Evidence of Iran Nuclear Weapons Program May Be Fraudulent
By Gareth Porter | t r u t h o u t | 18 November 2010
Since 2007, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) – with the support of the United States, Israel and European allies UK, France and Germany – has been demanding that Iran explain a set of purported internal documents portraying a covert Iranian military program of research and development of nuclear weapons. The “laptop documents,” supposedly obtained from a stolen Iranian computer by an unknown source and given to US intelligence in 2004, include a series of drawings of a missile re-entry vehicle that appears to be an effort to accommodate a nuclear weapon, as well as reports on high explosives testing for what appeared to be a detonator for a nuclear weapon.
In one report after another, the IAEA has suggested that Iran has failed to cooperate with its inquiry into that alleged research, and that the agency, therefore, cannot verify that it has not diverted nuclear material to military purposes.
That issue remains central to US policy toward Iran. The Obama administration says there can be no diplomatic negotiations with Iran unless Iran satisfies the IAEA fully in regard to the allegations derived from the documents that it had covert nuclear weapons program.
That position is based on the premise that the intelligence documents that Iran has been asked to explain are genuine. The evidence now available, however, indicates that they are fabrications.
The drawings of the Iranian missile warhead that were said by the IAEA to show an intent to accommodate a nuclear weapon actually depict a missile design that Iran is now known to have already abandoned in favor of an improved model by the time the technical drawings were allegedly made. And one of the major components of the purported Iranian military research program allegedly included a project labeled with a number that turns out to have been assigned by Iran’s civilian nuclear authority years before the covert program is said to have been initiated.
The former head of the agency’s safeguards department, Olli Heinonen, who shaped its approach to the issue of the intelligence documents from 2005 and 2010, has offered no real explanation for these anomalies in recent interviews with Truthout.
These telltale indicators of fraud bring into question the central pillar of the case against Iran and raise more fundamental questions about the handling of the Iranian nuclear issue by the IAEA, the United States and its key European allies.
Drawings of the Wrong Missile Warhead
In mid-July 2005, in an effort to get the IAEA fully behind the Bush administration’s effort to refer the Iranian nuclear dossier to the United Nations Security Council, Robert Joseph, US undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, made a formal presentation on the purported Iranian nuclear weapons program documents to the agency’s leading officials in Vienna. Joseph flashed excerpts from the documents on the screen, giving special attention to the series of technical drawings or “schematics” showing 18 different ways of fitting an unidentified payload into the re-entry vehicle or “warhead” of Iran’s medium-range ballistic missile, the Shahab-3.
When IAEA analysts were allowed to study the documents, however, they discovered that those schematics were based on a re-entry vehicle that the analysts knew had already been abandoned by the Iranian military in favor of a new, improved design. The warhead shown in the schematics had the familiar “dunce cap” shape of the original North Korean No Dong missile, which Iran had acquired in the mid-1990s, as former IAEA Safeguards Department Chief Olli Heinonen confirmed to this writer in an interview on November 5. But when Iran had flight tested a new missile in mid-2004, it did not have that dunce cap warhead, but a new “triconic” or “baby bottle” shape, which was more aerodynamic than the one on the original Iranian missile.
The laptop documents had depicted the wrong re-entry vehicle being redesigned.
When I asked Heinonen, now a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Center, why Iran’s purported secret nuclear weapons research program would redesign the warhead of a missile that the Iranian military had already decided to replace with an improved model, he suggested that the group that had done the schematics had no relationship with the Iranian missile program. “It looks from that information that this group was working with this individual,” said Heinonen, referring to Dr. Mohsen Fakrizadeh, the man named in the documents as heading the research program. “It was not working with the missile program.”
Heinonen’s claim that the covert nuclear weapon program had no link to the regular missile program is not supported by the intelligence documents themselves. The IAEA describes what is purported to be a one-page letter from Fakrizadeh to the Shahid Hemat Industrial Group dated March 3, 2003, “seeking assistance with the prompt transfer of data” for the work on redesigning the re-entry vehicle.
Shahid Hemat, which is part of the Iranian military’s Defense Industries Organization, was involved in testing the engine for the Shahab-3 and, in particular, in working on aerodynamic properties and control systems for Iranian missiles, all of which were reported in the US news media. “Project 11” was the code name given to the purported re-entry vehicle project.
Heinonen also suggested that the program’s engineers could have been ordered to redesign the older Shahab-3 model before the decision was made by the missile program to switch to a newer model and that it couldn’t change its work plan once it was decided.
However, according to Mike Elleman, lead author of the most authoritative study of the Iranian missile program thus far, published by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) last May, Iran introduced the major innovations in the design of the medium-range missile, including a longer, lighter airframe and the new warhead shape, over a period of two to five years. Elleman, told me in an interview that the redesign of the re-entry vehicle must have begun in 2002 at the latest.
The schematics on the laptop documents’ redesigned warhead were dated March-April 2003, according to the IAEA report of May 2008.
Heinonen’s explanation assumes that the Iranian military ordered an engineer to organize a project to redesign the warhead on its intermediate-range ballistic missile to accommodate a nuclear payload, but kept the project in the dark about its plans to replace the Shahab-3 with a completely new and improved model.
That assumption appears wholly implausible, because the reason for the shift to the new missile, according to the IISS study, was that the Shahab-3, purchased from North Korea in the early to mid-1990s, had a range of only 800 to 1,000 km, depending on the weight of the payload. Thus, it was incapable of reaching Israel. The new missile, later named the Ghadr-1, could carry a payload of conventional high-explosives 1,500 to 1,600 kilometers, bringing Israel within the reach of an Iranian missile for the first time.
The missile warhead anomaly is a particularly telling sign of fraud, because someone intending to fabricate such technical drawings of a re-entry vehicle could not have known that Iran had abandoned the Shahab-3 in favor of the more advanced Ghadr-1 until after mid-August 2004. As the IISS study points out, the August 11, 2004, test launch was the first indication to the outside world that a new missile with a triconic warhead had been developed. Before that test, Elleman told me, “No information was available that they were modifying the warhead.”
After that test, however, it would have been too late to redo the re-entry vehicle studies, which would have the biggest impact on news media coverage and political opinion.
Iranian statements about the Shahab-3 missile would have been misleading for anyone attempting to fabricate these schematics. The IISS study recalls that Iran had said in early 2001 that the Shahab-3 had entered “serial production” and declared in July 2003 that it was “operational.” The IISS study observes, however, that the announcement came only after the US invasion of Iraq, when Iran felt an urgent need to claim an operational missile capability. The study says it is “very dubious” that the missile was ever produced in significant numbers.
Skepticism and Resistance at the IAEA
A second inconsistency between the laptop documents and the established facts emerged only in 2008. At a briefing for IAEA member states in February 2008, Heinonen displayed an organization chart of the purported research program, showing a “Project 5” with two sub-projects: “Project 5/13” for uranium conversion and “Project 5/15” for uranium ore processing. Kimia Maadan, a private Iranian firm, is shown to be running “Project 5.”
One of the key documents in the collection, a one-page flow sheet for a uranium-conversion process, dated May 2003, with Kimia Maadan’s name on it, is marked “Project 5/13.”
Bush administration hardliners and the IAEA safeguard department had been convinced in the 2004-2005 period that Kimia Maadan was a front for the Iranian military. In a 2005 report, the IAEA questioned how that company, with such “limited experience in ore processing,” could have established an ore processing plant at Gchine in such a short time from 2000 to mid-2001 on its own.
But in January 2008, Iran provided documents to the IAEA showing that Kimia Maadan had actually been created by the civilian Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) in 2000 solely to carry out a contract to design, build and put into operation an ore-processing facility. The documents also established that the firm’s core staff consisted entirely of experts who had previously worked for AEOI’s Ore Processing Center and that the conceptual design and other technical information had been provided to Kimia Maadan by AEOI.
But the most explosive new evidence provided by Iran showed that the code number of “Project 5/15” on ore processing, supposedly assigned by the Iranian military’s secret nuclear weapon research program, had actually been assigned by the AEOI more than two years before the purported nuclear weapons program had been started. In the context of the documents on Kimia Maadan’s relationship with AEOI, the IAEA report of February 2008 acknowledged, “A decision to construct a UOC [uranium ore concentration] plant at Gchine, known as ‘project 5/15,’ was made August 25, 1999.”
An unpublished paper by the IAEA safeguards department, leaked to the media and the Washington, DC-based Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) in 2009, identified early 2002 as the formal beginning of what it called the Iranian military’s “warhead development program.”
Asked about this contradiction, Heinonen told me he couldn’t answer the question, because he did not recall the specific dates involved.
After the IAEA had acquired that new evidence of fraud in January 2008, an IAEA official familiar with the internal debate inside the agency told me that some IAEA officials had demanded that the agency distance itself publicly from the intelligence documents. But IAEA reports made no concession to those demands. Instead, beginning with the May 2008 report, the agency began to use language implying that the documents were considered reliable.
Behind the scenes, a conflict was about to boil over between Heinonen and then IAEA Director General Mohammed ElBaradei, who was skeptical about the authenticity of the laptop documents and refused to give them any official IAEA endorsement. In late 2008, Heinonen began pushing ElBaradei to approve publication of his department’s favorable assessment of the intelligence documents, which concluded that Iran had done research and development on nuclear weapons components and speculated that it was continuing to do so.
But ElBaradei refused to do so and in August 2009, diplomats from the UK, France and Germany, who were supporting Heinonen’s view of the documents, leaked to Reuters and The Associated Press that, for nearly a year, ElBaradei had been suppressing “credible” evidence of Iran’s covert work on nuclear weapons.
ElBaradei responded to those political pressures to publish the safeguards department speculative study in an interview with The Hindu on October 1, 2009, in which he declared, “The IAEA is not making any judgment at all whether Iran even had weaponisation studies before because there is a major question of authenticity of the documents.”
Evidence of Israel’s Role
The origin of the laptop documents may never be proven conclusively, but the accumulated evidence points to Israel as the source. As early as 1995, the head of the Israel Defense Forces’ military intelligence research and assessment division, Yaakov Amidror, tried unsuccessfully to persuade his American counterparts that Iran was planning to “go nuclear.” By 2003-2004, Mossad’s reporting on the Iranian nuclear program was viewed by high-ranking CIA officials as an effort to pressure the Bush administration into considering military action against Iran’s nuclear sites, according to Israeli sources cited by a pro-Israeli news service.
In the summer of 2003, Israel’s international intelligence agency, Mossad, had established an aggressive program aimed at exerting influence on the Iran nuclear issue by leaking alleged intelligence to governments and the news media, as Israeli officials acknowledged to journalists Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins. According to the book, “The Nuclear Jihadist,” as part of the program, Mossad sometimes passed on purported Iranian documents supposedly obtained by Israeli spies inside Iran.
German sources have suggested that the intelligence documents were conveyed to the US government, directly or indirectly, by a group that had been collaborating closely with Mossad. Soon after Secretary of State Colin Powell made the existence of the laptop documents public in November 2004, Karsten Voight, the coordinator of German-American cooperation in the German Foreign Ministry, was quoted in The Wall Street Journal as saying that they had been transferred by an Iranian “dissident group.” A second German source familiar with the case was even more explicit. “I can assure you,” the source told me in 2007, “that the documents came from the Iranian resistance organization.” That was a reference to the Mujahideen-E-Khalq (MEK), also known as the People’s Mujahideen of Iran, the armed Iranian exile group designated as a terrorist organization by the US State Department.
The National Council of Resistance in Iran (NCRI), the political arm of the MEK, was generally credited by the news media with having revealed the existence of the Iranian nuclear facilities at Natanz and Arak in an August 2002 press conference in Washington, DC. Later, however, IAEA, Israeli and Iranian dissident sources all said that the NCRI had gotten the intelligence on the sites from Mossad.
An IAEA official told Seymour Hersh that the Israelis were behind the revelation of the sites and two journalists from Der Spiegel reported the same thing. So did an adviser to an Iranian monarchist group, speaking to a writer for The New Yorker. That episode was not isolated, but was part of a broader pattern of Israeli cooperation with the MEK in providing intelligence intended to influence the CIA and the IAEA. Israeli authors Melman and Javadanfar, who claimed to have good sources in Mossad, wrote in their 2007 book that Israeli intelligence had “laundered” intelligence to the IAEA by providing it to Iranian opposition groups, especially the NCRI.
Israeli officials also went to extraordinary lengths to publicize the story of covert Iranian experiments on a key component of a nuclear weapon, which was one of messages the intelligence documents conveyed. As a result of satellite intelligence brought to the attention of the IAEA in 2004 by Undersecretary of State John Bolton, the IAEA requested two separate investigations at the main Iran military research center at Parchin. The investigations, in January 2005 and November 2005, were aimed at examining the charge that Iran was using facilities at Parchin to test high explosives used in the detonation of a nuclear weapon. In each investigation, the IAEA investigators were allowed complete freedom to search and take environmental samples at any five buildings in the complex and their surroundings. But they failed to find any evidence of any Iranian nuclear weapons-related experiments.
At that point, Israeli intelligence came up with a new story. Hersh reported that, earlier in 2006, Mossad had given the CIA an intelligence report – purportedly from one of its agents inside Iran – claiming that the Iranian military had been “testing trigger mechanisms” for a nuclear weapon. The experiment supposedly involved simulating a nuclear explosion without using any nuclear material, so that it could not be detected by the IAEA. But there were no specifics on which to base an IAEA investigation – no test site specified and no diagrams – and CIA officials told Hersh they could not learn anything more about the identity of the alleged Israeli agent.
The CIA evidently did not regard the Israeli claim as credible, because the intelligence community issued a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) in late 2007, which said that Iran had ended all work on nuclear weapons in 2003 and had not restarted it. Israel expressed dismay at the US intelligence estimate, but Israeli officials admitted that the official position that Iran was still working actively on a nuclear weapon was based on an assumption rather than any hard evidence.
Israel encountered yet another problem in its effort to promote the covert Iranian nuclear weapon narrative. The IAEA analysts doubted that Iran would be able to develop a nuclear weapon small enough to fit into the missile it had tested in 2004 without foreign assistance, as David Albright, former IAEA contract officer and director of the Institute for Science and International Security, wrote in a letter to The New York Times in November 2005.
Sometime between February and May, however, yet another purported Iranian document conveniently materialized that addressed the problem of the US NIE and the “small bomb” issue noted by Albright. The document was a long, Farsi-language report purporting to be about the testing of a system to detonate high explosives in hemispherical arrangement. Based on the new document, the IAEA safeguard department concluded that the “implosion system” on which it assumed Iran was working “could be contained within a payload container believed to be small enough to fit into the re-entry body chamber of the Shahab-3 missile.”
The document was given to the IAEA by a “Member State,” which was not identified in the leaked excerpts from an unpublished IAEA report describing it. But Albright, who knows Heinonen well, told me in a September 2008 interview, that the state in question was “probably Israel.”
The day before the Reuters and Associated Press stories attacking ElBaradei over his refusal to publish the report appeared in August 2009, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported that Israel “has been striving to pressure the IAEA through friendly nations and have it release the censored annex.” The operation was being handled by the director general of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission and the Foreign Ministry, according to the report. The Israeli objective, Haaretz reported, was to “prove that the Iranian effort to develop nuclear weapons is continuing, contrary to the claims that Tehran stopped its nuclear program in 2003.”
Rethinking the Case Against Iran
Once the intelligence documents that have been used to indict Iran as plotting to build nuclear weapons are discounted as fabrications likely perpetrated by a self-interested party, there is no solid basis for the US policy of trying to coerce Iran into ending all uranium enrichment. And there is no reason for insisting that Iran must explain the allegations in those documents to the IAEA as a condition for any future US-Iran negotiations.
News coverage of the purported intelligence documents over the past few years has created yet another false narrative that distorts public discourse on the subject. Almost entirely ignored is the possibility that the real aim of Iran’s nuclear program is to maintain a bargaining chip with the United States, and to have a breakout capability to serve as a deterrent to a US or Israeli attack on Iran.
The evidence that documents at the center of the case for a covert Iranian nuclear weapons program are fraudulent suggests the need for a strategic reset on Iran policy. It raises both the possibility and the need for serious exploration of a diplomatic solution for the full range of issues dividing the two countries, which is the only sensible strategy for ensuring that Iran stays a non-nuclear state.
Cantor Recants
November 15, 2010 — MJ Rosenberg — Political Correction
Soon-to-be House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) is desperately trying to explain away the promise he made to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu last Wednesday.
Cantor huddled with Netanyahu just prior to the prime minister’s meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Clinton was expected to reaffirm the American commitment to Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and opposition to Israeli settlement expansion. Cantor wanted Netanyahu to know that he had his back.
Cantor’s office itself put out a statement bragging about his pledge to Netanyahu:
Eric stressed that the new Republican majority will serve as a check on the Administration and what has been, up until this point, one party rule in Washington,” the readout continued. “He made clear that the Republican majority understands the special relationship between Israel and the United States, and that the security of each nation is reliant upon the other.
For now, forget Cantor’s ridiculous assertion that the security of Israel and the United States are “reliant upon the other.” No, the United States provides Israel with the security assistance to survive — it is not the other way around.
But lay that aside. It is Cantor’s statement of loyalty to Netanyahu that is the shocker. Specifically, it is his promise that he would ensure that Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives “will serve as a check” on U.S. Middle East policy.
Almost immediately, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s bureau chief in Washington, Ron Kampeas, declared that Cantor’s statement was “extraordinary.” He wrote that he could not “remember an opposition leader telling a foreign leader, in a personal meeting, that he would side, as a policy, with that leader against the President.”
Kampeas was clearly shocked, but he was understating the enormity of Cantor’s offense. Cantor’s pledge of allegiance to a foreign leader would be remarkable, and deeply offensive, even if the foreign country in question were Canada or the United Kingdom, our two closest allies with whom we have few policy differences.
The United States has major policy differences with Israel, and has had them for decades, most notably over settlements, the occupied West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, etc. Israel is also the largest recipient of US foreign aid in the world, which means that the President of the United States has every right to express those differences firmly and clearly.
On the other hand, no American official — by any stretch of the imagination — has the right to tell the government of Israel, or any foreign government, that he stands with the foreign leader against his own president. It is one thing to oppose particular US policies; it is quite another to tell a foreign leader, “I’m with you, not my president.”
Of course, Cantor was just being honest. Although he does oppose virtually all of President Obama’s policies (he’s a Republican and that is what Republicans do), he supports 100% of Israeli policies. And although an extreme partisan domestically, when it comes to Israel, he supports whichever government is in power. He believes in the right to criticize this government, just not that one.
Cantor’s mistake was not telling Prime Minister Netanyahu what everyone knows is true anyway, but telling the world what he said.
This is the classic Washington definition of a gaffe (i.e., inadvertently speaking an inconvenient truth).
In this case, the gaffe produced a firestorm.
And this is where I consider the possibility that Cantor simply doesn’t understand what he’s doing.
After all, he has been an AIPAC cutout since he first was elected to office. He’s been to more AIPAC meetings than he can probably count. And he should have figured out by now that the lobby is extremely careful, obsessively careful, to always emphasize loyalty to the United States while simultaneously endorsing Israeli policies that undermine our foreign policy objectives.
AIPAC officials never, ever, say that when push comes to shove their loyalty is with Israel not the United States. In fact, the accusation that this is the case is the charge AIPAC hates most.
But the soon-to-be Majority Leader came right out and said it: Israel, right or wrong.
It took a few days for Cantor to understand how utterly offensive his statement was. (He might have heard from a few Tea Party types who, say what you will about them, tend to take their patriotism seriously.)
So today Cantor explained he was misunderstood. His inconvenient truth, his gaffe, was replaced by a laughable untruth.
This is how the Washington Post‘s Dana Milbank reports it:
Brad Dayspring, Cantor’s press guy, tells me Cantor’s promise that the Republican majority would “serve as a check on the administration” was “not in relation to U.S./Israel relations.”
Mmmm. So Cantor’s pledge to stand with Netanyahu against Obama was “not in relation to US/Israel relations” despite the context of Cantor’s statement — just before Netanyahu’s meeting with Clinton — and the fact that the person he was talking to was the Prime Minister of Israel.
So, what was Cantor’s pledge “in relation to”?
Was it in relation to either repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” or the Bush tax cuts for millionaires? Maybe it was about farm subsidies.
Come on, Eric. Don’t make us laugh.
It is eminently clear what you said and what you meant. And this time we will take you at your word.
Foreign Affairs – Remaking the Middle East
The US has been trying to remake the Middle East for decades. (Zoriah.net)
By Jim Miles | Palestine Chronicle | November 12, 2010
The title from this issue of Foreign Affairs struck me as rather odd, in particular the subtitle ‘New Challenges Call for New Policies. Are the U.S. and Israel Ready to Change Course?’ (September/October 2010) The U.S. has been trying to remake the Middle East for quite some decades now as it gradually took over the role of the British and French as the local imperial power.
The first article “Beyond Moderates and Militants – How Obama can Chart a New Course in the Middle East” struck me as a non-starter as Obama has done nothing to do away with Bush’s heritage and has extended it further east with another surge into Afghanistan and incursions and covert actions into Pakistan. The authors introduce Obama with what I perceive as an error in that “the Obama administration has rejected…the worldview of the Bush administration.” Perhaps rhetorically with vague talk about change and hope, neither of which offer any practical solutions, leaving Obama’s actions to speak for themselves: unconditional support for Israel; kowtowing to AIPAC; supporting military occupation as a theoretical means to bring peace into the region; and basically not challenging any of the previous actions of the Bush administration. His appointees in a variety of positions within the executive are mainly from the previous Bush and Clinton administrations.
Much of the article emphasizes the Palestinian/Israeli problem. This “resumption of crises in the Persian Gulf, Lebanon, and between the Israelis and the Palestinians prompted an ongoing, persistently vicious, and periodically violent renegotiation in the balance of power among nations…and within nations.” There is much to argue with here. There has been no resumption of crises as it has been ongoing for decades and the “vicious and violent renegotiation” rises almost entirely from Israeli contravention of international laws of all kinds with U.S. support ideologically, financially, and militarily. This is combined with U.S. vicious and violent actions in pre-emptive wars in the region very similar in nature with regards to international law as the Israeli actions. That context is missing.
The article argues on, coming to a mid-point conclusion that Obama is pursuing policies that, “had Bush implemented them during his administration, may well have worked.” That is a rather bizarre argument as Obama has not changed the U.S.’ military or economic posture in the region, only the rhetoric. Following that the authors say the U.S. “risks making vital policy adjustments only after it is too late.” Adjustments? Such as removing the military from the Middle East? Israel’s “undeclared nuclear program, foot-dragging approach to peace, and often single minded reliance on military means to resolve conflicts are hard to reconcile with Obama’s intention to restore [U.S.] standing in the Arab and Muslim worlds.” The rhetoric may well be working, as people generally do want change, but U.S. actions, which have been pretty much identical to the Israelis on the military side, do not support the supposed benevolence of Obama’s words.
The article to its credit does at least recognize Israeli intransigence and the “one dimensional approach” used by the west, and it recognizes the contradiction about the U.S.’ “promotion of liberal values [as] a pillar of Middle East policy” at the same time “trampling the very principles underlying that vision.” U.S. history is filled with good intentions (rhetorically) and murderous deeds in foreign countries. It also recognizes that with its military and economic power the U.S. “still enjoys veto power over virtually all significant regional initiatives,” but some of those regional initiatives – Iran supporting the Shi’ites of Southern Iraq, Hezbollah gaining and so far maintaining a degree of political power in Lebanon – have not exactly worked according to U.S. desires.
The nuclear issue receives brief comment without discussing the overwhelming predominance of Israeli nuclear power under its official policy of maintaining ambiguity by not stating anything. There really is no ambiguity, but by not stating that it has nuclear weapons, Israel avoids all sorts of political posturing that would be necessary in its rhetorical arguments about peace, freedom, democracy, equality, and its position as the underdog victim in the region. It also avoids coming under attack for having double standards vis-à-vis Iran within the context of the NPT.
Finally the article settles on the idea that the U.S. must “grasp the necessity of including new regional actors to help achieve what is now beyond the ability of Washington and its allies to do on their own: giving legitimacy and credibility to an Israeli-Palestinian accord.” Obama will have to “go further and close the book on the failed policies of the past.” This of course contradicts the statement about having veto power over regional initiatives, but ignoring that for now, there is little discussed about what the alternates to the reality of the failed policies could be. So many have been offered here and elsewhere, yet the authors seem reluctant to address the various alternate solutions as to their chances of success or not.
If it is beyond the ability of Washington to be successful what are the alternatives? Getting out of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and stopping military and financial support for Israel would certainly change the U.S. policy in the region. Stop threatening Iran indirectly with the “all options” phrase used so often in current political discourse, threats contrary to international law. Or perhaps least likely, the U.S. and its allies – Great Britain and Canada in particular – could step up and announce a credible Israeli-Palestinian accord that recognizes the true nature of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory and, combined with military and financial counter-actions, pressure the Israelis into accepting a rational settlement with a functioning contiguous Palestinian territory as a neighbor to a democratic Israel. That alone would settle much of the discord in the region. It is within the realm of the possible; unfortunately maintaining course, maintaining the status quo seems to be the path of least resistance for the U.S. – and unfortunately serves Israeli interests all too well as they slowly take in more and more Palestinian land.
Are they ready to change course? Short answer, no. They have neither the moral courage nor the humanitarian instinct to do so.
– Jim Miles is a Canadian educator and a regular contributor/columnist of opinion pieces and book reviews for The Palestine Chronicle.
Netanyahu assumes command in Washington
By Paul Woodward | War in Context | November 13, 2010
After winning the US midterm elections, Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu hardly needs to worry about holding his own coalition government together. The fact that he so transparently now has Washington in his pocket should duly impress anyone who might have doubted America’s willingness to tolerate its increasingly servile relationship with Israel.
Even so, after the announcement that 1,345 new housing units will be built for Jewish occupants in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem, President Obama’s reaction — to suggest that this move is “unhelpful” during peace negotiations — set off alarm bells. The White House was swift to assure those concerned, that the administration is not stepping out of line.
On a conference call with American Jewish leaders today, a White House official said the administration hadn’t sought a confrontation with the Israelis over a new construction announcement.
President Barack Obama answered a question at a press conference on the subject straightforwardly but hadn’t specifically planned to make a statement criticizing new Israeli building, National Security Council official Dan Shapiro said on the call, according to a participant.
Perhaps the press can avoid causing Obama any further embarrassment by henceforth not asking questions on such sensitive topics.
Still, this administration remains an object of mistrust and so when Netanyahu met his leading representative in Washington a few days ago, Eric Cantor, the congressman and likely GOP majority leader assured his prime minister that the Republican party will now be able impose the required discipline.
Eric stressed that the new Republican majority will serve as a check on the Administration and what has been, up until this point, one party rule in Washington. He made clear that the Republican majority understands the special relationship between Israel and the United States, and that the security of each nation is reliant upon the other.
Unfortunately, a few Americans might be perplexed by this claim that the security of the United States is dependent on the security of Israel. Cantor believes “most Americans understand that Israel’s security is synonymous with America’s security.”
Mutual dependence and the security of these two nations being synonymous are not quite the same thing.
It’s easy to see that Israel is capable of having such a disruptive impact on the Middle East that this will damage US interests and in that sense that the US depends on Israel not to undermine its national security even more than it already does.
But to say that Israel’s security is synonymous with America’s security suggests another possibility. If our interests do indeed so perfectly overlap, then we really don’t need to think about Israel’s security. If America focuses on its own interests, Israel’s — in as much as their interests are identical — will be taken care of. In as much as our interests differ — well that’s Israel’s problem, not ours.
The Neocons, Sarah Palin and the Tea Party
Eli Clifton | Lobe Log | November 11th, 2010
Founding editor of The American Conservative, Scott McConnell, has just published an in-depth analysis of the origins of the Tea Party’s foreign policy and how the Tea Party may influence foreign policy in the new Congress.
McConnell, in an article for Right Web, traces the Tea Party’s foreign policy pronouncements back to Sarah Palin and her close relationship with neoconservative heavyweight Bill Kristol. Kristol, as described by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker, “discovered” Palin the summer before John McCain put her on the Republican national ticket.
McConnell writes:
McCain enlisted influential neoconservative Randy Scheunemann as a policy advisor, and in turn Scheunemann brought on Steve Biegun as her chief foreign policy staffer. Palin’s previous foreign policy pronouncements had been vague and scattered, but she became an eager student. She made hawkish noises during the campaign: while she spoke more loosely than expected about the possibility of war with Russia, she forthrightly supported an Israeli strike on Iran. Despite efforts by paleo-conservatives to reach out to her and provide some counter-influence, she stayed on message—which would have considerable significance as she became a political star in her own right.
Palin has continued to hit neoconservative talking points even while the Tea Party movement has, at times, called for cuts in government spending and rejected the Bush administration’s military adventurism.
McConnell observes:
She reliably echoes neoconservative talking points about war with Iran. When addressing the Tea Party Convention in Nashville last February, she hit neocon talking points by citing Ronald Reagan, “peace through strength,” and “tough action” against Iran.
And
Wearing an Israeli flag pin, she charged that President Obama was causing “Israel, our critical ally” to question our support by reaching out to hostile regimes.
But Palin’s apparent willingness to uphold Bush’s “freedom agenda” of spreading democracy has not always been received with enthusiasm by Tea Party audiences who embrace small-government.
McConnell writes:
Even David Frum, the prominent neoconservative writer and Iraq war enthusiast who has expressed deep skepticism regarding Palin and the Tea Party, praised the foreign policy segments of her speech, claiming that she sounded as “somebody who knew something of what he or she was talking about.” Live blogging her talk, Frum tellingly observed that Tea Partiers sat on their hands during these segments: “Interesting—no applause for sanctions on Iran. No applause for Palin’s speculation that democracies keep the peace.”
While Tea Party members are, understandably, skeptical of the benefits of “nation building,” neoconservatives such as Frank Gaffney have capitalized on the movement’s nativist leanings by hyping the threat of “creeping Shariah.” Islamophobic fear mongering has proven itself a more effective tool for bringing, otherwise isolationist, Tea Partiers behind the neoconservative’s foreign policy.
And besides, a militarist foreign policy is far less expensive—dare I say “more fiscally responsible”?—if the nation building is cut from the budget.
McConnell writes:
Asked at a recent Washington forum whether the new Congress would support or oppose an attack on Iran, Colin Dueck, author of Hard Line: The Republican Party and U.S. Foreign Policy since World War ll, quipped that if you do air strikes you don’t have to do nation building. In this sense, the budget constraints which Tea Party candidates worry about may be much less a barrier to near term neoconservative foreign policy ambitions than might be imagined.
The Parcel Bomb Plot – Al-Qaeda’s Latest Christmas Gift to Israel
By Maidhc Ó Cathail | MEMO | 08 November 2010
While Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) may have claimed responsibility for the parcel bomb plot, it’s worth considering how this latest Yemen-linked terror scare has been a gift to their avowed enemies.
A mere two weeks before the discovery of mail bombs addressed to “two places of Jewish worship in Chicago,” Rupert Murdoch sounded prescient as he received an award from the Anti-Defamation League for his support of Israel. “The terrorists continue to target Jews across the world,” declared the media mogul in his acceptance speech. “But they have not succeeded in bringing down the Israeli government – and they have not weakened Israeli resolve.” Equating criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, the Fox News owner smeared the growing worldwide condemnation of Israel’s rogue behaviour as an “ongoing war against the Jews.”
Benjamin Netanyahu, a frequent London house guest of Murdoch and a likely recipient of his political contributions, was quick to make hay of the foiled plot. Briefing the cabinet on his impending address to the General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America, the Israeli Prime Minister told them that it would be “held against the background of reports about the attempt to attack the Jewish community in Chicago.”
Linking the parcel bomb plot to some of the most iconic terrorist attacks of the post-9/11 era, Netanyahu said that “it does not matter if the target was a synagogue in Chicago or a railway station in Madrid, London, Mumbai or Bali.” Deftly associating his increasingly isolated government with the victims of those attacks, the Israeli Prime Minister proclaimed: “We are facing a growing wave of terrorism by extremist Islam.”
Netanyahu, never one prone to understatement, offered this analysis of the unsuccessful attempt to use desktop printers as terror weapons: “It is growing in the scope and brazen gall of its attacks, in the weapons with which it is arming itself, and in the sweeping objectives of the leaders of global terrorism.”
He then assured his colleagues that “one of the main issues” he would be addressing in New Orleans with American Jewish leaders was “the steps that the civilized and free world must take in order to stop this wave that threatens us all.”
Needless to say, those “steps” are unlikely to include an end to the 43-year occupation and colonisation of the West Bank or a lifting of the 4-year blockade of Gaza.
An American apologist for Israel’s self-appointed guardian of “the civilized and free world” took a similar line. Joel Pollak, a Republican candidate in the midterm elections, released a statement condemning the attempted terror attack, saying he would be spending the Jewish Sabbath in West Rogers Park “in solidarity with the people of the 9th congressional district who were the direct targets of Al Qaeda terror.” Sounding a lot like Netanyahu, Pollak attempted to rally his constituents by telling them, “We must not stop fighting to eradicate the twin evils of terror and hatred.”
Again, we can take it as read that the “terror and hatred” Americans are being urged to combat only applies to Israel’s enemies.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly, which describes itself as “the leading geopolitical newsletter,” has even attempted to implicate Israel’s current enemy number one, Iran. The next issue, for subscribers only, promises to reveal “how the al Qaeda air package plot fit [sic] into the selective partnership between Tehran and al Qaeda and homes in on the areas where their schemes dovetail.”
But how trustworthy is “the leading newsletter in this rarefied field”?
“Debka is prepared mostly by former Mossad operatives. A reliable stream of information,” Martin Peretz, the Islamophobic editor-in-chief of the staunchly pro-Israel New Republic assures us.
Ever since an Israeli firm let the Christmas Day crotch bomber “slip through” security at Schiphol Airport without a passport, a few influential voices with close ties to Israel have been instrumental in making Yemen “the new buzzword.”
Appearing on Fox News two days later, the No. 1 pro-Israel advocate and leader in Congress, Senator Joe Lieberman, announced: “Iraq was yesterday’s war. Afghanistan is today’s war. If we don’t act preemptively, Yemen will be tomorrow’s war.”
Within a week, Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Saban Center in the Brookings Institution, had an op-ed in The Daily Beast titled “The Menace of Yemen.” Touting the botched Christmas Day plot as evidence of “the growing ambition of al Qaeda’s Yemen franchise,” Riedel called for “significant American support to defeat AQAP.”
Riedel’s employer, the Saban Center, is named after Haim Saban, the Israeli-American media mogul, who in 2002 pledged $13 million to found the Saban Center for Middle East Policy. Two years later, the billionaire admitted to the New York Times, “I’m a one-issue guy and my issue is Israel.”
“The US may be walking into a bit of a trap,” warns Gregory Johnsen, a Yemen expert and doctoral candidate at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies.
That “trap” has been best described by Philip Giraldi. “America’s misguided war on terror,” Giraldi pointed out in a recent article, “is in fact a complete adoption of Israeli security paradigms without any regard for the actual threats that confront the US, making Israel’s many enemies also the foes of Washington.”
Israel must be very grateful indeed for this latest terror scare. If Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula did not exist, they might have to invent it.
Maidhc Ó Cathail is a widely published writer based in Japan.
Jeff Blankfort: There’s never been a sit-in at the Israeli Airline El Al, the question is Why not?
INTERVIEW BY KATHLEEN WELLS – August 2010
Kathleen Wells: So, I mean, if what you’re saying is true, the organized Jewish establishment or this lobby has essentially bought Congress, at least with regards to issues regarding Israel. So, I mean, this is very disturbing to hear, and it says that something is wrong with our entire system of government.
Jeffrey Blankfort: They have been bought by every major sector/special interest of American society that represents American capitalism: the arms industry, and so on, and, in this sense, Israel and the Jewish establishment that supports it have been a major player. They had been responsible for, at least since World War II, at least 60 or more percent of the money that goes to the Democratic Party, making the Democratic Party, literally, a subsidiary of the Zionist establishment.
In 2000, Mother Jones Magazine ran what they called “Mother Jones [400],” which listed the top 400 contributors to the American political campaigns in that year. And of the top 400, of the top ten, seven were Jewish; of the top 20, 12 were Jewish; and of the top 250, where I stopped counting, at least 125 were Jewish. And 75 percent of their money went to the Democratic Party. In 2002, one Israeli-Egyptian born American named Haim Saban, who brags about his loyalty to Israel being his primary interest, he contributed $12.3 million to the Democratic Party, seven of which bought their office building in Washington, D.C., and that was only about a million and a half dollars less than the political action committee of the arms industry gave to both political parties. So this is the kind of clout that they have in Washington.
And there was once an institution, one independent think-tank in Washington that wasn’t in the pro-Israel lobby camp, and that was Brookings [Institution.] And in the same year, he [Saban] gave $12.3 million, the same number, to Brookings [Institution] to found Saban Center for Middle East Policy, thereby taking over Brookings’ role in the Middle East. And it was at Brookings where Andrew Shapiro gave his talk. And the head of Brookings is a man named Kenneth Pollack, whose book, “The Gathering Storm,” was one of the most instrumental pieces of propaganda that got us into the current Gulf war. I covered a lot of ground there but all …
Kathleen Wells: Yes. Yeah, and you know, the American people are not aware of this, the depth and breadth of this influence, and it’s a bit overwhelming to hear this. You were once a member of AIPAC, is that correct?
Jeffrey Blankfort: Well, I actually joined AIPAC in 1988. I had just begun editing the Middle East Labor Bulletin and co-founded a committee called the Labor Committee on the Middle East, which focused on the situation of Palestinian workers in Israel and in the occupied territories and in other Middle Eastern countries, which tried to show Palestinians as activists, as not just victims.
But I began to see the role of AIPAC and so I joined AIPAC, and I went to a luncheon that they gave in San Francisco. Now, every year in Washington, the biggest event of the year in Washington is the AIPAC Conference, in which at least half the members of Congress attend and have their names put on a roll so their constituents back home — Jewish constituents — know that they attended, and usually a major speaker from Israel or the U.S. Government, [the] Secretary of State, Vice President, and so on, speak there.
But they also have local conferences in cities around the country. In San Francisco, they have usually three events — two luncheons and one dinner in different parts of the Bay area, so I went to a luncheon in San Francisco. And I was astounded to see that all the local public officials had been invited to attend and were there at the Fairmont Hotel, which is one of the most flashiest, gaudiest hotels in San Francisco, where they were addressed by a major speaker — a U.S. Senator. These U.S. Senators or governors, they go around the country, and they speak at AIPAC events. The news media are not involved, are not invited. And back home, they don’t know about it either, wherever these senators come from.
But what was astounding to me was to see that all the important people in San Francisco were attending this luncheon. And when you come, you’re given a card that tells you how much you’ve contributed to AIPAC, and, of course, they collect money there. What happens after these meetings, and they take place all over the country, is that local Jewish community organizations — the Jewish Community Relations Council or Jewish foundations or federations — then spend the money and send these public officials — police chiefs, fire chiefs, mayors, city council people, supervisors — to Israel on all-expense-paid trips where they meet the prime minister, the defense minister, very important people. They go to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial Museum; they go visit the West Bank settlement; they come back to the United States, and they know they have very powerful friends in the Jewish community who accompanied them on the trip. And from this group of people, we get our members of Congress, since they are already indoctrinated into being pro-Israel even before they file for running for Congress.
So most Americans and actually most people — even pro-Palestinian supporters — are not aware of this. They don’t follow this because they’ve been told by Professor Chomsky and others that the problem is not the Israel lobby but U.S. imperialism — which is a pretty remote target for most people. If they thought it was their members of Congress who were involved in voting for money for Israel/supporting Israel policies, they might be sitting in at their offices.
For example, Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, has spoken at a number of AIPAC conferences in which she repeatedly pledges her loyalty to Israel, but there has never been any major protest against Pelosi for her support of Israel. As a matter of fact, she is the favorite of the liberals in San Francisco because she’s criticized China and she’s very good on the issue of gay rights, which is an important issue in the Bay Area.
Kathleen Wells: So you’re basically hitting on or touching on issues that the activist — pro-Palestinian activists — steps they should take to be more effective.
Jeffrey Blankfort: Well, yes, to this point the solidarity movement for Palestinians in this country is an utter failure. They have succeeded in doing absolutely nothing, and you see around the world the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement [BDS] targeting Israel has been gaining ground in Europe, among labor unions in England and Ireland and Scotland, and so on. And here, there is a movement that is developing, but it’s only targeting companies that do business in Israel, which is very positive, but there is no reason that it shouldn’t be like South Africa, in which you target the economy of the country that’s responsible, and that’s mainly Israel.
I mean during the anti-apartheid movement, which I was involved in, they had sit-ins at South Africa Airways and forced South African Airways to close its offices. But there’s never been a sit-in, as far as I know, at any offices of the Israeli Airline El Al, and they’re all over the place, and the question is Why not? There has never been a major campaign to call Congress to stop aid to Israel; whereas, for example, in the 80s when Congress was giving $15 million a year to the Contras to overthrow the Nicaraguan government, there was a national campaign to stop aid to the Contras — calling members of Congress — and it was successful. As a result, we had the Iran-Contra scandal. Why has there never been a similar campaign waged by the very same people who are also involved themselves in pro-Palestinian activities to do the same regarding Israel?
Kathleen Wells: Well I mean, let me ask you — Why? Why hasn’t that happened?
Jeffrey Blankfort: Well, because the left for many years has been predominantly Jewish, and this is because there’s a history of Jewish radicalism going back to the beginning of the trade unions in this country. Jewish radicals – – Jews — were very heavily involved in all progressive organizations — the civil rights movement, and so on, against the war in Vietnam. But, suddenly, when it came to Israel, it’s closer to home. And there was a reticence to put the blame on Jews. Israel calls itself a Jewish State, though 20 percent of the population is not Jewish, it’s Palestinian Arab. But there was this reticence to do that. It was a lot easier to blame U.S. foreign policy, U.S. imperialism. For example, when Israel was heavily involved in supporting the Contras in Nicaragua, supporting and arming the Salvadoran government, arming the government in Guatemala, the solidarity groups in those particular arenas were predominantly Jewish, but they refused to take critical positions on Israel arming Salvador, Israel arming [the] Nicaragua [Contras], and Israel arming Guatemala. And when I organized a demonstration in 1985, opposing Israel’s roles as a U.S. surrogate in South Africa and Central America, those organizations would not endorse the demonstration.
As a matter of fact, the Nicaraguan Solidarity Committee gave an excuse that they weren’t giving any more endorsements. Guatemala Solidarity Committee [Guatemalan News & Information Bureau] did finally endorse, but I had to call and threaten them with exposure, and it split the organization. And the same thing with CISPES around El Salvador.
Kathleen Wells: So what we are talking here is ethnic loyalties. So are you saying that ethnic …
Jeffrey Blankfort: We’re talking about a kind of tribalism that, even though these particular Jewish activists were anti-Zionist (they didn’t believe in a Jewish state), they became very defensive when it came to criticizing Israel specifically. And this is one of the reasons you had members of Congress who were very adamant about apartheid in South Africa, but when it came to Israel arming apartheid South Africa, they were silent. When it came [to the U.S. arming] the Contras [they spoke out]. But when it came to Israel helping the Contras, they were silent. [When] we had the Iran-Contra hearings, Israel was never named as a country. They were country A.
Kathleen Wells: So let me ask you, are these ethnic loyalties — or tribalism, as you term it — taking precedence over defending the rights of Palestinians?
Jeffrey Blankfort: It has. They would deny that this is the case. I have been attacked for suggesting that it is. But I see no other reason, because, I mean, I’ve been into this 40 years, and when I first came back from my trip to the Middle East (I happen to be Jewish, but I come from a non-Zionist family — non- Zionist, which later became anti-Zionist) and people I knew who’ve been active around civil rights, and before there was a civil rights movement, when they heard that I had been with the Palestinians, they went crazy. They literally became like Afrikaners because they had been traumatized by the holocaust. And this feeling of the victimization of Jews in World War II was something that Jews growing up with, including myself, felt very strongly. So the notion of blaming Jews was to them going back to periods of anti-Semitism and playing into a right wing and what they call “a neo-Nazi agenda.”
The fact of the matter is, however, that it was a Jewish state, done in the name of Jews, [that] had ethnically cleansed the Palestinians and it was Jewish organizations that were lobbying, not only in the United States, but throughout Western Europe, for continued support of what Israel was doing — not only ethnic cleansing but all its wars against the Palestinians, against the Lebanese. And whereas Professor Chomsky says, “None of this would have been done without the U.S. authorization,” it’s simply not true.
As a matter of fact, when Menachem Begin, the Israeli prime minister, annexed the Golan Heights in Syria, Ronald Reagan was on a trip to Europe and it was like [he was] blindsided.
Chomsky will also, by the way, point to a situation where the United States was very unhappy and complained when it was discovered that Israel had been selling Falcon radar warning devices to China without U.S. approval, and there were some U.S. parts in this. Now, Chomsky and his supporters say, “Where was the lobby on this?” And, in fact, the lobby was not informed and felt blindsided. It was very embarrassing for some of the neocons in Washington, like Douglas Feith, one of the instrumental people in giving us the war in Iraq. They felt blindsided by it because the Israelis, who basically have very little respect for their American counterparts — they had made a deal with China without notifying the Jewish establishment here in this country. So that was an embarrassment on their part, for them. And they were quite upset with their Israeli friends because they weren’t notified about it.
There are issues in which the Israeli lobby — actually, it’s more of a hotel or a Leviathan or an octopus — is not dominant, but it is when it comes to Middle East policies, certainly when it comes to Palestine and pushing toward the war in Iraq, pushing for the war against Iran. Up to now, they haven’t succeeded, largely because there are people in the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies that know that a war or attack on Iran would be a global disaster — not only bad for United States, but bad for the world economy.
Nevertheless, it seems now that the possibilities of an attack on Iran are greater than ever. And this has been at the top of the agenda of the Zionist establishment since the attack on Iraq. You could just go to the AIPAC website, the website of the American Jewish Committee, which is a very important, probably the second most important organization in the Jewish community. It’s the foreign policy arm of the Israel lobby with offices in Latin America, Africa, Europe. And they have been lobbying foreign governments for years to take pro-Israel positions.
The head of that organization, David Harris, is probably the most well-known American Jew outside the United States. He meets regularly with the heads of state of all the European countries — our NATO allies — with Mexico [and] countries in Latin America, Africa, and so on.
If there is going to be a war against Iran, there is no way that it could not be said that it is a war for Israel. As a matter of fact, the United States, since the defeat of George Bush, Sr., has increasingly made Israel’s enemies our enemies. So where Hezbollah and Hamas are not American enemies (they’re seen as Israel’s enemies) they have now become our enemies.
Yet Hezbollah has never [been] proven to have done anything to attack the United States [although] they were accused of being responsible for the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983, where I happened to be at the time. Hezbollah formed as a resistance organization to the Israeli occupation, and there are a lot of questions as to who actually carried out that bombing, but it has never been proven that Hezbollah did it. Hezbollah has never launched a terrorist attack against the United States, nor has Hamas, and yet those two organizations are now considered to be U.S. enemies because they’re essentially Israel’s enemies.
Kathleen Wells: We’re covering a lot of ground here and I can hear your critics say that you are contending that there is a cabal driving U.S. foreign policy.
Jeffrey Blankfort: When it comes to the Middle East, there is no question about it. It is not only outside of the government. Let’s [look at] what it consists of: You have AIPAC; you have the American Jewish Community; you have the Anti-Defamation League, which is quick to call any critic of Israel an anti-Semite. It is actually an organization that has been spying on American leftists since the 1930s, including me and thousands of other political activists, including the NAACP — virtually every political group that might have an issue around Israel.
We have a group called the Israel Project, which is a propaganda arm of Israel which holds regular events, press conferences in Israel and has 18 members of Congress on its board of directors. Eighteen members of the U.S. Congress on the board of a pro-Israel lobbying group which, of course, is tax exempt [and is not required to register as a foreign agent.]
You have a number of think tanks: the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which was founded by AIPAC in 1985, whose talking heads appear every Sunday, every … they’re on NPR, they’re on PBS, and they are never identified as being part of an Israeli lobby institution. The American Enterprise Institute is also a pro-Israel lobby institution. You have the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which you never hear about, but this has members of Congress, senators, a former CIA chief, Jim Woolsey [who] is on every one of these pro-Israel lobbying groups — every one of them. You have JINSA, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, founded in 1976, which has about 20 former generals and admirals on its board but also has many of the neocons: Michael Ledeen, Richard Perle, Max Kampelman. These are the ones — people who are very much involved in fomenting the Iraq war; Paul Wolfowitz. There was PNAC, Project for New American Century from 1997, which called for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, which had some of the very same people on it — mostly Jewish neocons — which is largely a Jewish movement, although not exclusively Jewish.
Fomenting the war on Iraq was done on every single level in the media. You had op-ed pieces written by William Safire in the New York Times; Abe Rosenthal in the Washington Post. You had Kristol, Chuck Krauthammer, and you had Mortimer Zuckerman, who is the owner of the US News and World Report and the New York Daily News, writing op-ed piece after op-ed piece calling for an attack on Iraq. You had Kenneth Pollack, the head of the Brookings Institution Saban Center writing a book called “The Gathering Storm” endorsing the war on Iraq.
It is a cabal, and it’s not a hidden cabal. It’s quite public, except those people who don’t want to see it don’t look at it. It’s like the monkey: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. This is how the solidarity movement has been when it comes to this cabal.
Kathleen Wells: You’ve written a piece titled “A War for Israel.” I want to touch on that piece, because last week* the last combat soldier left Iraq, and so many Americans — not all, but many Americans — are asking what was the war in Iraq about? And many will answer it was about oil. Give us your thoughts about that.
Jeffrey Blankfort: Well, it’s interesting. There is no record of oil companies wanting a war in Iraq. What the oil companies want is stability. They would like to have been able to purchase oil from Saddam Hussein, who would have liked to have sold it to them.
In fact, the same thing with Iran. Conoco, a major American oil company, had to cancel a contract with Iran under pressure from the Zionist lobby. The oil companies need stability [where they get their resources]. Their profits are guaranteed. They’d have an arrangement with Saddam Hussein like they would have with Saudi Arabia or with Kuwait. So the fact of the matter is that the war in Iraq threatened the stability of the oil companies’ [sources]. And it’s interesting that President George Bush, Sr., his Secretary of State James Baker, and his National Security Council — excuse me, National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft — all of whom had closer ties to the oil industry itself than did Bush or Cheney — they opposed the war on Iraq because they thought it would destabilize the region and would bring the Shi’a into power in Iraq, which would then make Iraq closer to Iran.
Now, what’s happened after the war is that the major oil contracts have gone, not to American companies, but to China, for example. The largest contract for oil in Iraq went to China, and that was based on a contract that was, ironically, signed with China during the reign of Saddam Hussein.
Now why was this a war for Israel? I actually wrote this in 2004, and there’s much more evidence to that effect today. There was a plan put forth by an Israeli political analyst named Oded Yinon in the 80s. The idea was to divide the Arab countries, including Iraq, into their confessional states, making several confessional states based on religion. So instead of having a country called Iraq, you would have a Shi’a Iraq, a Kurdish Iraq, and a Sunni Iraq. That would be designed to weaken Israel’s Arab enemies, and Iraq was seen as a major threat to Israel.
Another reason was Israel also wanted to see the U.S. as an occupying force in the Middle East, just like it is, so the U.S. could then use Israeli “expertise” in occupying Palestine to occupy Iraq. And many of the same techniques that Israel has used to occupy both Lebanon in the past and to occupy the occupied territories in West Bank and Gaza were used by the United States in Iraq. Also, if the United States was occupying an Arab country, it would be less prone to criticize Israel for doing the same thing. And we saw there has been far less criticism by the U.S. government since 2003 than before in terms of what it was doing in the occupied territories.
Also, in 1995, you had a group of neocons — among them Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and Meyrav Wurmser, who wrote a paper called “A Clean Break.” But this was for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, calling on Israel to get rid of the regime of Saddam Hussein and stop peace talks with the Palestinians.
Netanyahu did not adopt that position, but these very same neocons then came into the administration of George W. Bush — W, Junior — with the same policies to get rid of Saddam Hussein [as did] the Project for a New American Century.
Now, it’s interesting in the First Gulf War, George Bush, Sr., was criticized by the Zionist establishment and its friends in the media for not dethroning Saddam Hussein. And this was when the neocons turned on Bush because they thought Israel’s main enemy in Iraq was going to be eliminated and there would be regime change there that would be more favorable to Israel and would reinstate the oil line that used to go from Iraq [to] Haifa. This was probably not going to happen. But in any case, they believed that Israel would benefit from the getting rid of Saddam Hussein.
Kathleen Wells: But why did they believe that? Give me one sentence as to why they believe regime change in Iraq would benefit Israel?
Jeffrey Blankfort: They saw Iraq as the most significant foe and threat to Israel — the largest Muslim Arab state. Egypt is now out of contention because of the Camp David agreement, and Iraq was considered to be a major threat. The Zionist lobby tells [us] that they didn’t really want us to attack Iraq; they wanted to attack Iran, but statements by Israeli officials, including Shimon Perez, called on the U.S. to dethrone Saddam Hussein, because by eliminating Saddam Hussein and hopefully breaking Iraq into a Shi’a, Kurdish, and Sunni states, they would eliminate Israel’s major threat in the Arab world.
Iran is not an Arab country, and for years Israel’s foreign policy had been based on making alliances with non-Arab regimes in the region such as Turkey, Iran, and the Kurds. And so they had a long, very close relationship with Iran under the Shah. Despite the statements made by Khomeini and Iranian leaders, we saw that during Iran-Contra, that the Iranians and the Israelis were dealing arms. And Turkey now, of course, has made close ties to Iran, and this has put the U.S. in a bind, because Turkey has been a real strategic asset to the United States since World War II. And the Israel lobby is pushing for the United States to break that relationship with Turkey, because Turkey is not bending to Washington’s wishes or Israel’s wishes when it comes to Iran or to the Palestinians.
Kathleen Wells: And you’re saying that Israel — the Jewish lobby — is pushing for the United States to break with Turkey? Is that what you just stated?
Jeffrey Blankfort: Well, the Israel lobby has gone so far as to get 87 senators to sign a letter to President Obama calling for the Turkish charity that sponsored the Gaza flotilla (the last one) to be put on the terrorist list by the United States, which would be a major attack on Turkish sovereignty, because this particular charity, IHH, is the most important Turkish charity [and close to Turkey’s ruling party].
Turkey has told Israel that unless Israel apologizes for the murder of eight Turks and one Turkish-American on board the Mavi Marmara, Turkish-Israel relations will not be restored. And Israel refuses to apologize, so the Zionist establishment and its friends in the media are pushing for the U.S. to break with Turkey. But Turkey is an essential part of U.S. imperial policy and U.S. regional policies since World War II, whereas Israel has been, as I say, more of a liability. Right now Israel, by provoking Turkey and by pushing its agents in the United States, the Zionist establishment, to break with Turkey, is causing a major problem for the United States. Now the United States has been telling Turkey that it has to toe the Israel line; otherwise, it’s going to have a problem with the United States. But Turkey doesn’t need the United States as much as the United States needs Turkey.
Kathleen Wells: And you said that 87 senators have signed a letter?
Jeffrey Blankfort: They did send a letter, about a month ago, to President Obama, calling for the IHH, the Turkish charity, to be put on the terrorist list. And they’re very upset that it hasn’t happened to date.
Kathleen Wells: And this letter was drafted by whom again?
Jeffrey Blankfort: It was probably drafted by AIPAC. Before President Obama had his first meeting with Netanyahu [in 2009], he received a letter on May 9, signed — he received actually two letters : one from three quarters of the Senate and the other from three-quarters of the Congress, in which they called on him, when he met with Netanyahu, not to put any pressure on Netanyahu. And the pdf, the file sent to [members of] Congress [for their signatures], was called “AIPAC letter.” Not a single U.S. newspaper published this story other than in a blog on the Washington Post, when Al Cayman wrote, he said, “Curiously, when we opened the attachment, we noticed it was named AIPAC letter, Hoyer Canter, May 2009 pdf.”
Kathleen Wells: And so it was signed by Hoyer — Senator Hoyer, Congressman Hoyer — and Congressman Canter.
Jeffrey Blankfort: Right.
Kathleen Wells: So this is … You have Congresspersons across the aisle, Republicans and Democrats coming together on one issue, and the issue being Israel.
Jeffrey Blankfort: This has historically been the case. And not only that, in that congressional recess a year ago, Congressman Hoyer, who is the House Majority Leader — he’s not just an ordinary congressman — he led a group of thirty Democrats, just after Cantor had led a group of twenty-five Republicans to go to Israel, where they met with Netanyahu, gave press conferences shown on Israeli television, and Steny Hoyer gave his press conference — by himself — in which he took the position of Israel against the U.S. President when it came to [Jewish] settlement in Jerusalem.
Now, were a congressman doing this for any other country besides Israel, it might be called treason. But not only was this not reported here in the United States, it was also ignored by those who say that they support the Palestinian struggle here in the United States. This was online. I actually played Steny Hoyer’s comments for my radio audience so they could see what I was talking about.
Kathleen Wells: You’re saying it’s not reported. So talk to me about the media when you say things are not being reported.
Jeffrey Blankfort: The media has been a target of the Zionist establishment since its inception — since Israel’s inception — because the media is what manufactures the consent of the public to U.S. policies. In the beginning, the Zionist establishment was on the outside looking in. But over the years, it has [built] a media stable in the major newspapers, such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, whose columns are reproduced all over the United States. So it’s not just important that a Charles Krauthammer, for example, writes in the Washington Post. If it was only the Washington Post, it wouldn’t be so important, but Krauthammer’s columns appear all over the United States. You had William Safire in the New York Times, whose columns appeared everywhere. He was a close friend of Ariel Sharon. He was replaced by David Brooks, another neocon — Jewish neocon — whose columns appear everywhere around the country. You have Tom Friedman, the liberal support of Israel, whose columns [in the Times] appear all over the country. You have Jonathan Jacoby of the Boston Globe. You have Richard Cowan in the Washington Post.
You don’t have anybody anymore who is a critic of Israel writing in a mainstream newspaper. You used to have Anthony Lewis, who is Jewish, who’d write editorials or op-ed pieces for the New York Times critical of Israel. He was replaced by Tom Friedman who never does.
In 1979, the Washington Post was writing a number of articles critical of Israel. So the Jewish community leadership there complained and demanded that a representative of the Washington Jewish community be allowed to sit in the Washington Post newsroom for a week to watch how it worked. And the Washington Post editor agreed to let that happen. Over the years, the Washington Post went from being a responsible newspaper to being, editorially, a mouthpiece for the Israeli position and for the Israel lobby.
There have been exceptions. Just recently, when I was back in Washington, at the time Netanyahu was also there [and] met with President Obama — this time President Obama rolled out the red carpet; and Dana Milbank, who is their Washington columnist, wrote a column which he headed “Alliance or Dysfunctional Relationship?” And he wrote how when Netanyahu visited President Obama, White House officials, “instead of flying the U.S. flag, might have flown the white flag of surrender.”
He said [that] Tuesday, Obama, “routed and humiliated by his Israeli counterpart, invited Netanyahu back to the White House for what might be called the Oil of Olay Summit. It was all about saving face.” And then he writes “Obama came to office with an admirable hope of reviving Middle East peace efforts by appealing to the Arab world and positioning himself as more of an honest broker. But he has now learned the painful lesson that domestic politics won’t allow such a stand.” That’s pretty heavy.
Kathleen Wells: Yeah, everything you’re saying is pretty heavy, and I think that, [given] everything you are disclosing, you know, the charge of being a self-hating Jew is going to be leveled against you.
Jeffrey Blankfort: I’ve already surpassed that. I’ve been called an anti- Semite. This is like the last refuge of scoundrels, as far as I’m concerned. [chuckle] Patriotism is the first one. The charge of anti-Semitism in this case is the last.
But I’ve been following this problem for years, and when I started speaking out about the role of the Zionist lobby, I was marginalized. Now, fortunately, there are people speaking out about it. When John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt wrote the book “[The] Israel Lobby and American [U.S.] Foreign Policy,” it was a major breakthrough. Of course, they’ve been called imperialist hawks. They’ve been called anti-Semites. These are two distinguished university professors. There’s nothing, when you read their book, that is anti-Semitic, but it’s a way of trying to smear them, and the smears come not … They come not only from the right-wing, but they come also from the “left-wing,” Jews who claim to be anti-Zionist. They call Mearsheimer and Walt imperialist hawks. And there’s nothing to back that up.
My position is I’m a human being first and my responsibility is to humanity before it is to my Jewish history — my Jewish background. That’s the way I was brought up. And so, yeah, as far as I’m concerned, those criticisms only reflect the lack of arguments to challenge what I say. They have no arguments so they have to smear me.
Kathleen Wells: So President Obama will be resuming peace talks with President Netanyahu, Palestinian Authority President Abbas, King Abdullah of Jordan, and President Mubarak of Egypt on September 2. Give us your thoughts about these peace talks that are going to be taking place soon.
Jeffrey Blankfort: This reminds me of the comic strip “Peanuts,” in which every September, Lucy used to put out the football. And every time he would go to kick, she’d pull the football away. This game has grown old. There is simply no way, at this point in time, for a kind of solution — a two-state solution, or even a one-state at this point — without severe economic pressure brought to bear on Israel.
There are no pre-conditions for this peace talk. As a matter of fact, I read today that the only pre-condition that the Palestinians had was that Hillary Clinton would say — would not say — that there were no pre-conditions, and she went and said there were no pre-conditions. So the Palestinians are miffed because Abbas, who is not legally anything — his term of office expired more than a year ago. There has not been an election. [Their representation is a fiction.]
He does not even have the support of a substantial part, or even what’s left of the Palestinian Authority. A number of important Palestinians in the West Bank did not appear, simply did not show up to take a vote on him going to come and meet with President Obama. That he’s coming to meet with Obama [is] because he’s been pressured to do that, but Abbas has to be remembered as being one of the people who drafted the Oslo Agreement back in ’93, which actually betrayed the Palestinians and turned over part of the land of Palestine to Israel, which is, in fact, against international law, but that’s been ignored.
Kathleen Wells: So you’re saying President Abbas doesn’t have the authority to negotiate peace.
Jeffrey Blankfort: He really doesn’t. I mean, he doesn’t have the support of the Palestinians. If there would be some incredible deal in which Israel would agree to withdraw to the 1967 borders, he would have some credibility, but he has none. When the Goldstone Report came out criticizing Israel for its brutal behavior, brutal attack on Palestinians in Gaza, Abbas wanted to suppress the report.
I’m saying that the Palestinians don’t expect anything in these talks. This is all like a political charade, and it has been in every case.
Kathleen Wells: I was just going to ask you that. And then you mentioned the fact that there are no pre-conditions. In fact, Assistant Secretary Shapiro said last July at the Brookings [Institution] that for the fiscal year 2010 the Obama administration has requested $2.775 billion in security assistance funding specifically for Israel. And this is the largest request in history — in U.S. history — and Congress has … Go ahead.
Jeffrey Blankfort: Yeah. This is part of a ten-year package that was first negotiated by George W. Bush at the end of his term, but it was signed with President Obama’s approval. That amount of money is also not the total amount of money.
For example, President Obama, to gain the favor of the Jewish community, which is now turning on him or certain elements of it are, approved $205 million for something called the Iron Dome — a defensive shield for Israel to protect itself against rockets from Hezbollah the next time Israel launches a war on Lebanon, which is considerably more than the United States has offered to Pakistan to help the Pakistanis in what is the largest global disaster in modern times.
The United States has come up with less than $200 million for Pakistan at this particular point in time. And, in fact, [it] had the Pakistani Army divert waters that would have covered a military base there and which drowned a Pakistani town.
The United States’ commitment to Israel is, unfortunately, virtually unbreakable at this point in time, unless there is a mass movement from the American people to change it. It doesn’t appear that it’s happening, because nobody is really calling for it, even on the side of those who support the Palestinians. Or say they do.
Kathleen Wells: So let me ask you. Since our support — or Obama’s support rather — the administration’s support of Israel is so generous and effective, why is President Obama so unpopular in Israel?
Jeffrey Blankfort: Well, first of all, it begins with his speech in Cairo. Well, maybe that continues. The Israeli public, the Ashkenazi — the European Jewish public –is very racist. They’re racist against the Ethiopian Jews that emigrated there from Ethiopia. They’re racist against dark-skinned Jews, who are really the Arab Jews who emigrated from Arab countries. One of the reasons that the right wing Likud came into power in 197[7] was because the European Ashkenazi Jews who ran the Labor Party looked down on the Jews from the Arab lands, dark-skinned Jews who were indistinguishable physically from Palestinian Arabs, whereas the European Jews were white. I guess they lost their color after leaving ancient Palestine 2000 years ago.
In any case, the racism is a great part of it, the same kind of racism that we see here against Obama on the part of a significant segment of the American public that has nothing to do with his policies. The idea that his name, of course, is Barack Hussein Obama and then he was born to a Muslim father only added to this. We see today that 20 percent of Americans think that Obama is a Muslim.
Kathleen Wells: And he is not, I want to …
Jeffrey Blankfort: And he’s not.
Kathleen Wells: Yes.
Jeffrey Blankfort: But the point is that the Israelis are used to having a President who bends over and kisses the behind of whoever is the Israeli Prime Minister. And that was the case with Bill Clinton. It was the case with George W. Bush. And they expected the same with Obama. The first George Bush, however, was the last President to really stand up to Israel, and he paid for it at election time when he lost to Clinton. He probably …
Kathleen Wells: Oh, I thought Kennedy was the last President to stand up to …
Jeffrey Blankfort: No, Kennedy took three positions that were red lines for Israel. One, Kennedy supported the Palestinian “right of return” — Resolution 194 — which called for Palestinians as individuals to determine whether they would take compensation or return to their homes in Palestine. Kennedy realized that all Palestinians couldn’t return, but he believed a significant number should be allowed to return, and he supported that. Israel was adamantly against that.
President Kennedy was adamantly opposed to Israel’s nuclear weapons, both publicly and privately, as he was with the Palestinian “right of return,” and he was very upset with the way the Israelis lied to him about what they were doing in Dimona — that they were building [a] nuclear reactor for peaceful purposes, a propaganda lie that was propagated by the American Zionist Council here in the United States, which they bragged about.
The third position of Kennedy was that his Justice Department, under his brother Bobby, was making a serious effort to get the American Zionist Council, which was a predecessor to AIPAC, to be registered as a foreign agent. And they refused to do so. They kept stalling and stalling until Kennedy was assassinated, and then under Johnson, all these particular campaigns were allowed to die. And Johnson became the first really pro-Israel President we’ve had. Most of that is not known about Kennedy. Professor Chomsky never writes about it. He doesn’t consider it to be important. It would interfere with his position that the United States supports Israel because it’s an asset. That’s not the way Kennedy saw it.
Jeffrey Blankfort: Now Bush, Sr., in 1991, decided that he wanted to force Israel to come to the peace table. It should be noted that when Bush was Vice President, when Israel bombed the Iraq nuclear reactor, Bush wanted Israel to be sanctioned. He was outvoted by President Reagan and Secretary of State Alexander Haig. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, Bush also wanted Israel to be sanctioned. Again he was outvoted by Reagan and Haig. This is documented by Moshe Arens, Israel’s Foreign Minister at the time, in his book “Broken Covenant: The US Israel Relationship and the Bush Presidency.” – (The book title is Broken Covenant: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis Between the U.S. and Israel.)
In 1991, when Israel came to Bush and wanted ten billion dollars in loan guarantees from the U.S. government at a time when our economy was hurting, Bush saw this as Israel’s way of not engaging in peace talks, and he told Israel … He asked the Israeli Prime Minister Shamir to postpone his request for four months. Shamir decided he would not do it and he would go over his head to Congress. When Bush Sr. found out and realized that Congress would override his veto of the $10-billion loan guarantees, he went to the American people [on TV] on September 12, 1991, and [held] a press conference/statement, in which he said, “There are a thousand lobbyists up here on Capitol Hill against little old me.” And he told the American public the amount of money that each Israeli citizen — man, woman, and child — was getting in aid from the United States.
At this time there were a thousand — at least a thousand — Jewish lobbyists on Capitol Hill talking to members of Congress about passing the loan guarantee legislation. And so the very next day the polls showed that the American public was behind Bush by 85 percent. This really scared the lobby and members of Congress. And so they retreated. But the head of AIPAC at the time, a man named Thomas Dine, made a statement that September 12, 1991, would be a day that would live in infamy. And from that moment on, even Republicans such as William Safire in the New York Times began attacking Bush over the economy. They wouldn’t attack over this issue but over the economy.
And in February of ’92, when Bush again would not approve the loan guarantees, they went after him big time. This is all very well documented. The Congressional Record is filled with speeches attacking the President and supporting Israel. The only person who spoke against the loan guarantees was the late Senator Robert Byrd, but you did not read what he had to say in the American press because the American press by 1992 was parroting essentially the Israeli line.
Jeffrey Blankfort: The failure to get the loan guarantees, at that time, embarrassed Shamir, and he was defeated by Rabin for Prime Minister, and with the November elections rolling around, Bush then agreed to give loan guarantees to Israel while deducting the amount of money that was being spent on the settlements. Bush was adamantly against the Jewish settlements; he wanted a freeze on the settlements. He did not want any Russian Jews going to the settlements.
Kathleen Wells: Hasn’t Obama been trying to impose a settlement freeze on Netanyahu?
Jeffrey Blankfort: He did in the beginning, but, unfortunately, he found out that Congress was not behind him. And unlike at the time when the first George Bush did it, there was nobody writing editorials or op-ed pieces in the American press that was supporting it. So in a sense he found himself out on a limb spending political capital that he could not afford to spend. When you have the U.S. Congress supporting the position of a foreign government and that being ignored by those who criticize our government, it’s quite an astonishing situation.
Kathleen Wells: I interview members of Congress. Do you think I can get any members of Congress to sit down and have an interview with me about this issue?
Jeffrey Blankfort: Well, you could probably get ex-members of Congress. Once somebody is out of Congress, they’re usually more willing to talk about it. Lynn Woolsey in Marin County told a group of visiting constituents, including my sister a couple of years ago, that half the people in Congress are afraid of AIPAC or they hate AIPAC, and they’re intimidated by AIPAC. And then Congressman Henry Waxman from Los Angeles, who’s the liberals’ darling but is a hatchet man for AIPAC within Congress, told Woolsey that if somebody opposed her in the Democratic primary who’s a serious candidate, they would support that person because of a couple of votes she had taken against the AIPAC position.
And we have Maxine Waters, now under investigation in Los Angeles for a charge that is nothing compared to what so many members of Congress have done to enrich their own pocketbooks. But Maxine Waters made a couple of mistakes. Back in, actually, 1991, when Congress was supporting loan guarantees for Israel, she tried to circulate a petition among her fellow members of Congress for loan guarantees for American cities at a time when the economy was hurting. She only got 38 signatures, and then under pressure, she pulled it. That was also never reported in [the] American media, but I did report it in my Middle East Labor Bulletin.
Then in 2004, when Cynthia McKinney was running to get back into Congress, Maxine Waters went to Atlanta, Georgia, to speak on behalf of McKinney, where I interviewed her, and recently she has taken some votes that AIPAC doesn’t like. And so now she is in their cross-hairs or the cross-hairs of the House Ethics Committee, which might as well be speaking for the Israel lobby.
Kathleen Wells: Why do you say that? Why do you say the House Ethics Committee is speaking for the Israeli lobby?
Jeffrey Blankfort: Well, because there are a number of unethical positions that have been taken by members of Congress who are very strong supporters of Israel over the years who have not found themselves targeted. I mean, when you find members of Congress, particularly in the Senate Banking and Finance Committee, getting millions of dollars in contributions from the savings and loans and banks, and so on, and becoming millionaires by the time they get out of Congress, some real questions need to be asked, but they’re never asked.
Kathleen Wells: Haven’t you written a book or a pamphlet called, “If Americans Only Knew?” Did you write something like that?
Jeffrey Blankfort: No. Actually, If Americans Knew is a website — excellent website — which has some of my articles and information about how the Zionist lobby influences United States politics and the media. If Americans Knew is run by an activist named Alison Weir, and I recommend that to all of your listeners.
Kathleen Wells: Speak to me about how the American labor unions have been influenced by the lobbies.
Jeffrey Blankfort: One of the cornerstones of the support for Israel in this country has been the American labor unions, which were predominantly Jewish in leadership because of Jewish activity in labor unions in the 30s and 40s. So they were early supporters of the State of Israel. And it was interesting, in 1983 there was an article in the Hadassah Courier — Hadassah being the leading Jewish women’s organization — which began, as I recall, saying in the lobby of the AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington, there is a bust of Golda Meir, the former Prime Minister of Israel, and that’s not surprising because, next to the organized Jewish community, the strongest support for Israel has been from American labor unions. And the article goes on to talk about the millions of dollars in State of Israel bonds that the American labor unions have purchased with their members’ dues, but their members aren’t aware of this. The article, by the way, was written by Wolf Blitzer, who is a former staff member of AIPAC, now frequently seen on CNN. He also wrote for the Jerusalem Post.
What happens is you have about 1,700 labor unions who have invested in State of Israel bonds, which obliges them to be lobbyists for Israel on the basis that, as long as the Israeli economy is in good shape, their bonds are in good shape; but if the Israeli economy will go south, so will their investments. The Israeli bond corporation, which is part of the Israel government, has sold State of Israel bonds to about half the states in the union, to many, many pension funds, and most of their members are not aware of it. It is very difficult to get this information — who exactly owns what and how much — unless you have an inside or an in with these organizations.
Kathleen Wells: How did you become aware of it?
Jeffrey Blankfort: When I read this article in 1983 by Wolf Blitzer, it was what encouraged me to accept the suggestion of my friend, Steve Zeltzer — who is also Jewish, a labor union activist — to form the Labor Committee on the Middle East and start doing research on the labor unions’ ties with Israel. And they are very, very strong.
The AFL-CIO is the lone international labor union that has not taken a position supporting Palestinian workers. They are very close to the Israeli Labor Federation, Histadrut, which is discriminating against Palestinian workers and is historically part of the Israeli problem. They were the main organization that organized the businesses and industries of pre-state Israel. It also had close ties with South Africa during the apartheid regime.
Kathleen Wells: You’ve mentioned that you disagree with Chomsky’s views regarding the boycott, divestment and sanction tactics/strategies. Recently, I know that California launched a BDS campaign. Elaborate on how you and Chomsky differ and the recent campaign launched in California.
Jeffrey Blankfort: Well, actually, I believe Professor Chomsky endorses the campaign launched in California recently to get on the ballot next year. What Chomsky opposes is Israel itself being a target for sanctions — Israeli companies, Israeli cultural — actors, actresses, musicians, and so on — academics. This boycott … A boycott of Israel totally has been called for by representatives of Palestine’s … Palestinian civil society.
They believe that this should be the same kind of boycott that was inflicted on South Africa and helped to end apartheid there. What Professor Chomsky and many of those who support him and live in this country believe [is] that the boycott divestment and sanctions should only be targeted on companies and businesses that invest or are active in the occupied territory that participate in the oppression and occupation of the Palestinians. So the question is: Is Israel allowed to get off the hook? And the Palestinian civil society says no.
Professor Chomsky believes that for Americans to support that position is hypocritical because they should be calling for a boycott of the United States, since Professor Chomsky believes that Israel only does actions that are authorized by the United States and that Israel is not the main culprit but the United States is. And I beg to differ with him on that.
Also, he believes that those who support targeting Israel are actually harming the Palestinian cause — that includes the Palestinian themselves — because this information, this attitude, would be used by hardliners within Israel and the United States to damage the Palestinian cause. There’s been no evidence of that, and he gives no example of that.
So this is an important difference between Professor Chomsky and I, between Professor Chomsky and the Palestinian Civil society. Many organizations are calling for an international boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel, which is supported around the world by a number of trade unions, a number of cultural actors and actresses — people who’ve been involved in the anti-apartheid work and see the same kind of struggle taking place in trying to bring Israel to its knees.
Kathleen Wells: So California is the first state in the United States that has launched a BDS campaign. Talk to me … Give me some specifics how this program, this campaign, will be launched.
Jeffrey Blankfort: As I understand it, it was launched in Los Angeles by a group of people, pro-Palestinian supporters, and the idea is to let the American or the California citizenry vote as to whether state pension funds in California should be required to divest from investments that they have in Israel that benefits Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Not Israel per se, but Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
They need 400,000 signatures to get it on the ballot next year, and it will be the first kind of a campaign of its type and what is … It will be mightily opposed by the Israel lobby and probably by all of the nation — nationwide media, not just California media. And we expect to see all kinds of money and activity coming in to try and stop this event, but if we could get 400,000 signatures to put this on the ballot — it is a possibility to educate the public about this issue in a way they’ve never been educated before.
Kathleen Wells: Now, when you make this distinction between they’re not campaigning against Israel per se, but rather Israel’s occupation of Gaza …
Jeffrey Blankfort: Well, no, occupation of the West Bank. And of course, it’s not officially of Gaza, but Gaza has a large prison camp which they control. It’s essentially … it’s the same, but they have no investments in Gaza. But there are a number of American businesses, companies — Caterpillar, Motorola, IBM, Intel — have investments in the occupied territories, do business there. There are millions of dollars involved in investing in Israel — in the occupied territories — and so the idea is to cause those institutions that have those investments to divest them. I think they’re talking about the state institutions, not private institutions.
Kathleen Wells: Oh, state institutions.
Jeffrey Blankfort: Right.
Kathleen Wells: I’m just trying to figure out how you make this distinction between not campaigning against Israel per se, as opposed to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. How do you draw that distinction? I’m not clear on it.
Jeffrey Blankfort: I don’t actually draw that distinction. Probably to get more people to sign this, it would seem that Israel itself is not being punished but just Israel’s occupation. However, supporters of Israel will treat this as if it was Israel itself because they are now propagating a campaign around the world saying that the boycott, divestment and sanction movement is a movement to de-legitimize Israel. And, of course, there’s nothing in any of the statements that say that. What is being de-legitimized is a country that occupies other people’s land for decades, and if Israel has a problem with its own legitimacy, so do many other people, among them myself.
Kathleen Wells: Because to say it’s not against Israel, but Israel is occupying the West Bank, so I don’t see…
Jeffrey Blankfort: Yes. So the idea is to only punish that aspect of Israel, those investments that are directly in the West Bank, those companies that have businesses or factories in the West Bank, or those companies that produce materials, like Caterpillar and their bulldozers that are used to demolish Palestinian homes; they have a special bulldozer for that. And so there’s been a long campaign, which has not been very successful so far, to get Caterpillar to not sell its bulldozers to Israel. And this is kind of an escalation of that.
Kathleen Wells: And then how will California residents be involved? What … say, assuming they get the requisite number of signatures, what is that? 400,000?
Jeffrey Blankfort: Something like that.
Kathleen Wells: Yeah. And they get those signatures and then will it be California residents asking that their pension funds …
Jeffrey Blankfort: There are a number of state pension funds, and those pension funds were the ones that would have to divest. That would also include the universities, I presume. I’m not sure of all the details. I haven’t read the fine print. But I assume any state institution that invested in any business that did business in the occupied territories or contributed to enhancing or maintaining the occupation would be a legitimate target. And they would have to divest those funds if the voters of California approved that.
Kathleen Wells: Now we talked dramatically about the pro-Israel influence with Democrats in D.C. Elaborate on this notion how this influence — this pro- Israel influence — in D.C. is also … whether or not it’s a bipartisan effort?
Jeffrey Blankfort: There is probably no more bipartisan effort on a critical issue — not a Mother’s day resolution or a resolution to thank our veterans. There is no other issue in which both political parties have historically marched in locked step with one another. So you have Senator Boxer here in California arm-in-arm with former Senator Jesse Helms. The most right-wing racist senators, congressmen, and the most liberal of Democrats march arm-in-arm when it comes to pledging their allegiance to Israel. The Democrats get the most money, but the Republicans, now, in more recent years, get money from Christian-Zionists, who are even more zealous than so many Jewish Zionists about Israel maintaining every inch of the West Bank and even more.
But what happens if you are a Republican and you step out of line and you criticize Israel, you will be targeted. Then the three famous cases of Charles Percy — Senator Charles Percy of Illinois, who was very pro-Israel — I mean he was also … believed the Palestinians should have their rights.
When he, in 1981, voted for what they call the AWACS, the Advanced Air Warning System, to sell this advanced warning system to Saudi Arabia which would protect it from hostile attack, President Reagan lobbied personally to get Charles Percy to change his vote. And Charles Percy changed his vote and voted for AWACS to sell to Saudi Arabia and it passed. And the Israel lobby organization – AIPAC — then targeted Charles Percy — deliberately, openly, publicly — to get some congressman [Paul Simon] to run against him. And they succeeded and Percy was defeated.
There was another Illinois congressman, Paul Findley, who also spoke favorably of the Palestinians. He later wrote a book about it called “They Dared to Speak Out”. He was also targeted. “They Dared to Speak Out” was a story of what happens to people in this country — not just politicians, but teachers and so on — who have dared to publicly speak out against the Israel lobby and the policies of the State of Israel.
Finally, there was my lawyer, Pete McCloskey, a marine veteran from California who openly supported the Palestinians [in Congress]. He supported Israel, he supported two-state solution before it was acceptable. There was a time when anyone who supported two states was considered anti-Israel. Twenty years ago, if you called for two states, you were anti-Israel. Pete McCloskey called for two states; he was targeted. So Republicans know, just like Democrats, that if they speak out against Israel or are critical of Israel policy, they are going to be just as much of a target as a Democrat.
So what you see are these 400 to four votes, 99 to one in the Senate. The one now is dead — the late Bobby Byrd, Robert Byrd. So the votes now will be 100 to nothing when it comes to pro-Israel positions. It’s a pretty ugly situation. There’s no other issue that is of such importance to America and to the world in which both houses of the U.S. Congress come together. No parliament in France, England, anywhere else is like this, even those countries that support Israel. There’s nothing comparable to this, because they don’t have the money in their politics that we have in ours.
Kathleen Wells: So you’re saying that it used to be 99 to one with the late Senator Byrd being the only senator that would vote against Israel on legislation?
Jeffrey Blankfort: Or any issue that might involve Israel, critical of Israel. Byrd was the only one who would do that. He was well-liked and well-loved. He brought a lot of money back to West Virginia. He took care of West Virginia very well and so he was not the kind of person that AIPAC would think of attacking. They just ignored him. He would make statements on the floor of Congress critical of Israel, and the newspapers would not publish them.
Kathleen Wells: Okay. This is my last question, I promise. What prescriptions can you offer for an effective pro-Palestinian movement?
Jeffrey Blankfort: We need to recognize that, as someone once said, “All politics is local,” and the Israeli-Palestine issue is no exception. When we have schools firing teachers, when we have healthcare limited, when we don’t have universal healthcare, when we have serious economic problems in all our communities, all our localities, the notion that we are contributing, giving money to Israel … They’re not buying these weapons with their money. That we are giving them the money to buy these weapons [is outrageous]. And we are fighting wars that they want — sending our soldiers to fight and die and kill innocent people on an agenda that was Israel’s before it was ours.
Members of Congress [who] support that they should be targeted and exposed with the speeches that they have made. It’s all available online. You go to the AIPAC website, aipac.org, and you look at all the letters that have been sent to various persons by members of Congress over the years, it’s all there. It’s not secret. And those members of Congress should be held to account. And I’m sure, for example, if the American public could have heard the speech of Andrew Shapiro, which I played for my listeners — and it enraged them — to the Brookings Institution about the U.S.-Israel relationship, they would be enraged. But the point is we have to speak to ordinary Americans who have no vested interests in the outcome in the Middle East, either Jewish or Arab Americans. This is an issue that is the responsibility of all Americans. This is what needs to be done and, of course, Israel itself should be targeted. Israeli institutions should be targeted.
We didn’t bring up the example of the USS Liberty, the ship that was attacked and [almost] sunk by the Israelis in 1967 in which 34 sailors were killed and 171 wounded [during] more than an hour of attacks, and the survivors were not allowed to talk about it by President Johnson under penalty of court martial. The American public doesn’t know about that. But my experience is, when I talk to people about the Liberty, they do get angry, and they would get angrier if they knew what Israel has been doing with our support.
I would like to bring up the role of certain members of Congress who consider themselves to be agents of Israel rather than United States. And there was one I wrote about named Steven Solarz, who back in 1980 sent his constituents very proudly a letter in which he wrote … It was titled, “Delivering for Israel,” and I quote. He said, “It is a story of how legislative maneuvering and political persistence managed to prevail over physical constraints and bureaucratic resistance.” This is how they got an additional $660 million in foreign aid for Israel and how, he said, “given that this was an election year.”
He also wrote to his constituents, largely Jewish at the time, I quote. He said, “We also gently suggested to the Secretary Cyrus Vance that we were prepared to take the fight for increase in aid to the floor of Congress. That it might put the administration in an election year in a bad light with some of its most important constituencies if it would be seen to be opposing in an effort to help Israel.”
And then, shortly thereafter, Secretary Vance [said] the administration had decided to recommend an increase of from $1 billion to $1.2 billion in additional military assistance, but to keep at the same level — $785 million — the amount of economic assistance for Israel. So an additional half of a billion dollars of U.S. money went to Israel as a result of the pressure of Steven Solarz and his fellow agents for Israel in the U.S. Congress in 1980, when the U.S. economy was in the doldrums as it is today.
Kathleen Wells: As it is today.
Jeffrey Blankfort: And you have the same thing happening today, 30 years later, except Solarz is no longer in Congress. We have Howard Berman. We have Charles Schumer. We have Jane Harman. We have Henry Waxman. We have Eric Cantor. We have Eric Weiner, Eliot Engle, Gerald Nadler, and I could keep on and on and on.
Kathleen Wells: And why hasn’t there been a national campaign to educate Americans about U.S. aid to Israel and an attempt to end it?
Jeffrey Blankfort: Well, there is an organization. There are campaigns, but they’re not conducted with enthusiasm, and they don’t have the enthusiastic support of people in the solidarity movement who believe that the problem is U.S. imperialism and not Israel.
In their slogans, they keep repeating, “End the occupation. End the occupation.” I would say that the majority of Americans, if you ask them on the street, and you say “End the occupation,” they won’t know what you’re talking about. But if you say, “Stop aid to Israel” and you tell them how much money is involved, particularly at this point in time, they would put their heads up, and they would wonder, and they would be concerned, especially when after-school programs are being cut and when their teachers are no longer able to get jobs. And when they themselves are out of work.
Kathleen Wells, J.D., is a political correspondent for Race-Talk. Kathleen is a native of Los Angeles and has degrees in political science and law, from UCLA and UC Berkeley, respectively. She writes/blogs on law and politics.
The Original Audio Version (Part 1, 2 and 3) : http://www.race-talk.org/?p=5833
Why won’t the Tampa Trib tell you what people in Nashville know about Steve Emerson?
By John Sugg | Creative Loafing | November 2, 2010
Steven Emerson, a self-styled terrorism expert, is a guy who had a profound and caustic impact on Tampa for more than a decade. Emerson has had much less of an impact on another city, Nashville, although his corrosive brand of often-inaccurate smear jobs recently slithered into Tennessee.
Still, Nashville’s citizens know a whole lot more about Emerson than folks in Tampa, despite his relatively recent arrival on the Tennessee hate-Muslim soapbox, where he jostles for the limelight with loopy religious fanatics and just plain old-fashioned Southern bigots.
Why that imbalance of knowledge about Emerson? The answer lies in a horrible miscarriage of journalism committed over many years by The Tampa Tribune, a series of atrocities the Trib could easily correct by just providing a dash of fair and accurate reporting, something history indicates the newspaper won’t do. Nashville should be grateful that it has a newspaper, The Tennessean, which unlike the Trib will fearlessly dig out the truth.
In tandem with his vassal reporter at the Tampa Trib, Michael Fechter, Emerson waged a decade-long jihad against a professor at the University of South Florida, Sami Al-Arian, accused by Emerson and Fechter of being a terrorist mastermind. Emerson and Fechter were backed by a shadowy network of former federal agents and foreign spooks, notably a disinformation specialist for Israel’s ultra-right Likud party named Yigal Carmon and a controversial ex-FBI official named Oliver “Buck” Revell – and a lot of money whose origins have never been revealed.
However, where their information came from was clear. As the great Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz explained before Al-Arian’s 2005 federal trial: “Israel owns much of the copyright for the case; a well-informed source termed the prosecution an ‘American-Israeli co-production.’ The Americans are running the show, but behind the scenes it was the Israelis who for years collected material (and) transmitted information…” How did they transmit information? In part, via “secret evidence” slipped to our federales, evidence and accusers Al-Arian wasn’t allowed to confront (who needs that nasty old Sixth Amendment?). But reporters were also conduits for scurrilous “intelligence” claims. Fechter himself wrote that “former and current senior Israeli intelligence officials” loaded his stories with information. Those allegations, many ludicrous on their face, were rejected by a federal jury, despite a highly prejudiced judge and rulings that, if they had been issued against Martin Luther King Jr. would have prevented him from mentioning Jim Crow in his defense.
Over the years, while a Weekly Planet and Creative Loafing editor, I had a great deal of fun exposing Emerson, and the prevarications by Fechter and the federal government. I tried to put into context what the anti-Muslim crusaders were up to. I joined a rather elite cadre of journalists that had tangled with Emerson – including famed investigative reporters Seymour Hersh, Robert I. Friedman and Robert Parry, who provided me with insight into Emerson’s real agenda.
Emerson filed two bogus lawsuits against me, the Weekly Planet (AKA Creative Loafing) and an AP reporter who had told me about questions he had had over the provenance of a document Emerson gave the news service. We obtained a court order that would have forced Emerson to produce real proof of his allegations – and he knew we were digging into who he really was and who paid his bills – so he ran away from the fight he started; the good guys (me, for example) prevailed.
It’s noteworthy that a number of dispassionate analysts had observations similar to mine. New York University scholar Zachary Lockman, for example, (as quoted on “Right Web”) wrote in 2005: “[Emerson’s] main focus during the 1990s was to sound the alarm about the threat Muslim terrorists posed to the United States. By the end of that decade Emerson was describing himself as a ‘terrorist expert and investigator’ and ‘Executive Director, Terrorism Newswire, Inc.’ Along the way, critics charged, Emerson had sounded many false alarms, made numerous errors of fact, bandied accusations about rather freely, and ceased to be regarded as credible by much of the mainstream media . The September 11 attacks seemed to bear out Emerson’s warnings, but his critics might respond that even a stopped clock shows the right time twice a day.”
Again, it’s sadly significant that the Trib never even provided such mild doses of context about its primary source, Emerson, in its inflammatory, intentionally erroneous and misleading, and often racist diatribes against Al-Arian. The Trib still gives Emerson ink – never questioning his claims and guilt-by-association-and-innuendo tactics, and never vetting his background, associations, financing and motives.
Some insight on Emerson’s millions has now been provided by The Tennessean, Nashville’s daily newspaper. MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, citing the Tennessean’s reports, on Oct. 26 awarded Emerson his nightly “Worst Person in the World” citation. Olbermann expressed regret that the network had previously used Emerson as a chattering head on terrorism topics. (Similarly, CBS did not renew its contract with Emerson after he claimed that the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing had “a Middle Eastern trait” because it was carried out “with the intent to inflict as many casualties as possible.” That was a big “Oops.”)
The Tennessean reported that Emerson collects money through a non-profit, the Investigative Project on Terrorism Foundation, and then funnels that money to his for-profit SAE (as in Steven A. Emerson) Productions. Quoting Ken Berger, president of Charity Navigator, a nonprofit watchdog group, the Nashville paper reported: “Basically, you have a nonprofit acting as a front organization, and all that money going to a for-profit. It’s wrong. This is off the charts.”
That little bit of information on Emerson, contained in one report, is far more than the Trib told you about Emerson over a decade – despite Emerson using the Trib to provoke a legal firestorm that is still ongoing.
You do recall the firestorm, right? Emerson and Fechter launched a series of attacks on Muslims. No amount of hyperbole and vitriol-spewing was considered excessive by the Trib or Emerson. Fechter, for example, darkly hinted that the FBI found documents about MacDill Air Force Base among Al-Arian’s papers, insinuating some dastardly design. Nope. Al-Arian had twice been invited to speak to large groups of military and intelligence officers, and the sinister documents were, well, just the hand-out materials. Fechter, following the lead of his guru, Emerson, also tried to blame the Oklahoma City bombing on Arabs, an egregiously false story the Trib has never seen fit to correct. Emerson, meanwhile, said in February 1996 that Palestinian advocates at USF were involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Emerson promised proof “in the near term.” The proof never came, and the Justice Department said it had no records supporting the allegation.
You think the Trib might have called Emerson on that one? Hahaha.
The former head of the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Tampa, Robert O’Neill, twice concluded during the 1990s there was no evidence to prosecute Al-Arian, according to my multiple sources in the Justice Department. I don’t like quoting anonymous sources so I’ll be clear: O’Neill, now the U.S. Attorney for Florida’s Middle District, himself told me he had looked at the evidence and found no reason to prosecute. In 1998, the then FBI counterterrorism chief Bob Blitzer also told me “no federal laws were broken” by the Tampa Muslims.
Yet, after 9/11, propelled by hate-Muslim diatribes from Bill O’Reilly (who had been funneled highly slanted information by Fechter) and the fear by Jeb Bush that the University of South Florida would conclude a settlement with Al-Arian that would prove embarrassing to the Bushite regimes in Washington and Tallahassee, the federal government indicted Al-Arian. The trial concluded with the government failing to win a single guilty verdict against Al-Arian or his co-defendants, an immense disaster for the Bush Justice Department.
Al-Arian later plea bargained in order to preclude another trial on counts on which the jury didn’t reach a verdict – although notably no more than two jurors felt he was guilty on even those “hung” counts. Al-Arian’s plea bargain stipulated that he had had no involvement in terrorist activities. Rather, he had provided some minor support to people who might have become terrorists, although it’s clear from the trial that any such activities by Al-Arian occurred when they were legal. The plea agreement supposedly ended all business between Al-Arian and the federal government. However, due to legal chicanery by a rogue federal prosecutor in Virginia, Gordon Kromberg – who has been called a doppelganger of Emerson – Al-Arian remains entangled in federal courts and on house arrest.
According to my federal sources, the Al-Arian case cost our government at least $50 million, and, no, the Trib and Emerson didn’t offer to pay part of the bill (you and I had that honor). And, with so many FBI agents chasing a guy whose “guilt” was mostly in exercising his First Amendment rights, the FBI missed another fellow flitting around Florida, a real terrorist with blood on his mind, Mohammed Atta.
The final chapters in the Trib’s pogroms against Muslims had a sadly humorous angle. Fechter, who had long been a tool of Emerson’s, finally got slightly honest and went to work for his mentor. And Fechter dumped his wife and children and shacked up with one of the federal prosecutors who tried Al-Arian. I don’t recall where Fechter got his journalism training, but he must have skipped the classes on journalistic objectivity and not sleeping with your sources.
So, The Tennessean’s articles might have provided an excellent opportunity for the Trib to revisit and maybe heal a terrible wound it was complicit in inflicting in Tampa. On Friday, I asked Trib Managing Editor Richard “Duke” Maas if he had such an inclination – heck, I inquired, aren’t you interested in what The Tennessean wrote about a guy who had so much impact on Tampa and your newspaper? Well, not really, Maas responded, sounding more irritated than journalistically curious. He added that Fechter had left the newspaper, which I gather meant he felt the Trib was thereby absolved of responsibility.
If you happen to have a spare backbone, you might send it to the pathetic folks at The Tampa Tribune.
John F. Sugg was editor of the Weekly Planet in the 1990s, and group senior editor of Creative Loafing Newspapers until he retired in 2008.
Israel relationship is costing the U.S. its alliance with Turkey
By Gil Maguire | November 5, 2010
Israel and its U.S. lobby’s insistence on unquestioning U.S. support for Israel in its brutal and illegal conduct toward Palestinian and Turkish civilians has cost the U.S. a major, strategic ally, Turkey, and has severely undermined U.S. foreign policy goals, strategy, and power in the Middle East.
President George W. Bush has been accused of having the most disastrous foreign policy in U.S. history. Unfortunately, President Obama’s apparent inability to stand up to Israel’s U.S. lobby may have created a foreign policy catastrophe that exceeds even that of his hapless predecessor by costing the U.S. the loss of Turkey as our main strategic ally in the region, and by drastically reducing U.S. influence and power in the Middle East.
If this sounds implausible, consider the following: Turkey just recently concluded a public but covert military air combat training exercise with the Chinese in Turkey in which the Chinese flew their jet fighter aircraft from China to Turkey, refueling in Iran. Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao just made a state visit to Turkey after which both countries concluded a strategic cooperation agreement. China will build a 4500-kilometer railroad to Turkey, along with two high-speed rail lines, plus oil pipeline systems from Iran to Turkish ports. China has agreed to sell military equipment to Turkey, and is also developing a surface-to-surface rocket-launching system together with Turkey. Turkey’s foreign minister visited China this week, working out details of its new strategic relationship. Turkey has also strengthened its ties with Russia, Iraq, Syria and Iran, and refused to support the most recent UN resolution imposing sanctions on Iran.
Turkey has ceased all cooperation with its former close ally, Israel, including closing its airspace to Israeli planes, ceasing all cooperative military exercises, ending intelligence sharing with Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, and has changed Israel’s status from a close ally to a strategic threat. Turkey has strongly condemned Israel for its brutal conduct against Palestinian and Turkish civilians in Israel’s December 2008 Gaza invasion, and the recent Gaza aid flotilla incident, accusing Israel of committing state terrorism. Turkey has also accused the U.S., formerly its strongest ally, of supporting an international terrorist (Israel) for failing to condemn Israel’s atrocities, and for its monetary, military, and diplomatic support of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians and illegal settlement activity in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
In less than two years, Turkey has changed from being a strong U.S. ally and NATO member to a country pursuing an independent path toward strategic relationships with countries that are either adversaries or potential adversaries of the U.S. How did we get to this point?
Turkey’s Importance as a Major U.S. Strategic Ally
Turkey, a nation of 73 million Muslims, has been a major strategic ally of the U.S. for some six decades since the beginnings of the Cold War, providing the U.S. with military bases and a forward bulwark against Soviet expansionism into the Middle-East and the Mediterranean. Turkey fought alongside the U.S. in the Korean War, and risked nuclear annihilation during the Cuban Missile Crisis by allowing the U.S. to station nuclear-tipped Jupiter missiles in Turkey, on the Soviet Union’s doorstep.
Turkey has the second largest military force in NATO and occupies one of the most vital geographic areas in the world, bordering the Mediterranean, Greece, Bulgaria, the Black Sea, Russia, Georgia, Armenia, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. It has the second fastest growing economy in the world, behind only China. Most important, Turkey is a stable, moderate, secular, Muslim democracy and provides a model template for success for the many Muslim nations in the Middle East and South Asia that suffer from instability, autocratic rule, religious extremism, and poverty.
Turkey also provides the U.S. with an invaluable entrée into the Muslim world and a proven ability to conduct effective diplomacy and mediation among Muslim nations such as Iraq, Syria, and Iran. Turkey permits the U.S. to use a critical military air base and transportation hub at Incirlik, in southeastern Turkey While strong militarily, Turkey has been successfully moving to reduce tensions with all of its neighbors, including traditional rivals such as Greece, Armenia, Syria, and Iraq, and, in addition, has also moved to defuse the conflicts with its minority Kurdish population. It has also taken steps, in part with Brazil, to reduce the conflict between Iran and the West. In short, Turkey, under its strong civilian leadership, has become a major strategic player in the world economically, politically, and diplomatically, and a vital player and asset for the U.S. and its European allies in the Muslim world and in the Middle East and South Asia.
It is difficult to imagine an ally of greater strategic importance to the U.S. in the Middle East than Turkey. Its loss is a major blow to U.S. vital national security interests.
The Gaza Disasters and the Loss of Turkey
In December of 2008, the U.S. and Turkey remained strong, close NATO allies. Israel and Turkey also had a strong strategic alliance in which they cooperated on intelligence matters, and conducted joint military training exercises; Israel had the use of Turkish airspace for training and operational use; Turkey purchased weapons systems from Israel; trade and tourism between the two countries was booming. Turkey was also mediating the disputes between Syria and Israel in the hope of resolving their differences and achieving a permanent peace treaty for the two countries.
Israel’s brutal bombing and shelling of civilian noncombatants in its invasion of Gaza in December 2008, and in its violent capture of a Gaza aid ship in May of 2010, in which nine Turkish citizens were killed, at least five execution-style, by Israeli commandos, deeply angered the Turks. These events, coupled with subsequent UN investigative reports that confirmed Israeli atrocities against civilians and other war crimes in both incidents, ultimately caused Turkey to end its close strategic alliance with Israel. The U.S.’ unquestioning support of Israel in both incidents, even after both later UN investigative reports confirmed Israeli atrocities toward civilians, caused Turkey to be highly critical of the U.S., and ultimately caused it to reduce its strategic alliance with the U.S. and seek, or at least consider, new strategic relationships and agreements with potential U.S. adversaries such as Russia, Iran, and, of greatest and most recent concern, China.
The strength and effectiveness of Israel’s U.S. lobby in influencing U.S. foreign policy in matters related to Israel was demonstrated by Congress and the Obama administration’s unqualified support of Israel’s excessively brutal actions toward civilians in its Gaza invasion and capture of the Gaza aid flotilla in the face of worldwide approbation of Israel. An unfortunate and apparently unforeseen byproduct of the lobby’s actions was the loss to both the U.S. and Israel of the support of a critical major strategic ally, Turkey.
The loss of Turkey as a major U.S. ally will change the balance of power in the Middle East and do serious harm to U.S. vital national security interests in that region, and to Israel’s as well. It is inconceivable that the U.S. would allow a strategic relationship with an ally as vitally important as Turkey to be undermined by supporting brutal and unlawful conduct on the part of a far less strategically important ally, Israel. Yet, because of the overwhelming strength and influence of Israel’s U.S. lobby on the Obama administration and Congress, that is precisely what has occurred.
The Israel Lobby’s Role in the Loss of Turkey as a Key U.S. Ally
The Israel Lobby, headed by the American-Israeli Political Action Committee, or AIPAC, acts in a variety of ways to protect and promote Israeli interests in this country. Any Israeli action, such as the Gaza invasion or the capture of the Gaza aid flotilla, is immediately condoned and praised, discussion and debate are stifled, and dissent is punished. While it is beyond the scope of this article to address the lobby’s strategy and methods in any detail, these are well-known and well-documented. After the Gaza incidents, letters or resolutions supporting Israel’s actions were immediately forthcoming from either the U.S. Senate or the House, or both, and were typically signed or approved by astonishingly overwhelming margins, typically 75 to 90 percent.
There is never any debate in Congress or investigation by congressional committees into Israel’s actions and whether or not they might have a negative effect on U.S. foreign policy interests. Any member of Congress that publicly questions, let alone disapproves, any action taken by Israel, quickly suffers the consequences. For instance, 54 members of Congress, many of whom were running for reelection, were attacked for supposedly being “anti-Israel” because they signed a letter that labeled Israel’s invasion of Gaza as “de facto collective punishment of the Palestinian residents of the Gaza Strip” and pressed for “immediate relief for the citizens of Gaza.” Yet, the charge of collective punishment, a war crime, was later well documented and confirmed by a balanced and competent United Nations investigating committee.
The problem isn’t whether a member of Congress can be criticized for a statement made or action taken, but whether healthy debate about U.S. foreign policy interests is being stifled by the aggressive actions of a lobby that acts in the interest of a foreign government, namely Israel. When Turkey, a major U.S. ally, criticized Israel’s brutality toward civilians in both the Gaza invasion and the Gaza aid flotilla capture, Congress should have at least debated the issue, particularly since there was widespread televised evidence of the conduct and worldwide universal criticism of Israel’s actions during and after both events. Instead, Congress showed unquestioning support for Israel, without investigating or even inquiring about the facts related to either incident.
Later, when two separate UN investigations of these incidents developed overwhelming evidence of Israeli war crimes and atrocities toward civilian noncombatants, Congress again immediately sided with Israel and conducted no inquiry or investigation into the incidents, or the allegations and evidence provided in the UN investigations. The Obama administration also sided with and provided unquestioning support for Israel, describing the investigations as biased. The fact that a major strategic ally and fellow NATO member had suffered the death of nine of its citizens in the Gaza aid flotilla incident, and that the UN investigation described at least five of the deaths as illegal summary executions seemed an unimportant detail to the Obama administration.
The key, critical question is whether the Israel lobby’s actions forcing congressional and executive branch approval and support for Israel’s brutal and illegal treatment of civilian noncombatants caused Turkey to change its policies toward the U.S., reduce its commitment to its alliance with the U.S., and take steps contrary to the vital national security interests of the U.S. The answer, unfortunately, is yes. The public statements of Turkish leaders since these incidents, strongly criticizing the U.S. failure to criticize Israel and support Turkey and the rest of the world in sanctioning Israel, plus the strong actions taken by Turkey that negatively impact U.S. interests in that region, after the U.S.’ failure to provide that support, demonstrates that causal link. Turkey’s frustrations and disillusionment with U.S. uncritical support for Israel along with its failure to move aggressively toward achieving a two-state solution, had reached a breaking point.
While it would be easy to adopt the Israel lobby’s view that Turkey’s actions are those of an increasingly radical and Islamic regime, there is little evidence to support such a view. Turkey, in fact, has taken the moral high ground in criticizing Israel’s brutal behavior toward Gazan and Palestinian noncombatants. Turkey had little to gain by entering this fray, and much to lose, both in its relationship with Israel and with its longtime ally the U.S. Nonetheless, it has taken a strong public position against both Israel’s actions and U.S. enabling of, and complicity in, those actions. And it is clearly not about to back down.
The Consequences of Inaction
Unless the U.S. can reengage with Turkey, allow the UN to sanction Israel for its Gaza atrocities toward civilian noncombatants, and move to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a major, even cataclysmic shift in the balance of power in the Middle East could occur. Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran could assume control and assert power in that area in place of the U.S.’ traditional “moderate” allies of Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Both China and Russia are interested in gaining economic and political influence in the northern Persian Gulf area and are lukewarm toward or unwilling to support strong sanctions against Iran. China, in particular, sees that area as the most important source of oil and natural gas in the world, and would be willing to pay almost any price to gain influence in that area and access to its oil.
For those who remain nostalgic about Israel, our supposed great friend, strong ally, and strategic partner in the Middle East, imagine the following scenario: China offers Turkey billions of dollars in development aid for oil and gas pipelines, ports, railways, and other infrastructure projects. In return it receives a long-term exclusive lease for Incirlik air base and a major naval base on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast. Turkey then withdraws from NATO and improves its trade ties with Iran, Iraq, Syria and Russia and forms an alliance with these countries, and perhaps including Lebanon and even Jordan. Such an alliance would control much of the oil resources in the Persian Gulf. Russia and China would both benefit from this arrangement, China most of all by gaining access to Iranian and Iraqi oil and natural gas resources. China would also gain a significant strategic position in southern Europe, the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf with a major air base and naval base in Turkey.
The U.S. and NATO would be suddenly faced with a major strategic competitor in what had been largely their own private Mediterranean lake. With the loss of its Incirlik air base, the U.S. would no longer have easy air access to its conflicts and interests in the Middle East and South Asia. European Union countries would be facing a potential loss of Persian Gulf oil and gas resources. Israel would be even more isolated strategically, now facing the might of Turkey against any incursion it might contemplate against Lebanon, Syria, or Iran. The U.S. would be in the unenviable position of having to defend Israel against not only Turkey but potentially China and Russia as well.
While the above scenario may not be imminent or even likely, the reality is that Turkey has become so disillusioned by the U.S.’ inability to fulfill its role as the dominant player in the Middle East that it has decided to forge its own path, independent of the U.S. and its NATO allies. Turkey clearly sees U.S. Middle East policy as feckless and dominated by Israel and its U.S. lobby, and unlikely to change. It no longer views the U.S. as a strong, reliable, trustworthy partner and ally, but as a weakened giant unable to control small allies like Israel even when its vital national security interests are under threat. That view of the U.S., as a feeble, declining giant, unable or unwilling to defend its vital interests, may well increasingly be shared by many of our allies and potential adversaries. If so, that is a dangerous trend indeed, and one that we need to stop.
Clearly the U.S. desperately needs to reevaluate its foreign policy goals and relationships in the Middle East. Faced with the loss of Turkey, a foreign policy disaster of epic proportions, it needs to do so immediately. President Obama should begin his post-election administration by conducting a major reevaluation of U.S. Middle East policy, beginning by appointing an independent, bi-partisan commission of distinguished elder statesmen and states women to review U.S. Middle East policy and the effect of Israel and its U.S. lobby on influencing that policy. Continuing down a byzantine path of a U.S. Middle East policy influenced or even directed by Israel and its U.S. lobby is a recipe for further foreign policy disasters and a cataclysmic decline in U.S. influence in the world. This is an outcome that even Israel and its lobby should fear.
Israeli army denies hinting at US clearance over Gaza assassination
DPA – 04/11/2010
TEL AVIV, Israel — The Israeli military denied Thursday that it had hinted it had received clearance from the United States, before it used a bomb to assassinate a suspected Palestinian militant in Gaza City the previous day.
Lieutenant-Colonel Avital Leibovich, who briefed reporters on the assassination Wednesday night, said her remarks were not meant as a hint that Israel had given Washington advance notice of the hit.
“I didn’t hint in any way,” she told the German press agency DPA, clarifying that instead, she had spoken of a general cooperation and information sharing with the US as well as with other allied armies.
“In general there is cooperation with the US and with other armies,” Leibovich said, but emphasized she did not know whether such information-sharing had taken place prior to the targeted killing of Mohamed Al-Nemnem.
Al-Nemnem, a senior member of the radical Army of Islam group, died when his car exploded outside western Gaza City’s police headquarters around noon Wednesday.
Israel said he was involved in planning an attack against Israeli and American targets in the Sinai peninsula and was targeted because he was a “ticking bomb.”
Briefing reporters on the targeted killing Wednesday, Leibovich said: “Without getting specifically into more details, I can tell you there is very good cooperation between us and the Americans.
“We have an ongoing relationship with the Americans as well as with other forces and from time to time we pass on information.”
“A Summer of Fire in Lebanon”; Pellegrini Reveals US Attempt to Join July War
Al Manar | November 2, 2010
United Nations Interim Forces in Lebanon (UNIFIL) commander Alain Pellegrini uncovered a US attempt to penetrate the leadership of UNIFIL during July 2006 war on Lebanon, in order to convert the force into a bridgehead for the intervention of international forces from NATO or the EU, without waiting until the ceasefire.
In a telephone interview with As-Safir newspaper on Tuesday, Pellegrini said “in case of launching a joint operation, I was offered to join American officers. The US had deployed (off the coast of Lebanon) the twenty-fourth marine intervention Unit which is capable to intervene in my operational area and is ready to provide me with reinforcements in case of launching any operation.”
The U.S. offer “to assist UNIFIL”, during the July war, came after meetings in Rome, which considered the possibility of sending international forces, under the flags of the United Nations.
Pellegrini continues his story about the United States, which was likely to militarily intervene in the July war, via NATO, after Israel stumbled in attacking Hezbollah.
“The Western countries, except France, in their consultations in New York, agreed to blame UNIFIL for ineffectiveness and try, in particular, to bring other forces (a multinational force) without the blue berets, sent by the NATO or the European Union, which former US President George Bush would speedily conjoin, without waiting for the ceasefire ,” the General revealed.
Pellegrini also speaks about the Israeli spying and ability to infiltrate the UNIFIL reports about Hezbollah. “We know many of Hezbollah positions, our leadership in New York are aware of their evolution of deployment, so everything is transparent and Israeli agents can get reports from Naqoura,” the UNIFIL commander said.
He proved his word by revealing that “every time I send my semi-annual report to the UNIFIL, attached by details for the leadership of United Nations forces alone, and despite the fact that the report is encrypted, I immediately receive after each report to New York, a letter from the Israeli Army, containing suggestions for writing the report, hoping to amend it!!”
“The information goes to the Israelis either by tapping or at the time it reaches the United Nations in New York,” the General uncovered.
Pellegrini also unveiled that Israel had killed four UNIFIL officers monitoring the truce in Khiyam plain during the July war.
On Thursday, the French general will release his book “Summer of Fire in Lebanon” in which he talks about the July war as he witnessed it from ‘inside’ in Francophone Book Fair in Beirut.
Featured Video
No Vote, No Representation, No State: Democracy, Israeli Style
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
Sanctions, War and the Policy of Dual Containment
By SASAN FAYAZMANESH | March 17, 2008
It is now nearly three decades since the Unites States adopted the policy of dual containment of Iran and Iraq. While much has been written about the containment of Iraq, there has been very little in-depth analysis of this policy when it comes to Iran. In a book that is going to be released on March 31, 2008, entitled The United States and Iran: Sanctions, Wars and the Policy of Dual Containment (Routledge), I attempt to address this shortcoming by investigating when and why the US policy of containment of Iran came about, how it evolved, and where it stands today.[1] To the extent that Israel has been involved in US policy making, the study will also include the role that Israel has played in the containment of Iran. Also, since the fate of Iran has been inextricably linked to that of Iraq, occasionally the investigation will overlap with the containment of Iraq.
The policy of dual containment of Iran and Iraq originated during the Carter Administration, but it was not until the Clinton Administration that the expression “dual containment” became popular. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- No Vote, No Representation, No State: Democracy, Israeli Style
- Zionist Bought Senate Blocks Information About American Citizens Killed By Israel
- While Gaza dominates the UN, these are the people keeping it alive
- New Report: “Scholasticide and Genocide in Gaza: Assessment, Testimonies and Legal Analysis”
- ‘THAAD Delusion’: Iran war exposes US missile shield limits – The Atlantic
- Moscow issues warning to NATO over Russian exclave
- Yes, the Iran war has destroyed Trump’s presidency
- The fallacy of US delusions about Iran’s economic collapse
- Hezbollah denies Syria cell link, warns of Israeli plan to sow discord
- The legacy of US sanctions, war, and occupation in Iraq
- If Americans Knew
- Mamdani releases plan to combat antisemitism and hate crimes in New York City
- Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Publish Letter to the American People
- DMFI launches $1 million ad campaign supporting Virginia’s Elaine Luria
- US Senate blocks resolution seeking report on Americans killed by Israel
- Israeli Attacks Kill Ten Palestinians in Gaza
- Massacre at Minab: The School That Became a Grave
- Israeli media: The IDF Shows It Doesn’t Turn a Blind Eye; It Actively Emboldens Settler Havoc
- As settlers ravage West Bank, Israeli forces kill 10 in Gaza – Daily Update
- New Report: “Scholasticide and Genocide in Gaza: Assessment, Testimonies and Legal Analysis”
- Ex-Biden officials are desperate for a Gaza scapegoat
- No Tricks Zone
- Green Energy Debacle: German Expert Professor Fritz Vahrenholt Warns Of Severe Economic And Social Consequences
- Two More Paleo Reconstructions Affirm Meters-Higher Sea Levels Across Ireland, Brazil 7000-6000 Years Ago
- New Study: Earth And Venus Surface Warmth Largely Explained By Convection And Lapse Rate, Not CO2 Or Radiation
- 2025 Nature Paper Claiming Worsening Global Drought Gets RETRACTED …Heavily Flawed
- New Study: ‘Global Drought Shows No Detectable Recent Acceleration Under Climate Warming’
- Economic Masterminds: German Socialists Suggest Taxing Productivity Gains Stemming From Using AI
- The South China Sea Has Not Been Cooperating With The Climate Change Narrative
- Energy Crisis: Germany Enters Heating Season With Historically Low Gas Reserve Fill Levels
- New Study: The Antarctic Ice Sheet Gained Mass From 2020-2024 Due To Staggering Snow And Ice Accumulation
- Study: Ocean Heating Rates From Thousands Of Years Ago ‘Dwarf’ Modern Ocean Heating Rates
