Plamegate's secret, 'American boys and girls are dying for Israel'

Oct '03, Joe Wilson pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/truth/interviews/wilson.html

It was not until late in the game that the so-called moral war came into being as a further justification. But the people, the neo-conservatives who brought this war upon us, who were the biggest supporters of this war, did not mention the moral case when they wrote the Project for the New American Century, when they wrote their 1998 letter to then-President Clinton, when Mr. Perle and company wrote their paper for Bibi Netanyahu, called "A Clean Break, a New Strategy for the Security of the Realm," or even when Mr. Wolfowitz drafted his security statement when he was undersecretary for policy in the Bush I Defense Department.



Dec '03, Gen. Anthony Zinni

"I think the American people were conned into this," he says.

Referring to the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which the Johnson administration claimed that U.S. Navy ships had been subjected to an unprovoked attack by North Vietnam, he says, "The Gulf of Tonkin and the case for WMD and terrorism is synonymous in my mind."

Likewise, he says, the goal of transforming the Middle East by imposing democracy by force reminds him of the "domino theory" in the 1960s that the United States had to win in Vietnam to prevent the rest of Southeast Asia from falling into communist hands.

And that brings him back to Wolfowitz and his neoconservative allies as the root of the problem. "I don't know where the neocons came from -- that wasn't the platform they ran on," he says. "Somehow, the neocons captured the president. They captured the vice president."

He is especially irked that, as he sees it, no senior officials have taken responsibility for their incorrect assessment of the threat posed by Iraq. "What I don't understand is that the bill of goods the neocons sold him has been proven false, yet heads haven't rolled," he says. "Where is the accountability? I think some fairly senior people at the Pentagon ought to go." Who? "That's up to the president."

Zinni has picked his shots carefully -- a speech here, a "Nightline" segment or interview there. "My contemporaries, our feelings and sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice," he said at a talk to hundreds of Marine and Navy officers and others at a Crystal City hotel ballroom in September. "I ask you, is it happening again?" The speech, part of a forum sponsored by the U.S. Naval Institute and the Marine Corps Association, received prolonged applause, with many officers standing.

Zinni says that he hasn't received a single negative response from military people about the stance he has taken. "I was surprised by the number of uniformed guys, all ranks, who said, 'You're speaking for us. Keep on keeping on.'"

washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A22922-2003Dec22

crooksandliars.com/2006/04/02.html#a7762



March '04, Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski

In the early winter of 2002, a co-worker U.S. Navy captain and I were discussing the service being rendered by Colin Powell at the time, and we were told by the neoconservative political appointee David Schenker that "the best service Powell could offer would be to quit right now." I was present at a staff meeting when Bill Luti called Marine Gen. and former Chief of Central Command Anthony Zinni a "traitor," because Zinni had publicly expressed reservations about the rush to war.

dir.salon.com/story/opinion/feature/2004/03/10/osp/index.html?pn=1



May '04, The cult that's running the country

by Joseph Wilson

The neoconservatives who have taken us down this path are actually very few in number. It is a small pack of zealots whose dedication has spanned decades, and that through years of selective recruitment has become a government cult with cells in most of the national security system. Among those cells are the secretive Office of Special Plans in the Department of Defense (reportedly now disbanded) and a similar operation in the State Department that is managed in the office of Under Secretary for Disarmament John Bolton.

Pat Lang -- with whom I had frequently exchanged views on Iraq policy -- served his country first as an army officer, then as an intelligence officer in the Defense Intelligence Agency in charge of the Middle East before retiring. He once told me about when he was recruited for possible membership in the group.

He described to me a visit, during the administration of the first George Bush, from an elderly couple who dropped in on him unannounced one afternoon at his Pentagon office. They had come, they said, at the suggestion of Paul Wolfowitz, then the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, who had told them that Col. Lang was a bright fellow. They introduced themselves as Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter, professors from the University of Chicago, and they made themselves at home for a brief chat.

Albert Wohlstetter, one of the most influential strategists of nuclear weapons policy in the second half of the twentieth century until his death in 1997, was a mentor to Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. In the 1970s he had been an architect of the first effort to bring outside analysts into traditional institutions like the CIA to "reassess" the Soviet threat. This "Team B" effort resulted in the Reagan administration's use of wildly exaggerated claims about Soviet rearmament to justify huge American defense spending increases. By the end of the decade, Wohlstetter had expanded his definition of America's strategic role to include the Middle East. He advocated that the U.S. extend its security umbrella to the Persian Gulf on the grounds that even if no Soviet hand could be seen behind the Islamic revolution in Iran of 1979, the situation there still represented a threat to American interests in the Middle East and Pakistan.
_

President Bush could fundamentally change the direction of his administration by firing fewer than fifteen senior officials, beginning with those signatories of the Project for the New American Century and those currently holding government posts who signed a 1998 letter that urged President Clinton to wage war on Iraq. They are clustered at the National Security Council, in the Defense and State Departments, and within Vice President Cheney's own parallel national security office. That particular little-known organization -- not accountable to Congress and virtually unknown to the American people -- should be completely dismantled. Never in the history of our democracy has there been established such an influential and pervasive center of power with the ability to circumvent longstanding and accepted reporting structures and to skew decisionmaking practices. It has been described to me chillingly by a former senior government official as a coup d'etat within the State. That's all it would take -- firing fewer than fifteen officials, and the scuttling of Cheney's questionable office -- to alter this administration's radical course.

But President Bush would have to want to make these changes. The fact that he has utterly failed to do so suggests that one popular notion about this president -- that he has delegated foreign policy to his "prime minister," Dick Cheney, and that the president is somehow manipulated by him -- is doubtful. Even as the criticism mounts and the failure of the war policy becomes ever more evident with every attack on American interests in Iraq, the president refuses to make changes in his lineup. In fact, as one former intelligence officer suggested to me, President Bush may himself be a neoconservative "recruit," and now an active leader of the radical movement rather than a passive follower unable to block it.
_

The other name that has most often been repeated to me in connection with the inquiry and disclosure into my background and Valerie's is that of Elliott Abrams, who gained infamy in the IranContra scandal during the first Bush administration. ... According to my sources, between March 2003 and the appearance of my article in July, the workup on me that turned up the information on Valerie was shared with Karl Rove, who then circulated it in administration and neoconservative circles.

dir.salon.com/story/books/feature/2004/05/03/accuse/index.html
www.archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares


May '04, Hendrik Hertzberg reviews Bob Woodward's "Plan of Attack"

And then there's the dish. Powell can't stand Cheney. Powell can't stand Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby. Powell can't stand Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and he really can't stand Douglas Feith, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy. He privately referred to a "cell" that Feith established in the Pentagon as a "Gestapo office." (Powell now says he "doesn't recall" using that term, a classic non-denial denial.) General Franks wasn't crazy about Feith, either. "The general," Woodward writes, "once confided to several colleagues about Feith: 'I have to deal with the f ucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth almost every day.'" Feith seems to have annoyed even Woodward, who normally keeps his likes and dislikes to himself. "Feith has a high-pitched, insistent voice," he writes. "He is articulate and has mastered the language of the management consultant, short, pithy sayings, what he called 'big thoughts.' He liked to lecture his staff and others in the Pentagon."
_

On the losing side, the bitterness ran deep. In "Plan of Attack," it is expressed not by Powell himself but by Powell's alter ego and best friend, Richard Armitage, the bullnecked, chrome-dome Vietnam veteran who serves, still, as Powell's deputy. After two and a half years of frustration and humiliation, Armitage stopped bothering to conceal his feelings around the office. "Later in 2003," Woodward writes, "whenever there was a presidential speech or an issue with the White House, particularly on the Middle East, he would say to Powell, 'Tell these people to f uck themselves.'" And Woodward offers this choice anecdote:

A newly appointed assistant secretary of state who had worked for one of the conservative think tanks in Washington had come to see Armitage his first day on the job. "I think with my contacts I'll really be able to fix the relationship and act as a bridge between Defense and State," the new man said.

"You're on our team," Armitage told him, realizing that he was ripping the poor man's head off. "You don't bridge shi t. I've known all those f uckers for 30 years. You ain't bridging shi t."

Three weeks later, the two have another little chat:

"I had no idea," the new man said. "It's mind-numbing." He then went on to detail how "the motherf uckers" at Defense had been trying to obstruct the efforts with the U.N.

newyorker.com/critics/books/articles/040510crbo_books?040510crbo_books



May '04, Gen. Zinni on 60 Minutes

"I blame the civilian leadership of the Pentagon directly. Because if they were given the responsibility, and if this was their war, and by everything that I understand, they promoted it and pushed it - certain elements in there certainly - even to the point of creating their own intelligence to match their needs, then they should bear the responsibility"

"Certainly those in your ranks that foisted this strategy on us that is flawed. Certainly they ought to be gone and replaced."

Zinni is talking about a group of policymakers within the administration known as "the neo-conservatives" who saw the invasion of Iraq as a way to stabilize American interests in the region and strengthen the position of Israel.

They include Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith; Former Defense Policy Board member Richard Perle; National Security Council member Eliot Abrams; and Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

Zinni believes they are political ideologues who have hijacked American policy in Iraq.

"I think it's the worst kept secret in Washington. That everybody - everybody I talk to in Washington has known and fully knows what their agenda was and what they were trying to do," says Zinni.

"And one article, because I mentioned the neo-conservatives who describe themselves as neo-conservatives, I was called anti-Semitic. I mean, you know, unbelievable that that's the kind of personal attacks that are run when you criticize a strategy and those who propose it. I certainly didn't criticize who they were. I certainly don't know what their ethnic religious backgrounds are. And I'm not interested."

"I know what strategy they promoted. And openly. And for a number of years. And what they have convinced the president and the secretary to do. And I don't believe there is any serious political leader, military leader, diplomat in Washington that doesn't know where it came from."

cbsnews.com/stories/2004/05/21/60minutes/main618896.shtml

"I couldn't believe what I was hearing about the benefits of this strategic move. That the road to Jerusalem led through Baghdad, when just the opposite is true, the road to Baghdad led through Jerusalem. You solve the Middle East peace process, you'd be surprised what kinds of others things will work out.

The idea that we will walk in and be met with open arms. The idea that we will have people that will glom on to democracy overnight. The idea that strategically we will reform, reshape, and change the Middle East by this action -- we've changed it all right."

"The sixth mistake, and maybe the biggest one, was propping up and trusting the exiles, the infamous "Gucci Guerillas" from London. We bought into their intelligence reports. To the credit of the CIA, they didn't buy into it, so I guess the Defense Department created its own boutique intelligence agency to vet them. And we ended up with a group that fed us bad information. That led us to believe that we would be welcomed with flowers in the streets; that led us to believe that this would be a cakewalk.

When I testified before Congress in 1998, after a grilling from Senator McCain and all those wonderful senators supported the Iraqi Liberation Act, and I told them that these guys are not credible and they are going to lead us into something that we will regret. At that time, they were pushing a plan that Central Command would supply air support and special forces, and we would put it into Iraq, and they would pied piper their way up to Baghdad and the whole place would fall apart. This plan was created by two senate staffers and a retired General. I happened to be the commander of central command, nobody bothered to ask me about how my troops would be used. And they were a little bit upset about me being upset about this. These exiles did not have credibility inside the country or in the region. Not only did they not have credibility, it was clear that the information they were providing us many times was not correct and accurate."

cdi.org/program/document.cfm?DocumentID=2208

undergroundclips.com/video/A.Zinni_60_Minutes-2004-05-23.mov
undergroundclips.com/video/RichardClark_60min.mov



July '04 upi.com/archive/view.php?archive=1&StoryID=20040716-104354-4970r

It's hard to muster much sympathy for the CIA, especially these days. In light of the drubbing it takes in the report of a Senate committee studying pre-Iraq war intelligence, even using the word "intelligence" to describe what we were told about Iraq stretches the definition.

On the other hand, the Pentagon's attempt to force an apology from Sen. Jay Rockefeller for mentioning the contributions to public misinformation made by Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith puts the dispute in perspective.

This may actually turn out to be a case of blaming the victim. If CIA is guilty of overstating the case, it certainly had help, and the trail of "faulty intelligence" tracks back to Feith.
_

As is often the case in Washington, Rockefeller's mistake was candor.

We don't have to wait for some post-election revelation. Feith's role is on display in four books about Iraq, 9/11 and the war on terrorism. In "Plan of Attack," Bob Woodward's cautious chronicle, Feith appears briefly as a protégé of Richard Perle, the former Reagan defense official who served as part of Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board. Woodward notes that Feith "liked to lecture his staff and others in the Pentagon" and "was not popular with the uniformed military."

In "Against All Enemies," Richard Clark, who coordinated counterintelligence for both the Clinton and Bush administrations, mentions Feith in a post-war context. When Bush's assertions about an al-Qaida-Saddam link began to unravel in 2003, Feith promised a congressional committee that he would prove it. Instead, he sent a highly classified memo that added little.

More important, writes Clark, is the fact that someone leaked the memo to a neoconservative magazine, "which promptly printed the secret information. Neoconservative commentators then pointed to the illegally leaked document as conclusive proof of the al-Qaida-Iraq nexus." It was a typical move, sidestepping officials to publicly reinforce a misconception.

But if you really want to understand Feith's role, the basics are provided in "A Pretext for War," James Bamford's look at the abuse of U.S. intelligence agencies both before and after 9/11. Bamford argues that Feith and Perle developed their blueprint for the Iraq operation while working for pro-Israeli think tanks.

Their plan, called "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," centered on Israel taking out Saddam and replacing him with a friendly leader. "Whoever inherits Iraq," they wrote, "dominates the entire Levant strategically." The subsequent steps they recommended included invading Syria and Lebanon.

In the 1990s, Feith churned out anti-Arab diatribes in Israeli newspapers, Bamford reveals. In those articles, he urged Israel to establish more settlements and end the Oslo peace process. When George H.W. Bush was president, he organized a group to denounce the elder Bush for his "mistreatment of Israel." What Feith wanted was a full-scale war against the Palestinians in the occupied territories.
_

But the worst was still to come: Feith's Office of Special Plans. Officially, its job was to conduct pre-war planning. But its actual target was the media, policy-makers, and public opinion. Feith's partner, Abram Shulsky, liked to call their operation "the cabal."

According to London's Guardian newspaper, the OSP's job was to provide key people in the administration with "alarmist reports on Saddam's Iraq." In particular, holdouts like Powell needed to be persuaded. To do that, the OSP obtained cooked intelligence from its own unit and a similar Israeli cell. There was also a close relationship with Vice President Dick Cheney's office. In the end, the public heard what Feith's unit wanted them to hear.

How did it work? According to Bamford, OSP's intelligence unit cherry-picked the most damning items from the streams of U.S. and Israeli reports. "Then the OSP would brief senior administration officials," he writes. "These officials would then use the OSP's false and exaggerated intelligence as ammunition when attempting to hard-sell the need for war to their reluctant colleagues, such as Colin Powell, and even to allies like British Prime Minister Tony Blair." Senior White House officials received the same briefings. It was clearly music to their ears.

youtube.com/watch?v=W-6ibicKl50
crooksandliars.com/2007/02/18/chris-wallace-shoots-down-feiths-claims/
crooksandliars.com/2007/02/09/douglas-feith-under-secretary-of-lies-obfuscation/

Aug '04, FBI Probes Pentagon Spy Case

CBS sources say that last year the suspected spy, described as a trusted analyst at the Pentagon, turned over a presidential directive on U.S. policy toward Iran while it was, "in the draft phase when U.S. policy-makers were still debating the policy."

This put the Israelis, according to one source, "inside the decision-making loop" so they could "try to influence the outcome."

The case raises another concern among investigators: Did Israel also use the analyst to try to influence U.S. policy on the war in Iraq?

With ties to top Pentagon officials Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, the analyst was assigned to a unit within the Defense Department tasked with helping develop the Pentagon's Iraq policy.

cbsnews.com/stories/2004/08/27/eveningnews/main639143.shtml



Sept '04, Spy Case Renews Debate Over Pro-Israel Lobby's Ties to Pentagon

Aipac has dismissed the accusations as baseless, and Israel has denied conducting espionage operations in the United States.

Behind the scenes, however, the case has reignited a furious and long-running debate about the close relationship between Aipac, the pro-Israel lobbying organization, and a conservative group of Republican civilian officials at the defense department, who are in charge of the office that employs Lawrence Franklin, the Pentagon analyst.

Their hard-line policy views on Iraq, Iran and the rest of the Middle East have been controversial and influential within the Bush administration.

"They have no case," said Michael Ledeen, a conservative scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a friend of Mr. Franklin. "If they have a case, why hasn't anybody been arrested or indicted?"

Nearly a dozen officials who have been briefed on the investigation said in interviews last week that the FBI began the inquiry as a national security matter based on specific accusations that Aipac employees had been a conduit for secrets between Israel and the Pentagon. These officials said that the FBI, in consultation with the Justice Department, had established the necessary legal foundation required under the law before beginning the investigation.

A half dozen people sympathetic to Aipac and the civilian group at the defense department said they viewed the investigation in different terms, as a politically motivated attempt to discredit Aipac and the Pentagon group. Supporters of Aipac have said the organization is being dragged into an intelligence controversy largely because of its close ties to a Republican administration and the Israeli government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

Friends and associates of the civilian group at the Pentagon believe they are under assault by adversaries from within the intelligence community who have opposed them since before the war in Iraq. The Pentagon civilians, led by Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, and Douglas Feith, the undersecretary for policy, were among the first in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks to urge military action to topple the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, an approach favored by Aipac and Israel.

Mr. Wolfowitz and Mr. Feith were part of a larger network of policy experts inside and out of the Bush administration who forcefully made the case that the war with Iraq was part of the larger fight against terrorism.

The Pentagon group circulated its own intelligence assessments, which have since been discredited by the Central Intelligence Agency and by the independent Sept. 11 commission, arguing that there was a terrorist alliance between the Hussein regime and Al Qaeda.

The group has also advocated that the Bush administration adopt a more aggressive policy toward Iran, and some of its members have quietly begun to argue for regime change in Tehran. The administration has not yet adopted that stance, however, and the Pentagon conservatives have been engaged in a debate with officials at the State Department and other agencies urging a more moderate approach to Iran.

To Israel, Iran represents a grave threat to its national security. Pushing the United States to adopt a tougher line on Tehran is one of its major foreign policy objectives, and Aipac has lobbied the Bush administration to support Israel's policies.
_

"I know that this is part of a campaign against us," said Michael Maloof, a former Pentagon analyst who worked in a special-intelligence unit created by Mr. Feith after Sept. 11. Mr. Maloof lost his security clearances because of an investigation that he believed was unfair.

He now believes that Mr. Franklin is being unfairly targeted as well. "They are picking us off, one by one," Mr. Maloof said.

But leading critics of the Pentagon hard-liners have repeatedly argued that Mr. Wolfowitz, Mr. Feith and others have used the Sept. 11 attacks as a pretext to pursue issues that in some ways mirror the interests of Israel's conservative Likud government.

One piece of evidence repeatedly cited by the critics is a 1996 paper issued by the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, an Israeli think tank, calling for the toppling of Saddam Hussein in order to enhance Israeli security. Entitled "A Clean Break," the 1996 paper was intended to offer a foreign policy agenda for the new Likud government of Benjamin Netanyahu.

nytimes.com/2004/09/06/politics/06spy.html?ex=1252123200&en=f69ed749a90b9f88&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland



Nov '04, CIA memo urging spies to support Bush provokes furore

Michael Scheuer, a former head of the CIA's "Bin Laden station", who denounced the Iraq war, said: "I've never experienced this much anxiety and controversy." Mr Scheuer, who resigned last week, added: "Suddenly political affiliation matters to some degree. The talk is that they're out to clean out Democrats and liberals.

"The administration doesn't seem to be able to come to grips with the reality that it was a stupid thing to do to invade Iraq. If it goes too far like this into the political realm our fortunes overseas are going to be hurt."

Mr Goss, a Bush appointee, is seeking to use the CIA's counterintelligence department to weed out leakers to the press, a controversial move that has triggered resignations by senior staff who argued it was an inappropriate use of the agency's mole hunters. Mr Goss and a team of advisers, whom he brought from the House of Representatives where he was a Republican congressman, have also targeted CIA analysts, many of whom dissented from the administration's prewar certainty that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and al-Qaida links.

The directorate's chief, Jami Miscik, is rumoured to be the next on the Goss hitlist.

According to one intelligence source, the "president's daily brief", which the CIA delivers each morning, has already been "watered down" with the removal of controversial analysis about the counter-insurgency in Iraq or the "global war on terror".

The Goss memorandum, according to an official who had read it, said: "We support the administration and its policies in our work and as agency employees we do not identify with, support or champion opposition to the administration or its policies."

Asked to comment on the note, a CIA spokesman said: "Support means intelligence support. It does not mean taking a position on policy either pro or con."

But Vincent Cannistraro, a former head of the CIA's counter-terrorist centre, said: "It can only be interpreted one way - there will be no more dissenting opinions."

Mr Goss's order follows more than two years of veiled conflict between the CIA and the White House, which escalated when it became clear the administration was determined to go to war in Iraq. Disgruntled CIA officers fought their corner principally through leaks to the press.

When the head of counterintelligence - whose name cannot be published under US law - refused to pursue the leakers last week, the No 2 in the directorate of operations, Michael Sulick, was ordered to fire her, according to well-informed sources.

When he refused, his boss, Stephen Kappes, was ordered to step in. Mr Kappes refused and after a weekend showdown both he and Mr Sulick resigned on Monday.

Mr Kappes's departure was widely described as a serious loss. "Kappes was a fine officer and he had done a lot of hard things in a lot of nasty places in the world. It's a shame to see him go," Mr Scheuer said.

He argued there should be a staff shakeout at the CIA but said the purge was aimed in the wrong direction - targeting dissidents rather than risk-averse leaders. The 52-year-old former agent blamed some of the turmoil at the CIA on the abrupt management style of Mr Goss's new team. "There's nothing wrong with being a little bit gruff and a bit abrasive but I've heard these people have been real bastards," he said.

But another former agent, Robert Baer, argued that Mr Goss had no choice but to stop the leaks. "You can't have an intelligence agency operating in the open, writing books and leaking to the press. They lost the confidence of the president."

http://guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1353715,00.html

Scheuer: Does Israel Conduct Covert Action in America?
antiwar.com/scheuer/?articleid=8827



Oct '05, by Zbigniew Brzezinski iht.com/articles/2005/10/13/opinion/edzbig.php

Sixty years ago, Arnold Toynbee concluded, in his monumental "A Study of History," that the ultimate cause of imperial collapse was "suicidal statecraft." Sadly for President George W. Bush's place in history but - much more important - ominously for America's future, it has lately seemed as if that adroit phrase might be applicable to the policies pursued by the United States since the cataclysm of 9/11.
_

[The Iraq] war, advocated by a narrow circle of decision makers for motives still not fully exposed, propagated publicly by demagogic rhetoric reliant on false assertions, has turned out to be much more costly in blood and money than anticipated.



Oct '05, LA Times truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/37/14954

Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff was so angry about the public statements of former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, a Bush administration critic married to an undercover CIA officer, that he monitored all of Wilson's television appearances and urged the White House to mount an aggressive public campaign against him, former aides say.

Those efforts by the chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, began shortly after Wilson went public with his criticisms in 2003. But they continued into last year - well after the Justice Department began an investigation in September 2003, into whether administration officials had illegally disclosed the CIA operative's identity, say former White House aides.

While other administration officials were maintaining a careful distance from Wilson in 2004, Libby ordered up a compendium of information that could be used to rebut Wilson's claims that the administration had "twisted" intelligence to exaggerate the threat from Iraq before the U.S. invasion.

Libby pressed the administration to publicly counter Wilson, sparking a debate with other White House officials who thought the tactic would call more attention to the former diplomat and his criticisms. That debate ended after an April 2004 meeting in the office of White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett, when staffers were told "don't engage" Wilson, according to notes taken during the meeting by one person present.

"Scooter had a plan to counter Wilson and a passionate desire to do so," said a second person, a former White House official familiar with the internal deliberations.



Joe Wilson, "I had a civic duty to hold my government to account for what it had said and done."

Apr '06 truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/62/21135



June, FRONTLINE: The Dark Side

Richard Clarke: I remember vividly, in the driveway outside of the West Wing, Scooter Libby, from the vice president's office, grabbing me and saying, "I hear you don't believe this report that Mohamed Atta was talking to Iraqi people in Prague." I said, "I don't believe it because it's not true." And he said: "You're wrong. You know you're wrong. Go back and find out; look at the rest of the reports, and find out that you're wrong."

I understood what he was saying, which was: "This is a report that we want to believe, and stop saying it's not true. It's a real problem for the vice president's office that you, the counterterrorism coordinator, are walking around saying that this isn't a true report. Shut up!" That's what I was being told.

pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/darkside/view

After the failure to find WMD, the tension between the agency and Cheney's allies grew to the point that some in the administration believed the CIA had launched a covert war to undermine the president. In response, Cheney's office waged a campaign to distance itself from the prewar intelligence the vice president had helped to cultivate. Under pressure, Tenet resigned. Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, would later admit to leaking key sections of the NIE -- authorized, he says, by Cheney. Insiders tell FRONTLINE that the leak was part of the battle between the vice president and the CIA -- a battle that many believe has destroyed the CIA.



July '06 vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/07/yellowcake200607 (pg7)

Rhapsodizing about war week after week, Ledeen became chief rhetorician for neoconservative visionaries who wanted to remake the Middle East. "Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our own society and abroad," he wrote after the attacks. "We must destroy [our enemies] to advance our historic mission."

The U.S. must be "imperious, ruthless, and relentless," he argued, until there has been "total surrender" by the Muslim world. "We must keep our fangs bared," he wrote, "we must remind them daily that we Americans are in a rage, and we will not rest until we have avenged our dead, we will not be sated until we have had the blood of every miserable little tyrant in the Middle East, until every leader of every cell of the terror network is dead or locked securely away, and every last drooling anti-Semitic and anti-American mullah, imam, sheikh, and ayatollah is either singing the praises of the United States of America, or pumping gasoline, for a dime a gallon, on an American military base near the Arctic Circle."



Oct '06, The Lost Year in Iraq pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/yeariniraq/view

Q: In making your film, what were you able to learn about who originated the "deep deBaathification" and the "disband the Iraqi army" decisions? Did you learn what motivated these disastrous decisions?

Michael Kirk: The idea of deBaathification seems to have grown out of the offices of Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith at the Pentagon.

Q: I would love to know WHO suggested Bremer for his post in Iraq. Bremer seemed out of touch with the military, CIA and Iraqis and completely out of control in his decision making.

MK: Bremer told us he was called and asked if he would be interested in the job by Lewis "Scooter" Libby, from Vice President Cheney's office, and Paul Wolfowitz.

washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2006/10/16/DI2006101600400.html



Ahmed Chalabi: "Can you believe that on such a basis the United States would go to war? The intelligence community regarded the I.N.C. as useless. Why would the government believe us?"

iht.com/articles/2006/11/03/africa/web.1103chalabi.php?page=9



Richard Perle: "The decisions did not get made that should have been. They didn't get made in a timely fashion, and the differences were argued out endlessly. At the end of the day, you have to hold the president responsible. I don't think he realized the extent of the opposition within his own administration, and the disloyalty."

"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.' I don't say that because I no longer believe that Saddam had the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction, or that he was not in contact with terrorists. I believe those two premises were both correct. Could we have managed that threat by means other than a direct military intervention? Well, maybe we could have."

vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/12/neocons200612


3,207 US dead. 23,417 wounded
icasualties.org


George Washington's Farewell Address, 1796

A passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions; by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained, and by exciting jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld. And it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation), facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity; gilding, with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation.

As avenues to foreign influence in innumerable ways, such attachments are particularly alarming to the truly enlightened and independent patriot. How many opportunities do they afford to tamper with domestic factions, to practice the arts of seduction, to mislead public opinion, to influence or awe the public councils. Such an attachment of a small or weak towards a great and powerful nation dooms the former to be the satellite of the latter.

Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government. But that jealousy to be useful must be impartial; else it becomes the instrument of the very influence to be avoided, instead of a defense against it. Excessive partiality for one foreign nation and excessive dislike of another cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other. Real patriots who may resist the intrigues of the favorite are liable to become suspected and odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people, to surrender their interests.

yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/washing.htm


The War Party - BBC
video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6453738561338241311

The World According to Bush (pt 1 of 4)
youtube.com/watch?v=fpxvo-JibjY

Sep '06, Gen. Wesley Clark
youtube.com/watch?v=_8aOiMmekGk

musicforamerica.org/bushjoke

JFK on Secret Societies and the Responsibility of the Press
youtube.com/watch?v=LlEqtaWpKEU

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Israel_Lobby_and_U.S._Foreign_Policy
ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/rwp/RWP06-011/$File/rwp_06_011_walt.pdf