Category Archives: History

FBI v. Presidents; Presidents v. FBI

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Today, we have a breakdown in trust not only with media but with any and all White House personnel. There is no presidential administration that is exempt since Nixon for sure.

The American people must keep an unemotional and clinical posture with what is being told to us to maintain a clearer capacity for critical thinking.

It all came to a head during the Nixon administration regarding taping conversations inside the White House and the Oval Office. These operations and equipment are managed, maintained, stored and investigated by the U.S. Secret Service.

An unknown factoid is the White House has microphones all over it and several taping units, while Camp David is not excluded.

For a fascinating read on the Nixon White House taping facts, check this document. The Secret Service coordinates and collaborates with the FBI on such investigations.

Image result for nixon watergate tapes  NYTimes

Secret_Service_Nixon_taping

Technology has advanced by leaps and bounds since the Nixon days, adding even more curious questions as to what subsequent presidents have used with taping equipment. In fact technology has taken us to the advanced digital realm. Ever wonder what we really don’t know?

Much has been said about tapes in the Trump White House, to which Trump denied having tapes of Former FBI Director Comey and Trump conversations. Okay, but is that really true? There are legacy FBI agents that well remember countless cases and heated interactions with presidents. We then hear this new term of ‘deep state’, where anonymous sources and leaks are causing scandals and headaches for the Trump White House. Can we know who those are alleged to be part of the ‘deep state’? Much of the blame is being pointed to Comey as the leaker. Well, maybe, or it could be the Secret Service. Remember Kerry O’Grady who refused to protect President Trump? Are there others? Conversely, there were Secret Service agents that had big issues with previous presidents and their wives, one notable scandal throughout the agency was due to Hillary Clinton.

We also cannot overlook all the Secret Service scandals under the Obama administration as some cases involved the USSS erasing tapes. Other cases included USSS and hookers in Cartegena, car accidents and drunk agents that had to be flown home in disgrace.

Image result for secret service white house video tapes CNN

Beyond the Secret Service, how about Obama loyalists that remain behind? This site published a piece in January of 2017 regarding Obama’s appointments of key loyalists that have ‘forever’ government positions, known as burrowing in.

Did Barack Obama tape conversations? According to Jim Acosta at CNN, the answer is no, but in the same article, the answer is yes and there was also a stenographer.

The White House press office had a stenographer in meetings with journalists in order to have an independent transcript of the interviews, a common practice, the former official said.   
“None of that was hidden,” the former official said. “The stenographer sat in interviews with a tape recorder and sometimes even a boom mic — the same stenographers would tape and transcribe press briefings and gaggles. Journalists who interviewed President Obama would have been familiar with that.”
Below is a long but fascinating read. You can be sure that agents within the Secret Service, the FBI and the investigative wing at Department of Homeland Security have many stories to tell. To have some perspective, this gem if historical summary allows the reader to see facts and settings through the eyes of assigned agents.
Enjoy:
John Mindermann is part of an unusual fraternity. A former agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, now 80 and retired in his hometown, San Francisco, he is among the relative handful of law-enforcement officials who have investigated a sitting president of the United States. In June, when it was reported that the former F.B.I. director Robert Mueller would investigate whether President Trump had obstructed the federal inquiry into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election, I called Mindermann, who told me he was feeling a strong sense of déjà vu.

Mindermann joined the F.B.I. 50 years ago, after a stint with the San Francisco police force, whose corruption he was happy to leave behind. He was soon transferred to the bureau’s Washington field office, housed in the Old Post Office building on Pennsylvania Avenue — the same 19th-century edifice that is now a Trump hotel. On the afternoon of Saturday, June 17, 1972, he was in the shower at home when the phone rang.

An F.B.I. clerk told him that there had been a break-in overnight at the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate complex. He was to go to the Metropolitan Police Department headquarters and see the detective on duty. Then, lowering his voice, the clerk confided that the bureau had run a name check on one of the burglars, James McCord. It revealed that McCord had worked at both the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. He would later be identified as the chief of security at the Committee to Re-elect the President, the Nixon campaign operation known as Creep.

Mindermann met the detective, who was wearing a loud sports jacket and smiling widely. The detective strode into the walk-in evidence vault and, wearing latex gloves, produced nearly three dozen crisp new $100 bills, each in a glassine envelope. He fanned them out on a desk, like a magician performing a card trick. They had been seized from one of the burglars. Mindermann noticed the consecutive serial numbers. ‘‘That alone told me that they came from a bank through a person with economic power,’’ Mindermann told me. ‘‘I got this instant cold chill. I thought: This is not an ordinary burglary.’’

McCord had been carrying wiretapping gear at the Watergate. This was evidence of a federal crime — the illegal interception of communications — which meant the break-in was a case for the F.B.I. Wiretapping was standard practice at the F.B.I. under J. Edgar Hoover, who had ruled the bureau since 1924. But Hoover died six weeks before the Watergate break-in, and L. Patrick Gray, a lawyer at the Justice Department and a staunch Nixon loyalist, was named acting director. ‘‘I don’t believe he could bring himself to suspect his superiors in the White House — a suspicion which was well within the Watergate investigating agents’ world by about the third or fourth week,’’ Mindermann said.

A month after the break-in, Mindermann and a colleague named Paul Magallanes found their way to Judy Hoback, a Creep accountant. The interview at her home in suburban Maryland went on past 3 a.m. By the time Mindermann and Magallanes stepped out into the cool night air, they had learned from Hoback that $3 million or more in unaccountable cash was sloshing around at Creep, to finance crimes like the Watergate break-in. Both men sensed instinctively that ‘‘people in the White House itself were involved,’’ Magallanes, who is now 79 and runs an international security firm near Los Angeles, told me. Mindermann said he felt ‘‘a dark dread that this is happening in our democracy.’’ By 10:45 that morning, the agents had typed up a 19-page statement that laid out Creep’s direct connections to Nixon’s inner circle.Mindermann, the young ex-cop with five $27 department-store suits to his name, remembers the president’s men who stonewalled the investigation throughout 1972 and early 1973 as ‘‘Ivy Leaguers in their custom-fitted finery — these privileged boys born to be federal judges and Wall Street barons. They were gutless and completely self-serving. They lacked the ability to do the right thing.’’ By late April 1973, however, the stonewalls were crumbling. On Friday, April 27, as Nixon flew off to Camp David for the weekend, mulling his dark future, the F.B.I. moved to secure White House records relevant to Watergate.

At 5:15 p.m., 15 agents arose from their dented metal desks in the Old Post Office building and marched in tight formation, fully armed, up Pennsylvania Avenue. On Monday, a highly agitated Nixon returned to the White House to find a skinny F.B.I. accountant standing watch outside a West Wing office. The president pushed him up against a wall and demanded to know how he had the authority to invade the White House. Mindermann laughed at the memory: ‘‘What do you do,’’ he said, ‘‘when you’re mugged by the president of the United States?’’

‘‘I take the president at his word — that I was fired because of the Russia investigation,’’ James Comey, the former F.B.I. director, said in June, testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee a month after his abrupt dismissal from his post by the president. Comey was referring to the account Trump gave in an NBC interview on May 11 — and Comey fought back on the rest of the story as Trump told it. Trump, he said, ‘‘chose to defame me and, more importantly, the F.B.I. by saying that the organization was in disarray, that it was poorly led, that the work force had lost confidence in its leader. Those were lies, plain and simple.’’

Trump, Comey said, had asked his F.B.I. director for his loyalty — and that seemed to shock Comey the most. The F.B.I.’s stated mission is ‘‘to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution of the United States’’ — not to protect the president. Trump seemed to believe Comey was dutybound to do his bidding and stop investigating the recently fired national security adviser, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. ‘‘The statue of Justice has a blindfold on because you’re not supposed to be peeking out to see whether your patron is pleased or not with what you’re doing,’’ Comey said. ‘‘It should be about the facts and the law.’’

Trump might have been less confused about how Comey saw his job if he had ever visited the F.B.I. director in his office. On his desk, under glass, Comey famously kept a copy of a 1963 order authorizing Hoover to conduct round-the-clock F.B.I. surveillance of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It was signed by the young attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy, after Hoover convinced John F. Kennedy and his brother that King had Communists in his organization — a reminder of the abuses of power that had emanated from the desk where Comey sat.

One of history’s great what-ifs is whether the Watergate investigation would have gone forward if Hoover hadn’t died six weeks before the break-in. When Hoover died, Nixon called him ‘‘my closest personal friend in all of political life.’’ Along with Senator Joseph McCarthy, they were the avatars of anti-Communism in America. Hoover’s F.B.I. was not unlike what Trump seems to have imagined the agency still to be: a law-enforcement apparatus whose flexible loyalties were bent to fit the whims of its director. In his half-century at the helm of the F.B.I., Hoover rarely approved cases against politicians. In the 1960s, he much preferred going after the civil rights and antiwar movements and their leaders, and his agents routinely broke the law in the name of the law.

In 1975, however, Congress, emboldened by Watergate and newly attuned to its watchdog responsibilities, began its first full-scale investigation of this legacy, and of similar abuses at the C.I.A. Edward Levi, Gerald Ford’s attorney general, gave the F.B.I. an unprecedented assignment: investigating itself. Fifty-three agents were soon targets of investigations by their own agency, implicated in crimes committed in the name of national security. Mark Felt, the agency’s second-in-command (who 30 years later revealed himself to have been Bob Woodward’s source ‘‘Deep Throat’’), and Ed Miller, the F.B.I.’s intelligence director, were convicted of conspiring to violate the civil rights of Americans. (President Ronald Reagan later pardoned them.) The F.B.I.’s rank and file felt it was under attack. ‘‘Every jot of wrongdoing — whether real, imagined or grossly exaggerated — now commands an extraordinary amount of attention,’’ Clarence Kelley, the F.B.I. director under Presidents Nixon, Ford and Jimmy Carter, said in 1976. The American people, he argued, could not long endure ‘‘a crippled and beleaguered F.B.I.’’

The Iran-contra scandal provided the bureau with its first great post-Watergate test. On Oct. 5, 1986, Sandinistas in Nicaragua shot down a cargo plane, which bore an unassuming transport-company name but was found to contain 60 Kalashnikov rifles, tens of thousands of cartridges and other gear. One crew member was captured and revealed the first inklings of what turned out to be an extraordinary plot. Reagan’s national-security team had conspired to sell American weapons to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and, after marking up the price fivefold, skimmed the proceeds and slipped them to the anti-Communist contra rebels in Nicaragua. This was a direct violation of federal law, as Congress had passed a bill cutting off aid to the rebels, which made Iran-contra a case for the F.B.I.

In a major feat of forensics, F.B.I. agents recovered 5,000 deleted emails from National Security Council office computers, which laid out the scheme from start to finish. They opened a burn bag of top-secret documents belonging to the N.S.C. aide Oliver North and found a copy of elaborately falsified secret testimony to Congress. They dusted it for fingerprints and found ones belonging to Clair George, chief of the clandestine service of the C.I.A. In short order, an F.B.I. squad was inside C.I.A. headquarters, rifling through double-locked file cabinets. Almost all the major evidence that led to the indictments of 12 top national-security officials was uncovered by the F.B.I.

George H. W. Bush pardoned many of the key defendants at the end of his presidency, on Christmas Eve 1992 — just as Reagan pardoned Mark Felt and Ford pardoned Nixon. This was the limit of the agency’s influence, the one presidential power that the F.B.I. could not fight. But over the course of two decades and five presidents, the post-Hoover relationship between the F.B.I. and the White House had settled into a delicate balance between the rule of law and the chief of state. Presidents could use secrecy, and sometimes outright deception, to push their executive powers to the limit. But the F.B.I., through its investigative brief, retained a powerful unofficial check on these privileges: the ability to amass, and unveil, deep secrets of state. The agency might not have been able to stop presidents like Nixon and Reagan from overreaching, but when it did intervene, there was little presidents could do to keep the F.B.I. from making their lives very difficult — as Bill Clinton discovered in 1993, when he appointed Louis J. Freeh as his F.B.I. director.

Freeh was an F.B.I. agent early in his career but had been gone from the agency for some time when he was named to run it — so he was alarmed to discover, shortly after he started his new job, that the F.B.I. was in the midst of investigating real estate deals involving the Clintons in Arkansas. Freeh quickly turned in his White House pass. He saw Clinton as a criminal suspect in the Whitewater affair, in which the F.B.I. and a special prosecutor bushwhacked through the brambles of Arkansas politics and business for four years — and, through a most circuitous route, wound up grilling a 24-year-old former White House intern named Monica Lewinsky in a five-star hotel. The bureau, through the White House physician, had blood drawn from the president to match the DNA on Lewinsky’s blue dress — evidence that the president perjured himself under oath about sex, opening the door to his impeachment by the House of Representatives.

‘‘He came to believe that I was trying to undo his presidency,’’ Freeh wrote of Clinton in his memoir. Clinton’s allies complained after the fact that Freeh’s serial investigations of the president were not just a headache but also a fatal distraction. From 1996 to 2001, when Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden bombed two American Embassies in Africa and plotted the Sept. 11 attacks, the F.B.I. spent less time and money on any counterterrorism investigation than it did investigating claims that Chinese money bought influence over President Clinton though illegal 1996 campaign contributions — an immense project that eventually became a fiasco on its own terms. One of the F.B.I.’s informants in the investigation was a socially promi­nent and politically connected Californian named Katrina Leung. At the time, Leung was in a sexual relationship with her F.B.I. handler, James J. Smith, chief of the bureau’s Los Angeles branch’s China squad. Smith had reason to suspect that Leung might be a double agent working for Chinese intelligence, but he protected her anyway.

The F.B.I. buried the scandal until after Clinton left the White House in 2001. By the time it came to light, Freeh was out the door, and President George W. Bush had chosen Robert Mueller as the sixth director of the F.B.I.

Born into a wealthy family, Mueller exemplified ‘‘the tradition of the ‘muscular Christian’ that came out of the English public-school world of the 19th century,’’ Maxwell King, Mueller’s classmate at St. Paul’s, the elite New England prep school, told me. Mueller arrived at F.B.I. headquarters with a distinguished military record — he earned a bronze star as a Marine in Vietnam — and years of service as a United States attorney and Justice Department official. It was a week before the Sept. 11 attacks, and he was inheriting an agency ill suited for the mission that would soon loom enormously before it. Richard A. Clarke, the White House counterterrorism czar under Clinton and Bush, later wrote that Freeh’s F.B.I. had not done enough to seek out foreign terrorists. Clarke also wrote that Freeh’s counterterror chief, Dale Watson, had told him: ‘‘We have to smash the F.B.I. into bits and rebuild it.’’

Mueller had already earned the respect of the F.B.I. rank and file during his tenure as chief of the criminal division of the Justice Department. When he started work at the Justice Department in 1990, the F.B.I. had been trying and failing for two years to solve the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. ‘‘The F.B.I. was not set up to deal with a major investigation like this,’’ Richard Marquise, an F.B.I. intelligence analyst who became the leader of the Lockerbie investigation under Mueller, said in an F.B.I. oral history. ‘‘I blame the institution.’’

Mueller used his power under law to obliterate the F.B.I.’s byzantine flow charts of authority in the case. ‘‘We literally cut out the chains of command,’’ Marquise said. ‘‘We brought in the C.I.A. We brought the Scots. We brought MI5 to Washington. And we sat down and we said: ‘We need to change the way we’re doing business. . . . We need to start sharing information.’ ’’ It was a tip from the Scots that put Marquise on the trail of the eventual suspect: one of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s intelligence officers, whose cover was security chief for the Libyan state airlines. Qaddafi’s spy, Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, was indicted in 1991. It took until the turn of the 21st century, but he was convicted.

It meant a great deal to Mueller, in the Lockerbie case, that the evidence the F.B.I. produced be deployed as evidence in court, not justification for war. In a speech he gave at Stanford University in 2002, concerning the nation’s newest threat, he spoke of ‘‘the balance we must strike to protect our national security and our civil liberties as we address the threat of terrorism.’’ He concluded: ‘‘We will be judged by history, not just on how we disrupt and deter terrorism, but also on how we protect the civil liberties and the constitutional rights of all Americans, including those Americans who wish us ill. We must do both of these things, and we must do them exceptionally well.’’

These views made Mueller something of an outlier in the Bush administration; five days after the Sept. 11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney was warning that the White House needed to go over to ‘‘the dark side’’ to fight Al Qaeda. Among the darkest places was a top-secret program code-named Stellar Wind, under which the N.S.A. eavesdropped freely in the United States without search warrants.

By the end of 2003, Mueller had a new boss: James Comey, who was named deputy attorney general. Comey was read into the Stellar Wind program and deemed it unconstitutional. He briefed Mueller, who concurred. They saw no evidence that the surveillance had saved a single life, stopped an imminent attack or uncovered an Al Qaeda member in the United States. In the first week of March, the two men agreed that the F.B.I. could not continue to go along with the surveillance programs. They also thought Attorney General John Ashcroft should not re-endorse Stellar Wind. Comey made the case to Ashcroft.

In remarkable congressional testimony in 2007, Comey would describe what happened next: Hours later, Ashcroft keeled over with gallstone pancreatitis. He was sedated and scheduled for surgery. Comey was now the acting attorney general. He and the president were required to reauthorize Stellar Wind on March 11 for the program to continue. When Comey learned the White House counsel and chief of staff were heading to the hospital of the night of March 10 to get the signature of the barely conscious Ashcroft, Comey raced to Ashcroft’s hospital room to head them off. When they arrived, Ashcroft lifted his head off the pillow and told the president’s men that he wouldn’t sign. Pointing at Comey, he said: ‘‘There is the attorney general.’’

Bush signed the authorization alone anyway, asserting that he had constitutional power to do so. Mueller took meticulous notes of these events; they were partly declassified years later. On March 11, he wrote that the president was ‘‘trying to do an end run around’’ Comey, at the time the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer. At 1:30 a.m. on March 12, Mueller drafted a letter of resignation. ‘‘I am forced to withdraw the F.B.I. from participation in the program,’’ he wrote. If the president did not back down, ‘‘I would be constrained to resign as director of the F.B.I.’’ And Comey and Ashcroft would go with him.

Seven hours later, with the letter in the breast pocket of his suit, Mueller sat alone with Bush in the Oval Office. Once again, the F.B.I. had joined a battle against a president. Mueller’s notes show that he told Bush in no uncertain terms that ‘‘a presidential order alone’’ could not legalize Stellar Wind. Unless the N.S.A. brought Stellar Wind within the constraints of the law, he would lose his F.B.I. director, the attorney general and the acting attorney general. In the end, Bush relented — it took years, but the programs were put on what Mueller considered a defensible legal footing.

Trump’s showdown with Comey and its aftermath is the fifth confrontation between the F.B.I. and a sitting president since the death of J. Edgar Hoover, and the first in which the president’s principal antagonists, Mueller and Comey, have been there before. When Bush faced the same two men, he was acutely aware of the history that attended their confrontation. He wrote later that he realized their resignations could be the second coming of the Saturday Night Massacre, the penultimate disaster of Nixon’s presidency, when the embattled president keelhauled the special prosecutor pursuing the secret White House tapes and lost his attorney general and deputy attorney general in the process. The question is whether Trump cares enough about the consequences of history to avoid repeating it.

For the Watergate veterans John Mindermann and Paul Magallanes, the news of recent weeks has come with a certain amount of professional gratification. When I spoke with them on June 14, both agents said they wanted the bureau’s role as a check on the president to be in the public eye. For years, they felt that their own work had gone unacknowledged. ‘‘We never got an ‘attaboy’ letter from our superiors,’’ Mindermann said. ‘‘But we changed history, and we knew it.’’ Magallanes had always been bothered by how, in the collective American memory, Nixon’s downfall was attributed to so many other authors: Woodward and Bernstein, crusading congressional committees, hard-nosed special prosecutors. To the agents who were present at the time, it was first and foremost an F.B.I. story. ‘‘We were the people who did the work,’’ Magallanes told me. ‘‘It was we, the F.B.I., who brought Richard Nixon down. We showed that our government can investigate itself.’’

New Leader of Gaza?

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Photo of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and discharged Fatah leader Muhammad Dahlan (File)

GAZA CITY (Ma’an) — Amid an escalating conflict between Hamas and the Fatah-ruled Palestinian Authority (PA), a leaked and unconfirmed document obtained by Ma’an has noted that discharged Fatah leader and President Mahmoud Abbas’ political rival Muhammad Dahlan could be appointed head of Gaza’s government as a result of talks between Hamas officials and Dahlan in Cairo.

MaanNews: The document, titled “A National Consensus Document for Trust-Building” details an agreement allegedly made between the Hamas movement, led by Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, and Dahlan during Egyptian-sponsored talks when Palestinian officials established a political front to challenge the PA in coordination with Dahlan.
Dahlan, being a fierce former opponent of Hamas’ rule in Gaza following its success in the 2006 elections that threw Fatah and Hamas in a protracted internal conflict, seemed like an unlikely political ally for Hamas. Nevertheless, analysts have pointed out that the new relationship between the former enemies represents Dahlan and Hamas’ mutual rejection of the PA, led by Abbas in the occupied West Bank.
The document contains 15 articles focused on ending the issues of Palestinian reconciliation, including articles aiming to resolve issues of revenge or compensation that have arisen during Hamas and Fatah’s more than a decade-long feud.
According to the document, the talks agreed that Dahlan would be head of the government in the Gaza Strip, while Hamas would control Gaza’s Ministry of Interior.
The reports have not been confirmed by Hamas or Dahlan.
Hamas’ newfound relationship with Dahlan also received attention following Egypt’s decision to send millions of liters of fuel to the besieged Gaza Strip, after Israel, which has kept the territory under a crippling blockade for a decade, dramatically cut its power supply to Gaza, at the request of the PA which had decided to cut its funding of Israeli fuel to the coastal enclave.
Despite the PA denying the allegations, it is widely believed among Palestinians and international critics that the PA’s recent policies in Gaza are aimed at putting pressure on Hamas to relinquish control of the besieged coastal enclave and hand over the territory to the PA.
Dahlan, who while residing in exile in Abu Dhabi continues to hold political clout in the region, had reportedly persuaded the Egyptian government to send the fuel to the besieged territory in order to avert a full humanitarian collapse.
However, other reports stated that the fuel was provided to Gaza under an agreement that Hamas would work with the Egyptian government to deter militant activities in the Sinai, which Hamas has been accused of exacerbating by harboring militants in its territory. Hamas has consistently denied such allegations.
In the 1990s, Dahlan led a merciless crackdown on Hamas, rounding up thousands of Islamists who refused to recognize the legitimacy of the newly-created PA following the Oslo Accords.
But he fell from grace in June 2007 after the humiliating rout of his forces by Hamas fighters during days of fierce street battles in Gaza, when Hamas expelled Fatah forces from the territory.
Two years later, he returned to the political stage when he was elected to the Fatah central committee in August 2009.
But in December 2010, he was suspended from the committee which said it had set up a commission of inquiry to examine his finances and claimed he tried to set up a personal militia.
In 2015, Dahlan made headlines once again when he called for integrating all Palestinian factions, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad, into the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO).
Dahlan has also called to end the PA’s widely criticized security coordination with Israel, and has said he now considers the Oslo Accords to be invalid.
International media has also reported plans by several Middle Eastern countries to buttress Dahlan as the next Palestinian president to replace his rival Abbas

Taliban Lindh out in Two Years, Then What

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Image result for john walker lindh pink house Clarion

Related reading: John Walker Lindh Sues For Prison Prayer Group

Related reading: Remembering Johnny Michael Spann

Image result for john walker lindh in prison TheBlaze

FP: On Nov. 25, 2001, two CIA officers discovered a bearded 19-year-old English speaker among a group of captured Taliban fighters in Afghanistan.

The bedraggled teen stood out. “Irish? Ireland?” a CIA officer asked the prisoner, who gave no reply.

He turned out to be an American. And hours later, one of his CIA interrogators was killed when the captured Taliban prisoners staged an uprising.

Photographed naked and bound, California-born John Walker Lindh became detainee #001 in the global war on terrorism and dubbed the “American Taliban.” Branded a traitor and terrorist back home, he was convicted of supporting the Taliban and sentenced to 20 years in prison in a media firestorm that captured the zeitgeist of the post-9/11 era.

Now 36 years old, Lindh is set to be released in less than two years. And he’ll leave prison with Irish citizenship and a stubborn refusal to renounce violent ideology, according to the U.S. government. Foreign Policy obtained two government documents that express concerns about Lindh: One details the communications of Lindh and other federal prisoners convicted of terrorism-related charges, and the second, written by the National Counterterrorism Center, addresses the intelligence community’s larger concerns over these inmates, once released.

“As of May 2016, John Walker Lindh (USPER) — who is scheduled to be released in May 2019 after being convicted of supporting the Taliban — continued to advocate for global jihad and to write and translate violent extremist texts,” reads the National Counterterrorism Center document prepared earlier this year.

The report, marked “For Official Use Only” and dated Jan. 24, 2017, provides a window into how the intelligence community looks at the prospect of releasing American citizens still considered potential threats. The document indicates that intelligence and law enforcement agencies are already worried that “homegrown violent extremists,” like other criminals, could have high rates of recidivism.

The document, which cites various Federal Bureau of Prisons intelligence summaries, claims that in March of last year, Lindh “told a television news producer that he would continue to spread violent extremist Islam upon his release.”

The television news producer is not identified, no specific statements are quoted, and there is no public record that Lindh has participated in media interviews.

While Lindh’s case is the most prominent among these prisoners, it’s not unique. U.S. authorities are monitoring dozens of other inmates who they deem to be “homegrown violent extremists” and who will be released within the next several years.

By the end of 2016, according to the National Counterterrorism Center, there were 300 terrorism offenders in prison, including 80 arrested in the past two years. “We assess that at least some of the more than 90 homegrown violent extremists incarcerated in the US who are due to be released in the next five years will probably reengage in terrorist activity,” the report says, “possibly including attack plotting, because they either remain radicalized or are susceptible to re-radicalization as has already been demonstrated overseas.”

Back in 2002, Lindh’s case posed difficult challenges for a government just starting to grapple with how to prosecute the war on terrorism on the battlefield and in the courts. Fifteen years later, as Lindh approaches his release from prison, the federal government will again be venturing into unchartered waters as sentences for other convicted extremists expire.

Now it will be up to President Donald Trump to decide one of the trickiest legacies of the war on terrorism: how to treat so-called homegrown terrorists after they’ve served their time.

Several attorneys who worked on terrorism cases told FP the government doesn’t have any specific conditions in place for extremists once they’re released. Most of the emphasis is on the prosecution up front, and not what happens after they leave prison, they say.

Most sentences for terror-related cases involving U.S. citizens in the post-9/11 era “are ripening into release just now,” said Joshua Dratel, a lawyer who has defended suspected terrorists in federal court. “The government is just starting to run into the dilemma of what to do with them.”

Lindh’s journey from a liberal suburb in Marin County, California to northern Afghanistan began as an adolescent, when he watched the film Malcolm X. He told FBI interrogators that the movie inspired him to convert to Islam. In 1998, at just 17 years old, he dropped out of school and went to Yemen to learn Arabic, with his parents’ support.

From there, he traveled to Pakistan, where he spent time with a paramilitary group fighting for Kashmir’s independence from India. Then he made his way to Afghanistan, prior to the Sept. 11 attacks, to fight with the Taliban, which controlled much of the country and was waging a war with the Northern Alliance. It was then that he lost contact with his family, who wouldn’t hear from him again until after his capture.

Lindh spent seven weeks at a training camp near Kandahar, which was used to prepare Taliban militants for combat and al Qaeda volunteers for terrorist attacks. He met Osama bin Laden at least once and spoke briefly with the al Qaeda leader, who thanked the American and other foreign fighters for taking part in the jihad, according to the FBI’s account of his interrogation.

In November 2001, U.S. forces found Lindh among a group of Taliban fighters whose commander had surrendered to the Northern Alliance near Mazar-i-Sharif. Hours after Lindh was interrogated, his fellow prisoners staged a revolt in which some 500 were killed, including a CIA operations officer, Johnny Michael Spann. Lindh was shot in the leg during the fighting. He was one of only 86 who survived the uprising.

Lindh’s parents only learned of his whereabouts when CNN aired an interview with him shortly after his capture.

During more than 50 days of detention, U.S. authorities sometimes had Lindh blindfolded, naked and bound to a stretcher with duct tape. Although his family had retained a defense lawyer and told U.S. authorities about it, Lindh knew nothing about his attorney for a month.

Left: 14-year-old John Walker Lindh (Photo credit: Courtesy Frank Lindh); Right: The home of Frank Lindh on Dec. 3, 2001 in San Rafael, California. (Photo credit: JUSTIN SULLIVAN/Getty Images)

Brought back to the United States, Lindh found himself facing charges of terrorism, even though there was no evidence he plotted against Americans. In the frenzied aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft described Lindh as an al Qaeda-trained terrorist who “chose to embrace fanatics.”

In the first legal case of the “war on terror,” Lindh was charged with providing material support for terrorism. The government’s case eventually collapsed over questions about Lindh’s treatment and confession while he was held by the U.S. military in Afghanistan and on U.S. naval ships.

With the defense team ready to shine an embarrassing light on Lindh’s treatment, federal prosecutors — at the urging of the Defense Department — dropped nine of the ten counts, including charges he tried to kill a CIA officer or support terrorism. Lindh ultimately pleaded guilty to violating an executive order prohibiting aid to the Taliban, and for carrying weapons in Afghanistan, and he agreed to drop any claims that he was abused by the U.S. military.

At his sentencing, Lindh, then 21, denounced Osama bin Laden, expressed regret over joining the Taliban, and renounced terrorism. “I condemn terrorism on every level — unequivocally,” he said in a prepared statement. “My beliefs about jihad are those of mainstream Muslims around the world.”

More than 15 years after he was captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan, Lindh’s case remains the subject of debate and intense speculation. Is he a dangerous traitor or the victim of an angry nation lashing out after a terrorist attack?

“We’ll never know what actually happened to John Walker Lindh,” said Wells Dixon of the Center for Constitutional Rights. “John Walker Lindh, in many respects, was a victim of the time. It was the aftermath of 9/11.”

Marc Sageman, a former CIA operations officer and a terrorism expert, said Lindh’s rise to public infamy and lengthy prison term was an “overreaction” to the new threat of terrorism in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. “Of course he pled guilty to some kinds of charges. Because the country was ready to lynch him,” Sageman said.

For Sageman, Lindh was more of a foot soldier fighting for a U.S. adversary rather than a terrorist plotting attacks. “People bandy about the word terrorism when they describe him,” he added. “I don’t see him as a terrorist.”

John Walker Lindh knows he won’t walk out of prison as just another ex-convict, and will likely face a hostile American public. While in prison, he came up with the plan of possibly moving to Ireland, according to a Bureau of Prisons intelligence summary. The document, prepared by the Federal Bureau of Prisons Counter Terrorism Unit, summarizes communications of prisoners convicted of terrorism-related crimes, and includes excerpted emails in which Lindh discuss his desire to leave the United States after his release.

Lindh secured Irish citizenship in 2013, according to the intelligence summary. Sources familiar with the matter confirmed his Irish citizenship to FP, and said it was obtained thanks to his paternal grandmother, Kathleen Maguire, an Irish citizen from Donegal born in 1929.

His father, Frank Lindh, hopes that his son could build a new life in Ireland after his release. But under Irish law, even with his new citizenship, the Irish government could refuse to issue a passport on grounds that Lindh posed a threat to national security. The U.S. government also could bar him from traveling abroad for at least three years, under the terms of his “supervised release” from prison, and even after that, legal experts say.

When asked about Lindh’s case, the Irish Embassy in Washington said it “does not comment on individual cases.” U.S. authorities also declined to comment.

In his initial years in prison at Terre Haute, Indiana, John Walker Lindh was kept under what are known as “special administrative measures,” which heavily restricted his communications with the outside world. Those measures were lifted in 2009, though the Bureau of Prisons declined to say if any specific restrictions are currently applied to Lindh.

Whether by choice or government constraint, Lindh has communicated little about his life in Terre Haute, though some details can be gleaned from his lawsuits against the Bureau of Prisons. In 2013, he won the right for communal prayer, and in December 2014, Lindh joined another legal battle, this time arguing for the right to wear his pants above his ankle, in line with Muslim tenets.

The Bureau of Prisons intelligence summary obtained by FP indicates that Lindh does have email contact with his father and an advocacy group working on his behalf.

“Regarding the Ireland issue, I really don’t know what to expect from the Irish government. I know virtually nothing about them. I think the only reasonable way to present my case to them is to explain my unique circumstances that make my survival in the US practically impossible,” Lindh wrote to CAGE, a nongovernmental organization that advocates on behalf of prisoners and detainees caught up in the war on terrorism. “Essentially I am seeking asylum from one country where I am a citizen in another country where I am also a citizen. The worst they can do is to decline my request. I figure it is worth at least trying,” Lindh wrote.

Go here to access documents.

In an email to his son in December 2016, Frank Lindh recounted his “hope-inducing conversation” with CAGE about emigrating. But first, CAGE required the assistance of an American defense lawyer to communicate with U.S. government officials, Frank Lindh informed his son.

There was one hitch: The renowned attorney who represented Lindh in his 2002 trial, James Brosnahan, had “dropped” his client, according to the intelligence summary. (Brosnahan did not respond to a request for comment.)

Frank urged his son “to mend fences with Jim,” referring to his former lawyer, adding that Brosnahan would likely demand that Lindh explicitly reject violence.

“We can discuss this in our next phone call, but one thing I anticipate Jim will absolutely demand is that you be willing to condemn, in all sincerity, publicly if needed, and without any reservation whatsoever, depravity of any kind, whoever commits it,” he wrote.

“You can visualize yourself what the list of depraved acts might consist of. I believe such a request should be easy for you, to fulfill as a devout Muslim and person of conscience.”

But John Walker Lindh refused. Replying to his father, he wrote: “I am not interested in renouncing my beliefs or issuing condemnations in order to please Brosnahan or anybody else.”

The Bureau of Prisons document says that “inmate Walker Lindh made pro ISIS statements to various reporters and was subsequently dropped by counsel.” It does not indicate which counsel, nor does it cite any specific statements.

CAGE has been at the center of its own controversy in recent years; proponents praise its work with detainees while critics accuse of it apologizing for terrorists. Amnesty International dropped its partnership with CAGE in 2015 and still refuses to share a public platform with the group, according to an Amnesty spokesperson. Despite the political baggage, it appears Frank Lindh is pinning his hopes on this organization.

Over the years, John Walker Lindh’s father has campaigned to win a possible commutation of his son’s sentence. In 2009, he participated in an interview with GQ in which he said, “I’m proud of my son.”

Lindh’s father has sought to portray his son as a spiritual, well-intentioned young man unjustly labeled as a terrorist. “Like Ernest Hemingway during the Spanish Civil War, John had volunteered for the army of a foreign government battling an insurgency,” he wrote in a 2011 New York Times op-ed. “His decision was rash and blindly idealistic, but not sinister or traitorous.”

Frank Lindh declined several requests for comment. A letter sent to John Walker Lindh at Terre Haute went unanswered. The Bureau of Prisons said that John Walker Lindh declined a request to comment for this article.

In October 2016, in the waning days of the Barack Obama’s presidency, the writer Paul Theroux published an op-ed in the New York Times asking that Lindh’s sentence be commuted, arguing that what Lindh did was comparable to his own youthful experience supporting rebels in Malawi in the 1960s. Theroux said that Lindh was “taking risks to help people perceived as oppressed; and like me, he did not fully understand the bigger picture, was in over his head, and was overtaken by events.”

The next month, Donald Trump, who has railed against the threat of Islamic extremism, was elected president, potentially snuffing out any chance of a commutation. It is now unclear how the government will deal with Lindh or others convicted of terrorism-related charges upon release.

It’s difficult to create a one-size-fits-all rehabilitation program for extremists because there are so few of these cases and each one is unique, said a former U.S. attorney who prosecuted numerous high-profile terrorists. “In this area of trying to rehabilitate extremists, it is really all over the map,” said the former U.S. attorney, who requested to remain anonymous. “The threshold question is what’s effective?

The National Counterterrorism Center suggested one option would be to widen government programs designed to counter violent extremism to include probation and parole officers, and to track convicted terrorists upon release. There’s a precedent with Megan’s Law, the document notes, which requires sex offenders to register their home address and check in frequently with law enforcement.

Lindh, for his part, does not appear to be optimistic. He tells his father in a December 2016 email quoted in the intelligence summary that he likely will have to “abandon this project” to move to Ireland. He says an earlier request to be released to Puerto Rico had not been answered, and that he anticipates having to endure threats and hostility on the U.S. mainland.

“I will just have to stay here for a while and deal with the lynch mobs as best as I can,” he writes. “It is a daunting predicament that I’m in, but many people around the world are in even more difficult situations and find ways to manage, so I am not worried.”

Investigating the Other Collusion Case

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Seems it at least began in 2015, long before Donald Trump was campaigning for the Oval Office.

Also, as an aside, John Podesta is testifying before the House Intelligence Committee next week. He too has financial ties to Moscow operations.

The Vnesheconombank is Russian owned and has been under a sanctions architecture due to the annexing of Crimea. In Russia, by law, the bank’s board chairman is the Prime Minister of Russia. Vladimir Putin increased leading when he became the bank’s chairman in 2008. Now precisely why is Russia investing at all in the United States in the first place? Well soft power and doing business with the Export Import Bank, an agency that is corrupt to the core. Further, Sergei Gorkov is head of the bank and is is/was a Russian spy.

Image result for Vnesheconombank  ABC

BusinessInsider:The U.S. Treasury has added a bunch of entities to its Russia sanctions list, including a sovereign wealth fund that used to be connected to some pretty high-profile U.S. billionaires.

The Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assistance Control on Thursday added The Russian Direct Investment Fund to the list, along with a number of entities linked to RDIF parent Vnesheconombank and energy giant Rosneft.

Vnesheconombank was first sanctioned last year, but RDIF hadn’t been explicitly targeted until the announcement on Thursday.

Private equity moguls Steve Schwarzman of Blackstone, David Bonderman of TPG, and Leon Black of Apollo Global Management all served as board members for RDIF when it was established in 2011, according to a press release at the time.

At some point, those names were removed from the RDIF website.

The Wall Street Journal first reported that the investors’ names had disappeared from the site in September 2014, but said that they still served on the board at that time. There are currently no names listed on the international advisory board on RDIF’s website.

Back in 2011, each board member issued statements about joining the board. Here are some highlights:

“We believe there are many attractive investment opportunities in Russia — the RDIF will provide the strong and experienced local partnership needed for investors to realize those opportunities.” — David Bonderman

“Russia has strong fundamentals that will continue to fuel its growth trajectory and offer attractive investment opportunities. We believe the Russia Direct Investment Fund will help further align U.S. and Russian objectives in terms of identifying paths toward partnership in the private sector.” — Leon Black

“It’s always good to have friends when you are going to a place that you are not as familiar with.”  — Stephen Schwarzman

Bonderman has spoken publicly about investing in the country in recent months, telling an audience at the Milken Global Conference this year that the Russian market remains attractive, according to a report by CNN Money.

He is quoted as saying: “Sanctions are perfectly set up not to work at all but to make a political statement.”

Spokespeople for Blackstone and TPG declined to comment. Apollo could not be reached for comment.

A spokesperson for the Russian Direct Investment Fund said: “For Vnesheconombank subsidiaries the new clarification by the US Department of the Treasury is essentially a technical repetition of sanctions imposed a year ago, which targeted a number of Russian companies including Vnesheconombank and its subsidiaries.

“Given the nature of the Fund’s activity, RDIF has never attracted financing in the USA, it invests its own funds. Since the introduction of sanctions last year RDIF has continued to invest into the Russian economy and build new international partnerships.”

So what you ask?

Image result for sergei gorkov Sergei Gorkov

Well due to sanctions, those on the Trump campaign team, transition team and now in the White House may have violated sanctions. If so, the reason would be why, to what end and how many may be involved? It should also be added that many Republicans have ties to Russians and oligarchs, not all is as it seems. We can only hope, while not knowing details, the Senate is also investigating Hillary Clinton in much the same condition. Yet as Secretary of State, Hillary and Obama had the ability to sign waivers to finesse sanctions. This was likely the case between Hillary and the Kremlin regarding Skolkovo.

Remember, don’t shoot the messenger. Furthermore, it seems some on the Senate committee are leaking too.

Senate investigators are examining the activities of a little-known $10-billion Russian investment fund whose chief executive met with a member of President Donald Trump’s transition team four days before Trump’s inauguration, a congressional source told CNN.

The source said the Senate intelligence committee is investigating the Russian fund in connection with its examination of discussions between White House adviser Jared Kushner and the head of a prominent Russian bank. The bank, Vnesheconombank, or VEB, oversees the fund, which has ties to several Trump advisers. Both the bank and the fund have been covered since 2014 by sanctions restricting U.S. business dealings.
Separately, Steve Mnuchin, now Treasury Secretary, said in a January letter that he would look into the Jan. 16 meeting between the fund’s chief executive and Anthony Scaramucci, a member of the transition team’s executive committee and a fundraiser and adviser for Trump’s presidential campaign. At the time, Mnuchin had not yet been confirmed as Treasury Secretary. The Treasury Department did not respond to a request for an update.
Two Democratic senators had asked Treasury to investigate whether Scaramucci promised to lift sanctions — a policy shift that would help the fund attract more international investment to Russia.
The questions draw attention to the Russian Direct Investment Fund, a government investment arm that has helped top U.S. private-equity firms invest in Russia and that was advised by Stephen Schwarzman, who is now chairman of Trump’s Strategic and Policy Forum, an advisory group of business leaders.
Schwarzman, chief executive officer of Blackstone Group, was named in 2011 to the fund’s International Advisory Board along with other leaders of major equity companies and sovereigh-wealth funds who reviewed the fund’s operations, plans and potential investments. Schwarzman declined to comment. A source close to him said Schwarzman has not spoken to anyone on the fund “for some time.”
The fund also worked with Goldman Sachs, whose former president Gary Cohn is Trump’s chief economic adviser and where Kirill Dmitriev, the fund’s chief executive, worked as an investment banker in the 1990s. Goldman was part of a consortium created in 2012 to invest in large Russian businesses preparing to go public, and was hired in 2013 to burnish Russia’s investment image. The company declined to comment.

‘I would reach out to people to help him”

Senate and House investigators are looking into various Russian entities to determine whether anyone connected to the Trump campaign helped Russians as they meddled in the 2016 presidential election, and whether Trump associates discussed sanctions with Russian officials.
The congressional inquiries, along with a criminal investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller, have shadowed the Trump administration. Trump has denied any connection to Russia’s election-meddling, calling the criminal probe “a witch hunt.”
Scaramucci, the founder of SkyBridge Capital, minimized his January meeting with Dmitriev in the resort town of Davos, Switzerland, at the celebrated annual gathering of the World Economic Forum. Scaramucci had met Dmitriev at previous Davos meetings, although at the gathering in January, Scaramucci was expecting to be named White House liaison to the business community.
Dmitriev “came over to say hello in a restaurant, and I was cordial,” Scaramucci said in a recent email to CNN. “There is nothing there.”
The day after the meeting, Scaramucci told Bloomberg TV that he had “as a private citizen” been working with Dmitriev on bringing a delegation of executives to Russia.
“What I said to him last night, in my capacity inside the administration, I would certainly reach out to some people to help him,” Scaramucci said before describing a thicket of ethical clearances he would face. “The idea was many months ago to have more outreach with Russia but also other countries, not just Russia. China, other countries.”
Scaramucci’s comments alarmed Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Ben Cardin of Maryland, who asked Mnuchin investigate whether Scaramucci sought to “facilitate prohibited transactions” or promised to waive or lift sanctions against Russia.
In a reply Jan. 30, before he was sworn in, Mnuchin said he would “ensure the appropriate Department components assess whether further investigation of this matter is warranted.”
A spokeswoman for the Russian fund said the two men did not discuss sanctions, and that the discussion itself did not violate sanctions that U.S. imposed in 2014 after Russia annexed part of neighboring Ukraine. The spokeswoman declined to describe the conversation, saying, “We do not comment on private meetings.”

An advocate for lifting sanctions

Since Trump’s election, Dmitriev has been one of Russia’s most vocal officials in calling for an end to U.S. sanctions and arguing that joint U.S.-Russia projects can create jobs in the United States.
The fund hired two U.S. lobbying firms in September 2014, after sanctions were imposed, paying them a combined $150,000 over two months for public relations work. The fund has not hired any lobbyists since then.
With a history of helping U.S. manufacturers and asset management companies invest in Russia, the fund is a logical starting point for Russia’s push to lift U.S. sanctions, former State Department chief economist Rodney Ludema said.
“If you’re going to get your nose under the tent, that’s a good place to start,” said Ludema, a Georgetown University economics professor. “I’m sure their objective is to get rid of all the sanctions against the financial institutions. But RDIF is one [sanctioned organizations] where a number of prominent U.S. investors have been involved.”
Scaramucci also questioned U.S. sanctions while he was in Davos and echoed Trump’s statements about improving relations with Russia.
Two weeks after the meeting between Scaramucci and Dmitriev, when President Trump spoke by phone to Russian President Vladimir Putin, the fund announced it would open an office in New York in May.
No New York office has been opened but the fund “still expects to open a representative office in the US this year,” the spokeswoman said.

 

 

Kushner in Israel, with ‘Allen Plan’ in Hand?

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President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner meets with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu hoping for a breakthrough on peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians. After this session, Kushner goes to Ramallah to meet with Palestinian Mahmoud Abbas. This is the 50th anniversary of the 1967 Mideast war where Israel captured the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza.

One of the big issues with the Palestinians is the construction of ‘settlements’ which this site takes extreme exception to that term. The other term used by the Palestinians which should never be accepted is ‘occupation’.

So, as the title of the article includes the ‘Allen Plan’….exactly what is that?

It refers to General Allen and 1967 lines, proposed during Obama’s term as president. Israel is always prepared for these types of meetings and had already formally rejected any re-proposal for The Allen Plan.

Does this look like Israel can defend itself reverting to 1967 lines? Further, that proposal demands Israel to relinquish the most sacred historical territory.

Image result for israel 1967 lines map

Image result for general john allen john kerry

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The Trump White House is currently reexamining the Allen Plan, an Obama-era proposal that calls for a Palestinian state in the 1967 borders with no IDF presence whatsoever. This plan is dangerous. If it is implemented, Israel will have to rely on foreign forces for its security, a situation that has not worked in the past. More than that, it is antithetical to the Israeli ethos of self-defense and self-preservation in the Jewish homeland.

Col. Kris Bauman’s appointment as Israel adviser to the US National Security Council is a noteworthy event. He assisted Gen. John Allen in formulating recommendations for security arrangements for Israel in the context of a permanent settlement, to which then-Secretary of State John Kerry aspired. This set of recommendations came to be known as the Allen Plan.

Gen. Allen’s vision was detailed in a comprehensive document prepared at a US research institute by two Israelis and two Americans: Gen. (res.) Gadi Shamni and Nimrod Novik, along with Ilan Goldenberg and Col. Kris Bauman.

The plan envisages a Palestinian state with full sovereignty inside the 1967 borders, its capital in east Jerusalem, with minor modifications for settlement blocs. The plan is based on complete acceptance of the Palestinian demand for full sovereignty. This means no IDF soldiers anywhere in their state, which would extend from the Jordan River to the 1967 line.

In lieu of Israel’s demands regarding defensible borders, which include an Israeli military presence in the Jordan Valley to ensure the Palestinian state’s demilitarization, the plan proposes a varied and complex security solution. One element would be a US military force that would operate in the Jordan Valley. As the document’s Executive Summary states,

The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that well-thought-through security measures in the context of the two-state solution can provide Israelis and Palestinians with a degree of security equal or greater to that provided today by Israel’s deployment into the West Bank…

The basic problem is the notion that Israel will rely for its security on foreign forces. Not only is it difficult to ensure that such forces would fulfill their duty successfully, but it is uncertain whether or not they would stay in place – particularly after they have suffered casualties like those they have suffered in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past decade.

Recall that during the waiting period before the Six-Day War, the security guarantee given by President Eisenhower to Ben-Gurion after the 1956 Sinai Campaign evaporated. When he demanded that Israel withdraw unconditionally from the Sinai Peninsula, Eisenhower promised that if the Straits of Tiran were ever again closed to Israeli shipping, the US would intervene. Yet when Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban came to Washington in May 1967, President Johnson candidly explained to him that Eisenhower’s promise – however estimable – was no longer a practical proposition. With his army bogged down in Vietnam, Johnson apparently could not have gained the nation’s or Congress’s support for an intervention in the Straits of Tiran even if he had wanted to.

The main concern is that the existence of the Greater Tel Aviv area – indeed, the daily routine of the State of Israel – will come to be dependent on the goodwill of foreign forces. That is the heart of the matter. Do we want Israel to be no more than a haven for persecuted Jews where they can subsist under foreign protection? Or do we want Israel to be a place of freedom, a homeland, in which we alone are responsible for our own security and sovereignty?

The authors of the Allen document emphasize that Israel’s security would continue to be based on the IDF’s power. But it is hard to imagine under what circumstances Israel would attain the international legitimacy to pursue an offensive deep within the Palestinian state, should the need arise. Regarding the conditions that could justify an IDF operation in Palestinian territory, the document says:

The Palestinians will never agree to an Israeli right of re-entry, but there could be a side agreement between Israel and the United States on the conditions under which the United States would support unilateral Israeli action. Ultimately, Israel is a sovereign state that enjoys the right of self-defense. Thus, it can unilaterally violate the sovereignty of another state, but with the attendant risks that would have to be weighed by Israeli leadership.

Should the IDF evacuate the territories completely, as envisaged by this plan, the Palestinians would certainly employ their carefully honed tactical and strategic talent for nonaccountability and ambiguity. They would take care to ensure that the Palestinian state cannot be defined as a hostile entity against which a “just war” can be declared. Whether deliberately or not, they would be able to let “rogue,” non-state forces do their work for them, and avoid taking responsibility. What then?

There is also good reason to doubt whether conditions for demilitarization can be maintained. In an era of global arms proliferation, and of forms of smuggling that elude surveillance (as in the flow of weapons to Hamas in Gaza and to Hezbollah in Lebanon), along with increasingly sophisticated local arms manufacture, there is no way to guarantee real demilitarization without a constant effort to keep the territory fully isolated and to operate within it.

We must also take into account the possibility that war could erupt in more than one arena at at a time. If war were to break out with the state of Palestine in the West Bank, it could happen simultaneously in Lebanon, Gaza, and so on. The IDF would be unable to concentrate its efforts in the West Bank arena – which, because of its geographic proximity to Israel’s population centers, could inflict a heavy blow. Under the new conditions of war, which are fundamentally different from those that prevailed in June 1967, reconquering the territory would be incomparably more difficult.

And what of the document’s validity under changing conditions? The security solution the document proposes must be weighed in terms of the time dimension, and in circumstantial contexts that are subject to change. If a solution is responsible and workable, what time span is envisaged? Who knows under what evolving circumstances the solution will be required to provide protection to a state of Israel that has been trimmed down to the coastal plain? Is there not also a need for responsible risk management regarding contingencies that are still beyond the horizon?

We must ask to what extent we ourselves, with the excessive emphasis we have placed on security concerns in recent decades as a key criterion by which to assess any prospective solution, have laid the groundwork for Gen. Allen’s plan. His security document is, after all, intended expressly to offer a technical solution to all the familiar security issues. It would leave the Israeli leadership without the faintest possibility of invoking a security pretext to ward off the “peace solution.”

In describing Kerry’s efforts, Thomas Friedman asserted (The New York Times, February 17, 2013) that in light of Gen. Allen’s solution for Israel’s security concerns, the Israeli government had reached a juncture where it would have to choose between peace and ideology.

Perhaps we have forgotten that protecting the national existence, in terms of how the IDF defines national security, does not pertain solely to ensuring the physical existence of the citizens of the country but also to safeguarding national interests. A national interest – such as the sovereignty of the people of Israel in their capital, Jerusalem – can go far beyond the technical contents of a plan for security arrangements, however worthy. Security is only a means, not an end in itself.

From a practical, professional standpoint, Gen. Allen’s plan leaves much to be desired. But on a deeper level, it completely ignores the possibility that the people of Israel, in renewing their life in their homeland, are motivated by something much greater than the need for a technical solution to security concerns.