Jane Harman Weighs In on Israel's Hold Over Congress
Economists have a concept they call "revealed preferences." The basic idea is that it's one thing to ask someone how much they value something. It's another thing to watch the economic choices that they make, from which you can draw inferences about what their true preferences are, regardless of what they say.
A lot of ink has been spilled about the question of to what degree the Israeli government has the ability to make the U.S. Congress do things. The exact truth is hard to know, partly because U.S. foreign policy is also awful in areas of the world where the Israel Lobby is presumably not weighing in as much, so it's assess exactly what the Israel Lobby's specific contribution is to the particular awfulness of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. And because there are particular reasons that have nothing to do with Israel for U.S. policy to be worse in the Middle East than it is in other areas. And also because a lot of folks clearly have incentives to overstate or understate the influence of the Lobby.
What I find most fascinating about the Jane Harman-AIPAC-Gonzales-FISA scandal is
what it suggests Representative Jane Harman's actual working model was of how Congress works.
[For the purpose of this argument I am assuming that the CQ and New York Times reports are accurate. Rep. Harman has denied them and demanded that the alleged transcript of the wiretapped call be released. You can watch Harman's denial on MSNBC here. You can read and listen to her denial on NPR - where she seems to deny, then concede, then deny again that the alleged conversation took place - here. Note my concern here is not whether Rep. Harman broke any law, but what the scandal reflects in terms of beliefs about how Congress operates as a political matter.]
The allegations suggest that Jane Harman believed that if the Israeli government decided that Harman should be the chair of the Intelligence Committee, and communicated that belief to Nancy Pelosi through the America Israel Public Affairs Committee, it was significantly more likely that Harman would become chair of the Intelligence Committee. And that she believed that difference in probability was significant enough to justify taking a significant risk.
That she believed that she was taking a real risk is indicated by the reports that at the end of the wiretapped phone call with the suspected Israeli agent, Harman said, "This conversation doesn't exist."
And if this was Harman's actual belief about how to make things happen in Congress, it's a very significant fact. After all, Jane Harman was in a position to know. She's got many years of experience in Washington political games. She's close to AIPAC. She's close to the Israeli government. She's close to Pelosi. She knows how these actors interact.
So first of all, Harman had to believe that if the Israeli government tells AIPAC to do something, AIPAC is very likely to do it, without asking for much explanation. And second, she had to believe that if AIPAC tells Nancy Pelosi to do something, Nancy Pelosi is very likely to do it, without asking for much explanation. In this case, the mechanism was allegedly that media mogul Haim Saban would threaten to withhold campaign contributions to Pelosi. Given that Pelosi has a safe seat, this wouldn't seem to be that much of a threat to her personally, so in order to believe that this was a credible threat Harman had to believe that Pelosi had some proclivity to accede to such a threat.
Of course in the event Harman did not become the Intelligence Chair and there is no record as yet that this scheme led to any interaction with Pelosi or her staff. So I do not mean to suggest that Pelosi or any member of her staff had any direct involvement in the scandal, since I am not aware of any evidence that this is true. And furthermore I am quite aware that we really don't know yet what Harman did or didn't do, and therefore any inference from her actions about what she did or didn't believe is speculative.
But as a judgment of how people perceive the Democratic leadership, I do think the scandal has implications that the Democratic leadership should consider. The belief that the Israeli government can tell the Democratic leadership what to do is apparently so widespread that the set of believers seems to include high-ranking Democratic Members of Congress. Can Democratic leaders really be content with this? If now there is no investigation of this matter - if not a criminal investigation, how about a referral to the House ethics committee? - won't this outcome be perceived to validate the belief?
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Naiman lays it on the line:
"If now there is no investigation of this matter - if not a criminal investigation, how about a referral to the House ethics committee? - won't this outcome be perceived to validate the belief?"
Exactly.
Kudos to you, Robert Naiman, to address this issue as an American. Pro-Israel groups that interfere with this discussion should be met with all the opprobrium they deserve.
Oh Israel, leave us and the Palestinians alone.
Political money is useful for a lot more than getting (re) elected. Pelosi can also donate to other politicians to get them to do what she wants them to.
This is another reason of why we need election reform NOW. I can not stand AIPAC, but what this organization seems to have a hold on Congress on both sides of the aisle (I might add), and has influenced US Foreign Policy.
When Obama talked on the campaign trail about interest groups, I put AIPAC out there together with big oil, big pharma, etc.
Surprised noone has yet spotted the connection between Harman, Israel, NSA and NSA's use of Israeli-controlled contractors to intercept and process transmissions over telco facilities in its warrantless wiretapping, and the real reason the telcos were given immunity for criminal eavesdropping - protect Is-un-real.
Harman's infuriated that she got caught on a legal interception because US agents were acting on behalf of the US government to monitor Israel espionage. See, in her view, US government resources exist to support Israal.
I heard Harman's prevarications on NPR as well. What gets me, is Harman was the one who lambasted the NYTs for publishing the NSA wiretap story. It seems she's been the victim of the same program she defended.
On that note, does anyone else find it intriguing that the Bush regime was apparently using the NSA program to wiretap members of Congress? Shouldn't there be some outcry about this?
That's not to defend Harman, but to raise the question about how the Bush regime used, or abused, its ability to conduct wiretaps.
As I understand the press reports, Harman was not the target of the wiretap. The other side of the conversation - the "suspected Israeli agent" - was the target of the wiretap. Furthermore, this wasn't a warrantless wiretap - there was a court-approved warrant for a specific investigation. So at least in this case, according to the press reports, the "Bush regime" was not using "the NSA program" to wiretap Members of Congress. I mean that, what we know from the press reports about this case is not evidence of wiretapping Members of Congress per se. Of course you could argue that the question of investigating foreign influence on Congress is inherently fraught because of the blurry line between illegal foreign influence and protected First Amendment activity of U.S. citizens. But my understanding is that in this case they did have a court-approved wiretap.
Robert is correct. This was a legal court-approved FBI wiretap on a suspected foreign spy, not one of the warrantless NSA wiretaps. Harman just happened to be one of the people the suspect called.
Harman, with her "abuse of power" cries, is intentionally trying to confuse the issue by bringing up the unpopular NSA warrantless eavesdropping program. Surely we WANT our FBI wiretapping foreign spies when a judge approves?
You are correct to say that Ms. Pelosi has a safe seat in congress, but there is a flaw in your logic. Ms. Pelosi holds her seat as Speaker of the House in considerable part because of her ability to solicit donations for other Democrats. So AIPAC donations are presumably a real incentive for her to hold that position. Otherwise, I agree with your comments.
I take your point. Of course Pelosi cares about fundraising because of her relationship with other Members of Congress. What I was trying to get at, and perhaps I should have explained this more fully, is that if one is talking about her national fundraising presumably a single donor, even a very wealthy one, would not loom so large as to make such a threat decisive - does every potential donor get to make this kind of threat and make it stick? - unless one were predisposed to heed such a threat from a particular source.
Check your facts. AIPAC is a Political Action Committee.
While it is technically correct that AIPAC doesn't give money to candidates, in the matter at hand this is a distinction without a difference. Steering happens, and everyone knows it. Read the CQ and New York Times articles, and try to imagine how they make sense in a world where AIPAC has no relationship to fundraising. You can't.
But they OBVIOUSLY orchestrate the financial donations of their hundred thousand members (each one personally) and especially people like Saban, who threatened financial consequences at the Behest of aipac in a way that could NEVER be tracked by official tallies of donations. IE his donations dont COME from AIPAC, but are still controlled by them.
It's much MORE effective than simply giving or taking away "on the record" donations, as it allows them to do MUCH more insidious things politically.
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