Wow! Another taboo dismantled. There is hope:


 http://counterpunch.org/christison1213.html

A Rose By Another Other Name The Bush Administration's Dual Loyalties,
by KATHLEEN and BILL CHRISTISON, former CIA political analysts,
Counterpunch, December 13, 2002 [IMPORTANT ARTICLE!]

"Since the long-forgotten days when the State Department's Middle
East policy was run by a group of so-called Arabists, U.S. policy on Israel
and the Arab world has increasingly become the purview of officials well
known for tilting toward Israel. From the 1920s roughly to 1990, Arabists,
who had a personal history and an educational background in the Arab world
and were accused by supporters of Israel of being totally biased toward
Arab interests, held sway at the State Department and, despite having
limited power in the policymaking circles of any administration, helped
maintain some semblance of U.S. balance by keeping policy from tipping
over totally toward Israel. But Arabists have been steadily replaced by
their exact opposites, what some observers are calling Israelists, and
policymaking circles throughout government now no longer even make a
pretense of exhibiting balance between Israeli and Arab, particularly
Palestinian, interests.

In the Clinton administration, the three most senior State Department
officials dealing with the Palestinian-Israeli peace process were all
partisans of Israel to one degree or another. All had lived at least for
brief periods in Israel and maintained ties with Israel while
in office, occasionally vacationing there. One of these officials had
worked both as a pro-Israel lobbyist and as director of a pro-Israel think
tank in Washington before taking a position in the Clinton administration
from which he helped make policy on Palestinian-Israeli issues. Another
has headed the pro-Israel think tank since leaving government.

The link between active promoters of Israeli interests and policymaking
circles is stronger by several orders of magnitude in the Bush
administration, which is peppered with people who have long records of
activism on behalf of Israel in the United States, of policy advocacy in
Israel, and of promoting an agenda for Israel often at odds with existing
U.S. policy. These people, who can fairly be called Israeli loyalists, are
now at all levels of government, from desk officers at the Defense
Department to the deputy secretary level at both State and Defense, as well
as on the National Security Council staff and in the vice president's
office.

We still tiptoe around putting a name to this phenomenon. We write articles
about the neo-conservatives' agenda on U.S.-Israeli relations and imply
that in the neo-con universe there is little light between the two
countries. We talk openly about the Israeli bias in the U.S. media. We make
wry jokes about Congress being 'Israeli-occupied territory.' Jason Vest in
The Nation magazine reported forthrightly that some of the think tanks that
hold sway over Bush administration thinking see no difference between U.S.
and Israeli
national security interests. But we never pronounce the particular words
that best describe the real meaning of those observations and wry remarks.
It's time, however, that we say the words out loud and deal with what
they really signify. Dual loyalties.

The issue we are dealing with in the Bush administration is dual
loyalties-the double allegiance of those myriad officials at high and
middle levels
who cannot distinguish U.S. interests from Israeli interests, who baldly
promote the supposed identity of interests between the United States and
Israel, who spent their early careers giving policy advice to right-wing
Israeli governments and now give the identical advice to a right-wing
U.S. government, and who, one suspects, are so wrapped up in their concern
for the fate of Israel that they honestly do not know whether their own
passion about advancing the U.S. imperium is motivated primarily by
America-first patriotism or is governed first and foremost by a desire to
secure Israel's safety and predominance in the Middle East through the
advancement of the U.S. imperium. "Dual loyalties" has always been one of
those red flags posted around the subject of Israel and the Arab-Israeli
conflict, something that induces horrified gasps and rapid heartbeats
because of its implication of Jewish disloyalty to the United States and
the common assumption that anyone who would speak such a canard is ipso
facto an anti-Semite ...

But an examination of the cast of characters in Bush administration
policymaking circles reveals a startlingly pervasive network of pro-Israel
activists, and an examination of the neo-cons' voluminous written record
shows that Israel comes up constantly as a neo-con reference point, always
mentioned with the United States as the beneficiary of a recommended
policy, always linked with the United States when national interests are at
issue ...

Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz leads the pack. He was
a protégé of Richard Perle, who heads the prominent Pentagon advisory
body, the Defense Policy Board. Many of today's neo-cons, including Perle,
are the intellectual progeny of the late Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson,
a strong defense hawk and one of Israel's most strident congressional
supporters in the 1970s. Wolfowitz in turn is the mentor of Lewis
"Scooter" Libby, now Vice President Cheney's chief of staff who was first
a student of Wolfowitz and later a subordinate during the 1980s
in both the State and the Defense Departments.

Another Perle protégé is Douglas Feith, who is currently undersecretary of
defense for policy,
the department's number-three man, and has worked closely with Perle both
as a lobbyist for Turkey and in co-authoring strategy papers for right-wing
Israeli governments. Assistant Secretaries Peter Rodman and Dov
Zachkeim, old hands from the Reagan administration when the neo-cons
first flourished, fill out the subcabinet ranks at Defense. At lower
levels,
the Israel and the Syria/Lebanon desk officers at Defense are imports
from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank spun
off from the pro-Israel lobby organization, AIPAC.

Neo-cons have not made
many inroads at the State Department, except for John Bolton, an
American Enterprise Institute hawk and Israeli proponent who is said to
have been forced on a reluctant Colin Powell as undersecretary for arms
control. Bolton's special assistant is David Wurmser, who
wrote and/or co-authored with Perle and Feith at least two strategy papers
for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu in 1996. Wurmser's
wife, Meyrav Wurmser, is a co-founder of the media-watch website
MEMRI (Middle East Media Research Institute), which is run by retired
Israeli military and intelligence officers and specializes in translating
and widely circulating Arab media and statements by Arab leaders ...

In
the vice president's office, Cheney has established his own personal
national security staff, run by aides known to be very pro-Israel. The
deputy director of the staff, John Hannah, is a former fellow of the
Israeli-oriented Washington Institute. On the National Security Council
staff, the newly appointed director of Middle East affairs is Elliott
Abrams, who came to prominence after pleading guilty to withholding
information from
Congress during the Iran-contra scandal (and was pardoned by President
Bush the elder) and who has long been a vocal proponent of right-wing
Israeli positions. Putting him in a key policymaking position on the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict is like entrusting the henhouse to a fox.

Pro-Israel activists with close links to the administration are also busy
in the information arena inside and outside government. The head of Radio
Liberty, a Cold War propaganda holdover now converted to service in the
"war on terror," is Thomas Dine, who was the very active head of AIPAC
throughout
most of the Reagan and the Bush-41 administrations. Elsewhere on the
periphery, William Kristol, son of neo-con originals Irving Kristol
and Gertrude Himmelfarb, is closely linked to the administration's
pro-Israel coterie and serves as its cheerleader through the Rupert
Murdoch-owned magazine that he edits, The Weekly Standard.

Some of Bush's speechwriters including David Frum, who coined the term
'axis of evil' for Bush's state-of-the-union address but was forced to
resign when his wife publicly bragged about his linguistic prowess ­ have
come from The
Weekly Standard. Frank Gaffney, another Jackson and Perle
protégé and Reagan administration defense official, puts his pro-Israel
oar in from his think tank, the Center for Security Policy, and through
frequent media appearances and regular columns in the Washington Times.
The incestuous nature of the proliferating boards and think tanks, whose
membership lists are more or less identical and totally interchangeable,
is frighteningly insidious ...

Probably the most important organization, in terms of its influence on Bush
administration policy formulation, is the Jewish Institute for National
Security Affairs (JINSA). Formed after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war
specifically to bring Israel's security concerns to the attention of U.S.
policymakers and concentrating also on broad defense issues, the extremely
hawkish, right-wing JINSA has always had a high-powered board able to place
its members inside conservative U.S. administrations. Cheney, Bolton, and
Feith were members until they entered the Bush administration.

Several lower level JINSA functionaries are now working in the Defense
Department. Perle is still a member, as are Kirkpatrick, former CIA
director and leading Iraq-war hawk James Woolsey, and old-time rabid
pro-Israel types like Eugene Rostow and Michael Ledeen. Both JINSA and
Gaffney's Center for Security Policy are heavily underwritten by Irving
Moskowitz, a right-wing American Zionist, California business magnate (his
money comes from bingo parlors), and JINSA board member who has lavishly
financed the establishment of several religious settlements in Arab East
Jerusalem.

By Their Own Testimony Most of the neo-cons now in government have left a
long paper trail giving clear evidence of their fervently right-wing
pro-Israel, and fervently anti-Palestinian, sentiments ... A recent New
York Times Magazine profile by the Times' Bill Keller cites critics who say
that 'Israel exercises a powerful gravitational pull on the man' and notes
that as a teenager Wolfowitz lived in Israel during his mathematician
father's sabbatical semester there. His sister is married to an Israeli.
Keller even somewhat reluctantly acknowledges the accuracy of one
characterization of Wolfowitz as 'Israel-centric.'"