By way of deception, shalt thou wage war.

– motto of Mossad, Israel’s Intelligence Service

The scenes of flag-waving Libyans welcoming home Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the man known as the Lockerbie bomber, further discredited Muslims in the minds of many. For those whose knowledge of the story is derived mainly from TV news, it appeared to be a callous celebration of mass murder, lending credence to the belief that “Islam” and “terrorism” are virtually synonymous. A closer look at the facts surrounding the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, however, reveals a pattern of deception by those who have most to gain from making Muslims look bad.

While the news reports dutifully recorded the protestations of outrage by Barack Obama, Gordon Brown and others at what appeared to be an unseemly hero’s welcome for a convicted terrorist, they neglected to mention that Libyans were celebrating the release of a countryman whom they believe had been wrongfully imprisoned for eight years. Also omitted from the reports was any indication that informed observers of Megrahi’s case in Britain and elsewhere are likewise convinced of his innocence.

Robert Black, the University of Edinburgh law professor who was the architect of the trial at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands, says that “no reasonable tribunal could have convicted Megrahi on the evidence led,” and calls his 2001 conviction “an absolute and utter outrage.” Prof. Black likens the Scottish trial judges to the White Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass who “believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Hans Köchler, a UN-appointed observer at the trial, states that “there is not one single piece of material evidence linking the two accused to the crime,” and condemns the court’s verdict as a “spectacular miscarriage of justice.” And Dr. Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora was one of the 270 killed on December 21, 1988, dismisses the prosecution’s case against Megrahi and fellow Libyan Lamin Khalifa F’hima as “a cock and bull story.”

According to that “cock and bull story,” Megrahi, the head of security for Libyan Arab Airlines (LAA), conspired with Lamin Khalifa F’hima, the station manager for LAA in Malta (who was acquitted), to put a suitcase bomb on a flight from Malta to Frankfurt. At Frankfurt, the lethal suitcase had to be transferred to another flight bound for London Heathrow. Then in Heathrow Airport, it would have to be transferred for a second time onto the ill-fated Flight 103 destined for New York.

But for that rather implausible scenario to be true, the Libyans would have to have had an inordinate faith in the reliability of baggage handlers in two of Europe’s busiest airports at one of the busiest times of the year. Less optimistic would-be bombers would surely have slipped the bomb-laden suitcase on board in London. Fueling suspicions that this is indeed what happened, investigating police were told by a security guard at Heathrow that the Pan Am baggage storage area had been broken into on the night of the bombing.

The reported break-in at Heathrow was part of 600 pages of new and deliberately suppressed evidence that Megrahi’s defense could present at an appeal, which in 2007 the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, after a three-year investigation, recommended he be granted.

But before that appeal could be heard, the compassionate release of Megrahi, suffering from terminal prostate cancer, conveniently spared the potential embarrassment of all those involved in his dubious conviction. More significantly, it also averted awkward questions being raised, in the likely event of the Libyan being acquitted, about who actually planted the bomb, and why.

Reel Bad Muslims

Many of those who doubt Libya’s responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing, perhaps not surprisingly in the current climate, tend to suspect other Muslim countries of involvement. The most popular theory is that Iran hired the Syrian-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC) led by Ahmed Gibril to avenge the “accidental” shooting down by the USS Vincennes on July 3, 1988 of Iran Air Flight 655, which killed all 288 civilians on board.

Others believe that Abu Nidal, the founder of the infamous Black September terrorist group, may have been involved. If they’re right, it raises disturbing questions about who was ultimately responsible for the Lockerbie atrocity. In his fine biography of Nidal, A Gun for Hire, British journalist Patrick Seale confirms long-held suspicions that many in the Middle East have had about the “Palestinian terrorist” who did more than anyone to discredit the Palestinian cause. “Abu Nidal was undoubtedly a Mossad agent,” Seale asserts. “Practically every job he did benefited Israel.”

Interestingly, one theory which has the PFLP-GC collaborating with Abu Nidal on behalf of Iran, has been espoused by a former Mossad staffer, Yuval Aviv, whose New York-based investigative agency, Interfor, prepared a report for Pan Am’s insurers on the Lockerbie bombing.

Writing under the pen name Sam Green, Aviv also authored Flight 103, a fictional account of the Lockerbie tragedy he claims is “based solidly on real-life facts,” in which the vengeful Iranians enlist a Palestinian terrorist, Ahmed ‘The Falcon’ Shabaan, to do their dirty work. Aviv, who inspired Steven Spielberg’s Munich, hopes his director friend will convert his Lockerbie tale into another Hollywood blockbuster.

Hardly any mainstream commentators, however, have questioned the trustworthiness of a former Mossad agent, who retains close ties with the intelligence service, fingering Palestinians and Iran for a terrorist attack which killed 189 Americans, thereby blackening the reputation of two of Israel’s greatest foes in the minds of those it wishes to convince that the U.S. and Israel face a common enemy.

Dirty Tricks

Not everyone in the media has been as naive about Israeli machinations though. Writing in the Guardian just before the trial of the two Libyans, veteran American journalist Russell Warren Howe, in an excellent article titled “What if they are innocent?” analyses whether the Iranian government, Palestinian terrorists or Israeli intelligence were more likely perpetrators. Howe concludes, “Even if Megrahi and F’hima are found guilty of the most serious charges, there would still be a need for a new investigation: to decide what was Israel’s possibly major role in mass murder and deception of its main benefactor, the US.” Howe is suggesting that even if the Libyans, or other Arabs, had actually planted the bomb, they may still have been duped into doing so by Israeli agents.

Intriguingly, Howe cites a reference in Gordon Thomas’ book on Mossad, Gideon’s Spies,to a Mossad officer stationed in London who showed up in Lockerbie the morning after the crash to arrange for the removal of a suitcase from the crime scene. The suitcase, said to belong to Captain Charles McKee, a DIA officer who was killed on the flight, was later returned “empty and undamaged.”

Moreover, the idea of Libyan responsibility, Howe notes, seems to have originated in Israel. Again, he quotes Thomas, who says that a source at LAP, Mossad’s psychological warfare unit, informed him that “within hours of the crash, staff at LAP were working the phones to their media contacts urging them to publicise that here was ‘incontrovertible proof’ that Libya, through its intelligence service, Jamahirya, was culpable.”

It may also have been Mossad disinformation, Howe suspects, that induced the U.S. government to believe the Libyans were guilty. The day after the Lockerbie bombing, U.S. intelligence intercepted a radio message from Tripoli to a Libyan government office in Berlin that effectively said, “mission accomplished.”

Two years earlier, a similar message intercept had induced Ronald Reagan to order air strikes against Libya, killing over a hundred people, including Qaddafi’s two-year-old adopted daughter. But the message had been faked by Israel, according to Victor Ostrovsky, a former Mossad case officer, who described the operation in The Other Side of Deception, the second of two exposés he wrote about the Mossad after leaving the service.

Operation Trojan began in February 1986 when the Mossad secretly installed a communications device known as a “Trojan” in an apartment in Tripoli. The Trojan received messages broadcast by Mossad’s LAP on one frequency and automatically transmitted them on a different frequency used by the Libyan government. “Using the Trojan,” Ostrovsky writes, “the Mossad tried to make it appear that a long series of terrorist orders were being transmitted to various Libyan embassies around the world.” U.S. intelligence, as anticipated by the Israelis, intercepted the bogus messages, and believed them to be authentic — especially after receiving confirmation from the Mossad.

Within weeks of the Trojan being installed, two American soldiers were killed in an explosion at La Belle Discothèque, a nightclub in West Berlin frequented by U.S. servicemen. Assuming that Libya was responsible, nine days later the U.S. dropped 60 tons of bombs on Tripoli and Benghazi. Few suspected that the Americans had been tricked into the “retaliation” by Israel, whose subterfuge had punished Qaddafi for his support of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and further alienated the U.S from the Arab world.

Not all Americans are oblivious to Israeli wiles, however. Commenting on the Israeli intelligence service’s penchant for deception, Andrew Killgore, a former U.S. ambassador to Qatar, wrote in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, “Mossad’s specialty was dirty tricks… Its modus operandi had always been the same: pull off a dirty trick but make it appear somebody else had done it.”

As part of any new investigation to establish whether or not the Lockerbie bombing was another one of the Mossad’s “dirty tricks,” detectives might want to interview Issac Yeffet, the former chief of security for the Israeli airline, El Al, who in 1986 was commissioned by Pan Am to survey its security at a number of airports worldwide. As Killgore, in a separate article for the Washington Report, suggestively noted: “Yeffet may have been successful in maintaining perfect security for El Al at Ben-Gurion Airport. But his efforts at Heathrow Airport in London, one of the airports he surveyed for Pan Am, and to which he and his employees had full rein, failed to save Pan Am Flight 103.”

Still protesting his innocence, the dying Megrahi told reporters on his release, “The truth never dies.” That may be so. But as long as the Western media continue to believe that only Israel’s enemies would blow up a civilian airliner, the truth about Lockerbie is unlikely to ever reach a very wide audience.

You confront evil, you do not negotiate with it.

– Natan Sharansky

While it may be a long way from Tel Aviv to Pyongyang, Israel bears considerable responsibility for North Korea’s increasingly fraught relations with the world. Indeed, through its small but influential support network in the United States, the self-styled Jewish state has played a rarely acknowledged but arguably decisive role in undermining progress towards a peaceful resolution of America’s longest running conflict. Though totally oblivious to this unwarranted intervention by a seemingly distant and irrelevant power, hundreds of millions of Koreans, Chinese and Japanese could have paid, and may yet pay, a terrible price for Israel’s covert meddling in East Asian politics.

In his State of the Union Address delivered on 29 January, 2002, George W. Bush called Iraq, Iran and North Korea an “Axis of Evil” that was allegedly supporting terrorism and seeking weapons of mass destruction. It later emerged that the provocative phrase which arbitrarily linked Pyongyang to Israel’s two greatest regional rivals had been written by David Frum, Bush’s Canadian speechwriter. An ardent Zionist, Frum recently said that the occupied West Bank belongs to Israel but that Palestinians living there shouldn’t have the vote. He is also the co-author with Richard Perle of An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, in which the Likudnik neo-conservatives advocated a confrontational approach to North Korea.

Even more threatening from a North Korean perspective than being officially designated “evil” was the National Security Strategy of the United States announced by Bush in September 2002. Charles Krauthammer, a neo-conservative columnist for the Washington Post, coined the phrase “Bush doctrine” to describe the policy of preemptive strikes, which specifically targeted Iraq, Iran and North Korea. However, Philip Shenon, a New York Times reporter, claims in his book The Commission that it was Philip Zelikow, a neo-conservative member of Bush’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board later appointed executive director of the 9/11 Commission, who wrote the policy that was used to justify the invasion of Iraq on the pretext that its supposed “weapons of mass destruction” posed a threat to the United States.

Yet, on the eve of the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Zelikow told a crowd at the University of Virginia, “I’ll tell you what I think the real threat is, and actually has been since 1990. It’s the threat against Israel.” No doubt because this would not be, as Zelikow admitted, a “popular sell” to the American people, the grandiose words given Bush to read were somewhat less candid: “Our responsibility to history is clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.”

The “Zelikow doctrine” had an immediate, and probably foreseeable, catalysing effect on an already fearful North Korean regime. Bruce Cumings, a specialist in modern Korean history, wrote, “From October 2002 onward they acted as if their only deterrent to this irresponsible administration was a nuclear one, a decision that any general sitting in Pyongyang (or Tehran) would have made.” Writing in 2004, Cumings predicted that if North Korea were to develop a nuclear deterrent, it would be known as “Bush’s bomb.” But since it was the Israel-centered neo-conservatives in the Bush administration that scuttled the 1994 Agreed Framework which had frozen Pyongyang’s nuclear developments for eight years, perhaps it might be more accurate to call it “the neo-con bomb.”

If the North Koreans really had the capacity to hit America with a missile — and if Kim Jong-Il were sufficiently “crazy” (as the pro-Israeli media portrays him) to start a war with a global superpower that has up to 5,000 nuclear warheads in its arsenal — they may have considered their own preemptive strike against one particular target in Washington D.C. For the building at 1150 17th Street, home to such neo-con strongholds as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the now defunct Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and The Weekly Standard, is the source of much of Washington’s apparent animus toward Pyongyang.

It was there on November 22, 2004, for example, that William Kristol, the editor of the Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard, wrote a PNAC memo to “opinion leaders” entitled “Toward Regime Change in North Korea.” In the memo, Kristol praised an article in The Weekly Standard by Nicholas Eberstadt, “one of AEI’s in-house hawks on North Korea.” In “Tear Down This Tyranny,” Eberstadt had called for the ouster of Kim Jong-Il, to be achieved in part by “working around the pro-appeasement crowd in the South Korean government.”

For neo-cons like Kristol and Eberstadt, it is seemingly preferable to risk provoking war with North Korea than to “appease” an “evil tyrant” like Kim Jong-Il — as if Kim were another genocidal Hitler and the then South Korean leader Roh another naive Chamberlain. Such “moral clarity” presumably comes easier to those who live at a comfortably safe distance from the firing zone.

Eberstadt is also the author of The End of North Korea, whose title summed up the Bush administration’s policy toward Pyongyang, as a New York Times reporter was once told by Eberstadt’s AEI colleague John Bolton, Bush’s Under Secretary of State for Arms Control, whose hawkishness did much to wreck arms control. Bolton, described by the Zionist Organization of America as “one of Israel’s truest friends in the world,” sabotaged Secretary of State Colin Powell’s attempts to start nuclear disarmament negotiations with North Korea.

Project for the New Israeli Humanitarianism

While the infamous militarist policies of the pro-Israel neo-conservatives undoubtedly intimidated Pyongyang, the Israel lobby’s lesser known “humanitarian” activism played a complementary role in provoking the North Korean nuclear crisis.

The appointment of Bill Kristol’s friend and fellow neo-con Jay Lefkowitz as special envoy for human rights was one of the Bush administration’s more provocative acts toward North Korea.Lefkowitz, who considers legitimate criticism of Israel to be “anti-Semitism,” was not slow to criticize Pyongyang’s abuses, however. In January 2008, speaking at the AEI, he said, “The way the North Korean government treats its own people is inhumane and therefore deeply offensive to us. It should also offend free people around the world.” Leaving aside the hypocrisy of Lefkowitz’s selective condemnation, his undiplomatic language was hardly calculated to promote a smooth dialogue with the North Koreans.

Drawing on a study entitled “The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps,” Lefkowitz advocated linking humanitarian aid to human rights issues, a counterproductive strategy opposed by career diplomats in the State Department. As chief U.S. negotiator Christopher Hill put it, “We have no interest in weaponizing human rights.” The same, however, could not be said for Lefkowitz. As Suzy Kim and John Feffer wrote in Foreign Policy in Focus, “Lefkowitz deliberately overstepped his bounds to undermine the nuclear talks by linking them to human rights.”

“The Hidden Gulag” report had been published by the U.S. Committee on Human Rights in North Korea, an NGO which has among its officers and directors more than a fair share of pro-Israelis. It should, of course, strike people as a little odd to see the likes of Nicholas Eberstadt, Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Congressmen Stephen Solarz and Gary Ackerman, and Carl Gershman, the president of the National Endowment for Democracy, championing North Koreans’ human rights while at the same time condoning Israel’s human rights abuses against Palestinians.

Lefkowitz’s appointment as human rights envoy came about as a result of the U.S. Congress passing the North Korea Human Rights Act in 2004, legislation which his cousin, Michael Horowitz, played a key role in instigating. Horowitz, a senior fellow at the hawkishly pro-Israel Hudson Institute, hailed the passing of the bill as a “miracle” in an interview with Christianity Today. As director of Hudson’s Project for International Religious Liberty, he had mobilized Christian evangelicals to support the legislation based on the religious persecution of North Korea’s approximately 10,000 Christians.

Meanwhile, the plight of the rapidly dwindling Christian population in Israel and occupied Palestine, down from 350,000 in 1948 to about 175,000 today, goes unheeded by Horowitz’s evangelicals, many of whom are misled by Christian Zionist leaders like John Hagee to believe that the Bible endorses the modern state of Israel’s appropriation of Palestinian land.

But the prize for chutzpah in Israel’s human rights advocacy for North Koreans must surely go to Natan Sharansky. In 2005, the “acclaimed human rights activist” told a Freedom House sponsored symposium advocating regime change in North Korea, “The people of North Korea must be free!” That same year Sharansky resigned from the Israeli cabinet in protest over then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s removal of Jewish settlers from Gaza. As Housing Minister, Sharansky had, according to Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery, “systematically enlarged the settlements on expropriated Arab land in the West Bank, trampling on the human and national rights of the Palestinians.”

Nevertheless, Sharansky was such a major influence on George W. Bush’s foreign policy that he has been dubbed “Bush’s guru.” The thought that someone more extreme than Sharon helped shape the worldview of the world’s once most powerful leader is, as Avnery put it, “rather frightening.”

“You confront evil,” Sharansky told the Freedom House symposium, “you do not negotiate with it.” And that in a nutshell is the policy prescription pushed by Frum, Perle, Zelikow, Kristol, Eberstadt, Bolton (proof that you don’t have to be Jewish to be a Zionist), Lefkowitz, Horowitz, et al. on the Bush administration in its dealings with “evil” North Korea. The result of heeding that dangerously simplistic advice — a nuclear North Korea — has been an unmitigated failure for American diplomacy in East Asia.

But does Israel’s American lobby see its efforts to undermine negotiations with Pyongyang as a failure? Or to put it another way, does Israel actually benefit from the North Korean nuclear crisis?

With the U.S. having been induced by neo-con lies about weapons of mass destruction to eliminate the Iraqi threat to Israel, the focus of Israeli security concerns has shifted to the alleged Iranian threat. And the threat that an “unpredictable” nuclear-armed North Korea now supposedly poses to the United States is invariably cited by pro-Israelis in their efforts to push Washington toward war with Iran before its “mad Mullahs” too acquire nuclear weapons.

The real threat to Israel, however, is not that Iran is going to “wipe it off the map” (a mistranslation endlessly repeated by the media), but that its monopoly on nuclear weapons in the Middle East might end. For without that monopoly on the ultimate weapons of mass destruction, not only would Israel’s regional hegemonic ambitions be forestalled, but the apartheid Jewish state might be forced to pay a little more attention to the egregious human rights abuses closer to home.

Worried about the global economic crisis? It’s all in your head, says a leading financial expert.

And that’s the problem, according to Jeff Gates, author of the
highly-regarded Democracy at Risk: Rescuing Main Street from Wall Street, a sequel to The Ownership Solution: Toward a Shared Capitalism for the 21st Century, which was described by one reviewer as “the best book on economics for a generation,” and praised by Ralph Nader as “a Capitalist Manifesto, a blueprint for spreading the benefits of capitalism more equitably.”

In an interview with Japan’s Kansai Time Out magazine, Gates, a former counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance (1980-87), identifies the source of the current economic crisis as a “shared mindset” into which we have been induced to put our faith, to the grave detriment of the majority — but to the immense benefit of a very few.

Following the September 15, 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers about 460,000 Japanese had lost their jobs by the end of April, bringing the number of unemployed to 2.95 million. With 77 percent of people not receiving any government benefits, the already serious problem of homelessness is certain to get much worse, Bloomberg reporters Stuart Biggs and Masatsugu Horie wrote on April 26, 2009 in their article “‘Lehman Shock’ Fuels New Wave of Homeless in Osaka.”

While the events of last September on Wall Street may have come as a “shock” to many — not least those who suddenly found themselves out of work and on the streets — they were “perfectly predictable” to a close-knit group of “financial sophisticates,” Jeff Gates maintains.

“Reforms”

“Lehman’s demise traces its roots to 1982 when Reagan-era ‘reform’ of the Savings and Loan sector transformed a modest problem into a major disaster for mortgage markets,” Gates points out. “Then Clinton-era ‘reform’ of investor protections, led by Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin, former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, enabled the ‘financial supermarkets’ at the core of this collapse — including Citigroup where he became a senior executive alongside CEO Sandy Weill.”

These “reforms,” Gates says, led to a return to the “Depression-era conflicts of interest” that characterised the financial sector up to 1933 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law the regulatory Glass-Steagall Act, which prohibited banks from owning other financial companies.

“Rubin successor Larry Summers (now Barack Obama’s top economic adviser) fought for ‘reforms’ that de-regulated financial derivatives — magnifying the impact of the crash as those arcane arrangements grew from $88 trillion a decade ago to a market that now represents transactions with a face value of $600 trillion,” Gates says.

“Add to that toxic mix the easy credit policies of a central bank overseen by Alan Greenspan, a disciple of Ayn Rand, a Russian-Ashkenazi philosopher and market fundamentalist.”

The Fed Chairman’s praise for Wall Street’s financial “creativity” further “emboldened market-exploitative practices,” he adds.

Gates also points to the culpability of insurance giant AIG for failing to put aside reserves to cover the hugely profitable risks they took on in the newly de-regulated market, since they were “confident that taxpayers could be forced to pick up the tab,” which to date has come to $170 billion.

“Meanwhile the perpetrators — typified by Lehman CEO Richard Fuld — booked record profits and paid record bonuses from this multi-faceted fraud,” Gates says. “The gains were theirs; the losses ours.”

Money, Money, Money

But is there any evidence that this was a deliberate fraud?

“Systems analysts offer an acronym (“POSIWID”) to identify systemic flaws: the purpose of a system is what it does,” Gates explains.

“In financial systems, results are downstream of the ‘Chicago model’ — a shared mindset from which today’s results flow. Over the past
half-century, this market-fundamentalist perspective evolved into the ‘Washington’ consensus to emerge as the guiding principle of the World Trade Organization (WTO) now taking this model to global scale.”

What exactly does he mean by the “Chicago model”?

“At the core of this worldview lies a premise whose purpose is easily stated: ‘maximize financial returns and — trust us — all else will be fine.’ Faith in that perspective ensured today’s results,” Gates says.

“As this ‘Chicago’ frame of mind gained the force of law through the ‘law and economics’ movement, the result became a globalized operating system best described as ‘money-on-autopilot.’ There lies the blame for this collapse — in that narrow ‘consensus’ perspective.”

The “law and economics” movement referred to by Gates also traces its origins to the University of Chicago. As key opponents of financial regulation, this movement was heavily funded by the same Olin Foundation that also supported neoconservatism through its funding of neocon think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute.

This “Chicago” state of mind, Gates argues, had far-reaching consequences that could have been easily foreseen by its advocates.

“The results of this purpose-driven ‘operating system’ were guaranteed to concentrate wealth and income and thereby undermine both democracies and markets. By equating personal freedom with financial freedom, we were induced to freely embrace the very forces that now jeopardize freedom,” Gates says.

“Nowhere in this operating system is there any provision for the values essential to the long-term health of communities: fiscal foresight, civil cohesion and environmental sustainability. Money is the only value granted a voice.”

As to how they are getting away with it, Gates explains: “The source of this internalized fraud remains invisible because its operating system relies on that shared perspective. Its cause remains imperceptible because its source is a mental framework through which we were educated to filter our perception. Therein lies the blame for these fast-globalizing trends.”

Education, Gates argues, played a key role in the dissemination of the “Chicago” mindset to other countries such as Japan, particularly in the post-WWII period. “Since WWII, Japanese policy-makers have granted deference to the U.S. — including an education system in which Japanese were schooled in the same consensus economic beliefs as Americans.”

These oligarch-creating forces, he points out, “are imbedded in education. Both our peoples were taught to put their faith in a consensus ‘operating system’ guided by a very narrow bandwidth of values (i.e., money).”

The people in between

Jeff Gates’ latest book, Guilt By Association: How Deception and Self-Deceit Took America to War, which traces the corruption that plagues American politics to a network who “share an ideological bias sympathetic to Israel,” should be read by concerned citizens everywhere, but especially in the United States, where the “Chicago” mindset has been most deeply embedded in its economic and foreign policy-making.

Endorsed by former U.S. Ambassador Edward Peck and Illinois Congressman Paul Findley (1961-1983), Guilt By Association identifies those who have promoted aggressive economic and foreign policies that have been “ruinous” not only to America’s reputation but also to “moderate and secular Jews,” who, Gates points out, are often unfairly portrayed as “guilty by association” with the behaviour of these “elites and extremists.”

Who are these “elites and extremists,” and how do they make America appear “guilty by association”?

“When waging unconventional warfare, Defense Secretary Robert Gates points to the perilous role of ‘the people in between.’ Thus, for instance, while pro-Israelis induced the U.S. to wage war in Iraq with false and flawed intelligence, ‘the people in between’ created, promoted and reported intelligence ‘fixed’ around that pre-determined goal,” Gates explains.

“In the financial domain, ‘the people in between’ are securities bundlers, rating agencies and, most fundamentally, those who induce “the mark” (the public) to put their faith in the financial premise that enables this ongoing fraud. All flows downstream from a ‘consensus’ perspective –regardless whether the deception is a shared belief in Iraqi weapons of mass destruction or a consensus faith in the infallibility of unfettered financial markets. The modus operandi is identical — the displacement of facts with beliefs.”

Perhaps not coincidentally, the intellectual roots of neoconservatism can also be traced to Chicago, where University of Chicago Professor Albert Wohlstetter’s cadre of students included Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz. Wohlstetter himself had been a protégé of another University of Chicago Professor, Leo Strauss, considered to be the “intellectual godfather” of the neocons, who significantly advocated a “philosophy of deception.”

Robert Zoellick, Paul Wolfowitz’s successor as president of the World Bank, also typifies “the people in between,” in that he too weaves together the political and economic strands of the “Chicago” state of mind. Zoellick is another ardent Zionist, as signatory of the neocon Project for the New American Century, advocating in 1998 the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the destabilization of Muslim regimes throughout the Middle East. At the World Bank, Zoellick now plays a key role in globalizing the “Chicago” economic mindset.

In 2004, as U.S. Trade Representative, this one-time manager of Goldman Sachs, was very influential in Prime Minister Koizumi’s privatization of Japan’s Post Office. Postal privatization was, according to Gavan McCormack, “a further, large step in sustaining Washington’s Iraq mission” – a mission for which Zoellick’s neocon cronies were key instigators. Moreover, privatization allowed America’s “financial supermarkets” much coveted access to “the giant Japanese pool of savings.”

Toward a sustainable future

Through their failure to identify the source of the problem, government responses to the ongoing economic crisis will only make matters worse, maintains Gates. He sees little difference between responses to the crisis whether crafted in Tokyo or Washington.

“Same pig; different lipstick,” he quips, referring to Taro Aso’s $153 billion and Obama’s $787 billion stimulus plans.

“Both lawmakers seek to solve a systemic problem well downstream of its source. By piling on more interest-bearing debt without addressing the underlying problem, both men are unleashing long-term financial forces destined to make a bad situation worse — at a staggering cost,” he says.

“Both nations can anticipate stagnation and inflation while ‘the people in between’ continue to amass more assets (at distressed prices) and collect more interest on more taxpayer-secured debt. The pace is poised to quicken in this policy-enabled redistribution of wealth — from the bottom to the top.”

What then would Gates, who has counselled more than 35 countries on financial policy, advise Prime Minister Aso to do?

“The mindset is the problem,” he reiterates. “The consensus operating system includes a ‘closed system of finance’ guaranteed to concentrate wealth and income — and thereby destabilized democracies and markets. Those foreseeable results are made worse by relying solely on government debt as the means for creating money — and by depending on a one-size-fits-all national currency. With these design flaws left intact, nations are systemically unable to meet the needs of communities.”

So, what kind of financial system could actually meet the needs of communities?

“The solution,” Gates believes, “lies in combining financing techniques that broaden ownership with monetization techniques that secure currencies with the physical capital essential to healthy communities. Local hydrogen reformers, for instance, could back currencies able to stimulate local purchasing power while also hastening the transition to the Hydrogen Age.”

“Sustainable futures will be found in policies that decentralize monetization and make finance more inclusive and more accountable. That’s how Japan can begin to identify and displace ‘the people in between.’ And how other consensus-enamored nations can be freed of this systemic corruption.”

No doubt, “the people in between” wish that you had never heard of Jeff Gates, so as not to disturb your Chicago state of mind.

Inspired by the latest Israeli assault on Gaza, British playwright Carol Churchill’s “Seven Jewish Children” is a moving eight minute play which dramatizes the tragedy of Palestine from a Jewish perspective as Jewish adults struggle to explain seven key historical moments to a Jewish girl.

In Client State: Japan in the American Embrace, Gavan McCormack demonstrates how Japan’s apparent nationalist turn owes much to the need to conceal the country’s increasing subordination to American imperial designs. However, a closer examination of the driving forces behind the US Empire in the 21st century suggests that both countries may be serving a quite different agenda.

Rightly described as a “masterful” analysis by fellow Japan expert Chalmers Johnson, McCormack’s 2007 book expertly documents how Japan’s postwar “peace constitution” has been steadily attenuated to the point of meaninglessness, as Tokyo has consistently bowed to pressure from Washington to become more active in its support of US hegemony, culminating in a “merger” of their military forces in the wake of 9/11.

McCormack claims that this is “an agenda heavily in the American, rather than the Japanese national interest.” But in what sense could the extremely costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, now being expanded into Pakistan under the “antiwar” commander-in-chief Obama, be said to be in “the American interest”?

These illegal wars of aggression have been costly to America not only in terms of the trillions of dollars added to its ballooning national debt, but also in terms of the incalculable loss of credibility that it has suffered in the eyes of world opinion, appalled by the shameless lies about WMDs, the lurid scenes of torture in Abu Ghraib, and the massive casualties inflicted by high-tech weaponry on innocent civilians, whose lives are casually dismissed as “collateral damage” in the never-ending pursuit of the elusive Bin Laden.

The so-called War on Terror may be extremely profitable for weapons manufacturers, private military corporations, and the venal pro-war pundits they fund, but who else does it benefit?

Big Oil, says the antiwar left. But the “no blood for oil” adherents too may be misinformed, according to one leading analyst of the Iraq war. “Contrary to the view of most American progressives that oil, and specifically the interests of Big Oil, is the primary mover, there is no evidence that the major US oil corporations pressured Congress or promoted the war in Iraq or the current confrontation with Iran,” James Petras argues in The Power of Israel in the United States. “To the contrary: there is plenty of evidence that they are very uneasy about the losses that may result from an Israeli attack on Iran.”

And as for the American people, or at least those lucky enough to hold their jobs in the coming Wall Street-induced depression, they will be paying dearly in greatly increased taxes for their government’s folly for the foreseeable future.

Considering all this, it is difficult not to concur with the conclusion of a policy paper published by the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep) that the War on Terror has been “for the most part, extremely damaging to US interests.”

The 2003 paper, “Clean Break or Dirty War?” by Irmep, a Washington-based nonprofit organization that studies US-Middle East policy formulation, shows how policies originally prepared for Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996 by a study group which included the likes of Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser under the title “A Clean Break: A Strategy for Securing the Realm” came to shape US foreign policy under the Bush administration.

“A Clean Break” (ACB) advocated getting rid of Saddam Hussein, and the destabilisation or overthrow of the governments of Iran, Lebanon, Syria and Saudi Arabia for Israel to be truly safe. Many of the same themes were repeated in the Project for the New American Century’s 2000 document “Rebuilding America’s Defences,” which, after the “catastrophic and catalysing event” of 9/11, became the official US policy of “preemptive war” in the US National Security Strategy of 2002, authored by PNAC signatory Paul Wolfowitz.

As the IRmep paper explains, “…no set of policies ever come to fruition without an active and vocal distribution and implementation network.” This small but influential neocon network,” it is argued, “have achieved amazing success at seasoning and baking ACB policy agenda items into a tenuous mold as ‘vital interests’ of the United States itself.”

The IRmep paper damningly concludes: “Many US actions are simply so inexplicable that consideration of their chief benefactor, Israel, is the only reasonable explanation. And as Americans dismiss Arab government charges that Israel is attacking them by proxy across the region, the evidence shows that the Arabs are correct. ‘A Clean Break’ is, at heart, an Israeli proclamation of ‘Dirty War.’”

The spies who love US

Indeed, Americans recently got an inkling of just how corrupted their political system has been by Israeli interests, or at least they would have if the mainstream media had given the latest twist in the AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) spy scandal the serious attention it deserved. For those who haven’t been following the story on Antiwar.com, where Justin Raimondo, Grant F. Smith, Philip Giraldi and others have written extensively about it, here’s what happened.

Jeff Stein, who writes for Congressional Quarterly, reported in April that two former national security officials had read transcripts of National Security Agency wiretaps in which Democrat Congresswoman Jane Harman was overheard talking to a “suspected Israeli agent” who wanted her to lobby the Justice Department on behalf of two former AIPAC officials under indictment for violating the 1917 Espionage Act. The two lobbyists, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, were charged with passing on classified information about Iran to the press and the Israeli embassy, which they had received from Colonel Lawrence Franklin, who had been a top Iran analyst in Douglas Feith’s office at the Pentagon before Franklin pled guilty to espionage in 2005. In return for Harman’s assistance, the Israeli operative promised to pressure House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to give Harman the chair of the House Intelligence Committee by threatening to withhold the political contributions of Haim Saban if she didn’t.

It was not a threat to be taken lightly, as Saban, the billionaire Israeli-American media mogul, had been the largest overall contributor to the Democratic National Committee during the 2001-2002 cycle, when, according to Matthew Yglesias, “the party leadership was backing the Iraq War.”

In case there are some outraged Democrats who might protest that Saban’s support for the party was probably not just about Iraq, that he more than likely also approved of the Democrats’ liberal domestic policies, Saban’s own words should disabuse them of that notion. On September 5, 2004 he told the New York Times, “I’m a one-issue guy and my issue is Israel.”

Considering that this self-confessed monomaniac used to spend hours on the phone with Ariel Sharon, the so-called “man of peace” who in a saner world would have been hauled to the Hague for war crimes, Saban’s influence over the Democrats should be cause for concern, to say the least.

Now that the Iraqi “threat” to Israel has been effectively neutralized by the American invasion and seemingly endless occupation (America’s West Bank?), Saban’s current paramount concern appears to be the “existential danger” that Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons now pose to Israel, a state which already has hundreds of nuclear weapons – the only one in the Middle East which does. Yet Israel is also the only one which is not under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the only one which has not acceded to the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Despite these facts, Saban’s recent acquisition of Univision, the largest Spanish-language broadcaster in the US, as part of a wider AIPAC outreach strategy to the growing Hispanic community, is probably intended to convince its 3.7 million viewers of the urgent need to spill more American blood, much of it Hispanic, in curbing the Iranian “threat.”

Lest anyone dismiss Haim Saban as an isolated ideologue attempting to use his wealth – he’s the 102nd richest person in America – to remake US foreign policy in the image of the Likud party, consider that close to 60 percent of Democratic Party funding (compared to 35 percent for the Republican Party) comes from mainly hardline pro-Israeli Jews, unrepresentative of American Jews in general, who tend to be antiwar unless Israel is directly involved.

Rosen, another PNAC signatory, even had the chutzpah to lead the witch-hunt that prevented Charles Freeman from becoming chairman of the National Intelligence Council, practically smearing the respected diplomat as an “anti-Semite” for his failure to confuse American interests with Israel’s. In that key position, Freeman would have been responsible for supplying the President with sound intelligence about genuine threats facing America, as opposed to the fake intelligence that led to the Iraq war, some of which made its way to the White House from Ariel Sharon’s office via Douglas Feith’s Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon, as recounted in Julian Borger’s 2003 Guardian article, “The Spies Who Pushed For War.”

You’d think Rosen would have kept a lower profile at least until his own trial was over, which was ultimately quashed in early May, apparently due to White House pressure. But perhaps he was confident in the knowledge that in Washington Israel’s security is “sacrosanct,” as Obama assured his AIPAC sponsors, whereas America’s security seems to be for sale to the highest bidder, at least as long as most Americans are kept in the dark about the costs of their “special relationship” with Israel.

Dying for a lie

While US taxpayers had subsidised Israel to the tune of at least $108 billion up to 2006 (currently $3 billion a year) the Japanese too have paid dearly for their subordination to a US Empire prone to fight Israel’s wars.

“The seriously ill Japanese economy takes every possible step to prop up the equally ailing US economy, pouring Japanese savings into the black hole of American illiquidity in order to subsidize the US global empire, fund its debt, and finance its over-consumption,” writes McCormack. “Japan has become the sine qua non of Washington’s global, superpower strategy and status.”

Japan’s commitment to the War on Terror has brought added costs. One estimate puts the cost of Japan’s post-9/11 “rear support” at $90 billion. Tokyo promised another $5 billion for rebuilding an Iraq that had been destroyed by lies.

But Japan’s treasure is no longer sufficient to satisfy Washington’s demands of its “client state.”

Richard Armitage, yet another PNAC signatory, once told an Australian audience that an “alliance” meant that “Australian sons and daughters…would be willing to die to help defend the United States. That’s what an alliance means.” As long as the Israel lobby maintains its stranglehold over US foreign policy, that also means being willing to die to defend Israel against its neighbours, who increasingly see its drive for regional hegemony as a real threat to their existence. And as long as Japan remains in the American embrace, it won’t be long before Japanese parents will be expected to make a similar sacrifice.

Now if only there were a powerful Japan lobby in Washington – let’s call it AJPAC – things might be a lot different.

This article has also been published by Dissident Voice, The Palestine Chronicle, Global Research, OpEd News, Media Monitors Network, Uruknet and lots of other sites. It even had Paul Wolfowitz twittering about it.

“[I]f action is not taken now, we will all be threatened by a much greater peril … (for) no gas mask and no vaccine can protect against nuclear weapons.”

As we all now know, that was, in Buchanan’s colourful phrase, “horse manure of a high grade.” But most Americans haven’t yet learned to treat Netanyahu’s scaremongering with the contempt it deserves. And now, cautions Buchanan, Barack Obama seems to be making the same mistake that George W. Bush made in listening to Israeli “advice” on the “threat” posed to America by another one of Israel’s rivals in the Middle East:

“By setting a six-month deadline, Obama has given an incentive to Israel, AIPAC, the neocons, and even al-Qaeda, which wants Shia Iran bombed back to the Stone Age, to provoke collisions with Iran, until December, then demand that Obama keep his word, suspend talks, impose severe sanctions, and start us on the escalator to war.”

How many more unnecessary wars have to be started before Americans realize they are fighting Israel’s wars for hegemony in the Middle East?

“Israeli behavior suggests that the pre-staging for a terrorist attack may be underway to advance indirectly what Tel Aviv cannot achieve directly.”

Regarding the recent meeting between Benjamin Netanyahu, the man who coined the phrase “war on terrorism,” and Barack Obama, whom James Petras described as “America’s First Jewish President,” Gates says,

“If President Obama in any way links the two-state solution to concessions on Iran, he is inviting a terrorist attack. If history is any guide, that attack will be accompanied by an orgy of evidence implicating Hezbollah, with Iran the plausible Evil Doer.”

It certainly wouldn’t be the first time that Israel had tried to frame an enemy in order to induce America to attack it. As former CIA officer Philip Giraldi wrote in “If Iran is Attacking It Might Really be Israel”:

“Those who argue that Israel would never do such a thing should think again. Israel is willing to behave with complete ruthlessness towards the US if they feel that the stakes are high enough, witness the attack on the USS Liberty and the bombing of the US Consulate in Alexandria in the 1950s. If they now believe that Iran is a threat that must be eliminated it is not implausible to assume that they will stop at nothing to get the the United States to do it for them, particularly as their air force is only able to damage the Iranian nuclear program, not destroy it.”

Many American lives – and far more Arab and Muslim lives – will be lost until enough Americans accept Gates’ description of the sordid nature of their “special relationship” with Israel, and do something about it. In the introduction to the must-read Guilt By Association, this is how Gates encapsulated that relationship:

“Six decades ago, an enclave of Jewish elites and extremists induced Harry Truman, a Christian Zionist president, to recognize Zionism as a sovereign entity in the Middle East. Rather than operate as a loyal ally, that enclave has proven itself an enemy.”

“In the UK press one frequently finds tough criticism of Israel. See, for example, this recent essay by Mark Steel in the Independent, a thoroughly mainstream UK paper. One cannot imagine a similar essay appearing in the New York Times, or the Washington Post, or the Los Angeles Times, or the Wall Street Journal, or USA Today, or indeed any other major American newspaper. Why not? Perhaps more taboo than mentioning the ‘Israel Lobby,’ is asking what’s behind it, what makes it different than the tobacco lobby, the NRA, or the AARP? To get at this vexing issue I turned to an extraordinarily distinguished leftist academic, Dr. James Petras. Jim is one of the very, very few people that I know of who reasons sensibly about the problem of Zionist influence and who isn’t afraid to speak out.”

During the interview, Petras expressed his disillusionment with Jewish American intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky, a former co-author, and Norman Finkelstein, a former student, who both downplay the significance of the Israel Lobby in determining US foreign policy. In contrast, he mentions Jeff Blankfort, Steve Lendman, Jeff Halper and Ilan Pappé as just some of the Jewish intellectuals he has found helpful to his critique of what he calls the Zionist Power Configuration.

Discussing international efforts to criminalize criticism of Israel, Kenney remarked to Petras that the Zionist thought police, which Petras said operates as “a kind of organized McCarthyism [only] much more dangerous than Joe McCarthy ever was,” hadn’t noticed him yet. Petras retorted, “It means you have to do more!”