USA At A Crossroads

Israeli newspapers are reporting that the FBI has "reached a crossroads" in their probe of the pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC. In fact, it's a moral and political crossroads that the whole USA is facing, not just the FBI:

Some media sources have said the entire Franklin affair illustrates some of the internal battles that have taken place over how the US should deal with Iraq. The document that Franklin is alleged to have given the two AIPAC staffers may have been a draft copy of a National Security Presidential Directive written by Pentagon neocons (who advocate a hard line towards Iran), which contained a proposal to destabilize Iran. The directive had apparently been turned down by the White House.

These reports come on a day when arch neo-con Paul Wolfowitz is unanimously approved as the new head of the World Bank, and when yet another taxpayer-funded investigation into 9/11 intelligence failures refuses to even discuss the giant white elephant in the middle of the room, a.k.a. the neocon-controlled Office of Special Plans. Instead we get this crap:

“The analysts who worked Iraqi weapons issues universally agreed that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments,” the report said.

But it added: “It is hard to deny the conclusion that intelligence analysts worked in an environment that did not encourage skepticism about the conventional wisdom.”

Hard to deny that it did not... But apparently impossible to say that it did.

Of course, this latest investigation was only set up to reach the pre-determined conclusion that John Negroponte needs total control of all US intelligence powers (and funds). Its recommendations include "sweeping changes at the FBI" which will inevitably impact on cases like the AIPAC investigation above.

So the Bush Neocon machine marches on, towards total control of an increasingly Fascist state, at an astonishingly rapid pace... who will stop them?

UPDATE: From the BBC's article on this intelligence report:

One problem is that, like the Butler review in the UK, the Robb-Silberman commission did not examine the way in which politicians used - or misused - the intelligence in their possession.

In both cases, the mandate of inquiry was limited to what happened within intelligence agencies - but, arguably, dealing with the political use of intelligence is another key component in restoring credibility.

Experts and practitioners all caution that intelligence is inherently fragmentary, incomplete and difficult. The commission says that in the future, this needs to be made clearer to politicians and policymakers.

But the question will still remain about whether politicians make the caveats and qualifications sufficiently clear when they communicate intelligence either to the public or to allies.

Indeed, the British response to the WMD lies has been quite markedly different to the US response. Whereas the US neo-cons have all received promotions to more influential positions, Britain is drawing up laws to ensure the nation will never again go to war based on intelligence:

BRITAIN should never again go to war solely on the reports of the secret services, the government admitted yesterday in a comprehensive intelligence shake-up.

New rules to ensure ministers always treat the reports of MI6 and other agencies with caution are at the centre of the reforms brought about by the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction fiasco.

New jobs and structures for the spies themselves are also intended to embed scepticism about the reliability and value of intelligence reports in the heart of Whitehall.

The changes announced by the Foreign Office amount to a tacit admission that Tony Blair and other ministers did not do enough to question the reports that led the Prime Minister to state "beyond doubt" that Iraq had WMDs...