Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall on background of Iraq peace move news.

Talking Points Memo

Newspaper stories see the light of day for all sorts of strange and inscrutable reasons. Often the nominal 'story' is like the calm or slightly rippled surface of a lake in which all sorts of hidden business is taking place beneath.

Why are you hearing about a given story now? Who dropped a dime on who? The surface story is often at least as important as the backstory. But the backstory is something you want to know too.

Here's one of those cases.

snip

Down deep in the New York Times article, there's this line contained in a parantheses: "In May, Mr. Maloof, who has lost his security clearances, was placed on paid administrative leave by the Pentagon."

There's your ripple.

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I think the equivalent of Watergate 'surprise horrors' in the current debacle will center on the Office of Special Plans, Office of Global Communications, etc and foreign/private operatives. Someday the wretched truth will begin to seep out.

smart guy with his finger on the pulse yet not arrogant

kind of like a good college professor (but he does have a ph.d.)

He gets the "why" of every story and very quickly.

like a teacher ... "when you see this in D.C. it generally mean that" ... almost teaching meta-cognition, political style...

I read the article and I don't see the underlining point that he sees...and I really want to see it!

and i don't know that i am right but it seems the dude (Maloof) in question was part of the overatures yet also was doin' the chalaby thang (trying to connect the unconnectable socialist/fascist/iraqi regime with major fanatical fundie islamic organizations). marshall shows us he was cut off, so maybe marshall is saying the dude cut off is responsible for a 'negative' (to the us administration) news story...


but i could be missing it too. the dude maloof wouldn't have much credibility, given this part of the tpm post:

"In aftermath of 9/11, Maloof and David Wurmser were part of a two-man team tasked by the Pentagon with finding links between Shi'a and Sunni extremist groups as well as between Islamist terrorists and secular Arab regimes. They reported finding lots of evidence. But the folks at the CIA never bought it."

others?

marshall links to that article on KR Wash Bur

and that article states:

'Maloof is on administrative leave and hasn't been charged with wrongdoing. Those close to him contend that his clearances were pulled in retaliation for challenging the official assessment that there were no operational terrorist links between al-Qaida and Iraq.'

so marshall is alluding to (i think) a disgruntled truth-teller. the lebanese-american businessman didn't find the fascist/socialist/iraqi links with the fundies, nor sunnifundie/shiitefundie connections, that wasn't the 'party' line, he was cut off ... then the story.
marsall leave the connection between the dots out but that might be the connection ...

and can't read. dude is shady. so the point is subtle . ..

maloof is the source for the current story.

The untold story, behind the scenes, is what we dont exactly know.

reminds me of the wilson affair.

If you also read the link at the bottom of Marshall's article you will see that Douglas Feith (Office of Special Plans) and Richard Perle went to bat for this Maloof when his security clearance was dropped in August, so Maloof was obviously a person willing to 'shape' intelligence in the direction that was politically correct for the PNAC pod in the White House? Maloof was either willing or could possibly be forced to spin intelligence the way Feith and Perle and Cheney wanted it presented so they could represent it the way they wanted which we know was war-war-war-now-now-now.

I just heard on a radio report -ABC I think- that Perle is saying he was approached with the peace initiative 10 days before the war commenced while he was in London but he was told not to pursue/entertain it from political people in the white house. Like he really wanted to do that anyway.

It seems to me that this story could put Perle in a position where he is straddling an ever-widening rift in the administration. Think Wiley Coyote with a leg on each side a a split in the rocks that has just been blasted apart by one of his own bombs intended for the road-runner.

like maloof, shady dude he is, is the one that has to be discarded, but by discarding him, that shakes certain other events happening later in time loose for re-scrutiny--shadier by taint given by the white house itself in its defense just this evening. the source of the original story is the question.

See what pops up when David Wurmser is googled, and there's lots more at this fabulous web page Disinfopedia. Wurmser was once an advisor to Netanyahu!

David Wurmser, a neo-conservative, who was a "special assistant" to John R. Bolton at the State Department<1> and a research fellow on the Middle East at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) has been moved (in early September 2003) to the office of the Vice President Dick Cheney and I. Lewis Libby, replacing in this job, Eric Edelman.

Wurmser has long called for the United States and Israel to work together to roll back the Ba'ath-led government in Syria. For the latter part of the 1990s, he wrote frequently to support a joint U.S.-Israeli effort to undermine then-President Hafez Assad in hopes of destroying Ba'athist rule and hastening the creation of a new order in the Levant to be dominated by "tribal, familial and clan unions under limited governments".
... Indeed, it was precisely because of the strategic importance of the Levant that Wurmser advocated overthrowing Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in favor of an Iraqi National Congress (INC) closely tied to the Hashemite monarchy in Jordan.
..."Whoever inherits Iraq dominates the entire Levant strategically," he wrote in one 1996 paper for the Jerusalem-based Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS). <2>and<3>


Wurmser has written extensively (books and articles) on the Middle East. His credits include: Wall Street Journal, Wall Street Journal Europe, Washington Times, Weekly Standard, New Republic, SAIS Review, Middle East Quarterly, Perspectives on Political Science, Strategic Review, Jobs & Capital, and The World and I.

He was director of Research in Strategy and Politics Program at the Institute for Advanced Strategic & Political Studies (96), director of Institutional Grants at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (94-96), and project officer at the United States Institute of Peace (88-94).

David Wurmser is married to Israeli born Meyrav Wurmser who as head of Middle East studies at the neo-conservative Hudson Institute, was the main author of a 1996 report by a task force convened by the IASPS and headed by Perle, called the 'Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000'.
...The paper, called A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, was directed to incoming Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.
... It featured a series of recommendations designed to end the process of Israel trading land for peace by transforming the balance of power in the Middle East in favor of an axis consisting of Israel, Turkey and Jordan.
... To do so, it called for ousting Saddam Hussein and installing a Hashemite leader in Baghdad. From that point, the strategy would be largely focused on Syria and, at the least, to reducing its influence in Lebanon.
... Among other steps, the report called for Israeli sponsorship of attacks on Syrian territory by "Israeli proxy forces" based in Lebanon and "striking Syrian military targets in Lebanon, and should that prove insufficient, striking at select targets in Syria proper". <4>and<5>


Wurmser is a close friend and political ally at the AEI with Richard N. Perle. Perle wrote the introduction to Wurmser's book "Tyranny's Ally: America's Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein." <6>

http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=David_Wurmser