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Politics : WAR on Terror. Will it engulf the Entire Middle East? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Haim R. Branisteanu who wrote (7405)	8/29/2004 2:12:23 AM
From: Haim R. Branisteanu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 32591

It is all about politics possible rooted in the CIA in their effort to save face from the 9/11 fiasco and ill conceived fight on terrror Officials said it was not yet clear whether the probe would become an espionage case or perhaps would result in lesser charges such as improper release of classified information or mishandling of government documents. On Friday, Pentagon officials said Franklin was not in a position to have significant influence over U.S. policy. "The Defense Department has been cooperating with the Department of Justice for an extended period of time," a Pentagon statement said. "It is the DOD's understanding that the investigation within DOD is very limited in its scope." At the Pentagon and elsewhere in Washington yesterday, people touched by the case said they were baffled by aspects of it. Colleagues said they were stunned to hear Franklin was suspected of giving secret information to a foreign government. And foreign policy specialists said they were skeptical that the pro-Israel group under FBI scrutiny, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, would jeopardize its work with classified documents from a midlevel bureaucrat when it could find out almost anything it wanted to by calling top officials in the Bush administration. "The whole thing makes no sense to me," said Dennis Ross, special envoy on the Arab-Israeli peace process in the first Bush administration and the Clinton presidency. "The Israelis have access to all sorts of people. They have access in Congress and in the administration. They have people who talk about these things," said Ross, now a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. ........................................ More recently, Feith has been a target of criticism from Democrats who claim that two offices in his branch -- the Office of Special Plans, headed by Luti, and the Counterterrorism Evaluation Group -- sought to manipulate intelligence to improve the Bush administration's case for war against Iraq. House and Senate intelligence committee investigators found no evidence for allegations that the Pentagon offices tried to bypass the CIA or had a major impact on the prewar debate. But in the Senate panel's report on prewar intelligence, three Democratic senators -- John D. Rockefeller IV (W.Va.), Carl M. Levin (Mich.), and Richard J. Durbin (Ill.) -- specifically criticized Feith's operation. .............................. One Israeli official familiar with the situation said yesterday that his government had checked "every organ here" to make sure that no part of government was involved. "We checked everything possible, and there's absolutely nothing. It's a nonevent, from the Israeli point of view. Someone leaked this to [hurt] . . . the president, AIPAC and the Jews on the eve of the Republican convention," he speculated. washingtonpost.com