Posted: 04/30/09 14:51
by Coleen Rowley
This warning may be coming a bit late but there's still time to reverse course. An "Iran Divestment Bill", which is part of the "Divest Terror Movement" initiated by AIPAC and "Project for the New American Century" signatory Frank Gaffney Jr., has already passed the MN House and S.F. 131 is scheduled to be heard in the Senate Finance Committee tomorrow (Friday-May 1) morning at 8:30 am. Do MN legislators have any idea they are falling prey to a far right neo-connived plan that is antithetical to Minnesotans' economic interests?
Here are some of the links that connect the dots but you can find a lot more by simply googling for yourself:
First click: rightweb... for background info on Frank Gaffney Jr., a former Reagan administration official who got his start working under Richard Perle in the 1970s, and is now a prominent neoconservative hardliner whose Center for Security Policy (CSP) serves as a clearinghouse for information and analysis that promotes controversial weapons programs, a Likudnik line on Mideast peace issues, and an expansive "war on terror" targeting "Islamofascists" (a popular Gaffney term) throughout the Middle East.
Then check this IPS report: explaining how Frank Gaffney Jr. is the force pushing this state divestment legislation around the country. The spearheading by Gaffney's neoconservative think tank Centre for Security Policy (CSP) - aims to force mutual funds, pension funds, and endowments to pull their investments from international companies that do business with Iran. As Likud Party Chairman Benjamin Netanyahu told the 2007 AIPAC Convention audience, "Divestment against Iran is right because Iran is openly in contravention of international law, preaching the destruction of an entire people."
Originally the blacklisted "terror" countries being targeted for divestment were Cuba , Iran , North Korea , Sudan , and Syria but AIPAC decided to narrow the list down to just one country: Iran .
In assessing intelligence, the source is always extremely important. So consider also that the person who helped introduce the "Iran Divestment Bill" in the Minnesota Legislature, is former CIA Assistant Legal Counsel John Radsan who served as a CIA lawyer during the time the Bush Administration's torture tactics were being devised and implemented. A remarkable and wide ranging interview on the topic of torture conducted by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 2007 with former CIA and FBI insiders and other experts on torture explained that it was "Radsan's job as a CIA lawyer to explore the boundaries of what could be done":
JOHN RADSAN, ASSISTANT GENERAL COUNSEL TO THE CIA, 2002-04: I don't think it's true or correct to say that torture never works. If we have someone here in the room and we're allowed to do very aggressive things to him, will he give us information? I think most of us have to say yes, he will give us information. It may be tainted, it may be unreliable, but we still have something that we can check against the other information that we have. Implicit in that is that if the person gives us bad information that we're going to go back, if we're willing to cross that line, that we'll go back and do even more severe things to that person, that it is about costs and benefits, and we can make the costs such that at some point we're going to get good information.
JOHN RADSAN, ASSISTANT GENERAL COUNSEL TO THE CIA, 2002-04: The CIA felt that it could engage in cruel, inhuman and degrading practices on non-US citizens outside the United States , because there was nothing under a statute, the Constitution or a regulation that precluded that.
JOHN RADSAN, ASSISTANT GENERAL COUNSEL TO THE CIA, 2002-04: The administration says that we don't torture people. They don't give us a clear definition or their definition of what torture is.
So it's going to be back and forth between the lawyers at the CIA, lawyers at the Justice Department that that are interpreting these statues, the torture statute, the amendments, or the guidance I should say from the Military Commissions Act, to figure out these tough questions about whether we can do sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, whether we can do things in that intermediate zone of aggressiveness.
JOHN RADSAN, ASSISTANT GENERAL COUNSEL TO THE CIA, 2002-04: Chopping off someone's fingers, most people, everyone should agree that's torture. Hooking somebody up to electrodes, shocking them, that's severe pain, that may create severe mental anguish. That's torture. So you can have these clear boundaries. But we have to get into the grey area. What about sleep deprivation? What about playing music? Some people may not like Olivia Newton-John and you play Olivia Newton-John in their cell - is that torture or not? They're very difficult questions. I don't mean to make light of this. But in that middle category we have to figure out, is this permitted, is this prohibited?"
ABC.AU.4corners
It seems that Radsan, who now teaches law at William Mitchell, was therefore involved, at least in some ways, in ensuring the "golden shield" legal memos were written to protect the CIA when following Bush's illegal orders.
Additionally, at the neo-conservative think-tank Center of the American Experiment, Radsan has called for America to "go over to the dark side" in its dealings with Iran.
American Experiment
Radsan openly advocates for the use of treachery upon various separatist groups to inflict "pain" through U.S. covert actions to achieve regime change in Iran . You Tube In shilling for further covert "treachery" to be applied against Iran , Radsan reveals the familiar short-sightedness of CIA group-think, i.e. he clearly considers U.S. covert support for the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan ("Charley Wilson's War" ) as a great "success" despite the fact that those Mujahedeen we armed to fight the Russians quickly morphed into "Al Qaeda" terrorists.
"One other possibility, we might even think from the papers that this is going on right now...We can play the Kurdish card against them, we can support other separatists. The people on the ground may know we're supporting them but then we can play the game in international forums to say, "We're not supporting any separatist movements there," and we have to play that game for it to be effective. Here in the Cold War one of our great successes was supporting the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan ...All things go back to Afghanistan . ... There is that template of encouraging separatist movements. The paradox to it is that these people may think they're fighting for their independence. And some of the treachery and intrigue of espionage is that you may have to lead them on for them to think that they're going to be independent. We may understand in our heart of hearts that the Kurds, the Baluchis, and Azeris are not going to be independent but we're using them, we're accommodating to put pressure on the Islamic Republic. "
What's fairly surprising is that all this "dark side" talk about inflicting pain through covert foreign policies has not deterred the Minnesota Legislature from wading right in! But if the Minnesota legislature wishes to make wise foreign policy on behalf of the rest of the United States, it ought to take testimony from other foreign policy experts not aligned with AIPAC or its related neo-con think tanks; in so doing, the Minnesota legislators might hear solid arguments that Minnesota's succumbing to Frank Gaffney's CSP Iran divestment campaign could actually hurt the foreign policy interests of the United States in several important ways.
On one level, divestment and even talk of divestment could undermine international diplomatic efforts to isolate Iran if that is still the goal. "The companies that would be divested would be European and Asian companies," said William A Reinsch, president of the National Foreign Trade Council, as quoted in the New York Times. "It sticks a stick in the eye of the very countries we are trying to get to cooperate with us." For example, this type bill could prohibit state pension funds from owning shares of foreign companies that are rebuilding Iran's oil infrastructure, including Anglo-Dutch giant Shell, France's Total, Italy's ENI, Russia's Gazprom, Germany's Siemens and China's Sinopec and China National Petroleum - countries the U.S. needs in order to apply continued pressure on Tehran. Even the Bush administration wasn't this dumb and stopped short of taking action that would divide the U.S. from its allies, according to a March New York Times report.
In any event, a significant shift in thinking from that of the neo-con dominated Bush Administration has been ushered in by the Obama Administration which includes promoting Iran in energy markets. A lengthy article published just yesterday in Asia Times describes the turnabout, stating that
" Washington will adopt a highly pragmatic approach to Iran . It is signaling its willingness to jettison US sanctions against Iran and instead keenly promote Iran as Russia 's competitor in the European gas market both as a supplier and as a transit country for Central Asian gas. . . Washington thereby hopes to build US-Iran relations as well. Tehran badly needs to modernize its energy industry and develop its liquefied natural gas sector, which provides highly lucrative business opportunities for hi-tech American oil companies. No doubt, it is a "win-win" situation for Washington and Tehran ."
ATimes.com
Another pragmatic argument is this: although no one likes Ahmadinejad's rhetoric, he is not the supreme leader of Iran . The overwhelming sentiment of the youth in Iran -- a high percentage of the population -- is more liberal and even more pro-western than their leaders. They are fed up with the mullahs and their extreme version of Islam. Anything the U.S. does to isolate Iran , in order to benefit Israel , simply alienates these and other important sectors of the Iranian population and strengthens extremists like Ahmadinejad.
In contrast to these solid pragmatic arguments against divestment campaigns, Frank Gaffney Jr., head of the neo-con "Centre for Security Policy" which is the entity pushing for divestment from Iran , has a terrible track record when it comes to foreign policy! Here are just a few of the worst Gaffney Gaffes (all on wikipedia, by the way): Gaffney said he believed over 4,000 American military troops had to die in Iraq over a chemical attack committed by Saddam Hussein before the first Gulf War. "My position is it is regrettable that any Americans died. It is regrettable that they had to die, but I believe they did have to die. The threat we knew about was the chemical capability that Saddam Hussein had used against his own people. And that's the reason I'm still delighted that we did what we did." In October, 2008, Gaffney questioned whether "Obama is a natural born citizen of the United States " and his legal eligibility to be president. In a February, 2009 Washington Times column, Gaffney accused President Obama of "embracing the agenda of the Muslim Brotherhood," a terrorist organization banned across the Middle East . And in April, 2009, Gaffney appeared on television and accused President Obama of using coded language to indicate that America would submit to Sharia law. Gaffney also admitted, "I'm a member of Dick Cheney's fan club." And on March 12, 2009, Gaffney appeared on MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews and accused Saddam Hussein of being involved in the Oklahoma City bombing: "There is also circumstantial evidence, not proven by any means but nonetheless but some pretty compelling circumstantial evidence, of Saddam Hussein's Iraq being involved with the people who perpetrated both the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center and even the Oklahoma City bombing."
The hardest question that Minnesotans might ask about the issues of this Iran Divestment Legislation-regardless of whether they want to listen to a fool like Gaffney, sympathize with the neo-conservatives' approach to foreign policy and/or follow Israeli Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu's plan, is why has our state legislature decided to wade into these difficult areas of national foreign policy in the first place?! Shouldn't state governments stay out of such difficult decisions and leave the making of foreign policies to the experts in the State Department and other federal government agencies as well as the U.S. Congress? Isn't this exactly why we have a CIA to hopefully discover and accurately assess what dangers and threats are posed by foreign countries? Albeit the CIA mistakenly went along with Bush on the Iraq WMD deception, their analysts can generally do a much better job than Minnesota legislators simply because they have more time and resources. State Legislators are just not trained to make these kind of foreign intelligence assessments. At the very least, Gaffney's and Radsan's histories and mistakes, as the main proponents of this legislation, should have raised some red flags and gotten the Minnesota supporters of this legislation to do their homework.
The worst thing about this neo-con initiated legislation is that it could cost Minnesota pension funds anywhere from a couple hundred million to a few hundred million dollars to divest from Iranian energy companies as mandated. So where are Minnesota 's fiscal conservatives in this time of economic crisis? Haven't pension funds taken a big enough hit without forcing the Minnesota Investment Board to sell their holdings at a loss? Actually those exact points were made in a bipartisan, pro-Minnesotan way, by both Republican Rep Mary Kiffmeyer as well as DFL Rep. Al Juhnke. You can see the whole debate last week on the MN House Floor on this short video: MEFeedia Unfortunately the few minutes of debate by Minnesota legislators hardly served the task of formulating and steering a judicious course for the rest of the United States in dealing with any foreign country, much less Iran. The Minnesota fiscal conservatives and Minnesotan pension investments were not listened to either and were defeated on an 82 to 46 vote.
It makes you wonder what kind of Kool-Aid AIPAC has been pushing on our poor unsuspecting Minnesota legislators who really ought to stick to what's best for Minnesota and stay out of international politics.
Cross Posted at MnProgressive Project
