The Octopus of Plamegate and Yellowcake
How can the White House, how can special prosecutor Fitzgerald, still claim that the two scandals are separate? The Italian newspaper La Repubblica, and here at home Josh Marshall, Laura Rozen, Knight Ridder's Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel and the HuffPost's own James Moore have been doing some riveting digging into the root of the scandal.
La Repubblica lays out the timeline showing the Italian origins of the forged documents as part of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's desire to please Bush on the eve of his first visit to the White House. And just like Watergate, the paper reports that a simple burglary seems to have started it all, this one into Niger's Italian embassy where they copped some stationery and an official stamp. It is great reading (and if my parents were still alive they'd be thrilled that my post-collegiate stint translating for La Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli finally paid off).
What is most fascinating to me, however, is where the clumsy fakes went from there. (Did I say clumsy? Ambassador Wilson didn't even have to go all the way to Niger to debunk them, an IAEA researcher did so by just a few minutes Googling.) The story as we know it now goes that after the CIA saw through them immediately but SISMI, the Italian CIA, found the neocons in the White House and the DoD more than sympathetic. The neocon that most interests me is the one sent to Italy twice on a fishing expedition for evidence that Saddam was pursuing WMDs.
I'm talking about Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute.
And here is where Plamegate becomes irrefutably linked with Yellowcake and any prosecutor truly interested in ferreting out the truth would have to pursue this line. Michael Ledeen is none other than Karl Rove's only full-time foreign policy advisor. He is also an extremist nut who has been hovering around most of the worst scandals plaguing this country and Italy since the 1970s from the Italian P2 Masonic scandal to Iran-Contra.
So what I'd like to know is did SISMI really cook up the Yellowcake story on their own and it is just a coincidence that Italo-file Ledeen picked up on it later and ran back to his bosses with it, or did the Yellowcake lie begin with Rove, Ledeen (and his other boss the DoD's Douglas Feith) and they just used Ledeen's long-time contacts in Italian intelligence to make it seem as if they hadn't hatched the scheme themselves?
Link Here
La Repubblica lays out the timeline showing the Italian origins of the forged documents as part of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's desire to please Bush on the eve of his first visit to the White House. And just like Watergate, the paper reports that a simple burglary seems to have started it all, this one into Niger's Italian embassy where they copped some stationery and an official stamp. It is great reading (and if my parents were still alive they'd be thrilled that my post-collegiate stint translating for La Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli finally paid off).
What is most fascinating to me, however, is where the clumsy fakes went from there. (Did I say clumsy? Ambassador Wilson didn't even have to go all the way to Niger to debunk them, an IAEA researcher did so by just a few minutes Googling.) The story as we know it now goes that after the CIA saw through them immediately but SISMI, the Italian CIA, found the neocons in the White House and the DoD more than sympathetic. The neocon that most interests me is the one sent to Italy twice on a fishing expedition for evidence that Saddam was pursuing WMDs.
I'm talking about Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute.
And here is where Plamegate becomes irrefutably linked with Yellowcake and any prosecutor truly interested in ferreting out the truth would have to pursue this line. Michael Ledeen is none other than Karl Rove's only full-time foreign policy advisor. He is also an extremist nut who has been hovering around most of the worst scandals plaguing this country and Italy since the 1970s from the Italian P2 Masonic scandal to Iran-Contra.
So what I'd like to know is did SISMI really cook up the Yellowcake story on their own and it is just a coincidence that Italo-file Ledeen picked up on it later and ran back to his bosses with it, or did the Yellowcake lie begin with Rove, Ledeen (and his other boss the DoD's Douglas Feith) and they just used Ledeen's long-time contacts in Italian intelligence to make it seem as if they hadn't hatched the scheme themselves?
Link Here
posted by Kangaroo Brisbane Australia at 5:40 PM
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