* Colin Powell blames others for his own disgraceful conduct in promoting the Bush/Cheney “war of choice” in Iraq

******

see prior post …

* Powell claims Saddam has anthrax and the means to deliver it

******

CBSNews reports (2/16/11) …

• in an interview with The Guardian, Former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell has called on the CIA and Pentagon to explain why they failed to notify him of unreliability of a key source who claimed knowledge of Saddam Hussein’s bio-weapons capability.

source: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/02/16/501364/main20032561.shtml

LMW COMMENT …

• Colin Powell had every reason to doubt the information pandered by the Bush/Cheney crowd, and he was certainly positioned to find out for himself.
• The best spin on the matter is that Powell did not have the courage and the independence to investigate.
• The worst spin is that he knew the truth – no WMD, no anthrax – and supported the call for war anyway.
• This is the most disgraceful episode of Powell’s otherwise mostly distinguished career and he compounds the problem now by blaming others for his own shortcomings and moral inadequacies.

It is a premise of my novel CASE CLOSED,

fictional as I wrote it but I believe worthy of investigation,

that the Bush/Cheney crowd did not want the anthrax case to be solved

because it was a valuable component in their case of lies

to convince Congress and the American people

to support their “war of choice” in Iraq.

Colin Powell’s disgraceful testimony at the UN

was a major part of making that case.

******

CASE CLOSED is a novel about the FBI’s failed investigation

of the 2001 anthrax attacks

******

read the opening scene of CASE CLOSED …

* CASE CLOSED – opening scene … the DIA re-investigates the FBI’s failed case

******

* buy CASE CLOSED at amazon *

******

* who benefitted from the FBI failure to solve the 2001 anthrax mailings case? … first to benefit … the Bush/Cheney plan to invade Iraq

Secretary of State Colin Powell waving a vial of "anthrax" at the UN on Feb 5, 2003

******

on February 5, 2003, Secretary of State  Colin Powell

addressed the United Nations Security Council …

• One of the most worrisome things that emerges from the thick intelligence file we have on Iraq’s biological weapons is the existence of mobile production facilities used to make biological agents.
  • In a matter of months, they can produce a quantity of biological poison equal to the entire amount that Iraq claimed to have produced in the years prior to the Gulf War.
  • “…  a fourth source, an Iraqi major, who defected, confirmed that Iraq has mobile biological research laboratories, in addition to the production facilities I mentioned earlier.
• “Ladies and gentlemen, these are sophisticated facilities. For example, they can produce anthrax.
  • In fact, they can produce enough dry biological agent in a single month to kill thousands upon thousands of people. And dry agent of this type is the most lethal form for human beings.
• “The Iraqi regime has also developed ways to disburse lethal biological agents, widely and discriminately into the water supply, into the air in ways that can cause massive death and destruction.
• “Let me talk now about the systems Iraq is developing to deliver weapons of mass destruction, in particular Iraq’s ballistic missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles, UAVs.
• “There is ample evidence that Iraq has dedicated much effort to developing and testing spray devices that could be adapted for UAVs.

“… Leaving Saddam Hussein

in possession of weapons of mass destruction

for a few more months or years is not an option,

not in a post-September 11th world.”

NOTE: 6 weeks later, Iraq was invaded

******

LMW COMMENT …

• This was perhaps Colin Powell’s worst moment in an otherwise distinguished career. Virtually none of what he said at the UN turned out to be true. Saddam had no anthrax, no means to make anthrax, and no means to deliver anthrax to the US.
• But making us afraid that he did was one of the important false props in the Bush/Cheney false case for invading Iraq.
• If the FBI had by  then (which was 15 months after the anthrax attacks) solved the case, and it wasn’t Saddam, at least one of these false props would have disappeared, and perhaps we would never have invaded Iraq.

The FBI’s case against Dr. Ivins is clearly bogus: no evidence, no witnesses, an impossible timeline, science that proves innocence instead of guilt.

So what really happened? And why doesn’t the FBI offer America a credible story?

I can imagine only 3 possible “actual” scenarios …

1. The FBI has more evidence against Dr. Ivins but is, for some undisclosed reason, withholding that evidence … POSSIBLE BUT NOT SO LIKELY
2. The FBI, despite the most expensive and extensive investigation in its history, has not solved the case and has no idea who prepared and mailed the anthrax letters that killed 5 Americans in 2001 … EVEN LESS LIKELY
3. The FBI knows who did it (not Dr. Ivins) but is covering up the actual perpetrators, for undisclosed reasons … THE MOST LIKELY SCENARIO

It is this third scenario that leads me to try to show

who might have benefitted from not solving the case.

I am making no accusations,

but it is surely appropriate in an unsolved case

to look at those who might want to keep it unsolved.

******

The “fictional” scenario in my novel CASE CLOSED has been judged by many readers, including a highly respected official in the U.S. Intelligence Community, as perhaps more plausible than the FBI’s unproven assertions regarding Dr. Ivins.

* buy CASE CLOSED at amazon *

******

* U.S. Attorney Fitzgerald calls the idea of a government cover-up of a terrorist attack “fantastically paranoid.” Really?

Lew’s new novel CASE CLOSED

explores the FBI’s failed investigation of the 2001 anthrax case …

* see CASE CLOSED VIDEO on YouTube

* purchase CASE CLOSED (paperback)

* U.S. Attorney Fitzgerald calls the idea

of a government cover-up  of a terrorist attack

“fantastically paranoid.”

… Really?

Cliff Kincaid writes (6/18/09) …

• A journalist has been threatened with a lawsuit by powerful U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald.  
• A five-time Emmy Award winner formerly with ABC News, Peter Lance is one of the few journalists with mainstream press credentials still raising the hard questions about how al-Qaeda agents were able to prepare terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, even while some of them were under surveillance here and abroad by various U.S. government agencies.
• Lance argues in his book that Fitzgerald and other senior Department of Justice and FBI officials failed to properly follow up on hard evidence about al-Qaeda activities on U.S. soil and that information was discounted and suppressed about the planning and nature of some of the terrorist attacks.
• Fitzgerald is threatening Lance and publisher HarperCollins with legal action
• Fitzgerald calls the idea of a government cover-up of a terrorist attack on TWA 800 “fantastically paranoid.”

read the entire article at … http://www.sodahead.com/question/441007/an-honest-journalist-threatened-for-exposing-cover-ups/

http://www.1115.org reports on the same story …

• In the past year and a half, Fitzgerald has written four letters to HarperCollins—owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.—demanding it “cease publication” and “withdraw” copies of Triple Cross, a 2006 book by ex–TV newsman Peter Lance that criticizes Fitzgerald’s handling of terror cases in New York in the 1990s.

read the entire article at … http://www.1115.org/2009/06/15/peter-lance-triple-cross-patrick-fitzgerald/

Rory O’Connor writes in the Huffington Post (6/10/09)

• in an article titled “Patrick Fitzgerald’s Private Jihad”
• Fitzgerald, who must have too much time on his hands now that Scooter Libby has been freed and Rod Blagojevich indicted, spent much of the last year and a half going after another journalist, Peter Lance, in an attempt to kill a new edition of Lance’s investigative book Triple Cross by threatening to sue both the author and his publisher for libel.
• Fitzgerald’s stab at censorship is especially chilling coming from such a powerful prosecutor.

read the entire post at … http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rory-oconnor/patrick-fitzgeralds-priva_b_213807.html

LMW COMMENT …

This is a chilling story.

Is this what happens when you criticize the DOJ and the FBI?

In the face of an obvious government cover-up of the FBI’s investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks, how credible can Fitzgerald be to call even the idea of a cover-up of the investigation into a terrorist attack paronoid?

Related Comments by DXer …

• DXer on * lack of control … A Cairo Medical school alum was Zawahiri’s tour guide on his last US tour.
• DXer on * lack of control ... Lance Williams of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an eye-opening profile of Khalid Dahab, a Cairo Medical School drop-out who recruited US operatives for Al Qaeda.
• DXer on * lack of control ... The “insider” problem was addressed in Peter Lance’s important “Triple Cross” which is again is in today’s news.

* Keith Olbermann: anthrax, silicon, Iraq … government scientist conveniently changes his mind

 

Keith Olbermann

Keith Olbermann on Countdown …watch the Olbermann video at … http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fP60

GOVERNMENT CLEARLY NOT FORTHCOMING ABOUT ANTHRAX INVESTIGATION

LMW COMMENT …

The original government position was that silicon was added to the anthrax by the person who prepared the powder for mailing.

SInce Iraq was one of 3 countries with that capability (the U.S. and Russia are the others), the silicon addition allowed suspicion to fall on Iraq and add another plank in the case for invading Iraq in the Bush/Cheney war of choice. See Colin Powell at the U.N. waving a vial of anthrax and warning that Iraq had bioweapons and the ability to deliver them to the eastern shores of the U.S.

Now, however, Dr. Bruce Ivins has been identified by the FBI as the sole perpetrator, and there seems to be a concensus that Ivins did not have the capability or wherewithall to add silicon.

OOPS!

Suddenly, the government scientist has changed his view. How convenient.

DkbpCTo

* Bush, Cheney & Rumsfeld manufactured the Iraq intelligence they wanted

Julian Borger wrote in the Guardian (7-17-03) …

• a complete breakdown in US intelligence that helped steer America into war.
• According to former Bush officials, all defence and intelligence sources, senior administration figures created a shadow agency of Pentagon analysts staffed mainly by ideological amateurs to compete with the CIA and its military counterpart, the Defence Intelligence Agency.
• The agency, called the Office of Special Plans (OSP), was set up by the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to second-guess CIA information and operated under the patronage of hardline conservatives in the top rungs of the administration, the Pentagon and at the White House, including Vice-President Dick Cheney.
• In the days after September 11, Mr Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, mounted an attempt to include Iraq in the war against terror. 
• When the established agencies came up with nothing concrete to link Iraq and al-Qaida, the OSP was given the task of looking more carefully.
• The OSP had access to a huge amount of raw intelligence. It came in part from “report officers” in the CIA’s directorate of operations whose job is to sift through reports from agents around the world, filtering out the unsubstantiated and the incredible.
• The OSP itself had less than 10 full-time staff, so to help deal with the load, the office hired scores of temporary “consultants”. They included lawyers, congressional staffers, and policy wonks from the numerous rightwing thinktanks in Washington. Few had experience in intelligence.
• The OSP absorbed this heady brew of raw intelligence, rumour and plain disinformation and made it a “product”, a prodigious stream of reports with a guaranteed readership in the White House. The primary customers were Mr Cheney, Mr Libby and their closest ideological ally on the national security council, Stephen Hadley, Condoleezza Rice’s deputy.
• In turn, they leaked some of the claims to the press, and used others as a stick with which to beat the CIA and the state department analysts, demanding they investigate the OSP leads.

read the entire article at … http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/jul/17/iraq.usa

* Seymour Hersh: selective intelligence from the OSP (5-12-03)

Seymour Hersh wrote in the New Yorker (5-12-03) …

• They call themselves, self-mockingly, the Cabal—a small cluster of policy advisers and analysts now based in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans.
• In the past year, according to former and present Bush Administration officials, their operation, which was conceived by Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, has brought about a crucial change of direction in the American intelligence community.
• These advisers and analysts, who began their work in the days after September 11, 2001, have produced a skein of intelligence reviews that have helped to shape public opinion and American policy toward Iraq.
• “The Pentagon has banded together to dominate the government’s foreign policy, and they’ve pulled it off. They’re running Chalabi. The D.I.A. has been intimidated and beaten to a pulp. And there’s no guts at all in the C.I.A.”
• According to the Pentagon adviser, Special Plans was created in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed to be true—that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons that threatened the region and, potentially, the United States.
• Rumsfeld and his colleagues believed that the C.I.A. was unable to perceive the reality of the situation in Iraq. The goal of Special Plans, he said, was “to put the data under the microscope to reveal what the intelligence community can’t see.
• For example, many newspapers published extensive interviews with Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a civil engineer who, with the I.N.C.’s help, fled Iraq in 2001, and subsequently claimed that he had visited twenty hidden facilities that he believed were built for the production of biological and chemical weapons.
• One, he said, was underneath a hospital in Baghdad. Haideri was apparently a source for Secretary of State Colin Powell’s claim, in his presentation to the United Nations Security Council on February 5th, that the United States had “firsthand descriptions” of mobile factories capable of producing vast quantities of biological weapons. The U.N. teams that returned to Iraq last winter were unable to verify any of al-Haideri’s claims.
• In a statement to the Security Council in March, on the eve of war, Hans Blix, the U.N.’s chief weapons inspector, noted that his teams had physically examined the hospital and other sites with the help of ground-penetrating radar equipment. “No underground facilities for chemical or biological production or storage were found so far,” he said.
• … they were using the intelligence from the C.I.A. and other agencies only when it fit their agenda. They didn’t like the intelligence they were getting, and so they brought in people to write the stuff. They were so crazed and so far out and so difficult to reason with—to the point of being bizarre. Dogmatic, as if they were on a mission from God.” He added, “If it doesn’t fit their theory, they don’t want to accept it.”
• In interviews, former C.I.A. officers and analysts described the agency as increasingly demoralized. “George knows he’s being beaten up,” one former officer said of George Tenet, the C.I.A. director. “And his analysts are terrified. George used to protect his people, but he’s been forced to do things their way.”
• The Defense Department and the Office of the Vice-President write their own pieces, based on their own ideology. We collect so much stuff that you can find anything you want.”

read the entire article at … http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/05/12/030512fa_fact

* Seymour Hersh: Bush & Cheney corrupted the Iraq intelligence (10-27-03)

Seymour Hersh wrote in the New Yorker (10-27-03) …

• Since midsummer, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been attempting to solve the biggest mystery of the Iraq war: the disparity between the Bush Administration’s prewar assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered.
• Part of the answer lies in decisions made early in the Bush Administration, before the events of September 11, 2001. In interviews with present and former intelligence officials, I was told that some senior Administration people, soon after coming to power, had bypassed the government’s customary procedures for vetting intelligence.
• The vetting process is especially important when one is dealing with foreign-agent reports—sensitive intelligence that can trigger profound policy decisions.
• … what the Bush people did was “dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them.
• There was also a change in procedure at the Pentagon under Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and Douglas Feith, the Under-Secretary for Policy.
• Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had long complained about the limits of American intelligence.
• After he became Secretary of Defense, a separate intelligence unit was set up in the Pentagon’s policy office, under the control of William Luti, a senior aide to Feith. This office, which circumvented the usual procedures of vetting and transparency, stovepiped many of its findings to the highest-ranking officials.
• The State of the Union speech was confounding to many members of the intelligence community, who could not understand how such intelligence could have got to the President without vetting.
• The former White House official told me, “Maybe the Secretary of Defense and his people are short-circuiting the process, and creating a separate channel to the Vice-President. Still, at the end of the day all the policies have to be hashed out in the interagency process, led by the national-security adviser.” What happened instead, he said, “was a real abdication of responsibility by Condi.”

             

LMW COMMENT … The separate Pentagon office which produced so much misinformation about Iraq and its ability to produce and deliver anthrax to the eastern U.S., is featured in my novel CASE CLOSED, to be published in the summer of 2009.

                

            

            

            

             

                       

 read the entire article at … http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/10/27/031027fa_fact

* selective intelligence

May 12, 2003 … Selective Intellingence – by Seymour M. Hersh – New Yorker

They call themselves, self-mockingly, the Cabal—a small cluster of policy advisers and analysts now based in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans.

In the past year, according to former and present Bush Administration officials, their operation, which was conceived by Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, has brought about a crucial change of direction in the American intelligence community.

These advisers and analysts, who began their work in the days after September 11, 2001, have produced a skein of intelligence reviews that have helped to shape public opinion and American policy toward Iraq.

They relied on data gathered by other intelligence agencies and also on information provided by the Iraqi National Congress, or I.N.C., the exile group headed by Ahmad Chalabi. 

read the entire article at … http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/05/12/030512fa_fact

                       

* ideologically driven intelligence

July 17, 2003 … The spies who pushed for war – The Guardian

According to former Bush officials, all defence and intelligence sources, senior administration figures created a shadow agency of Pentagon analysts staffed mainly by ideological amateurs to compete with the CIA and its military counterpart, the Defence Intelligence Agency.

The agency, called the Office of Special Plans (OSP), was set up by the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to second-guess CIA information and operated under the patronage of hardline conservatives in the top rungs of the administration, the Pentagon and at the White House, including Vice-President Dick Cheney.

The ideologically driven network functioned like a shadow government, much of it off the official payroll and beyond congressional oversight.

But it proved powerful enough to prevail in a struggle with the State Department and the CIA by establishing a justification for war. 

read the entire article at … http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/jul/17/iraq.usa

                               

* Office of Special Plans manipulated intelligence on Iraqi threat

July 25, 2003 … CIA Probe Finds Secret Pentagon Group Manipulated Intelligence on Iraqi Threat – Jason Leopold

A half-dozen former CIA agents investigating prewar intelligence have found that a secret Pentagon committee, set up by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in October 2001, manipulated reams of intelligence information prepared by the spy agency on the so-called Iraqi threat and then delivered it to top White House officials who used it to win support for a war in Iraq.

The ad-hoc committee, called the Office of Special Plans, headed by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith and other Pentagon hawks, described the worst-case scenarios in terms of Iraq’s alleged stockpile of chemical and biological weapons and claimed the country was close to acquiring nuclear weapons, according to four of the CIA agents, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the information is still classified, who conducted a preliminary view of the intelligence.

The agents said the Office of Special Plans is responsible for providing the National Security Council and Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice and Rumsfeld with the bulk of the intelligence information on Iraq’s weapons program that turned out to be wrong.

But White House officials used the information it received from the Office of Special Plans to win support from the public and Congress to start a war in Iraq even though the White House knew much of the information was dubious, the CIA agents said.

read the entire post at … http://www.antiwar.com/orig/leopold11.html