2004-08-31

Who sabotaged the AIPAC investigation?

The leak to CBS news which disclosed the investigation
of Lawrence Franklin and his relation to AIPAC and Israel
has had the effect of ruining the chances
of fully understanding this matter.

See, for example, this excerpt (emphasis added):
The premature disclosure has caused problems for investigators,
according to numerous law enforcement officials
speaking on the condition of anonymity
because the probe is ongoing.

"This has severely hampered their investigation,"
one law enforcement official said.
"It's impossible to tell what might have been lost
because of all this."

and this:
[I]nvestigators have already been forced to move
more quickly than they had hoped
because news organizations became aware of the inquiry.

Some officials suspect that the case will never reach the level of an espionage matter.
Investigators do not fully understand the motivations
of two Aipac officials who they believe
were in contact with Mr. Franklin.
Moreover, investigators have given up their hope
of determining whether Israel regarded Mr. Franklin
as an asset in a formal intelligence collection operation
or as informal source.

The U.S. has lost the ability to fully investigate
this serious compromise of classified documents,
specifically because some person in the government
leaked knowledge of the investigation.
In other words, they deliberately tipped off
those who were under investigation.
This is exactly what would happen if
the leaker was also a mole,
and wished to tip off his fellow moles
without using communication channels
which his knowledge of the investigation told him
had been compromised.

Why is not the government investigating this leak,
and why is not the media demanding that just that happen,
as they did in the case of Valerie Plame?

I suggest that the answer is that Jews,
throughout both the government and the media,
are working together to ensure that Israeli spying
is not thoroughly investigated.

2004-08-23

WaPo ignores key Iraq responsibilty story

The NYT published on 08-19
a most important and significant report
on former weapons inspector David Kay's 08-18 testimony
before the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The article is extraordinarily worthwhile.
Here are the leading four grafs:
A former Bush administration official who led the fruitless postwar effort to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq told Congress on Wednesday that the National Security Council led by Condoleezza Rice had botched intelligence information before the war and was "the dog that did not bark" over Iraq's weapons program.

In uncharacteristically caustic remarks about his former colleagues, the weapons inspector, David Kay, said the National Security Council had failed to protect President Bush from faulty prewar intelligence and had left Secretary of State Colin L. Powell "hanging out in the wind" when he tried to gather intelligence before the war about Iraq's weapons programs.

"Where was the N.S.C?" Dr. Kay asked, suggesting that the president had come to depend too heavily on information supplied by Ms. Rice, Mr. Bush's national security adviser, and that the president needed to reach out to others for national security information.

"Every president who has been successful, at least that I know of, in the history of this republic, has developed both informal and formal means of getting checks on whether people who tell him things are in fact telling him the whole truth," Dr. Kay told the Senate intelligence committee at a hearing called to discuss the findings of the Sept. 11 commission.

Why, in God's name, has the Washington Post
totally ignored this story?
Two possible reasons:
  1. They wish to maintain the belief
    that it's all the fault of Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/CIA.

  2. The NSA, for whom the NSC staff works,
    is an African-American woman,
    thus protected against any serious allegations,
    no matter how well deserved,
    of incompetence.
    Further,
    the key NSC staff members dealing with the Middle East
    are, surprise, Jewish.
    Musn't point the finger at them.
    That would be anti-Semitic, you see.

I fully recognize that some will find the above remarks offensive.
My defense is that the WaPo has, prima facie,
failed to report what it should have reported,
and that the urge in the newsroom to protect politically correct groups
is a matter of fact, not speculation.
Of course, I do not know that that was the explanation in this case,
just that it is plausible.

In any case, the remarks in the article itself
are clearly worthy of wider dissemination.

2004-08-19

Pre-war articles against the war

Here are several articles available on the web,
all written before the war started,
which gave a prescient view of the reasons why
we should never have invaded Iraq.
The excellent article "Whose War?" is among them.

The Madness of Empire,
Iraq: The Case Against Preemptive War,
Iraq Invasion: The Road to Folly,
The Unintended Consequences of War and
Whose War?.

Note that all can be put in printer-friendly format.

For access to all back issues:
The American Conservative archive.

2004-08-09

The 1998 OBL intercept leak

A quick reference for the 1998 leak concerning the OBL intercepts
is in 1998-08-23 article
"Bin Laden's several links to terrorist units known"
by Bill Gertz in the Washington Times.
[Note added 2006-02-23: See the complete text here.]
Here's some of the relevant part:
U.S. intelligence officials said the CIA had received electronic intercepts linking bin Laden to the Khobar bombing - some of the same electronic evidence that linked his group to the Africa bombings.

...

According to a [CIA Counterterrorism Center] report labeled "top secret" but obtained by The Washington Times, bin Laden told several confederates that the Riyadh bombing was the first action, Dhahran was the second and that "more is coming."

Among those who called bin Laden to congratulate him for the Dhahran bombing were the leader of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Ayman Zawahiri, and a leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad named Ashra Hadi. Both are terrorist groups.

Bin Laden also was notified by telephone of the Nov. 13, 1995, bombing in Riyadh on the same day as the blast.

Somebody committed high treason in leaking that.
That information is pure codeword.
And that leak directly led to our failure
to monitor OBL's later communications,
which would have indubitably prevented 9/11.

Permit me a partisan diatribe:
the "responsible people" who did not choose to investigate
were under the all-estrogen "justice" team of
Hillary Rodham Clinton and her hand-picked,
must-be-female, Attorney General, Janet Reno.
The only security feminists care about is that of women.