It Wasn't Only Joseph Wilson They Were After

As has been remarked, the lengths to which the administration went to exact revenge on Joseph Wilson for pulling the tablecloth off the WMD rationale and letting the yellowcake crash to the floor were way out of proportion to his imagined offense. Especially when it had a war to wage.

Sure, Cheney is noted for his vindictiveness. However, according to Wayne Madsen, it wasn't just Wilson the administration was after:

"['Scooter'] Libby and Cheney links to global weapons smuggling cartel resulted in exposure of Brewster Jennings and Associates non official cover (NOC) network. . . the operation's cover was partially blown because of its success at removing Soviet era nuclear weaponry and materials such as high grade plutonium from the international weapons smuggling market."

In other words, Libby, if not Cheney except for guilt by association, was after Brewster Jennings, the dummy corporation the CIA had set up to interrupt the flow of black market nuclear weapons. As usual with the invaluable Madsen, his piece is almost encrypted. Here's my attempt to render his report intelligible to others besides intelligence:

Libby was once the lawyer for Marc Rich, the Swiss-based American fugitive, who, you'll remember, was pardoned by President Clinton. Rich, whose links to Israel are splashed all over the Internet, became enmeshed with Russian and Ukrainian organized crime figures who escaped to Israel to avoid prosecution, according to a CIA source of Madsen.

Russians with access to nuclear materials sold same to the crime figures, who, in turn, retailed them to the A.Q. Khan network in Pakistan and other WMD smuggling operations. To remove these materials from circulation, Brewster Jennings, in a CIA Directorate of Operations Counter Proliferation Division operation, bought them at this "nuclear used car market," as one CIA source put it. In the late 1990s, according to Madsen, black-market high-grade plutonium was being sold in buckets from warehouses.

Thus did the Russian crime figures, Rich, and Libby find themselves pitted against Brewster Jennings. Then a well-known neocon affiliated with a Washington think tank received classified information about Brewster Jennings from someone within the Department of Defense and passed it on to forces within Israel, who relayed it to the Russian crime figures.

Some of this information was contained in documents passed to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Israelis by indicted former Defense Department analyst Larry Franklin.

The Russian crime figures discovered the Brewster Jennings purchase program was making Russian surplus nuclear materials scarcer. With prices thus driven up and sales hurt, they used their connections inside the Pentagon and White House (Libby, presumably) to expose Brewster Jennings by outing Ms. Plame. They were only trying to remove the competition--as well as those Russians involved in the CIA WMD purchase program, some of they executed gangland style.

Was that any help?

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