"Sometimes an intended epithet can be turned to good advantage...In the sole surviving issue of the Decatur, Texas Times one finds the way Populists not only accepted the label 'calamity howler' but insisted that they had ample reason to howl and would continue to howl until their objectives had been attained." --- THE POPULIST MIND, edited by Norman Pollack
EDITOR\PUBLISHER: A.V Krebs
E-MAIL: avkrebs@comcast.net
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OVERVIEW:
* THE SUNSHINE BOYS CAN'T SAVE IRAQ
By Frank Rich
* TIME TO FACE FACTS ABOUT SURGING IRAQ WAR COSTS
By Kevin Hassett
* A COLD, HARD LOOK AT REALITY IN IRAQ
By James Sterngold
* ISRAEL IS NOT LINKED TO IRAQ, EXCEPT THAT IT IS
By Ethan Bronner
* LANCE'S TRIPLE CROSS BLOWS TWA 800 WIDE OPEN
By Jack Cashill
THE SUNSHINE BOYS CAN'T SAVE IRAQ
By Frank Rich
New York Times
December 10, 2006
IN America we like quick fixes, closure and an uplifting show. Such were the high hopes for the Iraq Study Group, and on one of the three it delivered.
The report of the ten Washington elders was rolled out like a heartwarming Hollywood holiday release. There was a feel-good title, "The Way Forward," unfortunately chosen as well by Ford Motor to promote its last-ditch plan to stave off bankruptcy. There was a months-long buildup, with titillating sneak previews to whip up anticipation. There was the gala publicity tour on opening day, starting with a President Bush cameo timed for morning television and building to a "Sunshine Boys" curtain call by James Baker and Lee Hamilton on "Larry King Live."
The wizard behind it all was the public relations giant Edelman, which has lately been recruited by Wal-Mart to put down the populist insurgency threatening its bottom line. Edelman's vice chairman is Michael Deaver, the imagineer extraordinaire of the Reagan presidency, and "The Way Forward" had a nostalgic dash of that old Morning-in-America vibe.
In The Washington Post, David Broder gushingly quoted one member of the group, Alan Simpson, musing that "immigration, Social Security and all those other things that have been hung up for so long" might benefit from similar ex-officio bipartisanship. Only in Washington could an unelected panel of retirees pass for public-policy Viagra.
Mr. Simpson notwithstanding, the former senator who most comes to mind is Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York. In the early 1990's he famously coined the phrase "defining deviancy down" to describe the erosion of civic standards for what constitutes criminal behavior. In 2006, our governmental ailment is defining reality down. "The Way Forward" is its apotheosis.
This syndrome begins at the top, with the president, who has cut and run from reality in Iraq for nearly four years. His case is extreme but hardly unique. Take Robert Gates, the next defense secretary, who was hailed as a paragon of realism by Washington last week simply for agreeing with his Senate questioners that we're "not winning" in Iraq.
While that may be a step closer to candor than Mr. Bush's "absolutely, we're winning" of late October, it's hardly the whole truth and nothing but. The actual reality is that we have lost in Iraq.
That's what Donald Rumsfeld at long last acknowledged, between the lines, as he fled the Pentagon to make way for Mr. Gates. The most revealing passage in his parting memo listing possible options for the war was his suggestion that public expectations for success be downsized so we would "therefore not 'lose.' "
By putting the word lose in quotes, Mr. Rumsfeld revealed his hand: the administration must not utter that L word even though lose is exactly what we've done. The illusion of not losing must be preserved no matter what the price in blood.
The Iraq Study Group takes a similarly disingenuous tack. Its account of how the country Mr. Bush called a "grave and gathering danger" in September 2002 has devolved into a "grave and deteriorating" catastrophe today is unsparing and accurate. But everyone except the president knew this already, and that patina of realism evaporates once the report moves from diagnosis to prescription.
Its recommendations are bogus because the few that have any teeth are completely unattainable. Of course, it would be fantastic if additional Iraqi troops would stand up en masse after an infusion of new American military advisers. And if reconciliation among the country's warring ethnicities could be mandated on a tight schedule. And if the Bush White House could be persuaded to persuade Iran and Syria to "influence events" for America's benefit. It would also be nice if we could all break the bank in Vegas.
The group's coulda-woulda recommendations are either nonstarters, equivocations (it endorses withdrawal of combat troops by 2008 but is averse to timelines) or contradictions of its own findings of fact. To take just one example: Even if we could wave a magic wand and quickly create thousands more military advisers (and Arabic-speaking ones at that), there's no reason to believe they could build a crack Iraqi army and police force where all those who came before have failed. As the report points out, the loyalties and capabilities of the existing units are suspect as it is.
By prescribing such placebos, the Iraq Study Group isn't plotting a way forward but delaying the recognition of our defeat. Its real aim is to enact a charade of progress to pacify the public while Washington waits, no doubt in vain, for Mr. Bush to return to the real world. The tip-off to the cynical game can be found in a single sentence: "We agree with the goal of U.S. policy in Iraq, as stated by the president: 'an Iraq that can govern itself, sustain itself, and defend itself.' "
This studious group knows that even that modest goal, a radical devaluation of the administration's ambition to spread democracy throughout the Middle East, has long been proven a mirage. The Iraqi government's ability to defend anything is so inoperative that the group's members visited the country but once, with just one (Chuck Robb) daring to leave the Green Zone. The Bush-Maliki rendezvous ten days ago was at the Four Seasons hotel in Amman.
The only recommendations that might alter that reality, however evanescently, come not from "The Way Forward" but from its critics on the right who want significantly more troops and no withdrawal timetables whatsoever. But a Pentagon review leaked to The Washington Post three weeks ago estimates that a true counterinsurgency campaign would "require several hundred thousand additional U.S. and Iraqi soldiers as well as heavily armed Iraqi police," not the 20,000 or so envisioned as a short-term booster shot by John McCain.
Since these troops don't exist and there is no public support in either America or Iraq for mobilizing them, the president can't satisfy the hawks even if he chooses to do so. Since he's also dead set against a prompt withdrawal, we already know what his policy will be, no matter how many "reviews" he conducts. He will stay the course, with various fake-outs along the way to keep us from thinking we've "lost," until the whole mess is deposited in the lap of the next president.
But as Chuck Hagel said last week, "The impending disaster in Iraq is unwinding at a rate that we can't quite calibrate." It is yet another, even more reckless flight from reality to suppose that the world will stand still while we dally. The Iraq Study Group's insistence on dragging out its deliberations until after Election Day for the sake of domestic politics mocked and undermined the urgency of its own mission.
Meanwhile the violence metastasized. Eleven more of our soldiers were killed on the day the group finally put on its show. The antagonists in Iraq are not about to take a recess while we celebrate Christmas. The mass exodus of Iraqis, some 100,000 per month, was labeled "the fastest-growing refugee crisis in the world" by Refugees International last week and might soon rival Darfur's.
THE Iraq-Vietnam parallels at this juncture are striking. In January 1968, L.B.J. replaced his arrogant failed defense secretary, Robert McNamara, with a practiced Washington hand, Clark Clifford. The war's violence boiled over soon after (Tet), prompting a downturn in American public opinion.
Allies in our coalition of the willing --- Thailand, the Philippines, Australia --- had balked at tossing in new troops. Clifford commissioned a re-evaluation of American policy that churned up such ideas as a troop pullback, increased training of South Vietnamese forces and a warning to the South Vietnamese government that American assistance would depend on its performance. In March, a bipartisan group of wise men (from Dean Acheson to Omar Bradley) was summoned to the White House, where it seconded the notion of disengagement.
But there the stories of Vietnam and Iraq diverge. Those wise men, unlike the Iraq Study Group, were clear in their verdict. And that Texan president, unlike ours, paid more than lip service to changing course. He abruptly announced he would abjure re-election, restrict American bombing and entertain the idea of peace talks.
But as Stanley Karnow recounts in "Vietnam: A History," it was already too late, after some 20,000 casualties and three years of all-out war, for an easy escape: "The frustrating talks were to drag on for another five years. More Americans would be killed in Vietnam than had died there previously. And the United States itself would be torn apart by the worst internal upheavals in a century."
The lesson in that is clear and sobering: As bad as things may seem now, they can yet become worse, and not just in Iraq. The longer we pretend that we have not lost there, the more we risk losing other wars we still may salvage, starting with Afghanistan.
The members of the Iraq Study Group are all good Americans of proven service to their country. But to the extent that their report forestalls reality and promotes pipe dreams of one last chance for success in this fiasco, it will be remembered as just one more delusional milestone in the tragedy of our age.
TIME TO FACE FACTS ABOUT SURGING IRAQ WAR COSTS
By Kevin Hassett
Bloomberg
December 11, 2006
The report by the Iraq Study Group added fuel to the fiery foreign and defense-policy debate last week. But it also focused the attention of budget experts on the past and future costs of the war.
As one pores through the spending numbers, one thing is clear: The costs will be steep no matter what. The open question is, will Congress continue to act as if that doesn't matter?
While opinions differ sharply on the best way to help Iraq make the transition to an acceptable future, there is fairly broad agreement among economists about the numbers. One can project with some precision the different possible budget paths that would occur depending on whether the war goes well or continues to go poorly. Those different paths could have an enormous impact on our fiscal future.
Lee Hamilton, co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group, suggested last week that the costs of the war may rise to more than $1 trillion. While that number may seem sensationalistic, the basic logic behind it is easy to reconstruct. Things could be that bad, but it will depend on how soon the U.S. is able to extricate itself from the situation.
As of fiscal year 2006, Congress had appropriated $437 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and for the global war on terror overall. The latest numbers added $70 billion to that total, bringing the amount spent on all three operations to $507 billion. It is not easy to go from those numbers to a cost for the Iraq war in isolation because the Department of Defense doesn't break out their individual costs. A recent study by the Congressional Research Service attributed about 75% ($379 billion) of that total to the Iraq war. Given those numbers, the research service estimated that Operation Iraqi Freedom cost $6.4 billion a month, a number that has climbed recently to $8 billion a month.
We would have to spend $621 billion more to push the costs of the Iraq war to $1 trillion. Assuming it costs $8 billion a month, then we would have to be at that level for 78 months, almost six and a half years, to spend that much. It seems likely the costs will rise. After all, salaries, equipment and fuel will all become more expensive. If the average cost per month rises to $10 billion, then it would take about 62 months to push the costs to $1 trillion. While it is impossible to feel a great deal of confidence about what the future may hold, it seems pessimistic to assert that the current level of expenditure would endure for so long.
An alternative path would see the U.S. gradually reducing the level of troops engaged in the war on terror, including forces in Iraq. One recent Congressional Budget Office estimate looked at the possibility of a drawdown from the current level of about 258,000 troops engaged in those conflicts to 74,000 by 2010, staying steady at that level thereafter. In this scenario, the cost of the conflicts would be about $371 billion between 2007 and 2016, lifting the cost of the Iraq war and war on terror operations to about $800 billion.
It may be possible to be more optimistic than that, but prudent budgeting probably shouldn't take that flight of fancy. That means the likely budgetary costs of the Iraq war are enormous going forward, even in the best-case scenario. A high cost, of course, doesn't imply that the policy isn't working. Given the current state of affairs, it may well be that any alternative path would be less desirable. But it does raise an important fiscal policy issue.
Democrats made a big deal in the last election about introducing Paygo rules that enforce responsible budgeting. But there is a very real risk that almost all the incremental cost of the Iraq war will be excluded from the new rules. As we enter the budget season, it is important to recognize that new rules will accomplish nothing if the debates are about hypothetical budgets that have nothing to do with reality.
Keeping a war with enormous costs out of the Paygo process, even when the more optimistic future scenarios have a heavy cost, disguises the fiscal-policy problem. The fact is the Iraq war may well require about half a trillion dollars over the next five years, and an expenditure like that necessitates tough choices. Making room for that much spending will likely require cuts in other programs or tax increases or both. When Paygo legislation and budgets are drawn up early next year, Iraq should be part of the picture. Anything else is self deception.
(KEVIN HASSETT is director of economic-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He was chief economic adviser to Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona during the 2000 primaries. The opinions expressed are his own.)
A COLD, HARD LOOK AT REALITY IN IRAQ
By James Sterngold
San Francisco Chronicle
December 7, 2006
Of the many grim messages in the Iraq Study Group's report, one of the most unexpected was the panel's suggestion that the United States has to address not a single crisis but two --- one in Iraq and another at home.
"Many Americans are dissatisfied, not just with the situation in Iraq but with the state of our political debate regarding Iraq," the panel's co-chairmen, James Baker and Lee Hamilton, said in a letter to President Bush that accompanied the report.
It was startling enough that a bipartisan study group would essentially repudiate a president's policies in the middle of a war and propose that the administration dismantle and replace virtually its entire approach to Iraq. But what was even more striking was the degree to which panel members veered into a harsh assessment of how toxic domestic politics have become --- and how the deep divisions in Washington make the prospects in Iraq even more perilous.
"Our country deserves a debate that prizes substance over rhetoric," said the letter.
Several panel members said the rancor in Washington has to be replaced by the search for common ground --- otherwise there is even less hope of retrieving some kind of success from what the panel described as the "grave and deteriorating" situation in Iraq.
"As I told the president this morning, this war has badly divided this country," Leon Panetta, a former Bay Area congressman, said in a press conference Wednesday morning. "This country cannot be at war and be as divided as we are today," he said he told Bush. "You've got to unify this country."
Many of the Iraq Study Group's recommendations had been leaked and debated for weeks. But what was not expected was that the group, established earlier this year by Congress, would insist on fundamental changes not just in Baghdad but in Washington.
"U.S. foreign policy is doomed to failure --- as is any course of action in Iraq --- if it is not supported by a broad, sustained consensus," said the letter to Bush. "The aim of our report is to move our country toward such a consensus."
None of the study group members explicitly criticized Bush or his conservative advisers, who were among the most uncompromising supporters of the war. But Alan Simpson, the retired Republican senator from Wyoming, lambasted "100-percenters" --- people who took inflexible views on Iraq policy and refused to consider alternatives. "A 100-percenter is a person you don't want to be around," Simpson said. "They have gas, ulcers, heartburn and B.O. They're not seekers; they're seethers."
Panetta said in an interview with The Chronicle that Simpson had made it clear during the study group's meetings that he had some neoconservative policymakers and Republican hard-liners in mind. "Policy in this town has been determined by those who have very simple ideas," said Panetta, who was President Bill Clinton's chief of staff.
Sandra Day O'Connor, the retired Supreme Court Justice, agreed with other panel members that the problems in Iraq go beyond policies on the ground there. She said she had not appreciated how dire the situation was, and she issued what amounted to a plea for Americans to come together behind a new policy that both parties can agree on. "It is my belief that if a large segment of our country gets behind the recommendations, we can make some progress," she said.
Panetta warned in the interview that if Bush does not reach out and construct a bipartisan policy with Democrats for a change in course, an even deeper domestic confrontation is in store. "If there is continued conflict on this issue, make no mistake about it, Congress will cut off the money or demand withdrawal of our troops," Panetta said. "That may happen. But it's a horrible way for this country to run foreign policy."
The study group members said several times on Wednesday that they would not directly criticize the Bush administration's decision to launch the war in Iraq or the way it had handled the deteriorating security environment. But the report's 79 recommendations take apart, one by one, many of the president's key policies. And in many of those instances, the report touches on critical domestic political issues that have grown increasingly tense and partisan.
For instance, the White House has long played down the costs of the Iraq war, and it has disputed some of the long-term projections by Congress, think tanks and policy experts of how expensive the war will prove.
The study group stated flatly that, in addition to the terrible human toll, the war is costing $8 billion a month, that it already has drained about $400 billion from the country and eventually it could cost $2 trillion, which would make it by far the most costly war in U.S. history. Further, the report rejected the way the White House has financed the war, with special supplemental requests, each a few months apart, rather than including the costs in the regular annual defense budget. That has concealed the real costs, the report said.
In a lightly veiled rebuke to the White House, the study group said the "the normal budget process should not be circumvented" --- as administration opponents have long charged --- and that "funding requests for the war in Iraq should be presented clearly to Congress and the American people."
The report also implicitly criticized departing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for driving a wedge between military and civilian leaders. Rumsfeld has been widely criticized for reportedly dismissing advice from his military commanders when it did not fit his own views and for preventing officers from offering candid information and advice to Congress and the White House.
The report recommends that the new defense secretary, Robert Gates, "should make every effort to build healthy civilian-military relations by creating an environment in which the senior military feel free to offer independent advice not only to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon but also to the president."
Panetta said in the interview that, based on the group's meeting with Bush Wednesday morning, he was unsure how much of the report the president will accept. "I guess I want to believe that he understands how bad the situation is and the need for change," Panetta said.
ISRAEL IS NOT LINKED TO IRAQ, EXCEPT THAT IT IS
By Ethan Bronner
New York Times
December 10, 2006
The day after the Baker-Hamilton report on Iraq was released, Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, rejected the part that urged the United States to refocus on the Israeli-Arab conflict because all Middle East issues were, it said, "inextricably linked." Mr. Olmert responded, "The U.S.'s problems in Iraq are entirely independent of the problems between us and the Palestinians."
Yet Mr. Olmert's own recent statements and actions belie his argument. Partly in anticipation of an American shift in policy and partly out of longstanding and growing concern over Iran, he has been pursuing an approach to Israeli interests that involves reaching out to the Palestinians and Iraq's neighbors. It could almost have been taken from the playbook written by James A. Baker III.
In a speech late last month at the grave of Israel's founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, Mr. Olmert called for the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state and said he would seek the help of Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other gulf countries to make that a reality. For the first time he praised elements of a 2002 Saudi-sponsored plan calling for full diplomatic relations between all Arab states and Israel in exchange for such a Palestinian state (under certain conditions). Senior Israeli officials have met in recent months not only with Jordanians and Egyptians but --- most notably --- with Saudis.
The reason: Israel's overriding concern is the rise of Iran and its nuclear program, especially because Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has called often for Israel to be wiped off the map and has dismissed the Holocaust as a myth.
The Sunni states of Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt share Israel's concern about Shiite Iran and worry about its eventual influence in an Iraq that is spinning out of control. So they have made modest gestures toward Israel and the United States and urged them to move ahead with a Palestinian state. Both countries are listening.
"The Saudis are saying to us, 'We are afraid of Iran and want to work with you but the Palestinian issue has to be solved,' " a senior Israeli official said, insisting on anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly. "To some extent this is an excuse but to some extent it is genuine. This is partly what motivated Olmert's speech."
He added that the growing domination of Palestinian politics by Hamas, the militant Islamist group that calls for Israel's destruction and has received Iranian aid, is a threat to secular Arab rulers just as it is to Israel. So they want to boost the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, who favors negotiations with Israel --- and that, too, coincides with Israel's view.
The war last summer between Israel and the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah falls into a similar category. Hezbollah, which is sponsored and armed by Iran, is seeking to take over the Lebanese government. The three current or potential civil wars in the Middle East, then ‹ in Lebanon, Iraq and the Palestinian areas - are therefore all interlinked in Israel's logic, with Iran as the common denominator. The result is that Israeli leaders, while publicly complaining about Mr. Baker's linkage of all Middle Eastern problems, are acting as if there is a connection, and seeking common cause with Arab states over Iran and the Palestinian question.
In fact, this is not new. Michael B. Oren, an Israeli historian with a book coming out next month on American involvement in the Middle East, said he was at a meeting with Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1993 as peace talks with the Palestinians under Yasir Arafat were starting. "He said to the group, 'Why am I embarking on this, taking a risk of talking to Arafat?' " Mr. Oren recalled. " 'The answer is Iran. We have to stabilize our relations with the Arab world in order to deal with the real threat, which is Iran.' So already then, Israel understood that the peace process with the Palestinians begins with Iran."
There are two other reasons Mr. Olmert and other Israelis spoke out against the report's call for linkage: They don't want others to define linkage for them; they want any linkage to be on their terms, out of their own mouths. And they never liked Mr. Baker, whom they considered hostile when he was secretary of state in the early 1990's.
That said, most Israelis and many independent analysts see a straight linkage between the Palestinian question and Iraq as something of a mirage. As Daniel Kurtzer, the former American ambassador to Israel and now a professor at Princeton, put it: "If the United States brokered peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, do you think a single Iraqi gunman would put down his weapon? Not a chance."
And a senior Israeli official made another point. "Why would we want to link our own problem to a nightmare like Iraq? It's a terrible mess there. We don't want it to be thought that until it is solved we can't solve our problem."
LANCE'S TRIPLE CROSS BLOWS TWA 800 WIDE OPEN
By Jack Cashill
WorldNetDaily.com
November 22-23, 2006
Of all the mainstream reporters writing today on the terror front, none has the cojones of five-time Emmy Award winner Peter Lance, author of the new book, Triple Cross: How bin Laden's Master Spy Penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets, and the FBI --- and Why Patrick Fitzgerald Failed to Stop Him.
Lance sets out his thesis in the subtitle of this sprawling, daring epic, but as Lance knows, the most explosive part of his book deals not with Ali Mohamed, the master spy in question, but with the fate of TWA Flight 800. This is the Boeing 747 that blew up mysteriously off the coast of Long island on July 17, 1996.
Triple Cross is sufficiently important that I will take at least two columns to explicate it, the second and perhaps third on Lance's larger thesis, the first on his inquiry into the fate of TWA Flight 800. In the way of full disclosure, Lance and I have over the last year or two shared information on a few of the key elements within the book.
Lance is an honest-to-God boots-on-the-ground reporter. He not only connects the dots, but he also goes out and collects them. In Triple Cross, he puts more real raw red intelligence meat on the table than any other reporter has since 9-11. I would strongly urge you to buy this book, read it, and make it a topic of conversation in every chat room or talk radio show in which you participate.
That much said, I have some real points of disagreement with Lance's arguments. Although Lance pushes the mainstream media to their limits, he has largely stayed within their pale. This I understand, especially on the subject of TWA Flight 800. To mention the word "missile" in that context is to risk losing a TV presence.
On some subjects, however, Lance actively shares mainstream biases. By blinding himself to one area of inquiry --- Iraq --- he does not pull the strongest possible thesis from the data that he himself has collected. Unworried about respectability, and willing to be presumptuous, in next week's column I will help Mr. Lance connect his dots.
No matter how you align them, those dots lead to the fellow we know as Ramzi Yousef. Yousef is the convicted mastermind of both the first World Trade Center bombing and the Bojinka plot, a devious scheme to blow up a dozen airliners over the Pacific. Where Lance moves beyond the mainstream pale is in his argument that Yousef also engineered the destruction of TWA Flight 800 and served as the original architect of September 11.
The evidence that Lance presents is compelling. On January 6, 1995, as is well enough known, a fire broke out in Yousef's Manila apartment where he and his fellow Baluchi, Abdul Hakim Murad, were mixing chemicals. Yousef escaped, but when Murad went back to retrieve Yousef's laptop, Philippine police apprehended him. On the laptop were the Bojinka plans--and more.
Murad was a pilot. In custody he talked to the police about flying a private plane into the CIA building. This was not a far-fetched plan and has been discussed in the press, though not widely. What has not been not discussed, as Lance reveals, was that al Qaeda had already purchased a used Sabre-40 jet in Arizona.
The plans went deeper still. As Lance documents beyond argument, Yousef had hatched an audacious third plot, this one Murad finally revealed when threatened with extradition to Israel. As early as 1994, Yousef had contemplated hijacking multiple airliners and flying them into U.S. targets including the CIA headquarters, the White House, the Sears Tower, and the World Trade Center. Lance interviewed at least two high level Philippine police, and both insist that they turned the planes-as-missiles information to the FBI in January 1995 with the rest of the information. For less than honorable reasons, that information has remained buried, much to the surprise of the Filipinos.
Murad would later tell the FBI, and they would record on a witness report called a "302," that Yousef "wanted to return to the United States . . . to bomb the World Trade Center a second time." Murad had learned to fly in the United States in the early 1990s. He was slated to coordinate the training of the other Islamic pilots. Even after his arrest, and well before the "official" beginning of the September 11 plot, numerous jihadists had enrolled in U.S. flight schools.
In February 1995, Yousef was arrested in Pakistan and eventually returned to New York to stand trial. In the interim, a bomb destroyed the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, for which Murad took credit in Yousef's name. Lance makes the case that Yousef very possibly instructed Nichols in bomb-making during one of Nichols' frequent trips to the Philippines.
In New York City, Murad and Yousef were jailed in cells next to mobster Gregory Scarpa, Jr. Scarpa's father was an FBI informant, and Junior followed in the family tradition. An FBI 302 from March 1996‹four months before the destruction of TWA Flight 800 --- notes the following, "YOUSEF told SCARPA that during the trial they had a plan to blow up a plane and hurt a judge or an attorney so a mistrial will be declared." Yousef also revealed that he had "four people here" to help.
To get beyond the information gleaned from passed notes, the FBI set up a dummy Mafia front company called the "Roma Corporation." Scarpa gave Yousef the number and conned him into believing that the Roma people could patch his calls anywhere in the world. The FBI was, of course, listening in. Yousef outsmarted the FBI by making his critical calls in Baluchi, a language its agents could not translate.
Last year I received an anonymous letter from someone within the National Security Agency. According to the letter's author, he actually saw the transcription of one of Yousef's calls, this one made from New York within minutes of the downing of Flight 800. A recording of that call was sent to the NSA at the request of James Kallstrom, then the head of the FBI's New York office, asking for help in its translation. The NSA forwarded the tape to the Defense Language Institute where it was translated as follows, "What had to be done has been done, TWA 800 (last two words unintelligible)." This year, I received verification from a second NSA source. Lance followed up with this person and confirmed the account.
As Lance reports, "Evidence now suggests that that 'flaw' in the Roma Corp. operation led to the second biggest act of terror and mass murder in U.S. history: the crash of TWA Flight 800." In other words, Yousef used the FBI phone to plot the plane's destruction. The day after the crash, true to his word, Yousef applied for a mistrial claiming that the New York environment was now prejudicial to plane bombers.
Yousef had, in fact, already bombed a plane. In December 1994, he boarded a Japan-bound 747 in Manila, assembled a small bomb on board, and placed it under seat 26K, which he had thought to be right above the center wing tank. Yousef set the time and disembarked at the plane's stop in Cebu City. After the plane took off, the bomb exploded, killing a Japanese passenger but narrowly missing the center wing tank. The pilots wrestled the plane to an emergency landing on Okinawa.
In Triple Cross, Lance argues that a Yousef acolyte likely planted a comparable bomb on the TWA 800 leg from Athens to New York, this time right above the center wing tank. Whether accurate or not, and more on this next week, Lance makes a significantly more credible argument for the downing of TWA Flight 800 than does the NTSB, while using the very same evidence. He does not contest the notorious zoom-climb scenario that the authorities concocted. He does not need to.
He argues, as the NTSB does, that the center wing tank explosion brought down the plane. Lance, however, adds that the explosion was triggered by a bomb, not by some random, untraceable spark. As to the claim that there was no physical damage of the kind found at the Lockerbie crash, Lance rightly contends that Yousef's was a much smaller bomb designed specifically to trigger a fuel tank explosion. As such, it had a unique, nearly invisible signature
Lance follows up on the work James Sanders and I did in First Strike --- and reporter Dave Hendrix before us --- on the FBI claim that a botched dog training exercise led to the explosive residue found all over the TWA 800 aircraft. He interviews the training officer and reviews the aircraft logs and concludes that we were right: the TWA 800 plane could not have been used in the training exercise in question. A sister plane nearby was almost assuredly the site of the exercise. In short, the FBI knowingly corrupted the investigation to steer it away from terrorism.
To make sure the TWA Flight 800 story never saw the light of day, Lance argues, the Feds rewarded Scarpa with a hard 40 in the Florence, Colorado Supermax, an unusually severe sentence for a non-lethal RICO conviction. Lance introduces a motive for FBI cooperation in the 800 cover-up beyond national security, namely that one of its agents had been involved in a corrupt relation with Scarpa Sr., one that if revealed would unravel any number of high level mob convictions.
These are bold claims by Lance especially given that most writers on terrorism won't touch TWA Flight 800. In his elegant but orthodox book on the run-up to September 11, The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright dedicates all of three paragraphs to the crash. Wright describes it as "largely a public relations problem" that distracted the FBI from its real work.
This problem was resolved was when an FBI middle-manager, John O'Neill, "persuaded the CIA to do a video simulation of [the zoom climb] scenario," thereby discrediting all 270 FBI eyewitnesses to a likely missile attack. This was no small accomplishment on O'Neill's part in that the CIA would spend a year on the project, and the thesis of Wright's book is that the failure of the CIA and FBI to communicate led to September 11. No matter. Wright has his story, and he is sticking to it. He did not respond to my query on his sourcing.
It will be interesting to see whether mainstream interviewers dare broach the subject of TWA 800 with Lance, even though his information points to a scandal that would dwarf Watergate if ever opened. My guess is that they will not. My concern is that they will not even book Lance for fear that he raise the subject himself. There is a lot more to this always revealing and rigorously sourced book than I can explore herein. It is definitely worth an exploration on your own.
JACK CASHILL and JAMES SANDER'S First Strike: TWA Flight 800 and the Attack on America is now available. First Strike explains how a determined corps of ordinary citizens worked to reveal the compromise and corruption that tainted the federal investigation. With an impressive array of facts, they show the relationship between events in July 1996 and September 2001 and proclaim how and why the American government has attempted to cover up the truth.
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The Calamity Howler Issue #123
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By A.V. Krebs, Ed.
Corporate Agribusiness Research Project, December 13, 2006
Straight to the Source
