Neocons Try, And Fail, To Crush Lead Organization Fighting Against War With Iran

More

The war over war with Iran has many battlefronts. Inside Washington, the battle line is between a small coalition of peace and security, non-proliferation and religious groups opposing war and favoring a peaceful solution to the stand off with Iran, and a well-funded war machine comprising neoconservative organizations who believe war with Iran should have started years ago.
A central organization within the anti-war coalition is the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), the largest Iranian-American grassroots organization. NIAC has been at the forefront of opposing war, favoring diplomacy and opposing broad sanctions that only hurt the Iranian people, while, at the same time, rebuking Tehran’s horrible human rights record.

At the end of this five-year process, no evidence was found to substantiate the accusation that NIAC was lobbying for the Iranian regime.

 
With its access to the White House, State Department and media, NIAC has increasingly troubled the war crowd, so much so that it has become one of their favorite targets.
Its leading attack dog, Seyyed Hassan Daioleslam put it like this in an internal email: “destroying” NIAC and its President Trita Parsi “is an integral part of any attack on [former Secretary of State Hillary] Clinton and President Obama.” In other words, destroying NIAC would also destroy the administration’s policy of avoiding war with Iran.
Daioleslam has engaged in a massive defamation campaign accusing NIAC of being the lobby of the Islamic Republic of Iran — a ludicrous accusation considering NIAC’s unambiguous support for the Iranian pro-democracy movement but one that would rightly destroy the organization if proven true.
NIAC responded, as it had to, by taking Daioleslam to court for defamation.
No doubt, NIAC knew that in suing NIAC it was fighting a David vs. Goliath battle, since the laws are stacked against anyone suing for defamation in the U.S.
But it was worse than that. Not only were the laws stacked against it, NIAC was also significantly outspent because the neoconservatives decided to go all out to deal a death blow to the anti-war forces. In fact, the well-financed anti-Muslim, pro-war and anti-Obama activist Daniel Pipes stepped in to support Daioleslam through the legal arm of his organization, the Middle East Forum. Pipes got Daioleslam a top-notch legal team headed by George Bush’s former White House lawyer Bradford Berenson of Sidley Austin, the sixth largest law firm in the world.
At first, Daioleslam’s court room argument was that his statements were accurate and that NIAC should be compelled to open its books so that the veracity of his claim of NIAC’s control by Tehran could be assessed.NIACcomplied and Daioleslam’s high-powered legal team went through thousands of emails, documents and calendar entries.
However, to their great frustration, they couldn’t find a shred of evidence supporting Daioleslam’s claims. Instead, the documents revealed a very simple truth:NIACis an independent grassroots organization supported by the Iranian American community, and which, engages withallparties to the conflict including the U.S., Iranian and Israeli governments.
Failing to prove his main contention, Daioleslam retreated from the assertion thatNIACwas the Islamic Republic’s lobby. This was a huge victory for NIAC and, if the lawsuit had been filed in any other country, the conclusion would have been: Daioleslam lost, NIAC won.

Not a good day for the pro-war lobby, but a very good one for Americans who abhor the idea of being embroiled in a third Middle East war.

 
But in the U.S., the plaintiffs (in this case, NIAC) have to go one step beyond proving that they were defamed. Plaintiffsalso have to prove that the other side had acted with malice. So NIAC had to prove that Daioleslam knew that he was lying — a tall order under all circumstances. And convincing the very conservative, Bush appointed Judge John Bates —the same judge that got Dick Cheney off the hook in the Valerie Plame case— that Daioleslam acted with malice was probably impossible.
NIAC could not pull that off and the judge responded by shifting some of the legal “discovery” costs ($184,000) from Daioleslam to NIAC. But that was Daioleslam’s only victory.
Not only was the claim that NIAC is a foreign lobby shattered but Daniel Pipes and other neoconservatives had spent considerably more than $184,000 on their efforts to destroy NIAC. They had hoped to shift a much larger chunk of those costs to NIAC to cripple it by emptying its coffers.
But NIAC succeeded in striking out the largest item on Daioleslam’s menu of requests, leaving NIAC with an $184,000 bill, an amount it is appealing. In short, Dailoeslam’s attack backfired, apparently leaving him (or Pipes) heavily in the hole. In fact, during a press call last week, Dailoeslam actually called on reporters to donate and help defray its costs!
So at the end of this five-year process, no evidence was found to substantiate the accusation that NIAC was lobbying for the Iranian regime; the objective of “destroying NIAC” has completely failed as the organization continues to be one of the most prominent voices on Iran policy in Washington; and the vast majority of the cost of the discovery process remains with the defendant and his neo-conservative backers.
Not a good day for the pro-war lobby, but a very good one for Americans who find the idea of being embroiled in a third Middle East war- so soon after Iraq and with our troops still in Afghanistan – utterly appalling.
 

0 thoughts on “Neocons Try, And Fail, To Crush Lead Organization Fighting Against War With Iran

  1. Has Rosenberg joined hands with Iran. No one wants with Iran. We just want them to end their nuclear weapons program and cease threatening the destruction of Israel.It’s very simple.

  2. If only it were so simple! Iran has every reason to fee threatened and has every right to defend itself against those threats. What is so dangerous is the very defensiveness that on all sides that continues to escalate threats that might otherwise be managed and resolved.

    • As a regime that was behind the bombing of the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires and a backer of Hezbollah, I never thought of Iran as a victim. Need I forget.they are backing the genocidal Assad regime.

  3. I don’t know much out here in flyover country, but I do know (finally) to be skeptical at anything out government and the neocons promote, and suffer from almost zero ability to fact check. It has occurred to me, though, that if I were Iran, with memory of the CIA overthrow of democratically elected M. Mosadegh in 1953(or was it ’54?), I’d be worried. Also, I would be a little nervous being surrounded by 5 nuclear powers (Israel, Russia, China, India, and Pakistan, and being squeezed by US occupation forces and/or their remnants both to the east (Afghanistan) and the west (Iraq), plus perhaps noting that we (the U.S.) (let’s use the end of WWII as the starting point) haven’t invaded any country with nuclear weapons, it sure would be tempting to consider developing nuclear weapons if only as a deterrent if I were Iran. Rational it seems to me. But we are not allowed to discuss that. So, of course, I’m not discussing that, just speculating. I have had many Iranian and Iranian-American friends over many decades, though none are in my orbit right now (I’m very old, most have died), All this belligerence (everything from all the tough talk “every option is on the table” to the horror of the drone campaign) makes me sick and sad, so unnecessary and doomed to guarantee more of the same. One thing that I have noticed, though, is that no matter what out announced reasons for destructive military intervention, the result seems to be destruction of societies. So I have to work very hard at self-censorship when the question keeps popping up in my mind: “Could the destruction of societies maybe be the real purpose of our invasions?” Of course, I never allow myself to explore possible answers other than, “Of course not! We would never do such a thing!”

  4. NIAC was criticized in public, which it didn’t like, so it sued to silence its critics. Mr. R. thinks that silencing people whom he calls “neoconservatives” is great, after all, in Mr. R’s world, democracy is only for those he likes. OK, but now the court dismisses NIAC’s suit. That, to Mr. R., is a victory, because at least NIAC was able to harass its enemies. What a great progressive person, this Mr. R. What a friend we have in MJ, what a savior of us all !

  5. I must add something about the legal issue which Rosenberg obscures.
    Rosenberg complains that “the laws are stacked against anyone suing for defamation in the U.S.” That is untrue. In the case of a public figure ever since NYTimes v. Sullivan (1964), and only in that case, a plaintiff in a defamation suit must establish “actual malice.” All civil libertarians have applauded this standard. In the case of NIAC v. Daioleslam, the case at issue here, the court took pains to point out that the Sullivan standard protects freedom of debate. As I have said above, Rosenberg obviously does not approve of freedom of debate, no more than the rulers of Iran whose side he takes here.
    The court fully supported the defendant, showing, for example, that he was fully justified in maintaining that NIAC is on the side of the Iranian regime. NIAC’s very mild words of criticism of the regime, the court held, are “tepid.” So if Rosenberg thinks that NIAC was handed some sort of legal victory, he is deluded.
    I urge the reader to read the case for himself:
    https://ecf.dcd.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/show_public_doc?2008cv0705-189

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *