PRESS RELEASE
Bush's Arms Control Team:
Whom Do They Really Work For?
Jan. 16, 2002 (EIRNS)—Against a backdrop of efforts by hardliners in both Moscow and Washington to sabotage the budding "strategic partnership" between Presidents Bush and Putin, the United States and Russia held talks in Washington Jan. 15-16, on reductions in arsenals of strategic nuclear weapons. The talks began a week after the Pentagon released its "Nuclear Posture Review," which proposed substantial reductions in the U.S. nuclear arsenal over the next decade.
At their summit meeting in Crawford, Texas several months ago, Bush and Putin announced that they would work to greatly reduce both countries' nuclear weapons arsenals, and the progress on this issue had greatly tempered the Russian reaction to the U.S. abrogation of the ABM Treaty several weeks later.
However, Executive Alert has learned that the U.S. Pentagon and State Department team of negotiators, who sat down with their Russian counterparts this week, are all hardline neo-conservatives, with long track records of provocations against Russia and China. The team--Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy, J.D. Crouch; Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Doug Feith; and Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs, John Bolton--are all members of the "Wolfowitz Cabal," proteges and allies of Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. They all have strong ties to the Israeli rightwing circles of Ariel Sharon, and are deeply infected with the disease called "Clash of Civilizations."
During the Clinton Administration, while out of government, Crouch was a leading public advocate for a pre-emptive military strike against North Korea, promoting the idea that the North Koreans were on the verge of deploying nuclear weapons and long-range missiles capable of hitting the United States. He surfaced as part of the International Security Council, an outfit run by Dr. Joseph Churba, co-founder of the Jewish Defense League, and a long-suspected Israeli intelligence operator.
Doug Feith was a special counsel to President Reagan's Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle, where both he and Perle were investigated by the Secretary of Defense's General Counsel Office as suspected participants in the Jonathan Jay Pollard Israeli spy ring. During the Clinton era, Feith was a leading figure, along with another suspected Pollard collaborator, Frank Gaffney, in the Center for Security Policy, an organization now leading the attack against President Bush for his failure to invade Iraq, for his collaboration with Russian President Putin, and for his refusal to fully support Ariel Sharon in his drive to crush the Palestinians and start a new Mideast war.
John Bolton, the chief State Department arms control negotiator, was in the Bush Administration, and then spent the Clinton years at the American Enterprise Institute, where he helped found Margaret Thatcher's New Atlantic Initiative (co-chaired by Henry Kissinger) and was a leading proponent of a fullscale U.S. invasion of Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
These pedigrees prompted Lyndon LaRouche, founder and contributing editor of Executive Intelligence Review, and a currrent candidate for the 2004 Democratic Party Presidential nomination, to express grave reservations about the negotiating team. LaRouche questioned who these men actually represent, noting that all have been accused of being closer to the Israelis than to American national security and foreign policy interests. "Where do they stand," LaRouche asked, "in respect to the U.S.-Russian cooperation struck by Presidents Bush and Putin, and greatly reinforced by President Putin's support for his American counterpart on September 11."
