The Invisible Man

Who is The Invisible Man ?

I was not the only one who was enthusiastic about this idea and I -- Director Casey used several words to describe how he felt about it, all of which were effusive. He referred to it as the ultimate irony, the ultimate covert operation kind of thing and was very enthusiastic about it. --Oliver North, Select Committees Testimony, 7/8/87, p. 124. [Iran Contra Hearings]

Federal rules (namely Title 28 of the Code of Federal Regulations, Part 600.3) require the appointment of a prosecutor “selected from outside the United States government.” As United States Attorney in Chicago – one of the Bush Administration’s top Justice representatives in the Midwest – Fitzgerald hardly qualifies.

Mr. Inside Goes To Washington

Some miscellaneous tidbits regarding the Plame case:

We fell into an easy relationship and would banter back and forth about the new administration and its predecessors. After board meetings or other events, we'd often Metro back across town together. As the obsession with Iraq overtook many influential members of the Bush administration, our conversations turned frequently to the emerging debate on Iraq and the merits of the approach being advanced by the prowar crowd.--Joseph Wilson, recollecting his relationship with Brent Scrowcroft, from his book, The Politics of Truth. 

Posted at 07:40 AM ET, 07/14/2005

Obligatory Karl Rove Item

[Yesterday I tried to post this item about Karl Rove, but the blogging tool went haywire. I'm going to try again, DESPITE THE FACT THAT IT IS NOT LOCAL NEWS. Actually I guess it is local news if you consider that Rove lives and works here. In fact he lives in my neighborhood. So do the Wilsons. Rove and the Wilsons attend the same church. Even more important, we all shop at the same wine store. We bond over Bordeaux.]

The Plame-Rove church connection is also mentioned in the documentary/book Bush's Brain.

Vincent Cannistraro, Plame's former boss in Counter-terrorism, says she works in WINPAC.

She is a case officer in the CIA's clandestine service and works as an analyst on weapons of mass destruction.

Plame worked for both WINPAC and front company Brewster-Jennings.

...WINPAC, the group responsible for many of the flawed prewar assessments on Iraq.

See:

Curveball

This is from a neoconservative source:

DiGenova says he hasn’t changed his mind from what he told me in March, when we had a long conversation just before I left for a reporting trip to Iraq. He pointed out that the statute that protects the identity of covert agents “has a very high standard for prosecution."

“The only way an investigation can begin is if the agency swears — swears — that it took every conceivable step to protect this person’s identity.”

For example, the CIA had to answer 11 specific questions about what steps it took to protect the identity of a covert agent. But diGenova questions whether some of the information the CIA provided the Justice Department on those 11 questions “was materially false.”

In addition, he pointed out that the CIA paid for Wilson’s trip, didn’t ask him to sign a confidentiality agreement, didn’t object to his writing the op-ed article in the Times and allowed him to conduct TV interviews and to appear in a photo with his wife in Vanity Fair, he noted.

“The CIA isn’t stupid,” he said. “They wanted this story out. I’m raising the question: Did the CIA mislead Fitzgerald?

There is some good background info re: Brewster Jennings - AQ Khan here:

Is it possible that Plame’s “sting operation” directly tracked and helped expose the nuclear proliferation network of A.Q. Khan? If so, why was Plame’s operation exposed from the White House? Joe Klein says, “’Only a very high-ranking official could have had access to the knowledge that Plame was on the payroll’ of the CIA, an intelligence source told me."

Plenty More to Swear About

And Mohamed El Baradei says A.Q. Khan is just the tip of the nuclear iceberg. “Dr. Khan was not working alone,” International Atomic Energy Association chief Mohamed El Baradei told reporters, adding he had help from people in many countries.

The Nuclear Controversy and Damage Control

Could Cheney have had a financial relationship with the Nuclear Walmart, which would have provided a motive for exposing Plame’s operation? We shall explore this in sections D and E of this paper. First it is important to understand what is currently known about A.Q. Khan’s network before we uncover Cheney’s connection with it. The purpose of this examination is not intended as a comprehensive index of the network, but as an exploration into some of the more sinister elements of the network that led to relationships not only among state sponsors of terrorism, but to relationships with terrorist organizations themselves.

This article is probably barking up the right tree, just the wrong branch.

Yellowcake is not a WMD issue, it's a mining issue. --Joseph Wilson on BBC World. [date/transcript?]

Saddam was already sitting on 500 tons of yellowcake, (under IAEA seal, but Iraqi guard) 1.7 tons of which had already been enriched. The IAEA warned George W. Bush during the invasion that the al-Tuwaitha nuclear site would be left unguarded, so he had better do something about it. They let that stockpile sit there for 14 months--unguarded. During this time, the site was looted. Then, the US Department of Energy decided to airlift the 1.7 tons out because it was so dangerous.

The material was taken from a former nuclear research facility on 23 June [2004], after being packaged by 20 experts from the US Energy Department’s secret laboratories.

It was flown out of the country aboard a military plane in a joint operation with the Department of Defense, and is being stored temporarily at a Department of Energy facility.

US Reveals Iraq Nuclear Operation

PURE uranium oxide which could be used in the making of a “dirty nuclear bomb” capable of killing countless [Actually, dirty bombs kill ZERO people. See Adam Curtis, The Power of Nightmares] people is being offered for sale in a Basra souk for $250,000.

Senior American officials have confirmed that rampant looting was discovered by US marines arriving at the al-Tuwaitha nuclear site on April 7.

…

John Large, a leading independent nuclear consultant, said the size and description of the cylinders “suggests this is enriched uranium”. He added: “A well-informed terrorist might be able to construct a crude nuclear device which would act like a mini-nuclear reactor and generate highly radioactive fission products for release into the urban atmosphere.”

Even if the uranium was not enriched, he says any radio active material is dangerous in the hands of terrorists because of its psychological impact. “The public perception of all things nuclear is of a fate worse than death. The use of even low-level uranium in a dirty bomb would cause widespread psychological and economic panic.”

Looted and for sale in Iraq: the deadly core of nuclear weapons 

An Open Letter To Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald From Former White House Counsel John W. Dean

Go here and read that blog too, to further flesh out any possible understanding of this confusing conundrum and hall of mirrors known as the Plame Affair.

In regards to citing right-wing sources:

Mae Brussel, who inspired a whole generation of researchers (sometimes known as "Brussel Sprouts") taught her disciples to read everything across the whole political spectrum and to sift and weigh all pieces of information as separate elements of the collective aggregate. She taught us to compare everything with every other thing and to work out the contradictions between the various voices that speak conflicting things because everything means something and nothing is without significance. If we use our heads, we can eventually find the whole truth. Reality is the total synthesis of all the voices, past and present, and in politics (polis being the city or society at large), every political faction contains a certain amount of truth as well as varying degrees of error. This is the main difference between the followers of Mae Brussell and the followers of Chip Berlet. Mae told us to study everything and to learn how to discern what is real from what is not. Chip Berlet, on the other hand, whose sudden prominence and cachet on the progressive political scene portends a dangerous tendency which might aptly be called Neo-Mugwump or left-wing McCarthyism, implies by innuendo that all information hanging out in right wing journals is ipso facto false, at best tainted, and those caught reading it are de facto, polluted. Certain people, it seems-a new class of "experts"-have elected themselves to be the intellectual food-tasters and the watch-dogs for the rest of us. The new shibboleth seems to be, "I am not now, nor have I ever been a reader of politically incorrect literature or a person who talks to politically incorrect people."