AIPAC Ordered Bush To Attack Iran

By Gordon Duff
In a unique interview with an official at the highest policy levels of the Pentagon, White House and, eventually, CIA, we are offered a unique "behind the curtains" look at areas of policy making during the period between 1999 and 2007. Extensive notes have been taken of meetings with President Bush and all his top policy advisors. This is only a teaser.

A highly placed source within the White House and CIA confirmed, in an interview, that the invasion of Iran was sheduled for 2006 but planned in 1999. We have heard some of this before but not with so many pieces and, I am told, more to come. In an interview with a Bush administration policy official:

Q. What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of your work at the White House? You have read my articles, what do you think of my take on things?

A. You are closer than anyone else in understanding how things worked, the only person willing to simply put it out there. You also come at things like the Pentagon people I have worked with, the ones who stood against Bush, Cheney and the AIPAC gang at the NSC (National Security Council.) I can also see that you don't have background material that you need. Some of it you have wrong, particularly the motives for Iraq. It was always Iran, Iraq was simply a door.

"The Iraq invasion was a 'done deal' in 1999, but not as you thought to steal oil and bilk billions, that was all gravy. Iraq, the entire Bush presidency, had one purpose, to remove Iran from the picture."

Q. You talk about journalists. What has your experience been?

A. I have good friends at the New York Times, Time Magazine, the Washington Post and others. They know all of this. They aren't fooled. They could write anything but it would never hit print.

Q. Back to the 2000 election. The first impediment was, I am told, removing John McCain from the picture. Was this the case?

A. "He was enemy # 1, stubborn, unpredictable and already tarnished by the Keating 5 scandal, with all his faults, he didn't have the serous skeletons in his closet that would fit the bill. McCain couldn't be blackmailed like Bush, thus McCain is a risk. Unless you can be controlled, blackmailed or bought or both, you will go nowhere in Washington.

McCain is a womanizer, the real thing. For a war hero, with McCain's charm that's nothing, he would never fall into the kind of trap Clinton did. Rove was assigned the job of getting rid of McCain. We all saw what was done in South Carolina. It was a masterful job."

Q. When you talk about McCain not being vulnerable, he certainly was in South Carolina, a few rumors and smears and he was gone. You say Bush is more vulnerable?

A. "A window into a lot of this can be found in the Rosen-AIPAC lawsuit. Bush has serious issues, let's just leave it at that.

As for Rosen, he just wasn't an AIPAC lobbyist, he sat inside the National Security Council until 2005 as the Rand Corporation's Director of Foreign Policy. When the press talks about an AIPAC employee and spying, he didn't join AIPAC until later, after his arrest.

The FBI investigation and his indictement for spying covered a time when he was at the center of the Bush administration, a key policy formulator at the highest levels of government. Rosen, indicted in 2004 for spying for Israel, was responsible for formulating American policy in the Middle East and largely responsible for the fate of the Palestinian people, a bit of a conflict of interest for an Israeli lobbyist and accused spy."

Q. Rosen has made some accusations, says AIPAC spies all the time and that they do nothing but watch pornography there. You worked with this guy, what do you know?

A. "Rosen has dirt on absolutely everyone. His divorce depositions are fascinating reading. They are sealed now but there are copies out there. I know that reporters at Time Magazine have them, others too. The FBI has tons, they were after Rosen for years. As for AIPAC, Rosen told me of their spy operations many times, but nobody needed telling, they were more than obvious to all of us.

Q. You talk about Rosen and his "black book," that he has dirt on "everyone." The news stories mentioned only porn. That doesn't sound so serious. Dirt, not just porn, what kind of dirt?

A. "Mostly sex stuff, gay bondage, clubs, expense money being spent on sex, liasons in public restrooms, that kind of thing. Many of the key people around the president are involved and there is FBI surveillance, massive amounts of it, photographs, videos, and one or more undercover informants recorded conversations with top National Security Council members. Spying, nuclear secrets passed to Israel, this was common place.

I witnessed, with two others, the top Bush counter-terrorism official, actally primary advisor to Bush on counter-terrorism, who had served Clinton and others, pass nuclear weapons plans to an Israeli agent, like it was nothing."

Q. Did the FBI know about this?

A. "For years, FBI agents, I have a list of names, worked to stop this. Then I learned that the Department of Justice killed the prosecution, Rosen's lasted into the Obama administration before it was dropped. Witnesses were threatened with prosecution and the guilty, the spies, were allowed to keep doing what they are doing. This is what Rosen knows and what he is talking about when he says AIPAC was involved in spying. It isn't just that AIPAC is said to receive information it is that it came from top administration officials."

Q. Let's get back to the sex thing. How high up does it go?

A. "One famous joke around the NSC, there was a photo of someone kissing Laura Bush on the cheek and shaking hands with President Bush. The same person had, not that long before, using those same lips and hands in a men's restroom."

Q. What do you know about 9/11?

A. "9/11 was planned as early as 1999 or before, to be executed as soon as the Bush team was in place. One meeting in April 2001, a meeting outlining the invasion of Iraq, may have been the green light.' Chalibi was in place early on, from day number one. I remember telling them he was a known crook, totally disreputable and that things in Iraq would fall apart immediately. Nobody in the National Security Council ever spoke about what they would do once Saddam was overthrown. Nobody really seemed to care.

Of course, none of those people have real experience with military issues or, in fact, much of anything else."

Q. How was the Iran invasion supposed to work?

A. "This is where so many have it wrong. In fact, there was never serous discussion about terrorism or Al Qaeda or bin Laden. These things weren't even a sideshow. The only talk about any of it was how it could be used to justify going into Iraq and then attacking Iran.

Q. The intel on Iraq, we all know it was wrong. When was that learned?

A. "The administration didn't believe false intelligence, it created it, order it in place before the election to be ready for, well I guess, 9/11. Silencing Plame and Joe Wilson, those were the same people who planned the creation of the phony intelligence. There was never a discussion of a serious terrorist threat against the United States. These guys would have fallen off their chairs laughing themselves to death. It was all a joke to them, 9/11, the Iraq invasion, all of it."

Q. Back to Iran, how was the invasion to start?

A. "Everything was going to happen in Bahrain. Plans were to attack Americans, blow up clubs, restaurants. There were plans to stage a "Tonkin Gulf' type attack and blame it on Iranian torpedo boats. Guys in the military were aware of this and there was strong opposition. Marine Colonel Joe Molofsky was the real hero here. He did more to scramble administration plans than anyone else, Molofky and General Mattis. These were really straight shooters, how I learned to trust the Marine Corps.

The government there, their security services, I believe they were deeply involved. It would have been good to see something about this in Wikileaks."

Q. You said that war had to start by 2006. Was there a timetable?

A. "Absolutely. General Petraeus was sent to Iraq to quiet things down, not to win a war or create a lasting peace, nothing like that. His job was to shut things down so an operation against Iran could be staged from Iraq."

Q. But that never got off the ground…

A. "No kidding, and Bush was enranged. It was the only reason he was put in office in the first place, as long as Iran survived, he was a failure, no matter what happened to the US."

Q. Didn't they know that war with Iran would have driven oil to $300 a barrel and collapsed the American economy?

A. "There were never briefings on that like there were never briefings on stabilizing Iraq. Nobody cared, nobody noticed and it was never discussed. It was really all about Iran and orders came in and people did what they were told like good little soldiers."

Q. Orders? From where?

A. "All of it, all foreign policy issues, were out of AIPAC, they ran everything in the Bush adminsitration. That was the whole point of it. We never were told why we had to destroy Iran only that it had to be done. Nobody ever asked why. Nobody ever believed Iran had a credible nuclear program and, eventually, we were all very certain they never would. There was never an issue about Iran being a threat or not. There was never an issue of motive of any kind. These were orders, plain and simple, the administration that will come into office in 2001 will be tasked with destroying Iran, tasked by AIPAC who will control all key position in the administration."

Q. Was there talk about Lebanon and the threat of Hizbollah?

A. "There really weren't talks at all, only planning on how to follow policy, never on what policy should be or what was right or wrong. There was never a discussion about the United States, what was good for America or bad for America. People were generally oblivious to there being an America."
http://sabbah.biz/

DIFFERENT WORDS; SAME MUSIC

“There isn’t one I haven’t heard” or so goes one of the lines in a well-known American musical. Yet, this time the world is imbuing the words with new meaning when it comes to US/Israel relations. The hope is that at long last the US is going to discipline Israel.

Alas, in the flurry of words, the music has not changed. America seems as much bedazzled by Israel as a parent who is blind to the antics of an over-indulged, demanding child. No amount of insults seems to shatter their illusion that the precious being is in fact a monster.

In their attempts to convince the rest of us not so enamoured, they fail to see that they have allowed their symbiotic relationships to become abusive. Just as the parent can no longer control a child’s obnoxious behaviour, so too America finds itself hamstrung by Israel’s illegal settlement expansion into Palestinian territory and its determination to take and Judaise all of Jerusalem. And while this time there have been some firm admonishments, there have been no follow-up consequences, America lapsing into the same old routine of placating Israel with promises to keep the faith.

The AIPAC conference in Washington DC provided the meeting place for the usual Israel love-in. There, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu plumbed the depths. He lied when he said that Jews had built Jerusalem 3,000 years ago. He lied when he said it was theirs to build again. He lied when he said “it is our capital”.

No one pulled him up over those lies. Instead Secretary of State Hillary Clinton waffled on about how Israel’s behaviour exposes the daylight between them that others in the region hope to exploit – the same daylight that US Vice-president Biden vowed did not exist between the two countries – and how it endangers the proximity talks and America’s essential role in bringing those to fruition. But, not before she had told the audience that America’s commitment to Israel was “rock solid, enduring, unwavering and forever”.

Her prime concern was not that Israel’s behaviour denies millions of Palestinians the right to live in their own homeland and cruelly oppresses those who still do, but rather that America’s credibility as an honest broker in a long-defunct peace process might be at risk.

Nothing was said about Jerusalem being a corpus separatum under UN trusteeship since the Partition of Palestine in 1947 or that Israel does not have sovereignty over Jerusalem, despite its military conquests. Not a mention was made that East Jerusalem is occupied territory and that Israel is in breach of international law.

Netanyahu’s claims over Jerusalem presuppose an “eternal connection” between Jews and the land. But the historical record on that is clear. Not only are there non-Jewish groups who ruled Jerusalem for centuries rather than the brief 170 years of likely Jewish rule, but also the city existed long before Judaism took form.

On any reading, Jerusalem is no more Jewish than it is Christian or Islamic. Yet, if anyone can lay claim to it by an “eternal connection”, it is the Palestinians whose history goes back millennia to the Canaanites who worshipped pagan deities and then to those who converted to emerging Judaism, Christianity and centuries later to ascendant Islam. Thus, the three monotheistic religions believe they too have a claim. For this reason, the 1947 UN Partition resolution sought to give Jerusalem international status as a separate body.

To this day, the international community has refused to officially recognise Israeli sovereignty of Jerusalem. Notwithstanding this, Israel has pursued an aggressive policy of “unification” and “reunification” of Jewish Jerusalem by pushing out the boundaries of Palestinian East Jerusalem to some 73 sq km, well into the military-occupied West Bank where Israel has illegally settled some 300,000 Jews.

Secretary Clinton’s “no to settlements” and “no to natural growth” at the end of last year were empty words. Within days, she had eagerly announced that Netanyahu’s guarantees of no new settlement building and no new land grabs were “unprecedented” concessions. Nothing was said about the building going on in East Jerusalem, let alone the forced evictions of Palestinians, the demolition of their homes and Israeli building policies, which are deliberately skewed towards Jewish population growth.

One has to wonder what meaning words have at all when carefully considered ones are ignored. A United Nations report of May 2009 put as many as 60,000 Palestinians at risk of eviction from their homes and called for a freeze on demolitions in East Jerusalem. Yet, the most that Secretary Clinton could say then – 10 months ago – was that Israel’s actions were “unhelpful” in advancing the peace process.

As has happened innumerable times in the past, the chiding words of US emissaries and government officials, are always quickly followed up with other words to reassure Israel of “the unbreakable bond” between the two countries, and more significantly, actions that belie the reprimands. In the midst of all the recent hoo-ha about chilling relations, a $210 million arms deal with Israel and paid for by US military aid nevertheless went ahead with an estimated massive $3 billion F-35 warplane deal still in the offing.

In other words, regardless of the song-sheet, America never misses a beat to give Israel what it wants. It will be interesting to see if the US does withdraw support for Israel in the United Nations on any resolutions before the Security Council critical of Israel’s settlement policies in occupied East Jerusalem. The rumours are fulminating amongst denials from both sides. While to many this signifies a change of heart in America’s love affair with Israel, it may be no more than the stuff of gossip columns to re-make America’s image as honest broker in the Middle East.

The disconnect between words and actions might please those who want peace more than they want justice for the Palestinians, but for many, the words have been done to death. By the time proximity talks morph into full negotiations, there will be no Jerusalem left to negotiate and no Palestinians left in Jerusalem. All words will then be meaningless.
by Sonja Karkar
http://desertpeace.wordpress.com/2010/03/30/different-words-same-music/

Zionism's dark forces don't want the lights on

By Alan Hart* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

At the opening of AIPAC's annual foreign policy conference its new president, Lee Rosenberg, was not a happy man. As he put it, "In recent days we have witnessed something (the Obama administration's initial public anger with Netanyahu and his government) very unfortunate."

The Biden "incident", Rosenberg said, was "regrettable", but Netanyahu had apologized "four separate times" and said "the announcement" (of more Jewish construction in occupied Arab East Jerusalem) was "hurtful and should not have been made." Quite so, Mr. Rosenberg. It would have been much better from Zionism's point of view if the announcement had not been made and Israel had just got on with the business of de-Arabizing East Jerusalem.

In any relationship even the best of friends were going to disagree, Rosenberg said, but it was "how friends disagree, how they react when missteps occur, that can determine the nature of the relationship."

Then he made his three key points:

"Number one, the people of Israel and the democratically elected government of Israel passionately believe in peace. And Israel is committed to its alliance with America.

"Number two, the United States and Israel both have a responsibility to work with one another and achieve that peace. That is what allies do.

"And three, allies should work out their differences privately."

That brought AIPAC's new president one of three standing ovations.

Why should disagreements between American administrations and Israeli governments be kept from the public?

Rosenberg's answer was: "History shows that when America pressures Israel publicly, it provides an opportunity for those who wish to derail the peace process to have their way."

Ah, so it's not Israel that is making peace impossible?

Rosenberg could not have been more explicit with AIPAC's take on that aspect of the matter.

"Ladies and gentlemen, let us be clear, the reluctant partner in this peace process is not Israel's elected leader Prime Minister Netanyahu. (Another standing ovation).

"The recalcitrant partner is the Palestinians and their leader – President Mahmoud Abbas.

"The Palestinians are bitterly divided between Hamas and Fatah – that is a problem. The failure of President Abbas to end his nay-saying and come to the table for direct talks which Prime Minister Netanyahu has been committed to from the start – that is a problem. The failure of the Arab world to begin normalizing its relationships with Israel – that is a problem.

"Israel is not the problem. Israel is America's partner. (The third standing ovation).

When I was a child my father often said to me, "Boy, there are none so blind as those who don't want to see."

But blind though AIPAC is for that reason, it's not completely out of touch with reality. It knows that the more Zionism's on-going colonisation is exposed to the light, the more the world understands that Israel is the obstacle to peace. (The world now includes some of the U.S.'s top military men who are going on the public record with their view that support for Israel right or wrong is not in the best interests of America).

If you are a Zionist, the case for keeping the lights off is a very strong one.

At the time of writing, I'm waiting, as no doubt many others are, to see if President Obama returns to his surrender mode when he meets with Netanyahu tomorrow.
http://sabbah.biz/mt/archives/2010/03/22/zionisms-dark-forces-dont-want-the-lights-on/

The Pro-Israel Lobby And The New Israel

Andrew Sullivan at the Atlantic has a good read:

In a response to Dowd, Goldblog acknowledges:

It is undeniably true that Jewish fundamentalists wield disproportionate power in Israeli decision-making; it is true that a small minority -- fundamentalist settlers -- has kept Israel entangled in the lives of the Palestinians on the West Bank; it is true that, because of the power of the Orthodox rabbinate, it is easier in some ways to be Jewish in America than in the Jewish state (Just ask women who try to pray at the Western Wall.) All this is not to say that Israel isn't still the most enlightened democracy in the Middle East, but there's not much of a competition. And it should be cause for deep worry when the Saudis -- not especially known for their liberalism -- have a point about illiberal Israel.

What I found telling was MoDo's more recent column in which she came up with the following brilliant formulation that reflects on the pro-Israel voices so over-represented in the MSM punditariat:

Obama created an obstacle for himself by demanding that Israel stop expanding settlements when it was not going to do so — even though it should — and when that wasn’t the most important condition to Arabs

Got that? Now I have no idea what Maureen means when she says that a settlement freeze "wasn’t the most important condition to Arabs." Much that I've read seemed to suggest that the various Sunni Arab regimes were looking for precisely a freezing of further Israeli colonization of the West Bank as proof that Obama really was going to break from the whatever-Israel-wants policy of the previous eight years.

But notice that it is Obama's fault for asking an alleged ally merely to freeze - not reverse - construction settlement as a good faith gesture to the peace process and as a favor to the US in trying to recapture the role of an honest broker in the region. It is not Israel's fault - even though Maureen thinks Israel should have done it.

Nothing illustrates better the total bizarreness of the US-Israel relationship. No one in Washington - apart from a few Likudniks and Palinite end-timers - actually supports more settlements or any settlements i the West Bank. At the same time, Washington exercizes a UN veto to protect Israel from international law, funnels a vast amount of foreign and military aid to the country, helped finance the pulverization of Gaza last year, provides absurd international cover for Israel's 150 nukes, has worked tirelessly to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear capacity, and on and on.

In return? Fuck you, Obama. To which the overwhelming response in Washington is: Obama screwed up.

There is something completely awry here and it has rarely been more evident than in the last twelve months.
http://irish4palestine.blogspot.com/2010/03/pro-israel-lobby-and-new-israel.html

Sami Jamil Jadallah – Is President Obama an Enemy of the Jews?

Even before he was elected president, Barack Obama faced relentless and vicious attacks of mainstream American Jewish organizations and leadership with claims of being Muslim in secret, of lacking the born American credential among many other claims, including being anti-Israel even though as a senator he was one of the most ardent supporters of Israel and always voted in favor of Israel on all bills drafted by AIPAC and passed by the US Senate.

I think it is necessary here to inform the readers that the Jewish community and leadership of Chicago were the early sponsors and mentors for then local politician Obama, with Penny Pritzker of the “Hyatt Hotels” as key supporters together with Joan Harris-Leading the well known Chicago philanthropists, Lestor Crown of the Jewish Federation, David Axelrod who managed Obama’s win of the White House to the president’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, the son of an Israeli member of the Jewish terrorist group “Irgun”, in addition to key support from Hollywood moguls the likes of Steven Spielberg, David Geffen and Jeffery Katzenberg, and not withstanding the testimony of Alon Pinkas of the Jerusalem Post “Obama’s voting record on issues pertaining to Israel is impeccable” to be seconded by Haaretz US correspondent Shmuel Rosner “Obama supports Israel, period”.



This attack continued after his election and recently this attack became more and more vicious after his speech in Cairo and after his demands (which he quickly withdrew and retreated from) that Israel freeze its programs of settlements building in Palestinian occupied territories. Such attacks are spearheaded by senior members of Netanyahu’s Likud party and their supporters and influential and powerful sponsors in the in the United States among mainstream Jewish leadership and organizations, whose power and influence go beyond formulations of US foreign policy and goes to domestic issues through the stranglehold they have over members of Congress.



Israel officials like Minister Limor Livnat labeled Obama’s administration as “terrible”, with Yossi Naim head of the Beit Aryeh regional council threatening Obama with his declaration ”I announce to you Obama: You won’t be able to stop us”. With many leading Israeli and American Jewish leaders charging that Obama by his calls for freezing Israeli settlements is promoting “ethnic cleansing of Jews and jeopardizing Israeli security”. It seems Israeli security is built on land theft.



The Jewish settlers’ leadership and their political and financial sponsors within mainstream American Jewish community and in Congress spearhead the anti-Obama campaign. An American Jewish leadership and community that is never grateful to the United States for half of century of political, military, financial and legal support that enabled Israeli to commit the kinds of crimes it is committing on a daily basis since the ‘67 War, committing war crimes in Gaza and in Lebanon, with the use of cluster and phosphorous bombs on civilian targets and using American-supplied weapons to bomb and kill civilian targets, with the United States providing the Veto power that so far enabled Israel to get away with murder and violations of international and humanitarian laws.



Not only does the United States provide political and legal coverage for Israeli crimes, it also allows and in fact supports the illegal settlements and criminal settlers through tax exemptions of American Jewish organizations, groups, individuals even synagogues that fund the criminal and terrorist activities of Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank and in East Jerusalem. One of the key Israeli organizations that receives US tax exempted funds is “The Task Force to Save the Nation and the Land” which gave cash awards of NIS 20,000 to each Israeli soldier who lifted signs that read, ”The Shimshon Battalion does not evict from Homesh” a month ago at the Western Wall, gave NIS 1,800 to solider Tzach Kortz for shooting a Palestinian near Kiryat Arba and that gives NIS 1,000 each day to every soldier who publicly demonstrates their opposition to Israeli evacuations from the West Bank, gives NIS 1,000 for each day soldiers spend in military prisons for disobeying orders of military commanders that comes to dealing with Jewish settlers. The list goes on and on with hundreds of American Jewish groups, rich and powerful business leaders supporting the Israeli Jewish settlers’ movements and the crimes and terror they commit on a daily basis against the people of Al-Khalil/Hebron, against Palestinian towns and villages burning and uprooting centuries-old olive trees, poisoning water wells and killing of livestock, not to mention killing and murdering of Palestinian villagers. This is in contrast to the microscopic scrutiny that mosques, Muslim and Arab charities are subjected to on a daily basis from US law enforcement agencies.



The failure of the United States government to enforce its laws related to export of and use of American weapons against civilian targets and its failure to look into and revoke the tax exemption statutes of many of the American Jewish organizations that actively support and fund Jewish terrorism in Palestinian territories shows that President Obama is not an enemy of the Jews but a very good friend of Israel and its criminal policies in the Occupied Territories, otherwise he could order his attorney general to look into and investigate funding of Jewish settlers’ groups and organizations, perhaps issue executive orders that revoke tax exemption status of American Jewish organizations that fund and sponsor Jewish terrorism.



However all of that support by Obama’s administration is never enough to satisfy power and political greed of the American Jewish leadership and community. They have succeeded in derailing the nomination of Chaz Freeman to chair the National Intelligence Council citing his “anti-Israeli leanings” and now are after former senator Chuck Hagel as President Obama’s intelligence aid and his lack of being pro-Israel. It seems and in the words of Natsha Mozgovaya writing in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, “Every appointee to the American government must endure a thorough background check by the American Jewish community”. That is the way it is in the United States, what really counts are Israel and the American Jewish community and the hell with the United States and its national and security interests. The litmus tests of public service in the United States is not loyalty to the US or long-term service but loyalty to Israel and its supporters in the United States, supporters and sponsors who corrupted our election laws and financing, corrupted both the executive and Legislative branch and are now on the way to corrupting the judicial branch and perhaps undermining and corrupting the soul of our nation’s strength; the United States Constitution.