On to Iran

November 22, 2004
Won't Get Fooled Again?
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
It is not yet Bush's second term. All available US troops are tied down in Iraq by a few thousand lightly armed insurgents. Go-it-alone Bush has isolated America from her allies. And the neocons want to spread their war to Iran.
The Bush administration is recycling the lies that it used to invade Iraq: Iran is acquiring nuclear weapons that will be given to terrorists. In a display of loyalty to a ruthless neocon administration calculated to win him appointments to corporate boards, outgoing Secretary of State Colin Powell told reporters that Iran was working on nuclear missiles.
The source for this effort to spread hysteria? One "walk-in" source with unverified documents. Most likely, the source is a member of an Iranian exile group given the assignment by neocons Richard Perle and John Bolton.
One might think that Powell would be suffering shame enough for lying to the UN about Iraq. Apparently not, as his last act against world peace is to spread neocon propaganda that Iran is going nuke.
The US media, now a tamed propaganda organ for the White House, dutifully repeated Powell's unverified claims, thus providing "reports" for Bush to cite as evidence that Iran was rushing ahead with the development of nuclear weapons.
The International Atomic Energy Agency conducts regular inspections in Iran. The IAEA recently issued a report stating that it has found no evidence of a nuclear weapons program in Iran.
Real evidence, however, is no match for neocon propaganda.
And the propaganda is pouring out of the well-oiled neocon machine. French, German and British agreements that confine Iran to the peaceful use of nuclear energy are in the way of the neoconservatives' intention to spread the war to Iran and must be discredited.
On November 20, Caroline Glick, deputy managing editor of the Jerusalem Post hysterically accused Europe of defending "Iran's ability to attain the wherewithal to destroy the Jewish state." Glick "exposes" France's efforts to prevent the outbreak of wider war in the Middle East as a trick: "France wishes only to box in the US to the point that the Americans will not be able to continue to fight the war against terrorism."
The neoconservative Heritage Foundation promptly broadcast Glick's hysterical rants into the Republican noise machine, reviving talk radio calls for nuking France, "America's oldest enemy."
Three years ago Ann Coulter was fired by National Review, a neocon publication, when she declared: "We should invade [Muslim] countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." Today such violent words are common parlance.
There is no evidence whatsoever in behalf of the claims the Bush administration is making about Iranian nukes. The purpose of these false claims is to create fear that will breech the public's opposition to a draft. The neocons are desperate for troops for their Middle Eastern War.
For a decade or longer, the neocons who control the Bush administration's foreign and military policies have been writing papers advocating a US-Israeli conquest of the Middle East. A moronic president has given them their chance.
Anxious to get their war underway, the neocons launched their invasion before they had the necessary manpower for the task. Bogged down in Iraq, the neocons are desperate to widen the war before the American public has enough of the pointless carnage and forces a withdrawal.
Thus, before the Iraqi war is finished, the neocon propaganda machine is at work creating fear that the US is in danger from Iranian nukes unless America preemptively attacks Iran.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. But Americans are perfectly set up to be fooled twice. Right-wing talk radio has conservative patriots absolutely demanding to be fooled. Christian rapture propagandists have conservative congregations waiting to be wafted up to heaven. The corporate media is with President Bush. Military types are determined to avenge the Vietnam loss by winning the war against Islam into which they have been conned.
Critics are dismissed as "enemies" who are "against us". Reason and common sense are not features of the Bush administration. It is all blind emotion, a replay of The Triumph of the Will.
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts11222004.html
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy during 1981-82.

$20 million for a coup in Iran?

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/printstory.mpl/editorial/outlook/2911185

Bush is bringhing the NeoCons on board

Powell 'pushed out' by Bush for seeking to rein in Israel

By Charles Laurence in New York and Philip Sherwell11/21/04 "The Telegraph"

-- Colin Powell, the outgoing US secretary of state, was given his marching orders after telling President George W Bush that he wanted greater power to confront Israel over the stalled Middle East peace process.Although Mr Powell's departure was announced on November 15, his letter of resignation was dated November 11, the day he had a meeting with Mr Bush.According to White House officials, at the meeting Mr Powell was not asked to stay on and gave no hints that he would do so. Briefing reporters later, he referred to "fulsome discussions" - diplomatic code for disagreements."The clincher came over the Mid-East peace process," said a recently-retired state department official."Powell thought he could use the credit he had banked as the president's 'good cop' in foreign policy to rein in Ariel Sharon [Israel's prime minister] and get the peace process going. He was wrong."Bob Woodward, the veteran Washington reporter who was granted unprecedented access to the first Bush administration for his books Bush At War and Plan Of Attack, said last week that Mr Powell had been "dreaming" if he thought that he could stay on.Vice-president Dick Cheney and his fellow hardliner, John Bolton, an under-secretary of state to Mr Powell, are both understood to have lobbied Mr Bush to replace him.They wanted to make Iran's alleged nuclear bomb aspirations and support for Islamic terror groups the foreign policy priority for the new administration and believed that Mr Powell would back away from a confrontational approach.The two are frustrated that Britain, France and Germany are still seeking a diplomatic deal with Teheran rather than backing an immediate UN Security Council resolution condemning Iran and threatening sanctions.Mr Powell's final pitch to remain in office for at least another year was made during Tony Blair's visit to Washington nine days ago, The Telegraph has learned. Earlier indications had been that he intended to step down after enduring four years of clashes with the office of Mr Cheney and the Pentagon under Donald Rumsfeld.Friends of Mr Powell later briefed journalists that he had changed his mind because he saw the chance of progress on the peace process and wanted to see through the Iraqi elections.Mr Powell is to be replaced by Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser and close confidante of Mr Bush.Mr Bolton's predicted promotion as her deputy is a further signal that the president wants to conduct foreign policy without the "moderating" influence and popular public face of Mr Powell.Prominent neo-conservatives in Washington make no secret of their desire for regime change in Teheran, although few believe that a full-scale military operation is a viable strategy.Instead, the emphasis is on establishing economic sanctions as a means to squeeze the ruling mullahs. There is also the option that the US may tacitly back Israeli air strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.The overhaul of the CIA under its new director, Porter Goss, a recent Bush appointee, is also intended to remove critics of America's foreign policy.16 November 2004: Rice 'to take over from Powell' Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. IranSecerte has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is IranSecrete endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

Neocons

You Can't Blame the Neocons on Us!

As I take a look around the train crash that was the Presidential election 2004, I can take solace in the knowledge that the Democrats did not create the Neocons. No, Neocons are a totally Conservative Republican Right creation.
Amanda Roe Lang

11/17/04 "ICH" -- First, a little history. What is the difference between the regular "Conservative Republican Right" and the "Neocon"? The Neocons are the original "Reagan Republicans." Like their conservative counterpart, the Neocon believes in a strong military and never met a member of the "military-industrial complex" that he/she did not like, especially when it comes to spending the taxpayers' dollars on bigger and better war-toys -- even if they do not work (for example: SDI or "Star Wars"). The Neocons and Conservatives part ways on the issues of "nation-building" and "pre-emptive war". The Neocons are for both, period. The Conservative Republican Right is more concerned about gay sex and marriage, and those other 'life-threatening' moral issues.

By finding a kindred spirit in President Reagan, the Neocons greatly influenced US foreign policy in the 1980s. With huge deficits looming from the Reagan "trickle down bullshit" and unprecedented defense spending, America wanted a change. A Clinton victory over Daddy Bush 41 in the 1990s put the Neocons temporarily out of business and without an ear to influence public policy. So what did the conservatives do? They established little "neoconservative think-tanks" to house these "special" new conservatives -- they feed them honey, nightshade, kept them warm...somebody loved them -- the AEI, the American Enterprise Institute and PNAC, the Project for the New American Century to name a few. So despite being muted by President Bill Clinton who largely tried to practice restraint and humility in foreign affairs, the neocons, funded by their Conservative Right brethren, used the 1990s to "hone their message and craft their blueprint for American power." Funded and nurtured by Republican Conservatives, many neocons won key posts in the Bush administration.
September 11, 2001 provided a much needed opportunity for these think-tanks to act and to push the Bush administration closer than ever to Neoconservative foreign policy. On September 20, 2001, PNAC wrote an open letter to President Bush calling for regime change in Iraq -- a letter that in retrospect had been hatching since Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolowitz, and Libbey walked through the White House doors -- propelled the Bush administration and the American people to adopt and execute Neoconservative foreign policy programs that took the U.S first to Afghanistan, then Iraq and threatened to take us to Iran, North Korea, and perhaps China, Europe, and areas of South America.
September 20, 2001
The Honorable George W. BushPresident of the United StatesWashington, DC
Dear Mr. President,
We write to endorse your admirable commitment to “lead the world to victory” in the war against terrorism. We fully support your call for “a broad and sustained campaign” against the “terrorist organizations and those who harbor and support them.” We agree with Secretary of State Powell that the United States must find and punish the perpetrators of the horrific attack of September 11, and we must, as he said, “go after terrorism wherever we find it in the world” and “get it by its branch and root.” We agree with the Secretary of State that U.S. policy must aim not only at finding the people responsible for this incident, but must also target those “other groups out there that mean us no good” and “that have conducted attacks previously against U.S. personnel, U.S. interests and our allies.”
In order to carry out this “first war of the 21st century” successfully, and in order, as you have said, to do future “generations a favor by coming together and whipping terrorism,” we believe the following steps are necessary parts of a comprehensive strategy.
Osama bin Laden
We agree that a key goal, but by no means the only goal, of the current war on terrorism should be to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, and to destroy his network of associates. To this end, we support the necessary military action in Afghanistan and the provision of substantial financial and military assistance to the anti-Taliban forces in that country.
Iraq
We agree with Secretary of State Powell’s recent statement that Saddam Hussein “is one of the leading terrorists on the face of the Earth….” It may be that the Iraqi government provided assistance in some form to the recent attack on the United States. But even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism. The United States must therefore provide full military and financial support to the Iraqi opposition. American military force should be used to provide a “safe zone” in Iraq from which the opposition can operate. And American forces must be prepared to back up our commitment to the Iraqi opposition by all necessary means.
Hezbollah
Hezbollah is one of the leading terrorist organizations in the world. It is suspected of having been involved in the 1998 bombings of the American embassies in Africa, and implicated in the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983. Hezbollah clearly falls in the category cited by Secretary Powell of groups “that mean us no good” and “that have conducted attacks previously against U.S. personnel, U.S. interests and our allies.” Therefore, any war against terrorism must target Hezbollah. We believe the administration should demand that Iran and Syria immediately cease all military, financial, and political support for Hezbollah and its operations. Should Iran and Syria refuse to comply, the administration should consider appropriate measures of retaliation against these known state sponsors of terrorism.
Israel and the Palestinian Authority
Israel has been and remains America’s staunchest ally against international terrorism, especially in the Middle East. The United States should fully support our fellow democracy in its fight against terrorism. We should insist that the Palestinian Authority put a stop to terrorism emanating from territories under its control and imprison those planning terrorist attacks against Israel. Until the Palestinian Authority moves against terror, the United States should provide it no further assistance.
U.S. Defense Budget
A serious and victorious war on terrorism will require a large increase in defense spending. Fighting this war may well require the United States to engage a well-armed foe, and will also require that we remain capable of defending our interests elsewhere in the world. We urge that there be no hesitation in requesting whatever funds for defense are needed to allow us to win this war.
There is, of course, much more that will have to be done. Diplomatic efforts will be required to enlist other nations’ aid in this war on terrorism. Economic and financial tools at our disposal will have to be used. There are other actions of a military nature that may well be needed. However, in our judgment the steps outlined above constitute the minimum necessary if this war is to be fought effectively and brought to a successful conclusion. Our purpose in writing is to assure you of our support as you do what must be done to lead the nation to victory in this fight.
Sincerely,
Members of PNAC
And before we knew it Bush, who campaigned against nation building and world policing began calling for regime change in Iraq. Thus America began her odyssey -- Democratization of the Middle East.
In February 2003 before we pre-emptively attacked Iraq, Bush chose the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) as the venue for a speech to prepare U.S. citizens for the coming war. Here he declared that a US victory in Iraq "could begin a new s tageforMiddleEasternpeace.AEI – the de facto headquarters for neoconservative policy – had been calling for democratization of the Arab world for more than a decade and from day one of George W. Bush's appointment. In George they trusted, and apparently in them did he....
It follows, then, that among those who deserve credit for shaping this stunning triumph of American virtues and values are the much-maligned "neoconservatives" and their friends, who have been responsible for helping Bush design and execute his wartime agenda. Special recognition and thanks are thus accorded, for example, to: Vice President Dick Cheney and key members of his staff (including Lewis "Scooter" Libby, John Hannah, and David Wurmser); the National Security Council's Condoleezza Rice, Robert Joseph, and Elliott Abrams; the Defense Department's Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and William Luti; and the State Department's John Bolton, Paula Dobriansky, and Paula DeSutter. These people — and too many others — have helped the president imprint moral values on American security policy in a way and to an extent not seen since Ronald Reagan's first term.
The aid supplied by the Conservative Republicans in the 90s allowed the Neocons to survive, prosper, and ascend to the highest offices of power within the Bush administration so that they could deliver the first 21st century war to the world's doorstep.
So Conservatives -- PLEASE STOP TELLING ME YOU DON'T KNOW WHO THE NEOCONS ARE OR HOW THEY CAME TO CONTROL THE GOVERNMENT!!!
The Conservative Republican Right created the Neocons

You remind me of a guy I had lab with who had a maggot farm for part of his research. Every day in lab he complained about the flies. Finally one day I had to say, "GDI, if you have maggots, you are going to have flies, duh?" He said, (I SWEAR), ..."if I had known flies were going to be involved, I would never had selected the maggots." OK Conservatives, you built it, they came. The maggot farm and the flies belong to you.

Amanda Roe Lang, PhD
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. IranSecerete has no efiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is IranSecrete or sponsored by the originator.)

Neocons Gone Wild

Neocons Gone Wild
Jim Lobe
November 08, 2004
Perhaps a few of you spotted Richard Perle and David Frum's neocon fantasy piece in bookstores last spring. Well, with Bush re-elected and not calling for anyone to resign, the neocons are preparing their plans for freedom through American domination. Jim Lobe, our steadfast neocon watcher, says that what was fantasy is about to become policy.
Jim Lobe writes for Inter Press Service, an international newswire, and for Foreign Policy in Focus, a joint project of the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies and the New Mexico-based Interhemispheric Resource Center.
An influential foreign-policy neoconservative with close and long-standing ties to top hawks in the George W. Bush administration has laid out what he calls ''a checklist of the work the world will demand of this president and his subordinates in a second term.''
The list, which begins with the destruction of Falluja in Iraq and ends with the development of ''appropriate strategies'' for dealing with threats posed by China, Russia and ''the emergence of a number of aggressively anti-American regimes in Latin America,'' calls for ''regime change'' in Iran and North Korea.
The list's author, Frank Gaffney, the founder and president of the Center for Security Policy (CSP), also warns that the Bush administration should resist any pressure arising from the anticipated demise of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to resume peace talks that could result in Israel's giving up ''defensible boundaries.''
While all seven steps Gaffney listed in an article published Friday morning in the National Review Online have long been favoured by prominent neocons, the article itself, entitled 'Worldwide Value', is the first comprehensive compilation to emerge since Bush's re-election Tuesday.
It is also sure to be contested—not just by Democrats who, with the election behind them, are poised to take a more anti-war position on Iraq—but by many conservative Republicans in Congress as well. They blame the neoconservatives for failing to anticipate the quagmire in Iraq and worry that their grander ambitions, such as those set forth by Gaffney, will bankrupt the treasury and break an already-overextended military.
Yet its importance as a road map of where neoconservatives—who, with the critical help of Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, dominated Bush's foreign policy after the 9/11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon—want U.S. policy to go was underlined by Gaffney's listing of the names of his friends in the administration who, in his words, ''helped the president imprint moral values on American security policy in a way and to an extent not seen since Ronald Reagan's first term.''
In addition to Cheney and Rumsfeld, he cited the most clearly identified—and controversial—neoconservatives serving in the administration: Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis ''Scooter'' Libby; his top Middle East advisors, John Hannah and David Wurmser; weapons proliferation specialist Robert Joseph and top Mideast aide Elliott Abrams on the National Security Council; Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith; and Feith's top Mideast aide, William Luti in the Pentagon; and Undersecretaries for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton and for Global Issues Paula Dobriansky at the State Department.
Virtually all of the same individuals have been cited by critics of the Iraq war, including Democratic lawmakers and retired senior foreign service and military officials, as responsible for hijacking the policy and intelligence process that led to the U.S. invasion.
Indeed, in a lengthy interview about the war last May on 60 Minutes, the former head of the U.S. Central Command and Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief Middle East envoy until 2003, ret. Gen. Anthony Zinni called for the resignation of Libby, Abrams, Wolfowitz and Feith, as well as Rumsfeld, for their roles.
Zinni also cited former Defense Policy Board (DPB) chairman Richard Perle, who has been close to Gaffney since both of them served, with Abrams, in the office of Washington State Sen. Henry M. Jackson in the early 1970s. When Perle became an assistant secretary of defense under Reagan, he brought Gaffney along as his deputy. When Perle left in 1987, Gaffney succeeded him before setting up CSP in 1989.
As Perle's long-time protegé and associate, Gaffney sits at the center of a network of interlocking think tanks, foundations, lobby groups, arms manufacturers and individuals that constitute the coalition of neoconservatives, aggressive nationalists like Cheney and Rumsfeld, and Christian Right activists responsible for the unilateralist trajectory of U.S. foreign policy since 9/11.
Included among CSP's board of advisors over the years have been Rumsfeld, Perle, Feith, Christian moralist William Bennett, Abrams, Feith, Joseph, former UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, former Navy Undersecretary John Lehman, and former CIA director James Woolsey, who also co-chairs the new Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), another prominent neoconservative-led lobby group that argues that Washington is now engaged in ''World War IV'' against ''Islamo-fascism.''
Also serving on its advisory council are executives from some of the country's largest military contractors, which finance CSP's work, along with contributions from wealthy pro-Likud individuals, such as prominent New York investor Lawrence Kadish and California casino king Irving Moskowitz, and right-wing foundations, such as the Bradley, Sarah Scaife and Olin Foundations.
Gaffney, a ubiquitous ''talking head'' on television in the run-up to the war in Iraq, himself sits on the boards of CPD's parent organisations, the Foundation for the Defense Democracies (FDD) and Americans for Victory Over Terrorism (AVOT), and also was a charter associate, along with Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle, Wolfowitz and Abrams, of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), another prominent neoconservative-led group that offered up a similar checklist of what Bush should do in the ''war on terrorism'' just nine days after the 9/11 attacks.
His article opens by trying to pre-empt an argument that is already being heard on the right against expanding Bush's ''war on terrorism;'' namely that, since a plurality of Bush voters identified ''moral values'' as their chief concern, the president should stick to his social conservative agenda rather than expand the war.
''The reality is that the same moral principles that underpinned the Bush appeal on 'values' issues like gay marriage, stem-cell research, and the right to life were central to his vision of U.S. war aims and foreign policy,'' Gaffney wrote. ''Indeed, the president laid claim square to the ultimate moral value—freedom—as the cornerstone of his strategy for defeating our Islamofascist enemies and their state sponsors, for whom that concept is utterly (sic) anathema.''
To be true to that commitment, policy in the second administration must be directed toward seven priorities, Gaffney says, beginning with the ''reduction in detail of Fallujah and other safe havens utilized by freedom's enemies in Iraq;'' followed by ''(r)egime change—one way or another—in Iran and North Korea, the only hope for preventing these remaining 'Axis of Evil' states from fully realizing their terrorist and nuclear ambitions.''
Third, the administration must provide ''the substantially increased resources need to re-equip a transforming military and rebuild human-intelligence capabilities (minus, if at all possible, the sorts of intelligence 'reforms' contemplated pre-election that would make matters worse on this and other scores) while we fight World War IV, followed by enhancing ''protection of our homeland,'' including deploying effective missile defenses at sea and in space, as well as ashore.''
Fifth, Washington must keep ''faith with Israel, whose destruction remains a priority for the same people who want to destroy us (and...for our shared 'moral values) especially in the face of Yasser Arafat's demise and the inevitable, post-election pressure to 'solve' the Middle East problem by forcing the Israelis to abandon defensible boundaries.''
Sixth, the administration must deal with France and Germany and the dynamic that made them ''so problematic in the first term: namely, their willingness to make common cause with our enemies for profit and their desire to employ a united Europe and its new constitution—as well as other international institutions and mechanisms—to thwart the expansion and application of American power where deemed necessary by Washington.''
Finally, Bush must adapt ''appropriate strategies for contending with China's increasingly fascistic trade and military policies, (Russian President) Vladimir Putin's accelerating authoritarianism at home and aggressiveness toward the former Soviet republics, the worldwide spread of Islamofascism, and the emergence of a number of aggressively anti-American regimes in Latin America,''—which Gaffney does not further identify.
''These items do not represent some sort of neocon 'imperialist' game plan,'' Gaffney stressed. ''Rather, they constitute a checklist of the work the world will demand of this president and his subordinates in a second term."

Neo-Con Spies IV

Neo-Con Spies IV
Jihad Al Khazen Al-Hayat 2004/09/25

What is more dangerous than neo-cons spying for Israel is that some officials hijacking the U.S. foreign policy and direct it to serve the Israeli interests. In previous columns, I recorded their stances toward Iraq, Iran and Palestinians that have become U.S. policy. This is what probably led the real conservative Patrick Buchanan to say, "What the U.S. needs in the Middle East is a policy made in the U.S. not in Tel Aviv, AIPAC or the American Enterprise Institute (AEI)."
Would the Lawrence Franklin scandal be a new Iran-Contra? The bad guys of the new scandal are the same infamous ones of two decades ago in the previous one. Franklin and another "specialist" from Douglas Feith's office, Harold Rhode, were among the officials who established contacts with the Iranian arms dealer, Manucher Ghorbanifar, and Iranian refugees abroad; exactly like the arms sales scandal under the Reagan administration. It seems that the contacts reflected a competition between the neo-con clique in the administration who want "to change the regime" in Iran and the officials at the Department of State and the CIA who prefer to be cautious.
Around a year ago, News Day exposed the contacts with Ghorbanifar, and Washington Monthly conducted an exclusive interview with him in which he confirmed he met with officials at the Defense Department, and strongly denied the fact that they were 'chance meetings' as the Department claimed. Thus, it became obvious that there is a separatist team in the Defense Department working on changing the regime in Iran, albeit it was not the policy of the State Department or the administration, and probably without the consent of top officials, including the President.
There is an Israeli nest inside the U.S. Defense Department, and it is not supporting Yitzhak Rabin's policies but the radical Likudnik policy that is working against peace and for war in the whole region, at the expense of American souls and interests. The best image from inside of the Israeli gang in the Department is that presented by Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski about her work directly linked to Israel's gang in the Department's office for Near East South Asia (NESA). In fact, she wrote a long article in Salon Internet magazine; she talked about how she moved after two years of working in the Defense Secretary's office to the administration that opened her eyes to the "hijacking" of U.S. foreign policy.
Kwiatkowski said that between May 2002 and April 2003, she "observed firsthand the formation of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans and watched the latter stages of the neo-conservative capture of the policy-intelligence nexus in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. This seizure of the reins of U.S. Middle East policy was directly visible to many of us working in the Near East South Asia policy office, and yet there seemed to be little any of us could do about it."
She added, "I saw a narrow and deeply flawed policy favored by some executive appointees in the Pentagon used to manipulate and pressurize the traditional relationship between policymakers in the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies."
She wrote: "To begin with, I was introduced to Bill Luti, assistant secretary of defense for NESA. A tall, thin, nervously intelligent man, he welcomed me into the fold. I knew little about him. Because he was a recently retired naval captain and now high-level Bush appointee, the common assumption was that he had connections, if not capability. I would later find out that when Dick Cheney was secretary of defense over a decade earlier, Luti was his aide. He had also been a military aide to Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich during the Clinton years… Co-workers who had watched the transition from Clintonista to Bushite… I soon saw the modus operandi of "instant policy" unhampered by debate or experience with the early Bush administration replacement of the civilian head of the Israel, Lebanon and Syria desk office with a young political appointee from the Washington Institute, David Schenker. Word was that the former experienced civilian desk officer tended to be evenhanded toward the policies of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel, but there were complaints and he was gone… I learned that there was indeed a preferred ideology for NESA. My first day in the office, a GS-15 career civil servant rather unhappily advised me that if I wanted to be successful here, I'd better remember not to say anything positive about the Palestinians… A politically savvy civilian-clothes-wearing lieutenant colonel named Bill Bruner served as the Iraq desk officer, and he had apparently joined NESA about the time Bill Luti did. I discovered that Bruner, like Luti, had served as a military aide to Speaker Gingrich. Gingrich himself was now conveniently an active member of Bush's Defense Policy Board.
I asked why Bruner wore civilian attire, and was told by others, "He's Chalabi's handler." Chalabi, of course, was Ahmad Chalabi, the president of the Iraqi National Congress, who was the favored exile of the neoconservatives and the source of much of their "intelligence." Bruner himself said he had to attend a lot of meetings downtown in hotels and that explained his suits. Soon, in July, he was joined by another Air Force pilot, a colonel with no discernible political connections, Kevin Jones. I thought of it as a military-civilian partnership, although both were commissioned officers.
I spent time that summer exploring the neoconservative worldview and trying to grasp what was happening inside the Pentagon. I wondered what could explain this rush to war and disregard for real intelligence. Neoconservatives are fairly easy to study, mainly because they are few in number, and they show up at all the same parties. Examining them as individuals, it became clear that almost all have worked together, in and out of government, on national security issues for several decades. Richard Perle, David Wurmser and Douglas Feith sent Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud Party campaign in Israel in 1996 a study entitled "A Clean Break: Strategy for Securing the Realm," in which they opposed peace with Palestinians.
David Wurmser is the least known of that trio worked in 2001, as the research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute was assigned to the Pentagon, then moved to the Department of State to work as deputy for the hard-line conservative undersecretary John Bolton, then to the National Security Council, and now is lodged in the office of the vice president. His wife, the prolific Meyrav Wurmser, executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute, is also a neoconservative team player. (She is an Israeli who came with Colonel Igal Karmon to found MEMRI and then left him and worked in the same field.)"
Kwiatkowski is an expert in her field and has occupied several positions at the American government and is now preparing a PhD in international affairs. She authored two books on African issues, her first field of specialty. I have never heard anyone refuting her writings or denying them, which gives her credibility of which the sayings of the radical neo-cons lack.
In addition, Wurmser said in an address delivered at front the AEI at the beginning of 2001, eight months before the known terror occurred, that the tendency of the U.S. and Israel is a common strike to Iraq, Iran, Syria and Libya.
This is what I have on the spies. I hope that what I illustrated has reached those who are able to take care, if they do not care for their peoples.
©2003 Media Communications Group مجموعة الاتصالات

Reza Pahlavi A Puppet of the US and Israel?

April 22, 2003

Iran's Reza Pahlavi
A Puppet of the US and Israel?

by JOHN STANTON
The omnipresent neo-conservative kingmakers are at it again, this time with the eloquent and dashing Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, eldest son of the former enigmatic Iranian King of Kings, Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi, who ruled Iran from 1941 until his exile in 1979. The rest, as the cliche goes, is a history well known to the world. That painful past for Americans, Iranians, and Iraqis includes the Ayatollah Khomeini's authoritarian rule, former President Jimmy Carter's debilitating US Embassy Hostage crisis, former President Ronald Reagan's damaging Iran-Contra Affair, the horribly futile Iran-Iraq War in which the US supported Iraq, and, now, as history continues to weave its ugly tapestry, Iran finds itself a bona-fide member of current President George Bush II's Axis-of-Evil.
Thanks to the flesh and blood versions of Mattel Toy Company's line of pull-string Chatty Cathy dolls--which utter the same statements over and over and over again--the US seems destined to continue that notorious relationship with Iran. The formulaic logic used to justify the destruction of Iraq has now been set in motion for Iran by Richard Perle, Jim Woolsey, Mike Leeden, Bill Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, and Donald Rumsfeld, affectionately known as "neo-cons". And, as another cliche goes, the world is subjected to their "broken record" comments that are repeated ad nauseum each news cycle.
What journalist hasn't tired of mentioning them?
Pull the string on any of them, let's say the Chatty Cathy Leeden version, and this is what one gets: "There is now a clear recognition that we must defend ourselves against them [Iran and Syria]. They are an integral part of the terror network that produced September 11. Left undisturbed, they will kill us in Iraq and Afghanistan, and mount new attacks on our homelands. We will see the day when not one turban rules these countries."
These ideological cousins of right-wing Israeli strategists such as Yitzhak Shamir and Ariel Sharon are prepping the world with more pronouncements of regime change for the double-barreled purposes of American Empire and a Greater Israel. Today it's Iran; tomorrow it's Syria. Smart money is on Iran due to their oil. On the other hand, Syria would be easier to crush given their antiquated military. Then again, both the USA and Israel have got Reza Pahlavi dancing on strings.
Cool Dude
So what's a cool guy like Pahlavi, a USC graduate and US Air Force trained fighter pilot with a wonderful family here in the USA, doing mixing it up with guys like Leeden? Why not take it easy and stay out of the messy and brutal business that being a king involves? The answer, it seems, is the irresistible pull of genetics and, perhaps, the quest to build a stable and "free" society and not end up, or in his case continue, in exile like his father and grandfather before him. A visit to Pahlavi's excellent website features noted "peace" author Gene Sharp's work Dictatorship to Democracy and The Politics of NonViolent Action, plus assorted other works on removing totalitarian regimes through peaceful means. It's a family site too and one is invited to view photo albums of the family and a host of other documentation including speeches and articles.
Based on the message presented on his website, Pahlavi seems the reincarnation of Cyrus the Great whose Freedom Charter, circa 540BCE, stated:
"Now that I put the crown of kingdom of Iran I announce that I will respect the traditions, customs and religions of the nations of my empire and never let any of my governors and subordinates look down on or insult them. I will impose my monarchy on no nation. Each is free to accept it, and if any one of them rejects it, I never resolve on war to reign. I will never let anyone oppress any others, and if it occurs, I will take his or her right back and penalize the oppressor. I will never let anyone take possession of movable and landed properties of the others by force or without compensation. Until I am alive, I prevent unpaid, forced labor. Today, I announce that everyone is free to choose a religion. People are free to live in all regions and take up a job provided that they never violate other's rights. No one can be penalized for his or her relatives' faults. I prevent slavery and my governors and subordinates are obliged to prohibit exchanging men and women as slaves within their own ruling domains. Such a tradition should be exterminated the world over."
What Iranian, or for that matter American, wouldn't want such an idyllic state of affairs?
But some of the statements attributed to Pahlavi suggest that there's a dangerous streak of kingly greed that fuels his motives and that he merely covets the throne for personal reasons and, in order to get it, is willing to sell out the Iranian people in the process. Is Pahlavi the equivalent of the dashing and dynamic character Gordon Gekko in the movie Wall Street? That Gekko who proclaimed that "the point is, ladies and gentleman, greed is good. Greed works, greed is right. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit." Or is Pahlavi a modern day Cyrus the Great who truly wants what's best for Iran but finds himself making Faustian bargains with the ruthless Pro-Israeli militarists of the American Empire?
Family Matters
Grandfather Reza Khan was a respected warfighter in the Cossack Brigade in the late 1800's, and ultimately led a coup to rid the country of a government that allowed British, Russian and Ottoman troops to occupy Iran during World War I. Khan became Prime Minister of the new government and four years later in 1925, ascended to the throne replacing the weakly Ahmad Mirza Shah. He took the name Reza Shah Pahlavi (Reza Shah Kabir or Reza Shah the Great) and the dynasty was underway.
According to iranchamber.com, "Reza Shah introduced many great reforms, reorganizing the army, government administration, and finances. He abolished all special rights granted to foreigners, thus gaining real independence for Iran. Under Reza Shah's 16 years of rule, roads and Trans-Iranian Railway were built, modern education was introduced and the University of Tehran was established, and for the first time, a systematic dispatch of Iranian students to Europe was started. Industrialization of the country was stepped-up, and achievements were great. By the mid 1930's Reza Shah's dictatorial style of rule caused dissatisfaction in Iran. In World War II the Allies protested his rapprochement with the Germans, and in 1941 British and Russian forces invaded and occupied Iran. Forced to abdicate in favor of his son, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, he died in exile in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1944."
Like father like son, so yet another cliche has it, and Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi was also forced to abdicate and subsequently died in 1980, exiled in Egypt. This Shah of Iran was embroiled in the CIA coup that ousted quixotic Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq and was a pawn of successive American administrations during the Cold War, which pitted the USSR against the USA. His popular legacy is the current theocratic regime in Iran and SAVAK--the brutal intelligence arm of the Shah. For a short time, though, he waived the flag of democratic reform and Iranians had high hopes for democracy. He instituted the White Revolution, according to the above mentioned website, a 1963 program that included land reform, the extension of voting rights to women, and the elimination of illiteracy. But the trappings of power, fear of opposition groups, and insensitivity towards Islam (Arab Muslims conquered Iran in roughly 650 BCE and Islam remians a powerful force)led him, like his father, into an insular dictatorship and all the wretched practices that method entails.
Will the Real Reza Pahlavi Please Stand Up?
During a recent meeting with US Congressional Representatives and staffers on Capitol Hill, Pahlavi--called "Your Majesty" by the representatives and staffers -seemed embittered at the slow pace of non-violent change taking place in Iran so beautifully articulated on his website. According to sources, several times he blasted the Europeans and those who wish to have contact with Iran and said that they should not "throw a rope to a sinking ship."
As if to echo the neo-conservatives, Pahlavi argued for the political and economic boycott of Iran using the Iraqi model, in order to undercut the Iranian regime while seemingly ignoring the dastardly effects that action would have on the people he wants to "liberate". He also indicated that he was in close contact with Iranian students and that they are asking for a political and economic boycott. That claim, according to many insiders, has been refuted by the students who are smart enough to know what pain and suffering it would cause. Oddly, he maintained that Bush II is someone who cares for Iranians and indicated that "Iranians were heartened by the Axis of Evil comment".
He went on to articulate his view that Iran is the key country in the region and that Iran must change before the entire region can rest easy. As if a neo-con Chatty Cathy himself, Pahlavi stated that Iran is a grave threat to world peace, that they harbor and support Al-Qaeda, they threaten US economic interests and, as if to take the words right out of the mouth of Curt "suitcase nuke" Weldon, US representative from Pennsylvania, Pahlavi indicated "the Iranians do not need delivery systems to send nukes to the US, they can send one lone terrorist to blow off a nuclear device in Lake Michigan."
Iran has been working for generations to acquire nuclear energy generation capability (no doubt some of the weapons grade by-products of that capability too). That effort began in 1967 initiated by Pahlavi's father with the purchase of a five-megawatt research reactor from the United States. The Atomic Energy Organization of Iran was established in 1974 and the Shah had intended to build nuclear power plants throughout Iran by 1994. The Iranian nuclear program was supported by the United States, France, Germany and, of course, now Russia.
Yet, during the same meeting with Representatives in the US Congress, the younger Pahlavi stated that Iran does not need nuclear technology. That runs contrary to the belief on the ground in Iran, some report, pointing out that the populace feels the country is in need of nuclear technology in order to develop. But Pahlavi categorically said that Iran has enough energy through gas and oil, and has no need for nuclear power. He said that he would like to see a "reversal of Iran's nuclear program," which only will occur if Iran is democratized.
That, of course, is music to the oily ears of Bush II and Cheney.
Pahlavi also cut a backroom deal by garnering political support and funding from the US Congress for private Iranian-American satellite companies in California and US government sponsored external radio programs such as Radio FARDA, geared to reprogramming Iranians under 30 years of age. He was very careful to mention that there should be "one degree of separation"--no royal hand involved so to speak--and that American taxpayer's funds should be given to foundations that in turn can give the money to the satellite broadcasters. Not surprisingly, Senator Sam Brownback, a Republican from Kansas, introduced an amendment on April 8, 2003, that would provide $50 million (US) to an Iran Democracy Foundation, the purpose of which is to broadcast "democracy" into Iran. According to reports, the language in Brownback's amendment has its origins in the Pentagon and is almost the same as that used in the Iraqi Liberation Act that the US Congress approved in 1998.
"Don't appease the dictators. They only understand the language of power." That according to the Pahlavi who would be the next Shah of Iran. Yet if history offers valid insights, and in light of his recent comments, this next King--should the US and Israel install him--seems destined to repeat the mistakes of his ancestors.
It doesn't have to be that way.

John Stanton is a Virginia based writer specializing in national security matters. He can be reached at cioran123@yahoo.com

Coalition for Democracy in Iran:

Whats New at Right Web
Exposing the Architecture of Power that's Changing Our World
http://rightweb.irc-online.org

October 19, 2004
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Introducing new articles from IRCs Right Web initiative

Coalition for Democracy in Iran
By Tom Barry

The Coalition for Democracy in Iran (CDI) is one of numerous pressure groups created by neoconservatives that focus on changing U.S. foreign policy. These include the U.S. NATO Committee, Committee for Liberation of Iraq, and U.S. Committee for a Free Lebanon. In late 2002 Michael Leeden and Morris Amitay spearheaded the creation of the Coalition for Democracy in Iran. Other members include Frank Gaffney, Jack Kemp, Bruce McColm, Joshua Muravhik, Danielle Pletka, Rob Sobhani, Raymond Tanter, and James Woolsey. (1)

CDI represents just one thrust in a phalanx of neoconservative initiatives and organizations that aim to set the U.S. foreign policy agenda for Iran. Other groups include the Middle East Forum, Project for the New American Century, Hudson Institute, Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, Committee on the Present Danger, Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and especially the American Enterprise Institute, which serves as the flagship neocon think tank.

CDI states it was formed to mobilize the efforts of groups and individuals across the United States, including Iranian-Americans, who support the aspirations of the Iranian people for democracy and respect for human rights in Iran. In the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, there is an even greater urgency to focus the attention of the U.S. public opinion and the policy makers on the real agenda of the Iranian regime. If judged by actions rather than by words, the battle between the reformers and the hardliners appears only to be a myth, albeit one that has resulted in conflicting signals from Washington. On the vital issues of support for terrorism and for development of weapons of mass destruction, the Islamic Republic tolerates no dissention. Nor has the theocracy been able to deliver economic and political reforms for the people of Iran. Promoting democracy in Iran will build a more peaceful and prosperous Iran, advancing the common interests of both Americans and Iranians.

Tom Barry is Policy Director for the Interhemispheric Resource Center (online at http://www.irc-online.org).

See new Right Web analysis at:
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/analysis/2004/0410cdi.php

With printer-friendly .pdf version:
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/pdf/0410cdi.pdf

Is Iran Next?
The Pentagon Neocons Who Brought You the War in Iraq Have a New Target
By Tom Barry

(Originally printed in the October 25, 2004 edition of In These Times, http://www.inthesetimes.com)

Shortly after 9/11, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith began coordinating Pentagon planning for an invasion of Iraq. The challenge facing Feith, the No. 3 civilian in the Defense Department, was to establish a policy rationale for the attack. At the same time, Feiths ideological cohorts in the Pentagon began planning to take the administrations global war on terrorism, not only to Baghdad, but also to Damascus and Tehran.

In August it was revealed that one of Feiths Middle East policy wonks, Lawrence Franklin, shared classified documentsincluding a draft National Security Presidential Directive formulated in Feiths office that outlines a more aggressive U.S. national security strategy regarding Iranwith the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and Israeli officials. The FBI is investigating the document transfer as a case of espionage.

This spy scandal raises two concerns for U.S. diplomats and foreign policy experts from across the political spectrum. One, that U.S. Middle East policy is being directed by neoconservative ideologues variously employed, coordinated or sanctioned by Feiths Pentagon office. And two, that U.S. Middle East policy is too closely aligned with that of Israeli hardliners close to U.S. neoconservatives.

See new Right Web analysis at:
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/analysis/2004/0410isirannext.php

With printer-friendly version at:
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/pdf/0410isirannext.pdf

Also see:

Douglas Feith: Portrait of a Neoconservative.
See profile online at: http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/feith/feith.php

Morris J. Amitay
Co-founder of the Coalition for Democracy in IranSee profile online at: http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/amitay/amitay.php

Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA)
See profile online at: http://rightweb.irc-online.org/org/jinsa.php

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Larry Franklin spy probe over control of Iran policy

The Larry Franklin spy probe reveals an escalating fight over control of Iran policy.

By Laura Rozen and Jason VestIssue Date: 11.02.04

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(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, thiTo Washington’s small and sometimes fractious community of Iran experts, it was becoming obvious: What to do about Iran and its fast-developing nuclear program was set to rival Iraq as the most pressing foreign-policy challenge for the person elected president in 2004. By the spring and early summer of this year, the city was awash in rival Iran task forces and conferences. Some recommended that Washington engage in negotiations with Tehran’s mullahs on the nuclear issue; they drew scorn from the other side, which preached regime change or military strikes.
In late July, as this debate raged, a Pentagon analyst named Larry Franklin telephoned an acquaintance who worked at a pro-Israel lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). The two men knew each other professionally from their long involvement in the Washington Iran and Iraq policy debates. A Brooklyn-born Catholic father of five who put himself through school, earning a doctorate, as an Air Force reservist, Franklin had served as a Soviet intelligence analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency until about a decade ago, when he learned Farsi and became an Iran specialist. At their July meeting, Franklin told the AIPAC employee about his frustration that the U.S. government wasn’t responding aggressively enough to intelligence about hostile Iranian activities in Iraq. As Franklin explained it, Iran had sent all of its Arabic-speaking Iranian agents to southern Iraq, was orchestrating attacks on Iraqi state oil facilities, and had sent other agents to northern Iraq to kill Israelis believed to be operating there. Iran had also transferred its top operative for Afghanistan to the Iranian Embassy in Baghdad. The move, Franklin implied, signified Tehran’s intention to cause more trouble in Iraq.
A couple of weeks after this meeting, in mid-August, the AIPAC official was visited by two FBI agents, who asked him about Franklin. From the line of questioning, it wasn’t clear to the AIPAC official whether Franklin was being investigated by the FBI for possible wrongdoing or if he was simply the subject of a routine background investigation for renewal of his security clearance.
But on August 27, when CBS broke the story that the FBI was close to arresting an alleged “Israeli mole” in the office of the Pentagon’s No. 3 official, Douglas Feith, it became clear that Franklin was in trouble. News reports said that the FBI had evidence that Franklin had passed a classified draft national-security presidential directive (NSPD) on Iran to AIPAC. What’s more, reports said, the FBI wasn’t just interested in Franklin. For the past two years, it had been conducting a counterintelligence probe into whether AIPAC had served as a conduit for U.S. intelligence to Israel, an investigation about which National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was briefed shortly after the Bush administration came into office.
In the flurry of news reports that followed, the scope of the FBI investigation seemed potentially enormous. Citing senior U.S. officials, The Washington Post reported that “the FBI is examining whether highly classified material from the National Security Agency … was also forwarded to Israel,” and that the investigation of Franklin was “coincidental” to that broader FBI probe. Time magazine reported that Franklin had been enlisted by the FBI to place a series of monitored telephone calls (scripted by the FBI) to get possible evidence on others, including allies of Ahmad Chalabi, a favorite of Pentagon neoconservatives. Chalabi was alleged to have told his Iranian intelligence contacts that the United States had broken their communications codes -- a breach that prompted a break in U.S. support for Chalabi last spring -- and the FBI wanted to know who had shared that highly classified information with Chalabi. What’s more, an independent expert on Israeli espionage said he had been interviewed by the FBI in June and in several follow-up calls, and that the scope of the senior FBI investigators’ questioning was broad and extremely detailed.
In the wake of the first news reports, AIPAC strongly denied that any of its employees had ever knowingly received classified U.S. information. Israel also categorically denied that it had conducted intelligence operations against the United States since the case of Jonathan Pollard, a U.S. Navy intelligence analyst who was convicted of spying for Israel in 1987.
At the time the CBS report aired in late August -- incidentally, on the Friday evening before the opening of the Republican national convention -- custody of the Franklin investigation was being transferred from the head of the FBI counterintelligence unit, David Szady, to U.S. Attorney Paul McNulty, a Bush appointee, in Alexandria, Virginia, as the case moved to the grand-jury phase.
And then, in mid-September, news of the Franklin investigation went dark.
* * *
The classified document that Franklin allegedly passed to AIPAC concerned a controversial proposal by Pentagon hard-liners to destabilize Iran. The latest iteration of the national-security presidential directive was drafted by a Pentagon civilian and avid neocon, Michael Rubin, who hoped it would be adopted as official policy by the Bush administration. But in mid-June, Bush’s national-security advisers canceled consideration of the draft, partly in response to resistance from some at the State Department and the National Security Council, according to a recent memo written by Rubin and obtained by The American Prospect. No doubt also contributing to the administration’s decision was the swelling insurgency and chaos of postwar Iraq.
Rubin, in his early 30s, is a relative newcomer to the neoconservative circles in which he is playing an increasingly prominent role. Once the Iraq and Iran desk officer in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans and later a Coalition Provisional Authority adviser in Iraq, these days the Yale-educated Ph.D. hangs his hat at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and serves as editor for controversial Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes’ magazine, The Middle East Quarterly.
In an article published in the Republican-oriented quarterly Ripon Forum in June, Rubin suggests that the administration resolve its Iran waffling by turning against the current regime. “In 1953 and 1979,” he wrote, “Washington supported an unpopular Iranian government against the will of the people. The United States should not make the same mistake three times.” In other words, President Bush should step up his public condemnation of the Iranian regime and break off all contact with it in hopes of spurring a swelling of the Iranian pro-democracy movement. In short, Rubin, like his fellow Iran hawks, urges the administration to make regime change in Iran its official policy.
This invocation of “moral clarity” has a long intellectual pedigree among neoconservatives. It’s the same argument they made to Ronald Reagan about the Soviet Union more than 20 years ago. “If we could bring down the Soviet empire by inspiring and supporting a small percentage of the people,” Michael Ledeen, a chief neoconservative advocate of regime change in Iran and freedom scholar at AEI, recently wrote in the National Review, “surely the chances of successful revolution in Iran are more likely.”
Was it to this end that Franklin was allegedly observed by the FBI passing the draft NSPD on Iran to AIPAC? Was he trying to inform AIPAC, or Israel, about the contents of the draft NSPD? Or rather, and perhaps more plausibly, was he trying to enlist the powerful Washington lobbying organization in advocating for a Iran-destabilization policy? In other words, is the Franklin case really about espionage, or is it a glimpse into the ugly sausage-making process by which Middle East policy gets decided in Washington and, in particular, in the Bush administration?
* * *
Arguably past the apogee of its power, AIPAC nonetheless remains one of Washington’s most influential organizations. Successor to the Eisenhower-era American Zionist Council of Public Affairs, AIPAC came into its own during the Reagan years, thanks largely to the efforts of former Executive Director Thomas Dine. When Dine assumed his post in 1981, the organization had an annual budget of a little more than $1 million, about two dozen employees, and 8,000 members; when he left in 1993, a budget of $15 million was being administered by a staff of 158, and the committee had 50,000 members.
An assiduous networker and fund-raiser, Dine also quickly became indispensable to the Reagan White House as a promoter of various neoconservative foreign-policy initiatives. He also forged alliances between AIPAC and other interests, including the Christian right. (Another former AIPAC executive director, Morris Amitay, has long been active in neoconservative ventures, as both a business partner to Feith and Richard Perle and co-founder, with Michael Ledeen, of the Coalition for Democracy in Iran.) By the mid-’80s, AIPAC had been a prime mover in the defeat or crippling of initiatives and legislators not to its liking, and the passage of billions in grants to Israel. It had also taken on an increasingly pro-Republican (and pro-Likud) tilt.
While many regarded AIPAC’s power as lessened during the Clinton administration, since 2001 AIPAC has been powerful enough that even the Bush administration couldn’t get the committee and its congressional allies to tone down language in a 2002 resolution in support of Israeli military actions against the Palestinians. AIPAC’s 2002 annual conference included 50 senators, 90 representatives, and more than a dozen senior administration officials; this year’s conclave boasted President Bush himself, plus House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and an array of State and Defense department officials.
But while AIPAC is a powerhouse, it is not clear that it would have been the perfect vehicle for the kind of Iran-destabilization lobbying that some in Washington have been pushing. There are a wide variety of Israeli positions on how to deal with Iran. Many of Washington’s Middle East hands who are pro-Israel believe destabilization will not likely succeed, and they fear it will not deal with what they consider the real threat from Iran: nuclear weapons.
“If you mean trying to promote the peaceful overthrow of the regime in Iran, I think the prospects for success are highly uncertain,” says Patrick Clawson, deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a pro-Israel think tank. Pro-Israel activists in Washington want to make sure that the United States considers Iran’s nuclear program first and foremost an American problem, the response to which could include, if necessary, air strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Iran’s nuclear program, one such activist recently told the Prospect, “has to be seen as Washington’s problem.”
There are other competing positions within the Israel-policy community. One Israeli official in Washington this summer for diplomatic meetings discussed regime change in Iran with a reporter from The American Prospect on the condition that his identity not be disclosed. He believes that Iran is ripe for democratic revolution, that it has one of the most pro-Western populations in the region, and that Iranian opposition forces would be electrified by a vigorous show of U.S. presidential support. But he believes that any sort of military intervention in Iran would set back considerably these promising regime-change forces. Still another group of Israeli policy-makers seem more inclined toward a military option, as evidenced by Israel’s well-publicized purchase of 500 “bunker-buster” bombs from the United States in September and its failed efforts to launch a spy satellite to monitor Iran’s nuclear-program developments.
Yet another policy position became evident in Seymour Hersh’s article in The New Yorker in June, in which Hersh reported that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, sensing that the U.S.–created chaos in Iraq could leave an opening for anti-Israel efforts in Iran, was pursuing a “Plan B” that had Israeli operatives covertly training and equipping Kurds in Iraq, Iran, and Syria for possible future covert action to counter any such measures. As Hersh reported: “Israeli intelligence and military operatives are now quietly at work in Kurdistan, providing training for Kurdish commando units and, most important in Israel’s view, running covert operations inside Kurdish areas of Iran and Syria. … Some Israeli operatives have crossed the border into Iran, accompanied by Kurdish commandos, to install sensors and other sensitive devices that primarily target suspected Iranian nuclear facilities.”
The Israeli government insisted the story wasn’t credible, and that it was sourced by Turkey, which is panicked, as ever, about foreign designs on Kurdistan. But a source told the Prospect that Franklin expressed the conviction that the United States has intelligence that affirms Hersh’s report to be largely accurate. A second former U.S. diplomatic official who recently visited the area told the Prospect that there are Israeli intelligence officials operating in Kurdish Iraq as political advisers, and others under the guise of businessmen.
All of which raises questions, like what exactly was in the draft NSPD that Rubin wrote and Franklin allegedly shared with AIPAC? And does the destabilization plan pushed by neoconservatives in the draft NSPD in fact advocate that the United States or its proxies arm the Iranian opposition, including the Kurds, as part of its efforts to pursue regime change?
The public statements by the neoconservatives emphasize that regime change in Iran would not require U.S. military force. Then again, the neoconservatives’ inspiration for the Iran plan has its roots in Reagan-era NSPDs that, while providing nonmilitary support to Poland’s Solidary Movement, also had the CIA aggressively arming and training the Afghan mujahideen, the Nicaraguan Contras, and other anti-communist rebels. There’s also no denying that some of the chief advocates of the Iran regime plot come out of the Pentagon, America’s military command center. And some of those same Iran hawks have discussed the Iran regime-change issue, for instance, with Parisian-based Iran Contra arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar -- not exactly the kind of go-to guy for a nonviolent regime change plan, one might think.
* * *
Whatever the nuances, the neocons are facing one of their biggest challenges in Washington today: persuading the administration to adopt their regime-change policy toward Iran even while their regime-change policy in Iraq appears to be crumbling. Since the Iraq invasion, Feith’s office has come under the intense scrutiny of congressional investigators, investigative journalists, and Democratic critics for its two controversial prewar intelligence units, the Office of Special Plans and the Policy Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group. It was those units that had helped convince the Bush White House of an operational connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda -- a claim since disproved by the independent September 11 commission, among others. Those secretive intelligence units had also been among the administration’s strongest champions of Chalabi, who allegedly told Iranian intelligence agents that the United States had penetrated Iranian communications channels.
An FBI counterintelligence investigation of who had leaked this information to Chalabi was reportedly under way by spring 2004, and many of Chalabi’s neocon allies were incredibly anxious: Misjudgment about Chalabi’s virtues or postwar Iraq planning was one thing; passing secrets to another nation would be an accusation of an altogether graver magnitude.
All of these investigations put Franklin and other neoconservatives associated with Feith at the white-hot center of a raging controversy: What would any second-term Bush foreign policy look like? Would controversial neocon figures like Feith remain in power? Or would it mark the rise of pragmatists and realists? For the neoconservatives, the fight to clear Franklin and themselves has become a fight against their internal administration rivals. And they’re fighting it in classic neocon fashion: dirty and disingenuously.
Among intelligence professionals, it’s hardly a state secret that even nations whose relationships go beyond mere alliance and constitute friendship spy on one another. That’s one reason nations have counterintelligence capabilities as well. As such, investigations of espionage and mishandling of classified documents are not uncommon in Washington; the Bush administration’s Justice Department, for example, has opened investigations to probe allegations of Chinese, Taiwanese, and Saudi espionage, including ones that involve ranking officials at the FBI and State Department. With the investigations into AIPAC and Franklin, the Justice Department has renewed its interest in snooping by our ally, Israel.
Since the Pollard case, U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement sources have revealed to the Prospect that at least six sealed indictments have been issued against individuals for espionage on Israel’s behalf. It’s a testament to the unique relationship between the United States and Israel that those cases were never prosecuted; according to the same sources, both governments ultimately addressed them through diplomatic and intelligence channels rather than air the dirty laundry. A number of career Justice Department and intelligence officials who have worked on Israeli counterespionage told the Prospect of long-standing frustration among investigators and prosecutors who feel that cases that could have been made successfully against Israeli spies were never brought to trial, or that the investigations were shut down prematurely. This history had led to informed speculation that the FBI -- fearing the Franklin probe was heading toward the same silent end -- leaked the story to CBS to keep it in the public eye and give it a fighting chance.
But the pro-Israel lobby and some neoconservatives, fighting for their political lives, have turned the leak on its head. They claim that the AIPAC and Franklin investigations have nothing to do with the substance of the Iran-related leaks. Rather, they say, investigators are going after Jews. In the current probes of Franklin and AIPAC, Michael Rubin has led the strident charge. On September 4, during the media flap over the investigations, Rubin sent an e-mail memo -- obtained by the Prospect -- to a list of friendly parties targeting two of Washington’s more respected mainstream journalists, calling them key players in an “increasing anti-Semitic witch hunt.” The memo fingered Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage as one likely source of the leaks about the investigation, and also urged that, if the accusations had any merit, the White House demand the evidence be made public. “I’m increasingly concerned about the leaks spinning off from the Franklin affair,” Rubin wrote. “It was bad enough when the White House rewarded the June 15, 2003, leak by canceling consideration of the NSPD. It showed the State Department that leaks could supplant real debate. … Bureaucratic rivalries are out of control.” Rubin’s memo showed up in a similar form almost a month later in the op-ed pages of The Washington Times under the byline of National Review staffer Joel Mowbray, and echoes of it can be seen in the pages of the neocon-friendly Jerusalem Post.
Meanwhile, Franklin was involved in some pushback of his own. In late August, the Franklin case was referred from Szady to U.S. Attorney Paul J. McNulty, a Bush-Ashcroft appointee who heads the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. A grand jury was seated on the case in September and had subpoenaed at least some witnesses to testify about Franklin. Then, on October 1, The New York Sun reported that Franklin had fired his court-appointed attorney (whom he had presumably retained for financial reasons), halting grand-jury proceedings while he found new counsel. On October 6, the Los Angeles Times reported that Franklin had stopped cooperating with the FBI entirely. He had hired a high-profile lawyer, Plato Cacheris (of Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen fame), and had rejected a proposed plea agreement whose terms Franklin considers “too onerous,” according to the Los Angeles Times.
Who pushed Franklin -- who for months seemed vulnerable -- to stop cooperating? And who is paying for his expensive new lawyer? At this writing, we do not know. Also unknown is the status of the larger FBI counterintelligence probe of alleged Israeli espionage into which Franklin stumbled. But we do know that his recent decisions would seem to immensely help any of the people against whom he could have testified. At least for now, that’s a round won by a clique intent on pushing freelance crypto-diplomacy to its limits.
Laura Rozen reports on foreign-policy and national-security issues from Washington, D.C. Jason Vest is a Prospect senior correspondent.
Copyright © 2004 by The American Prospect, Inc. Preferred Citation: Laura Rozen and Jason Vest, "Cloak and Swagger", The American Prospect Online, Nov 1, 2004. This article may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission from the author
s material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. IranSecrete has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is IranSecrete endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

A Bush pre-election strike on Iran 'imminent'

A Bush pre-election strike on Iran 'imminent'

White House insider report "October Surprise" imminent

By Wayne Madsen

10/20/04 "Lebanon Wire" -- According to White House and Washington Beltway insiders, the Bush administration, worried that it could lose the presidential election to Senator John F. Kerry, has initiated plans to launch a military strike on Iran's top Islamic leadership, its nuclear reactor at Bushehr on the Persian Gulf, and key nuclear targets throughout the country, including the main underground research site at Natanz in central Iran and another in Isfahan. Targets of the planned U.S. attack reportedly include mosques in Tehran, Qom, and Isfahan known by the U.S. to headquarter Iran's top mullahs.
The Iran attack plan was reportedly drawn up after internal polling indicated that if the Bush administration launched a so-called anti-terrorist attack on Iran some two weeks before the election, Bush would be assured of a landslide win against Kerry. Reports of a pre-emptive strike on Iran come amid concerns by a number of political observers that the Bush administration would concoct an "October Surprise" to influence the outcome of the presidential election.
According to White House sources, the USS John F. Kennedy was deployed to the Arabian Sea to coordinate the attack on Iran. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld discussed the Kennedy's role in the planned attack on Iran when he visited the ship in the Arabian Sea on October 9. Rumsfeld and defense ministers of U.S. coalition partners, including those of Albania, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Iraq, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Mongolia, Poland, Qatar, Romania, and Ukraine briefly discussed a very "top level" view of potential dual-track military operations in Iran and Iraq in a special "war room" set up on board the aircraft carrier. America's primary ally in Iraq, the United Kingdom, did not attend the planning session because it reportedly disagrees with a military strike on Iran. London also suspects the U.S. wants to move British troops from Basra in southern Iraq to the Baghdad area to help put down an expected surge in Sh'ia violence in Sadr City and other Sh'ia areas in central Iraq when the U.S. attacks Iran as well as clear the way for a U.S. military strike across the Iraqi-Iranian border aimed at securing the huge Iranian oil installations in Abadan. U.S. allies South Korea, Australia, Kuwait, Jordan, Italy, Netherlands, and Japan were also left out of the USS John F. Kennedy planning discussions because of their reported opposition to any strike on Iran.
In addition, Israel has been supplied by the United States with 500 "bunker buster" bombs. According to White House sources, the Israeli Air Force will attack Iran's nuclear facility at Bushehr with the U.S. bunker busters.The joint U.S.-Israeli pre-emptive military move against Iran reportedly was crafted by the same neo-conservative grouping in the Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney's office that engineered the invasion of Iraq.
Morale aboard the USS John F. Kennedy is at an all-time low, something that must be attributable to the knowledge that the ship will be involved in an extension of U.S. military actions in the Persian Gulf region. The Commanding Officer of an F-14 Tomcat squadron was relieved of command for a reported shore leave "indiscretion" in Dubai and two months ago the Kennedy's commanding officer was relieved for cause.
The White House leak about the planned attack on Iran was hastened by concerns that Russian technicians present at Bushehr could be killed in an attack, thus resulting in a wider nuclear confrontation between Washington and Moscow. International Atomic Energy Agency representatives are also present at the Bushehr facility. In addition, an immediate Iranian Shahab ballistic missile attack against Israel would also further destabilize the Middle East. The White House leaks about the pre-emptive strike may have been prompted by warnings from the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency that an attack on Iran will escalate out of control. Intelligence circles report that both intelligence agencies are in open revolt against the Bush White House.
White House sources also claimed they are "terrified" that Bush wants to start a dangerous war with Iran prior to the election and fear that such a move will trigger dire consequences for the entire world.

Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and columnist. He served in the National Security Council (NSA) during the Reagan Administration and wrote the introduction to Forbidden Truth. He is the co-author, with john Stanton of "America's Nightmare: The Presidency of George Bush II." His forthcoming book is titled: "jaded Tasks: Big Oil, Black Ops, and Brass Plates." Madsen can be reached at Wmadsen777@aol.comCopyright©1999-2004 Lebanonwire®.com http://www.lebanonwire.com/0410/04102002LW.asp
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Neo-Con Agenda: Iran, China, Russia, Latin America

Neo-Con Agenda: Iran, China, Russia, Latin America ...

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Nov 5 (IPS) - An influential foreign-policy neo-conservative with longstanding ties to top hawks in the administration of President George W Bush has laid out what he calls ''a checklist of the work the world will demand of this president and his subordinates in a second term.'' The list, which begins with the destruction of Fallujah in Iraq and ends with the development of ''appropriate strategies'' for dealing with threats posed by China, Russia and ''the emergence of a number of aggressively anti-American regimes in Latin America,'' also calls for ''regime change'' in Iran and North Korea. The list's author, Frank Gaffney, the founder and president of the Centre for Security Policy (CSP), also warns that Bush should resist any pressure arising from the anticipated demise of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to resume peace talks that could result in Israel's giving up ''defensible boundaries.'' While all seven steps listed by Gaffney in an article published Friday morning in the 'National Review Online' have long been favoured by prominent neo-cons, the article itself, 'Worldwide Value', is the first comprehensive compilation to emerge since Bush's re-election Tuesday. It is also sure to be contested, not just by Democrats who, with the election behind them, are poised to take a more anti-war position on Iraq, but by many conservative Republicans in Congress. They blame the neo-cons for failing to anticipate the quagmire in Iraq and worry their grander ambitions, like those expounded by Gaffney, will bankrupt the Treasury and break an already-overextended military. Yet its importance as a road map of where neo-conservatives -- who, with the critical help of Vice President Dick Cheney and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, dominated Bush's foreign policy after the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and the Pentagon -- want U.S. policy to go, was underlined by Gaffney's listing of the names of his friends in the administration who he said, ''helped the president imprint moral values on American security policy in a way and to an extent not seen since Ronald Reagan's first term.'' In addition to Cheney and Rumsfeld, he cited the most clearly identified -- and controversial -- neo-conservatives serving in the administration: Cheney's chief of staff, I Lewis ''Scooter'' Libby; his top Middle East advisors, John Hannah and David Wurmser; weapons proliferation specialist Robert Joseph and top Mideast aide Elliott Abrams, on the National Security Council (NSC). Also on the roster are: Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith; Feith's top Mideast aide William Luti, in the Pentagon; Undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton, and for global issues, Paula Dobriansky at the State Department. Virtually all of the same individuals have been cited by critics of the Iraq War, including Democratic lawmakers and retired senior foreign service and military officials, as responsible for hijacking the policy and intelligence process that led to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Indeed, in a lengthy interview about the war on the most-watched public-affairs TV programme, '60 Minutes', last May, the former head of the U.S. Central Command and Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief Middle East envoy until 2003, retired Gen Anthony Zinni, called for the resignation of Libby, Abrams, Wolfowitz and Feith, as well as Rumsfeld, for their roles in the attack. Zinni also cited former Defence Policy Board (DPB) chairman, Richard Perle, who has been close to Gaffney since both of them served, along with Abrams, in the office of Washington State Senator Henry M Jackson in the early 1970s. When Perle became an assistant secretary of defence under Reagan he brought Gaffney along as his deputy. When Perle left in 1987, Gaffney succeeded him before setting up CSP in 1989. As Perle's long-time protege and associate, Gaffney sits at the centre of a network of interlocking think tanks, foundations, lobby groups, arms manufacturers and individuals that constitute the coalition of neo-conservatives, aggressive nationalists like Cheney and Rumsfeld and Christian Right activists responsible for the unilateralist trajectory of U.S. foreign policy since 9/11. Included among CSP's board of advisers over the years have been Rumsfeld, Perle, Feith, Christian moralist William Bennett, Abrams, Feith, Joseph, former United Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, former Navy Undersecretary John Lehman and former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director James Woolsey. Woolsey also co-chairs the new Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), another prominent neo-con-led lobby group that argues Washington is now engaged in ''World War IV'' against ''Islamo-fascism.'' Also serving on its advisory council are executives from some of the country's largest military contractors, which -- along with wealthy individuals sympathetic to Israel's governing Likud Party, such as prominent New York investor Lawrence Kadish and California casino king Irving Moskowitz, and right-wing bodies, such as the Bradley, Sarah Scaife and Olin Foundations -- finance CSP's work. Gaffney, a ubiquitous ''talking head'' on TV in the run-up to the war in Iraq, sits on the boards of CPD's parent organisations, the Foundation for the Defence of Democracies (FDD) and Americans for Victory Over Terrorism (AVOT). He was a charter associate, with Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle, Wolfowitz and Abrams, of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), another prominent neo-conservative-led group that offered up a similar checklist of what Bush should do in the ''war on terrorism'' just nine days after the 9/11 attacks. His article opens by trying to pre-empt an argument that is already being heard on the right against expanding Bush's ''war on terrorism'': that since a plurality of Bush voters identified ''moral values'' as their chief concern, the president should stick to his social conservative agenda rather than expand the war. ''The reality is that the same moral principles that underpinned the Bush appeal on 'values' issues like gay marriage, stem-cell research and the right to life were central to his vision of U.S. war aims and foreign policy,'' according to Gaffney. ''Indeed, the president laid claim squarely to the ultimate moral value -- freedom -- as the cornerstone of his strategy for defeating our Islamofascist enemies and their state sponsors, for whom that concept is utterly (sic) anathema.'' To be true to that commitment, policy in the second administration must be directed toward seven priorities, according to Gaffney, beginning with the ''reduction in detail of Fallujah and other safe havens utilised by freedom's enemies in Iraq''; followed by ''regime change -- one way or another -- in Iran and North Korea, the only hope for preventing these remaining 'Axis of Evil' states from fully realising their terrorist and nuclear ambitions.'' Third, the administration must provide ''the substantially increased resources needed to re-equip a transforming military and rebuild human-intelligence capabilities (minus, if at all possible, the sorts of intelligence 'reforms' contemplated pre-election that would make matters worse on this and other scores) while we fight World War IV, followed by enhancing ''protection of our homeland, including deploying effective missile defences at sea and in space, as well as ashore.” Fifth, Washington must keep ''faith with Israel, whose destruction remains a priority for the same people who want to destroy us (and ... for our shared 'moral values) especially in the face of Yasser Arafat's demise and the inevitable, post-election pressure to 'solve' the Middle East problem by forcing the Israelis to abandon defensible boundaries.'' Sixth, the administration must deal with France and Germany and the dynamic that made them ''so problematic in the first term: namely, their willingness to make common cause with our enemies for profit and their desire to employ a united Europe and its new constitution -- as well as other international institutions and mechanisms -- to thwart the expansion and application of American power where deemed necessary by Washington.'' Finally, writes Gaffney, Bush must adapt ''appropriate strategies for contending with China's increasingly fascistic trade and military policies, (Russian President) Vladimir Putin's accelerating authoritarianism at home and aggressiveness toward the former Soviet republics, the worldwide spread of Islamofascism, and the emergence of a number of aggressively anti-American regimes in Latin America'', which he does not identify. ''These items do not represent some sort of neo-con 'imperialist' game plan'', Gaffney stressed. ''Rather, they constitute a checklist of the work the world will demand of this president and his subordinates in a second term.'' (END/2004) :

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