Larisa: Condi Rice = Larry Franklin

* larisa was on some radio show - she said:

• chalabi set up the Zalmay Khalilzad/iraq/iran meetings
• chalabi is a mercenary (which i questioned yesterday)
  
• chalabi/ghorba have always worked at cross-purposes

Apparently we'll hear more about Chalabi in her article tomorrow.

on another radio show larisa beat up on the corporate media for covering the detail about Rove in front of the GJ but still hasn't asked the most important question - what was Plame working on?

the host replied that it was nuclear proliferation - and in particular Iran.

Larisa replied that it was 'inputs and outputs' - into & out of Iran - and she said that she couldn't talk about it any further, but pointed to the listeners to Clemons:

But another dimension of this story has to do with an assessment of the damage that her outing caused this nation. As we now start down a path towards harder-edged threats against Iran, allies will naturally question the quality of our intelligence given our failures on Iraq WMDs.

If Cheney & Co. outed one of the key intelligence operations monitoring the inputs and outputs of Iran's nuclear program -- then Cheney & Co. did vast damage to our ability to know what is real and contrived inside Iran."

Here's the same exchange from our interview:

Luke: but one of the things that was interesting in your article was that Plame was tracking arms both to and FROM Iran - that element didn’t seem to get much attention - is Iran selling a lot of this stuff as well?

LA: again - you have to remember that I had to write this article very broadly - so its fair to speculate whatever you care to glean out of that - but I just can’t comment - I cant comment beyond what I wrote in that article.

Here's my question - what is Iran selling, and who are they selling it to? My guess is the answer to the first question is nuke technology, because that seems to be what Plame was focussing on. The answer to the second question? This week Iran threatened to sell to Sudan, for example - but we also know that Turkey is building a nuclear program as we discussed a while back.

Remember this at the bottom of a page14 article in the WaPo:

"Turkey's state policy is always: Play the game within the rules," said Mustafa Kibaroglu, a nuclear proliferation expert at Bilkent University in Ankara. But "if Iran goes nuclear, then who knows?"

In the past, Kibaroglu saw merit in a domestic nuclear industry for Turkey. In a recent interview, however, he argued for alternatives, including improvements to the electrical grid, which leaks as much as a quarter of the power it produces.

"I'm not supporting Turkey's nuclear energy program anymore," he said, "because I'm not clear about what the real intention is. Let's put it that way.""

great.

Radio Host Guy told Larisa that she only had 30 seconds remaining - what else does she wanna say:

Larisa: On the same day that the CIA fired AND outed Mary O'Connor last week, the news broke that Condi leaked the same classified information to the same people that Larry Franklin did - and Franklin got 12 years in jail for those same actions.