In response to efforts to involve the US in plans to attack Iran the answer must be never again, argues Jeff Gates* The phony intelligence used to induce the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003 has been dusted off. This time it's being deployed to take the US into Iran. Same scam. Same storyline. Same fraud -- even featuring some of the same players. Except that this time around their deception lacks the broader context required to gain traction for their phony content. That key difference makes today's perpetrators far more transparent -- for those willing to look. Those foisting on the United States this latest fraud also face another challenge: Americans now realise it was Israel and its advocates who fixed that false intelligence around a Zionist agenda. That realisation adds combustibility to the facts now fuelling Israel's fast-fading legitimacy. Each week brings new insights that undermine generally accepted truths about the events on 9/11 and the US response to that mass murder on US soil. As the costs continue to rise in both blood and treasure, the credibility of those who sold this "clash" continues its steady decline. One key player in this long-running fraud remains unfazed: the mainstream media. In March 2002, Israeli- American Jeffrey Goldberg published in the US magazine The New Yorker a story alleging an alliance between the jihadists of Al-Qaeda and the secular Baathists of Iraq. Though an impossible premise, his account made it appear plausible. His collaborator was James Woolsey, a former director of the CIA and an avid Zionist. Woolsey assured the magazine's readers that Iraqi intelligence officials met in Prague with Al-Qaeda. Woolsey's intelligence was "sexed up" to sound credible. Now it is known to be false. All of it. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. In the consistency and common source of this duplicity lies the perilous future of Israel and its fast-shrinking legitimacy as a nation state. The fast-growing worldwide revulsion at all things Israeli suggests that this latest fraud may yet fail -- though not for lack of trying. Goldberg is back with another round of "reporting". Woolsey helped hype his 2002 New Yorker essay, calling it a "blockbuster". That it was. Woolsey, former speaker of the US House of Representatives Newt Gingrich and Richard Perle lobbied the Bush White House in May 2004 to retain Iraqi liar Ahmed Chalabi as the US- favoured leader for Iraq. Perle took two decades to develop Chalabi as an Israeli asset -- at US taxpayer expense. New York Times "reporter" Judith Miller featured as facts Chalabi's fabrications about Iraqi WMD. Meanwhile, Perle took over as chair of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board in 2001, on which Woolsey and Gingrich served. None dare call this treason -- yet. Goldberg is now making the "Evil Doer" case for Iran. Writing in the September 2010 issue of the US magazine The Atlantic, he argues the Israeli case for bombing Iran and urges that the US again join the fray. Woolsey, Gingrich and Perle are pushing the same agenda from the periphery. US senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman, among Chalabi's earliest Congressional supporters, are again vocal in their support of expanding the war. If the US had an honest media, Goldberg would be revealed as a fraud and his cohorts reviled as traitors. Instead, he has been interviewed on the US network MSNBC by Andrea Mitchell, wife of Alan Greenspan, and lionised by US network CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer, who served 17 years with The Jerusalem Post. The probability of Goldberg conceding that he served in the Israeli army is as likely as Blitzer conceding that he wrote a sympathetic book on Israeli master spy Jonathan Pollard. The November 2007 US National Intelligence Estimate confirmed with high confidence that Tehran halted its nuclear weapons programme in the fall of 2003. No credible evidence has been offered that Tehran intends to enrich uranium beyond what is required for fuel and medical applications. In a step that took place late in August, Russia is assisting Iran in shifting 64 tons of low-enriched uranium from a storage site to the reactor chamber as the first of three steps in the long-delayed start-up of Iran's nuclear reactor at Bushehr. If all goes according to plan, Iran's reactor will begin generating electricity in three to four months. As a condition of completing and fuelling the plant, Russia insists that Iran return spent fuel so that the plutonium cannot be extracted for use in developing atomic weapons. To date, the Iranians have produced only 5,300 pounds of low- enriched uranium. Moscow sees this next step as essential to bringing Tehran's nuclear activities under the auspices of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). But what's the Israeli strategy for IAEA compliance? Bomb Iran. What's the US strategy? Follow the lead of our faithful and reliable ally. Tel Aviv portrays the Iranian reactor as an "existential threat" and a sure sign of a pending holocaust. How Likud Party leaders divine that outcome remains obscure. But never mind that minor detail: the mainstream American media can fill in the "never again" blanks. It was during just such a development stage of an Iraqi nuclear facility that Israel attacked and destroyed a nuclear plant at Osirak as it neared completion in June 1981. From here comes a concern that Tel Aviv may attack the Bushehr facility before the reactor rods are lowered into the reactor core. Any attack after the chain reaction begins is certain to release radiation into the atmosphere. Other key factors are also driving Israel in this direction, including the need for a diversion. Tel Aviv is now implicated in the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Al-Hariri. The massive bomb in which Al-Hariri was killed left a crater 10 feet deep and 50 feet across. To date, Syria has been blamed for Al-Hariri's murder, along with Hizbullah. The ensuing instability was cited by Israel as a rationale for its 2006 invasion of Lebanon with the US -- as usual -- widely portrayed as guilty by association. A UN tribunal is now turning the spotlight on Israel's role. The tribunal will add fuel to the ongoing inquiry into the suspicious death of UK nuclear weapons inspector David Kelly, who complained about the "sexed up" intelligence on WMD used to induce the war in Iraq. When waging Information Age warfare, false beliefs are routinely deployed as a form of weaponry to displace facts. That displacement process is much easier when the psychological operations include an emotionally wrenching component: thus the necessity that those selling such an agenda wield influence in the mainstream media. With Israeli dominance also reaching deep into US official decision-making, those in the US military who question today's Zionist narrative are routinely cashiered out of the service. So who remains to counter the disinformation that passes for intelligence? In the US's tattered system of self-governance, who can deploy the facts required to displace the fictions foisted on the American public by Woolsey & co? Answer: you and those with whom you share these facts and analyses. The solution to this corruption requires people willing to tell the truth about what is being done to the US and by whom. Make it personal -- because it is. What is chronicled in these accounts is how organised crime succeeds in plain sight. In a system of governance dependent on facts for the public's informed consent, the mainstream media was an early target of those perpetrating these ongoing psy-ops. Their success traces the domination of this key industry by supporters of this purported ally. The facts are clear and the case is compelling: Israel is not an ally of the US but a reliable enemy. Goldberg, Woolsey, Perle, Gingrich, McCain, Lieberman, Miller, Mitchell, Blitzer, Chalabi & co comprise an army of agents and assets enabled by an industry taken hostage by those destabilising and delegitimising the US -- from within. Should the Zionist state again approach the US for assistance, of any sort, the response must be clear and unequivocal: never again. * The writer served for seven years as counsel to the US Senate Committee on Finance. His latest book is Guilt by Association: How Deception and Self-Deceit took America to War.
