On Wednesday, October 26, 2011 the Committee on Homeland Security’s Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence and the Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations, and Management held a joint hearing entitled “Iranian Terror Operations on American Soil.” Among the five witnesses, two were from “conservative” think tanks closely aligned with the Israel lobby, while a third represented a supposedly more “progressive” pro-Israeli position: Mr. Reuel Marc Gerecht, Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies; Dr. Matthew Levitt, Director, Stein Program on Counterterrorism & Intelligence, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy; and Dr. Lawrence Korb, Senior Fellow, Center For American Progress Action Fund.
The other two witnesses are also sympathetic to the Israeli line on the Middle East. General Jack Keane, United States Army (Retired), co-authored with Frederick W. Kagan the 2007 policy paper sponsored by the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute entitled “Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq” which proposed the so-called “surge” belovedof America’s Israel partisans.
Colonel Timothy J. Geraghty, United States Marine Corps (Retired), who commanded the 24th Marine Amphibious Unit in Beirut, Lebanon, during the suicide truck bombings on 23 October 1983,echoes all the standard Israeli propaganda against Tehran. While Geraghty doesn’t hesitate to blame Iranian-backed Hezbollah for the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish centre in Buenos Aires, the U.S. ambassador to Argentina at the time has said, “To my knowledge, there was never any real evidence [of Iranian responsibility]. They never came up with anything.”
