Ayoon wa Azan (Neo-Con Spies IV)
Jihad Al Khazen Al-Hayat 2004/09/25
What is more dangerous than neo-cons spying for Israel is that some officials hijacking the U.S. foreign policy and direct it to serve the Israeli interests. In previous columns, I recorded their stances toward Iraq, Iran and Palestinians that have become U.S. policy. This is what probably led the real conservative Patrick Buchanan to say, "What the U.S. needs in the Middle East is a policy made in the U.S. not in Tel Aviv, AIPAC or the American Enterprise Institute (AEI)."
Would the Lawrence Franklin scandal be a new Iran-Contra? The bad guys of the new scandal are the same infamous ones of two decades ago in the previous one. Franklin and another "specialist" from Douglas Feith's office, Harold Rhode, were among the officials who established contacts with the Iranian arms dealer, Manucher Ghorbanifar, and Iranian refugees abroad; exactly like the arms sales scandal under the Reagan administration. It seems that the contacts reflected a competition between the neo-con clique in the administration who want "to change the regime" in Iran and the officials at the Department of State and the CIA who prefer to be cautious.
Around a year ago, News Day exposed the contacts with Ghorbanifar, and Washington Monthly conducted an exclusive interview with him in which he confirmed he met with officials at the Defense Department, and strongly denied the fact that they were 'chance meetings' as the Department claimed. Thus, it became obvious that there is a separatist team in the Defense Department working on changing the regime in Iran, albeit it was not the policy of the State Department or the administration, and probably without the consent of top officials, including the President.
There is an Israeli nest inside the U.S. Defense Department, and it is not supporting Yitzhak Rabin's policies but the radical Likudnik policy that is working against peace and for war in the whole region, at the expense of American souls and interests. The best image from inside of the Israeli gang in the Department is that presented by Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski about her work directly linked to Israel's gang in the Department's office for Near East South Asia (NESA). In fact, she wrote a long article in Salon Internet magazine; she talked about how she moved after two years of working in the Defense Secretary's office to the administration that opened her eyes to the "hijacking" of U.S. foreign policy.
Kwiatkowski said that between May 2002 and April 2003, she "observed firsthand the formation of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans and watched the latter stages of the neo-conservative capture of the policy-intelligence nexus in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. This seizure of the reins of U.S. Middle East policy was directly visible to many of us working in the Near East South Asia policy office, and yet there seemed to be little any of us could do about it."
She added, "I saw a narrow and deeply flawed policy favored by some executive appointees in the Pentagon used to manipulate and pressurize the traditional relationship between policymakers in the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies."
She wrote: "To begin with, I was introduced to Bill Luti, assistant secretary of defense for NESA. A tall, thin, nervously intelligent man, he welcomed me into the fold. I knew little about him. Because he was a recently retired naval captain and now high-level Bush appointee, the common assumption was that he had connections, if not capability. I would later find out that when Dick Cheney was secretary of defense over a decade earlier, Luti was his aide. He had also been a military aide to Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich during the Clinton years… Co-workers who had watched the transition from Clintonista to Bushite… I soon saw the modus operandi of "instant policy" unhampered by debate or experience with the early Bush administration replacement of the civilian head of the Israel, Lebanon and Syria desk office with a young political appointee from the Washington Institute, David Schenker. Word was that the former experienced civilian desk officer tended to be evenhanded toward the policies of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel, but there were complaints and he was gone… I learned that there was indeed a preferred ideology for NESA. My first day in the office, a GS-15 career civil servant rather unhappily advised me that if I wanted to be successful here, I'd better remember not to say anything positive about the Palestinians… A politically savvy civilian-clothes-wearing lieutenant colonel named Bill Bruner served as the Iraq desk officer, and he had apparently joined NESA about the time Bill Luti did. I discovered that Bruner, like Luti, had served as a military aide to Speaker Gingrich. Gingrich himself was now conveniently an active member of Bush's Defense Policy Board.
I asked why Bruner wore civilian attire, and was told by others, "He's Chalabi's handler." Chalabi, of course, was Ahmad Chalabi, the president of the Iraqi National Congress, who was the favored exile of the neoconservatives and the source of much of their "intelligence." Bruner himself said he had to attend a lot of meetings downtown in hotels and that explained his suits. Soon, in July, he was joined by another Air Force pilot, a colonel with no discernible political connections, Kevin Jones. I thought of it as a military-civilian partnership, although both were commissioned officers.
I spent time that summer exploring the neoconservative worldview and trying to grasp what was happening inside the Pentagon. I wondered what could explain this rush to war and disregard for real intelligence. Neoconservatives are fairly easy to study, mainly because they are few in number, and they show up at all the same parties. Examining them as individuals, it became clear that almost all have worked together, in and out of government, on national security issues for several decades. Richard Perle, David Wurmser and Douglas Feith sent Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud Party campaign in Israel in 1996 a study entitled "A Clean Break: Strategy for Securing the Realm," in which they opposed peace with Palestinians.
David Wurmser is the least known of that trio worked in 2001, as the research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute was assigned to the Pentagon, then moved to the Department of State to work as deputy for the hard-line conservative undersecretary John Bolton, then to the National Security Council, and now is lodged in the office of the vice president. His wife, the prolific Meyrav Wurmser, executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute, is also a neoconservative team player. (She is an Israeli who came with Colonel Igal Karmon to found MEMRI and then left him and worked in the same field.)"
Kwiatkowski is an expert in her field and has occupied several positions at the American government and is now preparing a PhD in international affairs. She authored two books on African issues, her first field of specialty. I have never heard anyone refuting her writings or denying them, which gives her credibility of which the sayings of the radical neo-cons lack.
In addition, Wurmser said in an address delivered at front the AEI at the beginning of 2001, eight months before the known terror occurred, that the tendency of the U.S. and Israel is a common strike to Iraq, Iran, Syria and Libya.
This is what I have on the spies. I hope that what I illustrated has reached those who are able to take care, if they do not care for their peoples.
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