Feith Referenced Fake Company As Evidence Of Pre-War Ties Between Iraq And Bin Laden

by angryindian | May 26, 2007 at 09:15 am
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Feith Referenced Fake Company As Evidence Of Pre-War Ties Between Iraq And Bin Laden

Feith Referenced Fake Company As Evidence Of Pre-War Ties Between Iraq And Bin Laden

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More Bush administration hi-jinks as another fraud that led-up to the twin invasions is exposed.   Douglas Feith is caught in the act again manufacturing false evidence to butress Bush administration claims that Al-Queda and Iraq were in cahoots.

When will the neo-conservatives and republicans ever admit to the hypocrisy that runs rampant through their party?  The lack of integrity shown by both republicans as well as democrats in the face of the borderline fascism we are facing is apalling.  - The Angryindian

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From Intelligentaindigena:  

Early last month, Senate Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) released
a declassified version of a Pentagon Inspector General report that
found that in Sept. 2002, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith gave
a briefing entitled “Assessing the Relationship Between Iraq and al-Qaida” to Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff.



In this “alternative” intelligence assessment, Feith asserted that
Osama Bin Laden’s al-Hijra Company had business “contacts” with a Dutch
company, Vlemmo N.V. and that Vlemmo was a “front for Iraqi military procurement“:

Dick Cheney “publicly praised” the Feith assessment as “the best source of information on the topic.”



Yesterday, however, the Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen
explained that Feith had apparently invented the company, saying “Vlemmo is unknown to the Netherlands“:

The company has never been registered with the Chamber of Commerce in the Netherlands and is also not known to the tax service. That the company may have served as a front for illegal arms trade with Iraq is equally unknown to me.

The Inspector General report concluded that Feith inappropriately “developed, produced and then disseminated alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and al-Qaeda relationship,’” which included “conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus of the Intelligence Community.”



Juan Cole has more.

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ricknight
ricknight
flagged this story as Good Stuff

at 08:27 on May 26th, 2007

angryindian, They're shameless... first they lie, and then when you catch them they accuse you of giving aid to the enemy. The "Ministry of Truth" is alive and well in DC. -> Good stuff.

jordan
jordan
flagged this story as Good Stuff

at 09:44 on May 26th, 2007

Regardless how one feels about regime change, it's really weird how there is no real momentum for impeachement; Nixon's involvement in the Watergate break-in was far more benign than all of this, and the nation was screaming for his blood.

Karen Hatter
Karen Hatter
flagged this story as Good Stuff

at 10:34 on May 26th, 2007

Was it the Ministry of Truth that gave us Doublespeak in 1984? If so, we've sure had a lot of that! I'm hard pressed to decide, among all of the rationales bandied about, which is the most corrupted, the idea of 'preemptive strike', not to be confused with starting a war or the term 'detainees', not to be confused with prisoners of war, people taken when engaged in battle, to name only two.


Then again, a War Against Terror has an ever morphing set of circumstances and participants.

Angryindian, good stuff and thanks so much for your analysis.

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ricknight

Yep, "Ministry of Truth" - fine purveyors of misinformation since Orwell created them... only his was fictional and ours is only too real.

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Karen Hatter

You are right, Ricknight and that distinction IS what makes this so frighteningly unconscionable.

pwalmsley
pwalmsley
flagged this story as Good Stuff

at 11:33 on May 26th, 2007

angryindian, I like this story. It's good stuff.

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joellerose

Don't get too excited.  Apparently there may have been a company called Vlemmo N.V. located in Belgium (where most people speak Dutch) which went bankrupt in 2004 and which can be found in a Google search.  The evidence for such a company seems problematic unless you can speak Dutch.

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ricknight

So once again we are confronted with two choices.... Douglas Feith and the administration are either liars, or just plain incompetent...  they can't seem to tell the difference between the Netherlands or Belgium [Where they speak French, Wallon and Flemish]...

The excuses are becoming too over the top to even be catagorized as disingenius...  But there is a certain entertainment value in listening to them... They're like an Ed Wood movie. So bad, they're actually kinda funny.

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joellerose

All governments are incompetent in almost everything they do.  That's the first thing lefties need to learn.  That's why, when we grow up, we're usually not lefties any more.

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war on terrr

As if on queue, so enters joellerose with more fruitless name callling.  The point made in this thread is that incompetence is the BEST defence for the administration.  Joellerose you seem pretty anxious to accect this.   Is it easier to be cynical than to accept that you have been duped by a very sophisticated network of liars?

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joellerose

9/11 did happen; the Cole attack did happen; Khobar Towers and the African embassy bombings did happen; Saddam did use chemical weapons against the Kurds and the Iranians; Saddam did invade Kuwait and was poised to invade Saudi Arabia; Saddam did fire Scuds at the Israelis and the the Saudis; Saddam did try to reconstitute the nuclear weapons capability he once had.  Saddam did give $25,000 to the families of suicide bombers; Iraq lies in the center of the Middle East and the location of the main oil reserves.  I could go on and on.  Irrational hatred of Bush may blind some to the necessity of military action, but it doesn't change anything.

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ricknight

If he had WMD (still missing) don't you think that during and American attack would have been the time to use them? Was he saving them for some other large superpower to take a shot at him?

No matter how many times you say Saddam and 9/11 in the same breath, it doesn't make a connection that wasn't there...  

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joellerose

You are correct.  The WMD have not been found.  Either every western intelligence agency was wrong, and they were not there, or they were moved, or we haven't found them yet.  Now what?  Having large military forces and permanent bases in Iraq and Afghanistan provide immense strategic advantages in confronting the Islamic terrorists and protecting the oil supplies. 

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ricknight

Or perhaps the inteligence was F-A-B-R-I-C-A-T-E-D...
and the connection to 9/11 was F-A-B-R-I-C-A-T-E-D...
and the real reason was O-I-L...

thanks for clearing that up. 

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ricknight

sorry... I've been right handed all my life... and they're holding a spot for you at the Ministry of Truth, mind you, the Ministry of Love might make a good counter offer.

Given the choice between juvenile and myopic I'll take the former.

Still wondering what flavour kool-aid you're having.... :)  

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angryindian

Face it folks, Americans as a whole would rather except claims of silly incompetence  rather than  accept responsibility  for allowing this Bush administration to snowball into Germany 1933 lite. 

Neo-conservatives aside, the democrat, rather than mis-labelled 'Liberal' party is just as concerned with saving American hegemony globally than with doing the right thing.  This country was never concerned with fair play, (see: Manifest Destiny) and a commanding percentage of the U.S. population is willing to turn a blind eye provided they are allowed to.  This complacent and conspiratorial major corporate media has made this possible.   Or so says Dan Rather, Walter Cronkite, Mike Wallace, Charlie Rose and even arc-conservative and someone I actually respect as a real conservative William F. Buckley Jr. who said publicly that Bush the Younger should have stepped down years ago if he really cared about the country.

Second point to face up to: the majority of American citizens opposed to the conflict are only doing so now because the U.S. is losing.  The United States government, not this military, thought they could easily overpower the Arabian world and casually extract its main resource, petroleum.  The military since jump street told them not to do this without the proper material, Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney said, "You go to war with the army you have, not the army you wish to have."  No flak jackets, no armoured transportation, spoiled food and water provided by U.S. private industry and paid for by American tax dollars, in some cases, the lack of ammunition has cost missions to be left uncompleted and objectives and over benchmarks by the military command unattended to and I could list more but this is only a response.

Not one conservative pundit has challenged the Bush administration on these factoids and they never will.  No WmD's found anywhere other than what the U.S. sold them when Saddam Hussein was working for the American CIA.  Torture and rape rooms?  The United States has constructed their own unless photographs of American service personnel abusing and raping Iraqi detainees is you idea of U.S. soldiers "Just blowing off steam" as Oxy-contin addict Rush Limbaugh suggested.

I pay little or no attention to neo-conservative non-answers and outright over-simplistic grasping for imaginary straws.  It is a waste of a good jounalist's time and effort that could be better spent searching for the root causes of world conflict instead of emotional band-aids to soothe bigoted neo-con feelings of inadequacy. 

- The Angryindian  

 

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Team Mole

Needless British and American lives have been lost as a result of the Bush / Blair action in Iraq, oil was always the primary objective, now the world has to suffer the actions of Islamic backlash.

Why should we be surprised?

"Teflon Tony Blair is now off to bank his £millions following his unsurprising resignation leaving the UK a complete and utter economic mess following his years of Government!

So why do so many people say "what can you do?"

Apathy rules and allows Governments to ply their flawed policies at the expense of world peace.

The $Billions spent could have been better used to avert world poverty and prevented the genocide rampant in so many countries.

But then, surprise, surprise, these are the affected countries with no oil.

Time to stop this utter abuse of world power... 

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