Post-election, maybe I can give it another try.
I do recall that swinish comment by Ledeen about how he thought he’d ‘remembered reading in the newspapers’ about the meetings between Franklin and Ghorbanifar and G*d only knows who else that he’d set up himself.

Anyway, thanks for that link, as well as the McClatchy!

Leen @78: Over and above the wreckless destruction you reference, there is another layer: these idiots basically handed over America’s ass on a silver platter to people who do not mean us well. ‘Patriots’ is not a word that I would use to reference these clowns.

Hell we have yet to witness anyone held for the false, cherry picked, and dessiminated false pre war intelligence that poured out of the Office of Specials plans. But what the hell only thousands…hundreds of thousands of people are dead, injured and millions displaced by the use of this false intelligence to convince the majority of American people to kind of support a war based on a “pack of lies” And what the hell most of those dead are Iraqi’s and they do not count in Feith, Cambone’s Bush, Cheney’s and some Americans books

Niger Documents anyone been held accountable for those. No. Just move forward, turn the page, move on says Obama and many of the other Dems

I hope everyone knows dougie is fish bait for the Spanish sharks, one of the Garzon ’six’ along with Fredo, Haynes, Bybee, Yoo, and Addington.

DalyBean @ 72, thanks also — your points underscore American ignorance on so much related to the Middle East. Combined with data on the extravagant sums of money that Republican administrations since Reagan have showered on Chalabi, it makes the McClatchy article [about Iranians punking the neocons into taking us into Iraq] that leveymg links to all the more resonant.

It’s in a McClatchy story of June 5, 2008 on the release of a Senate Intelligence Committee Report into the going-on at OSP by Feith, Rhode, Cambone and their contacts with Ledeen and Ghorbanifar. There’s another interesting element here that has been scarcely remarked on, and that’s the embrace of this fabrication by then Sens. Gingrich, Kyle, Brownback and Santorum: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/ira…..40080.html

According to the report, Ledeen, however, persisted, presenting then-Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith with a new 100-day plan to provide, among other things, evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that supposedly had been moved to Iran — Saddam Hussein’s archenemy. This time, the report said, Ledeen solicited support from former speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich and from three then-GOP senators, Sam Brownback of Kansas, Jon Kyl of Arizona and Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania.

Rhode and Ghorbanifar met again in Paris in June 2003 with at least the tacit approval of an official in Cheney’s office, the Senate report said.

He reported back to officials in the Pentagon and the vice president’s office, but “there is no indication that the information collected during the Paris meeting was shared with the Intelligence Community for a determination of potential intelligence value,” the report said.

‘In the section on Iraq, and the necessity of removing Saddam Hussein, there was telltale “intelligence” from Chalabi and his old Jordanian Hashemite patron, Prince Hassan: “The predominantly Shi’a population of southern Lebanon has been tied for centuries to the Shi’a leadership in Najaf, Iraq, rather than Iran. Were the Hashemites to control Iraq, they could use their influence over Najaf to help Israel wean the south Lebanese Shi’a away from Hizbollah, Iran, and Syria. Shi’a retain strong ties to the Hashemites.” Of course the Shia with “strong ties to the Hashemites” was the family of Ahmed Chalabi. Perle, Feith and other contributors to the “Clean Break” seemed not to recall the 15-year fatwa the clerics of Najaf proclaimed against the Iraqi Hashemites. Or the still more glaring fact, pointed out by Rashid Khalidi in his new book “Resurrecting Empire,” that Shiites are loyal only to descendants of the prophet Muhammad’s son-in-law, Ali, and reject all other lineages, including the Hashemites. As Khalidi caustically notes, “Perle and his colleagues were here proposing the complete restructuring of a region whose history and religion their suggestions reveal they know hardly anything about.” In short, the Iraqi component of the neocons “new strategy” was based on an ignorant fantasy of prospective Shia support for ties with Israel.’

Subsequently, Chalabi changed tack, and abandoned the fantasy of sorting out Israel’s problems through Hashemite control of Iraq for the fantasy that the Iraqi Shia were secular, so that an Iraqi democracy, to be headed by Chalabi, would not only be a natural ally of Israel and the U.S., but a dagger pointed at the heart of the regime in Tehran.

At the same time he was explaining to his Muslim friends — as one of them recalled to Dizard — ‘that he just needed the Jews in order to get what he wanted from Washington, and that he would turn on them after that.’

(See http://dir.salon.com/story/new…..4/chalabi/)

http://turcopolier.typepad.com…..-iran.html

What does seem clear is that there was no one underlying conspiracy, but a welter of competing agendas, some of them conspiratorial in that they had to be kept secret, interacting with a number of actors, e.g. professionals just trying to do their job, greedy opportunists, bureaucrats, etc.

The preexistence of a torture program at CIA, and the unknown articulation of DoD departments, particularly Special Operations, with that, is where this all begins. Something was already there, with its own history and development, so that when the current situation appears on the scene, it’s not ab ovo. Mitchell and Jessen did not bring this evil into the world, they merely saw the chance to jump on the gravy train, be big kahunas, heros, like the Special Ops guys they worked with so long.

Are you stating essentially that competition to win favor was the driver and that’s how to different agencies ended up with similar approaches? I know I’m over simplifying it but that’s how your insights read.

Okay, your latest comment gives some more clarity. I guess I thought the parallel shop by Rumsfeld was for expediting everything to Bush.