Ledeen, Franklin, Rhode, SCIRI, Iranians in key pre-war meeting?

Nur al-Cubicle has an English translation today of yet another great piece from La Repubblica on the Italian angle to the planning of the US War on Iraq. Like the earlier ones on the SIItalian origins of the yellow cake fantasy, this article is also by Carlo Bonini and Giuseppi d’Avanzo.
They write that a high-ranking official in the Italian sintel organization SISMI told them:

    For us Italians… the war on Iraq was already underway in the days before Christmans, 2002. He smiles. He is animated with a glint of excitement in his eyes and for once seems seems to have no qualms about letting his personal satisfaction slip from behind a frozen mask.
    Our man is too disciplined to crow about his successes and too stubborn to be discouraged by defeat. He tells us: It was a novelty, a revolution for our intelligence services. Never before in its history has SISMI been so prominently involved in military ground operations and a major role in planning a war campaign, to boot. The Italian Government? Of course our work was authorized by the Italian Government—are you joking? It was real war, not an exercise! The twenty men we sent to Iraq were risking their lives. He pauses. The espresso arrives. He sips it slowly, his eyes half-closed with satisfaction.
    He continues. Twenty men from three SISMI departments were involved: Intelligence, Operations, and Counterterrorism…

So this whole thing seems, in this account, to have started with a fateful meeting:

    The story of Italian military intervention in Iraq begins when the resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, [and well-known Iran-contra sleaze-bag] Michael Ledeen, sponsored by Defense Minister Antonio Martino, debarks in Rome with Pentagon men in tow to meet a handful of “Iranian exiles.” The meeting is organized by SISMI. In an agency “safe house” near Piazza di Spagna (however, other sources have told us it was a reserved room in the Parco dei Principi Hotel).

(This meeting, by the way, was probably the same December 2002 gathering described by Josh Marshall and Laura Rozen in this September 2004 article.)
The Repubblica writers continue:

    Twenty men are gathered around a large table, covered by a maps of Iraq, Iran and Syria. Those who count are Lawrence Franklin and Harold Rhode of the Office of Special Plans, Michael Ledeen of the AIE, a SISMI chief accompanied by his assistant…

So there we have it: AIPAC-gate indictees Larry Franklin and Harold Rhode– and Michael Ledeen… all there in Rome at that planning meeting. But who were these other people, these “iranian exiles” they were meeting with, you ask??
SISMI agent Nicolo Pollari tells the Repubblica reporters:

    I can tell you those Iranians were not exactly “exiles”. The came and went from Tehran with their passports with no difficulty whatsoever as if they were transparent to the eyes of the Pasdaran…

The Repubblica writers continue by quoting an American intel source as saying, “You Italians have always underestimated the work of conversion carried out Ahmed Chalabi, the chairman of Iraqi National Congress.” They note the important roles played by two key Chalabi lieutenants, Aras Habib Karim and Francis Brooke (Brooks?) But it gets even better. They say that the pro-Iranian Iraqi Shiite group SCIRI was also involved… Also, long-time Iranian shyster and arms salesman Manoucher Ghorbanifar (though according to the Repubblica duo he was only included in the Rome meetings as a diversionary tactic.)
Josh Marshall and Laura Rozen had placed Ghorbanifar at that meeting. But not anyone from SCIRI, or come to that anyone else still very well-connected to the mullahs’ regime in Teheran.
The Repubblica reporters write:

    So, forget about Manusher Ghorbanifar. In the Rome meeting held at the Parco dei Principi Hotel—or in the safe house near Spanish Steps—three intelligence paths will cross: Nicolò Pollari’s SISMI, Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress and SCIRI and the Sadr (Badr?) Brigades led by Muhammad and Abdalaziz al-Hakim. The integration of the “processing” and “output” of the three “networks” will provide essential information to the Anglo-American war planners and above all, a concrete estimation of Saddam’s defenses, from the willingness to fight of his generals to the arsenal of weaponry at their disposal, in addition to the influence operations. Each of the three intelligence networks has an ace on the table which will be useful to the Pentagon…

Juicy, fascinating stuff, indeed! Thanks so much for the translation work, Nur! (I think she’s promising us a translation of the second part of the article, yet to come? I can’t wait….)
So what do you think? Will there be one single massive harmonic convergence in which the AIPAC-gate trial suddenly all starts to mesh together with the Lewis Libby trial? Are all these guys’ heinous tricks and manipulations all starting to come unraveled together?

11 thoughts on “Ledeen, Franklin, Rhode, SCIRI, Iranians in key pre-war meeting?”

  1. What do I think? I think you can have all those unravellings but if there is no leadership the whole system is going to default back to the same establishement.
    I don’t see where that leadership is going to come from. The USA needed a peace movement to be built at least a year before the Presidential election. It could have been the kingmaker, got a candidate committed to peace, and kept this new President in line. Instead, whatever there was in the way of a movement capitulated, gave up, walked away, and hasn’t come back yet.
    I would like to see you answer your own question, Helena, but not from your usual journalistic standpoint. Rather answer it from the point of view of your Charlottesville peace group. I mean the one that holds up signs by the side of the road every week.
    Do you think that if there is enough mess in Washington the ordinary people of Charlottesville, USA, are going to rise up spontaneously? Or have you and the group got a plan of expanding your reach and organisation? Or are you waiting for Cindy Sheehan, or a second Cindy, to make it all happen?

  3. Rahul Mahajan in his blog “Empire Notes of October 31 writes, inter alia:
    ‘”opposition” in public opinion, as expressed in answers to poll questions, means very little; what matters is political opposition, things that genuinely make it more difficult for those in power to continue on their course, or that make alternatives seem preferable.’
    See http://www.empirenotes.org/

  4. Sibel Edmonds has stated these different scandels are all related.
    I went and read the transcript of that interview, as well as the Vanity Fair article on Edmonds that covers the same material.
    Despite Scott Horton’s strenuous attempts to get Edmonds to substantiate the connection and to implicate Israel, AIPAC and the “neocons”, Edmonds clearly does no such thing. The closest she comes is to admit that there is a similarity, but that what she claims to know is much more serious and goes much higher up. The clearer implication is that Turkey, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgistan, or a combination of these, are involved. (For some reason she does not mention Azerbaijan, a point that I find interesting, especially since, there is a good chance that her father was Azeri.)
    What is even more interesting is the connection with Brent Scowcroft, who was notable as one of two H.W. Bush advisors who was openly against the invasion of Iraq.

  6. edq,
    I read the entire transcript, as well as the Vanity Fair article following your posting. (I also saw the original interview on 60 Minutes.) I don’t think that that is what she was saying, although Scott Horton clearly attempted to get her to say such things. My reading is that she was saying that this is even bigger than the AIPAC thing; not that the same people are involved. I also repeat that the Scowcroft issue is very interesting, as is the reference to “Able Danger”, which hardly supports the theory you are suggesting.
    You are welcome to show me in the transcript where she clearly says that these events are connected. BTW, I’m still waiting for the source of your claim that Shamir tried to run ads in the NYT in the 1950s, which also seems to me to be a strange claim.

  7. JES,
    I will take another look at the Edmonds interview. She was vague and unspecific because she is under a gag order but I had the sense from her statements that there is a certain amount of overlap between these scandels. I agreee she was saying there is a larger scandel looming in the background.
    The source for the information about the NYT boycott was a book called “The Zionist Connection” by ALfred Lilienthal. He discusses this event in one of the chapters.

  8. There’s another transcript on antiwar.com that links to several other Edmonds interviews, including this one by Christopher Deliso in which she does finger Azerbaijan. Both interviewers very clearly want her to implicate Israel, but she keeps changing the subject back to the Turkish-American Council and the Turkic countries, stating that the TAC scandal will “make the AIPAC case look lame.” At one point during the Deliso interview, she actually says that the AIPAC scandal itself will turn out to be about the Turkic countries as much as Israel.
    She does say, on a couple of occasions, that the TAC and AIPAC have overlapping membership and that some lobbyists have worked for both. That doesn’t really surprise me given how incestuous the lobbying world can be.
    The thing is that I’m not entirely sure what she’s alleging. She seems to be saying that, in addition to its legitimate activities, the TAC is a front for money-launderers and narcoterrorists, that it was involved in the sale of nuclear materials to Pakistan and that it may have had something to do with 9/11. She isn’t as clear about whether the TAC works for non-state terrorists or whether the governments of the Turkic countries are implicated. At one point, she says that the current Turkish government isn’t involved, but in other places she suggests that prior Turkish governments as well as the Central Asian states are in on it.
    I also can’t quite see what the governments of the Turkic countries would gain from all this. They all have fairly close relationships with the United States, and I can’t imagine any plausible gain that would be worth the risk involved with financing and/or participating in the 9/11 attack. It’s nothing unusual for foreign governments or corrupt organizations to bribe politicians or infiltrate intelligence agencies, but Edmonds seems to be suggesting something well beyond the usual hanky-panky. The dots aren’t connected, although that may simply be because she can’t lay out all her evidence.
    In any event, I tend to be skeptical of grand conspiracy theories in general, whether Turkish, Israeli or (as the La Repubblica article suggests) Iranian. The truth can, I think, be found with many fewer strokes of Occam’s razor. All three countries may have provided intel to the United States, but I doubt they sold Bush anything he hadn’t already decided to buy.

  9. In an interview on the CBC this morning on the subject of Libby, John McArthur made a comment that probably nothing would come out of this because most Americans, despite their growing dissatisfaction in the polls are just not pushing for change. With new praise from the right about Bush’s latest court nominee, he seems to be back on track. Rove and Cheney are still in place. The grassroots are just not stirring. What event is going to change this?

  10. Don’t despair, Jean. Bush is a long way from being back on track. The American people and their media love to hear and tell the story of the once high and mighty brought low by their own arrogance and overreaching. This is the second favorite national bedtime story, after the “Abe Lincoln” one of rising from humble origins to greatness through personal virtue and hard work. In order to knock ’em down, you have to build ’em up first. They built George and Dick up about as high as possible. Now they’re gonna blow up real good! You’ll see.

  11. All this makes me think to the Hutton enquiry in UK; I fear the same result and although I hope to be wrong.
    Bush and his gang have to be brought to trial; they are responsible for thousands of useless deaths and they broke all the international laws.

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