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Do you think we have a state run media? On July 23, 2003 Fox News had an article, “Top Bush Adviser Apologizes for Role in Iraq Intel Flap”. On the same day the Washington Times had an article “Rice aide says fault his for nuclear item in State of Union”.
Both articles have these identical quotes,” A second top Bush administration official on Tuesday stepped up and took partial blame for allowing a disputed intelligence claim on Iraq's weapons program into the president's State of the Union address.
Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, in a rare on-the-record session with reporters, said that he had received two memos from the CIA and a phone call from agency Director George Tenet last October raising objections to an allegation that Iraq was seeking to buy uranium ore from Africa to use in building nuclear weapons.
As a result, Hadley said the offending passage was excised from a speech on Iraq the president gave in Cincinnati last Oct. 7. But Hadley suggested that details from the memos and phone call had slipped from his attention as the State of the Union was being put together.”
FOX NEWS added this cynical assertion that this latest admission exonerates 43,
”Hadley's admission also seemed to exonerate Bush from accusations the president knowingly utilized false information when making the case for war with Iraq.
So, we are to believe that Hadley’s boss, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice had no idea about this. Just as we are supposed to believe that Cheney, even though he sent former Ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger in February 2002 to check out allegations that Saddam Hussein had tried to purchase uranium for a nuclear weapons program from Niger, never received a report from Wilson. If you can believe this nonsense, then you must also further believe that none of this was communicated to 43, who is ultimately responsible for what he says.
Senator Bob Graham is the Former Chairman of the Intelligence Committee. His opinions are the product of thoughtful experience in these situations.
Speaking about this on the July 13 2003 “Meet the Press” show Senator Graham has this to say regarding the CIA and the sixteen words, “No, I don’t think this is a George Tenet problem. I think George Tenet, as was indicated in the news over the weekend, had communicated as early as October that this was bogus information, unreliable…There’s another fact: Who was it that asked for this review of the Niger nuclear material question? It was the vice president. Mr. Wilson, the former ambassador, was sent to Niger in response to the vice president’s questions about this issue. So, assumedly, the vice president got a report back in response to his question and that report contained the Wilson memo of his assessment of the situation, and yet although the vice president is just down the hallway from the president’s office, information didn’t get communicated? That’s hard to believe.”
Regarding the lies that Cheney has spread that he didn’t get the report from the CIA, Graham, on the same show, further stated, “I will have to say that stretches belief that the vice president who had gone to the CIA offices in Langley, Virginia, on several occasions had specifically asked that there be a review of this matter. The idea that he didn’t get a report back and that that report did not contain the recommendations of Ambassador Wilson, I think I’ve got some swamp land to sell to you.”
This final excerpt from the same show from Senator Graham, “Tim, as I see it, this is not an issue of George Tenet. This is an issue of George Bush. And it’s not a singular incident. There’s been a pattern in this administration, beginning with the development of the energy policy in the first few weeks, running through environmental policy, economic policy, and now Iraq and the war on terror, in which the American people have not been let in to understand what is going on, what the basis of decisions will be, and we end up having to go through almost a grammar lesson of word-by-word assessment of what’s been said in order to understand what the leadership of this country is intending to communicate”, sums up the history of stonewalling and abuses of executive privilege that this awful regime is subjecting the country to.
At first glance, Hadley and Tenet’s falling on his sword here is the same as Ollie letting Reagan off for Iran-Contra scandal. The current web of deceit gets more tangled here because too quickly we have had a mind-numbing procession of fall guys. After Tenet and before Hadley there was Robert Joseph. Do you remember him?
When Tenet appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee in closed session, portions of the classified hearing's contents were disclosed. Illinois Senator Richard Durbin announced that the director of Central Intelligence had told the committee that the CIA actually had objected to inclusion of the controversial language in the run-up to the State of the Union address, but that an unnamed White House official had insisted it be included. Sound like what Graham was saying doesn’t it?
Later, anonymous congressional and administration sources attached a name to that inflammatory charge: Ambassador Robert Joseph, a special assistant to the president with responsibility for counter-proliferation matters on the National Security Council staff.
Who will be the next to blame? Shouldn’t it be the clown who spoke the words?
In the run-up to the Iraq War we were frequently told that 43’s team had “secret information” but because “sources and methods” could not be exposed, the information could not be shared. What a lie as “sources and methods” certainly could be exposed when it served 43’s purpose.
Senior Bush officials blew the cover of a US intelligence officer working covertly in a field of vital importance to national security--and by doing so broke the law. Do you think that the man who would “return honor and dignity to the White House” would retaliate against anyone?
Soon after Wilson disclosed his trip in the media and made the White House look bad the payback came. Conservative journalist Bob Novak's July 14, 2003, column presented the background about Wilson's mission and contained the following sentences, "Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate" the allegation.
In a despicable act of retribution the White House, through one of its many Rove controlled media operatives, outed, and effectively destroyed an undercover CIA officer, and all of her “sources and methods”.
This is not only a possible breach of national security; it is a potential violation of law. Under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, it is a crime for anyone who has access to classified information to disclose intentionally information identifying a covert agent.
The Sept. 11 attacks were preventable, a Congressional report to be released on July 24th 2003 says. The report, by a joint committee of the House and Senate intelligence panels, found that for nearly two years before the attacks, the Central Intelligence Agency knew about the terror connections between the two men, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhazmi, who in 2000 moved to San Diego, frequenting Muslim circles that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had infiltrated. The report redacted 28 pages relating to Saudi Arabia.
As hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar enter the US
for the first time (see November 1999), they are met at the Los Angeles
International Airport by a Saudi man named Omar al-Bayoumi. He drives them to San Diego, arranges for them to live in an apartment a few doors away in the same apartment building, guarantees the lease and pays $1,550 in cash to cover the first two months rent. He also helps them open a bank account, obtain car insurance, get Social Security cards and call flight schools in Florida. Alhazmi and Almihdhar may have reimbursed al-Bayoumi for the rent money later the same day. Al-Bayoumi is arrested after 9/11, but released after one week. Some FBI officials later suggest that al-Bayoumi was an al-Qaeda agent.
For some Machiavellian reason the FBI is refused to allow Abdussattar Shaikh, the FBI informant who lived with hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar to testify before the Congressional inquiry. His local FBI contact is also not allowed to testify. The FBI claims the informer would have nothing interesting to say.
Recently retired San Diego FBI agent Butler has been unable to speak to the media, but accounts of his testimony say he was the agent who managed Abdussattar Shaikh. Butler claims he might have uncovered a hint of the 9/11 plot if the CIA had provided the FBI with more information earlier about Alhazmi and Almihdhar. Butler disclosed that he had been monitoring a flow of Saudi Arabian money involving Osama Basnan and Omar al-Bayoumi that wound up in the hands of two of the 9/11 hijackers, but his supervisors failed to take any action on the warnings. It is not known when Butler started investigating the money flow, or warned his supervisors. Despite the knowledge about the Saudi money trail involving them, both Basnan and al-Bayoumi are allowed to leave the U.S. Basnan was deported to Saudi Arabia, where he disappears and al-Bayoumi, who has recently been living in Britain, disappears as well.
All of the above regarding the Saudis and the 9-11 tragedy is easily researchable and resides in moderate newspaper articles and magazines. I’d hate to be anyone in the U.S. who had any relations with Saudi Arabians. Guess who has such a relationship, not only with peripheral Saudis but with one who is bin laden’s brother in law, as well as bagman?
In the January 31, 2003 article, “Global Eye -- Kean Insight” by Chris Floyd, he writes about retired New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean, being named Kissinger's 9-11 Investigation replacement. Kean is described as a "safe pair of hands," by the professional spinners in the mainstream media. Floyd continues, “Fortune Magazine reports this week that both Kean and Bush share an unusually well-placed business partner: one Khalid bin Mahfouz -- perhaps better known as "Osama bin Laden's bagman" or even "Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law." He concludes that, “ Kean is a director of Amerada Hess, an oil giant married up to Saudi Arabia's Delta Oil in a venture to pump black gold in Azerbaijan. (The partnership is incorporated in a secretive offshore "tax haven," natch. You can't expect a GOP inner-circle criminal, like Kean, to pay taxes like some grubby wage slave.)” One of those cut-outs was Mahfouz factotum James Bath, a partner in Dubya's early oil venture, Arbusto, who has admitted serving as a pass-through for secret Saudi money. It is easy to keep connecting the dots when you see that years later, when Bush's maladroit business skills were about to sink another of his companies, Harken Energy, the firm was saved by a $25 million investment from a Swiss bank -- a subsidiary of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, partly owned by the beneficent Mahfouz. The U.S. Senate labeled BCI as, "one of the largest criminal enterprises in history". It doesn’t end there as Floyd concludes,“ Somehow we doubt that worthy Kean will poke very hard at the nexus of intersections between his own business partner, Mahfouz, and the bin Ladens, the Bushes, the Saudi royals, Saddam, the CIA and BCCI.” So, Kean is slime and 43 rewards him for his immorality by naming him Kissinger's 9-11 Investigation replacement. 43 rewards flunkies who have passed him money through, an impossible to estimate, number of money laundering schemes. 43’s motives are always disreputable, so how can we trust this Iraq 2 to be anything other than a money making bonanza for 43 and his soul-mates.
His principal soul-mate is the blood-thirsty, heartless Cheney. Remember 43 picked Cheney because he wanted an experienced hand for his early days as the first selected resident of the White House.
William Rivers Pitt mentions that during Cheney’s Halliburton days the company he was CEO of did $73 million in business with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. He writes, “Another corporation that stands to do well by a war in Iraq is Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton. Ostensibly, Brown & Root is in the construction business, and thus has won a share of the $900 million government contract for the rebuilding of post-war Iraqi bridges, roads and other basic infrastructure. This is but the tip of the financial iceberg, as the oil wells will also have to be repaired after parent-company Halliburton puts out the fires.
More ominously is Brown & Root's stock in trade: the building of permanent
American military bases. There are twelve permanent U.S. bases in Kosovo today, all built and maintained by Brown & Root for a multi-billion dollar profit. If anyone should wonder why the administration has not offered an exit strategy to the Iraq war plans, the presence of Brown & Root should answer them succinctly. We do not plan on exiting. In all likelihood, Brown & Root is in Iraq to build permanent bases there, from which attacks upon other Middle Eastern nations can be staged and managed.”
Seems like William Rivers Pitt is as good at predicting the future as Nostradamus was. Really, if you assume that an experienced GOP villain, such as the v.p. would act according to his easily identified pattern, then you could guess that this regime would have acted just as blatantly immoral as it has.
Cheney and Bush will say that they have divested themselves of these business interests. Who can believe that given the GOP, long-standing, richly duplicitous tradition, of having money laundering schemes? These GOP constantly re-use ideas. Reagan’s trickle down theory of “voodoo economics” is the parent to 43’s plan of giving all of the money to the top 1%. Isn’t 43’s scheme of an “ever-lasting war against terrorism”, just a moderately bastardized adaptation of Tricky Dick’s “domino theory” that he and Kissinger used to elongate their reign of terror? Given these GOP patterns, it is clear to see that money laundering, which occurred during Ollie’s in Iran-Contra scandal, can be applied to this present situation by 43 and his heart diseased, or is it bereft of heart, v.p.
Bob Connors
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