Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our first guest on the show today is Grant F. Smith.
He runs the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy at IRMEP.com, I-R-M-E-P, oh, is it dot org?
I bet it's dot org, and I'm screwing it up.
Welcome back to the show, Grant, how are you doing?
Hey Scott, doing great, and I'm happy to see that Shark Week has been followed by M-E-K Week.
It's been quite a learning experience hearing Trita Parsi and all your guests talk about it.
Yeah, yeah, I've been having a great time, and if you haven't heard Sahimi's interview from yesterday yet, you'll really like it.
Great, can't wait.
And later on today, an hour from now actually, we'll be talking with Scott Peterson from the Christian Science Monitor, who did this incredible report about all the money going into the pockets of some of the most vile Republicans and Democrats in our society to plug for these guys.
Well, it's really hard to follow the money, so anybody who's up to that task has got their work cut out for them.
Yeah, well, I don't know if you've seen that CSN piece yet, but it's great.
I'll just go ahead and mention it again, everybody.
It's called Iranian Group's Big Money Push to Get Off U.S. Terrorist Lists, and that's really something else.
But now let's talk about what you wrote.
It's on antiwar.com today, and it is dot org, by the way.
I'm an idiot.
I-R-M-E-P dot org, the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy.
By the way, do you like original sources?
Do you like government documents and trolling through them yourselves to see what they really contain?
Why, check out I-R-M-E-P dot org.
They've got all of the primary sources you could ever want to spend a weekend reading.
Hey, thanks.
No, it's- I think it's well worth the effort to engage in multi-year Freedom of Information Act and mandatory declassification reviews to get documents and reports that the government just doesn't want to release, either because they think they're embarrassing or, in the domain we're talking about, could cause problems with an important Middle East ally.
And that's been the case for a lot of the things that we've been getting released.
But the thing I wrote about recently is just plain old, ordinary IRS stuff.
Well, and this headline, I think, well, you just must be wrong.
It just couldn't be.
Does AIPAC have only two major donors?
Really?
Well, it's an interesting question, and I know you always joke about, you know, donors and how Randolph Bourne didn't leave $3 billion to Antiwar.com and all of that, but- Only he had, huh?
Yeah, but somebody's sure pumping a lot of money into AIPAC, and I think, you know, given the outsized clout that the group has, the fact that they're sending 20% of Congress on recess to Israel to talk as opposed to letting them go back to their districts, it's really important to understand where their money's coming from.
And the organization, from what I've heard from a lot of people who used to be members, has engaged in a ton of telemarketing and outreach and really trying to get their smaller donor base turned out, but from what they're telling the IRS and, you know, just basically to back up, all nonprofits that are 501c3 and 501c4s file a public tax return, so you can kind of see, you know, who's running the organization, what their charitable purpose is, and how they're spending donations.
And so, it's a way for there to be some accountability.
People can see who are donors, if their money's well spent, people can see if they're outsiders, what the group is really doing, and in this case, we've obtained the list of contributors for the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, just to see kind of the profile of giving to the organization, and in comparing 2006, where they had a fairly broad base of donors giving on average 15,000 of 1,700 key donors, according to their last available Schedule B list of contributors, that's dwindled to really two very large donors, and in inquiring to the IRS just to verify this, they said, in fact, in a phone call yesterday, that yes, in fact, they have only two people now listed as contributing $5,000 or more for this organization.
So, you know, we don't know who they are, is it Haim Saban, is it Sheldon Adelson, we don't know, and they won't tell, but it's a very troubling, I think, pattern for an organization with this much influence to be relying on such a small source of funding, given the activities that it's engaged in right now, particularly the lobbying for covert action and sanctions and all sorts of very inflammatory positions toward Iran.
Yeah, well, you know, I'm just no good at the rubber meets the road stuff, I just sit here behind my microphone and complain and that kind of thing, but, you know, when I was reading that article in the New York Times about the very, very few men behind the hate and fear Muslims and Sharia law movement in America a couple of weeks ago, it occurred to me how easy it was for them, how easy it's been for them to, you know, for example, come up with this model legislation and introduce it in as many states as they can and get all this attention and flex all this muscle.
Here we got only a couple of people donate more than $5,000, so it must be hundreds of thousands or whatever, to AIPAC, and then they get to completely, you know, dictate to Congress how they're supposed to vote on any issue concerning Middle East policy whatsoever.
Why can't we do that then?
Well, I wish it were only a couple hundred thousand.
AIPAC's top donor in 2009 gave almost $49 million, and their second top donor gave in almost $14 million.
That's why we can't do it.
Yeah, that's why.
I mean, that's an incredible amount of resources, and, you know, it's extreme concentration.
That means all the rest of their small donors, who in past years typically gave around $500, kicked in all the rest of the $2.3 million, which made up their total public support of around $65 million for 2009.
So I mean, you're talking about the lion's share, the majority of funding only coming from two sources, and for an organization that claims to speak for such a broad group of people in the United States, that sort of funding concentration doesn't sync with that claim.
I mean, if they were to come out and say in all of their conferences, etc., hey, we represent two people, well then fine, but that's not what they say.
And so I think it's troubling, and I also mentioned in the article, and I think this is important, you know, the conditions for this organization have changed quite a bit because they've been subject to a lot more scrutiny recently.
And I would trace that, you know, back certainly to the Mearsheimer-Waltz essay that was canceled by the Atlantic and appeared in the London Review of Books, and then their book that came out setting off more of an intelligent discussion about the history and activities of the organization.
And it hasn't helped at all either that one of their own employees, who they had to, as you said, throw under the bus back in 2005 because they were indicted for espionage, has been keeping a defamation suit alive against the organization.
In fact, in the article I mentioned that in June of this year he has appealed to the D.C.
Court of Appeals against a judgment that was rendered throwing out his $20 million defamation suit against the Board of Directors and the organization itself.
And this is, of course, Stephen J. Rosen, the longtime research and general operative of AIPAC, who is, along with Keith Weissman, indicted for espionage.
So the organization, it's ironic Steve Rosen has pried the organization open because he continues to file these very damning internal documents in court.
All right, now hold it right there, because I want to ask you more about what we've learned from Steve Rosen and his defamation lawsuit against AIPAC when we get back.
It's Grant F. Smith from the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy, IRMEP.org.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Antiwar Radio, I'm Scott Horton, I'm talking with Grant F. Smith from the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy.
He's got a piece at Antiwar.com today called, Does AIPAC Have Only Two Major Donors?
I'm pretty sure that the headline was written with that tone of voice in mind, right?
Yeah, exactly that tone.
And so now I paged down in the article here and I found the thing that you were just mentioning there, Rosen's smoking gun that Steve Rosen indicted and then turned loose by Barack Obama, former, I forgot exactly his position, but a very high level agent of the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee.
And it's got a couple of emails, one about Libya in 1984, and then this other one is an email to Howard Korr on U.S. intelligence about Iran.
What's that about?
Is this the thing the FBI was after him for?
Yeah, well, this is kind of the smoking gun, as you know, and you know, Justin Raimondo wrote a lot about this case as well.
There was this moment back in 2004 where it looked like AIPAC itself was going to be criminally indicted for espionage.
And this email, which I don't believe has ever come out anywhere, but it was in the appeals document, talks about intelligence on Iran that I believe they got it from Colonel Lawrence Franklin of the Department of Defense.
And here he is telling Howard Korr everything that he learned.
And so his argument is, you know, this is just another day at the office.
You know, I managed to get some some intel from from one of my agents.
I'm running at the Department of Defense.
Here it is.
And he's using it in this defamation suit to say, hey, you know, you didn't punish me back then.
You know, and everybody was getting the same classified information.
Boy, thank goodness for that double jeopardy clause in Article one, section nine here, right?
I mean, what is this other than a guilty plea?
Well, you know, it's a one way communication.
So who knows what AIPAC's current executive director would say about it?
You know, maybe he didn't get it.
Maybe it went to his junk mailbox.
But the point is, here you have Steve Rosen, who is actually opening up the organization a lot.
It's very ironic for is as hidden as the rest of the operation is with these two mysterious donors.
Here's Steve Rosen filing 600 pages in open court in June about intimate details about the operations of the organization and how he basically got his job at the organization because he managed to get some other classified information that he was able to use to destroy Jesse Jackson's presidential bid back in the 80s.
I mean, if you read that first email, he talks about, oh, he can't remember the the good old days.
He was trying to remember the exact date that that he was able to get that classified information and destroy Jesse Jackson.
And he's he's he's remembering it in the email and tying it to the death of a major donor.
So, I mean, there's a lot of really interesting information about how this organization works, which continues going back to the big question, which is, you know, why did the attorney McNulty, who's now in private practice, not just hand down indictment a la, you know, Enron that, hey, indict the organization for for this type of activity?
Well, they complained at the time that, well, we're not saying they're innocent.
We're just saying that the judges ruled against us so many times in preliminary hearings that we don't think that we can make our criminal case anymore, which Well, that was later on, though, I'm talking about in 2000.
That's right.
I'm talking about in 2004 when no indictments had been handed down.
So, you know, it's an interesting it's an interesting juxtaposition because, you know, there's there's other information that's also coming out about sort of the early days of APAC.
When APAC's founder was still working at the Israeli Office of Information, he was holding meetings and trying trying to kind of set up the lobby as it would be run in Washington and New York.
And there's some really interesting transcripts from an informant that I haven't written about or put up yet, which talk about how they were settling on New York as kind of a PR region and that Washington, D.C. would be a source for intelligence and in particular, you know, getting as much intel as they could shovel to the Israelis as possible.
And this is back when he was actually working for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
But it's really interesting to see kind of that same attitude, you know, in play for this organization that he created, which is ostensibly, you know, a nonprofit charity.
It's it's the same sort of intel gathering operation to work with the Israelis to get all of this great aid and diplomatic support.
So it's it's a fascinating insight into the organization.
Well, and I just can't get over this email from Keith Weissman to one of the temporarily indicted there to Howard Corr, he says in a conversation with someone familiar with U.S. intelligence, presumably Larry Franklin, I learned the following information and included here is Iran is shoring up their control of the Badr Brigade, the Iraqi Shia militia based previously in Iran during Saddam's days, and they're sending surveillance assassination teams to northern Iraq to under to uncover Israelis and their activities there, as reported by Seymour Hersh with an eye to eventually targeting them for killing, it says.
Right.
Kind of funny little footnotes there about, you know, what they were talking about in July of 2004, you know, and the right Brigade we now call the Iraqi Army.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And what did they do with this?
They both went on the phone with Glenn Kessler, The Washington Post, and Steve Rosen's pronouncement was literally, quote, This is Iran engaging in total war against the United States in southern Iraq.
That was that was another little snippet that he made.
He should have been reading Bob Dreyfuss.
He had, you know, there's pictures of George Bush sitting down and drinking tea with Abdulaziz al-Hakim.
Best of buds, those two.
Wow.
Well, you know, it's it's a you know, of course, we probably still have about 40 more years to go before we really even find out what was happening, especially during the end of the Bush administration.
But well, that's right now.
Help me on this point of fact here.
Is it not the case that according to the indictment against Stephen Rosen and Keith Wiseman, that some of the information that they were getting from Larry Franklin was the very highest level internal deliberations about what to do about Iran, say, for example, between Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powell, et cetera, at the time?
Yeah, that is it.
It was, you know, the very top policy documents.
And that is, of course, what they needed so that the Israelis, whatever interest they had, could front run that and influence that and et cetera, et cetera.
It's AIPAC is always after that sort of inside information, which is, you know, as Stephen Rosen would admit, frequently classified.
And that's what makes lobbying the executive branch so dangerous, is that almost by default, everything such as those policy directives is not supposed to be circulated and particularly not by an organization like AIPAC.
Well, and their only defense was that they're Bradley Manning, whistleblowing to Glenn Kessler.
What do you hate, the First Amendment or something?
Yeah, it was a great big article of the BBC of all places calling Stephen J.
Rosen a whistleblower.
And there was another whole round of conflation comparing the two with journalists.
And it's absolutely absurd.
They don't they're not whistleblowers.
They weren't after this information so that they could improve public policy.
They were after it so that they could work with the Israelis.
And that's exactly where they sent it first so that they could front run U.S. policy and influence policy.
So calling calling Weissman or Rosen whistleblowers is to contort all meaning out of the word.
And of course, all of their biggest defenders who said, hey, this is just free speech are the same people who say that Bradley Manning and Julian Assange as well.
You know, the Glenn Kessler of this situation are all just be strung upside down.
Well, it all ties back into M.E.K. week, doesn't it?
You know, these aren't terrorists because some people now like them and like what they do and like the potential for what they could do inside Iran.
So they must not be terrorists anymore.
You know, everything is so Orwellian in terms of none of these words mean anything.
You know, they're whistleblowers.
No, not at all.
They you know, they've they've been acting much more surreptitiously.
And I believe the Espionage Act indictments against them were warranted.
And I only wish that there had been a public accountability moment frequently called a criminal trial so that there wouldn't be these two, you know, people out there who may indeed have been acquitted if only, you know, this thing had gone to trial.
But the Americans were robbed of that moment by the Obama administration.
Yeah.
Like they're robbed of everything else by him, man.
All right.
Well, I'm sorry we don't have more time because I want to ask you more questions, but I'll just direct everyone to your great article today at Antiwar.com.
Does AIPAC have only two major donors?
And check out everything at IRMEP, I-R-M-E-P dot org.
The Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy.
Thanks very much, Grant.
Appreciate it.
Thanks a lot, Scott.
Bye.
