What If...?

Mike Whitney explores evidence that the USA was behind the bombings of the Golden Dome Mosque in Iraq. He suspects Philip Zelikow was involved.

Zelikow served under Reagan and Bush 41, then under Condi Rice at the State Deptartment. Zelikow, a former director of the Aspen Strategy Group, believes that contemporary history is "defined functionally by those critical people and events that go into forming the public's presumptions about its immediate past".

In the November-December 1998 issue of Foreign Affairs, he co-authored an article entitled "Catastrophic Terrorism," in which he speculated that if the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center had succeeded, "the resulting horror and chaos would have exceeded our ability to describe it. Such an act of catastrophic terrorism would be a watershed event in American history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented in peacetime and undermine America’s fundamental sense of security, as did the Soviet atomic bomb test in 1949. Like Pearl Harbor, the event would divide our past and future into a before and after.

A year after 9/11, at Condi Rice's request, Zelikow re-wrote America’s national security strategy.

Most famously, Zelikow was the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, which deliberately suppressed information showing that Condi Rice was (at the very least) negligent in ignoring repeated warnings about an impending attack:

Notably, on July 10, 2001, Rice met with Tenet in what he referred to as an "emergency meeting" held at the White House at Tenet's request to brief Rice and the NSC staff about the potential threat of an al Qaeda attack. Rice responded by asking Tenet to give a presentation on the matter to Secretary Rumsfeld and (now-former) Attorney General John Ashcroft.

When asked about the meeting in 2006, Rice asserted she did not recall the specific meeting, commenting that she had met repeatedly with Tenet that summer about terrorist threats. Moreover, she stated that it was "incomprehensible” to her that she ignored terrorist threats two months before the September 11 attacks.

This Rice-Tenet meeting was not revealed to the 9/11 Commission because Zelikow personally kept it secret.

Zelikow has also said that the main reason for invading Iraq was to protect Israel:

"Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I'll tell you what I think the real threat (is) and actually has been since 1990 -- it's the threat against Israel,"

"And this is the threat that dare not speak its name, because the Europeans don't care deeply about that threat, I will tell you frankly. And the American government doesn't want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell."

At the risk of being labelled (again) an anti-Semite, I'm going to guess that Zelikow is a Jewish name. Zelikow is now vocally supporting the practice of CIA renditions and arguing against any more legal restrictions on it.