Camp David failed because of manipulated intelligence

[whirlygigspin]

David Hirst
Saturday July 17, 2004
The Guardian

This is London:

"In his memoirs, the former US president Bill Clinton writes that the Camp David summit..., was the greatest failure of his career. And that, he says, was overwhelmingly Yasser Arafat's doing - for, unlike Israeli premier Ehud Barak, who had been ready for "enormous concessions", the Palestinian leader couldn't "make the final jump from revolutionary to statesman".

"There is one reason that, even if he believes this, he should not, even now, be so publicly proclaiming it. Camp David was essentially Barak's brainchild. Desperate for a breakthrough in the moribund peace process, he conceived the gambit of telescoping both the still unaccomplished "interim phases" of the Oslo agreement and "final-status" issues into one grand, climactic conclave that would "end the 100-year conflict". Clinton only persuaded a deeply reluctant Arafat to attend at all by pledging not to blame him for an inglorious outcome."

"In the first place it was not Arafat who blew up Camp David. Robert Malley, Clinton's adviser at the conference, and others have long since exhaustively debunked this for the almost ludicrously partisan myth it was. In their view, Barak himself contributed more to the collapse than Arafat.

And now comes Malka, the former intelligence chief, who flatly asserts that the evaluations of Arafat's intentions and actions on which Barak, and later Sharon, relied were "erroneous", and deliberately so. They were the handiwork of one man, who occupied a key position in the Israeli policy-making process: Amos Gilad, the head of the military intelligence research department. He presented "national security assessments" to the government. Crucially, he only did so orally, because, as he put it, "they don't read".

Well, I'll be PNAC'ed

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1263361,00.html