MORE ON AIPAC & IRAQ & SPIES FOR ISRAEL

The Senate Intelligence Committee released another report on the pre-war intelligence and in the AP report, I found this interesting tidbit. Note the distance between the initial mention of the

The report's Iran-related information focuses on the series of meetings in Rome over three days in December 2001. The U.S. was fighting in Afghanistan and working on initial planning for the Iraq war.

The undersecretary for policy at the time, Doug Feith, sent two Pentagon employees to the Rome meetings with Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian middleman already dismissed by the CIA as untrustworthy, and two Iranians — one a current member of the security service, the second a former member.

The meetings also involved an unspecified foreign government's intelligence service. Michael Ledeen, a former Pentagon official and an analyst with the conservative American Enterprise Institute, arranged the meeting and attended.

In one meeting, Ghorbanifar pressed for a change of government in Iran and, on a napkin, outlined a plan to do that, saying it could cost as much as $25 million, according to the report.

Ledeen pursued Ghorbanifar's plan through at least May 2003, the report said. In a letter to Feith, he outlined the Iranian request for a $7 million loan, money for a secret intelligence activity and money for an Iranian media outlet in Southern California. In return, Ghorbanifar promised photos of suspected terrorists inside Iran, the locations of purported Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that he claimed had been moved to Iran, and events that would lead to mass insurrections within Iran.

The report said Bush's deputy national security adviser at the time, Stephen Hadley, failed to fully inform then-CIA Director George Tenet and then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage about the meeting. Hadley and the Pentagon were within their rights to conduct the meeting, the report said.

White House spokesman Tony Fratto said Hadley made the appropriate notifications about the meeting.

The report said Defense Department officials refused to allow "potentially useful and actionable intelligence" to be shared with intelligence agencies, even throughout the Defense Intelligence Agency. Then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz briefed the head of the DIA on the Iranian intelligence but would not let him discuss it, the report said.

Ledeen said Thursday that the notion that the meetings were kept secret from U.S. intelligence is "nonsense" and that he had briefed the U.S. ambassador to Italy twice.

"Any time the CIA wanted to find out what was going on all they had to do was ask," he said.

One of the two Pentagon representatives, Larry Franklin, now faces jail time after pleading guilty to espionage-related charges unrelated to the Rome meeting. Franklin told the committee he believed the intelligence gathered at the meetings "saved American lives." He passed word of the alleged hit teams to a special operations forces commander in Afghanistan.

A casual reader may not connect Franklin with AIPAC and probably won't realize that Ledeen is an extreme war whore. And if you relied on the NY Times report, neither Ledeen nor Franklin are mentioned. Worse, the LA Times, Reuters and UPI don't even mention the Rome meetings.