Israel is looking at Africa’s east as an important strategic interest, and trying to step up ties with nations in the region under the name of “controlling the spread of Islamic extremists”.
The Associated Press reports that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hosted the leaders of Uganda and Kenya earlier this week.
The Kenyan leader has said that the Zionist entity has promised to provide ‘security assistance’ to his country to help protect its borders.
Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga has said Netanyahu promised to help build “a coalition against fundamentalism,” bringing together the countries Kenya, Ethiopia, South Sudan and Tanzania. The African country also has said Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, has told him Israel is ready to make “everything available to Kenya” for internal security.
For the Israeli part, Netanyahu’s office refuses to comment on Odinga’s claims, while Peres’ office suggests the Kenyan leader has gone too far.
An official in the Peres’ office says he has boasted that Israel is one of the most advanced countries in the world regarding homeland security and would be happy to share its expertise with any country fighting “global terror.” But the official, speaking on condition of anonymity says no specifics have been discussed.
Another Israeli official says an alliance with Kenya and other eastern African countries is natural.
An agency quotes Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev as saying: “We have joint interests and we believe that mutual cooperation can be beneficial to us all”.
Uganda and Kenya have been battling al-Shabab, a Somalia-based ‘al-Qaeda’ linked group.
According to AP, the Zionist entity also has intentions to build strong ties with the newly liberated South Sudan whose president has held a meeting with Netanyahu at the United Nations in September.
In Israel’s eyes, eastern Africa poses a potential hinterland where ‘al-Qaeda’ and other militants can potentially forge ties with similarly minded groups just to the north in Egypt and Gaza. Israeli officials already believe that Sudan is a pathway for smugglers providing weapons to militants in Gaza and the Sinai, and that ‘al-Qaeda’ linked groups in Egypt have been behind a deadly cross-border raid in August that killed eight Israelis.
The Zionist entity already has military ties with several African countries, including Nigeria, Tanzania and the Ivory Coast.
Relations with Kenya, Uganda and South Sudan have not yet reached that stage, though Israel’s “Defense” Ministry has given clearance for private Israeli security firms to operate in those nations, including some arms sales. Israeli defense officials say intelligence sharing is limited to a few close allies at this stage.
“The Ministry of Defense has excellent relations with a number of friendly nations in Africa, especially internal security and counterterrorism,” an official said, refusing to elaborate. He was not allowed to be identified under ministry regulations.
Israel has a long history of involvement in Africa, sending experts in agriculture and development, as well as military advisers and mercenaries, over the years.
November 18, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Africa, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel, Kenya, Mark Regev, Shimon Peres, Uganda |
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Israeli paper Israel-Ayom reports today about a recent ‘Congressional bill’ that would require the “American administration to support Israel in a move deemed necessary to defend itself against the Iranian nuclear threat.”
Five Republican congressmen who visited Israel last week disclosed the bill.
The bill states an “expression of support for Israel’s right to defend its sovereignty and to protect the lives and safety of its citizens and use all necessary means to confront and eliminate the nuclear threat that emerges from the Islamic Republic of Iran, including use military force in the absence of other diplomatic means available in the near future.”
The initiator of the bill is Rep. Doug Lamborn (Colorado).
November 17, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel |
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The Long Road to Damascus
In 1996, an Israeli think tank, the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, prepared “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” for incoming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In that seminal report, the Richard Perle-led study group suggested that Israel could “shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria.” Comprised mainly of American-based pro-Israel advocates, the group stressed, “Most important, it is understandable that Israel has an interest supporting diplomatically, militarily and operationally Turkey’s and Jordan’s actions against Syria, such as securing tribal alliances with Arab tribes that cross into Syrian territory and are hostile to the Syrian ruling elite.”
Although Netanyahu didn’t act on their advice at the time, Perle and two of his co-authors, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser, found George W. Bush more receptive to “securing the realm” – for Israel – after September 11, 2001. Nine days after that “catastrophic and catalyzing event,” Perle signed a Project for a New American Century letter to President Bush, urging the United States to “consider appropriate measures of retaliation” against Iran and Syria if they didn’t “immediately cease all military, financial, and political support for Hezbollah” – whose presumably unforgivable crime was that it had “humiliated Israel by driving its army out of Lebanon.” Explaining the Bush administration’s subsequent decision to invade Iraq in 2003, Patrick Buchanan famously wrote in The American Conservative, “In the Perle-Feith-Wurmser strategy, Israel’s enemy remains Syria, but the road to Damascus runs through Baghdad.”
Notwithstanding Syria’s initial cooperation with the Israeli-inspired but American-fought “war on terror,” the Israel lobby ensured that there would be no long-term rapprochement between Washington and Damascus. A September 5, 2002 document, “Working to Secure Israel: The Pro-Israel Community’s Legislative Goals,” declared AIPAC’s intention to “sanction Syria for its continuing support of terrorism” by working “with Congress to pass the Syria Accountability Act.”
In October 2003, Representative Eliot Engel, who sponsored the legislation, proudly reported the bill’s imminent passage to the inaugural Jerusalem Summit, organized by Ariel Sharon’s government and its diehard American supporters (including the ubiquitous Perle) “to work out a joint strategy of resistance to the Totalitarianism of the Radical Islam, and to the moral relativism which in vain tries to placate this Totalitarianism by sacrificing Israel.” Confusing the ultimate target of the AIPAC-crafted legislation with Israel’s more southerly bête noire, the Jewish Democrat from New York informed the summit, “It’s no secret that the people on Lebanon’s southern border, the terrorists, Hamas, are wrecking [sic] havoc and causing all kinds of destruction and could be stopped tomorrow if Syria wanted it. This is Hamas, the group which blew up over 200 US marines. This is the group that goes out not only to destroy Israel, but would destroy the United States as well.”
With Iraq proving to be less of a “cakewalk” than America’s pro-Israel warmongers had breezily predicted, Syria managed to survive two Bush terms. The failure of Israel’s 2006 invasion of Lebanon to dislodge Hezbollah, however, added significantly to the impetus for regime change in Damascus. When Israel’s friends in Washington concluded that the Syrian corridor to Iran was “Hezbollah’s achilles heel,” Bashar al-Assad’s days were increasingly numbered. The Arab uprisings of 2011 provided them with their long-sought opportunity for “rolling back Syria.”
Writing in the Guardian, Alistair Crooke describes how the “great game” of “losing Syria” is currently being played out with the cooperation of the absolute monarchies of Saudi Arabia and Qatar; the also predominantly Sunni secular Republic of Turkey; and France, arch-promoters of Libya’s NATO-backed “revolution” and Syria’s short-lived former colonial rulers, i.e. “set up a hurried transitional council as sole representative of the Syrian people, irrespective of whether it has any real legs inside Syria; feed in armed insurgents from neighbouring states; impose sanctions that will hurt the middle classes; mount a media campaign to denigrate any Syrian efforts at reform; try to instigate divisions within the army and the elite; and ultimately President Assad will fall.”
Enforcing those AIPAC-endorsed sanctions has been the happy task of the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. Created in early 2004 after intensive lobbying by AIPAC and its associated think tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the TFI unit has been aptly described as “a sharp-edged tool forged principally to serve the Israel lobby.” With David S. Cohen succeeding Stuart Levey as Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence in January 2011, a leading journalist on the Middle East was later prompted to call the position “a job which seems reserved for pro-Israeli neo-cons to wage economic warfare against Tehran.”
In recent days, Cohen’s TFI unit has been eagerly waging economic warfare against Damascus. Daniel L. Glaser, the Assistant Secretary for Terrorist Financing, has just completed a tour of Lebanon and Jordan to secure their compliance with economic sanctions against the Assad government. In Beirut, the U.S. Embassy announced that Glaser was pressing the authorities to “remain vigilant against attempts by the Syrian regime to evade U.S. and EU sanctions.”
In a recent policy alert, WINEP’s executive director, Robert Satloff, urged that “with the strategic opportunity of contributing to the demise of Iran’s premier Arab ally, Washington should be working overtime to act in defense of the Syrian people.” Considering the long road to Damascus pursued by Satloff’s fellow-travellers, it should be clear for which country regime change in Syria presents a “strategic opportunity.”
Maidhc Ó Cathail is a political analyst and editor of The Passionate Attachment.
November 16, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel |
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As though there weren’t already enough clowns in the cast, the beloved king of Jordan took the stage to call on the Syrian president to stand down. The hawker of Jordan’s public assets – scion of a dynasty whose monthly payments from the CIA continue to this day, and whose upbringing and education is supervised by British intelligence’s finest instructors – judged that the Syrian crisis makes it necessary for Assad to go. One wonders if the man might one day face a mirror.
Whatever the case, the drama continues to unfold as scripted. To pump up the excitement, it has apparently been decided to screen more than one episode per day. Syrian film-making will be dealt a blow. Neither extra episodes of home-made TV dramas, nor the dubbing of more Turkish soap operas, can hope to compete with the rolling blockbuster being brought to us by US-Franco-Qatari Revolutions Inc.
The producers have so far made do with the blood already being shed in Syria. But later, and perhaps soon – for the production schedule is tight – some bloodier scenes may have to be loaded onto the reel. But what exactly is required? Bombings in public markets? Assassinations of regime leaders? More sectarian killings? Nobody is yet sure what pitch will have the right effect on the relevant international human rights organizations, whose executives have begun rubbing their hands in anticipation of a new boon. But give it another day or two and Nabil al-Arabi will summon them to come over immediately and without delay. The oil states will pay the expenses. Hamad bin-Jasem has assured his Arab counterparts, and informed the Arab League secretariat not to worry about the funds needed for the planned foreign intervention aimed at toppling Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
One act in the spectacle was supposed to have been wound up on Tuesday in Cairo —though there was no guarantee against hitches. This was to feature Syrian opposition figures uniting in a single organization so they can then be recognised as the sole legitimate representative of the Syrian people. The Syrians who support the regime and those who oppose foreign intervention do not count. For once, the intellectual colossus Ahmet Davetoglu will have been correct in his analysis. Assad’s supporters will be treated as irrelevant: a ‘zero problem’.
In Cairo, a special kind of adhesive tape had to be used. It is not designed to last long. It only has to stick things together for now, and hold them in place for a few weeks or months to make a structure that can be called the unifying framework of all sections of the Syrian opposition. Someone or other will then select a name and logo for it, and it will have a seat reserved at the Arab League. Many are competing to fill that seat. But while the photographers will focus on the occupant, nobody will wait to listen to his or her views, as the decisions have already been made. However, they will have the honour of reading them out. Those who cooked the decisions up think they’ll suffice to topple the Assad regime.
Meanwhile in Rabat – where Arab foreign ministers are due to discuss upping the pressure – there will also be much verbal one-upmanship about human rights and the incessant blood-letting in Syria. But everyone there, too, will be waiting for further decisions. It is unlikely that any will have an answer to Syria’s request for the convening of an emergency Arab summit.
The series will carry on until further notice. The Arab and Western capitals concerned believe that a lot can be achieved between now and the end-of-year holiday season. They’re hoping for scenes of rejoicing as Bashar al-Assad’s downfall is celebrated on the streets of Damascus, Aleppo and other Syrian cities, as well as the world’s capitals. They certainly don’t want the TV cameras to be tracking the plane flying the last American occupation troops out of Baghdad, and the accompanying celebrations in Syria as well as Iraq itself, Lebanon and Iran. The US and its Arabs want the cameras focused on Syria’s towns. They do not care what images they convey, provided they feature anguish, pain and blood. All is fair game in the service of the shared objective: for Syria’s opposition to US-Israeli hegemony to cease.
The Arab and Western players involved in this lunacy assume that the Syrian regime will be unable to bear a combination of diplomatic pressure, economic sanctions, and acts of sabotage and destabilization. They are counting on armed groups – which have been or are being put in place – to mount extensive military actions in border areas adjoining Turkey, or even Lebanon. This will then be used to move on to the ‘protected areas’ phase. Some border incident will be sufficient to trigger the creation of such enclaves, without awaiting permission from the UN Security Council or anyone else. The only impediment is that the planners are still waiting for a final decision from Turkey on whether to allow such a step to be taken.
The movie has already become tiresome, but it seems as though viewing it will be both compulsory and lucrative. All expenses paid out of the blood and sweat of the Syrians themselves, and of fellow Arabs too. But this film has yet to be completed by the production company, which is also doing the promotion and casting.
One wonders whether the shareholders in this venture have paused to consider how the other side might react. Do they really think that the fact it has avoided causing problems is a sign of weakness, and that it has no tricks of its own up its sleeve?
Let’s wait!
Ibrahim al-Amine is editor-in-chief of al-Akhbar.
November 16, 2011
Posted by aletho |
False Flag Terrorism, Wars for Israel |
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Sound familiar? This is from neoconservative Bill Kristol and liberal Lawrence Kaplan’s 2003 call for a war on Iraq: The War Over Iraq: Saddam’s Tyranny and America’s Mission:
Saddam… likens Israel to “a cancerous tumor that should be excised from Palestine.”
Unlike some of his fellow Arab leaders, Saddam really means it. With the help of the French, he began construction on a nuclear power plant shortly after his rise to power. Its purpose was clear: foreign countries “should assist the Arabs to obtain… the nuclear bomb in order to confront Israel’s existing bombs,” Saddam declared in 1981. When the Israel air force laid waste to the Osirak nuclear plant that same year, the Iraqi dictator only stepped up his threats to destroy the Jewish state…
In the years since Desert Storm [1991], Iraqi officials have stated explicitly that Iraq maintains biological weapons for use against Israel. Saddam’s son Uday boasts that Baghdad possesses “weapons of comprehensive destruction” for this purpose and that “the extinction of the Zionist entity was a necessity dictated both by the will of God, and the need to recover exclusive Arab rights to Palestine.” …
Israel is not the only country against which the Iraqi dictator wields this peculiar brand of aggression. The United States also has been affected by Iraqi-sponsored acts of terror… American officials have recently documented contacts between Iraqi and Al Qaeda agents, as well as “solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of Al Qaeda members, including some that have been in Baghdad,” according to CIA director George Tenet…
The United States should… conceive of itself as at once a European power, an Asian power and, of course, a Middle Eastern power. It would act as if threats to the interests of our allies are threats to us, which indeed they are. It would act as if the flouting of civilized rules of conduct are threats that affect us with almost the same immediacy as if they were occurring on our doorstep…
November 16, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel |
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This is Matthew Gould, second from right, British Ambassador to Israel, who was pictured speaking at a meeting of the Leeds Zionist Federation that was also the opening of the Leeds Hasbarah Centre. The Leeds Zionist Federation is part of the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland, motto “Speaking Up for Israel.” A collection was made at the meeting to send packages to members of the Israeli Defence Force.
On 29 May 2011 The Jerusalem Post reported: “British Ambassador Matthew Gould declared his commitment to Israel and the principles of Zionism on Thursday”.
Remember this background, it is unusual behaviour for a diplomat, and it is important.
The six meetings between British Ambassador to Israel Matthew Gould and Minister of Defence Liam Fox and Adam Werritty together – only two of which were revealed by Cabinet Secretary Gus O’Donnell in his “investigation” into Werritty’s unauthorised role in the Ministry of Defence – raise vital concerns about a secret agenda for war at the core of government, comparable to Blair’s determination to drive through a war on Iraq..
This is a detective story. It begins a few weeks ago, when the Fox-Werritty scandal was first breaking in the media. I had a contact from an old friend from my Foreign Office days. This friend had access to the Gus O’Donnell investigation. He had given a message for me to a trusted third party.
Whistleblowing in the surveillance state is a difficult activity. I left through a neighbour’s garden, not carrying a mobile phone, puffed and panted by bicycle to an unmonitored but busy stretch of road, hitched a lift much of the way, then ordered a minicab on a payphone from a country pub to my final destination, a farm far from CCTV. There the intermediary gave me the message: what really was worrying senior civil servants in the Cabinet Office was that the Fox-Werritty link related to plans involving Mossad and the British Ambassador to Israel, Matthew Gould.
Since I became a notorious whistleblower, several of my ex-friends and contacts have used me to get out information they wanted to leak, via my blog. A good recent example was a senior friend at the UN who tipped me off in advance on the deal by which the US agreed to the Saudi attack on pro-democracy demonstrators in Bahrain, in return for Arab League support for the NATO attack on Libya. But this was rather different, not least in the apparent implication that our Ambassador to Israel, Matthew Gould, was engaged in something with Werritty which went beyond official FCO policy.
I was particularly concerned by this because I knew slightly and liked Matthew Gould, from the time he wrote speeches for Robin Cook. I hoped there was nothing much in it. But then Gould’s name started to come up as professional journalists dug into the story, and reported Werritty’s funding by pro-Israeli lobby groups.
I decided that the best approach was for me to write to Matthew Gould. I did so, asking him when he had first met Werritty, how many times he had met him, and how many communications of every kind there had been between them. I received the reply that these questions would be answered in Gus O’Donnell’s report.
But Gus O’Donnell’s report in fact answered none of these questions. It only mentioned two meetings at which Fox, Gould and Werritty were all three present. It did not mention Gould-Werritty bilateral meetings and contacts at all. To an ex-Ambassador like me, there was also something very fishy about the two trilateral meetings O’Donnell did mention and his characterisation of them.
This led me to dig further, and I was shocked to find that O’Donnell was, at the most charitable interpretation, economical with the truth. In fact there were at least six Fox-Werritty-Gould meetings, not the two given by O’Donnell. Why did GOD lie? I now had no doubt that my informant had pointed me towards something very real and very important indeed.
Matthew Gould was the only British Ambassador who Fox and Werrity met together. They met him six times. Why?
The first meeting to which O’Donnell admits, took place in September 2010. O’Donnell says this was
“a general discussion of international defence and security matters to enable Mr Gould better to understand MOD’s perspective.”
O’Donnell says Werritty should not have been present. An FCO spokesman told me on 21 October that
“Mr Gould’s meeting with the Defence Secretary was arranged by his office as part of his pre-posting briefing calls.”
All Ambassadors make pre-posting briefing calls around Whitehall before taking up their job, as you would expect. But even for our most senior Ambassadors, outside the Foreign Office those calls are not at Secretary of State level. Senior officials are quite capable of explaining policy to outgoing Ambassadors; Secretaries of State have many other things to do.
For this meeting to happen at all was not routine, and Werritty’s presence made it still more strange. Why was this meeting happening? I dug further, and learnt from a senior MOD source that there were two more very strange things about this meeting, neither noted by O’Donnell. There was no private secretary or MOD official present to take note of action points, and the meeting took place not in Fox’s office, but in the MOD dining room.
O’Donnell may have been able to fox the media, but to a former Ambassador this whole meeting stunk. I bombarded the FCO with more questions, and discovered an amazing fact left out by O’Donnell. The FCO spokesman replied to me on 21 October 2011 that:
“Mr Werritty was also present at an earlier meeting Mr Gould had with Dr Fox in the latter’s capacity as shadow Defence Secretary.”
So Gould, Fox and Werritty had got together before Gould was Ambassador, while Fox was still in opposition and while Werritty was – what, exactly? This opened far more questions than it answered. I put them to the FCO. When, where and why had this meeting happened? We only knew it was before May 2010, when Fox took office. What was discussed? There are very strict protocols for senior officials briefing opposition front bench spokesman. Had they been followed?
The FCO refused point blank to answer any further questions. I turned to an independent-minded MP, Jeremy Corbyn, who put down a parliamentary question to William Hague. The reply quite deliberately ignored almost all of Corbyn’s question, but it did throw up an extraordinary bit of information – yet another meeting between Fox, Werritty and Gould, which had not been previously admitted.
Hague replied to Corbyn that:
“Our ambassador to Israel was also invited by the former Defence Secretary to a private social engagement in summer 2010 at which Adam Werritty was present.”
Getting to the truth was like drawing teeth, but the picture was building. O’Donnell had completely mischaracterised the “Briefing meeting” between Fox, Werritty and O’Donnell by hiding the fact that the three had met up at least twice before – once for a meeting when Fox was in opposition, and once for “a social engagement.” The FCO did not answer Corbyn’s question as to who else was present at this “social engagement”.
This was also key because Gould’s other meetings with Fox and Werritty were being characterised – albeit falsely – as simply routine, something Gould had to do in the course of his ambassadorial duties. But this attendance at “a private social engagement” was a voluntary act by Gould, indubitable proof that, at the least, the three were happy in each other’s company, but given that all three were very active in Zionist causes, it was a definite indication of something more than that.
That furtive meeting between Fox, Werritty and Gould in the MOD dining room, deliberately held away from Fox’s office where it should have taken place, and away from the MOD officials who should have been there, now looks less like briefing and more like plotting.
My existing doubts about the second and only other meeting to which O’Donnell does admit make plain why that question is very important.
O’Donnell had said that Gould, Fox and Werritty had met on 6 February 2011:
“in Tel Aviv. This was a general discussion of international affairs over a private dinner with senior Israelis. The UK Ambassador was present.”
There was something very wrong here. Any ex-Ambassador knows that any dinner with senior figures from your host country, at which the British Ambassador to that country and a British Secretary of State are both present, and at which international affairs are discussed, can never be “private”. You are always representing the UK government in that circumstance. The only explanation I could think of for O’Donnell’s astonishing description of this as a “private” dinner was that the discussion was far from being official UK policy.
I therefore asked the FCO who was at this dinner, what was discussed, and who was paying for it? I viewed the last as my trump card – if either Gould or Fox was receiving hospitality, they are obliged to declare it. To my astonishment the FCO refused to say who was present or who paid. Corbyn’s parliamentary question also covered the issue of who was at this dinner, to which he received no reply.
Plainly something was very wrong. I therefore again asked how often Gould had met or communicated with Werritty without Fox being present. Again the FCO refused to reply. But one piece of information that had been found by other journalists was that, prior to the Tel Aviv dinner, Fox, Gould and Werritty had together attended the Herzilya conference in Israel. The programme of this is freely available. It is an unabashedly staunch Zionist annual conference on “Israel’s security”, which makes no pretence at a balanced approach to Palestinian questions and attracts a strong US neo-conservative following. Fox, Gould and Werritty sat together at this event.
Yet again, the liar O’Donnell does not mention it.
I then learnt of yet another, a sixth meeting between Fox, Gould and Werritty. This time my informant was another old friend, a Jewish diplomat for another country, based at an Embassy in London. They had met Gould, Fox and Werritty together at the “We believe in Israel” conference in London in May 2011. Here is a photo of Gould and Fox together at that conference.
I had no doubt about the direction this information was leading, but I now needed to go back to my original source. Sometimes the best way to hide something is to put it right under the noses of those looking for it, and on Wednesday I picked up the information in a tent at the Occupy London camp outside St Paul’s cathedral.
This is the story I was given.
Matthew Gould was Deputy Head of Mission at the British Embassy in Iran, a country which Werritty frequently visited, and where Werritty claimed to have British government support for plots against Ahmadinejad. Gould worked at the British Embassy in Washington; the Fox-Werritty Atlantic Bridge fake charity was active in building links between British and American neo-conservatives and particularly ultra-Zionists. Gould’s responsibilities at the Embassy included co-ordination on US policy towards Iran. The first meeting of all three, which the FCO refuses to date, probably stems from this period.
According to my source, there is a long history of contact between Gould and Werritty. The FCO refuse to give any information on Gould-Werritty meetings or communications except those meetings where Fox was present – and those have only been admitted gradually, one by one. We may not have them all even yet.
My source says that co-ordinating with Israel and the US on diplomatic preparation for an attack on Iran was the subject of all these meetings. That absolutely fits with the jobs Gould held at the relevant times. The FCO refuses to say what was discussed. My source says that, most crucially, Iran was discussed at the Tel Aviv dinner, and the others present represented Mossad. The FCO again refuses to say who was present or what was discussed.
On Wednesday 2 November it was revealed in the press that under Fox the MOD had prepared secret and detailed contingency plans for British participation in an attack on Iran.
There are very important questions here. Was Gould really discussing neo-con plans for attacking Iran with Werritty and eventually with Fox before the Conservatives were even in government? Why did O’Donnell’s report so carefully mislead on the Fox-Gould-Werritty axis? How far was the FCO aware of MOD preparations for attacking Iran? Is there a neo-con cell of senior ministers and officials, co-ordinating with Israel and the United States, and keeping their designs hidden from the Conservative’s coalition partners?
The government could clear up these matters if it answered some of the questions it refuses to answer, even when asked formally by a member of parliament. The media have largely moved on from the Fox-Werritty affair, but have barely skimmed the surface of the key questions it raises. They relate to secrecy, democratic accountability and preparations to launch a war, preparations which bypass the safeguards of good government. The refusal to give straight answers to simple questions by a member of parliament strikes at the very root of our democracy.
Is this not precisely the situation we were in with Blair and Iraq? Have no lessons been learnt?
There is a further question which arises. Ever since the creation of the state of Israel, the UK had a policy of not appointing a jewish Briton as Ambassador, for fear of conflict of interest. As a similar policy of not appointing a catholic Ambassador to the Vatican. New Labour overturned both longstanding policies as discriminatory. Matthew Gould is therefore the first Jewish British Ambassador to Israel.
Matthew Gould does not see his race or religion as irrelevant. He has chosen to give numerous interviews to both British and Israeli media on the subject of being a Jewish ambassador, and has been at pains to be photographed by the Israeli media participating in jewish religious festivals. Israeli newspaper Haaretz described him as “Not just an ambassador who is Jewish, but a Jewish ambassador”. That rather peculiar phrase appears directly to indicate that the potential conflict of interest for a British ambassador in Israel has indeed arisen.
It is thus most unfortunate that it is Gould who is the only British Ambassador to have met Fox and Werritty together, who met them six times, and who now stands suspected of long term participation with them in a scheme to forward war with Iran, in cooperation with Israel. This makes it even more imperative that the FCO answers now the numerous outstanding questions about the Gould/Werritty relationship and the purpose of all those meetings with Fox.
There is no doubt that the O’Donnell report’s deceitful non-reporting of so many Fox-Gould-Werritty meetings, the FCO’s blunt refusal to list Gould-Werritty, meetings and contacts without Fox, and the refusal to say who else was present at any of these occasions, amounts to irrefutable evidence that something very important is being hidden right at the heart of government. I have no doubt that my informant is telling the truth, and the secret is the plan to attack Iran. It fits all the above facts. What else does?
UPDATE: A commenter has already pointed me to this bit of invaluable evidence:
“My government absolutely agrees with your conception of the Iranian threat and the importance of your determination to battle it.” Dealing with the Iranian threat will be a large part of my work here.” Gould said.
From Israel National News. It also says that he will be trying to promote a positive atmosphere between Israel and the Palestinian National Authority, but the shallowest or the deepest search shows the same picture; an entirely biased indeed fanatical zionist who must give no confidence at all to the Palestinian Authority. He must be recalled.
~
Simple Questions A Real Democracy Would Answer
November 15, 2011
The government could clear up the issue of Fox Gould and Werritty if it answered these very simple questions. They are questions to which in any real democracy we would be entitled to expect an answer, concerning officials paid by us. I have put these questions to them. Consider why the government refuses to answer these simple and obvious questions.
But the truly terrifying thing is not just that the government refuses to answer these questions from me, it is that the mainstream media refuses even to ask them:
How many times in total did Gould, Werritty and Fox meet?
How many of these are listed in O’Donnell’s official investigation?
Why the discrepancy?
Did the meeting between Fox, Gould and Werritty while Fox was Shadow Defence Secretary follow official rules concerning briefing of opposition front bench spokesmen by officials?
Where did it take place?
When did Gould first meet Werritty?
How many times did Gould meet Werritty without Fox present?
How many communications of all sorts have there ever been between Gould and Werritty?
Where precisely was the “Pre-posting briefing meeting” for Gould with Werritty and Fox held?
Why was it not held in the Secretary of State’s office?
Why was no MOD official present?
Who paid for the “Private dinner” between Fox, Gould and Werritty and “Senior Israelis” in Tel Aviv in February 2011?
Who was present?
Was any note subsequently made of the discussion?
Who paid for the “social engagement” to which Fox invited Gould and Werritty in summer 2010?
Who was present?
Was the possibility of an attack on Iran discussed in any of the above meetings, events or communications?
These really are very simple questions and I will happily report any answer in full. Every media outlet should be asking these questions. Remember Werritty had no security clearance. It is therefore not possible that the answers to these questions is classified information.
If the explanations are innocent, why should these questions not be answered?
The answer to these questions would not be hidden in a democracy.
~
Please feel free to re-use and republish this article anywhere, commercially or otherwise. It has been blocked by the mainstream media. I write regularly for the mainstream media and this is the first article of mine I have ever been unable to publish. People have risked a huge amount by leaking me information in an effort to stop the government machinery from ramping up a war with Iran. There are many good people in government who do not want to see another Iraq. Please do all you can to publish and redistribute this information.
November 15, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel |
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In an interview with Spiegel Online on April 19, 2011, Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, former Director General of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), was asked if he was deceived by the US and its allies when investigating their allegations against Iran’s nuclear program. He answered: “the Americans and the Europeans withheld important documents and information from us. They weren’t interested in a compromise with the government in Tehran, but regime change—by any means necessary.”
In his tenure at the IAEA ElBaradei had faced a dilemma. As a politically astute Egyptian, he was well aware of the nature of the US-Israeli policy of dual containment of Iraq and Iran. He was also aware that his own agency had been used as an instrument to pursue this policy. Indeed, when in 2008 ElBaradei assured Iran that the IAEA will protect her legitimate military secrets, if Iran supplied information about some “alleged studies,” this writer wrote an open letter to remind him about how the IAEA had been used by US-Israeli spies in containing Iraq. In particular, I reminded him of David Kay’s comment about the “Faustian bargain.” Kay, who had served as the IAEA/UNSCOM (United Nations Special Commission) Chief Nuclear Weapons Inspector in Iraq, had been accused by Iraqi officials to be a spy and was instrumental in building the case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In 1999 he admitted that some inspections in Iraq went hand in hand with spying and called the use of international organizations for spying a Faustian bargain, “a bargain with the Devil—spies spying.”
I also reminded ElBaradei that under his own leadership the IAEA was still being used by the US and its allies to do to Iran what had been done to Iraq. For example, IAEA reports on Iran marked “Restricted Distribution” regularly appeared—and to this day continue to appear—on the website of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), an organization whose agenda to contain Iran on behalf of the US and Israel is clear to everyone who keeps track of its activities, claims and predictions about how soon Iran will develop nuclear weapons.
Dr. ElBaradei, of course, knew all of the above and, yet, there was hardly anything he could do about it, except to try to moderate the IAEA reports that were intended to bring about regime change in Iran after Iraq. He knew well that the US and Israel had been trying desperately to remove him as the head of the IAEA. As I wrote in 2008, the first lines of the AP report on September 9, 2007, read: “Chief nuclear inspector Mohamed ElBaradei is coming under intense pressure for his handling of the Iran file, with the United States and key allies accusing him of overstepping his authority. The diplomats suggested that U.S. disenchantment with the International Atomic Energy Agency chief was at its highest since early 2005.”
The pressure on ElBaradei to produce tough reports on Iran or be forced out of office continued after my open letter. For example, Haaretz reported on August 19, 2009, that according to “senior Western diplomats and Israeli officials” the IAEA “is hiding data on Iran’s drive to obtain nuclear arms.” More specifically, according to some “officials,” the report went on to say, the IAEA under ElBaradei “was refraining from publishing evidence obtained by its inspectors over the past few months that indicate Iran was pursuing information about weaponization efforts and a military nuclear program.” According to the report, these officials claimed that IAEA inspectors had written a “classified annex,” but the annex was not incorporated into the agency’s published reports. Haaretz also stated that “American, French, British and German senior officials have recently pressured ElBaradei to publish the information next month in a report due to be released at the organization’s general conference.” “The efforts to release the allegedly censored report,” Haaretz went on to write, “is being handled in Israel by Dr. Shaul Horev, director general of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission, and the Foreign Ministry.” Haaretz then stated what the crux of the matter was:
Israel has been striving to pressure the IAEA through friendly nations and have it release the censored annex. It hopes to prove that the Iranian effort to develop nuclear weapons is continuing, contrary to claims that Tehran stopped its nuclear program in 2003. A confirmation of these suspicion (sic) would oblige the international community to enact “paralyzing sanctions” on Iran.
Throughout his term, Israel has accused ElBaradei of not tackling the Iranian nuclear issue with sufficient determination. As the end of his term in December nears, Israeli diplomats are concerned that he will become less responsive and continue to hide the classified report.
Finally, Haaretz stated: “Jerusalem is hoping, however, that his successor, Japanese diplomat Yukiya Amano, will take up a tougher line on the Iranian nuclear program.” Israel and the US could not have hoped for a fellow with tougher line on Iran than Amano.
In a highly contested election, and after many rounds of balloting, in July of 2009 the IAEA 35-member board elected the Japanese candidate Yukiya Amano over South Africa’s Abdul Samad Minty. Amano was, as news sources pointed out, the “preferred candidate of the West” (AFP, July 2, 2009 and Bloomberg July 4, 2009). Much later, to be exact on December 2, 2010, the Guardian published a confidential cable, released by WikiLeaks and classified by US Ambassador Glyn Davies on October 16, 2009, which stated:
Amano reminded Ambassador on several occasions that he would need to make concessions to the G-77, which correctly required him to be fair-minded and independent, but that he was solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.
On February 18, 2010, Amano issued his first report on Iran. As expected, the report was one of the longest and harshest reports on Iran that the IAEA had ever issued. It repeated all the old allegations mentioned in previous IAEA reports and presented them as if they were new. However, unlike previous reports, there was no mention of the fact that the IAEA did not have, and could not show to Iran, original documents alleging that Iran had engaged in illicit activities. The last section of the report, entitled “Possible Military Dimensions,” was the harshest and most ominous section. It read:
The information available to the Agency in connection with these outstanding issues [alleged activities] is extensive and has been collected from a variety of sources over time. It is also broadly consistent and credible in terms of the technical detail, the time frame in which the activities were conducted and the people and organizations involved. Altogether, this raises concerns about the possible existence in Iran of past or current undisclosed activities related to the development of a nuclear payload for a missile. These alleged activities consist of a number of projects and sub-projects, covering nuclear and missile related aspects, run by military related organizations.
Needless to say that the US, Israel and their “expert” think tanks, such as the ISIS, as well as reporters who have been trying to do to Iran what Judith Miller had done to Iraq, such as David Sanger of The New York Times, had a field day with the report.
Amano’s report was opening the way for imposing more US unilateral sanctions against Iran, as well as the push for the passage of the fourth United Nations Security Council sanction resolution. Reuters had reported on February 2, 2010 that “Western diplomats told Reuters that officials at the U.S. State Department have circulated a paper outlining possible new sanctions to senior foreign ministry officials in London, Paris, and Berlin.” The report added that “Western powers would like to target Iran’s central bank.”
On September 6, 2010, Amano distributed a restricted version of the IAEA report on Iran, which as usual appeared immediately on the ISIS website. Amano’s report was, once again, harsh and confrontational. It contained something quite unusual, passages from the Security Council Resolutions sanctioning Iran. Also, for the first time ever, the report challenged Iran’s right to object to designation of those inspectors that Iran had found objectionable, either for leaking confidential information or false and misleading reporting. On “Possible Military Dimensions,” the report stated that the “passage of time and the possible deterioration in the availability of some relevant information increase the urgency of this matter.”
The next two IAEA reports, on November 23, 2010, and February 25, 2011, were not as confrontational as previous reports. But after the latter report, AP reported on March 7, 2011, that Amano could not “guarantee that Iran is not trying to develop atomic arms.” He was quoted as saying:
Iran is not providing the necessary cooperation to enable the agency to provide credible assurance about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran . . . [the IAEA cannot] conclude that all nuclear material in Iran is in peaceful activities. . . Unfortunately, since I came into office, Iran has not interacted with us. . . There has not been progress.
Afterward, Amano told reporters: “We are not saying that Iran has a nuclear weapons program. . . We have concerns and we want to clarify the matter.”
The next report of IAEA, on May 24, 2011, added something quite menacing. At the very end, the report stated:
Since the last report of the Director General on 25 February 2011, the Agency has received further information related to such possible undisclosed nuclear related activities, which is currently being assessed by the Agency. As previously reported by the Director General, there are indications that certain of these activities may have continued beyond 2004. The following points refer to examples of activities for which clarifications remain necessary in seven particular areas of concern.
This was followed by seven allegations against Iran, such as studies on the green salt project, high explosives testing and the missile re-entry vehicle. These allegations were not new and had been based mostly on the claim by American intelligence officials that they had discovered in 2004 a stolen laptop showing Iran’s attempt to design a nuclear warhead. Indeed, the IAEA report of September 15, 2008, written under ElBaradei, had stated the following about these allegations and Iran’s response:
Iran provided written replies on 14 and 23 May 2008, the former of which included a 117-page presentation responding to the allegations concerning the green salt project, high explosives testing and the missile re-entry vehicle project. While Iran confirmed the veracity of some of the information referred to in the Annex to GOV/2008/15, Iran reiterated its assertion that the allegations were based on “forged” documents and “fabricated” data, focusing on deficiencies in form and format, and reiterated that, although it had been shown electronic versions of the documentation, Iran had not received copies of the documentation to enable it to prove that they were forged and fabricated. Iran also expressed concern that the resolution of some of these issues would require Agency access to sensitive information related to its conventional military and missile related activities.
Even though the above allegations against Iran were very old, they were now resurfacing in Amano’s IAEA reports.
On September 2, 2011, Amano issued yet another restricted report that appeared immediately on the ISIS website. Although the content of the report indicated that Iran had conceded and cooperated with the IAEA on a number of contentious issues, the tone of the report was quite harsh. Under “Possible Military Dimensions,” the report stated ominously: “the Agency is increasingly concerned about the possible existence in Iran of past or current undisclosed nuclear related activities involving military related organizations.” Given the wording, one could expect something more drastic to appear in the next report; and this indeed happened.
On November 8, 2011, Amano released the restricted copy of the report that Israel and the US had been waiting for. The release came right after much publicity concerning the alleged plot by Iran to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador in Washington and plans by Israel and the UK to attack Iran. Prior to the release of the report, numerous articles appeared in the media as to what it will contain, even though the report was supposed to be restricted until its official de-restriction. On November 5, 2011, Joby Warrick of The Washington Post even wrote about the “12-page annex to the report.” Two days later he wrote the details of the report and referred mostly to the head of ISIS, “David Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector who has reviewed the intelligence files.”
The reports in the media also indicated that some US government officials knew about the content of the report and were consulted about the report by Amano himself. On November 3, 2011, Reuters quoted President Obama as saying at the G20 summit: “The IAEA is scheduled to release a report on Iran’s nuclear program next week and (French) President (Nicolas) Sarkozy and I agree on the need to maintain the unprecedented pressure on Iran to meet its obligations.” The President’s comment came after Amano had secretly visited the White House. On November 7, 2011, David Sanger wrote in The New York Times that when “Yukia Amano, came to the White House 11 days ago to meet top officials of the National Security Council about the coming report, the administration declined to even confirm he had ever walked into the building.”
The much anticipated report, even though it was for “official use only” and “Restricted Distribution,” appeared once again on the website of ISIS on November 8, 2011, followed by an “analysis” a few hours later. The report had the 12-page “Annex” that the media had already reported. The media, however, had failed to mention, and did not mention even after the release of the report, that this was essentially the same annex that in 2009 Israel had pressured the IAEA to release, hoping that it “would oblige the international community to enact ‘paralyzing sanctions’ on Iran’”.
The annex was detailed, but given that it was basically the same document that ElBaradei had refused to publish, there was hardly anything new in it. Much of it was still no more than “allegations” made by a non-identified “Member State” or “two Member States.” Indeed, the words “alleged” and “allegation” appeared 28 times in the annex. Most of these allegations were the same ones that had been found on the mysterious laptop that somehow landed on the lap of the US government in 2004. Some, however, appeared to be new. For example, the report stated that:
The Agency has strong indications that the development by Iran of the high explosives initiation system, and its development of the high speed diagnostic configuration used to monitor related experiments, were assisted by the work of a foreign expert who was not only knowledgeable in these technologies, but who, a Member State has informed the Agency, worked for much of his career with this technology in the nuclear weapon programme of the country of his origin.
Previously, in his Washington Post article of November 7, 2011, Joby Warrick had identified the “foreign expert” as “Vyacheslav Danilenko, a former Soviet nuclear scientist.” On November 10, 2011, Reuters reported that Danilenko “has denied being the brains behind Iran’s nuclear program.” He was quoted as saying: “I am not a nuclear physicist and am not the founder of the Iranian nuclear program.” The report further added that Danilenko’s expertise was in detonation nanodiamonds, “the creation of tiny diamonds from conventional explosions for a variety of uses from lubricants to medicine.”
Some other allegations were also as flimsy as Danilenko’s case. For example, the report stated that the information “provided by Member States indicates that Iran constructed a large explosives containment vessel in which to conduct hydrodynamic experiments. The explosives vessel, or chamber, is said to have been put in place at Parchin in 2000.” Parchin is, of course, the same military complex that ISIS had alleged in 2004 to be a possible “site for research, testing and production of nuclear weapons.” It was inspected twice in 2005 and no nuclear activities were found. Amano’s latest report itself admitted that “the Agency’s visits did not uncover anything of relevance.” But now, the report seemed to imply that inspectors had looked in wrong places!
Some other new allegations bordered on the verge of absurdity. For example, the report stated: “Research by the Agency into scientific literature published over the past decade has revealed that Iranian workers, in particular groups of researchers at Shahid Behesti University and Amir Kabir University, have published papers relating to the generation, measurement and modelling of neutron transport.” The report then added that such “studies are commonly used in reactor physics or conventional ordnance research, but also have applications in the development of nuclear explosives.” This allegation is bizarre. Since when publishing papers by some scholars at the most prestigious universities in Iran—whom the report refers to as “workers”—is illegal? What should these “workers” do, submit their papers first to Mr. Amano, or US-Israeli intelligence services, for screening?
In the end, the hyped IAEA report of November 8, 2011, turned out to contain some old allegations that remain unverified and some new ones that appear to be flimsy or strange. So why publish these allegations with fanfare? One can answer the question by paraphrasing the two aforementioned statements by former IAEA Director General ElBaradei and US Ambassador Glyn Davies: the Americans and their allies, particularly the Israelis, are only interested in one thing and one thing only, regime change in Iran by any means necessary. In this endeavor, Mr. Amano is solidly in the US-Israeli court.
~
Sasan Fayazmanesh is Professor Emeritus of Economics at California State University, Fresno. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, forthcoming from AK Press. He can be reached at:sasan.fayazmanesh@gmail.com.
November 15, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel |
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The Friday resignation of chief White House adviser on the Middle East Dennis Ross drew sharply contrasting reactions that reflected the sectarian, pro-Israel agenda his presence in government represented.
AIPAC, the key arm of the Israel lobby, issued a rare statement hailing Ross’s legacy. “In his tireless pursuit of Middle East peace, Ambassador Ross has maintained a deep understanding of the strategic value of the US-Israel relationship and has worked vigorously to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.”
Rashid Khalidi, a former negotiator for the PLO who now directs the Middle East Institute of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, had a less positive take on Ross’s legacy.
“Since the Reagan administration, Dennis Ross has played a crucial role in crafting Middle East policies that never served peace, which is today farther away than ever,” Khalidi said. “His efforts, which contributed to the growth in the number of Israeli settlers in the occupied territories, were marked by a litany of failures. It is long overdue for him and the bankrupt policies he represents to be shown the door.”
Despite references to Ross’s pro-Israel leanings by his defenders and detractors, his full impact on the trajectory of US policy towards the Middle East in general and the Arab Israeli conflict in particular remains underrated or under-reported.
Serving in four American administrators and overseeing a long and fruitless process to secure an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Ross did more than any official to advance Israeli ambitions of expansion at the cost of Palestinian pursuit of statehood and freedom.
Inside the Obama White House, Ross made little effort to conceal his pro-Israel agenda. While serving on the President’s National Security Council, Ross actively sought to obstruct the US from pressing Israel to engage in negotiations on final status issues like borders and refugees, or to apply measures to stop its construction of settlements in occupied East Jerusalem. At the same time, Ross spearheaded Washington’s effort to punish Iran for pursuing nuclear energy capacity, pushing for harsh sanctions against Iran that have proven fruitless. The New York Times described Ross simply as “Israel’s friend in the Obama White House.”
When Ross announced his resignation this week, he chose to do so before the board members of the Jewish People Policy Institute, a Jerusalem-based think tank founded by Israel’s Jewish Agency to develop prescriptions for combating threats to “Jewish demographics” in Israel and abroad. Ross directed the think tank for several years before entering the Obama administration. By the time Ross revealed his plans to retire from government, he had already arranged for a golden parachute with one of the key arms of the Israel lobby. In December, Ross will return to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a hawkish think tank that he founded in collaboration with AIPAC. After nearly three decades of advancing Israel’s interests from the inside, Ross’s career had come full circle.
Ross was raised in a strictly secular atmosphere by a Catholic stepfather and a secular Jewish mother. Like many American Jews of his generation, Ross became religiously observant and enthusiastically Zionist following Israel’s lightning victory in the 1967 war. Ross’s first paper for WINEP, which he published in 1985, demanded the appointment of “a non-Arabist Special Middle East envoy” who would not “feel guilty about our relationship with Israel and our reluctance to force Israeli consensus.”
He gathered diplomatic experience at the failed US-brokered Madrid Summit, where Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir privately revealed Israel’s intention to “drag out the talks on Palestinian self-rule for ten years while attempting to settle hundreds of thousands of Jews in the Occupied Territories.”
With the election of Democratic President Bill Clinton, Ross’s dream job finally arrived. Clinton’s presidential campaign drew momentum from the Israel lobby’s anger at President George H.W. Bush, who momentarily withheld loan guarantees to Israel to force Shamir to accept a settlement freeze. Clinton’s top individual donor was Haim Saban, an American-Israeli media tycoon committed to cementing Israeli influence over American policy. Saban raised US$3.5 million at an event he hosted for the Clinton campaign, then helped secure the appointment of WINEP co-founder Martin Indyk as US Ambassador to Israel once Clinton was elected. For his part, Ross was appointed as Clinton’s special Middle East coordinator – his “non-Arabist Special Middle East envoy.”
Ross was the most influential American figure in negotiations between Israel and Palestinian representatives during the 1990’s, arguably more powerful than even the President. As a former senior Clinton official told journalist Clayton Swisher, “Part of the problem was with people like Dennis… instead of being a broker – instead of facilitating the parties making a deal – they started doing it as if they were the principal or the President himself.”
Ross played a central role in negotiating the Oslo Accords, an agreement that postponed all major issues from borders to refugees to a later date while granting full Israeli military control over 60 percent of the West Bank, enabling Israel to transform large swathes of the occupied area into a land of settlers while strategically confining the Palestinian urban population into a series of isolated Bantustans. As new Israeli “facts on the ground” that forever altered the landscape of future negotiations, the settlements stood as symbols of Ross’s legacy.
After repeated Israeli violations of the terms it agreed to at Oslo, Ross urged the White House to avoid making any moves that might cause Israel to question America’s commitment to the special relationship. Behind the scenes, Ross spent hours at a time huddling with Israeli officials, helping them hammer out onerous demands, while hoarding communications that arrived from the Palestinians, refusing to allow National Security Advisors to view them. Ross alienated Palestinian negotiators to the point that Arafat personally asked Clinton for his removal.
Inside the Clinton administration, some national security advisers grumbled about Ross’s behavior, demanding he be replaced even though they knew he was entrenched to the point that he was practically intractable.
“Dennis assumed he knew more about the issue than anyone else,” a former State Department official told Swisher, “and when he felt close to getting a deal, it became evident to everyone that his more pro-Israeli feelings were coming out. As we came very close to the time to do a deal, Dennis became very nervous about the Israelis’ position on the potential deal.”
Though the Clinton administration rarely strayed from the Israel lobby’s diktat, Ross was so determined to extend Israeli influence over American policy that he actively undermined the President. In 1999, when Congress attempted to insert a special provision that would have eliminated the President’s authority to block legislation moving the US Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Ross argued at a meeting in the White House, “I just don’t see why we can’t move the embassy to Jerusalem.”
At the time, Ross’s son was interning for Senator Joseph Lieberman, a strong advocate of the legislation to move the embassy. In the end, the congressional initiative failed, while Clinton’s inner circle made efforts to isolate Ross from negotiations.
At Camp David in 2000, the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority met to resolve final status issues. After repeated Israeli violations of the terms of Oslo, however Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat was skeptical about the usefulness of more talks. He agreed to them only after extended pressure from Clinton, who explicitly promised that he would not blame Arafat if the negotiations failed.
Ross returned to his central role at Camp David, using his control over the flow of documents to ensure that Israel had the upper hand. “The ‘no surprises’ policy, under which we had to run everything by Israel first, stripped our policy of the independence and flexibility required for serious peacemaking,” Ross’s deputy, Aaron David Miller complained afterwards. Alluding to his boss, Miller described the American negotiating team at Camp David as “Israel’s lawyer.”
When the talks collapsed, primarily because of Israel’s refusal to relinquish key areas of East Jerusalem – Israel and the United States attempted to force Arafat’s team to agree to terms that stood well outside the Arab consensus – Clinton reneged on his promise to Arafat, publicly blaming him for rejecting a “generous offer” in order to help then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak win re-election.
Ross curiously omitted Clinton’s broken promise from his voluminous, 840-page account of Camp David, “The Missing Peace,” attacking Arafat instead as a “skunk” and offering the Orientalist and ahistorical claim that Arafat was psychologically incapable of making the transition from freedom fighter to statesman.
The American campaign against Arafat enabled Barak to introduce the “no partner” theme – that there was no Palestinian partner for peace – a canard designed to justify Israel’s brutal repression of the Second Intifada and its subsequent strategy of unilateralism. In October 2000, before the Palestinian campaign of suicide bombing had begun in earnest, Israeli troops fired 1.3 million bullets at Palestinians revolting against the occupation. Like the post-Oslo settlement construction boom, the lives – and limbs – shattered in the wake of Camp David symbolized Ross’s legacy of failure.
When the George W. Bush administration took power, Ross cooled his heels at WINEP, collecting a US$230,000 annual paycheck while padding his wallet with over US$220,000 in speaking fees from pro-Israel organizations like AIPAC. Ross delivered a total of zero speeches for Arab and Muslim groups during this period. Ross also found time to join leading neoconservatives in making the case for invading and occupying Iraq.
With the mission accomplished in Iraq, Ross joined John Bolton, Donald Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith and a Who’s Who of neocons to produce a report called “Meeting the Challenge: US Policy Toward Iranian Nuclear Development.” The paper was a bellicose collection of arguments for ramping up conflict with the evildoers of Iran. Veteran national security analyst Jim Lobe summarized the document most succinctly when he called it “a road map to war.”
The same year, Ross emerged in a novel role as a campaign proxy for Obama, who was attempting to weather a storm of slander from his Republican opponents. The latter accused Obama of everything from crypto-Islamic sentiments to a hidden pro-Palestinian agenda, pointing to a past relationship with Rashid Khalidi (the horror!) that in fact amounted to little more than a casual friendship.
From Obama’s vulnerability on the Israel issue came Ross’s strength, allowing the veteran insider to emerge as Obama’s de facto liaison to the Jewish donors who accounted for so much of the Democratic Party’s base of funding.
During the final months of the campaign, Ross was junketed to synagogues in affluent suburbs from Pennsylvania to Florida to reassure nervous pro-Israel voters that he would be their man on the inside, working for Israel’s interests at every turn.
When Obama appeared at the annual convention of AIPAC in 2008, Ross inserted a provocative line that reflected his personal zealotry: “Jerusalem must remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.”
By mouthing the phrase, Obama contradicted official US policy, generating embarrassment and controversy that forced him to backpedal immediately afterwards. But thanks to the guiding hand of Ross, the candidate doubts inside the pro-Israel community that he might prove insufficiently pliant. Thus the flow of bundled donations continued unabated.
Ross’s departure from the Obama administration has fueled concerns about the President’s fundraising potential. “Ross’s departure is not a diplomatic problem for the White House; it is instead a problem for the Obama re-election campaign,” wrote Elliot Abrams, the neoconservative former Assistant Secretary of State for the Bush II administration. “For Ross was the only official in whom most American Jewish leaders had confidence. As most of them are Democrats who have long accepted Ross’s faith in the ‘peace process,’ they viewed his role as the assurance that a steady, experienced, pro-Israel hand was on or near the tiller.”
Ross’s dual role as Obama’s Jewish consigliere and Middle East advisor was the ultimate symbol of the Israel lobby’s corruption of American foreign policy. Ross may have failed at each turn, but each successive failure has enabled maximalist Israeli impulses, from the construction of settlements to the siege of the Palestinian population. In this regard, Ross fulfilled his promises to his cohorts in the lobby. Whether Ross and his allies have advanced the long term Israeli goal of securing international legitimacy is another matter, however. Indeed, it is no coincidence that he left government with the peace process in shambles and with Israeli leaders braying for a war of aggression against Iran. Perhaps nothing summarizes Ross’s career as well as a single line sung by Bob Dylan: “There’s no success like failure, and failure’s no success at all.”
November 15, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel |
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Daniel Joyner is Professor of Law at the University of Alabama School of Law. In an Op-ed at Jurist Forum he writes on the recent IAEA report on Iran: Iran’s Nuclear Program and the Legal Mandate of the IAEA:
This report is legally problematic in a number of ways.Firstly and most fundamentally, the IAEA simply has no legal mandate to produce such a report on activities being carried on within an IAEA member state concerning items and technologies that may be related to the development of a nuclear explosive device, but that are not directly related to fissionable materials or associated facilities.
…
Since the IAEA is acting outside of its legal authority in this section of the report, it does not have a legal standard to apply to its conclusions regarding possible nuclear weapons related activities not involving fissile material. […] In short, as the ancient legal maxim states, there can be no illegality where there is no law. The IAEA is simply “concerned.”
Why they are concerned is itself a matter of curiosity. There is no knowledge or technical ability related to nuclear weapons detailed in this report, and allegedly possessed by Iran, which other technologically advanced non-nuclear-weapon states like Japan or Germany do not possess. These are specialized bodies of knowledge and technical capabilities, to be sure, but they are well within the knowledge base and technical abilities of these advanced industrial states.
…
Since there is no evidence presented in this new report by the IAEA Director General that Iran has physically constructed a nuclear explosive device or any of its components, one can conclude that the Director General’s concern expressed in this report cannot be justified as being based upon a breach of a rule of international law prohibiting the activities outlined in the IAEA report. Such a rule exists neither in Iran’s safeguards agreement with the IAEA, or in the NPT. Rather, the reason for the IAEA’s and the UN Security Council’s attention to Iran can only be based on other factors, primarily including the determination of the US and other states that Iran is a threat to Israel, the region and international peace and security generally.
…
[The IAEA’s] track record in devoting so much critical attention to Iran over the past nine years, and not to other non-nuclear-weapon states who have for decades engaged in precisely the same production of knowledge and capabilities, through the same processes, has convinced both Iran and the other members of the Non-Aligned Movement (comprising the vast majority of states in the world) that the IAEA has thereby undermined its independence and objectivity as a technical monitoring and verification body. Instead, they believe, it has become a politicized instrument of the foreign policy goals of the US and other Western states. The agency’s overreaching in its new report is simply the most recent evidence of this fact.
With regard to “to other non-nuclear-weapon states who have for decades engaged in precisely the same production of knowledge and capabilities, through the same processes” Joyner mentions, let us just point to two of them (there are many more).
From the Wall Street Journal, October 28 2011: In Japan, Provocative Case for Staying Nuclear
Many of Japan’s political and intellectual leaders remain committed to nuclear power even as Japanese public opinion has turned sharply against it. One argument in favor rarely gets a public airing: Japan needs to maintain its technical ability to make nuclear bombs.
…
“I don’t think Japan needs to possess nuclear weapons, but it’s important to maintain our commercial reactors because it would allow us to produce a nuclear warhead in a short amount of time,” Shigeru Ishiba, a former defense minister, said in an interview in a recent edition of Sapio, a right-leaning twice-monthly magazine.”It’s a tacit nuclear deterrent,” added Mr. Ishiba, an influential parliament member who made similar remarks on a prime time television news show in August while serving as policy chief of Japan’s main opposition party.
This on Brazil from a HuffPo piece datelined September 25 2009: Jose Alencar, Brazil VP, Says Country Should Build Nuclear Arms
Jose Alencar, who also served as defense minister from 2004 to 2006, said in an interview with journalists from several Brazilian news media that his country does not have a program to develop nuclear weapons, but should: “We have to advance on that.”
Like Iran Brazil has not signed the Additional Protocol to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty plus it has several nuclear activities that awake at least suspicion with regards to possible nuclear weapon manufacturing including an HEU production facility for highly enriched Uranium at Resende that is only partially under IAEA watch. Brazil seems, in total, much more determined and active working towards nuclear weapon capability than Iran.
Joyner is quite right in pointing out that the IAEA is far off its legal basis and highly partisan with regards to Iran. He also caught the reason why this is so quite well.
November 13, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel |
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TEHRAN – Parliamentary sources revealed on Saturday that Iran’s legislature is due to discuss the country’s withdrawal from the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director-general released a biased report against Iran.
Vice-Chairman of the Iranian parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission Mohammad Kowsari told FNA on Saturday that his commission would “study Iran’s withdrawal from the NPT” after a relevant demand by a major political faction of the Iranian university students.
His remarks alluded to a relevant demand raised earlier today by the Iranian students’ Office for Consolidating Unity (Daftar-e Tahkim-e Vahdat), asking the Iranian officials to review the country’s membership in the IAEA.
Kowsari underlined the “unreal” nature of the IAEA report on Iran which has been issued under the pressures of the US and Israel, and said the UN nuclear watchdog should not be turned into a place for the US false claims and allegations against other countries as it will impair the Agency’s dignity and credibility.
IAEA Director-General Yukiya Amano released a US-dictated report on Iran earlier this week, in a move seen by many, even in the West, as part of Washington and Israel’s efforts to find a new pretext for intensifying pressure on Tehran.
The western diplomats and sources had informed around a month ago that the new report would contain allegations on the basis of some copied documents which have been presented to the IAEA by certain western countries to show that Iran is pursuing a military drive in its nuclear program.
Once the report was released, not only Iran, but also many world states, including Russia, China and the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) member states, strongly rejected it and blasted the UN nuclear watchdog chief for acting as a White House proxy.
Iran also said that it would not budge “an iota” from its peaceful atomic activities.
Israel and its close ally the United States accuse Iran of seeking a nuclear weapon, while they have never presented any corroborative document to substantiate their allegations. Both Washington and Tel Aviv possess advanced weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear warheads.
November 12, 2011
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Wars for Israel |
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Syrian protesters have stormed the Saudi and Qatari embassies in Damascus to voice their outrage at an Arab League’s decision to suspend Syria’s membership in the Pan-Arab body.
The incident occurred late on Saturday when thousands of people poured into the streets of Damascus to stage protest rallies in front of the Qatari, Saudi, Turkish and US embassies.
Demonstrations were also held in Syria’s major cities of Aleppo, Raqqa, Lattakia, Tartous, Hasaka and Sweida.
In Damascus, some protesters broke into the Saudi embassy while some accessed the rooftop of the Qatari embassy building and raised the Syrian national flag.
Others pelted the Qatari facility with tomatoes and eggs to protest against Doha for heading the Arab League emergency session, where the suspension was announced earlier in the day.
Chanting slogans in support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the protesters then gathered in front of the Turkish and US embassies, condemning the Arab bloc for acting out a plot they said had been hatched by the United States.
A similar protest was held against the Saudi-based Al-Arabiya and the Doha-based Al-Jazeera news channels in the Jordanian capital, Amman.
The angry protesters tried to break into the buildings of news channels, which they blamed for following a US and Israeli agenda against Syria.
The Arab League voted “to suspend Syrian delegations’ activities in its meetings” until the peace plan proposed by the body is implemented by the Syrian government.
It also urged Arab countries to recall their ambassadors from Damascus and called for the imposition of economic and political sanctions on Syria.
The announcement of Syria’s membership suspension came during an emergency meeting at the League’s headquarters in the Egyptian capital, Cairo.
Syria has been experiencing a deadly unrest since mid-March and according to the United Nations, over 3,500 people have been killed in the violence. Hundreds of Syrian security forces are among the dead.
While the Syrian opposition accuses the security forces of cracking down on what it calls anti-government protesters, Damascus blames the violence on outlaws, saboteurs and armed terrorist groups sponsored by foreign countries.
November 12, 2011
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Israel is trying to exploit the international community’s uncertainty about how to respond to this week’s report by the UN nuclear watchdog (IAEA) on Iran’s nuclear program to justify a possible military strike against Iran. The IAEA’s report indicated Iran has secretly worked for years on developing a nuclear warhead and might still be doing so.
The International Atomic Energy Agency’s report is certain to lead to demands by the US and Europe for stiffer sanctions on the Iranian regime. Russia and China, meanwhile, have urged dialogue and cooperation with Iran.
Amid the divisions, British government officials said this week that Israel was preparing to launch a military attack on Iran’s suspected nuclear sites within the next two months, probably with logistical support from the United States.
An unnamed senior official at the Foreign Office told the Daily Mail newspaper: “We’re expecting something as early as Christmas, or very early in the new year.”
Similarly anonymous US military officials have been ringing alarm bells in the US media that Israel might launch an attack. The Pentagon, CNN reported, was “increasingly vigilant” for military activity between Israel and Iran.
The warnings followed a fortnight of reports in the Israeli media of bitter feuds within the Israeli government, as well as with Israel’s security chiefs, about plans to initiate such a strike.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, and his defense minister, Ehud Barak, are said to be strongly in favour of an attack. The balance in the inner cabinet apparently tipped in their favour last week when they recruited the foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, to their cause.
Further reports suggest that Netanyahu and Barak have recently moved from discussing a strike to the stage of “implementation.” In what looked like an additional intimidatory move, Israel test-launched last week the Jericho III, a long-range missile capable of reaching Iran.
Lined up against Netanyahu and Barak, according to the Israeli media, are both the current and recently retired heads of all the main military and intelligence services. They appear to be using the country’s military affairs correspondents to pass on dire warnings of the folly being prepared by Netanyahu.
The only one who has gone public so far is Meir Dagan, who departed as head of the Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, nearly a year ago. He incurred Netanyahu’s wrath early this year by stating that an attack on Iran was the “stupidest thing I have ever heard.”
He undermined Netanyahu’s public position again last month, arguing that Iran could not develop a nuclear bomb for at least another three years and, apparently contradicting the IAEA report, suggested there was no evidence Tehran has yet decided to develop military uses.
That position accords with the 2007 estimate of 16 US intelligence agencies, which found no evidence of Iran pursuing a nuclear weapons programme. An updated estimate this year has so far been kept under wraps by the White House, apparently because it confirms the earlier assessment.
Iran has long claimed it is only seeking to establish a civilian nuclear energy programme, as it is entitled to do as a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It has been receiving help chiefly from Russia.
However, some experts believe Iran is also secretly trying to become a “nuclear threshold state”: that is, to get close to developing a warhead so that, should Tehran be threatened – possibly with a US invasion, as happened to neighboring Iraq – it can quickly produce a nuclear bomb as a deterrence.
Dagan and other Israeli security officials are reported to believe that an Israeli attack on Iran would be futile and dangerous. It would fail to disable most of the nuclear production sites, which are dispersed and hidden underground, and would only intensify the pressure on Tehran to develop the technology.
Israel’s security establishment also fears that a strike would lead to severe retaliation not only from Iran but also potentially from Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas; rally Iranians behind their regime; threaten reprisals against the US in Iraq; and bring international condemnation on Israel’s head.
Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, underlined that point today when he said any attack by either Israel or the US would provoke “regional war.”
Similarly, Iranian leaders have warned that, if attacked, they would hit back against both Israel and the US. “We would make them regret such a mistake and would severely punish them,” said Hassan Firouzabadi, the Iranian chief of staff, this month.
Nonetheless, the Israeli public appears to be supportive of an attack. In May, 71 percent of Israelis backed the US launching a strike against Iran. A poll this month showed 41 behind a lone Israeli operation, with a further 20 percent undecided. Support among Israeli Jews is almost certainly higher, as the survey included the fifth of the Israeli population who are Palestinian and are generally opposed to military action.
The very public display of division in Israel’s political and military establishments on a matter of such importance to national security is almost unprecedented, leading Dan Meridor, a deputy prime minister, to call the debate “insane” and a “scandal.”
Israel is believed to have twice launched attacks on Arab states to prevent what it claims were secret efforts towards making a nuclear warhead. In 1981 it bombed Iraq’s Osirak experimental reactor, while it was under construction; and Israel is widely assumed to have been responsible for a strike in 2007 on a suspected nuclear site in Syria.
Both attacks were carried out without warning.
Israel’s true intentions in this case are hard to decipher.
Israel has been warning of the dangers of an Iranian bomb for nearly two decades, regularly claiming over that period that Tehran is only years or months from building a warhead.
However, in recent years Israel has won backing in the form of a series of increasingly stringent sanctions on Iran, imposed by the UN Security Council, to dissuade it from pursuing even a nuclear energy programme.
But most in the Israeli leadership are known to be skeptical that sanctions alone can stop Tehran from getting the bomb. They argue that a nuclear-armed Iran would be a threat to world peace and suggest that Israel would be first to be targeted.
Netanyahu has been especially vociferous in promoting this threat, calling Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, the “new Hitler” and warning that Israel faces a “Holocaust from the ayatollahs” – comparing Israel’s position to that of the Jewish community in Germany in 1938.
Israel’s real concerns, however, are rather different from the doomsday rhetoric.
In fact, the leadership is chiefly fearful of the domestic and geo-political implications of Tehran developing a warhead, believing it would severely weaken both Israel’s regional superpower status and its tight alliance with Washington.
Israel has its own nuclear arsenal – estimated at between 200 and 400 warheads – which it developed secretly with assistance from Britain and France, and against US wishes, in the late 1960s.
Commentators have noted that one of Israel’s chief aims in developing a warhead was to blackmail the US and force it into a military alliance for fear that otherwise Israel might use the bomb in a confrontation with a neighboring state.
Francis Perrin, head of the French Atomic Energy Agency during the period when France helped Israel to develop a nuclear weapon, said: “We thought the Israeli bomb was aimed against the Americans… to say ‘if you don’t want to help us in a critical situation we will require you to help us, otherwise we will use our nuclear bomb.”
Just such a moment occurred a few years later, in 1973, when the US was forced massively to rearm Israel as it faced defeat at the hands of neighboring Arab states.
At the regional level, Israel’s current fear is that an Iranian bomb would unravel these gains. Israeli analysts were clear on this point as far back as the early 1990s, when Iran was trying to get European oversight for a nuclear energy programme.
Aluf Benn, an analyst for Haaretz, wrote in 1994, for example, that Israel regarded Iran as the number one military priority because it “could aspire to regional hegemony and ruin the peace process by virtue of having nuclear weapons and long-range missiles.”
In this assessment, were Tehran to become a military rival to Israel, it would be able to bolster its position with the Arab states, force Israel to make major concessions to the Palestinians and compete for influence in Washington.
None of these prospects is easy for Israel to live with.
In addition, there are also fears that a nuclear Iran would pose a “demographic threat” domestically for Israel, making Israeli Jews consider emigrating and Jews in the diaspora unwilling to immigrate. Given Israel’s desire to ensure the Jewish population outnumbers the Palestinians at all times, such issues are taken seriously.
In 2006 Ephraim Sneh, at the time the deputy defense minister to Barak, revealed that Israel was not primarily concerned that Iran might fire a nuclear missile.
The danger of an Iranian bomb, he warned, was that “most Israelis would prefer not to live here; most Jews would prefer not to come here with families, and Israelis who can live abroad will.” He added: “I am afraid Ahmadinejad will be able to kill the Zionist dream without pushing a button. That’s why we must prevent this regime from obtaining nuclear capability at all costs.”
But while there is no doubt these threats are taken extremely seriously by Israel’s security establishment, there is much less clarity about what action can feasibly be taken.
Dagan is credited with a series of exploits – including assassinating Iranian scientists, introducing computer viruses into the software being used in Iran’s nuclear programme, and setting up shell companies to sell faulty equipment to Tehran – that are believed to have slowed Iranian progress.
According to a confidential US embassy cable released by WikiLeaks last year, Dagan told US officials that covert action, including helping minority groups topple the regime, could contain Iran’s nuclear programme for the forseeable future.
There has been fevered speculation about why Israeli officials have gone public with their dispute about military action.
The disagreement has made Israel look weak and indecisive, fuelling fears that Netanyahu and Barak are sincere about wanting a military strike, even if they have to go against US wishes.
More likely, however, Dagan and others in the intelligence establishment are concerned that, while Netanyahu’s belligerent posturing towards Iran is a bluff, it might escalate into a dangerous confrontation. Haaretz’s military correspondent, Amos Harel, said there was a danger in Netanyahu’s behaviour of “a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
That concern is shared by Russia. Its foreign minister, Dmitry Medvedev, said today that Israel was using “dangerous rhetoric” that could lead to “a major war.”
Certainly, there is little evidence that Netanyahu’s threats are likely to dissuade Tehran from developing a weapon, if that is what Ahmedinejad’s regime is really trying to do. In fact, menacing Iran may simply firm up its resolve to protect itself by building a warhead.
The real audience of Netanyahu’s threat of military action, it seems, is the White House and the international community.
According to Israeli analysts, the US alone has the military muscle to take out Iran’s nuclear sites. Netanyahu appears to hope that Washington can be goaded into carrying out a strike of its own to avoid the threat of an unsuccessful Israeli operation.
At the very least, he may hope, Obama will be assisted in trying to win over China and Russia to “crippling sanctions,” as Lieberman demanded this week.
Even intensified sanctions might be used to try to bring Iran to its knees, as occurred in Iraq. That is the fear of Russia. Its deputy foreign minister, Genady Gatilov, warned this week that more sanctions would be seen as “an instrument of regime change in Tehran”.
The question is how Obama responds to the pressure. He is facing a presidential election year, and can expect to come under enormous arm-twisting not only from Israel but also from its supporters in the Congress and among Washington’s lobby groups.
How credible the report is is already open to doubt. Yaacov Katz, a Jerusalem Post analyst, noted that Israeli intelligence had provided “critical information used in the report.” That may have included information that Iran had recruited a Russian scientist, Vyacheslav Danilenko, to help in developing its nuclear programme. Almost immediately, evidence surfaced indicating that Danilenko had no nuclear expertise.
In a sign that the White House might fight a rearguard action to try to stop Israel cornering it into military action, US defence secretary Leon Panetta warned today that such an attack should be a “last resort,” and would make little impact on an Iranian programme but would have unintended consequences, including for US forces in the region.
November 12, 2011
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