Subject: FW: A virtual declaration of war against Iran
Date: Thursday, June 12, 2008, 12:35 PM
From: RayClose
Sent: Thursday, June 12, 2008 3:31 PM
To: undisclosed-recipients
Subject: A virtual declaration of war against Iran
A virtual declaration of war against Iran .
The following is from retired USAF Colonel Sam Gardiner today:
It is amazing how far Members of the Congress will go in sup****t of
Israel . Hidden within a resolution now being considered on the Hill
is what amounts to a suggested declaration of war against Iran .
Representative Mark Kirk from Illinois is circulating a Sense of the
Congress Resolution (H. Con. Res 362). The resolution now has 47 co-
sponsors and "demands that the President initiate an international
effort to immediately and dramatically increase the economic,
political, and diplomatic pressure on Iran to verifiably suspend its
nuclear enrichment activities by, inter alia, prohibiting the ex****t
to Iran of all refined petroleum products; imposing stringent
inspection requirements on all persons, vehicles, ****ps, planes,
trains, and cargo entering or departing Iran..."
This option in the resolution is being pushed by the American-Israeli
Public Affairs Committee. At the AIPAC meeting in Wa****ngton last week
both Senators McCain and Obama mentioned an embargo of refined
products without any details.
I don't how the United States inspects aircraft flying from Moscow to
Tehran . I don't know how the United States inspects trucks going from
Azerbaijan and Pakistan into Iran . The ****ps part, however, produces
a fairly clear image. The United States Navy operating inside and
outside the Gulf stops and searches all ****ps entering Iranian ****ts.
If the ****ps are carrying refined products, they are ordered to leave
the area. If they refuse, warning shots will be fired. If they
continue to refuse, lethal action will be initiated.
Since destination is not always clear, on occasion the United States
Navy will have to enter Iranian territorial waters. The United States
Navy will be stopping Russian ****ps and searching them. The United
States Navy will be stopping Chinese ****ps.
To their credit, the McCain campaign must have begun to understand the
implications. A spokesman issued a statement yesterday that the
Senator was talking about, "a voluntary withdrawal from the Iranian
markets of the companies providing gasoline is one option."
One hopes there can be equal wisdom in the "Sense of the Congress."
Sam Gardiner
Colonel, USAF (retired)
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http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=3D12972
'Faster, Please!'
Senate re****t exposes key role of the Israel lobby in fomenting war
with Iran
by Justin Raimondo
June 11, 2008
Scott McClellan, the most significant defector from behind the Iron
Curtain of the War Party's domain, doesn't think we were lied into
war. According to him, it was all due to the "partisan" attitudes that
dominate Wa****ngton discourse on every issue. As he puts it, "the
permanent campaign" atmosphere made them do it: "I don't think that
this was some deliberate, conscious effort to mislead the American
people."
In an interview with Keith Olbermann the other night, he disdained the
very idea as a "conspiracy theory." McClellan seems to believe that
the need to bias intelligence is inherent in the American political
system, the inevitable consequence of the Wa****ngton ethos as defined
by the struggle between the two major parties. He denies any "criminal
intent" in the actions of the administration and its flunkies, and he
trivializes the matter by referring to "people sitting around a table"
making plans to dupe Congress and the American people. The evidence,
however, points in the other direction, as "Phase Two" of the long-
awaited and deliberately-delayed re****t of the Senate Intelligence
Committee makes clear [.pdf].
In spite of Keith's effusive reference to McClellan as "the Rosetta
Stone" for helping us understand what we've endured during the past
eight years, the former White House spokesman seems incapable of
deciphering what he saw and participated in, as the first section of
the "Phase Two" Senate re****t shows. All the prewar "talking points"
of the administration, and the flimsy-to-nonexistent "evidence" used
to back them up, are here debunked, and the pattern of deceit is all
too clear. However, it is the second section of the re****t =96 which
deals with the activities of the Office of Special Plans and other
parallel intelligence-gathering operations set up by the neocons =96
that suggests something more sinister than extreme partisan****p is
motivating the actors in this drama of deception.
In 2001, as the wheels that would eventually drive us to war with Iraq
began to turn, the groundwork was being laid for the inevitable
denouement of that historic error: the present looming conflict with
Iran.
Leafing through the story of the secret Rome meetings conducted by
Michael Ledeen and Manucher Ghorbanifar =96 set up by a "foreign
intelligence service," as the re****t avers =96 this section of the
Senate re****t reads like a spy thriller set in the future, a future in
which we are about to go to war with Iran.
Neocon warlord Ledeen isn't just one of the War Party's most tireless
polemicists. The fun part about being a foreign agent disguised as a
"commentator" is that you get to rail away at the Bu****es for not
being enthusiastic enough about the Grand Plan of "liberating" the
Middle East, demanding "faster, please!" Yet Ledeen isn't just one of
those armchair types who merely pontificates from his pundit's perch:
this student of Italian fascism is a man-of-action, too.
Indeed, that's a considerable understatement. He and Ghorbanifar are
longtime partners in crime, having been the two biggest spiders at the
center of the Iran-Contra web, in which Ledeen and Ghorbanifar
deployed their contacts in Israel =96 and within the Iranian government
=96 to broker the mid-1980s arms-for-hostages deal.
As the Senate re****t reveals, Ledeen and Ghorbanifar, together with a
group centered around the Office of Special Plans =96 and including a
former Pentagon official convicted of engaging in espionage on behalf
of Israel =96 met with a group of Iranians and officials of a certain
"foreign intelligence service" that is never named. The purpose of the
meeting: regime change in Iran.
The Office of Special Plans was one of several neocon-created
"parallel institutions" designed to cir***vent the ordinary vetting
process for intelligence gathered by U.S. agencies. Two analysts from
the neocons' DoD policy shop, Harold Rhode and Larry Franklin, were
assigned to the Rome meetings. Franklin was once Douglas Feith's top
Iran analyst. His career ended in 2005 when he was convicted of
stealing U.S. state secrets on behalf of Israel.
Rhode, an expert on the Middle East, speaks a good number of
languages, including Farsi, Turkish, and Hebrew, and was the key
organizer for and advocate of the Iraqi National Congress in the U.S.
He was described by one CIA hand as "living out of [Ahmed] Chalabi's
office" during his time in Iraq. Indeed, Rhode served as Chalabi's
American agent, rallying sup****t for the American Enterprise
Institute's Che Guevara when Chalabi's offices were raided by U.S.
forces. It later came out that Chalabi was doing just what Franklin
was doing =96 stealing U.S. secrets on behalf of a foreign power.
In a UPI piece by Richard Sale, a "former senior intelligence
official" who served in the Coalition Provisional Authority is quoted
as saying that "'Rhode was observed by CIA operatives as being
constantly on his cell phone to Israel,' and that the information that
the intelligence officials overheard him passing to Israel was 'mind-
boggling.'"
As for Franklin, his activities on behalf of the Israeli intelligence
services, acting through the American-Israel Political Affairs
Committee (AIPAC), have been covered extensively in this space.
Together with Ledeen =96 founding president of JINSA =96 and Ghorbanifar,
whose extensive and long-standing links to the Israelis are common
knowledge, the provenance of this whole Rome operation seems beyond
dispute. The Senate re****t informs us that the Rome meetings were
coordinated and facilitated by this mysterious, unnamed "foreign
intelligence" entity, and then mentions the presence of at least one
official of SISMI, a personal friend of Ledeen's, but the re****t's
language is ambiguous =96 although it isn't hard to figure out that the
Italian connection is just a diversion.
So here we have American officials, without the full knowledge or
consent of their superiors, including the president, traveling around
on the taxpayers' dime, in concert with and apparently under the
direction of the Israeli government, plotting regime change in Iran,
and rehearsing all the talking points that we hear today from the
Pentagon and the White House. At one point, we are told, Ghorbanifar
wrote down his plan for regime change on a napkin in a bar, telling
Franklin he would need at least $5 million to start initial
"disruptions" in and around Tehran, but that the bill would get higher
as the "revolution" progressed.
The idea was to set up Ghorbanifar as the sponsor of an Iranian
version of the Iraqi National Congress, a network that would
disseminate intelligence on Tehran's inner workings as well as work to
overthrow the regime. As in the case of Chalabi, who bilked the U.S.
out of millions, cash considerations figured prominently in the
schemes of the Rome cabal. At one point, the re****t informs us:
"The proposed funding for and foreign involvement in Mr. Ghorbanifar's
plan for regime change were never fully understood. A synopsis of the
Rome discussions averred that Ledeen and Ghorbanifar advised Mr.
Franklin and Mr. Rhode that the [foreign government sup****t] for this
information collection op****tunity and financing by [ foreign]
cor****ate enterprises midway through the interviews. The costs would
be in the millions."
The bill would be picked up by this not-so-mysterious "foreign
government" generously supplemented by a "multi-million dollar
business deal that the foreign government arranged for the two Iranian
interlocutors" =96 and, of course, by the U.S. taxpayers.
Here is the quintessential neocon recipe for regime change, involving
a lot of cash floating in a thick soup of ideology, with a bold flavor
of espionage pervading the dish.
It's interesting that a lot of the most incriminating material was
gleaned from interviews with Franklin, no doubt pried out of him with
the charges of espionage hanging over him. He was sentenced to a mere
12 years in prison and a hefty fine for delivering sensitive materials
stolen from his Pentagon office to Israeli embassy officials. Using
AIPAC as the go-between, the Israelis ripped off intelligence about
terrorist activities in Central Asia and U.S. operations in Iraq, and
when Franklin was caught, he spilled the beans but good in a frantic
effort to avoid spending the rest of his life in the big house.
Perhaps the release of the Senate re****t =96 and the starring role
played in its narrative by Franklin, the convicted spy =96 will bring
renewed attention to the case against Franklin's handlers, former
AIPAC bigshot Steve Rosen, and the group's point man on Iran, Keith
Weissman.
For years, the Justice Department has been trying to prosecute Rosen
and Weissman without releasing vital U.S. secrets and compromising our
national security. The defense =96 the best money can buy =96 has engaged
in a strategy of "graymail" from the beginning and stymied what are
probably not the Justice Department's best efforts. The chief
prosecutor in the case recently announced he was leaving for greener
pastures, and there has been a lot of political resistance to this
case for all the usual reasons, and then some.
"Oh, everyone does it," is the standard defense. That's what
Wa****ngton is all about: trading information. Baloney. These two were
caught red-handed receiving vital U.S. secrets from Franklin and
passing them on to their Israeli handlers in what was a classic spying
operation. That's not "trading information," it's espionage. It's
embarrassing to have to point this out, but in the present atmosphere,
in which any indication that Israel might be undermining the interests
of its major benefactor is dismissed as evidence of resurgent anti-
Semitism, the plain truth needs to be stated in unequivocal terms.
For years, I've been saying that the only way to understand the Iraq
war =96 a war that hurt, rather than advanced, American interests =96 is
to see it as a successful covert action carried out by the Israelis
and their American collaborators. The "Clean Break" scenario, launched
by American "advisers" to then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, laid
it all out in 1996. That was the theory, the practice of which is
revealed in second section of the Senate intelligence re****t. It's no
accident that two individuals involved in creating that seminal
blueprint for the "transformation" of the Middle East, Doug Feith and
David Wurmser, are intimately connected with the activities examined
in the Senate re****t.
The entire re****t is a goldmine of information that gives us a
fascinating overview of the lies that lured us into war. And lies they
were, whatever McClellan may say or believe. This is another mark of
Empire: when the superpower, as the Old Right polemicist Garet Garrett
pointed out more than half a century ago, is taken hostage by its own
satellites. A globe-spanning Empire becomes, in effect, "a prisoner of
history," driven by foreign lobbyists and their domestic
constituencies, and is no longer cognizant of distinctly American
interests.
Yes, we are prisoners of history. Our invasion of Iraq has led
directly to a looming confrontation with Iran, just as the war-
planners knew it would. What the second ****tion of the Senate re****t
shows, however, is that we are also prisoners of the Israel lobby,
which is inexorably pu****ng us into war with Iran. That lobby
exercises enormous power in Wa****ngton and beyond, effectively
policing not only the media but the government for the least sign of
"anti-Israel" (i.e., pro-American) activity, relentless in pursuit of
its goals =96 and its enemies.
Yet there is growing resistance to the Lobby's hegemony, especially
within intelligence, counter-intelligence, and law enforcement
circles. They, after all, are expected to put up with Israeli
shenanigans conducted on American soil and stand by while the White
House and the Pentagon let our alleged best friends get away with the
crown jewels, the family silver, and the quarters in the cookie jar to
boot.
Now the Senate re****t has blown away much of their cover; that and the
recent exposure of Ben Ami Kadish, an Israeli spy handled by the same
spook who directed Jonathan Pollard, constitute a double body-blow to
Israel's fifth column in America =96 which is, today, just another name
for the War Party and its top leader****p.
As Ledeen might put it: "Faster, please!"
NOTES IN THE MARGIN
Get yourself on over to Taki's Magazine, and check out my latest:
=93Libertarianism's Divergent Roads,=94 an adaptation (with a new
introduction) of my recent talk at the Future of Freedom conference.
And the first review of the new edition of my Reclaiming the American
Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement is in the Western
Standard, is out, written by the perceptive Kalim Kassam, along with a
wonderful video illuminating the book's theme by Jack Hunter, =93the
Southern Avenger,=94 a regular columnist for the Charleston City Paper.
~ Justin Raimondo
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