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Wake Up America!
http://www.cnionline.org/featured-article-philip-giraldi-on-the-israel-lobby-and-islamophobia/
By Philip Giraldi
"…Fast forward a few years. The country that paid the man to steal the secrets becomes a major beneficiary of US assistance and uses the money to set up a lobbying organization that effectively manages key players in the federal government and the media…"
Let us suppose for a moment that an individual enjoying the full confidence and trust of the United States government was given access to the most secret information possessed by the US military, to include how it would react to an attack by an aggressor armed with nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. Let us further suppose that that individual violated his trust in the most egregious and vile fashion, offering to sell the information to anyone, but eventually settling on a nation ostensibly friendly to the US but not in any way a formal ally.
The individual then proceeded to deliver defense secrets literally by the carload, not only information that might plausibly have been construed as relevant to the buyer's own security, but also strategic defense information that could conceivably have led to the deaths of millions of American citizens. That information was then bartered and re-sold to an enemy who was in a position to use it to devastate the United States, together with sources and methods information on intelligence operations that in short order led to the deaths of many American citizens and also foreigners who had been cooperating with the United States.
Let us further suppose that the individual who stole the secrets was eventually caught because the sheer volume of what he was stealing was detected in spite of the indolence and incompetence of his superiors and he was convicted and imprisoned for life. In the damage assessment made after the arrest, it was determined that the espionage had been the most devastating ever experienced by the United States of America, both in volume and in the sensitivity of the information that had been betrayed.
Fast forward a few years. The country that paid the man to steal the secrets becomes a major beneficiary of US assistance and uses the money to set up a lobbying organization that effectively manages key players in the federal government and the media, making it virtually invulnerable to any criticism. Pumped up by hubris, that country seeks on several occasions to obtain the freedom of its spy, claiming inaccurately that he was only taking information used for purely defensive purposes. Fast forward a few more years and legislators in the US Congress known to be advocates of the foreign country that bought the secrets join in, calling for the release of the convicted spy. The media, also compromised and in the pockets of the foreign lobby, obligingly does not report the tale of American legislators who have apparently sold out.
I am, of course, referring to Jonathan Pollard and his friends in Israel and the United States. Pollard did more damage to the United States than any spy in history. And it was genuine damage, not just a mass of documents that had been routinely classified. Pollard's Israeli handler, aided by someone in the White House who has up until now evaded arrest, was able to ask for specific classified documents by name and number. The Soviets obtained US war plans, passed to them by the Israelis in exchange for money and free emigration of Russian Jews without any regard for the damage it was doing to the United States. The KGB was able to use the mass of information to reconstruct US intelligence operations directed against it and a number of Americans and US agents paid with their lives. Pollard also revealed to the Israelis and Soviets the technical and human source capabilities that US intelligence did and did not have, which is the most critical information of all as it underlies all information collection efforts. Compounding the problem, the United States has never actually been able to accurately ascertain all of the damage done by Pollard because the Israeli government has refused to cooperate in the investigation and has not returned the documents that were stolen.
And make no mistake, Pollard did it for money. He has since wrapped himself in the Israeli flag and promoted himself as an observant Jew to justify his crime and to obtain his freedom. He is reported to be a very popular person in Israel, an Israeli citizen by act of parliament, and there is a square in Jerusalem that has been renamed "Freedom for Jonathan Pollard Square." There is also an active "Justice for Jonathan Pollard" movement in the United States supported by the heavyweight Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Never before has there been such a transformation, with a despicable lowlife spy who sold out his country for money turned into a hero.
Pollard is just one symptom of the asymmetrical relationship that makes many mutter "wag the dog" whenever the subject of Israel comes up. If ever a foreign country has stuck its thumb in the eye of Uncle Sam, it is Israel in its willingness to take the United States for a ride while always demanding still more. And when it demands more it is invariably given more, with US politicians and mainstream media ever willing to genuflect and do what is right for the kleptocracy in charge in Tel Aviv.
The latest criminal outrage is a quartet of congressmen who are calling on the Obama Administration to free Pollard to "advance the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks." Well, first of all, everyone knows that the talks are kabuki, designed to accomplish absolutely nothing while advancing the standing of Obama prior to the US congressional elections in November. Israel continues its creeping annexation of the West Bank aided and abetted by Washington, which will do nothing substantive to stop the illegal and immoral activity. Abbas presumably is being bought off to stay silent while the play unfolds and Hamas, which should be sitting at the table, has been excluded.
That means that the congressmen in question, who actually took an oath to uphold the US Constitution, know that they are doing nothing but throwing yet another bone to Israel. The congressmen are Barney Franks of Massachusetts, Edolphus Towns of New York, Anthony Weiner also of New York, and Bill Pascrell of New Jersey. Mark their names well. Franks and Weiner are presumably acting due to tribal solidarity, but Pascrell and Towns are the straight men in the routine, brought along to make the Free Pollard movement appear to be less than a complete ethnically based sell out.
It is time for the American people to rise up and throw these bums out. Putting them in jail for malfeasance and corruption would be even better. I would like to see a panel of USS Liberty survivors and widows and orphans of the dead intelligence officers question Franks, Weiner, Pascrell, and Towns about their plan to free Pollard. Better still, I would like to see some US veterans groups and their publications develop a backbone and take up the cause, finally saying that enough is enough since it is our soldiers, sailors, and airmen who have paid the price in their blood for the Israeli connection. And then there is the intelligence community. Its leading lobby, Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO), has long ignored Israeli espionage and prefers to regularly express concern about "Islamofascism." Look in your own backyard folks, it is the Israelis who are skinning us alive, not the Muslims, and Pollard is the poster child of what exactly is being done to us. He is sometimes cited as proof that spies for Israel are caught and punished, but the truth is that he is the only one who has done hard time in jail and only because of the enormity of his crime while all the others have somehow slipped through our criminal justice system. Franks, Weiner, Pascrell, and Towns are only the latest in a long line of collaborator politicians who should sometimes sit back and ponder where their loyalty actually lies. If they persist in their Pollard campaign, they should be regarded as not fit to sit in the congress of the United States. And that goes for anyone else who decides to lobby on behalf of Pollard.
An opportunity is coming in November to remove the snakes from Congress. Let's organize to get rid of Franks, Weiner, Pascrell, and Towns. To be sure they will be replaced by others who are probably just as attached to Israel or fearful of its lobby as they are, but the time will inevitably come when allegiance to a foreign nation that is a strategic liability for the United States will become unseemly. May that day come soon.
Dr. Philip Giraldi, a counter-terrorism expert and former CIA and military intelligence officer, is Executive Director of CNI. Complete bio. This article was first published by Antiwar.com.
A Bipartisan Look at the Israel Lobby
by Philip Giraldi
The Bipartisan Policy Center's National Security Preparedness Group's September 10th report "Assessing the Terrorist Threat" concludes that there is a growing threat to the United States derived from the radicalization of some American Muslims, a number of whom have joined extremist groups abroad. The report and its conclusions have received wide distribution in the United States mainstream media, to include a Washington Post article on September 11th headlined "US Must Deal With Homegrown Terror Problem." National Public Radio reported it as "Homegrown terrorists pose biggest threat" while the Associated Press headlined "US must deal with domestic radical problem."
As the Bipartisan Policy Center was founded by five former United States senators, its findings have an aura or respectability. This is unfortunate as the report deliberately seeks to heighten fear of a minority community based on what it might do, not necessarily what it has done. The timing of the release of the report is also intriguing, coming as it did just before 9/11, heightening the already considerable anti-Muslim sentiment being expressed nationwide over the proposal for an Islamic community center in southern Manhattan near the former site of the World Trade Center.
Warning about a Muslim domestic terrorist threat is bad policy intended to dramatize complex issues in Manichean terms, somewhat akin to advocating security initiatives that can fit on a bumper sticker. While the report concedes that United States government "overreactions" have contributed to the growth of extremism, it does not address the core issue, which is that the national counter-terrorism policy is itself deeply flawed and arouses legitimate concerns in many Muslim countries that Washington is intent on a never-ending apocalyptic war against Islam.
In reality, Muslim Americans are law abiding and the number of radicalized young men is tiny, many being naturalized citizens with deep family roots in countries where the United States is undertaking military action and killing large numbers of civilians. Describing the terrorism threat confronting the United States as a "Muslim problem" is a simplistic and ultimately incorrect assessment of a much more complex group of interactions. The Bipartisan Policy Center's identification of 43 Muslim men who were convicted last year over support for or alignment with militant groups is unconvincing evidence of a major threat against the United States. Many of those convicted were on the receiving end of FBI sting operations in which an informant was inserted into the group, suggesting the possibility that the informant might have served as a catalyst or enabler for the proposed terrorist act. In legal terms, this is referred to as "entrapment." Of the 43 cited convictions in 2009, only two were of men who actually carried out a terrorist action and there was one more who was capable of doing so, suggesting that the contention that there is a significant terrorist threat is greatly exaggerated.
The Bipartisan Policy Center might claim to be bipartisan because it includes both Democrats and Republicans but that does not mean that it is objective. Two years ago it produced a "task force" report on the Iranian threat called "Meeting the Challenge: US Policy Toward Iranian Nuclear Development." It concluded that Iran has no right to enrich nuclear fuel for any purpose and predicted that Tehran would have sufficient highly enriched uranium in one year's time to build a bomb. It advocated talking to Tehran to give it a chance to surrender on all key issues before attacking it, urging newly elected but not yet inaugurated President Barack Obama to build up forces for the assault. The task force recommended that the US military should, after bombing Iran into submission, remain in the area vigilant and ready to react to any possible attempt at retaliation by Tehran.
Currently, two years after the alarming report, Iran still has neither a nuclear device nor any weapons grade fuel and there is no solid evidence that it has a program to produce a bomb, meaning that a war would have been another case of "preemption" of non-existent weapons of mass destruction, reminiscent of the lies that led to the invasion of Iraq. And the Iran report conclusion calling for a US attack could hardly have been otherwise based on the make-up of the Bipartisan Policy Center task force that produced it. It included Dennis Ross, who has been described as the State Department's "lawyer for Israel" as well as Steve Rademaker husband of Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Michael Rubin also of AEI, Kenneth Weinstein of the Hudson Institute, and Kenneth Katzmann of the Congressional Research Service. Rubin drafted the report assisted by the project director Michael Makovsky, who is the brother of David Makovsky, the senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a pro-Israeli think tank that was founded by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). No one on the task force was an independent expert on Iran who might have been willing or able to express Iran's concerns or point of view. Indeed, apart from Rubin, no one on the task force knew anything about Iran at all, except possibly that it was supposed to be part of the axis of evil.
And history repeats itself for the Bipartisan Policy Center's current "Assessing the Terrorist Threat." It was written by Peter Bergen, a journalist, and Bruce Hoffman, an academic. Both have made their reputations talking and writing about terrorists, so, in a sense, they are part of the burgeoning terrorism industry and have a personal stake in hyping the threat. On page 2 they acknowledge assistance from a number of "experts." Judging from the names, not one is a Muslim, meaning that there has been no input from the very community that is being excoriated in the report. That is very much business as usual in Washington, but it invites some skepticism about the agenda of the authors of the report and the institution that sponsored it.
If the Bipartisan Policy Center is seriously interested in examining threats against the United States rather than starting new wars or persecuting a religious group, I would suggest that they set up a new task force and take a long hard look at the actions of the Israel Lobby. They could start by talking to Ross, Rademaker, Rubin, and the two Makovskys since they are members in good standing of the Lobby and are readily available, probably sitting somewhere down the hall. Explain to them how United States security has been compromised by the tie that binds with Israel and how its institutions have been corrupted. Suggest to them that official Washington insofar as it relates to the Middle East is an AIPAC-run enterprise. Run through the list of the State Department's Assistant Secretaries of State for the Near East and discover that all of them have been Israel-firsters ever since Martin Indyk, an Australian citizen and AIPAC lobbyist, obtained the post in 1997. Bush appointee and hawk Jeffrey Feltman currently holds the position, virtually guaranteeing that there will be no shifting of allegiance at Foggy Bottom. Describe to them the more than $120 billion that Israel has received directly from the US taxpayer and discuss with them the many spies for Israel that have avoided prosecution because of government fear to cross AIPAC.
And then there is AIPAC itself. You might explore with Dennis Ross why he thinks AIPAC should not be registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act even though it describes itself on its website as "America's Pro-Israel Lobby." And you can chat a bit in a friendly way about how it works through intimidation and a large number of pro-Israel PACs to control Congress. And then there are the Israel-firsters in the media, the gatekeepers of truth and managers of the narrative. Names like Will, Krauthammer, Horowitz, Zuckerman, Ignatius, Thomas, Kristol, Friedman, and Brooks come to mind but there are many, many more. And remind them of the stories that just won't go away, like Senator Arlen Specter trying to make everyone forget how Israel illegally obtained uranium from a plant in Pennsylvania owned by one Zalman Shapiro and used it to make bombs. Or the nagging accounts of Israeli spying, the most aggressive effort to steal American secrets by any country considered to be friendly.
And never forget that the Lobby is bipartisan. There are the billionaire Crown and Pritzker families of Chicago, exceptionally good friends of Israel and President Obama's money men, and Aubrey and Joyce Chernick of Los Angeles who have been funding the recent anti-Muslim frenzy. And let's not leave out Irving Moskowitz the California bingo king and Pastor John Hagee of Christians United for Israel, who both actively support the illegal expansion of Israeli settlements. And speaking of the settlers, the "charitable" funding that enables them to arm themselves and steal Palestinian land is a tax write-off thanks to a congress, treasury, and justice department that prefer to look the other way.
Yes, there is quite a lot to examine and if anyone is seriously interested in genuine threats against the United States AIPAC and the Israel Lobby are good places to start. But to do so would not be welcomed in many influential circles and there would be inevitable retaliation from the chattering class and the media. The well-funded Bipartisan Policy Center would attract the anger of some very powerful and wealthy people and would suddenly find itself less well-endowed as its supporters disappear. Instead of taking on the Lobby let's follow the Center's sage advice and amble down a more inviting and less controversial path. Let's bomb the hell out of Iran shortly before locking up American Muslims in prison camps to keep them out of mischief. Such measures will undoubtedly stop nuclear proliferation and end the international terrorism problem while the friends of Israel will be able to sleep soundly in their beds knowing that they will not be troubled by the Bipartisan Policy Center.
Dr. Philip Giraldi, a counter-terrorism expert and former CIA and military intelligence officer, is Executive Director of CNI. Complete bio. This article was first published by Antiwar.com.
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"All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing"
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Wednesday, September 29, 2010 at 9:57AM
