http://www.rense.com/general56/ddie.htm Behind The Israeli Mole Affair -
The Point Of Maximum Danger
Of War With Iran Approaching
By Webster Griffin Tarpley
8-29-4
WASHINGTON, DC -- News of the investigation of Larry
Franklin, a middle-level functionary working for the
Wolfowitz-Feith-Luti-Shulsky clique in the Pentagon,
indicates that we are now approaching a critical
choice-point on the road to war with Iran, and towards
a synthetic terrorism attack inside the US which would
be used as an additional pretext to start such a war.
The probe of an Israeli mole in the Pentagon was made
public by CBS news last Friday evening. The Saturday
edition of the Washington Post named Larry Franklin as
being identified by sources as the person under
investigation. In Sunday,s Washington Post, it was
confirmed that Lawrence A. Franklin was the person at
the center of investigation.
As seen in the excerpt below, this same Larry Franklin
was named in my June 6 news release, "Rogue Bush
Backers Prepare Super 9-11 False Flag Terror Attacks.
Franklin was indicated as one of the vulnerable links
in the neocon network which finds itself in a
hysterical flight forward to try to salvage the
debacle of their Iraq war by expanding that war to
neighboring countries, notably Iran. The threat of a
new round of "own goal synthetic terrorism, quite
possibly in the ABC dimension, was linked to the
preparation of that wider war. The logic at work was
that of an "October surprise, this time on the scale
adequate to shock the post 9-11 world.
The best working hypothesis to understand the new mole
investigation is that neocon networks in the Pentagon
may be very close to embroiling the United States in a
war with Iran. This would likely come as an Israeli or
US pre-emptive bombing attack on Iran,s nuclear
facilities, possibly combined with a terrorist attack
inside the US using weapons of mass destruction, which
the corporate controlled media would immediately blame
on Iran.
Whatever forces are behind the naming of Franklin, it
must be assumed that their main aim is to break up
neocon preparations for a surprise attack on Iran,
which the neocons have been boasting about in the
media with special emphasis for some weeks. Backing
the Franklin probe may well be military factions who
have no desire to be fed into the Iranian meatgrinder,
and who not fancy neocon fascist dictatorship. The
immediate goal would be to knock Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz,
Feith, Bolton, Rice, Abrams and their cheering section
in the media and think-tanks onto the defensive. While
the exposure of Franklin is a positive step, it is far
from decisive, and the neocons are still in a position
to unleash the dogs of war over the next days and
weeks.
We are therefore now most probably on the brink of war
with Iran, and at the same time entering a period of
steadily increasing danger of synthetic terrorism
designed to steal or cancel the November elections,
and thus freeze the current neocon clique in power for
the foreseeable future. The calculation of the rogue
network operating behind the scenes is evidently that
terrorism taking place a few days before the elections
will stampede the electorate to support Bush, while
terrorism well in advance of the elections will give
the public time to recover enough to advance
recriminations and demands for accountability on the
part of the administration. We are now entering the
time frame when the terrorist controllers can expect
the maximum impact of their handiwork, either in
stampeding the electorate, or in calling off the
elections completely.
OCTOBER SURPRISE IN SEPTEMBER?
On August 19, Martin Sieff of UPI warned: "Forget an
October Surprise, a much worse one could come in
September: Full-scale war between the United States
and Iran may be far closer than the American public
might imagine.
Sieff quoted remarks made by Iranian Defense Minister
Ali Shamkhani on August 18 which bluntly warned that
if Iranian military commanders believed the United
States were serious about attacking Iran to destroy
its nuclear power facility at Bushehr, or to topple
its Islamic theocratic form of government, the Iranian
military would not sit back passively and wait for the
U.S. armed forces to strike the first blow, as
President Saddam Hussein in neighboring Iraq did in
March 2003. They would strike first.
"We will not sit to wait for what others will do to
us," Shamkhani told al-Jazeera. "Some military
commanders in Iran are convinced that preventive
operations which the Americans talk about are not
their monopoly," he added. With this, the Iran-Iraq
border became a new line of hair-trigger confrontation
in the restless war agitation of the neocons.
One day earlier, neocon Undersecretary of State for
Arms Control and International Security John Bolton
told an audience at the Hudson Institute in Washington
that it was imperative that the Iranian nuclear
program be brought before the U.N. Security Council.
"To fail to do so would risk sending a signal to
would-be proliferators that there are no serious
consequences for pursuing secret nuclear weapons
programs," said Bolton. "We cannot let Iran, a leading
sponsor of international terrorism, acquire nuclear
weapons and the means to deliver them to Europe, most
of central Asia and the Middle East, or beyond,"
Bolton added. "Without serious, concerted, immediate
intervention by the international community, Iran will
be well on the road to doing so." Similar threatening
noises have come from Condoleezza Rice at the Bush
National Security Council.
Iranian public opinion had been shocked by a raving,
psychotic column by Charles Krauthammer in the July 23
Washington Post: Krauthammer wrote: "The long awaited
revolution (in Iran) is not happening. Which [makes]
the question of pre-emptive attack all the more
urgent. If nothing is done, a fanatical terrorist
regime openly dedicated to the destruction of 'the
Great Satan' will have both nuclear weapons and
missiles to deliver them. All that stands between us
and that is either revolution or pre-emptive attack."
Iranian observers compared this to the US propaganda
campaign which had preceded the attack on Iraq.
US FORCES IN IRAK AS HOSTAGES TO IRAN
Competent US military commanders dread the prospect of
war with Iran. Iran is four times the area of Iraq,
and has three times the population. Its infrastructure
was not destroyed during the Kuwait war in the way
that Iraq,s was, and Iran has not been subjected to 13
years of crippling UN sanctions on everything,
including food and medicine. The Iranian military
forces are intact. In case of war, Iran could be
expected to use all means ranging from ballistic
missile attacks on US and Israeli bases to
asymmetrical warfare. The situation of the US forces
already in Iraq could quickly become extraordinarily
critical. Shamkhani alluded to this prospect when he
said that "The U.S. military presence will not become
an element of strength at our expense. The opposite is
true because their forces would turn into a hostage."
For purposes of analogy, the Iraq war so far could be
compared to the first months of the Korean War, from
June to November 1950. By provoking Iran to go beyond
logistical support for guerrillas and the sending of
volunteers, and come into the war with both feet, the
neocons would be inviting a repeat of the Chinese
intervention and the disastrous US retreat south from
the Yalu to south of Seoul, which still stands as the
longest retreat in US military history. Just as
Chinese entry into the Korean conflict in late
November 1950 created a wholly new and wider war,
Iranian entry into the US-Iraq war would have
similarly incalculable consequences. The choices might
quickly narrow to the large-scale use of nuclear
weapons or defeat for the current US hollow army of
just 10 divisions.
ANOTHER STEP TOWARDS WORLD WAR III
In the case of Iran, the use of nuclear weapons by the
US would have a dangerous complication: Iran is an
important neighbor and trading partner of the Russian
Federation, which is helping with Iran,s nuclear power
reactor program. The threatened US/Israeli raid on
Iran might kill Russian citizens as well. Such a US
attack on Iran might prod the Russian government into
drawing its own line in the sand, rather than sitting
idle as the tide of US aggression swept closer and
closer to Russia,s borders, as one country after
another in central Asia was occupied. In other words,
a US attack on Iran bids fair to be the opening of
World War III, making explicit was already implicit in
the invasion of Iraq. The Iran war project of the
neocons is the very midsummer of madness, and it must
be stopped.
War with Iran means a military draft, just for
starters. If Iran can close the Straits of Hormuz, it
might mean rationing of food and fuel. Bloated
speculative financial structures could hardly survive.
The Israeli mole investigation seeks to explore the
intersection of the Valerie Plame affair, the Chalabi
affair, the Niger yellowcake forged documents scandal,
and some key policy documents passed to the Israelis.
According to a CIA veteran interviewed by CNN, the
probe reaches into the National Security Council as
well as the Pentagon. On June 6, I had identified
Larry Franklin in these terms:
At the root of the Valerie Plame affair is the role of
her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, in refuting the
baseless claim that Iraq had sought to purchase
uranium yellowcake from Niger. This story was
buttresses by documents which turned out to be forged.
A prime suspect in this regard is Ledeen, and the
accusation is made more plausible because the faked
documents first surfaced in Rome, where Ledeen
possesses extensive contacts. A federal grand jury is
probing this matter. Ledeen, like so many Bush
officials, is an alumnus of the 1980s George H. W.
Bush-Poindexter-Abrams-Oliver North Iran-contra
gun-running and drug-running scandal, and appears to
have mobilized these networks as part of the post 9-11
assault on Iraq. In December 2001, Ledeen moved to
revive the Iran connection, setting up a meeting
between two Pentagon civilian neo-cons and Manucher
Ghorbanifar, an Iranian arms dealer whom the CIA
called a criminal and liar. Three days of meetings in
Rome involved Harold Rhode, Larry Franklin,
Ghorbanifar, and two unnamed officials of the Iranian
regime. After the conquest of Iraq, Rhode was sent to
Baghdad as the contact point between the Office of
Special Plans and Chalabi. Ghorbanifar, in a Dec. 22,
2003 interview with Newsweek's Mark Hosenball,
reported that he maintained contact with Rhode and
Franklin "five or six times a week through June 2003,
when he had a second meeting with Rhode in Paris. This
back channel to the Iranians is now also under intense
scrutiny.
In the June 6 release, I also showed that, for Bush,
the notion of a confrontation with Iran was closely
linked to the hypothesis of a new wave of synthetic
terrorism. I pointed in this context to a key speech
in which Bush had escalated his threat of both:
A dramatic turning point on the way to the current
emergency came on April 21, when Bush delivered two
speeches which represented a palpable escalation of
the tone of his usual demagogy of terrorism and fear.
In the afternoon, he assured the Newspaper Association
of America, composed of newspaper editors, that Iran
"will be dealt with if they pursue a nuclear
development program. Bush went on to characterize the
United States as "a battlefield in the war on terror.
He was at pains to build up the stature of Al-Qaeda,
whose members he emphatically characterized as
"smarttoughand sophisticated. Because the terrorists
are so formidable, Bush said the United States "is a
hard country to defend. Our intelligence is good. It,s
just never perfect, is the problem. We are disrupting
some cells here in America. We,re chasing people down.
But it is we,ve got a big country. Later, Bush spoke
to the same themes at a closed-door gathering at the
White House: "...On Tuesday evening, Bush told
Republican congressional leaders during a meeting at
the White House that it was all but certain that
terrorists would attempt a major attack on the United
States before the election, according to a
congressional aide. The leaders were struck by Bush's
definitiveness and gravity, the aide said...
(Washington Post, April 22, 2004)
The general thesis of the June 6 release was this:
Washington DC, June 6 Intelligence patterns monitored
here now point conclusively to the grave threat of an
imminent new round of ABC
(atomic-bacteriological-chemical) terror attacks in
the United States, Great Britain, Canada, and possibly
other nations. These attacks could include nuclear
detonations, radiological dirty bombs, poison gas and
other chemical weapons, or biological agents, to be
unleashed in such urban settings as New York City, Los
Angeles, Chicago, Washington DC, Vancouver BC, or
London. The goal of these operations would be to
produce a worldwide shock several orders of magnitude
greater than the original 9-11, with a view to
stopping the collapse of the Bush administration, the
Wall Street-centered financial structures, and the
US-UK strategic position generally. The attacks would
be attributed by US/UK intelligence to controlled
patsy terrorist groups who would be linked by the
media to countries like Iran, Syria, Cuba, North
Korea, Egypt, or Saudi Arabia, thus setting these
states up for attack. The organizers of the attacks
would in reality be substantially the same secret
command cell in the United States which set up the
9-11 events and its associated networks, which has
been able to continue in operation because of the
abject failure of all 9-11 investigations to date to
identify it. These forces are now in a desperate
flight forward to escape from their current
increasingly grim position. Their goal is now to
establish a neocon fascist dictatorship in the United
States, complete with martial law, special tribunals,
press and media censorship, and the full pervasive
apparatus of the modern police state.
As of the end of August, 2004, this threat is now more
urgent than ever.
These issues will be discussed in my upcoming book,
9/11 Synthetic Terrorism: The Myth of the Twenty-First
Century, to be published by Progressive Press. For information, please contact info@progressivepress.com
To read the full text of the June 6 release, "Rogue
Bush Backers Prepare Super 9-11 False Flag Terror
Attacks,aaa' please go to:
http://inn.globalfreepress.com/modules /news/article.php?storyid=355
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