All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
And first up on the show today is Grant Smith from the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy.
That's IRMEP.org, I-R-M-E-P dot org.
And he's written a whole bunch of books about, well, Israeli covert action inside the United States, pretty much.
The latest is Divert, NUMEC, Zalman Shapiro, and the Diversion of U.S.
Weapons-Grade Uranium into the Israeli Nuclear Weapons Program.
Because subtlety's his game.
Welcome back, Grant.
How are you doing?
Hey, Scott.
It's great to be on your millionth show.
Uh, yeah.
Oh, good.
You heard that.
Uh, this is my one millionth radio show today.
All right.
Anyway.
Uh, so yeah, basically, uh, for everyone who's not familiar, it's been a little bit of time, uh, has passed since we've talked on the show.
Uh, Grant's thing is he's a journalist and he goes, uh, suing under the Freedom of Information Act all day long to get paperwork on what the American federal, uh, you know, national police and intelligence services, uh, what dirt they have on Israel in the United States, Israel meaning their government and their front men in the United States, what they're up to and what they get away And, uh, boy, is it a lot all the time.
And, uh, this one is great.
US charity secretly funds Israeli nukes.
And then, uh, what was this this morning in the email grant that, uh, uh, you, you've, uh, paid the fee in order to have the IRS answer to you, whether you can deduct donations to Israel's nuclear weapons program from your taxes.
Is that right?
Exactly.
Exactly.
That's, that's the follow on to this research, you know, um, we're, we're submitting FOIAs and, uh, mandatory declassification reviews to presidential libraries, to the CIA, to the NSA, to the FBI, to lots of different entities, the state department, um, and the purpose is to find out number one, what's going on, because one of the things that I've discovered over the past 10 years is that nobody has ever actually gone after any of this information.
We've virtually been the first ones to do so, uh, in every single case.
Uh, and we can talk about why later, but in this particular case, the research, uh, was into US support for the Israeli nuclear weapons program.
And as you know, it's just all over the news networks right now, uh, balanced and penetrating analysis of how many nuclear weapons Israel has, how it got them, when it got them.
I mean, it's, you're probably bowled over by the, the, the sheer mass of investigative reporting as I am.
Right.
That's why I never mentioned it myself.
Cause I figured they've got it covered over there on the Chris Matthews show.
Yeah, right.
Because they're just all over this, but anyway, he's still got a show, right?
Oh, I wouldn't know either.
The, uh, the, the thing about this though is the, it's becoming more and more clear and, and I can't take credit for all of this.
Abner Cohen has probably done the best work on the Israeli nuclear weapons program.
It's secret.
Uh, US presidents have been, uh, pretty much told that they can't discuss it due to this agreement struck back in the day with Golda Meir, but investigation into the secret Israeli weapons program.
You inevitably come up with the question of, well, how did they pay for it?
And where did they get technology and material?
And so this is going right into that.
Uh, the FBI basically declassified a bunch of files, which were counter espionage files in which they uncovered that an entity called the Wiseman Institute, um, was not only trying to get, uh, information from classified sites in the United States in this particular case, but they did enough research to understand that this was a funding mechanism for the Israeli nuclear weapons program.
And so it's evidence in the FBI files is that like a lot of situations, unfortunately, and, uh, I think John Cole mentioned this on your show one time, this investigation, just like many others was shut down after it got to a certain point in identifying this illegal activity.
Um, the follow on to this, uh, was more of an accountability exercise in which we filed, uh, with the IRS asking to make a $50,000 donation to laser enriched uranium at the Wiseman Institute, and then put it on top of a nuclear missile.
And so we filed a formal request for the IRS to tell us whether that's actually a tax deductible charitable program to do something like that and paid them a thousand dollars.
And today the IRS agent called back with the answer.
Yeah.
And what'd he say?
Uh, he said that he would not make a formal ruling on this, but it was his opinion that that sort of program was not, had no charitable purpose, but like smart man who probably wants to keep his job.
He referred it to another division of the IRS.
So the, uh, the question though, uh, that remains is this, uh, this organization continues to raise the white, the American committee for Weisman Institute.
Well, now wait a minute, isn't it, isn't it perfectly, uh, already, uh, tax deductible to donate directly to the IDF?
Uh, you can donate to friends of the IDF.
Uh, you can donate to, there's, there's just a constellation of charities that support, uh, illegal settlement developments that support arms shipments.
So I guess the answer is yes.
Amazing.
All right.
So, so the answer now is, I mean, the question is, well, you're just calling them out because no legally, uh, even if you can donate to the friends of the IDF and write that off on your taxes, you should not be able to donate to their nuclear weapons program and do, and write that off, right?
And you're just, the, the joke is you can't get them to say that because then they're going to get in trouble because they're implying that the FBI didn't follow through doing their job, enforcing the law, right?
One of the reasons that, that all presidents won't talk about the Israeli nuclear weapons program and that it's, it's necessary to go through such gyrations to get any sort of answers from the federal government is that there's been a host of illegal activities going on for decades and decades surrounding the Israeli nuke program.
And we also have legislation on the books, uh, such as the Simington and Glenn amendments that say that us taxpayer dollars can't even go to countries that are outside the NPT and acquiring nuclear, uh, material and devices.
So there's this charade going on in the United States where, uh, nobody in federal government will deal honestly with this issue.
And so by escalating this a little bit, and there are actually a number of other tactics that can be taken for further escalation.
The idea is to push this question out into the open and force the United States to deal with it because as, as, as mentioned in the article, uh, that was up on the website, us charity secretly funds, Israeli nukes by letting this happen.
The U S is being pushed out of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty.
Not that it's actively reducing its own stockpile or doing anything to stay there anyway, but yeah, or respecting other countries rights to nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.
Exactly.
And so here we are allowing fundraising and technology transfers and even material transfers, which is the point of my last book to occur.
And that's the violation of article one of the treaty.
And so how is it that $50 million per year are being raised in the United States and transferred to this overseas organization, which the federal government has long known has been involved in secret clandestine nuclear weapons development.
That really is amazing.
The kind of things that go on.
It's amazing too.
As you kind of alluded to there about the silence there in the rest of the media.
I mean, this is a big deal.
And, you know, you think about like the exception proven the rule and whatever, when, um, uh, it was Andrea Mitchell, wasn't it?
Who was given the scoop by AIPAC that they'd been raided by the FBI, uh, back the one time the FBI ever raided them.
And, and that was political too.
The fact that that one wasn't covered up was a political decision, uh, just as the coverup of every other one was.
All right.
Hang on just a sec.
We'll be right back with Grant F.
Smith from earmap.org.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton talking with Grant F.
Smith from the Institute for research, Middle Eastern policy, IRMEP.org.
And of course, uh, we run all his articles at antiwar.com.
He's got all the documents.
He always shows us work.
Uh, the very first words of this article here, newly declassified FBI files is a hot linked right to them.
So that, uh, you can check and see if they say what he says.
They say, yeah, of course they do.
Um, anyway, um, that's important people link to, uh, their source material when they can.
Um, all right.
So now let's see, I forget where we were, uh, before the break, I was interrupting you going on about something.
Oh, I know what it was.
It was that, uh, the FBI, whenever they investigate, um, Israeli government covert action on American soil, uh, it never goes anywhere, or maybe they write up some files for you to FOIA later, but, uh, it's so rare that there's ever any real movement.
And you look at the one exception, which was the Larry Franklin, Steve Rosen thing, at least my interpretation of that was that was really kind of a, uh, you know, old establishment within the state pushing back against the neocons kind of a thing right there.
And that was, uh, you know, just as political, the fact that they ever rated a pack or, or, you know, pretended to that they were going to prosecute a couple of their guys at all, you know, uh, that that was basically just a stunt, which just goes to prove my real point in the first place, which was that all things being equal, they will never, ever be held to account by the department of justice or the judiciary in this country, period.
I agree with that.
And, you know, in going after these files, there's usually one that's missing and that's the shutdown order from the department of justice.
And when we go after those shutdown memos, they usually claim a FOIA exemption, which is no deliberative material will be released.
So you see a lot of, of fairly penetrating investigations that uncover crimes that sometimes get referred to grand juries, but it's almost inevitably the justice department that shuts them down.
And I think the, uh, in, in the case of the, uh, Rosen Weissman, Larry Franklin, uh, attempted espionage act prosecution, I do think there was a factor involved there and that they were going after material, which would have allowed them to make a better public case for attacking Iran.
And so I think the stakes on that were so high that it triggered kind of a warranted response, at least in terms of raids and actually indicting people, although from my point of view, based on what I've seen, it was clear in that case, they should have indicted AIPAC and not just their employees, but that's another matter entirely.
Yeah.
Well, and would have been nice if the judge had allowed them to actually even take the case to trial, but yeah.
And that, I mean, that's what was going on between the indictments and the Obama administration coming into office and, and getting people to throw it out was a lot of judicial gymnastics in which the judge was saying things such as, well, you really need to prove the state of mind of Rosen and Weissman to show that they were actually in a mood of intending to commit espionage.
And then they're handing the stuff over to the guys from the Israeli embassy, AKA Israeli intelligence.
Right.
But then they had the, the, the head guy from the national archives come onto their team and say, well, it may be that this stuff shouldn't have been classified in the first place.
And, and that's another thing that inevitably happens.
It's just the national security council deliberations about what their red line is and what could get them to bomb Iran or not, you know?
Well, you know, and that's, that's the thing.
There were unlimited resources being lined up, including as we saw in the court documents, a huge campaign to smear everybody on the prosecutorial side as, as succumbing to antisemitism.
So there was this gigantic thing brewing that would have exploded if this thing had actually gone into court and by shutting it down, they avoided everything.
They avoided all the political fallout.
No donors would be upset.
Nobody would go to jail except for Franklin and the true culprits, including their home base, the mothership could go on its merry way, you know, fomenting war on Iran.
So, I mean, these things are extremely, extremely corrosive and, you know, you have me, uh, explain, you know, at times why there's so much need to focus on these Israel lobbying organizations.
And it's not because they're too good at lobbying and it's not because they're just out maneuvering everybody based on skill and acumen.
It's because there's a huge amount of illegal activity that takes place, whether it's corrupting elections, whether it's stealing classified information, et cetera, et cetera, that's been well-documented.
And the problem is none of these things are actually receiving any due process and there's no accountability.
And so that's why we've got such horrible policies.
It's because nobody's ever held account for the activities and the power grabs that are behind these that rely on illegal activities.
Well, and you know, your work does get coverage from time to time, but it's not like they have you on TV with all this stuff, even though it's all, you know, you would be showing up with a giant grip of documents in your hand because that's your whole game is everyone look at these documents.
Exactly.
It's not photogenic and neither am I.
But the thing that the problem is the, it's, it's not the media coverage because again, you know, anybody could be doing this.
It's, it's really, uh, it's not about me at all.
It's about the fact that no other journalists feel at this point in time that they can actually handle any of this information.
I mean, I was surprised though, that Pakistan's biggest English language newspaper almost within days was running this because they picked it up from anti-war.
I mean, there are people very interested in this and thank goodness for the internet to sort of end run the gatekeepers, but there is a serious problem with establishment media and we can just, well, they're just not going to cover it unless it's a federal case.
No, they're not even going to cover the federal cases.
I mean, you know, the, this whole espionage case only recently came to a conclusion.
We're going back to the Rosen Weissman thing because there was a defamation suit follow on, but there was absolutely no coverage of that either.
Yeah, that's true.
You could read it in the paper, but not see it on TV.
You couldn't even read that in the paper.
The amount of coverage of what actually happened to shut down sort of the rump case to the espionage case was, was minimal.
It just wasn't there.
I don't think anyone made it into the Washington post.
Yeah.
So I mean, this is a serious problem.
It, you know, when they were the ones really who covered it the best, surprisingly.
Who now?
The post, as far as major media is staying on top of the Rosen Weissman story.
They had, oh yeah.
When it was still an espionage and not a defamation.
Right, right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So I, I, I just think that, um, you know, there, fortunately I think people are becoming more and more interested in this because they see, uh, really, you know, these inexplicable policies, whether it's this gigantic aid package that just took place, you know, almost, uh, secretively to guarantee quantitative military edges, uh, advantages and fund the Israeli, uh, anti-missile shield and all of these things, people are becoming more interested in, in how these things are being crafted behind the scenes.
And you see more confidential AIPAC memos coming out on websites and things like that, but you really can't count on, on establishment coverage of this.
Well, here's a quote that blew me away.
I didn't realize that you had, um, you know, written in the words of someone so high level, uh, confirmation of the fact.
I mean, I know you already had all the documents with all the facts themselves, but, uh, here in this article at, uh, antiwar.com, uh, you quote Henry Kissinger saying there is circumstantial evidence that some fissionable material available for Israel's weapons development was illegally obtained from the United States by about 1965.
So that's pretty good.
Right.
Exactly.
And, and the interesting thing about that, uh, is that, that Americans are about to be hit with, I would say probably hundreds of millions of dollars more in costs as people who've been affected by that have filed a massive lawsuit, uh, to recover, uh, damages for, uh, health related, uh, radiation sickness related issues because of that front company that was moving uranium out of Pennsylvania.
And so, you know, but the fact that Henry Kissinger was there willing and able to accept an award from the Wiseman Institute, which is also the fundraising arm of Israel's nuclear weapons program says a lot just about how bad government has been on this issue.
Yeah.
Well, and how bad that guy is on everything.
God, it's incredible.
It is incredible.
When I, you know, I had never, I'd never seen that connection before, but it explains a lot.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, certainly he would have had access to that information and known.
Um, but that's just funny.
He's going and accepting prizes from, you know, exactly.
Um, all right, everybody, I'm begging you go and check out this article.
It'll blow you away.
It's great.
U.S. charity secretly funds Israeli nukes by Grant Smith.
It's at antiwar.com and at earmep.org.
IRMEP.org.
Thanks.
Thanks a lot, Scott.
