Dems Should Marginalize AIPAC Now That Group's Been Caught Spying

[KittyWampus]

isn't it possible to use the arrest of Franklin and the fact AIPAC had a spy in the Pentagon as a way to start marginalizing them?

here's some excerpts from an excellent look at AIPAC. A must read in it's entirety.

....................................................................
http://www.prospect.org/web/view-print.ww?id=8764
From "Cloak and Swagger" in the American Prospect Nov 1, 04.

"In late July, as this debate raged, a Pentagon analyst named Larry Franklin telephoned an acquaintance who worked at a pro-Israel lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). ... At their July meeting, Franklin told the AIPAC employee about his frustration that the U.S. government wasn’t responding aggressively enough to intelligence about hostile Iranian activities in Iraq. ...

A couple of weeks after this meeting, in mid-August, the AIPAC official was visited by two FBI agents, who asked him about Franklin...

But on August 27, when CBS broke the story that the FBI was close to arresting an alleged “Israeli mole” in the office of the Pentagon’s No. 3 official, Douglas Feith, it became clear that Franklin was in trouble. News reports said that the FBI had evidence that Franklin had passed a classified draft national-security presidential directive (NSPD) on Iran to AIPAC. What’s more, reports said, the FBI wasn’t just interested in Franklin. For the past two years, it had been conducting a counterintelligence probe into whether AIPAC had served as a conduit for U.S. intelligence to Israel, an investigation about which National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was briefed shortly after the Bush administration came into office.

In the flurry of news reports that followed, the scope of the FBI investigation seemed potentially enormous. Citing senior U.S. officials, The Washington Post reported that “the FBI is examining whether highly classified material from the National Security Agency … was also forwarded to Israel,” and that the investigation of Franklin was “coincidental” to that broader FBI probe. Time magazine reported that Franklin had been enlisted by the FBI to place a series of monitored telephone calls (scripted by the FBI) to get possible evidence on others, including allies of Ahmad Chalabi, a favorite of Pentagon neoconservatives. Chalabi was alleged to have told his Iranian intelligence contacts that the United States had broken their communications codes -- a breach that prompted a break in U.S. support for Chalabi last spring -- and the FBI wanted to know who had shared that highly classified information with Chalabi. What’s more, an independent expert on Israeli espionage said he had been interviewed by the FBI in June and in several follow-up calls, and that the scope of the senior FBI investigators’ questioning was broad and extremely detailed.

In the wake of the first news reports, AIPAC strongly denied that any of its employees had ever knowingly received classified U.S. information. Israel also categorically denied that it had conducted intelligence operations against the United States since the case of Jonathan Pollard, a U.S. Navy intelligence analyst who was convicted of spying for Israel in 1987.

At the time the CBS report aired in late August -- incidentally, on the Friday evening before the opening of the Republican national convention -- custody of the Franklin investigation was being transferred from the head of the FBI counterintelligence unit, David Szady, to U.S. Attorney Paul McNulty, a Bush appointee, in Alexandria, Virginia, as the case moved to the grand-jury phase.

And then, in mid-September, news of the Franklin investigation went dark.

* * *

The classified document that Franklin allegedly passed to AIPAC concerned a controversial proposal by Pentagon hard-liners to destabilize Iran. The latest iteration of the national-security presidential directive was drafted by a Pentagon civilian and avid neocon, Michael Rubin, who hoped it would be adopted as official policy by the Bush administration. ....

snip

.... In short, Rubin, like his fellow Iran hawks, urges the administration to make regime change in Iran its official policy.

This invocation of “moral clarity” has a long intellectual pedigree among neoconservatives....

[xchrom]

1. aipacs roots run very deep.

while i agree with your conclusion -- i don't the democratic party is in any better shape to marginalize aipac better than anyone else.

[seabeyond]

2. exactly cryshame. this is what we and the dems must do

they are not going to come on our side. they want this war. we have to allow nation and our brother and sister jew see the abuse of this org, their tie in to bushco, and the reason why. less than pure; greedy and corrupt and will never have positive results.

good stuff. yes yes.

instead of crying i give, we need to get to work.

thanks

[Coastie for Truth]

3. GOP Should Marginalize APIPAC Now That We See Their Damage

What is . It is the American Petroleum Institute Political Action Committee - the trade group and lobbying arm of the major oil companies, and the major engineering companies that build refineries, like Halliburton.

And did Katrina and Rita show them to be wrong on all counts.

Global Warming from the human activity of too much hydrocarbon combustion exacerbated these Level 5 hurricanes.



References:
* The Republican War on Science By: Chris Mooney
The American Petroleum Institute and ExxonMobil and TexacoChevron, and their CEO's Lee Raymond, PhD, and David O'Reilly, PhD, get prominent mention.


* Climate Change Begins at Home : Life on the Two-Way Street of Global Warming By: Dave Reay

* Divine Wind: The History And Science Of Hurricanes By: Kerry Emanuel

* An Introduction to Dynamic Meteorology By: James R. Holton - with MatLab software supplement CD

* Meteorology Today With Infotrac: An Introduction to Weather, Climate, and the Environment By: C. Donald Ahrens

* Workbook/Study Guide Meteorology Today: An Introduction to Weather, Climate and the Environment By: Donald D. Ahrens

* Meteorology for Scientists and Engineers: A Technical Companion Book to C. Donald Ahrens' Meteorology Today By: Roland B. Stull (with, like, Partial Differential Equations, etc.)

But here's the big thing - in addition to lying to the President about Global Warming (see The Republican War on Science By: Chris Mooney, above), they have lied to the President about the role of cars. So, it looks like the President had another epiphany - like when he quit boozing--

With fears mounting that high energy costs will crimp economic growth, President Bush called on Americans yesterday to conserve gasoline by driving less. He also issued a directive for all federal agencies to cut their own energy use and to encourage employees to use public transportation.

But look at API Power--->

On Capitol Hill, senior Republicans called for new legislation that they said would lower energy costs by increasing supply and expanding oil refining capacity over the long run.

---edit---

In 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney said, "Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it cannot be the basis of a sound energy policy." Also that year, Ari Fleischer, then Mr. Bush's press secretary, responded to a question about reducing American energy consumption by saying "that's a big no."

"The president believes that it's an American way of life," Mr. Fleischer said.

Not conservation, not higher mileage, not switching to transit -- BUT MORE DRILLING American Petroleum Institute

We've been in a chronic situation here where supplies have not really caught up with demand," said Dave Costello, an analyst at the Energy Information Administration.

In response to higher energy costs, households are likely to spend less on restaurant meals, clothing and other items. That would slow economic growth in coming months, but economists predicted that other forces - like a continuing housing boom and rising corporate investments in factories and equipment - would keep the economy growing.

"I don't think we're talking about a recession or a near recession," said Joshua Shapiro, the chief United States economist at MFR, a research company in New York. "I think we're talking about growth that is slower than people expected."

The real enemy is Big Oil and the American Petroleum Institute.

And if you actually take the time to read the myriad of Acrobat Files on the , maybe with a good book on petroleum politics and petroleum geopolitics -- like "A Century Of War : Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order" by F. William Engdahl and "Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy" by Matthew R. Simmons, you might be able to deduce that the role is AIPAC is minuscule compared to "Big Oil" - the lobby APIPAC, and their lobbyists, Bush family consigliere Jim Baker.

I have been in the "Energy Industry" for 3/4's of my career. Check out my blog--

[KittyWampus]

4. that'll never happen , but interesting info.

[nadinbrzezinski]

5. Actually BOTH partries

should shun AIPAC and start listening to Lerner, and other progresives, but the way DC politics work nope, it ain't gonna happen, their roots are way too deep inside the beltway with BOTH parties