Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and get the fingered at FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America, and by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been hacked.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, saying three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing Grant F. Smith.
He is the director of the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy, IRMEP, I-R-M-E-P, I-R-M-E-P dot org.
And he wrote Big Israel, all about the Israel lobby in Washington, D.C., and a bunch of great books about the Israel lobby before that.
And he sues under FOIA all day and breaks stories and writes great stuff.
And we reprint it all at Antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing?
I'm doing great, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
Right on, man.
Very happy to have you here.
Treasury sanctions foreigners for Israel.
You got a big one here.
Yeah, yeah, we do.
Like you said, you never get any information that's worthwhile out of the government unless someone leaks it or you sue them and get it out of a court battle with them.
And we sued the Treasury Department on September 1 of 2017 to get information about its operations, but specifically the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, a fairly new department of the Department of Treasury.
And starting to get some info, but also starting to see just how badly they want to not talk about this office.
All right.
So when was it created and by who and what for?
Well, if you look at the story, Treasury sanctions foreigners for Israel, well, Israel lobby captured OTFI sanctioned Americans, which was up on antiwar on August 30.
I attribute the creation of this office to the lobbying activities of the American Israel Public Affair Committee and its think tank, which is the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
And cite some of the congressional testimony that was taking place in 2003 as those organizations desperately lobbied the George W. Bush administration to launch this new Treasury unit.
And so to me, it's a case, a clear case of capture.
And in every filing we've made to the district's court, we've referred to this unit as being captive of the Israel lobby.
That's in every single filing in this case, which people can look at online at IRMEP.org slash CFP slash Treasury.
And nobody has presented any arguments saying this isn't a captured unit.
And by capture, we really mean that it was it's not just regulatory capture where like the Food and Drug Administration is captured by food and drug makers, which is an offsited case, not regulatory capture, because this thing was never really designed to regulate any activity or interest other than the Israel lobby.
So we're just calling it captured.
But basically, all day long, the OTFI is all about lodging economic sanctions, which are clearly designed to advance Israel's interests and not very clearly designed to advance any U.S. interests, particularly business and banking interests around the world.
So it's really if you look at OTFI, the Terrorism Financial Intelligence Unit created in 2004 is an umbrella for the Office of Foreign Assets Control.
And this is the office that's responsible for administering, quote unquote, U.S. economic sanctions programs.
And as everybody knows, these are the sanctions programs targeting Iran, targeting Syria, targeting Russia.
And so this is a powerful economic warfare unit that is virtually inscrutable to outsiders.
As I noted in the article, if you want to get a briefing about its so-called successes, you pretty much have to be a member of AIPAC or the Washington Institute to ever see the leadership of this organization give you a rundown about what they're doing.
But they typically refuse to answer or respond to any FOIA request citing the Bank Secrecy Act and saying that their work is just so vital to U.S. national security, they can't ever say what they're doing to the greater masses of Americans for whom they allegedly work.
Yeah.
Well, it sounds kind of elementary, but my first thing here is I wonder how many other organizations there are that, you know, federal government agencies and departments like this that I've never even heard of that have God knows what powers and responsibilities, you know?
Yeah, well… So wait, this goes back to Bush Jr. and the dawn of the terror war.
Is that when they created it?
Yep.
That's when they created it.
Oh, I see.
You say here 2004.
Right.
So all these men that have run the thing, when you say capture, you're talking about they've just been staffed straight out of AIPAC and went up?
Is that it?
No, not really straight out of.
I mean, if you look at the leadership, you can see that they've clearly been handpicked and selected and the lobbying and confirmation processes and recommendations have been Israel affinity groups.
But I'm not saying in the article, for instance, that the first leader, Stuart Levy, was right out of AIPAC, but he's a hardcore Zionist ideologue.
He wrote his Harvard thesis about Israel lobbying organizations.
He wrote it about the Jewish Defense League, which is a terrorist organization.
And as I read his thesis, it was clear to me that it was all about boiling a frog.
You know, if you want to boil a frog and not have it jump out of the pot, you have to raise the temperature slowly.
And this is all about getting the Israel lobby's objectives met without attracting too much attention, without generating blowback.
And he compared blowback and getting into trouble to the JDL, which is an organization that they're the ones who punch protesters in front of AIPAC in the face, as opposed to lodging behind the scenes activities like AIPAC does.
So he was the first leader of OTFI.
And then he pretty much laterally transferred the leadership to David Cohen, who worked at the same DC law firm as he did.
And Cohen, you know, Phil Weiss, the great Phil Weiss, wrote a piece about how he was running away from reporters who wanted to ask him about why OTFI wasn't sanctioning the Israeli nuclear weapons program, but only the Iranian non-nuclear weapons program, and how he refused to answer that as kind of a symbol for lack of accountability and capture.
And then go on to the third leader, Adam Zubin, who was never confirmed, like his predecessors, always available to present and brief people at AIPAC and WNEP, but not very publicly available.
And, and now we have Sigal Mandaker from the Pittsburgh area, who was a Justice Department employee who's now leading up to, well, leading OTFI.
And as Debka file, which is a, an interesting intelligence website says she either was or still is an Israeli citizen.
So there's a clear profile that you have to be a dedicated Zionist to get this position.
And the hearings and testimony given by these officials really puts that out front and center.
There's really no controversy that that's why they're there.
They're in this position to advance Israel.
And what the lawsuit is all about is finding out by soliciting personnel records, just how deep down this capture goes.
A lot of the officials are well known, but the questions raised by the lawsuit is, you know, where was this staffed by an influx of new people from the outside?
What are their backgrounds?
Are they all in agreement that this is an appropriate balance of sanctions?
Do any of them disagree?
And in the lawsuit, the latest filing, which is around 60 pages, we compare kind of point by point the Office of Special Plans, which has a lot of similarities with OTFI and the OTFI to make the point that the public has a right to know early who's staffing these.
You can't rely on revelations from a Karen Kutowsky years later that the thing was an operation that was basically working for a foreign government as opposed to any U.S. interests.
So we're not going to wait for that, because as the lawsuit filing explicitly states, sometimes the biggest national security threats to the U.S. are in fact U.S. government agencies and particularly secret government agencies.
Well, you can say that again.
Well, so I don't know if this belongs in your lawsuit or not, but in my most I don't even know if it's posted yet.
You may know my most recent interview of Larry Wilkerson.
He again states that, yeah, sure, there are a lot of neocons in the Bush Jr., the first Bush Jr. administration there when he was chief of staff for Colin Powell, the Secretary of State.
But he singles out he has before David Wormser, but who was at that time in the State Department.
But this time he again singled out Douglas Feith.
And he even told an anecdote that, which I had never heard this one before, that Colin Powell said to George W. Bush, you do know that the number three guy at the Pentagon is a card carrying member of the Likud party?
And that then Bush Jr. said, well, wait, you mean like I made him open his wallet.
He's actually got a Likud card in there.
Right, right.
And he said that that happened.
I guess he witnessed it or heard it.
I should have followed up.
But anyway, and so for people who aren't familiar, when you mentioned the Office of Special Plans there, Grant, that this was Feith's policy shop when he was the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy in the first Bush Jr. administration.
And under him, he had the Office of Special Plans, which was run by a guy named Abraham Shulsky.
He was another Likudnik.
And in fact, the whole group were a bunch of Likudniks.
And these were the guys who dug through the CIA's trash basically to make the WMD case.
Right.
And really pushed a lot of the lies from Chalabi and the exiles of the Iraqi National Congress.
Yeah, exactly.
And, you know, the Senate Armed Service Committee ultimately had an investigation and they really did find out this was a stovepipe operation with ties to a parallel unit in the Israeli government.
And that it really was a completely captured organization.
And I made the point in the lawsuit, another big OSP member was, of course, Lawrence Franklin.
And the specific argument that we make in this latest filing is that if Lawrence Franklin's identity had been known, if he wasn't just hidden away in the OSP, you know, reporters who were really digging into this could have dug into him a little bit more.
And maybe exposed him before he actually committed espionage on behalf of the Israelis when they were trying to circulate national intelligence information to tripwire the U.S. into attacking Iran.
That's the kind of thing that reporters can do if the FOIA can actually be allowed to function the way it's intended to and get information about who's in these units.
But, you know, of course, no, we have to spend two trillion dollars or more, you know, hundreds of thousands of wasted lives, futures unrealized, because this unit in government, like the OTFI, I would argue, was acting with no scrutiny as a captured foreign interest that was harming the United States.
So that's all in there.
And, you know, it's difficult because you can imagine you have a lot of people trying to do FOIA lawsuits on your program in the past.
The U.S. since 9-11, every single government agency is basically arguing the same thing, that all of their employees are under constant threat of, you know, abduction and terrorist attacks and blah, blah, blah.
They file these hair raising affidavits in court about just how exposed and valiant their employees are.
And they can't we can't really know anything about them or their background because they're all subject to immediate terrorist reprisals.
This this lawsuit, unlike others, presents some actual facts about how you're about 30 times more likely to be killed by a wild animal than a foreign terrorist these days.
And that this, you know, look in the rearview mirror at 9-11, it appears to be much closer than it actually is.
And in fact, it's receding and they need to stop this nonsense of claiming national security exemptions for FOIA requests like this.
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All right.
So talk more about, well, that's a huge point, too.
Sorry.
I don't know what else to say about it, though.
But tell me more about the clear pro-Israel agenda of this group as they've been created.
Again, this is the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, OTFI, at the Treasury Department.
Right.
So basically how it works is this, where the rubber meets the road is the SDN, which is a list of actors that can have sanctions applied to them.
It's the specially designated nationals and blocked persons list.
And boy, if you get on this list, you cannot get off it.
If somebody suspects that you are involved in terrorism or laundering money or whatever, there's no trial.
There's no indictment.
There's no jury of your peers.
You just go onto this list and the OTFI and OFAC units go to work on you trying to disconnect you from any banks, any markets that you might be involved in.
But as I note in the lawsuit, the reason why this is suspect is not only the application of just a whole basket of presidential executive orders and laws and extremely broad laws like the Economic Emergency Act, Powers Act, is that it seems as though, and you go through the list, they've got a soft spot for Israel.
So Israeli drug traffickers, Israeli nuclear smugglers, money laundering into what the 9-11 hijackers said was certainly a key problem of the US policy, which is illegal settlements – or excuse me, what has been raised as a key problem, which is illegal settlements.
They don't do anything about any of that.
Their focus is exclusively on targets that are either directly related or somewhat or indirectly related to Israel's advancement.
And so you're not going to see an organization like the Belgian company Telegy, which violated the Arms Export Administration Act of 79 by smuggling all sorts of nuclear testing equipment into Israel's nuclear weapons program.
You're not going to see Telegy on the SDN list.
And our argument is – the reason why is that the SDN and OTFI weren't created really to administer the law in a blind fashion.
They are dead set against doing anything about illegal settlement finance or nuclear trafficking because those are things that the Israeli government wants to do.
So forget about those violations.
Just focus on Iran.
Focus on Syria.
Focus on Russia.
So the charge that's elaborated on in this article is really that the enforcement is not balanced, that you could easily include people like Arnon Milchan, the Israeli spy but current-day Hollywood producer.
Put him on the list and sanction his companies and his income if this were a legitimate, balanced sort of justices' blind operation.
But they're never going to do that because, again, they were not only formed but they're captured by the Israel lobby in Israel and they're not going to target Israeli violators.
They're only going after Israel's rivals.
Well, that's what it sure sounds like.
So it's funny.
I wonder – do you know about the history of how this was created?
I'm having fun imagining the conversations where, well, we're just going to give the Israelis their own office at the Treasury Department to do what they want with American global police power here.
It will be fine.
No, I mean it's really – this is on a sort of a spectrum.
It's all about lobbying.
It's all about the hype over terrorism.
It's really related to sort of getting together an alternative to the justice system kind of like Guantanamo was.
A lot of the people were frustrated in the Israel lobby that they couldn't just shut down US charities that were helping the Palestinians.
They wanted to find an avenue to connect those charities to terrorism, to Hamas, and then shut them down with no due process.
And at the end of the spectrum is really a conversation that's going on right now about, hey, this OTFI and SDN model are really successful.
Let's start sanctioning Americans that dare engage in economic boycotts or cut off trade with Israel.
And let's use some of the same powers, some of the same statutes like the Emergency Economic Powers Act to target actual Americans.
I mean that's basically what the new Israel Anti-Boycott Act is all about.
So it's possible to look at the testimony and look at the people.
As far as having access to Apex files or Israeli government files about their interest in this unit, we don't have access to that.
They haven't been leaked by Julian Assange or anybody like that.
But if you simply apply the test of who's benefiting from all of this, look at the list, look at who's leading the organization, look at how hard it's fighting not to reveal anything about who works there, what it does.
And then also look at the Israel – the Anti-Boycott Act legislation as it undergoes modification and nears passage into law.
You can see what it's designed to do and who's benefiting from it.
So the warning and the reason why we thought it was important to file this lawsuit and talk about it is that if the Israel Anti-Boycott Act becomes law, Americans are also going to be able to be put on an SDN-like list.
And they're not going to have any due process either because the same sort of model is what's contemplated in that legislation.
So it's important for people who want to retain their First Amendment rights and maybe don't want to be subject or subjugated to a foreign-influenced sort of authority within their own federal government to stand up against this.
Yeah.
Well, so what does it mean?
You say in your article here that the Anti-Boycott Act legislation requires enforcement actions under this same authority and declares a national emergency.
But so that means that if your business, say, what, puts up a pro-Palestine, pro-PDS billboard that they get to seize your bank account or – what are we talking about?
That's the gist of it.
That's what I'm reading it as.
The International Emergency Economic Powers Act is really kind of an ancient piece of law that is more related to the conditions that existed in World War II.
And it's really kind of a dodo bird sitting in the middle of the statutes.
But it is cited in the Israel Anti-Boycott Act.
It's an authority granted to the president to deal with unusual and extraordinary threats.
And what the Israel Anti-Boycott Act argues is that if Americans actually refuse to accept agricultural products grown in illegal settlements by Israelis who have basically stolen Palestinian farms, that is an American economic emergency that demands a response underneath the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
And you can see that in the proposed legislation.
It's draconian.
And, you know, the fact that we've allowed OTFI to do this kind of thing to foreigners and nobody's raised a fuss about it is going to bite Americans as they themselves become subjected to this twisting of, again, a kind of obsolete American law as it's twisted and targeted against them for exercising their rights.
So, yeah, that's exactly what it means.
Your bank account is frozen.
You go to the ATM, the cash doesn't come out.
Your check bounces.
You know, the Bank Secrecy Act as well, which is what allows OTFI to hide behind that particular law to never disclose what it's actually doing, is somewhat draconian.
It's what really causes Americans to be watchful of depositing more than $10,000 in cash at their bank.
It requires mandatory reports if you do that.
It sort of prejudges that you're involved in criminal activity if you were to do that, because you immediately are made.
You're red flagged on a treasury list of suspicious transactions.
I mean, what's suspicious about depositing cash in a bank?
But suddenly you come on to the radar of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, FinCEN, which is also included in our lawsuit, I might say, to see who's working at FinCEN.
But, you know, it's basically using laws that industry fought tooth and nail.
The banking industry never liked the Bank Secrecy Act.
They immediately sued over it.
They thought it was a presidential power grab.
They fought it for 10 years before finally complying with it.
You know, these laws go on the book, and then they're incrementally accepted, and then suddenly they're being turned against parties that they, you know, as bad as they were, were never intended to be used against.
And that's what's coming down the pipe as Americans sit idly by and don't oppose the Israel Anti-Boycott Act.
They're going to be subject to it, or at least those of them who are trying to do something meaningful in terms of boycotts and protests.
Yep.
Well, ain't that always the way?
You got drones in the sky, and the torture law, and every other thing come home from the foreign empire, just like anybody who knew better might have told you was going to happen.
Right.
I mean, it always sounds like some crazy person is out there sounding the alarm bell, and then 10 years later it turns out that they did not strike the alarm bell loudly enough.
Right.
Well, you know, somebody like Chalmers Johnson was sitting there ringing it as loud as he possibly could.
Hey, everybody, give up your empire, live under it.
That's the lesson in history right there.
So here we are.
No good deed will be unpunished.
And the bad ones, they'll get away with those.
Seems like.
Yeah.
All right, Grant, you're great.
Thank you very much.
Appreciate it.
Great, Scott.
Bye.
All right, you guys, that's Grant F. Smith.
He's at the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy, IRMEP, IRMEP.org, and also at Antiwar.com, Treasury Sanctions Foreigners for Israel.
All right, y'all, thanks.
Find me at Libertarian Institute.org, at Scott Horton.org, Antiwar.com, and Reddit.com slash Scott Horton Show.
And again, read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan, at foolserrand.us.
