Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to 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 had.
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, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, bitch, say it, say it 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 Ben Freeman.
He is the director of the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative at the Center for International Policy.
Okay.
And author of the Foreign Policy Auction.
Oh, that sounds fun.
So he's got this piece at Tom Dispatch following the foreign policy money trail in Washington.
And so, of course, we've republished that under Tom's name, Tom Englehart's name at Antiwar.com.
And so welcome back to the show, Ben.
How are you doing?
Thanks.
I'm doing great.
What year did this book come out here?
Oh, 2012, it says.
Okay, great.
The Foreign Policy Auction.
And that's certainly the subject here.
Last time we spoke, it was about the Middle Eastern lobby in, well, I guess, especially the Arab lobby or lobbies in Washington, D.C.
And that's what this article is about again, but especially the think tanks and the different think tanks in the different kingdoms.
I guess kings, sultans, emirs and so forth who finance them and what it all means.
It sounds like, am I right to say they're kind of following the Israeli example of trying to skate the definition of foreign lobby in doing it this way?
That, oh, these are all Americans who just happen to see things Saudi Arabia's way, for example.
Yeah, I think that's a big part of it.
What they do with think tanks is they're making these, in some cases, multimillion dollar donations.
We have a full report coming out on this in a few months, but we've already found several multimillion dollar donations.
Like Qatar, for example, gave $14 million in just one year to Brookings.
And we don't really have any idea about what they get in return for that money.
Are they getting favorable reports?
Are they getting favorable testimony before Congress?
Are they getting the folks at those think tanks to say the right thing on TV, on NPR, wherever?
We really don't know because there's no transparency there.
Well, but I mean, you do have C-SPAN.
So when you check, and Brookings has a website.
And by the way, for the people who aren't familiar, because not everybody knows every think tank, but Brookings, they essentially are the Hillary Clintonites, right?
The very center-left Democrat type think tank.
Yeah, they are known for being— Not partisan, but that era, that place on the spectrum, essentially, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I'd say that's fair.
They do have plenty of folks at Brookings who are kind of center-right, too.
Brookings, by and large, is sort of a kind of down-the-center kind of place.
But they're not immune from this.
And the point I always make in foreign influence is if you're a foreign power, it doesn't matter to you if it's a Democrat or a Republican.
As long as they can get the job done you want to get done, they'll probably throw some money at you.
Well, and I say Hillary, too, because she's a pretty right-wing hawkish Democrat for a Democrat, a pretty centrist Democrat.
I mean, because there could be—I know there are think tanks that are much further to the left, that kind of thing.
But just so, like, in the scheme of things, so people understand what we're talking about when we're talking about Brookings.
Because $14 million is a lot of money.
But then, so the question is, do their people write a bunch of pro-Saudi propaganda?
And, look, we've got to protect Yemen from Iran or whatever garbage.
Or what are they doing?
Yeah, in a lot of cases we're finding that they are.
But that's really the hard part, because we can't get these contracts behind these donations.
We can't see exactly what's going on.
In other words, you have lots of correlations, but you can't prove causation.
You don't want to claim causation until you have brass tacks in writing.
That's exactly right.
I hear you.
Unfortunately, that's where kind of the investigative component comes in.
And we're able to sometimes get some of these personal email communications from these folks at these think tanks.
Because a lot of folks at think tanks, they still just want to be there to do the right thing.
Their heart's in the right place.
So they're willing to leak out emails, which is what we found in the article I highlight, the Center for American Progress, which is very much a left-wing democratic think tank.
Yeah, they're much more directly tied to the Democratic Party, right?
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
I mean, this is a place that was founded by John Podesta.
He used to be the president of it, and he was also Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman.
So this is very much a Democratic Party outfit.
And what we found there was some of the emails got leaked from a guy who was working there, who it appears very explicitly said they needed to tone down their response to the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.
And it just turns out that that guy, he also helps to organize trips to the UAE for think tank folks.
He's contacted all the time by the UAE's lobbyists in D.C.
Oh, yeah, and Cap gets a lot of money from the UAE, too.
Saudi Arabia's great ally.
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Well, so did you do much analysis or in your upcoming report, do you have much attempt to correlate some causation here on the case of Syria?
Because here we have a policy, especially in the Obama years, this just absolutely insane backing.
The bin Ladenite insurgency from Iraq War II imported into Syria as long as it's against Iran's friend.
And, of course, Saudi and Qatar played a big role in that war over on, you know, there with fighters and money.
But so what about in Washington, D.C.?
Because, boy, is there a bizarre kind of surreal sort of consensus among all the experts for this absolutely insane policy that they pursued there.
Yeah, yeah, there really was.
And the funny thing was, as with a lot of foreign policy, the experts here are often just clamoring for war.
And then back home, you know, most Americans are like, wait, who are we bombing and why the heck are we bombing them?
And that was definitely the case with Syria here.
And what we found is that a lot of a lot of Saudi, a lot of Saudi money and Emirati money we're finding, too.
It was very much complicit in trying to get the U.S. more involved in Syria and to sway how our involvement, you know, would play out there.
And so the money, it's another great example of how foreign money coming from these governments more and more just tries to draw the U.S. into wars that I think the American people just really don't want to be in.
Yeah, well, and then so I guess the same thing on Yemen, too.
It must be if anything else they've bought, if nothing else, they bought silence on Yemen.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, absolutely.
And that's the crazy thing about Yemen.
You have this terrible scenario on the ground in Yemen, you know, declared the world's worst humanitarian crisis.
Over 10,000 civilians killed there.
We have all this evidence piling up that that a lot of the civilians are being killed, you know, with U.S.-made arms.
And U.S. is involved in aerial refueling and, you know, definitely has this, has its fingers in the Yemen war.
And yet for years, nobody, nobody really cared here.
Nobody, not a lot of folks were really talking about our role in Yemen.
And unfortunately, it took the tragic murder of Jamal Khashoggi to kind of pull, pull the wool back from people's eyes and lift the veil on all the terrible things that Saudi Arabia was doing.
And a big one of those being the disastrous war they got us involved in in Yemen.
Yeah.
Now, so one thing I'm sure you hear this all the time is people paraphrasing a thing that you never said.
It's certainly something that I never said, or even Grant Smith, who specializes in the Israel lobby, for example, never said that these guys are infallible and all controlling and some, you know, horrible trope of some kind or another.
But what it really comes down to, though, is that these foreign governments have more influence than the American people have.
So that's not everything.
And, you know, there are obviously power factions of Americans who, you know, will choose differently than the Israelis or the Saudis want on any given issue or what have you.
But when it comes to us idiots out here in flyover country or something, we're not even on the scale of comparison in the influence that these guys have.
Yeah, I would say that's absolutely true.
And the sad thing is here in D.C. is that you see people basically being bought off for nothing, but very cheap in the grand scheme of things.
You know, if you're Saudi Arabia or if you're the United Arab Emirates, you know, you have billions and billions of dollars of just oil money, for example.
And so if you put a few million dollars into a think tank here, it's chump change for you.
But a lot of the folks here, you know, at a think tank or if they're at a lobbying firm here, then they might do exactly what this foreign power wants for nothing.
And that may have nothing to do with what's in the U.S. interest or what's in the American interest or what folks like you're talking about in flyover country, what real Americans really care about.
All these folks here care about in some of these cases is their pocketbook and trying to get a little bit richer.
And meanwhile, you know, if so many people are doing that, American foreign policy suffers because of it.
Yeah.
You know, the last time we spoke, you had this piece for Tom Dispatch along these lines.
And I guess it was more about Congress.
And he told the story of this senator who the Saudis bought a genocide from him for just three thousand dollars.
Was it two thousand dollars?
Yeah.
Two thousand.
Two thousand dollars.
Can you name names on that again for us?
Yeah.
Well, there are a lot of names in that story, man.
I'm never one to not name names because I think that the people have a right to know when their elected officials are selling them out.
They have a right to know exactly who's doing it.
But but in that case, we were talking about former Senator Norm Coleman there.
And there were some folks at a lobbying firm here, lobbying and law firm here called Brownstein Hyatt that were also involved in that, too.
And it's amazing.
And I think it's another one of those examples where, you know, it doesn't take a lot of money, I think, to sway people.
And in this case, it was he was he was good on a bill to prevent the sale of more bombs to the Saudis.
And he got a phone call and a couple thousand dollars.
Then he changed his mind and changed his vote to allow the weapons transfer there.
So a real consequential thing for a couple of grand.
Right.
And now, of course, you know, the the the other side, he might come back and say, you know, the money had nothing to do with it.
It was just a really persuasive phone call that I got.
You know, he just got just the information he needed to make the informed choice.
Yeah.
And the two thousand dollars the same day was a coincidence.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, it just happened to be a campaign contribution.
You know, the two things aren't related, but that's what we get here.
And also another one that I get a lot from folks when I point out these things and I say, you know, hey, you know, on the same day you're meeting with the Saudis lobbyists or these Emirati lobbyists.
You know, you took some you took some big bucks from them.
You know, what do you have to say about that?
And the most common response that I get on that is actually, well, I take a lot of money.
That didn't really matter because I'm taking so much money from so many people like that.
That doesn't make it any better.
Yeah.
They're runner up excuses.
I don't know anything about the Middle East.
I don't pay any attention to that.
I'm on the tax committee or whatever.
Yeah, I'm just so awash in cash, you know, I can't pay attention to all of the different people who try to buy me off.
Yeah, exactly.
That's why I learn everything I know from TV instead of reading.
And this is the danger that I that I try to point out in the in the recent piece.
The one that just came out this week was that so many of the folks that you see on, you know, on NBC, even mainstream networks, Fox and, you know, CNN, whoever.
A lot of these, you know, Middle East experts are this, you know, Saudi Arabia experts.
A lot of these folks are coming from these think tanks.
And I know that these think tanks are funded by these same governments these guys are talking about.
But the average American, you know, the average viewer of a Fox or an NBC, they have no idea that the person that they're hearing from, you know, is in at least some way being paid by the Saudis or the Emiratis.
And I think that, you know, that's got to change.
If you're going to you're going to try to claim your credible media source, at the very least, just tell your viewers that, hey, you know, this guy you're hearing from right now, the place where he works.
Well, they take two million dollars from the Saudis.
Just want to let you know.
Well, that's the funny thing, right, is this such a corrupt and dishonorable thing that to even say it all, to even say that at all would imply a severe conflict of interest and would really kind of impugn the guy would be like an accusation against him.
What a way to introduce your guest on your TV show, you know.
Right.
Right.
Right.
Just sounds horrible just to even say it out loud at all.
Yeah.
And also, the other thing is, if they did it, they'd have to do it for almost every guest.
They write because because, you know, most of this town in one way or another is, you know, has these conflicts of interest.
It's sort of the dirty little secret of the swamp here that nobody wants to talk about.
The funding of these places really matters.
It really does affect the work and it really affects what these people are saying to Americans all over the country.
And now so but this has got to be I mentioned at the beginning that, you know, obviously the Israelis are the vanguard in this.
But like, what's the history of this?
How did it come to be that?
I mean, wasn't there an era, I don't know, when I was a little kid or before that or something where it couldn't be this blatant?
You couldn't have foreign governments come in and set up think tanks or at least buy them up in such a blatant way and buy up so much influence.
I know they have the foreign foreign powers registration, this and that, but it's never enforced.
And then or it's never updated to include all the fancy ways that people have come up with for getting around it.
But it just seems like, wow, what a imperial free for all up there where the satellites are just divvying up all the stakes and putting, you know, American faces on all their activities.
And the American people are almost oblivious to the whole thing going on.
Yeah, it seems like somebody's job was supposed to be to prevent this.
Don't tell me the FBI or something.
Unfortunately, I do have to tell you, it is the FBI.
Oh, I see the problem.
And no, you really hit the nail on the head in so many in so many ways.
And it really does go back to the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
And the reason we get that quick history lesson there, it's actually all Hitler's fault.
You know, back right before World War Two, Hitler had a bunch of Nazi propagandists working in the U.S. trying to get the U.S. on the Nazi side, or at the very least, just get the U.S. to stay out of World War Two.
We found out about it.
We said, you know, you know, maybe that's a bad idea.
Maybe we should have a law about this.
And so we create this Foreign Agents Registration Act or FARA, as we call it.
And then FARA, so this is a 1938 law.
You know, it gets a couple updates in the 60s and then another update in the early 90s.
But that's it.
That's the last time this law has been updated.
And so when you think about that, this law we have that's, you know, supposed to protect us from this undue foreign interference, the last time it was updated, you were probably dialing up your Internet connection on AOL.
And, you know, it was doing that creaky thing where it's taking you two minutes to dial up.
I mean, forget Facebook.
Facebook wasn't even invented.
You know, there's no Twitter.
There's no Instagram.
None of the media that we're talking about now that that all these countries use to influence us.
None of that was even around.
And yet Congress is still sitting on its butt.
They're not updating this law.
And so now foreign governments, it's really a field day here right now because there's nothing stopping them from pouring money into all these different avenues to influence the American people.
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All right.
So, I mean, there's, at least in my imagination, a tipping point where they're all so bought off that no one's willing to stick their neck out and do anything about it.
It's not like any of them care.
They're all so corrupt kind of thing.
But then I think, OK, well, you have this backlash to the Khashoggi killing where the House and the Senate are now passing a war powers resolution over the Saudis' dead body, essentially telling them, screw you, we hate this war.
And, you know, they're not really ending it, but they're doing what they can to make it known that they no longer approve.
So that's pretty big.
But then I wonder if that's, you know, essentially sort of a pre-agreed upon show that like, well, we're going to go this far to prove our dissatisfaction, but no real indication that the relationship would change there at all.
Or that there might be a crackdown on their influence in D.C. as a result of that or anything like that.
Yeah.
The hope is that the momentum keeps going forward and that these resolutions pass.
But the president has already said that he's going to veto if this bill gets on his desk, the human war powers resolution, he's going to veto it.
So then they'd have to go back to Congress.
They'd have to get more votes to override the veto.
But there's still a chance that they could there.
On the home front here in D.C. for the front lines of the foreign influence operations, what you've seen post-Khashoggi is that several of the firms that were representing the Saudis, they jumped ship and they said, you know, we're not going to, you know, you guys went too far.
This is ridiculous.
And so three of their big firms, they jumped ship there.
And some of the think tanks did, too.
I mentioned the Brookings Institution earlier.
They said after Khashoggi that they were going to cut ties with the Saudis, return some money they had already received and said they weren't going to take any more.
Another think tank did, too, the Middle East Institute.
So that was good.
But the problem is that none of that is institutionalized.
You know, they put out these press releases while Jamal Khashoggi was making front page headlines saying, you know, hey, we're not going to tolerate this.
But there's nothing to stop them, you know, tomorrow even from saying, hey, you know what, I think the Saudis have paid the price.
We're going to go ahead and take those checks again.
Nothing to prevent them from doing that.
There's also nothing in the law that says they even have to tell us if they take those checks, because think tanks as nonprofits don't have to disclose that they're foreign donors.
So for all we know, you know, yeah, yeah.
And that's something that I'm hoping to change, too.
You know, we should be able to go on your website and see like, hey, you know, these are these are the countries you're taking money from.
But right now there's no requirement for them to do that whatsoever.
I mean, for domestic donors, that would all be in the IRS records.
Right.
But for foreign donors, that's just a blank X.
Yeah.
Even for domestic donors.
And so a lot of your you get some of the information in the IRS filings, but this is getting way too nerdy.
But a Schedule B that a lot of these nonprofits would file doesn't have to be publicly disclosed.
And now some groups voluntarily do it.
My organization, the Center for International Policy, we put all this information out.
You know, I've always been curious because I talk to guys from the CIP all the time.
Of course, John Pfeffer and Foreign Policy and Focus, that whole crew.
There's, you know, we rerun all all kinds of stuff from there at antiwar.com for years and years on end.
And you're so good.
And you guys are all, you know, to the left of me.
I'm a libertarian, you know, but so, so good on so many things.
But I have always wondered if you guys are some kind of George Soros outfit or who exactly is behind it.
And I'm too lazy to have looked it up.
So tell me.
Yeah, no, my my my personal story is my favorite story.
I am personally my program is funded by everybody's boogeyman.
But both take money from the Open Society Foundation, George Soros and the Charles Koch Institute to my my Saudi lobby report.
Actually, the last time you had me on that, that was funded through Koch money.
So if somebody had businessmen, but you know what?
They support a lot of my friends and co-ideologues at various libertarian institutions.
So I think, you know, as far as right wing oligarchs go, they're about as good as you're going to get.
They're bad on Venezuela, but they're good on the Middle East.
That's right.
That's right.
And I think the key for me is is making it transparent.
And in my Saudi lobby report, I put right in there, you know, where the money for that came from.
And on our website, you can look up all our funders.
You know, we've got a lot of different programs, but you can see every single one of our funders on there.
You know, we're not going to hide anything from anybody.
But most of the think tanks around here, you know, they're hiding who their donors are.
They would never they would never do what I just did and say it in a radio interview, you know, who was funding them.
And I think that's a problem.
You know, people can freely judge me for who's funding me, but at least they know it.
Yeah.
Well, and you know what?
I mean, as far as foreign policy, which is the only thing that really matters to me, everybody there is consistent, almost entirely consistently anti interventionist.
And there's nothing that's so left wing communist that it's, you know, stands out or anything like that.
It's all but it's all definitely left enough to be in the best way, disloyal to the Democratic Party and that kind of partisanship.
And instead is focused on the facts and the policies and, for example, plenty consistent, plenty of consistent criticism of Obama all the way through, you know, the best kind of leftist to me.
Yeah.
I mean, I think my one of our favorite stats that comes out of our security assistance monitor program is a reminder to everybody that Obama is historically the biggest arms dealer that the world has ever known.
I mean, Trump, for all his claims about his hundred and ten billion dollar arms sale to Saudi Arabia, almost all of that came from the Obama administration.
And so, you know, the ironically, he's the he's the biggest gun salesman in American history, too, although most of that was reaction against him.
But for the domestic crowd, for sure.
And I mean, certainly for the mainstream, you know, Democratic Party is is, I think, very inter interventionist in many ways.
You know, it might be you can call it whatever you want, liberal interventionist, you know, to make it sound nicer.
But I think it's the one thing that a lot of, you know, D.C.
Democrats and Republicans agree on, that the U.S. should have this very overreached military presence that gets us involved in wars all over the world.
All right.
Now, real quick, because I've got you diverted all over the place here, Ben.
Tell us the names of more of these think tanks and especially you mentioned a couple of them have at least temporarily disavowed a Saudi and UAE type money here.
But tell us a little bit more about which ones, which names of these think tanks we should look out for, at least.
Yeah, I would keep an eye on it.
And unfortunately, it's most of the big foreign policy think tanks.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies, they're one of the biggest foreign policy think tanks.
They also take a significant amount of money from foreign governments.
The Atlantic Council as well.
You know, one of the big names in foreign policy takes a lot of money, significant amounts of money from foreign governments, too.
Any of the Gulf type think tanks, so if you hear like the Middle East Institute, which I talk a lot about in my piece, they are primarily funded from the very governments that their experts talk about in the Middle East.
The same thing is true at the Gulf States Institute, for example, and really the Middle East think tanks there and the experts there.
They are, I think, very heavily funded by the exact same countries that they're talking about.
So chances are when folks are hearing from an expert from one of these places, chances are that the country they're talking about is also funding their think tank.
Yeah, man, that's really something else.
And it's, well, shocking, but not surprising, right?
It's the kind of thing that we all know it's like this, but then when you get down to really how bad it is, it's a real head-shaking kind of a thing.
Sounds like a real difficult thing to figure out how to overcome and undo in any way, really.
Yeah, I mean, I think the first key is transparency and then letting people know what's going on there and then holding these folks accountable when they are just shilling for foreign governments.
Yeah, well, we try.
You're doing great work.
I really appreciate all your great articles that I've read so far.
We're running them all at antiwar.com, and I really appreciate your time on the show, Ben.
Yeah, thanks a lot, Scott.
Always great to be on.
Okay, guys, that is Ben Freeman.
He is a regular at tomdispatch.com, the great Tom Englehart, and he's got this piece, Following the Foreign Policy Money Trail in Washington, and we've rerun that, of course, in the archives under Tom Englehart's name at antiwar.com there as well.
All right, y'all, thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
