http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=EbxD55LnlGg
July 17, 2003
The Guardian (UK)
The Spies Who Pushed for War
Shadow rightwing intelligence network set up in Wa****ngton to second-guess
the CIA and deliver
a justification for toppling Saddam Hussein by force
by Julian Borger
The agency, called the Office of Special Plans (OSP), was set up by
the defence secretary,
Donald Rumsfeld, to second-guess CIA information and operated under the
patronage of hardline
conservatives in the top rungs of the administration, the Pentagon and at
the White House,
including Vice-President Dick Cheney.
The ideologically driven network functioned like a shadow government,
much of it off the
official payroll and beyond congressional oversight. But it proved
powerful enough to prevail
in a struggle with the State Department and the CIA by establi****ng a
justification for war. . . .
The OSP was an open and largely unfiltered conduit to the White House
not only for the
Iraqi opposition. It also forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc
intelligence operation inside
Ariel Sharon's office in Israel specifically to bypass Mossad and provide
the Bush
administration with more alarmist re****ts on Saddam's Iraq than Mossad was
prepared to authorise.
FULL TEXT
---
Michael Lind, "Israel Lobby Distorts U.S. Foreign Policy," Prospect
Magazine, April 2002
"Whose War? Israel's Say Jewish Writers," The Wisdom Fund, March 12,
2003
[But the argument [installing a new regime in Iraq will foster the
spread of democracy]
has been pushed hardest by a group of officials and advisors who have been
the leading
proponents of going to war with Iraq. Prominent among them are Paul D.
Wolfowitz, the deputy
defense secretary, and Richard Perle, --Greg Miller, "Democracy Domino
Theory 'Not Credible',"
Los Angeles Times, March 14, 2003]
[Woolsey, one of the most high-profile hawks in the war against Iraq
and a key member of
the Pentagon's Defence Policy Board, is a director of the Wa****ngton-based
private equity firm
Paladin Capital. . . .
An influential member of the Pentagon's Defence Policy Board, Perle
is managing partner of
venture capital company Trireme, which invests in companies dealing in
products of value to
homeland security.--Antony Barnett and Solomon Hughes, "Bush ally set to
profit from the war on
terror," Guardian, May 11, 2003
Bernard Weiner, "How We Got Into This Imperial Pickle: A PNAC
Primer," Information
Clearing House, May 28, 2003
Simon English, "Cheney had Iraq in sights two years ago," Telegraph
(UK), July 22, 2003
Jack Shafer, "The Times Scoops That Melted: Cataloging the wretched
re****ting of Judith
Miller," Slate, July 25, 2003
Jerry Kroth, "Who Forged the Letters that Sucked Us into War? Israel,
Yellowcake and the
Media," CounterPunch, August 2, 2003
William Pierce, "Mossad and the Jewish Problem," National Alliance,
August 2003
[The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near
East and South Asia
(NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally created by Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by
the official U.S.
intelligence agencies for connections between Iraqi President Saddam
Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defense
Intelligence Agency
(DIA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that
the two offices
exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it
along to the White House.
But key personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were part of a
broader network of
neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush
political appointees
scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to
war, according to
retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002
through February
2003.--Jim Lobe, "Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network," Inter Press
Service, August 7, 2003]
[Most neocons share unwavering sup****t for Israel, . . . The original
neocons were a small
group of mostly Jewish liberal intellectuals . . .--"Neocon 101,"
Christian Science Monitor,
August 27, 2003]
[IILG appears to be part of a carefully-constructed network aimed at
channelling business
into Iraq.
Interestingly, the firm's website is not registered in Salem
Chalabi's (nephew of Ahmed
Chalabi) name but in the name of Marc Zell, whose address is given as
Suite 716, 1800 K Street,
Wa****ngton. That is the address of the Wa****ngton office of Zell, Goldberg
&Co, which claims to
be "one of Israel's fastest-growing business-oriented law firms", and the
related FANDZ
International Law Group.
The unusual name "FANDZ" was concocted from "F and Z", the Z being
Marc Zell and the F
being Douglas Feith. The two men were law partners until 2001, when Feith
took up his Pentagon
post as undersecretary of defence for policy.--Brian Whitaker, "Friends of
the family,"
Guardian, September 24, 2003]
Sidney Blumenthal, "Bush and Blair - the betrayal," Guardian,
November 14, 2003
"General: Israelis exaggerated Iraq threat," AP, December 4, 2003
Julian Borger, "Israel trains US assassination squads in Iraq,"
Guardian (UK), December 9,
2003
VIDEO: "The Lie Factory - How the Neocons & the Office of Special
Plans Pushed
Disinformation and Bogus Intelligence on Iraq," Democracy Now, December
18, 2003
Mark Thompson, "Paul Wolfowitz: The godfather of the Iraq war," Time,
December 21, 2003
[The liberation of Iraq, in the neocon scenario, would be followed by
a democratic Iraq
that would quickly recognize Israel. This, in turn, would "snowball" - the
analogy only works
in the Cedar Mountains of Lebanon - through the region, bringing democracy
from Syria to Egypt
and to the sheikhdoms, emirates and monarchies of the Gulf.
All these new democracies would then embrace Israel and hitch their
backward economies to
the Jewish state's advanced technology.--Arnaud de Borchgrave, "Iraq and
the Gulf of Tonkin,"
Wa****ngton Times, February 12, 2004]
[In 1996, in a strategy paper crafted for Israel's Bibi Netanyahu,
Richard Perle, Douglas
Feith and David Wurmser urged him to "focus on removing Saddam Hussein
from power" as an
"Israeli strategic objective." Perle, Feith, Wurmser were all on Bush's
foreign policy team on
9-11.
- In 1998, eight members of Bush's future team, including Perle,
Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld,
wrote Clinton urging upon him a strategy that "should aim, above all, at
the removal of Saddam
Hussein."
- On Jan. 1, 2001, nine months before 9-11, Wurmser called for
U.S.-Israeli attacks "to
broaden the (Middle East) conflict to strike fatally ... the regimes of
Damascus, Baghdad,
Tripoli, Teheran and Gaza ... to establish the recognition that fighting
with either the United
States or Israel is suicidal."
"Crises can be op****tunities," added Wurmser.
On Sept. 11, op****tunity struck.
On Sept. 15, according to author Bob Woodward, Paul Wolfowitz spoke
up in the War Cabinet
to urge that Afghanistan be put on a back burner and an attack be mounted
at once on Iraq,
though Iraq had had nothing to do with 9-11. Why Iraq? Said Wolfowitz,
because it is "doable."
On Sept. 20, 40 neoconservatives in an open letter demanded that Bush
remove Saddam from
power, "even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the (9-11)
attack." Failure to do so,
they warned the president, "would constitute an early and perhaps decisive
surrender in the war
on international terrorism."--Patrick J. Buchanan, "Have the Neocons
Killed a Presidency?,"
Antiwar.com, February 16, 2004]
"Pentagon offices face probe on Iraq claims," Reuters, February 19,
2004
[The fact that so many of the authors of this war are Jewish is not
im****tant. That they
uncritically fit the alien shroud of Israeli far-right expansionist policy
over American
security policy is. They sup****ted Chalabi so recklessly because he
promised to immediately
open relations between Iraq and Israel and begin piping oil to
Israel.--Georgie Anne Geyer,
"THE TRUTH ALWAYS COMES OUT IN THE WASH," Universal Press Syndicate,
February 20, 2004]
[They wanted to put in a government friendly to the U.S., and they
wanted permanent basing
in Iraq. . . .
Almost a billion dollars has been spent - a billion dollars! - by
David Kay's group to
search for these WMD, a total whitewash effort. They didn't find anything,
they didn't expect
to find anything. . . .
The last reason is the conversion, the switch Saddam Hussein made in
the Food for Oil
program, from the dollar to the euro. He did this, by the way, long before
9/11, in November
2000 - selling his oil for euros.--Marc Cooper, "Soldier for the Truth:
Exposing Bush's
talking-points war," L.A. Weekly, February 20 - 26, 2004]
Stephen Green, "Serving Two Flags : Neo-Cons, Israel and the Bush
Administration,"
CounterPunch, February 28, 2004
[It has been im****tant ever since Bush took office in January 2001
for the administration
to downplay any connection between Israel and the war against Iraq.
Obfuscating the "Israeli
motive" of the war was almost certainly one of the reasons the
administration so transparently
exaggerated first Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction and,
more recently,
Wa****ngton's desire for democracy in Iraq.--Bill Christison, "Faltering
Neo-Cons Still
Dangerous," CounterPunch, March 5, 2004]
Ed Blanche, "Neocons at work: Israel gets its 1st slice of Iraqi
pie," The Daily Star,
March 17, 2004
Emad Mekay, "9/11 Commission Director: Iraq War Launched to Protect
Israel," Antiwar.com,
March 30, 2004
[Powell felt Cheney and his allies - his chief aide, I. Lewis
"Scooter" Libby, Deputy
Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense for
Policy Douglas J. Feith
and what Powell called Feith's "Gestapo" office - had established what
amounted to a separate
government -- William Hamilton, " Bush began to plan war three months
after 9/11," Wa****ngton
Post, April 17, 2004]
[A U.S. senator's charge that Israel is behind the Bush
administrations's decision to
invade Iraq has rattled American Jewish leaders.--"Senator spoke for many
on Hill when he
blamed Israel for war," WorldTribune.com, May 20, 2004]
Justin Raimondo, "Senator Hollings Is Right: It's all about Israel,"
CounterPunch, May 21,
2004
[Zinni is talking about a group of policymakers within the
administration known as "the
neo-conservatives" who saw the invasion of Iraq as a way to stabilize
American interests in the
region and strengthen the position of Israel. They include Deputy Defense
Secretary Paul
Wolfowitz; Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith; Former Defense Policy
Board member Richard
Perle; National Security Council member Eliot Abrams; and Vice President
Cheney's chief of
staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby. --"Gen. Zinni: 'They've Screwed Up'," CBS
News May 21, 2004]
[Israeli intelligence and military operatives are now quietly at work
in Kurdistan,
providing training for Kurdish commando units and, most im****tant in
Israel's view, running
covert operations inside Kurdish areas of Iran and Syria. Israel feels
particularly threatened
by Iran, whose position in the region has been strengthened by the war.
The Israeli operatives
include members of the Mossad, Israel's clandestine foreign-intelligence
service, who work
undercover in Kurdistan as businessmen and, in some cases, do not carry
Israeli
pass****ts.--Seymour M. Hersh, "As June 30th approaches, Israel looks to
the Kurds," The New
Yorker, June 21, 2004]
Peter Bergen, "Did one woman's obsession take America to war?,"
Guardian, July 5, 2004
[Mr Feith's cell undermined the credibility of CIA judgments on
Iraq's alleged al-Qa'eda
links within the highest levels of the Bush administration.
The cell appears to have been set up by Mr Feith as an adjunct to the
Office of Special
Plans, a Pentagon intelligence-gathering operation established in the wake
of 9/11 with the
authority of Paul Wolfowitz.--Julian Coman, "Fury over Pentagon cell that
briefed White House
on Iraq's 'imaginary' al-Qaeda links," Telegraph (UK), July 11, 2004]
[Cooperation between Israel and the United States helped produce a
series of intelligence
failures in the lead up to the Iraq war, according to separate re****ts
issued by members of the
Senate and the Knesset.--Ori Nir, "Senate Re****t on Iraq Intel Points to
Role of Jerusalem,"
The Forward, July 14, 2004]
Ray McGovern, "The Iraq War and Israel: How 9/11 Re****t Soft-Pedaled
Root Causes,"
CounterPunch, July 28, 2004
Patrick J. Buchanan, "Where the Right Went Wrong: How
Neoconservatives Subverted the
Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency," Thomas Dunne Books
(September 1, 2004)
Bob Drogin and Greg Miller, "Israel Has Long Spied on U.S., Say
Officials," Los Angeles
Times, September 3, 2004
Eric Margolis, "FBI painting ugly picture," Toronto Sun, September 5,
2004
[Retired general Anthony Zinni, a former chief of the U.S. Central
Command and
presidential Middle East envoy, told CBS in May that "the worst-kept
secret in Wa****ngton" was
that the neoconservatives pushed the war in Iraq for Israel's
benefit.--Marc Perelman, "Neocons
Blast Bush's Inaction On 'Spy' Affair," The Forward, September 10, 2004]
[The weapons of mass destruction disinformation that was fed to the
president and to the
American public came directly from Shulsky's shop. . . .
Wurmser, Perle and Feith were the principal authors of the 1996
100-day policy plan for
incoming Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. None ever registered under the
Foreign Agents
Registration Act for this work.
That plan, "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,"
published by Israel's
Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, has served as the
guiding road map for
the neocons both in Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's office and in
the Bush
administration.--Anonymous, "The State Department's extreme makeover,"
Salon, October 4, 2004]
[It was nice to see the White House finally pull the plug on the
transparent scheme of the
neo-cons to smear U.N. General Secretary Kofi Annan over the alleged
"oil-for-food
scandal."--Jude Wanniski, "Another Neo-Con Imperial Plot," Wanniski.com,
December 8, 2004]
[The neocons would have you believe that having a nuclear power plant
- even one whose
operation is subject to IAEA Safeguards, like Iran's - is tantamount to
having a plutonium-239
implosion nuke.--Gordon Prather, "Virtual Nukes," Antiwar.com, December
11, 2004]
[In 1996, some of the people in Perl's circle had begun to think
about what it would mean
for Saddam Hussein to be removed from the Middle East scene. They
concluded that it would be
very good for Israel. . . . the group was pleased enough with its work to
send the paper to the
newly elected Israeli primime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. "A Clean
Break: A new Strategy for
Securing the Realm" called for Israel to free itself both from socialist
economic policies and
the burdens of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Instead of
retreating from occupied lands
in exchange for dubious promises of peace, Wurmser wrote, Israel should
take the fight to the
Palestinians and their Arab backers--George Paker, "The Assassins Gate:
America in Iraq,"
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (October 15, 2005) p. 30]
[Libby was among those associated with the Project for a New American
Century, a think
tank that publicly urged President Clinton to use military force to remove
Hussein from
power.--Bryan Bender, "Indictments put focus on neoconservatives," Boston
Globe, October 29, 2005]
[Republican elder statesman, Gen Brent Scowcroft, national security
advisor to Bush's
father, accused Bush Jr of being 'wrapped around the little finger' of
Israel's PM Ariel
Sharon.--Eric Margolis, "AMERICANS ARE RUNNING OUT OF PATIENCE WITH THEIR
'WAR PRESIDENT',"
ericmargolis.com, November 14, 2005]
[Mylroie had been pu****ng for an all-out war against Iraq for a
decade. In the run-up to
the first Gulf war, Mylroie, along with the recently fired New York Times
re****ter Judith
Miller, wrote a book titled, "Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the
Gulf."--Evelyn J. Pringle,
"Laurie Mylroie's War: Bush Gang Swore Saddam was Behind 9/11 in Lawsuit,"
counterpunch.org,
November 16, 2005]
Gary Leupp, "A Neocon Plan to Plant WMDs?," counterpunch.org, January
14, 2006
[Other special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy,
but no lobby has
managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest,
while simultaneously
convincing Americans that US interests and those of the other country Ð in
this case, Israel Ð
are essentially identical.--John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, "The Israel
Lobby and U.S.
Foreign Policy," London Review of Books, March 23, 2006]
[Khaled Salih, a spokesman for the Kurdistan Regional Government,
says: "These are not new
allegations for us. Back in the sixties and seventies we were called 'the
second Israel' in the
region and we were supposed to be eliminated by Islamist nationalist and
now Islamist
groups.--Mark Urban, "Kurdish soldiers trained by Israelis," BBC
Newsnight, september 19, 2006]
[ . . . they were out at Kennebunk****t, and Bush Jr. says, "Can I ask
you a question?
What's a neocon?" And the father says, "Do you want names or a
description?" The President
says, "I'll take a description." He says, "I'll give it to you in one
word: Israel,"--Andrew
Cockburn, "Donald Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy,"
democracynow.org, March
7, 2007]
[I discovered that Michaels and his associates were part of an effort
by the Kurds and
their allies to lobby the West for greater power in Iraq, and greater
clout in Wa****ngton, and
at the same time, by a group of Israeli ex security officials to rekindle
good relations with
their historical allies the Kurds through joint infrastructure, economic
development, and
security projects.--Laura Rozen, "Kurdistan's Covert Back-Channels: How an
ex-Mossad chief, a
German uberspy, and a gaggle of top-dollar GOP lobbyists helped Kurdistan
snag 15 tons of $100
bills," Mother Jones, April 12, 2007]
[Bush's "war on terror" is a hoax that serves to cover U.S.
intervention in the Middle
East on behalf of "greater Israel."--Paul Craig Roberts, "What the Iraq
War Is About,"
antiwar.com, April 23, 2008]
"THE ARCHITECTS OF WAR: WHERE ARE THEY NOW?," thinkprogress.org ]
http://www.twf.org/News/Y2003/0722-Spies.html
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