Larisa Alexandrovna of Raw Story has the details:
The Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Peter Hoekstra (R-MI), has recently held meetings in Paris with a front man working for Iranian arms dealer and Iran-Contra figure Manucher Ghorbanifar, US and foreign intelligence sources tell RAW STORY.
In July 2005, it was reported that Congressmen Hoekstra had travelled to Paris along with Congressman Curt Weldon (R-PA), the No. 2 Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, to meet with Ghorbanifar front man Fereidoun Mahdavi.
Two former senior intelligence officers and current intelligence sources abroad have now described a more recent meeting between Hoekstra and Mahdavi that took place in Paris sometime between the spring and summer of this year. What is by far of greatest concern to the sources is that accompanying Hoekstra on the trip was Vaughn Forrest, a mysterious character who, like Ghorbanifar, has ties to the Iran-Contra scandal. […]
One source says they believe the meeting to be part of a larger campaign to allegedly create and launder falsified intelligence by planting it with key publications and individuals abroad, in hopes that it will seep back into official American channels as though it were legitimate information, collected by allied intelligence organizations. Such a campaign of disinformation, if it exists, would be difficult to track, precisely because it is designed to mask its origins through other channels.
While other sources could not definitely confirm this aspect of the story, they indicated that they were not surprised by the possibility, identifying the “cooking” of pre-war intelligence on Iraq as an earlier example of such a campaign. […]
All of the intelligence sources confirm that the Hoekstra-Forrest trip to Paris was made “recently,” with some sources stating specifically that it occurred between spring and summer of this year. While the Senate source could not confirm that Forrest made the trip with Hoekstra, all intelligence sources agree that Forrest was part of the meeting, if not the guiding element of the meeting itself.
Intelligence sources familiar with Forrest’s previous activities indicated concern, since they see this latest series of events as an attempt to lure a member of Congress into backing false information.
Indeed, Hoekstra would have no need to meet with Ghorbanifar on intelligence matters, even if Ghorbanifar did have important, valid information, since Ghorbanifar is allegedly back on the US payroll, operating on instructions, sources claim, of Vice President Dick Cheney’s office. As previously reported by Raw Story, Ghorbanifar is in essence an agent of the United States:
“Asked if Ghorbanifar was essentially being employed as a spy, one former senior counterintelligence official said, ‘You could put it that way.'”
Now tell me again that Bush, Cheney & Co. don’t have Iran in their sights. Because this is such complete bullshit. Our country is in the hands of megalomaniacs and their propagandists. And the sum total of their foreign and domestic policies can be expressed in three word: War is Good.
