Individuals familiar with Fitzgerald’s case tell RAW STORY that John Hannah, a senior national security aide on loan to Vice President Dick Cheney from the offices of then-Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs, John Bolton, was named as a target of Fitzgerald’s probe. They say he was told in recent weeks that he could face imminent indictment for his role in leaking Plame-Wilson’s name to reporters unless he cooperated with the investigation.

Superfluous as it is for me to comment on this, when we've got the likes of Digby and Jane Hamsher doing the heavy lifting, I can't resist: it's just that huge. Be sure not to miss the end of the story, which is where the action really gets hot and heavy.

Hannah is currently under investigation by U.S. authorities for his alleged activities in an intelligence program run by the controversial Iraqi National Congress (INC) and its leader, Ahmed Chalabi.

According to a Newsweek article, a memo written for the Iraq National Congress (INC) raised questions regarding Cheney’s role in the build up to the war in Iraq. During the lead up to the war, Newsweek asserts, the INC was providing intelligence on the now discredited Iraqi WMD program through Hannah and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff.

"A June 2002 memo written by INC lobbyist Entifadh Qunbar to a U.S. Senate committee lists John Hannah, a senior national-security aide on Cheney’s staff, as one of two 'U.S. governmental recipients' for reports generated by an intelligence program being run by the INC and which was then being funded by the State Department. Under the program, 'defectors, reports and raw intelligence are cultivated and analyzed'; the info was then reported to, among others, 'appropriate governmental, non-governmental and international agencies.' The memo not only describes Cheney aide Hannah as a "principal point of contact" for the program, it even provides his direct White House telephone number."

Isn't that nice? All our good friends are here: John Bolton, Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby, Ahmed Chalabi. So, by implication, is our friend Judy Miller: it'd be a really delicious irony if John Hannah turned out to be the nameless other source she was trying to "protect." (Which might well explain John Bolton's visit to her in her martyr's cell. "Hannah's the weak link here, Judy—burn Scooter if you have to, but keep Hannah's name out of it at all costs.")

The outlines of the pre-war disinformation conspiracy are coming ever clearer, and they look more and more like the visage of Ol' Scowly himself. Via carefully placed, ideologically reliable Party operatives at the Pentagon and in the State Department (Doug Feith, Bolton), Cheney had constructed a network whose purpose was to launder skewed or fabricated "intelligence," no doubt produced on demand, through paid clients such as the INC (and allied foreign intelligence services, like SISMI?)—intelligence that had to be kept out of the normal pipelines, where it would have been vetted and discounted, and maybe its tangled sourcing unravelled. And that "intelligence" was then channeled surreptitiously to such media friendlies as Judith Miller, who more than ever looks herself like a member of the network, a conscious and committed agent. (She's just got too damn many ties to too many of its key figures.)

The Plame case is just the crack in the baseboard that exposes these cockroaches to the light. Cheney got careless, and used the same apparat that had distributed false WMD claims to burn Joe Wilson's wife, and thereby opened the whole shebang to criminal investigation. With Hannah—who sounds like he was running the INC branch of the operation—as a cooperating witness, I have more hope than ever that there will be a public accounting of the conspiracy on a broad scale. We may get an impeachment out of this yet.

posted by michael  4:16:29 PM  
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