The blog, which falls under the “news and events” tab, seems to promote news and views about Iran, with a particular focus on human rights issues inside the country. There’s also an occasional perfunctory right-wing pro-Israel talking point – with little connection to Iran — thrown in for good measure. Entries so far are few, all written by someone named “Emily.”
One post in particular caught my eye: an item warning of an Iranian ‘electro-magnetic pulse’ or EMP attack on the U.S.
This one small blog post is a shining example of what independent journalist Max Blumenthal wrote about in his latest piece for Tom Dispatch: the recent uptick in Islamophobia is not some spontaneous eruption, but the “fruit of an organized, long-term campaign by a tight confederation of right-wing activists and operatives who first focused on Islamophobia soon after the September 11th attacks, but only attained critical mass during the Obama era.”
Following up on Blumenthal’s post, Matt Duss at the Wonk Room notes a Washington Post story on Islamophobic actors giving lectures to law enforcement. One of the totally expected cast of characters is Frank Gaffney, the head of the rightist Center for Security Policy (and, as Duss notes, Obama truther, birther, and other Obama-Muslim wacky conspiracy-theorist).
Gaffney, of course, was recently named to Clarion’s advisory board.
I tried to contact “Emily” to ask her some questions, but Alex Traiman — director of “Iranium” as well as Clarion’s Associate Director and media handler — apologized that he couldn’t furnish an e-mail contact because he was “really pretty busy.”
What’s most troubling about the fear-mongering inherent in “Emily”‘s posting is the many issues it conflates, especially with regard to the author’s characterization of comments made over the weekend by Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Just before some scare-mongering about an EMP attack, Clarion blogger “Emily” sums up Mullen’s comments in the Persian Gulf region like this:
The United States announced over the weekend that it is “very ready” to counter Iran should the regime try to start a war.
Enter the “looming” threat of an Iranian EMP weapon:
But what if Iran attacks with an EMP and renders all of America’s society and infrastructure out of commission? Then how ready will we be? Maybe we should have more of a plan.
That there is the entirety of the post. Leave aside the staggering absence of depth (the hollow recommendation for “more of a plan”), the short piece is based on innuendo designed to stoke fears of a threat-that-isn’t.
An Iranian attack against U.S. soil was not what Mullen was talking about in Bahrain. A quick click on the link to a BBC article provided by “Emily” or me readily proves this. The headline unequivocally states as much (“…Mullen Reassures Gulf States on Iran”) as do Mullen’s quotes in the body of the BBC story (my emphasis):
The US was “very ready” to meet any challenge from Iran, he said. “There are real threats to peace and stability here, and we’ve made no secrets of our concerns about Iran.”
Does it sound like Mullen should have then espoused that the United States, in addition to already stated “concerns about Iran,” develop policy to address a tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory?
So this is exactly the EMP ruse.
Think Progress analyst Matt Duss made light of the obsession with EMP among advocates of far right foreign policy positions:
As a practical matter… it’s probably worth pointing out here that the likelihood of Iran, or anyone, actually pulling off such an attack is roughly the same as Iran building an enormous, space-bound vacuum cleaner and sucking up all of America’s oxygen. But Gaffney and other EMP threat promoters like Newt Gingrich are betting that most Americans aren’t going to invest the amount of time it would require to learn this.
Although Clarion thus far isn’t providing a “plan” to counter the EMP threat, many EMP fear-mongerers have: Missile defense systems. In a piece on an EMP conference, Right Web‘s Robert Farley wrote:
The central political purpose of the EMP awareness movement appears to be advancement of the cause of missile defense.
It’s no surprise, again, that Gaffney’s think tank receives much funding from the same groups — defense contractors (Boeing, General Atomics, General Dynamics, Litton, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Thiokol, and TRW) – that would profit massively from the creation of the robust systems (including space-based missile defense) that these EMP scare-mongers are pushing.
]]>Because I got hung up in New York Wednesday morning, I hit rush hour traffic on the Beltway coming into DC, and arrived late for the opening session of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies‘s Washington Forum on “Countering the Iranian Threat.”
Nothing out of the ordinary during last night’s cocktail outing at the Ritz-Carlton, where in an adjacent conference area, two Barhraini gentlemen stood in white robes and head-dresses greeting people for an event sponsored by that government. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) event is your run-of-the-mill blue chip neoconservative conference at the high-endest of high-end Washington hotels.
As I looked closely at the final schedule, I was rather struck by the speakers’ list.
The New York Times‘s David Sanger — who just co-wrote a controversial story about Iran – will moderate a panel. Jeffry Goldberg, another mainstream journalist and no stranger to controversial stories on Iran, will be on a panel with perhaps the most strident advocate of immediate attacks on Iran, Reuel Marc Gerecht.
From officialdom, U.S. WMD czar and the former vice president of United Against a Nuclear Iran, Gary Samore, will address the crowd on Friday morning.
Naturally, the right wing of the foreign policy establishment is represented as well. Iran Policy Committee head Raymond Tanter, a tireless advocate of the Mojehedeen-e Khalq (MEK), was at the cocktail. And the Hudson Institute‘s I. Lewis Scooter Libby — formerly then-Vice President Dick Cheney‘s chief of staff who was convicted of lying to investigators in the PlameGate scandal — was in attendance for Thursday morning’s panels, as was Patrick Clawson of the AIPAC-formed Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Of course there is the FDD roster itself: Gerecht (who was seen chatting in the lobby on Thursday morning with neoconservative Washington Times journalist Eli Lake), Cliff May, Michael Ledeen, and all the others.
But what really piqued my interest was an FDD fundraiser scheduled for Thursday night at the home of an unnamed ambassador to the United States.
Here’s what the schedule has to say:
7:00 pm
Dinner at the residence of one
of Washington’s noteworthy Ambassadors
(Closed to Media)
(Minimum $5,000 gift required. Contribute here, or for more information on becoming a donor, please contact XXXXXXX)
FDD’s communications director, Judy Mayka, told me on Wednesday night that just which ambassador is hosting the $5,000 a plate fund-raiser is such a closely guarded secret that even she didn’t know. I’ll update as I find out more.
However, Thursday morning’s session featured Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL), who made the case for more robust U.S. assistance to Israel on missile defense. He received spontaneous mid-presentation applause — a rarity at these Washington panels.
Given the focus on Israel for FDD and many of its scholars — and the neoconservative movement from which they emerge — it’s not a stretch to put the early odds that Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren will play host to tonight’s big money FDD donors.
Otherwise, what I caught of the opening panel was rather unremarkable. Former Regean administration national security advisor Bud McFarlane spoke about impending threats and FDD’s unique ability to confront them:
We’re going, in the next two years, to face a threat from Iran, North Korea… We’re probably going to face a disruption of the oil supply…
Nobody else in Washington has the reach and the depth and the solutions that will get us out of this.
Mark Dubowitz, FDD’s executive director, ran down the group’s roster and sang their praises. He joked, as anti-anti-Semitism activist Irwin Cotler did on Thursday morning, about being a Canadian. Threats against Iran were not totally absent, but Dubowitz delivered them with a metaphor:
There’s no silver bullet for solving this problem, but there might be silver shrapnel.
Knowing some of the views of FDD staff and experts, some of the panel titles read like rhetorical questions:
- Sanctions: What’s Next?
Is enforcement enough?- Increasing Threats, Diminishing Options: Should the Military Option be Employed against Iran?
When does this become the only option?
Dubowitz confirmed the militarist bent of FDD when he closed out Wednesday night’s opening cocktail reception: “We’re not just a think tank. We like to think of ourselves as a ‘battle tank’.”
]]>Through the Jackson Award, JINSA recognizes and thanks those leaders whose careers have been distinguished by the principle that is the foundation of JINSA’s work; the belief that the United States requires a strong military capability for both its own security and for that of trustworthy friends and allies.
Translation: JINSA propounds (per Jason Vest’s still timely article, The Men from JINSA and CSP) : “…articles of faith that effectively hold there is no difference between U.S. and Israeli national security interests, and that the only way to assure continued safety and prosperity for both countries is through hegemony in the Middle East — a hegemony achieved with the traditional cold war recipe of feints, force, clientism and covert action.”
The brief article on JINSA’s website about the award presentation– including Raytheon’s corporate sponsorship of the event — reveals more about the the role of the defense industry in U.S. politics and foreign policy than any Wikileaks document.
1. The conferer: JINSA
JINSA’s particular forte within the pro-Israel lobby is luring retired U.S. military officers to its cause through its annual Flag and General Officers trip to Israel. Since 1982, JINSA has provided around 400 retired U.S. military officers with all-expense paid junkets to Israel, where they hobnobbed with Israel’s military and political establishment as well as representatives of Israeli defense industries.
JINSA also provides networking opportunities that help ease the transition from the ‘business of war’ to ‘war as a business.’ Many military officers who retire from the U.S. Armed Forces go to work for defense contractors. Others have become consultants who provide input to members of Congress on defense-related issues and projects.
JINSA insists that there are no strings attached to participation in their Israel trips, and that no subsequent pressure is brought to bear on participants to publicly support JINSA’s political agenda. Nevertheless, upon their return, many do provide helpful quotes for JINSA advocacy statements and press releases. All sixty military officers who signed an ad, published in major newspapers by JINSA this past spring, defending Israel as a security “asset” of the U.S. and expressing “dismay and grave concern that political differences may be allowed to outweigh our larger mutual interests,” had gone on a JINSA Israel trip for military retirees.
On Nov. 29, JINSA issued an Open letter to the America’s Jewish Community, attacking both the New START treaty itself and Jews supporting it:
There is no reason why the United States should be required to sacrifice its own defense capabilities to inspire Russia to a greater degree of diplomatic fortitude. If a nuclear-armed Iran is worrisome to Russia then Moscow should need no extra incentive to take necessary actions to stop it.
The letter was not signed by any military retirees.
2. The recipient:
Jon Kyl has been in the headlines recently because of his vocal opposition to “resetting” the START treaty with Russia in the lame-duck session of the Senate. The day after Kyl received his JINSA award, Peter Baker explained in his New York Times blog:
A failure to approve the treaty in the departing Senate could undermine Mr. Obama’s broader campaign to curb nuclear weapons and eventually eliminate them. The treaty, which would trim American and Russian strategic arsenals and restore mutual inspections that lapsed last year, was supposed to be the first, and easiest, step in a long-term effort to bring an end to age of nuclear arms.
It could also sour Mr. Obama’s two-year effort to “reset” ties with Russia and win greater cooperation from Moscow in areas like counterterrorism, transit routes to Afghanistan and pressuring Iran to give up its nuclear program. Mr. Obama vowed to pass the treaty during a meeting with his Russian counterpart, President Dmitri A. Medvedev, in Japan on Sunday, and is scheduled to see him again later this week at a NATO summit meeting in Lisbon.
While not calling for the Senate’s outright rejection of the START treaty, Kyl insisted it was too important to be enacted hastily in a lame-duck Senate session, and that any further consideration should be entrusted to the incoming Senate for slow and cautious consideration. According to Baker:
Mr. Kyl’s announcement shocked and angered the White House, which learned about it from the news media. Both parties had considered Mr. Kyl the make-or-break voice on the pact, with Republicans essentially deputizing him to work out a deal that would secure tens of billions of dollars to modernize the nation’s nuclear weapons complex in exchange for approval of the treaty. After months of negotiations and the addition of even more money in recent days, the White House thought it had given Mr. Kyl what he wanted.
While Kyl suggested he might be open to negotiating the possibility of a Senate vote in 2011, it’s probable that Kyl will soon be deeming it too late in Obama’s presidency to undertake such a serious matter, and demand that the Senate vote be postponed until after the 2012 elections.
Kyl has a long history of hostility to any gestures of conciliation toward Russia. Prior to his election to the U.S. Senate in 1994, as Congressman from Arizona’s 4th district since 1986, Kyl opposed any cuts in U.S. defense spending, and was one of the few enthusiatic supporters of Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”) on the House Armed Services Committee. He is a strong proponent of missile defense.
3. The honor
The award with which Kyl was presented bears the name of the late Sen. Henry M. (“Scoop’) Jackson (1912-1983), a hawkish Democrat from Washington state who served in the U.S. Senate for three decades (1953-1983), and whose close ties to the aerospace industry prompted the moniker “the Senator from Boeing.” Jackson argued vociferously against the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty between the U.S. and the Soviet Union in the Senate debates in the late 1960′s. (It passed anyway in 1972.)
Jackson was the co-sponsor of the Jackson-Vanik amendment to Title IV of 1974 U.S. Trade Act, which conditioned improved U.S. trade relations with the Soviet Union on permission being granted to Soviet Jews to emigrate to Israel. Among the diverse and direct beneficiaries of Jackson-Vanik: Natan (formerly Anatoly) Sharansky, the high profile refusenik turned Israeli über-hawk, whose views President George W. Bush enthusiastically appropriated as “part of my presidential DNA”; Israel’s hardline Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman; American Foreign Policy Council VP Ilan Berman, editor of JINSA’s Journal of International Security Affairs; and “birther queen” Orly Taitz, who insists that President Obama was not born in the U.S. and therefore is not legally its president.
Jackson’s greatest legacy, however, has been his coterie of acolytes, who have comprised much of the top echelon of neo-conservative hawks over the past decade. “Prince of Darkness” Richard Perle worked for Jackson from 1967-1980. Other members of Jackson’s inner circle who have continued to shape U.S. foreign policy by advocating war with Iraq as well as regime change in — or war with — Iran include Paul Wolfowitz, Eliot Abrams, Frank Gaffney and Douglas Feith.
4. The corporate sponsor
The sponsor of the JINSA award ceremony – defense contractor Raytheon – is the world’s largest producer of guided missiles, specializing in the manufacturer of defense systems. Raytheon became the leading manufacturer of radar systems during World War II. Absorbing the defense electronics divisions of Texas Instruments and Hughes Aircraft in 1997, Raytheon is widely regarded as the leading Western manufacturer of surface-to-air missiles, including the Hawk and the Stinger, as well as the Sidewinder and Phoenix air-to-air missiles and the Maverick air-to-ground missile.
Raytheon’s Patriot missile system played a key role in “Operation Desert Storm” — also known as “the First Gulf War” against Iraq — in 1991. It provides much of the advanced weaponry used by the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Patriot is also “the air and missile defense system of choice for 12 nations around the globe,” including five NATO nations.
Raytheon’s “growing list of partners” also includes Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and, to some extent, Israel (where Patriot is in competition with the Arrow system developed by Israel Aircraft Industries in cooperation with Boeing). In Asia, Raytheon’s customers include Japan, Taiwan and South Korea.
Indeed, Raytheon, which boasts of its “global presence,” is well situated to profit from all of the crises making today’s headlines. From Raytheon’s perspective, threat of armed conflict means the opportunity for profit. Raytheon is a major contender to build the proposed U.S. missile defense system against Iran, of which Kyle is a champion.
On July 26, the U.S. and Israel signed a joint agreement to integrate the high altitude Arrow-3 with Israel’s current missile defense system, which relies on both the Arrow-2 and the Patriot. The next day, the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense voted to provide Israel’s missile defense programs with $422.7 million for 2011 (nearly $96 million above what the White House funding request asked for) and doubling U.S. aid to Israel for missile defense from 2010 to meet the perceived urgency of countering an “Iranian threat” to Israel.
With such huge contracts at stake, it’s little wonder that Dennis Carroll, Raytheon’s Vice President for Business Development, was chosen to present JINSA’s award to Kyl. Raytheon also ranks among Kyl’s top twenty campaign contributors.
As for the START treaty, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev stated in his annual state of the nation address to the Kremlin on Nov.30, “Either we reach an agreement on missile defense and create a joint mechanism for cooperation, or, if we do not succeed in entering into a constructive understanding, there will begin a new arms race.”
A new arms race? Sounds like good business for Raytheon. With customers in more than 80 countries, arms races are the key to Raytheon’s prosperity. No wonder Jon Kyl — the “senator from Raytheon”? — is putting the brakes on New START, while drawing accolades from JINSA.
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