Democrat Bill Foster won a special election to fill Denny Hastert's old seat in Illinois 14, what had been a reliably Republican district. Foster beat dairy kingpin Jim Oberweis and it seems one of the statements that helped Foster pull this seat out of Republican hands was Oberweis's declaration that we need to stay in Iraq for another ten years. (Think about it: in McCain terms, that's practically cut and run.)
You should read this article. You aren’t going to be getting any news on Sibel Edmonds from the mainstream. I personally am surprised she hasn’t met with an accident yet."A WHISTLEBLOWER has made a series of extraordinary claims about how corrupt government officials allowed Pakistan and other states to steal nuclear weapons secrets," reports Great Britain's Sunday Times in the lede of their front page exclusive, headlined "For sale: West’s deadly nuclear secrets."
In the article, just filed tonight, [Sibel] Edmonds reveals details overheard on wiretaps she translated during her time at the FBI, just after 9/11. Her disclosures to the Times reveal a maze of nuclear black market espionage involving U.S. Defense and State Department officials, that resulted in the sale and propagation of nuclear secrets to Turkish and Israeli interests. In turn, that information was then sold to Pakistan and used by A.Q. Kahn for development of nuclear weapons. The secrets were subsequently proliferated to Iran, Libya, North Korea, and potentially al-Qaeda's Osama bin Laden, just weeks prior to September 11th, 2001.
[...]
In late October, Edmonds had told The BRAD BLOG she was prepared to reveal the information to any major U.S. broadcast media outlet, after feeling that she had exhausted all efforts to see the disturbing information properly investigated by U.S. Government agencies.
[...]
Despite broken promises for hearings on her case by U.S. Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA), support from Senators Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Patrick Leahy (D-MI), and a number of mainstream exposés several years ago detailing aspects of her story before she was willing to break her unprecedented "States Secrets Privilege" gag order, none of the American broadcast media outlets took her up on her offer.
"She has now decided to divulge some of that information after becoming disillusioned with the US authorities' failure to act," reports the Sunday Times tonight...
[...]
"What I found was damning," Edmonds tells the Times about the information she learned while at the FBI concerning the nuclear blackmarket activities and proliferation of several government agencies, including her own unit at the FBI. "While the FBI was investigating, several arms of the government were shielding what was going on."
[...]
In a 15-page 2005 exposé in Vanity Fair, concerning yet another, if perhaps-related, aspect of Edmonds' allegations, British reporter David Rose detailed charges of nearly $500,000 in bribes from Turkish interests, said to have been prepared for former U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL). His attorney has denied those allegations, though, in another BRAD BLOG exclusive, Edmonds challenged specific details of the denial. Hastert recently resigned from Congress, sparking speculation for his sudden departure after reports by ABC News in 2006, that he was under DoJ investigation for bribery charges related to convicted Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
In our October story, Edmonds had told us that, in addition to Hastert, she was prepared to name and give details of corruption involving at least "two other well-known" members of Congress. She told us at the time that they are both Republicans from the U.S. House and "one of them is recently no longer there."
Brad Blog
Let me guess....he wants to spend more time with his family.
...but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.
(First Karl, then Denny. I'm beginning to think that gay/child porn ring story may be about to bust.)
(I'm going to be sorry for that remark when I find out he has cancer or something, huh? But not much.)
Update: Must post a line from Bob's comment for people who don't take the time to check: "Apparently he has outlived his uselessness."
Now I must remember that line.
Who would these three be? Our old friends Doug Feith and Richard Perle, and a former State Department official, Marc Grossman. (She also puts Dennis Hastert and our buddy Paul Wolfowitz in the pot.)[Ms. Edmunds claims] that investigations already carried out by the FBI would demonstrate that three former senior officials were involved in illegal weapons sales and other activities that would justify charges of espionage and possibly even treason against them.
Lukery ends his post in the comments section arguing for the possibility that a slow resolution of all these types of inquiries and investigations might be best in the long run to essentially dig out the toxin that is the current administration and GOP from its roots, but that…”If it is business as usual, and Waxman is just bowing to AIPAC’s wishes, then we have truly been taken over and it is time for pitchforks.”[…] possibly because Israeli officials and the country’s defense industry are believed to have been involved in the weapons diversion activity.
Congressman Waxman is regarded as close to Israel’s principal lobby, AIPAC, and even promised Jewish voters back in November 2006 that there would be no Democratic congressional committee chairmen involved with Middle Eastern policy who were not completely supportive of Israel.
GOP paybacks to me means that the man is on to something. I'm having doubts now about Fitzgerald ultimately clearing the WH with this investigation.Late this evening I got emails from a few readers who told me about a news story on Chicago's Channel 9, WGN-TV which pointed out that Patrick Fitzgerald's term as US Attorney in Chicago is coming up in October and that pressure is building to deny him a reappointment.
As it was described to me, the news segment featured an interview with former Sen. Peter Fitzgerald (R)(no relation), who suggested that Denny Hastert might be pushing to turn Fitzgerald out of his job.
And who would think a stand-up guy like Denny Hastert would stoop to something like that?
Incidentally, in that article, a CIA official denies that Rove and Libby had anything to do with writing Tenet's sacrificial speech.[S]pecial prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has asked not only about how CIA operative Valerie Plame's name was leaked but also how the administration went about shifting responsibility from the White House to the CIA for having included 16 words in the 2003 State of the Union address about Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium from Africa, an assertion that was later disputed.[...]
[Bill] Harlow, the former CIA spokesman, said in an interview yesterday that he testified last year before a grand jury about conversations he had with Novak at least three days before the column was published. He said he warned Novak, in the strongest terms he was permitted to use without revealing classified information, that Wilson's wife had not authorized the mission and that if he did write about it, her name should not be revealed.
Harlow said that after Novak's call, he checked Plame's status and confirmed that she was an undercover operative. He said he called Novak back to repeat that the story Novak had related to him was wrong and that Plame's name should not be used. But he did not tell Novak directly that she was undercover because that was classified.[...]
Harlow was also involved in the larger internal administration battle over who would be held responsible for Bush using the disputed charge about the Iraq-Niger connection as part of the war argument. Based on the questions they have been asked, people involved in the case believe that Fitzgerald looked into this bureaucratic fight because the effort to discredit Wilson was part of the larger campaign to distance Bush from the Niger controversy.
[...]
Behind the scenes, the White House responded with twin attacks: one on Wilson and the other on the CIA, which it wanted to take the blame for allowing the 16 words to remain in Bush's speech.
Not everyone in the Times building is on the same page when it comes to Judy Miller. The official story the paper is sticking to is that Miller is a heroic martyr, sacrificing her freedom in the name of journalistic integrity.
But a very different scenario is being floated in the halls. Here it is: It's July 6, 2003, and Joe Wilson's now famous op-ed piece appears in the Times, raising the idea that the Bush administration has "manipulate[d]" and "twisted" intelligence "to exaggerate the Iraqi threat." Miller, who has been pushing this manipulated, twisted, and exaggerated intel in the Times for months, goes ballistic. Someone is using the pages of her own paper to call into question the justification for the war -- and, indirectly, much of her reporting. The idea that intelligence was being fixed goes to the heart of Miller's credibility. So she calls her friends in the intelligence community and asks, Who is this guy? She finds out he's married to a CIA agent. She then passes on the info about Mrs. Wilson to Scooter Libby (Newsday has identified a meeting Miller had on July 8 in Washington with an "unnamed government official"). Maybe Miller tells Rove too -- or Libby does. The White House hatchet men turn around and tell Novak and Cooper. The story gets out.
This is why Miller doesn't want to reveal her "source" at the White House -- because she was the source. Sure, she first got the info from someone else, and the odds are she wasn't the only one who clued in Libby and/or Rove (the State Dept. memo likely played a role too)… but, in this scenario, Miller certainly wasn't an innocent writer caught up in the whirl of history.
As Pincus and Jim VandeHei rightly say, twin attacks -- one aimed at Wilson for blowing the whistle, the other at the CIA, an elaborate fraud perpetrated upon the American people (and perpetuated through last year's SSCI report) in which the CIA, which had repeatedly tried to prevent the president from publicizing and validating the bogus Niger uranium claims, was forced to take the blame for not warning the president of their falsity. (As this ball of yarn unravels, remember the name Alan Foley.)[...]
As Frank Rich put it so aptly less than two weeks ago, "the administration knows how guilty it is. That's why it has so quickly trashed any insider who contradicts its story line about how we got to Iraq, starting with the former Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill and the former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke."
....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.
Corexit: More toxic than the oil
IVAW: Iraq Veterans Against the War
