About the Forged letters that got us into the Iraq War

Aug 08, 2008 : A forged letter linking Saddam Hussein to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks was ordered on White House stationery and probably came from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, according to a June 2008 conversation Ron Suskind with the Central Intelligence Agency's former Deputy Chief of Clandestine Operations Robert Richer.

Below Richer says that he saw a letter with the White House letterhead, meaning it came from the White House- from Scooter Libby and the shop

around the vice president, commanding the CIA to fabricate a document

The fabricated document was a bogus memo that claimed that 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta had received training in Baghdad but also discussed the arrival of a "shipment" from Niger, which the Administration claimed had supplied Iraq with yellowcake uranium.

The transcript from a recording of the conversation:

Suskind (S): "Now this is from the Vice President's Office is how you remembered it--not from the president?"

Richer replied (R): "No, no, no, What I remember is George [Tenet] saying, 'we got this from'--basically, from what George said was 'downtown.'"

S: "Which is the White House?"

R: "Yes, But he [Tenet] did not--in my memory--never said president, vice president, or NSC. Okay? But now--he [Tenet] may have hinted--just by the way he said it, it would have--cause almost all that stuff came from one place only: Scooter Libby and the shop around the vice president."

R: "But he didn't say that specifically….. I would naturally -- I would probably stand on my, basically….. my reputation and say it came from the vice president."

S: "But there wasn't anything in the writing that you remember saying the vice president?"

R: "Nope," "It just had the White House stationery."

R: "You know, if you've ever seen the vice president's stationery, it's on the White House letterhead. It may have said OVP (Office of the Vice President). I don't remember that, so I don't want to mislead you."

Rob Richer received a copy of Ron Suskind’s book, The Way of the World on, August 4, the day before publication. (The next day), he said he had read key portions of the book and was comfortable with what they contained.

Today, The American Conservative also published a report saying that the forgery was actually produced by then-Defense Undersecretary Douglas Feith's Office of Special Plans, citing an unnamed intelligence source. The source reportedly added that Suskind's overall claim "is correct."

"My source also notes that Dick Cheney, who was behind the forgery, hated and mistrusted the Agency and would not have used it for such a sensitive assignment," the magazine wrote. "Instead, he went to Doug Feith's Office of Special Plans and asked them to do the job.

http://crooksandliars.com/2008/08/09/tape-top-cia-official-confesses-to-911-iraq-war-forgery-came-from-white-house

Commentary by Philip Giraldi ( a former CIA officer)

August 7th, 2008 : An extremely reliable and well placed source in the intelligence community has informed me that Ron Suskind’s revelation that the White House ordered the preparation of a forged letter is correct (a forged letter that would link Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda and also to attempts made to obtain yellowcake uranium), but that a number of details are wrong.

My source also notes that Dick Cheney, who was behind the forgery, hated and mistrusted the Agency and would not have used it for such a sensitive assignment. Instead, he went to Doug Feith’s Office of Special Plans and asked them to do the job. The Pentagon has its own false documents center, primarily used to produce fake papers for Delta Force and other special ops officers traveling under cover as businessmen. It was Feith’s office that produced the letter and then surfaced it to the media in Iraq. Unlike the Agency, the Pentagon had no restrictions on it regarding the production of false information to mislead the public. Indeed, one might argue that Doug Feith’s office specialized in such activity.

http://www.amconmag.com/blog/2008/08/07/suskind-revisited/

Giraldi also said that the Italian Niger/yellowcake document were forgeries created by former CIA officers and Michael Leeden. He said it was 'unsubstantiated', ie, he has no proof.

During the 2008 presidential primaries, Giraldi served as Ron Paul’s foreign policy adviser.

Philip Giraldi was a participant or observer of events: see: http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=philip_giraldi

Out sourcing US Intelligence

July 27, 2008: According to the latest estimate, the cumulative 2009 intelligence budget for the 16 agencies in the U.S. Intelligence Community will be more than $55 billion. However, it's possible that the real figure in the deeply classified budget may soar over $66 billion, which would mean that the U.S. budget for spooks has more than doubled in less than a decade.

Tim Shorrock, an investigative journalist in his new book,
*Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing*. The following quotes are a précis of some of his key findings:

"In 2006, the cost of America's spying and surveillance activities outsourced to contractors reached $42 billion, or about 70 percent of the estimated $60 billion the government spends each year on foreignand domestic intelligence . . .

The number of contract employees now exceeds [the CIA's] full-time workforce of 17,500 . . . Contractors make up more than half the workforce of the CIA's National Clandestine Service (formerly the Directorate of Operations), which conducts covert operations and recruits spies abroad . . .

At the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) (includes NSA), the agency in charge of launching and maintaining the nation's photoreconnaissance and eavesdropping satellites, almost the entire workforce is composed of contract employees working for [private] companies . . . With an estimated $8 billion annual budget, the largest in the IC
[intelligence community], contractors control about $7 billion worth of business at the NRO, giving the spy satellite industry the distinction of being the most privatized part of the intelligence community . . .

The company, CACI International, via two contracts for "information technology services," ended up supplying some two dozen interrogators to the Army at Iraq's
already infamous Abu Ghraib prison in 2003. According to Major General Anthony Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib torture and abuse scandal, four of CACI's interrogators were "either directly or indirectly responsible" for torturing prisoners (Shorrock, p. 281).

As David Bromwich, a political critic and Yale professor of literature, observed in the *New York Review of Books*: "The separate bookkeeping and accountability devised for Blackwater, DynCorp, Triple Canopy, and similar outfits was part of a careful displacement of oversight from Congress to the vice-president and the stewards of his policies in various departments and agencies. To have much of the work parceled out to private companies who are unaccountable to army rules or military justice, meant, among its other advantages, that the cost of the war could be concealed beyond all detection."

By the end of [Clinton's first] term, more than 100,000 Pentagon jobs had been transferred to companies in the private sector -- among them thousands of jobs in intelligence . . . By the end of [his second] term in 2001, the administration had cut 360,000 jobs from the federal payroll and the government was spending 44 percent more on contractors than it had in 1993" (pp. 73, 86).

After 2001, Bush and Cheney added an ideological rationale to the process Clinton had already launched so efficiently. They were enthusiastic supporters of "a neoconservative drive to siphon U.S. spending on defense, national security, and social programs to large corporations friendly to the Bush administration" (pp. 72-3).

Blackwater Worldwide supplies security and analytical services to the CIA and the State Department in Baghdad.

This kind of out sourcing results in the loss of the most valuable asset any intelligence organization possesses -- its institutional memory. The essence of professionalism for a career intelligence analyst is his integrity in laying out what the U.S. government should know about a foreign policy issue, regardless of the political interests of, or the costs to, the major players.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174959/chalmers_johnson_warning_mercenaries_at_work

North Sea oil field Running Out of Oil

July 11, 2008: Opening up the North Sea in the 1970s helped break the power of OPEC, the oil producers' cartel, and deliver two decades of cheap energy, from the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s. Now, the region is one of the fastest-declining oil provinces in the world, according to the International Energy Agency. On the U.K. side, oil and gas output
peaked at the turn of the decade and has been falling by 7.5 per cent a year since 2002.

The giant areas developed in the 1970s are producing a fraction of their peak output and the fields being discovered today are tiny by comparison.A new field of more than 50m barrels is a rarity.

The newer fields are also generally harder to exploit. The oil is heavy, so it will not flow easily, or is held in what is known as a "high pressure high temperature" reservoir: at 150 degrees Celsius or more. Producing oil and gas from these fields means constantly pushing back the technological frontier.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/21ffd340-4f74-11dd-b050-000077b07658.html

"Only willful ignorance can maintain that the 9/11 narrative should be treated as a closed book."

Richard Falk, a United Nations investigator of human rights in the palestinian territories called for more serious examination of the conspiracy theories surrounding the Sept. 11 attacks. Pointing to discrepancies between the official version of events and other versions, he recently wrote that "only willful ignorance can maintain that the 9/11 narrative should be treated as a closed book."

New York Times, page A16, December 16, 2008

"Conspiracy" just means, more than one person being involved in something. Genuine Conspiratorial Politics?

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