| This article
appears in the December 5,
2003 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
Cheney Faction
Lashes Out
Against LaRouche Exposés
by Jeffrey
Steinberg
According to a well-placed Washington source, in October of this
year, a series of heated, closed-door debates took place in the office of
Vice President Dick Cheney. The subject: whether or not to launch a public
smear campaign against Democratic Party Presidential candidate Lyndon
LaRouche, over LaRouche's year-long campaign to expose the Vice President
as the leader of the neo-conservative war party inside the Bush
Administration, responsible for the disastrous Iraq war and schemes for a
string of future, similar senseless military engagements, all aimed at
promoting a unilateral American imperium.
While
some Cheney political aides opposed getting into such a flight-forward
confrontation with LaRouche, some of the office hotheads, including the
Vice President himself, as well as his chief of staff Lewis "Scooter"
Libby, reportedly insisted that the LaRouche exposes could not go
unchallenged, according to the source.
Now,
with the publication, on Nov. 24, of a scurrilous attack on LaRouche by
neo-con scribbler Kenneth R. Timmerman, in the Moonie-owned Insight
magazine, it is clear that Cheney and company have launched a dirty tricks
effort against the Democratic Presidential candidate.
Parallel Dirty
Tricks in Europe
In
Europe, a similar Cheney-led smear campaign is underway against LaRouche,
emanating out of England, and spreading into Germany and elsewhere. The
ostensible subject of the European slander is the suicide death of a young
British man, following his participation in a Schiller Institute youth
conference in Germany. Despite a thorough investigation into the incident
by both German and British authorities, the smears have persisted,
confusing many in Europe. The publication of the Insight attack on
LaRouche now confirms that the British media slanders of LaRouche are part
of the same Cheney-led dirty tricks effort, to subvert LaRouche's
Presidential campaign in the United States.
A 'Rogue
Intelligence Cabal'
The
Nov. 24 Insight piece, accompanied by a photograph of
Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith and Pentagon Office of Special Plans
(OSP) head William Luti, accused Lyndon LaRouche of being the architect of
a campaign to expose the OSP as a "rogue intelligence cabal," behind the
unjustified and unwarranted Iraq war. Timmerman, whose attack on LaRouche
is also being promoted by neo-con propagandist Frank Gaffney, through his
Center for Security Policy website, lamented, "All this silliness could
become deadly serious if Senate Democrats get their way, led by Sen. John
D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the vice chairman of the Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence (SSCI)."
Rockefeller has launched an SSCI probe into the OSP, and, in an
Oct. 1 letter to Feith, demanded answers to a series of questions. A
subsequent Oct. 30 letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, co-signed
by Rockefeller and intelligence panel chairman, Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.),
gave the Pentagon 24 hours to produce the material and supply
witnesses.
In
fact, on Oct. 27, Feith did submit a memo to the SSCI, with a top-secret
annex, detailing "proof" that Saddam Hussein had been behind the Sept. 11,
2001 al-Qaeda terror attacks on New York and Washington. The Feith annex
was also leaked to the neo-con Weekly Standard, which published lengthy
excerpts from the classified document on Nov. 14, proclaiming "Case
Closed"—i.e., that Dick Cheney's lying assertions that Saddam Hussein was
behind 9/11 were now "proven."
Actual
intelligence experts made mincemeat out of the Weekly Standard's
effort to defend Cheney by regurgitating the Saddam-ran-Osama bin Laden
fairytale. Former Defense Intelligence Agency Mideast head, Col. Pat Lang,
debated Weekly Standard author Stephen Hayes on CNN on Nov. 20, and
exposed the Feith memo as a cherry-picked collection of raw and
uncorroborated intelligence reports. Former CIA officer Larry Johnson told
The Hill on Nov. 19, "If anybody doubted that there was such a
thing as intelligence with a [predetermined] purpose, this is a case
study. Just because someone says something and it gets 'classified'
stamped on it, doesn't necessarily mean it's true."
'Beast-Man'
Cheney
The
leaking of the Feith annex to the neo-con media occurred simultaneously
with the theft of Democratic Party staff memos from the Senate
intelligence panel and the Senate Judiciary Committee. Sources say that
both the thefts and the leaking of the pilfered staff memos to the Wall
Street Journal, the Washington Times, and right-wing radio
gadfly Sean Hannity, were all aimed at bullying Democrats into a defensive
posture—allowing Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) to shut down
the work of the Senate Intelligence Committee altogether, on the grounds
that the Democrats were playing "partisan politics" with the national
security of the United States in the midst of the "war on
terror."
Several
Senate sources have confirmed that Frist's unprecedented Nov. 14 shutdown
of the SSCI's probe came under direct orders from the Vice
President.
However, the whole scheme backfired, as Rockefeller refused to be
cowed, and, instead, forced a criminal probe into the leaks and the
thefts.
On Nov.
21, the Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Bill Pickle seized four computer servers
at the Senate Judiciary Committee office, to determine how the theft of
the staff memos, addressed to Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Sen.
Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) took place. Both the CIA and the SSCI have
demanded a similar probe by the Department of Justice into the Feith memo
leak, and the theft of a staff memo to Senator Rockefeller.
The
stench of Watergate is in the air, and this time, the prime target is not
the President, but Vice President Dick Cheney.
Timmerman's
Folly
It was
against the backdrop of this accelerating fight over the fate of Vice
President Cheney that the Timmerman piece was published in Insight
magazine.
After
going through a defense of the legitimacy of the Pentagon OSP, and
revealing that he had been given direct access to their office and the
visitors sign-in logs, Timmerman posed the question:
"So how
did a legitimate and effective Iraq planning office get painted as a dire
'cabal?' As incredible as it may seem, it began with conspiracy-theorist
Lyndon LaRouche, a self-styled Democratic Party presidential aspirant who
claimed in March that a 'cabal' of pro-Israel conservatives he called the
'Children of Satan' were running a rogue intelligence operation at the
Pentagon. Their mission: fabricate intelligence and drag the Untied States
into a needless war, all at Israel's bidding. It was all very dark, murky
and conspiratorial. If responsible journalists had been doing their job,
the story never would have crept from the LaRouche Website into the
light."
Timmerman lashed out, "Instead, like a virus jumping from animals
to humans, the story erupted in a May 6 article by Seymour Hersh in the
New Yorker." From there, Timmerman ranted, the LaRouche
material—including the role of the late Leo Strauss, the intellectual guru
of the neo-cons—found its way into the pages of the Guardian, Time,
and scores of other "mainstream" publications.
The end
result: According to Timmerman, "Luti's office now stands accused by Sens.
Rockefeller and Carl Levin (D-Mich.) of illegally organizing clandestine
intelligence operations overseas." Among the allegations cited by
Timmerman, and blamed, ultimately on LaRouche: That Luti's OSP coordinated
its intelligence operations with a "rump unit" in the Office of Israeli
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon; and that OSP personnel conducted unauthorized
meetings overseas with Iranians.
An
unnamed Administration official was quoted by Timmerman, "This is Church
Committee stuff," a reference to the late 1970s Senate probe of CIA and
FBI misdeeds.
The
misdeeds, once again, are definitely there. OSP was set up at the
Pentagon, in part, to come up with "off-the-reservation" unvetted
intelligence to promote a war that Cheney and company had already decided
on launching. Ostensibly run by Luti and Feith, the unit, in fact, was
steered by Libby, on behalf of Dick Cheney, according to eyewitness
accounts.
CIA
Director George Tenet has reportedly told several Congressmen and Senators
that he is convinced the Pentagon was engaged in unauthorized covert
operations, that first require Presidential Findings.
These
are serious crimes—far beyond the scope of the original Watergate scandal.
Attacking Lyndon LaRouche for his persistent campaign to expose Cheney et
al. is not going to change that one iota. |
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