More on Corsi, Ledeen, Iran, Israel and atom bombs

You may recall our previous discussion of Jerome Corsi and his unnerving prediction that Iran would set off an atomic device within a major American city. This atrocity, Corsi insists, will be aided and abetted by such alleged Iranian "appeasers" as John Kerry, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy -- four Democratic politicians whose pro-Tehran activity has so far remained invisible to all rational observers.

Corsi's foresight does not derive from any claimed parapsychological abilities. Rather, he presents himself as a conduit of "inside the beltway" dope.

Who is this man, and who are his associates?

As mentioned previously, he first came into view as one of the key authors of the "swift boat" smears against John Kerry. At that time, William Hare wrote the following:

A simple Google search under the name Jerome Corsi reveals a treasure trove of information, particularly one productive link through MediaMatters.org. This reputable site has compiled comments of Corsi and others from his Free Republic site. Their discourse reads like a Skinhead seminar. Corsi has revealed himself to be an unmitigated Neo-Nazi bigot with an unquenchable thirst for hateful commentary, with special emphasis on degrading Catholics, Jews and Muslims. The Pope is senile; Catholicism and Islam are routinely referred to as actively condoning "buggery" while Hillary Clinton is a fat lesbian without hair.

Kerry is referred to as a "Jew boy" who cannot be trusted for that reason...

(One wonders when conservative Jews and Catholics will wake up and take note of just how strange a bedfellow Corsi truly is.)

Corsi's incessant emphasis on the "appeasement" bogeyman forces us to ask: By what standards are Kerry, Clinton, Kennedy and Biden labeled "appeasers"?

A closer look reveals a startling double-standard. Those pushing for action against Iran often invoke Ronald Reagan. The propaganda film "An Atomic 911," linked to Corsi's effort, was produced by Tim Watkins, previously involved with the making of "In the Face of Evil: Reagan's War in Word and Deed." The makers of this documentary offer this summary:

The film presents Ronald Reagan's forty-year campaign against Soviet communism as a blueprint for fighting evil in the world.

Translation: Dubya's crusade against Islam is just like Saint Ronnie's crusade against the bolshies.

One could counter this notion on any number of levels, not least by noting that Democrats made anti-communism official policy when Reagan was still an alleged actor and a corrupt Screen Actor's Guild president. But I would call your attention to one special irony:

Ronald Reagan's administration illegally sold arms to Iran!

Odd, isn't it, that the current anti-Iran crusaders would invoke Reagan's name in order to fire up the troops against the Tehran regime (which is, arguably, a bit more moderate now than in RR's day)?

But that's not all, irony fans...!

One of the web sites affiliated with the current crusade is Regime Change Iran, which supports, and is supported by, ultra-neo-con Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute. (As Ted Koppel once put it: "Michael Ledeen is a Renaissance man...in the tradition of Machiavelli." Of course, Ledeen lives in a world where a comparison to Machiavelli is considered complimentary.)

Ledeen, as you will recall, remains a die-hard supporter of the disgraced Iraqi exile leader Ahmed Chalabi. And why did Chalabi fall into disgrace? In large part because he was routing intelligence to Tehran.

Ledeen is also strongly linked with the mysterious Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar. Even though the CIA had dismissed Ghorbanifar as a prevaricator, Ledeen insisted on arranging a series of meetings between the Iranian and a number of likeminded Defense Department bigwigs.

All of which brings us to one simple question: How can Corsi accuse Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden of "appeasement? None of them ever sold weapons to Iran; none of them ever palled around with Iranian arms merchants of inscrutable loyalties; none of them ever helped funnel intel to Tehran. In short: None of them have demonstrated any link to Iran. Yet we are supposed to believe that these four Democrats are hand-puppets of the Iranian mullahs -- while Reagan, Ledeen and Chalabi must forevermore remain free of all such accusations.

The road to war. Ledeen and his defenders became angry when the Times of London described him as "the prominent neo-conservative who has led calls for an attack on Iran." As the Regime Change blog puts it:

Ledeen has long been an advocate of regime change in Iran. Perhaps they [the Times] drew the false conclusion he was referring to militarily forcing a regime change. But he has not led calls for an attack on Iran, but rather advocates supporting of a regime change in Iran using similar methods as were used in Romania, the Ukraine, Lebanon and elsewhere.

If that were the end of it, I'd have no overwhelming disagreement with Ledeen's position -- although I strongly doubt that the Iranians will soon rise against the mullahs the way the Romanians rose against Ceausescu.

Ledeen, however, obviously wants to sneak war through the back door -- indeed, this goal seems to have been the entire purpose of his more recent dalliances with Ghorbanifar. From the Sydney Morning Herald of August 9, 2003:

Administration officials said at least two Pentagon officials working for the Undersecretary of Defence for Policy, Douglas Feith, have held "several" meetings with Manucher Ghorbanifar, the Iranian middleman in United States arms-for-hostage shipments to Iran in the mid-1980s.

The officials who disclosed the secret meetings said the talks with Mr Ghorbanifar were not authorized by the White House and appeared to be aimed at undercutting sensitive negotiations with Iran's Government.

A senior Administration official said the US Government had learned about the unauthorized talks by accident.

The senior official and another Administration source said the ultimate objective of Mr Feith and a group of neo-conservative civilians inside the Pentagon is change of government in Iran.

The immediate objective appeared to be to "antagonise Iran so that they get frustrated and then by their reactions harden US policy against them"

(Emphasis added by me.) Later, we read: "It is understood Mr Ledeen reopened the Ghorbanifar channel with Mr Feith's staff."

All very telling -- especially when we recall that there had been, not long before, a brief thaw in relations between Tehran and Washington, due in part to mutual antipathy toward the Taliban.

Perhaps more telling still is this paragraph from Rightweb's profile of Ledeen:

Michael Ledeen, the neocons' point man on regime change in Iran (and in Syria, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia), is apparently capable of viewing diplomacy only through the barrel of a gun, arguing in a November 2003 piece for the National Review Online that the "appeasers" in Congress and the State Department "don't want to know about Iran, because if they did, they would be driven to take actions that they do not want to take. They would have to support democratic revolution in Iran, and they prefer to schmooze with the mullahs." He concludes, "I guess some top official will have to die at the hands of (obviously) Iranian-supported terrorists before the Pentagon is permitted to work on the subject."

(Emphasis added by me.) Notice the recurrent motifs: Anyone who disagrees with Ledeen's position is an "appeaser," and we won't get action until the Iranians do something drastic and terrible -- and better that day come sooner than later. The entire purpose of the Ghorbanifar meetings apparently revolved around a scheme designed to goad Tehran into taking an incautious step.

Corsi and Ledeen are obviously singing from the same songbook.

Unfathomably strange bedfellows: As others have previously noted, Corsi had demonstrated on the Free Republic site a Goebbels-esque penchant for insulting Jews and Catholics, and allegedly referred to John Kerry a "Jew boy." Although I have yet to see confirmation of the "Jew boy" remark, he did once write of Kerry: "After he married TerRAHsa, didn't John Kerry begin practicing Judaism? He also has paternal grandparents that were Jewish. What religion is John Kerry?"

To put that remark in context, here's Corsi on Catholics: "Boy buggering in both Islam and Catholicism is okay with the Pope as long as it isn't reported by the liberal press." (If the mainstream media ignored the church's sex scandals, why did I read so much about it in the Los Angeles Times?)

And while we're at it, here's Corsi on Islam: "a worthless, dangerous Satanic religion." These words will not convince Mr. Average Iranian that Jerome Corsi has his best interests at heart.

Despite these unfunny "jokes," Corsi claims to be both a Catholic and a supporter of Israel. Many would argue that the Iran war he promotes would serve Likud interests.

Not only that. One portion of the afore-cited 2003 story on Ghorbanifar now carries a resonance not apparent at that time:

The senior Administration official identified two of the defence officials who met Mr Ghorbanifar as Harold Rhode, Mr Feith's top Middle East specialist, and Larry Franklin, a Defence Intelligence Agency analyst on loan to the undersecretary's office.

(Emphasis added by me.)

Rhode is a Ledeen protege who acted as a liaison between Pentagon neocons and Chalabi. But the most intriguing figure here is, of course, Larry Franklin -- the central figure in the current AIPAC scandal. You may want to read Xymphora's recent observations on that score.

Larry Franklin was passing highly sensitive information to AIPAC (translation: to Israel) in the same time period as those hush-hush meetings with Ghorbanifar. Again: While we don't know precisely what went on at those meetings, they seem to have centered on attempts to provoke Iran into giving America a causus belli.

The best piece on this imbroglio remains Laura Rozen's analysis from about a year ago:

1) The secret meetings between Pentagon officials and associates of Ghorbanifar in Europe went on for almost two years, a full year longer than the Bush administration has acknowledged. Ghorbanifar told me of three meetings. While the Pentagon originally told the Post last year that Harold Rhode, an official in Feith's office, had simply run into Ghorbanifar in Paris in June 2003, Ghorbanifar tells me that the two spent weeks planning the meeting.

2) The Italian military intelligence organization SISMI provided logistics and security at the first meeting, in Rome, in December 2001. And the head of Sismi, Nicolo Pollari, as well as the Italian Defense Minister, Antonio Martino, attended the meeting, along with Michael Ledeen, Ghorbanifar, Pentagon officials Harold Rhode and Larry Franklin. [Sismi has been in the news recently for having been reported to have used an Italian middleman to put the forged Niger docs into circulation.]

3) Ghorbanifar told me he has had fifty meetings with Michael Ledeen since September 11th, and that he has given Ledeen "4,000 to 5,000 pages of sensitive documents" concerning Iran, Iraq and the Middle East, "material no one else has received."

Since the Italians have long-standing trade ties to Iran, one can easily understand why Ledeen's faction would use SISMI to arrange the enigmatic liaisons with Ghorbanifar.

In the 1980s, a number of books and articles fingered Michael Ledeen as a member of Italy's fascist P2 "lodge," a pseudo-Masonic power group founded by former blakshirt and SS liaison officer Licio Gelli. Gelli's fascist cabal infiltrated, and largely controlled, SISMI. According to reports published in the 1980s, Gelli had created an organization within the organization, jocularly labeled "Super SISMI."

How do we reconcile the seeming contradiction between Ledeen's hawkish pro-Israeli views and his reported alliance with the Nazi-fied Gelli? I'm not sure how to answer that one. Neither can I explain why a man like Corsi, who also claims to support Israel, would spew ugly anti-Semitism on the Free Republic site.

In summary: Yes, I know that this post tosses the reader into a stew containing a very confusing array of ingredients. I apologize if this essay resembles a "brain dump," as opposed to a structured argument.

My bottom line, at least, is simple: A faction within our power establishment wants war with Iran. To that end, they will not refrain from staging a provocation. And they will use this incident both to attack that country and to assail freedom within the United States.

Forewarned is forearmed. Let us hope the forearmed can forestall.