thing he has been looking for: the “smoking gun.”?"


more discussed here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=2046689&mesg_id=2049455

Also some history comes up on Kappes at wikipedia but not at Co-op Research.

The CIA is popping up way too much for them not to be involved with Plame's outing see post# 58

Gotta go watch Jon Stewart see you on Friday!

Peace!

[robertpaulsen]

57. Let me clarify my direction, if its a wild goose chase, let me know.

I'm not sure how much in this article is a red herring and how much would be valuable to pursue. But there might be two avenues that would be worth exploring. One would be this State Department angle via John Bolton. What's his relationship with Jeff Castelli? With Ledeen? Ghorbanifar? Polari? Martino?

The other is this statement in the article:

Jeff Castelli, the Rome CIA station chief, had just been recalled to Langley by Tenet allegedly because of his misconduct.

Something tells me that the "misconduct" that Tenet called him back from his position in Italy for had to do with more than just improper handling. Kidnappings and murders tend to be a little more inflammatory. ;)

[stop the bleeding]

58. I was thinking about Tenet, Castelli, Bolton, Hadley, Rice as well

Here are some other points/questions worth thinking about, also when thinking about these people lets look at how events overlap in regards to calender dates. I will source this later a lot of it has been sprinkled among the threads.

Stephen Kappes - Ex CIA(I posted some good info on him in a previous thread in the LBN) - gets called off of Weldon's fishing expedition.(Rawstory) Resigns around 11/15/04,was was a point man for Bush on WMD intel involving Libya - from usnews.com(Kicking over the Hornets Nest- well worth reading) & wikipedia.

Three questions about Kappes

1. Who or better WHY was he called off?

2. What does or did he know about Plame?(CIA)- question 2 may answer question 1

3. Did he talk to Fitz after his resignation in Nov. 2004?


2 months earlier(Sept. 2004) than Kappes' resignation(Nov 2004) -

Porter Goss(CIA) was appointed to take Tenet's place, before that he was on House Intel Committee - the same House Intel Committee that was bypassed by Klink's(Democrat)out of the blue phone call on 03/07/03 to Weldon(Rep).(Rawstory)

At the same time UN denounces Forgeries and Cheney had his meeting with Libby and a third person on 03/07/03 or 03/08/03.(American Judas)


Tenet(CIA) - seems to go back and forth on his enthusiasm for Iraq intel from 09/11/01 forward.

1. When does he make up his mind? I would like to see when and what this overlaps. Co-op research is where I will look.

2. Tenet resigns gets the medal of whatever and conveniently removes himself from the equation.

3. Tenet oversees Castelli(CIA)(Which we need to explore more) in Italy and probably by way of Castelli oversaw Sheldon Lady(CIA)

4. We need to explore Tenet's history MUCH MUCH more I am starting to see a pattern as Emit highlighted in research between Langley and Italy, now throw Hadley/Rice and you have WHIG/OSP, Ledeen/Rover all working in concert playing the American public.

Couple more things on my mind that I am going to check out when I have time.

When does Fitz start to investigate the Italy connection?(kappes question 3?) or when does he take the case to Italy for the Forgery investigation? Would Wilson have a part or some one in or was in the (CIA)?

When were the warrants issued for the Mysterious 13(CIA) in Italy for the abduction of the Cleric(possible CIA)?

I know that these answers are here I just thought of this stuff earlier and haven't checked for facts yet, but wanted to give you all an idea of what was running through my head.

Lastly the people mentioned in the top are the keys(Castelli, Bolton, Tenet, Hadley, Rice) to the puzzle we just have to see how they all work together including the links(Castelli/Gang of 13).

[Emit]

60. When I read this post

The first thought that came to mind regarding Bolton was Sey Hersh's article about the Stovepipe: "The intelligence report was quickly stovepiped to those officials who had an intense interest in building the case against Iraq, including Vice-President Dick Cheney." Sey Hersh


More:

THE STOVEPIPE
How conflicts between the Bush Administration and the intelligence community marred the reporting on Iraq’s weapons.
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Issue of 2003-10-27
Posted 2003-10-20

~snip~

A few months after George Bush took office, Greg Thielmann, an expert on disarmament with the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, or INR, was assigned to be the daily intelligence liaison to John Bolton, the Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control, who is a prominent conservative....Eventually, Thielmann said, Bolton demanded that he and his staff have direct electronic access to sensitive intelligence, such as foreign-agent reports and electronic intercepts...

BTW, there's an interesting part in Hersh's article, toward the end, starting here:

~snip~
Another explanation was provided by a former senior C.I.A. officer. He had begun talking to me about the Niger papers in March, when I first wrote about the forgery, and said, “Somebody deliberately let something false get in there.” He became more forthcoming in subsequent months, eventually saying that a small group of disgruntled retired C.I.A. clandestine operators had banded together in the late summer of last year and drafted the fraudulent documents themselves.

“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.

“They thought that, with this crowd, it was the only way to go—to nail these guys who were not practicing good tradecraft and vetting intelligence,” my source said. “They thought it’d be bought at lower levels—a big bluff.” The thinking, he said, was that the documents would be endorsed by Iraq hawks at the top of the Bush Administration, who would be unable to resist flaunting them at a press conference or an interagency government meeting. They would then look foolish when intelligence officials pointed out that they were obvious fakes. But the tactic backfired, he said, when the papers won widespread acceptance within the Administration. “It got out of control.”

Like all large institutions, C.I.A. headquarters, in Langley, Virginia, is full of water-cooler gossip, and a retired clandestine officer told me this summer that the story about a former operations officer faking the documents is making the rounds. “What’s telling,” he added, “is that the story, whether it’s true or not, is believed”—an extraordinary commentary on the level of mistrust, bitterness, and demoralization within the C.I.A. under the Bush Administration. (William Harlow, the C.I.A. spokesman, said that the agency had no more evidence that former members of the C.I.A. had forged the documents “than we have that they were forged by Mr. Hersh.”)
~snip~

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?031027fa_fact

Hhmmm, prompted apparently by this part in Hersh's article, the freepers have their own theories going on, trying to place the blame on the Dems and the French as an elaborate attempt to bring down Bush:

http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:Dx-hMJPJ4LUJ:www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1522546/posts+John+Bolton+Jeff+Castelli&hl=en

[stop the bleeding]

61. quick update on Franklin

http://go.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=politicsNews&storyID=10921087&src=rss/politicsNews

Ex-Pentagon analyst jailed for sharing US secrets
Fri Jan 20, 2006 12:15 PM ET


ALEXANDRIA, Virginia (Reuters) - A former Pentagon analyst was sentenced to 12 years and seven months in prison on Friday for passing U.S. defense information to two pro-Israel lobbyists and for sharing classified information with an Israeli diplomat.

Lawrence Franklin, who previously worked as an analyst in the office of the secretary of defense, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis. Franklin had pleaded guilty in October to sharing the information and also to illegally possessing classified documents.

Franklin had faced up to 25 years in prison. His sentence could be further reduced because of his cooperation with the government which is still prosecuting a case against the two remaining defendants in the case -- former officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel lobbying group.

[Emit]

62. Here's someone who tried to make a chart

Originally posted by Juan Cole: "Also, the Uggabugga blog has put up a diagram of the Franklin spying affair as far as it is known so far."

http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:vz4biTl-cjQJ:www.juancole.com/2004_08_01_juancole_archive.html+Diagram+Bush+administration&hl=en

Here is the diagram:

http://uggabugga.blogspot.com/2004/08/complicated-juan-cole-has-new-post.html

It's back from September of 2004, so it's incomplete, but,with the info out at that time, it's a good attempt to connect the players.

[stop the bleeding]

63. Emit and RP, Check out what I got googling "Tenet Castelli"

http://64.233.179.104/search?q=cache:3cYQKnU1A2YJ:www.correntewire.com/the_italian_job_timeline_second_course+tenet+castelli&hl=en


Had to give you the cached version because the regular page would shut down my internet every time I brought it up.

This is a Part II of your Nur al-Cubicle’s article

This piece has all of the players

The Italians.
Tenet
Castelli
State Department/Greg Thielmann
Rice/Hadley
Wolfowitz
Cheney
Ledeen


I did not paste any excerpts because the whole thing is worth reading, let me know what you all think

[robertpaulsen]

64. Good timeline. But I think we should be looking at a FORMER station chief

Remember this article you posted:

At this point, any American connection to the actual forgeries remains unsubstantiated, though the OSP at a minimum connived to circumvent established procedures to present the information directly to receptive policy makers in the White House. But if the OSP is more deeply involved, Michael Ledeen, who denies any connection with the Niger documents, would have been a logical intermediary in co-ordinating the falsification of the documents and their surfacing, as he was both a Pentagon contractor and was frequently in Italy. He could have easily been assisted by ex-CIA friends from Iran-Contra days, including a former Chief of Station from Rome, who, like Ledeen, was also a consultant for the Pentagon and the Iraqi National Congress.

http://www.amconmag.com/2005/2005_11_07/feature.html

Who are some former CIA station chiefs in Rome? This was a comment on an earlier link I posted:

I agree that there are other factors beyond and above CIA functionaries, although they have certainly supervised a lot of nefarious activity over the years. In particular, in recent years it seems that the NSC (the presidential National Security Council) has handled a lot of the "blacker than black" operations, while the role of the DIA and its SAPs remains much more obscure than the more visible CIA.

For the record, a bit of Googling reveals the following names of CIA station chiefs in Rome (presumably better Googling would produce more)

# James Angleton (OSS chief WWII to early 50's??)
# Mark Wyatt (1948 election payoffs)
# William Colby (1953-1958)
# Thomas Karamessines (early 60's)
# William Harvey Feb.1963--??
# Howard "Rocky" Stone 197?-75
# Duane Clarridge 1980 Ustica!!!!
# Jeffrey W. Castelli Rome Station Chief up to summer 2003

The are obvious gaps, especially between Dewey Clarridge and Jeff Castelli, as well as the incumbent. Note also that the (in)famous Ted Shackley was second in command in Rome in the early 70's. It's striking to note what a springboard to success the Rome station has been.

As always, I make no claim to infallibility, and the above list could well be "off" on dates, etc. Corrections and additions are welcome.

http://www.eurotrib.com/story/2005/7/20/2096/60605


I found the gap between Clarridge and Castelli, and a whole lot more:

Earlier this week here on Antiwar.com, Justin Raimondo, based on a secret source, broke the story and revealed that Patrick Fitzgerald is indeed following the question of the origin of the crudely forged documents and the identities of Michael Ledeen's former CIA friends. Fitzgerald, he says:

"'has finally been given a full copy of the Italian parliamentary oversight report on the forged Niger uranium document,' the former CIA officer tells me:

'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...'

My source tells me that 'Fitzgerald asked the Italians if he could share the report with Paul McNulty,' the prosecutor in the AIPAC case. There are plenty of links between the two investigations: they are, in a sense, the same investigation, since many of the same people are involved. McNulty is delving into a single aspect of the cabal's activities, while Fitzgerald seems to have broadened his probe to include not only the outing of Plame, but also the origin of the Niger uranium forgeries and other instances of classified information leakage via the vice president's office.

more...

http://www.antiwar.com/blog/comments.php?id=P2452_0_1_0


Alan Wolf and Duane Clarridge. I think this is where the truth about the Niger docs lies!

[robertpaulsen]

65. Loggin off tonite, tomorrow let's google DUANE CLARRIDGE & ALAN WOLF.

Every connection you can think of, OSP, INC, SISMI, PNAC, Ghorbanifar, Feith, Cheney, you name it. I think we're getting real close to the real Niger forgers and their motives.

Emit and stop the bleeding, you've both made this fun and exciting!

[stop the bleeding]

66. I found this on my break this morning - Clarridge/Operation Phoenix

this has everything from Woolsey, Operation Phoenix, GH Bush, to Special Ops in Iraq that could also be the one's Larisa highlighted in one of her articles a few weeks back.

Torture, the CIA and the Press - Who Let the Dogs Out?-DOUGLAS VALENTINE, counterpunch.org


It does take a minute for the article to get going but once it does it is uncanny how much what it is talking about from the 1970's is paralleled with today's events. This may just be some good bathroom reading or there may be some good points in here.


I came across this by googling Tenet and Clarridge there were a lot of pages that came up some of them I have seen before and others I still need to look at. I will check back sometime later today and see if I or someone else has been able to make any more headway on this.


Also more from this Oct/2001 article from Seymour Hersh

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?011008fa_FACT
*********************************


and this little blog piece from 12/29/2005

http://64.233.179.104/search?q=cache:3wo3MLwNQDkJ:www.taylormarsh.com/archives_view.php%3Fid%3D1602+Clarridge+tenet&hl=en



****

this one has some of the same stuff but also goes into a little bit on the progress/questions of the Intel Committee

http://64.233.187.104/search?q=cache:5Oe2oWD78CsJ:www.mepc.org/public_asp/journal_vol11/0406_lang.asp+Clarridge+tenet&hl=en

[robertpaulsen]

67. Good stuff. Be sure to check out this thread.

Fitzgerald Eyes Plame-Niger Conspiracy - By Jason Leopold
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x215947

Look how Leopold BURNS Rove & WHIG in the article at the link:

The current State Department official said the INR memo was discussed at length during the meeting Grossman attended at the White House. That meeting may have been the first time other White House officials, including Karl Rove, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, and other unknown administration officials learned that Valerie Plame was Wilson's wife and that she worked at the CIA in a covert capacity.

All of the sources interviewed separately for this story said they were told that Karl Rove was the person who first suggested using the media to "turn the tables on Wilson." The officials wouldn't identify the person who told them this. The decision, however, was made during a meeting that took place between the White House Iraq Group.

"There was a discussion about what to do about Mr. Wilson," the current State Department official said. "There was a decision to leak a story to the press - I think a few journalists - about the Wilson trip, that it was a non-issue because his wife set it up for him. They were going to show that Wilson and his wife were Democrats. Can you imagine? They were going to say 'don't listen to them, they're partisan.' It was a coordinated effort to turn him into the story. Much to my surprise, it worked."

One of the officials interviewed for this story was also cited in a September 28, 2003, Washington Post story about the motivation to leak Wilson's wife's identity to the media. "Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge," the State Department official told the Post. The Post did not name the official.

more...

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/7014

[robertpaulsen]

68. The first link on post 66 blew my mind. Clarridge is one dirty dog!

These paragraphs detail his Iran/Contra past:

Hersh then chose to cite former CIA officer Robert Baer, an avid supporting for unleashing the CIA, who heaped praise on former CIA officer Duane Clarridge for running the CT Center properly under Ronald Reagan's CIA Director, William Casey. This was in the mid-1980s, when mining foreign ports and forming death squads was permitted. But, Hersh tells us, Clarridge was eventually fired because the things he was doing were "too risky."

Hersh, however, did not choose to use the word "illegal" to describe what Clarridge did, nor did he choose to mention that Clarridge, who may be one of his anonymous sources, was indicted in the Iran-Contra scandal, but pardoned by lame duck President G. H. W Bush in December 1992.

It's also important to know that Hersh, in a 20 December 2001 article for The New Yorker, reported that Duane Clarridge, along with General Wayne Downing ("who ran a Special Forces command during the Gulf War," and was a nominee to head the Office of Homeland Security), had helped Ahmad Chalabi draw up an attack plan for Iraq. Chalabi, of course, is the discredited leader of the Iraqi National Congress (and mentor to New York Times reporter Judy Miller), upon whose word the Bush Regime based many of its claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.



Indicted then pardoned, I hope that's not a trait son inherited from father. Now here's the dirt on Phoenix which brings us full circle to TF 121, which goes back to the 4-5 man OSP WMD planting task
force:

Again, Hersh is careful in what he doesn't say. For example, former CIA Director (and unofficial "black propaganda" minister) R. James Woolsey was, in 1985, one of seven directors of the Titan Corporation. In 2002, Titan employed Adel Nakhla, who was assigned by Titan as a civilian translator to the 205th MI Brigade. Notably, Nakhla is named as a "suspect" in the Taguba Report, which Seymour Hersh analyzed and then presented to the public in an article for The New Yorker, even before the Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff had, by his own account, had a chance to read it.1

Curiously, this writer knows of one former CIA contract officer who, before joining the Titan Corporation, worked as a Phoenix Coordinator in Vietnam in 1967. This same individual served in 1974 as a congressional liaison officer for CIA officer Donald Gregg. As Vice-President George H. W. Bush's National Security Advisor, Gregg helped to create the CIA's Counter Terrorism Center under Duane Clarridge in 1986. Gregg had managed the Phoenix Program in III Corps in Vietnam in 1970.

This unstated connection to the Phoenix Program, which was a major factor in the May Lai Massacre, is also significant in understanding what Hersh wants us to infer from his articles on national security issues. Specifically, as Hersh informed us in a December 2003 article in The New Yorker (titled "MOVING TARGETS: Will the counter-insurgency plan in Iraq repeat the mistakes of Vietnam?"), the CIA had formed a new Special Forces group, designated Task Force 121, to neutralize Baathist insurgents, by capture or assassination. According to Hersh, many of the anonymous officials he interviewed for his article feared that the new operation, called "preëmptive manhunting" by one of them, had "the potential to turn into another Phoenix Program."



Finally, here's another coincidence. Phoenix started in 1968 under another former CIA chief of station in Rome William Colby. Go figure:

The Phoenix Program "got out of control," Hersh reported. "According to official South Vietnamese statistics, Phoenix claimed nearly forty-one thousand victims between 1968 and 1972; the U.S. counted more than twenty thousand in the same time span. Some of those assassinated had nothing to do with the war against America but were targeted because of private grievances. William E. Colby, the C.I.A. officer who took charge of the Phoenix Program in 1968 (he eventually became C.I.A. director), later acknowledged to Congress that "a lot of things were done that should not have been done."

http://counterpunch.org/valentine05082004.html



Can't wait to discover what else there is on this traitor!

[Emit]

70. Dewey Clarridge On Michael Ledeen and "The Terror Network"

~snip~

Dewey Clarridge On Michael Ledeen and "The Terror Network"
In 1980, Ledeen used his connections with the newly elected Reagan administration to promote author Claire Sterling's claims of a vast Soviet-controlled terror network.

Duane R. Clarridge, a longtime CIA field agent (NE & SE Asia) and administrator who was pardoned by George HW Bush for his role in the Iran-Contra affair, describes Michael Ledeen as a "fine journalist," "a scholar," and a friend. However, he comments that their friendship had a "rocky start." Clarridge wrote that Ledeen made "life difficult for us ". He noted that the CIA took a "dim view" of individuals such Ledeen and retired CIA officer Theodore Shackley who freelanced with foreign intelligence services. In 1980, Ledeen and Shackley teamed up to provide "war games-type training" for European intelligence services, including Italy's intelligence service.

Clarridge explains that Ledeen's damage to Jimmy Carter's presidential campaign by "trumpeting of the Billy/Qaddifi relationship" earned the appreciation of Alexander Haig and other prominent Republicans. Clarridge wrote that Ledeen further aggravated the CIA by becoming an unofficial conduit between Haig and General Giuseppe Santovito, head of the Italian Military Service (SISMI).

Clarridge noted that Ledeen shared the views of Claire Sterling. Sterling contended in his 1980 book "The Terror Network" that the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc "extensively sponsored and trained the Red Brigades and other terrorist organizations." Clarridge commented that the book "implied (without documentation) that the Italian intelligence services -- people such as Santovito -- knew this and were sitting on the information."

When Santovito was in Washington on a trip organized by Ledeen, Clarridge describes going uninvited to the Watergate Hotel intercept Santovito in the lobby before Santovito left for the State Department to meet with Haig. Clarridge believed Haig was looking to Santovito for "evidence of Soviet or Eastern Bloc collusion in the activities of the Red Brigagdes." Clarridge recalls saying "Look, General, you know as well as I do that you have absolutely no evidence of any Soviet or Eastern Bloc involvement in training or guiding the Red Brigades. Isn't that true?" Santovito replied "Yes, that's true." < "A Spy For All Seasons: My Life in the CIA," Duane R. Clarridge, Scribner, 1997, pgs. 187-189. >

Clarridge notes that in 1987, as he was retiring from the agency after being formally reprimanded, it was his friend Ledeen who used connections with a prominent General Dynamics shareholder to introduce Clarridge to the General Dynamic executives who offerred him a position at the company. < pg. 395 >

~snip~

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Michael_Ledeen#Dewey_Clarridge_On_Michael_Ledeen_and_.22The_Terror_Network.22

[Emit]

71. Also, remember the rumors that Fitzgerald

was looking into these guys?

Thanks to a letter of February, 2004 in which Fitzgerald asked for and obtained expanded authority, the Special Prosecutor is now in possession of an Italian parliament investigation into the forged Niger documents alleging Iraq's interest in purchasing Niger uranium, sources said.

They said that Fitzgerald is looking into such individuals as former CIA agent, Duane Claridge, military consultant to the Iraqi National Congress, Gen. Wayne Downing, another military consultant for INC, and Francis Brooke, head of INC's Washingfton office in an effort to determine if they played any role in the forgeriese or their dissiemination. Also included in this group is long-time neoconservative Michael Ledeen, these federal sources said.

http://www2.boomantribune.com/story/2005/10/26/105036/84

On a side note, not to be too tangential, and as you are probably aware, but others might want to know:

The INC (Iraqi National Congress )was essentially created by the Rendon Group, which is basically a propaganda firm hired by the US Government (and others):

Shortly after the September 11 attacks on Wall Street and Washington, the Pentagon gave Rendon a $100,000-a-month contract to track anti-U.S. foreign news reports, offer advice on media strategy and plant pro-U.S. stories in web, print and television. In 2002 when the Pentagon tried to create the Office of Strategic Influence to spread misleading stories in foreign countries, Rendon was the contractor they had in mind. President Bush ultimately disappeared the Office after a storm of protest from the media and the public at large, but in retrospect one wonders if the administration simply renamed the project.

~snip~

Not surprisingly, the INC (best known for its founder, Ahmed Chalabi, a now disgraced member of the Iraqi Governing Council) was created by the Rendon Group, according to a February 1998 report by Peter Jennings of ABC News which showed that the Rendon Group spent more than $23 million dollars under contract with the CIA. According to ABC, Rendon invented the name for the Iraqi National Congress. Indeed Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker magazine says the Rendon Group was "paid close to a hundred million dollars by the CIA" for its work with the INC.

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=11486


And Francis Brooke used to work for Rendon (they were the ones who staged the bringing down of the Saddam statue during the 'Shock and Awe' period early on in the war, if I remember correctly):

Francis Brooke worked in the mid-1990s on the Rendon Group's anti-Iraq campaign in London at a salary of $19,000 a month. He subsequently became the chief assistant in Washington to Ahmad Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Rendon_Group

Some of the INC's intelligence on Iraq's alleged arsenal of weapons of mass destruction and Saddam's supposed ties to militant Islamic groups are reportedly funneled directly to the office of Vice President Dick Cheney by Francis Brooke, the DC lobbyist for the group. Brooke will later acknowedge that the information provided by the INC was driven by an agenda. “I told them , as their campaign manager, ‘Go get me a terrorist and some WMD, because that's what the Bush administration is interested in.’ ” Brooke had previously worked for the Rendon Group, “a shadowy CIA-connected public-relations firm.”
People and organizations involved: Francis Brooke, Frank Gaffney, Richard ("Dick") Cheney, Douglas Feith...

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/entity.jsp?entity=francis_brooke

[robertpaulsen]

72. Seeing Fitz nail those traitors would be sweet. Here's more from Raimondo

From his original column:

Even as the FBI was following the trail of the forgers, the Italians were looking into the matter from their end. A parliamentary committee was charged with investigating, and they issued a heavily redacted report: now, I am told by a former CIA operations officer, the report has aroused some interest on this side of the Atlantic. According to a source in the Italian embassy, Patrick J. "Bulldog" Fitzgerald asked for and "has finally been given a full copy of the Italian parliamentary oversight report on the forged Niger uranium document," the former CIA officer tells me:

"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."

snip

The cast of characters involved in Niger-gate is like old home week in the government scandal sweepstakes. Aside from Ledeen, whose storied (or is that checkered?) history is well-known, we have Clarridge, first head of the Counterterrorism Center set up by Bill Casey under Reagan, who deserves a column all by himself. His close relationship with Ledeen dates from his time as chief of station in Rome in the late 1970s. Clarridge was indicted for lying to prosecutors during the Iran-Contra imbroglio, but given a presidential pardon. His book, A Spy for All Seasons, was the first real "tell-all" book about the Agency. During the Reagan administration, he purportedly was the intellectual author of the notorious "Psychological Operations in Guerilla Warfare," a CIA how-to manual instructing the Nicaraguan contras in the fine art of terrorism, including bombings, assassinations, and violence directed at noncombatants. It was Clarridge who came up with the bright idea of mining Nicaragua's harbors, which led to the unprecedented condemnation of the U.S. government's actions in the World Court. He was reportedly slated to become a top counterterrorism official in the National Security Council, but was nixed. He now lives in San Diego, Calif., and pursues a number of business and ideological interests, including Dax Resources Corp., which runs a 24-hour Global Response Center and advertises its facility at kidnap prevention and counterterrorism, noting that "we can also undertake special operations, including technical countermeasures."

http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=7681

[robertpaulsen]

73. Hey Emit, here's more on Wayne Downing.

From stop the bleeding's link on post 66:

Shortly after his hasty departure from Jordan, Chalabi, with the backing of his neocon allies in Washington, most notably, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Professor Bernard Lewis of Princeton, helped launch the INC. Chalabi had first been introduced to Perle and Wolfowitz in 1985 by their mutual mentor, Albert Wohlstetter. Bernard Lewis met Chalabi in 1990 and soon thereafter asked his own allies inside the Bush 41 administration, including Wolfowitz's Pentagon aide Zalmay Khalilzad, to help boost the Iraqi exile. Another future Bush 43 Iraq War player also met Chalabi about that time. General Wayne Downing was first introduced to Chalabi in 1991, when Downing commanded the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

snip

In spite of this, neoconservatives inside the United States, largely in exile during the Clinton administration, succeeded in influencing the Congress enough to obtain passage of the "Iraq Liberation Act of 1998," largely to revive Chalabi's End Game scheme. Now retired, Gen. Downing, along with retired CIA officer Duane "Dewey" Clarridge of Iran-contra fame, became military "consultants" to Chalabi's INC and then drafted their own updated version of the Chalabi plan, now dubbed "the Downing Plan." It was different in name only. The Downing-Clarridge plan insisted that a "crack force" of no more than 5,000 INC troops, backed by a group of former U.S. Army Special Forces soldiers (Green Berets), could bring down the Iraq Army. "The idea from the beginning was to encourage defections of Iraqi units," Clarridge insisted to The Washington Post. "You need to create a nucleus, something for people to defect to. If they could take Basra, it would be all over." It is difficult to understand how a retired four-star army general could believe this to be true.

In subsequent congressional testimony, then-Central Command head General Anthony Zinni (USMC) denounced the Downing scheme in no uncertain terms, warning that it would lead to a "Bay of Goats," adding that, by his most recent counts, there were 91 Iraqi opposition groups. None of them had "the viability to overthrow Saddam." Elsewhere he mocked Chalabi and the INC as "some silk-suited, Rolex-wearing guys in London." Despite CIA and uniformed military repudiation of End Game, the Downing Plan and other variations on the same theme, the neoconservative group continued to crank out advocacy for Chalabi's proposed revolution.

http://64.233.187.104/search?q=cache:5Oe2oWD78CsJ:www.mepc.org/public_asp/journal_vol11/0406_lang.asp+Clarridge+tenet&hl=en

Gotta love Zinni for putting the crazies in their place!

[Emit]

82. Michael Ledeen, Dewey Clarridge, Ahmed Chalabi and Francis Brookes

Are who the Italian Parliament, according to sources, focused in on as the origins of the forgeries. La Repubblica reported the same, I think. And these are some of the same guys, with the exception of Chalabi, that Fitzgerald was focusing on (see post #71 for refresher).


From a French source:
via What really happened? http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/aipacledeen.html
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/aipacledeen.html

In Italy, the Parliament comes to conclude a study on the origins and the consequences from the forgeries, and according to certain sources, the report/ratio mentions among the principal suspects Michael Ledeen, Dewey Clarridge, Ahmed Chalabi and Francis Brookes.

Let us recall that Ledeen works like "consultant" near the service of Italian information SISMI since long years (since the beginning of the Eighties and the bursting of the scandal around the P2 cabin). To December 2001, at the time where the documents natives of Niger were transmitted to the SISMI, it went to Rome in company of Harold Rhode and of Lawrence Franklin of the Pentagon, officially to meet Manucher Ghorbanifar, large protagonist of the Business Iran-Countered. Franklin is at the present time accused to have transmitted secret information to the AIPAC like with a person in charge for the embassy of Israel.

[robertpaulsen]

88. Amazing how ALL these names are tied to INC.

As well as Wayne Downing, according to the link:

The fact that Clarridge, Chalabi and Brookes (related to Iraqi National Congress (Inc)), are mentioned is particularly interesting. With the end of the year 2001, the tsar of the counter-terrorism of the White House was the General (Cr) Wayne DOWNING. He proposed to take Clarridge for assistant. Brookes came from Rendon Group, a cabinet of "public relations" that the Pentagon engaged to promote Chalabi and the Inc.



Just for humor's sake, did you read Ledeen's reaction to Libby's indictment?

"Documents R Us" Ledeen has thoughts about Fitz; Let's introduce them...
by kant
Fri Oct 28, 2005 at 09:29:12 PM PDT

As many of you know Michael Ledeen, Friend of Rove and Norquist and "scholar" at the American Enterprise Institute, has been tied to meetings in Italy around the time that the forged Niger documents surfaced.

Well it appears Mr. Ledeen has some thoughts about the indictment of Mr. Libby...

See it below... And I've offered you Mr. Ledeen's e-mail address to tell him how you feel. And perhaps you can help facilitate a meeting between Ledeen and his favorite Special Prosecutor.

more...

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/10/28/232912/78

[Emit]

90. Interesting, thanks. He's an arrogant SOB. Have you seen any of his

op-eds re: the Niger forgeries?

This one is worth a read-- (he's talking to that dead CIA guy, I posted about that somewhere on one of these threads) Anyway, I can't read anything written by him now that I don't think is some sort of psy-ops thing. Here he's blaming the French for the forgeries:


The French Connection

Getting to the Bottom of the Prewar-Intelligence Mystery
By Michael A. Ledeen
http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.23424,filter.all/pub_detail.asp

[robertpaulsen]

74. Your last link, the W. Patrick Lang column, is especially good.

Not just for detailing the Clarridge-Downing-Chalabi axis of evil, but for detailing the inner workings and history of the OSP. The Kwiatkowski quote says a lot:

Lt. Col. (ret.) Karen Kwiatkowski (USAF), who served at NESA from June 2002 to March 2003, provides an interesting perspective. She says she was "shocked to learn that Luti was effectively working for Libby . . . . In one of the first staff meetings that I attended there," she recalled recently, "Bill Luti said, ‘Well, did you get that thing over to Scooter? Scooter wants this, and somebody's got to get it over to him, and get that up to him right away.' After the meeting, I asked one of my co-workers, who'd been there longer, ‘Who is this Scooter?' I was told, `That's Scooter Libby over at the OVP (Office of the Vice President). He's the Vice President's chief of staff.' Later I came to understand that Cheney had put Luti there."

Kwiatkowski learned that OSP personnel were participating, along with officials from the DIA and CIA, in the debriefings of Chalabi-delivered informants. John Trigilio, a DIA officer assigned to NESA, confirmed it to her in a heated discussion.

I argued with him (Tregilio) after the president's Cincinnati speech (in October 2002). I told him that the president had made a number of statements that were just not supported by the intelligence. He said that the president's statements are supported by intelligence, and he would finally say, ‘We have sources that you don't have.' I took it to mean the sources that Chalabi was bringing in for debriefing. . . . Trigilio told me he participated in a number of debriefs, conducted in hotels downtown, or wherever, of people that Chalabi brought in. These debriefs had Trigilio from OSP, but also CIA and DIA participated. . . . If it (the information) sounded good, it would go straight to the OVP or elsewhere. I don't put it out of possibility that the information would go straight to the media because of the (media's) close relationship with some of the neoconservatives. So this information would make it straight out into the knowledge base without waiting for intelligence (analysts) to come by with their qualifications and reservations.

NESA/OSP apparently carried the cherry-picking methods of the smaller Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group to a new level of effectiveness, according to Lt. Col. Kwiatkowski,

At the OSP, what they were doing was looking at all the intelligence they could find on WMD. That was the focal point, picking bits and pieces that were the most inflammatory, removing any context that might have been provided in the original intelligence report, that would have caused you to have some pause in believing it or reflected doubts that the intelligence community had, so if the intelligence community had doubts, those would be left out. . . . They would take items that had occurred many years ago, and put them in the present tense, make it seem like they occurred not many years ago . . . . But they would not talk about the dates; they would say things like, ‘He has continued since that time' and ‘He could do it tomorrow,' which of course, wasn't true. . . .The other thing they would do would be to take unrelated events that were reported in totally unrelated ways and make connections that the intelligence community had not made. This was primarily in discussing Iraq's activities and how they might be related to al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups that might be against us, or against Israel. . . . These kinds of links would be made. They would be made casually, and they would be made in a calculated way to form an image that is definitely not the image that anyone reading the original reports would have. The summaries that we would see from Intelligence did not match the kinds of things that OSP was putting out. So that is what I call propaganda development. It goes beyond the manipulation of intelligence to propaganda development.



My highlights are inserted to point out that OSP went beyond cherrypicking intelligence to making shit up! Wurmser and Maloof were two of the biggest offenders through their PCEG.



Here's another link to Clarridge, with info I didn't know about his time in Italy:

Who is Duane Clarridge?

snip

Clarridge is best known as "the CIA official who engineered the covert war in Nicaragua." He's the guy who mined the harbors! And the guy on the ground in Nicaragua who supported the contras against the Sandinistas.

That means Clarridge was knee deep in the Iran-contra affair. Indeed, after being indicted for lying to Congress (seven counts of perjury), Clarridge was pardoned by the current President's father. From the USIA, 1992:

The president also pardoned five other persons who already had pleaded guilty or had been indicted or convicted in connection with the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages investigation. They were Elliott Abrams, a former assistant secretary of state for Inter-American affairs; former National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane; and Duane Clarridge, Alan Fiers, and Clair George, all former employees of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Even by Novak's ambiguous definition, Clarridge was an operative.

Like Ledeen, Clarridge lived and worked in Rome for awhile -- apparently participating in some way in the toppling of an Italian government. He was serving in Rome when the Pope was shot. He was also there when a Libyan aircraft crashed (filled with bullet holes) at about the same time an Italian airliner went down. There was some sort of coverup in Italy and Clarridge allegedly said Israel shot down the plane because it suspected France of shipping nuclear fuel to Iraq on the plane!

http://rpayne.blogspot.com/2005/10/who-is-duane-clarridge.html

[stop the bleeding]

76. I have not had a chance to even review the articles that I posted earlier

been busy catching up on Wurmser. I like what I see so far with how you and Emit have tied Clarridge in with Fitzgerald's focus in this investigation.

I like you two keep running into this Rendon Group as well.

One other dude I keep running into a lot is James Woolsey he has got ties in any and all of these scandals not to mention what he said on Jon Stewart the other night.

I need to go and grab something to eat and then I will review my articles from post # 66, along with the information found from your's and Emit's research.

Need to go chow be back in a bit.

Peace!

[Emit]

77. Yes--I just read a similar excerpt about Clarridge with more detail

Again, it goes back to Iran-Contra days...

...in June 1985, when Bush formed the Terrorism Task Force, at which point the illegal arms sales went forward. And to assure that no one else in the CIA would obstruct Reagan's secret policy, Casey in January 1986 conscripted veteran CIA officer Duane Clarridge into the Counter-Terror Network, as its de-facto security chief, and directed Clarridge to form the CIA's Counter-Terror Center, which exists until today. 14

Terror Central

Under the current "unpresident" Bush, counter-terrorism is a mechanism to conduct illegal operations on behalf of his economic patrons, to circumvent Congress, and to his harass domestic critics. Counter-terrorism is the preferred political and psychological weapon of the radical right wing, and it was perfected in 1986 with the creation of the CIA's Counter-Terror center...Duane "Dewey" Clarridge, a man with an extensive background in terror, was well equipped for managing this job. A rabid right wing ideologue, he was chief of the CIA's station in Turkey in the late 1960s and 1970s, when the fascist Grey Wolves went on a terror rampage, bombing, shooting and killing thousands of officials, journalists, students, lawyers, labor organizers, social democrats, left-wing activists and Kurds. Since then, Turkey' military dictatorship has been one of America's strongest allies.

A body-builder and certified member of the Old Boy clique that runs the CIA, Clarridge in August 1976 helped ADDO Ted Shackley recruit Albert Hakim, later a member of Secord's Enterprise, to spy in Iran.15 (Shackley was soon thereafter forced into retirement due to his association with "rogue elephant" Ed Wilson, the CIA officer who sold tons of explosives to Libya.) Clarridge was serving as the CIA's station chief in Rome when the Pope was shot, and was chief of Latin America Division from 1981 until 1984, when Nicaraguan harbors were mined and the psyops "murder manual" was distributed to the Contras, with his approval. In this capacity Clarridge helped Richard Secord move PLO weapons captured by Israeli forces during their bloody invasion of Lebanon, through Noriega in Panama, to the Contras.

Clarridge, as chief of the Europe Division, next played a pivotal role in the illegal Iran-Contra operation, by providing the back channel, through his station chief in Lisbon, that allowed North and Secord's Enterprise to sell HAWK and TOW missiles to the Iranians, at a huge profit for Secord and his Israeli counterparts, in exchange for the release of several American hostages. The operation, which subverted the U.S. Constitution and the Bolland Amendments passed by Congress, made Ronald Reagan into the world's biggest, but most adorable, liar.

~snip~

In an interview with this writer, Clarridge described the Counter-Terror Center, which has coordinated the CIA's back-channel activities since its formation in 1986, as a central unit with members from the four directorates, operating under a committee at the National Security Council. With input from the different divisions, the Counter-Terror Center "divines" anti-terrorism policy, and then constructs entities that can conduct operations. It is not function of the U.S. Army Special Forces, according to Clarridge, but pieces together counter-terrorism "action teams"--commando squads trained to capture suspected terrorists and bring them to the United States to stand trial.

During his tenure from 1986 to 1988, Clarridge oversaw a massive increase in intelligence gathering on suspected terrorists, and developed new weapons for use against them. He worked especially closely with George W. H. Bush, much to his advantage. Indeed, after it was revealed that Clarridge had assisted North in the transfer of surface-to-air missiles to Iran, he was forced to resign from the CIA. He lied about it when called before Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, and was indicted on seven counts of perjury. But he never went to trial, thanks to a last minute pardon issued by Bush on December 24, 1992. Bush's pardon provided blanket amnesty to Clarridge, Reagan's Secretary of Defense Casper Weinburger, Elliott Abrams, a former assistant secretary of state for Inter-American affairs, former National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane, CIA officer Alan Fiers, and CIA officer Clair George.

~snip~

Then, the author it sums up...

...The moral to this story is crystal clear: Presidents Nixon, Reagan and Bush created secret "counter-terror" cabals within their administrations to conduct illegal operations and harass their domestic political opponents. Under the aegis of counter-terrorism, the FBI since then has conducted extensive surveillance against every peace group that opposes any right wing Administration's blatant terrorism.

http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:25iYhRPFGvIJ:newsmine.org/archive/coldwar-imperialism/iran-contra/suspend-constitution-rex-84.txt+Dewey+Clarridge+Iran-Contra&hl=en

[Avalux]

9. Ledeen was behind the forgeries; a Rove buddy too.

Even though he's not in the Admin anymore, he's still a big player.

[Marie26]

16. He's Rove's only foreign policy advisor,

And an open facist.

[SOS]

18. That's the truly stunning aspect

of Ledeen. He is an avowed, open, declared fascist.
That's probably why they keep him (technically) out of the administration.
otoh - he's the only person in Bushco who is open about his true intentions.

[AntiFascist]

29. Not only does he brag about being a long-time student of fascism...

he claims that the president has also been a good student, though not as intellectual, who latched onto his ideas quickly.

[Marie26]

46. Isn't it?

The fact that they'd rely on such a man tells you a whole lot about who these people are. Ledeen might not "technically" be in the Administration, but as Rove's advisor, he has more direct access to Bush than Colin Powell ever did. I've got no doubt that he was involved in this Niger forgery business.

[The Backlash Cometh]

11. Omigod. I smell striking flint. Smoke is sure to follow.

[warrens]

13. Ledeen = AIPAC

I think he was in Office of Special Plans with Feith, too.

[Marie26]

15. Didn't La Repubblica already do an expose on this? nt

[Emit]

20. BTW, since this story is so important and can get very confusing

Here's an excellent timeline, in part using translations from Italian sources (La Repubblica) , that might help provide the framework to this ongoing issue:

www.correntewire.com/the_italian_job_timeline_first_course

and

www.correntewire.com/the_italian_job_timeline_second_course

On edit: Added "second course" and, these links are behaving a little screwy. I'll try to correct them if they don't work.

[AntiFascist]

30. The first link crashes my IE app n/t

[Emit]

31. Sorry 'bout that!

Sorry--it gave me some problems, too, but not until I went back into it later. I'll try to find another source.

Anyway, what I got out of this timeline that this guy has created is that (aside from providing a great framework for those who had not followed this story from the beginning) it shows, from translated Italian pieces, etc., that the documents were forged back in 1999 (or there abouts, as I recall), initially to be used to leverage the French for monetary gain. (I knew that, but had forgotten the details.) It then gives thoughts to how they ended up in Bush & Co.'s hands. It had some interesting thoughts and conclusions.

(The reason this origin of the forgeries interested me is 1) it could account for why the forgeries were so poorly done, which has been questioned by so many people 2) it shows that Ledeen himself (which some people have claimed) likely did not actually forge the docs, or may not have been involved the initial forgery, aside from having shady connections the people involved. )

[wiggs]

22. Nah, it's just coincidence.

Just like torture at Abu Ghraib occurred coincidently after Gonzales tells Bush he can order torture.

[robertpaulsen]

23. Links to other Ledeen/planted WMD threads.

PLAME= IRAN/CONTRA REDUX - Planted WMD from Ghorbanifar & Ledeen.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=364&topic_id=109553

Ledeen, Ghorbanifar, and the strategy of tension
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=364&topic_id=118064

PLAME/AIPACGATE UPDATE: OSP tried to plant WMD in Iraq.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=364&topic_id=60048

[tiptoe]

24. k&r

[KittyWampus]

25. Ladies & Gents, we are very close to having a smoking gun here

I think our Intelligence agencies and possibly those of other countries are helping get info like this out.... and that they have more.

Interesting how this stuff is all bleeding out very slowly but surely.

[Nothing Without Hope]

26. Wow - this is a huge story - too bad Ledeen's name isn't in the OP

It would attract a lot more attention.

K & R with thanks and a smile for how pieces are continuing to come together. I wonder what Fitz thinks of this and whether he can pursue it.

[many a good man]

28. "one of the most persistent mysteries "

There are far too many persistent myseries surrounding this administration.

[Wordie]

32. K&R

[lonestarnot]

36. Thanks for the kick! I almost missed this!

[lala_rawraw]

38. Oh how funny, you have to read this moron's piece

He clearly seems to think that Rome is in France:
http://socalpundit.com/blog/index.php/2006/01/17/knew-they-were-fake/

[lala_rawraw]

39. You guys, you really have to read this logic

... no joke and really let the author know about the flaws in his/her idiotic theory.

[DemReadingDU]

40. K&R

[stop the bleeding]

42. Good article here on this,,,,,

When researching the Niger Forgeries people/places/situtations/investigations cross this story and has been suggested by blogs that one is linked with the other.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=BOH20050925&articleId=1003

"My husband's homicide," she adds, "cannot be allowed to become yet another of Italy's 'mysteries."

Mrs. Calipari is referring to countless unsolved political crimes—from the murder of Prime Minister Aldo Moro in 1978 to the massacre of 80 people and wounding of 200 in the Bologna train station bombing in 1980—that point to collusion between the Italian secret services, trained and funded by the CIA, and Anglo-American-dominated NATO intelligence, which sought to reverse the electoral progress of Italy toward a coalition government of national unity that would welcome the powerful and then respected Italian Communist Party as a partner.

In spite of the Italian Communist Party's official separation from Moscow and recognition of Italy's participation in NATO, the idea of a multi-party sovereignty for Italy was anathema to the George H.W. Bush's CIA (the senior Bush was head of the CIA in 1976 for one year), to then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and to then Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, General Alexander Haig.

The terrorist crimes of the Italian "years of lead," carried out by neo-fascist or Mafia elements, were subsequently blamed on the left to discredit it in the eyes of the electorate and were part of the infamous "strategy of tension," born and bred within the intelligence institutions of the Anglo-American allied command of post-war occupied Europe to stem, subvert, and thwart the advance of socialist and democratic forces in Europe (to look up this intelligence saga, research Stay-Behind and Gladio, the names of secret subversive operations for Europe under the eventual umbrella of NATO).

and this.. Please go check this out for verification lots of good stuff here.

http://www.sandersresearch.com/Sanders/NewsManager/ShowNewsGen.aspx?NewsID=1017

As if these two affairs were not enough, there is currently a third scandal unfolding in Italy, which concerns the discovery of a secret and unofficial anti-terrorist organisation, Dipartimento studi strategici antiterrorismo(DSSA), which was illegally created within the ranks of the Italian police and security services after the Madrid bombings in 2004. A Genoese prosecutor has ordered two men to be arrested, and some twenty-five premises across Italy to be searched. It is alleged that the people who belonged to this unofficial cell within the police were Freemasons and extreme right-wingers: a good deal of the Internet blogging on this issue has focussed on alleged links to a fascist splinter group in Italy, because the two men arrested, Gaetano Saya and Riccardo Sindoca, were founder members of Destra Nazionale-Nuovo MSI.

Two elements link this scandal to the others, and both concern the United States of America and the war on terror. The first is that the two men arrested say they were also former members of Gladio, the secret underground army which NATO created during the Cold War and which I discussed in a recent issue of All News is Lies.<3> Gladio’s purpose was originally to stay behind in the event of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, and to organise the underground resistance to the putative occupiers. However, there is strong evidence to suggest that this covert army instead became involved in heavy interference in internal Italian politics, even to the extent of encouraging terrorist attacks which were then blamed on Communists. If true, then this would show how quickly a war against something can turn into complicity with it, whether the war is against communism, terrorism or drugs.

The allegations about Gladio were comprehensively rejected in an interview given by the former president of the Italian Republic, Francesco Cossiga, to Corriere della sera on 2nd July.<4> He said that the members of Gladio had all been patriots and that he was proud to have been involved with it. Cossiga said that the two police officers arrested were lying when they claimed to have been connected to the old Gladio. However, Cossiga inadvertently confirmed what many people had suspected when he said that he was concerned about the potential link between the scandal over the DSSA and the capture of the Egyptian imam. There is no proof that members of the secret army were involved in the capture – all thirteen people for whom arrest warrants have been issued are American nationals – but the two scandals are linked by the fact that both seems to be infringements of Italian sovereignty by US secret forces: the DSSA is said to have set itself up in order to receive clandestine finance from, among others, the American government and Israel.<5>

Most intriguingly of all, there might be a connection between the DSSA scandal, the Abu Omar kidnapping, and the killing of Nicola Calipari in March. The DSSA “secret army” was discovered by Genoese prosecutors during an investigation into the death of an Italian bodyguard in Iraq, Fabrizio Quattrocchi, a video of whose execution members of the DSSA were allegedly hawking for sale. So both the DSSA scandal and the Calipari killing have an Iraqi connection. Bloggers speculate openly that Calipari may have been deliberately killed by American soldiers because he had discovered links between Western secret services and so-called Islamist kidnappers, i.e. that his murder was deliberate because he knew too much.<6>

[stop the bleeding]

43. The soldier's name is Mario Lozano - the one who killed Calipari

http://www.libertyforum.org/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=news_international&Number=294262053&page=&view=&sb=&o=

The Rome prosecutor's office identified the marine as Mario Lozano .

Intelligence officer Nicola Calipari was killed on March 4 when US troops manning a temporary roadblock opened fire on a car carrying him, another agent and a released hostage to Baghdad airport .

A joint investigation by Italian and US military experts failed to reach a shared conclusion, with the American members clearing the soldiers of all responsibility and the Italians blaming the US's organisation of the roadblock .

Italian investigators were able to identify Lozano thanks to a youth in Bologna who was able to uncover the name which had been blacked out in the joint report .

American authorities have never replied to Italian investigators' requests for the names of the soldiers manning the roadblock. The Toyota Corolla in which Calipari and the others two were travelling came under 'friendly fire' from a temporary roadblock manned by ten US soldiers on their first day of service .

Ballistic evidence gathered from the car by Italian experts indicated that only one weapon had been fired. According to the American investigation, the car was travelling at high speed, about 80kmh, and the driver panicked .

(According a Pentagon source cited by CBS News, a US satellite filmed the incident and thanks to its images the speed was calculated at 96kph. However, this information was not included in the Pentagon report.) The US military claimed the driver failed to stop or slow down when soldiers flashed a spotlight, shone a green laser onto the car's windscreen and fired warning shots .

<snip> response/post to blog

My American friend recently went to Rome. His local contacts instructed him not to speak at the restaurant and ordered for him. If they knew he was an American they would have spit in the food.

There is much for Italy to hate about Americans. If Operation Gladio weren't enough, we have the murder of an apparently decent man, and the attempted murder of the journalist Sg

[robertpaulsen]

49. Another link on Calipari and Il Diario reporter Enzo Baldoni

As usual, though, when dealing with all things neocon, it gets worse. “Negroponte. Ledeen. Boykin. North. Kerek. If these figures make you uneasy, they should. An Italian investigation has uncovered an underground, parallel police network with possible links to the CIA which may be involved in the slaying of Niccola Calipari and Il Diario reporter Enzo Baldoni, the extraordinary rendition of Abu Omar and Nigergate,” the Daily Kos wrote in July.

Abu Omar (aka Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr) was the CIA asset (according to the Chicago Tribune) kidnapped off the streets of Milan (subsequently to disappear, a not uncommon fate for CIA assets). Niccola Calipari was a SISMI agent shot and killed while escorting the Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena out of Iraq after she was released from kidnappers. Both Sgrena and Enzo Baldoni were working on Fallujah stories when they were abducted (Baldoni was executed).

Mark Zepezauer adds:

Many members of Operation Gladio were also in a shadowy organization known as P-2; it too was financed by the CIA. P-2 had connections with the Vatican and the Mafia, and eventually with an international fascist umbrella organization called the World Anti-Communist League…. One of P-2’s specialties was the art of provocation. Leftist organizations like the Red Brigades were infiltrated, financed and / or created, and the resulting acts of terrorism, like the assassination of Italy’s premier in 1978 and the bombing of the railway station in Bologna in 1980, were blamed on the left. The goal of this “strategy of tension” was to convince Italian voters that the left was violent and dangerous-by helping make it so.

It appears Michael Ledeen, the “influential” neocon, was involved in Gladio operations past and is also linked to the faux Niger yellowcake documents cooked up by Italian intelligence, as noted above.

more...

http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=84

[Emit]

47. 1987 Article on Ledeen

Written by Stephen Engelberg, who co-wrote a book with Judith Miller (Germs : Biological Weapons and America's Secret War) and a few articles when he worked at the NYT. I can't link the article, because it's a LexisNexis source, but here's an excerpt:

HEADLINE: A CONSULTANT'S ROLE IN THE IRAN AFFAIR

BYLINE: By STEPHEN ENGELBERG, Special to the New York Times

DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Feb. 1

BODY:
In October 1985, when the Reagan Administration was forcing down a jetliner carrying the hijackers of the cruise ship Achille Lauro, it turned in desperation to a part-time consultant to reach Prime Minister Bettino Craxi of Italy by telephone. The consultant, Michael A. Ledeen, worked on terrorism issues for the National Security Council, and he was able to reach Mr. Craxi, a personal friend, at a hotel in Rome. The security guard insisted Mr. Craxi was unavailable, and Mr. Ledeen recalls that he threatened in his finest vulgar Italian to hold him personally responsible for the operation's failure. The guard relented, and later that evening Mr. Craxi spoke by phone with President Reagan and Mr. Ledeen helped with the translation, giving him a small role in what was seen as one of this country's victories over terrorism.

~snip~

Mr. Ledeen's outspoken views, including public support for covert operations aimed at assassinating terrorists, and his disdain for the institutional biases of Government agencies have assured that few respond neutrally when his name is mentioned. ''He's much too close to the Israelis,'' complained one Congressional investigator who has looked into the Iran affair. ''He's an amateur when it comes to the Middle East,'' an Administration official said. ''He's a source of information you can't get through other channels,'' retorted a senior Administration official who added, ''In Washington, an amateur is someone who's for something you're against.''

~snip~

After being denied tenure at Washington University in St. Louis in 1972 (for plagiarism-ed. Emit), Mr. Ledeen became a visiting professor at the University of Rome. In 1977, he was invited to become the editor of The Washington Quarterly, a foreign policy journal published by a conservative research institute. There, he met Mr. Haig, later the Secretary of State, who hired him as a special adviser reporting through the State Department Counselor, Robert C. McFarlane. His work involved maintaining liaison with members of the Socialist International then in opposition, such as Mr. Craxi of Italy or Shimon Peres of Israel. After Mr. Haig left government, Mr. Ledeen was eventually hired as a consultant by Mr. McFarlane, who had since become the national security adviser. He said his job involved analyzing intelligence on terrorism and writing occasional papers. He also maintained a private business consulting for European concerns. Mr. McFarlane said he regularly asked Mr. Ledeen to report on his private travels to various parts of the world. He said Mr. Ledeen was assigned to gather information, not represent the Government.

A somewhat different picture emerges from the Senate report and an interview with Mr. Ledeen. In the spring of 1985, Mr. Ledeen said, he told Mr. McFarlane he was going to Israel and would be willing to raise the issue of Iran with Mr. Peres. Mr. McFarlane agreed, and Mr. Ledeen said he met with Mr. Peres and asked whether his country had any solid intelligence on Iran's internal politics. The issue of developing contacts, he said, never came up. The trip touched off a bureaucratic turf fight when Secretary of State George P. Shultz complained to Mr. McFarlane, who replied that Mr. Ledeen had been acting ''on his own hook.'' Mr. McFarlane said he recalls telling Mr. Ledeen that ''you were not authorized to say I was sending you.'' Mr. Ledeen says he does not remember this conversation and notes that the White House paid for all but one of his trips involving the Iran program.

~snip~

___________________

The article also notes that Ledeen said he was 'granted' high-level security clearances 'repeatedly'.

Also, the article discussed how Senate/intelligence committee 'sources' questioned Ledeen (under oath) about his connections with Israeli intelligence. Says Ledeen denied it, and that he resents the 'repeated allusions to his relationship with the Israelis.' Article quotes Ledeen as saying "There is absolutely no evidence of closeness; the number of Israeli officials I know is really quite small...There's nothing there."

This part as excerpted above: "The trip touched off a bureaucratic turf fight when Secretary of State George P. Shultz complained to Mr. McFarlane, who replied that Mr. Ledeen had been acting "on his own hook." Mr. McFarlane said he recalls telling Mr. Ledeen that "you were not authorized to say I was sending you.""

...Is interesting, IMO, based on Ledeen's comments in an op-ed here:

Iran-Contra Revisited?
Our dangerous Iran policy continues.

Even for August, the media's handling of the latest round of leaks from the usual unnamed sources in State and CIA on the subject of Iran is unusually feckless. The gist of the "story" fed to the press is that some Pentagon officials (and maybe I, as well) met and actually spoke with some Iranians a year or more ago, and then again a month or two ago. These talks were "unauthorized," which apparently means that Colin Powell and George Tenet weren't asked for permission beforehand, and, according to Newsday and the Washington Post, they got in the way of the State Department's own secret talks with members of the Iranian regime. One unnamed deep thinker went so far as to see the dark hand of a neoconservative plot, designed to prod the Iranians into a rigid and uncooperative posture that would defeat State's efforts to arrive at a deal with Tehran...

~snip~

First, the implication of the complaint about Pentagon officials' conversations is that it's okay for our diplomats to talk to the official representatives of the murderous mullahcracy in Tehran, with an eye to establishing some form of rapprochement, but it's not okay for midlevel Iran experts at DoD to talk to private Iranians to enhance our understanding about what's going on inside Iran, and what the Iranian regime is going, or planning to do, to Americans and our friends and allies. Why should that be so? One would think that any such conversations should be praised, not leaked to death.

Second, the leakers — and some of the more overzealous scribblers — suggested that somehow the Pentagon was repeating the errors of Iran-Contra by talking to Ghorbanifar. But the shoe is on the wrong foot here, for it's the State Department that has repeated one of Iran-Contra's momentous blunders by believing that there are "moderates" in Tehran with whom the United States can and should work...

~snip~

http://www.nationalreview.com/ledeen/ledeen081403.asp


Hhmmm, Mr. Ledeen, are you involved in an unauthorized plot of some sorts? Or, perhaps, it is authorized then?

[salin]

50. the awful realities of this administration

are spilling out so fast it is hard to keep track.

[No Exit]

69. Did Ledeen create the Niger forgeries?

It's beginning to look like he was at least in on it.

[stop the bleeding]

75. He was IN on IT that is for sure, but he had help and that help came

various old CIA buddies I can not go into detail right now but if you read through the posts you will learn just enough to realize how much we all don't know and how far this goes.

Any posts by emit, robertpaulsen, me, happydreams, levymeg, H2Oman, seemslikeadream, and many others are usually filled with gobbs of research. I am sorry for anyone that I am leaving out.

I will be glad to send any of my bookmarks on this subject for refernce.

[No Exit]

78. Thanks! Speaking of neocons, have you seen this article?

http://www.counterpunch.org/green02282004.html

I found it helpful, in that it outlined the history of several of the neocon players whose names we now recognize. (I would like to emphasize that just b/c the article mentions the word "Israel" doesn't mean it's "anti-Semitic". I draw a bright line between Zionist fanatics, and average American Jews. It irritates me whenever someone on the net screams "anti-Semitic" just b/c an article might talk about Israel's clandestine doings. Don't those hysterical people know that obviously not all Jews are Israelis or Zionists? I mean, look at Russ Feingold and Carl Levin--two of the best members of Congress, if not THE best members.)

[stop the bleeding]

79. Awesome article! - Richard Perle, Stephen Bryen, Ledeen, Feith & Wolfowitz

all wrapped into one. This Richard Perle needs to get his clock cleaned this guy has had way too much control and influence in DC for way too many years.

I may have read it before but after having a few weeks to let the information settle in it is now a much clearer picture of who has been doing what with who.

Rp and Emit if you all have not read this yet then I would highly recommend it for a refresher on all of these guys interactions

I am really starting to grow tired of these boys and their agenda for money and helping Israel

[Emit]

80. Yes, stb--No Exit, that was a good article

Yet again, it points to the underlying history. Also, this article points to dates/people even further back than I had read about. Very interesting. And, regarding the author of that article, I came across this:

MOLE HUNT
An expert on U.S.-Israeli relations reveals details from his recent visit
with the FBI
____________________________________________________________________

THE AMERICAN PROSPECT
Web Exclusive
September 3, 2004
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=8467
By Jason Vest and Laura Rozen

In May, Stephen Green was hard at work campaigning for a seat in Vermont's
House of Representatives when he got a phone call. The last person the
64-year-old former United Nations official, then preoccupied with
health-care policy issues, expected to hear from was an FBI agent, who
asked if he could come to Washington to chat with him about the history of
Israeli espionage efforts against the United States.

~snip~

Early reports suggested that the FBI had wiretap evidence that a veteran
Iran analyst working in Feith's office at the Defense Intelligence Agency,
Larry Franklin, may have passed a classified draft of a National Security
Presidential Directive on Iran to an official working for the pro-Israel
lobbying organization, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee
(AIPAC). Members of the organization, in turn, were said to have passed the
document on to Israel. (AIPAC officials strongly deny the accusations.)

But as Green spoke with investigators, he realized the agents were
investigating far more than Franklin.

"Larry Franklin's name never came up, but several others did," he said.

~snip~

Green said the agents asked about several current or former Pentagon officials such as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Michael Ledeen, and Stephen Bryen.

"The tenor of their questions was such that it defined where these people were in terms of the nature of their focus," Green says. "They also asked about a couple other Office of Special Plans people, including Harold Rhode. Ironically, about the only name that didn't come up was Larry Franklin."

~snip~

cont'd here:
http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:fAjFR83v2e8J:www.antenna.nl/~phlegm/areas/pian0001.htm+Israeli+espionage+Michael+Ledeen+Koch&hl=en

[stop the bleeding]

81. cool thanks for the reading very interesting - see here from your

link

According to the FBI agents who contacted Green, as he recounts, the
article had come to their attention when one of Green's sources -- a
retired national security official they were interviewing -- shared it with
them.

And so on June 22, Green found himself sitting across an oval-shaped
conference table from two FBI agents at an undisclosed northern Virginia
venue. The meeting lasted nearly four hours.

"They were extraordinarily well-informed; it was apparent they've been at
this for awhile," Green says. "I asked them if there was a current reason
for them asking questions about things that go back over 30 years, and they
sort of looked at each other and said, 'Yes, it's a present issue,' but
wouldn't say specifically what. Though they did ask very specific questions
about one individual in particular."

I wonder who this lucky person was that the FBI asked questions about??

I gotta go train- but wanted to put this in there to give you all something to chew on. Will check back in a few hours.

Thanks again Emit - you rock!

[robertpaulsen]

84. WOW! I'm now convinced Ledeen is a Mossad agent & AIPAC a nest of spies!

I thought the espionage for Israel through AIPAC was only a recent development, like in the last five years. This article spells out how this has been going on for over 30 years!

From the article:

The evidence was strong. Bryen had been overheard in the Madison Hotel Coffee Shop, offering classified documents to an official of the Israeli Embassy in the presence of the director of AIPAC, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee. It was later determined that the Embassy official was Zvi Rafiah, the Mossad station chief in Washington. Bryen refused to be poly-graphed by the FBI on the purpose and details of the meeting; whereas the person who'd witnessed it agreed to be poly-graphed and passed the test.

This was 1979!

Perle came to Washington for the first time in early 1969, at the age of 28, to work for a neo-con think tank called the "Committee to Maintain a Prudent Defense Policy." Within months, Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson offered Perle a position on his staff, working with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And within months after that--less than a year--Perle was embroiled in an affair involving the leaking of a classified CIA report on alleged past Soviet treaty violations.

The leaker (and author of the report) was CIA analyst David Sullivan, and the leakee was Richard Perle. CIA Director Stansfield Turner was incensed at the unauthorized disclosure, but before he could fire Sullivan, the latter quit. Turner urged Sen. Jackson to fire Perle, but he was let off with a reprimand. Jackson then added insult to injury by immediately hiring Sullivan to his staff. Sullivan and Perle became close friends and co-conspirators, and together established an informal right-wing network which they called "the Madison Group," after their usual meeting place in--you might have guessed--the Madison Hotel Coffee Shop.

Well, what a coincidence, right? To top it off, here's the dirt on Ledeen:

In 1983, on the recommendation of Richard Perle, Ledeen was hired at the Department of Defense as a consultant on terrorism. His immediate supervisor was the Principle Assistant Secretary for International Security Affairs, Noel Koch. Early in their work together, Koch noticed with concern Ledeen's habit of stopping by in his (Koch's) outer office to read classified materials. When the two of them took a trip to Italy, Koch learned from the CIA station there that when Ledeen had lived in Rome previously, as correspondent for The New Republic, he'd been carried in Agency files as an agent of influence of a foreign government: Israel.



Thank you No Exit, for this great find. This is one of the best threads of the year!

[stop the bleeding]

85. RP what do you think of Emit's post# 82 and my bold highlighted

sections in post# 81??

[robertpaulsen]

86. My guess is the very specific questions were about Michael Ledeen.

I think the "retired national security official" that was a source for Green is Noel Koch. I've heard lots of claims that Ledeen is a Mossad agent from unnamed sources, but Koch went on the record for Green stating this. My guess is that this is what the FBI wanted to take a deeper look at.

I'll be sure to read post 82.

[Emit]

87. Yes, thanks rb. It probably is Koch...

~snip~

Michael Ledeen was hired by the DOD as a consultant on terrorism in 1983 and his immediate superior was Assistant Secretary of Defense Noel Koch. Koch told Green that Ledeen had somehow obtained classified information that he should not have been allowed to see. Koch then informed his executive assistant that Ledeen was to be denied classified materials in the future.

In the mid-1990s Ledeen left the DOD and joined the National Security Council (NSC) as a consultant. In that capacity, Ledeen became a major player in the “Iran-Contra” scandal. Ledeen was noted for carrying messages to then Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres. Ledeen had his NSC security clearance downgraded while in that position. He moved downward from Top Secret to Secret. Also in Iran-Contra document Oliver North recommended that Ledeen “be asked to take periodic polygraph examinations”. Noel Koch testified that he was suspicious of Ledeen because he learned that Ledeen was negotiating the sale of US basic TOW missiles for $2500 each when the normal cost to another foreign government was $6800 per missile. Throughout their governmental careers, Bryen and Ledeen have consistently been promoted to high-level defense and security positions by their fellow neocons; former Defense Advisory Board Chairman Richard Perle, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith.

~snip~

http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:R0ZUcGVN5-oJ:www.aljazeerah.info/Opinion%2520editorials/2004%2520opinions/Feb/28%2520o/Neocons%2520With%2520Dual%2520Agendas%2520and%2520Divided%2520Loyalties,%2520Michael%2520Saba.htm+Noel+Koch&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=7


I thought before your post that it might be this guy: FLYNT LEVERETT

[robertpaulsen]

89. Hey! There's W. Patrick Lang again!

Remember how he dissected the Ledeen-Downing-Chalabi axis of evil in the link on post 66? Here's from your link:

COL. PATRICK LANG: Well, it is a mess, in my view. I have a lot of people in Iraq, Iraqis that I speak to regularly because I continue to do business all over the Middle East in my private capacity, and it isn't clear at all what sort of government we will hand over to, who will be in charge, what the implications are, of the fact that the Iraqi security forces are nothing like -- prepared to take up the burden of security in their country. And at the same time, it isn't clear to me or anybody else that I know of, exactly who is going to be in charge on the American side. It looks like you will have the emergence of a US subordinate unified command with a four-star general, with a high-powered ambassador and CIA chief of station. These people will all, to some extent, be in competition with each other. So it seems like a very muddled picture. And I know that we are not supposed to use the Vietnam word in connection with this. But I was in Vietnam for a very long time, and this looks like the command set up on the American side in Vietnam.


I don't think he's Stephen Green's guy, but it's good to see him speaking out!

[The Whiskey Priest]

83. This is too much

Leeden in that close to the magazine that found the documents....way to close.

[AntiFascist]

91. Hey everyone check this out....

I don't mean to distract anyone from important research, but here's a new research project on the World Anti-Communist League. (I just discovered this -doh- which may relate to Ledeen somewhat?)

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_oet&address=358x2886