As Larry Johnson reminded us in his piece Mambo Italiano and Plame Gate, there is much involved in the overall forged Niger documents story that we still don’t have concrete answers about. Prosecutor Fitzgerald’s grand jury will only take us so far and is not designed to answer all of those questions. Will we ever know the full story?
The Independent’s Norman Dombey asked that question in his recent commentary, Tell Us Who Fabricated the Iraq Evidence, and ties together three figures involved in their own major news stories lately: Karl Rove the possible leaker of Valerie Plame’s name, Mohamed ElBaradei who revealed the forgery to the UN Security Council, and Larry Franklin who pleaded guilty last week to providing classified DoD information to the pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC .
It’s a retelling of events worthy of a Tom Clancy spy novel.
He begins with the fact that, in early 2001, the Niger Embassy in Rome was broken into, yet it appeared that nothing substantial was taken. That break in, however, could well have been the source of the official Niger government letterhead used in the forthcoming forgeries. According to Dombey’s theory, in December, 2001, Michael Ledeen, “an American specialist on Italy with a long-standing commitment to Israel”…” ” flew to Rome with Manucher Ghorbanifar, a former Iranian arms dealer, and two officials from OSP, one of whom was Larry Franklin. In Rome they met the head of Sismi. Some months later, the documents were published, having been sold to an Italian journalist by a Roman businessman linked to Sismi.”
Adding weight to the connection is the former head of counter terrorism operations at the CIA:
One man who might well know the answer to all this is Vincent Cannistraro, the former head of counter terrorism operations at the CIA. His belief is that the documents were produced in the US but “funnelled through the Italians”. When an interviewer asked Cannistraro “if I said Michael Ledeen”, he reportedly replied “I don’t think it’s a proven case …You’d be very close”
Ledeen has denied any involvement.
It’s a tangled web but it’s vital to understand what happened in order to appreciate how we have arrived at this point in history – the month someone may or may not be held responsible for leaking the name of CIA covert agent Valerie Plame, the wife of Joseph Wilson who blew the lid off the forgeries and antagonized the Bush administration as a result.
While we’re at it… isn’t it worth looking into who forged the Rathergate documents?
I think it was a deliberate entrapment… but who did it?
What Fitzgerald’s investigtion, indictments, and subsequent trial(s) can do is open enough evidence of yellowcakegate to public scrutiny that it requires a second investigation into that subject itself.
Fitzgerald’s investigation is by far the more important and damning one but it is my hope that it lays bare enough of the inner crookedness of this administration that it spawns yet another investigation right on it’s tail. Those that don’t get nailed by treason-gate can then get nailed by yellowcake-forgery-gate.
Well I hope the Dems will push hard for a serious investigation into “yellowcake-forgery-gate” once Fitz is done.
Just my take on things…I think it came from Cheneys office….thru Bolton…..thru his contacts in Italy….That is just me tho…all a neocon push IMHO
my last name ends with an a. The folks in Venice would never participate in any wrongdoings, way to creative and artsy.
P2 P2 P2!
P2 and the neocons have a confluence of interests vis a vis the Mid East. Destroying Iran (P2), gaining control of all the energy resources in the region (neocons), killing enemies and making lots of money at the expense of others (both groups); these psychopaths will be partners for a long while.
But, the P2 gang are much more ruthless, and when the time comes when P2 and the neocons are at odds with each other, P2 will erase the neocons without breaking a sweat and without a second thought.
It’s too bad the P2 was disbanded in the early eighties, and most of the people on the P2 lists are retired or very old if not dead. Certainly, some of them, especially the hard core, may get together for a game of cribbage or a poetry reading and talk about the good old days.
There are a lot of new boys in town that play the same old game, but it’s not the P2 anymore.
You are wrong about P2. The Masonic lodge formally disowned them in 1976, but (former “Grandmaster”) Gelli was still operating well after that and he was even indictied in Italy this past July in connection with the murder of Roberto Calvi back in the early 80’s.
As a clandestine group, there is absolutely no evidence to support the theory that P2 disbanded. Many of P2’s operatives are relatively new, (Rocco Martino, SISMI head Nicolo Pollari, among others linked to the forger Niger documents), but many of the old ones are still wheeling and dealing, like they were when they were running the BCCI swindles, Iran-Contra, and the Vatican Bank before that.
Powerful, well-connected and wealthy groups like this don’t disband; they simply move back off the radar screens and continue on with their enterprises.
I think the Hitler, er History, Channel has a show about the history of “secret organizations” — wonder if they get into all this.
Virtually no one in the MSM references P2 in any news stories. Even during the huge BCCI scandal, the BNL (Banco Nazionale Lavorno) scandal, ($4billion in unregulated loans to Iraq in the 1980’s through BNL’s Atlanta, GA branch), or the entire Iran-Contra affair, little if any reference was made to P2 or the fact that key players in all these particular scandals were in fact P2 members, several of whose names appeared on the membership list discovered in the home of P2 leader Licio Gelli during a raid in 1981.
These guys operate on a level very different from the neocons. the cheney gang have big money groups behind them and they infiltrate the op-ed pages and other media positions within the media community. They have their think tanks like PNAC and like minded operations like Heritage, AEI, etc. But P2 by and large avoids notoriety. They work off camera; they own the banks and financial groups where the neocons are just supplied by such entities. They don’t advertise themselves as adherents of a particular ideology but rather get others to work on their behalf to advance propaganda when necessary to facilitate particular actions they want to take. They are dangerous.
If our congress decides to start reducing funding for the Iraq conflagration P2 will be really pissed.
I thought they all moved on to the Enterprise Institute with the rest of the Iran Contra Criminals.
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AT&T ● Bechtel ● Carlyle Group ● Gannon Int’l St. Louis ● Lockheed Martin ● SAIC … ●
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