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Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
Our next guest is Grant F. Smith.
He runs the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy.
That's I-R-M-E-P dot org.
IRMEP dot org.
And he's the author of America's Defense Line, and Spy Trade, and a lot of other great books concerning the Israel lobby's influence on American foreign policy.
Welcome back to the show, Grant.
Hey Scott, thanks for having me on.
I'm really happy to have you here.
Now here's the thing, we just finished the last interview with Eric Margulies talking about the modern anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, because after all it is mostly directed at Arabs, although you can take it however you like, metaphorical or otherwise, the anti-Muslim conspiracy theory that basically Islam is what caused the 9-11 attacks in the first place, and that therefore, I guess, American Muslims are all part of this same thing.
Just like the Jews in Europe in the 1930s were accused of being able to all hear each other think and all secretly agreeing to somehow bring down the German state from within, the enemy, the fifth column, destroying us from within, and what have you, this kind of conspiracy theory is being pushed about Muslims right now.
But at the same time, somebody just made a comment actually on the Flint Leverett interview saying, I can't believe this sort of anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that you guys are doing, blaming the Jews for the downfall of America.
When you pick on these neoconservatives and you pick on the Israel lobby, when it's you, you're the ones who have destroyed yourselves with this empire, and you want to pick on these neocons, it's really no different than the neocons are doing to the Muslims.
So what do you say about all that, Grant?
Oh, I think that's an oversimplification.
First, just on the mosque, I mean, this is a litmus test for whether or not there is truly going to be any freedom of expression in this country.
So I think it's probably a good thing that all of these pressures are being revealed so publicly, and people can take a stand of whether they're for or against that kind of freedom of expression.
Obviously, this center should be built, it should be built, and it should not be hidden away, people should know it's there, people should visit it, mosques are not scary places, and they should educate themselves about it.
So I think Michael Bloomberg is right, and MJ Rosenberg is right, and people who are writing about this as being pure demagoguery are absolutely right.
I don't really see the conflation with looking into the neoconservative policy leadership we've had in this country, because really, these groups and organizations are all but unchallenged.
I mean, here in Washington, D.C., there are great policy shows on 24-7, and across the rest of the country, where it's considered to be a balanced debate to have Martin Indyk from the Brookings Institution on with people from the Washington Institute for Near East Affairs and Near East Policy, and the American Enterprise Institute all on the same show, pretty much debating each other, when in fact, that's all pretty much the same view.
So I don't see challenging some of the leading and most enfranchised groups and their policies being all that comparable to making a war against some of the most disenfranchised groups.
I mean, our U.S. Treasury Department has basically gone after something like 12 or 13 Muslim institutions, charities, tiny compared to a lot of the other groups, and basically put them out of business with no due process.
I mean, that's the kind of country that we're becoming, and I think it's tragic.
Well, and now I've read a couple of your books, and I've read a lot of what you've written before, and I don't think I've ever seen you use the term the Jews or any such thing.
I mean, what you write about is the Israeli government and their agents and their friends and the things that they do that are actual things.
When the war parties says Islamic extremism is Islamic extremism, they're being deliberately vague because they don't want to talk about the truth of why anybody would do anything bad to America.
So instead they have to make up this myth that they hate us because they're Muslim and we're good.
And I don't think that that is much of a parallel with your work.
But then again, here's the thing, too, where I want to make this point and let you respond to it, too.
You know, America for a long, long time has not been run by Jews.
And in fact, most neoconservatives are or many neoconservatives are Jews, but many neoconservatives are not.
And almost all of them come from kind of upper middle class backgrounds.
These are not people who, you know, the actual membership of the American Enterprise Institute, for example.
These aren't people who were born billionaires.
These aren't the top one half or one percent of the American empire that rule things.
And it is a common tradition throughout history when governments do bad things, especially to their own people, to blame it on Jews who happen to work in the state, but not at the highest levels.
They're always the deputy assistant secretary of something.
But they end up getting the blame for, you know, the waspy wasps like George W. Bush and the people who are really making the decisions.
What about that?
I have a big problem with George W. Bush.
I have a huge problem with Ashcroft.
And actually I've written quite a bit about that as well.
And it's really not people or religion I think we need to focus on.
You know, and you're right.
What I write about is crime and corruption, basically.
I mean, I cut my teeth back in the 80s working on Citizen League projects against groups that were taking tax dollars and using it to lobby the government.
So it's that sort of thing that I'm most concerned about.
And I happen to focus on AIPAC and I happen to focus on some of the other groups because we have a huge problem with the way that they're operating in the United States and what they're actually doing against what they claim to be doing.
I think, you know, everyone needs to be aware of anti-Semitism.
Everyone needs to be aware of history.
And everyone needs to also be willing to take a cold, hard look at who has been driving policy objectives, whether it was for the war on Iraq or whether it's to support the blockade on the Palestinians or whether it's for the new drive to attack Iran on false pretenses.
And go after the groups and individuals who are pushing that and not be afraid to call them out on it.
And also not be afraid to be called names if you're becoming effective at that, because that will happen.
I mean, it's inevitable that if you're attacking Richard Perle, if you're attacking the Kagans, as you so eloquently do, someone's going to...
Eloquently?
And not.
But effectively, someone's going to call you a name.
So live with it and keep rolling, because really it's the policies.
It's not the people.
It's the tragedies.
It's not the religion.
And again, everyone who's protesting against letting some mild-mannered Muslims have their center in lower Manhattan really needs to reflect on this.
Because I think in a few years after this blows over, they're going to realize that they were on the wrong side.
Well, I sure hope so.
It usually takes so many years, it seems like, for people to admit they're wrong.
But oh well, I don't know why it's so hard.
I kind of like admitting I'm wrong.
That's how I learn new stuff, you know, and let the new stuff replace the old stuff I used to think until it couldn't hold up no more.
Well, thank God for new media, because it's pretty impossible to sustain a gigantic, bogus, ideologically-based worldview when you have five comments underneath your article saying, Hey, you know you got this wrong?
You know, I get dates wrong once in a while.
People call me out on it and I'll say, Oh yeah, you're right, I got the date wrong.
Big deal.
But you do have to be willing to say if someone challenges you, you have to respond.
And that's another thing that I think people find so aggravating.
It's all but impossible to get a Tom Friedman to respond to some of his more egregious worldviews.
He just won't do it.
And I think that's a real problem.
All right.
Well, I kind of, I think it's problematic that we have to, maybe we don't have to, but that we did spend ten minutes kind of on all disclaimer about what bigots neither of us are.
But so I want to come back and I want to talk about the actual thing that would tend to get somebody criticized along those lines when we get back after this.
All righty.
You can sign up for the Liberty Radio Network email updates at updates.lrn.fm and join us on Facebook at facebook.lrn.fm.
All right, welcome back to the show.
We're all out of segments for me to rant and rave.
We're just wrapping up this interview with Grant Smith, wrapping up the third hour of the show here today.
So let me just say real quick, if you look at my Facebook page or the antiwar.com slash blog, you can find YouTube of me on Russian TV talking about Iran's new nuclear reactor and their nuclear program in general.
And then sometime today, Iranian state TV is going to post an interview that I did with them.
And that's press TV.
And we'll have links up everywhere and what have you.
And that was about Gates and Iraq and Afghanistan and Obama and such like that.
So I don't I haven't seen the edit yet.
It was a 20 minute interview, but it is what it is.
So look for that if you're interested in that kind of thing.
We're talking with Grant Smith and he runs the Institute for Research Middle East Policy.
That's IRMEP.org.
And, you know, Grant, I think, you know, we're talking.
I brought up that comment on the Flint Leverett interview.
And I think I got a pretty reasonable guess at what it was that set that person off.
And it was probably Leverett's statement that unlike the Iraq war, in his view, the Israel lobby and the neoconservatives in America and their interest being Israel are the number one and almost exclusive proponents of an American war against Iran.
That really the Pentagon doesn't want a war against Iran.
Maybe the Air Force, like Gareth Porter says, but the rest of the branches of the military don't want one.
The old CFR establishment types don't want one.
And I don't I don't know about the oil men and the guys over at Lockheed and Northrop Grumman.
Obviously, what they think counts for a lot.
But according to Flint Leverett, like, yeah, it's the neocons.
I don't know what to tell you, but that's who they are.
And and again, they're not all Jewish, but they are all Israel first years.
Yeah, well, I can.
I think that it's a strong argument to say that it's pretty hard to point to a Dick Cheney or an energy interest map of oil fields in Iran or anything like that and say, hey, there's a heavy clandestine industrial desire to get into Iran.
And, of course, most of the people, the Jeffrey Goldberg at all, who are out there beating the drums of war, they're largely, you know, alone.
And so I think it's a fair comment for for Leverett to say that this is being primarily driven by a lot of neoconservative groups.
And, you know, if if no one wants that charge to be made, then maybe some of the ads should come down or maybe at least some genuine, critical and eloquent people can now be allowed on the air, on the national public radios and on the C-SPAN shows on the same panel as all of these war proponents to debate at the same time live.
And one of the things I wrote about last week is the fact that as a group, the lobby has had a written policy of not allowing that to happen through a lot of tactics of denying venue and not showing up, not allowing programmers to even program that sort of event.
So I think you said it yourself on your RT interview that because there is no debate and no one's allowed to make any debate, it certainly looks like there's only really one group out there and allowed to talk about these issues.
And that's not the way it should be, not in the U.S.
And by the way, never mind my sloppy paraphrase.
People, you know, Flint Leverett certainly speaks for himself.
He and his wife write at RaceForIran.org and people can look at Antiwar.com slash radio and find the archive of his interview.
My interview of him, Gareth Porter, also interviewed him on the show.
But it was, I think, last month or in June.
And I think it's got a transcript, too.
And he can speak for himself.
I was roughly paraphrasing.
So I don't want to put words in anybody's mouth.
But I think basically what he was saying, and in fact he was very careful and said that he disagreed with a lot of people who said that the Israel lobby was really the decisive factor in the Iraq war.
But that he thought in this case, I mean, there's really no argument to be made about it, I think.
Yeah, yeah.
But anyway, so now let's talk about your most recent article here, the Israel Lobby Swims the Atlantic.
Of course you mentioned the IDF prison guard now masquerading, I think is what Glenn Greenwald called it, as a journalist at the Atlantic Monthly.
And his article about the inevitability of an Israeli and or American war against Iran.
And now you've got an article here about the history of the Atlantic and the Israeli government and what it is that they write and want us to read.
Right, well, you know, I was at the National Archives taking receipt of a lot of declassified Senate records.
And it amazed me that virtually the same time I was seeing about how AIPAC's predecessor organization was working in their media plans to get lots of content about, at that time, Dimona and Arab refugees.
And in fact the Atlantic...
Wait, wait, wait, tell them what Dimona is.
Dimona, well, Dimona is the site of Israel's nuclear weapons facility, which Mordecai Ben-Nuneh showed in the London Sunday Times, was in fact manufacturing nuclear weapons.
And which American presidents and the rest of government isn't allowed to talk about because it might upset the Israelis.
But anyway, that was one of the policy agendas back in the 60s was promoting content that it was just a scientific facility.
And the other top, one of the other top agenda items was working with the Atlantic and buying lots of reprints and getting stories printed that the Palestinians, that none of them should return to their homes and properties in what's now Israel to have any sort of compensation, that all of them would eventually be happier integrating into the surrounding neighborhood.
And it was surprising to see, I mean, the documents are, you know, they're executive reports from AIPAC's predecessor organization.
They're very carefully worded.
They brag about planning stories, they brag about working with editors, they brag about pressuring organizations like the Christian Science Monitor to kill stories.
It's all very damning stuff.
But basically it makes the Atlantic look like an appendage or, you know, useful bullhorn for having stories come out that are favorable to Israeli government policies.
And so the article that I wrote simply compared and contrasted that.
And, well, there's been a lot of download activity on the reports which are naming all of these magazines.
And that's good.
That's only the tip of the iceberg.
What I found in this particular Senate file is that most of the damning stuff from the investigation and even the Senate transcripts were modified under pressure of the organizations that were taking heat.
And the outcome of all of this is why AIPAC exists in its current form.
It's because at the end of this investigation, its predecessor or parent organization was rightfully ordered to begin openly disclosing its activities, not as a U.S. nonprofit organization, but rather as an Israeli foreign agent.
You know, Stephen Walt, who, of course, has been widely criticized and praised for his work on the Israel lobby's influence in America, said on this show that, hey, listen, and he said this numerous times.
Of course, they said this in the book and in the in the original article at the London Review of Books, the Israel lobby in U.S. foreign policy, that in a democracy like ours, take that for granted.
It's perfectly OK for a foreign government or for Americans who are loyal to a foreign government to lobby the Congress to do things their way.
What's important is that we have an honest discussion about this, that lobbies that are interested in what's good for foreign nations, perhaps even at the expense of our own, are subject to the same rules, 14th Amendment style, as each other and, you know, equal protection of the laws and all that, and that in the free media that we can discuss these things openly and ask ourselves whether, for example, America must have a policy against Iran that is basically devised in Tel Aviv instead of according to what American interests are, even if you define the most widely definable American imperial interests.
Still, are we doing what we want or what the lobbyists representing a foreign power want here?
Yeah, well, I would disagree with some of that, because if you follow the trajectory of the most important organization, which is AIPAC, the guy who formed it was an employee for public relations at the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
He was repeatedly pursued by the Department of Justice to register as a foreign agent.
He brought a lot of money from the wrong places to start up AIPAC.
AIPAC has since gone on to be investigated by the FBI for theft of government property involving clandestine documents or commercial information, theft of government property.
It was investigated for espionage just back in 2005.
It's still got a court case about ordering the coordination of political action committees.
So an organization that's been under investigation for so many illegal activities with that sort of history, I would argue that it's not as American as apple pie as it holds itself out to be.
And the other thing that kind of goes against the grain of what Walt said is that if you look at these documents that were released just last week, it shows the comprehensive strategy for suppressing debate.
One of the reasons Walt can't have a debate with Dennis Roth and Martin Indyk and Richard Perl at the same table is they would never do that.
And they would work hard to make sure that he could never talk about that in any other forum as well.
A real Democratic American organization doesn't engage in that kind of behavior and still claim that it's working for the best interest of the U.S., as AIPAC continues to do.
Well, you know, I was trying to pay close attention to the first Gulf War, but I was only in ninth grade.
And this whole part of the debate completely escaped me.
And that was where Pat Buchanan said that Congress is Israeli occupied territory.
And they have a lot of influence on this policy going on right now.
And he got excoriated for that.
And people still hold that against him as though it's just some sort of racist statement.
But I guess maybe a less bigoted question mark version of that same statement comes from Steve Rosen, who was part of the espionage case you were just referring there from 2004 and 2005, who was the head of AIPAC, who told Jeffrey Goldberg, the guy of The Atlantic, again, we're talking about, when he was back at The New Yorker magazine, that, you see this napkin?
By this time tomorrow, I could have 77 senators' signatures on this napkin.
Yeah, I think, yeah, go ahead.
Well, that's the setup for my question, which is, could you please paint a fair and accurate portrait of how much influence in Congress the Israel lobby really has and why?
It ain't because they're angels, and it ain't because their policy is good for America.
I already know that.
Yeah, well, the real reason that AIPAC is so powerful is that it's at the forefront.
Its executive committee is composed of 54 organizations, ranging from everyone from the Zionist Organization of America to the Americans for the Israeli Defense Forces.
And so they've got this comprehensive executive directory of organizations that are heavily involved and extremely influential in themselves.
And then they're also able to send messages to individual donors and political action committees to either disperse or withhold funding to candidates based on AIPAC's scorecard.
Besides the illegal activities that they've engaged in in the past and successfully managed to wriggle out of, their real base of power is that base of political action committee and campaign finance.
And the big problem here is that unlike the NRA and unlike the American Association of Retired People, the organization is dedicated to promoting the interests of a foreign government.
And this entire statement that U.S. interests and Israeli interests are the same is the way that they try to make it seem as though it's okay to do that, when in fact it's not.
There shouldn't be an organization that is as closely tied as AIPAC is to the Israeli government operating in that fashion in the United States.
And the fact that there's been so many efforts by the Justice Department and by other groups, including Jewish organizations, to regulate them properly, I think makes a strong case again for showing that this is not as American as apple pie as the Israel lobby book says.
But you have to be more specific than just simply saying occupied territory.
You have to actually show what they're doing.
And I mention this because we're looking at Senate record documents which were unsealed only now, which were showing this massive media manipulation campaign going on.
And it's difficult when you have to wait decades and decades to look at the real story.
And that's one of the problems.
It's also one of the reasons why a lot of people and organizations are beginning to write so much about the Israel lobby.
Well, now, the great Andrew Coburn, who's, I hope, going to be on the show this week to talk about the 1980s and 90s in Iraq, he wrote this great book called Rumsfeld, His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy.
And part of his time explaining that book on this show was talking about his view of the neoconservative movement as basically, yeah, a front for the Israel lobby, but also a front for the military industrial complex.
And that basically, you know, Fort Worth and Washington State and, you know, I guess Georgia and all these places, well, pretty much every state in the union now, but especially these centers of power away from D.C. and New York, who are the recipients of, you know, the new right, basically, after World War II, the recipients of all these military industrial complex dollars, that they really needed to hire some intellectuals to justify their policy of permanent war.
And they found common cause with the Israel lobby.
And that that part of it is apple pie.
It's poisonous, but it is American.
And you could even kind of break down the difference pretty easily, right, between Stephen Hadley and Richard Pearl and these guys who were basically corporatists, fascists, military industrial complex types, compared to, say, some weenie like Bill Kristol, who last time he had a government job, it was telling Dan Quayle what to say.
And otherwise, just, you know, as a writer, and, you know, Francis Fukuyama, and these other people who basically are just the sort of court intellectuals.
There are, you know, you can divide them pretty easily from Richard Pearl and the guys who actually get these things done, right?
I mean, in a way?
Well, I disagree with that, because it kind of gets cause and effect backwards.
I mean, people like to say, well, you know, the U.S. supports Israel because it gets to, you know, pump all of these weapons into Israel.
Well, the only reason the U.S. has so many connections with the Israeli military industrial complex is because the Israelis really worked hard to embed themselves into U.S. contracting back in the early 70s.
And so the process for getting memorandums of understanding and getting it so that U.S. bases could be serviced by Israeli service providers, or so that if there were a weapons system being built, the Israelis would have to have a certain percentage of the action on that contract.
None of that was pushed by the U.S.
In fact, a lot of U.S. defense contractors resented it because it meant they had the plant full of Israelis who were many times hauling off boxes of plans, like in recon optical, taking them back home and then putting together competing products.
So I think most U.S. arms manufacturers would have been perfectly content not to have their sales limited or qualified or contingent upon the whims of the Israel lobby, you know, as good or bad or potentially worse as that might be.
You know, you hear this over and over again, putting the cart before the horse.
You'll hear lobbyists say, well, Truman was the greatest president for recognizing Israel.
But if you go to the Truman Library and look at his correspondence, I mean, you see that he was heavily pressured, heavily lobbied, tremendously resentful.
And you see that in the private correspondence of a lot of U.S. presidents who are hailed as all of these great leaders and benefactors, the fact that they had their arms twisted.
Well, but there's also the just plain old follow the money.
And if you go to the PNAC side, or I don't know if it's the PNAC one anymore, if they still have it, but, you know, you look at the AEI, you look at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and all these guys, they're all intertwined with Lockheed.
Oh, they are now.
What I'm saying is it's not like Lockheed or the U.S. government was going after a big project in the Middle East centered on Israel.
In other words, the reason the neocons are rich is not because of the military-industrial complex.
The reason the neocons are rich is because of the Israel lobby, and then the military-industrial complex is, all right, then.
I would say that's more accurate.
If you're moving the dollars, if you're in Ginza, if you're able to put the kibosh on a Saudi sale and ramp up the Israeli sale, that's why you have integration into Lockheed.
And, you know, again, in general, the whole idea of feeding the military-industrial complex as opposed to, you know, maybe repairing our national infrastructure is a whole other debate that might be worth having.
But, you know, it is constantly getting the argument exactly reversed.
The reason that Israel is such an integrated portion of the U.S. defense establishment is not because it was a great thing for the U.S. defense establishment.
It was because of tireless lobbying, tireless memorandum of understanding, and, you know, a lot of fairly nefarious activities, including the 1984 theft of a lot of corporate information back when the U.S. was negotiating a free trade agreement.
So, you know, again, there's a clear documentary record of the entire history of memorandums of understanding.
Every single one of them was instigated by the lobby, instigated by the lobby.
None of them were brought forward by industry.
All right, now if people go to IRMEP, IRMEP.org, the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy, what sort of other documents can they find?
Well, you should go to the Israel Lobby Archive because, again, because this collection of lobbies gets relatively little attention, if you go in there, what you see are a lot of declassified documents.
One of the most important ones is the GAO study, which is looking into the diversion of weapons-grade uranium from the United States.
And that report took a tremendous amount of effort to get declassified, and we still haven't gotten all of the CIA information that was redacted from it declassified, but it talks about how one time the Congress attempted to find out what happened to the uranium from a facility in Pennsylvania that suffered the heaviest losses of any facility in the United States of highly enriched uranium.
So people should read that.
It's extremely – it reads like a spy novel, and we hosted a conference around that document just a couple of months ago.
Well, you know – oh, I'm sorry, go ahead.
Oh, there's also correspondence from Senator Arlen Specter, who tried to get the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to clear the head of the plant because he'd like to have a nice clean legacy.
There are all of the incorporation documents of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, which show that while its parent company was being ordered to register as a foreign agent, how they incorporated and achieved tax-exempt status, which is an interesting document trail.
The 1984 FBI theft of government property espionage investigation into AIPAC is there.
The Steve Rosen civil suit against AIPAC documents are there, in which he's alleging that AIPAC has a parallel declassification unit within it that makes it okay to traffic classified information.
Cool.
Those documents are there.
The development of the Symington Amendment and how U.S. foreign aid, if the U.S. recognized Israel as a nuclear weapon state, would be affected.
There's information about the Jewish Agency for Israel, which is a parastatal organization that hosted Dennis Ross most recently before he left for the National Security Council.
It's an organization that had a history of setting up a smuggling network in the United States back in the Ben-Gurion days, and which has now just announced its return to the U.S. to lobby from New York.
The Department of Justice and Treasury refusal to investigate laundering from U.S. tax exempts in the Israeli settlements.
The entire battle to register AIPAC's parent as a foreign lobby is in there.
Lots of stuff.
People should check out the Israel Lobby Archive.
Yeah, as well, they should check out your archive, Grant Smith's archive, at antiwar.com.
There's a lot of really great articles in there, and, of course, all heavily linked to the sources, as well.
And everybody, again, if you want that archive he was just talking about, there's audio, video, and tons of documents, all kinds of stuff, and links to a bunch of great books, as well, at irmep.org, I-R-M-E-P.org, the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today, Grant.
All right.
Thanks a lot, Scott.
Peace.
Bye.
