leveymg
leveymg's JournalSame Iraq WMD Fabricators Planned US Attack by "Drawing Attention" to Syria's WMDs in 1996
They almost did it again - manipulated the US into a direct military role in Mideast conflict. Tonight, the US is once more poised to launch yet another Shock and Awe-style missile strike, again on the basis of a selective reading of intelligence, most of it provided by Israel.
The NYT reports this evening:
That news comes on the heels of revelations yesterday that the original source of intercepts of Syrian communications on which the Obama Administration is basing its decision to launch unilateral attacks on Syria is Israeli intelligence, specifically IDF Unit 8200, the Israeli NSA. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/28/israeli-intelligence-intercepted-syria-chemical-talk
Certain Obama officials have been pushing direct US military intervention since March 2011, while similar urgings for action against neighboring Mideast countries goes back at least 15 years before that to release in 1996 of a neocon manifesto, A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm written for the then newly installed conservative Likud Party of Benjamin Netanyahu (has Bibi been in and out of the top office for that long, now?). The best-known authors of that planning paper were Richard Perle, the Wurmsers, and Doug Feith, who went on to establish the notorious Pentagon Office of Special Plans (OSP), the DoD unit under Undersecretary for Intelligence Steven Cambone that fabricated much of the intelligence to justify Bush's invasion of Iraq.
"A Clean Break" is a remarkably candid and concise document that accurately predicted U.S. and Israeli policy and actions in the region, particularly events in Syria involving external agitation of internal ethnic conflict, foreign military responses, and Israel "drawing attention" to Syria's WMDs -- all events that have finally come to fruition during the last couple weeks.
The 1996 document extracted below explicitly states that Syria's WMD along with Turkish and Jordanian-sponsored ethnic conflict inside Syria will serve as a pretext for western intervention, leading to the possible breakup of Syria, while at the same time PM Netanyahu should reject U.S. pressures to accept land for peace. That is exactly what has come to pass in 2013.
As A Clean Break makes clear, serial regime change in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and then Iran has long been the goal of a core group of Washington power players in both parties going back to that era. Here's the plan to transform the Mideast (and the U.S.) so as to expand Israel's regional hegemony, along with Turkey and Jordan, with Saudi Arabia the silent partner of the Rightwing parties in Israel, the US, and the UK. This plan of serial regime change was later euphemistically termed, "The Arab Spring", when conditions were deemed ripe for overthrow of a string of governments of states surrounding Israel.
The "Clean Break" document was submitted to then PM Benjamin Netanyahu. It is remarkably prescient, and has come to pass through the wars and covert operations waged by the past two U.S. Administrations, with a few bumps in the road, almost exactly as planned 17 year ago.
Ironically, as alluded to below (and developed at greater length in later sections of the document not excerpted below,) make clear, the ultimate point of neocon regime change is to invert the relationship of Israel with the US, and to make the former autonomous of the constraints imposed by the latter. The U.S. is the ultimate target of Right-wing regime change planned in Israel by the same Neocons advising Netanyahu's Likud Party who went on to carry out the Iraq War WMD fabrications: http://www.israeleconomy.org/strat1.htm
A Clean Break:
A New Strategy for Securing the Realm
Following is a report prepared by The Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies "Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000." The main substantive ideas in this paper emerge from a discussion in which prominent opinion makers, including Richard Perle, James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks, Jr., Douglas Feith, Robert Loewenberg, David Wurmser, and Meyrav Wurmser participated. The report, entitled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," is the framework for a series of follow-up reports on strategy.
Israel has a large problem. Labor Zionism, which for 70 years has dominated the Zionist movement, has generated a stalled and shackled economy. Efforts to salvage Israels socialist institutionswhich include pursuing supranational over national sovereignty and pursuing a peace process that embraces the slogan, "New Middle East"undermine the legitimacy of the nation and lead Israel into strategic paralysis and the previous governments "peace process." That peace process obscured the evidence of eroding national critical mass including a palpable sense of national exhaustionand forfeited strategic initiative. The loss of national critical mass was illustrated best by Israels efforts to draw in the United States to sell unpopular policies domestically, to agree to negotiate sovereignty over its capital, and to respond with resignation to a spate of terror so intense and tragic that it deterred Israelis from engaging in normal daily functions, such as commuting to work in buses.
Benjamin Netanyahus government comes in with a new set of ideas. While there are those who will counsel continuity, Israel has the opportunity to make a clean break; it can forge a peace process and strategy based on an entirely new intellectual foundation, one that restores strategic initiative and provides the nation the room to engage every possible energy on rebuilding Zionism, the starting point of which must be economic reform. To secure the nations streets and borders in the immediate future, Israel can:
* Work closely with Turkey and Jordan to contain, destabilize, and roll-back some of its most dangerous threats. This implies clean break from the slogan, "comprehensive peace" to a traditional concept of strategy based on balance of power.
* Change the nature of its relations with the Palestinians, including upholding the right of hot pursuit for self defense into all Palestinian areas and nurturing alternatives to Arafats exclusive grip on Palestinian society.
* Forge a new basis for relations with the United Statesstressing self-reliance, maturity, strategic cooperation on areas of mutual concern, and furthering values inherent to the West. This can only be done if Israel takes serious steps to terminate aid, which prevents economic reform.
This report is written with key passages of a possible speech marked TEXT, that highlight the clean break which the new government has an opportunity to make. The body of the report is the commentary explaining the purpose and laying out the strategic context of the passages.
A New Approach to Peace
Early adoption of a bold, new perspective on peace and security is imperative for the new prime minister. While the previous government, and many abroad, may emphasize "land for peace" which placed Israel in the position of cultural, economic, political, diplomatic, and military retreat the new government can promote Western values and traditions. Such an approach, which will be well received in the United States, includes "peace for peace," "peace through strength" and self reliance: the balance of power.
A new strategy to seize the initiative can be introduced:
TEXT:
We have for four years pursued peace based on a New Middle East. We in Israel cannot play innocents abroad in a world that is not innocent. Peace depends on the character and behavior of our foes. We live in a dangerous neighborhood, with fragile states and bitter rivalries. Displaying moral ambivalence between the effort to build a Jewish state and the desire to annihilate it by trading "land for peace" will not secure "peace now." Our claim to the land to which we have clung for hope for 2000 years--is legitimate and noble. It is not within our own power, no matter how much we concede, to make peace unilaterally. Only the unconditional acceptance by Arabs of our rights, especially in their territorial dimension, "peace for peace," is a solid basis for the future.
Israels quest for peace emerges from, and does not replace, the pursuit of its ideals. The Jewish peoples hunger for human rights burned into their identity by a 2000-year old dream to live free in their own land informs the concept of peace and reflects continuity of values with Western and Jewish tradition. Israel can now embrace negotiations, but as means, not ends, to pursue those ideals and demonstrate national steadfastness. It can challenge police states; enforce compliance of agreements; and insist on minimal standards of accountability.
Securing the Northern Border
Syria challenges Israel on Lebanese soil. An effective approach, and one with which American can sympathize, would be if Israel seized the strategic initiative along its northern borders by engaging Hizballah, Syria, and Iran, as the principal agents of aggression in Lebanon, including by:
* striking Syrias drug-money and counterfeiting infrastructure in Lebanon, all of which focuses on Razi Qanan.
* paralleling Syrias behavior by establishing the precedent that Syrian territory is not immune to attacks emanating from Lebanon by Israeli proxy forces.
* striking Syrian military targets in Lebanon, and should that prove insufficient, striking at select targets in Syria proper.
Israel also can take this opportunity to remind the world of the nature of the Syrian regime. Syria repeatedly breaks its word. It violated numerous agreements with the Turks, and has betrayed the United States by continuing to occupy Lebanon in violation of the Taef agreement in 1989. Instead, Syria staged a sham election, installed a quisling regime, and forced Lebanon to sign a "Brotherhood Agreement" in 1991, that terminated Lebanese sovereignty. And Syria has begun colonizing Lebanon with hundreds of thousands of Syrians, while killing tens of thousands of its own citizens at a time, as it did in only three days in 1983 in Hama.
Under Syrian tutelage, the Lebanese drug trade, for which local Syrian military officers receive protection payments, flourishes. Syrias regime supports the terrorist groups operationally and financially in Lebanon and on its soil. Indeed, the Syrian-controlled Bekaa Valley in Lebanon has become for terror what the Silicon Valley has become for computers. The Bekaa Valley has become one of the main distribution sources, if not production points, of the "supernote" counterfeit US currency so well done that it is impossible to detect.
Text:
Negotiations with repressive regimes like Syrias require cautious realism. One cannot sensibly assume the other sides good faith. It is dangerous for Israel to deal naively with a regime murderous of its own people, openly aggressive toward its neighbors, criminally involved with international drug traffickers and counterfeiters, and supportive of the most deadly terrorist organizations.
Given the nature of the regime in Damascus, it is both natural and moral that Israel abandon the slogan "comprehensive peace" and move to contain Syria, drawing attention to its weapons of mass destruction program, and rejecting "land for peace" deals on the Golan Heights.
Moving to a Traditional Balance of Power Strategy
TEXT:
We must distinguish soberly and clearly friend from foe. We must make sure that our friends across the Middle East never doubt the solidity or value of our friendship.
Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right as a means of foiling Syrias regional ambitions. Jordan has challenged Syria's regional ambitions recently by suggesting the restoration of the Hashemites in Iraq. This has triggered a Jordanian-Syrian rivalry to which Asad has responded by stepping up efforts to destabilize the Hashemite Kingdom, including using infiltrations. Syria recently signaled that it and Iran might prefer a weak, but barely surviving Saddam, if only to undermine and humiliate Jordan in its efforts to remove Saddam.
But Syria enters this conflict with potential weaknesses: Damascus is too preoccupied with dealing with the threatened new regional equation to permit distractions of the Lebanese flank. And Damascus fears that the 'natural axis' with Israel on one side, central Iraq and Turkey on the other, and Jordan, in the center would squeeze and detach Syria from the Saudi Peninsula. For Syria, this could be the prelude to a redrawing of the map of the Middle East which would threaten Syria's territorial integrity.
Since Iraq's future could affect the strategic balance in the Middle East profoundly, it would be understandable that Israel has an interest in supporting the Hashemites in their efforts to redefine Iraq, including such measures as: visiting Jordan as the first official state visit, even before a visit to the United States, of the new Netanyahu government; supporting King Hussein by providing him with some tangible security measures to protect his regime against Syrian subversion; encouraging through influence in the U.S. business community investment in Jordan to structurally shift Jordans economy away from dependence on Iraq; and diverting Syrias attention by using Lebanese opposition elements to destabilize Syrian control of Lebanon.
Most important, it is understandable that Israel has an interest supporting diplomatically, militarily and operationally Turkeys and Jordans actions against Syria, such as securing tribal alliances with Arab tribes that cross into Syrian territory and are hostile to the Syrian ruling elite.
King Hussein may have ideas for Israel in bringing its Lebanon problem under control. The predominantly Shia population of southern Lebanon has been tied for centuries to the Shia leadership in Najf, Iraq rather than Iran. Were the Hashemites to control Iraq, they could use their influence over Najf to help Israel wean the south Lebanese Shia away from Hizballah, Iran, and Syria. Shia retain strong ties to the Hashemites: the Shia venerate foremost the Prophets family, the direct descendants of which and < . . .>
There's a near perfect inverse relationship between Black Budget spending and national security.
The more we spend on secret domestic spying and covert action abroad, the weaker the U.S. becomes. It's been going that way for decades.
If the intercepts prove anything, it's that some Gen. Ripper type launched the attack on his own.
Might as well blame President Merkin Muffley for that errant SAC wing sent to bomb Russia to protect America's precious bodily fluids. Since the red line has been crossed -- doesn't matter who or why -- we might as well kill a lot of people in Syria, anyway. Shows resolve.
This is as insane as the plot line of "Dr. Strangelove"- psychotic Gen. Jack Ripper sets off WW3 to protect his precious bodily fluids. Some middling officer commanding an isolated Syrian Army unit in a northern suburb of Damascus fires off some chemical rounds, which is something the Syrian Defense Minister is clearly upset by, and everyone else has to die winning the war. Utterly insane.
The White House needs to release the intercepts so the rest of us can hear what was said, and make up our own minds - they should have done that five days ago, but didn't. Why not? Assad isn't the only one who isn't being transparent.
The original source of the intercept is Israeli intelligence. We can and should release it and wait for independent analysis and authentication before we do a thing. Here's the source for that: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/28/israeli-intelligence-intercepted-syria-chemical-talk
You know when fluoridation first began? Nineteen hundred and forty-six. Nineteen forty-six, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual. Certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core Commie works.
-- General Jack D. Ripper
I'll buy another personal Airbus 380 and a Boeing 747, just to celebrate
Thank you, America.
On second thought, make that two Boeings with this order.
(Response to question: Who wins if America bombs Syria?)
I had hopes for constructive change to CIA Counter-terrorism operations in 2008.
The Tsarnaev case points out the fatal lack of reform and control over U.S. covert operations. In particular, we now see that the Obama Administration has in fact not been successful in efforts to fix what the President previously characterized as "a systemic failure" of U.S. intelligence to prevent the entry of persons known to the CIA to be terrorists. That this obvious fact after the Boston Bombing is being pointed out on a blog and not in the major media also highlights that there has also been a failure of the corporate press, and its abdication of any meaningful role since 9/11 as public watchdog over these dangers.
At the beginning of the Obama Presidency, and that seems a long time ago, there seemed to have been some cause for hope for change after the 2009 Underwear bomber incident. Obama was reported to have been furious that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who was known to the CIA since the previous August, was allowed on a Xmas Day flight to Detroit at Amsterdam's Skocpol Airport. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2009/12/obama-systemic-failure-allowed-alleged-bomber-on-plane.html The President was quoted at the time as saying,
A new candor by the Administration appeared to have been signaled when, in early January 2010 Undersecretary of State Patrick Kennedy pretty much came out and admitted in public testimony to a Senate Committee that a decision had been made to permit the Underwear Bomber to keep a visa to enter the US even though he was a known intending terrorist. Here's the key section of Kennedy's testimony, that was widely ignored:
1/20/10: Statement of Patrick F. Kennedy, Under Secretary of State for Management - Before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary,
http://travel.state.gov/law/legal/testimony/testimony_4635.html - Cached - SimilarIn addition to these changes, the Department is reviewing the procedures and criteria used in the field to revoke visas and will issue new instructions to our officers. Revocation recommendations will be added as an element of reporting through the Visas Viper channel. We will be reiterating our guidance on use of the broad discretionary authority of visa officers to deny visas on security and other grounds. Instruction in appropriate use of this authority has been a fundamental part of officer training for several years.
The State Department has broad and flexible authority to revoke visas and we use that authority widely to protect our borders. Since 2001, we have revoked 51,000 visas for a variety of reasons, including over 1,700 for suspected links to terrorism. We have been actively using this authority as we perform internal scrubs of our data with watchlist information provided by partner agencies. For example, we are re-examining information in our CLASS database on individuals with potential connections to terrorist activity or support for such activity. . . We recognize the gravity of the threat we face and are working intensely with our colleagues from other agencies to ensure that when the U.S. Government obtains information that a person may pose a threat to our security, that person does not hold a visa.
We will use revocation authority prior to interagency consultation in circumstances where we believe there is an immediate threat. Revocation is an important tool in our border security arsenal. At the same time, expeditious coordination with our national security partners is not to be underestimated. There have been numerous cases where our unilateral and uncoordinated revocation would have disrupted important investigations that were underway by one of our national security partners. They had the individual under investigation and our revocation action would have disclosed the U.S. Governments interest in the individual and ended our colleagues ability to quietly pursue the case and identify terrorists plans and co-conspirators.
But, apparently, even after all the publicity that Umar had been assisted onto the flight, the Anwar al-Awlaki operation in Yemen stayed open for business, as we found out later with the AP embroglio over the wire service's report published in March that the Yemen AQ bomb-making cell had been penetrated by the CIA and Saudi intelligence double-agents. http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/05/15/184274166/leaks-bombs-and-double-agents-more-on-that-ap-story The droning of al-Awlaki and several other highly visible AQ figures appeared to have put an end to this sort of attract and trap operation involving CIA double-agents.
The Boston Bombing in April, nevertheless, is yet another instance where we are told that information about a designated terrorist let into the U.S. wasn't shared or fell through the cracks -- even though Tamarlan Tsarnaev was originally nominated as a terrorist by the CIA, and his name (with alternative spellings) appeared on three watch lists before he traveled and returned through US customs following his adventure in Russia and Chechnya -- yet, again, nothing was done to even monitor him and prevent another attack.
Nothing has changed, and this is just sickening.
Your world view, if not an aggregation including poor people is that of a corporate economist
The US has fallen by most indices of life at the middle to something like 18th in the world. For the bottom quintile, life is very much like a developing country, for those at the bottom 10 percent, it's a 3rd world country. That's a fact.
Yes, things are still rosy at the top. But, below that, there's growing insecurity. And below that, misery. But, if you're not a consumer, you don't exist in the view of the corporate economists.
For once, I agree with you. When actual US terrorist attacks occurred, NSA spying was useless.
For several decades, every real mass casualty "foreign" terrorist attack that has succeeded inside the US has been carried out by groups and individuals associated with CIA covert operations. In some of these, particularly 9/11, the NSA was conducting surveillance on some of the principal participants, but the FBI was prevented from accessing this data by another federal agency, the Central Intelligence Agency.
Consider this, for instance, about the hijackers who commandeered Flt. 77 on 9/11: http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=journals&uid=143890
(FBI Director) Mueller's claims omit those key facts. The Director instead stated that Khalid al-Midhar was being monitored by intelligence agencies, but they lost track of him, Mueller said. http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2013/0613/Secret-NSA-program-could-have-derailed-9-11-attacks-FBI-director-says-video
In each major terrorist attack that occurred here during the last twenty years, one or more of the perpetrators was known directly to the CIA and identified as a terrorist, yet they somehow managed to enter the US and carry out attacks. This is true going back to WTC '93, and includes 9/11, the string of Anwar al-Awlaki-related incidents (which included 9/11 and the Underwear Bomber), and the Tsarnaev brothers. In other words, almost all real terrorism that has caused civilian casualties in America in recent times has been carried out by "our" terrorists, or more accurately, individuals known by the CIA to be part of terrorist groups.
Let's look at the older Boston Bomber, Tamarlan Tsarnaev. Tamarlan was nominated by the CIA as a terrorist in the fall of 2011 after a Massachusetts triple-murder in which the older brother is now implicated in the killing of his closest friend. Nonetheless, while an active murder investigation was ongoing, Tamarlan was allowed to leave the country to travel to Russia and Chechnya where he met with Islamic militants, and then hastily returned when his local contact with the militants was killed by the Russian security forces. Yet, inexplicably, he was never stopped or questioned during these travels, despite being on three terrorist watch lists. Again, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was designated a terrorist at about the same time he is alleged to have been involved in a triple murder, but at the time whatever was known to the CIA was never turned over to Boston Police or the FBI. In addition, he was not stopped when he left or returned to the US, despite the fact that he is not a US Citizen and was listed on the watchlist: http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/04/27/17945669-boston-bombing-suspects-mother-was-in-us-terror-database?lite
If, after 9/11, we had simply curtailed the CIA's use of terrorists, instead of hastily passing the Patriot Act, we wouldn't be having this debate about NSA. Instead, the government threw money at NSA contractors to spy on everyone, Bush invaded Iraq, and the CIA continued along its merry way, running known terrorists in and out of the country who proceed to carry out attacks with seeming impunity.
Unfortunately, American casualties from terrorist attacks is seen as acceptable collateral damage of CIA covert operations (or, treated as acceptable by US policymakers, who never really change the way intelligence agencies do business) and are used as a pretense to go to war (not necessarily against those who actually attack us) and to build up a police state apparatus inside the US.
This is the real "intelligence failure" of U.S. Counter-terrorism. The lies told to obscure and redirect responsibility for these losses are all the more revolting for the fact that they are so transparent.
Institutional conservative.
If eating live kittens for breakfast were an established part of American government and economy, Obama would sacrifice anything to preserve it. Even kittens . . .
Paleocon/Neocon constellation rising as darkness descends over the Syrian horizon?
Watching the stars and sacrificing bird entrails to find a clue to U.S. policy and intentions.
He'll probably pick up some Russian language and habits fairly quickly. Here's a useful phrase:
Ваше заявление о предоставлении убежища было одобрено, товарищ Эдвард Сноуден. Добро пожаловать в страну свободы и братского мира. Теперь, вы должны научиться, как водка.("Your asylum application has been approved, comrade Edward Snowden. Welcome to the land of freedom and fraternal peace. Now, you will have to learn to like Vodka."
He should start with the word водка.
Profile Information
Member since: Wed May 5, 2004, 09:44 AMNumber of posts: 36,418