They Were Never Going to Tell You...

THEY WERE NEVER GOING TO TELL YOU... Elhadi Benkirane

On a July morning in 1996, a paper was handed to a newly elected prime minister in Jerusalem. It was not long, twenty three pages in its original form, and it was written in the direct, unadorned language of men who are accustomed to being taken seriously. Its title was A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. Its audience was Benjamin Netanyahu, who had just won Israel's general election and was preparing to form his government. Its authors were Americans.

Not American Jews with dual loyalties, not informal advisors maintaining plausible distance, not academics moonlighting as consultants. The lead author was Richard Perle, who had served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy under President Ronald Reagan from 1981 to 1987, who sat on the boards of major defense contractors, who was one of the most well connected men in Washington's permanent national security establishment. The co-authors included Douglas Feith, a lawyer and defense intellectual who had previously served in the Reagan National Security Council; David Wurmser, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who had written extensively on Middle East policy; and Meyrav Wurmser, an Israeli American academic and co-founder of the Middle East Media Research Institute.

These were not fringe figures. They were not outsiders. They were the American national security establishment, writing strategy documents for a foreign government.

The document called for the removal of Saddam Hussein, the destabilization of Syria, and the rollback of Iranian regional influence, all using American military power as the primary instrument. Its authors were in the rooms where those decisions were made five years later.

Richard Perle became chairman of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee. Douglas Feith became Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, the third highest position in the Pentagon. David Wurmser became Middle East Advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney. Paul Wolfowitz became Deputy Secretary of Defense.

None of this was hidden. The Clean Break document was publicly available. The positions these men occupied were matters of public record confirmed by Senate confirmation hearings. The relationship between what they had written for the Israeli government in 1996 and what they would do from their American government positions after 2001 was available to be observed by anyone who chose to observe it.

Almost nobody in the mainstream American press chose to observe it.

The neoconservative policy network that produced both the Clean Break document and the Project for the New American Century was not a collection of individuals who happened to share views. It was a coordinated institutional presence, constructed deliberately, funded deliberately, and deployed deliberately into the permanent policy infrastructure of the United States government.

The Project for the New American Century was founded in 1997 with a statement of principles signed by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and others who would, within four years, occupy the commanding heights of American national security policy.

This is not a network. It is a government in waiting.

The September 2000 PNAC report noted that the process of transformation "is likely to be long absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor." That sentence was written in September 2000. Twelve months later, the catastrophic and catalyzing event arrived. The men who had written that sentence were in office when it did.

The Iraq War was launched in March 2003 based on two claims: that Saddam Hussein's government possessed weapons of mass destruction, and that there were links between his government and al Qaeda. Both claims were false.

The Brown University Costs of War Project calculated in 2021 that the post 2001 wars cost the United States approximately eight trillion dollars in direct and indirect expenses. Nine hundred thousand people died in direct war violence. More than seven thousand American service members died. Approximately thirty seven million people were displaced.

These outcomes align precisely with the objectives stated in the 1996 Clean Break document.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee does not contribute directly to political campaigns. This is by design. What AIPAC has is something more powerful than a PAC: a national network of donor relationships that it can activate or deactivate in specific congressional districts and states in response to specific votes and specific positions.

Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was one of the earliest and most persistent critics of unconditional American support for Israeli policy. He lost his 1974 primary in Arkansas. The organized financial opposition that materialized against him was documented and commented upon at the time.

Senator Charles Percy of Illinois maintained positions on Middle East policy that deviated from what the donor class required. He lost his 1984 Senate race.

Representative Cynthia McKinney of Georgia was defeated in the 2002 Democratic primary after taking positions critical of Israeli policy. She won back her seat in 2004. She lost it again in 2006 under circumstances that replicated the pattern of 2002 with sufficient precision that the replication itself was a message.

In 2023, AIPAC established its own super PAC, United Democracy Project, and spent more than 14 million dollars in Democratic primary races against incumbents who had been critical of Israeli government policy. The money came overwhelmingly from donors who did not live in the districts where it was spent.

The system does not need to target everyone. It needs to target enough people that everyone else does the calculation and arrives at the same conclusion.

The first thing to understand about Jeffrey Epstein is that his biography does not make sense. Not in the way that complicated biographies sometimes fail to make sense, where the pieces are present but the pattern is unclear. It does not make sense in the most fundamental way: the things that are known about him do not cohere into a plausible account of how a person accumulates the resources, the connections, and the institutional protection that Epstein demonstrably had.

Jeffrey Edward Epstein was born on January 20, 1953, in Coney Island, Brooklyn, the son of a parks department worker. He attended Lafayette High School and then studied mathematics at Cooper Union before dropping out. He had no academic credentials in finance. He had no family connections to the financial industry. He had no social connections to the world of institutional money.

He had, by every visible measure available to an observer in 1974, no plausible path to the position he obtained that year: a teaching position at the Dalton School, one of the most prestigious private schools in Manhattan, whose student body came from the families of the city's financial, cultural, and social elite.

A twenty one year old without a completed undergraduate degree was appointed to teach at an institution whose faculty qualifications were, by any reasonable standard, more rigorous than those applied to Epstein.

At Dalton, Epstein met Alan Greenberg, the chairman of Bear Stearns. Through Greenberg, Epstein obtained a position at Bear Stearns without the academic or professional credentials that any normal hiring process would have required.