NEGROPONTE'S
VETO
This
administration does: John Negroponte, American ambassador
to the UN, justified the
US veto by averring that the resolution aimed to "isolate
politically one of the parties to the conflict through an
attempt to throw the weight of the Council behind the other
party.'' The resolution, said Negroponte, was unsatisfactory
because it didn't specifically
mention "recent acts of terrorism'' against Israelis.
Naturally, this scuttled the whole thing, as it was intended
to do.
THE
VICTIMOLOGICAL OLYMPICS
For
this argument, if carried on long enough, would lead to an
infinite regression of victimological examples: the pro-Arab
bloc would insist on specifically mentioning the supposedly
accidental killing of five Palestinian children by an Israeli
booby-trap bomb planted near a school. This would be the cue
for the Israeli side to come up with a Hamas-Hizbollah atrocity
that merits inclusion – and, before you know it, we're
all the way back to 1948 with the pro-Arabists demanding the
inclusion of the massacre
at Deir Yassein, and, naturally, the Zionist bloc doing
them one better by moving for some mention of the Roman conquest and persecution
of the Jews.
THE
WAR AGAINST THE WORLD
The
US veto undermines the war effort, and makes the Americans
seem as if they are waging a war not only on Islam, but against
the entire world on behalf of Israel. After decades of trying
to prove its bona fides as an honest broker of peace in the
region, it is the US that is effectively isolated. The resolution
was co-sponsored (or amended) by France and the Security Council
vote was 12-1, with Britain and Norway abstaining. Whatever
credibility the US had in the Arab world – very little,
I'm afraid – was lost with that one arrogant gesture.
So much for the grand "coalition" that Colin Powell
has been building: the Israeli lobby in the US has demolished
it with a single blow.
THE
LAST LAUGH
Is
that the demonic laughter of the Mad Sheik I hear, chortling
in his cave at this act of American self-sabotage? It may be Osama bin Laden is not long for this world.
Yet he will
die happy in the knowledge that the US is sowing the seeds
of his future warrior army, who will spring like Muslim Myrmidons
out of Palestine's blood-soaked earth.
BATTLEGROUND
AMERICA
Speaking
of sabotage, the story of the gigantic Israeli spy operation
in the US – and its mysterious activities in the weeks
prior to 9/11 – continues to amaze and shock even me.
When I wrote, a few weeks ago, that the
detention of some 60 Israelis in connection with 9/11 was
"ominous" little did I realize just how much of
an understatement that would turn out to be. It is often said
that, post-9/11, the US is going through what the Israelis
have had to endure for decades. The series of Fox News special
reports on Israeli penetration of US intelligence assets puts
this insight in an entirely new light. For it appears, from
what we are learning, that the struggle between two desert
tribes in a far away land has truly been brought home to the
US: America, we are discovering to our horror, has become
a battleground for both sides in that ancient conflict.
ENDS
& MEANS
As
I related
last week, the first part of this astonishing four-part
series by Fox News reporter Carl Cameron
presents credible evidence suggesting Israeli intelligence
had foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks. The second and third parts show they had
the means to acquire
this knowledge. According to Cameron,
"Fox
News has learned that some American terrorist investigators
fear certain suspects in the Sept. 11 attacks may have managed
to stay ahead of them, by knowing who and when investigators
are calling on the telephone."
ALL
ROADS LEAD TO AMDOCS
Cameron
takes us through an explanation of how and why virtually all
telephone calls in the US are billed by a single company,
Amdocs Ltd.,
which just happens to be headquartered in Israel. Chances
are that when you make a call, the record of the call and
the billing is done through Amdocs. With a virtual monopoly
in the US, and tentacles worldwide, Cameron reports that "it
is virtually impossible to make a call on normal phones without
generating an Amdocs record of it." Amdocs denies any
wrongdoing, but sources tell Fox News that, in 1999,
"The
super secret national security agency, headquartered in northern
Maryland, issued what's called a Top Secret sensitive compartmentalized
information report, TS/SCI, warning that records of calls
in the United States were getting into foreign hands –
in Israel, in particular."
SPIES
IN THE WOODWORK
It's
not that anyone is listening in on all these calls, but that
these methods are a way to know who is calling whom, when,
and for how long – vital information in and of itself.
Cameron assures us that the White House and the Pentagon are
immune from such surveillance, but an
article in Insight, the magazine put out by the
Washington Times, showed how Israeli intelligence had thoroughly penetrated
the communications system at the Clinton White House. According
to co-authors J. Michael Waller and Paul M. Rodriguez, writing
in May of last year, the FBI was
"Probing
an explosive foreign-espionage operation that could dwarf
the other spy scandals plaguing the U.S. government. Insight has learned that FBI counterintelligence
is tracking a daring operation to spy on high-level US officials
by hacking into supposedly secure telephone networks. The
espionage was facilitated, federal officials say, by lax telephone-security
procedures at the White House, State Department and other
high-level government offices and by a Justice Department
unwillingness to seek an indictment against a suspect."
"The
espionage operation may have serious ramifications,"
wrote Waller and Rodriguez,
"because the FBI has identified Israel as the
culprit."
MONICA
TELLS ALL
Dozens
of officials confirmed the story, telling the authors of this
fascinating piece how the Israelis had managed to penetrate
not only State Department telephone lines, but also those
in the White House, the Defense Department, and the Justice
Department. That the President knew this at the time is beyond
doubt; it came out, you'll remember, during l'affaire Lewinsky,
when Monica testified that, on March 29, 1997,
she and Clinton
were desecrating the Oval Office and she specifically remembered
it because, as the Starr Report put it:
"He
suspected that a foreign embassy was tapping his telephones,
and he proposed cover stories. If ever questioned, she should
say that the two of them were just friends. If anyone ever
asked about their phone sex, she should say that they knew
their calls were being monitored all along, and the phone
sex was just a put on."
LITTLE
DID THEY KNOW
That
"foreign embassy" was the Israelis'. It is spooky,
in retrospect, to read the comments of the American intelligence
and law enforcement officials who sourced this pioneering
Insight piece (which, for some reason, is no longer available on their
website but is still available, thanks
to the miracle of Google). "It's a huge security
nightmare," said one senior US official. "The implications
are severe," another unnamed official chimed in.
"We're not even sure we know the extent of it,"
said a third high-ranking intelligence official. "All
I can tell you is that we think we know how it was done. That
alone is serious enough, but it's the unknown that has such
deep consequences."
OUT
OF THE MURK
Ah,
but the deepness of these consequences is just beginning to
be known. As the Fox News revelations make all too clear,
they are a lot deeper than anyone, including Waller and Rodriguez,
could possibly have imagined last year. The picture that is
beginning to emerge out of the murk is this: the Israelis
were watching the hijackers and/or their associates, and they
very possibly had access to a complete set of the conspirators'
phone records, if not direct access to the content of their
conversations. In the months prior to the attacks, the Israelis
did indeed issue a warning of "massive" terrorist
attacks, but, in an effort to protect both their sources and
methods, their warning gave no details and was therefore practically
useless.
THE
COMVERSE CONNECTION
The
third part of the Fox series
shows how the Israelis had access, not only to phone records,
but also to the wiretaps being conducted by US law enforcement
agencies. This access could have easily been provided, Cameron
points out, by yet another hi-tech Israeli communications
company, Comverse,
which operates as practically a branch of the Israeli government,
and enjoys near monopolistic status here in the US.
When
you place a call, it goes through a complicated network of
routers and switchers. The way wiretapping works is that customized
computers are linked to that network via specialized software,
and the system intercepts, records, and stores wiretapped
calls. But this system has a "back door" that could
have easily been opened by Israeli intelligence. Comverse
maintains a link to the wiretapping computers, on the grounds
that it is necessary for system "maintenance." Over
the opposition of some patriotic law
enforcement officers, this
process was authorized by the 1994 Communications Assistance
for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA). But that wasn't the end of
it. According to Fox News,
"Attorney
General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller were both warned
Oct. 18 in a hand-delivered letter from 15 local, state and
federal law enforcement officials,
who complained that 'law enforcement's current
electronic surveillance capabilities are less effective
today than they were
at the time CALEA was enacted.'"
ASHCROFT'S
COMPLICITY
But
Ashcroft is too busy rounding up Arabs and closing down their
organizations to worry about the wholesale penetration of
our communications system – including "secure"
networks at the White House, the Defense Department, and elsewhere
– by our wonderful allies, the Israelis. Cameron cites
several unnamed law enforcement agents – concerned about
the ominous implications of the Israeli penetration in light
of 9/11 – who say that even raising the issue is "career
suicide."
I
HOPE YOU'RE SITTING DOWN
Okay,
so the Israelis have the phone lines over at the White House,
the Defense Department, the Justice Department, and, for all
we know, your local dogcatcher's office bugged to the max.
So they have the capability to know where and when practically
every phone call in the US, and large sections of the rest
of the world, is made, and to whom. As fantastic as it sounds,
given the advance of technology and the reputation of the
Mossad, I'm willing to believe it. What's really alarming,
however, is that, as Cameron reports:
"On
a number of cases, suspects that they had sought to
wiretap and survey immediately changed their telecommunications
processes. They started acting
much differently as soon as those supposedly secret wiretaps
went into place."
BEYOND
THE BEGUINE
The
implications of this stunning news go far beyond my original
contention: that the Israelis had foreknowledge of the 9/11
attacks and simply failed to let us know the details. For
it all depends on the intended target of the wiretaps: was
it the Israelis, or Bin Laden's agents? If the former were
acting differently after wiretaps were put in place, it means
only that the Israelis were using their sources and methods
to protect their own: if the latter, it means the Israelis
were using their sources and methods to protect the Bin Ladenites.
That is a possibility no one – including me – wants to contemplate, and, in all truthfulness,
I must confess I cannot believe it. I am forced to concede,
however, that, given what we now know, it is possible.
Until and unless the government comes clean, we won't
know for sure.
INVESTIGATE
THE ISRAELI CONNECTION
At
the end of his second report, Carl Cameron remarked to Brit
Hume that the question of the Israeli connection to 9/11 "came up in the select intelligence committee on Capitol
Hill today,"
and "they intend to look into what we reported
last night." Naturally, all this is occurring in secret,
with the likelihood of a cover-up all but certain. What is
needed is a public investigation, and full disclosure of the Israeli role, if
any, in 9/11.
WHERE
IS THE MEDIA?
That,
of course, is the role of the media – and, in this regard,
it is interesting to note that Cameron's explosive investigation
has not been picked up by a single news outlet, as far as
I know (although I would be happy to be proved wrong) or discussed
by a single "mainstream" columnist. Yet Fox News
is hardly a marginal new source. In a business where scandal
and especially spy stories are hot, you would think that a
story like this, with its tie-in to 9/11, would have the other
networks and the major media falling all over themselves to
get a piece of the action. But not this time, at least so
far.
FAN
MAIL FROM SOME CRANKY FLOUNDER
It's
funny, but when I wrote my first column on this subject, I
got a whole bunch of nutball letters from anti-Semitic cranks
who told me that "the Jews" would never let me get
away with it, and that I am now a "marked man."
This story, wrote one correspondent, "will go nowhere,"
because "the Jews" control the media, blah blah
blah. I laughed, reading
these perfervid notes, most of them WRITTEN IN ALL CAPITAL
LETTERS, wondering at the infinite capacity of people to fit
reality into ideological categories rather than the other
way 'round. After all, the mere fact that the story was broadcast
on Fox News, a major media organization, appears to contradict
the self-evidently absurd thesis that the "Elders of
Zion," sitting in a control room somewhere, determine
what news we're allowed to read.
THE
ANTI-SEMITIC FALLACY
I
can only hope, for Mr. Cameron's sake, that what amounts to
"career suicide" in law enforcement doesn't hold
true at Fox News. Israel certainly has many vocal and very
active supporters, who are quick to make their opinions known.
But it is false to posit a "Jewish-controlled" media,
no matter what the ethnicity or political persuasion of editors,
owners, or whatever: these media companies are beholden to
their shareholders, and to the market. Reporting the news
is an intensely competitive business: there is no way to enforce
an embargo on certain information, not in this day and age.
There is no "Jewish conspiracy" – only the
machinations of a particular foreign government and its uncritical
supporters in this country, who span the ethnic and religious
as well as the political spectrum.
THE
TRUTH, AT LAST
It
is too soon to say whether or not this story has "legs,"
as they say, and is going anywhere soon. But one thing's for
sure: Fox News has blown the mystery of 9/11 wide open. This
isn't going to just go away. On September 11, the American
people looked on in disbelief at the sight of not only the
World Trade Center going down but the Pentagon – the
Pentagon, fer chrissake! – under attack
and apparently defenseless. My first thought, at any rate,
was: How could this happen? With these latest
surprising developments – pointing to an ambiguous Israeli
role, at best, in all this – I fear we are just beginning
to discover the answer to that question.
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