Sibel Edmonds story breaks into Mainstream Media
We’ve been talking about these latest developments in the Sibel Edmonds case ever since the Times of London helped break her silence back on January 6th. (You can find our previous articles about the case from Jan 6th - here , Jan. 24th - here , and Jan. 28th - here.)
Now the story has finally gone mainstream with Sunday’s Dallas Morning News running an Op-Ed from Philip Garldi which you can see here
Since, Edmond’s revelations deliver hits to both Republicans and Democrats it is unlikely to see anyone clamoring for an inquiry unless public demand heats up.
Nonetheless, the greatest damage seems to strike at the Neo-Con cabal that has worked it’s duplicitous path throughout pretty much the entire Bush Administration.
For those interested, a guest contributor has summarised the reasons why he thinks the story is SOOOOO damaging.
Perhaps it’s a bit too tin-foil, but honestly, so many things begin to make sense when you factor in these motives and hdden aggendas that the effect is quite uncanny.
He enters the complex web with the actions of convicted spy Larry Franklin, who delivered secrets to the AIPAC. The case regarding their complicity is still pending, though the pressure to just drop it has been great.
Read on and leave a comment whether you think there’s any substance here….
The story of spies in the Pentagon will percolate, no doubt. I have no answers, but perhaps the questions themselves will help explain what is going on in the current administration, and the administration that is sure to come.
Was the release of Larry Franklin’s name at this time politically motivated? And was that to hurt the Bush presidency or to save it, as Laura Rozen muses, with a “controlled burn”?
Why would Larry need to give draft documents on policy anywhere in the Middle East to AIPAC, when all the big decisions are already coordinated between Israel and the U.S. at far higher levels?
Why is Larry the result of FBI investigational success instead of the names of the Pentagon senior operatives who shared classified information with Ahmad Chalabi regarding American success in reading coded Tehran communications, specifically now as neoconservatives rage for war in Iran? Or instead of the names of senior White House operatives who revealed and destroyed the U.S. security mission of Valerie Plame?
Are there any advantages gained in front-page stories on a “spy for Israel” who is not one of the usual suspects? You know, a person with no business dealings dependent upon American (and Israeli) decisions, a person without an openly pro-Israel ideology or someone who was never known as a passionate advocate of U.S. power to promote Israel’s security and economic viability? A career-constrained professional rather than fly-by-night political appointees who have written widely and acted most consistently to advance the interests of Israel in American policy towards the Middle East? Cui bono?
But key personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003.
The heads of NESA and OSP were Deputy Undersecretary William Luti and Abram Shulsky, respectively.
Other appointees who worked with them in both offices included Michael Rubin, a Middle East specialist previously with the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI); David Schenker, previously with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP); Michael Makovsky; an expert on neo-con icon Winston Churchill and the younger brother of David Makovsky, a senior WINEP fellow and former executive editor of pro-Likud ‘Jerusalem Post’; and Chris Lehman, the brother of the John Lehman, a prominent neo-conservative who served as secretary of the navy under Ronald Reagan, according to Kwiatkowski.
Along with Feith, all of the political appointees have in common a close identification with the views of the right-wing Likud Party in Israel.
Feith, whose law partner is a spokesman for the settlement movement in Israel, has long been a fierce opponent of the Oslo peace process, while WINEP has acted as the think tank for the most powerful pro-Israel lobby in Washington, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which generally follows a Likud line.
It was the uncovering of these spy rings that led the FBI to put Naor Gilon, the chief of political affairs at the Israeli embassy in Washington, under videotape surveillance. They were “floored” when Larry Franklin walked in and sat down and began offering Gilon a confidential document. Franklin was one of two Iran desk officers for the Near East and South Asia bureau at the Pentagon.
Franklin reported to Bill Luti, who in turn reported to Douglas Feith, the number three man at the Department of Defense. Feith is a long-time activist in the Jewish Institute of National Security Affairs, which mobilized throughout the 1990s to destroy the Oslo peace process and ensure continued Israeli land grabs in the West Bank. Karen Kwiatkowski reported that a phalanx of Israeli generals marched into Feith’s office before the Iraq war, without signing in as regulations required. Feith organized the “Office of Special Plans,” also staffed largely with JINSA and other rightwing Zionist activists, which cherry-picked intelligence so as to make a (false) case for the Iraq war.
Sale reports more on what exactly suspected Pentagon spy Lawrence Franklin was passing to the Israeli embassy concerning US plans for Iran:
Kwiatkowski, in Salon: ”From May 2002 until February 2003, I observed firsthand the formation of the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans and watched the latter stages of the neoconservative capture of the policy-intelligence nexus in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. This seizure of the reins of U.S. Middle East policy was directly visible to many of us working in the Near East South Asia policy office, and yet there seemed to be little any of us could do about it. I saw a narrow and deeply flawed policy favored by some executive appointees in the Pentagon used to manipulate and pressurize the traditional relationship between policymakers in the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies. I witnessed neoconservative agenda bearers within OSP usurp measured and carefully considered assessments, and through suppression and distortion of intelligence analysis promulgate what were in fact falsehoods to both Congress and the executive office of the president. While this commandeering of a narrow segment of both intelligence production and American foreign policy matched closely with the well-published desires of the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party, many of us in the Pentagon, conservatives and liberals alike, felt that this agenda, whatever its flaws or merits, had never been openly presented to the American people. Instead, the public story line was a fear-peddling and confusing set of messages, designed to take Congress and the country into a war of executive choice, a war based on false pretenses, and a war one year later Americans do not really understand. That is why I have gone public with my account. To begin with, I was introduced to Bill Luti, assistant secretary of defense for NESA. A tall, thin, nervously intelligent man, he welcomed me into the fold. I knew little about him. Because he was a recently retired naval captain and now high-level Bush appointee, the common assumption was that he had connections, if not capability. I would later find out that when Dick Cheney was secretary of defense over a decade earlier, Luti was his aide.”