10/23/13 – Grant F. Smith – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys.
Welcome back to the show.
Time for our first guest.
It's the great Grant F. Smith from IRMEP.
And that's not ear like your ear.
It's I-R-M-E-P.
I-R-M-E-P.org.
IRMEP, that's the...
I used to always have it on the tip of my tongue.
Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy.
I had that on the tip of my tongue six seconds ago, and then it went away.
Thank you.
God, welcome back to the show, Grant.
It's been way too long.
Yeah, yeah.
It's great to be back.
I hope it hasn't been too long.
No, it has.
It's been way too long, I says.
I mean it.
Hey, so I love this thing that you wrote.
I wish everyone in America would read it.
And then I think they'd think more like me.
About America's relationship with Israel.
It's 10 explosive U.S. government secrets about Israel.
And I don't think that's really too hyperbolic of you to say explosive there.
Some of these are literally such, and all of them are really horrible.
And all of them completely buried.
And you don't even include number 11 on the dial.
On the PA, which of course would be the USS Liberty.
But anyway, I'm going to be quiet as much as I can and just let you tell these stories.
I'll only interrupt if I think I absolutely have to to follow up something here.
But please go ahead and start us off.
We got half an hour to go through your list here.
All right.
Well, let me start from the bottom of the list because it's one that I haven't worked on at all.
But I know that you've talked about it.
It's the revelation broadcast by Glenn Greenwald, facilitated by Edward Snowden, which is that the United States is funneling intercepts, NSA intercepts on Americans to Israel.
And, you know, just finding that out makes anyone ask a simple question, which is, I don't know about that.
Who authorized that?
You know, if that kind of thing is going on, what else is going on?
And the purpose of this piece is to really lay it out with evidence, with links to the Freedom of Information Act filings, to the mandatory declassification review attempts of secret documents, and even the latest attempts to get the highest body in the declassification world, the Interagency Security Classifications Appeals Panel, called the ISCAP, to release documents.
And what you find is that there are a lot of secrets.
There are a lot of toxic, explosive secrets that if only Americans had any idea about what happened, what their history actually was, they would take action.
They would become people who could give advised consent as opposed to just consent.
And so, you know, it really, it was an inspiration to see the Snowden release, and it made me want to get out some of the work that we've been doing over the past decade to let people know there's a lot more going on than anyone even realized.
Well, now, okay, here's one of the parts where I absolutely have to interrupt you, and that is just to tell the people how important your website is and the work that you do.
Again, IRMEP.org, the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy.
Just pages and pages, I don't know how many thousands of pages of documents of all of your digging.
I mean, this is the real digging through the weeds here for the primary source material.
Right, right.
Tons of it, I mean truckloads full of it.
Yeah, and particularly a section of the website called the Israel Lobby Archive, where we've done some groundbreaking work on just gathering documents about how the U.S.
Middle East policy is really determined behind the scenes in terms of lots of Israel lobbying groups and American presidents and other interest groups coming together, including law enforcement at times, in a vast collision.
So it's a real look behind the scenes.
And we try to add to that document store what I found is that in most cases nobody else is really trying to get a lot of this stuff declassified.
And the problem with it is that a lot of the information gradually disappears.
It becomes what Rumsfeld would call unknown unknowns, stuff that has been forgotten, destroyed, purposely destroyed at times through the document retention policies, etc., etc.
So we're trying to save history in many cases.
And the first instance here was trying to get FBI files on Henry Morgenthau Jr.
Now, this is FDR's Treasury Secretary.
He's most known for wanting to dismember Germany after World War II, return it to a pastoral state, as he and others have said.
Instead of the more constructive Marshall Plan for Reconstruction.
But he was involved in, according to secondhand accounts, a lot of activities related to arming fighters in Palestine to fight for a Jewish state.
And some even claim that he was involved in helping finance nuclear weapons research and weapons building by charitable donations and things like that.
What year did Israel get the bomb, by the way?
Well, it looks like they had it by the mid-1960s.
It looks as though by 65 or 66 they were able to assemble simple gun-type events, or excuse me, gun-type weapons using uranium that was actually stolen from the United States.
In a row-shaped bomb, in other words, yeah.
We don't have a lot of the CIA's most closely held pieces of intelligence about that, for some reasons I'll get into later.
But anyway, there's a 10,000-page file full of intercepts.
It's a counterintelligence file.
It's about Morgenthau.
And the National Archives, the FBI have gone through it, and they've now claimed that they have declassified it.
And every single page, almost every page is blanked out.
So it's up on the website.
People can take a look.
Just once again, search for this by article titled, 10 Explosive U.S.
Government Secrets About Israel.
And you'll see that even this World War II-era document, the government does not think Americans are fit, not ready to see that yet.
The second one's Eisenhower and the Obama High Fair.
Wait, wait, wait.
We've got to skip the second one and come right back to it.
But we've got to go to number three, because you just mentioned it already.
And I think if people were listening close, they went, wait, what did he just say now again?
How much uranium did Israel steal from the United States?
And which current prime ministers of Israel were in on that?
Yeah, right.
Well, Netanyahu, it turns out, in some documents that we had released last year, came out on July 4th, was involved in the smuggling ring that was taking Krytrons, which can be used as nuclear triggers, out of the United States.
He's clearly named in the FBI documents.
But the bigger case here, which is called the diversion from Apollo or the Pneumec incident, is something the CIA has developed thousands of pages about, because they were told to investigate the Americans and the Israelis involved in smuggling weapons-grade material, 339 kilograms, out of Apollo, Pennsylvania's plants-this was government-owned uranium, by the way, from a contractor-into Dimona.
And there is quite compelling evidence.
It's come from all sorts of government agencies, including the fact that samples were picked up with the signature of the same type of uranium that came from Apollo picked up outside of Dimona.
But the most recent news on getting any of these thousands of CIA files out is a blanket denial that we received this year, which cites a previous blanket denial, which was given in 1979 by John Stein, who was CIA deputy director for operations, in which he said, basically, in English, that in order to release any of this, there would have to be coordination with the president, and also could be some problems with the Israelis, which they see as a valuable liaison equity.
So it's really up to the president and the Israelis to let the CIA disclose this, or at least that's how we're interpreting it.
But people can see that as point number three.
Basically, this is absolutely incredible.
You know, thousands of documents detailing exactly what happened at the CIA, and they will not release any of them.
So that's pretty bad.
Moving back to Eisenhower and the Levon Affair.
Okay, so Eisenhower...
This one is just as shocking to me, and is probably just as unknown as the theft of the nuclear material, too.
Sure.
Well, and it's going to stay that way, because maybe people don't know this, but the Eisenhower Presidential Archive in Kansas apparently doesn't have enough resources to process his files.
And although the archivist and other people write books about Eisenhower, excuse me, authors write books about Eisenhower, the archivist can say that they don't actually know what his reaction was when they found out in 1954 that the Israelis had launched a false flag attack on U.S. facilities in Egypt, trying to frame the Egyptians, but they were caught by the Egyptians and prosecuted and hung.
And what lessons did Eisenhower learn about all of this, especially as he was, you know, constantly being swarmed by lobbyists from the American Zionist Council and the founder of AIPAC, who's pictured at the very far left in the article, constantly meeting with him, asking for money and support.
Well, support for a country that attacks you and tries to frame Egypt.
So they have not been able to find any documents.
They've released some National Security Council memos in which Ike expressed his low opinion of some of his counterparts, but they've never, never, never actually released any information about what he thought about this attack.
And I think that would be very informative, particularly when we get further on into the Niger-Uranium forgeries.
By the way, can you be a little bit more specific about what actually happened, the Israelis and how they got busted?
Was it just cutouts or were they actual Mossad officers or what was the deal?
They were Jewish Egyptians who were in Egypt and they were sent to attack American Information Agency facilities such as libraries and other sort of goodwill, public diplomacy type facilities dressed as Arabs so that the United States would think that Egypt was a place where they had to maintain troops and an international presence in particularly the Suez Canal zone, which was becoming and still is, of course, a lifeline of international commerce, particularly energy coming up through the Arab Gulf and Persian Gulf area.
So they failed when some of their explosives went off early and they were arrested and all thrown into a jail.
One of them committed suicide.
Israel denied that these were their false flag operatives for years and years until something like 2005 when they were all given National Medals of Honor, the surviving ones.
And so this was a thorn in the side of Israel's reputation in the United States and it even led later on in the early 1960s, led the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to think about, well, if the Israelis are trying to tripwire us into this type of response, maybe we should look into their lobbying arms in the United States and make sure they're not continually doing that to us.
So it was a very important event and it's astounding.
It's just astounding that Eisenhower has no known written analysis of what this implied for U.S.-Israel relations.
How big of a news story was it back then, if at all?
Do you know?
Not a very big news story.
It's very, very difficult to find clippings.
The AIPAC newsletter mentions it, surprisingly.
The Near East Report, when it refers to a problem it was having, it has an article titled Another Explosion and it kind of doesn't really talk too much about the terrorist attacks, but you could see just how important it was to the lobbying organizations and sort of their internal house organs.
But like a lot of things, like the NUMEC affair in fact, the reporting is bad.
Like the Krytron heist, the reporting is bad.
Thomas Friedman's article about the Krytron's claims unconvincingly that they can also serve as soup timers.
So one common denominator in a lot of the establishment media reporting about this type of stuff is that if they do report on it, it's astonishingly deceptive.
But normally they choose not to report on it.
All right, now you mentioned the Nigerian forgeries and so I want to get to Iraq and Iran here in a minute, but since we're jumping around anyway, let's talk about Jonathan Pollard here and Cap Weinberger.
Yeah, so Jonathan Pollard was detected by a fellow, he was a naval contractor, naval intelligence, I'm sorry, worker, and he was detected, he was basically pilfering Defense Intelligence Agency files for some of the most sensitive things the U.S. had going, such as the RAIS and the communications manual, all the spectrum and monitoring that was going on around the world and funneling it to the Israelis.
He had always considered, since going to Israel in a Wiseman Institute camp, summer camp, he had always claimed to his friends that he was going to become an Israeli spy and he finally did become one.
And he had kind of an attitude when he was finally indicted.
He basically claimed that he believed it was the established policy, and this is quoting him, of the Department of Justice not to prosecute American citizens for espionage as long as it was on behalf of Israel, and was extremely surprised when Caspar Weinberger issued a classified briefing to the sentencing judge that made him the exception to that rule and gave him a life sentence.
And so the process of trying to- It sounds like a pretty fair defense he was offering, right?
They're like, hey, everybody does it.
What are you talking about?
Why am I the bad guy here?
He was offering, if he hadn't said that, he might have gotten the same deal that people like Abraham Feinberg got, Neill Bernstein, the same deal that Hank Green spun, the armed smuggler got, Al Schwimmer.
I mean, there were a host of other people who he was undoubtedly familiar with who had been major smugglers and spies who never got any penalty for their activities, in fact were rewarded for it handsomely.
So yeah, I mean, it was a fair assessment of the situation, but Caspar Weinberger told the judge something that made him give Pollard a life sentence.
Now, the amount of rigmarole that the Defense Department went through when we tried to get that classified sentencing memorandum has been incredible.
They finally said the Justice Department owns it.
We don't own it, even though the DOD produced it.
And the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys says, hey, you know what?
We can't find our copy.
We're not going to ask DOD for their copy.
And we're not going to walk two blocks over to court to get a copy.
You know, I've been within 10 feet of this document.
It's locked in a safe in the district court.
And I'm sure it would be very good to know if, as many people suspect, many people's security clearances suspect, that the reason he got a harsh sentence was that Israel was passing all this information to the Soviets so it could get more immigrants to Israel at this particular moment.
I mean, it fits the time.
It fits the activities that the Israelis are engaged in.
But we can't know because some executive office employees at the attorney's office won't walk over to court and begin a declassification process.
So we probably will never see that.
Jonathan Pollard, of course, is slated to be released fairly soon, having served the majority of his sentence, which, you know, life is not exactly life anymore.
So that's a very interesting document we can't get.
But getting into the overall theme of Israeli spies, you really can't get information on any Israeli spy.
You know, you can get a lot of information on Anna Chapman.
She was arrested in 2010.
She was sent to Russia.
You can get it on American spies who spied for other countries, such as Robert Hansen.
You can get a lot of information from the FBI about their prosecutions or diligent investigations of any spy, as long as it's not an Israeli spy.
And that's rather interesting.
In fact, I put up some FOIA responses.
The FBI wanted us to get Rafael Eitan, who is probably the biggest, most destructive Israeli spy ever to target America, wanted us to get his signature on a Privacy Act waiver before they gave us his voluminous file.
They told us Hurricane Sandy prevented them from finding Ben Ami Kaddish, who was working at the same time Jonathan Pollard was, getting his file.
And basically, Avram Eremoni, a big nuclear spy who targeted all sorts of U.S. nuclear technology, they won't release a single page about any Israeli spy.
And worse than that, in our other FOIA activity, we've detected that they've really stopped prosecuting them as well.
Stuart Nezat, who was working on all sorts of contracts with Israel aircraft industries, but simultaneously passing classified information, they designed a separate sting operation to take him down, and thereby avoided embarrassing Israel.
Telegy, which was smuggling nuclear equipment, 2007 to 2010, they simply had an industry regulator fine them and punish them, but didn't actually engage in a criminal investigation, which they should have done.
So you've got this sort of double standard.
They won't release information, and they're not actually even prosecuting spies for Israel anymore.
And this is showing up in a lot of the statistics, whereas Israel was previously ranked as a number one economic and national security defense threat.
You can kind of see the results of non-prosecution trickling through those reports to Congress.
They just don't show up anymore.
And of course, every time they get away with it, it's just a permission slip to keep doing it, too.
Right.
And you've had former FBI and justice officials on your show.
Was it Cole who said there's a huge stack of unprosecuted Israeli spies?
I believe he said 150 cases that he knew of where they were prosecutable, but not prosecuted.
Right.
The Justice Department's licked.
I mean, they haven't been able to bring a successful case.
They get bombarded internally, externally, beaten up by the press.
Pretty much, if you indict an Israeli spy, the world comes down on your head.
And, you know, it just doesn't, they just don't do it anymore, basically.
Number six, there's a tape that the FBI has with Steve Rosens and Keith Weissman's voice trying to convince a Washington Post reporter, Glenn Kessler, that Iran was engaged in total war against the United States inside Iraq, which, of course, means that back in 2004, 2005, the United States should have immediately attacked Iran, or at least that's the story they were selling.
They were trying to use purloined classified information to make that convincing argument.
They were being wiretapped by the FBI.
The FBI played the tape to AIPAC's legal counsel, Nathan Lewin, and we've been trying to get it ever since, and they won't give it to us.
So even as AIPAC tries to get us into Syria, we still can't listen to their arguments for trying to get us into Iran.
I would like to listen to those arguments.
I'd like to see how AIPAC and its buddies in the establishment press work.
Well, the story was, wasn't it, that the documents that they got were documents describing the internal discussions between Bush, Cheney, and Rice and the leadership, and that was helping them to create the spin that they wanted to figure out, you know, which wires to pull sort of thing.
Right.
They had decision documents.
They had documents about the bombing of Kobar Towers that they wanted to leverage into grist for war.
But the- Which was an al-Qaeda attack, and they're liars, but sorry.
Yeah, exactly.
And so the categorization that I'm giving, though, is the one that Steve Rosen gave during his depositions for a subsequent defamation suit.
He was very clear saying, you know, I positioned it as total war.
You know, I was talking to get them to write a story about this.
And so the information I'm giving is really his account of what was going on.
We know they were also very closely tied to Israeli diplomats at their meeting on a weekly basis and sharing information, tasking Lawrence Franklin to get more information.
So everything in the bigger file makes it look like a very comprehensive, you know, espionage effort designed to trigger a U.S. war on Iran, basically.
But, you know, the simple fact of the matter is the two were indicted.
The process never came to any real conclusion in the terms of an acquittal.
The two were never acquitted.
The prosecution was simply quashed when the Obama administration came into office, and suddenly it was gone.
As I mentioned, the same year that Obama began shoveling all of this class, all of these wiretaps over via the NSA to Israel.
So there's a real nasty point of analysis you can make that he's simultaneously shutting down a warranted espionage prosecution and then even harnessing the power of the NSA to spy on Americans and shovel the intelligence to Israel.
It's very suspicious.
It's got to get a lot more analysis before he leaves office.
But this tape should also be released.
Rosen characterized it as sinister, something that made him look really bad, as though he were, you know, not the one who was talking on the wiretap.
But I think Americans should be able to listen to this tap.
And they can't because the Department of Justice doesn't think that even though they've played it for, you know, one member of the public, that the rest of the members of the public should be able to listen to it.
And now, listen, we're almost out of time here.
So let me just set up real quick.
There's there's a lot more we're not going to be able to cover here.
But you don't mention.
But I just wanted to set up the story of the Niger uranium thing and the possibility there that Bob Dreyfuss in The Nation and Julian Borger in The Guardian both reported that there was an office of special plans created in Ariel Sharon's office where they were manufacturing bogus intelligence in English to funnel straight into the intelligence stream, into the neocons, the stovepipe to the White House.
And the Nigerian forgeries, of course, seem to fit into that whole project.
Of course, Stephen Hadley, a dying Neocon, admits he's the one who accepted the Nigerian forgeries from the Italians and put them into the intelligence stream after the CIA had said no 14 times, I think.
Right, right.
And Ledeen's, Michael Ledeen's, figureprints are also all over this in the sense that the magazine Panorama that surfaced it and his involvement and connection to people directly involved.
So the bottom line is there's a 1,000-page FBI investigation.
And again, I've seen many of these investigative files, and they're usually quite illustrative or very interesting to read.
But after beginning to declassify and release it, suddenly, suddenly, we can't get it.
They've denied it.
So, you know, that's another thing in the wake of Syria and the hype to attack Syria, people should at least know about this Niger investigation and what they found about these bogus forgeries.
Well, I remember Steve Rosen complaining to, I guess, Horowitz that the FBI was asking him, when they were interrogating him, they were asking him about, quote, every Jew in the Pentagon.
And so the FBI was, they were at least, you know, they were looking at Douglas Feith, they were looking at who passed the fact that America had broken Iran's codes to Chalabi, and they were looking at all kinds of crimes that the neocons and the Office of Special Plans had committed there.
Yeah, that's his characterization of it.
But the bottom line is he was probably upset because they wanted to flip him.
And they said, hey, you need to talk to us.
And he was, you know, I wish they had flipped him, frankly.
I wish they had been able to roll up this incredibly insidious network.
Me too.
Hey, thanks for the time.
I really appreciate it.
All right, Scott, appreciate it.
All right, everybody, that is Grant F. Smith from IRMEP, I-R-M-E-P, the Institute for Research Middle East Policy.
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