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A Clean Break
The same investigation, restaged one beat at a time. Drive it with the arrow keys, space, or autoplay. Nothing is cut from the piece — long runs are split across frames. Read the full investigation or open the Israeli Influence on the United States hub.
A clean break.
Seven years before the Iraq War, some of the men who'd help launch it wrote a strategy paper — for a foreign prime minister — naming the removal of Saddam Hussein as a goal. Then they wrote one for America, and took the jobs.
The same American strategists wrote regime-change advice for Israel (1996) and for the United States (PNAC), took senior Bush-era offices, and got the Iraq War they'd argued for. The paper trail is public.
Documents and roles are FACT. We reject the two overreaches: the 9/11-truther read of 'new Pearl Harbor' (PURE SPECULATION), and the dual-loyalty smear. The influence question — a documented overlap of interests — is carried as PROBABLY TRUE, name-specific, never about an ethnic group.
'A Clean Break' named removing Saddam as an Israeli objective in 1996; PNAC pressed it as US policy from 1997; the same authors took Bush-administration posts; the US invaded Iraq and removed Saddam in 2003.
Clean Break / PNAC / the record
'A Clean Break' (1996) was written for Netanyahu — and named removing Saddam.
Prepared by the IASPS 'Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000' as advice to incoming PM Netanyahu; participants (per the paper) included Richard Perle (group leader), Douglas Feith, David and Meyrav Wurmser, James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks Jr., and Robert Loewenberg. It urged a break from Oslo and argued Israeli security was best served by regional regime change — naming removal of Saddam Hussein. Feith hosts the document on his own website.
PNAC pushed the same thesis as US policy — and wrote the 'new Pearl Harbor' line.
PNAC (founded 1997 by Kristol and Kagan) campaigned for US primacy and Iraq regime change, sending Clinton a 1998 letter urging Saddam's removal. Its Sept 2000 report 'Rebuilding America's Defenses' states, in a passage on the slowness of military transformation: 'the process of transformation... is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor.' Verbatim, page 51.
The authors took the jobs — and the thesis became the war.
In the Bush administration Perle chaired the Defense Policy Board, Wolfowitz was Deputy Secretary of Defense, Feith was Under Secretary of Defense for Policy (running the Office of Special Plans), and David Wurmser advised the VP's office. In 2003 the US invaded Iraq and removed Saddam — the objective both papers had named. Document → office → war is a matter of record.
An ally said it aloud: Netanyahu twice acknowledged the attacks benefited Israel.
On 9/11/2001 Netanyahu told the NYT the attacks were 'very good' for US–Israel relations, then edited to 'it will generate immediate sympathy.' In 2008 (Bar-Ilan, via Ma'ariv/Haaretz): 'We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq,' which 'swung American public opinion in our favor.' We grade only what he said — candid observations of geopolitical benefit. NOT evidence he caused, planned, or foreknew the attacks; benefiting from an event is not causing it.
The 'new Pearl Harbor' line is not evidence PNAC wanted or planned 9/11.
Rejected outright. The line sits in a dry passage arguing that modernizing the military would be slow unless something dramatic accelerated it — a prediction about pace, not a wish, plan, or call for an attack. No evidence, in the document or anywhere, that PNAC wanted, foresaw, or orchestrated 9/11. Treating it as proof of a false-flag plot is a conspiracy theory with nothing behind it. The verbatim quote is striking on its own and cannot bear that weight.
The influence question is real and documented — and it is not the antisemitic version.
The defensible core: American strategists wrote regime-change advice for a foreign government, advanced a materially identical agenda from inside the US government, and got the war they argued for. That overlap is documented and worth scrutiny — fair to ask whose 'realm' was being secured. But the honest version is name-specific (a handful of people and two papers, not 'the Jews'), and the authors sincerely held that toppling Saddam served US primacy too. We grade the documented overlap and its question, and refuse to launder it into a dual-loyalty smear.
Ideas move from paper to power.
This belongs in Israeli Influence not as a theory about hidden hands but the opposite: the hands are visible, the papers signed, the offices on record. A strategy written to secure one country's 'realm' became, through the same authors, a plank of American war policy — documented influence looks like a paper trail people stopped reading. It's a Military Grift story too: the war those papers argued for cost trillions and hundreds of thousands of lives, and its designers mostly paid no price. We reject the 9/11 plot theory and the dual-loyalty smear; the record survives both.