An alarm went off when I learned that Michael Chertoff was the man pushing the inane full-body-scan machines on our government, in response to a Nigerian man boarding a plane in Amsterdam on December 25, 2009, and allegedly trying to blow it up with explosives hidden in his underwear.
I was surprised to find that this was such old news. Chertoff had been pushing the full-body scans since he was head of the Homeland Security Agency in 2005. After leaving Homeland Security in 2009, he founded the Chertoff Group, and took on Rapiscan ("Rape-scan"?), the manufacturer of the $150,000 machines.
The question this raised for me wasn’t about the conflicts of interest, or becoming very rich through gaming our government. It’s this: Why was an Israeli – Chertoff is a citizen of Israel – ever appointed to head our Homeland Security Agency? And why were a few dozen citizens of Israel appointed to high posts in our government, where they would help shape our priorities and direction: economically, politically, and militarily? Even at the end of G.W. Bush’s eight years as President, there were at least thirty-three Israelis reported to be in positions of great authority:
Attorney General – Michael Mukasey
Head of Homeland Security – Michael Chertoff
Chairman Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board – Richard Perle
Deputy Defense Secretary (Former) – Paul Wolfowitz
Under Secretary of Defense – Douglas Feith
National Security Council Advisor – Elliott Abrams
Vice President Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff (Former) – "Scooter" Libby
White House Deputy Chief of Staff – Joshua Bolten
Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs – Marc Grossman
Director of Policy Planning at the State Department – Richard Haass
U.S. Trade Representative (Cabinet-level Position) – Robert Zoellick
Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board – James Schlesinger
UN Representative (Former) – John Bolton
Under Secretary for Arms Control – David Wurmser
Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board – Eliot Cohen
Senior Advisor to the President – Steve Goldsmith
Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary – Christopher Gersten
Assistant Secretary of State – Lincoln Bloomfield
Deputy Assistant to the President – Jay Lefkowitz
White House Political Director – Ken Melman
National Security Study Group – Edward Luttwak
Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board – Kenneth Adelman
Defense Intelligence Agency Analyst (Former) – Lawrence (Larry) Franklin
National Security Council Advisor – Robert Satloff
President Export-Import Bank U.S. – Mel Sembler
Deputy Assistant Secretary, Administration for Children and Families – Christopher Gersten
Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development for Public Affairs – Mark Weinberger
White House Speechwriter – David Frum
White House Spokesman (Former) – Ari Fleischer
Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board – Henry Kissinger
Deputy Secretary of Commerce – Samuel Bodman
Under Secretary of State for Management – Bonnie Cohen
Director of Foreign Service Institute – Ruth Davis*
Does Israel have a similar number of US citizens shaping their policies? Does any country? Do we have citizens of any other country holding positions of such influence?
In her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein describes the origin of Israel’s ties to the Security industry:
The rise of the tech economy in Israel was threatened when the dot-com economy crashed in 2000, and Israel’s leading companies needed to find a new niche in the global market. With the most tech-dependent economy in the world, Israel was hit harder by the dot-com crash than anywhere else. The country went into immediate free fall, and by June 2001, analysts were predicting that roughly three hundred high-tech Israeli firms would go bankrupt, with tens of thousands of layoffs. The government encouraged the tech industry to branch out into security and surveillance. When the market for these services and devices exploded in the years after 9-11, the Israeli state openly embraced a new national economic vision: the growth provided by the dot-com bubble would be replaced with a homeland security boom. It was the perfect marriage of the Likud Party’s hawkishness and its radical embrace of Chicago School economics. By 2003, Israel was already making a stunning recovery, and by 2004 the country had seemed to pull off a miracle: it was performing better than almost any Western economy. Much of this growth was due to Israel’s savvy positioning of itself as a kind of shopping mall for homeland security technologies. The timing was perfect. Overnight, Israel became, in the words of Forbes magazine, "the go-to country for antiterrorism technologies" (p. 435).
Unlike the Wikileaks that have thrown our government and many potentially dangerous citizens into furious hysteria, the facts here are all hidden in plain sight. The terror industry that rescued both Israel’s and U.S. economies relies on keeping citizens terrified – frozen by the "Shock" Naomi Klein detailed -- while their governments are looted, their civil rights disappear, and citizens are regimented into a police state at home and permanent war abroad. We needn’t endorse the conspiracy theories voiced by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in his speech before the United Nations on September 23, 2010 – he had referred to 9-11 as a "big lie" back in March 2010 – but there has to be more to it than just a list of thirty-three names.
The Israeli citizens listed above are, technically, dual citizens of Israel and the United States. But as a wise young rabbi once said, "No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money (Matthew 6-24, Luke 16:13)." With Israel surrounded by enemies and accusers, both in the Middle East and the United Nations, it doesn’t seem likely that they could afford to put any country’s needs ahead of their own. Maybe Wikileaks will weigh in.
ENDNOTES:
* This story appeared on several websites, including
-- salonesoterica.wordpress.com/.../03/dual-us-israeli-citizens-running-american-government (posted on April 3, 2008 by Boulderdash
-- "Dual Citizenship – Loyal to Whom?" by Dan Eden, http://viewzone.com/...
-- http://chimpplanet.blogspot.com/...