New Yorker: the Franklin scandal shows how the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC

Nothing Without Hope

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Sun Jul-03-05 02:35 PM
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New Yorker: the Franklin scandal shows how the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC

Edited on Sun Jul-03-05 02:36 PM by Nothing Without Hope

works to shape American foreign policy

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) lobbies for Israel�s financial and physical security. It is one of the most powerful lobbies in Washtington, closely connected with � and influential in the election or defeat of � many members of Congress, and its pressure affects decisions made by the US government and all aspects of Israeli national security. Read the article and see how far and how deeply this goes.

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/050704fa_fact
The New Yorker � �Letter From Washtington�

REAL INSIDERS

by JEFFREY GOLDBERG
A pro-Israel lobby and an F.B.I. sting.
Issue of 2005-07-04
Posted 2005-06-27

(snip)

AIPAC�s leaders can be immoderately frank about the group�s influence. At dinner that night with Steven Rosen, I mentioned a controversy that had enveloped AIPAC in 1992. David Steiner, a New Jersey real-estate developer who was then serving as AIPAC�s president, was caught on tape boasting that he had �cut a deal� with the Administration of George H. W. Bush to provide more aid to Israel. Steiner also said that he was �negotiating� with the incoming Clinton Administration over the appointment of a pro-Israel Secretary of State. �We have a dozen people in his��Clinton�s��headquarters . . . and they are all going to get big jobs,� Steiner said. Soon after the tape�s existence was disclosed, Steiner resigned his post. I asked Rosen if AIPAC suffered a loss of influence after the Steiner affair. A half smile appeared on his face, and he pushed a napkin across the table. �You see this napkin?� he said. �In twenty-four hours, we could have the signatures of seventy senators on this napkin.�

(snip)

Unlike American neoconservatives, who have openly supported the Likud Party over the more liberal Labor Party, AIPAC does not generally take sides in Israeli politics. But on Iran AIPAC�s views resemble those of the neoconservatives. In 1996, Rosen and other AIPAC staff members helped write, and engineer the passage of, the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act, which imposed sanctions on foreign oil companies doing business with those two countries; AIPAC is determined, above all, to deny Iran the ability to manufacture nuclear weapons. Iran was a main focus of this year�s AIPAC policy conference, which was held in May at the Washington Convention Center. Ariel Sharon and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, among others, addressed five thousand AIPAC members. One hall of the convention center was taken up by a Disney-style walk-through display of an Iranian nuclear facility. It was kitsch, but not ineffective, and Rosen undoubtedly would have appreciated it. Rosen, however, was not there. He was fired earlier this year by Howard Kohr, nine months after he became implicated in an F.B.I. espionage investigation. Rosen�s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, expects him to be indicted on charges of passing secret information about Iranian intelligence activities in Iraq to an official of the Israeli Embassy and to a Washington Post reporter. A junior colleague, Keith Weissman, who served as an Iran analyst for AIPAC until he, too, was fired, may face similar charges.

(snip)

The person who, in essence, ended Rosen�s career is a fifty-eight-year-old Pentagon analyst named Lawrence Anthony Franklin, who is even more preoccupied with Iran than Steven Rosen. Franklin, until recently the Pentagon�s Iran desk officer, was indicted last month on espionage charges. The Justice Department has accused him of giving �national-defense information� to Rosen and Weissman, and classified information to an Israeli official. Franklin has pleaded not guilty; a tentative trial date is set for September. If convicted, he will face at least ten years in prison.

(snip)

Even some of AIPAC�s most vigorous critics do not see the Rosen affair as a traditional espionage case. James Bamford, who is the author of well-received books about the National Security Agency, and an often vocal critic of Israel and the pro-Israel lobby, sees the case as a cautionary tale about one lobbying group�s disproportionate influence: �What Pollard did was espionage. This is a much different and more unique animal�this is the selling of ideology, trying to sell a viewpoint.� He continued, �Larry Franklin is not going to knock on George Bush�s door, but he can get AIPAC, which is a pressure group, and the Israeli government, which is an enormous pressure group, to try to get the American government to change its policy to a more aggressive policy.� Bamford, who believes that Weissman and Rosen may indeed be guilty of soliciting information and passing it to a foreign government, sees the case as a kind of brushback pitch, a way of limiting AIPAC�s long�and, in Bamford�s view, dangerous�reach.

(snip)