Reply
Fri 27 Aug, 2004 07:31 pm
Reporters have been hearing for several months that an investigation was going on. Of importance is the forged document that accused Saddam of trying to buy yellow cake in Nigeria, that was one of the excused made by the Bush administration for attacking Iraq. It is alleged that Israel was the forger of the document, acting to help provide evidence to support the Bush administration's intention to go to war with Iraq.
You may wish to keep these names in mind: Douglas Feith and William Luti of the Pentagon and Stephen Hadley of the National Security Council and David Wurmser. For info re Wurmser: http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:cIqP1lmCf0EJ:www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml%3Ftitle%3DDavid_Wurmser+david+wurmser&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
As an aside, this is a really big news story that should erase the Swiftboater smears out of the news---and right before the Republican convention. ---BBB
FBI Probes Pentagon Spy Case
Aug. 27, 2004
CBS News has learned that the FBI has a full-fledged espionage investigation under way and is about to -- in FBI terminology -- "roll up" someone agents believe has been spying not for an enemy, but for Israel from within the office of the Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon.
60 Minutes Correspondent Lesley Stahl reports the FBI believes it has "solid" evidence that the suspected mole supplied Israel with classified materials that include secret White House policy deliberations on Iran.
At the heart of the investigation are two people who work at The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a powerful pro-Israel lobby in Washington.
The FBI investigation, headed up by Dave Szady, has involved wiretaps, undercover surveillance and photography that CBS News was told document the passing of classified information from the mole, to the men at AIPAC, and on to the Israelis.
CBS sources say that last year the suspected spy, described as a trusted analyst at the Pentagon, turned over a presidential directive on U.S. policy toward Iran while it was, "in the draft phase when U.S. policy-makers were still debating the policy."
This put the Israelis, according to one source, "inside the decision-making loop" so they could "try to influence the outcome."
The case raises another concern among investigators: Did Israel also use the analyst to try to influence U.S. policy on the war in Iraq?
With ties to top Pentagon officials Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, the analyst was assigned to a unit within the Defense Department tasked with helping develop the Pentagon's Iraq policy.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has been made aware of the case. The government notified AIPAC today that it wants information about the two employees and their contacts with a person at the Pentagon.
AIPAC told CBS News it is cooperating with the government and has hired outside counsel. It denies any wrongdoing by the organization or any of its employees.
An Israeli spokesman said, "We categorically deny these allegations. They are completely false and outrageous." The suspected spy has not returned repeated phone calls from CBS News.
That will be curtains for Don.
BBB
The Nigerian yellow cake document fraud info:
http://www.factcheck.org/article.aspx?docID=222
It is further alleged that the Israeli mole leaked the Pentagon's top secret plans to contain Iran's WMD program to the Israeli government.
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that there is a link between the Israeli mole and the retaliation outting of Ambasador Joe Wilson's CIA agent wife. Could it be that the investigation of the outing might expose the mole to discovery?
BBB
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FBI fears Israel has Pentagon spy
Gary Younge in New York
Saturday August 28, 2004
The Guardian
The Federal Bureau of Investigation believes an Israeli spy has infiltrated the highest level of the Pentagon and may have tried to influence United States policy towards Iran and Iraq, it emerged last night.
The FBI has launched a wide-ranging investigation into a suspected mole with ties to top Pentagon officials who is thought to have supplied Israel with classified material that included secret White House deliberations on Iran, the CBS News network reported.
The Israeli embassy in Washington immediately refuted the report. "We categorically deny these allegations. They are completely false and outrageous."
But CBS News said the FBI believed it had solid evidence that the mole leaked sensitive information to Israel. It said the operative had ties to top Pentagon officials Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith.
An FBI official confirmed an investigation had been set up, telling the Associated Press that no arrests had yet been made.
"The FBI has a full-fledged espionage investigation under way and is about to ... roll up someone agents believe has been spying, not for an enemy, but for Israel, from within the office of the secretary of defence [Donald Rumsfeld]," the network reported.
The network described the spy as "a trusted analyst" assigned to a unit within the defence department which helps develop the Pentagon's Iraq policy.
CBS said the spy was thought to have been passing secrets to Israel through intermediaries at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a pro-Israel lobby.
AIPAC said it was cooperating with the government and had hired outside counsel. It denies any wrongdoing by the organisation or any of its employees.
"Our sources tell us that last year the suspected spy ... turned over a presidential directive on US policy toward Iran while it was 'in the draft phase'," the network said.
"This put the Israelis - according to one of our sources - 'inside the decision-making loop' so they could 'try to influence the outcome'," CBS reported.
It is not the first time the issue of Israel and espionage has surfaced, creating tension with America's closest ally.
In 1985 Jonathan Pollard, who worked in a special US Navy intelligence unit, was arrested at the gates of the Israeli embassy in Washington. Mr Pollard was tried, convicted and handed a life sentence. Israel later apologised and disbanded the intelligence cell that he operated under.
The neo-cons won't care as long as it wasn't China.
The Wurmser Turns
The Wurmser Turns
by Jim Lobe
October 29, 2003
Jim Lobe is Inter Press Service's correspondent in Washington, DC. Visit his archive.
A neo-conservative strategist who has long called for the United States and Israel to work together to "roll back" the Ba'ath-led government in Syria has been quietly appointed as a Middle East adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney.
David Wurmser, who had been working for Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton, joined Cheney's staff under its powerful national security director, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, in mid-September, according to Cheney's office.
The move is significant, not only because Cheney is seen increasingly as the dominant foreign-policy influence on President George W. Bush, but also because it adds to the notion that neo-conservatives remain a formidable force under Bush despite the sharp plunge in public confidence in Bush's handling of post-war Iraq resulting from the faulty assumptions propagated by the "neo-cons" before the war.
Given the recent intensification of tensions between Washington and Damascus - touched off by this month's U.S. veto of a United Nations Security Council resolution deploring an Israeli air attack on an alleged Palestinian camp outside Damascus - Wurmser's rise takes on added significance.
The move also follows House of Representatives' approval of a bill that would impose new economic and diplomatic sanctions against Syria.
Wurmser's status as a favoured protégé of arch-hawk and former Defence Policy Board chairman Richard Perle at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) also speaks loudly to Middle East specialists, who note Perle's long-time close association with Cheney, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and Rumsfeld's chief deputy Paul Wolfowitz.
Wolfowitz was the first senior administration official to suggest that Washington might take action against Syria amid reports last April that Damascus was sheltering senior Iraqi leaders and weapons of mass destruction in the wake of the U.S. invasion.
"There's got to be a change in Syria," Wolfowitz said, accusing the government of President Bashar Assad of "extreme ruthlessness." Rumsfeld subsequently accused Syria of permitting Islamic "jihadis" to infiltrate Iraq to fight U.S. troops.
Perle, who last week was in Israel to receive a special award from the "Jerusalem Summit," an international group of right wing Jews and Christian Zionists who describe themselves as defenders of "civilisation" against "Islamic fundamentalism," has made no secret of his own desire to confront Damascus.
In a series of interviews, Perle applauded Israel's attack on Syrian territory - the first since the 1967 war - in alleged retaliation for a Palestinian suicide bombing in Israel. "I am happy to see the message was delivered to Syria by the Israeli Air Force, and I hope it is the first of many such messages," he said.
Perle said he "hope(d)" the United States would itself take action against Damascus, particularly if it turned out that Syria was acting as a financial or recruiting base for the insurgency in Iraq.
"Syria is itself a terrorist organisation," he asserted, insisting that Washington would not find it difficult to send troops to Damascus despite its commitment in Iraq. "Syria is militarily very weak," added Perle.
Damascus has been in Wurmser's sights at least since he began working with Perle at AEI in the mid-1990s.
For the latter part of the decade, he wrote frequently to support a joint U.S.-Israeli effort to undermine then-President Hafez Assad in hopes of destroying Ba'athist rule and hastening the creation of a new order in the Levant to be dominated by "tribal, familial and clan unions under limited governments."
Indeed, it was precisely because of the strategic importance of the Levant that Wurmser advocated overthrowing Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in favour of an Iraqi National Congress (INC) closely tied to the Hashemite monarchy in Jordan.
"Whoever inherits Iraq dominates the entire Levant strategically," he wrote in one 1996 paper for the Jerusalem-based Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS).
Wurmser, whose Israeli-born spouse Meyrav Wurmser heads Middle East studies at the neo-conservative Hudson Institute, was the main author of a 1996 report by a task force convened by the IASPS and headed by Perle, called the 'Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000'.
The paper, called 'A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm', was directed to incoming Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.
It featured a series of recommendations designed to end the process of Israel trading "land for peace" by transforming the "balance of power" in the Middle East in favour of an axis consisting of Israel, Turkey and Jordan.
To do so, it called for ousting Saddam Hussein and installing a Hashemite leader in Baghdad. From that point, the strategy would be largely focused on Syria and, at the least, to reducing its influence in Lebanon.
Among other steps, the report called for Israeli sponsorship of attacks on Syrian territory by "Israeli proxy forces" based in Lebanon and "striking Syrian military targets in Lebanon, and should that prove insufficient, striking at select targets in Syria proper."
"Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, even rolling back Syria," the report argued, to create a "natural axis" between Israel, Jordan, a Hashemite Iraq and Turkey that "would squeeze and detach Syria from the Saudi Peninsula."
"For Syria, this could be the prelude to a redrawing of the map of the Middle East, which could threaten Syria's territorial integrity," it suggested.
A follow-up report by Wurmser titled 'Coping with Crumbling States', also favoured a substantial redrawing of the Middle East along tribal and familial lines in light of what he called an "emerging phenomenon - the crumbling of Arab secular-nationalist nations."
The penchant of Washington and the West in general for backing secular-nationalist states against the threat of militant Islamic fundamentalism was a strategic error, warned Wurmser in the second study, a conclusion he repeated in a 1999 book, Tyranny's Ally, which included a laudatory foreword by Perle and was published by AEI.
While the book focused on Iraq not Syria, it elaborated on Wurmser's previous arguments by attacking regional specialists in U.S. universities, the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) who, according to him, were too wedded to strong secular states in the Arab world as the preferred guarantors of regional stability.
"Our Middle East scholarly and policy elite are informed by bad ideas about the region that lead them to bad policies," he charged, echoing a position often taken by Perle.
In the book's acknowledgments, Wurmser praised those who most influenced his work, a veritable "who's who" of those neo-cons most closely tied to Israel's far right, including Perle himself, another AEI scholar, Michael Ledeen and Undersecretary of Defence for Policy and the man in charge of post-Iraq war planning, Douglas Feith.
He listed former CIA director James Woolsey, who has called the conflict in Syria the early stages of "World War IV," Harold Rhode, a Feith aide who has also called himself Wolfowitz's "Islamic Affairs adviser" and INC leader Ahmed Chalabi.
Wurmser also gave thanks to Irving Moskowitz, a major casino operator and long-time funder of Israel's settlement movement, whom he described as a "gentle man whose generous support of AEI allows me to be here." 1996 Report, "A Clean Break" and "Coping With Crumbling States."
William Luti
Dr. William J. Luti is Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Special Plans and Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs. 2002
From Tufts University e-news, October 30, 2003:
"William J. Luti was a third-level policymaker in the Bush administration, a position which normally receives little political and public recognition. But the Tufts graduate, chief of Middle Eastern policy at the Pentagon, broke the mold - and has risen to become one of the most talked about figures in Washington.
"'The day-to-day manager of the Defense Department's Iraq policy, [William Luti] has the highest profile of anyone to ever hold his post,' reported The Washington Post.
"A retired Navy captain, Luti's military career spanned more than 25 years and incorporated both sea duty and high-level policy positions in Washington. Asked to join the Bush administration in 2000, he took a position working for the Vice President on Middle East policy, and soon retired from the Navy.
"Armed with his military background, Luti offered a unique perspective to the policymaking groups he worked with. Lending early support for a military presence in Iraq, Luti earned higher and higher positions as war in Iraq became a major focus within the White House. He is now the deputy undersecretary of defense for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs.
"'Luti was an early advocate of military action against Iraq, and, as the Administration moved toward war and policymaking power shifted toward the civilians in the Pentagon, he took on increasingly important responsibilities,' reported the New Yorker.
"Luti has been influential in developing Iraq policy both before and during the war. A key member of the Office of Special Plans - an office created last year to work on Iraq strategy - he helped to develop defense policy options and worked to monitor their implementation.
"Before joining the Bush administration, Luti had been a key player in Washington for years. Over the last decade, the Tufts graduate had worked under Vice President Richard Cheney, former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith.
"In his years as a student at Tufts' Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Luti was also a powerhouse - studying strategy and diplomacy.
"'He's a lightning rod,' Richard Shultz - Fletcher professor of international politics and Luti's thesis advisor - told the Post. 'That's partly because he is so passionate, and partly because he is so devoted to policies that have been divisive.'
"While Luti came to Tufts for a master's degree, 'he was such a damned good student that we admitted him to the doctoral program,' Shultz told the Post.
"The Tufts graduate has also earned praise from Newt Gingrich, his former employer, who kept in touch with Luti over the years.
"'[Luti is] very smart, very aggressive, slightly impatient, and
with a very deep feeling that the world is more dangerous than many of his colleagues in the Pentagon, in the services, understand,' Gingrich told the Post."
Re the Office of Special Plans: "Its day-to-day boss was William Luti, a former Navy officer who worked for Vice President Dick Cheney before joining the Pentagon...." Douglas Feith, Luti and their advisers wanted to put Ahmad Chalabi - the controversial Iraqi exile leader of a coalition of opposition groups - in power in Baghdad."[1]
"...William Luti, the deputy undersecretary of defense responsible for policy matters pertaining to the Middle East and South Asia. Luti's office includes Special Plans, a unit created in October 2002 to run policy planning on Iraq.
"Feith said they used the term 'special plans' for Luti's office because, 'at the time, calling it Iraq Planning Office might have undercut our diplomatic efforts with regard to Iraq in the U.N. and elsewhere.'
"The small team of analysts finished its work before Luti's office of Special Plans was created, he and Feith said. The intelligence team had no connection to Luti's office and none to a separate intelligence program that was set up by the Defense Intelligence Agency before the war to debrief Iraqi defectors, they told reporters."[2]
Senior State Department officials are said to be particularly displeased with William Luti, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Near East and South Asian Affairs. Luti, a retired Navy captain and Gulf War combat veteran who served on Vice-President Dick Cheney's staff last summer, is seen by people at State as so obsessed with an immediate overthrow of Saddam that he hasn't thought through the consequences. Luti's supporters, however, include Richard Perle, who was an Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan Administration and now heads the Defense Policy Board, a Pentagon advisory group. Perle was one of Bush's early foreign-policy advisers in the Presidential campaign, and his views, which reflect the thinking of the Republican right, are taken seriously in Washington.
In previous Administrations, such interagency fights were often resolved by the national-security adviser, now Condoleezza Rice. But the National Security Council has been weakened recently by a series of resignations and reassignments, some of them said to be the result of internal bickering. The N.S.C. currently has no senior Iraq expert on its staff. Bruce Riedel, the longtime ranking expert on the Middle East, moved overseas recently on a sabbatical, and the person who recently filled in as the N.S.C.'s Iraq expert, an intelligence officer on loan from the C.I.A., went back to the agency after only a few months at the White House. A third regional expert left the N.S.C. this winter after a series of policy disputes with civilian officials in the Pentagon. With no replacement in sight, a former official told me, the N.S.C. has been forced to "farm out" papers on important issues to the C.I.A. and the State Department.
The difficulty in coördination, Administration officials said, is apparent in some of the proposals for Saddam's overthrow now being circulated. One plan that has been enthusiastically endorsed by the civilian leadership in the Pentagon, revolving around a small, mobile attack force of Iraqi dissidents and American Special Forces, and the declaration of an interim government, was derided by a top State Department official, who told me that it was little more than "a concept." Another plan, proposed by the C.I.A., which called for increased covert operations against Saddam and continued diplomacy while issues of invasion timing and force structure are worked out, was debunked by a former C.I.A. station chief as hardly different from the plans of the past decade.
The N.S.C.'s lack of high-level expertise on Iraq has created a planning void which is now being filled by retired Army General Wayne Downing, an expert on special operations. President Bush brought Downing in after September 11th as an adviser on combatting terrorism. The General has also served as an ad-hoc adviser to the Iraqi National Congress, the most prominent Iraqi opposition group. Both Perle and Luti argue that any move against Iraq should involve the I.N.C. and its leader, Ahmad Chalabi, who, with the C.I.A., planned a coup attempt that failed against Saddam in 1995.
Stephen J. Hadley
Stephen J. Hadley
Deputy National Security Adviser
National Institute for Public Policy: Study member
last updated: 11/20/2003
Institutional Affiliations
National Institute for Public Policy (NIPP): Participated on the NIPP study, Rationale and Requirements for U.S. Nuclear Forces and Arms Control, a study that called for the development of "usable" mini-nuclear weapons and served as a blueprint for George W. Bush's Nuclear Posture Review.
Government Service
National Security Council: Deputy National Security Adviser (current)
Department of Defense: Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy, 1989-1993
President's Special Review Board ("Tower Commission"): Counselor for the comission that investigated U. S. arms sales to Iran, 1986
National Security Council's Office of Program Analysis: 1975-1977
Department of Defense: Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy: Comptroller for an analysis group, 1972-1974
Corporate Connections/Business Interests
Shea & Gardner (Washington law firm whose clients include Lockheed Martin and Boeing): Partner, 1977-2001
Scowcroft Group (international consulting firm): Principal
ANSER Analytic Services: Board member
Education
Cornell University: B.A., 1969 (8)
Yale University Law School: J.D., 1972
Highlights & Quotes
Stephen Hadley, Condoleezza Rice's right-hand man in the Bush administration's National Security Council, served as the fall guy when allegations arose regarding the national security adviser's mishandling of information about Iraq's purported effort to buy uranium from Niger. According to the Washington Post, Hadley was told by CIA Director George Tenet that the Niger allegations, which were used by Bush in various speeches (including the January 2003 State of the Union Address) and served as a key justification for invading Iraq, were probably bogus and should not be used by the president. Hadley, who claimed that Rice had been unaware of the controversy, told the newspaper, "I should have recalled ... that there was controversy associated with the uranium issue."
Trying to keep up, but, that's a lot of reading.
Edgar
Sorry, Edgar, but I've thought there was a link between Israel and Bush's war against Iraq for a long time. I've also been following Wolfowitz's staff as the source of the fraudulent information as well as the con man Chalabi et al.
I may be wrong in my guesses, but we may never know if the Bush administration tries to cover it up. Or they may use it as a scape goat for their disasterous decisions to attack Iraq. Who knows what desperate people will do to save their hides.
BBB
Not complaining, just commenting on my slowness.
That's explosive, the Israelis to put upon more the friendship beetween the U.S and their country.
Thanks for the very interesting articles, BBB.
Here is a liitle bit more:
Quote:The alleged "mole" working for Israel could have been in a position to influence Bush administration policy toward Iran and Iraq, one of the officials said on Friday.
However, another government official said the suspect is "not in a level to influence policy."
"He is an analyst in an undersecretary's office," this official said.
Sources said the FBI investigation has been going on for many months and more than one government employee is under investigation.
A senior Pentagon official confirmed to CNN that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld "had been made generally aware that the Justice Department had an investigation going on."
The Pentagon issued a statement Friday, confirming it "has been cooperating with the Department of Justice on this matter for an extended period of time."
"It is the DOD [Department of Defense] understanding that the investigation within the DOD is limited in its scope."
CBS News, which first reported the story, said the FBI had developed evidence against the suspect, including photographs and conversations recorded through wiretaps.
The network said the alleged spy has ties to two senior Pentagon officials: Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith.
Multiple sources have told CNN that the investigation is well along, and one government official described the evidence against the suspect as a "slam dunk case" and said "there has been no decision to prosecute the individual."
Officials said the suspect passed classified documents to Israel through the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a pro-Israel lobbying group.
But AIPAC released a statement late Friday calling the news reports "false and baseless."
The statement said AIPAC learned Friday that "the government is investigating an employee of the Department of Defense for possible violations in handling confidential information."
A designation of the material as confidential would indicate a much lower level of secrecy than if it had been designated as classified.
AIPAC said it "is cooperating fully" with government authorities, including providing documents and information and making staff members available for interviews. Sources told CNN that two AIPAC employees have been interviewed in the case by the FBI.
"Neither AIPAC nor any of its employees has violated any laws or rules, nor has AIPAC or its employees ever received information they believed was secret or classified," the statement said.
"AIPAC is an American organization comprised of proud and loyal U.S. citizens committed to promoting American interests. We do not condone or tolerate any violation of any U.S. law or interests."
Washington insiders note that it is not unusual for friendly governments to have access to certain classified information, so even if the allegations are correct, not everyone involved may have thought they were involved in espionage.
Still, one U.S. source is calling the case "a very serious matter."
David Siegel, a spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in Washington, denied the allegations.
"The United States is Israel's most cherished friend and ally. We have a strong, ongoing, working relationship at all levels, and in no way would Israel do anything to impair this relationship."
An Israeli official in Washington said the U.S. government has not contacted the Israelis about any such investigation.
Despite the close relationship between the two countries, espionage against the United States on behalf of Israel would not be without precedent. Former U.S. Navy intelligence analyst Jonathan Pollard is serving a life sentence for passing classified material to Israel.
The Justice Department, speaking for the FBI, refused to comment, saying only, "We cannot confirm or deny the report."
An FBI spokesman said the bureau has no comment on the CBS report.
link
Let's hope the coverage of this story doesn't get completely drowned out by the RNC Convention.
Watching closely.
Many thanks BBB
Joe
This is shocking. I wonder if it will put down conspiracies theories?
Thanks, BBB. You have made following all of this so much easier.
So, are you thinking... Luti?
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