- This article appears in the January 20, 2006 issue of
Executive Intelligence Review.
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- An ever-more-desperate Dick Cheney is pulling out all
the stops to install "Clean Break" hawk Benjamin "Bibi"
Netanyahu as the next Israeli Prime Minister, to push for an immediate
confrontation between Israel and Syria. Israeli sources report that Cheney,
as of Jan. 11, had an emissary in Israel, exploring the means to put "Bibi"
and the Likud back in power, despite collapsing Israeli popular support
for the extreme rightwing policies of the neo-con faction that Netanyahu
represents.
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- Part of Cheney's growing desperation stems from the fact
that the recent plea agreement between U.S. Justice Department prosecutors
and super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff, threatens to bring down the entire political
dirty-money empire of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.),
which has been Cheney's principal power base since coming in as Vice President
and de facto head-of-state in January 2001. Cheney and DeLay were shown
by a recent EIR exclusive story to be politically "joined at the hip"
(see EIR, Dec. 30, 2005). The Vice President is so deeply implicated in
the DeLay/Abramoff dirty-money machine that the legal defense funds of
DeLay and Cheney's ex-chief of staff Lewis Libby are headed by the same
two Republican lobbyists, Wayne Berman and former Congressman Bill Paxon
(R-N.Y.).
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- But Israeli sources report, and Washington insiders confirm,
that Netanyahu himself is so closely tied to Jack Abramoff that the fallout
from Abramoff's plea may bring him down as well, as the international web
of money-laundering fronts, tax-exempt charities, and no-bid contractors
put together by Abramoff unravels under U.S. prosecutors' scrutiny.
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- West Bank Story
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- The first published clue about the Netanyahu/Abramoff
links actually surfaced last year, when Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff
revealed on May 2, 2005 that one of Abramoff's tax-exempt charities, Capital
Athletic Foundation, had funnelled $140,000 to a West Bank settlement,
to finance the purchasing of security equipment, including "camouflage
suits, sniper scopes, night-vision binoculars, a thermal imager, and other
material."
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- Funds for the Capital Athletic Foundation, ostensibly
an Abramoff family charity dedicated to helping inner-city youth, came
largely from Indian tribe clients of Abramoff.
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- The security gear was provided to the West Bank town
of Beitar Illit, which Isikoff described as "a sprawling ultra-Orthodox
outpost whose residents have occasionally tangled with their Palestinian
neighbors."
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- Beitar Illit is the home of Schmuel Ben-Zvi, a rightwing
American who moved to the West Bank, and who was a close high school pal
of Abramoff in Hollywood. The $140,000 was paid to an Israeli group called
Kollel Ohel Tiferet, which is not publicly registered in Israel.
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- While Ben-Zvi denied any links to the $140,000 West Bank
payoff, an exchange of emails between him and Abramoff told a different
story. On receiving the money, Ben-Zvi wrote to Abramoff: "I feel
like the tank commanders in the Yom Kippur war, who when hearing over the
radio that reinforcements were coming, felt so great that they raised their
seats higher out of the tank hatch and went forward." To which Abramoff
wrote back: "If only there were another dozen of you the dirty rats
would be finished," referring to the Palestinian neighbors of Beitar
Illit.
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- When questions arose over what Israeli entity to pass
the money to, Ben-Zvi proposed to write a letter to the Capital Athletic
Foundation, on the letterhead of his Snipers Workshop, which he described
as "an educational entity of sorts."
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- Informed of the West Bank funding, Indian tribal lawyer
Henry Buffalo told Newsweek, "This is almost like outer-limits bizarre.
The tribe would never have given money for this."
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- FBI sources told Newsweek's Isikoff that the bulk of
the $4 million listed as the Abramoff fund's tax-exempt gifts went to a
now-defunct Maryland yeshiva where Abramoff's two sons went to school.
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- Wiring Congress
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- Another contributor to the Capital Athletic Foundation
was an Israeli telecom startup company, Foxcom, which kicked in $50,000
to the Abramoff fund. Foxcom received a $3-million contract to install
wireless antenna systems at the U.S. Congress, in a deal pushed through
by Abramoff crony Rep. Bob Ney (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Administration
Committee. The Washington Post revealed on Oct. 18, 2005 that Foxcom had
paid Abramoff $280,000 in lobbying fees around the time they got the Congressional
contract. An American company, LGC Wireless, which had lost the bid to
Foxcom, went to the FBI and charged that the bidding process had been rigged
by Ney.
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- Newsweek reported on Aug. 22, 2005 that U.S. officials
had rushed to indict and arrest Abramoff on Aug. 11, because they feared
he would flee to Israel, as two of his business partners had already done.
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- And still to be unravelled are the Abramoff connections
to the Russian oil company Naftasib, which laundered $1 million to another
Abramoff "charity," the U.S. Family Network, through a London
law firm, James and Sarch, in 1998. Two top Naftasib executives, Marina
Nevskaya and Alexander Koulakovsky, spent "quality time" with
Tom DeLay in Moscow, shortly before the laundered payoff to Abramoff. The
Russian "oil company" lists the Russian Ministry of Defense and
Ministry of Interior as Naftasib's two main clients. Some of the military
equipment delivered to the West Bank settlement of Ben-Zvi came from Russia,
hinting at Russian Mafiya ties in the background of the Abramoff saga.
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- Senior Washington sources have cautioned that it would
be a mistake to presume that the Abramoff money flow to Israel and Russia
primarily went out of the United States. Abramoff's takeover of the gambling
cruise ship line SunCruz gave him a perfect instrument for laundering millions
of dollars a day through the offshore gambling tables.
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- Syria War Diversion
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- The Cheney push to install Netanyahu as Israel's next
Prime Minister, replacing the now-incapacitated Ariel Sharon, is, according
to Israeli sources, part of Cheney's desperate move to "change the
subject" from his growing political problems in Washington.
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- Netanyahu is pledged, according to the Israeli sources,
to a war with Syria, to divert attention, and to move ahead with the decade-old
"Clean Break" scheme, drafted for Netanyahu in July 1996 by a
group of American neo-con allies of Cheney. The "Clean Break"
strategy paper was co-authored by Richard Perle, David Wurmser, Douglas
Feith, and others, and called for the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime
in Iraq, followed by similar "regime changes" in Syria, Iran,
Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. David Wurmser, the single most vociferous advocate
of "regime change" in Damascus, is now a senior Middle East policy
aide to Cheney. He previously served under Doug Feith at the Pentagon,
when Feith was Undersecretary of Defense for Policy in the first Bush-Cheney
Administration.
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- Cheney's war scheme against Syria also implicates Abramoff,
according to a Jan. 11, 2006 story by Justin Raimondi, posted on antiwar.com.
"One investigator, eager to obtain information about the neo-con-sponsored
Reform Party of Syria, led by one Farid Ghadry, the Syrian version of Ahmed
Chalabi" Raimondi wrote, "stumbled on the Abramoff connection:
'When repeated calls to [Ghadry's] organization went unanswered, I visited
the Washington, D.C. headquarters of the RPS. Reform Party of Syria is
in the office of super-Zionist lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Middle Gate Ventures,
Abramoff's political advisory company, partners with RPS."
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- http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2006/3303cheney_bibi.html
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