Reply #47: Who would've thought that the CIA and JCS would do this, too? [View All]

[leveymg]

On March 30, 2003, just ten days after after the start of a massive U.S. military occupation of Iraq, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency ordered the agency's Inspector General to refer the Plame outing to the Justice Department for prosecution. In the following months, as it became clear that there were no substantial stocks of WMD in Iraq, and that an enormous deception had taken place, the Joint Chiefs of Staff launched their own investigation. That investigation was vigorously opposed by the White House and Secretary Rumsfeld.

In July 2005, the FBI arrested Larry Franklin, a reserve Air Force officer assigned to the Office of Special Plans (OSP), a unit set up within the Pentagon to bypass the Defense Intelligence Agency's normal channels of intelligence gathering, analysis and dissemination related to South Asia and the Middle East. Acting as a cooperating witness prior to his arrest, the investigation of Col. Franklin revealed a network of Israeli espionage and American conspirators who had fed false intelligence about Iraq and Iran to the Office of the Vice President (OVP) that supported the policy decision already made when the Bush-Cheney Administration came into office to launch military attacks on Iraq and Iran.

Simultaneously, as the occupation of Iraq bogged down into an increasingly bloody quagmire that revealed American military vulnerabilities, the JCS notified the White House that it did not find Iran war plans put forward to be legal, workable or in the national interest.

That's the context, my friend, that the U.S. military would not block domestic and international prosecution of figures in the Administration for war crimes and other offenses related to the invasion and occupation of Iraq.