Huffington Post blogger, Sam Sedai, wrote the following article in response to the CNI’s public hearing on Captiol Hill last December. The Huffington Post refused to publish it, but it is available at www.commondreams.org:
Published on Wednesday, February 13, 2008 by CommonDreams.org
Not Revising History on Tom Lantos
by Sam Sedaei
As I entered the building of the United States Congress one afternoon in early December of last year, I walked through long hallways in the basement of the Capitol to attend a hearing on the Annapolis meeting between Israelis, Palestinians and a number of other countries from the region. Retired Ambassador Edward Peck – the head of the White House Terrorism Task Force during the Reagan administration – was the keynote guest. Other participants included Journalist Dan Lieberman and retired Professor Grace Austin. A staff member as well as the lawyer for the Council for the National Interest foundation in Capitol Hill were also present, an organization that has long promoted America’s interests through supporting fair and even-handed policies in the Middle East.
It was a great event, except there was one problem with it. The hearing wasn’t organized by Congress. In fact, it was only a counter-hearing to the official House hearing on the matter. The Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee had previously decided that he was not going to ask any current or former State Department officials to speak at the official Congressional hearing on Annapolis. Instead, he had only invited two people to speak at the hearing: Dennis Ross – counselor of the hawkish Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which is the research arm of American Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC) – and David Wurmser – a neoconservative who has long been credited as being one of the main authors of the 1996 report Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, which was prepared for then incoming Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.
The Chairman was made well aware of the fact that both invited witnesses had a consistent record of disproportionately and unconditionally supporting Israel, and that there was a need for at least one State Department official who could have an objective voice in the hearing. Despite hundreds of calls that were made to his office in the run-up to the hearing, he made the point of steadfastly refusing to invite a truly independent expert to speak. The name of the Chairman of House Foreign Affairs Committee was Representative Tom Lantos.