| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Oct 04, 2004 8:43 pm Post subject: Neocon Pink Slips And The Fall Of America |
| Neocon Pink Slips And The Fall Of America
By Kurt Nimmo
Online Journal
10-4-4
Here's the unspeakable truth: I lost my job to make Israel safe.
Or more specifically: an obscene amount of tax dollars are flushed down the Pentagon rat hole every year while billions are slashed from state and social programs, including education. I worked for a state-funded education program. I was pink-slipped because there's no money for the program this year.
In short, George Bush fired me.
The Bushcon invasion of Iraq costs $177 million per day, $7.4 million per hour, and $122,820 per minute. So far, the invasion has cost an astounding $134.5 billion. "When you integrate Iraqi spending, which is necessary, with the effort to control spending, it puts more pressure on you to make harder choices," said Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) in June. "If you can name one part of government immune from this, I'd like to know."
Hard choices - like throwing Americans out of work.
But according to Republicans such as Patrick Toomey (R-Pa), even more Americans need face the "hard choice" of poverty. Education and social services are non-starters when compared to blowing things up and butchering thousands of mostly innocent people. "I'd say let's have a smaller deficit," said Toomey in June. "But most of all, don't spend it on something else. The non-defense, non-security part of the budget is out of control."
For instance, literacy programs for poor kids.
In other words, billions will be squandered on "security" to protect Israel from its enemies before a dime is spent here in America on education, nutrition programs, repairing our crumbling infrastructure, and other things insignificant to Republicans and their multinational corporate masters.
As we now know, or should know if we pay attention, Iraq was invaded at the behest of Israel and a small clan of extreme right-wing Likudites. Philip Zelikow, executive director of Bush's 9/11 whitewash commission, admitted as much during a speech delivered at the University of Virginia on September 10, 2002. "Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I'll tell you what I think the real threat (is) and actually has been since 1990óit's the threat against Israel," said Zelikow.
Never mind Saddam had no nukes, or even a few mustard gas shells.
Paul W. Schroeder, a veteran diplomatic historian, wrote for the American Conservative magazine on October, 21, 2002, "the unacknowledged real reason and motive behind the policy [is] security for Israel. . . . It would represent something to my knowledge unique in history. It is common for great powers to try to fight wars by proxy, getting smaller powers to fight for their interests. This would be the first instance I know where a great power (in fact, a superpower) would do the fighting as the proxy of a small client state."
"The suggestion that the war with Iraq is being planned at Israel's behest, or at the instigation of policymakers whose main motivation is trying to create a secure environment for Israel, is strong," write Kathleen and Bill Christison, former CIA political analysts. "Many Israeli analysts believe this."
But not the forever gullible American people. For them, Osama is Saddam and Bush's "war on terror" is about payback for September 11, 2001, even if those on the blunt end of the murderous payback truncheon are innocent civilians.
Israel Firsters have essentially taken over the United States government, from the White House and the Pentagon to Congress. Fighting (largely manufactured) terrorism sells the Israel First policy well, if only because it is wrapped in an American flag.
"These people, who can fairly be called Israeli loyalists, are now at all levels of government, from desk officers at the Defense Department to the deputy secretary level at both State and Defense, as well as on the National Security Council staff and in the vice president's office," note the Christisons.
In Congress, the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC) rules supreme, and if you don't vote for the pro-Likud agenda there's a good chance you will not be re-elected. Ask Cynthia McKinney. "Jewish donors have already begun to back McKinney challenger Denise Majette, a former state court judge from Atlanta who proudly touts a strong pro-Israel position," wrote Eli Kintisch of the Forward prior to the last mid-term elections. Majette eventually unseated McKinney.
"The American Israel Political Action Committee is a lobbying group that used to support whatever government was in power in Israel, and used to give money even-handedly inside the US," writes Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor, on his blog. "My perception is that during the past decade AIPAC has increasingly tilted to the Likud in Israel, and to the political Right in the United States."
AIPAC is so powerful it operates a long-running spy operation that passes classified information on to the Likudites in Israel. As an example of Bushcon influence over not only foreign but domestic policy, an FBI investigation of the AIPAC spy operation was seriously compromised by a preemptory media leak and the investigation is now all but dead in the water.
How is it possible a major spy scandal has fallen so effortlessly by the wayside?
Anti-Semitism, the perpetual and unfailing canard. "In an indication of their growing estrangement with the Bush administration, neoconservatives are slamming the White House for failing to stop what they describe as an anti-Semitic campaign to marginalize them being conducted by the CIA and the State Department," writes Marc Perleman of Forward.
Of course, Perleman has it wrong: the neocons, or Israel Firsters, are not estranged from the Bush administration - they *are* the Bush administration and their calculated attack is aimed at the CIA and the State Department, who have not demonstrated the required degree of enthusiasm for the Israel First cause at the expense of American lives and treasure. As the Israel Firsters know, anti-Semitism is so emotionally charged that there is virtually no defense against it. Once painted as an anti-Semite, the only two possible options are atonement or banishment.
If you believe the November election will change things, think again. Even if Kerry is elected, the Israel Firsters will rule supreme in Washington. Kerry has gone out of his way to align himself with Sharon and the Likudites. If need be he will perform summersaults to accommodate AIPAC and the Likudites and their long-standing dream of a Greater Israel at the expense of not only Arabs and Iranians but the beleaguered American taxpayer.
Sharon and the Israel Firsters are not really keen on the "liberal" Kerry, so we can probably expect four more years (or four more decades) of the Christian Zionist Bush and the Straussian neocons. No way are they going to allow a mere election to sidetrack plans launched during the Bush I administration by Wolfowitz, Feith, and their fellow neocon travelers - alumni going back to Reagan and the Iran-Contra days - and subsequently taken up by the Project for a New American Century, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, a camarilla - or more appropriately, a crime syndicate - that has labored long and hard to make the Likudite vision of Greater Israel America's primary foreign policy objective.
Of course, if Kerry does "win" in November, we can expect the neocons to quickly refashion themselves into "war hawk" Democrats. Remember: Richard Perle, neocon par excellence, the Prince of Darkness (as his colleagues fondly call him), started his political career as a "Scoop" Jackson Democrat.
But even if the Bush neocons don't stage a comeback in the event Kerry is selected to be CEO of America, there is no shortage of Israel First zealots in the Democratic Party, as evidenced by the Clinton administration (one such zealot was Martin S. Indyk, Clinton's ambassador to Israel, who is the founding executive director for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy where the Straussian neocon Wolfowitz sits on the board of directors). Kerry's senior foreign policy adviser is none other than James P. Rubin, Clinton's Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, an AIPAC-installed Zionist who believes UN-documented facts of Palestinian suffering under the brutal and interminable Israeli occupation are "exaggerated" and amount to self-inflicted misery, as he told Dr. Khaled M. Batarfi of Arab News in August, adequately demonstrating the difference between "liberal" Arab haters and "conservative" Arab haters is at best negligible.
Our collective lot is cast, Kerry or Bush.
Crushing debt and the rapid devaluation of the dollar in the coming year will result in more pink slips, more Americans relegated to the ranks of the ignored poor, more compounded and intensified misery under the leadership of Republicans, who will maintain a stranglehold on Congress no matter who is selected CEO of America. For the Israel First clan commanding the highest reaches of our government, unemployment and tumbling standards of living are far less of a concern than the "threat" posed to the sacrosanct state of Israel by Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia.
For Americans unfortunately age 18-35, unemployment will not be a problem in the coming year because thousands, possibly millions of them will be working for Uncle Sam as conscripted bullet-stoppers, or if not bullet-stoppers as slaves assigned to other "national security" tasks - under proposed legislation known as the "Skills Draft" - for the Ministry of Homeland Security and the misnamed Department of Defense (this behemoth should revert to its old name, the Department of War).
I will be 52 years old soon after the next CEO of America is selected, so my services will not be required - although my tax dollars will be, that is if I ever find gainful employment again (a bleak prospect for "older workers," that is to say workers who demand a living wage).
In the meantime, I sit here, in an apartment I can scarcely afford, running a computer that chews up vastly overpriced electricity (our electric corporation was owned by Enron before Enron became one of the largest criminal organizations in history). I will continue to write about the high-paid quislings in Congress, the plutocrats, the corporatists - who, as Mussolini knew, defined fascism - and the Israel Firsters, conspiring with the aforementioned quislings in Congress, who are selling our government and the American people down the river to a foreign power, about as close to a textbook definition of treason as there is.
I do not expect the American people to turn this country around.
Far too many are reduced to mindless and conditioned flag-waving and have bought into the nocuous illusion that voting for corporate candidate A or B is the only acceptable way solve our (usually government or corporate created) problems - and robotically allowing themselves to believe the "issues" are about swift boats and who will do a better job fighting perpetual wars waged against manufactured enemies, in other words Israel's opponents, not ours.
I have no faith in the American people because the Fox News induced lobotomy is too severe and obviously irreversible.
It's a long way back from where we are now.
Most of us not only don't know the way back, we don't realize there is a way back or, worse, that there is even anything particularly wrong - beyond the in-your-face nastiness of bin Laden and al-Qaeda so rudely penetrating our consumerist fantasy cocoon - and thus requiring the people to do what Thomas Jefferson implored: have a revolution every few years and throw out the quislings, defrauders, and traitors.
It's not going to happen.
History teaches that the Roman Empire fell with a loud noise - and our fall, our catastrophic decline, will be far noisier, if only because we have perfected the art of noisemaking. It took western civilization nearly 10 centuries to recover from the fall of the Roman Empire. It took over 900 years to reach the Renaissance. Hopefully, it will not take us that long to recover from what the Straussian neocons, the Israel Firsters, and their corporate collaborators - who are not particularly ideological, are more akin to scurrilous and amoral carpetbaggers going along for the profitable ride - will ultimately do to us, only because we will let them, only because we duteously believe 2 + 2 = 5, as repeated ad nauseam by the Ministry of Truth (viz., the alphabet corporate news organizations).
Such a fall, however, does have an upside. It will mean the telescreens will be blank - that is to say there will no longer be Fox News gibbering 24/7.
- Kurt Nimmo is a photographer and multimedia developer in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Visit his excellent no holds barred blog at www.kurtnimmo.com/blogger.html.
Copyright © 1998-2004 Online Journal. All rights reserved.
http://www.onlinejournal.com/
Commentary/100204Nimmo/100204nimmo.html | |  | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Oct 06, 2004 8:15 pm Post subject: How Zionist Neoconservative Perle hijacked foreign policy |
| From: "Couples Company"
Subject: How Perle hijacked foreign policy
Date: Tue, 5 Oct 2004 13:44:51 -0700
The State Department's extreme makeover
A veteran Foreign Service officer warns that when Colin Powell departs in a second Bush term, America will lose its last bulwark against the radical ideologues who are planning more Iraqs.
Editor's note: "Anonymous" is a veteran Foreign Service officer currently serving as a State Department official. The views expressed are personal and not related to his official position.
http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news2/salon39.html
By Anonymous
Oct. 4, 2004 | Secretary of State Colin Powell is not staying for a second Bush term. When he goes, the last bulwark against complete neoconservative control of U.S. foreign policy goes with him. The implications are enormous, yet the American electorate appears to be blinded by the Bush campaign's deliberate manipulations of 9/11.
Powell has served both as the reasoned voice of career diplomats and the experienced voice of career U.S. military in the Bush administration. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ignored military advice and excluded Department of State career professionals from Iraq planning. Power was concentrated in the hands of a clique of neocon ideologues he placed in key policy positions, including Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith. In the first term of George W. Bush, protégés of now disgraced former Defense Policy Board member and neocon godfather Richard Perle achieved control or subordination of every executive branch foreign-policymaking body -- except the Department of State.
Career employees of the department enthusiastically greeted Colin Powell when he pulled up to the curb for the first time at Foggy Bottom in his PT Cruiser. They have supported him, and through him, have unfailingly supported the president through thick and thin over four years -- up to and including volunteering in record numbers to staff fully the highly dangerous positions in the new embassy in Baghdad, Iraq. Even after being dumped on by the Pentagon neocons and witnessing the debacle of the Pentagon's Jay Garner's post-conflict solution, the State Department's Civil and Foreign Service staff took up the slack when the Pentagon unceremoniously fled responsibility for Iraq reconstruction and stabilization. Now, Powell's departure is seen within the department as an invitation to a lynching.
The realization that the same neocons who dismissed State's accurate "Future of Iraq Project," prepared before the war, may now take over at State in the second term is widely viewed inside the department as a threat to the very integrity of the country's diplomatic first line of defense. Corridor discussion has turned desperate -- maybe former Secretary of State James Baker will intervene, maybe former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft will talk to someone, maybe 41 will talk to 43.
State personnel are used to comings and goings of Democratic and Republican administrations, serving all equally and fairly. Not since Vietnam, however, has the U.S. diplomatic establishment viewed the future with such a degree of alarm. Retired U.S. ambassadors and diplomats have raised their own public concerns in signed public statements about the direction of U.S. foreign policy -- but that concern pales compared with the quiet revolt brewing against a neocon takeover at Foggy Bottom.
After 9/11, Wolfowitz, Feith and his subordinate, Harold Rhode, recruited David Wurmser as a contractor from the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute to set up what became known internally as the "Wurmser-Maloof" project. F. Michael Maloof, neocon fellow traveler and former aide to Richard Perle, and Wurmser created a hidden intelligence unit, the Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group, under Feith at the Pentagon. The purpose of the group was to end-run the CIA and create the rationale for invading Iraq. The parallel operations model was previously followed by Oliver North at the National Security Council and Elliott Abrams at State in their ill-fated Iran-Contra strategy. It should have come as no surprise that another neocon think-tank insider, Abram Shulsky, an Abrams colleague from their days as staffers to Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, would end up heading up what became the Office of Special Plans, the secret intelligence unit at the Pentagon under Feith. The weapons of mass destruction disinformation that was fed to the president and to the American public came directly from Shulsky's shop.
After setting up this operation at the Pentagon for Wolfowitz and Feith, Wurmser, with the help of Perle, was sent in early 2002 to burrow in at State as senior advisor to John Bolton, under secretary for arms control and international security.
In December 2002, Wolfowitz, Feith, Wurmser and Vice President Cheney's national security advisor, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, acting together, maneuvered Condoleezza Rice into appointing Elliott Abrams to the position of special assistant to the president and senior director for the Middle East at the National Security Council. This appointment gave the neocons everything they wanted -- the NSC, Executive Office of the President, Office of the Vice President, the Pentagon, a cornered director in George Tenet at CIA, and Wurmser at State.
The neocons had control of the information reaching the president and a channel for their pseudo-intelligence product from Wolfowitz and Feith's secret Pentagon Office of Special Plans. The only wild card was Colin Powell and State's elite and independent Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR).
Neither Powell nor his deputy, Richard Armitage, who is also leaving with Powell, seems to have been fooled by Wurmser's desire to leave the Pentagon and join John Bolton's staff -- in effect, to come work for Powell. They cornered and then neutralized Wurmser. Wurmser's target was to get at the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, a thorn in the neocons' side and Powell's intelligence ace-in-the-hole against Tenet's "slam-dunk" sellout at the CIA.
INR kept telling Powell the truth about Saddam's nonexistent WMD. State's Future of Iraq project, led by a career Foreign Service officer, who was cold-shouldered by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, laid out what might happen if we took over control of Iraq. Unfortunately, even the sober minds of INR could not stop Powell from lending his credibility to the "unfortunate error" show at the U.N. Security Council. Modeled on Adlai Stevenson's Oct. 25, 1962, Cuban missile presentation to the Security Council, Powell's Feb. 5, 2003, presentation marks the low point of his tenure and, in retrospect, underscores how badly his credibility was needed and then was abused by Vice President Cheney and the president.
The whole time Wurmser was at State, career professionals around him saw someone acting more like an agent of influence than as a subordinate of the secretary of state. He was in constant contact with his Pentagon intelligence cell. Questions were asked -- but never answered -- as to how Wurmser got a full security clearance when he never registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act for his 1996 policy work for Israel's incoming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (including advice on how to lobby the U.S. Congress) and as someone who was married to an Israeli citizen with close ties to Israel's Likud Party -- in theory, a party to U.S.-brokered Middle East peace negotiations.
In September 2003, Wurmser left the Department of State to become Vice President Cheney's principal deputy for national security affairs under "Scooter" Libby. He left before any questions were answered about his access to and use of classified information. His clearances were never questioned when he joined the vice president's staff, and his status under the Foreign Agents Registration Act has never been clarified.
Powell's early 2005 departure is the subject of intense jockeying among the neocons. A Perle neocon protégé, Michael Rubin, has been given the task of destroying the only competition -- L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer, the former Iraq Coalition Provisional Authority chief, not a neocon insider and the favorite of traditional Republican conservatives. The neocon plan is to make Bremer the scapegoat: It was not bad neocon policy, it was bad Bremer decisions that has led to the fiasco in Iraq. Rubin was sent to Baghdad to be Wolfowitz's man inside the CPA. Bremer dissed Rubin as a lightweight. Rubin tried to push neocon policy inside the CPA -- what he, Perle and Ahmed Chalabi had pushed from the American Enterprise Institute -- restoring the Hashemite monarchy in Iraq by placing Jordan's Crown Prince Hassan on the throne. Bremer would have none of it. Rubin is now tasked by Perle and Wolfowitz to trash Bremer -- which he is dutifully doing in print and media appearances arranged by neocon handler, lecture agent and media booker Eleana Benador. They intend to close the Foggy Bottom door to any aspirations Bremer, a former Foreign Service officer and Kissinger protégé, might have to take over from Powell.
Given the implosion of Iraq, Wolfowitz and his coterie have doubts that Wolfowitz can be confirmed as secretary (of either DOD or State) without a debilitating confirmation process, though State remains choice No. 1. A more complicated plan is to again play behind Condoleezza Rice. With Rice as secretary of state and Wolfowitz in as national security advisor, neocons would put David Wurmser or John Bolton in as Rice's deputy, replacing Armitage.
Wurmser, Perle and Feith were the principal authors of the 1996 100-day policy plan for incoming Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. None ever registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act for this work.
That plan, "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," published by Israel's Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, has served as the guiding road map for the neocons both in Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's office and in the Bush administration. No one should have been surprised by Iraq -- the neocons have not been coy in laying out their vision of Israel's security requirements. David Wurmser published a book-length version of his IASPS study at AEI. The introduction to that screed, "Tyranny's Ally: America's Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein," was written by Richard Perle. It lists as sources Ahmed Chalabi, Michael Ledeen, Douglas Feith and Harold Rhode.
Control at State would remove the last obstacle to the plan Perle, Wurmser and Feith laid long before 9/11. The neocons telegraphed their intentions clearly in President Bush's GOP convention acceptance speech in New York, in which the neocon hand was palpable in the ambitious agenda to remake the Middle East.
The president used political buzzwords to whip the crowd -- and the voting public -- into a noncomprehending patriotic frenzy of "four more years." Like Pope Urban at the 1095 Council of Clermont, who launched the First Crusade to cries of "God Wills It" from the frenzied Christians wanting to take back the Holy Land, Bush has decreed a crusade to bring enlightened Western democracy to the Muslim populations of the Middle East, left otherwise bereft in dysfunctional colonial-inspired states by the breakup of the Ottoman Empire.
But Bush the Crusader is off to a rocky start in Iraq. The ongoing meltdown is awakening Americans to the reality of the neocon agenda. But is it too late? Neocons are not dissuaded by the problems in Iraq; on the contrary, they are arguing that the problem is "Bremerism" -- the U.S. has not gone far enough. In their view, we need to take out the Palestinians, Syria and Iran now.
The neocons, working in tandem with a similar staff in the office of Prime Minister Sharon of Israel, have a three-part agenda for the first part of Bush's second term: first, oust Yasser Arafat; second, overthrow the secular Baathist al-Assad dictatorship in Syria; and, third, eliminate, one way or another, Iran's nuclear facilities.
Nowhere has support for the neocon Middle East crusade resonated more than in the constituency of Rep. Tom DeLay, who is the top Christian Zionist handler in the Republican Party and poised to strike GOP gold with his gerrymandering of Texas congressional districts.
For the neocons, Sept. 11 and Israel's security policy under Sharon have morphed into a single concept, the kind of thinking typified by Secretary Rumsfeld's recent lapses mixing Saddam Hussein with 9/11 and Osama bin Laden with Iraq.
Working with direct input from Israeli intelligence, Feith's Pentagon office coordinated with Libby and Wurmser in the vice president's office to spread the story that the missing WMD are to be found hidden in Syria. Israeli agents have worked overtime to neutralize and undo Syrian cooperation with the CIA against al-Qaida. This comes on the heels of a similar highly successful destruction of CIA inroads with the Palestinian Authority. We are now light-years beyond the two-state solution focus of Middle East policy. Instead of chasing Laden, the neocons plan to put the U.S. on the road to Damascus -- and Tehran. The groundwork is laid.
While the FBI scrutinizes whether Pentagon neocon aide Larry Franklin and AIPAC passed secrets to Israel, the larger story of Richard Perle and the neocons' carefully orchestrated takeover of Bush foreign policy has yet to be fully comprehended by the electorate.
Powell is leaving. We need to repeat that. When this reality sinks in, we will finally understand what we are getting ourselves into in a second Bush term. A handful of conservative columnists, Republican senators and a few other GOP luminaries are trying to reclaim a traditional conservative Republican foreign policy approach. But it is clearly too late.
Comparing Bush's foreign policy views in 2000 with his New York convention acceptance speech, it is clear that since 2000, the neocons started with a blank foreign policy slate. Looking carefully at Bush's 2000 campaign and statements and comparing them with the current 2004 campaign, it is startling how far he has come from his traditional Republican base. He has become the "Neoconian Candidate."
George W. Bush has signed on to the neocon agenda with the unshakeable faith of the born again. At this point, we all need a reminder that Crusades 1 through 5 ended badly in the long run, not just for the Crusaders, but on the home front. In a new Bush crusade, in a second term, the first to fall may be the professionals at the State Department. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Oct 07, 2004 6:44 am Post subject: Policy Analyst Is Said to Have Rejected Plea Deal |
| http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-spyprobe6oct06,1,7480802,print.story?coll=la-headlines-nation
THE NATION
Policy Analyst Is Said to Have Rejected Plea Deal
Larry Franklin, who is accused of passing secrets on Iran, also has replaced his attorney.
By Richard B. Schmitt
Times Staff Writer
October 6, 2004
WASHINGTON — A Pentagon analyst being investigated for allegedly helping pass secrets to Israel has stopped cooperating with authorities and retained a new lawyer to fight possible espionage charges, sources familiar with the case said Tuesday.
The analyst, Larry Franklin, has been a key witness in a continuing FBI investigation looking into whether classified intelligence was passed to Israel by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, an influential Washington lobbying firm.
Franklin has been accused of passing the contents of a classified document about U.S. policy on Iran to two AIPAC officials, who in turn may have given the information to Israeli officials in Washington, sources have said.
Federal prosecutors had proposed an agreement under which Franklin would plead guilty to some of the charges. Such agreements usually are done in exchange for leniency and are accompanied by a pledge of cooperation.
But sources said Franklin had rejected a proposed deal because he believed the terms were too onerous. He recently replaced his court-appointed lawyer. "It looks like there is going to be a battle," a source familiar with the case said.
FBI officials have not yet sought charges against Franklin or anyone else in the case, although the breakdown of plea negotiations would appear to raise the odds that he could be charged soon.
The scope of the investigation is believed to encompass a top diplomat at the Israeli Embassy in Washington; two high-ranking analysts at AIPAC; and the Pentagon office in which Franklin works as an Iran analyst, which is headed by Defense Undersecretary Douglas J. Feith.
The case has attracted widespread attention because it spotlights U.S. relations with a longtime ally and raises questions about whether those relations have become too close in recent years. Israel has become acutely sensitive to the growing nuclear capabilities of Iran, which it considers to be its most worrisome and deadly foe.
Both the Israeli government and AIPAC have denied that they engaged in any wrongdoing or were given unauthorized access to secrets.
A spokesman for Paul McNulty, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, whose office has been assigned the case, declined to comment.
A prominent Washington defense lawyer, Plato Cacheris, confirmed this week that he recently had been retained by Franklin.
"We consider him a loyal American who did not engage in any espionage activities," said Cacheris, the first person representing Franklin to speak on his behalf since the investigation surfaced a month ago. "Any charge of espionage will be met with fierce resistance."
Cacheris has represented a number of accused turncoats, including CIA operative Aldrich H. Ames, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1994 after confessing to years of spying for the Soviet Union. Cacheris also represented former FBI counterintelligence agent Robert P. Hanssen, also convicted of passing secrets to the Soviets, who received a life sentence in 2002.
Cacheris' other clients have included former Clinton White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky and Nixon administration Atty. Gen. John Mitchell.
Some U.S. officials familiar with the investigation have said there was little hard evidence that Franklin intended to commit espionage and no hint that he was paid for any role he might have played.
U.S. officials believe there is more evidence that Franklin — described by colleagues and friends as diligent and thoughtful yet periodically unreliable and disorganized — might have handed over information without understanding the gravity of his actions.
During two decades at the Pentagon spent tracking threats, he was considered a journeyman analyst and an absent-minded professor who often could be found in his office buried behind huge stacks of documents.
The classified information he is suspected of sharing includes the contents of a draft version of a national security presidential directive, or NSPD, on Iran. The draft advocated measures the United States could take to help destabilize the regime in Tehran, a subject of intense interest to the Israelis.
But officials also have said that the draft, which originated at the Pentagon's Near East and South Asian Affairs office, where Franklin worked, contained little in the way of sensitive secrets that had not been reported by the media already.
If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at latimes.com/archives. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Oct 08, 2004 7:12 am Post subject: Israeli AIPAC Spy Scandal - Update |
| Upcoming from MER:
The Secrets of U.S.-imposed Debt Relief for Iraq
Israeli AIPAC Spy Scandal - Update
MIDDLEEAST.ORG - MER - Washington - 7 October: It was just a month ago that the latest Washington spy scandal involving the very heart of the Israeli-Jewish Lobby had everyone buzzing. Then it faded from view as the corporate media moved on, as CBS News which originally broke the story found itself under assault, and as the election campaign and debates took center stage. Interesting, not one question from the PBS moderators about Israeli spying, nor even about the U.S. veto of the Security Council resolution condemning Israel, nor the International Court of Justice decision doing the same. Here's an update -- however inadequate -- from yesterday's L.A.Times. Though the real heart of the story should be AIPAC and the influence, tactics, and status of the Israeli-Jewish lobby; instead they focus on just the individual and not as they should on the large group of support persons and organizations. This should especially include, of course, the current cabal of largely Jewish neocons in top positions...including the one who hired Larry Franklin (Douglas Feith), and the ones who hired him (Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle).
THE NATION
Policy Analyst Is Said to Have Rejected Plea Deal
Larry Franklin, who is accused of passing secrets
on Iran, also has replaced his attorney.
By Richard B. Schmitt
Los Angeles Times - October 6, 2004 WASHINGTON — A Pentagon analyst being investigated for allegedly helping pass secrets to Israel has stopped cooperating with authorities and retained a new lawyer to fight possible espionage charges, sources familiar with the case said Tuesday.
The analyst, Larry Franklin, has been a key witness in a continuing FBI investigation looking into whether classified intelligence was passed to Israel by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, an influential Washington lobbying firm.
Franklin has been accused of passing the contents of a classified document about U.S. policy on Iran to two AIPAC officials, who in turn may have given the information to Israeli officials in Washington, sources have said.
Federal prosecutors had proposed an agreement under which Franklin would plead guilty to some of the charges. Such agreements usually are done in exchange for leniency and are accompanied by a pledge of cooperation.
But sources said Franklin had rejected a proposed deal because he believed the terms were too onerous. He recently replaced his court-appointed lawyer. "It looks like there is going to be a battle," a source familiar with the case said.
FBI officials have not yet sought charges against Franklin or anyone else in the case, although the breakdown of plea negotiations would appear to raise the odds that he could be charged soon.
The scope of the investigation is believed to encompass a top diplomat at the Israeli Embassy in Washington; two high-ranking analysts at AIPAC; and the Pentagon office in which Franklin works as an Iran analyst, which is headed by Defense Undersecretary Douglas J. Feith.
The case has attracted widespread attention because it spotlights U.S. relations with a longtime ally and raises questions about whether those relations have become too close in recent years. Israel has become acutely sensitive to the growing nuclear capabilities of Iran, which it considers to be its most worrisome and deadly foe.
Both the Israeli government and AIPAC have denied that they engaged in any wrongdoing or were given unauthorized access to secrets.
A spokesman for Paul McNulty, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, whose office has been assigned the case, declined to comment.
A prominent Washington defense lawyer, Plato Cacheris, confirmed this week that he recently had been retained by Franklin.
"We consider him a loyal American who did not engage in any espionage activities," said Cacheris, the first person representing Franklin to speak on his behalf since the investigation surfaced a month ago. "Any charge of espionage will be met with fierce resistance."
Cacheris has represented a number of accused turncoats, including CIA operative Aldrich H. Ames, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1994 after confessing to years of spying for the Soviet Union. Cacheris also represented former FBI counterintelligence agent Robert P. Hanssen, also convicted of passing secrets to the Soviets, who received a life sentence in 2002.
Cacheris' other clients have included former Clinton White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky and Nixon administration Atty. Gen. John Mitchell.
Some U.S. officials familiar with the investigation have said there was little hard evidence that Franklin intended to commit espionage and no hint that he was paid for any role he might have played.
U.S. officials believe there is more evidence that Franklin — described by colleagues and friends as diligent and thoughtful yet periodically unreliable and disorganized — might have handed over information without understanding the gravity of his actions.
During two decades at the Pentagon spent tracking threats, he was considered a journeyman analyst and an absent-minded professor who often could be found in his office buried behind huge stacks of documents.
The classified information he is suspected of sharing includes the contents of a draft version of a national security presidential directive, or NSPD, on Iran. The draft advocated measures the United States could take to help destabilize the regime in Tehran, a subject of intense interest to the Israelis.
But officials also have said that the draft, which originated at the Pentagon's Near East and South Asian Affairs office, where Franklin worked, contained little in the way of sensitive secrets that had not been reported by the media already. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Oct 09, 2004 6:33 am Post subject: Calls to C-SPAN |
| Rules of Engagement: Getting past screeners of the “Live Call In” Media
By Terry Thurber
Al-Jazeerah, October 7, 2004
In the morning of October 6, 2004, the honorable Tom Ridge was a guest on C-SPAN’s Journal. One of the few places for those in the “Zion Resistance Movement” can actually counter the propaganda promoted by the pro-Israeli media, to a large (and cognizant) market.
A few years ago, C-SPAN was fairly open. Providing the caller had not violated the thirty-day “between calls” rule, almost anything was allowed. The screening was minimal, if at all.
Things have changed. A few weeks back, Brain Lamb, a producer and host, was either showing his age, or exorcising the cronyism so obvious in Zion’s “lower on the food chain good old boys”. On this particular show, Brian had NYT reporter. I wish I could recall the name – but they all look and sound so similar, that names are not important. Does anybody remember the names of Joseph Goebbels’s copy boys and editors? I didn’t think so.
Anyway, on that day, a caller rang in with a question about the “AIPAC Spy” story. Despite the caller’s ritually polite tone, he was cut off. Brian’s guest sighed the required “crack-pot” smirk, and Brian, forever beholding to the NYC Press Houses that publish his less than exciting folksy drawls detailing Americana’s refuge of ignorance; chimed in with “that investigation is [mostly] political, huh?” Brian – up your Ginkgo intake man!
Mostly political?
As if really needed, this reinforced my belief that COM-CAST is beholding to Zion more than America – so what - what else was there to expect? There was, however, a new twist. In Zion’s yellow sheets, the AIPAC investigation is depicted as an "anti-Semitic” affront to the special relationship Israel enjoys with America. The special relationship includes billions in support and military grants. This relationship also assures a proper allocation of shrapnel for every child in Palestine.
What was different about Brian’s “political” spin on the caller’s question was that the enemy (Zion) has recognized that the “anti-Semitic” label will not work at all levels of the “mob” politic. It seems, at least in these cases, that spin (to counter Israeli indiscretions) for consumption by an “educated” [C-SPAN] audience should be dubbed “Political”.
Interesting, most interesting.
Back to today (October 6, 2004), and Tom Ridge, and my call to C-SPAN. I got through. It has been months. I think my number was blocked because I asked a smiling twit of cheerleader from the American Enterprise Institute, if “she felt like a pom-pom girl for fascism”.
So today – I used a friend’s phone – and the second ring, a screener asks: “What is your question about?”
I respond “The 9-11 Commission report”
The screener mutes and seconds pass. The screener returns and asks: ”Could you be more specific?”
I blundered and offered an honest response: “The 9-11 Commission has cited Israeli occupation of Palestine as the root cause of terrorism, and I wondered if Mr. Ridge thought that the current incursion in Gaza would ….” Buzzzzzzz. A dead line. I turn up the TV, and a guy from Georgia accolades with the standard “ … you guys are doing a great job – give him hell” jeers we are all so used to by now.
The point: Adopt the Mossad Strategy: Deceive – It’s easy to lie to liars. When I called in I should have framed my question along the lines of “.. ask Mr. Ridge about budgets items for new airport screeners” or some similar tripe.
What I was really going to ask: “Mr. Ridge you are doing a terrible job. The 9-11 Commission, the US Department of State, the UN, the world court, world opinion and [even] Osama Bin Ladden have all stated that the root cause of terrorism is Israel’s treatment of Palestine. Given the present massacre we are seeing in Gaza, will your job be any easier?”
Who is humanity’s enemy? Think about the enemy. The enemy is not George Bush. The enemy is not John Kerry or Ariel Sharon. Saddam is not the enemy. Those guys are/were nothing more than clerks and administrators for a small and selective group of oligarchs. The popular name [today] for these oligarchs are Zionists. They have had different labels in the past. They have been with us forever.
But, knowledge and technology have leveled the playing field, Now they live in fear. They fear we have acquired the confidence to break our bonds with them. They fear we will reduce them from emperors to administrators. They fear our humanity. And well they should!
Though it would be easy to hurt them through bottlenecking the frail infrastructure required for their “centralized commerce” and, thus demonstrating the truth of their powerlessness, we cannot. We must let them subside into history with the least impact. We must say goodbye to them as friends. Their paranoid genetics helped our ancestral clans through the darkness, fear and unregulated greed of the past. But now, they are the wall between us and the realization of a shared humanity.
We have some control: “wars” are now “little” wars, waged by little Napoleons, for their oligarch masters, whose ability to control the mobs perceptions has diminished. Look at Israel. Espoused as a model of democracy, is on the verge of collapse. Hundreds of thousands of public sector employees have gone without pay for months. The Airports have been closed. Inflation is high and the exodus is out, rather than to the land of [someone else’s] milk and honey. What goes around will come around.
http://www.aljazeerah.info/Opinion%20editorials/2004%20opinions/October/7%20o/Rules%20of%20Engagement%20Getting%20past%20screeners%20of%20the%20Live%20Call%20In%20Media%20By%20Terry%20Thurber.htm | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue Oct 12, 2004 8:30 am Post subject: Franklin:Just a Sideshow on the Road to Total War |
| Franklin:Just a Sideshow on the Road to Total War
http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=3245
Monday 6th September 2004 :
Larry Franklin: Just a Sideshow on the Road to Total War
By Kurt Nimmo
Isn’t it curious that right smack in the middle of an investigation of Israel spying on its best “friend,” Hamas pulls off back-to-back suicide bombings-after a lull of nearly six months-in Beersheba? Hamas declares the bombing was revenge for Israel’s assassination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi. Rantissi was assassinated on April 17 and Yassin on March 22.
Is there a reason Hamas waited so long to take revenge? Of course there is. Hamas is essentially an Israeli contrivance. It’s used for effect when politically expedient.
Israel “aided Hamas directly-the Israelis wanted to use it as a counterbalance to the PLO,” Tony Cordesman, Middle East analyst for the Center for Strategic Studies, told the UPI’s Richard Sale in 2002. Hamas is a descendant of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamic organization long ago penetrated by the CIA. “There is a long historic alliance between the CIA and the Muslim Brotherhood,” writes Peter Goodgame. “The entire Bin Laden-CIA created ‘mujahideen’ network came from the Muslim Brotherhood.” As we now know, Prince Turki of Saudi intelligence, in cahoots with William Casey of the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI, sent bin Laden to Afghanistan and bankrolled the Services Center (Makhtab al-Khidmat) of the Jordanian Palestinian Abdullah Azzam, in the offices of the World Muslim League and Muslim Brotherhood in Peshawar (see Rashid, Taliban, p.131). After Azzam was assassinated, Makhtab al-Khidmat became al-Qaeda, although bin Laden did not call his organization such.
It should be obvious by now that the CIA and Mossad manufactured a virulent strain of Islamic terrorism for their own purposes. For instance, as an excuse for the Zionists to never make peace with the Palestinians. “What does frighten Sharon,” Yossi Sarid, chairman of the Meretz party, told Haaretz in 2002, “is any prospect or sign of calm or moderation. If the situation were to calm down and stabilize, Sharon would have to return to the negotiating table and, in the wake of pressure from within and without, he would have to raise serious proposals for an agreement. This moment terrifies Sharon and he wants to put it off for as long as he possibly can.”
No doubt Sharon is also keen to deflect attention from the fact that Israel has a long-standing spy operation in America. Of course, considering how the Bushites and Congress bend over backwards to please the Likudites in Israel, such a spy operation may not even be necessary. Regardless, the casual relationship between the Zionist neocons in the Pentagon and the Zionists in Israel-for the moment splashed all over the front page-looks bad for Sharon, especially during the US election cycle. Hamas strikes when the Likudites need a diversion. Same thing for Bush and his facile cave dweller terror threats.
In addition, the latest terror attack in Israel gives Sharon all the more reason to push his 720-kilometre apartheid wall, as Reuters quoted Sharon as saying he would do hours after the attack. Last month the UN General Assembly put forward a resolution demanding Israel dismantle the apartheid wall after the International Court of Justice declared it to be in violation of international law. But then the Likudites and the Bushcons are above international law. International law is to be used as a crowbar against Iran as it scrambles to develop a few nukes, knowing full well what the Zionists in Tel Aviv and Washington have in mind for the Iranian people. As North Korea understands full well, saber-rattling enemies think twice when you have a few nuclear warheads under your belt.
Israel is truly an outlaw nation. Its criminal government is run by racist settlers who are pushing for war against Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinians. Israel realizes it cannot possibly wage war against the Arabs and the Iranians without America’s military prowess-and its large supply of naive bullet-stoppers-so it has spent years undermining the US government and buying off Congress through AIPAC. It has exploited the mental problems of the Christian Zionists-who believe Israeli murder and hegemony are key to their fanatical biblical fantasies-and has worked tirelessly to subvert the highest reaches of the American government by installing the conniving Zionist neocons in the White House and Pentagon. Sharon really does not want John Kerry in the White House, but if push comes to shove Kerry will do in a pinch because he is also an avowed Zionist-some say more of a Zionist than even Bush-and he would be the first Jewish president of the United States (not only was his grandfather born Fritz Kohn, but his brother, Cameron Kerry, converted to Judaism when he married a Jewish woman, Kathy Weinman).
Lost in the chatter about Larry Franklin is the fact the neocons and Sharon are itching to invade Iran, possibly before the election in November. “News of the investigation of Larry Franklin, a middle-level functionary working for the Wolfowitz-Feith-Luti-Shulsky clique in the Pentagon, indicates that we are now approaching a critical choice-point on the road to war with Iran, and towards a synthetic terrorism attack inside the US which would be used as an additional pretext to start such a war,” Webster Griffin Tarpley warns. “War with Iran means a military draft, just for starters. If Iran can close the Straits of Hormuz, it might mean rationing of food and fuel. ... [The] goal is now to establish a neocon fascist dictatorship in the United States, complete with martial law, special tribunals, press and media censorship, and the full pervasive apparatus of the modern police state.” For the Straussian neocons, it would be a dream come true.
The FBI may copy the hard drive of Steve Rosen, AIPAC’s director of foreign policy issues-and it may even arrest a neocon or two (certainly not Douglas Feith or Paul Wolfowitz)-but this momentary sideshow will not put an end to or even slow down appreciably the demented neocon Master Plan for war against Islam in the name of Greater Israel. “This is not an Israeli problem. This time it is a world problem,” Yuval Steinitz, chairman of the Israeli parliament’s foreign affairs and defense committee, said last month. “Iran is seeking to become a world power.” In other words, Iran must be attacked soon, before it can patch together a few nukes and give Israel a run for its money-or, rather, a run for the money weaseled out of increasingly stressed American taxpayers. No number of FBI agents running around Washington, interviewing traitorous neocons and copying hard drives, will slow down the Zionists, not when the entire political establishment of the United States-both sides of the Property Party-are spoony over Arab killing Zionists.
Once again, Sharon has used Hamas-a Frankenstein monster devised by Mossad, as al-Qaeda was devised by the CIA-to not only distract from the minor problem presented by Larry Franklin, but also to remind the timorous and easily bamboozled (American and Israeli citizens alike) that terrorism is alive and well, even if it takes a long and inexplicable hiatus on occasion. Blowing up commuter buses drives home an unrelenting message: there is evil lurking out there, Muslim evil, and it is supported by malevolent mullahs in Tehran, the minions of Arafat in Ramallah, and the crafty cave dwellers of Osama. As Bush says, the war on terrorism cannot be won-terrorism is interminable, perpetual, and unending.
Next year, be it Bush or Kerry, Iran will be invaded.
Kurt Nimmo is a photographer and multimedia developer in Las Cruces, New Mexico. He is the author of Another Day in the Empire: Life in Neoconservative America, a collection of essays published by Dandelion Books. Visit his weblog at KurtNimmo.com.
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/nimmo09012004/
by : Kurt Nimmo
Monday 6th September 2004 | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Oct 20, 2004 4:27 pm Post subject: Latest on the Zionist Neocon Spies at the Pentagon |
| http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=8764
Cloak and Swagger
The Larry Franklin spy probe reveals an escalating fight over control of Iran policy.
By Laura Rozen and Jason Vest
Issue Date: 11.02.04
To Washington’s small and sometimes fractious community of Iran experts, it was becoming obvious: What to do about Iran and its fast-developing nuclear program was set to rival Iraq as the most pressing foreign-policy challenge for the person elected president in 2004. By the spring and early summer of this year, the city was awash in rival Iran task forces and conferences. Some recommended that Washington engage in negotiations with Tehran’s mullahs on the nuclear issue; they drew scorn from the other side, which preached regime change or military strikes.
In late July, as this debate raged, a Pentagon analyst named Larry Franklin telephoned an acquaintance who worked at a pro-Israel lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). The two men knew each other professionally from their long involvement in the Washington Iran and Iraq policy debates. A Brooklyn-born Catholic father of five who put himself through school, earning a doctorate, as an Air Force reservist, Franklin had served as a Soviet intelligence analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency until about a decade ago, when he learned Farsi and became an Iran specialist. At their July meeting, Franklin told the AIPAC employee about his frustration that the U.S. government wasn’t responding aggressively enough to intelligence about hostile Iranian activities in Iraq. As Franklin explained it, Iran had sent all of its Arabic-speaking Iranian agents to southern Iraq, was orchestrating attacks on Iraqi state oil facilities, and had sent other agents to northern Iraq to kill Israelis believed to be operating there. Iran had also transferred its top operative for Afghanistan to the Iranian Embassy in Baghdad. The move, Franklin implied, signified Tehran’s intention to cause more trouble in Iraq.
A couple of weeks after this meeting, in mid-August, the AIPAC official was visited by two FBI agents, who asked him about Franklin. From the line of questioning, it wasn’t clear to the AIPAC official whether Franklin was being investigated by the FBI for possible wrongdoing or if he was simply the subject of a routine background investigation for renewal of his security clearance.
But on August 27, when CBS broke the story that the FBI was close to arresting an alleged “Israeli mole” in the office of the Pentagon’s No. 3 official, Douglas Feith, it became clear that Franklin was in trouble. News reports said that the FBI had evidence that Franklin had passed a classified draft national-security presidential directive (NSPD) on Iran to AIPAC. What’s more, reports said, the FBI wasn’t just interested in Franklin. For the past two years, it had been conducting a counterintelligence probe into whether AIPAC had served as a conduit for U.S. intelligence to Israel, an investigation about which National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was briefed shortly after the Bush administration came into office.
In the flurry of news reports that followed, the scope of the FBI investigation seemed potentially enormous. Citing senior U.S. officials, The Washington Post reported that “the FBI is examining whether highly classified material from the National Security Agency … was also forwarded to Israel,” and that the investigation of Franklin was “coincidental” to that broader FBI probe. Time magazine reported that Franklin had been enlisted by the FBI to place a series of monitored telephone calls (scripted by the FBI) to get possible evidence on others, including allies of Ahmad Chalabi, a favorite of Pentagon neoconservatives. Chalabi was alleged to have told his Iranian intelligence contacts that the United States had broken their communications codes -- a breach that prompted a break in U.S. support for Chalabi last spring -- and the FBI wanted to know who had shared that highly classified information with Chalabi. What’s more, an independent expert on Israeli espionage said he had been interviewed by the FBI in June and in several follow-up calls, and that the scope of the senior FBI investigators’ questioning was broad and extremely detailed.
In the wake of the first news reports, AIPAC strongly denied that any of its employees had ever knowingly received classified U.S. information. Israel also categorically denied that it had conducted intelligence operations against the United States since the case of Jonathan Pollard, a U.S. Navy intelligence analyst who was convicted of spying for Israel in 1987.
At the time the CBS report aired in late August -- incidentally, on the Friday evening before the opening of the Republican national convention -- custody of the Franklin investigation was being transferred from the head of the FBI counterintelligence unit, David Szady, to U.S. Attorney Paul McNulty, a Bush appointee, in Alexandria, Virginia, as the case moved to the grand-jury phase.
And then, in mid-September, news of the Franklin investigation went dark.
* * *
The classified document that Franklin allegedly passed to AIPAC concerned a controversial proposal by Pentagon hard-liners to destabilize Iran. The latest iteration of the national-security presidential directive was drafted by a Pentagon civilian and avid neocon, Michael Rubin, who hoped it would be adopted as official policy by the Bush administration. But in mid-June, Bush’s national-security advisers canceled consideration of the draft, partly in response to resistance from some at the State Department and the National Security Council, according to a recent memo written by Rubin and obtained by The American Prospect. No doubt also contributing to the administration’s decision was the swelling insurgency and chaos of postwar Iraq.
Rubin, in his early 30s, is a relative newcomer to the neoconservative circles in which he is playing an increasingly prominent role. Once the Iraq and Iran desk officer in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans and later a Coalition Provisional Authority adviser in Iraq, these days the Yale-educated Ph.D. hangs his hat at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and serves as editor for controversial Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes’ magazine, The Middle East Quarterly.
In an article published in the Republican-oriented quarterly Ripon Forum in June, Rubin suggests that the administration resolve its Iran waffling by turning against the current regime. “In 1953 and 1979,” he wrote, “Washington supported an unpopular Iranian government against the will of the people. The United States should not make the same mistake three times.” In other words, President Bush should step up his public condemnation of the Iranian regime and break off all contact with it in hopes of spurring a swelling of the Iranian pro-democracy movement. In short, Rubin, like his fellow Iran hawks, urges the administration to make regime change in Iran its official policy.
This invocation of “moral clarity” has a long intellectual pedigree among neoconservatives. It’s the same argument they made to Ronald Reagan about the Soviet Union more than 20 years ago. “If we could bring down the Soviet empire by inspiring and supporting a small percentage of the people,” Michael Ledeen, a chief neoconservative advocate of regime change in Iran and freedom scholar at AEI, recently wrote in the National Review, “surely the chances of successful revolution in Iran are more likely.”
Was it to this end that Franklin was allegedly observed by the FBI passing the draft NSPD on Iran to AIPAC? Was he trying to inform AIPAC, or Israel, about the contents of the draft NSPD? Or rather, and perhaps more plausibly, was he trying to enlist the powerful Washington lobbying organization in advocating for a Iran-destabilization policy? In other words, is the Franklin case really about espionage, or is it a glimpse into the ugly sausage-making process by which Middle East policy gets decided in Washington and, in particular, in the Bush administration?
* * *
Arguably past the apogee of its power, AIPAC nonetheless remains one of Washington’s most influential organizations. Successor to the Eisenhower-era American Zionist Council of Public Affairs, AIPAC came into its own during the Reagan years, thanks largely to the efforts of former Executive Director Thomas Dine. When Dine assumed his post in 1981, the organization had an annual budget of a little more than $1 million, about two dozen employees, and 8,000 members; when he left in 1993, a budget of $15 million was being administered by a staff of 158, and the committee had 50,000 members.
An assiduous networker and fund-raiser, Dine also quickly became indispensable to the Reagan White House as a promoter of various neoconservative foreign-policy initiatives. He also forged alliances between AIPAC and other interests, including the Christian right. (Another former AIPAC executive director, Morris Amitay, has long been active in neoconservative ventures, as both a business partner to Feith and Richard Perle and co-founder, with Michael Ledeen, of the Coalition for Democracy in Iran.) By the mid-’80s, AIPAC had been a prime mover in the defeat or crippling of initiatives and legislators not to its liking, and the passage of billions in grants to Israel. It had also taken on an increasingly pro-Republican (and pro-Likud) tilt.
While many regarded AIPAC’s power as lessened during the Clinton administration, since 2001 AIPAC has been powerful enough that even the Bush administration couldn’t get the committee and its congressional allies to tone down language in a 2002 resolution in support of Israeli military actions against the Palestinians. AIPAC’s 2002 annual conference included 50 senators, 90 representatives, and more than a dozen senior administration officials; this year’s conclave boasted President Bush himself, plus House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and an array of State and Defense department officials.
But while AIPAC is a powerhouse, it is not clear that it would have been the perfect vehicle for the kind of Iran-destabilization lobbying that some in Washington have been pushing. There are a wide variety of Israeli positions on how to deal with Iran. Many of Washington’s Middle East hands who are pro-Israel believe destabilization will not likely succeed, and they fear it will not deal with what they consider the real threat from Iran: nuclear weapons.
“If you mean trying to promote the peaceful overthrow of the regime in Iran, I think the prospects for success are highly uncertain,” says Patrick Clawson, deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a pro-Israel think tank. Pro-Israel activists in Washington want to make sure that the United States considers Iran’s nuclear program first and foremost an American problem, the response to which could include, if necessary, air strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Iran’s nuclear program, one such activist recently told the Prospect, “has to be seen as Washington’s problem.”
There are other competing positions within the Israel-policy community. One Israeli official in Washington this summer for diplomatic meetings discussed regime change in Iran with a reporter from The American Prospect on the condition that his identity not be disclosed. He believes that Iran is ripe for democratic revolution, that it has one of the most pro-Western populations in the region, and that Iranian opposition forces would be electrified by a vigorous show of U.S. presidential support. But he believes that any sort of military intervention in Iran would set back considerably these promising regime-change forces. Still another group of Israeli policy-makers seem more inclined toward a military option, as evidenced by Israel’s well-publicized purchase of 500 “bunker-buster” bombs from the United States in September and its failed efforts to launch a spy satellite to monitor Iran’s nuclear-program developments.
Yet another policy position became evident in Seymour Hersh’s article in The New Yorker in June, in which Hersh reported that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, sensing that the U.S.–created chaos in Iraq could leave an opening for anti-Israel efforts in Iran, was pursuing a “Plan B” that had Israeli operatives covertly training and equipping Kurds in Iraq, Iran, and Syria for possible future covert action to counter any such measures. As Hersh reported: “Israeli intelligence and military operatives are now quietly at work in Kurdistan, providing training for Kurdish commando units and, most important in Israel’s view, running covert operations inside Kurdish areas of Iran and Syria. … Some Israeli operatives have crossed the border into Iran, accompanied by Kurdish commandos, to install sensors and other sensitive devices that primarily target suspected Iranian nuclear facilities.”
The Israeli government insisted the story wasn’t credible, and that it was sourced by Turkey, which is panicked, as ever, about foreign designs on Kurdistan. But a source told the Prospect that Franklin expressed the conviction that the United States has intelligence that affirms Hersh’s report to be largely accurate. A second former U.S. diplomatic official who recently visited the area told the Prospect that there are Israeli intelligence officials operating in Kurdish Iraq as political advisers, and others under the guise of businessmen.
All of which raises questions, like what exactly was in the draft NSPD that Rubin wrote and Franklin allegedly shared with AIPAC? And does the destabilization plan pushed by neoconservatives in the draft NSPD in fact advocate that the United States or its proxies arm the Iranian opposition, including the Kurds, as part of its efforts to pursue regime change?
The public statements by the neoconservatives emphasize that regime change in Iran would not require U.S. military force. Then again, the neoconservatives’ inspiration for the Iran plan has its roots in Reagan-era NSPDs that, while providing nonmilitary support to Poland’s Solidary Movement, also had the CIA aggressively arming and training the Afghan mujahideen, the Nicaraguan Contras, and other anti-communist rebels. There’s also no denying that some of the chief advocates of the Iran regime plot come out of the Pentagon, America’s military command center. And some of those same Iran hawks have discussed the Iran regime-change issue, for instance, with Parisian-based Iran Contra arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar -- not exactly the kind of go-to guy for a nonviolent regime change plan, one might think.
* * *
Whatever the nuances, the neocons are facing one of their biggest challenges in Washington today: persuading the administration to adopt their regime-change policy toward Iran even while their regime-change policy in Iraq appears to be crumbling. Since the Iraq invasion, Feith’s office has come under the intense scrutiny of congressional investigators, investigative journalists, and Democratic critics for its two controversial prewar intelligence units, the Office of Special Plans and the Policy Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group. It was those units that had helped convince the Bush White House of an operational connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda -- a claim since disproved by the independent September 11 commission, among others. Those secretive intelligence units had also been among the administration’s strongest champions of Chalabi, who allegedly told Iranian intelligence agents that the United States had penetrated Iranian communications channels.
An FBI counterintelligence investigation of who had leaked this information to Chalabi was reportedly under way by spring 2004, and many of Chalabi’s neocon allies were incredibly anxious: Misjudgment about Chalabi’s virtues or postwar Iraq planning was one thing; passing secrets to another nation would be an accusation of an altogether graver magnitude.
All of these investigations put Franklin and other neoconservatives associated with Feith at the white-hot center of a raging controversy: What would any second-term Bush foreign policy look like? Would controversial neocon figures like Feith remain in power? Or would it mark the rise of pragmatists and realists? For the neoconservatives, the fight to clear Franklin and themselves has become a fight against their internal administration rivals. And they’re fighting it in classic neocon fashion: dirty and disingenuously.
Among intelligence professionals, it’s hardly a state secret that even nations whose relationships go beyond mere alliance and constitute friendship spy on one another. That’s one reason nations have counterintelligence capabilities as well. As such, investigations of espionage and mishandling of classified documents are not uncommon in Washington; the Bush administration’s Justice Department, for example, has opened investigations to probe allegations of Chinese, Taiwanese, and Saudi espionage, including ones that involve ranking officials at the FBI and State Department. With the investigations into AIPAC and Franklin, the Justice Department has renewed its interest in snooping by our ally, Israel.
Since the Pollard case, U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement sources have revealed to the Prospect that at least six sealed indictments have been issued against individuals for espionage on Israel’s behalf. It’s a testament to the unique relationship between the United States and Israel that those cases were never prosecuted; according to the same sources, both governments ultimately addressed them through diplomatic and intelligence channels rather than air the dirty laundry. A number of career Justice Department and intelligence officials who have worked on Israeli counterespionage told the Prospect of long-standing frustration among investigators and prosecutors who feel that cases that could have been made successfully against Israeli spies were never brought to trial, or that the investigations were shut down prematurely. This history had led to informed speculation that the FBI -- fearing the Franklin probe was heading toward the same silent end -- leaked the story to CBS to keep it in the public eye and give it a fighting chance.
But the pro-Israel lobby and some neoconservatives, fighting for their political lives, have turned the leak on its head. They claim that the AIPAC and Franklin investigations have nothing to do with the substance of the Iran-related leaks. Rather, they say, investigators are going after Jews. In the current probes of Franklin and AIPAC, Michael Rubin has led the strident charge. On September 4, during the media flap over the investigations, Rubin sent an e-mail memo -- obtained by the Prospect -- to a list of friendly parties targeting two of Washington’s more respected mainstream journalists, calling them key players in an “increasing anti-Semitic witch hunt.” The memo fingered Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage as one likely source of the leaks about the investigation, and also urged that, if the accusations had any merit, the White House demand the evidence be made public. “I’m increasingly concerned about the leaks spinning off from the Franklin affair,” Rubin wrote. “It was bad enough when the White House rewarded the June 15, 2003, leak by canceling consideration of the NSPD. It showed the State Department that leaks could supplant real debate. … Bureaucratic rivalries are out of control.” Rubin’s memo showed up in a similar form almost a month later in the op-ed pages of The Washington Times under the byline of National Review staffer Joel Mowbray, and echoes of it can be seen in the pages of the neocon-friendly Jerusalem Post.
Meanwhile, Franklin was involved in some pushback of his own. In late August, the Franklin case was referred from Szady to U.S. Attorney Paul J. McNulty, a Bush-Ashcroft appointee who heads the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. A grand jury was seated on the case in September and had subpoenaed at least some witnesses to testify about Franklin. Then, on October 1, The New York Sun reported that Franklin had fired his court-appointed attorney (whom he had presumably retained for financial reasons), halting grand-jury proceedings while he found new counsel. On October 6, the Los Angeles Times reported that Franklin had stopped cooperating with the FBI entirely. He had hired a high-profile lawyer, Plato Cacheris (of Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen fame), and had rejected a proposed plea agreement whose terms Franklin considers “too onerous,” according to the Los Angeles Times.
Who pushed Franklin -- who for months seemed vulnerable -- to stop cooperating? And who is paying for his expensive new lawyer? At this writing, we do not know. Also unknown is the status of the larger FBI counterintelligence probe of alleged Israeli espionage into which Franklin stumbled. But we do know that his recent decisions would seem to immensely help any of the people against whom he could have testified. At least for now, that’s a round won by a clique intent on pushing freelance crypto-diplomacy to its limits.
Laura Rozen reports on foreign-policy and national-security issues from Washington, D.C. Jason Vest is a Prospect senior correspondent.
Copyright © 2004 by The American Prospect, Inc. Preferred Citation: Laura Rozen and Jason Vest, "Cloak and Swagger", The American Prospect Online, Nov 1, 2004. This article may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission from the author. Direct questions about permissions to permissions@prospect.org. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Oct 20, 2004 5:13 pm Post subject: Serving Two Flags The Bush Neo-Cons and Israel |
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September 3, 2004
Serving Two Flags The Bush Neo-Cons and Israel
By STEPHEN GREEN
[Editors' Note: This is a slightly updated version of a ground-breaking essay exposing the relationship of the neo-cons embedded in the Bush administration with the government of Israel.]
Since 9-11, a small group of "neo-conservatives" in the Administration have effectively gutted--they would say reformed--traditional American foreign and security policy. Notable features of the new Bush doctrine include the pre-emptive use of unilateral force, and the undermining of the United Nations and the principle instruments and institutions of international law....all in the cause of fighting terrorism and promoting homeland security.
Some skeptics, noting the neo-cons' past academic and professional associations, writings and public utterances, have suggested that their underlying agenda is the alignment of U.S. foreign and security policies with those of Ariel Sharon and the Israeli right wing. The administration's new hard line on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict certainly suggests that, as perhaps does the destruction, with U.S. soldiers and funds, of the military capacity of Iraq, and the current belligerent neo-con campaign against the other two countries which constitute a remaining counterforce to Israeli military hegemony in the region--Iran and Syria.
Have the neo-conservatives--many of whom are senior officials in the Defense Department, National Security Council and Office of the Vice President--had dual agendas, while professing to work for the internal security of the United States against its terrorist enemies?
A review of the internal security backgrounds of some of the best known among them strongly suggests the answer.
Dr. Stephen Bryen and Colleagues
In April of 1979, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Robert Keuch recommended in writing that Bryen, then a staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, undergo a grand jury hearing to establish the basis for a prosecution for espionage. John Davitt, then Chief of the Justice Department's Internal Security Division, concurred.
The evidence was strong. Bryen had been overheard in the Madison Hotel Coffee Shop, offering classified documents to an official of the Israeli Embassy in the presence of the director of AIPAC, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee. It was later determined that the Embassy official was Zvi Rafiah, the Mossad station chief in Washington. Bryen refused to be poly-graphed by the FBI on the purpose and details of the meeting; whereas the person who'd witnessed it agreed to be poly-graphed and passed the test.
The Bureau also had testimony from a second person, a staff member of the Foreign Relations Committee, that she had witnessed Bryen in his Senate office with Rafiah, discussing classified documents that were spread out on a table in front of an open safe in which the documents were supposed to be secured. Not long after this second witness came forward, Bryen's fingerprints were found on classified documents he'd stated in writing to the FBI he'd never had in his possession....the ones he'd allegedly offered to Rafiah.
Nevertheless, following the refusal of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to grant access by Justice Department officials to files which were key to the investigation, Keuch's recommendation for a grand jury hearing, and ultimately the investigation itself, were shut down. This decision, taken by Philip Heymann, Chief of Justice's Criminal Division, was a bitter disappointment to Davitt and to Joel Lisker, the lead investigator on the case, as expressed to this writer. A complicating factor in the outcome was that Heymann was a former schoolmate and fellow U.S. Supreme Court Clerk of Bryen's attorney, Nathan Lewin.
Bryen was asked to resign from his Foreign Relations Committee post shortly before the investigation was concluded in late 1979. For the following year and a half, he served as Executive Director of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), and provided consulting services to AIPAC.
In April, 1981, the FBI received an application by the Defense Department for a Top Secret security clearance for Dr. Bryen . Richard Perle, who had just been nominated as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy, was proposing Bryen as his Deputy Assistant Secretary! Within six months, with Perle pushing hard, Bryen received both Top Secret-SCI (sensitive compartmented information) and Top Secret-"NATO/COSMIC" clearances.
Loyalty, Patriotism and Character
The Bryen investigation became in fact the most contentious issue in Perle's own confirmation hearings in July, 1981. Under aggressive questioning from Sen. Jeremiah Denton, Perle held his ground: "I consider Dr. Bryen to be an individual impeccable integrity....I have the highest confidence in [his] loyalty, patriotism and character."
Several years later in early 1988, Israel was in the final stages of development of a prototype of its ground based "Arrow" anti-ballistic missile. One element the program lacked was "klystrons", small microwave amplifiers which are critical components in the missile's high frequency, radar-based target acquisition system which locks on to in-coming missiles. In 1988, klystrons were among the most advanced developments in American weapons research, and their export was of course strictly proscribed.
The DOD office involved in control of defense technology exports was the Defense
Technology Security Administration (DTSA) within Richard Perle's ISP office. The Director (and founder) of DTSA was Perle's Deputy, Dr. Stephen Bryen. In May of 1988, Bryen sent a standard form to Richard Levine, a Navy tech transfer official, informing him of intent to approve a license for Varian Associates, Inc. of Beverly, Massachusetts to export to Israel four klystrons. This was done without the usual consultations with the tech transfer officials of the Army and Air Force, or ISA (International Security Affairs) or DSAA (Defense Security Assistance Agency.
The answer from Levine was "no". He opposed granting the license, and asked for a meeting on the matter of the appropriate (above listed) offices. At the meeting, all of the officials present opposed the license. Bryen responded by suggesting that he go back to the Israelis to ask why these particular items were needed for their defense. Later, after the Israeli Government came back with what one DOD staffer described as "a little bullshit answer", Bryen simply notified the meeting attendees that an acceptable answer had been received, the license granted, and the klystrons released.
By now, however, the dogs were awake. Then Assistant Secretary of Defense for ISA, (and now Deputy Secretary of State) Richard Armitage sent Dr. Bryen a letter stating that the State Department (which issues the export licenses) should be informed of DOD's "uniformly negative" reaction to the export of klystrons to Israel. Bryen did as instructed , and the license was withdrawn.
In July, Varian Associates became the first U.S. corporation formally precluded from contracting with the Defense Department. Two senior colleague in DOD who wish to remain anonymous have confirmed that this attempt by Bryen to obtain klystrons for his friends was not unusual, and was in fact "standard operating procedure" for him, recalling numerous instances when U.S. companies were denied licenses to export sensitive technology, only to learn later that Israeli companies subsequently exported similar (U.S. derived) weapons and technology to the intended customers/governments.
In late1988, Bryen resigned from his DOD post, and for a period worked in the
private sector with a variety of defense technology consulting firms.
Bryen and the China Commission
In 1997, "Defense Week" reported (05/27/97) that, ...." the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence reaffirmed that U.S.- derived technology from the cancelled [Israeli] Lavi fighter project is being used on China's new F-10 fighter." The following year, "Jane's Intelligence Review" reported (11/01/98) the transfer by Israel to China of the Phalcon airborne early warning and control system, the Python air-combat missile, and the F-10 fighter aircraft, containing "state-of-the-art U.S. electronics."
Concern about the continuing transfer of advanced U.S. arms technology to the burgeoning Chinese military program led, in the last months of the Clinton Administration, to the creation of a Congressional consultative body called the United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission. The charter for the "The China Commission", as it is commonly known, states that its purpose is to...."monitor, investigate, and report to the Congress on the national security implications of the bilateral trade and economic relationship between the United States and the Peoples Republic of China." The charter also reflects an awareness of the problem of "back door" technology leaks: "The Commission shall also take into account patterns of trade and transfers through third countries to the extent practicable."
It was almost predictable that in the new Bush Administration, Dr. Stephen Bryen would find his way to the China Commission. In April 2001, with the support of Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Senator Richard Shelby (R-Alabama) Bryen was appointed a Member of the Commission by Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert. Last August, his appointment was extended through December of 2005.
Informed that Bryen had been appointed to the Commission, the reaction of one former
senior FBI counter-intelligence official was: "My God, that must mean he has a "Q
clearance!" (A "Q" clearance, which must be approved by the Department of Energy, is the designation for a Top Secret codeword clearance to access nuclear technology.)
Michael Ledeen, Consultant on Chaos
If Stephen Bryen is the military technology guru in the neo-con pantheon, Michael Ledeen is currently its leading theorist, historian, scholar and writer. It states in the website of his consulting firm, Benador Associates, that he is "...one of the world's leading authorities on intelligence, contemporary history and international affairs" and that...."As Ted Koppel puts it, 'Michael Ledeen is a Renaissance man....in the tradition of Machiavelli.'" Perhaps the following will add some color and texture to this description.
In 1983, on the recommendation of Richard Perle, Ledeen was hired at the Department of Defense as a consultant on terrorism. His immediate supervisor was the Principle Assistant Secretary for International Security Affairs, Noel Koch. Early in their work together, Koch noticed with concern Ledeen's habit of stopping by in his (Koch's) outer office to read classified materials. When the two of them took a trip to Italy, Koch learned from the CIA station there that when Ledeen had lived in Rome previously, as correspondent for The New Republic, he'd been carried in Agency files as an agent of influence of a foreign government: Israel.
Some time after their return from the trip, Ledeen approached his boss with a request for his assistance in obtaining two highly classified CIA reports which he said were held by the FBI. He'd hand written on a piece of paper the identifying "alpha numeric designators". These identifiers were as highly classified as the reports themselves....which raised in Koch's mind the question of who had provided them to Ledeen if he hadn't the clearances to obtain them himself. Koch immediately told his executive assistant that Ledeen was to have no further access to classified materials in the office, and Ledeen just ceased coming to "work".
In early 1986, however, Koch learned that Ledeen had joined NSC as a consultant, and sufficiently concerned about the internal security implications of the behavior of his former aide, arranged to be interviewed by two FBI agents on the matter. After a two hour debriefing, Koch was told that it was only Soviet military intelligence penetration that interested the Bureau. The follow-on interviews that were promised by the agents just never occurred.
Koch thought this strange, coming as it did just months after the arrest of Naval intelligence analyst Jonathan Pollard on charges of espionage for Israel. Frustrated, Koch wrote up in detail the entire saga of Ledeen's DOD consultancy, and sent it to the Office of Senator Charles Grassley, then a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which had oversight responsibility for, inter alia, the FBI.
A former senior FBI counter-intelligence official was surprised and somewhat skeptical, when told of Koch's unsuccessful attempts to interest the Bureau in an investigation of Ledeen, noting that in early 1986, the Justice Department was in fact already engaged in several on-going, concurrent investigations of Israeli espionage and theft of American military technology.
Machiavelli in Tel Aviv
Koch's belated attempts to draw official attention to his former assistant were too late, in any event, for within a very few weeks of leaving his DOD consultancy in late 1984, Ledeen had found gainful (classified) employment at the National Security Council (NSC). In fact, according to a now declassified chronology prepared for the Senate/House Iran-
Contra investigation, within calendar 1984 Ledeen was already suggesting to Oliver
North, his new boss at NSC...." that Israeli contacts might be useful in obtaining release of the U.S. hostages in Lebanon." Perhaps significantly, that is the first entry in the "Chronology of Events: U.S.- Iran Dialogue", dated November 18,1986, prepared for the Joint House-Senate Hearings in the Iran-Contra Investigations.
What is so striking about the Ledeen-related documents which are part of the Iran-Contra Collection of the National Security Archive, is how thoroughly the judgements of Ledeen's colleagues at NSC mirrored, and validated, Noel Koch's internal security concerns about his consultant.
-- on April 9, 1985, NSC Middle East analyst Donald Fortier wrote to National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane that NSC staffers were agreed that Ledeen's role in the scheme should be limited to carrying messages to Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres regarding plans to cooperate with Israel on the crisis within Iran, and specifically that he should not be entrusted to ask Peres for detailed operational information;
- on June 6, 1985, Secretary of State George Shultz wrote to McFarlane that, "Israel's record of dealings with Iran since the fall of the Shah and during the hostage crisis [show] that Israel's agenda is not the same as ours. Consequently doubt whether an intelligence relationship such as what Ledeen has in mind would be one which we could fully rely upon and it could seriously skew our own perception and analysis of the Iranian scene."
- on 20 August, 1985, the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense informed Ledeen by memorandum that his security clearance had been downgraded from Top Secret-SCI to Secret.
- on 16 January, 1986, Oliver North recommended to John Poindexter "for [the] security of the Iran initiative" that Ledeen be asked to take periodic polygraph examinations.
- later in January, on the 24th, North wrote to Poindexter of his suspicion that Ledeen, along with Adolph Schwimmer and Manucher Ghorbanifar, might be making money personally on the sale of arms to Iran, through Israel.
During the June 23-25, 1987 joint hearings of the House and Senate select committees' investigation of Iran-Contra, Noel Koch testified that he became suspicious when he learned that the price which Ledeen had negotiated for the sale to the Israeli Government of basic TOW missiles was $2,500 each.
Upon inquiring with his DOD colleagues, he learned the lowest price the U.S. had ever received for the sale of TOWs to a foreign government had been a previous sale to Israel for $6,800 per copy. Koch, professing in his testimony that he and his colleagues at DOD were not in favor of the sale to begin with, determined that he--Koch--should renegotiate the $2,500 price so that it could be defended by the "defense management system." In a clandestine meeting on a Sunday in the first class lounge of the TWA section of National Airport, Koch met over a cup of coffee with an official from the Israeli purchasing mission in New York, and agreed on a price of $4,500 per missile, nearly twice what Ledeen had "negotiated" in Israel.
There are two possibilities here--one would be a kickback, as suspected by his NSC colleagues, and the other would be that Michael Ledeen was effectively negotiating for Israel, not the U.S.
Like his friend Stephen Bryen (they've long served together on the JINSA Board of Advisors) Ledeen has been out of government service since the late1980s....until the present Bush Administration. He, like Bryen, is presently a serving member on the China Commission and, with the support of DOD Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith, he
has since 2001 been employed as a consultant for the Office of Special Plans OSP). Both involve the handling of classified materials and require high-level security clearances.
The Principals : Perle, Wolfowitz and Feith
One might wonder how, with security histories like these, Messrs. Bryen and Ledeen have managed to get second and third chances to return to government in highly classified positions.
And the explanation is that they, along with other like-minded neo-conservatives, have in the current Bush Administration friends in very high places. In particular, Bryen and Ledeen have been repeatedly boosted into defense/security posts by current Defense Policy Council member and former chairman Richard Perle, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith.
As previously mentioned, Perle in 1981 as DOD Assistant Secretary for International Security Policy (ISP) hired Bryen as his Deputy. That same year, Wolfowitz as head of the State Department Policy Planning Staff hired Ledeen as a Special Advisor. In 2001 Douglas Feith as DOD Under Secretary for Policy hired, or approved the hiring of Ledeen as a consultant for the Office of Special Plans.
The principals have also assisted each other down through the years. Frequently. In 1973 Richard Perle used his (and Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson's) influence as a senior staff member of the Senate Armed Services Committee to help Wolfowitz obtain a job with the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. In 1982, Perle hired Feith in ISP as his Special Counsel, and then as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Negotiations Policy. In 2001, DOD Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz helped Feith obtain his appointment as Undersecretary for Policy. Feith then appointed Perle as Chairman of the Defense Policy Board. In some cases, this mutual assistance carries risks, as for instance when Perle's hiring of Bryen as his Deputy in ISP became an extremely contentious issue in Perle's own Senate appointment hearings as Assistant Secretary.
Every appointment/hiring listed above involved classified work for which high-level security clearances and associated background checks by the FBI were required. When the level of the clearance is not above generic Top Secret, however, the results of that background check are only seen by the hiring authority. And in the event, if the appointee were Bryen or Ledeen and the hiring authority were Perle, Wolfowitz or Feith, the appointee(s) need not have worried about the findings of the background check. In the case of Perle hiring Bryen as his deputy in 1981, for instance, documents released in 1983 under the Freedom of Information Act indicate that the Department provided extraordinarily high clearances for Bryen without having reviewed more than a small portion of his 1978-79 FBI investigation file.
RICHARD PERLE: A HABIT OF LEAKING
Perle came to Washington for the first time in early 1969, at the age of 28, to work for a neo-con think tank called the "Committee to Maintain a Prudent Defense Policy." Within months, Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson offered Perle a position on his staff, working with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
And within months after that--less than a year--Perle was embroiled in his first security inquiry. An FBI wiretap authorized for the Israeli embassy in Washington picked up Perle discussing with an Embassy official classified information which he said had been supplied by a staff member of the National Security Council. An NSC/FBI investigation to identify the staff member quickly focused upon Helmut Sonnenfeldt. The latter had been previously investigated in 1967 while he was a staff member of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, for suspected to an Israeli Government official of a classified document concerning the commencement of the 1967 war in the Middle East.
Perle's second brush with the law occurred in 1978. He was the recipient of a classified CIA report on alleged past Soviet treaty violations. The leaker (and author) of the report was CIA analyst David Sullivan. CIA Director Stansfield Turner was incensed at the unauthorized disclosure, but before he could fire Sullivan, the latter quit. Turner urged Sen. Jackson to fire Perle, but he was let off with a reprimand. Jackson then added insult to injury by immediately hiring Sullivan to his staff. Sullivan and Perle became close friends and co-conspirators, and together established an informal right-wing network which they called "the Madison Group," after their usual meeting place in--you might have guessed--the Madison Hotel Coffee Shop.
In 1981, shortly before being appointed Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy (ISP)--with responsibility, inter alia, for monitoring of U.S. defense technology exports, Richard Perle was paid a substantial consulting fee by arms manufacturer Tamares, Ltd. of Israel. Shortly after assuming that post, Perle wrote a letter to the Secretary of the Army urging evaluation and purchase of 155 mm. shells manufactured by Soltam, Ltd. After leaving the ISP job in 1987, he worked for Soltam.
PAUL WOLFOWITZ : A WELL PLACED FRIEND
In 1973, in the dying days of the Nixon Administration, Wolfowitz was recruited to work for the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA). There was a certain irony in the appointment, for in the late 1960's, as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, Wolfowitz had been a student and protege of Albert Wohlstetter, an influential, vehement opponent of any form of arms control or disarmament, vis a vis the Soviets. Wolfowitz also brought to ACDA a strong attachment to Israel's security, and a certain confusion about his obligation to U.S. national security.
In 1978, he was investigated for providing a classified document on the proposed sale of U.S. weapons to an Arab government, to an Israel Government official, through an AIPAC intermediary. An inquiry was launched and dropped, however, and Wolfowitz continued to work at ACDA until 1980.
In 1990, after a decade of work with the State Department in Washington and abroad, Wolfowitz was brought into DoD as Undersecretary for Policy by then Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney. Two years later, in 1992, the first Bush Administration launched a broad inter-departmental investigation into the export of classified technology to China. O particular concern at the time was the transfer to China by Israel of U.S. Patriot missiles and/or technology. During that investigation, in a situation very reminiscent of the Bryen/Varian Associates/klystrons affair two years earlier, the Pentagon discovered that Wolfowitz's office was promoting the export to Israel of advanced AIM-9M air-to-air missiles.
In this instance, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, aware that Israel had already been caught selling the earlier AIM 9-L version of the missile to China in violation of a written agreement with the U.S. on arms re-sales, intervened to cancel the proposed AIM (-M deal. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs at the time was General Colin Powell, currently Secretary of State.
Wolfowitz continued to serve as DoD Undersecretary for Policy until 1993, well into the Clinton Administration. After that, however, like most of the other prominent neo-conservatives, he was relegated to trying to assist Israel from the sidelines for the remainder of Clinton's two terms. In 1998, Wolfowitz was a co-signer of a public letter to the President organized by the "Project for the New American Century." The letter, citing Saddam Hussein's continued possession of "weapons of mass destruction," argued for military action to achieve regime change and demilitarization of Iraq. Clinton wasn't impressed, but a more gullible fellow would soon come along.
And indeed, when George W. Bush assumed the Presidency in early 2001, Wolfowitz got his opportunity. Picked as Donald Rumsfeld's Deputy Secretary at DoD, he prevailed upon his boss to appoint Douglas Feith as Undersecretary for Policy. On the day after the destruction of the World Trade Center, September 12, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz raised the possibility of an immediate attack on Iraq during an emergency NSC meeting. The following day, Wolfowitz conducted the Pentagon press briefing, and interpreted the
President's statement on "ending states who sponsor terrorism" as a call for regime change in Iraq. Israel wasn't mentioned.
Douglas Feith: Hardliner, Security Risk
Bush's appointment of Douglas Feith as DoD Undersecretary for Policy in early 2001 must have come as a surprise, and a harbinger, even to conservative veterans of the Reagan and George H.W. Bush Administration. Like Michael Ledeen, Feith is a prolific writer and well-known radical conservative. Moreover, he was not being hired as a DoD consultant, like Ledeen, but as the third most senior United States Defense Department official. Feith was certainly the first, and probably the last high Pentagon official to have publicly opposed the Biological Weapons Convention (in 1986), the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty (in 1988), the Chemical Weapons Convention (in 1997), the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (in 2000), and all of the various Middle East Peace agreements, including Oslo (in 2000).
Even more revealing perhaps, had the transition team known of it, was Feith's view of "technology cooperation," as expressed in a 1992 Commentary article: "It is in the interest of 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 promote peace thereby."
What Douglas Feith had neglected to say, in this last article, was that he thought that individuals could decide on their own whether the sharing of classified information was "technical cooperation," an unauthorized disclosure, or a violation of U.S. Code 794c, the "Espionage Act."
Ten years prior to writing the Commentary piece, Feith had made such a decision on his own. At the time, March of 1972, Feith was a Middle East analyst in the Near East and South Asian Affairs section of the National Security Council. Two months before, in January, Judge William Clark had replaced Richard Allen as National Security Advisor, with the intention to clean house. A total of nine NSC staff members were fired, including Feith, who'd only been with the NSC for a year. But Feith was fired because he'd been the object of an inquiry into whether he'd provided classified material to an official of the Israeli Embassy in Washington. The FBI had opened the inquiry. And Clark, who had served in U.S. Army counterintelligence in the 1950's, took such matters very seriously.....more seriously, apparently, than had Richard Allen.
Feith did not remain unemployed for long, however. Richard Perle, who was in 1982 serving in the Pentagon as Assistant secretary for International Security Policy, hired him on the spot as his "Special Counsel," and then as his Deputy. Feith worked at ISP until 1986, when he left government service to form a small but influential law firm, then based in Israel.
In 2001, Douglas Feith returned to DoD as Donald Rumsfeld's Undersecretary for Policy, and it was in his office that "OSP", the Office of Special Plans, was created. It was OSP that originated--some say from whole cloth--much of the intelligence that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld have used to justify the attack on Iraq, to miss-plan the post-war reconstruction there, and then to point an accusing finger at Iran and Syria.....all to the absolute delight of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Reason for Concern
Many individuals with strong attachments to foreign countries have served the U.S. Government with honor and distinction, and will certainly do so in the future. The highest officials in our executive and legislative branches should, however, take great care when appointments are made to posts involving sensitive national security matters. Appointees should be rejected who have demonstrated, in their previous government service, a willingness to sacrifice U.S. national security interests for those of another country, or an inability to distinguish one from the other.
Stephen Green is a freelance journalist in Vermont. He can be reached at: green@counterpunch.org | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
