AIPAC of Spies
On Monday, in this space, I stated what for me was obvious: that Larry Franklin, the apparent Israeli spy, and Ahmad Chalabi, the known Israeli spy and leading Friend of Neocons, were peas in a pod. I wrote:
Let's assume that Chalabi and Franklin, two lower-level operatives for the same machine, are still working together. And that the machine, the great Neoconservative Empire Machine and its Israeli right-wing allies, is what needs to be investigated.
Today’s Washington Post reports exactly that. It’s a stunning break in the Franklin case, which isn’t really the Franklin case at all, but a broader counterintelligence inquiry aimed at the Pentagon’s nest of spies run by Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith and Bill Luti. The circle, it ought to be obvious, is blissfully leaking secrets to the likes of Chalabi and AIPAC, and apparently blundered not once, but twice now—most recently when they sent Franklin stumbling into a meeting with AIPAC and the Embassy of Israel. Says the Post:
FBI counterintelligence agents are investigating whether several Pentagon officials leaked classified information to Iraqi politician Ahmed Chalabi and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, according to a law enforcement official and other people familiar with the case.
Several sources familiar with the case say the probe now extends to other Pentagon personnel who have a particular interest in assisting both Israel and Chalabi, the former Iraqi dissident who was long a Pentagon favorite but who has fallen out of favor with the U.S. government.
Hmm. Who could that be? Which “personnel” might want to assist both Israel and Chalabi? Now the point is, assisting Israel and Chalabi makes sense because they are the same thing. And of course Chalabi isn’t spying for Iran, unless you think trying to build up the already existing Iran-Israel axis (remember Iran-contra) means spying for Iran. Chalabi is on Israel’s team, and vice versa, and so are the neocons. For a decade, they’ve been scheming to topple Saddam Hussein, wreak havoc in the Arab world, and boost the security of Israel. Before that, from 1979 to 1988, Israel supported Iran in its war with Iraq, helped arm the mullahs, and built strong connections to Iran’s military-industrial complex. Chalabi has multiple ties to the Israelis, and both have multiple ties to Iran and to various components of Iraq’s restive Shiite gangs.
The Post quotes a follower of Feith and Co. charging that the whole spy inquiry is just some petty CIA vendetta against “neoconservatives”:
Another official, an ideological ally of Feith's, said, however, that the investigation is part of an effort by some in the intelligence community to discredit Pentagon hawks. "This is part of a civil war within the administration, a basic dislike between the old CIA and neoconservatives," the official said.
But since when are “the CIA” and “neoconservatives” equal players? The CIA and the FBI are charged with protecting national security, a job that they do with, let’s say, uneven success. But the neoconservatives have a decades-long history of spying for Israel. This has long been known to U.S. counterintelligence officials. For the first time in memory it seems that the CIA and the FBI are actually doing something about it.
The N.Y. Daily News—the Daily News!—reports that the real target of the investigation is the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans. (Anyone seen Abe Shulsky lately? What’s he doing anyway? Shulsky was the first director of OSP, and I was the first to out him in The American Prospect in 2002.). Anyway, the Daily News :
An unorthodox Pentagon outfit responsible for much of the Bush administration's discredited intelligence on Iraq is the target of a broad FBI national security probe, sources told the New York Daily News Wednesday.
The secretive Office of Special Plans and a related project are being investigated over how they obtained top-secret intelligence and whom they shared it with, according to four federal sources.
"It involves the improper transfer of information," said one source briefed on the case. "A lot more is going to come out."
So AIPAC is being watched, the Israeli Embassy has clammed up, AEI is not saying much and Franklin is getting ready to sing in front of a grand jury:
Franklin is expected to testify about his activities next week before a federal grand jury, said a fifth federal source.
The intelligence source said it's not clear what, if anything, Franklin will be charged with, "but I doubt it will be full-blown espionage."
No, it will be half-blown espionage. Or, make that fully blown.
Now since the investigation was announced to Condi Rice and Steve Hadley two years ago, the question is: Did they tell Elliot Abrams? If so, they blew the investigation, because Abrams is part of the conspiracy. I hope the FBI was watching who told who what at the White House, but it’s obvious that this investigation was known to all the principals since 2002. I suppose they assumed they were so powerful that no one, no one would accuse them of being spies. We’ll see. That rag, the New York Sun—home of Eli Lake, junior mouthpiece of neocons—is reporting that the Attorney General Ashcroft himself is intervening in the case, possibly because his special pipeline to Jesus told him that Zionists must be protected at all costs. From the Sun :
According to sources familiar with the investigation, the U.S. district attorney in charge of the probe, Paul McNulty, has ordered the FBI not to move forward with arrests that they were prepared to make last Friday when the story broke on CNN and CBS. 'He put the brakes on it in order to look at it,' a source familiar with the investigation told the Sun. 'To see what was there. Basically the FBI wanted to start making arrests and McNulty said "Woa, based on what? Let's look at this before you do anything.”
Mr. McNulty was only assigned the case by Attorney General Ashcroft last Friday when federal agents came to AIPAC's offices in Washington to request files and hard drives. 'Ashcroft wanted to make sure this case was being handled properly,' the source familiar with the probe said. 'I would not expect any action on this for at least three weeks.' This source added that a grand jury is now being selected, but it was likely the charges, initially reported as espionage, would be scaled back to the mishandling of classified information.
Sure, let’s “scale it back.” Why not? It’s only a few neoconservatives.
Tom Paine: The Dreyfuss Report
Let's assume that Chalabi and Franklin, two lower-level operatives for the same machine, are still working together. And that the machine, the great Neoconservative Empire Machine and its Israeli right-wing allies, is what needs to be investigated.
Today’s Washington Post reports exactly that. It’s a stunning break in the Franklin case, which isn’t really the Franklin case at all, but a broader counterintelligence inquiry aimed at the Pentagon’s nest of spies run by Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith and Bill Luti. The circle, it ought to be obvious, is blissfully leaking secrets to the likes of Chalabi and AIPAC, and apparently blundered not once, but twice now—most recently when they sent Franklin stumbling into a meeting with AIPAC and the Embassy of Israel. Says the Post:
FBI counterintelligence agents are investigating whether several Pentagon officials leaked classified information to Iraqi politician Ahmed Chalabi and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, according to a law enforcement official and other people familiar with the case.
Several sources familiar with the case say the probe now extends to other Pentagon personnel who have a particular interest in assisting both Israel and Chalabi, the former Iraqi dissident who was long a Pentagon favorite but who has fallen out of favor with the U.S. government.
Hmm. Who could that be? Which “personnel” might want to assist both Israel and Chalabi? Now the point is, assisting Israel and Chalabi makes sense because they are the same thing. And of course Chalabi isn’t spying for Iran, unless you think trying to build up the already existing Iran-Israel axis (remember Iran-contra) means spying for Iran. Chalabi is on Israel’s team, and vice versa, and so are the neocons. For a decade, they’ve been scheming to topple Saddam Hussein, wreak havoc in the Arab world, and boost the security of Israel. Before that, from 1979 to 1988, Israel supported Iran in its war with Iraq, helped arm the mullahs, and built strong connections to Iran’s military-industrial complex. Chalabi has multiple ties to the Israelis, and both have multiple ties to Iran and to various components of Iraq’s restive Shiite gangs.
The Post quotes a follower of Feith and Co. charging that the whole spy inquiry is just some petty CIA vendetta against “neoconservatives”:
Another official, an ideological ally of Feith's, said, however, that the investigation is part of an effort by some in the intelligence community to discredit Pentagon hawks. "This is part of a civil war within the administration, a basic dislike between the old CIA and neoconservatives," the official said.
But since when are “the CIA” and “neoconservatives” equal players? The CIA and the FBI are charged with protecting national security, a job that they do with, let’s say, uneven success. But the neoconservatives have a decades-long history of spying for Israel. This has long been known to U.S. counterintelligence officials. For the first time in memory it seems that the CIA and the FBI are actually doing something about it.
The N.Y. Daily News—the Daily News!—reports that the real target of the investigation is the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans. (Anyone seen Abe Shulsky lately? What’s he doing anyway? Shulsky was the first director of OSP, and I was the first to out him in The American Prospect in 2002.). Anyway, the Daily News :
An unorthodox Pentagon outfit responsible for much of the Bush administration's discredited intelligence on Iraq is the target of a broad FBI national security probe, sources told the New York Daily News Wednesday.
The secretive Office of Special Plans and a related project are being investigated over how they obtained top-secret intelligence and whom they shared it with, according to four federal sources.
"It involves the improper transfer of information," said one source briefed on the case. "A lot more is going to come out."
So AIPAC is being watched, the Israeli Embassy has clammed up, AEI is not saying much and Franklin is getting ready to sing in front of a grand jury:
Franklin is expected to testify about his activities next week before a federal grand jury, said a fifth federal source.
The intelligence source said it's not clear what, if anything, Franklin will be charged with, "but I doubt it will be full-blown espionage."
No, it will be half-blown espionage. Or, make that fully blown.
Now since the investigation was announced to Condi Rice and Steve Hadley two years ago, the question is: Did they tell Elliot Abrams? If so, they blew the investigation, because Abrams is part of the conspiracy. I hope the FBI was watching who told who what at the White House, but it’s obvious that this investigation was known to all the principals since 2002. I suppose they assumed they were so powerful that no one, no one would accuse them of being spies. We’ll see. That rag, the New York Sun—home of Eli Lake, junior mouthpiece of neocons—is reporting that the Attorney General Ashcroft himself is intervening in the case, possibly because his special pipeline to Jesus told him that Zionists must be protected at all costs. From the Sun :
According to sources familiar with the investigation, the U.S. district attorney in charge of the probe, Paul McNulty, has ordered the FBI not to move forward with arrests that they were prepared to make last Friday when the story broke on CNN and CBS. 'He put the brakes on it in order to look at it,' a source familiar with the investigation told the Sun. 'To see what was there. Basically the FBI wanted to start making arrests and McNulty said "Woa, based on what? Let's look at this before you do anything.”
Mr. McNulty was only assigned the case by Attorney General Ashcroft last Friday when federal agents came to AIPAC's offices in Washington to request files and hard drives. 'Ashcroft wanted to make sure this case was being handled properly,' the source familiar with the probe said. 'I would not expect any action on this for at least three weeks.' This source added that a grand jury is now being selected, but it was likely the charges, initially reported as espionage, would be scaled back to the mishandling of classified information.
Sure, let’s “scale it back.” Why not? It’s only a few neoconservatives.
Tom Paine: The Dreyfuss Report
posted by R7 | 9/04/2004 11:30:00 PM
1 Comments:
AIPAC Spy Case Update
Knight Ridder's Warren Strobel, who reported a week ago that the FBI investigation of Lawrence Franklin was part of a much larger probe of the pro-Likud Neocon clique in Washington (he didn't put it exactly like that) is increasingly being vindicated as the papers of record pick up the story. The Washington Post reported that the leak of intelligence information to Ahmad Chalabi is part of the investigation. Chalabi somehow found out that the US had cracked Iranian communications codes, and passed the information on to Iran, profoundly damaging the ability of the US to monitor Iran's (largely peaced) nuclear program. The Washington Post also reveals that the investigation extends to David Wurmser, who wants to overthrow the governments of Syria and Iran, and now works for Dick "Kindly Grandpa" Cheney. The Post also reveals that Michigan Congressman John Conyers is very concerned that the investigation has been taken over by a Republican political appointee and may get buried as a result.
It turns out that Condi Rice and Stephen Hadley were informed of the investigation already in 2001, which raises real questions about what action AIPAC officials took to spark it in the first place (most of the details so far leaked concern issues that arose in 2002 and 2003). Stephen Hadley is very tight with the Neocons, and if he knew about the investigation, you wonder whether he could have kept it to himself. On the other hand, maybe the FBI deliberately told some people, to see if they then showed up in the electronic surveillance.
Jason Vest and Laura Rozen reveal that Vermont politician Stephen Green, who has written two books critical of the US-Israeli relationship that covered past spying cases involving AIPAC that were somehow dropped, was interviewed by the FBI, which was clearly looking into whether those investigations should have been dropped.
So far the press has not much looked into the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK or MKO) angle, which I think might be quite important to the whole case.
The politics of the investigation of AIPAC within the FBI would be fascinating to know more about. There have been suspicions that post-9/11, the FBI has been worried about being penetrated by the Israeli intelligence and military, because it now needs the expertise of Arabists, and one recruiting pool for Arabists is Sephardic Jews from, or who are close to, Israel.
As it is, pro-Israeli figures like the Phalangist-related Walid Phares have played a sinister behind-the-scenes role in trying to railroad Arab-Americans like the four defendants in the Detroit case, which has now had to be dropped because of overwhelming evidence of their innocence and of prosecutorial malfeasance. The FBI should investigate how Pharis, an undistinguished academic with links to far rightwing Lebanese groups and the Likud clique, became the "terrorism analyst" at MSNBC.
FBI director Robert Mueller, whose resume is extremely professional, may just think like a prosecutor and mind his country being made a patsy.
posted by Juan @ 9/4/2004 04:25:50 PM
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