Free Republic

Washington, D.C. - Michael Maloof was back in the game. He and another Pentagon aide, David Wurmser, drove the short distance from the Pentagon to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. It was early October, a good season in Washington, but Maloof’s nerves were on edge during the scenic ride along the tree-lined George Washington Parkway. snip Maloof was a legend within the Pentagon circle that tracked arms proliferation. His office was obscure, but it performed a crucial national security function. snip The Pentagon wanted years of intelligence reporting on al Qaeda, Iraq, Iran and other potential targets in the war...

- The flow of natural gas from Israel’s Tamar reservoir in the Mediterranean to the Ashdod reception facility was inaugurated on March 30, 2013, ushering in a new era in Israel’s energy sector. Israel will not only become independent in being able to supply its own energy needs, but it is likely to become an energy exporter as its maritime gas fields are further developed. - On January 17, 2009, Israel’s economy and even its strategic stature changed when a team led by the Texan firm Noble Energy discovered gas in the Tamar field in the eastern Mediterranean, which is...

US President George W. Bush will not attack Iran to halt its nuclear weapons program before his term ends in January, David Wurmser, a key national security adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney up until last year, has told The Jerusalem Post. "No, Bush won't go," Wurmser said when asked whether he thought the US president would want to take military action before he left office. Wurmser's comments came after a day-long roundtable this week in Brussels on nuclear nonproliferation sponsored by the European Jewish Congress. "Two things have to be in place for there to be an attack," Wurmser...

US Vice President Richard Cheney has considered provoking an exchange of military strikes between Iran and Israel in order to give the United States a pretext to attack Iran, Newsweek magazine reported in its Monday issue. But the weekly said the steady departure of neoconservatives from the administration over the past two years had helped tilt the balance away from war. One official who pushed a particularly hawkish line on Iran was David Wurmser, who had served since 2003 as Cheney's Middle East adviser, the report said. A spokeswoman at Cheney's office confirmed to Newsweek that Wurmser left his position...

Newsweek Magazine reported Sunday that Vice President Richard Cheney may have considered a plan for Israeli missile strikes against an Iranian nuclear site in an effort to draw a military response from Iran, which could in turn spark a U.S. offensive against targets in the Islamic Republic. Citing two unnamed sources the magazine called knowledgeable, the magazine quoted David Wurmser, until last month Cheney's Middle East Advisor, as having told a small group of people that "Cheney had been mulling the idea of pushing for limited Israeli missile strikes against the Iranian nuclear site at Natanz - and perhaps other...

One of the biggest names of the conference never even uttered a word. Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer is the military intelligence operative who recently went public with a controversial claim that a year before September 11, his top-secret task force "Able Danger" was able to identify the man who later turned out to be the lead hijacker as being connected to al Qaeda. Shaffer is a veteran of top-secret operations against terrorists, including some in Afghanistan, and several of his DIA colleagues have come out publicly to confirm that they remember Mohamed Atta being identified in 2000 as part of...

defense lawyers say they now believe there is a White House insider or former official who has been helping the investigation for months. The lawyers say this is based on information grand jury witnesses heard about the actions of Karl Rove and Scooter Libby well before reporters Matt Cooper and Judy Miller testified White house officials leaked information about an administration critic. The lawyers supporting the White House also point to a sealed legal brief Fitzgerald submitted to the courts more than a year ago that prompted judges to refer to the gravity of the case. According to several news...

WASHINGTON: Soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, a two-man intelligence team set up shop at the Pentagon, searching for evidence of links between terrorist groups and host countries. The men, Michael Maloof and David Wurmser, culled classified material, much of it uncorroborated data from the CIA. "We discovered tons of raw intelligence," said Maloof. "We were stunned that we couldn't find any mention of it in the CIA's finished reports." They recorded and annotated their evidence on butcher paper hung like a mural around their small office. By the end of 2001, they had constructed a startling new picture of...

WASHINGTON - A neo-conservative strategist who has long called for the United States and Israel to work together to "roll back" the Ba'ath-led government in Syria, has been quietly appointed as a Middle East adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney. David Wurmser, who had been working for the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, John Bolton, joined Cheney's staff under its powerful national security director, I Lewis "Scooter" Libby, in mid-September, according to Cheney's office. The move is significant, not only because Cheney is seen increasingly as the dominant foreign policy influence on President George W Bush,...

World dispatch -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- US thinktanks give lessons in foreign policy Brian Whitaker reports on the network of research institutes whose views and TV appearances are supplanting all other experts on Middle Eastern issues Monday August 19, 2002 A little-known fact about Richard Perle, the leading advocate of hardline policies at the Pentagon, is that he once wrote a political thriller. The book, appropriately called Hard Line, is set in the days of the cold war with the Soviet Union. Its hero is a male senior official at the Pentagon, working late into the night and battling almost single-handedly to rescue...