From Joshua Micah Marshall @ Talking Points Memo
For those of you who journeyed down this dark alley almost two years ago, you know that a lot turns on just when in the timeline someone mentioned Plame's name, who went first, just what they knew, and various other details.
- - - - -
Now, you'll also remember that a couple months back the usual ducks on the right were clucking about the whole investigation coming to an end-- and apparently the whole thing had come to nothing.
That particular cluck never quite computed to me because Fitzgerald shouldn't be pressing [the] matter of jailing journalists unless he thinks he's on his way to prosecuting a serious crime.
So just a question: Would Fitzgerald have pushed to get Cooper and Miller in the slammer if some other party in the White House weren't in a lot of trouble?
And one last question: Cooper and Miller are very different kinds of journalists, swim in very different waters. Are they really in this jam for the same reasons?
- - - - -
I've gotten hints or suggestions from several sources over the last month that new information is bubbling to the surface, not about who leaked Valerie Plame's identity, but who was behind the underlying caper that started the whole drama afoot in the first place: those phoney Niger uranium documents.
As longtime readers of this site know, last year colleagues of mine and I were able to trace the documents back to a former Italian intelligence agent named Rocco Martino. Martino was the "Italian businessman" who tried to sell the documents to Elizabetta Burba, the journalist who eventually brought them to the US Embassy in Rome.
We were able determine that the documents had been put into Martino's hands by a then-serving member of SISMI-- Italian military intelligence. And this SISMI colonel had done so using a women working in the Niger embassy in Rome, an Italian national, as a cut-out.
This was, as you might imagine, more than enough to make us want to know a lot more. But we were never able to develop any conclusive proof about who or what was behind the SISMI colonel or what the backstory was within SISMI.
Suspicions, we had plenty. But in terms of hard facts, we hit a wall just inside SISMI.
Just who forged the documents? And, more significantly, who put the whole process in motion? And why had SISMI or elements within it involved themselves?
From AfterDowningStreet.org
John Conyers writes:
How do the facts and intelligence get fixed around the policy, as the highest ranking British government officials have alleged the Bush Administration was doing to justify the Iraq war?
One way would be by having the Vice President hover over the shoulders of intelligence analysts. This paragraph caught my eye from a 2003 Washington Post article. Notice how close the wording of the last sentence is to the language in the Downing Street Minutes:
"Vice President Cheney and his most senior aide made multiple trips to the CIA over the past year to question analysts studying Iraq's weapons programs and alleged links to al Qaeda, creating an environment in which some analysts felt they were being pressured to make their assessments fit with the Bush administration's policy objectives, according to senior intelligence officials."
- - - - -
We are all now familiar with the President's false statement in his 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq was seeking to buy Uranium from Niger. I trust that all of my readers know that, prior to this address, former Ambassador Joe Wilson was sent to Niger by the Central Intelligence Agency to investigate these claims and the documents purporting to offer support for this allegation. He reported back that he had found no basis for the claims. Shocked that the allegation had found its way into the most important speech a President can give, a speech that constitutes a President's assessment to Congress about the stability and security of the United States, Wilson went public about the falsity of the allegation.
In an effort to smear Wilson and intimidate and other prospective whistleblowers, high ranking Administration officials leaked, in violation of federal law, the name of Wilson's wife and the fact that she was a clandestine operative for the CIA. A grand jury has been impaneled to determine who the leaker or leakers are, and what legal actions should be taken against them. (One journalist is now saying that the leaker was Karl Rove.)
But, as Mr. Marshall has been asking, what about the documents that purported to prove that Iraq was seeking to purchase uranium from Niger, and were later proven to be obvious forgeries? Who forged them, and [at] whose request and why? Mr. Marshall may be closer to the answer.
- - - - -
This is a very big story.
ConyersBlog.us TalkingPointsMemo.com AfterDowningStreet.org |
No comments:
Post a Comment