Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got Ben Freeman.
He runs the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative at the Center for International Policy.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm great, Scott.
Always a pleasure to be with you.
Very happy to have you here.
What an interesting piece of work you have here.
The Emirati Lobby.
How the UAE wins in Washington.
And this is coming out tomorrow.
But anyway, a massive study about the influence of not Mohammed bin Salman this time, but Mohammed bin Zayed and his partners over there in the United Arab Emirates.
As you point out right off the bat in this piece, and so I will, too, in this interview, also guilty as hell for the genocide in Yemen over the past four and a half years, almost five years now.
And so that's one major reason why they ought to be of interest to the rest of us.
Tell us more reasons.
Oh, man, there's so much to cover.
I mean, the UAE has really gotten a pass while everybody's been focused on Saudi Arabia.
People haven't really taken a hard look at the United Arab Emirates, but they're doing a lot of the exact same stuff that the Saudis are doing.
Everything from just an abhorrent human rights record there, you know, extra judicial imprisonment of UAE citizens, in some case torturing expats that are in the United Arab Emirates.
Even Western academics that come to the UAE are regularly harassed and intimidated.
I talked to one professor who was there from the New York University who was followed by secret police there.
And I've also spoken with a man named Matt Hedges, who was a British academic in the UAE who was imprisoned in solitary confinement for over six months because they said he was a spy working for the British government, when in fact he was just a PhD student working on his dissertation there.
So the UAE, and this is all in addition to everything that they're doing in Yemen.
And yet, despite all this stuff, folks very rarely know any of this.
And they think of the UAE, if they think of the UAE at all, they might think about Dubai and all the flashy buildings there.
Yeah.
Well, so let's stick with Yemen for a minute here, because we got great reporting, a whole series by the Associated Press about their torture camps there and roasting people alive on spits like Iwaks.
And, you know, this kind of madness.
And of course, where the Saudis have, I guess, uncharacteristically preferred al-Islah, the Muslim Brotherhood faction, which supports their guy Hadi there in Yemen.
The UAE has preferred to back al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula instead, and has even given them American MRAPs to drive around and use in their war against the Houthis.
Yeah, I mean, it's sort of unbelievable, the situation that we're seeing developing in Yemen now.
I mean, we really have been.
It's extraordinary.
And the real extraordinary thing to me is that we see this sort of like in D.C. here, we see this kind of a general love for the Emiratis.
And yet, when you look on the ground at everything that's happening in Yemen, you mentioned that just grotesque torture program there.
They were also running a targeted assassination program there, working with some former U.S. forces folks, too, in addition to all the civilian casualties committed by the UAE and the Saudi-led coalition.
Yet, again, we only hear about the Saudi misdeeds.
We very rarely hear about everything that the Emiratis are doing there, including, as you mentioned, directly giving U.S.-made weapons to al-Qaeda.
And I think that can't be said enough.
They're giving weapons directly to al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
Yeah, I think people might have seen those pictures on CNN and said, ah, geez, there you go with ISIS guys stealing American vehicles that George Bush left behind somewhere again or something.
Nope.
In this case, turned right over to them deliberately because we're on their side.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, it's almost like a form of currency over there, weapons and military equipment.
And so the Emiratis, this was no accident, very intentionally gave weapons to al-Qaeda there.
And then, of course, there's, you know, we've got to cover all the child soldiers and mercenaries, because just like the Saudis, they don't have much of an army of their own.
I guess they have their special operations forces.
I guess it's been reported, too, there's been American, retired, quote-unquote, American officers leading their mercenary army there, at least at some times over the past few years.
And we know there's been child soldiers from Sudan in large numbers sent there to fight for them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I mean, on sort of every metric you can think of, what the Emiratis are doing in Yemen has been, you know, absolutely abhorrent.
The civilian casualty, use of child soldiers, torture, assassination programs, I mean, on down the line.
And I think the bottom line from a U.S. point of view is everything that they're doing there has certainly not made the world a safer place.
And I think arguably because of their connection with al-Qaeda there, you know, I think it's destabilized the world.
It's certainly destabilized Yemen in that region more.
But I think the greatest threat from a U.S. interest point of view is the possibility of terrorism being exported.
And the Houthis aren't going to do that.
The real threat there, as we know, is al-Qaeda being able to export terrorism.
And as long as the al-Qaeda there continues to be backed by the Emiratis, they can develop a terrorist safe haven potentially, and they could potentially have the reach to, you know, to export some terrorism out of there.
And so I think from a U.S. interest point of view, we need to take a really hard look at what's going on with the UAE there and really rethink our support for the Emiratis and Saudis there.
All right.
Well, so before we get to the Emiratis in D.C., were there any other major points about their misbehavior in the region and the role that they play in, you know, as an American, you know, client state there that you want to bring to our attention?
Yeah.
One more thing I'll say on it is that on the arms sale side of it, my colleagues here at the Center for International Policy, they dove into the numbers.
And in the last 10 years, we sold the Emiratis over $27 billion in arms.
And, you know, some folks like to say, well, you know, that's just good for American businesses here.
But the flip side of it is that, you know, as we know, we were just talking about a lot of those arms are finding their ways into the hands of terrorists there.
And there's some arms sales that are currently under consideration for the Emiratis, too.
And so I think it really behooves us to say, you know, can we wait a minute on these arms sales till we figure out where the heck all of our U.S. arms are going?
And are they actually going to terrorists instead of going to the Emiratis?
Yeah.
Well, and of course, there's an American air base there as well, right?
Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right.
And it's a valuable air base.
As we make clear in our new report, there are a lot of, I think, legitimate ties and value to the U.S.-Emirati relationship.
We do have an air base there, which has been instrumental in the fight against terrorism in the region.
And all that stuff is well and good.
I can see that.
I mean, all that is is a trip wire for worse conflict and a reason for America to double down on our support for this same corrupt regime.
Yeah, exactly.
And it becomes kind of this downward spiral of support.
And certainly the argument that a lot of people make here, it's like, well, there are there are devout allies.
So we've got to become even more enmeshed in their country, in their wars.
And we've got to send our troops to fight wars that they might otherwise be fighting.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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All right, so tell us all about the lobby in D.C.
Oh, yeah.
So this is where the story gets interesting.
As I mentioned, you know, despite everything we just talked about, all these misdeeds that are going on by the Emiratis, if you ask the average person, I think, around D.C., you know, what they thought of the UAE, they would probably say some very positive things about the UAE.
You know, everybody's seen sort of glamorous photos and videos even of the UAE.
I mean, heck, one of the Fast and the Furious films was filmed in the UAE.
And so, you know, fast cars, you know, beautiful people.
They might think of the UAE as being very glamorous.
And one of the big reasons that there's this sort of there's this major disconnect between what the UAE actually is and how they're perceived here is their lobby in America.
And what we did, my program at the Center for International Policy, we took a look at the UAE lobby in 2018.
And what we found was staggering.
The Emiratis hired 20 different lobbying and public relations firms to work for them in just that one year.
They also spent over $20 million on those firms, lobbying and PR campaigns.
We documented over 3,000 political activities those folks engaged in.
They contacted almost half of all congressional offices.
They worked with 18 think tanks, reached out to almost every mainstream media outlet.
And a lot of this work that they're doing, their foreign agents, their lobbyists are working with folks at think tanks that, you guessed it, the Emiratis also fund these think tanks.
And so not surprisingly, a lot of these think tanks that are funded heavily by the Emiratis, they produce reports and op-eds that are really favorable to the Emiratis.
And it helps to create this sort of echo chamber here that the Emiratis are our devout allies, and we've got to stand by them through thick and thin no matter what.
And basically what we found, the bottom line of this report, is that through this massive lobbying and influence operation, they've really been able to pull the wool over the eyes of just about everybody here in Washington, D.C.
Yeah.
Well, hey, everybody likes money.
And especially free money.
And that's the whole thing about this, right?
Is in this kind of business, the lobbyists themselves, everybody involved in this, they're getting paid big time.
All the margins are, you know, I presume, quite a bit thicker than you would see on a regular kind of market level job being carried out by people of that same talent level, you know?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, it's like the sums of money here are just incredible.
I'll give you an example.
Just one of these firms here, it's a firm called the Camstall Group, and they do a lot of PR work for the Emiratis.
They're under contract with the Emiratis, and their monthly retainer, monthly, is $400,000 a month.
They make almost $5 million a year working for the Emiratis.
And that's before any billable hours.
That's just to keep them on retainer.
Oh, yeah.
If you add up the expenses and everything that they're doing, they're billing for, it ends up being well over $5 million a year that the Emiratis are spending, again, on just this one PR factory they've got going for them.
All right.
So talk about their favorite think tanks and ours.
Yeah, yeah.
The big think tanks for them are sort of, not surprisingly, as I mentioned before, think tanks that they fund.
So they're working with the Middle East Institute really heavily, the Center for American Progress really heavily, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies really heavily.
And in all these cases, we were able to document in our report.
I know I should mention that your listeners can find the report on our website, internationalpolicy.org.
Yeah, don't forget to mention AEI, the American Enterprise Institute.
That's a really important one, too.
Yeah, AEI as well, the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
So it's kind of the who's who of big think tanks around town.
Their agents, these lobbyists and these PR folks are working directly with think tank experts there.
And those think tank experts, in many cases, they're producing stuff that's extremely favorable to the UAE.
We documented many cases where this was happening.
The Center for American Progress, for example, shortly after the Khashoggi murder, a bunch of leaked emails came out, and they revealed that a CAP staffer had chosen to water down their response to the Khashoggi murder and really make it down to kind of a nothing burger response.
And coincidentally, or perhaps not, that CAP staffer, he helps to organize every year trips by think tank folks to Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
And he works directly with a UAE lobbyist, a guy named Richard Mintz at the Harvard Group, to coordinate those trips and to make sure those trips happen.
He also works with folks at the Middle East Institute, too, which a lot of folks didn't know that the Middle East Institute got a $20 million contribution from the United Arab Emirates just two years ago.
And the reason folks might not have known that is because the Middle East Institute didn't initially disclose it.
It came out again when some emails were leaked from the UAE ambassador.
This gigantic contribution came out in those emails.
And otherwise, if not for those leaked emails, we wouldn't have known anything about this.
And yet, the Middle East Institute likes to say that none of this money affects any of its decisions or any of that stuff.
But if you look at a lot of the reports coming out from it, I think the bias towards the UAE is very clear to any objective observer.
Hey, we're surprised as anyone to find out how much the UAE agreed with our point of view.
And you have a whole section here about, they're not alone either, right?
This is kind of a constant thing where these FARA filings fall quite a bit short of what they should detail here.
Oh, man, it's really humbling, too.
I like to say in the report that we identify so much here.
We follow so much of the money.
There's so much going on here.
But I tell you, Scott, we've only got the tip of the iceberg.
Because even these firms that we're looking at, so many of them, they just flat out don't report what they're doing on behalf of the UAE.
And the interesting thing is the FARA statute, the Foreign Agents Registration Act, it's pretty clear about what you have to report and what should be in these filings.
And a lot of these firms that are working for the UAE, it just really looks like they're not meeting that threshold.
And so, for example, some of these firms, one of the firms I mentioned, the Camstall Group, just said before that they're getting paid around $5 million a year by the UAE when they have to report their political activities.
All they say is, well, you know, we're meeting with some think tank folks, met with some folks from media, some folks on the Hill, too.
And they're basically like, you know, that's all we're doing.
OK, case closed there.
And they don't report any of the people who they're meeting with, anybody, which of their lobbyists are doing it, what they're talking about, all these different things that are supposed to be in FARA filings.
Simply, they're just not listing them.
And despite what everybody's saying right now about there being this, you know, FARA frenzy, FARA enforcement is way up, none of these firms are being punished for any of this.
It's basically the seeming rule is now is as long as you're registered under FARA, you're good, even if what you report in your registrations is basically nothing.
So really, my big complaint here is there's very, very little transparency about what the UAE is actually doing in this town.
We've just hit the tip of the iceberg.
And I think if you get really below the sea on this, you're going to find some even more shady stuff.
Yeah.
Well, you know, especially here when you get to the section about political contributions.
My God, it's like foreign meddling in our elections here.
And, you know, I think the first time we spoke, it was a piece that you'd done for Tom Dispatch where you talked about how I think in that case it was the Saudis had just very plainly in the light of day laundered a couple of thousand dollars through an American lobbyist to pay off a senator to change his vote so that he would no longer oppose the genocide in Yemen.
This aggressive war, which, again, is not just genocidal, but also treasonous and is being fought on behalf of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
And it was just three thousand dollars was enough to flip the senator's vote around.
So and then but he ain't alone.
This is a constant thing with UAE money.
And I guess everybody else, too, huh?
The Russians.
Sorry.
Yeah.
Everybody but the Russians, maybe.
I mean, yeah, it's phenomenal.
And so that's why, you know, whenever whenever folks are talking about, you know, the influence of Russia, I always have to remind people Russia is just one country.
A majority of the countries in the world right now.
And I mean that very literally.
A majority of countries in the world have paid lobbyists working for them in D.C. right now.
And so Russia is not unique.
And we see there's plenty to complain about Russia.
Don't get me wrong there.
No evidence they ever funneled money into anybody's political campaigns other than just make believe leaks to The New York Times and The Washington Post that were debunked.
Sure, sure.
The point I want to make here is that for folks, it's like it goes well beyond Russia.
And you look at like what we have in the report here on the money coming from the UAE.
And what we found was around six hundred thousand dollars coming from registered these firms that are registered to work for the UAE.
They spend around six hundred thousand dollars on campaign contributions.
And this is just in 2018, over half a million dollars going to campaigns.
The interesting thing in this case, what we found when we've looked at other countries like Saudi Arabia, is the money kind of goes pretty evenly to to Republican and Democratic candidates here.
But what we found is very different for the UAE.
Most of this money, in fact, our report has the top 10 list of recipients of contributions from these UAE foreign agents.
Nine out of the top 10 folks are Democrats.
In this case, the only Republican in that top 10 was Paul Ryan, former Congressman Paul Ryan.
So, you know, there's a very there's definitely a partisan angle to what the UAE appears to be doing in D.C.
Yeah, I wonder why.
I mean, the smart bet is to pay everybody off, right?
It's not like they don't have the money.
They've got plenty of money.
I mean, it's sort of the rule with all this.
And I often joke that, you know, everybody's on the take.
It's not, you know, it's not a partisan issue.
Yeah, so it was sort of surprising to see that this, you know, mostly going to to Democrats, at least on the top end.
And, you know, it's always interesting to me sometimes how low the number totals can be that still represent such a great amount of influence for these political campaigns.
It's the same thing here where you say tens of millions of dollars going around per year.
You know, I don't know, in the scheme of things.
But in reality, that'll buy a bunch of congressmen, right?
I remember the headline about Lockheed spending $14 million on lobbying and how that was shocking that they would spend that much.
And yet that's chump change to them, considering the checks they're cashing from the U.S. Treasury that they get in return for the steak dinners they're buying for pennies, really.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, when you think about it, you know, Lockheed's getting over $40 billion a year.
That's a billion with a B in U.S. government contracts.
And so for Lockheed to spend $14 million on lobbying, you know, that's a that's a rounding error for Lockheed Martin in a given year.
So when you think of it from a return on investment for them, if that $14 million can help to get them, you know, even one more billion dollar contract that U.S. taxpayers are on the hook for, they're going to do it every year.
And we see it year in and year out from Lockheed Martin.
Yeah.
And this is just the same way, too, where, hey, if $14 million can buy a Lockheed that much influence, then how much is $20 or $30 million a year from UAE buy?
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
We talk about, you know, I talk about in the report to all the arms sales, you know, we've documented over $27 billion in arms sales going to UAE.
Speaking of Lockheed, right?
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And Lockheed's one of those big suppliers of that equipment.
And so you you you get this kind of nexus a lot of times between defense contractors in the foreign governments that they're selling those weapons to.
So it's almost like, you know, it's a multiplier effect.
You take Lockheed lobbying, you know, you add the UAE lobbying into it, too.
And you get this kind of next, this sort of pro-war, pro-militarization, like super lobby that's really just pushing to keep the U.S. involved in all these overseas conflicts and keeping us selling arms to a lot of countries that we probably should be selling arms to.
Yeah.
Now, so when you talk about in the study here, about the UAE's foreign agents contacting this many congressional offices, 200, that's a lot, 18 think tanks, and most mainstream media outlets.
Those are very interesting numbers, but contacted seems really broad, too.
Do you have some kind of consequence coming from any of those contacts or all of them are a different number for the ones that seem to actually make a difference that you could trace an article that got pulled or promoted or whatever?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
We found particularly with the media engagements, we found a lot of examples where their lobbyists, you know, would meet somebody at a media outlet.
We have a few of these examples in the report where their lobbyists will meet with a reporter.
And then a couple of days later, this kind of fluff piece about the UAE will be published by that exact same reporter or that same outlet.
Can you give us some examples?
I don't know if you've got to name all the reporters by name, unless you want to, but at least they're outlets.
Yeah, I'm happy to.
And one that maybe your readers have heard of, but I hadn't, was this outlet called OZY.
I'll be honest, I'd never heard of them before, but they're sort of a new up-and-coming digital media outlet.
And behind the Washington Post, they were the most contacted by the UAE's lobbyists.
And so we dove into it a little more and we said, well, you know, what's OZY putting out about the UAE?
And so these journalists at OZY met with these UAE lobbyists.
And then a couple of days later, the UAE puts out these real puff pieces on the UAE becoming the next fashion capital of the world and, you know, had some very, very flowery rhetoric about how, you know, Abu Dhabi was rivaling Paris as the next fashion capital of the world.
And nowhere in the article did they mention that the UAE has an incredibly strict dress code in that if you violate, if a foreigner even, you know, if you and I are visiting the UAE on vacation and our significant other, or us, violate the UAE's dress code, we can actually go to jail for up to three years for violating the UAE's dress code.
But you never see that from this article.
It just talks about basically how they're rivaling Paris.
And we saw the same thing, too.
We documented instances where UAE foreign agents met with think tank experts.
And then within days of that, those think tank experts are writing these op-eds that are very favorable to the UAE.
And at least one instance, we documented that they met with them.
The think tank expert wrote an op-ed.
And then another PR firm that was working for the Emiratis then sent that same op-ed to over 200 congressional offices.
And so it's something that we're affectionately calling around here, talking point laundering.
The talking points start with a lobbyist, they go to a think tank expert, and then they're distributed on the Hill as if they're just the objective opinion of somebody at a think tank.
Yeah.
Hey, these people are real experts.
Otherwise, they wouldn't be getting paid so well, probably, right?
Yeah, that's exactly right.
And you know what?
Just like with so many things, one of the big stories, sort of the lead is buried, that none of this is really criminal, that this is actually how business is done.
That's all.
Oh, yeah, that's exactly it.
As we always have to put all these caveats in our reports is that this might be corruption, but this is perfectly legal corruption in the U.S.
Wait a minute, is that including the campaign contributions, too?
Funneling through these lobbyists that way in such a transparent way, too?
Oh, yeah, absolutely, Scott.
The campaign contributions are also perfectly legal because the campaign contributions that are reported here, in the FARA filings, it says very clearly that these contributions are made on these foreign agents, made on their own behalf, with their own money, and that the money is not coming from these foreign governments.
Never mind that in most of these cases that a lot of these folks' salaries are completely derived from the work that they're doing on behalf of these foreign governments.
That doesn't matter, but because they say that they're making these contributions from their own money and for their own reasons, it's perfectly legal.
Yeah, especially when, I like that where it's not even really smoke and mirrors.
It's just hot air.
It's just nothing to really stand in the way of the correct interpretation.
It's just a shrug and a fudge.
No, see, what happened was this lobbyist was really worried that the Senate was going to stop the genocide in Yemen, and he thought he really needed to make a call to the senator and tell him, here, I'll give you $3,000 if you'll vote for the genocide.
But that has nothing to do with his day job representing the people who are committing that genocide.
Don't be silly.
By the way, what was the name of that senator again?
From your story?
It was a year ago, right?
Last October or so?
Yeah, there's so many.
Oh, I'm blanking on exactly that one.
Sorry, but that was for a vote related to Saudi Arabia.
Yeah, it was.
It was on the War Powers Act resolution, or one of those.
Yeah, it was Senator Heinhoff.
Okay.
Yeah, I think it was a Democrat from the East Coast somewhere.
Does that count?
I'm not sure if that's the same guy.
No, we did have one with a Democrat, and I'm blanking on who that was, too.
But the one right before the War Powers vote was Senator Heinhoff, and the contribution was made by a lobbyist at the McKeon Group.
Yeah, that must be the one I'm thinking of.
Yeah, it's really something else.
But, you know, William S. Lynn said a long time ago, he says, look, Washington, DC, it's just an imperial court.
That's all it is.
It's, you know, as they keep documenting, you and others keep adding up these numbers.
It's a trillion dollars a year.
As he said then, this is back in 04 or 05.
This is the biggest honeypot in the history of the world.
There's nothing that compares to it.
And so get in on it.
You know, why can't?
So that's it.
So whether it's the Israelis or the UAE or the Saudis, or the arms dealers, or for that matter, you know, all the different interest groups in America, the big agriculture firms and the pharmaceutical companies and the insurance companies and the bankers and everybody else, the arms industries on both sides of that, you know, that, boy, it's just a runaway freight train, this thing.
And so the UAE, they'd be crazy, wouldn't they, to not do everything they can to try to bribe and influence the US government to do things their way, instead of, hey, God forbid, tilting away from them and towards someone else over there?
Yeah, yeah, no, exactly.
I mean, when the game in DC right now, you know, it's a it's a town on the take right now.
And so the incentive for all these foreign governments and all the interest groups, lobbying groups that you mentioned, the incentive for all of them is to just get in on it.
For somebody like me, who, you know, works to expose that, I guess, on one hand, it's job security.
On the other hand, it's just pretty darn frustrating, Scott.
Yeah, well, and it's job security for me, too, of course, because it means that the wars all continue, all these violent deaths.
It's not like they're just cashing checks, they're cashing checks, again, for weapons that they're using, not just, you know, it used to be that at least we can sort of take comfort that the Saudis are just stockpiling all this stuff in warehouses somewhere and weren't doing anything with it, and didn't know how to do anything with it.
You know, it's just a form of recycling American petrodollars and this kind of deal.
But now look at them starving babies to death quite deliberately, you know, targeting their irrigation systems and their electricity and waterworks.
And now a lot of those weapons are pointing directly at Iran.
And I think, you know, I feel like every day that there's a danger that we're going to get sucked into another war in the Middle East.
Yeah, well, and I think the only good news there is that would be so catastrophic, that even the Army and Marine Corps have figured that out already and don't want that to happen.
And but you know what?
I mean, cross your fingers if that's the best you've got is guys who love to fight are the only ones really holding back all of the civilians who would like to start the conflict, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
Think of that, the standing army restraining the civilians.
That's the irony of this whole era.
I mean, don't get me wrong, they carry out a whole lot of what they're ordered to, but they've been the brakes on our civilian government quite a few times over the past 20 years as well, you know?
Yeah, that's right.
That's right.
Anyway, what a disaster either way, all the ways.
But listen, so thanks so much for this.
Now I got the PDF because you're really nice and emailed it to me.
But tell everybody where they can find this great new report about the influence of the United Arab Emirates.
It's called the Emirati Lobby, how the UAE wins in Washington.
Yeah, all of you listeners can find it on our website, the Center for International Policy's website, and that's at www.internationalpolicy.org.
That's internationalpolicy.org.
Okay, great.
And I'll make sure to get that blogged over to antiwar.com as well there, Ben.
That's great, Scott.
As always, thank you.
Hey, thanks a lot for coming on the show.
I really appreciate it.
You bet.
Have a good day, buddy.
All right, you guys, that is Ben Freeman.
Again, the Emirati Lobby, and that is the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative at the Center for International Policy, internationalpolicy.org.
All right, y'all, thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan, at foolserrand.us.
