03/10/14 – Grant F. Smith – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
And it looks like I just missed Jonathan Landay.
We'll see if we can get him on the show tomorrow.
That'll be fun.
He's the guy who was trying to truth you out of war back in 2002, if only you were reading Knight Ridder stories.
He was writing the Office of Special Projects, close, man, in August of 02.
So that's pretty good.
That's called way, way ahead of the curve.
Anyway, so our next guest is Grant F.
Smith from the Institute for Research Middle East Policy, and he is the author of a great many books, America's Defense Line, and a bunch of others, including Divert, NUMEC, Zalman Shapiro, and the Diversion of U.S.
Weapons-Grade Uranium into the Israeli Nuclear Weapons Program.
That's the latest.
Welcome back to the show.
Grant, how are you doing?
Hey, Scott, doing fine.
A little tired.
I suspect you are, too.
Nah, I'm fine, man.
Covering.
That's good.
Thank you very much for inviting me out to this conference.
It was the National Summit to Reassess the U.S.-Israel Special Relationship.
Took place at the National Press Club on Friday, put on by your group and Phil Giraldi's group, the Council for the National Interest, and If Americans Knew, and the Washington Report for Middle Eastern Affairs.
And am I leaving anyone out?
No, you've got them all.
It was four organizations all collaborating and pulling together as many good speakers and panels as we could possibly fit into a short slot.
And we all thank you for coming out and moderating what was probably the most difficult panel of them all.
So that was good.
And also kicking off the event.
Yeah, well, I had a great time doing it.
And I really appreciate you all having me out.
And good.
I have my list here.
I kind of jotted down.
I'm not going to go through it, but I think it's probably a dozen people who have been sort of long-distance radio acquaintances or friends of mine for many years now that I was finally able to meet in person.
And so and then, of course, I got to see you and Gareth Porter and Karen Kotowski and Ray McGovern again, but that was still nice, too.
So, well, that was part of the point.
I mean, the idea was that this isn't just, you know, a bunch of people speaking from the 10-inch riser, but that people would come and talk to each other and have a little bit more personal contact than we normally do in this, you know, digital age.
And I feel the same way you do.
There are people who I've never met, but I've known their work for many, many years.
And they are suddenly there.
They all are in the same room and looking around.
And I thought it was a fantastic opportunity, you know, when we weren't rushing to get the next presentation up to go and talk to people.
Yeah, that's the joke.
I should have cracked at the beginning was if you want to know about my show, I basically interview all the people you're going to see give speeches today.
Right.
With a few new ones, you know, a few people I've never talked to before up there, but it was sort of like a best of of a Scott Wharton show only live in a way up there.
Exactly, exactly.
I mean, it was kind of a reunion for you in some respect.
And I felt we almost should have kicked it up by saying, you know, the reason there's no Wi-Fi here is we're not going to do any social media.
We're going to go back to socializing and we're going to talk to each other and look at each other's name tags and connect namespaces and work.
So, you know, it was really, you know, a really interesting experience, particularly outside the conference hall where people were really getting into some intense discussion.
Right.
OK, so now let's talk about the coverage.
Of course, C-SPAN cover the whole thing live.
Was it on C-SPAN or two or three or it doesn't really matter?
It matters.
It was on C-SPAN three.
As far as I could tell, they didn't do a live radio broadcast, but they wouldn't normally do something that long live on C-SPAN radio, which is only really here in Washington and the surrounding area.
But it's been since then.
It's been split up into segments.
It was on C-SPAN two and C-SPAN as well.
In fact, I particularly enjoyed yesterday on C-SPAN.
They had Benjamin Netanyahu's speech and then they segued directly to Paul Pilar's point by point debunking of virtually everything that the prime minister had just said at AIPAC.
Really?
And I thought that that was something.
I mean, that's that's the reason we have mass media right there is to get both sides of the story like that.
And quite frankly, I've never seen anything so valuable and timely spliced together like that.
Well, you know, I've long respected Brian Lamb and the whole C-SPAN project because I think they really try to have a professional agnostic attitude about opinions on these political issues.
And, you know, what what's a qualification for them is if this seems like it's a big and legitimate enough, you know, typical American participation in the democratic process, they point their cameras at it.
They don't care.
You know, they try not to.
They try very hard, I think, not to favor.
And of course, they have their mainstream biases because, you know, they live in D.C. and they're they're the creatures of that kind of process.
But they're they always seem to have been very fair minded.
I think, for example, even showing up and then especially like you're saying, saying, well, you know, earlier there was a CIA guy who gave a speech that kind of disagree with that.
Let's go ahead and play that, you know, and they I think they just have that sort of easygoing attitude about it.
It makes that kind of thing possible, you know.
Well, I think you're right to a certain extent.
You know, typically, though, you're getting to see the highly, you know, professional, you know, logo wall backdrop presentations coming from a very limited point of view.
That's right.
It's got a lot of financing.
And then the other guys are in the back room of a bookstore, you know, with a with a scruffy podium and maybe a little less polished.
So it doesn't always look good.
It doesn't always have the effect.
And quite frankly, there aren't that many of them.
They broadcast, you know, a lot of think tank gatherings here in Washington.
And most of the local radio stations that really have a lot of content about foreign policy, like WAMU at American University, it's always the same people and the same viewpoint.
They very rarely mix up the journalist panels on the Diane Rehm show and other shows.
So it's, you know, C-Standard does a good job.
But, you know, between the saturation of the think tanks that are already here and relative rarity of this type of event, people don't see too much of it.
Right.
Well, I just got to compete with them better.
We need more CNIs and more earmuffs, because really, I mean, this is really the great success of the neoconservative movement was to not just occupy.
You know, you know, 60 or 80 people in the whole country occupy, you know, all the major editorial boards.
There's at least one good, reliable neocon on every editorial board, on every major paper.
And then they created just I mean, a lot of these think tanks exist only in Bill Kristol's desk drawer, you know, but they're still you know, there's a dozen of them.
And they create this wonderful echo chamber for whatever Netanyahu wants.
Yeah, I think people are getting wise to that.
And I was, you know, you mentioned that that takeover Scott McConnell's presentation about sort of the gatekeeping and how people were suddenly answering the midge vector, you know, over over at Buckley's shop was very illuminating.
And, you know, it was very detailed, but it provided sort of the same snapshot of gatekeeping and limiting debates that you also find on the other side on the left as well.
And those were two panels, you know, again, on the segment that you moderated.
Panel five has a lot of capture political parties in the news media.
They really got into some brass tacks, moho barred looks at what's happened.
And one of the things that I think worked well was that people had to get to the point.
One of the things that happens a lot in this sort of discussion is that people think they have a lot of time to make their point.
And we made sure they didn't so that they would get to the point.
And everybody did with just, you know, aplomb.
And I think that worked very well.
But I wanted to mention that at the netsummit.org website, we've got half of the audio up now in mp3 format so that people can download individual segments and listen to them, because that's not available at C-SPAN, which has the video.
And we should have the rest of them up by later today.
So people can go in and kind of download to their podcast listeners' devices virtually every panel and every speaker.
So that should be good for people who want to review some of these things.
And then will all the different speeches be up on YouTube at some point, too?
Yes, yes.
One of the things, again, that C-SPAN doesn't do that we're doing is putting the slides into the presentations so that people can kind of treat it like a classroom.
And so at some point, embeddable video, which is not currently the case.
Embeddable video by the end of the week or weekend should be available so that people can kind of, you know, chew this stuff over a little bit on their own websites and look at the slides.
Well, listen, I think it was a great success.
I mean, you had a ton of people.
I mean, a great list.
And we're going to go down a list when we get back of speakers who talked about a great range of subjects.
And also it was a packed house.
I don't know, 300, 350 people, something like that, filled up a big room there at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
I think it was absolutely a successful event in a lot of ways.
And I want to talk to you about some of the different ways, what maybe we could have accomplished there, what we can do going forward from here.
It's Grant Smith from the Institute for Research Middle East Policy, IRMEP.org.
And we'll be right back after this.
On March 7th at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., the Council for the National Interest is co-hosting the first ever national summit to reassess the U.S.-Israel special relationship.
Confirmed speakers include Walt Scheuer, Geraldine McGovern, Kutowski, Porter, McConnell, Weiss, Raimondo, USS Liberty survivor Ernie Gallo, as well as co-sponsors Allison Ware of If Americans Knew, and the great Grant Smith of the Institute for Research Middle East Policy.
That's the National Summit to Reassess the U.S.-Israel Special Relationship, Friday, March 7th, all day at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., NatSummit.org.
All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Grant F. Smith, the author of Divert, about the Israelis stealing weapons-grade uranium from the United States of America to make their nuclear weapons to threaten the rest of the Middle East with.
And he's the director of IRMEP, the Institute for Research Middle East Policy.
And what he does is he goes to court and he makes the government give him documents about the history of Israeli policy in the United States.
And great stuff.
IRMEP.org.
Go digging through that stuff and you'll be wide-eyed and jaw-dropped, I promise.
Now, Grant, along with Phil Giraldi and Allison Ware and others, put together this great thing that took place Friday in Washington, D.C., at the press club there.
It was the National Summit to Reassess the U.S.-Israel Special Relationship.
There's a great list of speakers and a wide variety of topics covered, historical and contemporary, and the lobby here and the Palestinians there, and Iran's so-called alleged studies documents on that forged laptop and all the rest.
It was really something else.
Why don't you go through and tell us, I don't know, who was your favorite speaker?
Is that unfair?
You know, I couldn't name a favorite, because one of the fallacies, I think, is that people who work in this field know a lot about everything.
And I felt pretty stupid listening to a lot of these, because I'd never heard a lot of some of the really fine points.
So I liked them all, and I was sitting in the back listening and learning as much as anybody else.
But there were definitely some surprising points, and I can't even really name a favorite.
I liked them all.
All right, well, so let's go through Chronological Order, then, and let's pick some highlights.
I guess we can't talk about each and every speaker, but give people a reason to want to go and look this thing up on C-SPAN.org and on Natsummit.org.
Okay, well, sure.
Actually, I'll just go in reverse chronological order, because I thought the Anchoring Panel, the Intelligence Panel, which you boosted that several times on C-SPAN, and it was extremely important to have that.
Paul Pillar did just an absolutely stunning job.
He went through every single one of these sort of false narratives that's coming out of Israel about securing the western frontier, excuse me, the eastern frontier, and all of these Iranian threats.
And he basically tore them all apart while explaining what a U.S. ally really would be like, and how it's in the Israelis' interest to get behind the negotiations.
And I just found that, you know, again, I've read his things, but I've never heard him speak live.
And that was fascinating.
Ray McGovern, very interesting.
He's always good on your show.
But he did bring in some hard points about how assassinations in Gaza, you know, affected the fatally flawed and ridiculous U.S. invasion of Iraq to an even harsher degree.
And of course, Philip Giraldi at the end, making a very sincere and abbreviated summary that he doesn't believe the U.S. has an ally in Israel.
So I thought that was extremely powerful, that entire segment.
But then, you know, right before it was your panel.
And you had Jeff Blankert talking about how a lot of people have been mesmerized by a very limited analysis of Israel as it fits into the U.S. sort of national security and defense policy.
You had Alan Braunfeld, who's just a very eloquent speaker from the American Committee on Judaism, talking about how Zionism has evolved inside social welfare organizations.
Justin Raimondo, who did this really interesting recap on the rights and the Israel lobby and how it's kind of come 180 degrees.
Scott McCollum, who we talked about earlier.
And then, of course, the inimitable Philip Weiss, talking about everything from...
I love that guy, man.
He is so cool, yeah.
Everything from blogging and hauling out his six-guns when he heard about Nir Shalem or Wall Street to some very, very poignant ideas about how the media is changing.
I just see, you know, most bloggers, you just think of them as being people who are excelling behind a keyboard.
But he's a very, very interesting speaker.
So I thought that was a treat.
But then, before that, we had a history panel where Stephen Waltz not only recapped what he said along with John Nirshheim and what he didn't say in his book, which was just as important, but he was followed by Jeffrey Waldo, who has this fascinating book called Quicksand, which kind of explains the U.S. position in the Middle East right now.
Very eloquent.
He had a lot of terrain to cover, and he did it very well.
Yeah, that was a really interesting speech there.
That was the one, the guy that talked about the history of the founding of Israel from what he learned going through all the formerly secret documents of the Americans and the British on the issue at the time and what they were saying to each other about it and that kind of thing.
Right, and he didn't have time to go into some of the treatment of his book.
I mean, that's a penguin book.
People should buy Quicksand and read it.
It hasn't gotten the reception that it should have gotten.
And then, of course, John Quigley going over international law and how the U.S. support for Israel's ongoing occupation is damaging its credibility.
And Allison, we were talking about her research in her book Against Our Better Judgment.
So that was another longer panel, very historically based.
And, of course, before that was probably the best example of a panel that was moving at light speed, because I think everybody hit their mark of 13 minutes.
In fact, one of the speakers even said, Hey, I'm done 13 seconds early, like we're going to give them a prize.
But it was about whether the special relationship transcends rule of law.
And so I went through basically the things I talk about on your show, how a lot of espionage cases, foreign agent cases, smuggling cases just were never prosecuted, and what was going on inside the Justice Department.
Ernie Geller, who was on the USS Liberty, talked about the treatment of that whole episode.
Man, everybody, you've got to see that one.
Gallo, the USS Liberty survivor.
Show that to your Zionist brother-in-law and see what he thinks of that, man.
Come on.
Everyone stood up and applauded him.
He had a standing ovation after he got done with his presentation.
That was something else.
And then the guy, what's his name, the FBI agent from the counterintelligence division who put together the case against Jonathan Pollard?
I don't know how you got him to show up at this thing, but that was just incredible.
Yeah, that was Spike Bowman, and he talked about the Jonathan Pollard affair.
Although it didn't quite get through my thick head, I never understood that he's the one who wrote Caspar Weinberger's memorandum in aid of sentencing that got Jonathan Pollard the life sentence.
And I still didn't quite understand that until I realized at the end of the panel that I've been trying to get his document declassified for ten years.
And I followed up on that with him, and he said, don't ever expect to see the classified portion.
So it was really interesting to have somebody sitting there saying, yeah, we know about the Freedom of Information Act, and we know how to write these things so that some portions will just never be declassified.
So I learned a lot there.
He really did explain that, didn't he, in kind of plain English.
Oh, yeah, we write it in ways where it'll never be declassified if we want it that way.
But it wasn't condescending.
It was just very straight.
And now I'm sorry, because we're really short on time, and we don't have time to go down the whole list, I guess.
I've got to stop you there.
But I hope that people are rushing to cspan.org and finding this thing and bookmarking it.
It's the National Summit to Reassess the U.S.-Israel Special Relationship.
You'll be able to find, as he already said, audio is available at natsummit.org, and there's video at cspan.org, and soon it'll be coming out on YouTube and all that.
But I wanted to ask you here at the very end, I guess we've got a couple of minutes, Grant, what do you think about the future of this, or what do you think that this conference means in the scheme of things as far as advancing this topic of having an open and honest political debate, just like we do have on virtually every other issue in this country, really, no matter how controversial.
I mean, we even talk about the government selling drugs and stuff like that sometimes on C-SPAN.
But this is sort of a first, something like this.
So do we really break some ice?
Are we really going to move forward from here, you think?
I think so.
I think there's a role and a natural space in the same week that AIPAC has its annual policy conference for another loose coalition of individuals to come together, again, people who don't necessarily agree on everything, but to come together and talk about what's happening for the rest of the United States and the rest of the interests.
And I think it's something that a lot of people are interested in.
We're quite frankly still gathering data and feedback.
The survey of opinions about this is not complete.
So I'll be asking you what you think of it and asking others.
I think we still need to collect information.
But, I mean, clearly there's a place for everybody who feels as though we're on the wrong track, and that's a number that's getting bigger every day, to gather and hear some briefings and then be able to self-organize and move ahead after.
So I definitely see the promise that this would not be the last one.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, I think the thing went real well.
I mean, it's silly.
As Stephen Walt pointed out, I was talking about this earlier on the show, Stephen Walt said, oh, yeah, they called us Nazis after we wrote our article, and then we got a book deal.
So even then, as harsh as it was, the attacks on Walt and Mearsheimer, that whole frenzy against them, it didn't really stand against them, and I think they really helped move the ball forward a lot.
And then with this, I mean, come on.
We're talking about his honest debate about our country and their country and whatever.
Nobody's bigots here.
This isn't about any nefarious thing.
It's nothing like anybody would put in an accusation.
It's just, well, like I was saying in the context of C-SPAN earlier, just plain old Americans participating in the democratic process, exactly like it's supposed to be the deal.
Right, exactly like we're supposed to.
So on the issue that was too long ignored, but whose time has come for sure.
Thanks, Grant.
Absolutely.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks, Scott.
Thanks for coming.
All right, everybody.
That's the great Grant Smith.
Institute for Research Middle East Policy.
That's IRMEP.org.
The latest book is Divert.
And check out NatSummit.org and C-SPAN.org for the footage and the audio there.
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