@@ Things are getting ugly for dirty Jews & Azari-Zionists @@
Arash
September 5, 2004
FBI probe into leaked secrets embroils Israeli lobbying group
Diplomatic tension as Pentagon officials and Bush aides implicated in Middle
East spying row. Ros Davidson in Washington reports
It's a political juggernaut and one of the most effective and controversial
lobbying groups in the US. It also has close ties to Israeli prime minister
Ariel Sharon and his Likud Party.
Even as it emerged as a key suspect in an alleged leak of classified US
information on Iran to Israel, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee
(AIPAC) last week continued to wine and dine Washington's elite.
At a reception co-hosted by Aipac in New York, guests included 70 Republican
members of Congress, two members of President Bush's Cabinet, five state
governors and three top staffers of the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign,
according to BusinessWeek.
As almost 2000 guests nibbled on grilled vegetables and smoked salmon,
Bush's
campaign chair Ken Mehlman was introduced thusly: "We are honoured that
President Bush's campaign is being managed by one of us."
With 85,000 members, many of them relatively wealthy , AIPAC is ranked by
Fortune magazine as America's fourth most powerful lobbying group.
"It's a very skilled organ isation," said Dan Byman, a Middle East expert
who teaches security studies at Georgetown University. AIPAC, traditionally
close to both Israel and the Pentagon, claims to hold more than 2000
meetings a year with members of Congress and to have a role in dozens of
pieces of pro-Israel legislation in Washington.
In the first six months of this year AIPAC spent £410,000 on lobbying, says
the Centre for Responsive Politics, which tracks money in US politics. But
its clout, and its ability to leverage financial support, is far greater
than that.
"It's very good at putting pressure on Congress and making members believe
what it believes," said a Middle East expert and former government official,
who noted that AIPAC is also loathed by some in the US government precisely
because it is so powerful.
The group has been investigated, and cleared, of illegally influencing
political races within the US. AIPAC now stands as the middleman in an FBI
probe into a small group of ultra-hawkish neo-conservatives. Several US
officials in the Pentagon and in vice-president Dick Cheney's office are
linked to the alleged leak to Israel, which may have been meant to harden
the Bush administration's muddled policy on Iran.
A suspected pro-Israel mole in the Pentagon, mid-level Iran analyst
'Lawrence J Franklin', allegedly passed on a classified draft of US policy
on Tehran to Israel through two staffers at AIPAC. As the main pro-Israel
lobby group, AIPAC sees its top priority as preventing Iran acquiring
nuclear weapons, a view in line with Tel Aviv.
Franklin, a hawkish, religious Catholic once posted in Israel as a US Air
Force reservist, works for the defence under-secretary 'Douglas Feith', the
Pentagon's number three official and a former consultant to Likud, who
formed his own intelligence unit to argue that al-Qaeda had ties to Iraq.
The FBI probe, started in 2001, is also investigating whether highly
classified mat erial from the National Security Agency, which intercepts
electronic communications, was passed to Israel. And, according to an
unconfirmed and startling report in The Washington Post, the FBI is also
looking into whether information on Iran was similarly leaked to Ahmad
Chalabi, the disgraced Iraqi politician and formerly the administration's
favoured ruler of post-Saddam Iraq.
Friday's Washington Post claimed FBI counter-espion age agents are now
focusing on several policy-makers, all of them more influential than
Franklin.
They are said to be: Feith; Richard Perle of the defence policy board, which
advises defence secretary Donald Rums feld; David Wurmster, an Iran
specialist in Cheney's office; deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz; and
Harold Rhode, a Pentagon specialist on Iraq and Iran.
The FBI has interviewed two AIPAC staffers: Steven Rosen, its director of
foreign policy, and Kenneth Weissman, an expert on Iran. Agents also copied
the hard drive from one of AIPAC's computers.
Naor Gilon, a senior official at the Israeli embassy in Washington, has
acknowledged meeting Franklin but said he did nothing illegal. Gilon, the
embassy's chief of political aff airs, was under surveillance by the FBI
when he was meeting with two AIPAC staffers and Franklin unex pectedly
walked in.
The FBI often watches foreign diplomats on US turf. But this issue is
especially sensitive, if only because the US and Israel collaborate so
closely on intelligence. One administration source has said that the
AIPAC-Franklin probe is the most serious since 1987, when Jonathan Pollard,
an American, was imprisoned for life for passing classified information to
Israel.