Lexington:
>>>Is Osama bin Laden Dead?

As a topic of conversation, yes. We've moved on to Brokeback Mountain and Sudoku.

LXN

fantomas:
Oh come on, you know full well who right-winger Michael Ledeen is, MIB!

Ledeen has a colorful track record, which has produced substantial grist for the conspiracy mill: He was allegedly tied to the Italian P2 Masonic Lodge, a violent right wing group that was involved in a number of terrorists attacks in Italy in the 1970s the 1980s; in the late 1970s, while P2 was doing its dirty work, Ledeen was working as a consultant to Italian intelligence on terrorism issues; as a consultant to the National Security Council in the 1980s, Ledeen acted as a go-between for Oliver North in the early stages of the Iran-Contra affair, working with the Israeli spy David Kimche to gain the release of U.S. hostages in Beirut through an Iranian arms dealer, Manucher Ghorbanifar; he helped promote the \"Bulgarian Connection\" theory that the KGB was behind the assassination attempt on the pope in 1981; and, more recently, the Sydney Morning Herald reported (August 8, 2003) that Ledeen worked with Pentagon staffers to redevelop the channel to arms dealer Ghorbanifar in support of resistance efforts in Iran. Reported the Herald: \"[Harold] Rhode recently acted as a liaison between [Douglas] Feith's office, which drafted much of the Administration's post-Iraq planning, and Ahmed Chalabi, a former Iraqi exile groomed for leadership by the Pentagon. Mr. Rhode is a protege of Michael Ledeen, who was a National Security Council consultant in the mid 1980s when he introduced Mr. Ghorbanifar to Oliver North, a NSC aide, and others in the opening stages of the Iran-Contra affair. It is understood Mr. Ledeen reopened the Ghorbanifar channel with Mr. Feith's staff.\" (9, 10)

A fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, Ledeen holds a Ph.D. in History and Philosophy from the University of Wisconsin. He is a former employee of the Pentagon, the State Department and the National Security Council. As a consultant working with NSC head Robert McFarlane, he was involved in the transfer of arms to Iran during the Iran-Contra affair -- an adventure that he documented in the book \"Perilous Statecraft: An Insider's Account of the Iran-Contra Affair.\" His most influential book is last year's \"The War Against the Terror Masters: Why It Happened. Where We Are Now. How We'll Win.\"

Ledeen's ideas are repeated daily by such figures as Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. His views virtually define the stark departure from American foreign policy philosophy that existed before the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001. He basically believes that violence in the service of the spread of democracy is America's manifest destiny. Consequently, he has become the philosophical legitimator of the American occupation of Iraq.

Now Michael Ledeen is calling for regime change beyond Iraq. In an address entitled \"Time to Focus on Iran -- The Mother of Modern Terrorism,\" for the policy forum of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) on April 30, he declared, \"the time for diplomacy is at an end; it is time for a free Iran, free Syria and free Lebanon.\"
***
Quotes from Ledeen's works reveal a peculiar set of beliefs about American attitudes toward violence. \"Change -- above all violent change -- is the essence of human history,\" he proclaims in his book, \"Machiavelli on Modern Leadership: Why Machiavelli's Iron Rules Are as Timely and Important Today as Five Centuries Ago.\" In an influential essay in the National Review Online he asserts, \"Creative destruction is our middle name. We do it automatically ... it is time once again to export the democratic revolution.\"

Ledeen has become the driving philosophical force behind the neoconservative movement and the military actions it has spawned. His 1996 book, \"Freedom Betrayed; How the United States Led a Global Democratic Revolution, Won the Cold War, and Walked Away,\" reveals the basic neoconservative obsession: the United States never \"won\" the Cold War; the Soviet Union collapsed of its own weight without a shot being fired.
***
The process by which this should be achieved is a violent one, termed \"total war,\" a concept pioneered by the 19th century Prussian general, Karl von Clausewitz in his classic book \"On War.\"

Ledeen's take on this idea is wedded to ideology. In summarizing his book \"The War Against the Terror Masters\" on the American Enterprise Institute Web site, he writes: \"We wage total war because we fight in the name of an idea, and ideas either triumph or fail ... totally.\" In his reckoning, force is the only reliable strategy to enforce our ideology on our enemies. In the same summary he claims, drawing inspiration from Machiavelli: \"We can lead by the force of high moral example ... [but] fear is much more reliable, and lasts longer. Once we show that we are capable of dealing out terrible punishment to our enemies, our power will be far greater.\"

Etc.

Is Osama bin Laden Dead?

Several U.S. and foreign intelligence sources, along with investigators, say an Iranian exile with ties to Iran-Contra peddled a bizarre tale of stolen uranium to governments on both sides of the Atlantic in the spring and summer of 2003.

The story that was peddled -- which detailed how an Iranian intelligence team infiltrated Iraq prior to the start of the war in March of 2003, and stole enriched uranium to use in their own nuclear weapons program -- was part of an attempt to implicate both countries in a WMD plot. It later emerged that the Iranian exile was trying to collect money for his tales, sources say.

By all credible accounts, the source of this dubious tale was Manucher Ghorbanifar [known Mossad agent], an Iranian arms dealer who used middle-men and cut-outs to create the appearance of several sources. Manucher Ghorbanifar played a key role in the Iran-Contra scandal (http://nsarchive.chadwyck.com/icintro.htm) that threatened to take down the Reagan administration, in which the U.S. sold arms to Iran and diverted the proceeds to Nicaraguan militants.