.
TODAY’S NEWS ::
Prosecutor Winding Up CIA Leak Probe

It’s DoD Donald Rumsfeld proximity to Intelligence fabrication, and not VP Cheney’s responsibility. The political HQ in the White House under Karl Rove is of course target in DoJ Fitzgerald’s investigation in the outing of Valerie Plame.

The confidential intelligence about CIA agent Plame must have been gathered by David Wurmser and his DoD Office near NESA/OSP in the Pentagon, and leaked to “Scooter” Libby and Stephen Hadley. Judith Miller was not a CIA but a DoD Operative on the coat tails of Chalabi.

Cheney aide David Wurmser passed Plame’s name to Libby, Hadley, those close to leak investigation say

(RAW STORY) Oct. 24 — With the possibility of indictments just days away, sources close to the investigation into who outed covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson provided a more detailed account into how and why Plame’s name was leaked and what role the Pentagon and the vice president’s office played.

Those close to the investigation say that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has been told that David Wurmser, then a Middle East adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney on loan from the office of then-Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs John Bolton, met with Cheney and his chief of staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby in June 2003 and told Libby that Plame set up the Wilson trip. He asserted that it was a boondoggle, the sources said.

  «« click on pic to article

More below the fold »»

Libby then shared the information with Karl Rove, President Bush’s deputy chief of staff, the sources said. Wurmser also passed on the same information about Wilson to then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley and then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, they added.

Within a week, Wurmser, on orders from “executives in the office of the vice president,” was told to leak her name to a specific group of reporters in an effort to muzzle her husband, Wilson, who had become a thorn in the side of the administration, those close to the inquiry say. It is unclear who Wurmser had spoken with in the media, the sources said, but they confirmed he did speak with reporters at national media outlets about Plame.

“Libby wanted to discredit Wilson right from the start, he used David Wurmser to help him do that,” one source close to the investigation said.

Neither Wurmser or Libby could be reached for comment.

    Fits well with last testimony of Judith Miller “finding her notes” on conversation with “Scooter” Libby in June 2003.

David Wurmser bio ◊ by SusanHu

WURMSER WAS SUBJECT OF ANOTHER FBI PROBE:
“According to a government source, the Pentagon’s National Criminal Investigative division began probes in 2002 – with FBI guidance – to determine who leaked secret war plans to The New York Times and The Washington Post in June 2002. At the State Department, diplomatic security launched an investigation into David Wurmser, an aide to John Bolton, for leaking a letter from Secretary of State Colin Powell to the Pentagon objecting to the Syria Accountability Act. The letter ended up being the basis for a story in The Jerusalem Post.”
[The New Republic, 10/10/05]

Lie Factory ◊ published in Mother Jones Jan-Feb 2004 Issue

Both Wolfowitz and Feith have deep roots in the neoconservative movement. One of the most influential Washington neo- conservatives in the foreign-policy establishment during the Republicans’ wilderness years of the 1990s, Wolfowitz has long held that not taking Baghdad in 1991 was a grievous mistake. He and others now prominent in the administration said so repeatedly over the past decade in a slew of letters and policy papers from neoconservative groups like the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.

Feith, a former aide to Richard Perle at the Pentagon in the 1980s, and an activist in far-right Zionist circles, held the view that there was no difference between U.S. and Israeli security policy and that the best way to secure both countries’ future was to solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem. Not by serving as a broker, but with the United States as a force for “regime change” in the region.

Called in to help organize the Iraq war-planning team was a longtime Pentagon official, Harold Rhode, a specialist on Islam who speaks Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish, and Farsi. Though Feith would not be officially confirmed until July 2001, career military and civilian officials in NESA began to watch his office with concern after Rhode set up shop in Feith’s office in early January. Rhode, seen by many veteran staffers as an ideological gadfly, was officially assigned to the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, an in-house Pentagon think tank headed by fellow neocon Andrew Marshall.

Rhode helped Feith lay down the law about the department’s new anti-Iraq, and broadly anti-Arab, orientation. In one telling incident, Rhode accosted and harangued a visiting senior Arab diplomat, telling him that there would be no “bartering in the bazaar anymore. You’re going to have to sit up and pay attention when we say so.”
Rhode refused to be interviewed for this story, saying cryptically, “Those who speak, pay.”

According to insiders, Rhode worked with Feith to purge career Defense officials who weren’t sufficiently enthusiastic about the muscular anti-Iraq crusade that Wolfowitz and Feith wanted. Rhode appeared to be “pulling people out of nooks and crannies of the Defense Intelligence Agency and other places to replace us with,” says a former analyst. “They wanted nothing to do with the professional staff. And they wanted us the fuck out of there.”

[…]

Besides Cheney, key members of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, including Perle and ex-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, all Iraq hawks, had direct input into NESA/OSP. The offices of NESA were located on the Pentagon’s fourth floor, seventh corridor of D Ring, and the Policy Board’s offices were directly below, on the third floor. During the run-up to the Iraq war, Gingrich often came up for closed-door meetings with Luti, who in 1996 had served as a congressional fellow in Speaker of the House Gingrich’s office.

As OSP got rolling, Luti brought in Colonel Bruner, a former military aide to Gingrich, and, together, Luti and Bruner opened the door to a vast flow of bogus intelligence fed to the Pentagon by Iraqi defectors associated with Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress group of exiles. Chalabi founded the Iraqi National Congress in 1992, with the help of a shadowy CIA-connected public-relations firm called the Rendon Group, one of whose former employees, Francis Brooke, has been a top aide to Chalabi ever since.

Selective Intelligence by Seymour M. Hersh
Issue of 2003-05-12 – Posted 2003-05-05

Donald Rumsfeld has his own special sources. Are they reliable?

Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, 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. By last fall, the operation rivalled both the C.I.A. and the Pentagon’s own Defense Intelligence Agency, the D.I.A., as President Bush’s main source of intelligence regarding Iraq’s possible possession of weapons of mass destruction and connection with Al Qaeda.

The director of the Special Plans operation is Abram Shulsky, a scholarly expert in the works of the political philosopher Leo Strauss. Shulsky has been quietly working on intelligence and foreign-policy issues for three decades; he was on the staff of the Senate Intelligence Com-mittee in the early nineteen-eighties and served in the Pentagon under Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle during the Reagan Administration, after which he joined the Rand Corporation. The Office of Special Plans is overseen by Under-Secretary of Defense, William Luti, a retired Navy captain. Luti was an early advocate of military action against Iraq, and, as the Administration moved toward war and policymaking power shifted toward the civilians in the Pentagon, he took on increasingly important responsibilities.

W. Patrick Lang, the former chief of Middle East intelligence at the D.I.A., said, “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.”

AEI – Iraq Needs A Revolution ◊ by David Wurmser

(AEI) Nov. 12, 1997 — In 1995 Hussein Kamel, Saddam’s son-in-law, defected to Jordan. His defection gave U.S. policy makers the idea of tapping a group of former Iraqi officials to plot a coup. The United States moved in 1996 to support a group under the command of Ayad Alawi, himself a defector from Saddam’s regime. But the movement, known as the “Wifaq” (Arabic for “trust”), was plagued from the start by double agents.

Indeed, Saddam penetrated it far more effectively than it penetrated his inner circle. In July 1996 Saddam’s security apparatus swept across Iraq and arrested hundreds of the Wifaq’s agents. Saddam’s security services then used CIA communications equipment, captured from the defectors, to contact the CIA station chief in Amman, Jordan, to crow over their victory.

RELATED DIARIES & COMMENTS ::

 1. Conspiracy Indictment Next?! – Josh Marshall TPM Agrees ¶ DoJ Press Release
 2. Mr. X Is David Wurmser ME Advisor to VP Cheney ¶ Link to ISA John Bolton
 3. White House Awaits Grand Jury News ¶ It’s Rove … Lawrence O’Donnell
 4. DeLay :: Gotcha – Fingerprints et al! ¶ Abramoff & Bob Ney
 5. Prosecutor Fitzgerald Zeroes In :: Cheney – CIA Feud!
 6. CIRCLE CLOSED :: Neocons – AIPAC – Shill Reporter ¶ Laurie Mylroie – Benador Associates
 7. As Time Evolves :: Neocon Think ¶ A DEEP THROAT?
 8. THIS IS MAJOR! ¶ Our Reichstag’s Fire
 9. Israel and AIPAC Accused in Spy Case of Franklin, Pentagon Analyst
10. U.S. District Court Indictment Larry Franklin & AIPAC Directors
11. Judith Miller :: A Need To Know Basis
12. Judith Miller :: Libya – Gaddafi – Poindexter