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 Richard Silverstein.
He writes the blog Tikkun Olam at richardsilverstein.com.
Welcome to the show, Richard.
How are you?
I'm fine.
Thanks, Scott, for giving me the chance to speak to your audience.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
This is such an important story and quite a complicated one.
I'd like to recommend people, again, check out richardsilverstein.com.
And here's a couple of other articles.
Secret trial revelations prompt U.S.
-Israeli diplomatic storm.
This one is in the London Independent.
And then the New York Times version focused on, oh goodness, did y'all know that the American government spies on the Israeli embassy, as though that was the real point of the story.
But anyway, there's a little bit of the important part in there.
I guess, you know, just if you could please start us off with giving us the background, telling us about your friend, I think it is, Shamay Leibovitz, and what happened with his trial and all that.
Well, in 2009, Shamay, who I had known as a blogger, also blogging about the Israeli-Arab conflict and who is Israeli.
And, by the way, was one of the first Israelis to sign a public statement refusing to serve in the occupied territories when he was in the army himself.
He came over to this country and got a law degree in Washington, D.C.
And eventually, after starting his blog, he started to work for the FBI as a translator.
It turns out that he was translating documents, translating wiretap transcripts from Israeli conversations in the Israeli embassy.
And also, this was picking up all sorts of other diplomatic conversations as well, from places like Jerusalem and other conflicts in the U.S.
So, he contacted me because he was very concerned about what he was translating and believed that it meant that the Israeli government may be trying to create an environment here in our political system which would support, for sure, a very punitive relationship with Iran and, at worst, possibly going to war with Iran.
And he felt that merely translating the material and passing it up the chain of command wasn't enough and that he wanted it to be made public.
So, I started taking some of the information that he gave me and putting it in my blog, trying to warn people about this danger.
And eventually, Shammai was exposed.
I don't really know how.
And he was charged with passing information to me.
And he eventually, partly because he didn't have the means, I think, to mount a really serious legal defense, he entered into a plea agreement with the government and accepted a plea of 20 months in prison.
And he ended up spending about 12 months in federal prison and was released to a halfway house last month.
And I decided, especially after I had a conversation with Daniel Ellsberg, that I started to see Shammai as a whistleblower against Israel and thought that the story really needed to be told now that he was out of prison and I couldn't harm him legally by going public.
I thought that I would do that to let the American public know the types of activities that the Israeli government engages in in this country to serve Israeli interests.
All right.
Now, do I have it right then that you're saying you posted the documents on your blog back in 2009, but then you took them down?
Is that it?
I didn't post the actual physical documents like WikiLeaks does.
What I did was I extracted information from it and wrote posts on the general themes of what I was reading.
But I didn't say in 2009 that I was using U.S. secret classified material because I didn't want to expose Shammai.
And I knew that if I did that he would be in trouble.
So my goal was to try to continue doing this as long as I could.
So I had to be a little bit opaque about what I was doing.
And now I'm free to be more public about it.
So after he was arrested, then you took all that stuff down and burned all the documents in fear for your own liberty, right?
I actually burned the documents when he told me to do that before he was indicted.
I'm not sure why he asked me, but throughout this I did whatever he asked me to do because his safety and security was paramount in my mind.
But when he did agree to a plea deal, I did take the post down that I had put up there.
So I have allowed journalists who are working on the story to see the material.
Most of it still exists, but it's not publicly accessible.
Well, why not go ahead and repost it all now if you still have it?
Well, I might do that.
I might do that, but technically I'm in jeopardy as well.
It would be very unusual for the government to go after a journalist after a case like this, but it is possible.
So I want to try to stay within certain limits and not provoke the righteous indignation of the Justice Department to come down on me as well.
Well, it's certainly intelligent to be fearful of the Justice Department.
Now, I think probably most Americans know, most people in this audience know that according to the law in the United States of America, you could not possibly be convicted of a crime for posting secret documents that were liberated by a government employee and delivered to you being a journalist.
But the law really isn't the point, is it?
I assume your lawyers are telling you, be careful because the law isn't necessarily going to protect you, the First Amendment and all that.
If they can use the Espionage Act against this whistleblower, why not use it against Richard Silverstein?
Right.
It's possible that they could go after a journalist, so I do have to be careful.
It would be the first time, as far as I know, that they did that, if they did.
So it's unlikely, but I really can't stick my head into the jaw of the lion and dare the lion to take a bite out of me.
Do you have legal advice telling you to beware and tread very carefully here, or this is just your own ego?
Yes.
I know I do have an attorney who's represented me throughout this process here in Seattle, and he's told me to be quite careful.
He probably would like me to be even more careful than I am, but that's what lawyers do, and that's what they're paid for.
So yes, I've had to get a lawyer.
Well, I mean, this really is its own news story, right?
That the state of the law and the state of the persecution of whistleblowers in this country right now is that a journalist is chilled from publishing documents.
I mean, legally speaking, you're no different than when Colin Powell tells a secret to Bob Woodward, and he publishes it in the Washington Post here.
Right.
Exactly right.
And you're not Bob Woodward, and so you're in jeopardy.
I'm a blogger, of course, and I don't have the means of the lawyers of the Washington Post or the New York Times behind me.
So theoretically, I could be in jeopardy, and I want to go back to Shami's predicament as well.
Yeah, of course.
Because he did not have, if you recall, the Steve Rosen, Keith Weissman episode, the spying episode.
You know, AIPAC provided a gold-plated defense that cost $8 million, and that's one of the reasons why the two of them were able to really go head-to-head with the government and say, you know, throw everything you've got at us, and we'll take it, and we'll win.
And Shami didn't have that support network behind him, and I think, you know, partly because of a lack of means, he may not have been able to fight as intensely.
I'm sorry, we'll have to hold it right there, Richard.
We'll be right back with Richard Silverstein, the blogs at richardsilverstein.com.
We're talking about the truth leaked by Shami Leibovitz and the consequences.
Back after this.
You ever notice what a strange world it is we live in here?
Have a naturalized Israeli citizen working for the FBI, translating their wiretaps of the Israeli embassy, and he turns it over to an American blogger to get the truth out.
He's loyal to America and to peace before the foreign country.
Then you have a couple of American citizens, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, who basically, if you read the indictment, they're both guilty as hell of conspiring to get classified information about the debate about Iran policy in the White House so that they could pass it on to the Israeli government so that they could better use it to push us into war with Iran.
And as our guest Richard Silverstein was saying, those guys got an $8 million defense and they got off.
The guy that they duped into doing their dirty work, Larry Franklin, got a year in prison, but Rosen and Weissman got off scot-free.
Here, a whistleblower, a real whistleblower, and they tried to spin that whole case as a freedom of speech issue, but here a real whistleblower, Mr. Leibowitz, Shemai Leibowitz, is prosecuted and sentenced to at least a year in prison, prosecuted under the Espionage Act.
What a ridiculous upside-down world we live in, it seems like to me, Richard.
Yeah, I wanted to really emphasize the sacrifice that Shemai made on behalf of the American people and their right to know what Israel was trying to do in this country.
The last time anyone was given the kind of sentence he was for leaking classified documents to a journalist was in the early 1980s, and the man's name was Samuel Morrison.
He leaked documents to a military publication in England, and he got money for doing so.
Shemai didn't get any money, he did it for a cause, he did it for a moral and a political value, and what his reward was was a year in federal prison.
This is a whistleblower who really is a patriot in my eyes, and that's why I went to the New York Times to let them know about this, and was happy that they were willing to report this story.
The story is not what some people have spun it, as you mentioned in the beginning of this segment, that the U.S. was spying on Israel, because we know that Israel spies on the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv, and we know that most governments spy on major other governments that have embassies on their territory.
So that's not the issue.
The issue is what Israel was doing here that needed to be monitored to begin with, and you have issues like Jewish community leaders in various places in the United States reporting to consulates, Israeli consulates, on the travel schedules of members of the House of Representatives who are going to Gaza to find a trip after Operation Cast Lead was completed.
You have in Texas a member of Congress meeting with a wealthy donor and a diplomat to talk about legislation against Iran, pending legislation, and how to move that forward.
You have members of Congress holding conferences to talk about the threat of Iran.
You just have a whole gamut of activities that Israel was engaged in to promote this idea that Iran was evil and that we had to stop the nuclear program there at all costs, even if it meant a military attack on Iran.
I don't think that Shomai went into this expecting that he would serve in prison, and I'm sure he's not happy about what happened to him, but he should be comforted to a small degree by the importance of what he did, and I want everyone to understand the sacrifice that he made for all of us.
Absolutely.
When it comes to monitoring these congressmen, because you're right, the important part here is the substance of what was in those documents, in those wiretaps.
You say not just that they were keeping tabs on their friends in the pro-Israel supermajority faction in the Congress, but some dissenters who had gone to Gaza after Cass led to do their own little fact-finding investigation.
Is that right?
Can you tell me more about that?
Right.
Keith Ellison, the first Muslim-American member of Congress, going with Brian Baird, who represented a district in Washington State, where I live, and they were the first two members of Congress going to visit Gaza after that war.
So you had on the tapes a member of the Jewish community in Minneapolis reporting to the Israeli consulate in Chicago about the travel schedule when they were going, and you heard them talking about evaluating Ellison and saying that his activities were hostile to Israel.
You really had them doing a baseball scorecard on the different members of Congress and targeting the ones that were going to be the most helpful to Israel in this battle against Iran.
You saw them talking about how to prioritize the members of Congress and saying that the ones that were on the military and foreign relations committees were the most important to Israel and should be the most cultivated.
You had them bad-mouthing David Obie, who was then in Congress representing Wisconsin as hostile to Israel.
You even had them talking about if you need to get anything from Obie's office, you need to call when he's not there and talk to staff because staff is more sympathetic to us.
You had in Boston an Israeli diplomat writing or helping to write an op-ed that appeared in the Boston Herald and then having a member of the Jewish community add their name to the op-ed that appeared.
So all sorts of stuff going on that Israel, you might not say that it was illegal, don't know whether any laws were violated, but very underhanded, dishonest, and stuff that Israel would not have wanted to be transparent about.
And this continues.
I'm not looking at transcripts anymore, but I'm seeing all sorts of examples of this sort of thing continuing to happen, including the latest thing is that we have a 30,000-member food cooperative supermarket in Olympia, our state capital, and the Israeli Consul General here has helped create a lawsuit against the food co-op because they have taken Israeli goods off their shelves in support of the BDS movement, the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement.
So the Israeli foreign ministry in this country is still doing similar things to what it was doing in 2009, and very little has changed, I'm afraid.
Well, the Israeli government clearly has more influence in the U.S. Congress than the American people do, but this is the first I've heard of the anti-boycott law in Israel applying in Washington State.
Yeah, exactly right.
The Knesset passed a law saying that if you publicly supported the boycott movement in Israel, that you could be sued by anyone.
You could be sued for monetary damages and didn't even have to prove that you suffered any.
And so they have made it a policy of the government to come into this country and to file lawsuits against American companies who support the boycott.
I understand that the Israeli government itself is funding the lawsuits, is paying American lawyers to file these lawsuits, and that it's an official policy of the Israeli government.
Israel has enough problems for its foreign policy to deal with without having to get into the minutia of what American companies are deciding to do in their own American markets.
And just to me, it's just really outrageous.
And they do not have their priorities or their heads screwed on right in deciding to do this sort of thing.
Well, typically it never hurts them when they screw up, so might as well just go for it, right?
Well, we're trying to keep them honest.
One of the goals of my blog is to keep them honest, and if they want to pursue these sorts of nutty projects, that we get the word out and let people know, and hopefully let Americans read about it and let them decide.
And maybe they will have to pay a price hopefully down the line.
I wonder if in any of the documents there's anything frank like, well, we all know the Iranians aren't really making nuclear weapons, but we really want these particular dumb congressmen to believe it, so send somebody to go and fool them, that kind of thing.
Well, there's nothing quite that explicit.
They may not be always the sharpest tacks at what they do, but they do understand that if they said anything that explicit, they would be in even bigger trouble.
But I did want to go back to another interesting thing.
I just was recalling about these documents I worked on.
Going back to Obama's inauguration in 2009, this was right around the period of Operation Cast Lead, and there was a lot of furor in the U.S. about whether or not the war would end and whether or not there would be Gazans being killed as Obama was inaugurated.
The documents revealed that Israel was lobbying very intensely Obama.
They were updating him, giving him briefings on how the war was going in Gaza, and they were trying to get him to be sympathetic to what they were doing.
I do note that the Israelis stopped the war two days before the inauguration, and I have very little doubt, based on all the activity I was reading in these transcripts, that this was a deal that was arranged between the Israelis and between Obama's operatives.
This, too, is very disheartening, because if Obama could stop the war two days before his inauguration, he certainly could have stopped it even earlier than that.
He felt that he just didn't want to get involved and didn't want to expend any capital to try to save Palestinian lives, and I think we can see that in the policy that Obama is pursuing right now.
It's just not a policy that is going to bring peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
Well, and he had the most feeble excuse.
He would do nothing but criticize George Bush about everything in the world, but when it came to Operation Cast Lead, he would say, well, we only have one president at a time.
That's right.
Exactly right.
We only have one president at a time, and that was, of course, helpful to him, because he didn't want to alienate the Jewish community by being seen as being publicly opposed to the war.
I don't know if you saw this, but I think it's probably the most hilarious footnote to punctuate this interview with.
We're already over time, but there's a new organization called Attack Watch, which is being formed to protect President Obama from terrible smears such as, quote, President Obama's opponents have falsely suggested that the president has not been a strong ally to Israel.
He's been the strongest ally to Israel imaginable, and if you say otherwise, the Democrats are coming to get you.
Well, that's because the Republican Jewish coalition is attacking Obama, and I can see it on the Israeli publications that I read.
They've got all these smear things talking about Obama hating Israel, and I can't tell.
It's like dumb and dumber.
This case is perfect for AttackWatch.com.
They can say, if Obama's so anti-Israel, then how come he used the Espionage Act against Shami Leibovitz, the heroic American whistleblower?
That may be one of the reasons they were so aggressive in pursuing him, because they wanted to be able to say to the Israelis and to American Jews, look, we prosecuted Steve Rosen and we prosecuted Shami Leibovitz, so that means that we're good guys because we didn't want either one of them to hurt America.
Well, and next they'll free Jonathan Pollard, I guess.
Yeah, well, let's hope that that doesn't happen.
That would be really awful.
All right.
Well, listen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate your time on the show today, Richard.
And actually, let me ask you one more thing.
I know for a fact that Justin Raimondo at Antiwar.com would love to have some of that access to some of those documents that you spoke of earlier to write about.
You think that's possible to arrange?
Well, yeah, I can get in touch with him and give him access to what I wrote.
I'll explain to him that I don't have the actual verbatim transcripts, but certainly I'd be happy to give him what I have.
Well, I'll send out an email with the two of you cc'd on it right here at the break.
All right, great, Scott.
Thanks again for this chance.
Thank you so much, Richard.
Appreciate it.
All right.
Bye-bye.
Everybody, that's Richard Silverstein.
His blog is richardsilverstein.com.
Tikkun olam.
Make the world a better place.
