It’s World War IV Stupid!: How the Usual Suspects planned this all along.

 So Newt Gingrich thinks we are seeing the beginning of World War III. Looks like he’s been out of touch with his neocon buddies for quite some time then, because, as anybody who’s followed the megalomaniacal ramblings of the Usual Suspects knows, this is actually World War IV.The Usual Suspects have been planning this big brouhaha for some time and if you’d like, I’ll take you down their little rabbit hole and show you the roadmap they’ve made.  So whip out your Blue Pills and let’s go…

Cross Posted at Conceptual Guerilla’s. The History of World War IV.First off, a little history before we come to The Plan.  As ex-CIA director James Woolsey told us several years ago (didn’t Newt get the memo?), The Cold War was World War III.  We are on the brink of World War IV, he told us back in 2003, and furthermore:

This fourth world war, I think, will last considerably longer than either World Wars I or II did for us. Hopefully not the full four-plus decades of the Cold War

One can only hope can’t they?  The Military Industrial Complex must have been orgasming in ecstasy when they heard that.  But that’s not all Woolsey tells us of the neocons plans for our future and our childrens future:

He said the new war is actually against three enemies: the religious rulers of Iran, the “fascists” of Iraq and Syria, and Islamic extremists like al Qaeda.Woolsey told the audience of about 300, most of whom are students at the University of California at Los Angeles, that all three enemies have waged war against the United States for several years but the United States has just “finally noticed.”

So we’ve actually been fighting World War IV for several years now, but the United States has just “finally noticed”.  Sort of a delayed reaction, I guess, kinda like right after Katrina hit.

You might want to know a few details about the milieu in which Woolsey made this sweeping Declaration of War.  He was at a “teachin” at UCLA.  There were a series of “teachins” across the nations universities at the time.

A group calling itself “Americans for Victory Over Terrorism” sponsors the teach-ins, and the Bruin Republicans, UCLA’s campus Republicans organization, co-sponsored Wednesday night’s event.The group was founded by former Education Secretary William Bennett, who took part in Wednesday’s event along with Paul Bremer, a U.S. ambassador during the Reagan administration and the former chairman of the National Commission on Terrorism.

Newt really should be more in the loop.  In fact, you can go back to the weeks after 9-11 to find that the World War IV meme was already in use by the neocons when Eliot Cohen wrote “World War IV: Let’s call this conflict what it is.”  in which he also asserts, as Admiral Woolsey did, that the war

“began well before Sept. 11, and its casualties include, at the very least, the dead and wounded in our embassies in Africa, on the USS Cole and, possibly, in Somalia and the Khobar Towers.”

And Cohen reiterates that “The Cold War was World War III.” So obviously, Newt was completely out of the loop to have missed the entirety of World War III.  But does Cohen name the same enemies as Woolsey?

The enemy in this war is
not “terrorism”…but militant Islam….Afghanistan constitutes just one front in World War IV, and the battles
there just one campaign….The immediate choice lies before the U.S. government in regard to Iran….The overthrow of the first theocratic revolutionary
Muslim state and its replacement by a moderate or secular government, however, would be no less important a victory in this war than the annihilation of bin Laden…Second, the U.S. should continue to target regimes that sponsor terrorism.  Iraq is the obvious candidate, having not only helped al Qaeda, but attacked Americans directly (including an assassination attempt against the first President Bush) and developed weapons of mass destruction…Third, the U.S. must mobilize in earnest…the beginning of a desperately needed “transformation” of the American military…

One can almost hear the Military Industrial Complex crying out at the end, “Oh God!  Oh God!  I’M CUMMING!”  One can almost see the dollar signs in the corporatists eyes and hear the cash register going “Ka-Ching!”.

But did Cohen, professor of strategic studies at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, come up with this meme or did he simply get the memo that Newt missed?

Actually, Woolsey gave a speech entitled “World War IV” just 4 days before Cohens article, so the memo had already been out there.  Gee Newt, considering you shared a spot on the same defense policy board as Woolsey, you really should read your memo’s more often!

Oh wait!  I think I found the memo!  Yep, it’s right here called the Project For the New American Century (PNAC), established in 1997 and Woolsey, Bennett, Bremer and Cohen are all members of it.

Take a close look at the PNAC and you’ll find many of the Usual Suspects are charter members.  Billy Kristol is the chairman, Wolfowitz, John Bolton the man I tagged as being the Usual Suspect that outed Valerie Plame is a member:

Let’s take a moment to consider something: Where did The Usual Suspects get their information about Valerie Plame?  Who in the administration would have had access to Top Secret information pertaining to Valerie Wilson/Plame’s role in nuclear proliferation?  The only logical person to turn to for such information would have been John Bolton, State Dept. deputy secretary in charge of WMD’s.  Bolton played a central role in the Niger Yellowcake story.

And who was Bolton’s assistant?  David Wurmser, also a member of PNAC.  And at last, we come to

The Plan

As detailed in The Wurmser Turns, David Wurmser gave us a very detailed look at exactly what World War IV is going to look like.

Damascus has been in Wurmser’s sights at least since he began working with Perle at AEI in the mid-1990s.For the latter part of the decade, he wrote frequently to support a joint U.S.-Israeli effort to undermine then-President Hafez Assad in hopes of destroying Ba’athist rule and hastening the creation of a new order in the Levant to be dominated by “tribal, familial and clan unions under limited governments.”

Indeed, it was precisely because of the strategic importance of the Levant that Wurmser advocated overthrowing Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in favour of an Iraqi National Congress (INC) closely tied to the Hashemite monarchy in Jordan.

“Whoever inherits Iraq dominates the entire Levant strategically,” he wrote in one 1996 paper for the Jerusalem-based Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS).

Wurmser, whose Israeli-born spouse Meyrav Wurmser heads Middle East studies at the neo-conservative Hudson Institute, was the main author of a 1996 report by a task force convened by the IASPS and headed by Perle, called the ‘Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000’.

The paper, called ‘A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm‘, was directed to incoming Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

It featured a series of recommendations designed to end the process of Israel trading “land for peace” by transforming the “balance of power” in the Middle East in favour of an axis consisting of Israel, Turkey and Jordan.

To do so, it called for ousting Saddam Hussein and installing a Hashemite leader in Baghdad. From that point, the strategy would be largely focused on Syria and, at the least, to reducing its influence in Lebanon.

Among other steps, the report called for Israeli sponsorship of attacks on Syrian territory by “Israeli proxy forces” based in Lebanon and “striking Syrian military targets in Lebanon, and should that prove insufficient, striking at select targets in Syria proper.”

“Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, even rolling back Syria,” the report argued, to create a “natural axis” between Israel, Jordan, a Hashemite Iraq and Turkey that “would squeeze and detach Syria from the Saudi Peninsula.”

“For Syria, this could be the prelude to a redrawing of the map of the Middle East, which could threaten Syria’s territorial integrity,” it suggested.

There’s the groundwork being laid for World War IV, way back in 1996.  Israel must move into Lebanon and from there the attack on Syria begins.  So how influential is David Wurmser?  Read what I’ve uncovered about The Usual Suspects here, here and ashulmans diary here. Take special note of the list of “authors” at the bottom of ashulmans diary.  Then take another look at the flowchart that shows Wurmser’s place in the grand scheme of things.  Wurmser’s job at one time was to prove there existed a link between Al Queda and Iraq.  Do any of the other names on that flowchart look familiar?

Woolsey, Gingrich, Perle, Cheney, Libby, Michael Ledeen (Keyser Soze himself!), Harold Rhode, Bolton, Shulsky, Rubin, Wolfowitz, etc.

These are The Usual Suspects, people, and this plan for starting World War IV has been long in the making.

The Usual Suspects Agenda – Phase II: Attacking Syria

Welcome to World War IV.What?  You missed World War III?  Most people now acknowledge that World War III was the War Formerly Known as The Cold War.  Since the Berlin Wall fell, however, America’s Military-Industrial Complex has been desperately casting about for a new war to justify their bloated share of the taxpayers money and keep living high off the pork.  So as I was saying, Welcome to World War IV.

It began with the invasion of Iraq.  It continues with the invasion of Syria.  It’s all a part of The Plan.  Don’t believe there’s a Plan?  Don’t believe this is World War IV?  Well, I didn’t make that up, they did.  As I’ll show you after the fold, it’s been The Plan since right after the Berlin Wall fell…

None other than the former Director of the CIA James Woolsey declared the onset of World War IV with his speech to AIPAC in Nov. 2002.  Yeah, once again AIPAC comes into play.  For those he keep accusing me of trying to draw a line between the AIPAC spy scandal and The Usual Suspects over at AEI, it wasn’t MY doing, it just “happened” to be where he made the speech. Go figure.

I was really quite honored when David asked me a few months ago to be with you this weekend.
…I have adopted Eliot Cohen’s formulation, distinguished professor at Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies, that we are in World War IV, World War III having been the Cold War. And I think Eliot’s formulation fits the circumstances really better than describing this as a war on terrorism…
…This is going to be a long war, very long indeed. I hope not as long as the Cold War, 40 plus years, but certainly longer than either World War I or World War II. I rather imagine it’s going to be measured, I’m afraid, in decades.

Can’t you just feel the Military-Industrial Complex getting all warm and fuzzy over those words!  OH Happy Happy Joy Joy!  War for DECADES!

BTW, the “David” Woolsey is referring to is David Wurmser, the fellow who is said to have rolled over for Fitzgerald and is now singing like a canary about the Plame leak.

More about David Wurmser:

From Lew Rockwell’s website:

Damascus has been in Wurmser’s sights at least since he began working with Perle at AEI in the mid-1990s.For the latter part of the decade, he wrote frequently to support a joint U.S.-Israeli effort to undermine then-President Hafez Assad in hopes of destroying Ba’athist rule and hastening the creation of a new order in the Levant to be dominated by “tribal, familial and clan unions under limited governments.”

Indeed, it was precisely because of the strategic importance of the Levant that Wurmser advocated overthrowing Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in favour of an Iraqi National Congress (INC) closely tied to the Hashemite monarchy in Jordan.

“Whoever inherits Iraq dominates the entire Levant strategically,” he wrote in one 1996 paper for the Jerusalem-based Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS).

Wurmser, whose Israeli-born spouse Meyrav Wurmser heads Middle East studies at the neo-conservative Hudson Institute, was the main author of a 1996 report by a task force convened by the IASPS and headed by Perle, called the ‘Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000’.

The paper, called A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm’, was directed to incoming Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

It featured a series of recommendations designed to end the process of Israel trading “land for peace” by transforming the “balance of power” in the Middle East in favour of an axis consisting of Israel, Turkey and Jordan.

To do so, it called for ousting Saddam Hussein and installing a Hashemite leader in Baghdad. From that point, the strategy would be largely focused on Syria and, at the least, to reducing its influence in Lebanon.

Among other steps, the report called for Israeli sponsorship of attacks on Syrian territory by “Israeli proxy forces” based in Lebanon and “striking Syrian military targets in Lebanon, and should that prove insufficient, striking at select targets in Syria proper.”

“Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, even rolling back Syria,” the report argued, to create a “natural axis” between Israel, Jordan, a Hashemite Iraq and Turkey that “would squeeze and detach Syria from the Saudi Peninsula.”

“For Syria, this could be the prelude to a redrawing of the map of the Middle East, which could threaten Syria’s territorial integrity,” it suggested.

A follow-up report by Wurmser titled ‘Coping with Crumbling States’, also favoured a substantial redrawing of the Middle East along tribal and familial lines in light of what he called an “emerging phenomenon – the crumbling of Arab secular-nationalist nations.”

The penchant of Washington and the West in general for backing secular-nationalist states against the threat of militant Islamic fundamentalism was a strategic error, warned Wurmser in the second study, a conclusion he repeated in a 1999 book, Tyranny’s Ally, which included a laudatory foreword by Perle and was published by AEI.

While the book focused on Iraq not Syria, it elaborated on Wurmser’s previous arguments by attacking regional specialists in U.S. universities, the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) who, according to him, were too wedded to strong secular states in the Arab world as the preferred guarantors of regional stability.

“Our Middle East scholarly and policy elite are informed by bad ideas about the region that lead them to bad policies,” he charged, echoing a position often taken by Perle.

In the book’s acknowledgments, Wurmser praised those who most influenced his work, a veritable “who’s who” of those neo-cons most closely tied to Israel’s far right, including Perle himself, another AEI scholar, Michael Ledeen and Undersecretary of Defence for Policy and the man in charge of post-Iraq war planning, Douglas Feith.

He listed former CIA director James Woolsey, who has called the conflict in Syria the early stages of “World War IV,” Harold Rhode, a Feith aide who has also called himself Wolfowitz’s “Islamic Affairs adviser” and INC leader Ahmed Chalabi.

Harold Rhode, Michael Ledeen, Douglas Feith, Ahmed Chalabi.  Where have I heard those names before?  Ah yes, here and here and here.

In other words, The Usual Suspects over at AEI are once again calling the shots.  Oh, and back to that AIPAC spy scandal that some people just don’t want to believe is somehow linked to AEI:

From Raw Story:

According to a 2004 story in the Washington Post, the FBI interviewed officials in Cheney’s office and the Pentagon, including Hannah and Wurmser, former Defense Policy Board member Richard Perle, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, to determine if they were involved in leaking U.S. security secrets to Israel, the former head of the Iraqi National Congress Ahmed Chalabi and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

Note that not much attention has been given to the news that the AIPAC spy scandal has widened to include intelligence leaks to Chalabi.  Given that Chalabi allegedly gave Iran the heads up we’d broken their codes, this has huge implications.

The Usual Suspects are have been building up to it for some time now:

Colin Powell:

in a speech to the America Israel Public Affairs Committee, the country’s pre-eminent pro-Israel lobby group, Secretary of State Colin Powell declared that Washington wanted to see “more responsible behavior” from Damascus. And he didn’t stop there. Denouncing the Syrian government’s harsh criticism of the US-led invasion of Iraq, Powell declared that Syria now “faces a critical choice.” It was strong language reminiscent of the nuanced threats leveled at Iraq last year, and it was greeted by hearty applause from the AIPAC crowd.

From Israel National News:

According to Newseek magazine, Rice said she favored isolating Syria diplomatically over launching a military strike. She cited a pending UN report that may blame Syria for assassinating former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri.The United States has accused Syria of harboring Iraqi insurgents who have been escalating the war against American forces in Iraq. U.S. forces have recently been waging an offensive against insurgents infiltrating into Iraq from Syria. The offensive has concentrated on Iraqi towns along the Syrian border.

President Bush turned up the heat on the Syrian government last Thursday when he referred to it as an “outlaw regime,” even going so far as to say that such a regime was an “enemy of civilization.”

Prior to the president’s speech, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, said last month that “our patience was running out,” with Damascus.

And now They have their excuse.  The Syrians are alleged to have assassinated the Lebanese Prime Minister.  So now George Bush tells the U.N. that they need to get on Syria’s ass.

President Bush on Friday called on the United Nations to convene a session as soon as possible to deal with a U.N. investigative report implicating Syrian officials in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.”The report strongly suggests that the politically motivated assassination could not have taken place without Syrian involvement,” Bush said after helping dedicate a new pavilion at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Southern California.

Having read the report here I have to agree.  Syria probably did commit the crime.  While some might wonder that this conveniently fits the AEI’s agenda, the investigation looks to be legitimately free of either the White House, or Israels interference.

THAT SAID, Syrian involvement flies in the face of these comments:

“If we send back our troops, this is a dream, a wish list for the Bush administration. … We’re not going to put ourselves in a confrontation with the tiger.“The White House said on Friday it had information that Damascus had drawn up an assassination list of Lebanese political leaders, a charge also made by a prominent anti-Syrian Lebanese opposition leader.

Moustapha repeated his country’s rejection of accusations that it had such a hit list.

“We are not that stupid. We understand what are the ulterior motives of this administration,” Moustapha said. “We’re not going to give them a pretext on a plate of silver and say we ‘will do everything possible to provoke you into attacking Syria.”

I’m sorry, but the Bush admin’s track record of “having information” is abysmal.  Which HAS to make one wonder if Syria did, indeed, kill the Lebanese PM or if this wasn’t simply building a case for the Usual Suspects agenda all along.

In fact, one wonders if there isn’t proof that the White House is trying to “fix the intelligence” with Syria.  Turns out perhaps there is evidence of just that:

Here is a most extraordinary letter from Syria’s Ambassador in Washington Imad Mustapha to Congresswoman Sue Kelly, which has come into my possession. It explains how the American Administration has been stonewalling Syrian cooperation on a host of issues. It explains how Syria is being set up to fail so that the US can isolate it and carry out a process of regime-change at the expense of Iraqi stability and the lives of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians. It explains how the US administration’s policy of forcing regime change in Syria is trumping the need to save lives in Iraq….Human rights activists in Syria have documented for a long time how Syria is arresting Islamists, cracking down on Syrians who go to Iraq to fight by arresting their family members and jailing the fighters when they return from Iraq. Read Razan Zeitouneh’s story about Syria’s “Preemptive War” against Islamists here. The Syrian secret police have been terrorizing would be terrorists in Syria for many months now. The US has cut off all intelligence sharing with Syria despite repeated Syrian attempts to cooperate on this most important issue. Rumsfeld refused a Syria delegation of top border officials permission to meet with their Iraq and American counterparts just two months ago. Read the story here.

The rest of the article is the Ambassadors letter.  Very good reading.

So the big question remains:  Are we attacking Syria?

The answer seems to be we already are:

As I suspected six months ago, U.S. military and Bush administration civilian officials confirmed last week that U.S. forces have invaded Syria and engaged in combat with Syrian forces.An unknown number of Syrians are acknowledged to have been killed; the number of Americans — if any — who have died in Syria so far has not yet been revealed by the U.S. sources, who by the way insist on remaining faceless and nameless.

On the U.S. side, no declaration of war preceded the invasion of Syria, in spite of the requirements of the War Powers Act of 1973. There is no indication that the Congress was involved in the decision to go in. If members were briefed, none of them have chosen to share that important information with the American people. Presumably, the Bush administration’s intention is simply to add any casualties of the Syrian conflict to those of the war in Iraq, which now stand at more than 1,970. The financial cost of expanding the war to Syria would also presumably be added to the cost of the Iraq war, now estimated at $201 billion.

Is this true?  Have we already invaded Syria?  According to Paul Roberts we were planning to do so just three weeks ago:

The diplomatic editor of the London Telegraph reports (Oct. 5) that the US is aiming at Syrian “regime change.” The British newspaper quotes Israeli defense minister Shaul Mofaz as saying that a report blaming Syria for the assassination of a former Lebanese government official will be the catalyst that starts the ball rolling. Mofaz says the report will be the pretext for Bush to impose sanctions on Syria, “beginning with economic sanctions and moving on to others.”The Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, reports (Oct. 3) that the Bush administration has asked Israel’s government to recommend a successor for Syrian president Bashar al Assad. No doubt, the Bush administration will describe Israel’s selection of Syria’s new president as the workings of democracy.

The Stratfor Intelligence Brief reports (Oct. 5) that Bush’s National Security Council is deciding whether to bomb Syrian villages along what are thought to be “the infiltration routes used by jihadists” and to have US special forces conduct operations inside Syrian territory.

Welcome to World War IV.

The Usual Suspects: The Heroin Connection

It’s been nearly two years since I first posted my series, The Usual Suspects I, II, III, IV, and V, but a recent diary by lukery has inspired me to revisit this subject.  New info has come forth that demands examination.  Is the White House involved in heroin trafficking?  Are The Usual Suspects up to more than just what they’ve put forth in the PNAC?  The evidence seems to say so.  The evidence seems to put The Usual Suspects right at the heart of a drug smuggling operation that supplies 93% of the worlds heroin and funnels money right to Al Queda.

As I originally posted in The Usual Suspects Part I: Richard Perle, Prince of Darkness, there has always been a suspected link between The Usual Suspects and heroin trafficking:

By 1986, Perle had completed negotiations on the Defense and Economic Cooperation Agreement with Turkey.  This put Turkey as the third largest recipient of US military aid after Israel and Egypt.  Then he establishes a high-level US-Turkish consultation group co-chaired by the Pentagon and Turkish general staff.  Perle is the American co-chair for this group.  It is at this time that Richard Clarke is assigned by the State Department to “keep an eye on” Perle when he takes a trip to Turkey.

In 1987, Richard Perle resigned as Assistant Secretary of Defense under allegations he’d leaked classified information.

In 1989 Perle negotiated with Turkey an $800,000 contract for his own company, International Advisors Inc. (IAI), which he started with Douglas Feith.  He received $48,000 annually.  IAI is registered as Turkey’s foreign agent with the Justice Department.  In all, IAI receives $3.8 million dollars from Turkey over the next 6 years.

In 1995 Perle, along with Douglas Feith, illegaly act as advisors to the government of Bosnia during the Dayton peace talks without registering with the Department of Justice, as required by law.  Perle goes on to serve as military advisor to Bosnia.  Within months, Perle is lobbying to get Turkey to arm and train Bosnian muslims, which he claims is of vital interest to the United States.

It is soon after this that it becomes apparent to Interpol that the KLA has taken over heroin trafficking from Turkish criminal elements and that the KLA is also receiving protection from the US.  Intercepted messages speak of the desire to drown the western infidels in drugs.  Interpol realizes that Turkish-Albanian drug smuggling and political activities are deeply intertwined and that Osama bin Ladin is involved.
Perle was a signatory on the PNAC letter sent to President Clinton in 1998 calling for him to use military force against the Serbs.  They urge Clinton to support the KLA.

I’ll get back to the KLA in a moment, but let’s further establish Richard Perle’s drug trafficking credentials.  Let’s go back to the Iran-Contra affair.  Doesn’t everything about The Usual Suspects eventually lead back to that?

According to this article, the Pentagon lists a close Perle associate with drug trafficking:

Even Adnan Khashoggi has financed wars with drug profits, the gist of a report written in 1991 at the Pentagon – declassified in July 2004 by the National Security Archives in Washington – of 104 “more important Colombian narco-terrorists contracted by the Colombian narcotic cartels for security, transportation, distribution, collection and enforcement of narcotics operations in both the U.S. and Colombia.”

Remember, the word used by the Pentagon to describe the traffickers listed in the report, including Khashoggi, was “narco-terrorist.” So Richard Perle, assistant secretary of defense under Bush, a business partner of Khashoggi’s at TriReme Corp., was in business with a narco-terrorist, according to the Pentagon’s own records.

In 1999, the Washington Post detailed the link between the KLA and Al Queda:

Some members of the Kosovo Liberation Army, which has financed its war effort through the sale of heroin, were trained in terrorist camps run by international fugitive Osama bin Laden.  The KLA members…were trained in secret camps in Afghanistan, Bosnia-Herzegovina and elsewhere, according to newly obtained intelligence reports.

The intelligence reports document what is described as a “link” between bin Laden, the fugitive Saudi millionaire, and the KLA –including a common staging area in Tropoje, Albania, a center for Islamic terrorists. The reports said bin Laden’s organization, known as al-Qaeda, has both trained and financially supported the KLA.

The KLA’s involvement in drug smuggling as a means of raising funds for weapons is long-standing. Intelligence documents show it has aligned itself with an extensive organized crime network in Albania that smuggles heroin to buyers throughout Western Europe and the United States.
Drug agents in five countries believe the cartel is one of the most powerful heroin smuggling organizations in the world.
The documents show heroin and some cocaine is moved over land and sea from Turkey through Bulgaria, Greece and Yugoslavia to Western Europe and elsewhere. The circuit has become known as the “Balkan Route.”

So what we have here is the neocons supporting the KLA, which in turn is supported by Al Queda and financed through heroin smuggling.  This same pattern emerges again in Chechnya.  The Washington Post once again weighs in on the subject:

American officials said that several hundred Chechen fighters were trained at al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and that bin Laden sent “substantial amounts of money” to equip Chechen rebels in 1999.

And do the neocons support the Chechens as well?  Ya sure ya betcha!

in the US, the leading group which pleads the Chechen cause is the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (ACPC). The list of the self-styled “distinguished Americans” who are its members is a rollcall of the most prominent neoconservatives who so enthusastically support the “war on terror”.

They include Richard Perle, the notorious Pentagon adviser; Elliott Abrams of Iran-Contra fame; Kenneth Adelman, the former US ambassador to the UN who egged on the invasion of Iraq by predicting it would be “a cakewalk”; Midge Decter, biographer of Donald Rumsfeld and a director of the rightwing Heritage Foundation; Frank Gaffney of the militarist Centre for Security Policy; Bruce Jackson, former US military intelligence officer and one-time vice-president of Lockheed Martin, now president of the US Committee on Nato; Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, a former admirer of Italian fascism and now a leading proponent of regime change in Iran; and R James Woolsey, the former CIA director who is one of the leading cheerleaders behind George Bush’s plans to re-model the Muslim world along pro-US lines.  Coming from both political parties, the ACPC members represent the backbone of the US foreign policy establishment, and their views are indeed those of the US administration.

It looks like a literal Who’s Who of The Usual Suspects.

So once again the neocons are supporting a group which is in turn supported by Al Queda.  And is there a heroin connection?  According to Healthhaven:

Chechen criminal groups and guerrilla factions reportedly play a significant part in the narcotics trade in Central Asia, Russia and the Caucasus region. In the First Chechen War guerrillas used funding from a variety of rackets as well as the sale of oil. However in the Second Chechen War the fighters received huge financial backing from Jordanian militant Ibn Al-Khattab, who joined with guerrilla leader Shamil Basayev and became a prominent figure in the war. This marginalized some figures such as Ruslan Gelayev, who turned to the drugs trade full time.

The Chechen mafia appears to dominate the traditional Russian mafia organizations in the drugs trade

Osama bin Laden and Chechen rebel leader Ibn Khattab are, as a CIA officer puts it, “intricately tied together” in a number of ways.

Neocons, Al Queda, Heroin.  And then it all ties together from Chechnya to Al Queda to Turkey:

On the other side of the globe, to finance their separatist movement, Islamist leader Shamil Basayev and his Chechen followers transported Afghani heroin through Abkhazia to the Black Sea or through Turkey to Cyprus and then on to Europe.

lukery helps tie the neocons and their CIA operatives into the overall operation:

The operation includes propaganda and indoctrination in the form of financing, building and operating madrassas, control of media outlets and publishing houses, financing of terrorist groups, and heroin trafficking, as well as facilitating the requisite money-laundering apparatus. It is this operation that is at the heart of the gagging of former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, and many of the names on Sibel’s State Secrets Privilege Gallery are associated with this operation.

So now let’s take a closer look at The Usual Suspects and see what kind of direct involvement we can find.

Back in October 2000, Michael Ruppert, who first broke Peak Oil, had this to say about Dick Cheney, whom I covered in Part IV of The Usual Suspects:

The success of Bush Vice Presidential running mate Richard Cheney at leading Halliburton, Inc. to a five year $3.8 billion “pig-out” on federal contracts and taxpayer-insured loans is only a partial indicator of what may happen if the Bush ticket wins in two weeks. A closer look at available research, including an August 2, 2000 report by the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) at http://www.public-i.org, suggests that drug money has played a role in the successes achieved by Halliburton under Cheney’s tenure as CEO from 1995 to 2000. This is especially true for Halliburton’s most famous subsidiary, heavy construction and oil giant, Brown and Root. A deeper look into history reveals that Brown and Root’s past as well as the past of Dick Cheney himself, connect to the international drug trade on more than one occasion and in more than one way.

The CPI report entitled “Cheney Led Halliburton To Feast at Federal Trough” written by veteran journalists Knut Royce and Nathaniel Heller describes how, under five years of Cheney’s leadership, Halliburton, largely through subsidiary Brown and Root, enjoyed $3.8 billion in federal contracts and taxpayer insured loans. The loans had been granted by the Export-Import Bank (EXIM) and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC). According to Ralph McGehee’s “CIA Base ©” both institutions are heavily infiltrated by the CIA and routinely provide NOC to its officers.

One of those loans to Russian financial/banking conglomerate The Alfa Group of Companies contained $292 million to pay for Brown and Root’s contract to refurbish a Siberian oil field owned by the Russian Tyumen Oil Company. The Alfa Group completed its 51% acquisition of Tyumen Oil in what was allegedly a rigged bidding process in 1998. An official Russian government report claimed that the Alfa Group’s top executives, oligarchs Mikhail Fridman and Pyotr Aven “allegedly participated in the transit of drugs from Southeast Asia through Russia and into Europe.”

These same executives, Fridman and Aven, who reportedly smuggled the heroin in connection with Russia’s Solntsevo mob family were the same ones who applied for the EXIM loans that Halliburton’s lobbying later safely secured. As a result Brown and Root’s work in Alfa Tyumen oil fields could continue – and expand.

After describing how organized criminal interests in the Alfa Group had allegedly stolen the oil field by fraud, the CPI story, using official reports from the FSB  (the Russian equivalent of the FBI), oil companies such as BP-Amoco, former CIA and KGB officers and press accounts then established a solid link to Alfa Tyumen and the transportation of heroin.

In 1995 sacks of heroin disguised as sugar were stolen from a rail container leased by Alfa Echo and sold in the Siberian town of Khabarovsk. A problem arose when many residents of the town became “intoxicated” or “poisoned.” The CPI story also stated, “The FSB report said that within days of the incident, Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) agents conducted raids of Alfa Eko buildings and found ‘drugs and other compromising documentation.’

“Both reports claim that Alfa Bank has laundered drug funds from Russian and Colombian drug cartels.

“The FSB document claims that at the end of 1993, a top Alfa official met with Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, the now imprisoned financial mastermind of Colombia’s notorious Cali cartel, ‘to conclude an agreement about the transfer of money into the Alfa Bank from offshore zones such as the Bahamas, Gibraltar and others. The plan was to insert it back into the Russian economy through the purchase of stock in Russian companies.

“É He [the former KGB agent] reported that there was evidence ‘regarding [Alfa Bank’s] involvement with the money laundering ofÉ Latin American drug cartels.”

It then becomes harder for Cheney and Halliburton to assert mere coincidence in all of this as CPI reported that Tyumen’s lead  Washington attorney James C, Langdon, Jr. at the firm of Aikin Gump “helped coordinate a $2.2 million fund raiser for Bush this June. He then agreed to help recruit 100 lawyers and lobbyists in the capital to raise $25,000 each for W’s campaign.”

The heroin mentioned in the CPI story, originated in Laos where longtime Bush allies and covert warriors Richard Armitage and retired CIA ADDO (Associate Deputy Director of Operations) Ted Shackley have been repeatedly linked to the drug trade. It then made its way across Southeast Asia to Vietnam, probably the port of Haiphong. Then the heroin sailed to Russia’s Pacific port of Valdivostok from whence it subsequently bounced across Siberia by rail and thence by truck or rail to Europe, passing through the hands of Russian Mafia leaders in Chechnya and Azerbaijan.  Chechnya and Azerbaijan are hotbeds of both armed conflict and oil exploration and Brown and Root has operations all along this route.

It is perhaps not by coincidence again that Cheney and Armitage share membership in the prestigious Aspen Institute, an exclusive bi-partisan research think tank,

That last sentence I couldn’t help but notice.  The Aspen Institute.  And where have I heard aspens mentioned in relation to Dick Cheney before?  Oh yeah, it was when Judith Miller sat in jail rather than testify and possibly link Dick Cheney to the outing of Valerie Plame.  Libby sent that infamous letter:

Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning.  They turn in clusters because their roots connect them

Probably nothing, but then, everyone’s always wondered what the hell that meant.

There are many roots out there connecting The Usual Suspects to heroin, Al Queda and terrorism.  The FBI was actually busily pursuing links to Turkish drug traffickers and the buying out of American politicians when Bush came into office and immediately squashed the investigation.  Again, as reported by lukery:

Here’s Sibel:

“…What happened was, FBI had this information since 1997. In 1999, the Clinton Administration actually asked the Department of Justice to appoint a Special Prosecutor to investigate Hastert, and certain other elected officials that were not named in this (VF) article, to be investigated formally. And the Department of Justice actually went about appointing this prosecutor, but after the Administration changed they quashed that investigation and they closed it despite the fact they had all sorts of evidence, again I’m talking about wiretaps, documents- paper documents- that was highly explosive and could have been easily used to indict the Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert. That investigation was closed in 2001, and this was around the time I started reporting my cases to the Congress.”

Vanity Fair reported the same thing, from a different source

“One counter-intelligence official familiar with Edmonds’s case has told Vanity Fair that the F.B.I. opened an investigation into covert activities by Turkish nationals in the late 1990’s. That inquiry found evidence, mainly via wiretaps, of attempts to corrupt senior American politicians in at least two major cities—Washington and Chicago.
[…]
[I]n December 2001, Joel Robertz, an F.B.I. special agent in Chicago, contacted Sibel and asked her to review some wiretaps. Some were several years old, others more recent; all had been generated by a counter-intelligence that had its start in 1997. “It began in D.C.,” says an F.B.I. counter-intelligence official who is familiar with the case file. “It became apparent that Chicago was actually the center of what was going on.”

Its subject was explosive; what sounded like attempts to bribe elected members of Congress, both Democrat and Republican. “There was pressure within the bureau for a special prosecutor to be appointed and take the case on, “the official says. Instead, his colleagues were told to alter the thrust of their investigation – away from elected politicians and toward appointed officials. “This is the reason why Ashcroft reacted to Sibel in such an extreme fashion,” he says “It was to keep this from coming out.”

In her secure testimony, Edmonds disclosed some of what she recalled hearing. In all, says a source who was present, she managed to listen to more than 40 of the Chicago recordings supplied by Robertz. Many involved an F.B.I. target at the city’s large Turkish Consulate, as well as members of the American-Turkish Consulate, as well as members of the American-Turkish Council and the Assembly of Turkish American Associates.

Some of the calls reportedly contained what sounded like references to large scale drug shipments and other crimes…. One name, however, apparently stood out – a man the Turkish callers often referred to by the nickname “Denny boy.” It was the Republican congressman from Illinois and Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert.”

The ATC was formed by AIPAC.  As you’ll already know if you’ve read my series, AIPAC is a nexus around which all The Usual Suspects revolve.  Around and around it goes, but in the end it always comes back to…The Usual Suspects.

The Usual Suspects Pt 5: Paul Wolfowitz, High Priest of Neocon

Paul Wolfowitz got his start where many of The Usual Suspects began their careers: on the staff of Henry “Scoop” Jackson.  It was there that he developed a close relation with Richard Perle.  Like Perle, Wolfowitz was also a disciple of the Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).  Like Perle, Wolfowitz tutor was Albert Wohlstetter.  It was Wohlstetter, a vehement opponent of arms control, who recommended Wolfowitz to Fred Ikle, the head of the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), who brought him on board in 1973.  Stephen Green noted that

Wolfowitz…brought to ACDA a strong attachment to Israel’s security, and a certain confusion about his obligation to U.S. national security.

Five years later, Wolfowitz was being investigated for passing classified information to Israel through an AIPAC intermediary.  Once again, an investigaton into The Usual Suspects spy ring was dropped.  Wolfowitz continued to work for the ACDA till the end of the Carter Administration.

Paul Wolfowitz is now head of The World Bank.  His story beneath the fold.

Team B, a prelude to the Iraq debacle.

During the Ford administration, Wolfowitz mentor, Albert Wohlstetter, assailed the U.S. intelligence agencies over the annual National Intelligence Estimate because he felt they underestimated the Soviet threat.  This came at a time when Rumsfeld and Cheney had just pulled off the “Halloween Massacre” which had purged the White House Cabinet and made Cheney the youngest Chief of Staff in U.S. history. Rumsfeld and Cheney pushed out CIA director William Colby and replaced him with George H.W. Bush.

The reason for this manuever was because the CIA had been uncooperative with the neocons anti-detente campaign.  As Sidney Blumenthal explains:

Instead of producing intelligence reports simply showing an urgent Soviet military buildup, the CIA issued complex analyses that were filled with qualifications. Its National Intelligence Estimate on the Soviet threat contained numerous caveats, dissents and contradictory opinions. From the conservative point of view, the CIA was guilty of groupthink, unwilling to challenge its own premises and hostile to conservative ideas.

The new CIA director was prompted to authorize an alternative unit outside the CIA to challenge the agency’s intelligence on Soviet intentions. Bush was more compliant in the political winds than his predecessor. Consisting of a host of conservatives, the unit was called Team B. A young aide from the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Paul Wolfowitz, was selected to represent Rumsfeld’s interest and served as coauthor of Team B’s report. The report was single-minded in its conclusion about the Soviet buildup and cleansed of contrary intelligence.

25 years later, history would repeat itself in the intelligence buildup to the Iraq war.  Team B would become the Office of Special Plans.  The results would be identical.

In 1976, Team B’s report would be leaked to the press.  It stated that

All the evidence points to an undeviating Soviet commitment to what is euphemistically called the ‘worldwide triumph of socialism,’ but in fact connotes global Soviet hegemony.

The report then went on to claim that the Soviets had developed new, terrifying Weapons of Mass Destruction, such as a nuclear submarine fleet that utilized an undetectable sonar system that didn’t depend on sound.

According to Dr. Anne Cahn of the ACDA:

If you go through most of Team B’s specific allegations about weapons systems, and you just examine them one by one, they were all wrong.

The same modus operandi that was put into effect in the propaganda war to get us into Iraq.

When Carter took over in 1977, Wolfowitz moved to the Pentagon.

The next year, as Counterpunch reports

In 1978, he was investigated for providing a classified document on the proposed sale of U.S. weapons to an Arab government, to an Israel Government official, through an AIPAC intermediary. An inquiry was launched and dropped, however, and Wolfowitz continued to work at ACDA until 1980.

In 1979, when Jeanne Kirkpatrick began the neocon migration from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, Wolfowitz received a phone call from Fred Ikle asking him to leave the Carter administration to join Reagan’s administration.  In early 1980, he resigned from the Pentagon and began teaching at the SAIS.  One of his students was Scooter Libby, who would go on to become one of Wolfowitz deputies.

In 1981, Wolfowitz became Director of Policy Planning at the U.S. State Department where he was responsible for defining the nations long term foreign policy goals.  With him came Scooter Libby.  Not long after, Wolfowitz made  Michael Ledeen a special advisor. Perle, shortly afterwards, recommended Ledeen to the Department of Defense as a consultant on terrorism.

Ledeens immediate supervisor was the Principle Assistant Secretary for International Security Affairs, Noel Koch. Koch noticed early on that  Ledeen had a habit of stopping by Koch’s outer office to read classified materials.  Koch soon learned from the CIA that Ledeen was carried in Agency files as an agent of influence of a foreign government: Israel. Afterwards, Ledeen
approached Koch for help in obtaining two highly classified CIA reports which he said were held by the FBI. He gave Koch a hand written piece of paper which contained identifying “alpha numeric designators”. These identifiers were as highly classified as the reports themselves, which raised in Koch’s mind the question of who had provided them to Ledeen if he did not have the clearances to obtain them himself.  Koch ordered his executive assistant that Ledeen was to have no further access to classified materials in the office.  Shortly afterwards Ledeen ceased coming to work.

It wouldn’t be long after that the Jonathon Pollard spy scandal broke.

According to EIR:

In 1985, when it was clear that Jonathan Jay Pollard, an American convicted that year of spying for Israel, could not have been working alone in stealing such high-level U.S. secrets for Israel to sell to the Soviet Union, top-level intelligence officials told EIR that an entire “X Committee” of high-level U.S. officials, was being investigated. Wolfowitz and Perle were on the list of “X Committee” suspects, and Israeli spying against the United States was so thick that investigators told EIR they had found “not moles, but entire molehills.

Meanwhile, Libby and Wolfowitz were off to Manila where he met with the Dictator Marcos to press for, as Wolfowitz put it

Military reform, economic reform, getting rid of crony capitalism, relying on the church, political reform: It was very institutionally oriented.

During this time he fought Congress, which wanted to end military aide to the Marcos regime.

Later, when massive street protests caused Marcos to flee the Philipinnes on a U.S. air force plane and Reagan was forced to recognize the Aquino government, Wolfowitz claimed that this only showed that democracy

needs the prodding of the U.S.

Again, a meme we heard repeated in the invasion of Iraq.

Another meme we hear repeated in Iraq can be seen in Wolfowitz handling of his next post, U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Indonesia.  As ABC News reported:

He never intervened to push human rights or stand up to corruption.  Tens of thousands of people in East Timor,  a country Suharto’s troops occupied in 1975, died during the 1980s in a series of army anti-insurgency offensives.

Ah yes, the “insurgency”.  When you occupy another country and they try to kick you out, they’re an insurgent.

ABC News goes on to say that the Director of the International Forum on Indonesian Development claimed Wolfowitz went to East Timor and saw what was happening and kept quiet.  ABC News then claims that

during his 32-year reign, Suharto, his family and his military and business cronies transformed Indonesia into one of the most graft-ridden countries in the world, plundering an estimated $30 billion

Graft, corruption, it’s the “free market” neocon way.  What else would the High Priest of Neocon do?  Wolfowitz still praises Suharto to this day.

When Bush the Elder became president, Wolfowitz became Undersecretary for Defense and reported directly to Dick Cheney.  His new job was to figure out a new military strategy for the U.S. after the fall of the Soviet Union.

The Defense Planning Guide

Scooter Libby and Paul Wolfowitz would write the
Defense Planning Guide to

set the nation’s direction for the next century.

Wolfowitz was clear what the U.S. policy should be:

The number one objective of U.S. post-Cold War political and military strategy should be preventing the emergence of a rival superpower.If necessary, the United States must be prepared to take unilateral action.

The foundations for the PNAC and the Bush Doctrine were being laid.

Meanwhile the flow of U.S. military technology from Israel and from there to China, as I detailed in The Usual Suspects Pt 3: Stephen Bryen continued with Wolfowitz willing participation.  As Lew Rockwell reports:

In 1992, when he was serving as undersecretary of defence for policy, Pentagon officials looking into the unauthorised export of classified technology to China, found that Wolfowitz’s office was promoting Israel’s export of advanced air-to-air missiles to Beijing in violation of a written agreement with Washington on arms re-sales.

When Clinton took over, Wolfowitz moved on to academia, becoming the Dean at SAIS.

In 1997, he became a charter member of PNAC.  There he continued to advocate preemptive military intervention against Iraq.  It was Wolfowitz who drafted the letter to Clinton stating

We are writing you because we are convinced that current American policy toward Iraq is not succeeding, and that we may soon face a threat in the Middle East more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War.

He attacks the weapons inspectors, claiming

it is difficult if not impossible to monitor Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons production

.

He derides the U.N. and insists that America must unilaterally remove Saddam Hussein for the safety of Israel and our moderate Arab allies.  Of course, much as in the Team B report, we would find out that his exaggerated and paranoid warnings were simply not true.

That same year he would urge Clinton to arm Ahmed Chalabi’s INC to overthrow Saddams regime from within.

In 1999 NATO formed the Georgia-Ukraine-Uzbekistan-Azerbaijan-Moldava alliance (GUUAM), to control the Caspian oil and gas resources.  On the Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce? Wolfowitz, Perle, Cheney, Armitage…a regular Who’s Who of The Usual Suspects.

Wolfowitz would go on to join The Vulcans, a group led by Condi Rice in Bush Juniors campaign team.  When Bush usurped the presidency, Wolfowitz became U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense, reporting to Donald Rumsfeld.

According to Scoop and many other sources, Wolfowitz began arguing to invade Iraq immediately after the 9-11 attacks.  Wolfowitz quickly submits his plan, Operation Infinite War

the plans argue for open-ended war without constraint either of time or geography and potentially engulfing the entire Middle East and central Asia.

The plans put before the President during the past few days involve expanding the war beyond Afghanistan to include similar incursions by special ops forces – followed by air strikes by the bombers they would guide – into Iraq, Syria and the Beqaa Valley area of Lebanon, where the Syrian-backed Hizbollah (Party of God) fighters that harass Israel are based.
If action in Lebanon led to an Israeli reinvasion of the southern part of the country, it would be supported by the US.

Colin Polwell’s argument – backed by National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice – is that such a campaign would be disastrous.

And once again, as in Team B, Wolfowitz and The Usual Suspects ignore the advice of the military and intelligence agencies and exaggerate the threat in order to pursue their own agenda. Only afterwards would Wolfowitz admit that there were no ties between Iraq and Al Queda:

I’m not sure even now that I would say Iraq had something to do with it.

And once again, as in Team B, Wolfowitz and The Usual Suspects use Weapons of Mass Destruction as their number one argument to acheive their agenda.  As Wolfowitz himself later admitted:

for bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.

And once again, as in Team B, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld decided that the intelligence community was deemed hostile to conservative ideas and once again, as in Team B, an alternative unit was formed outside the CIA to challenge the agency’s intelligence.  The Office of Special Plans.

It was from the Office of Special Plans that Larry Franklin operated.  Franklin is now serving a 12 year sentence for passing classified information to Israeli agents operating out of AIPAC.

According to Tom Paine’s report,

Franklin was introduced to Rosen-Weissman when the two AIPACers “called a Department of Defense employee (DOD employee A) at the Pentagon and asked for the name of someone in OSD ISA [Office of the Secretary of Defense, International Security Affairs] with an expertise on Iran” and got Franklin’s name. Who was “DOD employee A”? Was it Douglas Feith, the undersecretary for policy? Harold Rhode, the ghost-like neocon official who helped Feith assemble the secretive Office of Special Plans, where Franklin worked? The indictment doesn’t say. But this reporter observed Franklin, Rhode and Michael Rubin, a former AEI official who served in the Pentagon during this period and then returned to AEI, sitting together side by side, often in the front row, at American Enterprise Institute meetings during 2002-2003. Later in the indictment, we learn that Franklin, Rosen and Weissman hobnobbed with “DOD employee B,” too.

Fourth, Rosen and Weissman told Franklin that they would try to get him a job at the White House, on the National Security Council staff. Who did they talk to at the White House, if they followed through? What happened?

Keep in mind that it was Larry Franklin who accomanied Harold Rhode and Michael Ledeen to Rome in 2001 to meet with Manucher Ghorbanifar to open channels with Iran and get information about Iraq.  A trip that coincided with the appearance of the now infamous Niger Yellowcake forgeries.

Franklin studied at SAIS under Paul Wolfowitz and it was Wolfowitz who brought him into the administration.  Franklin worked in the OSP under William Luti who bragged to Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski that he reported directly to Scooter Libby.

But passing classified information to Israel was not the Office of Special Plans main function.  It was formed, as Team B had been before, to come up with evidence to support the neocons agenda.  Niger Yellowcake, weapons of mass destruction, bioweapons labs, the list of things went on and on.

And once again, as in Team B, if you go through the OSP’s specific allegations, one by one, you find that they are all wrong.

What was the price for such complete incompetence?  In 2005, Wolfowitz became the President of the World Bank.

The Usual Suspects Pt 4: Dick Cheney

In the fourth installment of this series I will cover the Vice President of the United States, Dick Cheney.  For those just joining, here are the first three installments of The Usual Suspects:
Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen, and  Stephen Bryen.

Dick Cheney has a long and illustrious career aiding and ultimately leading The Usual Suspects.  While his political career started at roughly the same time as many of the Usual Suspects,  unlike many of this gang, he didn’t get his start working for Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson.  He started his career in politics working for Richard Nixon in 1969.

For those of us who lived in 1969, all that needs said is this was a man who was pro-Vietnam yet took 5 deferments because, as he was quoted in 1989: “I had other priorities in the ’60s than military service” and who then wanted to work for Richard Nixon.

For the rest of you: Meet Dick Cheney.

Of all Cheney’s deferments, the fourth and fifth ones are perhaps the most telling. After three deferments for being in college, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution meant being a college student wasn’t enough to avoid going to war.  Being married could keep you home, however and so 22 days later, Dick Cheney married his wife Lynee.  That kept him out of Vietnam for a while, but then, as Wikipedia explains it:

On October 6th, 1965, the Selective Service lifted its ban against drafting married men who had no children. On January 19th, 1966, when his wife was about 10 weeks pregnant, Mr. Cheney applied for 3-A status, the “hardship” exemption, which excluded men with children or dependent parents. It was granted. In January 1967, Cheney turned 26 and was no longer eligible for the draft.

Well, you do the math.  On second thought, let me do the math.  Cheney got his wife pregnant on or around the 10th of November, 1965. However, one might also note that their first daughter, Elizabeth, was born exactly 9 months and 2 days after the ban was lifted.  Once all his other deferments would no longer keep him from going to war, he and Mrs. Cheney didn’t waste any time.  Which is fine by me if you’re not at the same time supporting said war.  Obviously, Cheney thought Vietnam was just dandy…for the other guy.

In his 1989 confirmation hearings to become Bush I’s Secretary of Defense, Cheney said

I would have obviously been happy to serve had I been called.

Uh-Huh.

But back to 1969.  Working for Richard Nixon, the man who said

when the president does it, that means it’s not illegal

Cheney was special assistant to the director of the Office of Economic Opportunity from 1969 to 1970.  Yeah, who’da thunk it?  Cheney working for the Office that oversaw Job Corps, Head Start and a great many of the programs of Johnson’s War on Poverty.  Oh, wait, did I mention that the OEO was dismantled by Richard Nixon and most of its programs shipped off to other agencies?  Guess that was one short lived war.  I’m sure Dick Cheney “did his part.” He later voted against funding Head Start as a Representative of Wyoming in the 80’s.   Oh, and by the way, guess who was the Director of the OEO at that time?  Donald Rumsfeld.

And so it began.

As the Boston Globe reports:

The antipoverty agency, set up by Congress during the Johnson administration, was unpopular among conservatives, and Rumsfeld’s and Cheney’s job was to help Nixon impose greater political control over the office.
A chief target was the agency’s legal aid program, headed by Terry Lenzner. Now a private investigator, Lenzner said in a recent interview that the White House pressured him to fire lawyers who filed class-action lawsuits on behalf of the poor. But Lenzner said he could not fire them because of the way Congress had written the agency’s statute.

1. “I was being told, ‘You have to put a stop to this, you have to control these lawyers,'” Lenzner recalled. “But I said that ‘If I do what you want me to do, it will violate the law.'”

The orders to fire lawyers, Lenzner said, came from other White House aides, not Rumsfeld or Cheney personally. Still, in November 1970, Rumsfeld summoned Lenzner to his office, and, with Cheney at his side, fired Lenzner because he was unwilling to follow orders.

Yep, that was one short war.

Under Ford, Cheney became the youngest White House Chief of Staff in history.  An article in the Rolling Stone reported that

“Having turned Ford into their instrument, Rumsfeld and Cheney staged a palace coup. They pushed Ford to fire Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, tell Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to look for another job and remove Henry Kissinger from his post as national security adviser. Rumsfeld was named secretary of defense, and Cheney became chief of staff to the president.

More from the Globe shows us just how far Cheney would go to preserve unfettered presidential powers.  When a 20 year CIA domestic spying program was revealed and Congress was in an uproar because the CIA had been opening mail, tapping phones and breaking into the homes of anti-war protestors:

In a memo to Ford, obtained at the Ford Presidential Library in Ann Arbor, Mich., Cheney urged the swift creation of a presidential commission to investigate the CIA. Cheney wrote that doing so was “the best prospect for heading off congressional efforts to further encroach on the executive branch”

The next spring, after revelations that the National Security Agency had monitored the phone calls of American civil rights and antiwar activists, Congress drafted legislation to require warrants for domestic surveillance. Cheney’s allies, including Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and then-CIA director George H.W. Bush, opposed such a bill as a derogation of presidential power.

And thus began FISA.  So it should come as no surprise that Bush is ignoring FISA and domestic spying has once again become something an American president feels is within his presidential prerogative.  Some dare call it tyranny.

In 1978, Cheney became a Representative for Wyoming.  By 1988 he’d become the House Minority Whip.  What happened during those years are most informative.

According to Sourcewatch

Mr. Cheney opposed the Equal Rights Amendment, is an anti-abortion advocate, and supports prayer in school. While serving in Congress, he was one of 21 members opposing the sale ban of armor-piercing bullets; was one of only four to oppose the ban on guns that can get through metal detectors; opposed sanctions against the apartheid-era South Africa in the mid-1980s along with voting against a resolution calling for the release of Nelson Mandela; voted for a constitutional amendment to ban school busing; voted against Head Start; and voted against extending the Clean Water Act in 1987.

Nice guy huh?

In November of 1986 the Iran-Contra scandal finally broke through the layers of Perception Management and entered the publics awareness.  As Robert Parry, one of the reporters to first uncover parts of the scandal would later write:

Immediately, the administration and Republicans on Capitol Hill moved to counter and to contain the scandal. For his part, Bush insisted that he was “not in the loop” on the Iran-contra business.

Cheney to the Rescue
One of the key congressional Republicans fighting this rear-guard action was Rep. Dick Cheney of Wyoming, who became the ranking House Republican on the Iran-contra investigation. Cheney already enjoyed a favorable reputation in Washington as a steady conservative hand.
Cheney smartly exploited his relationship with Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., who was chairman of the Iran-contra panel. Hamilton cared deeply about his reputation for bipartisanship and the Republicans quickly exploited this fact.
A senior committee source said one of Cheney’s top priorities was to block Democrats from deposing Vice President Bush about his Iran-contra knowledge. Cheney “kept trying to intimidate Hamilton,” the source said. “He kept saying if we go down that road, we won’t have bipartisanship.”
So, Hamilton gave Bush a pass. The limited investigation also gave little attention to other sensitive areas, such as contra-drug trafficking and the public diplomacy operation. They were pared down or tossed out altogether.
Despite surrendering to Cheney’s demands time and again, Hamilton failed, in the end, to get a single House Republican to sign the final report.
The watered-down Iran-contra majority report essentially let Vice President Bush off the hook. Bush’s political career was saved.

So the Democrats, in the name of bipartisanship, let The Usual Suspects off the hook over the Iran-Contra scandal and now they’re back, making an even greater obscenity of our government and laws and the Democrats are back in power again and what do they want?  More bipartisanship.

Once the scandal was contained and Bush Sr safely elected President instead of send to prison,  Cheney became Bush’s defense secretary.  Later, when Bush lost his second election, he pardoned all the Iran-Contra criminals on Christmas Eve 1992.  Thanks to that, Elliott Abrams was allowed to become Deputy National Security Advisor and, as can be found in Wikipedia:

The Observer and other journals have alleged that Abrams planned the Venezuelan coup attempt of 2002 against Hugo Chávez. These publications claim that he and Otto Reich, interim Assistant Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere in the Bush administration, were not only aware the coup was about to take place, but had sanctioned it and discussed it in some detail, right down to its timing, and estimated an excellent chance of success.

Bush’s junior is the President.
Dick Cheney is the puppetmaster behind the presidency.
Lee Hamilton has provided bipartisan cover for The Usual Suspect by serving as co-chair of the 9/11 commission, which Harpers decries as:

The plain, sad reality—I report this following four full days studying the work—is that The 9/11 Commission Report, despite the vast quantity of labor behind it, is a cheat and a fraud. It stands as a series of evasive maneuvers that infantilize the audience, transform candor into iniquity, and conceal realities that demand immediate inspection and confrontation.

And now Hamilton just wrapped up making his recommendations as co-chair of the Iraq Survey Group.  Bipartisanship.  Kinda makes ya feel all warm and fuzzy inside now that the Dems are back in charge doesn’t it?

But back to Dick Cheney, He Who Eats Babies Raw.

Having done his part to bail Daddy Bush’s butt out of the fire and nab himself the job of Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney directed the invasion of Panama, sending of troops into Somalia and Operation Desert Storm.  He worked closely with the likes of Paul Wolfowitz and it was Cheney who selected Colin Powell to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was Cheney who openly worried that Iraq, Iran or North Korea would get nuclear weapons.

When Saddam invaded Kuwait, Cheney advised Bush to start Operation Desert Storm without the consent of Congress.  Bush asked Congress anyways, to which Cheney said:

From a constitutional standpoint, we had all the authority we needed.  If we’d lost the vote in Congress, I would certainly have recommended to the president that we go forward anyway.

During Operation Desert Storm Cheney had to confront the Air Force Chief of Staff, Michael Dugan over quotes made to the press.  As Colin Powell recollected:

Dugan had made the Iraqis look like a pushover; suggested that American commanders were taking their cue from Israel.

Cheney fired Dugan, the Iraqis were a pushover and from what we’ve seen so far from The Usual Suspects, American commanders probably were taking their cues from Israel.  Can’t let the public find that out, doncha ya know.

Once Clinton took over the presidency, Cheney left public office and joined the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), whose membership seems to be mandatory for The Usual Suspects.  One could rename the it The Usual Suspects Bar and Grill.

And of course, as pretty much anyone who hasn’t been in a coma knows, from 1995 to 2000, Cheney was the CEO of Halliburton.  What most people don’t know is that during his tenure, Halliburtons off shore tax havens increased from 9 to 44.  I can guarantee that most right wingnuts who railed about the U.N. Oil for Food program don’t know that Halliburton was making millions from Iraq’s oil industry under that same program.

Halliburton, of course, received a $7 BILLION no-bid contract to rebuild Iraq.  I hear electricity is still sporadic in Baghdad even though Halliburton’s been in Iraq longer than the U.S. fought WW2.  I guess $7 BILLION doesn’t go far in Iraq.

Patrick Leahy accused Cheney of cronyism, to which Cheney told Leahy to “go fuck yourself.”

In 2005, Cheney’s gross income was nearly $8.82 million.  Most of this came from his Halliburton stocks.  Not too shabby considering what The Nation reveals about what a class-action lawsuit against Halliburton has to say:

Brushing aside facts and subordinates’ warnings, CEO Cheney made a series of daring but wrong decisions that were disastrous for the company. The managerial incompetence was compounded by fraudulent accounting gimmicks that concealed the company’s true condition. Cheney, however, relentlessly issued bullish assurances, hiding the losses and pumping up the stock price.
Eventually, the truth caught up with the company–its stock tanked–but Cheney was already off to Washington, $40 million richer and running the country. He sold his shares at the top. HAL, the Halliburton stock symbol, began falling a few months after his resignation, from $53 to an eventual low of $8.

Emphasis mine because I just couldn’t miss pointing out the similarity between what happened to Halliburton and how they sold America a bill of goods about Iraq.  Then he turns around and makes another killing, getting Halliburton the no-bid contract and taking them from $8 a share to todays final posting of $33.3 per share.  Hmmm, quadrupled it since 2001.  Not too shabby indeed.

Cheney was a founder for the Project for a New American Century (PNAC).  This is the neocon Holy Grail.  If you want to know what they plan for America’s future, just read that.  It contains all sorts of wonderful ideas, like how a “Pearl Harbor” type event would be necessary to propel America into thier “process of transformation”.  A completely “Ledeenian” type of statement.  Or how we should develop genome-specific bioweapons.  Eugenics being right up Michael Ledeen’s alley, I suppose.

advanced forms of biological warfare that can target specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.

A politically useful tool?

Given Cheney’s chickenhawk credentials, I suppose a bioweapon is okay so long as it doesn’t affect him.  A race-specific bioweapon, therefore, would be something he would have no problem with at all.

And of course, Cheney joined the board of advisors for JINSA, which, as I’ve already pointed out in Part 2, was founded by Michael Ledeen.

Since becoming Vice President of the United States, (which for some reason the very typing of those words reminds me of the  The Omen III), Cheney made Paul Wolfowitz the Pentagons #2 man, he brought in John Bolton, then vice-president of AEI, and played a key role in getting Elliott Abrams to the Middle East office of the NSC.

Scooter Libby, another member of the PNAC, was his original Chief of Staff.  Libby is under indictment for the Valerie Plame affair.

As for the Plame affair, there’s been plenty posted on the internet so far about Cheney’s possible involvement and to do it justice would take an article all to itself.  I think the fact that Valerie Plame is suing Dick Cheney for illegally conspiring to reveal her identity about covers it for the time being.

Then there was Cheney’s relationship with Ken Lay.  As Michael Moore wrote in “An Open Letter to George W. Bush”

Lay and Dick formed an ‘energy task force’ (Operation Enduring Graft) which put together the country’s new ‘energy policy.’ This policy then went on to shut down every light bulb and juicer in the state of California. And guess who made out like bandits while ‘trading’ the energy California was in desperate need of? Kenny Boy and Enron! No wonder Big Dick doesn’t want to turn over the files about those special meetings with Lay!

Let me finish with this quote by Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Mr Powell until last January:

What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made. – “Now it is paying the consequences of making those decisions in secret, but far more telling to me is America is paying the consequences.

There’s so much about Dick Cheney that a person could write several novels and still not cover the half of it.  Anyone with additional insights, feel free to add your knowledge in the comments section below.

The Usual Suspects Pt 3: Dr. Stephen Bryen

Unlike the previous two Suspects, Richard Perle and Michael Ledeen, the average American has probably never heard of Stephen Bryen.  If they had, the average American would be scared shitless.

Bryen was executive director of JINSA after Michael Ledeen stepped down.  In 1981 he handed over the directorship to his wife and became a consultant for Richard Perle.  After Perle became Assistant Secretary of Defense, he named Bryen as deputy assistant secretary of defense in charge of regulating the transfer of US military technology to foreign countries.

Bryen, like Ledeen and Perle, was thought to be a spy for Israel.

Bryen had been overheard offering documents to Zvi Rafiah, an Israeli Embassy official who just happened to be the Mossad station Chief in Washington. Also present was the director of AIPAC.   While Bryen refused to be polygraphed, the witness agreed and passed the polygraph test.

The FBI also had testimony of a staff member of the Foreign Relations Committee who said she’d witnessed Bryen in his Senate office with Rafiah, discussing classified documents which were spread out on a table in front of an open safe.  FBI agents discovered that Bryen met at least two to three times a week with Rafiah.

Bryen’s fingerprints were found on classified documents he’d stating in writing to the FBI that he’d never had in his possession.  The same documents, which included a detailed analysis of Middle Eastern air defense and radar systems, he’d been accused of offering to Rafiah.  Documents that “could prove to be a major embarrassment to the US government.” One document was described in a Defense Intelligence Agency report as being “particularly damaging to the U.S. government.”

In April of 1979, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Robert Keuch recommended in writing that Bryen, then a staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, undergo a grand jury hearing to establish the basis for a prosecution for espionage. John Davitt, then chief of the Justice Department’s Internal Security Division, had concurred with this decision.

Bryen escaped prosecution because Philip Heymann, chief of Justice’s Criminal Division, chose to shut down the investigation.  Heymann was a former schoolmate and fellow U.S. Supreme Court clerk of Bryen’s attorney, Nathan Lewin.  Nathan Lewin was the attorney for Larry Franklin, who recently received a 12 year sentence for passing classified documents to Israeli agents at AIPAC.  Bryen’s boss, Clifford Case, and Richard Perle’s boss, Henry Jackson, also exerted strong pressure and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee refused to grant the Justice Department access to files which were key to the investigation.

Bryen was then asked to resign from his post.  Rafiah would go on to work as a consultant for Israeli defense industries.  His area of expertise was how to obtain U.S. Pentagon contracts.

Less than two years later Perle had placed Bryen in charge of military technology transfer to foreign countries.  Within six months, at Richard Perle’s insistence, Bryen received both Top Secret-SCI (sensitive compartmented information) and Top Secret-”NATO/COSMIC” clearances.

By 1988 Bryen had allegedly established a pipeline of classified US technology to Israel.  As two former DOD officials who wish to remain anonymous have stated, there were numerous instances where U.S. companies were denied licenses to export sensitive technology, only to learn later that Israeli companies subsequently exported similar (U.S.-derived) weapons and technology to the same foreign power, most notably China.  They claim that bypassing US security and getting classified technologies into Israel’s hands was “standard operating procedure” for Dr. Bryen.

For example, in early 1988, Israel was in need of “klystrons”, small microwave amplifiers critical in a missiles target acquisition system and one of the most advanced US military technologies of that time.  Their export was forbidden.  By this time, Bryen had founded and was in charge of the DOD’s Defense Technology Security Administration (DTSA), within Richard Perle’s internal security policy office.  DTSA controlled defense technology exports.

When Bryen sent Richard Levine, a navy tech transfer official, a standard form informing him of Bryen’s intent to transfer 4 klystrons to Israel, Levine flatly replied “No” and asked for a meeting of the ISA (International Security Affairs) and DSAA (Defense Security Assistance Agency), neither of whom had been consulted as would normally be done.  At the meeting, all the officials opposed the transfer.  Bryen stated that he’d ask the Israelis what they needed the klystrons for.  Later he informed all concerned that the Israelis had given an acceptable answer and that the klystrons had been released.

The China Commission

In its May 27, 1997 issue, Defense Week reported that,

the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence reaffirmed that U.S.- derived technology from the cancelled [Israeli] Lavi fighter project is being used on China’s new F-10 fighter.

The following year, the Nov. 1, 1998 Jane’s Intelligence Review reported the transfer by Israel to China of the Phalcon airborne early warning and control system, the Python air-combat missile, and the F-10 fighter aircraft, containing “state-of-the-art U.S. electronics.”

In response to this, Clinton established the United Staes-China Economic and Security Review Commission, ie “The China Commission”, to

monitor, investigate, and report to the Congress on the national security implications of the bilateral trade and economic relationship between the United States and the Peoples Republic of China.  The Commission shall also take into account patterns of trade and transfers through third countries to the extent practicable.”

This was not the first time Israel had passed along sensitive material to a foreign nation at odds with the United States.  As Duncan Clarke says in Israel’s Unauthorized Arm’s Transfers,

Evidence shows that Israel has systematically circumvented U.S. restriction on the re-export of U.S. defense products, components and technical data.

In the Pollard spy scandal, Jonathon Pollard stole classified documents relating to the US Nuclear Deterrent relative to the USSR and sent them to Israel who in turn traded them to the Soviet Union in exchange for increased emigration quotas from the USSR to Israel.

An FBI agent is quoted as saying:

Pollard stole every worthwhile intelligence secret we had. We are still trying to recover from what he did. We have had to withdraw dozens of agents in place in the former Soviet Union, in the Middle East, South Africa and friendly nations like Britain, France and Germany. The American public just don’t know the full extent of what he did.

In 1992, the first Bush Administration was concerned about the transfer to China by Israel of U.S. Patriot missiles and/or technology.  In response they launched a broad inter-departmental investigation into the export of classified technology to China.  The Pentagon discovered that the export to Israel of advanced AIM-9M air-to-air missiles was being promoted from out of Paul Wolfowitz’s office.  Since Israel had already been caught selling AIM 9-L missiles to China, in violation of their agreement with the U.S., the Joint Chiefs of Staff intervened to cancel the deal.

The AIM 9-L, the Harpy anti-radar attack UAV, the TOW-2 anti-tank missile, the F-16, all found their way from the U.S. to Israel to China.

In April 2001, at the urging of Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz,  Bryen was appointed a member of the China Commission by Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert. In August 2004, his appointment was extended through December of 2005.

One former senior FBI counter-intelligence officials reaction to his appointment was:

My God, that must mean he has a ‘Q‘ clearance!

A Q clearance is required to gain access to nuclear technology.

The Usual Suspects Pt 2: Michael Ledeen

The first part in this series, covering Richard Perle, can be found here.In the second installment of The Usual Suspects series, I will explore the role of Michael Ledeen, aka Kayser Soze, in American and international affairs.  Michael Ledeen has been called the driving philosophical force behind the neoconservative movement.  Amongst his more infamous quotes are

Change–above all violent change–is the essence of human history.
The only way to achieve peace is through total war.
The purpose of total war is to permanently force your will onto another people.

Meet Michael Ledeen

Michael Ledeen, like many of The Usual Suspects, is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) where he holds the Freedom Chair.  He serves on the Board of Advisors of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), of which he was a founding member. Other key figures connected to JINSA include Stephen Bryen, who was investigated for giving classified secrets to Israel, Richard Perle and Dick Cheney. Ledeen is also a contributing editor for the National Review.  He has been described as an expert on Machiavelli.  He is a former director of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).  AIPAC was recently involved in a spy scandal involving Larry Franklin and the Office of Special Plans, where many of The Usual Suspects operated in the buildup to the Iraq War.  In 2001, Ledeen was hired by Feith to work on contract for the Office of Special Plans.Ledeen does not consider himself a conservative, but rather a “democratic revolutionary”,

According to a Washington Post interview with Washington University’s history department faculty, Ledeen was denied tenure in 1972 because of questions about whether he’d “used the work of somebody else without proper credit”.

In 1972 Ledeen published as his doctoral dissertation the book Universal Fascism, which explored Mussolini’s efforts to create a Fascist International in the ’20’s and ’30’s. Ledeen argued that fascism was not reactionary but was instead both right wing and revolutionary.  Ledeen
further argued that it was a mistake to explain fascisms popularity

solely because they had been hypnotized by the rhetoric of gifted orators and manipulated by skilful propagandists.  It seems more plausible to attempt to explain their enthusiasm by treating them as believers in the rightness of the fascist cause, which had a coherent ideological appeal to a great many people.  While `fascism-movement’ was overcome and eventually suppressed by `fascism-regime’, fascism nevertheless constituted a political revolution in Italy. For the first time, there was an attempt to mobilize the masses and to involve them in the political life of the country.

Ledeen felt fascism was “the Revolution of the 20th century.”  He contended that people had determined

the old ruling class had to be swept away so that newer, more dynamic elements – capable of effecting fundamental changes – could come to power.

Ledeen would later write in 1996 that

The people yearn for the real thing-revolution.

Ledeen would more recently write in the National Review that

Creative destruction is our middle name. We do it automatically… it is time once again to export the democratic revolution.

In 1974 Ledeen studied Italian fascism in Rome.

In the late 70’s, while working as an consultant to Italian Intelligence, Ledeen was allegedly tied to the Italian P2, a fascist organization that did most of its dirty work at that time.

Sometime around 1980 the CIA allegedly listed Ledeen as an agent of influence for Israel.

In 1980 he collaborated with Francesco Pazienza of SISMI and P-2 in the “BillyGate” affair. This is the same Pazienze who was recently found out to belong to the parallel intelligence agency in Italy. In 1985 Pazienza was found guilty of political manipulation, forgery, and the protection of terrorists.  Ledeen is identified in court documents as an agent of SISMI.

Italian police official Umberto d’Amato claimed, “there was an interregnum (during the Reagan transition) during which relations between Italy and the United States were carried on in the persons of the duo Pazienza-Ledeen”  By 1984 the new head of SISMI labelled Ledeen an intriguer and unwelcome in Italy.

Pazienza, a forger and felon who was kicked out of SISMI but had found new employment at Propaganda Due, the shadow intelligence agency in Italy, was acquainted with Rocco Martini, the man who produced the Niger Uranium forgeries.  Pazienza has to be considered the primary suspect behind those forgeries.

As I discussed in  The Usual Suspects Pt 1: Richard Perle, Prince of Darkness, it was Richard Perle who, in 1983 recommended that Michael Ledeen be hired at the Department of Defense as a consultant on terrorism. During this same period he was hired as special advisor by Wolfowitz in his role as head of the State Department Policy Planning Staff.

Ledeens immediate supervisor was the Principle Assistant Secretary for International Security Affairs, Noel Koch. Koch noticed early on that  Ledeen had a habit of stopping by Koch’s outer office to read classified materials.
Koch soon learned from the CIA that Ledeen was carried in Agency files as an agent of influence of a foreign government: Israel. Afterwards, Ledeen approached Koch for help in obtaining two highly classified CIA reports which he said were held by the FBI. He gave Koch a hand written piece of paper which contained identifying “alpha numeric designators”. These identifiers were as highly classified as the reports themselves, which raised in Koch’s mind the question of who had provided them to Ledeen if he did not have the clearances to obtain them himself.  Koch ordered his executive assistant that Ledeen was to have no further access to classified materials in the office.  Shortly afterwards Ledeen ceased coming to work.

Koch went on to warn the FBI about Ledeens record of spying for Israel, without being accused, despite the fact that the Justice Department was already engaged in several on-going, concurrent investigations of Israeli espionage and theft of American military technology.

Secretary of State George Shultz decreased Ledeen’s security authorization, in order to ban him from seeing top secret documents.  Even Oliver North recommended that Ledeen be made to take periodic lie detector exams.

Ledeen was a major actor in the Iran/Contra affair.  As Robert McFarlane’s security advisor, Ledeen vouched for Manucher Ghorbanifar, a suspected forger and a man who will get his own installment of The Usual Suspects at a later date.  Ledeen met personally with the Israelis to arrange meetings with the Iranian officials that would cement the weapons for hostages deal.

From the
FINAL REPORT OF THE INDEPENDENT COUNSEL FOR IRAN/CONTRA MATTERS

In early May of 1985, Michael Ledeen, a part-time consultant to the NSC, obtained National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane’s approval to meet in Israel with Prime Minister Shimon Peres to explore whether Israel
would share information on Iran with the United States.On July 13, 1985, Ledeen told McFarlane that Adolf “Al” Schwimmer, an adviser to Prime Minister Peres, said that Peres wanted McFarlane to know that Israel’s principal Iranian contact had told Kimche and Schwimmer that he
was in touch with a group of Iranians who wished to improve relations with the West and who could demonstrate good faith by arranging the release of the American hostages. In return, these Iranians needed to have 100 American-made TOW anti-tank missiles.

Schwimmer told Ledeen that the Iranian was Manucher Ghorbanifar. Ghorbanifar was an Iranian businessman who was well known to the American intelligence community as a prevaricator. The CIA had concluded, after past interaction with Ghorbanifar, that he could not be trusted to act in anyone’s interest but his own. So strong were the CIA’s views on Ghorbanifar that the Agency issued a “burn notice” in July 1984, effectively recommending that no U.S. agency have any dealings with him. Nevertheless, Ghorbanifar was to play a major role over the next year as the initial intermediary (the “First Channel”) between Iran, the United States and Israel.

McFarlane authorized Ledeen to meet with Ghorbanifar. Ledeen did so in late July 1985…

…The Israelis tried to move things forward by convening a meeting in Paris on September 4 and 5. McFarlane sent Ledeen. As Ledeen put it, the “usual suspects” attended: Israelis Kimche, Schwimmer and Nimrodi, along with Ghorbanifar. During discussions that often were heated, Ghorbanifar explained that more TOWs would have to be sent — 400 more — in order to gain the release of a single hostage.

And now you know why I’ve nicknamed Ledeen as Kayser Soze, because it was he who originally gathered together “the usual suspects”.

The Pentagon downgraded Ledeen’s security clearances from Top Secret-SCI to Secret in the mid-1980s, after the FBI began a probe of Ledeen for passing classified materials to a foreign country, believed to be Israel.

Along with Stephen Bryen, Ledeen became a member of the China Commission during the George W. Bush administration.  As I pointed out in the Richard Perle installment of this series, Stephen Bryen had been under investigation for giving classified secrets to Israel in the early 80’s.  In a future installment of this series, we will explore how Stephen Bryen was involved in “state of the art” U.S. fighter plane electronics, missiles and aircraft winding up in the possession of China via Israel.

As I pointed out in Niger Yellowcake and the Man Who Forged Too Much it was Ledeen who organized the meeting between Harold Rhodes, Larry Franklin and Manucher Ghorbanifar on Dec. 1, 2001 in Rome.  Ghorbanifar, an alleged MOSSAD double agent, is Ledeen’s Iranian connection.  He is to Iran what Chalabi has been to Iraq.  According to former Iranian President Bani Sadr, it was either Ghorbanifar, Parvis Sabati, or both, who attended the alleged Paris meetings in which the infamous “October Surprise” was set into motion in 1980, which toppled Carter and vaulted Reagan and the Usual Suspects into power.

From The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs:

Meanwhile, at the Tehran airport, television footage shows Iranian officials guarding the hostages listening on portable radios to inauguration ceremonies. Exactly 15 minutes after Ronald Reagan took the oath of office, the hostages were released and put on an airplane to fly home. Clearly, it was a signal. At the time, however, no one except perhaps some newly appointed Reagan officials, and some of their Israeli equivalents, knew what it meant.
Arms Follow Hostages
The hostages came home from 444 days of captivity and a very few weeks later in March 1981, Israel signed an agreement to ship arms to Iran. One planeload left immediately. The Washington Post says the shipment was authorized by then-Secretary of State Alexander Haig and was worth $10 to $15 million. Haig denies this, but adds, “I have a sneaking suspicion that someone in the White House winked. ”
Then-Israeli Ambassador to the US Moshe Arens told the Boston Globe in October 1982 that Israel’s arms shipments to Iran were coordinated with the US government “at almost the highest of levels.”

In 1981 Ledeen became anti-terrorism advisor to Secretary of State Haig.

The article goes on to say that, because of the October Surprise,

The Reagan administration apparently was vulnerable to highly damaging Israeli blackmail, and at least some top officials of both governments knew it. It also explains how and why the Reagan administration so easily fell into the catastrophic series of arms-for-hostages blunders, clearly instigated as well as carried out by Israel, that became known as Irangate, or the Iran-Contra scandal. The renewed arms shipments in 1985 and 1986 were initiated by reopening exactly the same channels used in 1980 and 1981 by some of the same principals on both, sides.

Those “same principles” being Michael Ledeen and the Usual Suspects.In the `90’s, Ledeen began preaching his “total war” ideology.  In 1996 he published “Freedom Betrayed; How the United States Led a Global Democratic Revolution, Won the Cold War, and Walked Away”, in which he claimed that democratic institutions should be sprouting up in the vacuum created by the fall of the Soviet Union.  Ledeen felt that Iran, Syria and Iraq should be the main targets of American democratization.

“Total War”, the concept first proposed by the 19th century Prussian General Karl von Clausewitz in his book “On War”, is the method America should employ according to Ledeen, to acheive these ends.  In his book, “The War Against the Terror Masters”, he states that:

We wage total war because we fight in the name of an idea, and ideas either triumph or fail … totally.

The parallels between that worldview and both Hitler and Goebbels in Nazi Germany are compelling.  In his most famous speech in 1943 Goebbels announced that “Total war is the demand of the hour.”  He even referred to Hitlers quote that “in the end there will be no winners or losers, only the living and the dead.”  Hitler, of course, demanded that Germany win utterly or be utterly destroyed, going even so far, in the end, as to issue the Nero Decree.This is the ideology that Ledeen incessantly whispers in the welcoming ears of The Usual Suspects.  This is the ideology that influences our administrations every decision.  This is, my friends, “The Course” Bush would have us stay.  This is madness.

In March, 2003, Ledeen told a forum that

the level of casualties in Iraq is secondary (because) we are a warlike people…we love war.

In 2005, when Vincent Cannistrano, former CIA head of counterterrorism operations, was asked if Michael Ledeen was the source of the forged Niger Uranium documents, he answered, “You’d be very close.”

Philip Girardi said in July of that year thatthe forgeries were produced by:

a couple of former CIA officers who are familiar with that part of the world who are associated with a certain well-known neoconservative who has close connections with Italy

He then went on to confirm the neocon in question was Michael Ledeen.

In 2006 Ledeen reasserted his stance on Iran by insisting once again that he doesn’t favor sanctions nor military force, but feels that Iran can be toppled from within through an internal revolution.

Ledeen was Karl Roves only regular full-time international affairs consultant when Rove served as Bush’s policy analyst.  But is Ledeen sane?  Check out this article by Emptywheel and you tell me.  Channeling James Jesus Angleton?  And THIS was Roves primary consultant on international affairs?

Now Ledeen, much like Perle, is trying to distance himself from the failure in Iraq.  In 2002 Ledeen wrote

Blessedly, President Bush knows by now that the Palestinian question can only be addressed effectively once the war against Saddam and his ilk has been won…One can only hope that we turn the region into a
cauldron, and faster, please. If ever there were a region that richly deserved being cauldronized, it is the Middle East today. If we wage the war effectively, we will bring down the terror regimes in Iraq, Iran, and Syria, and either bring down the Saudi monarchy or force it to abandon its global assembly line to indoctrinate young terrorists.

And now, like Perle, he’s singing a different tune.  In response to the November Vanity Fair article Ledeen tried to distance himself from the White House when he wrote for the National Review:

I do not feel “remorseful,” since I had and have no involvement with our Iraq policy. I opposed the military invasion of Iraq before it took place and I advocated–as I still do–support for political revolution in Iran as the logical and necessary first step in the war against the terror masters.

As  William Beeman said in 2003:

Most Americans have never heard of Michael Ledeen, but if the United States ends up in an extended shooting war throughout the Middle East, it will be largely due to his inspiration.

The Usual Suspects Pt 1: Richard Perle, Prince of Darkness

This is the first installment of a series of articles in which I will introduce you to the cast of characters that pull all the strings behind the neocon movement, The Usual Suspects. This group has had a long and sordid history of criminal activity and have shown a propensity for sacrificing U.S. national security for their own agendas.Today, I will  introduce you to a rather infamous figure many of you probably already know.  Richard Perle, The Prince of Darkness.

Perle served as an assistant Secretary of Defense for the Reagan administration and on the Defense Policy Board Adisory Committee from 1987 to 2004.  He was Chairman of the Board from 2001 to 2003 under the Bush Administration.Perle is a member of the Project for the New American Century, (PNAC), the Hudson Institute and is a resident fellow  on the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). He is also a disciple of the Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). You will be hearing those organizations quite often in this series, but let me point out now that Nitze, who founded the SAIS in 1944, was a former investment banker for a company that floated loans for the Third Reich.  It was Nitze who wrote NSC Memorandum 68 which was the policy basis for the Cold War and led to the establishment of our never ending war economy. This document asserted, for the first time in U.S. history, a U.S. claim on any economic and social resources anywhere in the world.

Perle earned his nickname “The Prince of Darkness” for his radical ideas including the use of nuclear weapons.  He is considered a hardliner and believes in military intervention in the domestic conflicts of foreign nations.  Perle is on the public record advocating pre-emptive strikes against North Korea, Syria, Iran amongst other countries.

From 1969 to 1980, Perle was a staffer for Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson.  Less than a year after joining the staff, Perle was involved in the leaking of a CIA report on Soviet treaty violations.  CIA analyst David Sullivan was author of the report and leaked it to Perle who in turn leaked it to the public.  Sullivan quit before he could be fired and was subsequently hired by Henry Jackson, who only reprimanded Perle despite the CIA Director STansfield Turner’s insistence that he be fired.  The security leaks won’t end there.

One could say he was “initiated” into the Usual Suspects in October 1970 when FBI wiretaps recorded him disclosing classified information to Israeli officials at the Israeli Embassy in Washington.  The information had been passed to him by NSC staff member Hal Sonnenfeldt, who himself was being wiretapped and had been repeatedly investigated by the FBI for suspected security leaks involving Israel.

In the late 70’s, Perle, with his mentor Albert Wohlstetter, began promoting Turkey as a key US and Israeli strategic ally.  When Islamic terrorists destablized that nation, a military coup established a pro-US regime.  It was later found that the terrorism that had destabilized Turkey was carried out by the Turkish military in conjunction with the CIA and NATO.  This is but one instance in which Perle was involved in western support for islamic militancy.

In 1980, Perle left his position as a Senate aide to become a consultant with the Abington Corporation. His first clients were Israeli arms dealers who wanted to sell the US weapons produced by Soltam Ltd., an Israeli company. Soltam agrees to pay Abington $10,000 a month for a period of one year. Despite Perle’s resignation as a Senate aide, he inexplicably remained on the Senate rolls as a nonsalaried employee until May 31, 1981. During this period, Perle retained his Senate security clearance. William F. Hildebrand later tells the New York Times that Perle’s arrangement with the Senate was not normal.

In 1983, it is Richard Perle who recommends that Michael Ledeen be hired at the Department of Defense as a consultant on terrorism.  Michael Ledeen, aka Kayser Soze, will be the subject of another installment of The Usual Suspects.  Ledeen was considered by the CIA to be an agent of Israel.

It was during his stint as Assistant Secretary of Defense under Reagan that he was accused of corrupt dealings with Israel after he had recommended the purchase of an armaments system from Tamares, Ltd. who had paid him $50,000 in consulting fees just a year earlier.

Controversy surrounded Perles confirmation hearings for Assistant Secretary of Defense when he indicated he would like Stephen Bryen for deputy assistant.  Bryen was previously investigated by the FBI for passing classified documents to an Israeli embassy offical in 1978.  Once again, spying for Israel becomes a security concern due to Richard Perle.

Two decades later, Larry Franklin will be discovered to be the conduit between  the Office of Special Plans, a secret Pentagon cell and two Israeli espionage agents. Richard Perle and many of The Usual Suspects operated out of the OSP in the buildup to the Iraq war.

In 1984, Perle urged the CIA to promote a propaganda program to get Soviet soldiers to defect to the mujaheddin in Afghanistan.  The CIA officers describe him as the craziest of the many extreme right-wingers they’d ever dealt with.

By 1986, Perle had completed negotiations on the Defense and Economic Cooperation Agreement with Turkey.  This put Turkey as the third largest recipient of US military aid after Israel and Egypt.  Then he establishes a high-level US-Turkish consultation group co-chaired by the Pentagon and Turkish general staff.  Perle is the American co-chair for this group.  It is at this time that Richard Clarke is assigned by the State Department to “keep an eye on” Perle when he takes a trip to Turkey.

In 1987, Richard Perle resigned as Assistant Secretary of Defense under allegations he’d leaked classified information.

In 1989 Perle negotiated with Turkey an $800,000 contract for his own company, International Advisors Inc. (IAI), which he started with Douglas Feith.  He received $48,000 annually.  IAI is registered as Turkey’s foreign agent with the Justice Department.  In all, IAI receives $3.8 million dollars from Turkey over the next 6 years.

In 1995 Perle, along with Douglas Feith, illegaly act as advisors to the government of Bosnia during the Dayton peace talks without registering with the Department of Justice, as required by law.  Perle goes on to serve as military advisor to Bosnia.  Within months, Perle is lobbying to get Turkey to arm and train Bosnian muslims, which he claims is of vital interest to the United States.

It is soon after this that it becomes apparent to Interpol that the KLA has taken over heroin trafficking from Turkish criminal elements and that the KLA is also receiving protection from the US.  Intercepted messages speak of the desire to drown the western infidels in drugs.  Interpol realizes that Turkish-Albanian drug smuggling and political activities are deeply intertwined and that Osama bin Ladin is involved.

Perle was a signatory on the PNAC letter sent to President Clinton in 1998 calling for him to use military force against the Serbs.  They urge Clinton to support the KLA.

This letter also calls for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime.  This letter claimed that diplomatic efforts had been a failure and military force was required to depose the Iraqi dictator.  It was spearheaded by Ahmed Chalabi.  The signatures read off like a roll call of all The Usual Suspects:  Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, Richard Armitage, Duane “Dewey” Clarridge, Frank Carlucci and others.  These names will continue to crop up in interested places, such as the Niger Uranium forgeries, as this series continues.

He also chaired a study group that included other members of The Usual Suspects, such as Douglas Feith and David Wurmser, that created the strategy paper for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.  A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. which recommended, among other things:

1: Armed incursions into Lebanon.
2: Strikes against Syria and Iran
3: The removal of Saddam Hussein from power
4: A move by Isreal away from liberalism and towards laissez faire capitalism.  ie, Corporate Fascism.
5: Establishing a policy of pre-emptive strikes.

So far, three of those five recommendations have come to pass.

It was after receiving this paper that Netanyahu became a strong proponent of using American military force to drive Saddam out of Iraq.  When Clinton refused, both Netanyahu and Blair were said to be furious.

On 9-11 the Sharon government instantly declared that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the attacks and called for massive retaliation against Baghdad.  Within two weeks, The Usual Suspects were making a feverish pitch to invade Iraq.  Richard Perle was immediately brought into the inner sanctum.

It was Richard Perle, who during a July 10th, 2002 Defense Policy Board meeting, demanded the purging of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of all opponents of the Iraq war, and called for a U.S. military occupation and takeover of the Saudi oil fields and a total break with the House of Saud-just as his July 1996 IASPS “Clean Break” study had proposed.

Perle, along with fellow SAIS disciple Paul Wolfowitz, argued for over 19 hours the week after 9-11 for a war against Iraq, the removal of Saddam Hussein and most importantly the seizure of Iraqi oil, just as soon as the war in Afghanistan could be wrapped up.

It was Perle’s contention that we needed only 40,000 troops to invade Iraq.  He was critical of Gen. Shinseki’s idea to use 250,000 troops.  Perle went so far as to tell  David Corn of the Nation that:

Forget the 250,000 figure, Perle said: “The Army guys don’t know anything. They said we needed 500,000 troops in 1991 [for the Gulf War]. Did we need that many to win? No.”What’s the Perle Plan? I asked.

“Forty thousand troops.” he said.

To take Baghdad? Nah, he replied. To take control of the north and the south, particularly the north, where the oil fields are.

However, in a recent issue of the L.A. Times he is quoted as saying

I’m getting damn tired of being described as an architect of the war. I was in favor of bringing down Saddam. Nobody said, ‘Go design the campaign to do that.’ I had no responsibility for that.

The L.A.Times also quotes him as saying:

I think if I had been Delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said ‘Should we go into Iraq?’ I think now I probably would have said, ‘No, let’s consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists . . .’

It is interesting to note that in that same David Corn interview, he is quoted as saying this about Scott Ritter:

I said, President Bush was obligated to present a solid case to the American public, and so far Bush and his crew have only asserted that Saddam poses a threat. They have not proven that Saddam’s supposed pursuit of weapons of mass destruction has made him a clear and present danger to the United States.Perle moved closer and said, “Trust me.”

Sorry, I answered, I don’t think we should head to war merely on the say-so of a few government officials. Besides, I added politely, why trust you? Why not trust Scott Ritter?

Ritter, Perle huffed, is “unstable.”

Low blow, I said.

Perle claimed he does not call everyone with whom he disagrees “unstable.” But, he said, this was an appropriate term for a fellow who had changed his position 180 degrees.

Unstable may well be an appropriate term to describe Richard Perle.

In 2003, The Guardian  reported Richard Perle as admitting the invasion of Iraq was illegal.

Mr Perle told an audience in London: “I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing.”Mr Perle, a key member of the defence policy board, which advises the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said that “international law … would have required us to leave Saddam Hussein alone”, and this would have been morally unacceptable.

Perle is also an advocate of Total Information Awareness technology.

His new spin on the Iraq fiasco is that it was a good plan but was executed poorly.  This meme seems to be gaining ground amongst The Usual Suspects as a means to hang the failure of the Iraq war on the shoulders of Rumsfeld.

When asked if there would be a Democratic Party candidate he’d support for President, Perle named Joe Lieberman and Gov. Mark Warner, both strong DLC supporters.

Corruption  seems to follow him wherever he goes:

On August 31, 2004, a special committee of the Board of Directors investigating the alleged misconduct of the controlling shareholders of Hollinger International submitted the 512-page Breeden Report to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). In the report, Perle is singled out as having breached his fiduciary responsibilities as a company director by authorizing several controversial transactions which diverted the company’s net profit from the shareholders to the accounts of various executives. Perle received over $3 million in bonuses on top of his salary, bringing the total to $5.4 million, and the investigating committee called for him to return the money.Top Hollinger executives dismissed the report and have filed a defamation lawsuit against the head of the investigating committee, former SEC chairman Richard C. Breeden. However, in 2005 Mr Perle publically acknowledged he had been served a ‘Wells notice'[3], a formal warning that the S.E.C.’s enforcement staff had found sufficient evidence of wrongdoing to bring a civil lawsuit.

Perle once had close business ties with Conrad Black of Hollinger International Inc. which owns over 400 newspapers worldwide.  Perle was the top executive of Hollinger Digital Inc. the media management and investment arm of Hollinger International.  Now the two men have accused each other of swindling Hollinger International.  The Breeden Report describes Perle thusly:

As a faithless fiduciary, Perle should be required to disgorge all compensation received from the company

Hollinger is demanding $22.9 million in reparations.

When he finally stepped down from the chairmanship of the Defense Policy Board in 2003, it was amid allegations of a conflict of interest.  He had become an advisor for the telecommunications company Global Crossing, which wanted help cutting through resistance to its proposed sale to a foreign firm with ties to China.  Perle was paid $750,000 and promised another $600,000 if the sale was approved.  The moment he stepped down, Global Crossing announced their ties with Perle had been severed.

Prior to that, Perle had been an advisor to Loral Space and Communications, which had faced accusations of transferring rocket technology to China.

Niger Yellowcake and the Man Who Forged Too Much

They say all roads lead to Rome.  Well, this one certainly does.  It’s a road that starts in Paris, at the door of Iranian arms dealer and Mossad double agent Manucher Ghorbanifar, a man known to the CIA as an “intelligence fabricator”.  It’s a road that runs through Niger uranium mines, past a Genoan fascist organization operating as a parallel Italian intelligence network with ties to Rocco Martino, and down the streets of Milan, where a CIA operative, now considered a fugitive at large by  Italian authorities, once operated.Ultimately, however, it is a road that does not end in Rome.  It runs past that ancient icon of Imperial corruption and leads us to Washington D.C., past a Federal Investigation into Israeli espionage and right up to the steps of the White House and Dick Cheney’s Office of Special Plans.

All signs along this road point to the answer to the question:  Who forged the Niger Uranium Documents?

We find ourselves beginning our journey in Paris with Manucher Ghorbanifar.Back in 1984, Michael Ledeen put forward the idea of using Manucher Ghorbanifar to make illegal arms sales to Iran.  The CIA’s Deputy Director for Operations, Clair George, deemed Ghorbanifar totally unreliable.  He felt that Ghorbanifar, a MOSSAD double agent, had Israel’s security as his only priority.  But George Bush Sr., having dealt with Ghorbanifar in Paris prior to the infamous “October Surprise” that got Ronald Reagan elected, agreed with Ledeen and so Ghorbanifar became the middleman in what became known as the Iran-Contra affair.  In fact, Oliver North testified that the diversion of funds to the Contras was proposed to him by
Ghorbanifar during a meeting in January 1986.

So it should have come as no surprise that Newsweek reported that :

Ghorbanifar, a former Iranian spy who helped launch the Iran-contra affair, says one of the things he discussed with Defense officials Harold Rhode and Larry Franklin at meetings in Rome in December 2001 (and in Paris last June with only Rhode) was regime change in Iran….The Pentagon cut off contact with Ghorbanifar, whom the CIA years ago labeled as a fabricator, after news about the talks broke last summer….But Ghorbanifar says he continued to communicate with Rhode, and sometimes Franklin, by phone and fax five or six times a week until shortly after the Paris meeting last summer (June 2002).

The important points to note in the Newsweek article were this:

1: The two Americans at the meeting were
a)  Harold Rhode, a member of the Office of Special Plans, protege of Michael Ledeen and the liason between the administration and Ahmed Chalabi and b) Larry Franklin, formerly of the Office of Special Plans, whom the FBI arrested for giving away secrets to Israel through the organization AIPAC.

2: The two Italian men present were
a) SISMI (Italian Intelligence) Chief Nicolo Pollari. b) Italian Minister of Defense Antonio Martino.

3: The meetings were in Rome in Dec. 2001.

What Newsweek doesn’t tell us is that a third American was present at that first meeting and that he was the man who organized the meeting:  Michael Ledeen.

But back to Ghorbanifar.  A quick look in the Wikipedia shows us that:

Ghorbanifar’s suspected duplicity during the Iran-Contra deal led CIA Director William Casey to order three separate lie-detector tests, all of which he failed. Iranian officials also suspected Ghorbanifar of passing them forged American documents. The CIA issued a “burn notice” (or “Fabricator Notice”) on Ghorbanifar in 1984, meaning he was regarded as an unreliable source of intelligence. A 1987 congressional report on Iran-Contra cites the CIA warning that Ghorbanifar “should be regarded as an intelligence fabricator and a nuisance” who was known to spread false information to advance his own interests.

In case you missed it, let me repeat:  Iranian officials also suspected Ghorbanifar of passing them forged American documents.

Our road now takes us from Paris to Genoa, to the doors of an organization known as Propaganda Due (P2).

On July 4, 2005 the news broke that the Genoan police had arrested two leaders of a Neo-Fascist, unofficial, self-proclaimed “anti-terrorist” network operating parallel to SISMI in Italy.  The group recruited police and intelligence agents to their cause.  Saya and Sindoca created the Department of Strategic Anti-Terrorism Studies (DSSA), which reportedly had ties to the Bush administration as well as Isreal. One of the two leaders – Gaetano Saya – affirms he is a member of P-2 (Propaganda Due) on the DSSA website. A website which also says:

The evil which has descended upon us finds in men like George Bush in America and Gaetano Saya in Italy an impregnable bulwark: God-fearing men, harded and pure individuals who, enlightend by God, have descended into the valley of the shadow of death to defend the Judeo-Christian faith and the West. The righteousness which these men represent will defeat the anti-Christ. God is on their side.

The P-2 Lodge, a hotbed of fascism, reportedly maintained close links with Michael Ledeen.  A number of SISMI agents and assets have been tied to the group, including Francesco Pazienza, a SISMI agent, and Rocco Martino. In 1981, a raid on the home of Licio Gelli uncovered documents listing all the names of the members of P2.

Italy’s current Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi was on that list.

The road then takes us to Milan.

The mounting evidence has caused prosecutors in Genoa and Milan to suspect that the neo-Fascist intelligence group may have been involved in the kidnaping of Imam Abu Omar (Moustapha Hassan Nasr) from a street in Milan in 2003. Michael Scheuer told Italy’s La Repubblica that the kidnaping of Abu Omar was authorized by SISMI chief Nicolo Pollari. Saya’s website seems to indicate that SISMI Chief Nicolo Pollari was affiliated with his organization.

On June 24th, 2005 an Italian judge ordered the arrests of 13 people that an Italian newpaper reported were all American CIA agents, in the purported abduction of Abu Omar.

The judge proclaims that  “Wanted for coordinating the kidnaping: Robert Seldon Lady.”

Robert Seldon Lady was a Honduran-born CIA agent once in charge of a covert American unit in Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua tasked with infiltrating anti-American groups and turning them over. Italian authorities believe Lady was involved in the initial interrogation of Abu Omar in Egypt. Lady is also accused of trying to influence the investigation. Italian agents went to Lady’s home with an arrest warrant. He had fled the country.

So, like Ghorbanifar, Lady seems to have followed the road from Iran-Contra to Italy.

The road that leads us now to Rome and the Niger Embassy.

Enter Rocco Martino.  A known felon in Italy, he was an on again off again member of SISMI.  At one point he had worked as a consultant for the division within Fort Braschi that was keeping track of weapons of mass destruction.

In early 2000, Rocco Martino, who, as I noted above, was tied to P-2, went back on the SISMI payroll.  He was then directed by a SISMI agent to contact a SISMI source, a “lady” who worked at the Niger Embassy in Rome, could provide Martino with information in exchange for which Martino pays the Nigerien “lady” 500 euros/month.

On January 2nd, 2001, police discover that the Nigerien Embassy has been broken into and documents and files were stolen.  Italian investigators now believe that the breakin is related to the Niger forgeries.

Then in October 2001, the following occured as described by Joshua Marshall :

You’ll remember that most of the papers in the bundle of Niger-uranium documents that arrived at the US Embassy in Rome were actually authentic. It was only a subset of the documents — those specifically related to the alleged Niger-Iraq transactions and a couple others — that were bogus.In late 2001, the SISMI officer[the one who put Martino in contact with the “lady”] brought the Niger Embassy employee a packet of documents — those later identified as forgeries — and instructed her to slip them in with the other documents she was providing to the `security consultant’ [Rocco Martino] on an on-going basis. She mixed those documents in with authentic documents which she had access to in the course of her work at the embassy. She then passed those documents — again, a mix of authentic and forged ones — to the `security consultant'[Rocco Martino].

This was the story that was fed to Joshua Marshall.  However, now that the light has been exposed upon the parallel clandestine organization operating within SISMI, an organization that Rocco Martino was a member of, one has to ask themselves if any “lady” from the Nigerien Embassy was ever involved.

If she ever really existed, why haven’t investigators already discovered the identity of this “lady”?  You’d think, at the least, there’d have been an internal investigation at the Nigerien Embassy to find out who was leaking documents.  There couldn’t have been that many Nigerien women working in the Embassy.  It seems especially unlikely that SISMI doesn’t know the identity of the “lady” since the Niger embassy in Rome has been a key listening post for Italian military intelligence since 1983 in addition to the fact it was a SISMI agent that
first sent Martino to the Nigerian Embassy.

Then again, the FBI hasn’t questioned Martino either, even after they were informed he was coming to America .

And here’s what one analyst said about the forged documents:

the thing that stood out immediately about the documents was that a companion document – a document included with the Niger documents that did not relate to uranium – mentioned some type of military campaign against major world powers. The members of the alleged military campaign included both Iraq and Iran, and was, according to the documents, being orchestrated through the Nigerien Embassy in Rome.

Iraq and Iran, allied, taking on the world in a plan orchestrated through the Nigerien Embassy in Rome?

Uhhh.

But it is important here to note the linkage being made by the fabricator of this forgery.  This person wants to link Iran with Iraq.  He wants us to believe that these two nations are a
threat.  More on that later.

Here are the Nigerian forgeries .

So let’s sum up what we know so far:

Rocco Martino, Michael Ledeen, Francesco Pazienza, Silvio Berlusconi and Nicolo Pollari are all members of P-2. P-2 is found out to have been running a parallel intelligence network that recruited SISMI agents. Pollari authorized the abduction of Abu Omar. The abduction was allegedly coordinated by Robert Lady. An unknown SISMI agent contacts Martino and puts him in touch with a “lady” who can get him documents about Niger. The Niger Embassy is broken into. The unknown SISMI agent gives the “lady” real Niger documents along with the forgeries. This “lady” gives them to Martino.

And now the road takes us to the office of Panorama.

Panorama is owned by Silvio Berlusconi.

Elisabetta Burba, a journalist for Panorama, receives a telephone call from Rocco Martoni telling her about the Niger documents, offering to sell them to here for ten thousand dollars.  She meets with him and he gives her photocopies.  She asks how they could be authenticated and he shows her a photocopy of the codebook from the Niger Embassy.

Italian authorities believe the codebook was obtained in the breakin of the Niger Embassy in 2001.

Burba shows the documents to her boss and requests to arrange a visit to Niger.  Her boss, editor-in-chief Carlo Rossella, who is known to have ties with the Berlusconi government, insists that she first turn copies over to the U.S. Embassy,, which she did on October 9th.  Burba’s trip to Niger proved that the documents were fake and even that the companies allegedly
involved were too small to make a transaction of that size. Something the French would have known had they been behind the forgeries.

Martoni was never paid.  The article was never published.

The New Yorker published an account of what happened next:

Two former C.I.A. officials provided slightly different accounts of what happened next. “The Embassy was alerted that the papers were coming,” the first former official told me, “and it passed them directly to Washington without even vetting them inside the Embassy.” Once the documents were in Washington, they were forwarded by the C.I.A. to the Pentagon,
he said. “Everybody knew at every step of the way that they were false–until they got to the Pentagon, where they were believed.”

Who would have alerted the Embassy that the papers were coming? The entire statement presupposes that the Embassy knew what papers were coming.

But now, the long and winding road leads us at last to Washington DC and the FBI investigation into the AIPAC spy ring.  Here we find the usual suspects.

Keyser Soze aka Michael Ledeen.

Michael Ledeen was one of the founders of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA).  He holds the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a think tank for AIPAC.  He is co-founder of the Coalition for Democracy in Iran.  As far back as 1980, the CIA allegedly listed Ledeen as an agent of influence of Israel.  Ledeen is the main foreign policy advisor to Karl Rove.  Ledeens main obsession seems to be to overthrow Iran.

In 1972 he published the book Universal Fascism, in which he expounds upon “the rightness of the fascist cause.”  In Universal Fascism, Ledeen first builds his case that fascism was the “20th Century Revolution” and that “people yearn for the real thing – revolution”. It’s the blueprint for a fascist revolution.

In 1980 he collaborated with Francesco Pazienza of SISMI and P-2 in the “BillyGate” affair. This is the same Pazienze who was recently found out to belong to the parallel intelligence agency in Italy. In 1985 Pazienza was found guilty of political manipulation, forgery, and the protection of terrorists.  Ledeen is identified in court documents as an agent of SISMI.

The Pentagon downgraded Ledeen’s security clearances from Top Secret-SCI to Secret in the mid-1980s, after the FBI began a probe of Ledeen for passing classified materials to a foreign country, believed to be Israel.

In 2001, Ledeen was hired by Feith to work on contract for the Office of Special Plans.

It was Ledeen who got Israeli spy Jonathon Pollard his job in the Navy.

It was Ledeen who insisted on using Manucher Ghorbanifar, the Mossad double agent, in the Iran-Contra affair.

It was Ledeen who organized the meeting between Rhodes, Franklin and Ghorbanifar on Dec. 1, 2001 in Rome.

On Dec. 12, 2001, U.S. Amb. Sembler has a private dinner with Ledeen and the Italian Defense Minister Antonio Martino.  Ledeen and Martino begin discussing the previous meeting with Ghorbanifar which they had both attended.  Sembler, deeply concerned that a secret meeting had occured with the recipient of two CIA “burn notices”, informed the CIA which in turn informed the White House, specifically Stephen Hadley.  Hadley told Ledeen and Co. to back off of Ghorbanifar.  But that order was ignored and communication between Ghorbanifar and Rhode continued up to their second face to face in June 2003.

Rhode also met with AIPAC lobbyists, Ahmed Chalabi, Israeli agents and SISMI during this time.

Harold Rhode.

Rhode is a member of the Office of Special Plans.  He fervently pushes for the invasion of Iran. He’s the main liason between the White House and Ahmed Chalabi.  He is a 20 year Middle East expert.  He has close ties to Michael Ledeen.

“According to one former senior U.S. intelligence official who maintained excellent contacts with serving U.S. intelligence
officials in the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, “Rhode practically lived out of (Ahmad) Chalab’s office.” This same source quoted the intelligence official with the CPA as saying, “Rhode was observed by CIA operatives as being constantly on his cell phone to Israel,” and that the information that the intelligence officials overheard him passing to Israel was “mind-boggling,” this source said. It dealt with U.S. plans, military deployments, political projects, discussion of Iraq assets, and a host of other sensitive topics, the former senior U.S. intelligence official said.” FBI probes DOD office – (United Press International)

Larry Franklin.

Larry Franklin, a Col. in the US Air Force, is considered the Pentagons top Iran analyst.  He attended the meeting in Rome with Ghorbanifar. He works for the Office of Special Plans and is a fervent believer in the need to invade Iran.  He is now under arrest for allegedly giving state secrets to Isreal through AIPAC.

FBI investigators indicate that they are looking for more than one person. Michael Ledeen and Harold Rhode have to be considered primary suspects.

This flowchart shows how the Office of Special Plans was organized.

Note that many members are also affiliated with AEI and therefore, by extension, with AIPAC.  Their names are Wurmser, Rubin, Cheney, Perle and Gingrich.  That’s in addition, of course, to Keyser Soze, er Michael Ledeen.

One need only look at what espionage operation risked being exposed by Wilson revealing the Niger Yellowcake forgeries to realize why Rove would go so far as to ‘out’ Valerie Plame to discredit Joe Wilson.

Which takes us down the road to the desk of Bob Novak.

Bob Novaks greatest harm to national security didn’t come from outing Valerie Plame and her front company.  His greatest harm came when he made the following statement in his July 14, 2003 article:

Wilson’s mission was created after an early 2002 report by the Italian intelligence service about attempted uranium purchases from Niger, derived from forged documents prepared by what the CIA calls a “con man.” This misinformation, peddled by Italian journalists, spread through the U.S. government. The White House, State Department and Pentagon, and not just Vice President Dick Cheney, asked the CIA to look into it.

Up until that time, the name of the country involved was classified. Check out EmptyWheels great diary.

How could Novak have known SISMI was involved? Either someone with clearance told him, or a conspirator to the forgeries told him.

Who would those conspirators be? Those with links to P-2 and the parallel Italian intelligence network. I think I’ve pretty much spelled out who’s on that list.

So did Manucher Ghorbanifar make the forgeries? Or was it Francesco Pazienza? The signs along the road would point to Ghorbanifar. Remember that the second forgery had the outlandish claim that Iraq and Iran were planning to take on the worlds major powers? Ghorbanifars self interest is the “liberation” of Iran. Isreal wants Iraq and Iran invaded. So does Ledeen, he’s done nothing but rant about just that for years. So does Rhodes. So does Franklin. The invasion of Iran is already being planned by the White House.

No, Pazienza was most likely the SISMI agent that put Martino in touch with the “lady” who in turn passed Ghorbanifars forgeries along with the stolen Niger documents onto him.

So why hasn’t the FBI questioned Rocco Martoni or the alleged “lady” at the Niger Embassy?

The answers to those questions probably lie somewhere down the road with the trial of Larry Franklin and the investigation into Valerie Plame.

We can only hope.

First blog post