If there’s a headquarters of neoconservatism in Washington, there’s a good argument it’s 918 Pennsylvania Avenue, SE.
That’s where the new Emergency Committee for Israel — the group that launched with a Politico feature and an ad calling Pennsylvania Senate candidate Joe Sestak a terrorist symp — is currently operating. And it’s the same building that was base for the old Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (the Iraq sign is even still outside, apparently).
The latter was the outfit, rememeber, that had a brief but influential run in the early 2000s providing an outside assist to the Bush Administration’s push for an attack on Iraq. It included neocon luminaries like Bill Kristol (who is also on the board of the new Israel group), Richard Perle, and James Woolsey, along with senators like John McCain and Evan Bayh.
The evidence lies in a a letter from ECI’s executive director (PDF), Noah Pollak, to Comcast regarding the attack ad the group has been running in Pennsylvania. The letterhead bears the following address: “918 Pennsylvania Ave., SE · Washington, D.C. 20003.”
That address happens to be the same as that of Orion Strategies, a public-relations consultancy owned and operated by renowned GOP lobbyist Randy Scheunemann, who, in addition to serving as president of the CLI, has been retained since the 2008 elections as Sarah Palin’s personal — and Bill Kristol-approved — foreign-policy trainer.
Michael Goldfarb, who works at Orion and is an adviser to the Emergency Committee, told Salon in an email:
“They didn’t exactly find the Rosetta stone there–I’m on the record as an adviser to ECI and its no secret that I work at Orion, where the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq sign is still proudly displayed on the front of the building. ECI will be opening an office next week, but given the urgency of our cause, getting an office sorted out seemed less pressing than exposing Joe Sestak’s anti-Israel record.”
(For the record, the Emergency Committee’s website currently lists another address that appears to be at a UPS Store.)
Noah Pollak, a writer at Commentary and head of the Emergency Committee, did not immediately return a call for comment.
So what does all this mean? For one, it’s a pretty striking illustration of just how small a world the still-influential neocon foreign policy community occupies. It’s also a good reminder that the Emergency Committee for Israel is following much the same low-budget, high-impact model that was used so successfully by the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. It’s a model that involves a very small staff and physical footprint coupled with the ability to get lots of free coverage from a hungry political media.
As for how much, or whether, neoconservative affinity for Israel played in the push for war with Iraq — that’s still a matter ofmuchdebate.
[UPDATED] On Wednesday, Tea Party Express organizer Mark Williams wrote a plainly and grotesquely racist “letter” to Abraham Lincoln in the voice of NAACP president Ben Jealous, whom Williams refers to as “Tom’s nephew.”
The letter includes lines like this:
Freedom means having to work for real, think for ourselves, and take consequences along with the rewards. That is just far too much to ask of us Colored People and we demand that it stop! …
Mr. Lincoln, you were the greatest racist ever. We had a great gig. Three squares, room and board, all our decisions made by the massa in the house.* Please repeal the 13th and 14th Amendments and let us get back to where we belong.
CNN responded by inviting Williams on its network — twice — on Thursday to debate the NAACP’s anti-Tea Party resolution with Roland Martin. Neither of the debate moderators — Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper — asked Williams about his “letter.”
Here’s the Blitzer segment:
The obvious larger issue here is why CNN keeps inviting Williams, who has called Allah a “monkey God” and said he believes President Obama is Muslim (that last one was on CNN) — and basically admitted that he says wacky, racist things so he “goes viral” — back on and treating him as a reasonable pundit. We’ve put in inquiries with spokespeople for Blitzer and Cooper and will let you know if we hear back.
* It appears that Williams has now edited the word “massa” to read “someone else.” But you can read the original versionhere.
UPDATE: Williams has now taken down the “parody letter” in response, he says, to the NAACP offering an “olive branch” to start a dialogue with the Tea Partiers. He also issues a call for racial comity, urging everyone “to fight those who seek to divide us by race.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets with President Barack Obama in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Tuesday, July 6, 2010. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)(Credit: AP)
To hear most media tell it before last week’s meeting between Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu, the only relevant question was whether a deep U.S.-Israel “rift“ was temporary or permanent.
But the idea of some kind of substantive schism between the two countries has always been a bit comical. As Bloomberg put it in an underappreciated piece last month, “Obama’s Israel Policy Showing No Difference With Clinton-Bush.”
The latest evidence of the non-rift comes in this new Time story in which Joe Klein passes on spin he’s getting from unnamed U.S. and Israeli government sources about the chances of a U.S. attack on Iran supposedly rising (emphasis ours):
Other intelligence sources say that the U.S. Army’s Central Command, which is in charge of organizing military operations in the Middle East, has made some real progress in planning targeted air strikes — aided, in large part, by the vastly improved human-intelligence operations in the region. “There really wasn’t a military option a year ago,” an Israeli military source told me. “But they’ve gotten serious about the planning, and the option is real now.” Israel has been brought into the planning process, I’m told, because U.S. officials are frightened by the possibility that the right-wing Netanyahu government might go rogue and try to whack the Iranians on its own.
Hard to know what to make of this, especially as Klein opts not to let us in on which side is feeding him this information. But high-level military cooperation is a useful reminder that talk of a “rift” between the Obama and Netanyahu is pretty much bunk.
A contractor's vehicle is destroyed after a suicide car bomb attack on the outskirts of Kabul.
In one of the least examined aspects of President Obama’s escalation of the Afghan war, armed private security contractors are being killed in action by the hundreds — at a rate more than four times that of U.S. troops, according to a previously unreported congressional study.
At the same time, the Obama administration has drastically increased the military’s reliance on private security contractors, the vast majority of whom are Afghans who are given the dangerous job of guarding aid and military convoys, the new Congressional Research Service study found.
In a 10-month period between June 2009 and April 2010, 260 private security contractors working for the Defense Department made the ultimate sacrifice, while over the same period, 324 U.S. troops were killed. In analyzing the numbers, the report found a private security contractor “working for DOD in Afghanistan is 4.5 times more likely to be killed than uniformed personnel.”
Unlike when a soldier is killed in action and the military promptly issues a press release describing the circumstances of the death, contractor deaths go almost entirely unreported by the Pentagon, and, by extension, the media. As a result, both the level of violence and the number of people being killed as part of the U.S. effort in Afghanistan are being significantly underreported.
Details about how the private security contractors are dying are exceedingly hard to come by, beyond the fact that the majority were killed while guarding convoys.
The Defense Department told Salon it does not track the names or even the nationalities of the killed contractors, though a DOD official recently testified to Congress that the military’s private security contractor force is over 90 percent Afghan.
“We have a very, very rigiorous system of tracking the soldiers and civilians who are killed — it’s publicly released, every single name,” Pentagon spokeswoman Lt. Col. Elizabeth Robbins told Salon. “But with contractors, it’s up to their contracted company.”
Anthony Cordesman, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Salon that the Afghan private security contractors guarding convoys can be particularly vulnerable because they often lack the armored vehicles or helicopters that U.S. troops travel in. “The casualties can come from anything from the Taliban, to fights between contractors, to failure to pay local warlords off and an occasional reminder to do that,” he said.
Those casualty numbers are likely to continue to rise as the military retains more and more private security contractors. When Obama announced last November that he was sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, for a total of 100,000, the number of armed security contractors had already been surging.
In March 2009, about the time Obama entered office, there were 4,000 contractors working for the DOD in Afghanistan. One year later, in March 2010, there were more than 16,000, according to the congressional study.
Internet pastor Bill Keller doesn’t have a location for his proposed “9/11 Christian Center at Ground Zero.” He doesn’t have a staff. A Floridian, he admits he doesn’t even know anyone in New York.
But, Keller told Salon today, he intends to have the new church — his answer to the planned Muslim community center derided by some right-wingers as the “Ground Zero Mosque”– up and running by Jan. 1.
“This is not to be confrontational with the Muslims, it really isn’t,” he said of the 9/11 Christian Center. Asked about the center’s website, which calls Islam a “false religion” whose 1 billion adherents “are going to Hell,” Keller said it was not intended as confrontation but rather “telling the truth.”
And he insisted the money donated to him for the church project, the cost of which he pegs at $1 million, will be used for legitimate purposes — even though Keller has been involved in questionable fundraising schemes in the past. Our favorite is Gold for Souls, a project of Keller’s LivePrayer.com ministries, which advertises “personal responses to all email prayer requests.”
Gold for Souls is a service in which you send Keller your “old gold, jewelry, diamonds, and precious items” and … well, that’s about it. Keller, who dedicated his life to ministering after an insider trading conviction in 1989, makes his pitch on a promotional video for Gold for Souls:
Today we legally slaughter 4,000 innocent babies every 24 hours in this nation … We’ve made mainstream sexual perversions of every kind. Our government supports the enemies of israel. Pornography and gambling are now socially acceptable. We bow down and worship every false god and idol man has dreamed up in his deranged mind. …
Now you can be part of this great movement to turn this nation back to God and biblical truth! One way you can help is by donating your old gold and jewelry to Gold For Souls.com.
He continues: “Gold For Souls will not only get you a tax deductible donation receipt for the fair market value of your gold and jewelry, but it will pay you eternal dividends since the funds will be used to help lead this nation back to God and biblical truth and the souls of men to faith and Jesus Christ.”
Keller told Salon that the service has been “well-received” since it launched in February and has helped support the work of his St. Petersburg-based outfit. He also stressed that he was merely paid to host and produce an infamous 2009 Birther infomercial. The proceeds from the infomercial, in which viewers were asked to pay $30 to send faxes demanding Obama’s birth certificate, went to his partner in the project, conservative activist Gary Kreep. (Keller added, “It would be nice to see someone get a hold of that original birth certificate.”)
As for the 9/11 Christian Center, Keller is eager to get started, so he claims he will travel to New York from Florida once a week starting in September and preach at the Embassy Suites hotel in lower Manhattan, until he finds a permanent home — or, perhaps more likely, the project fizzles.
(Keller contacted Salon after a piece ran about him yesterday, writing in an e-mail, “I know Salon is nothing but a smear rag..but at least ahve [sic] the nads to call.” So we did.)
Bill Keller, the Florida pastor Alex wrote about earlier who says he is planning a “9/11 Christian Center” as an alternative to a Muslim community center planned near ground zero, is also a leading Birther. He gained notoriety last year with a late-night informercial demanding that President Obama produce his birth certificate and encouraging viewers to send him money to help keep the pressure on.
The Cordoba House project near the World Trade Center site has produced a large-scale freakout among prominent conservatives, including New York Rep. Peter King and gubernatorial candidate Rick Lazio, despite strong support for the project from Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the local community board.
Joining them in opposing the community center is Keller, a fundamentalist Christian pastor who runs an Internet prayer service called LivePrayer. He calls the project “a spit in the face of the people of New York.” Keller is now proposing a $1 million project next door that he dubs “the 9/11 Christian Center at Ground Zero.”
It looks a lot like Keller is seizing an opportunity to reap easy cash from conservatives around the country who are horrified by what they read in Human Events about the proposed Muslim community center — just as Keller saw an opportunity when he tapped into the Birther movement with an informercial last year.
“Where was President Obama born? Why does he refuse to produce his official state of Hawai birth certificate? What is he hiding?” Keller asked in the Birthermercial, which was running in at least seven states in the South. “Don’t sit back, do nothing. Act now! Tell President Obama to prove where he was born.”
For a donation of $30, Keller’s group would send faxes to state attorneys general asking them to demand Obama produce his birth certificate. As a special thank you, those sending in money got a custom-made “Got a birth certificate?” bumper sticker.
The slapdash website of Keller’s Christian Center, which is sprinkled with quotes damning Muslims (one prayer on the site is titled “The False Religion of Islam and the Courage to Tell One Billion People They are Going to Hell”), features a large donate button at the top, encouraging visitors to “Take your stand against evil.” The donate link takes visitors straight to the donation section of the Web site of Keller’s LivePrayer outfit.
Bill Kristol 
Mark Williams, Wolf Blitzer, and Roland Martin 
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets with President Barack Obama in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Tuesday, July 6, 2010. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)(Credit: AP) 
A contractor's vehicle is destroyed after a suicide car bomb attack on the outskirts of Kabul. 
