Courtroom:Judgement::AIPAC:

November 16, 2010 10:12 AM

America's top Israel lobby is going through a process of discovery. AIPAC's former top employees Keith Weissman and Steve Rosen made clear they were not going to go down on charges of spying for Israel without a fight. AIPAC initially backed Rosen and Weissman when the FBI raided its offices in August 2004. But to the shock of many, AIPAC dropped the two like a bad habit just seven months later, alleging the pair had not lived up to AIPAC's professional standards. Federal indictments followed.

"Suffice it to say that 27 percent of the filing deals with widespread workplace-inappropriate activities at AIPAC – from tales of prostitution, late-night Craigslist-powered anonymous hookups, and massive flows of digital content not generally handled by reputable charities. It’s funny to speculate whether AIPAC could have made a plausible defense to Justice Department prosecutors in 2005 that its office network was simply too overflowing with pornography to accommodate substantial amounts of classified government information." - Grant Smith

More from Clayton Swisher at Al-Jazeera

posted by parmanparman (5 comments total)

Clearly I have lost my journalist chops these last few years. oy vey.
posted by parmanparman at 10:22 AM on November 16, 2010

In recent AIPAC news::

[Soon-to-be House Majority Leader Eric] Cantor's office itself put out a statement bragging about his pledge to Netanyahu:

Eric stressed that the new Republican majority will serve as a check on the Administration and what has been, up until this point, one party rule in Washington," the readout continued. "He made clear that the Republican majority understands the special relationship between Israel and the United States, and that the security of each nation is reliant upon the other.

... Almost immediately, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency's bureau chief in Washington, Ron Kampeas, declared that Cantor's statement was "extraordinary." He wrote that he could not "remember an opposition leader telling a foreign leader, in a personal meeting, that he would side, as a policy, with that leader against the President." ...

[Cantor] has been an AIPAC cutout since he first was elected to office. He's been to more AIPAC meetings than he can probably count. And he should have figured out by now that the lobby is extremely careful, obsessively careful, to always emphasize loyalty to the United States while simultaneously endorsing Israeli policies that undermine our foreign policy objectives. ...

So today Cantor explained he was misunderstood.
posted by Joe Beese at 10:26 AM on November 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

From the Al Jazeera article: After reading the exhaustive autopsy of AIPAC's darkest internal matters, it's hard to imagine how they got anything at all done. It appears their donations have sharply declined in recent years

I thought that was interesting, at least.
posted by MuffinMan at 10:29 AM on November 16, 2010

"He wrote that he could not "remember an opposition leader telling a foreign leader, in a personal meeting, that he would side, as a policy, with that leader against the President."

Holy crap. Is that even... allowed?
posted by schmod at 11:07 AM on November 16, 2010

I'm sure they got done exactly what they were created and funded to get done. If you know what I mean. And I think you do.
posted by spicynuts at 11:10 AM on November 16, 2010