04/08/09 – Grant F. Smith – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Introducing our next guest today, it's Grant F. Smith.
He's got an article on Antiwar.com today called The Samson Gambit, Why Steve Rosen is Suing AIPAC.
He's the author of the new book, The Defense Line, The Justice Department's Battle to Register the Israel Lobby as Agents of a Foreign Government.
He's a frequent contributor to Radio France International and Voice of America's Foro Interamericano.
Smith has also appeared on BBC News, CNN, C-SPAN.
He's currently director of the Institute for Research, Middle Eastern Policy, otherwise known as IRMEP, in Washington, D.C.
Welcome back to the show, Grant.
How are you doing?
Hey, Scott.
It's great to be back.
Thanks.
Good, good.
It's good to have you here.
And very interesting developments in this story of the Larry Franklin, Steve Rosen, Keith Weissman criminal proceedings, I guess.
Perhaps we can just start with a short recount of the story of who Larry Franklin is and Steve Rosen, Keith Weissman.
What basically is the background leading up to the recent developments today?
Well, as you know, back in August of 2005, Colonel Franklin from the Doug Fyfe outfit at the Pentagon, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman from AIPAC were all indicted for violating the 1917 Espionage Act, which basically prohibits anyone from trafficking in classified national defense information that could serve the interest of a foreign state.
It doesn't talk about allies or anything like that.
But anyway, Colonel Franklin pled guilty.
He's been sentenced to a fine in 12 years.
Rosen and Weissman, on the other hand, and their ABLE defense team have kept the pretrial maneuvers going now for every year since 2005, seeking to essentially get the trial thrown out on technicalities Alternatively, through media pressure campaigns, saying first this is a violation of their freedom of speech rights as quasi-information collectors and even journalists to obtain information and circulate it as they saw fit.
And more recently, it's being positioned as a vestigial legacy of Bush administration secrecy, and now we've got to throw this out as a miscarriage of justice.
So there's been a behind-the-scenes fight ongoing since they were indicted, but now it's heating up because, as we put in the article, Stephen Rosen is ratcheting up the pressure for some very interesting reasons.
Well, yeah, this tactic, they call it gray mail, right?
If you're going to prosecute me, you're going to have to declassify so many documents that you don't want to declassify that I'm going to make it not worth it for you.
Right, that's been the gist of the ongoing appeals and maneuvers so far, and this always happens in high-profile espionage cases where the defendants fight back, and basically they've won a lot of concessions from Judge T.S.
Ellis to actually reveal classified information and not even have it revealed under SIPA provisions, which are ways of protecting it in court.
So they've won virtually every maneuver, including being able to bring in an expert on classification who shouldn't, according to the prosecutors, have originally been able to testify on their defense because he was privy to some of the prosecution machinations before they actually did the indictments or while they were doing the indictments.
But anyway, they've won virtually every appeal.
Go ahead.
The Justice Department continues to just continue to go along with the judge and release the documents that they win on these small battles, and apparently they're not backing down on the prosecution in spite of this.
So the graymailing is having the effect of getting the things declassified, which I guess could aid in their defense, but it's not causing the Justice Department to call off the case as of yet.
Well, you're right, but they have a pretty solid case.
In fact, the newest documents, which we'll talk about shortly, basically admit that AIPAC was out there collecting this classified information, and because the government's case is fairly strong, they have no reason to back down other than political reasons.
The prosecution has suffered setbacks in terms of one of its key prosecutors was hired away to an outside firm, so there's basically been some attrition on their side in terms of continuity.
But they are apparently going to go to court at the end of May, so the case is still there.
Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal have both published editorials saying that this case should now just go away, but the prosecutors don't seem to want to do that.
Well, I usually would not be caught saying so, but in this case, I'm glad to see somebody be prosecuted.
Usually people go to jail over nothing, but in this case, they're basically trying to normalize what amounts to espionage, or I guess they've been indicted for espionage, but they're trying to sort of minimize it into nothing, make a mountain into a molehill, and in fact even saying that they're simply protected by freedom of speech.
All I was doing was passing on these classified documents describing internal deliberations about Iran policy to a couple of guys who would pass it on to the Israeli embassy.
It's my First Amendment protected right to do so.
Yeah, it all gets into kind of the bigger issue of what does AIPAC represent?
Is it really an American non-profit pursuing American interests, or is it what it appears to be, which is a de facto agent of the Israeli government, which was set up by a man who used to work for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Israel, who was ordered repeatedly to file under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and who was receiving funds to set up both the Near East Report, which is AIPAC's newsletter, and ultimately AIPAC.
This all strikes back at the bigger overarching question, which is what is AIPAC, what does it do, why is it in such tight communication with the foreign government, and is it really in the interest of the United States to have them become so influential and powerful in the United States, particularly on major issues such as invading Iraq and possibly attacking Iran.
What we have here is a mebia strip in which the ant starts crawling along this twisted paper, and the justification for AIPAC's existence is that Americans believe supporting it is good for the United States, and that the United States should support Israel because Americans believe in it.
It's a very convoluted thing that's present here.
Well, and so now Steve Rosen has taken the strategy of saying, I guess, in a sense, yes, it's all true, and he's suing AIPAC for not admitting such, and hanging him out to dry as being some special exemption, when he's saying they're all in on it too, not so much, it doesn't seem like, to just tattletale on them and get them in trouble and bring them down, but to normalize what it is he's done, and to try to reinforce again that idea that, hey, this is just, you know, communication, this is what lobbyists and governments do, that's all.
Well, I don't think so.
Or is he going ahead and trying to bring down AIPAC too?
I don't think he's trying to bring down AIPAC, but you have to think about Steve Rosen like Jason Bourne.
He's like the black ops agent who's been spurned by his old agency, and he's on the run to save himself, and he's quite capable of fighting back.
So he's launched this 36-page complaint for libel and slander, you know, asking for tens of millions of dollars going after the personal assets of the entire board of directors of AIPAC.
This is a twisted call for help.
This is saying, I'm not going to be a patsy for AIPAC.
We all know that AIPAC is trafficking in classified information.
We all know that it's acting as a foreign agent to destroy peace initiatives launched by the American government, but I'm not going to go down for it alone.
If I go down, you go down.
So he's basically put a two-month timer fuse on the entire existence of AIPAC saying, you know, I may be going to trial in late May, but guess what?
You're going to be entering the courtroom on June 5th.
They've all been subpoenaed, by the way, and we're going to start having a talk about what you people do.
And, you know, Steve Rosen is a tough guy, and he's not going to go down without a fight.
Well, yeah, that's really upping the ante in terms of the Justice Department's point of view, too, because now they're being put in the position of prosecuting him for something that it will be on the record that all of AIPAC is guilty of, and they don't want to be put in the position of prosecuting the entire Israel lobby.
That would be a higher political decision than Justice Department lawyers, right?
Right.
And it's a higher ante politically, too, because what you've got here is a nexus of various events where we've got this hardline Israeli government coming into power, Benjamin Netanyahu, the original client of the Clean Break Plan, for goodness sake, which is tangentially related to all of this.
He's coming in.
Obama's got to somehow appease the Israelis who are now saying that everything's off the table.
And so he's really put this, by launching his own lawsuit, he's really put all of these issues onto the table.
You know, the administration right now, just like the Kennedy administration, when it was secretly fighting to register the Israel lobby as Israel's foreign agents, is now going to have to either stay the course for a prosecution that they didn't initiate, or they can back down, just like Eric Holder already backed down on the Mark Rich prosecution under Clinton, in the name of preserving strategic diplomatic relations.
So in a sense, Stephen Rosen has made it easier for the administration to back down in the cause of peace.
Well, I guess it seems a strange political decision that this was ever allowed to happen in the first place, the raids on AIPAC and the beginnings of this prosecution, and that it's the Bush administration which is more enthralled to the Israel lobby than anyone else that presided over such a thing.
Well, I think what we're beginning to see is some evidence that, whereas they were strongly under the influence of neoconservatives at the beginning of the administration, that by the end it was certainly beginning to unravel.
For example, they wouldn't pardon Louis Libby, they wouldn't permit Israel to attack Iran and have overflights and the munitions they needed.
So I think the Bush administration may not have been as enthralled to the lobby as some people think it was.
The question is really whether the Obama administration, and particularly Barack Obama, is as enthralled to the lobby as he appeared to be when he appeared at AIPAC shortly after receiving the Democratic Party's nomination.
That is a totally open question at this point.
Well, and in that speech he basically went further than any American politician of that level at least has gone in saying that there ought to just be one Jerusalem undivided under Israeli control, which is sort of contrary to the circumstances on the ground, at least partially still at this point.
And no other, not even George Bush, had ever promised that, even in the early years.
Yeah, that was an extraordinary, I wouldn't call it a concession, because it certainly was not his to make, but that was an extraordinary bit of red meat that he threw to AIPAC.
So at this point I think it's clear that Rosen has been extremely intelligent by raising the profile of the trial in this way.
It's basically saying, I'm not going down alone.
There are others, like Douglas Bloomfield, the former chief lobbyist for AIPAC, who has publicly stated that AIPAC has a lot of skeletons in its closet that could come out.
There's a sort of battle between the extreme section of the Israel lobby and the not-so-extreme battling for how to approach this.
The fundamental flaw of the DOJ prosecution is this.
The FBI raided AIPAC twice, was apparently very concerned about what AIPAC was doing to foment U.S. intervention, military intervention with Iran, and basically made a deal, this was the Paul McNulty deal, with AIPAC saying, we're not going to indict you as an organization, we're going to indict these two operatives and you've got to let them go, you've got to begin saying that they were in fact engaged in activities outside the normal scope of AIPAC.
And the interesting thing about Rosen's lawsuit is that he is right.
He was engaging, as he asserts, in normal behavior at AIPAC.
And it's going to be very difficult for AIPAC to go to trial and prove that what Rosen was doing was in any way outside normal standard operating procedure at AIPAC.
Well, you know, what's interesting here is that Larry Franklin worked for Douglas Feith in the office of the Secretary of Defense for Policy, and this was the headquarters of the Office of Special Plans, which brought together Harold Rode and Bill Lutie and Abram Shulsky and all these guys who basically served as the stovepipe of much bogus intelligence that led us into war.
And it's been reported by Robert Dreyfuss in an article in The Nation called Agents of Influence and Julian Borger in The Guardian and the Spies Who Pushed for War.
James Bamford also confirms this in his book, A Pretext for War, that the Israelis were actually manufacturing bogus intelligence about Iraq in English in the office of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and pipelining it straight there through that office in the Pentagon where Larry Franklin worked, where Douglas Feith, who is of course a lawyer in a law partnership that represents Israeli military industrial companies and so forth, I believe.
Those are the overarching contexts for this small conflagration, and those in a world that was in any way sane would be front and center right now in the form of additional criminal prosecutions for wire fraud, this propaganda for all sorts of trickery involving intelligence.
Those would be the things that would be going to court, not this AIPAC conflagration.
Well, you know, Justin Raimondo calls it the transmission belt of treason, and I don't think he is implying, and I'm not attempting to imply, that Feith himself was actually somehow literally an agent of a foreign power or anything like that.
It doesn't seem to me like any of these neocons would need any kind of financial incentive or anything like that.
They just believe that apparently on its face that American and Israeli interests are one and the same and that whatever they do that's good for both is good for both, and that's just the way they see things.
So I'm not necessarily saying that it seems like Douglas Feith is actually on the level of Larry Franklin breaking the law in this way, because I don't have any evidence of that, but it does seem like the fact that Larry Franklin was part of that same office where, after all, Chalabi was getting classified information and things like that, would certainly open up all of this to investigation.
Right, the timing of Feith leaving the office was very much centered around this same incident, and I'm not alleging anything either, but we already know about the problems with the quality of the intelligence, the embassy in Rome, the tangential experiences of people who were involved with the Iran-Contra scandal.
So those are clearly the real issues behind all of this.
What I found in getting government documents declassified about Middle East policy is you don't really get all of this relevant information about 42 years after any sort of accountability moment has long since passed.
So we will probably never know.
The government and organizations like AIPAC and individuals are very good at keeping secrets.
Nobody should believe that even half of what really went on has become public yet, because there's no basis for believing that.
This is a major issue for your average Joe American, because basically AIPAC has taken a lot of privileges and assumed a role of authority in terms of declassifying information and having sort of a shadow bureaucracy which has assumed so much power in Washington that really takes any sort of accountability and decision-making away from Congress and away from the executive and away from, of course, the average American who should be represented by those.
So it is good to see looming accountability on the matters at hand, but I do agree with you, the big issues, they just have not yet come to the fore.
Well, and you know, it seems like also, well, according to the J Street poll that came out, I think early last week had it that most American Jews take a very liberal position.
They want to even recognize Hamas as the elected government of Gaza or at least some sort of joint government with Fatah.
They're willing to come to a final agreement about giving up the West Bank and Gaza or at least major portions of them in order to have a peace agreement and all that kind of thing.
And yet the Israel lobby seems to represent the Avigor Lieberman point of view of the world rather than that of American Jews who presumably, I guess, there are also the John Hageeite right-wing dispensationalist crazies too, but it seems like American Jews would be able to exercise more power over the direction of policy that Jewish groups like AIPAC push so strong.
Yeah, you would think that, and I saw that poll as well, and it just sort of speaks to the disenfranchisement I was talking about, but still, you look on this liberal side of some of the most outspoken persons, people like Eric Alterman, who basically said in a panel that was attended by Philip Weiss over at his great blog, Mondo Weiss, that, you know, hey, we're not going to talk about things like Israeli nukes or anything like that, even though we're the progressives, because, in his words, America can take a few hits, but Israel just can't.
And they were talking about the context of 9-11.
And I just find that kind of attitude appalling, and I don't think this is really a religious issue.
This is really about being able to have a wide-ranging discussion and not have American peace initiatives constantly subverted and thwarted by the most extreme elements of a lobby, which, even on its most progressive side, will never question any of the central tenets of how did we get to where we are today.
Well, and this addresses the very basic principles of free speech.
I mean, why is it that we value free speech in the first place?
It's because nobody's really right, and we've got to keep arguing about everything to try to find the best answer.
You can't just say this part of the argument has already been decided and nobody else is allowed to chime in now.
Right, but that is precisely why AIPAC was constructed.
And, again, if you look at this particular legal filing, again, I urge people to go to Antiwar and take a look at the Sampson essay.
This machinery is designed precisely to thwart that.
It's designed to channel privileged information to privileged donors and operatives to make sure that that choice and that debate never occurs.
And, you know, in all of the years that it's been operating, AIPAC has been particularly good, whether it's knocking off politicians like Earl Hilliard by having him compared to Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, or, you know, making sure that coordinated PAC money is not reaching this politician but is reaching that politician, has entirely subverted freedom of speech on all aspects of Middle East policy formulation.
So it's been an amazing ride for them up until this point, but people can only be happy that perhaps there will be an accountability moment in which Prosecutor Paul McNulty, who wasn't able to indict AIPAC for some of these activities, his failure will be rectified by the fact that Steve Rosen is not going down without a fight.
All right, well, the article again is the Sampson Gambit, and I have the book here, it's America's Defense Line, the Justice Department's Battle to Register the Israel Lobby as Agents of a Foreign Government, and I'm afraid to admit, but it's true, that I have not had a chance to get to this book yet, but I'm very interested in the history of all this, going back to the Eisenhower and Kennedy years and all that, as you do in the book.
So I hope I can get a chance to read it and have you back on the show to discuss a little bit of the broader background of this story.
All right, thanks for Antiwar Radio.
All right, hey, thanks a lot, Grant, for your time.
Bye now.
All right, that's Grant Smith, everybody, from IRMEP, which is short for the Institute for Research Middle East Policy, and they're available at irmep.org.
And his article again today is at antiwar.com, the Sampson Gambit.