- Neo-con cabal born in treason in the late 1970s. Lying,
massive fraud, illegal weapons smuggling, forged documents . . . all sound
like a description of the lead-up to the war in Iraq. However, this same
situation existed in the late 1970s. Some of the same players who got this
nation into the bloody quagmire of Iraq also criminally conspired to bring
down the administration of President Jimmy Carter. President Carter's indignation
about the neo-cons -- their blind support for Israel, their whittling away
of our Constitution, our neo-con foreign policy -- is rooted in the treason
they committed against the United States during his administration. There
is no statute of limitations on treason and the neo-cons should face double
barrel treason charges from incidents a generation apart.
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- The neo-con attacks on President Carter were planned
in the office of the late Democratic Senator from Washington, Henry "Scoop"
Jackson. Jackson was the Joe Lieberman of his day -- more concerned about
representing the interests of a defense contractor, Boeing (Lieberman represents
the interests of General Dynamics), and the expansionists and military-intelligence
complex of Israel (as does Lieberman). Jackson's treason against the United
States is honored today in Britain, where the Henry Jackson Society pushes
the neo-con agenda in the British Parliament and media. Jackson, his chief
assistant, Richard Perle, and foreign and defense policy aides Frank Gaffney,
William Kristol, Douglas Feith, and Elliott Abrams, as well as unofficial
Jackson adviser Paul Wolfowitz, did everything possible to derail U.S.-Soviet
detente and arms limitation treaties, including the Strategic Arms Limitation
Treaty (SALT II). Jackson and Perle helped initiate sanctions against the
USSR, at the expense of American farmers, with the help of Ohio Democratic
Rep. Charles Vanik (the Jackson-Vanik sanctions act). Jackson's Coalition
for a Democratic Majority (CDM) was the "Democratic Leadership Council"
of its time. CDM worked tirelessly to damage President Carter and among
its ranks were, in addition to Jackson, Texas Democratic Senator Lloyd
Bentsen, Oklahoma Senator David Boren, Georgia Senator Sam Nunn, Louisiana
Senator J. Bennett Johnston, Ben Wattenberg, Irving Kristol, Max Kampelman,
Richard Pipes, John Roche, Samuel Huntington, and James Woolsey. In 1976,
the CDM helped form the Committee on the Present Danger, reactivated in
2004 by Lieberman, Arizona Republican Senator Jon Kyl, Laurie Mylroie,
Norman Podhoretz, Frank Gaffney, American Israel Public Affairs Committee
(AIPAC), Boeing, American Enterprise Institute, and the Heritage Foundation.
-
- The treason committed by these neo-cons against the Carter
administration centered on machinations in Rome (Rome was also at the center
of the later conspiracy to drive the United States into war in Iraq). Arch
neo-con and foreign policy adviser to Karl Rove, Michael Ledeen, served
as the Rome correspondent for The New Republic from 1975 to 1977 and a
journalist for the right-wing Milan newspaper Il Giornale. In Rome, Ledeen
cultivated close ties with neo-fascist groups.
-
- Jackson's and his staff's first documented case of treason
against the United States concerned the leak of a Top Secret CIA report
on the SALT talks by CIA nuclear weapons analyst Daniel S. Sullivan to
Jackson and Perle in 1978. Sullivan, believing the Soviets deceived the
U.S. in SALT talks, took it upon himself to pass Top Secret information
to Jackson and his band of neo-cons. However, rather than being prosecuted,
Sullivan was permitted to resign due to "insubordination," not
illegally passing classified information to unauthorized persons. Sullivan
later joined the staff of Senator Bentsen and received another Top Secret
clearance as a member of Bentsen's staff. The conspiracy by Sullivan, Jackson,
and the neo-cons to derail a major policy initiative of President Carter
was not the only act of treason by these early neo-cons.
-
- However, the leak of the Top Secret SALT CIA document
to Jackson may not have been the only leak to have taken place. In February
2005, the Everett (WA) Herald reported that five federal agents from the
Departments of Defense and Energy removed several documents from the archived
papers of Jackson housed at the University of Washington's Suzzallo-Allen
Library. The seized documents were re-classified by the government. The
retention by Jackson and his staff of top secret documents is reminiscent
of the Larry Franklin-AIPAC case, in which Franklin, opposed to U.S. policy
on Iran, passed a number of classified CIA documents to AIPAC and the Israeli
embassy's Mossad station in Washington.
-
- Rather than being treated as the traitor he was, Jackson
is today lauded by Democrats of various political stripes. His ideological
descendants are at the core of the Republican pre-emptive strike foreign
policy machinations.
-
- In 1976, two years after Secretary of State Henry Kissinger
threatened then-Italian Foreign Minister Aldo Moro against forming a coalition
with the Communists, Jackson, on a trip to Italy, issued a similar warning
to Moro. In Phillip Willan's Puppetmasters, Moro's widow recounted Kissinger's
warning, which was undoubtedly echoed by Jackson: "You must abandon
your policy of bringing all the political forces in your country into direct
collaboration . . . or you will pay dearly for it." Moro was kidnapped
for 55 days by so-called Red Brigades, who were later found to be in the
service of Italian fascists, Italian intelligence, the P-2 Masonic Lodge,
a parallel SID [Italian Defense Intelligence Service], and the CIA. Some
of these same elements would be behind the infamous Niger yellowcake forgeries
used by the neo-cons to prove a case for war against Iraq.
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- The same neo-con network would alter Mehmet Ali Agca,
the would-be assassin of Pope John Paul II, from a right-wing member of
the Turkish Gray Wolves to a Communist in the employ of the KGB and Bulgarian
intelligence. The Judith Miller-like journalist in those days who spun
the story about Agca's Soviet Bloc connections was Claire Sterling, whose
disinformation was quickly picked up by The Reader's Digest, New York Times,
NBC News, and other mainstream media outlets. Sterling's fellow disinformation
journalist was Ledeen.
-
- Agca told a fantasy story about his orders to kill the
Pope coming from a Bulgarian "control officer" and that he had
also been involved in a plot to kill Polish Solidarity leader Lech Walesa,
Tunisian President Habib Bourguiba, and Malta's Prime Minister Dom Mintoff.
In fact, there was a plot to overthrow and possibly kill Mintoff, Allende-style,
but it was being crafted by U.S. Navy intelligence in conjunction with
the neo-fascist and renegade Italian intelligence elements in Rome. The
U.S. Navy wanted to overthrow Mintoff to gain access to its former NATO
base on the island nation off the Libyan coast. Bourguiba was not popular
with the neo-cons because he allowed Yasir Arafat's Palestine Liberation
Organization to maintain its headquarters-in-exile in Tunis.
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- The Turkish Gray Wolves and the pan-Turkic National Action
Party (NAP) made common cause with the neo-cons and their Israeli friends.
The Wolves and the NAP considered the peoples of Soviet Central Asia to
be "captive Turks." The Turkish right-wing nationalists foresaw
a nuclear-armed Turkey extending from Thrace to the central Asian steppes.
The anti-Soviet concordat between the Turkish right (and the Turkish intelligence
agency MIT) and the neo-cons in America, Israel, and Italy would later
serve as a basis for the political alliance between AIPAC and the American
Turkish Council.
-
- Ledeen operated a right-wing cell in Rome that included
Francesco Pazienza, an Italian businessman linked to P-2, Italian SISMI
military intelligence chief General Giuseppe Santovito, and the mafia;
P-2 "Venerable Master" Licio Gelli; and Banco Ambrosiano chief
Roberto Calvi (later murdered Masonic ritual-style in London on Blackfriar's
Bridge). Ledeen provided a conduit between this group and Ronald Reagan's
Secretary of State Alexander Haig.
-
- In an attempt to embarrass President Carter during the
1980 presidential race, Santovito, Pazienza, and Ledeen conspired to entrap
Bill Carter, the president's brother, into a business relationship with
Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi. La Repubblica reported on the Italian investigation
into the conspiracy:
-
- "The scandalous material was gathered mostly by
Pazienza and by his American friend Michael Ledeen . . . Pazienza availed
himself of SISMI both for the use of some secret agents and for the expenses
of organizing the scandalous plan. It seems that the organizers got a huge
payoff for "Billygate." Moreover, Santovito and Pazienza got
great advantage in return from American officials, in fact, may have been
helped in other obscure affairs. The "Billygate" operation did
not come from SISMI's institutionally mandated task, and for that reason
Judge Sica brought charges of pursuing private interests through official
activities." [Translated in Diana Johnstone, "The Ledeen Connection,"
In These Times, Sept. 8-14, 1982].
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- Rather than being charged and prosecuted for treason
against the United States, Ledeen was rewarded with a consulting job for
the State Department and Pentagon in the Reagan administration, a position
from which he was free to continue his anti-American activities with fellow
traitors from the Henry Jackson staff.
-
- While the traitors in the Washington office of Jackson
and Ledeen in Rome were conspiring against President Carter, George H.
W. Bush, Carter National Security Council staffer Robert Gates, and William
Casey criminally conspired with the Ayatollah Khomeini's government to
keep 52 hostages held in Tehran captive in return for the shipment of weapons.
A meeting between Casey, Gates, and Bush and Iranian agents was held on
October 19, 1980 in what became known as the "October Surprise."
The deal was worked out using As WMR has previously reported, the CIA arranged
a pre-election weapons shipment, unknown to President Carter, to Iran on
the SS Poet from Chester, PA to Iran. The Poet was later disposed of along
with its American crew by U.S. intelligence or those in its service. And
what magazine later debunked the "October Surprise" story of
a Bush-Casey treasonous deal with Iran? None other than Ledeen's old employer,
The New Republic.
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