My Money’s on Hannah

Here’s your “cooperating witness.” John Hannah. Cheney’s Deputy Chief of Staff, who was on loan from John Bolton’s anti-WMD office at the State Department. A person who was definitely in a position to know and liaison with anti-WMD people at the CIA such as covert agent Plame. I’ve said that Bolton was involved in this all along, so I’m sticking with it. Multiple rumors have it that Hannah, after receiving a “target letter” from Fitzgerald, flipped over and is naming names to the Prosecutor. We’ll see. After the break, please read more about his track record….

Hannah is Cheney’s Middle East policy point-man, and before that was director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP). Middle East expert Juan Cole shines his reportorial flashlight on what’s under that particular rock:
“Libby and Hannah form part of a 13-man vice presidential advisory team, sort of a veep NSC [National Security Council], which helps underpin Cheney’s dominance in the US foreign policy area. Hannah is a neoconservative and old cold warrior who is really more of a Soviet expert than a Middle East expert. But in the 90s he for a while headed up the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a think tank that represents the interests of the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC). Hannah is said to have been behind Cheney’s and consequently Bush’s support for refusing to deal with Yasser Arafat. But he was also deeply involved in getting up the Iraq war….”

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Libby and Hannah were the enforcers who made sure that the lies put out by this administration to bamboozle us into war with Iraq were strictly adhered to within the government. Libby was a frequent visitor over at CIA headquarters, along with his boss, and, as Juan Cole writes:

“[H]annah had fingers in all three rotten pies from which the worst intel came – Sharon’s office in Israel, the Pentagon Office of Special Plans (for which Hannah served as a liaison to Cheney), and fraudster Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. Hannah had probably been the one who fed Cheney the Niger uranium story, triggering a Cheney request to the CIA to verify it and thence Joe Wilson’s trip to Niamey in spring of 2002, where he found the story to be an absurd falsehood on the face of it.”