Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - Do YOU think Iran is developing nuclear weapons?

host · 05-09-2006, 07:25 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by aceventura3

Does Isreal have a right to exist?

Iranian leaders want to wipe Isreal off the face of the earth. If they act on thier desire we will come to the aid of Isreal therefore Iran will want to wipe us off the face of the earth.

I think its all about Isreal. As a nation we need to face the question of Isreal's right to exist. If the answer is yes - it means war. If the answer is no - we need to leave the middle east alone.

aceventura3, when I read your post, the milk that I was drinking with my cookies, shot out through my nostrils...what a mess!

The question we need to face, ace, is whether Israel runs our foreign policy, and whether we have been manipulated (some of us...) into a perverse, reversed role where the giant acts as the military proxy for the client state, instead of in the traditional role, which is the other way around.

Israel's interests are well taken care of, aceventura3. In fact, U.S. policy has shifted from
"honest broker" in mediating the disputes between Israel and the Palestinians in
the 90's....to the current state of affairs; where it is now impossible to tell
who is in charge of u.S. policy.....Israel...or the Bush administration.

What moderate Arab, Muslim, or Iranian would trust an American president today to
broker a fair deal with Israel, or in any other matter, the way the Palestinians trusted
the POTUS and the State Dept. to be their "broker" in the 90's?

Read about who has recently served on the JINSA advisory board:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=JINSA

Read my OP about JINSA and it's influence on U.S. policy and it's outsized
role in the Bush administration:
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthread.php?t=104074

Read this 21 year old article. Read the description of JINSA, google the names in the article, especially JINSA's first director, Dr. Steve Bryen

Quote:

ALLEGED ARMS SMUGGLER BRAGGED OF ISRAELI DEAL
San Jose Mercury News (CA)
August 9, 1985
Author: PETE CAREY AND ALAN GATHRIGHT, Mercury News Staff Writers

Alleged arms smuggler Paul Sjeklocha met in Israel with then- Defense Minister Ariel Sharon in 1982 and returned with a scheme to sell arms captured during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, according to his former editor at a Santa Clara-based defense magazine.

Sjeklocha, one of seven charged last week with conspiracy to sell arms to Iran, visited Israel on a tour with several retired, high-ranking U.S. military officers, according to Harry V. Martin, former editor of Military Electronics/ Countermeasures, which is no longer published.
Sjeklocha, also known as Paul S. Cutter, returned from his trip and told his editors that he had been asked to be an agent to sell the arms captured in the Lebanon invasion, Martin said.

''I said, 'Hey, we're not in the arms business, and you don't know what you're getting into,' " Martin said.

Sjeklocha visited Israel as a journalist on a tour sponsored by the Jewish Institute of National Security, known as JINSA, according to Shosona Bryen, the group's executive director.

Sjeklocha was accompanied on the tour by retired Lt. Gen. Eugene F. Tighe Jr., who was the chief of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency from 1977 to 1981. The agency coordinates all intelligence activities of the U.S. armed services.

The two met with Sharon and several Israeli military officers as part of the tour, Bryen said Wednesday.

JINSA is a 12,000-member non-profit organization formed in 1976 to improve American Jews' understanding of U.S. defense policy, Bryen said. Its first director was Bryen's husband, Dr. Steve Bryen, who left the post in 1981 to become assistant secretary of defense in charge of stemming the flow of U.S. defense technology to unfriendly nations. Dr. Bryen could not be reached for comment.

Martin said that when Sjeklocha returned, he came "rushing to me and said he was given an offer -- we could sell all the captured equipment from the invasion of Lebanon. I have all the photographs of the equipment. He had made a deal that we could sell these things, but he never told me the source. I felt Paul was (exaggerating) so I didn't take it seriously.

''I told him we are a publishing company, not an arms dealer, that it (arms dealing) is a strange world, you should not be in it," Martin said. "To my knowledge, no one ever pursued it."

Martin said he, his wife and his publisher, Clifford N. Herbstman, were in the office at the time. Herbstman could not be reached for comment.

Sjeklocha, 47, of San Jose is being held in the Seminole County Jail near Orlando, Fla., on charges of conspiracy to smuggle thousands of offensive missiles and military spare parts to Iran, in violation of U.S. export laws.

According to an FBI affidavit filed when Sjeklocha was arrested last week, he bragged of having made $6 million to $9 million in the past two years selling arms to Iran.

The State Department confirmed in 1982 that Israel had sold Iran $27 million in military hardware, including $300,000 worth of spare tires for F-4 fighters and an unknown amount of other F-4 spare parts.

According to Anthony H. Cordesman, a Middle Eastern arms specialist with Analytical Assessments Corp. of Los Angeles, and David Isby, a respected Washington arms analyst, Israel also has exported to Iran arms it captured from the Palestine Liberation Organization during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

The executive director of JINSA described Tighe and Sjeklocha as a "duo" who were added to the tour at the request of the Israeli Embassy in Washington.

Tighe, a member of the JINSA board of advisers, acknowledged he took the trip, but declined to comment on his relationship with Sjeklocha. He said, however, that he was unaware of any Israeli arms deal offer to Sjeklocha.

After his 1982 tour, Sjeklocha wrote some generally favorable stories about Israeli military policy and that country's controversial 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

The articles, written with help from Tighe, ran in special issues of Military Electronics/Countermeasures in January and February of 1983, when Sharon was under intense criticism for the invasion and the following massacre of Palestinian civilians in Beirut refugee camps by Phalangist troops.

Shosona Bryen said Sjeklocha asked the Israeli Embassy for a trip to Israel after the invasion, and the embassy was "trying to attach as many individuals to groups as they could. I was asked if I would take two additional people. The other was Gene Tighe. (He) was right up our alley because we were including retired military officers."

Bryen said Sjeklocha and the others on the tour met Sharon, the Israeli chief of staff and other military spokesmen, visited an air base and watched F-15s take off and land.

''There is nothing very deep about these trips," she said. She said the group was not taken to see captured equipment.

But Sjeklocha, who had flown to Israel separately, stayed in the country after the nine-day JINSA tour ended.

''There might have been things that happened after he left," she said.

In the spring of 1983, Sjeklocha was made a member of JINSA's board of advisers, according to Bryen. Four months later, she removed him from the board because, she said, she suspected he was trading on the connection to "impress" people.

''We disinvited him," Bryen said. "He was kind of trading on it, and I didn't like it. . . . I called him one day and told him I was removing him from the board."

Quote:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story...163563,00.html
If governments are going to rely on intelligence, its reliability is critical

Isabel Hilton
Saturday March 6, 2004
The Guardian

.........Jinsa describes its mandate as two-fold: "To educate the American public about the importance of an effective US defence capability...and to inform the American defence and foreign affairs community about the important role Israel can and does play in bolstering democratic interests in the Mediterranean and the Middle East." Their interests, Chalabi persuaded them, coincided: Saddam, the supporter of Palestinian suicide bombers, the strongest and most troublesome leader in the Arab world and a menace to Israel, should be replaced with a friendly government that would make peace with Israel and become the US's best Arab friend.

The advocates of radical action in the Middle East came to power with Bush. The next steps are now well documented. As Richard Perle once complained: "The CIA has been engaged in a character assassination of Ahmad Chalabi for years now, and it's a disgrace." To bypass such obstacles, an alternative intelligence group - the Office of Special Plans - was created. But there was still a shortage of evidence on two key points: that Saddam had WMD and that he had links to al-Qaida. Step forward Ahmad Chalabi, whose INC benefited from nearly $100m of US taxpayers money, despite Chalabi's conviction for a $300m bank fraud in Jordan. Chalabi, who knows a market when he sees one, claimed his sources inside and outside Iraq could supply the necessary evidence.

In 2001, Colin Powell declared: "He [Saddam Hussein] has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction...our policies have strengthened the security of the neighbours of Iraq." Tony Blair told the Commons in November 2000 that, "We believe that the sanctions regime has effectively contained Saddam Hussein." These assessments coincided with the view of the intelligence services and the inspectors. ............

The influence of JINSA and the Israeli lobby AIPAC, on U.S. policy has cost us a functioning CIA, 2400 troops, 17000 wounded, huge military expenditures, Iraqi occupation and reconstruction costs, many former allies, and ultimately it has cost Bush his presidency. He's squandered it and the American people no longer trust him or believe him....and ....for what?....
It comes down to this question, aceventura3:
What natioal interests are served by US support of Israel?