Coincidence on Iran?

At the risk of starting a conspiracy theory, I ask what the relationship is between the report that Valeries Plame was working on nuclear weapons issues on Iran and the recent charges against members of the Israeli lobbying group, AIPAC?

I posted these remarks at Steve Clemons' blog, The Washington Note. Clemons is well-known reporter with sources high up in the Washington insider pecking order. In the Comments section to his posting on the Plame/Iran meme, I posed my own somewhat tongue-in-cheek post hoc propter hoc fallacy. Stranegely enough, two people seemed to undertake to answer my comments... I am intrigued by the responses since they seem to confirm some of the implications of my own comments. They speak in intellegence-ese, which leads me to believe that the commenters are either very familiar with the intelligence community or are intelligence professionals themselves.

Here are their comments:

There's surprisingly little new information about Iran's nuclear program in this report. Iran has sought, and continues to seek, uranium from sources abroad since the Shah started the country's nuclear program. Significant indigenous uranium ore deposits were discovered in the late 1970s. Iran declared to to the IAEA in 2000 that it had embarked in an enrichment program. International excitement about that program was ramped up after an "exile" group announced in August 2002 -- about the same time the Niger yellowcake forgery was being stovepiped through OSP -- that Iran had a heavy water plant in Arak and a nuclear fuel "production" facility in Natanz. Last March, Iran opened those facilities to the international press, and precious little indicating a bulk production process was there to be seen.

If Valerie Plame and her office was working primarily on detecting Iran WMD issues at the time she was outed in July 2003, there doesn't seem to have been dramatic developments to study, as the Iranian program hadn't amounted to much, and was by all responsible accounts a decade away from any sort of building an actual bomb. Likely, that's exactly what she was reporting to her superiors -- which wasn't what the White House wanted to hear.

At the same time that the Niger yellowcake forgery was making its way to the Oval Office, Larry Franklin's contacts at the Israeli Embassy was making "suggestions" for changes to Pentagon documents about the Iranian WMD program. Some of this information made its way into reports that Franklin, the DoD Iran desk officer, prepared for his superiors. Franklin also travelled to Rome with an OSP coleague in December 2001, where he met with Manoucher Ghorbanifar and Mike Ledeen. This group has been linked to the network that introduced the Niger Yellowcake forgery into US files.

Franklin's primary contact at the Israeli Embassy "FO-3" in the indictment, was Naor Gilon, the Mossad Chief of Station, who fled DC when the FBI investigation was leaked. See, Lawrence Franklin Indictment, pp. 23-34, para. 6.

I would suggest that the the Niger yellowcake forgery was Track 1 of a disinformation program to justify U.S. military action against Iraq. Furthermore, much of allegations about Iranian WMDs, such as the August 2002 opposition group disclosures, are Track 2 of the same operation to draw the US into a widening general war in the Middle East. Same M.O. and group of perpetrators behind both deadly deception campaigns.
Posted by leveymg at February 13, 2006 05:26 PM

Cyrus, you're right about the Iran-Niger dealings being insignificant and irrelevant.

I would think that this piece by Raw Story is another attempt to turn up the tension levels on Iran in the run up to an attack. We have to consider the "source" of Raw Story's information which could be a propaganda ploy now that Porter Goss is DCI, and clearly a Bush cheerleader.

We've seen this ploy used before with the run up to the attack on Iraq, though now the lies concerning that have been laid bare. Need we be bamboozled once again with a similar tactic? Not if we look further at recent and little publicized events.

I might point out something which has been overlooked on here and that is the case of Asher Karni.

Karni was recently convicted of smuggling nuclear triggers from a Massachusetts company, first to South Africa, where he lived and worked for 30 years, and then to Pakistan by way of Oman.

Karni, an Israeli national and suspected Mossad operative, was working with South African military on related matters to their own nuclear development program for many years and presumably was also acting in collusion with the suspected Israeli collaboration with the South African government in this endeavor.

Once the nuclear triggers were gotten into Pakistan, connections had been arranged with former operatives of the A.Q. Khan network who had previous contacts with the Iranians.

However, Plame's counter-proliferation network was tracking Karni and had an operative in South Africa who reported on this activity. This operative seems to have been compromised after Plame was outed.

In any event, with the work of Plame's group the Pakistani ISI intercepted and recovered the entire shipment of triggers, which are really electronic modules used for nuclear detonations.

The outing of Plame more and more seems like the work of the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) and it seems as though Plame's group was getting too close for comfort to the true perpetrators of this nuclear proliferation.

These facts seem to point to the nuclear trigger episode as a "hurry up" attempt to provide Iran with incriminating evidence as a means to justify the attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.

This all points to the real sources of WMD proliferation and global terrorism. They are one and the same and we need look no further than the Bush Crime Family and their connections to the Saudis and also the Zionist criminal cabal whose intentions toward both Iraq and Iran have been clear for many years and pushed by the arch neocon, Michael Ledeen, just to name one.

Follow the money trail and it will lead to the truth. They are all interconnected by this one element.
Posted by jim at February 13, 2006 06:11 PM

Make of it what you will. I am still mulling the implications of these remarks. I imagine there are journalists following up on the story, given its astonishing ramifications for an understanding of what actually brought about the Plame outing.