"The Italian Letter" Rove Wanted To Axe Cheney, Cheney Got Pissed & Other Stories

[kpete]

In the Mail: "The Italian Letter"
By Jeralyn, Section Media
Posted on Wed Apr 04, 2007 at 06:08:19 PM EST
...............................

Among the books findings:

---A simple google search by the CIA on the "verbatim text" of the accord it received from the Italian Embassy on Feb. 5, 2002 could have changed history. The text is full of errors including incorrect names and dates. Had the CIA done a simple information search, the hoax would have been discovered and died then and there.

---There's another Scooter Libby story, and it's one that says Libby took the fall for Karl Rove. The authors also say Rove floated the idea to conservative supporters of dropping Dick Cheney from the 2004 ticket. Cheney found out and was far from pleased.

---Cheney had been told many times by intelligence operatives over a period of years there was no evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program or operational ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda.

http://www.talkleft.com/story/2007/4/4/19819/08727

[Fridays Child]

1. It seems to me that Cheney would have had the power to sink Rove...

...in the Plame case, if he had wanted to. If it's true that Rove tried to axe Cheney, in 2004, I'm surprised that Cheney let Libby take the fall, in 2007.

[seemslikeadream]

2. Thanks

:hi:




http://rising-hegemon.blogspot.com/2007/04/italian-letter.html

It was 3 a.m. in Italy on Jan. 29, 2003, when President Bush in Washington began reading his State of the Union address that included the now famous -- later retracted -- 16 words: "The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Though it's a long article, it still suffers from being far too abbreviated.

Like most Europeans, Elisabetta Burba, an investigative reporter for the Italian newsweekly Panorama, waited until the next day to read the newspaper accounts of Bush's remarks. But when she came to the 16 words, she recalled, she got a sudden sinking feeling in her stomach. She wondered: How could the American president have mentioned a uranium sale from Africa?

Burba felt uneasy because more than three months earlier, she had turned over to the U.S. Embassy in Rome documents about an alleged uranium sale by the central African nation of Niger. And she knew now that the documents were fraudulent and the 16 words wrong.


The entirety of the book tracks the use of the letter and how it was demonstrably and plainly false -- in fact, identified as such with a few easy and basis google searches. Anyone who studied the matter, from French intelligence of matters in their former colony to the CIA official at the U.S. Embassy in Rome to Joe Wilson found that from the dodginess of the document to the near impossible logistics and nature of the obtaining of yellowcake that matter was almost certainly false. Yet, somehow the claims were made.

The book also details other matters that I frankly didn't know beforehand, such as Iraq already having 550 tons of yellowcake uranium within its borders, all under the lock and key of the IDEA so there was little need for another 500 tons. It also details how the British government somehow became the Bush Administration's factotum in holding the same fraudulent documents to say the Uranium claims were true, later sloppily used by the GOP Controlled and uniquely partisan Intelligence Committee which perpetuated the fraud about the fraud -- all with the purpose of attacking Joe Wilson instead of doing its job.

It also shows that Italian intelligence is an unbelievable joke, and known to be so, and raises major questions as to just how the Bush Administration and the Italian government at the time under Berlusconi were enabling each other. Sadly, the question of who actually forged the document remains difficult to ascertain (maybe it was Khalid Sheik Mohammad?), but the chain of possession of the forgery comes out of the bizarre world of third world countries who have small staffs in dumpy locations looking to make a buck and another world where intelligence documents are sold to various agencies or journalists for cash.

Finally, for you folks who like multiple exposures of fraudulent behavior, you'll really enjoy one section of the book that demonstrates the lengths to which Christopher Hitchens will go to lie and make any claim he shits out into the ether seem like truth. Hitchens is truly exposed, in quick work, as a complete and utter charlatan on the issue of Niger, Iraq and related matters.


http://faithfulprogressive.blogspot.com/2007/03/fp-book-review-italian-letter-by-peter.html

But as numerous sources confirm, the US didn't have a reasonable government in the immediate aftermath of 9/11--rather we were led by a secretive cabal that was happy to seize upon even forged Italian garbage-intelligence-for-a-fee if it would help them make the case for an invasion of Iraq. The War in Iraq was not a failure of intelligence, it was a strategic and policy failure of the first order.

The Italian Letter follows the story with detailed reporting and the quick pace of a good spy novel. The story also considers the CIA leak scandal in a new light. One interesting suggestion comes from Lawrence Wilkerson, Sec. Powell's former Chief of Staff--who speculates (with no proof) that both Richard Armitage and Colin Powell "were complicit with" the White House in leaking Ms. Plame Wilson's undercover identity. (p.236)

Other interesting gossip, er, reporting relates to how much Cheney and Rove are said to dislike each other--to the point that Cheney appeared willing to throw Karl under the bus in the CIA Leak criminal matter.

But the single most disturbing theme is how willfully blind or intentionally misleading Cheney and the secretive White House Iraq Group were in fairly analyzing the intelligence relating to the threat to the US posed by Iraq. No fair-minded person would have been convinced by that intelligence, but Cheney was.

The authors quote Carl Ford, a former principal deputy to Cheney during Desert Storm: "Ford who had access to every snippet of intelligence on Iraq's alleged nuclear program before the 2003 invasion, described it as 'so piss-poor that everybody was simply guessing based on very fragmented information...I had never seen such limited data making such important calls... The fact is that (Cheney) read the same things I did...And if he thought there were good things there (proving that Iraq was rebuilding its nuclear program), then he's not as smart as I thought he was." (pp.223-224)


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2007/04/03/DI2007040300438.html


Newark, Del.: With Democrats the majority in the Congress now, why are they not pushing for a bipartisan inquiry by respected names from the past about how we got into this war? Our politicians and our country owe it to us.

Peter Eisner: A fine question. Henry Waxman in the House is in fact asking Condoleezza Rice to provide information on the Niger story. There is still a lot to be told. Waxman has asked her to appear before the committee and so far hasn't answered.

_______________________

Memphis, Tenn.: Mr. Eisner, I look forward to reading your book. Is it possible that an obscure intelligence agent contrived the idea, then manufactured documents that became then a principal source and case for this war? All this for money, then he or she planted this arrangement throughout Europe with other sources? Comments?

Peter Eisner: No, I don't think that Rocco Martino forged the documents. It seems likely that other elements, perhaps close to Italian intelligence, pulled old material out of dusty files and adapted them to use. The reason? Perhaps for money, and perhaps to help Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister, provide good offices to the Bush administration

_______________________

Vienna, Va.: This information have being circulation around for a long time -- why wasn't The Washington Post aware of it? Or did The Post choose to ignore it?

Peter Eisner: Pieces of the information have been out there and published. One key point is that we actually were able to track the trail of the documents from their delivery to Elisabetta Burba, the Milan journalist, to Washington. And comparing versions, one finds glaring errors.

_______________________

Washington: I'm curious why your piece left out any mention of what British intelligence was up to during the relevant time period -- after all, the allegations were attributed to the British government. What do they say about the allegations? Also, is it not the case that Wilson's infamous piece in the New York Times ultimately was discredited? Please respond ... we deserve the complete story, not just the convenient parts.

Peter Eisner: The excerpt only gave us so much space. In the book, we deal with the fact that the British claimed to have their own sources. Most intelligence sources we spoke to said that it was highly unlikely that Britain would have intelligence that was not available to the United States, and especially to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Britain is required to provide such information to the IAEA.

_______________________

Vienna, Va.: Why is there no mention to the break-in at the Nigerian Embassy in Italy a month before?

Peter Eisner: We discuss the break-in at the Niger embassy in Rome, which took place a year earlier. It had all the signs of an inside job, and possibly was intended to divert attention from the real intelligence operation that was going on elsewhere. Seems unlikely that Niger officials participated in the fraud.

[Olney Blue]

3. Everyone in the WH was stabbing someone else in the back.

Why am I not surprised?