Dagnabbit EW, your post prolificacy has my head spinning! *g*

Meanwhile back at your CIA log post, I wondered about some “curiosities” in that log.

And wrt this post, I wonder if you’ve heard anymore from Joe and Valerie Wilson?

Twould seem that the more rocks that are turned over, the tighter the connection between Valerie’s betrayal, torture and the Iraq war.

Saw that. Matthews tied Issa into a pretzel

I kinda agree with darrel

don’t wake me until you catch the CIA telling the TRUTH

when that happens, you can bring it up, ti then, uh what ???

what do you mean, that ain’t what he said ???

he’s Defending the cia, and trying to act like they don’t lie ???

well then, that’s different

who gives a shit what he thinks

(wink)

The “drone” story 43 tried to sell in his SOTU Address caught my attention more at the time than the Niger yellowcake story did, because I had just read Aviation Week & Space Tech. mag’s article on the Iraqi UAV program, and it was clear that they were refitting planes that use long runways, not any craft that could clear the deck of an aircraft carrier, never mind a freighter or tanker. Besides, they were able to fly racetrack patterns and land the thing, but not much else; not what you’d call a capable weapons system.

So, the CIA was trying to bootstrap that tottering program into some bogeyman, too? What part of the CIA was that, exactly? Team B? That in itself tells me that the CIA is not monolithic and that someone was using CIA cred, such as it might be, to sell a scare story. (Which was definitely what Bush was trying to do in his speech.) (I turned the TV off and left the room before he had finished trying his luck with the Niger scam, the con artist.)

Thanks for this post EW. This is the first I have heard of the Kanjorski story. What I am most struck by though is the ability of the Rethugs to hang themselves. They are the ones making a big stink to try to make Pelosi look bad on the basis of a crappy CIA document. Did it never occur to them how badly that could backfire if the doc was any less than 100% truthful and squeaky clean? Do you think nobody bothered to tell Issa and Boehner and the rest that they are defending a boatload of lies and that it will come back to bite them in the end? During Watergate, Congressional Republicans had to tell Nixon to go in order to save themselves. At what point does self-interest kick in for the likes of Issa?

Two paragraphs from Prados’s book Hoodwinked that bear somewhat on the Kanjorski accusation. The first one validates that during early Sept. 2002, briefings were flying thick and fast as apparently it was slowly dawning on the geniuses in the Executive branch that they might actually have to put up some kind of case to get any political cover at all. Note how arrangements are made that would impede any attempt by legislators attending different briefings to share information, as well as impeding information flow to the public as Prados says.

Consultation with Congress brought the administration into further contact with these views [that they had not made an acceptable factual case for war with Iraq]. Demands for more specific data resulted in a top-secret briefing for the four most senior members of Congress on September 5 by CIA Director George Tenet. White House concern was evident in the fact that Vice President Richard Cheney attended as well, and both Cheney and Tenet joined Secretary Rumsfeld the next morning when a larger group of twenty-five senators were given a breakfast briefing on weapons proliferation issues. There were private briefings as well, such as of friendly Democratic leader Richard Gephardt by Tenet on September 13 and Robert Menendez (D-NJ) by Condi Rice and Tenet that same week. But there was a clear effort to stifle any flow of information to the public —members of Congress who attended briefings were asked to sign special secrecy agreements. [pp. 32–33]

The second ¶ describes Sen. Bill Nelson’s reaction, similar to that of Kanjorski, on finding out how bogus the drone claim was; Nelson had been in a group briefing on them in October, just before the vote on the AUMF. Prados does some figuring that suggests that in this round it might have been either Director Tenet or Secretary Rumsfeld with the clicker in the conference room:

Next to the biological claim as a hair-raiser stands the specter of Iraqi drones attacking the continental United States. This was not merely a claim made in the CIA white paper. According to Florida Senator Bill Nelson, speaking to home state journalists in late 2003, a drone attack on the American homeland figured as a prime feature of an intelligence briefing given to a large group of legislators on Capitol Hill before the vote on the war resolution. Nelson repeated this charge on the floor of the Senate in January 2004: “I was looked at straight in the face and told that UAVs could be launched from ships off the Atlantic coast to attack eastern seaboard cities of the United States.” Although Senator Nelson declined to specify the exact date of the briefing or who from the Bush administration participated, CIA Director George Tenet is known to have met with legislators on October 3, 2002, and to have been at a large congressional briefing with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld a couple of days later. We know from public complaints made by Senator Tom Daschle in December 2002 that no intelligence briefings occurred between then and mid-December. Thus one of these two meetings had to have been the occasion when the attack on the continental United States was emphasized. Meanwhile Senator Nelson, a former astronaut, is a sophisticate on matters of technology and could hardly have mistaken a claim about a drone threat against the United States for some other point made by CIA briefers. [pp. 106–107]

Who needs tapes of the torture (to prove the dark deeds of the CIA and that torture was used to justify links between 9/11 & Iraq) when there are faked photographs taken in the southwest US by a CIA photographer of drones they purport to have been Iraq’s?

Bush and Rice were in and out of the meeting where these photographs were shown that Kanjorski says was attended by four or five other members of Congress including himself. Why aren’t reporters crawling all over the Congress looking for these other members, getting corroboration?

What’s keeping this from exploding into full-scale investigations, hearings and prosecutions is that it’s not being picked up by mainstream media.

EW is but one person and this scandal is going to die and be buried like October-Surprise, Iran-Contra without the groundswell of the public demanding investigations and justice. That’s not going to happen unless major publications, major media, start covering the facts. MSNBC is the cable news channel coming closest to the facts, but even their coverage is all about the company line. Pelosi’s being made a scapegoat, and it’s looking as if it will end there.

Without a narrative more in keeping with the truth, Obama will just continue along the Bush path, embracing more of Bush’s policies with no change whatsoever. Obama told the human rights groups today that there will be no prosecution of anyone in the Bush administration, and 9/11-type of commission.
Rachel Maddow and Mike Isikoff tonight broke the story – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evCeWcRJxSg