| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Aug 31, 2005 10:37 pm Post subject: Prominent Mideast analyst associated with AIPAC espionage |
| Ex-AIPAC staffers say Condi leaked them classified info:
Two former lobbyists for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee say
Condoleezza Rice was their informant on sensitive national security matters.
http://tinyurl.com/yrsea4
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Subpoena arguments in AIPAC case
Published: 08/30/2007
The federal judge in the case against two former AIPAC staffers heard government arguments against subpoenaing top U.S. officials, including Condoleezza Rice.
Judge T.S. Ellis III's pretrial hearing Thursday in Alexandria, Va., in the classified information leak case against Steve Rosen, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's former foreign policy chief, and Keith Weissman, its former Iran analyst, was closed to the media because it dealt with classified information. However, a docket entry described the hearing as dealing with prosecutors' "objections to defendants' prospective subpoenas to U.S. government officials."
The list of targeted officials was unsealed inadvertently last year for several days, and among those sought by the defense are Rice, the secretary of state, and Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser.
Rosen and Weissman want to show that the information outlined as leaked in the indictment was not extraordinary and had been relayed to them by officials at the highest level of government.
Government reasons for resisting the subpoenas were not available.
Rosen and Weissman are scheduled to go on trial in January.
http://www.jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa/breaking/103916.html
The Gorilla in the Room is US Support for Israel:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/08/05/the-gorilla-in-the-room-is-us-support-for-israel.php
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Date: Thu, 01 Sep 2005 16:45:52 -0700
From: "Jeff Blankfort" <jblankfort@earthlink.net>
Subject: Jerusalem Post: Mideast analyst Pollack named in AIPAC indictment
What this article does not say is that former White House analyst
Kenneth Pollack was one of the main propagandists for the war in Iraq
through his articles in the New Yorker to which he is a regular
contributor but more importantly through his book, "The Threatening
Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq." Though he has, at times, tried to
publicly distance himself from the neocons, it has been purely
cosmetic.
Like AIPAC, they are all one and the same when it comes to promoting
Israel's interests first and foremost.
Jeff B
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/Printer&cid=1125454956995&p=1111893688901
Mideast analyst named in AIPAC indictment
MATTHEW E. BERGER/JTA, THE JERUSALEM POST Aug. 31, 2005
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Middle East analyst Kenneth Pollack is one of two US government officials referenced in the indictment against two former staffers of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), JTA has learned.
But Pollack, who was a staffer on President Clinton's National Security Council, said he didn't give the AIPAC staffers any classified information. Pollack also said the information that Steve Rosen, AIPAC's former director of foreign policy issues, was accused of passing on to a reporter could not have come from him.
"I believe I am USGO-1," Pollack told JTA on Monday, using a term in the indictment for US Government Official No. 1.
A second source, speaking on condition of anonymity, has verified the information.
Neither Pollack nor the other unnamed government official – identified by sources as David Satterfield, a former deputy assistant secretary of state – has been charged with a crime. That has raised questions about the government's case against Rosen, former AIPAC Iran analyst Keith Weissman and Larry Franklin, a former Pentagon analyst accused of passing classified information to the AIPAC staffers.
The three men pled not guilty earlier this month, and their trial is set for January.
Supporters of Rosen and Weissman in the Jewish community argue that if the people who allegedly gave them the sensitive material aren't in trouble, then the information Rosen and Weissman are accused of passing to journalists and three officials at the Israeli Embassy in Washington can hardly warrant their prosecution.
Pollack left government in March 2001 and today is director of research at the Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy. Satterfield recently was promoted to deputy chief of mission at the US Embassy in Baghdad.
Pollack confirmed he had lunch with Rosen and Weissman in December 2000 and discussed US policy in Iraq. "I don't remember the lunch and don't remember anything about the lunch," Pollack said. "But they know I had lunch with Steve and Keith, and I don't deny it."
According to the indictment, Rosen spoke with an unnamed reporter after the lunch and gave classified information about policy options and internal government deliberations.
The indictment says Pollack had access to the classified information Rosen allegedly discussed with the journalist, but doesn't say Pollack gave the information to the lobbyists.
That's a sharp contrast to the language regarding Satterfield, who is expressly said to have discussed classified information with Rosen.
The sequence of events is part of a charge of conspiracy to communicate national defense information brought against Rosen and Weissman earlier this month. Pollack said he could not have given the two AIPAC staffers any classified information, and the indictment doesn't suggest it either.
The new revelations are likely to intensify speculation in Washington that Rosen and Weissman are being targeted for conducting the normal Washington practice of trading sensitive information.
The two men's interaction with Pollack and Satterfield is believed to be central to the prosecutors' case that Rosen and Weissman engaged in a pattern of seeking classified information and disseminating it to journalists and the Israeli government.
Pollack, the author of two books on US policy in the Middle East and a regular commentator on CNN, said he had met with the FBI and the US Attorney's Office for the eastern district of Virginia, and believed he was not a subject of the investigation. State Department officials said Satterfield had been told the same thing.
A spokeswoman at the US Attorney's Office had no comment. Rosen's attorney, Abbe Lowell, was unavailable for comment.
Pollack said that according to information he had been given, Rosen spoke with an unnamed journalist after meeting with Pollack, telling the journalist that he had received from a US government official an eight-point plan for regime change in Iraq. He then gave a broad description of the plan.
"There was never an eight-point plan for regime change in Iraq," Pollack said Monday.
Pollack said he might have given Rosen and Weissman the same "talking points" on American regime-change policy that he gave to other lobbyists and Middle East policy wonks, but did not lay out a specific plan.
Because the meeting occurred just a month before the end of the Clinton administration, little work was being done on the issue until President Bush came to office.
Pollack said the talking points he gave Rosen and Weissman didn't include sensitive information. Rosen is not accused in the indictment of knowingly giving classified information to a third party in 2000, as he is on other occasions.
But Pollack suggested the meeting he had with Rosen and Weissman was similar to others he held with numerous parties interested in the administration's Middle East agenda.
Pollack said he could not imagine he gave classified information to Rosen and Weissman.
"I had a standard repertory of lines that I gave," he said. "I knew what was kosher and not."
This article can also be read at http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1125454956995&p=1111893688901
Satterfield and AIPAC's Rosen also mentioned in the following article by Justin Raimondo:
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=10764
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The recently released paperback version of James Bamford's 'A Pretext for War' book includes an additional section at the end about the ongoing AIPAC/Israel espionage via the Pentagon...
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Ex-AIPAC staffers say Condi leaked them classified info:
Two former lobbyists for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee say
Condoleezza Rice was their informant on sensitive national security matters.
http://tinyurl.com/yrsea4
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Book Interview: FOREIGN AGENTS: The American Israel Public Affairs
Committee from the 1963 Fulbright Hearings to the 2005
Espionage Scandal
(Audio File) http://irmep.org/MP3/08192007wbai_fa.mp3
Shelton Walden interviews Grant Smith about the book
"Foreign Agents". One hour interview with call-in.
Foreign Agents is now #1 on Barnes and Noble's New
Policy Book Release Ranking:
http://tinyurl.com/yvhccd
Foreign Agents is #7 among all new B&N Politics Books:
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Copies available direct from the publisher at:
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Supporters receive their complimentary books in September.
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http://www.washingtonian.com/articles/people/6215.html
“This Is the FBI—Can We Talk?”
Share | Print By Mark Matthews
Keith Weissman and Steven Rosen Are PhDs and Middle East Experts Who Did Some Lobbying. They Thought They Were Doing What Washington Insiders Always Do.
Thomas O’Donnell didn’t reveal his job when he phoned Keith Weissman in 2004 and got the policy analyst’s wife. He says he didn’t want to scare her. When Weissman returned the call and found out O’Donnell was an FBI agent, his first reaction was to attempt a joke: “What did I do?” “I’m sure you didn’t do anything,” O’Donnell told him. He wanted to meet that day, for five or ten minutes, and get Weissman’s help on something “that I can’t talk about on the telephone.”
Weissman was calling from his cell phone, standing outside a New Balance shoe store near Boston. He turned down the invitation to meet with O’Donnell: “That’s a little too cryptic for me. I’m on vacation with my family.”
O’Donnell was in Boston, and he offered an explanation for why he was there. He said he had been sent for the Democratic National Convention “and some other matters.” The political convention, where the FBI kept watch for violent demonstrators, had wrapped up a few days earlier at Boston’s Fleet Center.
Weissman agreed to meet O’Donnell in Washington six days later and “have a cup of coffee and [find] a quiet place and we can talk.”
When Weissman pressed O’Donnell, seeking to find out what the FBI was after, he was told, according to an FBI transcript, that the bureau wanted to tap “your expertise with some different countries . . . that you’ve studied and written on and done some research. It’s that kind of stuff.”
That was plausible. Weissman, then 52, was a senior analyst for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Washington’s most influential pro-Israel lobbying group, where he had worked since 1993. His job combined research and efforts to influence US government policy. He had a good grasp of the political and cultural currents of the Middle East, having studied in Iran and Egypt and earned a PhD in Middle East history at the University of Chicago.
Weissman’s wife, Deborah, a lawyer and former investigator with the Securities and Exchange Commission, became anxious when told of the FBI meeting. She urged her husband to take someone with him to the appointment, such as AIPAC general counsel Philip Friedman. Her instincts were sound. O’Donnell’s assurance to Weissman that “I’m sure you didn’t do anything” was a feint.
O’Donnell worked at the FBI’s Washington Field Office at Fourth and F streets, Northwest. The city-block-size WFO, as it’s known, serves as the nerve center of the government’s low-key but expansive efforts to track leaks of secrets to foreign countries. Its targets aren’t just America’s enemies; allies and friends hunger after each other’s closely held information.
Russian espionage continues unabated after the collapse of the Soviet Union. An American agent in Paris was caught trying to steal French trade secrets. Despite its disclaimers, Israel is reported to be on the lookout for any information that will help preserve a military edge over regional enemies and expand its exports of weaponry and technology. The United States, in turn, is alert for signs that Israel is selling military hardware to China.
“There has been, for some time, serious concern about Israeli espionage in the US,” says Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA veteran who also held intelligence posts at the White House and Pentagon. The FBI, he adds, “puts Israel up alongside China as espionage threats.”
In 2000, CBS’s 60 Minutes broadcast the disguised voice of an unnamed CIA official saying, “We believe that there have been numerous documented instances in which the Israelis have successfully recruited US persons to spy for them.”
O’Donnell’s call prompted Weissman to try to reach his boss, Steven Rosen, AIPAC’s director of foreign-policy issues. Rosen, then 62, was a former academic. A political scientist with a PhD from Syracuse, he had taught at Brandeis, the University of Pittsburgh, and Australian National University and cowrote a textbook, The Logic of International Relations. He joined AIPAC in 1982 after four years with the Rand Corporation, where he held a top-secret security clearance to work on projects for the CIA. While at Rand, he became acquainted with a promising young graduate student, Condoleezza Rice, who was working there temporarily.
Weissman didn’t want to call Steven Rosen’s cell phone; he thought his boss should be sitting down when he heard about the FBI call. As it turned out, Rosen also had gotten a message from an FBI agent who wanted to talk to him about a “field investigation.”
When the two AIPAC officials speculated over the phone about what the FBI was after, they turned up one possibility: The investigators’ interest had been piqued by information the lobbyists had supplied to the Washington Post two weeks earlier. Still, Rosen was reluctant to act defensive, which would suggest that their organization was involved in “nefarious things.”
Rosen returned the FBI’s call and spoke with agent Catherine Hanna. “Is this a criminal matter?” he asked.
“No,” she replied.
That afternoon, Hanna and partner Robert Porath went to Rosen’s AIPAC office on First Street near Union Station. The agents told Rosen that the FBI was updating the security clearance of Pentagon analyst Lawrence Franklin and was interviewing his contacts as part of a background investigation. Franklin was the Pentagon desk officer for Iran, a subject of deep interest to Rosen. The FBI had turned up some possible security issues, the agents said, including the fact that Franklin may have stored classified documents at his house.
According to the agents’ notes, Rosen said he had met with Franklin about three times, but the two had never discussed classified information, nor had Franklin shared any with him. Asking for classified information, Rosen told the agents, was “a quick way to ruin relationships.”
Weissman kept his appointment the next week with O’Donnell and another agent, William McDermott, at the Sun Spot Cafe, adjacent to the lobby of AIPAC’s office building. Over a beverage and cigarette, Weissman described having met with Franklin four or five times over the previous two years to talk about non-Arab Middle East countries, primarily Iran, according to a court document. The agents asked him if Franklin had ever disclosed classified information to him or anyone else he knew, and they noted his answer: “No.”
The two AIPAC officials’ hunch that a phone call to the Post had found its way onto the FBI’s radar was correct. They had shared what law-enforcement officials considered “national-defense information” with Post reporter Glenn Kessler about stepped-up Iranian activity in Iraq. The government would later charge that Rosen described it to Kessler as “agency information” from an “American intelligence source.”
But that call to the Post was a small piece of the story. And contrary to what agent Hanna told Rosen, this was “a criminal matter.” By the time the agents approached Rosen and Weissman, they were nearing the final stages of an investigation into leaks of classified information that would wreck the two men’s careers and throw one of Washington’s most powerful lobby groups on the defensive.
The FBI probe included hours of wiretaps approved by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in Washington and surveillance of meetings at Washington-area restaurants. It also included a search of AIPAC’s offices in 2002 that appears to have been surreptitiously conducted, because the offices’ entrance is monitored 24 hours a day and no one appeared with a search warrant around that time.
Federal prosecutors theorized that Rosen and Weissman had engaged in a five-year conspiracy to cultivate government sources with the aim of obtaining sensitive “national-defense information,” which they would pass on to colleagues at AIPAC, Israeli officials, and journalists. By August 2005, prosecutors persuaded a federal grand jury in Alexandria that the two AIPAC officials were not only assiduous in collecting classified information but almost flamboyant in sharing it with others.
“When it comes to classified information, there is a clear line in the law,” then–US attorney Paul McNulty said when the indictments were announced in August 2005. “Today’s charges are about crossing that line.”
Rosen, Weissman, and Franklin were accused under a rarely used section of the World War I–era Espionage Act.
A conviction could land Weissman, a father of three, in prison for up to ten years and Rosen, also a father of three who faces an additional charge, for up to 20. But the potential impact extends beyond these two men and AIPAC. It could also send a chill through the ranks of Washington lobbyists and consultants for foreign governments.
To influence the US government or even react knowledgeably to US actions, many countries think an embassy staffed with diplomats isn’t enough. They’re willing to pay large fees to hire Americans with contacts at high levels and an understanding of how policymakers think. Often these are ex-government officials. While barred from lobbying former colleagues immediately upon leaving office, they nonetheless bring valuable experience and eventually get inside for meetings and to open doors for foreign visitors.
For instance, when India was negotiating its 2006 civilian nuclear agreement with the Bush administration—fraught with strategic implications for both countries—it enlisted the lobbying firm Barbour Griffith & Rogers for advice. The firm had previously signed on the former US ambassador to New Delhi, Robert Blackwill. Although Blackwill wasn’t involved in getting the firm’s India contract, he has since been a prominent advocate for a new US/India partnership.
Robert Litt, a defense lawyer who has represented people caught up in leak investigations, sees the indictment of Rosen and Weissman as part of a broad crackdown on leaks by the Bush administration: “People formerly in the intelligence community are looking at [the AIPAC case] and the leak investigations with great trepidation.”
But a conviction is by no means a sure thing, due in part to an aggressive three-year fight by the defense team, led by Abbe Lowell for Rosen and by John Nassikas III for Weissman. The lawyers’ no-stone-unturned litigation fills a foot-thick file of motions and rebuttals in US District Court in Alexandria. A series of rulings by the resolutely evenhanded presiding judge, T.S. Ellis III, has knocked some of the stuffing out of the government’s case and required the Bush administration to put some of its top officials on the witness stand.
In fact, what the US attorney called the “clear line in the law” isn’t clear at all, particularly where the question of intent comes into play. When the case comes to trial in late April, assistant US attorneys Kevin DiGregory and William N. Hammerstrom Jr. will have to meet a big burden of proof. Showing that Rosen and Weissman obtained, talked about, and relayed sensitive national-defense information won’t be enough. Prosecutors will have to prove that the two men did so knowing that if the information were revealed, it would damage US national security and also knowing that disclosing it was illegal.
Convincing a jury that Rosen and Weissman possessed this criminal state of mind won’t be easy. To counter the charge, defense lawyers intend to lay bare the largely hidden world of back-channel Washington diplomacy. They will try to show that senior officials regularly gave AIPAC officials sensitive information with the full expectation that it would be passed along to Israelis and others. In that way, they will contend that AIPAC played a role in developing US foreign policy.
Over prosecutors’ objections, defendants won court approval to subpoena 15 current and former top administration officials. Their names read like the lineup for a crisis meeting in the White House Situation Room during President Bush’s first term: national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice (now secretary of State); current national-security adviser Stephen Hadley; Richard Armitage, former deputy secretary of State; William Burns, US ambassador to Russia; Marc Grossman, former undersecretary of State for political affairs; David Satterfield, now the State Department’s coordinator for Iraq; Elliott Abrams, deputy national-security adviser; Paul Wolfowitz, former deputy secretary of Defense; and Douglas Feith, former undersecretary of Defense.
Judge Ellis didn’t okay these subpoenas lightly. He did so after being persuaded that each of these officials would be able to testify about specific meetings or conversations—either with the two defendants or with others at AIPAC—that dealt with information comparable in sensitivity to the kind Rosen and Weissman allegedly obtained and passed on.
Ellis also knew that the subpoenas might derail the case. If the administration balks at allowing sworn testimony by senior officials about sensitive conversations, the case against Rosen and Weissman could be dismissed.
The line between information that can and can’t get passed is blurred by the amount of officially sanctioned daily intelligence sharing between the United States and its allies. Such exchanges are particularly intense between the United States and Israel, which regularly trade information and assessments on terrorism and other perceived threats.
“It’s absurd for anyone to think that the Israelis have to enlist people to spy,” says Sandra Charles, a former Pentagon and National Security Council official who consults in Washington for Persian Gulf Arab governments. “They can go to the highest levels of the administration if they want to find out what the thinking is on US policy.”
To James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, the case casts a shadow not only over AIPAC but also over other groups, such as his, that engage in what he calls “ethnic lobbying.” But he says he doesn’t have any sympathy for Rosen and Weissman. Like AIPAC lobbyists, Zogby has met with senior American policymakers and been asked to convey signals to and from foreign officials—in his case, Arab leaders. “[US officials] would say to me, ‘You’re going to the Gulf—ask this,’ or ‘If we say this to [Yasser] Arafat, what will he say?’ ”
“Everybody in this business knows the difference” between that kind of discreet communication and what Rosen and Weissman are charged with, Zogby claims. “Their choice was to pass on information they knew was sensitive to Israel.”
Just how sensitive will be disputed at the trial. Rosen and Weissman were accused of transferring not classified documents, only information they had been given orally. The trial itself will include a mass of classified material that the government has reluctantly decided to divulge. Ellis ordered that it be stripped of markings such as “top secret” or “no forn” (no foreign nationals), which could give the jury an impression that the information was closely held when in fact it might not have been.
If civilian lobbyists such as Rosen and Weissman can be punished for obtaining and discussing classified information, what about journalists and researchers who uncover data the government prefers to keep hidden? McNulty contended in 2005 that “those not authorized to receive classified information must resist the temptation to acquire it.”
Press-freedom advocates view the case as a potential blow to newsgathering, coming on top of court and prosecutorial pressure on reporters to divulge confidential sources. Think tanks and interest groups that specialize in collecting and analyzing information on national security are worried as well.
John Pike, who directs GlobalSecurity.org, an organization skilled at unearthing national-security data from open sources, says the indictment raises this question: “How many degrees of separation can remove you from the obligation to protect information that was originally classified?”
Just when the FBI opened its AIPAC probe isn’t clear.
“It started a long time before I got there,” says David Szady, a veteran counterespionage officer and leak investigator who in 2001 was named to the new FBI post of national counterintelligence executive. He declines to comment further.
Why the probe began remains a mystery. A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment on the case. Speculation centers on 1990s suspicion of an Israeli “mole” in the national-security apparatus, ongoing surveillance of Israelis that turned up contacts with AIPAC, or a general law-enforcement search for leakers. The question of why AIPAC lobbyists were singled out prompted darker theories, summed up in a headline on a Wall Street Journal opinion piece by Dorothy Rabinowitz: first they came for the jews.
Justice Department lawyers knew that a probe of AIPAC would be controversial. A senior participant at the time says: “It was obvious to me and to many others that an investigation of this nature was going to receive a lot of attention because of the significance of the organization involved.”
Regularly ranked as one of the most effective lobbying organizations in Washington, AIPAC strives to forge closer political, strategic, and military ties between the United States and Israel. The group combines grassroots organizing, fundraisers capable of pulling in tens of millions of dollars a year, and a skilled Washington staff that finds willing legislative sponsors among friends in both parties. When preparing a major arms sale to Arab allies, the Pentagon will often brief AIPAC specialists before the deal is put before Congress.
“For anyone who deals with the Middle East,” consultant Sandra Charles says, “AIPAC is one of those realities you learn to work with.”
Each year, AIPAC draws thousands from across the country to its Washington convention to hear speeches by the President, Cabinet secretaries, top congressional leaders, and Israeli politicians. Then AIPAC members move on to Capitol Hill to lobby members of Congress. AIPAC has consistently lined up a large congressional majority in support of military and economic aid for Israel and cooperation between the two countries in a variety of spheres from missile defense to homeland security. The aid package for Israel tends to be the engine that gets the whole US foreign-aid budget through Congress.
While nonpartisan and not directly involved in political campaigns, AIPAC keeps its membership of more than 100,000 apprised of congressional votes important to Israel. This kind of scrutiny can have an intimidating effect on lawmakers because it has the potential to influence where AIPAC members send their campaign contributions. Critics have contended that AIPAC should be required to register as a political-action committee. But neither the courts nor the Federal Election Commission has forced the issue.
Other detractors contend that because it lobbies for aid and policies that benefit Israel, AIPAC ought to register with the Justice Department as a foreign agent. But unlike organizations and firms that represent foreign interests and governments, AIPAC doesn’t get money from and is not contractually linked to Israel. BS!
Crucial to AIPAC’s influence on US policy is its ability to keep Congress and executive-branch policymakers informed of actual or potential threats to Israel and alerted to dangerous political trends in surrounding Middle East countries. This is where Rosen and Weissman came in.
Rosen played a big role in expanding the organization’s influence beyond Congress into the executive branch, meeting behind the scenes with well-placed officials and the journalists who cover them. Generally hawkish but nonideological, Rosen specialized in hard-nosed, sometimes prescient analysis of the major actors in the Middle East and Washington. A father of two sons, ages 25 and 8, and a 22-year-old daughter, Rosen has been married and divorced six times. Five years ago, he reunited with his first wife after 39 years apart.
The indictment shows that investigators recorded conversations among Rosen, Weissman, and Israeli officials starting in April 1999, when Rosen allegedly disclosed to an Israeli diplomat that he had “picked up an extremely sensitive piece of intelligence.” He described the information as code-word protected, meaning that access to it was highly restricted. Two months later, Weissman allegedly told the same diplomat that he knew of a “secret classified FBI report” on the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia.
In December 2000, both men met over lunch with Kenneth Pollack, then a Persian Gulf specialist on the National Security Council staff under President Bill Clinton. Afterward, Rosen allegedly talked to a reporter about then-classified US strategy options against Iraq. In January 2002, Rosen met with David Satterfield, a senior State Department Middle East official, about the sharing of intelligence between the United States and Israel following the Karine A episode, in which the Israelis seized a large Palestinian arms shipment. The episode damaged the US relationship with Yasser Arafat. The government alleges that, in a memo to other AIPAC staffers, Rosen included classified information he had picked up.
The lobbyists’ contacts with Lawrence Franklin developed in 2002 when the defense analyst joined the Pentagon’s newly formed Office of Special Plans under Douglas Feith.
Rosen had been watching with growing alarm the signs that Tehran’s cleric-dominated regime was seeking to develop a nuclear weapon, compounding the danger posed by Iran’s support for terrorist and guerrilla movements in Lebanon, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip and its export of an extremist ideology. He shared some of the frustration of Israeli leaders, who, from former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin onward, saw Iran as a threat to the Jewish state’s existence and pressed for greater attention from Washington. As confrontation loomed between the United States and Iraq, Rosen worried that the United States would be pulled into a quagmire, unable to respond to what he considered a graver threat from Iran.
From his midlevel perch at the Pentagon, Franklin chafed at what he saw as a failure by the Bush administration to come to grips with the Iranian danger. He reached out to Rosen and Weissman, hoping they would bring their influence to bear on the NSC and, if possible, help him secure a job at the White House. This would put him, in Rosen’s words, “by the elbow of the President.” Rosen, according to the indictment, promised to “do what I can.”
At the time that the AIPAC men and Franklin were first in touch with each other, getting tough on Iran was not a White House priority. Administration policy was fixated on ousting Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. As Bush worked to build domestic and international support for regime change in Iraq, the administration expected to enlist help from Iraqi Shiites, coreligionists of the Iranian regime.
Five days after Rosen called the Pentagon seeking to make contact with an Iran expert and got Franklin’s name, the Bush administration hosted a get-together of Iraqi exiles in Washington. It included a representative of the Tehran-based Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution. Ahmad Chalabi, who led the Iraqi National Congress and was the Pentagon’s chief ally among Iraqi exiles, would later take up residence in the Iranian capital in the weeks before the US-led invasion of Iraq.
According to letters in the case file, in September 2002, the month after Rosen and Franklin first spoke, the FBI conducted a search at AIPAC headquarters. What it produced, if anything, remains under seal. An AIPAC spokesman says the organization wasn’t aware of any search at that time. To cultivate Franklin, Weissman at one point took him to an Orioles game in Baltimore. Franklin, who was also an Air Force Reserve officer, held not only a top-secret security clearance but also one entitling him to SCI, “sensitive compartmented information,” the kind kept at a secure site and granted on a need-to-know basis to a limited number of individuals.
During a series of meetings in 2003, Franklin spilled several pieces of allegedly classified information, from policy options against Iran to specific intelligence about attacks on US forces in Iraq. On a couple of occasions, Rosen or Weissman allegedly passed along what he’d learned to Israeli diplomats or journalists.
Franklin, likewise, relayed sensitive information to an Israeli diplomat and to the media. On May 21, 2004, he disclosed what prosecutors described as “top secret/SCI” information to journalists from CBS about what prosecutors would later cryptically claim concerned “meetings involving two Middle East officials.”
That evening, CBS correspondent Lesley Stahl reported on evidence that onetime Pentagon favorite Ahmad Chalabi “personally gave Iranian intelligence officers information so sensitive that if revealed it could, quote, ‘get Americans killed.’ ” Later in the broadcast, she reported that the information Chalabi had allegedly passed was so sensitive that US officials “at the highest levels” had prevailed on CBS not to broadcast it.
Five weeks later, the FBI closed in on Franklin. Armed with a warrant, agents searched his workspace and turned up a June 25, 2003, classified document. Franklin admitted he had given information derived from the document to Rosen and Weissman. Agents then searched his house in Kearneysville, West Virginia, and found more than 80 classified documents he had brought home illegally over three decades.
Franklin was vulnerable. He had a record of security breaches for taking documents home. Lacking substantial assets and with a wife afflicted with crippling rheumatoid arthritis, Franklin did not hire a lawyer; instead, he agreed to cooperate with the FBI.
Authorities enlisted Franklin in a sting: In July 2004, he attempted to arrange meetings with Rosen and Weissman, armed with the kind of information that clearly would be of interest to Israel. At one point, he requested an urgent meeting with Weissman, telling him lives were in danger. When the two met, Franklin, who was wired, warned him that Iran had discovered the presence of Israeli agents in northern Iraq. The information was highly classified “agency stuff,” and Weissman could get in trouble for having it, Franklin told him.
Weissman in turn told that to Rosen, and the two contacted Naor Gilon, a political officer at the Israeli Embassy. Rosen and Weissman also called Glenn Kessler at the Post to report an increased threat to US soldiers in Iraq from Iranian-backed militias.
Franklin also helped the FBI with a counterintelligence probe of Chalabi, who has denied divulging any US secrets. Among those he called was Francis Brooke, a Chalabi aide in Washington. According to Brooke, Franklin also called active members of the Iraqi National Congress, Chalabi’s political party.
“He was asking questions about Ahmad Chalabi and my dealings with Iranian officials,” Brooke says. He recalls that Franklin said, “There’s a lot of stuff going on. You should tell me the straight story. I’m in contact with journalists, and I could spin it for you.”
Says Brooke: “I thought he was off his rocker.”
The Chalabi probe foundered, but the AIPAC investigation gained momentum. The calls to Naor Gilon and Kessler provided what prosecutors considered new evidence that Rosen and Weissman had violated a section of the 1917 Espionage Act, barring the possession and transfer of “national-defense information” by anyone not authorized to have it.
Three weeks after their meeting with Weissman at the Sun Spot Cafe, FBI agents knocked on Rosen’s door in Silver Spring shortly before 8 am. They told Rosen they knew Franklin had provided classified information to an Israeli official. What would Rosen say, they asked him, if the Israeli official told Franklin that the information had already been supplied to him by Rosen? According to the agents’ report, “Rosen said he had done nothing wrong.”
Later, agents confronted Weissman outside his home in Bethesda. They played him a recording of the July conversation between Weissman and Franklin. “Look,” Weissman told them, “I was told by people at the office not to talk to you.”
That afternoon, the FBI searched Rosen’s office at AIPAC headquarters, this time presenting a search warrant. CNN cameras filmed the agents entering the building. Apparently tipped off before the raid, CBS called AIPAC with questions.
Initially, AIPAC circled the wagons around its two officials, defending them in public statements, assigning them legal counsel, and paying the legal fees. Rosen and Weissman both received bonuses at the end of 2004. But the investigation continued. Although AIPAC was assured in December that it was not a target, four senior AIPAC staffers were called to testify before a federal grand jury in Alexandria.
According to defense documents, in February 2005, US attorney Paul McNulty—who later became deputy attorney general—met with AIPAC’s executive director and AIPAC lawyers and urged them to cooperate. AIPAC’s counsel called lawyers for Rosen and Weissman the next day, telling them that McNulty “would like to end it with minimal damage to AIPAC. He is fighting with the FBI to limit the investigation to Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman and to avoid expanding it.” Prosecutors disclosed to AIPAC lawyers some evidence they had obtained under a secret warrant.
Rosen and Weissman were fired. AIPAC also halted payment of their legal fees. At the time, the Justice Department viewed an organization’s payment of legal fees for employees under investigation as a sign of a lack of cooperation with the probe. An AIPAC spokesman, Patrick Dorton, denied that the organization had acted under government pressure: “Any suggestion that AIPAC acted at the government’s behest is completely false. Our decisions on dismissal and legal fees were made independently, based on the facts and our commitment to doing the right thing in a very difficult situation.”
One source close to AIPAC noted that Weissman and Rosen had refused to waive their rights to sue the organization. Recently, Dorton repeated a statement he had made at the time of the indictment: “Rosen and Weissman were dismissed because they engaged in conduct that was not part of their jobs and because this conduct did not comport with the standards that AIPAC expects and requires of its employees.”
Franklin, despite helping with the sting, was indicted along with the two AIPAC lobbyists. He pleaded guilty to two conspiracy counts in October 2005 and drew a 12-year prison sentence. Judge Ellis held the sentence in abeyance until the AIPAC case is over. The attorney Franklin acquired late in the probe, Plato Cacheris, expects his client to be called as a witness. He hopes, as a result of Franklin’s cooperation with the prosecution, that his sentence will be reduced to a “minimal” term.
The FBI’s investigation didn’t end with the conspiracy indictments of Rosen and Weissman in August 2005, a year after Weissman got that initial phone call in Boston. One reason may have been a gap in the government’s case. The two men were charged with oral receipt and transmission of national-defense information. There is no evidence that classified documents ever exchanged hands.
The next year, the FBI and one of the prosecutors approached the family of the late muckraking columnist Jack Anderson, seeking access to his archive. Anderson’s son Kevin told a congressional panel that he was told they “wanted access to Dad’s documents to see if either Rosen’s or Weissman’s fingerprints were on any government documents.” Anderson’s widow initially consented to the request, but the family collectively decided to refuse.
When the trial gets under way, parts of it will be closed to the public. Judge Ellis has allowed the introduction of some classified evidence that only the jurors will see or hear in full. He also has allowed the defense to probe potential jurors for indications of anti-Jewish bias.
AIPAC has regained its place as one of Washington’s premier lobbying groups and is building a new headquarters. Within the last few months, AIPAC agreed to pay Rosen’s and Weissman’s legal fees, which have climbed into the millions of dollars. No explanation was given, although the decision came after Ellis ruled that any government pressure on AIPAC was “inappropriate and fraught with the risk of constitutional harm.”
Franklin, Rosen, and Weissman have all failed to find permanent employment while the case is pending. Franklin works at odd jobs, his lawyer says. Rosen received financial help from friends and has done part-time consulting. Weissman spends a good deal of time with his children—his daughter is studying Arabic at college; one son is a high-school senior, and another is in middle school—walking his two golden retrievers and pondering book projects, including one on rock ’n’ roll.
Last edited by Alpha on Wed Mar 05, 2008 12:00 pm; edited 11 times in total | |  | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Aug 31, 2005 10:42 pm Post subject: U.S. official in case of ex-AIPAC men |
| Pollack definitely had friendly relations with Israel as the article from the 'Washington Report on Middle East Affairs' conveys via the following URL:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/02/13/neocons-concentrate-on-promoting-u-s-iran-war.php
The following URL conveys some interesting info as well (about Saban and the pro-Israel Brookings Institution which Pollack has been associated with):
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2004/11/21/israel-buys-another-piece-of-washington.php
Will check it out further with additional contacts...
Ray wrote:
I wonder if it could be learned who funds Saban and who funded Pollack's mischievous book
Insert paste of exchange below:
My questions: Is it possible that Israelis helped fund Pollack's famous book on having to make war on Iraq? Someone told me they finance the Saban center at Brookings. do you know about that?
===================================
Following is an article from JTA: The Global News Service of the Jewish People. For in-depth coverage of the latest developments affecting Jews all over the world, click: www.jta.org
Prominent Mideast analyst says he's
U.S. official in case of ex-AIPAC men
By: Matthew E. Berger
WASHINGTON, Aug. 29 (JTA) Mideast analyst Kenneth Pollack is one of two U.S. government officials referenced in the indictment against two former staffers of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, JTA has learned.
But Pollack, who was a staffer on President Clinton’s National Security Council, said he didn’t give the AIPAC staffers any classified information. Pollack also said the information that Steve Rosen, AIPAC’s former director of foreign policy issues, is accused of passing on to a reporter could not have come from him.
“I believe I am USGO-1,” Pollack told JTA on Monday, using a term in the indictment for U.S. Government Official No. 1.
A second source, speaking on condition of anonymity, has verified the information.
Neither Pollack nor the other unnamed government official — identified by sources as David Satterfield, a former deputy assistant secretary of state — has been charged with a crime. That has raised questions about the government’s case against Rosen, former AIPAC Iran analyst Keith Weissman and Larry Franklin, a former Pentagon analyst accused of passing classified information to the AIPAC staffers.
The three men pled not guilty earlier this month, and their trial is set for January.
Supporters of Rosen and Weissman in the Jewish community argue that if the people who allegedly gave them the sensitive material aren’t in trouble, then the information Rosen and Weissman are accused of passing to journalists and three officials at the Israeli Embassy in Washington can hardly warrant their prosecution.
Pollack left government in March 2001 and today is director of research at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy. Satterfield recently was promoted to deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.
Pollack confirmed he had lunch with Rosen and Weissman in December 2000 and discussed U.S. policy in Iraq.
“I don’t remember the lunch and don’t remember anything about the lunch,” Pollack said. “But they know I had lunch with Steve and Keith, and I don’t deny it.”
According to the indictment, Rosen spoke with an unnamed reporter after the lunch and gave classified information about policy options and internal government deliberations.
The indictment says Pollack had access to the classified information Rosen allegedly discussed with the journalist, but doesn’t say Pollack gave the information to the lobbyists.
That’s a sharp contrast to the language regarding Satterfield, who is expressly said to have discussed classified information with Rosen.
The sequence of events is part of a charge of conspiracy to communicate national defense information brought against Rosen and Weissman earlier this month. Pollack said he could not have given the two AIPAC staffers any classified information, and the indictment doesn’t suggest it either.
The new revelations are likely to intensify speculation in Washington that Rosen and Weissman are being targeted for conducting the normal Washington practice of trading sensitive information.
The two men’s interaction with Pollack and Satterfield is believed to be central to the prosecutors’ case that Rosen and Weissman engaged in a pattern of seeking classified information and disseminating it to journalists and the Israeli government.
Pollack, the author of two books on U.S. policy in the Middle East and a regular commentator on CNN, said he has met with the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the eastern district of Virginia, and believes he’s not a subject of the investigation. State Department officials said Satterfield has been told the same thing.
A spokeswoman at the U.S, Attorney’s Office had no comment. Rosen’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, was unavailable for comment.
Pollack said that, according to information he has been given, Rosen spoke with an unnamed journalist after meeting with Pollack, telling the journalist that he had received from a U.S. government official an eight-point plan for regime change in Iraq. He then gave a broad description of the plan.
“There was never an eight-point plan for regime change in Iraq,” Pollack said Monday.
Pollack said he may have given Rosen and Weissman the same “talking points” on American regime-change policy that he gave to other lobbyists and Middle East policy wonks, but did not lay out a specific plan.
Because the meeting occurred just a month before the end of the Clinton administration, little work was being done on the issue until President Bush came to office.
Pollack said the talking points he gave Rosen and Weissman didn’t include sensitive information. Rosen is not accused in the indictment of knowingly giving classified information to a third party in 2000, as he is on other occasions.
But Pollack suggests the meeting he had with Rosen and Weissman was similar to others he held with numerous parties interested in the administration’s Middle East agenda.
Pollack said he can not imagine he gave classified information to Rosen and Weissman.
“I had a standard repertory of lines that I gave,” he said. “I knew what was kosher and not.”
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Treason at a high level: Pentagon Zionists, AIPAC and Israel:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2004/09/08/treason-in-high-places-pentagon-zionists-aipac-and-israel.php
Last edited by Alpha on Fri Apr 20, 2007 8:08 pm; edited 5 times in total | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Sep 02, 2005 12:23 am Post subject: U.S. Diplomat Is Named in AIPAC Secrets Case |
| U.S. Diplomat Is Named in AIPAC Secrets Case
This is the same Satterfield (a Jew) who has helped to continue the cover-up of Israel's treacherous attack on the USS Liberty ( http://www.ussliberty.com ) as he wouldn't allow Captain Ward Boston's declaration (which James Bamford read at the USS Liberty panel discussion at the State Department which can be viewed via the link at the bottom of www.irmep.org ) to be added to the historical record at the State Department (the Office of the Historian at the State Department is a Jew as well - Mark Susser - as he can be seen cutting off the USS Liberty survivors in the same video of the US State Department panel discussion which can be viewed via accessing the link near the bottom of www.irmep.org):
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.nytimes.com
August 18, 2005
U.S. Diplomat Is Named in Secrets Case
By DAVID JOHNSTON and JAMES RISEN
WASHINGTON, Aug. 17 - The second-highest diplomat at the United States Embassy in Baghdad is one of the anonymous government officials cited in an Aug. 4 indictment as having provided classified information to an employee of a pro-Israel lobbying group, people who have been officially briefed on the case said Wednesday.
The diplomat, David M. Satterfield, was identified in the indictment as a United States government official, "USGO-2," the people briefed on the matter said. In early 2002, USGO-2 discussed secret national security matters in two meetings with Steven J. Rosen, who has since been dismissed as a top lobbyist for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, known as Aipac, who has been charged in the case.
The indictment said that Mr. Rosen met USGO-2 on Jan. 18, 2002, and March 12, 2002, but provides few details about the encounters. The indictment does not describe Mr. Satterfield's activities in detail nor does it specify what classified information the diplomat discussed with the lobbyist. The meetings were also confirmed by documents, people who have been briefed said. These people asked not to be identified because many of the matters related to the case are classified.
The indictment does not accuse USGO-2 of any wrongdoing, nor does it indicate whether he might have been authorized to talk with the lobbyist. Mr. Satterfield is not believed to be the subject of a continuing investigation. He is the first higher-ranking government official to be caught up in the criminal inquiry.
Mr. Satterfield's role in the inquiry has been known within a small circle at the State Department. Before he was sent to Baghdad, officials at the State Department asked the Justice Department whether the investigation posed any impediment to his assignment in Iraq, someone who has been officially briefed said. Officials at the State Department were advised that he could take the job.
Mr. Satterfield is one of the department's rising stars. Before his assignment as deputy chief of mission in Baghdad, Mr. Satterfield, 50, held several jobs in the Clinton and Bush administrations as a Middle East expert. He was ambassador to Lebanon from 1998 to 2001, and was confirmed by the Senate as ambassador to Jordan in 2004, although he never served in that position.
Current and former colleagues say that Mr. Satterfield, who went to Iraq earlier this year, chose the Baghdad post because it posed a bigger professional challenge than Jordan. The United States ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, has strong political credentials but, colleagues said, Mr. Satterfield was brought in to provide managerial strength.
Mr. Satterfield did not respond to an e-mail message asking about his role in the case, and one State Department spokesman said that Mr. Satterfield would not discuss the matter. Sean McCormack, the spokesman for the department, referred legal questions about Mr. Satterfield to the Justice Department.
He added, "David is a fine public servant who has served the American people for many years and is continuing to do so under difficult working conditions."
The investigation is one of the more puzzling national security cases in recent years, focusing on the interactions between foreign affairs lobbyists and officials of the United States and other governments, who over the years, have routinely traded gossip and sometimes classified information. Under the Justice Department's theories of the case, it is no longer clear whether such conversations are legally permissible.
Current and former colleagues praised Mr. Satterfield as a seasoned and careful diplomat. "I've known David Satterfield for 20 years, and he is thoroughly professional, and takes his responsibilities very seriously," said Dennis Ross, the former chief Middle East negotiator for the United States and a longtime State Department official. "He has always acted solely in American interests." Martin Indyk, Mr. Satterfield's former boss in the Clinton administration, both at the National Security Council at the White House and at the State Department, said the idea that Mr. Satterfield leaked classified information is "absurd."
"The way he speaks is crafted for a public audience," Mr. Indyk said. "He has this facility for talking publicly without saying anything sensitive. So the idea that he would be leaking classified information is preposterous.
"He has an unblemished record as the consummate diplomat and as a highly effective policy maker as well. He is among the cadre of the best and the brightest in the Near East Bureau. He dealt with Aipac, because it was part of his job to deal with Aipac."
Mr. Rosen and another former lobbyist, Keith Weissman, have been charged with conspiring to communicate national defense secrets to journalists and a foreign government, which officials have identified as Israel. A third person, Lawrence A. Franklin, a former Pentagon analyst and Iran expert, has also been charged, accused of turning over information to the two lobbyists.
At an arraignment on Tuesday in Federal District Court in Alexandria, Va., all three pleaded not guilty and were released on their own recognizance. Judge T. S. Ellis III set a trial date for Jan. 3.
Only Mr. Rosen met with USGO-2, according to the indictment. At the time of the meetings, Mr. Satterfield was the deputy assistant secretary for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs, which made him the State Department's second-ranking official for the Middle East.
Their meetings are listed as overt acts in a conspiracy to illegally communicate national defense secrets to a foreign government. After Mr. Rosen's first meeting with USGO-2 on Jan. 18, 2002, the indictment said, a memorandum containing the information that Mr. Rosen had obtained was sent to other Aipac employees. The indictment did not indicate who wrote the memorandum, but said that it "contained classified information provided by USGO-2."
The two men met again on March 12, the indictment said. At their second meeting, they talked about Al Qaeda, the indictment said, without saying what aspect of the terror network was discussed. On March 14, Mr. Rosen disclosed to an unidentified foreign official, "FO-2," the information that he had heard from USGO-2, the indictment said.
Prosecutors have charged that Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman improperly obtained classified information from Mr. Franklin, Mr. Satterfield and two other American officials. The two officials whose identities remain unclear are referred to in the indictment as "USGO-1," and a Defense Department employee identified as "DOD-B." Although USGO-1 has not been publicly identified, the people who have been officially briefed said that person was no longer in the government.
As the Aipac's director of foreign policy issues, Mr. Rosen was a well-known figure in foreign policy circles related to the Middle East, inside and outside the government. He helped Aipac set its lobbying goals and maintained relationships with powerful conservatives in the Bush administration. Mr. Weissman was a senior Middle East analyst.
Several Middle East experts noted that Mr. Satterfield was never regarded as particularly supportive of Aipac's views on Israel. One analyst at an independent consulting firm recalled attending a conference Aipac held for Congressional staff members, during which Mr. Satterfield talked about United States policy toward Israel. She recalled that Mr. Satterfield was met with a mixed reception because his comments were not in line with Aipac's views.
Last edited by Alpha on Fri Sep 02, 2005 2:56 pm; edited 1 time in total | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Sep 02, 2005 3:11 am Post subject: |
| http://www.waynemadsenreport.com
August 31, 2005 -- A convergence of investigations: AIPAC and ATC. As reported previously on WMR, federal investigators are poring over wiretap transcripts and other intelligence that link the Larry Franklin/Rosen/Weissman AIPAC investigation to the investigation of who in the White House leaked the name of Valerie Plame Wilson and her Brewster Jennings & Associates non-official cover company to journalists, including Robert Novak. According to intelligence insiders, a new nexus of the investigation is the intelligence relationship discovered between AIPAC and the American Turkish Council (ATC). As with the AIPAC and Mossad penetration of the Pentagon, a similar ATC and Turkish intelligence penetration of the Defense Department was discovered and it reportedly involved some of the same players involved in the AIPAC probe, including former Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy and Plans Douglas Feith.
In addition, two former U.S. ambassadors to Turkey -- Marc Grossman (who has since joined the Cohen Group of former Defense Secretary William Cohen) and Eric Edelman, who replaced Feith at the Pentagon, were identified in FBI wiretaps as key players with the ATC. The AIPAC and ATC link involves individuals who profit from the use of Turkey as a base for nuclear materials proliferation, including fissile material from the former Soviet Central Asian states, and heroin distribution from Afghanistan and other countries to Europe and North America. The AIPAC-ATC links also involved persons and businesses tied to the A. Q. Khan nuclear proliferation network that was headquartered in Pakistan but had operational offices in Turkey. Those links, involving Israeli citizen and nuclear smuggler Asher Karni and Turkish Jewish businessman Zeki Bilmen and his New Jersey-based Giza Technologies, were first reported by WMR on August 1.
Another company that has reportedly been making entrees to the ATC-AIPAC influence peddling consortium is the Ashcroft Group, a firm set up in May 2005 by former Attorney General John Ashcroft to help countries with law enforcement and counter-terrorism. Ashcroft's partner in the Ashcroft Group is Juleanna Glover Weiss, who worked for Ashcroft, Steve Forbes, Rudolph Giuliani, and Vice President Dick Cheney. As one intelligence insider put the AIPAC-ATC links, "these have nothing to do with religion or politics, just pure greed." | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Sep 03, 2005 6:22 pm Post subject: |
| One can listen to JINSA/CSP/PNAC (Israel first) Neocon Richard Perle lying to Congressman Walter ('Freedom Fries') Jones about the 'A Clean Break'/war for Israel agenda that esteemed US intelligence author James Bamford discusses on pages 261-269/321 of his 'A Pretext for War' book:
http://gorillaintheroom.blogspot.com/2005/04/operating-off-different-agenda.html | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue Jul 31, 2007 5:47 pm Post subject: |
| Keep in mind that Pollack has also been associated with the AIPAC espionage case as well:
Jerusalem Post: Mideast analyst Pollack named in AIPAC indictment
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/08/31/prominent-mideast-analyst-associated-with-aipac-espionage.php
CBS had him on the 'Evening News' again last night as he is all for Americans to continue dying/getting horribly maimed for Israel in Iraq.
PS: The Saban Center at Brookings is also named after Haim Saban whose main issue is Israel (see http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2004/09/10/us-billionaire-i-m-a-one-issue-guy-israel.php ). Isn't it interesting how Brookings has proposed the 'soft partition' plan for Iraq (which seems to be in accordance with Israeli Oded Yinon's 'divide and conquer'
plan for Israel's enemies as mentioned by Dr. Stephen Sniegoski in his 'Israeli Origins of Bush II's War' via the following URL):
Israeli Origins of Bush II's War:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/04/26/the-israeli-origins-of-bush-ii-s-war.php
Hoping that the soon to be released Mearsheimer/Walt book (can currently be pre-ordered at Amazon.com via doing a search there for 'Mearsheimer') will address the above as well.
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http://www.consortiumnews.com/Print/2007/073007.html
The NYT's New Pro-War Propaganda
By Robert Parry
July 30, 2007
No need to wait until September. It’s already obvious how George W. Bush and his still-influential supporters in Washington will sell an open-ended U.S. military occupation of Iraq – just the way they always have: the war finally has turned the corner and withdrawal now would betray the troops by snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
At one time, the Iraq story line was how many schoolrooms had been painted or how well the government security forces were doing. Now there are new silver linings being detected that will justify a positive progress report in September – and the U.S. news media is again ready to play its credulous part.
President Bush signaled the happy-news judgment of his hand-picked commander, Gen. David Petraeus, in a round of confident public appearances over the past two weeks. With his effusive praise of “David,” as Bush called the general at a White House news conference, the President acted like a smug student arriving for a test with the answers tucked in his pocket.
Another key element of the coming propaganda campaign was previewed on the op-ed page of the New York Times on July 30 as Michael E. O’Hanlon and Kenneth M. Pollack of the Brookings Institution portrayed themselves as tough critics of the Bush administration who, after a visit to Iraq, now must face the facts: Bush’s “surge” is working.
“As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily ‘victory’ but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with,” O’Hanlon and Pollack wrote in an article entitled “A War We Just Might Win.”
Yet the authors – and the New York Times – failed to tell readers the full story about these supposed skeptics: far from grizzled peaceniks, O’Hanlon and Pollack have been longtime cheerleaders for a larger U.S. military occupying force in Iraq.
Indeed, Pollack, a former CIA analyst, was a leading advocate for invading Iraq in the first place. He published The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq in September 2002, just as the Bush administration was gearing up its marketing push for going to war.
British journalist Robert Fisk called Pollack’s book the “most meretricious contribution to this utterly fraudulent [war] ‘debate’ in the United States.” (Meretricious, by the way, refers to something that is based on pretense, deception or insincerity.)
Neocon ‘Full Monte’
Pollack’s influential book offered the “full monte” neoconservative vision for remaking the Middle East, with the Iraq invasion as only the first step in the transformation. Ousting Saddam Hussein “would sever the ‘linkage’ between the Iraq issue and the Arab-Israeli conflict,” Pollack wrote. “It would remove an important source of anti-Americanism.”
But Pollack was wrong in his predictions. If anything, the Iraq War has deepened Arab-Israeli animosities while enflaming the region’s anti-Americanism.
Also, in Fisk’s view, “Pollack’s argument for war was breathtakingly amoral. War would be the right decision, it seemed, not because it was morally necessary but because we would win. War was now a viable and potentially successful policy option.
“It would free up Washington’s ‘foreign policy agenda,’ presumably allowing it to invade another country or two where American vital interests would be discovered. [Pollack’s] narrative – in essence an Israeli one – is quite simple: deprived of the support of one of the Arab world’s most powerful nations, the Palestinians would be further weakened in their struggle against Israeli occupation.” [See Robert Fisk's The Great War for Civilization]
After the U.S. invasion of Iraq failed to locate the promised weapons of mass destruction – and a stubborn Iraqi insurgency emerged – Pollack offered an apology for his high-profile role in promoting the war.
In fall 2004, Pollack told an interviewer for the New York Times magazine, “I made a mistake based on faulty intelligence. Of course, I feel guilty about it. I feel awful. … I’m sorry; I’m sorry!” [NYT Magazine, Oct. 24, 2004]
But now Pollack – having re-positioned himself from war booster to war critic – can reinvent himself again as a grudging convert to the wisdom of Bush’s war strategy, without either him or the Times editors alerting readers to this reverse metamorphosis.
This idea of a critic reluctantly admitting the wisdom of a neoconservative strategy has long been one of the neocons’ favorite propaganda tactics dating back to the Cold War days of the 1980s.
Then, a common neocon refrain was that “even the liberal New Republic” supported the Nicaraguan contra rebels. That endorsement supposedly lent the contra cause greater weight because the New Republic had a historic reputation as a leftist magazine.
In reality, however, the New Republic had been taken over by neocon Martin Peretz in the 1970s, and he had turned it into a home for neocon and right-wing pundits, such as Charles Krauthammer and Fred Barnes.
Yet, if Americans didn’t know those details, they could be influenced by an out-of-date impression, much as many people still recall Brookings as a “liberal” think tank, an image that Brookings has worked quietly to shed since it started moving rightward in the 1980s, bringing in more centrist, center-right and neoconservative analysts.
Surge Backer
In 2002-03, Pollack’s Brookings colleague, O’Hanlon, was more skeptical about the Bush administration’s case for invading Iraq than Pollack was. For instance, O’Hanlon correctly doubted the evidence of links between Hussein’s secular government and the Islamic extremists of al-Qaeda.
But O’Hanlon carefully covered all his bases, arguing that “there is a case for overthrowing Mr. Hussein if we cannot re-establish and improve the inspections and disarmament process in Iraq. But it has more to do with the region’s security than with any unlikely Hussein-al-Qaeda link.” [Baltimore Sun, Sept. 26, 2002]
Since the failure to find WMD stockpiles and the stumbling occupation, O’Hanlon and Pollack have constructed reputations as critics of Bush’s war strategy not by objecting to its imperial impulses or the immorality of invading a country at peace but by hitting the administration for an inadequate commitment of troops and resources.
In other words, they have fit themselves in with many Washington insiders who still maintain that the invasion was a fine and noble idea; the only problem was the incompetent occupation.
Along those lines in early 2007, O’Hanlon emerged as a defender of Bush’s plan to send more than 20,000 additional U.S. troops to Iraq. On Jan. 14, he published a Washington Post op-ed entitled, “A Skeptic's Case For the Surge.”
O’Hanlon’s chief pro-surge argument was to hoist Iraq War opponents on their own petard – their supposed complaint that Bush’s failure was in not sending enough troops and not giving the military the necessary tools.
“On the military surge itself, critics of the administration’s Iraq policy have consistently argued that the United States never deployed enough soldiers and Marines to Iraq,” O’Hanlon wrote. “Now Bush has essentially conceded his critics’ point … It would … be counterintuitive for the president’s critics to prevent him from carrying out the very policy they have collectively recommended.”
While perhaps a clever debating point, O’Hanlon’s argument is disingenuous. It is not accurate to say that war critics “collectively” wanted Bush to invade with a larger army and then to throttle Iraq with a bigger occupation force.
Many – indeed probably most – war critics opposed any invasion and any occupation, basing their objections on legal and moral grounds, noting that international law prohibits aggressive wars and that Iraq was not threatening the United States.
It’s also disingenuous today for O’Hanlon and Pollack to present themselves as harsh critics of Bush’s Iraq War when, in fact, they either advocated the invasion (in Pollack’s case) or eagerly promoted the surge (as O’Hanlon did). At minimum, they should have given a fuller accounting of their past positions.
To read their op-ed in the New York Times, an unsuspecting reader would get the impression that these two hard-boiled anti-war skeptics have finally been won over to Bush’s wisdom by the strength of the evidence. That simply isn’t the case; they were predisposed to Bush’s position to begin with.
The reality appears to be that these two on-and-off war supporters were given an administration-sponsored tour of Iraq with the expectation that they would return to Washington with glowing reports about the war’s progress, made all the more believable by them playing up – or puffing up – their credentials as war critics.
In that case, Mission Accomplished.
[For other examples of the U.S. press corps’ misleading coverage of Iraq, see our new book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush.]
While one might yawn about the predictability of the Bush administration and its mouthpieces misleading the public once again, readers of the New York Times might reasonably expect that – given the newspaper’s role aiding and abetting the march into this disastrous war five years ago – that the editors at least might insist on a more accurate ID for these two “experts.”
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there.
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http://www.nytimes. com/2007/ 07/30/opinion/ 30pollack. html?_r=4&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
NY Times: July 30, 2007
A WAR WE JUST MIGHT WIN
By MICHAEL E. OHANLON and KENNETH M. POLLACK
*Michael E. OHanlon is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Kenneth M. Pollack is the director of research at the Saban Center for
Middle East Policy at Brookings.
VIEWED from Iraq, where we just spent eight days meeting with American and
Iraqi military and civilian personnel, the political debate in Washington
is surreal. The Bush administration has over four years lost essentially
all credibility. Yet now the administrations critics, in part as a result,
seem unaware of the significant changes taking place.
Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are
finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two
analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administrations miserable
handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential
to produce not necessarily victory but a sustainable stability that both
we and the Iraqis could live with.
After the furnace-like heat, the first thing you notice when you land in
Baghdad is the morale of our troops. In previous trips to Iraq we often
found American troops angry and frustrated many sensed they had the wrong
strategy, were using the wrong tactics and were risking their lives in
pursuit of an approach that could not work.
Today, morale is high. The soldiers and marines told us they feel that
they now have a superb commander in Gen. David Petraeus; they are
confident in his strategy, they see real results, and they feel now they
have the numbers needed to make a real difference.
Everywhere, Army and Marine units were focused on securing the Iraqi
population, working with Iraqi security units, creating new political and
economic arrangements at the local level and providing basic services
electricity, fuel, clean water and sanitation to the people. Yet in each
place, operations had been appropriately tailored to the specific needs of
the community. As a result, civilian fatality rates are down roughly a
third since the surge began though they remain very high, underscoring how
much more still needs to be done.
In Ramadi, for example, we talked with an outstanding Marine captain whose
company was living in harmony in a complex with a (largely Sunni) Iraqi
police company and a (largely Shiite) Iraqi Army unit. He and his men had
built an Arab-style living room, where he met with the local Sunni sheiks
all formerly allies of Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups who were now
competing to secure his friendship.
In Baghdads Ghazaliya neighborhood, which has seen some of the worst
sectarian combat, we walked a street slowly coming back to life with
stores and shoppers. The Sunni residents were unhappy with the nearby
police checkpoint, where Shiite officers reportedly abused them, but they
seemed genuinely happy with the American soldiers and a mostly Kurdish
Iraqi Army company patrolling the street. The local Sunni militia even had
agreed to confine itself to its compound once the Americans and Iraqi
units arrived.
We traveled to the northern cities of Tal Afar and Mosul. This is an
ethnically rich area, with large numbers of Sunni Arabs, Kurds and
Turkmens. American troop levels in both cities now number only in the
hundreds because the Iraqis have stepped up to the plate. Reliable police
officers man the checkpoints in the cities, while Iraqi Army troops cover
the countryside. A local mayor told us his greatest fear was an overly
rapid American departure from Iraq. All across the country, the
dependability of Iraqi security forces over the long term remains a major
question mark.
But for now, things look much better than before. American advisers told
us that many of the corrupt and sectarian Iraqi commanders who once
infested the force have been removed. The American high command assesses
that more than three-quarters of the Iraqi Army battalion commanders in
Baghdad are now reliable partners (at least for as long as American forces
remain in Iraq).
In addition, far more Iraqi units are well integrated in terms of
ethnicity and religion. The Iraqi Armys highly effective Third Infantry
Division started out as overwhelmingly Kurdish in 2005. Today, it is 45
percent Shiite, 28 percent Kurdish, and 27 percent Sunni Arab. In the
past, few Iraqi units could do more than provide a few jundis (soldiers)
to put a thin Iraqi face on largely American operations. Today, in only a
few sectors did we find American commanders complaining that their Iraqi
formations were useless something that was the rule, not the exception, on
a previous trip to Iraq in late 2005.
The additional American military formations brought in as part of the
surge, General Petraeuss determination to hold areas until they are truly
secure before redeploying units, and the increasing competence of the
Iraqis has had another critical effect: no more whack-a-mole, with
insurgents popping back up after the Americans leave.
In war, sometimes its important to pick the right adversary, and in Iraq
we seem to have done so. A major factor in the sudden change in American
fortunes has been the outpouring of popular animus against Al Qaeda and
other Salafist groups, as well as (to a lesser extent) against Moktada
al-Sadrs Mahdi Army.
These groups have tried to impose Shariah law, brutalized average Iraqis
to keep them in line, killed important local leaders and seized young
women to marry off to their loyalists. The result has been that in the
last six months Iraqis have begun to turn on the extremists and turn to
the Americans for security and help. The most important and best-known
example of this is in Anbar Province, which in less than six months has
gone from the worst part of Iraq to the best (outside the Kurdish areas).
Today the Sunni sheiks there are close to crippling Al Qaeda and its
Salafist allies. Just a few months ago, American marines were fighting for
every yard of Ramadi; last week we strolled down its streets without body
armor.
Another surprise was how well the coalitions new Embedded Provincial
Reconstruction Teams are working. Wherever we found a fully staffed team,
we also found local Iraqi leaders and businessmen cooperating with it to
revive the local economy and build new political structures. Although
much more needs to be done to create jobs, a new emphasis on microloans
and small-scale projects was having some success where the previous aid
programs often built white elephants.
In some places where we have failed to provide the civilian manpower to
fill out the reconstruction teams, the surge has still allowed the
military to fashion its own advisory groups from battalion, brigade and
division staffs. We talked to dozens of military officers who before the
war had known little about governance or business but were now ably
immersing themselves in projects to provide the average Iraqi with a
decent life.
Outside Baghdad, one of the biggest factors in the progress so far has
been the efforts to decentralize power to the provinces and local
governments. But more must be done. For example, the Iraqi National
Police, which are controlled by the Interior Ministry, remain mostly a
disaster. In response, many towns and neighborhoods are standing up local
police forces, which generally prove more effective, less corrupt and less
sectarian. The coalition has to force the warlords in Baghdad to allow the
creation of neutral security forces beyond their control.
In the end, the situation in Iraq remains grave. In particular, we still
face huge hurdles on the political front. Iraqi politicians of all stripes
continue to dawdle and maneuver for position against one another when
major steps towards reconciliation or at least accommodation are needed.
This cannot continue indefinitely. Otherwise, once we begin to downsize,
important communities may not feel committed to the status quo, and Iraqi
security forces may splinter along ethnic and religious lines.
How much longer should American troops keep fighting and dying to build a
new Iraq while Iraqi leaders fail to do their part? And how much longer
can we wear down our forces in this mission? These haunting questions
underscore the reality that the surge cannot go on forever. But there is
enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress
should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008.
__._,_.___ | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Aug 02, 2007 7:33 am Post subject: |
| From: "Jeff Blankfort"
Date: Wed, 01 Aug 2007 17:23:20 -0700
Subject: Forward: AIPAC Case: Bush Officials May Face New Subpoenas
Why do I have the feeling that this whole affair, while serious in the beginning, has become a charade?-JB
http://www.forward.com/articles/11284/
Bush Officials May Face New Subpoenas
Nathan Guttman |
Forward/ Fri. Aug 03, 2007
Arlington, Va. - High-profile Bush administration officials could be called to the witness stand if two deposed pro-Israel lobbyists have their way in a court case that is moving toward a January 2008 trial date.
Lawyers for two former lobbyists at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee have asked federal judge T.S. Ellis III to subpoena the highest-ranking foreign policy players in the administration, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, Hadley’s deputy, Elliott Abrams, and other top officials from the White House, State Department and Pentagon.
The two Aipac lobbyists, Keith Weissman and Steve Rosen, are on trial for allegedly receiving classified information from government officials and relaying it to diplomats, journalists and other Aipac staff members. Their attorneys are seeking testimony from Rice and others in order to make the case that passing on classified information to lobbyists was routine conduct in Washington. The prosecution filed a series of motions asking that all subpoenas for government officials be dismissed.
If the subpoenas are approved by the court, the Aipac trial has the potential of turning into a major embarrassment for the Bush administration, which has made fighting leaks in the government one of its policy cornerstones. Having the most senior members of the administration testify under oath about conversations with lobbyists in regard to classified information could shatter what is left from the anti-leak posture the administration has adopted in its early years.
Last Tuesday, the judge moved closer to setting a trial date, securing January 14 — three-and-a- half years after the case first broke out — as the target for beginning the jury trial.
“We’ve got to get this done,” said Ellis in the hearing, while prodding the prosecution to speed up procedures. “This case has languished for quite a long time.”
Currently, the case’s closed-door discussions have reviewed the classified information that will be put forward. After that is completed, the proposed list of witnesses is expected to take center stage in the pretrial hearings.
The list contains some 30 witnesses, few of them directly involved in specific events mentioned in the indictment. Such is the subpoena requested for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. When Rice was national security adviser during the first term of the Bush administration, she held a White House meeting with Aipac’s executive director, Howard Kohr, and with Rosen, who was then the lobby’s policy director. During the meeting, Rice allegedly revealed information that was later conveyed to Rosen and Weissman by former Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin, who already has admitted to passing on classified information as part of a plea agreement with the prosecution.
The purpose of having the government officials testify, defense sources said, is to prove to the jury that leaking classified information to Aipac members, as well as to other lobbyists, journalists and diplomats, was not only standard procedure but also a pattern of behavior directed from the highest ranks in the administration.“We want to show it was authorized from the top,” a defense source said.
In addition to members of the State Department and Pentagon, the list may include current senior staff members of Aipac, though defense sources would not confirm that they are actually on the final list.
Due to the nature of the case, which centers on the use and proliferation of classified information, the court is required to approve each of the witnesses, and the topics about which he or she will be asked, in order to ensure that classified information is not revealed during the testimonies.
The government prosecution has filed motions arguing that the subpoenas are not relevant to the case. But Ellis has given some indication that he sees things otherwise. During one of the closed-door hearings, Ellis said that testimonies dealing with the nature of the relationship between Aipac and America’s government are “flatly relevant to this case,” since it is important for determining the defendants’ state of mind when they encountered classified information.
It is already clear that court will not allow the entire witness list presented by the prosecution, since Ellis is attempting to keep the trial short and not all the officials requested are relevant to Aipac issues.
Meanwhile, as the trial date was postponed yet again, the legal bills of the defendants have reached a record high. According to unofficial estimates within the defense team, both defendants have already incurred $7 million in legal fees a figure that might grow to $10 million by the time the case is over, making this trial one of the costliest in American history.
An agreement reached several months ago between Aipac and lawyers for Weissman ensures that the lobby will cover Weissman’s legal costs. A similar agreement is still being negotiated between Aipac and Rosen’s lawyers.
Fri. Aug 03, 2007
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