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This Week You Need To Know...
The awesome power of a free society committed to a single mission is something [our enemies] cannot imagine.... Our unexpectedly quick and impressive victory in Afghanistan is a prelude to a much broader war, which will in all likelihood transform the Middle East for at least a generation, and reshape the politics of many older countries around the world.
—From Michael Ledeen's book, War Against the Terror Masters
On March 10, 2003, in a revealing profile of President George Bush's political Svengali, Karl Rove, the Washington Post reported that when the President's man needs advice on the war on terrorism or other national security matters, he turns to one man in particular: Michael Ledeen.
Ledeen told the Post that the two men met shortly after Bush's 2000 election. "He said, 'Anytime you have a good idea, tell me.' " Ledeen obliged, passing on faxes to Rove on a regular basis. According to the Post, "More than once, Ledeen has seen his ideas, faxed to Rove, become official policy or rhetoric."
Now, as Karl Rove sweats out the possibility of indictment in the Valerie Plame leak investigation, his Ledeen ties may come back to haunt him. And Rove is not alone. Ledeen, according to a wide range of American and Italian sources, has emerged as a central player in the intrigue of the century: the forging of Niger government documents and the use of those shoddy fakes by Vice President Dick Cheney and others, to shove the unjustified and disastrous Iraq War down the throats of the U.S. Congress, the American people, and the United Nations, on the basis of the bogus claim that Saddam Hussein was on the verge of having a nuclear bomb.
In the wake of the Oct. 28 criminal indictment and resignation of Vice President Cheney's chief of staff and alter ego, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, for his role in the Plame leak, sources report that the Special Counsel probe will now enter an expanded new phase, focussed on more underlying issues of how the United States came into the Iraq War, and the specific role the Niger forgeries hoax played in that process. According to a variety of sources, confidential documents from an Italian parliamentary probe into the Niger hoax, have been recently provided to prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. Those documents reportedly name a number of American spooks, including Ledeen, as suspects in the hoax: former CIA "Iran-Contra" figure Duane Clarridge; former CIA Rome station chief Allan Wolfe; and Gen. Wayne Downing (USA-ret.), a longtime mentor of the Iraqi National Congress's leader Ahmed Chalabi....
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