Let's Ignore The Lyndon LaRouche Part Here

No Quarter has the transcript from a May 7th event in Washington with Larry Johnson, Larry Wilkerson, Pat Lang and the authors of The Italian Letter. Apparently the transcript first appeared in the LaRouchite publication "Executive Intelligence Review," but it sounds reasonable, and I think we can work on the assumption it's accurate. (For instance, there are no references to the Queen of England controlling the drug trade.)

It's all worth reading. But here's what particularly struck me, starting with one of the authors of The Italian Letter:

KNUT ROYCE: We devote at least a chapter, and probably more than that, because WINPAC was such a key player in the bogus information that came out. We devote at least a chapter, and actually more than that, to WINPAC, and the head of WINPAC at the time, Alan Foley...

However, he told Mel [Goodman], before the war started—Mel asked him: "So, what do you think we're going to find in Iraq?" And Foley said, "Little, if anything, of weapons of mass destruction."

Later there's some blog triumphalism, and more about what happened, from Larry Johnson:

JOHNSON: And in January of 2003, I put together a paper—this was in my pre-blog days. I'm convinced, if I'd known more about blogs then, and there were more blogs active, we might have stopped the war. But, I wrote this paper. It was detailing Iraq's involvement, or lack thereof, in terrorism...

In May of 2003, I got a note from one of my former colleagues in the CIA. A senior person. And this person said, "the books were cooked." And I went, "Uh oh." And so at that point, I started looking back, and pushing into other areas, and it became clear, that this was a deception that was being carried out on the people of the United States.

Colin Powell's right hand man Larry Wilkerson on America's political system:

WILKERSON: Our political process, not just the Federal bureaucracy, but our political process is broken. And somehow, we as Americans have allowed that to happen. And I don't know what you think about it, but I'm damned mad about it, and I'm doing everything I can, across the country, to tell people that I believe this; to tell them how I think the Federal bureaucracy needs to be repaired—including the Congress of the United States; its committee relationship with the Executive branch is absurd, it's an anachronism. The Congress needs to be reformed, the Executive branch needs to be reformed.

But the big problem we're confronted with is going to come to bear again, very shortly: it's this insane process where you have less than 50% of Americans electing our President. And if you think about that, that means one in four, actually elect him or her. And this insane process of primaries, and factions, as Washington called it—not parties; he called it "factions"—who go out there and appeal to their extremes, and are successful in doing so! We have to do something about that, and the only people who can do something about that, are us.

(Thanks to mistah charley for mentioning this.)