Behind the Iraq Dossier Hoax...


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Posted by andreas from dtm2-t7-1.mcbone.net (62.104.210.76) on Thursday, March 13, 2003 at 1:52PM :

This article appears in the February 21, 2003 issue of Executive
Intelligence Review.

Behind the Iraq Dossier Hoax:
Intelligence Was Cooked in Israel

by Jeffrey Steinberg

According to media accounts, the 10 Downing Street "dossier," cited
favorably by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell in his disastrous Feb. 5
report to the United Nations Security Council, was plagiarized from an
American graduate school paper, based on information more than a decade
old. The scandal that erupted when the Blair dossier hoax hit the press,
seriously undermined the credibility of those war party advocates of an
immediate Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. As Lyndon LaRouche wrote, Powell
was set up by a gang of public relations flacks who can't think straight.

So far so good. But a deeper probe into the scandal reveals that there was
good reason that the spin-meisters at the Coalition Information Center—the
Washington-London civilian government propaganda unit that crafted both the
Blair dossier and major portions of Secretary Powell's own lighter-than-air
book of evidence—did not reveal the sources of their information. The
entire cooked intelligence picture was "Made in Israel." It was cooked up
at a right-wing think-tank complex notorious as a hotbed of radical
Likudnik propaganda, and with links to the Office of Vice President Dick
Cheney, via his Chief of Staff Lewis Libby and his former client, Marc
Rich.

The essential facts are as follows: Two days before Powell's UN appearance,
10 Downing Street issued a 16-page paper, "Iraq: Its Infrastructure of
Concealment, Deception, and Intimidation," purportedly based on high-level
British intelligence data. In fact, at least 11 of the 16 pages were
lifted, verbatim, from an Israeli journal, Middle East Review of
International Affairs, whose sole proprieter is Dr. Barry Rubin, an
American-born Israeli citizen. The 11 pages were drawn from two articles,
by Ibrahim al-Marashi and Robert Rabil, that appeared in the September 2002
edition of that journal.

Al-Marashi's article, a profile of Iraqi intelligence, was drawn, largely,
from Iraqi government documents confiscated during the 1991 Persian Gulf
War. Al-Marashi, in turn, heavily footnoted his article to other, earlier
stories published in Rubin's obscure online journal, by Amazia Baram, the
journal's deputy editor.

This was no bit of grammar school plagiarism. The public relations team
that put together the Blair and Powell propaganda drivel were themselves
linked to Rubin and his fellow Israeli pranksters, through Ahmed Chalabi's
discredited and corrupt Iraqi National Congress (INC). Chalabi, University
of Chicago protégé of the late utopian Albert Wohlstetter, then fugitive
swindler, was adopted as the Iraqi oppositionist-of-choice by Israeli "X
Committee" agent and chairman of the Defense Policy Board Richard Perle and
his British Arab Bureau handler, Dr. Bernard Lewis, in the 1980s.

Rubin and the Chicken-hawk Intelligence Agency
Rubin issued a statement following the Downing Street dossier flap, taking
full credit for the cooked intelligence report. His only complaint was
that, while the Blair government apologized to Al-Marashi, they did not
issue a similar public statement of regret to him and his journal.

To have done so would have been suicidal, as a quick review of Rubin's
pedigree makes clear.

According to three current biographies, Prof. Barry Rubin is the deputy
director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies in Israel, and a
senior fellow at Hebrew University's Harry Truman Center and Haifa
University's Jewish-Arab Center. He is the director of the Global Research
in International Affairs Center, research director of the Lauder School of
Government Policy and Diplomacy, and a senior fellow at the International
Center for Counterterrorist Policy (ICT)—all of which are part of the
Interdisciplinary Center, Israel's first private university, in Herzliya.

The Lauder School was named after Ronald Lauder, the former Reagan
Ambassador to Austria, former president of the Conference of Presidents of
Major American Jewish Organizations, soon-to-be-successor of Edgar Bronfman
Sr. as head of the World Jewish Congress, and a notorious financier of
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and former Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu.

The ICT, which co-sponsored a May 26, 2002 Herzliya center conference on
suicide terrorism with the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai Brith, is
financed by the Marc Rich Foundation, the tax shelter of fugitive Russian
Mafiya don Marc Rich. Avner Azulay, a former Mossad officer and director of
the Rich Foundation, is an ICT director. Another publicly listed associate
of the ICT is Maj. Gen. Meir Dagan, one of Ariel Sharon's most notorious
thugs, and the current head of the Mossad.

Rubin, a transplanted Israeli citizen, still spends a good deal of time in
the United States. On Feb. 4, he was one of the speakers at a Willard Hotel
luncheon in Washington sponsored by Eleana Benador Associates, a New York
City public relations firm that counts among its clients the entire
chicken-hawk apparatus. Among the other speakers with Rubin were Benador
clients Perle, Michael Ledeen, Frank Gaffney, Laurie Mylroie, former UN
weapons inspector Richard Spertzel, and former Iraqi weapons scientist
Khidhir Hamza.

Rubin is also the chief Middle East columnist for Conrad Black's Hollinger
Corp.-owned Jerusalem Post, and a senior fellow at the Washington Institute
for Near East Policy (WINEP), the think-tank spawn of the American Israel
Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the official Israel lobby in America. His
writings frequently appear in Middle East Quarterly, the hyper-shrill
propaganda journal of Daniel Pipes. Rubin and Pipes are both funded by the
Bradley Foundation, one of the quartet of ultra-right-wing tax-exempt
funds, along with the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Olin Foundation, and
the Mellon Scaife Foundation.

Typical of Rubin's prolific writings was a Dec. 3, 2002 Op-Ed in the Wall
Street Journal, entitled "Sharon the Centrist?" The article celebrated
Sharon's Likud party primary victory over Netanyahu, and assailed both
Netanyahu and the Labor Party candidate, Gen. Amram Mitzna, whom Rubin
labelled an apologist for the Yasser Arafat whom he termed an unrepentant
terrorist.

In his Benador schpiel, Rubin echoed Perle and Doug Feith's "A Clean Break"
strategy, arguing that the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of
Saddam Hussein would herald the "third Arab revolution" of the postwar
period, triggering a spontaneous outbreak of democracy, human rights, and
free trade throughout the Arab world. Rubin's simplistic fantasy of a
Middle East re-made in the American-Israeli image has prompted some genuine
experts to denounce him as the "Bernard Lewis for dummies." Princeton
Professor Lewis is the author of the "Arc of Crisis" strategy for permanent
instability in the Middle East.

The Coalition Information Center
It takes two to tango. The Blair dossier—based on the cooked-in-Israel
propaganda of Rubin—and the Powell UN speech, were both largely the work of
the Coalition Information Center (CIC), an Anglo-American government
propaganda unit set up to counter opposition to the U.S. bombing of
Afghanistan, and later transformed into a permanent shared venture of the
White House and 10 Downing Street.

According to recent news accounts in New Yorker magazine and the New
Republic, the CIC was the brainchild of Gen. Wayne Downing (USA-ret.)—who
was chief of counter-terrorism at the National Security Council until last
June—and his deputy, former CIA officer Linda Flohr. The two hired a
discredited public relations firm, the Rendon Group, which had a reputation
for burning through government cash, but which had been instrumental in the
launching of Chalabi's INC. Downing, before joining the White House team,
was the "military advisor" to the INC. In mid-February, Downing was in
India, as part of a delegation from the Jewish Institute for National
Security Affairs (JINSA), another thinly-disguised Israeli espionage and
recruiting front which targets retired American military and intelligence
officers.

John Rendon, a Jimmy Carter-era Democratic National Committee executive
director, made his connections to Team Bush in 1989, when he handled the
propaganda for the overthrow of Gen. Manuel Noriega. In Panama, Rendon
hooked up with CIA Iran-Contra operative Flohr, who got Rendon the
propaganda contract for Operation Desert Storm. In 1991, President Bush
signed a Presidential Finding, authorizing a covert campaign to overthrow
Saddam Hussein, and Rendon got an estimated $150 million in CIA cash to
manufacture a Potemkin Village opposition to the Baghdad regime, built
around Chalabi. According to investigative reporters Seymour Hersh and Jeff
Stein, most of the CIA money went to overpaid public relations consultants,
posh London flats, flights on the Concorde, and even more suspect cash
diversions. Ultimately, the CIA Inspector General got into the act, and
Rendon was dumped by the Agency.

Things improved for this crowd, once again, when "Bush 43" came to town.
Flohr, who had gone to work for the Rendon Group after retiring from the
CIA in 1994—and working for Oliver North's bullet-proof vest company—was
tapped by Downing to join him at the National Security Council (she is now
officially listed as the director of counter-terrorism for the NSC and
director of security for the Office of Homeland Security). Not only did
Rendon put together the CIC, but, following Sept. 11, 2001, he won a
$100,000 per month Pentagon contract to work for the short-lived Office of
Strategic Influence. This was a black-propaganda unit inside the Feith's
"chicken-hawk intelligence agency" led by William Luti, a retired Navy
captain who was seconded to the Pentagon from the Office of Vice President
Dick Cheney. When the New York Times exposed the planned OSI agitprop unit,
the plans were scrapped, but Rendon retained the Pentagon cash-flow.



-- andreas
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