Janet McMahon, Managing Editor – Washington Report on Middle East Affairs explains the history and impact of “stealth PACs.” Why has the American Israel Public Affairs Committee spawned a network of PACs across America? Why don’t any claim affiliation to their creator or use descriptive names? Shouldn’t they be consolidated to have reduced total contribution limits like other PACs? How has the American Israel Public Affairs Committee secretly coordinated stealth PACs, and what has been done about it? Presentation panel from the Move Over AIPAC conference on May 21, 2011.
Author: Grant Smith, IRmep
Register AIPAC as a Foreign Agent – Picket @ DOJ
May 24, 2011 Move Over AIPAC picket at the US Department of Justice.
US-Israel Trade: Espionage, Theft and Secrets
http://vimeo.com/22314781
On April 6, Grant F. Smith presented a comprehensive review of the US-Israel Free Trade Agreement to the Finance and Economics Council at the University of Rochester. Using a slide show of declassified documents and charts, Smith revealed how secret agreements and a joint Israeli embassy/AIPAC covert operation undermined US industries and the trade negotiating process.
New quantitative analysis and disclosures reveal the US-Israel trade agreement is actually a $10 billion/year foreign aid program. Smith also discusses how major omissions in Dan Senor and Saul Singer’s 2009 Council on Foreign Relations book Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle undermine their two major findings: that perpetual conflict gives Israel a comparative advantage and that the US should reinstate conscription in order to match Israel’s entrepreneurial output.
Neoconomics 101: Conscription and War as Wealth
Yesterday Antiwar.com published Grant F. Smith’s book review “Neoconomics: Conscription and War as Wealth” discussing Dan Senor and Saul Singer’s 2009 book Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle.
A 19 minute radio interview is available today.
2:19 Israeli conscription and societal cohesion
2:43 Bomb releases to electric car batteries
3:13 Ben-Gurion and Shimon Peres as entrepreneurs
4:21 An international entitlement: preferential US market access
5:55 Are US entrepreneurs battle tested?
6:36 Start-up Nation’s exclusive focus on supply-side
7:20 US consumer market buys 40% of total Israeli exports
7:39 $10 billion in yearly trade surplus as aid to Israel
Continue reading “Neoconomics 101: Conscription and War as Wealth”
Israel Lobby’s 50 Year Campaign to Subvert Free Speech in America
“Takes on the World” WZYX public radio program broadcast on 9/8/2010.
Host Jeffrey Blankfort interviews Grant F. Smith on the public radio program “Takes on the World” about newly unsealed Senate Foreign Relations Committee files investigating the Israel lobby. The documents reveal quarterly $5,000 payments ($38,000 today) from the Jewish Agency to AIPAC for the lobbying newsletter “Near East Report” and illegal foreign funded covert actions designed to permanently undermine American free speech.
00:00:45 Host Jeffrey Blankfort: peace processing and the Israel lobby
00:01:22 Legitimacy crisis: Abbas in, Hamas out and the US as “neutral” arbitrar
00:02:20 Colonization during the “settlement freeze”
00:03:15 $5 billion F-35 jet fighter potlatch
00:05:10 Massive US JP-8 jet fuel shipment to Israel
00:09:00 Purchase priorities: Iraqi and other ME weapons procurement
00:11:35 In trouble with the lobby EU to US: Stone, Thomas, Nasser, and de Groote
00:14:10 IRmep and Grant Smith’s investigatory work
00:15:45 “Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal” panel at the Spy Museum
00:16:45 1960’s birth of the Israel Lobby: The DOJ and Senate investigate
00:17:25 Key Findings: AIPAC’s 7 year campaign to alter US ME press coverage
00:18:22 The Senate classified findings, because investigation failed
00:19:30 Am. Council for Judaism calls for investigation of Jewish Agency money laundering
00:20:26 AIPAC’s campaign to shut down competing ideas: academia, media and government
00:20:50 Half century of targeting American free speech rights
00:21:16 Abraham Feinberg: Israel’s nuclear weapons program funding coordinator and AIPAC donor
00:21:39 Two prong attack: Dimona propaganda, undermining Kennedy nonproliferation drive
00:22:03 The AIPAC media cover-up: Israel’s Dimona nuclear weapons plant as “peaceful”
00:25:00 The mobsters who funded AIPAC when legitimate donors wouldn’t
00:26:23 The American Council for Judaism’s moral and legal challenges to AIPAC
00:27:18 The Israel lobby’s hidden business model: global swaps with the Israeli gov’t
00:30:50 The Jewish Agency’s man on the Obama National Security Council: Dennis Ross
00:32:20 NPR turns down preferential access to declassified Israeli media manipulation files
00:34:23 Israel lobby coverage: overseas and alternative news only, forbidden in America
00:35:00 “62 tactics” to undermine American free speech rights in effect for 50 years
00:37:00 Free trips to Israel for opinion leaders, politicians and media personalities
00:38:55 Q&A ……a new movement is building
Declassified: Massive Israeli manipulation of US media exposed
Illegal Israeli PR in America: Declassified
UPDATE: See RT’s coverage here.
A huge trove of newly declassified documents subpoenaed during a 1962-1964 Senate investigation reveals how Israel’s lobby pitched, promoted, and paid to have content placed in America’s top news magazines with overseas funding. The Atlantic (and many others) received hefty rewards for trumpeting Israel’s most vital – but damaging – PR initiatives across America.
The relevant documents are now online.
Media strategies on display include:
Cover-ups: “The [Dimona] nuclear reactor story inspired comment from many sources; editorial writers, columnists, science writers and cartoonists. Most of the press seemed finally to accept the thesis that the reactor was being built for peaceful purposes and not for bombs.”
Payola: “The Atlantic Monthly in its October issue carried the outstanding Martha Gellhorn piece on the Arab refugees, which made quite an impact around the country. We arranged for the distribution of 10,000 reprints to public opinion molders in all categories… Interested friends are making arrangements with the Atlantic for another reprint of the Gellhorn article to be sent to all 53,000 persons whose names appear in Who’s Who in America…Our Committee is now planning articles for the women’s magazines for the trade and business publications.”
Pressure: “It can be said that the press of the nation…has by and large shown sympathy and understanding of Israel’s position. There are, of course, exceptions, notably the Scripps-Howard chain where we still need to achieve a ‘break-through,’ the Pulliam chain (where some progress has been made) and some locally-owned papers.”
Ghost Writing: “We cannot pinpoint all that has already been accomplished by this Committee except to say that it has been responsible for the writing and placement of articles on Israel in some of America’s leading magazines….”
A defunct Dow Jones report noted “The Senate investigation closed down the conduit, but the extensive propaganda activities still go on…”
Continue reading “Illegal Israeli PR in America: Declassified”
Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal – Espionage, Opacity and Future
What do newly declassified documents about weapons grade uranium and dual-use technology diversions from the US reveal about the role of espionage in building Israel’s secret arsenal? Did Israel’s proposed nuclear weapons sales to apartheid South Africa signal they are still for sale if the partner and price are right? Do FBI and CIA cover-ups of investigations into Israeli nuclear espionage signal official US government approval or political acquiescence? Are Israel’s nuclear weapons of strategic benefit to the US?
In an event organized by Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRMEP); ‘Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal – Espionage, Opacity and Future’, these questions were tackled by John J. Mearsheimer, Grant F. Smith and Sasha Polakow-Suransky, and moderated by Jeffrey Blankfort. PULSE has previously posted John Mearsheimer’s address; here is the full video of the event as well as individual speaker presentation audios over the fold.
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Continue reading “Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal – Espionage, Opacity and Future”
Israel’s Lobby and Nuclear Diversions
Scott Horton interviews Grant F. Smith, director of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy in Washington, D.C., about the newly declassified 1978 GAO report released by IRmep on May 10, 2010. They cover the diversion of US nuclear material to Israel, marginal investigations and possible cover-ups by the FBI and CIA, prosecutorial immunity for high-profile Americans who commit crimes for Israel’s benefit, and billionaire Haim Saban’s considerable influence on the Democratic Party. They review new information about why LBJ’s political debt to fundraiser Abraham Feinberg (designated by David Ben Gurion as the US funding coordinator for Israel’s nuclear weapons program in 1958) probably explains his disdain for the NUMEC investigation and applying nuclear nonproliferation to Israel.
No thanks, Ester Kurz
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s address to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee last week provided a fleeting glimpse of hidden corruption at the core of the US-Israel “special” relationship. The inner halls of the annual AIPAC conference were a safe harbor for hardcore lobbyists buffeted by the Obama administration’s unyielding opposition to illegal settlements and Gen. David Petraeus’s analysis that American favoritism for Israel was putting US troops at risk. Clinton, a politician who has received almost as much Israel lobby largess as her husband, publicly praised an AIPAC operative now known to have played a role in corrupting US-Israel Free Trade Area negotiations in 1984.
Irrepressible investigative reporter Jeff Stein noted that an inconvenient archive of a 1984-1987 FBI investigation into Israeli-AIPAC theft of US government property and economic espionage began circulating across the Internet on March 10, 2010. Former executive director Thomas Dine (who left AIPAC to work for the US government-run Al-Hurra Middle East satellite channel), chief lobbyist Douglas Bloomfield (now an omnipresent pundit for the Jerusalem Post and other media outlets) and Israeli Minister of Economics Dan Halpern (currently at the America-Israel Chamber of Commerce) all appear in the FBI’s investigation for their various roles in obtaining, duplicating, trafficking and covering up AIPAC’s possession of classified trade data stolen from 70 major US companies and workers groups opposed to the US-Israel Free Trade Area.
The purloined report is still classified, rendering it difficult to know precisely which trade secrets and confidential market data AIPAC and Israel used in their lobbying and export promotions to the US market. But the passage of time has quantified the sordid results of the theft. The US-Israel Free Trade Area is an anomaly among bilateral US trade deals, producing an $80 billion cumulative deficit to the US since signed. This contrasts with the year 2009 $80 billion total surplus the US harvested from its other bilateral trade deals with such countries as Singapore, Australia and Morocco. The institutionalized theft and routine misappropriations that tainted trade deal negotiations continue to this day.
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