Antiwar.com Blog

Roger L. Simon has a problem with my call for Fitzgerald to indict Michael “P-2” Ledeen as a conspirator in the forging of the Niger uranium documents. He complains in a post called, “Reactionaries on Parade (Left Wing Dvision [sic])”:

“Without any evidence other than a posting on Wikipedia (wow… there’s an unimpeachable source), someone named Scott Horton of the soi-disant Anti-War Blog is calling for the indictment of Michael Ledeen for the Niger yellowcake forgeries. If I were Michael, I’d take this nitwit to court. Were this the UK, I’d bet my house Mr. Horton would be paying for Ledeen’s next vacation in Tahiti. But perhaps the looser US libel laws shield infants like Horton from this kind of action.”

Here is the deal Mr. Simon:

First of all, I am not a leftist. Secondly, the sources for the quotes of former CIA and DIA agent Philip Giraldi were my interviews of him, as indicated in the correctly transcribed entry on the Wikipedia page, and which I provided the mp3 link for. Fourth, I am happy that the US is no longer part of the British Empire.

As far as Ledeen and the Niger uranium forgeries, Giraldi explained in the interviews that the “couple of CIA agents” were paid in foreign accounts and that Fitzgerald had “already found the money trail.” Ledeen’s connections to the Office of Special Plans and Sismi are well documented, he attended a number of meetings in Italy with Harold Rhode, who “practically lived out of (Iranian spy) Ahmad Chalabi’s office,” Manucher Ghorbanifar and guilty Israeli spy Larry Franklin, around the time the Italians began passing on the (already debunked) story back to the US.

As Josh Marshall put it in The Hill:

“[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.”

But where did they originate? Giraldi’s partner, Vincent Cannistraro, Director for Intelligence Programs at the National Security Council under Reagan, has maintained that they were produced in the US and has said, “You’d be very close,” in answer to the question of whether Ledeen forged them.

Combined with what Giraldi had to say, it sure seems like enough to take to a grand jury to me.

Or is it not a crime to lie a country into war?

Including one who died of wounds received in July

Today the Department of Defense announced the death of a Marine supporting the war in Iraq. Kenneth E. Hunt Jr., 40, died of wounds recieved in July “when the vehicle he was riding in struck an anti-tank mine while conducting combat operations against enemy forces in Al Taqaddum, Iraq.” This death bring the total American combat deaths from ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’ to 1574 and total deaths to 1967. Over just the last week, 22 US troops have been killed in operations in Iraq. Below are just a few reports of these deaths:

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Spc. Jeremiah W. Robinson, 20, of Mesa, Ariz., died in Baghdad, Iraq, on Oct. 6, of injuries sustained there on Oct. 5, when an improvised explosive device detonated near his HMMWV during convoy operations. Robinson was assigned to the Army National Guard’s 860th Military Police Company, Phoenix, Ariz.

Cpl. Nicholas O. Cherava, 21, of Ontonagon, Mich., and Lance Cpl. Jason L. Frye, 19, of Landisburg, Pa., died Oct. 6 from an improvised explosive device while conducting combat operations against enemy forces near Al Karmah, Iraq. They were assigned to 2nd Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Lejeune, N.C.

Pfc. Shayne M. Cabino, 19, of Canton, Mass., died Oct. 6 from an improvised explosive device while conducting combat operations against enemy forces near Al Karmah, Iraq. He was assigned to 2nd Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Lejeune, N.C.

Two died of injuries sustained in Haqlaniyah, Iraq, on Oct. 7, when their dismounted patrol was attacked by enemy forces using small arms fire. Both soldiers were assigned to the Army’s 3rd Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division, Fort Bragg, N.C.

Killed were:

Sgt. Eric A. Fifer, 22, of Knoxville, Tenn. Fifer died in Al Asad, Iraq.

Pfc. Nicholas J. Greer, 21, of Monroe, Mich. Greer died in Haqlaniyah, Iraq.

Helping to ensure passage of the Iraqi Constititution, the Iraqi government has failed to put any voting stations in the Sunni cities of Haditha, Hit, Rawa, Qaim, Ana, Baghdadi and the villages around them.

“There aren’t actually any voting centers or even voting sheets in these cities … Nobody knows how and where to vote if they decide to,” said Mahmoud Salman al-Ani, a human rights activist in Ramadi.

In Ramadi, a group of residents said they had walked around their neighborhood looking for a voting center and not found one.

The Bush crew has done it again (remember the plastic turkey on Thanksgiving?): (via Think Progress)

Earlier today, President Bush held an “impromptu” public teleconference with a group of U.S. soldiers based in Tikrit, Iraq.

Pentagon communications aide Allison Barber “insisted the questions were not rehearsed. The military had been told ahead of time only about topics the president might want to talk about, not specific questions. ‘We just knew broad themes,’ Barber said.”

Yet reporters could clearly hear White House handlers, including Barber herself, prepping the troops for President Bush’s photo-op:

WH Pooler Geoff Earle of the New York Post writes of the teleconference: “The soldiers, nine U.S. men and one U.S. woman, plus an Iraqi, had been tipped off in advance about the questions in the highly scripted event. Allison Barber, deputy assistant to the Secretary of Defense for internal communication, could be heard asking one soldier before the start of the event, “Who are we going to give that [question] to?”

Read the rest here. Some of the audio in question here.
Update: It turns out the Turkey was real, just not for sharing with the soldiers. And the PR stunt was still pathetic.
Thanks to some jerk for the correction.

Boy, the liberventionists sure picked a great time to become conservatives. Howard Fineman at MSNBC says the “conservative coalition” has had it. Wouldn’t that be great? The oddball grouping of fundamentalist crazies, the warfare mercantilists, fiscal conservatives and libertarians was in jeopardy after the fall of Communism when quite a few on the right who had believed William F. Buckley, when he said that the “totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores” was strictly a temporary measure found themselves disappointed.

The imperial rule of Bill “burn and machine gun and call it suicide” Clinton helped keep the structure of the right intact temporarily, but the damage had already been done. George W. Bush and his neoconservative cronies’ “strategic disaster” of a war in Iraq, as former Reagan-era NSA director William Odom has called it, has finished the job.

The neocons, having created the war in Iraq, have now turned on Bush for having it waged, and officially abandoned him:

“Their neo-Wilsonian theory is correct, they insist, but the execution was botched by a Bush team that has turned out to be incompetent, crony-filled, corrupt, unimaginative and weak over a wide range of issues.

The flight of the neocons – just read a recent Weekly Standard to see what I am talking about – is one of only many indications that the long-predicted “conservative crackup” is at hand.”

Fineman is adding the neocons to the religious crazies who are mad about Harriet Myers’ nomination to the Supreme Court, businessmen (presumably from companies other than Halliburton) who are embarrassed by the disastrous handling of Hurricane Katrina, fiscal conservatives worried about funny money, and those he calls “isolationists” (the old smear term against those who advocate political “independence“).

Traditional establishment chessboard types like Zbigniew Brzezinski haven’t liked him since he went to Iraq instead of taking over all of Central Asia.

So who are the 40% of people left supporting George W. Bush and the stupidest foreign policy since McKinley waged aggressive war in the Philippines to Christianize the Catholics?

This seems like a pretty good sample: American government school graduates who think Iran is a continent in the South Pacific.

Hey, Everybody! Check out Antiwar.com’s new regular writer Charles Pena. He is just the kind of heavy hitter we like to have around here: a senior fellow with the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, an adviser to the Straus Military Reform Project and an analyst for MSNBC television. Pena is the co-author of Exiting Iraq: Why the U.S. Must End the Military Occupation and Renew the War Against al-Qaeda, and author of the upcoming Winning the Un-War: A New Strategy for the War on Terrorism.

His new column is called Dispatches from the Un-War, and today’s, A New York State of Mind, deals with the hoax terror threat in New York last week.

Score one for Anti-interventionism!