[Peace-discuss] Wayne Madsen on Bush, neo-cons, and Israeli right-wingers

[ndahlhei at uiuc.edu]

The Joseph Wilson vs. Bush Administration battle runs deep 
as the arrogance of the neo-cons in outing Wilson's wife 
Valerie Plame as a CIA agent with Brewster and Jennings over 
her husband's exposure of the great Niger uranium yellow 
cake lie is causing the CIA to fight the neo-con crowd in 
Bush's Pentagon.  This scandal runs deep and goes right to 
the heart of the Iraq war.  Wayne Madsen explains:

Winds of Change:

Troubled Waters Ahead For the Neo Cons

by
Wayne Madsen

[The Bush-Cheney campaign is racing toward November. But it 
isn't only running toward the raw power it loves. It's 
running away from the punishment it fears. In this late-
breaking story, FTW's Wayne Madsen maps out the lines of 
force in the current Plame and Chalabi scandals, showing 
them to be nodes of interpersonal influence and compromise 
that may soon crack the administration in half. The neocons' 
dark alliance with the right wing of Israeli politics has 
brought them enormous power. But it's unstable power, 
vulnerable to legal sanction and due process at the right 
pressure points. As Watergate proved decades ago, even a 
dying legal infrastructure can still throw a few jabs once 
in a while - if the CIA wants it to. --JAH]

August 11, 2004 0800 PDT (FTW) - The winds that have favored 
the neo-cons and their political and financial masters since 
George W. Bush's ascension to power may now be turning 
against them at gale force strength. There is a reason why 
Richard Perle and his American Enterprise Institute (AEI) 
friends, including "Second Lady" Lynne Cheney and former 
Reagan National Security Council staffer Michael Ledeen, 
were uncomfortable when Iraq con man and Iraqi Governing 
Council member Ahmed Chalabi's offices in Baghdad were 
raided this past May by Iraqi police, FBI and CIA officers. 
The Baghdad money trail may soon lead to Washington, DC. The 
sinewy links between the neo-cons, Ariel Sharon's Likud 
government, and the Chalabis should be a definite cause for 
concern by some Bush administration officials, and 
particularly troubling for Mrs. Cheney, who reportedly sits 
upon a $125,000 AEI fellowship funded by Likud Party 
interests.

The Chalabi files recovered by U.S. intelligence and law 
enforcement provided enough information for the FBI to begin 
a criminal investigation of a Baghdad-Jerusalem-Washington 
syndicate that is profiteering from America's misguided 
invasion and occupation of Iraq. The investigation led to 
shadowy Israeli-owned firms registered in Delaware and 
Panama that were fraudulently obtaining contracts and sub-
contracts to provide everything from cellular phones and VIP 
security to the interrogation of Iraqi prisoners using 
seconded members of Israel's feared Unit 1391 "special 
techniques" interrogation center. Not only were these firms 
operating in Iraq with the concurrence of the neo-cons in 
the Pentagon but some U.S. government officials were 
personally benefiting from the contracts. 

Peeling apart the Chalabi files demonstrated that the neo-
con agenda for Iraq extended far beyond political ideology, 
into a realm where law enforcement can be most effective: 
fraud. 

According to Pentagon and Justice Department sources, U.S. 
investigators discovered that Ahmad Chalabi and his business 
partners were involved in fraudulently obtaining cellular 
phone licenses in Iraq. The Pentagon's Undersecretary of 
Defense for International Technology Security John (Jack) 
Shaw smelled a neo-con rat when the Iraqi Coalition 
Provisional Authority (CPA), in late 2003, awarded cellular 
phone contracts to three companies - Orascom, Atheer, and 
Asia-Cell - with ties to Ahmed Chalabi. As with all those 
who challenge the impropriety and illegal activities of the 
neo-cons, Shaw was, in turn, charged with improperly 
steering Iraq cell phone contracts to Qualcomm and Lucent. 
However, it is Shaw, reported by his longtime colleagues to 
be a solid and trustworthy public servant, who has the 
confidence of law enforcement, Pentagon investigators, and 
the military brass. Anything with Ahmed Chalabi's 
fingerprints on it also bears the fingerprints of his nephew 
Salem Chalabi. Salem, named as the chief prosecutor in 
Saddam Hussein's trial, is a law partner of L. Marc Zell, a 
Jerusalem-based attorney who was the law partner of Douglas 
Feith - the head of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans 
that concocted phony intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass 
destruction and ties to Al Qaeda with the assistance of 
Likud operatives seconded by Ariel Sharon's government. 

The law firm of Feith & Zell, in concert with Perle, was 
instrumental in funneling hundreds of millions of dollars 
from Arab and Muslim countries to the Bosnian government 
during that nation's civil war. While that effort was 
ostensibly designed to assist the Bosnians to purchase 
weapons, officials familiar with its actual operation 
reported that some of the arms and money "spilled over" to 
Al Qaeda and Iranian Pasdaran forces in the Balkans.

The neo-con attack on Shaw was predictable considering their 
previous attacks on Ambassador Joe Wilson, his wife Valerie 
Plame, former U.S. Central Command chief General Anthony 
Zinni, former counter-terrorism coordinator Richard Clarke, 
former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, CIA counter-
terrorism agent Michael Scheuer (the "anonymous" author of 
Imperial Hubris who has recently been gagged by the Bush 
administration), fired FBI translator Sibel Edmonds (who 
likely discovered a penetration by Israeli and other 
intelligence assets using the false flag of the Turkish 
American Council and who also has been gagged by the Bush 
administration), and all those who took on the global 
domination cabal. But Shaw showed incredible moxie. When he 
decided to investigate Pentagon Inspector General Reports 
that firms tied to Perle and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul 
Wolfowitz were benefiting from windfall profit contracts in 
Iraq, Shaw decided to go to Iraq himself to find out what 
was going on. When Shaw was denied entry into Iraq by U.S. 
military officers (yes, a top level official of the Defense 
Department was denied access to Iraq by U.S. military 
personnel!), he decided to sneak into the country disguised 
as a Halliburton contractor. Using the cover of Cheney's old 
company to get the goods on Cheney's friends' illegal 
activities was yet another masterful stroke of genius by 
Shaw. But it also earned him the wrath of the neo-cons. They 
soon leaked a story to the Los Angeles Times claiming that 
Shaw actually snuck into Iraq to ensure that Qualcomm (on 
whose board sat a friend of Shaw's) was awarded a lucrative 
cell network contract.

But nothing could be further from the truth. Shaw, who 
worked for Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, represented 
the Old Guard Republican entity that in August 2003 set up 
shop in the Pentagon right under the noses of Rumsfeld, 
Wolfowitz, and Feith to investigate the neo-con cabal and 
their illegal contract deals. The entity, known as the 
International Armament and Technology Trade Directorate, was 
soon shut down as a result of neo-con pressure. Not to be 
deterred, Shaw continued his investigation of the neo-cons. 
Although the neo-cons told the Los Angeles Times that the 
FBI was investigating Shaw, the reverse was the case: the 
FBI was investigating the neo-cons, particularly Perle and 
Wolfowitz, for fraudulent activities involving Iraqi 
contracts. And in worse news for the neo-cons: Secretary of 
Defense Donald Rumsfeld was giving the Inspector General's 
and Shaw's investigations a "wink and a nod" of approval. 

The financial stakes for the Pentagon are high - the Iraqi 
CPA's Inspector General recently revealed that over $1 
billion of Iraqi money was missing from the audit books on 
Iraqi contracts. For Shaw and the FBI, it was a matter of 
what they suspected for many years - that Perle, Wolfowitz, 
and their comrades were running entities that ensured 
favorable treatment for Israeli activities - whether they 
were business opportunities in a U.S.-occupied Arab country 
or protecting Israeli spies operating within the U.S. 
defense and intelligence establishments.

Shaw certainly must have recalled how, during the Reagan 
administration, an Israeli spy named Jonathan Pollard was 
able to steal massive amounts of sensitive U.S. intelligence 
over a long period of time and hand it over to his Israeli 
control officer, a dangerous and deadly agent provocateur 
named Rafael "Rafi" Eitan. That had disastrous effects on 
U.S. intelligence operations throughout the world because 
some of the documents were handed by the Israelis to the 
Soviets in return for letting more Soviet Jews emigrate to 
Israel. 

Shaw must have also recalled that when a young National 
Security Council staffer named Douglas Feith was suspected 
of being an Israeli agent of influence, he was stripped of 
his job and security clearance by then- National Security 
Adviser Bill Clark but soon managed to find another job (and 
another top level clearance) under then Deputy Defense 
Secretary Richard Perle. 

And it was certainly known that during Pollard's subsequent 
appeal of his life sentence for spying for Israel, one of 
his attorneys was none other than right-wing stalwart and 
neo-con friend, Ted Olsen, the former Solicitor General of 
the United States under Ashcroft and the person in charge of 
all U.S. attorneys. It was from Olsen's cadre of U.S. 
Attorneys that special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald was 
selected to investigate the Valerie Plame / Brewster, 
Jennings White House leak to the media and perhaps other 
high crimes by neo-con officials of the Bush administration.

Fitzgerald continues to expand his case against the leakers 
of Plame's identity. But he may be getting more than he 
originally bargained for. As his investigation expanded into 
the bowels of the Pentagon, he was bound to discover that 
the treachery of the neo-cons was not merely confined to the 
leaking of the name of a covert CIA officer - disastrous in 
itself - but coupled with other activities that call into 
question the loyalties and financial dealings of those who 
swore an oath to the U.S. Constitution. 

With Ashcroft's deputy, James Comey, the person who 
appointed Fitzgerald, finding himself increasingly frozen 
out of Ashcroft's inner sanctum deliberations, it is clear 
that the neo-cons are worried about what Fitzgerald is 
discovering and how far his investigation will go. Also 
unusual was the fact that as Fitzgerald's case began to gain 
steam - with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney both retaining 
criminal defense attorneys - FBI Director Robert Mueller 
suddenly transferred the lead FBI agent on the Plame case, 
John C. Eckenrode, a well-seasoned 29-year veteran of the 
bureau, to head up the FBI's Philadelphia office. An FBI 
spokesman in Philadelphia said that such sudden transfers, 
in the middle of major investigations, sometimes, 
just "happen."


Make no mistake about it: the violation of the 1982 
Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 by the 
disclosure of Plame's identity and that of her non-official 
cover corporate umbrella organization (Brewster, Jennings & 
Associates) along with its official counterpart, the CIA's 
Nonproliferation Center - had a disastrous impact on the 
ability of the United States to track the proliferation of 
weapons of mass destruction around the world. At least one 
anonymous star (representing a covert U.S. agent killed 
while working abroad) placed on the CIA's Wall of Honor 
during the past year was reportedly a direct result of the 
disastrous disclosures from Cheney's office. The political 
vendettas of the neo-cons in exposing Plame's dangerous work 
and retaliating against Wilson's revelations about Bush's 
use of bogus intelligence regarding a fanciful Iraqi uranium 
shopping spree in Niger ensured that America's military-
intelligence complex was going to seek a final accounting 
with the neo-cons. And a final accounting they are getting, 
in spades.

Adding insult to injury, neither the CIA nor FBI were happy 
that Israeli spies operating under the cover of Israeli "art 
students' and moving van operators, and who were picked up 
by federal agents and local "first responder" law 
enforcement officers before and after 911, were quickly 
deported by immigration officers before they could be fully 
interrogated. The penetration of FBI and other federal law 
enforcement data networks and databases by Israeli software 
and telecommunications companies working under U.S. 
government contracts has also left a bitter taste in the 
mouths of federal law enforcement and intelligence personnel.

So now, it is payback time. The recent arrest warrants 
issued by the Iraqi government for Ahmed and Salem Chalabi 
(Ahmed's for counterfeiting Iraqi dinars and Salem's for 
murdering an Iraqi Finance Ministry official) indicates that 
Shaw's instincts about the fraud engaged in by them and 
their neo-con friends in the Pentagon were right on the 
money. Let us ponder that news again: the lead prosecutor 
against Saddam Hussein murders an official of the Iraqi 
Finance Ministry - an individual that just may have known 
something about what happened to $1 billion in missing Iraqi 
revenues. The accused is a partner of an Israeli-U.S. lawyer 
who is a close colleague of leading neo-cons in the Pentagon 
(some of whom are also dual U.S.-Israeli citizens) and the 
nephew of a man who was supported bureaucratically by a 
former CIA Director (James Woolsey), financially by hundreds 
of millions of dollars from the budget of the Defense 
Intelligence Agency, and politically by a think tank (AEI) 
that includes the wife of the Vice President of the United 
States. Uncle Ahmed was also a personal guest of George W. 
and Laura Bush in the VIP box at the 2004 State of the Union 
address. The President and First Lady welcomed a person who 
now is now an accused criminal to America's State of the 
Union address, a person whose nephew is now an accused 
murderer! John Le Carre could not have come up with a better 
international thriller scenario. 

The recent decision by the chief judge in the Plame leak to 
order NBC's Tim Russert to testify about just who it was at 
the White House that contacted him about Plame's identity, 
while troubling for First Amendment freedom of the press 
protections, is an indication that time is growing short for 
the leakers. Three months before a U.S. presidential 
election, that could be a crucial windfall for John Kerry 
and the Democratic Party.

The neo-cons hoped the focus of the election campaign would 
be Saddam Hussein's trial. Instead, it may be the trials of 
the Chalabis and potentially other members of the Iraqi 
National Congress, the entity that was nurtured by Perle, 
Wolfowitz, Feith, and Woolsey. However, the Chalabis escaped 
from Iraq before they could be arrested. If they turn up in 
the United States or in a member country of the 
laughable "coalition of the willing," the Bush 
administration and the neo-cons will be caught between a 
virtual rock and a hard place. If they refuse to hand over 
the Chalabis, their true motives will be on display for the 
entire world to see. If they help to turn over the Chalabis, 
they will be in a position to rat out their neo-con friends 
on the fraud already discovered by Shaw, the IGs of the 
Pentagon and CPA, the FBI, and the CIA. The neo-cons should 
never have underestimated by the CIA. When the agency came 
under attack, its allies were able to marshal all their 
impressive resources, including Bush 41 confidants C. Boyden 
Gray, Brent Scowcroft, James Baker III and even George H. W. 
Bush himself. The conflict between father and son now rivals 
that found in any Shakespearean tragedy. 

And the penetration of the Pentagon over the past three 
years by those with close connections to Likud interests 
cannot sit well with either former Reagan Defense Secretary 
Caspar Weinberger or former National Security Agency (NSA) 
Director and CIA Deputy Director Bobby Ray Inman, who 
ordered a severing of U.S. intelligence sharing with Israel 
after the Pollard affair and other Israeli penetrations of 
NSA signals intelligence programs through joint Israeli-
NSA/CIA communications and satellite intelligence projects 
known as DINDI and PYREX, respectively. Those contracts were 
eventually canceled after Israeli engineers used friendly 
and sympathetic U.S. contract engineers working for RCA and 
Bendix Field Engineering to obtain Sensitive Compartmented 
Information (SCI) intelligence on NSA and CIA operations in 
the Middle East and around the world, including technical 
details of how the NSA intercepted microwave communications 
and information on a classified satellite intelligence 
system called MAROON SHIELD. The fact that Ahmed Chalabi, an 
ally of Pollard's old friends in the Pentagon, was recently 
caught passing on NSA cryptologic intelligence to Iran on 
the agency's ability to crack Iranian diplomatic and 
military codes must have served as a painful reminder to 
Weinberger, Inman, and other U.S. intelligence veterans who 
remember the duplicity of the Israelis going as far back as 
the purposeful 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, an 
NSA surveillance ship. It also ensured that the Republican 
Old Guard would continue to coalesce into a united front to 
ensure the ultimate routing of the neo-cons from their party.

There may yet be a silver lining in the mess brought about 
by the neo-cons. In addition to possible indictments of 
Libby, Wolfowitz, and others for everything ranging from 
contract fraud, to disseminating - via an Italian con man 
named Rocco Martino (a close confidant of Iran-contra 
Manucher Ghorbanifar with whom Ledeen rekindled a 
relationship in the lead-up to the Iraq fiasco) - Niger 
government documents known to be false, and leaking the name 
of a covert CIA agent and her proprietary firm, there may be 
a settling of accounts with Israel over the involvement of 
it and its agents of influence in the various scams that 
prodded the U.S. into a war in Iraq. 

Every recent Israeli Prime Minister - Yitzhak Shamir, 
Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak, 
and Ariel Sharon - have demanded that Pollard be released by 
the United States and allowed to go to Israel. And every 
American administration - that of Reagan, Bush 41, Clinton, 
and up to now - Bush 43 - has refused. But it may be time 
for a deal with the Israelis - a deal that would, for once, 
favor U.S. national security interests over those of Israel. 
As the influence of the neo-cons drastically falls, the idea 
of a Cold War-style agent swap is gaining momentum. If 
Israel would release the formerly jailed Israeli nuclear 
scientist and convert to Christianity Mordechai Vanunu from 
a virtual house arrest in Jerusalem, the United States would 
release Pollard, who was granted Israeli citizenship after 
his imprisonment. Pollard's breaches of U.S. security, while 
very serious, have been mitigated by further advances in 
U.S. spy satellite and other surveillance technology over 
the years. But Vanunu's knowledge could be very helpful to 
the United States - so much so that a former Mossad chief 
revealed that the Israeli spy agency actually contemplated 
assassinating the scientist rather than forcibly kidnapping 
him from London.

One caveat on a deal - since when it comes to intelligence 
matters, Israel cannot be trusted to deal in good faith - 
Vanunu would be released and given a medical examination by 
independent American medical personnel before Pollard is 
turned over to the Israelis. The U.N. checkpoint in divided 
Nicosia, Cyprus might serve as the perfect "Checkpoint 
Charlie" for such a swap. Vanunu would be turned over to the 
Americans from the Greek side and into the relatively 
Israeli-Russian Mafia-free Turkish Northern Cyprus where he 
would be examined and given a clean bill of health (meaning 
no sudden "heart problems"), after which Pollard would be 
handed over to the Israelis on the Greek side. 

The United States, after suffering major losses in its 
ability to track the proliferation of nuclear weapons 
because of the neo-con leaks and disinformation, would have 
a new intelligence asset in Vanunu - someone who had inside 
information about Israel's illegal acquisition of nuclear 
technology for years. Even though he was jailed in 1986, 
some of the illegal international nuclear trade networks 
operating out of the former U.S.S.R. and Eastern bloc - 
which Israel used to its own advantage and as a supply 
pipeline to its own Dimona nuclear weapons plant - may yet 
yield important intelligence for the CIA's Nonproliferation 
Center. Let Valerie Plame, whose more recent expertise in 
international nuclear proliferation would complement 
Vanunu's prior knowledge of such activities, serve as his 
debriefing officer - with a commensurate promotion in rank. 
Vanunu may even be useful in the continuing FBI criminal 
investigations of Israeli intelligence activities directed 
against the United States in the early 1980s - activities 
that continue to implicate senior members of the current 
Bush administration. In all, such a deal would be a major 
win for the national security of the United States.


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Wayne Madsen is the author of the forthcoming book: "Jaded 
Tasks: Big Oil, Black Ops and Brass Plates." He was with the 
National Security Agency under the Reagan administration. He 
is now a syndicated columnist and Washington,DC-based 
investigative journalist.