@@ A JEW conspiracy so vast…the Plame plot thickens @@
Arash
November 18, 2005
'A Conspiracy So Vast…'
The Plame plot thickens…
By Justin Raimondo
In the wake of the Irv Lewis "Scooter" Libby
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Libby) indictment, and the collapse of support
for the war – even in the Republican congressional caucus
(http://www.antiwar.com/blog/comments.php?id=P2511_0_1_0) – the bad guys are
desperately trying to make a comeback, and what a pathetic sight it is.
First off, we have Lewis Libby's lawyer now saying the revelation that Bob Woodward
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Woodward), the famous Washington Post reporter –
and favored administration stenographer – was the first reporter to hear about
Valerie Plame Wilson's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valerie_Plame) CIA affiliation
somehow exonerates his client:
"William Jeffress Jr., one of Libby's lawyers, told the Post that Woodward's
testimony raises questions about his client's indictment. 'Will Mr. Fitzgerald now
say he was wrong to say on TV that Scooter Libby was the first official to give this
information to a reporter?' Jeffress said.
"Added former Justice Department official Victoria Toensing of Fitzgerald: 'He
has been investigating a very simple factual scenario and he has missed this crucial
fact. It makes you cry out for asking, Well what else did he not know, what else did
he not do?' "
William Jeffress is full of it: Fitzgerald said no such thing, on TV or off. What he
did say was that Libby "was the first official known to have told a reporter when he
talked to Judith Miller in June of 2003 about Valerie Wilson." So Fitzgerald has
nothing to apologize for – as if he, unlike Lewis Libby's cheesy legal team, would
ever get into a down-and-dirty media flame-war. Dream on, Jeffress…
Aside from that, however, the Bob Woodward revelation in no way addresses the charges
against the vice president's chief of staff: if anything, they confirm the pattern of
deception (http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j070903.html) of which Lewis Libby's lies
were a part. For if we now have a "senior administration official" telling a
journalist – Woodward – about Plame, then this merely validates Fitzgerald's
contention that the flow of information on Plame ran in a certain direction: from the
inner sanctum inhabited by high government officials outward to the media.
Fitzgerald's case against Libby still stands – as does the special prosecutor's most
telling remark during his press conference, which today leaps out at us: "It's not
over".
http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:LrLQOid6ttsJ:www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/10/28/leak.probe/+%22not+over%22+fitzgerald+libby&hl=en&lr=&strip=1
Indeed it isn't…
Toensing, too, has it all wrong: Fitzgerald has not been investigating "a very simple
factual scenario" – as the Woodward revelation makes all too plain. Although I'm
tempted – for the sheer dramatic impact – to conjure "a conspiracy so vast", I don't
want to jump too far ahead of Fitzgerald. At this point, however, I think events are
confirming what John Dean (http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20051104.html) had to
say about the prospect of yet more indictments to come: he said he would be "shocked"
if they failed to materialize. These latest developments seem to presage them.
Why, after all, did this mysterious "senior administration official" come forward and
alert Fitzgerald to this earlier conversation? In all likelihood, Official X didn't
just come clean out of some notion of civic duty, but instead came under Fitz's
merciless scrutiny and was "turned" under the threat of doing time in a cell right
next to Scooter's.
Just as I predicted, this show trial is truly a show, with more plot twists than a
beach-blanket page-turner, and a cast of characters worthy of a drama that includes
elements of both a potboiler and a morality play: a hero whose virtue is visible
enough to include him on the list of "Sexiest Men Alive", and a villain who writes
novels about bestiality and looks like the liar he apparently is.
We have a Greek chorus – the Scooter Libby Fan Club, otherwise known as the War
Party, hailing the neocon equivalent of Mumia Abu Jamal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumia_Abu-Jamal#Cause_c.C3.A9l.C3.A8bre
Free Scooter – And All Political Prisoners! Scooter has even established a defense
fund, and I wonder if there's any truth to the rumor that their first fundraiser will
be a live benefit reading by Judy Miller
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller_%28journalist%29) and Bob Woodward of
their forthcoming book: "Journalism as Stenography: My Life as a Shill".
Speaking of shills, the really fun part of all this – aside from anticipating more
indictments for Christmas – is the spectacle of the loudest, most obnoxious laptop
bombardiers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Malkin) flailing about in defense
of the war, just as the entire process (http://www.militaryweek.com/kk011904.shtml)
by which the country was lied into Iraq is coming under intense public scrutiny. I
get a particularly big kick out of Christopher Hitchens
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Hitchens), perhaps the loudest and most
obnoxious of them all, who is now reduced to slapping together screeds of rapidly
shrinking length and credibility. Writing about current events must be, for him, a
very painful procedure these days, and it shows.
Take, for example, his most recent effort (http://www.slate.com/id/2130293/nav/tap2),
a Slate piece that tries to prove – well, it isn't quite clear. He starts out by
disdaining the idea that we were lied into war, and that his friend
(http://www.slate.com/id/2101345) and political ally, Ahmed "Hero in Error" Chalabi,
had anything to do with it. But by the second sentence he is already drifting away
from the task he sets himself, and takes out after easier prey: a lone demonstrator
outside Chalabi's AEI talk
(http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20051110/chalabi_and_aei_the_sequel.php) claiming
that Bush planned 9/11. Soft targets like this are a godsend, especially if you have
a huge hangover and really don't feel much like writing.
Christopher Hitchens then takes on Walter Pincus
(http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_east/jan-june03/blix_2-13.html) and Dana
Milbank (http://www.nndb.com/people/871/000044739) of the Washington Post,
cherry-picking isolated quotes from their November 12 piece
(http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/4653) – but linking to it: now that's a
first! Hitchens actually links to something outside Slate, for once, and in doing so
fatally undermines his argument: for by going to the Washington Post article he
refers to, and actually reading it, we can see that Hitchens' point is considerably
blunted. He fails to cite the crucial point made by Walter Pincus and Dana Milbank,
which is that the "official reports" cited by administration spokesman –
Silberman-Robb (http://www.wmd.gov/report/report.html), the Senate Select Committee
on Intelligence (http://intelligence.senate.gov/iraqreport2.pdf), etc. – never delved
into the manipulation of prewar intelligence:
"The only committee investigating the matter in Congress, the Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence, has not yet done its inquiry into whether officials
mischaracterized intelligence by omitting caveats and dissenting opinions. And Judge
Laurence H. Silberman, chairman of Bush's commission on weapons of mass destruction,
said in releasing his report on March 31, 2005: 'Our executive order did not direct
us to deal with the use of intelligence by policymakers, and all of us were agreed
that that was not part of our inquiry' ".
Shorn of its decorative curlicues and rhetorical bombast, Christopher Hitchens'
argument is reduced to the current neocon talking points
(http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/11/20051113.html): we all believed it,
so it wasn't a lie.
To those of us in the reality-based community
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community), however, this argument makes
absolutely no sense, and that's the problem with being an ideologue: an attempt to
mold reality to fit ideological preconceptions is likely to baffle, rather than
convince, the ordinary person. That's why the majority of Americans
(http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/index.cfm/fuseaction/viewItem/itemID/9842) now
believe the Bushies lied us into war – and why, with the upcoming trial of Libby
(and, possibly, his co-conspirators) making new headlines practically every day, that
majority is likely to increase.
The War Party has got to find that demoralizing, and the effects are seen in
Hitchens' halfhearted efforts to buck up the faithful and hold high the banner.
Halfway through his polemic, he remembers to defend Chalabi:
"It was, of course, the sinuous and dastardly forces of Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi
National Congress who persuaded the entire Senate to take leave of its senses in
1998. I know at least one of its two or three staffers, who actually admits to having
engaged in the plan. By the same alchemy and hypnotism, the INC was able to
manipulate the combined intelligence services of Britain, France, Germany, and Italy,
as well as the CIA, the DIA, and the NSA, who between them employ perhaps 1.4 million
people, and who in the American case dispose of an intelligence budget of $44
billion, with only a handful of Iraqi defectors and an operating budget of $320,000
per month. That's what you have to believe".
But if Chalabi is a "genius", as Christopher Hitchens has alleged – so formidably
brilliant that he single-handedly broke the Iranians' internal code
(http://kris.typepad.com/blog/2005/11/chalabi_in_dc.html), before he told them the
U.S. was reading their communications – well, then, why not? Why couldn't this
Machiavelli-Einstein hybrid (http://www.ctbw.com/lubman.htm ,
http://www.aip.org/history/einstein/emc1.htm) fool the U.S. and its allies simply by
focusing his enormous brain power on the problem?
Of course, he may have had a little help in this regard – perhaps from elements
within the allied governments, but principally in Washington. After all, they called
themselves "the cabal" (http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030512fa_fact).
All those little aspens, connected at the root
(http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001220134),
turning in the same direction – telling the same lies, covering up the same treason,
and, hopefully, sharing an entire wing of the same prison in the end.
That's what I have to believe – that is, if I'm going to have faith that there's any
concept of justice left in this country. Yes, we are afflicted with creeps like
Hitchens, Woodward, Miller, and all the rest of the grinning, leering, grimacing
monkey-demon minions of this administration, called out by their masters to defend
the castle of the Wicked Witch of the West as it comes under attack. These courtiers
of the Imperial City can make a lot of noise, but their chatter dies down, you'll
notice, at the approach of a giant of Fitzgerald's stature and gravitas. They fear
him, and rightly so (http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=7908): for he is the spirit
of the old America, a country where everybody didn't do it: where backstabbing,
lying, and betrayal of the country's secrets were crimes that got punished. Where the
words "and justice for all" didn't exempt high government officials and their
"journalist" marionettes (http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=5187).
The War Party would like nothing better than to forget that any of this is
happening – the massive uncovering of a conspiracy to lie us into war, an unfolding
story that makes daily headlines.
http://news.google.com/news?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLG,GGLG:2005-22,GGLG:en&q=%22vice%2Bpresident%27s%2Boffice%22
What's pathetic – and rather fun – to watch is their fruitless attempts to divert us
away from this edifying spectacle, complete with the outright denial of the more
deluded neocons, such as Hitchens. What do you mean, avers Hitchens, that we didn't
find (http://www.cia.gov/cia/reports/iraq_wmd_2004) those elusive "weapons of mass
destruction" in Iraq? (http://www.musicforamerica.org/bushjoke) But "of course" we
did, he says:
"Hans Blix, the see-no-evil expert who had managed to certify Iraq and North
Korea as kosher in his time, has said in print that he fully expected a coalition
intervention to uncover hidden weaponry. And this, of course, it actually has done.
We did not know and could not know, until after the invasion, of Saddam's plan to buy
long-range missiles off the shelf from Pyongyang, or of the centrifuge components
buried on the property of his chief scientist, Dr. Mahdi Obeidi".
Mahdi Obeidi (http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3068200) is an Iraqi nuclear scientist who once
presided over Iraq's gas centrifuge program for uranium enrichment. Detained by U.S.
forces in 2003, he led American investigators to a rose garden in back of his house
where they dug up "200 blueprints of gas centrifuge components, 180 documents
describing their use, and samples of a few sensitive parts" – buried, in 1991, by
order of Qusay Hussein. In spite of the best efforts to extract evidence from Mahdi
Obeidi to buttress the administration's case for war, however, he told his
interrogators that Saddam ditched his nuclear program in 1991, precisely as the
Iraqis had claimed all along (http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1845) – and exactly
what the most trenchant critics of the war, including Scott Ritter, insisted
(http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0721-02.htm) was the case.
Furthermore, Mahdi Obeidi also told investigators he would have known about any
revival of the effort. He also disabused them of the notion that the July 2001 tube
shipment (http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2003/transcripts/s976015.htm)
intercepted by the CIA was in any way related to nuclear weapons. The gas centrifuge
designed by Obeidi specified tubes with a 145 mm diameter; the intercepted tubes had
a diameter of 81 mm.
Like Mahdi Obeidi, Christopher Hitchens is reduced to conjuring the "latent" danger
posed by Saddam. Yet the world is full of potential threats – and a foreign policy
targeting them all would have to mean perpetual war. That would make few people,
including within the administration, very happy, with the possible exception of Dick
Cheney. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4314234.stm
Poor Hitchens. The transition from Trotskyite to Cheneyite has really sped up a
decline triggered, perhaps, by prodigious quantities of alcohol.
http://www.counterpunch.org/mccarthy02212003.html
He's become like that lone protester outside the Chalabi talk carrying a sign saying
Bush was behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks: the advocate of a crackpot theory that
doesn't even begin to withstand the most perfunctory critique. Worse, the "evidence"
he cites proves the exact opposite of what he says it does. Now that is the mark of
the truly deluded, of one who's quaffed so much of the neocon Kool-Aid
(http://deepblade.net/journal/2004/09/hersh-on-daily-show.html) that he not only
cannot any longer distinguish truth from fiction, but has stopped caring about the
difference.
Hitchens reminds me of a friend of mine who fell into a life of drug addiction, and
who, after a long absence from my life, turned up late one evening in a disreputable
dive – I just happened to be passing through – and announced to me that he had found
the secret of all knowledge. What, I asked, could that possibly be? "Speed," he
announced, with absolute certitude, and without the slightest indication that he was
joking.
I felt sorry for him, but I don't feel sorry for Christopher Hitchens. Here is
someone who has managed to get by on the strength of an aptitude for sophistry and a
British accent, and has been given a platform from which to harangue us on why a war
of aggression (http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=7993) is really an act of
"liberation." Here is a foreigner who is willing to fight to the last American in
order to make the world safe for his beloved
(http://windsofchange.net/archives/005182.php) Kurds and to satisfy his ideological
obsessions. He deserves the pathetic fate that's befallen him.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/09/05/hitchens/index_np.html
Christopher Hitchens really hasn't been the same since having his head handed to him
by George Galloway, and there is a lesson in his public degeneration into a babbling
idiot. What Harry Elmer Barnes called "court intellectuals"
(http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard27.html) are always of the second- and
third-rate sort.
The War Party is imploding, and not quietly, either. So, as I put it many months ago,
when Fitzgerald was first appointed special prosecutor in the Plame case:
"Get out the dip and chips, pull up a chair – and let the show trial begin!"
http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=1962
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=8065