Kenneth Pollack told the Jewish Telegraph Agency (via Josh Marshal) that he is one of two US government officials (USGO-1) mentioned in the indictment against former Larry Franklin, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman.
The relevant paragraph reads:
On or about December 12, 2000 ROSEN and WEISSMAN met with a United States government official (USGO-1). Following the meeting, ROSEN has a conversation with a member of the media to whom he gave information about classified United States strategy options against a Middle Eastern country and the internal United States government deliberations on those options. USGO-1, with whom ROSEN and WEISSMAN met, had acess to the classified information ROSEN disclosed,
We still don’t know what Pollack is alleged to have discussed, given that even Pollack is a little befuddled by what he’s alleged to have disclosed:
Pollack said that, according to the information he has been given, Rosen spoke with an unnamed journalist after meeting with Pollack, telling the journalist that he had received from a U.S. government official an eight point plan for regime change in Iraq. He then gave a broad description of the plan.
“There was never an eight-point plan for regime change in Iraq,” Pollack said Monday.
For what’s its worth, in January 2001 the Clinton Administration submitted an eight page plan to Congress outlining assistance to the Iraqi opposition.
John Lancaster at the Washington Post (he of the Madeline Albright character assasination) broke that story in January 2001:
With barely a week left in office, the Clinton administration has approved a plan to help Iraqi opposition groups reestablish their presence inside Iraq, a potentially high-risk operation that could test President-elect Bush’s commitment to ousting Saddam Hussein, administration officials said.
In a report submitted to Congress on Wednesday, the administration outlined plans to distribute food, medicine and other forms of humanitarian relief inside government-controlled areas of Iraq by means of the Iraqi National Congress, or INC, the main umbrella group for opposition forces arrayed against Hussein’s government.
Notwithstanding its humanitarian purpose, the $12 million program has important political and security implications because it would commit the United States to assist the INC in reestablishing a substantial operation inside the U.S.-protected “safe area” of northern Iraq, from which it was ousted by Hussein’s forces in 1996.
[snip]
According to the eight-page report, the INC plans to distribute humanitarian aid to displaced persons in northern Iraq and to “Iraqis living in areas controlled by the regime (especially Marsh Arabs and other people living in southern Iraq and the Iran-Iraq border areas).”
I am not saying Lancaster is the journalist. But the January 2001 report is not a terrible candidate for the non-existent “eight-point-plan.”
Pollack doesn’t mention the report in A Threatening Storm: The Case For Invading Iraq, noting only that his views on Iraq had begun to shift during this period. But he was certainly involved in that decision as the the National Security Council staffer for Iraq.
***
Can you imagine the stones of the reporter who calls Ken Pollack to ask about this stuff?
Reporter: So, like, remember when you advocated invading Iraq to disarm Saddam of the WMD he didn’t have?
Pollack: Well, uh …
Reporter: And, like, remember when you first started thinking about invading Iraq, you gave some classified information to those AIPAC guys who were later indicted?
Pollack: Um, well …
Reporter: That was awesome.
