For Pacifica Radio, June 9th, 2019.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
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It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I'm the editorial director of antiwar.com.
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All right, you guys, introducing Eli Clifton, again, writing for the great Jim Loeb's blog, Loeblog.
This one is called FDD.
Oh, you had me at FDD.
FDD aligned with State Department to attack supporters of Iran diplomacy.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Eli?
I'm doing well.
Thanks for having me.
Very happy to have you back on the show here.
Very complicated, but very important story that you have here about the State Department and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and their doings.
Why don't you tell us?
Well, I mean, the essence of it is that there was a suspicious-seeming, anonymously run Twitter account and website called Iran Disinfo.
And what caught a lot of our attention is that the Twitter account was very actively attacking, over the past month or so, US-based, in many cases US citizens, who were advocates of diplomacy with Iran and critics of the Trump administration under the national security leadership of John Bolton.
They're heightening tensions and militarism towards Iran.
Now, this Twitter account, otherwise, that really wouldn't have raised much in the way of anything noticeable about it, other than that the website associated with Iran Disinfo said that it was actually being funded by the State Department.
So that meant that a lot of us looking at this started to ask some serious questions about why the State Department might be funding attacks on US citizens or US-based human rights advocates, in some cases.
It was going after Human Rights Watch.
It was going after people associated with the National Iranian American Council.
And it was going after Iranian American journalists, many of whom, again, were being critical of the Trump administration's strategy towards Iran, their maximum pressure campaign.
But when we started to dig deeper, we saw that there was basically one major source of research and of published materials that Iran Disinfo was utilizing.
And it was coming from a Foundation for Defense of Democracies expert named Saeed Ghassaminajad.
And Saeed's work was being cross-posted, it seems, on FDD's website as well, where FDD actually had it under something called the Iran Disinformation Project on their own website, which suggested that, if nothing else, that there was close coordination between Saeed and FDD, or perhaps more.
Now, Mark Dubowitz, the head of FDD, has said that FDD itself was not involved in this project.
But it still seems like one of their experts was basically the central expert and source of materials being used by this State Department-funded project to attack Iranian Americans and proponents of diplomacy with Iran.
One other thing I would just add in here is that the Twitter account seemed to very actively not just promote Saeed's work, but Mark Dubowitz and FDD's.
There seemed as if there was a close, perhaps symbiotic relationship, if not something more specifically coordinated.
Hang on just one second.
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It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm talking with Eli Clifton.
But now, so the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, they don't get any State Department money.
It's just this associated, coordinated group type of a situation.
You know, that's what would seem to be the case.
However, we actually don't know exactly what the grant was, exactly who the grant went to, or we still don't know exactly who was behind the Iran disinformation project.
That's all still in the shadows.
Oh, really?
So, the State Department isn't saying that, oh, yeah, this is how much money we gave them?
You only know that because they bragged about it on their own website.
Is that it?
That's right.
I see.
Well, so, can you find out, Eli, from the State Department?
Don't they have to report who they're giving money to for stuff like this?
They do.
And I think that that's in the works right now.
I think that there are a number of different avenues being pursued to try to get to the bottom of exactly what State Department grant that was that went to Iran Disinfo, and again, what was the entity or individuals that the grant was issued to.
But at this point, we still don't have that information.
Well, now, so tell me about Bernard Marcus.
Well, so this is something that I got into in this piece I wrote recently about Iran Disinfo and FDD, which is that we have an interesting overlap now, where FDD says that they were not directly involved in this project.
However, this project was promoting essentially the same tactics and strategies and attitudes and ultimately policies towards Iran that the State Department under Mike Pompeo has been advocating for.
And the FDD was pretty much always pushing for these positions before the Trump administration would adopt them.
By all accounts, Mark Dubowitz and the FDD are in very close coordination with the Trump administration when it comes to forming this administration's Iran strategy.
So I started to look at, well, let's see what else FDD and the Trump administration have in common.
And one of the things that I think is most significant here is that I believe it's Trump's second biggest campaign contributor, or not directly contributing to the campaign, but outside spending supporter, because that can exceed the campaign finance limits, is a guy named Bernard Marcus.
He's the co-founder of Home Depot.
He's a billionaire.
He also contributes around 25 percent and some years more to FDD's budget, and he sits on their board.
And Bernie Marcus has some pretty extreme views towards Iran.
He went on Fox Business a few years ago, and this is when the Obama administration was negotiating the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, and he literally said Iran is the devil.
So this is the guy who's funding Mark Dubowitz.
This is the guy who's funding Donald Trump.
And this is a guy who also put about $500,000 into John Bolton's super PAC.
So we can see that he certainly is an advocate of all of these folks, and he makes no bones about his attitudes towards Iran.
The other person I looked at is Sheldon Adelson, who is the GOP's single biggest contributor.
He was Donald Trump's single biggest campaign supporter.
And Sheldon Adelson has talked about wanting to drop a nuclear bomb on Tehran, which is clearly proposing an attack on the civilian target, if you care to make those sorts of distinctions.
And he thought that would be a great negotiating technique to get Iran to back away or to constrain its nuclear program.
Now, Sheldon Adelson, at least until several years ago, was also a major donor to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Hey, man, tell me something.
Is Lowe's run by Zionists too?
I don't know.
We need to look into that.
Yeah.
I would add that I think that Bernie Marcus probably goes beyond being just a Zionist, as you put it.
He's clearly a pretty radical viewpoint.
If you want to talk about where he is in sort of the pro-Israel lobby, he's sort of in the Zionist Organization of America camp.
Actually, they gave him an award and he gave a speech there.
So that's pretty far on the far right.
He's in the Republican Jewish Coalition, which despite its name is really not representative of most American Jews or even the pro-Israel camp.
It's very far to the right.
And it's pretty much, you know, representing some pretty extremist viewpoints.
I usually try to not use that word because it's just too broad and it represents too many different things.
Like on one hand, it means Avigdor Lieberman, but on the other hand, it means a lot of other people too.
So let's not be too confusing about that.
But yeah, some of these guys, well, as you say about Sheldon Adelson, he's made it very clear that this is his most important issue.
And he really is the news here, right?
Because this guy, am I right about this?
Help me if I screw up the numbers, but he spent like 20 million on Trump's campaign and then another, what, 80 or a hundred million on the congressional campaigns in 2016 and 18.
Is that somewhere around, right?
I believe that it was probably around.
Yes.
I think that he's well over a hundred million for 2016, 2018 combined.
I think it's actually considerably over that because he was a, and I think this is the thing that gets overlooked with Sheldon Adelson is that he's not just Donald Trump's biggest campaign supporter or any Republican running for president for that matter.
I think a lot of his real leverage and power, including over a Republican president comes from the fact that he is the biggest contributor to a Republican congressional campaigns.
So pretty much every member of Congress has to pay attention to what he says.
And when he calls them, which I have no doubt that he does they have to take that call.
And that gives him not just influence then over that member of Congress, but it also gives him influence over a Republican president, because if that Republican president wants members of Congress to be supportive of their legislative agenda, they probably need to have a Sheldon Adelson on board as well.
Yep.
And of course, Trump had sort of started out saying, Hey, I'm rich.
I don't even need any of your Israel lobby money.
But then somebody told him, yeah, but the Congress does, and you need a Republican Congress.
So shut up.
That's right.
I mean, he, I mean, he also, he also took Adelson's money for the general election, which I thought was kind of an odd move, but I think you're exactly onto something here that, and that's incidentally not even, you're not even really a Donald Trump's choice.
The point is, is that when it comes to the congressional campaigns, he was then informed probably, Hey, you know, you can have your own views about Sheldon Adelson if you have them.
But you know, the reality of the matter is, is that even if you want to distance yourself from him, pretty much every Republican congressional candidate is going to choose not to do that.
And that's something that you need to live with is that, is that they answer to him at some level.
Hang on just one sec for me.
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Scott Horton here.
I'm talking with Eli Clifton.
And then, so as you say, and please, if you could continue on with your discrimination and differentiation between the different sorts of lacunics here, because as you say, this guy Adelson said, you know what we ought to do is drop an atom bomb in the desert near Tehran somewhere, I guess, where they can see it.
And tell them, yeah, the next one's going to be downtown if you don't bow down and do everything we say.
This is a pretty extreme position, even for very right-wing lacunics in America.
I never heard Richard Pearl even say that, you know what I mean?
Or Michael Ledeen, maybe.
Well, I think you're hitting on something here, which is that where Sheldon Adelson's views are and where this administration's views and where FDD's views are, are all very closely mirroring the Likud party in Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu's political party.
And I think we've seen that certainly coming from Netanyahu, who talks about that Iran is this existential threat, which can only be dealt with effectively with use of force.
But then you see language like, well, Sheldon Adelson's about, you know, we need to basically drop a nuclear bomb on them.
And then we have language coming out of the administration about sort of a long list of demands about Iran, you know, stop, things that Iran needs to stop doing, suggesting that Iran is a non-normal state, and that Iran needs to somehow come into compliance with the way the rest of the world works, and that it's somehow behaving in an anomalous way with how the world order is.
And I think that all of those are fundamentally sort of coming from the same place, which is the idea that Iran is abnormal, it's unusual, it's running counter to world order, it's running counter to global stability, and it poses an existential threat to Israel, Saudi Arabia, UAE, also countries that are very much in the same wavelength at this point, as well as to sort of the Likud party proponents in the United States, like Sheldon Adelson and FDD.
Well, and meanwhile, this is, it's worth saying, I know it goes a little bit beyond the purview of your article, but this is essentially a hoax.
I mean, all of the worst things that Iran has done in the 21st century in that region have been essentially accepting the results of America's policies in their favor, including getting rid of Saddam, giving Assad an important reason to invite their forces into Syria, for a couple of examples, giving them credit for every one of the Houthis gains in Yemen.
And meanwhile, have they really betrayed an attention, a real change in strategy that they mean to attack Israel, that they would ever, what, invade Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, or any of this kind of thing?
Of course not.
There's a narrative about how we're supposed to be so scared that even says that they're allied with al-Qaeda.
Why not?
As long as we're going for broke.
But meanwhile, in reality, essentially none of that stuff is true.
Right.
And actually, that brings us back to FDD.
A couple of years, I guess it was a year or two ago now, that it appeared that Pompeo had helped to arrange for FDD to get this tranche of documents, many of which seemed like had already been discussed or released, coming out of the Abbottabad raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
And the documents, FDD tried to spin it as being evidence of an al-Qaeda-Iran link, when in reality, the vast majority of the documents seemed to underscore that there was a great deal of tension and very little cooperation, if not outright hostility and competition or distrust between al-Qaeda and Iran.
That was largely just entirely fabricated as a narrative and clearly one designed to try to desperately link Iran to global terrorism, to al-Qaeda, to 9-11.
And it's continued to be, I know, an effort of the neoconservatives and some of the Likud-aligned organizations, but there's been very little evidence to actually support that conjecture.
Here's a dog that didn't bark in that case.
How come Bush and Cheney didn't carpet bomb them back then if they did 9-11, if they had helped Osama bin Laden with that?
Come on, man.
Well, I mean, they were carpet bombing people that weren't also involved in 9-11, such as Saddam Hussein.
They definitely considered the possibility.
And I know there were people in the Bush administration and advocates of the Bush administration strategy that were saying, you need to go to Tehran next, real men go to Tehran.
But even then they weren't accusing the Ayatollah of doing the attack on the towers, you know?
That's absolutely true.
And I think in that case, the Bush administration was getting bogged down in Iraq and identified that if you don't like how the war and invasion of Iraq went, you're going to hate how things would go if there was a war with Iran.
Yeah.
All right.
And speaking of which now too, please give us a real good 101 on the foundation for the defense of democracies.
It's just another think tank, right?
What's the big deal?
Well, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies was founded in 2001.
And the common story about them is that they were founded and funded as a response to 9-11, trying to bolster US national security after the intelligence failures that led to 9-11.
And the reality is that it actually was formed as something called EMET.
It was formed as a pro-Israel group briefly before 9-11 was founded.
I believe it was in April the first papers were filed for FDD.
And they changed their name and mission, it seemed, after 9-11 to fall more in line with sort of where the Bush administration was going and where the public sentiment and interests were, which was in combating terrorism and trying to prevent another 9-11.
They were certainly advocates of the invasion of Iraq.
And they were actually somewhat bipartisan.
People like Donna Brazile were on their advisory board until 2008, when they went after Democratic members of Congress who were having some concerns about passing legislation to sort of offer retroactive approval of some of the warrantless wiretapping that had gone on under the Bush administration.
And at that point, it became more and more partisan, became far more right-leaning, and became far more aligned with organizations like the Republican Jewish Coalition, like the Likud Party in Israel, and with funders such as Paul Singer, Sheldon Adelson, Bernie Marcus, who formed sort of the backbone of sort of pro-Likud, far right-wing, neoconservative funding of the Republican Party.
It's anti-war radio, talking with Eli Clifton here.
You know, I know over the years, we've talked about this a little bit, and I'm sure I really kind of have this wrong.
You know, I'm oversimplifying it.
But it sort of seemed like you kind of have a caste system inside the neoconservative movement, where people like Robert Kagan are like a little bit more sophisticated and a little bit less, well, at least on the surface, less, you know, insane.
But then you have people like Frank Gaffney over at the Center for Security Policy, and you have people like Michael Ledeen or whatever, where, you know, go ahead and put a straitjacket on them, these guys, and a lot of the things that they say and think.
And I know that these guys all mix together, and it's a very small group, the neocons.
It's under 100 men that really count as true neoconservatives, it seems like, but I never counted actual heads.
But if you look at rightweb.com, that's about right, you know?
Yeah.
But it just occurs to me that it seems like of all the different neoconservative foundations, and there really are a lot of these different think tanks from WINEP and GENSA and AEI and whoever, that for FDD, which is one of the more winger ones over there with the Center for Security Policy, for those guys to be the ones who are the most closely tied to the Trump administration is really alarming.
Because as we're talking about here, they deal in this total unreality, this narrative about Iran, and about all of the rest of what's going on in all the surrounding issues, including the ties to al-Qaeda and everything else, that are really wrong and could really lead to a real conflict if they become truly the premises for American action.
Well, you know, I think that you pointed to something interesting here, which is that, yeah, there are obviously different groups within the neoconservatives.
And as you put it, it's not that big a community to start with.
But, you know, we have people that are somewhat serious, like Kagan, and then we have folks that sort of quickly sort of spiral into the conspiratorial loony bin in sort of the Frank Gaffney Center for Security Policy model.
And I think that FDD is actually really interesting if you view it through that prism, which is that FDD is one of the best funded of these groups.
It's also the one which I think shows sort of the crossroads of all these people and shows that they fundamentally do share some sort of a shared worldview.
Because you do get people who are kind of serious at FDD.
I mean, Mark Dubowitz is not an unserious person.
He's very, very eloquent.
He's clearly, he doesn't really engage in too much of the conspiracy theory stuff.
And they have a number of experts who come across as pretty serious folks and are well regarded.
Obviously, they often are pushing a strategy in a line that is fundamentally wrong and flawed.
But, you know, they come off as serious.
Whereas they also have given platforms to people like Michael Ledeen, and they gave, you know, Sebastian Gorka legitimacy inside Washington.
He worked at FDD for like seven years before he spun off on his own and eventually wound up in the Trump administration.
So I think that FDD kind of is a good litmus test of if you're a part of sort of the neoconservative in circle, but it also is a good way of showing that, yeah, it is hard to see how Robert Kagan and Frank Gaffney can belong to the same group.
Because obviously, they share a limited amount of views.
And their priorities are certainly different on a lot of these.
However, you know, this is kind of where everybody can overlap is at FDD.
And FDD has certainly, I think, played a central role in sort of in organizing and in providing a shared space for neoconservatives in Washington.
I'm sure you've seen the documentary, The Israel Lobby USA, where they really show a lot of direct ties, or I guess, they appear to show a lot of very direct ties to the Israeli government and the FDD, where essentially, I can't recall the exact scenes out of the movie, honestly, off the top of my head.
But I remember it being along the lines of here are your marching orders, carry it out for me.
Thanks.
Right.
And I think also the Al Jazeera Israel Lobby series showed something that ties us back to this attacking Iranian-Americans and human rights advocates through this Iran disinfo campaign, which is that what it showed was that FDD was probably more deeply involved than we had previously understood in the anti-boycott, divestment, and sanction, anti-BDS efforts on American college campuses, which were often targeting individual students.
In many cases, these were fairly young men and women who were speaking out about Israeli human rights abuses and promoting a boycott, divestment, and sanctions as a method for applying pressure to Israel.
And the efforts were being made to paint these people as terrorist lovers, as terrorists, as anti-Semitic.
And FDD, as was shown in a lot of hidden camera footage in that series, was very deeply involved with that.
And you ask, well, why is a think tank in Washington that mostly focuses on national security issues, focusing on student politics on campuses across the United States, and whether or not they pass resolutions about BDS?
And I think that you've kind of hit the nail on the head, that it was a priority of Israel's foreign ministry, and accordingly, FDD was a part of that movement.
And that really doesn't make a difference, right?
They're exposed in this thing that—I mean, because if we were talking about, oh, I don't know, Iran or, say, Russia, then those people would be felons for being agents of a foreign power, or at least they'd be—I don't know what they'd be—they'd be in violation of FARA.
Is that a misdemeanor or a felony, to be an unregistered agent of a foreign power acting like that?
Well, the funny thing about FARA is that the FARA prosecutions are few and far between.
We're hearing more about FARA under the Trump administration, because there are legitimate prosecutions that are going on.
I mean, Mike Flynn was clearly in violation of FARA.
I think it's healthy to see that we're getting some enforcement of it, but historically, it's something that is essentially compliance is voluntary, and I don't think there's any enforcement that actually goes on on a day-to-day basis or any resources put toward actually checking if folks are in FARA compliance or not.
But I think you're right, that if it was another country, we might have been hearing more about it.
Well, and, you know, the whole foreign registration thing is kind of BS, but it's that selective enforcement that makes it so powerful, of course.
Exactly.
If you're going to do it, do it evenly.
And, you know, it's fair to have a discussion about whether it's a useful law to have on the books and whether it's perhaps even sort of a holdover from a different time in history, which it is.
But it's a bit ridiculous, the way that it is so selectively and rarely enforced.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, keep writing great stuff, man.
I sure love reading it.
Thank you.
Take it easy.
All right, everybody, that's Eli Clifton from Lobe Log.
Lobe Log.
FDD aligned with State Department to attack supporters of Iran diplomacy.
All right, you guys, and that is anti-war radio for this morning.
Thanks very much for listening.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
You can find my full interview archive, almost 5,000 interviews now, going back to 2003 at scotthorton.org.
I'm here every Sunday morning for anti-war radio from 830 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
See you next week.
