Given the proliferation of crimes, both foreign and domestic, known to have been committed by the U.S. government in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, there is an understandable willingness among large swathes of the public to believe almost anything told them by someone claiming to be blowing the whistle on an increasingly rogue \u201cworld\u2019s policeman.\u201d And, as a rule, the more persecution the whistleblower appears to suffer for exposing the global cop\u2019s transgressions, the greater the desire to believe her story\u2014no matter how far-fetched it might be.<\/p>\n
Earlier this year, an effort was made to interest a number of prominent alternative media outlets in just such a \u201cwhistleblower\u201d story. According to the professional-sounding pitch, an American contractor named Gwenyth Todd, while advising the Bahrain-based U.S. Navy\u2019s Fifth Fleet, had single-handedly foiled a plot involving \u201ca few select high-ranking members of the U.S. Navy\u201d to provoke a war with Iran. \u201cFearing of the powers she had obstructed, and fearing for her own safety, Todd left Bahrain moving to Australia,\u201d wrote the anonymous promoter. \u201cFor her honesty, bravery, and service, Todd has been sought after by the U.S. Justice Department for prosecution and pursued by the FBI. Nearly all in the corporate press have chosen to ignore her case.\u201d<\/p>\n
But not only has Gwenyth Todd\u2019s case not been ignored by the corporate press, it has in fact been the subject of a five-page\u00a0Washington Post<\/i>\u00a0special by \u201cSpyTalk\u201d blogger Jeff Stein. Moreover, Stein\u2019s Aug. 21, 2012 piece entitled \u201cWhy was a Navy adviser stripped of her career?\u201d uncritically touts Todd\u2019s conspiratorial narrative solely on the basis of interviews with Todd herself and \u201ca half-dozen Navy and other government officials who demanded anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, many parts of which remain classified.\u201d Then, six months after having her story featured by one of America\u2019s most influential pro-Israel daily newspapers, Todd was the unlikely focus of an even more credulous Iranian state television production. In February 2013, Press TV released \u201cUntold Truths,\u201d a half-hour-long program that introduced her as a \u201cMiddle East specialist\u201d and \u201cformer U.S. government consultant.\u201d The production began with a dramatic assertion: \u201cIn 2007, the U.S. tried to wage a war against IRAN. One person stopped it. This is her story.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the\u00a0Washington Post\u00a0<\/i>and Press TV versions, the alleged conspiracy to start a war with Iran is said to have occurred in Bahrain in 2007. However, in a June 2012 article, Todd\u2019s \u201csenior editor\u201d at the notoriously unreliable and ostensibly \u201canti-Semitic\u201d\u00a0Veterans Today (VT)\u00a0<\/i>website\u2014with which Todd has \u201clong worked\u201d and currently serves on its motley editorial board of directors\u2014sets the narrative two years earlier, and in a neighboring country. \u201cGwenyth Todd of the National Security Agency, close associate of Paul Wolfowitz and Condi Rice,\u201d wrote Gordon Duff, \u201cback in 2005, discovered a White House plot to stage an attack on American forces in Qatar.\u201d<\/p>\n
Confusing matters even more, another\u00a0VT<\/i>\u00a0colleague and enthusiastic promoter of Todd\u2019s story, Kevin Barrett, claims in a September 2012 piece first published by Press TV, \u201cShe stopped a 2006 neocon plot to stage a false flag attack in Bahrain intended to trigger war on Iran, and had to flee for her life to Australia.\u201d<\/p>\n
Although Todd presents herself as an \u201cappalled\u201d critic of the neoconservatives and the broader Israel lobby, there are good reasons to doubt her credibility on this point as well. In a Sept. 12, 2012 radio interview with Barrett, for example, she made the extraordinary claim that 9\/11 was a \u201csetback\u201d for the neocons because it supposedly upset their plans for regime change in Iraq. According to Todd, their plan was to restore a pre-1958 type friendly regime, ruled by Ahmed Chalabi, with Iraq then serving as a base from which to launch regime change in Iran. In that same interview, she further claimed that the neoconservative agenda for Iraq had nothing to do with Israel. As if unaware of the fact that neocon Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz had once been investigated for having passed a classified U.S. document to an Israeli government official, she proffered as evidence, \u201cDidn\u2019t Wolfowitz admit to having affairs with Palestinian students?\u201d<\/p>\n
It seems highly unlikely, however, that a former top Middle East analyst such as Todd claims to be would be unfamiliar with Oded Yinon\u2019s seminal 1982 article, \u201cA Strategy for Israel in the 1980s.\u201d \u201cIraq, rich in oil on the one hand and internally torn on the other, is guaranteed as a candidate for Israel\u2019s targets,\u201d observed Yinon. \u201cIts dissolution is even more important for us than that of Syria.\u201d And it seems even less likely that she would be unaware of \u201cA Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.\u201d That influential 1996 report, prepared by a group of mainly American neocons for then-incoming Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, recommended \u201cremoving Saddam Hussain from power in Iraq\u2014an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right.\u201d<\/p>\n
Five years later, these right-wing Zionist policy advisers, many then members of the Bush administration, would seize the golden opportunity presented by the 9\/11 attacks to turn this hawkish blueprint for Israeli expansionism into U.S. Middle East policy.<\/p>\n
Todd\u2019s seeming ignorance of Israel\u2019s longstanding strategic designs for the breakup of Iraq is even harder to believe in light of her claim to have been \u201cpersonally recruited\u201d by the \u201cClean Break\u201d study group leader. In the Sept. 12 radio interview with Barrett, she recounted a conversation with Richard Perle\u2014who, like Chalabi\u2019s other chief booster, Wolfowitz, has also been caught passing classified material to Israel\u2014that supposedly took place at the end of George Bush\u2019s pre-inaugural candlelight dinner in January 2001. \u201cPaul\u2019s going, Paul Wolfowitz is going to be the deputy secretary of defense,\u201d she claimed Perle told her. \u201cYou know what we are going to do in Iraq, and we need like-minded people in the Pentagon so we can make it happen.\u201d<\/p>\n
When the interviewer expressed amazement that she had been approached directly by the so-called \u201cPrince of Darkness\u201d himself, Todd not very convincingly replied: \u201cYes, well, when I\u2019d met him on a couple of\u2026I\u2019d been in conferences with him before.\u201d<\/p>\n
Presumably in an attempt to explain how the reputedly Machiavellian Perle could have been so na\u00efve as to have tried to recruit someone he\u2019d only met at a few conferences, Todd recounted a car journey with Perle in the 1990s during which he supposedly raved about the analytic prowess of her predecessor at the Pentagon\u2019s Turkey desk\u2014based solely on the analyst\u2019s rumored ability to talk to cab drivers in Turkish. Claiming to have been shocked by Perle\u2019s \u201ctotal na\u00efvet\u00e9,\u201d Todd went on to say that she subsequently heard the exact same story from fellow Iraq war architect Bernard Lewis at the Aspen Strategy Group in 1997, when she found herself seated between \u201cJudy\u201d Miller and the influential pro-Israel Orientalist, whom she said has dedicated his\u00a0The Emergence of Modern Turkey\u00a0<\/i>to \u201csome good friends\u201d of hers.<\/p>\n
Notwithstanding Todd\u2019s claims to have been persecuted for thwarting a neocon-backed false flag designed to provoke war with Iran in December 2007\u2014or was it in 2005? or 2006, perhaps?\u2014she was asked in November 2010 to write a report on Turkey for Australia\u2019s leading pro-Israel foreign policy think tank. Yet this past February, a mere week after she left little doubt in a social media conversation that she was fully aware of the founder and chairman Frank Lowy\u2019s Israeli connection, Todd first feigned ignorance and then surprise in the comments section of\u00a0The Passionate Attachment\u00a0<\/i>blog when this writer pointed out the Lowy Institute\u2019s widely known close ties with Israel.<\/p>\n
And as for the alleged unwarranted pursuit by U.S. law enforcement, it may have much less to do with her claimed success in preventing war with Iran than with a mysterious sum of money of uncertain origin and unclear purpose. When questioned by the FBI in 2007 about $30,000 she had received from her daughter\u2019s father, Robert Cabelly\u2014who would be indicted in 2009 for conspiring to act as an illegal agent of Sudan and to violate sanctions against the government of Omar al-Bashir\u2014Todd said she told the federal agents that the money was for \u201cemergency surgery\u201d in Bahrain. By a strange coincidence, this just happened to be the exact same amount she told\u00a0The New York Times\u00a0<\/i>in February 2011 that she had once spent out of her own pocket to buy gifts for the children of the poorest Shi\u2019i families. Todd said she had been ordered by a commanding officer, fearful of upsetting the ruling Sunni Al-Khalifa royal family, to renege on a promise made on behalf of the Navy.<\/p>\n
Indeed, the more one looks into the incredible tale spun by Gwenyth Todd, the more likely one is to agree with the former commander of U.S. Central Command, Admiral William J. Fallon\u2014who in 2007 vetoed a move by the Bush administration to send a third carrier group to the Persian Gulf, vowing that an attack on Iran \u201cwill not happen on my watch.\u201d Cast as an unlikely villain in Todd\u2019s narrative, the retired four-star admiral was asked by\u00a0The Washington Post\u2019s\u00a0<\/i>Jeff Stein to comment on her conspiratorial allegations; Fallon\u2019s terse e-mail response\u2014\u201cB.S.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Maidhc \u00d3 Cathail is an investigative journalist and Middle East analyst. He is also the creator and editor of\u00a0<\/i>The Passionate Attachment<\/a>\u00a0blog, which focuses primarily on the U.S.-Israeli relationship.<\/i><\/p>\n