| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Sun Jul 10, 2005 8:58 pm Post subject: More war for Israel coming: Netanyahu warns West on Iran |
| More war for Israel coming: Netanyahu warns West on Iran:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1688013,00.html
July 10, 2005
Netanyahu warns West it must halt Iran nuclear plans
Peter Conradi
THE Israeli finance minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has warned that the West must do more to counter Iran’s potential nuclear threat following the election last month of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the hardline mayor of Tehran, as president of the country.
Netanyahu, in London to address a conference, said concerted action was required to rein in Iran, not least because of its links with Islamic terrorist groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas. He said he wanted the shipment of Russian nuclear equipment and nuclear fuel to a plant under construction at Bushehr to be stopped.
“The Iranian regime supports terror, both ideologically and operationally,” he said. “I think the regime will go as fast as it can to develop nuclear weapons, regardless of who leads it.”
Netanyahu, prime minister from 1996-9, said that if Iran succeeded in developing nuclear weapons it would boost radical Islamic groups by providing them with “a nuclear umbrella”.
“This is not an Israel problem — this is a world problem that concerns everybody, including Russia,” he said. “There has to be a common solution here: first to prevent the transfer of nuclear technology or fuel, secondly to punish regimes that deviate from this and, thirdly, to put pressure on the Iranian regime, in all avenues possible, to stop this programme.”
Netanyahu contrasted Iran’s apparent determination to develop nuclear weapons with Libya’s decision to abandon its own fledgling programme in response to the American attack on Iraq. “The deterrent effect has worked on some, but so far has not worked on others,” he said.
Asked whether there would ultimately have to be a military solution to the problem — perhaps involving a repetition of Israel’s pre-emptive strike on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in June 1981 — Netanyahu replied: “I don’t know.” He added: “I am not aware of any plans, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist, for example in America.”
Netanyahu, who has been critical of the plan by Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, to withdraw from settlements in Gaza next month, was sceptical that any concessions by Tel Aviv towards the Palestinians would reduce the threat from terrorists.
He said the Palestinian issue was far down the list of grievances cited by Al-Qaeda and other Islamic groups. If Israel were to conclude a peace treaty with the Palestinians, it would be rejected by such Islamic groups, which viewed the Jewish state as a cancer that must be excised.
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Netanyahu spews Zionist truth distortion above yet again as the primary motivation for the tragic 9/11 attack was US support of Israel's brutal oppression of the Palestinian people:
LA Times: US Support of Israel primary motivation for the 9/11 attack:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/02/19/la-times-u-s-policy-on-israel-key-motive-for-911-attack.php
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Keep in mind that the 'A Clean Break' (war for Israel) agenda was written for Netanyahu by JINSA/CSP/PNAC Jewish supremacists Richard Perle, David Wurmser and Douglas Feith:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/02/11/a-clean-break-from-james-bamford-s-a-pretext-for-war.php
The US war with Iran has already begun (for Israel)
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/06/20/the-us-war-with-iran-has-already-begun-for-israel.php
Jewish JINSA/PNAC Neocon (Richard Perle) Calls for the Bombing of Iran for Israel:
http://gorillaintheroom.blogspot.com/2005/05/perle-calls-for-invasion-of-iran.html
AIPAC Fifth Columnists Push US to Attack Iran for Israel:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/05/14/aipac-fifth-columnists-pushing-us-to-attack-iran-for-israel.php
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http://nomorewarforisrael.blogspot.com
http://www.nowarforisrael.com
http://nogw.com/warforisrael.html
http://gorillaintheroom.blogspot.com
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com
Last edited by Alpha on Mon Jul 11, 2005 12:26 am; edited 1 time in total | |  | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Jul 13, 2005 6:42 am Post subject: Iran could be behind Israel bomb blast |
| Hardly a surprise that the war for Israel hack Rumsfeld would spew what he did below:
http://nomorewarforisrael.blogspot.com
Iran could be behind Israel bomb blast: Rumsfeld Tue Jul 12, 6:27 PM ET
Iran could be behind the suicide attack at a shopping mall in Israel that killed at least four and injured dozens, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said.
"I wouldn't want to suggest that I know about the attack today, but clearly that's been one of the stated and continuous purposes of Iran, to harm Israel," said Rumsfeld, speaking at a press conference with his Italian counterpart Antonio Martino.
"We know that Iran has been on the terrorist list. We know that Iran has been assisting Hezbollah and other organizations and moving equipment and people down through Damascus into Beirut and down into positions where they can attack Israel for years and years and years and years," he said.
The attack in the Israeli city of Netanya was the first suicide bombing inside Israel in four and a half months. At least three Israelis as well as the bomber were killed in the blast.
Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas slammed the bombing, claimed by Islamic Jihad, as "a terrorist attack" and vowed to punish the perpetrators.
Israel said the attacks proved the Palestinian Authority is "doing nothing to stop terrorism".
The White House also demanded the Palestinian Authority "act to dismantle terrorist organizations and to stop attacks from happening in the first place." | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Jul 16, 2005 5:56 pm Post subject: Kissinger: Don't Exclude Military Action Against Iran if Neg |
| http://www.cfr.org/publication.php?id=8255
Kissinger: Don't Exclude Military Action Against Iran if Negotiations Fail
Former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, in a wide-ranging discussion of foreign-policy issues, says he is disturbed at the possibility that Iran will develop nuclear weapons know-how if current negotiations to stem Tehran's nuclear program fail. In fact, he says, Iran's program is more worrisome than the crisis over North Korea's nuclear weapons.
He says that if Iran secures nuclear weapons, nonproliferation may cease to be a "meaningful policy, and then we live in a world of multiple nuclear centers. And then we'd have to ask ourselves what the world would look like if the [terrorist] bombs in London [on July 7] had been nuclear and 100,000 people had been killed." Asked if he favored military action against Iran if diplomacy failed, he says, "I'm not recommending it but, on the other hand, it is a grave step to tolerate a world of multiple nuclear weapons centers without restraint. I'm not recommending military action, but I'm recommending not excluding it."
Kissinger was interviewed by Bernard Gwertzman, consulting editor of cfr.org, on July 14, 2005.
Other Interviews
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What are the lessons of the terror bombings in London? Do they indicate the war on terrorism is not that effective yet?
The war on terrorism cannot be effective in terms of preventing every attack. To launch an attack like this took five people, but probably weeks of preparation. I don't think it can be fully measured in terms of whether each attack could be prevented. I believe on balance that the attacks on London mark a setback in the war on terrorism, because it's brought the war now into Europe for the second time [after the Madrid bombings on March 11, 2004], and it's brought it to a country which is not ambiguous about reacting to attacks on its territory. I believe whatever capability the terrorists have inside England will be significantly reduced as a result of this attack, and it will probably oblige the Europeans to take a more coherent approach, at least to attacks in Europe.
Are the London bombings related to Iraq in any way?
The attacks on the World Trade Center happened before Iraq. In fact, there was a whole series of attacks on the United States well before Iraq. And there have been attacks in Indonesia, Tunisia, Morocco, all totally unrelated to Iraq. Iraq undoubtedly helped in recruiting, but the underlying conflict transcends Iraq.
On Iraq, what is your feeling now on how we should deal with that country?
I supported the original decision to act against Iraq for the following reasons: I did not see how we could project the war against terror and leave intact a government that had the largest army in the region, had potentially the largest oil income, and the greatest capacity to support terrorism. And through its very existence, it symbolically demonstrated that you could challenge the United States through 17 violations of a U.N.-negotiated ceasefire. And in addition, I believe, as [President Bill] Clinton did and as [President George W.] Bush did, as did every intelligence officer that I've ever met, that they did have weapons of mass destruction.
I did not share the view that the follow-up of victory could be done by analogy to the occupation of Germany. I was of the view that the occupation of Germany and Japan were of countries which have a coherent national structure and a coherent national history. They were countries that felt they had been defeated and therefore needed a new approach. I did not think Iraq was a national country in the sense that European countries or Japan were. And for this reason, I preferred an approach, which is now being decried, of trying to get somebody to surrender and establish a government, and then creating some sort of U.N. structure, in which U.N. forces could protect the borders and help this government in a crisis, rather than [the United States] assuming full responsibility for rebuilding the country as a democracy. Having chosen the other alternative, I now believe it is imperative that it succeed.
What impact do you think the evolution of Iraq will have on other Middle Eastern issues, particularly the Israel-Palestine situation?
The Israel-Palestine issue is almost autonomous of the Iraq issue and could be heading for a diplomatic resolution. It seems to me the elements for it are in place. The only question is whether one is willing to run the risk of the turmoil that the effort of concluding it is bound to cause. Iraq affects it remotely in a negative way. If we fail in Iraq, which I define as the emergence of a radical, theocratic government in Baghdad, if that happens, the consequence will be that the more radical approach to the Palestinian issue will become dominant. But it means also that the radical side of Islam will get tremendous impetus in every Islamic country. And I don't know any leader of any country that has a large Islamic minority, or is Islamic like Indonesia or Malaysia, that would not be grievously affected by an American defeat as I have defined it in Iraq.
Are you surprised that the European nations that have large Muslim populations haven't been more supportive--the French and Germans in particular?
Their problem is that European countries' constituencies now won't make any sacrifice for anything, either domestically or abroad, and the leaders know what the consequences of a defeat in Iraq will be. They have been helping us, within the limits of what they can do without any domestic penalty. They're no longer trying to thwart us. But it's not a heroic face.
Do you think there are players in the Middle East who can affect this agreement between Israel and Palestine? Have you met Palestinian President Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas]?
I have talked to him on the telephone at his initiative. I think I met him once or twice, but it can't be analyzed that way because I don't think anybody by himself is strong enough to bring about the agreement. But the outline of the agreement is now fairly obvious.
What would that be?
The outline of the agreement seems to me to be that Israel and the Palestinians agree to Israel getting [territory] along the lines of the Barak plan [introduced by then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak in 2000]--around 7 or 8 percent of territory in order to create a defensible security wall. Israel in return will give up some territory to symbolically balance this and, if you wanted to be really creative, you would take territory with significant Arab populations to help the demographic problem.
And there'll have to be some partition of Jerusalem, along lines yet to be determined. But some de facto solution of the refugee problem which involves no return of [Palestinian] refugees into Israel. I think intellectually the elements of this are there; that most moderate Arab states and many thoughtful Palestinians agree with this and most Israelis sort of agree with this, although what it would mean is that the [Israeli] settlements on the other side of the dividing line will be on Arab territory.
Now, to bring this about, one needs support from the European states, at least in the sense that they will not look for an alternative to the Arab leaders and therefore give moderate Arab leaders an excuse to proceed, and one needs tacit support from countries like Egypt, Algeria, and Morocco to enable Abu Mazen to do this, not as a solitary Palestinian effort. And I believe an energetic American policy can bring this about.
Does Bush have the stomach for that? Does Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice? I don't get the impression the United States is really digging in hard on the Middle East.
For whoever does it, it will be a very painful exercise because, having stated the outline, as you go through the process, the pain this will cause to all the parties is so intense that you can't even be sure when it's all over that it will totally quiet the radicals. You can be sure it will not totally quiet the radicals, but at least it will give some breathing room in which coexistence between a Palestinian state and Israel might evolve.
There's been a lot of rhetoric from the administration, particularly in Bush's inaugural address, about democracy and reform in the Arab world. And the Arabs themselves seem interested in this subject. But are we being too idealistic?
It's important for the United States to stand for something else than simply a display of its power. I support the concept that this is what the United States would stand for. I'm more cautious on the ability to implement this as an administration program in a brief period of time. I'm also more cautious about involving ourselves in the details in the various countries where we have a tendency to lecture. So I support the concept, I support the attitude, but we should keep in mind that we also support stability. It's difficult to apply this in every country, but if you take Iran, you can make that case. But you can also make the case, historically, that attempts to force feed democracy in the [President Jimmy] Carter administration produced [Ayatollah Ruhollah] Khomeini, or contributed to producing Khomeini. So the line one has to walk here needs to be very sensitively drawn.
What do you think of the policy that's being followed to try to stop Iran's uranium processing through negotiations?
I agree that we should try to stop the processing and probably, tactically, it's very useful to let the Europeans do the negotiating and we back it up. But the fact is, at some point in the relatively near future, we will have to decide whether those negotiations are working or whether they are not simply a way of legitimizing a continued program. That will be hotly disputed. Then we have to decide, we together with our allies, what measures are appropriate, and then we will face the question of how far we are willing to go to prevent nuclear-weapons technology in Iran. Iran will get us probably beyond the point where nonproliferation can be a meaningful policy, and then we live in a world of multiple nuclear centers. And then we'd have to ask ourselves what the world would look like if the bombs in London had been nuclear and 100,000 people had been killed.
Am I right to think you're not adverse to some kind of military action down the road?
I'm not adverse to thinking about it, but I think it has to be very carefully looked at.
That would be quite a quagmire.
I'm not recommending it but, on the other hand, it is a grave step to tolerate a world of multiple nuclear-weapons centers without restraint. I'm not recommending military action, but I'm recommending not excluding it.
What about the North Koreans? There are hints they're ready to deal. You've been in China, you talked to the Chinese. Do you get a sense of a deal?
I even met some North Koreans here. I am more confident of the Korean problem than I am on the Iranian problem, which doesn't mean I'm very confident. But I have the impression that when China, Russia, Japan, and the United States are in fundamental agreement that there should not be nuclear weapons in North Korea--and when this is really a fundamentally bankrupt country that has no economy--the North Koreans may be beginning to look for a way out, from what I've heard, now from all sides.
And if that is true, the frantic efforts of the South Koreans, who keep offering more and more, at some point could become an obstacle. Without the South Koreans it cannot be really settled, because no one will put in the resources into North Korea that it takes to stabilize the economy. It's a country of 20 million people. It will never be hugely attractive for investment even if its system became more like the Chinese, which would be a huge step for them. But I actually think the North Korean issue is probably moving toward a resolution.
You've become one of the world's great experts on China since you first visited there in 1971. There seems to be a looming problem with China, as there was with Japan ten or fifteen years ago. Is China becoming so powerful it will endanger U.S. interests?
In the United States, there's always a temptation to believe that we can write the course of history, that it's entirely up to us to decide whether a country is powerful, less powerful, whether it is helpful to us or not. And one of the fundamental lessons we have to learn is that we are moving into a world in which a lot of things are happening that we cannot control. We can shape, but we cannot prevent China from becoming a major country. We can slow it down and then pay the consequences ten to twenty years down the road, and policymakers have every right to consider that. But fundamentally, China is going to emerge as a major power in Asia. Secondly, the center of gravity of the world is going to shift from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Those are realities.
Then we have to ask the policy question: Do we want to slow down that process at the risk of producing a generation of Chinese considering us to be the biggest obstacle of their national endeavors? Or do we want to signal an attitude of cooperation while defending specific American interests when they are being challenged? That we must always do. I tend to lean toward the second course. I believe also that a new equilibrium will emerge in Asia, and if we want to be relevant to that, it is wiser to do it from a posture of cooperation with China than from a posture of trying to recreate the Cold War, because in the second course, all the countries around China will be forced to choose and we will be blamed for putting them in a position where they are forced to choose. It will weaken our position in those countries, rather than strengthen it.
Washington seems worried about China's military buildup. Is this a factor?
The growth of Chinese influence in the next ten years does not depend on their military strength. It depends on the economic ties they are creating with all the countries around them and on the extraordinary subtlety and skill of their diplomacy. So in the foreseeable future it is a political problem. The Chinese military budget--there will be endless debates on this--is a maximum of around $60 billion. It's probably less, around $50 billion, about the same as the Japanese. Then if you add together the Japanese military budget, the Indian military budget, the Korean budget, and the Russians', China is not in a position to overrun the world, and that doesn't even count us.
Certainly, China's growing industrial capacity will improve its military capacity, and surely in a war with us, China could do us more damage in ten years than it can do now. But surely it would suffer total devastation in such a war. The thing we have to get used to is that war between major countries in the nuclear age is not the same as it was before World War I. And even in World War I, if any of the leaders in August 1914 had known what the world would look like in 1918, they would have recoiled from it. So we cannot look at this problem as a primarily strategic issue. China will not be in a position for a generation to threaten vital American interests militarily. But it can surely affect vital American interests politically.
Do you see a strengthening relationship between the United States and India?
I think the interests of India and the United States are very parallel. In the region from Singapore to Aden [in Yemen], for example, we have very parallel interests. We don't want domination by radical Islam, we don't want major powers active. We have an interest in protected energy supplies. I think, in the natural course of events, it is important for the United States and India to increase their interaction so they can give expression to common interests that exist in a very wide range.
I do not think it is wise to put India in the position as a key player in an anti-Chinese coalition. India will know how to protect its own security and it will know that America has an interest in the overall balance of power. Certainly, the fact that we are both democracies eases our interaction, but it didn't produce close cooperation in earlier periods when we were also two democracies. So that is a useful, but not a decisive, element. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Jul 18, 2005 12:23 am Post subject: US Plans Nuclear Attack on Iran |
| From: "Stephen Sniegoski" <hectorpv@comcast.net>
Subject: US Plans Nuclear Attack on Iran
Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2005 19:32:32 -0400
Friends,
US Plans Nuclear Attack on Iran
Philip Giraldi, a former intelligence officer in the CIA (and DIA), claims that the United States is developing a plan for the bombing of supposed military targets in Iran, which would include the use of NUCLEAR WEAPONS. The US strike would take place after a 9/11-type terrorist attack on the US. However, the US attack would not depend on Iran actually being involved in the terrorism. In short, the planned attack on Iran would be analogous to the unprovoked attack on Iraq.
Could this criminal insanity be possibly true? Would the United States really launch an unprovoked nuclear attack? Giraldi is a reputable source and has provided information on Iran to Seymour Hersh in the past. Moreover, other articles have come out indicating that the United States has developed contingency plans to use nuclear weapons to attack military installations in Iran and North Korea. (I have included an article by William Arkin from the Washington Post). Giraldi adds that a terrorist attack on the US would serve as the pretext for putting the plan into action.
Now could it be implemented? Certainly, the 9/11 terrorism led to the eventual attack on Iraq (neocons wanted to attack Iraq immediately after September 11), so another terrorist attack could be used as a pretext to attack Iran. I (along with knowledgeable people such as Scott Ritter) expected the United States to either have attacked Iran by now, or at least be far advanced in its propaganda offensive. While the Bush administration has talked about the danger of Iran, the propaganda offensive has not approached the intensity achieved during the 2002-2003 build-up for the attack on Iraq. Undoubtedly the problems in Iraq and war weariness of the American people have made such a propaganda offensive less viable at this moment. Also, many Americans now realize the war lies the Bush administration has relied upon, so any propaganda offensive, by itself, might be counterproductive. However, a new catastrophic terrorist event could so traumatize and anger a large sector of the American public as to provide a window of opportunity to launch an attack on Iran. The terror attack would be immediately followed by a massive propaganda barrage linking Iran to the terrorism. The idea that Iran is behind all terrorism has already appeared in the writing of neocons Michael Ledeen, Kenneth Timmerman and others. I have attached an article on the current effort to demonize Iran. http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news2/ft01.html
Perhaps the most extreme propaganda piece is "Atomic Iran: How the Terrorist Regime Bought the Bomb and American Politicians," by Jerome R. Corsi, which appears to be for average and sub-average IQ types and has been made into a video. It involves the nuclear bombing of the US by terrorists who are equipped by Iran. "The scenario described in ‘Atomic Iran’ shows that a 150-kiloton IND exploded in New York would reduce much of the city to rubble. Some 1.5 million people would be killed instantly, with another 1.5 million certain to die over the next few days." http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=43766 (I have attached this article too)
Naturally, Israel and its supporters are spearheading the move to attack on Iran. It should be emphasized that Israel has for some time regarded Iran as a serious threat. It is a threat to Israel’s nuclear monopoly in the Middle East and it provides support to Hezbollah in Lebanon and to a number of Palestinian resistance groups. My article "The future of the global War on Terror: Next stop, Iran" www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future.htm provides information on this issue. My article came out in October 2004, but Israel continues to voice its serious concerns. Some recent comments follow. The Jerusalem Post of June 29 reported a presentation by the head of the IDF Intelligence Corps research division that Iran is committed to building a nuclear bomb, which would help it spread the Islamic revolution across the Middle East. http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/Printer&cid=1119925651633&p=1101615860782
In late June, Israeli ambassador to the US Daniel Ayalon emphasized that Iran must be stopped from developing nuclear weapons. "The clock is ticking, and time is not on our side," Ayalon said. http://ap.lancasteronline.com/4/israel_iran
Sharon has supposedly handed Bush photographs of what are supposed to be Iran’s nuclear installations - http://www.counterpunch.org/nimmo04132005.html –which are certainly as accurate as the Israeli intelligence information on Saddam’s threatening WMD.
And Richard Perle was the big hit of this May’s AIPAC conference in Washington with his call for an attack on Iran. The danger of Iran was featured in an AIPAC multimedia show, "Iran's Path to the Bomb." As the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank described the multimedia show: "The exhibit, worthy of a theme park, begins with a narrator condemning the International Atomic Energy Agency for being ‘unwilling to conclude that Iran is developing nuclear weapons’ (it had similar reservations about Iraq) and the Security Council because it ‘has yet to take up the issue.’ In a succession of rooms, visitors see flashing lights and hear rumbling sounds as Dr. Seuss-like contraptions make yellowcake uranium, reprocess plutonium, and pop out nuclear warheads like so many gallons of hummus for an AIPAC conference." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/23/AR2005052301565_pf.html
Since a terrorist attack on the United States is, according to experts, almost inevitable, the Bush administration would likely be given the pretext to launch an attack on Iran. Would a propaganda offensive bring about public support for such an attack? With a Republican Congress it seems quite likely that there would be some type of congressional approval for a strike (not a declaration of war, of course). Maybe the Bush administration would not even seek congressional approval and launch the attack on the basis of alleged self-defense.
Iran is not going to stand around and take it. It is considerably stronger than Iraq. An American attack on Iran using conventional weapons would cause chaos in the Middle East. The use of nuclear weapons would have all types of terrible international ramifications—World War IV against Islam, global terrorist strikes, Sino-Russian reaction, etc.
As Giraldi points out, some Air Force officers are appalled by the nuclear strike plan "but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objections." Perhaps, no respectable person would want to risk his career to prevent a nuclear war. But this must be done if the United States, and planet Earth, is going to avoid a catastrophe.
_________________________________________
Philip Giraldi, Deep Background
The American Conservative August 1, 2005 p. 27
In Washington it is hardly a secret that the same people in and around the administration who brought you Iraq are preparing to do the same for Iran. The Pentagon, acting under instructions from Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, has tasked the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) with drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States. The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons. Within Iran there are more than 450 major strategic targets, including numerous suspected nuclear-weapons-program development sites. Many of the targets are hardened or are deep underground and could not be taken out by conventional weapons, hence the nuclear option. As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States. Several senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of what they are doing—that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack—but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objections.
Philip Giraldi, a former CIA Officer, is a partner in Cannistraro Associates
___________________________________________________________
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/14/AR2005051400071_pf.html
washingtonpost.com
Not Just A Last Resort?
A Global Strike Plan, With a Nuclear Option
By William Arkin
Post
Sunday, May 15, 2005; B01
Early last summer, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld approved a top secret "Interim Global Strike Alert Order" directing the military to assume and maintain readiness to attack hostile countries that are developing weapons of mass destruction, specifically Iran and North Korea.
Two months later, Lt. Gen. Bruce Carlson, commander of the 8th Air Force, told a reporter that his fleet of B-2 and B-52 bombers had changed its way of operating so that it could be ready to carry out such missions. "We're now at the point where we are essentially on alert," Carlson said in an interview with the Shreveport (La.) Times. "We have the capacity to plan and execute global strikes." Carlson said his forces were the U.S. Strategic Command's "focal point for global strike" and could execute an attack "in half a day or less."
In the secret world of military planning, global strike has become the term of art to describe a specific preemptive attack. When military officials refer to global strike, they stress its conventional elements. Surprisingly, however, global strike also includes a nuclear option, which runs counter to traditional U.S. notions about the defensive role of nuclear weapons.
The official U.S. position on the use of nuclear weapons has not changed. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has taken steps to de-emphasize the importance of its nuclear arsenal. The Bush administration has said it remains committed to reducing our nuclear stockpile while keeping a credible deterrent against other nuclear powers. Administration and military officials have stressed this continuity in testimony over the past several years before various congressional committees.
But a confluence of events, beginning with the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and the president's forthright commitment to the idea of preemptive action to prevent future attacks, has set in motion a process that has led to a fundamental change in how the U.S. military might respond to certain possible threats. Understanding how we got to this point, and what it might mean for U.S. policy, is particularly important now -- with the renewed focus last week on Iran's nuclear intentions and on speculation that North Korea is ready to conduct its first test of a nuclear weapon.
Global strike has become one of the core missions for the Omaha-based Strategic Command, or Stratcom. Once, Stratcom oversaw only the nation's nuclear forces; now it has responsibility for overseeing a global strike plan with both conventional and nuclear options. President Bush spelled out the definition of "full-spectrum" global strike in a January 2003 classified directive, describing it as "a capability to deliver rapid, extended range, precision kinetic (nuclear and conventional) and non-kinetic (elements of space and information operations) effects in support of theater and national objectives."
This blurring of the nuclear/conventional line, wittingly or unwittingly, could heighten the risk that the nuclear option will be used. Exhibit A may be the Stratcom contingency plan for dealing with "imminent" threats from countries such as North Korea or Iran, formally known as CONPLAN 8022-02.
CONPLAN 8022 is different from other war plans in that it posits a small-scale operation and no "boots on the ground." The typical war plan encompasses an amalgam of forces -- air, ground, sea -- and takes into account the logistics and political dimensions needed to sustain those forces in protracted operations. All these elements generally require significant lead time to be effective. (Existing Pentagon war plans, developed for specific regions or "theaters," are essentially defensive responses to invasions or attacks. The global strike plan is offensive, triggered by the perception of an imminent threat and carried out by presidential order.)
CONPLAN 8022 anticipates two different scenarios. The first is a response to a specific and imminent nuclear threat, say in North Korea. A quick-reaction, highly choreographed strike would combine pinpoint bombing with electronic warfare and cyberattacks to disable a North Korean response, with commandos operating deep in enemy territory, perhaps even to take possession of the nuclear device.
The second scenario involves a more generic attack on an adversary's WMD infrastructure. Assume, for argument's sake, that Iran announces it is mounting a crash program to build a nuclear weapon. A multidimensional bombing (kinetic) and cyberwarfare (non-kinetic) attack might seek to destroy Iran's program, and special forces would be deployed to disable or isolate underground facilities.
By employing all of the tricks in the U.S. arsenal to immobilize an enemy country -- turning off the electricity, jamming and spoofing radars and communications, penetrating computer networks and garbling electronic commands -- global strike magnifies the impact of bombing by eliminating the need to physically destroy targets that have been disabled by other means.
The inclusion, therefore, of a nuclear weapons option in CONPLAN 8022 -- a specially configured earth-penetrating bomb to destroy deeply buried facilities, if any exist -- is particularly disconcerting. The global strike plan holds the nuclear option in reserve if intelligence suggests an "imminent" launch of an enemy nuclear strike on the United States or if there is a need to destroy hard-to-reach targets.
It is difficult to imagine a U.S. president ordering a nuclear attack on Iran or North Korea under any circumstance. Yet as global strike contingency planning has moved forward, so has the nuclear option.
Global strike finds its origins in pre-Bush administration Air Force thinking about a way to harness American precision and stealth to "kick down the door" of defended territory, making it easier for (perhaps even avoiding the need for) follow-on ground operations.
The events of 9/11 shifted the focus of planning. There was no war plan for Afghanistan on the shelf, not even a generic one. In Afghanistan, the synergy of conventional bombing and special operations surprised everyone. But most important, weapons of mass destruction became the American government focus. It is not surprising, then, that barely three months after that earth-shattering event, the Pentagon's quadrennial Nuclear Posture Review assigned the military and Stratcom the task of providing greater flexibility in nuclear attack options against Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Libya, Syria and China.
The Air Force's global strike concept was taken over by Stratcom and made into something new. This was partly in response to the realization that the military had no plans for certain situations. The possibility that some nations would acquire the ability to attack the United States directly with a WMD, for example, had clearly fallen between the command structure's cracks. For example, the Pacific Command in Hawaii had loads of war plans on its shelf to respond to a North Korean attack on South Korea, including some with nuclear options. But if North Korea attacked the United States directly -- or, more to the point, if the U.S. intelligence network detected evidence of preparations for such an attack, Pacific Command didn't have a war plan in place.
In May 2002, Rumsfeld issued an updated Defense Planning Guidance that directed the military to develop an ability to undertake "unwarned strikes . . . [to] swiftly defeat from a position of forward deterrence." The post-9/11 National Security Strategy, published in September 2002, codified preemption, stating that the United States must be prepared to stop rogue states and their terrorist clients before they are able to threaten or use weapons of mass destruction against the United States and our allies."
"We cannot let our enemies strike first," President Bush declared in the National Security Strategy document.
Stratcom established an interim global strike division to turn the new preemption policy into an operational reality. In December 2002, Adm. James O. Ellis Jr., then Stratcom's head, told an Omaha business group that his command had been charged with developing the capability to strike anywhere in the world within minutes of detecting a target.
Ellis posed the following question to his audience: "If you can find that time-critical, key terrorist target or that weapons-of-mass-destruction stockpile, and you have minutes rather than hours or days to deal with it, how do you reach out and negate that threat to our nation half a world away?"
CONPLAN 8022-02 was completed in November 2003, putting in place for the first time a preemptive and offensive strike capability against Iran and North Korea. In January 2004, Ellis certified Stratcom's readiness for global strike to the defense secretary and the president.
At Ellis's retirement ceremony in July, Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told an Omaha audience that "the president charged you to 'be ready to strike at any moment's notice in any dark corner of the world' [and] that's exactly what you've done."
As U.S. military forces have gotten bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq, the attractiveness of global strike planning has increased in the minds of many in the military. Stratcom planners, recognizing that U.S. ground forces are already overcommitted, say that global strike must be able to be implemented "without resort to large numbers of general purpose forces."
When one combines the doctrine of preemption with a "homeland security" aesthetic that concludes that only hyper-vigilance and readiness stand in the way of another 9/11, it is pretty clear how global strike ended up where it is. The 9/11 attacks caught the country unaware and the natural reaction of contingency planners is to try to eliminate surprise in the future. The Nuclear Posture Review and Rumsfeld's classified Defense Planning Guidance both demanded more flexible nuclear options.
Global strike thinkers may believe that they have found a way to keep the nuclear genie in the bottle; but they are also having to cater to a belief on the part of those in government's inner circle who have convinced themselves that the gravity of the threats demands that the United States not engage in any protracted debate, that it prepare for the worst and hope for the best.
Though the official Washington mantra has always been "we don't discuss war plans," here is a real life predicament that cries out for debate: In classic terms, military strength and contingency planning can dissuade an attacker from mounting hostile actions by either threatening punishment or demonstrating through preparedness that an attacker's objectives could not possibly be achieved. The existence of a nuclear capability, and a secure retaliatory force, moreover, could help to deter an attack -- that is, if the threat is credible in the mind of the adversary.
But the global strike contingency plan cannot be a credible threat if it is not publicly known. And though CONPLAN 8022 suggests a clean, short-duration strike intended to protect American security, a preemptive surprise attack (let alone one involving a nuclear weapon option) would unleash a multitude of additional and unanticipated consequences. So, on both counts, why aren't we talking about it?
Author's e-mail: warkin@igc.org
William M. Arkin, who writes frequently about military affairs, is the author of "Code Names: Deciphering U.S. Military Plans, Programs and Operations in the 9/11 World" (Steerforth).
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http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news2/ft01.html
Financial Times
Books add to rightwing campaign to demonise Iran
Published: July 8 2005 03:00 | Last updated: July 8 2005 03:00
Two new books in the US - Countdown to Terror and Countdown to Crisis - accuse an incompetent Central Intelligence Agency of failing to recognise the potentially catastrophic threat posed by Iran through what it alleges are close ties between Iran and the fugitive Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.
Serialised in the conservative media and popularised on talk-shows, the books have arrived in the midst of a rightwing campaign to demonise Iran - and expose the CIA - at the same time as the Bush administration is exploring ways of funding and backing Iranian opposition groups.
In Countdown to Terror, Curt Weldon, a Pennsylvania republican congressman and vice-chairman of the House armed services committee, charges that Iran will carry out the next terror strike on the US, has a bomb that can kill more than 100,000 people, and is giving refuge to Mr bin Laden.
Mr Weldon's information comes from "Ali", said to be a former senior official during the Shah of Iran's rule, whom he first met in Paris in April, last year.
Mr Weldon says he was driven to write his book after the CIA dismissed Ali as a fraud even though, Mr Weldon claims, many of his predictions came true.
Mr Weldon's secondary target is George Tenet, the former CIA boss, and what he calls the old intelligence community elite. Mr Weldon accuses this elite of waging a propaganda war against George W. Bush in the run-up to the 2004 presidential election.
Mr Weldon strongly defends his old friend Porter Goss, who replaced Mr Tenet last year, and his efforts to purge the agency. He concludes that the US would be justified in launching a pre-emptive war against Iran. But since this is not feasible, Mr Weldon argues that the US should give financial support to Iranian groups preparing for regime change.
The ferocity of Mr Weldon's accusations have driven Bill Murray, the former CIA station chief in Paris, to go public with his side of the story - that Ali was a fraudster well known to the agency. The CIA has responded by declassifying a letter to Mr Weldon, in which it says Ali was a fabricator who embellished press reports. "He has provided no information to date worthy of follow-up," it said, adding that it spent hundreds of man hours evaluating his claims.
Mr Murray told the Financial Times that he had informed Mr Weldon that Ali was a known fabricator who wanted money. He said Ali was "totally dependent" on Manouchehr Ghorbanifar, an Iranian arms dealer discredited by the CIA for his role in the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s.
James Woolsey, a friend of Mr Weldon and former CIA director, praises the book as "a case study of an intelligence failure in the process of happening, with potentially catastrophic consequences for the United States." Mr Goss has not commented on it in public.
The CIA has not commented either on Countdown To Crisis: the Coming Nuclear Showdown With Iran, by Kenneth Timmerman, a journalist and author with close ties to exiled Iranian opposition groups. A CIA spokesman said the agency was too busy to read it.
Mr Timmerman, quoting alleged high-level defectors from Iranian intelligence organisations, says Iran plotted the September 11, 2001, attacks on the US together with al-Qaeda, and is also protecting Mr bin Laden.
"Because of the arrogance and wilful blindness of our nation's top intelligence officers, America's leaders were misled about the threat from Iran until it was too late."
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http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=43766
NUCLEAR WAR-FEAR
Iran nuke commercial
hits TV markets
Spot depicting atomic terror attack in NYC to be seen in 20 cities
Posted: April 13, 2005
1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2005 WorldNetDaily.com
A commercial produced by an organization fighting for the freedom of Iran that depicts a nuclear terror attack in America – the kind many experts believe is possible should Tehran get the bomb – will run in 20 markets across the country this month.
Titled "An Atomic 9-11: When Evil is Appeased," the spot, sponsored by the Iran Freedom Foundation, is based on a scenario described in the new WND Books release "Atomic Iran: How the Terrorist Regime Bought the Bomb and American Politicians," by Jerome R. Corsi, co-author of the best-selling "Unfit for Command."
The ad can be viewed on the IFF website.
Corsi believes an atomic 9-11 is an imminent threat once a terrorist state like Iran has the capability to develop nuclear weapons.
"The major technical problems that have kept terrorists from exploding improvised nuclear devices within American cities are solved once a terrorist regime like the Islamic Republic of Iran has the capability to manufacture a nuclear weapon and deliver it in containers to a major U.S. port," he said.
"The device can be picked up by sleeper terrorist cells, assembled and driven into the heart of the city, where it can be detonated at the height of an ordinary business day."
The resulting destruction from a successful atomic 9-11 attack on a major U.S. city like New York would be enormous.
"In the blink of an eye, the United States could be reduced to second-class economic status," Corsi said.
The scenario described in "Atomic Iran" shows that a 150-kiloton IND exploded in New York would reduce much of the city to rubble. Some 1.5 million people would be killed instantly, with another 1.5 million certain to die over the next few days.
The television ad will air for 13 days four times daily in each city. The markets include cities in Maine, Mississippi, Texas, Oregon, California, New Jersey, Illinois, Ohio, South Carolina, Alabama, Indiana, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Washington, Florida, and Washington, D.C.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/23/AR2005052301565_pf.html
washingtonpost.com
AIPAC's Big, Bigger, Biggest Moment
By Dana Milbank
Post
Tuesday, May 24, 2005; A13
How much clout does AIPAC have?
Well, consider that during the pro-Israel lobby's annual conference yesterday, a fleet of police cars, sirens wailing, blocked intersections and formed a motorcade to escort buses carrying its conventioneers -- to lunch.
The annual meeting of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee has long produced a massive show of bipartisan pandering, as lawmakers praise the well-financed and well-connected group. But this has been a rough year for AIPAC -- it has dismissed its policy director and another employee while the FBI examines whether they passed classified U.S. information to Israel -- and the organization is eager to show how big it is.
Reporters arriving at the convention center yesterday were given a list of "Food Facts" for the three-day AIPAC meeting: 26,000 kosher meals, 32,640 hors d'oeuvres, 2,500 pounds of salmon, 1,200 pounds of turkey, 900 pounds of chicken, 700 pounds of beef and 125 gallons of hummus.
Another fact sheet announced that this is the "largest ever" conference, with its 5,000 participants attending "the largest annual seated dinner in Washington" joined by "more members of Congress than almost any other event, except for a joint session of Congress or a State of the Union address." The group added that its membership "has nearly doubled" over four years to 100,000 and that the National Journal calls it "one of the top four most effective lobbying organizations."
"More," "most," "largest," "top": The superlatives continued, and deliberately. In his speech Sunday, the group's executive director, Howard Kohr, said the "record attendance" at the conference would dispel questions about AIPAC raised by the FBI investigation.
"This is a test, a test of our collective resolve," Kohr said of the "unique challenge" presented by the FBI probe, "and your presence here today sends a message to every adversary of Israel, AIPAC and the Jewish community that we are here, and here to stay." (The official text has two exclamation points after that sentence.) Kohr, without mentioning the fired staffers, told participants that "neither AIPAC nor any of its current employees is or ever has been the target."
As yesterday's session showed, the scandal isn't keeping the powerful from lining up to woo AIPAC. The morning brought Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the evening brought congressional leaders, and at a luncheon "debate" in between, Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) and informal administration foreign policy adviser Richard N. Perle tried to one-up each other in pro-Israel views.
Perle drew cheers for denouncing Palestinian anti-Semitism and the French. Harman mentioned that an aide once worked for AIPAC, called her audience "very sophisticated" and celebrated Yasser Arafat's death as "a blessing." Debating a hard-liner in front of a pro-administration crowd, Harman heaped praise on President Bush, calling the Iraqi elections "sensationally impressive" and moving to "applaud" or "commend" Perle and the administration a dozen times. "Richard is right, and so is President Bush," she said at one point.
But after half an hour of this, Harman could not keep up. Perle provoked cheers from the crowd when he favored a military raid on Iran, saying that "if Iran is on the verge of a nuclear weapon, I think we will have no choice but to take decisive action." When Harman said the "best short-term option" is the U.N. Security Council, the crowd reacted with boos.
AIPAC is a demanding crowd, and even Rice, introduced as a "very special friend," did not satisfy universally. The participants applauded heartily her reminder that Bush did not meet with Arafat, but when she said Arafat's successor, Mahmoud Abbas, "is committed to both freedom and security," and when she mentioned more U.S. funds for Palestinians, the room was quiet.
Likewise, Rice's call for Arab states to "establish normal relations with Israel" earned an extended ovation; her reminder that Israel must not "jeopardize the true viability of the Palestinian state" did not.
There were subtle signs of dissent within AIPAC (a sticker critical of Israel's "disengagement" from Gaza, a policy supported by AIPAC) and not-so-subtle dissent from without: a group of anti-Zionist orthodox Jews with signs proclaiming, "Torah Forbids any Jewish State." But the attendees overall showed an impressive ideological discipline -- right down to AIPAC's multimedia show, "Iran's Path to the Bomb," in the convention center's basement.
The exhibit, worthy of a theme park, begins with a narrator condemning the International Atomic Energy Agency for being "unwilling to conclude that Iran is developing nuclear weapons" (it had similar reservations about Iraq) and the Security Council because it "has yet to take up the issue." In a succession of rooms, visitors see flashing lights and hear rumbling sounds as Dr. Seuss-like contraptions make yellowcake uranium, reprocess plutonium, and pop out nuclear warheads like so many gallons of hummus for an AIPAC conference.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
Last edited by Alpha on Mon Jul 18, 2005 6:51 am; edited 1 time in total | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Jul 18, 2005 5:53 am Post subject: Michael Ledeen Demands `Regime Change' in Iran |
| This article appears in the July 11, 2003 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
`SYNARCHISM-NAZI/COMMUNISM'
Michael Ledeen Demands
`Regime Change' in Iran
by Scott Thompson
We have already crossed the Rubicon. We are already in Hell. World War III in Eurasia is already ongoing. There was not an Iraq war; there is a continuing Iraq war. There was not an Afghanistan war; there is a continuing Afghanistan war. There's already an onset of a war with Iran, being run covertly, as a covert operation, from the United States, in Iran right now! You see it on the television screens here. That is not a spontaneous student movement. That is a U.S.-run destabilization of Iran, trying to set up the conditions for a war. The situation in Korth Korea; other situations I know of; we are now inside World War III. It is not something that we could prevent from happening. We're there.
—Address by Lyndon LaRouche in Istanbul, Turkey, June 14, 2003
Ledeen's ideas are quoted daily by such figures as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. His views virtually define the stark departure from American foreign policy philosophy that characterized United States actions since September 11, 2001.... Now Ledeen is calling for 'regime change' beyond Iraq. In an address titled 'Time to Focus on Iran: The Mother of Modern Terrorism,' for the policy forum of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) on April 30, he declared: "The time for diplomacy is at the end; it is time for a free Iran, a free Syria and free Lebanon."
—William O. Beeman, "Michael Ledeen: Neoconservative Guru," in The Daily Star, Beirut, Lebanon, May 9, 2003
The same drumbeat for "regime change" that led to war against Iraq, is now coming from the mouths of Vice President Dick Cheney's "chicken-hawk" cabal; only now, the target is Iran. This destabilization is being run through U.S. private foundations and think-tanks, to overthrow the government in Iran, and run a destabilization, and/or military strike against Iran's nuclear energy production facilities.
The pointman is Michael Ledeen, who divides his time among National Review Online, JINSA, and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Ledeen is stirring up the networks in Congress and the press, and lining up tainted intelligence to justify war on Iran.
This is the same Michael Ledeen, who, as a consultant to the Reagan-Bush Administration National Security Council in the mid-1980s, was a pivotal criminal figure in the Iran-Contra fiasco, covertly peddling weapons to the very Ayatollahs whom he is now plotting to overthrow. He is also the same Ledeen who now calls for the United States to wage war against Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Sudan, Libya because, he alleges, they are all "masters of terror." Yet in the 1980s, Ledeen was one of the biggest promoters in Washington of the so-called Afghansi mujahideen—including Osama bin Laden—whom he touted as "freedom fighters" and "champions of the democratic struggle against totalitarian communism."
Ledeen's operations are not merely the rantings of deeply disturbed wanna-be Il Duce. His efforts should be understood as reflecting the immediate intentions of the Administration neo-conservatives. His cronies, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith, are the key advisors to Secretary of Defense Donald "Dr. Strangelove" Rumsfeld.
Ledeen, the self-proclaimed "universal fascist," has long been under scrutiny by EIR researchers, as a man who has been in the midst of some of the dirtiest covert intelligence operations of the past 30 years. EIR's Special Report of April 1987, Project Democracy: The 'Parallel Government' Behind the Iran-Contra Affair, put a spotlight on Ledeen, from which I draw some of the brief profile published here.
Ledeen, as he wrote in his book Machiavelli on Modern Leadership: Why Machiavelli's Iron Rules Are As Timely and Important Today as Five Centuries Ago (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000), is a believer in "total war" through "creative violence." There is no such thing as peace between nations, he maintains; peace is just an interlude between wars.
Ledeen fits the profile of a "Synarchist," or "Nazi/Communist," as those concepts were discussed in World War II-era documents made available to EIR by military intelligence and other sources during the 1980s (see Jeffrey Steinberg, "Synarchism: The Fascist Roots of the Wolfowitz Cabal," EIR, May 30, 2003). Particularly relevant to this characterization is Ledeen's work with both "Red" and "Black" terrorists in Italy, and his support, along with Henry Kissinger, of the Propaganda Due (P-2) Freemasonic Lodge of former Nazi collaborator Licio Gelli, which directed the NATO-related "strategy of tension" against former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro.
Still Promoting Terrorists
On June 23, France's Secret Service launched a crackdown on the Iranian Mujahadeen e-Khalq (MEK, or MKO), an anti-regime group that has been on the U.S. State Department's list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations since 1997. Simultaneous with recent confrontations in Iran, some 150 MEK members were arrested at their "international headquarters" near Paris, and accused of plotting terrorist attacks against Iranian embassies and diplomats throughout Europe. The MEK members arrested by the French authorities were operating under the cover of the National Council for Resistance in Iran, the MEK's international front group. Among those arrested were MEK cult leader Maryam Rajavi and her husband, MEK military chief Massoud Rajavi. Following the arrests, nine members of the group set themselves on fire in protests in Paris. One died.
Rather than applaud the French moves as part of the war against terrorism, Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) is trying to whip up public support for the group. In an open letter, published in the June 24 Washington Times, he called for the "terrorist" designation to be dropped. He had earlier put forward an amendment to a bill that would give $50 million to exile Iranian satellite TV stations, to continue the sort of psy-ops carried out by Radio Farda. Back on March 13, Senator Brownback had joined Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.) to call for a "regime change," in Iran, despite the fact that moderate reformers, notably President Khatami, have become a significant factor in the country. Brownback's website states: "It may seem that our support is not really that important, but in truth, democracy dissidents inside Iran tell me that it is crucial to motivate the opposition and for them to know that there can be a strong future with the U.S. once they have re-claimed their ancient land."
Brownback was joined in the call to arms in defense of the terrorist MEK, by Michael Ledeen's alter-ego Daniel Pipes, who posted an op-ed on his website, demanding not only that the MEK be removed from the State Department terror list; but that the U.S. government adopt the MEK as a "liberation group" to wage guerrilla insurgency against the Iranian government.
Ledeen joined the fray with a raving article in the June 16 National Review Online, "The Iranian Revolution, 2003," in which he proclaims that he can "sniff out" Iranian revolution from "the tell-tale odors coming from the undergarments of its doomed leaders." The article cites six reasons why the Iranian "revolution" is unstoppable now—and why President Bush must embrace it. The article is considered a signal that the neo-con cabal inside the Administration is going into high gear behind the scenes to get war in Iran. Among other objectives, war on Iran would help derail the Road Map negotiations for Israeli-Palestinian peace—a policy the President supports, but the Administration neo-cons despise.
Ledeen's 'Focus on Iran'
Ledeen and company have been putting this operation in place for some time. In 2001, Ledeen founded the Coalition for Democracy in Iran (CDI), with a call for regime change in that country. One of his partners in founding the coalition was Dr. Rob Sobhani, a professor at Georgetown University and president of Caspian Energy Consulting. Support for the CDI also comes from the Center for Security Policy's Frank Gaffney, former Rep. Jack Kemp, Joshua Muravchik of AEI, and former CIA director James Woolsey, who sits on the Defense Policy Board. Woolsey has also worked for the Doug Feith/Abram Shulsky "Office of Special Plans" in the Pentagon, which cooked the intelligence to push through the Iraq War. One of CDI's policies, as spelled out in the June 15 Washington Post, is to support Brownback's call for an Iran Liberation Act, similar to the 1997 one for Iraq.
Ledeen rails against Iranian terrorism in his recent book The Terror Masters: Why It Happened. Where We Are Now. How We'll Win. According to Pacific News Service of May 19, he gave a speech at a JINSA policy forum on April 30, entitled "Time to Focus on Iran—The Mother of Modern Terrorism."
Bernard Lewis Joins In
The next big push came on May 6, when Ledeen moderated a panel at a conference at AEI, on "The Future of Iran: Mullarchy, Democracy, and the War on Terror."
Co-sponsoring the event was the Hudson Institute—funded by the Russian and Jewish Mafia-linked Marc Rich (whose attorneys had included Cheney's "Scooter" Libby) and by British media baron Conrad Black—and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. Opening the event was Meyrav Wurmser, director of Middle East programs at the Hudson Institute, whose husband, David Wurmser, is an adviser to Assistant Secretary of State John Bolton. Her morning panel was entitled, "Iran Today—A Reality Check," and panelists included Uri Lubrani of the Israeli Defense Ministry.
Ledeen gave the introduction for former British military intelligence operative and Princeton Professor Emeritus Bernard Lewis, who is the inventor of the idea of a "Clash of Civilizations," later popularized in a book by that name by Samuel Huntington. Lewis' thesis, cloaked in phrases of Athenian democracy, is that which President Carter's National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski formerly called "the Arc of Crisis" and today calls "the Zone of Instability." It calls for stopping Eurasian integration through manipulating tribal, ethnic, and religious axioms to destroy nation-states, beginning especially in the Middle East. Ledeen introduced Lewis as "the reigning genius of Middle East studies everywhere."
Lewis openly called for a "revolution" in Iran, to follow the military conquest of Iraq; he compared Iran to Napoleonic France or Stalin's Soviet Union. Lewis said that the most important and dangerous neighbor of Iraq was Iran, adding, "It is, I suppose, in Iran that this fear of a success of democracy in Iraq is most strongly felt, and with the very best of reasons." Pointing to the fact that there are more Shi'ites than Sunnis among Islamic religious denominations in Iraq, Lewis continued, "Shi'ism is [also] the predominant religion in Iran and the one which ... [is] invoked by the current leadership of that country and the theocracy that was established by the revolution in '79."
Lewis presented the pie-in-the-sky view that "democratic ideas and democratic examples from a new Iraq might spread across the border ... and the Muslim Shi'ite divines on both sides may feel—and one can understand this—they feel they have to do something about it. They have to do something to counter this American-sponsored Democratic fright.... What is necessary from the point of view of the Iranian theocracy is that the democratic experiment in Iraq should fail and that the consequences to Americans there should be so awful that they would go away and not come back."
Also speaking at the AEI event was Senator Brownback, who called for support for his Senate Resolution 82, and promoted his Iran Democracy amendment. "It should be the policy of the U.S.," he said, "to seek a genuine democratic government in Iran that will restore freedom to the Iranian people, abandon terrorism, and live in peace and security with the international commuity."
Everyone who knows the first thing about Iran realizes that any American meddling there—such as the actions already being run through Ledeen, Brownback, Woolsey, et al.—is a recipe for chaos and likely mass deaths. The promotion by Ledeen of a "liberation" of Iran is, thus, a drive for the kind of "purgative violence" that is at the heart of his "universal fascism." Which brings us to Ledeen's variety of fascism.
Ledeen's 'Synarchist' Roots
The first important influence on Ledeen's life was George Mosse, a German Jewish emigré, who had been on good terms with such Nazi leaders as Joseph Goebbels and Herman Goering. Mosse was so close that Goering offered to make his father an Aryan, and the family was permitted to leave Germany 15 minutes before the law was changed.
The Cambridge-educated Mosse, who would become Ledeen's teacher at the University of Wisconsin, taught Ledeen that despite its "perversion" by anti-Semitism, Fascism ought to be scientifically studied, because the Geist (soul) of Western countries had been suffocated and could only be revived through Fascism or Nazism. It is reported that while Ledeen was working on his Ph.D., he was blackballed for having joined—under Mosse's influence—a cell of the Israeli intelligence-linked movement associated with Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky, whom Israeli leader David Ben Gurion referred to as "Vladimir Hitler."
It was through Mosse that Ledeen was introduced to later Presidential Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board member David Abshire, who was the founder of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and who hired Ledeen as a political intelligence operative.
But an even more important mentor to Ledeen was Renzo de Felice, an advocate of the Jacobin Revolution in France which led to the emergence of the first modern Fascist, Napoleon Bonaparte. De Felice did not hide his Fascism, as he wrote in The Illuminati and Revolutionary Mysticism, 1789-1900: "There is something in common between my Jacobins and a certain kind of Fascism.... Fascism wanted to achieve the transformation of society and the individual ... [toward] a new phase in the history of civilization."
After researching in Italy from 1966 to 1967, where he met scions of the Venetian oligarchy who are "magicians" in cultural warfare, Ledeen wrote: Universal Fascism (1972); "Italian Fascism and Youth," Journal of Contemporary History, July 1969; "Fascist Social Policy," in The Use and Abuse of Social Science, ed, Irving Louis Horowitz; and, among others, Fascism, An Informal Introduction to Its Theory and Practice, by Renzo de Felice, which includes an interview with Ledeen.
Ledeen preferred unbridled, Jacobin-style fascism, such as that of Gabrielle D'Annunzio in the early 1900s. In his 1972 Universal Fascism, Ledeen criticized Benito Mussolini as being too rigid: "He never had enough confidence in the Italian people to permit them a genuine participation in Fascism."
Ledeen's Criminal Trail
Ledeen has been associated, throughout the past two decades, with some of the most sordid criminal affairs, implicating government officials, intelligence services, and private "synarchist" networks:
Irangate: It is particularly ironical that Ledeen is today calling for a "regime change" in Iran, since he had been an integral culprit in Project Democracy's covert operations with Iran's regime during the 1980s. He worked closely with Manuchar Ghorbanifar, an Iranian living in France, to whom he had been introduced by top Israeli political intelligence agent David Kimchee. Ledeen brought Ghorbanifar to a meeting on Oct. 8, 1985 with the National Security Council's Lt. Col. Oliver North, at which was also present Israeli arms dealer Ya'acov Nimrodi, a key player in North's "Enterprise." Ledeen had frequent meetings with North in this regard throughout 1985, despite CIA warnings that Ghorbanifar was not to be trusted. It was through Ghorbanifar that 500 TOW missiles were shipped to Iran, and then 19 Hawk SAM missiles, in exchange for the release of American hostages then being held by terrorists in Lebanon. This was the "arms for hostages" deal that was at the heart of the Iran-Contra scandal. The weapons that went to Iran came either directly from the U.S. military stockpiles, or from Israel's massive arms industry, involving top officials of the Israeli government.
Ledeen maintained that he was just involved in a "research program" on Iran, which "by accident," turned into an "action program." However, it is notable that throughout this period, he was involved, by way of a firm called EATSCO, with former CIA Deputy Director for Plans Theodor Shackley, who was another pivotal Iran-Contra figure.
Italy's Propaganda-2 Lodge: According to innumerable sources on both sides of the Atlantic, while working for Kissinger and Alexander Haig at CSIS, Ledeen became a member of the Propaganda Due (P-2) Lodge, which emerged to public light on May 20, 1981. This unmasking occurred just seven days after the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II by Mehmet Ali Agca, in which P-2 was thought to be involved. The exposure of P-2 forced the resignation of 47 Italian Army generals and 6 Navy admirals. Also named was Bruno di Fabio, a naval officer working at NATO headquarters in Brussels, across whose desk passed the reports of the secret services of all of NATO's members. Other prominent Italians revealed to be members of the secret society, who were toppled and were known to be among Ledeen's close associates, were the chief of staff of defense, Giovanni Torrissi; the head of the coordinating body of the secret services, Walter Pelosi; the head of military counterintelligence (SISMI), Giuseppe Santovito; the head of the civilian intelligence service (SISDE), Giuliano Grassini. As for P-2 Grand Master Licio Gelli himself, he was the perfect "Synarchist" or, as Ledeen might put it, "universal Fascist," having been both a Nazi SS liaison officer and, until at least 1956, a Soviet agent.
The Temple Mount conspiracy: Ledeen and his wife Barbara have been part of an "Armaggedon Project" to rebuild Solomon's Third Temple in Jerusalem on al-Haram al-Sharif (a.k.a. "Temple Mount") which is the third most holy site in Islam. The planned destruction of the al-Aqsa Mosque on the Dome of the Rock would unleash unstoppable warfare in the Middle East. Barbara Ledeen was until recently on the editorial masthead of Biblical Archeology Review, which has played a central role in plotting where the Third Temple should be placed, together with the Quatuor Cornati ("Four Crowns") research lodge of British Freemasonry. | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Jul 20, 2005 6:00 pm Post subject: America Has Fallen Into The Abyss |
| 19 July 2005
www.MiddleEast.Org
America Has Fallen Into The Abyss
Terror, Assassination, Torture, Disinformation
"Bush and his cohorts are plunging the world into an abyss, an endless
night of murder and terror -- wholesale, retail, state-sponsored, privatized;
of fear and degradation, servility, chaos, and the perversion of all that's best in us.
Now the night has come. Now the United States stands openly --
even proudly -- for terrorism, torture and the Hitlerian principle of aggressive
war. America has fallen into the pit -- and the hopes of the world go with it."
"In their ignorance and arrogance, the Bushists will almost certainly strike at Iran --
despite the fact that even Iranian dissidents support the effort to make their nation
a nuclear power and would join the mullahs in retaliation. The result will be a
conflict far surpassing the horror and magnitude of the Iraq disaster."
MER - MiddleEast.Org - Washington - 19 July: While the Americans denounce so many hither and yon for 'terrorism', even those who are clearly fighting against occupying armies for their own self-determination and freedom, many others around the world are increasingly seeing the Americans themselves as 'terrorists' of an imperial 'New World Order' kind. Publishered earlier this year, this important article simply titled 'American Terror' should be carefully read and contemplated by all serious persons before it is too late. The list of annotated articles at the end is also of considerable interest and was provided by the Moscow Times.
American Terror
By Chris Floyd
01/21/2005 "Moscow Times" -- More than two years ago, we wrote here of a secret Pentagon plan to foment terrorism by sending covert agents to infiltrate terrorist groups and goad them into action -- in other words, committing acts of murder and destruction. The purpose was two-fold: first, to bring the terrorist groups into the open, where they could be counterattacked; and second, to justify U.S. military attacks on the countries where the terrorists were operating -- attacks which, in the Pentagon's words, would put those nations' "sovereignty at risk." It was a plan that countenanced -- indeed, encouraged -- the deliberate murder of innocent people and the imposition of U.S. military rule anywhere in the world that U.S. leaders desired.
This plan is now being activated.
In fact, it's being expanded, as The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh revealed last week. Not only will U.S.-directed agents infiltrate existing terrorist groups and provoke them into action, but the Pentagon itself will create its own terrorist groups and "death squads." After establishing their terrorist "credentials" through various atrocities and crimes, these American-run groups will then be able to ally with -- and ultimately undermine -- existing terrorist groups.
Top-level officials in the Pentagon, the U.S. intelligence services and the Bush administration confirmed to Hersh that the plan is going forward, under the direction of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld -- just as we noted here in November 2002. Through a series of secret executive orders, George W. Bush has given Rumsfeld the authority to turn the entire world into "a global free-fire zone," a top Pentagon adviser says. These secret operations will be carried out with virtually no oversight; in many cases, even the top military commanders in the affected regions will not be told about them. The American people, of course, will never know what's being done in their name.
The covert units -- including the Pentagon-funded terrorist groups and hit squads -- will be operating outside all constraints of law and morality. "We're going to be riding with the bad boys," one insider told Hersh. Another likened it to the palmy days of the Reagan-Bush years: "Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador? We founded them and we financed them. The objective now is to recruit locals in any area we want. And we aren't going to tell Congress about it." Indeed, we reported here last summer that Bush has already budgeted $500 million to fund local paramilitaries and guerrilla groups in the most volatile areas of the world, a measure guaranteed to produce needless bloodshed, destruction and suffering for innocent people already ravaged by conflict.
The activation of the Pentagon terrorist operation is part of Bush's second-term expansion of the "war on terror." Despite some obfuscating rhetoric about "diplomacy," the Bush regime is pressing ahead with a hard-line strategy aimed at opening new military fronts in the "global free-fire zone." Any dissenting voices within the government are being ruthlessly purged. The Pentagon's secret forces are set for operations in at least 10 countries, and Bush insiders "repeatedly" told Hersh that "Iran is the next strategic target."
Iran has long been a focus of the small clique of "global dominationists" -- led by Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney and their acolytes -- who engineered the invasion of Iraq. This group is determined to "whack Iran," as one insider put it, and they're not at all discouraged by the debacle in Iraq; indeed, to them it's a rousing success. Their first objective -- openly stated years ago, before Bush took office -- was the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime and the planting of a U.S. "military footprint" in Iraq. This has now been done. The fact that it has plunged the Iraqi people into a hell of violence, chaos, terror and extremism is of no real concern to the clique. Their lofty rhetoric about "freedom" and "liberation" is meaningless sham, shuck and jive for the rubes. By the admission of the clique's own publications, they seek strategic control over the world's energy resources in order to preserve and expand American geopolitical and economic hegemony in the new century. Everything else -- including the security of the American people, put at increasing risk by the clique's reckless policies -- is of secondary importance.
U.S. forces are already conducting military reconnaissance inside Iran in preparation for strikes on alleged nuclear weapons facilities, Hersh reports. The Pentagon is feverishly updating war plans for a "maximum ground and air invasion of Iran," incorporating the new staging areas now available in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, while employing an Iranian terrorist group, MEK, to launch covert ops and terrorist acts against Tehran. MEK was once given sanctuary by Hussein, who used the group as a brutal enforcer against Kurd and Shiite insurgents. Now Bush, "riding with the bad boys," has embraced the MEK murderers as his own.
In their ignorance and arrogance, the Bushists will almost certainly strike at Iran -- despite the fact that even Iranian dissidents support the effort to make their nation a nuclear power and would join the mullahs in retaliation. The result will be a conflict far surpassing the horror and magnitude of the Iraq disaster.
In our original report on the Pentagon's terror scheme, we wrote: "Bush and his cohorts are plunging the world into an abyss, an endless night of murder and terror -- wholesale, retail, state-sponsored, privatized; of fear and degradation, servility, chaos, and the perversion of all that's best in us." Now the night has come. Now the United States stands openly -- even proudly -- for terrorism, torture and the Hitlerian principle of aggressive war. America has fallen into the pit -- and the hopes of the world go with it.
Annotations
The Coming Wars
New Yorker, Jan. 17, 2005
Into the Dark: The Pentagon's Plan to Foment Terrorism
CounterPunch, Nov. 1, 2002 http://www.counterpunch.org/floyd1101.html.
Cry Havoc: Bush's Own Personal Janjaweed
CounterPunch, Sept. 7, 2004
American Dominance
Bergen Record, Feb. 23, 2003
Preparing for an attack on Iran?
Salon.com, Jan. 18, 2005
America's Death Squads
Antiwar.com, Jan. 10, 2005
Deadlier Face of Torture Emerges
The Times, Jan. 16, 2005
Pro-Government Death Squad Surfaces in Irag
Focus News, Jan. 11, 2005
Neocons turn their attention to Iran
Financial Times, Jan. 18, 2005
Bush Planned Iraq 'Regime Change' Before Becoming President
Glasgow Sunday Herald, Sept. 15, 2002
Rebuilding America's Defenses
Project for a New Century, September 2000
Statement of Principles
Project for a New American Century, June 3, 1997
Seymour Hersh: Rumsfeld's Dirty War on Terror
The Guardian, Sept. 13, 2004
Osama: A Texas-Style Republican in Islamic Clothing
Online Journal, Sept. 12, 2004
Bush Team Knew of Abuse at Guantanamo
The Guardian, Sept. 13, 2004
The Hidden History of CIA Torture
TomDispatch.com, Sept. 9, 2004
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