Sent to you by Sean McBride via Google Reader: Signed, Sealed,
Delivered, I'm Yours: Jane Harman and the Israel Lobby via Mondoweiss
by Philip Weiss on 11/4/08
When last I saw Nancy Pelosi and Haim Saban, they were at the AIPAC
conference in June. Pelosi was dangling the dogtags of Israeli soldiers
taken hostage by hostile forces. Weirded me out: I wondered if she
dangles American dogtags? While Saban, truly a glorious presence in a
platinum tie, was showing off his multicultural display of the young
American-Israel army, his Saban fellows, and telling his amazing
personal story of going from Cairo to Israel and on to buy Power
Rangers in Japan...
Well: here Pelosi and Saban are again. In a Time magazine piece two
years ago suggesting that California Congresswoman Jane Harman, who is
Jewish, was illegally using AIPAC muscle to lobby her own party boss,
Pelosi, to make sure she got appointed the top Dem on the House
Intelligence Committee.Harman's bio says she's the ranking Dem.
I bring all this up because Harman is being spoken of for the director
of the CIA under Obama. Do you think AIPAC muscle has anything to do
with such rumors? Key excerpt from the Time piece:
Saban has donated at least $3,000 to Harman's campaign, according to
Federal Election Commission records, and the Saban Center for Middle
East Policy, which he sponsors at the prestigious Brookings
Institution, boasts Harman among its biggest fans. "When the Saban
Center talks, I listen," Harman said at a Saban Center briefing in
February on U.S. strategy in Iraq. Harman quipped that, in order to
attend the session at Brookings, she had to "blow off" a senior
intelligence official's appearance before a House committee.
What would Harman blow off for Saban at CIA?
P.S. The Time Magazine piece touched on the famous AIPAC spying case
that drags on and on, going nowhere, for a reason. Writes a
friend: "Well the AIPAC spy case was in court again on October 18th but
nothing in the media about it. Truly frightening. While trying to find
any news of it I did find this October 25th radio discussion with Grant
Smith, [author of the great new book on the birth of AIPAC, America's
Defense Line] involving the case, and the usual contextual suspects,
especially, in light of Obama's likely new role as POTUS, Dennis Ross
("Israel's lawyer"), who is an Obama consultant on foreign policy..."
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