Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax 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 hacked.
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 us, 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.
Okay, guys, on the line, I got the great Grant F. Smith from the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy.
IRMEP, I-R-M-E-P, IRMEP.org.
And what he does is he uses the courts to sue the government to make them release documents that show the reality behind the activities of the Israel lobby in the United States of America.
Isn't that right about the best way to put it there, Grant?
Welcome.
That's a really good way to put it, Scott.
Thanks for having me on again.
Yeah, man, I like the work that you do.
And conflict of interest here.
This guy's my buddy and let me crash at his house when I was giving a speech in D.C. the other day.
I owe him.
I would have to pretend to like this article even if I didn't, but I do.
That's a lot of coercive power, that couch.
I mean, it's not a nice couch, but you know.
I slept like a baby.
It was great.
You know, yeah.
But no, to me, it's just a great opportunity then to get you to talk about your work on the show.
You wrote a bunch of books, including the Israeli stealing weapons-grade uranium from the United States and including all kind of interfering in U.S. trade policy and this, that, and the other thing.
A whole string of them.
Everybody check out his Amazon page.
But this one is at antiwar.com.
Israel and the trillion dollar 2005 through 2018 U.S. intelligence budget.
Zero Days.
U.S. may have spent billions on cyber warfare to placate Israel.
Well, I can't imagine America doing anything to placate Israel, but I thought Zero Days was a skate video.
No?
No, no.
It's really an excellent Alex Gibney documentary that came out in 2016 all about where Stuxnet came from and has a lot of really interesting quotes from intelligence officials, including CIA director, NSA director Hayden, about why Stuxnet had to be used and Israel's insistence that the U.S. target Iran.
So, it's directly related to a lawsuit we filed in 2015 and some of the information that came out went right into a huge brief that was filed in federal court yesterday.
So, very related to some numbers we've been trying to get since 2015.
Man, oh man.
So, and this Hayden quote, I had forgotten because there's so many Hayden quotes in the world.
But this Hayden quote is a really important quote and it kind of lies at the heart of what we're talking about here.
When you're saying, had to, you kind of mean, I don't know, man.
He's such a slippery SOB, but I guess it's against interest for him to say something like this.
You take more or less this quote at face value.
First of all, tell us what he said and then what you think of it.
Sure.
So, within the documentary, Michael Hayden, after being very evasive with Gibney and his team, was talking about why the U.S. felt compelled to ramp up and attack Iran via cyber warfare in a joint effort with Israel.
And he says, quote, our belief was that if they, meaning Israel, went on their own knowing the limitations, no, they're very good Air Force, all right, but it's small and the distances are great and the targets dispersed and hardened, right?
So, they would have attempted a raid on a military plane.
We would have been assuming that they were assuming we'd finish that which they started.
In other words, there would be many of us in government thinking the purpose of the raid wasn't to destroy the Iranian nuclear system, but the purpose of the raid was to put us, meaning the U.S., at war with Iran, unquote.
And so, this is a person they coaxed out to admit that the reason Stuxnet was launched, the reason the Iranian nuclear facility at Natanz was attacked with cyber weapons, was because the Israelis were threatening to attack Iran to suck the U.S. into conflict with Iran.
And this is something other officials have mentioned.
Larry Wilkerson's mentioned it.
But then they also go on to quote some anonymous NSA officials, not only saying, yeah, that's exactly why, but that, quote, we spent hundreds of millions, maybe billions on it, unquote, meaning the cyber attacks on Iran because otherwise the Israelis are going to suck the U.S. into war.
So, extremely damning and I would say consistent information.
And it really leads to the question of how much more secret aid are the Israelis actually getting out of the U.S. in the black budget?
Yeah.
Well, so let's get back to all the zillions of dollars in a second here.
So, I'm trying to remember that because I know that we talked a lot about this and all our former CIA officer friends like Phil Giraldi and Ray McGovern had a lot to say about this.
And there was some real concern in the first Obama term, basically, that Netanyahu would launch a war in order to drag the U.S. into it.
And I seem to remember that I was skeptical all along and thought that maybe they were bluffing, but then maybe I did fall for it, too.
I don't really remember.
Somebody check the archives and tell me.
But apparently here, apparently, this really worked on the Obama guys.
Like, they really thought with, you know, I guess the different leaks coming out of Israel where the defense minister over there is really concerned that Netanyahu's going to do something.
And they're trying to dial down his rhetoric and this and that.
I mean, because from outside, we all kind of thought that this was just good cop, bad cop kind of thing.
I think I remember thinking that Obama was in on it with Netanyahu, that like, look, you guys be worse than us and we'll use that to manipulate them.
Right?
No?
Well, yeah, I mean, but when you go back through the headlines, 2010, 2011, you really do see a serious media campaign on the part of the Israelis just going all out publicly.
We don't know if we can be restrained much longer.
Existential threat, you know, Netanyahu at the U.N.
Oh, you know, you guys, long, silent stares at U.N. members saying you don't care.
So we're going to have to take care of this ourselves.
So seemed like a credible threat to me.
But what's extremely interesting is these were peak years.
2010, the U.S. intelligence budget was $80.1 billion.
2011, $78.6 billion.
2012, $75.4 billion.
So, you know, mysteriously, there are all these huge increases in the intelligence budget.
And now we have this very full documentary of massive amounts of money flowing out of the Treasury to this Unit 8200 in Israel.
Israel remodifying the cyber weapons and launching them in such a haphazard manner that they get picked up by Iran and Russia.
That was part of the story, right, in the documentary that they worked together on it and everything, but the Israelis kept adding to it and adding to it to the point that they broke it and got caught.
Which is typical.
I mean, typical to have the Israelis rework U.S. technologies or joint technologies, whether it's airborne radar and resell them to China or drone technology.
It's kind of what they do.
And it kind of gets back into the whole commercial aspect of all of this, where the U.S. is paying for all of this, and they call it a joint project.
But, you know, the really concerning thing is that it's all responding to Israel's initiatives, and the U.S. claims it has no way.
If they're threatening to go, then the U.S. has to not only provide hundreds of millions of billions of dollars to the Israelis to restrain them, but it's also got to create contingency plans, because as the NSA officials quoted anonymously that weren't Hayden said, you know, we had to assume, as they said, quote, in the event the Israelis did attack Iran, we assumed we'd be drawn into the conflict.
And so they built this whole other system called Nitro Zeus, which, by the way, got a great picture of Nitro Zeus in the last article, you know, to attack the civilian infrastructure of Iran.
So this is something the U.S. does even beyond, again, because they feel so beholden to Israel that they know that if they do attack, the U.S. gets sucked in, and then they have to build all this other infrastructure to launch broader scale cyber attacks.
So these attacks were, when you say they're civilian infrastructure, that means what?
That means power grids, transportation, communication, financial systems, water, you know, energy, it means everything.
And this is the attack that wasn't launched, but which was developed and ready to go in case the Israelis went ahead and attacked anyway, because the U.S. wanted to make sure none of the planes would be shot down, wanted to disrupt military communications, but also disrupt the economy so severely that Iran would be left in a shambles.
They apparently did not launch that attack, but U.S. taxpayers paid for it.
Hey, you guys, if you're good libertarians, go ahead and submit articles to the Libertarian Institute.
Maybe I'll run them.
You can find out all the submission guidelines there at libertarianinstitute.org.
So I did quit Twitter, not because they banned me for a week, but because I've been trying to quit anyway.
I've got a lot of book reading done, and now I'm writing another one here, and so I'm glad to be done with that.
But I am still on Reddit, but it's a private Reddit group.
Tom Woods convinced me to do it.
He wanted me to do Facebook, but it's on Reddit.
Anybody who donates more than $5 a month by way of PayPal or patreon.com or whatever you want, send a check.
You get access to the private Reddit group at r.scotthortonshow.
We've got about 90-something people in there now, and it's a good little group, and so I spent some time in there if you want to check that out.
Well, in my day, Bumblebee was a bumblebee and not a Camaro, and so I never heard of Nitro Zeus.
But I did click on it and see the cool picture that you're talking about.
He's a Decepticon.
Yeah, he's one of the so-called bad ones of these things.
But it's an apt metaphor because apparently over at NSA, they had this new cadre in its cyber command of young hacker types who had all these toys in their cubicles.
And so when they had to come up with a name for this contingency plan to attack civilian infrastructure, that was the name they gave it.
Well, and it's still sitting there on John Bolton and Donald Trump's shelf right now, so we'll see what happens.
Yeah, I guess the scary part is that it's still there somewhere.
They're going to call Sheldon Adelson and ask him what he thinks they should do.
Well, yeah, that would be a really interesting question.
I guess they had a chance to talk about it during the midterms as he sat over there with Trump in the White House.
Yeah, exactly.
So I guess we have this Decepticon thing we can deploy.
Well, I guess the one thing, though, that I think this whole thing raises, and, you know, I saw this in the Washington Examiner where they had long-term seeker of secrets, Stephen Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists.
This utter ignorance about this giant secret budget.
And he basically, you know, he does the same thing.
He gets the entire intelligence agency budget, both the military side and the national intelligence side, every year because he first started out suing the government for them.
And they finally just said, it's not worth it.
Just give them the numbers.
And so he releases the aggregate intelligence budget every year.
And it's been going up, you know, on average since 2005, it's been going up 7 percent per year.
But for 2018, it went up 12 percent.
And he claims, you know, pretty much ignorance about, oh, where does all this money go?
What could account for the increase?
And, well, you know, obviously something's going on.
So maybe there is a new ramp up with a new secret finding to attack somebody.
And so I would say this is a leading indicator that maybe someone's up to no good again.
Yeah, sure sounds like it could be.
Well, and so now when Snowden leaked the black budget and the Washington Post published it, did it coincide, you know, and basically verify whatever they had been giving Aftergood?
Well, he leaked, yeah, what he did that was good.
The overall budget was already, you know, it was known as $67.6 billion.
He leaked in 2013, though, interesting things, such as the fact that the CIA budget was $14.7 billion.
And so for the first time...
Maybe they are dependent on Afghan heroin.
It seems like they would have a lot bigger budget than that.
Why do they need it, Scott?
As you said in your new favorite book about Donald Trump, you saw that part where they shook down the Saudis for $4 billion for Syria operations.
I mean, it looks like they do a lot of things to get money, just like they did in the Iran-Contra affair, where they shake down a foreign government for their budget.
So, you know, it's not that low if you consider that apparently, again, according to this new book, Fear, about the Trump administration, it looks like they're just following the Reagan playbook where they shake down other governments and all the money stays offshore.
Well, the Reagan playbook was sell cocaine to the people of Florida, Arkansas and California to pay for the death squads in El Salvador.
That's what Gary Webb uncovered to some extent, although he backed away from saying they were doing it purposely.
But I think our friend Ray McGovern was saying, yeah, of course, they flew stuff around in Southeast Asia.
Hey, man, there's a new movie that came out this year, last year, with Tom Cruise as Barry Seal.
Oh, really?
Flying all the cocaine into Bill Clinton's Arkansas.
Catch up with the times, man.
Haven't you ever read Compromised?
Clinton, Bush and the CIA?
I'm still working my way through the politics of heroin, so I'm way behind.
I'm reading old books about this.
Yeah, there you go, man.
There's a tome.
Yeah, when I finish that, I'll jump on Tom Cruise.
But more about Israel and the thing here is Bamford, and I'm pretty sure you must have read The Shadow Factory by Bamford, where he talks all about the Israeli companies getting the contracts for all the software that runs everything for the NSA.
Right, Amdocs, Infosys, all of those.
Yeah, and Varent and all this.
And he showed how when they're doing more or less the exact same job for the Australians, the Australians caught them with their giant backdoor and everything.
And then, of course, there's the Guardian story from the Snowden documents that the New York Times never even made reference to ever.
I mean, and there's no forgiving that in the scheme of things and the way it works in the media and all that.
For those of us who read these people all the time this way, the Guardian story, even though they broke it, it was big enough that the Times was obligated to cover it, too.
That the NSA gives their entire haul to the Israelis daily, everything, which is everything.
Yeah, that was Snowden when he was saying that it's unsanitized info on Americans, which is, you know, it really is terrifying.
I mean, there's been enough news with this new documentary, which, by the way, everybody needs to watch.
The leaked Al Jazeera documentary that was produced in 2016 and supposed to be released about the operations of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy and the Israel project.
But they are heavy into social media monitoring and using all sorts of advanced monitoring as well.
So you've got the Israelis, you've got their domestic cutouts all trying to achieve their goals through what amounts to basically cyber espionage, not necessarily cyber warfare.
But as is proved by this affair, it's not a very large step to go from one to the other.
Well, thank you so much for bringing up the lobby documentary there.
I could swear I wrote that down in my notes somewhere, but it's not in your category where it belongs here.
But it's such an important thing, and I really hope people look at it.
It's at Electronic Intifada is who's leaked it here.
And so check out their website, Electronic Intifada.
And it's in four parts, which I guess it's like really two parts divided in four or something anyway.
But it's really, really worth looking at because here's what happened in here was they got a young Jewish British peacenik to go undercover to join the essentially right wing nationalist Israel lobby in the United States as an undercover reporter.
And to the nth degree, I mean, Greg Pallast, eat your heart out when it comes to secret recordings of people discussing their nefarious business.
I mean, this is some really stellar journalism here.
I mean, this is really good stuff.
Pulitzer Prize winning stuff on the activities of the lobby in America against Congress and against American students.
You know, 22 year old kids who are just trying to stick up for Palestinians rights being all smeared and attacked as a bunch of genocidal Nazis and God knows what.
And it's just incredible.
And so and the whole thing is out now.
They had a few little stories coming out, but now the whole thing is out and every one of us can watch the whole thing and can share it on Facebook and Twitter and whatever.
And with our family and friends and show everyone this thing, because, man, it's a window into a reality that you do not get to see on 60 Minutes.
There's no American media that would ever dare to do what they did.
Oh, man, they just killed.
It's going to be online for very long either.
So people should watch it when they can.
The Daily Motion's hosting it, YouTube.
But with the way things are going with the shutdown of social media, people should not expect that this will be available ad infinitum.
So they really need to watch it now.
And the thing you forgot to mention is the pipeline from the Israel project right into The Washington Post.
Right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
That's actually in my notes.
Yeah, for sure.
And how they just outright brag about it.
Yeah, put anything we want into The Washington Post.
Including let's destroy a senator by calling him a Nazi.
Exactly, exactly.
I mean, come on.
What are they talking about?
Especially old Jim Moran.
Like, I don't know everything about him, but he doesn't seem like a Nazi.
Looks like they took down Leslie Coburn, who was running for office in Northern Virginia with the same smear.
So, you know, it still works.
And it's dangerous to democracy.
And it's mostly unfounded.
And I don't know about in Moran's case, but in Coburn's case and in the university cases here, we see that young Jews stand up for the Palestinians who are being smeared and attacked.
And say, there's no...
I forgot which university in Tennessee where the leader of the Jewish umbrella group of students or whatever says, there's no anti-Semitism here.
Believe me, if there's a giant anti-Semitism problem, I think I would have heard of it.
So don't you give me this and don't you use victimization of me that never happened in order to inflict victimization onto these people.
And so, you know, that I think is really important to note, too, that there's a lot of that going on.
And it should be as much as possible.
You know, people, if they would only watch this documentary, they could really have a better handle on the politics, the media, the money.
But unfortunately, you know, even Al Jazeera, when it was operating at full capacity, couldn't really get out the information because it's, you know, it's got limited distribution in the U.S.
And now this will not go out because the Israel lobby went on a war footing against Goddard over this issue and they got them to censor it.
I mean, think about that.
That's such a huge part of the story right there.
This thing was, this incredible piece of Peel the Surprise worthy journalism was completely censored and buried for two years.
And everybody knows it's been perfectly reported and no question about it, that it was simply because the Israelis put pressure on the government of Qatar to quash the film.
And it worked and they were able to repress it, suppress it on apparently what they saw as an absolute emergency basis for two years.
Right.
So two years to recover.
What does that tell you about the value of that journalism that they did?
They went to the nth degree in order to keep it suppressed and that it worked in this day and age where everything is a digit at however many megabytes upload speeds are getting good.
You know, it's, it's incredible that they were able to keep it suppressed as long as they did, but I definitely see why.
All right.
So anyway, I did want to ask you overall about the money, how about outside of Stuxnet and bribing Israel to not attack Iran, that just kind of overall the cyber warfare industrial complex is very much integrated with the Israelis.
That's why I meant to go that direction with the Bamford thing where this is really a integrated system already.
And, and I think as you're saying, enlargement measure just as an excuse to funnel money to the Israelis.
Further subsidies on top of the $4 billion a year under another name.
Right.
And the secrecy means that nobody can debate it.
Nobody can evaluate it.
There's just no downside in terms of this doesn't offset the $3.8 billion per year that's given out of the foreign aid budget.
It's extra money.
And, you know, as, as it says in the article again, just to read the title so people can go read it, Israel and the trillion dollar 2005 to 2018 U.S. intelligence budget.
If you go read that, I mean, it's true since 2005, it's been a trillion dollars flowing into this community and it's completely unaccountable.
And the, in courtrooms, the intelligence community fights desperately to keep anything on the program level or agency level a secret.
So there's just no transparency in this entire realm.
All right, you guys, that's the great Grant F. Smith, IRMEP, I-R-M-E-P, IRMEP.org.
Thanks.
Hey, thanks, Scott.
Oh, yeah.
And I should say again, sorry, Antiwar.com, Israel and the trillion dollar 2005 to 18 U.S. intelligence budget.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at LibertarianInstitute.org, at ScottHorton.org, Antiwar.com, and Reddit.com slash Scott Horton Show.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at FoolsErrand.us.
