07/26/10 – Michael Flynn – The Scott Horton Show

All right y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio, starting up the second hour here.
We're going to get back to the Bradley Manning WikiLeaks story at the bottom of the hour and we're going to not leave it for the next couple of years.
We're going to be talking with Mike, oh man, Mike G., all about it, just hang tight.
This is just as important, the Emergency Committee for Israel, William Kristol's new group, pushing for war with Iran.
And before we get too far into that, let me first of all just introduce Michael Flynn, he's from rightweb.irc-online.org, just google RightWeb, it'll come right up for you.
And now, I'm sorry because I'm having trouble with your website today and I can't seem to pull up your bio, Michael, so first of all, welcome to the show, and second of all, please tell us about yourself a little bit.
Well, thank you for having me on the show.
The reason why you probably can't pick up RightWeb right now is because we have been subject to a number of hacks over the past six or seven months that have slowed down the website, made a lot of our pages unavailable, so unfortunately, we're trying to deal with this issue right now, but it seems like there's some people out there who would rather that our website doesn't show up online.
And I can't imagine who that would be.
In fact, well, go ahead, tell me your bio real quick, and then we'll get into why anyone might want to hack this website.
Right, well, as you said, my name is Michael Flynn, I'm the director of RightWeb, which is a project based at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C.
However, I'm speaking to you now from Geneva, Switzerland.
I sort of wear a couple hats.
One is I run a research program on immigration detention in Geneva, but I also work out of Washington at the Institute for Policy Studies on this program, RightWeb.
And what RightWeb does is it tracks the work of people and organizations that promote what we call militarist U.S. foreign policies.
And by militarist, that can mean everything from pushing very hard-line war on terror policies to policies on nuclear weapons or other arms policies.
So it's a pretty broad range of issues, but the main focus of the program has been on Middle East policy, which has been really the focus of a lot of militarist advocacy since 9-11.
Well, and let me tell the people a little bit about RightWeb, too.
You guys are right there with Jim Loeb and Justin Raimondo and others who've been on the case of the neoconservative faction of the war party, specifically, for a very long time.
And if people go and look through the RightWeb profiles, they can find profiles of all of the individuals and all of the think tanks and much of the history of the neoconservative movement, who all these people are, how they're all married to each other's daughters and sisters, and this very small group of war party neoconservatives who basically lead the left, the right, and the media, and every bit of the discussion of foreign policy in this country.
And you guys really are the top of the list up there.
I highly recommend people just spend a Saturday afternoon digging through RightWeb, and you'll find profiles of all the neocons, including ones you never heard of before, all the think tanks.
But anyway, I really mean it.
It's great stuff.
And it has been.
Well, I appreciate your generous words there.
But just to be clear, the neoconservatives form a very significant core of what you would call, or what we call, militarist advocacy in the United States.
But they're not the only people.
And I think you rightly point out, neoconservatives are generally a pretty small group of people.
Many of them are related, sons and daughters and brothers and sisters.
That's true as well.
But they're really just one aspect of what I think is sort of a larger phenomenon in the United States.
And the neoconservatives are very good to look at, because they maintain pretty strong connections with other factions in U.S. politics that are also very aggressive in how they perceive U.S. policy abroad.
And those can include people in the Democratic Party, they can include people in the Christian Right.
It's a pretty broad movement of people.
The neoconservatives, I think, arguably are some of the more effective advocates of these policies.
Well, yeah.
I think that's one of the reasons that I knew that you guys, well, years ago I used to talk with Tom Berry all the time and stuff.
But I knew that you guys had your act together as far as understanding the form of the War Party, because it's certainly not, as someone might expect, just a website about the Republicans.
Here's Right Web, the GOP that we don't like.
It's not that.
It's much more specific about the actual players in the War Party game.
And as you said, when it comes to Christian Zionists or certain Democrats or whatever that belong in the same categories, there they go.
They get their own bio, all their, you know, CNAS gets a profile right up there next to PNAC, etc.
Right, right.
Exactly.
Great stuff.
Great stuff.
Right Web.
I would say, I would just add, you know, and we can move on, but the name Right Web is actually a little bit misleading in this case.
It began, the program began shortly after 9-11, and we were focused really closely on actors within the Bush administration at that time.
And so that's why Right Web, that's the term we used, Right Web sort of captured the idea that to some extent this was very much coming out of a Republican administration.
But also there was an interconnectedness between the individuals, which is what Web was sort of reflecting.
But as we've matured in our understanding of the phenomena of militarism in the United States, it's clear that Right Web is misleading.
But it's become a bit of a brand name, so we're loathe to give it up.
But clearly it's more than the right.
It's right, left, and center.
It's definitely, there's historical roots that go into the Democratic Party, the Republican Party that have militarist aspects to them.
So it certainly isn't just about the right wing.
Okay.
Now, the Emergency Committee for Israel.
We've got about three minutes, a little bit more than three minutes, before we go out to our first break here.
So maybe you can just sort of give us the overview and, you know, the first four or five most prominent names involved.
Okay, well, the Emergency Committee for Israel is the latest in a long line over the past year of what you might call letterhead groups or astroturf groups, groups that seem to represent larger, larger political groupings, but really maybe just a couple individuals with some donors behind them.
And they put up ads online and they're basically attacking.
Right now, these organizations are attacking mainly Democrats on Mideast policy, whether it's on whether or not to get tough with Iran or whether or not to get softer on Israel, whatever the case may be.
But they're very strongly connected to networks of neoconservatives.
Now, the Emergency Committee for Israel has, as you mentioned earlier on, William Crystal as one of its principles.
But there are a number of other people who are closely aligned with neoconservatism that are also involved, people like Gary Bauer, a very important Christian right figure in the United States, who's an old college buddy of William Crystal's and has also been involved in the Project for the New American Century, was one of the founding signatures.
Bauer's an old college buddy of Crystal, huh?
Why didn't I know that?
They were roommates in Harvard, if I'm not mistaken.
I may be wrong about that, but I'm pretty sure about that.
See everybody right away, huh?
Yeah, I mean, I know that about Alan Keyes, but I didn't know that about Gary Bauer.
Well, excuse me, it's got to be Alan Keyes, excuse me, I'm mistaken, I'm crossing wires here.
Oh, OK.
Well, all right, as long as we got it all straightened out, no short circuit.
They're old friends and, you know, exactly what that relationship is, I can't, I don't recall exactly.
So Gary Bauer's there, and then you've got the wife of Elliot Abrams, Rachel Abrams, who's a real piece of work.
She runs a blog, which she, as Daniel Lubin over at Loeblog has pointed out quite nicely, she has this tendency to combine her criticism of people who she perceives as being anti-Israel with this sort of homophobic tendency.
And so she's on board, this is the first time she's sort of appeared as one of these members of one of these groups.
So that's another person, who else is involved?
There's a new person on the block, so to speak, a guy named Noah Pollack, who's got quite a history over the past 10 years of becoming, of being very tightly involved in neoconservative groups.
He was a contributor, I think still is maybe, for Commentary Magazine.
He was an editorial assistant at the Middle East Forum, which is run by Daniel Pipes.
He's also worked in Israel for a think tank called the Sharlem Center, which is funded by a very important neoconservative funder, Ken Adelson, not Ken Adelson, Sheldon Adelson.
So hold it right there, hold it right there, Sheldon Adelson.
All right, everybody, we'll be right back, talking with Michael Flynn from Right Web.
You can interact with other LRN listeners in our message board at forum.lrn.fm.
That's forum.lrn.fm.
All right, Sheldon, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
What's Norm Pothorff?
Well, if we were to bomb the Iranians, as I hope and pray we will, it will unleash a wave of anti-Americanism all over the world that will make the anti-Americanism we've experienced so far look like a love fest.
On the other hand, that's a worst-case scenario.
Yeah.
You know, the best-case scenario, I guess, would be that everyone in the whole world will celebrate and love America more than ever before.
Okay.
Now, so I'm talking with Michael Flynn from Right Web, and, you know, I was just reading here.
It says that CNN's Campbell Brown is married to Dan Sonor, who is one of these, I think, and he's one of the peanut guys going way back and is part of the foreign policy initiative.
This is the kind of thing that you learn reading Right Web, and I wonder, what exactly is Norman Pothorff's relationship to any of these members of the Emergency Committee for Israel?
Michael?
Well, I mean, Norman Pothorff happens to be the father-in-law of the executive director of the Emergency Committee for Israel.
Excuse me, not of the executive director, of just one of the board members, Rachel Abrams.
And this is a sort of an interesting...
So Rachel Abrams is married to Elliot Abrams, who basically inherited the policy shop from Doug Feith over at the Pentagon in the second Bush Jr. administration, right?
Exactly.
And goes back to Iran-Contra scandal and all that.
Exactly.
And then, so now, how is it that he's related to Norman Pothorff?
Well, so, I mean, the situation is, Rachel Abrams is the daughter of Midge Dechter, which is the wife of Norman Pothorff.
So Norman Pothorff is Rachel Abrams' stepfather.
I see.
And Norman Pothorff, so this is a sort of interesting relationship.
Norman Pothorff's son took over John Pothorff, is now the editor of Commentary magazine, which has been basically the flagship publication of neoconservatism since the 1970s, late 1960s.
And so it's basically just been passed down from generations here.
But it also...
The Pothorff clan is quite interesting, because it really gives you a sense of how family-oriented, to some extent, neoconservatism is.
So you have Midge Dechter, who is on the board of the Center for Security Policy, this hardline neocon outfit run by Frank Gaffney in D.C., former Reagan figure.
So Midge Dechter's on the Center for Security Policy.
She also was one of the founding members of the Project for the New American Century.
And in the 1980s, she co-directed with Donald Rumsfeld the Committee for the Free World.
So that's Midge Dechter, which was one of these very, very strong anti-communist, hardline anti-communist groups.
So that's Midge Dechter, the wife of Norman Pothorff.
Then you have Norman Pothorff, who you put a very apropos quote just on.
And so Pothorff is one of the guys who really helped shape the sort of aesthetics, I think, of neoconservatism back in the early 1970s, as editor of Commentary.
Now his daughter-in-law's husband, Elliot Abrams, who we all know, as you said, who's got quite a legacy in the Reagan years with the Iran-Contra scandal, and then as a very incompetent person working in the Bush administration on Middle East policy.
So here you have this sort of web of different individuals all connected with all kinds of organizations going back decades, but they're all within one family.
And that's sort of a little bit of a snapshot of what neoconservatism is.
Not completely, not to the full extent, but that's definitely one aspect of it, the family aspect.
Well, and they all hire each other.
Glenn Greenwald loves to point out how all these people adopt the rhetoric of libertarian individualism and how everybody's got to be a self-made man, and yet every single one of them works for their dad, or got hired by their dad, or their dad's best friend or something.
Anyway, so here's something else that jumps out at me from that Norman Pothorff quote that we just played there, which is available at thinkprogress.org if anybody wants to look for it, and your profile at RightWeb of the Emergency Committee for Israel.
If you type Norman Pothorff in Google, you'll get our profile on Norman Pothorff up in the top two or three of the returns, which is one of the things that RightWeb's been quite good at, is sort of finding its niche online with this very particular group of individuals and organizations.
I can't think of why any hackers would be attacking your site.
Okay, wait, no, we're about to get to why right now, because you guys are not shy to get to the point, which is the obvious subtext of what Norman Pothorff's just said there, and it's certainly outright in the text of, hell, just the title of the thing, the Emergency Committee for Israel, is that the neoconservatives are willing to sacrifice America for Israel.
It's not a matter of dual loyalty, it's a matter of loyalty to a foreign government.
Why don't you quote this guy, Noah Polak, saying, well, all kinds of what?
Go ahead.
Well, I mean, I would contest some of what you just said, but just for a moment, I have an interesting quote from Noah Polak.
I mean, listen, these guys justify what they do with some pretty banal arguments.
So Noah Polak being interviewed by the right-wing newspaper, the Jerusalem Post, about why they created this Emergency Committee for Israel, and he says, quote, we will not rest until there is a pro-Israel group representing every pro-Israel person on earth.
Well, whatever.
So, I mean, this is the kind of banal stuff that these guys throw around.
But the Emergency Committee for Israel, the first... let me just go back to what you're saying.
Well, he also says we're the pro-Israel wing of the pro-Israel community.
That was what William Crystal said.
Oh, my bad.
Yeah, yeah.
That's what William Crystal said.
But equally banal, equally banal and sort of silly.
But let me just tie in something that you said earlier.
Are they willing to sacrifice U.S. security for Israeli security?
Well, there's certainly an argument to be made that they're willing to jeopardize U.S. interests for their own perceived view of what they think Israeli security is.
I think that's a pretty clear statement.
But to say that they're willing to...
I mean, I don't know how far you want to push that argument.
I don't know how far you want to push the dual loyalty thing.
Well, Norman Plodhorit says in that quote that it will unleash...
I hope and pray that we'll bomb Iran.
It'll unleash a wave of anti-Americanism around the world that'll make our current situation, which that's from like 2006, during the worst of the Iraq war, that'll make our current situation look like a love fest.
But oh well.
Oh, and that's just a worst case scenario anyway.
I mean, what is that?
And he's in the extreme of the camp.
He's in the extreme of the camp.
And he may be thinking, and the rest of the context, I don't know of that particular quote, but he may be thinking that this is exactly the kind of thing that needs to happen for Americans to wake up in order to really become the militant sort of white light angel saving the world military power that he wants it to be.
Maybe that's what he thinks.
Maybe he thinks that that is what he...
Okay, that's fair enough.
That's a few points taken.
I understand.
That's fair.
But in any case, the important thing I think about the Emergency Committee for Israel that we need to take on board, there's a couple of things.
But first of all, the name itself, the Emergency Committee for Israel, is trying to communicate something to us, which is that Israel is in dire threat and unless drastic steps are taken, it suffers being wiped from the Earth.
Right.
It's all about controlling the conversation.
I'm sorry.
We're all out of time.
And you had to waste time correcting my overstatement there, but we're at a hard break here.
We'll do it again, though.
Everybody, that's Michael Flynn.
It's RightWeb.
Just Google it up.
RightWeb.irc-online.org.
Thanks.
Thanks a lot for the time, eh?