While we wait for Patrick Fitzgerald to announce the results of his investigation of the Plame affair and since RAW STORY mentioned the little discussed John Hannah who may have flipped on his higher-ups, I thought it might be useful to present what we know about this man who has been flying under the radar.

The speculation that Hannah has been a cooperative witness in this case is actually old news. Back in early 2004, it was rumoured that Hannah, along with Libby, was facing possible indictments and by late summer that year speculation was rampant that he had flipped to the prosecution’s side.

As Juan Cole informed us then, Libby and his deputy Hannah worked together on Cheney’s foreign policy agenda:

Libby and Hannah form part of a 13-man vice presidential advisory team, sort of a veep NSC, 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.

As for Hannah’s possible motive for outing Valerie Plame, a December 9, 2003 Newsweek article, “Cheney and the “Raw” Intelligence” laid out the background:

For months, Cheney’s office has denied that the veep bypassed U.S. intelligence agencies to get intel reports from the INC. But a June 2002 memo written by INC lobbyist Entifadh Qunbar to a U.S. Senate committee lists John Hannah, a senior national-security aide on Cheney’s staff, as one of two ‘U.S. governmental recipients’ for reports generated by an intelligence program being run by the INC and which was then being funded by the State Department. Under the program, ‘defectors, reports and raw intelligence are cultivated and analyzed’; the info was then reported to, among others, ‘appropriate governmental, non-governmental and international agencies.’ The memo not only describes Cheney aide Hannah as a ‘principal point of contact’ for the program, it even provides his direct White House telephone number. The only other U.S. official named as directly receiving the INC intel is William Luti, a former military adviser to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich who, after working on Cheney’s staff early in the Bush administration, shifted to the Pentagon, where he oversaw a secretive Iraq war-planning unit called the Office of Special Plans.”

(INC= Iraqi National Congress)

Cheney et al had reason to be concerned, especially John Hannah. Juan Cole explained why this may have set Hannah at odds with Wilson. Hannah was right in the middle of the disinformation propaganda team in Cheney’s office that made claims about Hussein’s supposed ties to Al-Quaeda and the projected estimations of Hussein’s weapons – including all things nuclear. As Cole stated: “Hannah 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 Ahmad 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”.

Justin Raimondo of antiwar.com further explained Hannah’s role in his excellent Oct 3, 2005 article, A Second Take on Scooter-Gate. (That is a must-read for those who need background information of the whole affair to date.) Three of Hannah’s AIPAC cohorts are in serious trouble:

Raimondo’s timeline intersperses the Plame affair with what happened in the Franklin espionage case. One player intersects the two cases: John Hannah. It’s quite possible that Hannah not only participated in outing Plame, he may have had some involvement or knowledge of the AIPAC espionage. (Speculation Alert). If Hannah realized he was in deeper water than he originally realized, he may well have tried to cut a deal by informing on those he worked with – including John Bolton – as noted in the RAW STORY article (linked above). And Judith Miller, the mouthpiece for the neocons, could well have been one of the target vehicles for Cheney’s revenge.

There are so many neocons with practically the same motive, revenge against those who spoke truth to the lies about the Bush administration’s rationale for the Iraq war, that any one or a group of them could have been responsible for outing Valerie Plame. That’s what makes this case so difficult to parse as we await Fitzgerald’s findings. More and more though, it appears that there may very well have been a conspiracy to get that job done. The stakes for the neocons were extremely high. They had worked towards their goals for decades. Any unravelling of what they thought were well-crafted plans would see their absolute destruction and they are certainly one group of people who don’t believe in the old adage “revenge is a dish best served cold”.

(That’s what I know. Time for the rest of you to fill in the blanks.)

Update [2005-10-19 16:6:28 by catnip]:: As I reported in this diary, the latest NYT article about Plamegate, No Final Report Seen in Inquiry on C.I.A. Leak, curiously includes a paragraph at the end mentioning John Hannah. Curious because it does not fit into the context of the rest of the article. Sloppy writing or is someone trying to tell us something?