03/05/14 – Grant F. Smith – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Pat Buchanan's coming up in half an hour.
Find out what he thinks about this Ukraine thing.
He's a good old-fashioned coal warrior, right?
Well, we'll see what he says.
First though, Grant Smith, he's the founder and the director of the Institute for Research Policy.
That's IRMEP.com or .net or .org or something.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Hey, great, Scott.
It's .com.org.
You'll find it.
IRMEP.
Yeah, it's there.
It's .com and .org, everybody, and I'll tell you real briefly, what Grant does is he sues the government not for money or damages but for documents, and he shows the hidden history of the Israel lobby in the United States of America through official government paperwork.
Primarily, I don't mean to sum it up too briefly, but that's, I'll tell you what, there's nothing like IRMEP.com for digging through primary source material about the activities of Israel's government in America over the last two, three, four generations, I mean it.
So, yeah.
Yeah, it's quite a volume.
In fact, we put a lot of effort into cataloging and putting up historic documents that have never seen the light of day, and whether it's how the first lobbying organizations were confronted and attempted regulation as foreign agents to mishaps such as uranium smuggling and nuclear technology smuggling to trade agreements that favored one side but not the other.
It's all there, and it's being used by more and more people to really understand how the relationship really works between the U.S. and Israel, as opposed to kind of how it's explained in generalist sources.
Exactly.
All right, so, before we get into all that, because I want to get into all that, I know a lot of that is going to be the subject of your talk at this National Summit, but what National Summit?
Yeah, so, there is a National Summit that's happening Friday, all there at the National Press Club in the Ballroom, which is an airplane hangar-like space, open to the public.
And from 8 o'clock until 5 o'clock, there's going to be nothing but a series of experts talking about the special relationship between the United States and Israel.
It just seems the right time, and this conference has been planned for quite a while now, but it seems like the right time, given all the efforts that go into lobbying to support Israel militarily and the prerogatives that the lobbying organizations here have in the United States to put forward programs and lobby Congress for the biggest aid package delivered by the United States.
It seems like the right moment to gather a large group of experts from academia, former Congress people, people from governments, people from the intelligence world, scholars, historians, and talk about the real cost-benefit in kind of a basic way, so that the press and people and interested parties can understand how it functions, and see the costs and what happens as a result of that relationship.
So just to kind of summarize some of the speakers, former Congressman Paul Finley, who wrote one of the first books about the Israel lobby, Janet McMahon, who tracks political contributions, Cynthia McKinney, a congressperson who was forced out, one of two African-American congresspeople forced out by lobbying activities, Delinda Hanley, who follows aid to Israel to talk about how much we're actually spending, as well as experts talking about neoconservatives in the Iraq war, what was going on inside the Pentagon, Gareth Porter, someone you interview a lot coming in to talk about the drive, the continual drive for U.S.-Israel military actions against Iran, and whether there's any substance behind that, Brigadier General James David, who's going to talk about military aid and how it impacts other allies.
I'll have an interesting panel on the special relationship and rule of law, as we've talked about many times, that it's my fundamental position that the lobby and its activities in the U.S. have typically transcended law.
There are no laws that are well enough enforced to actually impact its operations.
But we'll also have Mark Perry talking about what he's seen as a national security reporter, and M.E. Spike Bowman, who is a counterintelligence guy at the FBI, who's written about Jonathan Pollard to talk about what it all means.
And hopefully he'll talk about whether Jonathan Pollard is kind of the exception to the rule, which is stated by Pollard, is that the U.S. doesn't and shouldn't ever prosecute Israeli espionage.
So that should be an interesting panel.
But we've also got historic panels.
Stephen Walt, who wrote The Israel Lobby, is coming in to talk about what's changed since he wrote that book with John Mearsheimer.
Jeffrey Warrow is talking about his book Quicksand, and also what happened to him as a historian who wrote kind of an unpopular revision of Middle East history, John Quigley talking about the ongoing impact of 1967 and Israel's occupation and U.S. support for it.
And so it's a series of panels, including a final panel on intelligence, in which Michael Scheuer, Paul Polar, Raymond Governor, and Philip Giraldi, again, people that you know and interview, are going to answer a series of questions about this alliance, whether it's truly an alliance and whether the United States is benefiting or suffering from blowback.
There's a really interesting panel, number five, that we've got a star mediator for, the moderator rather, who's going to talk about the lobby and political parties of the news media.
One famous radio announcer called Scott Horton.
So this whole thing is just an unprecedented national gathering with hundreds and hundreds of people already signed up who are going to talk about reality as opposed to myth and legend and what normally passes for a discussion of this issue in Washington.
Right.
I mean, that's the most striking thing about all this, is how unprecedented it is.
But guess what, everybody?
At the National Press Club in D.C., there's going to be an honest discussion of the costs and consequences of America's pseudo alliance with Israel.
The one that everybody called you Klansman for mentioning just before a couple of years ago is completely outside of polite discussion somehow, at least between New York and D.C. to even talk about this kind of thing.
Of course, the Mearsheimer-Walt book did a lot to change that.
And, of course, the Iraq War did a lot to change that.
Right.
I just think that the key driver, though, for a lot of people is, you know, here the Israel lobby's No.
1 priority is getting the U.S. to really completely isolate and at some point attack Iran for what we all know are entirely specious reasons.
And so it's really timely to look at the infrastructure that's behind that and really take it apart from the perspective of not a regional, not an economic, or not entirely economic, but really from the standpoint of, if the United States is supposed to be pursuing its own interests, is this in the U.S. interest or not?
And so, you know, the panels have been constructed around a series of questions, and we've reached out to a lot of people to be on those panels.
It's, you know, it's not the broadest perspective.
I mean, there are certainly things that have been left out, but, you know, in terms of learning something about how this special relationship develops and when it's stripped of all of the publicity, what it really stands for and what kind of facts on the ground here in the United States it creates, this is it.
This is what's going to do that.
Yeah, and you know, Fitzy in the chat room is just saying, because we just finished talking with MJ Rosenberg, that right now they really are back on their heels after these three big losses and Obama himself shouting them down in the State of the Union address on the Iran sanctions and kind of splits and faction fights, really between liberal and conservative I guess, even within the Israel lobby and that kind of thing.
So this is perfect timing.
Right as they're up to their very worst activity, trying to undermine our peace deal with Iran, which is what the nuclear deal ultimately is, the resolution of the biggest outstanding so-called issue anyway, and right in the middle of them being weak and up to their worst comes Grant Smith and Phil Giraldi in this national summit to make it clear and on C-SPAN for everyone to see just, you know, what are the other consequences?
You know, now that we're looking at this with open eyes about what we're really dealing with here, what have we been missing over the last few years that they didn't talk about back when you couldn't talk about it, you know?
Exactly.
I think the interesting thing is there's not a single person who's going to be on any of these panels who's afraid to break what's probably the number one taboo in the news media and in politics, and that is to be frank about the fact that Israel is a nuclear weapons state.
It engaged in a lot of illegal activities to become that way, and it's absolutely ridiculous to talk about Iran or even the region without being very honest about the fact that they have an overwhelming strategic advantage over everybody.
All right, we'll be right back with Grant Smith after this.
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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
We're talking with Grant F. Smith from the Institute for Research Middle East Policy.
That's IRMEP.org, IRMEP.com, I-R-M-E-P, and NatSummit.org, where his group and Phil's are all these groups.
The Council for the National Interest are putting on the National Summit to Reassess the America-Israel Special Relationship this Friday, all day, 8 to 5, at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
Get there early and see me, say hi for a minute, and introduce the thing.
And then later in the day, I'll be hosting a panel, too.
If everything else he said, one, enough to convince you to show up, I'm going to be there.
Okay, great.
Yeah, there's the bonus.
And there are also two other sponsors.
One is the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, and the other is If Americans Knew.
And it should be a really interesting time to talk to other people.
So wait a minute, because I wasn't done introducing you again, even though I was kind of blabbing all over the place.
But I still got to tell the people that you're the author of Divert, NUMEC, Zalman Shapiro, and the Diversion of U.S. Weapons-Grade Uranium into the Israeli Nuclear Weapons Program, available at all your fine booksellers online and in real life.
Yeah, thanks.
Well, I think it's interesting, because the core story in Divert is something that's going to come up in presentation.
Military.com, in fact, just ran a piece noting the irony that at the same time that AIPAC was meeting to talk about further ways to go after Iran's non-existent nuclear weapons program, you had Arnaud Milchan on stage getting an Oscar award.
This is an admitted, self-confessed spy who targeted the United States for nuclear technologies.
And on the East Coast, you had Benjamin Netanyahu, who worked with Milchan and Richard Kelly Smith addressing AIPAC and talking about the dangers of proliferation.
So here you've got two proliferators, and the funny story is they're going to be meeting in California.
It'll be kind of like a reunion for the two, who knows, maybe to rehash old times and talk about maybe new technologies they'd like to spirit out of the United States illegally.
The irony of real proliferators being able to so completely get away with that sort of activity, and most Americans aren't even aware of it, that's just a prime case study for how bad things have gotten.
And unfortunately, it's kind of a repeat of history.
You know, the United States and Israel got off on a bad foot back in the 40s, because the first thing that the government in waiting did was come over to the United States and put together a giant conventional arms smuggling network.
And so, because nothing has ever been done, and because the awareness level was so low, that sort of thing just continues, it perpetuates.
There's really almost a reflexive idea that this is an open market and that the laws really don't apply to this relationship, and it's hurting the United States.
All right, now, I want to ask you about some of the history of this, because you've written a great many books besides Divert, but as long as you mention it, can you be a bit more specific about the role of the current Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in this nuclear smuggling ring?
Well, he was...
We have covered this on the show before, if people want to go back and look at scottwharton.org, by the way.
Yeah, the FBI released reports from one of the front companies that was rolled up in the United States called Heli Trading Company, and it turned out that when the leader of that company was put against the wall in 2002, after he had been extradited from Spain after he fled prosecution in the United States, he said quite clearly that Benjamin Netanyahu was the one he was meeting with in Israel in the 70s and 80s to procure nuclear weapons technology, and he also was the guy who did time for that, Milchan, who was his handler, who recruited him, Arnon Milchan, a Hollywood producer, and Netanyahu, of course, skated free.
The two connected.
They're not the types of people the FBI and Justice Department are interested in, frankly.
You see in the FBI file that the first thing they did was look at who's who in America and discover that Milchan was one of those people that they probably wouldn't prevail against.
And the reason this is history, and the reason why it's history repeating itself is the exact same thing happened 30 years earlier, when high-profile people, friends of the president, people who were bundling campaign contributions, were also upset at the prospect that conventional weapons smugglers might be called to the carpet and prosecuted for shipping tons and tons of material to Israel, basically subverting US foreign policy to create a foreign state, basically taking advice and consent governance and taking that away from the rest of America through their own military policy.
So what we see here is a corruption that is so deep and so embedded and so entrenched that you don't even see...
You know what, though?
Let me ask you this.
I mean, it's so entrenched.
I mean, the fact of the matter is, as Anthony Gregory says, Barack Obama's the only real trillionaire around here, and the state, it's the state, and as big as any billionaire is, or foreign state, I mean, we're talking about the USA here, that ultimately the DOJ is always the bigger foot to stomp, if I could say it that way.
They nail people, not all the time, you know, I understand that the who's who have a leg up on the rest of us, legally speaking and everything, but there are times where the Justice Department will in fact nail very powerful people to the wall just to prove that they can and that they still are boss around here and that kind of thing, but you're talking about the Israel lobby getting away with bloody murder here for decades with virtually no accountability.
Am I overstating it?
Ah, you're not overstating it.
I mean, yeah, of course, they'll make an example out of this person or that person, but what you see and the reason why we ask for these documents, and we're still collecting these documents, because, for example, we still don't have internal Justice Department decisions on the decision to quash the 2005 AIPAC espionage case, we don't have all the files on those who was stealing secrets for Israeli aircraft industries right up until 2008, but what we see in the previous releases is that there's always a meeting between the Attorney General and a group of lobbyists or Israelis in which the investigation comes to a complete halt and everything's wrapped up, classified, and packed away, and the next answer to the press is no comment, and this is for things that are very harmful to the United States.
One of the investigations that we talk about is the counter-espionage investigation about a circumstance in which an American and a South African anti-apartheid activist died in mysterious circumstances, and yet the case going after the classified documents in that case held by the ABL, which is a branch of the Israeli lobby, it was quashed.
Why?
Because of due process?
No, because of, again, this access and this embedded corruption.
So it's because it repeats over and over and over again, it's always the same story, you know, malicious activity, real harm, investigation launched, sometimes with press, sometimes without it, investigation terminated.
That's the pattern.
Rinse, wash, and repeat.
Yeah, well, and it's not just them.
I mean, I don't mean to imply that, you know, the rule of law is always applied to the rich and powerful around here or something, you know, too naive, but it is amazing to me how much they get away with.
I mean, even when you saw the real pushback, I guess, over the Iraq war politically, where they clamped down on the Larry Franklin, Stephen Rosen, Keith Weissman, document laundering, and all of that, that, I mean, they still let them get away with it.
And that was the, that was really a first that, you know, two FBI raids on AIPAC headquarters or something like that.
And it was dramatic for the silence surrounding it on all sides, in a way, you know?
Well, it was, you're right, the raids were first, but the FBI's investigation of AIPAC, it was the third time.
The first time being when one of their directors stole missile secrets in order to promote an Israeli plant in the region.
The second was when they stole the trade secrets of 77 American corporations lobbying against a lopsided trade deal.
But even that was just in the 80s, right?
That was in the 80s.
So, yeah, so it's like every 10 years, you've got the FBI having to, you know, get its lantern-jawed agents to crash into a door and look at what the documents are saying, and then, you know, of course, terminate the investigation.
I didn't realize that they had ever done, you know, raids that had ever gone that far before.
No, no, you're right about the raids.
But, you know, they have showed up before and gotten a document.
So, in this case, you're right, raids, hard drive thieves, it was apparently scary enough for them to arm a full-scale defense.
And what you can see in a lot of the court documents when Steve Rosen later filed a defamation suit is they had a massive PR campaign ready on deck to go after the FBI at the drop of a hat if they weren't able to get the case squashed.
But, you know, again, it doesn't make any sense.
When you look at the fact that we have an organization like AIPAC, which was the lobbying division of another organization that was ordered to register as a foreign agent and be open in the fact that it was a front for Israeli government priorities of the United States, the reason it exists is that when its mothership was ordered to register, it simply split off six weeks later and continued the operations.
We have absolutely no real accountability and no enforcement for any of these organizations that are trying to, again, get us into wars.
You know, I think the biggest historical analogy here is the reason that there was an intense investigation of these groups in the 60s, leading the Foreign Agent Registration Act orders, was they were right after the Senate Foreign Relations Committee studied and discussed the Levant Affair, which was an attempt to get the U.S. to attack Egypt.
Well, here we are decades later, the same organizations are trying to get us to attack Iran, and we haven't learned anything.
The laws that could enforce transparency and allow Americans to see who's behind all of this haven't been enforced, and we're basically on the Mebbius Strip of fatal foreign policies that are really a result of inaction and our failure in governance here at home.
All right, everybody, that is the great Grant Smith from IRMEP.org, I-R-M-E-P.org, and Natsummit.com.
Or is that .org, too?
Anyway, it's the National Summit about America and Israel this Friday at the National Press Club.
Thanks, Grant.
Thanks, see you Friday.
On March 7th at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., the Council for the National Interest is co-hosting the first-ever National Summit to reassess the U.S.-Israel special relationship.
Confirmed speakers include Walt Scheuer, Giraldi, McGovern, Kutowski, Porter, McConnell, Weiss, Raimondo, USS Liberty survivor Ernie Gallo, as well as co-sponsors Allison Ware of If Americans Knew, and the great Grant Smith of the Institute for Research Middle East Policy.
That's the National Summit to reassess the U.S.-Israel special relationship, Friday, March 7th, all day at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
Natsummit.org.
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