Greenwald writes: "Clinton's words read like the ultimate loyalty oath: 'I
have stood with Israel my entire career ... As president, I will continue
this fight.'"
Glenn Greenwald. (photo: Occupy.com)
Leaked Emails From Pro-Clinton Group Reveal Censorship of Staff on Israel,
AIPAC Pandering, Warped Militarism
By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept
09 November 15
Leaked internal emails from the powerful Democratic think tank Center for
American Progress (CAP) shed light on several public controversies involving
the organization, particularly in regard to its positioning on Israel. They
reveal the lengths to which the group has gone in order to placate AIPAC and
long-time Clinton operative and Israel activist Ann Lewis including
censoring its own writers on the topic of Israel.
The emails also provide crucial context for understanding CAPs
controversial decision to host an event next week for Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu. That event, billed by CAP as A Conversation with Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, will feature CAP President Neera Tanden and
Netanyahu together in a Q&A session as they explore ways to strengthen the
partnership between Israel and the United States. That a group whose core
mission is loyalty to the White House and the Democratic Party would roll
out the red carpet for a hostile Obama nemesis is bizarre, for reasons the
Huffington Post laid out when it reported on the controversy provoked by
CAPs invitation.
The emails, provided to The Intercept by a source authorized to receive
them, are particularly illuminating about the actions of Tanden (right), a
stalwart Clinton loyalist as well as a former Obama White House official.
They show Tanden and key aides engaging in extensive efforts of
accommodation in response to AIPACs and Lewis vehement complaints that CAP
is allowing its writers to be anti-Israel. Other emails show Tanden
arguing that Libyans should be forced to turn over large portions of their
oil revenues to repay the U.S. for the costs incurred in bombing Libya, on
the grounds that Americans will support future wars only if they see that
the countries attacked by the U.S. pay for the invasions.
For years, CAP has exerted massive influence in Washington through its ties
to the Democratic Party and its founder, John Podesta, one of Washingtons
most powerful political operatives. The group is likely to become even more
influential due to its deep and countless ties to the Clintons. As the
Washington Posts Greg Sargent put it earlier this year: CAP is poised to
exert outsized influence over the 2016 president race and should Hillary
Clinton win it the policies and agenda of the 45th President of the United
States. CAP founder John Podesta is set to run Clintons presidential
campaign, and current CAP president Neera Tanden is a longtime Clinton
confidante and adviser.
The recent CAP announcement of the Netanyahu event has generated substantial
confusion and even anger among Democratic partisans. Netanyahu sacrificed
much of his popularity with the Democratic Party by crusading against the
Iran nuclear deal, the Huffington Post noted. Netanyahu has repeatedly
treated the Obama White House as a political enemy. Indeed, just today,
Netanyahu appointed as his new chief of public diplomacy a conservative
academic who suggested President Obama was anti-Semitic and compared
Secretary of State John Kerrys mental age to that of a preteen.
A core objective of Netanyahus trip to Washington is to re-establish
credibility among progressives in the post-Obama era. For that reason, the
Huffington Post reported, the Israeli government pushed hard for an invite
to CAP and was joined by [AIPAC], which also applied pressure to CAP to
allow Netanyahu to speak.
The article quoted several former CAP staffers angered by the groups
capitulation to the demands of the Israeli government and AIPAC; said one:
Netanyahu is looking for that progressive validation, and theyre basically
validating a guy who race-baited during his election and has disavowed the
two-state solution, which is CAPs own prior work. Matt Duss, a former
foreign policy analyst at CAP, said the idea that CAP would agree to give
him bipartisan cover is really disappointing since this is someone who is
an enemy of the progressive agenda, who has targeted Israeli human rights
organizations throughout his term, and was re-elected on the back of blatant
anti-Arab race-baiting. Yet another former CAP staffer, Ali Gharib,
published an article in The Nation noting that Netanyahu has all but
formally aligned himself with the GOP, writing: That a liberal institution
feels the need to kowtow to AIPAC in a climate like this speaks volumes
about either how out of touch or how craven it can be.
BUT NONE OF THIS should be surprising. The Nation previously investigated
CAPs once-secret list of corporate donors, documenting how the group will
abandon Democratic Party orthodoxy whenever that orthodoxy conflicts with
the interests of its funders. That article noted that Tanden ratcheted up
the efforts to openly court donors, which has impacted CAPs work. Staffers
were very clearly instructed to check with the think tanks development team
before writing anything that might upset contributors.
Since that article, CAP, to its credit, has provided some greater
transparency about its funding sources. As the Washington Posts Sargent
reported earlier this year, CAPs top donors include Walmart and
Citigroup, and also include the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers
of America, which represents leading biotech and bio-pharma firms, and Blue
Cross Blue Shield Association. Other large CAP donors include Goldman
Sachs, the Em¬bassy of the United Ar¬ab Emir¬ates, Bank of America, Google
and Time Warner.
Still, many of its largest donors remain concealed. That is disturbing
because of persistent reports that CAP manipulates and suppresses its own
writers opinions to suit the interests of its donors. One former CAP
staffer described to The Intercept the not-so-subtle ways they were
pressured to abandon positions that offended CAPs donors; the staffer was
directed to meet with corporate lobbyists who argued against his progressive
position on a widely debated political controversy, and was told by CAP
officials that his views were bad and unhelpful.
But on Israel, CAPs efforts to manipulate the content of its publications
are even more aggressive and overt. Under Tanden, the group has repeatedly
demonstrated it will go to almost any length to keep AIPAC and its
pro-Israel donors happy, regardless of how such behavior subverts its
pretense of independent advocacy.
In 2012, a former AIPAC spokesman, Josh Block, launched a campaign to brand
several young, liberal writers at CAPs blog, ThinkProgress, as anti-Semites
due to their writings on Israel, Palestine and Iran. CAP and its writers
were widely vilified for what Ben Smith, then of Politico, called deviations
from the bipartisan consensus on Israel, and for voicing a heretical and
often critical stance on Israel heretofore confined to the political
margins. Among other crimes, these CAP writers stood accused of failing to
sufficiently praise the Netanyahu government: Warm words for Israel can be
hard to find on [CAPs] blogs, Smith noted.
Rather than stand behind its writers, top CAP officials, led by Tanden,
applied constant coercion to stifle content upsetting to AIPAC. As Gharib,
one of the vilified CAP writers, recounted last week, CAPs positions
moving forward from the attacks including but not limited to virtually
banishing criticisms of Israel and Netanyahu from our writings and, in at
least one case, needlessly censoring a piece after publication were guided
by how to return to AIPACs good graces, often in coordination with AIPAC
itself. Most of the CAP writers accused of Israel heresy were gone from the
organization within a short time thereafter, and several have publicly
revealed that they had been censored on matters pertaining to Israel.
THESE NEWLY PUBLISHED EMAILS reveal AIPAC-pleasing efforts far more
heavy-handed than previously known. On January 20, 2012 at the height of
the controversy over ThinkProgress publications on Israel Tanden wrote an
email to CAP founder John Podesta and several of her top aides, including
ThinkProgress editor Judd Legum. In that email, Tanden recounted an angry
call she received from Ann Lewis who, among other D.C. roles, served as the
representative of Hillary Clintons 2008 campaign on Jewish matters and is
also a board member of Blocks hard-line group The Israel Project. The email
reflects the censorship demands being imposed on CAP over Israel and how
seriously Tanden was taking those demands:
That phone call was preceded by a rambling, detailed email from Lewis to
Tanden, describing the audit she conducted of ThinkProgress output over
several weeks about Israel and identifying all of the offending material.
Ambassador Michael Oren was called a liar in two posts, complained Lewis,
and there are regular criticisms of the Israeli government but no mention
of rocket attacks from Gaza. (All of the leaked CAP emails referenced in
this article can be read here.)
Four days after Lewis angry phone call, two ThinkProgress writers, Gharib
and Eli Clifton, published an investigation that exposed the funding sources
behind a controversial anti-Muslim film called The Third Jihad, which had
been used as training material by the NYPD. The film was produced by a
shadowy group calling itself The Clarion Fund, about which almost nothing
was known. Through outstanding shoe-leather reporting, Gharib and Clifton
revealed numerous ties between that group and various Israeli settlers and
other extremists.
Because it dared to discuss Israeli activists, publication of this exposé
provoked serious consternation from Tanden, as this email exchange
demonstrates. It begins with an email from long-time Democratic Party
operative Howard Wolfson, formerly a top aide to Hillary Clinton and Chuck
Schumer, which provides a link to the piece with one simple message: For
the love of god! Tandens reply expressed concern about whether Israel
should have been included in the reporting:
Soon after their article was published, it was severely censored. Virtually
every reference to Israelis was simply deleted. The neocon magazine Weekly
Standard first noticed the censorship and reveled in the success of the
campaign to force CAP to suppress Israel criticisms. Somebody at the Center
for American Progress ThinkProgress realized that what had been published
was completely inappropriate. Within what seems to have been a few hours,
the post was scrubbed, it noted. The good news is that there seems to be
at least one grown up at the Center for American Progress, it proclaimed.
One of the articles authors, Gharib, told The Intercept that Tanden
implemented a policy requiring that any material about Israel was to receive
special review from a designated editor before being published. Gharib and
Clifton did not submit this particular article for special review in advance
of publication because it concerned only individual Israeli funders, not
Israel itself. That editor, however, went into the article hours after it
was published and deleted the references to Israelis. When asked, CAPs
senior national security fellow and then-chief-of-staff, Ken Gude, said he
does not recall this specific incident.
The website Mondoweiss, which had trumpeted the importance of this Clarion
Group report when it was first published, detailed the following day that
the piece originally contained four explicit references to Israel. Now it
contains only one, at the end, an aside about Gingrich. As Mondoweiss put
it, This is a shocking effort to remove any description of the Israel lobby
from a major ideological and political undertaking.
Shocking indeed. But it was all part of a larger CAP effort to assure AIPAC
and the likes of Ann Lewis that it would not allow any meaningful criticisms
of Israel to be voiced. In a Washington Post article on the Josh
Block-created campaign against CAP, Gude groveled, reciting this loyalty
pledge: The clear and overwhelming record of the literally hundreds of
articles and policy papers from the Center for American Progress and
ThinkProgress demonstrates our longstanding support both for Israel and the
two-state solution to the Middle East peace process as being in the moral
and national security interests of the United States.
CAP also denounced the language used by its writers as inappropriate and
boasted to the Post that they deleted some of the tweets that were deemed
offensive. And after his article was censored, Gharib was told by a CAP
editor that he was to avoid criticizing American Jewish groups, such as
AIPAC, under any circumstances. When he asked whether this was a temporary
ban in light of the controversy or a permanent one i.e., when he could
once again write about such groups the editor told him: For AIPAC?
Probably never.
Less than two weeks after CAP criticized its own writers to the Washington
Post, the groups top officials celebrated that their censorship efforts and
public groveling seemed to be restoring them to AIPACs good graces. On
February 1, 2012 exactly one week after publication of the heavily
censored post Gude wrote an excited email to top CAP officials, including
Tanden. The subject was Gudes meeting with AIPACs deputy director of
policy and government affairs, Jeff Colman, which Gude gushed was very
positive.
In light of the steps we have taken the public apologies, the
censorship, the denouncing of CAPs own writers AIPAC, said Gude, deemed
that CAP now was moving in the right direction. The AIPAC official singled
out several CAP staffers for praise, saying AIPAC now believes CAP/AF is in
good hands. Gude celebrated the rewards CAP was likely to receive for its
good behavior: I bet we get a lot of invitations to attend an upcoming
AIPAC event, Gude predicted. And its very likely that Im going to Israel
on one of their upcoming trips.
The list of CAP employees who received the AIPAC stamp of approval is
telling indeed: Jeff is a big fan of Rudy and Brian. Rudy is Rudy
DeLeon, who, in addition to serving as a CAP senior fellow and being a
former Pentagon official, is now a member of the board of directors of
General Dynamics; hes literally being paid by weapons manufacturers as he
helps manage CAPs positions. Brian is Brian Katulis, also a CAP senior
fellow whose work focuses on U.S. national security policy in the Middle
East and South Asia; he simultaneously works as a senior adviser to the
strategic consulting firm Albright Stonebridge Group, assisting clients
with issues related to the Middle East and South Asia. Katulis was one of
the first to publicly distance CAP from the work of its own writers on
Israel.
That is who AIPAC demanded shape CAPs positions, and that is exactly what
AIPAC got: people literally paid by the permanent corporate war faction in
Washington to promote its agenda and serve its interests.
Gude claims that when citing all the steps that convinced AIPAC that CAP
was moving in the right direction, he was referring to only one incident,
namely: We were responding to a controversy that originated from a young
staffers use of his personal social media account. We instituted a social
media policy for the organization that asked staff to make clear that their
personal social media accounts represented their own views and a reminder
that even in that context, their social media messages reflect on the
organization.
Notably, Tandens effort to suppress Israel reporting began well before the
anti-CAP public campaign was launched. As one former CAP staffer recounted
to The Intercept, Tanden, almost immediately upon her return to CAP from the
Obama White House in late 2010, summoned senior staff to a meeting at which
she demanded to know why CAP was covering Israel/Palestine. She said she
understood that Israel was one of three issues along with trade and guns
that were off the table for CAP, and did not understand why
ThinkProgress was devoting coverage to it. In response to questions for this
article, CAPs Ken Gude denied that these topics were off limits, and
cited numerous posts published and events hosted by the group on those
topics from 2012-2015 (after the reported conversation with Tanden took
place).
When told that the CAP blog had hired several writers such as Matt Duss who
specialized in that area, and that CAPs work was consistent with the Obama
White Houses intention to confront Israel on settlements, Tanden
re-iterated her view that it was not constructive for CAP to work on
Israel, particularly in such a critical manner. The subsequent public
controversy aimed at CAP, and the resulting censoring of its own writers,
had its genesis in Tandens pre-existing belief that Israel should be
avoided.
GIVEN ALL THIS, it is anything but surprising that ever since it rid itself
of its troublesome Israel heretics, CAPs foreign policy positions have been
hawkish in the extreme. One remarkable email exchange in particular reveals
the critical role played by Tanden in that positioning. In October 2011, a
CAP national security writer, Benjamin Armbruster, circulated a discussion
on CNN about whether Libya should be forced to turn over its oil revenue to
the U.S. as compensation and gratitude for the U.S. having liberated
Libya.
After one CAP official, Faiz Shakir, noted how perverse it is to first bomb
a poor country and then make it turn over its revenues to you for doing so,
Tanden argued that this made a great deal of sense:
Tandens argument is quite similar to Donald Trumps long-time stance about
Iraqi oil: I say we should take it and pay ourselves back. But Tandens
twist on the argument that Americans will continue to support foreign wars
only if they see the invaded countries forced to turn over assets that the
U.S. can use to fund its own programs is singularly perverse, as it turns
the U.S. military into some sort of explicit for-profit imperial force. As
Shakir put it in a subsequent email, that suggestion would make people
start to think that our military is just for-hire to carry out the agendas
of other people.
At first glance, CAPs devotion to AIPAC and Netanyahu may seem strange
given that it is so plainly at odds with the Obama White Houses interests.
But CAP like so many leading D.C. think tanks with pretenses to objective
scholarship has repeatedly proven that it prioritizes servitude to its
donors interests even over its partisan loyalties.
In the case of Israel and Netanyahu, there is an even more significant
factor at play: Tanden is far more of a Clinton loyalist than an Obama
loyalist, and a core strategy of the Clinton campaign is to depict Hillary
as supremely devoted to Israel. Just last night, Clinton published an op-ed
in The Forward on Israel that is so extreme it has to be read to be
believed. Its core purpose is clear from its headline and photo: to
implicitly criticize Obama for being too adversarial to Israel and
Netanyahu, while vowing that she, as president, will be the most stalwart
Israel loyalist imaginable:
Clintons op-ed reads like the ultimate loyalty oath: I have stood with
Israel my entire career.
As president, I will continue this fight.
Moreover, she writes, Netanyahus visit to Washington on November 9 is an
opportunity to reaffirm the unbreakable bonds of friendship and unity
between the people and governments of the United States and Israel. She
vows: I will do everything I can to enhance our strategic partnership and
strengthen Americas security commitment to Israel, ensuring that it always
has the qualitative military edge to defend itself. That includes
immediately dispatching a delegation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to meet
with senior Israeli commanders. I would also invite the Israeli prime
minister to the White House in my first month in office.
There is not a peep of criticism about the Israeli occupation or the
violence it has used against Palestinians, though the op-ed does harshly
scold the occupied people: Israelis have to look over their shoulders
during everyday tasks, like carrying groceries and waiting for the bus.
This violence must not be allowed to continue. It needs to stop immediately.
Many of us have seen the video of a cleric encouraging worshippers to stab
Jews as he waves a knife in the air. This incitement needs to end, period,
etc. etc.
In that context, CAPs servitude to AIPAC and pandering to Netanyahu makes
all the sense in the world. It may conflict with the Obama White Houses
preferences, but it very clearly serves its new primary goal: advancement of
the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Though Gude insists CAP did not communicate with the Clinton campaign about
the Netanyahu invitation, he acknowledges that the CAP board was informed
and [Clinton campaign head] John Podesta and [campaign official] Jose
Villarreal are members of the CAP board. They did not have a role in making
the decision to do the event. Whatever else is true, as Clintons op-ed
last night makes clear, she has clearly adopted a strategy of siding with
Netanyahu and Israel over the Obama White House, and CAP, with its
characteristic subservience, is fully on board.
UPDATE: Tandens office originally indicated she was traveling today and
thus was unable to respond to The Intercepts inquiries, but shortly after
publication of this article, CAPs Daniella Leger provided this comment
about our questions about Tandens views on Libyan oil revenues: Were a
think tank, and we have internal discussions and dialogues all the time on a
variety of issues. We encourage throwing out ideas to spur conversation and
spark debate. We did not take a position on this, but ThinkProgress covered
it. The posts certainly did not endorse the idea.
Ironically, one of those ThinkProgress posts she cited mockingly describes
Michele Bachmanns views, which are strikingly similar to the ones expressed
by Tanden: At last nights GOP presidential debate, Rep. Michele Bachmann
(R-MN) said Iraq and Libya should repay the U.S. for its war efforts in
those two countries. The other link described how even Rick Santorum
condemned this oil-seizure idea the one advocated by Tanden and Bachmann
as immoral and counterproductive: I think that would send every possible
wrong signal that America went to war for oil, said the right-wing former
GOP senator.
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Glenn Greenwald. (photo: Occupy.com)
https://theintercept.com/2015/11/05/leaked-emails-from-pro-clinton-group-rev
eal-censorship-of-staff-on-israel-aipac-pandering-warped-militarism/https://
theintercept.com/2015/11/05/leaked-emails-from-pro-clinton-group-reveal-cens
orship-of-staff-on-israel-aipac-pandering-warped-militarism/
Leaked Emails From Pro-Clinton Group Reveal Censorship of Staff on Israel,
AIPAC Pandering, Warped Militarism
By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept
09 November 15
eaked internal emails from the powerful Democratic think tank Center for
American Progress (CAP) shed light on several public controversies involving
the organization, particularly in regard to its positioning on Israel. They
reveal the lengths to which the group has gone in order to placate AIPAC and
long-time Clinton operative and Israel activist Ann Lewis including
censoring its own writers on the topic of Israel.
The emails also provide crucial context for understanding CAPs
controversial decision to host an event next week for Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu. That event, billed by CAP as A Conversation with Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, will feature CAP President Neera Tanden and
Netanyahu together in a Q&A session as they explore ways to strengthen the
partnership between Israel and the United States. That a group whose core
mission is loyalty to the White House and the Democratic Party would roll
out the red carpet for a hostile Obama nemesis is bizarre, for reasons the
Huffington Post laid out when it reported on the controversy provoked by
CAPs invitation.
The emails, provided to The Intercept by a source authorized to receive
them, are particularly illuminating about the actions of Tanden (right), a
stalwart Clinton loyalist as well as a former Obama White House official.
They show Tanden and key aides engaging in extensive efforts of
accommodation in response to AIPACs and Lewis vehement complaints that CAP
is allowing its writers to be anti-Israel. Other emails show Tanden
arguing that Libyans should be forced to turn over large portions of their
oil revenues to repay the U.S. for the costs incurred in bombing Libya, on
the grounds that Americans will support future wars only if they see that
the countries attacked by the U.S. pay for the invasions.
For years, CAP has exerted massive influence in Washington through its ties
to the Democratic Party and its founder, John Podesta, one of Washingtons
most powerful political operatives. The group is likely to become even more
influential due to its deep and countless ties to the Clintons. As the
Washington Posts Greg Sargent put it earlier this year: CAP is poised to
exert outsized influence over the 2016 president race and should Hillary
Clinton win it the policies and agenda of the 45th President of the United
States. CAP founder John Podesta is set to run Clintons presidential
campaign, and current CAP president Neera Tanden is a longtime Clinton
confidante and adviser.
The recent CAP announcement of the Netanyahu event has generated substantial
confusion and even anger among Democratic partisans. Netanyahu sacrificed
much of his popularity with the Democratic Party by crusading against the
Iran nuclear deal, the Huffington Post noted. Netanyahu has repeatedly
treated the Obama White House as a political enemy. Indeed, just today,
Netanyahu appointed as his new chief of public diplomacy a conservative
academic who suggested President Obama was anti-Semitic and compared
Secretary of State John Kerrys mental age to that of a preteen.
A core objective of Netanyahus trip to Washington is to re-establish
credibility among progressives in the post-Obama era. For that reason, the
Huffington Post reported, the Israeli government pushed hard for an invite
to CAP and was joined by [AIPAC], which also applied pressure to CAP to
allow Netanyahu to speak.
The article quoted several former CAP staffers angered by the groups
capitulation to the demands of the Israeli government and AIPAC; said one:
Netanyahu is looking for that progressive validation, and theyre basically
validating a guy who race-baited during his election and has disavowed the
two-state solution, which is CAPs own prior work. Matt Duss, a former
foreign policy analyst at CAP, said the idea that CAP would agree to give
him bipartisan cover is really disappointing since this is someone who is
an enemy of the progressive agenda, who has targeted Israeli human rights
organizations throughout his term, and was re-elected on the back of blatant
anti-Arab race-baiting. Yet another former CAP staffer, Ali Gharib,
published an article in The Nation noting that Netanyahu has all but
formally aligned himself with the GOP, writing: That a liberal institution
feels the need to kowtow to AIPAC in a climate like this speaks volumes
about either how out of touch or how craven it can be.
BUT NONE OF THIS should be surprising. The Nation previously investigated
CAPs once-secret list of corporate donors, documenting how the group will
abandon Democratic Party orthodoxy whenever that orthodoxy conflicts with
the interests of its funders. That article noted that Tanden ratcheted up
the efforts to openly court donors, which has impacted CAPs work. Staffers
were very clearly instructed to check with the think tanks development team
before writing anything that might upset contributors.
Since that article, CAP, to its credit, has provided some greater
transparency about its funding sources. As the Washington Posts Sargent
reported earlier this year, CAPs top donors include Walmart and
Citigroup, and also include the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers
of America, which represents leading biotech and bio-pharma firms, and Blue
Cross Blue Shield Association. Other large CAP donors include Goldman
Sachs, the Embassy of the United Arab Emirates, Bank of America, Google
and Time Warner.
Still, many of its largest donors remain concealed. That is disturbing
because of persistent reports that CAP manipulates and suppresses its own
writers opinions to suit the interests of its donors. One former CAP
staffer described to The Intercept the not-so-subtle ways they were
pressured to abandon positions that offended CAPs donors; the staffer was
directed to meet with corporate lobbyists who argued against his progressive
position on a widely debated political controversy, and was told by CAP
officials that his views were bad and unhelpful.
But on Israel, CAPs efforts to manipulate the content of its publications
are even more aggressive and overt. Under Tanden, the group has repeatedly
demonstrated it will go to almost any length to keep AIPAC and its
pro-Israel donors happy, regardless of how such behavior subverts its
pretense of independent advocacy.
In 2012, a former AIPAC spokesman, Josh Block, launched a campaign to brand
several young, liberal writers at CAPs blog, ThinkProgress, as anti-Semites
due to their writings on Israel, Palestine and Iran. CAP and its writers
were widely vilified for what Ben Smith, then of Politico, called deviations
from the bipartisan consensus on Israel, and for voicing a heretical and
often critical stance on Israel heretofore confined to the political
margins. Among other crimes, these CAP writers stood accused of failing to
sufficiently praise the Netanyahu government: Warm words for Israel can be
hard to find on [CAPs] blogs, Smith noted.
Rather than stand behind its writers, top CAP officials, led by Tanden,
applied constant coercion to stifle content upsetting to AIPAC. As Gharib,
one of the vilified CAP writers, recounted last week, CAPs positions
moving forward from the attacks including but not limited to virtually
banishing criticisms of Israel and Netanyahu from our writings and, in at
least one case, needlessly censoring a piece after publication were guided
by how to return to AIPACs good graces, often in coordination with AIPAC
itself. Most of the CAP writers accused of Israel heresy were gone from the
organization within a short time thereafter, and several have publicly
revealed that they had been censored on matters pertaining to Israel.
THESE NEWLY PUBLISHED EMAILS reveal AIPAC-pleasing efforts far more
heavy-handed than previously known. On January 20, 2012 at the height of
the controversy over ThinkProgress publications on Israel Tanden wrote an
email to CAP founder John Podesta and several of her top aides, including
ThinkProgress editor Judd Legum. In that email, Tanden recounted an angry
call she received from Ann Lewis who, among other D.C. roles, served as the
representative of Hillary Clintons 2008 campaign on Jewish matters and is
also a board member of Blocks hard-line group The Israel Project. The email
reflects the censorship demands being imposed on CAP over Israel and how
seriously Tanden was taking those demands:
That phone call was preceded by a rambling, detailed email from Lewis to
Tanden, describing the audit she conducted of ThinkProgress output over
several weeks about Israel and identifying all of the offending material.
Ambassador Michael Oren was called a liar in two posts, complained Lewis,
and there are regular criticisms of the Israeli government but no mention
of rocket attacks from Gaza. (All of the leaked CAP emails referenced in
this article can be read here.)
Four days after Lewis angry phone call, two ThinkProgress writers, Gharib
and Eli Clifton, published an investigation that exposed the funding sources
behind a controversial anti-Muslim film called The Third Jihad, which had
been used as training material by the NYPD. The film was produced by a
shadowy group calling itself The Clarion Fund, about which almost nothing
was known. Through outstanding shoe-leather reporting, Gharib and Clifton
revealed numerous ties between that group and various Israeli settlers and
other extremists.
Because it dared to discuss Israeli activists, publication of this exposé
provoked serious consternation from Tanden, as this email exchange
demonstrates. It begins with an email from long-time Democratic Party
operative Howard Wolfson, formerly a top aide to Hillary Clinton and Chuck
Schumer, which provides a link to the piece with one simple message: For
the love of god! Tandens reply expressed concern about whether Israel
should have been included in the reporting:
Soon after their article was published, it was severely censored. Virtually
every reference to Israelis was simply deleted. The neocon magazine Weekly
Standard first noticed the censorship and reveled in the success of the
campaign to force CAP to suppress Israel criticisms. Somebody at the Center
for American Progress ThinkProgress realized that what had been published
was completely inappropriate. Within what seems to have been a few hours,
the post was scrubbed, it noted. The good news is that there seems to be
at least one grown up at the Center for American Progress, it proclaimed.
One of the articles authors, Gharib, told The Intercept that Tanden
implemented a policy requiring that any material about Israel was to receive
special review from a designated editor before being published. Gharib and
Clifton did not submit this particular article for special review in advance
of publication because it concerned only individual Israeli funders, not
Israel itself. That editor, however, went into the article hours after it
was published and deleted the references to Israelis. When asked, CAPs
senior national security fellow and then-chief-of-staff, Ken Gude, said he
does not recall this specific incident.
The website Mondoweiss, which had trumpeted the importance of this Clarion
Group report when it was first published, detailed the following day that
the piece originally contained four explicit references to Israel. Now it
contains only one, at the end, an aside about Gingrich. As Mondoweiss put
it, This is a shocking effort to remove any description of the Israel lobby
from a major ideological and political undertaking.
Shocking indeed. But it was all part of a larger CAP effort to assure AIPAC
and the likes of Ann Lewis that it would not allow any meaningful criticisms
of Israel to be voiced. In a Washington Post article on the Josh
Block-created campaign against CAP, Gude groveled, reciting this loyalty
pledge: The clear and overwhelming record of the literally hundreds of
articles and policy papers from the Center for American Progress and
ThinkProgress demonstrates our longstanding support both for Israel and the
two-state solution to the Middle East peace process as being in the moral
and national security interests of the United States.
CAP also denounced the language used by its writers as inappropriate and
boasted to the Post that they deleted some of the tweets that were deemed
offensive. And after his article was censored, Gharib was told by a CAP
editor that he was to avoid criticizing American Jewish groups, such as
AIPAC, under any circumstances. When he asked whether this was a temporary
ban in light of the controversy or a permanent one i.e., when he could
once again write about such groups the editor told him: For AIPAC?
Probably never.
Less than two weeks after CAP criticized its own writers to the Washington
Post, the groups top officials celebrated that their censorship efforts and
public groveling seemed to be restoring them to AIPACs good graces. On
February 1, 2012 exactly one week after publication of the heavily
censored post Gude wrote an excited email to top CAP officials, including
Tanden. The subject was Gudes meeting with AIPACs deputy director of
policy and government affairs, Jeff Colman, which Gude gushed was very
positive.
In light of the steps we have taken the public apologies, the
censorship, the denouncing of CAPs own writers AIPAC, said Gude, deemed
that CAP now was moving in the right direction. The AIPAC official singled
out several CAP staffers for praise, saying AIPAC now believes CAP/AF is in
good hands. Gude celebrated the rewards CAP was likely to receive for its
good behavior: I bet we get a lot of invitations to attend an upcoming
AIPAC event, Gude predicted. And its very likely that Im going to Israel
on one of their upcoming trips.
The list of CAP employees who received the AIPAC stamp of approval is
telling indeed: Jeff is a big fan of Rudy and Brian. Rudy is Rudy
DeLeon, who, in addition to serving as a CAP senior fellow and being a
former Pentagon official, is now a member of the board of directors of
General Dynamics; hes literally being paid by weapons manufacturers as he
helps manage CAPs positions. Brian is Brian Katulis, also a CAP senior
fellow whose work focuses on U.S. national security policy in the Middle
East and South Asia; he simultaneously works as a senior adviser to the
strategic consulting firm Albright Stonebridge Group, assisting clients
with issues related to the Middle East and South Asia. Katulis was one of
the first to publicly distance CAP from the work of its own writers on
Israel.
That is who AIPAC demanded shape CAPs positions, and that is exactly what
AIPAC got: people literally paid by the permanent corporate war faction in
Washington to promote its agenda and serve its interests.
Gude claims that when citing all the steps that convinced AIPAC that CAP
was moving in the right direction, he was referring to only one incident,
namely: We were responding to a controversy that originated from a young
staffers use of his personal social media account. We instituted a social
media policy for the organization that asked staff to make clear that their
personal social media accounts represented their own views and a reminder
that even in that context, their social media messages reflect on the
organization.
Notably, Tandens effort to suppress Israel reporting began well before the
anti-CAP public campaign was launched. As one former CAP staffer recounted
to The Intercept, Tanden, almost immediately upon her return to CAP from the
Obama White House in late 2010, summoned senior staff to a meeting at which
she demanded to know why CAP was covering Israel/Palestine. She said she
understood that Israel was one of three issues along with trade and guns
that were off the table for CAP, and did not understand why
ThinkProgress was devoting coverage to it. In response to questions for this
article, CAPs Ken Gude denied that these topics were off limits, and
cited numerous posts published and events hosted by the group on those
topics from 2012-2015 (after the reported conversation with Tanden took
place).
When told that the CAP blog had hired several writers such as Matt Duss who
specialized in that area, and that CAPs work was consistent with the Obama
White Houses intention to confront Israel on settlements, Tanden
re-iterated her view that it was not constructive for CAP to work on
Israel, particularly in such a critical manner. The subsequent public
controversy aimed at CAP, and the resulting censoring of its own writers,
had its genesis in Tandens pre-existing belief that Israel should be
avoided.
GIVEN ALL THIS, it is anything but surprising that ever since it rid itself
of its troublesome Israel heretics, CAPs foreign policy positions have been
hawkish in the extreme. One remarkable email exchange in particular reveals
the critical role played by Tanden in that positioning. In October 2011, a
CAP national security writer, Benjamin Armbruster, circulated a discussion
on CNN about whether Libya should be forced to turn over its oil revenue to
the U.S. as compensation and gratitude for the U.S. having liberated
Libya.
After one CAP official, Faiz Shakir, noted how perverse it is to first bomb
a poor country and then make it turn over its revenues to you for doing so,
Tanden argued that this made a great deal of sense:
Tandens argument is quite similar to Donald Trumps long-time stance about
Iraqi oil: I say we should take it and pay ourselves back. But Tandens
twist on the argument that Americans will continue to support foreign wars
only if they see the invaded countries forced to turn over assets that the
U.S. can use to fund its own programs is singularly perverse, as it turns
the U.S. military into some sort of explicit for-profit imperial force. As
Shakir put it in a subsequent email, that suggestion would make people
start to think that our military is just for-hire to carry out the agendas
of other people.
At first glance, CAPs devotion to AIPAC and Netanyahu may seem strange
given that it is so plainly at odds with the Obama White Houses interests.
But CAP like so many leading D.C. think tanks with pretenses to objective
scholarship has repeatedly proven that it prioritizes servitude to its
donors interests even over its partisan loyalties.
In the case of Israel and Netanyahu, there is an even more significant
factor at play: Tanden is far more of a Clinton loyalist than an Obama
loyalist, and a core strategy of the Clinton campaign is to depict Hillary
as supremely devoted to Israel. Just last night, Clinton published an op-ed
in The Forward on Israel that is so extreme it has to be read to be
believed. Its core purpose is clear from its headline and photo: to
implicitly criticize Obama for being too adversarial to Israel and
Netanyahu, while vowing that she, as president, will be the most stalwart
Israel loyalist imaginable:
Clintons op-ed reads like the ultimate loyalty oath: I have stood with
Israel my entire career.
As president, I will continue this fight.
Moreover, she writes, Netanyahus visit to Washington on November 9 is an
opportunity to reaffirm the unbreakable bonds of friendship and unity
between the people and governments of the United States and Israel. She
vows: I will do everything I can to enhance our strategic partnership and
strengthen Americas security commitment to Israel, ensuring that it always
has the qualitative military edge to defend itself. That includes
immediately dispatching a delegation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to meet
with senior Israeli commanders. I would also invite the Israeli prime
minister to the White House in my first month in office.
There is not a peep of criticism about the Israeli occupation or the
violence it has used against Palestinians, though the op-ed does harshly
scold the occupied people: Israelis have to look over their shoulders
during everyday tasks, like carrying groceries and waiting for the bus.
This violence must not be allowed to continue. It needs to stop immediately.
Many of us have seen the video of a cleric encouraging worshippers to stab
Jews as he waves a knife in the air. This incitement needs to end, period,
etc. etc.
In that context, CAPs servitude to AIPAC and pandering to Netanyahu makes
all the sense in the world. It may conflict with the Obama White Houses
preferences, but it very clearly serves its new primary goal: advancement of
the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Though Gude insists CAP did not communicate with the Clinton campaign about
the Netanyahu invitation, he acknowledges that the CAP board was informed
and [Clinton campaign head] John Podesta and [campaign official] Jose
Villarreal are members of the CAP board. They did not have a role in making
the decision to do the event. Whatever else is true, as Clintons op-ed
last night makes clear, she has clearly adopted a strategy of siding with
Netanyahu and Israel over the Obama White House, and CAP, with its
characteristic subservience, is fully on board.
UPDATE: Tandens office originally indicated she was traveling today and
thus was unable to respond to The Intercepts inquiries, but shortly after
publication of this article, CAPs Daniella Leger provided this comment
about our questions about Tandens views on Libyan oil revenues: Were a
think tank, and we have internal discussions and dialogues all the time on a
variety of issues. We encourage throwing out ideas to spur conversation and
spark debate. We did not take a position on this, but ThinkProgress covered
it. The posts certainly did not endorse the idea.
Ironically, one of those ThinkProgress posts she cited mockingly describes
Michele Bachmanns views, which are strikingly similar to the ones expressed
by Tanden: At last nights GOP presidential debate, Rep. Michele Bachmann
(R-MN) said Iraq and Libya should repay the U.S. for its war efforts in
those two countries. The other link described how even Rick Santorum
condemned this oil-seizure idea the one advocated by Tanden and Bachmann
as immoral and counterproductive: I think that would send every possible
wrong signal that America went to war for oil, said the right-wing former
GOP senator.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
