This doesn’t surprise me, considering the influence the Israel Lobby has in our country. Our attachment to a country that is strategically of no help is sickening.
[quote]pushharder wrote:
[quote]GIA99 wrote:
This doesn’t surprise me, considering the influence the Israel Lobby has in our country. Our attachment to a country that is strategically of no help is sickening.[/quote]
Since you hereby win PWI’s Buffoon of the Day award let me emphasize that if Israel is anything, and I mean ANYTHING, to the US, it is that it’s a significant strategic help.[/quote]
Middle East
US up in arms over Sino-Israel ties
By Sudha Ramachandran
BANGALORE - Israel’s relationship with its closest ally, the United States, seems to have hit a rough patch, with Washington apparently upset with Israel’s clandestine dealings with China. The spat is not new, however. It has its roots in a decade-old issue. Old suspicions have returned. It is an explosion into the public domain of a row that has been going on for a few years.
The quarrel is over Israel’s alleged concealing from Washington of an upgrade of a major weapons system it sold to China more than a decade ago. The United States claims that by upgrading the system, Israel violated its commitment not to transfer US technology to China without Washington’s permission. Israel, however, insists that the upgrade was really just routine maintenance of a system that had originally been sold to China with US approval.
What appears to have propelled this simmering tension into the open is a clash of personalities. According to reports in the media, US Under Secretary of Defense Doug Feith believes that Israeli Defense Ministry director general Amos Yaron misled him on the arms sale to China. On Wednesday, Israeli media reported that Feith had demanded Yaron’s resignation (the Pentagon has subsequently denied this).
This clash of personalities is a minor matter and can be sorted out. That is not the case with the underlying issue of concern to the US - Sino-Israel military cooperation.
Israel is China’s second-largest arms supplier (the first being Russia). Although diplomatic relations between Israel and China were established only in 1992, military ties go back to the early 1980s. Until formal diplomatic ties were established, the military relationship was covert. Israel sold about US$4 billion worth of arms to China during the covert courtship. In the 1990s, the Sino-Israel military relationship grew rapidly. In fact, arms sales contributed to the strengthening of diplomatic engagement.
The military relationship hit a trough in 2000, however, when Israel came under pressure from the US to scrap a $250 million deal to sell China the Phalcon, an airborne radar system equipped with advanced Israeli-made aeronautics on board a Russian-made plane. Washington’s argument was that providing Beijing access to the technology would upset the military balance between China and Taiwan and threaten US interests in the region. When the US Congress threatened to cut the $2.8 billion it gives Israel annually if the deal went ahead, Israel buckled and scrapped it.
For years, the US government has expressed concerns over Israel illegally transferring technology to China. During the Gulf War, the US gave Israel Patriot missiles as protection against Iraqi Scud missiles. In 1992, a US intelligence report revealed that soon after the end of the Gulf War, Israel had sold Patriot anti-missile data to China. Israel denied the intelligence report.
Washington has also alleged on several occasions that Israel violated agreements by exporting restricted US technology it buys with yearly US subsidies. This was the case with the largely US-funded Lavi fighter-plane program. Israel, the Americans believe, passed on technology to Beijing. China’s F-10 fighter jet is believed to be almost identical to the Lavi.
Washington has also expressed concern from time to time that Israel’s arms trade with China could result in its military technology falling into the “wrong hands” - such as Iran’s, for instance. But this argument rings rather hollow considering that the US itself supplies Pakistan with high-tech weaponry, despite Pakistan’s “all-weather friendship” with China and Islamabad’s abysmal record on the issue of nuclear and missile proliferation and its supply of military technology and know-how to Washington’s foes.
Israel’s damaged reputation
Unlike previous occasions when suspicions were expressed more quietly, with the Phalcon deal the issue erupted into the open. The cancellation of the Phalcon deal damaged Israel’s image and interests to a considerable extent. It eroded Israel’s credibility as a weapons supplier in the international arms market and it laid bare to the world Israel’s susceptibility to US pressure.
The cancellation of the Phalcon deal not surprisingly led to a chill in Sino-Israel relations. Israel subsequently forked out $350 million in compensation to China, and there were no known arms sales through 2003. Back in 2002, a deal for Israeli communication satellites was signed. Early this year, an Israeli delegation went to China for talks on rebuilding military ties. Reports suggested that Israel and China were even considering reopening the Phalcon deal.
The military relationship is important for both countries. China is keen to have access to Israel’s high-quality defense products and services, and the relationship with Israel has enabled it to acquire “dual-use technology” that the US and Europe have been reluctant to provide.
Israel, which is among the world’s top exporters of arms, is keen on its military ties with China for several reasons. According to Gerald Steinberg, professor of political science at the Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv and consultant to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs and National Security Council, since Israel does not sell arms to the Arab countries or Iran, it has fewer potential markets than other major players in the high-tech arms market. (However, a look at Israel’s arms market over the past several decades indicates that the country has sold arms to regimes that other countries have been reluctant to trade with.)
Unlike most other arms manufacturers, Israel exports 75% of the total production of its military industries. Israel’s military industry is dependent on exports for its survival. And arms sales to China are among its most lucrative businesses. Therefore, arms trade with China is very important, providing contracts for jobs as well as income to offset the high costs of maintaining Israel’s technology and industrial base. Military trade has also paved the way for broader trade in other dual-use and high-tech goods. China’s immense value as a trade partner for Israel’s military industry is evident from Israel’s engagement with China and Taiwan. In the early 1990s, Israel passed up defense deals with Taiwan so as not to damage its fledging relationship with China.
Eugene Kogan, a defense-industry analyst, writes in the Jamestown Foundation’s China Brief that while Israel has rebuffed Taiwan’s repeated attempts to revive relations with it, “when it comes to contact with China, the Israeli Ministry of Defense (MOD) promotes a clear-cut policy. China is an extremely important trade partner for the Israeli defense industry. As a result, the MOD, which oversees the arms trade with China, has ensured that Israel maintains a positive relationship with the PRC [People’s Republic of China], while avoiding any contact with Taiwan which might disrupt this partnership.”
The Israel-China military relationship also contributed to China softening its anti-Israel stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict. China’s policy moved from its pro-Arab tilt to a more nuanced appreciation of the Israeli position. (Chinese criticism of Israel increased markedly after the cancellation of the Phalcon deal.)
What is interesting about China’s military relationship with Israel is that Beijing has been able to increase engagement with Israel without alienating the Arabs. Even Iran hasn’t protested Beijing’s close military ties to Israel.
Israel has much to lose by angering the Chinese. But it has more to lose by angering the US. The cost of not complying with Washington’s demands could result in a cutback on the nearly $2 billion in foreign military assistance that the US provides Israel annually. It could result in political and diplomatic costs, too, for Israel. It will have to do a fine balancing act if it wants to maintain its military ties with China without provoking Washington’s ire.
Sudha Ramachandran is an independent journalist/researcher based in Bangalore, India.
More on Israelâ??s Support for Apartheid
by Kevin Jon Heller
As the smear campaign against Richard Goldstone gets ever more desperate, it seems opportune to provide a bit more information about Israelâ??s support for apartheid, to which Goldstoneâ??s pales in comparison. Here is Sasha Polokow-Suransky again, this time responding to attacks on Goldstone by the Speaker of the Knesset and Israelâ??s Deputy Foreign Minister:
Goldstoneâ??s apartheid-era judicial rulings are undoubtedly a blot on his record, but his critics never mention the crucial part he played in shepherding South Africa through its democratic transition and warding off violent threats to a peaceful transfer of power â?? a role that led Nelson Mandela to embrace him and appoint him to the countryâ??s highest court.
More importantly, Ayalonâ??s and Rivlinâ??s moralism conveniently ignores Israelâ??s history of arming the apartheid regime from the mid-1970s until the early 1990s. By serving as South Africaâ??s primary and most reliable arms supplier during a period of violent internal repression and external aggression, Israelâ??s government did far more to aid the apartheid regime than Goldstone ever did.
The Israel-South Africa alliance began in earnest in April 1975 when then-Defense Minister Shimon Peres signed a secret security pact with his South African counterpart, P.W. Botha. Within months, the two countries were doing a brisk trade, closing arms deals totaling almost $200 million; Peres even offered to sell Pretoria nuclear-capable Jericho missiles. By 1979, South Africa had become the Israeli defense industryâ??s single largest customer, accounting for 35 percent of military exports and dwarfing other clients such as Argentina, Chile, Singapore, and Zaire.
High-level exchanges of military personnel soon followed. South Africans joined the Israeli chief of staff in March 1979 for the top-secret test of a new missile system. During Israelâ??s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the Israeli army took South African Defense Force chief Constand Viljoen and his colleagues to the front lines, and Viljoen routinely flew visiting Israeli military advisors and embassy attachés to the battlefield in Angola where his troops were battling Angolan and Cuban forces.
There was nuclear cooperation, too: South Africa provided Israel with yellowcake uranium while dozens of Israelis came to South Africa in 1984 with code names and cover stories to work on Pretoriaâ??s nuclear missile program at South Africaâ??s secret Overberg testing range. By this time, South Africaâ??s alternative sources for arms had largely dried up because the United States and European countries had begun abiding by the U.N. arms embargo; Israel unapologetically continued to violate it.
The blatant hypocrisy of the latest attack on Goldstone is nothing new. In November 1986, Benjamin Netanyahu, then Israelâ??s U.N. ambassador, gave a stirring speech to the General Assembly denouncing apartheid and insisting that â??Arab oil producers provide the umbilical cord that nourishes the apartheid regime.â?? (Never mind that Israel remained absent from the 1980 U.N. vote to impose an oil embargo on South Africa in deference to its friends in Pretoria.)
Netanyahu was right that Arab and Iranian oil was flowing through middlemen to the apartheid regime, but he categorically denied Israelâ??s extensive military and trade ties with South Africa, calling charges of lucrative arms sales â??flat nonsenseâ?? and accusing his critics of trying â??to defame Israel.â??
In fact, Israel was profiting handsomely from selling weapons to Pretoria at the time. Writing in the New York Times, Thomas Friedman estimated that the two countries did $400 million to $800 million of business in the arms sector in 1986. According to declassified South African documents, the figure was likely even greater: A single contract for modernization of South African fighter jets in the mid-1980s amounted to â??approximately $2 billion,â?? and arms sales in 1988 â?? one year after Israel imposed sanctions against the apartheid regime â?? exceeded $1.5 billion. As the former head of the South African Air Force Jan van Loggerenberg told me bluntly: â??Israel was probably our only avenue in the 1980s.â??
Declassified South African arms-procurement figures (which exclude lucrative cooperative ventures and shared financing arrangements) reveal the full extent of Netanyahuâ??s lie. The â??independent IMF figuresâ?? he cited (which excluded diamonds and arms) suggested trade was a minuscule $100 million annually. It was actually between five to 10 times that amount â?? depending on the year â?? making the apartheid regime Israelâ??s second- or third-largest trading partner after the United States. Not all of the weapons Israel sold were used in external wars, and there is no denying that Israeli arms helped prolong the rule of an immoral and racist regime.
Israeli Spying: The Mother of all Scandals
Once again, Israel has been caught with spies at the highest levels of the US Government.
At the heart of the investigation are two people who work at The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a powerful pro-Israel lobby in Washington. The FBI investigation, headed up by Dave Szady, has involved wiretaps, undercover surveillance and photography that CBS News was told document the passing of classified information from the mole, to the men at AIPAC, and on to the Israelis.
CBS sources say that last year the suspected spy, described as a trusted analyst at the Pentagon, turned over a presidential directive on U.S. policy toward Iran while it was, “in the draft phase when U.S. policy-makers were still debating the policy.” This put the Israelis, according to one source, “inside the decision-making loop” so they could “try to influence the outcome.” [CBS News]
Once again Israel denies wrongdoing, or faced with incontrovertible evidence (in this case one of the spies has reportedly cooperated with the FBI) dismisses the spying with the claim that such spying is harmless, because Israel and the United States are such good friends.
Well, let us take a closer look at that idea of â??harmless espionageâ?? by recalling Israelâ??s most famous failed spy, Jonathan Pollard.
Jonathan Pollard is an American of Jewish descent, born in Galveston Texas, who established a career as an intelligence analyst for the US Navy. There have been many theories offered as to why Pollard decided to betray his country of birth to the Jewish state, but that Pollard did betray his country of birth to Israel is beyond all doubt. Pollardâ??s defense was that he did not spy so much against the United States, only that he spied for Israel, sending them documents that in his opinion the US should have shared with Israel anyway.
That it was never Pollards job to decide what documents Israel should have was apparently irrelevant. Pollard arrogated that authority to himself. From his position of trust within the US Navy, Pollard delivered over 1000 classified documents to Israel for which he was well paid. Included in those documents were the names of over 150 US agents in the Mideast, who were eventually â??turnedâ?? into agents for Israel.
But by far the most egregious damage done by Pollard was to steal classified documents relating to the US Nuclear Deterrent relative to the USSR and send them to Israel. According to sources in the US State Department, Israel then turned around and traded those stolen nuclear secrets to the USSR in exchange for increased emigration quotas from the USSR to Israel. Other information that found its way from the US to Israel to the USSR resulted in the loss of American agents operating inside the USSR. Casper Weinberger, in his affidavit opposing a reduced sentence for Pollard, described the damage done to the United States thus, “[It is] difficult to conceive of a greater harm to national security than that caused by… Pollard’s treasonous behavior.”
This should end the suggestion that Israelâ??s spies are harmless. They are not. The United Statesâ?? nuclear deterrent cost an estimated five trillion taxpayer dollars during the 50s and 60s to build and maintain, and less than $100,000 for Pollard to undermine. Israel waited 13 years to admit Pollard had been spying for them, and now lobbies for his release, having granted him Israeli citizenship.
Pollard is hardly the only Israeli spy operating in the United States. He just had the misfortune to get caught. Here are just a few examples of the Israeli spy operations that have been detected.
- Information collected by the ADL in its spy operations on US citizens is used by the House Select Committee on Unamerican Activities. Subcommittee Chair Clare Hoffman dismisses the ADLâ??s reports on suspected communists as â??hearsay."
1950 John Davitt, former chief of the Justice Department’s internal security section notes that the Israeli intelligence service is the second most active in the United States after the Soviets.
1954 A hidden microphone planted by the Israelis is discovered in the Office of the US Ambassador in Tel Aviv.
1956 Telephone taps are found connected to two telephones in the residence of the US military attach� in Tel Aviv.
1954 “The Lavon Affair”. Israeli agents recruit Egyptian citizens of Jewish descent to bomb Western targets in Egypt, and plant evidence to frame Arabs, in an apparent attempt to upset US-Egyptian relations. Israeli defense minister Pinchas Lavon is eventually removed from office, though many think real responsibility lay with David Ben-Gurion.
1965 Israel apparently illegally obtains enriched uranium from NUMEC Corporation. (Washington Post, 6/5/86, Charles R. Babcock, “US an Intelligence Target of the Israelis, Officials Say.”)
1967 Israel attacks the USS Liberty, an intelligence gathering vessel flying a US flag, killing 34 crew members. See “Assault on the Liberty,” by James M. Ennes, Jr. (Random House). In 2004, Captain Ward Boston, Senior Legal Counsel for the Navyâ??s Court of Inquiry into the attack swears under oath that President Lyndon Johnson ordered the investigation to conclude accident, even though the evidence indicates the attack was deliberate. Given the use by Israel of unmarked boats and planes, and the machine-gunning of USS Libertyâ??s lifeboats, the most likely explanation is that USS Liberty was to be sunk with all hands, with evidence left to frame Egypt for the sinking. This would have dragged the US into the war on Israelâ??s side.
1970 While working for Senator Henry â??Scoopâ?? Jackson, Richard Perle is caught by the FBI giving classified information to Israel. Nothing is done.
1978, Stephen Bryen, then a Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer, is overheard in a DC hotel offering confidential documents to top Israeli military officials. Bryen obtains a lawyer, Nathan Lewin, and the case heads for the grand jury, but is mysteriously dropped. Bryen later goes to work for Richard Perle.
1979 Shin Beth [the Israeli internal security agency] tries to penetrate the US Consulate General in Jerusalem through a â??Honey Trapâ??, using a clerical employee who was having an affair with a Jerusalem girl.
1985 The New York Times reports the FBI is aware of at least a dozen incidents in which American officials transferred classified information to the Israelis, quoting [former Assistant Director of the F.B.I.] Mr. [Raymond] Wannal. The Justice Department does not prosecute.
1985 Richard Smyth, the owner of MILCO, is indicted on charges of smuggling nuclear timing devices to Israel (Washington Post, 10/31/86).
1987 April 24 Wall Street Journal headline: “Role of Israel in Iran-Contra Scandal Won’t be Explored in Detail by Panels”
1992 The Wall Street Journal reports that Israeli agents apparently tried to steal Recon Optical Inc’s top-secret airborne spy-camera system.
1992 Stephen Bryen, caught offering confidential documents to Israel in 1978, is serving on board of the pro-Israeli Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs while continuing as a paid consultant – with security clearance – on exports of sensitive US technology.
1992 “The Samson Option,” by Seymour M. Hersh reports, â??Illicitly obtained intelligence was flying so voluminously from LAKAM into Israeli intelligence that a special code name, JUMBO, was added to the security markings already on the documents. There were strict orders, Ari Ben-Menashe recalled: “Anything marked JUMBO was not supposed to be discussed with your American counterparts.”
- The ADL is caught operating a massive spying operation on critics of Israel, Arab-Americans, the San Francisco Labor Council, ILWU Local 10, Oakland Educational Association, NAACP, Irish Northern Aid, International Indian Treaty Council, the Asian Law Caucus and the San Francisco police. Data collected was sent to Israel and in some cases to South Africa. Pressure from Jewish organizations forces the city to drop the criminal case, but the ADL settles a civil lawsuit for an undisclosed sum of cash.
1995 The Defense Investigative Service circulates a memo warning US military contractors that “Israel aggressively collects [US] military and industrial technology.” The report stated that Israel obtains information using “ethnic targeting, financial aggrandizement, and identification and exploitation of individual frailties” of US citizens.
1996 A General Accounting Office report “Defense Industrial Security: Weaknesses in US Security Arrangements With Foreign-Owned Defense Contractors” found that according to intelligence sources “Country A” (identified by intelligence sources as Israel, Washington Times, 2/22/96) “conducts the most aggressive espionage operation against the United States of any US ally.” The Jerusalem Post (8/30/96) quoted the report, “Classified military information and sensitive military technologies are high-priority targets for the intelligence agencies of this country.” The report described “An espionage operation run by the intelligence organization responsible for collecting scientific and technologic information for [Israel] paid a US government employee to obtain US classified military intelligence documents.” The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (Shawn L. Twing, April 1996) noted that this was “a reference to the 1985 arrest of Jonathan Pollard, a civilian US naval intelligence analyst who provided Israel’s LAKAM [Office of Special Tasks] espionage agency an estimated 800,000 pages of classified US intelligence information.”
The GAO report also noted that “Several citizens of [Israel] were caught in the United States stealing sensitive technology used in manufacturing artillery gun tubes.”
1996 An Office of Naval Intelligence document, “Worldwide Challenges to Naval Strike Warfare” reported that “US technology has been acquired [by China] through Israel in the form of the Lavi fighter and possibly SAM [surface-to-air] missile technology.” Jane’s Defense Weekly (2/28/96) noted that “until now, the intelligence community has not openly confirmed the transfer of US technology [via Israel] to China.” The report noted that this “represents a dramatic step forward for Chinese military aviation.” (Flight International, 3/13/96)
1997 An Army mechanical engineer, David A. Tenenbaum, “inadvertently” gives classified military information on missile systems and armored vehicles to Israeli officials (New York Times, 2/20/97).
1997 The Washington Post reports US intelligence has intercepted a conversation in which two Israeli officials had discussed the possibility of getting a confidential letter that then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher had written to Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat. One of the Israelis, identified only as â??Dovâ??, had commented that they may get the letter from "Megaâ??, the code name for Israelâ??s top agent inside the United States.
1997 US ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk, complains privately to the Israeli government about heavy-handed surveillance by Israeli intelligence agents.
1997 Israeli agents place a tap on Monica Lewinskyâ??s phone at the Watergate and record phone sex sessions between her and President Bill Clinton. The Ken Starr report confirms that Clinton warned Lewinsky their conversations were being taped and ended the affair. At the same time, the FBIâ??s hunt for â??Megaâ?? is called off.
2001 It is discovered that US drug agentsâ?? communications have been penetrated. Suspicion falls on two companies, AMDOCS and Comverse Infosys, both owned by Israelis. AMDOCS generates billing data for most US phone companies and is able to provide detailed logs of who is talking to whom. Comverse Infosys builds the tapping equipment used by law enforcement to eavesdrop on all American telephone calls, but suspicion forms that Comverse, which gets half of its research and development budget from the Israeli government, has built a back door into the system that is being exploited by Israeli intelligence and that the information gleaned on US drug interdiction efforts is finding its way to drug smugglers. The investigation by the FBI leads to the exposure of the largest foreign spy ring ever uncovered inside the United States, operated by Israel. Half of the suspected spies have been arrested when 9-11 happens. On 9-11, 5 Israelis are arrested for dancing and cheering while the World Trade Towers collapse. Supposedly employed by Urban Moving Systems, the Israelis are caught with multiple passports and a lot of cash. Two of them are later revealed to be Mossad. As witness reports track the activity of the Israelis, it emerges that they were seen at Liberty Park at the time of the first impact, suggesting a foreknowledge of what was to come. The Israelis are interrogated, and then eventually sent back to Israel. The owner of the moving company used as a cover by the Mossad agents abandons his business and flees to Israel. The United States Government then classifies all of the evidence related to the Israeli agents and their connections to 9-11. All of this is reported to the public via a four part story on Fox News by Carl Cameron. Pressure from Jewish groups, primarily AIPAC, forces Fox News to remove the story from their website. Two hours prior to the 9-11 attacks, Odigo, an Israeli company with offices just a few blocks from the World Trade Towers, receives an advance warning via the internet. The manager of the New York Office provides the FBI with the IP address of the sender of the message, but the FBI does not follow up.
2001 The FBI is investigating 5 Israeli moving companies as possible fronts for Israeli intelligence.
2001 JDLâ??s Irv Rubin arrested for planning to bomb a US Congressman. He dies before he can be brought to trial.
2002 The DEA issues a report that Israeli spies, posing as art students, have been trying to penetrate US Government offices.
2002 police near the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station in southern Washington State stop a suspicious truck and detain two Israelis, one of whom is illegally in the United States. The two men were driving at high speed in a Ryder rental truck, which they claimed had been used to “deliver furniture.” The next day, police discovered traces of TNT and RDX military-grade plastic explosives inside the passenger cabin and on the steering wheel of the vehicle. The FBI then announces that the tests that showed explosives were â??false positivedâ?? by cigarette smoke, a claim test experts say is ridiculous. Based on an alibi provided by a woman, the case is closed and the Israelis are handed over to INS to be sent back to Israel. One week later, the woman who provided the alibi vanishes.
2003 The Police Chief of Cloudcroft stops a truck speeding through a school zone. The drivers turn out to be Israelis with expired passports. Claiming to be movers, the truck contains junk furniture and several boxes. The Israelis are handed over to immigration. The contents of the boxers are not revealed to the public.
2003 Israel deploys assassination squads into other countries, including the United States. The US Government does not protest.
2004 Police near the Nuclear Fuel Services plant in Tennessee stop a truck after a three mile chase, during which the driver throws a bottle containing a strange liquid from the cab. The drivers turn out to be Israelis using fake Ids. The FBI refuses to investigate and the Israelis are released.
2004 Two Israelis try to enter Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base, home to eight Trident submarines. The truck tests positive for explosives.
This brings us to the present scandal. Two years into an investigation of AIPACâ??s possible role as a spy front for Israel, Larry Franklin, a mid-level Pentagon Analyst is observed by the FBI giving classified information to two officials of AIPAC suspected of being Israeli spies. AIPAC hires lawyer Nathan Lewin to handle their legal defense, the same lawyer who defended suspected Israeli spy Stephen Bryen in 1978.
Larry Franklin worked in the Pentagon Office of Special Plans, run by Richard Perle, at the time Perle (who was caught giving classified information to Israel back in 1970) was insisting that Iraq was crawling with weapons of mass destruction requiring the United States to invade and conquer Iraq. There were no WMDs, of course, and Perle has dumped the blame for the â??bad intelligenceâ?? on George Tenet. But what is known is that the Pentagon Office of Special Plans was coordinating with a similar group in Israel, in Ariel Sharonâ??s office.
With two suspected Israeli spies (at least) inside the office from which the lies that launched the war in Iraq originated, it appears that the people of the United States are the victims of a deadly hoax, a hoax that started a war.
The leaking of the investigation of AIPAC to the media on August 28th, 2004 gave advance warning to other spies working with Franklin. The damage to the FBIâ??s investigation was completed when United States Attorney General John Ashcroft ordered the FBI to stop all arrests in the case. Like the Stephen Bryen case and the hunt for â??Megaâ??, this latest spy scandal seems destined to be buried by officials who have their own secret allegiances to protect, barring a massive public outcry.
The organization at the heart of the latest spy investigation, AIPAC, wields tremendous influence over the US Congress. Through its members and affiliated PACs, AIPAC directs a huge flow of campaign cash in favor of, and occasionally against, Senators and Representatives solely on the basis of their willingness to support Israel. As an example, in 2002, U.S. Rep. Artur Davis, D-Birmingham received so much help from pro-Israeli pacs that 76% of his campaign budget came from OUTSIDE the state of Alabama, mostly from New York.
Let me repeat that. A Congressman AIPAC wanted elected received more money from pro-Israel groups outside his state than from his own constituents inside his state. Who is that Congressman going to be thinking of when he votes in Congress?
So here is the mother of all scandals.
For two years, the FBI has suspected AIPAC of spying for a foreign country, and for those two years (and for decades before) that group suspected of spying for Israel has been reshaping the US Congress for the benefit of a foreign government.
And THAT is the mother of all scandals.
Think about that as billions of your tax dollars flow to Israel while your roads and schools crumble and decay and services are cut.
Think about that as the coffins come home with your loved ones inside.
Think about that when you and a million of your fellow citizens march down the streets of America opposing wars built on lies and deceptions and wonder why the government just doesnâ??t want to listen to you any more.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/motherofallscandals.php
[quote]GIA99 wrote:
Our attachment to a country that is strategically of no help is sickening.[/quote]
Bizarro world again? Okay, I’ll play. Yes, VEVAK is of more help to the US than Mossad. The Middle East is not a strategically important area and it has no significant oil and gas reserves. Additionally, the Suez Canal and the Persian Gulf are not vital waterways and even if they were the only people threatening them and US interests are the Israelis. Okay your turn.
here’s why:
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2011/11/israeli-officials-say-iaeas-elbaradei-an-iranian-agent.html
This would certainly explain a lot. “ElBaradei didn’t just mess us up, he messed up the entire sane world.” Indeed.
“Israeli officials: ElBaradei an Iranian agent,” by Itamar Eichner for Ynet News, November 9 (thanks to Pamela Geller):
Senior Israeli officials said Tuesday night that the International Atomic Energy Agency report stating that Iran has been working on developing a nuclear weapon design proves that the former UN nuclear watchdog chairman “was an Iranian agent”.
On Wednesday, ElBaradei rejected Israel’s accusations and called them “false.” His response was published on the website of the Egyptian daily al-Youm al-Saba’a.
The former IAEA chairman, Mohamed ElBaradei, is an Egyptian diplomat who even won the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize.
For years he defended the Iranian nuclear program, claiming that it was peaceful, thus allowing the Iranians to continue their activity with the nuclear watchdog’s seal of approval.
According to one of the state officials, the new report published Tuesday proves "just how much he was working for the Iranians.
"He simply rescued Iran and was constantly busy covering up for them, causing serious damage by allowing the Iranians to fool the entire world and play for time. History may judge him as the person who helped Iran obtain a nuclear weapon.
“The things exposed now are not new. These are old things which were hidden and not published,” the official added. “Now it turns out that ElBaradei led an active policy of concealment and disregard. This is very serious. He is a despicable person.”
“ElBaradei didn’t just mess us up, he messed up the entire sane world,” added Uzi Eilam, former head of Israel’s Atomic Energy Agency. “He was dishonest his entire term. He is the one who stopped the Security Council from imposing serious sanctions, providing the Iranians with precious time.”
[quote]joebassin wrote:
A jewish state were arabs are second class citizen which proceed to ethnic cleansing of Palestine. How come that does not qualify as religious extremism and terrorism. [/quote]
Because it’s completely f***ing imaginary.
[quote]method_man wrote:
Personally, I am rooting for the underdog Iranians against those racist Jewish pigs in Israel.[/quote]
Are you a Muslim? Or do you manage to be fully offensive without the help of the Koran??