A Conspiracy to Kill -2-

Jihad Khazen Al-Hayat 10/11/05

The criminal conspiracy pursued by the special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, was a premeditated attempt at murder and destruction. It is not logical that Dr. Mohammed El Baradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency, could take one look at the Niger documents and decide that they are a forgery while the Bush administration failed to see the forgery with all the intelligence agencies available to it.As I explained yesterday, the criminal cabal found a way of circumventing the CIA, but the betrayal of American national interests in the service of Israel does not stop there. The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of December 2001 said that Iraq did not have a nuclear program. The U.N. inspectors had left Iraq in 1998 and the estimate remained unchanged for three years. The NIE is by far the most important document of its kind. It is prepared under the CIA direction and includes information from all the intelligence branches. Disagreement or dissent is listed in the document but the 2001 estimate was unanimousStill President Bush in his State of the Union address the next month referred to Iraq as a "grave and growing danger" While Dick Cheney claimed time after time that Iraq had connections with Al Qaeda, was stockpiling biological and chemical weapons and was close to producing a nuclear bomb.Members of the cabal must have known that they were promoting lies. As the State Department and CIA contested the information, Wolfowitz and Feith established the Office of Special Plans in the Defence Department to produce false information provided by Ahmed Chalabi and other professional conmen. They also established the so-called Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group (CTEG) to "evaluate" intelligence information about Iraq in a way that suited their purposes.Dick Cheney was on television three times in one day, March 24, 2002, insisting that Iraq was actively working on a nuclear bomb. All members of the cabal joined in a huge public relations campaign to convince ordinary Americans of the impending danger from Iraq. They were helped by others like Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and General Richard Myers. They claimed that Iraq also sought to buy aluminium tubes suitable for centrifuges in uranium enrichment. But they could not have been oblivious to the fact that a year earlier both the CIA and the Energy Department had concluded that the aluminium tubes were not suitable for centrifuges and were probably for use in military rockets.Lewis Libby and his boss Cheney were at the heart of this conspiracy. They both visited CIA headquarters in Langley to pressure its experts to come up with the necessary information. When the experts failed they established what the magazine Mother Jones called the Lie Factory.Again, the journalist Judith Miller must have known that she was being fed lies by the likes of Chalabi. Her role is still to be revealed in full. She went to prison for 85 days claiming that she did not want to betray her source and almost had people believe that she was a martyr of the freedom of the press. Far from it, she was promoting the purposes of the neocons under a thin veneer of liberalism. It turned out that the waiver to her by Libby was given a long time ago. She did not use it until her lawyer secured from the private prosecutor a promise that his client will be questioned about Libby only. She is protecting other names and not in the interest of the freedom of the press.In all this Dick Cheney comes out as vile and insensitive. When his right hand man resigned he did not seek a compromise but instead appointed to replace him David Addington, a man whose name is connected with a famous paper justifying the torture of prisoners, and John Hannah as national security adviser.Addington's study flew in the face the American constitution, laws passed by Congress and international treaties which the U.S. has ratified.Hannah is also a major player. UPI quoted sources of the investigation that he faced the possibility of doing jail time. It was a way of pressuring him to name his superiors. In the 1990s Hannah worked for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a once centrist think tank that later moved into the Likud camp and cooperated closely with the official lobby AIPAC. He played an important role in the manipulation of intelligence information to justify the war on Iraq.It will be travesty of justice if Libby and others face only charges of perjury or obstruction of justice. They conspired to kill Iraqis and Americans and destroy Iraq. My hope is that they start telling on each other to save their skin. We already have the case of the former Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin who has pleaded guilty to spying for Israel in return for a shorter prison term. He has testified that he passed secret documents to Steven Rosen, AIPAC's long serving foreign policy director, and Keith Weissman, AIPAC's senior Iran specialist.The plot thickens, or sickens, as we find out that Franklin went to Rome where the most brazen forgery of the Lie Factory was hatched.We demand justice for the scores of thousands of Iraqis and Americans sacrificed in Iraq by a cabal of anti-peace Likudniks serving the interests of Israel instead of their own country.