Several days ago, I mentioned that Steve Clemons of The Washington Note had advertised that the story of Iran’s attempts to connect with Washington in 2003 was about to get a lot more complicated. Today, he reports on how the connection was made, linking to an article posted on antiwar.com:
Rove Said to Have Received 2003 Iranian Proposal
by Gareth PorterKarl Rove, then White House deputy chief of staff for President George W. Bush, received a copy of the secret Iranian proposal for negotiations with the United States from former Republican Congressman Bob Ney in early May 2003, according to an Iranian-American scholar who was then on his Congressional staff.
Ney, who pleaded guilty last year and was sentenced to prison in January for his role in the Jack Abramov lobbying scandal, was named by former aide Trita Parsi as an intermediary who took a copy of the Iranian proposal to the White House.
Parsi is now a specialist on Iranian national security policy and president of the National Iranian-American Council (NIAC), a non-partisan organization that supports a negotiated settlement of the conflict between Iran and the United States.
Parsi revealed that the document was delivered specifically to Rove, in an exclusive interview with IPS. Within two hours of the delivery of the document, according to Parsi, Ney received a phone call from Rove confirming his receipt of the document. Parsi said the proposal was delivered to Rove the same week that the State Department received it by fax, which was on or about May 4, 2003, according to the cover letter accompanying it.
Ney was chosen by Swiss Ambassador in Tehran Tim Guldimann to carry the Iranian proposal to the White House, according to Parsi, because he knew the Ohio Congressman to be the only Farsi-speaking member of Congress and particularly interested in Iran.
Guldimann helped the Iranians draft the proposal and passed it on the United States.
The White House press office had not responded to a request for a comment on the account naming Rove as the recipient of the Iranian proposal by midday Friday.
The Iranian proposal for negotiations, which suggested that Iran was willing to consider far-reaching compromises on its nuclear program, relations with Hezbollah and Hamas and support for a Palestinian peace agreement with Israel as part of a larger peace agreement with the United States, has become a contentious issue between the Bush administration and its critics in and out of Congress.
The identification of Rove as a recipient of the secret Iranian proposal throws new light on the question of who in the Bush administration was aware of the Iranian proposal at the time. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice denied in Congressional testimony last week that she had seen the Iranian offer in 2003 and even chastised former State Department, National Security Council and Central Intelligence Agency official Flynt Leverett for having failed to bring it to her attention at the time.
At a Capital Hill conference on U.S.-Iran relations Wednesday, sponsored by the New America Foundation and NIAC, Leverett responded to Rice’s criticism by saying it was "unthinkable that it would not have been brought to her attention" and demanding an apology from her.
The revelation that Rove is involved is huge — because it further raises the stakes for exactly why then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said that she never "saw the fax" of the Guldimann-couriered Iran offer.Foreign policy officials confirm to this writer that the fax did make it to National Security Council official Elliot Abrams, who has not admitted seeing the memos sent by Guldimann.
But if Rove also received the proposal through the separate channel of Congressman Bob Ney, it is hard to believe that Rove would have just hidden the matter in a pile of other faxes and not passed the material on to Rice directly — or at least to White House Chief-of-Staff Andy Card.
Where is the bottom?
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