The Israel Lobby Con EXTRA! Podcast

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson: Secretary of State Colin Powell’s former chief of staff explores how Israel’s influence over the U.S. has affected America’s strategic approach toward the Middle East.

The following is a presentation made at the 2016 Israel Lobby Con held at the National Press Club.

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson's last positions in government were as Secretary of State Colin Powell's Chief of Staff (2002-05), Associate Director of the State Department's Policy Planning staff under the directorship of Ambassador Richard N. Haass, and member of that staff responsible for East Asia and the Pacific, political-military and legislative affairs (2001-02).

Before serving at the State Department, Wilkerson served 31 years in the U.S. Army. During that time, he was a member of the faculty of the U.S. Naval War College (1987-1989), Special Assistant to General Powell when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1989-93), and Director and Deputy Director of the U.S. Marine Corps War College at Quantico, Virginia (1993-97). Wilkerson retired from active service in 1997 as a colonel, and began work as an adviser to General Powell. He has also taught national security affairs in the Honors Program at George Washington University. He is currently working on a book about the first George W. Bush administration. He currently is Distinguished Visiting Professor of Government and Public Policy at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. 

Prof. Kirk J. Beattie: How Congress shapes Middle East policy, and how AIPAC shapes Congress.

The following is a presentation made at the 2016 Israel Lobby Con held at the National Press Club.

Kirk James Beattie is the author of Congress and the Shaping of the Middle East as well as two books on Egyptian politics: Egypt During the Nasser Years and Egypt During the Sadat Years.

Beattie is a professor at Simmons College in the Political Science and International Relations Department, specializing in comparative politics with regional expertise in Middle East and West European politics.

Beattie has taught at Harvard, Wellesley, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and the University of Michigan.

He is a recipient of numerous national scholarships including a Fulbright grant, a Fulbright-Hays grant, an International Rotary Foundation Fellowship, an American Research Center in Egypt grant, and a Center for Arabic Study Abroad fellowship.

He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts, and in Wisconsin.

The conference is solely sponsored by the American Educational Trust, publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, and the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep). 

Visit https://IsraelLobbyCon.org

Dr. Roger Mattson: Did Israel steal U.S. weapons-grade uranium, and did it have help from U.S. citizens?

The following is a presentation made at the 2016 Israel Lobby Con held at the National Press Club.

Roger J. Mattson is the author of the recently published book Stealing the Atom Bomb: How Denial and Deception Armed Israel.

Dr. Mattson has experience in engineering and management with Sandia National Laboratory, the Atomic Energy Commission, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the Environmental Protection Agency and several nuclear safety and security consultancies.

He was an adviser to the NRC commissioners on policy issues such as safety goals, risk assessment, nuclear safeguards, and Three Mile Island reforms. After leaving government service in 1984, he led two private companies that provided safety and security services for U.S. nuclear power plants, the Energy Department's nuclear facilities, and several foreign users of nuclear power. Following the Chernobyl accident in 1986, he helped develop IAEA's guidance on safety principles for the world's nuclear power plants. He oversaw nuclear safety consultancies in five foreign countries. He also served on the offsite safety committees for several nuclear power plants and several DOE nuclear facilities. In 2012, he was part of a team formed by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers to forge a new safety construct for nuclear power after the tragedy at Fukushima. He has participated in safety analysis and field reviews of nearly 150 nuclear facilities in the US, Europe, the former Soviet Union and the Far East, including the startup of the latest U.S. nuclear power plant in 2015.

The conference is solely sponsored by the American Educational Trust, publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, and the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep). 

Visit https://IsraelLobbyCon.org

Grant F. Smith: Ten ways the Israel lobby ‘moves’ America.

The following is a presentation made at the 2016 Israel Lobby Con held at the National Press Club.

Grant F. Smith is the author of Big Israel: How Israel's Lobby Moves America, his eighth book about the Israel lobby.

Smith is the director of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep), a nonprofit organization that studies U.S. Middle East policy formulation. In 2014, Smith sued the Department of Defense in federal court and won release of a detailed report, contracted in 1987, on the advanced state of Israel’s nuclear weapons program. In 2015, Smith sued the Central Intelligence Agency and won release of 131 pages of formally classified information revealing its overseas agents obtained compelling evidence that Israel stole U.S. government-owned weapons-grade uranium in the 1960s to build its first atom bombs. The CIA’s refusal to share this information thwarted two FBI investigations into the diversion. This is the subject of ongoing IRmep litigation.

In his 30 year professional career as a researcher, Smith has investigated public sector lobbying, financial services and global telecommunications industries, worked in 22countries assessing the impact of regulatory and trade regime changes, and managed multinational research teams.

The conference is solely sponsored by the American Educational Trust, publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, and the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep). 

Visit https://IsraelLobbyCon.org

Reza Marashi: The Iran Nuclear Deal

The following is a presentation made at the 2015 Israel Lobby Con held at the National Press Club.

Reza Marashi joined the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) in 2010 as the organization’s first research director. He came to NIAC after four years in the State Department’s Office of Iranian Affairs.

Prior to his tenure at the State Department, he was an analyst at the Institute for National Strategic Studies (INSS) covering China-Middle East issues, and a Tehran-based private strategic consultant on Iranian political and economic risk.

Marashi is frequently consulted by Western governments on Iran-related matters. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and The Atlantic, among other publications.

He has been a guest contributor to CNN, NPR, the BBC, TIME Magazine, The Washington Post, the Financial Times, and other broadcast outlets.

The conference is solely sponsored by the American Educational Trust, publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, and the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep). 

Gareth Porter: The Israel lobby push for war on Iran

The following is a presentation made at the 2015 Israel Lobby Con held at the National Press Club.

Gareth Porter is an investigative journalist and historian who specializes in U.S. foreign and military policy. He has written five books, including Perils of Dominance, Imbalance of Power and The Road to War in Vietnam. 

His most recent book is Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare. The book highlights the impact that the United States’ alliance with Israel had on Washington’s turning the International Atomic Energy Agency into a tool of its anti-Iran policy. He writes regularly for Inter Press Service and has also published investigative articles on Salon.com, the Nation, the American Prospect, Truthout and The Raw Story.

His blogs have been published on Huffington Post, Firedoglake, CounterPunch and many other websites. Porter was Saigon bureau chief of Dispatch News Service International in 1971 and later reported on trips to Southeast Asia for The Guardian, Asian Wall Street Journal and Pacific News Service.

In 2012 he was awarded the Martha Gelhorn Prize for Investigative Journalism by the UK-based Gelhorn Trust.

Porter currently publishes Iran policy analysis in Middle East Eye.

The conference is solely sponsored by the American Educational Trust, publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, and the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep). 

Congressman Paul Findley: What I should have done, and what Congress can do today.

The following is a presentation made at the 2015 Israel Lobby Con held at the National Press Club.

Paul Findley served the 20th District of Illinois during 11 terms in Congress, from 1961 to 1983.

Findley wrote the very first book to analyze the pervasive influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) on U.S. politics, policy, and institutions from the perspective of Congress. Carefully documented with specific case histories, They Dare To Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel’s Lobby reveals how the Israel Lobby helps to shape important aspects of U.S. foreign policy and influences congressional, senatorial, and presidential elections.

First published in 1985 and reprinted several times since, the book criticizes the undue influence AIPAC exerts in the Senate and the House, and the pressure AIPAC brings to bear on university professors and journalists who seem too sympathetic to Arab and Islamic states, or too critical of Israel and its policies. Findley is co-founder of the Council for the National Interest.

The conference is solely sponsored by the American Educational Trust, publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, and the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep).

Paul Pillar: AIPAC/Netanyahu objectives and the American interest.

The following is a presentation made at the 2015 Israel Lobby Con held at the National Press Club.

Dr. Paul Pillar is a Nonresident Senior Fellow of the Center for Security Studies in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He also is a Nonresident Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution and an Associate Fellow of the Geneva Center for Security Policy. He retired in 2005 from a 28-year career in the U.S. intelligence community, in which his last position was National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia. Earlier he served in a variety of analytical and managerial positions, including chief of CIA analytic units, covering portions of the Near East, the Persian Gulf, and South Asia.

Dr. Pillar also served in the National Intelligence Council as one of the original members of its Analytic Group. He has been Executive Assistant to the CIA’s Deputy Director for Intelligence, and Executive Assistant to Director of Central Intelligence William Webster. He has also headed the Assessments and Information Group of the DCI Counterterrorist Center, and was deputy chief of the center from 1997 to 1999. He was a Federal Executive Fellow at the Brookings Institution in 1999-2000. Dr. Pillar was a visiting professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University from 2005 to 2012.

Dr. Pillar received an A.B. summa cum laude from Dartmouth College, a B.Phil. from Oxford University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University. He is a retired officer in the U.S. Army Reserve and served on active duty in 1971-1973, including a tour of duty in Vietnam. He is the author of Negotiating Peace: War Termination as a Bargaining Process (Princeton University Press, 1983); Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy (Brookings Institution Press, 2001; second edition 2003); and Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy: Iraq, 9/11, and Misguided Reform (Columbia University Press, 2011). He writes a blog at The National Interest.

The conference is solely sponsored by the American Educational Trust, publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, and the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep).

Congressman Rick Rahall: How does the Israel lobby influence Congress?

The following is a presentation made at the 2015 Israel Lobby Con held at the National Press Club.

Former Congressman Nick Joe Rahall II, a grandson of Lebanese immigrants, represented West Virginia in the U.S. Congress from 1977 to 2015. When he was elected, the 27-year-old became the youngest member of Congress.

Rahall was one of only 8 House members to vote against the Authorization for Use of Military Force against Iraq in 2002 that preceded the Iraq War.

Rahall has repeatedly expressed concern about America’s relationship with Israel, stating, “Israel can’t continue to occupy, humiliate and destroy the dreams and spirits of the Palestinian people and continue to call itself a democratic state.” He has affirmed that America’s interests would be served by getting the peace process back on track, and regretted the U.S. vetoes of U.N. resolutions against Israeli settlement building.

The Congressman pressed the State Department to end a ban on travel to Lebanon until the ban was finally lifted in 1997. Rahall also expressed concern over a bipartisan resolution supporting Israel in the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict without adding language urging restraint against civilian targets. Rahall helped draft a resolution that urged “all parties to protect innocent life and civilian infrastructure.”

The conference is solely sponsored by the American Educational Trust, publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, and the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep). 

Former AIPAC employee MJ Rosenberg: Is it all about the money?

The following is a presentation made at the 2015 Israel Lobby Con held at the National Press Club.

M.J. Rosenberg is a writer, primarily on matters relating to Israel. He is a regular contributor to The Nation and Huffington Post, with his writing widely reprinted throughout the world. He has special expertise on the Israel Lobby, having been employed by several pro-Israel organizations between 1973 and 1975 and 1982 and 1986. His last post was as editor of AIPAC’s Near East Report and as senior adviser to then-Executive Director Thomas Dine.

He also worked on Capitol Hill for a total of 15 years as legislative assistant to Rep. Jonathan Bingham (D-NY) and as Appropriations Committee staffer for Rep. Nita Lowey (D-NY), specifically handling her work on the Foreign Operations Subcommittee, where she was a leading advocate of the Israel aid package. He also served as chief-of-staff for Edward Feighan (D-OH) and as speechwriter for Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI). Rosenberg also spent three years as a Clinton political appointee at USAID.

Following Rosenberg’s years of government service, he went to work as Washington director of the Israel Policy Forum for 9 years, then as a Middle East writer at Media Matters For America.

Rosenberg’s opposition to AIPAC, which followed a successful tenure there, stems from his strong support for the “two-state solution” and his belief that it is the Lobby and the government of Israel that is responsible for its failure to be adopted. He is also, in his words, “appalled” by Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, as most recently evidenced by the “indefensible and horrific” Israel war on Gaza in the summer of 2014.

Since 2015 the annual IsraelLobbyCon conference series at the National Press Club explores the latest research, innovations and tactics for countering the Israel lobby’s damaging policies in the U.S. and around the globe.

 

The conference is solely sponsored by the American Educational Trust, publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, and the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep).