December 30th, 2003

Former U.N. Iraqi Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter discusses how he was personally involved in the MI6’s "Operation Mass Appeal" in the late 1990s to "shake up public opinion" by passing dubious intelligence on Iraq to the media. [includes transcript]
President George W Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blairs’ justification for the invasion of Iraq has run up against what appears to be unintended scrutiny from an unlikely source—Paul Bremer, head of the occupation forces in Baghdad.
In an interview with London’s ITV-1, Bremer dismissed Blair’s allegation that British and American weapons hunters had unearthed "massive evidence of a huge system of clandestine laboratories" in Iraq. The supposed danger from Saddam Hussein's alleged WMD was central to the case for war in Iraq, but despite months of work, the Iraq Survey Group, headed by David Kay, has all but given up hope of finding them. Blair has remained undaunted, insisting that the evidence would eventually turn up, and told British troops in his Christmas message that the information on laboratories showed Saddam had attempted to "conceal weapons".
But when the claim was put to Bremer, he said it was not true. Unaware that it had been made by Mr Blair, the American proconsul said it sounded like a "red herring" put about by someone opposed to military action to undermine the coalition. He said "I don't know where those words come from, but that is not what David Kay has said. I have read his report, so I don't know who said that ... It sounds like someone who doesn't agree with the policy sets up a red herring, then knocks it down."
But when the interviewer told Bremer the statement was actually made by Tony Blair, he changed his tune, saying "There is actually a lot of evidence that had been made public,", adding that the group had found "clear evidence of biological and chemical programs ongoing ... and clear evidence of violation of UN Security Council resolutions relating to rockets".
This comes amid allegations from a former chief UN weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, that MI6—the British intelligence agency—ran a campaign designed to exaggerate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
Ritter told reporters in the British House of Commons that he was involved personally with Operation Mass Appeal between the summer of 1997 until August 1998 when he resigned from the UN. Ritter said the MI6 operation was designed to "shake up public opinion" by passing dubious intelligence on Iraq to the media. A spokesman for MI6 said the allegations were "unfounded".
Scott Ritter, former U.N. weapons inspector
TRANSCRIPT
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AMY GOODMAN: Scott Ritter joins us now, the former UN weapons inspector.
SCOTT RITTER: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.
AMY GOODMAN: First of all, can you talk about what you were doing with the British spy agency?
SCOTT RITTER: First of all, let's clarify a couple of things. It's not an allegation. The British Government did say it was unfounded when I first came forward with the specifics of Operation Mass Appeal, but according to the Sunday Times this past weekend, the British Government has now changed its tune and acknowledged that indeed there was Operation Mass Appeal, and that it was an MI-6 operation, and that it was designed to help shape public opinion. So, you know, let's just understand from the start that what we're talking about is not a mere allegation. It's a statement of fact.
Why was I involved with the British intelligence service? Look, I ran intelligence operations for the United Nations in regards to the disarmament of Iraq. That was my job. Part of this job in 1997 and 1998 took on a propaganda aspect, given the fact that we had launched a series of controversial and confrontational inspections in Iraq, which although successful from a disarmament standpoint in exposing aspects of the Iraqi account which were not accurate, were causing problems for the United Nations in the Security Council. The Security Council as a whole was not backing these tactics that we were using. They were becoming more and more sympathetic to the Iraqi angle, which was that the inspectors were simply coming into Iraq and deliberately causing trouble, were serving the purposes of the unilateral objectives -- policy objectives of the United States and Great Britain to target Saddam Hussein, not to target weapons of mass destruction, et cetera.
We made a decision. We, being Richard Butler, the Executive Chairman who ran UNSCOM, and his senior staff members, of which I was one, that we needed to clean up our public image, and we did a number of things. For instance, in the fall and winter of 1997, we worked with CNN to put together a very high profile one-hour special on CNN about the weapons inspectors, about the Iraqi concealment program, et cetera. This is something that caused the Iraqis and their Security Council allies great consternation. They condemned UNSCOM for getting involved in this kind of media game. Of course, it was the same media game the Iraqis were playing, in taking journalists on guided tours of areas in Iraq that weapons inspectors were trying to gain access to, saying these are nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction.
I was approached by the British intelligence service, which I had, again, a long relationship with, of an official nature, to see if there was any information in the archives of UNSCOM that could be handed to the British, so that they could in turn work it over, determine its veracity, and then seek to plant it in media outlets around the world, in an effort to try to shape the public opinion of those countries, and then indirectly, through, for instance, a report showing up in the Polish press, shape public opinion in Great Britain and the United States.
I went to Richard Butler with the request from the British. He said that he supported this, and we initiated a cooperation that was very short-lived. The British came to me, not in the summer of 1997, but December 1997. The first reports were passed to the British sometime in February of 1998. There was a detailed planning meeting in June of 1998, and I resigned in August of 1998. So it wasn't as though UNSCOM's participation in this was significant. This is an operation – Operation Mass Appeal, that had been going on prior to UNSCOM being asked to be the source of particular data, and it's an operation that continued after my resignation.
AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Scott Ritter, who is a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq, who says that in 1997, 1998, he worked with the MI-6, with Operation Mass Appeal. A spokesperson speaking on behalf of the British spy agency told BBC News Online: “The allegation that Ritter was using MI-6 material is unfounded.” Your response to that?
SCOTT RITTER: Well, it's absurd in the extreme. The allegation that I was using MI-6 material. First of all: what allegation that I was using MI-6? In regards to Mass Appeal, the statement of fact that I put forward is that UNSCOM provided data to MI-6, which then MI-6 used in the press. That's no longer unfounded. The British Government has acknowledged this. They have acknowledged the existence of Operation Mass Appeal and its role in, you know, serving as a conduit of propaganda information to the media.
So, I believe that what we're talking about here is that the British Government needs to be careful here, because, remember, there was an inquiry by Lord Hutton into the death of David Kelly, the former British scientist, who tragically took his own life after he was exposed by the British Government as a source of information to the BBC. During this inquiry, MI-6 was called to testify, and MI-6 stated on record that it played no role in shaping public opinion, that all it did was provide, you know, intelligence assessment to the British Government, and that was all its job was: collecting intelligence data and then providing assessments on this data and giving it to the British Government. Now, you know, after being summoned to testify under oath for an official committee, the British Government has to acknowledge that: “No, wait a minute, there was an intelligence operation run by MI-6, which did involve, you know, passing intelligence to media outlets for propaganda purposes.” The revelation of Mass Appeal has totally contradicted, you know, sworn testimony of British intelligence services, and this should cause great consternation not only for Lord Hutton and his inquiry, which it appears now they were misled or lied to, but also the British Parliament, which needs to take a closer look, in my opinion, at how public opinion was shaped by the British Government in regards to, you know, alleged threats coming from Iraq in the form of weapons of mass destruction. Let's keep this all in focus, by noting that Tony Blair said that there were massive stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. His government published a dossier which backed up these unfounded allegations.
Now, we are almost ten months into an occupation of Iraq, and no such weaponry has been found. That should be everyone's focus. Where are the weapons? Why did the British Government say these weapons existed before the war, and if the British Government didn't have the data necessary to sustain these allegations, were they lying when they made their assessments or were they simply manipulating the public? This is something that should be looked into. The existence of operations like Mass Appeal run by British intelligence services designed to manipulate public opinion should be examined in great detail.
AMY GOODMAN: Scott Ritter, why didn't you say this before the invasion?
SCOTT RITTER: Well, before the invasion, I have said many things. I have gone on record saying that the British Government has manipulated data. I have gone on record challenging the assessments of the British Government and the United States Government. I have said straight up that they don't have this data to back up these allegations. I have said straight up they are misinforming the public, misrepresenting data. I have said straight up that their intelligence services cannot back up the claims being made. What I didn't say, was Operation Mass Appeal. Should I have said that before? Look, Amy -- I’m sitting on a wealth of data. You could interview me for a year, and I would come up with something new and dramatic every time you talked to me. Why didn't I pick that particular piece of data? Which piece of data do you want me to pick out of my seven-year experiences of weapons inspector which was very detailed and involved, multifaceted operations around world?
I did mention Mass Appeal to journalists in the spring of 2003, the summer of 2003. And some journalists chose not to do anything with it. Other journalists like Seymour Hersh ran major articles. Seymour Hersh ran an article in the New Yorker, although he didn't mention Operation Mass Appeal by name, he did talk about MI-6's information operations division and how they passed information to the media. He talked about the similar operation undertaken by the CIA, but nobody seemed to take notice. So, when I’m at the House of Commons in November of this year, in a meeting with British parliamentarians, and it becomes clear that the British parliamentarians are willing to rest on the laurels of the Hutton report that they were comfortable with the statements made by MI-6 and British intelligence, about their role with the media, I said, “Oh, look, it's time you guys big a little bit deeper. I’m going to give you some assistance, by putting -- by sharing this data with you.” And I gave them the name of the operation, I gave them the name of the intelligence service, and I gave them the name of the people involved. I gave the name people involved off the record because they are serving intelligence officers, and the publication of their names would represent a threat to them and their families. So, hopefully no one is ever going to mention those names, but by providing those names to specific sources, they were able to pin down as the Sunday Times did this past weekend, the British Government caught them in a lie and compelled them to acknowledge Mass Appeal.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you give specific examples of disinformation that you gave to the MI-6?
SCOTT RITTER: First of all, I didn't give disinformation to MI-6. I provided, as I clearly stated, intelligence data that was unverifiable. I provided intelligence data that was unactionable. UNSCOM had a number of files of data pertaining to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program that lacked the specificity necessary for to us take action. So, these files were sitting in our cabinet doing nothing, gathering dust. What the British wanted were these files to be transferred to them, so that they could then work these files over using their own information, seeing if they could determine the veracity of this information, and then make an effort, if the information was accurate, and this is according to the agreement that we had, if this information was accurate, they would then seek to plant it in the media abroad. So, it wasn't a disinformation campaign that I was involved in. It was a propaganda campaign, one that we felt was politically necessary, given the political events of 1997, 1998.
AMY GOODMAN: What specifically was planted?
SCOTT RITTER: Again, and this is what I have told the British, and I'll say it right now. What needs to happen, isn’t for Scott Ritter to pull out one or two examples and give it you to or anyone else. What needs to happen, happened. The British Government acknowledged now that their intelligence service, their secret intelligence service, was involved, contrary to the public statements of the MI-6 Chief to Lord Hutton's inquiry involved in a propaganda campaign designed to shape public opinion. So what needs to happen is, rather than me continuing to snipe from the edge, now that the government has acknowledged this, there must be an inquiry in which MI-6 is required to put all of its files. Don't ask me what MI-6 was doing. Ask MI-6. Demand that the files be put before the British Parliament. Demand that the people understand the totality of this propaganda campaign. Was this propaganda campaign disinformation? Did the British intelligence service deliberately plant data which they knew was unsustainable, unverifiable - data which they couldn't back up with anything else? This is the key of the question. Not to come back to the man who's trying to do his best to expose the truth by saying, “Give us specific examples.” I can do that, and I have told the British Parliament, that if you want to have an inquiry and call me before you, I will testify under oath about this; but right now, the pressure should be put on the British Government to provide the data, not on other individuals.
AMY GOODMAN: Looking at the Sunday Times of London, it says that Mr. Ritter said he obtained approval to cooperate with Richard Butler, then Executive Chair of the UN Special Commission on Iraq Disarmament. Mr. Butler, now Governor of Tasmania, said yesterday he had no recollection of this. He said he would not have approved any operations falling outside of his disarmament mandate. “We have a choice with respect to Scott Ritter,” Butler said. “Either he was misleading me when he worked for me, or he has chosen to mislead the public subsequently. He goes on to say, “He robustly advised me that Iraq retained unaccounted-for WMDs. I think his advice, then, was correct.” Your response.
SCOTT RITTER: Well, Amy. If you compare my public statements with Richard Butler’s public statements in regards to Iraq weapons of mass destruction programs, I think I have a very good track record. In fact, it's been 100% in terms of being accurate. I don't make anything up. Every time I say something, it's a statement of fact, and you can go to the bank with it. Richard Butler, on the other hand, has been publicly contradicted on any number of occasions about his assessments and about his statements. This is a man who testified before the United States Congress and told them that these weapons existed, that he knew they existed. I called him on this, on television on CNN. I called him a liar in front of everybody. I said, “You're lying. You cannot make that statement of certainty.” I never once told him that Iraq retained unaccounted-for weaponry. I told him, it's a matter of record in the United Nations, that we cannot account for all of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs and related weaponry. Therefore, we must investigate them as if Iraq was retaining them, that we cannot treat this as a light subject. Our job is complete disarmament. If we have unaccounted for material, we must pursue it and pursue it aggressively. This was my advice to Richard Butler.
In December of 1997, I approached Richard Butler about this issue of Mass Appeal. The British Government through their station chief, the MI-6 station chief in New York, had requested that we do not put this in writing. So I went to Richard Butler and sought verbal permission. Richard Butler gave me this verbal permission. Richard Butler knows that this meeting took place in December of 1998. Richard Butler knows that there are minutes of meetings that we attended together in London in May -- excuse me, the first meeting took place in December of 1997, in May of 1998, we attended formal meetings in London in which this issue was raised by the British Government in front of Richard Butler and myself, and Richard Butler again concurred with UNSCOM's participation.
So, you know, I cannot say that Richard Butler is lying. He says he has no recollection of this. Maybe what I just told you, once he hears it or reads of it, will get his brain to dig deeper, and suddenly he will recall this, in fact, is accurate. I have been very accurate about everything I have said in regards to weapons of mass destruction. I stand by everything that I have ever said. And, you know, I think it's Richard Butler that is the one that the media should start looking at askance whenever he opens his mouth about his investment in the disarmament effort. Because clearly, he is part of the problem. He is somebody who, you know, didn't run a very effective ship when he was the Executive Chairman. He is somebody who stated with absolute certainty that these weapons existed. I have never said that. I said we had a job to do, a disarmament task to do, and we needed to finish that job. We needed to account for all of their weaponry. He took it a step further saying that Iraq retained this, and he had evidence of this retention. His statements clearly were cherry-picked by British and American political authorities to help sustain their own allegations of the existence of a massive stockpile of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. That helped shape congressional opinion and public opinion here in the United States, and parliamentary opinion and public opinion in Great Britain to support a war that we now know was fought under false premises.
AMY GOODMAN: Scott Ritter, I want to thank you for joining us. Scott Ritter, former weapons inspector in Iraq. Thank you.
SCOTT RITTER: Thank you.

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/12/30/1441259&mode=thread&tid=25

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The Iran-Contra AffairAccording to the Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair issued in November 1987, the sale of U.S. arms to Iran through Israel began in the summer of 1985, after receiving the approval of President Reagan. The report shows that Israel's involvement was stimulated by separate overtures in 1985 from Iranian arms merchant Manucher Ghorbanifar and National Security Council (NSC) consultant Michael Ledeen, the latter working for National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane. When Ledeen asked Prime Minister Shimon Peres for assistance, the Israeli leader agreed to sell weapons to Iran at America's behest, providing the sale had high-level U.S. approval.

Before the Israelis would participate, says the report, they demanded "a clear, express and binding consent by the U.S. Government." McFarlane told the Congressional committee he first received President Reagan's approval in July 1985. In August, Reagan again orally authorized the first sale of weapons to Iran, over the objections of Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and Secretary of State George Shultz. Because of that deal, Rev. Benjamin Weir, held captive in Lebanon for 16 months, was released.When a shipment of HAWK missiles was proposed in November of that year, Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin again demanded specific U.S. approval. According to McFarlane, the President agreed.By December 1985, the President had decided future sales to the Iranians would come directly from U.S. supplies.According to the committees' report, NSC aide Lt. Col. Oliver North first used money from the Iran operation to fund the Nicaraguan resistance in November 1985. He later testified, however, that the diversion of funds to the Contras was proposed to him by Ghorbanifar during a meeting in January 1986.Saudi billionaire oil and arms trader Adnan Khashoggi said in an interview on ABC­TV on December 11, 1986, that he advanced $1 million to help finance the first arms shipment in the Iran-Contra arms scandal and put up $4 million for the second shipment. According to the President's special review board chaired by former Sen. John Tower, a foreign official (reportedly Saudi King Fahd) donated $1 million to $2 million monthly from July 1984 to April 1985 for covert financing for the Contras. Saudi Arabia denied aiding the Nicaraguan rebels, but the New York Times reported the contribution may have been part of a 1981 secret agreement between Riyadh and Washington "to aid anti­communist resistance groups around the sophisticated American AWACS radar planes, according to United States officials and others familiar with the deal."The Joint House-Senate Committee praised the Israeli government for providing detailed chronologies of events based on relevant documents and interviews with key participants in the operation. Its report also corroborated the conclusion of the Tower Commission: "U.S. decision makers made their own decisions and must bear responsibility for the consequences."copyright 2003 The American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise
http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/US-Israel/Iran_Contra_Affair.html

"Ledeen had proposed illegal arms sales to Iran in 1984 through Mossad double agent Manucher Ghorbanifar. The CIA's Deputy Director for Operations, Clair George, considered Ghorbanifar totally unreliable, and as having only his personal financial interests, and Israel's security, at heart. But George's objections were neutralized in June 1985, when Bush formed the Terrorism Task Force, at which point the illegal arms sales went forward. (...)Ledeen also was responsible, while employed at the National Security Council in 1984, for convincing North and Secord to employ Mossad double agent and world-class swindler Manucher Ghorbanifar as the middleman between the Iranians, the Israelis, and the Americans. As the record shows, it was Ghorbanifar's duplicity and avarice that led the entire misadventure to its ignoble conclusion.The homeland thanks you, Michael Ledeen. You're exactly the sort of corrupt public official we need advising the Bush regime on how to wage its counter-terror campaign against the Moslem world."
http://www.counterpunch.org/homeland6.html

... Among Iranians named as participants in the Paris meetings by Americans claimingto be witnesses were Manucher Ghorbanifar, the Iran-born Mossad agent and arms ... www.washington-report.org/backissues/0591/9105011.htm


"Iskandar Safa and the French Hostage Scandal" (February 2002)... all the communities (in the Middle East), Israel and the Mossad included." He ... mentionedin the DST memorandum may have been Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian ...
www.meib.org/articles/0202_l2.htm



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MSNBC
By Mark Hosenball

Dec. 22 issue - What was international man of mystery Manucher Ghorbanifar up to when he met with top Pentagon experts on Iran? In a NEWSWEEK interview in Paris last month, Ghorbanifar, a former Iranian spy who helped launch the Iran-contra affair, says one of the things he discussed with Defense officials Harold Rhode and Larry Franklin at meetings in Rome in December 2001 (and in Paris last June with only Rhode) was regime change in Iran.

Ghorbanifar says there are Iranians capable of organizing a peaceful revolution against the ruling theocracy. He says his contacts know where Saddam Hussein hid $340 million in cash. With American help, he says, this money could be retrieved and half used to overthrow the ayatollahs. (The other half would be turned over to the United States.) Ghorbanifar says he told his U.S. interlocutors that ousting the mullahs would be a breakthrough in the war on terror because top Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden, are in Iran. ("You won't be surprised if you find that Saddam Hussein is on one of the Iranian islands.") Among other intel Ghorbanifar says he and associates gave the Pentagon: a warning that terrorists in Iraq would attack hotels. He also says he had advance info about Iranian nukes and a terrorist plot in Canada. Financial gain was never his objective, he says: "We wanted to give them the money, not to take the money."

The Pentagon cut off contact with Ghorbanifar, whom the CIA years ago labeled as a fabricator, after news about the talks broke last summer. But controversy about the Iranian still reverberates in Washington. Administration sources say that when White House officials OK'd what they believed was a Pentagon effort to gather info about Iranian terrorist activity in Afghanistan, they didn't know Ghorbanifar was involved. When senior officials learned in 2002 about Ghorbanifar—and that regime change was on his agenda—they decided further contacts were "not worth pursuing." But Ghorbanifar says he continued to communicate with Rhode, and sometimes Franklin, by phone and fax five or six times a week until shortly after the Paris meeting last summer. (The Pentagon says any such contacts were sporadic and not authorized by top officials.)

In Congress, investigations into the Ghorbanifar story have sparked partisan tensions. Democrats want to know if the Ghorbanifar contacts are evidence of "rogue" espionage by a secretive Pentagon unit that allegedly dealt with controversial Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi; Republicans want to know whether the CIA refused to meet with potential informants merely because the middleman—Ghorbanifar—was someone the agency distrusted. A Defense official says any discussion that Ghorbanifar had with Pentagon experts about regime change was a "one-way conversation."

URL: http://msnbc.msn.com/Default.aspx?id=3706341&p1=0

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Project for the New American Century

January 26, 1998

The Honorable William J. Clinton
President of the United States
Washington, DC

Dear Mr. President:

We are writing you because we are convinced that current American policy toward Iraq is not succeeding, and that we may soon face a threat in the Middle East more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War. In your upcoming State of the Union Address, you have an opportunity to chart a clear and determined course for meeting this threat. We urge you to seize that opportunity, and to enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the U.S. and our friends and allies around the world. That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power. We stand ready to offer our full support in this difficult but necessary endeavor.

The policy of “containment” of Saddam Hussein has been steadily eroding over the past several months. As recent events have demonstrated, we can no longer depend on our partners in the Gulf War coalition to continue to uphold the sanctions or to punish Saddam when he blocks or evades UN inspections. Our ability to ensure that Saddam Hussein is not producing weapons of mass destruction, therefore, has substantially diminished. Even if full inspections were eventually to resume, which now seems highly unlikely, experience has shown that it is difficult if not impossible to monitor Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons production. The lengthy period during which the inspectors will have been unable to enter many Iraqi facilities has made it even less likely that they will be able to uncover all of Saddam’s secrets. As a result, in the not-too-distant future we will be unable to determine with any reasonable level of confidence whether Iraq does or does not possess such weapons.

Such uncertainty will, by itself, have a seriously destabilizing effect on the entire Middle East. It hardly needs to be added that if Saddam does acquire the capability to deliver weapons of mass destruction, as he is almost certain to do if we continue along the present course, the safety of American troops in the region, of our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil will all be put at hazard. As you have rightly declared, Mr. President, the security of the world in the first part of the 21st century will be determined largely by how we handle this threat.

Given the magnitude of the threat, the current policy, which depends for its success upon the steadfastness of our coalition partners and upon the cooperation of Saddam Hussein, is dangerously inadequate. The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy.

We urge you to articulate this aim, and to turn your Administration's attention to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam's regime from power. This will require a full complement of diplomatic, political and military efforts. Although we are fully aware of the dangers and difficulties in implementing this policy, we believe the dangers of failing to do so are far greater. We believe the U.S. has the authority under existing UN resolutions to take the necessary steps, including military steps, to protect our vital interests in the Gulf. In any case, American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council.

We urge you to act decisively. If you act now to end the threat of weapons of mass destruction against the U.S. or its allies, you will be acting in the most fundamental national security interests of the country. If we accept a course of weakness and drift, we put our interests and our future at risk.

Sincerely,

Elliott Abrams Richard L. Armitage William J. Bennett

Jeffrey Bergner John Bolton Paula Dobriansky

Francis Fukuyama Robert Kagan Zalmay Khalilzad

William Kristol Richard Perle Peter W. Rodman

Donald Rumsfeld William Schneider, Jr. Vin Weber

Paul Wolfowitz R. James Woolsey Robert B. Zoellick

http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm

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Israel seeks pipeline for Iraqi oil

US discusses plan to pump fuel to its regional ally and solve energy headache at a stroke

Ed Vuillamy in Washington
Sunday April 20, 2003
The Observer

Plans to build a pipeline to siphon oil from newly conquered Iraq to Israel are being discussed between Washington, Tel Aviv and potential future government figures in Baghdad.

The plan envisages the reconstruction of an old pipeline, inactive since the end of the British mandate in Palestine in 1948, when the flow from Iraq's northern oilfields to Palestine was re-directed to Syria.

Now, its resurrection would transform economic power in the region, bringing revenue to the new US-dominated Iraq, cutting out Syria and solving Israel's energy crisis at a stroke.

It would also create an end less and easily accessible source of cheap Iraqi oil for the US guaranteed by reliable allies other than Saudi Arabia - a keystone of US foreign policy for decades and especially since 11 September 2001.

Until 1948, the pipeline ran from the Kurdish-controlled city of Mosul to the Israeli port of Haifa, on its northern Mediterranean coast.

The revival of the pipeline was first discussed openly by the Israeli Minister for National Infrastructures, Joseph Paritzky, according to the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz .

The paper quotes Paritzky as saying that the pipeline would cut Israel's energy bill drastically - probably by more than 25 per cent - since the country is currently largely dependent on expensive imports from Russia.

US intelligence sources confirmed to The Observer that the project has been discussed. One former senior CIA official said: 'It has long been a dream of a powerful section of the people now driving this administration [of President George W. Bush] and the war in Iraq to safeguard Israel's energy supply as well as that of the United States.

'The Haifa pipeline was something that existed, was resurrected as a dream and is now a viable project - albeit with a lot of building to do.'

The editor-in-chief of the Middle East Economic Review , Walid Khadduri, says in the current issue of Jane's Foreign Report that 'there's not a metre of it left, at least in Arab territory'.

To resurrect the pipeline would need the backing of whatever government the US is to put in place in Iraq, and has been discussed - according to Western diplomatic sources - with the US-sponsored Iraqi National Congress and its leader Ahmed Chalabi, the former banker favoured by the Pentagon for a powerful role in the war's aftermath.

Sources at the State Department said that concluding a peace treaty with Israel is to be 'top of the agenda' for a new Iraqi government, and Chalabi is known to have discussed Iraq's recognition of the state of Israel.

The pipeline would also require permission from Jordan. Paritzky's Ministry is believed to have approached officials in Amman on 9 April this year. Sources told Ha'aretz that the talks left Israel 'optimistic'.

James Akins, a former US ambassador to the region and one of America's leading Arabists, said: 'There would be a fee for transit rights through Jordan, just as there would be fees for Israel from those using what would be the Haifa terminal.

'After all, this is a new world order now. This is what things look like particularly if we wipe out Syria. It just goes to show that it is all about oil, for the United States and its ally.'

Akins was ambassador to Saudi Arabia before he was fired after a series of conflicts with then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, father of the vision to pipe oil west from Iraq. In 1975, Kissinger signed what forms the basis for the Haifa project: a Memorandum of Understanding whereby the US would guarantee Israel's oil reserves and energy supply in times of crisis.

Kissinger was also master of the American plan in the mid-Eighties - when Saddam Hussein was a key US ally - to run an oil pipeline from Iraq to Aqaba in Jordan, opposite the Israeli port of Eilat.

The plan was promoted by the now Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and the pipeline was to be built by the Bechtel company, which the Bush administration last week awarded a multi-billion dollar contract for the reconstruction of Iraq.

The memorandum has been quietly renewed every five years, with special legislation attached whereby the US stocks a strategic oil reserve for Israel even if it entailed domestic shortages - at a cost of $3 billion (£1.9bn) in 2002 to US taxpayers.

This bill would be slashed by a new pipeline, which would have the added advantage of giving the US reliable access to Gulf oil other than from Saudi Arabia.

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Israel seeks pipeline for Iraqi oil: "

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A document tying the Iraqi leader with the 9/11 terrorist is probably fake.
PLUS, how terror financiers manage to stay in business


Newsweek
Updated: 11:31 a.m. ET Dec. 19, 2003

Dec. 17 - A widely publicized Iraqi document that purports to show that September 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta visited Baghdad in the summer of 2001 is probably a fabrication that is contradicted by U.S. law-enforcement records showing Atta was staying at cheap motels and apartments in the United States when the trip presumably would have taken place, according to U.S. law enforcement officials and FBI documents.
The new document, supposedly written by the chief of the Iraqi intelligence service, was trumpeted by the Sunday Telegraph of London earlier this week in a front-page story that broke hours before the dramatic capture of Saddam Hussein. TERRORIST BEHIND SEPTEMBER 11 STRIKE WAS TRAINED BY SADDAM, ran the headline on the story written by Con Coughlin, a Telegraph correspondent and the author of the book "Saddam: The Secret Life."
Coughlin's account was picked up by newspapers around the world and was cited the next day by New York Times columnist William Safire. But U.S. officials and a leading Iraqi document expert tell NEWSWEEK that the document is most likely a forgery—part of a thriving new trade in dubious Iraqi documents that has cropped up in the wake of the collapse of Saddam's regime.
"It's a lucrative business," says Hassan Mneimneh, codirector of an Iraqi exile research group reviewing millions of captured Iraqi government documents. "There's an active document trade taking place … You have fraudulent documents that are being fabricated and sold" for hundreds of dollars a piece.
Mneimneh said he hadn't seen the Telegraph document that purports to place Atta in Baghdad. But he, along with senior U.S. law-enforcement and intelligence officials, said the claims of an Atta trip to Iraq in the months before the September 11 attacks were highly implausible—and contradicted by a wealth of information that has been collected about Atta's movements during the period he was plotting the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The Telegraph story was apparently written with a political purpose: to bolster Bush administration claims of a connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam's regime. The paper described a "handwritten memo" that was supposedly sent to Saddam Hussein by Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti, chief of Iraqi intelligence at the time. It describes a three-day "work program" that Atta had undertaken in Baghdad under the tutelage of notorious Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal, who lived in the Iraqi capital until his death under suspicious circumstances in August 2002.
"Mohammed Atta, an Egyptian national, came with Abu Ammer [who is unidentified] and we hosted him in Abu Nidal's house at Al-Dora under our direct supervision," the document states. "We arranged a work program for him for three days with a team dedicated to working with him ... He displayed extraordinary effort and showed a firm commitment to lead the team which will be responsible for attacking the targets that we have agreed to destroy."
The document, which according to Coughlin was supplied by Iraq's interim government, doesn't say exactly when Atta was supposed to have actually flown to Baghdad. But the memo is dated July 1, 2001, and Coughlin himself places the trip as the summer of 2001.
The problem with this, say U.S. law enforcement officials, is that the FBI has compiled a highly detailed time line for Atta's movements throughout the spring and summer of 2001 based on a mountain of documentary evidence, including airline records, ATM withdrawals and hotel receipts. Those records show Atta crisscrossing the United States during this period—making only one overseas trip, an 11-day visit to Spain that didn't begin until six days after the date of the Iraqi memo.
One FBI document, labeled "Law Enforcement Sensitive," states that during the summer of 2001, Atta "conducted extensive travel" that included visits in Florida, Boston, New York, New Jersey and Las Vegas. Indeed, this and other FBI documents show that during the last few days in June—when the presumed Iraq trip would appear to have occurred—almost all of Atta's movements are accounted for: On June 27, 2001, Atta flew from Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., to Boston. On the morning of June 28, he traveled from Boston to San Francisco (flying first class) where he switched planes and landed in Las Vegas that afternoon at 2:41 p.m. That afternoon, he rented a Chevrolet Malibu from an Alamo rental-car office, set up an account at an Internet café called the Cyber Zone and checked into the EconoLodge motel on Las Vegas Boulevard, a cheap motel in a neighborhood of seedy strip joints that is located barely two blocks from the local FBI office.
The FBI records show Atta logged onto his Cyber Zone Internet account five times over the next two days and then checked out of the EconoLodge at 3:30 a.m. on the morning of July 1. He then returned his rental car and boarded a flight to Denver at 5:59 a.m., landing in Boston later that day. A week later, on July 7, Atta boarded a flight from Boston to Zurich—the first leg on his trip to Spain. He returned to the United States on July 19, 2001.
Much about Atta's movements is still unknown—and most likely will remain so. FBI officials believe, for example, that Atta flew to Las Vegas as part of a series of trips he took that summer to test security at U.S. airports in preparation for the September 11 attacks. But it is just a theory. The visit to Spain is believed to have been for a meeting with Ramzi bin al-Shibh, one of the planners of the September 11 attacks, who also was in Spain during the same time.
While all of Atta's movements cannot be accounted for, enough is known to make it "highly unlikely" that the September 11 ringleader could have flown off to Baghdad for a three-day work program with Iraqi intelligence, a FBI official told NEWSWEEK. For similar reasons, the bureau has long since discounted claims by Czech intelligence—and widely promoted by some Iraq hawks in the Bush administration—that Atta had flown to Prague to meet with an Iraqi intelligence agent around April 8, 2001.
FBI records show Atta and fellow hijacker Marwan Al-Shehhi checking out of the Diplomat Inn in Virginia Beach, Va., and writing a check for cash for $8,000 for a SunTrust account in that city on April 4, 2001. For the rest of that week, Atta's cell phone was used to make repeated calls to Florida. On April 11, Atta rented an apartment in Coral Springs, Fla. While acknowledging that a few days are unaccounted for, the FBI has found no evidence that Atta departed the country overseas during this period, an official said.
Mneimneh, the Iraqi document expert, says that there are other reasons to discount the handwritten memo touted by the Telegraph. The document includes another sensational second item: how Iraqi intelligence, helped by a "small team from the Al Qaeda organization," arranged for a shipment from Niger to reach Iraq by way of Libya and Syria. Although the shipment is unspecified, the reference to Niger was immediately suggestive of Bush administration assertions earlier this year that Iraq sought to import yellowcake uranium from that African nation—claims that also have been widely discredited as being based on other forged documents that apparently came from the Niger Embassy in Rome.
Mneimneh says the wording of the document makes him highly suspicious: Iraqi intelligence officials were notoriously conservative and rarely—if ever—put incriminating information in writing. The reference to the Iraqi intelligence working with a "small team from the Al Qaeda organization" is "too explicit," he says.
Ironically, even the Iraqi National Congress of Ahmed Chalabi, which has been vocal in claiming ties between Al Qaeda and Saddam's regime, was dismissive of the new Telegraph story. "The memo is clearly nonsense," an INC spokesman told NEWSWEEK.
Contacted by Newsweek, The Sunday Telegraph's Con Coughlin acknowledged that he could not prove the authenticity of the document. He said that while he got the memo about Mohammed Atta and Baghdad from a "senior" member of the Iraqi Governing Council who insisted it was "genuine," he and his newspaper had "no way of verifying it. It's our job as journalists to air these things and see what happens," he said.
Holes in the Terror Financing Net
What does it take to shut down a major terrorist finance network ? U.S., European and United Nations investigators acknowledge that despite decisions by the Bush administration and the United Nations to put out of business a Swiss-and-Bahamas-based Islamic financial network called Al-Taqwa ("Fear of God" in Arabic), the network's long-time chief, who is also the subject of U.S. and United Nations sanctions, still is fighting to keep some of his businesses open.
Youssef Nada, an elderly Egyptian financier who founded and ran the Al-Taqwa network from bases in southern Switzerland and northern Italy, was designated a terrorist financier by the Bush administration in November 2001. A U.S. Treasury official testified to Congress that Nada had provided financial assistance to Al Qaeda both before and after the 9/11 attacks. In 2002, the Treasury placed more than a dozen companies established by Nada and an Eritrean-born business associate named Ahmed Idris Nasreddin on the U.S. terrorist finance sanctions list.
But U.N. officials and some news organizations recently have reported that despite international and U.S. sanctions, Nada and Nasreddin have continued to operate companies and own businesses—including luxury hotels in Italy owned by Nasreddin. And NEWSWEEK has learned that authorities in the tiny alpine money haven of Liechtenstein have recently failed in efforts to seize control over the remnants of one of Nada's corporate vehicles.
In an apparent effort to keep part of his financial network alive, law-enforcement sources say, Nada successfully applied to Liechtenstein officials for permission to rename two of his companies based in the pocket principality, both of which were in the process of liquidation. Liechtenstein authorities subsequently launched an effort to oust Nada as liquidator of one of the companies, now called Waldenberg, and install a former senior Liechtenstein government official as the new liquidator. This would have given investigators control over what remains of the records of the company, which might have yielded valuable clues as to Nada's financial activities.
But European law-enforcement sources say that a judge in Liechtenstein recently rejected the government's proposals to install a new liquidator, leaving Nada in charge of the failed company—and its critical records. A recent U.N. report noted that even though U.N. sanctions say that officially designated terrorist financiers like Nada must not be allowed to travel internationally, Nada has traveled from his residence in a tiny enclave of Italian territory surrounded by the Swiss canton of Ticino to Liechtenstein on business. A Swiss government official said that due to relaxed travel controls around Europe, it is not practical for the Swiss government to enforce an international travel ban on Nada, who has repeatedly denied any connection to Al Qaeda or terrorism.© 2004 Newsweek, Inc.
URL: http://msnbc.msn.com/Default.aspx?id=3741646&p1=0

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A senior Air Force officer watches civilians craft the war plan.
By Karen Kwiatkowski

Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, a former Pentagon insider, continues her revelations in this second of a three-part series.
By the end of the summer of 2002, our Near East South Asia (NESA) office spaces were beginning to get crowded. Several senior people, including Abe Shulsky had moved into some of the enclosed front offices, and the cubicles were entirely filled, as were some less than ideal workspaces in the hallway.
Chatter swirled, and word went out that NESA was looking for additional space. By late August, a large office was located upstairs on the fifth floor. At a staff meeting, we were told that the expanded Iraq desk would become the Office of Special Plans and would move out. We were told not to refer to this office as the Office of Special Plans and, if pressed, we were also not to confirm that it was the expanded Iraq desk. This instruction came across as both surreal and humorous. When someone asked whether we could tell our Joint Staff counterparts, Bill Luti said no, to deny knowledge of the organizational shift. In my experience, our canny, connected, and cynical Joint Staff counterparts probably already knew more about it than we did, and this suspicion was later confirmed in conversations with some of them.
The subterfuge was not necessary in any case, as several weeks later Luti was announced as the new Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, NESA and Special Plans, allowing him to work directly for Undersecretary Doug Feith. Luti had always seemed to work directly for Feith. In one staff meeting, interrupted by a call from Feith’s office, Luti, in his famously incautious manner, proclaimed to all present, that Feith couldn’t wipe his ass without his [Luti’s] help.
The establishment of the Office of Special Plans, under Abe Shulsky, and including several military folks, a civil servant or two, and the larger group of neocon-friendly appointees or contractors, meant to the rest of us that we would have more space and a reduction in cross-regional chatter. The Iraq-war planning aspect would now be isolated from the rest of NESA and would establish its own rhythm and cadence, separate from the non-political-minded professionals covering the rest of the region. In planning a war, loose lips sink ships, and if anyone didn’t remember this World War II slogan, the Pentagon had several posters in common areas to remind us. (Interestingly, the planning and execution of wars—writing and implementing war plans—is the function of the Combatant Commander, with the Joint Staff as chief technical advisor and the Undersecretary of Policy as policy advisor. The Secretary of Defense approves, but combatant commanders work directly for the president. Nowhere in OSD should one, by law, custom, or common sense, find people busy developing and writing war plans, even if they are special.)
If they were not writing war plans, the Office of Special Plans did produce something related to the upcoming war. By August, only the Pollyannas at the Pentagon felt that the decision to invade Iraq, storm Baghdad, and take over the place (or give it to Ahmad Chalabi) was reversible. What was still being worked out at that time was the propaganda piece, a sustained refinement of the storyline that had been hinted at in neoconservative circles and the White House for months, even years. Based on the successful second leak of the war plans in July, Washington’s initial reactions of “Oh, no—so many troops!” was shaped masterfully by the Pentagon publicity machine with offended and vociferous denials of the stories, claiming that the operation would not require nearly that many troops. It was a propaganda coup of understated elegance and razor-edged acumen.
That genius, in some ways, was due to Abe Shulsky. A kindly and gentle-appearing man who would say hello in the hallways, he seemed to be someone with whom I, as a political-science grad student, would have loved to sit over coffee and discuss the world’s problems. Seeing me as a uniformed and relatively junior officer, I doubt he entertained similar desires. In any case, he was very busy. I didn’t see much of what Abe did on a daily basis, but I know that he approved a particular document produced by the Office of Special Plans for the staff officers in Policy. Desk officers write policy papers for our senior officers to help prepare them for meetings, speeches, or events where they will need to communicate U.S. security policy. In early September, after the OSP had been established, we were told via staff meetings and e-mails that whenever we wrote something that might include reference to the Iraq threat, and WMD and terrorism in general, we would now inform OSP and request their talking points. The actual contact point was Air Force Col. Kevin Jones. On a number of occasions from September through January, I e-mailed or called Colonel Jones and requested the latest version of the talking points. On several occasions, they weren’t available in an approved form, and we waited for Shulsky’s OK. This crafting and approval of the exact words to use when discussing Iraq, WMD, and terrorism were, for most of us, the only known functions of OSP and Mr. Shulsky.
As a desk officer, having a patented set of words to copy meant less to research, and I welcomed the talking points on principle. Then I made the mistake of reading them. They were a series of bulletized statements, written in a convincing way, and at first glance, they seemed reasonable and rational. Up to a point. Saddam Hussein had gassed his neighbors, abused his people, and was continuing in that mode, a threat to his neighbors and to us. Saddam Hussein tried to shoot at our aircraft when they enforced the no-fly zone. Saddam Hussein had harbored al-Qaeda operatives and offered and probably provided them training facilities. Saddam Hussein was pursuing and had WMD of the type that could be used by him, in conjunction with al-Qaeda and other terrorists, to attack and damage American interests, Americans, and America. Saddam Hussein had not been seriously weakened by war and sanctions and weekly bombings over the past 12 years and in fact was plotting to hurt America and support anti-American activities, in part through terrorists. His support for the Palestinians and Arafat proved his terrorist connections, and, basically, the time to act was now. This was the gist of the talking points, and they remained on message throughout the time I watched them evolve.
But evolve they did, and the subtle changes I saw from September to late January were revealing as to what exactly the Office of Special Plans was contributing to national security. Two key types of modifications would be directed, or approved, by Abe Shulsky and his team of politicos. First was the deletion of entire references or bullets. The one I remember most specifically is when they dropped the bullet that said one of Saddam’s intelligence operatives met with Mohamed Atta in Prague and that this was salient proof that Saddam was in part responsible for the 9/11 attack. It lasted through several revisions, but after the media reported the claim as unsubstantiated by U.S. intelligence, denied by the Czech government, and that the location of Atta had been confirmed to be elsewhere by our own FBI, that particular bullet was dropped entirely from our “advice on things to say” to senior Pentagon officials when they met with guests or outsiders.
The other type of change to the talking points was along the lines of fine-tuning and generalizing. Much of what was there was already so general as to be less than accurate. Some bullets would be softened, particularly statements of Saddam’s readiness and capability in the chemical, biological, or nuclear arena. Others were altered over time to match more exactly something Bush or Cheney had said in recent speeches. One item I never saw in our talking points was a reference to Saddam’s purported attempt to buy yellowcake uranium in Niger. The OSP list of crime and evil included a statement relating to Saddam’s attempts to seek fissionable materials or uranium in Africa. (Our point, written mostly in the present tense had conveniently omitted dates of the last known attempt, some time in the late 1980s.) I was later surprised to hear the president’s mention of the yellowcake in Niger because that indeed would be new, and in theory might have represented new actual intelligence, something remarkably absent in what we were seeing from the OSP.
During the late summer and fall I was industriously trying to get our overdue bilateral visits with Morocco and Tunisia back on schedule. There must have been clues throughout the fall that I was less than politically reliable. On the wall behind my desk, I had a display of cartoons and articles questioning the legality and justness of pre-emptive wars, images of neoconservatives gone wild, and other antiwar humor. I had plenty of visitors, and even folks who I had pegged as a little too imperialist for my taste enjoyed my personal wailing wall. But as winter approached, the propaganda campaign gained ground, Congress bought in, my sense of humor darkened, and the cartoons selected for the wall got angrier. It was becoming clearer that, after a year, the Afghan campaign was not proceeding as promised, and Iraq having been falsely advertised and politically manipulated would be even uglier and deadlier. And no one in the Pentagon with any political or moral power seemed to care.
December 15, 2003 issueCopyright © 2003 The American Conservative
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An uncovered memo suggests the Iraqi National Congress was feeding intelligence to Cheney's aides

By Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff
Newsweek

Dec. 15 issue - A memo written by a top Washington lobbyist for the controversial Iraqi National Congress raises new questions about the role Vice President Dick Cheney’s office played in the run-up to the war in Iraq.

The memo, obtained by NEWSWEEK, suggests that the INC last year was directly feeding intelligence reports about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and purported ties to terrorism to one of Cheney’s top foreign- policy aides. Cheney staffers later pushed INC info—including defectors’ claims about WMD and terror ties—to bolster the case that Saddam’s government posed a direct threat to America. But the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies have strongly questioned the reliability of defectors supplied by the INC.

For months, Cheney’s office has denied that the veep bypassed U.S. intelligence agencies to get intel reports from the INC. But a June 2002 memo written by INC lobbyist Entifadh Qunbar to a U.S. Senate committee lists John Hannah, a senior national-security aide on Cheney’s staff, as one of two “U.S. governmental recipients” for reports generated by an intelligence program being run by the INC and which was then being funded by the State Department. Under the program, “defectors, reports and raw intelligence are cultivated and analyzed”; the info was then reported to, among others, “appropriate governmental, non-governmental and international agencies.” The memo not only describes Cheney aide Hannah as a “principal point of contact” for the program, it even provides his direct White House telephone number. The only other U.S. official named as directly receiving the INC intel is William Luti, a former military adviser to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich who, after working on Cheney’s staff early in the Bush administration, shifted to the Pentagon, where he oversaw a secretive Iraq war-planning unit called the Office of Special Plans.

Hannah did not respond to a request for comment. But another Cheney aide insisted that the memo was misleading, and flatly denied that the vice president received “raw” intelligence from the INC. Hannah discussed only Iraqi political issues with INC representatives, not intelligence, the aide said. Francis Brooke, another D.C. lobbyist for the INC, said he often orally discussed Iraqi issues—including claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and Saddam’s terrorist connections—with Hannah, Luti and Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis (Scooter) Libby. But he insisted he talked with them only about INC intelligence matters that had already been reported in the media. A Pentagon official also denied Luti directly got INC intel reports, suggesting the author of the memo was just “dropping names” to drum up support for the INC on Capitol Hill.
© 2004 Newsweek, Inc.

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NATALIE WEINSTEIN
Bulletin Staff

Calling Iran a "sponsor of evil deeds," Sen. Barbara Boxer said this week she is backing a bill to sanction foreign companies that invest in the Mideast nation.

"If you do business with Iran, you won't do business with America," said the Jewish Democrat from Greenbrae.

Boxer spoke Monday to an audience of 700 at an American Israel Public Affairs Committee membership-drive luncheon at San Francisco's Fairmont Hotel. This event and two others in San Jose and Oakland were dedicated to Israel's late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

During speeches and interviews, Boxer and AIPAC national president Steve Grossman reaffirmed their support for the current peace process and outlined ways to minimize Israel's risks in this endeavor -- though neither would express an opinion on the possibility of stationing U.S. troops in the Golan Heights as part of a Syrian-Israeli peace agreement.

At the top of AIPAC's 1996 agenda, Grossman said, is legislation to boost Israel's military technology and to put the squeeze on Iran.

"If you think about the strategic threat to Israel long-term," Grossman said, "it's the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and...the spread of Islamic fundamentalism."

Iran excels in both areas, he said.

In recent weeks, Boxer has taken a leading role in helping work out differences between Congress and the administration on the Iran bill. Earlier this week, the bill was still in the Senate's banking committee, on which Boxer serves.

Though the federal government banned U.S. trade and investment with Iran this spring, foreign corporations with U.S. subsidiaries continue to purchase oil from Iran. By trying to cut off a major source of Iran's income, Boxer said, the United States can dry up financing for Iranian-backed fundamentalist terrorists.

When an oil deal between Conoco and Iran was scrapped earlier this year under pressure from the federal government and Israel supporters, Grossman said, a French corporation with 19 subsidiaries in the United States took Conoco's place. In November, he added, officials of more than 100 foreign companies traveled to Teheran to bid on projects worth $7 billion.

In addition to the Iran bill, Grossman said, AIPAC will focus next year on the possible expansion of military technology and sophisticated weaponry that the United States shares with or sells to Israel. Though Israel is considered a major ally, Grossman said, it doesn't rank as high as NATO countries when it comes to sharing defense information, such as infrared software.

A new relationship between the United States and Israel could take the form of a defense treaty, an upgraded "memorandum of understanding" or provisions within the annual foreign aid bill.

This potential shift becomes even more important, he added, as Israel relinquishes control of parts of the West Bank -- and potentially the Golan Heights and its security zone in southern Lebanon.

Such a move would drive home to Arab nations the fact that they cannot create a wedge between the United States and Israel, Grossman said. It would also help increase Israelis' confidence in any possible peace agreement with Syria.

Despite Prime Minister Shimon Peres' renewed interest in a Syrian-Israeli peace, neither Boxer nor Grossman would say whether they would back sending U.S. troops to the Golan as part of a peace agreement. "It's premature for AIPAC to take a position," Grossman said.

AIPAC continues to ask Congressmembers not to take a final public stand yet on this issue. That's because the details of any such peace agreement remain entirely unclear, Grossman said. Still unknown is whether Syria would agree to ground-based early warning stations, refrain from stationing troops on the border and constrain drug trafficking and terrorist activities.

Boxer agreed, saying any discussion of such a divisive issue is unnecessary for now. "No one's even asking for troops."

Though she wouldn't spell out her position on this issue, Boxer told the audience she has decided to support sending U.S. troops to Bosnia as part of an international operation to enforce the peace agreement and stop the atrocities. Since the Holocaust, she said, Jews have promised that such a tragedy would never happen again to anyone. "I think we can do something to prevent a genocide," she said.

Though some Bay Area Jews have said Boxer's voting record on Israel shows less than consistent support, Grossman considers her a steadfast ally.

In addition to her recent work on the Iran bill, Grossman pointed to Boxer's immediate commitment earlier this year to legislation moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Israel's capital.

"In the last year, we've gone to her for help, and she's been not only willing to be involved, but she's taken an early leadership role," he said. "She's been a terrific partner in the past year."

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FINAL REPORT OF THE
INDEPENDENT COUNSEL FOR
IRAN/CONTRA MATTERS

Volume I:
Investigations and Prosecutions
Lawrence E. Walsh
Independent Counsel
August 4, 1993
Washington, D.C.

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CIRCUIT

Division for the Purpose of
Appointing Independent Counsel
Division No. 86-6

TABLE OF CONTENTS: Volume 1

Contributors

Letter of Transmittal iii
Executive Summary xiii
Summary of Prosecutions xxiii

Part I The Underlying Facts 1

Part II History of the Investigation 25

Chronology of Key Public Developments 51

Part III The Operational Conspiracy:
A Legal Analysis 55

Part IV Investigations and Cases:
The National Security Council Staff 77

Chapter 1 U.S. v. Robert C. McFarlane 79
Chapter 2 U.S. v. Oliver L. North 105
Chapter 3 U.S. v. John M. Poindexter 123
Chapter 4 Paul B. Thompson 137
Chapter 5 Fawn Hall 147
Chapter 6 Robert L. Earl 151
Chapter 7 Thomas C. Green 155

Part V Investigations and Cases:
The Flow of Funds and the Private Operatives 157

Chapter 8 The Enterprise and Its Finances 159
Chapter 9 U.S. v. Richard V. Secord 173
Chapter 10 U.S. v. Albert Hakim 179
Chapter 11 U.S. v. Thomas G. Clines 181
Chapter 12 Swiss Funds Recovery Efforts 185
Chapter 13 Private Fundraisers (U.S. v. Carl R. Channell and U.S. v. Richard R. Miller) 187
Chapter 14 Other Money Matters 193

Part VI Investigations and Cases:
Officers of the Central Intelligence Agency 199

Chapter 15 William J. Casey 201
Chapter 16 Robert M. Gates 223
Chapter 17 U.S. v. Clair E. George 233
Chapter 18 U.S. v. Duane R. Clarridge 247
Chapter 19 U.S. v. Alan D. Fiers, Jr. 263
Chapter 20 U.S. v. Joseph F. Fernandez 283
Chapter 21 CIA Subject #1 295
Chapter 22 James L. Adkins 309
Chapter 23 Conduct of CIA Officers in November 1986 311

Part VII Investigations and Cases:
Officers of the Department of State 325

Chapter 24 George P. Shultz, M. Charles Hill and Nicholas Platt 325
Chapter 25 U.S. v. Elliott Abrams 375
Chapter 26 Edwin G. Corr 393

Part VIII Investigations and Cases:
Officers of the Department of Defense (U.S. v. Caspar W. Weinberger and Related Investigations) 405

Part IX Investigations of the White House 443

Chapter 27 President Reagan 445
Chapter 28 George Bush 473
Chapter 29 Donald P. Gregg 485
Chapter 30 Donald T. Regan 505
Chapter 31 Edwin Meese, III 525

Part X Political Oversight and the Rule of Law 555

Part XI Concluding Observations 561

Index 567

---

Source for this document

http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/walsh/



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by Amiram Cohen
The United States has asked Israel to check the possibility of pumping oil from Iraq to the oil refineries in Haifa. The request came in a telegram last week from a senior Pentagon official to a top Foreign Ministry official in Jerusalem.
The Prime Minister's Office, which views the pipeline to Haifa as a "bonus" the U.S. could give to Israel in return for its unequivocal support for the American-led campaign in Iraq, had asked the Americans for the official telegram.
The new pipeline would take oil from the Kirkuk area, where some 40 percent of Iraqi oil is produced, and transport it via Mosul, and then across Jordan to Israel. The U.S. telegram included a request for a cost estimate for repairing the Mosul-Haifa pipeline that was in use prior to 1948. During the War of Independence, the Iraqis stopped the flow of oil to Haifa and the pipeline fell into disrepair over the years.
The National Infrastructure Ministry has recently conducted research indicating that construction of a 42-inch diameter pipeline between Kirkuk and Haifa would cost about $400,000 per kilometer. The old Mosul-Haifa pipeline was only 8 inches in diameter.
National Infrastructure Minister Yosef Paritzky said yesterday that the port of Haifa is an attractive destination for Iraqi oil and that he plans to discuss this matter with the U.S. secretary of energy during his planned visit to Washington next month. Paritzky added that the plan depends on Jordan's consent and that Jordan would receive a transit fee for allowing the oil to piped through its territory. The minister noted, however, that "due to pan-Arab concerns, it will be hard for the Jordanians to agree to the flow of Iraqi oil via Jordan and Israel."
Sources in Jerusalem confirmed yesterday that the Americans are looking into the possibility of laying a new pipeline via Jordan and Israel. (There is also a pipeline running via Syria that has not been used in some three decades.)
Iraqi oil is now being transported via Turkey to a small Mediterranean port near the Syrian border. The transit fee collected by Turkey is an important source of revenue for the country. This line has been damaged by sabotage twice in recent weeks and is presently out of service.
In response to rumors about the possible Kirkuk-Mosul-Haifa pipeline, Turkey has warned Israel that it would regard this development as a serious blow to Turkish-Israeli relations.
Sources in Jerusalem suggest that the American hints about the alternative pipeline are part of an attempt to apply pressure on Turkey.
Iraq is one of the world's largest oil producers, with the potential of reaching about 2.5 million barrels a day. Oil exports were halted after the Gulf War in 1991 and then were allowed again on a limited basis (1.5 million barrels per day) to finance the import of food and medicines. Iraq is currently exporting several hundred thousand barrels of oil per day.
During his visit to Washington in about two weeks, Paritzky also plans to discuss the possibility of U.S. and international assistance for joint Israeli-Palestinian projects in the areas of energy and infrastructure, natural gas, desalination and electricity.
© Copyright 2003 Ha'aretz

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0825-03.htm

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Neocon Policy:


ISRAELI SETTLEMENTS: LEGITIMATE, DEMOCRATICALLY MANDATED, VITAL TO ISRAEL'S SECURITY AND,
THEREFORE, IN U.S. INTEREST

The Center for Security Policy
Transition Brief No. 96-T 130 [December 17, 1996]

(Washington, D.C.): The past few days have seen an escalating effort on the part of past and present U.S. government officials to challenge the government of Israel over its declared policy of strengthening settlements in the disputed territories around Jerusalem, elsewhere in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip. On Sunday, eight former American Cabinet officers -- including former Carter Administration Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and former Bush Administration Secretary of State James Baker -- wrote Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to oppose his settlements policy which Dr. Brzezinski described as "inimical to the peace process and even dangerous." During the Carter years, Israel settlements were called "illegal" and "illegitimate." During the Bush-Baker period, they were described as "obstacles to peace."

Clinton Administration policy-makers were clearly delighted with the letter (so much so as to raise suspicions that they may have encouraged its preparation). One unnamed "senior American official," who insisted on remaining anonymous, told the New York Times over the weekend, "What [the authors] propose is quite consistent with our own view of the problematic nature of settlement activity." The letter "is balanced, but clearly with a certain among of concern, and the concern is warranted."

Then, yesterday, President Clinton used his press conference with European Union leaders to join the fray. Agreeing with a questioner's characterization that Israeli settlements are "absolutely, absolutely" an "obstacle to peace," he urged Israel not to take steps that would "preempt the outcome of negotiations." This focus on process, however, belies an implicit objection to the substance of Israel's policy: Israeli settlements make it more difficult for the Jewish State to surrender territory Yasir Arafat and his supporters hope to transform into a sovereign Palestinian state.

Settlements Work

But that is precisely what settlements have been intended to do under both Labor and Liked governments. Indeed, in the decade that followed the 1967 Six-Day War, no one in the Israeli body politic -- whether from the Left or the Right -- believed, as the Arabs maintained, that it was illegal for Jews to live in the territories. During this period, the Israeli Left envisioned essentially partitioning the West Bank. Following a scheme known as "the Allon Plan," Labor governments put settlements in places deemed of strategic value (primarily in the Jordan valley)(1) and hoped to turn the rest over to Jordan.

For its part, the opposition Likud believed that the disputed territories should be retained indefinitely. The principal debate was over the prudence of relinquishing areas deemed to be strategically dispensable and particularly those that had large Arab populations. But both major Israeli political parties were adamantly opposed to the creation of a Palestinian state in these areas. As Yitzhak Rabin put it in his memoirs published in 1979:

"Although Labor and Likud differ in their views on the solution to the Palestinian question, we both oppose in the strongest terms the creation of a Palestinian 'mini-state' in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, first and foremost because it cannot solve anything../..../..The leaders of the PLO have declared -- and I believe them - that they view such a 'mini-state' as but the first phase in the achievement of their so-called secular, democratic Palestine, to be built on the ruins of the State of Israel." (Emphasis added.)

And in the Spring of 1980, Shimon Peres wrote in Foreign Affairs:

"../...Interlocutors who claim that Arafat may be satisfied with a less ambitious goal, namely that Israel withdraw to the pre-June 1967 borders, that it abandon East Jerusalem, and concede the establishment of a Palestinian army, may not realize that they sponsor a scheme that would prejudice Israel's capacity for self-defense and would leave it without defensible borders.


"A PLO state on the West Bank could never settle the problem of the Palestinian refugees. The open space of Jordan could. A PLO state would prolong, not end warfare; it would build a base for the continuation of the struggle, not work for reconciliation, (Emphasis added.)

True Then, True Now

In the wake of the intifada, however, Labor became more enthralled with the notion that land could be traded for peace. After it returned to power in 1992 (on a platform that rejected negotiations with the PLO and pledged to oppose the creation of a Palestinian state), the Rabin-Peres government quickly became frustrated when this policy failed to produce peace. As documented by Douglas J. Feith, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and founding member of the Center for Security Policy's Board of Advisors, in the March 1996 edition of Middle East Quarterly, Labor's response was to adopt a policy of unilateral withdrawal.

"Seeing that he could not insist on a secure peace while bringing the occupation to a prompt end, Rabin decided, fatefully, that the latter took priority. This was an historic and radical departure. Labor's slogan for decades after all, was Land for Peace -- not Unilateral Withdrawal, not Land for Nothing, and not Land for Your Assuming Our Burden.

"This new logic meant accepting [then-Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi] Beilin's characterization of the territories as 'a burden and a curse.' It meant abandoning the demand for a credible, non-terrorist Palestinian Arab negotiating partner. It meant initiating withdrawal before a peace settlement. And it meant leaving open the possibility that the final settlement would lead to the creation of a Palestinian state."

The implications of such a dramatic policy shift by the last Rabin-Peres government for Israel's settlements policy were profound. As Mr. Feith put it in his Middle East Quarterly essay entitled "Withdrawal Process, Not Peace Process":

The 'peace process' is more accurately called the 'withdrawal process.' 'Ending the occupation' and relinquishing responsibility are the key goals; peace is not. If peace develops, all to the good. If it does not, the process moves forward regardless. (During the last Labor government,] Israeli officials, to be sure, continued to negotiate and sign agreements with the PLO, to ascribe importance to their terms, and to demand that the PLO comply with the agreements. But their main concern is that enforcement of PLO pledges not interfere with the withdrawal.

"This applies to all PLO promises -- whether about amending the covenant, preventing or condemning terrorism, respecting the status quo in Jerusalem, abjuring belligerent rhetoric, or extraditing terrorists suspects. The [Labor] government highlights the benefits of peace, but it intends to complete its withdrawal plans whether or not there is peace." (Emphasis added.)

Such a policy was widely admired by those like James Baker, Cyrus Vance, Zbigniew Brzezinski and the State Department's Arabists. They tended to see withdrawal as the sine qua non of the "peace process." By definition, anything that impeded withdrawal was an impediment to that process. And,since Israeli settlements were, by design, intended to make withdrawal more difficult, they were impediments. For this reason, among others, the last Labor government enjoyed the overt support of the present American administration and like-minded officials of previous administrations.

The unilateral withdrawal policy was ultimately rejected by the Israeli people, however. In the election last May, Benjamin Netanyahu campaigned on a platform of peace with security. A key element of his vision of security was preserving -- and even expanding -- Jewish settlements in the disputed territories to help ensure that the territories would remain under Israeli control. While the overall electoral majority that voted for Mr. Netanyahu was narrow, the Jewish population rejected the Rabin-Peres withdrawal policy by an electoral landslide (i.e., by a 56-44% margin). Since what is at issue is a fundamental aspect of the Israeli-Arab conflict that may determine the future survival of the Jewish State, that margin is relevant, even though under Israeli democracy, Arab votes count just as much as do those of Jews. Israel

Israel Has a Legitimate Claim to the Territories

What is more, Israel is at least as entitled as the Palestinian Arabs to settle in the lands of the disputed territories. In an earlier, seminal article entitled "A Mandate for Israel," which appeared in the Fall 1993 edition of The National Interest, Douglas Feith convincingly argues that the Palestine Mandate adopted by the League of Nations -- which "secured Jewish rights to a homeland and to 'close settlement' in Palestine" -- provided international recognition of the Jews' claim to territory there. He notes that:

"../...[Although] the Mandate distinguished between Eastern and Western Palestine../...it did not distinguish between the region of Judea and Samaria and the rest of Western Palestine. No event and no armistice or other international agreement has terminated the Mandate-recognized rights of the Jewish people, including settlement rights, in those portions of the Mandate territory that have yet come under the sovereignty of any state. Those rights did not expire upon the demise of the League of Nations, the creation of the United Nations, or the UN General Assembly's adoption of the 1947 UN Special Committee on Palestine plan for Western Palestine."

Mr. Feith also cites Professor Eugene V. Rostow -- a distinguished international legal scholar who, as Under Secretary of State during the Johnson Administration, helped draft UN Security Council Resolution 242 -- as having concluded that "Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip constitute portions of the Palestine Mandate trust territory that have not yet been allocated to a sovereign." As Mr. Feith observes:

"It is not necessary, however, to decide whether the Mandate and all its institutions remain in full effect for these territories in order to conclude that, since Britain's resignation as Mandatory, no event has legally terminated or superseded the right of Jews to settle there, as derived from the 'historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine' recognized in the Mandate." (Emphasis added.)

The Bottom Line

Israel is fully entitled to expand existing settlements or build new ones in the disputed territories. Prime Minister Netanyahu is to be commended for resisting intense international pressure in order to engage in the former and to reserve the right to undertake the latter after final status negotiations have been completed. By so doing, he is engaging in the well-established Israeli practice of strengthening its physical position in strategic regions, increasing Israel's self-defense capability and undergirding U.S. interests in the region by enhancing the security of America's most reliable and powerful any in the Middle East.

Importantly, Mr. Netanyahu is, in the process, also honoring the commitment that earned him his mandate over a candidate who promised more of what amounted to unilateral withdrawals without enhanced security. The majority of Israelis understood that the policy they preferred might make it more difficult to realize further peace agreements with Arafat. They remained persuaded that the creation of a Palestinian state would be inimical to Israeli interests and, to the extent that Israeli settlements in the disputed territories constitute an obstacle to such an outcome, a democratic polity has freely adopted the Netanyahu policy.

It behooves the United States to respect this sort of democratic choice and to refrain from statements that can only encourage the inflammatory rhetoric exhibited by Yasir Arafat -- who called last week on Palestinian Arabs "to firmly confront with all possible means the Israeli settlement aggression in order to defend the land." American interests will be very badly served if Arafat and Company conclude that their threats of renewed violence on a scale as great, if not greater, than the recent Temple Mount tunnel episode will be rewarded.(2)

Even if the United States were willing to ignore the will of the Israeli people, to disregard the legitimacy of Israel's right to modify or build settlements in the disputed territories and to remain indifferent to its own interests in the Jewish State's ability to defend itself, President Clinton and like-minded former officials would be on weak ground to decry such Israeli construction -- unless they also insisted that all Arab construction in the territories halt as well.

After all, if Israeli building in the West Bank amounts, as the President put it yesterday, to "preempt[ing] the outcome of something both sides have agreed../...should be part of the final negotiations," it stands to reason that so mugs Arab building. By the estimate of Mr. Netanyahu's Director of Policy Planning and Communications, David Bar-Ilan, the Arabs "have more than 10 times the number of buildings under construction [in the territories] than those approved for the [Jewish] settlers.'' While it may suit the likes of James Baker and Cyrus Vance -- no friends of Israel -- to ignore Arab efforts to "change the facts on the ground," such a double standard must not be made a basis for U.S. policy in the Middle East.

NOTES



(1) Interestingly, a study performed in 1967 for the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff which concluded that Israel could not safely surrender the territories it acquired during the Six-Day War, judged the high ground of the Samarian mountains overlooking the Jordan valley were the more strategic points. Since those sites tended to be inhabited by Palestinian Arabs, however, the Allon Plan opted to stake an Israeli claim via settlements to the less valuable but uninhabited lowlands in the valley.

(2) See the Center's Decision Brief entitled Summit Postmortem: If Only Clinton Were Half as Resolute as Netanyahu in Safeguarding U.S. Interests in the Middle East (No. 96-D 96, 3 October 1996)

http://www.freeman.org/m_online/jan97/center.htm


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