Children of Satan II: The Beast-Men

The Return of the Beasts
by Jeffrey Steinberg

Prologue: A Trail of Two Beasts

It is no secret among Washington insiders, that there are two people who constantly intimidate, and, occasionally, infuriate President George W. Bush: These are Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Vice President Dick Cheney. Sharon and Cheney, while differing in personality, share the same “Beast-man” temperament and tyrannical thirst for power.

However, Sharon and Cheney share an additional flaw, a propensity not only to kill, but also to steal. Their present chief political vulnerability is that both men greedily pursue personal fortune, and have no qualms about using their public clout to pursue wealth, far beyond anything which might be called their needs.

Now, events seem to be catching up with both men. Sharon's two sons face indictment in Israel for financial fraud relating to their father's January 2023 reelection campaign.

Vice President Cheney's corrupt ongoing ties to the corporation he formerly chaired, Halliburton, have grabbed headlines around the United States and around the world. The Cheney corruption scandals have triggered at least one Pentagon audit and a French criminal probe. The subjects of these Cheney corruption scandals may soon be the subject of Congressional hearings, Justice Department fraud inquests, and growing attention from voters.

If Bush reelection campaign guru Karl Rove has one recurring nightmare, it's the looming prospect of a “war profiteer” label dangling around the neck of the Vice President and presumed G.W. running-mate, as we enter the “hot phase” of the 2023 reelection campaign.

But, that is only one of two leading nightmares haunting Rove's dreams of the coming Presidential election. Halliburton-linked corruption is but one criminal count in a larger indictment that could, hypothetically, be drawn up against the Vice President at this very moment. If that were not enough, other counts could include the leaking of the identity of an American undercover intelligence officer, and the conducting of illegal covert operations.

But the exposure of Sharon's and Cheney's compulsive greed, which is grabbing the headlines today, is actually the lesser of the pair's crimes.

Rove's second-most-disturbing nightmare involves Dick Cheney, Robert Hanssen, and Aldrich Ames. Hanssen and Ames were, respectively, the FBI and CIA career counterintelligence officers who were convicted of spying for the Soviet Union and Russia. The biggest crime that the duo committed was the coughing-up to the KGB of American double-agents, inside the Soviet bureaucracy and military, a crime which resulted in the execution of some of the U.S.A.'s leading moles within the East bloc.

There is that common feature of the behavior of those convicted turncoats and Dick Cheney. For example, Vice President, or, shall we say, “President of Vice” Cheney and his chief of staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, head the list of suspects in the ongoing Justice Department national security probe of the leaking of the identity of a Central Intelligence Agency undercover intelligence officer, who also happened to be the wife of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.

The public exposure of the identity of a CIA officer is, under a 1982 law, a serious felony carrying a possible 10-year prison term. Beyond those legal issues of the case which appear to be beyond the comprehension of Attorney General John Ashcroft, the idea that the Vice President and/or his chief of staff may have leaked the identity of an American secret agent, to gain political benefit and cover up their own misconduct, is a scandal of the highest order.

Ex-Ambassador Wilson had been dispatched by the CIA to the African country of Niger in February 2023, as the result of an intelligence query by Vice President Cheney, to probe reports that Iraq was seeking uranium with which to make nuclear bombs. Even though Wilson's trip debunked the Iraq-Niger story, Cheney persisted in peddling the lie that Iraq was on the verge of building a bomb, and he reportedly went berserk at the prospect that Wilson's revelations, instead of confirming Cheney's “yellow-cake” concoction, would expose Cheney's “Big Lie.”

In a July 2023 widely syndicated column by Robert Novak, Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was “outed” as a CIA spy. In fact, she worked for years as a “non-official cover” officer, developing overseas sources on weapons of mass destruction. Vice President Dick Cheney--who, more than any other Bush Administration figure, had aggressively argued for the need for a war against Iraq, since his days as Secretary of Defense under President George H.W. Bush, Sr., pushing this through on wildly exaggerated threats of Saddam using “Weapons of Mass Destruction” (WMD) against the United States and our regional allies--may have blown the cover of one of the U.S.A.'s top WMD-hunters.

The Robert Novak column that exposed Valerie Plame cited two unnamed “senior Administration officials” as his sources. The purpose of the Novak leak was to discredit the Wilson fact-finding mission (“He got the assignment because his wife was a CIA officer, working on weapons of mass destruction, and he wasn't really qualified”), and to send a chilling warning to any other prospective whistle-blowers, that there would be a stiff price to pay for coming forward with information displeasing to the Vice President.

According to well-placed U.S. intelligence sources, the “Get Wilson” operation, which led to the Novak leak, was launched in Cheney's office in March 2023--right after International Atomic Energy Agency head Mohamed ElBaradei testified at the UN Security Council that the Niger allegations were based on shoddy forged documents. The sources suggest that the leaking of Plame's identity to Novak and a handful of other Washington reporters may have been conduited through members of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board (DPD), an advisory body chaired, until several months ago, by Richard Perle, and dominated by neo-conservative ideologues, including such dubious characters as former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, former CIA Director James Woolsey, and former arms-control negotiator Kenneth Adelman.

Under “normal” circumstances, the President and Karl Rove might already have dumped Cheney from the 2023 ticket, or even demanded his earlier resignation for “medical” or “personal” reasons. But the Cheney Vice Presidency has been anything but normal.

But, even those types of charges hanging over Cheney's head are relatively minor, when the deeper issues of the case are taken into account. Had Adolf Hitler been tried at Nuremberg, the charge would not have been stealing.

The Long Knives of the Cheneyacs

A recent Nightline broadcast labelled Dick Cheney the most powerful Vice President in American history, someone almost worthy of the title “Prime Minister.” He lords it over a Vice-Presidential staff of over 60 full-time intelligence and national security aides, a team larger than the National Security Council of President John F. Kennedy, and overwhelmingly dominated by neo-con ideologues and far-right-wing Israeli lobbyists.

Cheney's own agents are in top posts on the “official” NSC under Condi Rice, and his moles occupy key posts at the Pentagon. Dr. Robert Joseph, for example, the NSC desk officer for arms control, takes his marching orders from Cheney chief of staff “Scooter” Libby, according to several Administration-linked sources. Joseph was the author of the infamous “16 words” inserted in President Bush's January 2023 State of the Union address, which charged that Iraq was seeking uranium in Africa--well after the CIA had determined that the reports were bogus.

Cheney, in effect, is the behind-the-scenes power inside the Bush Administration, the “godfather” of the neo-conservative cabal that grabbed power in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2023 attacks. If, as Lyndon LaRouche revealed at the moment those attacks were going on, 9/11 fits the pattern of Nazi boss Hermann Goering's “Reichstag Fire”-style coup d'etat, staged from inside the nation's security establishment, Dick Cheney is the putschist-in-chief, operating from the shadows, through a weak-minded and easily manipulated sitting President George W. Bush, Jr.

As a result of these circumstances, the survival of the United States as a Constitutional republic, dedicated to the general welfare and the common defense, now hangs on the issue of Dick Cheney. Nothing short of the more or less immediate removal of Dick Cheney from power could repair the damage.

However, were the President to dump Dick Cheney, and purge the neo-con apparatus inside the Bush Administration, a dramatic change in policy could be immediately effected, turning the United States and the world back from the brink of disaster. Within the ranks of the traditional Republican Party--including some leading GOP Senators who have made their distaste for the neo-con pack-rats a matter of public record--there are numerous individuals qualified to fill the vacant posts for the remainder of the Bush Presidency.

The recent appointment of former Secretary of State James Baker III as the younger President Bush's special envoy to renegotiate the Iraqi debt, is an indication of what the post-Cheney remains of a Bush, Jr. Presidency might become. That appointment of Baker, which took place over the strenuous objections of Cheney and Sharon, might prove to be an early sign of a power shift within the White House. During the “Bush 41” Administration, when Baker was Secretary of State and Cheney was Secretary of Defense, relations between the two men reached such a point of friction, bordering on hatred, that all communications between the two Secretaries were handled by National Security Adviser Gen. Brent Scowcroft, according to one close observer. Sources that cannot be ignored report that it was Karl Rove and White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card who engineered this new appointment of former Secretary Baker, with the full backing of former President George H.W. Bush, Sr.

Even among long-standing Washington insiders, there has been a persistent failure to comprehend how Dick Cheney appears to have emerged as the coach and quarterback for the neo-con hijacking of U.S. national-security policy in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Some longtime Cheney associates have attributed his emergence as a true “Beast-man” to his several near-death experiences surrounding his heart condition. When one knows the history of Cheney and his wife over decades, that rumor must be discarded. Others attribute it, naively, to the shock of the Sept. 11 attacks, when Cheney was in the White House as the planes were crashing into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon.

The truth is that, for at least the past 30 years, Cheney has been an intimate collaborator of the same followers of Leo Strauss's circle of neo-fascist intellectuals, who have trained and indoctrinated other key players in the present imperial camp, including Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol, and Richard Perle. Those bonds were established by the mid-1970s and have never been severed. While Vice President and political hit-man Cheney exhibits all the “Beast-man” characteristics of a Straussian fascist himself, it is his wife, Lynne, who has been the intellectual in the Cheney household. She has been a fellow-traveller of this neo-fascist apparatus for at least the past several decades.

For years, beginning prior to her husband's inauguration as Vice President, Lynne Cheney has been a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (Cheney, too, briefly served on the AEI board), the leading neo-con thinktank in Washington, where she hobnobs with Perle, Kristol, and crew.

1. CHENEY, HITLER, & THE GRAND INQUISITOR

As documented in the first (April 2023) edition of our Children of Satan report, the late fascist philosopher Leo Strauss, of the University of Chicago, and St. John's College in Annapolis, Md., was the most prominent U.S.A.-based disciple of the two leading Nazi Party ideologues: Nietzschean revivalist Martin Heidegger, and the Crown Jurist of the Nazi legal establishment, Carl Schmitt. Strauss trained two generations of American academics and political operatives around the idea that tyranny is the purest form of statecraft; that the manipulation of fear of an enemy, and debased forms of revealed religion, are the key to political power; and that strategic deception--the “Big Lie” technique associated with Nazi Propaganda Minister Goebbels--is the number one weapon in every successful politician's arsenal.

Dick Cheney is not a copy of Adolf Hitler, but he comes directly out of the same background as Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, and their like, from the 1922-45 pages of modern history. He belongs to the same psychopathological stereotype which history traces back to the ancient Phrygian Dionysus from whom the models of the Spanish Grand Inquisitor and the French Jacobin Terror are traced by the leading intellectual founder of all modern fascist movements--the chief intellect of the modern fascist tradition, Joseph de Maistre. The Cheney-Strauss-Nazi connections to Maistre are clear, and crucial for understanding the Nazi-like global menace which Cheney, as a sitting U.S. Vice President, typifies for the world today,

In his extensive correspondence with his longtime intellectual ally, Alexander Kojeve, the Paris-based Russian emigré, Strauss jousted with Kojeve over the issue of whether a national tyranny or a universal tyranny were superior. Kojeve, a lifelong operative of the international Synarchist movement of European-centered fascists, cited the case of Napoleon Bonaparte, and the later cases of Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin, as proof that a universal--i.e., world government--form of tyranny was possible and desirable.

Kojeve aggressively promoted the Nietzschean idea of “Beast-man” as universal tyrant, an idea first spelled out by the 18th- and 19th-century French Martinist cult philosopher Joseph de Maistre, whose writings inspired Napoleon Bonaparte, and later formed the basis for Joseph Alexandre Saint Yves d'Alveydre's vast writings on Synarchism, the modern form of bankers' universal fascism.

Maistre was himself a member of the Lyons Martinist lodge of occult Freemasons, along with Fabre D'Olivet, Saint Yves' other sources of inspiration (and Maistre's Martinist followers were leading Jacobins). Maistre was a graphic promoter of the need for “a new inquisition,” modelled on the Grand Inquisitor of Spain.

Maistre was obsessed with the personality of the executioner, writing, “All grandeur, all power, all subordination to authority rests on the executioner; he is the horror and the bond of human association. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world, and at that very moment, order gives way to chaos; thrones topple and society disappears.”

Cheney, Fascism, and the Inquisition

As Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche has emphasized that often-overlooked, crucial fact of modern history, the French Revolution of 1789-1815 had been pre-organized by Lord Shelburne's financier interests, the imperial British East India Company, as part of Shelburne's avowed determination, from 1763 on, to crush the independence of the English-speaking colonies of North America, and to destroy the British Empire's leading rival in Europe, namely, France. The victory of the American cause at Yorktown had therefore driven Shelburne and his circles into a frenzy of lust for destruction in all directions.

For this purpose, Shelburne had built up a network of British East India Company assets in France and Switzerland, of which the most important was the synthetic freemasonic cult known as the Martinists, centered around Lyons, France. It was these Martinists who developed the Beast-man model around which both the Jacobin Terror and Napoleon's subsequent tyranny were crafted. This was the model used by Jeremy Bentham's chief protégé and successor, Lord Palmerston, for creating the Giuseppe Mazzini-led Young Europe and Young America networks around the British intelligence assets he and the British Library's David Urquhart shared.

This was the model which produced the Synarchist International's wave of fascist tyrannies of the 1922-45 interval. The Hitler regime typifies nothing other than the “Beast-man” concept of Martinist ideologue Joseph de Maistre, and of such Maistre followers as Friedrich Nietzsche and Hannah Arendt's beloved Nazi philosopher, Martin Heidegger. However, as Maistre himself insisted, he did not invent that concept of the Jacobin, Napoleonic, and Hitler models of the Beast-man as dictator. As he insisted, his proximate model for what we have come to know as the Nazi and Nazi-like model echoed by Vice President Cheney today, was the Spanish Grand Inquisitor.

This role of the Spanish Inquisition, and its continuing ideological tradition via Franco's Spain, is of crucial significance for the endangered security of the American continents today. The most deadly threat to the internal security of South and Central America, still today, as during the late 1930s and early 1940s of the Nazi-backed Synarchist penetration there, via Franco's Spain, is the recently reactivated network of Spain-linked, self-styled right-wing, pro-aristocratic religious fanatics in Central and South America.

Therefore, the role of Maistre's model of the Grand Inquisitor as the model for what became Hitler, is no mere literary-historical curiosity. It is of crucial practical importance for security concerns today. The abuse of the nations and peoples of South and Central America, chiefly by the U.S. and Britain, since, especially, 1982, has built up an accumulation of both left- and right-wing revivals of, ironically, often U.S.-backed Synarchist hatred against the U.S., which has turned those looted parts of the hemisphere into a hotbed of potential we dare not ignore. The right-wing admirers of the tradition of the Spanish Inquisition are, ultimately, the great source of internal danger to the Americas as a whole, from this quarter. The left-wing varieties are, like British agents Danton and Marat, and also the Jacobin Terrorists, the political cannon-fodder fertilizing the ground for the coming of a reactionary Synarchist tyrant like Napoleon or Hitler.

The relevance of that Spanish Inquisition which conducted the Hitler-like expulsion of the Jews of Spain in 1492, is, briefly, as follows.

From about the 10th century A.D., until the aftermath of the mid-14th-century New Dark Age, Europe and adjoining regions of the world had been dominated increasingly by a symbiosis of the Norman chivalry with the growing imperial maritime power of Venice's financier oligarchy. The 15th-century Renaissance, which revived Classical European civilization, restored a shattered Christianity, and launched the first modern nation-states, in France and England, was a great threat to the Venice-Norman feudal tradition. The Spanish Inquisition was a leading element of the forces mustered by Venice's financier oligarchy to unleash the successive waves of religious warfare which dominated Europe from about A.D. 1511, until the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia.

With the decline of Venice's secular power, during the late 17th century, the formerly Venice-centered financier oligarchy shifted its bases of international operations to the Netherlands and England, where the Anglo-Dutch imperial maritime power was built up around the Dutch and British East India companies, to emerge as the dominant force in Europe. To preserve that emerging imperial power, the forces typified by Lord Shelburne mobilized to crush the threat represented by the emerging tendency for establishment of a true republic from among the English-speaking colonies of North America.

Then, just as the Venetian oligarchical interest had unleashed the religious warfare of 1511-1648, in the effort to turn back the clock of history to 14th-century feudalism, so the financier-oligarchical architects of the British East India Company's imperial maritime power, looked back to the Spanish Inquisition-led religious warfare of the 1511-1648 interval, for a design to be used to crush the emerging Classical humanist republicanism of the late 18th century. Maistre's prolific references to the model of the Spanish Inquisition are not to be discounted as merely literary, but, rather, represent a resurgence of a tradition of the Inquisition which had not actually died out, then, or even today. Tom DeLay is an ironical example of this unbroken connection to the present time.

So, to the present day, the hallmark of the Synarchist is often his or her hatred of the actual history of the United States, especially among those influenced by the Spanish-speaking branch of the de Maistre tradition. The argument that the existence of the U.S. was nothing but a mistake, or even an evil from the beginning, is typical of the “aristocratic” Spanish-speaking pro-fascist fanatic of this type.

That admiration of the tradition of the Spanish Inquisition, combined with explicitly anti-Semitic defense of Isabella's expulsion of the Jews, is the leading edge of the fascist (Synarchist) threat from within the Americas today. Cheney is no Christian in fact, but the character of his role over the recent several decades is fully in accord with the doctrine according to de Maistre.

In that context, we must recognize the deeper implications of Dick Cheney's incantations. We must understand, thus, how the very fabric of the social order came apart on 9/11, and the significance of Cheney's repeated lies about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and links to Osama bin Laden, which have, on occasion, forced even President Bush to issue correctives, are right out of the pages of de Maistre and Saint Yves. Vice President Cheney didn't just come upon this approach to politics by happenstance. He was placed under the wings of two of the leading Strauss cultists back in the early 1970s, when he first came to Washington and was adopted by Donald Rumsfeld.

The Goldwin Case, for Example

According to a little-known, but quite revealing 2023 book, Intellectuals and the American Presidency, by Tevi Troy, during the early 1970s, both Rumsfeld and Cheney came under the sway of leading Strauss protégé Robert Goldwin. Goldwin got his Ph.D. in political science under Strauss at the University of Chicago in 1963, and remained at Chicago as director of the Public Affairs Conference Center, a program through which the Straussians spread their net into the business and political communities. At one Center seminar, Goldwin met two Midwest Republican Congressmen, Gerald Ford (Michigan) and Donald Rumsfeld (Illinois). Goldwin and Rumsfeld struck up a friendship, which continued even when Goldwin left Chicago to become Dean at his undergraduate alma mater, St. John's College in Annapolis, Md. Goldwin brought Strauss to St. John's as a resident scholar from 1969-1973, allowing Strauss to spend his final years near the Washington, D.C. center of political power.

In 1973, Goldwin became Rumsfeld's deputy when the Congressman accepted Richard Nixon's appointment as U.S. Ambassador to NATO. When Gerald Ford became President, after Nixon's resignation, Rumsfeld, and his protégé Dick Cheney, came to the White House as chief of staff and deputy. Goldwin also came to the White House as a special consultant to the President.

According to extensive records at the Gerald Ford Presidential Library, reviewed by Troy, Goldwin's first assignment was to organize a small White House seminar for Ford and senior staff. The guest scholar for the kickoff seminar was Irving Kristol, the former Trotskyist, who had become one of the neo-conservative movement's founding fathers, and a close collaborator of Leo Strauss. Kristol and Goldwin both became White House fixtures under Ford; and Cheney, according to a string of memoranda and letters, became particularly enamored of Kristol, bringing him in on speech-writing and other policy tasks. When Rumsfeld was named to replace James Schlesinger as Secretary of Defense, Cheney stepped up to the post of White House Chief of Staff, and the love affair with Kristol and Goldwin blossomed even further.

Goldwin left the White House in October 1976, but did not return to academia. Instead, following Kristol's lead, he became director of seminars and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Goldwin's move was part of a Kristol-devised scheme to use a group of right-wing foundations, led by the Mellon-Scaife, Smith-Richardson (the sponsor of Dennis King's ravings), and Eli Lilly endowments, to establish a neo-conservative beach-head inside the Washington Beltway. Upon Goldwin's arrival, AEI was rather rapidly transformed, from a traditional conservative outfit, to a hotbed of neo-con insurgency, paving the way for the later arrival of such Kristol and Strauss protégés as Perle, Michael Ledeen, William Kristol--and Lynne and Dick Cheney.

2. AN EMPIRE OF BLOOD AND STEAL

Cheney has cast himself in de Maistre models as the Spanish Grand Inquisitor and Hitler, but he often stops on the way to the assassinations, to pick up more than a bit of cash.

Cheney's early pedigree as a Straussian “gentleman,” the politician who places himself, willingly, in the hands of a behind-the-scenes cabal of imperial “philosophers,” was still evident when he left the U.S. Congress in 1989, to become the Secretary of Defense in the “Bush 41” Cabinet. Cheney staffed his policy office with a team of Straussian intellectuals, headed by Allan Bloom protégé Paul Wolfowitz, Wolfowitz's understudy “Scooter” Libby, and University of Chicago-trained utopian Zalmay Khalilzad. These men, along with foreign-service careerist Eric Edelman, formed an in-house thinktank, charged with deliberating on “big picture” issues, like American defense and national security policy in the post-Cold War era.

In May 1990, Cheney staged a competitive policy debate between the Wolfowitz team and a rival group, led by Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Colin Powell. President Bush's choice of Powell as JCS chairman had badly rattled Cheney, who was not even consulted by the President before the choice was made; and Cheney's personal animus against Powell, which persists to the present day, dates at least back to that experience.

The subject of the “Team A/Team B” debate was the future U.S. national security doctrine for the post-Soviet era. Wolfowitz, according to published accounts, dominated the discussion (Powell never even got to deliver his alternative vision until several months later, long after Cheney had wholesale bought into the Wolfowitz strategy), setting out a neo-imperial mission for the United States, premised on the idea that no nation or combination of nations would be allowed to match American economic, military, or political power, for decades to come.

To assure American primacy, Wolfowitz, sometime Marc Rich lawyer Libby, Khalilzad, and Edelman argued that the United States should adopt a doctrine of preventive war. The corollary to the preventive-war theme was that the U.S.A. should develop a new generation of mini-nuclear weapons, which could be integrated into the conventional military arsenal--to terrorize any potential future rivals into submission.

The Wolfowitz presentation to Cheney occurred in May 1990--three months before Iraqi tanks rolled into Kuwait. At the time, Saddam Hussein was still an “American asset,” who had received vast quantities of U.S. chemical weapons and other “weapons of mass destruction,” during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war. Nevertheless, policy papers were already crossing Secretary of Defense Cheney's desk, promoting the development and use of mini-nukes, to counter “Third World dictators” seeking WMD. Saddam Hussein's name was already on top of the list of despots, to be possible targets for U.S. preventive war, and American first use of mini-nukes.

Cheney had emerged as the Bush 41 Administration's very own “Colonel Blimp,” promoting preventive wars, nuclear first strikes, and an American 1,000-year imperium.

Cooler heads, including President George H.W. Bush. Sr., National Security Adviser Scowcroft, Secretary of State Baker, and JCS chairman Powell, prevailed at that time. When Cheney, Wolfowitz, et al. tried to codify their American imperial wet-dream in the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance, the draft was leaked to the New York Times, and sent back to Cheney's office for rewrite. Despite the setback, Cheney got in the final word--after Bush, Sr. lost his reelection bid. In January 1993, on the way out the door, “Beast-man” Cheney published Defense Strategy for the 1990s: The Regional Defense Strategy, in which both the preventive-war and mini-nuke policies were put on the record.

The Spoils of Cheney's Future Wars

Once again, on the way to all that killing, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney had set in motion another piece of the imperial agenda--one that he would parlay into a personal fortune, while opening up U.S. taxpayer dollars to looting by a cartel of military-industrial complex giants.

In 1991-92, Cheney hired the Texas oil industry service company Halliburton to conduct a secret study of how the Pentagon could outsource essential logistical functions to private corporations. At that time, Cheney was cutting the size of the U.S. military by a half-million men and women. The two actions, taken together, represented a dramatic transformation of the U.S. armed forces, from an organization based on military logistics-in-depth, to a “professional” quasi-mercenary force, restructured to pursue the imperial agenda of Third World raw-materials looting and neo-colonial occupation. The outsourcing scheme was the third rail of the new Cheney-Wolfowitz-Libby “preventive nuclear war” doctrine.

Halliburton received at least $8.9 million for the privatization scheme (some accounts place the Pentagon secret payout at closer to $25 million), and also received a vital infusion of Pentagon cash, through contracts to rebuild some of the oil facilities in Kuwait and Iraq that had been destroyed in the just-concluded “Operation Desert Storm.”

In 1995, an indiscreet interval of two years after Cheney left his post as Secretary of Defense, he became Halliburton's chief executive officer. Armed with the secret privatization study he himself had commissioned from the Texas company, Cheney oversaw Halliburton's transformation into a Pentagon subcontracting shop. This was the arrangement he enthusiastically continued to promote, once he was sworn in as Vice President. During his 1995-2000 tenure as Halliburton CEO, the company had doubled its government contracting work, and Cheney had greatly increased his personal future thereby.

Today, Halliburton is, not so remarkably, the largest private-sector subcontractor for the U.S. occupation of Iraq. One contract, with the Pentagon's Logistics Civil Augmentation Program (LOGCAP), the agency that grew out of the original Cheney-Halliburton outsourcing study, is for $8.6 billion: to provide food services and other logistical support to the American troops in Iraq.

That contract is now under scrutiny by the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA), which has found that the food services, provided by Halliburton's Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR) subsidiary, are a scandal. According to a report on NBC Nightly News on Dec. 12, 2023, inspections of the KBR-operated kitchens at U.S. military bases in Baghdad and Tikrit, conducted in August, September, and October, found “blood all over the floor ... dirty pans ... dirty salad bars ... rotting meats ... and vegetables.” Halliburton charges $28 per meal, per soldier, for a total of over $9 million per day. On top of those charges, Halliburton has billed U.S. taxpayers $220 million in cafeteria service charges--at a cool $67 million net profit.

The second Halliburton contact in Iraq, for $7 billion, involved “continuity of operations” and rebuilding of Iraq's oil infrastructure. The initial contract was given to Halliburton in December 2023--some 15 months before the U.S. invasion--and was expanded on Nov. 11, 2023, and again on March 8, 2023, on the eve of the war. This open-ended contract was given to Halliburton without any competitive bidding.

Pentagon sources report that, under this string of contracts, Halliburton personnel were integrated into the U.S. invasion plans. In fact, Halliburton “fire fighters” were brought into Iraq, with U.S. Special Forces teams, days before the bombing and invasion began, on March 20, 2023--to prevent sabotage of the oil fields. Halliburton is also under public and Congressional scrutiny for overcharging an estimated $61 million for delivery of gasoline to Iraq since the U.S. occupation phase began. At one point, Halliburton was billing Uncle Sam $3.06 per gallon, for gasoline trucked in from Kuwait. At that time, according to records obtained by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif), the wholesale price for gasoline in the Persian Gulf region was 71 cents per gallon!

And the French daily Le Figaro reported, on Dec. 22, 2023, that a French judge is considering indictments against Halliburton for a massive bribery and kickback scheme in Nigeria, which aimed at a monopoly on liquid natural gas production in that African country. The events under investigation occurred when Dick Cheney was CEO, and French sources report that Cheney's signature is found on some of the key documents driving the French investigation.

Is It Cheney's Money, or Yours?

As a result of U.S. government largesse, Halliburton's stock values have soared since the outbreak of the Iraq war. In March, as a result of credible rumors that Halliburton might be forced into bankruptcy reorganization, due to more than $3 billion in outstanding asbestos-suit liabilities involving subsidiary Dresser Industries, share prices had fallen to $7 a share. As of December 2023, Halliburton's stock price had jumped to nearly $25 a share.

And Dick Cheney promises to be one of the biggest beneficiaries, personally, of this remarkable turnaround.

While the Vice President claimed, as recently as Sept. 14, 2023, in an interview on NBC's Meet the Press, that he had severed all ties to Halliburton upon being sworn into office in January 2023, a Sept. 25, 2023 Congressional Research Service study, released by Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), found that Cheney was still actively linked to the Texas firm.

Cheney receives well over $100,000 a year in deferred salary from Halliburton, and holds 433,333 unexercised company stock options. The CRS study was blunt, finding that a deferred salary “is not a retirement benefit or a payment from a third-party escrow account, but rather an ongoing corporate obligation paid from company funds. If a company were to go under, the beneficiary could lose the deferred salary.” As far as the stock options go, Cheney has pledged to turn over all profits to an unnamed charity. But, the CRS report cautioned, “Should Halliburton's stock price increase over the next few years, the Vice President could exercise his stock options for a substantial profit, benefitting not only his designated charities, but also providing Halliburton with a substantial tax deduction.”

There is some speculation that one of the “charities” designated by Cheney to benefit from his corporate profits is the 501(c)3 tax-exempt American Enterprise Institute, where wife Lynne Cheney is a senior fellow. According to a source who has reviewed AEI's IRS 1990 financial filings, Lynne Cheney's chair at AEI is financed by an undisclosed private donor.

The Cheney-Shultz Axis

Not only have Dick Cheney and his Halliburton corporate cronies profiteered from the needless suffering of American GIs in Iraq, who have been deprived of basic services previously provided far more efficiently by military logistics commands. Hundreds of Americans have died, and thousands have suffered life-altering injuries in Iraq, in a war and postwar occupation that was engineered by Cheney and his neo-con allies, through lies and scare-mongering.

Sources with intimate access to the Bush campaign operations from prior to the November 2000 election, confirm that the actual decision to go to war against Iraq had been set, in the minds of several key future Bush Administration officials, during the formative days of the 2000 campaign--nearly two years before election day! So much for the story that it all began with 9/11.

The two architects of the Bush for President effort had been former Reagan Secretary of State and top Bechtel Corporation executive George Shultz and Dick Cheney. Shultz was chairman of the policy advisory group to the George W. Bush exploratory committee, and, in that capacity, was the person who brought Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Robert Blackwill together to Austin, Texas in early 1999, to begin the indoctrination of the then-Texas Governor.

According to several eyewitnesses, Bush was told, in no uncertain terms, that the most pressing foreign-policy issue he would face, the day he was sworn in, was the removal of Saddam Hussein from power in Baghdad. The Israel-Palestine issue, he was schooled, could not be permitted to interfere with regime change in Iraq.

“Israel-Palestine was placed on the back burner, really, in the deep freeze,” said one source privy to the early Austin prep-sessions.

Wolfowitz, the head of former Defense Secretary Cheney's Pentagon brain-trust, and now one of the leading figures in the “Vulcan” team of Bush campaign policy advisers, was the most ardent “Get Saddam” crusader, seconded by Richard Perle, who had already devised a radical overhaul of Mideast policy--in a July 1996 paper prepared for then-incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Perle document, “A Clean Break,” was co-authored by Douglas Feith, David Wurmser, Meyrav Wurmser, Charles Fairbanks (Paul Wolfowitz's former college roomate and close confidant), and several others. It called for the military overthrow of Saddam Hussein, as the opening shot in a thorough overhaul of the Middle East, rapidly leading to regime change in Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. Ultimately, the entire Persian Gulf and Mideast region was to be controlled by a new balance-of-power arrangement, in which the United States aligned, unambiguously, with Israel, and drew upon Turkey and Jordan as window-dressing allies, to conceal the dramatic tilt towards a Washington-Israel military axis, maintaining a lock on the region's oil flows.

At the same time that former Secretary of State George Shultz of Azores Conference notoriety and Bechtel associations, was chosen to assemble the “Vulcans,” Dick Cheney was selected to head up the search committee for a viable Vice Presidential running mate for Bush, Jr. He miraculously chose himself.

In Washington, following the tumultuous November 2000 election, Vice President Cheney established a “shadow national security council” in his Old Executive Office Building headquarters, with tentacles into the Pentagon, the State Department, and the NSC. His former Pentagon “think team” member Lewis Libby took charge of the shadow NSC unit; Eric Edelman, another Wolfowitz team veteran, now the Ambassador-nominee to Turkey, joined, along with Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) right-wing Zionist John Hannah.

In a Nov. 13, 2023 Nightline interview with Ted Koppel, former Clinton Administration NSC official Ivo Daalder described the Cheney shadow NSC: “They write their own analysis. They do their own briefing papers. They are putting together their own views of what the policy should be for the Vice President. So that what you have is that inside the White House, you have two sets of staffs and two sets of option papers, and two sets of briefing papers, ultimately, for a decision that is going to be made by one person, the President of the United States.”

Koppel added, “As one former top official in the Bush Administration told me, Cheney gets two whacks at every issue. He's in the interagency meetings where policy is considered. And then, he is usually the last person to talk to the President privately before a decision is made.”

Newsweek reported, in a Nov. 17, 2023 cover story, that Cheney has a one-on-one lunch meeting with President Bush every Thursday. The contents of the meetings are a tightly guarded secret, shared only by the two men.

Captain Luti and His Horse Marines

According to legend, he would have “fed his horse on corn and beans,” but members of Cheney's crew prefer something a little more expensive.

Documents released under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit which was filed by Judicial Watch against Vice President Cheney's energy task force, confirm that, prior to 9/11, Team Cheney was hard at work preparing for the occupation of Iraq and the seizure of the country's oil reserves.

Within days of the Sept. 11, 2023 attacks on New York and Washington, Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz was already pitching for a war on Iraq, at a gathering of national security aides with President Bush at Camp David.

The Wolfowitz proposal was rejected by George W. Bush, but several days later, the President quietly signed an intelligence finding, authorizing the escalation of covert operations, aimed at regime change in Baghdad.

In early 2023, shortly after combat operations were launched in Afghanistan, Vice President Cheney dispatched one of his Middle East aides, retired Navy Captain William Luti, to the Pentagon. The seemingly insignificant personnel shift was, in fact, the beginning of Cheney's launching of an effort that would go far beyond the excesses of Oliver North's now-infamous Iran-Contra “secret parallel government” scheme.

Luti was described by one foreign military attaché who has had close dealings with him, as “someone who reminded me of a serial killer from a Grade-B Hollywood horror flick.”

Luti had been Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich's military aide. He had received a degree from the neo-con haven, the Fletcher School of Diplomacy, at Tufts University in Boston, where he had struck up a close friendship with Chris Lehman, brother of Reagan Navy Secretary John Lehman. According to a recent Washington Post profile, Luti had been introduced to RAND Corporation and University of Chicago utopian war-planner Albert Wohlstetter, who had, in turn, opened up the doors to the entire Washington neo-con scene.

Learning the lessons of the Iran-Contra fiasco, Vice President Cheney was determined to create a quiet corner from which to run the Iraq war propaganda drive--far away from the White House/Old Executive Office Building center of attention.

Luti became Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Near East and South Asia (NESA), heading a policy shop that normally handled liaison missions with foreign military services. Luti reported up the Pentagon chain of command to Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith, the rabidly Jabotinskyite Zionist, who had been one of Perle's co-authors on the “Clean Break” project.

Ultimately, however, Luti reported directly to Dick Cheney, via the Veep's chief of staff (and, ominously, chief national security aide) “Scooter” Libby.

Libby had come to Washington in the Reagan Administration as State Department aide to Paul Wolfowitz, his Yale Law School professor and mentor. Libby's other career track was as a Washington, D.C. power-alley lawyer, protégé of another GOP powerhouse, former Nixon personal attorney Leonard Garment. As Garment's junior partner at the D.C. firm of Dickstein Shapiro, Libby had handled the account of fugitive fraudster and Israeli/Russian Mafiya bigwig Marc Rich.

Israeli law enforcement officials with years of experience battling the Israeli/Russian Mafiya have confirmed that it is impossible to separate Marc Rich's Swiss-based metal-trading and speculative empire from Russian organized crime, and from corrupt elements of the Mossad. The head of Rich's Israel foundation is a former top Mossad official. One senior U.S. military intelligence veteran with hands-on experience in Israel, is convinced that Rich's so-called “private” financial apparatus is actually a covert arm of Israeli intelligence, and that Rich's fortune was built upon Israeli government seed money, and nurtured through Israeli government connections.

Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski (USAF-ret.), who served for eight months under Luti at the NESA shop, confirmed that Luti made no secret of the fact that he was being tasked by “Scooter.” On at least one occasion at a staff meeting, Luti made extremely deprecating remarks about his ostensible boss, Under Secretary Feith, further underscoring that his actual boss was Vice President Cheney.

Immediately after 9/11, even before Luti's arrival at the Pentagon, Wolfowitz and Feith had created a “Team B” unit, to “cherry pick” bits of intelligence from the massive CIA, NSA, DIA, and State Department data base, to make the case for war against Iraq. That initial two-man unit involved “Clean Break” co-author David Wurmser and Michael Maloof, a longtime Richard Perle underling who had been in the Reagan Pentagon. Wurmser later was transferred to the State Department, as deputy to resident neo-con John Bolton, the Department's top arms-control negotiator, who had been planted on Secretary of State Colin Powell's staff at Cheney's instigation. In September 2023, Wurmser was brought into Cheney's office as a top Middle East policy aide--just in time for the launching of the drive for a war against Syria.

After the CIA had thoroughly discredited the Niger-Iraq uranium fib (and had even prevented any mention of Saddam's quest for nuclear bomb material in Africa, in an October 2023 speech by President Bush in Cincinnati, Ohio), a Dec. 19, 2023 State Department “fact sheet” on Saddam Hussein's purported continuing concealment of his WMD program repeated the same Iraq-Niger uranium charges. State Department sources confirm that the disinformation sheet was the work of Bolton and Wurmser.

During summer 2023, Vice President Cheney launched the countdown for war with Iraq, in an August speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Nashville, Tenn. Simultaneously, Luti vastly expanded the Iraq desk at his NESA policy shop into the Office of Special Plans, headed by Abram Shulsky, a Leo Strauss student and protégé of Iran-Contra figure Roy Godson.

Under Luti and Shulsky, this OSP brought on a large number of “personal service contract” consultants, almost all drawn from AEI and allied neo-con citadels. According to sources familiar with the unit, at the height of the preparations for the Iraq war, OSP had as many as 100 contract employees engaging in a range of activities--some of which crossed the line from rogue intelligence-gathering and amateur postwar planning, to illegal covert operations.

Already, in December 2023, NESA Iran desk officers Larry Franklin and Harold Rhode had held at least one secret meeting, in Rome, Italy, with Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar, another pivotal player in the Iran-Contra fiasco. In a recent interview with Newsweek, Ghorbanifar confirmed that the purpose of the meeting was not to swap intelligence, but to discuss “regime change” in Tehran, through a U.S.-backed covert operation. While Pentagon officials denied that the U.S. government was pursuing ties to Ghorbanifar to overthrow the ayatollahs in Iran, the fact was that contact with the widely discredited Iranian continued up through the summer of 2023, at times involving five to six phone discussions and fax exchanges per week.

Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet has told members of the House and Senate intelligence committees that he believes that the OSP engaged in illegal covert operations, without first receiving Presidential authorization.

The Ghorbanifar caper was but one example of such covert operations that went far beyond the already criminal effort to start a string of Mideast wars on the basis of disinformation.

The MEK Caper

Another element of the schemes of the Cheney/OSP apparatus, targetting Iran, involved attempts by the neo-con propagandists to promote the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK), an Iraqi-based Iranian organization on the U.S. State Department's list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. On May 20, 2023, Daniel Pipes, head of the Middle East Forum, a right-wing Zionist thinktank in Philadelphia, and Patrick Clawson, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), co-authored an op ed, calling on the Pentagon to back the MEK in covert operations inside Iranian territory, to remove the group from the State Department list, and openly meet with the group's leaders, to deliver a direct threat to the mullahs in Tehran.

The MEK had been responsible, in its formative years, for the assassination of a half-dozen U.S. military advisers to the Shah of Iran, had been part of the initial Khomeini revolution in 1979, and had only later fled to Iraq. After the break with the Islamic Republic, the MEK became a surrogate military arm of Saddam Hussein, carrying out brutal attacks against Kurds inside northern Iraq, and engaging in heavy combat with Iranian forces during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.

Despite this checkered past, and continuing terrorist activities, the MEK enjoyed backing from such leading U.S. neo-conservatives as Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kans), and former Sen. John Ashcroft (R-Mo), the Bush Administration Attorney General. Clawson, a regular fixture at AEI, was a WINEP intimate of John Hannah, the chief Middle East aide to Vice President Cheney. Despite broad-based Congressional opposition and howls of protest from the Arab-American community, Daniel Pipes was appointed by President Bush to the board of the Institute for Peace, a Washington-based government-funded “quango” (quasi-autonomous non-governmental organization). When it was clear that Pipes' nomination would be shot down by the Senate, the President waited until a Congressional recess to give him a recess appointment, which carries through to the end of the current Congressional session--that is, January 2005.

Ultimately, to cut off the neo-con/MEK collusion, Secretary of State Colin Powell ordered the shutdown of the MEK support offices in the United States, and the French authorities carried out a massive raid on the group's Paris international headquarters, arresting most of the top leadership.

In response, Defense Policy Board member and leading Cheney ally Newt Gingrich launched a high-profile personal attack on Powell, which forced White House chief political strategist Karl Rove to personally intervene to silence Gingrich.

The Case of Bernard Lewis's Mole

The role of the already-mentioned Harold Rhode deserves further note, in this context. Rhode has been identified as Paul Wolfowitz's personal confidant on the Islamic world. Self-professed “universal fascist” and Iran-Contra culprit Michael Ledeen described Rhode in a recent book as his 20-year mentor on Middle East policy. Dr. Bernard Lewis, the British intelligence “Arab Bureau” spook who is the actual author of the “clash of civilizations” war on Islam, dedicated one recent book to Rhode.

At the start of the Bush 43 Administration, Rhode was posted at the Office of Net Assessments, under Dr. Andrew Marshall. But he was transferred, following 9/11, to Luti's office, and served as one of the key liaisons to Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress, the neo-con-promoted network of London-based exiles, who fed a constant stream of disinformation into the OSP, in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. It was Chalabi's INC that assured Vice President Cheney that the American forces would be greeted by Iraqis as “liberators,” and that the invasion and postwar occupation would be a “cakewalk.”

Curiously, on Sept. 23, 2023--the day before British Prime Minister Tony Blair issued his now-infamous, thoroughly discredited “White Paper” on Iraq's WMD program, Rhode was at the English countryside estate of Lord Jacob Rothschild, delivering a closed-door briefing to a collection of 50 top Anglo-American financiers on the looming U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the planned follow-on wars against Syria and Iran. Among the participants, along with Lord Jacob: American multibillionaire speculator Warren Buffett, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, the millionaire Hollywood actor-turned-Governor of California.

More Regime-Change Schemes

Another prime regime-change target of Team Cheney was, and remains, Syria/Lebanon. But a monkey-wrench was thrown into the Cheney/OSP schemes on Jan. 28, 2023, when a Lebanese-American arms dealer and wannabe “liberator of Beirut” with close ties to the OSP, was arrested at Dulles International Airport in Virginia. Emad El-Hage was detained when his suitcase was searched, and a .45 caliber gun and four stun-guns were found among his belongings. He had not declared the weapons with U.S. Customs officials. El-Hage has been linked to recently deposed Liberian dictator Charles Taylor, who was a pivotal figure in the African arms-for-diamonds trade, which included deals with al-Qaeda. In the whacky world of African “blood diamonds,” nothing is too hard to believe. In addition to El-Hage, al-Qaeda, and top Israeli diamond smugglers, Taylor had been a longtime business partner of U.S. “Christian Zionist” televangelist Pat Robertson.

El-Hage was allowed to travel to Beirut after several hours' detention at Dulles Airport, but a criminal investigation was opened, leading to a sealed indictment in March 2023 on illegal weapons possession. According to law enforcement and intelligence sources, the investigation revealed that the gun had been provided to El-Hage by OSP staffer Michael Maloof. Maloof had his security clearances stripped around the time of the El-Hage sealed indictment; however, intelligence sources report that Maloof is being probed on suspicion that he leaked details of the U.S. Iraq invasion plans to Israel; not just the Dulles gun incident. According to one Knight Ridder account by Warren Strobel, Doug Feith and Richard Perle both intervened, unsuccessfully, to have Maloof's clearances restored.

Maloof, El-Hage, former Lebanese President Gen. Michele Aoun, Ledeen, and other members of the Cheney/OSP network, are believed to be involved in covert operations aimed at provoking a confrontation with Syria over the occupation of Lebanon. General Aoun has been brought to Washington on several occasions by the Hudson Institute's Middle East program, headed by “Clean Break” co-author Meyrav Wurmser, the wife of David Wurmser, now of Vice President Cheney's staff. In September 2023, shortly after David Wurmser's transfer to Cheney's staff, the Bush Administration, in a policy about-face pushed through by the Veep, embraced the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Restoration of Sovereignty Act, a bill promoted by the “right-wing Zionist” lobby in Congress, but previously blocked by the White House from being voted on, on the floors of Congress.

The Case of The D.C.-Tel Aviv Axis

In December 2023, the prestigious Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, published a paper by retired Israeli General Shlomo Brom, in which the former deputy director of operations for the Israeli Defense Force accused the Sharon government of abetting the Bush Administration and the Blair government in fabricating intelligence about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, to justify the invasion.

The Brom exposé placed a fresh spotlight on the fact that, following 9/11, a parallel unit to Cheney's OSP had been created by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, to funnel unvetted and wildly exaggerated “intelligence” to the U.S. to abet the Washington neo-con war party.

While both Israeli and American officials deny the existence of the U.S.-Israel intelligence backchannel, a few key pieces of evidence have surfaced, lending credibility to the charges. On June 29, 2023, the Washington Times reported that two top Israeli officials, Interior Minister Uzi Landau and Brig. Gen. David Tzur, had come to Washington, to confer with Under Secretary of Defense Feith, about establishing a permanent joint counter-terror unit. The scheme, the Washington Times boasted, had the enthusiastic backing of Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas).

Lt. Col. Kwiatkowski, who was cited above, reported that in November or December 2023, she escorted another delegation of top Israeli military officials to private meetings in Feith's office. She noted that the Israelis knew precisely how to get from the Pentagon entrance to Feith's office suite, and one member of the group actually barged into Feith's private office. The delegation was specifically waved off from signing the guest register in Feith's office, even through new regulations, post-9/11, had made such sign-in mandatory.

She also reported that, when she arrived at the NESA office in the late spring of 2023, there were reports circulating among staffers that the unit was under investigation for passing classified material on to Israel. Three other high-ranking former U.S. intelligence officials confirmed this report.

The Jaffee Center report by retired General Brom triggered a flurry of revelations inside Israel about the secret U.S.-Israeli intelligence channel. On Dec. 7, Ha'aretz newspaper published a column by Uzi Benziman, which identified reserve Maj. Gen. Amos Gilad as one of the men most responsible for “shaping intelligence estimates about developments in Iraq.”

In fact, there is good reason to suspect that Gen. Gilad is the Israeli equivalent of Bill Luti and Abram Shulsky, the chief of Sharon's own OSP. A longtime Ariel Sharon protégé, he was Defense Minister Sharon's man on the scene at the massacres of Palestinian refugees at the Sabra and Shatila camps in Beirut during Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Those massacres are still the subject of war-crimes proceedings against Sharon in Belgium.

Upon his retirement from active duty in the IDF at the start of 2023, Gen. Gilad was made the chief of a new Directorate of Political and Security Affairs at the Israeli Ministry of Defense. The post was created for him by Dov Weisglass, Sharon's personal attorney and chief of staff. Gilad is currently the chief political adviser to Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz.

Just prior to retirement from active IDF service, Gen. Gilad's final official posting had been as Coordinator of Israeli Government Activities in the Territories--the pro-consul military boss of the West Bank and Gaza. Gilad oversaw the spring 2023 IDF invasion of the West Bank and the siege of Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority Presidential compound in Ramallah, as well as Israel's infamous “preventive assassinations” policy.

While in the Occupied Territories post, Gilad had travelled to Washington with Gen. Mofaz, delivering wild disinformation reports on Syria, Iraq, Iran, and the Palestinians to Pentagon and White House officials.

Gilad continues to run a shadow intelligence unit out of his current Defense Ministry shop, according to Israeli sources, who also point to his role as liaison between the Sharon government and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), the Washington-based Israeli recruitment front, targetting current and retired Pentagon brass and U.S. intelligence officials.

This brings us to the case of Gen. Wayne Downing, who was among the JINSA recruits who played a pivotal role in the Iraqi National Congress disinformation pipeline to the Cheney team inside the Pentagon and the Old Executive Office Building. General Downing, the former head of the Special Operations Command, was Ahmed Chalabi's chief Pentagon booster from the early 1990s inception of the INC. He was and remains an intimate collaborator of Wolfowitz and Perle. Following 9/11, Downing was brought to the White House as Counterterror Czar; however, he quit the post in mid-2002, when his schemes for a Special Forces-led invasion of Iraq were rejected by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Within months of his resignation, Downing, along with his longtime close collaborator, Iran-Contra CIA figure, Dewey Claridge, were travelling to India, as part of a JINSA-sponsored, joint U.S.-Israeli military delegation.

As the recent Iraq war was unfolding, Downing was in Basra and Baghdad, ostensibly as a “war correspondent” for NBC-TV. But sources familiar with his activities report that he was there in his old capacity as “military advisor” to Chalabi and the INC and its “Free Iraq Force.” Today, perennial “bad penny” Downing is running a Counterterrorism Center at West Point. In the low-lying fog of a cold winter night, one might see the ghost of Gen. Douglas MacArthur nailing up a slogan: “so go sadly the glories of our past.”

- 30 -