| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Jul 29, 2004 10:19 am Post subject: Zionists who Deceived US into Iraq are at it again |
| 9. Eric Margolis : Those who deceived America into attacking Iraq may be at it again
Toronto Sun Sun, July 25, 2004
Did Iran help al-Qaida stage the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States? Perhaps, suggested the U.S. 9/11 commission. It claimed Iran allowed eight al-Qaida future airplane hijackers to pass through Iran from Afghanistan between seven and 11 months prior to the attacks on America.
Unnamed senior Bush administration officials also claim Iran proposed collaborating with al-Qaida in 2000, but was rejected by Osama bin Laden. "Maybe we attacked the wrong country," one of the dimmer lights in Congress ruefully observed.
There has been no real evidence produced that Iran knew of the 9/11 attacks or assisted them. In fact, the Bush administration has still never produced the white paper promised by Colin Powell in late 2001 proving bin Laden and al-Qaida were behind 9/11.
Why would Iran, knowing it was in Bush's gunsights, join in a monstrous terrorist attack that, if linked to Tehran, could have conceivably brought U.S. nuclear retaliation?
This column has long predicted the Bush administration would orchestrate a pre-election crisis over Iran designed to whip up patriotic fervour in the U.S. and distract public and media attention from the Iraq fiasco.
Growing clamour
The growing clamour over Iran's nuclear intentions, with rumblings about air strikes against Iran's reactors in the fall, may prove to be a part of just such a manufactured crisis.
Remember, these latest fevered claims about Iran come from the same "reliable intelligence sources" and neo-conservative hawks who insisted Iraq had a vast arsenal of weapons of mass destruction that threatened the U.S., with intimate links to al-Qaida.
The Iran-Afghan border is 1,000 km of wild, broken terrain that is extremely difficult to police. Large numbers of smugglers cross this border on countless hidden trails, bringing hashish and gems into Iran. The U.S., with fleets of planes, helicopters and sensors, cannot stop a flood of undocumented Mexicans crossing its own southwestern borders.
Why should the poorly equipped Iranians do any better?
Didn't these same 9/11 hijackers also enter the U.S. unchallenged? Of course. They slipped unnoticed into Iran and the U.S. No one knew their intentions. This is the most likely explanation.
Iran does not have a unified government. This nation of 72.5 million is afflicted by feuding factions that have produced a state of political chaos. Iran has certainly been involved in acts of terrorism, notably against Jews in Argentina.
And militants from the intelligence service or Pasdarann (Revolutionary Guards), might have let al-Qaida mujahidin slip across the border without Tehran's knowledge.
But far more important are two key facts that most media and the government aren't telling you.
First, Iran and al-Qaida were bitter enemies.
In Afghanistan, al-Qaida ardently backed the Pushtun-dominated, Sunni Taliban movement, which hated Shia as heretics and killed large numbers of them. Shia Iran (and Russia) armed and supported the Taliban's greatest foe, Ahmad Shah Massoud and his Northern Alliance, composed of Dari (a Persian dialect)-speaking Tajiks, Afghan communists, and Shia. Massoud was a long-time collaborator with Soviet/Russian intelligence.
After the Taliban killed a group of Iranian intelligence agents, Iran almost invaded Afghanistan to overthrow them.
Just before 9/11, al-Qaida assassinated Massoud.
Iran quietly aided the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan that overthrew the Taliban, and jailed scores of al-Qaida members, including one of bin Laden's sons.
Active Iranian co-operation with al-Qaida seems illogical. Of course my enemy's enemy is my friend, and collaboration was theoretically possible, but Iran derived no benefit whatever from the 9/11 attacks -- quite the contrary.
Second, the Bush administration and former Clinton officials are trading accusations that the other was responsible for failing to take action against al-Qaida and its Taliban allies prior to 9/11.
But what no one admits is that both administrations sent millions in aid to the Taliban until four months before 9/11.
http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/Columnists/Toronto/Eric_Margolis/2004/07/25/556378.html
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10. US Involved In Secret Suspects' Deportation
CAIRO, July 25 (IslamOnline.net) - US security agents have been involved in forcible secret deportation of "terror suspects" before and after the 9/11 attacks from different countries to their homelands, where they can be detained or interrogated without all the legal protections available in their host countries, a US paper revealed Sunday, July 25.
CIA officials have testified in Congress about engaging in 70 such operations before September 2001, but the case of two Egyptians deported on a special US plane from Sweden to Egypt in the wake of the terrorist attacks indicated that more "extraordinary renditions" have taken place, the Washington Post said.
Quoting a police officer at Stockholm's Bromma Airport, the daily said Ahmad Agiza and Mohammad Zery were guarded by two CIA officers and a half-dozen hooded agents along with two uniformed Swedish officers on December 18, 2001.
Paul Forell, the police officer on duty at that night, recalled how the hooded agents cut off the clothes of the two Egyptians with scissors, changed them into red overalls and bound them with handcuffs and leg irons.
"When they gave orders to each other, they kept their voices down. It seemed like they had done this before. They were very professional," he remarked.
According to a declassified Swedish memo, the pair, asylum seekers, had been grabbed on the street without warning by 5 p.m. and were in the air by 9:47 p.m.
Their lawyers were not officially notified of their expulsion until after a US-registered Cairo-bound Gulfstream V jet had departed, to prevent them from filing appeals, the Post added.
The US involvement remained a secret until two months ago, when a Swedish television program broadcast a documentary reporting that US agents assisted in the apprehension of the two and that the plane chartered to Cairo had been used in a previous rendition case in Pakistan.
Away From Home
Critics, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Post that the US administration is engaging in practices abroad that would be illegal and unconstitutional at home.
The fate of the two Egyptian men offers a rare glimpse into such a case, as well as an example of what can go wrong, said the daily.
Records and interviews show that the agreement between Swedish and Egyptian authorities -- that the pair should receive human treatment --was broken almost as soon as the two arrived in Cairo.
Their lawyers, relatives and human rights groups said there is credible evidence that they were regularly subjected to electric shocks and other forms of torture.
Agiza's mother, Hamida Shalaby, said he told her during separate visits that he was given electric shocks and that prison doctors tried to cover up scars on his body by applying a special cream.
"He couldn't even pick up his arms to hug me," she said in an interview. "He was very slow and very tired and very weak."
Agiza was sentenced to 25 years in prison by a military tribunal after a trial that lasted less than six hours, while Zery spent almost two years behind bars without being charged, the American daily said.
Embarrassed
Swedish government officials now say the forced deportation was an embarrassing mistake.
The government has called for an international investigation, possibly under the authority of the United Nations, into how the two men were treated.
Separately, the Swedish parliament has opened an internal probe to determine the exact role played by US intelligence agents, according to the Post.
"We have taken the allegations seriously, very seriously," Deputy Foreign Minister Hans Dahlgren said in an interview in Stockholm.
"We have asked for an independent, international investigation. . . . It would be in the best interests of the government of Egypt to do this " if the allegations are false.
The Swedish government has released previously classified documents that confirm the American role.
In a memo, dated February 7, 2002, a partial reconstruction of the case by the Swedish security police noted that "the American side" had offered to help in the deportation "by lending a plane for the transport".
In addition, lawyers from the Swedish Justice Ministry wrote in a separate memo on April 12, 2002 that "the transport from Sweden to Egypt was carried out with the help of American authorities."
Advocacy groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have called on the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to open an inquiry into the case.
"The Swedish government is facing a very hard situation now," said Hafez Abu-Seada, secretary general of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights.
"Their reputation as a leading human rights nation is at stake."
In a report entitled "Ending Secret Detention", the American Human Rights First said the United States has more than 24 world detention camps , at least half of them operate in total secrecy, where the abuse of detainees is "inevitable".
Also, the Observer reported on Sunday, June 13, that Washington and its allies are running a wanton global network of detention camps allowing the US to fly terror suspects to other countries where they are tortured for information.
http://www.islam-online.net/English/News/2004-07/25/article03.shtml
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11. Editorial: Business of war / How much of the Iraq mission is about profit?
Saturday, July 24, 2004
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Ever since military suppliers gouged the nascent American government on gunpowder and uniforms during the Revolutionary War, this nation has had an uncomfortable relationship with businessmen who profit excessively from conflict. We're proudly a nation of entrepreneurs, but if we've learned anything it is that free enterprise becomes awfully expensive to taxpayers when it is allowed to take undue advantage of the public largesse during wartime.
That was true during the Civil War, the Spanish-American War and both world wars of the 20th century. It is also true today with the war in Iraq -- the no-bid, cost-plus contracts of Halliburton Corp., formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, being one example.
The Los Angeles Times recently opened a window on a new type of war profiteer: the insiders who served as public advocates for the Middle East invasion and who are now making money by guiding others to the burgeoning "business opportunities" in rebuilding postwar Iraq and in homeland security.
One prominent example cited by the Times is R. James Woolsey, the ubiquitous CNN commentator who served as CIA director from 1993 to 1995 and now works for two firms that do business in Iraq and has an interest in another that provides security and anti-terrorism services.
Mr. Woolsey, the Times says, "is part of a small group that shows with unusual clarity the interlocking nature of the way the insider system can work. Moving in the same social circles, often sitting together on government panels and working with like-minded think tanks and advocacy groups, they wrote letters to the White House urging military action in Iraq, formed organizations that pressed for invasion and pushed legislation that authorized aid to exile groups."
Since federal conflict-of-interest laws don't apply to former officials or informal advisers, this sort of activity is perfectly legal. That it works to blur the distinction between public and private interests does not seem to matter much to those in charge in Washington today.
Unlike the well-known Mr. Woolsey, many who practice this new trade do so in relative anonymity. They include people like Randy Scheunemann, former adviser to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who helped draft legislation that funneled $98 million in tax dollars to Iraqi exile groups -- the same folks who later provided misleading information used to justify the U.S. invasion.
Mr. Scheunemann, the founding president of a group called the Committee for Liberation of Iraq, now advises former Soviet bloc states, the Times says, on getting reconstruction business in Iraq. As we know, much of that reconstruction will be financed directly by U.S. taxpayers.
There is little doubt that routing a tyrant, building a democracy and preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction make more saleable rallying cries for war than, say, "making money for my friends." But the American people have every right to ask how much of the Iraq adventure can be ascribed to altruism and how much to the profit motive.Kirk Walters/The Blade, Toledo
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/04206/350956.stm
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Weekend Edition
July 24 / 25, 2004
12. PATRICK COCKBURN : "Don't Enter or You Will be Shot"--The Struggle for Iraq is Just Beginning
It is tempting to see the so-called handover of power from the US to the Iraqi interim government on 28 June as a fake. The few attending the ceremony at which sovereignty was legally transferred had to pass through four American checkpoints. Iyad Allawi, the new prime minister, worked for years for MI6 and the CIA. He is kept in power by 138,000 US troops. The ministers in the new government live isolated from the rest of Baghdad in palatial villas inside a secure compound. Many of them have spent most of their lives outside Iraq.
The pre-trial hearings for Saddam Hussein and his henchmen had the same artificial flavour -- not allayed by US censorship, which removed pictures of Saddam in chains from the footage, as well as the legal submissions of his 11 senior lieutenants. The censors tried to excise the moment when Saddam said ‘this is theatre -- Bush is the real criminal,’ and failed only because they didn’t understand how the sound equipment worked. US officials made little effort to hide the fact that they were running the trial, and that the target audience wasn’t Iraqi. The only foreign reporters allowed in were American and the timing of the hearing coincided with US breakfast television shows.
What America does in Iraq is determined by November’s presidential election as never before. If George Bush can pretend for four months that he has Iraq under control then he may well be re-elected. If disasters from Iraq continue to dominate front pages then he will probably lose. In April 150 soldiers were killed: the White House now needs to show voters that casualties are on the way down.
The appointment of Allawi is itself a demonstration of how far the balance of power in Iraq has swung against the US over the last year. Twelve months ago Paul Bremer, the US viceroy, was blithely talking about continuing the occupation for two years. His first act on arriving in Iraq was to disband the Iraqi army and security forces. The state machinery was deliberately dissolved. Direct imperial rule seemed feasible to Washington. Young Republicans with the right connections to the White House or the Bush family were sent off to rule Iraq like the offspring of British gentry dispatched to loot India in the 18th century. A 24-year-old Republican who applied for a job at the White House was instead sent to Iraq to reopen the Baghdad stock exchange. It stayed shut. At first Bremer planned only an advisory role for even such a tame organisation as the Iraqi Governing Council -- until last summer, when American losses began to mount.
Inside the heavily protected Green Zone, the US enclave in the heart of Baghdad, Bremer and the uniformed American military were cut off from what was happening on the ground. US generals claimed at briefings that the number of hostile incidents was falling. I began to wonder why, if there were only sixteen or so attacks on American soldiers a day, I seemed regularly to witness a quarter of these whenever I drove out of Baghdad. American soldiers in the field told me that they no longer reported guerrilla attacks unless there had been US casualties. It was a bureaucratic hassle to make out the reports and their commanders were keen to hear that resistance was petering out.
By November it was impossible to conceal the bad news any longer. I was in the dusty truck-stop city of Falluja, west of Baghdad, when we heard that a giant Chinook helicopter had been shot down. We drove across an old iron bridge over the Euphrates to look at the wreckage. On the way we saw a burned out vehicle that had been hit by a rocket; the American contractors inside had been killed. On the far side of the river, farmers were handing round twisted pieces of metal from the helicopter’s fuselage: 16 soldiers had died. Shortly after that incident, the White House began making its plans to dilute full imperial control by installing the interim government.
The American problem was simple -- though there is no evidence that Bremer and the US military saw it that way. Iraqi politics revolve around the relations between the three main communities: Sunni Muslim Arabs, Shia Arabs and Kurds. The base for Saddam’s regime was the Sunni community from the towns and cities around Baghdad. By disbanding the army and persecuting members of the Baath party, Bremer alienated the Sunni, who make up 20 per cent of the population. The US occupation could have survived without them if they had been prepared to give power to the Shia (60 per cent of the population); they already had the Kurds (20 per cent) in their corner. But Bremer was ambivalent about elections. The US didn’t really want to share power with anybody, Sunni or Shia.
Bremer and his Coalition Provisional Authority weren’t able to see that their political strength was diminishing by the month. In April the US took two disastrous decisions which led to simultaneous confrontations with both Sunni and Shiite communities. Four American private security contractors had been killed, their bodies burned and hung up from the bridge at Falluja; US marines quickly besieged the city. Six hundred people were killed. With ludicrously bad timing, Bremer had also decided to pursue Muqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric whose father had been martyred by Saddam Hussein in 1999. Both ventures failed. The marines dared not storm Falluja for fear of a general Sunni uprising. Sadr had retreated to the holy cities of Kufa and Najaf but the US army could not send its tanks into Shiite shrines. In both Falluja and Najaf American soldiers were forced to withdraw.
Power was already seeping away from the US before it was nominally handed over to Allawi. A year after Bush famously declared major combat in Iraq over, insurgents have their own capital in Falluja, thirty miles from Baghdad. In April, I was caught in an ambush of US petrol tankers at Abu Ghraib. The US military, unprepared to recognise that they had lost control of the road, were still sending convoys down it. By early June the road to the airport, the main US base near Baghdad, was no longer safe. Four security men who had been staying two floors above me in the Hamra Hotel were killed as they drove to the airport by men armed with machine-guns and grenade launchers. In the past I had often travelled with Dan Williams of the Washington Post -- but he was almost killed when his car was attacked on the road between Falluja and Abu Ghraib. Gunmen in another vehicle fired AK-47 rounds into his car at point-blank range. He was saved only because his car was armoured, had bullet-proof glass, and because his driver kept going when the two back tyres were shot out.
Suicide bombers, car bombs and rocket attacks have paralysed Baghdad; the US army are building increasingly elaborate fortifications to defend their bases. At the entrance to the 14 July Bridge over the Tigris, which leads into the Green Zone, the road is blocked by sandbags and razor wire. A notice hanging from the wire reads: ‘Do not enter or you will be shot.’ US soldiers in Baghdad are trigger happy and they like Iraqis to know it. All over the city, streets are closed, sometimes isolating whole districts, by the concrete defences of buildings housing American troops, foreigners, Iraqi police and Iraqi officials.
Twenty years ago I used to eat mazgouf, fish from the Tigris grilled over a wood fire, in the open-air restaurants that lined Abu Nawas Street. They were badly affected when Saddam, to emphasise his Islamic credentials, banned the public consumption of alcohol. After his overthrow, the restaurant owners hoped their customers might return. These days, Abu Nawas is largely a ghost town, deserted even in the middle of the day and used mainly by military vehicles. The street can be entered only from one end and culminates in a checkpoint defending the Palestine and Sheraton hotels. These are full of foreigners, who know that Abu Nawas is too dangerous for them to venture into.
I talked to Shahab al-Obeidi, the manager of the Shatt al-Arab restaurant on the bank of the Tigris. Dark grey fish swim in a circular pool decorated with blue tiles at the entrance to the restaurant (the river is polluted now and the fish come from fish farms). Shahab says business isn’t good: in the past three-quarters of his customers came in the evening. Now he shuts at 6 p.m. because the nights are unsafe. One night he broke his rule, staying open because he had a large table of customers who seemed to be enjoying themselves. ‘When I did present them with the bill,’ he said, ‘they laughed and took out their pistols and fired them into the ceiling and through the windows.’ He pointed to numerous bullet holes, still not repaired.
Foreigners in Baghdad and other cities all now live in the Green Zone or mini-Green Zones outside it. The concrete blocks, razor wire and guards spread in all directions. I no longer carry a camera in Baghdad because anybody taking photographs is suspected of carrying out reconnaissance for an attack. Paranoia runs high. A member of a newly arrived French camera crew caught in a traffic jam idly took a photograph of the enormous concrete blockade defending the street leading to the Baghdad Hotel, which Iraqis believe to be a centre for the CIA. Iraqi guards immediately arrested the crew and kept them in a prison cage for two nights.
The Baghdad Hotel is close to Saadoun street, a four-lane road that is one of the city’s main arteries. A few weeks ago the road was narrowed to two lanes in the section near the hotel. There is now another permanent traffic jam in the centre of Baghdad, and around thirty shops inside the hotel’s cordon sanitaire face closure.
Nadim al-Hussaini, sitting in a chair outside his empty shop, said: ‘My business has completely disappeared, first 30 to 40 per cent when they put up the concrete barrier, and 100 per cent when they closed the road.’ Next door, Zuhaar Tuma says his café is not so badly affected: he still has regulars who come to smoke hubble-bubble pipes and play dominoes. ‘I don’t want to get blown up any more than the Americans do,’ he says. ‘But the real solution is simply for the Americans staying at the hotel to leave.’
Neither the suicide bombers nor the US army care very much how many ordinary Iraqis get killed. The entrances to the Green Zone provide no protection for Iraqis queuing for jobs or to have their documents checked. They are frequently caught in bomb blasts; there are many casualties. On 17 May a suicide bomber assassinated Izzedin Salim, the head of the Iraqi Governing Council: his fleet of cars was waiting to enter the Green Zone. An Iraqi minister told me that Salim might have been safe if US soldiers at the gate had not delayed the convoy by declaring that some of the documents were not complete. There is an Iraqi conspiracy theory which sees foreign suicide bombers and the US acting in unison to prevent Iraq regaining its independence.
The suicide bombers have gone some ways towards discrediting the resistance: this ought to be an opportunity for Allawi’s interim government. Most Iraqis see the blue uniformed Iraqi police in their elderly white and blue patrol cars as a defence against crime rather than as allies of the occupation. The attacks on police stations are not popular. Even al-Sadr told his militiamen to co-operate with the police in Sadr City, ‘to deprive the terrorists and saboteurs of the chance to incite chaos and extreme lawlessness’. Some of the resistance groups in Falluja complain that they are losing popular support because the bombers were killing Iraqis and not Americans. Ministers in the new government speak of restoring order by ‘cutting off the hands’ and ‘slitting the throats’ of the insurgents. This is the sort of rhetoric once used by Saddam.
Iraqis are desperate for the return of some sort of security. Among the better off there is a pervasive fear of kidnapping. Over the last year this has become a local industry, now so common that new words have been added to Iraqi thieves’ slang: a kidnap victim is al-tali, or the sheep; the person who identifies the potential target is al-alaas.
I recently visited Qasim Sabty, a painter and sculptor who owns a gallery near the Turkish embassy. I wanted to ask him about an exhibition he had held of works depicting the torture of prisoners by guards at Abu Ghraib. But the first thing he spoke about was kidnapping. ‘So many of my relatives have been kidnapped,’ he said. ‘I fear I am going to be next.’ He mentioned another gallery owner who had just paid $100,000 for the return of her son.
Last year a rumour went round the city that Kuwaitis were seizing Iraqi girls and taking them back to Kuwait. This year the kidnapping is real. A businessman friend living in Jordan has just paid $60,000 to have his brother-in-law returned. Doctors are a favourite target. Operations are postponed in hospitals because specialist surgeons have fled the country.
At the dilapidated Shatt al-Arab restaurant, it turned out that the owner had disappeared to Syria after his son was kidnapped. I asked Lieutenant-Colonel Farouk Mahmoud, the deputy head of the forty-member police kidnap squad, how to avoid being kidnapped. ‘Go abroad!’ he said brightly, to laughter from his officers.
It’s not only the well-off who feel threatened. Gangs of thieves hop on and off buses in Rashid Street in the city centre and rob passengers at gun and knife-point. Ali Abdul Jabber, a driver at the al-Nasser bus station, has been robbed three times. ‘On the last occasion,’ he said, ‘the thieves jumped on board because the doors have to be open in this hot weather. Two of them stood guard at the back while two others walked down the bus looking in people’s handbags and stealing money and jewellery.’ Jabber didn’t dare glance back: he thought that if the thieves suspected he could identify them they would kill him. After the robbery nobody went to the police. ‘The passengers didn’t even discuss it among themselves because this sort of thing is so much part of daily life in Baghdad.’ Most of them thought that he was in league with the gang.
After the disasters of the past year the Americans know they cannot, even in the short term, occupy Iraq without the support of local allies. The problem for the US is that most Iraqis would like Allawi and the interim government to get rid of the suicide bombers and kidnappers -- and of the US occupation as well. But the US shows no sign of abandoning its plans to keep Iraq as a client state. It would have a weak army, devoted entirely to counter-insurgency. It would have no tanks, aircraft, missiles or artillery. The Iraq of the future would resemble a Latin American state of the 1960s with an army and security forces controlled largely by Washington. This was the message brought by Paul Wolfowitz in June when he turned up in Baghdad -- accompanied by Sir Kevin Tebbit, the permanent secretary at the Ministry of Defence -- just before the supposed handover of power. The US will allow Iraq to rearm, but only against its own people.
It was a tellingly low-profile visit. Wolfowitz and his entourage kept out of tall buildings visible from a distance. When he visited the city eight months ago he stayed in the al-Rashid hotel, a tall block dominating the skyline. Guerrillas interrupted his sleep by firing a volley of rockets from an improvised launcher into the upper stories of the hotel, killing an American colonel and sending Wolfowitz stumbling down an emergency staircase to safety. (Even then some of the American pundits accompanying him wrote that the occupation seemed to be on track and the forces of the resistance on the retreat.)
If he is to survive, Allawi needs to convince Iraqis that he is not an American stooge. He has to persuade the US to withdraw within a year, but at the same time he is for the moment wholly dependent on the American army. The difficulty he will have in facing both ways was illustrated by the declaration of his spokesman earlier this month that guerillas who had fought the Americans before the transfer of sovereignty would be eligible for amnesty since their actions were legitimate acts of resistance. A Kurdish member of the government, known for being close to the US, said he found this outrageous. At the same time, Allawi was offering an amnesty to al-Sadr, the Shiite leader, whom the US was trying until a few weeks ago to kill or capture.
The struggle for Iraq is only beginning. The Shia want elections and real power. The Sunni want the US out and will not accept being marginalised. The Kurds want a greater measure of autonomy, very close to independence, than the Iraqi Arabs will give. The Islamic resistance think the US is vulnerable in Iraq as the Soviet Union was in Afghanistan. The nationalist guerrillas will not stop killing American troops. Above all the US is still not convinced that it has lost its great gamble to keep control of Iraq, a country it made the test-case of its power as the world’s single imperial overlord.
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RESEARCH AND INFORMATION NETWORK (RAIN)
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P O Box 26119, Isipingo Beach, Durban South Africa. | |  | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sun Aug 01, 2004 11:43 am Post subject: 9/11 Reforms Could Weaken Rights, Says White House |
| James Bamford mentions in his new book ('A Pretext for War') that the US terror problem is a direct result of US support (in the BILLIONS as you can see via the link at the upper left of www.wrmea.com ) for Israel's brutal oppression of the Palestinians. So why should we have to give up our civil liberties for support of Israel.. Instead, we should cut the aid going to Israel as the Constitution (Bill of Rights) is much more important than supporting Israel... CUT ISRAEL LOSE TO SAVE AMERICAN FREEDOM!!!!!
9/11 Reforms Could Weaken Rights, Says White House
By Maura Reynolds and Greg Miller Times Staff Writers
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration warned Friday that the two central reforms proposed by the Sept. 11 commission — creating a powerful intelligence chief and establishing a new counterterrorism center — may remove barriers protecting intelligence from political influence and undermine civil liberties.
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The president and his senior advisors are drafting initial orders on some of the commission's recommendations that could be issued as soon as next week. But action on the centerpiece reforms deserves more consideration, a senior White House official said.
"We need to, in considering each of these recommendations, place a premium and real attention on how to protect civil liberties while better safeguarding our homeland," the official said.
Similar concerns were expressed by senators Friday during the first congressional hearing on the Sept. 11 commission's recommendations. The question of how to protect the independence of the intelligence community has become perhaps the most difficult dilemma for policymakers who are otherwise eager to embrace reform.
After getting off to a slow start, the White House also wants to appear responsive to the commission. A top-level White House task force — which has met nearly every day this week — conferred for two hours Friday to draw up executive orders on some of the simpler proposals. Those presidential actions will "go beyond" the panel's recommendations in some areas, the official said, declining to elaborate.
Civil rights advocates said they shared the White House's concerns, but questioned whether an administration that has been accused of weakening civil liberties was seizing on the privacy issue to delay action on proposals it dislikes.
As written, the commission report would allow domestic intelligence gathering, analysis and operations related to terrorism to be conducted from the White House. It also would locate the new intelligence chief inside the White House, which could make him or her more vulnerable to political influence.
The matter is particularly sensitive for the administration because of Democrats' accusations that White House pressure prompted the CIA (news - web sites) and other agencies to skew their prewar assessments of Iraq (news - web sites).
"We want to ensure that the intelligence operatives and analysts maintain their autonomy. That has to be a key consideration when you consider whether to place either of those" offices inside the White House, the official said.
The Sept. 11 commission, formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, said sweeping reforms were needed to protect the country against another catastrophic strike. But the administration and Congress are wary of lessons from the scandals of the 1970s and '80s, including the Nixon administration's use of the CIA and FBI (news - web sites) to dig up dirt on political enemies and the Reagan administration's Iran-Contra covert operation.
They also are mindful of lessons from the civil rights and Vietnam War eras, when the FBI kept dossiers on protesters.
In response to official excesses, Congress placed limits on the kinds of information that can be collected within the United States and the uses to which such intelligence may be put. Some of those protections were rescinded in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Members of both major parties fear the potential for similar abuse in putting a new intelligence director — with authority over covert operations overseas as well as domestic activities — in the president's inner circle.
"You sort of get into this Nixonian atmosphere, where the president now has all of these organs of government that he could use against political opponents," said a senior GOP official in Congress who asked not to be identified. "The Patriot Act is really a half-measure compared to where they're going with this."
The commission included 41 recommendations in its final report, but attention has fixed on the two main proposals: the elevation of a national intelligence director who would coordinate the activities of all 15 U.S. intelligence agencies and the creation of a counterterrorism center that would be in charge of operations and analysis in the war against Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations.
Nearly three years after the attacks, commission Vice Chairman Lee H. Hamilton said, the intelligence community still is plagued by a confusing chain of command and persistent barriers to the sharing of crucial information.
"I do not find today anyone really in charge," Hamilton said during a Senate Governmental Affairs Committee (news - web sites) hearing. "You can't possibly argue today that the CIA director is in charge of the intelligence community. That just doesn't stand up."
Friday's Senate hearing was the first of more than a dozen planned in Congress over the next month as part of an effort that is expected to lead to a historic restructuring of the intelligence community.
Committee members endorsed the idea of creating a new intelligence chief but questioned the wisdom of putting that position inside the White House.
Protecting intelligence analysts from political pressure "has been a problem throughout the course of recent decades, right up to the current time," said Sen. Carl Levin (news, bio, voting record) (D-Mich.). "How does putting your proposed director in the White House, even closer than the current CIA director … do anything other than to make this problem even more difficult?"
Members of the Sept. 11 commission acknowledged that the arrangement raises concerns but defended their proposal, saying a new intelligence czar would need the clout that comes with being part of the White House's inner circle.
"Look, there's no magic solution here," said Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana. "Every move you make has advantages and disadvantages."
Hamilton appeared alongside commission Chairman Thomas H. Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey. In testimony, both urged swift action on dozens of recommendations in the commission's final report, which was published last week.
The White House on Friday released a 21-page list of measures it says it has already taken to address many of the panel's recommendations. The senior White House official said quick action is coming on others but it would be unwise to rush consideration of the major restructuring.
"Given how complicated and how important an issue it is, I'm staggered at how quick people are to endorse wholesale the commission report without some considered reflection on it. That's what we're doing," the official said.
That remark appeared to be aimed in part at Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John F. Kerry (news, bio, voting record), who has embraced the recommendations and said he would implement them in their entirety.
A Kerry spokesman, Phil Singer, said that did not imply that Kerry is unconcerned with potential civil liberties problems. Instead, he noted that one of the commission's recommendations is to create a board within the executive branch to ensure that civil liberties and privacy are protected.
Rights advocates expressed surprise and suspicion about what they called the administration's sudden concern with privacy issues. They described the administration's argument as ironic in light of the rollback in civil liberties it pushed in the USA Patriot Act.
"I wish they had had similar concerns about civil liberties before the Patriot Act," said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (news - web sites). "Of course, this newfound concern with civil liberties has to be taken with a grain of salt. The administration has shown a great disregard for civil liberties in the wake of 9/11, and it's a cynical ploy to trot out arguments on civil liberties when they don't like the findings of the 9/11 report." | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Aug 26, 2004 10:45 am Post subject: ZIONIST NEOCON TIMELINE FOR WAR |
| http://www.ameu.org/summary.asp
Current Issue
Title: Timeline for War
Author: John F. Mahoney
September - October 2004
Volume 37 , Issue 4
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Unless otherwise noted, the sources for this timeline come from the following: “A Pretext for War,” (Doubleday) by James Bamford; “Plan of Attack,” (Simon & Schuster) by Bob Woodward; “Rise of the Vulcans,” (Viking) by James Mann; “Against All Enemies,” (Free Press, Simon & Schuster) by Richard Clarke; “The 9/11 Commission Report,” by The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks against the United States; and “The Path to War,” an article that appeared in the May 2004 issue of Vanity Fair.
A Reader’s Guide on pages 8 & 9 offers background information on persons who enter prominently in the timeline; it is based on two articles: “The Men From JINSA and CSP” by Jason Vest in the Sept. 2, 2002 issue of The Nation, and “Serving Two Flags: Neocons, Israel and the Bush Administration” by Stephen Green in the May 2004 issue of The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.
While the timeline was being constructed, the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee released its 511-page report on why we went to war against Iraq. The report concludes that the major reasons the Bush administration gave to justify the war were baseless. Most of the blame is placed on the CIA, but, as Senator Jay Rockefeller noted, the report does not explain the environment of intense pressure in which intelligence officials were asked to render judgments on Iraq, when policy officials had already forcefully stated their own conclusions in public. This part of the committee’s investigation is expected later this year, most likely after the November presidential elections.
Our timeline aims to fill the gap left in the Senate Committee’s report. Recognizing that the information was wrong is one thing; acknowledging how and why it was wrong is quite another—and too important to leave for post-November 2 reading.
A.M.E.U.’s list of books and videos is on pages 14-16. Of particular relevance to this timeline issue are James Bamford’s book, “A Pretext for War,” and the video “Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land,” produced by the Media Education Foundation. Bamford is the former Washington investigative producer for ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. His book reads like a detective mystery. And, like all good detectives, Bamford follows the facts. He concludes that the Bush administration has co-opted the intelligence community for its own political ends, and that its Middle East policy, from overthrowing Saddam Hussein to unconditionally supporting Israel, is driven by long-held beliefs and goals of an elite group of conservatives inside and outside government.
As for how this can happen and why we Americans fail to see the centrality of the Palestinian cause, “Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land” answers those questions better than any documentary I’ve seen.—John F. Mahoney, Executive Director, September 2004.
Articles
http://www.ameu.org/page.asp?iid=258&aid=434&pg=1
Timeline for War, by John F. Mahoney
Timeline for War
by: John F. Mahoney
September - October 2004
The Link - Volume 37, Issue 4
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Timeline for War
by: John F. Mahoney
September - October 2004
The Link - Volume 37, Issue 4
Timeline for War
The Timeline was written by AMEU executive director John Mahoney, with considerable input and editing from AMEU board members and staff.
March, 1992: The Pentagon. Paul Wolfowitz, undersecretary of defense for policy for President Bush, drafts an update of America’s overall military strategy called the “Defense Planning Guidance.” In it he argues that the U.S. might be faced with taking preemptive military action to prevent the use or development of WMD. The official ultimately responsible for the document is Bush’s defense secretary Dick Cheney. The draft is actually written by Wolfowitz’s protégé and top assistant Lewis Libby.
Sept. 1, 1992: New York. Ramzi Yousef, the nephew of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, arrives at JFK Airport. Born of a Palestinian mother, his goal is to punish the United States for its support of Israel, knowing that the U.S. government every year sends military and financial aid worth billions of dollars to Israel. Ramzi says that he and his uncle, an engineer who had studied higher mathematics and jet propulsion in the U.S., have been planning to bring down the towers of the World Trade Center, the ultimate symbol of America’s worldwide financial muscle.
Feb. 26, 1993: New York. Ramzi Yousef, with others, sets off explosives at the World Trade Center. Later in the day he flies out of JFK for Karachi, disappointed that both towers were still standing and determined to bring them down at another time.
Feb. 27, 1993: New York. A group calling itself the “Liberation Army” sends a letter to The New York Times saying the World Trade Center bombing was in retaliation for American support for Israel, and warning that if America did not change its Middle East policy, more terrorist missions would be carried out, some by suicide bombers.
April 15, 1993: Kuwait. Kuwaiti police say they have prevented an assassination attempt on former President George H. W. Bush, his wife, two sons, and daughter-in-law Laura. Most in the CIA promptly point the finger at Saddam Hussein; others, including investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, doubt the Iraqi president had any involvement in the plot.
Jan. 7, 1995: Manila. Ramzi Yousef and a colleague, Abdul Hakim Murad, accidentally set off an explosion in their apartment. Murad is captured and, under torture, tells the Philippine police of a plan to board an American commercial aircraft, hijack it, control the cockpit, and dive the plane into the CIA headquarters. The Chief of Intelligence Command for the Philippine National Police tells the Associated Press that its office shared the information immediately with FBI agents in Manila, along with the message they found on Yousef’s laptop explaining why they were doing it: “If the U.S. government keeps supporting Israel … then we will continue to carry out operations inside and outside the United States.”
April 18, 1996: Lebanon. Israel attacks a U.N. refugee camp at Qana, killing women and children. Israel says it was a mistake. The U.N. and Amnesty International say it was intentional. Shortly afterwards, Osama bin Laden moves to the mountains of Afghanistan, where he uses the Qana massacre to recruit fighters in a war against the U.S. and Israel.
July 9, 1996: Washington, DC. Douglas Feith, the Washington, DC partner of an Israeli firm soliciting American business for Israel’s right-wing settler movement, joins with other pro-settlement supporters Richard Perle, David Wurmser and Wurmser’s wife, Meryav, to develop a foreign-policy position paper for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Titled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” it calls for Israel to overthrow Saddam Hussein and put a pro-Israel regime in his place. Netanyahu rejects it.
July 25, 1996: Al Khobar, Saudi Arabia. A truck bomb rams a high-rise complex housing U.S. airmen. Nineteen are killed. The bombing is blamed on Hezbollah and its Iranian sponsors, although the U.S. commission investigating the 9/11 attacks will later conclude that Osama bin Laden may have had an involvement—but not Saddam Hussein.
Aug. 23, 1996: Afghanistan. Bin Laden, with his new mastermind for worldwide operations, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, issues a call to action: “My Muslim Brothers of the world…Your brothers in Palestine and in the land of the two Holy Places [Saudi Arabia] are calling upon your help and asking you to take part in fighting against the enemy — your enemy and their enemy — the Americans and the Israelis…The horrifying pictures of the massacre of Qana in Lebanon are still fresh in our memory...They [Americans] are not exonerated from responsibility, because they chose this [their] government and voted for it despite their knowledge of its crimes in Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq and in other places.”
Jan. 26, 1998: Washington, DC. Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Armitage, and 14 others send letter to President Clinton urging regime change in Iraq and a more aggressive Middle East policy. The letter is sponsored by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), founded by William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard.
July 31, 1998: New York. David Wurmser meets with Israel’s permanent representative to the U.N., Dore Gold, in an effort to get Israel to put pressure on the American Congress to approve a $10 million grant to Ahmed Chalabi ‘s Iraqi National Congress, an exile group based in London with a guerilla army based in northern Iraq, whose purpose is the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
Aug. 7, 1998: Tanzania and Kenya. Suspected Al Qaeda cells bomb U.S. embassies in both countries, killing 258, including 12 Americans.
Aug. 20, 1998: Afghanistan and Sudan. President Clinton orders missile attack against Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan said to produce nerve gas and to be linked to bin Laden. Bin Laden survives and doubts are raised about the pharmaceutical plant, which Sudanese say produced infant formula. Shortly after, bin Laden tells ABC News that, if the liberation of the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem and the Ka’aba in Saudi Arabia is a crime, he indeed is a criminal.
Feb.-March, 1999: Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden summons Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to tell him that his proposal to use aircraft as terror weapons against the U.S. has the full support of Al Qaeda.
Sept. 28, 2000: Jerusalem. Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, flanked by 1,000 armed police, visits site of the Al Aqsa Mosque. Bin Laden reacts by asking that the planned attacks against the U.S. be moved up.
Oct. 12, 2000: Yemen. The USS Cole is attacked; 17 sailors are killed and 39 wounded. Bin Laden, the suspected mastermind, praises the suicide attackers, then reads a poem he wrote in honor of Palestinian children killed in their struggle against Israel’s occupation of their land.
Jan. 1, 2001: Washington, DC. David Wurmser recommends to President-elect Bush that America and Israel join forces to “strike fatally, not merely disarm, the centers of radicalism in the region—the regimes of Damascus, Baghdad, Tripoli, Tehran, and Gaza,” and he suggests that “crises can be opportunities” to implement this plan.
Jan. 30, 2001: The White House. President Bush holds his first high-level National Security Council meeting. Two topics are on the agenda: Israel and Iraq. He says he plans to “tilt it [U.S. policy] back toward Israel” and—in what turns out to be the prime focus of the meeting—he says he wants to remove Saddam Hussein. Condoleezza Rice explains: “Iraq might be the key to reshaping the entire region.”
Feb. 5, 2001: The White House. Rice chairs a principals’ committee meeting to review Iraq policy. All agree that the sanctions were only hurting the Iraqi people, not Saddam. Powell proposes stricter U.N. sanctions on Saddam’s military programs.
April, 2001: The White House. Cabinet deputies meet to review terrorism policy. Richard Clarke warns that the network of terrorist organizations called Al Qaeda, led by Osama bin Laden, presents an immediate and serious threat to the U.S., and that the U.S. had to target bin Laden and his leadership by reinitiating flights of the Predator drone. Wolfowitz replies that Iraq is just as much a terrorist threat. Clarke says he is unaware of any Iraqi-sponsored terrorism directed at the U.S. Deputy CIA director John McLaughlin backs up Clarke. Wolfowitz tells Clarke he gives bin Laden too much credit and that he had to have a state sponsor. Clarke replies that bin Laden has made plain his terrorist aims and, as with Hitler in Mein Kampf, you have to believe these people will actually do what they say. Wolfowitz responds that he resents comparing the Holocaust to “this little terrorist in Afghanistan.” Clarke replies: “I wasn’t comparing the Holocaust to anything. I was saying that like Hitler, bin Laden has told us in advance what he plans to do and we would make a big mistake to ignore it.”
June 21, 2001: Afghanistan. Bin Laden aide Ayman al-Zawahiri announces over the Middle East Broadcasting Company that, “The coming weeks will hold important surprises that will target American and Israeli interests in the world.”
Aug. 6, 2001: Crawford, Texas. President Bush receives a President’s Daily Brief entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” It warns that the FBI has intelligence indicating that terrorists might be preparing for an airline hijacking in the U.S. and might be targeting a building in lower Manhattan. No action is taken.
Sept. 4, 2001: The White House. Counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke meets with the President to walk him through a proposed National Security Presidential Directive, whose goal is to eliminate bin Laden and Al Qaeda leaders. Clarke had asked for the meeting, calling it “urgent,” back in January, but only now is allowed to see him. He tells Bush that the use of minimum-wage rent-a-cops to screen passengers and carry-on at airports has got to stop. The President agrees.
Sept. 11, 2001: New York, Washington, DC, Pennsylvania. Nineteen Middle Eastern hijackers, 15 from Saudi Arabia, commandeer four commercial airplanes, crashing two into the World Trade Towers in Manhattan, one into the Pentagon in Washington, and one in a field in Pennsylvania. Nearly 3,000 are killed. Rumsfeld directs Pentagon lawyer to talk to Wolfowitz about Iraq’s connection to the attacks.
Sept. 12, 2001: Germany. Seven members of Rumsfeld’s brain trust meet at an airport in Frankfurt and board an Air Force refueling plane sent to ferry them back to Washington. Group includes Douglas Feith, now undersecretary of defense for policy. On the flight back they sketch out a plan for the defense secretary according to which the U.S. would first topple the Taliban government of Afghanistan, then go after other terror states, including Iraq. Feith appoints David Wurmser to put together a secret intelligence unit in his Pentagon office that will bypass the normal channels and report directly to him; called the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, its purpose is to find loose ties between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda in order to counter the CIA, whose analysts had found no credible links between the two. Later in the day, counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke attends White House meetings of the inner circle of Bush’s war cabinet and is stunned to learn that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were going to take advantage of the national tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq. Rumsfeld specifically asks if the attacks did not present an “opportunity” to launch war against Iraq.
Sept. 15, 2001: Camp David. Bush gathers closest advisers. Much discussion is on Afghanistan, but Wolfowitz advocates attacking Iraq, maybe even before Afghanistan. He says there’s a 10 to 50 percent chance Iraq was involved in 9/11. Bush sends note to Wolfowitz saying he doesn't want to hear more on Iraq that day. Cheney, Powell, Wolfowitz, and Rice vote against hitting Iraq first; Rumsfeld abstains. Powell, who is appalled at the idea of hitting Iraq, finds Rumsfeld abstention interesting. Richard Perle, who is also present, says Wolfowitz planted the seed.
Sept. 16, 2001: Washington, DC. Richard Perle and other neoconservatives send letter to Bush urging him to focus immediately on a war with Iraq, whether or not a connection with 9/11 can be shown.
Sept. 17, 2001: The White House. Bush signs a Top Secret order that lays out his plan for going to war in Afghanistan and directs the Pentagon to begin planning military options for an invasion of Iraq.
Sept. 19, 2001: The Pentagon. Perle convenes a two-day meeting of the Defense Policy Board, a group that advises the Pentagon. He introduces two guest speakers: Prof. Bernard Lewis of Princeton, a longtime friend of Cheney and Wolfowitz, who says U.S. must respond to 9/11 with a show of strength, and must support such democratic reformers in the Middle East as Ahmad Chalabi. The second speaker, in fact, is Ahmad Chalabi, who tells the group that Iraq does possess WMD, although, as yet, there is no evidence linking Iraq to 9/11.
Oct. 7, 2001: Afghanistan. U.S. and U.K. planes bomb Taliban bases; the war against Al Qaeda begins.
Nov. 13, 2001: Afghanistan. The capital, Kabul, falls. Most of the Taliban leaders flee.
Nov. 21, 2001: The White House. At the end of a National Security Council meeting, President Bush secretly directs Rumsfeld to prepare for war on Iraq.
Nov. 27, 2001: Florida. Rumsfeld flies to see General Franks at CENTCOM headquarters in Tampa and tells him to update the Top Secret Operation Plan on attacking and invading Iraq.
Dec. 4, 2001: The Pentagon. Franks presents a slightly revised plan on invading Iraq. Estimated force level is reduced from 500,000 to 400,000. Rumsfeld thinks fewer forces will be needed in light of the Afghanistan success. Franks agrees.
Dec. 12, 2002: The Pentagon. Franks returns with updated plan. Rumsfeld tells him he has to look at a plan that he could do “as early as April or May.”
Dec. 20, 2001: New York. The New York Times reporter Judith Miller has front-page interview with Iraqi defector Adnan Ishan Saeed al-Haidere, who says he has recently been working in Baghdad in secret facilities for biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons. Miller secures the interview through Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, which has close contacts with Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith. Miller will later say that it is Chalabi who provided most of the front page exclusives on WMD to The New York Times.
Dec. 28, 2002: The White House. Franks tells Bush that, with support from other Muslim countries, Iraq could be invaded with an initial 105,000 U.S. forces, but 230,000 eventually would be needed.
Jan. 2002: The White House. Bush’s top speechwriter, Michael Gerson, gives instructions to David Frum, a Canadian, to write a speech making the best case for war in Iraq.
Jan. 29, 2002: Washington, DC. Bush gives State of the Union address; he calls North Korea, Iran, and Iraq an axis of evil and pledges not to wait while dangers gather.
Feb. 1, 2002: The Pentagon. Franks tells Rumsfeld a unilateral U.S.-only invasion of Iraq could be readied in 45 days with an initial force of 105,000; ultimately, 300,000 would be needed to stabilize Iraq after it fell.
Feb. 7, 2002: White House Situation Room. Rumsfeld introduces notion of shock and awe, i.e., building up such a carrier force and bombing onslaught that it might, by itself, trigger regime change.
Feb. 12, 2002: Washington, DC. Powell tells the Senate Budget Committee there are no plans to go to war with Iran or North Korea, but U.S. is looking into ways of bringing about regime change in Iraq.
Feb. 16, 2002: White House. The National Security Council ratifies Policy Directive on Iraq, committing the U.S. to examining ways of bringing about a CIA-backed coup and providing military support for Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress.
Feb. 20, 2002: Iraq. CIA survey team secretly enters northern Iraq to prepare for deployment of CIA paramilitary teams.
Feb. 28, 2002: Pentagon. Franks brings Rumsfeld a list of nearly 4,000 possible bombing targets in Iraq. Rumsfeld tells him to prioritize the list.
March 6, 2002: The White House. In preparation of his upcoming visit to the Middle East, Cheney is briefed by Franks, who tells him what the U.S. will need in its invasion of Iraq from other Arab and Muslim countries. When he does go to the Middle East, the vice president is surprised to learn that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is seen by Arab leaders as a greater threat to the region than Saddam Hussein.
March 9, 2002: Washington, DC. CIA tells the White House reports that Niger was supplying Iraq with uranium were investigated by Ambassador Joseph Wilson and were found not to be credible.
March 14, 2002: The White House. The Joint Chiefs of Staff report that an invasion of Iraq “would place severe strains on personnel and cause deep shortages of certain critical weapons.”
April 20, 2002: Camp David. Bush tell Franks he wants the invasion of Iraq done “right and quickly.”
April 24, 2002: Doha, Qatar. Franks tells his major commanders to do whatever it takes to prepare for an invasion, no matter the costs.
May 11, 2002: Camp David. Franks presents a five-front war plan to Bush.
June 19, 2002: The White House. Franks tells Bush he could do the invasion within 30 days with a little over 100,000 ground assault troops.
Late Aug. 2002: The Pentagon. Office of Special Plans is set up at the Pentagon to plan for the war and its aftermath. Picked to head the OSP is longtime protégé of Richard Perle, Abram Shulsky. As part of its mission, the OSP forges close ties to a parallel intelligence unit within Ariel Sharon’s office in Israel, whose job is to provide key Bush administration people with cooked intelligence on Saddam’s Iraq. One Pentagon official, Air Force Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, later relates how she had escorted six or seven Israeli generals to Feith’s OSP office. The generals surged ahead of her, waved aside the required sign-in book, and entered the OSP office; seeing Feith’s office door closed, the generals demanded to know from his secretary who Feith was talking to.
Sept. 7, 2002: The White House. Bush tells reporters that an International Atomic Energy Agency report estimates that the Iraqis are six months away from developing a nuclear weapon. The new report, however, turns out to be an old IAEA document from 1996 that described a weapons program that the inspectors had long ago destroyed.
Sept. 12, 2002: New York. Bush addresses U.N. General Assembly, saying the U.S. will work with the U.N. Security Council for the necessary resolutions to go to war with Iraq.
Sept. 16, 2002: New York. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan says he has received a letter from Iraqi authorities allowing inspectors access “without conditions.” Bush administration is livid because it did not say “unfettered access,” meaning “anytime, anyplace.”
Sept. 19, 2002: Washington, DC. Rumsfeld, speaking before the Senate Armed Services Committee, says current U.N. inspection team is weak. At the White House, Bush says if U.N. Security Council won’t deal with Iraq, “the U.S. and some of our friends will.” Bush also meets with 11 House members, telling them the biggest threat is that Saddam, with his WMD, “can blow up Israel and that would trigger an international incident.”
Oct. 1, 2002: Langley, Virginia. CIA prepares secret National Intelligence Estimate on the case for war with Iraq. NIE claims Saddam has chemical and biological weapons, including mobile labs, and that it is building nuclear weapons. Bush wants condensed version for the public in the form of a White Paper. The White Paper, however, distorts the facts to make the strongest possible case for war. (See the Vanity Fair article for specific examples of distortions.)
Nov. 8, 2002: New York. U.N. Security Council passes Resolution 1441, which gives Iraq a “final opportunity” to come clean on its WMD, adding that the council would meet again, following the inspectors’ report, to “consider the situation.” The French, who oppose war with Iraq, say off the record that they understand the resolution is enough to give America and Britain legal cover for going it alone, if they felt Iraq hadn’t complied to their satisfaction.
Dec. 7, 2002: Baghdad. Iraqi government delivers a 12,000-page document in Arabic to UNMOVIC. It is intended to account for the state of its weapons programs. The U.S. takes possession of it, has it translated, submits it to the Security Council with large portions deleted, then dismisses it as a “material breach” of Resolution 1441.
Jan. 13, 2003: The White House. The French call for a meeting that is held in Rice’s office. Attending are Chirac’s top adviser, Maurice Gourdault-Montagne, and French Ambassador to the U.S., Jean-David Levitte. Both explain their country’s reasons for opposing the war, then Levitte says that if the U.S. was determined to go to war, it should not seek a second U.N. resolution, that 1441 arguably gave the White House enough cover, and that France would keep quiet if the U.S. went ahead. White House dismisses the offer because it has promised Tony Blair it would seek a second resolution. The French are angry. On the same day, Bush tells Powell in the Oval office, “I’m really going to do this.” Powell asks if he understands the Pottery Barn principle: if he breaks Iraq, he’ll own it. Bush says he understands.
Jan. 20, 2003: New York. French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin announces that France will not support military intervention in Iraq. The White House is irate.
Jan. 21, 2003: The White House. Franks delivers final war plan to Bush. He estimates fewer than 1,000 U.S. killed. No public pictures of returning coffins and no body count of Iraqis killed will be permitted, as both practices created bad PR during the Vietnam war.
Jan. 25, 2003: White House. Lewis Libby makes presentation on Saddam’s WMD and ties him to bin Laden. Much of the material comes from Feith’s Office of Special Plans. Richard Armitage, the second in authority at the State Department, sees it as drawing the worst conclusions from fragmentary threads; Wolfowitz finds it convincing. Bush aides Karen Hughes and Karl Rove think Powell should make the U.N. presentation. Powell agrees to do it.
Jan. 27, 2003: New York. Hans Blix delivers his first inspections report to U.N. He acknowledges that no WMD have been found but notes that Iraq has failed to account for undetermined quantities of the nerve agent VX and anthrax, and for 6,500 chemical bombs.
Jan. 28, 2003: Washington, DC. Bush gives State of the Union address in which he claims: “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
Jan. 29, 2003: The State Department. Powell gives his chief of staff, Larry Wilkerson, a 48-page dossier that the White House wants Powell to use in his U.N. speech making the case for war with Iraq. The dossier is prepared in Cheney’s office by a team led by Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis Libby, and his deputy assistant for national security affairs, John Hannah.
Jan. 30, 2003: Langley, Virginia. Wilkerson, with several staff members and CIA analysts, sets up shop at CIA headquarters to prepare Powell’s speech. Meanwhile the White House supplies 45 more pages on Iraq’s links to terrorism and human rights violations.
Jan. 31, 2003: Langley, Virginia. Wilkerson throws out the White House dossier, suspecting much of it originated with the Iraqi National Congress and its chief, Ahmad Chalabi, whose information in the past often proved suspect or fabricated. Powell is convinced that much of the material had been funneled to Cheney by the separate OSP unit set up by Rumsfeld. “We were so appalled at what had arrived from the White house,” says one staff member.
Feb. 5, 2003: New York. At 2 a.m., on the day of his U.N. speech, Powell receives a call from the CIA’s George Tenet, who says he wants another look at the speech. Tenet is afraid Powell has cut too much about Saddam’s supposed links to terrorism, especially the 9/11 attack. For days the White House and Cheney have pressed Powell to include a widely discredited Czech intelligence report that Mohamed Atta, the 9/11 ringleader, had met in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence officer. Powell had thrown out the Prague material as suspect and unverified. But Powell does keep much of what the White House wants, including mobile biological weapons labs, ties to Al Qaeda, and anthrax stockpiles. One of the sources for the mobile labs is an Iraqi major known to the CIA to be a liar. That morning, at the U.N., Powell insists that Tenet sit behind him as a signal that he is relying on the CIA to make the case for war.
Feb. 8, 2003: The White House. President Bush, in his weekly radio address, says: “Saddam Hussein has longstanding, direct and continuing ties to terrorist networks. Senior members of Iraqi intelligence and Al Qaeda have met at least eight times since the early 1990’s. Iraq has sent bomb-making and document-forgery experts to work with Al Qaeda. Iraq has also provided Al Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training. And an Al Qaeda operative was sent to Iraq several times in the late 1990’s for help in acquiring poisons and gases. We also know that Iraq is harboring a terrorist network headed by a senior Al Qaeda terrorist planner. This network runs a poison and explosive training camp in northeast Iraq, and many of its leaders are known to be in Baghdad.”
Feb. 14, 2003: New York. Hans Blix goes before the U.N. Security Council. He contradicts Powell, saying the trucks Powell had described as being used for chemical decontamination could just as easily have been used for routine activity, and he contradicts Powell’s statement that the Iraqis knew in advance when the inspectors would be arriving. And he adds that Iraq is finally taking steps toward real cooperation with the inspectors, allowing them to enter Iraqi presidential palaces, among other previously prohibited sites. Disarmament through inspections is still possible, he concludes.
Feb. 15, 2003: Worldwide. Tens of millions participate in an unprecedented, antiwar demonstration. The biggest crowds are in the countries that support the war: Britain, Italy, and Spain.
Feb. 24, 2003: New York. Claiming Iraq has failed to take the final opportunity afforded it in Resolution 1441, the U.S., Britain, and Spain propose the second resolution Tony Blair has been seeking.
Feb. 27, 2003: The White House. Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel visits Bush and tells him Iraq is a terrorist state that should be invaded as a matter of morality, otherwise Saddam will unleash a weapon of mass destruction on Israel. Bush later remarks, “If Elie Wiesel feels that way, I am not alone.”
March 1, 2003: Turkey. The Turkish government rejects U.S. request to move troops through its country.
March 3, 2003: The White House. Pope John Paul II’s envoy, Cardinal Pio Laghi, visits Bush and tells him war with Iraq would be unjust and illegal because it would cause so many civilian casualties, create a wider gap between the Christian and Muslim world, and overall would not make things better. Bush replies it would absolutely make things better.
March 7, 2003: France. The French announce they will veto a second resolution to authorize the automatic use of force. The U.S. begins lobbying the six undecided members of the Security Council: Pakistan, Chile, Mexico, Cameroon, Guinea, and Angola, having first wiretapped their offices. Chile and Mexico say they will not support a second resolution.
March 10, 2003: France. French President Chirac goes on TV and announces, “My position is that, regardless of the circumstances, France will vote ‘no’.” U.S. and Britain blame France for the diplomatic breakdown, and use it as the reason for not seeking the second resolution.
March 14, 2003: The White House. As a concession to Blair, Bush announces agreement on a road map for resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
March 16, 2003: The Azores. Bush, Blair and Spanish prime minister Aznar meet. Bush says they need to start the war soon because antiwar sentiment will only get worse if they delay. He says he is going to give Saddam a 48-hour ultimatum to leave Iraq.
March 17, 2003: The White House. Bush reneges on his commitment to seek U.N. approval, claiming 1441 provides ample authorization. In a TV announcement he gives Saddam the 48-hour ultimatum. Prior to the announcement he calls Australian prime minister Howard and Israeli prime minister Sharon to tell them of his decision. Meanwhile, Cheney tells congressional leaders of the decision, noting that Israel will not be part of the coalition, “but we are working closely with them on their reaction.”
March 18: 2003: London. Blair wins a Commons vote for war, barely carrying his own party.
March 19, 2003: The White House. Bush gives Franks order to execute Operation Iraqi Freedom. Around 4 p.m., CIA information is received that Saddam and his two sons are or will be in a bunker in Baghdad. Cheney advises Bush to strike at the target, effectively beginning the war. Bush agrees. At 7:30 p.m., Rice phones Israeli finance minister Benjamin Netanyahu, telling him the war had begun; he says he knows. Rice then summons Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar to come to the White House. Around 8:30 p.m. she tells him that, within a half-hour, all hell will break loose. At 10:10 p.m., Bush informs the nation the war has started.
April 7, 2003: Washington. Rumsfeld appoints Gen. Jay Garner to direct Pentagon’s new Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance for Iraq. Garner, a JINSA advisor, says the first person he will invite to work with him is former Israeli defense minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer.
May 2, 2003: The USS Lincoln. President Bush tells nation, “In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”
May 6, 2003: Washington. L. Paul Bremer III is appointed administrator of Iraq, replacing Jay Garner.
June 5, 2003: Washington, DC. The Washington Post reports that VP Cheney and his aide Lewis Libby paid multiple visits to the CIA in the months leading up to the Iraq war. Later, former CIA Counterterrorism chief Vince Cannistraro will tell a congressional hearing that prior to the war, the White House exerted unprecedented pressure on the CIA and other intelligence agencies to come up with evidence linking Iraq to bin Laden and Al Qaeda.
June 8, 2003: Washington, DC. David Kay, former chief weapons inspector for the U.N., is asked to take over the search for WMD in Iraq.
July 6, 2003: New York. Former U.S. ambassador Joseph Wilson IV writes column in The New York Times saying he was sent on a fact-finding mission to Niger by the CIA and that, well before the president’s State of the Union Address, he reported his finding that no uranium had been shipped to Iraq.
August 27, 2003: Washington. Newly available documents reveal that Halliburton, the company VP Cheney formerly headed, wins contracts for more than $1.7 billion out of Operation Iraqi Freedom and stands to receive hundreds of millions more under a no-bid contract awarded by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The Bechtel Group, George Shultz’s company, wins contracts for one billion dollars.
Sept. 17, 2003: The White House. President Bush tells a reporter, “No, we’ve had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September 11.”
Oct. 2, 2003: Washington, DC. Kay delivers interim report to Congress saying, “We have not yet found stocks of weapons.”
Dec. 13, 2003: Iraq. Saddam Hussein is captured.
Jan. 23, 2004: David Kay resigns.
Jan. 28, 2004: Washington. Regarding the existence of WMD in Iraq, Kay tells Senate Armed Services Committee, “We were almost all wrong.” His testimony forces White House to name a presidential commission to investigate the prewar intelligence on Iraq.
Feb. 5, 2004: Washington, DC. Tenet admits in a speech at Georgetown University that as far back as May 2002 the Defense Information Agency had issued a “fabrication notification” to steer clear of the Iraqi major who had attested to the mobile biological labs mentioned in Powell’s U.N. speech. Somehow the CIA never saw it.
Feb. 24, 2004: Washington, DC. CIA director Tenet tells the Senate Select Committee that, despite our invasion of Afghanistan and occupation of Iraq, the worldwide threat from bin Laden and Al Qaeda has grown, not diminished.
March 11, 2004: Madrid. Train bombs kill 200 people. Search leads to a widening web of organizations that may have few ties to Al Qaeda but share its goals.
March 14, 2004: Madrid. Conservative prime minister José Aznar is defeated by Socialist challenger José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero, who ran on a pledge to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq unless they were placed under U.N. sanction. The new prime minister calls the Iraq war an error, saying: “It divided more than it united, there were no reasons for it, time has shown that the arguments for it lacked credibility, and the occupation has been poorly managed.”
April 18, 2004: Madrid. Spain withdraws all its troops from the Coalition of the Willing.
April 19, 2004: Nicaragua. President Maduro says Nicaragua will withdraw its forces from Iraq.
April 28, 2004: CBS’s Sixty Minutes II shows U.S. troops mistreating Iraqi detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
April 29, 2004: Santo Domingo. The Dominican Republic withdraws its troops from Iraq, citing security concerns. Wolfowitz tells a congressional hearing that Iraq is still a combat zone, “and until it becomes peacekeeping, a lot of countries are probably going to stay on the sidelines.”
May 20, 2004: Baghdad. Iraqi police and U.S. military raid home of Iraqi National Council finance minister Ahmad Chalabi as part of an investigation into suspected fraud. CIA also charges him with informing Iran that the U.S. had cracked its secret codes and was eavesdropping on its intelligence messages. The Pentagon stops monthly payments of $340,000 to Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress.
May 26, 2004: New York. The New York Times acknowledges that its reporters, among them Judith Miller, used questionable sources in affirming the existence of WMD in Iraq, and that Ahmad Chalabi, the INC leader, was feeding bad information to journalists and the White House, information the White House eagerly received.
May 29, 2004: Baghdad. Iyad Alawi, a longtime CIA operative, is chosen interim prime minister of Iraq.
June 4, 2004: Langley, Va. CIA Director George Tenet resigns.
June 16, 2004: Washington, DC. The 9/11 Commission investigating the September 11 attacks reports that there did not appear to be a collaborative relationship between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.
June 22, 2004: Washington. Wolfowitz tells a House Armed Services Committee that the Pentagon had underestimated Iraq’s postwar insurgency and that the U.S. may have to keep a significant number of troops in Iraq for years to come.
July 5, 2004: Former U.S. Army General Janis Karpinski, who had been in charge of the Abu Ghraib prison when Iraqi detainees were abused and humiliated, tells BBC radio that she knew of at least one Israeli involved in the prisoner interrogation.
July 9, 2004: Washington. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concludes in its report that the most pivotal assessments used to justify the war against Iraq were unfounded and unreasonable. Senator Jay Rockefeller, vice chairman of the committee, concludes: “We in Congress would not have authorized that war — we would NOT have authorized that war—with 75 votes if we knew what we know now.” The second part of the report on whether the White House and Pentagon tried to influence intelligence agencies is postponed until after the November election.
July 12, 2004: The Philippines. President Arroyo announces that her country will withdraw from the Coalition of the Willing in order to save the life of a Filipino hostage held by Iraqi insurgents.
Aug. 1, 2004: Number of U.S. killed in the Iraq war reaches 910. The media is barred from showing their returning coffins. Number of Iraqi civilians killed is not available from official U.S. sources; independent sources estimate the number to be between 11,305 and 13,315. (For updates on Iraqis killed and wounded, see: www.iraqbodycount.org.)
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Return to Article | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Aug 26, 2004 10:55 pm Post subject: Another Interview with James Bamford |
| Excellent find! Just saw the following interview with James Bamford on 'A Pretext for War':
http://www.antiwar.com/av/?articleid=3440 | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue Oct 12, 2004 10:33 am Post subject: Neo-Conservative Ascendancy in the George W. Bush Administra |
| http://english.daralhayat.com/Spec/10-2004/Article-20041010-83649c00-c0a8-01ed-004f-353965679db8/story.html
Neo-Conservative Ascendancy in the George W. Bush Administration
Jihad Al Khazen Al-Hayat 2004/10/10
Jim Lobe
I have been monitoring the activities of Israel's supporters in the U.S. administration for 25 years. I saw them attain and lose power, and work in research institutes. Nevertheless, I never imagined that the day would come when they would control American policy as they do today in the Bush administration. I saw them exert their influence, yet, I never expected they would rule, work on undermining the Iraqi and Palestinian causes and manipulate American policy in a way that targets Arabs and Muslims worldwide.
Several months ago, I used every free hour I had to collect information on Israel's clique in the current administration. I was intending to write a feature on this subject, but what I collected, with the help of researchers, and wrote in English with a colleague, amounted to 30 pages, half of which was about the "hawks" and the neo-conservatives, or Sharon's Likudniks, while the other half involved the cabal's key members.
In short, I can say that I think what I wrote is the best documented study there is on Israel's gangs, thanks to the excellent research sources I had and a well-informed background on the subject.
The reader who keeps this will find that he has a complete file on Israel's mob; a ready-to-use reference. I will go back to March 9, 1978, when my friend Michael Saba, a widely educated and powerful American of Arab origin, found out that Stephen Bryen, then professional staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Near East Subcommittee Director, and Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, was showing an Israeli delegation the Pentagon's documents on the Saudi bases and drafting "our policy" (the Israeli policy) toward the American one which he was supposed to represent.
Bryen and the Israeli delegation were sitting at a table at the Madison Hotel, while Saba was sitting at an adjacent one. Thus, he was able to record the conversation. At that time, I was at the Madison Hotel, preparing to open an office for Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, a newly created Arab newspaper published in London. I heard about Bryen, whom Michael made the center of his national activities. I started following his steps ever since, especially after I opened my private office, two years later, in the Madison building neighboring the hotel.
Stephen Bryen resigned after Michael Saba exposed his activities. Instead of being sued, Richard Perle, then Under Secretary at the Defense Department, appointed him as an assistant. Israel's gangs are not only the dastardliest but also the most insolent. Stephen Bryen, who was accused of handing over the Saudi bases to the Israelis, was employed at the Defense Department, where confidential defense information related to the Middle East is kept. After 25 years, the neo-conservatives, or Israel's mob, were accused of planning to destroy Iraq in favor of Israel, while a retired General, Jay Garner, from the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), was sent to Iraq to rule a 24-million Arab and Muslim country.
The matter goes further than insolence; for this entire clique is bound by its members' racism and arrogance, and their conviction that they and Israel are the best. It is clear that there is an alliance between Israel's supporters and the born-again Christians in George W. Bush's constituency in Southern America, or what is known as the Torah belt. However, I feel that they despise the American Christians along with the Arabs and Muslims and take advantage of them; always keeping in mind that they are the "best."
I would like to add that the neo-conservatives' influence outweighs their number; their alliance with the born-again Christians represents a good example. They represent 17% of the total of American Christians, while the other American churches issued a clear statement against the war on Iraq. Even though, they backed Bush's southern Baptists wing, which means the ruling minority. Moreover, they are minorities among Jewish-Americans which crushing majority represents the liberal democrats whose voting for George Bush did not exceed 10% of the total American Jews. This rate will not increase much in the coming elections.
I hope the reader would remember that those are minorities and the majority of the American Jews support peace between Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims on the one hand, and Israelis on the other. And if some American Jews are the Palestinian, Iraqi, Iranian, and the Syrian causes' worst enemies, there are also American Jews who represent the best supporters of the Palestinian cause. Racism versus racism worsens matters.
Introduction
Developments in U.S. foreign policy under the Bush administration, particularly since the September 11, 2001 terror attacks in New York and Washington, have dramatically demonstrated the unprecedented ascendancy and power of the neo-conservatives in the U.S. administration.
Neo-conservatives have, from their early days in the 1970s, had a foothold in U.S. administrations, but it is in the George W. Bush administration that they have both their greatest representation numerically and their biggest influence on policy. Some observers claim that the neo-conservatives have 'hijacked' U.S. foreign policy and that through their control of levers of government they are pushing through an agenda they have developed over many years.
Neo-conservative trends have shaped the central elements of post-9/11 policy - the Bush Doctrine, the drive to maintain and develop the overwhelming military might of the USA, the designation of an 'axis of evil,' the war on terror, the national security doctrine of pre-emption, the ever-stronger support for Israeli policies, pre-emptive attacks, the drive to overthrow Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the project to reshape the map of the Middle East in the interests of the U.S. and Israel (through regime change where necessary) and a U.S. military presence and the strategic alliance with Israel and the pursuit of unilateralism and weakening of the UN and other multilateral institutions.
The neo-conservative viewpoint is decidedly pro-Israeli and anti-Palestinian. It is anti-Arab and anti-Muslim. Some of the neo-conservatives have been intimately involved in advising Israeli governments, helping them to develop their policies, and promoting their political and economic cause in Washington. The neo-conservatives have subsumed the more than 55-year-old Israel-Palestine conflict into the war on terror. The events of September 11 gave the neo-cons the chance to draw parallels between the suicide attacks both the U.S. and Israeli have experienced.
Many neo-cons (including former CIA director James Woolsey) agree with prominent neo-cons academic Eliot Cohen, Professor of Strategic Studies at John Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies, that we are already in World War IV; the Cold War having been World War III.
The chance to implement long-standing neo-conservative policies
The post-9/11 climate has accelerated the fusion of the worldviews of the classic neo-conservatives (many of them Jewish), traditional hard-line hawks, the Christian right and key presidential advisors, notably Karl Rove. (Just as not all neo-conservatives are Jewish, so not all Jews in the administration are neo-conservatives. Richard Haass, the director of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff is an example).
The classic neo-conservatives have worked tirelessly over the years to develop their key set of policies. These policy tenets are illustrated in a series of documents and projects produced over the past decade, which now read like blueprints for the George W. Bush program. They include:
The Defense Planning Guidance drawn up by Paul Wolfowitz and Libby Lewis for then Defense Secretary Dick Cheney in 1992. The document, with its emphasis overwhelming U.S. military domination, unilateral U.S. action and the use of pre-emptive force was seen as too extreme at the time.
The paper A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, drawn up in 1996 for then new Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by a team including Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and the husband and wife team of David and Meyrav Wurmser. A Clean Break envisages a redrawing of the Middle East political map. It insists that Saddam must be overthrown and advocates a program of neutralizing Syria, and of hot pursuit of the Palestinians. Much of this paper has been translated into official administration policy.
The Project for the New American Century (PNAC), founded in 1997 with the support of Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney among others, has been another vehicle for forceful promulgation of neo-conservative views. Bush's National Security Strategy issued in September 2002 shows the profound influence the opinions of the neo-conservatives have had in molding the new strategic approach.
A number of well-funded think tanks and foundations provide a focus for the development and dissemination of neo-conservative policies and a platform through which neo-conservatives prepare studies, which have an influence on policy making. They include the Center for Security Policy (CSP), the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), the Middle East Forum (MEF), the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), the Bradley Foundation, the Heritage Foundation and the Hudson Institute.
The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) set up by Meyrav Wurmser and Colonel Yigal Carmon, a former advisor on terrorism to the Israeli Prime Minister, translates and brings to wide attention articles from the Arabic press that show the Arabs in a particularly bad light.
The neo-conservatives benefit from a highly effective publicity apparatus, one element of which is the public relations company Benador, which has neo-conservatives as clients, and guarantees them a high profile in the media and on the lecture circuit. Clients include Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen, Frank Gaffney, Barry Rubin, Martin Kramer, Daniel Pipes, and former CIA director James Woolsey.
The neo-conservatives are regular contributors to the major American newspapers. An important press vehicle for their opinions is the Weekly Standard edited by William Kristol and bankrolled by right-wing publisher Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.
The war on Iraq as first step in redrawing Middle East map
The war on Afghanistan gave a first taste of the war on terror in practice, but it is the war on Iraq that has been the major neo-conservative experiment, using U.S. hyperpower's overwhelming force to Saddam Hussein as a first step in enforcing widespread change in the Middle East and what the U.S. sees as much-needed reforms.
The war on Iraq has been widely seen as a first step in the 'redrawing of the map of the Middle East' and profoundly changing the balance of power, in favor of U.S. and Israeli interests and giving some U.S. control over Iraq's vital oil reserves.
The declared aim is to tackle 'rogue states' that pose a danger to Western interests, curb the presence and development of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), and spread Western-style democracy in the region thereby make it less of a breeding ground for terrorism. The regime change in Iraq was portrayed as 'liberation.' In practice, it is a huge adventure that may turn out to have been very reckless in terms of the chain reaction it has triggered and that will have consequences for the U.S. and the West for many years.
The vision of post-war Iraq that the U.S. and Britain announced on 9 May in the form of a draft resolution to the UN Security Council names them as the occupying powers, referred to in the document as an "authority," gives them control of the country's oil revenues and endorses their "exercise of responsibility" for an initial 12 months. The authority's jurisdiction would continue automatically unless the UN Security Council decided otherwise. The UN is sidelined and has had little role apart from a place on the international advisory board for the proposed Iraqi assistance fund. American companies have been awarded the lucrative reconstruction contracts in Iraq.
Unease over neo-conservative power - Powell's denial of a 'cabal'
The attention that the media has paid the neo-conservatives and the anxieties in some quarters over the direction in which they have taken U.S. policies, with murmurings about dual loyalties, have gained such widespread currency that Secretary of State Colin Powell felt obliged to make a denial in a Congressional hearing in March on foreign aid.
Powell insisted: "The strategy with respect to Iraq has derived from our interest in the region and our support of UN resolutions over time. It is not driven by any small cabal that is buried away somewhere, that is telling President Bush or me or Vice President Cheney or Rice or other members of the administration what our policies should be." The looming conflict in Iraq "is not just the result of a few individuals who are running loose, as some suggest, but it's a comprehensive policy developed over the years with the support of Congress."
Powell has been answering a question from subcommittee chairman Representative Jim Kolbe, Arizona Republican, who said he was hesitant to raise the issue, but invited Powell to "help end speculation that our policy was developed and is being pushed in some kind of conspiratorial manner by supporters of Israel or Saudi Arabia, or any other [ethnic] group or nation."
Powell conceded that the U.S. has been one of Israel's strongest supporters for half a century, but added "We have other friends in the region." He said the U.S. has close alliances with Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and President Bush is committed to the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Some days earlier, Representative James P. Moran, Virginia Democrat, had suggested that the influence of American Jews had pushed the U.S. to the brink of war with Iraq. Moran apologized for his remarks, which were condemned by the White House as "shocking" and denounced by Jewish groups.
Pat Buchanan, the far-right two-time Republican presidential candidate and former presidential speech writer caused a rumpus when he charged in an article in the March 24 issue of The American Conservative, entitled "Whose War?" that U.S. foreign policy has been hijacked by a cabal of neo-conservatives who are "deliberately damaging U.S. relations with every state in the Arab world that defies Israel or supports the Palestinian people's right to a homeland of their own." Buchanan alleged that they "harbor a 'passionate attachment' to a nation not our own that causes them to subordinate the interests of their own country and to act on the assumption that, somehow, what's good for Israel is good for America."
Richard Perle claims it is not surprising that neo-conservatives are Jewish, because "you're going to find a disproportionate number of Jews in any kind of intellectual undertaking… if you balance out the hawkish Jews against the dovish ones, then we are badly outnumbered. But there is clearly an undertone of anti-Semitism about it, there's no doubt." On the question of "Israel first," Perle claims "it's a nasty line of argument to suggest that somehow we're confused about where our loyalties lie."
Neo-conservatives in the Department of Defense
Neo-conservatives hold some of the most powerful positions in the Bush administration, particularly in the Department of Defense. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz is widely regarded as the architect of the war on Iraq. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld himself has long had a hawkish militaristic outlook that chimes with neo-conservative views, and his friendship with Vice President Dick Cheney dates back to the days when they both served in the Ford administration.
Wolfowitz' deputy Douglas Feith is a neo-conservative with particularly active ties to Israel. Another neo-conservative Stephen Cambone was on March 11, 2003 sworn in as Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence - a newly created position. Prior to taking up his new position, Cambone had been Special Assistant to the Secretary and Director for Program Analysis & Evaluation, and before this Principal Deputy Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy.
The creation of the post of Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence illustrates the growing power of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, and it strengthens the hand of the Pentagon versus the CIA in intelligence - whereas others had planned reforms that would have strengthened the CIA's position.
In an article in The New Yorker in May 2003, Seymour Hersh describes how, according to former and present Bush administration officials, the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans (OSP) has brought about a crucial change of direction in the U.S. intelligence community. The Office of Special Plans was set up in order to find new intelligence evidence to back Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz' belief that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda and that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of weapons of mass destruction that threatened the region and, potentially, the U.S.
The Director of the Office of Special Plans, Abram Shulsky, has worked on intelligence and foreign policy issues for three decades. Under-Secretary of Defense William Luti oversees the Office of Special Plans.
Hersh stresses the fact that Shulsky, like Wolfowitz, was a student of Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago. Strauss, a refugee from Nazi Germany who arrived in the U.S. in 1937, was a political philosopher and a foremost conservative émigré scholar. He was widely know for his argument that the works of ancient philosophers contain deliberately concealed esoteric meanings whose truths can only be comprehended by a very few. Hersh notes that the Straussian movement has many adherents in and around the Bush administration, including, in addition to Wolfowitz, Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone and editor of The Weekly Standard William Kristol.
Strauss's influence on foreign-policy decision making - although he did not explicitly write about the subject himself - is usually seen in terms of his tendency to see the world as a place where isolated liberal democracies live in constant danger from hostile elements abroad, and face threats that must be confronted vigorously and with strong leadership.
Hersh examines the influence of Strauss also on intelligence gathering. In 1999 Abram Shulsky and Gary Schmitt (executive director of the Project for the New American Century, PNAC) wrote an essay entitled Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence (By Which We Do Not Mean Nous) criticizing the U.S. intelligence community for its failure to appreciate the duplicitous nature of the regimes it deals with. They accused the CIA of being naive in the Cold War. They argued that political philosophy could be an "antidote" to the failings of the CIA and would help understanding Islamic leaders "whose intellectual world was so different from our own."
According to Hersh, the Office of Special Plans had by last autumn come to rival the CIA and the Pentagon's own Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). The advisors and analysts in the Office of Special Plans rely on data from other intelligence agencies and also from the Iraq National Congress (INC) headed by Ahmad Chalabi, who provided Special Plans with the testimony of Iraqi defectors. But there are disputes over how reliable the evidence of any defector is, giving that they will have their own axes to grind.
Although some Iraqi defectors gave startling evidence, some of which was revealed in newspapers. Especially over WMDs and over alleged Iraqi links to the September 11 attacks, there was skepticism over their reliability. Hersh cites an internal Pentagon memorandum that suggested terrorism experts inside and outside government had deliberately "downplayed or sought to disprove" the link between Al Qaeda and Iraq. The memorandum alleged that there is a bias against defectors.
CIA sources consulted by Hersh counter that many CIA analysts are convinced that the Chalabi group's defectors' reports on WMDs and Al Qaeda have produced little of value, and that the DIA agreed with this view.
President Bush has set up a Terrorist Threat Integration Center, which started operations on May 1 and is supposed to enhance the relationship between the Department of Defense intelligence operations and the CIA. The center is composed of elements of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the new Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense. John O. Brennan who has worked for the CIA for 23 years heads it, and it is under the ultimate control of the CIA.
Rumsfeld has undertaken a sweeping review of U.S. military strategy and operations and his position was further strengthened when on May 7, 2003 President Bush announced that Air Force Secretary James Roche was being transferred to Army Secretary, and that oil executive Colin McMillan was to be Navy Secretary. Both are firm allies of Rumsfeld.
The Defense Policy Board
The 30-member Defense Policy Board, which was set up in 1985 to advise the Pentagon, has assumed its most powerful position ever in relation to policy making under the George W. Bush presidency, which it has used to promote a generally neo-conservative agenda. The members, former high-level government and military officials, are selected by and report to the Under-Secretary for Defense for Policy, Douglas Feith, and all are approved by the Defense Secretary. The members include Rumsfeld's old friend and colleague Ken Adelman.
Richard Perle, who is a member of the Board and chaired it until resigning in March 2003, described it in an interview on PBS with Ben Wattenberg as being "a group of volunteer civilians who advise the Secretary of Defense. It now includes a pretty illustrious group of people, Henry Kissinger, former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, Harold Brown, Tom Foley and Newt Gingrich, two former speakers. These are wise men with deep experience who come together half a dozen times a year for extensive briefings, discussions, meetings and advice for the Secretary of Defense."
Perle added: "The Board doesn't take corporate views. It's simply a means by which the Secretary of Defense can come together with a group of people who have interesting things to say and they, in turn, can look into what's going on in the Defense Department and give him advice, but there are no votes or anything like that".
The Internet magazine Salon describes the Defense Policy Board in much less flattering terms. Salon said: "formerly an obscure civilian board designed to provide the secretary of Defense with non-binding advice on a whole range of military issues, the Defense Policy Board, now stacked with unabashed Iraq hawks, has become a quasi-lobbying organization whose primary objective appears to be waging war with Iraq."
Richard Perle resigned as chairman of the Defense Policy Board on March 27 after being criticized for being involved in companies that have a significant business involvement with the Department of Defense, meaning there was a possible conflict of interest. Perle retains his place on the Board and has in practice lost little of his influence within it.
The American watchdog the Center for Public Integrity has found that nine of the Board's members have ties to companies that do business with the Department of Defense. The defense contractors concerned won more than $76 billion in contracts in 2001 and 2002.
For example former CIA director James Woolsey, a key member of the board, is a director of Washington-based Paladin Capital set up three months after September 11 as a business opportunity for investment in homeland security. He is also, since July 2002; vice president of consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton.
Richard Perle tends to attract controversy wherever he goes, and his chairmanship of the Defense Policy Board is no exception. In July 2002 he invited Rand Corp analyst Laurent Murawiec, a former follower of political extremist Lyndon LaRouche to address the Board on Saudi Arabia. In the briefing, which was reported on the front page of the Washington Post, Murawiec claimed that Saudi Arabia was active at every level of the terror chain "from planners to financiers, from cadre to foot-solider, from ideologist to cheerleader."
Murawiec recommended that the U.S. target Saudi Arabia's oil, financial holdings and even its holy places unless it "stamped out anti-U.S. and anti-Israeli writings, stopped funding fundamentalist mosques, and prosecuted or isolated those involved in the terror chain, including in the Saudi intelligence services."
News of the briefing rocked U.S.-Saudi relations and Secretary of State Colin Powell was swift to reassure Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al Faisal that the briefing had no bearing on U.S. policy. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld also distanced himself from the presentation. Perle claimed that he had been unaware what Murawiec was going to say in advance.
Other neo-conservatives in the administration
Outside the Department of Defense also, neo-conservatives have a strong place in the administration. Vice President Dick Cheney is a neo-conservative as is his Chief of Staff the ultra-Zionist Libby 'Scooter' Lewis. It was Lewis who worked with Wolfowitz in 1992 to draw up the Defense Planning Guidance for the then Defense Secretary Cheney.
At the time the document, advocating U.S. action to prevent the rise of hostile powers and calling for pre-emptive strikes against states developing weapons of mass destruction, was seen as too extreme. There was an outcry when excerpts were leaked to the New York Times.
Now, as laid down in the National Security Strategy document presented by George W. Bush in September 2002 there is a fundamental shift of U.S. Defense policy toward pre-emption and U.S. military dominance, and away from deterrence, containment and collective security, showing how neo-conservative thinking has become the official Defense policy of the George W. Bush administration.
The National Security Strategy document of 2002 repeats many of the core elements of the Wolfowitz and Libby paper. Some describe the 1992 document as having been "put on the shelf, and taken down again in 2002." Defense Planning Guidance is only one of several key policy documents drawn up by neo-conservatives that have influenced administration thinking.
Other neo-conservatives in influential positions in the Bush administration include Special Assistant to the President, and Senior Director on the National Security Council for Near East and North African affairs Elliott Abrams; the Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John R. Bolton and Bolton's Special Assistant David Wurmser (whose wife Meyrav is a leading voice among Zionist neo-conservatives).
There are many other neo-conservatives in positions in government. One of the most prominent neo-conservative think tanks, the Center for Security Policy (CSP) lists on its website 21 members of the Center's National Security Advisory Council (NSAC) who are now in government and on leave from the NSAC. They include Elliott Abrams, Richard Perle (who is on the Defense Policy Board), Douglas Feith (former Chairman of the CSP directors) and Air Force Secretary James Roche (now transferred to Army Secretary).
With the neo-conservative vision spreading to embrace formerly disparate groups of policy makers, Bush's enormously powerful aide Karl Rove has been brought under the neo-conservative umbrella. Rove manages the Office of Political Affairs, the Office of Public Liaison and the Office of Strategic initiatives.
Rove was the chief strategist for Bush's presidential campaign and will be using the militaristic image of Bush as a main winning point in the forthcoming re-election campaign.
Iraq war has mixed results for the neo-conservatives
In the eyes of some, the removal of Saddam Hussein was the first step towards establishing the Pax Americana in the Middle East was and the establishment of an American protectorate in Iraq. This would give control of oil heads, would warn every leader in the Middle East, and would establish in Iraq a military staging area for the eventual invasion and overthrow of several Middle Eastern regimes including some that have been allies of the U.S.
Following the military campaign on Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, there is deep concern in the Middle East about who might be in the U.S.'s sights for a further round of regime change. Many neo-conservatives have been making noises about Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia and are strongly pushing the view that there must be change, either from inside regimes or through toppling regimes by force.
When Secretary of State Colin Powell - not regarded as a neo-conservative - made his threatening noises about Syria on March 30, it was noteworthy that this was in a speech to the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
Powell said: "My friends, all of us here tonight are brought together by a deep commitment to Israel's security, prosperity, and freedom, and to the strongest possible relationship between Israel and the United States."
Powell said Syria faced a critical choice, "Syria can continue direct support for terrorist groups and the dying regime of Saddam Hussein, or it can embark on a different and more hopeful course. Either way, Syria bears the responsibility for its choices, and for the consequences."
But countries in the region do not appreciate being told "change and democratize or else" with a gun held to their heads, literally so in the wake of the Iraq war. Nor do people see the U.S. as such a virtuous repository of values as it claims. They know about the exercise of democracy there - George W. Bush's disputed election victory, the power of the Zionist lobby in the administration and in Congress.
U.S. presence may make governments clean up their acts. They will realize they cannot go on abusing human rights and oppressing their people and they will recognize that they have to become more accountable to their people. But at the same time through trying to enforce change, the U.S. might actually slow it. No government wants to look as if it is introducing changes dictated from outside.
The diminishing role of the UN has been a central plank of the neo-conservative program. Richard Perle asked: "Is the United Nations better able to confer legitimacy than, say, a coalition of liberal democracies?" He wrote an article entitled "Thank God for the death of the UN." There have been efforts to ridicule chief UN weapons inspector Dr. Hans Blix and his team, and to keep them out of Iraq while the Coalition look for WMDs.
The U.S. has come across as selfish - wanting to act unilaterally, opposing the International Criminal Court (ICC), weakening the UN, and then when it needs to, using international machinery such as the Geneva Conventions for its own nationals captured by the Iraqis.
It is still far from certain that the translation of the neo-conservative project into action, as shown so dramatically in the war on Iraq, will have the outcome the neo-conservatives dream of. However, some think that even if there is chaos, this will accord with their scheme of things, enabling yet further intervention or interference. Already the aftermath of the war in Afghanistan had shown the tremendous resources of time and commitment needed if the initial campaign was to have a chance of producing a system in the long-term interest of the U.S.
With Iraq, the experiment of dismantling a state that did not pose an immediate and direct threat and was not engaged in war has not been tried before and has numerous consequences; not all are foreseeable. Although Saddam's regime was overthrown, the Coalition had by mid-May failed to capture him or his two sons, and there was no conclusive evidence that they had been killed.
They faced the prospect of a fugitive leader, issuing videos and audiocassettes from time to time. There had yet to be the conclusive finds of the weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), Saddam's possession of which had been the stated casus belli. Luckily for the Coalition, Saddam's regime had been so ghastly in its brutality; at least they could claim his overthrow had benefited the Iraqi people.
There was resurgence of Shiite movements and of political parties. It is not at all certain that a free democratic election in Iraq would have a result that is in Western interests. The presence of the U.S. and British was resented, and there have been attacks on them. The Iraqis were already politically sophisticated and well educated, and resented the outside interference and the neo-colonialist era.
Anti-Americanism, already at high levels, intensified further in the Middle East and in many other parts of the world as a result of the war on Iraq. Some Arabs volunteered to fight in Iraq during the war. The perceived U.S. threat to the region, plus the assumption it would control the oil of Iraq and set up bases there, increased resentment. The suicide bomb attacks in Riyadh on March 12, shortly before Colin Powell arrived there, showed that terrorism in the region had been far from diminished after the war on Iraq.
It is far from certain that the Coalition action will reduce terrorism in the longer term. It has radicalized further young Arabs and Muslims, including those large populations in the West. The neo-conservative-shaped actions enhanced the chances of a 'Clash of Civilizations.'
Iraqi 'freedom' and 'liberation' have come at a huge price for the Iraqi people, who had already suffered from 12 years of UN sanctions. The Iraqis did not have the freedom to enjoy the most basic things - water, electricity, healthcare, and education. The income of families has been devastated by the cutting off of government salaries and by the loss of jobs and of savings in banks. The Coalition forces permitted widespread looting and destruction, and Iraq lost much of its cultural heritage. Ministries were burnt. There is a breakdown of security, with armed gangs roaming the streets and many families too scared to leave their houses.
The U.S. effort to reconstruct Iraq was admitted to be in chaos by May and there was a shake-up of the U.S. reconstruction effort. On May 6, 2003 President Bush appointed Lewis Paul "Jerry" Bremer III (61) as the top civilian administrator in Baghdad, replacing Jay Garner to oversee Iraq's transition to democratic rule. Bremer is one of the world's leading authorities on terrorism and has a 23-year career in the U.S. diplomatic service. Bremer's appointment was seen as a victory for the State Department in its long feud with the Defense Department over reconstruction in Iraq.
The appointment of Jay Garner, the former general, had aroused many suspicions in Iraq and the wider Middle East in light of his visit to Israel organized by JINSA in 1998 and had put his name to a JINSA-sponsored statement in October 2000 blaming the Palestinians for the outbreak of violence and praising the "remarkable restraint" of the Israeli Defense Forces.
Confidence in the U.S. program was shaken when it was announced on May 11 that Barbara Bodine, the U.S. administrator for central Iraq including Baghdad, returned to the U.S. This was an admission that things in Baghdad were not going according to plan.
The war on Iraq has emboldened Israel and its ardent supporters among the neo-conservatives to be even less willing to make any concessions to the Palestinians. Despite the pledge by U.S. President George W. Bush at a press conference with the British Prime Minister that he will expend the same amount of effort in the Middle East that Blair has in the Northern Ireland peace process, there was much skepticism that this would translate into real action, especially with the U.S. presidential election campaign grinding into gear.
But without some real movement, things could only get worse for the Palestinians and radicalization and support for Hamas and Islamic Jihad could only grow. During Secretary of State Colin Powell's visit to Israel and separate talks with Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas (aka Abu Mazen) in the second week of May, little real progress was made on the Roadmap and Israel swiftly reversed its easing on Palestinian movement once Powell had left.
The splits between the Pentagon and the State Department
The prevalence of the neo-conservative worldview within the Pentagon has been accompanied by running disagreements between the State Department and the Pentagon, and between Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich in an outburst, during a speech to the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute on April 22, 2003 in which he attacked the "pathetic" State Department, highlighted the dispute.
Gingrich said that Colin Powell, the U.S. Secretary of State, should not be traveling to Syria while the Syrians "openly host" seven terrorist organizations and when the "U.S. military has created the opportunity to apply genuine economic, diplomatic and political pressure."
It was the State Department, which undermined the U.S. position at the UN by accepting inspections, and agreeing to Hans Blix as chief weapons inspector, Gingrich argued. It was the "ineffective and incoherent" State Department that lost the battle for world public opinion, and despite a "pathetic public campaign of hand wringing and desperation" it failed to gain a majority on the Security Council for a second resolution. "It was a stunning diplomatic defeat of the first order," Gingrich said.
Gingrich attacked the State Department plan for peace in the Middle East, and the so-called Roadmap that will be put forward by the Quartet. He said that this was "a deliberate and systematic effort to undermine the president's policies" and that it was unimaginable after the bitter lessons of the last five months that the U.S. "would voluntarily accept a system in which the UN, the EU and Russia could routinely outvote President Bush's positions by three to one."
According to Gingrich, the culture of the State Department represents "process, politeness, and accommodation" as opposed to the president's approach of "facts, values and outcomes."
Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage retorted: "It's clear Mr. Gingrich is off his meds and out of therapy." And President Bush's press secretary Ari Fleischer defended Powell, saying that he "did an excellent job at ushering through that (diplomatic) process" at the UN and had the president's backing for his trip to Syria.
Some saw Gingrich's remarks as the first round in a neo-conservative campaign to transform the State Department into an equivalent of the Department of Defense under Donald Rumsfeld. The speech was part of a campaign against Powell that was muted during the Iraq invasion but was revived afterwards as some Republicans sought to harden U.S. policy toward other regimes including Syria and Iran.
Some White House officials are reported to have complained that Powell is limiting the influence of hawkish political appointees within the State Department, in the office of Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton, who was previously vice president of AEI.
One prominent Republican businessman, who declined to be identified, even claimed that the anti-Powell campaign had escalated to the point of a petition urging Bush to replace Powell.
The disagreements over strategy within the Bush administration seemed to have intensified with the end of the war, with conflicts over the approach to Syria, Iran, and North Korea as well as in how to rebuild Iraq. And the right, made bold by its victory in Baghdad, seems to be winning more of the arguments.
Administration officials, including Powell, have defended the heated ideological debates within the Cabinet as healthy. But others say they are exhausting for the bureaucracy, confusing to the American public and foreign governments and harmful to administration policies.
The origins of neo-conservative thinking
Although it is since September 11 that the rise and influence of the neo-conservatives on government policy has become so obvious, the roots of neo-conservative thinking go back to the late 1960s when some of those on the left started to shift from their liberal position over key issues. These included issues relating to Israel. The victory of Israel in the 1967 War encouraged some liberal Jews to become "born again Zionists."
The neo-conservatives had a liberal, even Trotskyite anti-Stalinist, background - hence the prefix "neo." Many of the pioneers of neo-conservative thinking were Jews who had fled persecution and came to the U.S. with idealistic, left wing views. They saw the U.S. as necessarily a force for good and a redemptive country. The political analyst and journalist Jim Lobe recalls hearing Elliott Abrams say: "Well, America may have made mistakes here and there but there's no question that it is the greatest force for good in the world today."
The Holocaust runs deep with many of the neo-conservatives (some of whom including Wolfowitz had family members who perished in it). The Munich agreement of 1938 is abhorred as an example of the type of appeasement with tyranny that should be avoided at all costs. In the run up to the Iraq war, the Munich agreement was often cited by the proponents of war in the U.S. and in Britain. They would ask: "So should we do nothing about the evil of Saddam and the threat he represents? What if we had nothing about Hitler?"
When asked about the neo-conservatives' origins in leftist politics, Richard Perle has said: "I suppose all of us were liberal at one time. I was liberal in high school and a little bit into college. But reality and rigor are important topics and if you got into the world of international affairs and you looked with some rigor at what was going on in the world, it was really hard to be liberal and naďve."
The fathers of the neo-conservative movement include Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz. Podhoretz edited the monthly magazine Commentary for many years and his wife Midge Decter was also active in developing the neo-conservative trend.
As has been described earlier, much has been made by The New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh, by James Atlas of the New York Times and some others of the influence of the Jewish German émigré Chicago University political philosopher Leo Strauss, who died in 1973. Strauss was an influence on Paul Wolfowitz, and Abram Shulsky who heads the Pentagon intelligence outfit, the Office of Special Plans. Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz are admirers of Strauss, whose books include 'On Tyranny.'
The vehemently anti-Soviet pro-Israeli Democrat Senator Henry 'Scoop' Jackson is another legendary figure in the history of neo-conservatism. One of Perle's early mentor's, Albert Wohlstetter, suggested that Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, who were at the time graduate students, go to interview Jackson. The outcome was that Perle worked for Jackson for 11 years. Perle often says he is still a Democrat, out of respect for Scoop Jackson.
Some of the other neo-conservatives to have worked with Scoop Jackson are William Kristol (Irving Kristol's son), Elliott Abrams (Norman Podhoretz' son-in-law) and Frank Gaffney. Perle and Abrams, working out of Jackson's office, used the issue of Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union to undermine U.S.-Soviet détente. Jackson sponsored legislation that made the Soviet Union's gaining "most favored nation status" contingent on an increase in Jewish emigration.
In 1973 Jackson, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and other similarly minded Democrats set up the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, which favored hawkish policies on Defense and national security. Elliott Abrams was a member, as were Norman Podhoretz, Jeane Kirkpatrick (who would later become Reagan's Ambassador to the UN) and Stephen Bryen. As Nixon's ambassador to the UN in the 1970s, Moynihan was markedly pro-Israeli.
Policy analyst and journalist Jim Lobe noted in an interview with ABC TV in February 2003 that in the mid-1970s Wolfowitz became a key figure in the development of neo-conservatism when he served on a body called 'Team B' - a group of analysts chosen by hawks in the Ford administration who were already working with people in Senator Jackson's office, particularly Richard Perle.
The hawks took issue with CIA estimates of Soviet strategic abilities and intentions. Wolfowitz wrote a chapter in a study by Team B in which he said the CIA had been much too optimistic in its estimates of U.S. advantage over the Soviet Union. Wolfowitz claimed that the Soviet Union was preparing for a war in which it would prevail in a nuclear exchange.
Jim Lobe described Team B as "hammering some very important nails in the coffin of détente by the mid-70s under the Ford administration and that really was its purpose; which is why it was selected. Wolfowitz was very highly regarded at that time as a strategic analyst and becomes a key player in this very hard-line faction."
At the time, Donald Rumsfeld was in his first incarnation as Defense Secretary, and he helped establish Team B. This helped Rumsfeld outmaneuver Henry Kissinger who was trying to work out an arms-control agreement with the Soviet Union.
The creation of Team B and the undermining of the CIA and the U.S. intelligence community forged an alliance between the neo-conservatives from Scoop Jackson's office, who were still Democrats, and Republican right-wingers of the Donald Rumsfeld type.
In 1977, within weeks of Jimmy Carter's election as president, neo-conservatives created the Committee on the Present Danger. They regarded the Carter years as disastrous. This was partly because of developments relating to apparent U.S. weakness in face of the Soviet Union, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the siege of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. In addition, Carter was seen as less supportive of Israel than previous presidents, and alarm bells rang when he said the Palestinians had the right to a homeland.
The Committee on the Present Danger, which worked towards the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, is seen as the first alliance between the neo-conservatives and the right wing as represented by Donald Rumsfeld.
When Reagan became president, he brought a number of neo-conservatives into the administration. Kirkpatrick was appointed as ambassador to the UN, and Richard Perle as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy from 1981 to 1987, and was a stiff opponent of arms-control agreements with the Soviets. Ken Adelman served as Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in 1983-87 and Elliott Abrams was Reagan's Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights in the early 1980s, and then became Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs.
Abrams played an active role in the Iran-Contra Affair. The Iran-Contra special prosecutor indicted him for giving false testimony. He pleaded guilty to two lesser offences of withholding information from Congress, and as such managed to avoid a trial and possible imprisonment. George Bush Sr. pardoned Abrams and some other Iran-Contra defendants in 1992.
A complex network of relationships links the neo-conservatives
A complex network of family, friendships, and working and mentoring-type relationships link the neo-conservatives. Jim Lobe writes in his March 2003 article Neo-conservative Geneology "This list of intricate, overlapping connections is hardly exhaustive or perhaps even surprising. But it helps reveal an important fact. Contrary to appearances, the neo-cons do not constitute a powerful mass political movement. They are instead a small, tightly-knit clan whose incestuous familial and personal connection, both within and outside the Bush administration, have allowed them to grab control of the future of American foreign policy."
Irving Kristol, born in 1920, was one of the founding fathers of neo-conservatism. He was managing editor of Commentary magazine from 1947 to 1950 and was co-founder and editor, with Stephen Spender, of Encounter magazine from 1953 to 1958. The CIA funded Encounter. Kristol is married to Gertrude Himmelfarb. Their son William Kristol, editor of the Rupert Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard, is described by Lobe as "Crown Prince of the neo-conservative clique."
In 1999 Irving Kristol authored the book Neo-Conservatism, Autobiography of an Idea. His disciples included Richard Perle.
Norman Podhoretz, like Irving Kristol, helped invent neo-conservatism in the late 1960s. His wife Midge Decter has been a trustee of the Heritage Foundation since 1981. They were leaders of the Committee on the Present Danger in 1980 and worked with Donald Rumsfeld.
Norman Podhoretz' protégés at Commentary included Jeane Kirkpatrick and Richard Pipes, who was Reagan's top advisor on the Evil Empire. His son Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, battles his version of 'evil' - Islam.
Perle was a classmate of Joan Wohlstetter, daughter of the late Alfred Wohlstetter, who introduced him to her father at the family swimming pool. Wohlstetter helped Perle and Paul Wolfowitz get their start in Washington over 30 years ago. According to Perle, Wohlstetter introduced him and Wolfowitz to each other when he thought they could work together in 1969 on the debate taking shape in the Senate over the ballistic missile defense. Perle and Wolfowitz interviewed Henry 'Scoop' Jackson together and Perle says: "it was love at first sight. I will never forget that first encounter with Scoop. Here we were, a couple of graduate students, sitting on the floor of Scoop's office in the Senate reviewing charts and analyses of the ballistic missile defenses and getting his views on the subject." Perle went to work for Scoop Jackson for 11 years.
Wolfowitz' deputy Douglas Feith is a protégé of Perle. His father Dalck Feith was a follower of the revisionist Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky in his native Poland in the 1930s and was active in Betar, Jabotinsky's youth movement. Dalck and Douglas Feith were honored at a dinner in November 1997 by the Zionist Organization of American (ZOA), which described them as "the noted Jewish philanthropists and pro-Israel activists."
The right-wing think tank the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) is a focus for some of the relationships. Lynne Cheney, wife of Dick Cheney, is a scholar at AEI. The Cheneys' daughter Elizabeth is Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs. In 2002, Norman Podhoretz received the AEI's highest honor - the Francis Boyer award, which in 2003 became the Irving Kristol award.
Michael Ledeen, Resident Scholar in the Freedom Chair at the AEI, is married to Barbara Ledeen, a founder and director of the anti-feminist Independent Women's Forum (IWF) who is much criticized by leftists. Barbara Ledeen is regarded as an influential force in Republican Congressional politics.
David Wurmser and his wife Meyrav are one of the most high-powered neo-conservative couples. Both were involved with Perle, Feith and others in authoring the 1996 memorandum for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. Wurmser has been director of Middle East studies at AEI. His book Tyranny's Ally: America's Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein, was published by the AEI Press.
Meyrav co-founded with Israeli intelligence operative Yigal Carmon the Middle East Research Institute (MEMRI) and was its executive director for four years. She is currently a Senior Fellow and Director of the Centre for Middle East Studies at the Hudson Institute and is writing a book on the failure of Oslo.
Robert Kagan and his wife Victoria Nuland are another power couple. Robert Kagan is author of the book Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order. He is a neo-conservative foreign policy analyst who started off as a liberal, and is probably still better known in France than in the U.S.
Victoria Nuland was U.S. deputy chief of mission to NATO, and has been appointed as Vice President Dick Cheney's number two foreign policy advisor.
Robert and his brother Frederick are the sons of Donald Kagan. Frederick Kagan is a professor of military history at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Together with Donald he wrote the 2000 book While America Sleeps: Self-Delusion, Military Weakness, and the Threat to Peace Today, which argues in favor of missile defense and warns of future threats to the U.S.
Donald Kagan has taught at Yale since 1969 and became Sterling Professor of Classics and History there in 2002. For more than 25 years he taught the popular course The Origins of War. He was a liberal Democrat who became a neo-conservative in the 1970s. Donald Kagan and his two sons often write articles and columns urging ever greater spending on Defense.
Elliott Abrams worked closely with Robert Kagan during the Reagan presidency. He is son-in-law of Norman Podhoretz. Norman Podhoretz' son John is a columnist for the New York Post, owned by Rupert Murdoch, and he is often seen on the Murdoch-owned Fox TV Channel. John Podhoretz wrote speeches for Ronald Reagan and then for George Bush Sr. He has written against America putting any pressure on Israel, and claims Israel refuses to defend itself so as to show its "good faith" in seeking peace.
The Project for the New American Century
The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) was set up in spring 1997, under the aegis of the New Citizenship Project, which has been generously funded by the Bradley Foundation. PNAC has close links with the American Enterprise Institute (AEI - also funded by Bradley), from which it rents office space.
PNAC is a non-profit educational organization whose goal is to promote American global leadership, and from its inception it has lobbied hard for war on Iraq and for America to play a more permanent role in the Middle East. It believes U.S. foreign policy to be by definition "right."
PNAC's chairman is William Kristol, and the project directors are Robert Kagan, Bruce P. Jackson, Lewis E. Lehrman and Mark Gerson. The six project staff include executive director Gary Schmitt and Reuel Marc Gerecht, who is Senior Fellow at the AEI and Director of the PNAC's Middle East Initiative.
(Bruce Jackson was, for years, vice-president of weapons manufacturer Lockheed-Martin and he headed the Republican Party Platform Subcommittee for National Security and Foreign Policy in the 2000 campaign, at which time he called for the removal of Saddam Hussein.)
Jim Lobe describes PNAC as "a front group for the coalition of neo-conservatives, hard-right Republicans and Christian Right activists that is behind what has come to be called Bush's 'neo-imperialist' policies." Many of the neo-conservatives involved in PNAC from its inception are now in positions of power in the administration, and are able to translate its programs into action.
A main thrust the setting up of PNAC by Rumsfeld, Cheney et al was to counter what they saw as the drift in President Bill foreign and defense policy. The establishment of PNAC cemented the powerful alliance between right-wing Republicans like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, Christian and Catholic Rightist leaders such as Gary Bauer and William Bennett, and the neo-conservatives, behind a platform of U.S. global military dominance.
Lobe says, "PNAC in many ways is the latest incarnations of a series of hawkish groups dominated by Jewish neo-conservatives dating back to the 1970s when they fought the anti-war wing of the Democratic Party and then combined with key Republicans like Rumsfeld to oppose détente with Moscow."
William Pitt has written that PNAC was the driving force behind the drafting and passage of the Iraqi Liberation Act, a bill that painted a veneer of legality over the ultimate designs behind an Iraq war. The names of every prominent PNAC member was on a letter to President Clinton in 1998 castigating him for not implementing the Act by driving troops into Baghdad.
PNAC funneled millions of taxpayer dollars to the Iraqi National Congress (INC). And it created a new group - the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.
The PNAC Statement of Principles
The PNAC's statement of principles, dated 3 June 1997 is signed by 25 people, among them Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Elliott Abrams, Jeb Bush, Norman Podhoretz and his wife Midge Decter, Zalmay Khalilzad, Frank Gaffney, Lewis Libby, Dan Quayle, Donald Kagan, William J. Bennett, and the right-wing one-time Republican presidential candidate, publisher Steve Forbes.
The statement of principles argues that American foreign and defense policy is adrift, and that although Conservatives have criticized the incoherent policies of the Clinton administration, they have not confidently advanced a strategic vision of America's role in the world and have not set forth guiding principles for American foreign policy. Nor have they fought for a defense budget that would maintain American security and advance American interests in the new century. "We aim to change this. We aim to make the case and rally support for American global leadership."
The statement says the history of the 20th century shows that it is important to shape circumstances before crises emerge and to meet threats before they become dire. "The history of this century should have taught us to embrace the cause of American leadership."
There are four consequences of this:
We need to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future.
We need to strengthen our ties to democratic allies and to challenge regimes hostile to our interest and values.
We need to promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad.
We need to accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity and our principles.
The statement concludes: "Such a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity may not be fashionable today. But it is necessary if the U.S. is to build on the successes of this past century and to ensure our security and our greatness in the next."
PNAC's open letters and memoranda
PNAC often publishes open letters and memoranda to President George W. Bush and opinion leaders, with numerous signatories including many of the neo-conservatives. The letters and memoranda are posted on the website, as are articles by PNAC members.
On September 21, 2001 PNAC issued an open letter to President Bush, calling on him to take the anti-terror war beyond Afghanistan through removing Saddam Hussein, breaking links with the Palestinian Authority (PA), and preparing for action against Syria, Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon. The 41 signatories included Richard Perle, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Frank Gaffney, Francis Fukuyama, William Kristol, and Donald and Robert Kagan.
A PNAC letter to Bush on April 3, 2002 commended him for his "strong stance in support of the Israeli government as it engages in the present campaign to fight terrorism… no one should doubt that the U.S. and Israel share a common enemy. We are both targets of what you have correctly called an 'Axis of Evil.' Israel is targeted in part because it is our friend, and in part because it is an island of liberal democratic principles - American principles - in a sea of tyranny, intolerance and hatred. As Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld has pointed out, Iran, Iraq, and Syria are all engaged in 'inspiring and financing a culture of political murder and suicide bombing' against Israel, just as they have aided campaigns of terrorism against the U.S. over the past two decades."
The letter denounced Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority leadership. "It can no longer be the policy of the U.S. to urge, much less to pressure, Israel to continue negotiating with Arafat, any more than we would be willing to be pressured to negotiate with Osama bin Laden or Mullah Omar. Nor should the U.S. provide financial support to a Palestinian Authority that acts as a cog in the machine of Middle East terrorism, any more than we would approve of others providing assistance to Al Qaeda.
"Instead, the U.S. should lend its full support to Israel as it seeks to root out the terrorist network that daily threatens the lives of Israeli citizens." The letter also urges Bush to accelerate plans for removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.
The letter's 34 signatories include Richard Perle, Norman Podhoretz, Ken Adelman, Robert Kagan, Frank Gaffney, Daniel Pipes, Randy Scheunemann and former CIA director James Woolsey.
The PNAC has attempted to put the best possible gloss on the post-war situation in Iraq. A PNAC memorandum to opinion leaders from Gary Schmitt on post-Saddam Iraq, dated May 5, 2003, criticizes the "doom and gloom" reporting by the media from Baghdad. It attaches an article 'Bad Reporting in Baghdad' by Jonathan Foreman of the New York Post, which was published in The Weekly Standard.
In his report, that contradicts reports by virtually every other journalist from Baghdad, Foreman writes: "The intensity of the population's pro-American enthusiasm is astonishing… and continues unabated despite delays in restoring power and water to the city... It's things like the way the women old and young flirt outrageously with GIs, lifting their veils to smile, waving from high windows, and shyly calling hello form half-opened doors."
"But you won't see much of this on TV or read about it in the papers… to an amazing degree, the Baghdad-based press corps avoids writing about or filming the friendly dealings between U.S. forces here and the local population."
The PNAC report 'Rebuilding America's Defenses'
In September 2000, PNAC produced a report entitled Rebuilding America's Defenses - Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century . There were 27 participants in the project, among them Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, Gary Schmitt and Lewis Libby. Donald Kagan and Gary Schmitt were the project co-chairmen and Thomas Donnelly the principal author.
The report proceeds from the belief that America should seek to preserve and extend its position of global leadership by maintaining the pre-eminence of U.S. military forces. It calls for a massive increase in defense spending and the fighting of several major theatre wars to establish U.S. dominance.
The report states: "The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein." It calls for "global U.S. pre-eminence shaping the international security order in line with American interests" and states that "Even should Saddam pass from the scene" U.S. troops should remain in the Gulf." The report says that peacekeeping missions "demand American political leadership rather than that of the UN."
The PNAC book 'Present Dangers'
For the 2000 presidential campaign PNAC assembled a book, which has been seen as a blueprint for the incoming administration, entitled 'Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy' edited by William Kristol and Robert Kagan (published by Encounter Books). Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams, and Richard Perle contributed chapters in the book.
In his chapter on the Middle East, Elliott Abrams lays out the "peace through strength" concept and argues that U.S. military strength and its willingness to sue it will remain "a key factor in our ability to promote peace." He calls for a pre-emptive toppling of Saddam, as do the other contributors to the book.
Abrams writes: "Strengthening our major ally in the region, Israel, should be the base of U.S. Middle East policy, and we should not permit the establishment of a Palestinian state that does not explicitly uphold U.S. policy in the region."
In their introductory chapter, on Regime Change, Kristol and Kagan target Iraq, Iran, North Korea and China as needing to be confronted. As regards Iraq and North Korea, the two PNAC founders conclude that the U.S. will have to intervene abroad "even when we | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
