Bernard Lewis, the Princeton emeritus professor who just received the American Enterprise Institute’s annual award, presumably for having done so much to lay the intellectual foundation for the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the subsequent transformation of the Islamic world, is expected to open the proceedings by addressing Iran’s historic, as well as contemporary, ambitions in the region. Rob Sobhani, a Georgetown University adjunct professor and president of Caspian Energy Consulting, who helped found, along with Michael Ledeen and several other AEI fellows, the Coalition for Democracy in Iran in 2002, has also been invited, as has one of Lewis’ most devoted protégés, AEI fellow and former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operative, Reuel Marc Gerecht.Will someone please tell me the precise nature of the American Enterprise Institute's relationship to the CIA? For decades now, Ledeen has been accused of being a former CIA man, although I know of no proof.
This is clearly the planning meeting for the next stage in the push to conquer Iran:
The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a neo-conservative group created two days after the 9/11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, is holding what it calls “a policy workshop” during Congress’ Memorial Day recess, no doubt to plot strategy for moving U.S. policy toward Iran in a direction compatible with its confrontational views.I've already expressed my belief that there cannot be an Iran attack without a staged (or permitted) terrorist attack.
The FDD was one of the leading cheerleaders for war in the run-up to the Iraq debacle. The leaders of the group include Steve Forbes, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Jack Kemp, Newt Gingrich, Joe Lieberman (of course), Louis Freeh, and former DCI James Woolsey. The Board of advisors includes Walid Phares (associated with a Lebanese militia group accused of terroristic acts), Gary Bauer (the notorious ladies' man who helped weld together Christian fundamentalism and Zionism), Richard Perle (Prince of Darkness) and -- hee hee hee -- Mark Foley.
Let's get back Reuel Marc Gerecht, "former" spook and Ledeen pal. In 2006, he wrote a piece on Iran called "To Bomb or not to Bomb," in which he came down firmly on the "to bomb" side. Remember when the neo-cons were trying to convince us that the Iranians would masochistically fall in love with the strong and Masterful nation that gave it the nuking it deserved? ("Yes! I've been a bad country. Hit me again, Daddy!") The war marketeers seem to have given up on that particular brand of snake oil, thank God.
And yet we learn, via a particularly strange Wikipedia entry, that "Gerecht is known to hang out at mosques and kebab joints throughout the Middle East and Central Asia." Um. Excuse me...but aren't the folks who hang out in mosques usually Muslim? The kebab joints I can understand. But the spectacle of a (possible) Muslim arguing for the bombing of Muslims -- well, am I the only one who considers that a bit odd?
4 comments:
I'm still trying to figure out FDD's director, Clifford May. For example, why he kept popping up in the months after the Plame outing to insist that of *course* everybody in DC knew Plame was CIA. Who assigned him that particular bit of spin management?
Or why he founded FDD just two days after September 11.
Or, for that matter, why he should have been in Taiwan on January 23, 2005, delivering an address to the World League for Freedom and Democracy -- which is the current incarnation of the World Anti-Communist League, much reduced from its glory days in the 1970's and 1980's.
There are far too many strange associations around May and the FDD for it to be just another Neocon group -- though its true nature remains less than obvious.
Bernard Lewis is another huge warning sign. With the Bush administration apparently resigned to the fact that we no longer have a military with which to invade Iran, Lewis's time-honored strategy of using everybody from fanatical Sunni jihadists to pan-Turanian fascists as handy surrogates seems to be back at center stage.
Fasten your seatbelts, boys and girls, we could be in for a bumpy ride.
Well, Cannonfire's blitzkrieg against any meeting that supports Democracy and freedom to the oppressed peoples in the Middle East is logical. This blog is assigned by the Iranian intelligence service with all Petro-dollars needed to blast the enemies of the fascist Mullah. The idiotic narrative of this page, not secret to anyone is disseminated through internet by the same Berkeley gang, that feeds from Hizbullah the Terrorist-on-Beirut. But guess what, the agents of Jihado-Nazism, are no one else than the rabid ex cold war Communists, Gitane-smokers. They can't get back to the center stage outside the Petro-dollars of either the Wahabis or the Khomeinists. The question is: who are they writing to? Who read them? The retardo-fascists of course. Operatives of the last totalitarian regimes, these "cyber-narcissists" roam online to find an alibi for their checks.
Guess what? They are read by their own group and the Berkeley gang. Voila, c'est tout..basta..
The peoples of the Middle East simply don't want your wisdom, Western agents of the Eastern regimes. A good Arab proverb says: "Drink from the Ocean," for no one has appointed you as representatives of the peoples..
"For decades now, Ledeen has been accused of being a former CIA man, although I know of no proof."
If he was a CIA man, he's officialy against his former spooky friends now (unless it's another of his tricks). I think Ledeen worked (or is still working) for other "masters" than the CIA, more like Mossad.
His last entry in Pajama Media about the CIA.
The Plot
As I said on The Corner a while ago, it’s a typical CIA product: the opposite of a serious program. You don’t need a secret disinformation operation; instead, we need an effective, public, information effort, including a VOA Farsi Service that entertains criticis of the mullahs more than their apologists, and administration spokesthings who talk about the grisly repression of the Iranian people carried out by the regime. Above all, four little words “we support regime change” would be a great way to start. And those words should come from the White House or Foggy Bottom. So far, we’ve got the secretary of state saying she doesn’t want regime change, just “better behavior” from the mullahs.
As for sabotaging the Iranian economy, it’s hard to improve on the mullahs’ own performance to date. I’d order CIA to stay out of their way.
In fact, I’d order the CIA to stay away from Iranians overall. What a bunch of dolts.
sami, I must say that of all the nutballs who have ever posted comments to this site, yours is the -- and I mean THE nuttiest. I am a Jihado-Nazi-Communist Gitane smoker? Wow! Couldn't you fit in something about the UFO people in there?
Ah, but the truth is, I'm getting pissed off at my evil Iranian overlords. They promised me a pot of petrodollars every month. Yet here we are, rent time mere days away, and I have no idea how to pay the landlord.
Hyperman: You come to a point that has been puzzling me for ages now, and it is one reason why I am (usually) careful to refer to "the intelligence community" as opposed to "the CIA." The writings of Joseph Trento and others make clear that there is a network of people who are but are not spies or intelligence operatives. And these are the guys doing most of the real mischief in this world. Quite often, they speak sneeringly about the CIA -- as did Ollie North an the people around him during the Iran-Contra days, when they tried to set up their own "CIA." Yet some of them, many of them, have Agency backgrounds.
This goes back a long ways. In the early 1960s, the networks invovled with the anti-Castro, anti-communist underground often despised the CIA, even though many of them seemed to COME from the CIA. You look at, say, the John Birch Society writings from those days, and it becomes clear that some ver well-funded operatives considered the Agency to be one of the main enemies. That's one reason why I always avoided the simplistic formulation that "the CIA killed Kennedy."
Post a Comment