C-Span just aired a panel at the Nixon Center about Jacob Heilbrunn’s book on the neocons: They Knew They Were Right. For me it was significant for the raw argument about Jewish identity that arose between Heilbrunn and respondent Dov Zakheim, the son of a Holocaust survivor.
The author spoke first. He said that the Holocaust is a "driving" force in the thinking of both neocons and liberal hawks on foreign policy. And he had a big "question mark" about that; he accused them of "sentimentalizing," i.e., reacting emotionally to events. He noted that Douglas Feith had told him that he had learned all about Israel and the Middle East from his father’s experience as a Holocaust survivor. A bit of hysterical thinking that I don’t think Heilbrunn mentioned in his book.
Alas, Heilbrunn doesn’t take this analysis to the next stage, which is that the neocons projected their Holocaust fears on to the Arabs/Palestinians, and so have magnified sectarian struggles in the Middle East into a hoped-for World War IV in which the U.S. must defeat evil. Heilbrunn doesn’t take it there because he has already broken taboos in his book, and there is a general air about his presence of–"Well, I have said enough, I will leave it at that" (as I wrote in the American Conservative). You understand his fear. He’s walking the line, as a Jew in Establishment circles. This week Arun Gandhi was forced to leave the presidency of the Peace Institute for writing on a Washington Post blog that Jews have overdone Holocaust consciousness, and that the result was that Jews and Israel are major players in a culture of violence. Now Gandhi has to go to some kind of reeducation session. You’re not allowed to discuss this sort of stuff, unless you’re Jewish.
Back to the Nixon Center. Heilbrunn was taken on by Dov Zakheim, a former Bush Administration official, who sought to argue that the neocons aren’t really Jewish, and the Holocaust has very little to do with their thinking. Zakheim, the son of a survivor, made a number of water-muddying comments. He said that Paul Wolfowitz deeply cares about the Palestinians, which makes him not a neoconservative. He said that to be affected by the Holocaust truly, you have to have had close kin killed. He said that Democrat Tom Lantos was the only survivor on Capitol Hill, and he’s damn sure not a neocon. He said last he had checked Zalmay Khalilzad was a Muslim not a Jew. And so forth.
These are spurious statements, designed to mislead. Lantos supported the Iraq war because Saddam reminded him of Hitler. It doesn’t matter whether he’s a neocon or not; he is emblematic of a strong element in Jewish public life that would go to war with the Arabs in part because they support suicide bombers in Israel. Not my country, thank you. Also, to be truly affected by the Holocaust you don’t have to be a survivor. As Brandeis historian Jacob Cohen said at a Dershowitz event last year, the Holocaust is a sacred Jewish experience. Too sacralized, in my view. But it is sacred; Jews of my generation were steeped in Holocaust consciousness. Zakheim is an Orthodox Jew and a strong supporter of Israel; he knows that Jewish concern for Israel is a real factor in pushing for a militarist American defense policy, particularly from big neocons.
The remarkable thing about the event, though, is that Jews were having it out publicly about the Jewishness of the neocons. Zakheim seems to hope the conversation goes away, but Heilbrunn has done an immense service by starting it. As I’ve said often on this blog, American Jewry won’t be healed, nor will American leadership, until we come to terms with the special Jewish role in the Iraq tragedy. Some day the Forward will do forums on the subject, so will the New York Times. To have Jews arguing about Jewishness and the Holocaust and militarism, at the Nixon Center and then on national TV, hey, that is progress.
If Kennedy and McNamara were Catholic, does that mean there was a special Catholic role in the Vietnam tragedy?
Interesting that he should mention Lantos. Here's some info on Lantos that readers might find interesting:
"Dov Zakheim, a former Bush Administration official, … sought to argue that the neocons aren't really Jewish, and the Holocaust has very little to do with their thinking. Zakheim, the son of a survivor, made a number of water-muddying comments."
Dov Zakheim was involved with the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). Its membership and activities overlap with those of the American Enterprise Institute, the Likud party, the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), and others.
If HUAC (the House Unamerican Activities Committee) still existed, it wouldn't have any difficulty tracing the links and interlocking directorates.
It's in the interest of Dov Zakheim to make 'water-muddying' comments which attribute misleading patriotic or universalist objectives to his ethnocentric motives. He's merely a good man, lying on behalf of his country. (And I don't mean the United States.)
Mr. Weiss: I sent a trackback because I blogged this, yet it doesn't seem to have registered.
http://bedouina.typepad.com/doves_eye/2008/01/philip-weiss-on.html
Thank you for this post.
To Eugene L
Re Keenedy and McNamara and the US in Vietnam
um Eugene….Ethnic solidarity did not motivate Kennedy et al to go into Vietnam.
However, I acknowledge that Catholics can have dual loyalty. It is reasonable to question the Catholic role in encouraging mass immigration from Latin America and the forthcoming merger with Mexico as a way to fill empty Catholic pews.
Feel free to start a blog analyzing how Catholic dual loyalty fractures America. But dont say that Weiss cannot analyze Jewish power in America to promote world wide Jewish interests and how it affects America.
BTW take alook a Kevin MacDonald's blog.
http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/Blog-Heilbrunn.htm
The Neocons as a Hostile Conservative (!) Elite
January 24,2008
I haven't read Jacob Heilbrunn's book on the neocons yet, but I'm not sure I need to after seeing Philip Weiss's review. Weiss's review makes it clear that Heilbrunn's book corroborates several of the themes in my writing on the neocons and on Jewish intellectual and political movements generally.
First, neoconservatism is a Jewish movement. That should have been clear to everyone by now, but references to the Jewish basis of the movement have been noticeably missing from much of the mainstream media, to the point that Bill Kristol was introduced as a columnist at the New York Times as simply a "conservative." This is critical because the neocons have now become the conservative establishment. When Kristol (or Bill O'Reilly or Sean Hannity) hold forth at Fox News, most people have no idea that they are tuning into the public face of a fundamentally Jewish movement that elbowed out more traditional conservatives.
Secondly, Jewish neocons not only have a strong Jewish identity, they also have strong Jewish interests. This is obvious from their involvement in pro-Israel activism, their personal relationships with Israeli leaders, and close ties with other Jews and with the wider Jewish community. In fact, I have argued that the neocons are more strongly identified as Jews than the mainstream liberal/left Jews — that the neocons form the vanguard of the Jewish community. After all, neocons were the first segment of the Jewish community to strongly condemn the USSR, both for its domestic anti-Semitism and for its alliances with Arab governments. Prominent neocons like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz began their political careers by making alliances with Cold War hawks like Henry Jackson This was at a time when the Jewish left was prominently involved in defending the USSR, apparently blind to the fact that the status of Jews as an elite in the USSR had changed greatly following World War II.
And the neocons are notorious for their strong ties to the most extreme racialist and nationalist segments of Israeli society — elements that the mainstream liberal/left Jewish community probably wishes would disappear or at least be less visible. (Hence the uproar over Christiane Amanpour's God's Jewish Warriors.) Indeed, the Jewish liberal/left has a huge blind spot, continuing to pursue its leftist multicultural agenda in the U.S. while ignoring the fact that the organized Jewish community is deeply complicit in dispossessing the Palestinians and erecting a racialist, apartheid state in Israel. As Weiss has noted elsewhere, "Steve Rabinowitz, Clinton friend, told me this year that if anyone did a study of how much [Democrat] money comes from Jews, it would fuel conspiracy theories." The Jewish liberal/left lavishly supports Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, but makes no attempt to wrest control of the pro-Israel lobby from the hands of what James Petras terms the "reactionary minority of American Jews" who head the major American Jewish organizations.
But more interestingly, Heilbrunn points to the “lifelong antipathy toward the patrician class among the neocons … [that] prompted them to create their own parallel establishment.” In this regard, the neocons are entirely within the American Jewish mainstream. As I noted in a previous blog (also commenting on Philip Weiss), "Jews have become an elite, but an elite that does not identify with its subjects — a hostile, estranged but very wealthy elite that still sees themselves as outsiders." And along with the American Jewish mainstream, the neocons have been vital players in the establishment of a variety of policies opposed to the interests and attitudes of the American majority, most egregiously unrestricted immigration which has successfully altered the ethnic composition of the country. Indeed, neoconservative Ben Wattenberg famously wrote that "The non-Europeanization of America is heartening news of an almost transcendental quality."
This hostility toward the traditional peoples and culture of America among people calling themselves conservatives is striking — the antithesis of normal and natural conservative tendencies. As Sam Francis noted, what the neocons dislike about traditional conservatives is simply that they "are conservative at all":
"There are countless stories of how neoconservatives have succeeded in entering conservative institutions, forcing out or demoting traditional conservatives, and changing the positions and philosophy of such institutions in neoconservative directions…. Writers like M. E. Bradford, Joseph Sobran, Pat Buchanan, and Russell Kirk, and institutions like Chronicles, the Rockford Institute, the Philadelphia Society, and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute have been among the most respected and distinguished names in American conservatism. The dedication of their neoconservative enemies to driving them out of the movement they have taken over and demonizing them as marginal and dangerous figures has no legitimate basis in reality. It is clear evidence of the ulterior aspirations of those behind neoconservatism to dominate and subvert American conservatism from its original purposes and agenda and turn it to other purposes…. What neoconservatives really dislike about their “allies” among traditional conservatives is simply the fact that the conservatives are conservatives at all—that they support “this notion of a Christian civilization,” as Midge Decter put it, that they oppose mass immigration, … that they entertain doubts or strong disagreement over American foreign policy in the Middle East, that they oppose reckless involvement in foreign wars and foreign entanglements, and that, in company with the Founding Fathers of the United States, they reject the concept of a pure democracy and the belief that the United States is or should evolve toward it."
Francis, S. (2004). The neoconservative subversion. In B. Nelson (ed.), “Neoconservatism.” Occasional Papers of the Conservative Citizens’ Foundation, Issue Number Six, 6–12. St. Louis: Conservative Citizens’ Foundation, p. 9.
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That the New York Times can call Kristol a conservative without shame or irony is a striking commentary on the death of American conservatism.
There are several other themes highlighted in Weiss's review that are worth mentioning because they are typical of other Jewish intellectual and political movements. Heilbrunn describes neocon "cabals" in the State Department and in academic departments at elite universities. This is a reference to Jewish ethnic networking. In general, all of the important Jewish intellectual and political movements — from psychoanalysis and Boasian anthropology to neoconservatism — have a mutually reinforcing core of Jews centered around charismatic leaders. In the case of the neocons, individuals such as Leo Strauss, Richard Perle, and Norman Podhoretz have played this role. Neoconservative cabals have been largely successful in controlling or at least heavily influencing elite institutions in academia, the government, think tanks, and the media.
And finally, the neocons are prime examples of another important theme of Jewish intellectual life — self-deception. Weiss writes:
"The reader is left with the shadowy sense that the neocons have a pro-Israel agenda that they are not upfront about. But it isn’t a conspiracy, Heilbrunn warns. The neocons have convinced themselves that the U.S. and Israel have congruent interests. “They just believe this stuff. They’re not agents,” an anonymous source tells him, speaking of Cheney aide David Wurmser, who is married to an Israeli."
Married to an Israeli. The neocons may believe it, but the rest of us need not be so foolish. For example, Douglas Feith is depicted by Heilbrunn as having published a letter defending the capture of the West Bank while still a teenager. Feith has also been credibly charged with spying for Israel, and was deeply involved in the disinformation used by the U.S. government to justify the invasion of Iraq. He has close ties to the settler movement, and was a participant in the notorious "A Clean Break" paper that advised the Israeli government that removing Saddam Hussein should be an Israeli strategic goal. The authors of this report speak as Jews and Israelis, not as U.S. citizens: “Our claim to the land—to which we have clung for hope for 2000 years—is legitimate and noble.”
European Americans may have a difficult time processing all of this. Their individualism and their own fragile and beleaguered sense of ethnicity make them less likely to attribute ethnic motives to others. And there is an imposing edifice of taboos surrounding even the mention of Jewish influence, much less anything that hints that Israel is the first loyalty of Jewish neocons — an edifice aggressively maintained by the organized Jewish community. But the rather unpleasant facts are staring European Americans in the face, even if the New York Times insists on calling them conservatives.
Kevin MacDonald Website
Kevin MacDonald Blog Archives
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May 2004, pages 20-23, 91
Neocon Corner
Serving Two Flags: Neocons, Israel and the Bush Administration
By Stephen Green
Since 9/11, a small group of “neoconservatives” in the administration have effectively gutted—they would say reformed—traditional American foreign and security policy. Features of the new Bush doctrine include the pre-emptive use of unilateral force, and the undermining of the United Nations and the principle instruments and institutions of international law…all in the cause of fighting terrorism and promoting homeland security.
Some skeptics, noting the neo-cons’ past academic and professional associations, writings and public utterances, have suggested that their underlying agenda is the alignment of U.S. foreign and security policies with those of Ariel Sharon and the Israeli right wing. The administration’s new hard line on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict certainly suggests that, as perhaps does the destruction, with U.S. soldiers and funds, of the military capacity of Iraq, and the current belligerent neocon campaign against the other two countries which constitute a remaining counterforce to Israeli military hegemony in the region—Iran and Syria.
Have the neoconservatives—many of whom are senior officials in the Department of Defense (DOD), National Security Council (NSC) and Office of the Vice President—had dual agendas, while professing to work for the internal security of the United States against its terrorist enemies?
A review of the internal security backgrounds of some of the best known among them strongly suggests the answer.
Dr. Stephen Bryen and Colleagues
In April of 1979, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Robert Keuch recommended in writing that Bryen, then a staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, undergo a grand jury hearing to establish the basis for a prosecution for espionage. John Davitt, then chief of the Justice Department’s Internal Security Division, concurred.
The evidence was strong. Bryen had been overheard, in the Madison Hotel Coffee Shop, offering classified documents to an official of the Israeli Embassy in the presence of the director of AIPAC, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee. It was later determined that the embassy official was Zvi Rafiah, the Mossad station chief in Washington. Bryen refused to be polygraphed by the FBI on the purpose and details of the meeting—whereas the person who’d witnessed it agreed to be polygraphed and passed the test.
The Bureau also had testimony from a second person, a staff member of the Foreign Relations Committee, that she had witnessed Bryen in his Senate office with Rafiah, discussing classified documents that were spread out on a table in front of an open safe in which the documents were supposed to be secured. Not long after this second witness came forward, Bryen’s fingerprints were found on classified documents he’d stated in writing to the FBI he’d never had in his possession…the ones he’d allegedly offered to Rafiah.
Nevertheless, following the refusal of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to grant access by Justice Department officials to files which were key to the investigation, Keuch’s recommendation for a grand jury hearing, and ultimately the investigation itself, were shut down. This decision, taken by Philip Heymann, chief of Justice’s Criminal Division, was a bitter disappointment to Davitt and to Joel Lisker, the lead investigator on the case, as expressed to this writer. A complicating factor in the outcome was that Heymann was a former schoolmate and fellow U.S. Supreme Court clerk of Bryen’s attorney, Nathan Lewin.
Bryen was asked to resign from his Foreign Relations Committee post shortly before the investigation was concluded in late 1979. For the following year and a half, he served as executive director of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), and provided consulting services to AIPAC.
In April 1981, the FBI received an application by the Defense Department for a Top Secret security clearance for Dr. Bryen. Richard Perle, who had just been nominated as assistant secretary of defense for international security policy (ISP), was proposing Bryen as his deputy assistant secretary! Within six months, with Perle pushing hard, Bryen received both Top Secret-SCI (sensitive compartmented information) and Top Secret-”NATO/COSMIC” clearances.
Loyalty, Patriotism and Character
The Bryen investigation became in fact the most contentious issue in Perle’s own confirmation hearings in July 1981. Under aggressive questioning from Sen. Jeremiah Denton, Perle held his ground: “I consider Dr. Bryen to be an individual of impeccable integrity…I have the highest confidence in [his] loyalty, patriotism and character.”
Several years later, in early 1988, Israel was in the final stages of development of a prototype of its ground-based “Arrow” anti-ballistic missile. One element the program lacked was “klystrons,” small microwave amplifiers which are critical components in the missile’s high-frequency, radar-based target acquisition system which locks on to incoming missiles. In 1988, klystrons were among the most advanced developments in American weapons research, and their export was, of course, strictly proscribed.
The DOD office involved in control of defense technology exports was the Defense Technology Security Administration (DTSA) within Richard Perle’s ISP office. The director (and founder) of DTSA was Perle’s deputy, Dr. Stephen Bryen. In May of 1988, Bryen sent a standard form to Richard Levine, a Navy tech transfer official, informing him of intent to approve a license for Varian Associates, Inc. of Beverly, Massachusetts to export to Israel four klystrons. This was done without the usual consultations with the tech transfer officials of the Army and Air Force, or ISA (International Security Affairs) or DSAA (Defense Security Assistance Agency).
The answer from Levine was “no.” He opposed granting the license, and asked for a meeting on the matter of the appropriate (above listed) offices. At the meeting, all of the officials present opposed the license. Bryen responded by suggesting that he go back to the Israelis to ask why these particular items were needed for their defense. Later, after the Israeli government came back with what one DOD staffer described as “a little bullshit answer,” Bryen simply notified the meeting attendees that an acceptable answer had been received, the license granted, and the klystrons released.
By now, however, the dogs were awake. Then Assistant Secretary of Defense for ISA (and now Deputy Secretary of State) Richard Armitage sent Dr. Bryen a letter stating that the State Department (which issues the export licenses) should be informed of DOD’s “uniformly negative” reaction to the export of klystrons to Israel. Bryen did as instructed, and the license was withdrawn.
In July, Varian Associates became the first U.S. corporation formally precluded from contracting with the Defense Department. Two senior DOD colleagues who wish to remain anonymous have confirmed that this attempt by Bryen to obtain klystrons for his friends was not unusual, and was in fact “standard operating procedure” for him, recalling numerous instances when U.S. companies were denied licenses to export sensitive technology, only to learn later that Israeli companies subsequently exported similar (U.S.-derived) weapons and technology to the intended customers/governments.
In late 1988, Bryen resigned from his DOD post, and for a period worked in the private sector with a variety of defense technology consulting firms.
Bryen and the China Commission
In its May 27, 1997 issue, Defense Week reported that, “…the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence reaffirmed that U.S.- derived technology from the cancelled [Israeli] Lavi fighter project is being used on China’s new F-10 fighter.” The following year, the Nov. 1, 1998 Jane’s Intelligence Review reported the transfer by Israel to China of the Phalcon airborne early warning and control system, the Python air-combat missile, and the F-10 fighter aircraft, containing “state-of-the-art U.S. electronics.”
Concern about the continuing transfer of advanced U.S. arms technology to the burgeoning Chinese military program led, in the last months of the Clinton administration, to the creation of a congressional consultative body called the United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission. The charter for the “The China Commission,” as it is commonly known, states that its purpose is to “…monitor, investigate, and report to the Congress on the national security implications of the bilateral trade and economic relationship between the United States and the Peoples Republic of China.” The charter also reflects an awareness of the problem of “back door” technology leaks: “The Commission shall also take into account patterns of trade and transfers through third countries to the extent practicable.”
It was almost predictable that, in the new Bush administration, Dr. Stephen Bryen would find his way to the China Commission. In April 2001, with the support of Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), Bryen was appointed a member of the commission by Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert. Last August, his appointment was extended through December of 2005.
Informed that Bryen had been appointed to the Commission, the reaction of one former senior FBI counter-intelligence official was: “My God, that must mean he has a ‘Q‘ clearance!” (A “Q” clearance, which must be approved by the Department of Energy, is the designation for a Top Secret codeword clearance to access nuclear technology.)
Michael Ledeen, Consultant on Chaos
If Stephen Bryen is the military technology guru in the neocon pantheon, Michael Ledeen is currently its leading theorist, historian, scholar and writer. According to the Web site of his consulting firm, Benador Associates, he is “…one of the world’s leading authorities on intelligence, contemporary history and international affairs” and that “…As Ted Koppel puts it, ‘Michael Ledeen is a Renaissance man…in the tradition of Machiavelli.’” Perhaps the following will add some color and texture to this description.
In 1983, on the recommendation of Richard Perle, Ledeen was hired at the Department of Defense as a consultant on terrorism. His immediate supervisor was Principle Assistant Secretary for International Security Affairs Noel Koch. Early in their work together, Koch noticed with concern Ledeen’s habit of stopping by in his (Koch’s) outer office to read classified materials. When the two of them took a trip to Italy, Koch learned from the CIA station there that when Ledeen had lived in Rome previously, as correspondent for The New Republic, he’d been carried in agency files as an agent of influence of a foreign government: Israel.
Some time after their return from Italy, Ledeen approached his boss with a request for his assistance in obtaining two highly classified CIA reports which he said were held by the FBI. He’d hand-written on a piece of paper the identifying “alpha numeric designators.” These identifiers were as highly classified as the reports themselves—which raised in Koch’s mind the question of who had provided them to Ledeen, if he hadn’t the clearances to obtain them himself. Koch immediately told his executive assistant that Ledeen was to have no further access to classified materials in the office, and Ledeen just ceased coming to “work.”
In early 1986, however, Koch learned that Ledeen had joined NSC as a consultant, and, sufficiently concerned about the internal security implications of the behavior of his former aide, arranged to be interviewed by two FBI agents on the matter. After a two-hour debriefing, Koch was told that it was only Soviet military intelligence penetration that interested the Bureau. The follow-on interviews that were promised by the agents never occurred.
Koch thought this strange, coming as it did just months after the arrest of Naval intelligence analyst Jonathan Pollard on charges of espionage for Israel. Frustrated, Koch wrote up in detail the entire saga of Ledeen’s DOD consultancy, and sent it to the Office of Sen. Charles Grassley, then a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which had oversight responsibility for, inter alia, the FBI.
A former senior FBI counter-intelligence official was surprised and somewhat skeptical, when told of Koch’s unsuccessful attempts to interest the Bureau in an investigation of Ledeen, noting that, in early 1986, the Justice Department was in fact already engaged in several ongoing, concurrent investigations of Israeli espionage and theft of American military technology.
Machiavelli in Tel Aviv
In any event, Koch’s belated attempts to draw official attention to his former assistant were too late, for within a very few weeks of leaving his DOD consultancy in late 1984, Ledeen had found his gainful (classified) employment at the NSC. In fact, according to a now declassified chronology prepared for the Senate/House Iran-Contra investigation, within calendar 1984 Ledeen was already suggesting to Oliver North, his new boss at NSC, “that Israeli contacts might be useful in obtaining release of the U.S. hostages in Lebanon.” Perhaps significantly, that is the first entry in the “Chronology of Events: U.S.-Iran Dialogue,” dated Nov. 18, 1986, prepared for the Joint House-Senate Hearings in the Iran-Contra Investigations.
What is so striking about the Ledeen-related documents, which are part of the National Security Archive’s Iran-Contra Collection, is how thoroughly the judgments of Ledeen’s colleagues at NSC mirrored, and validated, Noel Koch’s internal security concerns about his consultant.
• On April 9, 1985, NSC Middle East analyst Donald Fortier wrote to National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane that NSC staffers were agreed that Ledeen’s role in the scheme should be limited to carrying messages to Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres regarding plans to cooperate with Israel on the crisis within Iran, and specifically that he should not be entrusted to ask Peres for detailed operational information;
• On June 6, 1985, Secretary of State George Shultz wrote to McFarlane that “Israel’s record of dealings with Iran since the fall of the Shah and during the hostage crisis [show] that Israel’s agenda is not the same as ours. Consequently doubt whether an intelligence relationship such as what Ledeen has in mind would be one which we could fully rely upon and it could seriously skew our own perception and analysis of the Iranian scene.”
• On Aug. 20, 1985, the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense informed Ledeen by memorandum that his security clearance had been downgraded from Top Secret-SCI to Secret.
• On Jan. 16, 1986, Oliver North recommended to John Poindexter “for [the] security of the Iran initiative” that Ledeen be asked to take periodic polygraph examinations.
• Later in January, on the 24th, North wrote to Poindexter of his suspicion that Ledeen, along with Adolph Schwimmer and Manucher Ghorbanifar, might be making money personally on the sale of arms to Iran, through Israel.
During the June 23-25, 1987 joint hearings of the House and Senate select committees’ investigation of Iran-Contra, Noel Koch testified that he became suspicious when he learned that the price which Ledeen had negotiated for the sale to the Israeli government of basic TOW missiles was $2,500 each.
Upon inquiring of his DOD colleagues, he learned the lowest price the U.S. had ever received for the sale of TOWs to a foreign government had been a previous sale to Israel for $6,800 per copy. Koch, professing in his testimony that he and his colleagues at DOD were not in favor of the sale to begin with, determined that he—Koch—should renegotiate the $2,500 price so that it could be defended by the “defense management system.” In a clandestine meeting on a Sunday in the first-class lounge of the TWA section of National Airport, Koch met over a cup of coffee with an official from the Israeli purchasing mission in New York, and agreed on a price of $4,500 per missile—nearly twice what Ledeen had “negotiated” in Israel.
There are two possibilities here—one would be a kickback, as suspected by his NSC colleagues, and the other would be that Michael Ledeen was effectively negotiating for Israel, not the U.S.
Like his friend Stephen Bryen (the two have long served together on the JINSA board of advisors) Ledeen had been out of government service since the late 1980s…until the present Bush administration. He, like Bryen, is presently a serving member on the China Commission and, with the support of DOD Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith, has been employed since 2001 as a consultant for the Office of Special Plans (OSP). Both positions involve the handling of classified materials and require high-level security clearances.
The Principals: Perle, Wolfowitz and Feith
One might wonder how, with security histories like these, Messrs. Bryen and Ledeen have managed to get second and third chances to return to government in highly classified positions.
The explanation is that they, along with other like-minded neoconservatives, have in the current Bush administration friends in very high places. In particular, Bryen and Ledeen have repeatedly been boosted into defense/security posts by former Defense Policy Council member and chairman Richard Perle (who recently quietly resigned his position), Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith.
As previously mentioned, in 1981 Perle, as DOD assistant secretary for international security policy (ISP), hired Bryen as his deputy. That same year, Wolfowitz, then head of the State Department Policy Planning Staff, hired Ledeen as a special adviser. In 2001 Douglas Feith, as DOD Under Secretary for Policy, hired or approved the hiring of Ledeen as a consultant for the Office of Special Plans.
The principals also have assisted each other—frequently—over the years. In 1973 Richard Perle used his (and Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson’s) influence as a senior staff member of the Senate Armed Services Committee to help Wolfowitz obtain a job with the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. In 1982, Perle hired Feith in ISP as his special counsel, then as deputy assistant secretary for negotiations policy. In 2001, DOD Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz helped Feith obtain his appointment as undersecretary for policy. Feith then pushed Perle for chairman of the Defense Policy Board. In some cases, this mutual assistance carries risks—as, for instance, when Perle’s hiring of Bryen as his deputy in ISP became an extremely contentious issue in Perle’s own Senate appointment hearings as assistant secretary of defense.
Every appointment/hiring listed above involved classified work for which high-level security clearances and associated background checks by the FBI were required. When the level of the clearance is not above generic Top Secret, however, the results of that background check are seen only by the hiring authority. And in the event, if the appointee were Bryen or Ledeen and the hiring authority were Perle, Wolfowitz or Feith, the appointee(s) need not have worried about the findings of the background check. In the case of Perle hiring Bryen as his deputy in 1981, for instance, documents released in 1983 under the Freedom of Information Act indicate that DOD provided extraordinarily high clearances for Bryen without having reviewed more than a small portion of his 1978-79 FBI investigation file.
Richard Perle: A Habit of Leaking
Perle came to Washington for the first time in early 1969, at the age of 28, to work for a neocon think tank called the “Committee to Maintain a Prudent Defense Policy.” Within months, Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-WA) offered Perle a position on his staff, working with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
And within months after that—less than a year—Perle was embroiled in his first security inquiry. An FBI wiretap authorized for the Israeli Embassy in Washington picked up Perle discussing with an embassy official classified information which he said had been supplied by a staff member of the National Security Council. An NSC/FBI investigation to identify the staff member quickly focused upon Helmut Sonnenfeldt. The latter previously had been investigated in 1967, while he was a staff member of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, for suspected disclosure to an Israeli government official of a classified document concerning the commencement of the 1967 war in the Middle East.
Perle’s second brush with the law occurred in 1978, when he was the recipient of a classified CIA report on alleged past Soviet treaty violations. The leaker (and author) of the report was CIA analyst David Sullivan. CIA Director Stansfield Turner was incensed at the unauthorized disclosure, but before he could fire Sullivan, the latter quit. Turner urged Senator Jackson to fire his aide, but Perle was let off with a reprimand. Jackson then added insult to injury by immediately hiring Sullivan to his staff. Sullivan and Perle became close friends and co-conspirators, and together established an informal right-wing network which they called “the Madison Group,” after their usual meeting place in—you might have guessed—the Madison Hotel Coffee Shop.
In 1981, shortly before being appointed assistant secretary of defense for international security policy—with responsibility, inter alia, for monitoring of U.S. defense technology exports—Richard Perle was paid a substantial consulting fee by Israeli arms manufacturer Tamares, Ltd. Shortly after assuming the ISP post, Perle wrote a letter to the secretary of the army urging evaluation and purchase of 155 mm. shells manufactured by Soltam, Ltd. After leaving DOD in 1987, Perle worked for Soltam.
Paul Wolfowitz: A Well-Placed Friend
In 1973, in the dying days of the Nixon administration, Wolfowitz was recruited to work for the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA). There was a certain irony in the appointment, for in the late 1960s, as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, Wolfowitz had been a student and protégé of Albert Wohlstetter, an influential, vehement opponent of any form of arms control or disarmament, vis-à-vis the Soviets. Wolfowitz also brought to ACDA a strong attachment to Israel’s security, and a certain confusion about his obligation to U.S. national security.
In 1978, he was investigated for providing to an Israeli government official, through an AIPAC intermediary, a classified document on the proposed sale of U.S. weapons to an Arab government. An inquiry was launched and dropped, however, and Wolfowitz continued to work at ACDA until 1980.
In 1990, after a decade of work with the State Department in Washington and abroad, Wolfowitz was brought into DOD as undersecretary for policy by then-Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney. Two years later, in 1992, the first Bush administration launched a broad inter-departmental investigation into the export of classified technology to China. Of particular concern at the time was the transfer to China by Israel of U.S. Patriot missiles and/or technology. During that investigation, in a situation very reminiscent of the Bryen/Varian Associates/klystrons affair two years earlier, the Pentagon discovered that Wolfowitz’s office was promoting the export to Israel of advanced AIM-9M air-to-air missiles.
In this instance, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, aware that Israel already had been caught selling the earlier AIM 9-L version of the missile to China in violation of a written agreement with the U.S. on arms re-sales, intervened to cancel the proposed AIM 9-M deal. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs at the time was Gen. Colin Powell, currently secretary of state.
Wolfowitz continued to serve as DOD undersecretary for policy until 1993—well into the Clinton administration. After that, however, like most of the other prominent neo-conservatives, he was relegated to trying to assist Israel from the sidelines for the remainder of Clinton’s two terms. In 1998, Wolfowitz was a co-signer of a public letter to the president organized by the “Project for the New American Century.” The letter, citing Saddam Hussain’s continued possession of “weapons of mass destruction,” argued for military action to achieve regime change and demilitarization of Iraq. Clinton wasn’t impressed, but a more gullible fellow would soon come along.
And indeed, when George W. Bush assumed the presidency in January 2001, Wolfowitz got his opportunity. Picked as Donald Rumsfeld’s deputy secretary at DOD, he prevailed upon his boss to appoint Douglas Feith as undersecretary for policy. On Sept. 12, 2001, the day after the destruction of the World Trade Center, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz raised the possibility of an immediate attack on Iraq during an emergency NSC meeting. The following day, Wolfowitz conducted the Pentagon press briefing, and interpreted the president’s statement on “ending states who sponsor terrorism” as a call for regime change in Iraq. Israel wasn’t mentioned.
Douglas Feith: Hard-liner Security Risk
Bush’s appointment of Douglas Feith as DOD undersecretary for policy in early 2001 must have come as a surprise, and a harbinger, even to conservative veterans of the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. Like Michael Ledeen, Feith is a prolific writer and well-known radical conservative. Moreover, he was not being hired as a DOD consultant, like Ledeen, but as the third most senior United States Defense Department official. Feith was certainly the first, and probably the last, high Pentagon official to have publicly opposed the Biological Weapons Convention (in 1986), the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty (in 1988), the Chemical Weapons Convention (in 1997), the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (in 2000), and all of the various Middle East Peace agreements, including Oslo (in 2000).
Even more revealing, perhaps—had the transition team known of it—was Feith’s view of “technology cooperation,” as expressed in a 1992 Commentary article: “It is in the interest of U.S. and Israel to remove needless impediments to technological cooperation between them. Technologies in the hands of responsible, friendly countries facing military threats, countries like Israel, serve to deter aggression, enhance regional stability and promote peace thereby.”
What Douglas Feith had neglected to say, in this last article, was that he thought that individuals could decide on their own whether the sharing of classified information was “technical cooperation,” an unauthorized disclosure, or a violation of U.S. Code 794c, the “Espionage Act.”
Ten years prior to writing the Commentary piece, Feith had made such a decision on his own. At the time—March of 1982—Feith was a Middle East analyst in the Near East and South Asian Affairs section of the National Security Council. Two months before, in January, Judge William Clark had replaced Richard Allen as national security adviser, with the intention to clean house. A total of nine NSC staff members were fired, including Feith, who’d only been with the NSC for a year. But Feith was fired because he’d been the object of an inquiry into whether he’d provided classified material to an official of the Israeli Embassy in Washington. The FBI had opened the inquiry. And Clark, who had served in U.S. Army counterintelligence in the 1950s, took such matters very seriously…more seriously, apparently, than had Richard Allen.
Feith did not remain unemployed for long, however. As mentioned previously, in 1982 Richard Perle was serving in the Pentagon as assistant secretary for international security policy, and hired Feith on the spot as his “special counsel,” then as his deputy. Feith worked at ISP until 1986, when he left government service to form a small but influential law firm, then based in Israel.
In 2001, Douglas Feith, having returned to DOD as Donald Rumsfeld’s undersecretary for policy, created in his office the “OSP,” or Office of Special Plans. It was OSP that originated—some say from whole cloth—much of the intelligence that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld have used to justify the attack on Iraq, to mis-plan the post-war reconstruction there, and then to point an accusing finger at Iran and Syria…all to the absolute delight of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Reason for Concern
Many individuals with strong attachments to foreign countries have served the U.S. government with honor and distinction, and will certainly do so in the future. The highest officials in our executive and legislative branches should, however, take great care when appointments are made to posts involving sensitive national security matters. Appointees should be rejected who have demonstrated, in their previous government service, a willingness to sacrifice U.S. national security interests for those of another country, or an inability to distinguish one from the other.
Stephen Green is a Vermon-based free-lance journalist. This article first appeared in CounterPunch, Feb. 28-29, 2004. Reprinted with permission.
http://www.amconmag.com/2008/2008_01_28/article1.html
January 28, 2008 Issue
Copyright © 2007 The American Conservative
Found in Translation
FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds spills her secrets.
by Philip Giraldi
Most Americans have never heard of Sibel Edmonds, and if the U.S. government has its way, they never will. The former FBI translator turned whistleblower tells a chilling story of corruption at Washington’s highest levels—sale of nuclear secrets, shielding of terrorist suspects, illegal arms transfers, narcotics trafficking, money laundering, espionage. She may be a first-rate fabulist, but Edmonds’s account is full of dates, places, and names. And if she is to be believed, a treasonous plot to embed moles in American military and nuclear installations and pass sensitive intelligence to Israeli, Pakistani, and Turkish sources was facilitated by figures in the upper echelons of the State and Defense Departments. Her charges could be easily confirmed or dismissed if classified government documents were made available to investigators.
But Congress has refused to act, and the Justice Department has shrouded Edmonds’s case in the state-secrets privilege, a rarely used measure so sweeping that it precludes even a closed hearing attended only by officials with top-secret security clearances. According to the Department of Justice, such an investigation “could reasonably be expected to cause serious damage to the foreign policy and national security of the United States.”
After five years of thwarted legal challenges and fruitless attempts to launch a congressional investigation, Sibel Edmonds is telling her story, though her defiance could land her in jail. After reading its November piece about Louai al-Sakka, an al-Qaeda terrorist who trained 9/11 hijackers in Turkey, Edmonds approached the Sunday Times of London. On Jan. 6, the Times, a Murdoch-owned paper that does not normally encourage exposés damaging to the Bush administration, featured a long article. The news quickly spread around the world, with follow-ups appearing in Israel, Europe, India, Pakistan, Turkey, and Japan—but not in the United States.
Edmonds is an ethnic Azerbaijani, born in Iran. She lived there and in Turkey until 1988, when she emigrated to the United States, where she received degrees in criminal justice and psychology from George Washington University. Nine days after 9/11, Edmonds took a job at the FBI as a Turkish and Farsi translator. She worked in the 400-person translations section of the Washington office, reviewing a backlog of material dating back to 1997 and participating in operations directed against several Turkish front groups, most notably the American Turkish Council.
The ATC, founded in 1994 and modeled on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, was intended to promote Turkish interests in Congress and in other public forums. Edmonds refers to ATC and AIPAC as “sister organizations.” The group’s founders include a number of prominent Americans involved in the Israel-Turkey relationship, notably Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and former congressman Stephen Solarz. Perle and Feith had earlier been registered lobbyists for Turkey through Feith’s company, International Advisors Inc. The FBI was interested in ATC because it suspected that the group derived at least some of its income from drug trafficking, Turkey being the source of 90 percent of the heroin that reaches Europe, and because of reports that it had given congressmen illegal contributions or bribes. Moreover, as Edmonds told the Times, the Turks have “often acted as a conduit for the Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s spy agency, because they were less likely to attract attention.”
Over nearly six months, Edmonds listened with increasing unease to hundreds of intercepted phone calls between Turkish, Pakistani, Israeli, and American officials. When she voiced concerns about the processing of this intelligence—among other irregularities, one of the other translators maintained a friendship with one of the FBI’s “high value” targets—she was threatened. After exhausting all appeals through her own chain of command, Edmonds approached the two Department of Justice agencies with oversight of the FBI and sent faxes to Sens. Chuck Grassley and Patrick Leahy on the Judiciary Committee. The next day, she was called in for a polygraph. According to a DOJ inspector general’s report, the test found that “she was not deceptive in her answers.”
But two weeks later, Edmonds was fired; her home computer was seized; her family in Turkey was visited by police and threatened with arrest if they did not submit to questioning about an unspecified “intelligence matter.”
When Edmonds’s attorney filed suit to obtain the documents related to her firing, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft imposed the state-secrets gag order. Since then, she has been subjected to another federal order, which not only silenced her, but retroactively classified the statements she eventually made before the Senate Judiciary Committee and the 9/11 Commission.
Charismatic and articulate, the 37-year-old Edmonds has deftly worked the system to get as much of her story out as possible, on one occasion turning to French television to produce a documentary entitled “Kill the Messenger.” Passionate in her convictions, she has sometimes alienated her own supporters and ridden roughshod over critics who questioned her assumptions. But despite her shortcomings in making her case and the legitimate criticism that she may be overreaching in some of her conclusions, Edmonds comes across as credible. Her claims are specific, fact-based, and can be documented in detail. There is presumably an existing FBI file that could demonstrate the accuracy of many of her charges.
Her allegations are not insignificant. Edmonds claims that Marc Grossman—ambassador to Turkey from 1994-97 and undersecretary of state for political affairs from 2001-05—was a person of interest to the FBI and had his phone tapped by the Bureau in 2001 and 2002. In the third-highest position at State, Grossman wielded considerable power personally and within the Washington bureaucracy. He had access to classified information of the highest sensitivity from the CIA, NSA, and Pentagon, in addition to his own State Department. On one occasion, Grossman was reportedly recorded making arrangements to pick up a cash bribe of $15,000 from an ATC contact. The FBI also intercepted related phone conversations between the Turkish Embassy and the Pakistani Embassy that revealed sensitive U.S. government information was being sold to the highest bidder. Grossman, who emphatically denies Edmonds’s charges, is currently vice chairman of the Cohen Group, founded by Clinton defense secretary William Cohen, where he reportedly earns a seven-figure salary, much of it coming from representing Turkey.
After 9/11, Grossman reportedly intervened with the FBI to halt the interrogation of four Turkish and Pakistani operatives. According to Edmonds, Grossman was called by a Turkish contact who told him that the men had to be released before they told what they knew. Grossman said that he would take care of it and, per Edmonds, the men were released and allowed to leave the country.
Edmonds states that FBI phone taps from late 2001 reveal that Grossman tipped off his Turkish contact regarding the CIA weapons proliferation cover unit Brewster Jennings, which was being used by Valerie Plame, and that the Turk then informed the Pakistani intelligence service representative in Washington. It is to be assumed that the information was then passed on to the A.Q. Khan nuclear proliferation network.
Edmonds also claims that Grossman was instrumental in seeding Turkish and Israeli Ph.D. students into major American research labs by godfathering visas and enabling security clearances. She says that she reviewed transcripts in which the moles in the U.S. military and academic community involved in nuclear technology reportedly carried out several “transactions” involving the sale of nuclear material or information relating to nuclear programs every month, with Pakistan being a primary buyer. In the summer of 2000, the FBI recorded a meeting between a Turkish official and two Saudi businessmen in Detroit in which nuclear information stolen from an Air Force base in Alabama was offered: “We have a package and we’re going to sell it for $250,000,” the wiretap allegedly recorded. “The network appeared to be obtaining information from every nuclear agency in the United States,” Edmonds told the Times.
She further reports that beginning in 1999, the FBI was investigating senior Pentagon officials who were assisting agents of foreign governments, including Turkey and Israel. Edmonds has not publicly named names at the Pentagon, but a website linked to her appears to be a non-incriminating instrument for identifying suspects without doing so directly. Its “rogues gallery” includes photos of Richard Perle and Douglas Feith. Perle was chief of the Pentagon’s prestigious Defense Policy Board when Edmonds was working at the FBI, and Feith was undersecretary of defense for policy. If either were being investigated, it would be a matter of record, as would any reasons for dropping the investigation. “If you made public all the information that the FBI have on this case, you will see very high-level people going through criminal trials,” Edmonds told the Times.
She claims to have also learned that corrupt officials in the Turkish and Israeli Ministries of Defense falsified end-user certificates on weapons purchased in the United States to enable sales to third countries not allowed access to the technology. Principal recipients include the five “Stans” in central Asia—Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan.
Furthermore, Edmonds says that former House speaker Dennis Hastert and at least two other congressmen were investigated as suspected recipients of illegal political contributions or even bribes from Turkish sources. Her website gallery includes photos of Congressmen Roy Blount, Dan Burton, and Tom Lantos, though she has not otherwise implicated any of the three directly.
A low-level contractor might seem poorly positioned to expose major breaches of national security, but the FBI translators’ pool, riddled with corruption and nepotism, was key to keeping these secrets from surfacing. Edmonds’s claims that the section was infiltrated by translators who should never have received security clearances and who were deliberately failing to translate incriminating material are supported by the Justice Department inspector general investigation and by an FBI internal investigation, which concluded that she had been fired after making “valid complaints.” One translator, Melek Can Dickerson, who had worked for three Turkish front organizations under investigation—she failed to reveal this when applying for employment—allegedly stamped many documents of interest “not pertinent,” removed classified documents from FBI premises, and forged signatures on classified documents relating to 9/11 detainees. An Urdu translator was the daughter of a Pakistani Embassy employee who worked for Gen. Mahmoud Ahmad, the head of the Pakistani intelligence service who is accused of authorizing a $100,000 wire transfer to Mohammed Atta’s Dubai bank account immediately before 9/11. The Justice Department IG report confirmed Edmonds’s charge that translators’ section managers issued a go-slow order shortly after the terrorist attacks to create an artificial backlog that would justify an increase in budget and manpower. Those managers are reportedly still in place. Some have been promoted.
Edmonds’s revelations have attracted corroboration in the form of anonymous letters apparently written by FBI employees. There have been frequent reports of FBI field agents being frustrated by the premature closure of cases dealing with foreign spying, particularly when those cases involve Israel, and the State Department has frequently intervened to shut down investigations based on “sensitive foreign diplomatic relations.” One such anonymous letter, the veracity of which cannot be determined, cites transcripts of wiretaps involving Marc Grossman and a Turkish Embassy official between August and December 2001, described above, in which Grossman warned the Turk that Brewster Jennings was a CIA cover company. If the allegation can be documented from FBI files, the exposure of the Agency cover mechanism took place long before journalist Robert Novak outed the company in his column on Valerie Plame in 2003. The anonymous informant conveniently provides the FBI file number containing the transcripts of the recorded conversations: FBI Washington Field Office, Counterintelligence Division, Turkish Unit File 203A-WF-210023. According to the source, the FBI also recorded a subsequent conversation in which a Turkish official contacted the Pakistani Embassy to inform an ISI officer of Grossman’s warning. The FBI also reportedly informed the CIA of the Grossman conversations to determine if there was any “conflict of interest,” presumably to determine if the CIA was running its own operation that might be compromised as a result of the phone tap.
Curiously, the states-secrets gag order binding Edmonds, while put in place by DOJ in 2002, was not requested by the FBI but by the State Department and Pentagon—which employed individuals she identified as being involved in criminal activities. If her allegations are frivolous, that order would scarcely seem necessary. It would have been much simpler for the government to marginalize her by demonstrating that she was poorly informed or speculating about matters outside her competency. Under the Bush administration, the security gag order has been invoked to cover up incompetence or illegality, not to protect national security. It has recently been used to conceal the illegal wiretaps of the warrantless surveillance program, the allegations of torture and the CIA’s rendition program, and to shield the telecom industry for its collaboration in illegal eavesdropping.
Both Senators Grassley and Leahy, a Republican and a Democrat, who interviewed her at length in 2002, attest to Edmonds’s believability. The Department of Justice inspector general investigation into her claims about the translations unit and an internal FBI review confirmed most of her allegations. Former FBI senior counterintelligence officer John Cole has independently confirmed her report of the presence of Pakistani intelligence service penetrations within the FBI translators’ pool.
Edmonds wasn’t angling to become a media darling. She would have preferred to testify under oath before a congressional committee that could offer legal protection and subpoena documents and witnesses to support her case. She claims that a number of FBI agents would be willing to testify, though she has not named them.
Prior to 2006, Congressman Henry Waxman of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee promised Edmonds that if the Democrats gained control of Congress, he would order hearings into her charges. But following the Democratic sweep, he has been less forthcoming, failing to schedule hearings, refusing to take Edmonds’s calls, and recently stonewalling all inquiries into the matter. It is generally believed that Waxman, a strong supporter of Israel, is nervous about exposing an Israeli lobby role in the corruption that Edmonds describes. It is also suspected that Waxman fears that the revelations might open a Pandora’s box, damaging Republicans and Democrats alike.
Edmonds’s critics maintain that she saw only a small part of the picture in a highly compartmentalized working environment, that she was privy to only a fragment of a large operation to penetrate and disrupt the groups that have been stealing U.S. weapons technology. She could not have known operational details of what the FBI was doing and why.
That criticism is serious and must be addressed. If Edmonds was indeed seeing only part of a counterintelligence sting operation to entrap a nuclear network like that of A.Q. Khan, the government could now reveal as much in general terms, since any operation that might have been running in 2002 has long since wound down. Regarding her access to operational information, Edmonds’s critics clearly do not understand the intimate relationship that develops between FBI and CIA officers and their translators. Operations run against a foreign target in languages other than English require an intensive collaboration between field officers and translators. The translators are invariably brought into the loop because it is up to them to guide the officers seeking to understand what the target, who frequently is double talking or attempting to conceal his meaning, is actually saying. That said, it should be conceded that Edmonds might sometimes have seen only a piece of the story, and those claims based on her own interpretation should be regarded with caution.
Another objection is that Edmonds would only have seen “raw intelligence” that does not provide nuance and does not really indicate whether someone is guilty. That argument has merit, and it is undeniable that many intercepted communications lack context. But it ignores the fact that someone recorded in the act of taking a bribe or interceding to have a suspect in a criminal investigation released is behaving with a certain transparency. One either takes money or does not. There is very little interpretation that can change that reality.
Sibel Edmonds makes a number of accusations about specific criminal behavior that appear to be extraordinary but are credible enough to warrant official investigation. Her allegations are documentable: an existing FBI file should determine whether they are accurate. It’s true that she probably knows only part of the story, but if that part is correct, Congress and the Justice Department should have no higher priority. Nothing deserves more attention than the possibility of ongoing national-security failures and the proliferation of nuclear weapons with the connivance of corrupt senior government officials.
_________________________________________
Philip Giraldi, a former CIA Officer, is a partner in Cannistraro Associates, an international security consultancy.
Chris Moore – Are you Cooper AND Ed.?
>>um Eugene….Ethnic solidarity did not motivate Kennedy et al to go into Vietnam.
Touche.
Weiss' pet hypothesis is that it was a matter of Jewish ethnic solidarity which motivated the US to go into Iraq. Perhaps Weiss finely tuned ability to feel guilt at the misdeeds of a small group of Jews allows him to feel that Jews are collectively responsible, but his argumentation is so consistently muddled that it does nothing but feed those extremsists who might use Kevin MacDonald's work to support their beliefs…..
And if you're using Kevin MacDonald's blog to support your P.O.V., then you would do well to head over to Stormfront, where McDonald is a celebrity (hardly surprising, given that he described himself as "agnostic" with regard to the Holocaust while testifying for David Irving).
Surely, Philip Weiss is vying to be the king of the useful idiots, or maybe just the head village idiot.
>>But dont say that Weiss cannot analyze Jewish power in America to promote world wide Jewish interests and how it affects America.
He's quite allowed to. But his wild exaggeration and propensity towards collective guilt for the actions of a few are bound to bring out the malignant extremists such as yourself.
Three big issues this USA election time are preemptive war policy, immigration, and our economy, including monetary policy. A little research comes up with the dominent influences in these three areas–start with 1965 and bring it all up to the present.
“Weiss' pet hypothesis is that it was a matter of Jewish ethnic solidarity which motivated the US to go into Iraq.”
I can’t speak for Weiss, but most critics of the Jewish role in getting America into Iraq don’t indict all “ethnic Jews,” but rather Jewish Zionists, many of whom are ideological fanatics.
“you would do well to head over to Stormfront”
Stormfront is a white nationalist web site, whose perspective is not all that different than Jewish nationalist (Zionist) web sites. Their racial theories are quite similar to extreme Jewish racial theories, as well. Really, the only difference between Zionists and white nationalists is whom they define as the chosen.
“Philip Weiss is vying to be the king of the useful idiots”
Actually, its average American Jews who buy into Zionism that are the useful idiots. Neocon Zionists use them all the time to advance their fascist political agenda and simultaneously make themselves rich. They hide behind average Jews by claiming that criticism of their ideological program is “anti-Semitic” and hence taboo. It’s not unlike the way some terrorists hide within the civilian population to shield themselves from retaliation and isolation.
In addition to laughing about how easily the goyim are to manipulate, Jewish Zionists like Dov Zakheim mentioned by Weiss above probably laugh about how easy Jews are to manipulate as well. They just label their critics anti-Jewish, and all the Jewish Zionists come rushing in to protect them. They then escape out the back door with the cash. At heart, they are cowards. If they were not, they would be over in Israel fighting the Arabs themselves instead of luxuriating in America and getting US gentiles to do their dirty work for them.
Why average Jews think they could ever trust such base individuals is beyond me. Maybe average Jewish Zionists have ambitions to one day join the ranks of the elite Neocon Jewish Zionists in successfully scamming the rest of the world. To me, it’s a pretty disgusting and sleazy ambition, but then, I’m not a Zionist. For whatever reasons, such behavior seems to have great appeal to the Zionist mind.
Review of Lords of the Land at the new NYRB:
Robert Elias has written a very interesting study about "The politics of victimization". He analyzes how victimization changes "victims" and "victors".
The idea of victimization is also a theme that comes up in fascist ideologies.
Norman Finkelstein has pointed out that the holocaust did not figure prominently in Zionist thinking until the 1960's; it was seized by them in an opportunistic way.
>>I can’t speak for Weiss, but most critics of the Jewish role in getting America into Iraq don’t indict all “ethnic Jews,” but rather Jewish Zionists, many of whom are ideological fanatics.
"Zionist" represents such a wide spectrum of opinion within the Jewish community that your statement above is basically nonsense. There are Zionist extremists, but you imply that these fanatics represent a large portion of Zionists, which is, of course, a load of bull and evidence of your own lack of understanding with regard to Zionism.
Most of those who culturally self-identify as Jews are Zionists to some degree and the matter degree falls along a wide spectrum.
>>Stormfront is a white nationalist web site, whose perspective is not all that different than Jewish nationalist (Zionist) web sites. Their racial theories are quite similar to extreme Jewish racial theories, as well. Really, the only difference between Zionists and white nationalists is whom they define as the chosen.
What a stupid juxtaposition. You mention "extreme Jewish racial theories", which applies to a tiny minority of zealots, and then apply it to Zionists as a whole. The vast majority of Zionists are not Jewish supremacists any more than a patriotic American is an American supremacist.
>>Why average Jews think they could ever trust such base individuals is beyond me. Maybe average Jewish Zionists have ambitions to one day join the ranks of the elite Neocon Jewish Zionists in successfully scamming the rest of the world.
Seeing as a heavy majority of Jews continue to vote Democrat, I don't know why one would assume that Jews as a whole trust a small cadre of neocons.
Much like Weiss, you wish to place the guilt of a small group of Jews (and they are hardly the only guilty party in the Iraq debacle) upon Jews as a whole. Moreover, the assumption that the war in Iraq was created by Jews for Jews/Israel has never been shown to be true in any meaningful way and is increasingly seen as a load of crap, given that Iraq hasn't been one of Israel's main concerns for many years now.
This is why Weiss is such a useful idiot. His own neuroses serve buffer the beliefs the more malignant in our society of their conspirational view of Jews.
>>The vast majority of Zionists are not Jewish supremacists any more than a patriotic American is an American supremacist.
Edit to add:
Zionism at heart is the Jewish national movement to re-establish the historic geographic homeland (I do not subscribe to notions of "Greater Israel"). Any notion of Jewish supremacy lies far outside the mainstream of Zionism and has nothing to do with the reasons for which Zionism took hold. In fact, many of the religious extremists who may believe in such notions of supremacy were those who opposed Zionism in its early days, preferring to wait until God presented the Jews with Israel.
Now Gandhi has to go to some kind of reeducation session.
Sounds more than a bit Stalinist…
Yo, whoever is printing the long articles. This is uncool comment behavior, sign of rank newbieness.
Print an excerpt and a link.
Nobody wants your long articles to take up all that space in comments.
BTW, I do run on and make long comments on other people's posts. This may or may not be uncool, but I have a rule for myself – if I do go on too long at somebody else's blog then I need to copy my blather and make my own darned blog post, linking to the original post that started my free association.
This is a nice way of saying, get your own D*** blog.
"If Kennedy and McNamara were Catholic, does that mean there was a special Catholic role in the Vietnam tragedy?"
There was. Cardinal Spellman, a big anti-communist hawk, made speveral trips to Vietnam and pushed Kennedy, a family friend, to expand the war.
"Zionism at heart is the Jewish national movement to re-establish the historic geographic homeland."
Most Americans have ancestral roots in other continents. Does that ENTITLE them to go back and "re-establish their historic homeland," when other people are already living there?
Zionism is fundamentally insane. That's why it has required hundreds of billions of dollars in public and private funding to keep the misbegotten colonial experiment of Israel afloat. On its own, it is not viable or sustainable, and never will be.
And given that its host organism (the U.S.) has a negative net worth of nearly $60 trillion, Israel would be well advised to rethink the nutball zionist premises which got it into this appalling jam. The political strategy of suppressing facts and discussion is over. But zionists just keep pounding their opponents with the same old anti-semitic cudgel, somehow expecting 98% of the population to buy into a farfetched, ethnocentric ideology which offers them nothing but downside. "Such a deal" — NOT!!
Funny how they want to keep the name of the institute that Mr. Gandhi helped found for the prestige value but jettison the man himself for speaking inconvenient truths.
"Yo, whoever"
Charles Keating and Cooper, long time commentators,
though excerpt and link will help me think
I thank the lore, but, please, no more
for I cannot abide the thing of pride
whose pompous stride so fail to hide
her ugly butt such as our hut
shall house no bigger even if meagre
is the praise in the wind it breaks.
Now that's is uncool comment behavior!
Eugene wrote:
>>>"Most of those who culturally self-identify as Jews are Zionists to some degree and the matter degree falls along a wide spectrum."
You are generalizing about Jews, saying most are Zionists. So we agree that most Jews are Zionists (Jewish nationalists) to one degree or another.
>>>"The vast majority of Zionists are not Jewish supremacists any more than a patriotic American is an American supremacist."
But institutionalized Jewish nationalism (Zionism) is an inherently racialist enterprise. It has different laws for different races (based upon bloodlines), and those laws are written to advance the interests of those of Jewish bloodlines and penalize those without Jewish blood, and they are enforced by the Israeli government. So you are contending that most Jews support racialism because most Jews are Zionists. You yourself are saying most Jews are racists.
America does not have different laws for different races anymore, and so is not institutionally racialist. Of course it is impossible to be an American racial supremacist because there is no American race. It is possible to be a Jewish supremacist because there is a Jewish racial line according to Israeli law, which grants citizenship and privilege based upon Jewish bloodlines even to self-described Jewish atheists. The institutional granting of privilege based upon bloodlines is an innately supremecist act. Whether they acknowledge it or not, Jewish American Zionists are supporters of Jewish supremacy and the concept of institutional racism. They just don't support it in America (probably because unlike in Israel, they are in the minority and unlikely to be its beneficiary).
>>>"Any notion of Jewish supremacy lies far outside the mainstream of Zionism and has nothing to do with the reasons for which Zionism took hold.
You've already contended that most Jews are racists (Jewish supremacists/Zionists). How can most Jews be supremacists and yet Jewish supremacy be far outside the mainstream of Zionism? By the way, Zionism did not "take hold." It was/is the product of racist Jewish terrorists who removed native Palestinians from Palestine by force using terrorist tactics.
>>>"Seeing as a heavy majority of Jews continue to vote Democrat, I don't know why one would assume that Jews as a whole trust a small cadre of neocons."
Who said that voting Democrat and supporting Neocons are mutually exclusive? There are dozens of Jewish Zionists (supporters of institutional racism in Israel) in the Democratic Party, and Zionism is a central component of Neoconservatism. Another component is "preemptive" war. Dozens of Democrats supported the Iraq war, and continue to fund it to this day. Domestic authoritarianism is another component of Neoconservatism, and dozens of Democrats voted for the "Patriot" Act and continue to support it to this day.
>>>"Much like Weiss, you wish to place the guilt of a small group of Jews (and they are hardly the only guilty party in the Iraq debacle) upon Jews as a whole."
Dozens of Jewish Zionist lawmakers representing thousands of Jews and elected with millions of dollars from Jewish Zionists around the country is a "small group"? Millions of Jewish Zionists across the country who are staunch supporters of a central component of Neoconservatism are a "small group"?
>>>"the assumption that the war in Iraq was created by Jews for Jews/Israel has never been shown to be true"
I suggest you examine Jewish Zionists Doug Feith, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and David Wurmser's roles first working on behalf of the Israeli government and later helping to lie America into the Iraq war from inside the US government. That is step one. Then…better yet, just go to
http://www.judeofascism.com/
where it has all been documented. After that, buy a one-way plane ticket to Israel, assuming you’re not already living there. As a supporter of institutionalized racism (Zionism), you probably won't ever be very comfortable living in the liberal West. You just don't fit in and, quite frankly, really aren't wanted here. You supporters of institutionalized racism are poisonous and corrosive to Western civilization.
I apologize to everybody for posting the long articles (above) instead of just making a comment or two and referencing the source url(s).
I apologize to pixels everywhere for wasting their scarce, precious lives.
I apologize to the scroll-disabled for disregarding their lack of index finger muscle tone.
I apologize to the iron-willed blog rule-meisters (who set rules on other people's blogs), and beg for their mercy. I also recommend that they beware the door hitting them in their ass as they return to their own country.
How the original neocons fed the masses(the
sanitized AP version which glosses over the fact that entire cities were targeted…) They nearly killed off the golden calf/cash cow:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1546515/posts
Jewish death squad recalls revenge on Nazis
Friday, December 23, 2005 Posted at 8:25 PM EST
Associated Press
Jerusalem — A group of elderly Jews came forward Friday with accounts of a death squad they formed after the Second World War to take revenge on Nazis, recounting a brazen operation in which they poisoned hundreds of SS officers.
In a broadcast on Israel Channel Two TV, the survivors — some of whom fought in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising — recounted hunting down former SS officers at night. Disguised as British or U.S. officers, they dragged the men out of their homes and killed them, they said.
Members of the group, code-named “the Avengers,” said they received a large amount of arsenic from Paris and laced loaves of bread fed to hundreds of SS officers imprisoned in a U.S. camp after the war. Many were reported taken to hospital but it was unclear if any died.
They said they were also planning a broad operation in Dachau and Nuremberg but the Jewish leadership in what would soon become Israel forced them to abandon the plan.
“I didn't see myself as a murderer, not then and not today,” Simcha Rotem told Channel Two.
The broadcast focused on a rare reunion of the group earlier this month in a Tel Aviv suburb. With most of the Avengers either dead or in their late 70s and 80s, Mr. Rotem said they gave in to family pressure to recount their experiences to children and grandchildren and other relatives.
Reports of Jewish death squads have surfaced over the years, and several books have been written. Earlier this year, Israel's government refused a request from Poland to extradite a suspected death squad member.
Aaron Breitbart, senior researcher at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, said the tale of the bread-poisoning plot was plausible.
“This is not a story that somebody is telling out of a hat. There was such a plan.”
“We just don't know how close they got,” Mr. Breitbart said.
The revelations coincide with the release of Steven Spielberg's film “Munich,” which has drawn attention to another story of Jewish revenge — Israel's campaign to hunt down members of the Palestinian group that attacked Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics.
The attackers killed two Israelis and kidnapped nine others at the Olympic village in Munich, West Germany. All the hostages died later during a botched German rescue attempt.
Some Jews and Israelis have complained Munich distorts history and is too sympathetic to the Palestinian terrorists, though the widows of two of the slain athletes have praised the film.
With their actions part of history, the elderly survivors of the Avengers feel they have nothing to lose by speaking publicly about their operations.
One of the few surviving fighters in the Ghetto Uprising, Mr. Rotem, now 81, spent all of the Second World War battling the Nazis. At the end of the war, he went to Bucharest, Romania, where he met Nava (Abba) Kovner, head of a group of Avengers from eastern Poland.
“We walked around for two or three hours and we agreed to things and we began to work. It was very simple,” Mr. Rotem said.
Mr. Rotem, who lives in Jerusalem, said he took charge of a plan to poison 28,000 SS officers imprisoned by the Americans at Dachau and Nuremberg in Germany.
“I wanted to finish off the SS officers who were held by the Americans…unfortunately, we did not succeed,” he said.
Another plan, carried out in part by Joseph Harmatz, was more successful, they said.
Mr. Harmatz found work at a bakery that supplied bread to U.S.-run prisoner camps. He said he received arsenic in rubber bottles from Paris, which he then used to poison 3,000 loaves of bread.
He said about 2,280 SS men ate the bread but he did not know if any died. News reports at the time said more than 200 people were taken to hospital but mentioned no deaths.
“We fled (the Nazis) and we took revenge,” Mr. Harmatz told Channel Two.
“We saw ourselves as obligated not to leave Europe so we could settle accounts with the Germans.”
Michael Bar-Zohar, whose book The Avengers was published in 1967, said the bread poisoning was the biggest operation staged by the group.
It also considered an attempt to poison the water supply of five German cities but decided against it, Mr. Bar-Zohar said. Mr. Rotem confirmed some plans were called off because the group feared killing innocent people.
The group's 40 or so members were largely Jews who had not been sent to concentration camps and spent the war fighting Nazis, Mr. Bar-Zohar said.
“Their spirit hadn't been broken by the concentration camps,” he said.
The camp survivors “didn't have the will or desire to avenge.”
Nobody on the Hill is more right-wing on Israel than Lantos and more inclined to invoke the holocaust to justify the occupation. In my opinion, Lantos is much more of a neocon than, say, Joe Lieberman.
Dov Zakheim? THE Dov Zakheim?
Wiki:
"He served in various Department of Defense posts during the Reagan administration, including Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Planning and Resources from 1985 to 1987. As an Orthodox Jew, he gained notoriety for his involvement in ending the Israeli fighter program, the IAI Lavi."
Boy, am sure glad that US Department of Defense has such fantastic supporters of Israel.
Gosh, nothing bad can come of that…
I am also sure that the 5 Americans who have tuned to CSPAN were tremendously educated.
But the few billion who weren't were watching pundits talk about Heath Ledger…
Yes, that Dov Zakheim.
Below, a puff piece on the end of Zakheim's tenure as DoD Comptroller, from the DoD's own press service. At this point, just before riding off into the private industry/think tank sunset, Zakheim "only" has $700b in "lost" funding to reconcile. This conservative estimate of "lost" funds was never even close to fully reconciled.
In private industry, this would be called an obvious case of accounting fraud. In government, it would often be called a major scandal. In PNAC/Zionist crazy land, it's just a mere misplaced $700 billion or so.
Wonder where all those goyim tax dollars ended up?
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=43927
Zakheim Seeks To Corral, Reconcile 'Lost' Spending
By Gerry J. Gilmore
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, Feb. 20, 2002 – As part of military transformation efforts, DoD Comptroller Dov S. Zakheim and his posse of accountants are riding the Pentagon's financial paper trail, seeking to corral billions of dollars in so-called "lost" expenditures.
For years, DoD and congressional officials have sought to reconcile defense financial documents to determine where billions in expenditures have gone. That money didn't fall down a hole, but is simply waiting to be accounted for, Zakheim said in a Feb. 14 interview with the American Forces Information Service. Complicating matters, he said, is that DoD has 674 different computerized accounting, logistics and personnel systems.
Most of the 674 systems "don't talk to one another unless somebody 'translates,'" he remarked. This situation, he added, makes it hard to reconcile financial data.
Billions of dollars of DoD taxpayer-provided money haven't disappeared, Zakheim said. "Missing" expenditures are often reconciled a bit later in the same way people balance their checkbooks every month. The bank closes out a month and sends its bank statement, he said. In the meanwhile, people write more checks, and so they have to reconcile their checkbook register and the statement.
DoD financial experts, Zakheim said, are making good progress reconciling the department's "lost" expenditures, trimming them from a prior estimated total of $2.3 trillion to $700 billion. And, he added, the amount continues to drop.
"We're getting it down and we are redesigning our systems so we'll go down from 600-odd systems to maybe 50," he explained.
"That way, we will give people not so much more money, but a comfort factor, to be sure that every last taxpayer penny is accounted for," he concluded.