by Trowbridge H. Ford
Whenever anything terrible and surprising happens, the media are quick to fill the gap with hastily-written stories about how predictable it all was, and who is obviously responsible, leading the public to a rush to judgment which no amount of conflicting evidence and more deliberate analysis later can ever shake. Decades later, if ever, the public is still without any real clue about what really happened.
Just think of what happened in Dallas when President Kennedy was assassinated, when the Watergate burglars were discovered to have had the closest connections to Tricky Dick Nixon's White House, and when a Contra C-123K resupply plane from Mena's Intermountain Regional Airport in Arkansas was shot down over Nicaragua in October 1986. How many people still believe Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated JFK, the Watergate break-in was just a third-rate burglary, and that Iran-Contra was just the well-meaning Reagan exchanging arms for hostages?
Now that Chechen rebels have apparently massacred nearly 350 inhabitants in North Ossetia's Beslan, the press is quick to announce that it was all so predictable, given what Russian security forces have been doing in Chechyna, though the leading Chechen rebel group has denied the claim, and Moscow has not even provided a list of who participated in the outrage, how and why the carnage really started, and what has happened to the hostage-takers. All it has done is show one hostage-taker, it seems, who denies having done any of the killing, and expressing his deepest sorrow over what the Chechens did, though this must have been the result of torture. Russia's defence minister, Sergei Ivanov, has volunteered that none of the hostage-takers were Chechens.
Certainly, before we rush to yet another judgment, we should consider other possibilities - who had the motive, means, and opportunity to do the deed - and I suggest this just for something a little different.
Since the American election campaign is entering its final stages, with President George W. Bush having been renominated by the Republican National Convention just last Thursday night in New York, Israel's Mossad and former President William J. Clinton lost no time in making sure that Democratic challenger John F. Kerry, Senator from Massachusetts, was well and truly finished by staging, it seems, staggering incidents the next day. Meir Dagan's Mossad, it seems, made family security in the developed countries the leading counterterrorist issue by having his agent Abu Musab Zarqawi decimate the hostages being held in Beslan, while Slick Willie took a powder from Kerry's campaign -after his exacting tour promoting his autobiography, and his cosmetic efforts to promote the Northern Ireland peace process - by ducking into Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital for a quadruple heart bypass operation which was hardly pressing, if needed at all.
The Mossad has long been looking to place the struggle against terrorism back on an East-Wast axis - what the preemptive war by America and Britain with Saddam's Iraq threw completely off course. With France, Germany, and Russia disenchanted with what America, Britain, and Israel are attempting, Tel Aviv had to come up with some quick solution to the international chaos. Despite all the hoopla about another terrorist attack on New York, or finally in London, the prime target was Russia which was threatening to give teeth to Iran's ambition to develop nuclear energy, and possibly become a nuclear power - what Tel Aviv is firmly committed to preventing any country in the Middle East from becoming. Furthermore, Moscow was backing the PLO call for sancttions in the General Assembly against Israel for building the wall across Palestine.
To set the scene, the FBI finally acknowledged its investigation of the spying activities by the American-Israel Political Action Committee's Lawrence Franklin and others for Israel, and Tel Aviv allowed two female Hamas suicide bombers to pull off the bus bombings in Beersheba. Of course, the Bureau investigation of Franklin and other Jewish neo-cons inside the Bush administration will get no further than its inquiries into the leak of Joe Wilson's CIA wife's, Valerie Plame's, name to journalist Robert Novac to get back at him for having shot down the claim that Saddam Hussein had sought yellowcake from Niger. Both leaks will be seen as honest mistakes by well-meaing Americans who did the national interest no harm.
The bus bombings let Tel Aviv off the hook for having assassinated Hamas spiritual leader Sheik Yassin, and several of its political ones in response to its botched assassination attempt on Khalid Meshaal in Jordan back in 1997 - the assassination model for the murder last year of Dr. David Kelly. Israel has long shown that it is willing to sacrifice not only the citizens of friendly countries but also its own to achieve a permanent settlement for Greater Israel at the expense of the Palestinian Occupied Territories.
Female suicide bombers have increasingly become the Mossad's preferred method of assassination and terror. As Israel has seen its enemies in more massive terms, it has endorsed the use of more destructive terror to make sure that its battle to beat all is successful. Suicide bombers have become the trigger for what it used to rely upon single assassins - whether committed, hired, or brain-washed - to achieve. Female suicide bombers from any quarter can be easily recruited if their spouses have been killed, and the source of their recruitment is kept strictly secret.
Ever since the Mossad took out Abu Nidal in preparation for the attack on Iraq, the Israeli intelligence service has been hard pressed for new 'false-flag' operators who could carry out convincing deceptive operations. Nidal had been the convincing PLO dissident who could get rid of individual threats to Tel Aviv's long-term interests like Dr. Gerald Bull, the designer of Saddam's supergun; troublesome moderate underlings of PLO leader Yassar Arafat who were willing to settle for some kind of compromise; or innocent victims in the process, like the El-Al passengers who were checking in at the Rome and Vienna airports in December 1985, in the lead-up to Olof Palme's assassination.
Still, before Saddam was overthrown, the Mossad made good on Zarqawi's alleged reputation and potential with the Iraqi dictator and Nidal. Quite probably, Zarqawi was the leader of Nidal's assassination. In its follow-up to the 9/11 attacks - what it knew about but did nothing to stop, like with the terrorist attacks on the American embassies in Africa - it made it look like he was the supplier of the antrhax-filled letters to Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, and Vermont Senator Patríck Leahy. It seems that they were made possible by growth medium that Lt. Col. Philip Zack, a former researcher at Maryland's Fort Detrick, had made available to Mossad agents, what Zack blamed upon convenient Muslim researchers, and what had the most desireable effect, mobilizing the Democrats behind Bush's war on terror.
When the war on terror started to fizzle out in Iraq, Zarqawi, it seems, established connections through Abu Omar As-Seif with the Chechen rebels, hoping to recruit Chechens to help oust the Coalition from Iraq. At the same time, the Chechen rebels were trying to entice Arabs to join their fight with Moscow, especially because they were willing to become suicide bombers. By now the process has become so confused that few know who is doing exactly what for whom. The only sure sign is that recently the attacks - the ones on the Russian air liners, and the Rizhskaya metro station in Moscow - have been carried out by female suicide bombers, recruited from somewhere.
When the hostage crisis started, the Russian security people were looking for two female suicide bombers, and while the male leaders, headed by Magomed 'Magas' Yevloyev of the Wahhabi sect next to Chechnya who had led the attacks in Indushetia the week before, of the hostage-takers were changing their demands constantly about Chechnya with Moscow, the search for the female suicide bombers became more pressing. When Russian authorities sent in people to recover the bodies of those killed while the hostage-takers were occuping the school, the females apparently blew themselves up, sparking the whole tragedy.
While Moscow stresses what the males were doing in preparation for a long seige with the counterterrorists, apparently part of a sting operation which went so terribly wrong - like 9/11 and the Madrid bombings - they should really be determining who these women were, and who they were working for, especially since Tel Aviv is now calling upon Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov during his visit to join Israel in its fight for the wall, and against terrorism - exactly what the Sharon government did with the Turkish government after the bombings of the synagogues in Istanbul. The female bombers seem linked with Al-Qaeda and/or Israel.
The rush to judgment over Clinton's operation on Labor Day is completely laughable, though the public and the press are acting as if it is completely legitimate, and deserving their concern. This is exactly what Clinton said would never happen in the lead-up to the publication of his book, the party conventions, and the campaign - the former President would be by his side to make sure that Kerry has the best chance to gain the White House.
And this was after Clinton had staffed the Kerry campaign with many of his former, often controversial, unattractive, subordinates - Sandy Berger, Sidney Blumenthal, Harold Ickes, Joe Lockhart, Doug Sosnik, Joel Johnson, Madeleine Albright, media attack-dog James Carville, and others - and they engaged in work that did Kerry no good. Without Clinton by their sides, they have no hidden clout.
Berger, reminiscent of how presidential counselor Bernie Nussbaum was made the fallguy for Vince Foster's possible murder, resigned after it was disclosed that he had apparently removed some documents from the National Archives, though he was ultimately exonerated, and maintained he had done nothing wrong. So why did this leading American Jew in the Clinton administration resign? He wanted to make the Kerry campaign look like a sinking ship, especially for his co-religionists - which it is, with the Democratic challenger now calling hurriedly upon former Dukakis people like John Sasso to help salvage the campaign.
At the same time, Ickes continues to get out 527 advertisements attacking Bush's military service - what the White House has used to justify the most diverting, unfair ads about Kerry's own service. You would think that American troops are still bogged down in the rice paddies of South Vietnam rather than in the sand-filled ones of Iraq. Blumenthal, Clinton's leading, naive apologist, continues to treat readers of his liberal outlets with reassuring stories about how Bush's days in the White House are numbered.
Meanwhile, Clinton was most relaxed at Columbia-Presbyterian, waiting for when the doctors had time on the holiday weekend to give him his operation of choice. Surgeons are notorious for slicing up anyone wanting a cosmetic, covert, or imagined repair, and are quick to speak of their success no matter what sags, the cops nab, or the patient succumbs to later. Of course, Clinton had no heart attack, or signs of heart damage - just that some of the arteries dealing with his heart should be replaced in time.
By the time Clinton recovers, he should get back to campaigning - for Hillary in 2008, just after Bush has been re-elected.
Let's hope that the public sees through this secret work, and its deceptions before then.