01/08/16 – Eli Clifton – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, Scott Horton Show.
Just the one guest today, it's Eli Clifton.
Hey, at least it's a good one, right?
He's writing for Loeb Log.
This one's called Washington's Multi-Million Dollar Saudi PR Machine.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Eli?
I'm doing well, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
Very happy to have you here.
Well, always happy to see you covering things because you always bring a lot of insight to the topics that you cover.
Yeah, so happy to help promote your work here.
Washington's Multi-Million Dollar Saudi PR Machine.
How many multi-millions of dollars do the Saudis and their American allies spend on whitewashing their criminal regime in American media, Eli?
Well, certainly the Saudis spend approximately, based off the estimates and numbers I crunched, about $6.78 million per year.
That's directly in fees, all in retainers, actually, on a month-to-month basis.
That's the yearly total, though, for a variety of law firms, lobbyists and PR firms, all in the Beltway, most of them on K Street.
Now, on top of that, of course, there are expenses, and those could easily double that number.
But that's just their monthly retainers added up over the course of a year.
Okay, and then so, well, what kind of work are they doing?
What's to whitewash, anyway?
Well, certainly since their intervention in Yemen last year, we've seen really a number of social media accounts, websites, as well as placement in major media of op-eds occurring of folks who work for these firms, as well as Saudi officials.
They're making a concerted effort to try to suggest that they're a good regional actor and encouraging stability in the region, when many of the actions they're taking right now are leading a lot of folks to express concern that this major U.S. ally might be behaving in ways that ultimately don't serve the interests of the United States or the region as a whole.
Well, it seems like the current king isn't really that much worse than the ones before him, but he just is, I guess, that much clumsier at PR because it seems like the veneer has really been coming off the Saudi dictatorship there as of late.
You know, I think that's an interesting point.
And in looking at this recently, and especially seeing how they handled starting off the year by executing a Shiite cleric that was almost guaranteed to set off problems with their relationship with Iran and, for that matter, their own Shia community in Saudi Arabia, none of this is new.
They obviously have a difficult and tense relationship with Saudi Arabia, and really the Sunni-Shia divide is wider than it's ever been in recent years.
But when you look back in the past, some of the things that they say and believe about Iran, they knew to say only behind closed doors.
And it's good to look at the WikiLeaks State Department files.
Paul hailed Chelsea Manning doing 35 years in the brig for our government's sins.
I'm sorry, go ahead.
Right.
And in those, you get to see senior Saudi officials saying behind closed doors, well, you know, that we believe that Iran is the snake and the way that you destroy the snake is you cut off its head, effectively endorsing military action against Iran.
But in those cases, that even that when it was reported was considered sensational, because that is definitely not the message that they were sending in public.
Now, they're taking a far more, for lack of a better term, crude or crass approach to their public diplomacy, as well as their actual diplomacy, in ways that I think are making a lot of people take notice and express concern that the exactly that perhaps the king's pot, the new king's politics aren't that much different, but certainly the way he's handling himself is.
Yeah, well, and there's virtually a blackout here in America.
But certainly the European papers are at least admitting to the public that there is such a thing as this war in Yemen, that America and Saudi had been waging for the last, what, 10 months now, almost, and the consequences of that.
And, you know, I had the guy on from Oxfam earlier in the week, he said, this is, bar none, absolutely the worst humanitarian crisis on the face of the earth right now.
And so I think that's part of it is that's getting through to the public imagination.
In a way, anyway, here, even maybe without the actual narrative of the war, I think it's just kind of helping to contribute to the idea that these guys are pretty brutal, you know, just that atmosphere, as they call it, you know, in DC.
Right.
And I mean, I think Syria is, if there's anything that's changing, or I should say, making the public more interested in the regional politics, it's what's going on in Syria.
The fact that I think at this point, most people would like to see a diplomatic resolution to the conflict there, or at least something that deescalates it and brings an end to the humanitarian crisis, which is now spreading across Europe from as Syrian refugees get increasingly desperate to get out.
And it's impossible to see what Saudi Arabia is doing right now as being in any way helpful to improving the regional dynamics.
And as I said earlier, it only exacerbates the Sunni Shia divide, which groups like the Islamic State, as well as other proxy groups who are active in Syria are actively working to exploit as well.
You know, yeah, I think as far as Syria goes, I think that actually has seeped through to the public understanding a bit as well, that the Saudis are financing the Mujahideen.
Now, not worse than Obama, but still, you know, that's kind of part of it that, you know, our government may say that Assad is the worst, you know, the leader of the worst faction in Syria, but I don't think the American people are really buying that.
Right now, I think right now, people just want to see an end to the conflict.
And, and seeing the way Saudi Arabia is acting right now, doesn't seem to be helping in any way, shape or form.
Even the State Department is not rushing to the defense of the Saudis decision to start off the year by seeing how badly they could torpedo their relationship with Iran.
Especially, right, as we're at the point of saying, trying to see if we can fully implement the Iran nuclear deal.
You know, this is just not the time or place to be doing the things that Saudi Arabia is doing.
And frankly, they're going to need all the PR firepower they can get.
Yeah.
Now, what are they getting in terms of PR firepower for this money?
Anyway, a press release here and there, a steak dinner for a congressman here and there or what?
Well, it's a lot of outreach to congressional offices.
That's certainly something you see in the Foreign Agent Registration Act filings that I that I was reporting on here.
So there's plenty of outreach to Capitol Hill.
Now, the contents of those phone calls, we don't know, but you can probably make an educated guess about about what's being said.
There's also a lot of exactly press releases, not just a few press releases, I'd say a lot of press releases going out trying to put a positive spin on particularly the intervention in Yemen.
And now, obviously, try to smear Iran as somehow the destabilizing force in the region after some Iranians reacted to the executions in Saudi Arabia by attacking the Saudi embassy in Tehran.
So there's certainly that going on.
And then I think that there is a sophisticated social media and digital campaign, not all of which identifies necessarily as operating under the auspices of these PR agencies, or at least it's in the fine print.
And I think that that that's there as well.
And finally, traditional stuff like placing, providing sources to journalists, providing, placing op-eds.
And that's something that's always gone on and that these PR companies have helped with.
And they continue to do so.
If you read the New York Times and the Washington Post coverage, you see people provided by these agencies showing up.
One thing I will say, though, is I think the newspapers are becoming better.
This is entirely subjective on my part.
I haven't looked at the numbers, but I think that they're identifying more clearly when they're getting sources from these PR agencies that work for the Saudi government.
Well, yeah, does it make a difference to them, though, actually mind and and you're seeing what in Washington Post reporting that they kind of well, that is just what their PR men say, sort of an attitude now.
Yeah, I mean, I think that that's the way that it's portrayed.
And that's the fair way to portray it is to say, here's what here's what the Saudi PR folks say.
Here's what the State Department says.
And here's what you know, another source was before they would have just repeated it as gospel.
It's the point, right?
This is a major improvement, a little bit of skepticism.
Well, in the past, they may have just said this is a regional expert.
Right?
Yeah, there you go.
Gospel.
All right.
Hold it right there, everybody.
It's Eli Clifton.
We got to take this break.
And you go read this article during the break real quick.
Washington's multimillion dollar Saudi PR machine.
And we'll have more when we get back.
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All right, you guys.
Welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, Scott Horton Show.
Rocking out a little bit and interviewing Eli Clifton right in here for Jim Loeb's blog, Loeb Log.
And very important piece for looking at Washington's multimillion dollar Saudi PR machine.
And in fact, I need to move this lower in my tabs so that it goes on the list for running on antiwar dot com later, too.
Yeah, very important piece here.
And so and you mentioned at the beginning of the article here, Eli, about Jim Loeb's recent piece about the neocons and and Jim, of course, is so great on this stuff and has been for so long that he remembers that there was a time when the Saudis were on Richard Perle and the neocons hit list.
They wanted to regime change them just as good as Iran or anybody else.
And yet times have changed.
Well, because Iran, basically, is that about right?
Yeah, I think that that is probably the the short version of it.
You know, to put it another way, the neocons appear to be embracing the philosophy of the enemy.
If my enemy is my friend and certainly enemy number one to them, not recently, probably over the past five to 10 years has been Iran.
They've largely failed in their recent efforts to derail the nuclear agreement, although it hasn't been fully implemented yet either.
And they see what the Saudis is doing is the closest to what they would want to see done, which is that fine, exacerbate regional tensions, destabilize the region, try to get Iran to act out.
These are all neocons are very often associated with with pushing for sort of the far right in Israel's politics of Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party.
And when you see the things that have happened under Netanyahu in relation to Iran, the assassination of nuclear scientists, the alleged espionage that's gone on within Iran, you know, these are all things that to some degree were designed to fan flames.
And the fact that the Saudis are now taking a different tact on that same strategy seems to be OK by them.
And we saw, you know, I think was Patrick Clawson at the Washington Institute for Nary's Policy, you know, doing everything he can to say that this is the Iranians fault.
I know Elliott Abrams did the same.
And they're trying to frame this has been as being that this is actually the Iranians acting in a irresponsible manner.
And for the most part, I surprisingly I don't think that that narrative has really taken hold in an effective way.
Yeah.
Well, never mind the real details like Gareth Porter's recent piece about how all the accusations, all of them about Iran backing the Houthis in Yemen are basically thin air, where even the skeptics say, well, there was a little bit of support back years ago.
He's saying, no, not even that.
Right.
I mean, and even I mean, pretty much all the balanced reports I've heard now about Yemen suggests that, you know, even if there is if there is a Saudi in Iranian involvement, it is really true.
I mean, it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's really limited.
This has more to do with Yemen's politics and with and moreover, with Saudi Arabia wanting to create and hold on to a sphere of influence that includes Yemen and that Yemen has its own complicated political factions.
One plus American intervention there over the last decade has made it this way as well.
All our support for Assad.
There's that great piece.
What?
Four or five years ago now, boy, time flies where Jeremy Scahill wrote in The Nation, America's Yemen policy backfires, something like that, about how everything that we paid solid to do ended up doing nothing but make al Qaeda stronger and the Houthis stronger.
Right.
This has been a long time in the making.
Yeah.
And, you know, it's hard to describe any of these crises without pointing out America's role and making it worse.
Not not that they own every aspect of it, but they can't find a crisis that they don't want to set on fire.
Right.
And in the case of Yemen, it's important to look at the fact that, you know, in the past over the past 10 months, for sure, Saudi Arabia has become sort of the leading outside interventionist force there, where in the past the United States had been doing various classified operations, allegedly, and and certainly conducting drone strikes.
Now that seems to have been overshadowed by Saudi explicit military intervention.
But where do those weapons come from?
The majority of the Saudi arsenal is coming for certainly of their smart bombs and high tech missiles and weapons is coming from the United States.
And that's something that's probably perhaps even more important to look at when we're talking about Saudi influence in the United States, that the number I gave for their lobbying is $6.78 million per year.
But from 2007 to 2014, Saudi Arabia did $86 billion in arms trade agreements with the United States.
So that's some serious money.
And you better believe that the arms manufacturers in the United States have their own lobbyists.
Right?
In fact, that was part of Gareth's other piece the same day or two days before or whatever it was about how the military was really hesitant to go along with the more or less, you know, pro jihadist policies, at least de facto pro jihadist policies in Yemen and in Syria, but it's not like they were really willing to threaten to disrupt their arms agreements with the Saudi kingdom over it.
I mean, hey, you guys want to back out on this, right?
Go ahead.
It's not like we'd prefer that you stop and we get we have to stop selling you f 16s.
Right?
Well, I mean, and not to not to go that too far down a conspiratorial hole here.
But even if the military United States and senior leadership were concerned about the ongoing transfer of high tech weapons to Saudi Arabia, they wouldn't necessarily have the political strength to to stop it, especially when you have that much money changing hands between US defense contractors and the Saudi government.
And those defense contractors have a very active presence in Washington, DC.
Sure.
Well, and, you know, the Pentagon has a very strong presence in the on the boards of directors of these, you know, military companies and and around they go in their iron triangle.
So there's not much to differentiate the generals and admirals from the directors of Lockheed at this point, you know, it seemed like.
Yeah, yeah.
No, I mean, there's there's clearly overlap there.
Yeah.
I mean, it'd be nice if I was the one who coined the phrase iron triangle to replace revolving door to to show just how mean it can be or whatever.
But it wasn't me.
It was people who know a lot more about this stuff than me that came up with that one.
And it sure seems like a pretty apt description.
But now, so let me ask you this, too.
What about Houston?
Because all the oil companies, they have their relationship with Saudi Arabia or I guess not all of them, but some of them do.
And they've got a lot of political power and they must have some kind of say in this.
You know, that's an interesting question and one and one that I've sometimes looked for evidence of.
And it's possible that they are lobbying on these issues.
I think when it comes to, you know, for instance, intervention in Yemen, that would be more a matter if the oil companies had gotten involved in lobbying on that.
That would be really the Saudis phoning in a favor to the oil companies.
And at this point, I haven't seen or heard evidence that the oil companies have any real interest one way or the other.
They're obviously they want to keep up good relations with Kingdom.
But I think that they've at least to my knowledge, stayed away from it.
And as I say, that there's there's some actors here that have far more deep financial interests.
And those would be the defense industry.
I mean, when Lockheed Martin is looking to do an eleven and a quarter billion dollar sale of warships to Saudi Arabia, you know, that's a pretty clear connection with Saudi Arabia's regional military ambitions.
Yeah, absolutely.
And then, well, we're out of time.
You know, let me record you into the break for just 30 seconds or something here.
I just want to ask you if you had seen these recent polls about how horrible and evil all Muslims are that were done by the Clarion Fund.
And if you could comment on, you know, at least the background, I know, you know, at least the background of this group and where they're from and maybe a little bit more about the results, if you happen to know.
Well, I haven't looked at their latest polls.
I'd be highly suspicious of anything coming out of the Clarion Fund.
They're a group that are tied back to sort of originated out of this ultra orthodox group called Aisha Torah, this pro settler group.
The Clarion Fund has had employees who were settlers, actually.
And the Clarion Fund has a long history of trying to inject Islamophobia into the American political discourse.
Their most impressive effort of this was when they sent out a multimillion dollar campaign to send out an Islamophobic documentary before the 2008 election, thinking that it's a swing state voters, thinking that it would possibly swing things against Barack Obama.
Clearly, it didn't work.
But they've been omnipresent in Islamophobia sphere, constantly producing documentaries.
They did one about Iran, trying to basically promote the idea that the only way to stop Iran is through military intervention.
They are they are ultra hawkish group, and they've always been highly secretive about who they actually are, who they represent, and truthfully about how many of their employees and stakeholders are in the United States and how many of them are in other countries.
Mm hmm.
And now they're facts, you just don't like them, or they're not really facts?
Well, they certainly certainly have made assertions in the past that sort of would test ones.
You know, some of them don't just don't pass the laugh test.
They've tried to compare Islam to the Third Reich.
They've tried to suggest they've certainly been one of the groups trying to place I think it was in the third jihad, their documentary, they tried to place a Muslim officials and Muslim clerics as somehow responsible for inspiring the Holocaust.
I mean, they have a singular worldview, which is that everything wrong in the world originates from Islam and from Muslims.
And, you know, you don't have to look too closely at some of the things they're saying to start to to raise serious questions about what their agenda is.
And some of these things just don't pass a logical test or a historical one.
All right, there you go, everybody.
That is the great Eli Clifton writing this time at lobe log dot com lobe blog dot com Washington's multimillion dollar Saudi PR machine.
Thanks very much, Eli.
Thanks for having me.
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