Criminal State

In Iranian politics, few loom larger that Hashemi Rafsanjani. Yet for whom does he work—really?
As chairman of the Assembly of Experts, he oversees the selection, monitoring and dismissal of Iran’s Supreme Leader. As Chair of the Expediency Council, he mediates legislative conflicts. As President of Iran from 1989-1997, he created a power base dating back to his study of theology with Ayatollah Khomeini. But that was then; what about now?

To grasp his role in this “election” requires a reflection on whose interests are best served by crises in the region. Serial crises are essential to sustain the plausibility of the much-touted Clash of Civilizations as a means to justify a “global war on terrorism.” When Mahmoud Ahmadenijad won out over Rafsanjani in a 2005 bid for the presidency, the result was a spokesperson with little political power but a high-profile platform.

In today’s media-saturated politics, candidates are akin to brands. Soon after their release in the market, each is identified with a message. Ahmadenijad was quickly branded the world’s most famous anti-Semite and Holocaust denier. As the academics say: Cui bono—who benefits? Which nation gained most from that branding? Iran? Or Israel?

For an enclave dependent for support on branding itself the unwitting victim of a hostile, anti-Semitic world, who better to freshen up that brand? If so, what role does Rafsanjani play in a nation whose leaders have long collaborated with Israel in duplicitous operations?

Those operations, too numerous to describe, include the Israeli-enabled, presidency-discrediting Iran-Contra affair that Ronald Reagan denied and then was forced to admit. That clumsy arms-for-hostages exchange aided Iran in its war with Iraq, then a U.S. ally, and resulted in 11 federal convictions for Reagan-era officials. All were pardoned.

What role does Rafsanjani play in the casting for a real life drama that, if events continue on course, is poised to discredit another U.S. president? What we know is this. Ahmadinejad charged the Grey Eminence and his family with massive corruption, including racketeering, embezzlement and money laundering. That appears accurate. The Rafsanjani clan emerged wealthy beyond measure, including one son who is allegedly a billionaire in a nation long plagued with the ravages of poverty and false piety.

We also know that Rafsanjani, a billionaire also known as “the shark,” financed the campaign of opposition candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi. As Prime Minister, Mousavi was Tehran’s go-between for Iran-Contra. He also reportedly served as Iran’s middleman for the October 1983 bombing in Beirut that killed 241 Marines.

The question remains: for whom was he a middleman—really? For the bombing, was he the go-between with Hezbollah terrorists blamed for the attack? That may well be true. Yet former Mossad case officer Victor Ostrovsky insists that Israeli intelligence had a complete description of the truck used in that attack—and chose not to alert their ally.

That mass murder prompted the withdrawal of U.S. forces from the region, leaving the Middle East vulnerable to political manipulation by whatever nation proved most adept at the craft. Quo bono? Did Iran benefit from that bombing? Lebanon? Or Israel?

Any conclusions must remain conjectural until more is known about the role played by Israel and pro-Israelis in fixing the intelligence that induced the U.S. to invade Iraq. And may yet induce an attack on Iran aided by a well-timed crisis that may deter the direct negotiations that Washington proposed—and Tel Aviv opposed.

Readers of Guilt By Association know that analysis pivots off a person identified as “John Doe.” He encountered the Grey Eminence two decades ago while profiling the transnational criminal syndicate chronicled there. Rafsanjani was then selling an office building in Manhattan built by the Shah of Iran.

The top floors were occupied by arbitrageur Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken’s co-conspirator in securities frauds for which both were convicted. Boesky spent two years in Iran for purposes that remain obscure. Doe negotiated the sale with Pincus Green, the partner of Marc Rich who was then illegally trading oil with Iran—when Rafsanjani was president.

Rich’s defense team was led by Nixon White House counsel Leonard Garment and Lewis Libby who then worked in the Pentagon for Paul Wolfowitz in the G.H.W. Bush era. All four men are Ashkenazim. For G.W. Bush, Libby emerged as Chief of Staff for Vice President Dick Cheney when Wolfowitz, as Deputy Secretary of Defense, became a lead advocate for invading Iraq in response to the mass murder of 911.

In May 2007, Libby was found guilty on four federal charges for his attempts to obscure the fixing of intelligence that induced the invasion in pursuit of the expansionist goals for Greater Israel. The neoconservatives who advanced that agenda have since confirmed that their primary target was—and remains—Iran.

History is best understood in hindsight. Yet where, as here, behavior patterns repeat over multiple decades, Americans who continue to put their faith in false friends may find themselves repeating past tragedies. To avoid future calamities, Iranians had best grasp that neither this election—nor the Grey Eminence—may be what they seem.

Criminal State, Distorted Media, Domestic Press, Foreign Press, Politics, Washington Politics Ali Akbar Hasehmi Rafsanjani, anti-Semite, Ayatollah Khomeini, Beirut, Clash of Civilization, Clash of Civilizations, Expediency Council, G.H.W. Bush, G.W. Bush, George Bush, Grey Eminence, Guilt By Association, Hashemi Rafsanjani, Hezbollah, Holocaust denier, Iran's Supreme Leader, Iran-Contra, Leonard Garment, Lewis Libby, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Marine barracks, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, Paul Wolfowitz, Ronald Reagan, Shah of Iran, the shark

President Obama’s decision to release top-secret torture memos was reached in the office of Rahm Emanuel over protests from the Director of Central Intelligence. Former Vice President Dick Cheney defended the practice, claiming America is safer for it. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi then sought to defend her criticism despite early knowledge of it.

Caught lying, Pelosi attacked the CIA. Director Leon Panetta defended Agency briefers and their detailed records of what Pelosi was told. Needing the Speaker’s help to spearhead his ambitious legislative agenda, Obama’s team brokered a peace between Democrats Pelosi and Panetta.

Why did both Republican Cheney and Democrat Pelosi support the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” on one particular “high value” detainee? Answer: the case for war required a plausible “high-level link” between the secular Saddam—who hated religious fundamentalists—and the religious fundamentalists of Al Qaeda—who hated him. After 83 waterboardings, the link emerged in a confession.

Akin to the Inquisition, this detainee was “put to the question.” When proposing to wage a global crusade on false pretenses (The Clash of Civilizations), war-planners required One True Faith in that linkage. As in the Dark Ages, the confession was later recanted and the case collapsed—but only after the war in Iraq was well underway.

Even now that link remains an article of faith—alongside weapons of mass destruction, meetings in Prague and mobile biological weapons laboratories. All were bogus. But without this key link, the case would have been exposed as phony, even treasonous. However, the worst was yet to come—a November 18 White House meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

In a two-hour Oval Office encounter with this hawkish right-winger, an untested U.S. commander in chief met his Monica Lewinsky. Distracted by a promiscuous White House intern, Bill Clinton found himself embroiled in impeachment proceedings when he should have been keeping a closer eye on Al Qaeda. The allure of Netanyahu differs in kind but not in its impact on national security—and potentially on the Obama presidency.

The day before their meeting, Netanyahu met with an ebullient American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee. Obama’s Justice Department had not only withdrawn its espionage case against two AIPAC spies, the lobby had also silenced Obama while they savaged Charles Freeman, forcing him to withdraw his acceptance as chairman of the National Intelligence Council. A known skeptic of Israeli designs on the region, Freeman would have overseen the National Intelligence Estimate, coordinating the views of all 16 intelligence agencies.

By the time Netanyahu appeared alongside Obama, a U.S. president looked like he was a visitor in the office of the Israeli Prime Minister. Rather than issue photographs of their meeting as he did days earlier with Israeli president Shimon Peres, Obama granted Netanyahu a widely reported press conference in which he failed to press Israel’s new prime minister to end the four-decade occupation of Palestine as the top priority for achieving peace in the region.

Instead, he allowed the Israeli leader to use the White House as a pulpit to announce that peace with the Palestinians was a distant second to the risks posed by Iran. Romanced by Netanyahu and the pro-Israelis who populate his presidency, Obama once again fulfilled AIPAC’s wish list. By allowing pro-Israelis to control the White House agenda and Israelis to control the message, Obama signaled a go-ahead to those long determined to expand to Iran the war in Iraq.

While Netanyahu met with Obama, Israelis were pouring the foundations for settlement expansion, that conduct sent a clear signal to those waiting to see who controls foreign policy in the Obama administration. Only the next day did Secretary of State Clinton call for a halt to the settlements.

When Israeli jets bombed Gaza the next day, that conduct reconfirmed who controls U.S. policy. Only after their meeting did CIA Director Panetta urge that Israel not attack Iran. By then it was too late. America’s commander-in-chief had tipped his hand: what AIPAC wants, Israel gets.

Within 24 hours of their meeting, a letter was delivered to Obama by 76 Senators warning, “We must take into account the risks (Israel) will face in any peace agreement.” Within 48 hours, a 90-6 Senate vote denied Obama the funds required to close detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay. In a resounding rebuke, both Democrats and Republicans decried his inexperience in national security—making the militaristic Netanyahu look “presidential” by comparison.

The vote tally was known well beforehand by White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, Obama’s top political strategist. Both played key roles in producing this presidency. Both Obama and national security were victims of this sophisticated operation.

In stage-managing this series of back-to-back political debacles, Obama’s pro-Israeli advisers worked hand-in-glove with the Israel lobby to ensure he was left with few options but to support Israel’s designs on the region. Forced to prove his mettle, the commander-in-chief will find he has no hope of managing his way through the crises now awaiting him—except to back Israel’s expansionist agenda for the Middle East, ensuring more hatred for the U.S. while fueling The Clash. In the pursuit of Israel’s agenda, the Obama presidency is proving itself the missing link.

Uncategorized aipac, Barack Obama, Benjamin Netanyahu, Charles Freeman, Chas Freeman, CIA Director, Clash of Civilizations, Dark Ages, David Axelrod, Dick Cheney, enhanced interrogation methods, espionage case, fixed intelligence, Guantanamo Bay, high value detainee, high-level link, Hillary Clinton, Leon Panetta, missing link, mobile biological weapons laboratories, Monica Lewinsky, Nancy Pelosi, National Intelligence Council, National Intelligence Estimate, Obama presidency, One True Faith, Rahm Emanuel, Shimon Peres, spy case, The Clash, Torture memos, treason, waterboarding

Is Israel Pre-Staging War with Iran?

credited to Savannah Red

Visitors to the Criminal State website know how well-timed crises are deployed by those skilled at displacing facts with what people can be induced to believe. Thus the use of staged crises linked to fixed intelligence as a way to influence decision-makers. That behavior was on display when policy-makers were persuaded to invade Iraq in response to the mass murder of 9/11—buttressed by an induced belief in Iraqi WMD, Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda, mobile biological weapons laboratories, meetings in Prague, and so forth.

Fast-emerging events suggest pre-staging meant to make an attack on Iran appear reasonable, even desirable. Agent provocateur operations require the staging of collateral events to induce the intended main event. Does that suggest the US and the EU should expect another crisis on the scale of 9/11 as a means to catalyze that attack?

Throughout history, dedicated groups have seen their beliefs manipulated to serve the interests of others. Thus the need to consider the possibility that seemingly unrelated incidents are being staged to create a critical mass of opinion in support of war with Iran.

Consider the cumulative impact of incidents over the past 14 months:

• December 2007 saw the assassination of former Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Mark Siegel, her biographer and lobbyist, assured U.S. diplomats that Bhutto’s return to Pakistan was “the only possible way that we could guarantee stability and keep the presidency of Musharraf intact.” President Pervez Musharraf had earlier announced that resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict was the key to solving conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

• During her two terms as prime minister, Bhutto funded the Taliban as a means to wield influence in Afghanistan and catalyze conflicts in Kashmir, fueling tension with India. Meanwhile Israel allied with India and sent an emergency shipment of artillery shells during Islamabad’s armed conflict with New Delhi over the Kirpal region of Kashmir.

• In August 2008, General David Kezerashvili returned to Georgia from Israel to lead an assault on South Ossetia backed with Israeli arms and training. That crisis ignited Cold War tensions between the U.S. and Russia, key members of the Quartet (along with the EU and the UN) committed to resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict.

• The murder of Benazir Bhutto facilitated the replacement of Musharaff with Asif Ali Zardari, Bhutto’s notoriously corrupt husband.

• In late November 2008, a terrorist attack in Mumbai, India’s financial center, renewed fears of nuclear tension between India and Pakistan. When the attackers struck a hostel run by an ultra-orthodox Jewish sect from Brooklyn, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni announced from Tel Aviv: “Our world is under attack.” By early December, Israeli journalists urged that we “fortify the security of Jewish institutions worldwide.”

As “India’s 9/11” was proven to originate from Pakistan’s western tribal region, Zardari announced an agreement with the Taliban to allow Islamic (Sharia) law to govern a large swath of the North West Frontier Province where Al Qaeda leaders have free rein. With anti-Americanism on the rise, Islamabad’s capitulation to Islamic extremists endangered U.S. interests and made U.S. allies more vulnerable, including member countries of the EU.

With the Taliban and Al Qaeda allowed to operate freely in a nuclear-armed nation, Tel Aviv gained traction for its claim that a nuclear Tehran poses an “existential threat.” With the increased political clout gained by a nationalist-religious coalition in Israel’s February 10th elections, any chance of resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict became remote.

That political development is destined to fuel more Islamic extremism and gain more traction for those marketing the “global war on terrorism.” As Tzipi Livni argued in the aftermath of the murderous assault on Mumbai: “Israel, India and the rest of the free world are positioned in the forefront of the battle against terrorists and extremism.”

In Barack Obama’s first presidential press conference, veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas asked which nation in the Middle East has nuclear weapons. Side-stepping any mention of Israel, Obama spoke instead of the need for nuclear non-proliferation. As Islamic extremists were portrayed as gaining access to nuclear weapons, the case for Israeli compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty lost ground. With tensions heightened between a nuclear India and extremist-riddled Pakistan, the case for a global war on “Islamo” fascism gained ground—along with the thematic Clash of Civilizations.

Meanwhile Israel’s brutal incursion into Gaza—staged between Christmas and the Obama inaugural—drew criticism worldwide as Israeli troops killed more than 1,300 Palestinians. Student activists at Hampshire College, a leader in ending apartheid in South Africa, urged the College to divest its interest in companies complicit in Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

Harvard-Zionist law professor Alan Dershowitz portrayed the students as a “rabidly anti-Israel group” and “anti-Semitic.” That same day the Jerusalem Post cited Martin Luther King for the premise that to be “anti-Zionist” is “anti-Semitism.” Those statements followed an announcement that Israel had formed “an army of bloggers” to combat anti-Zionist websites.

Questions that can only be answered by future events include the following:

• Were the murders in Mumbai a form of geopolitical misdirection that served both the tactical goals of the Muslim attackers and the strategic goals of the Jewish state?

• When Bhutto’s murder, Musharraf’s removal, and the attack on Mumbai drew Pakistani forces to the border of India—and away from its western tribal region—did the response to those incidents heighten the risk of nuclear-armed extremism?

• As another extremist government gains influence in Tel Aviv, will these incidents be cited to again postpone settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict?

• Is Israel’s four-decade delay in ending the occupation of Palestine—despite repeated assurances it will do so—part of Tel Aviv’s agent provocateur strategy?

• Was Israel’s preemptive Six-Day War (in 1967) the provocation required to pre-stage the region-wide outrage now directed at the U.S. due to this entangled alliance?

In retrospect, each of these incidents advanced the Zionist state’s expansionist goals for Greater Israel. Is it possible that these murderous events trace their agent provocateur origins to a common source: those marketing the next main event—war with Iran?

Was the public’s intuitive grasp of this recurring behavior accurately reflected in an October 2003 poll of 7,500 people in EU member nations? That 15-country survey found that Israel is viewed EU-wide as the top threat to world peace. Is terrorism a tool limited to Islamo-fascists? Or is it also a means of geopolitical manipulation deployed from the shadows by what Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt described as “Jewish fascists”?

February 18, 2009

MP George Kaufman re Israeli Nazis

Politics 9-11, 9/11, agent provocateur, Al Qaeda, Alan Dershowitz, anti-Israel, anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist, Asif Ali Zardari, Benazir Bhutto, Benjamin Netanyahu, Clash of Civilizations, existential threat, Gaza, George Kaufman, Hampshire College, Hannah Arendt, Helen Thomas, India's 9/11, Iran, israel, Israel-Palestine, Jewish fascists, Jewish Nazis, Judeo Nazis, Kashmir, Kezerashvili, Lubavitch, Mark Siegel, Mumbai, Pervez Musharraf, Quartet, South Ossetia, Taliban, Tzipi Livni, Zionism, zionist