Israel Lobby’s US Treasury Follies Hurt
Grant F. Smith, Dissident Voice, Sep 16 2008 (extracts)
According to the JPost, the US Department of Treasury’s new Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (TFI) unit is going after the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines. TFI targeted the company and 18 affiliates for their alleged effort to “facilitate the transport of cargo for UN Designated proliferators.” TFI further charges it “falsifies documents and uses deceptive schemes to shroud its involvement in illicit commerce.” Later in the same article, AIPAC trumpets this as yet another victory in its drive to confront the Islamic Republic of Iran:
AIPAC strongly supports these steps which are part of a coordinated effort by the US and the international community to ratchet up the pressure on Iran and convince it to suspend its illicit nuclear activities. These steps send an important signal that America continues to lead the effort to confront and stop Iran’s nuclear pursuit.
But is America actually in the driver’s seat of this destabilizing brinksmanship? History suggests that it is not. AIPAC and its associated think tank, WINEP, were instrumental in lobbying the president for the creation of the TFI early in 2004. The Israel lobby also vetted Stuart Levey who Bush approved to lead the new unit. TFI claims to be “safeguarding the financial system against illicit use and combating rogue nations, terrorist facilitators, weapons of mass destruction proliferators, money launderers, drug kingpins, and other national security threats.” However its actions — and more important, inactions — reveal it to be a sharp-edged tool forged principally to serve the Israel lobby. TFI has taken no actions to undercut one nexus of money laundering in the Middle East unveiled in 2005 by Israeli prosecutor Talia Sasson and exposed by USA Today. Even mainstream print outlets such as Reuters continue to wonder aloud why US tax exemptions are offered for illegal overseas activities. Although Stuart Levey has made multiple official visits to Jerusalem to liaise with Israeli government officials, when formally asked under a FOIA request to reveal how TFI was tackling the reported $50b-$60b laundered from the US through Israel and into illegal West Bank settlements, TFI politely demurred (.pdf). TFI claims that Levey’s US-taxpayer-funded missions to Israel must be kept secret from the American public in order to comply with the Bank Secrecy Act, which ironically is an anti-money-laundering law. This is not to say that TFI is a black box to everyone. Invited guests and members of WINEP have received many intimate briefings from TFI officials and consultants — possibly more than the entire US Congress. […]
Looking back, it is painfully obvious that the US should have accepted the comprehensive “Grand Bargain” tendered by Iranian moderates in 2003. Iran’s $753b economy would be a highly productive trading partner for the US — Iran’s competitive advantages in energy are well matched with the US’s high-tech, engineering service and machinery exports. Instead, we have AIPAC continually disrupting trade flows against the broader American interest. AIPAC has a history of directing US trade policy against the interests of American producers and workers. In 1984, the FBI found AIPAC in possession of purloined secret International Trade Commission documents that US government officials solicited from private industry in order to negotiate a favorable bilateral free trade agreement with Israel. AIPAC promptly used this stolen information against the American worker — the subsequent FTA has yielded a $63b net US trade deficit with Israel between 1989 and 2007.
The grinding march toward a pointless war with Iran is not really about America’s own best interests. It’s not that Stuart Levey doesn’t know how Israeli extremism can endanger the US. Levey’s Fulbright-grant-funded undergraduate thesis was all about Meir Kahane, the Brooklyn-born rabbi who founded the Israeli group Kach. Kahane Chai (Kach) currently occupies slot number 20 on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations. While the buttoned-down Levey is certainly not an extremist of Kahane’s violent mold, his AIPAC-sponsored financial warfare is clearly extreme. Levey and his supporters are threatening US trading partners, banks, multinational corporations, independent shippers, small trade related businesses and the international shipping system. The only beneficiary of the action is Israel — a non-signatory to the NPT and longtime owner of its own nuclear weapons — an arsenal financed and created, in large part, by precisely the kinds of “deceptive schemes” and “illicit commerce” toward which TFI consciously turns a blind eye. In contrast, Iran signed the NPT, is under active IAEA monitoring, and is not enriching uranium to levels sufficient for nuclear weapons production.
Niqnaq 