July 13, 2006
The other (Plame) shoe drops
That is to say, the civil suit: Former CIA Officer Sues Cheney Over Leak
February 17, 2006
Rocco lives
Niger Uranium Rumors Wouldn't Die - Los Angeles Times
and the White House lies won't die....
(Thanks to D. Wayman for the heads up)
January 21, 2006
New York Times Hides Cheney Spy
Hid him in plain sight, I might add, on the back page of the Saturday national edition. And here’s the bland headline to David Johnston’s inscrutable article on Paul Wolfowitz’s former minion in the Department of Defense’s “Office of Special Plans” who has just been sentenced to 12 years and seven months in prison (and the question is why a confessed spy gets such a short sentence) for handing over state secrets to Israeli “lobbyists” (spies): “Former Military Analyst Gets Prison Term for Passing Information.”
Just to refresh, in 2001 Larry Franklin, a U.S. Air Force Reserve colonel and former attaché to the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv, seems to have been in Rome and, along with Michael Ledeen (former Reagan “Iran-Contra” scandal figure and friend to Karl Rove) and to have talked with Italian officials about Iraqi WMD at about the same time that Paul Wolfowitz was setting up his Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon with Douglas Feith (then Bush’s Under Secretary of Defense for Policy) and William (Bill) Luti (former staffer to Dick Cheney and at that time Deputy Under Secretary of Defense, Special Plans & Near East and South Asia Affairs). Bill Luti later hired Larry Franklin to work in the secretive and highly influential Office of Special Plans which was the main dissementator of the bogus intelligence about Niger “yellowcake” sales to Iraq.
Bill Luti, Larry Franklin’s boss at the Office of Special Plans, was also, according to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, one of only two people allowed to read reports coming from the Iraqi National Congress in 2002. The other person was John Hannah, Dick Cheney’s Senior National Security Advisor. After “Scooter” Libby was indicted for obstruction of justice and lying to the FBI in connection with the Yellowcake/Valerie Plame scandal, Cheney appointed Bill Luti to replace one-half of Libby—the National Security Advisor half—while David Addington was appointed by Cheney to be Libby’s other half—Chief of Staff and Assistant to the President.
So, Larry Franklin was Bill Luti’s errand boy and Luti was Cheney’s errand boy and they all were dealing in classified intelligence from the CIA, along with their own private lines of “intelligence” from Iraqis working in a program funded by the U.S. State Department (Paul Wolfowitz), and who-knows-what from the Italian secret service.
Also in 2001, the FBI was conducting a sting operation in New Jersey and New York City to uncover Israeli spy operations (Israel officials deny they spy on us) and, while FBI agents were watching a restaurant in New Jersey where the suspected Israeli spies were lunching, they noticed Larry Franklin walk in and sit down with the suspects. The spies, who call themselves “lobbyists” (note to self) were Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman, both senior staff members of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) which, as stated in today’s Times article “…was close to officials in the Bush administration.”
Years pass… we go to war on Iraq based on fake charges they are going to nuke us… and the FBI decides to “investigate” Larry Franklin because he refuses to cooperate with their continuing sting operation of Israeli spy cells. The FBI raids the offices of AIPAC in Washington (where else) and recovers hard drives and files that show Larry Franklin was passing classified information to the AIPAC “lobbyists”. On May 4, 2005 the FBI arrests Larry Franklin for violating the Espionage Act.
Larry Franklin then admits to passing classified information to the AIPAC “lobbyists” and an Israeli diplomat (unnamed) and, on January 19, 2006 Franklin is given a 12-year and 7-month sentence by Federal District Court Judge T.S. Ellis III who says at the sentencing that Mr. Franklin only desired to help the United States. Excuse me?!!
Since Franklin turned in “lobbyists” Rosen and Weissman, he won’t have to start serving his sentence until their trials are completed, at which time, according to Franklin’s lawyer “…the court will entertain a motion to reduce his sentence”. Entertain a motion, indeed. Perhaps Bush will entertain a notion to award him a medal of honor.
So, amongst all the hysteria about foreign terrorists and presidents spying on google users, you gotta hand it to the ol’ J. Edgar Hoover-Better Dead Than Red-Eleanor Roosevelt Was A Commie-FBI to catch actual spies who happen to be operating about as openly as Jack Abramoff at a Signature’s Restaurant fundraiser. The ol’ FBI. No fancy dancy Department of Homeland Security here. Just some Israeli spies…er lobbyists, a Cheney-affiliated Pentagon mole, and lots of classified documents.
What was in those documents anyway?? Oh, right. They’re classified.
December 1, 2005
Jack and the Greenstalk
It’s funny how shit keeps a bubblin’ up. The Bush administration is like a plumbing disaster these days. And all those leaky pipes are connected to each other. Which brings me to indicted former lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Back before his name was coffee break conversation, in the beginning of Senator McCain’s not-yet-newsworthy Indian Affairs Committee investigation, I was doing a little investigating of my own—of Indian gaming casinos then being proposed around San Francisco Bay. I happened on McCain’s committee web site and the reams of emails between Abramoff and his associate Mike Scanlon that were posted there. Definitely eyebrow-raising stuff for anyone not acquainted with the down and dirty of Washington Lobbyland and insider politics in general.
I wanted to know who was behind the billion-dollar casino schemes in California and, besides noting the staggering amount of money involved in these deals, didn’t have much use for the Abramoff angle. But I saved my notes. A Sept. 28, 2004 Washington Post article by R. Jeffrey Smith was most helpful. Smith looked at tax and spending records of an Abramoff “charity”, the Capital Athletic Foundation
Not unlike the Mafia in its heyday, Abramoff was obviously having some difficulty finding enough places to launder all the money that was rolling in from Indian tribes. One washing machine was the Capital Athletic Foundation, a bogus charity dedicated to supporting youth sports. Another laundry chute was a private school that Abramoff started and which his own sons attended. The school offered excellence in academics and sports, emphasis on the latter. According to the Post article, the school, which received close to $2 million from the Capital Athletic Foundation, bought—hang onto your eyebrows—TWO Zamboni ice-cleaning machines, even though it did not have a hockey rink. (We’re talking maybe $20k each?? Somebody into ice hockey help me out here).
Abramoff had a gift for creative fundraising too. One, reported by Lou Dubose in the Texas Observer was a proposal by Abramoff to a tribal council in Texas to pay the premiums of “term life” insurance policies for all the tribe’s elderly members. Upon their death, however, the payout would go to Abramoff’s private school. The school would then pay Abramoff’s fees at then-employer, Greenberg Traurig, a Washington lobbying firm. This is how he proposed that the tribe, Ysleta del Sur Pueblo Tribe of El Paso, pay for his services helping them snare a lucrative casino deal.
The long arm of Washington lobbying reached California too. A Dec. 26, 2004 Post article by Susan Schmidt and Jeffrey H. Birnbaum noted that the Agua Caliente tribe (big casino, southern California), paid Greenberg Traurig as much as $20,000 a month in lobbyists’ expenses, much of it for meals at Signatures, the restaurant that, until recently, was owned by Abramoff and served as yet another laundry drop for his fees as well as a schmooze spot for Washington politicos and benefactors whose meals were often free, quid pro quo understood. Ultimately, the tribes paid the bills.
Even more interesting was Abramoff’s connection to Grover Norquist and Americans for Tax Reform. According to Thomas B. Edsall, in a Nov. 8, 2004 Washington Postarticle, one tribe,
…began contributing hundreds of thousands of dollars to Americans for Tax Reform and similar groups. Norquist won’t disclose how much, but Abramoff told the Wall Street Journal in 2000 that the Choctaw have given “several million dollars” to outside groups, and that Americans for Tax Reform was a leading recipient.
It makes sense if you know that Abramoff was president of the College Republican national committee during the time Norquist was its executive director. Writes Edsall in the Post article,
While at the College Republicans, Abramoff, Norquist and Reed [Ralph Reed was a CR intern] quickly earned reputations as zealots. Abramoff wrote in the 1983 annual report: “It is not our job to seek peaceful coexistence with the Left. Our job is to remove them from power permanently. The group’s recruits were required to memorize a speech that included the lines: “Democrats are the enemy. Wade into them! Spill their blood!”
But, back to food and fundraising… An amusing note in E.J. Kessler’s June 27, 2003 column in The Forward, described how Abramoff’s culinary enterprises aided one Republican, Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia. According to Kessler, “The $500-a-plate fundraiser, a ‘sandwich naming party’ at which Cantor was honored with an eponymous roast-beef-on-challah sandwich, was held at Stacks Deli…” which was then owned by Abramoff. Mr. Roast Beef Sandwich failed to disclose the fundraiser as an “in kind” campaign contribution until five months later (law requires disclosure within 60 days). The quid pro quo? Cantor’s signature on a letter to Secretary of the Interior, Gale Norton, that argued for a ruling that would benefit the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana, an Abramoff client. Other signers of the letter? Tom Delay, Dennis Hastert, and Roy Blunt.
And just so this makes a little more sense, the goose laying the golden eggs in this Republican fairy tale is Indian gaming revenues in excess of $16 billion yearly.
November 28, 2005
16 lies
Mary McCarthy once famously declared that every word Lillian Hellman wrote was a lie, including “and” and “the.” I don’t bring this up to get into the feud between two acclaimed writers. Rather, it came to mind when I was thinking about President Bush’s now famous “16 words” in the January 2003 State of the Union speech. And how the telling of a lie must necessarily include “ands” and “thes”. Those 16 words are not untruths or misstatements or exagerations or distortions. They are lies. They are lies because every word is in the service of deceit. Every word is designed to persuade against fact and against truth.
Here is that lie, somewhat parsed:
“The British government has learned….”
This lie is designed to deflect the listener from thinking the American government is the source of intelligence implicating Iraq in activity perilous to American citizens, and therefore deflecting any suspicion that such intelligence might be fabricated. The British government, it could be reasoned, has no need to fabricate such evidence and, as a friend and ally, is merely warning of the peril. The words “has learned” imply an almost casual discovery, as if the information arrived suddenly, perhaps accidentally, but without, for instance, a concerted effort to uncover or find a secret intent of harm, of war-worthy threat.
This lie implicitly excludes the fact that the American government already knew about documents that purported to reveal the details of a deal between Saddam Hussein and the government of Niger to supply Iraq with yellowcake (uranium oxide) from Niger’s mines. Not only knew, but had those documents widely distributed to its own intelligence agencies by its own State Department. In fact, a government employee (Stephen Hadley) had already met and spoken with representatives of other governments (not British) about those documents.
“….that Saddam Hussein recently sought….”
This lie provides a false and crucial timing for an action that did not occur as described nor in the near past. The lie is crucial to establishing the need for immediate response to counteract an imminent threat to the American people. It personalizes that threat and puts a dark face on it. It is the face of the terrorists who flew American planes into the World Trade Center. It is the face of a despot and a murderer. But not of Americans. The face is that of a dictator who has killed his own citizens, for his own political ends. He is evil. But he is not our enemy.
“….significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
This lie tells us so much more than we needed to know. If we needed to have a reason for declaring war on Iraq. I do not know how much a “significant quantity” of uranium is. Neither do you. It is sufficient that President Bush finds the quantity significant because there is only one reason for mentioning any quantity of uranium at all. And that is to bring up the spectre of nuclear bombs. Even though it was American planes that were used as bombs to attack an American city, there is only one kind of bomb that could attack Americans in America from far away Iraq.
Why tell us the uranium comes from Africa? This is too clever a lie. We don’t care where the uranium comes from unless that place is also to be a target. This lie intends to lend an air of truth to a complicated lie. It is complicated because it must get around the fact that reputable agents have not found actual weapons or materials that can produce weapons in Iraq itself. We know that. We don’t know about uranium from Africa, however. That is a new scenario of plausibility that could perhaps convince us that a threat indeed exists. A threat not only from Iraq but from Africa. The dark continent.
On July 7, 2003—six months after President Bush’s State of the Union speech—Ari Fleisher says, “We’ve acknowledged that the information turned out to be bogus involving the report on the yellow cake. That is not new. You can go back. You can look it up. Dr. Rice has said it repeatedly. I’ve said it repeatedly. It’s been said from this podium on the record, in several instances. It’s been said to many of you in this room, specifically.”
Bogus means fake. So, the British government gave us fake information and President Bush went to war with Iraq on the basis of fake information from an ally. Furthermore, we’ve already been told a million times that this yellow cake report was bogus. Everybody in Washington knew but me and you, apparently.
So, we’ve been duped. By mistake. Shouldn’t we be mad or something? Perhaps we are still stunned by the repeated revelations that our president unwittingly spouted bogus information that led us into war. Maybe we want to give him the benefit of our doubt. Our doubt that we could be so lied to so badly by so many government officials. This isn’t 1984. We would know if our leaders were lying to us.
Wouldn’t we?
November 18, 2005
Woodward's pucecake
Or, a tale of a sneakily different color....the testimony of Bob Woodward, purveyor of deep cover journalism, in which he reveals his conversation with "Cheney's Cheney" I. Lewis Libby on June 23, 2003 about an 18-page list of questions he wanted Cheney's Cheney's Cheney to answer, including one about "yellowcake." I too, would like to submit a list of questions to Cheney's Cheney's Cheney though I doubt I could even think of 18 pages worth. Still, I would like those questions to be read to C.C.C. while he is strapped down and forced to watch rap music videos in a not-really-torture session by the C.I.A. or C.I.A. equivalent - perhaps somewhere in an unrevealable location south of the Russian border.
November 7, 2005
Bush Team on a Busman's Holiday*
2002 was a busy year for the Bush Team….
January 9: Douglas Feith (OOSP) calls Lt. Gen. Jay Garner on the phone….
Feith: Garner, I got a job for you.
Garner: Hello? Who is this?
Feith: Directive from da Man himself
Garner: The president?!
Feith: Rumsfeld, you idiot. Da Man. We need you to put together a team from the other agency to do the planning for postwar Iraq, if there was a war, I mean.
Garner: Which agency? What war?!
Meanwhile, at the State Department……
Colin Powell calls Tom Warrick, a State Department staffer.
Powell: Tom, I want you to head up a new project. I’m calling it The Future of Iraq Project.
Warrick: Um, great. Does this mean we’re going to war, Secretary?
February 19: At a meeting at the CIA, George Tenet, Condi Rice and Colin Powell all agree to send Joseph Wilson to Niger, even though the State Department says the Yellowcake story is bogus.
February 21: Lt. Gen. Garner has 70 to 100 staff on his new team, which includes Tom Warrick from the State Dept.
March 14: Garner briefs President Bush on the team project; Rumsfeld asks him if Tom Warrick is on the team. When Garner says yes, Rumsfeld tells him that he can’t use Warrick “or his work”. Tom Warrick is dismissed.
June: A memo from Washington lobbyist for the Iraq National Congress, Entifadh Qunbar, is read by a U.S. Senate Committee. It suggests that intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction is going directly to the Vice President via John Hannah (Cheney’s Senior National Security Advisor) and Bill Luti (OOSP). They are the only two people authorized to receive the intelligence reports.
August: WHIG (White House Iraq Group) is founded by Andrew Card to “market the Iraq war”; members of the group include Karl Rove, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Stephen Hadley, Condoleezza Rice, and a few other insiders.
August 1: President Bush goes on vacation
August 26: Dick Cheney, in a speech to a convention of Veterans of Foreign Wars says we now know Hussein has nuclear weapons capability.
Labor Day: “Rollout” of new White House product: Iraq war (“From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August,” Andrew Card.) Bush vacation over.
September 8: Condoleezza Rice on CNN: “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”
September 9: Stephen Hadley (WHIG member) meets with Nicolo Pollari, Chief of Italian Intelligence agency (SISMI)
September 26: Colin Powell, in closed testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee says “reports” of yellowcake acquisition by Iraq are “further proof” of Iraq having nuclear weapons capability. British “white paper” on Iraq nuclear weapons program comes out and says Iraq “had recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” CIA tells the Brits to drop that claim. The Brits say it’s from a different source. Condoleeza Rice is briefed on the British report.
October: The Office of Special Plans (D. Feith operation) inserts a reference to the British “white paper” into the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) which President Bush reads. The CIA insists on a footnote in the NIE stating that there are “different interpretations” of the yellowcake claims and that the State Department thinks the claims are “highly dubious.”
October 16: The Yellowcake Papers (direct from Italy via Pollari) are distributed by the State Department. President Bush makes a speech in Cincinnati, saying “We cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”
December 19: The U.S. State Department accuses Niger of traffic in uranium. They put out a Fact Sheet that says Iraq is hiding efforts to procure uranium from Niger. The IAEA (Internatl. Atomic Energy Agency) reads the Fact Sheet and asks to see the proof.
They are still waiting…..
*busman’s holiday: from “buzz man’s holiday,” the word came from the common practice of two pickpockets working as a team, one of whom would “buzz the mark,” or engage the victim in conversation, while the other picked his pocket.
November 4, 2005
Yellowcake Shake and Bake
As the NY Times finally gets its ass in gear and finds some reporters who aren’t owned by their sources to get on the Yellowcake Papers story…we continue with our little tale of aging spies, Italians in love, and the Bush administration’s Alternative Reality Operations (AROs).
The Story, Part II: Recipe for a W-r (classified)
In which the Yellowcake Papers, lovingly forged and pasted together by our dapper Italian International Man of Mystery, Rocco Martino, and which have proved to be exceptional money-makers for a man in the waning years of a distinguished and lucrative career, are now floating free as balloons escaped from a toddler’s hand, landing here and there in the capitols of Europe and of the Great Empire of Evi…er Enterprise, the white and gold City of Washington, District of Columbia, that legendary district of the land of Camelot from the Age of The Kennedys.
The Players:
Nicolò Pollari, head of SISMI (Italian Intelligence agency)
Michael A. Ledeen, Freedom Scholar , war monger and Renaissance Man
Lawrence Anthony “Larry” Franklin, Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) analyst working for Douglas Feith and Bill Luti in Paul Wolfowitz’s Office of Special Plans (OOSP) in late 2001; former attaché at the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv and an Air Force Reserve colonel; arrested by the FBI May 4, 2005 for passing classified information
Dick Cheney, Vice President of the United States of America (still) and former Secretary of Defense in the Bush I administration; chief executive officer of Halliburton (1995-2000) which got a no-bid contract for Iraq military operations approved by Douglas Feith in March 2003
I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Chief of Staff (Cheney) and Assistant to the President (Bush), Cheney’s Cheney, and”Deputy Vice President”
In late October of 2001, after returning to Rome, Col. Nicolò Pollari receives a phone call from Italian Defense Minister Antonio Martino (no relation to Rocco) who tells him to expect a visit soon from “a friend of Italy”….
Pollari: “Pollari here. Oh, Minister. Uh huh. Uh huh. Huh. Yes, Minister. Got it.”
Scene I: An espresso bar in Rome, late October 2001….
Pollari: “Well if it isn’t the Renaissance Man himself. I thought your ass was grass around here. Who let you in?”
Ledeen: “Funny Nicky. I want you to meet my associate, Larry Franklin. He’s our man in the Pentagon. Very in (he winks at Larry). Larry, Nicky. Nicky, Larry. So. We hear there’s some sweet intell on yellowcake. The Big Guys are peeing their pants for this stuff Nicky. We need it. Now. And it better be good.”
Pollari: “Look Ledeen. It’s scrag. You don’t want it. It’s a bum product by some rogue operator. It’s not our brand.”
Ledeen: “Relax, Nicky. We won’t expose you. It’s gonna stay deep. We just want a clean copy, right Larry? Somthing to take home to the family.”
Pollari: “Ok Ledeen. But you’ve got to get me in with the Big Guys. My boss wants a good connection. Somebody who is discrete and can manipulate the intell in the right way. It’s gotta be good for Mr. B.”
Three months later:
Scene II: Cheney’s office bathroom where he is smoking a forbidden cigar with the door open….
Cheney : “Scooter Pie!! Get Tenet on the horn. I want one of his guys to check out that two-bit trading post in Africa and get the goods on this uranus ore thing!”
Libby: “Sure thing boss. I’ll have George get right on it.”
Thanks To:
Next: The Bush administration goes on A Busman’s Holiday
November 3, 2005
Yellowcake Goes to America
To continue the story of how an aging Italian spy called Rocco, for purposes all his own and not related to Dick Cheney’s need to find the goods on Saddam Hussein in order to justify a war on Iraq, concocted a phony “dossier,” also known as The Niger Papers (or Yellowcake as I like to call them), and peddled them around Europe….we come now to the part where the sham documents are delivered to the desk(s) of one or more officials of the Bush administration in Washington, D.C. in October 2001.
The Story, Part II: The Berlusconi-Bush Affair
The Players:
Nicolò Pollari, head of SISMI (Italian Intelligence agency)
Silvio Berlusconi, Prime Minister of the Republic of Italy, media magnate who owns the weekly, Panorama, (and most of Italy’s media industry) which was offered Rocco’s fake Niger dossier
Greg Thielmann, State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research; assigned by Colin Powell to John Bolton at the Pentagon in 2001
Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense (until March 2005) and now President of the World Bank
Douglas Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy (Bush appointee, July 2001 to August 2005)
George W. Bush, President of the United States of America (still)
It is October 2001, only a shudder past the events of September 11, and Nicolò Pollari, newly installed director of SISMI, Italy’s CIA-equivalent, is anxious to please his boss. Pollari’s boss, Silvio Berlusconi, wants to do something nice for his good friend President Bush. In fact, Berlusconi is hot to really impress Bush with something that only Italy can deliver—evidence that Iraq is buying large quanities of uranium oxide (yellowcake) from Niger.
Pollari packs his suitcase and travels with Berlusconi to Washington with the Yellowcake Papers in (metaphorical) hand. He meets with CIA officers but the welcome is less than he expected. In fact, the spooks in Washington are very skeptical of his “gift” of intelligence.
Following up on Pollari, the CIA checks in with the U.S. embassy in Niger and asks the French-run consortium in charge of the two uranium mines there whether yellowcake had been going to Iraq. The French contacts say no. There is no possibility yellowcake was being diverted from Niger to Iraq (see Russ Hoyle’s story below). As well, Greg Thielmann, Colin Powell’s State Department staffer at the Pentagon, who has seen the report from Pollari, thinks the Yellowcake Papers are “highly suspect.” He will later tell the Italian newspaper, La Repubblica, that the intelligence collected in Rome is inconsistent, that the uranium story is phony and that a bunch of things contained in the report are fabricated.
Skepticism from the State Department and the CIA notwithstanding, the Yellowcake Papers have now begun their life as deep cover propaganda for the now-we-know-it-was-inevitable War on Iraq. But how?
Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith is how, for one. At a Department of Defense (DoD) briefing on June 4, 2003, Douglas Feith (accompanied by William J. “Bill” Luti—who will have his stage entrance a bit later in this story) tells reporters that his “team” at DoD “…began its work October of 2001…”. This team was to review intelligence from the CIA and “help digest it” for Feith and “other policy makers, to help us develop Defense Department strategy for the war on terrorism.” What was the work that Feith’s team began in October of 2001? The “work” was the creation of the Office of Special Plans (OOSP), founded by Paul Wolfowitz, at the Pentagon.
If the CIA and Colin Powell’s State Department were looking a gift horse in the mouth, the Office of Special Plans and it’s cabal of two saw an opportunity to build a Trojan Horse—packed with yellowcake-to be delivered to the American people. It will be almost a year and a half before that horse is trotted out but within months Joseph Wilson will be sent to Niger to investigate the Yellowcake Papers for the CIA.
But the story of yellowcake coming to America is also a love story. In October 2001 the Bush-Berlusconi Affair blossoms. Here’s a snippet of love talk from their October 15, 2001 press conference together:
Bush: It’s my honor to welcome the leader of one of our nation’s best friends, the Prime Minister of a country that has had so much to do with our nation and its development. I’m also pleased to be able to give him a lunch — after all, I had one of the best lunches I’ve had since I’ve been the President because of the Prime Minister. …I’m pleased that we’re sharing intelligence. I’m pleased that the Prime Minister understands that al Qaeda has cells all around the world and he’s more than willing to work with us to disrupt those cells, to bring people to justice.
Berlusconi: Thank you, Mr. President, I am here, first of all, to express our great pain and sadness for the attack on September the 11th and to say to you if the same attack had been — had occurred on an Italian city we would have felt the same pain as you are.And also I’m here to express to you our desire to be as close as possible and to provide both moral and material support.
The Evidence:
Russ Hoyle on yellowcake (via the Joseph Wilson website) http://www.politicsoftruth.com/
Russ Hoyle’s book excerpt (pdf):
Seymour Hersh [The New Yorker, October 21, 2003]
Next: Yellowcake Shake and Bake
November 2, 2005
Rocco and the Rome connection
The U.S. Senate Select Intelligence Committee inquiry may be going nowhere but thankfully we have the Italian Parliament to help us in our journey to enlightenment in the Yellowcake! story. And I have Nur-al-Cubicle to thank for providing a lucid summary of La Repubblica’s reportage on the government investigation of “The Niger Documents”.
The Story, Part I: Rocco Goes to Rome
The Setting: New Year’s Day 2001, the Niger Embassy, Rome
The Players:
Rocco Martino, a “retired” Italian spy and double-agent for France in need of cash
Antonio (Tony) Nucera, a SISMI (Italian Military Intelligence) division chief and friend of Martino
La Signora, an aging contract spy in the Niger embassy in Rome in need of cash
Yaou (Adam) Maiga Zakaria, First Embassy Counselor for Niger (Rome) in need of cash
(the following scene is imagined but the outcome is fact):
Nucero (on his cell): “Rocco. It’s Tony. The company documents are in the mail, the numbers and the telex. You got the key contact. You’re set to go. Ciao buddy.”
An espreso stand somewhere in Rome:
Rocco: “Look Doll. I’ve told you, this isn’t a home operation. Tony’s just helping me out. You’ve got the dough. Now we need somebody on the inside to get us in. Tonight.
La Signora (whispering): “Ok Rocco but I need another thousand for Adam. He’s in but he’s got an obligation to take care of right away.”
Rocco: “Merda woman, I’m not the CIA! Ok. Another thou. When is the shop closing?”
La Signora (melifluously): “Be there at 7. It will be dark by then and Adam can let you in. Have the cash with you.”
Later that evening at the Niger Embassy:
Rocco: “Adam, I want some sheets of official letterhead and the seal stamp.”
Zakaria: “No problem. Don’t you want to mess the place up a little?”
The next morning, January 2, an official at the Niger embassy notifies the police of a break-in although he can’t say what, exactly, was stolen. Rocco goes back to his apartment in Luxemburg with the stolen letterhead and official stamp and puts together a package of documents. The package contains both the real Niger documents from the late 1980s that his friend Nucero supplied him with, and the fake documents that Rocco created. The fake papers, dated July 5 and 6, 2000, are designed to solve a mystery for the French intelligence agents—they want to know who has been purloining uranium ore from a couple of inactive mines in their former colony, Niger. The papers document a deal between the Niger government and Saddam Hussein to supply Iraq with 500 tons of pure uranium oxide (yellowcake) per year—a main ingredient for the manufacture of nuclear weapons.
The French agents immediately recognize the documents are fakes (among other things, the official names are the wrong ones for the time period, and Niger uranium mines are incapable of producing anywhere near 500 tons of yellowcake in a year) and dispose of them. Rocco, however, decides to try and re-sell the Niger documents and contacts a reporter at Panorama, the Italian newspaper owned by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
The Panorama reporter, Elisabetta Burba, declines the offer from Martino (for a suggested $10k) and does not write about the incident. What happens next is murky. Either Burba’s Editor in Chief, Carlo Rosella, passes the bogus documents on to the U.S. Embassy in Rome or he does not. Either Rocco Martino himself gives (sells?) the fake documents to MI6 in London or he does not. Either SISMI, in person of new Director, Niccolò Pollari, passes the fake information on to the CIA or he does not. We only know for sure that the fake dossier purporting to show that Saddam Hussein was importing significant quantities of weapons-grade uranium ore from Niger, lands on the desk of U.S. State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research official, Greg Thielmann, in the fall of 2001. At about the same time, the phony dossier also is received by British Intelligence in London.
This is the story as many have told it. There are also stories, or speculations about other possible “authors” of the fake yellowcake papers, for instance, Michael Ledeen, a former Reagan National Security Counsel consultant, or ex-CIA officers Duane Claridge and Alan Wolf (deceased) working for or in collaboration with Ledeen. The only certainty, however, is that the Iraq-Niger yellowcake papers are a hoax, a scam, fake, phony, bogus and a lie. But the yellowcake hoax will not die. In fact, it soon begins a new life in the Bush administration’s busy “policy” backrooms.
The Documents: http://cryptome.org/niger-docs.htm
Take your own Yellowcake journey:
Seymour Hersh [The New Yorker, October 21, 2003]
Part II: Yellowcake Goes to America
November 1, 2005
Yellowcake!: a journey back from ignorance
Hey, the Democrats are finally getting mad about something! (Harry Reid shut down Senate business today saying, “… this administration manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to sell the war in Iraq and attempted to destroy those who dared to challenge its actions…”) I feel for them. I’m just working up a head of steam myself. Too late, unfortunately. We’ve already all been duped. Some of us (approximately 2025 and counting) are dead. A whole lot more Iraqis are dead. It was just last week, I think, that I noticed an old bumper sticker while driving to the Bowl (Berkeley Bowl - radical vegetables, brutal parking): “If you aren’t outraged you’re not paying attention.” I sneered to myself, “that’s so Berkeley,” facing off with a Lexus for the only remaining parking space. I bought my vegetables and drove smugly back home to Oakland.
And then I heard Patrick Fitzgerald on the radio, taking questions after announcing his indictment of the Vice President’s Chief of Staff (and Assistant to the President) I. Lewis Libby for lying to a grand jury: “You’re asking, do these charges vindicate a serious breach of the public trust? And Fitzgerald sounded like Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes To Washington.
The more I listened, the more I realized how little I really knew about what the heck was going on:Judith MIller goes to jail for the great cause and then it’s not such a great cause; Valerie Plame or Flame or Wilson is or is not a CIA agent, soccer mom, wife; there were or were not Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq that Joseph Wilson, husband or not of Valerie Plame/Flame Wilson was railing about in a newspaper and got Dick Cheney mad at him and perpetrated (or didn’t) the “Plame (or Flame or Wilson) Leak” for which I. (Scooter, which is or is not his real or baby name) Lewis Libby was indicted. Etcetera, Etcetera, Etcetera (quoting from The King and I).
Two days later on Sunday, Halloween eve (which itself is the eve of All Soul’s Day, the one day of the year when the veil of illusion between the living and the dead is momentarily lifted and ghosts and spirits are free to roam) I embarked on an obsessive Google-hunt to educate myself as to the origins of the Plame Leak Affair and everything and everyone associated with it. I mean everything I could dig up. It was my own personal search for truth in the muck of Washington war politics. I call this journey Yellowcake! because that is my new word for every lie that ever came out of a Washington official’s mouth in the service of a secret agenda. Yellowcake! It’s a lie.
Next: All Lies Lead to (or at least pass through) Rome
