| World
Jewish Review Wednesday, December 1, 2004
 Reasons
for concern at the CIA
By Neal
M. Sher A
wake-up call to the Jewish and pro-Israel
communities by the former director of the Office
of Special Investigations in the Justice
Department RECENT headlines scream that the
CIA is in disarray, beset by high level
resignations and open warfare between various
factions along the Potomac. Porter Goss
certainly has his hands full, although the smart
money is on the side of new Director. For those who live and die "inside the Beltway"
this is drama of the highest order, generating
delicious fodder for the cocktail party circuit.
While such intrigue should be of little interest to
the Jewish and pro-Israel communities, recent
events suggest that there is indeed reason to be
concerned about the thinking at the Langley
headquarters -- or at least in parts of it. Last year, in a very unusual development, a CIA
official was granted permission to publish a book
detailing his work as a counter-terrorism expert
and setting forth his highly critical analysis of
U.S. policy. There was one caveat imposed by his
employer: his identity could not be revealed.
Hence, the book "Imperial Hubris: Why the West is
Losing the War on Terror" was officially penned by
"Anonymous". Having just resigned from the Agency,
the author is now "out" and Michael Scheuer
(who headed the bin Laden desk at the CIA) has been
making the rounds of all the TV studios (including
60 Minutes) and granting interviews to
countless newspapers and magazines. In his book and recent media fest, major
emphasis is placed on Scheuer's negative views of
the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and of our failure
to eliminate Osama bin Laden. But there is another
significant theme which surprisingly has not
generated the level of concern it deserves. Central to his thesis
is the notion that bin Laden, Al Qaeda and the
terrorist attacks and threats against us are to
some degree a function of America's support for
Israel. Reminiscent of the famous charge by a well known
pundit that Israel is an albatross around America's
neck and that Capitol Hill is "Israeli occupied
territory", Scheuer contends that U.S. policy
towards Israel is 'the tail leading the dog" and
that pro-Israel activists have undue and dangerous
influence over foreign policy. Most respected
scholars and analysts have little brief for that
view and reject the argument that all we have to do
to insulate ourselves from the terrorist threat is
change our policy towards Israel. First of all, the argument flies in the face of
the facts and logic. For example, Al Qaeda attacks
against the U.S. embassies in east Africa and the
USS Cole came at a time when, under U.S.
auspices, Israel made the most generous concessions
imaginable to Arafat and the Palestinians.
Moreover, it smacks at the discredited "blame the
victim" phenomenon ( "if you Jews would only do
this or stop doing that, there would be no
anti-Semitism"), with which we are all too
familiar. It's not that Scheuer is raising something new.
He isn't. We've heard it before from Israel's
detractors and we'll certainly hear it again. It
comes with the territory. We can recall
commentators saying in the immediate aftermath of
9-11 that Americans now know what Israelis live
with on a daily a daily basis. Some predicted,
however, that such sympathy would eventually wane
and that anti-Israel crusaders would push the view
that America's pro-Israel stance was the root cause
of terrorism directed against us. This is precisely
the sort of thinking our enemies want us to
embrace. Surely, no reasonable
person can believe for a moment that if the U.S.
were to throw Israel overboard tomorrow all
terrorist threats would miraculously evaporate.
The raw truth is that they hate the U.S and the
West for reasons having nothing to do with
Israel. What is terribly distressing is that Scheuer's
view of the U.S.- Israel relationship was given a
Tenet-led CIA seal of approval when publication was
authorized. Make no mistake, a book like this,
approved as it was at the highest levels of the
Agency after scrutinizing every last word, was
meant to send messages. Whatever the other ones
might have been, the one regarding Israel could not
have been clearer. For whatever reason, the hostility towards
Israel in Imperial Hubris, which should have
raised a host of red
flags, seems to have flown under the Jewish
community's radar screen. To be sure, Scheuer is
careful to throw out the obligatory protestations
that he is not anti-Isarel, arguing that he merely
seeks a "re-examination" of U.S. policy in the
middle east. But we all know what that really means
and one would have thought that officially
sanctioned Israel bashing -- and that's precisely
what Scheuer's views represent -- would have come
under fierce attack. I don't know which is worse:
that he actually believes this nonsense, or that a
person of that mindset actually oversaw the
campaign against an enemy and movement which
perpetrated the worst crime ever on U.S. soil. The CIA is now under new management; the role
Goss intends to play regarding Israel and the
region remains to be seen. But it is essential that
we keep a watchful eye on the situation. To date,
we have seen nothing from Langley to repudiate
Scheuer's provocative comments. Given his high
public profile and his eagerness to perpetuate his
views about Israel, the Agency's silence is
troubling; and Goss himself is at best a question
mark on this issue. This is especially so in light of the fact that
as chairman of the House Committee on Intelligence
he was not at all sympathetic to the plight of a
CIA employee who had been subjected to blatant
anti-Semitism and scurrilous accusations of dual
loyalty, even though Agency improprieties were
established by irrefutable documentary evidence. I
know this because I represented the aggrieved
employee during his travails at the Agency. Scheuer's charges -- which have been given
seeming legitimacy by a backdoor CIA imprimatur --
must not be taken lightly. We
have every right to demand that Mr. Goss and
his Agency squarely repudiate the views of the man
formerly known as Anonymous.. JWR contributor Neal M. Sher, a New
York-based government relations and
communications consultant, served as the
director of the Office of Special Investigations
in the Justice Department. 
Sept 5, 2004: Ha'aretz headline: FBI
probes Jewish sway on Bush government: "The
FBI investigation into the Pentagon mole affair
has expanded ... to encompass the entire issue
of Jewish influence on the neoconservative part
of the administration"-
Neal
Sher and deceitful his role in the infamous
prosecution of John Demjanjuk
-
Listen to Colin Powell give a speech to AIPAC -
the American Israel Public Affairs Committee
(Real Player needed)
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-
Neal
Sher, Ex-AIPAC Head and Justice Department
Nazi-Hunter: Where is he now?
-
The Piper thanks the
Paymasters Text,
sound, and video of standing-ovation speech by
President George Bush to AIPAC, Israel's
Washington lobby | The
ADL is outraged - Jewish
Congresswoman says Bush's Policies are a Danger
to Jews | The
Forward Editorial on The Bush Cabal and the Iraq
War: The Ground Shifts
| The more the excuses,
the less the excuse: "Uncovering the Rationales
for the War on Iraq," by Devon M. Largio lists
27 of them.
[3
pdf files]-
Whom to vote for
A
checklist of bribes to US political candidates
from Israeli lobby
Sample: "Feinstein, Dianne
... (D) ... $112,842"
-
Israeli
and Jewish outrage at opinion piece, 'Palestine:
The Assault on Health and Other War Crimes,' by
British professor Derek Summerfield in
British Medical Journal
-
Ha'aretz
(Israel): Killing children is no longer a big
deal
|
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