[There's been a little discussion at 911blogger and the TruthMove forum regarding whether or not the oft-referenced "dual citizenship" of many of the neo-cons can be reliably sourced as fact. Although this article does not mention the citizenship status of the neo-con players in question, it certainly makes a strong case for entirely fractured -- or non-existent -- national loyalty. More thanks to the sacks of shit at CounterPunch.]

February 28 / 29, 2004

A
CounterPunch Special Report

Serving Two Flags

Neo-Cons,
Israel and the Bush Administration

By STEPHEN GREEN

Since 9-11, a small group of "neo-conservatives"
in the Administration have effectively gutted--they would say
reformed--traditional American foreign and security policy. Notable
features of the new Bush doctrine include the pre-emptive use
of unilateral force, and the undermining of the United Nations
and the principle instruments and institutions of international
law....all in the cause of fighting terrorism and promoting homeland
security.

Some skeptics, noting the neo-cons' past
academic and professional associations, writings and public utterances,
have suggested that their underlying agenda is the alignment
of U.S. foreign and security policies with those of Ariel Sharon
and the Israeli right wing. The administration's new hard line
on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict certainly suggests that,
as perhaps does the destruction, with U.S. soldiers and funds,
of the military capacity of Iraq, and the current belligerent
neo-con campaign against the other two countries which constitute
a remaining counterforce to Israeli military hegemony in the
region--Iran and Syria.

Have the neo-conservatives--many of whom
are senior officials in the Defense Department, National Security
Council and Office of the Vice President--had dual agendas, while
professing to work for the internal security of the United States
against its terrorist enemies?

A review of the internal security backgrounds
of some of the best known among them strongly suggests the answer.

Dr. Stephen Bryen
and Colleagues

In April of 1979, Deputy Assistant Attorney
General Robert Keuch recommended in writing that Bryen, then
a staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, undergo
a grand jury hearing to establish the basis for a prosecution
for espionage. John Davitt, then Chief of the Justice Department's
Internal Security Division, concurred.

The evidence was strong. Bryen had been
overheard in the Madison Hotel Coffee Shop, offering classified
documents to an official of the Israeli Embassy in the presence
of the director of AIPAC, the American-Israel Public Affairs
Committee. It was later determined that the Embassy official
was Zvi Rafiah, the Mossad station chief in Washington. Bryen
refused to be poly-graphed by the FBI on the purpose and details
of the meeting; whereas the person who'd witnessed it agreed
to be poly-graphed and passed the test.

The Bureau also had testimony from a
second person, a staff member of the Foreign Relations Committee,
that she had witnessed Bryen in his Senate office with Rafiah,
discussing classified documents that were spread out on a table
in front of an open safe in which the documents were supposed
to be secured. Not long after this second witness came forward,
Bryen's fingerprints were found on classified documents he'd
stated in writing to the FBI he'd never had in his possession....the
ones he'd allegedly offered to Rafiah.

Nevertheless, following the refusal of
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to grant access by Justice
Department officials to files which were key to the investigation,
Keuch's recommendation for a grand jury hearing, and ultimately
the investigation itself, were shut down. This decision, taken
by Philip Heymann, Chief of Justice's Criminal Division, was
a bitter disappointment to Davitt and to Joel Lisker, the lead
investigator on the case, as expressed to this writer. A complicating
factor in the outcome was that Heymann was a former schoolmate
and fellow U.S. Supreme Court Clerk of Bryen's attorney, Nathan
Lewin.

Bryen was asked to resign from his Foreign
Relations Committee post shortly before the investigation was
concluded in late 1979. For the following year and a half, he
served as Executive Director of the Jewish Institute for National
Security Affairs (JINSA), and provided consulting services to
AIPAC.

In April, 1981, the FBI received an application
by the Defense Department for a Top Secret security clearance
for Dr. Bryen . Richard Perle, who had just been nominated as
Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy,
was proposing Bryen as his Deputy Assistant Secretary! Within
six months, with Perle pushing hard, Bryen received both Top
Secret-SCI (sensitive compartmented information) and Top Secret-"NATO/COSMIC"
clearances.

Loyalty, Patriotism
and Character

The Bryen investigation became in fact
the most contentious issue in Perle's own confirmation hearings
in July, 1981. Under aggressive questioning from Sen. Jeremiah
Denton, Perle held his ground: "I consider Dr. Bryen to
be an individual impeccable integrity....I have the highest confidence
in [his] loyalty, patriotism and character."

Several years later in early 1988, Israel
was in the final stages of development of a prototype of its
ground based "Arrow" anti-ballistic missile. One element
the program lacked was "klystrons", small microwave
amplifiers which are critical components in the missile's high
frequency, radar-based target acquisition system which locks
on to in-coming missiles. In 1988, klystrons were among the most
advanced developments in American weapons research, and their
export was of course strictly proscribed.

The DOD office involved in control of
defense technology exports was the Defense Technology
Security Administration (DTSA) within Richard Perle's ISP office.
The Director (and founder) of DTSA was Perle's Deputy, Dr. Stephen
Bryen. In May of 1988, Bryen sent a standard form to Richard
Levine, a Navy tech transfer official, informing him of intent
to approve a license for Varian Associates, Inc. of Beverly,
Massachusetts to export to Israel four klystrons. This was done
without the usual consultations with the tech transfer officials
of the Army and Air Force, or ISA (International Security Affairs)
or DSAA (Defense Security Assistance Agency.

The answer from Levine was "no".
He opposed granting the license, and asked for a meeting on the
matter of the appropriate (above listed) offices. At the meeting,
all of the officials present opposed the license. Bryen responded
by suggesting that he go back to the Israelis to ask why these
particular items were needed for their defense. Later, after
the Israeli Government came back with what one DOD staffer described
as "a little bullshit answer", Bryen simply notified
the meeting attendees that an acceptable answer had been received,
the license granted, and the klystrons released.

By now, however, the dogs were awake.
Then Assistant Secretary of Defense for ISA, (and now Deputy
Secretary of State) Richard Armitage sent Dr. Bryen a letter
stating that the State Department (which issues the export licenses)
should be informed of DOD's "uniformly negative" reaction
to the export of klystrons to Israel. Bryen did as instructed
, and the license was withdrawn.

In July, Varian Associates became the
first U.S. corporation formally precluded from contracting with
the Defense Department. Two senior colleague in DOD who wish
to remain anonymous have confirmed that this attempt by Bryen
to obtain klystrons for his friends was not unusual, and was
in fact "standard operating procedure" for him, recalling
numerous instances when U.S. companies were denied licenses to
export sensitive technology, only to learn later that Israeli
companies subsequently exported similar (U.S. derived) weapons
and technology to the intended customers/governments.

In late1988, Bryen resigned from his DOD post, and for a period
worked in the
private sector with a variety of defense technology consulting
firms.

Bryen and the China
Commission

In 1997, "Defense Week" reported
(05/27/97) that, ...." the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence
reaffirmed that U.S.- derived technology from the cancelled [Israeli]
Lavi fighter project is being used on China's new F-10 fighter."
The following year, "Jane's Intelligence Review" reported
(11/01/98) the transfer by Israel to China of the Phalcon airborne
early warning and control system, the Python air-combat missile,
and the F-10 fighter aircraft, containing "state-of-the-art
U.S. electronics."

Concern about the continuing transfer
of advanced U.S. arms technology to the burgeoning Chinese military
program led, in the last months of the Clinton Administration,
to the creation of a Congressional consultative body called the
United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission.
The charter for the "The China Commission", as it is
commonly known, states that its purpose is to...."monitor,
investigate, and report to the Congress on the national security
implications of the bilateral trade and economic relationship
between the United States and the Peoples Republic of China."
The charter also reflects an awareness of the problem of "back
door" technology leaks: "The Commission shall also
take into account patterns of trade and transfers through third
countries to the extent practicable."

It was almost predictable that in the
new Bush Administration, Dr. Stephen Bryen would find his way
to the China Commission. In April 2001, with the support of Deputy
Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Senator Richard Shelby
(R-Alabama) Bryen was appointed a Member of the Commission by
Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert. Last August, his appointment
was extended through December of 2005.

Informed that Bryen had been appointed
to the Commission, the reaction of one former
senior FBI counter-intelligence official was: "My God, that
must mean he has a "Q
clearance!" (A "Q" clearance, which must be approved
by the Department of Energy, is the designation for a Top Secret
codeword clearance to access nuclear technology.)

Michael Ledeen, Consultant
on Chaos

If Stephen Bryen is the military technology
guru in the neo-con pantheon, Michael Ledeen is currently its
leading theorist, historian, scholar and writer. It states in
the website of his consulting firm, Benador Associates, that
he is "...one of the world's leading authorities on intelligence,
contemporary history and international affairs" and that...."As
Ted Koppel puts it, 'Michael Ledeen is a Renaissance man....in
the tradition of Machiavelli.'" Perhaps the following will
add some color and texture to this description.

In 1983, on the recommendation of Richard
Perle, Ledeen was hired at the Department of Defense as a consultant
on terrorism. His immediate supervisor was the Principle Assistant
Secretary for International Security Affairs, Noel Koch. Early
in their work together, Koch noticed with concern Ledeen's habit
of stopping by in his (Koch's) outer office to read classified
materials. When the two of them took a trip to Italy, Koch learned
from the CIA station there that when Ledeen had lived in Rome
previously, as correspondent for The New Republic, he'd been
carried in Agency files as an agent of influence of a foreign
government: Israel.

Some time after their return from the
trip, Ledeen approached his boss with a request for his assistance
in obtaining two highly classified CIA reports which he said
were held by the FBI. He'd hand written on a piece of paper the
identifying "alpha numeric designators". These identifiers
were as highly classified as the reports themselves....which
raised in Koch's mind the question of who had provided them to
Ledeen if he hadn't the clearances to obtain them himself. Koch
immediately told his executive assistant that Ledeen was to have
no further access to classified materials in the office, and
Ledeen just ceased coming to "work".

In early 1986, however, Koch learned
that Ledeen had joined NSC as a consultant, and sufficiently
concerned about the internal security implications of the behavior
of his former aide, arranged to be interviewed by two FBI agents
on the matter. After a two hour debriefing, Koch was told that
it was only Soviet military intelligence penetration that
interested the Bureau. The follow-on interviews that were promised
by the agents just never occurred.

Koch thought this strange, coming as
it did just months after the arrest of Naval intelligence analyst
Jonathan Pollard on charges of espionage for Israel. Frustrated,
Koch wrote up in detail the entire saga of Ledeen's DOD consultancy,
and sent it to the Office of Senator Charles Grassley, then a
member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which
had oversight responsibility for, inter alia, the FBI.

A former senior FBI counter-intelligence
official was surprised and somewhat skeptical, when told of Koch's
unsuccessful attempts to interest the Bureau in an investigation
of Ledeen, noting that in early 1986, the Justice Department
was in fact already engaged in several on-going, concurrent investigations
of Israeli espionage and theft of American military technology.

Machiavelli in Tel
Aviv

Koch's belated attempts to draw official
attention to his former assistant were too late, in any event,
for within a very few weeks of leaving his DOD consultancy in
late 1984, Ledeen had found gainful (classified) employment at
the National Security Council (NSC). In fact, according to a
now declassified chronology prepared for the Senate/House Iran-
Contra investigation, within calendar 1984 Ledeen was already
suggesting to Oliver North, his new boss at NSC...." that
Israeli contacts might be useful in obtaining release of the
U.S. hostages in Lebanon." Perhaps significantly, that is
the first entry in the "Chronology of Events: U.S.-
Iran Dialogue", dated November 18,1986, prepared for the
Joint House-Senate Hearings in the Iran-Contra Investigations.

What is so striking about the Ledeen-related
documents which are part of the Iran-Contra Collection of the
National Security Archive, is how thoroughly the judgements of
Ledeen's colleagues at NSC mirrored, and validated, Noel Koch's
internal security concerns about his consultant.

- on April 9, 1985, NSC Middle East analyst
Donald Fortier wrote to National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane
that NSC staffers were agreed that Ledeen's role in the scheme
should be limited to carrying messages to Israeli Prime Minister
Shimon Peres regarding plans to cooperate with Israel on the
crisis within Iran, and specifically that he should not be entrusted
to ask Peres for detailed operational information;

- on June 6, 1985, Secretary of State George Shultz wrote to
McFarlane that, "Israel's record of dealings with Iran since
the fall of the Shah and during the hostage crisis [show] that
Israel's agenda is not the same as ours. Consequently doubt whether
an intelligence relationship such as what Ledeen has in mind
would be one which we could fully rely upon and it could seriously
skew our own perception and analysis of the Iranian scene."

- on 20 August, 1985, the Office of the
Undersecretary of Defense informed Ledeen by memorandum that
his security clearance had been downgraded from Top Secret-SCI
to Secret.

- on 16 January, 1986, Oliver North recommended
to John Poindexter "for [the] security of the Iran initiative"
that Ledeen be asked to take periodic polygraph examinations.

 

- later in January, on the 24th, North
wrote to Poindexter of his suspicion that Ledeen, along with
Adolph Schwimmer and Manucher Ghorbanifar, might be making money
personally on the sale of arms to Iran, through Israel.

During the June 23-25, 1987 joint hearings
of the House and Senate select committees' investigation of Iran-Contra,
Noel Koch testified that he became suspicious when he learned
that the price which Ledeen had negotiated for the sale to the
Israeli Government of basic TOW missiles was $2,500 each.

Upon inquiring with his DOD colleagues,
he learned the lowest price the U.S. had ever received
for the sale of TOWs to a foreign government had been a previous
sale to Israel for $6,800 per copy. Koch, professing in his testimony
that he and his colleagues at DOD were not in favor of the sale
to begin with, determined that he--Koch--should renegotiate the
$2,500 price so that it could be defended by the "defense
management system." In a clandestine meeting on a Sunday
in the first class lounge of the TWA section of National Airport,
Koch met over a cup of coffee with an official from the Israeli
purchasing mission in New York, and agreed on a price of $4,500
per missile, nearly twice what Ledeen had "negotiated"
in Israel.

There are two possibilities here--one
would be a kickback, as suspected by his NSC colleagues, and
the other would be that Michael Ledeen was effectively negotiating
for Israel, not the U.S.

Like his friend Stephen Bryen (they've
long served together on the JINSA Board of Advisors) Ledeen has
been out of government service since the late1980s....until the
present Bush Administration. He, like Bryen, is presently a serving
member on the China Commission and, with the support of DOD Undersecretary
for Policy Douglas Feith, he
has since 2001 been employed as a consultant for the Office of
Special Plans OSP). Both involve the handling of classified materials
and require high-level security clearances.

The Principals: Perle,
Wolfowitz and Feith

One might wonder how, with security histories
like these, Messrs. Bryen and Ledeen have managed to get second
and third chances to return to government in highly classified
positions.

And the explanation is that they, along
with other like-minded neo-conservatives, have in the current
Bush Administration friends in very high places. In particular,
Bryen and Ledeen have been repeatedly boosted into defense/security
posts by former Defense Policy Council member and chairman Richard
Perle (he just quietly resigned his position), Deputy Defense
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and Under Secretary of Defense for
Policy Douglas Feith.

As previously mentioned, Perle in 1981
as DOD Assistant Secretary for International Security Policy
(ISP) hired Bryen as his Deputy. That same year, Wolfowitz as
head of the State Department Policy Planning Staff hired Ledeen
as a Special Advisor. In 2001 Douglas Feith as DOD Under Secretary
for Policy hired, or approved the hiring of Ledeen as a consultant
for the Office of Special Plans.

The principals have also assisted each
other down through the years. Frequently. In 1973 Richard Perle
used his (and Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson's) influence
as a senior staff member of the Senate Armed Services Committee
to help Wolfowitz obtain a job with the Arms Control and Disarmament
Agency. In 1982, Perle hired Feith in ISP as his Special Counsel,
and then as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Negotiations Policy.
In 2001, DOD Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz helped Feith obtain his
appointment as Undersecretary for Policy. Feith then appointed
Perle as Chairman of the Defense Policy Board. In some cases,
this mutual assistance carries risks, as for instance when Perle's
hiring of Bryen as his Deputy in ISP became an extremely contentious
issue in Perle's own Senate appointment hearings as Assistant
Secretary.

Every appointment/hiring listed above
involved classified work for which high-level security clearances
and associated background checks by the FBI were required. When
the level of the clearance is not above generic Top Secret, however,
the results of that background check are only seen by the hiring
authority. And in the event, if the appointee were Bryen or Ledeen
and the hiring authority were Perle, Wolfowitz or Feith, the
appointee(s) need not have worried about the findings of the
background check. In the case of Perle hiring Bryen as his deputy
in 1981, for instance, documents released in 1983 under the Freedom
of Information Act indicate that the Department provided extraordinarily
high clearances for Bryen without having reviewed more than a
small portion of his 1978-79 FBI investigation file.

RICHARD PERLE: A HABIT
OF LEAKING

Perle came to Washington for the first
time in early 1969, at the age of 28, to work for a neo-con think
tank called the "Committee to Maintain a Prudent Defense
Policy." Within months, Senator Henry "Scoop"
Jackson offered Perle a position on his staff, working with the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And within months after that--less
than a year--Perle was embroiled in an affair involving the leaking
of a classified CIA report on alleged past Soviet treaty violations.

The leaker (and author of the report)
was CIA analyst David Sullivan, and the leakee was Richard Perle.
CIA Director Stansfield Turner was incensed at the unauthorized
disclosure, but before he could fire Sullivan, the latter quit.
Turner urged Sen. Jackson to fire Perle, but he was let off with
a reprimand. Jackson then added insult to injury by immediately
hiring Sullivan to his staff. Sullivan and Perle became close
friends and co-conspirators, and together established an informal
right-wing network which they called "the Madison Group,"
after their usual meeting place in--you might have guessed--the
Madison Hotel Coffee Shop.

Perle's second brush with the law occurred a year later in 1970.
An FBI wiretap authorized for the Israeli Embassy picked up Perle
discussing with an Embassy official classified information which
he said had been supplied to by a staff member on the National
Security Council. An NSC/FBI investigation was launched to identify
the staff member, and quickly focused upon Helmut Sonnenfeldt.
The latter had been previously investigated in 1967 while a staff
member of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research,
for suspected unauthorized transmission to an Israeli Government
official of a classified document concerning the commencement
of the 1967 war in the Middle East.

In 1981, shortly before being appointed
Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy
(ISP)--with responsibility, inter alia, for monitoring
of U.S. defense technology exports, Richard Perle was paid a
substantial consulting fee by arms manufacturer Tamares, Ltd.
of Israel. Shortly after assuming that post, Perle wrote a letter
to the Secretary of the Army urging evaluation and purchase of
155 mm. shells manufactured by Soltam, Ltd. After leaving the
ISP job in 1987, he worked for Soltam.

PAUL WOLFOWITZ : A
WELL PLACED FRIEND

In 1973, in the dying days of the Nixon
Administration, Wolfowitz was recruited to work for the Arms
Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA). There was a certain irony
in the appointment, for in the late 1960's, as a graduate student
at the University of Chicago, Wolfowitz had been a student and
protege of Albert Wohlstetter, an influential, vehement opponent
of any form of arms control or disarmament, vis a vis the Soviets.
Wolfowitz also brought to ACDA a strong attachment to Israel's
security, and a certain confusion about his obligation to U.S.
national security.

In 1978, he was investigated for providing
a classified document on the proposed sale of U.S. weapons to
an Arab government, to an Israel Government official, through
an AIPAC intermediary. An inquiry was launched and dropped, however,
and Wolfowitz continued to work at ACDA until 1980.

In 1990, after a decade of work with
the State Department in Washington and abroad, Wolfowitz was
brought into DoD as Undersecretary for Policy by then Secretary
of Defense Richard Cheney. Two years later, in 1992, the first
Bush Administration launched a broad inter-departmental investigation
into the export of classified technology to China. O particular
concern at the time was the transfer to China by Israel of U.S.
Patriot missiles and/or technology. During that investigation,
in a situation very reminiscent of the Bryen/Varian Associates/klystrons
affair two years earlier, the Pentagon discovered that Wolfowitz's
office was promoting the export to Israel of advanced AIM-9M
air-to-air missiles.

In this instance, the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, aware that Israel had already been caught selling the
earlier AIM 9-L version of the missile to China in violation
of a written agreement with the U.S. on arms re-sales, intervened
to cancel the proposed AIM (-M deal. The Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs at the time was General Colin Powell, currently Secretary
of State.

Wolfowitz continued to serve as DoD Undersecretary
for Policy until 1993, well into the Clinton Administration.
After that, however, like most of the other prominent neo-conservatives,
he was relegated to trying to assist Israel from the sidelines
for the remainder of Clinton's two terms. In 1998, Wolfowitz
was a co-signer of a public letter to the President organized
by the "Project for the New American Century." The
letter, citing Saddam Hussein's continued possession of "weapons
of mass destruction," argued for military action to achieve
regime change and demilitarization of Iraq. Clinton wasn't impressed,
but a more gullible fellow would soon come along.

And indeed, when George W. Bush assumed
the Presidency in early 2001, Wolfowitz got his opportunity.
Picked as Donald Rumsfeld's Deputy Secretary at DoD, he prevailed
upon his boss to appoint Douglas Feith as Undersecretary for
Policy. On the day after the destruction of the World Trade Center,
September 12, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz raised the possibility of
an immediate attack on Iraq during an emergency NSC meeting.
The following day, Wolfowitz conducted the Pentagon press briefing,
and interpreted the
President's statement on "ending states who sponsor terrorism"
as a call for regime change in Iraq. Israel wasn't mentioned.

Douglas Feith: Hardliner,
Security Risk

Bush's appointment of Douglas Feith as
DoD Undersecretary for Policy in early 2001 must have come as
a surprise, and a harbinger, even to conservative veterans of
the Reagan and George H.W. Bush Administration. Like Michael
Ledeen, Feith is a prolific writer and well-known radical
conservative. Moreover, he was not being hired as a DoD consultant,
like Ledeen, but as the third most senior United States Defense
Department official. Feith was certainly the first, and probably
the last high Pentagon official to have publicly opposed the
Biological Weapons Convention (in 1986), the Intermediate Nuclear
Forces Treaty (in 1988), the Chemical Weapons Convention (in
1997), the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (in 2000), and all of
the various Middle East Peace agreements, including Oslo (in
2000).

Even more revealing perhaps, had the
transition team known of it, was Feith's view of "technology
cooperation," as expressed in a 1992 Commentary article:
"It is in the interest of U.S. and Israel to remove needless
impediments to technological cooperation between them. Technologies
in the hands of responsible, friendly countries facing military
threats, countries like Israel, serve to deter aggression, enhance
regional stability and promote peace thereby."

What Douglas Feith had neglected to say,
in this last article, was that he thought that individuals could
decide on their own whether the sharing of classified information
was "technical cooperation," an unauthorized disclosure,
or a violation of U.S. Code 794c, the "Espionage Act."

Ten years prior to writing the Commentary
piece, Feith had made such a decision on his own. At the time,
March of 1972, Feith was a Middle East analyst in the Near East
and South Asian Affairs section of the National Security Council.
Two months before, in January, Judge William Clark had replaced
Richard Allen as National Security Advisor, with the intention
to clean house. A total of nine NSC staff members were fired,
including Feith, who'd only been with the NSC for a year. But
Feith was fired because he'd been the object of an inquiry into
whether he'd provided classified material to an official of the
Israeli Embassy in Washington. The FBI had opened the inquiry.
And Clark, who had served in U.S. Army counterintelligence in
the 1950's, took such matters very seriously.....more seriously,
apparently, than had Richard Allen.

Feith did not remain unemployed for long,
however. Richard Perle, who was in 1982 serving in the Pentagon
as Assistant secretary for International Security Policy, hired
him on the spot as his "Special Counsel," and then
as his Deputy. Feith worked at ISP until 1986, when he left government
service to form a small but influential law firm, then based
in Israel.

In 2001, Douglas Feith returned to DoD
as Donald Rumsfeld's Undersecretary for Policy, and it was in
his office that "OSP", the Office of Special Plans,
was created. It was OSP that originated--some say from whole
cloth--much of the intelligence that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld
have used to justify the attack on Iraq, to miss-plan the post-war
reconstruction there, and then to point an accusing finger at
Iran and Syria.....all to the absolute delight of Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon.

Reason for Concern

Many individuals with strong attachments
to foreign countries have served the U.S. Government with honor
and distinction, and will certainly do so in the future. The
highest officials in our executive and legislative branches should,
however, take great care when appointments are made to posts
involving sensitive national security matters. Appointees should
be rejected who have demonstrated, in their previous government
service, a willingness to sacrifice U.S. national security interests
for those of another country, or an inability to distinguish
one from the other.

Stephen Green
is a freelance journalist in Vermont. He can be reached at: green@counterpunch.org