The Trail of Disinformation leading up to the Iraq war and the Israeli connection
Let's start with a simple fact. The United States invaded and conquered Iraq on the basis of lies. Even the official report of the United States Senate admits as much.
So, where did all this bad information come from? While the culprits would like to pin the blame on the Central Intelligence Agency, the facts point in a different direction. To cite just one example, the now-discredited claim that Saddam was trying to buy "Yellow Cake" Uranium from Niger came from the Pentagon, specifically from Paul Wolfowitz, using information the CIA stated was unreliable. Wolfowitz, and his assistant Douglas Feith, set up a special office called the "Office of Special Plans" in 2001, that fed information to the White House to urge the attack on Iraq. Shortly after the invasion, the OSP was disbanded.
So, the trail of the lies that started a war goes from the White House, to the Pentagon, to the Office of Special Plans. But where was the OSP getting their information? Clearly, they were not using information provided by the CIA, or the CIA would not have denounced their sources as "unreliable". According to some reports, the OSP was using "consultants" who came from outside the Pentagon and operated with no oversight or accountability! The Office of Special Plans operated on its own, off the official payroll and away from Congressional oversight. According to several sources, it was the information given out by the Office of Special Plans that Dick Cheney "encouraged" the the CIA to adopt! So where does the trail lead from the OSP?
As it turns out, the OSP was getting their information from primarily two sources. The first was Ahmed Chalabi, the bank embezzler who would be king and didn't care how it came about. The second, and more damning source, is the office of the Prime Minister of Israel, Ariel Sharon! As the Office of Special Plans poured out the lies that led to war, Israeli officers, up to the rank of General, were repeatedly escorted inside the Pentagon to the Office of Special Plans. At no time were they required to sign in!
Douglas Feith would then take this information, despite CIA doubts about the credibility of the claims, into private briefings at the White House that bypassed CIA. In some cases, the CIA was unaware of Feith's private briefings until the OSP information became part of White House public policy.
So, this is the trail of the lies that started a war, beginning at the White House, and via Dick Cheney moving upstream to the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, under Wolfowitz and Feith, then from OSP to a parallel group operating out of Ariel Sharon's office in Israel.
Yet another scandal involving Israeli spies has exploded. This one involves two senior people at AIPAC, the Israeli lobbying group (which pours millions of dollars into Congressional campaigns to re-engineer the US Congress to favor Israel) Pentagon desk officer Larry Franklin, who served in the Office of Special Plans, the secret Pentagon unit.
June 26, 2003 - FBI observes Franklin divulging secret information re: Iraq to AIPAC's Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman while having lunch. (http://www.marinij.com/Stories/0,1413,234~24410~2853235,00.html)
June 30, 2003 - FBI find the document Franklin disclosed in his office, pursuant to warrant, and Franklin admits his guilt in an interview. FBI search Franklin's home and find 83 documents of various levels of classification being held illegally. Franklin is stripped of his security clearance.
(http://news.findlaw.com/cnn/docs/dod/usfrnkln50305cmp.pdf).
Larry Franklin is a colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserve. It is feared that his spying dates back to his time as the Air Force Attaché at the US embassy in Tel Aviv. (see more below)
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/trailofdisinformation.html
General Anthony Zinni, who headed CENTCOM from 1997 to 2000, continued his own attack on the neocons, begun earlier this year, and had an opportunity to make his case on CBS’s 60 Minutes, namely, that the neocons conned the Resident into going to war.
Zinni specifically targeted Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, Former Defense Policy Board member Richard Perle, National Security Council member Elliot Abrams, and Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby - all of whom happen to be Jewish – whom, Zinni claims, saw the invasion of Iraq as a way to stabilize American interests in the region and strengthen the position of Israel. "I think it's the worst kept secret in Washington. That everybody - everybody I talk to in Washington - has known and fully knows what their agenda was and what they were trying to do," says Zinni. "Because I mentioned the neo-conservatives, who describe themselves as neo-conservatives, said Zinni, I was called anti-Semitic.
Source: KZYX Radio (Mendocino County, USA) Takes on the World May 26, 2004
Why then is the Zionist lobby so powerful? The answer is simple: the Jews are the richest ethnic or religious stratum in the US. Benjamin Ginsberg points out in The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State, "Since the 1960s, Jews have come to wield considerable influence in American economic, cultural, intellectual and political life. Jews played a central role in American finance during the 1980s, and they were among the chief beneficiaries of that decade's corporate mergers and reorganizations. Today, though barely 2 % of the nation's population is Jewish, close to half its billionaires are Jews.
Source: Jeffrey Blankfort "The Israel Lobby and the Left" Published in: The Politics of Anti-Semitism Edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair CounterPunch and AK Press, 2003, pp. 101-106
Israel stands to benefit greatly from the US led war on Iraq, primarily by getting rid of an implacable foe in President Saddam Hussein and the threat from the weapons of mass destruction he was alleged to possess. But it seems the Israelis have other things in mind.
An intriguing pointer to one potentially significant benefit was a report by Haaretz on 31 March that minister for national infrastructures Joseph Paritzky was considering the possibility of reopening the long-defunct oil pipeline from Mosul to the Mediterranean port of Haifa. With Israel lacking energy resources of its own and depending on highly expensive oil from Russia, reopening the pipeline would transform its economy. To resume supplies from Mosul to Haifa would require the approval of whatever Iraqi government emerges and presumably the Jordanian government, through whose territory it would be likely to run. [...] According to Western diplomatic sources in the region, the USA has discussed this with Iraqi opposition groups. It is understood from diplomatic sources that the Bush administration has said it will not support lifting UN sanctions on Iraq unless Saddam's successors agree to supply Israel with oil. All of this lends weight to the theory that Bush's war is part of a masterplan to reshape the Middle East to serve Israel 's interests.
Source: "Oil from Iraq: An Israeli pipedream?" www.janes.com/regional_news/africa_middle_east/news/fr/fr030416_1_n.shtml
Stephen Green, whose Taking Sides: America's Secret Relations with Militant Israel was the first examination of
Given the state of opinion within Israel, and still assuming unchanging U.S. "support for Israel," what long-term policies is Israel likely to pursue, apart from continued steps towards integration of the occupied territories in either the Likud or Labor style? Surely Israel will not tolerate any military build-up in the surrounding region that it considers a potential threat, and there will be no end to such threats if there is no political settlement, a prospect virtually guaranteed by U.S.- Israeli rejectionism. Furthermore, the costs of a permanent state of war are immense, and mounting, costs that Israel is increasingly unable to bear and that cannot be reduced as long as tension exists and its adversaries are not crushed. Hence the inducement to undertake a preemptive strike will always be high, and with it, the likehood of regional or even global war. It is only natural to expect that Israel will seek to destabilize the surrounding states...
Source: Noam Chomsky The Fateful Triangle / 4.1.2. From Coexistence to Hegemony South End Press, Cambridge, MA, 1999 (1983) Pages 455-460
State Department archives concerning US-Israel relations. Since the Eisenhower administration, wrote Green, in 1984, "Israel, and friends of Israel in America, have determined the broad outlines of US policy in the region. It has been left to American Presidents to implement that policy, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, and to deal with the tactical issues." An exaggeration, perhaps, but former US Senator James Abourezk (D-South Dakota) echoed Green's words in a speech before the American-Arab Anti- Discrimation Committee last June: "That is the state of American politics today. The Israeli lobby has put together so much money power that we are daily witnessing US senators and representatives bowing down low to Israel and its US lobby. Make no mistake. The votes and bows have nothing to do with the legislators' love for Israel. They have everything do to with the money that is fed into their campaigns by members of the Israeli lobby. My estimate is that at least $6 billion flows from the American Treasury to Israel each year. That money, plus the political support the US gives Israel at the United Nations, is what allows Israel to conduct criminal operations in Palestine with impunity." That is a reality that has been expressed many times in many forms by ex-members of Congress, usually speaking off the record.
Source: Jeffrey Blankfort "The Israel Lobby and the Left" Published in: The Politics of Anti-Semitism Edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair CounterPunch and AK Press, 2003, pp. 101-106
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/pathtowar.html
May. 04, 2005 --Lawrence (Larry) Franklin has been charge with four counts. Franklin wasn't charged with espionage, a much more serious charge, but he faces up to 10 years in prison if he's convicted on the charge of improperly disclosing classified "Top Secret/SCI," (sensitive compartmented information) information. The document, which is classified dealt with "potential attacks upon United States forces in Iraq," the affidavit stated.[4]
Franklin investigation stems from a two-year FBI probe into who leaked top secret war plans for Iraq published by the New York Times on July 5, 2002. An investigation into, Larry Franklin, a mid-levelI ran analyst is likely to focus on the misuse of classified materials, senior law enforcement officials told The New York Sun, and not the much more serious charge of espionage on behalf of Israel. Franklin was a former employee of the Defense Intelligence Agency where he often clashed with senior agency officials on their estimates of Iranian-directed terrorist activities.
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0804/pentagon_spy2.php3?printer_friendly
Larry Franklin is a colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserve. It is feared that his spying dates back to his time as the Air Force Attaché at the US embassy in Tel Aviv. The FBI has indicated that they are looking for more then one person. This causes speculation to fall on Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen as well as Pentagon Islam expert Harold Rhode. Franklin's boss Douglas J. Feith certainly has to be considered a suspect.
http://www.sw-asia.com/People/Bio918.htm
Franklin's name first surfaced in news reports when it became known that he and another Pentagon official, Harold Rhode, held covert meetings beginning in 2001 with Iranian arms merchant Manucher Ghorbanifar, a figure from the Iran-Contra arms scandal who was twice labeled untruthful by the CIA. [4] http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/11564322.htm
1998 - Harold Rhode reportedly had his security clearances at DoD suspended, based on allegations he had given classified information to Israel, according to UPI in 2004. (http://washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20040824-102938-1916r.htm)
The Bush administration sends two Defense officials, Harold Rhode and Larry Franklin, to meet with Iranians in Rome (Dec. 2001) in response to an Iranian government offer to provide information relevant to the war on terrorism. The offer had been back-channeled by the Iranians to the White House through Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian arms trader and a central figure in the Iran-Contra affair, who contacted another Iran-Contra figure, Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute. Ledeen passed the information on to his friends in the Defense Department who then relayed the offer to National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley.
http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/entity.jsp?entity=harold_rhode
Franklin and Harold Rhode, met with the Iranians over three days in Italy. Several Pentagon officials sought to play down Franklin's role in policymaking, saying that he was not in a position to have significant influence over U.S. policy.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40004-2004Aug27.html
Pentagon desk officer Larry Franklin, who served in the Office of Special Plans, the secret Pentagon unit.
-----------
What Role Did Bolton Play in the Forgery of the Niger Documents?
On Dec. 19, 2002, the State Department issued a fact sheet, in response to the Iraqi government's 25,000-page submission to the UN Security Council, accounting for their entire weapons program. The State Department fact sheet directly cited the Niger "yellow cake" deals as proof that Saddam Hussein was lying to the UN. According to one well-placed career foreign service officer at Foggy Bottom (State Dept.office) , the inclusion of the Niger allegation was likely the work of John Bolton, who is the State Department's chief arms control official. Bolton's deputy is David Wurmser, and both men are among the leading neo-con moles inside State.
The F.B.I. has been investigating the forgery at the request of the Senate Intelligence Committee. A senior F.B.I. official told me that the possibility that the documents were falsified by someone inside the American intelligence community had not been ruled out.” But “somebody’s hiding something, and they’re hiding it pretty well.”
Wurmser works at Douglas Feith's office, "Office of Strategic Influence" where he and another neocon, F. Michael Maloof, a former aide to Richard Perle, head a secret intelligence unit, named the Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group, or the “Wurmser-Maloof” project. The four- to five-person unit, a “B Team” commissioned by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, uses powerful computers and software to scan and sort already-analyzed documents. Wurmser is a known advocate of regime change in Iraq, having expressed his views in a 1997. David Wurmser, the director of Middle East studies for the American Enterprise Institute, to serve as a Pentagon consultant.
F.Michael Maloof, a former journalist. Maloof was also reportedly involved in a bizarre scheme to broker contacts between Iraqi officials and the Pentagon, channeled through Perle, in what one report called a 'rogue [intelligence] operation' outside official CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency channels." He was twice stripped of his high-level security clearances.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1004272/posts
Maloof:
1986 - Feith leaves ISP to form a law firm in Israel. (http://www.counterpunch.org/green02282004.html)
Maloof becomes Chief of Technology Security Operations and, at the direction of Perle, creates a task force intended to respond to the growth of front companies created for the illegal diversion of technology for conventional and unconventional weapons. Serves in this role until 2000. (http://www.findaresume.com/1985.html)
1986 Maloof becomes Chief of Technology Security Operations and, at the direction of Perle, creates a task force intended to respond to the growth of front companies created for the illegal diversion of technology for conventional and unconventional weapons. Serves in this role until 2000. (http://www.findaresume.com/1985.html)
1988 - Bryen is the key figures behind the attempted export of "klystrons," small microwave amplifiers that are critical missile components, to Israel. Bryen resigned his post with DoD in late 1988 and worked for several defense technology consulting firms. (http://www.counterpunch.org/green02282004.html)
In 1999, Maloof was the Chief of the Technology Security Operations Division in the Technology Security Directorate of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, in the Department of Defense.
1992 - The first Bush Administration launches a broad inter-departmental investigation into the export of classified technology to China. During the investigation, it is discovered that Wolfowitz, as Undersecretary for Policy under Dick Cheney, was promoting the export to Israel of advanced AIM-9M air-to-air missiles. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, aware that Israel had already been caught selling the earlier AIM 9-L version of the missile to China in violation of a written agreement with the U.S. on arms re-sales, cancels the proposed deal. Feith writes in Commentary magazine, "It is in the interest of U.S. and Israel to remove needless impediments to technological cooperation between them. Technologies in the hands of responsible, friendly countries facing military threats, countries like Israel, serve to deter aggression, enhance regional stability and promote peace thereby."
(http://www.counterpunch.org/green02282004.html)
Time line source: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/5/5/1506/67090
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit for research and educational purposes. MY NEWSLETTER has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is MY NEWSLETTER endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NewsViewsnolose
So, where did all this bad information come from? While the culprits would like to pin the blame on the Central Intelligence Agency, the facts point in a different direction. To cite just one example, the now-discredited claim that Saddam was trying to buy "Yellow Cake" Uranium from Niger came from the Pentagon, specifically from Paul Wolfowitz, using information the CIA stated was unreliable. Wolfowitz, and his assistant Douglas Feith, set up a special office called the "Office of Special Plans" in 2001, that fed information to the White House to urge the attack on Iraq. Shortly after the invasion, the OSP was disbanded.
So, the trail of the lies that started a war goes from the White House, to the Pentagon, to the Office of Special Plans. But where was the OSP getting their information? Clearly, they were not using information provided by the CIA, or the CIA would not have denounced their sources as "unreliable". According to some reports, the OSP was using "consultants" who came from outside the Pentagon and operated with no oversight or accountability! The Office of Special Plans operated on its own, off the official payroll and away from Congressional oversight. According to several sources, it was the information given out by the Office of Special Plans that Dick Cheney "encouraged" the the CIA to adopt! So where does the trail lead from the OSP?
As it turns out, the OSP was getting their information from primarily two sources. The first was Ahmed Chalabi, the bank embezzler who would be king and didn't care how it came about. The second, and more damning source, is the office of the Prime Minister of Israel, Ariel Sharon! As the Office of Special Plans poured out the lies that led to war, Israeli officers, up to the rank of General, were repeatedly escorted inside the Pentagon to the Office of Special Plans. At no time were they required to sign in!
Douglas Feith would then take this information, despite CIA doubts about the credibility of the claims, into private briefings at the White House that bypassed CIA. In some cases, the CIA was unaware of Feith's private briefings until the OSP information became part of White House public policy.
So, this is the trail of the lies that started a war, beginning at the White House, and via Dick Cheney moving upstream to the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, under Wolfowitz and Feith, then from OSP to a parallel group operating out of Ariel Sharon's office in Israel.
Yet another scandal involving Israeli spies has exploded. This one involves two senior people at AIPAC, the Israeli lobbying group (which pours millions of dollars into Congressional campaigns to re-engineer the US Congress to favor Israel) Pentagon desk officer Larry Franklin, who served in the Office of Special Plans, the secret Pentagon unit.
June 26, 2003 - FBI observes Franklin divulging secret information re: Iraq to AIPAC's Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman while having lunch. (http://www.marinij.com/Stories/0,1413,234~24410~2853235,00.html)
June 30, 2003 - FBI find the document Franklin disclosed in his office, pursuant to warrant, and Franklin admits his guilt in an interview. FBI search Franklin's home and find 83 documents of various levels of classification being held illegally. Franklin is stripped of his security clearance.
(http://news.findlaw.com/cnn/docs/dod/usfrnkln50305cmp.pdf).
Larry Franklin is a colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserve. It is feared that his spying dates back to his time as the Air Force Attaché at the US embassy in Tel Aviv. (see more below)
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/trailofdisinformation.html
General Anthony Zinni, who headed CENTCOM from 1997 to 2000, continued his own attack on the neocons, begun earlier this year, and had an opportunity to make his case on CBS’s 60 Minutes, namely, that the neocons conned the Resident into going to war.
Zinni specifically targeted Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, Former Defense Policy Board member Richard Perle, National Security Council member Elliot Abrams, and Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby - all of whom happen to be Jewish – whom, Zinni claims, saw the invasion of Iraq as a way to stabilize American interests in the region and strengthen the position of Israel. "I think it's the worst kept secret in Washington. That everybody - everybody I talk to in Washington - has known and fully knows what their agenda was and what they were trying to do," says Zinni. "Because I mentioned the neo-conservatives, who describe themselves as neo-conservatives, said Zinni, I was called anti-Semitic.
Source: KZYX Radio (Mendocino County, USA) Takes on the World May 26, 2004
Why then is the Zionist lobby so powerful? The answer is simple: the Jews are the richest ethnic or religious stratum in the US. Benjamin Ginsberg points out in The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State, "Since the 1960s, Jews have come to wield considerable influence in American economic, cultural, intellectual and political life. Jews played a central role in American finance during the 1980s, and they were among the chief beneficiaries of that decade's corporate mergers and reorganizations. Today, though barely 2 % of the nation's population is Jewish, close to half its billionaires are Jews.
Source: Jeffrey Blankfort "The Israel Lobby and the Left" Published in: The Politics of Anti-Semitism Edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair CounterPunch and AK Press, 2003, pp. 101-106
Israel stands to benefit greatly from the US led war on Iraq, primarily by getting rid of an implacable foe in President Saddam Hussein and the threat from the weapons of mass destruction he was alleged to possess. But it seems the Israelis have other things in mind.
An intriguing pointer to one potentially significant benefit was a report by Haaretz on 31 March that minister for national infrastructures Joseph Paritzky was considering the possibility of reopening the long-defunct oil pipeline from Mosul to the Mediterranean port of Haifa. With Israel lacking energy resources of its own and depending on highly expensive oil from Russia, reopening the pipeline would transform its economy. To resume supplies from Mosul to Haifa would require the approval of whatever Iraqi government emerges and presumably the Jordanian government, through whose territory it would be likely to run. [...] According to Western diplomatic sources in the region, the USA has discussed this with Iraqi opposition groups. It is understood from diplomatic sources that the Bush administration has said it will not support lifting UN sanctions on Iraq unless Saddam's successors agree to supply Israel with oil. All of this lends weight to the theory that Bush's war is part of a masterplan to reshape the Middle East to serve Israel 's interests.
Source: "Oil from Iraq: An Israeli pipedream?" www.janes.com/regional_news/africa_middle_east/news/fr/fr030416_1_n.shtml
Stephen Green, whose Taking Sides: America's Secret Relations with Militant Israel was the first examination of
Given the state of opinion within Israel, and still assuming unchanging U.S. "support for Israel," what long-term policies is Israel likely to pursue, apart from continued steps towards integration of the occupied territories in either the Likud or Labor style? Surely Israel will not tolerate any military build-up in the surrounding region that it considers a potential threat, and there will be no end to such threats if there is no political settlement, a prospect virtually guaranteed by U.S.- Israeli rejectionism. Furthermore, the costs of a permanent state of war are immense, and mounting, costs that Israel is increasingly unable to bear and that cannot be reduced as long as tension exists and its adversaries are not crushed. Hence the inducement to undertake a preemptive strike will always be high, and with it, the likehood of regional or even global war. It is only natural to expect that Israel will seek to destabilize the surrounding states...
Source: Noam Chomsky The Fateful Triangle / 4.1.2. From Coexistence to Hegemony South End Press, Cambridge, MA, 1999 (1983) Pages 455-460
State Department archives concerning US-Israel relations. Since the Eisenhower administration, wrote Green, in 1984, "Israel, and friends of Israel in America, have determined the broad outlines of US policy in the region. It has been left to American Presidents to implement that policy, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, and to deal with the tactical issues." An exaggeration, perhaps, but former US Senator James Abourezk (D-South Dakota) echoed Green's words in a speech before the American-Arab Anti- Discrimation Committee last June: "That is the state of American politics today. The Israeli lobby has put together so much money power that we are daily witnessing US senators and representatives bowing down low to Israel and its US lobby. Make no mistake. The votes and bows have nothing to do with the legislators' love for Israel. They have everything do to with the money that is fed into their campaigns by members of the Israeli lobby. My estimate is that at least $6 billion flows from the American Treasury to Israel each year. That money, plus the political support the US gives Israel at the United Nations, is what allows Israel to conduct criminal operations in Palestine with impunity." That is a reality that has been expressed many times in many forms by ex-members of Congress, usually speaking off the record.
Source: Jeffrey Blankfort "The Israel Lobby and the Left" Published in: The Politics of Anti-Semitism Edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair CounterPunch and AK Press, 2003, pp. 101-106
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/pathtowar.html
May. 04, 2005 --Lawrence (Larry) Franklin has been charge with four counts. Franklin wasn't charged with espionage, a much more serious charge, but he faces up to 10 years in prison if he's convicted on the charge of improperly disclosing classified "Top Secret/SCI," (sensitive compartmented information) information. The document, which is classified dealt with "potential attacks upon United States forces in Iraq," the affidavit stated.[4]
Franklin investigation stems from a two-year FBI probe into who leaked top secret war plans for Iraq published by the New York Times on July 5, 2002. An investigation into, Larry Franklin, a mid-levelI ran analyst is likely to focus on the misuse of classified materials, senior law enforcement officials told The New York Sun, and not the much more serious charge of espionage on behalf of Israel. Franklin was a former employee of the Defense Intelligence Agency where he often clashed with senior agency officials on their estimates of Iranian-directed terrorist activities.
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0804/pentagon_spy2.php3?printer_friendly
Larry Franklin is a colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserve. It is feared that his spying dates back to his time as the Air Force Attaché at the US embassy in Tel Aviv. The FBI has indicated that they are looking for more then one person. This causes speculation to fall on Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen as well as Pentagon Islam expert Harold Rhode. Franklin's boss Douglas J. Feith certainly has to be considered a suspect.
http://www.sw-asia.com/People/Bio918.htm
Franklin's name first surfaced in news reports when it became known that he and another Pentagon official, Harold Rhode, held covert meetings beginning in 2001 with Iranian arms merchant Manucher Ghorbanifar, a figure from the Iran-Contra arms scandal who was twice labeled untruthful by the CIA. [4] http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/11564322.htm
1998 - Harold Rhode reportedly had his security clearances at DoD suspended, based on allegations he had given classified information to Israel, according to UPI in 2004. (http://washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20040824-102938-1916r.htm)
The Bush administration sends two Defense officials, Harold Rhode and Larry Franklin, to meet with Iranians in Rome (Dec. 2001) in response to an Iranian government offer to provide information relevant to the war on terrorism. The offer had been back-channeled by the Iranians to the White House through Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian arms trader and a central figure in the Iran-Contra affair, who contacted another Iran-Contra figure, Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute. Ledeen passed the information on to his friends in the Defense Department who then relayed the offer to National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley.
http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/entity.jsp?entity=harold_rhode
Franklin and Harold Rhode, met with the Iranians over three days in Italy. Several Pentagon officials sought to play down Franklin's role in policymaking, saying that he was not in a position to have significant influence over U.S. policy.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40004-2004Aug27.html
Pentagon desk officer Larry Franklin, who served in the Office of Special Plans, the secret Pentagon unit.
-----------
What Role Did Bolton Play in the Forgery of the Niger Documents?
On Dec. 19, 2002, the State Department issued a fact sheet, in response to the Iraqi government's 25,000-page submission to the UN Security Council, accounting for their entire weapons program. The State Department fact sheet directly cited the Niger "yellow cake" deals as proof that Saddam Hussein was lying to the UN. According to one well-placed career foreign service officer at Foggy Bottom (State Dept.office) , the inclusion of the Niger allegation was likely the work of John Bolton, who is the State Department's chief arms control official. Bolton's deputy is David Wurmser, and both men are among the leading neo-con moles inside State.
The F.B.I. has been investigating the forgery at the request of the Senate Intelligence Committee. A senior F.B.I. official told me that the possibility that the documents were falsified by someone inside the American intelligence community had not been ruled out.” But “somebody’s hiding something, and they’re hiding it pretty well.”
Wurmser works at Douglas Feith's office, "Office of Strategic Influence" where he and another neocon, F. Michael Maloof, a former aide to Richard Perle, head a secret intelligence unit, named the Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group, or the “Wurmser-Maloof” project. The four- to five-person unit, a “B Team” commissioned by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, uses powerful computers and software to scan and sort already-analyzed documents. Wurmser is a known advocate of regime change in Iraq, having expressed his views in a 1997. David Wurmser, the director of Middle East studies for the American Enterprise Institute, to serve as a Pentagon consultant.
F.Michael Maloof, a former journalist. Maloof was also reportedly involved in a bizarre scheme to broker contacts between Iraqi officials and the Pentagon, channeled through Perle, in what one report called a 'rogue [intelligence] operation' outside official CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency channels." He was twice stripped of his high-level security clearances.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1004272/posts
Maloof:
1986 - Feith leaves ISP to form a law firm in Israel. (http://www.counterpunch.org/green02282004.html)
Maloof becomes Chief of Technology Security Operations and, at the direction of Perle, creates a task force intended to respond to the growth of front companies created for the illegal diversion of technology for conventional and unconventional weapons. Serves in this role until 2000. (http://www.findaresume.com/1985.html)
1986 Maloof becomes Chief of Technology Security Operations and, at the direction of Perle, creates a task force intended to respond to the growth of front companies created for the illegal diversion of technology for conventional and unconventional weapons. Serves in this role until 2000. (http://www.findaresume.com/1985.html)
1988 - Bryen is the key figures behind the attempted export of "klystrons," small microwave amplifiers that are critical missile components, to Israel. Bryen resigned his post with DoD in late 1988 and worked for several defense technology consulting firms. (http://www.counterpunch.org/green02282004.html)
In 1999, Maloof was the Chief of the Technology Security Operations Division in the Technology Security Directorate of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, in the Department of Defense.
1992 - The first Bush Administration launches a broad inter-departmental investigation into the export of classified technology to China. During the investigation, it is discovered that Wolfowitz, as Undersecretary for Policy under Dick Cheney, was promoting the export to Israel of advanced AIM-9M air-to-air missiles. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, aware that Israel had already been caught selling the earlier AIM 9-L version of the missile to China in violation of a written agreement with the U.S. on arms re-sales, cancels the proposed deal. Feith writes in Commentary magazine, "It is in the interest of U.S. and Israel to remove needless impediments to technological cooperation between them. Technologies in the hands of responsible, friendly countries facing military threats, countries like Israel, serve to deter aggression, enhance regional stability and promote peace thereby."
(http://www.counterpunch.org/green02282004.html)
Time line source: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/5/5/1506/67090
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit for research and educational purposes. MY NEWSLETTER has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is MY NEWSLETTER endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NewsViewsnolose
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