www.justiceforchandra.com

[fallout]

A quick blurb on Fox news. The FBI is responding to information developed by "law enforcement" based on new leads provided by people questioned during the height of the investigation. One of those questioned is apparently a "former driver for Congressman Condit".

Fox 'sources' tell them that a man from Maryland who worked for the Defense Department is being looked at.

Could this be the guy I saw rapelling in the trees on June 4, 2002?

Have you seen any other news on this? I'm just waking up to it....

James

[fallout]

Rita Cosby -- The Big Story Weekend -- FOX News:
Program aired on Saturday - August 28, 2004
The following was a Live Report by Rita Cosby:
There is new information tonight on the investigation into the unsolved murder of Chandra Levy, the Washington Intern whose skeletal remains were found in May 2002, in a Washington DC park.
FOX News has learned that recent tips given to law enforcement working on the Levy case, have caused FBI agents to revisit several old leads. In fact, in recent weeks several individuals who had been previously questioned in the case, have been revisited by FBI agents who have shown them 2 photos of a man who lives in Maryland and has done work for the Defense Department. Sources tell me that this man has a reputation for throwing parties that several members of Congress would attend.
One of the people recently questioned by the FBI about this man, is Gary Condit's former driver Vince Flaminni. Two FBI agents recently showed up at Flaminni's California home, and asked him if he had ever seen the man in the photo with the former Congressman, Gary Condit. He did not. Flaminni refused to comment about this visit from the FBI, with FOX News.
It is important to point out that Gary Condit, who had an affair with Chandra Levy, has always denied any involvement with her disappearance and also her murder.
Several individuals working on the Levy case tell FOX News that although it's been 2 years since Chandra Levy was found, this case has some promising new leads, and they are hopeful that it may finally be solved, possibly in the near future.

[laskipper]

Wow, fallout, you just drop in from time to time, drop a bomb and run. lol

Good story, good news!

Hey, who do you suppose this Maryland man is? Who lives in Maryland that we know to be connected to Condit, works for the Defense Department (sounds like freelance?) and has been known to give parties
that "several members of Congress attend"???

I'm thinking about the carpet stains in Condit's apartment. Could that be a link? Remember that story??

No, we haven't seen any news about this story, James. At least it's not been posted in any case.

I'll do some Googling....

[laskipper]

I'll chew on your ideas James. The first thing that came to mind for me was the current FBI investigation of the Douglas J. Feith/Larry Franklin debacle. Think there is a connection???

You're right in thinking that the news about Chandra's case may be (yet again) another distraction for the Republican Convention. Worked last time.

I pulled up a list of DoD supplers. None of the names look familiar. I'll find it again and post it.

From what I see on TV, you're in for a big week. 300 bike riders and thousands of protesters??? Yikes!

Stay out of the subways.

[benn]

Hello James, I have a possibly different view of the news we have received to date. Because there is not enough information to definitely lead us in one way or another I am thinking that the FBI investigation has something to do with the security leaks in the Defense Department that have leaked information to Israel.

I hope that the FBI is looking at Condit and not at the Defense Department leaks.

Rd says that Vince Flammini did not drive for Condit in Washington, only in California.

benn

[rd]

They apparently went to California and asked Flammini if he had seen the man with Condit anyway. I don't know what that means. Flammini drove Condit to San Francisco all the time so meetings there would be like with Anne Marie, whom Flammini saw with Condit in SF.

The most innocent explanation I have for coming out the same time as the DoD Israeli spy announcement is that mentioning it sooner would have blown the spy investigation. I don't know if this collateral damage from snooping in the DoD or what is going on.

rd

click to read the online true crime mystery novel Murder on a Horse Trail: The Disappearance of Chandra Levy

www.justiceforchandra.com home page
_________________
ralph@ee.net

[rd]

I'm going to post this detail on the DoD spy case as background for the simultaneous announcement of the FBI investigating someone at the DoD in conjunction with Condit. Throughout all of this, and i think this includes the leaks about both FBI investigations, everyone expresses puzzlement, as do I.

rd


from www.washingtonpost.com (fair use)

Analyst Who Is Target of Probe Went to Israel

By Thomas E. Ricks and Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, August 29, 2004

The FBI investigation into whether classified information was passed to the Israeli government is focused on a Pentagon analyst who has served as an Air Force reservist in Israel, and the probe has been broadened in recent days to include interviews at the State and Defense departments and with Middle Eastern affairs specialists outside government, officials and others familiar with the inquiry said yesterday.

At the center of the investigation, sources said, is Lawrence A. Franklin, a career analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency who specializes in Iran and has served in the Air Force Reserve, rising to colonel. Early in the Bush administration, Franklin moved from the DIA to the Pentagon's policy branch headed by Undersecretary Douglas J. Feith, where he continued his work on Iranian affairs.

Officials and colleagues said yesterday that Franklin had traveled to Israel, including during duty in the Air Force Reserve, where he served as a specialist in foreign political-military affairs. He may have been based at the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv on those tours, said a former co-worker at the DIA, but was never permanently assigned there.

Messages left at Franklin's Pentagon office were not returned yesterday, and nobody answered the door at his house in West Virginia. No one has been charged in the case.

FBI officials have been quietly investigating for months whether Franklin gave classified information -- which officials said included a draft of a presidential directive on U.S. policies toward Iran -- to two Israeli lobbyists here who are alleged to have passed it on to the Israeli government. Officials said it was not yet clear whether the probe would become an espionage case or perhaps would result in lesser charges such as improper release of classified information or mishandling of government documents.

On Friday, Pentagon officials said Franklin was not in a position to have significant influence over U.S. policy. "The Defense Department has been cooperating with the Department of Justice for an extended period of time," a Pentagon statement said. "It is the DOD's understanding that the investigation within DOD is very limited in its scope."

At the Pentagon and elsewhere in Washington yesterday, people touched by the case said they were baffled by aspects of it.

Colleagues said they were stunned to hear Franklin was suspected of giving secret information to a foreign government. And foreign policy specialists said they were skeptical that the pro-Israel group under FBI scrutiny, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, would jeopardize its work with classified documents from a midlevel bureaucrat when it could find out almost anything it wanted to by calling top officials in the Bush administration.

"The whole thing makes no sense to me," said Dennis Ross, special envoy on the Arab-Israeli peace process in the first Bush administration and the Clinton presidency. "The Israelis have access to all sorts of people. They have access in Congress and in the administration. They have people who talk about these things," said Ross, now a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's office issued a statement yesterday saying Israel was not involved in the matter and conducts no espionage in the United States. AIPAC has strongly denied any wrongdoing and said it is "cooperating fully" with the probe.

The FBI investigation was touched off months ago when a series of e-mails was brought to investigators' attention, said a U.S. official familiar with the case. The investigation moved into high gear in recent days, another official said. On Friday, Justice Department officials briefed some Pentagon officials about the state of the inquiry.

"I think they are at the end of their investigation and beginning to brief people in the chain of command, partly to make sure that the acts weren't authorized," one official said.

Pentagon co-workers expressed shock at the news. "It's totally astonishing to all of us who knew him," said a Defense Department co-worker who asked not to be identified because of the investigation. "He is a career guy, a mild-mannered professional. No one would think of him as evil or devious."

Franklin works in the office of William J. Luti, deputy undersecretary of defense for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs. For years a bureaucratic backwater, the office has been in the thick of the action since 2001 because it formulates Pentagon policy on Iraq. It played a central role as the U.S. military prepared for the spring 2003 invasion and since then as the Pentagon has overseen the occupation.

Luti's office is part of the policy operation under Feith.

Feith has been a controversial figure in U.S.-Israeli affairs since the mid-1990s, when he was part of a study group of American conservatives, then out of government, who urged Israel's then prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, to abandon the Oslo peace accords and reject the basis for them -- that Israel should give up land in exchange for peace.

More recently, Feith has been a target of criticism from Democrats who claim that two offices in his branch -- the Office of Special Plans, headed by Luti, and the Counterterrorism Evaluation Group -- sought to manipulate intelligence to improve the Bush administration's case for war against Iraq. House and Senate intelligence committee investigators found no evidence for allegations that the Pentagon offices tried to bypass the CIA or had a major impact on the prewar debate. But in the Senate panel's report on prewar intelligence, three Democratic senators -- John D. Rockefeller IV (W.Va.), Carl M. Levin (Mich.), and Richard J. Durbin (Ill.) -- specifically criticized Feith's operation.

In Kearneysville, W.Va., about 80 miles from the Pentagon, neighbors of the Franklins interviewed yesterday said they did not know the family well. Though nobody answered the door, voices were heard in the house, which had a "God Bless Our Troops" sticker and an American flag in the window.

People who know Franklin from different phases of his life offered contrasting accounts of his political views.

A U.S. government official familiar with the investigation said Franklin was very outwardly supportive of Israel, for example. But a former co-worker at the DIA disputed that characterization, saying that he did not recall in years of working with him any strong political statements about Israel or anything else. Franklin, he said, was a solid, competent analyst specializing in Iranian political affairs, especially the views of top leaders and the course of opposition movements.

In February 2000, Franklin wrote an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal's European edition that was sharply critical of Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, arguing that the leader was launching a "charm offensive" that was simply a "ruse" to make the Iranian government look better to Westerners while it continued to abuse human rights.

Details of Franklin's Air Force service, and especially his time in Israel, could not be learned yesterday. A spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv declined to comment.

In Israel yesterday, Sharon's office issued a statement. "Israel does not engage in intelligence activities in the U.S. We deny all these reports," the statement said, according to the Associated Press. That followed a strong statement Friday by the Israeli Embassy in Washington denying any wrongdoing.

One Israeli official familiar with the situation said yesterday that his government had checked "every organ here" to make sure that no part of government was involved. "We checked everything possible, and there's absolutely nothing. It's a non-event, from the Israeli point of view. Someone leaked this to [hurt] . . . the president, AIPAC and the Jews on the eve of the Republican convention," he speculated.

He added that Israel would not have been involved in such activities, "because we have a trauma here in Israel. It's called Pollard."

That was a reference to the case in which a U.S. Navy intelligence analyst, Jonathan J. Pollard, admitted in 1987 to selling state secrets to Israel. Pollard was sentenced to life in prison, and Israeli officials have said since then they do not conduct espionage against the United States.

At AIPAC, spokesman Josh Block said the organization had no comment yesterday beyond its Friday statement that the organization and its employees denied any wrongdoing and were cooperating with the government. A former AIPAC employee also said he was baffled by the news of the FBI investigation. "I have a hard time figuring out what this is about," he said. If the Israelis or their supporters want to know about deliberations in the Bush administration, he said, "all they have to do is take people to lunch."

Others in Washington, however, maintained that Israel does present a problem for the United States in certain aspects of intelligence, such as sensitive defense technologies and Iran policy.

Israel sees Iran as the single biggest threat to its existence, and so closely monitors all possible moves in Washington's Iranian policy -- especially as the Bush administration presses Tehran to disclose more about the state of its nuclear program.

One former State Department officer recalled being told that U.S. government experts considered the countries whose spying most threatened the United States were Russia, South Korea and Israel. "I also know from my time in Jerusalem that official U.S. visitors to Israel were warned about the counterintelligence threat from Israel," he said.

Taking a slightly different view, others speculated that the very closeness of the relationship between the United States and Israeli governments -- and especially the tight connections between the Israelis and Feith's policy office -- may have led officials to become sloppy about rules barring release of sensitive information.

Staff writers John Ward Anderson in Jerusalem, Dan Eggen, Amit R. Paley, Steven Ginsberg and Jerry Markon in Washington and staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.

[rd]

from Websleuths:

deputylinda
Join Date: Apr 2004
Posts: 2,036

tonight, sunday, on rita cosby's show , fox cable news channel, 9 pm...further discussion on newest chandra investigation.

The feds are trying to connect condit to photos of some guy who is a 'prime suspect'. i'm just hearing this on fox now. no name on suspect...this was based on a tip, and speculation of course. what is interesting is if they are trying to put condit with this guy. that says he's still on the radar.

[fallout]

Hey guys,

I've got the photo. The two people with Condit are not named. It was formerly available on Google and in Washingtonian Magazine but has now disappeared. It was dropped from the society pages but its still in my files. I posted two names earlier. Don't know what happened to that post????????????????? Wot Hoppened?


1. Edward O. Wayson Jr.

2. William M. Rickman Jr.


I was "visited" this evening by two members of the Virginia delegation to the convention (not the suspects above). This is too weird to be a coincidence.

See my reports on the situation here sometime after 1pm EST on Monday at

www.nycon2004.blogspot.com

James
NYC

[fallout]

And,

You guys are very shrewd sleuths!

I also have the feeling that the Larry Franklin news has something to do with this.

I think Laskipper mentioned something about fingerprints having been found at the scene. That report appeared on Al Martin's website called

www.almartinraw.com

I think its available without subscribing. If not I've got it somewhere here. He mentions that a former CIA contract man's fingerprints were found at the Levy 'recovery' scene.

Doesn't this seem like bookends to the last four years? While George Jr. was still feeling his way around the Whitehouse Chandra disappeared. Now that he's strugglin' to survive the Great Mystery returns. We are the last of the hardcore Chandra investigators on the net. RD's done a book on it! I think they'd better check with us before spinning another yarn.

James

[fallout]

RD said,

"The most innocent explanation I have for coming out the same time as the DoD Israeli spy announcement is that mentioning it sooner would blown the spy investigation."

That's not innocent RD---That's brilliant! Sherlock would be proud. Didn't think of that.

James

[fallout]

One more before I go to bed...

Doesn't this follow the National Enquirer story about local politicians who might have been involved in Chandra's murder including a former Governor and former Presidential candidate. I think they mentioned a power broker in Maryland in this story or another related one. Its not the first time I've heard it at least.

We looked at Tony Coelho as the "fixer" in the case. But he would not be a former Defense guy either.

My head aches but I have great hope that something is happening. But why is Fox the only source reporting this? They're also the one's who brought us the "Gas the Puppies" video to get us into a war with Iraq. Doggone it.

James

[blondie]

fallout - can you post the picture? PLEASE?????

yes the Enquirer did that story and a story 6-14-04 about a DOD top level empl that had parties for various congressmen and basically provided girls. He lived in the Potomac area in Md.

[benn]

Good morning, blondie. Yes, fallout post the picture if you can. I just looked at the Sacramento Bee, and I did not find anything about this story, either about Flammini, or Condit, or the DoD.

Now I am looking for my swift boat to take a ride down the river. :)

benn

[propria]

>>> why is Fox the only source reporting this? <<<



that one's easy, james ...

they're the only broadcast operation, cable/satellite or otherwise, that is not under the control of the powers that be on the left. my guess is that the broadcast networks and mainstream media are keeping a low profile because condit's name has surfaced again, and he's a dem who has already embarrassed his party more than enough ... i'm also waiting to see what the political leanings are for the alleged spy, as the low profile might be the result of a dem operative involved in the spy story, possibly as a set up to interfere with the gop convention coverage. speaking of which, there were murmurings at one time of chandra being involved with mossad ... do you suppose this story somehow tracks back to those claims?


nanci
_________________
the Truth has a name, and there is power in that Name!