CIA official "Michael Scheuer": Does Israel conduct covert action in America? You bet it does
Arash
April 8, 2006
Does Israel Conduct Covert Action in America? You bet it does
By Michael Scheuer
Retied CIA official
Covert action is much talked about and little understood. At its most basic level,
covert action is a set of intelligence operations undertaken by a specific state's
intelligence agencies to advance its national interests. They are executed in a
manner that limits the visibility of that state's hand in whatever is done.
Ideally, covert actions cannot be traced back to their sponsor. Most people take the
term covert action to mean violent actions of one kind or another: kidnapping,
assassination, support for insurgents, etc. While violence can certainly be part of a
covert-action campaign, the more insidious – and often more effective – arm of covert
action is called "political action", whereby one state seeks to influence the public
opinion of another by speaking through the mouths of that country's citizens.
And let me stress, there is nothing wrong or immoral about covert political action.
America used political action worldwide in the Cold War; Britain used it in the
United States to accelerate neutral America's entry into both world wars; the Saudis
pay untold amounts to retired senior U.S. officials to speak admiringly of the
anti-American desert tyranny; and Israel uses it today against America to ensure
unlimited and unquestioning U.S. support. It is a legitimate foreign affairs tool,
and the leaders of any nation who choose not to engage in such activity are
certifiably negligent fools.
For years – even decades – U.S. citizens have been the subject of a political action
campaign designed and executed by Israel. Currently, Israel's campaign is part
steady-as-she-goes and part improvisation to neutralize an unexpected and – for
Israel – worrying development.
So far, Israel's covert political action is succeeding hands down. Americans are
gradually being indoctrinated to believe Islamists are today's Nazis and that there
is no "Israeli lobby" in America.
Simply put, Israel is conducting a brilliant covert political action campaign in the
United States, a campaign any intelligence service in the world would rightly be
proud of.
Part one of Israeli's political action consists simply of using that old standby
debate-suppressor, the four-letter word "Nazi". Newspapers in Israel, of course, have
long used the word to describe Israel's Muslim enemies.
Recently, for example, the Jerusalem Post ran an article in which al-Qaeda
[al-CIA-duh] is described as "yet another Nazi knockoff". This sort of language is
the stuff of Israeli journalism, and not of much concern to Americans. If the Israeli
press wants to teach their readers to underestimate the Islamist threat, so be it.
But now the word "Nazi" is being gradually fed to Americans as a scientific
definition of our Islamist enemies. Headlines such as "Hamas Uber Alles", "Hitler's
Heirs in Damascus", and "The Nazi Correction to Islamic Terror" are increasingly
common in U.S. media publications found in the news files Googled daily by Americans.
U.S. politicians, too, are eager to jump on the call-them-Nazis bandwagon, with
Secretary Rumsfeld recently saying that leaving Iraq early would be like returning
postwar Germany to the Nazis, and Senator George Allen (R-VA) comparing the attack on
the Shia shrine in Samarra (Askari Mosque) to the burning of the Reichstag by the
Nazis.
The goal of using the Nazi analogy is to suppress any realistic debate about the
pluses and minuses of the US-Israel relationship, and to make sure any American
raising questions about U.S. support for Israel is seen as siding with the
"Islamofascists", the heirs of Nazism.
Any person who knows the least bit about Islam – and the Israelis know a great deal –
knows it is not Nazism, yet the internet is rife with such titles as "A Manifesto
Against Islamofascism" and "Islamofascism's Creeping Coup in Turkey". The best
capsule description of the threat posed by Islamofascists is provided by [Jew] Frank
Gaffney (http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/1183) in a recent issue of The
Intelligencer, the journal of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers
(http://www.afio.com/sections/wins/). Listen to Frank Gaffney, and you will almost
hear Muslim jackboots striking the pavement.
"We are engaged in nothing less than a War for the Free World. This is a fight
to the death with Islamofascists, Muslim extremists driven by a totalitarian
political ideology that, like Nazism and Communism before it, is determined to
destroy freedom and the people who love it".
The drive to make Islamofascist the term of choice in describing America's Muslim
enemies is meant to still U.S. debate about Israel and, indeed, to limit questions
about any aspect of U.S. foreign policy toward the Islamic world. After all, why
would anyone in their right mind care what people think, unless they are blindly and
unthinkingly opposed to Islamofascism?
The second part of any nation's covert political action plan is to be ready to
exploit or redress unexpected developments within the target society.
Last month, Professors John Mearsheimer [1] and Stephen Walt [2] provided such an
environment when they published a lengthy study [3] showing the strong influence the
Israeli lobby has on the crafting and application of U.S. foreign policy toward the
Islamic world. If American society had its head screwed on right, the collective
response of the citizenry would have been, "DUH!" – signifying that the
near-determinative nature of Israeli influence is so clear that no academic analysis
of that fact is necessary.
Instead, the reaction from American elites has been that of Captain Renault in
Casablanca – they are shocked, shocked, that anyone could even think that there is
such a thing as an Israeli lobby.
The elites demand that Americans believe there are no such things as Israel-suborned
American-citizen spies stealing U.S. national security secrets, pro-Israel U.S. media
publications routinely savaging any American questioning the perfect and eternal mesh
of U.S. and Israeli interests, and U.S. politicians from Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi
(D-CA) to Senator John McCain (R-AZ) to Congressman Tom DeLay (R-TX) to Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice groveling at AIPAC's annual conference, each willing to
compromise U.S. security if they can garner pro-Israel votes and pockets stuffed with
cash from pro-Israel contributions.
In the specific case of the Mearsheimer-Walt paper, prominent pro-Israel Americans
have been quick off the mark to limit the damage caused to Israel's interests caused
by the paper's candor and truthfulness. From [Jews] Marvin Kalb to David Gergen to
Max Boot to Alan Dershowitz, these folks have brazenly defied reality by insisting
there is no "Israeli Lobby" and that Mearsheimer and Walt are dead wrong, poor
scholars, paranoid conspiracy peddlers, or reborn Elders of Zion. Eliot Cohen's essay
in the Washington Post epitomizes the Israel-Firsters' goal of defaming Mearsheimer
and Walt to convince the citizenry that they are crazy and ranting anti-Semites.
The attacks on Walt and Mearsheimer are the stuff that the dreams of political action
planners are made of: The apparently spontaneous response by target-country citizens
voicing all-out support for the covert-action-sponsoring country. Such a response
deep-sixes any chance for a substantive debate on the issue at hand, and submerges it
in a blizzard of hate speech directed at the authors from prominent Israel-Firsters,
those paragons of virtue who are the chief proponents of First-Amendment-destroying
laws against hate speech.
So at day's end, one can only say: Astoundingly well done, Israel, good for you! The
impact of your covert political action activities in America are all that you could
have hoped for: Truth is negated, dissent is suppressed, and opponents are
intimidated and defamed, and all this is done by prominent U.S. citizens. The only
competitor you have is the Saudi lobby, an organization just as damaging as yours to
genuine U.S. national interests, a reality you and we would see if the bloodied but
hopefully unbowed Mearsheimer-Walt team decides to analyze the corrupt and corrupting
Saudi lobby.
Finally, I forgot to mention at the start that covert political action campaigns are
almost always directed by one nation against another nation that it considers an
enemy or whose leaders it judges to be gullible, venal, none too bright, unreliable,
or all four. That surely gives one pause for thought, but it truly is the way the
world works.
* Michael Scheuer (http://cooperativeresearch.org/entity.jsp?entity=michael_scheuer)
served in the CIA for 22 years before resigning in 2004. He served as the Chief of
the bin Laden Unit at the Counterterrorist Center from 1996 to 1999. He is the once
anonymous author of "Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror" and
"Through Our Enemies' Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam, and the future of
America". http://eyeball-series.org/scheuer-eyeball.htm
http://www.antiwar.com/scheuer/?articleid=8827
Notes:
--------
[1] John J. Mearsheimer
http://political-science.uchicago.edu/faculty/mearsheimer.html
http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people2/Mearsheimer/mearsheimer-con0.html
[2] Stephen M. Walt
http://ksgfaculty.harvard.edu/Stephen_Walt
http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people5/Walt/walt-con0.html
[3] "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy"
http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/rwp/RWP06-011/$File/rwp_06_011_walt.pdf
[PDF -1.2MB]
"The Israel Lobby"
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/mear01_.html
The Lobby: why is U.S. policy skewed in favor of Israel?
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=8730
Keeping It Quiet: The Israel Lobby's crushing of dissent
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.iranian/msg/dd467987b30a53eb