The Wet-Ass Hour

For Rove, Libby, Cheney, Chimpie, et alia, the wet-ass hour is going to be extended indefinitely, which is really a brilliant move on Fitzgerald's part. Keeping the tension and uncertainty mixed into the mess at the White House is the best way to torture those lousy motherfuckers. Rove may be happy he's not indicted today, but remaining under investigation can only mean worse rather than better for him.

The indictment of Scooter may be a demonstration to Rove what will happen to him if he does not flip to save his own pasty, bulbous ass. Fitz must have an airtight case on Libby, and he'd going to show Rove's lawyers that the only way to avoid hard prison time is going to be to turn over a bigger fish. That means Chimpie, Cheney, maybe Rumsfeld, and perhaps quite a number of others.

Remember, the rumor mill has been stoked solely by the lawyers and staffers of those under investigation, not from Fitzgerald's staff, so none of it carries any weight at all. When Fitz has his press conference in a couple of hours, I think there are going to be some very, very shocked motherfuckers.

Stay hopeful and stay tuned.

Absolutely Priceless

Click and laugh.

Prediction

I'm going to go out on a limb and make a prediction. Here goes: Patrick Fitzgerald's real goal in his investigation will go to the absolute heart of the runup to the invasion of Iraq and key in on the forged Niger uranium documents to determine who forged them. Mr. Fitzgerald is going to rock the Chimpie administration like a Richter Scale 10 'quake would rock San Francisco. When he gets to the bottom of the forgery, it is going to land right smack in Dick Cheney's lap, aided and abetted by Rove, with Bush's knowledge and consent.

They're all going to be royally fucked...by their own goddamned criminality.

Hooray. Too bad the cost had to be so high before the people get it.

Another Angle on Cheney's Culpability

Like Picasso, I am trying to shift points of view to more realistically render the overall phenomenon we are all trying to observe while impatiently waiting for the hammer to fall on the Chimpie Outlaw Cabal. Over at Alternet author Stephen Pizzo guides us through another passage through the crimes at the White House in the runup to war. Along with the great insights, Mr. Pizzo also drops one of the best similes I've read in a while, this time in regard to Patrick Fitzgerald's relentless pursuit of his quarry.

Letting a fellow like that loose on the Bush administration is like turning a bloodhound free in sausage factory -- his nose must have begun twitching the moment he arrived.

So the question is not "if" he found anything, but how much he found. Because when you find a fresh sausage there's almost always another one connected to it -- and another, and another. In this case the first sausage in that string is not the Valerie Plame affair, but war -- specially, how the administration justified invading another nation.

I love that--"like turning a bloodhound free in a sausage factory." As the pal of my two dogs, one of whom is part hound, I have a vivid picture of the excitement with which Mr. Fitzgerald must be pursuing the bad guys.

Mr. Pizzo also gives an excellent analogy as to the technique by which the cabal will be taken down.

First, understand that Dick Cheney was the maestro of that crime. Libby was his Sammy "The Bull" Gravano, the guy who got his hands dirty doing the boss's work. When tough-guy Sammy faced years in prison he rolled over on boss John Gotti. Sammy looked his old boss right in the eye in court as he dropped dime after dime after dime on him. Sammy got out of prison. Gotti died, alone and ranting, in a federal prison hospital.

That's why when Cheney looks at his old pal Scooter these days, he must shudder. Gone are he "atta boy" backslaps, between boss and sidekick. Gone are the "nod, nod, wink, winks," between two soul mates who think so much alike they seldom have to explain. Now when Cheney looks at Scooter he sees a guy who knows where all the bodies are buried -- because he helped bury them. When Scooter looks at Cheney he must see a guy who could spend his golden years luxuriating in his Jackson Hole mansion, while he, Scooter, spends his retirement filing appeals from a cell at Camp Beefcake -- where a nickname like "Scooter" would be a real liability.

So, it must be awkward between the two old friends these days.

If I learned anything about crooks from my years of covering such folk, it's this - good crooks always take out insurance. In the world of white collar crooks, insurance amounts to incriminating evidence - secretly tapped conversations with co-conspirators, copies of documents, notes and emails. The message is, "don't sell me up the river because I have the goods on you too."

So now we have even greater suspense as we await our Fitzmas. What indictments will come down from the Grand Jury? Will Fitz flip Libby and finally get Cheney dragged kicking and screaming from his quarters at the former house of the Superintendent of the Naval Observatory. At last, perhaps, the crooked smirk will become a scar of terror across his face, eyes wide with fear when he realizes that he is going to a place where he will be told when to eat, when to sleep, when to pray, and when to shit.

And then after the fatal heart attack, he'll burn in hell for all eternity. Beautiful.

The Forged Uranium Documents from Italy--Did the White House Know They Were Fake?

This story just keeps growing as our anticipation of the Plamegate indictments swells into discomfort (imagine being a kid and Xmas day starts getting getting shifted out a day on Xmas eve). It's painful, man. In The Washington Monthly on October 24, 2005, Kevin Drum advances a theory that if true could mean war crimes level malfeasance on the part of Chimpie, Cheney, Rice, and the rest of the criminals. First he asks the question that has occurred to many following this affair:

. After all, as Bob Somerby is fond of pointing out, Joe Wilson's famous July 2003 op-ed in the New York Times didn't actually contradict anything the White House had said. In his 2003 State of the Union address, George Bush said that Iraq had "sought...uranium from Africa," while Wilson said only that his trip to Niger convinced him that Iraq had not in fact succeeded in buying uranium. So why the desperate smear campaign against Wilson? Even Karl Rove must have known that leaking his wife's name was fantastically reckless and over the top. Why not just point out the lack of contradiction and leave it at that?

So why? Rove is a smart guy--nobody argues with that--and he is also quite adept at putting in play very complex operations that are several levels of indirection removed from him so that he and whomever he works for are insulated. He does play close to the edge sometimes, as when Chimpie's father fired Rove for leaking to the press during GHW Bush's campaign, but in his whole career he's developed a fine sense of where the line is and he can dance along it with great skill, much to the disgust and frustration of all who have been smeared by him.

Okay, so why take such a risk over such a minor problem? Well, maybe to the White House it wasn't so minor, because they already knew something that hadn't yet come out.

Well, there was something the White House knew at that point that the rest of us didn't. They knew that not only were the Nigerien documents fake, but that they had been proven fake the previous year — though not by Wilson or the IAEA. At that time, everybody thought the timeline went like this: (1) Bush gives SOTU address in January 2003, (2) IAEA proves Nigerien documents are phony in March. That's bad, but not catastrophic. However, the real timeline, known to only a few, was this: (1) State Department determines Nigerien docs are phony in October 2002, (2) Bush mentions African uranium anyway in January SOTU address.

Get it? Bush and his minions KNOW the documents are fake, but proceed to use them anyway, figuring that our collective short memory will prevent their subsequent exposure as bogus as having any effect on their desired goal--invading Iraq.

Mr. Drum makes a final observation that could be comic if the results hadn't turned out so tragic for so many human beings and for the soul of our nation.

And that's what scared them: the possibility that someone was about to expose the story behind the forged documents. That would have blown the pre-war stories about "mushroom clouds" and nuclear programs sky high, and that's what caused them to wildly overreact to Wilson's otherwise innocuous criticisms.

And that's why Fitzgerald wanted to see the Italian report. He figures it might explain the original motivation for the whole affair, and knowing the motivation might help him make his case.

At least, that's my best guess. The irony, of course, is that Wilson didn't know the story behind the forged documents and neither did anyone else. And despite plenty of digging, to this day no one knows the story. But the aftershocks live on.

So the White House, out of fear of exposure of the very dishonest game they were playing with the facts to argue for war, exposes the very depth of its criminality by overreacting to Wilson's revelations. Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has requested the Niger documents and I can only hope that it is because he has decided that the crimes committed by this horrid cabal are much, much more serious than outing a CIA agent or lying under oath, although that's enough to cry treason.

Meanwhile, we all wait for Fitzmas.

I Smell Something Big and It's Bad, Bad, Bad

Sismi is Italy's military intelligence service. Its head is a fellow named Nicolo Pollari. And the Italian paper La Repubblica has busted open a story relayed via Buzzflash and American Prospect Online. To wit:

Today's exclusive report in La Repubblica reveals that Pollari met secretly in Washington on September 9, 2002, with then–Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. Their secret meeting came at a critical moment in the White House campaign to convince Congress and the American public that war in Iraq was necessary to prevent Saddam Hussein from developing nuclear weapons. National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones confirmed the meeting to the Prospect on Tuesday.

Remember, Stephen Hadley is Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs.

The Sismi chief's previously undisclosed meeting with Hadley, who was promoted earlier this year to national security adviser, occurred one month before a murky series of events culminated in the U.S. government obtaining copies of the Niger forgeries.

The forged documents were cabled from the U.S. embassy in Rome to Washington after being delivered to embassy officials by Elisabetta Burba, a reporter for Panorama. She had received the papers from an Italian middleman named Rocco Martino. Burba never wrote a story about those documents. Instead her editor, Berlusconi favorite Carlo Rossella, ordered her to bring them immediately to the U.S. embassy.

Berlusconi, of course, is Silvio Berlusconi, pal of Chimpie and yet another corrupt right-wing corrupt leader, prime minister of Italy. Why would he want to influence or help to influence American policy with regard to an invasion of Iraq? La Repubblica covers that:

For Berlusconi and Pollari, according to La Repubblica, the overriding motive was a desire to win more appreciation and prestige from the Americans, who were seen as eager for help in making their sales pitch for war. On Monday, the newspaper described the atmosphere in 2002: "Berlusconi wants Sismi to be big players on the international security scene, to prove themselves to their ally, the United States, and the world. Washington is looking for proof of Saddam's involvement … and wants info immediately."

And the rest, as you know, is history. Bad, bad fucking history for 2000 Americans, countless Iraqis, and even 27 Italians. All in the name of power, of criminality, of arrogance.

May Bush, Berlusconi, and their ilk roast eternally on a spit in hell over Satan's barbecue.

Another Dot in the Forged Niger Docs

Over at Raw Story, there's another connection from the original forged Niger Yellowcake documents into the White House. Keep in mind, of course, that these are simply interesting events in a longer chain that may or may not add up to active participation of White House personnel in creation of these documents in order to build the case for war. And that is quite criminal. Here's an excerpt:

In an explosive series of articles appearing this week in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, investigative reporters Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d'Avanzo reveal how Niccolo Pollari, chief of Italy's military intelligence service, known as SISMI, brought the Niger yellowcake story directly to the White House after his insistent overtures had been rejected by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2001 and 2002.

Today's exclusive report in La Repubblica reveals that Pollari met secretly in Washington on September 9, 2002, with then–Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. Their secret meeting came at a critical moment in the White House campaign to convince Congress and the American public that war in Iraq was necessary to prevent Saddam Hussein from developing nuclear weapons.

The La Repubblica article quotes a Bush administration official saying, "I can confirm that on September 9, 2002, general Nicolo Pollari met Stephen Hadley."

Who is Stephen Hadley? According to the White House website, he is the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. He also happens to be one of the two people whom Chimpie sent out to meet with Cindy Sheehan when she was camped outside the Crawford "ranch."

Curioser and curioser.

Going Down, Taking As Much As He Can Along

In case you were hoping for Chimpie to have an epiphany and do a Scrooge- or Grinchlike turnabout, forget it. The New York Daily News has something that ought to scare the shit out of us all:

They describe him as beset but unbowed, convinced that history will vindicate the major decisions of his presidency even if they damage him and his party in the 2006 and 2008 elections.

Actually, it's a good news/bad news thing. The good news is that he is willing to take the Republican Party down with him. The bad news is that he's still in the presidency while he does it. If you think things are fucked up now, imagine the damage someone who is pathologically incapable of self-reflection but certain of historical redemption can do. All of our asses are up for grabs when someone with a messiah complex and a subnormal IQ has the reins of power.

Is Paris burning?

How Bad It's Going to Be for Chimpie

The UPI has published the best thing I've read so far on how deep Patrick Fitzgerald may be going into the Plamegate matter, and it's not good for the Bushits. The leaking of Valerie Plame Wilson's name was only a symptom of a much greater cancer on the executive branch of our government, which was the fabrication of a rationale to got to war.

Fitzgerald's team has been given the full, and as yet unpublished report of the Italian parliamentary inquiry into the affair, which started when an Italian journalist obtained documents that appeared to show officials of the government of Niger helping to supply the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein with Yellowcake uranium. This claim, which made its way into President Bush's State of the Union address in January, 2003, was based on falsified documents from Niger and was later withdrawn by the White House.

Why do these documents matter? Well, they turned out to be rather crude forgeries, which an Italian newspaper figured out right away, although it took the White House much, much longer (wink, wink) to discover that.

But by then Elisabetta Burba, a journalist for the Italian magazine Panorama (owned by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi) had been contacted by a "security consultant" named Rocco Martoni, offering to sell documents that "proved" Iraq was obtaining uranium in Niger for $10,000. Rather than pay the money, Burba's editor passed photocopies of the documents to the U.S. Embassy, which forwarded them to Washington, where the forgery was later detected. Signatures were false, and the government ministers and officials who had signed them were no longer in office on the dates on which the documents were supposedly written.

And where might those forged documents have come from originally?

There is one line of inquiry with an American connection that Fitzgerald would have found it difficult to ignore. This is the claim that a mid-ranking Pentagon official, Larry Franklin, held talks with some Italian intelligence and defense officials in Rome in late 2001. Franklin has since been arrested on charges of passing classified information to staff of the pro-Israel lobby group, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee. Franklin has reportedly reached a plea bargain with his prosecutor, Paul McNulty, and it would be odd if McNulty and Fitzgerald had not conferred to see if their inquiries connected.

If you Google Larry Franklin, it turns up this article from the August 27, 2004 edition of the Washington Post that says

Franklin's name surfaced in news reports last year that disclosed he and another Pentagon specialist on the Persian Gulf region had met secretly with Manucher Ghorbanifar, a discredited expatriate Iranian arms merchant who figured prominently in the Iran-contra scandal of the mid-1980s.

That meeting, according to Pentagon officials, took place in late 2001. It had been formally sanctioned by the U.S. government in response to an Iranian government offer to provide information relevant to the war on terrorism. Franklin and the other Pentagon official, Harold Rhode, met with the Iranians over three days in Italy. Ghorbanifar attended these meetings. Rumsfeld has said that the information received at the meetings led nowhere.

Now Franklin was attached to Douglas Feith's office in the Pentagon. Feith, you may remember, was the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy under Donald Rumsfeld, and was called by Army General Tommy Franks, according to Bob Woodward's book Plan of Attack, "the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth."

Funny how that all links up, isn't it? And you know that Patrick Fitzgerald is going to be going a whole lot deeper than a simple Google search. I wonder if the indictments to come won't blow this corrupt criminal adminstration into hell for all history to revile.

Cross your fingers.

Past Presidents Speak

Now here's an indicator that Chimpie's time is at end. I did a little shopping yesterday (for another guitar for the arsenal--yes, I have GAS, or Guitar Acquisition Syndrome, but a very mild case) and when I receive change for the purchase of an accessory item, one of the five dollar bills had a speech balloon coming from Abraham Lincoln's mouth with the words "Impeach Bush." No big deal.

But three days earlier, I had received a dollar bill in change at a grocery store and under "In God We Trust" was written "Bush, We Impeach."

A trend? A call to action? I don't know. But if a third such piece of currency in a higher denomination shows up in the next few days, then I know there's something afoot in this corner of the country at least.

Any similar reports out there?