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"Democracy vs Mediaopoly"; A who's who of
the core neo- conservative hawks that are reshaping the world in their image.
" To:
"The Collective Human Conscience;":;
" Subject:
"Democracy vs Mediaopoly";
A who's who of the core neo- conservative hawks that
are reshaping the world in their image.
" From:
"David D. Piney" <wu712@victoria.tc.ca>
" Date:
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=12612"
New Conservative Campaign For War
on Terrorism
Jim Lobe, AlterNet,
At a Tuesday gathering of the National Press Club, members
of the new Americans for Victory Over Terrorism (AVOT)
declared their intention to take to task those groups and individuals who
fundamentally misunderstand the nature of
the war we are facing.
The newly-formed organization is headed by a half a dozen
right-wing luminaries, including its chairman, the former Secretary of
Education and drug czar William Bennett. AVOT is project of Empower America,
which Bennett co-directs with former Republican vice presidential candidate,
Jack Kemp, and former U.N. Ambassador, Jeane
Kirkpatrick, a major architect of the Reagan administration's more violent
escapades in the
While Bennett not known for his foreign policy expertise,
he has never hesitated to
attach himself to the more bellicose positions of
the Republican Party. Two senior advisers to Bennett include two other
prominent neo-conservatives: former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director
R. James Woolsey; and former Reagan Pentagon
official Frank Gaffney.
Gaffney is the president of the ultra-hawkish Center for
Security Policy (CSP) which has long led the inside-the-Beltway campaign for
Star Wars. Its board of advisers consists of a who's who of retired right-wing
policymakers and defense analysts, along with top defense industry executives.
Past members if the advisory board include top Pentagon
officials in the Bush administration, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz,
and Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith, as well
as the arch-unilateralist Undersecretary of state for arms control and
international security John Bolton, top national security council staff,
including Elliott Abrams and Peter Rodman, and Vice
President Dick Cheney's chief of staff,
Gaffney, known as a no-holds-barred infighter in capital
politics, recently attacked Defense Secretary Rumsfeld
in an article titled "Defending Deception" published in the National
Review Online late last month for promising not to use disinformation in
response to the controversy over the presumably now-defunct Office of Strategic
Influence (OSI). His other controversial views include a 1999 campaign to
persuade the government and the public that two long-term leases taken out on
ports at either end of the
Gaffney was the most strident of the speakers at the
National Press Club Tuesday, urging skepticism about all of Washington's Arab
allies in the war on terror and accusing the governments of Saudi Arabia and
Egypt of using their control over their
countries' media in ways that create problems for the
larger effort. He warned that criticism of the administration's conduct of the
war could be interpreted in such a way as to hurt national resolve...(and) embolden the enemy.
AVOT is being funded initially primarily by Lawrence Kadish, a real estate investor in New York and Florida and
chairman of the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), who has given the party some
$532,000, making him one of the Republican's largest individual contributors.
The RJC, which has tried to build links between the
Republican Party, including its
Christian Right component, and American Jews, has long
supported a hard-line approach to negotiating an Israeli-Palestinian peace
accord. It strongly supported the
construction by the right-wing Likud
government of former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu of the controversial Har Homa settlement in
AVOT's self-declared aim is to counter both
internal and external threats to the nation. A full-page advertisement carried
in the Sunday New York Times over the weekend pointed to radical Islam as an
enemy no less dangerous and no less determined than the twin menaces of fascism
and communism we faced in the 20th century.
Former CIA director Woolsey appeared to expand that
definition somewhat Tuesday
when he lumped
Bennett, Gaffney, and Woolsey are all veteran members of a
neo-conservative network of groups with overlapping boards of directors that
have long championed right-wing governments in
Both Gaffney and Bennett, for example, were two of about
three dozen mainly neo-conservative signers of an open letter sent to Bush in
the name of the "Project for a New American Century" nine days after
the Sep 11 attacks on New York and Washington. It called not only for the
destruction of Osama bin Laden's
Al Qaeda network, but also for extending the war to
Iraq, and possibly to Iran, Syria, Lebanon and the Palestine Authority unless
they ceased their alleged support of terrorist groups opposed to Israel.
Woolsey, who reportedly declined to sign the letter due to
qualms about its not-so-subtle attack on Secretary of State Colin Powell, was
sent shortly afterwards as a member of the Pentagon's Defence
Policy Board, which is chaired by another top neo-conservative, Richard Perle, to Britain to gather evidence linking Iraq to the
Sep 11 attacks.
While the evidence he collected apparently satisfied him,
intelligence analysts at the State Department and the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) found it woefully lacking. Nonetheless, Woolsey has become one of
the most visible commentators in the media in favor of extending the war there.
Like the others, Woolsey is closely associated with a pro-Likud
position on the
Perle, who, like Woolsey, holds a unique position as both
chairman of the Pentagon's Defence Policy Board,
which gives him unmatched access to classified information and top
policymakers, and as an independent commentator, a position of which he has
made full use in leading the charge to war against Iraq. Like Kirkpatrick, his
main perch is at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a neo-conservative
think tank which also includes such incendiary polemicists as Michael Ledeen, an important figure in the Iran part of the
Iran-Contra scandal and a co-founder with Perle of
JINSA, and Reuel Marc Gerecht,
a former CIA officer in the Mideast and South Asia,
as well as a novelist writing under the pen name Edward Shirley.
Like Gaffney, both men have agitated strongly against
A former assistant secretary of defense under Reagan, Perle, along with Wolfowitz, was
a student of the ultimate Cold War hawk, Albert Wohlstetter
back in the 1960s, and, like many other neo-cons, subsequently worked to
dismantle detente as Sen.
Henry "Scoop"
Gaffney worked under him both in
AVOT's creation coincides with new polls showing
continued strong popular support for the Bush Administration's global war
against terrorism, which has expanded beyond Afghanistan to include sending
hundreds of military advisers to the Philippines and Yemen and proposed strikes
against Iraq.
However, in their $128,000 advertisement, the group warned
that "While support for
Bennett opened the press conference by noting gravely that,
"Professional and amateur critics of
AVOT's strategy appears similar to an earlier
effort to monitor controversial statements about the war on terrorism on
university campuses by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), on
whose board Bennett also serves. ACTA,
which was founded by Lynne Cheney, the vice president's
wife, and neo-conservative Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman, produced a
much-criticised report last November entitled
"Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America",
which detailed 117 incidents on campuses around the country of alleged
anti-Americanism. It claimed that "colleges and university faculty have
been the weak link in
AVOT's list includes statements by congresswoman
Maxine Waters, author of
"Prozac Nation"
He suggested that such remarks give aid and comfort to the
enemy. Another target included on AVOT's list is
Lewis Lapham, the editor of Harper's Magazine. In a
recent editorial wrote suggestively about the elasticity of the word "terrorism"
and cited examples where
In response to the AVOT's criticism, Lapham said
Bennett is a "wrong-headed jingo and an intolerant scold." He described the group's comparison of the
threat posed by Al Qaeda with those of fascism and
communism as a "grotesque exaggeration".
AVOT, he said, appeared to be a new "front
organization for the hard neo-con (neo-conservative) right.
Jim Lobe writes on international affairs for Inter Press
Service, Oneworld.net, Foreign Policy in Focus and AlterNet.org. (For more on
Americans for Victory Over Terrorism (AVOT), see
"http://www.avot.org/stories/storyReader$29";
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