A key Israel Lobby convention, the AIPAC Conference was severely inconvenienced today by the media coverage of Crimean secession, which many complained was “stealing their thunder.”
Still it wouldn’t be an AIPAC conference if they didn’t treat US foreign policy as something they could unilaterally dictate, and today that meant specific demands for what the details of a US-Iran deal would be allowed to include.
Immediately endorsed by a series of Congressional hawks in attendance, the demands are the same Israel has been pushing, aimed at making a deal impossible to reach and effectively killing the talks.
This includes demanding Iran would fully dismantle its civilian enrichment program, and insisting that the US keep its sanctions more or less intact no matter how much Iran gives up, with any “limited” relief coming only with a specific AIPAC and Congressional imprimatur. They also pushed for more sanctions right now, seemingly just to sabotage the process further.
AIPAC continues to present itself as the “pro-Israel” position, and by extension the Congressional default position, but there is growing dissatisfaction with their policy demands, with many US Jewish groups feeling they are getting far too hawkish.
For AIPAC read American Traitors to their own nation
For over ten years AIPAC has been using and recycling fabricated intelligence just like the false intelligence which came from "Curveball" that Bush/Cheney used to draw us into the war with Iraq. This intelligence for Iran came from forged documents passed on to the Germans from the MEK who had allegedly received them from an Iranian engineer claiming Iran had a WMD program of which was a part. In fact, the documents and allegations almost certainly came from the Israeli Mossad, and they were later discredited by the Germans who did not trust the information, as it was from a single source questionable intelligence asset, and they had already been burned with "Curveball".
The history of Iran's nuclear program and the West's campaign of disinformation including its reporting of these events have been investigated exhaustively by journalist-historian Gareth Porter in
his newly released book, "Manufactured Crisis- The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare" and in several followup articles in InterPress Service, Antiwar.com and Consortium News. This book is a tour de force and a must-read for every policy maker in this field, whether in our Administration, Congress, or the IAEA or UN. It is also a clinic for our intelligence services and any journalist worth his or her salt in how to exercise the necessary due diligence and conduct the exhaustive research and investigation needed to get at the evidence, and then vet it and probe it to get it right, if one is to get the policy right.
Why does Israel – through AIPAC – have such influence? Consider that each US state is represented by two Senators, and one representative for roughly every half million people (varies widely by state). The "51st state" of Israel – population about 7 million – is represented by at least 50 Senators and a couple of hundred Representatives. Every congress person / politician who attends AIPAC should find themselves replaced in future elections (or by recall petition) by people who represent only the states and citizens who elect them, not some undeclared "51st state" thousands of miles distant.