Alright kiddos, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
And our next guest on the show is Grant F. Smith.
He is director of the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy.
That's I-R-M-E-P dot org.
The Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy in Washington, D.C.
He's the author of the book, The Greatest War in History.
The Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy in Washington, D.C.
He's the author of the book, Spy Trade, America's Defense Line, Foreign Agents, Deadly Dogma, and Neocon Middle East Policy.
Jeff Stein, the great Jeff Stein of the Washington Post, calls Smith a Washington, D.C. author who has made a career out of writing critical books on Israel spying, Israeli spying and lobbying.
Philip Weiss says the best investigative work is being done by Grant Smith at I-R-M-E-P.
And boy is he right about that.
Welcome back to the show, Grant.
How are you, man?
Hey, Scott.
Great to be back.
I'm glad you're getting through the Florida heat there.
Yeah, it's actually really nice outside right now, but the best part about it is the rain.
I've been living in Los Angeles for two years, and it's just like the Bill Hicks joke.
You've got to be a lizard to like Los Angeles.
It's sunny every day, and I love sunny.
I love L.A. weather.
It's great.
It's never more than 82 degrees or something.
It cools down every night.
It's beautiful.
But, man, it was – I'll tell you, the smell of a rainstorm driving down the freeway here in Florida is just – it was the greatest thing.
It reminded me of Texas so much.
I haven't smelled rain in two years, Grant.
Yeah, well, sometimes every once in a while there's hurricanes rolling and wipe everything off the sand dunes people live on.
So you've got to be careful of that.
I lived down there for a while too, but watch your back for the hurricanes.
Yeah, well, hopefully I'll be able to get out of here in one piece before all that kicks in.
All right.
So now – well, here's an overly broad and perhaps stupid question.
Well, first of all, let me tell everybody to go and look at your articles at antiwar.com as well.
They heard me just say irmep.org, right?
That's the website for IRMEP.
And they can also look up original.antiwar.com/smith-grant/smith-grant.
And you can find a great many articles by Grant Smith about obviously primarily America's relationship with Israel.
And now one of the things going on here is these bogus peace talks with Likud as though this is going to go anywhere.
But Obama pretending to follow up on his Cairo speech and push for peace in the Middle East.
And somebody, I don't know who, Grant, brought up the idea that, you know, what you ought to do is release Jonathan Pollard.
And if you'll release Jonathan Pollard, America, then maybe we'll consider slowing the rate of growth of the colonies in the occupied territories.
Do you think Obama's going to go for that?
Well, that's a really good question, and that's the subject of the last thing I wrote for antiwar.com.
But the really interesting question is, you know, why are there even any so-called peace processes going on right now?
And it seems to me, and I think Phil Giroldi kind of hinted at it, is that these are 100 percent driven by the U.S. elections.
By pretending to have some sort of peace process going on, this kind of gets the lobby off of Obama's back and off of some of the Democrats' back, and maybe even allows them to do some fundraising with key donors.
And in the meantime, you have this really curious process where there are no ground rules, and it's the amazing game with no rules, where everything's on the table.
And there were two different letters that people have been talking about that have been leaked.
One of them by David Makovsky is from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
He said that Obama offered Netanyahu all sorts of concessions and U.N. support and weapons if only they would freeze the settlement for two more months.
And if that's true, that shows you this is 100 percent driven by the elections.
And apparently there's also a letter to the Palestinians saying that Obama would be willing to push for some concessions there around the 67 borders.
But, you know, the whole Pollard offer seems extremely, you know, it's the most extreme part of this, where you would take somebody who did enormous damage to the United States for money in a case that wasn't even investigated properly and throw that on the table as well, I just think shows the extreme nature of what the lobby in this country is willing to do, because this has been an on-off push for many decades now.
And it's really clear from some of the other cases of pardons that have been related to weapons smuggling that there is a drive to kind of get this thorn in the side of U.S.
-Israel relations, get it out of the side and attach it to any vehicle that it can possibly attach to that's sufficiently strong enough to pull it off.
The interests of a tiny little Maryland-sized foreign country can completely and totally override the interests of the American empire.
It's almost like, you know, a CIA coup in South America somewhere, where our government controls somebody else's government.
Is that too much hyperbole for you, or what?
I think there's one overriding factor, and that is there doesn't seem to be, again, there are no rules.
Any of our laws don't apply to this relationship.
One of your favorite people, David Sanger, was on a Washington, D.C. radio program this morning, and somebody called in, and after asking about Pollard, which is something they didn't want to talk about, this panel of journalists, all mainstream journalists, they asked Sanger, are the settlements considered illegal by the United States?
And David Sanger kind of hemmed and hawed, and he said, well, the U.S. doesn't consider them to be helpful, blah, blah, blah.
And meanwhile, another journalist from a Middle Eastern outlet chimed in and said, there are all the international laws that they break.
And so, you know, it's this willingness to be hyper-lawyers, inventing all sorts of rules and regulations that Iran is violating, and then trumpeting those to the press, completely ignoring the fact that our own president could, in two minutes, make a declaration saying, you know, we're going to wipe out this problem of illegal settlements.
And as president, I've instructed the U.S. Treasury Department to shut down all illegal flows into the West Bank, and for the IRS to pull the status of any charity found to be laundering money into West Bank settlements.
He could do that in an afternoon.
But the fact that our press, you know, our elite media, and our own president won't look at this as a legal issue, which it largely is, but instead, you know, are only handling it in the most political way, just really shows how much governance has declined in this country.
Well, you know, they say the three biggest lobbies in D.C. are the AARP, we want the young people's money, give it to us, and then the NRA, go ahead and take everybody's guns, we're here to pretend like we're here to protect gun rights, and then you have the Israel lobby.
And, I don't know, you can argue about who's more powerful or what, but there is no America lobby that has anything like the influence that the Israel lobby has in Washington, D.C., right?
No, and I've been doing quite a bit of research, as you know, into the genesis of this lobby in the 1960s, and was finding, you know, even at that time, a lot of the key players in the lobbies were so embedded into U.S. intelligence and cozying up to the FBI, and just embedding themselves into so many nexuses of power in the United States.
And again, this is, you know, from the 60s, it's just, it's incredible how developed and how powerful it has become.
And I thought to say it's all powerful, and I think the fact that there's an anti-war.com and there's the blogosphere, and people are at last being able to speak critically to larger audiences about how damaging this is to the United States, at least there's that, but, you know, the fact that...
Our music's playing, Grant.
Hold it right there, man.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Grant F. Smith from IRMEP.org after this.
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, kiddos, welcome back to the show.
I'm assuming this thing's on.
I don't know.
I was cutting out.
We got screwed up there a little bit, but I don't know.
We're working it out.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Grant F. Smith from the Institute for Research Middle East Policy.
And man, this guy knows more about Israeli influence in the United States than, well, I don't know anybody but the chair of AIPAC, I guess.
Now, where were we, Grant?
You were talking about some history there.
Yeah, I take exception to that because, you know, I think I know more than the chair of AIPAC.
And their PR director just recently resigned.
And I've been tempted to call him and debrief him about how horrible his organization is.
But anyway, the thing that makes me think that this is probably something, and I mentioned this in my article, you know, we can assume, I think, that Jonathan Pollard, if not already, you know, if there hasn't been a decision of maybe, you know, putting this in play as part of extending the freeze, if that were the case, they would have to let it go right away so that they could get the freeze extended.
But I think, given the fact that they already caught another spy, Ben-Amit Kaddish, you know, back a couple years ago, who was also doing the same thing as Pollard was doing, linked with his activities, had the same handler, and he was only fined $50,000 for stealing Patriot missile technology and all sorts of other things for Israel.
I tend to think that given how that case was handled and the fact that Eric Holder also refused to properly handle the Mark Rich situation by issuing a presidential pardon for him under intense pressure of AIPAC and other groups, I tend to think that Jonathan Pollard will, in fact, be pardoned by Obama at some point.
Back in the 1990s, they tried to get Bill Clinton to pardon Jonathan Pollard, and he was threatened with massive resignations from the CIA and the FBI, and everybody was going to quit over that.
He had to back down.
Right, but who would do that today?
Panetta?
Do you think that, you know, I tend to think that if Panetta threatened to resign, they'd probably say, well, that's fine, resign.
You know, the FBI directors will hold over from the Bush administration.
So I don't see that happening anymore.
What I see, again, is that there's been a long-term effort, and this goes back to people who were smuggling weapons for independence.
You know, Kennedy made one of these pardons.
Clinton made one of these pardons.
Bush made one of these pardons.
There have been a series of pardons all geared to sort of clean up the historic record and make it seem like these were just little bumps in the road when, in fact, the great majority of cases, according to some insiders, have never even entered the prosecutorial phase.
They were just simply covered up at an earlier phase.
Right, and John Miller, no, wait, was it John Cole, the FBI agent, counterintelligence agent, told me on this show that he personally knew of 250 counterintelligence, counterespionage investigations into Israel that went nowhere.
Right, that was a great interview, and so I tend to think that, again, given this intense drive, it was intelligent of this attempt to be made from the standpoint of, hey, hook Pollard up to just a dire moment for the Obama administration, which is called keep this fake peace process going all the way to the elections.
I'm half surprised it hasn't worked, although, of course, we are on a Friday, so if Pollard is on a plane to Tel Aviv right now, we probably wouldn't hear about it until 5 p.m., because that's when you release stories you want to die.
Right, well, you know, I don't know.
People, if you don't know who Jonathan Pollard is, look it up.
He stole the nuclear war plans for the Soviet Union and betrayed, I don't know about CIA agents, but at least virtually all of the CIA's assets in Russia were rolled up, they were called in the Soviet Union back then, were rolled up and killed, weren't they, Grant?
Yeah, pretty much.
This guy was capital T treason.
Yeah, over 100, by some estimates, agents were rolled up and killed, and, again, the things that he was stealing was mainly for trading.
He was basically, he wasn't taking anything that APEC or the HOWL should have been given to our wonderful ally, Israel, anyway.
He was taking stuff that was really geared to things that had nothing to do with Israel, that Israel then used to trade to get, to add to its population with Soviet immigrants.
That's one of the reasons.
But, again, I don't see in this day and age that, since most people don't know who he was, and because the investigation was so stunted, I mean, he was operating out of a safe house that was provided by one of the larger U.S.
-Israel technology and business exchange organizations called the BIRD Foundation.
And, you know, as an FBI investigator in the trenches looking at all of this, they would have said, well, why aren't we raiding all of these organizations?
And yet the investigation was stunted.
And, of course, as you've mentioned before, they never found out who actually gave Pollard the file numbers to retrieve and then take into this BIRD safe house here in Washington to photocopy and then return.
So, like a lot of investigations, you know, the key to all of this has been, as I mentioned before, intertwine all of these foundations and lobbies together and then intertwine them to the extent possible with the intelligence community.
And pretty soon nobody wants to take any of these investigations too far because they'll wind up hurting higher-ups and people who are, you know, somehow related to them.
So it's a real problem.
It really poisons politics in this town.
All right.
Sorry, Grant.
I got problems here, man.
I don't know what's wrong.
Hey, there's the music.
There's the music.
Sorry for the dead air, y'all.
I don't know what the hell's up with my connection here.
But, anyway, we're going to be talking about MEGA, Jonathan Pollard's handler with Grant F. Smith when we get back from this break.
Sorry for the cluster screw up here.
All right.
Yeah, that's all I feel like doing is laying around listening to some Poison Idea, man.
Half hour more of this.
Luckily, though, I got Grant Smith on the phone.
Grant F. Smith, that is.
From the Institute for Research Middle East Policy.
You can also find him at original.antiwar.com/smith-grant.
There's got to be an easier way to work that out.
Anyway, so we're going out to break and I was screwing up.
And I don't know if my mic was off or I lost my attention.
Or what the hell happened.
But so you were talking, Grant, about how when Jonathan Pollard was busted, that it was clear that he was receiving instructions of what to steal.
For example, he knew where to look for which documents to take and that kind of thing.
And there was a Bamford article, James Bamford, the heroic James Bamford, author of three books about the National Security Agency, as well as a pretext for war.
And he wrote an article that I think was in the Washington Post back then about how there was an Israeli spy or a group of Israeli spies known as MEGA.
And these were the people who, when he talked about Ben Amikudish there a little bit, this was the same MEGA that was his handler.
Who is MEGA, Grant, do you know?
No, we always come back to this.
No, we always come back to this.
But, you know, my question these days is really, who isn't MEGA?
I mean, who isn't feeding either AIPAC or feeding the intelligence of Israel with information?
Because these are key questions that anybody needs to ask.
I don't have a guess as to who is giving the file numbers to Pollard.
But I do know that there are a lot of things that we're never going to know.
You know, as we've talked about before, I've been doing a lot of research into U.S. diversion of technology and uranium to Israel.
And yet, in filing Freedom of Information Act requests, there's a fascinating book called The Bomb in the Basement, which says that Henry Morgenthau, Jr., who was the Treasury Secretary back in the day, was also helping finance the Israeli nuclear weapons program.
And I thought that was very interesting.
But we just missed that.
Our Freedom of Information Act request came back saying that all of the internal security files on him were destroyed in 2008.
So we'll never know.
You know, he would have been kind of a MEGA in the early days for doing something that was blatantly illegal against the U.S. interests.
And yet, we probably had a lot of information about that that's lost to history.
And another thing, just from a research perspective, in trying to find the new MEGAs of tomorrow, there's a lot of open lobbying that takes place in the Department of Justice, whether it's Fre Stewart Nozzetti, who was caught in a sting by the FBI, you know, offering to become a Mossad agent, and he was a nuclear-level security clearance NASA person before he left that organization.
The Department of Justice won't release any of their Office of the Pardon Attorney records on third-party correspondence lobbying for them to release either Pollard or Nozzetti.
They send back a response saying that unless you can prove an immediate need, that they won't respond to a Freedom of Information Act request, which means that these processes are almost completely hidden from the public or from watchdog organizations that want to know about how these backroom deals are cut.
And they even, in fact, cite a case of the ACLU against the DOJ about why they can drag their heels until the dirty deeds are actually done.
There was a court case.
The ACLU had the money to take the DOJ to court, which is probably a disappointing thing for them.
But at any rate, whether it's MAGA or whether it's people inside government or powerful individuals lobbying for clemency for some pretty horrific acts against their fellow countrymen, the level of secrecy around all of this stuff really preserves the sort of impunity with which the lobby can operate in this country.
And that's probably the most frustrating thing.
But it's also one of the reasons why this work is so interesting, because it's certainly not being done by any so-called investigative journalists.
Yeah, not many anyway.
Well, you know, Phil Giraldi, our previous guest, I know you were listening to that interview, but I guess it was probably the last time I interviewed Phil, was in regards to a piece that he did for the American Conservative about Israeli spies posing as CIA and trying to recruit Muslims in America to do God knows what.
Is that the kind of thing that goes on typically?
Well, he has more information about that than I do, but I do note that the FBI at the same time was posing as Mossad agents to recruit Americans sympathetic to Israel in exactly the same way.
Well, but that was to trick them and prosecute them, presumably, right?
Yeah, that was to trick them and prosecute them, and we'll probably never know why the Mossad was trying to get some of these Arab Americans.
I didn't notice whether they were trying to implicate them in something, but it does indicate a level of intelligence activity in this country that I'd certainly like to find out more about.
Yeah, well, it's like Christopher Ketchum wrote in his great piece in Counterpunch about Israeli spying in America.
It begins with, scratch a CIA agent, and he'll start telling you about how much he hates Israel.
And I asked Phil about that, I think, probably in that last interview.
He was like, why do all you CIA guys hate Israel so much?
You know, think of Ray McGovern or, you know, hate is a strong word, but whatever.
And of course the answer was because people in the CIA don't actually know what's going on in our relationship with Israel, as opposed to the rest of us who basically get our news from television in this country.
People at the CIA, they understand the relationship between America and Israel, and they don't like it.
Well, yeah, any analyst who's forced to look at the actual situation of a country, a small country in the Middle East that offers the U.S. nothing but is almost entirely dependent on the U.S., it must be more difficult for them, unlike the majority of Americans, to stomach this constant barrage about how this is such a wonderful ally and how much they do for us, because it's obviously not true, and anybody who's done their homework knows that it's not true.
So I would assume that there would be a little bit more rancor, especially given the fact that they do know more.
I mean, the Central Intelligence Agency is sitting on a gigantic case file that we're still trying to get about the new mech case, sort of the diversion of 300 kilograms of weapons-grade uranium from Pennsylvania.
So they know.
They know what the relationship's really about.
And yet, again, we've got all of these organizations that won't let this information out.
And you, in fact, I think you're going to be surprised in a couple of months because you put me on to something during our last interview that I hadn't thought of, and it turns out that you're right.
But I'm not even going to tell you what you're right about, so think about that.
Well, I guess I'll just have to wait patiently to find out.
Maybe you'll have me back on again and we can talk about it.
Everybody, Grant Smith says I'm right about something.
Well, no, you're right about a lot of things.
But, you know, whenever you assume the worst, you're usually on the right track in this relationship.
So, again, if we find out at 5 p.m. today that Paul is on his way to Tel Aviv in exchange for two months of phony settlement freezes, then we'll know something else.
Amazing.
Well, you know, I'm looking at this thing from Sarasota Springs, Utah, ABC 4 News, Why are a bunch of Israeli art students walking around in the Salt Lake City area pretending to be art students?
Could it possibly have anything to do with the massive new National Security Agency Center being built there?
And how transparent can you get?
We remember the last time there were a bunch of Israeli art student spies in this country, and I don't think we like it very much, right?
Well, yeah, that's still an operation that, you know, art students going into DEA and other facilities, that unless it was related to the massive X to C exports that come from Israel to the United States, I'm not sure what that was about.
Well, we're going to have to leave it there because Rob is playing here.
But I'll just tell everybody, go read The Shadow Factor by James Bamford.
You want to know about Israel and the National Security Agency, that thing will blow your mind.
And please check out IRMEP, I-R-M-E-P, the Institute for Research Middle East Policy.
Grant F. Smith, thank you very much for your time.
Thanks, Scott.
