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WHO RULES: THE ISRAEL LOBBY
OR UNCLE SAM?
The answer
at last! Uri Avnery, former Knesset member, assesses the Lobby's
power. "If the Israeli government wanted a law tomorrow
annulling the 10 Commandments, 95 U.S. Senators (at least) would
sign the bill forthwith." But, yes, in the end the dog wags
the tail.Fifty
years ago Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" blew the cobwebs
out of millions of young minds and drove a stake through the
heart of Eisenhower's America. Lenni Brenner remembers Ginsberg
in the East Village.Dr Mengele died in exile, in disguise. Dr Ishii
died rich and recognized, in his own Tokyo home. Christopher
Reed on Japanese WW2 medical tortures and how the U.S. covered
them up.CounterPunch
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"Hold 'em, Yale" is one of the best
short stories of Guys and Dolls creator Damon Runyon,
who depicted the New York City underworld in the 1920s. The story
deals with an undercover operation to scalp ducats before the
annual Yale-Harvard football game. It begins:
"What I am doing in New
Haven on the day of a very large football game between the Harvards
and the Yales is something calling for no little explanation,
for I am not such a guy as you are likely to find in New Haven
at any time--and especially not on the day of a large football
game."
A variant came to mind Thursday
as I walked through a posh Atlanta neighborhood to the Southern
Center for International Policy to hear a speech by Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld.
"What I am doing in Atlanta
on the day of a very large lecture by Donald Rumsfeld to an establishment
audience is something calling for no little explanation, for
I am not such a guy as you are likely to find in such a venue
at any time--and especially not when the ducat requires $40 up
front."
But serendipity prevailed.
The ACLU of Georgia had invited me to their annual dinner on
Thursday, May 4, to receive the National Civil Liberties Award.
Friends in Atlanta arranged for me to bookend my remarks at the
ACLU dinner with a Wednesday presentation to Pax Christi, the
Catholic peace movement, and a talk on Friday evening at Quaker
House in Decatur. I planned to put the rationale for looming
war with Iran in context by drawing an unhappy but direct parallel
with the bogus reasons adduced to "justify" the U.S.
attack on Iraq more than three years ago.
When those friends learned
last Monday that Rumsfeld would be in Atlanta Thursday to give
an afternoon speech at the Center, it seemed a natural to go.
The event was said to be open to the public, but it took tradecraft
skills assimilated over a 27-year career with the CIA to acquire
a ticket. (The event was strangely absent from the Center's Web
site, reportedly at the insistence of the Defense Department.)
The fact that my presence there
was pure coincidence turned out to be a huge disappointment for
those who began interviews later that day by insisting I tell
them why I had stalked Rumsfeld all the way from Washington to
Atlanta. Especially people like Paula Zahn, who asked me on Thursday
evening "what kind of ax" I had to grind with him.
To prepare for my presentations,
I took along a briefcase full of notes and clippings, one of
which was a New York Times article datelined Atlanta,
Sept. 27, 2002, quoting Rumsfeld's assertion that there was "bulletproof"
evidence of ties between al-Qaeda and the government of Saddam
Hussein.
This was the kind of unfounded
allegation that, at the time, deceived 69 percent of Americans
into believing that the Iraqi leader played a role in the tragedy
of 9/11. Rumsfeld's "bulletproof" rhetoric also came
in the wake of an intensive but quixotic search by my former
colleagues at the CIA for any reliable evidence of such ties.
A fresh reminder of the Bush
administration's Iraq deceptions surfaced Thursday morning, when
the Spanish newspaper El Pais published an interview with
Paul Pillar, the senior U.S. intelligence specialist on the Middle
East and terrorism until he retired late last year. Pillar branded
administration attempts to prove a link between al-Qaeda and
Saddam Hussein "an organized campaign of manipulation I
suppose by some definitions that could be called a lie."
I arrived at the Rumsfeld lecture
early, took a seat near a microphone set aside for Q-and-A, and
thought I might ask Rumsfeld to explain his use of the "bulletproof"
adjective, which came at a time when none other than Gen. Brent
Scowcroft was describing such evidence as "scant,"
and the CIA was saying it was nonexistent. (The 9/11 commission
later ruled definitively in CIA's favor.)
Rumsfeld brought up bête
noire terrorist Zarqawi as proof of collaboration between
al-Qaeda and Iraq, but that was a canard easily knocked down.
It appears that Rumsfeld thinks no one really pays attention.
Sadly, as regards the mainstream press, he has been largely right--at
least until now.
When Rumsfeld broadened our
dialogue to include the never-to-be-found Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction, saying, "Apparently, there were no weapons
of mass destruction," I could not resist reminding him that
he had claimed he actually knew where they were. Anyone who followed
this issue closely would remember his remark to George Stephanopoulos
on March 30, 2003:
"We know where they are.
They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west,
south, and north somewhat."
As soon as the event was over,
CNN asked me for my sources, which I was happy to share. The
CNN folks seemed a bit surprised that they all checked out. To
their credit, they overcame the more customary "McGovern
said this, but Rumsfeld said that"--and the dismissive "well,
we'll have to leave it there"--kind of treatment. In Rumsfeldian
parlance, what I had said turned out to be "known knowns,"
even though he provided an altered version on Thursday of his
"we know where they are." Better still, in its coverage,
CNN quoted what Rumsfeld had said in 2003.
That evening a friend e-mailed
me about a call she got from a close associate in "upper
management at CNN" to ask about me. She quoted the CNN manager:
"We checked and double-checked everything this guy had to
say, and he was 100 percent accurate." He then asked if
those protesting the war "were getting organized or something."
She responded, "Indeed we are and have been for some time,
and it's about time the mainstream media caught up."
With the exception of CNN--and
MSNBC which also did its homework and displayed the tangled web
woven by the normally articulate defense secretary--the other
networks generally limited their coverage to the "he-said-but-he-said"
coverage more typical of what passes for journalism these days.
Even CNN found it de rigueur to put neocon ideologue Frank
Gaffney on with me for Wolf Blitzer. Gaffney is well to the right
of Rumsfeld, so I should not have been surprised to hear Gaffney
take the line that the U.S. may still find evidence of ties between
Iraq and al-Qaeda, and of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Hope springs eternal.
And there were more subliminal
messages. In some press reports I was described as a "Rumsfeld
critic" and "heckler" who was, heavens, "rude
to Rumsfeld." Other accounts referred to my "alleged"
service with the CIA, which prompted my wife to question--I think
in jest--what I was really doing for those 27 years. I believe
I was able to convince her without her performing additional
fact-checking.
All in all, my encounter with
Rumsfeld was for me a highly instructive experience. The Center's
president, Peter White, singled out Rumsfeld's "honesty"
in introducing him, and 99 percent of those attending seemed
primed to agree. Indeed, their reaction brought to mind film
footage of rallies in Germany during the '30s. When Rumsfeld
replied to my first question about his false statements on Iraq
's WMD, the applause was automatic. "I did not lie then,"
he insisted.
This was immediately greeted
with what Pravda used to describe as "stormy applause,"
followed immediately by rather unseemly shouts by this otherwise
well-disciplined and well-heeled group to have me summarily thrown
out. At the end, as we all filed out slowly, I could make eye
contact with only one person--who proceeded to berate me for
being insubordinate.
Scary. No open minds there.
A graphic reminder for those wishing to spread some truth around
that we have our work cut out for us. We have to find imaginative
ways to use truth as a lever to pry open closed minds.
Ray McGovern works for Tell the Word, the publishing
arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC.
He is on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals
for Sanity (VIPS), and has a chapter "Sham Dunk: Cooking
Intelligence for the President" in the recently published
collection on the Iraq war, Neo-CONNED
Again! and is also a contributer to Imperial
Crusades: Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia.
This piece originally appeared
on TomPaine.com.
Now
Available
from CounterPunch Books!
The Case
Against Israel
By Michael Neumann
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