Last October, Reuters published news about a secret U.S. government panel which “nominated” militants for murder or capture, including U.S. citizens like Anwar al-Awlaki.  The story peered into the opaque process by which a government bureaucracy decides to take a human life.  And it was disturbing:

…Targeting recommendations are drawn up by a committee of mid-level National Security Council and agency officials. Their recommendations are then sent to the panel of NSC “principals,” meaning Cabinet secretaries and intelligence unit chiefs, for approval. The panel of principals could have different memberships when considering different operational issues, they said.

The names suggested are then brought before the president, who may veto them.

What’s astonishing about all this is that the names of those on the panel are unknown, how they decide someone should die is unknown, and what evidence is used to determine on a death sentence is unknown.  Everything about this process is deliberately opaque.  And there is no written record of the panel’s deliberations in order to further insulate participants, especially the president himself.  This fact alone reminds me of some of the more nefarious plots in recent history including Pol Pot’s genocide, Hitler’s Final Solution and Ben Gurion’s plans for the Nakba.  All wisely left little or no written evidence of their plans that could be used later by authorities or history to judge them.  Not that targeted killings rise to the level of genocide in terms of crimes against humanity, but they are grievious breaches of international law nonetheless.

The hypocrisy of Hillary Clinton swearing on a stack of Bibles that the U.S. had nothing to do with the last Iranian scientist assassination is laughable considering that our own behavior isn’t that dissimilar.  In a conversation with a journalist a few days ago who’d had discussions with CIA officers who justified the U.S. killing of al-Awlaki, the agent asked the reporter whether it would be justified to kill someone during World War II who fought right at Hitler’s side.

He was attempting to liken the Yemeni-American cleric to such a figure, when the evidence offered so far doesn’t justify it.  Is the CIA saying that Osama bin Laden was Hitler and al-Awlaki was his commander-in-chief?  Since when, on both counts?  I have no doubt that both were enemies of the U.S. who deserved to be tried and punished for their crimes.  But as Mehdi Hassan argues so persuasively in this commentary on the subject, “targeted killing is just the death penalty without due process.”

Barack Obama doesn’t get to be judge, jury and executioner under the U.S. Constitution.  In fact, he’s violating the Fifth Amendment, which prohibits taking a citizen’s life without due process.  A secret National Council panel is NOT due process.  It’s just death by bureaucratic fiat.  It is no different from Israel’s targeted assassinations of Palestinian militants and Iranian scientists.

Israel's 'false flag' operation

Amir Oren published today a story based on a senior Mossad official who flatly denies the truth of Mark Perry‘s false flag report in yesterday’s Foreign Policy.  The Mossad source (likely either Tamir Pardo or someone very close to him) called Perry’s report “absolute nonsense.”  The source continued by claiming that if the story was true then Meir Dagan, who was responsible for the operation as the agency chief at the time, would’ve been declared persona non grata and warned not to step foot in the U.S.  I always enjoy non-denial denials like this because they usually make a claim that goes like this: if story A were true, then B would’ve had to have happened.  When there is no reason whatsoever that A ipso facto must lead to B.

In fact, in Perry’s story the CIA sources make clear there was a furious debate within the administration about how to respond to the Mossad duplicity and the Cheney pro-Israel forces wore down those who were critical of Israel’s operation.  So no action was taken.  In that case, administration officials had to decide how important this event was in the greater scheme of U.S.-Israel relations.  Around this time (2007), Israel was lobbying intensively for permission to attack Iran and Bush was giving Israel the red light.  No doubt, Bush decided it was more important to get Israel to stand down from this plan than it was to take Meir Dagan to the woodshed.  In other words, we had bigger fish to fry with the Israelis than this false flag deal.

But what especially irks me about Oren’s report is that he adds a dig against Perry’s credibility that is gratuitous and deeply insulting.  Interestingly, the insult is only in the Hebrew version (wonder why hmm?) and not the English.  Dimi Reider, in his 972 report notes that Oren calls Perry, an “avowed supporter of the Arab cause.”  His Wikipedia article notes that Perry was an “unofficial” advisor to the PLO until 2004.  How does this fact impeach his reporting on the false flag story?  Because he had some informal involvement with the PLO ending eight years ago, that means he has it in for the Mossad on this story?  C’mon.  That’s bush league stuff.  But unfortunately, this is what Israeli intelligence people and their willing collaborators in the media stoop to.  And I say this as someone who’s admired all of Oren’s previous reporting.

Actually, there is nothing in Perry’s story that would give you the impression he was a pro-Arab partisan (and by the way Mossad source and Mr. Oren, Iranians aren’t Arab, but that’s beside the point).  It is a very carefully reported story that contains no animus whatsoever against Israel, nor any gratuitous partisan statements on Iran’s behalf.

As Perry notes in his interview with Reider, he researched the story for 18 months, had six major CIA sources at least two of which still are on active duty.  He also gave both the CIA and Israel an opportunity to respond formally before he published.  Neither chose to do so.  So who’s right?  My money is on Perry.

Another phenomenon I’ve noticed at work here is that most U.S. officials, if they have to speak to the media about a story, will generally try not to lie outright.  They will dance around the issue and make qualified denials.  But usually you can decipher what they’re truly denying and what they’re implicitly confirming.  With Israeli officials it is quite different.  On a subject like Iran, where they wish the Iranians to know what they’ve done and don’t feel they’ll suffer for it, they concede their involvement by bragging–though they do it implicitly, rather than explicitly.  So Ehud Barak said about the Iran missile base explosion: May there be many more.  They said something similar about Mahmoud al-Mabouh’s assassination.

When they are involved in something which, if known to the public, might do some harm to their interest, they clam up and refuse to say anything.  This was the case with the Dirar Abusisi kidnapping.  In this case, Israeli intelligence was duped by Hamas into believing the engineer knew Gilad Shalit’s whereabouts.  So it kidnapped him and found out it was left holding an empty bag.  For this reason, it has adopted a virtual Wall of Silence around the actual kidnapping (though it has falsely accused him of being a rocket engineer and other tall tales).

But when Israeli involvement in an incident could do grave harm to Israel’s military and security interests, then it flat-out lies and doesn’t give a crap who cares or who finds out.  Lying in these cases seems to be SOP.  This is what happened in the Eilat terror case when Ehud Barak, Bibi Netanyahu and the IDF spokesflacks offered flat-out lies in claiming the Gaza-based Popular Resistance Committees were behind the operation (in fact, Sinai Islamists were, having no known connection to Gaza at all).

This seems to be the MO behind the current story in which the Mossad upper echelon is lying about its Jundallah operation.  In fact, Meir Dagan himself told Nicholas Burns in a leaked Wikileaks cable, that Israel was recruiting Iranian dissidents for sabotage operations.  But he never spoke nor was asked about the false flag operation.  That’s the only part we didn’t have explicit confirmation about (until now).

As the photo and caption I’ve displayed here implies: are operations like this not just “false flags,” but false to the flag and ideals that Israel represents, and are they false to allies on whom Israel depends for so much, and possibly even its existence?

Jundallah leader Abdolmalek Riggi attended meeting in Morocco he believed was with NATO officials, who were either CIA, or more probably Mossad agents

Foreign Policy’s Mark Perry reports the astonishing story that Mossad agents posing as CIA operatives recruited Iranian Sunni dissidents affiliated with Jundallah to engage in acts of terror inside Iran

Israeli Mossad officers recruited operatives belonging to the terrorist group Jundallah by passing themselves off as American agents. According to two U.S. intelligence officials, the Israelis, flush with American dollars and toting U.S. passports, posed as CIA officers in recruiting Jundallah operatives — what is commonly referred to as a “false flag” operation.

…The [CIA] memos also detail…field reports saying that Israel’s recruiting activities occurred under the nose of U.S. intelligence officers, most notably in London, the capital of one of Israel’s ostensible allies, where Mossad officers posing as CIA operatives met with Jundallah officials.

…They were stunned by the brazenness of the Mossad’s efforts.

“It’s amazing what the Israelis thought they could get away with,” the intelligence officer said. “Their recruitment activities were nearly in the open. They apparently didn’t give a damn what we thought.”

I’ve been reporting for some time that the Mossad has been doing this with the MEK, which has assassinated Iranian scientists and bombed Iranian missile bases. Le Figaro also wrote that Israeli intelligence recruited Iranian Kurds inside Iraqi Kurdistan to engage in sabotage within Iran. Now, Perry’s story confirms an Israeli anti-Iran terror Trifecta.

I published a post here some time ago based on a Wikileaks cable in which Meir Dagan confirmed to Nicholas Burns the broad outlines of the above plan. The Israelis operate under the mistaken impression that by playing on the natural internal dissension among ethnic groups inside that country that it can subvert both Iranian stability and the current regime.

This is similar to the CIA’s tactics throughout the 1960s and later in Cuba, by which we tried mightily to bring down Castro through invasion, assassination attempts, and airline bombings. You can see how well that turned out.

I think it can and should be argued that such outside intervention by nations already viewed by the native population as hostile to their country’s interests, only serve to reinforce internal cohesion. They rally citizens around a repressive regime by focussing fear and paranoia on an external enemy. This is why it would a terrible idea for the U.S. to be seen to intervene publicly on behalf of the Iranian Green Movement and why the current black ops war against Iran fueled by both the U.S. (indirectly, see Stuxnet) is an even worse idea. It’s a typically ham-handed operation displaying all the subtlety of a jack hammer on a New York street.

I haven’t even begun to talk about the outrageous abuse of the U.S.-Israel alliance in this Jundallah operation. The Israelis had to adopt a false flag identity because they’re hated in the Arab world even more than Americans. So Israel likely recruited Israeli-Americans or native Israelis with excellent language skills in American English to pose as CIA agents. As an American-Jew, this aspect of the operation makes my blood boil. Americans in Israel already have a reputation of being settler hardliners, if not outright Jewish terrorists. Do we need to become known as well for betraying our American roots by becoming fake CIA spies in the Arab world?

What particularly upset the CIA operatives who discovered this Mossad dirty game was that the Israelis essentially didn’t care. They pursued their own interests without any sense that they needed to have any concern for the betrayal our own national interest:

“The report sparked White House concerns that Israel’s program was putting Americans at risk,” the intelligence officer told me. “There’s no question that the U.S. has cooperated with Israel in intelligence-gathering operations against the Iranians, but this was different. No matter what anyone thinks, we’re not in the business of assassinating Iranian officials or killing Iranian civilians.”

…[Under] Obama…U.S. intelligence services have received clearance to cooperate with Israel on a number of classified intelligence-gathering operations focused on Iran’s nuclear program, according to a currently serving officer. These operations are highly technical in nature and do not involve covert actions targeting Iran’s infrastructure or political or military leadership.

“We don’t do bang and boom,” a recently retired intelligence officer said. “And we don’t do political assassinations.”

…Israel’s activities jeopardized the administration’s fragile relationship with Pakistan, which was coming under intense pressure from Iran to crack down on Jundallah. It also undermined U.S. claims that it would never fight terror with terror, and invited attacks in kind on U.S. personnel.

Though President Bush, when he discovered the Israeli operation was enraged, there was enough pro-Israel sentiment within the administration (Cheney, Feith, Wurmser, Perle, Wolfowitz, et al.) that the U.S. never confronted Israel about it:

In the end,” the officer noted, “it was just easier to do nothing than to, you know, rock the boat.” Even so, at least for a short time, this same officer noted, the Mossad operation sparked a divisive debate among Bush’s national security team, pitting those who wondered “just whose side these guys [in Israel] are on” against those who argued that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

Another element to consider in the Mossad strategy behind this operation is that getting the U.S. associated with it, even in a fraudulent way would advance their interest. They could then argue, you’re already implicated, why not just take the plunge and go all the way on this? There is a slippery slope in military-intelligence activities. Once you go part way, it’s that much easier to persuade someone to go all in. Perry’s article makes clear that Israeli intelligence made such proposals regularly to their U.S. counterparts who, if they can be believed, uniformly rejected them.

One thing that you have to learn about Israel is that it is like the school bully in pursuing it’s interests. If you don’t confront it aggressively when such red lines are crossed, Israel understands from this that silence equals consent. From there, they will further test the limits by pushing that red line as far as they can in their direction.

One of the few times the U.S. pushed back was in the case of Jonathan Pollard, when the egregiousness of the betrayal of U.S. intelligence secrets to Israel and the transfer of much of that data to the Soviet Union caused a severe backlash inside the Reagan administration. Neither Bush nor Obama seem to have the spine of Reagan officials like Caspar Weinberger or George Schultz, who lobbied successfully for severe punishment of Pollard. While Pollard is still in prison, do you think it would prevent Israel from recruiting another Pollard from within U.S. intelligence if it could?

Final note: I just realized that some particularly astute Foreign Policy editor displayed an image with Perry’s story of Israeli soldiers standing before an Israeli flag.  If you combine this image with the article title, False Flag, the editor made a particularly acute visual pun.

Bulletin of Atomic Scientists Doomsday clock

You remember the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists Doomsday Clock which graced its monthly cover in the 1950s?  Periodically, the organization would announce how close we were to Nuclear Midnight depending on how grave relations were between the two major nuclear powers, the Russians and U.S.

Similarly, each day developments concerning Iran move my Doomsday Clock a minute closer or farther from midnight.  Right now, my sense is they’re at about four minutes till.  Everyone has their own conception of how dire things may be.  Maybe you’re at quarter till or one minute till.  Regardless of how close to the threshold we are, most of us would agree we are somewhere very close to it.

If war comes, at least for me it will be qualitatively different from most of the wars the U.S. has pursued in my adulthood.  The Gulf War you could justify based on Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait.  Afghanistan you could justify based on 9/11.  With the Iraq War at least Bush-Cheney ginned up severe threats of WMD and Saddam seemed a genuinely evil dictator.  With Iran, if it happens, it will be different.  Iran, unlike Iraq, has not invaded any country (we can leave aside the issue of terrorism for now since an invasion is qualitatively different from supporting proxies engaged in acts of terror).  Unlike Iraq, it is ruled by strongmen-Ayatollahs, but this is nowhere near the dictatorial powers wielded in Iraq.  Iran even has vestiges of a democratic system, though it isn’t fully democratic.  Iran has a vastly more capable military force than Iraq with more sophisticated weapons.  And Iran fought and vanquished Saddam in an eight year-long war that tested the nation’s mettle in a way that neither Americans nor Israelis have been tested in decades.

There is no international consensus to attack Iran as there was in the conflicts I referenced above.  Obama and Netanyahu will have to face an intense level of opposition in the rest of the world to any strike against Iran.  And once the Iranian response is felt, that opposition promises only to grow.  As Obama enters a re-election campaign, I can’t imagine him winning if the Democratic left-liberals abandon him, as they would if he either participated in or supported an Israeli attack on Iran.  He may count on a short war which would be long behind him by Election Day.  But I can’t see how Iran turns into a short engagement given the latter’s resiliency in the face of other indomitable foes it’s faced.  I fear Obama (and certainly Israel) is making a major and disastrous miscalculation.

That’s why I think the notion of a Doomsday Clock and Nuclear Midnight is apt in the case of Iran.  Not to mention, that we’re once again arguing about nukes as we were with the Russkies in the 1950s.  Though I don’t think the issues are anywhere near the same today.  I think the issue of an Iranian bomb is not really the main issue.  I don’t think anyone truly believes the Iranians will use a nuclear weapon, though that’s what the warhawks claims to believe.  For Israel, as I’ve written here, the issues with Iran revolve around regional hegemony.  The former has never liked having charismatic Arab leaders to compete with (viz. Nasser), and always takes the first opportunity to cut such figures down to size.  Israel wants to maintain its prerogatives and will brook no opposition on that score.  No one crimps Israel’s style.

Another fear that motivates Israeli bellicosity around Iran is that with a nuclear arsenal the latter can buttress its solidarity with the Palestinians and other frontline states.  Not that Iran would threaten to use nuclear weapons.  I think the Ayatollahs are too shrewd for that.  But the mere fact that there is a regional Muslim power with a weapon acts as an unstated insurance policy for the Arab cause.  It offers a red line beyond which Israel may not go unless it wishes to provoke the ire of a nuclearized Iran.  This constraint on Israeli power is also viewed as insufferable by Tel Aviv.

Now an explanation from the day’s news why the situation today seems so dire: first, Bibi Netanyahu yesterday gave another one of his infuriating ‘history-lesson’ speeches about how he has a rendezvous with history.  Except, instead of Churchill’s rendezvous with history, Bibi has a rendezvous with David Ben Gurion and Jewish history.  You see, the decision to attack Iran is at least as decisive in the history of Israel as Ben Gurion’s decision to declare Israeli independence.  At times like this I think back fondly on Lloyd Bentsen’s brilliant put down of  Dan Quayle.  In Israeli terms it would go like this: “I knew David Ben Gurion (or ‘BG’ in Israeli terminology), I was friends with BG, you are no BG!”

Here are some of Bibi’s words:

Great statesmen as well as friends of the Jews and of Zionism” warned Ben-Gurion that declaring a Jewish state in 1948 would bring an invasion of Arab armies and a “grave and difficult battle”, Netanyahu said.

“He understood full well the decision carried a heavy price, but he believed not making that decision had a heavier price,” Netanyahu said. “We are all here today because Ben-Gurion made the right decision at the right moment.  Today we are all in agreement it was a considered, correct and responsible decision. I want to believe we will always act with responsibility, courage and determination to make the right decisions to ensure our future and security,” Netanyahu said.

Although Netanyahu didn’t mention Iran or its nuclear program in his speech, it was quite clear that Netanyahu was using his speech to draw a comparison between himself and Ben-Gurion, and between Ben-Gurion’s decision to proclaim the foundation of the State of Israel and the decisions he, Netanyahu, is facing today to counter the Iranian nuclear threat.

How dare this two-bit tin-pot megalomaniac take the mantle of Winston Churchill or David Ben Gurion.  World War II and 1948 were indeed periods in which humanity was in the crucible of history.  Epochal decisions were made.  The decision to attack Iran, if it is made, will be nothing more than an expression of one leader and nation’s deep level of paranoia.  Such an attack will go down in history as a monumental catastrophe for all parties involved.  At least Avner Cohen can be consoled because he believes such idiocy can be redeemed by the declaration of the Middle East as a nuclear free zone.  I wish I had Avner’s optimism.  I think it might lead the region even deeper into the swamp of fratricide, if not genocide.

Besides Bibi’s “Sword of David” speech, the Telegraph reports that Ayatollah Khameini and Iran’s highest military officials have raised the readiness of the country’s armed forces to their highest level.  Presumably, leaves have been cancelled, readiness drills are underway, missiles and other advanced weapons systems are being dispersed throughout the country in order to prevent their being targeted in an attack and enabling them to survive to deal a return blow against any attacker:

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s spiritual leader, issued a directive to the heads of all the country’s military, intelligence and security organisations to take all necessary measures to protect the regime.

Gen Jaafari responded to this directive by ordering Revolutionary Guards units to redistribute Iran’s arsenal of long-range Shahab missiles to secret sites around the country where they would be safe from enemy attack and could be used to launch retaliatory attacks.

In addition, the Iranian air force has formed a number of “rapid reaction units”, which have been carrying out extensive exercises to practice a response to an enemy air attack.

The Iranian leadership fears the country is being subjected to a carefully co-ordinated attack by Western intelligence and security agencies to destroy key elements of its nuclear infrastructure.

In a related matter, the U.S. finally conceded that the drone which crashed inside Iran was, as the Iranians had claimed, its most advanced Sentinel RQ-170 stealth vehicle.  It also acknowledged that the craft was being operated by the CIA, thus confirming that its flight had nothing to do with Afghanistan, but was rather a secret spying mission inside Iran.  We did deny, though, that the Iranians shot down the plane, saying instead that there was a communications failure that caused it to crash.  This would explain why it was relatively intact when it landed.  And it would counter the Iranians claim that they succeeded in downing the plane themselves.

This incident calls to mind another one which rattled two earlier superpowers: the Russian downing of Francis Gary Powers’ U-2, which led to a massive escalation in tension between Russia and the U.S.  The confrontation was defused by two relatively adult, mature leaders, Kennedy and Khrushchev, who negotiated a prisoner exchange which brought Powers home.  Frankly, I doubt we have such a quality of leadership.  Today, our leaders are more likely to drag us deeper into a quagmire than extricate us from one as the two leaders did in 1962.

As in those days, everyone in Iran and the U.S. knows that we’re doing this, but to have the evidence right out in the open creates an even higher level of paranoia on both sides (but especially the Iranian).  If it weren’t for the loss of its most advanced surveillance and stealth technology, I don’t think the U.S. would mind the level of anger this will generate within Iran.  Our policymakers would say: if it gets the average Iranian riled up, it might make the Ayatollahs do something really stupid which we can exploit and use against them.

The Iranians aren’t the only ones who are paranoid and misconstruing reality.  A top state department non proliferation expert rattled sabers today:

“Iran…is becoming a pariah state,” Robert Einhorn, the U.S. State Department senior adviser for non-proliferation and arms control, told a news conference in the South Korean capital.

“The situation in Iran has become more and more worrisome. The timeline for its nuclear programme is beginning to get shorter, so it is important we take these strong steps on an urgent basis.

“If we do not, pressures will grow for much stronger actions. The U.S. favours a diplomatic solution pressure, but if we cannot achieve a diplomatic solution soon, inevitably interests will grow in a different kind of solution.

There are several outrageous, but interesting aspects to this passage.  First, Panetta warns Iran that closing the Straits of Hormuz would be a casus belli in American eyes.  Of course, Iran has not threatened to do so unless IT is attacked.  So either the U.S. is deliberately distorting the scenario so it appears that Iran might engage in an act worthy of a U.S. declaration of war; or he’s warning the Iranians that if future attacks against Iran which the U.S. and Israel have planned, ever give the regime the idea that it can use closing the Straits as a tactical tool, they ought to think again.

Second, Panetta’s claim that Iran is the greatest threat to the stability and security of the region is blatantly false.  Whatever level of threat Iran may pose, Israel poses as great or greater one.  It has 200-400 nuclear weapons.  It, as Panetta himself conceded in this same speech, is a pariah in the region despised by almost everyone in ways it wasn’t as recently as a year or two ago.  Israel, contrary to Iran, has shown itself more than willing to attack and invade neighboring countries in attacks causing the deaths of thousands of civilians.  Israel, contrary to its claims, has remained unwilling to compromise in ways that might resolve the serial conflicts with any of the frontline states.

Returning to the issue of sanctions, another NY Times article about their disruptive impact not just on the Iranian economy but on the world oil economy contains this prescient warning from a prominent Iranian-American analyst:

“At some point, sanctions become an act of war,” said Vali Nasr, a professor at Tufts University and an expert on Iranian affairs. “If you cut Iran out of the oil market, this is no longer economic pressure.”

What especially troubles me is that we, the U.S. are being led by the nose in this belligerency toward Iran.  This is not our fight.  Iran is not our mortal enemy.  It does not pose an existential threat to us.  Nor does it to Israel, but that’s another topic I’ve previously addressed.  Even with a nuclear weapon, Iran will pose no greater threat to world stability than Pakistan or North Korea.  The key is to manage the threat and not to eradicate it with violence.

I am not arguing that Iran is not a danger to the region.  It clearly is.  But it does not pose as great a danger, to my mind, as Israel does.  Instead of contemplating war to end the Iranian threat, we ought to be contemplating what inducements we could offer the Iranians to end their program.  Barring that, we should begin considering George Kennan’s approach of containing Iranian power, rather than going toe to toe against it.

The series of conflicts we’ve engaged in over the past decade have shown that American power is no long pre-eminent or omnipotent.  America can lose.  If a foe is persistent enough and has access to lethal-enough means, our enemies can make us bleed.  And America is growing weary of its boys dying on desert sands in faraway lands.  I don’t think Pres. Obama can make the case for going into yet another Middle East guerrilla conflict whose impact could last years.

I foresee an attack on Iran possibly turning into the type of morass which Napoleon and Hitler entered when they each decided to invade Russia.  This in turn led to them each facing a monumental defeat that led to their ultimate demise.  Iran too might be that sort of black hole for U.S. and Israeli power.  No, we wouldn’t be invading Iran in the same way they did.  But an attack on Iran would draw such a furious counterattack, that even against our will we might be drawn into a campaign of regime change.  Such a plan would require boots on the ground and an invasion.  Then we would be talking along the lines of Napoleon and Hitler’s folly.

As days like this mount up, as the threats, paranoia, and bellicosity rise, I become more and more convinced that an attack is likely.

Frankly, I’m wondering whether anything like this has ever been done before.  Apparently, a CIA drone killed two U.S. citizens in Yemen, one of whom was Anwar Al-Awlaki, a noted American-born Al Qaeda leader.  They killed him without trial despite the fact that the U.S. Constitution specifically prohibits depriving any citizen of life without due process.  Last I checked, a drone missile wasn’t due process.  They also killed him nowhere near any battlefield on which any U.S. citizen was in jeopardy nor during any war declared by this country against Awlaki’s (Yemen).  Samir Khan, another U.S. citizen, was also killed in the attack.  He was not on any wanted list at all.  His killing is even less defensible.  Now, enemies of the U.S. can argue we’ll kill you just for editing a magazine we don’t like.  As a member of the Charlotte Muslim community said:

“This is a very dangerous road when you go and kill someone like this,” said Ayeb Suleiman, 25, a medical resident. “He was just an editor. He was just writing.”

To be clear, I have no problem with apprehending anyone who organizes or is an accessory to any act of terror against U.S. citizens.  That’s the claim against Awlaki, though there have been absolutely no legal proceedings brought against him in any court, including any in the U.S.  I am fully prepared to see anyone, including Americans, who kill my fellow citizens punished to the full extent of the law.  If the U.S. had evidence it should’ve brought it.

Obama is now calling Awlaki the “director of external operations” for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a term no U.S. official has used before.  Until now, the only charges against him were that he was a fiery, gifted orator who detested the U.S. and its role in the Muslim world.  Awlaki was known as being an especial thorn in our side because he philosophically inspired a number of would-be terrorists who attacked us on our soil.  Now, after we’ve killed him and refused to provide any evidence of our claims about his guilt, we’re all of a sudden calling him a terror mastermind.  How convenient.

Even here, the NY Times says it outlines Awlaki’s “ties” to terror attacks, when all they can do is say that attackers listened to tapes of his before they went on a terror spree.  While I would’ve been be willing to see charges brought against him for incitement of such attacks…but killing him?  They certainly couldn’t get the death penalty against him in any real court.  Which is why they sentenced him to death by missile.  I only hope that those who passed this sentence don’t ever suffer the punishment themselves.  They at least deserve a trial before someone metes out such “justice” to them.

If you follow this logic to its chilling conclusion, the next time in U.S. history there is a movement like the Black Panthers or the American Indian Movement, which advocates violence against American targets, the U.S. government will be justified in murdering these future Bobby Seales, Huey Newtons, Leonard Pelletiers and Fred Hamptons without trial.  The only difference is that Obama killed Awlaki in Yemen and not in the U.S. itself.

I also opposed the assassination of Osama bin Laden.  Not only did he deserve a trial to determine his guilt, doing so would’ve raised America in the esteem of the world and further highlighted the value of international law.  As it was, we showed ourselves to be only marginally better than pirates plying the world’s oceans for prey.

We must be fully prepared for other guerrilla groups and nations to do precisely the same thing to our citizens–accuse them of being terrorists and claim the right to summarily execute them wherever they may be found without due process.  Let’s say that Yemen were a country that had the capacity to do this, and was inclined to pursue revenge against the U.S.  What would stop them, now that we’ve set such a precedent?  Alternatively, let’s say that Israel or the U.S. attack Iran and kill Iranians in significant numbers.  What’s to prevent the Iranians from pursuing a revenge terror attack against those who prepared similar attacks on their citizens?  The mullahs will rightly say that they learned their lessons well at the knee of their teacher, Barack Obama.  Who’s to say they’d be wrong?

David Cole writes similarly in the NY Review of Books:

In international law, where reciprocity governs, what is lawful for the goose is lawful for the gander. And when the goose is the United States, it sets a precedent that other countries may well feel warranted in following. Indeed, exploiting the international mandate to fight terrorism that has emerged since the September 11 attacks, Russia has already expanded its definition of terrorists…It may seem fanciful that Russia would have the nerve to use such an authority within the United States—though in the case of Alexsander Litvinenko it appears to have had few qualms about taking extreme measures to kill an individual who had taken refuge in the United Kingdom. But it is not at all fanciful that once the US proclaims such tactics legitimate, other nations might seek to use them against their less powerful neighbors.

…If…we continue to justify such practices in only the vaguest of terms [without offering proof of who we've targeted and why], we should expect other countries to take them up—and almost certainly in ways we will not find to our liking.

Martin Luther King said, inspired by Gandhi, that “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” makes us all blind and toothless.  I’m ashamed to say that Barack Obama has turned his back on this wisdom from the roots of the non-violence movement.  Our president thinks an eye for an eye is pretty good counter-terror policy.  And remember, this is the guy who won the Nobel Peace Prize, fer chrissakes!  What a schande that award looks like now.  It goes to show you that you must never bestow an award on someone in the hopes that it will spur them to do the right thing.

I have never heard that it is part of the CIA’s mandate to kill U.S. citizens.  Is it now legal to do what never was legal before the era of Dick Cheney?  Are we going to allow Pres. Obama, a leader we expected to be different from Bush and Cheney, to become them in such an ugly way?

Israel routinely assassinates alleged Palestinian militants in similar acts of state-sponsored terrorism.  Those killings often extend to innocent civilians who are collateral damage from such attacks.  Like the U.S., Israel never offers any evidence of the victims’ guilt other than to claim they organized this or that terror attack &/or were a “ticking bomb.”  No one inside Israel, except the usual (and blessed) human rights NGO suspects,  raises a hand against such murder.  It is accepted pro forma as the price to be paid by a national security state.  Do we in the U.S. want to become that?  Do we want to become renegades from international law as the Israelis are?

Israel’s military, intelligence, and Likud government are delighted with this development.  It further confirms their own draconian approach to national security.  If we become as bad as they are, then they’re not so bad after all, right?

Cole further argues that there are examples of countries who’ve responded differently than either the U.S. or Israel:

As many countries, including Great Britain, Germany, Spain, and, Italy have shown, the fact that organized groups seek to engage in politically motivated violence does not necessitate a military response.

This must stop.  Of course, just as in Israel, neither the courts nor the Congress will lift a finger.  But I think it’s now time to bring a case in an international tribunal against the current and past presidents who both sanctioned such killings (of U.S. citizens).  This must be tested in a fair tribunal.  One cannot be found here in the U.S., unfortunately.  But in order to bring a case before the ICC, we must exhaust the system here first.  So I hope the ACLU, which has denounced this latest killing, will do so.  A rejection by the U.S. courts would set the stage for an appeal to an international tribunal.

I wouldn’t mind seeing those responsible for this killing and Salah Shehadeh’s both answering to justice in the Hague.  They’d be entitled to far more justice than they ever gave any of their victims.

Another misguided claim by Obama and those who embrace such acts of state terror: they don’t “break the back” of the enemy.  They don’t “dismantle” Al Qaeda.  There are always those who will arise to take their place.  Sometimes, those who replace their predecessors are even more competent and lethal than those who came before them.

I am at the breaking point regarding Obama.  I don’t see any way I can vote for him the next time around.  This hurts me because in some ways all the Republican candidates would be worse, some far worse.  But they, unlike Obama, haven’t betrayed their promise and their promises–the ones they made to me and voters like me to be different from the tyrants who preceded them.

Glenn Carle, former CIA officer, resisted White House efforts to investigate Juan Cole (Stephen Crowley/NYT)

In 2006, I wrote about a nasty smear campaign mounted against Juan Cole, who’d been nominated for a prestigious endowed chair in history at Yale. Jewish pro-Israel alumni and right-wing blogs trumpeted Cole’s alleged anti-Semitic utterances and his supposed hatred for Israel.  The campaign worked.  While his appointment was approved by the department, through an unprecedented intervention it was eventually scuttled and he returned happily to his position teaching at the University of Michigan.

Now, the NY Times’ James Risen reports a U.S. intelligence official was dragooned into a CIA investigation involving Cole in an attempt to find out embarrassing information about him that could damage his reputation.  The official notes there were at least two separate attempts to do this which he frustrated each time.  It is, of course, illegal for the CIA to investigate U.S. citizens.  Which seems to me to give Juan a built-in lawsuit.  I’d give up on a Congressional investigation since the Obama administration seems almost as backward on national security as the Bush administration was.

What the article doesn’t reveal is who in the U.S. government initiated the request for an investigation of Cole.  It seems clear to me that this would not have come from the CIA itself.  In fact, the official reveals that the discussions began after his boss came back from a White House meeting.  My money of course is on the devil himself, Dick Cheney.  This is the part of the story I’d like to see expanded.  I’m hoping Juan has filed an FOIA request, though if Cheney was smart he wouldn’t have left any fingerprints that would lead directly back to him.  It’s just too damn bad he can’t sue Cheney himself if he’s the culprit.

An equally intriguing question would be whether members of the Republican pro-Israel Jewish community and/or the Israeli government were interested in this little adventure.  They certainly would’ve been able to get Cheney’s ear.  So the question, if Cheney was the initiator, would be whether he thought this up himself or the issue was brought to him by others.  And if so, whom.

While Pollard was Israel's biggest spy coup, now they're recruiting American Muslims

Jeff Stein, writing about intelligence matters at the Washington Post, notes a recent poll of CIA personnel ranking U.S. allies from best to worst in terms of the nature of their coöperation and relationship with our spy agency.  Here’s the result:

“Israel came in dead last,” a recently retired CIA official told me the other day.

Not only that, he added, throwing up his hands and rising from his chair, “the Israelis are number three, with China number one and Russia number two,” in terms of how aggressive they are in their operations on U.S. soil.

But not only are they the snoopiest, most intrusive and among the most duplicitous in their operations here, now they’re attempting to recruit American Muslims as intelligence assets.  Hard to believe they could have that much chutzpah to operate here in this fashion.  But nothing surprises me on this score.

Stein quotes an article by Phil Giraldi, himself a retired former CIA officer on these efforts:

One of Israel’s major interests, of course, is keeping track of Muslims who might be allied with Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, or Iran-backed Hezbollah, based in Lebanon.

As tensions with Iran escalate, according to former CIA officer Philip Giraldi, “Israeli agents have become more aggressive in targeting Muslims living in the United States as well as in operating against critics.”

“There have been a number of cases reported to the FBI about Mossad officers who have approached leaders in Arab-American communities and have falsely represented themselves as ‘U.S. intelligence,’ ” Giraldi wrote recently in American Conservative magazine.

“Because few Muslims would assist an Israeli, this is done to increase the likelihood that the target will cooperate. It’s referred to as a ‘false flag’ operation.”

Giraldi’s piece continued, “Mossad officers sought to recruit Arab-Americans as sources willing to inform on their associates and neighbors. The approaches, which took place in New York and New Jersey, were reportedly handled clumsily, making the targets of the operation suspicious.”

“These Arab-Americans turned down the requests for cooperation,” Giraldi added,”and some of the contacts were eventually reported to the FBI, which has determined that at least two of the Mossad officers are, ironically, Israeli Arabs operating out of Israel’s mission to the United Nations in New York under cover as consular assistants.”

“Oh, sure, they do that,” the other former CIA official said, waving a dismissing hand, when I asked about Giraldi’s story. “They’re all over the place.”

One of a number of extraordinary things about this activity is that the Mossad has recruited Israeli Palestinians to become agents.  I have to wonder what would motivate such a person to enlist in Israeli intelligence especially given the history of relations between Israel and its Palestinian citizens.

Stein also quotes an FBI counterintelligence officer on the subject of Israel’s penetration of the U.S.:

…A retired senior FBI counterintelligence official told SpyTalk, “They have always been extremely aggressive, and seem to feel they can operate whenever and wherever they want, in spite of being called on the carpet more than any other country by probably a factor of three times as often.”

Those of you who have been reading this blog for the past year or so will note that I have covered a number of stories involving Israeli activities in the U.S. which seek to influence domestic opinion in favor of war with Iran.  In the business, it’s called a perception management campaign to exploit media, political leaders and other influential figures to favor aggressive action against Iran.  The influence is exerted in ways overt and covert, transparent and oblique, straightforward and duplicitous.

As part of this operation, members of Congress were rated for the unfriendliness to Israeli interests, those deemed hostile were scrutinized closely by local Jewish community leaders who reported on the member’s activities that might be of interest to the embassy.  Articles planted in local newspapers hostile to Iran were written by embassy personnel but fronted by local Jewish community leaders.  Locally, the Israeli consulate utilized the cover of the local Aipac chapter and Jewish federation to organize an anti-Iran dog and pony show that featured a Jerusalem Post reporter, an Aipac flack and the Israeli consul general warning the Jewish community of the existential danger posed by Iran to Israel and the world.

An Israeli-American like Max Singer, living in Israel and a citizen of that country, publishes advocacy through the Hudson Institute which explicitly seeks to undermine a sitting U.S. president. Retired IDF generals openly and publicly wish for the defeat of the Democrats in the November elections.  There is seemingly no red line Israel isn’t willing to cross in boosting its perceived interests.  What’s more nefarious though is the argument that the policies advocated (belligerency towards Iran, for example) are good for the U.S., when in reality the policies are advocated because they are good for Israel (at least in the eyes of these war hawks).

And this is the more or less above-board activities in which they’ve engaged–not the deep cover activities of which I have no direct knowledge.  So you imagine to yourself what that might entail.

You’ll also remember that the Mossad exploited Israeli-owned U.S. finance companies with close ties to the Israeli military intelligence community to finance the Dubai assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabouh.  I’ve been waiting for months for the other shoe to drop on this one.  But it appears, at least so far, that the FBI isn’t prepared to make a stir over this though it should.  I suppose Obama thinks he has bigger fish to fry in bringing home an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement.  Of course, the danger is he may not get the agreement AND he may never uncover the abuse of the U.S. financial system to fund Israeli terror (something we claim to be in favor of exposing when it involves Arab terror).

We mustn’t lose sight of the fact that for Israel, the U.S. is the mother lode.  We are the world’s superpower.  We hold Israel’s fate in the balance, or at least we could if it were attacked.  From the Mossad’s point of view, they MUST have a robust presence here.  The problem is how they manifest that presence.  By importing to this country the traditions of opacity, duplicity and surreptitiousness for which Israeli intelligence is known in Israel, they risk degrading our own standards and values, especially if our own Justice Department and president allow them to behave with impunity.

Iran in Israel's crosshairs

Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst and current fellow at the Saban Center, a strongly pro-Israel DC think-tank, has published a detailed analysis of the folly that would be an Israeli attack on Iran:

Perhaps never before has the government in Jerusalem felt under greater threat than with the Iranian atomic program. The temptation is to attack. It is an exercise in futility with likely disastrous results.

Riedel also branches out into Israeli nuclear policy and notes that it is becoming increasingly impossible for Israel to sustain the historic policy of opacity and refusal to join the Non-Proliferation Treaty:

…The Arabs, led by Egypt, are demanding that Israel do so or they will sabotage the future of the NPT regime. They rightly argue that Washington has a double standard when it comes to Israel’s bomb: the NPT applies to all but Israel. Indeed, every Israeli prime minister since David Ben-Gurion has deliberately taken an evasive posture on the issue because they do not want to admit what everyone knows. Now that era may be coming to an end, raising fundamental questions about Israel’s strategic situation in the region.

The wonder is that a figure at a think tank named for, and heavily funded by Israeli media entrepreneur, Haim Saban, one of Aipac’s most powerful donors, has published such a sobering and realistic portrait of the pitfalls facing Israel as it walks the minefield that is its approach to the alleged Iranian nuclear threat.

I would quarrel with Riedel’s approving quotation of this passage from a U.S. report on Israel’s nuclear program:

IN A secret special national intelligence estimate (SNIE) in 1960, the American intelligence community concluded that “possession of a nuclear weapon capability . . . would clearly give Israel a greater sense of security, self-confidence, and assertiveness.”

What this analysis omits is the increasing Arab sense of insecurity, alarm and downright desperation concerning Israel’s nuclear capacity.  With each new Israeli attack, each new war, each new overseas assassination, the fear factor among the frontline states rises exponentially.  One can also argue whether Israel’s nuclear capability has had as felicitous an effect as claimed on Israeli policies in the region.  Might not its nuclear arsenal have increased its willingness to engage in military adventurism?  What is the Israeli policy of “the landlord’s gone crazy” but an expression of Israel’s willingness to go for broke–to Samson-like threaten to tear down the walls of the temple, that is, the entire region.  After all, one man’s self-confidence is another’s megalomania.

Riedel’s warning below follows similarly sobering warnings by military analyst, Anthony Cordesmann.  But it bears repeating.  Here is the money quote that should be noted for its clarity and realism:

AN ISRAELI attack on Iran is a disaster in the making. And it will directly impact key strategic American interests. Iran will see an attack as American supported if not American orchestrated. The aircraft in any strike will be American-produced, -supplied and -funded F-15s and F-16s, and most of the ordnance will be from American stocks.

…Iran will almost certainly retaliate against both U.S. and Israeli targets. To demonstrate its retaliatory prowess, Iran has already fired salvos of test missiles (some of which are capable of striking Israel), and Iranian leaders have warned they would respond to an attack by either Israel or the United States with attacks against Tel Aviv, U.S. ships and facilities in the Persian Gulf, and other targets. Even if Iran chooses to retaliate in less risky ways, it could respond indirectly by encouraging Hezbollah attacks against Israel and Shia militia attacks against U.S. forces in Iraq, as well as terrorist attacks against American and Israeli targets in the Middle East and beyond.

America’s greatest vulnerability would be in Afghanistan. Iran could easily increase its assistance to the Taliban and make the already-difficult Afghan mission much more complicated. Western Afghanistan is especially vulnerable to Iranian mischief, and NATO has few troops there to cover a vast area. President Obama would have to send more, not fewer, troops to fight that war.

Making matters worse, considering the likely violent ramifications, even a successful Israeli raid would only delay Iran’s nuclear program, not eliminate it entirely. In fact, some Israeli intelligence officials suspect that delay would only be a year or so. Thus the United States would still need a strategy to deal with the basic problem of Iran’s capabilities after an attack, but in a much more complicated diplomatic context since Tehran would be able to argue it was the victim of aggression and probably would renounce its NPT commitments. Support for the existing sanctions on Iran after a strike would likely evaporate.

And to put things even more baldly:

The United States needs to send a clear red light to Israel. There is no option but to actively discourage an Israeli attack…America does have influence and it should be wielded.

Perhaps the most radical statement in Riedel’s article is this (and I never would’ve expected to read this from anyone affiliated with the Saban Center):

PERSUADING ISRAEL not to attack Iran really means convincing Israel that now is the time to give up its regional nuclear monopoly.

In other words, Riedel is arguing that persuading Israel to give up on its attack means tacitly accepting an Iranian nuclear weapon AND giving up on decades of firm Israeli policy upholding its monopoly by military attack if necessary.  That would truly be a revolutionary about-face in Israeli strategic thinking.  If he or Obama or anyone else could persuade Israel to adopt this approach–more power to him.  But given the absolute hysteria emanating from Israeli leadership circles on this subject, I don’t see how such it can work.

Riedel’s piece argues convincingly that while Iran is a troublesome nation, that all of its strategic calculations and actions are based on carefully calibrated and pragmatic (not revolutionary or bellicose) considerations.  Here’s another money quote:

Contrary to Netanyahu’s cries, Iran is not a crazy state. A nuclear security guarantee to Israel, if backed by a credible arsenal, will deter Tehran.

Once again, it’s almost breathtaking to see this coming out of the Saban Center.  One wonders whether there may be a policy division among some in the Israel lobby developing about the wisdom of such an attack.

One thing’s for certain, either Riedel or Saban will shortly be facing stern lectures from the Israeli embassy and other lobby elites for having left the “pro-Israel” reservation.