The Fanonite

Gareth Porter of the excellent Inter Press Service with the latest in the Israel Lobby’s campaign to nudge US towards another war. You can hear Porter discuss his article on Antiwar Radio here:

Also see this interview with him from The Real News: ‘US House Res. 362 suggests the use of force with new bill’

Let me note here that I used to be a regular listener of Democracy Now and several other Leftist news programs. I am no more. It has been clear for some time now that the Israel Lobby and its neocon spearhead are the only entities pushing for war, yet you wouldn’t hear it said once. Even when statements have been made to that effect, such as Seymour Hersh’s comment on DN that ‘Jewish money’ was behind the war drive, Amy Goodman made a point not to pursue the point. These days I mostly turn to IPS for its excellent analysts (Porter, Khody Akhavi and the indispensable Jim Lobe), Antiwar.com, the Real News Network and Counterpunch for reliable news and commentary.

New arguments by analysts close to Israeli thinking in favor of U.S. strikes against Iran cite evidence of Iranian military weakness in relation to the U.S. and Israel and even raise doubts that Iran is rushing to obtain such weapons at all.

The new arguments contradict Israel’s official argument that it faces an “existential threat” from an Islamic extremist Iranian regime determined to get nuclear weapons. They suggest that Israel, which already has as many as 200 nuclear weapons, views Iran from the position of the dominant power in the region rather than as the weaker state in the relationship.

The existence of a sharp imbalance of power in favor of Israel and the United States is the main premise of a recent analysis by Patrick Clawson and Michael Eisenstadt of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) suggesting that a U.S. attack on Iranian nuclear facilities is feasible. Chuck Freilich, a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Center on Science and International Affairs, has also urged war against Iran on such a power imbalance.

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Pepe Escobar on Obama’s recently appointed Senior Working Group on National Security

‘The Bush Administration steps up its secret moves against Iran,’ reports Seymour M. Hersh. You can also hear him speak about this here:

As Alexander Cockburn points out, however, none of this is news. This story had already been broken by Andrew Cockburn on Counterpunch a few months back.

Operations outside the knowledge and control of commanders have eroded “the coherence of military strategy,” one general says.

Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.

Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year. These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of “high-value targets” in the President’s war on terror, who may be captured or killed. But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature.

Under federal law, a Presidential Finding, which is highly classified, must be issued when a covert intelligence operation gets under way and, at a minimum, must be made known to Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and the Senate and to the ranking members of their respective intelligence committees—the so-called Gang of Eight. Money for the operation can then be reprogrammed from previous appropriations, as needed, by the relevant congressional committees, which also can be briefed.

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By Muhammad Idrees Ahmad, Variant, Issue 32, Summer 2008; Spinwatch, June 23, 2008; Scoop (New Zealand), June 25, 2008; UK Watch, June 25, 2008; Media Monitors Network, June 25, 2008; Dissident Voice, June 27, 2008

“The public has to be more alert”, warned one “international terrorism expert” in the Daily Mail late last year, because Scotland “is set to become another Israel within five years”. “[A]nti-terror measures will soon become a common feature of life”, he assured the audience, and called for “routine arming of police officers” and increasing children’s “awareness of the dangers of terrorism” and for them to be “encouraged” to report anything “out of the ordinary”.

The oracle of doom was one Amnon Maor, identified as the head instructor of counter-terrorism for the IDF and Israeli border police.[1] Maor is working with security firm 360 Defence, based near Glasgow, which is “training Scottish police, military and civilians in security techniques”. This wouldn’t be the first time the British police benefits form Israeli anti-terror expertise. The police squad that carried out the extrajudicial execution of the young Brazilian electrician Jean-Charles de Menezes in the London underground had received similar training.

In the post-September 11 world, Naomi Klein writes, Israel has pitched its “uprooting, occupation and containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the ‘global war on terror’”. Britain has since been furnished with its own unpopular occupation of Arab land – and the lessons from Israel are not lost on its architects. In disaster lies opportunity – and the only thing more useful than a thing to fear is fear itself. The give away line in Maor’s prescription above is his offer to increase children’s awareness of the dangers of terrorism – absent the real thing, fear should suffice. The Prime Minister may not have many achievements to his name, but he can claim patents to ‘Fortress Britain’, whose battlements sit on a foundation of fear.
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Connie Bruck on ‘A multibillionaire’s relentless quest for global influence.’ This is an highly important article. Leftist received wisdom, as regurgitated by one recent visitor to this blog, holds that US supports Israel because of its ‘elite’. They rarely mention if the elite is unanimous in this support. It isn’t. Going back all the way to ‘48 and earlier, the elite has been wary of this alliance. It is the Jewish segment of the elite (a.ka. the Israel lobby) that spearheads this support, and as the following article amply illustrates, out of immediate political considerations they usually get others in the establishment to toe the line.

Sheldon Adelson’s Macao casinos have helped make him America’s third-richest man.

Last October, Sheldon Adelson, the gaming multibillionaire, accompanied a group of Republican donors to the White House to meet with George W. Bush. They wanted to talk to the President about Israel. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was organizing a major conference in the United States, in an effort to re-start the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and her initiative had provoked consternation among many rightward-leaning American Jews and their Christian evangelical allies. Most had seen Bush as a reliable friend of Israel, and one who had not pressured Israel to pursue the peace process. Adelson, who is seventy-four, owns two of Las Vegas’s giant casino resorts, the Venetian and the Palazzo, and is the third-richest person in the United States, according to Forbes. He is fiercely opposed to a two-state solution; and he had contributed so generously to Bush’s reëlection campaign that he qualified as a Bush Pioneer. A short, rotund man, with sparse reddish hair and a pale countenance that colors when he is angered, Adelson protested to Bush that Rice was thinking of her legacy, not the President’s, and that she would ruin him if she continued to pursue this disastrous course. Then, as Adelson later told an acquaintance, Bush put one arm around his shoulder and another around that of his wife, Miriam, who was born in Israel, and said to her, “You tell your Prime Minister that I need to know what’s right for your people—because at the end of the day it’s going to be my policy, not Condi’s. But I can’t be more Catholic than the Pope.” (The White House denies this account.)

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Uni Avnery on Mearsheimer and Walt in Israel:

Contrary to some expectations, the visit of the two controversial American professors was a great success.

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, whose book “The Israel Lobby” has caused an uproar in the United States and was boycotted there by the Jewish establishment, were cordially received in Israel and aroused a  lively debate.

The professors came to Israel as guests of Gush Shalom, after visiting Jordan and the West Bank. They continued to Dubai and Abu Dabi.

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Hard Right Neocons and AIPAC

Who Funds AIPAC?

Pay no mind to the Mossad agent on the line. Philip Giraldi on Israeli espionage in the US. For further context, check out this interview from Antiwar Radio: “Philip Giraldi discusses his recent article “The Spy Who Loves Us: Israeli Espionage In America” about the extensive Israeli spy network inside America and their surveillance of the 9/11 hijackers, the corroboration of their spying by U.S. intelligence agencies, the case of spy Jonathan Pollard and how Israel passes it’s stolen intel on to many enemies of America, the still secret identity of Israeli very top level asset “Mega,” the spy for Israel, Ben-Ami Kadish, and his treasonous crimes, the Israeli and Iranian influence in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, the White House/Iranian “negotiation” charade, and the planning for and consequences of an attack against Iran – including the possible use of nuclear weapons.”

After Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard was sentenced to life in prison in 1986, the U.S. negotiated an understanding with Israel—a “gentlemen’s agreement” —stipulating that neither nation would thenceforth conduct espionage operations in the other’s territory without consent. But the agreement was a sham from the beginning. The Israeli government didn’t even honor its commitments in the aftermath of the Pollard case, failing to return the estimated 360 cubic feet of stolen information to enable the U.S. to conduct a damage assessment. The United States, for its part, continued to recruit and run agents inside Israel throughout the 1980s and 1990s. And it was known within the intelligence and counterintelligence communities that Israel did the same in the United States. David Szady, the FBI’s assistant director for counterintelligence, was so dismayed by the level of Israeli spying in the late ’90s that he called in the head of the Israeli Embassy’s Central Institute for Intelligence and Special Activities (Mossad) office and told him, “Knock it off.”

Pollard’s name was in the news again on April 22, when former U.S. Army weapons engineer Ben-Ami Kadish was arrested for passing secrets to Israel. Kadish had been an agent run by Yosef Yagur, who directed Pollard. Yagur, under cover as a science attaché at the Israeli Consulate General in New York, fled the U.S. in 1985 after Pollard was arrested, but remained in touch with Kadish.

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After listening to Democracy Now’s appalling interview in its Tuesday, June 10 broadcast, I sent Amy Goodman a letter of complaint which I had also CCed to a few friends with interest in the subject. One of them had passed the letter on among other people to Counterpunch, who recognizing the urgency of the issue published it as an article, typos and all. The article has since generated a lot of reaction, nearly all of it positive (I have received more mail in response to this article than I have to all my past writings combined). Since today it has also been quoted by Alexander Cockburn, let me just add a note of qualification. The tone of the letter, a follow up to an earlier complaint about the lack of coverage of the AIPAC conference, was harsh because it was an immediate response and was not intended for publication. However, the substance of the complaint remains valid. This is not to say, as some have construed, that DN is abandoning its principles. I just think they have shown poor judgement (and they are not alone in this unfortunately; the whole US left, with the exception of the Cockburns, Chris Hedges, Philip Weiss and Ralph Nader, has given the lobby a free pass) which becomes all the more egregious given the particular time in history, the nature of the threats emanating from AIPAC’s podia, and the failure to investigate a power that imposes unanimity on politicians who otherwise have little in common. Other than that I remain a devoted listener, and I hope DN rectifies by giving Mearsheimer and Walt a chance to present their own case.

Following is a more precise, typo-free version of the letter:

It is with some alarm and dismay that I watched Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! provide platform to right-wing Paksitani journalist Ahmad Rashid, long an apologist for Bush’s war-on-terror, to recycle propaganda from British tabloid press and other discredited sources. His tale about al-Qa’ida recruiting “white European converts” for terrorist acts in Europe originated with the British security services as part of their fearmongering campaign to build support for the 42-day detention without charge plan. No shred of evidence was ever offered.

Equally bogus are his claims of organized al-Qa’ida “training camps with language facilities” etc. Once again, these claims are the products of the vivid imaginations of the terrorologists proliferating in the war on terror fear factory. I suggest Amy ask Rashid to substantiate his claims or issue a retraction. (When he claims Iraq is an “Arab Middle East problem” and that it would be resolved when its neighbours “stop interfering”, I would have liked Amy to at least ask if he was aware the country is under U.S. occupation.)

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Excellent piece on the Lobby by Alexander Cockburn where he also quotes my letter/article from the day before. I was surprised to the response to my letter which ended up as an article on CP. I thought I was alone in my disappointment with the left’s refusal to tackle the subject.

On Tuesday June 3 Barack Obama claimed the greatest prize the Democratic Party can offer, namely his nomination as its candidate for the presidency. The very next day the salesman of “change” raced from Minnesota back to Washington and publicly abased himself at the feet of an organization whose prime mission is to ensure that change unpalatable to the state of Israel will never be pressed by the United States government. The terms of Obama’s surrender exploded like rhetorical cluster bombs across the Middle East. To Israel and its Arab neighbors it surely signaled that whoever moves into the White House next January, there will be no swerve from Bush’s role as guarantor of Israeli intransigeance.

The conferences of the American Israel Public Committee have become showcases for the political clout of this lobbying group. The clout is real . A politician angering the Lobby can see campaign funds dry up and surprise challenges by well financed opponents. Back in September, 1991 President George Bush Sr, took on the Lobby pointing out that the U.S. spends nearly $1,000 a year for every Israeli and suggested this was extortion at the hands of AIPAC. “I’m up against some powerful forces,” he said at his press conference. “They’ve got something like 1,000 lobbyists on the Hill working the other side of the question. We’ve got one lonely little guy here doing it.” He want that particular battle, but some count the resultant enmity of AIPAC as a serious factor in his defeat by Clinton the following year. If so, George Jr took the lesson to heart.

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