ZGram - 12/6/2004 - "AIPAC on the hot seat - again!"

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

Zgram - Where Truth is Destiny:  Now more than ever!

December 6, 2004

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

The Justin Raimondo article below ought to give decent Americans some 
hope that not all is rosy and cozy for the Zionist aficionados:

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http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=4106

December 3, 2004
Jail the War Party
For treason
by Justin Raimondo

It was very obviously a well-planned operation, executed with 
military precision: the FBI moved in on a nondescript office building 
near the Capitol, Wednesday morning, arriving at 10, and staying 
until past 4 p.m. According to one source, "this was a massive raid - 
the FBI surrounded" the place and carted away a load of evidence. 
"This is no joke," the source told journalist Laura Rozen.

Another raid on an Islamic charity with alleged ties to terrorists? A 
drug bust? A hit on a child porn ring? No, none of the above: 
instead, the G-men's target was the Washington headquarters of what 
Fortune magazine has rated the second most powerful lobbying outfit 
in the nation's capital: the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee 
(AIPAC).

This will make the second time this year that the feds have come 
knocking on AIPAC's door: the first was in late summer, when the 
Larry Franklin case first surfaced and was trumpeted on major news 
media outlets, including CBS. Franklin, a mid-level Pentagon 
official, had been caught red-handed supplying Israeli government 
officials with classified information via two AIPAC officials, Steven 
Rosen and Keith Weissman. As the story began to come out, it became 
apparent that Franklin was just a small fish in a much larger 
aquarium, and had been scooped up in this web of intrigue almost by 
accident. As Laura Rozen and Jason Vest relate in The American 
Prospect:

"In late July, as this debate raged, a Pentagon analyst named Larry 
Franklin telephoned an acquaintance who worked at a pro-Israel 
lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)."

Franklin, who works in the policy shop run by the neocons' man on the 
ground, Douglas Feith, told his AIPAC friend that he was worried 
about U.S. government inaction in the face of alleged attempts by 
Iran to penetrate southern Iraq and counter growing Israeli influence 
in Kurdistan. A meeting was arranged. A few weeks later, as Rosen and 
Vest report, FBI agents showed up at the door of Franklin's friend, 
asking about the Iran analyst in what seemed like a routine 
background check.

In truth, the agents were interested in far more than Franklin: the 
FBI's counterintelligence unit had been eavesdropping on AIPAC for 
over two years, in what appears to be a wide-ranging and rapidly 
developing investigation into Israeli penetration of U.S. government 
agencies. Franklin had been swept up in a massive and ongoing 
counterintelligence operation aimed at a cabal of high-level Israeli 
moles.

The Franklin affair was leaked to the media, and the FBI, which had 
been hoping to catch bigger fish than a mid-level analyst, was forced 
into action: they raided AIPAC's headquarters, copied computer disks 
belonging to Rosen and Weissman, and conducted interviews with a 
number of employees. Rosen and Weissman soon stopped answering 
questions, however, and demanded legal counsel.

The story gathered headlines for a few days, and then disappeared off 
the radar screen as quickly and mysteriously as it had appeared - 
until now. In this latest raid, the feds not only carried away bales 
of evidence, but they also came bearing gifts: four subpoenas 
summoning AIPAC's executive director, Howard Kohr, managing director 
Richard Fishman, research director Raphael Danziger, and Renee 
Rothstein, the group's communications director, to testify before a 
grand jury. The investigation, formerly conducted by FBI 
counterintelligence czar David W. Szady, was transferred to the 
jurisdiction of U.S. attorney Paul J. McNulty, in Alexandria, 
Virginia: the Financial Times reported, just before the presidential 
election, that agents were being told to turn down the heat. But the 
heat is on again, and there is every prospect that it will get much 
hotter for AIPAC and Israel's amen corner in the U.S. even as the 
winter cold sets in.

The simple reason for a sudden change in the weather is that, as one 
official put it, "This is no joke." What is involved here is nothing 
less than treason - a spy ring far more sophisticated and dangerous 
to U.S. national security than the infamous Jonathan Pollard 
espionage operation conducted by Israel in the 1980s. The AIPAC spy 
scandal goes way beyond Franklin, as the Washington Post reported 
back in the beginning of September:

"The FBI probe is actually much broader, according to senior U.S. 
officials, and has been underway for at least two years. Several 
sources familiar with the case say the probe now extends to other 
Pentagon personnel who have a particular interest in assisting both 
Israel and Chalabi, the former Iraqi dissident who was long a 
Pentagon favorite but who has fallen out of favor with the U.S. 
government."

Post reporters Robin Wright and Thomas E. Ricks identified "at least 
two common threads" in this complex and multi-pronged investigation:

"First, the FBI is investigating whether the same people passed 
highly classified information to two disparate allies - [Ahmed] 
Chalabi and a pro-Israel lobbying group. Second, at least some of the 
intelligence in both instances included sensitive information about 
Iran. The broader investigation is also looking into the movement of 
classified materials on U.S. intentions in Iraq and on the 
Arab-Israeli peace process, sources added."

The Chalabi aspect of the probe surfaced after a visit by Iraqi 
government officials to the Baghdad headquarters of the Iraqi 
National Congress. Wright and Ricks report that classified U.S. 
intelligence material was discovered in the May raid, a 
widely-publicized incident that marked the meteoric decline of 
Chalabi, once the darling of the U.S. occupiers, and his descent into 
disgrace. Long in thrall to the Iranian government, Chalabi had 
somehow obtained access to the most closely-held secrets regarding 
U.S. intelligence sources and methods, revealing to Tehran that the 
U.S was monitoring the Iranians' internal communications.

On November 20, Washington hit out again at the neocons' Iraqi poster 
boy, raiding four INC offices, utilizing the good offices of the 
Iraqi Ministry of the Interior and some "American contractors." Now 
they're bitch-slapping the AIPAC crowd with subpoenas, grilling them 
in front of a grand jury convened to hear evidence of Israel's 
American fifth column in Washington. The timing of these two raids 
is, as they say, no coincidence.

Wright and Ricks point out two threads of this investigation, and 
draw out the implications with what limited information they have 
been able to discern from a very close-mouthed U.S. attorney and a 
few anonymous insiders. These two trails - the Iranian spy angle, and 
the AIPAC aspect - lead to the same group of individuals, but there 
are plenty of sub-trails and footpaths to follow, all of which point 
to the very same crowd - a powerful faction in this administration, 
one credited - if that is the word - with steering us into war with 
Iraq and trying mightily to navigate us into a conflict with Iran: 
the neoconservatives.

Centered mainly in the upper reaches of the Pentagon's civilian 
leadership, and in the Office of the Vice President, the recent 
history of this group is defined by its fervor for a new war in the 
Middle East. The conquest and occupation of Iraq, and the 
"liberation" of the region (excepting Israel, of course) has long 
been the announced aim of such worthies as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard 
Perle, and Douglas Feith. They filled the middle reaches of the 
national security bureaucracy with their underlings and ideologues - 
like Franklin - who were strategically placed to doctor the 
intelligence and stovepipe lies in two directions: to the general 
public, and to the White House (as well as funnel U.S. secrets to 
Israel).

The "Office of Special Plans" (OSP) - created by Wolfowitz's command 
and presided over by Feith - was the locus of lies when it came to 
rationalizing the invasion of Iraq. Not trusting the CIA or any of 
the other intelligence-gathering agencies to come up with the 
required "proof" of nonexistent Iraqi WMD and "links" to Osama bin 
Laden, the War Party did an end run around the U.S. intelligence 
community and built up their own parallel agency, one capable of 
churning out the "right" answers. The INC, on the take for millions, 
fed them a steady diet of fables, forgeries, and the tall tales of 
phony "defectors." Julian Borger of the Guardian, Robert Dreyfuss 
(writing in the Nation), and Karen Kwiatkowski, a former Pentagon 
analyst who worked alongside many of these people, including 
Franklin, have all pointed to direct Israeli involvement with the OSP.

Franklin was caught trying to hand over a copy of a draft 
presidential directive on Iran to Israeli agents, but the other 
threads of this investigation involve the decision to go to war in 
Iraq. November was the worst month yet in terms of the U.S. casualty 
rate, and as the ugliness of this war takes on new and more grotesque 
dimensions, the question of who lied us into war is increasingly on 
the minds of Americans.

The wives and mothers of the dead and horribly wounded lift up their 
eyes to heaven and raise their voices in a plaintive cry:

Who did this to us?

Who gained from this war - aside from Osama bin Laden, that is? It's 
a valid enough question to ask in trying to determine how policy was 
formed, and how we came to fall into the Iraqi quagmire. But it's 
less than half the story: and that's the significance of the AIPAC 
spy scandal.

For the first time, we have solid evidence that the Israeli 
government has actively sought, with some success, to penetrate the 
policymaking apparatus that steers the U.S. ship of state. The 
neocons have often been accused - including in this space - of 
hijacking American policy in the Middle East and utilizing U.S. 
military power to Israel's advantage. Now we are beginning to get the 
full picture of exactly how - with the full knowledge and active 
collaboration of the Israeli government - this was done.

The implications of the AIPAC affair are enormous. For instance: we 
are told that Condoleezza Rice, our putative Secretary of State, was 
briefed on this investigation when the Bush II crowd first came to 
Washington, along with her aide, Stephen Hadley - now slated to take 
her place as the president's national security chief. While Hadley's 
position doesn't require confirmation, Condi will face the Senate, 
and we wonder if there isn't just one senator who will ask her how 
this knowledge colored her handling of intelligence matters when it 
came to "evidence" of Iraqi WMD. How did so much get by her - and 
what did she know about the sources of alleged "intelligence" that 
was being fed to the White House by various interested parties?

We know what she knew, although the exact contours of that knowledge 
have yet to be fully revealed, and we know when she knew it. What 
inquiring minds want to know is why she didn't act on her knowledge, 
and take measures to counteract the covert cabal whose tentacles had 
slithered into the White House.

There are all sorts of other angles to this tale of spy vs. spy, and 
I don't have space to cover them all in one column. In any event, the 
AIPAC affair - in the course of its slow but steady development from 
a dark suspicion to a grand jury investigation and finally to a 
full-blown court case and cause célèbre - is going to reveal some 
hard truths about the recent course of our disastrous foreign policy, 
and may even motivate some radical changes, in the long term. In the 
short term, however, it's going to be an awful lot of fun watching 
the cockroaches scramble for cover, skittering across the floor in a 
frantic effort to avoid being squished.

The jailing of the War Party - they said it couldn't be done. I can't 
tell you how many wacked-out letters I've gotten telling me that 
"they" will never let this happen, that the investigation into the 
AIPAC spy nest - and the Plame affair, the Niger uranium forgeries, 
etc., etc. - would sink like so many stones, never to be seen or 
heard of again. To them I say: you're wrong. There is no all-powerful 
conspiracy that controls the U.S. government and has the power to 
bury this treason forever. There are patriots, yet, in our midst - 
yes, even in the government! - who will not stand idly by as traitors 
run rampant in the corridors of power.

And they have just begun to fightŠ.

NOTES IN THE MARGIN

The sinister history of Israel's secret war against America didn't 
start with the Franklin Affair, or AIPAC passing off classified 
materials to Israeli government agents: it reaches all the way back 
to the origins of our seemingly endless "war on terrorism." My short 
book, The Terror Enigma: 9/11 and the Israeli Connection, chronicles 
the story behind the "official" narrative of the worst terrorist 
attack in American history - and exposes the dark secret at the core 
of the U.S.-Israeli "alliance." The Terror Enigma will help you 
understand how and why Israel launched a major covert operation on 
American soil - and change the way you think about 9/11. Buy it today.

- Justin Raimondo

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