Rolling Stone Exclusive: Plot to Invade Iran

[chefmike]

A fascinating and disturbing article-

Iran: The Next War

Even before the bombs fell on Baghdad, a group of senior Pentagon officials were plotting to invade another country. Their covert campaign once again relied on false intelligence and shady allies. But this time, the target was Iran. BY JAMES BAMFORD

A few blocks off Pennsylvania Avenue, the FBI's eight-story Washington field office exudes all the charm of a maximum-security prison. Its curved roof is made of thick stainless steel, the bottom three floors are wrapped in granite and limestone, hydraulic bollards protect the ramp to the four-floor garage, and bulletproof security booths guard the entrance to the narrow lobby. On the fourth floor, like a tomb within a tomb, lies the most secret room in the $100 million concrete fortress—out-of-bounds even for special agents without an escort. Here, in the Language Services Section, hundreds of linguists in padded earphones sit elbow-to-elbow in long rows, tapping computer keyboards as they eavesdrop on the phone lines of foreign embassies and other high-priority targets in the nation's capital.

At the far end of that room, on the morning of February 12th, 2003, a small group of eavesdroppers were listening intently for evidence of a treacherous crime. At the very moment that American forces were massing for an invasion of Iraq, there were indications that a rogue group of senior Pentagon officials were already conspiring to push the United States into another war—this time with Iran.

A few miles away, FBI agents watched as Larry Franklin, an Iran expert and career employee of the Defense Intelligence Agency, drove up to the Ritz-Carlton hotel across the Potomac from Washington. A trim man of fifty-six, with a tangle of blond hair speckled gray, Franklin had left his modest home in Kearneysville, West Virginia, shortly before dawn that morning to make the eighty-mile commute to his job at the Pentagon. Since 2002, he had been working in the Office of Special Plans, a crowded warren of blue cubicles on the building's fifth floor. A secretive unit responsible for long-term planning and propaganda for the invasion of Iraq, the office's staffers referred to themselves as "the cabal." They reported to Douglas Feith, the third-most-powerful official in the Defense Department, helping to concoct the fraudulent intelligence reports that were driving America to war in Iraq.

Just two weeks before, in his State of the Union address, President Bush had begun laying the groundwork for the invasion, falsely claiming that Saddam Hussein had the means to produce tens of thousands of biological and chemical weapons, including anthrax, botulinum toxin, sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent. But an attack on Iraq would require something that alarmed Franklin and other neoconservatives almost as much as weapons of mass destruction: detente with Iran. As political columnist David Broder reported in The Washington Post, moderates in the Bush administration were "covertly negotiating for Iran to stay quiet and offer help to refugees when we go into Iraq."

this fascinating article in it's entirety here-

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/10962352/iran_the_next_war

[White_Male_Canada]

First the fluffington post , now the rolling stoned ! ? :lol:

You`re fooling no one you dumb fuck,but have succeeded at embarrassing and fooling yourself. Take that conspiracy shit of yours elsewhere,it`s been blown outta the water right here :lol: :

Rolling Stone's James Bamford has a new article on the crisis in Iran that fundamentally misrepresents one of his sources and mangles history so badly that one wonders when RS laid off its fact-checkers. I have been in touch with Michael Ledeen, whose extensive quotes appear throughout the article, and he has a number of issues with Bamford's article.

Let's start with the factual errors as Micheal outlines them. Bamford writes:

Weeks later, in December, a plane carrying Ledeen traveled to Rome with two other members of Feith's secret Pentagon unit: Larry Franklin and Harold Rhode, a protégé of Ledeen who has been called the "theoretician of the neocon movement."
Ledeen told me that "They were certainly not on my flights in either direction. ... Only an ignoramus would call Harold a protege of mine. If anything, it was the other way around."

Completing the rogues' gallery that assembled in Rome that day was the man who helped Ledeen arrange the meeting: Nicolò Pollari, the director of Italy's military intelligence. Only two months earlier, Pollari had informed the Bush administration that Saddam Hussein had obtained uranium from West Africa—a key piece of false intelligence that Bush used to justify the invasion of Iraq.

Ledeen: "Italian intelligence never said any such thing. Bush used British intelligence, not Italian, in his State of the Union address." In fact, Bamford misstates the evidence itself. The Bush administration said that Saddam had attempted to purchase uranium from Africa, not West Africa. They didn't claim that Saddam had actually concluded a purchase. The intel showed that Saddam was still attempting to develop nuclear weapons in defiance of the UN Security Council sanctions.

The British government still stands by that intelligence. In the Butler report, they explain that their intel came from a source not associated with the French/Italian counterfeited documents. Joe Wilson's own report to the CIA corroborated it, although Wilson tries the same spin that Bamford uses so clumsily here by claiming that Saddam never actually bought the uranium. Wilson's report went to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which noted that the Nigerien PM told Wilson that a secret trade delegation from Iraq had, in his opinion, tried opening a clandestine channel for uranium.

Ledeen, Franklin and Rhode were taking a page from Feith's playbook on Iraq: They needed a front group of exiles and dissidents to call for the overthrow of Iran. According to sources familiar with the meeting, the Americans discussed joining forces with the Mujahedin-e Khalq, an anti-Iranian guerrilla army operating out of Iraq.
Ledeen: "It never came up as far as I know. I did go to the bathroom from time to time, but I was present 99% of the time."

But by far the most egregious error in the article comes on page 3, in the same section discussing the trip to Rome. Bamford puts the time frame as December 2001, and Ledeen agrees. Here's what Bamford wrote about one of the major underpinnings of this entire conspiracy to start a war with Iran:

The men then turned their attention to their larger goal: regime change in Iran. Ghorbanifar suggested funding the overthrow of the Iranian government using hundreds of millions of dollars in cash supposedly hidden by Saddam Hussein. He even hinted that Saddam was hiding in Iran.
The idea that the Iranians would ever hide the man who waged a brutal war against them for eight years has a humor all its own. However, Bamford seems to have forgotten one critical point: Saddam was still running Iraq in December 2001, and would for the next sixteen months. Saddam may not have allowed people to know his specific whereabouts at any given moment, but we knew damned well he was still in Iraq, and still in charge.

Did Bamford bother to do any research at all on this story, or did he just make it up as he went along? And how about the Rolling Stone editors? Apparently, the levels of fact-checking ceased to exist on this story, and RS allowed Bamford to spin his fantasies unimpeded. No one ever questioned why the Shi'ite mullahcracy would shelter a genocidal Sunni madman that had brutally oppressed their brethren for decades. Hell, RS couldn't even read a calendar.

Ledeen sent this letter to Rolling Stone in response to this embarrassment:

Jeez, I thought it was only coffee in that cup Jim Bamford drank from at my house, but apparently he slipped something stronger into it when I was opening the box of cookies he brought over. Anyone who thinks I have any influence on the Bush Administration is regularly swallowing something more powerful than caffeine.

I've been writing for years now to encourage the government to support democratic revolution in Iran, but nothing of the sort has been done. I've openly and consistently opposed military invasion, yet Bamford says I'm trying--and on the verge of succeeding--to cause a "bloody war." He says that Douglas Feith brought me into his "cabal," but I have never worked for Feith, or Rumsfeld's Pentagon (Indeed I called for Rumsfeld to be replaced two years ago), or anyone else in this administration. As I told Bamford--and I have a recording of our conversation--I have no access to this administration, let alone sway over it. But he insists that I am Svengali to George Bush's Trilby. Any fact checkers left at the "Stone"?

He can't even run a decent "Nexis" search. He claims that our conversation was the first time I had discussed the meeting in Rome in 2001 that enabled the United States to obtain detailed information about Iranian plans to kill our soldiers in Afghanistan. In fact it was the umpteenth time I had been interviewed, in American and European publications and blogs, most recently in "Raw Story." I have written about it several times myself. And why not? That information saved American lives, as Bamford could have confirmed if he had been willing to work harder.

As for the endlessly maligned Mr. Ghorbanifar, who looks more reliable today, the CIA who described him as the world's greatest liar and refused to look at his information about murderous Iranian activities in Afghanistan and Iraq, or Mr. G himself? Nowadays his picture of Iran's role in the terror war against us is almost universally accepted. And by the way, the information Ghorbanifar gave me in the fall of 2001had to do with events inside Iran. Nothing secret, just unnoticed information about the widespread Iranian hatred of the regime. That, too, is now conventional wisdom. Bamford claims to be an independent critic of the Intellience Community, but here he has swallowed the company's bait en toto.

Whatever that stuff was in the coffee cup had long-lasting effects, because it totally knocked out the little grey cells in his frontal lobes. Somehow imagining that I want to invade Iran, he quotes an article of mine in "National Review Online" in which I call for the United States to support regime change in Syria and Iran, as if that meant a military campaign. If he had looked up a few lines he would have found these words:

"Give them a chance to fight for their freedom, as we did with the Georgians. The longer we dither, the more likely it becomes that we will sadly and unnecessarily find ourselves in a military confrontation of some sort, with all the terrible consequences that entails."

That's the actual context. The opposite of what Bamford says.

I can tell you from personal experience that Michael Ledeen has never supported armed intervention in Iran, for sound political and military reasons. He has even commented to that effect on more than one occasion on my blog. Ledeen has always championed an approach that funds democracy activists within Iran as a means of regime change. Anyone who has bothered to read Ledeen even superficially knows his viewpoint on action against Iran.

Bamford has no credibility as a journalist, and the Rolling Stone has become the purveyor of paranoid conspiracy fantasies.http://ww.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/

[chefmike]

You and your sources have no credibility here...you're just a rabid right-wing lackey who is hypocrital enough to post in a tranny forum...

[chefmike]

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/11058785/response_bamfords_report_on_selling_war_in_iran/1

Response: Bamford's Report on Selling War in Iran
The letter from Pentagon hawk Michael Ledeen and a reply from James Bamford Page 1 2

Jeez, I thought it was only coffee in that cup Jim Bamford drank from at my house, but apparently he slipped something stronger into it when I was opening the box of cookies he brought over. Anyone who thinks I have any influence on the Bush administration is regularly swallowing something more powerful than caffeine.

I've been writing for years now to encourage the government to support democratic revolution in Iran, but nothing of the sort has been done. I've openly and consistently opposed military invasion, yet Bamford says I'm trying -- and on the verge of succeeding -- to cause a "bloody war." He says that Douglas Feith brought me into his "cabal," but I have never worked for Feith, or Rumsfeld's Pentagon (indeed I called for Rumsfeld to be replaced two years ago), or anyone else in this administration. As I told Bamford -- and I have a recording of our conversation -- I have no access to this administration, let alone sway over it. But he insists that I am Svengali to George Bush's Trilby. Any fact checkers left at the Stone?

He can't even run a decent Nexis search. He claims that our conversation was the first time I had discussed the meeting in Rome in 2001 that enabled the United States to obtain detailed information about Iranian plans to kill our soldiers in Afghanistan. In fact it was the umpteenth time I had been interviewed, in American and European publications and blogs, most recently in Raw Story. I have written about it several times myself. And why not? That information saved American lives, as Bamford could have confirmed if he had been willing to work harder.

As for the endlessly maligned Mr. Ghorbanifar, who looks more reliable today, the CIA who described him as the world's greatest liar and refused to look at his information about murderous Iranian activities in Afghanistan and Iraq, or Mr. G himself? Nowadays his picture of Iran's role in the terror war against us is almost universally accepted. And by the way, the information Ghorbanifar gave me in the fall of 2001 had to do with events inside Iran. Nothing secret, just unnoticed information about the widespread Iranian hatred of the regime. That, too, is now conventional wisdom. Bamford claims to be an independent critic of the Intelligence Community, but here he has swallowed the Company's bait en toto.

Whatever that stuff was in the coffee cup had long-lasting effects, because it totally knocked out the little gray cells in his frontal lobes. Somehow imagining that I want to invade Iran, he quotes an article of mine in National Review Online in which I call for the United States to support regime change in Syria and Iran, as if that meant a military campaign. If he had looked up a few lines he would have found these words:

"Give them a chance to fight for their freedom, as we did with the Georgians. The longer we dither, the more likely it becomes that we will sadly and unnecessarily find ourselves in a military confrontation of some sort, with all the terrible consequences that entails."

That's the actual context. The opposite of what Bamford says.

Michael A. Ledeen

James Bamford responds: I have to say, Michael Ledeen brews an excellent cup of Italian espresso -- I wouldn't dream of adding anything to it. When the situation requires, he can also be very good at modesty. He portrays himself as a powerless, misunderstood peacenik who is shocked, shocked that anyone suspect that he would countenance a military solution in Iran. He insists he has "no access to this administration." But as the Washington Post has documented, Ledeen is among Karl Rove's high level "network of advisers." Ledeen once boasted to the reporters that Rove told him, "Anytime you have a good idea, tell me." And, according to the Post, he frequently does: "Every month or six weeks, Ledeen will offer Rove 'something you should be thinking about.' More than once, Ledeen has seen his ideas, faxed to Rove, become official policy or rhetoric."

Ledeen also claims that he has "consistently opposed military invasion" of Iran and Syria. But he certainly makes no bones about his distain for diplomacy. "All this diplotalk about snuggling up to the Syrians makes me sick," he wrote in July. "Down with Assad. Down with Khamene'I." And he frequently uses "take-no-prisoners" language when referring to Tehran and Damascus. "I would insist that my soldiers have the right of 'hot pursuit' into Iran and Syria," he wrote last month, "and I would order my armed forces to attack the terrorist training camps in those countries." In his book The War Against the Terror Masters, he refers to "our enemies" and says, "we must destroy them to advance our historic mission." Sounds like war talk to me.

With so little to challenge in the article, Ledeen spends much of his time defending himself against things of which I didn't accuse him, such as being employed by the Pentagon, and arguing over how many times he's been interviewed. I wrote that Feith brought him into his "cabal," which he certainly did by sending him off to Rome on a secret mission with several people from his Office of Special Plans. And I have yet to find an interview in which Ledeen extensively discusses his role in the Rome meeting. The interview he cited in Raw Story was simply an exchange of several e-mails in which he talks about a recent vacation to Italy, adding, "I did not 'go to Rome.' "

Finally, Ledeen is still in denial about his friend Ghorbanifar who, he says, "looks more reliable today." Despite the fact that my last book, A Pretext for War, was endlessly critical of the CIA, he says I have "swallowed the Company's bait en toto" about Ghorbanifar. In fact, it was Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon that said nothing came of the information Ghorbanifar gave at the Rome meeting.

All of this could be looked at as simply a silly sideshow were it not for the fact that the last time this circus came to town, we ended up in a deadly blood-drenched quagmire in Iraq. In the next war I think we should leave the troops home and send in the clowns.

[White_Male_Canada]

:sleep

"In a screed Rolling Stone is passing off as journalism, James Bamford becomes the latest in a growing crowd of hacks to smear our friend Michael Ledeen.

Up until now, the fiction recklessly spewed by disgruntled intelligence-community retirees and their media enablers — some of whom have conceded that the claim is based on zero evidence — has been that Michael had something to do with the forged Italian documents that, according to the Left’s narrative, were the basis for President Bush’s “lie” in the 2003 State of the Union Address that Saddam Hussein had obtained yellowcake uranium (for nuclear-weapons construction) in Africa. Of course, Michael had utterly nothing to do with the forgeries (the source has actually been identified); the forgeries were not the basis for the president’s statement; the president did not claim Saddam obtained yellowcake — merely that intelligence reports indicated that Saddam had sought to obtain it; and the British intelligence reports that actually were the basis for the president’s statement were true (the Brits stand by them to this day). But hey, why let the truth get in the way of a good story?

Naturally, the Italian forgeries make a cameo appearance in Bamford’s just-released hit piece. His anxious reprise of the distortion has Italian intelligence telling the Bush administration that Saddam had obtained uranium in West Africa, which becomes the source of the president’s State of the Union assertion. But, aside from being wrong, Bamford’s recitation makes no sense. We understand Italian intelligence denies ever having said any such thing. Obviously, though, if (a) it had said such a thing, and (b) that information had been the basis for the president’s assertion, then Bush would have said Saddam obtained uranium. Instead, he said Saddam had merely inquired about uranium — and in Africa, not, as Bamford claims, West Africa. This is exactly what was alleged by the British intelligence reports — the president’s real source.

But this forgery nonsense is a sideshow compared to Bamford’s ludicrous account of Michael’s December 2001 trip to Rome. It has to make one wonder whether there are editors at Rolling Stone who actually consider themselves responsible for the articles in the magazine before loosing it on an unsuspecting public.

Bamford claims his interview with Michael marked the first time Ledeen had discussed the Rome trip. This is just silly. The trip has been recounted numerous times and in numerous places, often by Michael himself and, most recently, in a page-one article in the July 13 edition of the Wall Street Journal.

Essentially, Michael received information from Manucher Ghorbanifar, a controversial figure with Iranian sources who has, over many years, provided the U.S. and other Western intelligence agencies with information the quality of which has been hotly debated. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, with U.S. forces pursuing al Qaeda and the Taliban, Ghorbanifar contacted Michael to offer to provide the U.S. with information about Iran’s terrorist assets in Afghanistan. Since the information, if valid, might have protected the lives of American troops, Ledeen suggested to then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley that he at least consider sanctioning a meeting with Ghorbanifar, notwithstanding the latter’s history (which includes participation in the Iran-Contra affair).

Given the stakes involved — again, the possibility of saving American lives — Hadley approved the meeting, as did the State Department, the Pentagon, and the CIA. As the Journal reported, “The Pentagon sent two Iran experts, Lawrence Franklin and Harold Rhode, to meet Mr. Ghorbanifar and other Iranians in Rome, according to two people who helped set up the meeting. Mr. Ledeen and representatives of Italy’s military intelligence unit, Sismi, also attended.” While obviously not getting into the sensitive substance of what Ghorbanifar conveyed, Michael has maintained that it was valuable for purposes of force protection.

Bamford, to the contrary, wants to turn the meeting into a nefarious plot by Ledeen and the neocons to push the nation into war with Iran. Yet, anyone even vaguely familiar with Michael’s work knows that he has opposed military action against Iran — notwithstanding that he was years ahead of most experts in accurately portraying Iran’s role as the terror master at the center of the jihadist network. Ledeen has always urged that the U.S. promote and empower Iran’s pro-democracy dissidents — a position similar to what he urged in Iraq.

Bamford’s account, though, is just as embarrassing on the small details as the large ones. He pegs Ledeen as a Bush-administration insider who was brought into Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld’s Pentagon to be a part of Undersecretary Doug Feith’s “cabal.” Michael, however, has never worked for the Bush administration, and far from working at the Pentagon, has been an occasional Rumsfeld critic. And Michael, who has a recording of his conversation with Bamford, tells us he informed the reporter that he has no special access to Bush administration, let alone sway over it.

Nonetheless, Bamford continues in conspiratorial tones, “a plane carrying Ledeen traveled to Rome with two other members of Feith’s secret Pentagon unit: Larry Franklin and Harold Rhode, a protégé of Ledeen who has been called the “theoretician of the neocon movement.” Michael, however, tells us that Franklin and Rhode did not accompany him on flights either to or from Italy. And he adds that it is simply ignorant to suggest that Rhode is a protégé of his — if anything, he says, it is the reverse.

An elaborate tale is then weaved by Bamford about how those at the meeting discussed toppling the Iranian regime. “[T]aking a page from Feith’s playbook on Iraq,” he claims the men talked about creating a “front group of exiles and dissidents to call for the overthrow of Iran. According to sources familiar with the meeting, the Americans discussed joining forces with the Mujahedin-e Khalq, an anti-Iranian guerrilla army operating out of Iraq.”

The MEK has been designated as a terrorist organization by the State Department since 1997. There is not a scintilla of evidence on which to base a suggestion that Ledeen or the other Americans at the meeting would have anything to do with the group. And in fact, Bamford concedes that Michael denied any such dealings, maintaining, “I wouldn’t get within a hundred miles of the MEK[.] … They have no following, no legitimacy.” But does the absence of proof make Bamford hesitate from his tin-foil-hat conclusion? Of course not: “But neoconservatives were eager to undermine any deal that involved cooperating with Iran. To the neocons, the value of the MEK as a weapon against Tehran greatly outweighed any benefit that might be derived from interrogating the Al Qaeda operatives — even though they might provide intelligence on future terrorist attacks, as well as clues to the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden.” Bunk offered up as fact.

But that is far from the most egregious of Bamford’s journalistic malpractice. He “reports” that, at the Rome meeting, when “[t]he men then turned their attention to their larger goal: regime change in Iran,” Ghorbanifar made a suggestion that “funding the overthrow of the Iranian government” could be done by “using hundreds of millions of dollars in cash supposedly hidden by Saddam Hussein.” Ghorbanifar, according to Bamford, “even hinted that Saddam was hiding in Iran.” (Emphasis supplied.)

There’s only one problem. This was December 2001. Saddam wasn’t in hiding. He was still the president of Iraq. He did not go into hiding until a year and a half later, when he was overthrown. And even on the off chance that Bamford, an award-winning journalist, had not heard that Saddam was found in December 2003 in an Iraqi rat-hole, should he not have gleaned that the last place on earth Saddam would have been hiding, at any time, was Iran — against whom Saddam had used chemical weapons during a brutal eight-year war in the 1980s?

Michael has sent a letter to Rolling Stone responding Bamford's disgraceful work. Rolling Stone ought to be ashamed of itself."


Fluffington,rollingstoned = fishwrap.

You offer nothing but the drive by smear and the pander and run while offering no vision and zero alternatives.Besides higher taxes and even bigger government. Even very liberal Liberals are saying so:

http://ww.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/27/AR2006072701222.html

After years of struggling to define their own approach to post-Sept. 11 foreign policy, Democrats seem finally to have hit on one. It's called pandering. In those rare cases when George W. Bush shows genuine sensitivity to America's allies and propounds a broader, more enlightened view of the national interest, Democrats will make him pay. It's jingoism with a liberal face….

Americans think Democrats stand for nothing, that they have no principles beyond political expedience. And given the party's behavior over the past several months, it is not hard to understand why.

[suckseed]

Clearly, truth has a sliding floor. I gave up trying to make sense out of all this. Obviously, if the RS article is true, it seems pretty much in line with the stated objectives of the PNAC. I include the link here not for you two, who obviously are aware of it.
http://www.newamericancentury.org/
I think it would be better and not undermine your position were you not to call people names during a political debate. Again, obviously, if either one of your positions is true, that's compelling information, but...well, you know.
I myself yelled at chefmike a couple of months ago, but it was because I perceived him to be being rude to a member here who wasn't currently even talking to him. I find Bush to be a very disappointing president, and he says things which are mind bogglingly ignorant sounding. Plus his resume before being elected clearly indicates that there were forces behind the scenes responsible for his win. Or maybe the American public is just that stupid.
How anyone thinks that a rich kid with a failed oil investment business and a short career as a stadium booster is qualified to be president is beyond me.
Anyway, as time has passed, I've regretted what I said, Mike. I don't agree with your approach in terms of being inflammatory, but I don't make it a habit to call people names, be it online or whatever. But I do agree most of the time with your criticisms of this administration - simply based on the available evidence. Bush consistently fails to come across as an intelligent speaker, which calls his thought processes or lack of them into question. And Iraq has been spectacularly bungled. With all our experience, technology and analysis, it's a mind blower to what it unfold. WTF?
And finally - there are intelligent and whacky people in both parties and at either end of the spectrum. Labels are lazy and brand us as people quick to make assumptions.