Mossad hyped intelligence

Juan Cole has some comments on the Israeli admission that Mossad hyped WMD intelligence information and then passed it to the U.S.

Respected Israeli security thinker Shlomo Brom argues in the current Strategic Assessment that Mossad fell down on the job in realistically assessing the threat to Israel of Iraqi weapons programs and stockpiles . (I.e. there were no significant WMD programs and very, very few if any stockpiles, but Mossad kept saying that both existed and were serious threats.) Brom points out that a major intelligence failure like this is inevitably bad for Israel's foreign relations posture, since enemies may conclude that if it so scared by paper tigers, then it is a pushover. Crying wolf is also always a bad idea, since when a real threat comes along the crier will be discounted. He admits that Israel has no real reason to regret the Iraq war, given that Saddam gave money to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.

...The first argument, that Mossad's failures were unimportant, is flawed because the US has long relied heavily on Israeli intelligence in the Middle East. In fact, Israeli intelligence and military support is the main justification for the US grant of billions of dollars a year to a first-world country with an average annual per capita income of $17,000 a year.

...Moreover, there is evidence that Israeli generals and intelligence officials had special access to Undersecretary of Defense for Planning Douglas Feith, and that they made many unlogged visits to his office. And, as former State Department counter-terrorism analyst Greg Thielmann pointed out in the Oct. 9 Frontline , Feith's Office of Special Plans cherry-picked "intelligence" (damning anecdotes from unreliable sources) and by-passed the usual intelligence channels by piping this skewed information directly to Dick Cheney.

..Critics of Brom on the Israeli far Right defend the assessment and say that Israel's failures cannot have been that important to the war anyway, given the similar failures by US and British intelligence. They also hold out hope that WMD weapons programs or stockpiles will yet be found in Iraq. Yeah, and OJ is going to find the real killers eventually, too.

Justin Raimondo had this to say in December of '02:

Israel's great achievement in the political and diplomatic realm has been to draw the unleashed anger of the American giant away from the perpetrators of 9/11 and toward its own enemies: Saddam Hussein, Hamas, and the fictitious "Islamic Al-Qaeda of Palestine," which exists only "by way of deception," to borrow a phrase from the official motto of the Mossad.

"By way of deception, thou shalt do war" – a principle the Israelis have always lived up to. Juxtaposed against the mounting evidence – a recent series of reports in the German and British media depict Mossad agents in the U.S. living "next door to Mohammed Atta" – the exposure of this "false flag" operation draws the curtain on the terrorist enigma. This demonstrates that an Israeli connection to the worst terrorist atrocity in our history is not an "urban myth," as one Justice Department spokesperson put it, but a sinister and increasingly likely possibility.

...In all the columns I've written on this subject, my thesis has been limited in scope. I've said only that the Israelis had a certain amount of foreknowledge – to what degree is not known – and failed to warn us. Not that they were behind 9/11. Nor am I saying that now. But I have a question: If the Israelis are running phony "Al Qaeda" cells in Palestine and Lebanon, why not in South Florida, or New York?

And, just for added emphasis, there's the recent admission that Lyndon Johnson covered up the truth about an Israeli attack on the USS Liberty in 1967, purportedly with the intention of blaming it on Egypt and dragging the U.S. into the Israeli-Arab Six-Day War.

Our good buddies, the Israelis.

Here's something else I brought up before (and still haven't found the original information I wanted): there is such a thing as pretending to be the enemy, not just blaming some action on the enemy.

Check out this Cryptome page on a phony al-Qaeda website.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.