Tag: AIPAC

U.S. Jewish groups skip meet with Turkish officials

ADL National Director Abraham Foxman says ‘there comes a point at which it becomes useless to have a conversation.’

By Natasha Mozgovaya

On the fringes of the Washington meetings of Turkish official delegations, there is usually a special place for outreach with the American Jewish community. But several Jewish groups intend to skip the meeting Wednesday evening with members of the Turkish ruling AKP (Justice and Development Party). The America Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC), B’nai Brith International and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) have decided to decline the invitation to protest the deteriorating relations between Ankara and Jerusalem.

Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League. Photo by: Haaretz

Ties between Israel and Turkey have been in decline since Israel launched a three-week military operation in Gaza in December 2008, aimed at halting rocket fire on its southern communities. Tensions between the two formerly strong allies were exacerbated when nine people were killed during violent clashes with Israeli troops aboard a ship carrying aid to Gaza.

“I believe in dialogue and meetings but there is a point at which it becomes useless to have a conversation,” ADL National Director Abraham Foxman told Haaretz on Wednesday.

“You can disagree with Israeli government and its policies but why should you cancel visit of Turkish teachers and scholars to Yad Vashem [Israel’s national Holocaust memorial]? I read that the prime minister of Turkey compared the Star of David to a swastika – it’s ugly and anti-Semitic, it’s what our enemies did. So ‘yesh gvul [there’s a limit].”

Foxman said that he would be happy to resume the outreach meetings once the Turkish government restored ties with Israel.

“Let them first reconcile with Israeli government, and them I’ll be delighted to talk to them,” he said. “But at the moment they’ve decided to use Israel as a whipping boy and provoke negative attitudes in Israel”

The American Jewish Committee (AJC), however, decided to attend the meeting, believing that traditional ties should not be abandoned hastily.

“We’ve had an increasingly rough dialogue with leaders in Turkey, but we believe that we want to take an opportunity to deliver a tough message”, AJC spokeswoman Alex Weininger told Haaretz. “There is a history of relations between the U.S. and Turkey and Israel and it shouldn’t be easily discarded.”

Turkey was also the subject of strong words from Congress on Wednesday, at a bipartisan press conference on the Hill in support of Israel’s right to defend itself.
Rep. Mike Pence (R-Indiana) warned Ankara that “There will be a cost” if Turkey keeps on its current course of “growing closer to Iran and more antagonistic to the State of Israel”.

Rep. Shelley Berkley (D-Nevada) added that, “If Israel is at fault in any way, it is for falling into the trap that was set for them by Turkey. The Turks have extraordinary nerve to lecture the State of Israel, when they are occupiers of the island of Cyprus, where they systematically discriminate against the ecumenical patriarch, and they refuse to recognize Armenian genocide. And this is the country that not only funded but sanctioned the flotilla. They did not do this for humanitarian reasons. They did this to provoke an international confrontation. As far as I’m concerned, Turkey is responsible for the nine deaths aboard that ship. It is not Israel that is responsible. Israel’s troops were attacked”.

A letter currently circulating these days on the Hill in support of Israel in the wake of the flotilla raid has now provoked another letter, by the J Street organization, urging Congressmen not to rush to sign the original letter of support.

“The blockade of Gaza was instituted to stop terrorists from smuggling weapons into Gaza to murder innocent civilians,” said the first petition. “The several dozen who attacked the Israeli soldiers were not peaceful aid workers, but extremists who sought to aid the Iran-backed terrorist Hamas regime in Gaza. The U.S. should make every effort to thwart international condemnation and focus the international community on the crimes of the Iran-backed Hamas leadership against Israel and the Palestinian people”.

J Street has urged Congressmen not to sign the letter, saying it is counterproductive and does not deal with the issue of the Israeli blockade on the Gaza Strip.

“J Street – the pro-Israel, pro-peace lobby – is not supporting sign-on letters to the President now circulating in the [House] regarding the Gaza flotilla,” wrote J-Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami.

“As is far too often the case, these letters have been drafted primarily for domestic political consumption rather than to advance the U.S. interest in peace and security in the Middle East. With tensions in the region already high and vital American and Israeli interests at stake, J Street urges members of Congress to seek changes to the letters currently circulating before signing – or to write their own.

“The petitions now circulating in the House and Senate, while expressing strong American support for Israel – a position we endorse – fail to address the impact of the present closure of Gaza on the civilian population, the deep American interest in resolving this conflict diplomatically, or the urgency of moving forward with diplomacy before it is too late”.

Meanwhile, the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations has urged lawmakers to sign the petition. The organization’s vice-chairman Malcolm Hoenlein told Haaretz that his organization was not scheduled to take part in a meeting of Jewish leaders with Turkish lawmakers, but added that it is “clearly not the right time for a constructive dialogue.”

www.haaretz.com, 17.06.10

June 17, 2010
Once Labeled An AIPAC Spy, Larry Franklin Tells His Story

In an Exclusive Interview, Talk of Antisemitism and Betrayal

By Nathan Guttman

Speaking Out: Larry Franklin, the former Pentagon analyst at center of AIPAC case, tells his side of the story to the Forward.

WASHINGTON — Former Pentagon Iran analyst Larry Franklin recently quit his job cleaning the restrooms at his local church in West Virginia. He still keeps his weekend job, mopping the floors at a nearby Roy Rogers restaurant. In recent years, Franklin also has gained experience in parking cars, digging trenches and cleaning cesspools. In between, he has been searching for a publisher for his book — a manual for saving America from the Iranian threat.

On June 30, Franklin marked the fifth anniversary of his meeting with FBI agents, in which he first learned he was a suspect in what would later be known as “the AIPAC case,” referring to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Along with Franklin, two of the Washington lobby’s senior officials were charged with violating the seldom-used federal Espionage Act of 1917.

Although charges against the two other key players, former lobbyists Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, were ultimately dropped in May, Franklin pleaded guilty early on as part of a plea agreement and is preparing to serve his reduced sentence of 100 hours of community service and 10 months in a halfway house.

Franklin’s narrative of his ordeal, which started off with him being described on national news as the “Israeli mole” in the Pentagon, reflects a mixture of naiveté, frustration with government bureaucracy and a deep belief that his views must be heard, even if it meant breaking the rules. In retrospect, it was a practice in humility for the devout Catholic military analyst.

“I’ve learned a lot by crawling on the ground,” the 62-year-old father of five said in his first interview since the affair began in 2004. The lessons that Franklin has learned from his experience include the capacity by his colleagues and partners for — as he sees it — betrayal, and the persistence, he has concluded, of deep-rooted antisemitic sentiment in certain quarters of America’s intelligence community.

“I was asked about every Jew I knew in OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense], and that bothered me,” Franklin said. His superiors at the time were both Jewish: Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense, and Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, whom Franklin believes was a target of the investigation. “One agent asked me, ‘How can a Bronx Irish Catholic get mixed up with…’ and I finished the phrase for him: ‘with these Jews.’” Franklin answered, “Christ was Jewish, too, and all the apostles.” “Later I felt dirty,” he added.

Bound until recently by a plea agreement that barred him from speaking to the press, Franklin has refrained until now from telling his side of the story. But in the Washington office of his attorney, Plato Cacheris, Franklin seemed eager to share his experience. Cacheris, who took on Franklin’s case pro bono, intervened time and again to warn his client against revealing information that is either classified or under a seal imposed by the court. Franklin was quick to agree, calling Cacheris his “angel” who saved him from prison.

In exchange for his cooperation with federal prosecutors, Franklin was initially sentenced to 12.5 years in prison as part of his plea agreement. But before entering his plea in 2005, he was approached by two people who suggested he fake his suicide and disappear to avoid testifying in court. At the request of the FBI, to which he immediately reported the encounter, Franklin had several follow-up conversations on the phone with one of them. “I thought I was in a movie,” Franklin said of the episode. Details of the event are still under court seal, and Franklin declined to identify the individuals who approached him or to offer further details.

Franklin, who speaks seven languages and holds a doctorate in East Asian studies, tends to weave historical references easily into his discourse, from ancient Greece to the modern days. His concern is intense.

Some in the government, he believes, “had some fantasy of a conspiracy” that had continued, unabated, after the 1985 arrest and 1987 conviction of Pentagon intelligence analyst Jonathan Pollard on charges of spying for Israel.

According to Franklin, the investigators he dealt with believed “that Pollard had a secret partner, a mole, probably in the OSD.” This quest to expose the mole, Franklin said, was, in part, “energized by a more malevolent emotion — antisemitism.”

In part, it was also fed by a deep suspicion toward Israel. “In the intelligence community,” he said, “you refer to Israelis as ‘Izzis’ and it doesn’t have a pleasant connotation. They can’t get away with kikes, so they say Izzis.” This suspicion became clear to Franklin as he learned of the way investigators viewed activists of the pro-Israel lobby.

He said it was made clear to him by the FBI that Rosen, then AIPAC’s foreign policy director, was the target of the investigation and had been followed by the FBI for years. “The bureau told me Rosen was a bad guy,” he said. Believing that he himself had “done wrong,” Franklin agreed to cooperate with the FBI investigation.

This cooperation culminated in a June 26, 2003, meeting at an Italian restaurant in Arlington, Va., where Franklin was sent by the FBI to carry out a sting operation against the AIPAC lobbyists. Before his meeting with Weissman, agents wired Franklin with microphones and transmitters and provided him with a fake classified document alleging there was clear life-threatening danger posed to Israelis secretly operating in Iraq’s Kurdish region. Passing on the information would help seal the case against the AIPAC staffers.

“At the time, I believed they were guilty,” Franklin said of Weissman and Rosen. Yet he still came to the meeting with mixed feelings. He put the document on the table, but hoped Weissman would not reach out for it. “And when he did not take the document, I did breath a silent sigh of relief,” he recalled. In retrospect, Franklin sees that moment as “one I am not proud of.”

Though Weissman didn’t take the document, he read its content, which was allegedly classified, and the sting operation succeeded. Weissman hurried back to AIPAC headquarters with the supposedly classified information disclosed it to Rosen, who subsequently relayed it to an Israeli diplomat. Even without Weissman taking the actual paper, prosecutors, who were wiretapping all the players, felt they had enough of a case to press charges against both Rosen and Weissman for communicating national defense information.

Franklin said he felt betrayed by the two former AIPAC staffers. He believed that he was sharing information with them so that they could pass it to other government officials, and was disappointed to learn they conveyed it to Israeli diplomats and to the press. “I do think they crossed a line when they went to a foreign official with what they knew was classified information,” Franklin said.

Rosen told the Forward in response: “Franklin did not expect us to warn the Israelis that they would be kidnapped and killed? That’s like telling officials of the NAACP that there is going to be a lynching, but don’t warn the victims, because it is a secret.”

For Franklin, ties with Rosen and Weissman were instrumental. He had grown frustrated with decisions made by his Pentagon bosses on Iraq and Iran, believing that regime change in Iran was the course America should pursue.

Franklin warned that Americans “would return in body bags” from Iraq because of Iranian intervention, and called for a preliminary show of force against Iran before invading Iraq, but got no response. Viewing the AIPAC lobbyists as well connected, Franklin bypassed his superiors and asked Rosen to convey his concerns on Iran to officials at the National Security Council, to whom he believed the influential lobbyist had access.

“I wanted to kind of shock people at the NSC,” he said, “to shock them into pausing and giving another consideration into why regime change needed to be the policy.” Franklin’s attempt to reach out over the heads of his bosses was unsuccessful and eventually got him in trouble. In the June 11 sentencing session at the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Judge T.S. Ellis showed little sympathy for Franklin’s explanation of the reasons that led him to disclose the information. “Secrets are important to a nation. If we couldn’t keep our secrets, we would be at great risk,” Ellis said.

Contact Nathan Guttman at guttman@forward.com

Source: www.forward.com, July 01, 2009, issue of July 10, 2009.

July 10, 2009
U.S.: Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, Who’s the Greatest Threat of All?

Analysis by Daniel Luban and Jim Lobe*

WASHINGTON, May 10 (IPS) – A potentially major clash appears to be developing between powerful factions inside and outside the U.S. government, pitting those who see the Afghanistan/Pakistan (“AfPak”) theatre as the greatest potential threat to U.S. national security against those who believe that the danger posed by a nuclear Iran must be given priority.

The Iran hawks, concentrated within the Israeli government and its U.S. supporters in the so-called “Israel lobby” here, want to take aggressive action against Iran’s nuclear programme by moving quickly to a stepped-up sanctions regime.

Many suggest that Israel or the U.S. may ultimately have to use military force against Tehran if President Barack Obama’s diplomatic efforts at engagement do not result at least in a verifiable freeze – if not a rollback – of the programme by the end of the year.

Their opponents appear to be concentrated at the Pentagon, where top leaders are more concerned with providing a level of regional stability that will allow the U.S. to wind down its operations in Iraq, step up its counter-insurgency effort in Afghanistan, and, above all, ensure the security of the Pakistani state and its nuclear weapons.

In their view, any attack on Iran would almost certainly throw the entire region into even greater upheaval. Both Defence Secretary Robert Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have repeatedly and publicly warned over the past year against any moves that would further destabilise the region.

Other key administration players are believed to share this view, including senior military officers such as Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Adm. Dennis Blair and Gen. Douglas Lute, the “war czar” whose White House portfolio includes both Iraq and South Asia.

The divide between these factions was on vivid display this past week, when Washington played host to two high-profile – and dissonant – events.

First, top U.S. and Israeli leaders were out in force at the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the powerful and hawkish lobby group, where attendees heard a steady drumbeat of dire warnings about the “existential threat” to Israel of an Iranian bomb and calls for increased sanctions – and occasionally even military force – against Tehran.

Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan were rarely mentioned at the conference, which instead stressed hopes for building a U.S.-led coalition against Tehran that would include both Israel and “moderate” Sunni-led Arab states.

But just as more than 6,000 AIPAC delegates fanned out Wednesday across Capitol Hill to press their lawmakers to sign on to tough anti-Iran sanctions legislation, the arrival of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari for summit talks with Obama and other top officials focused attention on the deteriorating situation in both countries.

The surface cordiality of Karzai’s and Zardari’s visits masked the fact that the U.S. has grown increasingly worried about the ability of either leader to combat their respective Taliban insurgencies.

Most indications are that the Obama administration, including Obama himself and Vice President Joe Biden, sides with the Pentagon, at least for now.

But the AIPAC conference, which was attended by more than half of the members of the U.S. Congress and featured speeches by the top Congressional leadership of both parties, served as a reminder that Iran hawks within the Israel lobby have a strong foothold in the legislative branch, and may be able to push Iran to the top of the foreign-policy agenda whether the administration likes it or not.

Obama pledged during the presidential campaign that he would give AfPak – which he then called the “central front in the war on terror” – top priority, and, since taking office, he has made good on that promise.

He appointed a powerful special envoy, Richard Holbrooke, with a broad mandate to take charge of U.S. diplomacy in the region. Holbrooke, who met briefly with a senior Iranian official during a conference at The Hague in late March, has said several times that Tehran has an important role to play in stabilising Afghanistan.

At the same time, Mullen, the U.S. military chief, has been virtually “commuting” to and from the region to meet with his Pakistani counterpart, Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani, Holbrooke noted in Congressional testimony this week.

Given its preoccupation with AfPak and with stabilising the region as a whole, the Pentagon has naturally been disinclined to increase tensions with Iran, which shares lengthy borders with Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan and could easily make life significantly more difficult for the U.S. in each of the three countries.

But the new Israeli government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is pushing the U.S. to confront Iran over its nuclear programme, and his allies in the U.S. have similarly argued that Iran should be a top priority.

For the moment, the Iran hawks have mostly expressed muted – if highly sceptical – support for Obama’s diplomatic outreach to Tehran. But they have warned that this outreach must have a “short and hard end date”, as Republican Sen. Jon Kyl put it at the AIPAC conference, at which point the U.S. must turn to harsher measures.

AIPAC’s current top legislative priority is a bill, co-sponsored by Kyl and key Democrats, that would require Obama to impose sanctions on foreign firms that export refined petroleum products to Iran.

In recent Congressional testimony, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that the administration would support such “crippling” sanctions against Tehran if diplomacy did not work, but she declined to say how long the administration would permit diplomatic efforts to play out before taking stronger action.

While sanctions seem to be the topic du jour, the possibility of military action against Tehran remains on everybody’s mind, as does the question of whether Israel would be willing to strike Iranian nuclear facilities without Washington’s approval.

In March, Netanyahu told The Atlantic that “if we have to act, we will act, even if America won’t.”

Asked at the AIPAC conference whether Israel would attack Iran without a “green light” from the U.S., former Israeli deputy defence minister Ephraim Sneh joked that in Israel, stoplight signals are “just a recommendation.”

By contrast, Pentagon officials have made little secret of their opposition. In late April, Gates told the Senate Appropriations committee that a military strike would only delay Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear capability while “send[ing] the programme deeper and more covert”.

Last month, Mullen told the Wall Street Journal that an Israeli attack would pose “exceptionally high risks” to U.S. interests in the region. (Although the newspaper chose not to publish this part of the interview, Mullen’s office provided a record to IPS.)

Similarly, Biden told CNN in April that an Israeli military strike against Tehran would be “ill-advised”. And former National Security Advisor (NSA) Brent Scowcroft, who is close to both Gates and the current NSA, ret. Gen. James Jones, told a conference here late last month that such an attack would be a “disaster for everybody.”

For the moment, the top Pentagon leadership’s resistance to an attack on Iran appears to be playing a major role in shaping the debate in Washington.

Gates “is a bulwark against those who want to go to war in Iran or give the green light for Israel to go to war”, said former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski last month.

Others dispute the idea, proposed by Netanyahu in his speech to AIPAC, that the Iranian threat can unite Israel and the Arab states.

“The Israeli notion making the rounds these days that Arab fears of Iran might be the foundation for an alignment of interest is almost certainly wrong,” wrote Marc Lynch, a professor at George Washington University, on the Foreign Policy website.

“Nothing would unite Arab opinion faster than an Israeli attack on Iran. The only thing which might change that would be serious movement towards a two state solution [in Israel-Palestine].”

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/.

Source: www.ipsnews.net, May 10 2009

May 15, 2009
Talking Turkey About Israel

Philip Giraldi *

The Israeli invasion of Gaza and the slaughter of civilians was such an egregious error in judgment that the usual suspects are working overtime to make it all look like a heroic defense of democratic values. The expected beneficiary of the “defensive action,” the ruling Kadima Party, so miscalculated that it is now likely to lose today’s election, with the Israeli electorate convinced that an even more extreme right-wing government is the only solution to the moderate right-wing bungling.

Israel will likely choose hard-right nationalism by electing Bibi Netanyahu as the next prime minister. Netanyahu has never let any values, democratic or otherwise, stand in his way in his quest for a Greater (Arab-free) Israel encompassing all of the West Bank and running from the Litani River in Lebanon in the north to the Suez Canal in the south. He has already promised that if elected he will not turn any occupied land over to the Palestinians.

There have been numerous signs that the world is no longer buying into the Israeli creation myth, even in the United States, where the suffering of the Gazans, neatly concealed by most of the mainstream media, nevertheless produced an outpouring of sympathy. The beleaguered little state of Israel founded as a homeland and refuge for the victims of persecution in Europe has become a regional military superpower ruled by a corrupt political class, with a socialist economy kept afloat by the U.S. taxpayer. Israel continues and even expands its occupation of the lands of its neighbors and engages in the brutal suppression of those who resist. Far from seeking a political solution that would create two states side by side, it has deliberately aborted every genuine peace initiative and now seeks absolute regional hegemony, pressing forward with racist policies that marginalize its own citizens of Arab descent. Most of the world has finally realized that claiming perpetual victimhood as a shield against criticism does not work very well when you can muster Merkava tanks, helicopter gunships, and white phosphorus against a civilian population.

The sharp exchange between Israeli President Shimon Peres and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan at Davos on Jan. 29 exemplifies Israel’s public relations problem and also casts light upon what steps the Israeli government and its friends in the United States are taking to counteract the negative press. Media reports suggest that Israel preceded its attack on Gaza by alerting a network of supporters to post comments on blogs, saturating the Web with the Israeli government’s justification for its action. This was evident on a number of blogs, including Huffington Post and the Washington Note. Many of the posters were Israelis, and it is believed that a number of them were active-duty military personnel selected for their fluency in English and other European languages as well as their familiarity with the Internet.

The coverage of the Erdogan-Peres exchange was carefully managed in the U.S. media, but less restrained in Europe and the Middle East. In a one-hour discussion of Gaza moderated by David Ignatius of the Washington Post, an odd choice for such an important discussion, Peres was allowed 25 minutes to speak in defense of the Israeli attack. Erdogan and two other critics on the panel were given 12 minutes each. The YouTube recording of the debate shows Peres pointed accusingly at Erdogan and raised his voice. When Erdogan sought time to respond, Ignatius granted him a minute and then cut him off claiming it was time to go to dinner. Erdogan complained about the treatment and left Davos, vowing never to return. Back in Turkey, he received a hero’s welcome.

Four days later the Washington Post featured an op-ed entitled “Turkey’s Turn From the West” by Soner Cagaptay, a Turkish-born, American-educated academic who is a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP). WINEP was founded by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Cagaptay is also on the board of the American Turkish Friendship Council, one of several Turkish lobbying groups that are supportive of the Israel-Turkey relationship. A review of Cagaptay’s writings reveals that he is AIPAC’s go-to guy for any argument that Turkey is becoming more anti-Western and religious.

That Cagaptay is a genuine expert on the country of his birth is clear, but his view on developments there is very much shaped by who pays him. He finds anti-Semitism lurking everywhere in Turkey and being “spread by the political leadership.” He is astonished by Erdogan’s assertion at Davos that Israel is “killing people.” He finds inexplicable the prime minister’s belief that there was “Jewish culpability for the conflict in Gaza” and that the “Jewish-controlled media outlets were misrepresenting the facts.” For good measure, Cagaptay believes it “doubtful whether Turkey would side with the United States in dealing with the issue of nuclear Iran,” and he sees a regrettable Turkish “solidarity with Islamist regimes or causes.”

AIPAC’s Turkey expert might be surprised to learn that most of the world, which saw the images of dying Palestinian children on nightly television, would probably agree with Erdogan. Israel planned its invasion of Gaza six months in advance, timed the assault for maximum political benefit for the ruling party and to engage the incoming U.S. president in its policies, committed war crimes against a largely defenseless civilian population, and then kept journalists out of the combat zone so it could lie about everything that it was doing. The U.S. media in particular chose to ignore the carnage and present the Israeli point of view. Though it would be unfair to claim that the media is controlled by any ethnic or religious group, it is certainly true that Jewish organizations mobilized to make sure that pro-Israel commentary far exceeded any reporting of Palestinian suffering.

Cagaptay likewise fails to see what the rest of the world sees regarding Iran. No one admires Iran’s government, but America’s European allies, not just Turkey, will not support yet another war in the Middle East, even if Tehran does move closer to acquiring a nuclear weapon. Turkey’s development of closer ties with the Islamic world, which Cagaptay tellingly insists on calling “Islamist,” is also an understandable response to being repeatedly snubbed in its bids to join the European Union, something that even WINEP’s reliable scholarly claque surely knows to be true.

Efforts to control and spin the narrative, to turn black into white, have been unrelenting since the Israelis decided to attack Gaza. Cagaptay is only a part of that effort, but his smearing of Turkey and its elected leaders is unfortunate, particularly as his newspaper audience probably knows little about Turkey and will assume that the analysis is credible. Anyone who knows Turks well knows that they are an exceedingly stubborn and honorable people who will invariably say what they think to be true. Prime Minister Erdogan spoke the truth in Davos and has been speaking the truth about the invasion of Gaza. Attempts to label him anti-Semitic and to denigrate the Turks in general will certainly have some impact, most certainly on the U.S. Congress, which will rapidly fall into line and comply with AIPAC’s instructions on an appropriate punishment. But Israel’s attempt to portray itself as always the victim of a global anti-Semitic, anti-Western conspiracy just will not stand any more, no matter how many Soner Cagaptays are paid by AIPAC to write for the Washington Post.

Source: www.antiwar.com, 10.02.2009

* Philip Giraldi is a former officer of the United States Central Intelligence Agency who became famous for claiming in 2005 that the USA was preparing plans to attack Iran with nuclear weapons in response to a terrorist action against the US, independently of whether or not Iran was involved in the action. He is presently a partner in an international security consultancy, Cannistraro Associates.

February 10, 2009