"Scooter" Libby (Leibowitz) has been a long-serving intelligence agent for Israel's Mossad, according to a veteran CIA "official cover" officer

Report: Libby a long-time Israeli intelligence agent | by Wayne Madsen | Global Research, July 7, 2007 | waynemadsenreport.com

Irving Lewis "Scooter" Libby (Leibowitz) has been a long-serving intelligence agent for Israel's Mossad, according to a veteran CIA "official cover" officer who spoke to the Wayne Madsen Report on deep background. The CIA's Clandestine Service has, over the years, gathered a tremendous amount of intelligence on Libby's activities on behalf of Mossad.
...
Current British Lord Chancellor and former British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said that during Middle East peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, "It's a toss-up whether [Libby] is working for the Israelis or the Americans on any given day." Clinton 's Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder told the House Government Affairs Committee in 2001 that he discovered much more about Rich after Clinton 's pardon and said, "Knowing everything that I know now, I would not have recommended to the president that he grant the pardon."

It has also been reported that, in addition to pressure from leading neocons in the United States to keep Libby out of jail, Bush was urged by leading Israeli government officials to prevent Libby from going to prison. ...

Wolfowitz Returns To Neocon Think Tank AEI ... neocon think tank

Saturday, June 30, 2007 Wolfowitz Returns To Neocon Think Tank AEI

Wolfowitz aims to stay in politicsBy Eoin Callan in WashingtonPublished: June 28 2007 22:15 Last updated: June 28 2007 22:15

Paul Wolfowitz vowed to continue in political life after he steps down as president of the World Bank this weekend following an internal revolt.The White House appointee and former deputy defence secretary is leaving his post midway through his term after being forced from office over an ethics scandal.

He said he would be joining the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank in Washington, as a visiting scholar, which would allow him to continue influencing public policy. ...

"The Case for Bombing Iran" with the deck, "I hope and pray that President Bush will do it."

'WSJ' Op-Ed: Bomb-bomb Iran | By E&P Staff | Published: May 30, 2007 10:30 AM ET

NEW YORK It was sort of funny last month when Sen. John McCain, in a takeoff on the old Beach Boys tune, sang, "Bomb-bomb-bomb Bomb-bomb Iran" but some conservatives aren't laughing -- and no one else should, either, it is now apparent.

In a lengthy op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today, Norman Podhoretz, the neo-con legend (and father of columnist John Podhoretz) advocates just that, the sooner the better.

The op-ed is titled, "The Case for Bombing Iran" with the deck, "I hope and pray that President Bush will do it."

Here is the climax.
*

In short, the plain and brutal truth is that if Iran is to be prevented from developing a nuclear arsenal, there is no alternative to the actual use of military force--any more than there was an alternative to force if Hitler was to be stopped in 1938.

Since a ground invasion of Iran must be ruled out for many different reasons, the job would have to be done, if it is to be done at all, by a campaign of air strikes. Furthermore, because Iran's nuclear facilities are dispersed, and because some of them are underground, many sorties and bunker-busting munitions would be required. And because such a campaign is beyond the capabilities of Israel, and the will, let alone the courage, of any of our other allies, it could be carried out only by the United States. ...

Perle [leading neoconservative thinker ] Turns on Bush in Harsh Terms [appease rather than confront America's enemies]

Perle Turns on Bush in Harsh Terms | By NICHOLAS WAPSHOTT | Staff Reporter of the Sun
May 15, 2007

The Bush administration is beginning to appease rather than confront America's enemies, a former chairman of the Defense Policy Board and leading neoconservative thinker said yesterday, describing the president as "a failure" who is proving powerless to impose his views on his administration.

Richard Perle offered a withering assessment of the president's impotence at a meeting of the Hudson Institute in New York, saying American foreign policy is being applied by an out-of-control State Department.
...

Office of Special Plans: acted "inappropriately" by cooking intelligence to reflect a "mature and symbiotic" relationship between Iraq and al-Qa'ida

Tenet Battled With the Office of Special Plans | By Matt Renner | t r u t h o u t | Report | Wednesday 02 May 2007

In his book, "At the Center of the Storm," former Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet describes efforts by Pentagon and White House officials to subvert pre-Iraq war intelligence assessment by the CIA.

Tenet focuses on the actions of a group inside the Pentagon that sent the Bush administration bogus intelligence on Iraq's weapons program and ties to terrorist organizations that supported the administration's policy.

This group was recently criticized by a Department of Defense inspector general report from February 9, 2007, which found that a policy-shop known as "the Office of Special Plans," headed by the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, acted "inappropriately" by cooking intelligence to reflect a "mature and symbiotic" relationship between Iraq and al-Qa'ida. This characterization was never supported by the CIA, but was presented as fact by Feith's office to White House policy makers in the run up to the Iraq war. ...
...
According to Tenet's book, when the bogus intelligence assessment was presented to Tenet in August, 2002, he told the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Vice Admiral Jake Jacoby, “This is entirely inappropriate. You get this back in intelligence channels. I want analysts talking to analysts, not people with agendas.” This instruction was not complied with. Instead, according to the Inspector General report, Feith fast-tracked the information and presented the findings to then Deputy National Security Director Steven Hadley and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Cheney.

Tenet claims that he did not know that the briefings continued despite his direction to Jacoby. As head of the DIA, Jacoby had two bosses, Tenet and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Tenet points out this fact but does not explicitly say that Rumsfeld over-ruled his direction to Jacoby. The Inspector General report concluded that the “inappropriate” activities of Feith's office were authorized by Rumsfeld or his former deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz.
...
According to Tenet, White House officials tried to prevent the CIA from publishing their own analysis of the relationship between Iraq and al-Qa'ida. A draft report of the CIA analysis of that relationship was sent to the White House in December 2002, resulting in "a series of calls from the White House" that asked the CIA to "revise or withdraw the paper." Tenet names the vice president's former Chief of Staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby and then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley as two of the White House officials who made these calls. Tenet claims that a previous draft of this report was given to the DOD for their feedback. Tenet says that Feith's office responded saying it had objections, "but would make their views known through other channels."

Documents pointing to a close relationship between Iraq and al Qa'ida were discovered in Baghdad after the invasion. After analysis by the CIA and the Secret Service, the documents were proven to be forgeries. According to Tenet, even after being discredited, "These raw, unevaluated documents continued to show up in the hands of senior administration officials without having gone through normal intelligence channels."

Wolfie has behaved with a stupidity born of the arrogance of power ...

April 17, 2007 | Wolfie's Piggy Bank | by Patrick J. Buchanan

Barracks language edited out, Tommy Franks once referred to the Pentagon's No. 3, Doug Feith, as "the dumbest guy on the planet."

It now appears Gen. Franks' honorific better applies to Feith's boss, the Pentagon No. 2, Paul Wolfowitz. For a man once hailed as the brightest of the neocons, Wolfie has behaved with a stupidity born of the arrogance of power.

Hailed in 2003 as architect of the Iraq victory, Wolfowitz, by late 2004, was being singled out as the bumbler of postwar planning and the man most responsible for what Gen. William Odom was already calling the greatest strategic blunder in U.S. history.

With the roster of U.S. dead and wounded rising, Wolfie was looking for a place to hide. George Bush, who had heeded his cawing for war on Iraq from the first hours after 9/11, took pity. And more than pity. Bush made him president of the World Bank, the post to which Robert McNamara retreated after seven years at the Pentagon plunging us into a another war, a war we later learned McNamara had come to believe we could not win. ...
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A few weeks in Eden, and Wolfie went straight for the apple tree. From memos unearthed by the Financial Times, he gave bank officials specific instructions on the care and feeding of his romantic interest, a mid-level Libyan bank bureaucrat by the name of Shaha Riza.

Warned by the bank ethics committee he was to have no role in deciding Shaha's salary, Wolfie brushed the ethics rules aside.

He ordered Xavier Coll, bank vice president for human resources, to assign Riza to the State Department and raise her salary by some 50 percent, to $193,000 today, tax-free. She would take home more than Condi Rice. Coll was then directed to assure that Riza receive annual pay hikes of 8 percent and be put on a glide path to the highest position of any civil servant at the bank. By 2010, she would be making $245,000, tax-free.

And what has been Wolfowitz's big cause at the bank? Fighting corruption. ...

secret plan was crafted by neo-conservatives intent on using Iraq's oil to destroy the Opec cartel

The rape of Iraq's oil | March 22, 2007 1:30 PM | Printable version

The Baghdad government has caved in to a damaging plan that will enrich western companies.

The recent cabinet agreement in Baghdad on the new draft oil law was hailed as a landmark deal bringing together the warring factions in the allocation of the country's oil wealth. What was concealed was that this is being forced through by relentless pressure from the US and will sow the seeds of intense future conflict, with serious knock-on impacts on the world economy.

The draft law, now before the Iraqi parliament, sets up "production sharing partnerships" to allow the US and British oil majors to extract Iraqi oil for up to 30 years. While Iraq would retain legal ownership of its oil, companies like Exxon, Chevron, Shell and BP that invest in the infrastructure and refineries would get a large share of the profits.

No other Middle Eastern oil producer has ever offered such a hugely lucrative concession to the big oil companies, since Opec has always run its oil business through tightly-controlled state companies. Only Iraq in its present dire condition, dependent on US troops for the survival of the government, lacks the bargaining capacity to resist.

This is not a new plan. According to documents obtained from the US State Department by BBC Newsnight under the US Freedom of Information Act, the US oil industry plan drafted early in 2001 for takeover of the Iraqi oilfields (after the removal of Saddam) was pushed aside by a secret plan, drafted just before the invasion in 2003, calling for the sell-off of all of Iraq's oilfields.

This secret plan was crafted by neo-conservatives intent on using Iraq's oil to destroy the Opec cartel through massive increases in production above Opec quotas. However, Philip Carroll, the former CEO of Shell Oil USA, who took control of Iraq's oil production for the US government a month after the invasion, stalled the sell-off scheme. As Ariel Cohen of the neo-conservative Heritage Foundation later told Newsnight, an opportunity had been missed to privatise Iraq's oilfields. ...

Neoconservative radicalism: it touts a radical and authoritarian nanny-statism that seeks, at its core, to provide feelings of protection, safety, an

Thursday March 29, 2007 08:59 EST | Neoconservative radicalism has reshaped our political spectrum

David Brooks' column in The New York Times this morning contains several important observations. It would maximize clarity in our political discussions if journalists could just ingest Brooks' central point: the dominant right-wing political movement in this country that has spawned and driven the Bush presidency has nothing to do with -- it is in fact overtly hostile to -- the ostensible principles of Goldwater/Reagan small-government conservatism. Though today's so-called "conservatives" exploit the Goldwater/Reagan mythology as a political prop, they don't believe in those principles in any way. That movement is the very antithesis of those principles.

Brooks comes out and explicitly declares the twin icons of "conservatism" to be every bit as quaint and obsolete as the Geneva Conventions: "Goldwater and Reagan were important leaders, but they're not models for the future."

Brooks admits what has been crystal clear for some time -- namely, that so-called "conservatives" (meaning the contemporary political "Right") no longer believe (if they ever did) that government power should be restrained in order to maximize freedom. That belief system, says Brooks, is an obsolete relic which arose out of the the 1970s, and has been replaced by the opposite desire -- for expanded government power on every front. ...
...
But neoconservatism -- which is really what the right-wing pro-Bush movement has become -- doesn't believe in any of that, and Brooks' column demonstrates that they are admitting that more and more explicitly. Instead, it touts a radical and authoritarian nanny-statism that seeks, at its core, to provide feelings of protection, safety, and moralistic clarity -- "security leads to freedom" -- all delivered by political leaders using ever-increasing federal government power and limitless militarism. Whether one believes in that radical and warped vision of the American federal government is, more than any other factor, what now determines one's political orientation.

I have argued several times before that the radicalism of the Bush presidency and the neoconservatism on which it is based has resulted in a fundamental political re-alignment. As Brooks points out, the issues that shape our political spectrum and determine one's political orientation have changed fundamentally -- Brooks contrasts today's predominant issues with those of the 1970s in order to demonstrate this shift, but the shift is just as drastic even when one compares today's predominant political issues to those that drove the key political dispustes as recently as the 1990s. ...

Many backed Bush thinking we were supporting a moderate small-c conservative with a humble approach to the rest of the world ...

Sunday, April 1, 2007 | The Conscience of a Bushie | 01 Apr 2007 06:20 am

The NYT's debriefing - degriefing? - of Matthew Dowd strikes a chord with me, as you might imagine. Many of us backed Bush in 2000 with the thought that we were supporting a moderate, inclusive Republican with a pragmatic small-c conservative domestic policy, and a humble approach to the rest of the world. We were wrong, but we bonded with the president we'd picked through the trauma of 9/11, and it took many of us time to come to terms with what it was we had ultimately enabled. It was in front of our noses, of course. But what Dowd calls a "love-affair" is sometimes hard to walk away from cleanly or even recognize as a nightmare before it is too late. I worried about spending rather quickly, but the war soon took precedence over everything else. For me, the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, the complete lack of planning, and the refusal to budge was the clincher. But Abu Ghraib - and the non-response to Abu Ghraib - made me realize that Bush was a danger to America, not an asset. The Federal Marriage Amendment obviously hit me in the solar plexus as well. It felt like a gratuitously vicious attack on a minority and a violation of conservatism. I knew my relationship with this president was over by the beginning of 2004. Some of us were mocked for backing John Kerry that year, and I can understand the mockery. Kerry? But yes, Bush really was that bad, that incompetent and that dangerous.

Dowd, it seems, took longer to recognize this. So have others. But what strikes me about the more thoughtful Bush alums - Matthew Dowd and David Kuo spring to mind - is their yearning for spiritual atonement. I think that for many the reckoning with these past few years may take longer to arrive. But there will be a wider reckoning. And it won't be pretty. ...

Neo-Conservative Architects of Military Escalation

"Surge" or "Involuntary" Military Conscription: The Neo-Conservative Architects of Military Escalation | by Michel Chossudovsky | Global Research, January 26, 2007
...
The decision to substantially increase US forces in Iraq is not a makeshift initiative, which emerged in response to the evolving crisis in Iraq. It is part of a carefully formulated NeoCon agenda to increase the size of US forces and reinstate "involuntary" forms of military conscription.

Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute is credited as being one of the main architects of Bush 's "Surge". Fred Kagan together with General (ret) Jack Keane, argue that "any troop increase must be large and lasting"... [involving] a surge of at least 30,000 combat troops lasting 18 months or so". (Quoted in the the Financial Times, 2 January 2007).

"Kagan was arguing that while "the high end of estimates" suggested the need for another 80,000 US troops to stage an effective counter-insurgency operation in Iraq, "it is very likely that a surge of 50,000 troops would be sufficient to stabilise the capital". In the event, it seems unlikely that Mr Bush will commit even half that number".(Ibid)

Frederick Kagan is the brother of Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who coincidentally is also on the board of Directors of the Project of the New American Century (PNAC). The latter is a Washington based think tank headed by William Kristol, with direct ties to the Bush Cabinet.

William Kristol is the son of Irving Kristol, one of the main founding figures of Neoconservatism. Irving Kristol sits on the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR). He is also a Senior Fellow of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

William Kristol is editor of the influential Washington based Weekly Standard. Robert Kagan is a contributing editor to the Weekly Standard. All of these people are firmly committed to America's "long war", a war without borders, inspired by the teachings of the late Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago.

Surge and the Project for the New American Century (PNAC)

An overall expansion of US forces worldwide is an integral part of the NeoConservatives mission, as formulated in the Project of the New American Century's key document entitled Rebuilding American Defenses.

Bush's "Surge" is essentially derived from this document, which constitutes the PNAC's manifesto. The authors of Rebuilding American Defenses are Donald Kagan, (Professor of History at Yale University and father of Frederick Kagan and Robert Kagan)., Gary Schmitt (PNAC Project Coordinator together with Donald Kagan) and Thomas Donnelly (main author), Both Schmitt and Donnelly are resident fellows at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and colleagues of Frederick Kagan.

In Part IV of Rebuilding American Defenses, the PNAC recommends an overall expansion of "active-duty strength" from 475,000 (2000 figure) to 525,000. It also points to the reinforcement of the Army National Guard as:

"a hedge against the need for a larger-than-anticipated force in combat.... It should not be used primarily to provide combat service support to active Army units engaged in current operations"

The Army National Guard should according to the PNAC "play its essential role in fighting large scale wars", while minimizing its civilian functions. ...

White House case for invading Iraq included "reporting of dubious quality or reliability" that supported the political views of administration

Official's Key Report On Iraq Is Faulted | 'Dubious' Intelligence Fueled Push for War | By Walter Pincus and R. Jeffrey Smith | Washington Post Staff Writers | Friday, February 9, 2007; Page A01

Intelligence provided by former undersecretary of defense Douglas J. Feith to buttress the White House case for invading Iraq included "reporting of dubious quality or reliability" that supported the political views of senior administration officials rather than the conclusions of the intelligence community, according to a report by the Pentagon's inspector general.

Feith's office "was predisposed to finding a significant relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda," according to portions of the report, released yesterday by Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.). The inspector general described Feith's activities as "an alternative intelligence assessment process."
...
"The bottom line is that intelligence relating to the Iraq-al-Qaeda relationship was manipulated by high-ranking officials in the Department of Defense to support the administration's decision to invade Iraq," Levin said yesterday. "The inspector general's report is a devastating condemnation of inappropriate activities in the DOD policy office that helped take this nation to war."

The summary document confirmed a range of accusations that Levin had leveled against Feith's office, alleging inaccurate work.

Feith's office, it said, drew on "both reliable and unreliable" intelligence reports in 2002 to produce a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq "that was much stronger than that assessed by the IC [Intelligence Community] and more in accord with the policy views of senior officials in the Administration."

It stated that the office produced intelligence assessments "inconsistent" with the U.S. intelligence community consensus, calling those actions "inappropriate" because the assessments purported to be "intelligence products" but were far more conclusive than the consensus view. ...

called the report “a devastating condemnation of inappropriate activities” carried out by Douglas J. Feith, who was under secretary of defense for pol

Senate Panel Debates Iraq Intelligence | By DAVID STOUT | Published: February 9, 2007

WASHINGTON, Feb. 9 -- Senate Democrats and Republicans differed sharply today on whether Pentagon officials deliberately used faulty intelligence to justify the Bush administration’s war against Iraq.

The debate before the Senate Armed Services Committee was touched off by a report by the Pentagon inspector general’s office, which investigated the Pentagon’s intelligence-gathering and found it seriously flawed, especially in its search for links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.

Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who heads the committee, called the report “a devastating condemnation of inappropriate activities” carried out by Douglas J. Feith, who was under secretary of defense for policy just before the invasion of Iraq early in 2003.

“Well, unfortunately, the damage has already been done,” Mr. Levin said. “Senior administration officials used the twisted intelligence produced by the Feith office in making the case for the Iraq war.”

But Senator James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican on the committee, immediately disagreed, setting the stage for a series of partisan exchanges. “First of all, you can read the same report and come up with different conclusions, which is quite obvious and will be obvious,” Mr. Inhofe said, adding that the report cannot easily be interpreted as “a devastating condemnation,” as Mr. Levin asserted.

The long-awaited report by Thomas F. Gimble, the Pentagon’s acting inspector general, concluded that, while the Feith team did not violate any laws or knowingly mislead Congress, it developed dubious intelligence that was inconsistent with the findings of the wider intelligence community. ...

Since the first Bush administration, Feith had been advising the Israeli government to pressure Washington to remove Saddam Hussein

March 12, 2007 Issue | Copyright © 2007 The American Conservative | Saving Feith |
A new report gives the Pentagon intelligence peddler a pass. | by Philip Giraldi

Pentagon Inspector General Thomas Gimble’s narrow report on the activities of Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith’s Office of Special Plans was not quite a whitewash, but neither was it an indictment. The report, presented to Congress on Feb. 9, rightly condemned Feith’s attempt to create what it charitably called “an alternative intelligence assessment process,” lacking the checks and balances observed by the CIA, DIA, and INR. But no punishment was recommended for anyone involved in the relentless advocacy that enabled the slide to war. Nor did the investigation seek to determine possible involvement of the Office of Special Plans in the Niger uranium forgeries and cover-up, or in the generation and dissemination of false intelligence derived from foreign sources.

Per Gimble’s careful parsing, Feith’s activities were deemed “inappropriate” but “not illegal or unauthorized.” And his investigation’s scope was curiously limited: the year-long inquiry only examined one of the many questionable activities carried out by the Office of Special Plans, the purported link between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. The role of Feith’s office in hatching the imaginary meeting between Mohammad Atta and Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague was significant, but it was only a single element in the much broader pattern of deception that provided the “evidence” President Bush used to persuade the American people that Saddam’s Iraq was an existential threat akin to Hitler’s Germany.

At best, any investigation conducted in-house, as this one was, will be more collegial than adversarial, and Gimble took pains not to speculate about motive. But Feith didn’t come to the Pentagon without an agenda. The IG report found that his OSP “was predisposed to finding a significant relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda,” and those who know Feith’s history understand why.

Since the first Bush administration, Feith had been advising the Israeli government to pressure Washington to remove Saddam Hussein. So it was unsurprising when he joined Richard Perle, David Wurmser, and others in July 1996 to develop a position paper that had Iraqi regime change as its centerpiece. Intended for incoming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the document, entitled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” pushed the new government to launch pre-emptive war against Israel’s Arab neighbors. “Israel has the opportunity to make a clean break,” the paper said, “to engage every possible energy on rebuilding Zionism.” Baghdad was first on the hit list—“Whoever inherits Iraq dominates the entire Levant strategically,” they wrote—followed by attacks on Syria and Lebanon. To secure American support for “rolling back” Arab regimes, the group recommended phony motives for the invasions—in Syria’s case counterfeiting, drug running, and WMD development. ...

The Anti-Neocon

The Anti-Neocon | David Corn | July 20, 2005

David Corn writes The Loyal Opposition twice a month for TomPaine.com. Corn is also the Washington editor of The Nation and is the author of The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception (Crown Publishers).

"I'm the anti-neocon." That's how Robert Merry recently described himself to me. After reading his new book—Sands of Empire: Missionary Zeal, American Foreign Policy, and the Hazards of Global Ambition —I have to say: He got that right.

His book is the most scorching mainstream critique of the neocons and their misadventure in Iraq that I have encountered. Merry, the publisher of Congressional Quarterly and a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal, rips apart that small band of ideologically driven chickenhawks and leaves their bones scattered on the floor of a Council of Foreign Relations conference room. Merry is a hard-ass practitioner of global realpolitik. There is not a smidgeon of sentiment in a single sentence of this book. He's certainly not keeping company with one-worlders and those who would identify (or misidentify, in his view) American national security interests with feel-good global humanitarianism. But in a classic example of that old Middle East cliché—the enemy of my enemy is my friend—he has produced a book that liberal-minded foreign policy folks ought to gobble up. And I would dare the neocons to enter Merry's knife-throwing gallery. ...

Anti-Neocons

Anti-Neocons No More Wars for Israel

Basics for new people. There are a lot of people who would like to know more about Zionism, the Neocons, MIC, NWO, CFR, BIS, CIA, MI6, Mossad, DSM, OSP, AIPAC, DOD, WHIG, MSM, ISCB, PNAC, and so forth. It is hard to swallow for regualr people with regular jobs who do not have the time to do the reasearch and who were not told a thing in School. This section is for breaking people into the movement.

choice of Abrams as a top expert on the Middle East ... speaks volumes

Abrams in Jerusalem | Tom Barry, IRC | August 23, 2006 | IRC Right Web | rightweb.irc-online.org

During the 35-day conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was accompanied on her shuttle diplomacy to the region by Elliott Abrams. Abrams, who serves as President George W. Bush's adviser for “Global Democracy Strategy,” is a former Reagan administration figure who was convicted (and later pardoned) for his role in the Iran-Contra affair. Now ensconced in the National Security Council (NSC), Abrams' portfolio also includes advising on policies related to the Middle East.

It was in this capacity that Abrams was put to use during—and before—the recent conflict. According to an unnamed U.S. government consultant “with close ties to Israel” who was interviewed by journalist Seymour Hersh, Israel had put together bombing plans long before Hezbollah kidnapped two Israeli soldiers, which ostensibly set off the conflict. As they developed their plans early this summer, said the consultant, Israeli officials went to Washington “to get a green light for the bombing operation and to find out how much the United States would bear … Israel began with Cheney. It wanted to be sure that it had his support and the support of his office and the Middle East desk of the National Security Council.” In other words, the Israelis wanted the imprimatur of Elliott Abrams.

The choice of Abrams as a top expert on the Middle East and as the administration's point man in the recent conflict in southern Lebanon speaks volumes about the president's views on “global democracy” and Mideast affairs. It also points to the White House's high comfort level with the foreign policy agenda being promoted by the neoconservative camp.

As a deputy to National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, Abrams' main focus has been the Israeli-Palestinian friction—which Abrams insists is an “Israel-Arab” conflict disguised as a self-determination conflict. After a couple of weeks of watching Israel clash against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and against Hezbollah in Lebanon, Abrams traveled to Jerusalem as part of a three-person, high-level delegation led by Rice and also including C. David Welch, a career diplomat who is assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs. Abrams travels regularly between Jerusalem and Washington and plays a key role in holding together the neoconservative-militarist Washington consensus on policy related to Israel and Iran and Arab states.

Abrams, a self-declared “neoconservative and neo-Reaganite,” is the son-in-law of Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter, an activist couple who played a leading role in establishing neoconservatism as an influential political tendency in the 1970s. There's no doubting Abrams' neoconservative and neo-Reaganite credentials. Like many other second-generation neocons, Abrams got his political start as member of the right-wing Social Democrats USA and as legal counsel to the hawkish and avidly pro-Israel Democratic Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson. In the late 1970s Abrams worked with other right-wing Democrats in the Coalition for a Democratic Majority as part of an unsuccessful attempt to turn the post-Vietnam War Democratic Party back toward hardline anti-communism; then, along with other Cold Warrior Democrats, Abrams became a Ronald Reagan supporter and a Republican.

When not in government service, Abrams has been affiliated with key neoconservative institutes and pressure groups, including the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Project for the New American Century (PNAC), Center for Security Policy, Committee for U.S. Interests in the Middle East, Committee for the Free World, and the Nicaraguan Resistance Foundation.

As a Reaganite, Abrams served in President Reagan's State Department, in the first term as assistant secretary of state for human rights and then as assistant secretary for inter-American affairs. As a State Department diplomat, Abrams helped coordinate illegal government support for the Nicaraguan Contras (known by Reaganites as “freedom fighters”). He worked with Lt. Col. Oliver North to triangulate arms sales through Israel to Iran with the proceeds channeled to the Contras—an illegal operation about which he falsely denied knowledge in congressional testimony, resulting in his criminal conviction.

As befitting his neo-Reaganite identity, Abrams argued in the 1990s for a renewal of Reagan's “peace through strength” foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East. In 1992 he helped form the Committee for U.S. Interests in the Middle East, which was actually a committee to ensure that U.S. policy was aligned with the Likud party in Israel. Other members of the committee included Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Frank Gaffney, and John Lehman, among dozens of other neoconservatives and pro-Israel hawks. The committee spoke out against what it perceived as a dangerous distancing between the George H.W. Bush administration and Israel that was supposedly evident in U.S. pressure for Israel to pull out of some occupied territories and halt its campaign to expand settlements in these zones. ...

[Bush / ] war's neoconservative boosters turned sharply on Bush administration, grand designs undermined by White House incompetence

Vanity Fair Exclusive: Now They Tell Us | Neo Culpa | by David Rose VF.COM November 3, 2006

As Iraq slips further into chaos, the war's neoconservative boosters have turned sharply on the Bush administration, charging that their grand designs have been undermined by White House incompetence. In a series of exclusive interviews, Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, David Frum, and others play the blame game with shocking frankness. Target No. 1: the president himself.
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According to Perle, who left the Defense Policy Board in 2004, this unfolding catastrophe has a central cause: devastating dysfunction within the administration of President George W. Bush. Perle says, "The decisions did not get made that should have been. They didn't get made in a timely fashion, and the differences were argued out endlessly.… At the end of the day, you have to hold the president responsible.… I don't think he realized the extent of the opposition within his own administration, and the disloyalty."

Perle goes so far as to say that, if he had his time over, he would not have advocated an invasion of Iraq: "I think if I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, 'Should we go into Iraq?,' I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.' … I don't say that because I no longer believe that Saddam had the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction, or that he was not in contact with terrorists. I believe those two premises were both correct. Could we have managed that threat by means other than a direct military intervention? Well, maybe we could have."
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To David Frum, the former White House speechwriter who co-wrote Bush's 2002 State of the Union address that accused Iraq of being part of an "axis of evil," it now looks as if defeat may be inescapable, because "the insurgency has proven it can kill anyone who cooperates, and the United States and its friends have failed to prove that it can protect them." This situation, he says, must ultimately be blamed on "failure at the center"—starting with President Bush....

the neocons as "so untethered from reality as to defy caricature."

Neonuts: "Neonuts"

For them, Afghanistan and Iraq will not suffice. They want to take out Syria and Iran, and speed full steam ahead towards World Wars III and IV. The Weekly Standard asks simply, "Why wait?"

According to Newt Gingrich, there is no need to wait at all. On Meet the Press this past Sunday he offered that the Israel-Hezbollah conflict "… is, in fact, World War III" and "the U.S. ought to be helping...."

And how might the US help fight Newt's World War? The Weekly Standard provides the answer: "It would be easier to act sooner rather than later. Yes, there would be repercussions – and they would be healthy ones, showing a strong America that has rejected further appeasement."

George Will – not exactly your run-of-the-mill, card-carrying liberal – describes the neocons as "so untethered from reality as to defy caricature." ...

THE ARCHITECTS OF WAR: WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

Think Progress � THE ARCHITECTS OF WAR: WHERE ARE THEY NOW?: "...

President Bush has not fired any of the architects of the Iraq war. In fact, a review of the key planners of the conflict reveals that they have been rewarded – not blamed – for their incompetence."
...
Bush promoted Wolfowitz to head the World Bank in March 2005. [Washington Post, 3/17/05]

Key Quote: “We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon.” [Wolfowitz, 3/27/03]
...
Feith voluntarily resigned from the Defense Department shortly after Bush’s reelection. He is co-chairman of a project at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government to write an academic book on how to fight terrorism. Feith’s secretive groups at the Pentagon are under investigation by the Pentagon and the Senate Intelligence Committee for intelligence failures. [Washington Post, 1/27/05, 11/18/05; Washington Times, 3/3/06]

Key Quote: “I am not asserting to you that I know that the answer is — we did it right. What I am saying is it’s an extremely complex judgment to know whether the course that we chose with its pros and cons was more sensible.” [Washington Post, 7/13/05]
...
On January 26, 2005, Stephen Hadley was promoted to National Security Advisor. [White House bio]

Key Quote: “I should have recalled at the time of the State of the Union speech that there was controversy associated with the uranium issue. … And it is now clear to me that I failed in that responsibility in connection with the inclusion of these 16 words in the speech that he gave on the 28th of January.” [Hadley, 7/22/03]
...
Perle is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute where he specializes in national security and defense issues. He has been investigated for ethical violations concerning war profiteering and other conflicts of interest. [Washington Post, 9/1/04]

Key Quote: “And a year from now, I’ll be very surprised if there is not some grand square in Baghdad that is named after President Bush. There is no doubt that, with the exception of a very small number of people close to a vicious regime, the people of Iraq have been liberated and they understand that they’ve been liberated. And it is getting easier every day for Iraqis to express that sense of liberation.” [Perle, 9/22/03]
...
Abrams was promoted to deputy national security adviser in February of 2005. [Slate, 2/17/05]

Key Quote: “We recognize that military action in Iraq, if necessary, will have adverse humanitarian consequences. We have been planning over the last several months, across all relevant agencies, to limit any such consequences and provide relief quickly.” [CNN, 2/25/03]
...
Wurmser was promoted to Principal Deputy Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs; he is in charge of coordinating Middle East strategy. His name has been associated with the Plame Affair and with an FBI investigation into the passing of classified information to Chalabi and AIPAC. [Raw Story, 10/19/05; Washington Post, 9/4/04]

Key Quote: “Syria, Iran, Iraq, the PLO and Sudan are playing a skillful game, but have consistently worked to undermine US interests and influence in the region for years, and certainly will continue to do so now, even if they momentarily, out of fear, seem more forthcoming.” [Washington Post, 9/24/01]
...
Natsios stepped down as the head of USAID in January and is currently teaching at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh’s School of Foreign Service as a Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy and Advisor on International Development. [AP, 2/20/06; Georgetown, 12/2/05]

Key Quote: “[T]he American part of this will be $1.7 billion. We have no plans for any further-on funding for this.” [Nightline, 4/23/03]
...
Bartlett was promoted to Counselor to the President on January 5, 2005, and is responsible for the formulation of policy and implementation of the President’s agenda. [White House]

Key Quote: “President Bush understands that the need to disarm Saddam Hussein is necessary. He has made that case to the United Nations Security Council. He’s made that case to the United States Congress. The entire world rallied behind this resolution that gives him one last chance. He has that chance, but time is running out.” [CNN, 1/26/03]
...
In 2004, Daniels was elected Governor of Indiana. [USA Today, 11/3/04]

Key Quote: Mitch Daniels had said the war would be an “affordable endeavor” and rejected an estimate by the chief White House economic adviser that the war would cost between $100 billion and $200 billion as “very, very high.” [Christian Science Monitor, 1/10/06]
...
Tenet voluntarily resigned from the administration on June 3, 2004. He was later awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom. [Washington Post, 6/3/04]

Key Quote: “It’s a slam dunk case.” [CNN, 4/19/04 ...

These are the right-wing intellectuals who demanded George Bush invade Iraq. Now they admit they got it wrong. Are you listening, Mr President?

Independent Online Edition > Americas: "9 March 2006 07:06 | NeoCon allies desert Bush over Iraq

These are the right-wing intellectuals who demanded George Bush invade Iraq. Now they admit they got it wrong. Are you listening, Mr President?
Published: 09 March 2006

William Buckley Jnr

INFLUENTIAL CONSERVATIVE COLUMNIST AND TV PUNDIT

'One can't doubt the objective in Iraq has failed ... Iraqi animosities have proved uncontainable by an army of 130,000 Americans. Different plans have to be made. And the kernel here is the acknowledgement of defeat.'

Francis Fukuyama

AUTHOR AND LONG-TERM ADVOCATE OF TOPPLING SADDAM

'By invading Iraq, the Bush administration created a self-fulfilling prophecy: Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, a training ground and an operational base for jihadists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at.'

Richard Perle

ARCH-WARMONGER AND PIVOTAL REPUBLICAN HAWK

'The military campaign and its political aftermath were both passionately debated within the Bush administration. It got the war right and the aftermath wrong We should have understood that we needed Iraqi partners.'

Andrew Sullivan

PROMINENT COMMENTATOR AND INFLUENTIAL BLOGGER

'The world has learnt a tough lesson, and it has been a lot tougher for those tens of thousands of dead, innocent Iraqis ... than for a few humiliated pundits. The correct response is not more spin but a sense of shame and sorrow.'

George Will

RIGHT-WING COLUMNIST ON 'THE WASHINGTON POST' AND TV PUNDIT

'Almost three years after the invasion, it is still not certain whether, or in what sense, Iraq is a nation. And after two elections and a referendum on the constitution, Iraq barely has a government.'

William Buckley Jnr

INFLUENTIAL CONSERVATIVE COLUMNIST AND TV PUNDIT

'One can't doubt the objective in Iraq has failed ... Iraqi animosities have proved uncontainable by an army of 130,000 Americans. Different plans have to be made. And the kernel here is the acknowledgement of defeat.'

Francis Fukuyama

AUTHOR AND LONG-TERM ADVOCATE OF TOPPLING SADDAM

'By invading Iraq, the Bush administration created a self-fulfilling prophecy: Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, a training ground and an operational base for jihadists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at.'

Richard Perle

ARCH-WARMONGER AND PIVOTAL REPUBLICAN HAWK

'The military campaign and its political aftermath were both passionately debated within the Bush administration. It got the war right and the aftermath wrong We should have understood that we needed Iraqi partners.'

Andrew Sullivan

PROMINENT COMMENTATOR AND INFLUENTIAL BLOGGER

'The world has learnt a tough lesson, and it has been a lot tougher for those tens of thousands of dead, innocent Iraqis ... than for a few humiliated pundits. The correct response is not more spin but a sense of shame and sorrow.'

George Will

RIGHT-WING COLUMNIST ON 'THE WASHINGTON POST' AND TV PUNDIT

'Almost three years after the invasion, it is still not certain whether, or in what sense, Iraq is a nation. And after two elections and a referendum on the constitution, Iraq barely has a government.'" ...

The Cartoons and the Neocon

The Cartoons and the Neocon: "The Cartoons and the Neocon | Daniel Pipes and the Danish Editor | By JOHN SUGG

02/14/06 'Counterpunch' -- -- Let me tell you a few things about blasphemy. Been there, done it. Got expelled from high school for it. "
...
I have to admit a severe conflict of principles here. On the one hand, I want to shout: “I am Danish! Cartoons don’t kill, bombs do!” I don’t countenance any prior restraint on freedom of expression, and when I first read of the Muslim outrage over cartoons -- such as one depicting Mohammed’s turban as a bomb -- I sighed a deep sigh of regret. There’s no dialogue in burning embassies.
...
There are other caveats that need to be stated: The Muslim world has been under assault from western, Christian crusaders for a thousand years. We’ve colonized and despoiled their lands. Many in America regard their oil as rightfully ours -- an underlying if not complete explanation for George Bush’s war of conquest. We’ve carved up the Middle East, overthrown democracies (pre-Shah Iran, for example), and fostered despots to suit the West’s imperial whims. And we wonder why THEY don’t like us, and why THEY take insults from us so seriously.

So, let’s look at the guy who started this whole cartoon escapade. He’s Flemming Rose, the cultural editor of the Danish newspaper. In all of the Lexis-Nexis database of stories from the American media on the Mohammed cartoons, there is absolutely no mention of the fact that Rose is a close confederate of arch-Islamophobe Daniel Pipes. Indeed, there is almost no context at all about Rose’s newspaper. On a brief mention in the Washington Post gave a hint at a fact desperately needed to understand the situation. The Post described the affair as “a calculated insult … by a right-wing newspaper in a country where bigotry toward the minority Muslim population is a major, if frequently unacknowledged, problem.”

How bad is Pipes? He wants the utter military obliteration of the Palestinians; indeed, from the Muslim world, his racism is about as blatant as that of the Holocaust denying Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Pipes’ frequent outbursts of racism -- designed to toss gasoline on the neo-cons’ lust for a wholesale conflict of cultures -- earned him a Bush nomination to the U.S. Institute of Peace, a congressionally funded think tank. Rose came to America to commune with Pipes in 2004, and it was after that meeting the cartoon gambit materialized.

It’s also worth noting that Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen wrapped himself in protestations about freedom of speech, and that’s commendable. But he is one of Bush’s few fans in Europe, steeped in the we-versus-them rhetoric, and having sent troops to the Iraqi Crusade.

Is Rose an equal opportunity offender? No way. As the British press reported last week, his newspaper refused in 2003 to run cartoons that ridiculed Jesus. And, of course, free expression in Europe is very relative. Many of the democracies have laws banning certain speech.

Rose gave a rather misanthropic rejoinder to AP when asked about whether he would have published the cartoons in light of the subsequent protests. Rose said: "I do not regret having commissioned those cartoons and I think asking me that question is like asking a rape victim if she regrets wearing a short skirt Friday night at the discotheque."

That, of course, makes the assumption that women are responsible for being raped. It’s just as fallacious as assuming the Muslim world should passively accept an intentional provocation, one that gratuitously attacked one of the religion’s strictest prohibitions. ...

The Truth About George W. Bush

The Truth About George W. Bush: "The George W. Bush Administration: | A Lesson for Bush Supporters | Editor, TvNewsLIES.org – February 2006

The facts and allegations contained in this article are not disputed, are easily verified and are documented by the subjects in their own words. ...

Group 1: The Neocons – The Policy Makers of the Administration

We have heard the term “Neocon” for the past five years. We have been told time and time again that the bulk of key policy makers in the Bush administration are Neo-Conservatives yet we never hear much about what Neocons believe in nor do we hear anything about their principles.

...

The godfather of the Neocon movement was an intellectual disciple of Machiavelli named Leo Strauss. Straus was a German Zionist who immigrated to the US in the 1930s and mentored people like William Kristol and Paul Wolfowitz while advocating his philosophy of a dog-eat-dog world.

In essence, the Straussian philosophy and teachings are now known as Neo-Conservatism. Below are some of the more interesting and perhaps surprising or even disturbing aspects of Neo-Conservatism as taught by Strauss:

• Nations cannot consider collective action and multilateralism unless it is 100 percent in line with their own selfish interests
• Strong leadership is required
• Military power is essential
• Leadership ought not be encumbered by human rights discourse or a moral conscience but nonetheless must "appear" to advocate such ideas.
• Rulers need not observe the laws they impose on the ruled.
• A ruler can cheat and lie and do all sorts of things but should at all time maintain the outside appearance of adherence to human rights and caring for people.
• Leaders can use religion as one of many tools to ensure the nation keeps on course as formulated.
• Outside threats help ensure social cohesion under domestic leadership
• Altruism, environmental protection, justice etc, are not the concern of governments and ruling elites. They have no part to play in the equation of power
• Strauss questioned how, and to what extent, freedom and excellence can coexist.
• Strauss was very pre-occupied with secrecy because he was convinced that the truth is too harsh for any society to bear; and that the truth-bearers are likely to be persecuted by society, especially a liberal society because liberal democracy is about as far as one can get from the truth as Strauss understood it.
• Secular society is the worst possible thing, because it leads to individualism, liberalism, and relativism, precisely those traits that may promote dissent that in turn could dangerously weaken society's ability to cope with external threats
• Nazism was a nihilistic reaction to the ungodly and liberal nature of the Weimar Republic.
• Religion should impose moral law on the masses who would otherwise be out of control.

Machiavelli’s political doctrine serves as the foundation of Neo-Conservatism and it denies the relevance of morality in political affairs. It states that that craft and deceit are justified in pursuing and maintaining political power. It implies that when it comes to achieving or maintaining power the end justifies the means. This is essentially the core of Machiavellianism and serves as the foundation for Neo-Conservatism: The priority for the power holder is to keep the security of the state regardless of the morality of the means. Machiavelli discusses frankly, the necessity of cruel actions to keep power. He was in the business of power preservation not piety. According to the originator of Neo-Conservative ideology the leader of the state must stick to the good so long as he can, but, being compelled by necessity, he must be ready to take the way of the evil.

Let me repeat this last principle of Neo-Conservatism because it plays into the “believability factor” when considering claims made by people who accuse the Bush administration of unconscionable actions: “The leader of the state must stick to the good so long as he can, but, being compelled by necessity, he must be ready to take the way of the evil.” These people believe that evil is acceptable and necessary at times!

Shortly before the publication of the Muhammad cartoons, Jyllands-Posten ran a headline reading, “Islam is the Most Belligerent.”

AxisofLogic/ Critical Analysis: "Denmark and Jyllands-Posten: The background to a provocation | By Peter Schwarz
Feb 11, 2006, 10:02

The basic lie in the controversy over the caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad published by Danish and European newspapers is the claim that the conflict is between free speech and religious censorship, or between Western enlightenment and Islamic bigotry.

...

In a country renowned for its tolerance and openness, the social crisis and the betrayals carried out by the old working class organizations have opened the way for the emergence of political forces which systematically encourage xenophobia and racism. The newspaper Jyllands-Posten has played a prominent role in this process.

Last autumn Jyllands-Posten assigned 40 prominent Danish caricaturists to draw the Prophet Muhammad. Twelve responded and the results were published on September 30. The project was deliberately designed to provoke.

According to the cultural editor of the newspaper, Flemming Rose, it was aimed at “testing the limits of self-censorship in Danish public opinion” when it comes to Islam and Muslims. He added: “In a secular society, Muslims have to live with the fact of being ridiculed, scoffed at and made to look ridiculous.”

When the anticipated reaction by the Muslim community failed to arise, the newspaper continued its campaign, determined to create a full-scale scandal. After a week had gone by without protest, journalists turned on Danish Islamic religious leaders who were well known for their fundamentalist views and demanded: “Why don’t you protest?” Eventually, the latter reacted and alerted their co-thinkers in the Middle East.

At this point the head of the Danish government, Andres Fogh Rasmussen, and the xenophobic Danish People’s Party, which is part of the ruling coalition, swung into action. Fogh Rasmussen demonstratively turned down appeals by concerned Arab ambassadors for talks to clarify the issue. Even after 22 former Danish ambassadors appealed to the prime minister to hold discussions with the representatives of Islamic states, Rasmussen maintained his stance, arguing that “freedom of the press” could not be a topic for diplomatic discussion.

...

Shortly before the publication of the Muhammad cartoons, Jyllands-Posten ran a headline reading, “Islam is the Most Belligerent.” The newspaper ran an exposé about an alleged Muslim death-list of Jewish names—until it emerged that the whole thing was a fabrication.

...

The FrankfurtRundshau writes: “Connoisseurs of Danish media will note with no little irony that it is precisely Jyllands-Posten which is now considered to be a beacon for free speech, i.e., the most right-wing of the Danish newspapers, which normally thrashes anyone who dares to advance a different point of view.”

Rumsfeld's Pentagon reissued clearances to Feith, Perle and Wolfowitz ... Feith was relieved of his clearances for allegedly passing sectets to AIPAC

The Raw Story | Pentagon investigation of Iraq war hawk stalling Senate inquiry into pre-war Iraq intelligence: "Larisa Alexandrovna | Published: January 30, 2006

The second part of the Senate investigation into bungled pre-war Iraq intelligence is still being held up by an internal Pentagon investigation of Douglas Feith, one of the war's leading architects, RAW STORY has learned.

As previously reported by Raw Story, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) inquiry -- titled Phase II -- is waiting on a report from the Pentagon inspector general as to Feith's alleged role in manipulating pre-war intelligence to support a case for war. Feith, who is also being probed by the FBI for his role in an Israeli spy case, resigned in January 2005.

More broadly, a RAW STORY investigation has found that Feith's access to classified information and his alleged wrongdoing can likely be laid at the feet of more senior officials in the Bush Administration -- namely Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld -- who would have had to have overruled Pentagon background checks to reissue Feith's clearances after he was booted from the National Security Council for allegations of espionage in the mid 1980s. ...
...
At the heart of the Senate Intelligence Committee's delay is the fact that Feith and the Defense Department refuse to provide documents and witnesses to the Committee. Senate sources say that Feith and the Pentagon have made the case that they will not share any information until the Senate provides them with full documentation of what the investigation is looking into, documentary evidence that Senate staff have acquired, and any other key findings that Feith's lawyers believe should be made available to them.
...
This lack of oversight has caused great concern among many former military and intelligence sources. One former intelligence source point to "a bigger can of worms" that a Feith investigation may unravel, pointing to the Israeli spy case -- in which Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin passed classified information to a pro-Israeli lobby -- and to the Defense Department's own inability to address security breaches.

In 1978, the current head of the World Bank and former Deputy Defense Secretary Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was investigated for passing classified information through AIPAC, the same organization that Franklin is charged with passing state secrets to.

Wolfowitz, who at the time was working for the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), was himself brought in by yet another high level alleged leaker, Richard Perle. Perle, too, is being investigated in the current AIPAC case.

Perle, who most recently served as chairman of the Pentagon Defense Policy Board and quietly resigned after the AIPAC case broke, was alleged to have passed on highly classified information to the Israeli embassy when he was a foreign policy aide for Senator Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson in 1970.

Perle was instrumental in bringing Feith into several positions, starting in the early 80s. By the mid-1980s Feith was relieved of his clearances for allegations of passing secrets to AIPAC, bringing the question of clearances full circle.

Rumsfeld seen to reinstate clearances

Despite their checkered past, Rumsfeld's Pentagon reissued clearances to Feith, Perle and Wolfowitz. Clearances were also issued to several of Feith's consultants, some of whom were major players in the Iran Contra scandal. ...

"Fixed" Intelligence from Feith's "Gestapo Office,"

"Fixed" Intelligence from Feith's "Gestapo Office,": "'By Walter C. Uhler | 01/21/06 'ICH'

The CIA and the Bush Administration's Impeachable Lies about Iraq's Prewar Links to al Qaeda

Except in the cynical, zealous or spiritually clouded minds of his right wing devotees, it's become a well-established (if under reported) fact that President George W. Bush is a serial liar, if not a congenital liar.1 For example, after The New York Times very belatedly leaked Mr. Bush's unconstitutional order permitting the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens without obtaining the required court-approved warrants, Bush defended his directive as a 'vital tool' in the war against terrorism.

But, as liars commonly do, Bush seems to have forgotten that in April 2004 he told an audience in Buffalo, New York: 'When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so.' He also told the audience that precisely because it was 'the United States government talking about wiretap,' Americans could rest assured that 'constitutional guarantees are in place.' 2"
...

The brief answer is: Because Douglas Feith's PCEG (which would merge into the Office of Special Plans) was still feeding him the bogus intelligence that confirmed what he already "knew." The PCEG did not simply "study the policy implications of relationships among terrorist organizations and their sources of support," as Feith falsely testified to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), but also "reviewed both raw and finished intelligence and did undertake their own intelligence analysis after looking at the IC [Intelligence Community] products and discovering that what they needed had not been produced by the IC." ¹⁸

What's worse, without exception, Feith's PCEG produced intelligence products that consistently exaggerated the number, type, significance and danger of the ties it found between Iraq and al Qaeda. And although it was wrong on every one of its assessments, not one of its errors resulted in underestimating the threat. This pattern of errors in one direction suggests fraud and the 'fixing" of intelligence, not mere incompetence.

But, thanks to the intervention of Feith's boss, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, the politicized intelligence gathered by this rogue "Iraqi intelligence cell in the OUSD(P)" ¹⁹ -- "rogue," because it was operating outside the established intelligence agencies funded by Congress and subject to congressional oversight -- was presented to (and impressed) Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, briefed to Director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet (but minus the slide disparaging the CIA), and ultimately presented to Condoleezza Rice's deputy (Stephen Hadley) and Cheney's Chief of Staff, "Scooter" Libby. That last briefing took place without the knowledge of Tenet.
...

Feith staffed the PCEG with his co-author of the 1996 report (and fellow unregistered agent for Israel) David Wurmser, as well as Michael Maloof. Wurmser and Maloof would be "working deductively, not inductively: The premise was true; facts would be found to confirm it." ⁶⁴ As the authors of Vanity Faire write in their exceptional expose, The Path to War, "the advocates of regime change in Iraq realized that, for any American invasion to enlist support, both domestically and internationally, links between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda needed to be proved." ⁶⁵ Thus, in light of the CIA's September 21, 2001 President's Daily Brief, somebody needed to fix the facts!

At this point, one might ask, as George Packer does in his highly acclaimed book, The Assassin's Gate: "Does this mean that a pro-Likud cabal insinuated its way into the high councils of the U.S. government and took hold of the apparatus of American foreign policy to serve Israeli interests?" In general, Packer's answer is no. But "For Feith and Wurmser," Packer answers yes: "the security of Israel was probably the prime mover." ^66
...

Inspired by Mossad, Feith's rogue intelligence cell appears to have solicited, reexamined, digested and regurgitated evidence from the programmed liars put forward by Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress - evidence that the Intelligence Community already had considered, before dismissing as unreliable. Then, as Seymour Hersh has noted: "A routine settled in: the Pentagon's defector reports, classified 'secret,' would be funneled to newspapers, but subsequent analyses of the reports by intelligence agencies - scathing but also classified - would remain secret."¹²⁹

Perhaps, that explains why even Secretary of State Colin Powell privately referred to Feith's intelligence cell as "Feith's Gestapo office." How ironic! Neocon Jews running a "Gestapo office." Finally, and most significantly, let's not forget that this "un-American intelligence" got it wrong!

Can the United States still be called a "democracy," if a majority of its citizens fails to recognize and redress such "un-American" behavior? ("Un-American," at least according to our ideals, if not our actual history.) ...