-
 - Powell-Blair Iraq Dossier
By Jeffrey Steinberg
Executive Intelligence Review
www.LaRouchePub.com/eiw
2-18-3
- According to media
accounts, the 10 Downing Street
"dossier," cited
favorably by U.S. Secretary
of State Colin Powell in
his disastrous Feb. 5 report to
the United Nations Security
Council, was plagiarized from an
American graduate school paper,
based on information more than a
decade old. The scandal that
erupted when the Blair dossier hoax hit the press,
seriously undermined the
credibility of those war party
advocates of an immediate
Anglo-American invasion of Iraq.
-
- So far, so good.
But a deeper probe into the
scandal reveals that there was
good reason that the
spin-meisters at the Coalition
Information Center--the
Washington-London civilian
government propaganda unit that
crafted both the Blair dossier and major portions of
Secretary Powell's own
lighter-than-air book of
evidence--did not reveal the
sources of their information.
-
- The essential
facts are as follows: Two days
before Powell's UN appearance, 10
Downing Street issued a 16-page
paper, "Iraq: Its
Infrastructure of Concealment,
Deception, and
Intimidation," purportedly
based on high-level British
intelligence data. In fact, at
least 11 of the 16 pages were
lifted, verbatim, from an Israeli
journal, {Middle East Review of
International Affairs}, whose
sole proprieter is Dr. Barry
Rubin, an American-born Israeli
citizen. The
11 pages were drawn from two
articles, by Ibrahim al-Marashi
and Robert Rabil, that appeared
in the September 2002 edition of
that journal.
-
- Al-Marashi's
article, a profile of Iraqi
intelligence, was drawn, largely,
from Iraqi government documents
confiscated during the 1991
Persian Gulf War. Al-Marashi, in turn,
heavily footnoted his article to
other, earlier stories published
in Rubin's obscure online
journal, by Amazia Baram, the
journal's deputy editor.
-
- This was no bit of
grammar school plagiarism. The
public relations team that put
together the Blair and Powell
propaganda were themselves linked
to Rubin and his fellow Israeli
pranksters, through Ahmed
Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress
(INC).
-
- Chalabi,
University of Chicago protege of
the late utopian Albert
Wohlstetter, was adopted as the
Iraqi oppositionist-of-choice by
Israeli "X Committee"
agent and chairman of the Defense
Policy Board Richard Perle and
his British Arab Bureau handler,
Dr. Bernard Lewis, in the 1980s.
-
- RUBIN AND THE
INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
-
- Rubin issued a
statement following the Downing
Street dossier flap, taking full
credit for the cooked
intelligence report. His only
complaint was that, while the
Blair government apologized to
Al-Marashi, they did not issue a
similar public statement of
regret to him and his journal.
-
- To have done so
would have been suicidal, as a
quick review of Rubin's pedigree
makes clear.
-
- According to three
current biographies, Prof. Barry
Rubin is the deputy director of
the Begin-Sadat Center for
Strategic Studies in Israel, and
a senior fellow at Hebrew
University's Harry Truman Center
and Haifa University's
Jewish-Arab Center. He is the
director of the Global Research
in International Affairs Center,
research director of the Lauder
School of Government Policy and
Diplomacy, and a senior fellow at
the International Center for
Counterterrorist Policy
(ICT)--all of which are part of
the Interdisciplinary Center,
Israel's first private
university, in Herzliya.
-
- The Lauder School
was named after Ronald Lauder,
the former Reagan Ambassador to
Austria, former president of the
Conference of Presidents of Major
American Jewish Organizations,
soon-to-be-successor of Edgar
Bronfman Sr. as head of the World
Jewish Congress, and a financier
of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon and former Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
-
- Another publicly
listed associate of the ICT is
Maj. Gen. Meir Dagan, the current
head of the Mossad.
-
- Rubin, a
transplanted Israeli citizen,
still spends a good deal of time
in the United States. On Feb. 4,
he was one of the speakers at a
Willard Hotel luncheon in
Washington sponsored by Eleana
Benador Associates, a New York
City public relations firm. Among
the other speakers with Rubin
were Benador clients Perle,
former UN weapons inspector
Richard Spertzel, and former
Iraqi weapons scientist Khidhir
Hamza.
-
- Rubin is also the
chief Middle East columnist for
Conrad Black's Hollinger
Corp.-owned {Jerusalem Post}, and
a senior fellow at the Washington
Institute for Near East Policy
(WINEP), the think-tank spawn of
the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the
official Israel lobby in America.
-
 Typical of Rubin's
prolific writings was a Dec. 3,
2002 Op-Ed in the {Wall Street
Journal}, entitled "Sharon
the Centrist?" The article
celebrated Sharon's Likud party
primary victory over Netanyahu,
and assailed both Netanyahu and
the Labor Party candidate, Gen.
Amram Mitzna, whom Rubin labelled
an apologist for the Yasser
Arafat whom he termed an
unrepentant terrorist.
- THE COALITION
INFORMATION CENTER
-
- It takes two to
tango. The Blair dossier and the
Powell UN speech, were both
largely the work of the Coalition
Information Center (CIC), an
Anglo-American government
propaganda unit set up to counter
opposition to the U.S. bombing of
Afghanistan, and later
transformed into a permanent
shared venture of the White House
and 10 Downing Street.
-
- RENSE.COM By
Jeffrey Steinberg, Executive
Intelligence Review. www.LaRouchePub.com/eiw
|
For those of you who read the
Handstand's Feb. Issue article on Sanctions in
Iraq, this excerpt from Media-Lens analyses will
be of interest: Blair has changed his stated
justification for waging war on Iraq at least
five times:
1. Proven Iraqi complicity in the September 11
attacks.
2. Iraqi refusal to readmit UN weapons
inspectors.
3. Discovery of undeclared Iraqi WMD by weapons
inspectors.
4. Proven Iraqi links with terrorist
organisations.
5. Iraqi failure to be sufficiently 'proactive'
in cooperating with UN
weapons inspectors (regardless of whether WMD are
found).
To this list must now be added a sixth, 'moral'
argument. In a recent speech Blair said:
"But the moral case against war has a moral
answer: it is the moral case for removing
Saddam... Yes, there are consequences of war. If
we remove Saddam by force, people will die, and
some will be innocent. And we must live with the
consequences of our actions, even the unintended
ones. But there are also consequences of 'stop
the war'. There will be no march for the victims
of Saddam, no protests about the thousands of
children that die needlessly every year under his
rule, no righteous anger over the torture
chambers which if he is left in power, will
remain in being..." ('The price of my
conviction', The Observer, February 16, 2003)
One might almost imagine that Blair's latest
resort to a 'moral' case is an attempt at black
humour. In reality there have of course been any
number of protests about "the thousands of
children that die needlessly every year" in
Iraq. We at Media Lens have ourselves
participated in demonstrations outside Downing
Street. Moreover, these protests have been
directed not at the Iraqi regime but at the
British government.
Blair's mention of needless Iraqi deaths is a
reference to the mass death of children under
sanctions reported by the UN, human rights groups
and aid agencies. In a recent Newsnight interview
Blair argued that "because of the way he
[Saddam] implements those sanctions" they
are "actually a pretty brutal policy against
the Iraqi people". (BBC2, Newsnight Special,
February
6, 2003)
Though you wouldn't know it from the media's
response to Blair's claim, this assertion has
been dismissed by the very people who set up and
ran the sanctions programme in Iraq. To glance
even briefly at the facts is to find that Blair
is once again employing his favoured strategy -
passionately 'sincere' truth reversal.
Editors MediaLens editor@medialens.org
MEMORANDUM
From: Thomas H. Nelson
Re: Crimes Cognizable under
the Treaty of Rome
This memorandum summarizes
the crimes cognizable under the Treaty of Rome.
I. Types of Crimes: Article
5
Article t of the Treat of
Rome establishes four types of crimes within the
jurisdiction of
the International Criminal
Court ("Court"). They are:
•
The crime of Genocide;
•
Crimes Against Humanity;
•
War Crimes, and
•
The Crime of Aggression.
The Crime of Aggression is
not yet defined; Genocide, Crimes Against
Humanity, and War
Crimes are defined in the
Treaty.
II. Genocide: Article 6
"Genocide" is
defined as "any of the following acts
committed with intent to destroy,
in whole or in part, a
national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as
such:"
(a) Killing members of the
group;
(b) Causing serious bodily
or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting
on the group conditions of life calculated
to bring about its physical
destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures
intended to prevent births within the group;
|
