WASHINGTON SCENE - MIDDLEEAST.ORG
Powell Out! CIA Purging!
Jewish Neocons + Christian Fundamentalist Evangelicals Still Greater Power

The USA's 'Palestinian Leaders'
The CIA's current Palestinians include Rajoub, Dahlan, Sha'ath

MIDDLEEAST.ORG - MER - Washington - 15 November: Over the weekend in occupied Palestine both Abu Mazen and Nabil Sha'ath found themselves viciously shouted down and literally under fire for 'being America's man'! These are also the leading figures who for reasons of their own helped cover up the assassination of Yasser Arafat, who made the huge pay off to silence 'wife' Suha, who repeatedly lied about the blood poisoning, who prevented the inquest and autopsy 'demanded' by Arafat's personal doctor; and who have themselves pocketed huge sums as well as special VIP priviledges over the years. Abu Mazen, Abu Ala, and Nabil Sha'ath -- the current 'Palestinian leaders' largely empowered and kept in place by the U.S. and Israel -- are quite literally despised by their own people and none has a chance of winning a real election in January other than by more corruption and American-Israeli designs.

As for what is to come in the Middle East and the all-but-laughable 'peace process as well as the Iraq debacle, former Secretary of State Colin Powell has now finally cast his vote.

Just hours after once again fronting for U.S. Middle East policies as today's article in The Guardian points out; just hours, after proclaming about the 'new Palestinian leaders' "We know these gentlemen well, and I hope to be able to see them..."; just hours after the extent of the historic purge of the CIA has flashed into the headlines...; Colin Powell has cashed in his chips in a combination of being pushed and walking away while he still can without even further damage to his once considerable reputation.

For many in Washington these developments all suggest that Powell himself has little real confidence in all the flowery optimistic rhetoric, knows how badly everything has deteriorated and how difficult it will be to even try to put humpty dumpty together again; and knows as well that in reality the Jewish/Israeli neocons and Christian fundamentalist evangelicals are now more in charge of U.S. foreign policy than ever.

Powell hints US is ready to broker Mid-East peace

By Andrew Buncombe in Washington

<>The Guardian - 15 November 2004: The US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, plans to meet moderate Palestinian leaders later this month in an early indication of America's readiness to become involved in a Middle East peace process.

General Powell said on Saturday that he planned to attend a conference in Egypt on 22-23 November where he expected to meet the current and former Palestinian prime ministers, Ahmad Quriea and Abu Mazen. If he did not meet them in Egypt, he might travel to the Palestinian territories to do so.

"We know these gentlemen well, and I hope to be able to see them to discuss what their plans are and how to move forward," General Powell said.

The Bush administration was widely criticised during its first term for failing to engage in a process for peace in the Middle East, taking the position that it was impossible to deal with the Palestinians' elected leader, Yasser Arafat.

Since Mr Arafat's death last week, the expectation that America would become more involved has grown. During a press conference with Tony Blair in Washington last Friday, President George Bush said he was ready to spend some of America's political capital on the issue and that he believed a separate Palestinian state could be established within four years.

General Powell said the US wanted Israel to allow Palestinians in the occupied territories to move freely to vote for Mr Arafat's successor.

Washington Post - Friday, November 12, 2004; Page A25 One of the more improbable chapters in the life of Yasser Arafat was his wink-and-nod understanding with the CIA. In secret, Arafat for the past 30 years allowed his top intelligence officers to maintain regular contact with the agency -- even as he publicly continued his defiant and ultimately fruitless quest for a Palestinian state.

The intelligence liaison was one of Arafat's many straddles -- a way of playing all possible sides of the game. In the early 1970s, when the covert relationship with the United States began, he was simultaneously in contact with the CIA and the KGB, with the radical Egyptians and the conservative Saudis. All these secret machinations didn't get Arafat much in the end, and maybe that's the real point: The things that matter most in the modern world are overt actions, not covert ones.

I stumbled across the U.S.-PLO contacts more than 20 years ago, when I was covering the Middle East for the Wall Street Journal, and published an exposé in 1983. With Arafat's passing, perhaps it's a good time to look back at his secret history.

America's dalliance with Arafat began in late 1969, when the CIA first spotted a promising potential recruit in his Fatah organization named Ali Hassan Salameh, known as Abu Hassan. A CIA case officer in Beirut, Robert Ames, made contact through a Lebanese intermediary, and there was a brief exchange of information. I'm told that it was blessed from the beginning by Arafat, who wanted to open a channel to the Americans.

It was a risky relationship for both sides. The Palestine Liberation Organization at that time was the leading terrorist threat to Israel and the West. But Ames's contacts with Abu Hassan continued in the spring of 1970 with a face-to-face meeting in Kuwait. A senior CIA officer then tried to "recruit" Abu Hassan by offering him a large payment in Rome later that year. The Palestinian angrily refused, insisting he was not an American agent.

The botched recruitment was followed by years of bloody turmoil. King Hussein expelled PLO guerrillas from Jordan in September 1970; Arafat responded by creating a secret terrorist wing known as Black September -- with America's former contact, Abu Hassan, as one of its key operatives. After Black September killed Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, the Israelis targeted Abu Hassan for assassination. But around that time, the CIA was resuming contact with the Palestinian intelligence officer, again with Arafat's blessing.

A secret understanding between Arafat's man and the CIA was reached in a meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria in November 1974, at the time of Arafat's visit to the United Nations. It amounted to a mutual nonaggression pact. The liaison deepened during the 1975-76 Lebanese civil war, when Arafat's operatives provided security for American diplomats in West Beirut.

Senior U.S. officials tell me that the Palestinian link helped save many dozens of American lives in the mid-1970s. But Abu Hassan remained a deadly enemy of Israel, and he was finally killed by an Israeli car bomb in 1979. Arafat was devastated by the loss of a man who had become his closest aide, yet he allowed the intelligence liaison to continue with a string of Abu Hassan's successors, in Beirut, Tunis and Ramallah.

All the while, Arafat acted as if the road to Jerusalem lay through Washington -- or, more precisely, through Langley. Like many Arab leaders, he was mesmerized by what he imagined as the power of U.S. intelligence to control events. Gruesome evidence that he was wrong came in April 1983, when Ames was killed by the truck bomb that destroyed the U.S. Embassy in Beirut. But Arafat remained a believer in the secret power of the CIA; that was one of his many mistakes.

Politicians often talk these days about the need for more "human intelligence" about terrorism, as if it's an engine that can be primed if you spend enough money. But the long history of contacts between the CIA and the Palestinians demonstrates just how murky and difficult these operations are -- and how dependent they are on personal relationships. The CIA-PLO intelligence contacts could keep channels open, but they could never substitute for diplomacy.

Peace isn't something that happens in secret. It's an open process of give-and-take. Arafat tried for a time to travel this public road, but he was probably more comfortable in the shadowy world of spies and secret bank accounts. That's one of the lessons for Arafat's successors: A new nation can't be created in backrooms. It's the ultimate overt action, and one that Arafat, sadly, could never accomplish.

But even as the victory was being declared, wide-spread violence erupted throughout the rest of the country, with parts of Mosul passing into the hands of insurgents, forcing the American military to detach and rush part of its Fallujah force to the northern city. There was also street fighting in Baghdad, where mortar rounds were fired at the Green Zone, the heavily barricaded heart of US power in Iraq, and heavy fighting in the town of Yusufiyah, south of the capital.

Aid agencies warned of a humanitarian disaster in Fallujah and neighbouring areas, with outbreaks of typhoid and other diseases. Eight groups said in a joint letter that there were now 200,000 refugees who have fled the fighting and are without food, water or shelter. People leaving the city described rotting bodies piling up on the streets.

"The people inside Fallujah are dying and starving. They need us," said Red Crescent spokeswoman Fardous al-Ubaidi. "The situation is catastrophic. It is our duty as a humanitarian agency to do our job for these people in these circumstances." A convoy of four trucks carrying food and medicine finally reached Fallujah city centre yesterday after prolonged negotiations with US troops. The Iraqi Health Minister, Ala'din Alwan, said the government had begun transferring "significant numbers" of injured to hospitals in Baghdad, but could not say how many.

In Baghdad, Qassem Daoud, the Iraq interim government's security adviser, said: "Operation Fajr [Dawn] has been achieved and only the malignant pockets remain that we are dealing with through a clean-up operation. The mission is accomplished and there only remains these few pockets, which are being cleaned up. The number of killed has risen to more than 1,000 and we have arrested more than 200 so far."

In continuing fighting yesterday, two city mosques were hit by air strikes after troops reported sniper fire from inside. Two US Marines were killed by a home-made bomb and a US warplane dropped a 225kg bomb to destroy what the military called an insurgent tunnel network.

The US military insisted that at least 100 of those killed were "foreign fighters". However, the authorities said afterwards that only 14 of the prisoners taken were foreign, and 10 of them were Iranians. Mr Daoud also said that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was not in Fallujah. Iyad Allawi, Iraq's US-appointed interim prime minister, had made the handing over of Zarqawi by the people of Fallujah a pre-condition to avoid an attack.

The US military said up to 2,000 insurgents are attempting to escape from Fallujah and the likely route would be south of the city, through the area where the Black Watch battle group is based. It emerged yesterday that their forward base is at al-Qaqa'a military industrial complex, looted last year after US soldiers failed to secure it. Weapons from al-Qaqa'a have been used, it is believed, in the attacks on the Black Watch.

In Mosul, masked gunmen took over banks and government buildings without interference from either US forces or Iraqi government troops. US warplanes had bombed the city 24 hours earlier and the police chief had been sacked after being accused of colluding with rebels. But there were reports of policemen changing into civilian clothes and joining the insurgents. Duriad Kashmoula, the governor of Mosul, blamed the uprising on "the betrayal of some police members". In other districts, vigilantes set up roadblocks and patrolled neighbourhoods. The US military said the insurgents in Mosul were local people, not fighters coming from Fallujah.

In Baghdad insurgents shot down a helicopter, injuring three. One soldier died and three other people were injured in an ambush. The government announced that the international airport would remain closed indefinitely to civilian traffic.

Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, said allied forces had "completed the move, for all practical purposes, from the north of the town to the south". Iraq's interim Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, said there had been "a clear-cut win over the insurgents and the terrorists".

But the pacification of the rebel stronghold could be a hollow victory. The Americans will leave behind them a shattered city, having unleashed the full might of the US military against an estimated 6,000 insurgents.

There was plenty of evidence across Iraq that the war is far from over, and the devastation of Fallujah is likely to have fuelled the resistance.

American and Iraqi forces were still "mopping up" pockets of resistance yesterday and conducting house-to-house searches. A US commander recognised that the city had been "occupied but not subdued".

The US military also acknowledged that the Jordanian militant leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and other prominent members of the insurgency had escaped from Fallujah. Mr Allawi said: "Fallujah is no longer a safe haven for terrorists" but he admitted that it would take "some days" to clear the remaining nests of resistance.

The six-day air and ground offensive left 38 Americans and six Iraqi government soldiers dead, according to the US military. More than 200 US soldiers were wounded. Two hundred of the insurgents who were killed were foreigners, the Americans said.

After failing in April to wrest Fallujah from the insurgents in a three-week assault, this time the American military expressed pride in the speed of the operation, which deployed six times the number of troops dispatched to the city seven months ago.

But the number of Iraqi civilians killed or wounded in the fighting was not mentioned. Mr Allawi said on Saturday that no civilian casualties had been reported.

Mr Rumsfeld confidently asserted last week that civilians had been given guidance on how to avoid getting injured. He predicted that there would not be large numbers of civilians killed, and "certainly not by US forces".

Up to half of the city's 300,000 resi-dents had fled before or during the military operation aimed at pacifying the city to enable elections to be held in January. But thousands remained trapped. Yesterday charred bodies were scattered in the streets, where rows of buildings lay in ruins.

People in the city said they had no water and no food, and aid agencies warned that Fallujah and surrounding areas were facing a humanitarian catastrophe. There have been outbreaks of typhoid and other diseases. Some people leaving the city told of rotting corpses being piled up and thousands of people trapped, many of them wounded without access to medical aid.

An aid convoy was held up at the city's main hospital in the western outskirts. Captain Adam Collier of the US Army cited security reasons as he explained that the seven trucks and ambulances sent by the Iraqi Red Crescent to Fallujah with medicine, food, blankets and water purification tablets would not be allowed through. US Marines Colonel Mike Shupp said: "There is no need to bring supplies in because we have supplies of our own for the people. Now the bridge is open, I will bring out casualties and all aid work can be done here."

Battles raged across Iraq yesterday. American helicopter gunships attacked Baiji in the north, and tanks moved into the centre of the city. In the northern city of Mosul, US and Iraqi security forces struggled to retake a police station that had been overrun by insurgents. They said the local security forces had lost control of much of Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city with an estimated population of 1.8 million Arabs, Kurds, Turkomen and Assyrian Christians. Also in the Kurdish-dominated region, gunmen ambushed and killed a senior official of the Iraqi Communist Party and member of the national assembly, Waddah Hassan Abdel Amir, on the road to Arbil. There were further gun attacks in Baghdad.

There was also an ominous political unravelling as a direct consequence of the Fallujah operation. A senior aide to Muqtada Sadr, the Shia cleric who has led two uprisings against the Americans, said he would not take part in the elections while "Iraqi cities are under attack".

Meanwhile an Islamist group has freed two women related to Mr Allawi but is still holding his male cousin hostage, two Arab satellite channels said yesterday. A previously unknown group seized the interim Prime Minister's 75-year-old cousin Ghazi Allawi along with Mr Ghazi's wife and their daughter-in-law in Baghdad last Tuesday.