I should have read this entry at Informed Comment more closely a couple of days ago. I think it is pointing in exactly the right direction:
Laura Rozen has reported on the stalled state of the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation of Feith and his "Office of Special Plans," as well as of meetings by Feith employees Lawrence Franklin and Harold Rhode with Iranian arms dealer and notorious fraudster Manucher Ghorbanifar in Rome (with the Italian Defense Secretary and the head of Italian Military Intelligence also in attendance). When Rockefeller brought up the possibility that the Rome meeting was illegal, Feith and his office abruptly ceased cooperating in the investigation. Feith has now left the Pentagon for private life, presumably to forestall further investigations of his activities in manufacturing a case for the Iraq War. His Iran desk officer, Lawrence Franklin, has pleaded guilty to espionage for Israel via the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
So how might the investigation of Feith's office (which is apparently dead in the water given that the Republicans on the committee would probably decline to issue subpoenas) delay the phase two conclusions that Roberts should be producing? Feith and the Office of Special Plans were central to these conclusions. If he and his employees are stonewalling, and if Roberts won't subpoena them or threaten them with contempt of Congress, then it is hard to see how any progress can be made.
A proper Senate investigation offers the tantalizing possibility of a Unified Field Theory of the Iraq War fraud. That is, Feith's Office of Special Plans, Franklin's Pentagon espionage cell on behalf of the Likud Party in Israel, and Libby's campaign against Ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife Valerie Plame Wilson could all be shown to be inter-related. At the center of the conspiracy were a group of hawks determined to set the United States in motion to fight wars against Iraq, Syria and Iran; for the Neoconservatives among them, these wars would leave the Likud Party free to pursue its expansionist ambitions.
1 comment:
This has been a working theory among the anti-bush nativist right in the US. One libertarian/old conservative site that has been pushing this is antiwar.com(Justin Raimondo)
The real key to all this appears to be determining the method by which the bad intel entered the stream and was "stovepiped" past critical analysis directly onto the desks of top admin officials.
The OSP is one of those mechanisms which took intel from outside the stream and channeled it directly to Cheney's office.
There have also been some allegations that the flow in the Franklin/AIPAC scandal was not just out, but also in. Then, you have the meeting in Italy of Ledeen, Rhode and Franklin with top Sismi officials, Chalabi and Iranians.
http://bornatthecrestoftheempire.blogspot.com/2005/10/ledeen-iranians-and-sismi.html
This is the key to unlock the whole mess, and this is why the Bush admin has been blocking "Phase II" of the Senate intel committee WMD investigation.
The OSP was effectively the intel shop for Cheney's office and the WHIG.
Then today, in an AFP piece, Wilkerson claims that Cheney's staff was spying on members of the NSC to such a degree that they stopped sending emails to each other.
http://bornatthecrestoftheempire.blogspot.com/2005/11/cheneys-staff-spied-on-nsc.html
If true, that's huge.
Mike
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