09/15/14 – Grant F. Smith – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, I'm Scott Horton here.
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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Hey, the end of that interview was really interesting.
You should go to the archives later and listen to it.
Boy, am I no good at these hard breaks.
No good, I tell you.
I try.
I fail.
All right.
Anyway, thanks for tuning in.
I'm Scott Horton.
Our next guest on the show today is our good friend Grant Smith from the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy, that's IRMEP, I-R-M-E-P.org, I-R-M-E-P.org, and he's got a whole mess of books about the Israel lobby and their crimes in America.
The latest is Divert, New Meck, Zalman Shapiro, and the Diversion of U.S. Weapons Grade Uranium into the Israeli Nuclear Weapons Program.
He is director of IRMEP, I already said that, sorry.
Hey, welcome back to the show.
Thanks for having me back.
In stereo, no less.
Oh, yeah.
Very good.
Hey, very happy to have you here.
Great to be here, Scott.
We're going to have to work out this sound.
Give me some sound check here.
Say, check one, two, or something.
Check one, two, three.
All right.
Yeah, yeah.
That's a little better there.
I'm going to turn it up.
All right.
Yeah, it's Grant Smith.
He's got a new piece right now at Antiwar.com.
DOJ demands immunity for anti-Iran group, UNI, United Against Nuclear Iran.
Hey, Grant, what's United Against Nuclear Iran?
It's a good question, Scott.
It appears to be something more than just a run-of-the-mill 501c3 nonprofit corporation, a charity, if you will, given a tax exemption by the IRS formed in 2007, I believe.
It's a small organization with a very big board of advisors and directors, including Dennis Ross, the Uber lobbyist for all things Middle East, Gary Seymour, former White House coordinator for arms control, Mark Wallace, financial guy, and of course, former director of the Mossad, the Israeli Mossad, Meir Dagan, and Joseph Lieberman, former senator.
It's a small organization with a very high-profile board of former government officials, all of whom, and this is relevant, would have in their former and perhaps even current capacities security clearances and access to intelligence flows.
Well, and let's get to that in a second, but right now we're still between the interim deal, the now extended interim deal, and the final negotiations on a final status for the position of Iran's nuclear program compared to the U.N. Security Council and America's position.
They're working it out, and the Israel lobby has been trying to undo that.
How powerful is this group?
How much effect do they have, relatively speaking, in Washington, D.C., in trying to undermine the nuclear deal, get new sanctions passed, that kind of thing?
Oh, a great deal.
This group is a very specialized group in that rather than do what AIPAC and some of the other nodes of the Israel lobby do, which is propose legislation that would have the effect of putting in sanctions, whereas the government's trying to use the idea of lifting sanctions as a carrot.
This organization, through an uncanny ability to obtain secret corporate documents and an uncanny ability to point commercial satellites, has a constant campaign of incitement against companies and individuals it says are undermining the global boycott against Iran and possibly aiding its nuclear program, which they insist is, of course, a weaponization program going against everything most people who follow this closely actually know.
So they're an important specialty organization.
I think the fact that they're so young and have managed to get themselves in so much trouble in such a short period of time speaks to what it actually is.
And I would say that the evidence points to it being yet another front for, in this case, laundering intelligence into public relations.
Yeah.
Well, they sound like a bunch of McCarthyites, basically, just going around accusing everybody and then no accountability.
So why not?
Well, that's exactly right.
I mean, they've now they've been sued by a Greek shipping magnet by the name of Victor Restes, who they claim on the evidence of a couple of documents they mysteriously obtained and refused to release.
They claim that he had been involved or considering involvement in some projects with the Iranians.
He denies it.
And they've gone to quite a bit of lengths to put out a lot of publicity that the government wouldn't really be in a position to do.
I mean, of course, there's the U.S. Treasury Department's list of people not to do business with.
But this organization, on the basis of some fairly flimsy allegations, mounts major campaigns against corporations, individuals, shippers, all sorts of people, all in the name of enforcing the boycott against Iran, which I believe they interpret broadly and maybe corporate lawyers a little bit more narrowly for businesses in the region and elsewhere.
So they've had a major role in this sort of gray area of taking allegations and using them against corporations and individuals to to really blacklist them and encourage others not to do business with them.
And in the case of Restes, he claims that their their allegations were unfounded and sued them for defamation in the Southern District Court of New York, saying that they'd cost him billions of dollars.
And he's also in the process of his lawsuit trying to recover damages, begun to engage in standard discovery processes against the organization's board of directors to see where they were getting their information that they were using against him and also try and see a little bit more about the funding flows of this organization.
And that has has led to an extreme response by the U.S. government.
Yeah.
All right.
We still got a couple of minutes.
Give us the short version of the extreme response and we'll get to the follow ups on the other side.
Yeah.
Extreme response.
The Justice Department is tipped off probably by United against the nuclear Iran in February and begins to intervene in the civil suit and has just now, as of last Friday, said to the judge, you have to shut this entire thing down.
We don't care if Restes was smeared or what his concerns are.
This group has information which, if disclosed, could jeopardize U.S. national security.
So shut down the whole case.
Sorry, I had to jump in.
The whole case, not just we have to exclude some information.
Exactly.
The whole thing.
Shut it down.
Isn't that amazing?
Yeah.
And so I wonder, then, is there any indication that these guys.
Well, now, I mean, I guess they're they're working with the DOJ.
It's not like the Rosen Weissman case where they kind of graymailed them and said, we're going to release all this stuff.
No, this this appears they're acting more like any U.S. government agency would, like if the CIA is being sued or if the Treasury Department is being sued, what they quickly do is they go to the Justice Department and cry wolf and try and get the best legal representation they can to get the thing thrown out of court.
These guys are acting more like a branch of the federal government than a nonprofit corporation.
Yeah.
Wow.
So that's that's really something else.
I believe it's only an invention of the Bush era that they get whole cases thrown out on state secrets privilege, right, rather than just specific documents or something, because after all, federal judges have don't they all have security clearance for this kind of stuff to look at themselves and back in their own office?
If not, you know, they can do it.
They can do what's called.
Yeah, exactly.
An in-camera review.
So they have that right.
Man, this is really something else.
All right.
Hold it right there.
Yeah, we'll be right back with Grant F. Smith.
We're talking about his newest piece at Antiwar dot com.
DOJ demands immunity for anti-Iran group because they've been giving them classified information in order to destroy people with sometimes on false accusations, apparently.
We'll be right back.
Hey, I'll Scott here.
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All right, guys.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show.
I'm talking with Grant F. Smith from the Institute for Research, Middle East Policy, IRMEP dot org, IRMEP dot org.
His latest book is Divert about the Israeli stealing weapons grade uranium from a plant in Pennsylvania.
I'm ask you a little bit more about that in a few minutes.
But right now we're talking about his piece that's running right now at antiwar dot com.
It's called DOJ Demands Immunity for Anti-Iran Group, UANI.
And it's this group that, well, what?
It's openly run by the former director of Mossad.
Right.
Does that tell you anything?
It's a nonprofit organization, you understand.
And what they do is they they accuse people and they try to get people prosecuted or sick the Treasury Department on people for violating the sanctions in any way.
And in this case, they're being sued by this this Greek shipping magnet.
I guess if you call him that, that means he's really rich and is the type of guy who typically has the power to fight back about something like this.
Is that right?
Right.
He didn't have to take any of this on the chin if he felt he had been poorly handled.
So, yeah, he's, you know, 100 million in business and billions in interest.
So, yeah, he's he's a big item.
And he's, by the way, not even opposed to, you know, keeping Iran from getting nuclear weapons.
He's stated very clearly that he he's not even he shouldn't even be a target of this group.
And when he goes to court to make his case, Uncle Sam steps in after being alerted by this group to come in and just blow the thing out of court.
So it's it's a rather drastic escalation.
But, you know, as the article states, this isn't the first sort of front organization that has either been moving intelligence or weapons or classified information on the on behalf of Israel, which, oh, no, no, of course not.
You've got MarTech.
You've got the Sonnenborn Foundation.
You've got, you know, as Juan Cole has probably accurately characterized it, the Middle East memory, the Middle East Research Institute that puts out as much hyperbolic press from the Arab speaking world and recycles it into the U.S.
He has said, well, you know, if it's run by Israeli intelligence, former intelligence agent and it doesn't have the monetary might to actually do all of this primary sourcing, it's probably just recycling intercepts from Israel, which seems plausible to me.
And in the article, of course, we mentioned the fact that an Israeli agent, Dan Halpern, a government official passed classified information to AIPAC when it was trying to pass a trade agreement.
We've gone over that quite a few times.
So none of this is new.
If you know the history, if you kind of look at this as yet another part of the Israel lobbying network in this country and compare it to past activities, it's actually not that new.
The only thing that's new here and somewhat outrageous is that a lot of these organizations in the Israel lobby have former government officials and former Israeli officials.
And if now the standard is that if they get into trouble, they can simply claim that one or more of these officials has classified information.
What does that do for accountability?
Will this set a precedent, basically, of immunity for a lot of organizations that have been engaged in mostly unpunished activity that appears to violate the law or at least any sort of sense of due process in this country?
It's a case that a lot of people put last Friday on their calendars to see what the government would ask, thinking that maybe there'd be some way to segregate whatever classified information issue there is.
And the fact that the government said, no, there isn't any way to proceed with this case without jeopardizing classified information strongly points to this organization either recycling things from the Treasury Department, the NSA or Israeli intelligence or recycling intelligence that was provided by the NSA to the Israelis and then back into the U.S.
We don't know.
And the government says we don't have a right to know.
So it's a it's a crazy situation that a lot of just purely sort of judicial watch type organizations have been just flabbergasted by.
Yeah, I see what you mean about how that could create an incredible precedent.
But maybe in a good way.
Can any of us from now on, whenever we're ordered in discovery to turn over anything, say, oh, no, I have some classified stuff that I know a guy, you know, knows a guy who gave it to me.
And so of course not.
Of course not.
Of course not.
Oh, I'd have to be an agent of a foreign power for the U.S. government to protect me in that way.
Is that right?
If you weren't lobbying for this prime directive that I mentioned in the article that came from Glenn Greenwald's reporting on Snowden, you know, if you're not working for the advancement of Israel, I think I would say forget it.
You're going to jail, buddy, because then the law will be applied.
You will.
But I think it's troubling because there only seem to be a couple of explanations for why the government's waiting in.
It's either because this organization is doing something that's against the law, which is conducting sort of an intelligence type propaganda operation in the U.S. in cahoots with with some U.S. government agency, and they don't want anybody to know about it, or it really is engaged in illegal activity.
And Eric Holder, who has a record going back to Mark Rich pardoning him when he was just giving advice to the Clintons, he has a record of capitulating.
He's, you know, he's kind of a poster boy for what the Justice Department always does in this situation, which is, in his case, visit with with the Israelis and then refuse to oppose a complete pardon for Mark Rich, who is apparently not only engaged in a lot of financial crime, but also an Israeli intelligence asset.
So, you know, that that sort of immunity has already been creeping up on America.
And you tend to look at the career trajectory of someone like Eric Holder and just say, well, I can see why some people would want him in place for just this sort of situation.
And he's already talked about this case.
He's waited in and said, no, we cannot let this case proceed.
The New York Times reported on that.
But it's it's it is I just think it's a travesty of justice.
It's just one more one more bit of evidence that some organizations and groups just operate beyond the law with the full support of a very pliant Justice Department.
Well, you know, we don't have time, so I guess we'll have to talk about Nixon and Israeli nukes later.
I want to ask you about this new documents that have come out.
But sure.
So we'll do that soon.
But so what was the other thing I was going to say then?
I don't remember anymore.
Damn.
Well, you're probably going to say, hey, it's great to talk over Skype and I'm in full agreement.
This is great.
I can hear you much clearer.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Definitely.
Definitely better than your phone.
Oh, it's going to be.
Well, I know something that I was going to say a few minutes ago that I didn't get a chance to say, which was when you mentioned Greenwald in Israel.
Someone just tweeted me this morning.
Hey, what was that story about America, the NSA turning over stuff to the Israelis?
Yeah.
It was all of it.
Everything to the Israelis.
Here it is in The Guardian reported by Glenn Greenwald.
It got the least press of almost any Snowden story that's come out yet.
No mentions in The New York Times or any Royal Scranton, but NSA turns it all over.
Oh, thank goodness.
The intercept, huh?
Yeah.
Yeah.
They're doing good work over there.
All right.
Hey, man.
Thanks very much for your time.
I'll get you back on.
We'll talk about Nixon and the nukes in a minute here.
I'll be there.
All right.
Thanks.
We'll be right back, y'all.
Hey, it's Grant Smith, IRMEP.org.
Hey, y'all.
Scott Horton here.
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