| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Dec 01, 2004 11:17 pm Post subject: FBI RAIDS TRAITOROUS AIPAC OFFICE |
| Date: Wed, 01 Dec 2004 15:02:26 -0800
Subject: FBI Raids AIPAC Office
FBI RAIDS AIPAC OFFICE
http://www.jta.org/index.asp
The FBI subpoenaed four senior staffers at the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee to appear before a grand jury.
The FBI searched the Washington office of the pro-Israel lobby on
Wednesday, seeking additional files related to two
staffers who were interviewed by the agency in August — Research
Director Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, deputy director for foreign
policy issues.
The FBI also delivered the grand jury subpoenas, AIPAC said in a
statement that did not name the four “senior staff members.” An FBI
spokeswoman confirmed the search, but had no further comment.
Federal investigators reportedly have been investigating AIPAC for two
years, and the case is said to focus around a former Pentagon official
suspected of passing a classified draft policy statement on Iran to
AIPAC, which allegedly then passed it on to Israel.
In a statement Wednesday, AIPAC continued to deny any wrongdoing.
“Neither AIPAC nor any member of our staff has broken any law,” the
statement said. “We are fully cooperating with the governmental
authorities. We believe any court of law or grand jury will conclude
that AIPAC employees have always acted legally, properly and
appropriately.”
---------------------------------------------------------- | |  | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Dec 01, 2004 11:38 pm Post subject: Whose War? |
| http://www.amconmag.com/03_24_03/cover.html
March 24, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Whose War?
A neoconservative clique seeks to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America’s interest.
by Patrick J. Buchanan
The War Party may have gotten its war. But it has also gotten something it did not bargain for. Its membership lists and associations have been exposed and its motives challenged. In a rare moment in U.S. journalism, Tim Russert put this question directly to Richard Perle: “Can you assure American viewers ... that we’re in this situation against Saddam Hussein and his removal for American security interests? And what would be the link in terms of Israel?”
Suddenly, the Israeli connection is on the table, and the War Party is not amused. Finding themselves in an unanticipated firefight, our neoconservative friends are doing what comes naturally, seeking student deferments from political combat by claiming the status of a persecuted minority group. People who claim to be writing the foreign policy of the world superpower, one would think, would be a little more manly in the schoolyard of politics. Not so.
Former Wall Street Journal editor Max Boot kicked off the campaign. When these “Buchananites toss around ‘neoconservative’—and cite names like Wolfowitz and Cohen—it sometimes sounds as if what they really mean is ‘Jewish conservative.’” Yet Boot readily concedes that a passionate attachment to Israel is a “key tenet of neoconservatism.” He also claims that the National Security Strategy of President Bush “sounds as if it could have come straight out from the pages of Commentary magazine, the neocon bible.” (For the uninitiated, Commentary, the bible in which Boot seeks divine guidance, is the monthly of the American Jewish Committee.)
David Brooks of the Weekly Standard wails that attacks based on the Israel tie have put him through personal hell: “Now I get a steady stream of anti-Semitic screeds in my e-mail, my voicemail and in my mailbox. ... Anti-Semitism is alive and thriving. It’s just that its epicenter is no longer on the Buchananite Right, but on the peace-movement left.”
Washington Post columnist Robert Kagan endures his own purgatory abroad: “In London ... one finds Britain’s finest minds propounding, in sophisticated language and melodious Oxbridge accents, the conspiracy theories of Pat Buchanan concerning the ‘neoconservative’ (read: Jewish) hijacking of American foreign policy.”
Lawrence Kaplan of the New Republic charges that our little magazine “has been transformed into a forum for those who contend that President Bush has become a client of ... Ariel Sharon and the ‘neoconservative war party.’”
Referencing Charles Lindbergh, he accuses Paul Schroeder, Chris Matthews, Robert Novak, Georgie Anne Geyer, Jason Vest of the Nation, and Gary Hart of implying that “members of the Bush team have been doing Israel’s bidding and, by extension, exhibiting ‘dual loyalties.’” Kaplan thunders:
The real problem with such claims is not just that they are untrue. The problem is that they are toxic. Invoking the specter of dual loyalty to mute criticism and debate amounts to more than the everyday pollution of public discourse. It is the nullification of public discourse, for how can one refute accusations grounded in ethnicity? The charges are, ipso facto, impossible to disprove. And so they are meant to be.
What is going on here? Slate’s Mickey Kaus nails it in the headline of his retort: “Lawrence Kaplan Plays the Anti-Semitic Card.”
What Kaplan, Brooks, Boot, and Kagan are doing is what the Rev. Jesse Jackson does when caught with some mammoth contribution from a Fortune 500 company he has lately accused of discriminating. He plays the race card. So, too, the neoconservatives are trying to fend off critics by assassinating their character and impugning their motives.
Indeed, it is the charge of “anti-Semitism” itself that is toxic. For this venerable slander is designed to nullify public discourse by smearing and intimidating foes and censoring and blacklisting them and any who would publish them. Neocons say we attack them because they are Jewish. We do not. We attack them because their warmongering threatens our country, even as it finds a reliable echo in Ariel Sharon.
And this time the boys have cried “wolf” once too often. It is not working. As Kaus notes, Kaplan’s own New Republic carries Harvard professor Stanley Hoffman. In writing of the four power centers in this capital that are clamoring for war, Hoffman himself describes the fourth thus:
And, finally, there is a loose collection of friends of Israel, who believe in the identity of interests between the Jewish state and the United States. … These analysts look on foreign policy through the lens of one dominant concern: Is it good or bad for Israel? Since that nation’s founding in 1948, these thinkers have never been in very good odor at the State Department, but now they are well ensconced in the Pentagon, around such strategists as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith.
“If Stanley Hoffman can say this,” asks Kaus, “why can’t Chris Matthews?” Kaus also notes that Kaplan somehow failed to mention the most devastating piece tying the neoconservatives to Sharon and his Likud Party.
In a Feb. 9 front-page article in the Washington Post, Robert Kaiser quotes a senior U.S. official as saying, “The Likudniks are really in charge now.” Kaiser names Perle, Wolfowitz, and Feith as members of a pro-Israel network inside the administration and adds David Wurmser of the Defense Department and Elliott Abrams of the National Security Council. (Abrams is the son-in-law of Norman Podhoretz, editor emeritus of Commentary, whose magazine has for decades branded critics of Israel as anti-Semites.)
Noting that Sharon repeatedly claims a “special closeness” to the Bushites, Kaiser writes, “For the first time a U.S. administration and a Likud government are pursuing nearly identical policies.” And a valid question is: how did this come to be, and while it is surely in Sharon’s interest, is it in America’s interest?
This is a time for truth. For America is about to make a momentous decision: whether to launch a series of wars in the Middle East that could ignite the Clash of Civilizations against which Harvard professor Samuel Huntington has warned, a war we believe would be a tragedy and a disaster for this Republic. To avert this war, to answer the neocon smears, we ask that our readers review their agenda as stated in their words. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. As Al Smith used to say, “Nothing un-American can live in the sunlight.”
We charge that a cabal of polemicists and public officials seek to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America’s interests. We charge them with colluding with Israel to ignite those wars and destroy the Oslo Accords. We charge them with 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. We charge that they have alienated friends and allies all over the Islamic and Western world through their arrogance, hubris, and bellicosity.
Not in our lifetimes has America been so isolated from old friends. Far worse, President Bush is being lured into a trap baited for him by these neocons that could cost him his office and cause America to forfeit years of peace won for us by the sacrifices of two generations in the Cold War.
They charge us with anti-Semitism—i.e., a hatred of Jews for their faith, heritage, or ancestry. False. The truth is, those hurling these charges 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 an assumption that, somehow, what’s good for Israel is good for America.
The Neoconservatives
Who are the neoconservatives? The first generation were ex-liberals, socialists, and Trotskyites, boat-people from the McGovern revolution who rafted over to the GOP at the end of conservatism’s long march to power with Ronald Reagan in 1980.
A neoconservative, wrote Kevin Phillips back then, is more likely to be a magazine editor than a bricklayer. Today, he or she is more likely to be a resident scholar at a public policy institute such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) or one of its clones like the Center for Security Policy or the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). As one wag writes, a neocon is more familiar with the inside of a think tank than an Abrams tank.
Almost none came out of the business world or military, and few if any came out of the Goldwater campaign. The heroes they invoke are Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Harry Truman, Martin Luther King, and Democratic Senators Henry “Scoop” Jackson (Wash.) and Pat Moynihan (N.Y.).
All are interventionists who regard Stakhanovite support of Israel as a defining characteristic of their breed. Among their luminaries are Jeane Kirkpatrick, Bill Bennett, Michael Novak, and James Q. Wilson.
Their publications include the Weekly Standard, Commentary, the New Republic, National Review, and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. Though few in number, they wield disproportionate power through control of the conservative foundations and magazines, through their syndicated columns, and by attaching themselves to men of power.
Beating the War Drums
When the Cold War ended, these neoconservatives began casting about for a new crusade to give meaning to their lives. On Sept. 11, their time came. They seized on that horrific atrocity to steer America’s rage into all-out war to destroy their despised enemies, the Arab and Islamic “rogue states” that have resisted U.S. hegemony and loathe Israel.
The War Party’s plan, however, had been in preparation far in advance of 9/11. And when President Bush, after defeating the Taliban, was looking for a new front in the war on terror, they put their precooked meal in front of him. Bush dug into it.
Before introducing the script-writers of America’s future wars, consider the rapid and synchronized reaction of the neocons to what happened after that fateful day.
On Sept. 12, Americans were still in shock when Bill Bennett told CNN that we were in “a struggle between good and evil,” that the Congress must declare war on “militant Islam,” and that “overwhelming force” must be used. Bennett cited Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and China as targets for attack. Not, however, Afghanistan, the sanctuary of Osama’s terrorists. How did Bennett know which nations must be smashed before he had any idea who attacked us?
The Wall Street Journal immediately offered up a specific target list, calling for U.S. air strikes on “terrorist camps in Syria, Sudan, Libya, and Algeria, and perhaps even in parts of Egypt.” Yet, not one of Bennett’s six countries, nor one of these five, had anything to do with 9/11.
On Sept. 15, according to Bob Woodward’s Bush at War, “Paul Wolfowitz put forth military arguments to justify a U.S. attack on Iraq rather than Afghanistan.” Why Iraq? Because, Wolfowitz argued in the War Cabinet, while “attacking Afghanistan would be uncertain … Iraq was a brittle oppressive regime that might break easily. It was doable.”
On Sept. 20, forty neoconservatives sent an open letter to the White House instructing President Bush on how the war on terror must be conducted. Signed by Bennett, Podhoretz, Kirkpatrick, Perle, Kristol, and Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, the letter was an ultimatum. To retain the signers’ support, the president was told, he must target Hezbollah for destruction, retaliate against Syria and Iran if they refuse to sever ties to Hezbollah, and overthrow Saddam. Any failure to attack Iraq, the signers warned Bush, “will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism.”
Here was a cabal of intellectuals telling the Commander-in-Chief, nine days after an attack on America, that if he did not follow their war plans, he would be charged with surrendering to terror. Yet, Hezbollah had nothing to do with 9/11. What had Hezbollah done? Hezbollah had humiliated Israel by driving its army out of Lebanon.
President Bush had been warned. He was to exploit the attack of 9/11 to launch a series of wars on Arab regimes, none of which had attacked us. All, however, were enemies of Israel. “Bibi” Netanyahu, the former Prime Minister of Israel, like some latter-day Citizen Genet, was ubiquitous on American television, calling for us to crush the “Empire of Terror.” The “Empire,” it turns out, consisted of Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Iraq, and “the Palestinian enclave.”
Nasty as some of these regimes and groups might be, what had they done to the United States?
The War Party seemed desperate to get a Middle East war going before America had second thoughts. Tom Donnelly of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) called for an immediate invasion of Iraq. “Nor need the attack await the deployment of half a million troops. … [T]he larger challenge will be occupying Iraq after the fighting is over,” he wrote.
Donnelly was echoed by Jonah Goldberg of National Review: “The United States needs to go to war with Iraq because it needs to go to war with someone in the region and Iraq makes the most sense.”
Goldberg endorsed “the Ledeen Doctrine” of ex-Pentagon official Michael Ledeen, which Goldberg described thus: “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show we mean business.” (When the French ambassador in London, at a dinner party, asked why we should risk World War III over some “shitty little country”—meaning Israel—Goldberg’s magazine was not amused.)
Ledeen, however, is less frivolous. In The War Against the Terror Masters, he identifies the exact regimes America must destroy:
First and foremost, we must bring down the terror regimes, beginning with the Big Three: Iran, Iraq, and Syria. And then we have to come to grips with Saudi Arabia. … Once the tyrants in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia have been brought down, we will remain engaged. …We have to ensure the fulfillment of the democratic revolution. … Stability is an unworthy American mission, and a misleading concept to boot. We do not want stability in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and even Saudi Arabia; we want things to change. The real issue is not whether, but how to destabilize.
Rejecting stability as “an unworthy American mission,” Ledeen goes on to define America’s authentic “historic mission”:
Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day, from business to science, literature, art, architecture, and cinema to politics and the law. Our enemies have always hated this whirlwind of energy and creativity which menaces their traditions (whatever they may be) and shames them for their inability to keep pace. … [W]e must destroy them to advance our historic mission.
Passages like this owe more to Leon Trotsky than to Robert Taft and betray a Jacobin streak in neoconservatism that cannot be reconciled with any concept of true conservatism.
To the Weekly Standard, Ledeen’s enemies list was too restrictive. We must not only declare war on terror networks and states that harbor terrorists, said the Standard, we should launch wars on “any group or government inclined to support or sustain others like them in the future.”
Robert Kagan and William Kristol were giddy with excitement at the prospect of Armageddon. The coming war “is going to spread and engulf a number of countries. … It is going to resemble the clash of civilizations that everyone has hoped to avoid. … [I]t is possible that the demise of some ‘moderate’ Arab regimes may be just round the corner.”
Norman Podhoretz in Commentary even outdid Kristol’s Standard, rhapsodizing that we should embrace a war of civilizations, as it is George W. Bush’s mission “to fight World War IV—the war against militant Islam.” By his count, the regimes that richly deserve to be overthrown are not confined to the three singled-out members of the axis of evil (Iraq, Iran, North Korea). At a minimum, the axis should extend to Syria and Lebanon and Libya, as well as ‘“friends” of America like the Saudi royal family and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, along with the Palestinian Authority. Bush must reject the “timorous counsels” of the “incorrigibly cautious Colin Powell,” wrote Podhoretz, and “find the stomach to impose a new political culture on the defeated” Islamic world. As the war against al-Qaeda required that we destroy the Taliban, Podhoretz wrote,
We may willy-nilly find ourselves forced … to topple five or six or seven more tyrannies in the Islamic world (including that other sponsor of terrorism, Yasir Arafat’s Palestinian Authority). I can even [imagine] the turmoil of this war leading to some new species of an imperial mission for America, whose purpose would be to oversee the emergence of successor governments in the region more amenable to reform and modernization than the despotisms now in place. … I can also envisage the establishment of some kind of American protectorate over the oil fields of Saudi Arabia, as we more and more come to wonder why 7,000 princes should go on being permitted to exert so much leverage over us and everyone else.
Podhoretz credits Eliot Cohen with the phrase “World War IV.” Bush was shortly thereafter seen carrying about a gift copy of Cohen’s book that celebrates civilian mastery of the military in times of war, as exhibited by such leaders as Winston Churchill and David Ben Gurion.
A list of the Middle East regimes that Podhoretz, Bennett, Ledeen, Netanyahu, and the Wall Street Journal regard as targets for destruction thus includes Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, and “militant Islam.”
Cui Bono? For whose benefit these endless wars in a region that holds nothing vital to America save oil, which the Arabs must sell us to survive? Who would benefit from a war of civilizations between the West and Islam?
Answer: one nation, one leader, one party. Israel, Sharon, Likud.
Indeed, Sharon has been everywhere the echo of his acolytes in America. In February 2003, Sharon told a delegation of Congressmen that, after Saddam’s regime is destroyed, it is of “vital importance” that the United States disarm Iran, Syria, and Libya.
“We have a great interest in shaping the Middle East the day after” the war on Iraq, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz told the Conference of Major American Jewish Organizations. After U.S. troops enter Baghdad, the United States must generate “political, economic, diplomatic pressure” on Tehran, Mofaz admonished the American Jews.
Are the neoconservatives concerned about a war on Iraq bringing down friendly Arab governments? Not at all. They would welcome it.
“Mubarak is no great shakes,” says Richard Perle of the President of Egypt. “Surely we can do better than Mubarak.” Asked about the possibility that a war on Iraq—which he predicted would be a “cakewalk”—might upend governments in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, former UN ambassador Ken Adelman told Joshua Micah Marshall of Washington Monthly, “All the better if you ask me.”
On July 10, 2002, Perle invited a former aide to Lyndon LaRouche named Laurent Murawiec to address the Defense Policy Board. In a briefing that startled Henry Kissinger, Murawiec named Saudi Arabia as “the kernel of evil, the prime mover, the most dangerous opponent” of the United States.
Washington should give Riyadh an ultimatum, he said. Either you Saudis “prosecute or isolate those involved in the terror chain, including the Saudi intelligence services,” and end all propaganda against Israel, or we invade your country, seize your oil fields, and occupy Mecca.
In closing his PowerPoint presentation, Murawiec offered a “Grand Strategy for the Middle East.” “Iraq is the tactical pivot, Saudi Arabia the strategic pivot, Egypt the prize.” Leaked reports of Murawiec’s briefing did not indicate if anyone raised the question of how the Islamic world might respond to U.S. troops tramping around the grounds of the Great Mosque.
What these neoconservatives seek is to conscript American blood to make the world safe for Israel. They want the peace of the sword imposed on Islam and American soldiers to die if necessary to impose it.
Washington Times editor at large Arnaud de Borchgrave calls this the “Bush-Sharon Doctrine.” “Washington’s ‘Likudniks,’” he writes, “have been in charge of U.S. policy in the Middle East since Bush was sworn into office.”
The neocons seek American empire, and Sharonites seek hegemony over the Middle East. The two agendas coincide precisely. And though neocons insist that it was Sept. 11 that made the case for war on Iraq and militant Islam, the origins of their war plans go back far before.
“Securing the Realm”
The principal draftsman is Richard Perle, an aide to Sen. Scoop Jackson, who, in 1970, was overheard on a federal wiretap discussing classified information from the National Security Council with the Israeli Embassy. In Jews and American Politics, published in 1974, Stephen D. Isaacs wrote, “Richard Perle and Morris Amitay command a tiny army of Semitophiles on Capitol Hill and direct Jewish power in behalf of Jewish interests.” In 1983, the New York Times reported that Perle had taken substantial payments from an Israeli weapons manufacturer.
In 1996, with Douglas Feith and David Wurmser, Perle wrote “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” for Prime Minister Netanyahu. In it, Perle, Feith, and Wurmser urged Bibi to ditch the Oslo Accords of the assassinated Yitzak Rabin and adopt a new aggressive strategy:
Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq—an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right—as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions. Jordan has challenged Syria’s regional ambitions recently by suggesting the restoration of the Hashemites in Iraq.
In the Perle-Feith-Wurmser strategy, Israel’s enemy remains Syria, but the road to Damascus runs through Baghdad. Their plan, which urged Israel to re-establish “the principle of preemption,” has now been imposed by Perle, Feith, Wurmser & Co. on the United States.
In his own 1997 paper, “A Strategy for Israel,” Feith pressed Israel to re-occupy “the areas under Palestinian Authority control,” though “the price in blood would be high.”
Wurmser, as a resident scholar at AEI, drafted joint war plans for Israel and the United States “to fatally strike the centers of radicalism in the Middle East. Israel and the United States should … broaden the conflict to strike fatally, not merely disarm, the centers of radicalism in the region—the regimes of Damascus, Baghdad, Tripoli, Tehran, and Gaza. That would establish the recognition that fighting either the United States or Israel is suicidal.”
He urged both nations to be on the lookout for a crisis, for as he wrote, “Crises can be opportunities.” Wurmser published his U.S.-Israeli war plan on Jan. 1, 2001, nine months before 9/11.
About the Perle-Feith-Wurmser cabal, author Michael Lind writes:
The radical Zionist right to which Perle and Feith belong is small in number but it has become a significant force in Republican policy-making circles. It is a recent phenomenon, dating back to the late 1970s and 1980s, when many formerly Democratic Jewish intellectuals joined the broad Reagan coalition. While many of these hawks speak in public about global crusades for democracy, the chief concern of many such “neo-conservatives” is the power and reputation of Israel.
Right down the smokestack.
Perle today chairs the Defense Policy Board, Feith is an Undersecretary of Defense, and Wurmser is special assistant to the Undersecretary of State for Arms Control, John Bolton, who dutifully echoes the Perle-Sharon line. According to the Israeli daily newspaper Ha’aretz, in late February,
U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton said in meetings with Israeli officials … that he has no doubt America will attack Iraq and that it will be necessary to deal with threats from Syria, Iran and North Korea afterwards.
On Jan. 26, 1998, President Clinton received a letter imploring him to use his State of the Union address to make removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime the “aim of American foreign policy” and to use military action because “diplomacy is failing.” Were Clinton to do that, the signers pledged, they would “offer our full support in this difficult but necessary endeavor.” Signing the pledge were Elliott Abrams, Bill Bennett, John Bolton, Robert Kagan, William Kristol, Richard Perle, and Paul Wolfowitz. Four years before 9/11, the neocons had Baghdad on their minds.
The Wolfowitz Doctrine
In 1992, a startling document was leaked from the office of Paul Wolfowitz at the Pentagon. Barton Gellman of the Washington Post called it a “classified blueprint intended to help ‘set the nation’s direction for the next century.’” The Wolfowitz Memo called for a permanent U.S. military presence on six continents to deter all “potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.” Containment, the victorious strategy of the Cold War, was to give way to an ambitious new strategy designed to “establish and protect a new order.”
Though the Wolfowitz Memo was denounced and dismissed in 1992, it became American policy in the 33-page National Security Strategy (NSS) issued by President Bush on Sept. 21, 2002. Washington Post reporter Tim Reich describes it as a “watershed in U.S. foreign policy” that “reverses the fundamental principles that have guided successive Presidents for more than 50 years: containment and deterrence.”
Andrew Bacevich, a professor at Boston University, writes of the NSS that he marvels at “its fusion of breathtaking utopianism with barely disguised machtpolitik. It reads as if it were the product not of sober, ostensibly conservative Republicans but of an unlikely collaboration between Woodrow Wilson and the elder Field Marshal von Moltke.”
In confronting America’s adversaries, the paper declares, “We will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self-defense by acting preemptively.” It warns any nation that seeks to acquire power to rival the United States that it will be courting war with the United States:
[T]he president has no intention of allowing any nation to catch up with the huge lead the United States has opened since the fall of the Soviet Union more than a decade ago. … Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military buildup in hopes of surpassing or equaling the power of the United States.
America must reconcile herself to an era of “nation-building on a grand scale, and with no exit strategy,” Robert Kagan instructs. But this Pax Americana the neocons envision bids fair to usher us into a time of what Harry Elmer Barnes called “permanent war for permanent peace.”
The Munich Card
As President Bush was warned on Sept. 20, 2001, that he will be indicted for “a decisive surrender” in the war on terror should he fail to attack Iraq, he is also on notice that pressure on Israel is forbidden. For as the neoconservatives have played the anti-Semitic card, they will not hesitate to play the Munich card as well. A year ago, when Bush called on Sharon to pull out of the West Bank, Sharon fired back that he would not let anyone do to Israel what Neville Chamberlain had done to the Czechs. Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy immediately backed up Ariel Sharon:
With each passing day, Washington appears to view its principal Middle Eastern ally’s conduct as inconvenient—in much the same way London and Paris came to see Czechoslovakia’s resistance to Hitler’s offers of peace in exchange for Czech lands.
When former U.S. NATO commander Gen. George Jouwlan said the United States may have to impose a peace on Israel and the Palestinians, he, too, faced the charge of appeasement. Wrote Gaffney,
They would, presumably, go beyond Britain and France’s sell-out of an ally at Munich in 1938. The “impose a peace” school is apparently prepared to have us play the role of Hitler’s Wehrmacht as well, seizing and turning over to Yasser Arafat the contemporary Sudetenland: the West Bank and Gaza Strip and perhaps part of Jerusalem as well.
Podhoretz agreed Sharon was right in the substance of what he said but called it politically unwise to use the Munich analogy.
President Bush is on notice: Should he pressure Israel to trade land for peace, the Oslo formula in which his father and Yitzak Rabin believed, he will, as was his father, be denounced as an anti-Semite and a Munich-style appeaser by both Israelis and their neoconservatives allies inside his own Big Tent.
Yet, if Bush cannot deliver Sharon there can be no peace. And if there is no peace in the Mideast there is no security for us, ever—for there will be no end to terror. As most every diplomat and journalist who travels to the region will relate, America’s failure to be even-handed, our failure to rein in Sharon, our failure to condemn Israel’s excesses, and our moral complicity in Israel’s looting of Palestinian lands and denial of their right to self-determination sustains the anti-Americanism in the Islamic world in which terrorists and terrorism breed.
Let us conclude. The Israeli people are America’s friends and have a right to peace and secure borders. We should help them secure these rights. As a nation, we have made a moral commitment, endorsed by half a dozen presidents, which Americans wish to honor, not to permit these people who have suffered much to see their country overrun and destroyed. And we must honor this commitment.
But U.S. and Israeli interests are not identical. They often collide, and when they do, U.S. interests must prevail. Moreover, we do not view the Sharon regime as “America’s best friend.”
Since the time of Ben Gurion, the behavior of the Israeli regime has been Jekyll and Hyde. In the 1950s, its intelligence service, the Mossad, had agents in Egypt blow up U.S. installations to make it appear the work of Cairo, to destroy U.S. relations with the new Nasser government. During the Six Day War, Israel ordered repeated attacks on the undefended USS Liberty that killed 34 American sailors and wounded 171 and included the machine-gunning of life rafts. This massacre was neither investigated nor punished by the U.S. government in an act of national cravenness.
Though we have given Israel $20,000 for every Jewish citizen, Israel refuses to stop building the settlements that are the cause of the Palestinian intifada. Likud has dragged our good name through the mud and blood of Ramallah, ignored Bush’s requests to restrain itself, and sold U.S. weapons technology to China, including the Patriot, the Phoenix air-to-air missile, and the Lavi fighter, which is based on F-16 technology. Only direct U.S. intervention blocked Israel’s sale of our AWACS system.
Israel suborned Jonathan Pollard to loot our secrets and refuses to return the documents, which would establish whether or not they were sold to Moscow. When Clinton tried to broker an agreement at Wye Plantation between Israel and Arafat, Bibi Netanyahu attempted to extort, as his price for signing, release of Pollard, so he could take this treasonous snake back to Israel as a national hero.
Do the Brits, our closest allies, behave like this?
Though we have said repeatedly that we admire much of what this president has done, he will not deserve re-election if he does not jettison the neoconservatives’ agenda of endless wars on the Islamic world that serve only the interests of a country other than the one he was elected to preserve and protect.
March 24, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Dec 02, 2004 6:14 am Post subject: Pro-Israel group in spy probe raid |
| http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,11564855%5E1702,00.html
BREAKING NEWS
This story is from our news.com.au network Source: AP
Pro-Israel group in spy probe raid
By Curt Anderson in Washington
December 02, 2004
FBI agents searched files and served subpoenas at the offices of the main pro-Israel lobbying organisation as part of an investigation into whether Israel improperly obtained classified US information on Iran.
The search at the offices of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee was disclosed in a statement by the organisation, which repeated it is co-operating "in order to get these false and baseless allegations put to rest fully and swiftly".
"As we have said from the beginning, AIPAC has done nothing wrong," the statement said.
The FBI previously searched AIPAC's offices on August 27.
Agents also have interviewed two AIPAC employees about whether a Defence Department analyst, Larry Franklin, gave them classified information that would up with Israel.
Mr Franklin works on Iran and Middle East issues in the office of policy undersecretary Douglas Feith. Mr Franklin has not commented on the probe and has not been charged.
AIPAC said FBI agents yesterday requested and received files related to those same two employees, who previously were identified - Steve Rosen, the director of research, and Keith Weissman, deputy director of foreign policy issues.
The FBI has copied computer hard drives and files from both men.
In addition, the AIPAC statement said subpoenas were served by the FBI requiring four unidentified senior AIPAC officials to testify before the federal grand jury investigating the case.
The FBI and Justice Department would not comment.
The Israeli Government has denied spying on the US, saying that meetings between US and Israeli officials are common and that the two countries share many secrets. Iran, particularly any assessments of its nuclear ambitions, is of critical importance to Israel's security interests.
Israel said it has imposed a ban on espionage in the US since the scandal over Jonathan Pollard, an American caught spying for Israel in 1985.
The AIPAC investigation dates to the early 2001 days of the Bush administration. No charges have been brought. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Dec 02, 2004 6:19 am Post subject: Action in Legal Case Against AIPAC |
| http://www.wrmea.com/archives/November_2004/0411025.html
Washington Report, November 2004, page 25
Lobby Watch
Action in Legal Case Against AIPAC
By Andrew I. Killgore
To bring readers up to date, the legal “case against AIPAC” (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) was first filed in 1989 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The seven complainants were Ambassador James Akins, Washington Report executive editor Richard Curtiss, former Congressman Paul Findley, Admiral Robert Hanks, Ambassador Andrew Killgore, Orin Parker, former president of American-Mideast Education and Training Services, and the late George Ball, the former deputy secretary of state who died in 1994.
We maintained that the Federal Election Commission (the FEC), the named defendant, was delinquent in not finding AIPAC to be a political committee and thus subject to reporting the sources of its income and expenditures. The U.S. District Court rejected our argument. The Court of Appeals, however, reversed the District Court, whereupon the FEC appealed to the Supreme Court. In 1998 the Supreme Court accepted the FEC’s argument that AIPAC was “a membership organization,” and ordered the case back to the FEC to resolve the membership organization “puzzle.”
Four years later, on May 20, 2002, our lawyers filed an administrative complaint against the FEC, arguing that if AIPAC were exempt from filing its income/expenditures under the “membership communication exception,” it must nevertheless file under a different section of the U.S. Code because, according to previous FEC findings, AIPAC communications were “expressly advocating the election…of…clearly defined candidates” at a cost “exceeding $2,000 for any election.” AIPAC had failed to comply with this reporting obligation.
Our administrative complaint consists of arguments in support of our position that AIPAC must publish its income and its expenditures. The FEC, on the other hand, supports AIPAC’s position that it is exempt because it is a “membership organization.” Finally, on July 27, 2004, U.S. District Court Judge John Garrett Penn, under whose jurisdiction this case is being heard, issued an order for plaintiffs to file a motion for summary judgment. This was on agreement of both parties, and we have filed the motion for summary judgment.
On Sept. 10, defendant FEC filed its opposition to our motion for summary judgment. On Oct. 8 plaintiffs are to respond to defendant’s opposition to our motion. Defendants must reply by Nov. 5.
Finally, there is some action in our legal case against AIPAC, and Judge Penn eventually—soon—will hear the case. If he decides for the FEC (AIPAC) we will appeal to the Court of Appeals. If he decides in our favor, the FEC is expected to appeal to the Court of Appeals. And so on, up to the Supreme Court—just as happened in the earlier case.
Our attempt to drive AIPAC out of the shadows into the sunlight is now 15 years old. We note that there are unresolved allegations of espionage against AIPAC. Whether this had any effect on the present action we do not know.
Andrew I. Killgore is publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Dec 02, 2004 6:29 am Post subject: THE MOTHER OF ALL SCANDALS |
| Forwarded:
For any newcomers just weening off the mainscream.....
THE MOTHER OF ALL SCANDALS
Once again, Israel has been caught with spies at the highest levels of the US Government.
Once again Israel denies wrongdoing, or faced with incontrovertible evidence (in this case one of the spies has reportedly cooperated with the FBI) dismisses the spying with the claim that such spying is harmless, because Israel and the United States are such good friends.
Well, let us take a closer look at that idea of “harmless espionage” by recalling Israel’s most famous failed spy, Jonathan Pollard.
Jonathan Pollard is an American of Jewish descent, born in Galveston Texas, who established a career as an intelligence analyst for the US Navy. There have been many theories offered as to why Pollard decided to betray his country of birth to the Jewish state, but that Pollard did betray his country of birth to Israel is beyond all doubt. Pollard’s defense was that he did not spy so much against the United States, only that he spied for Israel, sending them documents that in his opinion the US should have shared with Israel anyway.
That it was never Pollards job to decide what documents Israel should have was apparently irrelevant. Pollard arrogated that authority to himself. From his position of trust within the US Navy, Pollard delivered over 1000 classified documents to Israel for which he was well paid. Included in those documents were the names of over 150 US agents in the Mideast, who were eventually “turned” into agents for Israel.
But by far the most egregious damage done by Pollard was to steal classified documents relating to the US Nuclear Deterrent relative to the USSR and send them to Israel. According to sources in the US State Department, Israel then turned around and traded those stolen nuclear secrets to the USSR in exchange for increased emigration quotas from the USSR to Israel. Other information that found its way from the US to Israel to the USSR resulted in the loss of American agents operating inside the USSR. Casper Weinberger, in his affidavit opposing a reduced sentence for Pollard, described the damage done to the United States thus, "[It is] difficult to conceive of a greater harm to national security than that caused by... Pollard's treasonous behavior."
This should end the suggestion that Israel’s spies are harmless. They are not. The United States’ nuclear deterrent cost an estimated five trillion taxpayer dollars during the 50s and 60s to build and maintain, and less than $100,000 for Pollard to undermine. Israel waited 13 years to admit Pollard had been spying for them, and now lobbies for his release, having granted him Israeli citizenship.
Pollard is hardly the only Israeli spy operating in the United States. He just had the misfortune to get caught. Here are just a few examples of the Israeli spy operations that have been detected.
1947. Information collected by the ADL in its spy operations on US citizens is used by the House Select Committee on Unamerican Activities. Subcommittee Chair Clare Hoffman dismisses the ADL’s reports on suspected communists as “hearsay."
1950 John Davitt, former chief of the Justice Department's internal security section notes that the Israeli intelligence service is the second most active in the United States after the Soviets.
1954 A hidden microphone planted by the Israelis is discovered in the Office of the US Ambassador in Tel Aviv.
1956 Telephone taps are found connected to two telephones in the residence of the US military attaché in Tel Aviv.
1954 "The Lavon Affair". Israeli agents recruit Egyptian citizens of Jewish descent to bomb Western targets in Egypt, and plant evidence to frame Arabs, in an apparent attempt to upset US-Egyptian relations. Israeli defense minister Pinchas Lavon is eventually removed from office, though many think real responsibility lay with David Ben-Gurion.
1965 Israel apparently illegally obtains enriched uranium from NUMEC Corporation. (Washington Post, 6/5/86, Charles R. Babcock, "US an Intelligence Target of the Israelis, Officials Say.")
1967 Israel attacks the USS Liberty, an intelligence gathering vessel flying a US flag, killing 34 crew members. See "Assault on the Liberty," by James M. Ennes, Jr. (Random House). In 2004, Captain Ward Boston, Senior Legal Counsel for the Navy’s Court of Inquiry into the attack swears under oath that President Lyndon Johnson ordered the investigation to conclude accident, even though the evidence indicates the attack was deliberate. Given the use by Israel of unmarked boats and planes, and the machine-gunning of USS Liberty’s lifeboats, the most likely explanation is that USS Liberty was to be sunk with all hands, with evidence left to frame Egypt for the sinking. This would have dragged the US into the war on Israel’s side.
1970 While working for Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, Richard Perle is caught by the FBI giving classified information to Israel. Nothing is done.
1978, Stephen Bryen, then a Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer, is overheard in a DC hotel offering confidential documents to top Israeli military officials. Bryen obtains a lawyer, Nathan Lewin, and the case heads for the grand jury, but is mysteriously dropped. Bryen later goes to work for Richard Perle.
1979 Shin Beth [the Israeli internal security agency] tries to penetrate the US Consulate General in Jerusalem through a “Honey Trap”, using a clerical employee who was having an affair with a Jerusalem girl.
1985 The New York Times reports the FBI is aware of at least a dozen incidents in which American officials transferred classified information to the Israelis, quoting [former Assistant Director of the F.B.I.] Mr. [Raymond] Wannal. The Justice Department does not prosecute.
1985 Richard Smyth, the owner of MILCO, is indicted on charges of smuggling nuclear timing devices to Israel (Washington Post, 10/31/86).
1987 April 24 Wall Street Journal headline: "Role of Israel in Iran-Contra Scandal Won't be Explored in Detail by Panels"
1992 The Wall Street Journal reports that Israeli agents apparently tried to steal Recon Optical Inc's top-secret airborne spy-camera system.
1992 Stephen Bryen, caught offering confidential documents to Israel in 1978, is serving on board of the pro-Israeli Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs while continuing as a paid consultant -- with security clearance -- on exports of sensitive US technology.
1992 "The Samson Option," by Seymour M. Hersh reports, “Illicitly obtained intelligence was flying so voluminously from LAKAM into Israeli intelligence that a special code name, JUMBO, was added to the security markings already on the documents. There were strict orders, Ari Ben-Menashe recalled: "Anything marked JUMBO was not supposed to be discussed with your American counterparts."
1993. The ADL is caught operating a massive spying operation on critics of Israel, Arab-Americans, the San Francisco Labor Council, ILWU Local 10, Oakland Educational Association, NAACP, Irish Northern Aid, International Indian Treaty Council, the Asian Law Caucus and the San Francisco police. Data collected was sent to Israel and in some cases to South Africa. Pressure from Jewish organizations forces the city to drop the criminal case, but the ADL settles a civil lawsuit for an undisclosed sum of cash.
1995 The Defense Investigative Service circulates a memo warning US military contractors that "Israel aggressively collects [US] military and industrial technology." The report stated that Israel obtains information using "ethnic targeting, financial aggrandizement, and identification and exploitation of individual frailties" of US citizens.
1996 A General Accounting Office report "Defense Industrial Security: Weaknesses in US Security Arrangements With Foreign-Owned Defense Contractors" found that according to intelligence sources "Country A" (identified by intelligence sources as Israel, Washington Times, 2/22/96) "conducts the most aggressive espionage operation against the United States of any US ally." The Jerusalem Post (8/30/96) quoted the report, "Classified military information and sensitive military technologies are high-priority targets for the intelligence agencies of this country." The report described "An espionage operation run by the intelligence organization responsible for collecting scientific and technologic information for [Israel] paid a US government employee to obtain US classified military intelligence documents." The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (Shawn L. Twing, April 1996) noted that this was "a reference to the 1985 arrest of Jonathan Pollard, a civilian US naval intelligence analyst who provided Israel's LAKAM [Office of Special Tasks] espionage agency an estimated 800,000 pages of classified US intelligence information."
The GAO report also noted that "Several citizens of [Israel] were caught in the United States stealing sensitive technology used in manufacturing artillery gun tubes."
1996 An Office of Naval Intelligence document, "Worldwide Challenges to Naval Strike Warfare" reported that "US technology has been acquired [by China] through Israel in the form of the Lavi fighter and possibly SAM [surface-to-air] missile technology." Jane's Defense Weekly (2/28/96) noted that "until now, the intelligence community has not openly confirmed the transfer of US technology [via Israel] to China." The report noted that this "represents a dramatic step forward for Chinese military aviation." (Flight International, 3/13/96)
1997 An Army mechanical engineer, David A. Tenenbaum, "inadvertently" gives classified military information on missile systems and armored vehicles to Israeli officials (New York Times, 2/20/97).
1997 The Washington Post reports US intelligence has intercepted a conversation in which two Israeli officials had discussed the possibility of getting a confidential letter that then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher had written to Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat. One of the Israelis, identified only as “Dov”, had commented that they may get the letter from "Mega”, the code name for Israel’s top agent inside the United States.
1997 US ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk, complains privately to the Israeli government about heavy-handed surveillance by Israeli intelligence agents.
1997 Israeli agents place a tap on Monica Lewinsky’s phone at the Watergate and record phone sex sessions between her and President Bill Clinton. The Ken Starr report confirms that Clinton warned Lewinsky their conversations were being taped and ended the affair. At the same time, the FBI’s hunt for “Mega” is called off.
2001 It is discovered that US drug agents’ communications have been penetrated. Suspicion falls on two companies, AMDOCS and Comverse Infosys, both owned by Israelis. AMDOCS generates billing data for most US phone companies and is able to provide detailed logs of who is talking to whom. Comverse Infosys builds the tapping equipment used by law enforcement to eavesdrop on all American telephone calls, but suspicion forms that Comverse, which gets half of its research and development budget from the Israeli government, has built a back door into the system that is being exploited by Israeli intelligence and that the information gleaned on US drug interdiction efforts is finding its way to drug smugglers. The investigation by the FBI leads to the exposure of the largest foreign spy ring ever uncovered inside the United States, operated by Israel. Half of the suspected spies have been arrested when 9-11 happens. On 9-11, 5 Israelis are arrested for dancing and cheering while the World Trade Towers collapse. Supposedly employed by Urban Moving Systems, the Israelis are caught with multiple passports and a lot of cash. Two of them are later revealed to be Mossad. As witness reports track the activity of the Israelis, it emerges that they were seen at Liberty Park at the time of the first impact, suggesting a foreknowledge of what was to come. The Israelis are interrogated, and then eventually sent back to Israel. The owner of the moving company used as a cover by the Mossad agents abandons his business and flees to Israel. The United States Government then classifies all of the evidence related to the Israeli agents and their connections to 9-11. All of this is reported to the public via a four part story on Fox News by Carl Cameron. Pressure from Jewish groups, primarily AIPAC, forces Fox News to remove the story from their website. Two hours prior to the 9-11 attacks, Odigo, an Israeli company with offices just a few blocks from the World Trade Towers, receives an advance warning via the internet. The manager of the New York Office provides the FBI with the IP address of the sender of the message, but the FBI does not follow up.
2001 The FBI is investigating 5 Israeli moving companies as possible fronts for Israeli intelligence.
2001 JDL’s Irv Rubin arrested for planning to bomb a US Congressman. He dies before he can be brought to trial.
2002 The DEA issues a report that Israeli spies, posing as art students, have been trying to penetrate US Government offices.
2002 police near the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station in southern Washington State stop a suspicious truck and detain two Israelis, one of whom is illegally in the United States. The two men were driving at high speed in a Ryder rental truck, which they claimed had been used to "deliver furniture." The next day, police discovered traces of TNT and RDX military-grade plastic explosives inside the passenger cabin and on the steering wheel of the vehicle. The FBI then announces that the tests that showed explosives were “false positived” by cigarette smoke, a claim test experts say is ridiculous. Based on an alibi provided by a woman, the case is closed and the Israelis are handed over to INS to be sent back to Israel. One week later, the woman who provided the alibi vanishes.
2003 The Police Chief of Cloudcroft stops a truck speeding through a school zone. The drivers turn out to be Israelis with expired passports. Claiming to be movers, the truck contains junk furniture and several boxes. The Israelis are handed over to immigration. The contents of the boxers are not revealed to the public.
2003 Israel deploys assassination squads into other countries, including the United States. The US Government does not protest.
2004 Police near the Nuclear Fuel Services plant in Tennessee stop a truck after a three mile chase, during which the driver throws a bottle containing a strange liquid from the cab. The drivers turn out to be Israelis using fake Ids. The FBI refuses to investigate and the Israelis are released.
2004 Two Israelis try to enter Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base, home to eight Trident submarines. The truck tests positive for explosives.
This brings us to the present scandal. Two years into an investigation of AIPAC’s possible role as a spy front for Israel, Larry Franklin, a mid-level Pentagon Analyst is observed by the FBI giving classified information to two officials of AIPAC suspected of being Israeli spies. AIPAC hires lawyer Nathan Lewin to handle their legal defense, the same lawyer who defended suspected Israeli spy Stephen Bryen in 1978.
Larry Franklin worked in the Pentagon Office of Special Plans, run by Richard Perle, at the time Perle (who was caught giving classified information to Israel back in 1970) was insisting that Iraq was crawling with weapons of mass destruction requiring the United States to invade and conquer Iraq. There were no WMDs, of course, and Perle has dumped the blame for the “bad intelligence” on George Tenet. But what is known is that the Pentagon Office of Special Plans was coordinating with a similar group in Israel, in Ariel Sharon’s office.
With two suspected Israeli spies (at least) inside the office from which the lies that launched the war in Iraq originated, it appears that the people of the United States are the victims of a deadly hoax, a hoax that started a war.
The leaking of the investigation of AIPAF to the media on August 28th, 2004 gave advance warning to other spies working with Franklin. The damage to the FBI’s investigation was completed when United States Attorney General John Ashcroft ordered the FBI to stop all arrests in the case. Like the Stephen Bryen case and the hunt for “Mega”, this latest spy scandal seems destined by officials who have their own secret allegiances to protect, barring a massive public outcry.
The organization at the heart of the latest spy investigation, AIPAC, wields tremendous influence over the US Congress. Through its members and affiliated PACs, AIPAC directs a huge flow of campaign cash in favor of, and occasionally against, Senators and Representatives solely on the basis of their willingness to support Israel. As an example, in 2002, U.S. Rep. Artur Davis, D-Birmingham received so much help from pro-Israeli pacs that 76% of his campaign budget came from OUTSIDE the state of Alabama, mostly from New York.
Let me repeat that. A Congressman AIPAC wanted elected received more money from pro-Israel groups outside his state than from his own constituents inside his state. Who is that Congressman going to be thinking of when he votes in Congress?
So here is the mother of all scandals.
For two years, the FBI has suspected AIPAC of spying for a foreign country, and for those two years (and for decades before) that group suspected of spying for Israel has been reshaping the US Congress for the benefit of a foreign government.
And THAT is the mother of all scandals.
Think about that as billions of your tax dollars flow to Israel while your roads and schools crumble and decay and services are cut.
Think about that as the coffins come home with your loved ones inside.
Think about that when you and a million of your fellow citizens march down the streets of America opposing wars built on lies and deceptions and wonder why the government just doesn’t want to listen to you any more.
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/motherofallscandals.html/motherofallsc
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sun Dec 05, 2004 7:08 am Post subject: AIPAC Investigation Resumes After Hiatus |
| Date: Thu, 2 Dec 2004 16:39:53 -0800 (PST)
From: "Council for the National Interest" <count@igc.org> Add to Address Book
Subject: AIPAC Investigation Resumes After Hiatus
AIPAC Investigation Resumes After Hiatus
December 2, 2004
The FBI resumed its investigation of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the pro-Israel lobby in Washington, yesterday when agents searched its offices for the second time in three months and served subpoenas on four senior AIPAC staff. Those subpeonaed are required to appear at a grand jury regarding the alleged acts of espionage involving a Pentagon employee and AIPAC. The man at the center of the investigation is Larry Franklin, an Iran analyst who works in the office of William Luti, who in turn is in charge of the Iran desk in Douglas Feith's office.
Feith is undersecretary of defense for policy, the third highest position at Defense. As a leading neocon and "hawk" on Middle East questions, he was one of the leading voices urging the war on Iraq. Throughout the years he has shown his strong support for Israel, and even appears regularly at Zionist Organization of America events. He holds tight to the belief that Iran is Israel's archenemy.
Larry Franklin is suspected of passing a draft national-security presidential directive (NSPD) on Iran to AIPAC, which in turn is suspected of forwarding the classified document to Israel. The directive, which urged the administration to endorse regime change in Tehran, is believed to have been written by Michael Rubin, an up-and-coming neocon attached to the American Enterprise Institute. AIPAC has taken a leading role in discrediting Iran at every possible turn.
In October, according to the Los Angeles Times, Franklin stopped cooperating with the FBI and hired a high-profile attorney, Plato Cacheris, whose resume includes the Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen spy cases.
In Wednesday's search, FBI agents sought more files belonging to Steven Rosen, AIPAC's director of foreign policy issues, and Keith Weissman, an AIPAC expert on Iran. They served subpoenas on executive director Howard Kohr, managing director Richard Fishman, communications director Renee Rothstein and research director Rafi Danziger.
AIPAC meanwhile prominently posted a profession of innocence on the portal of its website. The December 1 statement read, "Today, the FBI returned and requested and obtained additional files relating to the same two AIPAC staff members and delivered subpoenas requiring the appearance of four senior AIPAC staff before a grand jury.... AIPAC has done nothing wrong...."
Also under investigation, according to the Israeli media, is Israeli diplomat Naor Gilon - political adviser to the Israeli embassy in Washington - who is suspected of giving US secrets to Israel.
The new administration's policy toward Iran, which the neocons have vowed to destabilize, is clearly reaching crisis proportions as international efforts seek to end Iran's program of uranium enrichment, even for peaceful purposes. Will the neocons, including Franklin, maintain their suspicions against Iran even if it has no nuclear capability? Will they continue their anti-Iran policies?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To make a tax-deductible contribution to the Council for the National Interest Foundation click here:
https://secure.groundspring.org/dn/index.php?aid=2836
Council for the National Interest
1250 4th St SW Ste WG-1
Washington, District of Columbia 20024
United States
http://www.cnionline.org | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Dec 09, 2004 8:46 am Post subject: AIPAC Agents Send Stolen US Nuke Technology To China? |
| AIPAC Agents Send Stolen US Nuke Technology To China?
http://www.rense.com/general60/AIPACagentssendstolen.htm
AIPAC Agents Send Stolen US Nuke Technology To China?
The Yarmulke And The Chopstick
By John Anast
Al-Jazeerah
12-8-4
A number of recent articles on China's growing military capability voice surprise and shock at the quick pace of the Peoples Republic of China "PRC" development in the area of tactical and ballistic submarine warfare. The discourse is a justified criticism of US intelligence assessments in general and specifically a diatribe against the Defense Intelligence Agency's "DIA", ability to quantify and produce accurate threat assessments. Yet no recent media reports have touched on the reasons DIA assessments, in hindsight, appear to be amateur.
Centrally, many of DIA's findings were based upon both faulty and incomplete data, including but not limited to, a problematic PRC test-firing of a missile during the Summer of 2004. Actually the first submerged test-firing of the prototype "JL-2" submarine launched ballistic "SLBM" missile took place in the Indian Ocean in 2001, launched from an Israeli submarine built by Germany. The Israelis stole W88 nuclear secrets from US labs and provided that technology to China in an arrangement whereas China for its part assembled both the delivery system and the W88 payload. There is no longer any doubt that US missile technology was also transferred illegally to China by agents of Israel and by Israel directly. The Israeli effort was designed to develop a submarine launched nuclear ballistic missile to augment an aging nuclear deterrent, and in an attempt to circumvent US hegemony over Israeli political and military ambitions beyond the Middle East.
In addition to the obvious national security implications for the United States, and balance of power issues as they relate to the defense of Taiwan and beyond, there is a more ominous implication for DIA, in particular, and to a lesser extent the Central Intelligence Agency "CIA". Did Israeli agents working within the Office of Secretary of Defense "OSD" influence policy at DIA, directly or indirectly, to weaken or deflect investigations away from Israeli espionage? And perhaps more importantly have personnel changes at DIA, made by Israeli agents working within OSD to reflect their own fanatical views regarding Israel, greatly impair DIA's ability to make accurate assessments of strategic importance to the United States by factoring-out references to illegal transfers of US technology by Israel or its agents? The answer to both questions is obviously -- yes!
The saga of DIA's inability to accurately assess China's capabilities reflects more upon their direction to avoid complications borne of running counter to the civilians leadership's political views, than it does upon the dedicated men and women working in the analytical service of our Nation. Some of the first known reports of the illegal transfer of W88 technology to China by Israel surfaced in early 2001 and were sent to CIA as well as the intelligence committee Chairman at that time. While the reports were mostly discarded for a variety of reasons -- not the least of which likely directly implicates organized Zionist espionage -- during the Summer of 2001 after the Israeli launch of an SLBM in the Indian Ocean was detected, renewed interest in those reports should have resumed with a furor, especially after our reconnaissance aircraft was downed on Hainan Island. Instead the Federal Bureau of Investigation "FBI" was directed away from the Zionist espionage ring operating at US nuclear weapons labs and towards other possible targets. Sources have identified that from 1999 thru 2001 several US based Zionist organizations sponsored travel to Hong Kong and mainland China in an effort to promote trade between China and Israel. Some of the people who participated in these rather strange discussions were alleged former Clinton appointees who in their Zionist zeal, discarded US security interests in favor of their desire to benefit Israel -- and who remain no less vile than the republican brand currently at the Pentagon. As in the past the only apple of interest a superpower like China would have with Israel would be in acquiring advanced US technology, heightened by the so-called arms embargo -- which apparently had little effect in precluding China from obtaining advanced classified US technologies. Israel's history as a source of classified US technology, weaponry and information during periods of embargo and the cold-war are well documented. The former Soviet Union, South Africa, and Red-China were all recipients of illegal technology transfers from Israel.
Certainly there is no lack of information available to US intelligence agencies regarding Israeli espionage activities targeting American secrets. Just from public sources alone the amount of information available is staggering. It should not have been a surprise to anyone that Israeli spies working for a moving company in New Jersey were apprehended after leaving a US military base with samples of specialized submarine fuel. Just as there should be no doubt that the fuel was on its way to China, say for the fact that a local police officer happened to stop the truck the Israelis were driving -- assuming it was not a decoy. The then question becomes why this type of information was not factored-into assessments within the intelligence and defense communities?
At some point the US advantage in technology and information systems will become irrelevant, if that point has not already been reached. It may be that the current FBI investigations of alleged improper activity at the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee "AIPAC" needs to go well beyond issues of briefing papers and focus upon illegal transfers of secrets to China and others, as well as other organized espionage activities against the United States and its people. Questions of equal value are whether the purge at CIA involves persons associated with AIPAC, and specifically if Jay Jakub met with AIPAC officials prior to assuming his role at the operations directorate of CIA, and if so, what was discussed?
As in any intelligence drama there is a history, usually one in public and another in private. In recent history, however, the public discourse is used generally as a political tool, while the private is used to enforce political motives in secret. Such is the drama currently unfolding at CIA under the guise of reform, when in reality CIA has become the whipping boy for the policy failures of the Bush Administration. So adept have our civil servants become at conforming to irrational whim, that independent thought a cornerstone of intelligence is vanishing under the "new" leadership. The group-think contagion apparently hit the general staff at Pentagon as well, with recent attributions in major media asserting the untold recent "gains" of the US occupation in Iraq -- as if the obvious success story is being under-reported.
The fact that DIA assessments regarding China's capabilities were so far off the mark, is reminiscent of another recent "intelligence failure" and reflects a growing problem within the entire US intelligence community. The first chapters appeared in public view when the now defunct Office of Special Plans at Pentagon inserted knowingly false "intelligence" into the Iraq policy debate as pretext for invasion. The last chapters of US intelligence hegemony are now being written ad hoc and acted out in haste from one end of Pennsylvania Avenue to the other only confirming a creeping infiltration of political views, on the one hand, and political goals on the other, as somehow legitimate intelligence product. With the only possible result being the weakening US defense capabilities in the face of a growing world threat. The intelligence reform legislation is the worst piece of legislation in the history of the United States. It will allow our enemies almost unfettered access to our Nations secrets -- the espionage equivalent of one-stop-shopping -- and actually decrease our readiness and analytical capabilities by exacerbating a dangerous level of political control over the entire US intelligence community. The compartmentalization of our intelligence community, and built-in system of competing views were the best way to safeguard this Nation -- "a little here and little there."
The only beneficiaries of the intelligence reform act will be bureaucracy itself and our enemies like Israel, which maintains one of the most aggressive and elaborate espionage campaigns and infrastructure targeted against the United States. It is centered within Zionist organizations, (including organizations located on college campuses), Israeli owned businesses operating in America and infiltration of agents from remote border crossings in Mexico and Canada. Some of the direct responsibilities of Zionist organizations operating in America are to (i) act as conduits for the transfer of American secrets to Israel, (ii) to collect data on Americans and American communication, (iii) to offer refuge and logistical assistance to Israeli agents, (iv) to provide identities, transportation and safe houses to Israeli spies, (v) to offer foreign and domestic political support for Israeli initiatives or those sought to benefit Israeli, (vi) to promote and expand Israeli influence through business arrangements, (vii) to help finance Israeli initiatives and espionage activities, et cetera, through the sale of Israeli bonds (such as in New Jersey, where the former governor was seduced by an Israeli spy). In addition some of the indirect responsibilities of Zionist organizations are (viii) to circumvent investigations into Israeli spying, (ix) to control the flow of information to the American public, and (x) to buy political influence within the US Congress -- such as the financial support garnered to the sponsors of the new intelligence legislation.
In the face of the growing Zionist espionage threat a patriotic American within the defense department issued a warning specifically targeting Zionists, only to have the warning withdrawn by persons within OSD, despite the mountain of evidence linking Israelis and Zionist organizations to a massive organized espionage ring. In its rather short history Israel has a habit of providing American defense secrets to foreign governments, which when taken at sum reveal that the pariah of the Middle East is in deed a foreign and hostile nation to the United States. The fact that Zionists in America have become merely a subterfuge for the defense of Israel at the expense of the American taxpayer and to the detriment of our own security, calls for direct and indirect action against this clear and present danger. No country on earth seeks to emulate Israel, its racist ideals for ethnic purity, constant state of war, or its policy of ethnic cleansing. So perverse have they become as a nation that they are attempting to build a wall around G-d, as if He belongs to them. The US association with Israel has brought little benefit to the American people, and has only served to prop up a foreign and corrupt regime hostile to the interests of the United States. Our own society is beginning to resemble that of a draconian state, where security measures are required to support a pariah racist state like Israel.
America needs its own "clean-break" strategy in the Middle East, and away from the cold-war dominated themes created in many ways by Israel based upon the inane notion that treason against America is somehow excusable where Israel is concerned. It is the same psychotic reasoning which prevails upon Israelis to murder Palestinian woman and children in a blood lust of frustration to drive the indigenous people from Palestine. As if the world is expected to realize the establishment of a religiously racist foreign Zionist state void of any diversity through murder, treachery, and ethnic cleansing is somehow noble? The mayhem, suffering and toll on American society is just not worth it, it's time for a different way. | | | | Alpha | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
