Reply #1: Ledeen is a dangerous liar...

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Iran-Contra II?
Fresh scrutiny on a rogue Pentagon operation.

By Joshua Micah Marshall, Laura Rozen, and Paul Glastris


The Italian Job

The first meeting occurred in Rome in December, 2001. It included Franklin, Rhode, and another American, the neoconservative writer and operative Michael Ledeen, who organized the meeting. (According to UPI, Ledeen was then working for Feith as a consultant.) Also in attendance was Ghorbanifar and a number of other Iranians. One of the Iranians, according to two sources familiar with the meeting, was a former senior member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard who claimed to have information about dissident ranks within the Iranian security services. The Washington Monthly has also learned from U.S. government sources that Nicolo Pollari, the head of Italy's military intelligence agency, SISMI, attended the meetings, as did the Italian Minister of Defense Antonio Martino, who is well-known in neoconservative circles in Washington.

Alarm bells about the December 2001 meeting began going off in U.S. government channels only days after it occurred. On December 12th 2001, at the U.S. Embassy in Rome, America's newly-installed Ambassador, Mel Sembler, sat down for a private dinner with Ledeen, an old friend of his from Republican Party politics, and Martino, the Italian defense minister. The conversation quickly turned to the meeting. The problem was that this was the first that Ambassador Sembler had heard about it.

According to U.S. government sources, Sembler immediately set about trying to determine what he could about the meeting and how it had happened. Since U.S. government contact with foreign government intelligence agencies is supposed to be overseen by the CIA, Sembler first spoke to the CIA station chief in Rome to find out what if anything he knew about the meeting with the Iranians. But that only raised more questions because the station chief had been left in the dark as well. Soon both Sembler and the Rome station chief were sending anxious queries back to the State Department and CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia, respectively, raising alarms on both sides of the Potomac.

The meeting was a source of concern for a series of overlapping reasons. Since the late 1980s Ghorbanifar has been the subject of two CIA "burn notices." The Agency believes Ghorbanifar is a serial "fabricator" and forbids its officers from having anything to do with him. Moreover, why were mid-level Pentagon officials organizing meetings with a foreign intelligence agency behind the back of the CIA -- a clear breach of US government protocol? There was also a matter of personal chagrin for Sembler: At State Department direction, he had just been cautioning the Italians to restrain their contacts with bad-acting states like Iran (with which Italy has extensive trade ties).

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No one at the U.S. Embassy in Rome seems to have known about this second Rome meeting. But the back-channel's continuing existence became apparent the following month -- July 2002 -- when Ledeen again contacted Sembler and told him that he'd be back in Rome in September to continue "his work" with the Iranians (This time Ledeen made no mention of any involvement by Pentagon officials; later he told Sembler it would be in August rather than September.) An exasperated Sembler again sent word back to Washington and Hadley again went into motion telling Ledeen, in no uncertain terms, to back off.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0410.marshall.html

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SISMI has long been notorious for far right, even neo-fascist, leanings. According to Italian judicial investigators, SISMI was deeply involved in numerous plots against Italy’s democratic government, including the 1980 Bologna train station terrorist bombing that left 85 dead and 200 injured. Senior SISMI officers were in cahoots with celebrated swindler Roberto Calvi, the neo-fascist P2 Masonic Lodge, other extreme rightist groups trying to destabilize Italy, the Washington neocon operative, Michael Ledeen, and the Iran-Contra conspirators. SISMI works hand in glove with US, British and Israeli intelligence. In the 1960’s and 70’s, SISMI reportedly carried out numerous operations for CIA, including bugging the Vatican, the Italian president’s palace, and foreign embassies. Italy’s civilian intelligence service, SISDE, associated with Italy’s political center-left, has long been a bitter rival of SISMI. After CIA rejected the Niger file, it was eagerly snapped up by VP Dick Cheney and his chief of staff, Lewis Libby, who were urgently seeking any reason, no matter how specious, to invade Iraq. Cheney passed the phony data to Bush, who used it in his January, 2003 address to the nation in spite of warnings from CIA . . .


So Franklin, Ledeen, and Rhode, all of them pro-Likud operatives, just happen to be meeting with SISMI (the proto-fascist purveyor of the false Niger uranium story about Iraq and the alleged Iran-Iraq plot against the rest of the world) and corrupt Iranian businessman and would-be revolutionary, Ghorbanifar, in Europe. The most reasonable conclusion is that they were conspiring together about the Next Campaign after Iraq, which they had already begun setting in train, which is to get Iran.

But now The Jerusalem Post reveals that at least one of the meetings was quite specific with regard to an attempt to torpedo better US/Iran relations:


The purpose of the meeting with Ghorbanifar was to undermine a pending deal that the White House had been negotiating with the Iranian government. At the time, Iran had considered turning over five al-Qaida operatives in exchange for Washington dropping its support for Mujahadeen Khalq, an Iraq-based rebel Iranian group listed as a terrorist organization by the State Department.

http://www.juancole.com/2004/08/pentagonisrael-spying-case-expands.html

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The most recent Ledeen-Ghorbanifar controversy is the series of meetings held between Ledeen and Ledeen's people from Feith's Pentagon office (specifically, the Office of Special Plans created to create the lies required for the attack on Iraq without having to worry about any inconvenient factual objections raised by the CIA), and Ghorbanifar and his associates (of course, the original Ledeen-Ghorbanifar controversy was a little thing we now know as Iran-Contra). These meetings went on despite the efforts of the State Department and the CIA to stop them. The first such meeting was held in Rome in December 2001, and by amazing coincidence the forged Niger yellowcake documents surfaced, in Rome, in October 2002 (the man who claims to be the source of the documents, Rocco Martino, is a man the FBI is remarkably uninterested in talking to). Rozen points out that included with the yellowcake documents was a completely over-the-top memo in which all the countries under sanctions conspired together to have the sanctions lifted (in my opinion, not the kind of document that somebody like Ghorbanifar or Chalabi would produce, but right up Ledeen's alley). Vincent Cannistaro has said that if you said the forger was Michael Ledeen, you'd be 'very close'.



One of the people attending these meetings was neocon Harold Rhode. Another was Larry Franklin, who currently is in a bit of trouble for allegedly providing Israel and its American agents with American classified material. None other than John Bolton - a guy who we know was involved in the improper removal of UN official Jose Bustani, Director-General of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, in order to stop Bustani from sending chemical weapons inspectors to Iraq and thus undermining Bush Administration lies about Iraq's possession of such weapons - was used to begin to spread the yellowcake lies (the State Department tried to hide Bolton's involvement). I think it is fair to say that our knowledge of the neocon conspiracy against Iraq - and the United States - is starting to come together.



All these characters got away with this stuff in order to provoke the attack on Iraq. It would be nice if they were not allowed to get away with it again and cause an attack on Iran based on the literary efforts of Ghorbanifar and his friend Michael Ledeen.

http://xymphora.blogspot.com/2005/06/mahdavi-ghorbanifar-ledeen.html