Jack Abramoff, back from the dead! And it looks like his malefic spirit will take down Republican Congressman John Doolittle of CA.
Abramoff paid a company run by Doolittle's wife in exchange for -- all right, all right:
possibly in exchange for,
theoretically in exchange for,
believed by some to be in exchange for -- the Congressman's help on behalf of Abramoff's clients. Now it appears that Doolittle's former aide, Kevin Ring, has turned squealer.
Moreover...Doolittle also received contributions from indicted defense contractor Brent Wilkes and his associates, and investigators are probing whether those contributions are linked to any official action Doolittle took to help Wilkes’s company obtain millions of dollars in government earmarks.
How long have I been saying that the Abramoff thing and the Wilkes thing might one day merge into One Big Bad Thing?
The French had penetrated Al Qaeda before 9/11! That was just one of the revelations in a blockbuster Le Monde piece that our American media almost willfully mistranslated. HamdenRice at D.U. blows the whole matter wide open
here -- and in my view, we all owe this guy a lot.
I hope to delve into the implications of this piece at greater length soon; right now, here's Hamden's precis:
The revelation here is the level of penetration into al Qaeda. The French have Uzbeks posing as jihadists in the command structure of al Qaeda; they have European born or based Muslims posing as jihadists in the al Qaeda camps; they are listening to their satellite conversations.
They have such sweeping and deep penetration of al Qaeda, that al Qaeda had become “transparent” to French intelligence. They even listen in to the jihadists debates about which airlines to strike and which airline routes to hijack. Their eyes and ears are there when it is decided months before 9/11 to hit American Airlines and United Airlines.
Among the many questions: Why did American conservatives mount a "hate France" campaign after 9/11? More to the point, why did so much effort go into decredibilizing a nation which could provide
actual data from inside Al Qaeda?
Let Sibel Edmonds speak! That's what
lukery demands of Henry Waxman -- after all, Waxman promised that Sibel would get her chance to testify.
Phil Giraldi, formerly of the CIA, has a
new piece about the Edmonds affair in the American Conservative. A key excerpt:
...she has recently elaborated on her allegations, stating 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. The three are leading Pentagon neoconservatives Douglas Feith and Richard Perle, as well as former State Department number three Marc Grossman. Edmonds is no crackpot and is considered to be a credible witness, most of whose charges were substantiated both by former FBI officials in 2002 and by the Department of Justice in 2005. Waxman appears to be uninterested in pursuing the matter, however, 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...
To which lukery adds:
Oh - and for those of you who are saying 'Huh? AIPAC? Israel? I thought Sibel's case was about Turkey and the American Turkish Council (ATC)!' Sibel says that both AIPAC and the ATC both essentially operate as fronts for the same criminal organization.
Question: As I look over the above post, I find myself wondering -- are these three
separate short stories, or are we dealing with three chapters of a single, much larger tale?