So asks McClatchy Newspapers ("Truth to Power") Washington Bureau reporter, John Walcott:
WASHINGTON — Defense Department counterintelligence investigators suspected that Iranian exiles who provided dubious intelligence on Iraq and Iran to a small group of Pentagon officials might have "been used as agents of a foreign intelligence service ... to reach into and influence the highest levels of the U.S. government," a Senate Intelligence Committee report said Thursday.
[Stephen Cambone], however, shut down the 2003 investigation into the Pentagon officials' activities after only a month, and the Defense Department's top brass never followed up on the investigators' recommendation for a more thorough investigation, the Senate report said.
The revelation raises questions about whether Iran may have used a small cabal of officials in the Pentagon and in Vice President Dick Cheney's office to feed bogus intelligence on Iraq and Iran to senior policymakers in the Bush administration who were eager to oust the Iraqi dictator. [emphasis added]
And who is the scurvy little creature at the crux of this question?
Michael Ledeen.
The aborted counterintelligence investigation probed some Pentagon officials' contacts with Iranian exile Manucher Ghorbanifar, whom the CIA had labeled a "fabricator" in 1984. Those contacts were brokered by an American civilian, Michael Ledeen, a former Pentagon and National Security Council consultant and a leading advocate of invading Iraq and overthrowing Iran's Islamic regime.
Ledeen gets my vote as "the creepiest creep" in the whole rogues gallery of swindlers and propagandists who conned this country into this war of conquest, this oil grab, this "aggressive war" in Iraq.
"Karl Rove’s Brain" — "Veteran neo-con advisor moves on Iran", by Jim Lobe, Asia Times:
When The Washington Post published a list of the people whom Karl Rove, President George W Bush’s closest advisor, regularly consults for advice outside the administration, foreign policy veterans were shocked when Michael Ledeen popped up as the only full-time international affairs analyst.
"The two met after Bush’s election," the Post reported cheerfully, quoting Ledeen about Rove’s request that "any time you have a good idea, tell me". "More than once, Ledeen has seen his ideas, faxed to Rove, become official policy or rhetoric," noted the newspaper.
CIA spooks Vincent Cannistraro and Philip Giraldi tie Ledeen to the Niger forgeries, via Doug Feith’s Office of Special Plans — aka: "The Lie Factory."
See too, McClatchy's companion piece, Senate committee: Bush knew Iraq claims weren't true, by Jonathan S. Landay.
Link to Senate Intelligence Committee Report (cumbersome pdf file), here.
SI Committee Phase II Press Release.
BTW: Asked about "criminal prosecutions" at the Phase II-release press conference, Senators Wyden and Rockefeller towed the Dem. leadership [sic] line:
Rockefeller: "No. I'm not into that." (ie: "Congress can't walk and chew gum at the same time.")
Wyden: "No, but this does warrant further review."
Press conference video link, via C-SPAN:
rtsp://video1.c-span.org/project/iraq/iraq060508_dems.rm
(requires Real Player)