08/12/16 – Grant F. Smith – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, introducing Grant F. Smith.
He's the director of the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy.
The Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy.
And he's the author of the book, Big Israel.
And I already know that he forgives me for not having read it yet, because I just don't have time to do that yet.
But I'm going to read it and interview him all about it in probably, like, six months.
But you should read it, and you should also read all the rest of his books.
And if you look at Grant Smith's Amazon page, you'll say, wow, has this guy written a lot of stuff about the crimes of the Israel lobby in the United States of America?
I think you'll be very impressed.
And I think also, if you just want to be blown away, search site earmap.org for the search term dot pdf.
Just see what you get there.
It's the Institute for Research.
All right.
Welcome back to the show, Grant.
How are you, sir?
Good.
Thanks for having me on again, Scott.
I'm very...
You are forgiven for not reading Big Israel.
It's...
I can't wait to read it, but I have to wait to read it.
That's all.
That's fine.
I have to.
It's the only reason.
Okay.
Just as long as not too many people take that approach, I'm okay.
Yeah, no, the rest of you read it.
Unless you also are writing a book about the entire war on terrorism and can't quite fit it into your schedule.
But otherwise, look, I have the best excuse.
I have the only excuse in the world.
That is the only excuse, yeah.
For not reading Big Israel right now.
But I promise I'm going to read it because I really, really want to read it.
You get a permission slip.
Yeah.
And the rest of you, go and read Big Israel.
This is the guy who knows the most about the Israel lobby.
So now you are suing the U.S. government saying that they have to stop giving aid to Israel right at a time when aid to Israel is increasing from $3 billion a year, as they say, to $5 billion.
I don't know if you want to adjust those numbers or anything like that, but right as this hugest increase is taking place, and the Americans who I think we already pay for a majority of the Israelis' military budget are paying even more of it, you're saying that it's illegal to give aid to Israel, Grant?
Well, we're talking about foreign aid, and we do actually have the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act, which forms the basis for the legality and procedures around delivering aid.
So the lawsuit is really all about, as you say, both the final installment, which will probably happen in August.
There's a lot of rush going on in terms of getting something in place in this month so that in October, the disbursement of the final MOU that was written up in the Bush administration is given over.
But the big enchiladas is giant.
It could be up to $5 billion, as you say, per year.
New MOU, which Obama's signing into law and then basically passing on to whoever wins the election.
So what we've done is filed a lawsuit in federal court, and it's really all about, all 135 pages of it.
If you want to read about it, it's at irmep.org slash cfp.
It's really all about amendments that have been made to the Foreign Assistance Act, which really prohibit any sort of assistance to clandestine nuclear states.
All right.
Well, and so now, yeah, the thing about that is that nuclear ambiguity that policy where everybody pretends that they don't know that Israel has nuclear weapons, it's been broken so many times, deliberately and otherwise.
It's really not a secret at all here.
I mean, I know that federal employees are not allowed to talk about it.
It's that kind of thing.
It's a rule.
But no one in the world denies that they have nuclear weapons.
Everybody knows they have nuclear weapons.
The amount of information in the public domain, whether it was Mordecai Venunu smuggling out photos of the inside workings of Dimona, Seymour Hersh for this book, The Samson Option, Abner Cohen with Israel and the bomb.
And Abner Cohen is the guy who's really done all of the core research on the so-called nuclear opacity, nuclear ambiguity, strategic ambiguity, whatever you want to call it.
We're just calling it nuclear ambiguity.
Jimmy Carter in 2008 saying Israel has 150 nuclear weapons.
I mean, who better would know that than a former president?
The U.S. Air Force did a study, too, right?
Well, it was a U.S. Air Force analyst and published under the auspices of the U.S. Air Force.
But yeah, he also did a study and, you know, Roger Mattson, Stealing the Bomb, a book published this year, all about the Pneumec incident.
So, yeah, the evidence is overwhelming to the extent that it makes, you know, this plausible deniability of farce.
And what we're trying to show in this lawsuit is that that has had very grave consequences and is, in fact, a violation of the law in and of itself.
Well, now, is this the kind of thing where if the judge ruled in your favor, Obama could just sign some waiver and it wouldn't matter anyway?
Well, it's not quite that simple.
So if we were to get some sort of injunction, then it would be in the Obama administration's court and probably even more important, Congress to do what they've done in the past.
They've already watered down the Symington and Glenn portions of foreign assistance.
In 1985, they kind of moved the dates of transfers of nuclear technologies that could make it illegal for Israel to have done it.
So they've already watered it down in the past.
But what they would have to do is, from a legal standpoint, change the section of law where the Foreign Assistance Act, excuse me, where the Symington and Glenn amendments currently reside.
And it would be complicated.
It would look bad.
It would probably be reported on.
So it's kind of, you know, it's kind of hard to say they would do that.
But the other thing that could happen, as you say, under Symington and Glenn, Obama, President Obama could, in fact, issue a waiver for Israel.
And he's never done that.
No president has ever done that since the amendment went into effect.
And the waiver could state explicitly why it is in the U.S. national security interest to give Israel aid, even though the United States knows that it has nuclear weapons.
So we've done that for Pakistan, done that for India during the Clinton administration.
But they don't want to do that.
They want, again, to pretend that there's no problem.
And that is that is the one of the core issues of the lawsuit is, you know, performing your duty and acting upon information not only in the public domain, but which is readily accessible to any president, for sure.
Right.
And now, you know, I don't know, man, I guess back in the 80s or maybe, yeah, would have just been in the 80s, maybe in the 70s, the Israelis proliferated some nuclear weapons technology to South Africa, that kind of thing.
But at this point, why wouldn't they just sign the nonproliferation treaty?
And or at least why should it be so hard for the Americans to say, OK, go ahead and just confess you have them and sign the NPT?
What difference does it really make?
Makes a huge amount of difference to the Israelis, I would say, from the U.S. standpoint.
And it appears that even President Obama had that same initial feeling when he came into office.
But they are going to say the administration, actually, somebody brought that up for a minute and then got shouted right down.
Right.
Yeah, that's that is the history.
They they felt that, you know, there should that there should, in fact, be signatories to it.
But you're right.
They got shouted down, probably didn't know about all of this, all of the history of ambiguity since Richard Nixon and Golda Meir concocted it, if you want to put it that way.
But, you know, if the Israelis were to really declare openly that they were a nuclear power and that they had X number of weapons and that they were going to be inspected, just like any other under the International Atomic Energy Agency, and be open about it, about it, their position internally, again, according to Abner Cohen, who really looks at the Israeli side, I don't so much.
I'm only really concerned about the U.S. compliance side, but that it would really make their lives a little bit more difficult because, as they say, or as the experts say, the Israeli experts, they would have to justify why they should be the only nuclear power in the Middle East.
And, you know, why shouldn't the Saudis, UAE and other states that could certainly afford it, why shouldn't they go nuclear as well and have their own deterrence, the ultimate deterrence, which has been proven pretty much to be, you know, the best way to avoid, you know, a massive attack on your country.
It hasn't stopped conventional wars, to be sure.
But anyway, they don't want to deal with that issue.
What I really argue in the lawsuits, and you might not be surprised by this, given the contents of the books you mentioned, and particularly Big Israel, is that we're really, on the U.S. side, there is no reason, other than the fact that, you know, Israel wants the weapons, that they would otherwise have to buy.
They want the aviation fuel, you know, billions of dollars and that, which, you know, there's a lot of argument that these are providing high-tech jobs in the U.S., but if you're buying a billion dollars worth of aviation fuel at a buck fifty a gallon, I would argue that that's not a big deal, nor are the food and other things that they get under this.
So Israel gets all of this.
It allows Israel to really concentrate on building up its nuclear deterrent, whether it's submarines or whether it's new missile technology, laser enrichment, all the things they're known to be doing.
Here in the United States, you have this vast ecosystem of Israel affinity organization, building up a funding base, doing the PR, hyping the Iran threat, funding, in some cases, through the Weizmann Institute of Science, actually funding Israel's nuclear weapons program with tax-deductible donations.
And the other part of the circle is AIPAC, which aggregates all of this power.
It lobbies for these aid packages, pressures Congress, and at the very top of this system are really elected officials who want all of this support.
They want the related party campaign contributions, PAC contributions, and so they ignore all of this intel.
They thwart all of sorts of inquiries for information about government policy and Israel's nukes.
They violate export controls, and they provide the aid.
So you've got this vicious circle where taxpayers are really holding the bag for all of these activities, and arguably the most egregious activity are these elected officials who are pretty much committed to this policy because, just as Richard Nixon mentioned upon passing nuclear ambiguity, he didn't want to deal with all of these interest groups which might rise up in unison against him if he did anything like withhold fighter jets or do some other punishment in order to get them in line with non-proliferation.
So, you know, unfortunately, this giant asterisk has made the U.S. kind of a laughing stock whenever it goes to NPT conferences and proclaims it's some sort of authority example and leader in non-proliferation.
Everybody who knows anything says, well, what about the Israeli nuclear program?
Yeah.
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And, you know, it's extra infuriating really when you put it that way about how fungible all these dollars are and how we're, you know, the American people are being made to pay to lobby against their own interests.
And right.
And all this kind of thing, the way that that works.
And, you know, calling all left wingers who are jealous and all right wingers who are pissed off.
Israel has a socialist economy.
America is paying it.
You know, they call it military aid, but you might as well say America is paying a directly into Israel's free higher education system and their free health care, you know, government, not free American paid, very expensive universal health care system.
And why in the world should this very first world country with, you know, per capita, very high ranking GDP in the world?
Why should they be getting one dime from the American people, many of whom are actually dead broke, by the way?
Thank you very much.
Yeah, that's a very good point.
I think, you know, the whole fungibility issue, although Symington, who was, you know, the guy who really promoted this and who was very much on board with nonproliferation, made the same point.
He said, quote, If you wish to take the dangerous and costly steps necessary to achieve a nuclear weapons option, you cannot expect the United States to help underwrite that effort directly or indirectly, unquote.
But he might as well have said, you know, if you want a subsidy that allows you to do all sorts of things, you know, beyond building up military capability, it's it's the same thing.
If the U.S. were getting a subsidy of this size, you know, obviously it could do more.
But it's the situation is the reverse.
But yeah, absolutely.
Fungibility is key here.
Yeah.
As I don't know if it was Ron Paul who coined it, but he always liked to quote it anyway about foreign aid is just a transfer of wealth from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.
In this case, rich people in rich countries, you know?
Yeah, absolutely.
I think I saw that quote.
He had some incredible YouTube videos from 2008.
And it's just he said some absolutely fantastic things about this domain, which are I think they're all viral at this point.
Yeah.
Boy, I miss him these days.
Well, and, you know, in his position on Israel always was that, you know, we should just butt out, that we shouldn't be taking sides, that they're going to have to work it out for themselves.
But he would also say that, you know, the Palestinians are being treated very unfairly.
You know, you look at what you know, and but he would stop and say, if you want my personal opinion, what's going on over there and look at what's going on in Gaza Strip, it breaks your heart.
You know, that was a direct quote back in 1960 when the CIA was definitely in the business of giving advice about strategic issues in the Middle East.
They said as well that if Israel goes nuclear, you can bet that it will feel ever less inclined and ever less pressure to have any sort of peaceful settlement with the Palestinians or anybody else.
And that is exactly what happened.
So, you know, these these you have to rely on the CIA for that sort of basic analysis.
But you can certainly rely on history since, you know, over the past 50, however many years plus that it has come to pass.
Well, and who are they credibly deterring anyway?
I mean, if their major hassle is Hezbollah on their northern border, they can't nuke them ever, you know.
Yeah.
Well, fallout and everything.
It's right there in their own neighborhood.
And it hadn't really served as a deterrent when they invaded southern Lebanon in 2006.
Hezbollah whooped on them.
And I saw no indication Hezbollah was concerned that Israel was going to break out the nukes.
They felt perfectly fine fighting them back.
Right.
Seymour Hersh would argue that it's really about the Samson option.
And I still think his analysis is the best.
All right.
Now, explain that, because people don't know what that means.
Well, sure.
The Samson option is just as Samson pulled down the pillars of the temple, which crashed down on the heads of everyone, that the Israelis have been in a position now for, you know, more of their history than not of being able to take the entire world with it.
If it suffers any sort of existential or, you know, what it tells everybody would be an existential crisis.
So I think U.S. officials should talk a lot more about that fact and how it limits or affects their ability to do anything in terms of the Middle East.
But one prominent Israeli politician even once bragged that wherever an Israeli government official go, he essentially takes the Middle East with him in his pocket.
And the ability of the Israelis, again, to sort of tell the world that if things are not going their way, that there is definitely a possibility that these horrible weapons might have to come out is a major lever against countries that are far larger economically, far larger in terms of size, geographically, far more influential than Israel would ever be as a conventional power.
So.
Well, wait, I mean, to be specific, what you're saying is they're threatening to nuke Rome, Berlin, Paris, London, New York, if they ever let Israel get in trouble.
That's the Samson option in a nutshell.
And that's reported by Seymour Hersh, who wrote a whole book about it.
Right.
But I mean, I think as Americans, we should hear what are the assessments from our intelligence agencies?
What are their contingencies for a state that has that kind of doomsday mentality?
What are they doing to mitigate that sort of risk?
And for a long time, it was said that the Israelis were targeting mainly Russia as a pressure point during their whole effort to score more Soviet emigres to build up their own population.
And the United States, when it was the sole nuclear power, certainly threw its weight around in the Soviet Union with threats.
And so I think, you know, that that is real power.
But whether it's legitimate for the United States to continue to punish both federal employees and contractors and people who supposedly work for the American people and researchers who want to know about these things is the real question of our lawsuit.
But I don't think, you know, anyone should learn to live with this sort of situation, just like nobody should accept and learn to live with the fact that, as you've done on many of your shows and mentioned many times, that the Russians still have this enormous capability and the U.S. still has this enormous capability to wipe each other out.
And yet we have, you know, nothing but saber rattling and hyperbolic rhetoric coming out.
And it's just it's something Americans really shouldn't stand for.
Yeah.
And listen, I want to make sure to mention this as long as we're on this subject, because even though it is hearsay, I think it's the very best quality hearsay in the whole world.
It's Daniel Ellsberg on this show, the famed whistleblower and brilliant genius and anti-nuclear weapons activist.
Daniel Ellsberg has told me repeatedly, and I've really followed up numerous times with, hey, you told me this before, but I just want to make sure that I got the number right.
You say it again.
And we've been over this and over this.
And he says that Mordecai Venunu, the Israeli nuclear weapons whistleblower, told him that Israel had 600 nuclear weapons, not 150 or 200, 600.
And they included hydrogen bombs, thermonuclear weapons, presumably in the tens of megatons.
Well, I made up the megatons part.
Maybe they're very miniaturized H-bombs.
But anyway, they they certainly could be in the megatons if they're H-bombs.
Well, Venunu is in a position to have known and his information, what, is 30 years old now.
But the 1987 DoD report we had released in 2015 certainly verifies that they had programs working on hydrogen bombs.
So I would find that credible.
And there have been lots of reports that they have tactical nuclear weapons.
I would certainly like to hear credible information about all of this and why it exists and what the U.S. position is.
But we're not able to get any of that.
We have, again, what you say, the very best hearsay available.
But it's certainly an issue in the region as explosive as the Middle East that the people should have much more information about it.
Yeah.
And hey, it's the age of WikiLeaks.
So for all the CIA people listening to this later, grow some balls and leak some docs.
What the hell, you wimps?
Yeah.
Well, I guess the problem is that nobody probably wants to be the next James Doyle, who wrote a very innocuous piece for a magazine which stated, in fact, the Israelis have nuclear weapons.
Here's some here's some strategic implications of that.
And what happened to him was, is he still working at a national laboratory?
No.
He was treated like a criminal.
He had his computer searched, his home searched.
He was fired.
And that's what happens to people who have the clearances to know about these sorts of things, who want to talk about it to the American people, particularly under this new gag order that we cite as the Obama administration's unique addition to nuclear ambiguity, a gag law called WPN 136, which is specifically to keep government officials and contractors fearful of ever talking about this.
So that's why I believe you have people like Paul Pilar, who certainly had the clearances as a major top level CIA official.
Even when he writes about these things, he calls them Israel's kumquats.
You know, he calls them he uses euphemisms because there is a political decision to have passed a gag law that will severely, severely prosecute any of these officials for doing it.
And our argument in the lawsuit, what gives us standing to even go to court is that this isn't just a threat to government officials.
It actually impacts everybody who tries to get information about the functions of government.
It actually thwarts the Freedom of Information Act, mandatory declassification reviews.
All of our sunshine laws are being destroyed by this type of unlawful gag law.
All right.
Well, listen, man, it's great work that you're doing.
And I sure do appreciate that you do and make time to come on the show and talk with us about it.
Hey, Scott, thanks for having me on again.
All right.
See you, man.
Appreciate it.
Yeah.
All right.
So that is the great Grant F. Smith.
He directs the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy, IRMEP, I-R-M-E-P, IRMEP.org.
And he's suing them on your behalf all the time.
Check out his Amazon page.
A ton of great books, including how they stole nuclear weapons material from the United States, the Israel lobby, that is the Israeli Israeli spies.
And that's Divert and a bunch before that, too, but Divert.
And then the latest one is called Big Israel about the power of the Israeli lobby in the United States.
The definitive book on the Israel lobby in the U.S. by the great Grant Smith there.
Hey, Al Scott Horton here for WallStreetWindow.com.
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