Prohibited activities again catching up with lobby

When former AIPAC director Steven J. Rosen interpreted the
contents of stolen classified U.S. national defense information to Washington
Post reporter Glenn Kessler in 2004, he peddled it as proof that Iran was
engaged in “total war against the United States.”  Far from an investigative journalism
scoop, Rosen’s propaganda was not only false, but another small component of
AIPAC’s larger drive to militarily entangle the U.S. with Iran. Mirroring the
trajectory of Enron — another secretive corporation that suddenly collapsed —
this lobby has racked up such an unbroken string of challenges to U.S. rule of
law that concerned Americans are again gathering to confront AIPAC on a massive
scale on May 21-24 in Washington.

More than a creative protest during AIPAC’s yearly
conference, participants are attending workshops and learning circles to
discover how to effectively expose, confront, and roll back AIPAC’s most
secretive, dangerous, and costly initiatives.  Participants will also network and leverage their contacts
with activists from other states working to create lasting peace in the Middle
East while reinstituting government accountability at home.  But why now?

A few observant Americans looked on in despair as AIPAC’s
1980s election law violations and 2004 employee indictments over classified
information trafficking were recently unwound through attrition and curious
moves by the courts and Justice Department.   The year 2011 is remarkably similar to a tipping point
catalyzed by misdeeds that took place a half a century ago, when a coalition of
fed-up Americans finally laid down the gauntlet and insisted on rule of law in
America — breaking the back of AIPAC’s parent organization.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s Jewish activists were
appalled that AIPAC’s parent organization, the American Zionist Council, was
illegally laundering funds raised for legitimate overseas charitable relief
back into covert U.S. public relations and lobbying activities in secret
coordination with the Israeli government. 
The American Council for Judaism and scores of similarly concerned
Americans relentlessly lobbied Congress and the U.S. Department of Justice for
relief. Even then-Congressman Donald Rumsfeld took action for his constituents.

After uncovering and documenting some of the AZC’s most
egregious activities, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy ordered AIPAC’s parent
organization — the AZC — to begin openly registering as an Israeli foreign
agent on November 21, 1962. 
Resistant to transparency and accountability, the AZC asked the Justice
Department to keep its filed activities as a foreign agent secret, a subversion
of the 1938 Foreign Agents Registration Act transparency provisions.  The DOJ complied and refused to
publicly release files about the AZC’s foreign agent filing until 2008.  This secret pact allowed the AZC to
quietly shut down and transfer all key activities into its formerly
unincorporated lobbying division, the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee.  AIPAC incorporated just
six weeks after the AZC FARA order, but has never registered as a foreign
agent.

According to newly declassified documents, the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee notified the Internal Revenue Service of its
findings about how tax-exempt funds were laundered from Israel into nonexempt
activities of the AZC and its AIPAC lobbying division.  But after a cursory investigation, and
in spite of the DOJ foreign agent order, the IRS refused to revoke the AZC’s
tax-exempt status.  In 1967, after
landslide fundraising in the wake of the Six-Day War, AIPAC submitted its own
application for IRS tax exemption editing out mandatory information about the
critical early support it received from the AZC and Israel.  The IRS granted AIPAC a tax exemption
in 1967 — retroactive to 1953 — boosting the impact of the Justice Department’s
prior cover-up of the organization’s true history.

Though again investigated as a foreign agent in the 1970s,
AIPAC was soon free to spawn a network of coordinated stealth Political Action
Committees designed to swing elections across the United States.  AIPAC board member Michael Goland was
indicted and served a prison term in 1990 for corrupting the 1986 Senate race
in California.  But like the AZC,
AIPAC has proven highly resistant to accountability and responsibility for the
actions of its associates.  Although
the Washington Post exposed vast illegal campaign activity coordinated from
AIPAC headquarters in the late 1980s, the FEC refused to regulate AIPAC as a
political action committee, and the matter languished in court for decades
until it was quietly and unceremoniously dismissed in 2010.

In 1984 the FBI also investigated AIPAC’s receipt of
government-classified U.S. confidential business data privately submitted by
entities as diverse as the AFL-CIO and Monsanto to negotiate a better bilateral
trade agreement with Israel. 
Again, nothing came of AIPAC or the Israeli government’s joint covert
violation of U.S. advice and consent negotiations and the shocking FBI
investigation file of AIPAC remained locked away from public scrutiny until
2009.

Fallout from criminal indictments of AIPAC staffers caught
red-handed trafficking classified information in 2004-2005 that were quietly
unwound under mysterious judicial rulings and even more DOJ acquiescence in
2009 has put AIPAC’s activities under a new spotlight.  AIPAC briefly considered a media
campaign to smear U.S. law-enforcement officials but instead cut its losses by
dumping Rosen. This led to Rosen’s $20 million retaliatory defamation lawsuit
which opened up shocking new insights about AIPAC.   In 2010, true to form, AIPAC let loose a salvo of
pornography and prostitution charges — which succeed more in revealing AIPAC’s
decrepit work environment than anything about its former top executive-branch
lobbyist. But the secret that AIPAC is an organization that has been breaking
U.S. laws since its emergence from the AZC in 1963 is now officially “out
of the bag.”  The list of U.S.
classified documents stolen and misused by AIPAC grew larger in 2010, even as the
IRS is again asked to retroactively revoke AIPAC’s tax exemption.

Rosen’s 2010 defamation lawsuit court documents reveal that
AIPAC’s classified information trafficking has been much more widespread than
previously known.  AIPAC obtained a
“secret National Security Decision Directive #99 calling on the Armed
Services and Secretary of Defense to explore the potential for stepped-up
strategic cooperation.” AIPAC gleaned classified annual reports of secret
U.S. arms transfers. AIPAC skimmed classified law enforcement files about North
African financial transfers to African-American political activists, which it
then used to sabotage Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign. AIPAC suctioned up
classified U.S. intelligence about Khartoum. An AIPAC board member funneled
classified raw U.S. signals intelligence into a lobbying effort, while another
AIPAC employee solicited and received classified information about secret U.S.
understandings with Saudi Arabia. 
Such pervasive classified information-trafficking activities by a charity
operating in the interest of a foreign government are simply not permissible
under IRS and nonprofit regulations — irrespective of the motive.

In 2011, AIPAC is the number one obstacle to those seeking peace in the
Middle East.  Today the lobby
launders with impunity purloined U.S. national defense information — rather
than overseas charitable funds — to undermine peace.  It has forced concerned Americans of many stripes, liberal
to libertarian, foreign policy novices to pros — to rekindle the spirit of the
1960s AZC accountability moment by again gathering in Washington May 21-24 at
Move Over AIPAC.