- 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 protege 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.
-
- _____
-
- For a personal update, call EIR, toll-free, at 1-888-347-3258.
Say you "saw it on Rense.com."
-
- "This is OUR Time, the historic LaRouche movement
conference held Feb. 15-16, is now archived on LaRouchePub.com.
|
