War Without End

Alpha · Posted: Wed Sep 29, 2004 5:44 pm Post subject: President's Comedy Routine

http://www.antiwar.com/reese/?articleid=3649

September 28, 2004
The President's Comedy Routine

by Charley Reese
President George Bush's denial of the reality of Iraq is beginning to sound like a stand-up comedy routine.

"Mr. President, the insurgency has spread to the whole country."

"We're making great progress."

"But Mr. President, the attacks against coalition forces have escalated dramatically."

"We're making great progress."

"But Mr. President, all but two percent of the Iraqi people want us to leave."

"We're making great progress."

"And the interim government has no support and in fact can't step outside the Green Zone without being surrounded by American security."

"We're making great progress."

And so forth. Whether the president is actually in denial or is misleading the public for partisan purposes, I will leave to your judgment. It would be less dangerous if he were engaged in deliberate deception. That, at least, is a sign of sanity.

Some are now speculating that the president's solution to the morass in Iraq will be to launch an attack against Iran – after the election, of course. There can be no other reason to sell Israel bunker-buster bombs. The only possible target would be Iran's nuclear reactors. The Iranians would retaliate, and, of course, the United States would join the war in defense of Israel. Widening the war to a country with 60 million people might sound stupid, but with this administration's record of stupid decisions, it's not to be ruled out.

Nothing would destroy the democratic movement in Iran quicker than an attack by Israel and the United States. The same stupid people who thought we would be greeted as liberators in Iraq, however, might actually think Iranians would welcome an attack. People who spend their lives in academic surroundings can be forgiven for not knowing much about human nature. The most basic response of all humans is to rally around their country's government when it is attacked by a foreign power. The Iranians would certainly do that, as they demonstrated in the 1980s when Saddam Hussein attacked them.

As all democratic nations do, we have uneven luck in choosing our leaders, but this is the first administration that actually scares me. There is nothing so stupid and wrongheaded that I can't visualize them doing it.

Bush has no real compassion. That's why he forbids ceremonies for returning dead. According to Ollie North, President Reagan was at the airport every time a dead American serviceman's body came home. The British also formally greet their returning dead with honor and respect. Only in the United States does the government even forbid news organizations from greeting the dead.

Bush and his corporate cronies care for Bush and his corporate cronies. If Reagan was the Teflon president, Bush is the irresponsible and unaccountable president. Not only has he created a bloody mess in Iraq, his economic policies have forced many American working men to endanger their lives by going there to work.

Alpha

Jane's: Israeli Moles Penetrate Pentagon

A mole called Mega

The scandal over a suspected Israeli mole in the Pentagon who allegedly passed highly sensitive policy documents on Iran to Israeli agents in Washington has rekindled suspicions long held by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and others in Washington, that Israel systematically spies on its strategic ally and benefactor.

The FBI probe currently under way goes far beyond the allegations that a lone analyst was providing the Israelis with US secrets.

Shortly before George Tenet retired as director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in June, he alleged that an Israeli agent was operating in Washington. Tenet was challenged to identify the agent but for reasons that were never explained apparently did not do so. For years, the FBI has been convinced that there is at least one high-level Israeli mole in Washington.

The Tenet episode underlined growing unease in some quarters in Washington about the influence that Israel's right wing has in US President George W Bush's administration through the pro-Likud neo-conservatives, largely in the Pentagon, and the politically powerful America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and loosely associated organisations, such as the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. The Mossad, Israel's foreign intelligence service, is known to seek out Jews around the world to serve as informal agents, known in Hebrew as sayanim or 'helpers'.

The Israeli government and AIPAC have strenuously denied that they were involved in the current scandal. But Israel's intelligence organisations have been spying on the US and running clandestine operations since Israel was established. These operations range from spiriting an estimated 200 lbs of weapons-grade uranium for its secret nuclear arms programme in the 1960s to widescale industrial espionage.

Much of this is conducted by the secret Scientific Liaison Bureau, known by its Hebrew acronym Lakam, run by the Ministry of Defence and its equally little-known successor, Malmab (the Security Authority for the Ministry of Defence).
http://www.janes.com/security/international_security/news/fr/fr040929_1_n.shtml

Alpha

Neocon Pink Slips And The Fall Of America

By Kurt Nimmo
Online Journal
10-4-4

Here's the unspeakable truth: I lost my job to make Israel safe.

Or more specifically: an obscene amount of tax dollars are flushed down the Pentagon rat hole every year while billions are slashed from state and social programs, including education. I worked for a state-funded education program. I was pink-slipped because there's no money for the program this year.

In short, George Bush fired me.

The Bushcon invasion of Iraq costs $177 million per day, $7.4 million per hour, and $122,820 per minute. So far, the invasion has cost an astounding $134.5 billion. "When you integrate Iraqi spending, which is necessary, with the effort to control spending, it puts more pressure on you to make harder choices," said Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) in June. "If you can name one part of government immune from this, I'd like to know."

Hard choices - like throwing Americans out of work.

But according to Republicans such as Patrick Toomey (R-Pa), even more Americans need face the "hard choice" of poverty. Education and social services are non-starters when compared to blowing things up and butchering thousands of mostly innocent people. "I'd say let's have a smaller deficit," said Toomey in June. "But most of all, don't spend it on something else. The non-defense, non-security part of the budget is out of control."

For instance, literacy programs for poor kids.

In other words, billions will be squandered on "security" to protect Israel from its enemies before a dime is spent here in America on education, nutrition programs, repairing our crumbling infrastructure, and other things insignificant to Republicans and their multinational corporate masters.

As we now know, or should know if we pay attention, Iraq was invaded at the behest of Israel and a small clan of extreme right-wing Likudites. Philip Zelikow, executive director of Bush's 9/11 whitewash commission, admitted as much during a speech delivered at the University of Virginia on September 10, 2002. "Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I'll tell you what I think the real threat (is) and actually has been since 1990óit's the threat against Israel," said Zelikow.

Never mind Saddam had no nukes, or even a few mustard gas shells.

Paul W. Schroeder, a veteran diplomatic historian, wrote for the American Conservative magazine on October, 21, 2002, "the unacknowledged real reason and motive behind the policy [is] security for Israel. . . . It would represent something to my knowledge unique in history. It is common for great powers to try to fight wars by proxy, getting smaller powers to fight for their interests. This would be the first instance I know where a great power (in fact, a superpower) would do the fighting as the proxy of a small client state."

"The suggestion that the war with Iraq is being planned at Israel's behest, or at the instigation of policymakers whose main motivation is trying to create a secure environment for Israel, is strong," write Kathleen and Bill Christison, former CIA political analysts. "Many Israeli analysts believe this."

But not the forever gullible American people. For them, Osama is Saddam and Bush's "war on terror" is about payback for September 11, 2001, even if those on the blunt end of the murderous payback truncheon are innocent civilians.

Israel Firsters have essentially taken over the United States government, from the White House and the Pentagon to Congress. Fighting (largely manufactured) terrorism sells the Israel First policy well, if only because it is wrapped in an American flag.

"These people, who can fairly be called Israeli loyalists, are now at all levels of government, from desk officers at the Defense Department to the deputy secretary level at both State and Defense, as well as on the National Security Council staff and in the vice president's office," note the Christisons.

In Congress, the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC) rules supreme, and if you don't vote for the pro-Likud agenda there's a good chance you will not be re-elected. Ask Cynthia McKinney. "Jewish donors have already begun to back McKinney challenger Denise Majette, a former state court judge from Atlanta who proudly touts a strong pro-Israel position," wrote Eli Kintisch of the Forward prior to the last mid-term elections. Majette eventually unseated McKinney.

"The American Israel Political Action Committee is a lobbying group that used to support whatever government was in power in Israel, and used to give money even-handedly inside the US," writes Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor, on his blog. "My perception is that during the past decade AIPAC has increasingly tilted to the Likud in Israel, and to the political Right in the United States."

AIPAC is so powerful it operates a long-running spy operation that passes classified information on to the Likudites in Israel. As an example of Bushcon influence over not only foreign but domestic policy, an FBI investigation of the AIPAC spy operation was seriously compromised by a preemptory media leak and the investigation is now all but dead in the water.

How is it possible a major spy scandal has fallen so effortlessly by the wayside?

Anti-Semitism, the perpetual and unfailing canard. "In an indication of their growing estrangement with the Bush administration, neoconservatives are slamming the White House for failing to stop what they describe as an anti-Semitic campaign to marginalize them being conducted by the CIA and the State Department," writes Marc Perleman of Forward.

Of course, Perleman has it wrong: the neocons, or Israel Firsters, are not estranged from the Bush administration - they *are* the Bush administration and their calculated attack is aimed at the CIA and the State Department, who have not demonstrated the required degree of enthusiasm for the Israel First cause at the expense of American lives and treasure. As the Israel Firsters know, anti-Semitism is so emotionally charged that there is virtually no defense against it. Once painted as an anti-Semite, the only two possible options are atonement or banishment.

If you believe the November election will change things, think again. Even if Kerry is elected, the Israel Firsters will rule supreme in Washington. Kerry has gone out of his way to align himself with Sharon and the Likudites. If need be he will perform summersaults to accommodate AIPAC and the Likudites and their long-standing dream of a Greater Israel at the expense of not only Arabs and Iranians but the beleaguered American taxpayer.

Sharon and the Israel Firsters are not really keen on the "liberal" Kerry, so we can probably expect four more years (or four more decades) of the Christian Zionist Bush and the Straussian neocons. No way are they going to allow a mere election to sidetrack plans launched during the Bush I administration by Wolfowitz, Feith, and their fellow neocon travelers - alumni going back to Reagan and the Iran-Contra days - and subsequently taken up by the Project for a New American Century, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, a camarilla - or more appropriately, a crime syndicate - that has labored long and hard to make the Likudite vision of Greater Israel America's primary foreign policy objective.

Of course, if Kerry does "win" in November, we can expect the neocons to quickly refashion themselves into "war hawk" Democrats. Remember: Richard Perle, neocon par excellence, the Prince of Darkness (as his colleagues fondly call him), started his political career as a "Scoop" Jackson Democrat.

But even if the Bush neocons don't stage a comeback in the event Kerry is selected to be CEO of America, there is no shortage of Israel First zealots in the Democratic Party, as evidenced by the Clinton administration (one such zealot was Martin S. Indyk, Clinton's ambassador to Israel, who is the founding executive director for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy where the Straussian neocon Wolfowitz sits on the board of directors). Kerry's senior foreign policy adviser is none other than James P. Rubin, Clinton's Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, an AIPAC-installed Zionist who believes UN-documented facts of Palestinian suffering under the brutal and interminable Israeli occupation are "exaggerated" and amount to self-inflicted misery, as he told Dr. Khaled M. Batarfi of Arab News in August, adequately demonstrating the difference between "liberal" Arab haters and "conservative" Arab haters is at best negligible.

Our collective lot is cast, Kerry or Bush.

Crushing debt and the rapid devaluation of the dollar in the coming year will result in more pink slips, more Americans relegated to the ranks of the ignored poor, more compounded and intensified misery under the leadership of Republicans, who will maintain a stranglehold on Congress no matter who is selected CEO of America. For the Israel First clan commanding the highest reaches of our government, unemployment and tumbling standards of living are far less of a concern than the "threat" posed to the sacrosanct state of Israel by Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia.

For Americans unfortunately age 18-35, unemployment will not be a problem in the coming year because thousands, possibly millions of them will be working for Uncle Sam as conscripted bullet-stoppers, or if not bullet-stoppers as slaves assigned to other "national security" tasks - under proposed legislation known as the "Skills Draft" - for the Ministry of Homeland Security and the misnamed Department of Defense (this behemoth should revert to its old name, the Department of War).

I will be 52 years old soon after the next CEO of America is selected, so my services will not be required - although my tax dollars will be, that is if I ever find gainful employment again (a bleak prospect for "older workers," that is to say workers who demand a living wage).

In the meantime, I sit here, in an apartment I can scarcely afford, running a computer that chews up vastly overpriced electricity (our electric corporation was owned by Enron before Enron became one of the largest criminal organizations in history). I will continue to write about the high-paid quislings in Congress, the plutocrats, the corporatists - who, as Mussolini knew, defined fascism - and the Israel Firsters, conspiring with the aforementioned quislings in Congress, who are selling our government and the American people down the river to a foreign power, about as close to a textbook definition of treason as there is.

I do not expect the American people to turn this country around.

Far too many are reduced to mindless and conditioned flag-waving and have bought into the nocuous illusion that voting for corporate candidate A or B is the only acceptable way solve our (usually government or corporate created) problems - and robotically allowing themselves to believe the "issues" are about swift boats and who will do a better job fighting perpetual wars waged against manufactured enemies, in other words Israel's opponents, not ours.

I have no faith in the American people because the Fox News induced lobotomy is too severe and obviously irreversible.

It's a long way back from where we are now.

Most of us not only don't know the way back, we don't realize there is a way back or, worse, that there is even anything particularly wrong - beyond the in-your-face nastiness of bin Laden and al-Qaeda so rudely penetrating our consumerist fantasy cocoon - and thus requiring the people to do what Thomas Jefferson implored: have a revolution every few years and throw out the quislings, defrauders, and traitors.

It's not going to happen.

History teaches that the Roman Empire fell with a loud noise - and our fall, our catastrophic decline, will be far noisier, if only because we have perfected the art of noisemaking. It took western civilization nearly 10 centuries to recover from the fall of the Roman Empire. It took over 900 years to reach the Renaissance. Hopefully, it will not take us that long to recover from what the Straussian neocons, the Israel Firsters, and their corporate collaborators - who are not particularly ideological, are more akin to scurrilous and amoral carpetbaggers going along for the profitable ride - will ultimately do to us, only because we will let them, only because we duteously believe 2 + 2 = 5, as repeated ad nauseam by the Ministry of Truth (viz., the alphabet corporate news organizations).

Such a fall, however, does have an upside. It will mean the telescreens will be blank - that is to say there will no longer be Fox News gibbering 24/7.

- Kurt Nimmo is a photographer and multimedia developer in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Visit his excellent no holds barred blog at www.kurtnimmo.com/blogger.html.

Copyright © 1998-2004 Online Journal. All rights reserved.

http://www.onlinejournal.com/
Commentary/100204Nimmo/100204nimmo.html

Alpha

From: "Couples Company"
Subject: How Perle hijacked foreign policy
Date: Tue, 5 Oct 2004 13:44:51 -0700

The State Department's extreme makeover
A veteran Foreign Service officer warns that when Colin Powell departs in a second Bush term, America will lose its last bulwark against the radical ideologues who are planning more Iraqs.
Editor's note: "Anonymous" is a veteran Foreign Service officer currently serving as a State Department official. The views expressed are personal and not related to his official position.

http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news2/salon39.html

By Anonymous

Oct. 4, 2004 | Secretary of State Colin Powell is not staying for a second Bush term. When he goes, the last bulwark against complete neoconservative control of U.S. foreign policy goes with him. The implications are enormous, yet the American electorate appears to be blinded by the Bush campaign's deliberate manipulations of 9/11.

Powell has served both as the reasoned voice of career diplomats and the experienced voice of career U.S. military in the Bush administration. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ignored military advice and excluded Department of State career professionals from Iraq planning. Power was concentrated in the hands of a clique of neocon ideologues he placed in key policy positions, including Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith. In the first term of George W. Bush, protégés of now disgraced former Defense Policy Board member and neocon godfather Richard Perle achieved control or subordination of every executive branch foreign-policymaking body -- except the Department of State.

Career employees of the department enthusiastically greeted Colin Powell when he pulled up to the curb for the first time at Foggy Bottom in his PT Cruiser. They have supported him, and through him, have unfailingly supported the president through thick and thin over four years -- up to and including volunteering in record numbers to staff fully the highly dangerous positions in the new embassy in Baghdad, Iraq. Even after being dumped on by the Pentagon neocons and witnessing the debacle of the Pentagon's Jay Garner's post-conflict solution, the State Department's Civil and Foreign Service staff took up the slack when the Pentagon unceremoniously fled responsibility for Iraq reconstruction and stabilization. Now, Powell's departure is seen within the department as an invitation to a lynching.

The realization that the same neocons who dismissed State's accurate "Future of Iraq Project," prepared before the war, may now take over at State in the second term is widely viewed inside the department as a threat to the very integrity of the country's diplomatic first line of defense. Corridor discussion has turned desperate -- maybe former Secretary of State James Baker will intervene, maybe former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft will talk to someone, maybe 41 will talk to 43.

State personnel are used to comings and goings of Democratic and Republican administrations, serving all equally and fairly. Not since Vietnam, however, has the U.S. diplomatic establishment viewed the future with such a degree of alarm. Retired U.S. ambassadors and diplomats have raised their own public concerns in signed public statements about the direction of U.S. foreign policy -- but that concern pales compared with the quiet revolt brewing against a neocon takeover at Foggy Bottom.

After 9/11, Wolfowitz, Feith and his subordinate, Harold Rhode, recruited David Wurmser as a contractor from the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute to set up what became known internally as the "Wurmser-Maloof" project. F. Michael Maloof, neocon fellow traveler and former aide to Richard Perle, and Wurmser created a hidden intelligence unit, the Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group, under Feith at the Pentagon. The purpose of the group was to end-run the CIA and create the rationale for invading Iraq. The parallel operations model was previously followed by Oliver North at the National Security Council and Elliott Abrams at State in their ill-fated Iran-Contra strategy. It should have come as no surprise that another neocon think-tank insider, Abram Shulsky, an Abrams colleague from their days as staffers to Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, would end up heading up what became the Office of Special Plans, the secret intelligence unit at the Pentagon under Feith. The weapons of mass destruction disinformation that was fed to the president and to the American public came directly from Shulsky's shop.

After setting up this operation at the Pentagon for Wolfowitz and Feith, Wurmser, with the help of Perle, was sent in early 2002 to burrow in at State as senior advisor to John Bolton, under secretary for arms control and international security.

In December 2002, Wolfowitz, Feith, Wurmser and Vice President Cheney's national security advisor, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, acting together, maneuvered Condoleezza Rice into appointing Elliott Abrams to the position of special assistant to the president and senior director for the Middle East at the National Security Council. This appointment gave the neocons everything they wanted -- the NSC, Executive Office of the President, Office of the Vice President, the Pentagon, a cornered director in George Tenet at CIA, and Wurmser at State.

The neocons had control of the information reaching the president and a channel for their pseudo-intelligence product from Wolfowitz and Feith's secret Pentagon Office of Special Plans. The only wild card was Colin Powell and State's elite and independent Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR).

Neither Powell nor his deputy, Richard Armitage, who is also leaving with Powell, seems to have been fooled by Wurmser's desire to leave the Pentagon and join John Bolton's staff -- in effect, to come work for Powell. They cornered and then neutralized Wurmser. Wurmser's target was to get at the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, a thorn in the neocons' side and Powell's intelligence ace-in-the-hole against Tenet's "slam-dunk" sellout at the CIA.

INR kept telling Powell the truth about Saddam's nonexistent WMD. State's Future of Iraq project, led by a career Foreign Service officer, who was cold-shouldered by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, laid out what might happen if we took over control of Iraq. Unfortunately, even the sober minds of INR could not stop Powell from lending his credibility to the "unfortunate error" show at the U.N. Security Council. Modeled on Adlai Stevenson's Oct. 25, 1962, Cuban missile presentation to the Security Council, Powell's Feb. 5, 2003, presentation marks the low point of his tenure and, in retrospect, underscores how badly his credibility was needed and then was abused by Vice President Cheney and the president.

The whole time Wurmser was at State, career professionals around him saw someone acting more like an agent of influence than as a subordinate of the secretary of state. He was in constant contact with his Pentagon intelligence cell. Questions were asked -- but never answered -- as to how Wurmser got a full security clearance when he never registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act for his 1996 policy work for Israel's incoming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (including advice on how to lobby the U.S. Congress) and as someone who was married to an Israeli citizen with close ties to Israel's Likud Party -- in theory, a party to U.S.-brokered Middle East peace negotiations.

In September 2003, Wurmser left the Department of State to become Vice President Cheney's principal deputy for national security affairs under "Scooter" Libby. He left before any questions were answered about his access to and use of classified information. His clearances were never questioned when he joined the vice president's staff, and his status under the Foreign Agents Registration Act has never been clarified.

Powell's early 2005 departure is the subject of intense jockeying among the neocons. A Perle neocon protégé, Michael Rubin, has been given the task of destroying the only competition -- L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer, the former Iraq Coalition Provisional Authority chief, not a neocon insider and the favorite of traditional Republican conservatives. The neocon plan is to make Bremer the scapegoat: It was not bad neocon policy, it was bad Bremer decisions that has led to the fiasco in Iraq. Rubin was sent to Baghdad to be Wolfowitz's man inside the CPA. Bremer dissed Rubin as a lightweight. Rubin tried to push neocon policy inside the CPA -- what he, Perle and Ahmed Chalabi had pushed from the American Enterprise Institute -- restoring the Hashemite monarchy in Iraq by placing Jordan's Crown Prince Hassan on the throne. Bremer would have none of it. Rubin is now tasked by Perle and Wolfowitz to trash Bremer -- which he is dutifully doing in print and media appearances arranged by neocon handler, lecture agent and media booker Eleana Benador. They intend to close the Foggy Bottom door to any aspirations Bremer, a former Foreign Service officer and Kissinger protégé, might have to take over from Powell.

Given the implosion of Iraq, Wolfowitz and his coterie have doubts that Wolfowitz can be confirmed as secretary (of either DOD or State) without a debilitating confirmation process, though State remains choice No. 1. A more complicated plan is to again play behind Condoleezza Rice. With Rice as secretary of state and Wolfowitz in as national security advisor, neocons would put David Wurmser or John Bolton in as Rice's deputy, replacing Armitage.

Wurmser, Perle and Feith were the principal authors of the 1996 100-day policy plan for incoming Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. None ever registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act for this work.

That plan, "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," published by Israel's Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, has served as the guiding road map for the neocons both in Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's office and in the Bush administration. No one should have been surprised by Iraq -- the neocons have not been coy in laying out their vision of Israel's security requirements. David Wurmser published a book-length version of his IASPS study at AEI. The introduction to that screed, "Tyranny's Ally: America's Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein," was written by Richard Perle. It lists as sources Ahmed Chalabi, Michael Ledeen, Douglas Feith and Harold Rhode.

Control at State would remove the last obstacle to the plan Perle, Wurmser and Feith laid long before 9/11. The neocons telegraphed their intentions clearly in President Bush's GOP convention acceptance speech in New York, in which the neocon hand was palpable in the ambitious agenda to remake the Middle East.

The president used political buzzwords to whip the crowd -- and the voting public -- into a noncomprehending patriotic frenzy of "four more years." Like Pope Urban at the 1095 Council of Clermont, who launched the First Crusade to cries of "God Wills It" from the frenzied Christians wanting to take back the Holy Land, Bush has decreed a crusade to bring enlightened Western democracy to the Muslim populations of the Middle East, left otherwise bereft in dysfunctional colonial-inspired states by the breakup of the Ottoman Empire.

But Bush the Crusader is off to a rocky start in Iraq. The ongoing meltdown is awakening Americans to the reality of the neocon agenda. But is it too late? Neocons are not dissuaded by the problems in Iraq; on the contrary, they are arguing that the problem is "Bremerism" -- the U.S. has not gone far enough. In their view, we need to take out the Palestinians, Syria and Iran now.

The neocons, working in tandem with a similar staff in the office of Prime Minister Sharon of Israel, have a three-part agenda for the first part of Bush's second term: first, oust Yasser Arafat; second, overthrow the secular Baathist al-Assad dictatorship in Syria; and, third, eliminate, one way or another, Iran's nuclear facilities.

Nowhere has support for the neocon Middle East crusade resonated more than in the constituency of Rep. Tom DeLay, who is the top Christian Zionist handler in the Republican Party and poised to strike GOP gold with his gerrymandering of Texas congressional districts.

For the neocons, Sept. 11 and Israel's security policy under Sharon have morphed into a single concept, the kind of thinking typified by Secretary Rumsfeld's recent lapses mixing Saddam Hussein with 9/11 and Osama bin Laden with Iraq.

Working with direct input from Israeli intelligence, Feith's Pentagon office coordinated with Libby and Wurmser in the vice president's office to spread the story that the missing WMD are to be found hidden in Syria. Israeli agents have worked overtime to neutralize and undo Syrian cooperation with the CIA against al-Qaida. This comes on the heels of a similar highly successful destruction of CIA inroads with the Palestinian Authority. We are now light-years beyond the two-state solution focus of Middle East policy. Instead of chasing Laden, the neocons plan to put the U.S. on the road to Damascus -- and Tehran. The groundwork is laid.

While the FBI scrutinizes whether Pentagon neocon aide Larry Franklin and AIPAC passed secrets to Israel, the larger story of Richard Perle and the neocons' carefully orchestrated takeover of Bush foreign policy has yet to be fully comprehended by the electorate.

Powell is leaving. We need to repeat that. When this reality sinks in, we will finally understand what we are getting ourselves into in a second Bush term. A handful of conservative columnists, Republican senators and a few other GOP luminaries are trying to reclaim a traditional conservative Republican foreign policy approach. But it is clearly too late.

Comparing Bush's foreign policy views in 2000 with his New York convention acceptance speech, it is clear that since 2000, the neocons started with a blank foreign policy slate. Looking carefully at Bush's 2000 campaign and statements and comparing them with the current 2004 campaign, it is startling how far he has come from his traditional Republican base. He has become the "Neoconian Candidate."

George W. Bush has signed on to the neocon agenda with the unshakeable faith of the born again. At this point, we all need a reminder that Crusades 1 through 5 ended badly in the long run, not just for the Crusaders, but on the home front. In a new Bush crusade, in a second term, the first to fall may be the professionals at the State Department.

Alpha

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-spyprobe6oct06,1,7480802,print.story?coll=la-headlines-nation

THE NATION

Policy Analyst Is Said to Have Rejected Plea Deal
Larry Franklin, who is accused of passing secrets on Iran, also has replaced his attorney.
By Richard B. Schmitt
Times Staff Writer

October 6, 2004

WASHINGTON — A Pentagon analyst being investigated for allegedly helping pass secrets to Israel has stopped cooperating with authorities and retained a new lawyer to fight possible espionage charges, sources familiar with the case said Tuesday.

The analyst, Larry Franklin, has been a key witness in a continuing FBI investigation looking into whether classified intelligence was passed to Israel by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, an influential Washington lobbying firm.

Franklin has been accused of passing the contents of a classified document about U.S. policy on Iran to two AIPAC officials, who in turn may have given the information to Israeli officials in Washington, sources have said.

Federal prosecutors had proposed an agreement under which Franklin would plead guilty to some of the charges. Such agreements usually are done in exchange for leniency and are accompanied by a pledge of cooperation.

But sources said Franklin had rejected a proposed deal because he believed the terms were too onerous. He recently replaced his court-appointed lawyer. "It looks like there is going to be a battle," a source familiar with the case said.

FBI officials have not yet sought charges against Franklin or anyone else in the case, although the breakdown of plea negotiations would appear to raise the odds that he could be charged soon.

The scope of the investigation is believed to encompass a top diplomat at the Israeli Embassy in Washington; two high-ranking analysts at AIPAC; and the Pentagon office in which Franklin works as an Iran analyst, which is headed by Defense Undersecretary Douglas J. Feith.

The case has attracted widespread attention because it spotlights U.S. relations with a longtime ally and raises questions about whether those relations have become too close in recent years. Israel has become acutely sensitive to the growing nuclear capabilities of Iran, which it considers to be its most worrisome and deadly foe.

Both the Israeli government and AIPAC have denied that they engaged in any wrongdoing or were given unauthorized access to secrets.

A spokesman for Paul McNulty, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, whose office has been assigned the case, declined to comment.

A prominent Washington defense lawyer, Plato Cacheris, confirmed this week that he recently had been retained by Franklin.

"We consider him a loyal American who did not engage in any espionage activities," said Cacheris, the first person representing Franklin to speak on his behalf since the investigation surfaced a month ago. "Any charge of espionage will be met with fierce resistance."

Cacheris has represented a number of accused turncoats, including CIA operative Aldrich H. Ames, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1994 after confessing to years of spying for the Soviet Union. Cacheris also represented former FBI counterintelligence agent Robert P. Hanssen, also convicted of passing secrets to the Soviets, who received a life sentence in 2002.

Cacheris' other clients have included former Clinton White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky and Nixon administration Atty. Gen. John Mitchell.

Some U.S. officials familiar with the investigation have said there was little hard evidence that Franklin intended to commit espionage and no hint that he was paid for any role he might have played.

U.S. officials believe there is more evidence that Franklin — described by colleagues and friends as diligent and thoughtful yet periodically unreliable and disorganized — might have handed over information without understanding the gravity of his actions.

During two decades at the Pentagon spent tracking threats, he was considered a journeyman analyst and an absent-minded professor who often could be found in his office buried behind huge stacks of documents.

The classified information he is suspected of sharing includes the contents of a draft version of a national security presidential directive, or NSPD, on Iran. The draft advocated measures the United States could take to help destabilize the regime in Tehran, a subject of intense interest to the Israelis.

But officials also have said that the draft, which originated at the Pentagon's Near East and South Asian Affairs office, where Franklin worked, contained little in the way of sensitive secrets that had not been reported by the media already.

If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at latimes.com/archives.

Alpha

Upcoming from MER:

The Secrets of U.S.-imposed Debt Relief for Iraq

Israeli AIPAC Spy Scandal - Update

MIDDLEEAST.ORG - MER - Washington - 7 October: It was just a month ago that the latest Washington spy scandal involving the very heart of the Israeli-Jewish Lobby had everyone buzzing. Then it faded from view as the corporate media moved on, as CBS News which originally broke the story found itself under assault, and as the election campaign and debates took center stage. Interesting, not one question from the PBS moderators about Israeli spying, nor even about the U.S. veto of the Security Council resolution condemning Israel, nor the International Court of Justice decision doing the same. Here's an update -- however inadequate -- from yesterday's L.A.Times. Though the real heart of the story should be AIPAC and the influence, tactics, and status of the Israeli-Jewish lobby; instead they focus on just the individual and not as they should on the large group of support persons and organizations. This should especially include, of course, the current cabal of largely Jewish neocons in top positions...including the one who hired Larry Franklin (Douglas Feith), and the ones who hired him (Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle).

THE NATION

Policy Analyst Is Said to Have Rejected Plea Deal

Larry Franklin, who is accused of passing secrets
on Iran, also has replaced his attorney.

By Richard B. Schmitt

Los Angeles Times - October 6, 2004 WASHINGTON — A Pentagon analyst being investigated for allegedly helping pass secrets to Israel has stopped cooperating with authorities and retained a new lawyer to fight possible espionage charges, sources familiar with the case said Tuesday.

The analyst, Larry Franklin, has been a key witness in a continuing FBI investigation looking into whether classified intelligence was passed to Israel by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, an influential Washington lobbying firm.

Franklin has been accused of passing the contents of a classified document about U.S. policy on Iran to two AIPAC officials, who in turn may have given the information to Israeli officials in Washington, sources have said.

Federal prosecutors had proposed an agreement under which Franklin would plead guilty to some of the charges. Such agreements usually are done in exchange for leniency and are accompanied by a pledge of cooperation.

But sources said Franklin had rejected a proposed deal because he believed the terms were too onerous. He recently replaced his court-appointed lawyer. "It looks like there is going to be a battle," a source familiar with the case said.

FBI officials have not yet sought charges against Franklin or anyone else in the case, although the breakdown of plea negotiations would appear to raise the odds that he could be charged soon.

The scope of the investigation is believed to encompass a top diplomat at the Israeli Embassy in Washington; two high-ranking analysts at AIPAC; and the Pentagon office in which Franklin works as an Iran analyst, which is headed by Defense Undersecretary Douglas J. Feith.

The case has attracted widespread attention because it spotlights U.S. relations with a longtime ally and raises questions about whether those relations have become too close in recent years. Israel has become acutely sensitive to the growing nuclear capabilities of Iran, which it considers to be its most worrisome and deadly foe.

Both the Israeli government and AIPAC have denied that they engaged in any wrongdoing or were given unauthorized access to secrets.

A spokesman for Paul McNulty, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, whose office has been assigned the case, declined to comment.

A prominent Washington defense lawyer, Plato Cacheris, confirmed this week that he recently had been retained by Franklin.

"We consider him a loyal American who did not engage in any espionage activities," said Cacheris, the first person representing Franklin to speak on his behalf since the investigation surfaced a month ago. "Any charge of espionage will be met with fierce resistance."

Cacheris has represented a number of accused turncoats, including CIA operative Aldrich H. Ames, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1994 after confessing to years of spying for the Soviet Union. Cacheris also represented former FBI counterintelligence agent Robert P. Hanssen, also convicted of passing secrets to the Soviets, who received a life sentence in 2002.

Cacheris' other clients have included former Clinton White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky and Nixon administration Atty. Gen. John Mitchell.

Some U.S. officials familiar with the investigation have said there was little hard evidence that Franklin intended to commit espionage and no hint that he was paid for any role he might have played.

U.S. officials believe there is more evidence that Franklin — described by colleagues and friends as diligent and thoughtful yet periodically unreliable and disorganized — might have handed over information without understanding the gravity of his actions.

During two decades at the Pentagon spent tracking threats, he was considered a journeyman analyst and an absent-minded professor who often could be found in his office buried behind huge stacks of documents.

The classified information he is suspected of sharing includes the contents of a draft version of a national security presidential directive, or NSPD, on Iran. The draft advocated measures the United States could take to help destabilize the regime in Tehran, a subject of intense interest to the Israelis.

But officials also have said that the draft, which originated at the Pentagon's Near East and South Asian Affairs office, where Franklin worked, contained little in the way of sensitive secrets that had not been reported by the media already.

Alpha · Posted: Sat Oct 09, 2004 6:29 am Post subject: Calls to SPAN

Rules of Engagement: Getting past screeners of the “Live Call In” Media

By Terry Thurber

Al-Jazeerah, October 7, 2004

In the morning of October 6, 2004, the honorable Tom Ridge was a guest on C-SPAN’s Journal. One of the few places for those in the “Zion Resistance Movement” can actually counter the propaganda promoted by the pro-Israeli media, to a large (and cognizant) market.

A few years ago, C-SPAN was fairly open. Providing the caller had not violated the thirty-day “between calls” rule, almost anything was allowed. The screening was minimal, if at all.

Things have changed. A few weeks back, Brain Lamb, a producer and host, was either showing his age, or exorcising the cronyism so obvious in Zion’s “lower on the food chain good old boys”. On this particular show, Brian had NYT reporter. I wish I could recall the name – but they all look and sound so similar, that names are not important. Does anybody remember the names of Joseph Goebbels’s copy boys and editors? I didn’t think so.

Anyway, on that day, a caller rang in with a question about the “AIPAC Spy” story. Despite the caller’s ritually polite tone, he was cut off. Brian’s guest sighed the required “crack-pot” smirk, and Brian, forever beholding to the NYC Press Houses that publish his less than exciting folksy drawls detailing Americana’s refuge of ignorance; chimed in with “that investigation is [mostly] political, huh?” Brian – up your Ginkgo intake man!

Mostly political?

As if really needed, this reinforced my belief that COM-CAST is beholding to Zion more than America – so what - what else was there to expect? There was, however, a new twist. In Zion’s yellow sheets, the AIPAC investigation is depicted as an "anti-Semitic” affront to the special relationship Israel enjoys with America. The special relationship includes billions in support and military grants. This relationship also assures a proper allocation of shrapnel for every child in Palestine.

What was different about Brian’s “political” spin on the caller’s question was that the enemy (Zion) has recognized that the “anti-Semitic” label will not work at all levels of the “mob” politic. It seems, at least in these cases, that spin (to counter Israeli indiscretions) for consumption by an “educated” [C-SPAN] audience should be dubbed “Political”.

Interesting, most interesting.

Back to today (October 6, 2004), and Tom Ridge, and my call to C-SPAN. I got through. It has been months. I think my number was blocked because I asked a smiling twit of cheerleader from the American Enterprise Institute, if “she felt like a pom-pom girl for fascism”.

So today – I used a friend’s phone – and the second ring, a screener asks: “What is your question about?”

I respond “The 9-11 Commission report”

The screener mutes and seconds pass. The screener returns and asks: ”Could you be more specific?”

I blundered and offered an honest response: “The 9-11 Commission has cited Israeli occupation of Palestine as the root cause of terrorism, and I wondered if Mr. Ridge thought that the current incursion in Gaza would ….” Buzzzzzzz. A dead line. I turn up the TV, and a guy from Georgia accolades with the standard “ … you guys are doing a great job – give him hell” jeers we are all so used to by now.

The point: Adopt the Mossad Strategy: Deceive – It’s easy to lie to liars. When I called in I should have framed my question along the lines of “.. ask Mr. Ridge about budgets items for new airport screeners” or some similar tripe.

What I was really going to ask: “Mr. Ridge you are doing a terrible job. The 9-11 Commission, the US Department of State, the UN, the world court, world opinion and [even] Osama Bin Ladden have all stated that the root cause of terrorism is Israel’s treatment of Palestine. Given the present massacre we are seeing in Gaza, will your job be any easier?”

Who is humanity’s enemy? Think about the enemy. The enemy is not George Bush. The enemy is not John Kerry or Ariel Sharon. Saddam is not the enemy. Those guys are/were nothing more than clerks and administrators for a small and selective group of oligarchs. The popular name [today] for these oligarchs are Zionists. They have had different labels in the past. They have been with us forever.

But, knowledge and technology have leveled the playing field, Now they live in fear. They fear we have acquired the confidence to break our bonds with them. They fear we will reduce them from emperors to administrators. They fear our humanity. And well they should!

Though it would be easy to hurt them through bottlenecking the frail infrastructure required for their “centralized commerce” and, thus demonstrating the truth of their powerlessness, we cannot. We must let them subside into history with the least impact. We must say goodbye to them as friends. Their paranoid genetics helped our ancestral clans through the darkness, fear and unregulated greed of the past. But now, they are the wall between us and the realization of a shared humanity.

We have some control: “wars” are now “little” wars, waged by little Napoleons, for their oligarch masters, whose ability to control the mobs perceptions has diminished. Look at Israel. Espoused as a model of democracy, is on the verge of collapse. Hundreds of thousands of public sector employees have gone without pay for months. The Airports have been closed. Inflation is high and the exodus is out, rather than to the land of [someone else’s] milk and honey. What goes around will come around.

http://www.aljazeerah.info/Opinion%20editorials/2004%20opinions/October/7%20o/Rules%20of%20Engagement%20Getting%20past%20screeners%20of%20the%20Live%20Call%20In%20Media%20By%20Terry%20Thurber.htm

Alpha

http://www.atimes.com

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FJ09Ak01.html

Middle East

Sidelined neo-cons stoke future fires
By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON - Sidelined by their failed predictions for Iraq and US President George W Bush's efforts to reassure voters he is not a warmonger, prominent neo-conservatives and their Christian Right allies are nonetheless trying hard to prepare the ground for future US adventures in the Middle East.

Echoing increasingly threatening noises from the government of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon about preventing Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, neo-cons are calling for Washington to undertake covert action, at the very least, to oust what some of them call the "terror masters" in Tehran as part of a more general "World War IV" against alleged Arab and Islamic extremism. (The Cold War is widely considered as World War III.)

Some neo-cons are even complaining that if Bush had been serious about the "war on terrorism", he should have taken on Iran after Afghanistan, rather than Iraq.

"Had we seen the war for what it was, we would not have started with Iraq, but with Iran, the mother of modern Islamic terrorism, the creator of Hezbollah, the ally of al-Qaeda, the sponsor of [Abu Musab al-]Zarqawi, the longtime sponsor of Fatah and the backbone of Hamas," wrote part-time Pentagon consultant Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) this week.

His article also reprised an argument he first made three years ago - that the Iranian people were already rising up against the mullahs and needed only a little nudge from Washington to succeed.

Neo-conservatives are also busy stoking tensions with Syria, even amid indications that Washington and Damascus are feeling their way toward some kind of "modus vivendi" that may even include joint military patrols along the latter's porous border with Iraq.

Last week they heard from a Syrian exile, Farid Ghadry, who apparently aspires to become the Ahmed Chalabi - the neo-con boosted leader of the exiled Iraqi National Congress whose standing in Washington plummeted after it was alleged he passed secrets to Iran - of his homeland.

In addition to lobbying for the pending Syria Liberation Act, which would commit the US government to "regime change" in Damascus, Ghadry charged that the government of President Bashir Assad was building "a new colony of terrorism" for youths in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley.

The neo-conservatives, who led the charge to war in Iraq, have steadily lost influence over US policy in Baghdad since a year ago, when US troops found themselves welcomed by a serious and growing insurgency rather than the flowers and sweets the neo-cons had predicted.

At the same time, Bush's top political adviser, Karl Rove, was reported to have told unhappy war hawks in the Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney's office, the two neo-con strongholds, that Bush's re-election prospects would be greatly enhanced if there was "no war in '04".

Led by arch-realists Secretary of State Colin Powell and his deputy Richard Armitage, the State Department gradually wrested control over policy towards Syria and Iran. With US troops bogged down next door, a policy of confrontation, as advocated by neo-cons, not only risked another war, the realists argued, but could also invite more damaging efforts by both Damascus and Tehran to destabilize Iraq.

Wary engagement with both countries has thus become official policy. The recent visit by a high-level US delegation to Damascus and the invitation of European and Arab allies and Iraq's neighbors to attend a US-sponsored meeting on Iraq in Tehran later this fall mark hard-fought advances in the State Department's agenda.

But while the neo-cons may be down, they are by no means out. As more than one foreign-policy analyst has noted, no neo-con within the administration has resigned or been fired, despite their responsibility for the Iraqi quagmire and public calls by even some senior Republican lawmakers and retired military officers that they be ousted.

Some analysts have argued the neo-cons remain in place only because their departure now would amount to an admission by the administration - and thus Bush himself - that serious mistakes had been made. In this view, Bush would purge them in a second term, as he continued along the State Department's "realist" line.

But a growing number of observers, particularly in the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), are coming to the conclusion that the neo-cons may actually enjoy greater influence if Bush wins re-election.

In just the past few days, for example, an article, The State Department's Extreme Makeover, published by online magazine Slate and attributed to an "anonymous" veteran foreign service officer, made precisely this argument.

It is in this context that neo-cons' recent efforts to focus their fire on Syria and Iran, in particular, should be seen.

Ghadry spoke at an all-day symposium co-sponsored by the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), a predominantly neo-conservative lobby group set up in August, and by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a group created two days after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the US, whose views largely mirror those of Israel's ruling Likud Party.

On FDD's board of advisers are prominent neo-cons and Iraq war boosters, including former Defense Policy Board chairman and Ledeen's sidekick at AEI, Richard Perle; AEI fellow Jeane Kirkpatrick; and former CIA director James Woolsey, who also co-chairs the CPD.

Joining them are Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, whose own Project for the New American Century first named Iran and Syria - as well as Iraq and the Palestinian Authority - as targets of the "war on terrorism", in an open letter published just 10 days after September 11.

The conference was addressed briefly by telephone by former secretary of state George Shultz, the group's new co-chair, while Woolsey announced that former Czech Republic president Vaclav Havel and former Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar had agreed to head an international chapter.

Keynoters for the symposium, titled "World War IV: Why We're Fighting, Whom We're Fighting, How We're Fighting", included Woolsey, who has long spoken of the fight against "Islamo-fascism" - defined as including "the mullahs of Iran", the Ba'athist parties of Iraq and Syria, and "the Wahhabis", of which the al-Qaeda terrorist group is a part - as the equivalent of a world war.

On hand was Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, whose participation appeared not only to provide an official sanction of the radical agenda, but also to confirm that the neo-con faction within the Bush administration is alive, kicking and unashamed despite the quagmire in Iraq.

Neo-conservative godfather Norman Podhoretz, who has also used "World War IV" as his favored description for the challenges Washington faces in the Near East, in particular, made a rare public appearance.

He called Israeli tactics in the occupied territories a "model for how to fight this kind of war", and asserted that "Iran is unquestionably on the agenda" of a second Bush administration.

"I have no doubt that we're going to have to do it and do it fast," he declared, noting there were "many different instrumentalities" at Washington's disposal for dealing with the mullahs and their nuclear program.

Podhoretz, whose son-in-law Elliott Abrams is the Middle East director on the National Security Council staff, also offered a sweeping vision of what the region might look like when the US triumphed.

Stressing the long-held Likud view that the nations of the region were artificial creations forged out of the defeated Ottoman Empire, he suggested, 'What was done in the aftermath of World War I can be undone in World War IV."

Two days later, the FDD helped convene the Middle Eastern American Convention for Freedom and Democracy to elaborate a foreign policy towards the region by several dozen mostly sectarian groups, including the American Coptic Association, the American Maronite Union, the Southern Sudanese Voice for Freedom, the Assyrian American National Federation, the Chaldean National Congress, the American Middle East Christian Association, Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa and the Washington Kurdish Institute.

(Inter Press Service)

Alpha

Franklin:Just a Sideshow on the Road to Total War

http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=3245

Monday 6th September 2004 :
Larry Franklin: Just a Sideshow on the Road to Total War
By Kurt Nimmo

Isn’t it curious that right smack in the middle of an investigation of Israel spying on its best “friend,” Hamas pulls off back-to-back suicide bombings-after a lull of nearly six months-in Beersheba? Hamas declares the bombing was revenge for Israel’s assassination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi. Rantissi was assassinated on April 17 and Yassin on March 22.

Is there a reason Hamas waited so long to take revenge? Of course there is. Hamas is essentially an Israeli contrivance. It’s used for effect when politically expedient.

Israel “aided Hamas directly-the Israelis wanted to use it as a counterbalance to the PLO,” Tony Cordesman, Middle East analyst for the Center for Strategic Studies, told the UPI’s Richard Sale in 2002. Hamas is a descendant of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamic organization long ago penetrated by the CIA. “There is a long historic alliance between the CIA and the Muslim Brotherhood,” writes Peter Goodgame. “The entire Bin Laden-CIA created ‘mujahideen’ network came from the Muslim Brotherhood.” As we now know, Prince Turki of Saudi intelligence, in cahoots with William Casey of the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI, sent bin Laden to Afghanistan and bankrolled the Services Center (Makhtab al-Khidmat) of the Jordanian Palestinian Abdullah Azzam, in the offices of the World Muslim League and Muslim Brotherhood in Peshawar (see Rashid, Taliban, p.131). After Azzam was assassinated, Makhtab al-Khidmat became al-Qaeda, although bin Laden did not call his organization such.

It should be obvious by now that the CIA and Mossad manufactured a virulent strain of Islamic terrorism for their own purposes. For instance, as an excuse for the Zionists to never make peace with the Palestinians. “What does frighten Sharon,” Yossi Sarid, chairman of the Meretz party, told Haaretz in 2002, “is any prospect or sign of calm or moderation. If the situation were to calm down and stabilize, Sharon would have to return to the negotiating table and, in the wake of pressure from within and without, he would have to raise serious proposals for an agreement. This moment terrifies Sharon and he wants to put it off for as long as he possibly can.”

No doubt Sharon is also keen to deflect attention from the fact that Israel has a long-standing spy operation in America. Of course, considering how the Bushites and Congress bend over backwards to please the Likudites in Israel, such a spy operation may not even be necessary. Regardless, the casual relationship between the Zionist neocons in the Pentagon and the Zionists in Israel-for the moment splashed all over the front page-looks bad for Sharon, especially during the US election cycle. Hamas strikes when the Likudites need a diversion. Same thing for Bush and his facile cave dweller terror threats.

In addition, the latest terror attack in Israel gives Sharon all the more reason to push his 720-kilometre apartheid wall, as Reuters quoted Sharon as saying he would do hours after the attack. Last month the UN General Assembly put forward a resolution demanding Israel dismantle the apartheid wall after the International Court of Justice declared it to be in violation of international law. But then the Likudites and the Bushcons are above international law. International law is to be used as a crowbar against Iran as it scrambles to develop a few nukes, knowing full well what the Zionists in Tel Aviv and Washington have in mind for the Iranian people. As North Korea understands full well, saber-rattling enemies think twice when you have a few nuclear warheads under your belt.

Israel is truly an outlaw nation. Its criminal government is run by racist settlers who are pushing for war against Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinians. Israel realizes it cannot possibly wage war against the Arabs and the Iranians without America’s military prowess-and its large supply of naive bullet-stoppers-so it has spent years undermining the US government and buying off Congress through AIPAC. It has exploited the mental problems of the Christian Zionists-who believe Israeli murder and hegemony are key to their fanatical biblical fantasies-and has worked tirelessly to subvert the highest reaches of the American government by installing the conniving Zionist neocons in the White House and Pentagon. Sharon really does not want John Kerry in the White House, but if push comes to shove Kerry will do in a pinch because he is also an avowed Zionist-some say more of a Zionist than even Bush-and he would be the first Jewish president of the United States (not only was his grandfather born Fritz Kohn, but his brother, Cameron Kerry, converted to Judaism when he married a Jewish woman, Kathy Weinman).

Lost in the chatter about Larry Franklin is the fact the neocons and Sharon are itching to invade Iran, possibly before the election in November. “News of the investigation of Larry Franklin, a middle-level functionary working for the Wolfowitz-Feith-Luti-Shulsky clique in the Pentagon, indicates that we are now approaching a critical choice-point on the road to war with Iran, and towards a synthetic terrorism attack inside the US which would be used as an additional pretext to start such a war,” Webster Griffin Tarpley warns. “War with Iran means a military draft, just for starters. If Iran can close the Straits of Hormuz, it might mean rationing of food and fuel. ... [The] goal is now to establish a neocon fascist dictatorship in the United States, complete with martial law, special tribunals, press and media censorship, and the full pervasive apparatus of the modern police state.” For the Straussian neocons, it would be a dream come true.

The FBI may copy the hard drive of Steve Rosen, AIPAC’s director of foreign policy issues-and it may even arrest a neocon or two (certainly not Douglas Feith or Paul Wolfowitz)-but this momentary sideshow will not put an end to or even slow down appreciably the demented neocon Master Plan for war against Islam in the name of Greater Israel. “This is not an Israeli problem. This time it is a world problem,” Yuval Steinitz, chairman of the Israeli parliament’s foreign affairs and defense committee, said last month. “Iran is seeking to become a world power.” In other words, Iran must be attacked soon, before it can patch together a few nukes and give Israel a run for its money-or, rather, a run for the money weaseled out of increasingly stressed American taxpayers. No number of FBI agents running around Washington, interviewing traitorous neocons and copying hard drives, will slow down the Zionists, not when the entire political establishment of the United States-both sides of the Property Party-are spoony over Arab killing Zionists.

Once again, Sharon has used Hamas-a Frankenstein monster devised by Mossad, as al-Qaeda was devised by the CIA-to not only distract from the minor problem presented by Larry Franklin, but also to remind the timorous and easily bamboozled (American and Israeli citizens alike) that terrorism is alive and well, even if it takes a long and inexplicable hiatus on occasion. Blowing up commuter buses drives home an unrelenting message: there is evil lurking out there, Muslim evil, and it is supported by malevolent mullahs in Tehran, the minions of Arafat in Ramallah, and the crafty cave dwellers of Osama. As Bush says, the war on terrorism cannot be won-terrorism is interminable, perpetual, and unending.

Next year, be it Bush or Kerry, Iran will be invaded.

Kurt Nimmo is a photographer and multimedia developer in Las Cruces, New Mexico. He is the author of Another Day in the Empire: Life in Neoconservative America, a collection of essays published by Dandelion Books. Visit his weblog at KurtNimmo.com.

http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/nimmo09012004/

by : Kurt Nimmo
Monday 6th September 2004

Alpha

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 naïve."

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

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Treason in high places: Pentagon zionists, AIPAC and Israel - page 3