Treason in High Places: Pentagon Zionists, AIPEC and Israel
The FBI investigation into Israeli espionage agents in the Pentagon
is part of a major struggle between prominent Zionists in the
Pentagon and the US security apparatus. Ever since the Bush regime
came to power there has been a fierce political and organizational
war between the Pentagon Zionists and their militarist collaborators,
on the one hand, and the professional military and intelligence
apparatus, on the other. This conflict has manifested itself in a
series of major issues including the war in the Middle East, the
rational for war, the relationship between Israel and the US, the
strategy for empire, as well as tactical issues like the size of
military force needed for colonial wars and the nature of colonial
occupation. From 9/11/2001 to the invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon
Zionists and the civilian militarists had the upper hand: they
marginalized the CIA and established their own intelligence services
to "cook the data", they pushed through the doctrine of sequential
wars, beginning with Afghanistan and Iraq and projecting wars with
Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries. The
Pentagon Zionists increased Israel's power in the Middle East and
promoted its expansionist colonization of Palestine, at the expense
of US soldiers, budget busting expenditures and CIA objections.
The US military and security apparatus has retaliated. First by
debunking Zionist lies about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, then
by exposing the role of Zionist client Ahmed Chalabi as a double
agent for Iran, followed by a two-year investigation of Pentagon
Zionists passing documents to Israeli military intelligence and the
secret police, the Mossad.
More is at stake than a turf war between the `Israel First' Pentagon
crowd and their opponents in the US military, diplomatic corp and
intelligence agencies. The fundamental issue is the freedom of the US
people to decide or at least influence their political leaders and
their appointees without being subject to the manipulation and
control by a foreign government (Israel) and their highly placed
agents in positions of power.
Israel has for decades subverted US foreign policy to serve its
interests through the organized power of major Jewish organizations
in the US. What is new in the current Pentagon spy case is that
rather than pressuring from the outside to secure favorable policies
for Israel, the Israel loyalists are in top positions within the
government making strategic decisions about US global policy and
providing their Israeli handlers with secret documents pertaining to
top level discussions in the White House on questions of war and
peace. Today the politics of Pentagon and AIPAC espionage is
especially dangerous – because what is at stake is a new US and/or
Israeli war on Iran which will ignite the entire Middle East.
The move to high-level spying by top Zionist policy-makers like
Douglas Feith, Elliott Abrams, Paul Wolfowitz and others in the Bush
Administration is the culmination of a long series of strategic
policies promoted by AIPAC designed to enhance Israeli expansionist
goals in the Middle East.
Wolfowitz, Feith, Abrams, Perle, Rubin et al were the most zealous
promoters of the war against Iraq. They worked closely with other
Zionist ideologues like Bush speechwriter David Frum to promote the
notion of "axes of evil", to engage in a sequence of wars against
Muslim regimes hostile to Israeli colonial policy in Palestine and
beyond. Wolfowitz, Feith set up the parallel `intelligence' agency
(the Office of Special Planning) run by fellow Zionist Abram Shulsky
using Chalabi to provide phony data on Iraq to precipitate that war.
An army of `Israel First' academic and journalist ideologues wrote,
spoke and acted to justify the US attack on Iraq as the first part of
a regional war to destroy any and all regimes critical of Israeli
expansionism. Cohen, Rubin, Kristol, Foxman, Ledeen and many others
provided "expert" propaganda on why US soldiers should kill and be
killed for Greater Israel. Almost daily meetings and consultations
took place between the top Zionists officials and the Israeli
military and intelligence leaders in the offices of Feith and other
Zionists. The Pentagon offices of Feith and Wolfowitz appeared to be
an upscale bordello for high ranking Israeli officials. Judging from
the subsequent policies it is clear that Pentagon Zionists took their
cues from their Israeli counterparts – Israel was given greater
funding, unlimited access to US policy makers and information
pertaining to US policy in the Middle East. Meantime US intelligence
and military officials were marginalized, their objections to Israeli
positions blown away, their very presence seen as obstacles to
realizing Sharon's vision of a Greater Israeli – sharing (?)
domination over the Middle East.
Given the high level of structural collaboration and integration of
US Pentagon Zionists and US Jewish organizations with the Israeli
state, the boundaries of what is United States policies and interests
and what are Israeli prerogatives and interests are blurred. From the
perspective of the Pentagon Zionists and their organized Jewish
supporters, it is "natural" that the US spends billions to finance
Israeli military power and territorial expansion. It is "natural" to
transfer strategic documents from the Pentagon to the Israeli State.
As Haaritz states, "Why would Israel have to steal documents when
they can find out whatever they want through official meetings?" The
routinization of espionage via official consultations between Israeli
and US Zionist officials became public knowledge throughout the
executive branch. Only it wasn't called espionage, it was referred to
as `exchanging intelligence', only the Israelis sent `disinformation'
to the Pentagon Zionists to serve their interests while the latter
passed on the real policies, positions and strategies of the US
government.
The history of the key Zionists in the Pentagon reveals a pattern of
disloyalty to the US and covert assistance to Israel. Harold Rhode
and William Luti, both fanatical Pentagon Zionists under Feith ,
Wolfowitz and I. Lewis Libby have been under investigation by the FBI
for passing documents to Israel. Rhode had his security clearance
suspended recently. CIA operatives in Baghdad reported he was
constantly on his cell phone to Israel reporting on US plans,
military deployments, political projects, Iraqi assets and a host of
other confidential information. Michael Ledeen, another influential
Zionist policy maker who worked in the Pentagon lost his security
clearance after he was accused of passing classified material to
a `foreign country (Israel). In 2001 Feith hired Ledeen to work for
the Office of Special Plans which handled top secret documents. Feith
himself was fired in March 1983 from the National Security Council
for providing Israel with classified data. The FBI investigated
Wolfowitz for having provided documents to Israel on a proposed sale
of US weapons to an Arab country.
It is clear that Israeli agents, not simply Zionists ideologues,
infest the top echelon of the Pentagon. The question is not merely a
question of taking this or that policy position in favor of Israel
but of working systematically on a whole range of issues to further
Israeli power over and against US imperial interests.
What is surprising is not the current investigation over Israeli
spies in the Pentagon but why they have not been arrested, indicted
and sentenced a decade or two earlier.
The problem of American Jewish organizational collaboration with
Pentagon espionage - namely the role of the AIPEC as an accomplice in
the current spy case - is not exceptional. In their books, former
Mossad agent, Victor Ostrovsky ( The Other Side of Deception, 1994),
and Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon (Robert Maxwell: Israel's
Superspy, 2002) describe how the Israeli security forces have
recruited overseas Zionist Jews, who are called sayanim, to serve as
back-up supporters and collaborators in Israeli overseas operations.
AIPAC is not merely a pro-Israel `lobby' but a long-standing
listening post and gatherer of public and confidential government
information for Israel. At a more `philosophical' level there is an
insidious belief widely held among the leaders of major Jewish
organizations like AIPAC that the basic question for all Jews is
whether the "policy is good for the Jews" - narrowly defined to mean
the interest of the State of Israel and its current rulers. In
pursuit of "Defending Israel at all costs" it is very likely that
some of these officials go over the line into wartime espionage.
President Bush has declared that he is a "wartime President" – the US
is officially involved in a colonial war of aggression against the
Iraqi people. In these circumstances, espionage in time of war is a
capital offense… even if the spymasters are Israelis. It is no wonder
that the Zionist and Israeli propaganda machine is working overtime
to undermine the espionage investigation.
After the first announcement by CBS television, the rest of the mass
media gave prominent space to Israeli and AIPEC denials. More
seriously the CBS broadcast deliberately harmed the FBI spy
investigation into the links between the Pentagon and AIPEC. The FBI
blames CBS's revelations concerning Franklin when, the latter had
already confessed and was working with the FEDS to implicate AIPAC
and Israeli agents. Zionist ideologues in the US mass media and the
Israeli press try to downplay the incident – first through vehement
denials and subsequently to reducing the case of treason to a
question of a routine exchange of information by a single "lower
level", bumbling but fanatically pro-Israel Gentile functionary. They
forget to mention he was hired and directed by Douglas Feith and Paul
Wolfowitz to be their expert on Iran deeply involved in handling top
secret documents and formulating policy on Iran.
The Israeli officials claim that Mossad and military intelligence
solemnly pledged to stop spying on the US after the Jonathan Pollard
case. "We have never spied on the US since…", they claim. In fact
over 800 Israeli spies posing as `art' students and tourists were
expelled after 9/11 and several Mossad agents posing as movers in New
Jersey and Tennessee were expelled.
The arrogance of Israeli power in then US, which Sharon publically
boasted about, is largely based on the simple principle embraced by
all Zionist zealots whether they are Ivy league academics or neo-
fascist felons (like Elliot Abrams) is "What's good for Israel is
good for the US". "Good for Israel" today means bloody US wars
against Israel's adversaries, unconditional support for Israeli
expansion and pillage of Palestine and now spying on the US for the
good of Israel. Guided by this slogan it is easy to see how
everything in the US that might be of use to Israeli intelligence
whether it be documents, directives or strategic debates about big
wartime issues taking place in the White House are fair game for
transmission to Israeli intelligence.
Rather than face the evidence, the Zionist ideologues have taken to
ad hominum attacks on their espionage agent as merely a middle level
official who didn't influence policy. They overlook the fact that he
was the `delivery boy' for his Zionist bosses who actually do make
policy and work with top echelons of the Israeli state
in `coordinating' US policy to fit Israel's needs. The power of the
Israeli-US Zionist propaganda machine is so overwhelming that the FBI
had to investigate for 2 years, make endless wiretaps, videos and
photos, interview dozens of government and not-government officials
before they could prepare to make the charges. Despite being taped
and photographed in the act of taking top secret documents, AIPEC
officials deny everything and then hire a string of high-powered
defense lawyers. Already the pro-Zionists mass media suggest that
Zionist-AIPEC spying is really a case of `mishandling sensitive
documents' – a case of putting top secret documents in the wrong
mailbox. Really!
In less than two days the pro-Israel mass media buried the story, and
a series of `news reports' were published featuring AIPEC denials,
Israeli ridiculing their Pentagon mole as a fanatical idiot (Haaretz)
and launching a counter attack questioning the motives of the
investigation and the FBI counter-espionage service. The media
published stories from anonymous "insiders" who purportedly spoke of
the FBI dropping espionage charges in favor of charges
of "mishandling a classified document" or even simply dropping the
case altogether. They claim that the spy handing over a classified
document to Israeli interests didn't know it was a crime, a case of
an innocent, well-intentioned error of judgment. This piece of
propaganda has been thoroughly discredited when it was revealed that
the Israeli agent (Franklin) confessed and has been cooperating with
the FBI for the past months.
Nothing captures the power and pervasive and corrosive influence of
the US-Zionist apparatus on US politics as much as the absolute
silence of both major candidates faced with a high-level security
lapse and potentially damaging spy investigation. John Kerry, the
Democratic candidate trailing Bush in the polls refuses to expose the
Zionist Pentagon's `security failures' despite national security
being at the center of his campaign. The reason is very clear: Kerry
is tied to the AIPEC-Israel-US Zionist political machine and he is
willing to sacrifice US security for the Zionist vote even when faced
with the issue of Israeli espionage in a time of war.
The Republicans went one step further – sending their top politicos
to an AIPEC political extravaganza organized in New York two days
after AIPEC was cited by the FBI as the Israeli intermediary in the
passing of secret documents. At no time in recent modern history has
any governing or opposition party engaged in public festivities with
an organization engaged in foreign espionage. The explanation is the
unprecedented and unique political situation that exists in the US
today – the extraordinary power that a small, economically dependent
state exercises over a global imperial state via its wealthy
organized political-religious agents.
If Israel can get anything it wants from its Zionist patriots in high
places in the US government, then why engage in espionage? There are
several explanations.
The hand delivery of documents by Franklin can be seen as a time
saving and security-wise move. If discovered, Franklin's mentors can
simply deny involvement – he was acting on his own, an argument put
forth in the Israeli press. The idea of Franklin as some kind
of `loose cannon' does not explain why he was hired, retained and
given delicate assignments and praised by the senior Zionists (Feith,
Wolfowitz, Ledeen and Abrams) up to the time of his exposure.
Secondly the document transferred provided Israel with very timely
information on a major top-level debate: US policy toward Iran, more
particularly who was for or against a military assault on Teheran.
This allows Israel to plan its own military strategy knowing in
advance Washington's possible response and directing its higher up
Pentagon collaborators how to prepare the ground for acceptance of
Israeli aggression. Fundamentally Israel wanted to be in the
White House decision making loop at every stage of Middle East
policymaking via Wolfowitz, Feith et al and via confidential
documentary accounts which the Mossad could analyze directly. There
was a `need' for espionage, because the Mossad does not merely rely
on one source of information, nor does it operate only on one track.
It has direct formal and `informal' relations (spying)
with `friendly' government policy-makers. It operates on many levels,
legal and illegal, through Zionist collaborators as well as overseas
agents, through agents with false passports and though local Zionist
sleepers, who can be activated for specific tasks…
Conclusion
Investigations and evidence are usually enough to proceed with
indictments, interrogations and the pursuit of the leaders and
foreign handlers in a major espionage case, especially in wartime.
Thousands of innocent South Asians, Arabs and Muslims have been
picked up and jailed on the most flimsy excuses ("suspicions"). But
in the case of Israeli-AIPEC-Pentagon espionage the normal legal
processes are inoperative.
The question of espionage prosecution depends on political power - a
struggle between the Israeli State backed by the major Presidential
candidates and parties, the Zionist-American political machines and
their mass media acolytes on the one hand and, on the other hand the
FBI, professional intelligence apparatus (CIA, DIA), state prosecutor
and his investigatory staff and few stray political voices. The so-
called progressive movements and policy critics are strangely silent:
Even as they speak out against war, they fail to denounce an
espionage case which is intimately related to the next Middle Eastern
war – an Israeli attack on Iran. Why don't progressive Jews denounce
AIPAC espionage to further a new war in Iran? A signed statement "Not
in our name" would clearly separate them from these agents of foreign
wars. Three days after the initial expose, the mass media have buried
the story. The FBI is delaying any announcements. The prosecuting
attorney is under tremendous one-sided political pressure. Lacking
any mass media outlets the US republic is a helpless giant, tied in
knots by malicious dwarfs, unable to defend itself, unable to define
its own policy interests. The latest report from the FBI tells us
that self-confessed Israeli agent was preparing to lead the
authorities to his contacts in the Israeli government when CBS blew
open the case. Was CBS aware of the danger to the Israeli secret
services and was it trying to undermine the investigation? No doubt
some sort of official statement will be made, perhaps even an
indictment will be made of the middle level functionary on secondary
charges and the FBI may even dare to interview Wolfowitz and Feith on
their knowledge of the espionage network with predictable
consequences. However if there is anything beyond an interview, the
Zionist media will charge "anti-Semitism", a "Second Dreyfuss" case,
which will probably end the current investigation.
The `underground' struggle between the Pentagon Zionists and the US
security apparatus will continue. If Bush is re-elected, Wolfowitz
will most likely become Secretary of Defense. If Kerry is elected,
the closet Zionist, Richard Holbrooke, will take charge of the
Pentagon.
American citizens will have to face a serious question: If the
security services are incapable of defending our country from foreign
espionage in high places – What is to be done?
In either case we face an imminent Zionist designed and promoted
military attack on Iran, which is likely to lead to a general
conflagration which can only benefit the neo-fascists who run the
state of Israel. And you are afraid of being called an anti-Semite
for opposing the Israel's espionage and regional wars.
James Petras
Rebelión
is part of a major struggle between prominent Zionists in the
Pentagon and the US security apparatus. Ever since the Bush regime
came to power there has been a fierce political and organizational
war between the Pentagon Zionists and their militarist collaborators,
on the one hand, and the professional military and intelligence
apparatus, on the other. This conflict has manifested itself in a
series of major issues including the war in the Middle East, the
rational for war, the relationship between Israel and the US, the
strategy for empire, as well as tactical issues like the size of
military force needed for colonial wars and the nature of colonial
occupation. From 9/11/2001 to the invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon
Zionists and the civilian militarists had the upper hand: they
marginalized the CIA and established their own intelligence services
to "cook the data", they pushed through the doctrine of sequential
wars, beginning with Afghanistan and Iraq and projecting wars with
Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries. The
Pentagon Zionists increased Israel's power in the Middle East and
promoted its expansionist colonization of Palestine, at the expense
of US soldiers, budget busting expenditures and CIA objections.
The US military and security apparatus has retaliated. First by
debunking Zionist lies about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, then
by exposing the role of Zionist client Ahmed Chalabi as a double
agent for Iran, followed by a two-year investigation of Pentagon
Zionists passing documents to Israeli military intelligence and the
secret police, the Mossad.
More is at stake than a turf war between the `Israel First' Pentagon
crowd and their opponents in the US military, diplomatic corp and
intelligence agencies. The fundamental issue is the freedom of the US
people to decide or at least influence their political leaders and
their appointees without being subject to the manipulation and
control by a foreign government (Israel) and their highly placed
agents in positions of power.
Israel has for decades subverted US foreign policy to serve its
interests through the organized power of major Jewish organizations
in the US. What is new in the current Pentagon spy case is that
rather than pressuring from the outside to secure favorable policies
for Israel, the Israel loyalists are in top positions within the
government making strategic decisions about US global policy and
providing their Israeli handlers with secret documents pertaining to
top level discussions in the White House on questions of war and
peace. Today the politics of Pentagon and AIPAC espionage is
especially dangerous – because what is at stake is a new US and/or
Israeli war on Iran which will ignite the entire Middle East.
The move to high-level spying by top Zionist policy-makers like
Douglas Feith, Elliott Abrams, Paul Wolfowitz and others in the Bush
Administration is the culmination of a long series of strategic
policies promoted by AIPAC designed to enhance Israeli expansionist
goals in the Middle East.
Wolfowitz, Feith, Abrams, Perle, Rubin et al were the most zealous
promoters of the war against Iraq. They worked closely with other
Zionist ideologues like Bush speechwriter David Frum to promote the
notion of "axes of evil", to engage in a sequence of wars against
Muslim regimes hostile to Israeli colonial policy in Palestine and
beyond. Wolfowitz, Feith set up the parallel `intelligence' agency
(the Office of Special Planning) run by fellow Zionist Abram Shulsky
using Chalabi to provide phony data on Iraq to precipitate that war.
An army of `Israel First' academic and journalist ideologues wrote,
spoke and acted to justify the US attack on Iraq as the first part of
a regional war to destroy any and all regimes critical of Israeli
expansionism. Cohen, Rubin, Kristol, Foxman, Ledeen and many others
provided "expert" propaganda on why US soldiers should kill and be
killed for Greater Israel. Almost daily meetings and consultations
took place between the top Zionists officials and the Israeli
military and intelligence leaders in the offices of Feith and other
Zionists. The Pentagon offices of Feith and Wolfowitz appeared to be
an upscale bordello for high ranking Israeli officials. Judging from
the subsequent policies it is clear that Pentagon Zionists took their
cues from their Israeli counterparts – Israel was given greater
funding, unlimited access to US policy makers and information
pertaining to US policy in the Middle East. Meantime US intelligence
and military officials were marginalized, their objections to Israeli
positions blown away, their very presence seen as obstacles to
realizing Sharon's vision of a Greater Israeli – sharing (?)
domination over the Middle East.
Given the high level of structural collaboration and integration of
US Pentagon Zionists and US Jewish organizations with the Israeli
state, the boundaries of what is United States policies and interests
and what are Israeli prerogatives and interests are blurred. From the
perspective of the Pentagon Zionists and their organized Jewish
supporters, it is "natural" that the US spends billions to finance
Israeli military power and territorial expansion. It is "natural" to
transfer strategic documents from the Pentagon to the Israeli State.
As Haaritz states, "Why would Israel have to steal documents when
they can find out whatever they want through official meetings?" The
routinization of espionage via official consultations between Israeli
and US Zionist officials became public knowledge throughout the
executive branch. Only it wasn't called espionage, it was referred to
as `exchanging intelligence', only the Israelis sent `disinformation'
to the Pentagon Zionists to serve their interests while the latter
passed on the real policies, positions and strategies of the US
government.
The history of the key Zionists in the Pentagon reveals a pattern of
disloyalty to the US and covert assistance to Israel. Harold Rhode
and William Luti, both fanatical Pentagon Zionists under Feith ,
Wolfowitz and I. Lewis Libby have been under investigation by the FBI
for passing documents to Israel. Rhode had his security clearance
suspended recently. CIA operatives in Baghdad reported he was
constantly on his cell phone to Israel reporting on US plans,
military deployments, political projects, Iraqi assets and a host of
other confidential information. Michael Ledeen, another influential
Zionist policy maker who worked in the Pentagon lost his security
clearance after he was accused of passing classified material to
a `foreign country (Israel). In 2001 Feith hired Ledeen to work for
the Office of Special Plans which handled top secret documents. Feith
himself was fired in March 1983 from the National Security Council
for providing Israel with classified data. The FBI investigated
Wolfowitz for having provided documents to Israel on a proposed sale
of US weapons to an Arab country.
It is clear that Israeli agents, not simply Zionists ideologues,
infest the top echelon of the Pentagon. The question is not merely a
question of taking this or that policy position in favor of Israel
but of working systematically on a whole range of issues to further
Israeli power over and against US imperial interests.
What is surprising is not the current investigation over Israeli
spies in the Pentagon but why they have not been arrested, indicted
and sentenced a decade or two earlier.
The problem of American Jewish organizational collaboration with
Pentagon espionage - namely the role of the AIPEC as an accomplice in
the current spy case - is not exceptional. In their books, former
Mossad agent, Victor Ostrovsky ( The Other Side of Deception, 1994),
and Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon (Robert Maxwell: Israel's
Superspy, 2002) describe how the Israeli security forces have
recruited overseas Zionist Jews, who are called sayanim, to serve as
back-up supporters and collaborators in Israeli overseas operations.
AIPAC is not merely a pro-Israel `lobby' but a long-standing
listening post and gatherer of public and confidential government
information for Israel. At a more `philosophical' level there is an
insidious belief widely held among the leaders of major Jewish
organizations like AIPAC that the basic question for all Jews is
whether the "policy is good for the Jews" - narrowly defined to mean
the interest of the State of Israel and its current rulers. In
pursuit of "Defending Israel at all costs" it is very likely that
some of these officials go over the line into wartime espionage.
President Bush has declared that he is a "wartime President" – the US
is officially involved in a colonial war of aggression against the
Iraqi people. In these circumstances, espionage in time of war is a
capital offense… even if the spymasters are Israelis. It is no wonder
that the Zionist and Israeli propaganda machine is working overtime
to undermine the espionage investigation.
After the first announcement by CBS television, the rest of the mass
media gave prominent space to Israeli and AIPEC denials. More
seriously the CBS broadcast deliberately harmed the FBI spy
investigation into the links between the Pentagon and AIPEC. The FBI
blames CBS's revelations concerning Franklin when, the latter had
already confessed and was working with the FEDS to implicate AIPAC
and Israeli agents. Zionist ideologues in the US mass media and the
Israeli press try to downplay the incident – first through vehement
denials and subsequently to reducing the case of treason to a
question of a routine exchange of information by a single "lower
level", bumbling but fanatically pro-Israel Gentile functionary. They
forget to mention he was hired and directed by Douglas Feith and Paul
Wolfowitz to be their expert on Iran deeply involved in handling top
secret documents and formulating policy on Iran.
The Israeli officials claim that Mossad and military intelligence
solemnly pledged to stop spying on the US after the Jonathan Pollard
case. "We have never spied on the US since…", they claim. In fact
over 800 Israeli spies posing as `art' students and tourists were
expelled after 9/11 and several Mossad agents posing as movers in New
Jersey and Tennessee were expelled.
The arrogance of Israeli power in then US, which Sharon publically
boasted about, is largely based on the simple principle embraced by
all Zionist zealots whether they are Ivy league academics or neo-
fascist felons (like Elliot Abrams) is "What's good for Israel is
good for the US". "Good for Israel" today means bloody US wars
against Israel's adversaries, unconditional support for Israeli
expansion and pillage of Palestine and now spying on the US for the
good of Israel. Guided by this slogan it is easy to see how
everything in the US that might be of use to Israeli intelligence
whether it be documents, directives or strategic debates about big
wartime issues taking place in the White House are fair game for
transmission to Israeli intelligence.
Rather than face the evidence, the Zionist ideologues have taken to
ad hominum attacks on their espionage agent as merely a middle level
official who didn't influence policy. They overlook the fact that he
was the `delivery boy' for his Zionist bosses who actually do make
policy and work with top echelons of the Israeli state
in `coordinating' US policy to fit Israel's needs. The power of the
Israeli-US Zionist propaganda machine is so overwhelming that the FBI
had to investigate for 2 years, make endless wiretaps, videos and
photos, interview dozens of government and not-government officials
before they could prepare to make the charges. Despite being taped
and photographed in the act of taking top secret documents, AIPEC
officials deny everything and then hire a string of high-powered
defense lawyers. Already the pro-Zionists mass media suggest that
Zionist-AIPEC spying is really a case of `mishandling sensitive
documents' – a case of putting top secret documents in the wrong
mailbox. Really!
In less than two days the pro-Israel mass media buried the story, and
a series of `news reports' were published featuring AIPEC denials,
Israeli ridiculing their Pentagon mole as a fanatical idiot (Haaretz)
and launching a counter attack questioning the motives of the
investigation and the FBI counter-espionage service. The media
published stories from anonymous "insiders" who purportedly spoke of
the FBI dropping espionage charges in favor of charges
of "mishandling a classified document" or even simply dropping the
case altogether. They claim that the spy handing over a classified
document to Israeli interests didn't know it was a crime, a case of
an innocent, well-intentioned error of judgment. This piece of
propaganda has been thoroughly discredited when it was revealed that
the Israeli agent (Franklin) confessed and has been cooperating with
the FBI for the past months.
Nothing captures the power and pervasive and corrosive influence of
the US-Zionist apparatus on US politics as much as the absolute
silence of both major candidates faced with a high-level security
lapse and potentially damaging spy investigation. John Kerry, the
Democratic candidate trailing Bush in the polls refuses to expose the
Zionist Pentagon's `security failures' despite national security
being at the center of his campaign. The reason is very clear: Kerry
is tied to the AIPEC-Israel-US Zionist political machine and he is
willing to sacrifice US security for the Zionist vote even when faced
with the issue of Israeli espionage in a time of war.
The Republicans went one step further – sending their top politicos
to an AIPEC political extravaganza organized in New York two days
after AIPEC was cited by the FBI as the Israeli intermediary in the
passing of secret documents. At no time in recent modern history has
any governing or opposition party engaged in public festivities with
an organization engaged in foreign espionage. The explanation is the
unprecedented and unique political situation that exists in the US
today – the extraordinary power that a small, economically dependent
state exercises over a global imperial state via its wealthy
organized political-religious agents.
If Israel can get anything it wants from its Zionist patriots in high
places in the US government, then why engage in espionage? There are
several explanations.
The hand delivery of documents by Franklin can be seen as a time
saving and security-wise move. If discovered, Franklin's mentors can
simply deny involvement – he was acting on his own, an argument put
forth in the Israeli press. The idea of Franklin as some kind
of `loose cannon' does not explain why he was hired, retained and
given delicate assignments and praised by the senior Zionists (Feith,
Wolfowitz, Ledeen and Abrams) up to the time of his exposure.
Secondly the document transferred provided Israel with very timely
information on a major top-level debate: US policy toward Iran, more
particularly who was for or against a military assault on Teheran.
This allows Israel to plan its own military strategy knowing in
advance Washington's possible response and directing its higher up
Pentagon collaborators how to prepare the ground for acceptance of
Israeli aggression. Fundamentally Israel wanted to be in the
White House decision making loop at every stage of Middle East
policymaking via Wolfowitz, Feith et al and via confidential
documentary accounts which the Mossad could analyze directly. There
was a `need' for espionage, because the Mossad does not merely rely
on one source of information, nor does it operate only on one track.
It has direct formal and `informal' relations (spying)
with `friendly' government policy-makers. It operates on many levels,
legal and illegal, through Zionist collaborators as well as overseas
agents, through agents with false passports and though local Zionist
sleepers, who can be activated for specific tasks…
Conclusion
Investigations and evidence are usually enough to proceed with
indictments, interrogations and the pursuit of the leaders and
foreign handlers in a major espionage case, especially in wartime.
Thousands of innocent South Asians, Arabs and Muslims have been
picked up and jailed on the most flimsy excuses ("suspicions"). But
in the case of Israeli-AIPEC-Pentagon espionage the normal legal
processes are inoperative.
The question of espionage prosecution depends on political power - a
struggle between the Israeli State backed by the major Presidential
candidates and parties, the Zionist-American political machines and
their mass media acolytes on the one hand and, on the other hand the
FBI, professional intelligence apparatus (CIA, DIA), state prosecutor
and his investigatory staff and few stray political voices. The so-
called progressive movements and policy critics are strangely silent:
Even as they speak out against war, they fail to denounce an
espionage case which is intimately related to the next Middle Eastern
war – an Israeli attack on Iran. Why don't progressive Jews denounce
AIPAC espionage to further a new war in Iran? A signed statement "Not
in our name" would clearly separate them from these agents of foreign
wars. Three days after the initial expose, the mass media have buried
the story. The FBI is delaying any announcements. The prosecuting
attorney is under tremendous one-sided political pressure. Lacking
any mass media outlets the US republic is a helpless giant, tied in
knots by malicious dwarfs, unable to defend itself, unable to define
its own policy interests. The latest report from the FBI tells us
that self-confessed Israeli agent was preparing to lead the
authorities to his contacts in the Israeli government when CBS blew
open the case. Was CBS aware of the danger to the Israeli secret
services and was it trying to undermine the investigation? No doubt
some sort of official statement will be made, perhaps even an
indictment will be made of the middle level functionary on secondary
charges and the FBI may even dare to interview Wolfowitz and Feith on
their knowledge of the espionage network with predictable
consequences. However if there is anything beyond an interview, the
Zionist media will charge "anti-Semitism", a "Second Dreyfuss" case,
which will probably end the current investigation.
The `underground' struggle between the Pentagon Zionists and the US
security apparatus will continue. If Bush is re-elected, Wolfowitz
will most likely become Secretary of Defense. If Kerry is elected,
the closet Zionist, Richard Holbrooke, will take charge of the
Pentagon.
American citizens will have to face a serious question: If the
security services are incapable of defending our country from foreign
espionage in high places – What is to be done?
In either case we face an imminent Zionist designed and promoted
military attack on Iran, which is likely to lead to a general
conflagration which can only benefit the neo-fascists who run the
state of Israel. And you are afraid of being called an anti-Semite
for opposing the Israel's espionage and regional wars.
James Petras
Rebelión
posted by R7 | 9/07/2004 06:15:00 PM
8 Comments:
The Lie Factory
This special Mother Jones investigation late last year detailed how, only weeks after 9/11, the Bush administration set up a secret Pentagon unit to create the case for invading Iraq. Here is the inside story of how they pushed disinformation and bogus intelligence and led the nation to war.
By Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest
January/February 2004 Issue
The Intelligence Chain
How a Pentagon intelligence unit created to build the case for war against Iraq funneled faulty information up the chain of command, often all the way to the White House.
It's a crisp fall day in western Virginia, a hundred miles from Washington, D.C., and a breeze is rustling the red and gold leaves of the Shenandoah hills. On the weather-beaten wood porch of a ramshackle 90-year-old farmhouse, at the end of a winding dirt-and-gravel road, Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski is perched on a plastic chair, wearing shorts, a purple sweatshirt, and muddy sneakers. Two scrawny dogs and a lone cat are on the prowl, and the air is filled with swarms of ladybugs.
So far, she says, no investigators have come knocking. Not from the Central Intelligence Agency, which conducted an internal inquiry into intelligence on Iraq, not from the congressional intelligence committees, not from the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. All of those bodies are ostensibly looking into the Bush administration's prewar Iraq intelligence, amid charges that the White House and the Pentagon exaggerated, distorted, or just plain lied about Iraq's links to Al Qaeda terrorists and its possession of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. In her hands, Kwiatkowski holds several pieces of the puzzle. Yet she, along with a score of other career officers recently retired or shuffled off to other jobs, has not been approached by anyone.
Kwiatkowski, 43, a now-retired Air Force officer who served in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia (NESA) unit in the year before the invasion of Iraq, observed how the Pentagon's Iraq war-planning unit manufactured scare stories about Iraq's weapons and ties to terrorists. "It wasn't intelligence‚ -- it was propaganda," she says. "They'd take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don't belong together." It was by turning such bogus intelligence into talking points for U.S. officials‚ -- including ominous lines in speeches by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell's testimony at the U.N. Security Council last February‚ -- that the administration pushed American public opinion into supporting an unnecessary war.
Until now, the story of how the Bush administration produced its wildly exaggerated estimates of the threat posed by Iraq has never been revealed in full. But, for the first time, a detailed investigation by Mother Jones, based on dozens of interviews‚ -- some on the record, some with officials who insisted on anonymity‚ -- exposes the workings of a secret Pentagon intelligence unit and of the Defense Department's war-planning task force, the Office of Special Plans. It's the story of a close-knit team of ideologues who spent a decade or more hammering out plans for an attack on Iraq and who used the events of September 11, 2001, to set it into motion.
Six months after the end of major combat in Iraq, the United States had spent $300 million trying to find banned weapons in Iraq, and President Bush was seeking $600 million more to extend the search. Not found were Iraq's Scuds and other long-range missiles, thousands of barrels and tons of anthrax and botulism stock, sarin and VX nerve agents, mustard gas, biological and chemical munitions, mobile labs for producing biological weapons, and any and all evidence of a reconstituted nuclear-arms program, all of which had been repeatedly cited as justification for the war. Also missing was evidence of Iraqi collaboration with Al Qaeda.
The reports, virtually all false, of Iraqi weapons and terrorism ties emanated from an apparatus that began to gestate almost as soon as the Bush administration took power. In the very first meeting of the Bush national-security team, one day after President Bush took the oath of office in January 2001, the issue of invading Iraq was raised, according to one of the participants in the meeting‚ -- and officials all the way down the line started to get the message, long before 9/11. Indeed, the Bush team at the Pentagon hadn't even been formally installed before Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of Defense, and Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary of Defense for policy, began putting together what would become the vanguard for regime change in Iraq.
Both Wolfowitz and Feith have deep roots in the neoconservative movement. One of the most influential Washington neo- conservatives in the foreign-policy establishment during the Republicans' wilderness years of the 1990s, Wolfowitz has long held that not taking Baghdad in 1991 was a grievous mistake. He and others now prominent in the administration said so repeatedly over the past decade in a slew of letters and policy papers from neoconservative groups like the Project for the New American Century and the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. Feith, a former aide to Richard Perle at the Pentagon in the 1980s and an activist in far-right Zionist circles, held the view that there was no difference between U.S. and Israeli security policy and that the best way to secure both countries' future was to solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem not by serving as a broker, but with the United States as a force for "regime change" in the region.
Called in to help organize the Iraq war-planning team was a longtime Pentagon official, Harold Rhode, a specialist on Islam who speaks Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish, and Farsi. Though Feith would not be officially confirmed until July 2001, career military and civilian officials in NESA began to watch his office with concern after Rhode set up shop in Feith's office in early January. Rhode, seen by many veteran staffers as an ideological gadfly, was officially assigned to the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment, an in-house Pentagon think tank headed by fellow neocon Andrew Marshall. Rhode helped Feith lay down the law about the department's new anti-Iraq, and broadly anti-Arab, orientation. In one telling incident, Rhode accosted and harangued a visiting senior Arab diplomat, telling him that there would be no "bartering in the bazaar anymore. You're going to have to sit up and pay attention when we say so."
Rhode refused to be interviewed for this story, saying cryptically, "Those who speak, pay."
According to insiders, Rhode worked with Feith to purge career Defense officials who weren't sufficiently enthusiastic about the muscular anti-Iraq crusade that Wolfowitz and Feith wanted. Rhode appeared to be "pulling people out of nooks and crannies of the Defense Intelligence Agency and other places to replace us with," says a former analyst. "They wanted nothing to do with the professional staff. And they wanted us the fuck out of there."
The unofficial, off-site recruitment office for Feith and Rhode was the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think tank whose 12th-floor conference room in Washington is named for the dean of neoconservative defense strategists, the late Albert Wohlstetter, an influential RAND analyst and University of Chicago mathematician. Headquartered at AEI is Richard Perle, Wohlstetter's prize protege, the godfather of the AEI-Defense Department nexus of neoconservatives who was chairman of the Pentagon's influential Defense Policy Board. Rhode, along with Michael Rubin, a former AEI staffer who is also now at the Pentagon, was a ubiquitous presence at AEI conferences on Iraq over the past two years, and the two Pentagon officials seemed almost to be serving as stage managers for the AEI events, often sitting in the front row and speaking in stage whispers to panelists and AEI officials. Just after September 11, 2001, Feith and Rhode recruited David Wurmser, the director of Middle East studies for AEI, to serve as a Pentagon consultant.
Wurmser would be the founding participant of the unnamed, secret intelligence unit at the Pentagon, set up in Feith's office, which would be the nucleus of the Defense Department's Iraq disinformation campaign that was established within weeks of the attacks in New York and Washington. While the CIA and other intelligence agencies concentrated on Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda as the culprit in the 9/11 attacks, Wolfowitz and Feith obsessively focused on Iraq. It was a theory that was discredited, even ridiculed, among intelligence professionals. Daniel Benjamin, co-author of The Age of Sacred Terror, was director of counterterrorism at the National Security Council in the late 1990s. "In 1998, we went through every piece of intelligence we could find to see if there was a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq," he says. "We came to the conclusion that our intelligence agencies had it right: There was no noteworthy relationship between Al Qaeda and Iraq. I know that for a fact." Indeed, that was the consensus among virtually all anti-terrorism specialists.
In short, Wurmser, backed by Feith and Rhode, set out to prove what didn't exist.
In an Administration devoted to the notion of "Feith-based intelligence," Wurmser was ideal. For years, he'd been a shrill ideologue, part of the minority crusade during the 1990s that was beating the drums for war against Iraq. Along with Perle and Feith, in 1996 Wurmser and his wife, Meyrav, wrote a provocative strategy paper for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu called "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm." It called on Israel to work with Jordan and Turkey to "contain, destabilize and roll back" various states in the region, overthrow Saddam Hussein in Iraq, press Jordan to restore a scion of the Hashemite dynasty to the Iraqi throne, and, above all, launch military assaults against Lebanon and Syria as a "prelude to a redrawing of the map of the Middle East which would threaten Syria's territorial integrity."
In 1997, Wurmser wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal called "Iraq Needs a Revolution" and the next year co-signed a letter with Perle calling for all-out U.S. support of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), an exile group led by Ahmad Chalabi, in promoting an insurgency in Iraq. At AEI, Wurmser wrote Tyranny's Ally: America's Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein, essentially a book-length version of "A Clean Break" that proposed an alliance between Jordan and the INC to redraw the map of the Middle East. Among the mentors cited by Wurmser in the book: Chalabi, Perle, and Feith.
The purpose of the unnamed intelligence unit, often described as a Pentagon "cell," was to scour reports from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and other agencies to find nuggets of information linking Iraq, Al Qaeda, terrorism, and the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In a controversial press briefing in October 2002, a year after Wurmser's unit was established, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld acknowledged that a primary purpose of the unit was to cull factoids, which were then used to disparage, undermine, and contradict the CIA's reporting, which was far more cautious and nuanced than Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith wanted. Rumsfeld particularly enjoyed harassing the CIA staffer who briefed him every morning, using the type of data produced by the intelligence unit. "What I could do is say, 'Gee, what about this?'" Rumsfeld noted. "'Or what about that? Has somebody thought of this?'" Last June, when Feith was questioned on the same topic at a briefing, he acknowledged that the secret unit in fact looked at the connection between Iraq and terrorism, saying, "You can't rely on deterrence to deal with the problem of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of state sponsors of terrorism because [of] the possibility that those state sponsors might employ chemical weapons or biological weapons by means of a terrorist organization proxy.
Though Feith, in that briefing, described Wurmser's unit as an innocent project, "a global exercise" that was not meant to put pressure on other intelligence agencies or create skewed intelligence to fit preconceived policy notions, many other sources assert that it did exactly that. That the White House and the Pentagon put enormous pressure on the CIA to go along with its version of events has been widely reported, highlighted by visits to CIA headquarters by Vice President Cheney and Lewis Libby, his chief of staff. Led by Perle, the neocons seethed with contempt for the CIA. The CIA's analysis, said Perle, "isn't worth the paper it's printed on." Standing in a crowded hallway during an AEI event, Perle added, "The CIA is status quo oriented. They don't want to take risks."
That became the mantra of the shadow agency within an agency.
Putting Wurmser in charge of the unit meant that it was being run by a pro-Iraq-war ideologue who'd spent years calling for a pre-emptive invasion of Baghdad and who was clearly predisposed to find what he wanted to see. Adding another layer of dubious quality to the endeavor was the man partnered with Wurmser, F. Michael Maloof. Maloof, a former aide to Perle in the 1980s Pentagon, was twice stripped of his high-level security clearances‚ -- once in late 2001 and, again, last spring, for various infractions. Maloof was also reportedly involved in a bizarre scheme to broker contacts between Iraqi officials and the Pentagon, channeled through Perle, in what one report called a "rogue [intelligence] operation" outside official CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency channels.
As the momentum for war began to build in early 2002, Wolfowitz and Feith beefed up the intelligence unit and created an Iraq war-planning unit in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia Affairs section, run by Deputy Undersecretary of Defense William Luti, under the rubric "Office of Special Plans," or OSP; the new unit's director was Abram N. Shulsky. By then, Wurmser had moved on to a post as senior adviser to Undersecretary of State John Bolton, yet another neocon, who was in charge of the State Department's disarmament, proliferation, and WMD office and was promoting the Iraq war strategy there. Shulsky's OSP, which incorporated the secret intelligence unit, took control, banishing veteran experts‚ -- including Joseph McMillan, James Russell, Larry Hanauer, and Marybeth McDevitt‚ -- who, despite years of service to NESA, either were shuffled off to other positions or retired. For the next year, Luti and Shulsky not only would oversee war plans but would act aggressively to shape the intelligence product received by the White House.
Both Luti and Shulsky were neoconservatives who were ideological soul mates of Wolfowitz and Feith. But Luti was more than that. He'd come to the Pentagon directly from the office of Vice President Cheney. That gave Luti, a recently retired, decorated Navy captain whose career ran from combat aviation to command of a helicopter assault ship, extra clout. Along with his colleague Colonel William Bruner, Luti had done a stint as an aide to Newt Gingrich in 1996 and, like Perle and Wolfowitz, was an acolyte of Wohlstetter's. "He makes Ollie North look like a moderate," says a NESA veteran.
Shulsky had been on the Washington scene since the mid-1970s. As a Senate intelligence committee staffer for Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, he began to work with early neoconservatives like Perle, who was then an aide to Senator Henry Jackson. Later, in the Reagan years, Shulsky followed Perle to the Pentagon as Perle's arms-control adviser. In the '90s, Shulsky co-authored a book on intelligence called Silent Warfare, with Gary Schmitt. Shulsky had served with Schmitt on Moynihan's staff and they had remained friends. Asked about the Pentagon's Iraq intelligence "cell," Schmitt‚ -- who is currently the executive director of the Project for the New American Century‚ -- says that he can't say much about it "because one of my best friends is running it."
According to Lt. Colonel Kwiatkowski, Luti and Shulsky ran NESA and the Office of Special Plans with brutal efficiency, purging people they disagreed with and enforcing the party line. "It was organized like a machine," she says. "The people working on the neocon agenda had a narrow, well-defined political agenda. They had a sense of mission." At NESA, Shulsky, she says, began "hot-desking," or taking an office wherever he could find one, working with Feith and Luti, before formally taking the reins of the newly created OSP. Together, she says, Luti and Shulsky turned cherry-picked pieces of uncorroborated, anti-Iraq intelligence into talking points, on issues like Iraq's WMD and its links to Al Qaeda. Shulsky constantly updated these papers, drawing on the intelligence unit, and circulated them to Pentagon officials, including Rumsfeld, and to Vice President Cheney. "Of course, we never thought they'd go directly to the White House," she adds.
Kwiatkowski recalls one meeting in which Luti, pressed to finish a report, told the staff, "I've got to get this over to 'Scooter' right away." She later found out that "Scooter" was none other than Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff. According to Kwiatkowski, Cheney had direct ties through Luti into NESA/OSP, a connection that was highly unorthodox.
"Never, ever, ever would a deputy undersecretary of Defense work directly on a project for the vice president," she says. "It was a little clue that we had an informal network into Vice President Cheney's office."
Although Feith insists that the OSP did not seek to gather its own intelligence, Kwiatkowski and others sharply disagree. Staff working for Luti and Shulsky in NESA/OSP churned out propaganda-style intelligence, she says. As an example, she cited the work of a U.S. intelligence officer and Arabic specialist, Navy Lt. Commander Youssef Aboul-Enein, who was a special assistant to Luti. "His job was to peruse the Arabic-language media to find articles that would incriminate Saddam Hussein about terrorism, and he translated these." Such raw intelligence is usually subject to a thorough vetting process, tracked, verified, and checked by intelligence professionals. But not at OSP‚ -- the material that it produced found its way directly into speeches by Bush, Cheney, and other officials.
According to Melvin Goodman, a former CIA official and an intelligence specialist at the National War College, the OSP officials routinely pushed lower-ranking staff around on intelligence matters. "People were being pulled aside [and being told], 'We saw your last piece and it's not what we're looking for,'" he says. "It was pretty blatant." Two State Department intelligence officials, Greg Thielmann and Christian Westermann, have both charged that pressure was being put on them to shape intelligence to fit policy, in particular from Bolton's office. "The Al Qaeda connection and nuclear weapons issue were the only two ways that you could link Iraq to an imminent security threat to the U.S.," Thielmann told the New York Times. "And the administration was grossly distorting the intelligence on both things."
Besides Cheney, key members of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, including Perle and ex-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, all Iraq hawks, had direct input into NESA/OSP. The offices of NESA were located on the Pentagon's fourth floor, seventh corridor of D Ring, and the Policy Board's offices were directly below, on the third floor. During the run-up to the Iraq war, Gingrich often came up for closed-door meetings with Luti, who in 1996 had served as a congressional fellow in Speaker of the House Gingrich's office.
As OSP got rolling, Luti brought in Colonel Bruner, a former military aide to Gingrich, and, together, Luti and Bruner opened the door to a vast flow of bogus intelligence fed to the Pentagon by Iraqi defectors associated with Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress group of exiles. Chalabi founded the Iraqi National Congress in 1992, with the help of a shadowy CIA-connected public-relations firm called the Rendon Group, one of whose former employees, Francis Brooke, has been a top aide to Chalabi ever since. A scion of an aristocratic Iraqi family, Chalabi fled Baghdad at the age of 13, in 1958, when the corrupt Iraqi Hashemite monarchy was overthrown by a coalition of communists and the Iraqi military. In the late 1960s, Chalabi studied mathematics at the University of Chicago with Wohlstetter, who introduced him to Richard Perle more than a decade later. Long associated with the heart of the neoconservative movement, Chalabi founded Petra Bank in Jordan, which grew to be Jordan's third-largest bank by the 1980s. But Chalabi was accused of bank fraud, embezzlement, and currency manipulation, and he barely escaped before Jordanian authorities could arrest him; in 1992, he was convicted and sentenced in absentia to more than 20 years of hard labor. After founding the INC, Chalabi's bungling, unreliability, and penchant for mismanaging funds caused the CIA to sour on him, but he never lost the support of Perle, Feith, Gingrich, and their allies; once, soon after 9/11, Perle invited Chalabi to address the Defense Policy Board.
According to multiple sources, Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress sent a steady stream of misleading and often faked intelligence reports into U.S. intelligence channels. That information would flow sometimes into NESA/OSP directly, sometimes through Defense Intelligence Agency debriefings of Iraqi defectors via the Defense Human Intelligence Service, and sometimes through the INC's own U.S.-funded Intelligence Collection Program, which was overseen by the Pentagon. The INC's intelligence "isn't reliable at all," according to Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA chief of counterterrorism. "Much of it is propaganda. Much of it is telling the Defense Department what they want to hear, using alleged informants and defectors who say what Chalabi wants them to say, [creating] cooked information that goes right into presidential and vice presidential speeches."
Bruner, the aide to Luti and Gingrich's former staffer, "was Chalabi's handler," says Kwiatkowski. "He would arrange meetings with Chalabi and Chalabi's folks," she says, adding that the INC leader often brought people into the NESA/OSP offices for debriefings. Chalabi claims to have introduced only three actual defectors to the Pentagon, a figure Thielmann considers "awfully low." However, according to an investigation by the Los Angeles Times, the three defectors provided by Chalabi turned up exactly zero useful intelligence. The first, an Iraqi engineer, claimed to have specific information about biological weapons, but his information didn't pan out; the second claimed to know about mobile labs, but that information, too, was worthless; and the third, who claimed to have data about Iraq's nuclear program, proved to be a fraud. Chalabi also claimed to have given the Pentagon information about Iraqi support for Al Qaeda. "We gave the names of people who were doing the links," he told an interviewer from PBS's Frontline. Those links, of course, have not been discovered. Thielmann told the same Frontline interviewer that the Office of Special Plans didn't apply strict intelligence-verification standards to "some of the information coming out of Chalabi and the INC that OSP and the Pentagon ran with."
In the war's aftermath, the Defense Intelligence Agency‚ -- which is not beholden to the neoconservative civilians at the Pentagon‚ -- leaked a report it prepared, concluding that few, if any, of the INC's informants provided worthwhile intelligence.
So far, despite all of the investigations under way, there is little sign that any of them are going to delve into the operations of the Luti-Shulsky Office of Special Plans and its secret intelligence unit. Because it operates in the Pentagon's policy shop, it is not officially part of the intelligence community, and so it is seemingly immune to congressional oversight.
With each passing day, it is becoming excruciatingly clearer just how wrong U.S. intelligence was in regard to Iraqi weapons and support for terrorism. The American teams of inspectors in the Iraq Survey Group, which has employed up to 1,400 people to scour the country and analyze the findings, have not been able to find a shred of evidence of anything other than dusty old plans and records of weapons apparently destroyed more than a decade ago. Countless examples of fruitless searches have been reported in the media. To cite one example: U.S. soldiers followed an intelligence report claiming that a complex built for Uday Hussein, Saddam's son, hid a weapons warehouse with poison-gas storage tanks. "Well," U.S. Army Major Ronald Hann Jr. told the Los Angeles Times, "the warehouse was a carport. It still had two cars inside. And the tanks had propane for the kitchen."
Countless other errors and exaggerations have become evident. The thousands of aluminum tubes supposedly imported by Iraq for uranium enrichment were fairly conclusively found to be designed to build noncontroversial rockets. The long-range unmanned aerial vehicles, allegedly built to deliver bioweapons, were small, rickety, experimental planes with wood frames. The mobile bioweapon labs turned out to have had other, civilian purposes. And the granddaddy of all falsehoods, the charge that Iraq sought uranium in the West African country of Niger, was based on forged documents‚ -- documents that the CIA, the State Department, and other agencies knew were fake nearly a year before President Bush highlighted the issue in his State of the Union address in January 2003.
"Either the system broke down," former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who was sent by the CIA to visit Niger and whose findings helped show that the documents were forged, told Mother Jones, "or there was selective use of bits of information to justify a decision to go to war that had already been taken."
Edward Luttwak, a neoconservative scholar and author, says flatly that the Bush administration lied about the intelligence it had because it was afraid to go to the American people and say that the war was simply about getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Instead, says Luttwak, the White House was groping for a rationale to satisfy the United Nations' criteria for war. "Cheney was forced into this fake posture of worrying about weapons of mass destruction," he says. "The ties to Al Qaeda? That's complete nonsense."
In the Senate, Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) is pressing for the Intelligence Committee to extend its investigation to look into the specific role of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, but there is strong Republican resistance to the idea.
In the House, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) has introduced legislation calling for a commission to investigate the intelligence mess and has collected more than a hundred Democrats‚ -- but no Republicans‚ -- in support of it. "I think they need to be looked at pretty carefully," Waxman told Mother Jones when asked about the Office of Special Plans. "I'd like to know whether the political people pushed the intelligence people to slant their conclusions."
Congressman Waxman, meet Lt. Colonel Kwiatkowski.
A Dangerous Appointment: Profile of Douglas Feith, Undersecretary of Defense under Bush
Douglas J. Feith, the new Undersecretary of Policy at the U.S. Department of Defense, believes in “good” versus “darkness” duality. Defining Middle East conflict in his absolute terms puts serious questions whether or not someone with his views can fairly serve in his critical post asks James Zogby*.
Douglas J. Feith has been appointed Undersecretary of Policy at the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD). This is one of the Pentagon’s four senior posts, charged with "all matters concerning the formulation of national security and defense policy and the integration and oversight of DOD policy and plans." Additionally, among his many areas of responsibility according to the DOD, the undersecretary of policy has the responsibility to:
- "Develop policy on the conduct of alliances and defense relationships with foreign governments, their military establishments and international organizations;
- "Develop, coordinate, and oversee the implementation of international security strategy and policy…on issues…that relate to foreign governments and their defense establishments; and
- "Provide oversight of all DOD activities related to international technology transfer."
This is a powerful position with great influence. Feith’s appointment to this post is a matter of great concern.
Feith has had a long career in both government service and the private sector. During the Reagan Administration he served as the White House National Security Staff and in the Defense Department as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Negotiations Policy. He also served as Special Counsel to Richard Perle, then Assistant Secretary of Defense.
Feith is an attorney with the Washington firm of Feith and Zell. His own biography says that he specializes in "technology transfer, joint ventures and foreign investment in the defense and aerospace industries."
On the political front, Feith has been associated with the Cold War "neo-conservative" school of thought. What is of concern here is the extent to which Feith has transposed the neo-conservative worldview onto the Middle East. As his fellow cold warriors defined the world in ideological dualistic terms—the forces of absolute good confronting the forces of absolute evil—Feith defines the Arab-Israeli conflict in similar terms.
A prolific writer, Feith has left a long paper trail of anti-Arab tracts and diatribes against those who challenge or seek to compromise Israel’s strength and as he defines it, "moral superiority" over the Arabs.
As was the case in the Cold War battle against Communism, in Feith’s view, there can be no place for compromise between Israel and the Arabs. Since he defines the Middle East conflict in absolute terms, the only option for Israel is to confront its Arab enemies until they are defeated, which, in his worldview, means when they submit and accept Israel’s legitimacy and sovereignty over all of mandatory Palestine.
Since Israel represents the "good" and "our values," in Feith’s view, it is necessary for the United States to identify with Israel in its struggle against the forces of "darkness," the Arabs. This means providing Israel with superior military strength and political support. It also means that the United States should never pressure Israel either to surrender land or to compromise its hegemonic position in the region.
Throughout his career, Feith has articulated views such as these.
In the late 1970s, for example, he criticized then President Jimmy Carter’s Camp David effort to bring about a "comprehensive peace"—a concept he decried as false since it required Israel to weaken itself by surrendering "Judea and Samaria" to the Arabs. Feith’s logic was that
- Arabs have no legal rights in Palestine;
- Palestinians are not a "national group as such" and, therefore, have no special claim to Judea and Samaria;
- Jordan is the Palestinian state for the Arabs; and
- No pressure should be brought against Israel for building settlements in Judea and Samaria, since it is their right to do so.
Operating from this framework, Feith argues that the notion that "the core of the Arab-Israeli conflict is the issue of the stateless Palestinians" is a clever Arab trap designed solely to weaken Israel by threatening its relationship with the United States and its hold over Judea and Samaria.
He, therefore, condemned the Carter Administration for its opposition to Israel’s settlement policy since, in his view, this "only encouraged Arabs to believe that they could win benefits from the United States by refusing to make concessions to Israel."
For Feith, Arab objections to Zionism were at the core of the conflict. Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories would not solve the conflict, only Arab acceptance of and submission to Israel would end it. Summarizing his recommendations to the Carter Administration, Feith suggested in a 1979 article that they, "(1) abandon the view that Judea-Samaria is the crux of the Arab-Israeli conflict, (2) acknowledge that the crux is really the Arab refusal to accept a Jewish state in Palestine, (3) renounce quarreling over Israel’s rights in Judea-Samaria, which encourages Arab inflexibility and damages valuable U.S.-Israeli ties, (4) confine itself to the role of mediator, rather than party, to the Arab-Israeli conflict, and thus (5) inform Damascus, Amman, the Palestinian Arabs, and Riyadh that if they want an alteration in Jerusalem’s policies they had best start negotiating with Jerusalem, as Sadat has done, and quit relying on Washington to ‘deliver’ the Israelis."
In the 1980s and 90s, Feith continued his criticism of any U.S. policy that deviated from his view. He criticized the Bush Administration for denying Israel loan guarantees and for pressuring the Shamir government to come to the Madrid peace conference.
His advice to the Bush Administration in 1991 echoed his earlier recommendations to the Carter White House. The U.S. government should, he suggested, require the Arabs to:
- "Drop the slogan of ‘land for peace,’ which skeptical Israelis must suspect is a program for dismantling Israel in stages, and simply offer peace. That is, they could put forward an open, unqualified, non-grudging and sincere acknowledgement that the Jewish people are entitled to a state in a Jewish homeland;" and
- "Abandon the name game by which they apply the label ‘Palestine’ only to the 20 percent of the British Mandate Palestine that lies west of the Jordan River. So long as one’s goal is the elimination of Israel, one does well to pretend that the Kingdom of Jordan, which occupies the other 80 percent of Mandate Palestine, is not a Palestinian state. That makes it possible to propagandize that the Jews control all the land and the Arabs of Palestine are ‘stateless.’"
During the Clinton years, Feith continued to oppose any agreement negotiated between the Israelis and Palestinians: Oslo, Hebron and Wye.
At one point he defined Oslo as, "one-sided Israeli concessions, inflated Palestinian expectations, broken Palestinian solemn understandings, Palestinian violence…and American rewards for Palestinian recalcitrance."
His objection to the Hebron and Wye understandings, however, is more interesting because it was his ideological soul mate, then Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who had agreed to them.
In 1996, Feith, together with Richard Perle wrote an advisory paper for the newly elected Likud Prime Minister. In that piece, entitled "A Clean Break: a New Strategy for Securing the Realm," they advised Netanyahu to: "make a clean break from the peace process;" reassert Israel’s claim to its land by rejecting "land for peace" as the basis of peace; strengthen Israel’s defenses to better confront Syria and Iraq; and forge a new and stronger relationship with the United States based on self-reliance and mutual interest.
Feith was, therefore, deeply disappointed when Netanyahu appeared to accept the basis of Oslo and sign two additional agreements with the Palestinians that turned more land over to them. In a lengthy piece written in 1997 "A Strategy for Israel," Feith returned to his neo-conservative roots arguing that "land for peace" was a fabrication designed to weaken Israel. Peace would only come when Arab and specifically Palestinian society was transformed into a democratic, law-abiding and peaceful one. Since Oslo had created unrealistic expectations and rewarded bad Palestinian behavior, the only solution for Israel was to repudiate Oslo and "reestablish an effective security and intelligence policy in the areas under Palestinian Authority control" (i.e. reoccupy the West Bank and Gaza). He went on to note that "the price in blood would be high," but would be, a necessary form of "detoxification—the only way out of Oslo’s web."
Despite his apparent obsession with the Arab-Israel conflict, Feith has written about a number of other Middle East-related topics. In all cases, inspired by the same pro-Israel, anti-Arab Manichean worldview.
He has written condemning U.S. politicians for estranging themselves from Israel in order to accommodate Arab oil states. He has associated himself with a controversial strategy paper that suggested, among other options, that the U.S. might lead a Kuwait-style invasion and war of liberation to oust Syria from Lebanon. And he has been one of Washington’s strongest advocates supporting the Iraq Liberation Act.
As disturbing as Feith’s views may be, his political associations cause even greater concern. In recent years, Feith has frequently been featured in the activities of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA). Known for its virulent anti-Arab incitement, the ZOA regularly attacks all Arab American political activity and demonizes politicians who hire Arab Americans or even associate with community organizations. The ZOA also frequently attacks American Jews whom they feel are not in line with their extremist pro-Likud philosophy.
In just the past few years, Feith was the Guest of Honor at ZOA’s 100th Anniversary Gala Banquet. He served as Master of Ceremony at two other major ZOA functions and has been a frequent participant at ZOA sponsored policy briefings on Capitol Hill supporting that organization’s anti-Palestinian legislative initiatives.
Feith’s law practice in Washington sheds further light on the one-sided nature of his work. His small law firm has one international affiliate, in Israel. Over two-thirds of all their reported casework involves representing Israeli interests. And, in light of Feith’s new appointment, one of these cases deserves some attention. As described on the firm’s website, Feith "represented a leading Israeli armaments manufacturer in establishing joint ventures with leading U.S. aerospace manufacturers for manufacture and sale of missile systems, to the U.S. Department of Defense and worldwide."
Feith has long been a strong advocate for Israeli military technology. In a 1992 article, he wrote that the U.S. should deepen its military cooperation with Israel noting that, "Israel has a number of unique military technologies that it behooves the U.S. armed forces to acquire, such as unmanned aircraft and air-to ground missiles. With shrinking U.S. defense budgets, it is less expensive for the Defense Department to acquire these technologies from the Israelis than to pay to have them reinvented."
He also observed in the same piece that, "It is in the interest of the U.S. and Israel to remove needless impediments to technological cooperation between them. Technologies in the hands of responsible, friendly countries facing military threats, countries like Israel, serve to deter aggression, enhance regional stability and perhaps also promote peace thereby."
In the private sector, Feith is free to hold whatever views he wishes to hold, associate with whomever he wishes to associate, and do whatever legitimate business comes his way. But serious questions must be asked whether or not someone with his views and associations can fairly serve in a critical post at the Department of Defense. I, for one, am terrified at the prospect. He is ideologue with an extreme anti-Arab bias, and his role in the sensitive position of chief architect of U.S. defense policy can, I believe, have grave consequences for the United States and its relations with the entire Arab world.
The Return Of Elliott Abrams
Israel's Likud Scores Big With White House Appointment
Jim Lobe writes for Inter Press Service, an international newswire, and for Foreign Policy in Focus, a joint project of the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies and the New Mexico-based Interhemispheric Resource Center.
Neo-conservative hawks in the administration of President George W. Bush have won a major battle against the State Department in the fight for control of United States Mideast policy with the surprise appointment of Iran-Contra figure Elliott Abrams to the region's top policy spot in the National Security Council (NSC).
The appointment, leaked to reporters by the White House, would for the first time place someone in a top Mideast policy spot who has publicly assailed the "land-for-peace" formula that has guided U.S. policy in the Arab-Israeli conflict since the 1967 war.
Abrams, who first came to national prominence as a controversial political appointee in the Reagan administration who later pleaded guilty to lying to Congress regarding the Iran-Contra scandal, has also opposed the Oslo peace process and called for Washington to "stand by Israel," rather than act as a neutral mediator between Israel and the Palestinians.
"Yet another American Likudnik is moving to a position where they control Washington's agenda in the Mideast," said Rashid Khalidi, a Mideast historian at the University of Chicago. "This is a tragedy for the Israeli and American people." Likud is the rightwing Israeli party headed by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Currently the NSC staff chief for Democracy, Human Rights, and International Operations, Abrams will become Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director on the NSC for Southwest Asia, Near East and North African Affairs.
As such, he will be in charge of presenting policy papers and options for National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, whose own opinions have proven decisive in cases where the president receives conflicting views from hawks, represented by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney, and the more-dovish Secretary of State, Colin Powell, who is often backed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the uniformed military. Rice, a Russia specialist, had no experience with Mideast issues until her current job. Abrams will replace Zalmay Khalilzad, a prominent foreign-policy strategist whose views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are considered much more neutral than Abrams'. Khalilzad succeeded Clinton holdover Bruce Reidel early last year but was quickly consumed with his native-borne Afghanistan after being named special envoy to the interim president, Hamid Karzai. Khalilzad will now become "ambassador-at-large for free Iraqis" and is expected to play a key role in sorting out internal conflicts among the Iraqi opposition.
Beloved by right-wingers who hail him as both a hero for his championship of the Nicaraguan contras during the 1980s, Abrams first gained prominence as a leading neo-conservative when he served as Reagan's Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights in the early 1980s and then as Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs.
In both positions, he clashed frequently and angrily with mainstream church groups and human rights organisations, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, who often accused him of covering up horrendous abuses committed by U.S.-backed governments, such as El Salvador and Guatemala, and rebel forces, such as the Contras and Angola's Unita, while, at the same time, exaggerating abuses by U.S. foes.
He was indicted by the Iran-Contra special prosecutor for giving false testimony about his role in illicitly raising money for the Contras but pleaded guilty to two lesser offenses of withholding information to Congress in order to avoid a trial and a possible jail term. He was pardoned by President George H.W. Bush along with a number of other Iran-Contra defendants in 1992.
His credibility for truth-telling was so low that at one point he was required to take an oath before testifying before Congressional committees. Most analysts here believe that he was given an NSC post by the new Bush administration because any other position would have required Senate confirmation.
After Reagan left office in 1989, Abrams, like a number of other prominent neo-conservatives, was not invited to serve in the Bush Sr. administration. Instead, he worked for a number of think tanks and eventually became head of the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) where he wrote widely on foreign-policy issues, including the Middle East, and the threats posed by U.S. secular society to Jewish identity. He also remained an integral part of the tight-knit neo-conservative foreign-policy community in Washington that revolved around one of his early mentors, Richard Perle and former UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).
Then-House of Representatives Speaker Newt Gingrich furthered his public rehabilitation by appointing him to the new U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom in 1999 for which he also served as chairman in 2000-01. Muslim groups here have complained about his refusal to criticise Israeli practices in the occupied territories and Jerusalem, such as sealing off Muslim holy sites, as violations of religious freedom.
He is not known as an Arab-Israeli specialist but has long favoured Likud positions on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and even assailed former Likud Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for caving into U.S. pressure to respect the Oslo peace process. Shortly after the outbreak of the al-Aqsa intifida at the end of September 2000, he criticised mainstream Jewish groups for calling for a resumption of peace talks between the Palestinian Authority and Israel, as well as a halt to the violence.
Like Perle, as well as Rumsfeld's civilian advisers like Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith and Cheney's top deputy, I. Lewis Libby, he has favoured a Mideast strategy based on the overwhelming military power of both the United States and Israel and on a military alliance between Israel and Turkey against hostile Arab states, particularly Syria and Iraq, in order to create a "broader strategic context" that would ensure whatever state might emerge on Palestinian territory would be friendly to United States and Israeli interests and that could force Syria to withdraw from Lebanon. He has long favoured forceful action to oust Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
He has accused Palestinian Authority leader Yassir Arafat of being an untrustworthy partner under the Oslo process and is believed to have used his previous NSC Democracy position to push for his ouster from power as part of a thorough reform process. That view, which was strongly backed by Rumsfeld and Cheney's offices, was eventually accepted by Bush last June, over strenuous objections by the State Department and senior aides for Bush's father, notably his former national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft.
In his new position, according to John Prados, a historian who has written about the National Security Council, Abrams should be in an excellent position to influence U.S. policy on the Mideast, particularly in "delaying and/or halting policy on the 'roadmap'" that is being developed by the "Quartet" -- the United States, European Union, Russia, and the United Nations -- on resuming political negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.
Indeed, it already appears that British hopes for a major meeting of the Quartet on the roadmap before the end of the year are fading quickly.
Abrams is expected to support Israel's recent requests both to put off discussion of the 'roadmap' until after Israel's elections at the end of next month and for some 14 billion dollars in military aid and loan guarantees to help the country cope with economic hard times.
Abrams' influence on policy is already clear. For the first time ever the Bush administration voted against a U.N. General Assembly resolution last week that called on Israel to repeal the Jerusalem law that declares that "Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel."
In the past, Washington has abstained on the issue, insisting that the the status of Jerusalem must be determined by negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians. Abrams has in the past assailed that vote, as well as Washington's refusal to recogize Jerusalem as Israel's capital, on the grounds that that such a position "tantalizes the Palestinians with the prospect of forcing the Jews to abandon Jerusalem."
As you might expect, Arab-Americans responded to the appointment with a mix of resignation and foreboding.
James Zogby, the director of the Arab-American Institute (AAI) here said Abrams' appointment sends "a very dangerous message to the Arab world" and adds to the "lock that the neo-con set now has on all the major instruments of decision-making except for the State Department."
Khalidi also pointed to Abrams' history as being less than forthcoming with information that may contradict his own views. "He will be yet another filter blocking reality from reaching the president," he said.
Fire Paul Wolfowitz
Memo To: Don Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense
From: Jude Wanniski
Re: The Monkeys on your Back
October 9, 2001
In case you have not noticed, Don, your deputy at the Pentagon, Paul Wolfowitz, has promoted himself and is now the Defense Secretary, and you are his deputy. We still see you quoted here and there, but Paul has already wrested policymaking from your hands and is making it himself. It is almost as if you have become his press secretary. He was bored with Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden long before the strikes began Sunday, as he is maniacally determined to cut to the chase, “finishing the war against Saddam Hussein,” as his many followers in the pundit community put it.
Do you realize how much more difficult it is for President Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell to hold together the coalition of the international community in the fight against terrorism when the Islamic world every day reads in the public prints or sees television commentary about how Iraq is next on the list? Do you realize that Wolfowitz, and his pal Richard Perle who chairs your Defense Policy Board, have been calling all their friends in the press corps, urging them to beat the drums for war with Iraq? Perle actually signed the “famous” letter of 41 drafted by Bill Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, who is Perle’s mouthpiece in Washington. (Bill Safire of the NYTimes is of course Perle’s mouthpiece in New York.) It is incomprehensible to me that you would allow Perle to remain at that post, where he is permitted to read all the most sensitive secret traffic flowing through the Pentagon. Not that he wouldn’t see it anyway, courtesy of Wolfowitz, but how brazen can he be and get away with it. The only thing I can conclude, Don, is that you have become so addicted to these monkeys over the years that you can’t get them off your back.
Why is Wolfowitz so maniacal about Iraq? Remember that in 1991 he was the senior member of the network created by the late Albert Wohlstetter in the Bush administration, working for then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney. It was Wohlstetter to whom I introduced you in 1975 when Albert was masterminding the strategic victory over the USSR from his office at the RAND corporation in Santa Monica and his seat at the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB). In 1991, the more senior Perle had left the government to make megabucks as a consultant to foreign governments (Turkey being the most generous at $800K per year). So Wohlstetter gave Wolfowitz, next in line, the assignment of persuading Cheney to not only kick Saddam out of Kuwait, but also to chase him all the way to Baghdad, slaughtering the Republican Guard on the way. Thank God Wolfowitz failed in his assignment!! Cheney sided with Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, thus keeping our word to the Islamic world. You are a smart fellow, Don. Did you ever think of the jihad that would have begun back then if we gave the finger to our Islamic allies? Take a few minutes, take a deep breath, and try to think this through.
One of my favorite conservative columnists, who has thus far resisted the mindless entreaties of Perle and Wolfowitz to “finish the job in Iraq,” on Monday wrote a boilerplate rendition of the nonsense being turned out by the press ringleaders: Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer and Michael Kelly. It was so alarming to me that they might persuade the President to “take out Saddam” that I wrote the fellow an e-mail. I won’t mention his name, but here is how I put it:
Now that Osama bin Laden has pushed us into the arms of the Russians, Chinese and French...who have for years been advocates of lifting the embargo against Saddam...it is not likely that Wolfowitz is going to persuade Bush/Cheney they have to give Moscow, Beijing and Paris the finger. For the same reason, an outlay of a zillion dollars to build a silly national missile defense system that won't stop an ICBM, let alone a boxcutter, has to be forgotten.
Iraq was the least radical of all the Islamic states, the most civilized and modern and hospitable to Jews and multiculturalism....which is why the Iran/Iraq war was fought, with Saddam doing our killing for us, at times with the chemical weapons the CIA supplied him with. After the war, our State Department gave Saddam its passive assent to grab the Kuwaiti oilfields, but when he did, Maggie Thatcher and the Wohlstetter boys persuaded Bush to kick him out. Okay. Reluctantly I went along, after swallowing some whoppers about Saddam planning to invade Saudi Arabia. But Bush also announced that we would not lift the embargo as long as Saddam was in power and Nixon agreed that was the thing to do. Bin Laden DOES speak for the entire Islamic world in noting that at least a million Iraqi civilians have died as a result of that policy. There would have been no attack on the WTC if we had dealt honestly and responsibly with Iraq. The reason Jack Kemp did not sign the Perle/Kristol letter is that I forced him to confront all these facts, which I dug out on my own. He actually assigned a researcher to check my facts because they seemed diametrically opposite of what the American people were being told. Jack met with Nizar Hamdoon when Hamdoon was Iraqi ambassador and was seriously considering a trip to Baghdad with Sam Nunn, endorsed by Jimmy Carter. But the Perle crowd was always a step ahead of any diplomatic solution, pushing the Clinton team and Mad Madeleine into expansions of the illegal no-fly zone and target-practice on Iraqi civilians. The Democrats went along with all this because the American-Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC) thinks it's a good idea to keep Saddam "contained."
Here is a column by Gordon Prather, which is about what you should really be worrying. There are no nukes in Iraq. There are in Pakistan. If Bush gives the world the finger and turns on Iraq, there is no way the Pakistani government will survive, and Osama will have the Islamic bomb. Wolfowitz should be fired. He is a menace and one of the most dangerous men in the world as long as you let him play Defense Secretary. HE MUST BE FIRED!!
Expatriate Richard Perle
By Kurt Nimmo
3-10-3
"Richard Perle is a traitor. There's no other way to put it."
Seymour Hersh is a rarity in America these days -- an investigative journalist.
"Hersh is not a nice man in the Washington sense," writes Eric Alterman of Salon, "he does not know how to make small talk, flatter his bosses, spin his defeats and conceal his fierce competitiveness. He is simply the best investigative reporter alive and expects his work to speak for itself."
Because Hersh does what he does so well, the chicken hawk Richard Perle called him a terrorist on CNN the other day.
That's right. Perle equated Hersh with Osama bin Laden and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. "Sy Hersh is the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist," Perle told Wolf Blitzer.
Perle slandered Hersh because the award winning journalist wrote in the March 17th issue of the New Yorker: "There is no question that Perle believes that removing Saddam from power is the right thing to do. At the same time, he has set up a company that may gain from a war."
I have not read the New Yorker article, so I can't comment on it. I don't know if Perle set up a company situated to profit from his boss' plan to mass murder possibly a half million Iraqis or not. But if Hersh said it, there must be something to it. Hersh is known for his meticulous research. He conducts interviews, double checks facts. Seymour Hersh does not make things up. Due to his professionalism Hersh has won more than a dozen major journalism prizes, including the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting and four George Polk Awards.
On the other hand, Perle and the neocons are liars.
One big lie is that Mohammed Atta met with Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, an official at Baghdad's embassy in Prague. US intelligence agencies went over records of Atta,s travels and concluded that during the period in question he was in Virginia Beach, not in Prague. Perle knew this was a fabrication. He attempted to pass it off on the American people as truth. There are many other lies, as well, but I will not bother you with enumeration.
That's how the neocons make their case before the American people -- through deceit, half-truth, fabrications, and outright lies. It should be considered treason. It should be a crime. Maybe one day Richard Perle will be prosecuted for his crimes. For now he is allowed to bend the ear of George W. Bush and prod the half-wit dictator into destroying America.
When Perle was working for Senator Scoop Jackson, he was investigated by the Justice Department and found to have violated US policies relating to unlawful transmission of sensitive classified US information to Israel.
"An FBI summary of a 1970 wiretap recorded Perle discussing classified information with someone at the Israeli embassy," writes Paul Findley (They Dare To Speak Out, Chicago, Ill, Lawrence Hill Books 1989)."He came under fire in 1983 when newspapers reported he received substantial payments to represent the interests of an Israeli weapons company. Perle denied conflict of interest, insisting that, although he received payment for these services after he had assumed his position in the Defense Department, he was between government jobs when he worked for the Israeli firm."
In other words, Richard Perle is an Israeli spy.
Perle should be expatriated immediately -- or made to share a cell with Jonathan Pollard, the spy who spent 18 months collecting and selling classified American intelligence to Israel from his position in U.S. Naval Intelligence. So pleased were the Israelis with the information passed on to them, two of the four government officials who had dealt with Pollard were promoted (Col. Aviem Sella, Pollard,s primary contact, was given full control of a major Israeli Air Force base). So arrogant are the Israelis that Sharon asked Bush to pardon and release Pollard.
If these are our friends, who needs enemies?
Okay, I'm going to use a word that will upset some of you -- Zionist. These days if you use the word Zionist you're going to be immediately accused of anti-Semitism. I receive hate email for using this word on occasion. You'd think I'm making excuses for the Holocaust (which is another subject that can get you in hot water, especially in France where you can go to prison for questioning the official verson of historical events). I'm not slandering Jews, I'm simply reporting the facts. Here's an indisputable fact:
Richard Perle is a Zionist.
Now what exactly does this mean? It means Richard Perle -- and Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and others in the Bush administration -- are Israeli nationalists. "Wolfowitz and fellow Jewish neo-cons Richard Perle and Douglas Feith have emerged as the Pentagon's Paladins," writes Ann Pettifer, "their aim being to subdue the Islamic world through decisive, pre-emptive use of American military superiority."
"Only in Washington does one get a true sense of the obsession of these Pentagon civilians," writes Hugo Young, a Guardian columnist. "Conversationally, it is common talk that some of them, not including Rumsfeld, are as much Israeli as American nationalists. Behind nervous, confiding hands come sardonic whispers of an American outpost of Likud. Most striking of all, however, is how unmentionable this is in the liberal press."
Ain't that the truth.
But then the corporate press in America rarely criticizes the Zionists. Notice how Perle can jump from one TV news show to another and nobody mentions his spying for the Israelis or working for an Israeli arms manufacturer. Nobody mentions his "dual loyalties," which are common knowledge in Washington. Nobody calls him a traitor. Nobody in the corporate media dares -- that is if they want to keep their jobs.
Perle can insult the Germans and French at the same time and the corporate media looks the other way. In fact, he is allowed to denigrate the whole of Europe. "I think Europe has lost its moral compass. Many Europeans have become so obsessed by the prospect of violence they have failed to notice who we are dealing with," he told the Guardian.
Gee, Richard. Maybe the Germans remember the horror of American Flying Fortresses dumping gasoline bombs on Dresden in 1945, an act of barbarity that resulted in the murder of 100,000 people. Maybe the French recall the Nazi occupation. Maybe there's still thousands of Dutch, Italians, Poles, and other Europeans alive who remember none too fondly the systematic and engineered mass murder of the Second World War. No doubt, as well, there's plenty of Jews who remember the monstrosity of Hitler's concentration camps.
I bet if you asked them if Saddam Hussein is Hitler reborn they would laugh in your face.
Actually, Saddam is not a threat to a single person in the United States. Perle and the Zionist neocons know this, of course. They also know that Iraq is not a serious threat to Israel, especially after a decade of war and sanctions have reduced Iraq to one of the poorest countries in the world. "We don't lose sleep over Iraq's military threat to us," Lt Gen. Moshe Yaalon, Israel,s Chief of Staff, told the New York Times.
So why are the Zionists pushing for a US invasion of Iraq?
First, the Zionists believe that bad relations between the US and Arab nations is good for Israel. It's no mistake Iraq and Iran were specifically fingered as part of an "axis of evil," nations the Bushites have singled out for invasion and "democratization." Sharon told fellow Zionist and U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton last month he wants Syria and Libya attacked next. As if to make sure he received the correct marching orders, Bolton also met with Foreign Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Housing and Construction Minister Natan Sharansky.
The Israeli Zionists don't care if perpetual war destroys the American economy. It does not bother them if Americans will die in the thousands.
Second, the Zionists are itching to "transfer" -- i.e., to ethnically cleanse -- as many Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza as possible. Israel will do this while the US is busy slaughtering Iraqis. "Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations in China, when world attention focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories," Netanyahu told students at Bar-Ilan University in 1989. Americans may be clueless about the intentions of Zionists toward the Palestinians, but in Israel ethnic cleansing is a popular subject of discussion. Fifty percent or more of Israelis think ethnic cleansing is a good idea. This from a nation that supposedly remembers the Holocaust.
"The idea of transfer is as old as modern Zionism and has accompanied its evolution and praxis during the past century," remarks Israeli historian Benny Morris. Moreover, the Palestinian "demographic threat" was something that "once left Golda Meir sleepless at night and now serves as the subject of obsession for Israeli conferences and nervous policy analysts," notes Will Youmans.
Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith, and their fellow travelers from the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), the Center for Security Policy (CSP), the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Hudson Institute -- as well as defense contractors and conservative foundations bankrolled by far-right American Zionists -- are calling the shots on Bush's invasion of Iraq.
It has nothing to do with the security of the American people. It has everything to do with Israel and the Likudites.
The Zionists in the Bush administration are pulling a fast one on the American people. It's criminal behavior. It should not be tolerated. The Zionist plan to bomb and kill Arabs across the Middle East will result in dismal failure and pointless mass murder. It will destroy America. It will wreck our economy and kill our sons. Perle and his cronies are mountebanks, swindlers, hypocrites. They are war criminals.
Richard Perle is a traitor. There's no other way to put it.
If Richard Perle -- and Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Elliot Abrams, and all the other Zionists embedded in the Bush administration -- love Israel so much, they should pack their bags and go there.
If they won't go on their own, they should be forced to leave.
In the meantime, their treacherous crimes need to be exposed.
nimmo@zianet.com Kurt Nimmo's Another Day in the Empire http://nimmo.blogspot.com/
David Frum's "Axis of Evil"
Authorial vanity strikes the Bush White House.
By Timothy Noah
Posted Tuesday, Feb. 5, 2002, at 3:49 PM PT
One of the occupational frustrations for established writers who become speechwriters is the absence of a byline. Apparently it's a frustration for their wives, too. Today Chatterbox was forwarded an e-mail apparently sent to family and friends by Danielle Crittenden, wife to White House speechwriter David Frum. Like her husband, Crittenden is a reasonably well-known Washington writer. Here's the e-mail:
Dear all,
I realize this is very "Washington" of me to mention but my husband is responsible for the "Axis of Evil" segment of Tuesday's State of the Union address. It's not often a phrase one writes gains national notice—unless you're in advertising of course ("The Pause that refreshes")—so I'll hope you'll indulge my wifely pride in seeing this one repeated in headlines everywhere!!
D
Chatterbox e-mailed Crittenden to confirm that she wrote the e-mail. She asked why Chatterbox wanted to know. Chatterbox explained that he was writing about it. Crittenden asked why Chatterbox was writing about it. Chatterbox explained that it was newsworthy. "I don't see why it is newsworthy," she replied. "You are asking about personal correspondence with friends and family. I'm disturbed that anyone would forward personal correspondence to you, and frankly, I think it's wrong of you to write about it."
Sounds like a confirmation!
[Update, Feb. 6: Apparently a Toronto Sun editorial identified Frum as authoring "axis of evil" on Feb. 1. Christopher Hitchens repeated this on MSNBC's Hardball on Feb. 4. In both instances, though, Frum's authorship was merely asserted, not attributed to any source, so it was hard to know whether it was true. The Feb. 11 Time attributes the phrase to both Frum and chief speechwriter Michael Gerson.]
[Update, Feb. 7: Peter Worthington suggests, bafflingly, in his Feb. 6 Toronto Sun column that the Sun learned of David Frum's authoring "axis of evil" by reading Time. This is baffling not only because the Feb. 1 Sun editorial made no mention of Time (or any source), but also because, as noted above, Time credited Frum and Gerson with coining the phrase. The mystery only deepens when one realizes that the Feb. 11 issue of Time couldn't have been seen by anyone prior to Feb. 4, the day it hit the newsstands. The fog begins to lift when Worthington acknowledges in the column that David Frum happens to be his son-in-law. Here's Chatterbox's best guess about how Frum's authorship first came to light: 1) Danielle Crittenden told her father, Peter Worthington, that Frum coined "axis of evil." 2) Worthington told somebody on the Sun's editorial board, which published it. 3) Either Frum or Crittenden informed Worthington that the leak was too traceable to the Frum-Crittenden household, and perhaps chided him for the indiscretion. 4) Worthington tried to cover his tracks by pretending that the Sun got its Frum scoop from Time. Chatterbox has no hypothesis about when it was during this likely sequence that Crittenden sent out her fateful e-mail. Rather endearingly, Crittenden tells Lloyd Grove in the Feb. 7 Washington Post that the whole affair makes her feel "like Lucy Ricardo."]
Timothy Noah writes "Chatterbox" for Slate.
Office of Special Plans
(renamed in July 2003 to Northern Gulf Affairs Office)
The Office of Special Plans (OSP) was created by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld to help create a case to invade Iraq. OSP evolved from the Northern Gulf Affairs Office, which fell under the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia policy office. It was renamed and expanded to the Office of Special Plans in October 2002 to to handle prewar and postwar planning. The name change was done to 'mask' its true mission." [1].
Also see the RightWeb profile of the "Office of Special Plans". (Last update 2/11/04).
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"Despite extensive planning by the U.S. Department of State's Future of Iraq Project to deal with post-Saddam chaos, much of which (including museum looting and extensive water and power shortages) was fully anticipated and provided for in those plans, these plans were simply set aside by Rumsfeld. [2].
"Air Force Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, who worked in the Pentagon until her retirement, was with the Office of Special Plans: 'What I saw was aberrant, pervasive and contrary to good order and discipline,' Kwiatkowski wrote recently. 'If one is seeking the answers to why peculiar bits of 'intelligence' found sanctity in a presidential speech, or why the post-Saddam occupation has been distinguished by confusion and false steps, one need look no further than the process inside the Office of the Secretary of Defense.' She described the activities of Rumsfeld's Office of Special Plans as, 'A subversion of constitutional limits on executive power and a co-optation through deceit of a large segment of the Congress.' [3].
In July 2003, "due to ever increasing criticism about the role OSP has played in the gathering of intelligence and the conclusions made to justify the war with Iraq, the Pentagon changed the name of OSP back to its original name, Northern Gulf Affairs Office." [4].
Julian Borger, in his July 17, 2003 article "The spies who pushed for war," published by the Guardian/UK, writes that Democratic congressman David Obey said concerning the OSP: "'The office was charged with collecting, vetting and disseminating intelligence completely outside of the normal intelligence apparatus. In fact, it appears that information collected by this office was in some instances not even shared with established intelligence agencies and in numerous instances was passed on to the National Security Council and the president without having been vetted with anyone other than political appointees'." [5]
On March 9, 2004, Los Angeles Times' staff reporter Greg Miller writes that during testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, George J. Tenet, Director of the CIA, revealed that "A special intelligence unit at the Pentagon provided private prewar briefings to senior White House officials on alleged ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda without the knowledge of [the] CIA Director ... [and the] disclosure suggests that a controversial Pentagon office played a greater role than previously understood in shaping the administration's views on Iraq's alleged ties to the terrorist network behind the Sept. 11 attacks, and that it bypassed usual channels to make a case that conflicted with the conclusions of CIA analysts." [6]
In her 4-page article "The New Pentagon Papers" published March 10, 2004, by Salon, Karen Kwiatkowski, "reveals how Defense Department extremists suppressed information and twisted the truth to drive the country to war." [7]
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Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest, in their January 26, 2004, Mother Jones article "The Lie Factory", write:
"As the momentum for war [in Iraq] began to build in early 2002, Paul D. Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith beefed up the intelligence unit and created an Iraq war-planning unit in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia Affairs section, run by Deputy Undersecretary of Defense William Luti, under the rubric Office of Special Plans, or OSP; the new unit's director was Abram N. Shulsky. By then, David Wurmser had moved on to a post as senior adviser to Undersecretary of State John Bolton, yet another neocon, who was in charge of the State Department's disarmament, proliferation, and WMD office and was promoting the Iraq war strategy there. Shulsky's OSP, which incorporated the secret intelligence unit, took control, banishing veteran experts-including Joseph McMillan, James Russell, Larry Hanauer, and Marybeth McDevitt-who, despite years of service to NESA, either were shuffled off to other positions or retired. For the next year, Luti and Shulsky not only would oversee war plans but would act aggressively to shape the intelligence product received by the White House."
"According to Lt. Colonel Kwiatkowski, Luti and Shulsky ran NESA and the Office of Special Plans with brutal efficiency, purging people they disagreed with and enforcing the party line. 'It was organized like a machine,' she says. 'The people working on the neocon agenda had a narrow, well-defined political agenda. They had a sense of mission.' At NESA, Shulsky, she says, began 'hot-desking,' or taking an office wherever he could find one, working with Feith and Luti, before formally taking the reins of the newly created OSP. Together, she says, Luti and Shulsky turned cherry-picked pieces of uncorroborated, anti-Iraq intelligence into talking points, on issues like Iraq's WMD and its links to Al Qaeda. Shulsky constantly updated these papers, drawing on the intelligence unit, and circulated them to Pentagon officials, including Rumsfeld, and to Vice President Cheney. 'Of course, we never thought they'd go directly to the White House,' she adds."
"Kwiatkowski recalls one meeting in which Luti, pressed to finish a report, told the staff, "I've got to get this over to 'Scooter' right away." She later found out that "Scooter" was none other than I. Lewis Scooter Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff. According to Kwiatkowski, Cheney had direct ties through Luti into NESA/OSP, a connection that was highly unorthodox.
"'Never, ever, ever would a deputy undersecretary of Defense work directly on a project for the vice president,' she says. 'It was a little clue that we had an informal network into Vice President Cheney's office.'
"Although Feith insists that the OSP did not seek to gather its own intelligence, Kwiatkowski and others sharply disagree. Staff working for Luti and Shulsky in NESA/OSP churned out propaganda-style intelligence, she says. As an example, she cited the work of a U.S. intelligence officer and Arabic specialist, Navy Lt. Commander Youssef Aboul-Enein, who was a special assistant to Luti. 'His job was to peruse the Arabic-language media to find articles that would incriminate Saddam Hussein about terrorism, and he translated these.' Such raw intelligence is usually subject to a thorough vetting process, tracked, verified, and checked by intelligence professionals. But not at OSP-the material that it produced found its way directly into speeches by Bush, Cheney, and other officials."
See remainder of article for more details on the Bush administration/OSP connections and activities.
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Leadership
Paul Dundes Wolfowitz, OSP architect
Douglas Jay Feith, Undersecretary of Defense (OSP reports to)
Steven A. Cambone, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence
Abram N. Shulsky, Director of Office of Special Plans
William Luti, Undersecretary of Defense who "oversees the OSP"
Disinfopedia Resources
cooked intelligence
Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group
Energy Infrastructure Planning Group
Loose Cannon Pentagon
Office of Net Assessment
preemptive war
revolution in military affairs
weapons of mass destruction investigation
Operation Rockingham
External Links
Rosalinda, Chickenhawk Intelligence Agency is Born, Rumor Mill News, April 9, 2003.
Paul Harris, Martin Bright, and Ed Helmore, US rivals turn on each other as weapons search draws a blank: "One key argument for war was the peril from weapons of mass destruction. Now top officials are worried by repeated failures to find the proof - and US intelligence agencies are engaged in a struggle to avoid the blame", The Observer (in Guardian UK), May 11, 2003.
Seymour Hersh, Selective Intelligence, New Yorker, May 15, 2003.
Al Cronkite, Judeo-Christian Decadence. At the Fount of Power, Etherzone, May 15, 2003.
Tabassum Zakaria, New Pentagon Intelligence Office Not a Run at CIA, Reuters, May 20, 2003.
Intelligence Community to Get Post-war Critique, NewsMax, May 23, 2003.
Duncan Campbell, Bush special office 'justified war', The Guardian, May 31, 2003.
Jihad Al Khazen, Neo-Conservative Ascendancy in the George W. Bush Administration: Part 1, Al-Hayet, June 4, 2003.
Officials deny misuse of special Pentagon unit to make case for Iraq war, AFP, June 4, 2003.
Lorelei Jackson, The continuing Debate over WMD's and the Denials from top Officials of Intelligence Manipulation, June 4, 2003.
Marc Perelman, Pentagon Team on Iran Comes Under Fire, Forward News, June 6, 2003: "Defense Department spokesmen acknowledge that a small, four-member team is working on Iran policy within the Pentagon's so-called Office of Special Plans. Critics contend that the office has been distorting intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and links to Al Qaeda in order to strengthen the case for war."
Eric Boehlert, Rumsfeld's Personal Spy Ring, Salon.com, July 16, 2003
Jason Leopold, Wolfowitz committee instructed White House to use Iraq/uranium reference in State of the Union speech, Online Journal, July 16, 2003.
Julian Borger, The spies who pushed for war, Guardian Unlimited, July 17, 2003.
Jason Leopold, CIA Probe Finds Secret Pentagon Group Manipulated Intelligence on Iraqi Threat, Antiwar.com, July 25, 2003.
Jim Lobe, Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network, IPS, 7 August 2003.
William Rivers Pitt, I believe, Truthout.org, September 8, 2003: reporting Kwiatkowski's remarks.
Cheney's Long Path to War, Newsweek (page 3), November 9, 2003.
Josh Marshall, The dubious link between Iraq and al Qaeda, The Hill, November 19, 2003
Robert Dreyfuss, Secrets And Spies, TomPaine, December 8, 2003.
Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff, Cheney and the ‘Raw’ Intelligence, Newsweek, December 15, 2003: "A memo written by a top Washington lobbyist for the controversial Iraqi National Congress raises new questions about the role Vice President Dick Cheney’s office played in the run-up to the war in Iraq."
William Rivers Ritt, The Lies for War Unravel, Truthout.org, January 12, 2004.
Robert Dreyfuss, The CIA Ate My Homework, Tom Paine, February 3, 2004.
Juan Cole, Red Herrings on Discount at Washington Post, juancole.com, March 13, 2004
JUDEO-CHRISTIAN DECADENCE
AT THE FOUNT OF POWER
By: Al Cronkrite
Has American foreign policy been hijacked by a Cabal that has the ear of the President and is able to effectively override such conventional government institutions as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)?
New Yorker pundit Seymour Hersh has written a detailed article reporting such usurpation by a small group of Pentagon insiders who facetiously call themselves the "Cabal". The group, apparently the brainchild of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, formally known as the Office of Special Plans (OSP), numbers no more than a dozen members. It is directed by Abram Shulsky and overseen by Under-Secretary of Defense William Lufti. Seymour Hersh describes Abram Shulsky as, "a scholarly expert in the works of the political philosopher Leo Strauss."
Abram Shulsky reports directly to Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz bypassing both the CIA and the DIA. The hawkish Rumsfeld led group has succeeded in overriding Secretary Powell's State Department and nullifying the restraining warnings of other agencies.
According to former CIA Chief of Counter-Terrorism, Vince Cannistraro, now retired, "Their methods are vicious. The politicization of intelligence is pandemic, and deliberate disinformation is being promoted. They choose the worst-case scenario on everything and so much of the information is fallacious". He describes Abe Shulsky as soft spoken and slow to anger but says that the group's members, "reinforce each other because they're the only friends they have, and they all work together. This has been going on since the nineteen-eighties, but they have never been able to coalesce as they have now. September 11th gave them the opportunity, and now they're in heaven. They believe the intelligence is there. They want to believe it. It has to be there."
There are several significant characteristics of the OSP. Most importantly it is primarily Jewish and strongly Zionist. It is religiously humanistic but tainted with the Pharisaical Jewish notion of superiority. It is clannish and secretive. It follows a Jewish pattern of being the power behind the throne that was recorded during the Babylonia Empire and in more contemporary times has been repeated in Germany and Russia.
At the root of this effective manipulation of power is the teaching of a man named Leo Strauss (1899-1973). Leo Strauss was a brilliant German Jew who after studying in Europe on a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation, became a highly paid professor at the University of Chicago. According to Robert Locke who studied under Professor Strauss he was an atheist and the purveyor of an esoteric philosophy, which was critical of liberalism but supported Machiavellian deception and a ruling elite.
Robert Locke lists among Strauss's students or those influenced by his students: Justice Clarence Thomas; Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork; Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; former Assistant Secretary of State Alan Keyes; former Secretary of Education William Bennett; Weekly Standard editor and former Quayle Chief of Staff William Kristol; Allan Bloom, former New York Post editorials editor John Podhoretz; and former National Endowment for the Humanities Deputy Chairman John T. Agresto.
Not included in the list is Abram Shulsky who along with Paul Wolfowitz received a Doctorate in 1972 under Strauss's tutelage.
His influence is pervasive and attractive to the group that forms the "Cabal" on a number of issues. He believed in the need for advisors and that those who have the ear of the King are more important than the King. He had a theory that ancient philosophers concealed hidden meanings in their works, which could only be understood by the intellectual few. He believed that governments must be deceptive because the people cannot comprehend the "truth" of value relativism. This premise may have resulted in the cult-like group of followers that can be found in large numbers around the Bush Administration and are surely accountable for the flagrant mendacity that has accompanied the Iraqi conquest.
Additionally worrisome is the reported Evangelical Christian leaning of our President, which makes him vulnerable to promoting the decadent Nation of Israel as the Will of God in bringing about His Millennium.
In one of his "Reality Check" writings, Gary North quotes a chillingly truthful passage written on the eve of his death by an Islamic suicide bomber. Two short sentences read, "They are not Jews of the Book. They are Jews of the university."
Christians in America are no longer Christians of the Book but have become Christians of the University. We have allowed the brilliance of the Strausses of our world to beguile as Satan beguiled Adam and Eve. Our attention has been diverted from God to the likes of Aristotle, Plato, Hegel, Machiavelli, and a plethora of humanistic scholars whose writings are the product of their own minds and as a result are only the opinions of men. Our mindset does not include sacrificing for Our God. Instead of working to bring His Kingdom into being on earth we ignore His dominion and instead seek our own blessing and our own dominion.
Willingly dying for our Christian Faith? Perish the thought!
The American Christian God is no longer worthy of death; a god-like people who above all require comfort and luxury have relegated him to the role of a servant.
The Muslim suicide bomber writes that there is no defense against suicide bombs. He takes up Pat Buchanan's mantle by pointing to the low birthrates in the Western World and advises Muslims to have more children. He chastises Westerners for enjoying toys and great wealth but not liking children. He points to the open border policy and the need for new workers to pay the taxes for supporting the elderly whose children no longer assume responsibility. He writes, "Jews in America have the money and the newspapers to tell the Crusader Presidents what to do---"
It is a realistically self righteous, optimistic, faith filled, world conquering religious persuasion written by a man who believes as he walks through the valley of the shadow of death his god will not forsake him. The confidence he expresses in his god and in the righteousness of Jihad has a quality that could no longer be mustered from our broken Christian platform.
Seeking a coercive peace in a militant Islamic environment may require the murder of civilian Muslims in quantities approaching those of Stalin and Mao. More disturbing is the fact that our government may well be up to the task.
During the Cold War, Abram Shulsky was an expert on Russian disinformation techniques. He became a critic of the United States intelligence efforts contending they failed to account for the duplicitous nature of our adversaries and our failure to cope with deliberate concealment.
There is no question concerning the militant nature of Islam. They have several times conquered large portions of the Western World only to be defeated and thrown back by superior Western forces.
Americans are no longer able to present the world with an example of righteous behavior. Our nation has become immoral both within and without. We now face an enemy whose faith and endurance is superior to our own an enemy with a worldview who respects history and who is willing to face reality. America, once blessed with faith in the One True God and founded under His dominion, has invaded that Nation and is now surrounded by a people who may succeed in creating quicksand under there domiciles.
Connivance is not a Christian virtue. The American government at one time supported both Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Ladin. The pragmatic change of loyalties from one era to the next brings our entire foreign policy under suspicion. Such behavior will never produce peace. We must remember that Western civilization's involvement in the Middle East has been both crafty and larcenous.
In his New Yorker article "Selective Intelligence", Seymour Hersh quotes Joseph Cropsey, a former professor at the University of Chicago and a Strauss defender, as believing a "certain amount of deception is essential in government". Cropsey then went on to say, "there is nothing in Strauss's work that favors preemptive action. What it favors is prudence and sound judgment."
It appears the pre-emptive action might have come from an overweening Zionist persuasion inherent in the "Cabal" itself and from a susceptible Chief Executive.
Brilliant atheists like Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Abram Shulsky, led by the clandestine, godless elitism of Leo Strauss will never bring American foreign policy back under the rule of The Great God of All Creation and without His blessing victory will be short lived and peace evasive.
The pervasive Jewish influence on American which has been immoral on both domestic and international fronts will one day come back to haunt them. Those who are willing to eschew the self-pity and study their own history with an honest mind will quickly find the need for repentance.
It was a mostly Christian America that was devastated. What we are today would have been unrecognizable by our Founders. The religion, which we now call Judeo-Christian, bears little resemblance to the Christian religion we inherited. It is a humanized shell of the robust beliefs of the Puritans and a lonely specter compared with the religious resolve of a suicidal Muslim.
Even as our churches fill with the 70% (or so) Americans who profess to be Christian it is glaringly obvious that we are no longer Christians of the Book.
"Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact."
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