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Gwyneth Todd, the 5th Fleet, and War With Iran

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posted on Oct, 7 2012 @ 07:57 AM
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I am not a writer. It is with this self realization I attempt to tell this story. I am far from the first to try and far from the most informed on the subject. It has been covered here on ATS in bits and pieces. But it definitely needs condensing to understand why it is important.

If you want to skip my version, I will not be offended. You can read the long but not too in-depth version here.

Some readers may be familiar with Gwyneth Todd. She is not listed in Wikipedia although she should be. The simple fact that she is not is an indicator of the veracity of what is implied in her story.



“Gwyneth Todd was from a long line of American diplomats, bankers, spies and scholars going back to Revolutionary times. Her first 17 years had been spent following her father, Kenneth Thompson, a career diplomat, and mother, Eve Tyler, granddaughter of a renowned art collector, through embassies in Malta, Turkey, West Africa, England and Spain. Summers were spent at the family chateau in France, where the bloodline led back to Napoleon. But Washington was home. Her maternal grandfather, William Royall Tyler, had been an assistant secretary of state in the Kennedy administration and director of Dumbarton Oaks, the estate and center for Byzantine and pre-Columbian art studies The estate’s original owners, Robert and Mildred Bliss, were intimate friends of her family. “When we weren’t overseas, I spent much of my time as a child playing in the gardens,” Todd said during one of several interviews in the past year. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa in Near and Middle Eastern studies from the University of California at Berkeley, then earned a master’s in Arabic and international affairs in 1990 at Georgetown University.”


www.smh.com.au...



“Gwenyth Todd had worked in a lot of places in Washington where powerful men didn’t hesitate to use sharp elbows. She had been a Middle East expert for the National Security Council in the Clinton administration. She had worked in the office of Defense Secretary Dick Cheney in the first Bush administration, where neoconservative hawks first began planning to overthrow Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. But she was not prepared a few years later in Bahrain when she encountered plans by high-ranking admirals to confront Iran, any one of which, she reckoned, could set the region on fire. It was 2007, and Todd, then 42, was a top political adviser to the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet.”

www.veteranstoday.com...


Obviously, she is not a hack. She does not sound like someone prone to rash or ill advised decisions. She would have never made it to where she was otherwise.

The location was Bahrain in the Persian Gulf. The year was 2007. The US Navy’s 5th Fleet was headquartered there. She served as a political advisor. Navy Command teams rotated in and out of theater regularly. Each time a new Command team arrived; they would bring a fresh set of eyes to the challenges the Navy and faced in the region. At least that was the intent.

In theory, the Navy wants to send the best and brightest to the most challenging positions in an attempt to produce the best possible results but the US Military is subservient to the civilian leadership in Washington. So what happens when that civilian leadership redefines “best possible results”? They still send those whom they think can achieve those results. Enter, the same cast of characters that brought us the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The results: Crisis Initiation with Iran.

I understand there are some who may balk at this or see it far-fetched that their government would allow this to happen. To them I offer the concept that their government is not a monolithic structure. There are many who seek their own ends which may or may not coincide with the welfare of the nation. They do not have to be elected officials. Indeed, there are many who would vouch those in positions of real power, the voters have never heard of. In this case, those in such positions found a like hearted soul in a new Navy Command team.

With the right pieces finally in place, those who desired war with Iran decided to make good on their efforts. It was in this set of circumstances, Todd found herself with a mission. Those arrayed against her were not clearly defined as Bad Guys one comes to expect in the fiction novels.



“In 2007, an American armada, troop ships, aircraft carriers, guided missile cruisers and destroyers sailed into the Persian Gulf. Their plan was to land Marines on Iranian soil, a plan hatched by Vice President Dick Cheney and White House officials including Karl Rove, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Clarke. Military command of this invasion, to be done without consultation of congress or the United Nations was left to Vice Admiral Kevin J. Cosgriff and Admiral Will J. Fallon, both career opportunists with extremist political views, willing to do anything for promotion and the curry favor from the powerful criminal figures in US government. Their “cover story” was to sale a frigate up the Shatt al Arab, a disputed waterway between Iraq and Iran, hoping to stimulate a “response” from Iran. Their real plan was to create the response themselves, as was done by the Navy during the Tonkin Gulf Incident in 1964 when America “invented” an attack by North Vietnam as a prelude to a 10 year war America eventually lost. Their plans were to create phony radio traffic simulating an Iranian attack in order to push America into authorizing hostilities that they, themselves, had perpetrated in as part of a conspiracy. The official version of story is in a 5 page article in Washington Post.


Continued next post.
edit on 7-10-2012 by ABNARTY because: (no reason given)



posted on Oct, 7 2012 @ 08:42 AM
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reply to post by ABNARTY
 




What is important here is not just the quality of the story that is told, but the more important story that could never be told. There was a second part of the plan. Admiral Cosgriff informed Todd, on December 13, 2007, while Todd was his chief advisor, that Iran planned on attacking Bahrain and had total control of Shiites in the region. This is how the Washington Post reports her response to the Admiral: “The report, which she guessed originated with the local CIA station, said the attacks were to be led by Bahrain’s top Shiite religious figure, Isa Qassim.Todd thought the report was fishy. Although Bahrain’s Shiites did oppose the U.S.-backed Sunni monarchy, they’re Arabs, eternal enemies of the Persian Iranians. And Qassim himself, it happened, had warned Todd just the previous day that anti-monarchy demonstrators might attack places frequented by U.S. personnel.The report “looked like a fabrication by someone trying to kill two birds with one stone, by making the Bahraini Shia appear to be anti-U.S. terrorists who also happened to be taking orders from Iran,” Todd said. “I knew, really knew, that the Bahraini Shia were trying to ensure U.S. personnel were nowhere near the possible violence.” She suspected the intelligence report was cooked up by Bush administration hawks.”Todd was sent to meet with intelligence sources who said the report was bogus. Private sources told a different story. They indicated that Bahrainian secret police, aided by special operations units answerable to the Joint Special Operations Command under Vice President Cheney, planned to stage an attack on US facilities. They would be timed to attacks on US naval personnel, terror bombings, staged by Americans but blamed on Isa Qassim, a popular religious figure who was known to oppose the local monarchy. Through him, false claims of naval attacks would flood in to Washington and Marines would land in Iran. Hundreds of Americans would be murdered by fellow Americans to serve “political necessity and the greater good,” as the slogan so often used by the “neocons” goes, especially when criminal acts are involved. None of this came to pass. The night Admiral Cosgriff sent Todd out to meet a CIA informant in Dirza, Todd’s clearances were stripped, she was cut off from all contact and abandoned, abandoned and hunted by death squads of Bahrainian secret police who had been tailing her. She was going to be murdered in Bahrain to silence her, as so many have been since. In the interim, however, Todd contacted ranking supporters within the Navy and US government, reporting this attempt at terrorism and an unauthorized invasion and, with the help of her soon to be husband, an Australian naval official, managed to escape unharmed and hunted."


www.veteranstoday.com...

To even the most casual observer, we know there has to be more to it than this. How much of this is accurate, how much is fabrication, and how much has been left out? I am not in a position to discern. Rather than the end of a story, I see this as a beginning.

I wonder why this happened in 2007 and I first heard about it now? I guess back then with the mortgage crisis going on and a 20,000 strong troop “surge” going to Iraq there were other things to talk about. Sure would have been fortuitous had the Iranians been engaged that those 20,000 extra troops were handy in the region. Folks probably would have had their attention diverted from the financial issues as well.

So what happen to those in Washington with their eye on engaging Iran? They are still there peddling their influence.

www.youtube.com...

Where is Gwyneth Todd? She lives in Australia unable to return to the US for fear of retribution for the government she used to work for. I leave it you to piece together your opinion.

noliesradio.org...



 
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