WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A federal appeals court in Washington has rebuffed an attempt by former CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson to sue top administration officials for the public disclosure of her intelligence job.

An attorney for Wilson and her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, said an appeal is likely.

A three-judge panel rejected the attempt by the Wilsons to revive a lawsuit dismissed by a lower court. The Wilsons wanted to sue Vice President Richard Cheney; his former top aide, Lewis "Scooter" Libby; former White House advisor Karl Rove; and former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage.

"Because the Wilsons have failed to state constitutional ... claims for which relief may be granted and failed to exhaust their administrative remedies as required ... we affirm the judgment of the district court dismissing the Wilsons' amended complaint in its entirety," the court said.

The lawsuit stems from the politically charged investigation of a leak that revealed Valerie Wilson worked for the CIA, and that the disclosure was made by administration officials to undermine Wilson's criticisms of the White House case for invading Iraq.

A lawyer for the Wilsons, Melanie Sloan, told CNN the conservative majority on the court "basically seemed to find there is no remedy for what Cheney, Rove and Libby did."

She said the likely appeal may focus on what she called the "Catch-22" of being told to file suit under a law that does not apply to the perpetrators. "It's a pretty scary conclusion," Sloan said, "if this decision can stand, then government officials can be protected for sacrificing intelligence operatives and national security in the name of politics."

The Justice Department had no comment on the appeals court ruling.

President Bush committed an impeachable offense by ordering the CIA to to manufacture a false pretense for the Iraq war in the form of a backdated, handwritten document linking Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, an explosive new book claims. The charge is made in “The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism” by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind, released today.

Suskind says he spoke on the record with U.S. intelligence officials who stated that Bush was informed unequivocally in January 2003 that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction. Nonetheless, his book relates, Bush decided to invade Iraq three months later — with the forged letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam bolstering the U.S. rationale to go into war.

“It was a dark day for the CIA,” Suskind told TODAY co-host Meredith Vieira on Tuesday. “It was the kind of thing where [the CIA] said, ‘Look, this is not our charge. We’re not here to carry forth a political mandate — which is clearly what this was — to solve a political problem in America.’ And it was a cause of great grievance inside of the agency.”

The author writes that Bush’s action is “one of the greatest lies in modern American political history” and suggests it is a crime of greater impact than Watergate. But the White House is denying the allegations, calling the book “absurd” and charging that Suskind practices “gutter journalism.”

Former CIA director George Tenet also released a statement in which he ridicules the credibility of Suskind’s sources and calls the White House’s supposed directive to forge the document as “a complete fabrication.”

But Suskind stands by his work. “It’s not off the record,” he says. “It’s on the record. It’s in the book and people can read it for themselves.”

Prelude to war

Suskind reports that the head of Iraqi intelligence, Tahir Jalil Habbush, met secretly with British intelligence in Jordan in the early days of 2003. In weekly meetings with Michael Shipster, the British director of Iraqi operations, Habbush conveyed that Iraq had no active nuclear, chemical or biological weapons programs and no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.

When Tenet was informed of the findings in early February, he said, “They’re not going to like this downtown,” Suskind wrote, meaning the White House. Suskind says that Bush’s reaction to the report was: “Why don’t they ask him to give us something we can use to help make our case?”

Suskind quotes Rob Richer, the CIA’s Near East division head, as saying that the White House simply ignored the Habbush report and informed British intelligence that they no longer wanted Habbush as an informant.

“Bush wanted to go to war in Iraq from the very first days he was in office. Nothing was going to stop that,” Richer is quoted in the book.

Suskind also writes that Habbush was “resettled” in Jordan with help from the CIA and was paid $5 million in hush money.

Vieira questioned Suskind’s contentions, pointing out that a number of intelligence figures eventually wrote Habbush off as unreliable.

“No, that’s not exactly the way it worked,” Suskind countered. “In the book, you’ll see people who are involved and talking about the debate, and it was quite a fierce debate at the highest levels of the government: ‘Is Habbush reliable? What’s he saying? How can we check it?’

“And a lot of people, at the end of the day, said it was hard for him to prove the negative, that what he said was no weapons were actually not there. That’s hard to do.”

The letter

On page 371 of “The Way of the World,” Suskind describes the White House’s concoction of a forged letter purportedly from the hand of Habbush to Saddam Hussein to justify the United States’ decision to go to war.

Suskind writes: “The White House had concocted a fake letter from Habbush to Saddam, backdated to July 1, 2001. It said that 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta had actually trained for his mission in Iraq — thus showing, finally, that there was an operation link between Saddam and al-Qaeda, something the Vice President's office had been pressing CIA to prove since 9/11 as a justification to invade.”

He continues: “A handwritten letter, with Habbush's name on it, would be fashioned by CIA and then hand-carried by a CIA agent to Baghdad for dissemination.”

CIA officers Richer and John Maguire, who oversaw the Iraq Operations Group, are both on the record in Suskind’s book confirming the existence of the fake Habbush letter.

When asked by Vieira for further proof of the letter, Suskind said: “Well, the CIA folks involved in the book and others talk about George Tenet coming back from the White House with the assignment on White House stationery, and turning to the CIA operatives, who are professionals, and saying, ‘You may not like this, but here is our next mission.’

“And they carried it through step by step, all the way to the finish.”

The London Sunday Telegraph first published a story about the letter in December 2003, on the same day that Saddam Hussein was captured in Iraq. Reported as genuine, the letter made an immediate impact upon the media in terms of justifying the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Suskind relates how NBC reported the letter, with journalist Con Coughlin telling Tom Brokaw that the letter “is really concrete proof that al-Qaeda was working with Saddam.”

Suskind also quotes Alan Foley, head of WMD analysis for the CIA, as saying, “It is, in my opinion, true that the administration, for whatever reason, was determined to have a showdown with Iraq that predated this whole WMD stuff.”

In support of that theory, Foley says that Naji Sabri, Saddam’s foreign minister, passed along information that Iraq had no WMD to a Lebanese journalist who served as an intermediary on behalf of the CIA in 2002.

That intelligence, Suskind writes, was dismissed as “disinformation.”

To read the article in its entirety, please click here.

For a review of the book by former White House press secretary Scott McClellan, titled “What happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception,” please click here.

Washington, DC - NO QUARTER RADIO Live Internet Talk enters new territory with "Security Corner," hosted by Larry Johnson. Larry joined the CIA the same day as Valerie Plame Wilson and spent a year with fifty other classmates in intelligence officer training. Larry subsequently left the CIA and served in the State Department’s Counter Terrorism Office and is an expert in counter terrorism.

Tune in to No Quarter Radio (NQR) live on Monday, July 14, 10:00-11:00 a.m. ET as Larry Johnson interviews Valerie Plame Wilson and Joe Wilson. They will be answering listener questions, and the call-in number is (347) 677-0792.

Valerie Plame Wilson is the author of Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House. Her identity as an undercover CIA operations officer was exposed by top Bush Administration officials after her husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, blew the whistle on President Bush for misleading the American people in declaring that Iraq had obtained yellow cake uranium.

Valerie and Larry will chat about the revelations from former Bush press spokesman, Scott McClellan; progress on the upcoming movie about her life; and her thoughts on reforming the CIA. For more information about Valerie.

Joe Wilson is the author of The Politics of Truth: A Diplomat's Memoir: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity.

Larry will get Joe’s take on the movie and pick his brain on the US' next steps in Iraq as well as Obama's changing statements on the Iraq War. Ambassador Wilson has written several articles at Larry Johnson's blog, No Quarter USA. Read all eight of Joseph Wilson's writings posted at No Quarter with his express permission.

Larry Johnson and other No Quarter writers have championed the cause of Valerie and Joe. The Wilsons are patriots who have served their nation honorably and suffered unjustly for trying to do their duty. We are honored to inaugurate No Quarter Radio with them.

An audio archive of today’s interviews will be available at NoQuarterUSA.net and at NQR immediately following the show.

Dem Rep. calls for impeachment at McClellan testimony: video

Raw Story

David Edwards and Stephen C. Webster
Published: Friday June 20, 2008

MORE: McClellan testifies to House Judiciary Committee.

After questioning former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan during a meeting of the House Judiciary Committee Friday, a Democratic congressman called for impeachment proceedings to be initiated.

Rep. Robert Wexler (D-FL) said that he believed McClellan's testimony implicated both Vice President Dick Cheney and President George W. Bush as the only two administration sources who could have leaked the identity of former CIA covert operative Valerie Plame-Wilson.

"The president and vice president have denied ordering this illegal leak, but logic and the chain of command dictates that it must have been one of them,” said Wexler. "Mr. McClellan, in your book, you state that you cannot believe President Bush authorized the leak of Valerie Plame Wilson's status as a covert agent. ... Who does that leave us? The vice president."

"He is someone that keeps things pretty close to the vest, to say the least," replied McClellan.

"There's a lot of suspicion there, because there's questions that have never been answered, despite the fact that we said we would address these issues." McClellan added. Asked Wexler, "So this suspicion leads you to believe that Vice President Cheney could have authorized Mr. Libby's leak?" McClellan replied, "I can't rule it out."

"We know that the vice president wrote a note where he starts to write and then crosses out the fact that the president himself asked Mr. Libby to stick his neck into a meat grinder to protect the administration," said Wexler. "It's clear to me that Mr. Cheney is the only one left -- the only likely suspect -- to have ordered the leak. If Mr. Cheney really thought Libby was innocent, then Mr. Cheney's note would have said, 'We need to protect this man, who has done nothing wrong.'"

Wexler closed by thundering: "The vice president's own hand betrays him, and Libby, and implicates the President of the United States. These facts in your testimony, Mr. McClellan, are more than enough, in my view, to open up impeachment hearings."

This video is from CNN.com, broadcast June 20, 2008.

WATCH THE VIDEO

"I do not think the president had any knowledge. In terms of the vice president, I do not know."

Great, he doesn't think one thing and doesn't know another... big help he is! Wasn't reasonable doubt on the matter already assumed?! I suppose we are simply back at square one.

By Belfast Telegraph

10/06/08 "Belfast Telegraph" - Former Democratic presidential contender, Dennis Kucinich, has called for the impeachment of George W Bush claiming that the president set out to deceive the nation, and violated his oath of office with the Iraq war.

Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich called for the impeachment of U.S. President George W. Bush for launching the war of aggression against Iraq.

The Ohio representative yesterday introduced 35 articles of impeachment against Bush on the floor of the US House of Representatives.

Kucinich unveiled a list of alleged illegal and improper acts by Bush, including war crimes.

He accused Bush executing a "calculated and wide-ranging strategy" to deceive citizens and Congress into believing that Iraq posed an imminent threat to the United States.

He went on to say that Bush and Cheney lied to Congress and the American public about the reasons for invading Iraq in 2003 and abused their offices in order to conduct the "War on Terror" following the 9/11 attacks.

"Bush misled the American people and members of Congress to believe Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction so as to manufacture a false case for war. President George W. Bush, by such conduct, is guilty of an impeachable offense warranting removal from office," Kucinich said.

He has already introduced a similar impeachment resolution against Vice President Cheney.

Bob Fertik, President of Democrats.com, said: "We've waited seven years to find one Member of Congress brave enough to stand up for our Constitution, for which generations of Americans have fought and died.

"We are thrilled and honored that Dennis Kucinich has chosen to be that one genuine patriot.

"We congratulate him on his historic leadership, and pledge to do everything in our power to persuade Congress to adopt all 35 Articles and put George W Bush on trial before the Senate of the United States, exactly as the Founding Fathers wanted."

Speaker Nancy Pelosi stated that there will be no consideration of impeachment proceedings against Bush and said the idea was "off the table."

Kucinich's case: the 35 points

Article I -  Creating a Secret Propaganda Campaign to Manufacture a False Case for War Against Iraq

Article II -  Falsely, Systematically, and with Criminal Intent Conflating the Attacks of September 11, 2001, With Misrepresentation of Iraq as a Security Threat as Part of Fraudulent Justification for a War of Aggression

Article III  -  Misleading the American People and Members of Congress to Believe Iraq Possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction, to Manufacture a False Case for War

Article IV  -  Misleading the American People and Members of Congress to Believe Iraq Posed an Imminent Threat to the United States

Article V  -  Illegally Misspending Funds to Secretly Begin a War of Aggression

Article VI  -  Invading Iraq in Violation of the Requirements of HJRes114

Article VII  -  Invading Iraq Absent a Declaration of War.

Article VIII  -  Invading Iraq, A Sovereign Nation, in Violation of the UN Charter

Article IX  -  Failing to Provide Troops With Body Armor and Vehicle Armor

Article X  -  Falsifying Accounts of US Troop Deaths and Injuries for Political Purposes

Article XI  -  Establishment of Permanent U.S. Military Bases in Iraq

Article XII  -  Initiating a War Against Iraq for Control of That Nation's Natural Resources

Article XIIII  -  Creating a Secret Task Force to Develop Energy and Military Policies With Respect to Iraq and Other Countries

Article XIV  -  Misprision of a Felony, Misuse and Exposure of Classified Information And Obstruction of Justice in the Matter of Valerie Plame Wilson, Clandestine Agent of the Central Intelligence Agency

Article XV  -  Providing Immunity from Prosecution for Criminal Contractors in Iraq

Article XVI  -  Reckless Misspending and Waste of U.S. Tax Dollars in Connection With Iraq and US Contractors

Article XVII  -  Illegal Detention: Detaining Indefinitely And Without Charge Persons Both U.S. Citizens and Foreign Captives

Article XVIII  -  Torture: Secretly Authorizing, and Encouraging the Use of Torture Against Captives in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Other Places, as a Matter of Official Policy

Article XIX  -  Rendition: Kidnapping People and Taking Them Against Their Will to " Black Sites" Located in Other Nations, Including Nations Known to Practice Torture

Article XX  -  Imprisoning Children

Article XXI  -  Misleading Congress and the American People About Threats from Iran, and Supporting Terrorist Organizations Within Iran, With the Goal of Overthrowing the Iranian Government

Article XXII  -  Creating Secret Laws

Article XXIII  -  Violation of the Posse Comitatus Act

Article XXIV  -  Spying on American Citizens, Without a Court-Ordered Warrant, in Violation of the Law and the Fourth Amendment

Article XXV  -  Directing Telecommunications Companies to Create an Illegal and Unconstitutional Database of the Private Telephone Numbers and Emails of American Citizens

Article XXVI  -  Announcing the Intent to Violate Laws with Signing Statements

Article XXVII  -  Failing to Comply with Congressional Subpoenas and Instructing Former Employees Not to Comply

Article XXVIII  -  Tampering with Free and Fair Elections, Corruption of the Administration of Justice

Article XXIX  -  Conspiracy to Violate the Voting Rights Act of 1965

Article XXX  -  Misleading Congress and the American People in an Attempt to Destroy Medicare

Article XXXI  -  Katrina: Failure to Plan for the Predicted Disaster of Hurricane Katrina, Failure to Respond to a Civil Emergency

Article XXXII  -  Misleading Congress and the American People, Systematically Undermining Efforts to Address Global Climate Change

Article XXXIII  -  Repeatedly Ignored and Failed to Respond to High Level Intelligence Warnings of Planned Terrorist Attacks in the US, Prior to 911.

Article XXXIV  -  Obstruction of the Investigation into the Attacks of September 11, 2001

Article XXXV  -  Endangering the Health of 911 First Responders

© Independent News & Media (NI)

I've added a new Reading List page to my blog where you will be tantalized with stories of political intrigue and personal drama.  This month I've dug into Valerie Plame's memoir, Fair Game, My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House.  It is all the more interesting against the backdrop of Scott McClellan's new book.  I think it's fascinating how he can defend the administration and admonish them at the same time.

I think he said on the Today Show that he didn't think anyone lied about WMD, rather they left out details that failed to support their claims.  Ummm, what the f is the difference?  When you are talking about committing thousands of troops and trillions of dollars does it not behoove a government to make sure that they're right?  I smell oil an ulterior motive.

Plame contends that the CIA did not have enough evidence or intelligence to support Bushie's WMD claims and that Colin Powel cherry-picked circumstantial evidence in his speech to the United Nations. She worked on WMD for the CIA.  I think she would know. 

I think McClellan's book may be the next on my list.  What do you think dear readers?  Will you be picking up the political prose this summer?  What is on your reading list?

Photo of former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan from the San Francisco Sentinel

"Take Five: Truthiness in Government"

Stephen Colbert satirized the Bush approach when he coined the concept of "truthiness": the truth we want, in our gut, to exist, without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.

McClellan reveals how much the joke matched the reality, saying that Bush's "leadership style is based more on instinct than deep intellectual debate." Citing Bush's assertion that he honestly couldn't remember if he'd ever done cocaine, McClellan says he felt he "was witnessing Bush convincing himself to believe something that probably was not true, and that, deep down, he knew was not true."

But who needs reality when you have faith? Who needs truth when you have truthiness? As George Costanza put it on Seinfeld: "Jerry, just remember, it's not a lie if you believe it."

A fantastic philosophy for a sit-com character. A disastrous philosophy for a sitting president.

Click here for the full article

He [McClellan] describes Bush as demonstrating a "lack of inquisitiveness," says the White House operated in "permanent campaign" mode, and admits to having been deceived by some in the president's inner circle about the leak of a CIA operative's name.

The book, coming from a man who was a tight-lipped defender of administration aides and policy, is certain to give fuel to critics of the administration, and McClellan has harsh words for many of his past colleagues. He accuses former White House adviser Karl Rove of misleading him about his role in the CIA case. He describes Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as being deft at deflecting blame, and he calls Vice President Cheney "the magic man" who steered policy behind the scenes while leaving no fingerprints.

McClellan stops short of saying that Bush purposely lied about his reasons for invading Iraq, writing that he and his subordinates were not "employing out-and-out deception" to make their case for war in 2002.

But in a chapter titled "Selling the War," he alleges that the administration repeatedly shaded the truth and that Bush "managed the crisis in a way that almost guaranteed that the use of force would become the only feasible option."

"Over that summer of 2002," he writes, "top Bush aides had outlined a strategy for carefully orchestrating the coming campaign to aggressively sell the war. . . . In the permanent campaign era, it was all about manipulating sources of public opinion to the president's advantage."

McClellan, once a staunch defender of the war from the podium, comes to a stark conclusion, writing, "What I do know is that war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary."

McClellan resigned from the White House on April 19, 2006, after nearly three years as Bush's press secretary. The departure was part of a shake-up engineered by new Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten that also resulted in Rove surrendering his policy-management duties.

A White House spokeswoman declined to comment on the book, some contents of which were first disclosed by Politico.com. The Washington Post acquired a copy of the book yesterday, in advance of its official release Monday.

Responding to a request for comment, McClellan wrote in an e-mail: "Like many Americans, I am concerned about the poisonous atmosphere in Washington. I wanted to take readers inside the White House and provide them an open and honest look at how things went off course and what can be learned from it. Hopefully in some small way it will contribute to changing Washington for the better and move us beyond the hyper-partisan environment that has permeated Washington over the past 15 years."

The criticism of Bush in the book is striking, given that it comes from a man who followed him to Washington from Texas.

Bush is depicted as an out-of-touch leader, operating in a political bubble, who has stubbornly refused to admit mistakes. McClellan defends the president's intellect -- "Bush is plenty smart enough to be president," he writes -- but casts him as unwilling or unable to be reflective about his job.

To read the review in its entirety, please click here.

Here is an exclusive on the book by Politico.com.

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Hillary Clinton's campaign released a new ad in Oregon Friday, featuring two familiar faces: Ambassador Joe Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame, who was the undercover operative in the highly publicized CIA leak case.

In the ad, they say Clinton has the "strongest plan to end the Iraq War and bring our troops home safely," according to the campaign.

The 30-second ad, dubbed "Strongest Plan," comes as Oregonians vote by mail in advance of the state's May 20 primary.

The Clinton campaign says the Wilsons played a "critical role in drawing attention to the Bush Administration's exaggerated claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and have been outspoken critics of the conduct of the war."

Watch the ad here.

Earlier this week, the White House disclosed that it could not recover lost e-mails from emergency backup tapes for the period covering the invasion of Iraq and the U.S. failure to find Iraq’s alleged WMD.

This new gap – from March 1, 2003, to May 23, 2003 – also may have wiped out evidence of how George W. Bush and his top aides reacted to the emerging criticism from former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson that the White House had sold the war using false claims about Iraq seeking uranium from Niger in Africa. . . .

Listen

The White House told a federal court that searching individual computers for allegedly lost e-mails about the Iraq invasion and the outing of a covert CIA officer would be too costly and too time-consuming. The hard drives of many older computers have already been destroyed, said a senior aide to President Bush.

Well, it's about time Scooter Libby got the axe... Disbarred that is.

Some of us; Geezer, Basheert, Anthony, Teak, GEF and myself followed his trial daily, in hopes of seeing the little Smurf go to prison.

I, for one, was greatly disappointed when Cheney Bush Pardoned Scooter last year.

Libby, was involved in the CIA Leak, which outed CIA Agent Valerie Plame Wilson. Patrick Fitzgerald and his team worked very hard on this case and Libby was convicted of perjury and obstructing justice.

Libby has paid $250,000 in fines and is on two years probation. I believe this is a small price to pay for what was done to Valerie and her family.

S-Q

It's been nearly five years since former White House political adviser Karl Rove sent an incriminating email to then Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley indicating that Rove had a candid conversation with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper about covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, and her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, a critic of the Bush administration's prewar Iraq intelligence.

Neocons in the US government were helping the Turks and Israelis steal US nuclear secrets and sell them to the Pakistanis, who moved them on to Saudi Arabia, Iran, North Korea, and the various Central Asian "republics."  They also helped sell stolen/surplus NATO weaponry--everything from helicopters to RPGs--to various militia groups in the Middle East, as well as bringing the heroin these groups produce into Europe to finance themselves.

In other words, they were helping  create the "terrorist problem" that they have been so eager to curtail our civil liberties in order to fight.  Does that extend to fomenting the 9-11 attacks?  I wonder, especially in light of the revelation that Pakistani intelligence chief Mahmoud Ahmad had $100,000 sent to Mohammed Atta, the alleged head of the 9-11 hijackers, shortly before the attack.  (I wonder why somebody who is about to die would need that kind of money?  Well, there's payments to bereaved families, and then there's bribes, bribes, bribes.....)

Ms. Edmunds has been under a gag order in this country because the government alleges that what she has (and has not yet, in some cases) revealed compromises US security.  It certainly should make a lot of neocons feel insecure, because it reveals that they ought to be tried for treason.  I think that's what government officials who sell nuclear secrets get tried for, isn't it?  Is it still a hanging offense?   Hey now, I'm against capital punishment.  I just want to know some big hulking con has made Richard Perle his bitch...

The mainstream media in this country have not touched this story, and the Democrats won't investigate it, probably because it leads back to Israel, and  one of the basic rules of politics in this country is to never make Israel look bad.

Here's an excerpt from an article by  former CIA agent Philip Giraldi, published in, of all places, The American Conservative:

The ATC, founded in 1994 and modeled on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, was intended to promote Turkish interests in Congress and in other public forums. Edmonds refers to ATC and AIPAC as “sister organizations.” The group’s founders include a number of prominent Americans involved in the Israel-Turkey relationship, notably Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and former congressman Stephen Solarz. Perle and Feith had earlier been registered lobbyists for Turkey through Feith’s company, International Advisors Inc. The FBI was interested in ATC because it suspected that the group derived at least some of its income from drug trafficking, Turkey being the source of 90 percent of the heroin that reaches Europe, and because of reports that it had given congressmen illegal contributions or bribes. Moreover, as Edmonds told the Times, the Turks have “often acted as a conduit for the Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s spy agency, because they were less likely to attract attention.”

And here are excerpts from the articles in the London Times, the first from Jan. 6:

“What I found was damning,” she said. “While the FBI was investigating, several arms of the government were shielding what was going on.”

The Turks and Israelis had planted “moles” in military and academic institutions which handled nuclear technology. Edmonds says there were several transactions of nuclear material every month, with the Pakistanis being among the eventual buyers. “The network appeared to be obtaining information from every nuclear agency in the United States,” she said.

They were helped, she says, by the high-ranking State Department official who provided some of their moles – mainly PhD students – with security clearance to work in sensitive nuclear research facilities. These included the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory in New Mexico, which is responsible for the security of the US nuclear deterrent.

Two weeks later, the Times continued the series:

The anonymous letter names a high-level government official who was allegedly secretly recorded speaking to an official at the Turkish embassy between August and December 2001.

It claims the government official warned a Turkish member of the network that they should not deal with a company called Brewster Jennings because it was a CIA front company investigating the nuclear black market. The official’s warning came two years before Brewster Jennings was publicly outed when one of its staff, Valerie Plame, was revealed to be a CIA agent in a case that became a cause célèbre in the US.

And here's a tidbit from the most recent installment, Jan. 27th:

The FBI denied the existence of a specific case file about any outing of Brewster Jennings by the State Department official, in a response to a freedom of information request. However, last week The Sunday Times obtained a document, signed by an FBI official, showing that the file did exist in 2002.

Much thanks to Sibel Edmonds for bringing facts to the murky world of presumed conspiracy.  I wish her health, freedom, a long life, and protection from the many powerful people who are likely plotting her demise even as I write these words.

(...)

Former CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson says the recent disclosures in the UK's Sunday Times concerning the sale of U.S. nuclear secrets to the foreign black market, as aided by high-ranking government officials, are "stunning."

The previously covert agent, who had worked in the agency's counter-proliferation division for years monitoring traffic in the nuclear black market under the guise of a cover company named Brewster Jennings until being outed by Bush Administration officials, was asked about the recent series of explosive stories in the British paper ...

(...)