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Guilt By Association: Deceiving People
Editor Raja Mujtaba
Posted on August 8, 2010 by Marivel Guzman

Posted on www.Opinion-Maker.org on 17. Jun, 2010 by Jeff in Uncategorized

By Tarik Jan

Jeff Gates new book Guilt by Association belongs to the same genre of works that one may characterize as humanistic, developed by Noam Chomsky, William Blum, Kevin Philip, Peter Beinart, Edward Said, John Mearsheimer-Stephen Walt, John Perkins, and others. The latter two are the insiders previously working for the government (CIA) or the corporate sector associated with CIA.

From data collection to analyses, their approaches are different but the common thread that runs through their works is the desire to move the world from the paradigm of domination and plunder to a relatively more equitable relationship among the nations. That is why many would consider them as children of humanity.

For instance, Noam Chomsky’s Year 501 the Conquest Continues and his other works place the U.S. in the European tradition of colonial conquest and plunder, defining it as modern-day imperialism.

William Blum’s The Rogue State centers on the U.S. desire to control the planet in the name of peace and protection. His thesis is that the U.S. wants the world to buy its weapons. “[L]et our military and our corporations roam freely across your land, and give us veto power over whom your leader will be, and we will protect you.” Blum describes it as the cleverest protection racket.

Kevin Philip’s American Theocracy is also in the same line though more focused on the deadly combination of oil and religion as arbiters of U.S. policies. By all counts it is a profound work.

Peter Beinart’s The Icarus Syndrome narrows down on the fallout of the U.S. policy in remaking world after its image.

Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism is a transformative work that traces culture role as informing the political and economic effort to control and consolidate the Western domination over others.

John Mearsheimer’s The Israeli Lobby and the U.S. Foreign Policy deals with the exaggerated American tilt toward Israel and the problems it has created to the U.S. image in the community of nations.

John Perkins’ Confessions of a Hitman is a testimonial work of a corporate employee trained to destabilize other countries through ill fated economic policies. In the process it exposes the linkage between American business and CIA sponsored subversion.

Why are these brilliant minds critical of their country? No doubt, their cause is unpopular with the powerful entrenched interests who often accused them of being anti-American. But they are not. Most of these writers share Edward Said‘s feelings about himself when he said, “It is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home.”

Jeff Gates follows their trail but with his own lantern. The imprint he leaves behind is easily discernable owing to its individuality, a sense of being earnest, and sincerity to his craft. His leitmotif is to unravel the machination and deception of the Jewish oligarchy at the micro-level, which he does with the skill of a consummate lawyer.

With attributes like these, Guilt by Association is a masterful study of how a “land grab” named Israel operates at the American expense. It is also an exhaustive study of how a small U.S. minority can manipulate the policies of a superpower for the benefit of the so-called Jewish homeland. More than that, it is a study of the criminalization of the American politics and economy. Combine the three aspects and one finds himself reading a book that is at once scholarly and yet free from the tedium of being pedantic, dealing with people and their wiles in pursuing a ruthless Zionist ideology and its grab for other’s land. In this sense, it has more than one dimension – a manual of subversion, a mix of psychology, brain manipulation, coercion, money laundering, and worst exploitation of human emotions.

To sift the myth from reality and facts from fiction, Gates applies the “game theory,” a branch of applied mathematics, to the Zionist manipulation of the U.S. political and economic scene. The game theory is a helpful tool in his hands to explain the role of each player in his strategic posturing. Thus as he explains it, there is the “target,” who is to be enfeebled and discredited; the “manipulator,” who plans and employs human consciousness to set the dynamics into motion against the backdrop of shared beliefs of Judeo-Christianity, democracy, and war against terrorism.

In pursuing their goals, the Israelis have layers of operatives whom Gates splinters into agents, assets, and helpers. Agents of course are trained for a job; assets are those who can be baited into empathizing with an intended cause for money, influence, sex, or ideology. Even a president can be made a pliable peddler for pro-Israeli policies through such means. Helpers are a corps of workers who give helping hand to Israeli operations. They could be as many as 7000 in London alone. As they say themselves, “[t]here are a lot of guys at the working level up here [on Capitol Hill] … who happen to be Jewish, who are willing to look … at certain issues in terms of their Jewishness. … You can get an awful lot done just at the staff level.”

With all these cadres in place, the mode is sophisticated meandering through a maze of actions. To begin with, the Israelis have chalked out dossiers of psychological profiles of individuals who can be influenced owing to their inclination or vulnerability. Jeff Gates mentions two such incidents where Jewish women used their charm on at least two presidents. For laundering money to have political clout he has a long list of beneficiaries of Jewish generosity from presidents to lawmakers, including recent presidential aspirant John McCain and White House inmate Barack Obama.

Validating his game theory, Gates mention, among others, two instances. Both are relevant to our times.

In the 1980s Libya was hot in the news for its vanguard role in supporting the Palestinian cause. Israel decided to neutralize Qadhafi through a three-phase action plan, which Jeff Gates spells out as pre-staging, orchestration, and provocation.

As pre-staging, messages are transmitted from the Libyan soil to its embassies to set off a chain of terrorist acts. The intension is obvious. Such messages are prone to interception. And that brings Libya blinking as a terrorist state on the intelligence screens in Europe and elsewhere. The U.S. shows its gullibility and accepts such doctored messages as real.

The Orchestrating phase activates the Mossad operatives to terrorist acts through proxy. The Israeli target is to get some Americans killed so that the U.S. is lured into killing those whom Israelis consider as offensive to their cause.

In the provocation phase, Berlin’s La Belle Discotheque is blasted, killing an American serviceman.

Enraged, 160 American, German, and British aircrafts unload 160 tons of explosives on Libya killing 40 civilians, including 2-year old Qadhafi’s daughter.

Berlin’s selection as the site for the terrorist attack is important as the ripple effect would be felt all over Europe convincing even cynical regimes about the Israeli plight surrounded by a sea of Muslim states.

Second, it will give the West a much needed new enemy of “radical Islam” against the backdrop of a winding cold war.

Third, it will alienate the Muslim world from the United States, eventually forcing Americans to identify themselves with Israel.

Here Jeff Gates cites a senior Mossad operative saying 15 year before 9/11 that after neutralizing Qadhafi, Iraq and Saddam Hussein will be their next target, “We are starting now to build him up as the big villain. It will take some time, but in the end, there is no doubt that it ‘ll work.” The rest is history. Saddam was hanged, and his country was decimated.

Gates is convincing in linking Berlin’s and 9/11 incidents to Israeli plan of bringing out U.S. total support to its security concerns in the Middle East.

He finds the genesis of the Israeli plan to involve U.S. in its war against its neighbors when Ariel Sharon’s staged an armed march to Temple Mount in the year 2000. It took Palestinians a year to start a series of suicide bombing as expected by Israel. The U.S. and Europe were of course prompt in condemning suicide bombing. But Israel was looking for something more. Iraqi support to Palestinian cause was worrisome and so was its economic and military rebound after the Gulf War. Iraq had to be axed, minimizing threat to Israel.

Gates quotes Sharon and Netanyahu saying that only when Americans “feel our pain” would they understand the Israeli plight. “Both men mentioned a weighted body count of 4,500 to 5,000 American lost to terrorism – the initial estimate of those who died a year later in the Twin Towers of New York City’s World Trade Center.”

September 11, 2001 is another orchestrated event to give Israel the much desired edge over others in the region. Two preparatory steps in Jeff Gates calculus were necessary to make this tragic event happened.

One, how to create a mental environment supportive to March 2003 invasion of Iraq? This called for a massive exercise in brain washing sustained and made plausible by a believable theoretical framework provided by Samuel Huntington 1993-1996 The Clash of Civilization.

Two, how to make people believe that Iraq was behind 9/11, and that it had weapons of mass destruction? Gates characterizes this effort as “the displacement of an inconvenient truth (that Iraq had no role in 9/11) with what people could be induced to believe. The emotionally wrenching nature of that event played a key fact-displacing role.”

But mere publication of a plausible work would not have helped unless it was critically acclaimed by the media, and academia owned it. Gates says “100 academies and think tanks were prepared to promote it, pre-staging a clash consensus five years before 9/11.”

As a capper, it would need a legislative act to legitimize Iraqi invasion. The Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, made possible by the cumulative efforts of pro-Zionist lawmakers like John McCain, Joe Lieberman, and Jon Kyl, should be seen against this scenario. Gates could have also said that the Iraqi Liberation Act of 1998, when 9/11 was still three years ahead, was a prelude to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. This implies that the plan to invade Iraq was already in gestation; 9/11 was a ruse.

Gates cites an important individual named Philip Zelikow, executive director of the 9/11 Commission. He was addressing September 10, 2002 audience of University of Virginia:

Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us?

I’ll tell you what I think the real threat [is] and actually has been since 1990 –

it’s the threat against Israel. And this is the real threat that dare not speak its

name, because the Europeans don’t care deeply about that threat, I will tell you

frankly. And the American government doesn’t want to lean too hard on it rhe-

torically, , because it’s not a popular sell.

Critiquing it, Gates says, “Zelikow omitted that candor in the 9/11 Commission report.”

Such devious cover-ups are usually associated with Third-World nations who are believed to be gullible and thus can be deceived. But here we are ironically encountering a superpower said to be free, has a vigilant press and a powerful Congress and yet the administration succeeds in deceiving people – that too without a whimper causing a major calamity to a segment of humanity (Muslims in this case). Gates dares to expose this criminality.

One should not however get the impression as if this is the only deception the U.S. played on its people. Gore Vidal’s The Golden Age has the narrative of a novel but it is history he writes without being irreverent that otherwise he is known for. According to him, it was Franklin Roosevelt who provoked Japan to attack Pearl Harbor, Harry Truman scorched Hiroshima and Nagasaki to dust on pretense that a million Americans would lose their lives even when the military heads disagreed. Vidal cites three serious works like Charles A. Beard’s President Roosevelt and the Coming of War, Robert A. Stinnet’s Day of Deceit, and Gar Alperovitz’s The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth to validate his assertion.

To people who think democracy is open and that it is people’s will, which is sovereign forget that democracy is a process that calls for shrewd management. Otherwise, it can backfire, hurting people at the hands of special interest groups who may deflect the process toward the fulfillment of their own parochial agenda. In this sense, democracy is a challenge to a people’s genius asking for their ability to sift right from wrong. Media which is considered to be a watch dog can become somebody else’s dog, susceptible to influences — acting as anesthetic to the people. If this can happen in the U.S., it can happen elsewhere too. Unfortunately, there are no exceptions.

Gates touches a few other important bases like demand or purchasing-power economics as against supply-side economics, privatization, and globalization. He shows reasonably well that supply-side economics based on the Chicago model is a root cause of our problems jeopardizing the world economy and creating monopolies. He does not, however, expose the privatization issue and its ramifications for the economy in general or how public interest is hurt, especially when it goes in the hands of international controllers of businesses. Privatization experience especially in a country like Pakistan has not been of much help in increasing efficiency or cost saving, as its proponents claimed. Public accountability to which utility services were amenable has now diminished as their ownership has moved to private hands. Karachi Electric Supply Company is one such instance.

While I agree with Gates that U.S. is guilty by association in its exaggerated tilt toward Israel, I disagree with part of his thesis giving me the impression as if it is only Israel making use of the United States. Accepting it would mean as if the Americans are too simple to care for their interests. On the contrary, there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that it is a two-ended relationship. Maybe I discuss it later.

Tariq Jan is a research scholar working with IPS Islamabad. He is also Member Board of Advisros, Opinion Maker. He has authored several books including ‘Secular Threat To Pakistan.’