Franklingate, AIPAC-Cheney

A Call to Arms

A top Middle East expert lays out in a new book a clear rationale for toppling Saddam Husseinﾒs dangerous regime. As the United States moves closer to a potential military conflict with Saddam Hussein, the debate in this country has revolved around a fundamental set of questions about the necessity of war: Why canﾒt Americaﾒs overwhelming military superiority simply deter Saddam from attacking us or his neighbors? Arenﾒt new U.N. inspectors enough to root out any remaining weapons of mass destruction? Wouldnﾒt covert support of a military coup or an Afghan-style opposition campaign be a less costly option than a full-scale invasion? Why strike now, if thereﾒs not yet an Iraqi nuclear capability?

A clear and well-reasoned response that will do much to answer these questions and elevate the current discourse on Iraq policy has now emerged. In his most recent book, The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq, Dr. Kenneth Pollackﾗa leading Middle East expert now at the Brookings Institutionﾗdelivers a compelling analysis. He concludes that a major military operation led by the United States is the right course for removing an enduring threat to U.S. and regional security.

His experience in the fields of intelligence and policy-making, gained as a CIA analyst and during two tours at the National Security Council during the Clinton administration, is evident throughout the 500-page book. It provides comprehensive detail about the events of the last decade that have brought us to the current situation, while laying out in a methodical and systematic fashion the rationale for the use of force.

Pollack begins by reviewing Husseinﾒs transgressions against neighboring states and his own people during the past 20-odd years, and outlining the evolution of U.S. containment policy toward Iraq as it evolved in the years following the 1991 Gulf war. Much of this ground has been covered elsewhere, but is presented here in a concise and readable manner that benefits from Pollackﾒs first-hand perspective.

The options of continued containment and deterrence, modified sanctions, renewed inspections, covert action and the ﾓAfghan approachﾔ are all considered in turn and shown to be lacking. Ultimately, Pollack concludes that pre-emptive invasion is the only means of resolving the issue as he rationally deduces that it is the ﾓleast badﾔ option. He stresses that an operation must be done rapidly to ensure minimum loss of life, and that America should lead the international effort to rebuild Iraq.

In sum, the book lays out an insightful and persuasive case for how and why we, together with our allies, must act against Iraqﾗbefore Saddam can strike us first.

ﾗCharles Perkins Perkins is AIPACﾒs Senior Military Analyst.

Near East Report

Jonathon Pollard AIPAC Page & Focus: 10 Ways the Pentagon Spy Case May Damage Israel Bradley Burston - Haaretz

Focus: 10 Ways the Pentagon Spy Case May Damage Israel Bradley Burston - Haaretz - September 8, 2004 The dread felt by Israeli and American Jewish officials was as rooted as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as fresh as the headline that they feared could break any minute. Could Israel have used its client American Israel Public Affairs Committee lobbying group as a conduit to receive classified information from a Pentagon analyst or the National Security Agency?

Such was the implication of a flurry of media reports which emerged last month.

Stated differently, could an Israeli agency have been so unwise as to have, in a single stroke, risked blunting the efficacy of AIPAC, casting American Jews in the shadow of accusations of dual loyalty and undue influence on U.S. policymaking, and endangering the Jewish state's only indispensable alliance, its lifeblood tie to Washington.

Israel says no. AIPAC says the same.

And although from the start the reports have offered much smoke and little actual fire, the case surrounding Pentagon analyst Lawrence Franklin presented Israel and AIPAC with the diplomatic equivalent of an unexploded cluster bomb.

Even as the case recedes from the headlines, it could do significant harm to Israel in a large number of ways, whether the allegations are true or not.

Conspiracy Theory and anti-Semitism "Even if the present affair pales, shrinks and fades away, it can supply fuel to the conspiracy theory, one that is widespread in certain sectors of the American media," said political scientist Avi Ben-Zvi, citing maverick Republican rightist Pat Buchanan and other strident right and left-wing critics of Israeli influence on American policymaking.

According to the theory, Ben-Zvi said, Jews in key positions in the administration, among them suspect analyst Franklin's neo-conservative - and Jewish - superiors, Deputy Defense Minister Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, a senior aide to Donald Rumsfeld on Iran and Iraq policy, represent "an enthusiastically pro-Israeli group diverting American policy to a direction which serves non-American goals - manipulating and directing policy."

"It sounds almost like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion," Ben-Zvi said.

The post-Saddam quagmire in Iraq has only intensified the sensitivity of the issue, as some leftists have argued that only Israel has benefited from a war which a "cabal" of Jewish neo-conservatives drove into being.

Closing off sources of shared intelligence Well-placed former members of the Israeli intelligence community have said that there are as many as thousands of contacts a year between American and Israeli figures, colleagues in a number of fields, in which non-classified but potentially valuable information is exchanged.

In the wake of the Franklin case, American officials, it is feared, will now shy away from contacts with Israelis, long a key source of information-sharing.

Moreover, the allegations tying Franklin, AIPAC, and Israel come at a time of strained relations between the Central Intelligence Agency and the Mossad, a tension that may have scaled down CIA cooperation with Israel of late.

The sharing of information is vital to both sides, as the United States has long received from Israel clues gleaned from the Middle East, while the Jewish state has relied on American sources for early warnings of potential attacks on Israel or Israeli or Jewish-linked interests abroad.

Undermining AIPAC Of all the weapons in Israel's policy arsenal, few have been more consistently potent and reliable than the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

"Apart from our direct military strength, our relations with the United States, in which AIPAC plays a very strong part, are our second-ranking strategic asset," said former Israeli ambassador to Washington Itamar Rabinovich.

It has been suggested that a key source of AIPAC's strength is its widespread image of unparalleled clout in affecting foreign policy regarding Israel, an image that the affair could sap.

In fact, AIPAC's very success in lobbying for Israel's interests has also rendered the group, which boasts 65,000 members in all 50 states, vulnerable to charges of undue influence in Washington decision making.

Late last month, FBI agents probing the Franklin case are said to have questioned two senior AIPAC officials, its foreign policy affairs director and its specialist on Iran, the Gulf area and oil-related issues.

Compromising efforts to curb Iran According to press reports, Franklin, a lead Iran hand in the Pentagon's policy planning office, is alleged to have given two AIPAC officials a draft of a presidential order on U.S.-Iran policy, a draft which then allegedly reached an Israeli diplomat.

The accounts said that FBI agents , using wiretaps and other surveillance methods, were monitoring a meeting between AIPAC officials and Naor Gilon, chief of political affairs at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, when Franklin unexpectedly appeared and joined the group.

Unnamed U.S. officials were quoted as saying that the alleged document contained a range of proposals aimed at destabilizing the regime in Tehran.

Now, in the wake of shadowy reports on Franklin - a key Pentagon advocate of regime change in Tehran - there is a sense that the case could swing Washington's post-election policy balance, in favor of those officials who argue for a softer approach toward Iran.

"Coming after Iraq, this could take away momentum for a regime-change policy in a second Bush term," Middle East affairs expert Kenneth Katzman told the Forward newspaper last week.

The affair could also blunt a longtime Israeli campaign to persuade Washington to marshal its clout to counter Iran's widely suspected efforts to build nuclear weapons.

Estranging American Jewry A major figure in the U.S. Jewish community responded last month with an explicit sense of relief on hearing that analyst Franklin was not Jewish.

Nonetheless, the affair has already stirred implied questions of dual loyalty and divided allegiance among American Jews, until recently a long-buried staple of native U.S. anti-Semitism.

The implied allegations of dual loyalty could have an effect on how American Jews themselves make career choices, persuading them to steer clear of government work for fear of falling prey to suspicions.

"Even if the story evaporates away, its unpleasant 'deposits' will not," Rabinovich argued. "Every affair of this type which fosters the murky atmosphere [of suspicions of divided allegiance] makes more people ask themselves if they really want to hire a Jewish analyst or other professional."

Souring ties with Washington George W. Bush has often been expansive on matters related to Israel, lauding Ariel Sharon as a man of peace, inviting the prime minister to the White House again and again.

But the administration's silence over the FBI probe - reports of which threatened for a time to shadow what turned out to be a Bush victory lap at the Republican Convention - registered loud and clear in Israel, which fervently hopes that the alleged spying affair will not render administration officials reluctant to appear overly pro-Israel.

"The most important connection is that of the war in Iraq, in which Israel is viewed as having dragged the United States into the war," Rabinovich said.

"At the same time, there are figures in the American intelligence community, or on its margins, who for years have disliked the intimacy of the ties, and disliked the fact that Israel both receives U.S. aid to develop weapons systems and sells weapons systems, which may compete with American systems."

Restirring the Pollard affair In a nadir of U.S.-Israel relations. Jonathan Pollard, a naval analyst, passed highly classified American material to Israeli intelligence agents until he was seized in the mid-80s.

"Although all of the information currently available shows that this isn't a new Pollard affair, in certain respects 'the Franklin affair' could prove more dangerous for the organized Jewish community," Haaretz Washington correspondent Nathan Guttman said.

"When the case of Jonathan Pollard erupted 19 years ago, it was easier for Jews to distance themselves from him and to claim that the man was a lone operative, not someone who could tarnish the entire community with the 'dual loyalty' brush.

"Now the situation is more problematic, not because of Larry Franklin, but because of AIPAC's role."

A Congressional investigation A top ranking Republican member of the House of Representatives, Majority Whip Roy Blunt of Missouri, has indicated that Congress could at some point launch its own probe into the Franklin affair.

At the same time, congressional sources have said that no inquiry is likely unless the FBI turns up substantive evidence of wrongdoing.

A pattern of allegations A new challenge facing Israeli officials is the difficulty of responding to news reports which are long on accusations but short on substance. A recent Los Angeles Times report stated:

"There is a huge, aggressive, ongoing set of Israeli activities directed against the United States," said a former intelligence official who was familiar with the latest FBI probe and who recently left government.

"Anybody who worked in counterintelligence in a professional capacity will tell you the Israelis are among the most aggressive and active countries targeting the United States."

An anti-neocon backlash Some U.S. Jewish leaders have suggested that the Franklin affair was part of an wider campaign by CIA and State Department officials to sandbag, discredit, and ultimately dethrone the neo-conservatives in positions of influence.

Some believe that the neocon influence has given the Sharon government unprecedented access and understanding in the administration, a status they fear could be blunted by a backlash against neocon thought.

by leveymg on Fri Oct 21, 2005 at 07:30:46 AM PDT

It's possible that Larry Franklin was Judy's source. We've been told that at in 2002 he walked into a lunch between AIPAC and their Israeli embassy contacts that was being monitored by the FBI, which promptly "turned" Larry into a cooperating witness. Franklin continued to work at Feith's and Wurmser's Office of Special Plans (OSP) at the Pentagon until it was shut down, and he was indicted last summer. For months, the Bureau monitored Frankin and his conversations and meetings as he moved within the OSP and neocon network trading documents alleging Iraq and Iran WMDs back and forth with the Israelis.

If this first scenario holds true, that would likely mean the FBI was also monitoring Miller, as she spread the poison pill around the White House.

Another possibility is just as intriguing as the first. Consider this: Judy was an internal cut-out within WHIG for information about Plame that was originally provide by Miler's source at the Israeli Embassy. Let's see, the date that Gilon talked to Franklin abot the unnamed woman with an interest in philanthropy and the WMD program of a Mideast country . That was on June 3, 2003, twenty days before Judy Miller's first recorded meeting with Scooter.

Miller claims the name "Valerie Flame" written in her reporter's notebook was from another source, which she says she did not disclose to Fitzgerald, pursuant to the agreement her lawyer made with the prosecutor to keep Miller's post-release testimony to the substance of her discussions with Libby.

It all fits nicely. Maybe too nicely. This is why. It appears that the whole Plame outing conspiracy was structured to avoid prosecution under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982. (IIPA). If Judy can plausibly claim that she learned Plame's identity from Gilon -- a Mossad officer -- rather than from Scooter, that would let Libby off the hook as far as an IIPA conviction is concerned, along with anyone else at the White House she also passed identifying information about Plame to.

That particular law requires the prosecutor prove five things: 1)that the official who leaked the identity had a security clearance and 2) access to a classified document, 3) he intentionally leaked it to 4) a person without a security clearance, and 5) the US gov't was taking active measures to ptotect the covert identity of the agent who was outed.

If Gilon, an agent of a foreign government, was Miller's source for Plame's identity rather than Libby (or another US Gov't official, such as Bolton) the conspirators may have thought they had created a firewall between themselves and violation of the IIPA.

But, here's where this strategy would fail and potentially create enormous leverage for the prosecutor. If Fitzgerald had evidence that Gilon conspired to inform Miller about Plame's identity, that's Espionage and conspiracy. A violation of the section of the Espionage Act dealing with revealing classified documents to foreign powers is a potential capital offense. That's some pretty scary leverage.

I think it's entirely possible that a very powerful agency of the US Government prevailed on the Israelis to convince Gilon to talk to Fitzgerald. If Judy were linked to espionage, she would sing her head off before the Grand Jury about what she knew about Scooter and the others she talked to. And, that's exactly what I believe she has done.

If Miller was the unidentified woman referenced in the the Larry Franklin OSP-AIPAC spy case indictment, she is the key to linking the Bush White House to a foreign espionage ring that illegally funneled forged documents to the Vice President's Office in a plot to involve the US in a war with disasterous results. That is treason. It is potentially fatal to any and all involved, particularly to those officials at the top of the conspiracy.

Either way, WOW.

by leveymg on Fri Oct 21, 2005 at 07:30:46 AM PDT