Do I Spy an Israeli Spy in AIPAC?

For those who believe AIPAC and Israel are at the root of propelling
the United States into the misguided Iraq War and subsequent occupation,
the Israel spy case involving classified information on Iran is serving
as the proverbial string entwining the various conflicts in the Middle
East. Once pulled, the garment comes unraveled providing a revealing
glimpse into Zionist/Israeli espionage and influence in America and far
beyond US borders.
In an article published in March by Salon Online, retired Air Force Lt.
Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, who worked in the Pentagon with the Office
of Special Plans described the transition from the Clinton to the Bush
administrations. Once the office was secured under Bush officials she
was advised not to say anything positive about the Palestinians. “At the
time, I didn't realize that the expertise on Middle East policy was not
only being removed, but was also being exchanged for that from various
agenda-bearing think tanks, including the Middle East Media Research
Institute, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and the Jewish
Institute for National Security Affairs.” The political appointees had
a lot in common, namely the views of the right-wing Likud Party in
Israel.

A quick glance at these “agenda-bearing think tanks” is quite
enlightening. Juan Cole, Professor of History at the University of Michigan and
an expert on the Middle East, informs us that the American Israeli
Public Affairs Committee a.k.a. AIPAC “set up the Washington Institute for
Near East Policy as a pro-Israeli alternative to the Brookings
Institution, which it perceived to be insufficiently supportive of Israel.”
Likewise, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy is linked to
AIPAC. It’s founding director, Martin Indyk, is the former research director
at AIPAP. The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) is
best known for their successful promotion of the Israel-First policy
which has become the rallying cry for the US Congress, rather than
America First.
Recently the FBI removed computers from AIPAC and is conducting an
investigation of two AIPAC employees regarding whether a Pentagon official,
namely Lawrence A. Franklin passed a secret document on Iran policy to
the group. But Larry Franklin’s involvement with Israel may be the tip
of the iceberg. For the past two years, the FBI had been investigating
whether AIPAC has been passing highly classified intelligence data on
to Israel, according to Haaretz.
In his article “Pentagon/Israel Spying Case Expands: Fomenting a War on
Iran,” Professor Cole states that the information Franklin may have
passed on about US policy on Iran is most likely “an echo of the one-two
punch secretly planned by the pro-Likud faction in the Department of
Defense. First, Iraq would be taken out by the United States, and then
Iran.”
Professor Cole who has met Franklin claims that he has a strong
Brooklyn accent and can barely speak a few phrases of Persian or Farsi, the
language most often spoken in Iran. Cole believes that Larry Franklin was
not giving the directive to AIPAC in order to provide them with
information. Franklin “was almost certainly seeking feedback from them on
elements of it. He was asking, ‘Do you like this? Should it be changed in
any way?’ And, he might also have been prepping AIPAC for the lobbying
campaign scheduled for early in 2005, when Congress will have to be
convinced to authorize military action, or at least covert special
operations, against Iran. AIPAC probably passed the directive over to Israel
for the same reason--not to inform, but to seek input.”
Professor Cole cites an article published in the Washington Monthly
that details Franklin's meetings with a corrupt Iranian arms dealer and
con man Manuchehr Ghorbanifar (among others), who in the 1980s played a
key role in the Iran-contra scandal. Cole also points out that the
forged documents falsely purporting to show Iraqi uranium purchases from
Niger - as a pretext for going to war with Iraq - implicated Iran, and the
Israeli spy and the Niger forgeries investigations may share links.
“The Iraq/Iran nuclear plot was so far-fetched that it is what initially
made the Intelligence and Research division of the US State Department
suspicious of the forgeries, even before the discrepancies of dates and
officials in Niger were noticed…”
“AIPAC and Israel were helping write US policy toward Iran, just as
they had played a key role in fomenting the Iraq war,” Cole writes. “With
both Iraq and Iran in flames, the Likud Party could do as it pleased in
the Middle East without fear of reprisal. This means it could expel the
Palestinians from the West Bank to Jordan, and perhaps just give Gaza
back to Egypt to keep Cairo quiet. Annexing southern Lebanon up to the
Litani River, the waters of which Israel has long coveted, could also be
undertaken with no consequences, they probably think, once Hizbullah in
Lebanon could no longer count on Iranian support. The closed character
of the economies of Iraq and Iran, moreover, would end, allowing
American, Italian and British companies to make a killing after the wars (so
they thought).”
Larry Franklin, the man the FBI believes may be a spy for Israel, is a
Colonel in the United States Air Force Reserves and served as an
attaché to the US embassy in Tel Aviv, Israel (a position which is now viewed
with suspicion). His most recent assignment as a so-called “expert” on
Iranian affairs under neo-conservatives William J. Luti and Douglas
Feith in the Office of Special Plans appears to have been as agenda laden
as the other substitutes for real expertise to which Lt. Colonel Karen
Kwiatkowski alluded. While serving at OSP, Kwiatkowski observed, “Feith
paid scant attention to most policy detail, except that relating to
Israel and Iraq.” She further noted, “Instead of developing defense policy
alternatives and advice, OSP was used to manufacture propaganda for
internal and external use, and pseudo war planning.” It is Kwiatkowski’s
opinion that Rumsfeld's Office of Special Plans was a “subversion of
constitutional limits on executive power and a co-optation through deceit
of a large segment of the Congress.”
Despite a career spent in support of Israel, in May after annoucing his
retirement from the Senate, Ernest “Fritz” Hollings of South Carolina
dared to openly question Congress’ Israel-First policy in a column he
wrote for his local newspaper and later, after being attacted as an
anti-Semite, on the Senate floor. Hollings had grown exasperated with the
neo-conservative, “Project for a New American Century” agenda which had
led the US down a garden path to the military quagmire we currently face
in Iraq. To his credit, Hollings spoke out because too many service men
and women were dying needlessly in Iraq as they had 30 years ago in
Vietnam, and because it is US funded military equipment and
state-of-the-art technology that is used by Israel to wage a lopsided war against the
unarmed Palestinian civilian population.
“You can't have an Israel policy other than what AIPAC gives you around
here,” Hollings stated on the Senate floor. “I can tell you no
President takes office--I don't care whether it is a Republican or a
Democrat--that all of a sudden AIPAC will tell him exactly what the policy is...”
Hollings had come to realize that though he had supported the
President’s policy on Iraq he was misled. “There weren't any weapons, or any
terrorism, or al-Qaida. This is the reason we went to war,” he told his
colleagues.
Fritz waxed eloquent that day in the Senate. His comments on President
Bush were equally revealing. “I just read about President Bush's
appearance before the AIPAC. He confirmed his support of the Jewish vote,
referring to adopting Ariel Sharon's policy, and the dickens with the 1967
borders, the heck with negotiating the return of refugees, the heck
with the settlements he had objected to originally. They had those
borders, Resolution No. 242--no, no, President Bush said: I am going along
with Sharon, and he was going to get that and he got the wonderful
reception he got with the Jewish vote,” Hollings said. “There is nothing like
politicizing or a conspiracy, as my friend from Virginia, Senator
Allen, says--,” Fritz said repeating Allen’s charges that Hollings had made
“an anti-Semitic, political, conspiracy statement” because he dared to
finally, after all these years, tell the Truth as he saw it.
“That is not a conspiracy. That is the policy. I didn't like to keep it
a secret, …but I can tell you now, I will challenge any one of the
other 99 Senators to tell us why we are in Iraq, other than what this
policy is here. It is an adopted policy, a domino theory of The Project for
the New American Century,” Hollings continued. “Everybody knows it
because we want to secure our friend, Israel.”
“With President Bush's domino policy in the Mideast gone awry, he can't
keep shouting ‘Terrorism war.’ Terrorism is a method, not a war,”
Hollings asserted. “Here, might does not make right. Right makes might.
Acting militarily we have created more terrorism than we have eliminated.”
“Militarily, Israel is a veritable aircraft carrier. You can hardly fly
and you are out of the country, and everybody has to understand that.
You cannot play the numbers game Sharon plays. He thinks he can do it
militarily,” the Senator from South Carolina continued.
“I want to remind you, it was in that 6-day war--the book is ‘Six Days
of War’ by Michael Oren. Look on page 151, and Major Ariel Sharon says:
Look, we are going to decimate the Egyptian army and you will not hear
from Egypt again for several generations. And Levi Eshkol, the Prime
Minister, on page 152 says: ‘Militarily victory decides nothing. The
Arabs will still be here.’" “That is my theme. I have watched it over the
years. You have to learn not to kill together, but to live together,”
the Senator said.
Hollings spoke of being struck by a headline he had recently read.
“When I saw it, I showed it to my staff. I said: You all come in here, I
want to ask you something. ‘Israel plans to destroy more Gaza dwellings.’
You see that headline? I asked staff members: Suppose they bulldoze
your daddy's home. Wouldn't you want to cut their throat? They said: In a
New York minute.”
Hollings went on to speak about a trip where he met with the King of
Jordan, the Prime Minister of Kuwait, and Mr. Musharraf, the President of
Pakistan who had all said that if you settle the Israel-Palestine
question, terrorism would disappear around the world. “Then we came in on a
Friday evening to make a little courtesy call with the French,”
Hollings reminisced. “The majority of the troops on the field at Yorktown with
the surrender of Cornwallis were French troops. We had French troops
that helped us get this so-called freedom. All this anti-French stuff, do
not give me french fries and everything else, (this) is crazy,” he said
in reference to the incident where the cafeteria menus in the three
House office buildings changed the name of “French Fries” to “Freedom
Fries.” The name change was a rebuke to France over the country's refusal
to support the U.S. position on Iraq.
During his trip, Hollings also met with French president Jacques
Chirac. After discussing Iraq, Hollings stated that Chirac said, “What we
have to do is do something about Israel and Palestine. I said, what would
you do? He said, I would put in a peacekeeping force. I said, would
French troops come? He said, French troops would come immediately. We
would be part of it and we would separate them from killing each other
every day.”
Hollings’ talk with the president of France must have gotten back to
Israel. Today there is growing concern in France that American Jewish
money is being used to influence French politics, including the
presidential election. The candidates cited are Patrick Gaubert, a well-known
Jewish leader, at a recent European Parliament election; Laurent Dominati,
in a French parliamentary election in Paris as well as presidential
hopeful Nicolas Sarkozy.
Marc Perelman, in a recent article published by Forward magazine,
stated that Israel's ambassador to France, Nissim Zvili, has warned the
Israeli Foreign Ministry, that American Jewish money funding a French
electoral campaign would be a catastrophe. According to Perelman, Zvili has
“urged Israel to tell American Jewish groups to proceed carefully. The
source indicated that the message was approved in Jerusalem and likely
passed on to American Jewish groups.”
Last year there was a controversial agreement regarding American Jewish
funding in France between the America Jewish Congress and a vocal
pro-Israel group called the Union of French Jewish Employers and
Professionals, known by its French acronym, UPJF, Perelman noted. “Concerns are
also being voiced about the European activities of the American Israel
Public Affairs Committee, the Washington pro-Israel lobbying
organization, which has developed ties with Jewish groups in France and other
European countries to encourage the development of American-style lobbying.”
AIPAC has its hands in many lands, or so it seems. If the results
elsewhere are as catastrophic as they have been to the American political
life, its economy and world standing, (as we preemptively strike our way
into a moral abyss) God help us all.
In closing, I wish to recognize members of the Jewish community in
America and throughout the world who are supporting Palestinian prisoners
in their hunger strike. Hunger striker Mohammed Al Arouqi from Gaza has
heard from Svera Haerter, a Jewish peace activist, who called from
Italy to say that she and many other peace activists in the world are
supporting the Palestinian prisoners in their hunger strike and for the
right of freedom.
“I speak on behalf of our group called ‘Europe Jews for Just Peace’,”
Ms. Haerter said. “We have formed a network of groups aiming at
promoting peace, democracy and supporting the Palestinians in their just issue.
Our network is composed of 18 different groups from different European
countries, mainly Jewish, who are against Israeli aggressions against
the Palestinians and refusing the Israeli terrorism in the name of
Judaism.” She added that the Israelis did not have the right to commit
crimes in the name of Judaism. “We want to prove to the world that there are
many Jews who condemn what the Israelis are doing and have a strong
belief in the just cause of the Palestinians.”

Genevieve Cora Fraser