Saturday, June 11, 2005

Laura Rozen's good articles

Let me summarize these two Laura Rozen articles for you, with some additional background info:

GOP Congressman Curt Weldon is writing a book called "Countdown to Terror" that contains lots of scary stuff about terrorism, complete with "confidential intelligence memos" which come from a mysterious dude named "Ali". Many of the terrorist plots described in the book didn't actually happen and came to nothing when they were investigated. So Laura goes to figure out who Ali is, and he turns out to be an old Iranian ex-official who is getting all his info from an arms dealer. The arms dealer, Manucher Ghorbanifar, is so shady that the CIA has instructed its people not to talk to him due to his past history of lying a lot and trying to con people in weird scams. Now the White House has started to listening to this stuff, and the CIA is freaking out because it's just more bad intelligence that will confuse everything, like with Iraq, where Ahmed Chalabi and some guy codenamed "Curveball" sold the White House a pack of lies and started a war.

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