in concert with the PNACers. Israel isn't at all terrorized by the US. I distinctly recall Netanyahu rushing over here on Sept 12 with his little list of countries we shouldn't wait one second to pulverize; he was all over the TV with it and there were many posts here about in what overly eager, poor taste that was. Netanyahu's testimony to Congress is after the excerpts about the Office of Special Plans:
The spies who pushed for war
Julian Borger reports on the shadow rightwing intelligence network set up in Washington to second-guess the CIA and deliver a justification for toppling Saddam Hussein by force
Thursday July 17, 2003
The Guardian
As the CIA director, George Tenet, arrived at the Senate yesterday to give secret testimony on the Niger uranium affair, it was becoming increasingly clear in Washington that the scandal was only a small, well-documented symptom of a complete breakdown in US intelligence that helped steer America into war.
It represents the Bush administration's second catastrophic intelligence failure. But the CIA and FBI's inability to prevent the September 11 attacks was largely due to internal institutional weaknesses. This time the implications are far more damaging for the White House, which stands accused of politicising and contaminating its own source of intelligence.
According to former Bush officials, all defence and intelligence sources, senior members of the administration created a shadow agency of Pentagon analysts staffed mainly by ideological amateurs to compete with the CIA and its military counterpart, the Defence Intelligence Agency. <snip>
The exchange of information continued a long-standing relationship Mr Feith and other Washington neo-conservatives had with Israel's Likud party. In 1996, he and Richard Perle - now an influential Pentagon figure - served as advisers to the then Likud leader, Binyamin Netanyahu. In a policy paper they wrote, entitled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, the two advisers said that
Saddam would have to be destroyed, and Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Iran would have to be overthrown or destabilised, for Israel to be truly safe. <snip>
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,999737,00.html---
No weapons in Iraq? We'll find them in Iran
By Neil Mackay Sunday Herald
Sunday 01 June 2003
Ironically, it was the ultra-hawkish US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld who let the cat out of the bag when he said on Wednesday: 'It is possible Iraqi leaders decided they would destroy (WMDs) prior to the conflict.' If that was true then Saddam had fulfilled the criteria of UN resolution 1441 and there was absolutely no legal right for the US and UK to go to war. Rumsfeld's claim that Iraq might have destroyed its weapons makes a mockery of the way the US treated the UN's chief weapons inspector Dr Hans Blix. The US effectively told him he wasn't up to the job and the Iraqis had fooled him.
<snip>
With September 11 as his ideological backdrop, Rumsfeld decided in autumn 2001 to establish a new intelligence agency, independent of the CIA and the Pentagon, called
the Office of Special Plans (OSP). He put his deputy, Wolfowitz, in charge. The pair were dissatisfied with the failure of the CIA among others to provide firm proof of both Saddam's alleged WMD arsenal and links to al-Qaeda.
<snip>
That was the policy blueprint, but to deliver it Rumsfeld turned to the Office of Special Plans. Put simply, the OSP was told to come up with the evidence of WMD to give credence to US military intervention. But what do conventional intelligence experts make of the OSP? Colonel Patrick Lang is a former chief of human intelligence for the Pentagon's Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) in the 1990s. He was also the DIA's chief of Middle East intelligence and was regularly in Iraq. He said of the OSP : 'This office had a great deal of influence in a number of places in Washington in a way that seemed to me to be excessive and rather ill-advised. 'The regular organisations of the intelligence community have very rigorous rules for how you evaluate information and resources, and tend to take a conservative view of analytic positions because they're going to dictate government decisions. 'That wasn't satisfactory in Secretary Rumsfeld's Pentagon so he set up a separate office to review this data, and the people in this office, although they're described as intelligence people, are by and large congressional staffers. They seemed to me not to have deceived intentionally but to have seen in the data what they believe is true. I think it's a very risky thing to do.'
<snip>
In a further curious twist,
an intelligence source claimed the real 'over-arching strategic reason' for the war was the road map to peace, designed to settle the running sore of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The source said: 'I believe that Britain and America see the road map as fundamental. They
were being told by Ariel Sharon's government that Israel would not play ball until Saddam was out of the picture. That was the condition. So he had to go.' <snip>
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0601-02.htm---
<snip>
"They are running their own intelligence operation, including covert action, and are using contractors outside the government to do some of the leg work," said a former top CIA official. "Their area of work has been concentrated on Iraq, which is why the intelligence on WMD was so bad, but they have a much broader portfolio. The office is undergoing some scrutiny from inside the government given its poor track record and the lack of 'sanity checking' their products with the intelligence community.
A lot of material they produce is not shared with CIA, not coordinated, and finds its way into public policy statements by the likes of Rumsfeld and Cheney."<snip>
more . . .
http://www.forward.com/issues/2003/03.06.06/news6.html---
White man's burden - EXCELLENT article in the Israeli Ha'aretz to bookmark
Edited on Wed Jul-09-03 10:29 PM by Tinoire
This excellent analysis is an absolute keeper!
<snip>
In the course of the past year, a new belief has emerged in the town: the belief in war against Iraq. That ardent faith was disseminated by a small group of 25 or 30 neoconservatives, almost all of them Jewish, almost all of them intellectuals (a partial list: Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, William Kristol, Eliot Abrams, Charles Krauthammer), people who are mutual friends and cultivate one another and are convinced that political ideas are a major driving force of history. They believe that the right political idea entails a fusion of morality and force, human rights and grit. The philosophical underpinnings of the Washington neoconservatives are the writings of Machiavelli, Hobbes and Edmund Burke. They also admire Winston Churchill and the policy pursued by Ronald Reagan. They tend to read reality in terms of the failure of the 1930s (Munich) versus the success of the 1980s (the fall of the Berlin Wall).
Are they wrong? Have they committed an act of folly in leading Washington to Baghdad? They don't think so. They continue to cling to their belief. They are still pretending that everything is more or less fine. That things will work out. Occasionally, though, they seem to break out in a cold sweat. This is no longer an academic exercise, one of them says, we are responsible for what is happening. The ideas we put forward are now affecting the lives of millions of people. So there are moments when you're scared. You say, Hell, we came to help, but maybe we made a mistake.
<snip>
((William Kristol))
Kristol is pleasant-looking, of average height, in his late forties. In the past 18 months he has used his position as editor of the right-wing Weekly Standard and his status as one of the leaders of the neoconservative circle in Washington to induce the White House to do battle against Saddam Hussein. Because Kristol is believed to exercise considerable influence on the president, Vice President Richard Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, he is also perceived as having been instrumental in getting Washington to launch this all-out campaign against Baghdad. Sitting behind the stacks of books that cover his desk at the offices of the Weekly Standard in Northwest Washington, he tries to convince me that he is not worried. It is simply inconceivable to him that America will not win. In that event, the consequences would be catastrophic. No one wants to think seriously about that possibility.
<snip>
((Charles Krauthammer))
And what if the experiment fails? What if America is defeated?
This war will enhance the place of America in the world for the coming generation, Krauthammer says. Its outcome will shape the world for the next 25 years. There are three possibilities. If the United States wins quickly and without a bloodbath, it will be a colossus that will dictate the world order. If the victory is slow and contaminated, it will be impossible to go on to other Arab states after Iraq. It will stop there. But
if America is beaten, the consequences will be catastrophic. Its deterrent capability will be weakened, its friends will abandon it and it will become insular. Extreme instability will be engendered in the Middle East.
You don't really want to think about what will happen, Krauthammer says looking me straight in the eye. But just because that's so, I am positive we will not lose. Because the administration understands the implications. The president understands that everything is riding on this. So he will throw everything we've got into this. He will do everything that has to be done. George W. Bush will not let America lose. <snip>
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=280279&sw=neocon---
The CIA declined to say how the agency eventually obtained the documents. Officials at several other U.S. agencies, including the State Department, declined to say whether another U.S. government agency possessed or viewed them before Bush's speech last January.http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20030716/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/iraq_uranium ---
Published on Wednesday, May 7, 2003 in the Times/UK
America's Weapons Evidence Flawed, Say Spies
by Tim Reid in Washington
<snip>
Present and former CIA officials, quoted in The New York Times and The New Yorker magazine, claimed that a small number of powerful neo-conservative ideologues in the Pentagon were so determined to prove the existence of a banned weapons program and links to al-Qaeda that they manipulated intelligence.
According to a report written by Seymour Hersh, the veteran New Yorker investigative reporter, the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans (OSP) relied too heavily on suspect intelligence provided by Iraqi defectors with links to the Iraqi National Congress, an opposition group headed by Ahmad Chalabi, an Iraqi exile.
<snip>
One former CIA official told Mr Hersh:
“One of the reasons I left was my sense that they (OSP) were using the intelligence from the CIA and other agencies only when it fits their agenda. They were so crazed and so far out and so difficult to reason with . . . as if they were on a mission from God. If it doesn’t fit their theory, they don’t want to accept it.” <snip>
Patrick Lang, a former head of Middle Eastern affairs in the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence agency, told Nicholas Kristof, of The New York Times, that when experts wrote reports skeptical about the existence of weapons of mass destruction “they were encouraged to think it over again”.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0507-09.htm---
Published on Sunday, June 8, 2003 by The Sunday Herald
Revealed: The Secret Cabal Which Spun for Blair
by Neil Mackay
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/unmovic/2003/0608secret.htmBritain ran a covert 'dirty tricks' operation designed specifically to produce misleading intelligence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction to give the UK a justifiable excuse to wage war on Iraq. Operation Rockingham, established by the Defense Intelligence Staff within the Ministry of Defense in 1991, was set up to 'cherry-pick' intelligence proving an active Iraqi WMD program and to ignore and quash intelligence which indicated that Saddam's stockpiles had been destroyed or wound down.
The existence of Operation Rockingham has been confirmed by Scott Ritter, the former UN chief weapons inspector, and a US military intelligence officer. He knew members of the Operation Rockingham team and described the unit as 'dangerous', but insisted they were not 'rogue agents' acting without government backing. 'This policy was coming from the very highest levels,' he added.
<snip>
Sources in both the British and US intelligence community are now equating the JIC with the Office of Special Plans (OSP) in the US Pentagon. The OSP was set up by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to gather intelligence which would prove the case for war. In a staggering attack on the OSP,
former CIA officer Larry Johnson told the Sunday Herald the OSP was 'dangerous for US national security and a threat to world peace', adding that it 'lied and manipulated intelligence to further its agenda of removing Saddam'. He added:
'It's a group of ideologues with pre-determined notions of truth and reality. They take bits of intelligence to support their agenda and ignore anything contrary. They should be eliminated.' Johnson said that to describe Saddam as an 'imminent threat' to the West was 'laughable and idiotic'. He said many CIA officers were in 'great distress' over the way intelligence had been treated. 'We've entered the world of George Orwell,' Johnson added. 'I'm disgusted. The truth has to be told. We can't allow our leaders to use bogus information to justify war.' <snip>
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/unmovic/2003/0608secret.htm---
Posted June 19, 2003
More Missing Intelligence
by Robert Dreyfuss
<snip>
According to the former official, also feeding information to the Office of Special Plans was
a secret, rump unit established last year in the office of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel. This unit, which paralleled Shulsky's--and which has not previously been reported--
prepared intelligence reports on Iraq in English (not Hebrew) and forwarded them to the Office of Special Plans. It was created in Sharon's office, not inside Israel's Mossad intelligence service, because the Mossad--which prides itself on extreme professionalism--had views closer to the CIA's, not the Pentagon's, on Iraq. This secretive unit, and not the Mossad, may well have been the source of the forged documents purporting to show that Iraq tried to purchase yellowcake uranium for weapons from Niger in West Africa, according to the former official.
<snip>
Astonishingly, the Bush Administration did not even bother to prepare and internally publish an intelligence estimate about postwar Iraq. (An "estimate," in intelligence jargon, is a formal evaluation produced after sifting, sorting and analyzing various bits and pieces of raw intelligence. So-called National Intelligence Estimates are produced by a unit that reports immediately to Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet.)
"Back in the old days, there would have been an estimate," says Raymond McGovern, the twenty-seven-year CIA warrior who formed Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity this past January.
"In their arrogance, they didn't worry about it." <snip>
Other sources concur.
"There was no intelligence estimate done, and there weren't a lot of questions being asked," says Melvin Goodman, a former CIA analyst with the Center for International Policy. "And I know for a fact that at CIA and NSA , none of them thought that postwar Iraq would be governable." Goodman says that CIA and DIA experts on Iraq were not called in by the Pentagon, and no intelligence roundtables were held to evaluate the situation. Most of the intelligence about how easily the INC and its allies could assume power in Iraq was coming from the INC itself, says a former State Department official. "And I know for a fact that when the subject came up, intelligence officers were extraordinarily skeptical of the exiles' information."
<snip>
On the eve of the invasion, there was something akin to panic at the Norfolk,Virginia-based US Joint Forces Command, which was responsible for supporting the Pentagon's Iraq task force, then headed by retired Gen. Jay Garner.
"They were scared shitless," says a former US official who was in close contact with the command.
"They were making it up as they went along." He adds, "There was a great deal of ignorance. They didn't know the names of the tribes, much less how they relate to each other. They didn't have the expertise, and they didn't have enough time to assemble the expertise."
<snip>
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030707&s=dreyfuss ---
Bush 'skewed facts to justify attack on Iraq'
A growing number of US national security professionals are accusing the Bush Administration of slanting the facts and hijacking the intelligence apparatus to justify its rush to war in Iraq.
A key target is a four-person Pentagon team that reviewed material gathered by other intelligence outfits for any missed bits that might have tied Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to banned weapons or terror groups.
This team, self-mockingly called the cabal, "cherry-picked the intelligence stream" in a bid to portray Iraq as an imminent threat, said Patrick Lang, a former head of worldwide human intelligence gathering for the Defence Intelligence Agency, which coordinates military intelligence.
...
The INC, which brought together groups opposed to Saddam, worked closely with the Pentagon to build a case against Iraq. "There are current intelligence officials who believe it is a scandal," Mr Cannistraro said.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/05/31/1054177765483.htmlCheney Investigated Forged Niger Uranuium Document
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush, and other very senior policy makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy makers at the table.
Cheney got into the operational side of intelligence as well. Reports in late 2001 that Iraq had tried to acquire uranium from Niger stirred such intense interest that his office let it be known he wanted them checked out. So, with the CIA as facilitator, a retired U.S. ambassador was dispatched to Niger in February 2002 to investigate. He found nothing to substantiate the report and lots to call it into question. There the matter rested – until last summer, after the Bush administration made the decision for war in Iraq.
...
http://feeds.bignewsnetwork.com/?sid=6e9d5502599dc6a2http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=5858&mesg_id=5858&page=Plans For Iraq Attack Began On 9/11
(CBS) CBS News has learned that barely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq — even though there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks.
That's according to notes taken by aides who were with Rumsfeld in the National Military Command Center on Sept. 11 – notes that show exactly where the road toward war with Iraq began, reports CBS News National Security Correspondent David Martin.
...
Now, nearly one year later, there is still very little evidence Iraq was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks. But if these notes are accurate, that didn't matter to Rumsfeld.
"Go massive," the notes quote him as saying. "Sweep it all up. Things related and not." (Sec. of Defense Donald Rumsfeld hours after 9/11 attack)
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/09/04/september11/main520830.shtmlhttp://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=53315&mesg_id=53315&page=A call to maintain CIA independence.
As the White House searches for every possible excuse to go to war with Iraq, pressure has been building on the intelligence agencies to deliberately slant estimates to fit a political agenda. In this case, the agencies are being pressed to find a casus belli for war, whether or not one exists.
"Basically, cooked information is working its way into high-level pronouncements, and there's a lot of unhappiness about it in intelligence, especially among analysts at the CIA," Vince Cannistraro, the agency's former head of counterterrorism, told The Guardian, a London newspaper.
This confirms what Knight-Ridder reporters found: "A growing number of military officers, intelligence professionals and diplomats privately have deep misgivings about the administration's double-time march toward war," the news service reported recently. "They charge that the administration squelches dissenting views and that intelligence analysts are under intense pressure to produce reports supporting the White House's argument that Saddam poses such an immediate threat to the United States that pre-emptive military action is necessary."
...
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/2002-10-24-oped-bamford_x.htmU.S. Insiders Say Iraq Intel Deliberately Skewed
...
The DIA was "exploited and abused and bypassed in the process of making the case for war in Iraq based on the presence of WMD," or weapons of mass destruction, he added in a phone interview. He said the CIA had "no guts at all" to resist the allegedly deliberate skewing of intelligence by a Pentagon that he said was now dominating U.S. foreign policy.
Vince Cannistraro, a former chief of Central Intelligence Agency counterterrorist operations, said he knew of serving intelligence officers who blame the Pentagon for playing up "fraudulent" intelligence, "a lot of it sourced from the Iraqi National Congress of Ahmad Chalabi."
...
They believe the administration, before going to war, had a "moral obligation to use the best information available, not just information that fits your preconceived ideas."
CHEMICAL WEAPONS REPORT 'SIMPLY WRONG'
The top Marine Corps officer in Iraq, Lt. Gen. James Conway, said on Friday U.S. intelligence was "simply wrong" in leading military commanders to fear troops were likely to be attacked with chemical weapons in the March invasion of Iraq that ousted Saddam.
Richard Perle, a Chalabi backer and member of the Defense Policy Board that advises Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, defended the four-person unit in a television interview.
...
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=578&ncid=578&e=2&u=/nm/20030530/ts_nm/iraq_intelligence_dcCIA had doubts on Iraq link to al-Qaida
The debunking of the Bush administration's pre-war certainties on Iraq gathered pace yesterday when it emerged that the CIA knew for months that a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida was highly unlikely.
As President George Bush was forced for the second time in days to defend the decision to go to war, a new set of leaks from CIA officials suggested a tendency in the White House to suppress or ignore intelligence findings which did not shore up the case for war.
...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,974182,00.htmlEx-CIA Officers Questioning Iraq Data
A small group composed mostly of retired CIA officers is appealing to colleagues still inside to go public with any evidence the Bush administration is slanting intelligence to support its case for war with Iraq.
Members of the group contend the Bush administration has released information on Iraq that meets only its ends -- while ignoring or withholding contrary reporting.
They also say the administration's public evidence about the immediacy of Iraq's threat to the United States and its alleged ties to al-Qaida is unconvincing, and accuse policy-makers of pushing out some information that does not meet an intelligence professional's standards of proof.
"It's been cooked to a recipe, and the recipe is high policy," said Ray McGovern, a 27-year CIA veteran who briefed top Reagan administration security officials before retiring in 1990. "That's why a lot of my former colleagues are holding their noses these days." ---
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20030314/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_iraq_intelligence_4http://www.democraticunderground.com/duforum/DCForumID61/18413.htmlPublic was misled, claim ex-CIA men
A GROUP of former US intelligence officials has written to President Bush claiming that the US Congress and the American public were misled about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction before the war.
The group’s members, most of them former CIA analysts, say that they have close contacts withsenior officials working inside the US intelligence agencies, who have told them that intelligence was“cooked” to persuade Congress to authorise the war.
The manipulation of intelligence has, they say, produced “a policy and intelligence fiasco of monumental proportions”. They write in the letter to Mr Bush: “While there have been occasions in the past when intelligence has been deliberately warped for political purposes, never before has such warping been used in such a systematic way to mislead our elected representatives into voting to authorise launching a war.
“You may not realise the extent of the current ferment within the intelligence community and particularly the CIA. In intelligence, there is one unpardonable sin — cooking intelligence to the recipe of high policy. There is ample indication that this has been done in Iraq.”
...
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,5944-698028,00.htmlMEMORANDUM FOR: The President
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0207-04.htmU.S. diplomats also tried to stop this invasion:
U.S. Diplomat's Letter of Resignation
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/27/international/27WEB-TNAT.htmlLetter of Resignation (Mary Wright)
http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/marywright.aspU.S. Mongolian Diplomat Resigns Over Iraq (Fourth U.S. Diplomat)
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=542&e=84&u=/ap/20030327/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/war_diplomat_resigns_2Third U.S. Diplomat Resigns Over Iraq Policy
http://truthout.org/docs_03/032303G.shtmlSecond US Diplomat Resigns in Protest
http://www.wagingpeace.org/articles/03.03/0314krieger_diplo_resign.htmU.S. diplomat resigns over Iraq war plans
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N10105063.htmNiger-Uranium Timeline
http://www.deanforamerica.com/site/PageServer?pagename=niger_timelineTHE BUSH ADMINISTRATION AND WMDs: THEN AND NOW
http://www.deanforamerica.com/site/PageServer?pagename=bush_wmd_summary ---
Richard Perle
In 1968 the neocons backed the late Senator Hubert Humphrey from Minnesota for president. In 1972, they mobilized their support behind the late Senator Henry Jackson from Washington. Both Humphrey and Jackson represented staunch anti-Soviet and pro-Israeli positions in the party...Senator Jackson's aides, Richard Perle and Elliott Abrams, who later became major figures in the Reagan foreign policy team, attempted to torpedo any effort by the Nixon and Carter administrations to improve relations with the Soviet Union or to launch peace efforts in the Middle East. From Jackson's office, the two led the campaign to use the issue of Jewish immigration from the Soviet Union to sabotage detente between Washington and Moscow...The neoconservatives formed the Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM) in 1973, aimed at rallying anti-Soviet and pro-Israeli Democrats in opposition to the McGovern liberals. That year also saw the beginning of the neoconservative drift toward the Republican Party, whose leaders saw in recruitment of the neocons an opportunity to improve Republican status in the media and in academic circles...It was the Carter administration's foreign policy agenda, including its efforts to improve the relationship with the Soviets and to accommodate the national interests of the Palestinians, that accelerated the political transition of the neocons from the Democratic to the Republican Party. Carter did not bring any members of the CDM into his administration...
The CDM, with the help of neoconservative columnists like Krautharnmer and Safire and of the New Republic, was the driving force behind a coordinated effort to weaken public support for Carter. For example, Michael Ledeen...whose name would surface later as one of the instigators of the IranContra affair (a note here - he was the Mossad-CIA link during the Iran-Contra scandal, and the man who got convicted spy J Pollard his Department of the Navy job) wrote an article in the New Republic which revealed ties between the late Billy Carter, the president's alcoholic brother, and Libyan government officials...At the same time, members of the CDM and other neoconservatives played a leading role in shaping the agenda of the Reagan administration...In addition to Kirkpatrick, who got her job as US representative to the UN after an article she published in Commentary caught Reagan's interest, other neocons occupied top positions in the Reagan foreign policy team. One was Max Kampelman, a former aide to Humphrey who was appointed to the position of director of arms control, and who was later replaced by another neocon, Kenneth Adelman. Richard Perle became the assistant secretary of defense. Richard Pipes, a regular Commentary contributor, joined the National Security Council. Elliot Abrams served as assistant secretary of state for human rights and later as assistant secretary for hemispheric affairs, where he played an active role in the Iran-Contra affair...it was the end of the Cold War that spelled disaster to the neocons, now at risk of being deprived of their favorite enemy...Enter the Middle Eastern bogeyman. - neoconservative intellectuals have focused on the need for the US to confront the new transnational enemy from the East, radical Arab nationalism and Islamic "fundamentalism," or what Krauthammer termed the "global intifada." The operational implication of this type of reasoning is that the original intifada can be forgotten. The neocons' main antagonists in the successful effort to get the United States to start shooting in the campaign to contain Saddam were the so-called "paleoconservatives," such as Pat Buchanan and Joseph Sobran, who since the end of the Cold War had been advocating a less activist American foreign policy...Most US proponents of sanctions, whether liberal or conservative, feared that a war in which thousands of Arabs died at American hands would, in the long run, increasingly isolate Washington in the region. Ironically, the only way to prevent such negative results of the neocon agenda would be decisive efforts by the Bush administration to follow up the rollback of Saddam with an Israeli-Palestinian settlement based upon land for peace. It is just such efforts, however, that the neocons can be counted upon to oppose..."
That was 1991 - the neocons kept on trying, and got their big chance after the G W Bush victory and 9/11.
A few more details about the main characters:
<snipped, you'll have to read the rest here:
http://neoconconjob.blogspot.com/> ---
An entire history to be found here:
PNAC Links Archive+++++
More here:
The spies who pushed for war
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=18394&mesg_id=18394&page=#18768Matcom's Dad (Ex CIA) Weighs In On "SPIES WHO PUSHED FOR WAR"
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=58441#58683BFEE/PNAC Mob's sleazy "Office of Special Plans" exposed by Guardian
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=56016===================================
HEARING OF THE
HOUSE GOVERNMENT REFORM COMMITTEE
September 12, 2002
BENJAMIN NETANYAHU, FORMER ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER
<<This is only Kucinich’s part but the other parts are as interesting- this is the only part I have readily handy>>
MR. NETANYAHU: I'm not prying into privileged dossiers. There is this thing, need to know, and I don't really need to know right now. But I think that you can be sure that when I did need to know there was a constant upgrading of these weapons, constant upgrading of these weapons, constant efforts to make them more lethal and to expand the reach of the delivery systems to deliver them.
REP. KUCINICH: I would respectfully suggest to the prime minister, notwithstanding the great affection I have for Mr. Prime Minister, that there is a need to know. If the United States is being called upon to launch preemptive action against Iraq, there is a need to know the evidence. Because I share the concern that other members have articulated here about the effects that a preemptive attack on Iraq by the United States would have not only on the people of our country who will be called upon to wage that, and innocent civilians, but also the effect that it would have on Israel.
Now, you've stated in your remarks that if the United States launched a preemptive attack on Iraq, that Iraq and Saddam Hussein, as you described the gas, would be expected to launch a counterattack on Israel.
If the United States does not launch a preemptive attack on the state of Iraq, do you see any indication that Iraq is prepared to launch an attack on Israel?
MR. NETANYAHU: First of all, let me comment on when I said I don't need to know, I meant I don't need that kind of detailed information that always involves just by the nature of the information some indication of sources, and I for one try to avoid that when I'm not in office. That's what I meant.
But I also say that if you connect the dots, you know, here's a man who from the minute he achieved power is trying to create a nuclear weapon. Twenty years ago he's very close to producing it. He's foiled. He changes the technology to centrifuges that will prevent him being foiled again. We know that he's taking in nuclear technologists and nuclear technology from various countries. We know that he is developing the means to deliver these weapons. We have defectors who describe how committed he is to this above all else.
So we have all these dots and we say, well, we don't know exactly what is happening. You know, it's like you're about to see somebody plunge the knife into someone, you're looking through a keyhole. You followed a murderer. You know that he is suspected that he's already killed a few people and you see him trailing somebody and you're trailing him. He shuts the door. You're looking through the keyhole and you see him grasping the throat of this person, raising the knife and then the light goes out and the next thing you know a body is found. And you can say, "Well, you know, I didn't actually see him en flagrante, in the act, if you will," but I think, Mr. Kucinich, that it is simply not reflecting the reality to assume that Saddam isn't feverishly working to develop nuclear weapons, as we speak.
REP. KUCINICH: But the question I had though is do you have any indication that Saddam Hussein is going to attack Israel?
MR. NETANYAHU: Oh, if he will attack Israel.
REP. KUCINICH: Absent a preemptive launch by the United States.
MR. NETANYAHU: I think it's -- I cannot tell you that he will attack Israel at a particular time. I think what you have to assume, and this is a fair assumption, that he doesn't have to necessarily directly attack Israel. What you can do and what these people do, for example, the Taliban regime didn't directly attack the United States. It harbored a terrorist group that did the job for them. The Taliban regime did not have its intelligence officers casing the joint, so to speak. Somebody else did it for them.
If Saddam has a nuclear weapon, he could use it to threaten or to actually detonate a nuclear regime directly or indirectly. He doesn't have to necessarily do it and undertake the risk of a response by Israel or by anyone else.
And this is precisely the problem. The problem is you're not dealing with Iraq alone; you're dealing with a terror network. You're dealing with a system where you have proxies. We now live in a world where these regimes have proxies.
REP. KUCINICH: I know my time has run out. Mr. Netanyahu, thank you. I just want to ask one last question, and that is you talk about a network of terror. Are there any other nations that you would recommend that the United States launch preemptive attacks upon at this point?
MR. NETANYAHU: No, the issue is not -- first of all are there other nations that are developing nuclear weapons? Yes.
REP. KUCINICH: Should we launch other preemptive attacks?
MR. NETANYAHU: First let me say what they are and then let me make a suggestion on how to proceed.
REP. KUCINICH: Thank you.
MR. NETANYAHU: The answer is categorically yes. The two nations that are vying and competing with each other who will be the first to achieve nuclear weapons is Iraq and Iran and Iran, by the way, is also outpacing Iraq in the development of ballistic missile systems that they hope will reach the Eastern Seaboard of the United States within 15 years. So I guess that doesn't include California but it includes Washington.
A third nation, by the way, is Libya as well. Libya, while no one is watching, under the cloak is trying very rapidly to build an atomic bomb capability.
So you have here now three nations. Not surprisingly, all three have been implicated in the past in terrorist activities using the clandestine means of terror and proxy.
Now, the question that you ask I think is vital, it's important, and that is what do you do about it. You can fight all of them. You have to dismantle the network and the question is do you dismantle all of it at once. No, you didn't. The first thing you did in facing the -- after the wake-up call on September 11th was that you took on the first regime, the obvious regime that directly perpetrated that catastrophe. You removed the Taliban regime and you scattered al- Qaeda, although it has not been completely destroyed yet.
Now the question is what's your next step, knowing that three of these nations are developing nuclear weapons. This is not a hypothesis; it is fact. Iraq, Iran and Libya are racing to develop nuclear weapons.
So now what is the next step? I believe that the next step is to choose -- it's not a question of whether you have to take action but what kind of action and against whom. I think of the three, Saddam is probably in many ways a linchpin, because it is possible to take out this regime with military action and the reverberations of what happens with the collapse of Saddam's regime could very well create an implosion in a neighbor regime like Iran for the simple reason that Iran has, I don't want to say a middle class but it has a very large population that might bring down the regime, just as has brought down the shah's regime.
So I think that the choice of going after Iraq is like removing a brick that holds a lot of other bricks and might cause this structure to crumble. It is not guaranteed. The assumption of regime removal in Iraq, an implosion in Iran, an implosion in Libya is an assumption. It is not guaranteed. But if I have to choose should there be military action first against Iraq or first against Iran, I would choose exactly what the president had chosen, to go after Iraq.
REP. KUCINICH: Who would you choose second?
MR. NETANYAHU: I would wait and see what the effects are. And I think that the effects could be quite mighty and startling. This region, the political culture in this region is not one, and in these societies is not one of respecting force; it is worshipping force and the determination, resolution of the United States in applying it.
I think that this could have beneficial effects that might preclude the application of further military action. I'm not saying that you should disavow it from the start, but I'm saying that the more resolutely and quickly you act now, the more victories you gain up front, the more victories you might end up gaining later without the need to apply such overt military power.
http://www.iraqwatch.org/government/us/hearingspreparedstatements/hgrc-091202.htm
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