In August 2005, Steve Rosen, fellow AIPAC employee Keith Weissman, and the Pentagon’s Col. Lawrence Franklin were indicted under the Espionage Act for allegedly trafficking classified U.S. national defense information in the interest of provoking a stronger U.S. posture toward Israel’s arch nemesis, Iran. Franklin has since pled guilty and received a prison sentence and fine. Franklin has not reported to prison, since he is cooperating with U.S. prosecutors and ready to testify when the criminal trial of Rosen and Weissman-repeatedly delayed by sophisticated defense team legal maneuvers-finally commences on May 27.

In his civil lawsuit against AIPAC Rosen maintains both his immunity from the Espionage Act and right to obtain tightly held government information for effective lobbying and public relations on behalf of Israel:

To be effective, organizations engaged in advocacy in the field of foreign policy need to have earlier and more detailed information about policy developments inside the government and diplomatic issues with other countries than is normally available to or needed by the wider public. ‘Agencies of the government sometimes choose to provide such additional information about policy and diplomatic issues to these outside interest groups in order to win support for what they are doing among important domestic constituencies and to send messages to select target audiences.

One surprising inside glimpse of AIPAC information flow in Rosen’s complaint reveals how special relationships cultivated with U.S. government officials yielded periodic harvests of tightly held information. This bounty was then internally circulated and funneled to outside constituencies at the discretion of AIPAC’s mirror bureaucracy of self-appointed declassification agents:

To control the flow of such information, government agencies in the field of foreign policy have designated individuals with the authority to determine and differentiate which information disclosures would be harmful to the United States, and which disclosures would benefit the United States through the work of their agencies and would not be harmful to the United States. To maintain liaison with the authorized agency officials who at times are willing to provide such information, organizations like AIPAC have designated officials of their own who have the requisite expertise and relationships to deal with government foreign policy agencies. At AIPAC, Steve Rosen was one of the principal officials who, along with Executive Director Howard Kohr and a few other individuals, were expected to maintain relationships with such agencies, receive such information, and share it with AIPAC Board of Directors and its Senior Staff for possible further distribution. AIPAC, and those defendants who were AIPAC officials and/or members of its Board of Directors, knew that Mr. Rosen and others at AIPAC were receiving such information and expected that they would share it with them.

More damning to AIPAC, Rosen states unequivocally that other top AIPAC officials not only knew what he was doing, but also received classified information for which they both praised and financially rewarded Rosen and others handling and channeling classified information:

Mr. Rosen was highly successful in his job, and was regularly praised and generously rewarded by AIPAC’s Executive Director, its President, and its Board of Directors, including by those named as defendants herein who are and/or who were in those positions, for obtaining and sharing such information as described in paragraph no. 18 above. Indeed at the time it was shared with them, AIPAC’s Executive Director, its President, and its Board of Directors including those named as defendants herein who are and/or were in those positions, were well aware of the nature of the information obtained by Mr. Rosen as described in paragraph no. 18 above. Being so aware, they would often share that same information with others outside of AIPAC, particularly valuing Mr. Rosen for his ability to provide them with such information. In fact, AIPAC’s Executive Director, its President, and its Board of Directors, including by those named as defendants herein who are and/or who were in those positions as well as others of AIPAC’s staff, also obtained and shared with each other, and with others outside of AIPAC, such information as described in paragraph no. 18 above, and did so on a regular basis quite apart from the information obtained and shared with them by Mr. Rosen.

Curiously, Steve Rosen is not the only former AIPAC staffer suddenly surfacing to confront AIPAC. Another even intimates that AIPAC is a hotbed for activities of questionable legality. Former AIPAC chief lobbyist Douglas Bloomfield characterized AIPAC not as classified information bazaar, but rather as a covert foreign agent for Israeli governments bent on thwarting U.S. brokered peace deals. While simultaneously forecasting the imminent demise of the government’s criminal prosecution against Weissman and Rosen, Bloomfield points to insider forces slowly arraying highly damaging information against AIPAC:

In cutting loose the pair, AIPAC insisted it had no idea what they were doing. Not so, say insiders, former colleagues, sources close to the defense, and others familiar with the organization.

One of the topics AIPAC won’t want discussed, say these sources, is how closely it coordinated with Benjamin Netanyahu in the 1990s, when he led the Israeli Likud opposition and later when he was prime minister, to impede the Oslo peace process being pressed by President Bill Clinton and Israeli Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres.

That could not only validate AIPAC’s critics, who accuse it of being a branch of the Likud, but also lead to an investigation of violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

What they don’t want out is that even though they publicly sounded like they were supporting the Oslo process, they were working all the time to undermine it,’ said a well-informed source.

Why the not-so-subtle public threats? Both Bloomfield and Rosen clearly feel that AIPAC violated the ethic of reciprocity when it cut loose Rosen and Weissman and halted funding for their legal defense. AIPAC fired the two to avoid indictment of the entire corporation in the aftermath of two harrowing
FBI raids. Corporate criminal indictments probably would have led to AIPAC’s immediate implosion. The melodramatic sense of betrayal that permeates the defamation complaint hinges on the flawed deal lead prosecutor Paul McNulty offered to AIPAC: “We could make real progress and get AIPAC out from under all of us.” AIPAC subsequently put Rosen and Weissman on leave and later fired them, after, in Rosen’s view, “they had approved and rewarded the very behavior which they now condemned.” AIPAC also began deploying its considerable influence in the news media to carefully place stories characterizing Rosen’s work and comportment as unacceptable and uncharacteristic, seemingly oblivious to the idea that the same tactic could also be turned against it. These particular slights may be the straws that broke the camel’s back. Rosen’s angst is palpable as he quotes AIPAC executive director Howard Kohr’s harsh treatment:

[M]r. Kohr subtly tried to make this case that Messrs. Rosen’s [another AIPAC employee] behavior was out of the ordinary for employees of the organization that considers itself one of the most powerful in Washington. At the same time, Mr. Kohr said he has taken steps to ensure that no lines in the future will be crossed by his lobbyists and analysts. ‘I will take steps necessary to ensure that every employee of AIPAC, now and in the future, conducts themselves in a manner of which you can be proud, using policies and procedures that provide transparency, accountability and maintain our effectiveness’ he said.

Rosen cites a Jewish Telegraphic Agency report to make a surprisingly frank assertion that Kohr himself not only received classified information from Rosen, but also knew it was from U.S. intelligence sources:

Further, on June 17, 2005, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported a different formulation to defame Steve Rosen: ‘No current employee knew that classified information was obtained from Larry Franklin or was involved in dissemination of such information,’ spokesperson Patrick Dorton said. In fact, Mr. Kohr had been told in writing that information obtained from Mr. Franklin originated from ‘intelligence’ sources, and Mr. Rosen knew no more about the sources or classification than Mr. Kohr.

The seemingly defeatist maneuvers of this circular firing squad partially mask Rosen’s real strategy. Millions of dollars would do him little good behind bars or preserve AIPAC’s reputation if he prevails. What Rosen needs most is for AIPAC to pull him ‘out from under all this’ as soon as possible. Otherwise AIPAC and the rest of the lobby will face the full wrath of Rosen’s accumulated arsenal: access to damning AIPAC internal information and a multitude of allies who follow the credo that “divided we fall.” Rosen, having recently proven his considerable powers even under indictment by derailing the nomination of Charles Freeman at the National Intelligence Council, now clearly expects AIPAC to muster the entirety of its own considerable resources to achieve concrete results before May 27. For bystanders, the key remaining question is whether Attorney General Eric Holder and President Barack Obama have the mettle to withstand the most intense maneuvers from all directions urging them to fold the Espionage Act trial before it begins.

Not since former attorney general Robert F. Kennedy ordered AIPAC’s parent organization to register as a foreign agent has the Israel lobby been as existentially threatened by rule of law in America. The elite mainstream press, from the Washington Post to the Wall Street Journal, has already pitched in to help by urging the DOJ to quickly march away from the prosecution. Pundits who before Barack Obama entered office saw the case as a threat to “freedom of the press” are now repositioning the trial as a vestigial legacy of the Bush administration’s pervasive secrecy.

But the passage of time has not played in AIPAC’s or the defendants’ favor. In the economic aftermath of a disastrous war empowered by carefully channeled disinformation, many Americans are questioning how rule of law might temper selective leaks from lobbyists obliviously liquidating U.S. tax dollars and soldiers in foreign follies. The Espionage Act should function like the financial industry’s Fair Disclosure regulation, which protects small investors from being victimized by larger investors trading on material inside information. If AIPAC obtains closely held information, shouldn’t all Americans instantly be privy? Also, that AIPAC is a de facto foreign agent covertly injecting Israeli government mandates into Congress and the executive branch isn’t quite the explosive secret AIPAC insiders presume it to be. In 2008, the DOJ grudgingly declassified all internal files detailing its earlier three-year fight to register AIPAC’s parent organization as a foreign agent. Any American who checks the Foreign Agents Registration Act against AIPAC’s routine activities knows it is the agent of a foreign power. Middle East historians have no need of Douglas Bloomfield’s verification that the Israel lobby thwarts presidential peace initiatives-the transcripts of Sen. J.W. Fulbright’s investigation of the Israel lobby in 1963 reveal precisely how such concerted actions thwarted the Johnson plan for Middle East peace. The issue is whether the Department of Justice will at long last stand up to AIPAC’s obvious violations of important laws that protect the interests of average Americans. Both John F. and Robert F. Kennedy struggled mightily and failed. If Obama and Holder similarly fail, it is not for lack of evidence now being delivered on silver platters from AIPAC operatives.

For, ironically, everything Steven Rosen alleges in his lawsuit and Bloomfield in his bluff is verifiably true. As an individual actor, Rosen truly is innocent of AIPAC’s protective ruse that he and Weissman alone were in any way unique at AIPAC. Yet another prior incident-also now public-substantiates this. AIPAC never adequately explained how its possession of a 300-page classified report in 1984 outlining the secret American negotiating position for the fatally flawed U.S.-Israel Free Trade Area could possibly be legal. The U.S. government, even in 2009, still won’t declassify that report for an overdue public audit.

Steve Rosen’s late legal gambit cannot obscure the obvious. The real issue isn’t whether AIPAC failed its lobbyists by jettisoning them in a panic; it is whether the Department of Justice failed Americans when it didn’t indict the entire American Israel Public Affairs Committee. If Obama and Holder resist urgent pressures from the Israel lobby, Steve Rosen’s lawsuit may actually accomplish what prosecuting attorney McNulty could not-making all top AIPAC operatives finally stand trial together.

AIPAC and its associated think tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), were instrumental in lobbying the president for the creation of the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence unit early in 2004. The Israel lobby also vetted Stuart Levey who President Bush approved to lead the new unit. TFI claims to be “safeguarding the financial system against illicit use and combating rogue nations, terrorist facilitators, weapons of mass destruction (WMD) proliferators, money launderers, drug kingpins, and other national security threats.” However its actions—and more important, inactions—reveal it to be a sharp-edged tool forged principally to serve the Israel lobby.

TFI has taken no actions to undercut one nexus of money laundering in the Middle East unveiled in 2005 by Israeli prosecutor Talia Sasson and exposed by USA Today. Even mainstream print outlets such as Reuters continue to wonder aloud why US tax exemptions are offered for illegal overseas activities. Although Stuart Levey has made multiple official visits to Jerusalem to liaise with Israeli government officials, when formally asked under a Freedom of Information Act request to reveal how TFI was tackling the reported $50-$60 billion laundered from the US through Israel and into illegal West Bank settlements, TFI politely demurred. (PDF) TFI claims that Levey’s US-taxpayer-funded missions to Israel must be kept secret from the American public in order to comply with the Bank Secrecy Act, which ironically is an anti-money-laundering law.¹ This is not to say that TFI is a black box to everyone. Invited guests and members of WINEP have received many intimate briefings from TFI officials and consultants—possibly more than the entire US Congress.

TFI’s highly selective, largely secret pursuits should surprise no one. This is not the first time Israel lobbyists have bent an agency toward counterproductive foreign policy initiatives with the approval of a sitting president. During WWII, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. became infatuated with the efforts of Peter H. Bergson (aka Hillel Kook, born in Lithuania, 1915-2001) toward the formation of a “Jewish Army” in the Middle East. Bergson’s “Committee for a Jewish Army” circulated an early plan to the US Congress calling for financing an army of 100,000 Jews in Palestine to fight Nazis and “fifth columnists” of Syria, Iraq, and Egypt. In reality, Bergson was leading an American front organization for Menachem Begin’s Irgun Z’vai Leumi organization. Irgun also lobbied Nazi Germany for a Jewish Army, as well as a formal alliance between 1940 and 1941 while Hitler appeared to have the upper hand in Europe.²

Morgenthau strongly identified with Bergson’s later rescue efforts to save Jews from Nazi barbarity by finding refugee havens in Western host countries. Morgenthau sought to remove displaced person policy from the jurisdiction of the US State Department by commissioning his own department assistants, Josiah Dubois, John Pehle, and Randolph Paul, to compile a report on rescue opportunities and failures, which he presented to President Roosevelt on January 16, 1944. It roundly castigated the State Department and recommended that Roosevelt “remove the hands of men who are indifferent, callous and perhaps even hostile.” He also threatened to launch a public relations attack on the State Department as a bastion of anti-Semitism. It was a charge, he said, that “will require little more in the way of proof for this suspicion to explode into a nasty scandal.”³

Roosevelt, not wishing to face such a scandal in an election year, issued Executive Order 9417 establishing the War Refugee Board (WRB). He named Morgenthau, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and War Secretary Henry Stimson to head the board. John W. Pehle, who as assistant treasury secretary had spent much of his time working to produce evidence of State Department procrastination on refugee efforts, became director of the WRB. Josiah Dubois affirmed that the work of Bergson was effective in “generating an atmosphere conducive to its formation…we were seeking the same goals.” Earlier, Pehl had ordered that Bergson be allowed to utilize State Department cables to communicate with Irgun leader Vladimir Jabotinsky and facilitate his movements to Turkey.⁴ The WRB was authorized to establish refugee absorption centers in neutral countries, a worthy effort that was unable to lead by example. By late July of 1944, the WRB was only able to secure infrastructure for 1,000 refugees at Fort Ontario in Lake Oswego, New York. This number was unimpressive to other countries being lobbied to absorb refugees, and the entire effort was largely a failure. But it was more than just a failure to rescue innocent victims of the Holocaust or a diversion of wartime assets—with no referendum on the matter or act of Congress, Morgenthau had allied a key US government agency to terrorists.

Before Bergson began receiving support from Treasury, Irgun had plenty of blood on its hands. Vladimir Jabotinsky was a major figure in the World Zionist Organization and put together a force of 5,000 soldiers as the organization’s contribution to the British conquest of Palestine during WWI. In 1920, he organized the Haganah, the precursor to the Israeli Army, and held a position in the WZO World Executive for his leadership role. The Haganah worked jointly with the British to quell the uprising as their “settlement police.” He resigned to build his own far-right-wing Zionist-Revisionist World Union in 1925, which opposed World Zionist Organization president Chaim Weizmann’s vision. Jabotinsky’s was to “revise” the British decision to separate Trans-Jordan from territory allotted to become the “Jewish National Home” after WWI in the Balfour declaration. Jabotinsky also wanted to “revise” the British decision to disband the Jewish legion. His views evolved over time toward supporting the absolute necessity of violent armed displacement of Arabs in Palestine. This was frankly encapsulated in his 1923 “Iron Wall” manifesto:

There can be no kind of discussion of a voluntary reconciliation between us and the Arabs…Any native people…view their country as their national home. They will not voluntarily allow, not only a new master, but even a new partner…Colonization can have only one goal. For the Palestinian Arabs this goal is inadmissible. This is in the nature of things. To change that nature is impossible…colonization can therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population—an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy toward the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy.

Jabotinsky established his paramilitary Betar youth group in 1923 in Palestine and other countries. Menachem Begin joined in 1929 in Poland, rising to head the national unit that became Betar’s largest branch.

Arab Palestinians, sensing their own eventual displacement, had begun revolting against Jewish immigration in 1936. A Revisionist paramilitary split from the Haganah in 1931 and was placed under the command of Jabotinsky in December of 1936. Although they were originally committed to “self restraint,” by November the Irgun forces were actively engaging in terrorism, including the use of milk-can bombs that would be famously deployed a decade later against the British in the King David Hotel attack. Early in September of 1936, 13 Arabs were killed, supposedly in retaliation for the death of three Jews. Several Irgunists were determined to act on their own, but the Irgun Command headed them off by organizing a wave of operations, beginning on November 14, that resulted in 10 dead and numerous wounded. The Irgun’s campaign of attacks on purely civilian targets reached its high point in the summer of 1938. On July 6, a bomb in a milk can went off in the Arab market in Haifa, leaving 21 dead and 52 injured. On July 15, an electric mine in David Street in the old city of Jerusalem killed 10 and wounded 30. On July 25, another bomb in the Haifa market left 35 dead and 70 wounded. On July 26, a bomb in Jaffa’s market killed 24 and injured 35.⁵ Historian Paul Johnson claims that Israel owes its existence largely due to the timely deployment of such terrorist attacks.⁶ Still, in these days long predating the so-called “war on terror,” the architect of many of these bloodbaths had no problem entering the US.

In America, Irgun leader Jabotinsky roamed freely for a short time. On August 2, 1940, he was examined by a doctor who suspected that he had heart trouble. Jabotinsky then made his way to a Betar camp in Greene County in the Catskill Mountains, 130 miles from New York. After reviewing an honor guard, he collapsed and died. Although Irgun has long since left the building, AIPAC’s men may now kill off the remaining international credibility of an already severely debilitated US Treasury Department.

Treasury gasped this week as it bailed out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to the tune of billions in committed taxpayer funds. International financial institutions holding US-mortgage-backed and Treasury securities forced the Treasury to intervene in order to avert a global financial catastrophe. Such sovereign economic interests are now returning to the forefront of international relations and displacing blind acquiescence to preemptive bellicosity. Looking back, it is painfully obvious that the United States should have accepted the comprehensive “Grand Bargain” tendered by Iranian moderates in 2003. Iran’s $753-billion-dollar economy would be a highly productive trading partner for the United States—Iran’s competitive advantages in energy are well matched with the US’s high-tech, engineering service and machinery exports. Instead, we have AIPAC continually disrupting trade flows against the broader American interest.

AIPAC has a history of directing US trade policy against the interests of American producers and workers. In 1984, the FBI found AIPAC in possession of purloined secret International Trade Commission documents that US government officials solicited from private industry in order to negotiate a favorable bilateral free trade agreement with Israel. AIPAC promptly used this stolen information against the American worker—the subsequent FTA has yielded a $63 billion net US trade deficit with Israel between 1989 and 2007.

The grinding march toward a pointless war with Iran, like Morgenthau’s dalliances with the Irgun, is not really about America’s own best interests. It’s not that Stuart Levey doesn’t know how Israeli extremism can endanger the United States. Levey’s Fulbright-grant-funded undergraduate thesis was all about Meir Kahane, the Brooklyn-born rabbi who founded the Israeli group Kach. Kahane Chai (Kach) currently occupies slot number 20 on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations. While the buttoned-down Levey is certainly not an extremist of Kahane’s or Jabotinsky’s violent mold, his AIPAC-sponsored financial warfare is clearly extreme. Levey and his supporters are threatening US trading partners, banks, multinational corporations, independent shippers, small trade related businesses and the international shipping system. The only beneficiary of the action is Israel—a non-signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and longtime owner of its own nuclear weapons—an arsenal financed and created, in large part, by precisely the kinds of “deceptive schemes” and “illicit commerce” toward which TFI consciously turns a blind eye. In contrast, Iran signed the NPT, is under active International Atomic Energy Agency monitoring, and is not enriching uranium to levels sufficient for nuclear weapons production.

Like the rigged 1984 Free Trade Agreement, AIPAC’s Treasury Department actions will create more hard times for American workers. As never before, America’s economy could benefit from any expansion in export jobs boosted by new market access. Trade with Iran and the rest of the Middle East is based on real comparative advantages. US workers, many facing home foreclosures due to junk mortgages, will be the unknowing victims of the latest US Treasury gambit. Like the Morgenthau scheme, the Israel lobby’s latest venture is likely to fail as the international system routes around the new trade impediments. The world largely ignored Morgenthau’s and the men from Irgun’s attempts to “lead by example” to save displaced persons of Europe. Levey’s far less worthy cause, fighting for Israeli regional nuclear hegemony through damaging trade edicts, may also be similarly ignored. Countries suffering from the fallout of their investments in US junk mortgages are unlikely to buy into more junk policies and junk wars crafted by the Israel lobby.

1. Smith, Grant F., America’s Defense Line: The Justice Department’s Battle to Register the Israel Lobby as Agents of a Foreign Government, page 197-198.
2. Polkehn, Klaus, “The Secret Contacts: Zionism and Nazi Germany, 1933-1941,” Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 5, No. 3/4 (Spring–Summer 1976), pp. 54-82.
3. Peck, Sarah E., “The Campaign for an American Response to the Nazi Holocaust , 1943-1945,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 15, No. 2 (April 1980), pp. 367-400.
4. Peck, Sarah E., “The Campaign for an American Response to the Nazi Holocaust, 1943-1945,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 15, No. 2 (April 1980), pp. 367-400.
5. Brenner, Lenni, “Zionist-Revisionism: The Years of Fascism and Terror,” Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Autumn 1983), pp. 66-92.
6. Johnson, Paul, A History of the Jews, New York, Harper and Row, 1987, p. 526.

It hasn't worked out very well for Franklin. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison. Curiously, Franklin remains free pending the outcome of the repeatedly postponed criminal trial against AIPAC's Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman. On Oct. 28, 2008, the prosecution is scheduled to appeal the ruling judge's order that it prove the alleged leaks harmed the United States. This is a far tougher standard of proof than the Espionage Act actually requires. Nevertheless, observers and critics hope the trial will provide insight into Middle East policy formulation — but there is diminished reason for this hope. A passel of musty documents from an earlier, long-secret Department of Justice attempt to hold the Israel lobby accountable was declassified on June 10, 2008. The files reveal that stalling tactics — and most critically, regime change in Washington — provide ample opportunity for the Israel lobby to subvert due process.

In 1962, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee investigated foreign lobbyists active in the United States. The committee hired tough investigators, including Walter Haskell Pincus, now the Washington Post's national security journalist. These investigators played hardball with the American Zionist Council (AZC) by going after its hidden financial flows. The Senate investigators rifled through the filing cabinets of the Israeli government's colonization and charitable fundraising partner, the Jewish Agency, American Section, based in New York. This raised howls of protest from Isaiah L. Kenen, then editor of a lobbying newsletter, the Near East Report.

The Senate investigation forced the Jewish Agency, American Section, regulated since 1938 under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), to file more detailed biannual activity declarations.¹ FARA is a disclosure law requiring all agents of foreign principals to detail their activities in reports filed at a public office within the U.S. Department of Justice. The Jewish Agency functioned as a quasi-governmental organization whose executive board was composed of Israelis (including government officials) and Americans. It not only received government funding, but had influence over internal policy and legal matters before they went to the Knesset under a 1953 "covenant" agreement with the Israeli government.

Sen. Fulbright, who led the investigation, was outraged at the idea that U.S. foreign aid and tax-preferential charitable funds were being funneled back into the U.S. to multiply foreign aid through lobbying and a massive stealth public relations campaign. At the time, Israel was far from the only violator. The Senate committee also caught the Philippines playing the same game through Washington lobbyists doling out campaign contributions in exchange for enormous WWII reparations payments funded by U.S. taxpayers. But Israel's covert lobbying and public relations venture was truly massive. By the time Fulbright's public Senate hearings ended in 1963, it had been established that the Jewish Agency laundered over $5 million (around $35 million today) into U.S. public relations and lobbying initiatives over a two-year period. The true scope of the campaign was never revealed, in spite of diligent attempts at law enforcement.

As in the Rosen and Weissman espionage incident, the FBI and Justice Department initially pressed the case forward. Their law enforcement efforts and internal deliberations work were largely invisible to the American public, but many sent letters urging that the American Zionist Council be registered as a foreign agent. On Nov. 21, 1962, before the full extent of the stealth PR and lobbying campaign was publicly exposed in Senate hearings, the head of the DOJ's Internal Security Section, J. Walter Yeagley sent a two-page letter and foreign agent registration forms [.pdf] to the American Zionist Council by certified mail.² The DOJ formally demanded that the Israel lobby's top umbrella organization openly register and disclose all of its U.S. activities as an agent of influence.

The AZC at the time — as the nonprofit umbrella corporation for the Zionist Organization of America, Hadassah, and other elite Zionist organizations in the United States – was the Israel lobby. It was almost completely dependent upon Jewish Agency-directed funds, some with special earmarks from the executive in Jerusalem to AIPAC founder Isaiah L. Kenen. Other recipients of the funding included New York Times media personalities, exiles from the shah's regime in Iran living in the U.S., tenured professors at Harvard, and authors active in churning out hundreds of "scholarly" books about Arab terrorism and Israel's special role as an ally to the U.S. in the Cold War.³

The Justice Department, directed by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (RFK), insisted that the AZC register as the Jewish Agency's American foreign agent. RFK and his top advisers felt the documented funding flows had "compromised" the lobby so much that they would quietly agree to file registration statements and disclosures. They did not count on the lobby's response. The lobby saw the registration demand as an "extinction-level event," like one of Hollywood's massive asteroids cinematically falling toward Earth. The lobby's outside lead counsel, Simon Rifkind of the firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, was apoplectic: FARA registration would be a "noose around the neck of his client" and "choke the very life out of it.⁴ The lobby's response was quiet, asymmetrical, and successful. The parallels with the 2005-2008 AIPAC espionage saga are uncanny.

In 2005, the Department of Justice's chief prosecutor on the espionage case, Paul McNulty, was suddenly and inexplicably promoted within the DOJ after he backed off on criminally indicting AIPAC as a corporation. That would have led to AIPAC's immediate demise as a going concern, just as earlier indictments doomed Enron and Arthur Andersen. A February 16, 2005 defense team communication between Rosen's lawyer, Abbe Lowell, and Nathan Lewin, AIPAC's legal counsel, revealed that U.S. Attorney Paul McNulty "would like to end it with minimal damage to AIPAC." Lewin further told Lowell that McNulty was now on AIPAC's side "fighting with the FBI to limit the investigation to Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman and to avoid expanding it.⁵ After discussing restricting the scope of the prosecution with AIPAC's lawyer and shortly after handing down only individual indictments (Aug. 4, 2005), McNulty was nominated to the position of deputy attorney general on Oct. 20, 2005. He was sworn into office on March 17, 2006. Why McNulty fought so hard to restrict the scope of the FBI's investigation is now less of a mystery. He was simply following the successful career path first blazed by Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach 40 years earlier.

Back in the 1960s, Katzenbach had also suddenly risen within the DOJ, becoming attorney general on Jan. 26, 1965, after he helped unwind the Israel lobby FARA registration demand within the DOJ. During the calamitous period after the Cuban missile crisis and John F. Kennedy's assassination, Katzenbach brokered an unprecedented deal. The American Zionist Council could register a "sample" Foreign Agent Registration Act declaration for a "representative" time period of its own choosing. Unlike every other filing open for public inspection at the FARA section, the AZC's would be kept in a special folder, with a secret name key linking the individuals and entities receiving Jewish Agency funding kept separate from the disbursement filing.⁶ This deal was derisively referred to as "the caveat" within the FARA section. It was the DOJ's and America's first and only "nonpublic" FARA disclosure. Many dedicated members of the FARA section, such as Nathan Lenvin and Irene Bowman, fought hard against this corruption of their transparency mandate. They lost. The Israel lobby's meager disclosure and internal files about the incident were classified and kept secret, only released under the Freedom of Information Act on June 10, 2008.

This subversion of the very essence of FARA heralded its subsequent demise as a serious buffer between Congress, the executive, and the American people and Israel's stealth lobbying campaigns. Analysis of the core documents related to the case reveals how seriously the Israel lobby managed to compromise the U.S. Department of Justice's enforcement efforts while it was vulnerable – during the Johnson administration's 1964 reelection campaign. FARA now serves only to pick off the most tangential of foreign schemers out of favor with the administration, such as those laundering Venezuelan "campaign contributions" through the U.S. to Argentina. The showdown with the Israel lobby and subsequent lobby-driven amendments gutted serious FARA enforcement in the early 1970s.

This calamity also produced an unprecedented career opportunity for Isaiah L. Kenen. Until the FARA battle, he was a long-term public relations operator for the nascent Israel lobby. The investigation traumatized Hadassah and the ZOA and exposed them to serious legal risks; it necessitated a corporate reshuffling because the need for an elite organization to spearhead Israel lobbying was still acute. Folding the AZC would leave a power vacuum in Washington. The AZC's stealth lobbying programs and public relations activities were subsequently transferred to a fledgling organization originally established as a unit within the AZC that was internally referred to as "the Kenen Committee.⁷ This became the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Its prerogatives have expanded such that in light of history, trade secrets theft⁸ and eventual run-ins with election law,⁹ not to mention the Espionage Act, now seem all but inevitable. The Justice Department's reticence to prosecute AIPAC, given its painful but secret FARA experience, seems understandable, though not necessarily forgivable.

The approaching criminal prosecution of Rosen and Weissman is no doubt again considered an extinction-level event by AIPAC and the rest of the Israel lobby, even in its highly robust present configuration. The lobby will have little time in 2009 for another cumbersome reorganization to rebuild credibility, not with soaring military aid demands, concerns over Iran, and its need to secure a semi-permanent U.S. military presence in the heart of the Middle East . But there is one problem. As years pass, it has become more difficult to score any viable legal strategy for dismissing the criminal case against Rosen and Weissman that would appear legitimate to the American public. The case docket [.pdf] reveals many defense team attempts to throw the case out on technical quibbling and how much classified U.S. national security information Rosen and Weissman may expose in their defense. Time also reveals that presiding Judge T.S. Ellis has been neither cowed by the potential graymail that typically plagues cases involving classified information nor intimidated by the lobby's allies in the news media.

Both the Republican and Democratic parties desperately need this case to go away long before the next president is sworn in. From their standpoint, it would be unseemly to have U.S. officials subpoenaed and actually put on the witness stand to reveal how Middle East policy is really crafted in the height of an election season dominated by narratives of hope, change, and restoring integrity. But hiring away the U.S. attorneys prosecuting the case, always a viable strategy, is now pretty much exhausted. One key member of the government's prosecution team has already left for the private sector.¹⁰ The Jewish Telegraphic Agency, formerly a wholly owned subsidiary of the Jewish Agency, recently called out for a popular uprising in Rosen and Weissman's defense. But like the Wall Street Journal's own earlier editorial page clemency plea directly to Attorney General Michael Mukasey, it has produced no tangible results. It is now up to the president himself to pardon Rosen and Weissman and end the trial before it can begin.

If President George W. Bush waits to pardon Weissman and Rosen until shortly before leaving office, it would be too late for AIPAC's most precious asset: its reputation as an entity engaged in lawful activities. The administration also has an overriding self-preservation interest in seeing this case vanish: it is the singular judicial process for determining whether AIPAC goes too far in agitating for wars – whether in Iraq, Lebanon, or Iran. For Americans a trial would be a very healthy process for determining whether powerful Washington think tanks and corporate news personalities blithely trafficking in our most sensitive national defense information for their own profit should ever be held accountable. But in the waning days of the Bush administration, short-circuiting public accountability for war decisions and the system that produces them is now the overriding doctrine. The pressure is on. Judge Ellis approved subpoenas for Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz as well as National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and Richard Armitage to appear as witnesses for the defense. Pardoning AIPAC would mean that Col. Lawrence Franklin, a member of Douglas Feith's infamous Pentagon policy shop and a crucial witness for the prosecution, walks free.

The decision to let the Israel lobby walk in 1965 was three years in the making. The initiative quietly gained momentum through similar appeals, stalling, and law enforcement delays. It was finalized during regime change in Washington. The calendar's pages are now inevitably turning toward a brief, singular moment for another special Israel lobby deal from a sitting U.S. president, a president who has little to gain by such public exercises in justice, and much to lose. However, unlike the secret Foreign Agents Registration Act deal of the 1960s, a presidential pardon will be impossible to keep secret. The possibility that a pardon could at last mass-mobilize the American people out of their unknowing tolerance for the lobby's dangerous foreign subversions may even be reason to welcome it.

1. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Investigation into the Activities of Agents of Foreign Principals in the United States, Washington, U.S. Government Printing Office, Aug. 1, 1963, pp. 1,704-1,709.
2. Certified letter from Assistant Attorney General Internal Security Division G. Walter Yeagley to the American Zionist Council Nov. 21, 1962 [.pdf], released under Freedom of Information Act on June 10, 2008.
3. Smith, Grant F., America's Defense Line: The Justice Department's Battle to Register the Israel Lobby as Agents of a Foreign Government, p. 173.
4. Memo from Thomas K. Hall, executive assistant, Internal Security Division to Files, p. 2, Jan. 24, 1962, released under Freedom of Information Act on June 10, 2008.
5. Judge T.S. Ellis III, U.S. vs. Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman, memorandum opinion, Aug. 9, 2006.
6. Smith, Grant F., America's Defense Line: The Justice Department's Battle to Register the Israel Lobby as Agents of a Foreign Government, pp. 177-178.
7. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Investigation into the Activities of Agents of Foreign Principals in the United States, 88th Congress, 1st session, Washington, U.S. Government Printing Office, May 23, 1963, p. 1,343.
8. "FBI Investigates Leak on Trade to Israel Lobby," Washington Post, Aug. 3, 1984.
9. "Papers Link Pro-Israel Lobby to Political Funding Efforts," Washington Post, Nov. 14, 1988.
10. "Top Prosecutor in AIPAC Case Quits," Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Feb. 28, 2008.

Martin Indyk, an Australian and naturalized US citizen, is the former deputy director of research at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Indyk helped establish the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) in 1984 with the support of AIPAC board member and activist Barbi Weinberg. Weinberg “had for over a decade privately wrestled with the idea of creating a foreign policy center.”¹ After the establishment of WINEP, Indyk stated that he was still dissatisfied and wished to establish an institution capable of escaping AIPAC’s reputation as a “strongly biased organization.”¹ Indyk would later go on to found the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. The center was initially funded by a $13 million grant from Israeli dual citizen and television magnate Haim Saban,² famously quoted by the New York Times as saying, “I’m a one-issue guy and my issue is Israel.”³ He also funded and established the Saban Institute for the Study of the American Political System within the University of Tel Aviv.⁴

WINEP’s role within the AIPAC power constellation is clear. While AIPAC lobbies with brute force for yearly aid allocations and enforces adherence to Israeli doctrine in Congress, WINEP polishes and shines Israeli policy objectives as pure expressions of US foreign policy interests. AIPAC is secretive about its internal deliberations and activities, but the highly sociable WINEP cultivates the image of a serious group of objective “scholars and wonks” deliberating Middle East policies in a rigorously academic fashion. WINEP not only hosts symposiums and conferences, but also conducts closed-door meetings with US politicians and distributes books and other publications rich in toned-down AIPAC ideology.

While AIPAC officials are loath to do live media events, especially with call-in or other potentially interactive audience segments, WINEP analysts and authors are omnipresent across major news- and policy-oriented programs. However, media announcements rarely mention WINEP’s overlap with AIPAC and other members of the Israel lobby or its close connections to Israel, although this would provide listeners and viewers with useful context for understanding the organization’s sophisticated positions. WINEP is also a place for grooming future presidential appointees, and it is perceived as a less controversial and more credible stepping stone to power than AIPAC.

Although AIPAC does not list WINEP as an affiliate in its IRS filings, in 2004 26% of AIPAC’s board of directors were also trustees of WINEP.⁵

WINEP’s ability to place stories that sway American public opinion toward supporting Israeli objectives is quantitatively revealed by analyzing the number of print media stories developed from WINEP content and analysts over a period of five critical years. Access, rather than merit or quality of content, drives WINEP’s news media success, according to former Middle East Studies Association President Joel Beinin:

While Aipac targets Congress through the massive election campaign contributions that it coordinates and directs, Winep concentrates on influencing the media and the executive branch. To this purpose it offers weekly lunches with guest speakers, written policy briefs, and “expert” guests for radio and television talk shows. Its director for policy and planning, Robert Satloff; its deputy director, Patrick Clawson; its senior fellow, Michael Eisenstadt, and other associates appear regularly on radio and television. Winep views prevail in two weekly news magazines, US News and World Report and The New Republic (whose editors-in-chief, Mortimer Zuckerman and Martin Peretz, sit on Winep’s board of advisers). The views of Winep’s Israeli associates, among them journalists Hirsh Goodman, David Makovsky, Ze’ev Schiff and Ehud Ya’ari, are spoon-fed to the American media.⁶

An analysis of major print coverage of WINEP-attributed content between the years 2001 and 2006 reveals that WINEP is not always engaged in a full-on media blitz. Rather, its media power is exercised cyclically as initiatives are strategically “brought to market.” In 2002, WINEP went on the offensive, tying the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US to Israel’s own efforts to subdue Palestinians and making a broad and vitriolic call for a greater US military role in the Middle East. Using the ProQuest print media database citations as an index, WINEP boosted war messaging media placements by 7%. In 2002-2003, AIPAC went into overdrive, secretly working Congress to support the ill-fated invasion of Iraq based on “weapons of mass destruction” and other pretexts. WINEP “analysts” began an all-out media blitz to “substantiate pretexts” and urge a hasty US military invasion of Iraq in the face of global opposition. Dennis Ross, the ubiquitous director of WINEP, eloquently appealed for public rejection of containment and other measures short of immediate US military invasion in a typical Baltimore Sun op-ed on March 13, 2003:

Sooner or later, Mr. Hussein, with nukes, would miscalculate again, making the unthinkable in the Middle East all too likely.

Some might reasonably argue that there are better ways to ensure he does not acquire nuclear weapons. Enhanced containment, with open-ended and intrusive inspections, could prevent Mr. Hussein from acquiring or developing these weapons. True, but is such a regime realistic? When the Bush administration came to power, the existing containment regime was fraying.

The alternative of war has made France a convert to enhanced containment for the time being. It has also provided Mr. Hussein an incentive to grudgingly, and always at the last minute, take the minimal steps required to keep us at bay.

Does anyone believe that in the absence of more than 200,000 U.S. troops in the area Mr. Hussein would be taking even his minimal steps? How long would he continue to “cooperate” if the troops weren’t there? How long would the French insist on intrusive inspections if we weren’t on the brink of war? And how long can we keep such a large military presence in the area?

The unfortunate truth is that we cannot maintain a war footing indefinitely. The paradox is that our large-scale military presence creates the potential to contain Iraq, but it is sustainable neither from our standpoint nor from the standpoint of the region. Either we will use it to disarm Mr. Hussein or we will within the next few months have to withdraw it. And once we began to remove it, several new and dangerous realities would emerge.⁷

The WINEP media placement index reveals a jump from 611 to 672 between the year 2002 and 2003 — a 10% increase in mainly Iraq-invasion-focused media placements.

WINEP Media Placement Index
(Source: ProQuest Print Database Search)

In the post-invasion fallout after public discovery that weapons of mass destruction were not the imminent threat to the US that had been portrayed by WINEP and many other operatives, WINEP saw no need to maintain a “surge”-level media blitz. The mission of getting US troops into Iraq, mirroring Israel’s own occupation of Palestinian territories, had been accomplished.

However, the post-invasion index jump from 430 to 630 indicates that WINEP is again on a mission. It is no secret that the new military objective is Israel’s arch-nemesis, Iran. Although the US public is vastly more skeptical about the claims of war partisans, the 47% increase in Iran-centric WINEP media placements should be understood as a leading indicator of military conflict in 2008 if WINEP and AIPAC meet their objectives. Given the elite status and political muscle of WINEP trustees, the efforts of AIPAC’s think tank should not be underestimated, especially in an election year. WINEP meets before the entry of a new president to debate and draft the administration’s Middle East “blueprint.” Many WINEP trustees believe that this policy mandate affecting all Americans is the prerogative of its handpicked commission members, including officials of the Israeli military establishment. Brian Whitaker of The Guardian questioned whether any other foreign principal could accomplish the same maneuver.

The Washington Institute is considered the most influential of the Middle East think tanks, and the one that the state department takes most seriously. Its director is the former US diplomat, Dennis Ross.

Besides publishing books and placing newspaper articles, the institute has a number of other activities that for legal purposes do not constitute lobbying, since this would change its tax status.

It holds lunches and seminars, typically about three times a week, where ideas are exchanged and political networking takes place. It has also given testimony to congressional committees nine times in the last five years.

Every four years, it convenes a “bipartisan blue-ribbon commission” known as the Presidential study group, which presents a blueprint for Middle East policy to the newly-elected president.

The institute makes no secret of its extensive links with Israel, which currently include the presence of two scholars from the Israeli armed forces.

Israel is an ally and the connection is so well known that officials and politicians take it into account when dealing with the institute. But it would surely be a different matter if the ally concerned were a country such as Egypt, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia.⁸

AIPAC’s influence in the US news media leads to curious and generally unnoticed subsidiary alumni reunions. On June 14, 2007, following a Hamas takeover of Palestinian installations in Gaza, Wolf Blitzer invited Dennis Ross into the CNN situation room to give his perspective on the instability. Customarily, Dennis Ross’s new book and WINEP affiliation were mentioned; AIPAC and the pervasive Israel connection were not. Equally unmentioned were Wolf Blitzer’s former career as a reporter and editor of the Near East Report (AIPAC’s newsletter) in the 1970s or his authorship of a comprehensive apologia downplaying the damage caused to the US by Jonathan Pollard’s spying for Israel in his book Territory of Lies.⁹

Although WINEP’s media influence is growing, compared to other think tanks, AIPAC’s ability to place public policy messages in the news media through WINEP was comparatively limited until 2002. Thanks to a timely “acquisition,” AIPAC and WINEP can now count on broader promulgation of AIPAC policy ideas through the Brookings Institution, one of the oldest and most highly regarded public policy think tanks in the United States.

The Saban Center for Middle East Policy

Brookings Institution Middle East policy research was placed under the direction of former AIPAC deputy director for research Martin Indyk in May of 2002. In an Internet video presenting the Saban Center, Indyk vastly understates both Haim Saban’s biography and his contribution to Brookings by referring to it as merely the “generosity of a Los Angeles businessman.” In 2006, Forbes magazine more accurately described Saban as the 98th richest person in America and the “Egyptian-born, Israeli-raised, now-American cartoon king.”¹⁰Indyk does not, however, understate how assembling hand-picked researchers to produce tightly messaged policy research can be thought of as “a business” in his Saban Center introductory video.

Haim Saban, a, uh, businessman in Los Angeles, came to Brookings with a desire to see us do more work on the Middle East issue. On the issues of the peace process, and terrorism, and the spread of weapons of mass destruction, and energy issues. And, uh, was prepared to put up the funds to get the center started. Through Haim Saban’s generosity, we are now able to launch a much larger effort to promote innovative policies, research and analysis that brings together the best minds in the business.¹¹

It is useful to carry Indyk’s “business” analogy a bit further. In 2003, Haim Saban led the $5.7 billion purchase of Kirch Media Group; in 2001, News Corporation and Saban sold Fox Family Worldwide for $5.1 billion. Saban was part of an investor group that won the bid for Univision, the biggest Spanish-language media corporation in the United States, in June of 2006. Financially speaking, Saban’s $13 million Brookings investment secured control over one of the most financially robust as well as influential policy think tanks. In 2005, the Brookings Institution’s net assets totaled $269,660,363.¹² From Saban’s perspective as a savvy media player concerned with promoting the policies of Israel’s government, taking over Brookings Middle East policy by launching the Saban Center in 2002 was yet another sound and extremely timely business investment — this time, in the marketplace of ideas. According to 2002 research by media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, Brookings led think tanks in total US media influence, measured by the number of policy analyst and report citations appearing in major US media.

Think Tank Share: US Marketplace of Policy Ideas
(Source: Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting)

By targeting and taking over Middle East policy at Brookings in 2002, Saban and Indyk were able to “leapfrog” AIPAC messaging from second to last in the think tank market (WINEP had only 2%) to first place. Taking over Brookings also made it appear to Americans that there was now an “expert consensus” from “right to left” on the key Middle East policy issue of the year: the US invasion of Iraq on weapons of mass destruction pretexts. Brookings is often portrayed as a “centrist to left think tank” in the corporate news media. According to FAIR, “Progressive or Left-Leaning” media citations were a small but important segment of the marketplace of ideas, but combined with “centrist,” they represented the majority. For Saban and Indyk, taking over Brookings Middle East policy in 2002¹³ meant penetrating the 63% of the marketplace of ideas that was generally not beating a drum for war in Iraq.

US Think Tank Policy by Political Ideology
(Source: Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting)

The arguments in favor of the Iraq invasion in the many Saban Center articles appearing across major newspapers, such as “Lock and Load” by Martin Indyk and Kenneth M. Pollack, Director of Research at Saban, did not differ in message from those of AIPAC’s own Washington Institute for Near East Policy and Dennis Ross. It would have been odd if they did, since, like Indyk, Kenneth Pollack worked at WINEP as a “research fellow” specializing on Iraq.¹⁴

Rather, the Bush administration could take the time it needs to “study” the Iraqi declaration, discussing its falsehoods and fabrications with allied governments until it has lined up all the necessary political and military ducks. Once the best case has been made and the preparations completed (probably in a few weeks), President Bush could announce that, in accordance with United Nations Resolution 1441, we and our allies have concluded that Iraq is in material breach of the 1991 cease-fire resolution and therefore the U.S. will lead a coalition to disarm Iraq by force.

If there must be war, this is the best way. The problem with allowing the inspections to play themselves out is that it is a policy based on hope, and as Secretary of State Colin Powell is fond of saying, “hope is not a plan.”

There is real risk in allowing the inspections to run on indefinitely. The longer the inspections go on and find nothing, the harder it will be for the U.S. to build a coalition when we finally decide to take action.¹⁵

The takeover of Brookings Middle East policy by an AIPAC operative and Israeli-American businessman represents an evolution in AIPAC influence over think tanks. From a business perspective, AIPAC has moved from “investment in startups” to “establishing subsidiaries” to the more recent stage of “corporate takeovers and acquisitions.” AIPAC has evolved strategically as a result of success and failure. Financing Dr. Benjamin Shwadran’s highly academic policy research at the Council on Middle East Affairs with Jewish Agency funding laundered through the Rabinowitz Foundation was problematic and nearly crumbled under the glare of Fulbright’s 1963 Senate probe. Even setting up the Washington Institute for Near East Policy in 1984 with AIPAC donor funds and board member involvement still did not give AIPAC the desired influence level of other less “captive” think tanks, particularly in the US news media. The takeover of Middle East policy at Brookings achieved what AIPAC had long sought in the marketplace of public policy: prestige, ideological spectrum dominance, and the highest level of achievable corporate media placement for its public policy initiatives. The American people are now more susceptible than ever before to AIPAC’s “weapons of mass destruction” propaganda campaigns and other targeted media messages emanating from its right, left, and center public policy “think tanks.” AIPAC and Saban are apparently convinced that the same messages can be effectively rebranded and simultaneously broadcast from both WINEP and Brookings. “Lock and Load” co-author Kenneth Pollack proved this during media appearances on CNN and Fox News in which he was successfully positioned as a liberal Bush Iraq war critic gradually coming to see the wisdom of the US military occupation, as documented by news watchdog Media Matters:

During the July 30 edition of CNN Newsroom, anchor Heidi Collins introduced Kenneth Pollack of The Brookings Institution by saying that Pollack “has been a vocal critic of the administration’s handling of the [Iraq] war, but he says that an eight-day visit has changed his outlook a bit.” Collins also said that Pollack’s “tune is changing a bit” with respect to the war. Pollack went on to discuss how a recent visit to Iraq has left him “more optimistic” about the war. However, while focusing on Pollack’s criticisms of the “handling” of the war, Collins failed to note that Pollack was an influential proponent of the Iraq invasion before it happened, leaving viewers with the impression that Pollack was a war opponent who has become more supportive of the war. Pollack’s 2002 book on the subject was titled The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq.¹⁶

Saban and AIPAC can be confident that few of the message’s target viewing population knew about Pollack’s record or key financial backer. They can also count on a new generation of eager AIPAC activists to populate think tanks and congressional offices in coming years thanks to “Saban Training” at AIPAC.

This summer GDI is proud to send two of its members to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Saban Training. On July 22, Joshua Sussman and Jen Sovronsky will travel to Washington, DC for 4 days of intense advocacy training.

The Saban conference is AIPAC’s premier student political leadership training seminar, presented through its Schusterman Advocacy Institute, is held twice each year in Washington, D.C. More than three hundred of AIPAC’s top student activists from over 100 campuses participate in three days of intense grassroots political and advocacy training. During this seminar, students meet with top Washington policy makers, elected officials, and Middle East experts.¹⁷

However, even as Saban advocacy training and activities continue in Washington, the potentially explosive outcome of a criminal trial across the Potomac in the Eastern District Court of Virginia could change the way many Americans view AIPAC.

1. Mark Milstein, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, July 1991.
2. Grant F. Smith, “Israel Lobby Initiates Hispanic Strategy.”
3. Andrew Ross Sorkin, New York Times, September 5, 2004.
4. Phyllis Berman, Forbes Magazine, December 8, 2006.
5. AIPAC Board Members on WINEP’s Board as listed in 2004 IRS form 990 filings include Robert Asher, Paul Baker, Edward Levy, Mayer Mitchell, Larry Mizel, Lester Pollack, Nina Rosenwald, Eugene Schupak, Roseelyne Swig, James Tisch, Larry Weinberg, Tim Wurlinger and Harriet Zimmerman.
6. Joel Beinin, Le Monde Diplomatique, July 2003.
7. Ross, Dennis, Baltimore Sun, March 19, 2003.
8. Brian Whitaker, The Guardian, August 19, 2002.
9. Territory of Lies: The Exclusive Story of Jonathan Jay Pollard: The American Who Spied on His Country for Israel and How He Was Betrayed
10. Forbes Magazine, September 21, 2006.
11. Director’s Introductory Video, Brookings Saban Center Website.
12. Brookings Institution form 990 filing for its fiscal year ending June 30, 2005.
13. Brookings Saban Center Website.
14. Profile of Pollack from the WINEP website archive
15. Martin Indyk, Los Angeles Times, December 19, 2002.
16. Media Matters, July 30, 2007.
17. University of Albany community website.

The other morning I removed my Masters in International Management degree from the office wall and carefully pulled it out of the frame. I held it in my hands and considered a chaotic journey of discovery during a campus era that has now come to an abrupt end.

Born in the Minneapolis suburbs, I did not have to travel far for an exciting education. The University of Minnesota was a thrilling place to learn in the mid-1980s.

Most stimulating for me were the perpetual classroom and campus debates. My first day in a philosophy class titled “Life of the Mind” opened with a pitched verbal battle between a proud semisocialistic professor and a rabidly free-market freshman. Their verbal sparring over the course’s reading list benefited me greatly and set the tone for what was in store for me on campus.

At the time, I had no idea what the term “political correctness” meant, or what the possible tradeoffs were between the quest for individual wealth and social welfare. It was all new, heady and contentious stuff.

When the Central Intelligence Agency came to the campus job fair, I initially sided with my outraged roommates. Surely passing through their booth was an endorsement of the Reagan administration’s contra war against Nicaragua and every covert CIA action from the toppling of Mossadegh in Iran to the attempted assassinations of Castro.

However, rather than join the cacophony of protesters, I went and spoke with the analyst and agent recruiters. Their congeniality was disarming. Yes, the “company” had implemented ham-handed policies, they allowed. Learning from mistakes was now part of the organizational structure. And wouldn’t I like to help fill their desperate need for Arab linguists and regional intelligence analysts?

No, thanks. But I learned more about real-world professions and opportunities from government, NGO and corporate recruiters than I ever could have by simply shouting them all down.

As I approached the end of my core curriculum, I had the pleasure of sitting at the elbow of a mild-mannered professor who actually flew up from Chicago to give chilling insights about his Cold War expertise: conventional deterrence. It was horrifying to listen to him spin scenarios of European tank warfare under the shadow of nuclear holocaust. Few, certainly not I, agreed with or wanted to face up to the bloody implications of his research. But we listened, and argued, and graduated.

In the early 1990s the University of St. Thomas offered the irresistible lure of a master’s degree in International Management. Hundreds of graduates now working in the United States and abroad will remember the stern financial protocols of director Herb Leshinsky contrasted against the flamboyant intercultural-communications teachings of Jon Giordano.

Giordano would spontaneously bring in interviewees as diverse as recalcitrant Soviets and a delegation of mild Canadian businessmen looking for market insights. Hushed student whispers in the corridors confirmed that Giordano and Leshinsky had nothing in common and were in constant conflict about everything. What they lacked in complementary worldviews, both educators made up for in competition to serve students. In my case, Leshinsky recommended me for a job in Bogota that would create an unprecedented opportunity personally and professionally. Giordano also remained in touch, flew in to give seminars to the local executives club and even invited me back to address students and to dine in his home. These professors continued teaching me long after my final tuition payments.

More than a decade later, I stand in awe over how intolerant of diverse views higher education and research institutions have become. The educational ferment is being purposefully watered down as cowardly administrators prioritize endowment over education.

John Mearsheimer, a professor of political science in Chicago, is now something of a pariah for his recent work on the Israel lobby, unwelcome and disinvited from numerous relevant venues. I now agree with much of what he says, but also value the opportunity to consider opposing views.

I have frequently gone to the American Enterprise Institute to hear and even confront controversial thinkers like Michael Ledeen and Richard Perle. I don’t agree with anything they say or have done, but wouldn’t deny anyone a venue for presenting their case. That would be deeply un-American.

Columbia University resisted pressure and grudgingly honored its commitment to hear out Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. DePaul University recently bent to the same pressures when it denied tenure to the controversial but brilliant Prof. Norman Finkelstein.

When President Dennis Dease denied Archbishop Desmond Tutu an opportunity to speak on the University of St. Thomas campus, he was quietly responding to the opaque pressures of a dangerous national trend. None of the names of the many great and sometimes controversial speakers and professors who grappled with and educated me appears on my diploma. However, the name “Dennis Dease” does.

I believe that the reputation and comportment of a university follow degree recipients long after they’ve graduated. This is why I mailed my diploma back to Dease, stamped “return to sender.”

That Dease has now changed his mind in the face of public protest matters not. The pressure to deny relevant venue to controversial thinkers is spreading across American campuses, and both students and graduates need to be vigilant. Dease can keep the diploma.