All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio on the Liberty Radio Network.
I'm Scott Horton, and our first guest on the show today is Grant F. Smith.
He runs the Institute for Research Middle East Policy.
That's IRMEP.org, IRMEP.org.
And you can also find him, of course, at AntiWar.com.
Welcome to the show, Grant.
How are you doing, man?
Great, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
Well, I really appreciate you joining us today.
Now, here's a couple of things.
From Raw Story, ex-APAC official threatens to uncover mass spying at Israel lobby.
That's from yesterday.
Yeah.
And then here's your last article from the 15th.
APAC bears all to quash lawsuit.
And if one were to type in APAC into Google News this morning, they'll get all kinds of results.
So I was wondering if maybe you could tell the good people listening, what's an APAC and what's the big deal?
Sure.
The American-Israel Public Affairs Committee is a corporation that has tax-exempt status in the United States that is engaged in a lot of different activities.
But the stories that are beginning to take over in terms of the blogosphere and alternative news channels have to do with Stephen J. Rosen, who, as you mentioned, I think, in your intro before I came on, was a high official at the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, one of the two who was indicted for some activities in 2004-2005 in terms of handling classified national defense information and parceling it out to people not entitled to have it.
They were indicted under the Espionage Act.
The Obama Administration Justice Department quashed that prosecution before it went to trial in 2009.
And just before that happened, Rosen filed a defamation suit seeking $20 million from APAC, which essentially said, hey, we commonly handle classified information at APAC, and I want you to compensate me for smearing me in the media and denying that what I did was anything but normal.
So, kind of like James Madison said, ambition must be made to check ambition.
Here's a guy who used to run APAC who, by the way, I'm all about innocent until proven guilty in a court of law and all that, but there is no law in America anymore.
These people get away with whatever they want to, including attacking American targets and blaming it on our enemies and God knows what.
And so I say if you work for APAC, you're guilty until you prove yourself innocent.
How do you like that?
And if anybody just types in Steve Rosen indictment and reads that indictment, unless the FBI is just making things up, which they like to do.
They're second on my list of things I don't like.
But unless they're just completely fibbing about the entire thing, they followed this guy around secret meetings and cloak and dagger and meeting at restaurants and hold your hand in front of your mouth when you talk.
And then they went to his buddy Larry Franklin's house, who he was working with to steal the secret information from the Pentagon, and he had a virtual library of classified documents at his house.
And apparently, correct me if I'm wrong, Grant, but these men were basically working to, Larry Franklin was bringing to Rosen, who was interning over to Danny Ailan and the Mossad guys at the Israeli embassy, information about the debate inside the administration about whether or not or when to bomb Iran.
And they were basically trying to figure out what's the debate between Hadley, Rice and Cheney and Bush and whoever, and what can we do better to put ourselves in a better position to get this war going?
Right.
It was about the policy formulation and having an inside track so that Israel could front run that inside track.
But it was also about gathering closely held information that the U.S. government had classified about various events that apparently they wanted to pin on Iran so that that would make a better pretext for war.
Right.
And now, so he got busted for that.
I mean, they didn't prosecute him, but the FBI raided AIPAC twice.
They put him and his top Iran expert, Keith Weissman, under indictment.
And then AIPAC basically cut these guys loose, right?
And that's why this guy's angry and suing now, even though the charges against him have been dropped.
He's now accusing AIPAC of defamation for saying that he did anything wrong.
And his point being, we all do this all the time.
That's our job.
That's what AIPAC is for.
Well, he's trying to thread the needle so that there is no liability to the organization or himself for passing classified information.
We should talk about how he's trying to thread that needle.
But the interesting thing that was revealed is that, yeah, AIPAC may have cut him off, but he was able to raise almost a million dollars from heavy AIPAC donors.
And the organization did pay $4.9 million toward his defense.
And that's another thing that came out in the anti-war story about, well, the story that triggered all this alternative coverage, basically.
The other thing that I think is important to mention is that there's a huge amount of confusion, purposeful confusion created by people who say things like, well, these two are just doing what reporters do every day.
And that's absolutely wrong.
They aren't out there getting classified information as whistleblowers.
They're not new Daniel Ellsbergs.
They're not Julian Assange.
Because what they're trying to do is obtain information that will allow them to make the case that best suits their foreign principle.
And in this case, that usually means getting the U.S. into a war, tapping U.S. military resources, obtaining additional foreign aid, things that tend to affect Americans directly and in many cases negatively.
The other thing that came out as far as the interplay between the FBI and Rosen is that they had made him an offer because they said that he had lied to them during some previous meeting and discussion with the FBI.
They were saying to him basically on his doorstep, hey, you need to come clean with us and we don't care that you lied to us and we need to get to the bottom of this, you know, mishandling of classified information.
Well, Rosen, what does he do?
He calls AIPAC.
They tell him to shut up and come in and talk to the lead counsel.
But what does he do instead?
He heads straight to a meeting with the number two at the Israeli embassy to warn them that the FBI is hot on the trail.
Hi, everybody.
We're talking with Grant F. Smith from IRMEP.
That's the Institute for Research Middle East Policy.
The books are Spy Trade, America's Defense Line, Deadly Dogma, Foreign Agents, and Visa Denied.
The website is IRMEP.org at Antiwar.com.
AIPAC bears all to quash lawsuit.
And now I'm trying to find – I'm sort of stalling for time here – I'm trying to find the great quote from Steve Rosen that I saw earlier.
Where did it go?
Ex-AIPAC official threatens to uncover mass spying at Israel lobby.
And what he's saying here is that they regularly traffic in U.S. government information, which brings up the question, isn't it time for the FBI agents to raid AIPAC headquarters again or at least detain this guy under a material witness warrant or something and make him cough up his – what he's got to say here?
Right.
What he's telling Jeff Stein at the Washington Post – and Jeff Stein brought this to him after reading the antiwar story and all of the building momentum – what he told Jeff Stein was, quote, I will introduce documentary evidence that AIPAC approved of the receipt of classified information, unquote.
And he says again, quote, most instances of actual receipt are hard to document because orally received information rarely comes with classified stamps on it nor records alerts that the information is classified, unquote.
So he's saying, yes, there's this infrastructure.
His own civil suit talks about kind of a parallel declassification unit that exists within AIPAC.
But he's also trying to weasel out of it by saying, oh, well, maybe there aren't documents, maybe it's all verbal.
So he's threading a needle there.
Interesting.
You know, I'm looking at Jeff Stein's blog and it says here that he got a lot of money, Rosen did, from Haim Saban.
Which brings up a whole other AIPAC scandal.
Let's talk about that a little bit when we get back.
Everybody, it's Grant F. Smith from IRMEP, I-R-M-E-P dot org, the Institute for Research Middle East Policy.
All right, everybody, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Grant F. Smith.
He's the director of the Institute for Research Middle East Policy.
That's IRMEP dot org, America's number one leading expert in the power of the Israel lobby in the United States.
He's the author of six or seven books about it, something like that.
We're talking about Steve Rosen.
You remember him.
He was part of the case with Larry Franklin when AIPAC was raided by the FBI in the late summer and I guess maybe early autumn of 2004.
Franklin pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 12, 13 years in prison, but then they let him go.
Rosen and Weissman, the two AIPAC officials, both had their charges against them dismissed.
But now Rosen is suing AIPAC for making him look bad, I guess, and is sort of kind of threatening to reveal what they're really up to.
You were talking about how when the FBI tried to flip Rosen, he ran straight to the head of AIPAC to talk to him.
Of course, in the Franklin indictment, it says that they were turning over all of this to the guys at the Israeli embassy, a.k.a.
Israeli intelligence.
So it brings up the question about these kind of fuzzy lines about what's a lobby and what's a front for a foreign government spying operation in the United States.
And then right before we went to break, I was looking at Jeff Stein's spy talk blog over at the Washington Post website, per your recommendation, and he mentions that one of Rosen's major benefactors is Haim Saban, which of course reminded me of the Jane Harman scandal.
And so I wonder, you know, those things in context, if you could maybe explain a little bit about, you know, how do we categorize AIPAC?
Is it a lobby?
Is it simply a front for a foreign government?
Well, the FBI back in the 80s was investigating AIPAC, and it had an assertion from a source that there was a member of Israeli intelligence actually working on AIPAC's staff.
But you've mentioned that you've read some of these books by the former Mossad officer.
Israel obviously has another type, according to Viktor Ostrovsky, of Mossad spying operations in the United States, which sometimes gathers incriminating evidence against politicians and that sort of thing.
So I don't think, you know, based on a lot of the information, they're primarily—AIPAC is really involved in that.
They're more involved in just straight influence lobbying, channeling the collective power of different Israel-related PACs and donor communities to make politicians tow a pro—well, they call it a pro-Israel line, but basically submit to Israeli foreign policy objectives.
And so the surprising thing, again, from the recent court filing is that—not that Steve Rosen went into AIPAC after confronted by the FBI.
As you say, he did contact AIPAC's head legal counsel.
But then he went directly and contacted the second-in-command of the Israeli embassy, Barack, and insisted that he drop all of his meetings and meet with him at a restaurant in Washington, D.C., so that he could warn them.
And he specifically mentioned the Jonathan Pollard case as an indication of the level of problems that the FBI was about to cause AIPAC and the Israeli lobby.
And this allowed Barack to go back and warn the rest of the Israeli embassy what was going on.
So that particular incident, so reminiscent of Pollard and the fact that he reveals in his deposition that they had ongoing weekly meetings at the same restaurant, just all builds the case of this ongoing policy coordination between the Israeli government and AIPAC, most of which they try to keep secret so that they don't appear to be a foreign agent.
But, you know, the problem is the founder of this organization, Isaiah Cannon, came straight from the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
He writes in his book that he agreed with Israeli officials to lobby domestically within United States front organizations and then was shut down several times and had to reconstitute AIPAC so that its current form is really only the latest iteration of a series of organizations that have had problems with the law, problems with the Treasury, problems with the Foreign Agents Registration Unit, and problems with the American people, because it's becoming more and more transparent that this organization doesn't represent any sort of U.S. interest.
It's strictly there to promote Israeli policies in the United States.
Well, now, MJ Rosenberg, a former AIPAC official who's now a hardcore peace activist, you know, left-wing activist, has written at Al Jazeera that, unfortunately for AIPAC, Rosenberg has 180 documents, which could prove that Howard Korr, AIPAC's executive director, and probably the AIPAC board as well, knew exactly what Rosenberg was doing in trafficking in these classified documents.
So that's perhaps beyond them doing it themselves without him, you know, just that part anyway.
But still, it's a wonder, isn't it, or it should be a wonder, shouldn't it, why all of AIPAC wasn't indicted as a corporation back then?
Well, there does seem to have been some dealings between the Justice Department, in which the Justice Department was reining in the FBI and not allowing them to take the investigation to its logical conclusion, and this deposition and set of documents released alludes to that deal between McNulty and AIPAC's head counsel, whereas, you know, they would throw two guys overboard and the organization would escape indictment.
Because, you know, basically when you indict a corporation, you basically sign its death warrant in most cases.
And so the Justice Department, for whatever political reasons, and whenever you deal with, you know, crimes committed in the name of Israel, politics quickly enters the picture, decided to talk about this deal.
There was reference to the Thompson Memorandum, which is a governing Department of Justice set of guidelines, which said if an organization appears to be, you know, making movements which would tend to handle the situation, that you don't indict the corporation.
But the bottom line is, with all of these new revelations and threats, people have to be asking, why is it that Rosen is going to be releasing these documents in a favorable environment, you know, the least damaging first, or only oral testimony and depositions first to get a settlement?
Why isn't he being placed in front of a grand jury, again, to get to the bottom of what AIPAC is really doing with all this classified information?
Because there is no such thing as a legitimate U.S. nonprofit corporation that is allowed to traffic in classified information to, you know, forward any sort of agenda.
It's just unheard of.
Well, so, M.J. Rosenberg seems to think that this is really going to hurt AIPAC.
They're spending all their money just trying to defend themselves.
He says, I guess, in here too, that, you know, they're just trying to pressure AIPAC to settle.
He's not really going to release these documents.
You know, he just wants them to pay him off.
Shut up.
But do you think that this could really diminish AIPAC's power, I guess?
Ira Chernis, who I talked to last week, he was saying that on Capitol Hill now, people ask basically their Jewish friends in Congress, you know, what's the pro-Israel line on this or that issue?
And instead of hearing, well, this is what you're supposed to think about it, which is the AIPAC line, and now they say, well, here's what AIPAC is saying, but here's what J Street is saying.
Things, you know, there really is beginning to be a conversation, even on Capitol Hill, question mark, exclamation point, in parentheses there, about, you know, the role of Israel in shaping America's policy and what America's policy toward Israel should be.
Right.
It opens up a can of worms for AIPAC.
And M.J. Rosenberg, who you should probably know better than anybody since he worked at the organization, is painting it as an existential crisis.
He's saying, you know, hey, if they're spending tens of millions of dollars, and, you know, their most recent IRS filings indicate they suffered a 14% hit in donations in 2008, which was a time when a lot of internationally oriented nonprofits were actually growing.
He's saying, how is it, you know, basically, are they going to continue to attract donors if they're basically pouring it down a rat hole of legal expenses to defend against Rosen, who has a good case, and, you know, also other possible exposures.
So he's right in saying, you know, that Congress could soon, if this plays itself out in any sort of meaningful way, be liberated from absolutely towing the AIPAC line and maybe have more room to listen to J Street or, heaven forbid, listen to some groups that are mainly concerned with U.S. interests that might want to rekindle business ties with the Arab world or the Islamic markets that have been severely impacted by AIPAC-oriented restrictions.
Well, now we're talking pie in the sky.
Well, you never know.
You never know.
All right, everybody.
That's Grant F. Smith, IRMEP.org for the Institute for Research Middle East Policy.
And check him out on Amazon.com.
He's got six books about it, including Spy Trade.
And sorry, I have one more question, but we're all out of time.
We'll have to save it for next time.
Thanks, Grant.
All right.
Thanks a lot.
