Gee, I wonder if Plame or Wilson was considered? They have knowledge of Iran that would take years to accumulate and with her contacts and background of running covert cells, Plame could have really contributed to better understanding of Iran and the region. Of course modern Congresses only want the appearance of oversight and investigations.

Wow.

I feel like I am in Oz and the curtain has just been pulled back.

BCCI (which involves all the Blackwater-type scumbags and middle eastern yes men), AQ Kahn, Skull&Bones Member John Kerry with his flaccid presidential timber, and Iran/Israel connected? What a drama? Ozzie and Harriet would roll in their graves!

As I understand the history of it, Clark Clifford was a very old man at the time and probably didn’t understand how he’d been used. In other words, someone in the intelligence/BCCI community “handled” him. I think Kerry understood this about the situation.

The juicy question is who set up Clifford?

Kerry is 65 years old and has been in the Senate for 24 years. The Senate is not a hotbed of radicalism, at least not of the liberal variety. It is very much the embodiment of the status quo. And Kerry personifies this. He is not Jesse Helms but then neither is he a closet progressive. He is in the most Establishment of establishments, and he did not wander in by mistake.

Can any of us be surprised that this is the case? How many firebreathing liberals are there in the Senate? There’s Kennedy but he’s both old and dying. There’s Bernie Sanders but he’s technically not even a Democrat. There’s Feingold but he is inconsistent and often muted.

As I pointed out, Kerry is 65. When I look across the media landscape, I see all of these figures who were once labeled “liberal” spouting some of the most conservative tripe around. NPR, the NewsHour, Washington Week, etc., these were all once part of the liberal media, now they are sad, hackneyed mouthpieces of the Conventional Wisdom and purveyors of conservative talking points. Can I be that surprised that Kerry belonging to the same “liberal” generation as these turn out any different?

The truth is our whole political class is out of touch with the country and more generally with reality. How else to explain the lack of opposition to the madness of the Bush years? Or the active participation in what has led us to the financial meltdown and the edge of depression? Their missing the point is not a bug. It’s a feature.

They have, media and politicians, constructed a bubble in Washington, much larger than anything Bush had, where they can grow old and comfortable together, going along to get along, hiring the people they know, who almost always have some connection to a rich and conservative group, that gave money or support to them. It is the perfect echo chamber, for members only, and as we have so often found out here: we are not members.

fearless leader quoting from Frantz: “He tends to operate in bursts, pushing relentlessly on a subject and then seeming to lose interest in it”

jdmckay @ 16: “he appears (and has for some time) more interested in his image than really putting his ass on the line” — versus the circumstances that led his being awarded the Silver Star.

I refuse to accept there’s value in indulging in cheap shots. Not only is it outside the style of Ms E and her regulars, it’s lazy, giving into Swiftboat hangover.

There’s lot of brain professionals here; what’s all this say to you about this personality type?

I suspect the reason Kerry has hired Frantz has less to do with his older book, “A Full Service Bank” than it does with his most recent one, “The Nuclear Jihadist: The True Story of the Man who sold the World’s most Dangerous Secrets…and how we could have stopped him.” Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins, (married to each other) Twelve/Grand Central Publishing, 2007. Didn’t get a whole lot of attention last year when published, but it is solid.

In 1988, when John Kerry’s investigation went up to the cusp, and then died, he was just a first term Senator, and he conducted his investigstion from the perch of a small subcommittee. The Leadership cut him off after the Clifford Clark bit was brought up — Clark was one of those bright shining objects that frequently show up when lines of investigation lead in the Direction of Bush Family Doings (as BCCI did with reference to several Texas Banks connected to the Bush Family), and Senate Democratic Leadership apparently feared there might be more Democratic shining objects such as Clark Clifford, and so essentially ordered Kerry to back off. He did, but his investigator handed off very valuable material to the Bank of England, which stepped up to the bar, and closed down BCCI — sorta closed it down. It is very important to remember this was the end of the Reagan Administration, and the year of the election of GHWBush, and had Kerry had his investigative powers — and had his ducks in order — the story would have played big in the 1988 election. But by throwing in Clifford, that shifted political calculations.

This story is reprised in Russ Baker’s “Family of Secrets” with a focus on both the Bush Banking entanglements in Texas that are part of the BCCI story, but also Baker makes the point about how Jimmy Carter was roped into BCCI via Burt Lance, who sold his Georgia Bank to BCCI, and thus entangled Carter into the story during his Presidency. Carter later received a very large donation from BCCI for the Carter Center, something that became public as a result of Kerry’s investigative work. If you follow Baker’s analysis closely, the scheme of having a few Democrats in fairly obvious positions in any Bush designed covert scheme, is a way of protecting a much larger covert operation. They are there to be discovered, to be “outed”, to be sacrificed to protect the guts of the operation. So while Kerry was on the cusp of discovering through his investigation the guts of BCCI — which included not only the funding of Pakistan’s covert Nuclear Operations, but also the CIA/Saudi covert funding of this as a side-show to the transfer of funds to the Reagan war in Afghanistan — that could all be “protected” by shoving out the door the Clifford and Carter/Lance stuff so that Democratic Leadership would back off.

Frantz’s latest book is blurbed by Steven Coll and by Graham Allison. Interesting mix. Allison in particular (Kennedy school/Harvard) is Obama’s special expert on dealing with a new Nuclear Proliferation Treaty — and I would factor that into why Kerry may be about to revisit both BCCI and the years in which CIA more or less fostered Pakistan’s Nuclear Industry along with the Saudi’s and others. Unless CIA’s involvement is untangled in a fairly public way (and CIA’s includes the Bush Family’s involvement) the US has no legitimacy in trying for a new non-proliferation regime — simple as that.

So I assume that Kerry’s staffing decision indicates less the narrow concern with going back and sorting out BCCI — but much more, putting on the record what Frantz’s investigative work developed about Bush Family/CIA involvement in Nuclear Proliferation beginning with BCCI and continuning until a couple of weeks ago. We are talking about perhaps 30 years of involvement and history. You need all of these narratives which are quite public, and are at the core of the problem — Coll’s work on Pakistan and Afghanistan, Frantz’s work on BCCI and then on A.Q. Khan and the Pakistani Nuclear Industry, you need Graham Allison’s papers and book, and for the structure of the overarching narrative, you need Russ Baker. If Kerry is successful, he could lay the ground for Obama to press for a new Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty, or at least working talks toward that end. First step — use the Foreign Relations Committee venue to get what are public facts (if you read the books) out on the table in a way that disarms those who allowed proliferation (The Bush Family Circle and some in CIA as well as Saudi interests). Then Obama could take the lead and propose talks among Nuclear Capable States — and others — toward a new anti-proliferation regime. For this — read Allison.

Selections from the report