@@ Ugly picture: SISMI, Mossad, CIA, MI6 @@
Arash
September 5, 2004
FBI painting ugly picture
By Eric Margolis
marg...@foreigncorrespondent.com
The dots in Washington are connecting. It's not a pretty sight.
Last week the results of a controversial two-year FBI investigation were
leaked to the media.
The story is potentially a huge scandal and may indicate a furious power
struggle between neocon supporters of Israel's far right Likud Party, who
dominated the Pentagon and National Security Council, and the CIA and the
state department.
The FBI is focusing on the Pentagon's policy department, a mini state
department within defence that plays a key role in U.S. Mideast policy. It
is headed by a neocon activist, defence undersecretary Douglas Feith, who
has longtime links to Likud.
The Pentagon's chief Iran analyst, Larry Franklin, who works for Feith's
deputy, William Luti, is under FBI investigation for allegedly passing top
secret presidential policy papers on Iran to two senior members of the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). AIPAC, one of Washington's
most powerful lobbies, allegedly passed them to Israel's spy service. Israel
is alarmed by Iran's nuclear developments.
AIPAC and Israel deny spying. The Pentagon says that Franklin is the only
member of the department suspected of wrongdoing. Israel insists it ceased
espionage in the U.S. after its agent, Jonathan Pollard, was jailed in 1987.
Pollard's controller in the U.S. government, known to the FBI as "Mr. X,"
has never been caught.
Still, the current investigation is one indication of growing concerns that
U.S. national security and foreign policy have been gravely compromised, or
even hijacked, by a small but powerful group of Bush administration neocons.
The concern is that this group, with the aid of Vice-President Dick Cheney,
helped to engineer the Iraq war at least in part to destroy an enemy of
Israel.
While only Franklin is under investigation, he works for Feith's office.
Feith reports to deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz, another strong
supporter of Israel.
Cheney and Wolfowitz were among the prime architects of the Iraq war.
In 1996, Feith and neocon Israel supporter Richard Perle were among the
authors of the policy plan, "A Clean Break," for Israel's then Likud prime
minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, calling for Greater Israel. As well, it called
for a much more aggressive policy on Iraq and Syria and for ending peace
talks with the Palestinians.
Feith ran the Pentagon's Office for Special Plans (OSP), which relied for
much of its information about Iraq on the likes of the notorious Ahmad
Chalabi.
Feith, Wolfowitz and Perle were key backers of Chalabi, a convicted
swindler, planning to make him a key leader of Iraq. Chalabi's carefully
crafted falsehoods and exaggerations about Iraq provided the White House
with much of its pretext for war.
The rock just turned over by the FBI also reveals other familiar denizens.
Welcome back Iranian con-man and arms dealer 'Manucher Ghorbanifar', a key
figure in the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal that nearly brought down the Reagan
administration.
And according to a Washington Monthly investigation, two other prominent
Washington neocons met secretly in Europe with Ghorbanifar, the chief of
Italy's military intelligence service, SISMI, and Lebanese rightists to
discuss various issues related to the Mideast. SISMI was also involved in
the Iraq-Niger uranium hoax.
The current controversy raises the question of whether neocon attempts to
blame the disaster they created in Iraq on the CIA, to blame 9/11 on the
FBI's faulty intelligence, along with three decades of spying investigations
squelched for political reasons, could have caused the security agencies to
go after what a CIA veteran terms "Washington's fifth column."
The growing scandal over the U.S. possibly being misled into a war by
neocons and various supporters of Israel is proving a field day for
anti-Semites, as this writer long warned it would.
Many feel these neocon ideologues arrogated to themselves the right to
decide what was good for Israel and the Jewish people, even though many
American Jews opposed war against Iraq.
In my view, what the neocon ideologues and their media allies have done is
to inflame anti-Semitism, encourage anti-U.S. terrorism, and destabilize the
entire Mideast.