Will Iran Attack Israeli Olympic Team ? Some Israeli politicians speculate so.

[Steven Gaal]

Will Iran Attack Israeli Olympic Team ???

I DONT THINK SO.

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Israel alert for attacks abroad, eyeing Olympics

Published July 22, 2012

Associated Press

JERUSALEM – Israel's prime minister said Sunday that his country is on alert for plots to kill more Israelis overseas, after speculation that last week's deadly bombing of an Israeli tour bus in Bulgaria was a rehearsal for a spectacular attack on Israel's Olympics team.

Israel blames Iran and its Lebanese Hezbollah proxies for last week's bombing at an airport in the Bulgarian resort town of Burgas, just a little over a week before the opening of the London Games. Five Israelis, a bus driver and the bomber were killed.

While Israeli officials are tight-lipped about security procedures for its athletes, they're on high alert on the 40th anniversary of a Palestinian attack at the 1972 Olympics in Munich that killed 11 Israeli athletes and coaches.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.c.../#ixzz21YpBrS8T

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Well if Olympic Israeli team attacked, I think I know who will do it.

Talk about self hating Jews !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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The next day, after being refused permission by the Syrian government to dock at Tartus, the hijackers singled out Leon Klinghoffer, a Jewish retired businessman who was in a wheelchair, for murder, shooting him in the forehead and chest as he sat in his wheelchair. They then forced the ship's barber and a waiter to throw his body and wheelchair overboard. Marilyn Klinghoffer, who did not witness the shooting, was told by the hijackers that he had been moved to the infirmary. She only learned the truth after the hijackers left the ship at Port Said. PLO Foreign Secretary Farouq Qaddumi said that perhaps the terminally ill Marilyn Klinghoffer had killed her husband for insurance money;[1] however, the PLO later accepted responsibility, apologized, and reached a financial settlement with the Klinghoffer family.[2][3]

Leon Klinghoffer, 69, a retired businessman who was in a wheelchair,

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http://www.thetruths...cle.asp?ID=6942

Was the Achille Lauro another Zionist 'Black Op'

SUMMARY: --- The Mossad in a attempt to sway world opinion in favor of Zionist Jews or provoke a armed reaction constantly stages events and blames Arabs. In this episode the Zionists use Mossad operative Arabs to hijack a cruise ship.

The crowning scene - played over and over - is where the Mossad Arabs throw a 75 yr old Jewish man, Leon Klinghoffer, over the side in his wheelchair.

Jewish version ........ Achille Lauro Hijacking Oct 7, 1985

Four heavily armed Palestinian terrorists in October hijack the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro, carrying more than 400 passengers and crew, off Egypt. The hijackers demand that Israel free 50 Palestinian prisoners. The terrorists killed a disabled American tourist, 69-year-old Leon Klinghoffer, and threw his body overboard with his wheelchair.

After a two-day drama, the hijackers surrendered in exchange for a pledge of safe passage. But when an Egyptian jet tries to fly the hijackers to freedom, U.S. Navy F-14 fighters intercept it and force it to land in Sicily. The terrorists are taken into custody by Italian authorities. Counter- terrorist units from the U.S responded, including elements of Delta Force and SEAL Team Six, however the situation was resolved before an assault became necessary. The terrorist group who hijacked the Achille Lauro was the Palestine Liberation Front.

What Really Happened

The hi-jacking of the Italian cruise ship the Achille Lauro by "Palestinian terrorists" was later reliably reported by former IDF arms dealer Ari Ben-Menashe in his 1992 book, Profits of War: Inside the Secret U.S.-Israeli Arms Network, to have been ordered and funded by Mossad.

Ben-Menashe revealed that Israeli intelligence organizations regularly engaged in "black operations," espionage activity designed to portray Palestinians and others in the worst possible light. "An example," wrote Ben-Menashe, "is the case of the 'Palestinian' attack on the cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1985. That was, in fact, an Israeli 'black' propaganda operation to show what a deadly, cutthroat bunch the Palestinians were. " According to Ben-Menashe, Israeli spymasters arranged the attack through "Abu'l Abbas, who, to follow such orders was receiving millions from Israeli intelligence officers posing as Sicilian dons. Abbas . . . gathered a team to attack the cruise ship. The team was told to make it bad, to show the world what lay in store for other unsuspecting citizens if Palestinian demands were not met.

As the world knows, the group picked on an elderly American Jewish man in a wheelchair, killed him, and threw his body overboard. They made their point. But for Israel, it was the best kind of anti-Palestinian propaganda." It should be noted that in April 1996, Abbas returned to Gaza and in a show of support for Yasser Arafat apologized for the hi-jacking and the killing of the American Jewish passenger Leon Klinghoffer without mentioning him by name, saying, "The hi-jacking was a mistake, and there were no orders to kill civilians." Abbas made no mention of Mossad involvement in the hi-jacking according to the April 23, 1996 Associated Press report.

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RELATED ISSUE IS ABU NIDAL

Other names his terror teams had

The Abu Nidal Organisation took the name from its founder Sabri al-Banna but like other terrorist organisations, it also went by a variety of other names. Here are some of the common ones.

Arab• Revolutionary Brigades (ARB)

Arab Revolutionary Council•

Black June• Organisation (BJO)

Black September Organisation (BSO)•

Fatah• al-Qiyadah al-Thawriyyah

Fatah Revolutionary Council (FRC)•

• Revolutionary Organisation of Socialist Muslims (ROSM)

Fatah the• Revolutionary Council (FRC)

Involvements

Date ... Location Action

Sept 1972 .. * Munich Germany Olympics killing of Israelis athletes

Sep 1973..Paris, France Attacked Saudi Arabian Embassy

Oct 1974.Damascus, Syria Assassination attempt on Arafat

Sep 1976.Damascus, Syria Attacked Semiramis Hotel

Oct 1976..Rome, Italy Attacked Syrian Embassy

Oct 1976.Islamabad, Pakistan Attacked Syrian Embassy

Nov 1976.Amman, Jordan Occupied International Hotel

Dec 1976..Syria Assassination attempt on Syrian Minister of Foreign Affairs

Oct 1977..Abu Dhabi Killed UAE Secretary of State, Foreign Affairs

Jan 1978..London, England Assassination of PLO representative

Feb 1978..Cyprus Assassination of the chairman of the Egyptian Press Trade Union

Jun 1978..Kuwait Assassination of PLO representatives

Mar 1980..Madrid, Spain Assassination of Spanish lawyer thought to be Jewish leader Max Mazini

Jul 1980...Brussels, Belgium Claimed responsibility for killing the Israeli Commerce Attaché

May 1981...Vienna, Austria Murdered City Councilman and threatened to kill Austrian Chancellor

Aug 1981...Vienna, Austria Machine-gunned a synagogue, killing two and injuring 17

Jun 1982..London, England Attempted assassination of Israeli Ambassador

Jun 1982...Rome, Italy Killed PLO official Husayn Kamal with a car bomb

Aug 1982... *Paris, France Killed six and injured 22 in a grenade and machinegun attack on a restaurant frequented by French Jews

Aug 1982.Bombay, India Attempted murder of UAE Consul

Aug 1982.Kuwait Shot and wounded UAE diplomat

Sep 1982.Madrid, Spain Assassinated Kuwaiti diplomat

Oct 1982.Rome, Italy Killed a child and injured ten in a grenade and machinegun attack on a synagogue

Apr 1983..Lisbon, Portugal Murdered PLO official Issam Sartawi at a conference

October 1983....Rome, Italy Attempted to kill the Jordanian Ambassador to Italy

Oct 1983..New Delhi, India Severely wounded the Jordanian Ambassador to India

Nov 1983.Athens, Greece Attacked security guards in front of the Jordanian Embassy, killing one guard and injuring another

Dec 1983.IzTnir, Turkey Bombing of the French Cultural Centre

Feb 1984.Paris, France Murdered the UAE Ambassador to France

Mar 1984..Athens, Greece Assassinated a British diplomat

Nov 1984..Bombay, India Assassinated British High Commissioner

Dec 1984.Rome, Italy Killed Arafat-supporter Ismail Darwish

Dec 1984.Bucharest, Romania Assassinated Jordanian diplomat

Mar 1985.Beirut, Lebanon Kidnapped and suspected murder of British journalist

Mar 1985.Rome, Italy Attacked Alia, the Royal Jordanian Airlines office injuring three

Apr 1985.Athens, Greece Fired a rocket at an Alia airliner damaging fuselage

..

Jul 1985.Madrid, Spain Bombed a British Airways office killing one and injuring 27

Jul 1985..Madrid, Spain ..Attacked Alia offices injuring two

Jul 1985..Ankara, Turkey Assassinated the first secretary of the Jordanian Embassy

Sep 1985..Rome, Italy Grenade attack on a cafe wounding 38

Sep 1985... *Malta Hijacked an Egyptian airliner where 60 people were killed in the rescue attempt

Dec 1985... *Rome and Vienna Attacked both airports with machineguns and grenades killing 16 and injuring 60

Jul 1986... *City of Poros, Greece Attacked excursion ship

Sep 1986... *Karachi, Pakistan Hijacked Pan Am flight 73 killing 17 and wounding over 150

Sep 1986..Istanbul, Turkey Attacked Neve Shalom synagogue killing 22

April 1986 -- *Berlin Germany Attack on LaBelle Disco killing 3 US serviceman

Sep 1987...West Bank, Lebanon Bombing of restaurant wounding 15 people

Nov 1987...Israel Hijacked a yacht off the coast taking eight hostages

Mar 1988..Bombay, India Attacked Alitalia airlines crew aboard a commuter bus, seriously wounding the captain

May 1988..Nicosia, Cyprus Detonated a car bomb near the Israeli Embassy, killing three and injuring 17

May 1988.Khartoum, Sudan Gunmen attack hotel and club killing eight (five British) and injuring 21

Dec 1988. Lockerbie Killed 299 people

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Saturday, October 25, 2008

Abu Nidal reportedly worked for the CIA and MOSSAD

http://aangirfan.blo...or-cia-and.html

Robert Fisk, in The Independent, 25 October 2008, tells us about Abu Nidal.

Reportedly, Abu Nidal, was a spy for the USA.

Documents which are now in the hands of The Independent (Abu Nidal, notorious Palestinian mercenary, 'was a US spy'), written by Saddam Hussein's security services, state that Nidal had been "colluding" with the Americans and, with the help of the Egyptians and Kuwaitis, was trying to manufacture evidence linking Saddam and al-Qa'ida.

In 1974, Abu Nidal set up Fatah, thus weakening Arafat's PLO. This worked in the interests of Israel.

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Abu Nidal Attacks ???? ((deep background wiki) At some early point real PLO man became MOSSAD man. Its not if, but when. (GAAL))

http://en.wikipedia....ed_to_Abu_Nidal

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whatreallyhappened

Abu Nidal was undoubtedly a Mossad agent. Practically every job he did benefited Israel.

Confirming Seale's theory are top Middle East terrorism experts, including intelligence officers in Arab countries, and even within Abu Nidal's own organization.

All the European and Mid-East terror experts agree that Nidal was Mossad.

He was a prot?g? of Menacham Begins ... ran free for 30 yrs ...used to kill unwanted Palestinians

Seale pointed out the senseless and extremely brutal attacks only benefited Israel. Nidal had two thrusts .... He killed Palestinians that were a threat to Israel, and hijacked American and European jets. SEE BELOW LINK

http://www.whale.to/c/abu_nidal2.html

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reliable witness Ari Ben-Menashe

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http://www.consortiu...hive/lost2.html

Troubling Witnesses

Much as the Congress had rejected witnesses and failed to followobvious leads in the mid-1980s as the Iran-contra scandal was building, Boren's Intelligence Committee brushed aside two witnesses connecting Gates to the alleged GOP actions in 1980and the purported CIA arms deals with Iraq a few years later.The witnesses, former Israeli intelligence official Ari Ben-Menashe and Iranian businessman Richard Babayan, both offered details about Gates's alleged connections to those schemes.

Ben-Menashe, who worked for Israeli military intelligence from1977-87, first fingered Gates as an operative in the secret Iraq arms pipeline in August 1990 during an interview I conducted for Public Broadcasting System's FRONTLINE program. Ben-Menashe wasin jail in New York on charges of trying to sell cargo planes to

Iran (charges which were later dismissed). When I interviewed Ben-Menashe in 1990, Gates was in an obscure position, as deputy national security adviser to President Bush and not yet a candidate for the top CIA job.

In that interview and later under oath, Ben-Menashe put Gates ina 1986 meeting with a Chilean arms manufacturer Carlos Cardoen who allegedly was supplying cluster bombs and chemical weapons to Saddam Hussein's army. At the time, Iraq was at war with Iran. Babayan, an Iranian exile working with Iraq, also connected Gates to the Iraqi supply lines and to Cardoen.

Ben-Menashe insisted, too, that Gates joined in meetings between Republicans and senior Iranians in 1980 when President Carterwas trying to gain release of 52 Americans then held in Iran.Ben-Menashe claimed that he and Gates were with Casey and Bush in Paris for a round of meetings in October 1980. The Israeli said he got Gates's help, too, in bringing a suitcase full of cash into Miami in early 1981 to pay off some of the participants in the hostage gambit.

In fall 1980, Gates was executive assistant to CIA director Stansfield Turner, a job giving Gates extraordinary access to the Carter administration's most closely held secrets. But, if true, Ben-Menashe's allegations would mean that Gates had betrayed his official duties. For his part, Gates has steadfastly denied involvement in either October Surprise or Iraqgate.

Alibis, Anyone?

"I was accused on television and in the print media by people I had never spoken to or met of selling weapons to Iraq, or walking through Miami airport with suitcases full of cash, of being with Bush in Paris in October 1980 to meet with Iranians,and on and on," Gates writes in his memoirs. "The allegations of meetings with me around the world were easily disproved for the committee by my travel records, calendars, and countless witnesses."

Gates blames the Ben-Menashe/Babayan charges on "the magnetic attraction of media attention in drawing out all manner of verystrange people." But none of Gates's supposedly supportive evidence was ever made public by either the Senate Intelligence Committee or the later inquiries into either October Surprise or Iraqgate. Not one of Gates's "countless witnesses" who could vouch for Gates's whereabouts was identified. Though Boren pledged publicly to have his investigators question Babayan,they never did.

Most galling was the Intelligence Committee's handling of aclaim by Ben-Menashe to have met with Gates in Paramus, N.J., onthe after noon of April 20, 1989. The date was pinned down by the fact that Ben-Menashe had been under Customs surveillance in the morning. So it could have been a perfect test for either destroying or buttressing Ben-Menashe's credibility.

When I first asked about this claim, congressional investigators told me that Gates had a perfect alibi for that day: he had been with Boren at a speech in Oklahoma. But when FRONTLINE checked that out, we discovered that Gates's Oklahoma speech had been on April 19, a day earlier. Gates also had not been with Boren and had returned to Washington by that evening.

So where was Gates the next day? Could he have taken a quicktrip to northern New Jersey?

The committee said no again, citing two points: Gates denied going to New Jersey and his calendar made no reference to the trip. But the investigators could not tell me where Gates claimed to be that afternoon. They also admitted they had questioned no witnesses to corroborate his alibi. Essentially,the alibi came down to Gates's word.

An Affidavit

Then, in January 1995, a new witness linked Gates to arms shipments to Iraq. Howard Teicher, a staffer on Ronald Reagan's National Security Council, submitted a sworn affidavit in an arms-to-Iraq case in Miami, Fla.

"Under CIA Director Casey and Deputy Director Gates, the CIA authorized, approved and assisted [Carlos] Cardoen in the manufacture and sale of cluster bombs and other munitions to Iraq," Teicher declared. In other words, an insider on Reagan's NSC staff was leveling the same Iraqgate charge against Gates that Ben-Menashe and Babayan had made earlier.

The Clinton administration, however, chose not to pursue this new avenue of investigation. Instead, Clinton prosecutors suppressed the affidavit and attacked Teicher's credibility. The federal judge ruled Teicher's testimony to be irrelevant in the Miami case against a mid-level Teledyne salesman, Edward Johnson, who was then convicted and sentenced to three years in prison.

The Democratic failures to enforce meaningful oversight on that12-year Republican era again had left dangling historical questions. Robert Gates remained a respectable man writing memoirs celebrating U.S. victory in the Cold War. But the truth, it seems, has yet to make the nation free.

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http://consortiumnew...iness-of-lying/

Bob Gates’s ‘Business’ of Lying

June 17, 2011

A Special Report: As Defense Secretary Robert Gates prepares to retire in late June, he is routinely lauded as a “wise man” committed to telling it like it is, even making a frank comment this week about how “most governments lie to each other.” But Gates’s own record for honesty is a deeply checkered one, Robert Parry reports.

By Robert Parry

June 17, 2011

On Wednesday, Sen. Patrick Leahy asked departing Defense Secretary Robert Gates about future U.S. relations with Pakistan and other “governments that lie to us.” Gates responded, in his flat Kansas twang, that “most governments lie to each other. That’s the way business gets done.”

Gates’s Realpolitik answer before the Senate Appropriations Committee drew appreciative laughter from the audience and the usual press kudos for his “refreshing candor,” but Gates’s response could also be a reminder about his own dubious honesty regarding his role in major government scandals.

After all, if “most governments lie to each other,” it follows that government officials do the lying and the U.S. government is not immune from the practice. So, if Gates felt that his work for past presidents – while he was at the CIA or the White House – needed to be protected by lying, would he lie?

Despite his current reputation for candor, Gates’s honesty or lack thereof was a key issue during his earlier incarnation as a young, ambitious national security bureaucrat elbowing his way through the corridors of Washington power in the 1980s and early 1990s.

For various reasons, from his personal charm to his powerful patrons, Gates evaded serious investigations of his questionable activities in those years. Both in official testimony then and in his 1996 memoir, From the Shadows, Gates provided only sweeping denials of accusations coming from both U.S. government co-workers and international intelligence operatives.

Gates relied on his influential allies in the Executive Branch, Congress and the Washington press corps to shut down any full-scale examination of what he actually did. Thus, Gates emerged from several scandals – mostly relating to secret dealings with Iran, Iraq and Israel – relatively unscathed.

However, two decades ago, U.S. history could have taken a very different course if Gates and his cohorts had faced real accountability and their secrets had been exposed. That more contentious route was opened in 1991 when President George H.W. Bush nominated Gates, then Bush’s deputy national security adviser, to become CIA director.

Indeed, Bush’s selection of Gates represented its own mystery: Why would Bush risk adding fuel to still-smoldering investigative fires, especially since Gates’s first nomination to head the CIA had been rebuffed by the Senate in 1987 because of doubts about his honesty regarding the Iran-Contra scandal?

Did Bush’s stratospheric poll numbers after the Persian Gulf War create a sense of hubris, or was the President desperate, needing a co-conspirator at the CIA’s helm to stop dangerous disclosures of incriminating information?

A Crossroads

In 1991, Gates’s nomination stood at a crossroads of several intersecting scandals including:

–The Iran-Contra investigation led by special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, who had just penetrated a long-running White House cover-up of the secret arms deals from 1985-86 and who had revealed the hidden role of the CIA where Gates had lurked in the background as the agency’s deputy director.

–The October Surprise case, an Iran-Contra prequel of secret dealings with Iran dating back to the 1980 presidential campaign, an inquiry which finally had reached a critical mass of congressional interest amid belated mainstream press attention (with Gates and Bush linked to those allegations as well).

–Iraq-gate, suspicions that President Ronald Reagan and then-Vice President George H.W. Bush had covertly aided and armed Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, which represented an embarrassment given the just-completed Persian Gulf War against Hussein (with Gates again implicated in those secret dealings on behalf of Reagan and Bush).

–Politicization of U.S. intelligence, a behind-the-scenes dispute at the CIA which was brought into the daylight by veteran CIA analysts who accused Gates of waging bureaucratic war on their independent judgment and giving the Reagan administration pre-cooked conclusions to support desired policies.

Besides his high poll numbers in 1991, President Bush had other reasons to feel confident about making his protégé, Gates, head of the CIA.

Though Democrats controlled Congress, they had little stomach for a pitched battle over national security issues. They had already retreated on the Iran-Contra Affair and the related Contra-cocaine scandal. By contrast, emboldened congressional Republicans were ready to fight any new investigative threat to their party’s hold on the White House.

Also, after more than a decade of Reagan-Bush rule, the Washington press corps had gone from standing upright in the 1970s to being “on bended knee” before Reagan in the 1980s – as author Mark Hertsgaard put it – to nearly prostrate under Bush-41.

The smart play for an ambitious national journalist was to take the Reagan-Bush side on almost any topic and mock anyone who gave credence to allegations of serious government wrongdoing.

Indeed, the media Zeitgeist of 1991 was a preview of the behavior of Washington journalists a dozen years later when they fell in line behind President George W. Bush’s progression toward war with Iraq and marched in lock step behind his false claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. In both cases, in 1991 and 2003, staying obedient was the smart career play.

In 1991, part of the media’s role in running interference for Gates involved rejecting the testimony of witnesses who implicated Gates in various scandals starting with the alleged back-channel negotiations with Iran in 1980, through the arming of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in the mid-1980s, to the Iran-Contra scandal which broke open in late 1986.

Two Witnesses

Responsible for Gates’s CIA confirmation in 1991, Sen. David Boren, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, brushed aside two witnesses who connected Gates to those illicit schemes, former Israeli intelligence official Ari Ben-Menashe and Iranian businessman Richard Babayan. Both offered detailed accounts about Gates’s alleged links to the arms transfers.

In an interview with PBS “Frontline,” Boren promised to question Babayan about his claims of secret U.S. support for Iraq’s Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, but Boren reneged when Gates issued a denial of the Iraq-gate charges.

But who was lying, Babayan or Gates? The shoddiness of Boren’s investigation became apparent four years later – in January 1995 – when Howard Teicher, one of Reagan’s National Security Council officials, added more details about Gates’s role in the Iraq shipments.

In a sworn affidavit submitted in a Florida criminal case, Teicher stated that the covert arming of Iraq dated back to spring 1982 when Iran had gained the upper hand in the war, leading President Reagan to authorize a U.S. tilt toward Saddam Hussein.

The effort to arm the Iraqis was “spearheaded” by CIA Director William Casey and involved his deputy, Robert Gates, according to Teicher’s affidavit. “The CIA, including both CIA Director Casey and Deputy Director Gates, knew of, approved of, and assisted in the sale of non-U.S. origin military weapons, ammunition and vehicles to Iraq,” Teicher wrote.

That same pro-Iraq initiative involved Donald Rumsfeld, then Reagan’s special emissary to the Middle East. An infamous photograph from 1983 showed a smiling Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein. But Teicher described Gates’s role as far more substantive than Rumsfeld’s.

“Under CIA Director Casey and Deputy Director Gates, the CIA authorized, approved and assisted [Chilean arms dealer Carlos] Cardoen in the manufacture and sale of cluster bombs and other munitions to Iraq,” Teicher wrote.

Even in 1995, during the Clinton administration (when Teicher’s affidavit was submitted), the Iraq-gate allegations were not seriously examined.

After Teicher provided the affidavit to a federal court in Miami, it was classified a state secret and Teicher’s credibility was attacked. Prosecutors saw the affidavit as disruptive to their case against a private company, Teledyne Industries, and one of its salesmen, Ed Johnson, for selling explosives to Cardoen, who then fashioned them into cluster bombs for Iraq. (With Teicher’s affidavit kept from the jury, Johnson was convicted and sent to prison.)

An Israeli’s Testimony

In 1991, Boren and his committee staff also swatted away Ben-Menashe’s accounts of Gates as the point man for the CIA’s covert supplying of Iraq in the 1980s.

In interviews with me, Ben-Menashe described a personal relationship with Gates dating back to the 1970s when both men were aspiring intelligence officers working for their respective governments. Ben-Menashe claimed that his mother even made meals for Gates when he was visiting Israel.

When Ben-Menashe began talking to the press in 1990 after he was arrested in the United States on charges of selling planes to Iran, Israeli authorities deemed him as an impostor who never worked for the government, but had to back track when I obtained documentary evidence showing that Ben-Menashe had served as an operations officer for a unit of Israeli military intelligence from 1977 to 1987.

Though Israel had to recant its initial lie — and Ben-Menashe won acquittal on the plane-sale charges in late 1990 – his credibility continued to be assailed, especially by neoconservatives in the U.S. press apparently upset that Ben-Menashe was exposing closely guarded secrets, including speaking with investigative reporter Seymour Hersh about Israel’s nuclear-weapons program. [see Hersh’s The Sampson Option.]

U.S. journalists with close ties to the Israeli Right, such as Steven Emerson, began parroting Israel’s fallback position on Ben-Menashe, that he was only a “low-level translator.” That talking point gained currency even though well-placed Israeli officials privately dismissed it as just another cover story.

But Ben-Menashe’s claimed relationship with Gates represented a real test of his credibility. Some well-respected journalists, including Hersh, doubted Ben-Menashe’s story about knowing Gates because Gates had been a Soviet analyst during his early career at the CIA and thus, presumably, would have no reason to become operationally involved with an Israeli intelligence officer.

I, too, was skeptical of Ben-Menashe’s claims about Gates. But I later learned from Gates’s CIA co-workers that his duties as a Soviet analyst involved Moscow’s policies toward the Middle East, offering a plausible reason for Gates to have spent time meeting intelligence officials in Israel.

It also struck me as odd that Ben-Menashe would have dredged up Gates’s name during interviews with me and other journalists in 1990 because by then Gates had slipped back into relative obscurity as a deputy director at Bush-41’s National Security Council staff. If the Israeli had wanted to puff himself up about knowing someone important in the U.S. government, why pick Gates?

Tripping Up a Source

My trying to disprove Ben-Menashe’s claims about Gates – and thus punch a major hole in the Israeli’s credibility – became a regular feature in my periodic contacts with Ben-Menashe.

Once when I met Ben-Menashe’s aging mother during a visit to the United States, I popped a question about whether she recalled making meals for Robert Gates. Her eyes immediately brightened and she responded in the affirmative. “Yes, Bobby Gates,” she said.

I thought I had Ben-Menashe tripped up another time after he insisted he had met with Gates in April 1989 during a trip to Paramus, New Jersey. I even pinned the time down, to the afternoon of April 20, 1989 because Ben-Menashe had been under Customs surveillance that morning.

Since Gates denied knowing Ben-Menashe at all, it was a perfect test for determining which one was lying.

It was before Gates’s CIA confirmation, so I brought the information about the alleged New Jersey meeting to Senate Intelligence Committee staffers. They checked on Gates’s whereabouts and came back to me, laughing. They said Gates had a perfect alibi for that day. They said Gates had been with Sen. Boren at a speech in Oklahoma.

But when I cross-checked that claim, it turned out that Gates’s Oklahoma speech had been on April 19, a day earlier, and that Boren had not been present. I also discovered that Gates had returned to Washington by that evening.

So where was Gates the next day? Could he have taken a quick trip to northern New Jersey?

Since senior White House national security officials keep detailed daily calendars, it should have been easy for Boren’s investigators to check Gates’s scheduled meetings and corroborate his alibi with a few interviews.

After I pointed out their screw-up on the Oklahoma speech, the committee staffers agreed to check again on the right date. They later called me back saying that Gates’s personal White House calendar showed no trip to New Jersey and that Gates had denied taking such a trip. That was good enough for the committee, they said.

But the investigators couldn’t (or wouldn’t) tell me where Gates was that afternoon or with whom. They also acknowledged that they interviewed no alibi witnesses. And they rebuffed my later request to review their copy of Gates’s calendar, which they claimed to have returned to him.

For his part, Gates wrote in his memoir that “the allegations of meetings with me around the world were easily disproved for the committee by my travel records, calendars, and countless witnesses.” But none of Gates’s supportive evidence was made public by Gates, by the Intelligence Committee, or by later inquiries into the Iran-hostage allegations or the Iraq-gate scandal.

Not one of Gates’s “countless witnesses” who could vouch for Gates’s whereabouts was identified. Perhaps most galling for those of us who were trying to assess Ben-Menashe’s credibility was the committee’s failure in 1991 to fully test Ben-Menashe’s claim about the April 20, 1989, meeting.

Calendar Revealed

It wasn’t until 2007 after Gates had become George W. Bush’s Defense Secretary (replacing Donald Rumsfeld) that I finally secured a copy of Gates’s calendar from the National Archives, via a Freedom of Information Act request.

I quickly leafed through the FOIA packet and pulled out the April 20, 1989, page. I finally thought I had the proof to confront Ben-Menashe with a clear-cut lie.

The calendar showed Gates with a full slate of White House meetings through the afternoon, including a public signing ceremony for the Space Council at 1:05 p.m., an Oval Office meeting with Belize’s Prime Minister Manuel Esquivel at 3 p.m., and a session with two journalists John Cochran and Sandy Gilmore at 4 p.m.

However, before I challenged Ben-Menashe to his face, I thought I should check out the calendar as best I could, given the lapse of 18 years and the likelihood that memories of Gates’s routine meetings with White House staff might be especially hazy.

Still, I could ask the archivists at the George H.W. Bush Library to check for photos of the public signing event. A picture of Gates would surely nail down that part of the time window. There also are sign-in sheets for Oval Office meetings like the one with the prime minister, so that would cover mid-afternoon. And the reporters might recall a White House sit-down with Gates.

It didn’t seem likely that Ben-Menashe could slip away from such conclusive proof.

So, at my request, the archivists located both still photos and video footage of the Space Council event. The images covered pretty much the entire room, but to my surprise, Gates was nowhere to be seen. I then got the sign-in sheet for the Oval Office meeting. Gates’s name was missing.

When I tracked down the two reporters, neither had any recollection of the interview with Gates.

In other words, there were still holes in Gates’s alibi for the time frame that Ben-Menashe had indicated for their meeting in northern New Jersey. Although these lapses do not prove that Gates did sneak off for a quick trip, the gaps did kill my plan of confronting the Israeli with hard evidence that he had lied.

The flawed alibi also represents another indictment of the Senate Intelligence Committee under Boren and his then-chief of staff George Tenet. In 1991, it would have been simple to check with Gates’s alibi witnesses whose memories would have been much fresher and who could have easily checked their notes.

Instead, Boren and Tenet essentially accepted Gates’s word and the reliability of his calendar entries, which at least in several instances appeared to be false.

In his 1996 memoir, Gates thanked his friend, David Boren, for pushing through his CIA nomination. “David took it as a personal challenge to get me confirmed,” Gates wrote.

Fouling Investigations

The dismissal of Ben-Menashe’s claim that he met with Gates in April 1989 had consequences for other related investigations, since Ben-Menashe also had placed Gates, along with George H.W. Bush, at a secret meeting between Republicans and Iranians in Paris in October 1980. That was when Jimmy Carter was still president and 52 Americans were being held hostage in Iran.

According to Ben-Menashe, Israeli intelligence officers were in Paris to coordinate arms shipments to Iran that the Republicans would approve once Ronald Reagan entered the White House in January 1981. In October 1980, Bush was Reagan’s vice presidential running mate, and Carter was desperate to gain freedom for the hostages before the November 1980 election.

As part of the alleged Paris deal, the Iranians were to release the hostages only after Carter lost reelection. (As it turned out, Iran let the hostages go immediately after Reagan was sworn in on Jan. 20, 1981.)

The repudiation of Ben-Menashe’s credibility helped shut the door on a 1992 congressional inquiry into the so-called October Surprise case, despite a good deal of corroborating evidence of a Republican-Iranian deal in Paris.

The House October Surprise Task Force was wrapping in December 1992 with a finding of Reagan-Bush innocence when a flood of evidence incriminating the Republicans arrived late (enough to prompt chief counsel Lawrence Barcella to unsuccessfully request an extention of the inquiry).

Instead, the task force leaders – Reps. Lee Hamilton, D-Indiana, and Henry Hyde, R-Illinois – chose to press ahead with the previous conclusion, that there was no credible evidence implicating Reagan, Bush, Gates or Casey, who had been Reagan’s campaign chief in 1980.

But there was still one more twist for the task force. In January 1993, just days before the task force findings were due for release, an extraordinary report was delivered from the Russian government, responding to an earlier request for information from Hamilton.

According to this Russian report, Soviet-era intelligence records revealed that Bush, Gates and Casey participated in secret contacts with Iranian officials to delay release of the U.S. hostages in Iran.

“R[obert] Gates, at that time a staffer of the National Security Council in the administration of Jimmy Carter, and former CIA Director George Bush also took part” in a meeting in Paris in October 1980, according to the Russian report.

Despite its explosive information, the Russian Report was kept hidden by the House October Surprise Task Force, which went ahead with its exculpatory findings. Later, I discovered the report when I gained access to some of the task force’s unpublished files.

Years later, Hamilton told me that he had never seen the report, although it was addressed to him. Barcella acknowledged that he might never have forwarded the report to Hamilton. [For the text of the Russian report, click here. To view the actual U.S. embassy cable that includes the Russian report, click here.]

Weapons Shipments

Despite lingering uncertainties about the details of the October Surprise case, what is beyond dispute is that once in office, President Reagan did permit weapons to flow to Iran via Israel. One of the Israeli planes carrying an arms shipment was shot down over the Soviet Union on July 18, 1981, after straying off course, but the incident drew little attention at the time.

The secret arms flow continued, on and off, until late 1986 when the Iran-Contra scandal – another case of arms-for-hostages dealing with Iran – broke into public view. [For more details, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

Regarding the Iran-Contra scandal – which might be viewed as the sequel to the October Surprise case – independent counsel Walsh chose not to indict Gates, though Walsh’s final report didn’t endorse Gates’s credibility either. After recounting discrepancies between Gates’s Iran-Contra recollections and those of other CIA officials, Walsh wrote:

“The statements of Gates often seemed scripted and less than candid. Nevertheless, given the complex nature of the activities and Gates’s apparent lack of direct participation, a jury could find the evidence left a reasonable doubt that Gates either obstructed official inquiries or that his two demonstrably incorrect statements were deliberate lies.”

For his part, Gates also denied any wrongdoing in the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostage deal and expressed only one significant regret – that he acquiesced to the decision to withhold from Congress the Jan. 17, 1986, presidential intelligence “finding” that gave some legal cover to the Iran arms shipments.

Besides the questions about whether Gates lied to protect himself and his superiors in these scandals involving Iran, Iraq and Israel, Gates also faced charges from senior colleagues inside the CIA’s analytical division that he corrupted their standards for providing honest assessments to U.S. policymakers.

Once Casey became Reagan’s CIA director in 1981, Gates was put on the fast track for career success. Shoving aside more senior officials, Gates rose quickly to head the CIA’s analytical division, where he reversed decades of CIA traditions regarding objective analysis.

In that job – and later as Casey’s deputy director – Gates oversaw an analytical division that began exaggerating dangers abroad to justify Reagan’s massive military buildup. Instead of seeing the signs of a coming Soviet collapse, Gates’s analytical product conjured up a Soviet empire gaining on all fronts.

To fit with Reagan’s geopolitical needs, Gates’s CIA also downplayed real dangers that ironically would emerge as greater threats today. For instance, analysts who warned about Pakistan’s secret work on a nuclear bomb were ignored and even punished, apparently because the Reagan administration needed Pakistan’s help in supporting anti-Soviet mujahedeen rebels in Afghanistan.

At Gates’s confirmation hearings in 1991, former CIA analysts, including renowned Kremlinologist Melvin A. Goodman, took the extraordinary step of coming out of the shadows to accuse Gates of politicizing intelligence. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “The Mysterious Robert Gates.”]

‘Wise Man’

Despite this checkered record for wisdom and truth-telling, Gates today is renowned across Washington as a modern “wise man.” In 2009, Washington Post columnist David Broder, the late “dean of the Washington press corps,” hailed Gates as “incapable of dissembling.”

Now, as Gates prepares to retire as Defense Secretary in late June, he is being showered with rose petals of official praise. His insights – like the one about governments lying to one another – are greeted with appreciative chuckles and appreciation for his “candor.”

At Wednesday’s hearing before the Senate Appropriations Committee, which was billed as his last congressional appearance as Defense Secretary, Gates was depicted in the media as a straight talker who had run out of patience with America’s erstwhile allies and the political posturing of Congress.

Despite his curt responses to questions from Leahy and others, the New York Times reported that “Wednesday’s hearing … was in fact mostly a lovefest as members of the committee lavished praise on Mr. Gates. On June 30 he is to walk out of the Pentagon and into a life of writing books lakeside near Seattle.

“‘Secretary Gates, I look forward to you coming home to our home state,’ Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, said at one point in the hearing. ‘I know you must be looking forward to that.’

“‘Fifteen days,’ Mr. Gates replied, to laughter.”

It is probably not likely that Gates will use his book writing to tell the full truth and nothing but the truth about what he did as a government official. After all, as Gates has made clear, lying is “the way business gets done.”

[For more on these topics, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege and Neck Deep, now available in a two-book set for the discount price of only $19. For details, click here.]

Edited July 27, 2012 by Steven Gaal

[Steven Gaal]

? ? ? ?

No security at Israeli swimmers' Olympic training camp

‎

Ynetnews - 13 hours ago

Culture, Sports: Team holds training camp in England with no security measures in place at site. Israeli officials refusing to take responsibility; ...

Edited July 27, 2012 by Steven Gaal

[Len Colby]

Gaal has a history of suggesting Jews have a habit of faking attacks against themselves

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=16873entry211210

Despite his confusing opening post suggesting that Abu Nidal was responsible for the Achille Lauro Hijacking that was NOT the case. That attack was carried out by the Palestine Liberation Front a group Nidal was never associated with. There is no dispute over responsibility for the hijacking, the PLO admitted responsibility, the leaders were known and captured.

His star witness Ben-Menashe is anything but reliable. Working for dictator Robert Mugabe he set up Morgan Tsvangirai. The judge in Tsvangirai's trial described him as "rude, unreliable, and contemptuous." He failed lie detector tests given by ABC News and anti-establishment journalists Craig Unger, one of the few to have ever cited him said "Listen to him, trust him, print his story verbatim — then sit round and watch your career go up in flames"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ari_Ben-Menashe#cite_note-Unger-4

The 'logic' that Abu Nidal was working for the Mossad because his attacks made the Palestinians look bad could be applied to just about any terrorist group. Only a true believer would be impressed by unnamed 'experts' cited by obscure sources.

[Steven Gaal]

Only a true believer would be impressed by unnamed 'experts' cited by obscure sources.// END COLBY

=======================================

Gee I think ,"Robert Fisk, in The Independent" knows more about the Middle East than Colby.

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Ari Ben-Menashe is more Relible source than Defense Secretary Robert Gates .

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Yes its troubling about Robert Mugabe and Ari Ben-Menashe and I thought you might bring it up. However I felt that I had a response. Gary Mack had $$ problems and he turned to the DARK SIDE IMHO. If one person turns from the truth and then sells out ,gives up to the evil side....thats what people do,thats life.

Frank Sinatra That's Life

==========================

Edited July 27, 2012 by Steven Gaal

[Len Colby]

Fisk attributed this to “documents...written by Saddam Hussein's security services” this raises two questions 1) were the documents authentic? It would be the 1^st time Fisk had fallen for a fake one nor the 2^nd he'd gotten his facts wrong. 2) IF they were real were the Iraqis right?

http://honestreporting.com/independent-admits-robert-fisk-story-was-false/

Ari Ben-Menashe is more Relible source than Defense Secretary Robert Gates .

That might well be the case but Gates is irrelevant to this discussion.

Ben-Menashe was unreliable well before his involvement with Mugabe, see what Unger said about him back in 1992 and note his failure to pass a lie detector test given him by ABC News in 1990

[Steven Gaal]

THE POLYGRAPH NOT OVERRATED.....ITS JUST A LIE. GAAL

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

xxxx, xxxx, Set the Polygraph on Fire

from cfif.org

Dr. William Marston, creator of the comic strip Wonder Woman, penned under the pseudonym of Charles Moulton, now has people amused by another of his creations — the lie detector test.

A new report from the National Academies' National Research Council supports what many junk science opponents have long argued: lie detector (polygraph) tests, which measure heart rate, respiratory rate and perspiration during interrogation, are too flawed to be relied upon and do not justify the government's heavy use.

Former FBI head J. Edgar Hoover had great enthusiasm for the lie detector.Consequently, it became a routinely used tool by the FBI in its investigations of crimes, employee screenings and spy matters. U.S. police forces, the Pentagon and other government departments followed suit. Just this past spring, another former FBI Director, William Webster, filed a report with the FBI about the Robert Hanssen Soviet-spy incident, criticizing the Bureau for its procedures and recommending a major expansion of lie detector use in ferreting out traitors.

The overuse of polygraph tests has also spread to the private sector. Some insurers now use lie detector technology when policyholders call to make a claim. Polygraph tests became so routine in workplace investigations that Congress passed the Federal Employee Polygraph Protection Act in 1998, banning the use of polygraphs in most private employment settings.

Yet numerous exceptions to the ban remain, including the permitted use in situations involving public employees, job applicants to drug manufacturers, job applicants to security firms, and in cases where an employer (public or private) is investigating a financial loss with reasonable suspicion that a specific employee was involved. Privacy concerns plague the polygraph's use, including maintenance and disclosure of results.

The Supreme Court ruled in 1973 that the "jury is the lie detector" and there is a per se inadmissibility rule for polygraph tests. Though courts do not permit lie detector results to be entered as evidence because they are too unreliable, polygraphs are still commonly used by investigators, prosecutors and even by suspects proclaiming their innocence. O.J. Simpson is rumored to have flunked; the parents of Jon Benet Ramsey proclaimed to have passed.

For many years, there has been no consensus in the scientific community over the reliability of polygraph evidence. Bill Casey, former CIA chief, commented on the ease with which one can manipulate the test. Entire web sites, such as PassaPolygraph.com, are devoted to teaching methods to fool the lie detector.

Yet, at least until now, tens of thousands of polygraphs are given each year. Lie detection is big business, with one Texas-based polygraph examiner reporting he receives over $50,000 annually from his client, the City of Arlington, to conduct about 40 polygraph tests a month.

The study by the National Research Council, which took almost two years to complete, will be discussed by Congress early next year. Dr. Stephen Fienberg, a prominent computer scientist who headed the panel of experts that produced the report, stated: "National security is too important to be left to such a blunt instrument." At a recent press conference, he added: "We believe that testing yields a choice between two unsatisfactory results: either too many loyal employees may be falsely judged as deceptive, or too many major security threats could go undetected."

The Department of Energy commissioned the study after the embarrassing Los Alamos fiasco. There, Wen Ho Lee, an experienced scientist at Los Alamos, underwent a series of polygraph tests, which were the basis of accusations against him of passing nuclear secrets to China, charges for which he was later exonerated.

The good news for parents is that the study results may culminate in a massive government sale of unreliable polygraph machines, making them more readily available to Robert DeNiro wannabes who can conduct Meet the Parents-like interrogations in their basements. The bad news is that the study recommends further research into other truth-screening methods, like brain fingerprinting, voice tremor analysis and thermal imaging

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see http://antipolygraph.org/pubs.shtml

The Lie Behind the Lie Detector is free for non-commercial use and distribution.

Edited July 28, 2012 by Steven Gaal

[Len Colby]

Yes experts disagree about the reliability of the polygraph. Most of the false positives were people suspected of murder or other serious crimes, thus it is especially surprising Menashe failed. Many intel ops can pass even when they are guilty Menashe claimed to be an intel op thus it is especially surprising he failed. But if if we dismiss his failure to pass the lie detector test we still have Unger telling us he was unreliable.