The Passionate Attachment

In Israel in the Second Iraq War: The Influence of Likud, former CIA Iraq analyst Stephen C. Pelletière observes:

…the process of involving Iran in the takeover of Iraq began before Bush took office, at the time of Bill Clinton. Clinton’s principal Middle East advisor, Martin Indyk, invited Tehran to send a delegation to Washington to advise on means of overthrowing the Ba’th. The Iranians complied, and, as a consequence, they were in the ground floor, so to speak, of the invasion planning. This enabled them to begin looking out for their interests.

In 1982, Indyk began working as a deputy research director for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). From 1985 Indyk served eight years as the founding Executive Director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think created by AIPAC to “do AIPAC’s work but appear independent.” In 2000, while serving as U.S. ambassador to Israel, Indyk’s security clearance was briefly suspended by the U.S. Department of State pending a State Department and FBI investigation into his handling of intelligence information.

Looking through who Google Ideas director Jared Cohen is following on Twitter, I came across this intriguing connection to the Israel lobby:

Scott Carpenter ‏@JSCarpenter11

Principal, @GoogleIdeas, where thinking and technology tackle the thorniest problems. Previously founder and director of Project Fikra @washinstitute.

The Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) was created by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) “to do AIPAC’s work but appear independent.” According to the think tank AIPAC built, Project Fikra is “a multiyear program of research, publication, and network-building designed to generate policy ideas for promoting positive change and countering the spread of extremism in the Middle East.” Or, as I have more accurately described the closely-related Fikra Forum, it’s basically “an Israeli forum for Arab democrats” surreptitiously pushing regime change in the Middle East.

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Referring to Google Ideas director Jared Cohen’s involvement in regime change in the Middle East last spring, Stratfor’s Fred Burton emailed his colleagues:

“GOOGLE is getting WH [White House] and State Dept. support and air cover. In reality, they are doing things the CIA cannot do.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, Google’s “think/do tank” is now targeting regimes closer to home:

‘There’s a reason the people in Cuba don’t have access to the Internet. It is because the government [couldn’t] survive it.”

That was Florida Sen. Marco Rubio last week at a Washington conference titled “Cuba Needs a (Technological) Revolution: How the Internet Can Thaw an Island Frozen in Time.” The event was sponsored by Google Ideas, a for-profit venture of the giant Internet search enterprise, and the nonprofit Heritage Foundation.

If 2011 was The Year of the Arab Spring, 2012 is shaping up to be El Año de la Primavera Latina.

Business Insider reports:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was a source to Stratfor Vice President Fred Burton since at least May of 2007, according to internal Stratfor emails leaked by WikiLeaks.

In an email dated May 1, 2007, Burton says that “BiBi [i.e. Netanyahu] believes he can unseat Olmert and there is a movement underway to do so.”

After an analyst sends a message to clarify, Burton responds:

BiBi (protect) has said that Olmert is “finished” Thursday.

In looking at my notes… it looks like BiBi is the one that wants the job very badly. He said, “it’s mine, I’ve shored up Likud [i.e. Israel’s major center-right political party]. Thank you Fred for your support of Israel…”

In mid-May 2009— the week before Netanyahu met with President Barack Obama for the first time since both took office— an email discussed Obama’s Middle East policy and Burton wrote:

BB, being the man of honor that he is, intends to let Obama know (I’ve been told man to man) that he is the vanguard of the State of Israel, with the hell bent intentions (Bush like I may add) of neutralizing the Iranian nuclear menace, because he trusts this Presidency about as much as I do. For that, he gets my man of the year award.

As 2009 progresses Iran’s nuclear capabilities and a potential Israeli strike become the main topic of discussion. In a November 2009 email titled “Insight – Blowback ** internal use only **” Burton provides intel from both U.S. and Israel:

A very good source just informed me that extremely quiet discussions are underway between [the Department of Homeland Security] and the FBI on the blowback to the Jewish community, facilities, synagogues, day-cares, et al in the United States, in the event of an Israeli strike on Iran…

From my lips to your ears. I would imagine that my good friend BB Netanyahu told Obama what the Sword of Gideon has in store for the Iranian menace. I also have it on good word that BB trusts Obama about as much as he trusted Arafat or Waddi Haddad.

Considering Burton’s clear preference for the Israeli Prime Minister over the U.S. President, the following should raise concerns about the potential for compromising U.S. national security:

Stratfor provides confidential intelligence services to large corporations and government agencies, including the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Marines and the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency.

By Philip Giraldi
The Passionate Attachment
March 28, 2012

The New York Times’ Isabel Kershner reporting from Jerusalem on March 20th described Israeli government rage at a comment made by the European Union’s foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton relating to the killing of three Jewish children in Toulouse France on the previous day. Ashton decried the killing but then tied it in to equally unfortunate deaths of children in other places, including Gaza. Her comment caused Netanyahu to explode, saying he was “infuriated” by the “comparison between a deliberate massacre of children and the defensive, surgical actions” of the Israeli Defense Forces hitting “…terrorists who use children as a human shield.” Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman quickly joined in, saying that Ashton should instead be thinking about the “children of southern Israel who live in constant fear of rocket attacks from Gaza.”

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What readers of The Passionate Attachment have known since early March 2011 about Jared Cohen’s involvement in the “Arab Spring” uprisings has been confirmed by a Lebanese daily’s English language Internet site:

Top Google execs, including the company’s CEO and one of Barack Obama’s major presidential campaign donors Eric Schmidt, informed the intelligence agency Stratfor about Google’s activities and internal communication regarding “regime change” in the Middle East, according to Stratfor emails released by WikiLeaks and obtained by Al-Akhbar. The other source cited was Google’s director for security and safety Marty Lev.

The briefings mainly focused on the movements of Jared Cohen, currently the director of Google Ideas, a “think/do-tank” billed as a vehicle for spreading American-style liberal democracy. Cohen was also a former member of US Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff and former advisor to Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton.

Email exchanges, starting February 2011, suggest that Google execs were suspicious that Cohen was coordinating his moves with the White House and cut Cohen’s mission short at times for fear he was taking too many risks. Stratfor’s vice-president of counter-terrorism Fred Burton, who seemed opposed to Google’s alleged covert role in “foaming” uprisings, describes Cohen as a “loose Cannon” whose killing or kidnapping “might be the best thing to happen” to expose Google.

In contrast to their fascination with less significant Wikileaks revelations, this narrative-changing story has been studiously ignored by almost all mainstream and so-called alternative media.

By Philip Giraldi
The Passionate Attachment
March 22, 2012

I’m sure that many have noted how successful Israel and its friends are at shifting the narrative. Palestinian statehood was made a non-issue by ignoring it in the media and concentrating instead on the largely fictitious threat being posed by Iran. Threats by Israel to attack Iran continue, to be sure, and have even increased in both volume and ferocity, but Israel is now creating a diversion in always useful Gaza. Israel has been staging airstrikes against Gaza and it is widely believed in the Israeli media that a new ground invasion is impending. The argument that Gaza is launching missiles into Israel is being trotted out anew, as it always is, but the homemade rockets have hardly had any impact whatsoever. Twenty-five Gazans have been killed in the Israeli response while no Israelis have either died or been seriously injured. So the conversation is not about what is happening with the Palestinians but rather about the terrible danger of rockets flying out from Gaza.

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