@@ Behind the Israeli mole affair @@
Arash
August 29, 2004
The Point Of Maximum Danger Of War With Iran Approaching
By Webster Griffin Tarple
WASHINGTON, DC -- News of the investigation of Larry Franklin, a
middle-level functionary working for the Wolfowitz-Feith-Luti-Shulsky clique
in the Pentagon, indicates that we are now approaching a critical
choice-point on the road to war with Iran, and towards a synthetic terrorism
attack inside the US which would be used as an additional pretext to start
such a war.
The probe of an Israeli mole in the Pentagon was made public by CBS news
last Friday evening. The Saturday edition of the Washington Post named Larry
Franklin as being identified by sources as the person under investigation.
In Sunday,s Washington Post, it was confirmed that Lawrence A. Franklin was
the person at the center of investigation.
As seen in the excerpt below, this same Larry Franklin was named in my June
6 news release, "Rogue Bush Backers Prepare Super 9-11 False Flag Terror
Attacks. Franklin was indicated as one of the vulnerable links in the neocon
network which finds itself in a hysterical flight forward to try to salvage
the debacle of their Iraq war by expanding that war to neighboring
countries, notably Iran. The threat of a new round of "own goal synthetic
terrorism, quite possibly in the ABC dimension, was linked to the
preparation of that wider war. The logic at work was that of an "October
surprise, this time on the scale adequate to shock the post 9-11 world.
The best working hypothesis to understand the new mole investigation is that
neocon networks in the Pentagon may be very close to embroiling the United
States in a war with Iran. This would likely come as an Israeli or US
pre-emptive bombing attack on Iran,s nuclear facilities, possibly combined
with a terrorist attack inside the US using weapons of mass destruction,
which the corporate controlled media would immediately blame on Iran.
Whatever forces are behind the naming of Franklin, it must be assumed that
their main aim is to break up neocon preparations for a surprise attack on
Iran, which the neocons have been boasting about in the media with special
emphasis for some weeks. Backing the Franklin probe may well be military
factions who have no desire to be fed into the Iranian meatgrinder, and who
not fancy neocon fascist dictatorship. The immediate goal would be to knock
Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Bolton, Rice, Abrams and their cheering section
in the media and think-tanks onto the defensive. While the exposure of
Franklin is a positive step, it is far from decisive, and the neocons are
still in a position to unleash the dogs of war over the next days and weeks.
We are therefore now most probably on the brink of war with Iran, and at the
same time entering a period of steadily increasing danger of synthetic
terrorism designed to steal or cancel the November elections, and thus
freeze the current neocon clique in power for the foreseeable future. The
calculation of the rogue network operating behind the scenes is evidently
that terrorism taking place a few days before the elections will stampede
the electorate to support Bush, while terrorism well in advance of the
elections will give the public time to recover enough to advance
recriminations and demands for accountability on the part of the
administration. We are now entering the time frame when the terrorist
controllers can expect the maximum impact of their handiwork, either in
stampeding the electorate, or in calling off the elections completely.
OCTOBER SURPRISE IN SEPTEMBER?
On August 19, Martin Sieff of UPI warned: "Forget an October Surprise, a
much worse one could come in September: Full-scale war between the United
States and Iran may be far closer than the American public might imagine.
Sieff quoted remarks made by Iranian Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani on
August 18 which bluntly warned that if Iranian military commanders believed
the United States were serious about attacking Iran to destroy its nuclear
power facility at Bushehr, or to topple its Islamic theocratic form of
government, the Iranian military would not sit back passively and wait for
the U.S. armed forces to strike the first blow, as President Saddam Hussein
in neighboring Iraq did in March 2003. They would strike first.
"We will not sit to wait for what others will do to us," Shamkhani told
al-Jazeera. "Some military commanders in Iran are convinced that preventive
operations which the Americans talk about are not their monopoly," he added.
With this, the Iran-Iraq border became a new line of hair-trigger
confrontation in the restless war agitation of the neocons.
One day earlier, neocon Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and
International Security John Bolton told an audience at the Hudson Institute
in Washington that it was imperative that the Iranian nuclear program be
brought before the U.N. Security Council. "To fail to do so would risk
sending a signal to would-be proliferators that there are no serious
consequences for pursuing secret nuclear weapons programs," said Bolton. "We
cannot let Iran, a leading sponsor of international terrorism, acquire
nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them to Europe, most of central
Asia and the Middle East, or beyond," Bolton added. "Without serious,
concerted, immediate intervention by the international community, Iran will
be well on the road to doing so." Similar threatening noises have come from
Condoleezza Rice at the Bush National Security Council.
Iranian public opinion had been shocked by a raving, psychotic column by
Charles Krauthammer in the July 23 Washington Post: Krauthammer wrote: "The
long awaited revolution (in Iran) is not happening. Which [makes] the
question of pre-emptive attack all the more urgent. If nothing is done, a
fanatical terrorist regime openly dedicated to the destruction of 'the Great
Satan' will have both nuclear weapons and missiles to deliver them. All that
stands between us and that is either revolution or pre-emptive attack."
Iranian observers compared this to the US propaganda campaign which had
preceded the attack on Iraq.
US FORCES IN IRAK AS HOSTAGES TO IRAN
Competent US military commanders dread the prospect of war with Iran. Iran
is four times the area of Iraq, and has three times the population. Its
infrastructure was not destroyed during the Kuwait war in the way that
Iraq,s was, and Iran has not been subjected to 13 years of crippling UN
sanctions on everything, including food and medicine. The Iranian military
forces are intact. In case of war, Iran could be expected to use all means
ranging from ballistic missile attacks on US and Israeli bases to
asymmetrical warfare. The situation of the US forces already in Iraq could
quickly become extraordinarily critical. Shamkhani alluded to this prospect
when he said that "The U.S. military presence will not become an element of
strength at our expense. The opposite is true because their forces would
turn into a hostage."
For purposes of analogy, the Iraq war so far could be compared to the first
months of the Korean War, from June to November 1950. By provoking Iran to
go beyond logistical support for guerrillas and the sending of volunteers,
and come into the war with both feet, the neocons would be inviting a repeat
of the Chinese intervention and the disastrous US retreat south from the
Yalu to south of Seoul, which still stands as the longest retreat in US
military history. Just as Chinese entry into the Korean conflict in late
November 1950 created a wholly new and wider war, Iranian entry into the
US-Iraq war would have similarly incalculable consequences. The choices
might quickly narrow to the large-scale use of nuclear weapons or defeat for
the current US hollow army of just 10 divisions.
ANOTHER STEP TOWARDS WORLD WAR III
In the case of Iran, the use of nuclear weapons by the US would have a
dangerous complication: Iran is an important neighbor and trading partner of
the Russian Federation, which is helping with Iran,s nuclear power reactor
program. The threatened US/Israeli raid on Iran might kill Russian citizens
as well. Such a US attack on Iran might prod the Russian government into
drawing its own line in the sand, rather than sitting idle as the tide of US
aggression swept closer and closer to Russia,s borders, as one country after
another in central Asia was occupied. In other words, a US attack on Iran
bids fair to be the opening of World War III, making explicit was already
implicit in the invasion of Iraq. The Iran war project of the neocons is the
very midsummer of madness, and it must be stopped.
War with Iran means a military draft, just for starters. If Iran can close
the Straits of Hormuz, it might mean rationing of food and fuel. Bloated
speculative financial structures could hardly survive.
The Israeli mole investigation seeks to explore the intersection of the
Valerie Plame affair, the Chalabi affair, the Niger yellowcake forged
documents scandal, and some key policy documents passed to the Israelis.
According to a CIA veteran interviewed by CNN, the probe reaches into the
National Security Council as well as the Pentagon. On June 6, I had
identified Larry Franklin in these terms:
At the root of the Valerie Plame affair is the role of her husband,
Ambassador Joseph Wilson, in refuting the baseless claim that Iraq had
sought to purchase uranium yellowcake from Niger. This story was buttresses
by documents which turned out to be forged. A prime suspect in this regard
is Ledeen, and the accusation is made more plausible because the faked
documents first surfaced in Rome, where Ledeen possesses extensive contacts.
A federal grand jury is probing this matter. Ledeen, like so many Bush
officials, is an alumnus of the 1980s George H. W.
Bush-Poindexter-Abrams-Oliver North Iran-contra gun-running and drug-running
scandal, and appears to have mobilized these networks as part of the post
9-11 assault on Iraq. In December 2001, Ledeen moved to revive the Iran
connection, setting up a meeting between two Pentagon civilian neo-cons and
Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian arms dealer whom the CIA called a criminal
and liar. Three days of meetings in Rome involved Harold Rhode, Larry
Franklin, Ghorbanifar, and two unnamed officials of the Iranian regime.
After the conquest of Iraq, Rhode was sent to Baghdad as the contact point
between the Office of Special Plans and Chalabi. Ghorbanifar, in a Dec. 22,
2003 interview with Newsweek's Mark Hosenball, reported that he maintained
contact with Rhode and Franklin "five or six times a week through June 2003,
when he had a second meeting with Rhode in Paris. This back channel to the
Iranians is now also under intense scrutiny.
In the June 6 release, I also showed that, for Bush, the notion of a
confrontation with Iran was closely linked to the hypothesis of a new wave
of synthetic terrorism. I pointed in this context to a key speech in which
Bush had escalated his threat of both:
A dramatic turning point on the way to the current emergency came on April
21, when Bush delivered two speeches which represented a palpable escalation
of the tone of his usual demagogy of terrorism and fear. In the afternoon,
he assured the Newspaper Association of America, composed of newspaper
editors, that Iran "will be dealt with if they pursue a nuclear development
program. Bush went on to characterize the United States as "a battlefield in
the war on terror. He was at pains to build up the stature of Al-Qaeda,
whose members he emphatically characterized as "smarttoughand sophisticated.
Because the terrorists are so formidable, Bush said the United States "is a
hard country to defend. Our intelligence is good. It,s just never perfect,
is the problem. We are disrupting some cells here in America. We,re chasing
people down. But it is we,ve got a big country. Later, Bush spoke to the
same themes at a closed-door gathering at the White House: "...On Tuesday
evening, Bush told Republican congressional leaders during a meeting at the
White House that it was all but certain that terrorists would attempt a
major attack on the United States before the election, according to a
congressional aide. The leaders were struck by Bush's definitiveness and
gravity, the aide said... (Washington Post, April 22, 2004)
The general thesis of the June 6 release was this:
Washington DC, June 6 Intelligence patterns monitored here now point
conclusively to the grave threat of an imminent new round of ABC
(atomic-bacteriological-chemical) terror attacks in the United States, Great
Britain, Canada, and possibly other nations. These attacks could include
nuclear detonations, radiological dirty bombs, poison gas and other chemical
weapons, or biological agents, to be unleashed in such urban settings as New
York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington DC, Vancouver BC, or London. The
goal of these operations would be to produce a worldwide shock several
orders of magnitude greater than the original 9-11, with a view to stopping
the collapse of the Bush administration, the Wall Street-centered financial
structures, and the US-UK strategic position generally. The attacks would be
attributed by US/UK intelligence to controlled patsy terrorist groups who
would be linked by the media to countries like Iran, Syria, Cuba, North
Korea, Egypt, or Saudi Arabia, thus setting these states up for attack. The
organizers of the attacks would in reality be substantially the same secret
command cell in the United States which set up the 9-11 events and its
associated networks, which has been able to continue in operation because of
the abject failure of all 9-11 investigations to date to identify it. These
forces are now in a desperate flight forward to escape from their current
increasingly grim position. Their goal is now to establish a neocon fascist
dictatorship in the United States, complete with martial law, special
tribunals, press and media censorship, and the full pervasive apparatus of
the modern police state.
As of the end of August, 2004, this threat is now more urgent than ever.
To read the full text of the June 6 release, "Rogue Bush Backers Prepare
Super 9-11 False Flag Terror Attacks,aaa' please go to:
http://inn.globalfreepress.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=355
http://www.rense.com/general56/ddie.htm