[Peace-discuss] "Realists" (not Neocons) attack Hamas
C. G. Estabrook
galliher at uiuc.edu
Wed Dec 31 20:01:34 CST 2008
Democracy Now!
March 05, 2008
How the Bush Administration Lied to Congress and Armed Fatah
to Provoke Palestinian Civil War Aiming to Overthrow Hamas
Vanity Fair reports that the White House tried to organize the armed overthrow
of the Hamas-led government after Hamas swept Palestinian elections two years
ago. According to the article, the Bush administration lied to Congress and
boosted military support for rival Palestinian faction Fatah in the aim of
provoking a Palestinian civil war they thought Hamas would lose. We speak with
David Rose, the journalist who broke the story. His latest article for Vanity
Fair magazine is called “The Gaza Bombshell.”
AMY GOODMAN: The article reports the White House tried to organize the armed
overthrow of the Hamas-led government after Hamas swept Palestinian elections
two years ago. According to Vanity Fair, the administration boosted military
support for rival Palestinian faction Fatah in the aim of provoking a
Palestinian civil war they thought Hamas would lose. Vanity Fair dubbed the
episode “Iran Contra 2.0,” a reference to the Reagan administration’s funding of
Nicaraguan Contras by covertly selling arms to Iran.
A former top Bush administration official said he believes Hamas’s seizure of
power in Gaza last year may have likely been a preemptive measure against the
anticipated US-backed coup. The official, David Wurmser, served as Vice
President Cheney’s Middle East adviser until he resigned in July of 2007, a
month after Hamas took over. Wurmser said, “There is a stunning disconnect
between the President’s call for Middle East democracy and this policy. It
directly contradicts it.”
The Bush administration is denying the story. State Department spokesperson Tom
Casey called the article “absurd,” “untrue” and “ridiculous.”
We’re joined now by journalist David Rose, author of the Vanity Fair piece. It’s
called “The Gaza Bombshell.” David Rose joins us from London in England.
Thanks for joining us, David Rose. Lay out what you learned.
DAVID ROSE: Well, just to deal first with this administration denial, of course,
it’s just a blanket denial with no detail. But what the piece is based on is,
first of all, a series of authenticated confidential documents, which lay out
the administration’s strategy, and, secondly, interviews that I conducted both
on the record with David Wurmser and John Bolton, the former UN ambassador, and
a considerable number of other senior officials in both the State Department and
the Pentagon, as well as officials inside the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah
and with people in Gaza, Hamas officials in Gaza. So to say that the story is
“absurd” is ridiculous.
But what it says, in a nutshell, is as you’ve already laid out, that what the
Bush administration wanted to do once Hamas won the elections, having been
warned, by the way, that Hamas would win the elections and having no strategy in
place to deal with that outcome, what the Bush administration tried to do was,
as one source put it to me, change facts on the ground. And the strategy set out
in these documents was to persuade President Abbas, the Fatah president of the
Palestinian Authority, to sack the Hamas government in both its two
incarnations, first the Hamas-led government that took office in January ’06 and
then the so-called national unity government, the coalition with Fatah, that
took office in March ’07. He was to fire this government, replace it with an
emergency government or call new elections, and meanwhile, Fatah would be armed,
at America’s behest, to deal with the inevitable outbreak of violence that would
take place, because Hamas, it could be predicted with certainty, would not take
that lying down.
AMY GOODMAN: How do you know this?
DAVID ROSE: Well, as I said, because we have documents that lay out the
strategy, which have been obtained from Palestinian sources, but authenticated
by senior American officials who saw them at the time, and because I’ve
conducted numerous interviews with officials who were knowledgeable about the
policy at the time it was unfolding and, in fact, took great issue with it. They
took issue with it on two counts: first, that it was wrong, and it was likely to
fail. And even those minority of officials that I spoke to who actually
supported it felt it was being carried out in a half-hearted matter, that if you
were going to arm Fatah, you had to do it in a serious way. In fact, according
to Muhammad Dahlan, the strongman who was the major recipient of military aid in
Gaza, he only ever got about $20 million worth of aid. He, by the way, has
confirmed all the details of the program in interviews with me. And he says,
well, it just wasn’t enough. And, of course, when it came to it, in the fighting
that broke out in June 2007, it clearly wasn’t enough.
AMY GOODMAN: Isn’t it openly known that the US is arming and supporting Fatah?
DAVID ROSE: Well, no, it’s not, because, for example, General Keith Dayton, the
United States security coordinator who has been in the region now for three or
four years and is supposedly there to help strengthen Fatah’s security
institutions, told the Congress on May 23, 2007—that’s just over two weeks
before the Hamas coup—that the US was only supplying non-lethal aid to Fatah. He
was emphatic about this: no lethal aid was going into the Palestinian
territories to support Fatah. And, indeed, he had testified and other officials
had testified to that effect on several occasions previously.
What he well knew, what he must have known, was at the very time he uttered
those words, the US, in the shape of Condoleezza Rice, Assistant Secretary David
C. Welch and other officials, had been furiously lobbying for lethal aid, not
directly from the United States, but from the so-called Arab Quartet—that is,
Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Jordan and Egypt. They wanted lethal aid to
go to assist Fatah’s forces, especially in Gaza, although to some extent in the
West Bank, too. And they knew that this was aid that was going to kill people.
And in fact, just a week before the coup began, the news broke in the Israeli
newspaper Haaretz that Dayton himself had asked for Israeli clearance to allow
an import of armored cars, heavy weapons, machine guns and so forth into Gaza
from Egypt, which was part of this covert program. I don’t think, by any stretch
of the imagination, machine guns, ammunition and armored cars can be described
as non-lethal aid. Well, it wasn’t non-lethal aid coming from the United States,
and if you actually parse some of the denials that were issued yesterday,
they’re sort of denying the idea that America itself was supplying lethal aid.
That’s not what the article states. It says there was a covert, parallel
program—that’s the words, by the way, of a senior State Department official—to
supply lethal aid from Arab sources.
AMY GOODMAN: David Rose, you begin your piece, "The Gaza Bombshell,” by talking
about a young man at the Al Deira Hotel that you sat across from in Gaza City.
Explain what happened to him.
DAVID ROSE: Yes. He’s a young man called Mazen abu Dan, who was a Hamas—is a
Hamas member. He was in fact a member of its so-called executive force, the kind
of militia that Hamas set up in the summer of 2006.
In October 2006, just when the US program to support Fatah was really getting
into gear, he was kidnapped and horrifyingly tortured, along with several
members of his family and friends. They were actually at a cemetery erecting a
tombstone to his grandmother who had just died. They were seized by about thirty
armed men and taken to the home of a man called Abu Jidyan, a senior Fatah
official who was in fact killed during the coup, a close associate of this
warlord, Muhammad Dahlan. And he was beaten with iron bars. The skin on his back
was completely lacerated. And he told me that afterwards they poured perfume
into his wounds. And then him and two others were taken to a market when this
torture was finished, and they thought they were going to be killed, but in fact
they were shot several times in each leg. He showed me the bullet wounds.
We also have a DVD, which depicts his torture, which was captured from a Fatah
security building when Hamas took over during the coup in June 2007. I believe
that an excerpt from that may be going on the Vanity Fair website later this
week. So, you know, he’s quite recognizable in this DVD, and it’s quite clear
that there are Fatah men who are torturing the prisoners that you see there. And
I met him, as I say, in the Al Deira Hotel.
AMY GOODMAN: What happened to Wurmser, the adviser, Middle East adviser to Vice
President Cheney? Why did he quit? And talk about the elections that you say the
US forced, never anticipating what would happen.
DAVID ROSE: Well, of course, it isn’t just Wurmser; it’s also the former UN
Ambassador John Bolton. I think—I mean, both these men are, of course, known as
neoconservatives. And, you know, whatever issues one may have with aspects of
neoconservatives’ take on foreign policy, they have an overt support for
elections and democracy. And what they saw in action here was a policy that was
ignoring the vote of the Palestinian people, which was seeking to invest in a
strongman to put it—in order, as Wurmser put it to me, to prop up a corrupt
dictatorship in the shape of Fatah.
Now, I am not certain that this is the sole reason that David Wurmser left the
administration. I think you’d have to ask him that. But it is striking that, of
course, he did leave the administration just a month after these events and was
plainly disgusted by what happened.
AMY GOODMAN: We just have thirty seconds. Why is this thing being called “Iran
Contra 2.0”?
DAVID ROSE: Because there are certain resemblances to that policy. For
example—and people forget that not all the money to buy weapons for the Contras
in the 1980s came from Iran. Quite a bit came from the same Arab countries who
were being lobbied to provide weapons and money to buy weapons for Fatah. And
again, it was an attempt to evade the Congress, just as the first Iran-Contra
policy was. So there are considerable analogies.
AMY GOODMAN: Are you saying the Bush administration misled Congress, when it
comes to—
DAVID ROSE: I’m absolutely saying that, yes. They lied to the Congress.
AMY GOODMAN: And it’s specifically on—
DAVID ROSE: They told the Congress that there was no program to supply lethal
aid to Fatah. This was not true. There was a covert program to supply lethal aid
to Fatah.
AMY GOODMAN: David Rose, I want to thank you for being with us, British
journalist, writes in the latest issue of Vanity Fair, his piece called "The
Gaza Bombshell,” speaking to us from London.
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/3/5/iran_contra_20_how_the_bush
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