'Floodgates of Fraud' at Spy Satellite Agency

February 06, 2007

The "floodgates of fraud reporting" have opened at the National Reconnaissance Office, the nation's top-secret builder and operator of spy satellites. This bit of news comes from no less a source than the NRO's inspector general, Eric Feldman. Yet Feldman and other NRO officials are mum about just how big the flood is over there.

This might not be such a big deal were the stakes at hand not so high. The NRO and its many contractors have grown notorious for massive cost overruns and quality control failures so serious they threaten the U.S. edge in high-tech reconnaissance satellites. Whether they're eavesdropping on al Qaeda communications or photographing Iranian nuclear facilities, these are the crown jewels of the U.S. intelligence community. But the current generation of spy satellites is burning out–and replacements are years away.

Feldman suggested something was amiss in the Journal of Public Inquiry, an obscure publication put out twice a year by the nation's inspectors general. With Alan Larsen, his general counsel, he described how contractors have systematically delayed and brushed off IG requests for information. When his office pushed through a revision to all contracts, explicitly stating the need to cooperate, some contractors "were hysterical, accusing NRO of violating four different amendments to the U.S. Constitution," they wrote. But since then, "the floodgates of fraud reporting mysteriously opened from companies that had previously had little interest in talking to us. . . . We believe that we have barely scratched the surface in identifying possible fraudulent activity on our contracts."

What kind of fraud is he talking about? Hard to say, but there are huge sums in play. The NRO grabs some $7.5 billion of the $44 billion annual intelligence budget–and most of that amount is shelled out to contractors large and small. The agency's troubled next-generation satellite, a $25 billion boondoggle called Future Imagery Architecture, has been so dogged by cost overruns and technical trouble that the director of national intelligence cut the project in half last year. Back in 1995, revelations surfaced that the NRO ran what some in Congress called a slush fund of over $1 billion, which the agency used to build a lavish new headquarters. The NRO director and his deputy were subsequently fired, and Congress stopped the agency from squirreling away unspent funds year after year.

The last NRO fraud case we found on the public record is six years old and involved a mere $160,000 in payoffs–a pittance in the world of defense contracts. The culprit was a Los Angeles-area contractor trying to corner routine maintenance and repair work on buildings run by TRW, an NRO contractor that no longer even exists.

The NRO says it has had no cases since then–at least that it can talk about. That seems hard to believe. More likely at work is the kind of knee-jerk, pervasive secrecy that infects so much of the U.S. intelligence community–the kind of needless secrecy that fosters the very lack of accountability the IGs should be fighting against.

NRO Inspector General Feldman declined repeated requests to comment. A pity. Even in the world of spy satellites, Americans have a right to know if billions of their tax dollars are being stolen.

Photo caption: An NRO satellite is launched from Vanderberg Air Force Base in 1996.

Credit: National Reconnaissance Office

Posted at 06:00 PM

Time to say no

To continue kowtowing to the US administration's demands over Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine would be suicidal, writes Hassan Nafaa

---

Gaping wounds in some of the most sensitive areas of the Arab world, most notably in Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine, have begun to suppurate. The current American administration, headed by a clique of anti-Arab Islamophobes, will stop at nothing, out of deference to Israel and commitment to the Christian-Zionist preaching in which they believe so fervently. This same administration believes the fact that neither the president's nor the vice-president's running for re-election gives them greater freedom of movement, at least until the electoral campaigns officially kick-off in February a year from now. Until then they will steamroll through measures in an attempt to complete an enterprise refuse to admit they have failed. And such is the catatonic stupor into which Arab regimes have fallen that they are prepared to allow the same doctor who caused the disease to treat their wounds.

Two factors forced Bush to re-adjust his policy and plans for Iraq and the region. The Baker- Hamilton report, drafted by a joint Democratic- Republican commission, concluded the administration's policy was a fiasco and demanded changes. Then, the Republicans lost their majority in both houses of Congress just as the growing anti-war movement was reminding the American public of the failings of the Vietnam era. In response, Bush dug in his heels. Instead of cooperating with Iran and Syria to restore an element of calm in order to pave the way for an honourable withdrawal, as the Baker-Hamilton report recommended, he did the opposite, ordering 20,000 more US troops to Iraq, two aircraft carriers to the Gulf, and furnishing his friends in the neighbourhood with anti-missile defence systems. Such moves were obviously in preparation for a military strike against Iran and the tightening of the siege around Syria, yet Bush was confident of his allies' support. Just in case, though, he sent Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on another tour of the region.

Here was the envoy of supposedly the greatest democracy on earth appealing to foreign friends in order to tip the scale of American public opinion back in favour of the executive after Congress had won the first round. The close observer might have detected Rice's inward sneer as she discovered how immeasurably more malleable decision-makers in this part of the world are than lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Certainly she shed no tears. Quite the opposite: she was delighted, full of confidence, pleased to see eight Arab foreign ministers climbing over one another in Kuwait to declare their support for America's "new" plans for Iraq and for the region. She had grounds for her confidence. She knows, after all, that she is the only person capable of getting this number of Arab foreign ministers to meet in any place she designates, in the Arab world or abroad, at the snap of her fingers. Perhaps, too, she felt a measure of malicious glee as she watched them fight to win her favour, in the full knowledge that while each and everyone of them is a member of the Arab League they would never come together on their own initiative in order to develop an independent policy to further their common interests.

When the rush of Arab governments to support an American policy that American society itself deplores stirred angry reactions among sectors of Arab public opinion, various diplomatic quarters tried to stem the damage. Some Arab foreign ministers, for example, tried to convey the impression that their support was qualified, that it was contingent upon results on the ground.

It was hardly convincing. Governments generally formulate policies on the basis of considerations and expectations that have not yet been put to the test. When other governments come out in support of those policies they are committing themselves, as partners, to working for its success regardless of what the future may bring. And just as they anticipate sharing the fruits of the policy, should it succeed, they must also be prepared to sustain their share of losses should it fail.

The Bush plan entails actions hostile to both Iran and Syria. To support it is to side unequivocally against these two countries. The same applies to the fact that the plan is opposed by the majority of the American people, not to mention powers such as China, Russia and the EU.

Bush's reckless adventurism is well known and the tide of opposition to his policy will swell further, both at home and abroad. While this makes failure even more likely it will not forestall the disasters that will undoubtedly be inflicted on Arabs and Muslims. So certain is the prognosis that it is only possible to wonder at the considerations upon which Arab regimes base their support of US policy. The most obvious premises for their behaviour are probably the right ones: first, they think Iran's expansionist designs more dangerous than the Zionist version, and second, they believe the need to placate the US in order to sustain their strategic relationships with Washington outstrips all other regional and international considerations.

Without underestimating the potential threat to the Arab world of Iran's growing power and influence, it is impossible to accept this presents a greater peril than the Zionist enterprise. The best way for the Arabs to confront Tehran's regional power bid is not to fall in with US-Israeli plans to strike Iran but to establish a unified Arab policy towards Iran. This would involve opening a dialogue with Tehran, to which end they would have to rely on Syria. A strike against Iran, by the US and/or Israel, may weaken Iran temporarily but it will not strengthen the hand of any Arab power. It could easily plunge the entire region into a state of chaos, triggering any number of local civil wars if not a full-fledged regional war.

Arab leaders who believed the claims that ridding Iraq of Saddam Hussein would eliminate one of the greatest impediments to regional stability should look at what has in fact been eliminated. It is Iraq as a state that has been destroyed. And who, apart from Iran and Israel, has gained from the catastrophe that has befallen Iraq? Does it not also follow that the sole beneficiary of any war against Iran will be Israel, for whom the destruction of Iran would come as the most crucial step towards realising Israel's dream of re-organising the Middle East into disparate sectarian-based statelets as it transforms itself into the engineer of their multi-farious rivalries and alliances?

As important as the strategic relationship with the US might be, Arab leaders should realise that Bush and his gang of neo-conservatives are not synonymous with the United States. They are a band of thugs bent on steering the world to unmitigated disaster, a fact grasped by the majority of the American people upon whom it has dawned that this administration is no less fanatical and racist than Hitler and the Nazis. Nor can a strategic relationship be founded upon handing over the determination of the fates of our peoples to the White House, regardless of whether its incumbent is a Democrat or Republican, an extremist or moderate. The US is a mighty power and acts as mighty powers mostly do: it respects the strong and crushes the weak once it can dispense with their services. When will Arab rulers open their eyes to the reality that their current weakness and disarray is hastening the day when the US finds them too much of a burden and drops them? When will they realise that they will never be able to make the transition from a dependent to a partner or build a strategic relationship that is truly mutually beneficent until they demonstrate their ability to effectively play what few cards they have left to their advantage?

Would it be excessive to suggest that the current crisis offers Arab countries that are on good terms with the US a rare opportunity to regain some of their forfeited leverage? I don't think so. This is one of those paradoxes of the current situation though to capitalise on it the ruling elites -- contrary to what they seem to believe -- must summon the resolve to convey to Bush a resounding no, and then enter immediately into talks with Iran, Syria and, perhaps, Turkey. Such a dialogue would seek to promote a range of interrelated objectives: an end to the internecine bloodshed in Palestine, the creation of a national unity government and the immediate lifting of the economic blockade on the Palestinian people; an end to the Lebanese crisis by pressuring rival parties to return to the negotiation table with the purpose of resolving their differences and safeguarding Lebanese independence while simultaneously ensuring Syria's security requirements; a reconciliation between rival Iraqi factions so as to preserve Iraq's territorial integrity and set in motion a new political process that will lead to a government that represents Iraqis regardless of sectarian affiliations; establishing channels of communication and dialogue with US leaders opposed to Bush's policies in order to generate pressure for an international conference, in which all concerned parties take part, the purpose of which is to resolve, in tandem, all the interconnected crises in the Middle East, and to establish agreed-upon systems for collective and humanitarian security so as to ensure the settlements are acceptable regionally and internationally.

It is mistaken to believe that what is happening in Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine are civil wars or even the beginning of civil wars. They are political conflicts fuelled by the US-Israeli drive for regional hegemony.

* The writer is a professor of political science at Cairo University.

© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved

Al-Ahram Weekly Online

The Gulf of Sneezes

This article appears in the February 9, 2007 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

by Jeffrey Steinberg

A survey of senior U.S. military, intelligence, and diplomatic specialists confirms that the Bush-Cheney Administration is presently on a course towards provoking a military confrontation with Iran sometime before the end of the Spring of 2007. Were such a lunatic provocation to go unchecked in the immediate days and weeks ahead, the planet would be plunged into perpetual war, and financial and economic chaos, that could take generations to undo. One certain consequence of a U.S.-provoked war with Iran would be the total destruction of the United States as the sovereign republic of the Founding Fathers, and the demonization of the U.S.A. in the eyes of what might remain of the population of the rest of the world.

The simplest and most elegant way to stop this madness is for Vice President Dick Cheney, the thug-in-chief of this Persian Gulf war drive, to be forced out of office this month. As of this writing, four separate House resolutions are being offered, to prevent military action against Iran without prior Congressional deliberation and full authorization. Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.V.) has a similar resolution in the Senate. The weakness of all of these well-intentioned efforts, however, is that none specify that an act of war against Iran, without prior Congressional authorization, would constitute an impeachable offense by both President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Under the present conditions of Bush-Cheney Executive branch madness and intransigence, only such blunt language, backed up by a clear commitment to act, could contribute to actual war avoidance.

It is an open secret that growing legions of leading Republican strategists and financial angels are coming to the conclusion that Cheney has to go—or else the GOP may not survive the 2008 election cycle. Increasingly, according to sources close to the Bush family, there is despair that the President is incapable of facing the reality that Dick Cheney has been the source of every policy fiasco of the past six years, and that Cheney's timely departure is the only "exit strategy" available to Dubya, if he wishes not to go down in history as the worst American President of all time. As of this writing, the President is the runaway leading contender for that dubious distinction.

A `Sneeze' Can Start a War
Military and intelligence sources with decades of experience in the Persian Gulf have warned EIR that once the second U.S. naval carrier group, led by the USS Stennis, arrives in the Persian Gulf sometime in the second half of February, there will be such a concentration of American and Iranian naval equipment in that narrow area, that "a sneeze" could start a conflagration. By "sneeze," these experts meant that naval commanders—American and Iranian—at the tactical level, operating in close quarters in poorly defined border areas of the Gulf, could carry out provocative actions that trigger a general war—without necessarily intending to do so.

According to one retired Persian Gulf commander, prior to the 1991 "Operation Desert Storm," no U.S. carrier groups were deployed into the Persian Gulf, precisely because the danger of blundering into a war was considered too great to justify the risk. Large-scale naval assets assigned to the Persian Gulf region were based in the Indian Ocean and in other nearby locations as a kind of fail-safe measure.

War Has Already Been Declared
In some respects, the Bush Administration has already issued a de facto, unconstitutional declaration of war. On Jan. 10, 2007, as President Bush was delivering his nationwide television address, announcing the "surge" of U.S. troops in Iraq, American Special Forces commandos were raiding the Iranian consular office in the Kurdish city of Irbil. The American soldiers arrested five Iranian officials, and accused them of providing support to the insurgents battling American and coalition forces in Iraq. As one retired senior American diplomat put it, "This was an act of war" on the part of the Bush Administration.

In his Jan. 10 speech, the President placed great emphasis on Iran's and Syria's purported roles in backing the insurgency. The President used a legalistic term, "material support for the insurgency," to describe the Iranian and Syrian actions. As the actions in Irbil demonstrated, the Bush Administration has decided to take a direct and aggressive approach to Iran's presence inside Iraq—regardless of the actual level of proof of Iran's involvement in backing insurgents and providing military hardware. According to some sources, Iranian Revolutionary Guard assets may have been engaged inside Iraq in provocative actions against the American and coalition occupation forces. But by refusing to engage in any kind of diplomatic efforts, and by highlighting Iran's longstanding presence inside neighboring Iraq, the Bush-Cheney Administration has adopted a willful plan to, in effect, back into a full-scale war against Iran.

Since the President's Jan. 10 speech and the "act of war" in Irbil, other provocative actions by the Bush Administration have piled up. On Jan. 31, the Los Angeles Times reported that the U.S. Air Force is increasing patrols along the Iran-Iraq border, aimed at cutting off the flow of arms and Revolutionary Guard operatives into Iraq. The combination of these intensified border sorties, which could result in strikes against Iranian territory, and the U.S. naval buildup in the Gulf, have many people worried. The Times quoted an unnamed American military officer: "A mistake could be made and you could end up in something that neither side ever really wanted, and suddenly it's August 1914 all over again." He gave a barely hypothetical example: "A boat crosses a line . . . but what does it mean? You've got to be very careful about overreacting."

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was equally blunt in an interview with CNN on Jan. 31, when he said, "We have told the Iranians and the Americans, `We know that you have a problem with each other, but we're asking you, please, solve your problems outside of Iraq.' We do not want the American forces to take Iraq as a base to attack Iran. . . . We will not accept Iran using Iraq to attack American forces. But does this exist? It exists and I assure you it exists."

WMD Gambit Dropped
According to one senior U.S. intelligence official, White House "spin doctors" concluded late last year that the Administration had been so discredited by the fraudulent claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction stockpiles, that no one would buy into a war against Iran on the basis of Administration claims that the Islamic Republic was on the verge of fielding nuclear weapons. At that time, the official rhetoric of Bush and Cheney shifted to an emphasis on Iran's interference in American counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq. While the White House has so far failed to provide any detailed evidence that Iran is behind the escalating insurgency, the temperature of the Administration rhetoric has jumped to a fever pitch. Recently, the President acknowledged that he issued an intelligence finding in Autumn 2006, authorizing American forces in Iraq to target Iranian assets inside Iraqi territory.

On Jan. 20, five American soldiers were killed in a sophisticated attack, by armed men disguised as Iraqi security officers, who spoke English. The Bush Administration has blamed the incident on Iran, claiming that Iraqi Shi'ite insurgents are not sophisticated enough on their own, to have carried out such an attack. Yet the Bush Adminstiration has still not released its long-promised report about Iranian involvement, and the latest National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) says essentially that other countries are not responsible for what's going on inside Iraq. The readiness of the Bush Administration to jump to conclusions about the Iranian hand behind every significant insurgent action just underscores the war fever that has spread around 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

It is in this context that the pending arrival of a massive new American naval force into the Persian Gulf represents the potential for what one senior retired U.S. Marine officer called a "Gulf of Tonkin II" nightmare.

A Unilateral Strike
The naval buildup also will soon put the United States in the position of being able to launch significant strikes against Iran without relying on any Persian Gulf states to provide basing or overflight support. It is no secret that the Iranian government has warned all of the major states of the Gulf Cooperation Council, including Saudi Arabia, that any support for an American attack on Iran will be met with a serious irregular warfare response. Kuwait and Bahrain, two GCC states with significant U.S. Air Force presence, are highly vulnerable to such Iranian-directed asymmetric warfare, given the sizeable Shi'ite minorities in both countries.

In recent days, Iran and Saudi Arabia have exchanged diplomatic missions, clearly aimed at avoiding a confrontation.

However, the pending arrival of the USS Stennis in the waters of the Persian Gulf will soon trump all of those efforts. Given the unpredictable situation in Tehran, nothing short of decisive action—the removal of Vice President Cheney—can assure the world that a "sneeze" will not start World War III.

Cheering Movers and Art Student Spies: Was Israel Tracking the Hijackers Before the 9/11 Attacks?

First Cockburn knocks questioning 9/11, now questions. Suspicious.
---
Thursday, February 8th, 2007

Listen to Segment || Download Show mp3
Watch 128k stream Watch 256k stream

---

A new article in the newsletter Counterpunch examines unresolved questions over whether Israeli agents were tracking the 9/11 hijackers before September 11th. ABC’s 20/20, The Forward, and Salon.com have all covered the story. But where’s the follow up? We speak to the author of the article, Christopher Ketcham; Counterpunch editor Alexander Cockburn, and Marc Perelman, the Forward reporter who did one of the first reports on the story in 2002. [includes rush transcript]

---

Were Israeli agents tracking the 9/11 hijackers before September 11th? In 2002, ABC’s 20/20, Salon.com, and the Jewish newspaper The Forward all did this story. But where’s the follow up?

Freelance journalist Christopher Ketcham has just published a comprehensive piece on this story in the newsletter Counterpunch. The article highlights various interconnected stories: The five Israeli “movers” who witnesses say were cheering after the first plane struck the World Trade Center; the so-called Israeli art students who were living in concentrated areas where hijackers were living around the United States and how two of the hijackers ended up on the Watch List weeks before 9/11.

Christopher Ketcham, the author of the article, joins us on the line from Upstate New York. Alexander Cockburn also joins us on the line. He is the editor of Counterpunch where the piece is published. And with us here in the firehouse studio is Marc Perelman he is the reporter who did one of the first reports on the story for The Forward in 2002.

• Marc Perelman. Diplomatic Correspondent for The Forward. He broke the story about Israeli spies in 2002.

• Alexander Cockburn. Editor of Counterpunch.

• Christopher Ketcham. Freelance journalist. Author of “What Did Israel Know in Advance of the 9/11 Attacks?” in the latest edition of CounterPunch’s print newsletter.

---

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

AMY GOODMAN: Christopher Ketcham, the author of the article, joins us on the line from Upstate New York. Alexander Cockburn also joins us on the phone. He is the editor of Counterpunch, where the piece is published. And with us here in the firehouse studio is Marc Perelman. He is the reporter who did one of the first reports on the story for the newspaper, The Forward, in 2002.

Why don't we begin with Christopher Ketcham? Christopher, start off with the story you begin with in this latest piece, and that’s the story of the five so-called “movers,” this story that has been documented, talked about, rumored about. Explain what happened that morning of 9/11.

CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM: Sure. Let me just preface this whole conversation just to say that the Counterpunch article does not pretend to provide readers with a definitive smoking gun for these allegations. Rather, what I’ve done is gathered all the available information on the matter. That is, the disparate media reports that you mentioned; leaked documents from FBI, CIA and the Justice Department; conversations with former intelligence officials and current FBI officers.

Now, the upshot of all this available evidence is this: the Israeli government likely was conducting some kind of spy operation on US soil in the run-up to the September 11th attacks. The purpose of the operation was to identify and track Muslim extremists, possibly including members of al-Qaeda.

Now, the best evidence that we have for this is, in fact, the story of these five moving men. Now, three of these guys were seen on the morning of September 11, just after the first plane hit the North Tower, quote-unquote, “celebrating” on the New Jersey waterfront. Now, that's -- I put the quotes around that, because it comes from a FBI BOLO, or “be on lookout,” an alert that was put out regarding these men that day. The celebration apparently consisted of high-fiving, according to one FBI official, of holding up cigarette lighters, as if they’re at a rock concert. So, remember, the plane has just hit the tower, exploded in the tower, and these three men are behaving rather oddly.

Later in the day, they were picked up. Two other men apparently joined them in a van. They were -- the case was immediately handed over to FBI counterintelligence. The men were held for 71 days. They were repeatedly interrogated. They repeatedly failed lie detector tests. And then, after those 71 days was up, they were sent home, apparently under pressure or because of pressure brought by the Israeli government and by certain players in the US government. And the story sort of disappeared from there. I mean, 20/20 covered this --

AMY GOODMAN: Just one thing, Chris Ketcham, you say -- you quote the officer who arrested them, named DeCarlo. You say, according to DeCarlo's report, this officer was told without question by the driver of the moving van, Sivan Kurzberg, “We are Israeli. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem.”

CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM: Right. Well, what's interesting there is that, you recall after the first plane hit, no one really thought that this was a terrorist attack. I mean, most people thought -- and I was there, you know, on the Brooklyn waterfront watching this whole thing. Everyone thought it was an accident. These guys, when they were interrogated by FBI, told them that -- essentially said that they immediately knew it was a terrorist attack. And they actually told the FBI that the reason they were celebrating was because the attacks would be beneficial to Israel, that it was, quote, “a good thing for Israel” -- that's according to the FBI spokesman who spoke on the record about this -- and that it would bring sympathy for Israel's political agenda in the Middle East.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And if I could interrupt, I’d like to bring in Marc Perelman to the conversation. Marc, it was your newspaper, The Forward, that first broke the story that the FBI thought that at least a couple of these people were Mossad agents. Could you talk about that and how you uncovered that information?

MARC PERELMAN: Yes, we ended up writing a story in March of 2002, after several months of reporting, because when this incident happened, obviously, a lot of people were intrigued, including journalists. And so, everybody was trying to find more information about this. And I’ve been talking to sources and trying to find out a little bit more, and after a while, I was able to confirm that, according to the FBI, two of those movers were identified as Mossad agents. And they were interrogated about it.

Obviously, the circumstances around the interrogation, there was a lot of panic after 9/11. People were looking for suspects everywhere. So the reports about exactly how they were behaving and what they said -- I mean, we should be a little bit careful about this, because -- and so, what I tried to do is go beyond the reports about them smiling and high-fiving, and so on, because I had my doubts about this. I still have them, by the way. And so, what I did was try to back up the information I had, that they were indeed recognized as Mossad agents who were essentially tracking a Muslim activist in the New York/New Jersey area, which was known to be active since the mid-‘90s, and so we eventually were able to piece the story together and go with it.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And what eventually happened to the five men?

MARC PERELMAN: They were sent home to Israel in, I think, November, if I remember, allegedly for immigration violations, and they’re home.

AMY GOODMAN: We don’t have much time, and I wanted to get to another story, which was a story of the so-called “art students,” Christopher Ketcham. Very briefly outline this parallel story.

CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM: Well, basically, the phenomenon of the art students, for want of a better phrase, because it is truly a mystery, even to me -- I’m a complete agnostic about this part of the story -- these so-called art students were young Israeli men and women who were traveling the country. They were identified by the Drug Enforcement Agency as repeatedly attempting to penetrate government offices, including DEA offices, and to sell, to try to sell art, these cheap knockoff oil paintings, to government officials.

Now, after September 11th, when, in the wake of these sudden attacks, investigators began to go back and look at the nexus of art student activity with the nexuses of the activities of the future hijackers, of the 9/11 hijackers, and what they found was that the art students, in many cases, were living in very close proximity to the September 11 hijackers. Many of these art students were moving large amounts of cash, some of them were reportedly, according to Le Monde, carrying cell phones provided them by an Israeli vice consul in the US. Many of them were highly trained in electronic intercept and intelligence work that was far beyond the compulsory military training required by Israeli law. So these were part of the -- suspicions were aroused, and they remain.

AMY GOODMAN: Suspicions that they were tracking the hijackers?

MARC PERELMAN: That’s correct.

AMY GOODMAN: Let's go to Alexander Cockburn. You have published this piece. It is titled "Cheering Movers and Art Student Spies: What Did Israel Know in Advance of the 9/11 Attacks?" Who were the Israelis living next to Mohammed Atta? What was in the van on the New Jersey shore? How did two hijackers land on watch lists weeks before 9/11? Who shut down FOX News’s Carl Cameron? We just have two minutes, but talk about the way the media has covered this, why you chose to cover it, and that last story of FOX.

ALEXANDER COCKBURN: The main thing, Amy, is that basically the story, which Perelman and others did do good work on, has been systematically suppressed by the media for a very long time, starting with FOX News, which killed off Cameron, the ABC News, which dropped it. And, obviously, there are thousands of questions, which Ketcham goes into in great detail, which should be the subject of congressional hearings and investigations, such as, was the Mossad essentially being subcontracted by the CIA to work in the United States on spying, which would be illegal? How much did the Israelis really know? If it was a good thing for Israel, maybe they withheld the final news that the thing was going to land. That’s a speculation, of course, but it should be investigated and probed.

It’s absolutely extraordinary that Ketcham’s story, which has been worked on, which is a very long and complex story, could not find any market until Counterpunch, which is what we’re here for, could published it. Obviously, the main reason is the word “Israel.” People drop it like a hot potato. As soon as you hear people say it’s a good thing for Israel, the whole lobby came in and had those people whipped out of their jail and sent back to Israel. And since then, all questions regarding it had been systematically checked off. I think that’s the sort of, you know, journalistic patty-cake --

ALEXANDER COCKBURN: Alexander, this story that you've published first was going to go to salon.com, then The Nation?

ALEXANDER COCKBURN: That's what I understand from Christopher, yes. That's true.

AMY GOODMAN: Christopher Ketcham?

CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM: Yeah. The editors didn't feel that there was any news here.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And I’d like to ask Marc Perelman, were you surprised when the 9/11 Commission Report came out that there was no mention of -- at all in the reports of possible knowledge by Israeli agents in this country of the attacks or tracking of some of these suspects?

MARC PERELMAN: Yes and no. I mean, I was surprised, because, since there have been questions that are still being asked now, that at least the commission would address the issue, even to debunk it. That being said, my reporting was narrow, was about those movers and what were they doing. And the conclusion was that they were essentially spying on radical activists in the region, and that they had been let go, because the American authorities had determined that they did not have foreknowledge of the attacks, which is different than what the article says, because it implies that they were essentially shipped to Israel because of the Israel lobby, and because they knew, whereas what I have been able to find out is that they were sent home because they did something they were not supposed to do and without the knowledge of the American government, which is an issue, obviously, that should be discussed publicly.

AMY GOODMAN: That the Israelis were spying on US soil.

MARC PERELMAN: Right, without the approval of the US authorities. Sometimes friendly governments have agreements, where they can kind of like spy together. Apparently, this was a case where it was not happening.

AMY GOODMAN: Marc, we’re going to have to leave it there. Marc Perelman of The Forward, which is based in New York; Christopher Ketcham, freelance journalist, author of this latest piece that appears in Counterpunch; Alexander Cockburn, thanks also for joining us, editor of Counterpunch newletter.

The Manichean War

February 09, 2007

Atrios:

The people "running" this war were never capable of distinguishing between the vision of the war they were selling to the country for propaganda purposes and the reality of what was happening. Even if torturing people to get "intelligence" was something which actually worked, the premise that such "intelligence" would actually help to solve the situation was based on the fantasy vision of what that problem was. They really believed that there were some evil masterminds with evil lairs - first former Baathists and then various "foreign fighters" - and if only they could find them and kill them then the problems would go away. There was an "enemy" which could somehow be vanquished, and once we did that the ponies would arrive.

This was a cartoon version of the war they tried to sell to the American public, but it was also what was driving their truly barbaric behavior.

That's quite right. I'll link again to Mark Danner's wonderful piece on the many different wars folks in the Bush administration thought they were fighting, which I still think is the smartest analysis of Iraq yet written. It's also worth dipping into an essay my friend Chris Hayes authored on the role World War II nostalgia played in all this. It wasn't an accident that the right kept comparing Bush to Churchill and Bush keeps comparing himself to Truman.

On September 11, 2001, George W. Bush wrote the following impression in his diary: “The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today.” He wasn’t alone in this assessment. In the days after the attacks, editorialists, pundits and citizens reached with impressive unanimity for this single historical precedent. The Sept. 12 New York Times alone contained 13 articles mentioning Pearl Harbor.

Five years after 9/11 we are still living with the legacy of this hastily drawn analogy. Whatever the natural similarities between December 7, 1941, and September 11, 2001, the association of the two has led us to convert—first in rhetoric, later in fact—a battle against a small band of clever, murderous fundamentalists into a worldwide war of epic scale.

No leader wants to be a mediocrity, a technocrat, a manager. Even the CEO President wants to engineer a dramatic turnaround and series of takeovers, not leave a record of competent governance and incremental achievements. But Bush entered office at a moment that seemed capable of little more. No wars in the offing, no powerful enemies looming, a surplus in the budget, relatively high contentment and satisfaction among Americans. 9/11 was his chance for greatness, and he took it. But Afghanistan was too easy, too quick, too simple, too obscure. We roared to Kabul and then it was...what? Over? So the reprisal against al-Qaeda became a war against not only terror, but tyranny, and illiberalism. A war against evil. As more and more Americans recognize that deception, and as our own actions in Iraq -- which will leave the country a maelstrom of murder, chaos, and tribal enmity -- begin looking somewhat dark themselves, I wonder how great the psychological damage will be to America. Back to Chris:

It is a grand irony that Spielberg claimed repeatedly that his entire motivation behind making Saving Private Ryan was to deconstruct the simplified version of WWII that Americans had come to accept. “All wars,” he said in a typical interview, are “chambers of horrors.” And that’s certainly true of the film’s opening and of the gruesome descriptions in Ambrose’s books and Brokaw’s recounting. But what emerges from these works is a picture of war as a chamber of physical horrors—torn limbs, exposed viscera, muck, blood. Absent completely are the moral horrors of combat, the horror of taking a life, of feeling the killer within. There’s a good deal of evidence that suggests the most traumatic experience of war isn’t being the target of violence, but rather the agent. A 1994 study of post-traumatic stress in veterans of World War II, Korea and Vietnam found that “responsibility for killing another human being is the single most pervasive, traumatic experience of war.”

What America is going through isn't, I think, a revulsion at the physical horrors of war. Nor is it a precise analogue to the Vietnam Syndrome, wherein we question our own power. Our power is massive, our ability to salve ancient ethnic conflicts is less so, but that's a different issue. What no longer looks certain, though, is the righteousness of our cause, the morality of our mission. American exceptionalism is what's taking a beating, even among Americans. We're shocked at the moral transgression of this invasion, and the blithe ease with which the country accepted a tragic conflict which will leave, when all is said and done, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, dead. It is the ease with which we have taken those lives, and the realization that we were capable of doing so immorally and irrationally, that will be most unsettling to the American psyche.

February 9, 2007 | Permalink

Wolfowitz Warns of 'Surprise like Pearl Harbor' Months Before 9/11 Attacks

Aaron Dykes / Jones Report | February 9, 2007

Video posted recently on Live Leak shows now World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz delivering a June 2001 West Point commencement speech wherein he focused on surprise attacks-- making heavy reference to Pearl Harbor.

Wolfowitz illustrated, just months before the infamous 9/11 attacks, that Pearl Harbor is interesting in that it was "preceded by an astonishing number of unheeded warnings and missed signals."

This surfacing video only reinforces the pre-meditation established by the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). Wolfowitz helped to pen the think tank's September 2000 document 'Rebuilding America's Defenses' which stated on pg. 51, amidst a larger call for dramatic military build-up, that:

"Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor."

Pearl Harbor is mentioned again later in the document in arguing for not only accelerated military spending, but for updated, state-of-the-art equipment, vehicles and Navy vessels. "Absent a rigorous program of experimentation to investigate the nature of the revolution in military affairs as it applies to war at sea, the Navy might face a future Pearl Harbor – as unprepared for war in the post-carrier era as it was unprepared for war at the dawn of the carrier age." This veiled threat evokes memories of a long-line of iconic false-flag attacks on U.S. ships-- including the Maine and the Gulf of Tonkin-- which, like Pearl Harbor, also launched profitable wars. During his June 2001 speech, Wolfowitz commented on the role of such unanticipated events: "Military history is full of surprises, even if few are as dramatic or memorable as Pearl Harbor. Surprises happen so often, that is is surprising that we're still surprised by it." At least since his 1992 'Wolfowitz Doctrine' under George H.W. Bush, he has called for a sharp transformation of military capabilities into an unilateral and pre-emptive security arm for world conflicts-- solidifying U.S. primacy in the world order and ensuring control over mid-east oil. One year after the goal of military escalation was reaffirmed in the PNAC documents-- written largely by members of the Bush administration-- the 9/11 'surprise' attack happened and Wolfowitz saw his dream of military build-up come to fruition-- including massive increases in budget, far beyond even the $100 billion increase Wolfowitz called for a decade earlier. Remember, President Bush had the orders to launch war in Afghanistan on his desk two days prior to 9/11, but didn't sign them until after the attacks. Wolfowitz seemed to expect an unexpected war could be just around the corner during his June 2001 speech. He went into some detail about the tendency of governments to get into a "routine of obsession with familiar dangers"-- explaining why a multitude of threats and signals can be overlooked and fail to prevent surprise attacks like that on Pearl Harbor. He illustrates the rather ironic story of David Starr Jordan, who predicted-- just before the start of World War I-- that nations would not go to war in the future because banks would not find them to be profitable. Nearly a century later, Wolfowitz warns us that we should: "use hindsight to replace the poverty of expectations with anticipation of the unfamiliar and the unlikely." He reiterated those words in the closing remarks of his address to West Point graduates: "Be prepared to be surprised. Have courage." Now in the comfort of hindsight, it is chilling to realize that such an unexpected war was just beyond Wolfowitz's warning-- the unlikely 9/11 attack was just around the corner and indeed, there was a heavy atmosphere of unheeded warnings in the intelligence community leading up to the surprise attack. Fortunately for Wolfowitz, he was not embarrassing wrong as Jordan had been before World War I. He was, in fact, surprisingly dead on-- so much so, that one would swear he had prior knowledge. (Wolfowitz, like fellow PNAC member William Kristol, is seen as an heir apparent to Leo Strauss, who believes openly in deceiving the public-- that it is not only acceptable, but necessary. Paul Wolfowitz chose the University of Chicago over Harvard in order to study under Strauss, who held a professorship there.)

Gitmo Cover-up?

February 09, 2007 1:26 PM

Vic Walter and Krista Kjellman Report:

An investigation by the U.S. Southern Command into allegations of prisoner abuse at Guantanamo Bay detention center has concluded that "insufficient evidence exists to substantiate the paralegal's allegations."

But Lieutenant Colonel Colby Vokey, the superior officer to the Marine sergeant who filed the allegations, called the investigation "outrageous." "I am aware that the investigators interviewed only the suspects and some witnesses but did not interview any detainees or potential victims," he told ABC News. "Failure to interview those who may have been subjected to abuse is indicative of an incomplete investigation."

As first reported on "The Blotter" on ABCNews.com, Heather Cerveny (pictured), 23, a Marine Corps sergeant, who spent a week on the base last September working as a legal aide to Lt. Col. Vokey, said she was "shocked" to hear several guards from different parts of the base openly speak of mistreating prisoners.

THE BLOTTER RECOMMENDS

• Video World News: Beatings Are 'Common' at Gitmo
• Blotter White House Ceding Legal Ground in Detainee Battle?
• Click Here to Check Out the Latest Brian Ross Slideshows

One said, "I took the detainee by the head and smashed his head into the cell door," she told ABC News in October after filing a sworn affidavit with the Pentagon Inspector General. Another "was telling his buddy, 'Yeah, this one detainee, you know, really pissed me off, irritated me. So I just, you know, punched him in the face.'"

The following investigation by SouthCom, which oversees military activities in the Caribbean and Latin America, looked into Cerveny's account and another filed by a civilian employee on the base that recounted a conversation between a female guard and a male interrogator on a training range. After interviewing 20 suspects and witnesses and combing through "three JTF-Guantanamo records systems used to trace detainee-guard interaction," investigators determined, "The evidence did not support any of the allegations of mistreatment and harassment."

Click Here for Full Blotter Coverage.

Amongst the recommendations issued by the investigating officer but ultimately rejected by the SouthCom commander following the investigation was "that disciplinary or other action be taken against Sergeant Cerveny," which Lt. Col Vokey says is the most "outrageous part of the investigation."

"The interview of her [Sgt. Cerveny] was ridiculous and oppressive," he said. "The investigating officers, a colonel and a captain, walked straight into her office with the intent to accuse her of a crime before she even opened her mouth. The colonel already had the form in his hand to read her her rights and accuse her, before the interview started."

Lt. Col. Vokey says this investigation sets a dangerous precedent for all officers who find themselves in a position to report suspected criminal activity. "This was outrageous and sends a dangerous message to all our service members: you'd better not report anything that goes on at Guantanamo Bay, or you'll be threatened or charged with a crime."

Read the press release from United States Southern Command.

February 9, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (2)