Antiwar.com Blog

Newsweek, in an article highlighting the animosity of many NY Times staffers to Stenographer to Power Judith Miller, ends the short piece with this intriguing little insight into Miller’s reaction to her pariah status:

But Miller is, for now at least, standing firm. Late last week she told NEWSWEEK she had every intention of returning to work. She also did some digging of her own. “Are you hearing anything about Fitzgerald?” she asked, before quickly hanging up.

What an amusing spectacle. Judy – cornered, discredited, and widely detested even by her ostensible colleagues – has delusions of dishing dirt on Fitzgerald, despite the fact that she will almost certainly be a guest, once again, in his courtroom? The Bushista talking-point phrase “divorced from reality” springs to mind.

I wonder if Judy has considered that this first impulse of smearing adversaries, so typical of her and the Bush Administration crowd she hangs with, is what got them into this mess to begin with. Some people never learn.

This poll result:

Forty-five percent of Iraqis believe attacks on U.S. and British troops are justified, according to a secret poll said to have been commissioned by British defense leaders and cited by The Sunday Telegraph.

Less than 1 percent of those polled believed that the forces were responsible for any improvement in security, according to poll figures.

Eighty-two percent of those polled said they were “strongly opposed” to the presence of the troops.

Might explain why scenes like this still occur in Iraq:

Four U.S. contractors for the U.S. military were killed in Iraq last month, the military said on Saturday, confirming an attack that a British newspaper said saw two of the men murdered in front of a jeering crowd.
[…]
The Telegraph, quoting a U.S. officer in the area who had spoken to soldiers involved, said the victims were American employees of Halliburton unit Kellog, Brown & Root, the biggest U.S. military contractor in Iraq.

At least two of the men were dragged alive from their vehicle, which had been badly shot up, and forced to kneel in the road before being killed, it said.

“Killing one of the men with a rifle round fired into the back of his head, they doused the other with petrol and set him alight,” the newspaper report said.

“Barefoot children, yelping in delight, piled straw on to the screaming man’s body to stoke the flames.”

The Telegraph said U.S. soldiers escorting the convoy were unable to respond quickly because the hatches on their Humvees were closed.

The hatches on their Humvees were closed? That’s an odd thing to say, isn’t it? Were the soldiers locked in or what?

As if on cue, the New York Times has posted another story featuring death by fire:

The Bradley fighting vehicles moved slowly down this city’s main boulevard. Suddenly, a homemade bomb exploded, punching into one vehicle. Then another explosion hit, briefly lifting a second vehicle up onto its side before it dropped back down again.

Two American soldiers climbed out of a hatch, the first with his pant leg on fire, and the other completely in flames. The first rolled over to help the other man, but when they touched, the first man also burst into flames. Insurgent gunfire began to pop.

Several blocks away, Lance Cpl. Jeffrey Rosener, 20, from Minneapolis, watched the two men die from a lookout post at a Marine encampment. His heart reached out to them, but he could not. In Ramadi, Iraq’s most violent city, two blocks may as well be 10 miles.

“I couldn’t do anything,” he said of the incident, which he saw on Oct. 10. He spoke quietly, sitting in the post and looking straight ahead. “It’s bad down there. You hear all the rumors. We didn’t know it was going to be like this.”

Here in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar Province, Sunni Arab insurgents are waging their fiercest war against American troops, attacking with relative impunity just blocks from Marine-controlled territory. Every day, the Americans fight to hold their turf in a war against an enemy who seems to be everywhere but is not often seen.

The cost has been high: in the last six weeks, 21 Americans have been killed here, far more than in any other city in Iraq and double the number of deaths in Baghdad, a city with a population 15 times as large.

Does this sound as if Iraq is getting any better? Even before these stories were reported, Larry Johnson made the following astute observation:

The delusional happiness reflected in Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice’s remarks this week to Congress about the so-called progress in Iraq ignores hard facts that point to a debacle. The international media appears to be finally catching on that the Washington spin about the purple thumb as a sign of democratic progress is pure nonsense. It is true that more people in Iraq voted in this election than last January. What Rice and other folks out of touch with reality ignore is that the increased number of Sunnis who voted came out to defeat the constitution. Unfortunately, the fix was in. Vote fraud was rampant. U.S. TV crews caught one Shia on tape casting seven yes votes. That’s sort of an old style American politics a la Chicago’s Daley machine–you know, vote early, vote often. And, results are now, once again, being withheld to “investigate” the irregularities.

Here is a bold prediction: The Constitution will pass and Shia politicians will have a lock on the new Government of Iraq. Consequently, the civil war currently underway will escalate. As the Iraqi Army grows, comprised mostly of Shia and Kurds, attacks against Sunnis will also increase. And that will put the United States in an impossible situation. If we allow the Shia Army and militias to attack Sunni targets we will continue to be the target of Sunni insurgents. If we intervene to try to aid the Sunnis, the Shia’s will turn on us. If you doubt that I would ask you to recall what happened in the Shia enclave, Sadr City, in April of 2004. That battle killed Casey Sheehan and left my cousin’s son with a shattered leg.

End it. Now. Bring them home.

The Washington Post is running the text of an email sent by New York Times executive editor Bill Keller to the Paper’s staff. Put in simple terms, Keller is saying “the pain in our collective backside is from Judy Miller screwing us over”.

I wish that when I learned Judy Miller had been subpoenaed as a witness in the leak investigation, I had sat her down for a thorough debriefing, and followed up with some reporting of my own.

Keller continues:

Until Fitzgerald came after her, I didn’t know that Judy had been one of the reporters on the receiving end of the anti-Wilson whisper campaign. I should have wondered why I was learning this from the special counsel, a year after the fact. (In November of 2003 Phil Taubman tried to ascertain whether any of our correspondents had been offered similar leaks. As we reported last Sunday, Judy seems to have misled Phil Taubman about the extent of her involvement.)

Taubman is the NYT’s Washington Bureau Chief. Keller goes on to say:

if I had known the details of Judy’s entanglement with Libby, I’d have been more careful in how the paper articulated its defense, and perhaps more willing than I had been to support efforts aimed at exploring compromises.

Entanglement. That is one word for it. After this thrashing, Keller goes even further, suggesting that a newspaper has, or should have, a contract with its reporters–and that Miller had broken it. In so doing, Miller had released the paper from any obligation to defend her source (Scooter Libby):

The contract holds that the paper will go to the mat to back them up institutionally _ but only to the degree that the reporter has lived up to his or her end of the bargain, specifically to have conducted him or herself in a way consistent with our legal, ethical and journalistic standards, to have been open and candid with the paper about sources, mistakes, conflicts and the like, and generally to deserve having the reputations of all of us put behind him or her.

Seems that Miller is about as popular over at the Gray Lady right now as skin cancer.

It is time for regime change in Washington DC, and I am so impatient! Who all in the executive branch will be indicted? The suspense is killing me. Rumors are swirling everywhere. It seems pretty clear that we can expect to see more indicted than just Libby and Rove, but what about the Niger uranium forgeries that started all this? As Chris Matthews explained the other day, without the “deal maker” lie that Iraq was actively pursuing nuclear weapons – a lie supported by Iranian spy and now Iraqi deputy prime minister Ahmad Chalabi, the ridiculous claims about the intended use of some intercepted aluminum tubes and the Niger uranium forgeries – the American people and the congress would not have supported the unprovoked invasion of a helpless third world nation.

So here once again is the case against that Machiavellian proto-fascist warmonger Michael Ledeen:

Ladies and Gentlemen of the internet grand jury, his motive is clear. Michael Ledeen has been intent on turning the Middle East into a “cauldron” of revolution for years. From the pages of the National Review, he consistently advocates the neocon’s Israel-First democratist ideology, advocating “creative destruction” and crying “Faster, please” for more war.

He was a contract employee of the Office of Special Plans in Douglas Feith’s “separate government” at the Pentagon, the “Lie Factory” where the talking points were put together to frighten the American people into supporting the invasion of Iraq.

His ties to SISMI, the Italian intelligence agency which gave the forged documents back to the US in 2002 go way back.

He attended a series of meetings in Italy with Israeli spy Larry Franklin, Harold Rhode, who “practically lived out of Ahmad Chalabi’s office,” Ledeen’s old Iran-Contra buddy, Manucher Ghorbanifar, and SISMI’s director around the time that the information surfaced.

Joshua Micah Marshall has written that all information about Iraq trying to buy uranium from Niger came from the forged documents, though the documents themselves weren’t given to the US until October 2002, and that it’s clear a SISMI asset at the Niger embassy in Rome was given the forgeries by SISMI people in the first place before she funneled them back to them and then us:

“[T]he intelligence reports that came in to Washington in late 2001 were from Italian military intelligence, SISMI. The other detail, according to intelligence sources I’ve spoken to, is that those reports turned out to be text transcriptions of Niger forgeries that didn’t surface in Rome until almost a year later…

From the very beginning, American suspicions about a Niger-Iraq trade in uranium were based on what turned out to be the forged documents. And the text transcriptions of those documents came in from Italian intelligence…

Burba, the Italian journalist who eventually brought the forgeries to the U.S. Embassy in Rome, got them from an unnamed Italian “security consultant.” His name turns out to be Rocco Martino, a retired SISMI operative. And as I mentioned last week, last summer, my colleagues and I conducted a series of in-person interviews with him.

It has sometimes been suggested in the Italian press that Martino himself is the forger. But he told us a different story — one that was corroborated by another participant in the handling of the documents. Martino told us that the documents came from a still-serving SISMI colonel, whom he named…”

Former CIA agent Larry Johnson has strongly implied that Ledeen is the one.

Another former CIA agent, former head of counter-terrorism under Reagan, Vincent Cannistraro, has answered the question of whether Ledeen was involved with, “You’d be very close.”

Former CIA and DIA covert operative Philip Giraldi, when I interviewed him on my radio show last July 26th said the documents were forged 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.”

When I said that must be Ledeen, he confirmed it, and added that the ex-CIA officers, “also had some equity interests, shall we say, with the operation. A lot of these people are in consulting positions, and they get various, shall we say, emoluments in overseas accounts, and that kind of thing.”

When I said there must be a money trail for Patrick Fitzgerald to follow. Giraldi told me he thinks Fitzgerald has already found it.

When I interviewed him a second time, on September 3rd, Giraldi elaborated to say that Ledeen and his former CIA friends worked with Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress. “These people did it probably for a couple of reasons, but one of the reasons was that these people were involved, through the neoconservatives, with the Iraqi National Congress and Chalabi and had a financial interest in cranking up the pressure against Saddam Hussein and potentially going to war with him.” Short mp3 of the relevant soundbites here

Wow, a board member of JINSA and his friends getting paid by Iran to lure the American people into their desert sand-trap.

Joshua Micah Marshall has also said,” [I]f and when we actually get serious about getting to the bottom of this mystery, Italian intelligence should be one of the first places we go to ask questions.”

Well, now it seems that this question is finally being asked and answered by the federal prosecutor… and even better – he’s sharing the answer with another like him.

Earlier this week here on Antiwar.com, Justin Raimondo, based on a secret source, broke the story and revealed that Patrick Fitzgerald is indeed following the question of the origin of the crudely forged documents and the identities of Michael Ledeen’s former CIA friends. Fitzgerald, he says:

“‘has finally been given a full copy of the Italian parliamentary oversight report on the forged Niger uranium document,’ the former CIA officer tells me:

‘Previous versions of the report were redacted and had all the names removed, though it was possible to guess who was involved. This version names Michael Ledeen as the conduit for the report and indicates that former CIA officers Duane Clarridge and Alan Wolf were the principal forgers. All three had business interests with Chalabi.’

Alan Wolf died about a year and a half ago of cancer. He served as chief of the CIA’s Near East Division as well as the European Division, and was also CIA chief of station in Rome after Clarridge. According to my source, ‘he and Clarridge and Ledeen were all very close and also close to Chalabi.” The former CIA officer says Wolf “was Clarridge’s Agency godfather. Significantly, both Clarridge and Wolf also spent considerable time in the Africa division, so they both had the Africa and Rome connection and both were close to Ledeen, closing the loop…’

[M]y source tells me that ‘Fitzgerald asked the Italians if he could share the report with Paul McNulty,’ the prosecutor in the AIPAC case. There are plenty of links between the two investigations: they are, in a sense, the same investigation, since many of the same people are involved. McNulty is delving into a single aspect of the cabal’s activities, while Fitzgerald seems to have broadened his probe to include not only the outing of Plame, but also the origin of the Niger uranium forgeries and other instances of classified information leakage via the vice president’s office.

Raw story says that neocon belly-crawler John Hannah and David “Clean Break” Wurmser are, after all their tough-guy-neocon-warmonger posturing, nothing but a couple of sniveling little rats – snitches, who have decided to turn state’s to save their own necks.

Let’s hope that in the pile of indictments to come down from the grand jury next week, Michael Ledeen and his fellow traitor Duane Clarridge are among those on the docket.

Faster, please!

Update: Wow, that was fast!

It’s clear from this report that Chris Matthews read Raimondo the other day, and then sent his man David Shuster to corroborate. It is a small wonder why he’s so far ahead of the rest of the press when it comes to this (these) investigation(s). While not yet naming Michael Ledeen, this report confirms that Fitzgerald has indeed received the unredacted report of the Italian parliamentary inquiry into the forgeries’ origin and that the forgers were associated with Chalabi and the INC as reported above.

Onward to Doug Feith’s office!

As Amy Goodman, of “Democracy Now,” pointed out on Chris Matthews’ Hardball tonight, at just about the time the 2000th American soldier falls in Iraq, Patrick J. Fitzgerald’s grand jury will — by all accounts — be indicting the War Party. This conjuncture of legality and tragedy needs to be observed with more than just appalled silence. United for Justice and Peace (UFJP), the biggest — and, in my view, the most effective — antiwar coalition, is calling for a national outpouring of protest on the day we reach the 2000 mark. From their website: Continue reading “2,000 Too Many”

Dear US State Department,

Here’s a suggestion for shutting Karen Hughes up:

Please bring her back to the US before she says any more offensive and stupid things.

U.S. envoy Karen Hughes on Friday defended Washington’s decision to go to war against Iraq in front of a skeptical audience, saying Saddam Hussein had gassed to death “hundreds of thousands” of his own people. A State Department official later said she misspoke about the number.

Hughes, undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, made the comment before a group of Indonesian students who repeatedly attacked her about Washington’s original rationale for the war, Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. No such arms were ever discovered.

“The consensus of the world intelligence community was that Saddam was a very dangerous threat,” Hughes said days after the ousted dictator went on trial in Baghdad on charges of murder and torture in a 1982 massacre of 148 Shiites in the town of Dujail.

“After all, he had used weapons of mass destruction against his own people,” she told a small auditorium with around 100 students. “He had murdered hundreds of thousands of his own people using poison gas.”

Although at least 300,000 Iraqis are said to have been killed during Saddam’s decades-long rule — only about 5,000 are believed to have been gassed to death in a 1988 attack in the Kurdish north.

Hughes twice repeated the statement after being challenged by journalists. Gordon Johndroe, a State Department official traveling with Hughes, later called The Associated Press to say she misspoke.

The title of this post has been blatantly ripped off from Princess Sparkle Pony.