America's Survival, Inc. Special Report: The Deepening Crisis in International Affairs and its Political Implications July 2003 From: Cliff Kincaid, President, America's Survival, Inc. Key Points: Bush Popularity Declines Hillary Eyes Presidential Run Supreme Court Facilitates Globalism International Criminal Court Threatens America House Votes on U.N. Issues Focus on Middle East Ignores Problems in Latin America Iraq Intelligence "Scandal" Spies in U.S. Agencies North Korean Threat The Neo-Con Controversy Saudi Arabia and 9/11 The 2001 Anthrax Attacks Despite the rise of "conservative media," the influence of the old mainstream liberal news organizations can be seen in the damage that has been inflicted on President Bush in the opinion polls and surveys. Washington Post columnist David Broder called it "Black Thursday," July 10, when the CBS Evening News and other media in effect accused Bush of a deliberate lie over Iraq. The Democratic National Committee, led by Clinton ally Terry McAuliffe, has blatantly lied about the alleged lie, insisting in an ad that Bush charged that "Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." The DNC left out the words Bush uttered right before those words, "The British Government has learned that." The president cited the British because his own CIA could not confirm the charge. This is a bad reflection on the CIA, not Bush, and raises questions about why Clinton-appointed CIA director George Tenet, a former Democratic staffer on Capitol Hill, has been retained. The media assault has taken a toll. A Zogby poll released on July 18 found that the Bush job performance had slipped to 53% Positive, 46% Negative. It found that more voters (47%) said it was time for "someone new" than favored his re-election. The Pew Research Center found that Bush's approval ratings stood at 60 percent, a significant drop from his 74 percent rating on April 9, the day the statue of Saddam Hussein fell in Baghdad. A July 21 USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll found that Bush only held a 6-percentage-point advantage, 47%-41%, when those polled were asked whether they would support his re-election bid against a Democratic candidate, down from 12 points a month ago. Clinton ally James Carville and his firm have released an analysis insisting that the public has "become more internationalist," and that people favor "building strong ties with other nations" over relying on U.S. military strength by a 52-39 percent margin. These results have created conditions under which various analysts, including former Clinton adviser Dick Morris, contend that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton may run for the presidency in 2004. The opening was hinted at in a July 21 Dan Balz story in the Washington Post, which noted that, "Six months of intensive campaigning by nine candidates have left the race for the Democratic presidential nomination every bit as unsettled as it was at the beginning of the year, with no clear front-runner, the addition of a surprise insurgency and several nationally prominent candidates struggling." A poll released on July 24 by Quinnipiac University showed that Senator Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., if she were to jump into the race for the Democratic nomination for president, would pull 48 percent of the vote within her party. Sen. Joseph Lieberman would be the only other candidate in double digits. Mrs. Clinton would be favored by the European and U.N. crowd. In an interview with Der Spiegel, conducted during the European part of her book tour, Mrs. Clinton praised her husband's close relationship with European leaders during his period in office. She declared that "for eight years we were on the right course to a globalized and integrated world - which is coming, one way or the other." Not only is a "globalized and integrated world" inevitable, she said, it is a foreign policy priority of the Democratic Party, "a perspective we Democrats have not successfully made clear." A Hillary Clinton presidential run could count on the support of the 1000 political activists attending a June 4-6 "National Conference to Take Back America" in Washington, D.C. It was described as "The largest multi-issue conference in over 20 years," featuring "progressive leaders, activists and presidential candidates," and sponsored by the Campaign for America's Future, whose co-director is Robert Borosage, formerly of the Marxist Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). In the book, The Next Agenda, Borosage and William Greider argued for implementation of a global tax. They urged "greater controls over capital and currency speculation. Perhaps the most interesting movement has been the campaign for a tax on short-term capital flows, called the Tobin Tax, after James Tobin, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who first proposed it. Amazingly, literally thousands have marched for this tax, leading the Canadian parliament and others to pass resolutions calling on the industrial nations to support the plan. The tax could slow the destabilizing flows of 'hot money' as well as create a global public fund that could be used to finance long-term investment in developing nations. Such a fund would reduce the pressures on countries to depend on export-led growth and free up resources for more internal development." Their citation for this proposal is the book, The Tobin Tax: Coping with Financial Volatility (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), by Mahbub ul Haq, Inge Kaul, and Isabelle Grunberg, eds. Kaul is a veteran United Nations official. Juliet McDermott of the U.K.-based Tobin Tax Network is now offering a video promoting the Tobin tax. One speaker at the Campaign for America event, at a session entitled, "Next Stage for the Peace Movement," was John Cavanagh, co-founder, United for Peace and Justice, and director of the IPS. An official listing of member groups involved in United for Peace and Justice includes the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS), an outgrowth of the old Communist Party; the Communist Party USA; the Democratic Socialists of America; the National Lawyers Guild; and the World Federalist Association. Leslie Cagan, a key member of the CCDS, is a co-founder of United for Peace and Justice who has been portrayed by the liberal media as a "moderate." America's Survival, Inc. has led the way in exposing the influence of communist organizations such as the WWP in the "anti-war" demonstrations that were held in Washington, D.C. We published photographs of the communist groups in attendance. We have also re-published a 1974 House Committee on Internal Security staff study of the Workers World Party and are pressing for a new congressional inquiry into the group's foreign ties and domestic activities. Mainstream columnists are noting a trend that America's Survival, Inc. had documented in our special report on the international campaign against the death penalty - a move toward recognizing international law over U.S. law, and a push for a global constitution. A European constitution is currently being drafted. An inter-governmental conference to complete the drafting process will start in October, and it is expected to complete its work by the end of the year. A ceremony in Rome to announce the Constitution is expected before the next European Parliament elections, which are due on June 13, 2004. French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin said it will give Europe a more prominent role in world affairs. "We are setting up a new political age, more efficient, more democratic, assuming [Europe's] full role on the world stage," he says. Taking note of the Supreme Court decisions in favor of affirmative action and homosexual rights, and the Court's citations of foreign courts and views, John Leo of U.S. News & World Report in the July 21 issue mentioned that: "…the legal elites of America and other western nations attend the same conferences and swim in the same intellectual waters. At the conferences, Americans are attacked as insular and parochial for not adopting new international or transnational standards. This pressure is not just to pull away from American law and the Constitution. Often it is also a push toward standards out of sync with American traditions of liberty. The European version of free speech is so frighteningly narrow that a major push is underway to criminalize criticism of homosexuality. "The courts of several western nations have interpreted their own constitutions in the light of international conventions and U.N. treaties. This is a dicey proposition because so many of these materials are produced by U.N. bureaucrats and powerful U.N. nongovernmental organizations with almost no democratic input. The NGOs--most, American--are predominantly far, far out on the cultural left. They specialize in producing nonbinding and apparently harmless documents, which they work to convert into explosive and legally binding texts that undermine national sovereignty and democratic procedures. This is not a system that deserves a nod of respect from Supreme Court justices." In the International Herald Tribune, before the Supreme Court decisions were handed down, Laurence R. Helfer, a professor at Loyola Law School, asked, "Will the recent trend recognizing gay rights in other countries influence the court's decision this time around? The justices are sharply divided over whether it is appropriate to consider foreign and international law when interpreting the U.S. Constitution. But in a recent ruling banning executions of the mentally retarded, a majority of the court took into account that such executions had received condemnation from the world community." On ABC's "This Week" on July 6, Clinton-appointed U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer seemed to endorse the concept of a global Constitution for the world, declaring that, "We see all the time, Justice O'Connor and I, and the others, how the world really...is growing together. That through commerce, through globalization, through the spread of democratic institutions, through immigration to America, it's becoming more and more one world of many different kinds of people. And how they're going to live together across the world will be the challenge, and whether our Constitution and how it fits into the governing documents of other nations, I think will be a challenge for the next generations." (emphasis added). Host George Stephanopoulos asked, "Is it conceivable that there will be a day when the Constitution is not the final word on the law of America?" O'Connor replied, "Well, you always have the power of entering into treaties with other nations, which also become part of the law of the land, but I can't see the day when we won't have a Constitution in our nation." At that point, the implication is that we will have a Constitution on paper but that it will have become altered or transformed by treaties and justices who cite the authority of other foreign documents. Breyer was one of the justices in the ruling upholding homosexual rights who cited foreign courts and opinions. Justice Antonin Scalia rejected this citation, saying that the Court's "discussion of these foreign views…" was not just "meaningless" but "dangerous" and contradicted a case finding that "this Court ... should not impose foreign moods, fads, or fashions on Americans." Foster v. Florida, 537 U. S. 990, n. (2002). In order to justify the finding of homosexual rights in the U.S. Constitution, the Supreme Court said "other authorities" pointed in that "direction." It said: A committee advising the British Parliament recommended in 1957 repeal of laws punishing homosexual conduct. The Wolfenden Report: Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offenses and Prostitution (1963). Parliament enacted the substance of those recommendations 10 years later. Sexual Offences Act 1967, §1. The Court also noted that "the European Court of Human Rights considered a case with parallels to Bowers and to today's case. An adult male resident in Northern Ireland alleged he was a practicing homosexual who desired to engage in consensual homosexual conduct. The laws of Northern Ireland forbade him that right. He alleged that he had been questioned, his home had been searched, and he feared criminal prosecution. The court held that the laws proscribing the conduct were invalid under the European Convention on Human Rights. Dudgeon v. United Kingdom, 45 Eur. Ct. H. R. (1981) ;52. Authoritative in all countries that are members of the Council of Europe (21 nations then, 45 nations now), the decision is at odds with the premise in Bowers that the claim put forward was insubstantial in our Western civilization." The "next phase" of the homosexual rights movement is "transgender liberation," which has been promoted by the Workers World Party (WWP). The managing editor of the WWP newspaper is a male-to-female transgender known as Leslie Feinberg, who runs a web site called "Transgender Warrior." Feinberg's own web site includes a "Join Me in Activism" section, which includes references to Workers World Party, The International Action Center, and the International ANSWER coalition. In an article for the WWP, he/she hailed the Supreme Court ruling on homosexual rights as "not the only news to roar about," adding that "When General Electric--owner of NBC television network--announced June 19 that the company's new union contracts will include health-care coverage for employees' same-sex domestic partners, it became the 64th Fortune 100 company to do so. Shop-floor pressure and leadership by groups like Pride At Work, the LGBT constituency group of the AFL-CIO, have made winning these benefits a top priority." LGBT stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual and Transgender. Harry Hay, the founder of the homosexual rights movement, was a member of the Communist Party who also promoted the North American Man-Boy Love Association. The November 7, 2002, edition of the WWP newspaper noted, "Hay's theoretical contribution to progressive politics was to explain that gays are an oppressed group under capitalism and that working-class solidarity meant unity against all forms of oppression. He spent most of his life advocating a coalition of all those who are oppressed under capitalism." The WWP added, "He actively supported the presidential campaign of the Rev. Jesse Jackson in 1984 by initiating the Gay Caucus of the Rainbow Coalition." The ICC and the U.N. The Bush administration on July 1 suspended $47.6 million in fiscal year 2003 military assistance to 35 countries that are members of the International Criminal Court (ICC) but have not exempted U.S. personnel from prosecution by the Court. This action occurred under the American Servicemembers' Protection Act of 2002 (Public Law 107-206). So far at least, the ICC prosecutor, leftist Argentinian lawyer Luis Moreno Ocampo, claims that he doesn't have any jurisdiction over alleged "war crimes" committed by U.S. troops in Iraq. Ocampo prosecuted military officials in Argentina for the "dirty war" against communism. America's Survival, Inc. held the first national news conference opposing the ICC in 1998, featuring then-Senator John Ashcroft and former Attorney General Edwin Meese. We also contributed significantly to the new film, "Independence or World Government," distributed to college audiences by the Leadership Institute. A House amendment to defund the United Nations or any affiliated agency of the United Nations was defeated on the House floor on July 17 by a vote of 350-74. On July 22, an amendment to eliminate the $71 million designated for the U.S. to rejoin the U.N. Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was rejected by 279-145. In an article in The American Legion Magazine, Rep. Roscoe G. Bartlett, R-MD, made the case for U.S. withdrawal from the U.N. He declared: "The United Nations has proved itself irrelevant. "Article I Chapter 1 of the UN Charter says the first purpose of the United Nations is, "To maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace." "The UN ignored Cambodia and Rwanda, the most shameful genocidal crises of the last 30 years. In Srebrenica, a UN-supervised 'Safe Zone,' 8,000 were massacred. "Consider Korea and the first Persian Gulf War - the only successful examples of international authority against aggression in the last 50 years. You will find the United Nations, but only in a subordinate role to a coalition led by the United States. "Compare the United Nations twelve-year failure to disarm Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and the four-week American-led Coalition campaign which eliminated Saddam Hussein's regime. "Consider that while Iraqis celebrated their release from Saddam Hussein's brutal tyranny by welcoming American soldiers as liberators, the United Nations Security Council failed to condemn North Korea for its unilateral withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. "Consider that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was scheduled to chair the United Nations Disarmament Conference. "Consider that the current Chair of the UN Human Rights Conference is Libya. "Worse than irrelevant, the United Nations supports brutal regimes, such as Saddam Hussein's Iraq through the UN Oil for Food Program and the government of Sudan which enslaves Black African Christians. Worse than irrelevant, the undemocratic majority in the United Nations General Assembly use democratic means to shake down productive, democratic republican nations for billions of dollars each year. "The UN's massive failure to disarm Iraq has opened Americans' eyes. Congressman Ron Paul's bill, H.R. 1146, which would remove the United States from the United Nations, would provide an excellent forum for Americans to debate the relevance of the United Nations." Urging a vote for the amendment to defund the U.N., Rep. Bartlett noted that the U.N. owed the U.S. billions of dollars. Echoing a claim that America's Survival, Inc. has made for years, he said, "Both the Department of Defense and the Congressional Research Service have documented that we have spent over $19 billion of taxpayers' money on legitimate U.N. peacekeeping activities. Now, the U.N. has legitimized our claim that this ought to be credited against our dues because they have credited $1.8 billion of this against our dues." This means the U.N. still owes the U.S. about $17 billion. The U.N. is actively undermining the war on terrorism, with a senior United Nations "rights expert" expressing alarm on July 7 over reports that six terrorist detainees may be brought to trial before a military commission by the United States Government. The official, Dato' Param Cumaraswamy, Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers of UN Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR), insisted that such "drastic measures to counter terrorism" are in defiance of the world body's resolutions. "Anti-War" Demonstration Planned Bush's declining poll numbers are attributed to media attention to the body count from the war in Iraq and the manufactured scandal over the use of pre-war intelligence. The radical left is energized, with the Washington Post reporting that, "About 400,000 people from every state have contacted members of Congress in the past three weeks as part of a MoveOn.org petition that asks Congress to investigate the controversial claims that led to the war on Iraq, with more than 50,000 people signing on to the liberal activist Web site in the past five days alone." On Saturday, October 25, the Workers World Party front Act Now to Stop War and Racism (ANSWER) is planning a demonstration in Washington featuring "tens of thousands of people in the U.S., joined by delegations from countries around the world, [who] will go back into the streets to demand End the Occupation, Bring the Troops Home Now! Under the banner, 'The World Unites Against U.S. Militarism…'" The group claims that, "The Bush Administration lied to the people, to the Congress, and to the United Nations as it raced to wage war against Iraq. The Bush administration is now carrying out a cover up of its lies and deceptions." ANSWER reports that, "The demonstration will be followed on October 26 by an assembly with international delegates from the global anti-war movement to assess and strategize challenging the Bush Administration's war drive and the component assault on civil rights and civil liberties taking place in many countries under the cloak of 'national security' laws, including the Patriot Act in the U.S." Liberal commentators such as Thomas Oliphant are claiming that, "The once mighty unilateralists around President Bush - Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld - are in the process of losing another fight against a broadly international response to the mess in Iraq." Editorials from liberal papers are joining the chorus. The Dallas Morning News declared, "It is painfully obvious that the United States and Britain need more help pacifying Iraq. Fortunately, many countries are inclined to help. However, they won't commit themselves without the political cover that explicit authorization by the United Nations would provide. The Bush administration should seek such authorization without further delay." The U.N. is demanding control over Iraq. In a report delivered to the U.N. on July 22, Secretary-General Kofi Annan declared, according to the U.N. News Service, that, "The day when Iraqis govern themselves must come quickly, and a clear timetable for the restoration of sovereignty with specific steps for the end of United States military occupation is essential if the growing impatience in the country is to be stemmed…" In Iraq, the administration says that 19 nations are providing more than 13,000 troops to help stabilize Iraq, and that "additional forces will soon arrive." It says that more than two dozen nations have pledged funds that will go directly towards relief and reconstruction efforts. Latin American Leftists The focus on the Middle East has diverted attention from anti-American trends in Latin America. As the Miami Herald reports, "In addition to those leftist leaders already holding power in Latin America, other like-minded political figures in several neighboring countries could soon join them." It stated that, "In El Salvador, former Marxist guerrilla leader Shafick Handal of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) is the front-runner in most polls for the March 21, 2004, election, raising public fears from U.S. officials about the fate of that country's democracy…Uruguay's leftist United Front party leader, Tabaré Vázquez, a former mayor of Montevideo, enjoys a comfortable lead in the polls for the 2004 elections. In Mexico, Mexico City Mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador tops the public opinion surveys for the 2006 elections. In Bolivia, hard-line leftist coca growers leader Evo Morales has soared from the margins of his country's political system to become a major player. Morales, a fiery opponent of free trade who has also vowed to expel the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration from Bolivia if elected president, came within two percentage points of winning his country's June 2002 elections, and controls the second-largest voting bloc in the Bolivian Congress." In the case of El Salvador, President Francisco Flores has distributed a letter in Washington, D.C. that FMLN Communists are getting closer to taking power. The FMLN front, the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), contends that the U.S. is conducting a "dirty campaign" against the FMLN, noting that on June 18 Daniel Fisk, US assistant Secretary of State for Hemispheric Affairs, publicly expressed his distrust in the FMLN's "commitment to democracy in El Salvador." He also stated that FMLN material "looks as if it were written in Havana." CISPES notes that outgoing US Ambassador Rose Likins "threatened US retaliation against El Salvador if an FMLN president were elected, and said that US investment could pull out of the country as a result. Likins has criticized the FMLN's economic platform and specifically spoken out against the party's position on privatization, dollarization, and the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA.) She also said that the FMLN's support of liberation movements, and its relations to Cuba, China, and Vietnam, were at odds with the U.S war on terrorism. The other leftist leaders in Latin America, alluded to by the Herald, are from Cuba, Venezuela and Brazil. Former Cuban political prisoner Armando Valladares recently told the conservative group called Tradition, Family & Property that Lula da Silva, the new president of Brazil, and Castro share a vision of "a communist society on the whole continent," adding, "I am sure that now Fidel Castro sees many possibilities of achieving that old dream and for this reason he could not miss the coming to power of Lula." Lula was inaugurated with Castro in attendance as a special guest. Valladares said, "Communism has gone through a transformation as a tactic of the fight, precisely to prevent its death. That is, I believe that the communist danger still exists. To say that communism has died is, in my opinion, a way to try to dull people's conscience and deviate it, so the communists can advance without obstacles." The well-respected Latin American News Service cites a 1993 book that includes a contribution written by Lula, who describes his Workers Party as a vehicle for political power that is made up of "Trotskyists, Castroites, activists of the Brazilian Communist Party…[with support from] progressive sectors of the church liberation theologians." The Iraq Intelligence Controversy The manufactured scandal over pre-war intelligence is designed to discredit the "Bush Doctrine" of pre-emptive strikes or war against emerging threats to America. This is viewed by the radical left as a violation of the U.N. Charter. Marjorie Cohn, a professor of law at Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego, claims that "Bush and Blair joined forces for an end run around the U.N., which violated the fundamental tenets of international law." The White House has badly mishandled the controversy, saying the Bush statement in the State of the Union should not have been included in the speech, and then saying it was accurate. Apologists for the administration are now saying that the administration had other grounds, besides the existence of weapons of mass destruction, for invading Iraq. The implications of this turnaround are significant. George Will commented in a July 24 column that, "Today a conservative administration is close to asserting that whatever the facts turn out to be regarding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the enforcement of U.N. resolutions was a sufficient reason for war. If so, war was waged to strengthen the United Nations as author and enforcer of international norms of behavior." The "scandal" has in its roots in the administration's lack of confidence in the CIA, despite the president's decision to retain George Tenet as CIA director. It is obvious that Bush made his statement citing the British government as his source for the charge that Iraq sought uranium from Africa, even though the CIA had not been able to confirm it, because the administration believed it to be true. One reported source for the British was the French intelligence service, which didn't want the information shared with the CIA because it would be compromised and leaked. It is apparent that the National Security Council and the Department of Defense do not trust the CIA. The DoD has an ad-hoc committee called the Office of Special Plans, including Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, to independent analyze intelligence information. Journalist Seymour Hersh in a New Yorker article claimed the office had emerged as a rival to both the CIA and the Pentagon's own Defense Intelligence Agency as a main source providing intelligence on Iraq to the White House. The State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research has been highlighted by the New York Times as dissenting to the charge that Iraq sought uranium from Africa. Greg Thielmann, who served as director of the Office of Strategic, Proliferation, and Military Affairs in the Bureau until September 2002, has been making media appearances challenging Bush's statement in the State of the Union address. But this bureau is considered notorious. Former Energy Department intelligence chief Notra Trulock points out, "Insiders know that the State Department's intelligence unit always produces the most benign interpretation of any foreign threat, so its assessment this time shouldn't be surprising...Agency sources questioned the unit's qualification to make judgments about such matters." The intelligence community has been stung by several high-profile espionage cases. Katrina Leung, a suspected Chinese-American double agent, and her FBI case officer, who also was her lover, have been induicted. The full story of this spectacular case is yet to be told, but Leung through her FBI handlers may have provided disinformation about Chinese Communist aims and ambitions to U.S. presidents and Congress for over a decade. Brian P. Regan, a retired Air Force sergeant, was convicted of espionage and barely escaped the death penalty. He was selling U.S. secrets to China and Iraq. And more details about convicted Cuban spy Ana Montes, a former senior analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency, are coming to light. Insiders are comparing her role as an agent of influence on behalf of Cuba to the service Alger Hiss gave to the Soviet Union. She peddled the line in an official report that the Castro regime was not a significant security threat to the U.S. One of the most spectacular CIA failures concerns the North Korean nuclear weapons program. North Korea could have eight nuclear weapons by the end of the year if its nuclear program is not reversed. A former official of the International Atomic Energy Agency claims that North Korea had constructed several secret underground tunnels at its Yongbyon nuclear center and both the Clinton and Bush administrations knew about them. North Korea is now preparing to declare itself a nuclear state unless the U.S. responds "positively" to its proposals by September 9 -- the anniversary of the communist country's founding. Official documents obtained by America's Survival, Inc. show that the Sun Myung Moon organization has been used by the intelligence community as a back channel to North Korea, trying to gather information about activities in the communist nation. We have released several reports on this matter and just recently obtained documents from the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act about Moon contacts with the North. But the end result of such penetration has been the funneling of millions of dollars through the Moon group to the North Korean regime, strengthening the dictatorship of Kim Jong-il. The Bush Administration's so-called "unilateral" approach to Iraq and multinational approach to North Korea reflect an obvious double-standard that leaves the U.S. vulnerable to a North Korean attack. The intervention in Liberia is another fiasco, being done under pressure from the U.N., Secretary of State Colin Powell and the liberal black establishment. The Neo-Con Controversy There have been numerous stories about a group of conservatives called "neo-cons" and their role in getting the U.S. into the Iraq war. Critics charge that neo-cons are motivated by a desire to protect Israel. But that wasn't the case in 1999 when neocons supported the NATO war on Yugoslavia launched by President Clinton, which benefited a Muslim terrorist group, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), with links to Osama bin Laden. Members of the KLA have today become the Kosovo Protection Corps, a police force operating under the protection of the United Nations and a NATO force, known as the Kosovo Force or KFOR. This group includes 3000 American troops. Some Israeli experts warned at the time that Western intervention in Kosovo was a mistake, and that it might lead to pressure on Israel to accommodate the Palestinians. But neocons joined Clinton in urging a war to "liberate Kosovo" by driving all Serb forces from the province. Bill Kristol's Weekly Standard said Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic and Serb forces were "slaughtering civilians and threatening the stability of the region…" They said NATO had to intervene or else NATO would lose its purpose and go out of business. Clinton justified the war by claiming "ethnic cleansing" or even "genocide" was taking place. This was a real "big lie," far more significant Bush's statement about Iraq and its nuclear weapons program. In fact, between 2000 and 3000 died, with several hundred of those deaths being Serbs. It was a terrible tragedy but no threat to the U.S. Experts working for the U.N. subsequently found about 2100 bodies. To avoid war, Milosevic was offered a deal he couldn't accept -- to withdraw his forces from Kosovo and give NATO access to the whole country. Milosevic had previously been hailed by Clinton as a statesman for helping arrange a peace deal in Bosnia. After NATO's 10 week bombing campaign, which killed as many as 15,000 civilians, Serb forces withdrew from Kosovo. Many Serbs, who are Christians, fled Kosovo, and more than 100 Christian churches have since been destroyed by Muslim extremists there. President Bush got the overwhelming support of Congress for the Iraq war but Congress failed to authorize the Kosovo war under the War Powers Act, making it illegal. Most Republicans had voted against it. The neo-cons have not disavowed their support for Clinton's illegal war - a war which did not benefit America, Israel or NATO. It only benefited the Muslim terrorists in the KLA, further destabilizing the region. Today, former KLA members enjoy American protection while the Serbs still flee. As we predicted in our report on the "new" NATO under Clinton, the Kosovo war led to more, not less, pressure on Israel to accommodate the Palestinians. The Iraq war has brought even more such pressure. The U.S. is backing a European/U.N. "road map" to peace that could lead to deployment of U.S. "peacekeepers" between Israelis and Palestinians. The Saudi Connection While the U.S. has announced a military pullout from Saudi Arabia (a long-time goal of Osama bin Laden), it is apparent that the Saudi regime is still wielding influence over the Bush administration. The belief among hard-liners in Israel, as reflected by the "Women in Green" group, is that "The Saudis OWN a huge chunk of America's economy. The Saudis flexed their muscles shortly after 9/11 by pulling billions of dollars out of the US stock market when the United States, against Saudi wishes, revealed that 15 of the 19 terrorist attackers were Saudi nationals. That was to serve as a warning to the United States that America was in the grip of Saudi financial might. And the Saudis certainly feel that they virtually control the American economy. For instance, the Saudis practically own Citibank and they have seventeen trillion dollars invested in the United States. The Saudis have also reacted with anger to a lawsuit for damages filed by families of September 11victims against Saudi banks and charities. There is no doubt that the Saudis hate Israel, have a boycott against all Israeli products, and will not do business with companies that have anything to do with Israel. It was pressure from Saudi Arabia, even threats to cut off all relations with the United States, which caused President George W. Bush to agree to the establishment of a Palestinian state, and to divide the Holy Land. Even his father, President Bush Sr., did not promote a Palestinian state when he was in office. In fact, at the Madrid conference after the first Iraqi war, he declared that the establishment of a Palestinian state was NOT United States policy. Saudi Arabia is the evil power that is manipulating the United States policy toward Israel. It is the major force behind the murderous Road Map conspiracy. Is this little desert kingdom with its collection of 3,000 oil-rich princes blackmailing today's only super-power?" The report of the congressional joint intelligence committee on 9/11 points to suspicion that Saudi Arabia may have played a role in the terrorist attacks that killed 3000 people in the U.S.It confirms the FBI failed to follow through on evidence on the al-Qaeda-Saudi link. The report cites evidence suggesting that Omar al-Bayoumi, a key associate of two of the hijackers, Nawaq Alhazmi and Khalid al-Midhar, may have been a Saudi Government agent. More damaging information was deleted. The Wall Street Journal noted that, "A 28-page section of the congressional report on the role foreign governments -- particularly Saudi Arabia -- may have played in the Sept. 11 attacks was deleted at the administration's insistence." In another embarrassment, the congressional report states that, "To date, no connection has been established between the anthrax attacks and the terrorist attacks of September 11." This is because the FBI has ignored evidence linking al Qaeda to the anthrax attacks. As of this writing, the former government scientist named by the FBI as a "person of interest" in the investigation of the anthrax attacks, Dr. Steven Hatfill, is reaffirming his innocence and threatening lawsuits against the media in an effort to clear his name. (30)              Printer-friendly version Click here to be added to our mailing list.