White House refused to fork over docs to Senate indicating they spoofed Iraq intelligence; Iraq schemers sold Zarqawi lies to U.S.

Libby got indicted. Tomorrow is another day. In the low light & very low shutter speed my camera made some weird effects. From the peace vigil on the Lake Street bridge last night:

"Miami: Emergency Supplies Are Dwindling" / "Aide to Cheney Appears Likely to Be Indicted; Rove Under Scrutiny"

I feel that life will never have such interesting sets of headlines simultaneously.

Well hey, it was already pretty much Bush's worst week ever, and now Fitzmas is upon us! Pat Fitzgerald has his own website. Expect indictment PDFs for Libby soon. Raw Story said that some indictments have already been secured. Antiwar.com has even more bits about it. More fake documents suddenly come spilling out of the woodwork. As they note, get this, the myth of Zarqawi was peddled to American intelligence agents and Washington lapped it up! UK Telegraph reported last year (via Antiwar):

US military intelligence agents in Iraq have revealed a series of botched and often tawdry dealings with unreliable sources who, in the words of one source, "told us what we wanted to hear".

"We were basically paying up to $10,000 a time to opportunists, criminals and chancers who passed off fiction and supposition about Zarqawi as cast-iron fact, making him out as the linchpin of just about every attack in Iraq," the agent said.

"Back home this stuff was gratefully received and formed the basis of policy decisions. We needed a villain, someone identifiable for the public to latch on to, and we got one."

The sprawling US intelligence community is in a state of open political warfare amid conflicting pressures from election-year politics, military combat and intelligence analysis. The Bush administration has seized on Zarqawi as the principal leader of the insurgency, mastermind of the country's worst suicide bombings and the man behind the abduction of foreign hostages. He is held up as the most tangible link to Osama bin Laden and proof of the claim that the former Iraqi regime had links to al-Qa'eda.

However, fresh intelligence emerging from around Fallujah, the rebel-held city that is at the heart of the insurgency, suggests that, despite a high degree of fragmentation, the insurgency is led and dominated not by Arab foreigners but by members of Iraq's Sunni minority.

Clemons floats a rumor that John Bolton's former Chief of Staff Fred Fleitz might be a hidden link in the Plame case, perhaps the source of the leak itself. But it's just a rumor. Tomorrow will tell!! The world according to former Powell aide Col. Lawrence Wilkerson. I linked this before but I like it a lot. And his bit in the LA Times. Clemons also had excerpts from a new New Yorker article interviewing Scowcroft, publicly leveling on how he's been exiled from this Administration and how nasty they've been.

The Indian Techie flamewar. Excellent. Some people are suing because they don't like that you can scratch an iPod nano.

Iranians not happy about a computer simulation of American war on Iran.

Good news for the Weed, Man! "Pot not a major cancer risk: report". "Study says high doses of marijuana stimulate brain cell growth:"

"Dr. Zhang commented on the chronic use of Marijuana based on the results of their research saying, "Chronic use of marijuana may actually improve learning memory when the new neurons in the hippocampus can mature in two or three months."

Spark it, yo.

Wal-Mart is some evil shit! Labor blog:

To discourage unhealthy job applicants, [the memo] suggests that Wal-Mart arrange for "all jobs to include some physical activity (e.g., all cashiers do some cart-gathering)."...

"It will be far easier to attract and retain a healthier work force than it will be to change behavior in an existing one," the memo said. "These moves would also dissuade unhealthy people from coming to work at Wal-Mart."

Read the whole thing (PDF) - thanks, NY Times.

Former CIA dude Pat Lang had an couple photos showing how fast Dubai is growing. His site, Sic Semper Tyrannis, has a lot of interesting bits on the Plame scandal, and whatever else suits an old spook.

Part III of the translated La Repubblica Niger-yellowcake investigation. More fun stuff filling in the timeline with SISMI chief Niccolo Pollari passing the forgeries to Stephen Hadley on Sept. 9, 2002. DC-area reporter Laura Rozen has been following this mess as well. As she summarizes:

You have an ex-Sismi agent (Rocco Martino), a current Sismi vice captain (Antonio Nucera), and a long-time Sismi mole in the Niger embassy Rome involved in assembling the Niger forgeries. You have a former Sismi agent (Rocco Martino) trying to selling them, to the French, to the British, to an Italian journalist. Sismi itself issued reports to the CIA and MI6 with the information on Iraq supposedly contracting to purchase 500 tons of yellowcake from Niger that turned up in the forgeries. You have the head of Sismi Nicolo Pollari admitting to Repubblica in an interview published Monday that Sismi knew what Rocco Martino was up to in 2001 and offering to show them a photo of Martino passing the dossier to British intelligence. I am not sure how the Berlusconi government can plausibly deny that Sismi didn't have a direct role in the Niger yellowcake claims to western intelligence, and a very cozily indirect role to the forgeries themselves. Unless it's the kind of denial that Rove and Libby meant when they told the grand jury that they hadn't told journalists about Wilson's wife or her place of employment.

She also tells us that Ahmed Chalabi will make a triumphant return to Washington to meet with Hadley in November. Perhaps they shall arrest him for espionage as well.

Murray Waas in National Journal reporting on Libby and Cheney suppressing info to the Senate, which subsequently whitewashed their manipulation of Iraq intelligence and blamed it on the CIA. Let's get into the details of the spoofed intel and the Cover Up:

Vice President Cheney and his chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, overruling advice from some White House political staffers and lawyers, decided to withhold crucial documents from the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004 when the panel was investigating the use of pre-war intelligence that erroneously concluded Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, according to Bush administration and congressional sources.

Cheney had been the foremost administration advocate for war with Iraq, and Libby played a central staff role in coordinating the sale of the war to both the public and Congress.

Among the White House materials withheld from the committee were Libby-authored passages in drafts of a speech that then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell delivered to the United Nations in February 2003 to argue the Bush administration's case for war with Iraq, according to congressional and administration sources. The withheld documents also included intelligence data that Cheney's office -- and Libby in particular -- pushed to be included in Powell's speech, the sources said.

The new information that Cheney and Libby blocked information to the Senate Intelligence Committee further underscores the central role played by the vice president's office in trying to blunt criticism that the Bush administration exaggerated intelligence data to make the case to go to war.
[.......]
The Intelligence Committee at the time was trying to determine whether the CIA and other intelligence agencies provided faulty or erroneous intelligence on Iraq to President Bush and other government officials. But the committee deferred the much more politically sensitive issue as to whether the president and the vice president themselves, or other administration officials, misrepresented intelligence information to bolster the case to go to war. An Intelligence Committee spokesperson says the panel is still working on this second phase of the investigation.

Had the withheld information been turned over, according to administration and congressional sources, it likely would have shifted a portion of the blame away from the intelligence agencies to the Bush administration as to who was responsible for the erroneous information being presented to the American public, Congress, and the international community.

In April 2004, the Intelligence Committee released a report that concluded that "much of the information provided or cleared by the Central Intelligence Agency for inclusion in Secretary Powell's [United Nation's] speech was overstated, misleading, or incorrect."

Both Republicans and Democrats on the committee say that their investigation was hampered by the refusal of the White House to turn over key documents, although Republicans said the documents were not as central to the investigation.

In addition to withholding drafts of Powell's speech -- which included passages written by Libby -- the administration also refused to turn over to the committee contents of the president's morning intelligence briefings on Iraq, sources say. These documents, known as the Presidential Daily Brief, or PDB, are a written summary of intelligence information and analysis provided by the CIA to the president.

One congressional source said, for example, that senators wanted to review the PDBs to determine whether dissenting views from the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the Department of Energy, and other agencies that often disagreed with the CIA on the question of Iraq's programs to develop weapons of mass destruction were being presented to the president.
[......]
A former senior administration official familiar with the discussions on whether to turn over the materials said there was a "political element" in the matter. This official said the White House did not want to turn over records during an election year that could used by critics to argue that the administration used incomplete or faulty intelligence to go to war with Iraq. "Nobody wants something like this dissected or coming out in an election year," the former official said.
[......]
Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to Powell as Secretary of State, charged in a recent speech that there was a "cabal between Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense [Donald L.] Rumsfeld on critical decisions that the bureaucracy did not know was being made."

In interagency meetings in preparation for Powell's U.N. address, Wilkerson, Powell, and senior CIA officials argued that evidence Libby wanted to include as part of Powell's presentation was exaggerated or unreliable. Cheney, too, became involved in those discussions, sources said, when he believed that Powell and others were not taking Libby's suggestions seriously.

Wilkerson has said that he ordered "whole reams of paper" of intelligence information excluded from Libby's draft of Powell's speech. Another official recalled that Libby was pushing so hard to include certain intelligence information in the speech that Libby lobbied Powell for last minute changes in a phone call to Powell's suite at the Waldorf Astoria hotel the night before the speech. Libby's suggestions were dismissed by Powell and his staff.

John E. McLaughlin, then-deputy director of the CIA, has testified to Congress that "much of our time in the run-up to the speech was spent taking out material... that we and the secretary's staff judged to have been unreliable."

All right, good stuff. Let's go on. According to the Nelson Report via Agonist:

[T]his may be obsolete before you read it, but as of late this afternoon, the rumor hot line had achieved a consensus that indictments have been approved against the right-hand men of both President Bush and Vice President Cheney...White House political chief Karl Rove, and VP chief of staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby. But where this reaches historic proportions...rumors that a "Constitutional officer is an unindicted co-conspirator". That is, Cheney himself.

Seeya Miers: Billmon, in a fine post rehashing the late great Miers nomination, notes the idea of 'critical legal studies.' I'd never heard of that but I should have assumed it's out there. This Hotline roundup of why it collapsed is funny.

Paul Begala visits TPMcafe to relate what it's like to be in a White House under siege. Awesome comic. TIME's Mike Allen said that there were likely plea offers from Fitz. Hotline hints that there the grand jury won't get extended.

Someone named DC Insider on the rightwing RedState.org said that indictments are probably coming for Wilson and Plame. Hilarious! Bill O'Reilly's Coward list. Also funny.

The DLC sucks. Hardcore. They keep giving this Peter Beinart guy way too much space. I hate their nasty anti-anti-war vibe. They have done nothing but screw things up.

Biological electricity and hurricanes. This writeup by a watcher of the weather about the electrical dynamics of hurricanes was a bit mysterious and interesting - via Slashdot:

"In a story at the new Open Source Energy Network site, Paul Noel says: "Energetically speaking, the vortex that forms in these storms is also a natural particle accelerator, and a massive capacitor bank. As the harmonic circuit develops, it resonates acoustically and functions as a capacitor, extracting the heat from the storm and transmitting it away. Without this electrical circuit, the storm would fail almost instantly due to the accumulation of heat from condensation of water." He also asserts that understanding these phenomena better could help us harness the power of nature, seen and unseen."

Meanwhile Norm Coleman continues his groundbreaking work at the Senate Un-American Activities and Scapegoating Committee.

More coming........