Antiwar.com Blog

CNN just reported that Patrick Fitzgerald will hold a press conference at 2 PM Eastern time.

“Scooter’s” indictment

UPDATE: USDOJ Office of Special Council Media Advisory

UPDATE: MSNBC reporting that at noon, there will be a release of documents.(via ReddHedd at firedoglake)

UPDATE: Bloomberg: The Justice Department was scheduled to make an announcement “regarding the status of the special counsel’s criminal investigation” at noon Washington time. Fitzgerald will hold a news conference at 2 p.m.

This should make the next Iraqi elections interesting. You could almost call it an anti-Iranian, anti-occupation coalition. Undoubtedly the Americans will back the pro-Iranian Shiite slate.

More at Lenin’s Tomb

More fake “documents” used to push Bush’s war on Iraq, Newsweek reports:

The new report is only the latest chink in the armor of the alleged Saddam-Al Qaeda connection. Last year, the September 11 Commission found there was no “collaborative” relationship between the Iraqi regime and Osama bin Laden; one high-level Al Qaeda commander—who had been cited by Powell as testifying to talks about chemical- and biological-warfare training—later recanted his claims. But the Pentagon and Cheney’s office have been reluctant to abandon the case: in the months after U.S. and allied forces deposed Saddam, NEWSWEEK has learned, Iraqi informants approached U.S. intelligence personnel with what purported to be caches of documents proving that Saddam’s dealings with Al Qaeda were extensive. (One cache of documents even claimed that six of 19 of the September 11 hijackers had been trained to fly in Iraq.)

Current and former U.S. counterterrorism officials said that when officials at the Bush White House learned about the existence of documents linking Saddam to Al Qaeda, they became very excited and pressured intelligence agencies to work quickly to validate and decipher them. However, the CIA ultimately established that most key documents about the Saddam-Al Qaeda connection turned over were faked—just like the documents purporting to show Iraqi purchases of uranium.

via Laura Rozen

So, the CIA managed to keep the Niger forgeries out of Bush’s Cincinnati speech of October 7, 2002 but the WHIGgers shoehorned this one in:

We know that Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network share a common enemy — the United States of America. We know that Iraq and al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade. Some al Qaeda leaders who fled Afghanistan went to Iraq. These include one very senior al Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year, and who has been associated with planning for chemical and biological attacks. We’ve learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases. And we know that after September the 11th, Saddam Hussein’s regime gleefully celebrated the terrorist attacks on America.

Though the Saddam-Al Qaida connection is generally scoffed at now and considered about as reliable as the Niger uranium myth, at the time they were trying to scare the American people into a war, the Bushies desperately needed to prove this connection. As the number of American war dead passes 2,000 and the unknown tens of thousands of Iraqi dead continue to mount, consider the consequences of this series of lies. Consider the wasted efforts of the 75th Exploitation Task Force, and then the ISG, searching the sand dunes of Iraq for imaginary WMD. Consider the frustrations of being sent on a deadly dangerous task purely on the basis of fake, worthless “intelligence.” As the Telegraph reported in April of 2004:

US military intelligence agents in Iraq have revealed a series of botched and often tawdry dealings with unreliable sources who, in the words of one source, “told us what we wanted to hear”.

“We were basically paying up to $10,000 a time to opportunists, criminals and chancers who passed off fiction and supposition about Zarqawi as cast-iron fact, making him out as the linchpin of just about every attack in Iraq,” the agent said.

“Back home this stuff was gratefully received and formed the basis of policy decisions. We needed a villain, someone identifiable for the public to latch on to, and we got one.”

The sprawling US intelligence community is in a state of open political warfare amid conflicting pressures from election-year politics, military combat and intelligence analysis. The Bush administration has seized on Zarqawi as the principal leader of the insurgency, mastermind of the country’s worst suicide bombings and the man behind the abduction of foreign hostages. He is held up as the most tangible link to Osama bin Laden and proof of the claim that the former Iraqi regime had links to al-Qa’eda.

However, fresh intelligence emerging from around Fallujah, the rebel-held city that is at the heart of the insurgency, suggests that, despite a high degree of fragmentation, the insurgency is led and dominated not by Arab foreigners but by members of Iraq’s Sunni minority.
[…]
Both President George W Bush and Tony Blair have, to varying degrees, conceded that intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction programme was misleading. But both continue to maintain that the continued violence since Saddam was ousted is because Iraq is now the front line in the war on terrorism.

Yet it now seems that the intelligence on which such claims are based is haphazard, scanty and contradictory

And now we know why. It was just more faked, cooked up propaganda, not “intelligence” at all. This is how the War Party “supports the troops.”

Now that the soporific Harriet Miers flap is at an end, I hope (and the White House fears) that we can all focus on the real reason for the season: indictments. I also hope this laughter reported by the NY Daily News was of a “Bwahahahaha” nature:

While White House staffers were tense, [special counsel Patrick] Fitzgerald’s team relaxed from their stoic, all-business demeanor. The cheery prosecutors shared an elevator ride with a News reporter and cracked up over a private joke.

Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber has translated part of today’s La Repubblica piece:

La Repubblica has another story today on the role of Italian intelligence in feeding bogus evidence on Niger to Hadley and others in the US and elsewhere. There’s one key piece of new information. UK intelligence claimed to have evidence independent of the forged documents, which showed that Iraq had indeed been trying to obtain uranium in Niger. According to La Repubblica:

This “evidence” has never been brought forward … “If it ever were brought forward,” said a source in Forte Braschi to la Repubblica, with a smile, “it would be discovered, with red faces, that it was Italian intelligence collected by SISMI at the end of the 1980’s, and shared with our friend Hamilton McMillan.”

More analysis by Henry here.

I’m not sure exactly what the provenance of this Richard Sale (intelligence correspondent for UPI) article is, but it’s posted by Pat Lang on his blog, Sic Semper Tyrannis and referred to here by Larry Johnson and here by Patrick Doherty of Tom Paine.com. Some highlights:

• Two top White House aides are expected to be indicted today on various charges related to the probe of CIA operative Valerie Plame whose classified identity was publicly breached in retaliation after her husband, Joe Wilson, challenged the administration’s claim that Saddam Hussein had sought to buy enriched unranium from Niger, acording to federal law enforcement and senior U.S. intelligence officials.

  If no action is taken today, it will take place on Friday, these sources said.



• Although most press accounts emphasized that Fitzgerald was likely to concentrate on attempts by Libby Rove and others to cover-up wrongdoing by means of perjury before the grand jury, lying to federal officials, conspiring to obstruct justice, etc. But federal law enforcement officials told this reporter that Fitzgerald was likely to charge the people indicted with violating Joe Wilson’s civil rights, smearing his name in an attempt to destroy his ability to earn a living in Washington as a consultant.

  The civil rights charge is said to include “the conspiracy was committed using U.S. government offices, buildings, personnel and funds,” one federal law enforcement official said.



• The probe is far from being at an end. According to this reporter’s sources, Fitzgerald approached the judge in charge of the case and asked that a new grand jury be empaneled. The old grand jury, which has been sitting for two years, will expire on October 28.


• Thanks to a letter of February, 2004 which Fitzgerald asked for and obtained expanded authority, the Special Prosecutor is now in possession of an Italian parliament nvestigationi into the forged Niger documents alleging Iraq’s interest in purchasing Niger uranium, sources said.

  They said that Fitzgerald is looking into such individuals as former CIA agent, Duane Claridge, military consultant to the Iraqi National Congress, Gen. Wayne Downing, another military consultant for INC, and Francis Brooke, head of INC’s Washingfton office in an effort to determine if they played any role in the forgeriese or their dissiemination. Also included in this group is long-time neoconservative Michael Ledeen, these federal sources said.
  

UPDATE: From Pat Lang:

An hour ago I was contacted by a U.S. government official close to the Fitzgerald case. This person told me that there WILL be indictments announced later this afternoon, and the Special Prosecutor will hold a press conference tomorrow.

Richard Sale