Tobin - Why Did the Administration Leak the Israel-Azerbaijan Story?

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary/Contentions..
03 April '12..



Veteran Israeli journalist Ehud Yaari has written in the Times of Israel claiming last week’s bombshell from Foreign Policy magazine about Azerbaijan’s willingness to allow Israel to use its air bases to strike Iran was pure fiction. Yaari excoriates the editors of Foreign Policy, the Israeli press (including, presumably, the Times of Israel, which prominently reported it) and anyone else (including, presumably, me) for taking it seriously. But though Yaari presents some good arguments why it might not be true, unlike magazine author Mark Perry, he offers no sources or reporting to back up his assertion.

But even if we assume Yaari is right and Perry’s piece is wrong, there are some interesting questions to be posed about the piece. Unless you are willing to believe, as perhaps Yaari and others disputing its authenticity do, that Perry is lying about the fact that senior officials in the Obama administration leaked the story to him, it’s still important to ask why they did so. What possible motive could they have had?

The answer is simple. Whether the air base angle was true or not, publicizing the ongoing close cooperation between Israel and Azerbaijan (something Yaari actually concedes is factual) can only make it more difficult for that relationship to continue. Because, as Yaari rightly notes, Perry is no friend of Israel, the willingness of Obama’s minions to circulate the tale speaks volumes about the off-the-record malevolence that lurks beneath the surface of the president’s current charm offensive aimed at Jewish voters.

Frankel - Mark Perry's Unsubstantiated ‘False Flag’ Story

Rafael D. Frankel..
+972..
22 January '12..
H/T Martin Kramer..




Mark Perry’s report on a false flag operation is not only unverifiable, it displays naivety about American foreign policy and bolsters the ludicrous thesis that Israel is the mastermind behind American Middle East belligerence.

The “false flag” operation conducted by the Mossad, as described by Mark Perry in an article published just after another assassination of an Iranian nuclear scientist, is an affront to the United States if it is true. The Mossad certainly has no business posing as the CIA in order to recruit a Pakistan-based terrorist group to make hits on Iranian targets. But without one single on-the-record source for this reporting, Perry should not have written the article and Foreign Policy should not have published it.

Reputable media outlets insist on named sources because of accountability. Anonymous sources are accountable to no one. There is no consequence to unnamed sources getting facts wrong, telling half-truths, or outright lying. Anonymous sources can use the media for their own purposes as well. Perhaps one of the people quoted in Perry’s story has a personal axe to grind with the Mossad. Perhaps he or she is an opponent of going to war with Iran and feels that placing such a story in a prominent magazine will diminish those chances. There is no way to know his or her motivation for talking to the author of this article and therefore no way to confirm the veracity of the claims.

Especially regarding something as important as this false flag operation, the burden is on the reporter and the media outlet to substantiate the claim either with a paper trail or with on-the-record quotes. There is no point in having reputable media outlets if anyone who has written a book on a related topic can present “news” as fact even if the facts are non-corroborated. This is exactly the problem with so many blogs today that have become sources of news. Since they don’t operate with the same standards as traditional journalism, rumor and innuendo get treated as facts, are repeated ad infinitum, and eventually become part of the public narrative even if they are false. (To be clear, I am not implying that Foreign Policy generally engages in such behavior.)

In a recent interview with +972, Perry said he’d been working on this story for 18 months. If he was not able to come up with one person during all that time who would talk to him on the record (even someone who is now retired), or provide him with copies of the actual memos he references in the article, then there must be a reasonable doubt as to whether the story he is telling is mostly true.

CAMERA - Ex-Arafat Advisor Mark Perry and the 'False Flag' Story

TS..
CAMERA/Snapshots..
15 January '12..

Mark Perry, the former advisor for Yasir Arafat and an advocate of U.S. engagement with Hamas and Hezbollah whose interpretation of General David Petraus' statements concerning U.S.-Israeli relations were discredited by Petraus himself, is at it again. Ha'aretz reports:

A senior Israeli government official rushed to denounce a report Friday which alleged Mossad agents had posed as CIA officers in order to recruit members of a Pakistan-based terror group to commit assassinations and attacks in Iran.

The Israeli official called the Foreign Policy article "absolute nonsense." Quoting U.S. intelligence memos, journalist Mark Perry's story reported that the Mossad operation was carried out in 2007-2008, behind the back of the U.S. government and infuriated then U.S. President George W. Bush.

Ha'aretz's description of Perry, the former advisor to Arafat whose foray into the Petraus affair was discredited, as simply a "journalist" is as unconscionable as Ynet referring to anti-Israel activist Richard Silverstein as simply a "U.S. blogger." (And Ynet was back in the act on this last week.)

Link: http://blog.camera.org/archives/2012/01/exarafat_advisor_mark_perry_sp.html

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Outside the box, or out of their minds?

Michael Young
The Daily Star (Beirut)
08 July '10

A perennial shortcoming in America’s interactions with the Middle East is that they tend to emerge from insular discussions. Policy is the result of calculations that usually rotate around Washington. Consequently, regional realities are frequently ignored, poorly understood, or bent out of shape to fit a favored agenda.

This was the case in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Disagreements between different government bureaucracies, civilian and military, played themselves out through media leaks. Intellectuals, too, hotly debated the merits of war. However, the Iraqis were marginal in the commotion, which is why so many Americans were taken aback by what happened once Baghdad fell.

The latest twist on this failing comes from the exchange now taking place in some American policy circles and the military over whether to engage Middle Eastern militant Islamist groups, particularly Hizbullah and Hamas. Last week, Mark Perry, author of a book advocating talking to Islamists, published a blog post on the Foreign Policy website saying that a recent “red team” report by senior officers in US Central Command had proposed a new approach to Hizbullah and Hamas. The officers cast doubt on the current American isolation of the groups, Perry wrote, and they recommended “integrating the two into their respective political mainstreams.”

The officers also revived the idea of incorporating Hizbullah and Hamas into their government-backed security forces, arguing: “The US role of assistance to an integrated Lebanese defense force that includes Hizballah; and the continued training of Palestinian security forces in a Palestinian entity that includes Hamas in its government, would be more effective than providing assistance to entities – the government of Lebanon and Fatah – that represent only a part of the Lebanese and Palestinian populace respectively.” (Italics in the original.)

Perry noted that while the officers acknowledged that Hizbullah and Hamas “embrace staunch anti-Israel rejectionist policies,” they added that the two groups are “pragmatic and opportunistic.”

Here was a controversial example of “thinking outside the box” on Hizbullah and Hamas, Perry opined. It was precisely the opposite. A bevy of Americans essentially made assumptions with no grounding whatsoever in the reasoning of either of the two Islamist groups. Worse, the officers lazily lumped Hizbullah and Hamas together, even though both have different aims and operate in significantly different political contexts. This was thinking made in Washington, directed at Washington, based on terms largely defined by Washington. It was the pure product of a closed Washington box.

(Read full article)

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Mainstreaming the Extremists; Marginalizing the Moderates

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
04 July '10

Simultaneously, in some far-flung places in the world, several smart people have come up with a horrifying conclusion: radicals are being systematically mainstreamed, real moderates are being declared extremists.

For example, the two semi-official lobbyists for Hamas and Hizballah—Alistair Crooke and Mark Perry—and the biggest defenders of the Ahmadinejad regime in America—Flyntt and Hillary Leverett—are getting adoring write-ups. Crooke and the Leveretts have been profiled in the New York Times. These peoples op-ed appear everywhere, including in the FP (Foreign Policy) blog. Criticism of them seems pretty much barred from the mainstream (there’s that word again) media.

In Australia, there’s an attempt to portray anti-Israel Jewish activists as mainstream and moderate while the traditional pro-Israel groups are said to be extremist. And of course this is what J Street is about: a group headed by a former lobbyist for a company working on a Qatari anti-Israel propaganda group and which itself has hardly ever taken a position supportive of Israel. Could J Street's cover possibly be more transparent, yet no mainstream media organ ever seems to mention this.

When Hussein Fadlallah, who might be called Hizballah’s founding spiritual guide, died recently, CNN’s chief editor for Arab affairs gushed in all a twitter that she had enormous respect for him while the BBC leaned backwards to sanitize his record.

It sounds better to say someone was an implacable foe of Israel or the United States than that he made virulently antisemitic statements and endorsed numerous terrorist attacks against Americans in which more than 240 U.S. servicemen were killed in Beirut. You see, if people knew this sort of thing they might not like him, or Hizballah.

Mainstreaming may seem to be a great solution but it is the gateway to a much worse situation. For example, General David Petraeus declared on taking command in Afghanistan, "We are in this to win." But how is the U.S.-led international force going to win? Certainly, they cannot wipe out the Taliban, since the rules of engagement restrain them from doing the kind of thing necessary to root it out.

(Read full article)

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President Karzai's Mideast tutorial

Petra Marquardt-Bigman
The Warped Mirror/JPost
04 April '10

A few weeks ago, Mark Perry, author of the book Talking to Terrorists and a former Arafat advisor, claimed that General Petraeus had come to the conclusion that US interests and security in the Middle East were gravely endangered by "Israeli intransigence". While few knowledgeable analysts bought Perry's story, there were plenty of pundits and bloggers who were all too happy to present it as the revelation of a long-hidden truth. The fact that General Petraeus himself soon rejected all the spin and set the record straight will probably dampen the enthusiasm of the "Blame-Israel" brigades only marginally.

Those who believed Perry's story seem to have a rather low opinion of General Petraeus, because they apparently assume that if he gets to hear complaints about "Israeli intransigence" from some Arab rulers, he will immediately conclude that America would be wildly popular in the Middle East if Arabs saw no reason to blame the US for "Israeli intransigence". But it is safe to assume that General Petraeus remembers very well that 9/11 happened - and was celebrated widely in the Middle East - not long after an American president and an Israeli prime minister had tried very hard to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Indeed, the proposals for a Palestinian state presented in Taba in January 2001 were so far-reaching that Yasser Arafat eventually regretted his failure to accept them.

But for those who find it too taxing to recall some major events that happened barely ten years ago, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan recently offered a reminder of the kind of intransigence that led to 9/11 - and that has nothing whatsoever to do with Israel. As The New York Times reported, Karzai decided to retaliate for a cancelled invitation to the White House by inviting Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Afghanistan and allowing him to deliver one of his anti-American tirades from the presidential palace in Kabul.

Karzai also reportedly believes that "the Americans are in Afghanistan because they want to dominate his country and the region, and that they pose an obstacle to striking a peace deal with the Taliban." Needless to say - at least for anyone who knows the Middle East - Karzai presents himself as the courageous and clever leader who works hard to frustrate America's supposed ambitions.

(Read full post)
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From the Horse’s Mouth: Petraeus on Israel

Max Boot
Contentions/Commentary
24 March '10

(One has to be careful to always look around before running with a claim. This was a classic, with Max Boot being one of the few with the proper understanding of what was said from the start. The Biden quotes behind closed doors, may also not have been any better, and have been challenged)

Back on March 13, terrorist groupie Mark Perry — a former Arafat aide who now pals around with Hamas and Hezbollah — posted an article on Foreign Policy’s website, claiming that General David Petraeus was behind the administration’s policy of getting tough with Israel. He attributed to Petraeus the view that “Israel’s intransigence” — meaning its unwillingness to give up every inch of the West Bank and East Jerusalem tomorrow — “could cost American lives.” His item received wide circulation though it may be doubted whether, as he now says, “It changed the way people think about the conflict.”

I tried to set the record straight with two Commentary items (see here and here) in which I suggested, based on talking to an officer familiar with Petraeus’s thinking, that Perry’s item was a gross distortion —in fact a fraud. I noted that in Petraeus’s view, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process was only one factor among many affecting U.S. interests in the region and that Israeli settlements were far from the only, or even the main, obstacle to peace. I even suggested — again, based on inside information — that the 56-page posture statement that Central Command had submitted to Congress, which stated that the Arab-Israeli conflict “foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel,” was not the best indicator of his thinking. Better to look at what he actually told Congress — in a hearing he barely mentioned Israel (until prompted to do so) and never talked about settlements at all.

This brought hoots of derision from commentators on both the Left and the Right, who claimed that I was putting words into Petraeus’s mouth — that I was, in Joe Klein’s phrase, taking a “flying leap.” Predictably piling on were Andrew Sullivan, who said I was “glossing over” what Petraeus said, and Robert Wright, who claimed that, “by Boot’s lights, Petraeus is anti-Israel.” Diana West added a truly inventive spin, by suggesting that Petraeus was a protégé of Stephen Walt, who was his faculty adviser many years ago at Princeton before the good professor won renown as a leading basher of the “Israel Lobby” and the state of Israel itself. It was from Walt, Ms. West claims, that Petraeus imbibed his “Arabist, anti-Israel attitudes.”

So who was off-base here: those of us who tried to explain the nuances of General Petraeus’s thinking or those bloggers and commentators who tried to suggest that he is a strident critic of Israel?

(Read full article)
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Is General Petraeus Behind Obama’s Dressing Down of Israel?

Max Boot
Contentions/Commentary
16 March '10

What’s behind the administration’s new get-tough policy with Israel? If you believe Mark Perry, a former Arafat adviser and author of Talking to Terrorists: Why America Must Engage with Its Enemies, it’s the doing of General David Petraeus. In a rather imaginative post at Foreign Policy’s web site, he claims that on Jan. 16,

a team of senior military officers from the U.S. Central Command (responsible for overseeing American security interests in the Middle East), arrived at the Pentagon to brief Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The team had been dispatched by CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus to underline his growing worries at the lack of progress in resolving the issue. The 33-slide, 45-minute PowerPoint briefing stunned Mullen. The briefers reported that there was a growing perception among Arab leaders that the U.S. was incapable of standing up to Israel, that CENTCOM’s mostly Arab constituency was losing faith in American promises, that Israeli intransigence on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was jeopardizing U.S. standing in the region, and that Mitchell himself was (as a senior Pentagon officer later bluntly described it) “too old, too slow … and too late.”

According to Perry, the briefing “hit the White House like a bombshell,” because in effect the U.S. military was placing itself in opposition to the “powerful … Israeli lobby” by announcing that “America’s relationship with Israel is important, but not as important as the lives of America’s soldiers.”

That didn’t ring true to me, so I asked a military officer who is familiar with the briefing in question and with Petraeus’s thinking on the issue to clarify matters. He told me that Perry’s item was “incorrect.” In the first place, Petraeus never recommended shifting the Palestinian territories to Centcom’s purview from European Command, as claimed by Perry. Nor did Petraeus belittle George Mitchell, whom he holds in high regard. All that happened, this officer told me, is that there was a “staff-officer briefing … on the situation in the West Bank, because that situation is a concern that Centcom hears in the Arab world all the time. Nothing more than that.”

(Read full post)
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Talking to Terrorists

Lee Smith
Tabletmag.com
03 March '10

“If you can talk to an insurgency that kills Americans, it should be easy to talk to ones that don’t,” Mark Perry tells me on the phone. Perry is author of the recently published Talking to Terrorists: Why America Must Engage With Its Enemies, a book documenting his meetings with terrorists around the Middle East, including officials from Hamas and Hezbollah. But his favorite template for successful engagement with terrorists is the Sunni insurgency in Iraq that eventually partnered with the Americans and turned against al-Qaida in Iraq. Perry argues that al-Qaida is the one terrorist group we shouldn’t be talking to, since it has no natural constituency and no interest in the democratic process. The others, Perry says, are “national resistance movements.”

Perry, who has lived and traveled in the Middle East for several decades, started talking to terrorists during the second intifada, when he built relationships with Hamas leaders like Ismail Haniyeh, Abdul Azziz Rantissi, and Mahmoud al-Zahar. These contacts would eventually lead to Perry’s partnership with former British intelligence official Alastair Crooke of the Beirut-based Conflicts Forum, an organization that regularly meets with terrorists and arranges meetings with non-active Western policymakers and diplomats. Perry left Conflicts Forum in the wake of Iran’s June presidential election, when he and Crooke found themselves on opposing sides. “He wrote an article on the June elections that showed disregard for the demonstrators,” says Perry. “And I wrote a piece castigating the regime and showing admiration for the opposition.”

Still, Perry has not lost his enthusiasm for the Iranian regime’s violence-prone proteges, like Hezbollah. How, I asked him, can the Party of God be considered democratic if its forces overran Beirut in May 2008, when the democratically elected government made a decision that Hezbollah didn’t like? The government, explained Perry, “wanted to take away Hezbollah’s privileges, so they pushed back.” Apparently, the fact that Hezbollah members only killed a few dozen of their fellow Lebanese before handing over their positions to the Lebanese Armed Forces makes them democratic.

“I’m not a reconciliation freak,” says Perry. “I’m not a pacifist. The vulnerability of my book is that people may come away thinking that simply by talking or listening, the scales will fall from our eyes. I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Sometimes, you sit down with them and you’re thinking, Holy cow—conflict is inevitable.” Still, he believes that Hamas may be willing to make a transition similar to that of the Iraqi insurgency and come to the negotiating table with Israel.

(Read full article)
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