The Men From JINSA and CSP

William Kristol's PNAC <http://www.newamericancentury.org/>,
<http://www.riprense.com/antiwarzone2.htm> think tank and advocacy 
are recognized as a principle influence on the Bush administration's 
foreign policy after the events of 9/11. But earlier groups of 
neoconservative hawks - including many of the same men behind the 
PNAC - created the Pax Americana foreign policy now ascendent in 
American government as the "Bush Doctrine,"The National Security 
Strategy of the United States of America, 
<http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html> well before the PNAC was 
established in 1997.

(excerpt)
"Founded in 1976 by neoconservatives concerned that the United States 
might not be able to provide Israel with adequate military supplies 
in the event of another Arab-Israeli war, over the past twenty-five 
years (the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs) JINSA has 
gone from a loose-knit proto-group to a $1.4-million-a-year operation 
with a formidable array of Washington power players on its rolls. 
Until the beginning of the current Bush Administration, JINSA's board 
of advisers included such heavy hitters as Dick Cheney, John Bolton 
(now Under Secretary of State for Arms Control) and Douglas Feith, 
the third-highest-ranking executive in the Pentagon. Both Perle and 
former Director of Central Intelligence James Woolsey, two of the 
loudest voices in the attack-Iraq chorus, are still on the board, as 
are such Reagan-era relics as Jeane Kirkpatrick, Eugene Rostow and 
Ledeen--Oliver North's Iran/contra liaison with the Israelis."

Here are the representatives of the "military/industrial complex" 
President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us about. First we were tricked 
into a war
in Viet Nam.  You can see where we are now.

Tim Jones

This article can be found on the web at
<http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020902&s=vest>
or
 <http://www.aaiusa.org/news/must_read09_02_02.htm>
or
<http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/JINSAandCSP.html>
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The Men From JINSA and CSP

by JASON VEST

[from the September 2, 2002 issue]

Almost thirty years ago, a prominent group of neoconservative hawks 
found an effective vehicle for advocating their views via the 
Committee on the Present Danger, a group that fervently believed the 
United States was a hair away from being militarily surpassed by the 
Soviet Union, and whose raison d'être was strident advocacy of bigger 
military budgets, near-fanatical opposition to any form of arms 
control and zealous championing of a Likudnik Israel. Considered a 
marginal group in its nascent days during the Carter Administration, 
with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 CPD went from the margins 
to the center of power.

Just as the right-wing defense intellectuals made CPD a cornerstone 
of a shadow defense establishment during the Carter Administration, 
so, too, did the right during the Clinton years, in part through two 
organizations: the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs 
(JINSA) and the Center for Security Policy (CSP). And just as was the 
case two decades ago, dozens of their members have ascended to 
powerful government posts, where their advocacy in support of the 
same agenda continues, abetted by the out-of-government adjuncts from 
which they came. Industrious and persistent, they've managed to weave 
a number of issues--support for national missile defense, opposition 
to arms control treaties, championing of wasteful weapons systems, 
arms aid to Turkey and American unilateralism in general--into a hard 
line, with support for the Israeli right at its core.

On no issue is the JINSA/CSP hard line more evident than in its 
relentless campaign for war--not just with Iraq, but "total war," as 
Michael Ledeen, one of the most influential JINSAns in Washington, 
put it last year. For this crew, "regime change" by any means 
necessary in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian 
Authority is an urgent imperative. Anyone who dissents--be it Colin 
Powell's State Department, the CIA or career military officers--is 
committing heresy against articles of faith that effectively hold 
there is no difference between US and Israeli national security 
interests, and that the only way to assure continued safety and 
prosperity for both countries is through hegemony in the Middle 
East--a hegemony achieved with the traditional cold war recipe of 
feints, force, clientism and covert action.

For example, the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board--chaired by 
JINSA/CSP adviser and former Reagan Administration Defense Department 
official Richard Perle, and stacked with advisers from both 
groups--recently made news by listening to a briefing that cast Saudi 
Arabia as an enemy to be brought to heel through a number of 
potential mechanisms, many of which mirror JINSA's recommendations, 
and which reflect the JINSA/CSP crowd's preoccupation with Egypt. 
(The final slide of the Defense Policy Board presentation proposed 
that "Grand Strategy for the Middle East" should concentrate on "Iraq 
as the tactical pivot, Saudi Arabia as the strategic pivot [and] 
Egypt as the prize.") Ledeen has been leading the charge for regime 
change in Iran, while old comrades like Andrew Marshall and Harold 
Rhode in the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment actively tinker with 
ways to re-engineer both the Iranian and Saudi governments. JINSA is 
also cheering the US military on as it tries to secure basing rights 
in the strategic Red Sea country of Eritrea, happily failing to 
mention that the once-promising secular regime of President Isaiais 
Afewerki continues to slide into the kind of repressive 
authoritarianism practiced by the "axis of evil" and its adjuncts.

Indeed, there are some in military and intelligence circles who have 
taken to using "axis of evil" in reference to JINSA and CSP, along 
with venerable repositories of hawkish thinking like the American 
Enterprise Institute and the Hudson Institute, as well as defense 
contractors, conservative foundations and public relations entities 
underwritten by far-right American Zionists (all of which help to 
underwrite JINSA and CSP). It's a milieu where ideology and money 
seamlessly blend: "Whenever you see someone identified in print or on 
TV as being with the Center for Security Policy or JINSA championing 
a position on the grounds of ideology or principle--which they are 
unquestionably doing with conviction--you are, nonetheless, not 
informed that they're also providing a sort of cover for other 
ideologues who just happen to stand to profit from hewing to the 
Likudnik and Pax Americana lines," says a veteran intelligence 
officer. He notes that while the United States has begun a phaseout 
of civilian aid to Israel that will end by 2007, government policy is 
to increase military aid by half the amount of civilian aid that's 
cut each year--which is not only a boon to both the US and Israeli 
weapons industries but is also crucial to realizing the far right's 
vision for missile defense and the Middle East.

Founded in 1976 by neoconservatives concerned that the United States 
might not be able to provide Israel with adequate military supplies 
in the event of another Arab-Israeli war, over the past twenty-five 
years JINSA has gone from a loose-knit proto-group to a 
$1.4-million-a-year operation with a formidable array of Washington 
power players on its rolls. Until the beginning of the current Bush 
Administration, JINSA's board of advisers included such heavy hitters 
as Dick Cheney, John Bolton (now Under Secretary of State for Arms 
Control) and Douglas Feith, the third-highest-ranking executive in 
the Pentagon. Both Perle and former Director of Central Intelligence 
James Woolsey, two of the loudest voices in the attack-Iraq chorus, 
are still on the board, as are such Reagan-era relics as Jeane 
Kirkpatrick, Eugene Rostow and Ledeen--Oliver North's Iran/contra 
liaison with the Israelis.

According to its website, JINSA exists to "educate the American 
public about the importance of an effective US defense capability so 
that our vital interests as Americans can be safeguarded" and to 
"inform the American defense and foreign affairs community about the 
important role Israel can and does play in bolstering democratic 
interests in the Mediterranean and the Middle East." In practice, 
this translates into its members producing a steady stream of op-eds 
and reports that have been good indicators of what the Pentagon's 
civilian leadership is thinking.

JINSA relishes denouncing virtually any type of contact between the 
US government and Syria and finding new ways to demonize the 
Palestinians. To give but one example (and one that kills two birds 
with one stone): According to JINSA, not only is Yasir Arafat in 
control of all violence in the occupied territories, but he 
orchestrates the violence solely "to protect Saddam.... Saddam is at 
the moment Arafat's only real financial supporter.... [Arafat] has no 
incentive to stop the violence against Israel and allow the West to 
turn its attention to his mentor and paymaster." And if there's a way 
to advance other aspects of the far-right agenda by intertwining them 
with Israeli interests, JINSA doesn't hesitate there, either. A 
recent report contends that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge must 
be tapped because "the Arab oil-producing states" are countries "with 
interests inimical to ours," but Israel "stand[s] with us when we 
need [Israel]," and a US policy of tapping oil under ANWR will "limit 
[the Arabs'] ability to do damage to either of us."

The bulk of JINSA's modest annual budget is spent on taking a bevy of 
retired US generals and admirals to Israel, where JINSA facilitates 
meetings between Israeli officials and the still-influential US flag 
officers, who, upon their return to the States, happily write op-eds 
and sign letters and advertisements championing the Likudnik line. 
(Sowing seeds for the future, JINSA also takes US service academy 
cadets to Israel each summer and sponsors a lecture series at the 
Army, Navy and Air Force academies.) In one such statement, issued 
soon after the outbreak of the latest intifada, twenty-six JINSAns of 
retired flag rank, including many from the advisory board, struck a 
moralizing tone, characterizing Palestinian violence as a "perversion 
of military ethics" and holding that "America's role as facilitator 
in this process should never yield to America's responsibility as a 
friend to Israel," as "friends don't leave friends on the 
battlefield."

However high-minded this might sound, the postservice associations of 
the letter's signatories--which are almost always left off the 
organization's website and communiqués--ought to require that the 
phrase be amended to say "friends don't leave friends on the 
battlefield, especially when there's business to be done and bucks to 
be made." Almost every retired officer who sits on JINSA's board of 
advisers or has participated in its Israel trips or signed a JINSA 
letter works or has worked with military contractors who do business 
with the Pentagon and Israel. While some keep a low profile as 
self-employed "consultants" and avoid mention of their clients, 
others are less shy about their associations, including with the 
private mercenary firm Military Professional Resources International, 
weapons broker and military consultancy Cypress International and SY 
Technology, whose main clients include the Pentagon's Missile Defense 
Agency, which oversees several ongoing joint projects with Israel.

The behemoths of military contracting are also well represented in 
JINSA's ranks. For example, JINSA advisory board members Adm. Leon 
Edney, Adm. David Jeremiah and Lieut. Gen. Charles May, all retired, 
have served Northrop Grumman or its subsidiaries as either 
consultants or board members. Northrop Grumman has built ships for 
the Israeli Navy and sold F-16 avionics and E-2C Hawkeye planes to 
the Israeli Air Force (as well as the Longbow radar system to the 
Israeli army for use in its attack helicopters). It also works with 
Tamam, a subsidiary of Israeli Aircraft Industries, to produce an 
unmanned aerial vehicle. Lockheed Martin has sold more than $2 
billion worth of F-16s to Israel since 1999, as well as flight 
simulators, multiple-launch rocket systems and Seahawk heavyweight 
torpedoes. At one time or another, General May, retired Lieut. Gen. 
Paul Cerjan and retired Adm. Carlisle Trost have labored in 
LockMart's vineyards. Trost has also sat on the board of General 
Dynamics, whose Gulfstream subsidiary has a $206 million contract to 
supply planes to Israel to be used for "special electronics missions."

By far the most profitably diversified of the JINSAns is retired Adm. 
David Jeremiah. President and partner of Technology Strategies & 
Alliances Corporation (described as a "strategic advisory firm and 
investment banking firm engaged primarily in the aerospace, defense, 
telecommunications and electronics industries"), Jeremiah also sits 
on the boards of Northrop Grumman's Litton subsidiary and of defense 
giant Alliant Techsystems, which--in partnership with Israel's 
TAAS--does a brisk business in rubber bullets. And he has a seat on 
the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, chaired by Perle.

About the only major defense contractor without a presence on JINSA's 
advisory board is Boeing, which has had a relationship with Israeli 
Aircraft Industries for thirty years. (Boeing also sells F-15s to 
Israel and, in partnership with Lockheed Martin, Apache attack 
helicopters, a ubiquitous weapon in the occupied territories.) But 
take a look at JINSA's kindred spirit in things pro-Likud and 
pro-Star Wars, the Center for Security Policy, and there on its 
national security advisory council are Stanley Ebner, a former Boeing 
executive; Andrew Ellis, vice president for government relations; and 
Carl Smith, a former staff director of the Senate Armed Services 
Committee who, as a lawyer in private practice, has counted Boeing 
among his clients. "JINSA and CSP," says a veteran Pentagon analyst, 
"may as well be one and the same."

Not a hard sell: There's always been considerable overlap beween the 
JINSA and CSP rosters--JINSA advisers Jeane Kirkpatrick, Richard 
Perle and Phyllis Kaminsky also serve on CSP's advisory council; 
current JINSA advisory board chairman David Steinmann sits on CSP's 
board of directors; and before returning to the Pentagon Douglas 
Feith served as the board's chair. At this writing, twenty-two CSP 
advisers--including additional Reagan-era remnants like Elliott 
Abrams, Ken deGraffenreid, Paula Dobriansky, Sven Kraemer, Robert 
Joseph, Robert Andrews and J.D. Crouch--have reoccupied key positions 
in the national security establishment, as have other true believers 
of more recent vintage.

While CSP boasts an impressive advisory list of hawkish luminaries, 
its star is Frank Gaffney, its founder, president and CEO. A protégé 
of Perle going back to their days as staffers for the late Senator 
Henry "Scoop" Jackson (a k a the Senator from Boeing, and the 
Senate's most zealous champion of Israel in his day), Gaffney later 
joined Perle at the Pentagon, only to be shown the door by Defense 
Secretary Frank Carlucci in 1987, not long after Perle left. Gaffney 
then reconstituted the latest incarnation of the Committee on the 
Present Danger. Beyond compiling an A-list of influential 
conservative hawks, Gaffney has been prolific over the past fifteen 
years, churning out a constant stream of reports (as well as regular 
columns for the Washington Times) making the case that the gravest 
threats to US national security are China, Iraq, still-undeveloped 
ballistic missiles launched by rogue states, and the passage of or 
adherence to virtually any form of arms control treaty.

Gaffney and CSP's prescriptions for national security have been 
fairly simple: Gut all arms control treaties, push ahead with weapons 
systems virtually everyone agrees should be killed (such as the V-22 
Osprey), give no quarter to the Palestinians and, most important, go 
full steam ahead on just about every national missile defense 
program. (CSP was heavily represented on the late-1990s Commission to 
Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States, which was 
instrumental in keeping the program alive during the Clinton years.)

Looking at the center's affiliates, it's not hard to see why: Not 
only are makers of the Osprey (Boeing) well represented on the CSP's 
board of advisers but so too is Lockheed Martin (by vice president 
for space and strategic missiles Charles Kupperman and director of 
defense systems Douglas Graham). Former TRW executive Amoretta Hoeber 
is also a CSP adviser, as is former Congressman and Raytheon lobbyist 
Robert Livingston. Ball Aerospace & Technologies--a major 
manufacturer of NASA and Pentagon satellites--is represented by 
former Navy Secretary John Lehman, while missile-defense computer 
systems maker Hewlett-Packard is represented by George Keyworth, who 
is on its board of directors. And the Congressional Missile Defense 
Caucus and Osprey (or "tilt rotor") caucus are represented by 
Representative Curt Weldon and Senator Jon Kyl.

CSP was instrumental in developing the arguments against the 
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Largely ignored or derided at the 
time, a 1995 CSP memo co-written by Douglas Feith holding that the 
United States should withdraw from the ABM treaty has essentially 
become policy, as have other CSP reports opposing the Comprehensive 
Test Ban Treaty, the Chemical Weapons Convention and the 
International Criminal Court. But perhaps the most insightful window 
on the JINSA/CSP policy worldview comes in the form of a paper Perle 
and Feith collaborated on in 1996 with six others under the auspices 
of the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies. 
Essentially an advice letter to ascendant Israeli politician Benjamin 
Netanyahu, "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm" 
makes for insightful reading as a kind of US-Israeli neoconservative 
manifesto.

The paper's first prescription was for an Israeli rightward economic 
shift, with tax cuts and a selloff of public lands and 
enterprises--moves that would also engender support from a "broad 
bipartisan spectrum of key pro-Israeli Congressional leaders." But 
beyond economics, the paper essentially reads like a blueprint for a 
mini-cold war in the Middle East, advocating the use of proxy armies 
for regime changes, destabilization and containment. Indeed, it even 
goes so far as to articulate a way to advance right-wing Zionism by 
melding it with missile-defense advocacy. "Mr. Netanyahu can 
highlight his desire to cooperate more closely with the United States 
on anti-missile defense in order to remove the threat of blackmail 
which even a weak and distant army can pose to either state," it 
reads. "Not only would such cooperation on missile defense counter a 
tangible physical threat to Israel's survival, but it would broaden 
Israel's base of support among many in the United States Congress who 
may know little about Israel, but care very much about missile 
defense"--something that has the added benefit of being "helpful in 
the effort to move the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem."

Recent months in Washington have shown just how influential the 
notions propagated by JINSA and CSP are--and how disturbingly zealous 
their advocates are. In early March Feith vainly attempted to get the 
CIA to keep former intelligence officers Milt Bearden and Frank 
Anderson from accepting an invitation to an Afghanistan-related 
meeting with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld at the Pentagon--not because 
of what the two might say about Afghanistan, according to sources 
familiar with the incident, but likely out of fear that Anderson, a 
veteran Arabist and former chief of the CIA's Near East division, 
would proffer his views on Iraq (opposed to invading) and 
Israel-Palestine (a fan of neither Arafat nor Sharon). In late June, 
after United Press International reported on a US Muslim civil 
liberties group's lambasting of Gaffney for his attacks on the 
American Muslim Council, Gaffney, according to a fellow traveler, 
"went berserk," launching a stream of invective about the UPI scribe 
who reported the item.

It's incidents like this, say knowledgeable observers and 
participants, that highlight an interesting dynamic among right-wing 
hawks at the moment. Though the general agenda put forth by JINSA and 
CSP continues to be reflected in councils of war, even some of the 
hawks (including Rumsfeld deputy Paul Wolfowitz) are growing 
increasingly leery of Israel's settlements policy and Gaffney's 
relentless support for it. Indeed, his personal stock in Bush 
Administration circles is low. "Gaffney has worn out his welcome by 
being an overbearing gadfly rather than a serious contributor to 
policy," says a senior Pentagon political official. Since earlier 
this year, White House political adviser Karl Rove has been casting 
about for someone to start a new, more mainstream defense group that 
would counter the influence of CSP. According to those who have 
communicated with Rove on the matter, his quiet efforts are in 
response to complaints from many conservative activists who feel let 
down by Gaffney, or feel he's too hard on President Bush. "A lot of 
us have taken [Gaffney] at face value over the years," one 
influential conservative says. "Yet we now know he's pushed for some 
of the most flawed missile defense and conventional systems. He 
considered Cuba a 'classic asymmetric threat' but not Al Qaeda. And 
since 9/11, he's been less concerned with the threat to America than 
to Israel."

Gaffney's operation has always been a small one, about $1 million 
annually--funded largely by a series of grants from the conservative 
Olin, Bradley and various Scaife foundations, as well as some defense 
contractor money--but he's recently been able to underwrite a TV and 
print ad campaign holding that the Palestinians should be Enemy 
Number One in the War on Terror, still obsessed with the destruction 
of Israel. It's here that one sees the influence not of defense 
contractor money but of far-right Zionist dollars, including some 
from Irving Moskowitz, the California bingo magnate. A donor to both 
CSP and JINSA (as well as a JINSA director), Moskowitz not only sends 
millions of dollars a year to far-right Israeli settler groups like 
Ateret Cohanim but he has also funded the construction of 
settlements, having bought land for development in key Arab areas 
around Jerusalem. Moskowitz ponied up the money that enabled the 1996 
reopening of a tunnel under the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif, which 
resulted in seventy deaths due to rioting.

Also financing Gaffney's efforts is New York investment banker 
Lawrence Kadish. A valued and valuable patron of both the Republican 
National Committee and George W. Bush, Kadish helps underwrite CSP as 
well as Americans for Victory Over Terrorism, an offshoot of 
conservative activist William Bennett's Empower America, on which he 
and Gaffney serve as "senior advisers" in the service of identifying 
"external" and "internal" post-9/11 threats to America. (The 
"internal" threats, asarticulated by AVOT, include former President 
Jimmy Carter, Harper's editor Lewis Lapham and Representative Maxine 
Waters.) Another of Gaffney's backers is Poju Zabludowicz, heir to a 
formidable diversified international empire that includes arms 
manufacturer Soltam--which once employed Perle--and benefactor of the 
recently established Britain Israel Communication and Research 
Centre, a London-based group that appears to equate reportage or 
commentary uncomplimentary to Zionism with anti-Semitism.

While a small but growing number of conservatives are voicing 
concerns about various aspects of foreign and defense policy--ranging 
from fear of overreach to lack of Congressional debate--the hawks 
seem to be ruling the roost. Beginning in October, hard-line American 
Enterprise Institute scholar Michael Rubin (to Rubin, outgoing UN 
human rights chief Mary Robinson is an abettor of terrorism) arrives 
at the Pentagon to take over the Defense Department's Iran-Iraq 
account, adding another voice to the Pentagon section of Ledeen's 
"total war" chorus. Colin Powell's State Department continues to take 
a beating from outside and inside--including Bolton and his special 
assistant David Wurmser. (An AEI scholar and far-right Zionist who's 
married to Meyrav Wurmser of the Middle East Media Research 
Institute--recently the subject of a critical investigation by London 
Guardian Middle East editor Brian Whitaker--Wurmser played a key role 
in crafting the "Arafat must go" policy that many career specialists 
see as a problematic sop to Ariel Sharon.)

As for Rumsfeld, based on comments made at a Pentagon "town hall" 
meeting on August 6, there seems to be little doubt as to whose 
comments are resonating most with him--and not just on missile 
defense and overseas adventures: After fielding a question about 
Israeli-Palestinian issues, he repeatedly referred to the "so-called 
occupied territories" and casually characterized the Israeli policy 
of building Jewish-only enclaves on Palestinian land as "mak[ing] 
some settlement in various parts of the so-called occupied area," 
with which Israel can do whatever it wants, as it has "won" all its 
wars with various Arabentities--essentially an echo of JINSA's stated 
position that "there is no Israeli occupation." Ominously, Rumsfeld's 
riff gave a ranking Administration official something of a chill: "I 
realized at that point," he said, "that on settlements--where there 
are cleavages on the right--Wolfowitz may be to the left of Rumsfeld."

--
<http://www.groundtruthinvestigations.com/>