5 SEP 2013
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Former CIA case officer and current Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest joins us to discuss his work documenting and exposing the lobbies behind the arms trade, and how these lobbies and their point men in the US government help to facilitate worldwide black market and smuggling operations from drugs to terrorism to nuclear proliferation. We discuss his work on the Sibel Edmonds case (“Who’s Afraid of Sibel Edmonds?“) and the influence of the American Turkish Council.
Philip Giraldi : Throw the Bums Out
PHILIP GIRALDI AUGUST 12, 2013 26
If you wonder why Washington persists in engaging in self-destructive behavior, just go ask Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham. They will wave a paper in your face and on it will be the latest directives from AIPAC.
http://mycatbirdseat.com/2013/08/41184-philip-giraldi-throw-the-bums-out/
by Philip Giraldi
As I have become accustomed to nearly every type of outrage here in the land of the BushObamas, it takes quite a bit to either surprise or shock me. But last week was a twofer and I’ll start with the shock.
On Thursday morning I was reading my way through a rather silly piece ”Rand Paul rebuked by fellow Republicans on foreign aid” by the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank, who clearly does not understand the meaning of “isolationism.” Then I hit the last few paragraphs. The article provided background and spin on the defeat of the recent Paul motion to cut aid to Egypt and included “[Senator Lindsey] Graham read aloud a letter from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) opposing Paul’s amendment…[Senator John]McCain needled Paul. ‘The question here is whether the senator from Kentucky knows what’s better for Israel, or Israel.”
Paul was clearly caught flat footed but, to his credit, called the AIPAC letter a “canard,” and, according to Milbank, “challenged the ‘so-called leadership’ of AIPAC.” Milbank described the GOP senators who lined up against Paul as engaging in an “emotional onslaught from his party’s most respected voices on foreign policy.” The article mentions Jim Inhofe, Bob Corker and Marco Rubio as having joined McCain and Graham in railing against Paul.
I will leave it to the judgment of the reader whether or not that group constitutes “respected voices” or not, but the truly shocking aspect of the incident was the open reading of and referral to the letter from AIPAC by both Graham and McCain. AIPAC traditionally likes to work in the shadows and behind closed doors but it is now apparent that even senior senators can openly nod to the organization as the ultimate authority on what U.S. policy in the Middle East should be. McCain even confirmed that AIPAC represents Israel as far as he is concerned.
As is all too often the case, for the “respected voices” the discussion is all about Israel, not about the United States, though it is nevertheless astonishing to hear that viewpoint expressed so openly in the Senate.
Rand Paul has three times attempted to restrict aid to Egypt and once tried to also do the same for Pakistan and Libya. All three attempts failed by large margins in the Senate.
As I have noted a number of times, I find Paul’s campaign against foreign aid laudable but ultimately hypocritical because he carefully exempts Israel from any such sanction in spite of the fact that Tel Aviv is by far the largest single recipient of assistance and is in violation of both international law and US policy with its continued occupation of the West Bank. Plus Paul is fond of throwing out slogans rather than engaging in any serious discussion, asserting repeatedly that we should deny aid to those who are “burning our flag” or shouting “death to America,” sending a clear message that the problem is those uppity Muslims, not the apparently peace loving Israelis. But if he thought a bit more deeply about what is going on in the Middle East he would realize that Washington’s Israel policy drives the fractious relationship with the Muslim world in general and generates global terrorism as a byproduct.
Paul consequently favors doing nothing against a nation that does actual damage to US interests while taking cheap shots against a gaggle of Islamic states that have minimal ability to harm the United States.
My surprise last week was over the appointment of Martin Indyk as special US envoy in the latest round of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. Secretary of State John Kerry has already lowered expectations by announcing that he has a nine month plan for some kind of agreement, meaning that nothing has to actually happen, but the appearance of Indyk was nevertheless an unpleasant reminder that even if everything changes in Washington nothing changes when it comes to the Middle East. Prior to the announcement, it had occurred to me that Kerry might actually try to fool the American people into thinking that he had a serious plan by appointing a respectable and respected US intermediary but he instead chose to play it safe by naming someone favored by Israel.
Indyk’s appointment was greeted with nary a ripple of concern by the mainstream media and hardly anyone noted that serious talks would be unimaginable with an interlocutor who has spent his entire life working on behalf of Israel.
He was universally and fawningly described by the press as a “seasoned” or “experienced” diplomat but the important parts of his biography were carefully left out.
Martin Indyk was born in Britain to Jewish parents before emigrating to Australia, where he was naturalized and educated at the University of Sydney and at the Australian National University. He was studying at the Hebrew University in Israel when he became a civilian volunteer at a kibbutz during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
That may have been when he decided that helping Israel would best be done from inside the United States. As Max Blumenthal describes it,
“I remembered stumbling into a huge auditorium [in 2009] to hear Indyk describe how he made ‘aliyah to Washington’ during the 1980′s to ensure that US policy remained slanted in Israel’s favor, and go on to blame Yasser Arafat for the failure of Camp David.” In 1981, Indyk did indeed move to the United States after being offered a position as an analyst with AIPAC. Three years later he went on to co-found with Dennis Ross the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), an AIPAC spin-off, serving as that organization’s Executive Director until 1993.
Advocacy for Israel and being a non-U.S. citizen were apparently not impediments to stepping over from the Israel Lobby directly into the federal government’s policy making positions relating to the Middle East. Indyk ran into a little problem in that he was still Australian but the Clinton White House quickly introduced into the House of Representatives a bill to naturalize him by act of congress and he was soon on his way. Beginning in 1993, he served as special assistant to President Bill Clinton and then as senior director of Near East and South Asian Affairs at the National Security Council. While at the NSC, he was principal adviser to the President and the National Security Advisor on Arab–Israeli issues, Iraq and Iran.
Indyk had come to the attention of the Clintons, possibly for his masterful explication of what Washington should do for Israel, but also because he had some serious money behind him. Israeli-American billionaire Haim Saban, who had given $3.5 million to the Clinton presidential campaign, asked that Indyk be named American Ambassador to Israel. Bill Clinton agreed, making Indyk the first Jew to serve in that position. He was in Israel for two years from 1995 until 1997, returned to Washington as Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Policy, and was then reappointed ambassador by Clinton in 1999 serving until 2001. Indyk was undeniably extremely popular in Israel, possibly because he had difficulty in separating US interests from those of his host country. He got into trouble when it was determined that he had been careless in his handling of classified intelligence information. His security clearance was suspended, the only time that has ever occurred with a United States Ambassador, but it was later conveniently restored by Madeleine Albright who intervened in the process and overruled her own security people.
Indyk, like his close friend Dennis Ross, is one of a cluster of Israel firsters who have dominated US policy making in the Middle East since the time of Ronald Reagan. The key players tend to move around a lot, alternating between government posts and think tanks or universities, with brief forays into the private sector where they make money exploiting the relationships that they developed while in office. After he stepped down as Ambassador Indyk wound up as Vice President of Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institute, which is heavily funded by his patron Haim Saban. He has morphed into a J Street type supporter of Israel, which means he favors peace with the Arabs but on Israel’s terms, because he apparently honestly believes that it is in Tel Aviv’s long term interest to permit a rump Palestinian state. There is nothing about the US interest, except as it coincides with that of Israel in his world view and now he is back making policy for the White House. I sometimes wonder what hold the Obamas and Bushes of this world have over Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to compel him to show up to endure the humiliation of sham peace talks, particularly when the US government makes no attempt to be even marginally fair in its dealings with the two sides. Poor Abbas, fated to look across the table at a grinning Martin Indyk.
Martin Indyk is a symptom of the cancer that rots the political system and makes many Americans despair of our ever emerging from the darkness of the past twelve years. Indyk is a passionate Zionist who is completely Israel focused. His willingness to do what is right for the United States and its people has to be considered questionable yet he has been given great power to do still more damage in a part of the world where the US has legitimate strategic concerns.
Surely there were better choices for the position but Kerry and Obama clearly considered it necessary to send a signal to Israel that Washington will not deviate in its support for the Netanyahu government, which, incidentally, has frequently expressed its unwillingness to permit a Palestinian state with any of the actual attributes of statehood.
So the game goes on, with no one winning but the thuglike and expansionistic Israeli settlers.
And if you wonder why Washington persists in engaging in self-destructive behavior, just go ask Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham. They will wave a paper in your face and on it will be the latest directives from AIPAC.
Tempers Flare Post CNI Press Briefing
Also see:
The Israel Lobby Advocates New Legislation
PHILIP GIRALDI MARCH 15, 2013 0
If we do get a war with Iran then those of us who have opposed it might as well fold our cards on “let us reason together” and begin to think of civil disobedience on a serious level. It might be the only option we have remaining to turn the ship around.
The Israel lobby is focusing its energies on legislation that will, tighten the bonds between Washington and Tel Aviv even more. One such bill, called “The Iran Nuclear Prevention Act,” is described as “A resolution strongly supporting the full implementation of United States and international sanctions on Iran and urging the President to continue to strengthen enforcement of sanctions legislation.” In this article Giraldi notes that the bill, SR 65 …
… is a virtual declaration of war on a timetable to be established by Israel … the resolution basically concedes that if Israel starts a war against Iran under any pretext, the United States must automatically support it up to an including using its own military and naval forces. As Senator Graham admitted in an interview, ‘If Israel acts in its own defense – even preemptively – we will support Israel economically, diplomatically, and politically.’
by Philip Giraldi
AIPAC – 2013
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has just completed its annual gala in Washington. A reported thirteen thousand AIPAC supporters reportedly cheered the latest efforts to make Israel America’s most favored nation. A small group of demonstrators was generally ignored though Scott McConnell reports that some protesters were spat upon by those filing in to celebrate Israel. It must be a habit they picked up in Jerusalem where spitting on Christian clergymen is considered de rigueur.
There has been considerable speculation that AIPAC’s power to corrupt and misdirect the American political system might be waning, that the struggle over the nomination of Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense revealed all the ugliness of the Israel Lobby. I have never quite bought into that argument even though it is true that the attempt to derail the nomination of a qualified former senator demonstrated clearly that U.S. foreign and defense policies are being judged by many in the media and the punditry as well as, to our shame, in congress solely in terms of how they impact on Israel. It seemed to me that the Israel Lobby is too firmly ensconced in the places that matter to be vulnerable to thirty days of scrutiny. The American public has already forgotten about Hagel, if it was ever interested at all, and there is no sign that any of the demagogic senators – Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, James Inhofe, John McCain, and Marco Rubio among others – will in any way pay a political price for their placing Israel first. Indeed, many of their evangelical constituents will inevitably applaud what they have done.
It has also been noted that the recently concluded AIPAC gathering was the first in many years where a sitting U.S. President or an Israeli Prime Minister did not speak, and this has been interpreted as a loss of influence. Last year, both President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were present but this year Netanyahu is engaged in forming a new government and could not travel while Obama is himself preparing for a trip to Israel next week. Vice President Joe Biden did yeoman’s work, however, making sure that everyone would understand that the Washington will continue to respond to Israel’s concerns, boasting how the Obama administration had successfully blocked any United Nations inquiry into Israel’s illegal settlements. So predictions that the death of AIPAC is imminent would appear to be somewhat premature.
Indeed, it would be a mistake to focus too much on AIPAC when the Israel Lobby encompasses so much more, but it is no coincidence that there has been a flurry of proposed legislation designed to coincide with the annual conference. Consider for a moment what the friends of Israel are now attempting to accomplish and how far their allies in congress are willing to go to compromise actual American interests. First there is H.R. 938 the “United States-Israel Strategic Partnership Act of 2013″ which was referred to the Committee on Foreign Affairs last Monday. The bill is co-sponsored by Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen who heads the committee and by her Democratic colleague from Florida Ted Deutch. Ros-Lehtinen is a familiar booster for Israel and also for what she perceives to be Jewish interests. In 2011 she co-sponsored a bill that provided special medical benefits to holocaust survivors to enable them to remain in their homes and receive medical care. As the Jewish Telegraphic Agency described it “the bill would give Holocaust survivors preference in obtaining aging services,” providing in this case something that is not available to normal Medicare recipients. Ros-Lehtinen has also been a co-sponsor of most of the pro-Israel, anti-Iran legislation that has surfaced in congress over the past five years.
H.R. 938 calls for strengthening “the strategic alliance between the United States and Israel.” It’s declaration of policy is that “Congress declares that Israel is a major strategic partner of the United States” and it indicates that its intention is to upgrade “the framework of the United States-Israel strategic and military relationships.” The text of the bill is relatively soporific but it does several things. First, it extends the time frame and scope of various assistance and information sharing programs that Washington has entered into with Tel Aviv, including its ability to help itself to equipment from U.S. military stockpiles. Second, it creates reporting requirements for the White House and various government Departments to ensure that programs relating to Israel are actually moving forward. There should be particular concern over the bill’s expanding the areas of military technology sharing between Washington and Tel Aviv as Israel has a track record of stealing the proprietary technology for use in systems that its own defense industry is marketing. Assisting in that effort, the bill also specifically gives Israel blanket authority to re-export any technology it obtains from the U.S. An additional substantive area that the bill addresses is the various missile defense systems that Israel has in place and is developing, mandating that the U.S. “should provide assistance upon request by the Government of Israel, for the…procurement and enhancement” of the systems.
The House Resolution also calls for the State Department to include Israel in the visa waiver program, which would allow Israelis to travel to the United States more-or-less freely. It will be a boon to Israeli/Russian organized crime, which has already spread throughout the United States. Interestingly, there is also a Barbara Boxer produced Senate version of the same bill (S.R. 462) that adds some interesting language, “Israel has made every reasonable effort, without jeopardizing the security of the State of Israel, to ensure that reciprocal travel privileges are extended to all US citizens.” Normally participation in the visa waiver program absolutely requires that the arrangement be completely reciprocal, but in this case the Senate is certifying that Israel is compliant even though it is not: it regularly denies entry to American citizens of Palestinian descent, most recently to a teacher in a Christian school in Ramallah. So Congress is again rewriting its own rules on behalf of Israel.
It does not require any particular insight to note that the “major strategic alliance” suggested by the bill benefits Israel by extending various cooperation and sharing agreements while further committing to pay for enhancements of the Israeli missile defense system “upon request” by Benjamin Netanyahu or whoever winds up succeeding him as prime minister. And it might be noted in passing that no other nation, including countries like Great Britain and Canada whose soldiers have actually fought side by side with Americans in a number of twentieth century wars and also more recently, is regarded as a “major strategic ally.” It is a designation that will be unique to Israel and is intended to elevate that nation above all others in terms of its relationship with Washington.
And there is nothing in the bill that actually benefits the United States. The words “alliance” and “ally” are used several times but they have no meaning as Israel is not in any traditional alliance relationship with Washington that would actually require it to do anything. In any event, it would be difficult for Washington to define what constitutes an attack on Israel as Israel has expanding borders. No reciprocity and no conditions set on possible mutual action means there is no actual alliance, unlike an organization like Cold War-era NATO which once upon a time clearly defined what member states had to do if threatened or attacked while further limiting what they could do unilaterally. The U.S. exercises no restraint on Israeli behavior and the relationship is strictly one way.
An additional bill, this time from the Senate, S.R. 65, authored by unflinchingly pro-Israel Senators Lindsey Graham and Robert Menendez, with twenty other Senatorial co-sponsors, was introduced on February 28th. There is a parallel version in the House of Representatives called H.R. 850 with 102 co-sponsors. The Senate version is called “The Iran Nuclear Prevention Act” and is described as “A resolution strongly supporting the full implementation of United States and international sanctions on Iran and urging the President to continue to strengthen enforcement of sanctions legislation.” It cites the Iranian “continuing pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability” and “the policy of the United States…to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon capability” before urging that “if the Government of Israel is compelled to take military action in self-defense the United States government should stand with Israel and provide diplomatic, military and economic support…”
Senate Resolution 65 is a virtual declaration of war on a timetable to be established by Israel though the text of the resolution concludes with a disclaimer that it is not an “authorization for the use of force or a declaration of war.” Disclaimer aside, the resolution basically concedes that if Israel starts a war against Iran under any pretext, the United States must automatically support it up to an including using its own military and naval forces. As Senator Graham admitted in an interview, “If Israel acts in its own defense – even preemptively – we will support Israel economically, diplomatically, and politically.”
But one of the interesting things about the attack Iran resolution is that its premise is wrong: both Israeli and U.S. intelligence believe that Tehran currently has no actual weapons program though if one goes by “capability” rather than actually having or seeking a weapon, Iran is one of more than fifty nations that currently have the technical ability to construct a nuclear device. To do so, it would have to make the political decision to spend the billions of dollars required in the effort and be prepared to submit to a catastrophically damaging international response which almost certainly would lead to a war that would devastate Iran and the entire Gulf region.
Finally there is the sequester, which provides an opportunity to return again to AIPAC. Part of AIPAC’s annual routine consists of its supporters flooding Capitol Hill Senate and House offices to lobby legislators regarding key issues of concern to the pro-Israel community. This year there were a couple of hot buttons, including the perennial favorite of the alleged Iranian threat, but the issue that received the most attention was the sequester. AIPAC’s supporters fanned out in the House and Senate office buildings to tell their congressmen that under no circumstances should Israel’s $3.2 billion in aid be cut, no matter what the sequester calls for and no matter what domestic programs have to be eliminated. One has to suspect that the no-cuts in aid to Israel will somehow be tied to the bid to declare the country America’s “major strategic ally.”
So are we back to square one? Not exactly. The Hagel confirmation fight revealed that U.S. interests matter not a whit for Israel’s most vocal supporters while the American media is gradually becoming more open to criticism of what is going on in Tel Aviv. But the Lobby still has the whip hand, able to manage what appears in most of the media while having a vice-like grip on congress. It is probably futile in the near term, but we the people should start to imitate AIPAC by letting congressmen know that there are a lot of us out here who vote and who are not too happy about the prospect of a third war in Asia against Iran. Indeed, the real test of the Israel Lobby’s power will be played out over the next nine months or so.
If we do get a war with Iran then those of us who have opposed it might as well fold our cards on “let us reason together” and begin to think of civil disobedience on a serious level. It might be the only option we have remaining to turn the ship around.
Philip Giraldi is director at the Council for the National Interest. He is a recognized authority on international security and counter-terrorism issues. He is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer who served eighteen years overseas in Turkey, Italy, Germany, and Spain. He was Chief of Base in Barcelona from 1989 to 1992 designated as the Agency’s senior officer for Olympic Games support.
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