Patterns from Repeat Players - Aspens Turn in Clusters, connected at their roots

Sy Hersh' New Yorker piece about the Iran-Contra Conspirators' Lessons Learned Conference in the VP's office is the latest example of the same cast of characters doing the same things.

The hazy memory / bad governing excuse has been in vogue since Reagan 'couldn't recall.' Libby used it, and now it is being used for Gonzalez' firing the 'disloyal' prosecutors for not prosecuting Democrats or for prosecuting Republicans, sometimes in the middle of investigations or trials. This is win-win for them for two reasons: 1) It is hard to audit someone's memory, 2) if 'public servants' come off stupid, then fine! That only makes government look more incompetent, which these guys want, so we'll run towards corporatism/privatization.

I can't get over how often these characters are reused. And then, perhaps, abused. (Note to moths: flying around candles is fun, but flying into the flame will get you killed.)

Judge Reggie Walton of the Libby Trial, which didn't get to the bottom of the actual crime -- who outed Plame-Wilson, ruining her counter-proliferation work. Walton was a highly placed anti-drug policy administrator, second to Kemp, and he was an anti-drug crusader in the Reagan days, and during Bush1's days he was appointed his first judge position. He was assigned Sibel Edmonds' judge about five times, including after she requested and was granted switches to other judges, but then Walton was back, supposedly randomly assigned,, quashing her case. And he was the judge on the Stephen Hatfill anthrax outing suit, allowing the government to drag the case out, while Hatfill deals with being blacklisted.

These are three cases that each have the potential of blowing the lid off the Bush2 admin and their vision for a national corporatist security state. All of them judged by Reggie Walton, a judge with his own penchant for privacy, as we see in how he approaches his public disclosure of where his income comes from...

Stephen Hatfill, a bio-wmd specialist, was fingered for the Anthrax Attacks, which really changed America after 9/11/01 because of the Patriot Act (but few remember those attacks and that investigation going nowhere)... He's the same fellow who designed and built training trailers for the US military to identify Iraqi Mobile Weapons Labs of the same design that Colin Powell had for his UN presentation. The return addresses on the envelopes from the Anthrax attacks referenced a fake school, Greendale, possibly alluding to Hatfill's days in a Rhodesian pro-white/anti-communist paramilitary force [There is a school in the once white Harare suburb of Greendale named for Courtney Selous, and Haftill fought in that commando unit (while perhaps working with the CIA or the USA). This unit has been accused of anthraxing hundreds of rural black villagers who experienced the skin type of the disease. Still, anthrax is a disease of livestock that affects humans through the skin. Of course, this 'Greendale' could have been put on the envelopes to set Hatfill up. Yet, there are dozens of Greendales, including one linked to a popular British TV show referencing a postman from Greendale, which would be appropriate for a mail-attack irony.] Also the the messages inside the envelopes could have set up Islamists as terrorists, using poor English, handwriting, and anti-Israeli, pro-Allah statements. Yet in Hatfill's suit (with Judge Reggie Walton) he says he only knows how to make pasty anthrax, not the finely milled dried weaponized kind... The kind made in Fort Detrick in Maryland where Hatfill stopped working a couple of years previously. Curiouser and curiouser. The FBI is against him, or maybe he's their convenient fall guy, but the DoD uses and needs him for counter-terrorism. The biggest mystery is why is the Anthrax killer investigation seemingly dead and dead for years? This is the first US WMD domestic case. And why did the DoD/CIA need Hatfill to build a practically working prototype. (Judy Miller said it was never plugged in... I won't even deal with her ... Aspens turning in clusters. Maybe Libby knew he was going to jail just as she was already in jail, so she might as well get out.) Wouldn't a drawing work for searchers just as well as a prototype? Was the DoD attempting to plant at least one fake WMD lab in Iraq for discovery to justify the war? Was Brewster-Jennings/the CIA's Counter-Terrorism unit a threat to such a ruse? Was Hatfill's reputation pro-actively assassinated so that he'd be forced to cooperate with the DoD and keep his mouth shut about plants?

There's a fine line between defense and offense, between terror and counter-terror, news and propaganda, between war-games and war.

I really like how the Washington Post covered Hatfill's work in 2001 creating nearly functional versions of mobile weapons labs for the DoD in this article:

One of Hatfill's most intriguing projects at the SAIC was his design of the mock mobile lab, which was assembled for training of the Delta Force, a commando unit of the U.S. Special Forces based at Fort Bragg. The nonfunctional lab was built on an 18-wheel trailer and fitted with a fermenter and other specialized equipment.

Hatfill planned the equipment, designed the interior layout and stored construction materials in a warehouse before building began, said a source who has seen the vehicle.

In its investigation, the FBI has traced all of the materials ordered for the lab by Hatfill and others at the SAIC, the source said.

The trailer, known at the SAIC as the "can," was under construction in late 2001 at a shop in Frederick, where Hatfill once lived in an apartment near Fort Detrick.
....
Col. Bill Darley, a spokesman for the U.S. Special Operations Command in Tampa, said that Hatfill also designed a fixed or "static" nonfunctional bioweapons lab for use in training Special Forces in an unspecified location in the western United States.

Darley said he could not discuss details of how these labs have been used in training. The programs, he said, are at the heart of the "dark tactics, techniques and procedures" used to prepare troops for missions abroad.

I have pointed out in previous posts how dangerous (from a fragging or 'friendly-fire' perspective) it is to work in US counter-terrorism during the Bush2 era. I am not sure if Hatfill fits this pattern. But it seems that the message has been received loud and clear in the US community, even if proliferators in Pakistan get to live a bit easier. It took over a year for the 'mobile bio-weapons labs' were finally admitted to really be weather balloon inflaters. The scientists on the team were frightened to come forward and kept their mum until word came out about their work in spring 2006. The truth kind of leaked out from other sources in autumn 2004 (when they knew since spring 2003). Even so, those scientists are still cautious, and their work is still largely classified -- another example of politically motivated classification and abuse of the privileges of state secrets to subvert democracy.

The authors of the reports were nine U.S. and British civilian experts -- scientists and engineers with extensive experience in all the technical fields involved in making bioweapons -- who were dispatched to Baghdad by the Defense Intelligence Agency for an analysis of the trailers. Their actions and findings were described to a Washington Post reporter in interviews with six government officials and weapons experts who participated in the mission or had direct knowledge of it.

None would consent to being identified by name because of fear that their jobs would be jeopardized. Their accounts were verified by other current and former government officials knowledgeable about the mission. The contents of the final report, "Final Technical Engineering Exploitation Report on Iraqi Suspected Biological Weapons-Associated Trailers," remain classified. But interviews reveal that the technical team was unequivocal in its conclusion that the trailers were not intended to manufacture biological weapons. Those interviewed took care not to discuss the classified portions of their work.

"There was no connection to anything biological," said one expert who studied the trailers. Another recalled an epithet that came to be associated with the trailers: "the biggest sand toilets in the world."

" In the end, the final report -- 19 pages plus a 103-page appendix -- remained unequivocal in declaring the trailers unsuitable for weapons production.

"It was very assertive," said one weapons expert familiar with the report's contents.

Then, their mission completed, the team members returned to their jobs and watched as their work appeared to vanish.

"I went home and fully expected that our findings would be publicly stated," one member recalled. "It never happened. And I just had to live with it." "

Nicholas Berg, a leftist going to Iraq to build cellphone radio towers for the Iraqi's in the name of freedom... Cellphone towers? High-tech communications equipment? Maybe signals intelligence or setting up compromised networks? And he knew or at least met Zack Moussaoui? Berg lent him his computer and web-email account. Hotmail I think. It takes five minutes to set up a Hotmail account... Why lend yours out? Moussaoui was a student. Students can use web terminals. Then Berg gets beheaded like Daniel Pearl. And then Robert Baer the former CIA agent posthumously says Pearl and he were collaborating together, which kind of echoes the terrorists' statements that Pearl was a spy. I got a kick out of President Mushareff's quotes about Perl, that he basically had it coming to him for digging where he was. It did seem to have a chilling effect on journalism since...

The Mo. Atta stories are pretty wild, too, and then there's the time he had those anthrax sores in the Florida hospital.. And his passport survives the plane attacks on the WTC, but somehow the black boxes are never revealed or publicly examined, presumed missing, so some say. You can read whole books about Atta, or is it more than one guy? Several of the hastily identified 9/11/01 hijackers are actually still alive, and the Atta stories just don't add up.

Back to Sibel Edmonds, she finds that a Turkish version of AIPAC is running drugs and arms, buying politicians, and that tipoffs to 9/11/01's plane attacks, as well as plans of buildings, probably including the WTC, were sent to the mid-east, and that plane attacks associated with Bin Laden were being planned. This arms network has a nuclear component, too, in which neo-cons are allowing parts to go to AQKhan's proliferation network. Edmonds is gagged, and her testimony to congress is retroactively classified! She's the defending whistleblower, and they stuff her.

Yet so long as people like Sibel Edmonds are prevented from speaking and the Libby trial remains restricted in scope, we will likely know little about the facts, whatever they may be and wherever they may lead.

Finally, the non-judicial nature of Judge Walton's prior job as a government policy crafter at a very high level, something that must have involved the same cast of characters, denotes in and of itself a conflict of interest. Courts are vexed whenever some famous person is tried and it becomes impossible to find jurors who have no prior opinion of them. That said, in what kind of country is a judge appointed to try his own former colleagues, who themselves are being defended by other former colleagues?

Back to Valerie Plame-Wilson (of Libby and Rove and NOVAKula fame), her international cover company, Brewster Jennings [the fake energy consultancy (named after a Rockefeller associate and Mobil oil founder)] is completely blown, ruining our intelligence gathering in Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and North Africa.

Bush and Cheney weren't after Joe Wilson, they were after Plame-Wilson and Brewster Jennings' work. Novak's statement on CNN, months after his column blows Plame's cover, then goes on to blow out Brewster-Jennings as a fake company! The whole revenge/schoolyard theme is a smokescreen.

Back to Hersch, one of the 'explosive' revelations of his piece is that the US is using slush funds from Iraq (Is it the oil or is it the tons and tons of missing $12Billion in cash?) to finance Al-Q'aida-linked jihadists against Iran.

This stuff is just too big to cover and to wrap one's head around.

Basically, in the age of nuclear and oil fueled empire, it seems that some feel that democracy is just too unpredictable and deliberative for the needs of empire. But rather than officially Ceasarize the US Executive Branch and declare the empire, we just keep enough of an idea/illusion of democracy going to inspire people to keep going to work (rather than protesting or fomenting) and serving in the military, either for patriotic reasons, or just pure lack of alternatives in a stagnant economy with very expensive education and health care.



Here's a tangential link to a quoted 2004 LA Times article about a former Israeli former South African now American selling nuclear weapons electronics to Pakistan; he got busted. One of the firms he dealt with, Giza Tech, a US firm (owned by Turkish Jews), was mentioned in the Sibel Edmonds' cans of worms with regard to trafficking nuclear technology to the middle east.
My take on this is the so-called splits between Jews and Muslims, Iran and Saudi Arabia, Al Qu'aida and the USA and/or Israel is a canard. At the levels of the greediest and super-wealth, there is no division -- arms, drugs, terrorism, war, and oil all fuel that greed. The splits are to satisfy and distract the middle class, motivating them to pay the taxes and work hard, and motivating the lower classes to fight in the wars and get killed off to thin the herd while distracting it.
The Party is in Dubai, the Las Vegas and the Swiss Bank of the world, behind sand, water, and security.

Here's something about how 'we' 'knew' those mobile labs were for weather balloons, but the President and Colin Powell kept saying for six months that they were WMD bio-trailers.