Larissa Alexandrovna has done detailed work on the Niger forgeries. The background is complex. Her conclusion regarding the Niger forgery itself: the focus on
Michael Ledeen is misplaced. Look instead to
Elliott Abrams,
Harold Rhode (also
1 2 3) and Cheney's Office of Special Plans (
OSP) for Iraq and the
Rendon Group (also
1 2 3 4), a DOD propaganda contractor.
According to Larissa, the White House plans, from even before Bush came to office in 2000, included an attack upon Iran which, at least for now, has been derailed. In this capacity Michael Ledeen was brought in by Cheney - not because of his Iran expertise - but because of his contacts with people like
Manucher Ghorbanifar (also
here), an expatriate Iranian arms dealer previously banned by the CIA for providing false intelligence. Ledeen's efforts to generate 'marketable intelligence' in relation to Iran put him in contact with Italians, some of whom ended up in delivering the Niger forged document to the US. This has led many to believe - falsely, says Larissa - that Ledeen was involved in the Niger forgery.
She also mentions
Lawrence Franklin, a US Air Force Reserve colonel who has pleaded guilty to
passing information about US policy towards Iran to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) while working for the DOD.
The problem with this popular account of Franklin's activities is as
Juan Cole points out:
"Franklin was not giving the directive to AIPAC in order to provide them with information. He was almost certainly seeking feedback from them on elements of it. He was asking, "Do you like this? Should it be changed in any way?"
"And, he might also have been prepping AIPAC for the lobbying campaign scheduled for early in 2005, when Congress will have to be convinced to authorize military action, or at least covert special operations, against Iran. AIPAC probably passed the directive over to Israel for the same reason--not to inform, but to seek input. That is, AIPAC and Israel were helping write US policy toward Iran, just as they had played a key role in fomenting the Iraq war." He makes a further telling point:
"The Niger forgeries also try to implicate Iran. Indeed, the idea of a joint Iraq/Iran nuclear plot was so far-fetched that it is what initially made the Intelligence and Research division of the US State Department suspicious of the forgeries, even before the discrepancies of dates and officials in Niger were noticed."And Cole describes (also
here) how in mid 2003 Franklin, Ledeen, Rhode and Ghorbanifar
undermined an offer by Iran to turn over five al-Qaida operatives (including al-Zarqawi) in exchange for Washington dropping its support for Mujahadeen el Khalq (
MEK), an Iranian terrorist group based in Iraq.
Larissa continues:
"Franklin went to Rome to discuss Iran and his intelligence espionage was all about Iran as well. Ledeen, Ghorbanifar, and Franklin all focused on Iran and continued well after the 2003 start of the Iraq war. Rhode, on the other hand, knew Judith Miller and Chalabi quite well, with all three meeting in Iraq in April of 2003. Rhode was part of all of the Rome meetings and most of the Paris meetings. So why has no one ever focused on Harold Rhode? Because everyone has been too busy focusing on Ledeen and the Iran arm of the policy -- myself included, but for a different reason... In the end, it does not matter who actually sticker taped the forgeries together, rather, what is key is who ordered it and who paid for it and how it was then used. To me, that is the story."The key personnel in regard to the Niger forgery itself according to Larissa, are: Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rhode, the DOD and the Rendon Group all acting through the OSP for Iraq.The OSP for Iraq was a creation of Rumsfeld (and Cheney) in order to obtain doctored intelligence using the DOD that would support the case for attacking Iraq - 'intelligence' they knew they would not be forthcoming from regular intelligence channels such as the NSA and the CIA because they had no basis in fact.
The
OSP:
"The Office of Special Plans, which existed from September, 2002, to June, 2003, was a Pentagon unit created by Donald Rumsfeld and led by Douglas Feith, to supply senior Bush administration officials with raw intelligence (unvetted by intelligence analysts, see Stovepiping) pertaining to Iraq. An allegedly similar unit, called the Iranian Directorate, was created in 2006 to deal with intelligence on Iran."
"In February 2007, the Pentagon's inspector general issued a report that concluded that Feith's office "developed, produced, and then disseminated alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and al Qaida relationship, which included some conclusions that were inconsisent with the consensus of the Intelligence Community, to senior decision-makers." The report found that these actions were "inappropriate" though not "illegal." Senator Carl Levin, Chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, stated that:
"The bottom line is that intelligence relating to the Iraq-al-Qaeda relationship was manipulated by high-ranking officials in the Department of Defense to support the administration's decision to invade Iraq. The inspector general's report is a devastating condemnation of inappropriate activities in the DOD policy office that helped take this nation to war.""
(It's also worth mentioning here that Rice received a memo raising serious questions about the uranium in October 2002, three months before Bush included the Niger reference in his SOTU address. Stephen Hadley, received two memos as well as a phone call warning from Tenet. So both Hadley and Rice were prepared to mislead Congress over Iraq. It should be assumed that they would lie about 9/11 if they felt it were politically expedient to do so.)
All of the OSP guys found an ideological home at the
American Enterprise Institute. More
here:
According to insiders, Rhode worked with Feith to purge career Defense officials who weren't sufficiently enthusiastic about the muscular anti-Iraq crusade that Wolfowitz and Feith wanted. Rhode appeared to be "pulling people out of nooks and crannies of the Defense Intelligence Agency and other places to replace us with," says a former analyst. "They wanted nothing to do with the professional staff. And they wanted us the fuck out of there."
The unofficial, off-site recruitment office for Feith and Rhode was the American Enterprise Institute...Headquartered at AEI is Richard Perle...chairman of the Pentagon's influential Defense Policy Board. Rhode, along with Michael Rubin, a former AEI staffer who is also now at the Pentagon, was a ubiquitous presence at AEI conferences on Iraq over the past two years, and the two Pentagon officials seemed almost to be serving as stage managers for the AEI events, often sitting in the front row and speaking in stage whispers to panelists and AEI officials.
Just after September 11, 2001, Feith and Rhode recruited David Wurmser, the director of Middle East studies for AEI, to serve as a Pentagon consultant. Wurmser would be the founding participant of the unnamed, secret intelligence unit at the Pentagon, set up in Feith's office, which would be the nucleus of the Defense Department's Iraq disinformation campaign.
On September 4, 2004, the
Washington Post reported that FBI counterintelligence investigators had questioned David Wurmser, along with Harold Rhode, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith about their involvement in passing classified information to Ahmad Chalabi and AIPAC. David Wurmser's wife, Israeli-born Meyrav Wurmser, co-authored for Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996 an Israeli policy document (
A Clean Break) that called for the overthrow of Iraq and Iran in pusuit of Israeli security in the Middle East.
What we have is a cabal of right wingers establishing their own intelligence program through the Defence Department and bypassing the CIA and NSA. They have strong ties to AIPAC, support Israel's foreign policy goals (which involve the invasion of countries in the Middle East), possess an ideological home in the AEI, are financially tied to major defense industries. A number of them are former Iran Contra agents willing to lie to Congress. The have utilisied a private industry -the Rendon Group - with a track record of destabilising countries and controlling intelligence in support US foreign policy. And they have been prepared to forgoe pursuing al Qaeda if it conflicts with other foreign policy goals - such as conducting a war against Iran.
The arguments about possible (some say, likely) connections to the events of 9/11 deserve a separate discussion but there is evidence of awareness of the hijackers' activities by various foreign intelligence agencies (
1 2 3 4 5 6). There is also evidence that Israeli intelligence was also aware of the activities of the hijackers prior to 9/11 (
1 2). And it is not too far a stretch to conclude that it would not have been ideologically beyond the people discussed here to have participated in the events of 9/11.
