Saturday, June 19, 2004

Superhuman agents of Evil
(or the Ubermensch)


It's amazing that Ahmad Chalabi, tough as he is, could have bested George "Slam Dunk" Tenet and his $400 Billion per year CIA in the recent Great Games in the Middle East. Sure he had friends in high places, but still. Chalabi and the neocons have superhuman powers according to the fevered imaginations of some conspiracy theorists.

Lyndon LaRouche and his cult followers have done nothing but given me more sympathy for Israel's cause. Osama bin Laden and his serial beheaders have had a similar effect.

This is why the New York Times's recent coverage of the final 911 Commission hearings and a Michiko Kakutani review gave me pause. The Wall Street Journal made no mention of the following, which filled me with unease:
In Afghanistan, Mr. Atta quickly achieved high status, pledging "bayat" or allegiance to Mr. bin Laden, who made him the operation's leader. The two men discussed targets for the attack. One commission report, based on the interrogation of Mr. bin al-Shibh, said the two men identified "the World Trade Center, which represented the U.S. economy; the Pentagon, a symbol of the U.S. military and the U.S. Capitol, the perceived source of U.S. policy in support of Israel."
and
For instance, Mr. bin Laden, Al Qaeda's top leader, initially pushed for a date of May 12, 2001, exactly seven months after terrorists attacked the American destroyer Cole in Yemen. Then, when he learned that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel would visit the White House in June or July, Mr. bin Laden pressed to amend the timetable.
And Kakutani writes:
What he does focus on is the role that Israel has played in shaping American policy. Mr. Bamford contends that "the blueprint for the new Bush policy" on the Middle East "had actually been drawn up five years earlier by three of his top national security advisers" (Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser) for the Israeli prime minister at the time, Benjamin Netanyahu (who rejected the plan), and that when they entered office in January 2001, all these hawks needed was "a pretext" for war against Iraq. Citing a report from the British newspaper The Guardian, Mr. Bamford adds that the Office of Special Plans, a Pentagon unit set up by Mr. Feith, "forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence unit within Ariel Sharon's office in Israel," which "was designed to go around the country's own intelligence organization, Mossad."
Why did Netanyahu, a leader of the Greater Israel movement, reject the plan I wonder?

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