Evidence Emerging Of Cheney-Led Smear Campaign Against Pelosi Over Syria Trip

Before Nancy Pelosi left Israel to travel to Syria earlier this month, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s spokeswoman Miri Eisin said “Pelosi is conveying that Israel is willing to talk if they (Syria) would openly take steps to stop supporting terrorism.” Pelosi delivered as requested, and this week received a thank you call from Olmert. So why then did the Israeli Prime Minister originally issue a statement of “clarification” about Pelosi’s message which became the basis for right-wing attacks against her?

The evidence of White House involvement behind the Israeli Prime Minister’s statement has been growing this past week. Middle East analysts have suggested Bush deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abramsobvious the White House is desperate to find some phony criticism of the speaker’s trip, even though it was a bipartisan trip,’ said Rep. Tom Lantos (D-CA), a Holocaust survivor who is considered the Democrat closest to the pro-Israel lobby. ‘I have nothing but contempt and disdain for the attempt to undermine this trip.’” — a close ally of Dick Cheney — may have been coordinating the attempts to undermine Pelosi’s trip. “‘It’s

Rep. Henry Waxman suggested that the White House’s coordinated attempts to smear Pelosi were part of an effort to undermine her on Iraq:

Waxman said the administration is focused on building a case against the Democrats in preparation for a showdown over the Iraq War funding bill. The more they can paint Democrats as weak and irresponsible, the more likely the Democrats will knuckle under and let the president continue the war unchecked. It’s been known to happen.

So Cheney trashes the reputation of men like Lantos and Waxman (who, by the way, has doggedly pursued waste and mismanagement in Iraq by Halliburton, the company that made Cheney rich), and it’s politics as usual.

This is not unchartered territory for Cheney. He has become famous for kneecapping people with whom he disagrees, even individuals within the administration. Middle East experts recalled Cheney’s involvement in a similar situation last year:

Last year, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice talked Olmert into a 48-hour cease-fire during the war with Hezbollah to allow humanitarian relief, but within hours Israeli planes were bombing again, to Rice’s surprise and anger. Olmert had received a call, apparently from Cheney’s office, telling him to ignore Rice.

The Cheney campaign against Pelosi hasn’t let up. This week, the Washington Post editorial board — which has helped drive the Pelosi smear campaign from the beginning — published an attack piece from Liz Cheney, the daughter of the Vice President.

Filed under: Administration, International Relations

Syria, Elliot Abrams, and the Contras All Over Again

POLITICS:
Elliott Abrams and Déjà Vu All Over Again
Analysis by Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Apr 9 (IPS) - It has an all too familiar ring to it.

A crisis area -- in this case, the Middle East -- finds itself in desperate need of a peace process capable of tamping down the forces of violence and destabilisation which the United States itself has played a central role in unleashing.

Regional efforts at diplomacy -- in this case, led by Saudi Arabia -- gain some momentum but are frustrated by die-hard hawks in a U.S. administration. While increasingly on the defensive both at home and abroad, they are determined to carry through their strategy of isolating and destabilising a hostile target -- in this case, Syria -- despite its oft-repeated eagerness to engage Washington and its regional allies.

Sensing an increasingly dangerous impasse, the Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives -- in this case, Nancy Pelosi, backed by a growing bipartisan consensus that the administration's intransigeance will further reduce already-waning U.S. influence in the region -- tries to encourage regional peace efforts by engaging the target directly.

But, worried that her quest might actually gain momentum, administration hawks -- in this case, led by Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams and Vice President Dick Cheney -- accuse the speaker of undermining the president and, working through obliging editorial writers at the Washington Post, among other sympathetic media, including, of course, the Wall Street Journal, attack her for "substitut(ing) her own foreign policy for that of a sitting Republican president."

If that scenario sounds familiar, your foreign policy memory dates back at least to 1987, when, despite intensified regional peace-making efforts for which Costa Rican President Oscar Arias won that year's Nobel Peace Prize, the Ronald Reagan administration was persisting in its efforts to isolate and overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

It was then-House Speaker Jim Wright who, with the quiet encouragement of Republican realists, notably Reagan's White House chief of staff, Howard Baker, Secretary of State George Shultz and his special Central America envoy, Philip Habib, sought to promote Arias' plan.

Like today's Republican realists on the Iraq Study Group (ISG), who have urged the Bush administration to engage rather than continue to isolate Syria, they understood that popular and Congressional support for a "regime change" policy in Nicaragua was not sustainable and Washington should seek a regional settlement on the most favourable terms available.

But Abrams, then assistant secretary of state for Inter-American Affairs, worked assiduously with fellow hard-liners in the White House and the Pentagon -- just as he works today with Cheney's office -- to torpedo both the Arias plan and Wright's efforts to advance it throughout the latter half of 1987.

As Abrams' assistant at the time, the future neo-conservative heavy thinker, Robert Kagan, put it later, "Arias, more than any other Latin leader single-handedly undid U.S. policy in Nicaragua." And when he won the Nobel Prize, "all us of who thought it was important to get aid for the contras reacted with disgust, unbridled disgust."

As part of their strategy, hard-liners led by Abrams rejected appeals by Nicaragua for high-level talks, thus forcing Habib to resign by late summer and insisting -- as they now do with Syria -- that direct negotiations would serve only to legitimate Sandinistas and demoralise the contras.

In November 1987, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega came to Washington with a proposal for a ceasefire with the contras. After the administration refused to receive him, Wright, seeing an opportunity to jump-start a stalled peace process, attended a meeting at the Vatican Embassy here at which Ortega asked his main domestic foe, Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo, to mediate between the Sandinista government and the contras.

Wright's participation in the talks was seized by Abrams as the launching pad for a public -- if barely concealed -- attack on the speaker. Interviewed by the Post under the guise of an unnamed "senior administration official," Abrams charged Wright with engaging in "guerrilla theater" and "an unbelievable melodrama" that had dealt a "serious setback" to the administration's policy.

"This was not forward movement; this was screwing up the process," the "senior official" complained to the Post which, as in its criticism Friday of Pelosi's meeting with Assad, obligingly followed up with its own editorial, entitled "What is Jim Wright Doing?", charging the speaker with having acted "as though the actual conduct of diplomacy in this delicate passage were his responsibility."

The Journal's neo-conservative editorial writers swiftly joined in, accusing Wright of a "compulsion for running off-the-shelf foreign-policy operations," just as last week they charged Pelosi and Democrats of seeking "to conduct their own independent diplomacy".

Within just a few months of his meeting with Ortega, however, the Democratic-led Congress rejected Reagan's request to fund the contras, a step which Abrams incorrectly predicted at the time would result in "the dissolution of Central America".

According to Roy Gutman's aptly named 1988 book about Reagan's Central America policy, "Banana Diplomacy", Washington soon found itself "at the margins of the region's diplomacy".

Unlike his high-public profile as assistant secretary 20 years ago, Abrams, who now presides over Middle East policy at the National Security Council, is today far more discreet, no doubt in part because his conviction in 1991 for lying to Congress about his role in the Iran-contra scandal has made him an easy target for Democrats.

"He's very careful about not leaving fingerprints," one State Department official told IPS earlier this year.

But there is little doubt among Middle East analysts here that Abrams is playing a lead role in White House efforts to discredit Pelosi for meeting with Assad, just as he did with Wright for meeting Ortega in 1987.

And just as he worked with Reagan hard-liners to undermine the Arias Plan 20 years ago, so he appears to be doing what he can to undermine recent efforts by Saudi King Abdullah to initiate an Arab-Israeli peace process and, for that matter, by Republican realists, and even Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, to push it forward.

Elliot Abrams’ uncivil war

Is the Bush administration violating the law in an effort to provoke a Palestinian civil war?

Deputy National Security Advisor, Elliott Abrams — who Newsweek recently described as “the last neocon standing” — has had it about for some months now that the U.S. is not only not interested in dealing with Hamas, it is working to ensure its failure. In the immediate aftermath of the Hamas elections, last January, Abrams greeted a group of Palestinian businessmen in his White House office with talk of a “hard coup” against the newly-elected Hamas government — the violent overthrow of their leadership with arms supplied by the United States. While the businessmen were shocked, Abrams was adamant — the U.S. had to support Fatah with guns, ammunition and training, so that they could fight Hamas for control of the Palestinian government.

While those closest to him now concede the Abrams’ words were issued in a moment of frustration, the “hard coup” talk was hardly just talk. Over the last twelve months, the United States has supplied guns, ammunition and training to Palestinian Fatah activists to take on Hamas in the streets of Gaza and the West Bank. A large number of Fatah activists have been trained and “graduated” from two camps — one in Ramallah and one in Jericho. The supplies of rifles and ammunition, which started as a mere trickle, has now become a torrent (Haaretz reports the U.S. has designated an astounding $86.4 million for Abu Mazen’s security detail), and while the program has gone largely without notice in the American press, it is openly talked about and commented on in the Arab media — and in Israel. Thousands of rifles and bullets have been poring into Gaza and the West Bank from Egypt and Jordan, the administration’s designated allies in the program.

At first, it was thought, the resupply effort (initiated under the guise of “assist[ing] the Palestinian Authority presidency in fulfilling PA commitments under the road map to dismantle the infrastructure of terrorism and establish law and order in the West Bank and Gaza,” according to a U.S. government document) would strengthen the security forces under the command of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Officials thought that the additional weapons would easily cow Hamas operatives, who would meekly surrender the offices they had only recently so dearly won. That has not only not happened, but the program is under attack throughout the Arab world — particularly among America’s closest allies.

While both Egypt and Jordan have shipped arms to Abu Mazen under the Abrams program (Egypt recently sent 1,900 rifles into Gaza and the West Bank, nearly matching the 3000 rifles sent by the Jordanians), neither Jordan’s King Abdullah nor Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak believe the program will work — and both are now maneuvering to find a way out of it. “Who can blame them?” an administration official told us recently. “While Mubarak has no love for Hamas, they do not want to be seen as bringing them down. The same can be said for Jordan.” A Pentagon official was even more adamant, cataloguing official Washington’s nearly open disdain for Abrams’ program. “This is not going to work and everyone knows it won’t work. It is too clever. We’re just not very good at this. This is typical Abrams stuff.” This official went on to note that “it is unlikely that either Jordan or Egypt will place their future in the hands of the White House. Who the hell outside of Washington wants to see a civil war among Palestinians? Do we really think that the Jordanians think that’s a good idea. The minute it gets underway, Abdullah is finished. Hell, fifty percent of his country is Palestinian.”

Senior U.S. Army officers and high level civilian Pentagon officials have been the most outspoken internal administration critics of the program, which was unknown to them until mid-August, near the end of Israel’s war against Hezbollah. When Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld learned about it he was enraged, and scheduled a meeting with President Bush in an attempt to convince him the program would backfire. Rumsfeld was concerned that the anti-Hamas program would radicalise Muslim groups among American allies and eventually endanger U.S. troops fighting Sunni extremists in Iraq. According to our reports, Rumsfeld was told by Bush that he should keep his focus on Iraq, and that “the Palestinian brief” was in the hands of the Secretary of State. After this confrontation, Rumsfeld decided there was not much he could do.

The Abrams program was initially conceived in February of 2006 by a group of White House officials who wanted to shape a coherent and tough response to the Hamas electoral victory of January. These officials, we are told, were led by Abrams, but included national security advisors working in the Office of the Vice President, including prominent neo-conservatives David Wurmser and John Hannah. The policy was approved by Condoleezza Rice. The President then, we are told, signed off on the program in a CIA “finding” and designated that its implementation be put under the control of Langley. But the program ran into problems almost from the beginning. “The CIA didn’t like it and didn’t think it would work,” we were told in October. “The Pentagon hated it, the US embassy in Israel hated it, and even the Israelis hated it.” A prominent American military official serving in Israel called the program “stupid” and “counter-productive.” The program went forward despite these criticisms, however, though responsibility for its implementation was slowly put in the hands of anti-terrorism officials working closely with the State Department. The CIA “wriggled out of” retaining responsibility for implementing the Abrams plan, we have been told. Since at least August, Rice, Abrams and U.S. envoy David Welch have been its primary advocates and the program has been subsumed as a “part of the State Department’s Middle East initiative.” U.S. government officials refused to comment on a report that the program is now a part of the State Department’s “Middle East Partnership Initiative,” established to promote democracy in the region. If it is, diverting appropriated funds from the program for the purchase of weapons may be a violation of Congressional intent — and U.S. law.

The recipients of U.S. largesse have been Palestinian President Abu Mazen and Mohammad Dahlan, a controversial and charismatic Palestinian political leader from Gaza. The U.S. has also relied on advice from Mohammad Rashid, a well-known Kurdish/Palestinian financier with offices in Cairo. Even in Israel, the alliance of the U.S. with these two figures is greeted with almost open derision. While Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has hesitantly supported the program, many of his key advisors have made it clear that they want to have nothing to do with starting a Palestinian civil war. They also doubt whether Hamas can be weakened. These officials point out that, since the beginning of the program, Hamas has actually gained in strength, in part because its leaders are considered competent, transparent, uncorrupt and unwilling to compromise their ideals — just the kinds of democratically elected leaders that the Bush Administration would want to support anywhere else in the Middle East.

Of course, in public, Secretary Rice appears contrite and concerned with “the growing lawlessness” among Palestinians, while failing to mention that such lawlessness is exactly what the Abrams plan was designed to create. “You can’t build security forces overnight to deal with the kind of lawlessness that is there in Gaza which largely derives from an inability to govern,” she said during a recent trip to Israel. “Their [the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority] inability to govern, of course, comes from their unwillingness to meet international standards.” Even Middle East experts and State Department officials close to Rice consider her comments about Palestinian violence dangerous, and have warned her that if the details of the U.S. program become public her reputation could be stained. In fact, Pentagon officials concede, Hamas’s inability to provide security to its own people and the clashes that have recently erupted have been seeded by the Abrams plan. Israeli officials know this, and have begun to rebel. In Israel, at least, Rice’s view that Hamas can be unseated is now regularly, and sometimes publicly, dismissed.

According to a December 25 article in the Israeli daily Haaretz, senior Israeli intelligence officials have told Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that not only can Hamas not be replaced, but that its rival, Fatah, is disintegrating. Any hope for the success of an American program aimed at replacing Hamas, these officials argued, will fail. These Israeli intelligence officials also dismissed Palestinian President Abu Mazen’s call for elections to replace Hamas — saying that such elections would all but destroy Fatah. As Haaretz reported: “Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin told the cabinet Sunday [December 24] that should elections be held in the Palestinian Authority, Fatah’s chances of winning would be close to zero. Diskin said during Sunday’s weekly cabinet meeting that the Fatah faction is in bad shape, and therefore Israel should expect Hamas to register a sweeping victory.”

Apparently Jordan’s King Abdullah agrees. On the day this article appeared, December 25, Abdullah kept Palestinian President Abu Mazen waiting for six hours to see him in Amman. Eventually, Abdullah told Abu Mazen that he should go home — and only come to see him again when accompanied by Hamas leader and Palestinian Prime Minister, Ismail Haniyeh. Most recently, Saudi officials have welcomed Haniyeh to Saudi Arabia for talks, having apparently made public their own views on the American program to replace Hamas. And so it is: one year after the election of Hamas, and one year after Elliot Abrams determined that sowing the seeds of civil war among a people already under occupation would somehow advance America’s program for democracy in the Middle East, respect for America’s democratic ideals has all but collapsed — and not just in Iraq.

Posted: January 7th, 2007 under CF REPORTS, Hamas, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Neocons, Palestinians, Bush Administration.
Comments: 3 | Permalink | home

Elliot Abrams Must Go. Elliot Abrams is a felon.

Monday, December 18, 2006

Bush White House Censors Op-Ed on Iran
Elliot Abrams Must Go

Juan Cole

Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation carries the story of how Elliot Abrams and others at the National Security Council in Bush's White House have intervened to stop the publication of an op-ed in the New York Times by Flynt Leverett. Leverett himself served in the National Security Council until not so long ago.

For Leverett's criticism of Bush administration Middle East policy and its mishandling of Iran since January of 2002, see this interview at Eurasia.net. He advocates US talks with Iran.

Ironically, the White House attempt to stop high-level discussion of talking to Iran comes just as the Iranian public dealt a slap in the face to extremist President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, who stole the presidential elections in summer of 2005. Former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani appears to have trounced Ahmadinejad's own favorite cleric, Mohammad Taqi Misbah Yazdi, an authoritarian anti-democrat.

Back to Washington. The remaining Neoconservatives in the Bush administration, like David Wurmser in Cheney's office and Abrams at the NSC have been agitating behind the scenes for war on Syria and Iran. These people hate peace the way the devil hates holy water. They confess themselves actively disappointed when a war doesn't happen. They helped send US troops into Iraq where 24,000 have been wounded or killed, and they'd just love to expend some more lives on other pet projects.

That does it. Elliot Abrams must go. Elliot Abrams is a felon. He was involved in stealing Pentagon weapons from US stockpiles, selling them to the Ayatollah Khomeiniri, and then stealing the Iranian funds so garnered to give to far-right Central American death squads, and then lying about all this to Congress. The Congress in the Constitution controls the budget. The Congress had cut off money to the rightwing death squads supported by Reagan and henchmen like Abrams. This elaborate criminal conspiracy inside the White House was the Right's response. They shredded the Constitution (and ever since have been calling their critics "unpatriotic.")

In 1991, Abrams pled guilty to two misdemeanor counts of lying to Congress under oath. Without the plea deal, he was facing felony charges, since what he did was in fact a felony.

Congress pledged that Abrams would never work at a high level in government again. But by the time the Neoconservative cabal in the Bush administration got Bush to appoint him to the National Security Council, there had been so much turn-over in Congress that, one member told me, "no one remembered who Abrams was."

I'm serious about this, everyone. The bloggers are touted as influential, but their influence is hard to measure or prove. Let's make this a test case.

Can Kos help? Eschaton? Talkingpointsmemo? And, it needn't be only one side of the aisle. A lot of principled persons on the right are deeply troubled by the criminality of this administration.

Please write your congressional representative and your senators and demand that they hold hearings on why Elliot Abrams is in charge of Middle East policy in the Bush White House.

Enough of being ruled by criminals and liars and warmongers. Enough of censorship and attacks on our Constitution. Elliot Abrams must go.

Here is an excerpt of Leverett's statement on the affair.

' Until last week, the Publication Review Board had never sought to remove or change a single word in any of my drafts, including in all of my publications about the Bush administration's handling of Iran policy. However, last week, the White House inserted itself into the prepublication review process for an op-ed on the administration's bungling of the Iran portfolio that I had prepared for the New York Times, blocking publication of the piece on the grounds that it would reveal classified information.

This claim is false and, I have come to believe, fabricated by White House officials to silence an established critic of the administration's foreign policy incompetence at a moment when the White House is working hard to fend off political pressure to take a different approach to Iran and the Middle East more generally.

The op-ed is based on the longer paper I just published with The Century Foundation -- which was cleared by the CIA without modifying a single word of the draft. Officials with the CIA's Publication Review Board have told me that, in their judgment, the draft op-ed does not contain classified material, but that they must bow to the preferences of the White House.

The White House is demanding, before it will consider clearing the op-ed for publication, that I excise entire paragraphs dealing with matters that I have written about (and received clearance from the CIA to do so) in several other pieces, that have been publicly acknowledged by Secretary Rice, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, and former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, and that have been extensively covered in the media.

These matters include Iran's dialogue and cooperation with the United States concerning Afghanistan in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and Iran's offer to negotiate a comprehensive "grand bargain" with the United States in the spring of 2003.

There is no basis for claiming that these issues are classified and not already in the public domain.

For the White House to make this claim, with regard to my op-ed and at this particular moment, is nothing more than a crass effort to politicize a prepublication review process -- a process that is supposed to be about the protection of classified information, and nothing else -- to limit the dissemination of views critical of administration policy.

Within the last two week, the CIA found the wherewithal to approve an op-ed -- published in the New York Times on December 8, 2006 -- by Kenneth Pollack, another former CIA employee. This op-ed includes the statement that “Iran provided us with extensive assistance on intelligence, logistics, diplomacy, and Afghan internal politics."

Similar statements by me have been deleted from my draft op-ed by the White House. But Kenneth Pollack is someone who presented unfounded assessments of the Iraqi WMD threat -- the same assessments expounded by the Bush White House -- to make a high-profile public case for going to war in Iraq.

Mr. Pollack also supports the administration's reluctance to engage with Iran, in contrast to my consistent and sharp criticism of that position. It would seem that, if one is expounding views congenial to the White House, it does not intervene in prepublication censorship, but, if one is a critic, White House officials will use fraudulent charges of revealing classified information to keep critical views from being heard.

My understanding is that the White House staffers who have injected themselves into this process are working for Elliott Abrams and Megan O'Sullivan, both politically appointed deputies to President Bush's National Security Adviser, Stephen Hadley.

Their conduct in this matter is despicable and un-American in the profoundest sense of that term. '