Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October/November 1997, Page 121

Publishers' Page

Some Time Ago We Predicted That...

President Bill Clinton would go down in history as the most morally corrupt president of the 20th century. Now we have to eat our words. But only the reference to the 20th century. It's not that we've learned more about 19th century presidents. It's only that...

We've Learned More About Bill Clinton.

It's funny, in a sick sort of way, to see Senate investigators triumphantly ferreting out all those conduits used to launder foreign money into both Democratic and Republican campaign coffers. Buddhist nuns from Taiwan, a Hong Kong businessman, a Thai businesswoman, a Chinese restaurateur from Arkansas. It's like counting anthills at the foot of a mountain. But it looks to us like that mountain, the Israel lobby...

Is Made of the Same Stuff as the Anthills!

Back in 1988 the publisher and executive editor of this magazine assembled five other retired U.S. government and military officials, including the late U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations George Ball, to file a lawsuit. Its purpose was to force the Federal Election Commission to subject the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Israel's principal Washington, DC lobby, and its armada of proxy political action committees to abide by the same financial disclosure laws that all other political committees and political action committees observe. We figured that existing federal rules should be applied equally to all the special interests at work in the elections game, no matter how cleverly they structure themselves to put themselves outside those rules.

AIPAC Officials Did a Lot of Spinning.

They said compiling the same information for the FEC that all non-profits have to compile for the IRS would be an intolerable burden. (Our circulation is comparable to their membership and we do it with five salaried employees, but maybe their 150 employees don't work as hard.) Later, we read in the weekly Jewish press that the FEC had dismissed the part of our suit aimed at AIPAC-directed PACs, and then that AIPAC had won, after going through the "worst nightmare" in the organization's history.

It Took Another Suit Against the FEC...

To get to the truth. The FEC had agreed that AIPAC was "a political committee," but decided that influencing elections was only part of its efforts and therefore it need not comply with the disclosure rules the FEC applies to all other political committees.

The Argument Was Silly, of Course!

The implication was that if a political action committee spends three-quarters of its $50,000 budget on contributions of one kind or another to candidates, it has to disclose how it raised and how it spent its money because of the $37,500 it put into the campaign. But if AIPAC, with a $15 million budget, spends only 25 percent of its money on similar contributions, it doesn't have to disclose how it raised and how it spent its money, even though it put $3,750,000 into the campaign.

To Make a Long Story Slightly Shorter...

Justice Laurence Silberman saw it our way. Thanks to him the case was put to all the justices of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. They ruled eight to two in our favor!

So, Eight Years After Starting, We Won!

Even the two appeals court judges who ruled against us didn't do so on the merits of our case, but only on whether or not we had "standing" to make the complaint in the first place. It seems that registered voters, taxpayers, and other ordinary mortals don't have the right to demand that a federal commission enforce its own rules against the lobbyists and political action committees that virtually dictate who will represent us in Congress.

Well, None of Us Complainants...

Claim to be anything but ordinary mortals. But all of us could bore you out of your skulls describing not only personal experiences with AIPAC and some of the 51 other members of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations—the roof organization for national pro-Israel groups in the U.S.—but also with the bitter consequences of a U.S. Middle Eastern policy driven almost solely by domestic politics, and hardly at all by U.S. national interests or the traditions, inclinations and preferences of the American people. Two of us have been doing this for the past 15 years in this magazine and...

We've Barely Scratched the Surface.

So we know we have "standing." But we'll have to prove it all over again and argue the merits of an open-and-shut case all over again because, guess what? Slaying the AIPAC dragon and the FEC dragon wasn't sufficient. Now we've got the government of the world's only remaining superpower on our case, literally. The solicitor general of the United States has appealed the 8-to-2 decision of the U.S. Federal Court of Appeals to the Supreme Court. Our case will be argued in the Supreme Court session that begins in October, and a decision can be expected before the Supreme Court adjourns next spring.

If You Think We Sometimes Exaggerate...

The power of the Israel lobby, think a little more about it. The Federal Election Commission, which consists of an equal number of Democrats and Republicans, usually ex-congressmembers, decided it would be easier to endure another lawsuit from a few aging ex-government officials than to enforce its own ruling that AIPAC is "a political committee." Now the Clinton administration's Department of Justice has decided it, too, would rather take on the successful complainants in yet another court case than order the FEC to obey a federal court decision. Why?

We've Been Meaning to Discuss That...

On this very page! So why not now? Early in the first Clinton term Attorney General Janet Reno defied the Lobby. When her deputy, Philip Heymann, tried to slip a recommendation for a pardon or clemency (we don't know which) for Jonathan Jay Pollard past her to the president, she fired him. Officially, it was a "clash of management styles." That's gobbledygook for not tolerating end runs. Janet Reno also made a bad decision early on (remember the Branch Davidians of Waco, TX?), but she also took the blame for it. We sang her praises on this page for the next three years, especially last fall when the Clintonites leaked it to the press that she wasn't a "team player" and therefore wouldn't be reappointed. So far as we were concerned, she was the member of the team who should remain. They say in Florida...

Her Mother Wrestled Alligators!

Stronger stuff than her daughter, it turns out. The worse the Clinton administration seems to look, the better Clinton "team player" Janet Reno has become. Her refusal to appoint a special counsel to look into foreign money entering U.S. domestic politics is a part of that picture. We all know it would make some members of the Clinton administration look very bad. We also think...

It Would Lead Inevitably...

From East Asia to "West Asia," where we think the region's "only working democracy" has been working a little too hard and a lot too long in Washington, and that the Justice Department's frenzy to protect AIPAC from federal disclosure laws is related. And we think we have the "standing"...

To Say We Think it Stinks!

If you do too, please read the "Editor's Essays" on the following page and see if, together, we can...

Make a Difference, This Month.