{"id":2432,"date":"2005-10-14T21:22:34","date_gmt":"2005-10-15T04:22:34","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2005-10-14T21:22:34","modified_gmt":"2005-10-15T04:22:34","slug":"indict-ledeen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2005\/10\/14\/indict-ledeen\/","title":{"rendered":"Indict Ledeen"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

“Without any evidence other than a posting on Wikipedia (wow… there’s an unimpeachable source), someone named Scott Horton of the<\/i> 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.”<\/i><\/p>\n

Here is the deal Mr. Simon:<\/p>\n

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

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<\/a> to the Office of Special Plans<\/a> and Sismi<\/a> are well documented, he attended a number of meetings in Italy<\/a> with Harold Rhode, who “practically lived out of<\/a> (Iranian spy<\/a>) Ahmad Chalabi’s office<\/a>,” Manucher Ghorbanifar<\/a> and guilty<\/a> Israeli spy Larry Franklin, around the time<\/a> the Italians began passing on the (already debunked) story back to the US.<\/p>\n

As Josh Marshall put it in The Hill<\/a>:<\/p>\n

“[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\u2019ve spoken to, is that those reports turned out to be text transcriptions of Niger forgeries that didn\u2019t surface in Rome until almost a year later…<\/p>\n

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…<\/p>\n

Burba, the Italian journalist who eventually brought the forgeries to the U.S. Embassy in Rome, got them from an unnamed Italian \u201csecurity consultant.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

It has sometimes been suggested in the Italian press that Martino himself is the forger. But he told us a different story \u2014 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.”<\/i><\/p>\n

But where did they originate? Giraldi’s partner, Vincent Cannistraro<\/a>, 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<\/a>,” in answer to the question of whether Ledeen forged them.<\/p>\n

Combined with what Giraldi had to say<\/a>, it sure seems like enough to take to a grand jury to me.<\/p>\n

Or is it not a crime to lie a country into war?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[676],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-2432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-antiwar-movement"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2432"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2432\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2432"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=2432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}