1990s — Silverstein for Heritage: calling for permanent war against the marginalized

The topic and thrust of that Heritage paper by Silverstein, “An American Strategy Against Terrorism,” clarifies further the conclusion of Bikowsky’s thesis: that the U.S. should take Israeli methods as a model for their own wars of aggression against Muslim populations. This has been the driving force behind both of their careers.

Silverstein published several other papers for Heritage, all of them promoting his vision of a future U.S. national security paradigm wherein the military and intelligence community would continually seek out conflicts in order to crush marginalized populations, particularly Muslims and Leftists.

His vision was of a military styled after the CIA; his message that, with the Cold War over, instead of shifting the national focus away from militarized responses to the internal affairs of other countries, our focus should be on equipping and authorizing “elite” forces like the Special Operations Command (SOCOM), the CIA, and the Marines to destroy any counter-hegemonic movement anywhere in the world, before the movement takes any action, on a moment’s notice.

The most notable among these is a piece entitled “An American Strategy For Third World Insurgencies.” It is here that Silverstein most thoroughly lays out this vision, proposing an insane regime he calls the “Special Program to Advance Regional Capabilities” or “SPARC.” Under this program, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the CIA, and the National Security Council (NSC) would work together to create a kind of “School of the Americas,” but on a broader scale, and funded significantly by the countries against whose people it would be used. Foreign civilian and military leaders of SPARC offshoots to be established in other countries would be brought to SPARC’s training institute in the U.S., where they would receive counterinsurgency training, as well as reeducation to reorient their political and economic concerns (the term “free markets” is used several times throughout the paper, to give you an idea of the economic concerns we would dictate to other countries’ leaders).

The output of neoliberal/neoconservative think-tanks during this period, and in particular that produced by Silverstein, make clear that they were well aware the policies they proposed would have to be enforced at gunpoint — that populations most adversely affected by the denial of any alternative to “free market” liberalization would attempt to assert their rights, even when SPARC-trained puppet governments acquiesced.

Silverstein’s proposals, then, were to transform the U.S. military into shock police, violently enforcing the self-consciously contrived, neoliberal worldview that, with the fall of the Soviet Union, “there is no alternative” (TINA); that the institution of “shock therapy” privatization efforts the world over must progress unhindered. That is, Silverstein’s writing offers many examples of how neoconservatism arose in order to create a secure environment for neoliberalism, and where that failed, to enforce policy prescriptions.

FDD: constructed from the ashes of 9/11

The economic message underpinning Silverstein’s work for Heritage in the 1990s would garner less overt mention later in his career. In the spring of 2001, during the first year of the Second Intifada, Emet: An Educational Initiative, Inc. was established. Intended to counter the sympathy many Americans felt toward Palestinians resisting Israeli abuses, particularly among students, it would “offer Israel the kind of PR that the Israeli government seemed unable to provide itself.” The organization was a virtual failure. Their program to send 40 students and professors to Israel during the summer for reeducation was their only successful effort — one that would be repeated each year since, after reshuffling the organization.

The greatest boon to Emet’s efforts would come on September 11th. The following day, they seized on the opportunity to use Americans’ security concerns to bolster their campaign. They immediately began painting Muslims broadly as assaulting “democracy,” which we’re apparently supposed to believe is represented by the U.S. and Israel. The organization was reincorporated as the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), which cynically arose from the wreckage of the very signifiers of both their neoliberal and neoconservative aims — the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

It is unclear when Silverstein joined the FDD — often referred to as the new Project for a New American Century (PNAC) — but by March of 2002, he was the organization’s deputy director. He would prove to be among the most enthusiastic propagandists for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, in which he already had over a decade of experience. The FDD claims to have been represented during that period in at least seven different articles per day in major newspapers, and frequently offered their warmongering services to CNN, MSNBC, news radio, and right-wing talk radio (then in its heyday).

Most will remember their talking points, and the fact that they were utterly fabricated. Yet after each round of arguments published in op-eds, offered for the record to journalists, or espoused on cable news, their claims would be disproven. Evidence mounted each time they spoke that they were blatantly lying in order to drum up support for an illegal war in Iraq, and yet each time, they were invited to mislead the public via the media some more.

Silverstein for the American Enterprise Institute (AEI): reviving the assassination option

It was around the time he joined FDD that Silverstein penned an article for American Enterprise (of AEI) arguing for the creation of a new U.S. assassination program. Bikowsky is today a major player in just that program. This would become by far his most-cited article.

Particularly relevant is how clear the piece makes the bloodthirst of both Silverstein and Bikowsky. The article opens with a cold and disdainful description of the poverty of a Palestinian town, Beit Lahiya, but the tone quickly shifts with Silverstein’s excitement that, “[a]s Friday morning dawned on January 5, 1996,” the cell phone of a man in the village exploded as he answered it, having been rigged to do so by Mossad, and that, “in an instant his hand and half of his head were blown off.” This is, according to Silverstein, exactly the kind of work he had in mind for his wife.

Dismissing the warnings against assassination of Senator Frank Church of the Church Committee as “dovish,” he would go on to propose that the U.S. replicate the Israeli assassination program. In Israel, he explains, Mossad makes the case that someone is a “terrorist” to the prime minister, defense minister, and foreign minister, with the attorney general “acting as a non-voting advisor.”

What is so noteworthy about this arrangement is that Silverstein got his way. All the Israeli counterparts in the U.S. government, the president, the secretary of defense, the secretary of state, and the attorney general, too preside over the U.S. assassination program’s last stage, with the president having the final say.

However, when the U.S. uses cell phones to target people for extrajudicial assassination, it typically depends on unreliable NSA metadata, and “in an instant,” it is not merely “his hand and half of his head” which are “blown off,” but the limbs and heads of him and his extended family, by massive drone airstrikes. This is what he wanted his wife to do, and it is what she’s done.

Agitating for war against Iraq

In October of 2002, Silverstein pulled a classic Cheneyan tactic on CNN, citing a story published that morning — based on an anonymous source from his wife’s own CIA — that “Saddam will be able to weaponize long range missiles within the decade or shorter,” and that “he has entirely reconstituted his weapons of mass destruction capability, save nuclear, and he is heading for that very goal.” And so, Silverstein argued, “we cannot wait. We cannot afford to let the U.N. [weapons inspectors] dither anymore.”

In the same appearance, he argued that Hussein should be removed from power because he was “an evil person,” and even after complaining of a lack of “democracy” in Iraq, he would go on to claim, in regard to the invasion:

[W]e should prepare to do it alone precisely because we are the only superpower left in the world. We’re the only one with regional interests and with regional capabilities that allow us to do that sort of thing. And quite frankly, I don’t want to cede our initiative to any other country in the region [Iran] or perhaps in Eurasia [Russia], to allow them to take the initiative. It’s ours. We are the ones who set policy in the Middle East quite rightly because we are the ones that protect those nations. We are the ones that protect the oil lines that feed the entire world’s economy. We are the ones who have the ability and ultimately, the responsibility.

From whom we ostensibly “protect those nations” is yet to be seen. Much more clear is from whom we “protect the oil lines”: the people and leaders whose countries those lines occupy. Again…

“[W]e are the only superpower left in the world … It’s ours.”

Throughout his appearances, on occasion, a CNN moderator would ask surprisingly pertinent questions; this interview closed with Fredricka Whitfield asking Silverstein, “if the U.S.’s idea is going in to help stabilize the country, is it your concern that by trying to stabilize Iraq perhaps it might destabilize Iraq and destabilize the region?” His response was, in hindsight, depressingly telling. To quote it in full:

I’m less concerned about instability post-Iraq [sic] than I am about getting rid of Saddam Hussein. I think that’s an evil person, we can all agree, needs to be removed [sic]. As for post-war Iraq, that’s something that a coalition and perhaps the regional neighbors can work on. But right now, let’s keep our eye on the prize. We need to remove Saddam Hussein before he bombs another country, invades it and loots it entirely.

Less pressing, apparently, was the need to remove the neocon Executive before it bombed another country, invaded it and looted it entirely.

Like the stories Bikowsky would feed detainees and coach them to “confirm” under torture, Silverstein’s claims were often fanciful. One of several seemingly delusional paranoiacs frequenting cable news programs at the time, he would try to convince the public — and perhaps himself — of such fabrications that Iraq was under-sanctioned, and that those sanctions had given Hussein time to “hide” the WMDs he did not possess. In response to a question about the lack of weapons yet discovered, his rhetoric slipped, but he quickly rebounded…

Silverstein: I think the longer that the inspectors are there the more likely they are to find more things.
Miles O’Brien, unmesmerized: Well, wait a minute. Isn’t that then a fairly compelling argument for letting the inspection process play its course a little longer?
Silverstein: Sure, you might think so. But the flip side of that, of course, is that Saddam will have the ability to develop more weapons, to hide more weapons, and to prepare his troops for what might be a war coming his way.

In another instance, when asked by Anderson Cooper whether Silverstein agreed with his other guest, Norman Solomon, that the U.S. knew CIA reports about a transfer of yellowcake uranium from Niger to Iraq were fabricated, he would project his own purported delusions onto Solomon, dodging the question by suggesting that Solomon “subscribes to the notion that there is this vast right-wing conspiracy out there that controls the minds of people and that we should all be walking around with tin foil on our heads to prevent it.”

The problem here is that there was a rather vast right-wing effort to secure the invasion of Iraq, spanning not only from the White House to the CIA, but also to their friends in NGOs. Even Hillary Clinton claims to have been virtually bribed into voting for the AUMF. Much of this has now been a matter of record for over a decade, yet no one has been held accountable.

Silverstein would go on to claim that despite U.N. Security Council (UNSC) resolutions against Iraq which he had just cited, the frustration of UNSC members with the U.S.’s fabrications were actually “about oil contracts…they are doing it for one reason only, they are doing it for money.” Solomon would call Silverstein out directly for his projection:

We’re hearing that oil interests are at the heart of opposition from France without acknowledging the U.S. government’s enormous oil interests. … This war is telegraphed ahead of time to be based on lies, and we know it now. We have to stop this war…

Again, never was it explained that Silverstein had ties to the CIA, which was the source of the fabrications presented to the UNSC. On cable news he was painted simply as a passionate advocate, even when invited to address the outing of Valerie Plame.

Predictably, in addressing that issue, he began by lamenting her outing, but quickly went on to smear her husband, Joseph Wilson, for opposing the war. “He should have kept his mouth shut,” he said.

Perhaps Silverstein should have kept his mouth shut.

Agitating for war against Syria

A thinly-veiled call for war against Syria, Silverstein’s February 2003 editorial in the National Review, was published just five months after his wife had single-handedly forced Maher Arar’s rendition for torture-by-proxy, on behalf of the U.S. and Canada, by the Syrian government. This too was just six months after the first torture sessions in which she engaged (against Abu Zubaydah), and just one month before she would fly to Poland to enthusiastically participate in Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s torture.

In this piece, Silverstein’s warmongering is peppered with a few facts, including that:

Amnesty International’s 2002 report on Syria states in part: “Hundreds of political prisoners, including prisoners of conscience, continued to be held, most following unfair trials before the Supreme State Security Court (SSSC) and Field Military Courts. Torture and ill-treatment continued to be used against political prisoners, especially during incommunicado detention.”

This is all to say, Silverstein used Syria’s record of torture to call for U.S. aggression against Syria’s government while they were torturing Arar at his wife’s behest. As admitted by former agent Robert Baer, the CIA’s view was that, “if you want [a suspect (of which Arar was only to Bikowsky)] to be tortured, you send them to Syria.” And so she did.

Agitating for war…

Silverstein’s rhetoric in regard to Syria is particularly revolting, given contemporaneous events, but he did not only spend 2002-’03 agitating for war against Iraq and Syria. He also called for aggression against Iran, Libya, Lebanon, and the Sudan — checking off all but Somalia (about which the U.S. public was not consulted) on the list of seven governments that neocons had planned to overthrow within five years, according to Gen. Wesley Clark.

Silverstein also used records of torture to call for aggression against Iran. He further used Iraq’s record to support his call for action against Syria, claiming that Iraq had been “leading the world in torture, murder, rape, and all kinds of unspeakable crimes” under Hussein (an exaggeration), and implying that this was now the role of Syria under Bashar al-Assad.

While the abuses of which he accused Hussein only proliferated in Iraq under the U.S. occupation, one would not know from his next statement, meant to contrast: “America doesn’t always live up to its standards, but you know what? We do a pretty darn good job, and we come awfully close, certainly better than anyone else anywhere around the world.”

The question is, “who else anywhere around the world is further from living up to ‘our standards’ than Silverstein’s wife?” One possible answer could come from journalist Rime Allaf, in the same interview: “What about Israel?”

Silverstein: What about Israel? Israel is a free country, too. It’s a democracy. Do the Palestinians have a democracy? No. They have a thugocracy.
Allaf: They don’t have a thing.

And so, do not confuse Silverstein’s cynicism for ignorance. Throughout his career, the arguments of those who have challenged him have stood the tests of time and scrutiny, while Silverstein’s own rhetoric of fabrication has shifted with neoconservative interests. The only consistent arguments Silverstein has made have been for the U.S. to overthrow governments throughout the Middle East and Africa whenever he deemed their policies or stance toward Israel unacceptable, and for the expansion of covert operations to these ends, like those his wife engaged in.

This is neoconservatism in a nutshell. But it is worth particular note when propagandized by Silverstein, because the policies he has promoted have served not only his ideological interests, but also those of his household finances. It was well-known that 9/11 created immense demand for people with skills and experience like Bikowsky’s, and he did everything he could to promote this further. But this did not begin with 9/11; as we’ve seen, the record of his promotion of greater CIA intrusion into the Middle East begins in the 1990s.

2001–2009 — Silverstein for the FDD: promoting American Zionism and Islamophobia

It is important to remember that FDD was originally Emet, and that it was merely rebranded in September of 2001. Throughout 2002-’03, they labelled themselves “non-partisan and non-ideological,” despite their failure to ever stray from the Likud party line and their neoconservative, Zionist ideology. And despite claiming to target “terrorism,” their use of the term “terrorists” interchangably with “Palestinians,” “Muslims,” and “Arabs” is also in line with Likud rhetoric.

As mentioned, Emet’s only successful project was a trip to Israel for 40 students and professors. Silverstein would lead this fellowship program for the FDD. Fortunately, the program’s requirement that participants “actively raise awareness of terrorism and its effects on democracy on their campuses” has led to many college newspaper articles describing the trip.

Fellows would need to be academics in a political field and have a history of organizing to be accepted. They would then receive an all-expenses-paid trip to Washington, D.C. and Israel in order to learn about “terrorist threats to democracy and freedom.” In Israel, they would visit “the West Bank, East and West Jerusalem, the [Syrian] Golan Heights, a number of Arab/Israeli and Druze villages, various religious sites, the controversial security fence where they had to go through some of the checkpoints, and even Gilboa Prison in northern Israel.” They would meet with representatives of both the IDF and Mossad.

But their visit to D.C. is especially interesting. Without mentioning the connections of the head of the program — Silverstein — a participant describes visiting FBI and CIA headquarters, as well as meeting “a female [CIA] agent who ‘goes to the Pentagon and essentially kicks ass every day.’” This is the same repulsive, aggrandizing language with which Bikowsky has been described elsewhere, and so this seems to be how she presents herself. Silverstein describes participants receiving “cutting edge information and access to critical decision-makers in the U.S. … No one else that we know of is permitted the same exposure.”

The purpose of these trips is to instill in academics Islamophobia, and the ideas that Israel is under assault, that their “counterterrorism” policy should be reproduced in the U.S., and that Israeli and U.S. interests are the same. In this instance, they fulfilled their purpose, with the student leaving the program with the lesson that “[t]he threat of terrorism is that there’s no more of us, there’s no more democracy, there’s no more America because we’re heretics, because we don’t value Allah.”

2007–today — Silverstein for ASMEA: grooming the next generation of American Zionists and neocons

A poorly veiled offshoot of FDD, Silverstein helped establish the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA) in 2007. Another neoconservative, Zionist organization, it was created to counter the scholarly thrust of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), which was apparently stifling Zionists, in that it offered space for non-Zionists as well.

ASMEA, like FDD, is of course a “non-ideological, non-partisan” organization, except that its leaders lambast the “politically correct,” as they put it, at every opportunity. As Silverstein describes, the organization’s leaders long for the return of an age of scholarship which fell by the wayside with desegregation and the rejection of white supremacy, untainted as it was by those who might dare to use such terms as “colonialism.”

If Israel was unable to perform its own PR in the U.S., necessitating the creation of Emet and FDD, ASMEA is an extension of that effort. Zionist neocons like Silverstein and Bikowsky were already equipped and excited for their careers in Islamophobia before they left grad school. The targeting of campuses by FDD and ASMEA is an effort to ensure that there will be many more like them — who do not recognize the humanity or rights of Muslims — in the generations to come. Just as Bikowsky and other CIA leadership are described by subordinates as having been “catastrophically corrosive” to the culture of the intelligence community, Silverstein and his neocon cohorts are attempting to corrode the culture of campuses and the media. And like Bikowsky, he is succeeding.

Epilogue: Neoconservatism as a fascism

Unfortunately, this story is far from over, and its cast of characters extends beyond the broken Silverstein-Bikowsky household. The incestuous relationships between those who design, make, and enforce policy are the product of a culture among Beltway elites and their allies globally.

It is no coincidence that the usual suspects arise here repeatedly. This is the case whether they are allowing the 9/11 attacks to occur, overthrowing Saddam Hussein, or Muammar Qaddafi, attempting to overthrow Assad, or cheering Israeli and Saudi war crimes against their neighbors; their aim is the disenfranchisement and destruction of the Middle East, toward the political-economic ends of this accidental cabal.

Silverstein and Bikowsky need not have been married to perform their roles. They are products as much as they are producers of that same culture — one which sees powerlessness as a natural invitation to exploitation, and itself as beyond reproach. Whether Silverstein was able to convince himself that Hussein was hiding WMDs would be irrelevant to him, since no apology need be made by this narcissistic and sociopathic elite for lying, to say nothing of kidnapping random Arab-Canadians, coups d’état, crimes against humanity, or any other means by which they enforce their power globally, and particularly throughout the Middle East.

It is autonomous action which so offends and terrifies this elite. They feel they are entitled to control, and it is for this reason that any claim to act on behalf of the greater good is irrelevant to them. As Silverstein admitted, he was not concerned about whether invasion would destabilize Iraq, because the U.S. had a mandate to invade on account of the fact that they could. This is power without justification, because this power justifies itself. It is fascistic.

Phares for Trump: Agitating for war with Lebanon?

The likes of Silverstein, Bikowsky, the Bushes, Barack Obama, the Clintons, or Donald Trump need not directly conspire together to work toward the common goals of the culture in which they are all steeped. Nor must Walid Phares, one of Silverstein’s closest colleagues — for both the FDD and ASMEA, Phares has also filled the role of a neoconservative propagandist, targeting the media and academia.

So it should not surprise us that, as the prospect of Bikowsky’s CIA being constrained only by the policy prescriptions of a President Trump looms, Trump’s campaign yesterday named Phares as a foreign policy adviser. Nor is it a coincidence that they did so the day Trump was to address the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Phares is a fitting match, having been a propagandist within the Christian Lebanese Forces (LF) — which committed atrocities against Muslims during the Lebanese Civil War, including the Sabra and Shatila massacre — as well as “a close adviser to Samir Geagea, a Lebanese warlord.”

Phares’ role in the LF during the war was to indoctrinate fighters, one of whom recalled:

Phares told Christian militiamen that they were the vanguard of a war between the West and Islam. … Phares believed that the civil war was the latest in a series of civilizational conflicts between Muslims and Christians. It was his view that because Christians were eternally the victims of Muslim persecution, the only solution was to create a national home for Christians in Lebanon modeled after Israel.

As Lebanon remains on the list of countries whose governments the neocons wanted to overthrow, with the Cedar Revolution having laid the groundwork, and with its government having narrowly avoided a Western-backed uprising just last year, this announcement should send chills down the spine of anyone who hopes Lebanon will not be engulfed in a conflict on the scale of that actively destroying Iraq and Syria.

Clinton and Trump may claim to regret that the U.S. invaded Iraq, but do not be surprised if they soon do so while spreading that conflict into Lebanon, with Bikowsky’s CIA again providing the “intelligence” necessary to rally the U.S. public around this aggression to which they’re entitled.

Meanwhile, the media will continue to fail to disclose the ties of their warmongering guests to these policymakers and enforcers, let alone explain that they are not “experts,” but rather propagandists who aim to corrode the whole of U.S. culture with Islamophobia, so that its people will support as many civil wars and Sabra and Shatila-inspired massacres as necessary to “secure their interests in the region.”

I don’t plan to delineate how it’s known Bikowsky and Silverstein were married here, as it reveals information both highly personal and irrelevant. It is discoverable by Google search, however.

CNN Appearances

I did not come even close to fully utilizing these transcripts for this story. Virtually every statement made by Silverstein in every one of these interviews is inflammatory and significant. *Of special interest.

1. March 20th, 2002: On Palestine/Israel
2. October 5th, 2002: On Iraq’s non-existent WMDs
3. January 18th, 2003: Propagandizing for a war on Iraq
4. March 9th, 2003: On fabricated U.S. intelligence presented to UNSC (n.b. Bikowsky is in Poland)
5. May 13th, 2003: On U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia
6. May 16th, 2003: On the so-called War on Terrorism
7. June 18th, 2003: On U.S. failures in Iraq
8. June 19th, 2003: On the War in Iraq*
9. July 3rd, 2003: On the War in Iraq*
10. August 19th, 2003: On the California blackout
11. August 31st, 2003: Stoking paranoia about Iranian and Saudi influence in Iraq
12. September 8th, 2003: On the so-called War on Terrorism
13. September 13th, 2003: On international involvement in Iraq
14. October 4th, 2003: On the Valerie Plame leak
15. October 10th, 2003: On the War in Iraq