Denne artikel beskriver hvorledes vitale dele af den amerikanske
administration ikke er så uafhængig som mange tror. Tværtimod er
den kontrolleret og manipuleret af en fremmed stat, så Det Hvide Hus
varetager alle denne stats interesser - herunder økonomi, militær
osv.
Er det ikke på tide, at alle krigsfortalerne sætter deres hidtidige
retorik samt perspektiv op til revision?
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http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=6316
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Indictment Shows Washington Is 'Israeli-Occupied Territory'
Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin's espionage case has uncovered a spy
nest at the top
by Justin Raimondo
The indictment [.pdf file] of Larry Franklin, the 58-year-old analyst
who headed up the Pentagon's Iran desk, marks a milestone in the FBI's
four-year-plus probe into Israel's covert activities in the U.S. The
investigation predates 9/11 and involves some of the leading figures
associated with planning and agitating for the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
The players: a hardline faction of the administration committed to
"regime change" not only in Iraq, but throughout the Middle East.
Skilled at the art of bureaucratic infighting and relentlessly
determined, even as the neocons' plan for the invasion and occupation
of Iraq was being implemented they were planning to put the next phase
of their grand plan for the Middle East into operation: a confrontation
with Iran.
At the Iran desk, Larry Franklin was the perfect patsy, the neocons'
gofer who was in a position to not only fight for their policies but
also to provide them with sensitive intelligence [.pdf]. And that's
where the bureaucratic turf wars that raged throughout this
administration, between the neocons and the "realists," crossed the
line into... treason.
The indictment lists two unindicted co-conspirators, identifying them
only as "CC1" and "CC2," but we know from numerous news accounts that
they refer to Steve Rosen, AIPAC's longtime public policy director, and
Keith Weissman, the lobby's Iran specialist. For two years, the
indictment charges, Franklin "did unlawfully, knowingly, and willingly
conspire, confederate, and agree, together with persons known and
unknown to the Grand Jury, to communicate, deliver, and transmit
information relating to the national defense to CC-1 and CC-2, persons
not entitled to receive such information, with reason to believe that
such information could be used to the injury of the United States and
to the advantage of a foreign nation."
That foreign nation is the state of Israel, a country passionately
interested in U.S. policy toward Iran - and aggressively pursuing a
campaign to glean all the information it can about the making of that
policy in a clear effort to shape it. The indictment shows how the
Israelis used AIPAC for that purpose.
It also shows the extraordinary access AIPAC has to U.S. government
officials. All Steve Rosen had to do, one summer day in 2002, was put
in a call to "DoD Employee A" and ask for someone with expertise on
Iran, and he was promptly given Franklin's name.
Rosen and Weissman set up a meeting with Franklin and another Pentagon
policy wonk ("DoD Employee B"), and pretty soon the rudiments of a spy
nest were being constructed by the defendant and his co-conspirators.
The indictment relates an intercepted phone conversation in which Rosen
chortles excitedly en route to a meeting with Franklin that he's got "a
real insider," "a Pentagon guy" on the hook. At that meeting, Franklin
discloses "national defense information" to Rosen and Weissman: the two
AIPACers then take the information and feed it to an unidentified
journalist. That reporter is Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post -
who was also of interest to prosecutors on the trail of who leaked CIA
officer Valerie Plame's name to the media.
What was in it for Franklin? He is widely believed to be an ideological
neoconservative and passionately devoted to Israel's cause, but there
was also the chance for a promotion. After proving his usefulness to
the Israelis, by the winter of February 2003 Franklin and Rosen were
already talking about getting him a position on the National Security
Council staff: Franklin would be "by the elbow of the president," said
Rosen. Franklin asked Rosen to "put in a good word" for him, and Rosen
said "I'll do what I can," remarking that their previous meeting had
been "a real eye-opener."
>From what we know about this particular breakfast meeting, Franklin
handed over a draft of a presidential "finding," an internal policy
paper that would set out the parameters of our actions vis-à-vis Iran.
The indictment further relates that Franklin "disclosed to [Rosen] and
[Weissman] national defense information relating to" the document.
Franklin and his AIPAC friends certainly acted like espionage agents.
At one point, they met at Union Station in Washington, D.C., early in
the morning:
"In the course of the meeting, the three men moved from one restaurant
to another restaurant and then finished the meeting in an empty
restaurant."
If these were just three guys out to discuss U.S.-Israel relations over
lunch, why all the cloak-and-dagger stuff? They obviously suspected
they were being followed: with justification, as it turns out. Franklin
insisted on faxing materials to Rosen's residence rather than the AIPAC
office: no need to take unnecessary risks.
They were careful when it came to the possibility of being followed but
threw caution to the winds when talking on the phone. They probably
never suspected the FBI was listening: after all, in order to tap
someone's phone, the cops have to go to a real live judge and come up
with some compelling evidence that it's necessary. Apparently, the FBI
had no trouble meeting that standard.
Rosen was apparently quite a braggart: in a conversation with a
journalist about the purloined internal policy paper, he confessed,
"I'm not supposed to know this" and averred that it was a "considerable
story." His braggadocio may be his undoing, however, as this
conversation helps make the case that Rosen knew he was breaking the
law.
Rosen and Weissman soon passed their prize acquisition directly over to
the Israelis: on Aug. 15, 2002, Naor Gilon, chief political officer at
the Israeli embassy in Washington, met with Franklin at a Washington,
D.C., restaurant, where Gilon explained to Franklin that "he would be
the appropriate person with whom the defendant should talk" - that
is, if he had anything really pressing to say. A month later, Franklin
called the embassy, and they handed him over to Gilon. They met again
on Jan. 30, 2003, after months of playing phone tag, at an unspecified
location near the Israeli embassy building in Washington, where they
discussed Iran's nuclear program. They met regularly from February
through May and throughout the summer, sometimes at the Pentagon
Officers Athletic Club; the focus seemed to be on Iran's nuclear
program and the U.S. response. At one point, Gilon arranged for
Franklin to meet with "former" top Mossad official Uzi Arad, now head
of the Herziliya Center in Israel. The three of them chatted about
Iran's nukes.
There are intriguing references sprinkled throughout the indictment
that provide the skeleton of a spy thriller: in late February of 2004,
Gilon and Franklin exchanged phone calls "about certain foreign
organizations." In June, they met at a Washington, D.C., coffeehouse
where "Franklin provided [Gilon] with classified information he had
learned from a classified United States government document related to
a Middle Eastern country's activities in Iraq." Later that month, Gilon
brought along "another official from Foreign Nation A," namely Israel,
and Franklin provided additional information about the military
situation in Iraq, as well as copies of a speech and a "list of
questions that a senior United States government official was to give
that day or the next before the Congressional Foreign Affairs
Committee." This has to mean the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations
closed briefing on Iraq given by Colin Powell on June 23. At some point
between December 2003 and June 2004, the two met at "an unknown
location," where Franklin spilled the beans about "a weapons test
conducted by a Middle Eastern country."
In trying to piece together what we know from the indictments and news
reports, there are discrepancies: for example, it is hard to say where
exactly this description of a lunch between Gilon, Rosen, Weissman, and
Franklin fits in: Newsweek has Gilon at the scene, but the indictment
doesn't mention it. The key event, from which several charges emanate,
was a June 26, 2003, luncheon in Arlington, Va., near Washington, where
Franklin met his AIPAC co-spies and started off by saying, "You set the
agenda." Rosen told him he understood that "the constraints" placed on
Franklin when he met with them were considerable, but apparently all
concerned let these go by the board as Franklin revealed an alleged
threat to American (and Israeli) troops in Iraq and Kurdistan
supposedly emanating from Iran. Franklin told his co-conspirators that
information was "highly classified" and warned them not to use it. In
the laconic prose of the indictment, he also revealed classified
information "related to the intelligence reporting activities of a
foreign nation," and again told them to keep it to themselves. Could
this be the information that the U.S. had broken the Iranian code and
was reading Tehran's internal government communications - information
that later got back to Ahmed Chalabi's boys and, through them, was
passed on to the Iranians? We just don't know yet, but the prospect is
intriguing and not at all unlikely, as Warren Strobel of Knight Ridder
has reported:
"Several U.S. officials and law enforcement sources said Thursday that
the scope of the FBI probe of Pentagon intelligence activities appeared
to go well beyond the Franklin matter. FBI agents have briefed top
White House, Pentagon, and State Department officials on the probe in
recent days. Based on those briefings, officials said, the bureau
appears to be looking into other controversies that have roiled the
Bush administration, some of which also touch Feith's office.
"They include how the Iraqi National Congress, a former exile group
backed by the Pentagon, allegedly received highly classified U.S.
intelligence on Iran; the leaking of the name of CIA officer Valerie
Plame to reporters; and the production of bogus documents suggesting
that Iraq tried to buy uranium for nuclear weapons from the African
country of Niger. Bush repeated the Niger claim in making the case for
war against Iraq.
"'The whole ball of wax' was how one U.S. official privy to the
briefings described the inquiry."
After the June 26 meeting, Rosen and Weissman talked between themselves
about the gold mine of information they had in Franklin: Rosen marveled
at the "highly classified" nature of what he had told them and remarked
that it was "quite a story." He also told Weissman: "Well, look, it
seems to me that this channel is one to keep wide open insofar as
possible." Weissman said he was going to be taking Franklin to a
baseball game, to which Rosen replied: "Smart guy. That's the thing to
do."
Yeah, especially if you're milking this guy for all the classified
information he can lay his hands on. Befriend him. Make him feel
comfortable, like part of a team - Israel's team, that is.
Aside from the unremarkable fact that Israel is spying on its alleged
best friend, stealing our secrets and trying to influence policy in any
way it can, why is any of this important? Because, as Michael Isikoff
and Mark Hosenball point out in Newsweek:
"Franklin was known to be one of a tightly knit group of pro-Israel
hawks in the Pentagon associated with his immediate superior, William
Luti, the hard-charging and impassioned protegé of former House
speaker Newt Gingrich. As deputy assistant secretary of defense for
Near East affairs, Luti was a key player in planning the Iraq war. He,
in turn, works in the office of Undersecretary Douglas Feith, a career
lawyer who, before he became the Pentagon's No. 3, was a sometime
consultant for Likud, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's political
party."
Feith's staff is a nexus of neocon activity in this administration:
they were the spark plugs behind the "Office of Special Plans," which
fed phony "intelligence" on Iraq's alleged WMD to the White House and
Congress via Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress and other equally
dubious sources. When the CIA wouldn't cooperate in cooking the
intelligence according to the neocons' recipe for war, they simply set
up their own parallel intelligence-gathering "rogue" operation, a "lie
factory," as one article describing its activities put it, churning out
half-baked rationales for invading Iraq. This is a favorite neocon
method: acting under color of authority of the U.S. government when
they have no authorization or legal right to do so. Franklin was
involved with his colleague Harold Rhode and Pentagon consultant
Michael Ledeen in another such "rogue" operation: setting up a series
of meetings in Paris and Rome with Manucher Ghorbanifar, the Iranian
arms dealer of Iran-Contra fame, to get behind a plan for "regime
change" in Iran. This whole crowd was deeply involved in lying us into
war and the effort to pull off a similar scenario when it comes to
Iran.
Did the neocon network in Washington allow itself to become an
instrument of Israeli espionage against the United States? Franklin's
arrest and the disclosure of his activities - or some of them - in
the indictment raises this question, albeit not for the first time. Who
is "DoD employee A" - the one who referred Rosen to Franklin to begin
with? And what about "DoD employee B," who inexplicably turned up at
Franklin's first meeting with Rosen and Weissman?
It's just not credible that Franklin is alone in his disloyalty. He was
and is part of a larger group actively committed to a very specific
ideological bias, one that valorizes the role of Israel in spurring the
U.S. to bolder action in the Middle East. That this agenda redounds to
the advantage of the Israelis is due, we are told, to the natural
confluence of interests, and is not the result of a determined effort
- overt or covert - on the part of the Israelis. However,
Franklin's arrest and the public revelation of his spying on behalf of
Israel demonstrates once and for all that these denials are hogwash.
As AIPAC's top officials snuck around our nation's capital with
Franklin in tow, meeting clandestinely and whispering secrets in the
dark, that organization's role as a cover for Israeli covert activities
was crystal clear to the FBI agents tailing them - and now we know
it, too. As AIPAC reached into the Pentagon and turned a highly placed
official into a spy, promising to use the lobbying group's legendary
influence to secure him a big promotion, Pat Buchanan's famous
description of Washington as "Israeli-occupied territory" no longer
seems over the top.
In ripping up and exposing Israel's Washington spy nest, federal
prosecutors will be disturbing all kinds of unpleasant nocturnal
creatures. If you pick up a big rock, you never know what's going to
scuttle out - and this trial, scheduled to start Sept. 6, is sure to
give us a few surprises. One thing that won't surprise me, however, is
a widening investigation - and more indictments.