Dec. 1- Dec. 15, 2001:

Late 2001 – SISMI, the Italian intelligence service, is reportedly investigating the possible acquisition of uranium by Iraq, but sourcing of the story still remains dubious.

Dec. 1, 2001 – Rumsfeld issues a Top Secret order to Gen. Franks, telling him to come up with a detailed war plan for invasion of Iraq that could be carried out within months. The plan is to be provided in three days.

Dec. 4, 2001 – Gen. Franks presents a set of Iraq war plans and briefs Rumsfeld, who tells him to do them over.

Dec. 4, 2001 – The New York Times publishes another article by Judith Miller, titled “U.S. to Block Assets It Says Help Finance Hamas,” that reveals beforehand administration plans to freeze assets of an Islamic group in the U.S.:

“Responding to the weekend's suicide bombings in Israel, President Bush is to announce on Tuesday the freezing of assets of a leading Islamic foundation in the United States and two other financial groups. The groups help finance the militant Palestinian organization Hamas, administration officials said.      

The officials and counterterrorism experts said the freeze would apply to the assets of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, a foundation based in Richardson, Tex., that raised $13 million last year and that says it is the largest Muslim charity in the United States.”

An office of the Holy Land Foundation is at this point targeted for a raid by federal investigators. This article, like previous reporting by Miller and the similar article a few days later by another NYTimes reporter, follows a pattern. While the Holy Land Foundation is reported here as based in Texas, it has an office in Illinois that is targeted for investigation; thus this article like the others has the effect of outing federal counterterrorism investigations from Illinois.

          Once again, the sources for the reported item are unnamed “administration officials.” The administration officials who out these investigations will never be named.

Dec. 5, 2001 – The anthrax letter addressed to Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) is opened carefully by investigators.

Dec. 6, 2001 – The New York Times runs an article by Judith Miller and David Johnston, on the Leahy letter, which attempts again to link the anthrax mailings to Iraq:

 
“As the investigative work on the letter began, two leading bioweapons experts told a House committee that they suspected that the anthrax in letters sent to the Senate and to news organizations was probably not of Russian or American military origin, and that if a state was responsible, the most likely suspect was Iraq.

The hearing followed weeks of statements by the F.B.I. that investigators were leaning toward the theory that the anthrax attacks were the work of a lone disaffected scientist, possibly an American with experience in or access to a United States government laboratory. So the return to an emphasis on Iraq as a potential culprit, in testimony by two veterans of germ weapons programs, was something of a surprise.    

The two witnesses, appearing before the House International Relations Committee, were Richard Spertzel, former head of the United Nations' biological weapons inspections in Iraq, and Ken Alibek, a defector from the Soviet Union's biological weapons program who is now president of Advanced Biosystems Inc. They disagreed about the level of expertise required to make such material, but agreed that it had probably not been obtained by using the production techniques of either the former Soviet Union or the American germ weapons program, now defunct.”

This expert testimony, given due prominence by the Times and Miller, contradicts the emerging consensus that the anthrax in the letters was actually produced in the United States. Within days, the Times will run another article by Miller conceding that the U.S. had recently been developing anthrax – following a report on the U.S. work with anthrax published in the Baltimore Sun.

Dec. 9, 2001 – Vice President Dick Cheney appears on NBC’s Meet the Press with Tim Russert, saying it is “pretty well confirmed” that 9/11 lead hijacker Mohamed Atta met with the head of Iraqi intelligence in Prague, Poland, in 2001.

 
This item, like the aluminum tubes and the Niger uranium and the ‘mobile chem labs’ also used to justify war with Iraq, proves to be based on faulty intelligence from an unreliable source, and false.

Dec. 11, 2001 – The U.S. Army moves the Third Army Headquarters from Georgia, near Afghanistan, to Kuwait, near Iraq.

Dec. 12, 2001 – Gen. Franks briefs Rumsfeld on the redone war plan; Rumsfeld again tells Franks to do it over.

Dec. 15, 2001 – The New York Times runs an article titled “F.B.I. Raids Two of the Biggest Muslim Charities; Assets of One Are Seized,” by Philip Shenon:

 “F.B.I. agents raided the offices of two of the nation's largest Muslim charities today in what Bush administration officials described as a broadening of its campaign to shut a financial pipeline to terrorist groups overseas.   

The government announced few details about the raids on the charities, the Global Relief Foundation and the Benevolence International Foundation, both of Illinois, and refused to say what terrorist groups might be linked to them. The Federal Bureau of Investigation would not say what information it seized.   

Last week, federal law enforcement agents froze the assets and searched the office of another large Muslim charity, the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, in Richardson, Tex.”

As with the contacts by Miller in advance of her articles reporting government raids on the Islamic charities, phone calls by Shenon to the charity tip off the target in advance of an F.B.I. raid, leading to a federal case. But the statute of limitations will expire by the time prosecutors eventually get their effort to trace the unnamed administration leakers upheld by the courts.