FBI painting ugly picture: The dots in Washington are connecting.

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http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/Columnists/Toronto/Eric_Margolis/2004/09/05/616439\

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Sun, September 5, 2004

 

FBI painting ugly picture

By Eric Margolis -- Contributing Foreign Editor

 

The dots in Washington are connecting. It's not a

pretty sight.

 

Last week the results of a controversial two-year FBI

investigation were leaked to the media.

 

The story is potentially a huge scandal and may

indicate a furious power struggle between neocon

supporters of Israel's far right Likud Party, who

dominated the Pentagon and National Security Council,

and the CIA and the state department.

 

The FBI is focusing on the Pentagon's policy

department, a mini state department within defence

that plays a key role in U.S. Mideast policy. It is

headed by a neocon activist, defence undersecretary

Douglas Feith, who has longtime links to Likud.

 

The Pentagon's chief Iran analyst, Larry Franklin, who

works for Feith's deputy, William Luti, is under FBI

investigation for allegedly passing top secret

presidential policy papers on Iran to two senior

members of the American Israel Public Affairs

Committee (AIPAC). AIPAC, one of Washington's most

powerful lobbies, allegedly passed them to Israel's

spy service. Israel is alarmed by Iran's nuclear

developments.

 

AIPAC and Israel deny spying. The Pentagon says that

Franklin is the only member of the department

suspected of wrongdoing. Israel insists it ceased

espionage in the U.S. after its agent, Jonathan

Pollard, was jailed in 1987. Pollard's controller in

the U.S. government, known to the FBI as " Mr. X, " has

never been caught.

 

Still, the current investigation is one indication of

growing concerns that U.S. national security and

foreign policy have been gravely compromised, or even

hijacked, by a small but powerful group of Bush

administration neocons. The concern is that this

group, with the aid of Vice-President Dick Cheney,

helped to engineer the Iraq war at least in part to

destroy an enemy of Israel.

 

While only Franklin is under investigation, he works

for Feith's office. Feith reports to deputy defence

secretary Paul Wolfowitz, another strong supporter of

Israel.

 

Cheney and Wolfowitz were among the prime architects

of the Iraq war.

 

In 1996, Feith and neocon Israel supporter Richard

Perle were among the authors of the policy plan, " A

Clean Break, " for Israel's then Likud prime minister,

Benjamin Netanyahu, calling for Greater Israel. As

well, it called for a much more aggressive policy on

Iraq and Syria and for ending peace talks with the

Palestinians.

 

Feith ran the Pentagon's Office for Special Plans

(OSP), which relied for much of its information about

Iraq on the likes of the notorious Ahmad Chalabi.

 

Feith, Wolfowitz and Perle were key backers of

Chalabi, a convicted swindler, planning to make him a

key leader of Iraq. Chalabi's carefully crafted

falsehoods and exaggerations about Iraq provided the

White House with much of its pretext for war.

 

The rock just turned over by the FBI also reveals

other familiar denizens. Welcome back Iranian con-man

and arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar, a key figure in

the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal that nearly brought down

the Reagan administration.

 

And according to a Washington Monthly investigation,

two other prominent Washington neocons met secretly in

Europe with Ghorbanifar, the chief of Italy's military

intelligence service, SISMI, and Lebanese rightists to

discuss various issues related to the Mideast. SISMI

was also involved in the Iraq-Niger uranium hoax.

 

The current controversy raises the question of whether

neocon attempts to blame the disaster they created in

Iraq on the CIA, to blame 9/11 on the FBI's faulty

intelligence, along with three decades of spying

investigations squelched for political reasons, could

have caused the security agencies to go after what a

CIA veteran terms " Washington's fifth column. "

 

The growing scandal over the U.S. possibly being

misled into a war by neocons and various supporters of

Israel is proving a field day for anti-Semites, as

this writer long warned it would.

 

Many feel these neocon ideologues arrogated to

themselves the right to decide what was good for

Israel and the Jewish people, even though many

American Jews opposed war against Iraq.

 

In my view, what the neocon ideologues and their media

allies have done is to inflame anti-Semitism,

encourage anti-U.S. terrorism, and destabilize the

entire Mideast.

 

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