Hillary Clinton

The Hate Mongers Among Us – Part 3: The Use of Pliable and Reliable Assets to Advance a Narrative

Many of America’s most prominent political leaders were induced to comment on “International Burn A Koran Day”—a high profile provocation proposed by a Christian-Zionist preacher with a small congregation in a small town in Florida.

When U.S. General David Petraeus spoke out against the proposal, the issue immediately gained an international profile as did Pastor Terry Jones who quickly became an international celebrity.

One need not dig deep to identify who may have advised General Petraeus to grant a global profile to a provocation consistent with Israeli goals for the region.

In March, as head of Central Command, Petraeus offered testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee confirming facts that have long been obvious but are seldom mentioned: our “special relationship” with Israel and its oppressive occupation of Palestine undermine U.S. interests in the Middle East and endanger American personnel. Read it for yourself:

“The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests… Israeli-Palestinian tensions often flare into violence and large-scale armed confrontations. The conflict foments anti-American sentiment due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the [region] and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support. The conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hizballah and Hamas….”

Petraeus is often spoken of as a potential Republican presidential candidate. Thus the chagrin among some in Washington when this high profile military leader appeared to curry favor with Max Boot, a former Wall Street Journal op-ed editor and outspoken Zionist. In an apparent attempt to soften the candor of his written testimony before the Senate, he wrote to Boot:

“Does it help if folks know that I hosted Elie Wiesel and his wife at our quarters last Sun night?!  And that I will be the speaker at?the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps in mid-Apr at the Capitol Dome…”

Boot wrote back to assure him that those comments were not necessary as Petraeus had not been described as anti-Semitic. Boot then posted a pro-Petraeus piece on the website for Commentary, a neoconservative publication, assuring readers that the general is not anti-Israel and dismissing his anti-Israel comments as inserted by staff in his statement—that Petraeus reviewed.

The Supporting Cast

After General Petraeus, now senior commander in Afghanistan, created a high profile for the Burn-A-Koran controversy, comments were offered by Attorney General Eric Holder, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama. With that, the provocation went viral.

These fuel-the-fire comments were followed by a personal appeal to Pastor Jones in a phone call from Defense Secretary Robert Gates that also went viral.

As any game theorist could predict, even the possibility of such a psy-ops (a Koran book burning) was guaranteed to galvanize anti-American sentiments and catalyze anti-American demonstrations. As the book burning gained steadily more profile, this provocation increased the probability of catalyzing long-lasting anti-American sentiments.

This stunt bears a remarkable resemblance to a Newsweek story alleging that a U.S. soldier flushed a Koran down the toilet. Though that May 2005 account by Michael Isikoff was later withdrawn in substantial part, its publication provoked an earlier well-timed response by setting off anti-American demonstrations in Muslim countries worldwide.

At first, the story gained only scant attention. That muted response changed dramatically when Pakistani cricket star Imran Khan gave Isikoff’s story an international profile by announcing from Islamabad that American military personnel had desecrated a holy Islamic text.

That’s when this Clash of Civilizations-catalyzing, U.S.-discrediting account went viral. In practical effect, Khan’s celebrity was appropriated to associate the U.S. military with conduct similar in its psy-ops effect to the profile given an American proposing to burn a Koran.

Newsweek was recently acquired by Sidney Harman, the husband of California Congresswoman Jane Harman, the Jewish Zionist chair of the Intelligence Subcommittee of the House Committee on Homeland Security. At the time of this provocation, Newsweek was a magazine affiliate of The Washington Post newspaper, an influential opinion-shaping newspaper based in the nation’s capital.

In the annals of “field-based warfare,” the Koran-flushing story will go down in history as a classic psy-ops for its success in targeting the minds of a built-in audience outside the U.S.—cricket fans—as a vulnerable and receptive shared field of consciousness.

When the high-profile Imran Khan described the alleged incident as factual, this operation transcended the literacy barrier as it provoked Muslims who did not even need to read in order to be reached—and provoked.

And because the story targeted cricket fans, its impact was disastrous to Americans while also remaining invisible to America where cricket is neither a well known activity nor a widely played sport.

In what passes for mainstream American media, the Isikoff story was called news. In national security parlance, the well-timed launch of that provocative storyline is called tactical psy-ops. So far, the Koran-burning story is being attributed solely to the whims of a southern preacher.

Stay tuned. It may be only a coincidence that Jones was a high school classmate of Rush Limbaugh, America’s most provocative radio talk show host.

Information Age Warfare

If this sounds familiar, it should. You may recall when the wartime role played by global media became apparent in the Clash-catalyzing “cartoon riots” that swept the world in February 2006. That reaction followed the publication in France, Germany, Italy and Spain of graphic images of the prophet Muhammad that first appeared in a Danish newspaper in September 2005.

Citing free speech as the rationale, cultural editor Flemming Rose published a compilation of cartoons certain to be seen by Muslims as blasphemous, including one featuring Muhammad with a bomb in place of a turban.

An Ashkenazi native of Ukraine, Rose worked as a reporter for five years in Moscow during the oligarchi-zation of Russia. As his contribution to that nationwide fraud, he translated into Danish a fawning 1990 autobiography (Against the Stream) of presidential candidate Boris Yeltsin whose administration enabled the wildly successful financial pillaging of Russia.

Six of the top seven Russian oligarchs were Ashkenazim who qualified for Israeli citizenship.

Rose’s career tracks the trajectory of a typical media asset. After Russia, he relocated to Washington, D.C. Again employed as a journalist, he traveled to China with Bill Clinton before returning to Moscow to work for Jyllands-Posten, a rightwing Danish publication known for its anti-immigrant news fare.

Before catalyzing the cartoon crisis, Rose published a flattering interview with the Islam-bashing Daniel Pipes who heads Campus Watch. This organization monitors, disrupts and seeks to intimidate pro-Palestinian speakers when they accept invitations to speak at U.S. colleges.

Pipes is the neoconservative, Jewish-Zionist son of “Team B” leader Richard Pipes a Polish emigre. Team B was a 1976 alternative intelligence assessment whose success with phony intelligence during the presidency of Gerald Ford (when G.H.W. Bush was C.I.A. Director) informed those who fixed the intelligence that enabled the U.S. to segue seamlessly from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism during the presidency of G.W. Bush.

After the promotion of Rose to cultural editor and publication of the provocative cartoons, CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer featured Pipes on The Situation Room. By showcasing Pipes, Blitzer ensured the airwaves would carry his anti-Islam interpretation of the Rose-catalyzed, media-fueled crisis.

Blitzer elected not to inform the viewers of CNN (“the most trusted name in news”) that he (Blitzer) served as an editor of Near East Report, the Israel lobby’s in-house journal, or that he spent 17 years with The Jerusalem Post, or that he published a sympathetic book on Israeli super-spy Jonathan Pollard who did more than anyone in history to damage U.S. national security.

The ensuing crisis cost many lives while the reaction to that provocation consumed the public’s attention and polarized public opinion internationally. Appearing on television, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice used the crisis to criticize Iran and Syria, adding American credibility and military authority to stoke The Clash of Civilizations as the post-Cold War narrative.

Overall, the response heightened tensions and made an attack on Iran appear more reasonable as scenes of widespread outrage by Muslims fueled Islamo-phobia in the West. To escape the media scrutiny, Rose fled to the U.S. where he vacationed in Miami.

Timing is Everything

The usual suspects stepped into the fray in support of Pastor Terry Jones’ First Amendment right to further outrage an already outraged Muslim population for whom the Koran is a sacred text.

Supporting cast for the Jones stunt included New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg who chose an annual Iftar dinner at Gracie Mansion to cite the U.S. Constitution in support of this provocation. Likewise for New York Times columnist Charles Blow whose prominently placed op-ed on September 11^th urged that “great American debates” should not be “tempered for terrorists.”

National security may (at long last) be catching on to how those complicit in these psy-ops use our guaranteed freedoms (of speech, press, religion, etc.) to undermine our freedom. It’s no coincidence that those most concerned about domestic eavesdropping by national security are drawn from the same ranks as those complicit in this ongoing manipulation of public opinion.

The high profile nature of this latest 911 anniversary ensured that agent provocateurs would use the event to keep hate alive. The day prior, President Obama urged that Israel extend its “temporary partial freeze” on settlements for the sake of sustaining the peace talks.

Meanwhile Jewish Zionist Pamela Zeller sponsored a speech at Ground Zero by Dutch politician Geert Wilders who likens the Koran to Mein Kampf. A staunch supporter of Israel, Wilders is known for his incendiary speeches with a strong anti-Islam theme.

Geller, a disciple of Russian philosopher Ayn Rand (Alisa Rosenbaum), advocates measures to “Stop Islamization of America.” She emphasizes the role of Barack Obama in doing the bidding of “Islamic overlords” in what she calls “The Obama Administration’s War on America.”

An outspoken Jewish Zionist, Geller urges that Israel “give up nothing.” A regular commentator on Zionist-dominated media outlets (CNN, Fox News, The Washington Post, The New York Times), she insists that Israel should “take back Gaza” and “secure Judea and Samaria”—better known as the West Bank, the key area of contention on expansion of the settlements.

Geller is also a driving force behind anti-Islam hate groups working to scuttle plans for an Islamic  Cultural Center two blocks from the 911 site. Allied with others in the hate campaign, she was among the first in November 2009 to describe the shootings on Fort Hood, Texas as a “Muslim terror attack.”

Next: Staying on message to advance the narrative.

Hillary Clinton

Dual Loyalty Revisited

Four-fifths of the U.S. House and Senate recently declared in correspondence to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that the U.S. must reaffirm its “unbreakable bond” with Israel. What persuaded our Congress to proclaim their loyalty to Israel while our military is waging war in the Middle East based on fabricated intelligence?

Any sober assessment of this bond must concede a need to reappraise its cost in blood and treasure. Yet the Congress—our Congress—opposed that reassessment even as our commander-in-chief seeks to end a brutal Israeli occupation of Palestine that has provoked worldwide outrage for more than six decades.

The Congress and the president are sworn to the same oath of office. That oath obliges them to protect the U.S. from all threats, both foreign and domestic. The facts confirm a common pro-Israeli source of the phony intelligence that took our military to war in Iraq. All the evidence points to Israel or its surrogates, including those in the Congress. Is that why the Israel lobby pressed the Congress for a pledge of allegiance to Israel?

Giving Aid and Comfort

The U.S.-Israeli relationship has proven itself a consistent threat to our national security. That peril has only worsened with time. Tel Aviv’s massive land grab in 1967 was not “defensive”— as Israeli leaders have since conceded. That assault on its neighbors was a long-planned seizure of territory that Zionists see as rightly theirs as part of Greater Israel.

That attack provoked precisely the reaction that any competent war-planning game theorist could foresee as Israeli conduct outraged everyone in the region. As Israel’s loyal ally, the U.S., was widely perceived as guilty for our unfailing support of an expansionist agenda that the Pentagon urged we shut down in 1948.

In advising President Harry Truman against recognition of this extremist enclave as a legitimate state, the Joint Chiefs detailed the Zionists’ “fanatical concepts” including their plans for “military and economic hegemony over the entire Middle East.” Our military was correct.

Facing a decline in his approval ratings and depleted campaign coffers in the lead-up to his 1948 presidential race, Truman put his signature on a two-sentence note that on May 14^th gave the Zionists what they sought: U.S. recognition. That decision began a “special relationship” that has proven consistently harmful to U.S. interests.

The Truman campaign train was then “refueled” with $400,000 from grateful Zionists ($3.6 million in 2010 dollars). As editorial support from pro-Israeli media shifted in Truman’s favor, his approval surged long enough for him to prevail in November over New York’s Tom Dewey.

Absent the Holocaust, Truman could not have recognized Zionism as a lawful basis for a sovereign state in Palestine over intense opposition from Secretary of State George Marshall, the Pentagon, the State Department Policy Planning staff and the Central Intelligence Agency. All were adamantly opposed, as were members of the U.S. diplomatic corps. They knew better.

While the politics of campaign finance clearly played a role, Truman also acted out of humanitarian and religious concerns informed by his Christian Zionist upbringing in rural Missouri where he famously read the Bible cover-to-cover five times by age 15.

His decision was also shaped by sentiments developed as a youngster steeped in a fundamentalist Baptist theology that revered the Jews’ “return to Zion” as a prerequisite for the return of the Christian messiah.

Fast forward to 2001 when, in reaction to the provocation of a mass murder on U.S. soil, another Christian Zionist (G.W. Bush) was predisposed to support a military response that coincided with an expansionist agenda long sought by those our military earlier described as fanatics.

The Six-Day Land Grab

In the minds of those who comprise the Jewish Diaspora, the Six-Day War of 1967 reactivated the mental and emotional insecurity associated with the fascists of WWII. In combination, those two events catalyzed a worldwide “internal Diaspora” based on:

• Nationalism—a shared emotional bond among those persuaded they share an identity of interest between themselves and a piece of real estate on which they may never set foot. After the Six-Day War, the state of Israel became the Land of Israel based on the more expansive area it occupied and the additional territory it has yet to seize.

• Insecurity—a shared sense of vulnerability and victimhood as Jews saw themselves pitted against a widely marketed and steadily shifting threat. After September 2001, the 1967 “Arab Ring of Steel” morphed into the threat of “Islamo-fascism.” When, as now, Israeli policies come under attack, media campaigns claim an outbreak of “anti-Semitism.”

Throughout this saga, certain facts have been taken for granted that are now being questioned. The Zionist premise of the Right of Return relies on an historical account now under scholarly assault. In The Invention of the Jewish People, Israeli historian Shlomo Sand challenges the factual accuracy both of the Exile and the Exodus, thereby putting in question the legitimacy of the Return, the moral foundation for Israeli statehood in Palestine.

As Egyptologists point out, this ancient civilization records little of an Exodus even though Egyptian kings were meticulous in documenting details of their monarchies. How then did such a cataclysmic event as the parting of the sea and the drowning of a mighty king along with his army pass undocumented by the Egyptians while filling an entire chapter of the Torah? Where does fact end and fiction begin?

Christians and Muslims were weaned on similar oral histories. Both faiths are derived from Judaism, an earlier religion also “of the book.” Yet the two derivatives were induced to wage war with each other by those long skilled at displacing facts with what a targeted populace can be deceived to believe—as with the fabricated “facts” about Iraq WMD, Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda, Iraqi mobile biological weapons labs and so forth. All were false. Yet all were widely believed.

A Promised Land of Myth-Makers and Story Tellers

Bound by a shared anxiety and the allure of a Promised Land offering refuge through a Right of Return, Israel initially emerged as a shared mental state. In 1948, that mental state emerged as a physical “homeland” in Palestine offering residency for those it considered “Jewish.”

In combination, the Holocaust and the Six-Day War made Zionism a geopolitical possibility. Without the fascist abuses of WWII, Truman’s recognition of Zionism as a legitimate state would have proven impossible. Absent the 1967 war, moderate Jews would have continued their opposition to a “Jewish state” as a barrier to assimilation and contrary to their values.

By regarding an enclave of religious fanatics as an entity on a par with other sovereign nations, forces were set in motion that were destined to discredit and endanger the U.S. Anti-Zionist Jews rightly worried that this expansion-seeking “state” would imperil the broader faith tradition by enabling all Jews to be portrayed as foreign agents of an aggressor nation.Moderate Jews saw that charges of “dual loyalty” could be deployed to impugn by association even those Jews appalled at what Israel was destined to become—as the Pentagon predicted.

Meanwhile pressure from the Israel lobby discredited the U.S. worldwide by ensuring Congressional indifference to six decades of Palestinian suffering. Adding insult to injury, the lobby again prevailed by persuading Congress to proclaim this “unbreakable bond.”

Turning Fiction to Fact

Tel Aviv’s 1967 land grab also enabled the “Israelites”—with support from their Christian Zionist allies—to occupy territory that Jewish Zionists consider theirs—because they are Jewish.

Thus the strategic necessity to oppose anyone who challenges either Israel’s retention of occupied land or its seizure of more territory for a more expansive Land of Israel. Or, as Jewish fundamentalists argue, the “redemption” of land that is rightly theirs as The Chosen of God because the land they occupy was given to them—by a god of their own choosing.

Thus also the need to maintain an aggressive strategy that seeks to discredit, isolate, ostracize or marginalize anyone critical of Tel Aviv’s expansionist policies – even when those policies undermine the prospects for peace essential to protect U.S. interests in the region. Thus the perilous timing of this Congressional pledge of allegiance to an “unbreakable bond.”

Israel’s treatment of its Muslim neighbors has long been appalling. Yet it is clear to all but the willfully blind that Israeli behavior is enabled by its “special relationship” with the U.S. This latest pledge makes it appear that Israeli conduct is condoned and even welcomed by Americans—with precisely the effect on U.S. troops that the Israel lobby could anticipate. The perilous impact of this pledge on U.S. national security makes the lobby’s conduct reprehensible.

Americans who want to restore our national security must hold accountable under the law those pro-Israelis who conspired to displace the facts essential to informed choice with the false beliefs that took us to war in Iraq. We also must ensure that never again are foreign interests allowed to exert such control over what little remains of “our” representative government.

The Israel lobby should be forced to register as foreign agents subject to all the restrictions that implies, including a dramatic reduction in the funding it provides to Congress.

In practical effect, those Senators and Representatives who recently pledged their loyalty to Israel gave aid and comfort to an enemy within. Those who led this latest dual loyalty effort are adhering to an enemy and should rightly be indicted for treason while this nation is at war.

That crime, for good reason, was made a capital offense by those who founded this nation to protect our freedom as Americans from those who manipulate beliefs to influence behavior.

This behavior—traceable to a common source—has long undermined our national interest and endangered our military. Those elected to the Congress face a stark choice: either defend this nation and support our troops or resign.

Those who do not resign risk a charge of treason when a long-deceived American public grasps that this pledge of allegiance was made while our military remains at risk based on intelligence fabricated by those to whom Congress just pledged an unbreakable bond.

An informed public will see the signatories of this pledge as prime suspects when federal law enforcement turns to identifying and indicting those complicit in enabling this ongoing treason.

Any American not outraged is not yet fully informed. Members of the military, both active duty and retired, should let an ill-informed public know what is being done in their name.

Hillary Clinton

Zionist Dominance in the Obama Presidency

Below is the second installment in a 5-part series regarding Pakistan.

Be not deceived by Barack Hussein Obama’s middle name or by the fact that he spent several childhood years in Indonesia. His political career is a product of a Westside Chicago Ashkenazi network with roots that trace directly back to organized crime of the 1920s.

Top fundraiser Penny Pritzker traces her family lineage to grandfather Abe and great-grandfather Nicholas who served as lawyers for organized crime. She declined a nomination as Secretary of Commerce in the Obama Cabinet, a post typically offered top fundraisers. Her confirmation hearings could have proved a political embarrassment by reminding us of the suspect origins of “our” latest president.

Clinton White House counsel Abner Mikva aptly described this high-profile product of the Chicago Outfit as “the first Jewish president.” Plus his Vice President, only a heartbeat from the reins of power, is the reliably obsequious Joe “I am a Zionist” Biden.

For his Secretary of State, Obama appointed a presidential rival, Hillary Clinton, whose political career traces to the same source. After serving as First Lady in the presidency of Arkansas native Bill Clinton, she fled to New York to run for the U.S. Senate knowing she could not win an election—any election—in Arkansas where she is widely reviled.

By staking out extreme pro-Israeli positions, she joined New York Senator Charles Schumer as, in practical effect, the second Jewish Senator from a key electoral state long dominated by this trans-generational criminal syndicate.

The chiefs of staff for Barack and Michele Obama are both Ashkenazim from Chicago, long a center of foreign espionage. That fact was recently reconfirmed by Federal Bureau of Investigation translator Sibel Edmonds when, from FBI wiretaps, she documented the close working relationship between the Israel Lobby and U.S. officials with power over policy making in the Middle East, including Richard Perle, Wolfowitz understudy Douglas Feith and key members of Congress.

Earlier this month, a Chicago man whose father was a Pakistani diplomat was charged with involvement in planning “India’s 911.” In practical effect, the murder of 166 people in Mumbai, India’s financial center, accelerated the destabilization of Pakistan by drawing troops out of the western provinces for redeployment along the eastern border with India. See:

• What is Israel’s Role in the Destabilization of Pakistan?

Why Outside Help Is Required

The same syndicate working to destabilize Pakistan is also destabilizing the U.S.—from the inside. That’s why ordinary Americans need the assistance of Pakistanis and others outside the U.S. to restore some semblance of representative government.

The confidence with which this game theory aggression progressed in plain sight could be seen in the behavior of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, a key Zionist insider. Four days after 9-11 while in a principals’ meeting at Camp David, a presidential retreat outside Washington, he proposed that the U.S. invade Iraq. At that time, the intelligence did not point to Iraqi involvement and Osama bin Laden was thought to be hiding in a remote region of Afghanistan.

On that same day, San Diego FBI Special Agent Stephen Butler interrogated Iraqi Munther Ghazal at his home near San Diego to determine if he was funding Mel Rockefeller with whom Ghazal traveled to Baghdad in early 1997. After meeting for several days with Nidhal al-Hamdani, a top nuclear physicist with oversight of Iraq’s mothballed nuclear weapons program, Rockefeller returned to the U.S. with a practical proposal for removing Saddam Hussein without this war and without triggering a violent and destabilizing insurgency.

[Insert 1997 photo of Nidhal al-Hamdani in her office on phone with Saddam Hussein.]

When regional specialists at the U.S. Department of State declined to meet with him, he traveled to Ottawa in April 1997 where he met with Middle East specialists in the Canadian government to ensure a written record would confirm there was an alternative to war in Iraq—six years before the invasion. Instead of debriefing him, FBI agents sought to discredit him.

[Insert fax of April 1997 from Canadian officials to James M. Rockefeller.]

Though FBI agents interviewed Munther Ghazal numerous times, they have yet to meet with Mel Rockefeller. Four packages sent to the Phoenix divisional office of the FBI documenting ongoing treason and criminal stalking were returned, marked “refused.”

FBI Special Agent Butler cashed checks and paid rent for the two San Diego-based hijackers who piloted planes into the World Trade Center towers. The same Iman who counseled Major Nidal Hasan (with FBI knowledge) before he was transferred to Fort Hood—where he went on a shooting spree—also counseled the San Diego-based hijackers—likewise with FBI knowledge.

As of December 18, 2009, no one from either federal law enforcement or national security had debriefed Mel Rockefeller—eight years after 9-11. Had he been engaged in good faith in early 1997 after his return from Baghdad or in early 2001 after his return from Jakarta, the facts suggest that 9-11 might well have been prevented. Good faith engagement after 9-11 could have prevented the invasion of Iraq. Instead, extraordinary steps were taken to discredit him.

When President George H.W. Bush declined to invade Baghdad to remove Saddam Hussein during the 1991 Gulf War, Pentagon Under Secretary for Policy Paul Wolfowitz imposed a No-Fly Zone in northern Iraq. By the time that the invasion of March 2003 began, the Israeli Mossad had more than 100 agents deployed for a decade in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.

Intelligence reports of Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda were also traced to Mosul—reports that proved false. Mosul again emerged in November 2004 as a center of the insurgency that destabilized Iraq. That reaction precluded the speedy exit of coalition forces promised in Congressional testimony by senior war-planner Wolfowitz.

In the lead-up to the invasion, Wolfowitz assured policy-makers of a swift and welcome regime-change whose $50 billion cost would be recovered from the proceeds of Iraqi oil. Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz has since projected the total cost will exceed $3,000 billion, all of it borrowed. That total, 60 times the original estimate, includes $700 billion in interest paid on war-related debt.

See:

A Closer Look at Israel’s Role in Terrorism

Ft. Hood: “Death By Political Correctness”?

Fort Hood Tragedy: The Real Story of the Terrorist “Mad Doctor Hasan”

Hillary Clinton

The Obama Presidency’s War in Iran

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.