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Blow Off
There are many pieces coming to light about the spy case involving the Pentagon´s Iran specialist Franklin.
Josh Marshall, Laura Rozen and Paul Glastris have been on the case for some month and their new Iran-Contra II? piece in The Washington Monthly gives the best background along with Laura´s writings in her weblog War and Piece and Josh´s in his Talking Points Memo.
Also interesting is the background on AIPEC given yesterday by Juan Cole Israeli Spy in Pentagon Linked to AIPAC and his excellent take on the scandal today Fomenting a War on Iran.
Additional information today comes via Newsweek: And Now A Mole? and from the big three: NYT F.B.I. Said to Reach Official Suspected of Passing Secrets, WaPo Analyst Who Is Target of Probe Went to Israel and LAT Report on Iran Key to Spying Inquiry and Pentagon Spy Flap Isn’t Open-and-Shut Case.
Knight Ridder says “the probe is broader than previously reported, and goes well beyond allegations that a single mid-level analyst gave a top-secret Iran policy document to Israel”: FBI espionage probe goes beyond Israeli allegations, sources say
The whole story is just too big and too complicate to be recapitulated here in full, but let me highlight some points.
Larry Franklin is the Pentagons´s top Iran policy analyst. He is working in the office of Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith. He is also a Colonel in the Air Force Reserve and has worked in Israel in this capacity. Some 18 month ago the FBI started an investigation on Franklin for giving away US policy papers on Iran to AIPEC, the right wing Israeli lobby group in Washington. AIPEC is said to have passed this information to Israel. Newsweek reports: “Franklin also passed information gleaned from more highly classified documents, [one] official said.”.
Franklin, together with his colleague Harold Rhode did meet several times with Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar and other Iranian exiles, dissidents and government officials starting in October 2001. Ghorbanifar played a key role in the Reagan administration’s Iran-Contra affair. The meetings also involved Michael Leeden, Nicolo Pollari, the head of Italy’s military intelligence agency, SISMI and the Italian Minister of Defence Antonio Martino. The meetings backchanneled official US policy and the State Department, but the White House is said to have blessed at least the first trip. Defence Minister Antonio Martino is vice president of the Italian Friends of Israel association (Link).
There are many connections to other scandals and it feels like these are all coming together now:
- Retired Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, who had worked in the DoD Middle East group, reported Israeli military and intelligence figures did work closely and off the record with Feith and Wolfowitz in the planning of a Iraq war.
- SISMI, the Italian military intelligence agency, is involved in the forged Nigerian Yellow Cake documents that falsly connected Iraq to uranium aquisitions and did lead to the Wilson/Plame case.
- The Pentagon group now under scrutiny is the same that worked to put Ahmad Chalabi into the top position in Iraq. The group is under investigation for illegally giving US information to Chalabi who then has given these to Iran.
- There are connections to a group of intelligence officers that are currently being trained to “work” in Iran.
There is not yet a connection to Sibel Edmond´s reports of foreign influence in the FBI´s translation service, but I do expect some connections to surface soon.
The opening of this scandal shortly before the Republican convention seems planed. The number of “official leaks” is incredible and this looks like the general hit back by all institutions and persons, CIA, State, FBI etc., that have been hurt by the Neocons over the last years. The consequences for Bush and for the US foreign policy can hardly be overestimated.
The Israeli press is rightly very concerned about the consequences of these scandals. Haaretz: Focus: The ‘dual loyalty’ slur returns to haunt U.S. Jews and Analysis: The Franklin affair will damage Israel’s image J´lem Post: Storm on the Israel-US horizon?
Are we seeing the last act of Gotterdamnrung?
Lug und Trug: … erledigen kann; denn der Kongress zittert vor Angst vor ‚AIPEC’, der israelischen … 2000 von dem „Project for the New Century“ (PNAC) verfasstes Dokument …
Can anyboby here translate german better than what I have done here? Also, pay attention to these dates.
Der Jude Michal Kinsley schrieb im Magazin „Slate“ vom 24. Oktober 2002:
„Tariq Aziz has a theory. Saddam Hussein’s deputy told the New York Times this week, “The reason for this warmongering policy toward Iraq is oil and Israel.” Although no one wishes to agree with Tariq Aziz, he has put succinctly what many people in Washington apparently believe.The lack of public discussion about the role of Israel in the thinking of “President Bush” is easier to understand, but weird nevertheless. It is the proverbial elephant in the room: Everybody sees it, no one mentions it. The reason is obvious and admirable: Neither supporters nor opponents of a war against Iraq wish to evoke the classic anti-Semitic image of the king’s Jewish advisers whispering poison into his ear and betraying the country to foreign interests.”
Der Jude Ari Shavit schrieb im israelischen Haaretz-Nachrichtendienst vom 5. April 2002 folgendes:
„The war in Iraq was conceived by 25 neoconservatives intellectuals, most of them Jewish, who are pushing President Bush to change the course of history. In the course of the past year, a new belief has emerged in the town (Washington): the belief in war against Iraq. That ardent faith was disseminated by a small group or 25 or 30 neoconservatives, almost all of them intellectuals (a partial list: Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol, Elliot Abrams, Charles Krauthammer), people who are mutual friends and cultivate one another and are convinced that political ideas are major driving force of history.”
Der Jude James Rosen schrieb in der kalifornischen Zeitschrift „The Sacramento Bee“ vom 6. April 2003 folgendes:
„In 1996, as Likud Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prepared to take office, eight Jewish neoconservative leaders sent him a six-page memo outlining an aggressive vision of government. At the top of their list was overthrowing Saddam and replacing him with a monarch under the control of Jordan. The neoconservatives sketched out a kind of domino theory in which the governments of Syria and other Arab countries might later fall or be replaced in the wake of Saddam’s ouster. They urged Netanyahu to spurn the Oslo peace accords and to stop making concessions to the Palestinians. Lead writer of the memo was Perle. Other signatories were Feith, now undersecretary of defense, and Wurmser, a senior adviser to John Bolton, undersecretary of state. Fred Donner, a professor of Near Eastern history at the University of Chicago, said he was struck by the similarities between the ideas in the memo and ideas now at the forefront of Bush’s foreign policy.”
Der Jude Thomas Friedman, ein Kolumnist der jüdischen “New York Times“, sagte am 4. April 2003 folgendes:
„I could give you the names of 25 people, all of whom are at this momet within a five-block radius of this office, without whom, if you had exiled them to a desert island a year and a half ago, the Iraq war would not have happened. It is not only the neo-concervatives who led us to the outskirts of Bagdad. What led us to the outskirts of Baghdad is a very American combination of anxiety and hybris.”
Der Jude Henry Markow, Autor und Erfinder von „Scruples“, sagte am 10. Februar 2003 folgendes:
“If the U.S. gets bogged down with heavy casualties on both sides, Americans are going to blame big oil and Zionism for getting them into this mess. Everybody knows that: The only country that fears Iraq’s WMD’s is Israel. American-Jewish neo-conservatives on the Defence Policy Board (Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz) planned this war in 1998 and made it Bush Administration policy. The purpose of the war is to change the balance of power in the Middle East so Israel can settle the Palestinian issue on its own terms; and Congress trembles in fear before the Israeli Lobby, ‘AIPAC’. At this perilous juncture in US history, there is no effective opposition because Zionist Jews appear to control both parties. The Jewish “Anti Defamation League” considers it a barometer of anti Semitism to say, “Jews have too much power.” But is something anti-Semitic if it is true? Anti Semitism is racial prejudice. Zionist power is not a racial prejudice; it is a fact of life. When a special interest group hijacks American foreign policy, it is a patriotic duty to say so. In recent decades, Zionists have succeeded in making support for Zionism synonymous with “Jewish.” They have made Israel appear to be a vulnerable country facing annihilation in a sea of bloodthirsty Arabs. In fact, Israel has 200-400 nuclear bombs and is one of the most powerful nations on earth. It has evaded many opportunities for a just peace because its secret agenda is to dominate the region. Israel keeps this quiet because most Jews, including Israelis, did not sign on for that.”
Bereits am 15. September 2002 schrieb Neil Mackay im “Sunday Herald” unter dem Titel “Bush plante einen ‘Regimewechsel’ im Irak schon vor seiner Präsidentschaft” (Januar 2001), dass ein im September 2000 von dem „Project for the New Century“ (PNAC) verfasstes Dokument mit dem Titel „Rebuilding America’s Defences: Strategies, Forces and Recources For A New Century“ offenbare, dass eine Bush-Regierung die militärische Kontrolle der Golfregion unabhängig davon anstreben würde, ob Saddam Hussein sich an der Macht befinde oder nicht. Dieses Dokument beruhe, so weiter in diesem Artikel, auf einem noch früheren Papier der Juden Paul Dundes Wolfowitz und Israel Lewis Libby, in dem gleichzeitig ein Regimewechsel in China (siehe „6015“), eine totale Kontrolle des Internets (siehe „6015“) und zukünftige völkerrechtswidrige Aggressionskriege gegen Nord-Korea, Libyien, Syrien und der Iran erörtert würden.
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Aug 29 2004 15:09 utc | 6
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