| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Nov 18, 2005 10:35 am Post subject: |
| One can see Feith near the top of www.nowarforisrael.com
Pentagon agrees to probe Feith's role in Iraq intel
Thu Nov 17, 2005 8:42 PM ET
By David Morgan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon's inspector general has agreed to review the prewar intelligence activities of former U.S. defense undersecretary Douglas Feith, a main architect of the Iraq war, congressional officials said on Thursday.
News of the Defense Department probe comes at a time of bitter political debate over whether President George W. Bush misled the American people with prewar intelligence. The increasingly biter dispute has pitted the president and his top advisers against lawmakers including some from Bush's own Republican Party.
Democrats have accused Feith of manipulating information from sources including discredited Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi to suggest links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, which masterminded the September 11, 2001, attacks.
Bush and other top administration officials cited alleged ties between Iraq and al Qaeda as a justification for military action. But the September 11 commission later reported that no collaborative relationship existed between the two.
The inspector general's office informed the Senate on October 19 that it would undertake a review after receiving separate requests from the Republican chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the ranking Democrat on the Senate Committee on Armed Services, officials said.
Congressional officials expect the review to look at whether Feith and his staff bypassed the CIA by giving the White House uncorroborated intelligence that sought to make a case for war in the months leading up to the 2003 Iraq invasion.
Feith, who was the Pentagon's policy chief until he left the Defense Department for the private sector earlier this year, was not immediately available for comment.
Officials said the Pentagon's inspector general told the Senate its review would begin sometime in November. One official estimated the probe could take at least six months.
"We're going to try to expedite it as much as possible," said Republican Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, the Senate intelligence panel chairman who asked the inspector general on September 9 for a review of Feith's Office of Special Plans.
"The IG knows we are very eager to get this done but he wants to get it done right," he told Reuters.
Roberts said his request had been incorporated with a later one from Democratic Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, who asked acting Defense Department Inspector General Tom Gimble in a September 22 letter for a broad probe encompassing all elements of Feith's Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy.
Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman said in an e-mail on Thursday that the inspector general's office was still discussing the requests with committee staff.
Defense officials have defended Feith, saying no credible evidence of wrongdoing by him or his staff has ever been discovered. They also say Democratic lawmakers never responded to a Pentagon challenge to produce incriminating evidence.
A copy of Levin's letter to Gimble, which was obtained by Reuters, asks the inspector general to consider 10 questions including whether Feith's office undercut the intelligence community by providing the White House with its own analysis that went beyond the scope of the underlying intelligence.
Levin also wants the inspector general to look into whether Feith misled Congress in January 2004 by providing oversight committees with reports dealing with the credibility of prewar intelligence on Iraq.
Roberts' office declined to provide a copy of his written request to the inspector general.
A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll this week said 63 percent of Americans oppose Bush's handling of the Iraq war, and 52 percent say troops should be pulled out now or within 12 months. | |  | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Nov 19, 2005 3:39 am Post subject: Faking the case ag Syria: Pushing the next neo con war |
| http://www.nowarforisrael.com
http://nomorewarforisrael.blogspot.com
JINSA/CSP/PNAC Neocons moving fast for action against Syria:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/10/21/jinsa-csp-pnac-neocons-moving-fast-for-action-against-syria.php
From: rbleier@igc.org
To: "rbleier" <rbleier@igc.org>
Subject: T.Schuh: Faking the case ag Syria: Pushing the next neo con war Date: Fri, 18 Nov 2005 22:19:49 -0500
I've snipped a long section, but kept the part about super-Zionist, Jack Abramoff who is (was?) apparently involved in planned regime change in Syria which is scheduled for next year.
The part about Mehlis is important. From the looks of it, Kofi Annan knew Mehlis would do a hatchet job on Syria, but was powerless to go against the US.
Yet another example of pernicious Zionist influence in getting us into more disasters. You'd think out of simple self interest, US Zionists would say, enough already. But since it's perceived to be good for Israel, they ignore US interests-- not to mention the rest of the world's. -RB
www.counterpunch.org
November 18, 2005
Mehlis's Murky Past; US and Israeli Proxies Pushing the Next Neo-Con War
Faking the Case Against Syria
By TRISH SCHUH
Another slam dunk forgery is being used to convict Syria. The United Nations' Detlev Mehlis inquiry into the murder of Lebanon's former Prime Minister Rafiq Hairri depends on a central witness, Zuhir Ibn Mohamed Said Saddik, who has faced accusations of being a swindler and embezzler. Der Spiegel exposed Saddik's brags of "becoming a millionaire" from his testimony to the Mehlis Commission. Saddik was referred to the Mehlis Commission by Syrian regime critic Rifaat Assad, the uncle of current Syrian President Bashar Assad. Rifaat has been lobbying the Bush administration to become the president of Syria in the event his nephew Bashar is ousted.
The record of the UN's investigator Mehlis does not inspire faith in his credibility. As Senior Public Prosecutor in the German Attorney General's office, Mehlis investigated the 1986 LaBelle Discotheque bombing in Berlin. Relying on alleged National Security Agency intercepts of coded messages between Tripoli and Libyan suspects in Germany (later revealed by former Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky as false telex signals generated by Mossad itself), Mehlis provided the 'irrefutable proof' of Libya's guilt that then justified Ronald Reagan's bombing of Libya.
In the case of the accusations against Syria, Mehlis's case revolves around a series of questionable phone conversations and intersecting calling card numbers allegedly dialled by the perpetrators. It contains no definitive forensics on the car bomb explosives used. Outside investigators have said it could have been RDX plastique, not TNT as Mehlis suggested in his report. The German Mercedes manufacturers were also perplexed at how Hariri's vehicle, reinforced by the heaviest steel-titanium alloy, was "melted by the force of the explosion," after-effects usually associated with high density DU munitions. The car bomb vehicle (stolen in Japan and never fully traced) was possibly driven by a suicide bomber, whose identity is still unknown. Mehlis's report then states: "Another only slightly less likely possibility is that of a remotely controlled device."
Mehlis conclusions on the case , due on December 15 could justify an attack on Syria, using the Hariri assassination as justification. But from Beirut to Damascus, the "Arab Spring" was a neocon forgery designed to destabilize the Levant and redraw the map of the middle east.
Near the Mohammad Al Amin Mosque of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in Beirut, I interviewed a founder of the Martyrs' Square tent city and asked about US-Israeli sponsorship of the 'Independence Intifadah'. Surrounded by red and white Lebanese flags, soldier Michael Sweiden of the Lebanese Forces emphasized he was Christian Lebanese.
"We love Israel", he told me. "Israel helps us. Israel is like our mother."
Years before its role in the so-called "Cedar Revolution" (a moniker coined by US Undersecretary of State Paula Dobriansky, a signatory to the Project for a New American Century), Israel awarded citizenship and grants of up to $10,000 to South Lebanon Army soldiers who collaborated with the Israeli Defense Forces during Lebanon's civil war. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz revealed, "Senior officials at Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's office were in touch with Lebanese leaders even before the current crisis." Backed by American and Israeli neocons, a Christian Lebanese Likud is proxying Israel's second invasion.
One example is the Lebanese Foundation for Peace, a self-styled "Government of Lebanon in Exile in Jerusalem" founded by former Lebanese Forces' military intelligence officer Nagi Najjar. Najjar, a CIA consultant, testified not so long ago in support of Ariel Sharon's "complete innocence" in the Sabra and Shatila affair against charges by Human Rights Watch and regional governments. Najjar has also paired with Mossad agent Yossef Bodansky while lobbying the U.S. congress to intervene in Hezbollah-dominated south Lebanon. His NGO, The Lebanese Foundation for Peace, endorsed the AIPAC-sponsored sanctions against Syria, known as the Syria Accountability / Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act of 2003. On his LFP website featuring an Israeli flag, Najjar's "government in exile" issued an official declaration; "We, the people of Free Lebanon, thank Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom for the campaign launched by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Afffairs aimed at ousting Syria from occupying Lebanon."
Another NGO of the Lebanese Likud is the United States Committee for a Free Lebanon. Its President, Ziad Abdel Nour is the son of wealthy Lebanese Minister of Parliament Khalil Abdel Nour. USCFL partners with designated "democratizers" such as the American Enterprise Institute (created by Lebanese-American William Baroody, Sr.), Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, Republican Jewish Coalition, Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, Middle East Forum, the Hudson Institute and kindred pro-Israel lobbies.
The USCFL hails former Lebanese president Amin Gemayel for signing a peace deal with Israel in 1983. (According to the UAE's late president Sheik Zayed bin sultan Al Nahyan, Saddam Hussein agreed to leave Iraq before the war in 2003 to halt the invasion. But Amin Gemayel, the mediator between Saddam and the US administration, wrongly informed the US that Hussein had rejected all offers of exile). Abdel Nour's other links include the World Lebanese Organization, which advocates Israel's re-occupation of south Lebanon. In 2000, he and neocon Daniel Pipes composed the policy paper "Ending Syria's Occupation of Lebanon: the US Role" and together co-author the Middle East Intelligence Bulletin. The bulletin is a project of the neocon Middle East Forum and is a frequent resource for American intelligence agencies. On November 2, 2005 Abdel Nour updated me on the Syrian crisis by phone.
Schuh: What is the future of Syria, of President Bashar Al Assad's situation?
Nour: Both the Syrian and Lebanese regimes will be changed- whether they like it or not- whether it's going to be a military coup or something else... and we are working on it. We know already exactly who's going to be the replacements. We're working on it with the Bush administration. This is a Nazi regime of 30 years, killing ministers, presidents and stuff like that. They must be removed. These guys who came to power, who rule by power, can only be removed by power. This is Machiavelli's power game. That's how it is. This is how geopolitics -- the war games, power games -- work. I know inside out how it works, because I come from a family of politicians for the last 60 years. Look, I have access to the top classified information from the CIA from all over the world. They call me, I advise them. I know exactly what's going on. And this will happen.
Q: So would they remove the entire Assad family?
A: Why not? Who is Bashar Al Assad?
Q: I didn't see forensic proof in the Mehlis report that would legally convict Assad of Hariri's death in a court of law.
A: I don't give a damn. I don't give a damn, frankly. This Bashar Al Assad-Emil Lahoud regime is going to go whether it's true or not. When we went to Iraq whether there were weapons of mass destruction or not, the key is -- we won. And Saddam is out! Whatever we want, will happen. Iran? We will not let Iran become a nuclear power. We'll find a way, we'll find an excuse- to get rid of Iran. And I don't care what the excuse is. There is no room for rogue states in the world. Whether we lie about it, or invent something, or we don't... I don't care. The end justifies the means. What's right? Might is right, might is right. That's it. Might is right.
Q: You sound just like Saddam. Those were his rules too.
A: So Saddam wanted to prove to the whole world he was strong? Well, we're stronger- he's out! He's finished. And Iran's going to be finished and every single Arab regime that's like this will be finished. Because there is no room for us capitalists and multinationalists in the world to operate with regimes like this. Its all about money. And power. And wealth... and democracy has to be spread around the world. Those who want to espouse globalization are going to make a lot of money, be happy, their families will be happy. And those who aren't going to play this game are going to be crushed, whether they like it or not! This is how we rule. And this is how it's going to be as long as you have people who think like me.
Q: When will this regime change take place?
A: Within 6 months, in both Lebanon and Syria.
Q: Some names of replacements?
A: It is classified. There are going to be replacements and we know who they are, but I cannot mention the names.
Q: Will this be done peacefully?
A: It doesn't matter. The end justifies the means. I don't care about how it's done. The important thing is that it is done. I don't rule out force. I'm not against force. If it's an option, it will be an option.
Q: But if it's just trading Syrian control for American or Israeli control?
A: I have -- we have -- absolutely no problem with heavy US involvement in Lebanon. On an economic level, military level, political level, security level... whatever it is. Israel is the 51st state of the United States. Let Lebanon be the 52nd state. And if the Arabs don't like it, tough luck.
[snip -- long section]
Rumsfeld's team had already begun discussions with Israeli intelligence about assassinating Lebanese officials -- particularly "Hezbollah and their supporters" in 2002, and intelligence operatives were dispatched to Lebanon. (This writer was introduced to at least one Israeli 'student' studying Arabic at AUB in Beirut. He travelled with an American passport, coming to Lebanon "to study 'the enemy' to find out how they think.") The Sunday Times (6/5/05) revealed that Mossad had been using Trojan Horse email surveillance on President Assad's wife Asma, labelling her family correspondence a "legitimate soft target".
By January 2005, the Pentagon were preparing for military operations in Lebanon to destroy "insurgency strongholds along the Lebanese-Syrian border". Simultaneously, Israeli approval for a military operation in Lebanon was given after Hezbollah killed an IDF officer. Political-security cabinet members comprised of PM Sharon, Deputy PM Ehud Olmert, Vice Premier Shimon Peres, and FM Silvan Shalom had authorized the action. (Haaretz, 5/3/05). But then Rafiq Hariri was killed, and the door to Syria swung open.
Syria may become America's 53rd state, if Farid Ghadry's NGO, the Reform Party of Syria rushes through that opened door. Ghadry is a Syrian Christian who worked for EG & G, a Department of Defense contractor. EG & G assisted in the development and testing of nuclear weapons and in many of the US military's top secret atomic projects. Ghadry's Reform Party coordinates with the Syrian National Council, and transmits Radio Free Syria from Cyprus and Germany to destabilize Syria. The CIA and Mossad have long used Kurds to target nations in the region. Journalist Jack Anderson wrote in 1972 about Israeli envoys delivering $50,000 a month to Kurdish leader Mullah Mustafa Barzani to destabilize Iraq.
In March 2004, this writer was approached in Damascus by Kurds from Qamishli and Hasaka (one whose brother was arrested in the riots) wanting to "thank Bush for helping us get rid of Assad". News accounts later verified that the chaos up north had been orchestrated by the US and Israel, using Turkish and Iraqi Kurds. 'Protesters' at the height of the melee even waved posters of President Bush and American flags. The ringleaders were sponsored by the Department of Defense and the US State Department. "Let the Damascus spring flower, and let its flowers bloom," said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. So sprouted another color catastrophe -- Syria's "Jasmine Revolution".
Reform Party of Syria's Farid Ghadry has been a featured speaker at the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, and is himself a member of AIPAC. When repeated calls to his organization went unanswered, I visited the Washington, D.C. headquarters of the RFP. Reform Party of Syria is the office of "super-Zionist" lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Middle Gate Ventures, Abramoff's 'political advisory company' partners with RFP. Abramoff is a top Beltway lobbyist now under intensive FBI investigation concerning, among other things, his proposed $9 million fee to get Gabon's president an Oval Office session with Bush.
As a College Republican in the 1980s, Abramoff founded the International Freedom Foundation, a project linked to the South African Defence Forces. The International Freedom Foundation was the PR branch of sister NGO Strategic Communications, a covert organization charged by former spy Craig Williamson in the Weekly Mail and Guardian for 2/24/95 with being involved with frame-ups, extreme violence and dirty tricks campaigns.
According to the Weekly Standard (12/20/04), one Abramoff venture was his organization of a 1985 global "summit" of underworld thugs. With Citizens for America sponsorship, Contra leaders, guerilla rebels and right wing 'freedom fighters' from around the world convened in the African hinterlands to strategize. During this period, Abramoff's membership/financial transactions with the secretive Council for National Policy, which included Oliver North and Richard Secord, became a template for how to mask money that still remains partially hidden. (Nizkor Project)
Recently Abramoff's interventionism has focused on the Middle East. Tomflocco.com reveals that Abramoff's long-time employer, Greenberg Traurig, partially financed a Homeland Security Government Contract Team trip to Israel for the US House/Senate Armed Services Committee and defense contractor CACI (accused of Abu Ghraib torture). The delegation reviewed IDF "resistance to interrogation techniques" used in Palestine, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. The Lebanon Daily Star reported that the group visited Beit Horon "the central training camp for the anti-terrorist forces of the Israeli police and border police" and were able to "witness exercises related to anti-terror warfare." Legislators' names were not disclosed.
Abramoff also works with the World Zionist Organization and the Christian Coalition to bankroll illegal Israeli settlement activities. According to Israeli prosecutor Talia Sasson they are part of a larger international problem. Some $60 billion worldwide has been illicitly funnelled to Israeli settlements via different foreign donors, quasi-NGOs and secret military accounts.
In one such case, according to Senate testimony and news reports in Newsweek and The New Republic, an Abramoff charity, Capital Athletic Fund, underwrote sniper scopes, camouflage suits, thermal imagers, night vision goggles, hydration tactical tubes, shooting mats and other paramilitary equipment through Greenberg Traurig to right wing settler Shmuel Ben-Zvi. Abramoff wanted to help ultraorthodox settlement Beitar Illit "neutralize terrorists" and wrote to Ben-Zvi; "Thanks brother. If only there were another dozen of you the dirty rats would be finished." Apparently angling for cover and a tax deduction, Beitar Illit seminar director Ben-Zvi suggested invoicing the weaponry to the Israeli Defence Forces on 'Sniper Workshop' stationery with a sniper logo and letterhead to qualify it as an educational entity. Payments were partially run through "Kollel Ohel Tiferet," an entity not publicly listed or traceable. Beitar Illit Mayor Yitzhak Pindrus claims never to have heard of it. (Newsweek, 5/2/05)
Abramoff dollars may also have found their way to the Israeli Defense Forces' Lebanon Border Unit, the civilian SF troops that patrol the Israel-Lebanon border. Yaagal, supposedly disbanded after Israel's 2000 pullout from south Lebanon, still conducts clandestine reconnaissance, plans ambushes and carries out cross-border incursions into Hezbollah-held areas of south Lebanon. As so often with lobbyist Abramoff's entities, the tools and trails remain murky.
Indicted AIPAC lobbyist Steven Rosen told the New Yorker; "A lobby is like a night flower: it thrives in the dark and dies in the sun." But Abramoff's own words to Ralph Reed in 1983 are even more apropos; "It is not our job to seek peaceful coexistance" with opponents. "Our job is to remove them permanently." Flowery language for forged freedoms, an "Arab Spring" Machiavelli-style.
Trish Schuh writes about Middle East politics. She can be reached at: hsvariety@yahoo.com | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sun Nov 20, 2005 6:02 pm Post subject: James Bamford: The Man Who Sold the War |
| Be sure to look up Cheney, Feith, Perle, Wurmser, Chalabi, Wolfowitz, Libby, Hadley, etc. in the index of James Bamford's 'A Pretext for War' book (the recently released paperback version includes mention on page 403 of how Israeli generals walked to JINSA Israel first operative Douglas Feith's office at the Pentagon like they owned the place). Wilkerson (who was Powell's chief of staff at the State Department) just mentioned Bamford's 'A Pretext for War' book and the following Bamford article as well from the November 15th, 2005 issue of Rolling Stone) on Wolf Blitzer's 'Late Edition' program on CNN (hoping that there will be a transcript of his interview available at www.cnn.com/wolfblitzer or somewhere else via www.cnn.com):
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/_/id/8798997?pageid=rs.Home&pageregion=single7&rnd=1132253345109&has-player=false
The Man Who Sold the War
Meet John Rendon, Bush's general in the propaganda war
By JAMES BAMFORD
The road to war in Iraq led through many unlikely places. One of them was a chic hotel nestled among the strip bars and brothels that cater to foreigners in the town of Pattaya, on the Gulf of Thailand.
On December 17th, 2001, in a small room within the sound of the crashing tide, a CIA officer attached metal electrodes to the ring and index fingers of a man sitting pensively in a padded chair. The officer then stretched a black rubber tube, pleated like an accordion, around the man's chest and another across his abdomen. Finally, he slipped a thick cuff over the man's brachial artery, on the inside of his upper arm.
Strapped to the polygraph machine was Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a forty-three-year-old Iraqi who had fled his homeland in Kurdistan and was now determined to bring down Saddam Hussein. For hours, as thin mechanical styluses traced black lines on rolling graph paper, al-Haideri laid out an explosive tale. Answering yes and no to a series of questions, he insisted repeatedly that he was a civil engineer who had helped Saddam's men to secretly bury tons of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. The illegal arms, according to al-Haideri, were buried in subterranean wells, hidden in private villas, even stashed beneath the Saddam Hussein Hospital, the largest medical facility in Baghdad.
It was damning stuff -- just the kind of evidence the Bush administration was looking for. If the charges were true, they would offer the White House a compelling reason to invade Iraq and depose Saddam. That's why the Pentagon had flown a CIA polygraph expert to Pattaya: to question al-Haideri and confirm, once and for all, that Saddam was secretly stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.
There was only one problem: It was all a lie. After a review of the sharp peaks and deep valleys on the polygraph chart, the intelligence officer concluded that al-Haideri had made up the entire story, apparently in the hopes of securing a visa.
The fabrication might have ended there, the tale of another political refugee trying to scheme his way to a better life. But just because the story wasn't true didn't mean it couldn't be put to good use. Al-Haideri, in fact, was the product of a clandestine operation -- part espionage, part PR campaign -- that had been set up and funded by the CIA and the Pentagon for the express purpose of selling the world a war. And the man who had long been in charge of the marketing was a secretive and mysterious creature of the Washington establishment named John Rendon.
Rendon is a man who fills a need that few people even know exists. Two months before al-Haideri took the lie-detector test, the Pentagon had secretly awarded him a $16 million contract to target Iraq and other adversaries with propaganda. One of the most powerful people in Washington, Rendon is a leader in the strategic field known as "perception management," manipulating information -- and, by extension, the news media -- to achieve the desired result. His firm, the Rendon Group, has made millions off government contracts since 1991, when it was hired by the CIA to help "create the conditions for the removal of Hussein from power." Working under this extraordinary transfer of secret authority, Rendon assembled a group of anti-Saddam militants, personally gave them their name -- the Iraqi National Congress -- and served as their media guru and "senior adviser" as they set out to engineer an uprising against Saddam. It was as if President John F. Kennedy had outsourced the Bay of Pigs operation to the advertising and public-relations firm of J. Walter Thompson.
"They're very closemouthed about what they do," says Kevin McCauley, an editor of the industry trade publication O'Dwyer's PR Daily. "It's all cloak-and-dagger stuff."
Although Rendon denies any direct involvement with al-Haideri, the defector was the latest salvo in a secret media war set in motion by Rendon. In an operation directed by Ahmad Chalabi -- the man Rendon helped install as leader of the INC -- the defector had been brought to Thailand, where he huddled in a hotel room for days with the group's spokesman, Zaab Sethna. The INC routinely coached defectors on their stories, prepping them for polygraph exams, and Sethna was certainly up to the task -- he got his training in the art of propaganda on the payroll of the Rendon Group. According to Francis Brooke, the INC's man in Washington and himself a former Rendon employee, the goal of the al-Haideri operation was simple: pressure the United States to attack Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein.
As the CIA official flew back to Washington with failed lie-detector charts in his briefcase, Chalabi and Sethna didn't hesitate. They picked up the phone, called two journalists who had a long history of helping the INC promote its cause and offered them an exclusive on Saddam's terrifying cache of WMDs.
For the worldwide broadcast rights, Sethna contacted Paul Moran, an Australian freelancer who frequently worked for the Australian Broadcasting Corp. "I think I've got something that you would be interested in," he told Moran, who was living in Bahrain. Sethna knew he could count on the trim, thirty-eight-year-old journalist: A former INC employee in the Middle East, Moran had also been on Rendon's payroll for years in "information operations," working with Sethna at the company's London office on Catherine Place, near Buckingham Palace.
"We were trying to help the Kurds and the Iraqis opposed to Saddam set up a television station," Sethna recalled in a rare interview broadcast on Australian television. "The Rendon Group came to us and said, 'We have a contract to kind of do anti-Saddam propaganda on behalf of the Iraqi opposition.' What we didn't know -- what the Rendon Group didn't tell us -- was in fact it was the CIA that had hired them to do this work."
The INC's choice for the worldwide print exclusive was equally easy: Chalabi contacted Judith Miller of The New York Times. Miller, who was close to I. Lewis Libby and other neoconservatives in the Bush administration, had been a trusted outlet for the INC's anti-Saddam propaganda for years. Not long after the CIA polygraph expert slipped the straps and electrodes off al-Haideri and declared him a liar, Miller flew to Bangkok to interview him under the watchful supervision of his INC handlers. Miller later made perfunctory calls to the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency, but despite her vaunted intelligence sources, she claimed not to know about the results of al-Haideri's lie-detector test. Instead, she reported that unnamed "government experts" called his information "reliable and significant" -- thus adding a veneer of truth to the lies.
Her front-page story, which hit the stands on December 20th, 2001, was exactly the kind of exposure Rendon had been hired to provide. AN IRAQI DEFECTOR TELLS OF WORK ON AT LEAST 20 HIDDEN WEAPONS SITES, declared the headline. "An Iraqi defector who described himself as a civil engineer," Miller wrote, "said he personally worked on renovations of secret facilities for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in underground wells, private villas and under the Saddam Hussein Hospital in Baghdad as recently as a year ago." If verified, she noted, "his allegations would provide ammunition to officials within the Bush administration who have been arguing that Mr. Hussein should be driven from power partly because of his unwillingness to stop making weapons of mass destruction, despite his pledges to do so."
For months, hawks inside and outside the administration had been pressing for a pre-emptive attack on Iraq. Now, thanks to Miller's story, they could point to "proof" of Saddam's "nuclear threat." The story, reinforced by Moran's on-camera interview with al-Haideri on the giant Australian Broadcasting Corp., was soon being trumpeted by the White House and repeated by newspapers and television networks around the world. It was the first in a long line of hyped and fraudulent stories that would eventually propel the U.S. into a war with Iraq -- the first war based almost entirely on a covert propaganda campaign targeting the media.
By law, the Bush administration is expressly prohibited from disseminating government propaganda at home. But in an age of global communications, there is nothing to stop it from planting a phony pro-war story overseas -- knowing with certainty that it will reach American citizens almost instantly. A recent congressional report suggests that the Pentagon may be relying on "covert psychological operations affecting audiences within friendly nations." In a "secret amendment" to Pentagon policy, the report warns, "psyops funds might be used to publish stories favorable to American policies, or hire outside contractors without obvious ties to the Pentagon to organize rallies in support of administration policies." The report also concludes that military planners are shifting away from the Cold War view that power comes from superior weapons systems. Instead, the Pentagon now believes that "combat power can be enhanced by communications networks and technologies that control access to, and directly manipulate, information. As a result, information itself is now both a tool and a target of warfare."
It is a belief John Rendon encapsulated in a speech to cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1996. "I am not a national-security strategist or a military tactician," he declared. "I am a politician, a person who uses communication to meet public-policy or corporate-policy objectives. In fact, I am an information warrior and a perception manager." To explain his philosophy, Rendon paraphrased a journalist he knew from his days as a staffer on the presidential campaigns of George McGovern and Jimmy Carter: "This is probably best described in the words of Hunter S. Thompson, when he wrote, 'When things turn weird, the weird turn pro.'"
John Walter Rendon Jr. rises at 3 a.m. each morning after six hours of sleep, turns on his Apple computer and begins ingesting information -- overnight news reports, e-mail messages, foreign and domestic newspapers, and an assortment of government documents, many of them available only to those with the highest security clearance. According to Pentagon documents obtained by Rolling Stone, the Rendon Group is authorized "to research and analyze information classified up to Top Secret/SCI/SI/TK/G/HCS" -- an extraordinarily high level of clearance granted to only a handful of defense contractors. "SCI" stands for Sensitive Compartmented Information, data classified higher than Top Secret. "SI" is Special Intelligence, very secret communications intercepted by the National Security Agency. "TK" refers to Talent/Keyhole, code names for imagery from reconnaissance aircraft and spy satellites. "G" stands for Gamma (communications intercepts from extremely sensitive sources) and "HCS" means Humint Control System (information from a very sensitive human source). Taken together, the acronyms indicate that Rendon enjoys access to the most secret information from all three forms of intelligence collection: eavesdropping, imaging satellites and human spies.
Rendon lives in a multimillion-dollar home in Washington's exclusive Kalorama neighborhood. A few doors down from Rendon is the home of former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara; just around the corner lives current Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. At fifty-six, Rendon wears owlish glasses and combs his thick mane of silver-gray hair to the side, Kennedy-style. He heads to work each morning clad in a custom-made shirt with his monogram on the right cuff and a sharply tailored blue blazer that hangs loose around his bulky frame. By the time he pulls up to the Rendon Group's headquarters near Dupont Circle, he has already racked up a handsome fee for the morning's work: According to federal records, Rendon charges the CIA and the Pentagon $311.26 an hour for his services.
Rendon is one of the most influential of the private contractors in Washington who are increasingly taking over jobs long reserved for highly trained CIA employees. In recent years, spies-for-hire have begun to replace regional desk officers, who control clandestine operations around the world; watch officers at the agency's twenty-four-hour crisis center; analysts, who sift through reams of intelligence data; and even counterintelligence officers in the field, who oversee meetings between agents and their recruited spies. According to one senior administration official involved in intelligence-budget decisions, half of the CIA's work is now performed by private contractors -- people completely unaccountable to Congress. Another senior budget official acknowledges privately that lawmakers have no idea how many rent-a-spies the CIA currently employs -- or how much unchecked power they enjoy.
Unlike many newcomers to the field, however, Rendon is a battle-tested veteran who has been secretly involved in nearly every American shooting conflict in the past two decades. In the first interview he has granted in decades, Rendon offered a peek through the keyhole of this seldom-seen world of corporate spooks -- a rarefied but growing profession. Over a dinner of lamb chops and a bottle of Chateauneuf du Pape at a private Washington club, Rendon was guarded about the details of his clandestine work -- but he boasted openly of the sweep and importance of his firm's efforts as a for-profit spy. "We've worked in ninety-one countries," he said. "Going all the way back to Panama, we've been involved in every war, with the exception of Somalia."
It is an unusual career twist for someone who entered politics as an opponent of the Vietnam War. The son of a stockbroker, Rendon grew up in New Jersey and stumped for McGovern before graduating from Northeastern University. "I was the youngest state coordinator," he recalls. "I had Maine. They told me that I understood politics -- which was a stretch, being so young." Rendon, who went on to serve as executive director of the Democratic National Committee, quickly mastered the combination of political skulduggery and media manipulation that would become his hallmark. In 1980, as the manager of Jimmy Carter's troops at the national convention in New York, he was sitting alone in the bleachers at Madison Square Garden when a reporter for ABC News approached him. "They actually did a little piece about the man behind the curtain," Rendon says. "A Wizard of Oz thing." It was a role he would end up playing for the rest of his life.
After Carter lost the election and the hard-right Reagan revolutionaries came to power in 1981, Rendon went into business with his younger brother Rick. "Everybody started consulting," he recalls. "We started consulting." They helped elect John Kerry to the Senate in 1984 and worked for the AFL-CIO to mobilize the union vote for Walter Mondale's presidential campaign. Among the items Rendon produced was a training manual for union organizers to operate as political activists on behalf of Mondale. To keep the operation quiet, Rendon stamped CONFIDENTIAL on the cover of each of the blue plastic notebooks. It was a penchant for secrecy that would soon pervade all of his consulting deals.
To a large degree, the Rendon Group is a family affair. Rendon's wife, Sandra Libby, handles the books as chief financial officer and "senior communications strategist." Rendon's brother Rick serves as senior partner and runs the company's Boston office, producing public-service announcements for the Whale Conservation Institute and coordinating Empower Peace, a campaign that brings young people in the Middle East in contact with American kids through video-conferencing technology. But the bulk of the company's business is decidedly less liberal and peace oriented. Rendon's first experience in the intelligence world, in fact, came courtesy of the Republicans. "Panama," he says, "brought us into the national-security environment."
In 1989, shortly after his election, President George H.W. Bush signed a highly secret "finding" authorizing the CIA to funnel $10 million to opposition forces in Panama to overthrow Gen. Manuel Noriega. Reluctant to involve agency personnel directly, the CIA turned to the Rendon Group. Rendon's job was to work behind the scenes, using a variety of campaign and psychological techniques to put the CIA's choice, Guillermo Endara, into the presidential palace. Cash from the agency, laundered through various bank accounts and front organizations, would end up in Endara's hands, who would then pay Rendon.
A heavyset, fifty-three-year-old corporate attorney with little political experience, Endara was running against Noriega's handpicked choice, Carlos Duque. With Rendon's help, Endara beat Duque decisively at the polls -- but Noriega simply named himself "Maximum Leader" and declared the election null and void. The Bush administration then decided to remove Noriega by force -- and Rendon's job shifted from generating local support for a national election to building international support for regime change. Within days he had found the ultimate propaganda tool.
At the end of a rally in support of Endara, a band of Noriega's Dignity Battalion -- nicknamed "Dig Bats" and called "Doberman thugs" by Bush -- attacked the crowd with wooden planks, metal pipes and guns. Gang members grabbed the bodyguard of Guillermo Ford, one of Endara's vice-presidential candidates, pushed him against a car, shoved a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. With cameras snapping, the Dig Bats turned on Ford, batting his head with a spike-tipped metal rod and pounding him with heavy clubs, turning his white guayabera bright red with blood -- his own, and that of his dead bodyguard.
Within hours, Rendon made sure the photos reached every newsroom in the world. The next week an image of the violence made the cover of Time magazine with the caption POLITICS PANAMA STYLE: NORIEGA BLUDGEONS HIS OPPOSITION, AND THE U.S. TURNS UP THE HEAT. To further boost international support for Endara, Rendon escorted Ford on a tour of Europe to meet British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the Italian prime minister and even the pope. In December 1989, when Bush decided to invade Panama, Rendon and several of his employees were on one of the first military jets headed to Panama City.
"I arrived fifteen minutes before it started," Rendon recalls. "My first impression is having the pilot in the plane turn around and say, 'Excuse me, sir, but if you look off to the left you'll see the attack aircraft circling before they land.' Then I remember this major saying, 'Excuse me, sir, but do you know what the air-defense capability of Panama is at the moment?' I leaned into the cockpit and said, 'Look, major, I hope by now that's no longer an issue.'"
Moments later, Rendon's plane landed at Howard Air Force Base in Panama. "I needed to get to Fort Clayton, which was where the president was," he says. "I was choppered over -- and we took some rounds on the way." There, on a U.S. military base surrounded by 24,000 U.S. troops, heavy tanks and Combat Talon AC-130 gunships, Rendon's client, Endara, was at last sworn in as president of Panama.
Rendon's involvement in the campaign to oust Saddam Hussein began seven months later, in July 1990. Rendon had taken time out for a vacation -- a long train ride across Scotland -- when he received an urgent call. "Soldiers are massing at the border outside of Kuwait," he was told. At the airport, he watched the beginning of the Iraqi invasion on television. Winging toward Washington in the first-class cabin of a Pan Am 747, Rendon spent the entire flight scratching an outline of his ideas in longhand on a yellow legal pad.
"I wrote a memo about what the Kuwaitis were going to face, and I based it on our experience in Panama and the experience of the Free French operation in World War II," Rendon says. "This was something that they needed to see and hear, and that was my whole intent. Go over, tell the Kuwaitis, 'Here's what you've got -- here's some observations, here's some recommendations, live long and prosper.'"
Back in Washington, Rendon immediately called Hamilton Jordan, the former chief of staff to President Carter and an old friend from his Democratic Party days. "He put me in touch with the Saudis, the Saudis put me in touch with the Kuwaitis and then I went over and had a meeting with the Kuwaitis," Rendon recalls. "And by the time I landed back in the United States, I got a phone call saying, 'Can you come back? We want you to do what's in the memo.'"
What the Kuwaitis wanted was help in selling a war of liberation to the American government -- and the American public. Rendon proposed a massive "perception management" campaign designed to convince the world of the need to join forces to rescue Kuwait. Working through an organization called Citizens for a Free Kuwait, the Kuwaiti government in exile agreed to pay Rendon $100,000 a month for his assistance.
To coordinate the operation, Rendon opened an office in London. Once the Gulf War began, he remained extremely busy trying to prevent the American press from reporting on the dark side of the Kuwaiti government, an autocratic oil-tocracy ruled by a family of wealthy sheiks. When newspapers began reporting that many Kuwaitis were actually living it up in nightclubs in Cairo as Americans were dying in the Kuwaiti sand, the Rendon Group quickly counterattacked. Almost instantly, a wave of articles began appearing telling the story of grateful Kuwaitis mailing 20,000 personally signed valentines to American troops on the front lines, all arranged by Rendon.
Rendon also set up an elaborate television and radio network, and developed programming that was beamed into Kuwait from Taif, Saudi Arabia. "It was important that the Kuwaitis in occupied Kuwait understood that the rest of the world was doing something," he says. Each night, Rendon's troops in London produced a script and sent it via microwave to Taif, ensuring that the "news" beamed into Kuwait reflected a sufficiently pro-American line.
When it comes to staging a war, few things are left to chance. After Iraq withdrew from Kuwait, it was Rendon's responsibility to make the victory march look like the flag-waving liberation of France after World War II. "Did you ever stop to wonder," he later remarked, "how the people of Kuwait City, after being held hostage for seven long and painful months, were able to get hand-held American -- and, for that matter, the flags of other coalition countries?" After a pause, he added, "Well, you now know the answer. That was one of my jobs then."
Although his work is highly secret, Rendon insists he deals only in "timely, truthful and accurate information." His job, he says, is to counter false perceptions that the news media perpetuate because they consider it "more important to be first than to be right." In modern warfare, he believes, the outcome depends largely on the public's perception of the war -- whether it is winnable, whether it is worth the cost. "We are being haunted and stalked by the difference between perception and reality," he says. "Because the lines are divergent, this difference between perception and reality is one of the greatest strategic communications challenges of war."
By the time the Gulf War came to a close in 1991, the Rendon Group was firmly established as Washington's leading salesman for regime change. But Rendon's new assignment went beyond simply manipulating the media. After the war ended, the Top Secret order signed by President Bush to oust Hussein included a rare "lethal finding" -- meaning deadly action could be taken if necessary. Under contract to the CIA, Rendon was charged with helping to create a dissident force with the avowed purpose of violently overthrowing the entire Iraqi government. It is an undertaking that Rendon still considers too classified to discuss. "That's where we're wandering into places I'm not going to talk about," he says. "If you take an oath, it should mean something."
Thomas Twetten, the CIA's former deputy of operations, credits Rendon with virtually creating the INC. "The INC was clueless," he once observed. "They needed a lot of help and didn't know where to start. That is why Rendon was brought in." Acting as the group's senior adviser and aided by truckloads of CIA dollars, Rendon pulled together a wide spectrum of Iraqi dissidents and sponsored a conference in Vienna to organize them into an umbrella organization, which he dubbed the Iraqi National Congress. Then, as in Panama, his assignment was to help oust a brutal dictator and replace him with someone chosen by the CIA. "The reason they got the contract was because of what they had done in Panama -- so they were known," recalls Whitley Bruner, former chief of the CIA's station in Baghdad. This time the target was Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the agency's successor of choice was Ahmad Chalabi, a crafty, avuncular Iraqi exile beloved by Washington's neoconservatives.
Chalabi was a curious choice to lead a rebellion. In 1992, he was convicted in Jordan of making false statements and embezzling $230 million from his own bank, for which he was sentenced in absentia to twenty-two years of hard labor. But the only credential that mattered was his politics. "From day one," Rendon says, "Chalabi was very clear that his biggest interest was to rid Iraq of Saddam." Bruner, who dealt with Chalabi and Rendon in London in 1991, puts it even more bluntly. "Chalabi's primary focus," he said later, "was to drag us into a war."
The key element of Rendon's INC operation was a worldwide media blitz designed to turn Hussein, a once dangerous but now contained regional leader, into the greatest threat to world peace. Each month, $326,000 was passed from the CIA to the Rendon Group and the INC via various front organizations. Rendon profited handsomely, receiving a "management fee" of ten percent above what it spent on the project. According to some reports, the company made nearly $100 million on the contract during the five years following the Gulf War.
Rendon made considerable headway with the INC, but following the group's failed coup attempt against Saddam in 1996, the CIA lost confidence in Chalabi and cut off his monthly paycheck. But Chalabi and Rendon simply switched sides, moving over to the Pentagon, and the money continued to flow. "The Rendon Group is not in great odor in Langley these days," notes Bruner. "Their contracts are much more with the Defense Department."
Rendon's influence rose considerably in Washington after the terrorist attacks of September 11th. In a single stroke, Osama bin Laden altered the world's perception of reality -- and in an age of nonstop information, whoever controls perception wins. What Bush needed to fight the War on Terror was a skilled information warrior -- and Rendon was widely acknowledged as the best. "The events of 11 September 2001 changed everything, not least of which was the administration's outlook concerning strategic influence," notes one Army report. "Faced with direct evidence that many people around the world actively hated the United States, Bush began taking action to more effectively explain U.S. policy overseas. Initially the White House and DoD turned to the Rendon Group."
Three weeks after the September 11th attacks, according to documents obtained from defense sources, the Pentagon awarded a large contract to the Rendon Group. Around the same time, Pentagon officials also set up a highly secret organization called the Office of Strategic Influence. Part of the OSI's mission was to conduct covert disinformation and deception operations -- planting false news items in the media and hiding their origins. "It's sometimes valuable from a military standpoint to be able to engage in deception with respect to future anticipated plans," Vice President Dick Cheney said in explaining the operation. Even the military's top brass found the clandestine unit unnerving. "When I get their briefings, it's scary," a senior official said at the time.
In February 2002, The New York Times reported that the Pentagon had hired Rendon "to help the new office," a charge Rendon denies. "We had nothing to do with that," he says. "We were not in their reporting chain. We were reporting directly to the J-3" -- the head of operations at the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Following the leak, Rumsfeld was forced to shut down the organization. But much of the office's operations were apparently shifted to another unit, deeper in the Pentagon's bureaucracy, called the Information Operations Task Force, and Rendon was closely connected to this group. "Greg Newbold was the J-3 at the time, and we reported to him through the IOTF," Rendon says.
According to the Pentagon documents, the Rendon Group played a major role in the IOTF. The company was charged with creating an "Information War Room" to monitor worldwide news reports at lightning speed and respond almost instantly with counterpropaganda. A key weapon, according to the documents, was Rendon's "proprietary state-of-the-art news-wire collection system called 'Livewire,' which takes real-time news-wire reports, as they are filed, before they are on the Internet, before CNN can read them on the air and twenty-four hours before they appear in the morning newspapers, and sorts them by keyword. The system provides the most current real-time access to news and information available to private or public organizations."
The top target that the pentagon assigned to Rendon was the Al-Jazeera television network. The contract called for the Rendon Group to undertake a massive "media mapping" campaign against the news organization, which the Pentagon considered "critical to U.S. objectives in the War on Terrorism." According to the contract, Rendon would provide a "detailed content analysis of the station's daily broadcast . . . [and] identify the biases of specific journalists and potentially obtain an understanding of their allegiances, including the possibility of specific relationships and sponsorships."
The secret targeting of foreign journalists may have had a sinister purpose. Among the missions proposed for the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Influence was one to "coerce" foreign journalists and plant false information overseas. Secret briefing papers also said the office should find ways to "punish" those who convey the "wrong message." One senior officer told CNN that the plan would "formalize government deception, dishonesty and misinformation."
According to the Pentagon documents, Rendon would use his media analysis to conduct a worldwide propaganda campaign, deploying teams of information warriors to allied nations to assist them "in developing and delivering specific messages to the local population, combatants, front-line states, the media and the international community." Among the places Rendon's info-war teams would be sent were Jakarta, Indonesia; Islamabad, Pakistan; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Cairo; Ankara, Turkey; and Tashkent, Uzbekistan. The teams would produce and script television news segments "built around themes and story lines supportive of U.S. policy objectives."
Rendon was also charged with engaging in "military deception" online -- an activity once assigned to the OSI. The company was contracted to monitor Internet chat rooms in both English and Arabic -- and "participate in these chat rooms when/if tasked." Rendon would also create a Web site "with regular news summaries and feature articles. Targeted at the global public, in English and at least four (4) additional languages, this activity also will include an extensive e-mail push operation." These techniques are commonly used to plant a variety of propaganda, including false information.
Still another newly formed propaganda operation in which Rendon played a major part was the Office of Global Communications, which operated out of the White House and was charged with spreading the administration's message on the War in Iraq. Every morning at 9:30, Rendon took part in the White House OGC conference call, where officials would discuss the theme of the day and who would deliver it. The office also worked closely with the White House Iraq Group, whose high-level members, including recently indicted Cheney chief of staff Lewis Libby, were responsible for selling the war to the American public.
Never before in history had such an extensive secret network been established to shape the entire world's perception of a war. "It was not just bad intelligence -- it was an orchestrated effort," says Sam Gardner, a retired Air Force colonel who has taught strategy and military operations at the National War College. "It began before the war, was a major effort during the war and continues as post-conflict distortions."
In the first weeks following the September 11th attacks, Rendon operated at a frantic pitch. "In the early stages it was fielding every ground ball that was coming, because nobody was sure if we were ever going to be attacked again," he says. "It was 'What do you know about this, what do you know about that, what else can you get, can you talk to somebody over here?' We functioned twenty-four hours a day. We maintained situational awareness, in military terms, on all things related to terrorism. We were doing 195 newspapers and 43 countries in fourteen or fifteen languages. If you do this correctly, I can tell you what's on the evening news tonight in a country before it happens. I can give you, as a policymaker, a six-hour break on how you can affect what's going to be on the news. They'll take that in a heartbeat."
The Bush administration took everything Rendon had to offer. Between 2000 and 2004, Pentagon documents show, the Rendon Group received at least thirty-five contracts with the Defense Department, worth a total of $50 million to $100 million.
The mourners genuflected, made the sign of the cross and took their seats along the hard, shiny pews of Our Lady of Victories Catholic Church. It was April 2nd, 2003 -- the start of fall in the small Australian town of Glenelg, an aging beach resort of white Victorian homes and soft, blond sand on Holdback Bay. Rendon had flown halfway around the world to join nearly 600 friends and family who were gathered to say farewell to a local son and amateur football champ, Paul Moran. Three days into the invasion of Iraq, the freelance journalist and Rendon employee had become the first member of the media to be killed in the war -- a war he had covertly helped to start.
Moran had lived a double life, filing reports for the Australian Broadcasting Corp. and other news organizations, while at other times operating as a clandestine agent for Rendon, enjoying what his family calls his "James Bond lifestyle." Moran had trained Iraqi opposition forces in photographic espionage, showing them how to covertly document Iraqi military activities, and had produced pro-war announcements for the Pentagon. "He worked for the Rendon Group in London," says his mother, Kathleen. "They just send people all over the world -- where there are wars."
Moran was covering the Iraq invasion for ABC, filming at a Kurdish-controlled checkpoint in the city of Sulaymaniyah, when a car driven by a suicide bomber blew up next to him. "I saw the car in a kind of slow-motion disintegrate," recalls Eric Campbell, a correspondent who was filming with Moran. "A soldier handed me a passport, which was charred. That's when I knew Paul was dead."
As the Mass ended and Moran's Australian-flag-draped coffin passed by the mourners, Rendon lifted his right arm and saluted. He refused to discuss Moran's role in the company, saying only that "Paul worked for us on a number of projects." But on the long flight back to Washington, across more than a dozen time zones, Rendon outlined his feelings in an e-mail: "The day did begin with dark and ominous clouds much befitting the emotions we all felt -- sadness and anger at the senseless violence that claimed our comrade Paul Moran ten short days ago and many decades of emotion ago."
The Rendon Group also organized a memorial service in London, where Moran first went to work for the company in 1990. Held at Home House, a private club in Portman Square where Moran often stayed while visiting the city, the event was set among photographs of Moran in various locations around the Middle East. Zaab Sethna, who organized the al-Haideri media exclusive in Thailand for Moran and Judith Miller, gave a touching tribute to his former colleague. "I think that on both a personal and professional level Paul was deeply admired and loved by the people at the Rendon Group," Sethna later said.
Although Moran was gone, the falsified story about weapons of mass destruction that he and Sethna had broadcast around the world lived on. Seven months earlier, as President Bush was about to argue his case for war before the U.N., the White House had given prominent billing to al-Haideri's fabricated charges. In a report ironically titled "Iraq: Denial and Deception," the administration referred to al-Haideri by name and detailed his allegations -- even though the CIA had already determined them to be lies. The report was placed on the White House Web site on September 12th, 2002, and remains there today. One version of the report even credits Miller's article for the information.
Miller also continued to promote al-Haideri's tale of Saddam's villainy. In January 2003, more than a year after her first article appeared, Miller again reported that Pentagon "intelligence officials" were telling her that "some of the most valuable information has come from Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri." His interviews with the Defense Intelligence Agency, Miller added, "ultimately resulted in dozens of highly credible reports on Iraqi weapons-related activity and purchases, officials said."
Finally, in early 2004, more than two years after he made the dramatic allegations to Miller and Moran about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, al-Haideri was taken back to Iraq by the CIA's Iraq Survey Group. On a wide-ranging trip through Baghdad and other key locations, al-Haideri was given the opportunity to point out exactly where Saddam's stockpiles were hidden, confirming the charges that had helped to start a war.
In the end, he could not identify a single site where illegal weapons were buried.
As the war in Iraq has spiraled out of control, the Bush administration's covert propaganda campaign has intensified. According to a secret Pentagon report personally approved by Rumsfeld in October 2003 and obtained by Rolling Stone, the Strategic Command is authorized to engage in "military deception" -- defined as "presenting false information, images or statements." The seventy-four-page document, titled "Information Operations Roadmap," also calls for psychological operations to be launched over radio, television, cell phones and "emerging technologies" such as the Internet. In addition to being classified secret, the road map is also stamped noforn, meaning it cannot be shared even with our allies.
As the acknowledged general of such propaganda warfare, Rendon insists that the work he does is for the good of all Americans. "For us, it's a question of patriotism," he says. "It's not a question of politics, and that's an important distinction. I feel very strongly about that personally. If brave men and women are going to be put in harm's way, they deserve support." But in Iraq, American troops and Iraqi civilians were put in harm's way, in large part, by the false information spread by Rendon and the men he trained in information warfare. And given the rapid growth of what is known as the "security-intelligence complex" in Washington, covert perception managers are likely to play an increasingly influential role in the wars of the future.
Indeed, Rendon is already thinking ahead. Last year, he attended a conference on information operations in London, where he offered an assessment on the Pentagon's efforts to manipulate the media. According to those present, Rendon applauded the practice of embedding journalists with American forces. "He said the embedded idea was great," says an Air Force colonel who attended the talk. "It worked as they had found in the test. It was the war version of reality television, and for the most part they did not lose control of the story." But Rendon also cautioned that individual news organizations were often able to "take control of the story," shaping the news before the Pentagon asserted its spin on the day's events.
"We lost control of the context," Rendon warned. "That has to be fixed for the next war."
James Bamford is the best-selling author of "A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies" (2004) and "Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency" (2001). This is his first article for Rolling Stone.
(Posted Nov 17, 2005) | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Nov 24, 2005 11:36 am Post subject: Where to Look for Answers on Corrupted Intelligence |
| Where to Look for Answers on Corrupted Intelligence
By Ray McGovern
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Sunday 20 November 2005
While it is altogether appropriate for Congress's attention to be riveted on the future and, specifically, on how to end the disaster in Iraq, we Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) continue to be asked about the past and how the George W. Bush administration was able to create/corrupt intelligence to convey a false picture of the need for war on Iraq in the first place.
Renewed, if short-lived, interest in this issue can be traced to Senator Harry Reid's demand on November 1 that Pat Roberts, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, make good on his promise to complete his investigation into this issue (the so-called "Phase 2" study that Democratic senator Jay Rockefeller acquiesced in postponing until after last year's election).
Don't hold your breath. Roberts is still diddling Rockefeller, who, as ranking Democrat on Roberts's committee, has a painful propensity for letting himself be outmaneuvered. The two are still far from agreement on how to proceed, and Roberts seems likely to use another pending study to delay still further the completion of "Phase 2."
Congressional sources disclosed Thursday that the Department of Defense Inspector General has agreed to review the pre-war intelligence activities of former defense undersecretary Douglas Feith, a main architect of the war on Iraq. The IG investigation could take at least six months, say defense officials. Indeed, the study is not yet under way, since the IG is "still discussing it with the Roberts committee staff," according to Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman.
For the gullible, here's a new promise from Pat Roberts: "We're going to try to expedite it [the IG study on Feith] as much as possible ... The IG knows we are very eager to get this done but he wants to get it done right."
Right.
Not that it really matters. Attempting to get an apolitical study out of Roberts's committee would be a fool's errand, even if Rockefeller had more backbone. Pat Roberts, you may recall, rejected as "inappropriate" Rockefeller's suggestion last year that the committee ask the FBI to look into who manufactured the (in)famous forgery about Iraq seeking uranium in Niger.
Don't despair. We in VIPS have been hard at work on this issue since well before the war. Indeed, it was/is our raison d'être.
Where to look for the answers? Try the just published "Neo-CONNED Again!" a collection of essays and interviews by and with VIPS and other professionals. My colleague Col. W. Patrick Lang, USA (ret) and I have authored chapters devoted specifically to how intelligence was corrupted to "justify" an unjustifiable war - or, in the words of the Downing Street Minutes, how "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
Pat's article, "Drinking the Kool-Aid: Making the Case for War with Compromised Integrity and Intelligence," was originally published in the summer 2004 Middle East Policy Journal. Mine is titled "Sham Dunk: Cooking Intelligence for the President." The text is posted here.
But for a fuller picture on the Iraq misadventure, you may wish to obtain the book itself. For it also contains a wealth of insight from the likes of Robert Fisk, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Karen Kwiatkowski, Jeffrey Record, Tom Engelhardt, Sam Gardiner, Michael Ratner and many others.
The experience of the past few years has shown that, although Pat Roberts prides himself on being a US Marine, waiting for him to deliver on his promises is like waiting for Godot. (See "Semper Fraud, Senator Roberts.") There, fellow Marine (and VIPS member) Scott Ritter offers unique insight into Pat Roberts, including his foot-dragging on the "Phase 2" investigation.
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Ray McGovern works for Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. He was an analyst at CIA for 27 years, and is on the Steering Group of VIPS. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Jan 11, 2006 11:23 pm Post subject: AIPAC on Trial |
| January 7 / 8, 2006
Them or Us
AIPAC on Trial
By JAMES PETRAS
In August 2004, the FBI and the US Justice Department counter-intelligence bureau announced that they were investigating a top Pentagon analyst suspected of spying for Israel and handing over highly confidential documents on US policy toward Iran to AIPAC which in turn handed them over to the Israeli Embassy. The FBI had been covertly investigating senior Pentagon analyst, Larry Franklin and AIPAC leaders, Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman for several years prior to their indictment for spying. On August 29, 2005 the Israeli Embassy predictably hotly denied the spy allegation. On the same day Larry Franklin was publicly named as a spy suspect. Franklin worked closely with Michael Ledeen and Douglas Feith, then Undersecretary for Defense in the Pentagon, in fabricating the case for war with Iraq. Franklin was the senior analyst on Iran, which is at the top of AIPAC's list of targets for war.
As the investigation proceeded toward formal charges of espionage, the pro-Israeli think tanks and neo-con ideologues joined in a two-prong response. On the one hand some questioned whether "handing over documents" was a crime at all, claiming it involved "routine exchanges of ideas" and lobbying. On the other hand, Israeli officials and media denied any Israeli connection with Franklin, minimizing his importance in policy-making circles, while others vouched for his integrity.
The FBI investigation of the Washington spy network deepened and included the interrogation of two senior members of Feith's Office of Special Plans, William Luti and Harold Rhode. The OSP was responsible for feeding bogus intelligence leading to the US attack of Iraq. The leading FBI investigator, Dave Szady, stated that the FBI investigation involved wiretaps, undercover surveillance and photography that document the passing of classified information from Franklin to the men at AIPAC and on to the Israelis.
The Franklin-AIPAC-Israeli investigation was more than a spy case. It involved the future of US-Middle East relations and more specifically whether the '",neo-cons' would be able to push the US into a military confrontation with Iran. Franklin was a top Pentagon analyst on Iran, with access to all the executive branch deliberations on Iran. AIPAC lobbying and information gathering was aggressively directed toward pushing the Israeli agenda on a US-Iranian confrontation against strong opposition in the State Department, CIA, military intelligence and field commanders.
Franklin's arrest on May 4, 2005 and the subsequent arrest of AIPAC foreign policy research director Steve Rosen and Iran specialist and deputy director for foreign policy, Keith Weissman on August 4, 2005 was a direct blow to the Israeli-AIPAC war agenda for the US. The FBI investigation proceeded with caution accumulating detailed intelligence over several years. Prudence was dictated by the tremendous political influence that AIPAC and its allies among the Conference of the Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations wield in Congress, the media and among Fundamentalist Christians and which could be brought to bear when the accused spies were brought to trial.
The first blow was struck on August 29, 2004, when CBS publicized the FBI investigation just when Franklin confessed to have passed highly confidential documents to a member of the Israeli government and began cooperating with federal agents. He was prepared to lead authorities to his contacts inside the Israeli government. Subsequently Franklin stopped cooperating. The Anti-Defamation League's (a leading Jewish pro-Israeli lobby) Abe Foxman called for a special prosecutor to investigate "leaks" of the FBI investigation, because they were "tarnishing" Israel's image. Then Attorney General Ashcroft intervened to try to apply the brakes to the investigation, which spread into the neo-con nest in the Pentagon: Feith, Wolfowitz, Perle, and Rubin were "interviewed" by the FBI. Neo-con Michael Rubin, former Pentagon specialist on Iran and resident "scholar" at the American Enterprise Institute, blasted Bush for "inaction in the spy affair" and called the investigation an "anti-Semitic witch hunt" (Forward Sept. 10, 2004). AIPAC launched a campaign against the spy probe and in support of its activities and leaders. As a result scores of leading Congress members from both parties vouched for AIPAC's integrity and pledged their confidence and support of AIPAC.
Never in the history of the United States had so many leading Congress members from both parties pledged their support for an organization under suspicion of spying, based only on information supplied by the suspect and in total ignorance of the federal prosecutor's case. Contrary to the bipartisan Congressional support for AIPAC, a poll of likely voters found that 61 per cent believed that AIPAC should be asked to register as an agent of a foreign power and lose its tax exempt status. Only 12 per cent disagreed. Among American Jews, 59 per cent were not sure, while 15 per cent strongly agreed and 15 per cent strongly disagreed (Zogby International, Sept. 25, 2004). Clearly many Americans have serious doubts about the loyalty and nature of AIPAC activities, contrary to their elected representatives. The federal spy investigation proceeded despite Executive and Congressional opposition, knowing that it had the backing of the great majority of US citizens.
In December 2004, the FBI subpoenaed four senior staffers at AIPAC to appear before a grand jury and searched the Washington office of the pro-Israel lobby seeking additional files on Rosen and Weissman.
AIPAC continued to deny any wrongdoing, stating: "Neither AIPAC nor any member of our staff has broken any law. We believe any court of law or grand jury will conclude that AIPAC employees have always acted legally, properly and appropriately" (AIPAC December 1, 2004). Nevertheless a few months into the investigation and with the arrest of the two top leaders, AIPAC terminated their employment and after a few months cut off paying their legal defense bills. Likewise Israel's categorical denials of espionage, evaporated, as video and transcripts of their intelligence operative receiving classified documents surfaced.
A Grand Jury was convoked in early 2005. As the FBI's spy investigation extended into AIPAC-Pentagon's inner recesses, self-confessed spy Franklin's superiors Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith announced their sudden resignation from the number 2 and 3 positions in the Pentagon. In February 2005, Bush announced that former convicted felon, defender of Central American death squads and long-term Zionist fanatic, Elliott Abrams, would be in charge of Middle East policy in the National Security Council. Abrams would serve as a channel for directing Israeli policies to the White House and as day-to-day source of the most essential policy decisions and discussions. Apparently Abrams was smart enough to keep his distance from the Franklin/Feith and AIPAC/Embassy operations and deal directly with Ariel Sharon and his Chief of Staff, Dov Weinglass. In April 2005, AIPAC dismissed Rosen and Weissman, saying their activities did not comport with the organizations standards. On May 4, Franklin was arrested on charges of illegally disclosing highly classified information to two employees of a pro-Israel lobbying group. On June 13, 2005 an expanded indictment explicitly named AIPAC and a "foreign country" (Israel) and its Mossad agent, Naor Gilon, who had, in the meantime, fled to Israel.
Despite AIPAC being named in a major espionage indictment involving Steve Rosen, head of its foreign policy department and Keith Weissman, head of its Iran desk, US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice gave the keynote address at AIPAC's convention (May 22-24, 2005). Leaders from Congress and the Republican and Democratic parties also spoke, declaring their unconditional support for AIPAC, Israel and Ariel Sharon. The list included Senator Hillary Clinton, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (Republican) and Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid. Based on previous year's attendance, more than half of the US Senate and one-third of US Congress members were in attendance.
Clearly AIPAC, with 60,000 wealthy members and $60 million annual budget, had more influence on the political behavior of the US executive, political parties and elected representatives than a federal indictment implicating its leaders for espionage on behalf of Israel. Could there be a basis for charging our political leaders as "accomplices after the fact" of espionage, if the AIPAC leaders are convicted?
On August 4, 2005 Paul McNulty of the Justice Department formally indicted AIPAC leaders Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman of receiving and passing highly confidential documents via the Israeli embassy to the State of Israel. Their trial is set for April 25, 2006. Franklin's trial was set to begin on January 2, 2006 but has been postponed. Franklin has been co-operating with the FBI and Justice Department in its investigations of AIPAC and the Pentagon's 'Israel Firsters' in the run up to the invasion of Iraq and the further plans to attack Iran. The indictments are based on a prolonged investigation. AIPAC was targeted for investigation as early as 2001, while the indictment of Rosen and Weissman cites illegal activities beginning in April 1999.
After Rosen and Weissman came under intensive federal investigation as co-conspirators in the Franklin spy case, AIPAC decided to cut its losses and cover its backside by throwing them overboard: AIPAC fired them on March 2005, arguing that their "conduct was not part of their job, and beneath the standards required of AIPAC employees" (Forward, December 23, 2005). In effect AIPAC was making Rosen and Weissman the "fall guys" in order to shake off a deeper federal probe of AIPAC's activities. Moreover AIPAC stopped payments to Rosen's and Weissman's lawyers sticking them with almost a half-million dollars in legal fees. AIPAC does not intend to pay the fees before the trial is over not for lack of funds (they raised over $60 million in 2005 and are tax-exempt) but for political reasons. AIPAC wants to see how the trial goes: if they are acquitted, it will be safe to pay their lawyers. But if they are found guilty AIPAC will refuse to pay (citing the organization's by-law technicalities) in order to avoid being implicated with convicted spies. AIPAC leaders are putting their organizational interests and their capacity to promote Israeli interests in Congress and the media over loyalty to their former officials.
Facing up to 10 years in federal prison, up against detailed, well-documented federal charges based on wiretaps, videos and the testimony of self-confessed spy and Pentagon contact Franklin, fired and denounced by their former colleagues and current leaders of AIPAC, Rosen and Weissman are striking back with unexpected vehemence.
The defense attorneys are expected to argue that receiving information from administration officials was something the two were paid and encouraged to do and something AIPAC routinely does (Forward, December 23,2005). In other words, Rosen and Weissman will say that pumping top US government officials for confidential memos and handing them over to Israeli officials was a common practice among AIPAC operatives. To bolster their case of "just following AIPAC orders", Rosen and Weissman's defense lawyers will subpoena AIPAC officials to testify in court about their past access to confidential documents, their contacts with high-placed officials and their collaboration with Israeli Embassy officials. Such testimony could likely bring national and international exposure to AIPAC's role as a two way transmission belt to and from Israel.
If Rosen and Weissman succeed in tying AIPAC to their activities and if they are convicted, that opens up a much larger federal investigation of AIPAC's role in aiding and abetting felonious behavior on behalf of the State of Israel.
In the almost two years since Rosen and Weissman came into the public limelight as spy suspects, AIPAC has successfully fended off adverse publicity by mobilizing leading politicians, party leaders and senior members of the Bush Administration to give public testimonials on its behalf. It dumped Rosen and Weissman and pushed ahead with lining up the US Congress with Israel's pro-war agenda against Iran. And then out of the blue, Rosen and Weissman threaten to blow their cover "as just another influential lobby" working to promote US and Israeli mutual security interests.
Rosen and Weissman's defense will certainly bring out the fact that AIPAC at no point informed their employees about what the law states regarding the obtaining and handing over of highly confidential information to a foreign power. Weissman and Rosen will argue that they did not know that receiving confidential information from administration officials and handing it over to Israel was illegal since everybody was doing it. They will further argue that their alleged spy activity was not a 'rogue operation' carried on by them independently of the organization, but was known and approved by their superiors citing AIPAC's employee procedures for reporting to superiors.
According to one former AIPAC employee with connections to the organization's current leadership, Rosen and Weissman are perceived as acting "like Samson trying to bring the house down on everyone" (Forward, December 23, 2005).
"Everyone" that is involved in exploiting US wealth, power and military forces to serve Israel's expansionist interests. What started out as a small scale spy trial, no different from other recent cases, is growing into a major cause celebre, involving the most powerful lobby influencing the entire direction of US Middle East policy. If Rosen and Weissman are convicted and they effectively make the case that they were following orders and informing AIPAC of their felonious activities, it is possible that it will drive away many wealthy Jewish donors and activists, and perhaps put some shame into the politicians who kow-tow and feed at the AIPAC trough. With a weakened AIPAC and its allies in the government wary of continuing to "liaison" with Israeli intelligence on Middle East policy, it is possible that a free and open debate based on US interests can take place. With a public debate relatively free of the constraints imposed by the Israel First lobbies and ideologues, perhaps the US public's opposition to Middle East Wars and occupations can become the dominant discourse in Congress if not the Executive. Perhaps the $3 billion dollars plus annual foreign aid to Israel more than $5 billion, all told -- can be reallocated toward rebuilding all the industrially ravaged cities and towns of Michigan, upstate New York and elsewhere.
James Petras, a former Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York, owns a 50 year membership in the class struggle, is an adviser to the landless and jobless in brazil and argentina and is co-author of Globalization Unmasked (Zed). His new book with Henry Veltmeyer, Social Movements and the State: Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia and Argentina, will be published in October 2005. He can be reached at: jpetras@binghamton.edu | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Jan 14, 2006 1:19 am Post subject: |
| Forwarded:
Dear friends,
Please click and see the " dignitaries" that AIPAC is planning to bring to Washington, DC to gather support for the Israeli aggression against the innocent civilians in Palestine.
http://www.aipac.org/pc2006/
REGISTRATION INFORMATION HOTEL & TRAVEL INFORMATION PROMOTIONAL VIDEO
Now is the time to ensure that Iran is referred to the U.N. Security Council over its nuclear weapons program. In March, while the IAEA is deciding whether to finally act, the pro-Israel community will be mobilizing to demand that Iran be referred immediately in order to keep the world's leading state sponsor of terror from acquiring the world's deadliest weapons. Do your part to help stop Iran. Join AIPAC as we mobilize in March and enlist the support of our leaders before it's too late.
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Learn more about the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program.
What is AIPAC’s Policy Conference? Top U.S. & Israeli Political Leaders Address Conference
AIPAC’s annual Policy Conference is a blockbuster event that attracts over 4,000 pro-Israel activists from all 50 states. Delegates participate in three jam-packed days of programming featuring addresses by America’s and Israel’s top leaders and scores of workshops and forums led by top experts in their fields. Top political leaders from the United States and Israel appear every year at the AIPAC Policy Conference. Last year featured addresses by top policymakers including Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the leadership of Congress.
Read the Transcripts or Listen to the Speeches
Highlights of the AIPAC Policy Conference
At the AIPAC Policy Conference banquet, Washington’s premier political gala, delegates dine and mingle with scores of lawmakers, administration officials and diplomats. Policy Conference 2005 featured addresses by the top Republican and Democratic House and Senate leaders.
Penetrating forum sessions explore the most pressing issues related to America’s Middle East policy. Last year’s conference featured sessions such as Today and Tomorrow: The Parties and Their Approach to Foreign Policy and Nuts and Bolts: How Israel Will Implement Disengagement.
Meetings on Capitol Hill promote the U.S.-Israel relationship. Last year, more than 450 meetings took place between AIPAC activists and members of Congress at the culmination of the Policy Conference.
Delegates mingle with fellow pro-Israel activists from around the country at the AIPAC Policy Conference–the pro-Israel community’s seminal event.
Exclusive events for AIPAC club members bring them face to face with leading policymakers and experts. At Policy Conference 2005, Club members had books signed by author Natan Sharansky and attended private events with political leaders including DNC Chairman Howard Dean, Republican insider Ari Fleischer, former Israeli Justice Minister Tommy Lapid and others.
Specially designed programming for campus activists–AIPAC campus activists take part in sophisticated seminars and training sessions designed to further develop leadership skills and encourage involvement in the political process.
For more information and to register, contact the Conference Registration Desk at 202-639-5363 or e-mail policyconference@aipac.org. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Jan 14, 2006 9:12 am Post subject: Crisis Over Iran's Nuclear Program Intensifies |
| http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/13/152244
Friday, January 13th, 2006
Crisis Over Iran's Nuclear Program Intensifies
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Iran threatened to halt snap inspections of its nuclear sites by the United Nations if its nuclear program is referred to the Security Council. The move came after the United States, Britain, France and Germany said Thursday that nuclear talks with Iran were at a dead end and the issue should be brought before the Council. We speak with Middle East and Iran expert Ervand Abrahamian of Baruch College. [includes rush transcript]
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Iran threatened to halt snap inspections of its nuclear sites by the United Nations if its nuclear program is referred to the Security Council. The protocol allows intrusive and short-notice inspections of the country's nuclear sites. The move came after the United States, Britain, France and Germany said Thursday that nuclear talks with Iran were at a dead end and the issue should be brought before the Council.
The crisis over Iran's nuclear program intensified this week after Iran removed seals at three nuclear facilities following a two-year freeze. Iran says its nuclear programs are solely for the peaceful generation of electricity.
Hashemi Rafsanjani, former president of Iran:
"Now the subject is very serious and sensitive and is the top issue. It seems that they, the West, don't want the Islamic country to have the new technology and want them to be backward. But we are determined to have this technology."
Meanwhile, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice urged the UN Thursday to confront what she called Iran's "defiance" over its nuclear program.
Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State:
"We also agree that the removal of seals by the Iranian Government, in defiance of numerous IAEA Board resolutions, demonstrates that it has chosen confrontation with the international community over cooperation and negotiation. As the EU-3 and EU have declared, these provocative actions by the Iranian regime have shattered the basis for negotiation.
We join the European Union and many other members of the international community in condemning the Iranian Government's deliberate escalation of this issue. There is simply no peaceful rationale for the Iranian regime to resume uranium enrichment. We're gravely concerned by Iran's long history of hiding sensitive nuclear activities from the IAEA, in violation of its obligations, its refusal to cooperate with the IAEA's investigation, its rejection of diplomatic initiatives offered by the EU and Russia and now its dangerous defiance of the entire international community
This is Massachusetts Senator John Kerry.
Sen. John Kerry (D - MA):
"Ultimately if we are not able to find any diplomatic resolution in the next weeks I don't think we have any choice but to take it to the international community. I think Iran has made a very dangerous and a very silly decision and it is inviting confrontation not with the United States but with the global community that cares enormously about the control of nuclear weapons."
Meanwhile, United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan stressed that diplomatic talks with Iran were still on the table.
Kofi Annan, UN Secretary General:
"First of all, I think we should try and resolve it if possible in the IAEA context and El Baradei is working with the parties doing his best to try to resolve it there. Once that process is exhausted it may end up in the council and I would leave it to the council to decide what to do if it were to come here. I wouldn't wan to preempt that. And my own, I have been talking to all the parties to negotiate a settlement and really keeping people at the table and try to discourage escalation. My good offices are always available if I need to do more and the parties so wish I will do it."
For the latest on Iran we are joined by:
Ervand Abrahamian, Middle East and Iran Expert at Baruch College, City University of New York. He is the author of several books and is the co-author of "Inventing the Axis of Evil: The Truth About North Korea, Iran, and Syria"
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JUAN GONZALEZ: This is the former president of Iran, Rafsanjani.
HASHEMI RAFSANJANI: [translated] Now, the subject is very serious and sensitive and is the top issue. It seems that they, the West, don't want an Islamic country to have new technology and want them to be backward. But we are determined to have this technology.
AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice urged the U.N. Thursday to confront what she called Iran's defiance over its nuclear program.
CONDOLEEZZA RICE: We also agree that the removal of seals by the Iranian government in defiance of numerous I.A.E.A. board resolutions demonstrates that it has chosen confrontation with the international community over cooperation and negotiation. As the E.U.-3 and E.U. have declared, these provocative actions by the Iranian regime have shattered the basis for negotiation.
We join the European Union and many other members of the international community in condemning the Iranian government's deliberate escalation of this issue. There is simply no peaceful rationale for the Iranian regime to resume uranium enrichment. We are gravely concerned by Iran's long history of hiding sensitive nuclear activities from the I.A.E.A., in violation of its obligations, its refusal to cooperate with the I.A.E.A.'s investigation, its rejection of diplomatic initiatives offered by the E.U. and Russia, and now its dangerous defiance of the entire international community.
AMY GOODMAN: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. This is Massachusetts Senator John Kerry.
SEN. JOHN KERRY: Ultimately, if we're not able to find a diplomatic resolution in the next weeks, I don't think we have any choice but to take it to the international community. I think Iran has made a very dangerous and a very silly decision. And it really is inviting confrontation not with the United States, but with the global community that cares enormously about the control of nuclear weapons.
AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan stressed diplomatic talks with Iran were still on the table.
KOFI ANNAN: First of all, I think we should try and resolve it, if possible, in the I.A.E.A. context. And El Baradei is working with the parties, doing his best to try and resolve it there. Once that process is exhausted, it may end up in the council, and I would leave it to the council to decide what to do if it were to come here. I wouldn't want to preempt them. And my own -- no, I've been talking to all the parties, doing whatever I can to encourage a negotiated settlement and really keeping people at the table and trying to avoid and discourage escalation. And I will continue to do that. My good offices are always available. If I need to do more and the parties so wish, I will do it.
AMY GOODMAN: That's Kofi Annan. For more on Iran, we are joined by Ervand Abrahamian. He is a Middle East and Iran expert at Baruch College, City University of New York, author of several books and coauthor of Inventing the Axis of Evil: The Truth About North Korea, Iran and Syria. The professor joins us in our Firehouse studio. Welcome to Democracy Now!
ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, can you talk about the latest, what looks like is evolving as a major crisis at the United Nations?
ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Yes. I think what we're seeing are beginnings of escalation, escalation which can eventually lead to some sort of military confrontation. Because of the Iraqi war, we have the sort of the premise that wars are done by design, by intention. The Iraqi war was actually very much of an exception. Most wars come out of miscalculation, misjudgment, playing chickens, expecting the other side to climb down. And this is a classic case where the two sides have irreconcilable interests, and the two sides are going to, in fact, play chicken, expecting the other side to back down. And as far as I can see, neither side is going to back down. So along the road, military confrontation is very much likely.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And your sense of the role of China and Russia in the Security Council, if this does move now to the Security Council?
ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Well, Iran, in the past, has been hoping, with the help of also India and other countries, but the bottom line is when it comes to who can offer what, of course, the U.S. can offer China and Russia far more than Iran can. So Iran is not really going to get much protection from those countries, and it probably knows that. It's willing to go along, because it feels it has other cards it can play against United States. So, Iran's actually acting from a position of strength, the way they see it. This makes it very dangerous, because they are overconfident about the situation.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And the New York Times is reporting that Israel, behind the scenes, is pressing very hard on this issue of Iran. But the hypocrisy of many of these western countries, raising these issues about Iran's nuclear program, while Israel's nuclear program goes basically unnoticed or not targeted by any of the other major powers.
ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Yes. And it's not, of course, only Israel. Pakistan has nuclear weapons. As is often -- Israel constantly says Israel lives in a dangerous neighborhood. But actually Iran lives in the same dangerous neighborhood. Although Iran is adamant that it has no interest, intention of building the bomb, clearly what the policy is to have the capabilities of building the bomb, if necessary.
And this is directly related to Iran's experience during the Iraqi war, when the Iraqis were using weapons of mass destruction and the international community didn't lift a finger. In fact, countries like United States helped Iraq use these weapons on Iran, actually sold the materials and looked the other way and denied the fact that Iraq had been using it. And from this experience, the Iranian decision makers have come to the conclusion that they need to be self-reliant. And if they're ever in a situation like that again, they would be able to build a bomb.
But that doesn't mean they want to build a bomb now. In the nuclear business, it's known as the Japanese option. Japan has this option, within a few months, of building a bomb, because it has all the equipment, it has the science, it has the knowledge. And this Japanese option, actually, some 30 countries in the world has it, and I think the strategy of the Iranian leadership is to be in the same position.
AMY GOODMAN: Why do you think it unsealed, pulled the seals now?
ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Well, I think this has been building up. I mean, Iran -- voluntary -- it kept on insisting this was a voluntary freeze while they’re negotiating with the Europeans. And those negotiations really went nowhere, mainly because it was -- Europeans were doing it for [inaudible] the United States. The United States was not involved. And since they discovered that basically they were freezing it indefinitely, it was not in their interest. So this is, for them, a time to do it. And, of course, what they see is the U.S. quagmire in Iraq. They feel that United States really can't do anything at the moment, and this is a perfect situation to go ahead.
AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Professor Ervand Abrahamian of Baruch College, has co-written the book, Inventing the Axis of Evil: The Truth About North Korea, Iran and Syria. In news, the Times of London reported that Israel's armed forces have been ordered by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon -- this was in December -- to be ready by the end of March for possible strikes on secret uranium enrichment sites in Iran. Israel has denied the report.
ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Yes, it actually doesn’t really matter whether U.S. does the strike or Israel does it, because Iran would obviously retaliate. And it really can't retaliate against Israel, but it could easily retaliate against United States, so if Israel carries out air strikes, it will be the United States that will suffer for it.
And the pain for the United States will come predominantly in Afghanistan and Iraq. In both countries, Iran, to use the jingo language, they have the assets, got a great deal of assets to cause a lot of trouble for United States. And the last thing, I think, the U.S. military wants in Iraq is a Shia revolt while they're dealing with a Sunni revolt.
AMY GOODMAN: You've talked about -- or I'd like to ask you about the President of Iran's comments on Israel, saying the Holocaust is a myth, saying Israel should be wiped off the face of the map, perhaps it should be established in someplace like Alaska. Your response?
ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Well, there are actually two explanations for this. One is this type of thinking is pretty current among rightwing in Iran. And the right wing in Iran is no more sophisticated than the right wing elsewhere. They pick up a few things from information about history, and they elaborate to a Holocaust denial, so every time in Europe someone questions a thing about the Holocaust, it's picked up in the rightwing newspapers in Iran as a major fact. So Ahmadinejad very much comes from that perspective, the questions about the Holocaust.
Then, the question is: Why is he being so adamant and insistent on it now? And I think that's a more interesting issue. If you look at it in the Middle East arena, in the Sunni Arab world Iran is seen as a collaborator with United States. This may sound strange in United States, but from their perspective, what's happening in Iraq is the government is set up in Baghdad, is a Shia government, pro-Iranian, but it's also working together closely with United States. I think this is a marriage of convenience that's not going last long, but from the Sunni, especially rightwing Sunni fundamentalist perspective, the Shias and the Iranians are actually in cahoots with United States.
Now, to basically overcome this stigma, the President in Iran is being more anti-Israeli than the Arabs. So if you can come out with these statements, you could say, ‘Well, look, I’m actually more pro-Palestinian, I’m more pro-Muslim, I’m more pro-Arab, I’m more anti-Israeli than you are, because I’m denying the Holocaust, I’m denying the legitimacy of Israel.’ And this is, again, from a rightwing Iranian perspective.
The more moderates, liberals, reformists had for a long time come to the conclusion that a two-state solution was the best thing. And the former president had actually gone on record as saying that anything the Palestinians accepted, Iran would have to accept, too. So if the Palestinians wanted a two-state solution, recognize Israel, it's not really the task of Iran to sabotage that and say, no. But I think here what Ahmadinejad is trying to do is like being more Catholic than the Pope, being more anti-Israeli than the Palestinians and the Arabs, as a way of forestalling the criticism that Iran is working with United States.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And in terms of North Korea, obviously the focus now, once again, on Iran and a nuclear program in Iran has basically forced North Korea out of the news. You hear virtually nothing about it anymore, and the United States policy of bringing this case to the U.N., while continuing to keep North Korea sort of aside in local regional talks there with some of the major powers there. Your perspective on the different approaches of the United States, of the Bush administration?
ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Yes. I mean, from the people in Tehran, their perspective is, ‘Look, North Korea has the bomb, and the U.S. is negotiating with it. Saddam Hussein didn't have the bomb and look what happened to him.’ So within, I think, Iranian elite, there is this debate. If, once Iran gets to the point of having the capabilities, should Iran then go that stretch, one lap, and actually build the bomb? And these are sort of questions that would be raised.
In fact, what is surprising is the last few years in Iran there has been much open discussion whether one should have the nuclear capability and the bomb. I don't know any other country that ever actually has such a debate. I mean, United States, when it built the bomb, or Germany or France or Russia or China, they did it secretly. And it became a de facto thing.
But in Iran there's actually quite a sophisticated knowledge about the dangers of going that route, and there's much discussion about it, the pros and cons into it. And there are even military leaders who argue that it's not in Iran's interest to build the bomb. They all agree on it’s important to have the capabilities, but to actually have the bomb is a debated issue. And many, I would say, important people would argue that it's not in Iran's interest to actually have the bomb.
AMY GOODMAN: We only have 30 seconds. But in your book you write, “The United States is on a collision course with Iran. The main casualty could well be the democratic movement in Iran.” What did you mean?
ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Well, it's already occurred. I mean, the casualty has been the democratic movement, because under the Carter and the Clinton administrations, there was actually a rapprochement, a détente. The two were pretty -- on good terms. And then you had the neo-cons coming into Washington and the “axis of evil” speech that basically undercut the reformers in Iran, because the reformers by basically -- inevitably were associated with good relations with United States. And here you have someone in Washington calling for the destruction of the Islamic republic, calling it “axis of evil.” That, really a major reason for the undermining of the reformers, so that's already occurred three years ago.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, this is a conversation that we will continue. Professor Ervand Abrahamian is a Middle East and Iran expert at Baruch College at the City University of New York, coauthor of Inventing the Axis of Evil: The Truth About North Korea, Iran and Syria. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Jan 14, 2006 10:07 am Post subject: Israel Urges Sanctions Against Iran |
| January 13, 2006
Israel Urges Sanctions Against Iran
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:29 p.m. ET
JERUSALEM (AP) -- Israel on Friday urged the international community to threaten Iran with sanctions if it doesn't abandon its nuclear ambitions, following new threats from Tehran to block U.N. inspections of its atomic sites.
Israeli officials said they remain hopeful that diplomacy can end the crisis, but they warned a military strike led by others against Iranian nuclear facilities may be necessary.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said the Iranian regime should be presented with a clear choice: ''Either they totally cease their nuclear weapons program or they endanger their relationships with the entire organized international community.''
''We believe the combination of fanatical ideology together with nuclear weaponry is a combination that no thinking person can feel comfortable with,'' Regev added.
The comments came a day after France, Britain and Germany -- backed by the United States -- said that nuclear talks with Iran had reached a dead end after more than two years of acrimonious negotiations and the issue should be referred to the Security Council.
With the support of Russia and China uncertain, however, they refrained from calling on the 15-nation council to impose sanctions and said they remained open to more talks.
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, in an interview with the British Broadcasting Corp., said Friday: ''Obviously if Iran failed to comply, the Security Council would then consider sanctions.'' But he denied military action was being considered by Britain or the U.S.
Iran says its nuclear program is peaceful and aimed only at generating electricity, but the U.S., Israel and others say Tehran is seeking to develop atomic weapons.
Israeli officials think Tehran is closer to the ''point of no return'' in developing weapons than Western countries do, arguing that point is not when Iran might have a bomb, but when it might have the technology to produce the fissile component of nuclear warheads.
Israeli defense officials have said that once Iran resumes its enrichment of uranium, as it has announced it would do, it would be able to produce fissile materials in six to 12 months.
Other experts say Iran may be up to five years or more away from producing a nuclear weapon.
Israel considers Tehran to be its greatest threat. Recent statements by Iran's hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad calling for Israel's destruction and Russia's plans to sell Iran missiles and other defense systems valued at more than $1 billion have only fueled those fears.
Last month, Israel's military chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, said he did not believe diplomatic pressure would put a halt to Iran's nuclear ambitions.
Still, Israeli officials have continued to say that international diplomatic pressure is the best way to end Iran's nuclear program, with military action considered only as a last resort. Last month, before his stroke, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Israel wouldn't lead the fight against the Islamic state's nuclear ambitions.
Israeli combat jets knocked out Iraq's unfinished nuclear reactor more than two decades ago in a lightning strike. But military experts have said a similar attack on Iran's nuclear project would be far more complex, because facilities are dispersed and some are hidden underground.
On Friday, Ran Cohena member of the Israeli parliament's foreign affairs and defense committee, said Israel ''definitely is not considering military action because it would only encourage radical (Islamic) groups to increase their power.''
But another committee member, Ephraim Sneh, said while Israel is not preparing to carry out a unilateral military strike, ''it doesn't mean it's not feasible.''
Asked about the possibility of an attack on Iran, the British foreign secretary said, ''I promise you I've never had a single discussion with anybody in the American administration about even the possibility of military action.''
''This can only be resolved by peaceful means. Nobody is talking about invading Iran or taking military action,'' Straw added.
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http://nogw.com/warforisrael.html | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Jan 20, 2006 8:17 pm Post subject: Ex-Pentagon man gets 12 years in AIPAC case |
| Why do we have find out about this from an Israeli newspaper as the serving Israel first US press/media isn't touching it from what I have seen thus far:
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/spages/672973.html:
Ex-Pentagon man gets 12 years in AIPAC case
By Shmuel Rosner, Haaretz Correspondent in Washington and AP
WASHINGTON - Former Pentagon analyst Larry A. Franklin was sentenced Friday to a 12 years and seven months imprisonment for passing classified information to former American Israel Public Affairs Committee lobbyists.
Franklin was also found guilty of sharing classified information with Israeli diplomat Naor Gilon. He was also fined $10,000.
In sentencing Franklin, U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III said the facts of the case led him to believe that Franklin was motivated primarily by a desire to help the United States, not harm it.
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Franklin, 59, had worked with top Pentagon officials, including former undersecretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith, and is an expert on Iraq and Iran.
Franklin pleaded guilty in October in a plea bargain, and will testify in the trial of former AIPAC lobbyists Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman slated to start in April 2005. Franklin's sentence could be then further reduced because of his cooperation with the government.
Rosen and Weissman, who are facing charges of disclosing confidential information to Israel, were fired from AIPAC in 2004.
The judge said that Franklin believed the National Security Council was insufficiently concerned with the threat posed by an unspecified Middle Eastern nation. Franklin thought leaking information might eventually persuade the Security Council to take more serious action, he said.
While the Middle Eastern country was not named in the court record, sources and the facts of the case point to Iran.
Ellis said he viewed Franklin's case differently than a case involving information leaked to the Soviets at height of the Cold War.
"But not different to the extent of excuse. Not at all," Ellis said.
Franklin at one time worked for Feith, then the Pentagon's No. 3 official, on issues involving the Middle East. During a court appearance last year, Franklin said he would occasionally be questioned directly by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former top Pentagon official Paul Wolfowitz on policy issues.
As a result, Franklin said, he sometimes took classified information home to stay up to speed. One of the charges to which he pleaded guilty was unlawful retention of classified national defense information.
Franklin admitted that he met periodically with Rosen and Weissman between 2002 and 2004 and discussed classified information, including information about potential attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq.
Rosen and Weissman would subsequently share what they learned with reporters and Israeli officials.
Rosen was a top lobbyist for Washington-based AIPAC for more than 20 years, and Weissman was the organization's top Iran expert. AIPAC fired them in April and says it has cooperated with the investigation.
Prosecution attorneys said Friday in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia they would consider releasing the court from federal sentencing guidelines once Franklin completes his cooperation in the case against Rosen and Weissman.
Franklin asked that he be allowed to serve his sentence at a minimum security prison near his home. | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
