| Author | Message | | Shnozzle | | Posted: Sat Aug 28, 2004 1:17 pm Post subject: They Hijacked the Pentagon |
| Soldier for the Truth - Exposing Bush’s talking-points war. (Karen Kwiatkowski - A Pentagon Insider talks)
... The OSP — a pet project of Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld — was more akin to a nerve center for what she now calls a “neoconservative coup, a hijacking of the Pentagon.” ...
... They pushed an agenda on Iraq, and they developed pretty sophisticated propaganda lines which were fed throughout government, to the Congress, and even internally to the Pentagon ...
... There was a sort of groupthink, an adopted storyline: We are going to invade Iraq and we are going to eliminate Saddam Hussein and we are going to have bases in Iraq. This was all a given even by the time I joined them, in May of 2002. ...
http://www.laweekly.com/ink/04/13/news-cooper.php
http://www.ariannaonline.com/forums/showthread.php?t=9738 | |  | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Aug 28, 2004 4:36 pm Post subject: Neocons Hijacked the Pentagon for War for Israel |
| In addition the following, the Zionist traitor worked for Bill Luti as a specialist in Iran policy (he spoke Farsi) as he most likely must have been helping to push for the coming attack on Iran (if the Zionist neocons get their way) as he was working under PNAC/JINSA/CSP Zionist extremists (both of whom are Jewish) Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz.
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2004/08/27/fbi-suspects-israel-has-mole-in-pentagon-cbs.php
I just finished watching the ABC 'Nightline' national television program in the USA as it was all about the Israel's mole at the Pentagon (hopefully a write-up or transcript of such will be added to www.abcnews.com/nightline soon). It was mentioned that the Zionist traitor to America worked under Bill Luti who headed up the Office of Special Plans (OSP) for JINSA/CSP Zionist extremist (Jew) Douglas Feith (the Office of Special Plans cooked intelligence for going to war in Iraq as conveyed in the 'The Lie Factory' article included below and in James Bamford's 'A Pretext for War' book as well):
Subj: The (Neocon) Lie Factory
Date: 1/9/04 5:21:34 PM Pacific Standard Time
From: hectorpv@comcast.net
To: hectorpv@comcast.net
Friends,
The (Neocon) Lie Factory
This is an excellent article by Jason Vest and Robert Dreyfus discussing how the neocons took over Defense Department intelligence and used it to propagandize for war against Iraq, especially with the creation of the Office of Special Plans. Thus neocon dominance went far beyond the existence of a few leading individuals, such as Wolfowitz, Feith, or Perle. Rather, the leading neocons brought in other members of their ilk and concomitantly purged those career officials who were resistant to their war mission. All the neocons worked together to promote the war. "?It was organized like a machine," she [Karen Kwiatkowski] says. ?The people working on the neocon agenda had a narrow, well-defined political agenda. They had a sense of mission.?" A close analogy was the success of the old Soviet-directed Communists to take over liberal and leftist organizations (and some governments) by virtue of their discipline and organization. The neocons, however, achieve greater success without the external, formal discipline of the Communist Party. They seem to have innate talent here. But it also might be added that the neocons are able to act more openly?in part because to oppose to them brings on the lethal charge of "anti-Semite," which is far more deadly than "red-baiter."
_________________________
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/01/12_405.html
MotherJones.com / News / Feature
The Lie Factory
Robert Dreyfuss, Jason Vest. Mother Jones. San Francisco: Jan/Feb 2004. Vol. 29, Iss. 1; pg. 34
Only weeks after 9/11, the Bush administration set up a secret Pentagon unit to create the case for invading Iraq. Here is the inside story for how they pushed disinformation and bogus intelligence and led the nation to war. BY ROBERT DREYFUSS & VEST
IT'S A CRISP FALL DAY IN WESTERN VIRGINIA, a hundred miles from Washington, D.C., and a breeze is rustling the red and gold leaves of the Shenandoah hills. On the weather-beaten wood porch of a ramshackle 90-year-old farmhouse, at the end of a winding dirt-and-gravel road, Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski is perched on a plastic chair, wearing shorts, a purple sweatshirt, and muddy sneakers. Two scrawny dogs and a lone cat are on the prowl, and tne air is filled with swarms
So far, she says, no investigators have come knocking. Not from the Central Intelligence Agency, which conducted an internal inquiry into intelligence on Iraq, not from the congressional intelligence committees, not from the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. All of those bodies are ostensibly looking into the Bush administration's prewar Iraq intelligence, amid charges that the White House and the Pentagon exaggerated, distorted, or just plain lied about Iraq's links to Al Qaeda terrorists and its possession of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. In her hands, Kwiatkowski holds several pieces of the puzzle. Yet she, along with a score of other career officers recently retired or shuffled off to other jobs, has not been approached by anyone.
Kwiatkowski, 43, a now-retired Air Force officer who served in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia (NESA) unit in the year before the invasion of Iraq, observed how the Pentagon's Iraq war-planning unit manufactured scare stories about Iraq's weapons and ties to terrorists. "It wasn't intelligence-it was propaganda," she says. "They'd take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don't belong together." It was by turning such bogus intelligence into talking points for U.S. officials-including ominous lines in speeches by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell's testimony at the U.N. Security Council last February-that the administration pushed American public opinion into supporting an unnecessary war.
Until now, the story of how the Bush administration produced its wildly exaggerated estimates of the threat posed by Iraq has never been revealed in full. But, for the first time, a detailed investigation by Mother Jones, based on dozens of interviews-some on the record, some with officials who insisted on anonymity-exposes the workings of a secret Pentagon intelligence unit and of the Defense Department's war-planning task force, the Office of Special Plans. It's the story of a close-knit team of ideologues who spent a decade or more hammering out plans for an attack on Iraq and who used the events of September 11, 2001, to set it into motion.
SIX MONTHS AFTER THE END of major combat in Iraq, the United States had spent $300 million trying to find banned weapons in Iraq, and President Bush was seeking $600 million more to extend the search. Not found were Iraq's Scuds and other long-range missiles, thousands of barrels and tons of anthrax and botulism stock, sarin and VX nerve agents, mustard gas, biological and chemical munitions, mobile labs for producing biological weapons, and any and all evidence of a reconstituted nuclear-arms program, all of which had been repeatedly cited as justification for the war. Also missing was evidence of Iraqi collaboration with Al Qaeda.
The reports, virtually all false, of Iraqi weapons and terrorism ties emanated from an apparatus that began to gestate almost as soon as the Bush administration took power. In the very first meeting of the Bush national-security team, one day after President Bush took the oath of office in January 2001, the issue of invading Iraq was raised, according to one of the participants in the meeting-and officials all the way down the line started to get the message, long before 9/11. Indeed, the Bush team at the Pentagon hadn't even been formally installed before Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of Defense, and Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary of Defense for policy, began putting together what would become the vanguard for regime change in Iraq.
Both Wolfowitz and Feith have deep roots in the neoconservative movement. One of the most influential Washington neoconservatives in the foreign-policy establishment during the Republicans' wilderness years of the 1990s, Wolfowitz has long held that not taking Baghdad in 1991 was a grievous mistake. He and others now prominent in the administration said so repeatedly over the past decade in a slew of letters and policy papers from neoconservative groups like the Project for the New American Century and the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. Feith, a former aide to Richard Perle at the Pentagon in the 1980s and an activist in far-right Zionist circles, held the view that there was no difference between U.S. and Israeli security policy and that the best way to secure both countries' future was to solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem not by serving as a broker, but with the United States as a force for "regime change" in the region.
Called in to help organize the Iraq war-planning team was a longtime Pentagon official, Harold Rhode, a specialist on Islam who speaks Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish, and Farsi. Though Feith would not be officially confirmed until July 2001, career military and civilian officials in NESA began to watch his office with concern after Rhode set up shop in Feith's office in early January. Rhode, seen by many veteran staffers as an ideological gadfly, was officially assigned to the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment, an in-house Pentagon think tank headed by fellow neocon Andrew Marshall. Rhode helped Feith lay down the law about the department's new anti-Iraq, and broadly anti-Arab, orientation. In one telling incident, Rhode accosted and harangued a visiting senior Arab diplomat, telling him that there would be no "bartering in the bazaar anymore.... You're going to have to sit up and pay attention when we say so."
Rhode refused to be interviewed for this story, saying cryptically, "Those who speak, pay."
According to insiders, Rhode worked with Feith to purge career Defense officials who weren't sufficiently enthusiastic about the muscular anti-Iraq crusade that Wolfowitz and Feith wanted. Rhode appeared to be "pulling people out of nooks and crannies of the Defense Intelligence Agency and other places to replace us with," says a former analyst. "They wanted nothing to do with the professional staff. And they wanted us the fuck out of there."
The unofficial, off-site recruitment office for Feith and Rhode was the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think tank whose 12th-floor conference room in Washington is named for the dean of neoconservative defense strategists, the late Albert Wohlstetter, an influential RAND analyst and University of Chicago mathematician. Headquartered at AEI is Richard Perle, Wohlstetter's prize protege, the godfather of the AEI-Defense Department nexus of neoconservatives who was chairman of the Pentagon's influential Defense Policy Board. Rhode, along with Michael Rubin, a former AEI staffer who is also now at the Pentagon, was a ubiquitous presence at AEI conferences on Iraq over the past two years, and the two Pentagon officials seemed almost to be serving as stage managers for the AEI events, often sitting in the front row and speaking in stage whispers to panelists and AEI officials. Just after September 11, 2001, Feith and Rhode recruited David Wurmser, the director of Middle East studies for AEI, to serve as a Pentagon consultant.
Wurmser would be the founding participant of the unnamed, secret intelligence unit at the Pentagon, set up in Feith's office, which would be the nucleus of the Defense Department's Iraq disinformation campaign that was established within weeks of the attacks in New York and Washington. While the CIA and other intelligence agencies concentrated on Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda as the culprit in the 9/11 attacks, Wolfowitz and Feith obsessively focused on Iraq. It was a theory that was discredited, even ridiculed, among intelligence professionals. Daniel Benjamin, co-author of The Age of Sacred Terror, was director of counterterrorism at the National Security Council in the late 1990s. "In 1998, we went through every piece of intelligence we could find to see if there was a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq," he says. "We came to the conclusion that our intelligence agencies had it right: There was no noteworthy relationship between Al Qaeda and Iraq. I know that for a fact." Indeed, that was the consensus among virtually all anti-terrorism specialists.
In short, Wurmser, backed by Feith and Rhode, set out to prove what didn't exist.
IN AN ADMINISTRATION devoted to the notion of "Feith-based intelligence," Wurmser was ideal. For years, he'd been a shrill ideologue, part of the minority crusade during the 1990s that was beating the drums for war against Iraq. Along with Perle and Feith, in 1996 Wurmser and his wife, Meyrav, wrote a provocative strategy paper for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu called "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm." It called on Israel to work with Jordan and Turkey to "contain, destabilize and roll back" various states in the region, overthrow Saddam Hussein in Iraq, press Jordan to restore a scion of the Hashemite dynasty to the Iraqi throne, and, above all, launch military assaults against Lebanon and Syria as a "prelude to a redrawing of the map of the Middle East which would threaten Syria's territorial integrity."
In 1997, Wurmser wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal called "Iraq Needs a Revolution" and the next year co-signed a letter with Perle calling for all-out U.S. support of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), an exile group led by Ahmad Chalabi, in promoting an insurgency in Iraq. At AEI, Wurmser wrote Tyranny's Ally: America's Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein, essentially a book-length version of "A Clean Break" that proposed an alliance between Jordan and the INC to redraw the map of the Middle East. Among the mentors cited by Wurmser in the book: Chalabi, Perle, and Feith.
The purpose of the unnamed intelligence unit, often described as a Pentagon "cell," was to scour reports from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and other agencies to find nuggets of information linking Iraq, Al Qaeda, terrorism, and the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In a controversial press briefing in October 2002, a year after Wurmser's unit was established, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld acknowledged that a primary purpose of the unit was to cull factoids, which were then used to disparage, undermine, and contradict the CIA's reporting, which was far more cautious and nuanced than Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith wanted. Rumsfeld particularly enjoyed harassing the CIA staffer who briefed him every morning, using the type of data produced by the intelligence unit. "What I could do is say, 'Gee, what about this?'" Rumsfeld noted. "'Or what about that? Has somebody thought of this?'" Last June, when Feith was questioned on the same topic at a briefing, he acknowledged that the secret unit in fact looked at the connection between Iraq and terrorism, saying, "You can't rely on deterrence to deal with the problem of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of state sponsors of terrorism because [of] the possibility that those state sponsors might employ chemical weapons or biological weapons by means of a terrorist organization proxy...."
Though Feith, in that briefing, described Wurmser's unit as an innocent project, "a global exercise" that was not meant to put pressure on other intelligence agencies or create skewed intelligence to fit preconceived policy notions, many other sources assert that it did exactly that. That the White House and the Pentagon put enormous pressure on the CIA to go along with its version of events has been widely reported, highlighted by visits to CIA headquarters by Vice President Cheney and Lewis Libby, his chief of staff. Led by Perle, the neocons seethed with contempt for the CIA. The CIA'S analysis, said Perle, "isn't worth the paper it's printed on." Standing in a crowded hallway during an AEI event, Perle added, "The CIA is status quo oriented. They don't want to take risks."
That became the mantra of the shadow agency within an agency.
Putting Wurmser in charge of the unit meant that it was being run by a pro-Iraq-war ideologue who'd spent years calling for a pre-emptive invasion of Baghdad and who was clearly predisposed to find what he wanted to see. Adding another layer of dubious quality to the endeavor was the man partnered with Wurmser, F. Michael Maloof. Maloof, a former aide to Perle in the 1980s Pentagon, was twice stripped of his high-level security clearances-once in late 2001 and again last spring, for various infractions. Maloof was also reportedly involved in a bizarre scheme to broker contacts between Iraqi officials and the Pentagon, channeled through Perle, in what one report called a "rogue [intelligence] operation" outside officiai CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency channels.
As the momentum for war began to build in early 2002, Wolfowitz and Feith beefed up the intelligence unit and created an Iraq war-planning unit in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia Affairs section, run by Deputy Undersecretary of Defense William Luti, under the rubric "Office of Special Plans," or OSP; the new unit's director was Abram N. Shulsky. By then, Wurmser had moved on to a post as senior adviser to Undersecretary of State John Bolton, yet another neocon, who was in charge of the State Department's disarmament, proliferation, and WMD office and was promoting the Iraq war strategy there. Shulsky's OSP, which incorporated the secret intelligence unit, took control, banishing veteran experts-including Joseph McMillan, James Russell, Larry Hanauer, and Marybeth McDevitt-who, despite years of service to NESA, either were shuffled off to other positions or retired. For the next year, Luti and Shulsky not only would oversee war plans but would act aggressively to shape the intelligence product received by the White House.
Both Luti and Shulsky were neoconservatives who were ideological soulmates of Wolfowitz and Feith. But Luti was more than that. He'd come to the Pentagon directly from the office of Vice President Cheney. That gave Luti, a recently retired, decorated Navy captain whose career ran from combat aviation to command of a helicopter assault ship, extra clout. Along with his colleague Colonel William Bruner, Luti had done a stint as an aide to Newt Gingrich in 1996 and, like Perle and Wolfowitz, was an acolyte of Wohlstetter's. "He makes Ollie North look like a moderate," says a NESA veteran.
Shulsky had been on the Washington scene since the mid-1970s. As a Senate intelligence committee staffer for Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, he began to work with early neoconservatives like Perle, who was then an aide to Senator Henry Jackson. Later, in the Reagan years, Shulsky followed Perle to the Pentagon as Perle's arms-control adviser. In the '90s, Shulsky co-authored a book on intelligence called Silent Warfare, with Gary Schmitt. Shulsky had served with Schmitt on Moynihan's staff and they had remained friends. Asked about the Pentagon's Iraq intelligence "cell," Schmitt-who is currently the executive director of the Project for the New American Century-says that he can't say much about it "because one of my best friends is running it."
According to Lt. Colonel Kwiatkowski, Luti and Shulsky ran NESA and the Office of Special Plans with brutal efficiency, purging people they disagreed with and enforcing the party line. "It was organized like a machine," she says. "The people working on the neocon agenda had a narrow, well-defined political agenda. They had a sense of mission." At NESA, Shulsky, she says, began "hot-desking," or taking an office wherever he could find one, working with Feith and Luti, before formally taking the reins of the newly created OSP. Together, she says, Luti and Shulsky turned cherry-picked pieces of uncorroborated, anti-Iraq intelligence into talking points, on issues like Iraq's WMD and its links to Al Qaeda. Shulsky constantly updated these papers, drawing on the intelligence unit, and circulated them to Pentagon officials, including Rumsfeld, and to Vice President Cheney. "Of course, we never thought they'd go directly to the White House," she adds.
Kwiatkowski recalls one meeting in which Luti, pressed to finish a report, told the staff, "I've got to get this over to 'Scooter' right away." She later found out that "Scooter" was none other than Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff. According to Kwiatkowski, Cheney had direct ties through Luti into NESA/OSP, a connection that was highly unorthodox.
"Never, ever, ever would a deputy undersecretary of Defense work directly on a project for the vice president," she says. "It was a little clue that we had an informal network into Vice President Cheney's office."
Although Feith insists that the OSP did not seek to gather its own intelligence, Kwiatkowski and others sharply disagree. Staff working for Luti and Shulsky in NESA/OSP churned out propaganda-style intelligence, she says. As an example, she cited the work of a U.S. intelligence officer and Arabic specialist, Navy Lt. Commander Youssef Aboul-Enein, who was a special assistant to Luti. "His job was to peruse the Arabic-language media to find articles that would incriminate Saddam Hussein about terrorism, and he translated these." Such raw intelligence is usually subject to a thorough vetting process, tracked, verified, and checked by intelligence professionals. But not at OSP-the material that it produced found its way directly into speeches by Bush, Cheney, and other officials.
According to Melvin Goodman, a former CIA official and an intelligence specialist at the National War College, the OSP officials routinely pushed lower-ranking staff around on intelligence matters. "People were being pulled aside [and being told], 'We saw your last piece and it's not what we're looking for,'" he says. "It was pretty blatant." Two State Department intelligence officials, Greg Thielmann and Christian Westermann, have both charged that pressure was being put on them to shape intelligence to fit policy, in particular from Bolton's office. "The Al Qaeda connection and nuclear weapons issue were the only two ways that you could link Iraq to an imminent security threat to the U.S.," Thielmann told the New York Times. "And the administration was grossly distorting the intelligence on both things."
BESIDES CHENEY, key members of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, including Perle and ex-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, all Iraq hawks, had direct input into NESA/OSP. The offices of NESA were located on the Pentagon's fourth floor, seventh corridor of D Ring, and the Policy Board's offices were directly below, on the third floor. During the run-up to the Iraq war, Gingrich often came up for closed-door meetings with Luti, who in 1996 had served as a congressional fellow in Speaker of the House Gingrich's office.
As OSP got rolling, Luti brought in Colonel Bruner, a former military aide to Gingrich, and, together, Luti and Bruner opened the door to a vast flow of bogus intelligence fed to the Pentagon by Iraqi defectors associated with Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress group of exiles. Chalabi founded the Iraqi National Congress in 1992, with the help of a shadowy CIA-connected public-relations firm called the Rendon Group, one of whose former employees, Francis Brooke, has been a top aide to Chalabi ever since. A scion of an aristocratic Iraqi family, Chalabi fled Baghdad at the age of 13, in 1958, when the corrupt Iraqi Hashemite monarchy was overthrown by a coalition of communists and the Iraqi military. In the late 1960s, Chalabi studied mathematics at the University of Chicago with Wohlstetter, who introduced him to Richard Perle more than a decade later. Long associated with the heart of the neoconservative movement, Chalabi founded Petra Bank in Jordan, which grew to be Jordan's third-largest bank by the 1980s. But Chalabi was accused of bank fraud, embezzlement, and currency manipulation, and he barely escaped before Jordanian authorities could arrest him; in 1992, he was convicted and sentenced in absentia to more than 20 years of hard labor. After founding the INC, Chalabi's bungling, unreliability, and penchant for mismanaging funds caused the CIA to sour on him, but he never lost the support of Perle, Feith, Gingrich, and their allies; once, soon after 9/11, Perle invited Chalabi to address the Defense Policy Board.
According to multiple sources, Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress sent a steady stream of misleading and often faked intelligence reports into U.S. intelligence channels. That information would flow sometimes into NESA/OSP directly, sometimes through Defense Intelligence Agency debriefings of Iraqi defectors via the Defense Human Intelligence Service, and sometimes through the INC's own U.S.-funded Intelligence Collection Program, which was overseen by the Pentagon. The INC's intelligence "isn't reliable at all," according to Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA chief of counterterrorism.
"Much of it is propaganda. Much of it is telling the Defense Department what they want to hear, using alleged informants and defectors who say what Chalabi wants them to say, [creating] cooked information that goes right into presidential and vice presidential speeches."
Bruner, the aide to Luti and Gingrich's former staffer, "was Chalabi's handler," says Kwiatkowski. "He would arrange meetings with Chalabi and Chalabi's folks," she says, adding that the INC leader often brought people into the NESA/OSP offices for debriefings. Chalabi claims to have introduced only three actual defectors to the Pentagon, a figure Thielmann considers "awfully low." However, according to an investigation by the Los Angeles Times, the three defectors provided by Chalabi turned up exactly zero useful intelligence. The first, an Iraqi engineer, claimed to have specific information about biological weapons, but his information didn't pan out; the second claimed to know about mobile labs, but that information, too, was worthless; and the third, who claimed to have data about Iraq's nuclear program, proved to be a fraud. Chalabi also claimed to have given the Pentagon information about Iraqi support for Al Qaeda. "We gave the names of people who were doing the links," he told an interviewer from PBS'S Frontline. Those links, of course, have not been discovered. Thielmann told the same Frontline interviewer that the Office of Special Plans didn't apply strict intelligence-verification standards to "some of the information coming out of Chalabi and the INC that OSP and the Pentagon ran with."
In the war's aftermath, the Defense Intelligence Agency-which is not beholden to the neoconservative civilians at the Pentagon-leaked a report it prepared, concluding that few, if any, of the INC's informants provided worthwhile intelligence.
SO FAR, DESPITE ALL of the investigations underway, there is little sign that any of them are going to delve into the operations of the Luti-Shulsky Office of Special Plans and its secret intelligence unit. Because it operates in the Pentagon's policy shop, it is not officially part of the intelligence community, and so it is seemingly immune to congressional oversight.
With each passing day, it is becoming excruciatingly clearer just how wrong U.S. intelligence was in regard to Iraqi weapons and support for terrorism. The American teams of inspectors in the Iraq Survey Group, which has employed up to 1,400 people to scour the country and analyze the findings, have not been able to find a shred of evidence of anything other than dusty old plans and records of weapons apparently destroyed more than a decade ago. Countless examples of fruitless searches have been reported in the media. To cite one example: U.S. soldiers followed an intelligence report claiming that a complex built for Uday Hussein, Saddam's son, hid a weapons warehouse with poison-gas storage tanks. "Well," U.S. Army Major Ronald Hann Jr. told the Los Angeles Times, "the warehouse was a carport. It still had two cars inside. And the tanks had propane for the kitchen."
Countless other errors and exaggerations have become evident. The thousands of aluminum tubes supposedly imported by Iraq for uranium enrichment were fairly conclusively found to be designed to build noncontroversial rockets. The long-range unmanned aerial vehicles, allegedly built to deliver bioweapons, were small, rickety, experimental planes with wood frames. The mobile bioweapon labs turned out to have had other, civilian purposes. And the granddaddy of all falsehoods, the charge that Iraq sought uranium in the West African country of Niger, was based on forged documents-documents that the CIA, the State Department, and other agencies knew were fake nearly a year before President Bush highlighted the issue in his State of the Union address in January 2003.
"Either the system broke down," former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who was sent by the CIA to visit Niger and whose findings helped show that the documents were forged, told Mother Jones, "or there was selective use of bits of information to justify a decision to go to war that had already been taken."
Edward Luttwak, a neoconservative scholar and author, says flatly that the Bush administration lied about the intelligence it had because it was afraid to go to the American people and say that the war was simply about getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Instead, says Luttwak, the White House was groping for a rationale to satisfy the United Nations' criteria for war. "Cheney was forced into this fake posture of worrying about weapons of mass destruction," he says. "The ties to Al Qaeda? That's complete nonsense."
In the Senate, Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) is pressing for the Intelligence Committee to extend its investigation to look into the specific role of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, but there is strong Republican resistance to the idea.
In the House, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) has introduced legislation calling for a commission to investigate the intelligence mess and has collected more than a hundred Democrats-but no Republicans-in support of it. "I think they need to be looked at pretty carefully," Waxman told Mother Jones when asked about the Office of Special Plans. "I'd like to know whether the political people pushed the intelligence people to slant their conclusions."
Congressman Waxman, meet Lt. Colonel Kwiatkowski.
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More on Lieutenant Colonel Karen KwiatkowsKi:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/articles/2003/11/18/us-air-force-lt-colonel-speaks-out-against-bush-neocons.php
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/articles/2003/12/13/buchanan-discusses-jinsa-pnac-neocon-cabal-on-c-span.php
Neocon Potpouri:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/articles/2004/01/02/neo-con-potpourri.php | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Aug 28, 2004 4:39 pm Post subject: More on Bill Luti of OSP |
| Forwarded:
William J. Luti, the controversial deputy undersecretary of defense and die-hard supporter of the war in Iraq, became a nationally known figure in early 2003 after the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh published a story about Luti's intelligence work in the Office of Special Plans (OSP), a secretive Pentagon outfit whose players included Douglas Feith and Abram Shulsky. According to Hersh's expose, Luti and his OSP cohorts were charged with digging up intelligence on Iraq that would support the administration's arguments for going to war.
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/luti/luti_body.html
http://www.why-war.com/news/2003/05/12/selectiv.html#Abram_Shulsky | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Aug 28, 2004 10:56 pm Post subject: FBI probes DOD (Feith's) Office of Special Plans |
| http://washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20040824-102938-1916r.htm
FBI probes DOD office
By Richard Sale
UPI Intelligence Correspondent
8/28/04
The FBI has intensified its investigation of senior members of what was formerly known as the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans on suspicion that one of them passed highly classified U.S. military information to the government of Israel, according to federal law enforcement officials.
In some cases, colleagues, former associates and members of other government agencies have been interviewed as many as four times by teams of FBI agents, FBI officials told United Press International.
Two of the people interviewed are Bill Luti, former chief of OSP, and Harold Rhode of the Near East/South Asia office, according to participants in the investigation.
The OSP, an intelligence unit, was set up by the No. 3 man in the Pentagon, Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, according to retired Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, who was a staffer in the office from June 2002 through March 2003.
Luti, a former Navy captain, switched to the Pentagon from Vice President Richard Cheney's staff, according to a congressional investigative memo.
According to other congressional memos, Luti was made deputy undersecretary and reported directly to Feith.
Luti also presided over the NESA office that worked closely with OSP "with sometimes an interchangeable staff," according to one congressional memo described the OSP "as a loose group of acolytes and hired hands" for Cheney, and (Cheney's chief of staff) I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Feith -- all "performing a mixture of intelligence, planning and other unspecified operational duties in support of preordained policy."
According to Kwiatkowski, Luti was a "name-dropper, who often referred to deadlines and assignments coming from 'Scooter.'"
Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col Chris Conway, told UPI that neither Luti nor Rhode had been interviewed or polygraphed by the FBI nor had their bosses alerted them that they were the subjects of an investigation.
A federal law enforcement official was not surprised. He said, "Any target of an investigation is the last person we would talk to. The fact that subjects haven't been approached is part of normal investigative procedure."
Rhode, another prominent official of the NESA office, also works for the Office of Net Assessment, Pentagon officials said.
According to one federal law enforcement official, Rhode and Luti and other OSP officials have been frequently mentioned in FBI interviews, "chiefly the nature and extent of his contacts with Israel," according to federal law enforcement officials.
A Pentagon spokesman said Rhode has been working for Net Assessment "for the last 10 years."
A former very senior CIA official told United Press International that Rhode recently had his security clearances lifted.
In an e-mail to UPI, Rhode denied this. "I have never had my security clearances revoked or canceled."
At least three former CIA officials told UPI that in 1998 Rhode had his clearances suspended, based on allegations he had given classified information to Israel.
In the same e-mail, Rhode denied this as well, adding: "Nor have I been informed that I am under any type of investigation."
Two former senior U.S. intelligence officials also stated that Rhode is on administrative leave.
However, Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Chris Conway said answering the question about whether or not Rhode is on administrative leave would violate the privacy act and therefore had no comment.
The NESA/OSP office was located on the fourth floor of the Pentagon, D ring, 7th corridor, according to Kwiatkowski, the former staffer.
According to one former senior U.S. intelligence official who maintained excellent contacts with serving U.S. intelligence officials in the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, "Rhode practically lived out of (Ahmad) Chalabi's office."
This same source quoted the intelligence official with the CPA as saying, "Rhode was observed by CIA operatives as being constantly on his cell phone to Israel," and that the information that the intelligence officials overheard him passing to Israel was "mind-boggling," this source said.
It dealt with U.S. plans, military deployments, political projects, discussion of Iraq assets, and a host of other sensitive topics, the former senior U.S. intelligence official said.
Other members of OSP are also under scrutiny, but federal law enforcement officials declined to confirm additional names furnished them by UPI. Pentagon spokesman Conway said, "We have no knowledge of any probe of particular OSP members."
Rhode is a close member of an inner circle of senior Bush officials who in the past have had skirmishes with the FBI over allegations that they provided classified information to Israel, several serving and former U.S. intelligence officials said.
FBI spokesman, Bill Carter said, "It has been our long-standing policy not to comment on matters of this type or to confirm or deny the existence of any investigation."
A great many examples of this was substantiated by Stephen Green, a highly respected author of two books on U.S.-Israeli relations, who, in a February article in Counterpunch, noted that the Pentagon finally downgraded Ledeen's security clearances from Top Secret-SCI to Secret in the mid-1980s, after an earlier boss, Noel Koch, the Principal Assistant Secretary for International Security Affairs, had urged the FBI to begin a probe of Ledeen, then a consultant on terrorism, for passing classified materials to a foreign country, believed to be Israel. (Green notes that Ledeen "was carried in Agency files as an agent of influence of a foreign government: Israel," a fact he confirmed for UPI in an interview.
Former agency officials said they knew this to be accurate.
In 2001, Ledeen was hired by Feith to work on contract for the Office of Special Plans, which involved the handling of sensitive materials, Green said, a fact confirmed last week to UPI by congressional investigators.
Yet according to Green, in March 1983, Feith, then a Middle East analyst on the National Security Council, was fired by Judge William Clark, who had replaced Richard Allen as national security adviser, because Feith "had been the object of an inquiry into whether he had provided classified material to an official of the Israeli Embassy in Washington" and that the FBI "had opened an inquiry."
Former Counterterrorism Chief Vince Cannistraro confirmed that Feith was fired from the NSC for leaking classified data to Israel.
In 1982, Feith went to work for Pentagon official Richard Perle, according to Green and confirmed by U.S. intelligence sources.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who an administration official described as having played a "large role in getting Feith" his current job, was working for the Arms Control and Disarmament agency in 1978 and was the subject of an investigation that alleged he had provided "a classified document on the proposed sale of U.S. weapons to an Arab government to an Israeli government official" via "an AIPAC intermediary," according to Green. The probe was eventually dropped.
In 1981, Wolfowitz, who was working as head of the State Department Policy Planning Staff, hired Ledeen as a Special Advisor, Green said.
copyright 2004 united press international
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Alleged Leak to Israel Probed for a Year
33 minutes ago
By CURT ANDERSON, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - The FBI (news - web sites) has spent more than a year covertly investigating, including with the use of electronic surveillance, whether a Pentagon (news - web sites) analyst funneled highly classified material to Israel, officials said Saturday. Prosecutors were still weighing whether to bring the most serious charge of espionage.
AP Photo
Charges could be brought in the case as early as next week, said two federal law enforcement officials speaking on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing. The case has taken so long in part because of diplomatic sensitivities between the United States and its close ally Israel, they said.
Although the information involved — material describing Bush administration policy toward Iran — was described as highly classified, prosecutors could determine that the crime involved falls short of espionage and could result in lesser but still serious charges of mishandling classified documents, the officials said.
They said the still-classified material did not detail U.S. military or intelligence operations and was not the type that would endanger the lives of U.S. spies overseas or betray sensitive methods of intelligence collection.
The target of the probe was identified by the two officials as Larry Franklin, a senior analyst in a Pentagon office dealing with Middle East affairs. Franklin, who did not respond to a telephone message left at his office Saturday, formerly worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Efforts to find a home telephone number were unsuccessful.
In a statement late Friday, the Defense Department, without saying he was under investigation, described Franklin as being at the "desk officer level, who was not in a position to have significant influence over U.S. policy. Nor could a foreign power be in a position to influence U.S. policy through this individual."
Franklin works in an office overseen by Douglas J. Feith, the defense undersecretary for policy. Feith is an influential aide to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld whose previous work included prewar intelligence on Iraq (news - web sites), including purported ties between Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s regime and al-Qaida terrorism network.
In August 2003, Franklin and a Pentagon colleague were in the news after it was disclosed they had met two years earlier with Manuchar Ghorbanifar, who was among the Iranians who suggested to the Reagan administration in the 1980s that profits from arms-for-hostages deals be funneled into covert arms shipments to U.S.-backed Contra rebels battling the leftist Nicaraguan government.
The investigation centers on whether Franklin passed classified U.S. material on Iran to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the highly influential main Israeli lobbying organization in Washington, and whether that group in turn passed them on to Israel. Both AIPAC and Israel deny the allegations.
The U.S. law enforcement officials stressed that the investigation is not yet complete and it remained possible that others could be implicated. They would not comment on whether that might include officials at AIPAC, which said it has been cooperating in the investigation.
"Any allegation of criminal conduct by AIPAC or its employees is false and baseless," AIPAC said in a statement.
In Israel, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (news - web sites) issued a statement Saturday saying that Israel has no connection to the matter. Israeli officials say their government halted all espionage activities in the United States after the 1985 arrest of Navy analyst Jonathan Pollard on charges of passing secrets to Israel.
"Israel does not engage in intelligence activities in the U.S. We deny all these reports," the statement said.
The investigation is being handled by U.S. Attorney Paul McNulty, whose Virginia district includes the Pentagon and whose office regularly deals with classified material, terrorism and other sensitive matters. The FBI's counterintelligence division and counterespionage prosecutors at the main Justice Department (news - web sites) in Washington are also involved in the case.
The law enforcement officials said that until the past few weeks, the investigation has been kept under tight wraps and included use of sophisticated electronic surveillance techniques they would not further describe. They also would not say whether such surveillance was conducted inside the Pentagon itself, although it has involved at least one computer of Franklin's, they said.
The United States has strongly backed Israeli efforts to block nuclear development in Iran, with President Bush (news - web sites) including Iran with Iraq and North Korea (news - web sites) as part of an international "axis of evil."
Yet his administration has battled internally over how hard a line to take toward Iran. The State Department generally has advocated more moderate positions, while more conservative officials in the Defense Department and some at the White House's National Security Council have advocated tougher policies.
Sharon's government has pushed the Bush administration toward more toughness against Iran.
Israel in recent months has repeated expressed concerns about Iran's nuclear ambitions, with some senior officials accusing Iran of developing nuclear weapons in violation of promises made to the United Nations (news - web sites). Last week, Iran threatened to destroy Israel's Dimona nuclear reactor if Israel attacks Iran's nuclear facilities. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Aug 28, 2004 11:22 pm Post subject: Israeli Pentagon Spy - Jewish Neocon Feith Hired Suspect |
| Israeli Pentagon Spy - Jewish Neocon Feith Hired Suspect
Douglas Feith, Top Deputy To Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz At The Pentagon,
Has Extensive Personal Connections To Israel And The Israeli-Jewish Lobby
MER - MiddleEast.Org
8-28-4
This latest Israeli spy scandal has connections to the very top of the Pentagon. The analyst involved is thought to have been hired by and worked for non other than Douglas Feith, a man long considered by many insiders to be a kind long-time Jewish lobby operative in Washington and a man known to have long and deep connections to the Sharon regime in Israel.
Now those who are familiar with MER know that we have for a long time pointed culpability fingers at the extensive Israeli-Jewish lobby in Washington; to the many ties between the Israelis and the top Jewish neocons in the Bush government, including Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith at the Pentagon and Eliott Abrams at the N.S.C. No doubt they are all working furiously now to contain and cover up this latest Israeli spy scandal, as they have so many times before. And in all likelihood, one way or another, they will succeed in doing so especially as neither of the political parties will dare risk truly offending 'the lobby' and Israel during this crucial pre-election season.
Many, most no doubt, of these kinds of things relating to Israel never get out into the public domain; they are buried and sucked up into official Washington where so many have so many reasons for always wanting to hush such things up. But there should be no doubt that the Israelis have infiltrated at many levels and greatly influenced in many ways U.S. policies in the Middle East, especially of late the decision to invade and occupy Iraq.
The following quick list of past Israeli spy scandals all of which were covered up or sucked in one way or another include
* Israeli Attack on U.S.S. Liberty - 1967
* Steve Bryent Israeli Spying Scandal - 1982
* Jonathan Pollard Arrested outside Israeli Embassy - 1985
* AIPAC infiltration scandal, President forced to resign - 1991
* Mossad bugging of Clinton and Monica - 1997
* Martin Indyk's Security Clearances 'temporarily' suspended - 2000 | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sun Aug 29, 2004 6:52 am Post subject: It's Time to Put America First |
| It's Time to Put America First
Commentary by Laura Dawn Lewis
http://www.couplescompany.com/Features/Politics/2004/Cipel1.htm#First
Another Israeli Spy, as reported by CBS is suspected in the Pentagon, though some news sources state this is the first time since Pollard during the 1980's one has been caught.
This is categorically untrue. September 11, 2001 five Mossad assets were arrested celebrating the attack in New Jersey as the Twin Towers disintegrated. In January 2002, FOX News exposed a nationwide Israeli Spy ring utilizing art students and mall kiosk workers in the hundreds nationwide, in addition to the use of moving companies as Mossad fronts in the United States. Between September 11, 2001 and January 2002 we deported nearly 800 Israeli nationals suspected of spying on the US. This moving company manifestation continues both in organized crime and earlier this year more Israeli agents under the cover of moving company workers were caught in Tennessee attempting to smuggle out classified submarine fuel. We have the wire and phone tapping scandals by Israeli companies likewise exposed in this time frame. Then we have Golan Cipel, a confirmed Israeli Agent.
It's long been suspected that members of JINSA, (Jewish Institute of National Security Affairs) the authors of our current war in Iraq, the PNAC (Project for the new American Century) and organizations including AIPAC (American Israeli Public Affairs Committee) which lobbies congress and is considered the most powerful lobby in America and the ADL (Anti-Defamation League), which acts as the Intelligence Arm in the United States under the guise of fighting racism while it promotes, funds and protects it in Israel have been involved in securing American support, funds and munitions on behalf of Israeli interests.
To speak of such automatically brands the reporter or politician anti-Semitic. There is nothing anti-Semitic about protesting or pointing to our security breaches and undue influence on US policy, politicians, budgets and the Constitution (Several pro-Israel but unconstitutional resolutions have been winding through congress stripping Americans of our 1st, 4th, 5th and 10th Amendment rights while protecting Israel from scrutiny including HR4230, HR3077 and S-625). Rather it is anti-American not to object. It is our country after all. To date these organizations hide behind the Jewish faith, curbing any discussion in the mainstream press through accusations of anti-Semitism.
This new spy scandal in Washington DC must be huge for CBS to risk condemnation by AIPAC and the Christian Zionists. Otherwise it would be covered up like the aforementioned incidents of the past three years. AIPAC will swing into action and attempt to minimize this, denying of course everything. Israeli loyalists in the media will attempt to spin this as not damaging because Israel is our "friend"; don't be surprised by this. Ariel Sharon has bragged on at least one public occasion that Israel controls the US Media. But what Americans need to realize, only Israel continually gets caught spying on us, selling our military secrets to communist countries and compromising our security. Britain doesn't do this. France doesn't do this. Canada doesn't do this, nor does Mexico and there would be hell to pay if they did. This discovery is the tip of the iceberg.
The biggest problems facing American democracy, our constitution and freedom, all trace back to the same little country, the one we keep catching spying and selling our security, the same country both Bush and Kerry proudly and publicly swear their solidarity to, our "friend" Israel.
The Agenda
This isn't about religion, nor is it about "fighting terrorism"; the issues would be the same if Israel were Catholic, Muslim or Buddhist. Religion continues to be used as a weapon to obscure and prevent discussion. As far as terrorism, it wouldn't exist in the Middle East if Israel ceased exterminating its neighbors, or if it had adhered to the agreement establishing the State of Israel in 1948.
(Israel possesses the 4th largest military in the world with over 600 WMD's. Israel is not a helpless nor an oppressed nation by any means. It defeated several nations in just six days and it has always, from day one outnumber the totality of all Arab country militaries by at least 3:1)
Terrorism wouldn't exist for Israel if America its enabler wasn't continually supplying the injunctions, money and weapons of oppression. Its problems with terrorism originate because of its policies: apartheid, genocide, racism, elitism and ethnic cleansing, nothing more.
If Americans truly want to end the threat of terrorism, the solution begins in Palestine and it is called justice, not apartheid. Continuing to shield Israel isn't helping Israelis. It's killing them, morally, spiritually and physically. If Americans really care about the Israelis and really want to save the Jewish people the biggest favor we can do for them is cut off all support until they learn to get along with their neighbors. This they will do quickly; they've gotten along in relative peace from nearly 1900 years. Terrorism will end without the financial and political support of America. It's called tough love and it works whether we're speaking of teenagers, alcoholics or rogue nations drunk on elitism and racism.
America please tell me, how many spies are required for this nation to wake up? Why we are supporting presidential candidates who place the welfare and importance of a foreign theocracy, primary and before the Constitution and the welfare of the United States? Does it not seem odd for the President of the United States and three quarters of congress to proudly swear their solidarity to a foreign country? Think about that. Think about what that really means. As Americans we need to decide whether we continue to cower in fear of being labeled anti-Semitic for simply standing up for our country, or whether Americans are willing to pay the true price of freedom by fielding these accusations and exposing them for the BS they are. What is more important: The Constitution, Freedom and the United States, or apartheid, terrorism and Israel.
I vote for America. What amazes me is how few of my countrymen agree. If the choice is between supporting Israeli apartheid and the United States our constitution and freedom, Israeli apartheid and racism win every time. I don't get it. What are we afraid of, a little name calling, being called racists for objecting to racism? Anyone who thinks will see this for the oxymoron it is. Honestly, there is nothing anti-Semitic about putting American interests first. We are American; we're supposed to. It's called self-preservation. After thirty-seven years and nearly two-trillion in aid and munitions to Israel, it is time we put the United States first. This is easy. All we need to do is follow the Constitution and apply the same standards we adhere to in the United States with our actions and support abroad. Apartheid, racism, oppression, ethnic cleansing are not American values. So why in Israel do we fund, defend and support them? If this isn't hypocrisy, what is? Isn't it time we put America first | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
