Tenet and the “Creamy White House Stationery”

/in /by

Tenet begs to differ with two of the incidents reported out of Suskind’s book so far.

First, to rebut the forgery story, he makes this rather convincing point about his own past refutation of the Al Qaeda-Iraq allegations.

It is well established that, at my direction, CIA resisted efforts on the part of some in the Administration to paint a picture of Iraqi-Al Qa’ida connections that went beyond the evidence. The notion that I would suddenly reverse our stance and have created and planted false evidence that was contrary to our own beliefs is ridiculous.

It’s true that Tenet repeatedly pushed back against OVP’s efforts to claim Iraq and Al Qaeda had any ties, right up to the beginning of the war.

Still, I can’t help but think of this passage from Bob Drogin’s Curveball, describing Tenet’s state of mind in the November 2003 to January 2004 time frame, when this letter would have been planted.

Neither [Tenet nor McLaughlin] tried to persuade [David Kay] to stay. Nor did they accept his conclusions. "I don’t care what you or anyone else says," Tenet insisted. "I know they had WMD."

Kay was astonished. My God, he thought, he’s still so invested in this he won’t admit a mistake.

The CIA leaders made only one parting request: don’t talk to the press.

Things were different in November 2003 than they were in March 2003, when Tenet successfully pushed back against the Al Qaeda-Iraq claim. Further, CIA was gearing up efforts to turn Zarqawi into enemy number one. So it’s possible Tenet changed his tune out of desperation at David Kay’s refusal to flub the record for the Administration.

I’m more interested in Tenet’s response to Suskind’s claim that the Iraqi who signed the letter, Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti, had told the British that there were no WMD. Here’s the allegation:

The author also claims that the Bush administration had information from a top Iraqi intelligence official “that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – intelligence they received in plenty of time to stop an invasion.”

[snip]

Suskind writes that the White House had “ignored the Iraq intelligence chief’s accurate disclosure that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – intelligence they received in plenty of time to stop an invasion.

And here’s Tenet’s response:

One supposed “news” item from the book apparently asserts that British intelligence had a high-placed Iraqi source who convincingly told them before the start of the war that Iraq had no WMD and that the British relayed this to the United States. As Mr. Suskind tells it, the White House directed (and CIA allegedly went along with) burying that information so that the war could go ahead as planned. This is a complete fabrication. In fact, the source in question failed to persuade his British interlocutors that he had anything new to offer by way of intelligence, concessions, or negotiations with regard to the Iraq crisis and the British — on their own — elected to break off contact with him.

There were many Iraqi officials who said both publicly and privately that Iraq had no WMD — but our foreign intelligence colleagues and we assessed that these individuals were parroting the Ba’ath party line and trying to delay any coalition attack. The particular source that Suskind cites offered no evidence to back up his assertion and acted in an evasive and unconvincing manner. [my emphasis]

Note what Tenet does not deny: that both the US and the British were talking with Habbush and that he claimed there were no WMD. Tenet’s refutation basically amounts to saying, "Habbush was unconvincing."

But Tenet goes further. He says, quite clearly, that "there were many Iraqi officials who said both publicly and privately that Iraq had no WMD." We know of perhaps one or two of these (more if you include the family members of scientists)–and that from reporting done on the war, not from official reports. That is, the reports of "many Iraqi officials who said both publicly and privately that Iraq had no WMD" are curiously absent from the SSCI report on Iraqi intelligence and the Robb-Silberman report. Yet here we have the former DCI admitting that CIA got that intelligence–publicly and privately.

So set aside, for a moment, whether or not Habbush was credible. I want to know why this is the first we’re getting public confirmation that CIA was getting intelligence from Iraq … and all of it said there were no WMD. In his book, for example, Tenet describes one of the short-comings of the 2002 NIE:

What isn’t emphasized, however, is the poor human access to Saddam’s WMD programs and the limitations of our knowledge.

He describes a single source whose reporting strongly influenced his own belief that Saddam had WMD.

This source reported that production of chemical and biological weapons was taking place, biological weapons were easy to produce and to hide, and prohibited chemicals were also being produced at dual-use facilities. This source stated that a senior Iraqi official in Saddam’s inner circle believed, as a result of the UN inspections, that Iraq knew the inspectors’ weak points and how to take advantage of them.

But he doesn’t describe the "many Iraqi officials who said both publicly and privately that Iraq had no WMD." I guess it’s easy to claim that CIA had "poor human access to Saddam’s WMD programs" when you dismiss "many Iraqi officials" who say Iraq had no WMD.

But now that Tenet has alluded to these "many Iraqi officials" who said Iraq had WMD, I’d like to hear about them–and hear why the Senate didn’t hear about them when they were reviewing Iraqi intelligence in 2003 and 2004.  

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      • bmaz says:

        Tenet’s refutation basically amounts to saying, “Habbush was unconvincing.”

        Fucker isn’t exactly a student of philosophical argument is he? They couldn’t prove a negative, therefore it had to be positive! That is his refutation? Uh huh. Nobody has proved there are not space aliens among us, so does Tenet believe there are. Jeebus. The stupid….

  3. jvass says:

    Tenet is such a joke. He said these “many Iraqi officials” were not convincing because they were “parroting the Ba’ath party line”. Meanwhile, why were Chalabi and Curveball “convincing”—because they parroted the WH party line?

    • skdadl says:

      Is that “single source” Curveball?

      I can never understand why guys like Tenet would be so determined to go on looking stupid in the eyes of the world (except for Tony Blair, but that’s another story).

      • jvass says:

        Yes, that Curveball. I’m pretty sure the Germans had questioned him extensively, found him unreliable, told the CIA that, and still the WH used it. One unreliable source versus “many Iraqi officials.” Who’re ya gonna believe? The DFHers all knew Bush, Cheney, Rummy, Wolfie et al were using selective intelligence, but now we’re finally seeing more concrete proof.

        • perris says:

          Yes, that Curveball. I’m pretty sure the Germans had questioned him extensively, found him unreliable, told the CIA that, and still the WH used it.

          that’s because they paid for it

  4. SparklestheIguana says:

    The guy who remembers looking down at the creamy stationery now works for Blackwater –

    Even five years later, (Rob Richer, who worked in CIA for 30 years and was in charge of “clandestine ops” in the Middle East–now working as an executive at Blackwater USA and in line to be CEO of Blackwater according to this book) remembers looking down at the creamy White House stationery on which the assignment was written. “The guys from the Vice President’s office were just barraging us in this period with one thing after another: Run down this lead, find out about that. It was nonstop. Of course, this was different. This was creating a deception.” Richer passed the directive down the chain, to the Iraq Operations Group. ((IOG was a CIA team co-led by John Maguire, clearly also a source for Suskind))

    http://www.crooksandliars.com/…..more-31571

    • pinson says:

      On NPR this morning Suskind brought up Richer and another CIA guy – John Maguire – to support his contention that the Atta forgery was a CIA job initiated by the White House. The exchange went something like this:

      Innskeep: “You’re saying George Tenet told you – look I was given this order to lie, and I fulfilled that.”

      Suskind: “There are off-the-record sources in the book, but there are on-the-record sources who are right in the thick of this operation: Rob Richer, the head of the Near East Division… Tenet turns to Richer and says… listen, you’re not going to like this but here goes. Richer then takes it, he turns to John Maguire, who runs Iraq for the CIA… and it goes down the chain…”

      The “it” here being the order to come up with the Atta forgery. If these guys are in fact willing to go on the record, we could have us a whole new ballgame.

  5. Citizen92 says:

    WH stationery is like none other. It is “creamy.” It is medium weight, and you get an edge when you tear it. And it’s water-marked with both an eagle as well as the date of production.

    THE WHITE HOUSE
    WASHINGTON

    Is embossed in blue at the top.

    Fine stuff, that 8 1/2 x 11 White House “creamy” stationery.

    Important to note that OVP and the NSC have their own stationery and do not generally use THE WHITE HOUSE – WASHINGTON standard. That stuff is left exclusively to politicals in the WHO (White House Office).

  6. phred says:

    Ah the tangled web we weave, eh? So Tenet carefully constructs his book to bolster their argument of how they were mistaken in their assessment of the intelligence, but then in a fit of pique blurts out the truth, which is they had plenty of evidence to the contrary, but it didn’t fit their predetermined outcome and hence was dismissed. Attaboy George, that’s one hell of an analytical approach.

  7. perris says:

    But Tenet goes further. He says, quite clearly, that “there were many Iraqi officials who said both publicly and privately that Iraq had no WMD.” We know of perhaps one or two of these (more if you include the family members of scientists)–and that from reporting done on the war, not from official reports. That is, the reports of “many Iraqi officials who said both publicly and privately that Iraq had no WMD” are curiously absent from the SSCI report on Iraqi intelligence and the Robb-Silberman report. Yet here we have the former DCI admitting that CIA got that intelligence–publicly and privately

    EXCELLANT analysis

  8. Mary says:

    I guess Durbin is way too tired after not whipping on fighting the FISA amendments to haul Tenet in and ask him about the one, two, many, Iraqi official sources who were all saying there were no WMDs.

    The other thing I think is interesting about Tenet’s statements re: Habbush (and really – his name is Habbush?) is that he pretty much paints the picture of a guy who would be willing to do just about anything to please, after pretty much running to the Brits and US, then finding them consistently displeased over what he had to tell them.

    In fact, the source in question failed to persuade his British interlocutors that he had anything new to offer by way of intelligence, concessions, or negotiations with regard to the Iraq crisis and the British — on their own — elected to break off contact with him.

    So they were going to cut him loose unless he offered up something they wanted? And that’s supposed to be convincing as to why he wasn’t approached with forging a letter for the CIA?

    For Tenet’s claim of “It is well established that, at my direction, CIA resisted efforts on the part of some in the Administration to paint a picture of Iraqi-Al Qa’ida connections that went beyond the evidence.”
    There’s not much about that which negates a, **so since Bush clung to that rationale like a tick on a hog, I figured we should go cook up some evidence***

    And besides, isn’t that how you “sell” the pitch? Have the planted stooge who has been saying “nope, nah, don’t believe it, there’s not enough evidence” then make his on-stage “conversion” when “the evidence” is presented?

    The notion that I would suddenly reverse our stance and have created and planted false evidence that was contrary to our own beliefs is ridiculous.

    Almost as ridiculous as someone claiming that there was no torture involved in the CIA program — and everyone knows Tenet would never have said anything like that.

    • perris says:

      Almost as ridiculous as someone claiming that there was no torture involved in the CIA program

      niceley done mary, very nicely done…that’s the tag line I believe

  10. alabama says:

    That’s a pretty strange press-release. It’s so free of doubt, so lacking in qualifiers of any kind, that it makes Tenet sound as if he really believes what he says. And I rather think he does.

    What are his thoughts, I wonder, on the outing of Valerie Plame? Was it a good thing to do–of real benefit to the country?

    • perris says:

      And I rather think he does.

      did you see mary’s excellant point;

      Almost as ridiculous as someone claiming that there was no torture involved in the CIA program

  12. GregB says:

    Everything, everthing these cretins have done, said or wrote has been a provable lie straight from the getgo.

    I do hear the CIAm and the FBI haves narrowed down the list of culprits who stole the W’s off of the Whitehouse keyboards in 2001 though.

    -G

  13. bobschacht says:

    What I don’t get in all this is what Tenet’s angle is. Cheney we understand: He is part and parcel of the Neocon cabal that has been plotting since Nixon’s resignation to restore the imperial presidency. Bush’s part was, well, OK, if you want to crown me as king, I’m game.

    But who is Tenet fighting for? What “side” is he on? Whose agenda is he pushing? I find it hard to believe that he’s entirely on his own, yet I’m not at all clear about what team he’s on. Can someone enlighten me?

    Bob in HI

    • DeadLast says:

      He is taking one for the team. Just like in On the Waterfront, it was not his night. He was powerful but not absolute. He had to and continues to have to take it. There is no angle — this is human sacrifice.

    • perris says:

      Cheney we understand: He is part and parcel of the Neocon cabal that has been plotting since Nixon’s resignation to restore the imperial presidency

      sorry, I believe you don’t understand cheney one bit

      his only purpose is to steal, it’s not to re-establish an imperial office of the presidency, he is a socioplath, his purpose under nixon was to have war so he could profit, that was his purpose as vice president

      the only reason he might want an imperial presidency is to insure that middle class assets will be redistributed to the wealthy

      he is a sociopath, a theif, a murderer and he is NOT an intelectual by any stretch of definition

      • bobschacht says:

        “Tenet is for Tenet. He wants to be seen as a bold warrior, not a political hack.”

        A warrior who rushes headlong into battle without checking to see who’s on his left and right flank, and who’s got his back, isn’t going to last very long. He’d be not only bold, but crazy and short-lived.

        Through two administrations, Tenet has been a team player. That’s what has me wondering, whose team is he on now? He’s holding a lot back– I have no doubt that he knows where most of the bodies are buried. But what’s his game, and who is he playing for?

        Bob in HI

        • hackworth says:

          The manner in which Tenet backed away from his book’s number one sales pitch blurb – The Slam Dunk (as a descriptor for selling the war to the American Public) – was extremely ham-fisted. This guy may be in trouble. He’s running out of friends.

      • MarieRoget says:

        Ah, you’ve hit it, GregB. Tenet is not only a political hack & career gladhander, but, truth be told, doesn’t actually have much of an intel background for a guy who headed CIA.

        Tenet was good @ being Affable George- reputation as a great guy to hang out with. That was about “the it” for what he was (still is) good at. Affability of George extending into the CYA for the higher-ups? You bet.

    • SparklestheIguana says:

      Yeah, I always wondered the same thing about Armitage the blabbing blabber.

      My take on Tenet, based on limited knowledge of him, is that he just wanted to be a power player, whatever the game was. Whether his boss was Clinton or Bush, he was flattered to have a major role….flattered to get the Medal of Freedom – the fact that he had to be a turncoat to get it, well, that came with the territory.

    • Dismayed says:

      People very seldom admit to things that make them look bad. Ask any litigator, an honest guy is always happy to say what the other guys in the company did wrong, but it’s a rare guy that will get up and admit to things that he thinks put him in a bad light. I think Tenet is just trying to put a good face on his tenure, it would just hurt to much to be known as the guy too weak to save all the lives he could have saved. Denial is a powerful thing.

    • InnocentBystander says:

      I’ve long wondered about these questions myself.

      Isn’t it odd that a Clinton appointee wasn’t hung out to dry on missing 9/11? Or that he was wrong on the assessment of Iraq’s WMD capability.

      In both cases, this administration chose to support Tenet, even though he wasn’t in the club. Why? He would have been a logical scapegoat, but he gets the Medal of Freedom when he chooses to leave the CIA.

      The only thing I can figure is that Bush-Cheney has some seriously incriminating evidence of something on Tenet. I also think he has the goods on this administration. So maybe we have a mini-MAD in play.

  14. PetePierce says:

    I didn’t know Ron Susskind had a new book until your two posts. The first two for me were pretty solid putting him on a must read list.

    Thanks for the notice.

    There are a lot of tantalizing details raised in this book being batted around including that the US has only 3 sources inside AQ, the info on King Abdullah of Jordan’s path to the throne greased by the CIA, and the purported threat of Musharaff in a phone call to Bhutto.

    Now the FBI has an arrest to deflect attention from the Anthrax screwup.

    MIT Trained Aafia Siddiqui is being arrained on two federal charges of murder in SDNY.

  15. yellowsnapdragon says:

    I’ll resist making any comparison between the creamy white stationary and Monica’s little blue dress.

  18. plunger says:

    Who was it that knew for a stone cold FACT that Iraq had no WMD, and had learned of a plan to plant WMD inside Iraq in order that it could be “found” by the invading troops?

    Brewster Jennings.

    Plame wasn’t outed to get even with Wilson. Plame was outed to shut down the eyes and ears of the US covert WMD operations in the Middle East in order for their lie to become truth.

    T R E A S O N

    • perris says:

      Who was it that knew for a stone cold FACT that Iraq had no WMD, and had learned of a plan to plant WMD inside Iraq in order that it could be “found” by the invading troops?

      Brewster Jennings.

      while I beleive that is speculated, I don’t believe it’s documented, I also believe joe thinks this was entirely retribution against him, I asked him this outright and that’s what he said

      anyway, do you have a link for this?

      • wavpeac says:

        Okay…I have a question. Would it be considered violating a top secret security clearance for Joe or Valerie to validate that the leak might have been for any other reason than personal retribution??

        Wouldn’t an admission of this imply that the rest of the story which may be considered “top secret” is valid?

        I don’t know enough about it, but it seems like they HAVE to say that it was a vendetta to avoid disclosing security secrets that the gov’t would likely LOVE to pin on them.

        • perris says:

          Okay…I have a question. Would it be considered violating a top secret security clearance for Joe or Valerie to validate that the leak might have been for any other reason than personal retribution??

          good question and I think I have the correct answer to that which is;

          …

          ERRR

          ….

          kinda, sorta, maybe I think so but maybe I think not

          there, that’s your answer

          • wavpeac says:

            So, I guess I have always assumed that we can only look to them for answers up to a certain point.

            I was married to a guy who had a security clearance. He was a software engineer and regularly spent time in the pentagon and the whitehouse basement several floors below.

            It just dawned on me that it is at least possible that they cannot answer that concern without confirming things that they probably are not cleared to confirm. And then, it may mean that what they are saying is absolutely true…but when folks have a clearance, it seems like you can never be too sure. I know there are certain lines that they will not cross or even imply.

  19. plunger says:

    Finally, Brewster Jennings could confirm that Iran was TEN YEARS away from having a functional nuke – which would totally screw-up the Israeli-led Pentagon plan to invade the entire Middle East under false pretense.

    TREASON

    IMPEACH

    • perris says:

      which would totally screw-up the Israeli-led Pentagon plan to invade the entire Middle East under false pretense

      sorry, this was a pnac thing not an israely thing, it’s a cheney thing and a haliburton thing, if israel were used they were used as pawns not the other way around

      • plunger says:

        Karen Kwiatkowski knows the entire truth. She worked inside. She saw how the Office Of Special Plans operated.

        SHE KNOWS THE TRUTH

        C-SPAN Interview April 2, 2006
        Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski
        U.S. Air Force, 1983-2003

        She saw which Generals from which country (other than our own) were free to come and go to the planning meetings in the lead up to the war without the need to sign in.

        I have no reason to disbelieve her accounts, do you?

        • perris says:

          thanx for the link plunger, looks like it’s going be a fun read

          as I say, if israel were involved, they were the pawns, not the other way around, this is from your link

          She would soon conclude that the OSP — a pet project of Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld — was more akin to a nerve center for what she now calls a “neoconservative coup, a hijacking of the Pentagon.”

          thanx again for the link

  20. oldtree says:

    Has anyone else noticed that the old feller can remember all these details about something like this, and forget all the other major details about the rest of his career? The “Senility and Dementia Tour” seems to have a bit of selective recall? Wouldn’t the appropriate congressional bodies have to begin looking back at his testimony when he seems so lucid today?

  21. MadDog says:

    From A Tiny Revolution blog on May 26, 2007:

    I’ve been looking through The Italian Letter by Peter Eiser and Knut Royce. There’s some amazing stuff in it about Alan Foley, the head of the CIA’s Weapons Intelligence Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center (WINPAC). WINPAC led the CIA’s analysis of Iraq’s purported WMD, and so Foley is at the very center of what happened.

    But what’s even more amazing is how little attention the material about Foley has gotten. The book came out several months ago, but according to Google, the below sections have appeared nowhere online.

    Here’s what Foley believed before the war (p. 125):

    There were strong indications that Foley all along was toeing a line he did not believe. Several days after Bush’s State of the Union speech, Foley briefed student officers at the National Defense University at Fort McNair in Washington, DC. After the briefing, Melvin Goodman, who had retired from the CIA and was then on the university’s faculty, brought Foley into the secure communications area of the Fort McNair compound. Goodman thanked Foley for addressing the students and asked him what weapons of mass destruction he believed would be found after the invasion. “Not much, if anything,” Goodman recalled that Foley responded. Foley declined to be interviewed for this book.

    So why, then, would WINPAC report that Iraq had WMD? Here’s the answer (p. 119):

    One day in December 2002, Foley called his senior production managers to his office. He had a clear message for the men and women who controlled the output of the center’s analysts: “If the president wants to go to war, our job is to find the intelligence to allow him to do so.” The directive was not quite an order to cook the books, but it was a strong suggestion that cherry-picking and slanting not only would be tolerated, but might even be rewarded.

    Interestingly, this event has appeared in other books, although not with Foley’s name attached. This is from Pretext for War by James Bamford:

    …within a few months [after the September 11 attacks], for many [at the CIA] the morale once again began to drop through the floor as they began getting pressure to come up with Saddam Hussein’s fingerprints on 9/11 and Al Qaeda.
    One of those who felt the pressure was a DO case officer who spent years running agents overseas, but who had been reassigned to the unit charged with finding weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq… According to the official, the group never found any indications of WMD in Iraq. “Where I was working, I never saw anything—no one else there did either,” the person said.

    Nevertheless, there was a great deal of pressure to find a reason to go to war with Iraq. And the pressure was not just subtle; it was blatant. At one point in January 2003, the person’s boss called a meeting and gave them their marching orders. “And he said, ‘You know what—if Bush wants to go to war, it’s your job to give him a reason to do so’… He said it at the weekly office meeting. And I just remember saying, ‘This is something that the American public, if they ever knew, would be outraged’…He said it to about fifty people. And it’s funny because everyone still talks about that — ‘Remember when [he] said that.’”

    And this appears in Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy by Lindsay Moran:

    During my short tenure in Iraqi Operations, I met one woman who had covered Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program for more than a decade. She admitted to me, unequivocally, that the CIA had no definitive evidence whatsoever that Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed WMD, or that Iraq presented anything close to an imminent threat to the United States. Another CIA analyst, whose opinion I’d solicited about the connection between Al-Qa’ida and Iraq, looked at me almost shamefacedly, shrugged, and said, “They both have the letter q?” And a colleague who worked in the office covering Iraqi counterproliferation reported to me that her mealy-mouthed pen pusher of a boss had gathered together his minions and announced, “Let’s face it. The president wants us to go to war, and our job is to give him a reason to do it.”

    Forgeries were just icing on the cake.

  22. plunger says:

    COUNTERPUNCH

    The inescapable conclusion we must draw is that the Bush administration policy leading into the Iraq War was dominated by officials, grouped under Cheney and Rumsfeld in particular, principally neocons and including Wolfowitz, Libby, Feith, Perle, Abrams, Shulsky, Luti, Bolton, Joseph, Hadley, Wurmser, Franklin, Cambone, Ledeen, Card, Hughes, Rhode, Rove and others who as a matter of policy, and without any moral qualms, deliberately practiced deception to build their case for war. They were not duped by conniving Europeans or badly served by incompetent CIA analysts. They were engaging in “psyops,” psychological operations, principally against their own people, whom they needed to delude with the most frightening imagery (”a mushroom cloud”) to get their job done.

    What was that job? Michael Ledeen, a central figure in the Niger uranium scandal, a sophisticated man who writes elegant prose, sums it up nicely: it requires that “Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and even Saudi Arabia” be destabilized, and that “every last drooling anti-Semitic and anti-American mullah, imam, sheikh, and ayatollah is either singing the praises of the United States of America, or pumping gasoline, for a dime a gallon, on an American military base near the Arctic Circle.”

    Now those guilty of deception—of foisting the Straussian “noble lies” upon the American people and the world—are involved in a desperate effort to avoid exposure, alarmed that the conventional workings of the American political system (congressional hearings, special prosecutors’ investigations, FBI investigations of espionage, reinvigorated investigative journalism, etc.) might not only jeopardize the project but also land the lot of them in jail.

    • perris says:

      The inescapable conclusion we must draw is that the Bush administration policy leading into the Iraq War was dominated by officials, grouped under Cheney and Rumsfeld in particular, principally neocons and including Wolfowitz, Libby, Feith, Perle, Abrams, Shulsky, Luti, Bolton, Joseph, Hadley, Wurmser, Franklin, Cambone, Ledeen, Card, Hughes, Rhode, Rove and others who as a matter of policy, and without any moral qualms, deliberately practiced deception to build their case for war. They were not duped by conniving Europeans or badly served by incompetent CIA analysts. They were engaging in “psyops,” psychological operations, principally against their own people, whom they needed to delude with the most frightening imagery (”a mushroom cloud”) to get their job done.

      bingo

      did you ever get a chance to read this?

      http://www.thomhartmann.com/in…..;Itemid=38

      you’ll enjoy that

      • plunger says:

        I did read that article, and it’s awesome. It serves to explain how Al Qaeda, an organization that does not exist, and Osama Bin Laden, a person who does not exist, came to be so feared.

        It should be a simple matter to prove a positive, yet no one can prove the existence of Al Qaeda or Bin Laden.

        There is no Osama Bin Laden.

  23. plunger says:

    Explore the concept of “discernible reality.”

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R….._community

    Focus on that concept like a laser beam, because it is the key to ALL understanding – a layer beyond what is readily apparent, or even predictable.

    Reporter Ron Suskind nailed it to the wall when he got Karl Rove to blurt this out:

    ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

    http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10…..ssuserland

  25. LS says:

    Susskind was interviewed today on NPR and said that Habbush was paid $5 million by the US and moved to Jordan. Our money!!!

    Tenet’s “In fact, the source in question failed to persuade his British interlocutors that he had anything new to offer by way of intelligence, concessions, or negotiations with regard to the Iraq crisis and the British — on their own — elected to break off contact with him.”… is baloney!!!

    He was paid off with our tax money to STFU.

    • LS says:

      Taxpayers like the 4000 plus resulting dead troops from Bushco’s lying actions…like those taxpayer’s money…

      Treason.

    • SparklestheIguana says:

      Wait, Chimpy told us we’re better at spending our own money than the government, dammit. That weasel.

  26. LS says:

    Yeah…maybe they “forged” AQ and OBL too. I’m convinced that the videos and Zawahiri letters, etc., are all BS…More Borat crappola.

  27. LS says:

    CNN reporting now….WH is in full destroy Susskind mode and destroy Habbush mode….

    They had WMD’s and Hussein used them on his own people….wahhhhhhh

    That’s all they’ve got. Heh.Heh.

  28. Mary says:

    If Habbush is just a guy who the Brits “turned loose” as not being worth anything, he shouldn’t be too hard to find, should he? I mean, it’s not like he has a 5 mill payoff and an intell service hiding him.

    • NCDem says:

      Mary, actually he was not just turned loose by the Brits. The US was also monitoring and cooperating with the weekly meetings with Habbash in Amman in January, 2003. After the war started, he was moved by our CIA to Amman, Jordan sometime in late March or early April. After he agreed to sign the forged the letter in late November, he was told he could stay in Amman, receive $5 million if he remained quite. Reminds me of Holbrooke and Serbia.
      Now that he will become prime meat for more journalist to ask questions, I think there will be a death soon in Amman. He is still wanted by the Iraqi government and has a price on his head. Odd, right! The CIA and our government offers a reward for his capture all the while they are protecting him next door in Amman. He needs to move hiding sites quickly.

      • yonodeler says:

        Maybe there’s such a thing as extraordinary renditioning to facilitate the safekeeping of pawns who must forever remain silent on sensitive matters.

  29. MadDog says:

    OT – From our favorite Henry:

    Committee Seeks Information About Documents Withheld Under Executive Privilege

    Chairman Waxman sent letters seeking additional information about documents withheld from the Committee under claims of executive privilege by President Bush, including documents relating to whether the White House complied with the Clean Air Act on important environmental decisions and documents relating to the outing of covert CIA official Valerie Plame Wilson.

    Letter to Attorney General Mukasey
    Letter to Susan Dudley
    Letter to Stephen Johnson

    • emptywheel says:

      Saw that. Makes sense for the EPA docs. But the FBI report? We know what that is (though we might at least get a date for the interview, which is something I’ve always wondered).

  30. LS says:

    Susskind also made it clear in the NPR interview that he and his lawyers can absolutely substantiate all of his allegations.

    • perris says:

      Susskind also made it clear in the NPR interview that he and his lawyers can absolutely substantiate all of his allegations.

      waxman, PLEASE TAKE NOTE and get this guy’s testimony!

      • Petrocelli says:

        Let’s contact Waxman & Conyers about this … a coupla thousand calls/faxes should nudge them into action …

        Why yes, I am an optimist … how did you guess ? *g*

    • pinson says:

      Just saw a new story on the AP wire with this line:

      Richer and Maquire, who both left the CIA in recent years, could not be reached Tuesday for comment about the book.

      These guys are key, and the big media are taking notice.

  31. SparklestheIguana says:

    Any chance this could lead to perjury/false statement charges against Tenet? From Froomkin:

    Suskind: “Well, you know, this is I think part of George’s memory issue. He’s dealt with this before in front of congressional investigators — “

    Viera: “You don’t think he’d remember this letter?”

    Suskind: “Well, he seems not to remember it. You know, that’s at least what he claims. (Chuckles) The fact is that a lot of people know about this. . . . In this book, Meredith, instead of going to George I went to all the people around George, close to George, who remembered because they were involved in the thing and they remember what George said to them.”

  32. alabama says:

    Maybe we’ve overlooked the most interesting point here–Tenet’s speedy response, and its recourse to fulsome detail. They give the lie to his assured and self-accrediting tone.

    Why the speed? Why the recourse to fulsome detail? Self-assured spooks maintain a stony silence always. They never retort in public.

    Tenet must know that some well-informed people are determined to “out the outers,” as it were, and that therefore some stuff, some really uncomfortable stuff, is bound to start popping up all over the place, and in a most untimely manner.

    He wouldn’t be bothering if the military adventure had prospered. But it crashed into a stone wall, and keeps crashing into that wall, arousing our invasive curiosity.

    Still and all, retorting just feeds the fire, so I find it very strange.

  33. Mary says:

    40 – Shades of the Goss Memo, isn’t it?

    The Goss memorandum, according to an official who had read it, said: “We support the administration and its policies in our work and as agency employees we do not identify with, support or champion opposition to the administration or its policies.”

    I always especially liked the direction no to “identify with” any opposition to administration policies.

  34. plunger says:

    The rats are fleeing the sinking ship – only in this case, the “Rats” are actually having a “come to Jesus moment,” ratting-out those who they know are in fact War Criminals, while hoping to distance themselves from their own complicity.

    Once the talking heads in the mainstream media realize that they too have been co-conspirators, and are themselves subject to prosecution for illegal propaganda leading to War Crimes, things ought to get REAL interesting.

  35. Mary says:

    Maybe a picture would help Tenet refresh his recollection?

    http://wwwimage.cbsnews.com/im…..13312x.jpg

    What, btw, was the CIA/Tenet pushback against the Habbush letter when it came out? Was Tenet out front, advising tht Habbush was discredited? Or, for that matter, was he out front, holding an investigation into how Allawi knew the Habbush letter from 2001 was NOT a forgery and saying to Bush, “Eureka – we now have the evidence – and from a 2001 letter no less!!”

    The very administration silence on the letter story makes you wonder who was worried with being a domestic media source on something they knew was disinformation. Why wasn’t the CIA or even the WH all over the Habbush letter at the time, especially with Allawi certifying it and with Brit intel having a tie to Habbush already?

    What happened to “get it all out there” as the motto? Especially an “all” that finally actually supported the President? You just have to think that with Congress acting like it might actually come to life over the Plame outing and the Niger story ties, the people high enough up the food chain to be worth a journalist writing about their take – were being very weirdly silent about evidence supporting their lord and master’s much criticized SOTU address. And going into an election year – wouldn’t it be a “slam dunk” to make much of the Habbush letter back on the domestic front?

    I think the interesting questions to Tenet would be to track him through the letter coming out and what he did and didn’t have the CIA do as it surfaced. A blase disinterest seems a bit — odd.

  36. Mary says:

    63 – LOL It actually went through my mind that, if DOJ is going to get unfriendly in the future, at least all those Regency Grads would still have a home at CIA.

    All the Ludlum and Le Carre novels will have to get a facelift.

  37. alabama says:

    Or maybe he’s protecting someone–answering an urgent cry for help. If so, whose? And why?

  38. seamus says:

    Does anyone remember Hussein Kamel, Saddam’s son-in-law, who defected in the mid-ninties and was debriefed by UNSCOM? He was in charge of Iraq’s WMD’s and he said that he had personally ordered their destruction. Here is the debrief (pdf)

    And here is his wiki file.

  39. MadDog says:

    I like Laura Rozen’s analysis of Tenet’s response:

    A friend notes, “There is definitely something a little peculiar about this White House denial to NBC”:

    Q: Did the White House direct the CIA to forge a letter in Habbush’s name to make the case for a link to al Qaeda?

    A: The idea that the White House had anything to do with a forged letter purportedly from Habbush to Saddam is absurd.

    Peculiar in that “absurd” does not necessarily mean “no”?

  40. njr83 says:

    “Tenet does not deny…”
    and

    David Gregory, journalist promoted to talking head is in denial…

    “Kay was astonished. My God, he thought, he’s still so invested in this he won’t admit a mistake.
    The CIA leaders made only one parting request: don’t talk to the press.”

    Those CIA leaders must have talked to David Gregory as today on his program on MSNBC he was truly exercised about the claims made in David Suskind’s new book. Gregory will some day come to realize he was duped, and to his shame might regret how long it has taken him to see he was duped. His energy level today indicates he’s gotten some clues, and the battle has begun between his pride and his conscience.

    I have few doubts that his pride will win, but today he was a man in conflict.

  43. MadDog says:

    Ron Susskind tells KO that he has hours and hours of “on the record” tapes from his CIA sources Robert Richer, the CIA’s former deputy director of clandestine operations and John Maguire, who headed the CIA’s Iraq Operations Group at the time.

    So, who are we going to believe, Ron and his “on the record” CIA sources or White House deputy press liar secretary Tony Fratto?

    • pinson says:

      AP now out with a new story – Richer and Maguire deny everything:

      WASHINGTON – Two former CIA officers Tuesday denied that they or the spy agency faked an Iraqi intelligence document purporting to link Saddam Hussein with 9/11 bomber Mohammed Atta, as they are quoted as saying in a new book.

      The White House issued the statement on behalf of the former officials after a day of adamant denials from the CIA and Bush administration about the claim, made in “The Way of the World,” a book by Washington-based journalist Ron Suskind.

      “I never received direction from George Tenet or anyone else in my chain of command to fabricate a document … as outlined in Mr. Suskind’s book,” said Robert Richer, the CIA’s former deputy director of clandestine operations.

      Richer also said he talked Tuesday to John Maguire, who headed the CIA’s Iraq Operations Group at the time and who gave Richer “permission to state the following on his behalf: `I never received any instruction from then Chief/NE Rob Richer or any other officer in my chain of command instructing me to fabricate such a letter. Further, I have no knowledge to the origins of the letter and as to how it circulated in Iraq,” the statement said.

      Guess we’ll find out if Suskind’s got tape!

      • bobschacht says:

        MadDog @81 sez he’s got hours and hours of tape. There are a few Congressional committees that need to be writing up some subpoenas presto. Oh, wait, they have to “invite” them first.

        Bob in HI

      • MadDog says:

        “I never received direction from George Tenet or anyone else in my chain of command to fabricate a document … as outlined in Mr. Suskind’s book,” said Robert Richer, the CIA’s former deputy director of clandestine operations.

        This may even be “technically” correct if he got his orders from the miscreants in the OVP.

        • Citizen92 says:

          Yes, yes, yes. They’re parsing, parsing, parsing.

          Both men’s statements include “…or anyone else in my chain of command…” OVP is not in their chain of command. The President really isn’t either.

          And the White House is SO knotted up over this, it released the statements ON BEHALF OF two retired CIA employees? That seems somewhat unprecedented.

          • skdadl says:

            The White House issued the statement on behalf of the former officials after a day of adamant denials from the CIA and Bush administration about the claim

            Huh? As Citizen92 above asks, is that done?

            That must have been quite some afternoon in the White House, and some afternoon for Richer and Maguire. I just watched the Olbermann clip, and Suskind sure doesn’t sound or look worried; in fact, he looks like the cat who got the creamy White House stationery. He also says (or implies) that he spoke to Richer at lunch yesterday and things were still ok; he sounds as though he knows both men very well by now (and likes them) — I mean, he just sounds credible, and when has anyone thought that of much out of the White House?

            This sounds like a new episode of criminality, frankly. Who was doing what to Richer yesterday afternoon, and how did they get him to agree to any statement issued by them? That has to be crooked.

            • MarieRoget says:

              The tension/discrepancy between when Suskind wrote in Way of the World & the statement(s) coming on behalf of ex-CIA from this WH alone should trigger Senate & House hearings. That alone. But will it.

              • skdadl says:

                Oh, there you are, hidden away in there. Good morning, Marie.

                Well, Scott McClellan’s book got the HJC to move, and that was useful. Suskind’s story sounds even weightier, so we can hope?

                Sands has become a frequent witness, and surely Jane Mayer will as well. Could get to be a regular ole book club up there, yes?

                • MarieRoget says:

                  Good morning, skdadl. W/the right witnesses & minimally decent questioning, could be a couple of pretty explosive book club meetings. Time to wake ‘em & shake ‘em, as my daughter frequently says.

                  • skdadl says:

                    I can’t tell from here — does it feel to you and people you know that there’s just no time to do other things as the conventions and the election loom? Are people feeling distracted and squeezed a bit?

                    • Petrocelli says:

                      I’m thinking that the fall would be a great time to have hearings on this and other malfeasance, so it can be front and center, right up to Election Day …

                    • MarieRoget says:

                      EPUville, but I’m back, & here’s yr. reply- I’m w/Petro. This fall would be an excellent time to liven things up on Capitol Hill w/some Congressional investigations.

                      But will Dems dare to do so? It may be now or not @ all for these type of hearings, as the “bygones be bygones” bi-partisanship (so have grown to despise that term recently) WH mentality looms after 1/09.

          • MadDog says:

            I’m thinking that Ron Suskind will be playing those “on the record” tapes of his in public in the very near future.

            I wonder how many boxes of Depends the White House has got in stock?

            • readerOfTeaLeaves says:

              Oh, here’s hoping they need several semis full of Depends backing up to the service entry.
              Semis with fully inflated tires, one suspects. Truckers know that tire pressure relates to fuel efficiency, even if the GOP can’t figure it out.

              OT – bmaz, wanna place a bet on how many NASCAR or Formula One drivers and pit crews don’t know tire pressure is a factor in road performance and fuel efficiency. Jeebuz…!
              (My bet = ‘0′)

  44. Citizen92 says:

    In Cheney parlance (aka forth branch theory) OVP does not equal White House. Maybe a better question would be

    Q: Did the Office of the Vice President direct the CIA to forge a letter in Habbush’s name to make the case for a link to al Qaeda?

    Furthermore, question only asks about a letter in Habbush’s name. Tenet responds by introducing Saddam. Maybe there was a forged letter in Habbush’s name to someone else??

    • MadDog says:

      Couple points to consider:

      1. I’m confident that Deadeye has been and is running his own “off the books” Super-Plumbers organization staffed with raving Neocon lunatic ex-intel and ex-military spooks and gunslingers. This is one of the reasons Deadeye won’t identify his OVP staffing or budget.

      2. It would not surprise me if Scooter is still functioning as a paid major domo to Deadeye. Yes, he might no longer have a government ID, but instead works as one of Deadeye’s hidden “private contractors” moving the ball down the field.

      3. Deadeye runs this organization out of his Naval Observatory home/bunker and this is a key reason why he has fought so hard in court to prohibit the release of his visitor logs there.

      • Citizen92 says:

        All along, I’ve believed (and many times over been reassured) that all of this skulduggery is hiding in plain sight.

        1. I agree. But OVP doesn’t believe it has to because it has constructed a bureaucratic legal mumbo jumbo to say it doesn’t have. I remember how I first learned about the existence of the “Fourth Branch” – through one of OVP’s masterful (but nearly buried) bureaucratic statements in the OVP Appendix to the 2004 Plum Book.

        The annual legislative branch appropriations act (see, for example, Public Law 108–83) and the annual transportation-treasury appropriations act (see, for example, Public Law 108–199) provide funds
        for the Vice President to hire employees to assist him in carrying out his legislative and executive functions. Executive branch employees also may be assigned or detailed to the Vice President (see 3 U.S.C. 112) and the Vice President may employ consultants (see 3 U.S.C. 106(a)). The Office of the Vice President (OVP) consists of the aggregation of Vice Presidential employees whose salary is disbursed by the Secretary of the Senate from the Vice President’s legislative appropriation, Vice Presidential employees employed with the Vice President’s executive appropriation, employees assigned or detailed to the Vice President, and consultants engaged by the Vice President

        .

        Never before had the role of “consultants” so explicitly been defined for OVP. Never before had there been an appendix for OVP in place of the incumbents holding the positions.

        2. Libby probably still has his White House blue pass. I wouldn’t be surprised if he remained on the government/White House official payroll for months after his trial to “ease the transition.” Why? On both counts, there’s no one to hold him accountable or say no. You’ll recall the Administration’s civilian guy responsible for “White House Security” – ex USSS agent Jim Knodell, admitted that, in fact, he had no control over White House security.

        3. I think he used to use NAVOBS for this purpose, but, somewhere along the line he panicked. That’s why he bought the estate on the Eastern Shore of Maryland (the one doors down from Rumsfeld) and goes there every weekend. I see Cheney’s helicopter returning there every Sunday afternoon/evening. Like clockwork.

      • readerOfTeaLeaves says:

        No clue where Doge Cheney runs his Neofeudalist Black Ops Empire out of, but the taxpayer-funded Naval Observatory — the one that had a giant (taxpayer funded) shredding machine sitting out front for a period of time pre-Nov 2006 election** — makes sense.

        For those watching via Internet, the KO link of the interview with Suskind: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21…..3#26045433

        bobschacht, ditto your qu’s about Tenet.

        ** as reported by EW back at her old TNH site, included a photo of the behemoth shredding truck right there in the roadway in front of PalaisCheney.

  45. prostratedragon says:

    The C&L link reminds us that the technique of using a foreign press report to launder propaganda placements into the U.S. media was probably tried with the Niger forgery, but failed at the doorstep of the Italian reporter Elisabeta Burba.

    She checked it out, concluded that the docs were likely to be fakes, and refused to prepare a story, instead taking the materials (as her boss directed) to the local U.S. reps.

  46. prostratedragon says:

    Just a marginal note: Until some or all of those who have both the authority and the responsibility to take effective action on these matters decide to do so, others who might be witnesses of some kind, but who lack those two qualifications, are pretty exposed so far as public statements are concerned. I could see myself having to figure that into my decision protocol, were I in the situation. Not saying it would affect what I ultimately did, but it might have to affect when and how I did it at the least.

    Guess that’s just another aspect of obstruction of justice.

  47. PetePierce says:

    I have some good news as far as taking down Saxby Chambliss in Georgia with a turnout boosted by Obama if and it’s a big if they can get 600,000 unregistered African American voters registered by October 6 which is the cutoff and then get them to the polls.

    Jim Martin is going to beat Vernon Jones in the Democratic Senate runoff tonight to run against Saxby Chambliss. He is a far better candidate and infintely more experienced for Senate Judiciary than Bush dittohead Chambliss who voted for every issue the Bush administration supported on SJC and in the Senate.

    Martin is an attorney from a firm that handled major criminal cases and was on the state senate judiciary committee for 17 years as well as DHR commissioner.

  48. yonodeler says:

    Who would have been more able than Habbush himself to actually compose a letter that would appear authentic in style, phrasing, detail, and handwriting. CIA officers could have dictated the necessary elements of the letter, offered editorial assistance, and required that they approve the finished letter. That would have left space for parsing-inclined officers to later state that no direction to forge a letter—direction that they forge the letter—was given to them. I don’t know what happened, of course.

    • PetePierce says:

      Look how hard Hatfill worked and what he had to go through to earn his $5 million compared with witness protection progamesque Habush or Not Habush–which is the question.

      Habush by George Bush a Letter in da Hand Be worth Two In Da Bush–sounds like a Broadway Musical soon to be. Costaring Giotti, and Oxycontin gobbling Mary Kate Olsen, featuring a walk-on by Ms. Buffalo Chip, Cindy “half a million on mah credit card ’cause a girl’s gotta shop” McCain.

      • stryder says:

        This is all bullshit.Something is rotten here.
        The timing is the first problem.Why now?
        The research assistant was snatched by the feds?
        Maybe it’s all a diversion.
        We need an EW timeline.Something’s missing
        If It’s true it’s almost like bush is rubbing our noses in the fact that there isn’t a goddomn thing anyone can do about anything.
        It just doesn’t fit somehow.

    • PetePierce says:

      Thanks. If McCain is elected or the Dems can’t control the House and Senate even though they are the world’s biggest Wussies, this will happen on November 5:

      What a McCain Presidency Would Bring

      My friend won the runoff for Senate
      by 60%-40%. He was expected to lose. Now to take down the Republican mutt.

  51. yonodeler says:

    In an MSNBC TODAY extract of Suskind’s new book is the author’s narration of the musings of “a longtime U.S. intelligence official,” from which (on page 3) the passage quoted below is taken.

    This state of affairs is untenable — a loss of intelligence capability that will end in disaster — and he thinks about why, about how America went from a country that people wanted to help in its time of need to one they’d just as soon see humbled. And each time he goes through this exercise, he comes back to Iraq and the suspicions of so many, in the United States and abroad, that we went to war under false pretenses. He thinks it’s the key reason the United States has lost its moral authority in the world. People — at the agency and around Washington — dismiss it, the whole mess, saying it’s all past tense, let it go. But he knows more than they do — more than all but a dozen people, maybe fewer, inside the U.S. government, with two of them being Bush and Cheney. He knows there was a secret mission a few months before the war — a top-drawer intelligence-gathering mission that the United States was involved in — that found out everything we later learned. That there were no weapons. And we knew in plenty of time.

    I’m wondering about that “secret mission a few months before the war.” Has much been reported about it, and does it have a name?

    • yonodeler says:

      I just noted something else interesting in the quoted passage: “ — a top-drawer intelligence-gathering mission that the United States was involved in — ” [my emphasis]. So who else was involved in the mission?

  52. MarieRoget says:

    It’s true that Tenet repeatedly pushed back against OVP’s efforts to claim Iraq and Al Qaeda had any ties, right up to the beginning of the war.

    That push back was supremely ineffectual, & those in the intel community who knew full well the intel indicating there was no evidence of Iraq- Al Qaeda ties felt Tenet’s push back was weakened by his basal level grasp of nuts & bolts intel gathering (this time on Iraq/Al Qaeda, but also in general), coupled w/Affable George’s need to be considered a BushCo team player & not rock the boat.

    Tenet’s push back easily thwarted by OVP, which had scoped out George’s interests/abilities as DCI very well, & knew how to end-run on him.

  53. wigwam says:

    According to Suskind on Countdown last night, his interviews are all on tape. In addition, there were plenty of news reports about the content of the letter, when it was released. Also, note that, federal officials to propagandize the American people in this way is a federal crime.

  54. plunger says:

    Let’s start out with a recap of some highly disturbing events in this country, as reported by a mainstream newspaper on the United States in August of 2005:
    http://www.timesherald.com/sit…..#038;rfi=6

    Now can you help me out with a plausible explanation for this:
    http://www.informationclearing…..le7545.htm

    And this official DEA report:
    http://www.whatreallyhappened……pying.html

    A counterintelligence investigation by the FBI concluded that at least two of them were in fact Mossad operatives, according to the former American official, who said he was regularly briefed on the investigation by two separate law enforcement officials.

    “The assessment was that Urban Moving Systems was a front for the Mossad and operatives employed by it,” he said. “The conclusion of the FBI was that they were spying on local Arabs but that they could leave because they did not know anything about 9/11.”

    However, he added, the bureau was “very irritated because it was a case of so-called unilateral espionage, meaning they didn’t know about it.”

    Spokesmen for the FBI, the Justice Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service refused to discuss the case. Israeli officials flatly dismissed the allegations as untrue.

    However, the former American official said that after American authorities confronted Jerusalem on the issue at the end of last year, the Israeli government acknowledged the operation and apologized for not coordinating it with Washington.

    The five men — Sivan and Paul Kurzberg, Oded Ellner, Omer Marmari and Yaron Shmuel — were arrested eight hours after the attacks by the Bergen County, N.J., police while driving in an Urban Moving Systems van.

    ‘A Scary Situation’ Steven Gordon, the attorney for the five Israeli detainees, acknowledged that his clients’ actions on Sept. 11 would easily have aroused suspicions. “You got a group of guys that are taking pictures, on top of a roof, of the World Trade Center. They’re speaking in a foreign language. They got two passports on ‘em. One’s got a wad of cash on him, and they got box cutters. Now that’s a scary situation.”

    While many have denied these events occurred, note these Mainstream Media accounts:

    Since their arrest, plenty of speculation has swirled about the case, and what the five men were doing that morning. Eventually, The Forward, a respected Jewish newspaper in New York, reported the FBI concluded that two of the men were Israeli intelligence operatives.

    Vince Cannistraro, a former chief of operations for counterterrorism with the CIA who is now a consultant for ABCNEWS, said federal authorities’ interest in the case was heightened when some of the men’s names were found in a search of a national intelligence database.

    Israeli Intelligence Connection?

    According to Cannistraro, many people in the U.S. intelligence community believed that some of the men arrested were working for Israeli intelligence. Cannistraro said there was speculation as to whether Urban Moving had been “set up or exploited for the purpose of launching an intelligence operation against radical Islamists in the area, particularly in the New Jersey-New York area.”

    According to ABC’s 20/20, when the van belonging to the cheering Israelis was stopped by the police, the driver of the van, Sivan Kurzberg, told the officers:

    “We are Israelis. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are your problem.”

  56. plunger says:

    Evidence is Growing: Continuity of Government Plan is Currently in Effect

    Cheney & Rumsfeld actually drilled for this “Armageddon” / Continuity of Government circumstance back in the Ford Administration…and they had long weekends together to craft their future plan to implement the need for its implementation:

    The Armageddon Plan

    During the Reagan era Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were key players in a clandestine program designed to set aside the legal lines of succession and immediately install a new “President” in the event that a nuclear attack killed the country’s leaders. The program helps explain the behavior of the Bush Administration on and after 9/11

    by James Mann

    A t least once a year during the 1980s Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld vanished. Cheney was working diligently on Capitol Hill, as a congressman rising through the ranks of the Republican leadership. Rumsfeld, who had served as Gerald Ford’s Secretary of Defense, was a hard-driving business executive in the Chicago area—where, as the head of G. D. Searle & Co., he dedicated time and energy to the success of such commercial products as Nutra-Sweet, Equal, and Metamucil. Yet for periods of three or four days at a time no one in Congress knew where Cheney was, nor could anyone at Searle locate Rumsfeld. Even their wives were in the dark; they were handed only a mysterious Washington phone number to use in case of emergency.

    After leaving their day jobs Cheney and Rumsfeld usually made their way to Andrews Air Force Base, outside Washington. From there, in the middle of the night, each man—joined by a team of forty to sixty federal officials and one member of Ronald Reagan’s Cabinet—slipped away to some remote location in the United States, such as a disused military base or an underground bunker.

  57. plunger says:

    Philip Zelikow – PsyOps Operative

    The Bush administration is very serious about controlling information. That’s why they launched the Pentagon’s Dept of Strategic Information. The military is now deeply engaged in “full spectrum dominance” of all information technologies.

    Consequently, “controlling the narrative” is more important than one might think. Propaganda is the cheapest and most effective way to control public behavior.

    The Bush administration has made some notable contributions to the traditional propaganda-paradigm. In fact, former Counselor at the State Dept, Philip Zelikow, (who was also executive director of the 9-11 Commission) is an expert in “the creation and maintenance of ‘public myths’ or ‘public presumptions’, which he defines as beliefs thought to be true although not necessarily known to be true with certainty, shared in common with the relevant political community. He has taken a special interest in ‘searing’ or ‘molding’ events that take on ‘transcendent’ importance and, therefore, retain there power even as the experiencing generation passes from the scene”.

    “In the Nov-Dec 1998 issue of Foreign Affairs he co-authored an article called ‘Catastrophic Terrorism’ in which he speculated that if the 1993 bombing of the World Trade center had succeeded ‘the resulting horror and chaos would have exceeded our ability to describe it. Such an act of catastrophic terrorism would be a watershed event in American history. ‘It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented in peacetime and undermine America’s fundamental sense of security. The US might respond with draconian measures scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects and use of deadly force.

    The previous paragraph is WRITTEN IN 1998!?! 3 YEARS BEFORE 9-11!

    Where, one might ask, did Zelikow get his crystal ball?

    Isn’t this the exact blueprint for what is taking place right now?

    Zelikow has figured out that the real essence of controlling behavior is not simply “propagating” ideas but understanding how humans process information.

    Both 9-11 and the blowing up of the Golden dome Mosque are examples of how this theory works.

    formerly linked here:

    http://www.ichblog.eu/content/view/32/1/

    More on Zelikow

  59. BrazCubas says:

    A tangential, but extremely telling point regarding Kay.

    My uncle was buried at Arlington National last week, beautiful ceremony. A photographer was present to photograph the ceremony and the reception that followed.

    On the way home my cousin, who is retired from the military and the defence industry said that he was David Kay.

    Apparently, the man cannot find work in this republican administration or the industries which serve it.

    He is now, and for the forseeable future will rmain, a freelance photographer.

    A freelance photographer with a very impressive resume.

  61. Neil says:

    N-OT:

    Since un-retiring this spring, Favre has made it known that he wants to return to the Packers and have a chance to be the starter or to be traded within the division: Each of those outcomes has one thing in common: He’d have a chance to get back at Packers management: in the first instance because he would win a power struggle with them, and in the second because he’d have a chance to stick it to them (by playing against the Packers twice a year and showing them and the world what they were missing.) [Favre to Bucs?] http://fifthdown.blogs.nytimes…..s-revenge/

  62. JohnLopresti says:

    Last June, Tom Engelhardt published this Thomas Powers ~15pp review, from the NY Review of Books, of the then recently published book “At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA” ‘by GTenet with Bill Harlow’. I read Suskind’s classic on Bush as if viewed through the lens of the establishment clause, from NYTmagazine2004, and thought it informative but somewhat ad hominem. With the stationery fiasco now, it seems there need to be some new facts around which to retrofit policy, but such is prewar hype, which pretty much is how Powers in 2007 depicted the ambience in 2003. The coterie that devised the flypaper war plan from many motivations had a president leading them who needed just such a component to bolster party, write history in wide strokes. It seems some of the IT stuff they implemented might have effected similar outcomes with respect to actually finding and bringing terrorists to justice without creating the regional problem Iraq was to become once destabilized. It is probably important to continue to examine how the dynamic of preemptive war prosecuted by the US occurred, and reset checks and balances to contravene against some future attempt at replication of that sort of executive discretion, though many of the top folks likely are glad for the ‘progress’ as well as the methodology employed. I wonder if Tenet is glad for how things developed, but right now Suskind appears to have removed some of the publicly told fictions at a minimum from Tenet’s story, though Woodward had a funny way of relating the basketball story, too.

  63. MsAnnaNOLA says:

    Thanks for all your work as usual. I can read all the posts right now but just wanted to say that. I hope someday someone will be held to account for these crimes.

  64. ohmercy says:

    I know I’m a day too late but I’m trying to play catch up.

    but our foreign intelligence colleagues and we assessed that these individuals were parroting the Ba’ath party line and trying to delay any coalition attack.

    What struck me in this paragraph as well as the fresh hell that you pointed out “parroting the Ba’ath party line and trying to delay any coalition attack.”

    Well duh.
    Of course they were… it was always a catch 22. They didn’t have WMD and they couldn’t provide proof of what they did not have but if they did not provide proof they would be attacked by coalition forces.
    So Tenet says the Ba’ath party line was telling them there was no WMD’s and despite having this repeated by multiple sources they- Bu$hco conveniently ascribe this as a way to delay being attacked. Hello?

    So rather than do more research which might become public knowledge they have to go in and get him just because they can. And now we see they couldn’t if you know what I mean.

    Anyway, wish I could articulate what I’m trying to untangle.
    Its about the idea of delaying being attacked party line that is tickling at me.

    Wish I was you Marcy.
    Always awesome!

  65. freepatriot says:

    maybe I’ve gone goofy, but didn’t Saddam’s own son in law tell us Saddam had no WMDs ???

    defected, sold out the lie of WMDs, returned to Iraq to be killed by Saddam ???

    did I dream that ???

    or am I creating my own reality or something

    anybody who said Saddam had WMDs in 2001 was lying

    nuff said

    case closed