All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest is Grant F.
Smith from the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy.
That's IRMEP.org.
IRMEP.org.
Hey, do you like original sources?
You know, declassified government documents and freedom of information act dumps and the rest of that.
Hmm.
This might be the website for you.
IRMEP.org, the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy.
And of course he also writes for antiwar.com where he's got one today.
AIPAC pushes hard for war with Iran.
What is this?
2007.
Welcome to the show.
Hey, Scott.
Great to be here.
Don't forget those mandatory declassification review dumps as well.
I mean, that's an important tool for people who want to stay out of court, but also be able to get a hearing on classified documents before a panel of so-called neutral experts from various government agencies.
So that's really important.
Yeah.
It seems like 2007.
Seems like 2005 when we had the Iran Freedom Support Act of 2005.
You know, this whole thing with this recent breaking the silence by Keith Weissman, a former AIPAC employee, has been a lot of fun to read about because there's an argument he's making that AIPAC is not fundamentally pursuing regime change in Iran.
And I thought that was the funniest thing I've read in a long time.
All right.
Well, rewind a little bit.
Who's this Keith Weissman character?
Well, Keith Weissman is one of three people who was indicted under the Espionage Act back in 2005, along with Colonel Lawrence Franklin and Stephen J.
Rosen, when the FBI wiretapped them funneling classified information around about U.S.
-Iran policy and basically indicted the three.
Franklin pled guilty and the Rosen and Weissman indictments created a firestorm in Washington, D.C., and the indictments were gradually unwound under extremely dubious circumstances over the next five years.
But Rosen has not talked until now, excuse me, Weissman hasn't talked until now, and so for people who follow AIPAC closely as being one of the main reasons why we have such horrible U.S.
-Middle East policy, the fact that he's broken the silence and said something is extremely important.
Well, now, he talked once to the forward, didn't he?
Or at least they had this piece about how he and Rosen had gone different ways, how Steve Rosen, you know, went over to be the worst guy over a commentary blog or whatever, and how Weissman had become kind of a peacenik.
Right.
Walking around with a keffiyeh around his neck.
But that was from, you know, quite a while back and it was nowhere near as in-depth and self-serving.
And it was Robert Dreyfuss that he talked to, interestingly, huh?
Yeah, yeah.
And so I think, you know, it appeared on a PBS website called Tehran Bureau.
Yeah, they actually have some really great writers on there.
Exactly.
So, you know, it's high profile stuff and people are slowly digesting what it means.
But, you know, some of the things that Weissman has said in this are just outright preposterous.
I mean, if you if you take the article piece by piece, he's making an argument that there was, at least until he left, a progressive force inside of AIPAC that was exercising restraint on the organization and that, you know, oh, how ridiculous it could be that that AIPAC would ever be pursuing regime change in Iran.
But he must have never looked at the front page of AIPAC.org.
Well, he's never looked at AIPAC's own lobbying disclosure forms.
I mean, how can he explain away the Iran Freedom Support Act, the Iran Transparency and Accountability Act, the Gulf Security, Iran Sanctions Enforcement Act?
I mean, what AIPAC has been doing for most of this decade is getting the U.S. to have a fairly comprehensive set of economic warfare engaged against Iran.
And so it's just absolutely preposterous that Keith Weissman could say today that it's not the policy of AIPAC to get regime change in Iran.
It goes against everything that they do in Congress and, more ominously, their ongoing meetings and access to the U.S. Treasury Department, the National Security Council, the U.S. State Department.
I really do have to encourage anybody who wants to look deeper into AIPAC to go to the office of the clerk and look at their lobbying reports.
And what you see is they've got a two-track focus.
One track is targeting Iran, getting the U.S. into ever closer direct military confrontation with Iran.
And the other is boosting their own power.
If people knew that in Minnesota, Camp Ripley's base upgrade for the National Guard depends on AIPAC because it's lobbying on that issue in legislation that has nothing to do with the Middle East, I think they'd be upset.
But a huge quantity of AIPAC's lobbying efforts are not just about targeting Iran for regime change, but just flexing muscle in an unprecedented way by either promoting or withholding plums in appropriations and supplemental appropriations to the Justice Department, the State Department, and agencies on things that have nothing to do with what they say their core interest is.
So it's terrifying in that respect.
Well, and look, just take it from the other way.
Who in America wants war with Iran?
Well, let's see.
There's the Israel lobby and, I don't know, maybe the Air Force?
I would stop.
You only need to put one figure on that list.
It's the most extreme part of the lobby.
But, you know, I have to say that just based on the work they've already done in terms of targeting and limiting financial flows, trying to cut off energy supplies, the U.S. has already been maneuvered into a position by AIPAC where it's engaged in as many economic warfare tactics against Iran as Eisenhower launched against the Soviet Union back in the Cold War.
I mean, it's terrifying to see how our country, a country of rule of law, has all of these tactical and financial arms pointed at Iran, which are strictly enforced.
But, of course, you know, there are other laws on the books that aren't enforced at all, which would have an effect of curbing the Israel lobby's power, which are totally ignored and there's no redress on that.
But it's it truly is terrifying how many tactical economic warfare tactics have been have been implemented against Iran at this point.
I think it was Spider-Man.
He said, with great power comes great stupidity.
Wouldn't that?
I only saw it once.
But, you know, the thing is, OK, if you and I sat down with AIPAC and said, OK, guys, let's see if we can design a policy to provoke Iran into trying to make nuclear weapons go.
Oh, wait, we just say, look, you guys already did all the work.
This is the plan.
This is how to do it.
And what are they thinking?
Well, you know, the scary thing is that all of this legislation, including legislation that AIPAC was working on while Weissman was still there.
And as you've noted over and over again on your program, particularly when Gareth Porter comes on, there is no debate.
I mean, all of these pieces of legislation targeting economic warfare tactics against Iran start with a preamble, such as the United States and its strong ally, Israel, in order to disrupt the Iranian nuclear weapons and mass destruction program.
I mean, that's the preamble.
There's no debate.
All right.
Hold it right there.
It's Grant F. Smith, everybody from the Institute for Research, Middle Eastern Policy, IRMEP.org and Antiwar.com is in the highlights.
We're at the top of the page today.
Go check it out.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
Fox News got John Bolton yelling about something.
I didn't bother hitting the closed caption button.
But I will say to my guest, Grant F.
Smith, wouldn't it be great if John Bolton runs for president?
Man, I can't wait to see him and Ron Paul fight.
He's the only one of these right wing lunatics who really thinks he's right enough to get up there and fight about it.
Even Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney are talking about, well, you know, maybe we shouldn't go nation building guys and whatever.
John Bolton, I say let him fight.
It'll be like Rocky III, Mr.
T versus Rocket Balboa kind of thing.
I agree.
Yeah.
I mean, I guess if he's, you know, he was up for chasing one of his aides around the hotel room, bringing them in a hotel, they'd probably probably be up for a fight.
Oh, well, his whole attitude is that he's smarter than everyone in the whole world.
And he certainly has a lot to say.
And he's evil, but he's, you know, consistent.
His arguments are valid, if not sound.
You know what I mean?
So, yeah, well, I mean, yeah, I think, you know, I think it's good to listen to arguments between well-informed people.
But I wouldn't put him in that category.
But it would be good to see real debates on real issues.
But we haven't been getting, you know, really anything on Middle East policy.
You know, nothing, nothing decent.
I mean, obviously, Ron Paul's got some very good positions on pulling back the aid and stop fueling the fires.
But you're not going to hear that, you know, for most of the time.
And that's that's a real crisis, because this is the single most important foreign policy issue there is.
And there's just no airtime.
There's no time for it.
Yeah, it's true.
And, you know, then when it is airtime at all, it's John Bolton saying, look, everybody knows they're making nukes and nobody to argue with him about it.
That's really the problem.
And he's, you know, I'm not sure if you have this on your website, but certainly on YouTube, it's a conference call with John Bolton explaining that we were trying to provoke the Iranians into withdrawing from the nonproliferation treaty and the international Atomic Energy Agency safeguards agreement so that we could he said that would have been advantageous for us because, of course, their goal is war and regime change.
Right.
So as long as the Iranians are cooperating with the international ATF there, it's kind of hard to make the case that they're not right.
No, I heard that.
And it's a very clear, you know, clear revelation of Bolton talking to his real base of supporters and trying to bring home the bacon.
And I don't know, had he even left the U.N. as the proposed interim position or was he just left at the time of that call?
I think he had just left.
Right.
Just left.
So there's Bolton talking to his true constituency, saying, darn, we just couldn't we couldn't lure them into the pitfall that we needed.
And, you know.
Right.
Well, you know, Gordon Prather's work at Antiwar.com, basically the vast majority of it amounts to so you have this axis of evil.
All three of them have operative safeguards agreements with the IAEA.
So what do you do?
On Iraq, you just Buffalo full speed into it and just hope that the B.S. is thick enough and it's fast enough that you get it done.
In Korea, they successfully provoked them into withdrawing from the treaty, but it didn't lead to a war, just led to the north acquiring a few nuclear bombs.
And then in Iran, they're still beating them over the head for putting their hands up and saying, look, we're abiding by the safeguards agreement in every way we're required to for years on end.
Well, that's that's the absurd thing, because, again, we have this these preambles and all of this economic warfare legislation that the U.S. is launching against Iran.
And AIPAC actually has the gall to mention the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty vision.
And, of course, you know, as guest after guest has mentioned, the Israelis have a gigantic nuclear weapons arsenal, which is not under the NPT.
And the U.S., in fact, has amendments to the Foreign Aid Act saying that we can't give aid to countries that have clandestine nuclear weapons stockpiles.
And that's one of the laws that because there's no knowledge or constituency behind it, it's simply ignored.
The president should be signing a waiver every time he sends aid to Israel, just like he does with Pakistan in acknowledgment that it's a nuclear weapons state.
And instead, he simply lies to the American people by not signing the waiver and delivering up all this aid.
So, you know, it's really hard to keep swallowing all of all of this legislation and all of these pronouncements, which are based on rich ideology, you know, cooked up in Tel Aviv and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, because at some point people have to finally stand up and say, you know, none of this is true.
And this is you know, this is taking money away from my school.
This is taking money away from my community.
I don't want infrastructure projects in my locality determined by AIPAC, which, again, sprang from the Israel Office of Information, a unit of the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1951, and was founded for the purpose of lobbying for the Israeli government.
I mean, I don't want this foreign lobby to be making those decisions and setting all these tripwires for war.
Well, and, you know, there were stories that at least Philip Weiss's blog, I probably should have done better research on this, but supposedly AIPAC had made it clear to the Obama administration they could withhold votes on health care if he was going to, you know, which not that I'm for that thing or anything, but just that they're they're, you know, going way off of their actual topic in order to do that.
And that's why I mentioned it is a dangerous development.
They used to be strictly about guns and money.
When Isaiah Cannon, the founder of AIPAC, was ordered to go to Congress and lobby as an American by the Israelis, by the way, he was told, get this done.
We need somebody there for six months to pass some legislation to allow us to buy arms.
Now they're just running wild and nobody will touch this issue.
I mean, you've got, you know, the bigger media outlets like Democracy Now, they'll take on Blackwater.
You know, Fox will take on Acorn.
None of them have the guts to take on a real problem in America, which is AIPAC.
It's running amok.
It's running amok.
I guess that's one thing nice about having nothing to lose.
I got freedom.
I don't care.
Well, and look, to get back to the whole point about Weissman's denial, if I had it right, the documents that Weissman arose and convinced Larry Franklin, or at least asked Larry Franklin to liberate, no, to steal in an espionage sort of sense, for real, from the Pentagon and give to them was about the internal deliberations on the National Security Council about what we want to do about Iran.
Right.
And this is when Sharon was not making any secret about the fact, if I remember it right, that they wanted war with Iran.
And this was apparently, and correct me if I'm wrong, but this is straight out of the indictment, isn't it, that that was the substance of much of the leak there and that what they were trying to do was help position the Israeli government to better influence the argument in America between Bush and Rice, for example.
That's right.
That's absolutely right.
Without that information, and this is the reason why AIPAC has been found to be trafficking in so many classified signals, intelligence, et cetera, et cetera.
But without tapping that high level inside information, they can't front run and they can't work with the Israelis out of their Tel Aviv office to get things done.
And that is precisely why the FBI took the wiretaps and, you know, after they were exposed, took them in and got indictments, because this is obviously illegal.
You know what?
Again, one of the things about the Dreyfus article, everybody in the media has given Rosen and Weissman a break, saying what they do is just like what reporters do every day.
But I'm sorry, that's not true.
They're not reporters.
In fact, look at what they're doing.
They're prosecuting whistleblower leakers who leak directly to reporters as though they're Rosen and Weissman and Franklin, the kinds of people who are actually doing espionage.
Well, right.
I mean, there's a huge conflation and, you know, Rosen and Weissman and AIPAC aren't media outlets and they don't do what they do to educate and inform us.
I mean, you know, the difference between what they did and what Bradley Manning and Daniel Ellsberg did and this NSA whistleblower is is completely different.
And yet we have the Washington Post and all of these other outlets saying, oh, no, no, no, no.
It's a slippery slope.
You prosecute Weissman and Rosman and you're just going to bring down the entire fourth estate.
And that's it's just patently not true.
And, you know, I just I just hope Weissman keeps talking so that we can keep analyzing and debunking what he says, because people need to be talking about what the lobby's doing, what it tried to do.
And the Iran, you know, getting the U.S. into a conflict with Iran is still front and center for this lobby.
So we have to make sure we keep on it.
Yeah, well, and as power shifts all over the place in the Middle East right now, it's a lot more volatile situation to dangerous.
All right.
Well, thanks very much for your time, as always, Grant.
We've got to leave it there.
But I thank you again and refer everyone to our MEP dot org and Amazon dot com for many great works by Grant F.
Smith.
Thanks again.
Thanks a lot.
