The files appear to back U.S. claims about Tehran's Shiite influence By MARK MAZZETTI New York Times Oct. 19, 2008
WASHINGTON — More than 80 pages of newly declassified intelligence documents for the first time describe in detail an elaborate network used by Iraqis to gain entry into Iran and train under Iranian supervision.
They offer the most comprehensive account to date to support American claims about Iranian efforts to build a proxy force in Iraq.
Those claims have become highly politicized, with Bush administration critics charging that detainees' accounts of Iranian involvement have been exaggerated.
The prisoners' accounts cannot be independently verified. Yet the detainees gave strikingly similar details about training compounds in Iran, a clandestine network of safe houses in Iran and Iraq they used to reach the camps and intra-Shiite tensions at the camps between the Arab Iraqis and their Persian Iranian trainers.
The documents, compiled by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, are a collection of interrogation reports based on accounts of more than two dozen Shiite fighters captured in Iraq in 2007 and 2008.
The center is a research organization that compiles and analyzes intelligence documents related to al-Qaida, Iraq, Iran and other topics.
Avoiding direct war
The documents portray an Iranian strategy to use Iraqi Shiites as surrogates, in part to avoid the risk of Iranians being captured in Iraq.
In one of the intelligence reports, a prisoner tells his captors that "Iran does not want to fight a direct war" with American forces in Iraq because Tehran worries that the United States would destroy Iran.
Brian Fishman, director of research at the Combating Terrorism Center and a co-author of a new study about Iran's political and military influence in Iraq, said that even though Iran was not in direct command of militia groups in Iraq, the training was one of the means at Iran's disposal to increase or decrease its influence in Iraq at will.
"Having the militia allies is a hedge," he said. "If things turn against Iran politically, it gives them a lever to pull."
American officials say it is still murky just how much of a direct role senior Iranian officials take in the training, although they say they believe that it takes place with at least the tacit approval of elements of Iran's government.
The documents do not provide any direct evidence of senior Iranian government officials overseeing the training.
Conference Focuses on Israel's Jewish 'Defamers' By GABRIELLE BIRKNER the Sun October 19, 2007
A pro-Israel organization that monitors press coverage of the Jewish state will hold a conference Sunday about high-profile Jews who speak out against Israel's policies and, in some cases, its right to exist.
Sponsored by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, or Camera, the gathering — called "Israel's Jewish Defamers" — comprises sessions on perceived bias in the Israeli press, as well as in articles penned by Jews and published in elite journals, such as the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. It will be held at Park Avenue Synagogue on East 87th Street.
Among the speakers slated to address the Camera conference is an Indiana University professor, Alvin Rosenfeld, who made headlines earlier this year when he published online an essay linking "progressive" Jewish participation in anti-Zionist speech and writing to the rise of anti-Semitism, particularly in the Arab-Muslim world. Mr. Rosenfeld, alongside writer Cynthia Ozick and psychiatrist and historian Kenneth Levin, will participate in a panel discussion on "Jewish Defamation of Israel: Roots, Rationales, and Ramifications."
"It's important to recognize the distinction between well-informed, reasonable criticism of any country's policies, leaders, and actions — including Israel's — and just nasty name-calling," Mr. Rosenfeld told The New York Sun.
Critiques portraying Israel as an "apartheid" state or referring to its policies as "genocidal" are defamatory, Mr. Rosenfeld said. "It's beyond the pale, but these views have begun to move from the margins to the mainstream," he said, citing as evidence President Carter's recent book "Palestine Peace Not Apartheid."
The associate director of Camera, Alex Safian, said there is a growing number of Jewish journalists, writers, and intellectuals whose work is misused by anti-Semites such as David Duke. He cited as examples of Jewish defamers a contributor to the New York Review of Books, Henry Siegman, and a former columnist for the New York Times, Anthony Lewis.
Also on the conference agenda is a presentation by Camera's executive director, Andrea Levin, on the "bias" in Ha'aretz, a left-of-center broadsheet published in Tel Aviv; a speech by Mr. Safian titled "The New York and London Review of Books: Elite Journals Fostering Elite Bias," and a letter-writing workshop.
"This is a conference about a nonexistent phenomenon," Mr. Lewis said in a telephone interview yesterday. "I don't know any Jewish defamers of Israel." He said that while many Jewish people object to Israeli policies, the expression of these views is not necessarily defamatory.
The Taub Professor of Israel Studies at New York University, Ronald Zweig, told the Sun he thought it was wrong for Camera to single out Jews among Israel's harshest critics. "I'm a serious critic of Norman Finkelstein," he said, referring to a high-profile Jewish anti-Zionist. "I'm not going to talk about him, that he's Jewish; I'm going to talk about what the says. The packaging is irrelevant."
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