Glenn Greenwald. (photo: Occupy.com)
Leaked
Emails From Pro-Clinton Group Reveal Censorship of Staff on Israel, AIPAC
Pandering, Warped Militarism
By Glenn Greenwald, The
Intercept
09 November 15
Leaked
internal emails from the powerful Democratic think tank Center for American
Progress (CAP) shed light on several public controversies involving the
organization, particularly in regard to its positioning on Israel. They reveal
the lengths to which the group has gone in order to placate AIPAC and long-time
Clinton operative and Israel activist Ann Lewis —including censoring its own
writers on the topic of Israel.
The
emails also provide crucial context for understanding CAP’s controversial
decision to host an event next week for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu. That event, billed by CAP as “A
Conversation with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,” will feature CAP
President Neera Tanden and Netanyahu together in a Q&A session as they
explore “ways to strengthen the partnership between Israel and the United
States.” That a group whose core mission is loyalty to the White House and the
Democratic Party would roll out the red carpet for a hostile Obama nemesis is
bizarre, for reasons the Huffington Post laid
out when it reported on the controversy provoked by CAP’s
invitation.
The
emails, provided to The Intercept by a source authorized to
receive them, are particularly illuminating about the actions of Tanden
(right), a stalwart Clinton loyalist as well as a former Obama White House
official. They show Tanden and key aides engaging in extensive efforts of
accommodation in response to AIPAC’s and Lewis’ vehement complaints that CAP is
allowing its writers to be “anti-Israel.” Other emails show Tanden arguing that
Libyans should be forced to turn over large portions of their oil revenues to
repay the U.S. for the costs incurred in bombing Libya, on the grounds that
Americans will support future wars only if they see that the countries attacked
by the U.S. pay for the invasions.
For
years, CAP has exerted massive influence in Washington through its ties to the
Democratic Party and its founder, John Podesta, one of Washington’s most
powerful political operatives. The group is likely to become even more
influential due to its deep and countless ties to the Clintons. As the Washington
Post’s Greg Sargent put it earlier this year:
CAP “is poised to exert outsized influence over the 2016 president race and —
should Hillary Clinton win it — the policies and agenda of the 45th President
of the United States. CAP founder John Podesta is set to run Clinton’s
presidential campaign, and current CAP president Neera Tanden is a longtime
Clinton confidante and adviser.”
The
recent CAP announcement of the Netanyahu event has generated substantial
confusion and even anger among Democratic partisans. Netanyahu “sacrificed much
of his popularity with the Democratic Party by crusading against the Iran
nuclear deal,” the Huffington Post noted. Netanyahu has repeatedly
treated the Obama White House as a political enemy. Indeed, just today,
Netanyahu appointed “as his new
chief of public diplomacy a conservative academic who suggested President Obama
was anti-Semitic and compared Secretary of State John Kerry’s ‘mental age’ to
that of a preteen.”
A core
objective of Netanyahu’s trip to Washington is to re-establish credibility
among progressives in the post-Obama era. For that reason, the Huffington
Post reported, “the Israeli government pushed hard for an invite to”
CAP and “was joined by [AIPAC], which also applied pressure to CAP to allow
Netanyahu to speak.”
The
article quoted several former CAP staffers angered by the group’s capitulation
to the demands of the Israeli government and AIPAC; said one: Netanyahu is
“looking for that progressive validation, and they’re basically validating a
guy who race-baited during his election and has disavowed the two-state
solution, which is CAP’s own prior work.” Matt Duss, a former foreign policy analyst
at CAP, said “the idea that CAP would agree to give him bipartisan cover is
really disappointing” since “this is someone who is an enemy of the progressive
agenda, who has targeted Israeli human rights organizations throughout his
term, and was re-elected on the back of blatant anti-Arab race-baiting.” Yet
another former CAP staffer, Ali Gharib, published an article in The
Nation noting that Netanyahu has all but formally aligned himself with
the GOP, writing: “That a liberal institution feels the need to kowtow to AIPAC
in a climate like this speaks volumes about either how out of touch or how
craven it can be.”
BUT
NONE OF THIS should be surprising. The Nation previously investigated CAP’s
once-secret list of corporate donors, documenting how the group will abandon
Democratic Party orthodoxy whenever that orthodoxy conflicts with the interests
of its funders. That article noted that “Tanden ratcheted up the efforts to
openly court donors, which has impacted CAP’s work. Staffers were very clearly
instructed to check with the think tank’s development team before writing
anything that might upset contributors.”
Since
that article, CAP, to its credit, has provided some greater transparency about
its funding sources. As the Washington Post’s Sargent reported earlier this year,
“CAP’s top donors include Walmart and Citigroup,” and also “include the
Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, which represents leading
biotech and bio-pharma firms, and Blue Cross Blue Shield Association.” Other
large CAP donors include Goldman Sachs,
the Embassy of the United Arab Emirates, Bank of America, Google and Time
Warner.
Still,
many of its largest donors remain concealed. That is
disturbing because of persistent reports that CAP manipulates and suppresses
its own writers’ opinions to suit the interests of its donors. One former CAP
staffer described to The Intercept the not-so-subtle ways they
were pressured to abandon positions that offended CAP’s donors; the staffer was
directed to meet with corporate lobbyists who argued against his progressive
position on a widely debated political controversy, and was told by CAP
officials that his views were “bad” and “unhelpful.”
But on
Israel, CAP’s efforts to manipulate the content of its publications are even
more aggressive and overt. Under Tanden, the group has repeatedly demonstrated
it will go to almost any length to keep AIPAC and its pro-Israel donors happy,
regardless of how such behavior subverts its pretense of independent advocacy.
In
2012, a former AIPAC spokesman, Josh Block, launched a campaign to
brand several young, liberal writers at CAP’s blog, ThinkProgress,
as anti-Semites due to their writings on Israel, Palestine and Iran. CAP and
its writers were widely vilified for
what Ben Smith, then of Politico, called deviations from
“the bipartisan consensus on Israel,” and for voicing “a heretical and often
critical stance on Israel heretofore confined to the political margins.” Among
other crimes, these CAP writers stood accused of failing to sufficiently praise
the Netanyahu government: “Warm words for Israel can be hard to find on [CAP’s]
blogs,” Smith noted.
Rather
than stand behind its writers, top CAP officials, led by Tanden, applied
constant coercion to stifle content upsetting to AIPAC. As Gharib, one of the
vilified CAP writers,recounted last week, “CAP’s
positions moving forward from the attacks — including but not limited to
virtually banishing criticisms of Israel and Netanyahu from our writings and,
in at least one case, needlessly censoring a piece after publication —
were guided by how to return to AIPAC’s good graces, often in coordination with
AIPAC itself.” Most of the CAP writers accused of Israel heresy were gone from
the organization within a short time thereafter, and several have publicly
revealed that they had been censored on matters pertaining to Israel.
THESE
NEWLY PUBLISHED EMAILS reveal AIPAC-pleasing efforts far more heavy-handed than
previously known. On January 20, 2012 — at the height of the controversy overThinkProgress’
publications on Israel — Tanden wrote an email to CAP founder John Podesta and
several of her top aides, including ThinkProgress editor Judd
Legum. In that email, Tanden recounted an angry call she received from Ann
Lewis who, among other D.C. roles, served as the representative of
Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign on Jewish matters and is also a board member of Block’s hard-line group
The Israel Project. The email reflects the censorship demands being imposed on
CAP over Israel and how seriously Tanden was taking those demands:
That
phone call was preceded by a rambling, detailed email from Lewis to Tanden,
describing the audit she conducted of ThinkProgress’ output over
several weeks about Israel and identifying all of the offending material.
“Ambassador Michael Oren was called a liar in two posts,” complained Lewis, and
“there are regular criticisms of the Israeli government” but “no mention of
rocket attacks from Gaza.” (All of the leaked CAP emails referenced in this
article can be read here.)
Four
days after Lewis’ angry phone call, two ThinkProgress writers,
Gharib and Eli Clifton, published an investigation that
exposed the funding sources behind a controversial anti-Muslim film called “The
Third Jihad,” which had been used as training material by the NYPD. The film
was produced by a shadowy group calling itself The Clarion Fund, about which
almost nothing was known. Through outstanding shoe-leather reporting, Gharib
and Clifton revealed numerous ties between that group and various Israeli
settlers and other extremists.
Because
it dared to discuss Israeli activists, publication of this exposé provoked
serious consternation from Tanden, as this email exchange demonstrates. It
begins with an email from long-time Democratic Party operative Howard Wolfson,
formerly a top aide to Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer, which provides a link
to the piece with one simple message: “For the love of god!” Tanden’s reply
expressed concern about whether Israel should have been included in the reporting:
Soon
after their article was published, it was severely censored. Virtually every
reference to Israelis was simply deleted. The neocon magazine Weekly
Standard first noticed the censorship and
reveled in the success of the campaign to force CAP to suppress Israel
criticisms. “Somebody at the Center for American Progress’ ThinkProgress realized
that what had been published was completely inappropriate. Within what seems to
have been a few hours, the post was scrubbed,” it noted. “The good news is that
there seems to be at least one grown up at the Center for American Progress,”
it proclaimed.
One of
the article’s authors, Gharib, told The Intercept that Tanden
implemented a policy requiring that any material about Israel was to receive
special review from a designated editor before being published. Gharib and
Clifton did not submit this particular article for special review in advance of
publication because it concerned only individual Israeli funders, not Israel
itself. That editor, however, went into the article hours after it was
published and deleted the references to Israelis. When asked, CAP’s senior
national security fellow and then-chief-of-staff, Ken Gude, said he “does not
recall this specific incident.”
The
website Mondoweiss, which had trumpeted the importance of
this Clarion Group report when it was first published, detailed the following day that
“the piece originally contained four explicit references to Israel. Now it
contains only one, at the end, an aside about Gingrich.” As Mondoweiss put
it, “This is a shocking effort to remove any description of the Israel lobby
from a major ideological and political undertaking.”
Shocking
indeed. But it was all part of a larger CAP effort to assure AIPAC and the likes
of Ann Lewis that it would not allow any meaningful criticisms of Israel to be
voiced. In aWashington Post article
on the Josh Block-created campaign against CAP, Gude groveled,
reciting this loyalty pledge: “The clear and overwhelming record of the
literally hundreds of articles and policy papers from the Center for American
Progress and ThinkProgressdemonstrates our longstanding support
both for Israel and the two-state solution to the Middle East peace process as
being in the moral and national security interests of the United States.”
CAP
also denounced the language used by its writers as “inappropriate” and boasted
to thePost that they deleted some of the tweets that were deemed
offensive. And after his article was censored, Gharib was told by a CAP editor
that he was to avoid criticizing American Jewish groups, such as AIPAC, under
any circumstances. When he asked whether this was a temporary ban in light of
the controversy or a permanent one — i.e., when he could once again write about
such groups — the editor told him: “For AIPAC? Probably never.”
Less
than two weeks after CAP criticized its own writers to the Washington
Post, the group’s top officials celebrated that their censorship efforts
and public groveling seemed to be restoring them to AIPAC’s good graces. On
February 1, 2012 — exactly one week after publication of the heavily censored
post — Gude wrote an excited email to top CAP officials, including Tanden. The
subject was Gude’s meeting with AIPAC’s deputy director of policy and
government affairs, Jeff Colman, which Gude gushed was “very positive.”
In
light of “the steps we have taken” — the public apologies, the censorship, the
denouncing of CAP’s own writers — AIPAC, said Gude, deemed that CAP “now was
moving in the right direction.” The AIPAC official singled out several CAP
staffers for praise, saying AIPAC now believes “CAP/AF is in good hands.” Gude
celebrated the rewards CAP was likely to receive for its good behavior: “I bet
we get a lot of invitations to attend” an upcoming AIPAC event, Gude predicted.
“And it’s very likely that I’m going to Israel on one of their upcoming trips.”
The
list of CAP employees who received the AIPAC stamp of approval is telling
indeed: “Jeff is a big fan of Rudy and Brian.” “Rudy” is Rudy DeLeon, who, in
addition to serving as a CAP senior fellow and being a former Pentagon
official, is now a member of the board of directors of
General Dynamics; he’s literally being paid by weapons manufacturers
as he helps manage CAP’s positions. “Brian” is Brian Katulis, also a CAP senior
fellow whose “work focuses on U.S. national security policy in the Middle East
and South Asia”; he simultaneously works as a senior adviser to
the “strategic consulting” firm Albright Stonebridge Group, “assisting clients
with issues related to the Middle East and South Asia.” Katulis was one of
the first to publicly distance CAP from
the work of its own writers on Israel.
That is
who AIPAC demanded shape CAP’s positions, and that is exactly what AIPAC got:
people literally paid by the permanent corporate war faction in Washington to
promote its agenda and serve its interests.
Gude
claims that when citing all the “steps” that convinced AIPAC that CAP was
“moving in the right direction,” he was referring to only one incident, namely:
“We were responding to a controversy that originated from a young staffer’s use
of his personal social media account. We instituted a social media policy for
the organization that asked staff to make clear that their personal social
media accounts represented their own views and a reminder that even in that
context, their social media messages reflect on the organization.”
Notably,
Tanden’s effort to suppress Israel reporting began well before the anti-CAP
public campaign was launched. As one former CAP staffer recounted to The
Intercept, Tanden, almost immediately upon her return to CAP from the Obama
White House in late 2010, summoned senior staff to a meeting at which she
demanded to know why CAP was covering “Israel/Palestine.” She said she
understood that Israel was one of three issues — along with “trade and guns” —
that were “off the table” for CAP, and did not understand whyThinkProgress was
devoting coverage to it. In response to questions for this article, CAP’s Ken
Gude denied that these topics were “off limits,” and cited numerous posts published and events hosted
by the group on those topics from 2012-2015 (after the
reported conversation with Tanden took place).
When
told that the CAP blog had hired several writers such as Matt Duss who
specialized in that area, and that CAP’s work was consistent with the Obama White
House’s intention to confront Israel on settlements, Tanden re-iterated her
view that it was not “constructive” for CAP to work on Israel, particularly in
such a critical manner. The subsequent public controversy aimed at CAP, and the
resulting censoring of its own writers, had its genesis in Tanden’s
pre-existing belief that Israel should be avoided.
GIVEN
ALL THIS, it is anything but surprising that ever since it rid itself of its
troublesome Israel heretics, CAP’s foreign policy positions have been hawkish in the extreme. One
remarkable email exchange in particular reveals the critical role played by
Tanden in that positioning. In October 2011, a CAP national security writer,
Benjamin Armbruster, circulated a discussion on CNN about whether Libya should
be forced to turn over its oil revenue to the U.S. as compensation and
gratitude for the U.S. having “liberated” Libya.
After
one CAP official, Faiz Shakir, noted how perverse it is to first bomb a poor
country and then make it turn over its revenues to you for doing so, Tanden
argued that this made a great deal of sense:
Tanden’s
argument is quite similar to Donald Trump’s long-time stance about Iraqi oil:
“I say we should take it and pay ourselves back.” But Tanden’s twist on the
argument — that Americans will continue to support foreign wars only if they
see the invaded countries forced to turn over assets that the U.S. can use to
fund its own programs — is singularly perverse, as it turns the U.S. military
into some sort of explicit for-profit imperial force. As Shakir put it in a
subsequent email, that suggestion would “make people start to think that our
military is just for-hire to carry out the agendas of other people.”
At
first glance, CAP’s devotion to AIPAC and Netanyahu may seem strange given that
it is so plainly at odds with the Obama White House’s interests. But CAP —
like so many leading D.C. think tanks with
pretenses to objective “scholarship” — has repeatedly proven
that it prioritizes servitude to its donors’ interests even over its partisan
loyalties.
In the
case of Israel and Netanyahu, there is an even more significant factor at play:
Tanden is far more of a Clinton loyalist than an Obama loyalist, and a core
strategy of the Clinton campaign is to depict Hillary as supremely devoted to
Israel. Just last night, Clinton published an op-ed in The Forward on
Israel that is so extreme it has to be read to be believed. Its core purpose is
clear from its headline and photo: to implicitly criticize Obama for being too
adversarial to Israel and Netanyahu, while vowing that she, as president, will
be the most stalwart Israel loyalist imaginable:
Clinton’s
op-ed reads like the ultimate loyalty oath: “I have stood with Israel my entire
career. … As president, I will continue this fight.” Moreover, she writes,
“Netanyahu’s visit to Washington on November 9 is an opportunity to reaffirm
the unbreakable bonds of friendship and unity between the people and
governments of the United States and Israel.” She vows: “I will do everything I
can to enhance our strategic partnership and strengthen America’s security
commitment to Israel, ensuring that it always has the qualitative military edge
to defend itself. That includes immediately dispatching a delegation of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff to meet with senior Israeli commanders. I would also
invite the Israeli prime minister to the White House in my first month in
office.”
There
is not a peep of criticism about the Israeli occupation or the violence it has
used against Palestinians, though the op-ed does harshly scold the occupied
people: “Israelis have to look over their shoulders during everyday tasks, like
carrying groceries and waiting for the bus. … This violence must not be allowed
to continue. It needs to stop immediately. … Many of us have seen the video of
a cleric encouraging worshippers to stab Jews as he waves a knife in the air.
This incitement needs to end, period,” etc. etc.
In
that context, CAP’s servitude to AIPAC and pandering to Netanyahu makes all the
sense in the world. It may conflict with the Obama White House’s preferences,
but it very clearly serves its new primary goal: advancement of the Hillary
Clinton campaign.
Though
Gude insists CAP did not communicate with the Clinton campaign about the
Netanyahu invitation, he acknowledges that “the CAP board was informed and
[Clinton campaign head] John Podesta and [campaign official] Jose Villarreal
are members of the CAP board. They did not have a role in making the decision
to do the event.” Whatever else is true, as Clinton’s op-ed last night makes
clear, she has clearly adopted a strategy of siding with Netanyahu and Israel
over the Obama White House, and CAP, with its characteristic subservience, is
fully on board.
UPDATE:
Tanden’s office originally indicated she was traveling today and thus was
unable to respond to The Intercept’s inquiries, but shortly after
publication of this article, CAP’s Daniella Leger provided this comment about
our questions about Tanden’s views on Libyan oil revenues: “We’re a think tank,
and we have internal discussions and dialogues all the time on a variety of
issues. We encourage throwing out ideas to spur conversation and spark debate.
We did not take a position on this, but ThinkProgress covered it. The posts
certainly did not endorse the idea.”
Ironically,
one of those ThinkProgress posts she cited mockingly describes
Michele Bachmann’s views, which are strikingly similar to the ones expressed by
Tanden: “At last night’s GOP presidential debate, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN)
said Iraq and Libya should repay the U.S. for its war efforts in those two
countries.” The other link described how even Rick Santorum condemned
this oil-seizure idea — the one advocated by Tanden and Bachmann — as immoral
and counterproductive: “I think that would send every possible wrong signal
that America went to war for oil,” said the right-wing former GOP senator.
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