11/25/15 – Grant F. Smith – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys.
Welcome back to The Thing here.
Oh, I should turn my backup recorder on just in case.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm him.
And our first guest today is our friend Grant Smith of the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy.
That's IRMEP.
I-R-M-E-P.
I-R-M-E-P.org.
And here's what you do.
You search site for .pdf and then just see what happens.
Yeah, he's like the Jason Leopold of the Israel Lobby only issue.
And that's what he does, Grant Smith.
He is the FOIA ninja of the East Coast and kicks the Israel Lobby's ass all day long.
He's written about 10 books based on all the documents he's gotten about FBI counterintelligence investigations of Israeli spies in our country and all their nefarious deeds and all the rest of it.
And really good stuff.
Stealing weapons grade uranium and the whole works.
So very happy to have you back here on the show.
I saw on Twitter you're putting out this press release to everybody just mocking them for refusing to say the most obvious thing, which is the obvious truth.
When they're refuting Donald Trump for accusing the Muslims of New Jersey for celebrating the September 11th attack, they've refused to acknowledge what we know they know.
It's in the archives.
When they go back to do the research, to do the debunking, they've got to come across the fact that somebody was celebrating the September 11th attack on September 11th outside in broad daylight in front of people.
But who were they?
Grant?
Who can possibly know?
I mean, when Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post started to answer that very question, he just couldn't bring himself to say it either.
So it was the Israelis.
They're the ones who were documented.
They're the ones who were hauled in by the FBI after they were tipped by a witness or an eyewitness who saw some celebrating going on.
But they weren't Arabs and they weren't Muslims.
They were some Israeli movers who were celebrating and taking pictures and having fun as the towers were going down.
So I just, I think it's incredible and you have this groundswell.
It's not just me, but of all sorts of people who remember that, who read the alternative press accounts of it.
I mean, it's been fairly well known since 2005 that there was this very curious celebration going on in New Jersey and it seems as though Trump had that in mind when he started going off about Arabs and Muslims celebrating this.
I'm not so sure about that part because apparently there were rumors then that Muslims were holding rooftop parties and were tailgating and it was because they were Arabs and sympathize with the terrorists.
But the reporters tried to track it down then and they couldn't find any evidence of it whatsoever.
The best they found was, oh yeah, well I heard that somewhere because somebody said that.
So I'm not, I'm not certain that this is the event that Trump necessarily got confused.
He may have been thinking of those initial false reports and of course I thought this was a funny little side note that Ben Carson initially said, yeah, that's right.
I saw that too.
And then he backtracked and he said, oh no, you know what I saw was Muslims in the Middle East celebrating it.
But that was a hoax too.
That was a footage of Palestinians celebrating some little kid's birthday or something.
And they put it on TV and said, look, here's the West Bank today, joyous celebrations of the 9-11 attacks.
And it was a damn lie.
Yeah.
There's a lot of manipulation going on with overseas videos that that's been fairly well established.
But it's, of course you're right.
Who can know it was in the mind of Trump when he made the, who wants to get in that mind?
But I mean, I think it was more likely that he heard those initial false reports, not necessarily this one, but as long as he's bringing up who was celebrating what, why in the world, Grant, would a bunch of Israelis celebrate a horrible attack on their greatest allies on the planet earth, the United States of America?
Well, the people who were later interviewed on a talk show in Israel, and their names are known, they've come out about it, Kurzbergs and Shmuel and Elner and Gabriel Marmari.
They explained that, you know, this was a common occurrence in Israel.
And so they had a different view when they saw those towers coming down than your typical American would have had, or at least, you know, that's their self-reporting.
So, you know, we have that to go on, but, um, well, didn't they talk to the cop, didn't they say to the cop, I'm paraphrasing, not quoting here, but something close to, see, you know, oh, we're not your problem.
You shouldn't be arresting us.
We're not your problem.
We're Israelis.
They're your problem.
The Muslims, see, and we're like you and you're like us and they are our enemy together and it's kind of, yeah, that's true.
The Palestinians are the problem.
We're not the problem.
And so they, they were a very curious, uh, so people know there was not a single Palestinian on any of those four airplanes that day, nor a single Iraqi, Iranian or Syrian.
Just to be clear.
I'm sorry.
Right.
They had, they had a, they had a narrative they're rolling out to the cops who apparently, you know, were so edgy and suspicious anyway, they, they refused to appreciate it.
Uh, but yeah, they were, they were some characters and operating illegally in the U S they had a moving company called urban moving systems and, and actually, you know, the importance of any of this stuff I think is, is fairly minimal in terms of, uh, the actual FBI files.
As I said, they've been out since 2005.
We went through a FOIA for them again in 2013 to more as an exercise and seeing whether they were going to accelerate any declassification of the sensitive stuff and they didn't.
But, uh, it was a, an instance of a very fairly substantial, uh, employment outfit that was using a lot of illegal labor and violating visas and all sorts of other problems that caused, uh, the company to pretty much fold up his operations and leave.
So it, you know, without going back and looking at all of the, uh, details, the one thing that struck me is one of my favorite reporters, Glenn Kessler, who is of course the recipient of the classified information obtained by AIPAC to gin up a war with Iran back in the day in 2004, 2005 he's the one who's supposedly debunking all of this with a big story.
Uh, and he mentions FBI probes and then he mentions that quote, reporters who wrote the story did not recall whether the allegations were ever confirmed, unquote, as if because the Washington post didn't want to follow up, it's just unknowable what happened with these FBI allegations.
But you know, I just thought it was clear and you saw the Twitter campaign.
It was clear that, you know, in the debunking stories, there was an FBI investigation.
There were celebrations, uh, that caused, uh, law enforcement to prick up its ears and that it goes against the narrative, which is of course the bigger story, the sweeping narrative, uh, that Arabs and Muslims are possible terrorist conspirators, which has come out of, you know, fear of the Paris attacks.
Well, there's another way of saying what you just said though, which is it's a giant damned lie by omission.
This is why they make you swear to tell the whole truth when you testify in court because you can get away with misleading the hell out of people by telling them half of what's true, but nothing that's outright false.
But if you lie by omission, it's still a lie.
Right.
The very first stories about this were horrible.
The New York Post was talking about Middle Easterners celebrating, they were referring to this story, but again, they couldn't quite bring themselves to, you know, avoid that error of omission or lie of omission.
And so there's, there's stories which are still available, uh, are just, uh, you know, they're as bad as, as these sweeping allegations.
So I agree.
Um, but yeah, I still, I've been, I've been monitoring this story and I still don't see very much uptake, um, of the idea that, yeah, there was an investigation.
Oh, by the way, no, it wasn't.
It wasn't Arab and Muslims because that doesn't fit the narrative.
I mean, you're lucky you don't live in Washington DC and listen to Frank Gaffney.
He has a radio program here and it's just nonstop hatred and, and it's just unbelievable.
But uh...
Hysteria.
Yeah.
He is the wackiest of the neocons, that, uh, that Gaffney and never was confirmed as anything like he claims to have been in the defense department in the Reagan years.
Anyway, we'll be right back with Grant Smith in just a sec, y'all.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, the Scott Horton Show.
I got Grant Smith on the line.
New Jersey 9-11 celebrants were Israelis, is his piece on the blog today at antiwar.com.
Go and read that.
But yeah, so let me ask you now about Jonathan Pollard.
Who's Jonathan Pollard?
Jonathan Pollard is the former Navy analyst, intelligence analyst, who was arrested and charged with espionage and convicted, well, pled guilty in 1987.
He's been in jail up until very recently serving a life term, 30 years, for espionage on behalf of the Israelis.
He was paid by them to get some very sensitive information from the U.S.
There's a lot that's not known about it still.
There's not really much reporting that does anything more than cover the least important aspects of it, but it's been charged that two important things, number one, that there was somebody much higher up who was tasking him to get specific file numbers, and we've never been able to get any evidence that that investigation went anywhere or that there even was a bona fide investigation at NCIS or the FBI.
And number two, Seymour Hersh did a big piece saying that the Israelis used the information obtained by Pollard as sort of bargaining information, trading it with the Soviets to get immigrants to go to Israel and keep that flow going back in the 80s.
So it's a hugely important story, but kind of like this whole debunking of the previous story, there's no real reporting on it.
And from kind of a 30,000 foot level, Pollard's really the only person in recent history who's been prosecuted.
All of the other cases, Ben-Ami Kaddish, who was about as bad, also caught Israeli spy.
Stuart Nazet, caught, but then the investigation was tailored in a way that it eliminated any Israeli involvement.
The AIPAC-2, United Against Nuclear Iran, which was trafficking and classified information, none of those cases ever went anywhere.
So Pollard is kind of the exception that proves the rule, as even he would have said that Israel can't be prosecuted for espionage, or almost never is.
And he's out now on parole, huh?
He's out, but there's no real good reporting on what he's up to.
It's said that he was offered a job at a financial services firm on Wall Street.
It's gone a little sour because the feds wanted to install a bunch of monitoring equipment on the computers as well as on him.
So the firm apparently said, no way.
If this were anybody else, we'd know the name of the firm and how he came to get the job and all that, but there's no reporting on any of that.
Well, I don't get it.
If they have nothing to hide, what are they worried about?
I don't know.
I think that, yeah, well, the job's off anyway.
So he's apparently out there, and according to everything that's available, he's going to be in the U.S. for the next five years.
He'll be writing a commentary magazine in a week.
We'll see, but there's been a real strategy.
Mort Klein, a conference of presidents of major organizations here in the U.S., has talked about how it's important not to celebrate too loudly or write stories about Jonathan Pollard being a hero and all of this stuff, and there's been Benjamin Netanyahu's tried to corral his Knesset into not celebrating or doing anything that would raise the profile of this.
But it's been a fairly quiet story, and nobody's making a lot of noise.
And this is all about Israel and Iran, isn't it?
Well, at this point- I mean, because if the Fed said, no, we don't want you to give him parole, then they wouldn't have got parole.
They arranged this.
I tend to think that nobody got anything out of this.
He was going to be eligible for parole, and it seems as though he finally stopped assuming or wishing that intervention would get him out.
There was some initial maneuver by the Obama administration to use him as a bargaining chip before his value expired, but I looked long and hard, and there wasn't anything going on at the pardon attorney that we could see.
There wasn't any special deal-making, so it looks as though once the 30 years came up, they really did just say, well, he's eligible, he's been a good boy, so why not let him out?
But again, though, all the DOJ would have had to do would be to insist that please don't let him out, like they would do if it was Charles Manson or whatever other point, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
If they'd wanted to play hardball- And that wouldn't have been an under-the-table kind of a thing.
That would have been a perfectly legitimate thing, right, for the prosecutors to say, we would like to remind the parole board about the damage that this person did to this innocent family or this innocent country or whatever it is.
Yeah, I think they could have done that.
On the side of Pollard, though, they would have insisted that he's probably served more time for espionage than anybody in recent memory.
I mean, there have been some- Well, but he was sentenced to life, though, right?
Yeah, that's true.
That's true.
But life can be life, or life can be- Because there was no parole in federal prison.
It's not like he had a pound of marijuana or something, Scott.
Come on.
But wait, I guess I'm confused about it, Grant, because I thought that there was no parole in federal prison.
Only state prisons have parole, and in federal time, you do your whole time.
That's it.
Yeah.
I have to admit, I'm not a lawyer, and I don't know anything about that particular aspect.
What I do know is- I don't know where I thought I learned that, but apparently that's completely wrong.
Most of the action on his case has been with the pardon attorney up to about five years ago where they were really sending in hundreds of signatures from members of Congress and all sorts of other influentials saying that we need a pardon here, and heavy pressure applied on President Bush, heavy pressure applied on Clinton, going all the way back.
Of course, yeah.
But in terms of whether he was going to be stuck in the pokey for the rest of his life, it looked as though life in this always meant 30 years.
I've never seen anything indicating that he was ever really going to be in there for life.
All right.
So now, tell me more about, or whatever it is you think you know, or whatever the accusations are at least, about who may have been feeding him the numbers of the paperwork that they wanted because apparently this was from above him in the pay grade scale.
Right.
Well, this is, we've hit a dead end.
I mean, the trail leads to NCIS, and they were really at the forefront of the investigation.
They have the biggest file.
That's the Navy counterintelligence.
Criminal Investigation Service.
And so querying their database, which is unstructured, they have not been able to produce anything about their investigation of so-called, of the mole who was feeding all of this, all of this code for the file.
So that's a question, I mean, if there were going to be any reporting about this story at all, it would be what happened to that investigation?
Why wasn't somebody else ever found?
And that's gone nowhere.
I've been very curious about that.
That seems to me to be the relevant question.
We do know that Ben-Ami Kaddish, who had a brother in Israel who's in missile development, he was feeding him all sorts of stuff at the same time, but he just got a slap on the wrist and then died a few years later.
Same sort of thing, being fed.
So there was this fairly robust spy ring pursuing military secrets, being very successful about it.
It's no big story, though, that the investigation petered out, because that's what always happens.
I mean, the multiple investigations of AIPAC for espionage always peter out at a certain point.
But there's just no real information that they ever really got anywhere or wanted to get anywhere in uncovering the bigger network.
So we may never know.
Now, is this the source that is termed MEGA?
And where does that come from?
That comes from Bamford's second book or something, right?
Where's that come from?
Yeah, I don't know where that comes from, but apparently that was picked up at a wiretap or some sort of communication that MEGA had to be protected or that MEGA was the source of these.
I never found that term in any of the files that we've gotten from the court or from NCIS on that.
So we may never know.
Yeah, it may or may not be connected there.
Maybe it's, yeah, something Bamford can tell us about.
Yeah, I've asked him about that before, but it's been many years now.
I don't remember.
Yeah.
Anyway, thanks very much for coming back on the show.
Always love talking with you.
Thanks for having me on.
Congratulations on the 4,000 podcast.
Hey, thanks, man.
Appreciate that.
All right, man.
See ya.
Hey, y'all, that's the great Grant Smith.
We'll be right back after this.
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