07/29/14 – Ken Klippenstein – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show here.
Now, I'm sorry, we go on to our next guest today.
It's Ken Klippenstein.
And I'm sorry, Ken, is it Stein or Steen?
It's Stein.
Okay, it is Stein.
Well, that was my first guest, so good.
Ken Klippenstein, he's right in here for, with Paul Gottinger, again, for Truthout.
That's truthout.org.
U.S. provides Israel the weapons used on Gaza.
And, of course, everybody knows that, but not everybody knows what's all in here.
Please break it down for us, Ken.
Well, it's pretty ugly, unfortunately.
The largest portion of U.S. weapons exports to Israel turns out to be precisely the same categories of weapons that Israel is using to kill Gazans right now.
And so the largest portion, when I broke it down from the publicly available U.S. Census Bureau export data, turns out to be military airplanes and military helicopters.
The second largest portion for 2013, for the year 2013, was cartridges and parts of cartridges for guns.
Then the third largest ones was bombs, grenades, and torpedoes.
Now, if we take a look back at, if we take a look at 2014, what's available now for the, about the first four months of the year, again, the largest portion is military airplanes, military helicopters.
Second largest portion is military transport planes.
And then the third largest portion is armored fighting vehicles, which would include howitzers and perhaps the tanks that they're invading Gaza with right now.
Man, so that's really incredible.
And, everybody, if you go to truthout.org and you pull up this article, again, it's called U.S. provides Israel the weapons used on Gaza.
There's your keyword, provides.
You know, you find that in there.
Google, pull it right up for you, or whichever is your favorite search engine.
And you got all the pie charts here, all the data, hot links to all the information here.
And so, now let's see.
Oh, that includes the howitzers.
Did you mention the howitzers?
M109.
How accurate are those things?
I mean, I guess I know it's a matter of trigonometry, but they sure do seem to kill a lot of people.
Well, unfortunately, they like to use words like a surgical strike.
And, you know, they talk about laser guided missiles and all these things.
But if you actually, a figure came out earlier this week finding that 70% of the dead are civilians.
And so, you have to question how accurate these are.
If, in fact, they're not intending to target civilians.
Because, as you point out, this is part of a strategy to destabilize Gaza to the point that they'll overthrow their leadership.
Because Israel is not happy with the leadership.
Yeah, well, and it doesn't seem to be working.
But, anyway, yeah, that sure does seem to be their policy.
And now, you know, what's interesting to me about USAID to Israel here, and you link to the Federation of American Scientists, they're talking about the $3 billion a year.
You know, it's, as I'm sure you're aware, it's written in the Constitution, that the Congress is forbidden from appropriating money for whatever you call your Defense Department, right, for the Army, the Navy, etc, for more than two years at a time.
And they're not allowed to do any five year or 10 year plan or anything like that for the military.
And that's supposed to be a little bit of a check and balance on having a permanent standing Army and a Spartan way of life around here.
And yet, in the more literal sense of that term, and yet, they're perfectly happy to pass a law earmarking $30 billion over 10 years for the Israeli military.
That's exactly correct.
And I don't think there's any better way to highlight the policy continuity, the way in which Bush and Obama's foreign policy is practically identical than looking at their Israel policy.
So what Bush did was he passed a $30 billion, as he pointed out, over 10 year military aid.
This is formal military aid.
This doesn't include all the other kinds of military aid that they label and designate with different terms.
And Obama hasn't passed a formal law, but he's upheld precisely the same amount.
So they're exactly the same on the Israel issue, both presidents.
And speaking of missile defense, I don't know if you saw the clip of Jon Stewart basically mocking the Israeli government for their denunciations of John Kerry, where one of these Israeli politicians went as far as to basically call John Kerry a terrorist or say his proposed ceasefire was in effect a terrorist attack against Israel.
And Jon Stewart is talking about how, yeah, yeah, John Kerry, the terrorist, committing terrorist attacks at the same time he's paid for the entire Iron Dome system that's protecting Israel from the rockets that are coming in here.
Even Jon Stewart, who usually doesn't go too far on these kinds of issues, can't help but point out like, boy, talk about biting the hand that feeds you in the middle of this thing, crying out loud.
Right.
Exactly.
I think the Israeli policy towards Gaza is becoming so vulgar that you're even starting to see some pretty some some normally pretty tepid critics of Israel come out with much stronger attacks.
One example being Jon Stewart, of course.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's exactly the term I was looking for there.
Vulgar is exactly what it is.
Like, hey, hey, hey, guys, take it down just a notch.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Somebody hire a new PR guy over there.
Right.
You can call it, you know, you can colonize Gaza, you can do whatever you like with it, but just tone down the whole killing of the kids thing.
That's getting a little far.
Yeah.
Well, you know, the military's experimenting on the drugs that make you lose your conscience.
So I was thinking if I could get some of that, then I could get a job doing PR for Israel and probably do pretty well in that industry.
Get a job with the DOD, huh?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, come on there.
Their lie departments are falling way behind the times here.
We got apps for debunking this stuff now, you know, that's great.
Well, so, yeah, let's talk about, as you mentioned in your article here a little bit, the criticism is something we talked about with a previous guest as well.
But the criticisms that the Israeli government has come under from the the United Nations and other international institutions for attacking medical facilities and other civilian infrastructures.
I don't know exactly when the Security Council said anything with somebody who's some people, some governments have been denouncing the Israelis for going too far this time now.
That's correct.
And if you look at it, the U.N. tried to establish a formal inquiry into whether or not Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza.
And if you look at it, the one member state that voted against the inquiry was the United States.
And so, I mean, one has to ask oneself, why wouldn't you want to have an inquiry in it if you are confident that they haven't done it?
Of course, Israel wasn't included in the vote since they're one of the one of the two countries involved in this in this particular conflict.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, everything they do displays that guilty conscience.
We'll stay in Iraq, but you got us you got to give us immunity for the war crimes we're going to commit there.
You know, otherwise, what are we what are we supposed to do?
Run around committing war crimes without immunity?
I can't have that.
And when you talk to the experts on it, I mean, it's pretty much taken for granted.
I talked to the he was the U.N. specialist on the Palestinian territories.
Oh, save that thought until right after this break.
It's Ken Klippenstein from Truthout.org.
He's got this article with Paul Gottinger.
U.S. provides Israel the weapons used on Gaza.
More in just a minute.
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All right, you guys, welcome to show back to it.
I mean, I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, Scott Horton Show.
Wrapping up today with Ken Klippenstein.
I say steam last time I'm terrible about that.
Ken Klippenstein, he's at truth out dot org.
That's truth out dot org.
U.S. provides Israel the weapons used on Gaza.
I'm sorry.
Interrupted by the heartbreak like every time on the show, Ken just keeps happening.
But you were saying the U.N. expert that you talked to was explaining about the consequences for the civilians there in Gaza.
Right.
If you look at the experts in the matter, they practically take for granted that Israel is guilty of war crimes.
So I was talking to the U.N. specialist on the Palestinian territories.
He was the specialist for a number of years up until just about a couple months ago.
And he said, given all the evidence, it's pretty clear that Israel is guilty of war crimes, you know, bombing hospitals, bombing ambulances, bombing U.N. shelters, which incidentally, there's tens of thousands of Gazans in U.N. shelters right now, so many that there's no space for anymore.
And exacerbating the problem, I came on the show earlier, about a month ago, and we discussed the military coup in Egypt.
Well, it turns out that that has a huge bearing on the Gazan situation because the new regime in Egypt has actually closed a border that has traditionally been used to allow Gazan refugees out of the area when they're being bombed by Israel.
And so now that he's closed it, they're not able to leave it to seek medical attention or even just wait for the bombing to finish.
Right.
Well, and it's worse than even in the Mubarak times, never mind when the Muslim Brotherhood was there.
And and they only actually loosened up that border a little bit.
It's not like they just opened it up wide or anything.
But but what I'm hearing from Rafa, from, in fact, the Egyptian side of the borders, the clampdown is far worse than it was even during Mubarak times.
And I'm talking about before the recent last three weeks of one sided warfare.
But just, you know, if you went back six weeks or whatever.
Yes, that's exactly correct.
And if you look at something else that Sisi did, the new military leader, the moment he came to power, they destroyed these tunnels running underground beneath Gazan and and and Egypt.
And what these tunnels are is a sort of vital hub for commerce, since the Israeli blockade on Gaza doesn't allow them to sort of import goods, which is really the right of any territory, any sovereign territory.
It's according to the Gazan economic minister, I believe he estimated that it's caused a decrease in 40 of 40 percent in the government revenue.
So this is have a devastating effect on the Gazan economy.
Yeah.
Well, and here's the other thing, too, man, is if you're talking about Coca-Cola or Levi's Jeans, there's no or Hollywood movies.
There's no mistake in the connection to the middle part of North America.
That's where this stuff comes from.
Same thing for F-16s and M-16s.
These are symbols of America.
It's not just that they're ruthlessly, you know, effective military hardware, but they don't have to have, you know, USA serial numbers on them.
There's no mistaking, you know, who's behind the military of Israel.
And we've already paid for that in terrorist attacks.
It seems, you know, inescapable that we're going to see more terrorists attacking the United States based on what we are helping the Israelis do to the Palestinians.
I think you bring up a very important point.
It would seem like there's no better policy to pursue to ensure terrorism against the West than by killing 70 percent civilians, many of them children and the elderly.
Yeah, well, I mean, I guess we don't really need to point out that the state and its cronies do tend to fail for their own interests and continue on in their folly, as in this case, as with anything else.
But I guess I just did point it out.
But yeah, and so it continues on.
And I think that's a really big thing.
All around the world, people are looking at this.
And it's amazing to see the polls from around the world where it's only the American people who are buying this.
Everywhere else in the world, they have the slightest even balanced coverage of it.
And public opinion snaps entirely the other way.
Wait, who's occupying who again?
Yeah, that's correct.
The claim that Gaza has, as John Kerry said, the Palestinians have besieged Israel.
Well, if you look at a map for half a second, you realize that's completely ridiculous.
Yeah, it's just amazing for them to try to.
Well, and I guess that's all they have is to just try to completely turn around.
It's like that article.
I'm still trying to get this author on in the Salon Dotcom wrote about the the Israeli Hasbara manual that recommends, for example, that when describing the occupation of the West Bank, you got to cast it in terms of the Jim Crow South.
OK, I'm with you so far.
And then they say, yeah, because the Arabs are the white supremacists and the Jews are the blacks who aren't allowed to just live wherever they want in peace in the West Bank.
And never even mind whose country is whose and what's occupied territory and.
Right.
You know, stealing the water and all this is never mind any of that.
Right.
It's all already Israel.
Only this is the Arab supremacist part of it somehow or something.
What we're seeing here is like a really old, like almost like pre 19th century form of colonialism that I think the global public just doesn't accept anymore.
And so for that reason, as you point out, propaganda is really important in order to be able to maintain this kind of thing.
Right.
And I think that's why the pro Israeli factions have been kind of panicking about how they're losing the war for public opinion in America.
You know, again, of course, that social media they like to cite as their evidence all the time sure does seem to be getting the job done.
Basically, it's a great equalizer between the news consumer and provider and where they have cracked down on media for doing a good job.
They've had to take it back in many of the cases anyway, more most famously, of course, in the case of NBC.
But it seems like there's finally a little bit of accountability because of the Internet here.
Yeah, I completely agree.
It's opened up an entire new form of dissent of which you are a part.
And of course, many other people are.
Yeah.
And I think that's important for challenging the dominant narratives.
Right.
All right.
So now let's get back into some of these numbers here about the if you have the article in front, can you talk about the numbers of F-16s and tanks and rifles and and all this kinds of things so we can get kind of an idea of just how much of their military is dependent on our aid?
Sure thing.
And I should preface this with the acknowledgement that these are the publicly available figures.
And so this is probably a vast understatement.
I actually spoke to an arms specialist named Andrew Feinstein.
He was a minister of parliament in South Africa for a while where he tried to challenge some of the worst abuses of these arms trafficking regimes like the US.
And what he told me is that the figures that we see are just the absolute minimum because it doesn't include all these other forms of military aid that just get called defense or other things.
So take, for instance, the missile defense system.
Well, there's a new report coming out of MIT finding that it doesn't actually defend against the missiles.
It only stops maybe 5 percent of them.
And then the ones that it does stop, it tends to have an even worse effect because when their missiles hit the rockets, they explode and have a sort of shrapnel effect that can harm people worse than if the rocket itself had just landed.
And so that's falsely labeled defense, even though it has no discernible, no serious discernible defense capability.
And that's something that we're sending about 500 million dollars in order to support.
But looking at the looking at the specific figure, that's a report coming out of MIT.
You can look at it online.
But looking at the specific figures in the fiscal year 2013, the amount of military airplanes and helicopters that was the largest portion was 196 million.
And then you look at some of the smaller figures like cartridges for weapons, that's 30 million.
Bombs, grenades and torpedoes, that's 25 million.
Guided missiles, which might be used by the F-16s they're using to hit Gaza and Homs, that's 10 million.
Warships is 10 million.
Rocket launchers and similar projectors are 11 million.
And then you have revolvers and pistols for another 11 million.
Now, if we look at 2014, which we only have a couple months of data in for, you see roughly the same pattern.
The largest portion dedicated military planes and helicopters at 91 million so far.
And then military transport planes at 64 million.
Armored fighting vehicles, which would include howitzers that you mentioned before, that's 39 million.
Rocket projectors at 9 million.
Then warships at 10 million.
And then a few smaller ones like the revolvers and pistols at about 7 million.
Yeah.
So I don't know how that compares to how much they're spending in their own budget.
And of course, dollars are fungible.
So in a way, we're going to finance their socialized medicine and every other thing, too, that Americans may or may not be for.
But I don't know how much it compares to their military spending.
That sure sounds like a big chunk of it anyway, huh?
Yeah.
If you look at the comparative economic figures, the U.S. GDP is 16 trillion.
And then if you look at the Israeli one, it's barely 300 billion.
And do you know what percentage of their military expenditure we're picking up the slack for there?
Oh, I would imagine an enormous amount.
I mean, Israel is basically a U.S. base in the Middle East.
I'm afraid so.
All right.
Thank you very much, Ken.
I sure appreciate it.
OK, thanks for having me on.
Sure.
I think America might be an Israeli base in North America.
We'll be back in a second.
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