Mordechai Vanunu spent 18 years in prison for revealing secrets about Israel's nuclear program. With Prime Minister Ehud Olmert apparently spilling the beans, he now feels vindicated, he told SPIEGEL ONLINE in an interview.

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The Dimona complex in the Negev Desert.

Vanunu was the source for an exhaustive 1986 story in the Sunday Times about Israel's nuclear weapons arsenal. Even as Israel officially denied the story, the country's secret service, the Mossad, arrested Vanunu and he ultimately spent 18 years in prison for treason -- 11 of them in solitary confinement. Now, it looks as though Israel's prime minister himself has let the cat out of the bag.

By Gordon Thomas

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Britain’s intelligence chiefs – Sir John Scarlett of MI6 and Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller of MI5 – are prepared to challenge the Stevens Report if it has failed to fully investigate the background of Henri Paul the night he drove Diana and her lover, Dodi Al-Fayed, to their deaths.

Scarlett and Dame Eliza are considering asking to appear in a closed session of the Oversight Parliamentary Intelligence Committee if they find the Stevens Report will attack the intelligence service’s role in the two deaths.

Both intelligence chiefs believe that central to the death crash was Paul’s mental state, which left him unable to control the powerful Mercedes.

Even as the stock market is hitting new record highs almost every day, the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department are quietly coordinating a devaluation of the dollar that the Bush administration hopes will be a slow decline rather than a dollar collapse.

This week, in an unusual move, the Bush administration is sending virtually the entire economic "A-team" to visit China for a "strategic economic dialogue" in Beijing Dec. 14 and 15.

But fate intervened, and things went wrong. The tires on Ambassador John Gunther Dean’s limousine automatically reinflated when they were shot out in 1979 (see November 2002 Washington Report, p. 15). The light tank shell simply bounced off the car’s armor. And, horror of horrors, Lebanese intelligence had retrieved the empty shell casing on which was written, “Made in the United States of America.”

Mossad’s specialty was dirty tricks, even if (or perhaps because) it was not very good as an intelligence organization. Its modus operandi had always been the same: pull off a dirty trick but make it appear somebody else had done it. An early example was the Lavon Affair, named for Pinhas Lavon, Israel’s minister of defense back in 1953. This Mossad operation persuaded some Jewish men in Egypt to burn U.S. Information Service libraries on the assumption that Egyptian President Jamal Abdul Nasser would be blamed. But one of the incendiary devices went off prematurely, and the young spies were caught. Some of them were executed. This provoked a scandal in Israel, and in the ensuing investigation it eventually turned out that Lavon’s signature authorizing the operation had been forged at the behest of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. A dirty trick within a dirty trick!

The reaction from actual Iraqis on the just-released report by the "Iraq Study Group"? They don't like it; it won't work; it's largely a tissue of fantasies and shows no grasp of the true situation in Iraq; it has nothing to do with solving Iraq's problems but everything to do with the American Establishment's desperate attempt to save face, no matter how many people must be slaughtered in the process.

But why should we listen to these wretched malcontents in Iraq? How the hell could they know more about the reality of their lives than Jim "Bagman" Baker and Lee "Whitewash for Hire" Hamilton and Harriet "Here's the PB&J, George" Miers and Ed Meese? I mean, come on: who on God's green earth knows more about the political, social, ethnic, historical, religious and military complexities of Iraq than Ed Meese? The Heritage Foundation's Ronald Reagan Distinguished Fellow in Public Policy? Man, he's the go-to guy for all things Iraqi! There's no freaking, frigging way that any Hakim or Abdul or Nouri or Motqada or Mahmoud is gonna have any greater insight on Iraq than Ed Meese. Are you kidding me?

Hailed by revisionist scholars Charles Beard, Harry Elmer Barnes, and Charles Tansill, this classic work remains unsurpassed as a one-volume treatment of America's Day of Infamy. Admiral H. E. Yarnell, former Pearl Harbor naval base commandant, wrote: "Mr. Morgenstern is to be congratulated on marshalling the available facts of this tragedy in such a manner as to make it clear to every reader where the responsibility lies." Indispensable introduction to the question of who bears the blame for the Pearl Harbor surprise, and, more important, for America's entry, through the "back door," into World War II. In his introduction to this attractive IHR edition, Dr. James Martin writes: "Morgenstern's book is ... still the best about the December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor attack, despite a formidable volume of subsequent writing by many others on the subject."

It’s amazing what you can find if you turn over a few rocks in the anti-terrorism legislation Congress approved during the election season.

Take, for example, the John W. Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2006, named for the longtime Armed Services Committee chairman from Virginia.

Signed by President Bush on Oct. 17, the law (PL 109-364) has a provocative provision called “Use of the Armed Forces in Major Public Emergencies.”

The thrust of it seems to be about giving the federal government a far stronger hand in coordinating responses to Katrina-like disasters.

But on closer inspection, its language also alters the two-centuries-old Insurrection Act, which Congress passed in 1807 to limit the president’s power to deploy troops within the United States.

For example, Silvestre Reyes, the incoming Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, says the U.S. cannot withdraw from Iraq until it has dismantled the militias. Reyes wants to put 30,000 more U.S. troops into Iraq to dismantle the militias. Reyes has forgotten that sending more troops was the Democrats' policy in Vietnam, a policy whose only result was that more Americans lost sons, fathers, husbands, and brothers.

Obviously, sending more U.S. troops will not succeed in dismantling the Iraqi sectarian militias. However, a U.S. attempt to dismantle the militias will result in the militias joining the insurgency and turning on the U.S. troops. The situation would deteriorate, not improve. It is frightening that the incoming chairman of the House Intelligence Committee does not understand this.

Many Americans have the absurd notion that the only limit to U.S. power is the will to use it. This absurd idea provides the Israel Lobby with a vocal American minority that is easy to exploit in behalf of "standing tough" in the Middle East. The main reason that neither Republicans nor Democrats can come to their senses about Iraq and America's disastrous Middle East policy is that the Israel Lobby will not let them.

Right-wing Israeli governments suffer the same delusion as neoconservatives about limitless U.S. power. They believe that the power of their lobby can ensure that American power will be used to destroy all of Israel's enemies.

The reference was buried deep inside a 160-page report that urged US President George W. Bush to renew efforts to revive Israel-Palestinian peace talks as part of a region-wide bid to end the chaos in Iraq.

"This report is worrisome for Israel particularly because, for the first time, it mentions the question of the 'right of return' for the Palestinian refugees of 1948," said a senior Israeli official, who was reacting to the US policy report on condition he not be identified.

A Middle East analyst who was involved in the Iraq Study Group discussions but did not participate in drafting the report expressed surprise when the reference was pointed out to him by a reporter.

President George W. Bush meets today with Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, the turbaned leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), a Shiite fundamentalist party that is strongly tied to Iran. In so doing, the president is meeting with someone who, perhaps more than anyone else in Iraq, is responsible for trying to destroy Iraqi national unity, prevent national reconciliation among Iraq’s ethnic and sectarian mix, and push Iraq into civil war. Al-Hakim, who was virtually Fed-Ex’d into Iraq by the Pentagon in March 2003, was a mainstay of the Iraqi National Congress, led by neoconservative darling Ahmed Chalabi throughout the 1990s. And today al-Hakim controls the SCIRI militia, the Badr Brigade, the Iraqi interior ministry and many of Iraq’s feared death squads. Not to put too fine a point on it, Hakim is a mass murderer.

What’s stunning about Bush’s encounter with al-Hakim is that it occurs precisely at the moment when critically important bridges are being built across Iraq’s Sunni-Shiite divide—bridges that al-Hakim is trying to blow up.

In order for this gigantic mass psychological warfare – for that is what it really is - to succeed, the mass media play a vital role which cannot be underestimated. For they are the instruments whose goal it is to undermine and neutralise the capacity of independent thought among the world’s population. That is the key role of global mass media like CNN, CBS, NBC, The New York Times, The Daily Telegraph, Le Figaró, FoxNews, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Corrieri della Sera, Le Monde, Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, US News & World Report, Business Week, Reuters, and their respective local outlets in all countries, all of which are directed by key people belonging to the CFR and/or its sister organizations in the US and elsewhere.