Intelligence Was Cooked in Israel
by Jeffrey Steinberg
According to media accounts, the 10 Downing Street "dossier," cited favorably by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell in his disastrous Feb. 5 report to the United Nations Security Council, was plagiarized from an American graduate school paper, based on information more than a decade old. The scandal that erupted when the Blair dossier hoax hit the press, seriously undermined the credibility of those war party advocates of an immediate Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. As Lyndon LaRouche wrote, Powell was set up by a gang of public relations flacks who can't think straight.
So far so good. But a deeper probe into the scandal reveals that there was good reason that the spin-meisters at the Coalition Information Center—the Washington-London civilian government propaganda unit that crafted both the Blair dossier and major portions of Secretary Powell's own lighter-than-air book of evidence—did not reveal the sources of their information. The entire cooked intelligence picture was "Made in Israel." It was cooked up at a right-wing think-tank complex notorious as a hotbed of radical Likudnik propaganda, and with links to the Office of Vice President Dick Cheney, via his Chief of Staff Lewis Libby and his former client, Marc Rich.
The essential facts are as follows: Two days before Powell's UN appearance, 10 Downing Street issued a 16-page paper, "Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception, and Intimidation," purportedly based on high-level British intelligence data. In fact, at least 11 of the 16 pages were lifted, verbatim, from an Israeli journal, Middle East Review of International Affairs, whose sole proprieter is Dr. Barry Rubin, an American-born Israeli citizen. The 11 pages were drawn from two articles, by Ibrahim al-Marashi and Robert Rabil, that appeared in the September 2002 edition of that journal.
Al-Marashi's article, a profile of Iraqi intelligence, was drawn, largely, from Iraqi government documents confiscated during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Al-Marashi, in turn, heavily footnoted his article to other, earlier stories published in Rubin's obscure online journal, by Amazia Baram, the journal's deputy editor.
This was no bit of grammar school plagiarism. The public relations team that put together the Blair and Powell propaganda drivel were themselves linked to Rubin and his fellow Israeli pranksters, through Ahmed Chalabi's discredited and corrupt Iraqi National Congress (INC). Chalabi, University of Chicago protégé of the late utopian Albert Wohlstetter, then fugitive swindler, was adopted as the Iraqi oppositionist-of-choice by Israeli "X Committee" agent and chairman of the Defense Policy Board Richard Perle and his British Arab Bureau handler, Dr. Bernard Lewis, in the 1980s.
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