NOVANEWS
Mark Perry is huffing and puffing in Foreign Policy about Israel endangering American lives through its false-flag operation. Indeed I agree with him that Israeli actions endanger American lives, but that doesn’t strike me as something idiosyncratic about the actions of the Israeli state. If I have time I will write something about it, but these few paragraphs struck me as pretty endearing:
According to one retired CIA officer, information about the false-flag operation was reported up the U.S. intelligence chain of command. It reached CIA Director of Operations Stephen Kappes, his deputy Michael Sulick, and the head of the Counterintelligence Center. All three of these officials are now retired. The Counterintelligence Center, according to its website, is tasked with investigating “threats posed by foreign intelligence services.”
The report then made its way to the White House, according to the currently serving U.S. intelligence officer. The officer said that Bush “went absolutely ballistic” when briefed on its contents.
“The report sparked White House concerns that Israel’s program was putting Americans at risk,” the intelligence officer told me. “There’s no question that the U.S. has cooperated with Israel in intelligence-gathering operations against the Iranians, but this was different. No matter what anyone thinks, we’re not in the business of assassinating Iranian officials or killing Iranian civilians.”
Of course, the US does not assassinate Iranian officials. Instead it sponsors coup d’etats to destroy nationalist governments there and places their leaders under house arrest until they die. And the US does not kill Iranian civilians. It simply supports sanctions that lead to their death and sends arms to Iraq while the latter is destroying Iran. Does anyone actually think that the USG wants a nuclear Iran?
And just in case you are a little slow in getting the point that Foreign Policy is orienting its regional coverage and pontificating to the renovation of American and Saudi hegemony over the region, alongside a demilitarized Palestinian state (that is ‘Palestinian liberation” to all of you going on and on about the lobby) and trying to whitewash the sordid history of empire in the process, Perry reminds us:
“We don’t do bang and boom,” a recently retired intelligence officer said. “And we don’t do political assassinations.”
Part of renovating American regional hegemony is co-opting those whose demands go considerably farther than the re-jiggered prisons that the American and Gulf ruling classes envision for the Palestinians — and indeed the rest of the regional dispossessed. Part of the process of co-optation is absorbing into the merely reformist movement those who think that the division amongst the elites is larger than it is. And part of that absorption means bringing radicals into the liberal camp. If you didn’t shake your head when the “retired intelligence officer” beatifically claimed that “we don’t political assassinations,” check your coordinates, please.
Israel regularly proposes conducting covert operations targeting Iranians, but is just as regularly shut down, according to retired and current intelligence officers. “They come into the room and spread out their plans, and we just shake our heads,” one highly placed intelligence source said, “and we say to them — ‘Don’t even go there. The answer is no.'”
That Perry has just documented instances of Israeli plans being roundly rejected by US officialdom has escaped the notice of those getting excited about this story. About that phenomenon I am not sure what to say. But I have interrupted your search for a right-populist savior who will put the Jewish state on its leash and save American democracy. Consider the interruption over, and you may now return to your regular hallucinating habits.
Related posts:
-
“the exclusive revolution” Khulud writes: The Tent Protests — Haifa © Photo by Dina…
-
“the exclusive revolution”: 2 Abir Kopty writes: Although some Israelis are calling for making…
-
Palestinian Gandhi, mark II I am not going to recapitulate the debate about Palestine,…
