04/26/17 – Grant F. Smith on secret US aid to Israel (beyond the billions already known about) – The Scott Horton Show

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That's a good one, too.
Alright, on the phone, I got Grant Smith.
Actually, I got him on Skype.
He's the author of a bunch of great books about the Israel lobby and their overt and covert actions inside the United States.
He wrote Big Israel about AIPAC and assorted Israel affinity organizations in the United States.
He wrote Divert about the Israelis stealing weapons-grade uranium from the United States.
And a bunch more before that.
He's the director of the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy.
It's I-R-M-E-P dot org, IRMEP, Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy.
And as I'm saying that, it's occurring to my brain that if I go to that site and look around, I might be able to find footage from the most recent Israel conference that Grant put on.
Oh, this is great.
This is the first question I should ask you today.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you, Grant?
Hey, I'm doing well, Scott.
Thanks a lot.
Where can people find footage of your recent awesome conference that you put on?
What was it called, and where can they get to it?
Yeah, it was called The Israel Lobby and American Policy.
It was on March 24th at the National Press Club.
And if you go to I-R-M-E-P dot org, down to the fourth link, you can see a YouTube video embed.
And that's actually a playlist of all of the speeches and keynotes given during the day from 9 till 5.30 or so.
So yeah, definitely check it out.
Great stuff there.
And you know, when I tuned in, the first thing that I saw on the live stream there was John Mearsheimer up there going off.
Yeah, he was.
He was amazing.
And he was giving an update of what's happened in the ten years since they published the book with Stephen Walt about the Israel Lobby.
Yeah, vindication is what's been going on.
Absolutely.
So he was fascinating.
He didn't have any good news for anybody.
He sees a lot of bleakness, and he doesn't see any resolution coming anytime soon.
So it's kind of a depressing thing.
But there were great presentations.
And Anish Rawi, Alain Pape.
They're just it was an incredible day.
Yeah.
So again, I-R-M-E-P, I-R-M-E-P dot org.
And just page down a little bit, you'll see that YouTube.
And that's the playlist of all the great speeches there.
And in fact, I'm sure if you follow to the YouTube page, you can find speeches from conferences from years past to lots of great stuff.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
So this is the fourth one at the National Press Club on that topic.
But there are definitely other ones as well.
So yeah, thanks.
But behind all of those books that we've been writing about, these are definitely Freedom of Information Act requests.
In fact, most of the information for the NUMEC book was a result of Freedom of Information Act filings and lawsuits so that we could get information that nobody had ever gotten about that diversion story.
And so I just I think the Freedom of Information Act is so important.
And yet, as I wrote about at Antiwar.com this week, extremely frustrating to actually get agencies like the CIA to abide by the spirit and actual wordings of different exemptions and other parts of the Freedom of Information Act.
So that's what that's all about.
Yeah.
Now, and everybody, you can find that most recent article at Original.
Antiwar.com slash Smith dash Grant.
That should just be slash Grant should fix that.
CIA fights disclosure of secret aid to Israel.
CIA fights disclosure of secret aid to Israel.
Secret aid to Israel.
Now, wait a minute.
I thought that they blatantly admit that they gave, what, three and a half, four billion dollars a year to Israel and including all this military aid and loan guarantees, which means loans they never have to pay back that are actually just grants.
Right.
No pun intended.
Extra appropriation.
Now you're telling me there's a whole other something that is a whole other something, too?
Absolutely.
And in fact, the thing that really triggered this particular Freedom of Information Act request back in 2015 was the fact that President Obama himself put some parameters on just how much more secret aid is actually given.
He's making a speech at American University, and he said basically that his administration had provided intelligence and military aid at unprecedented levels.
Well, you know, if that's the case and they've been pretty much plotting along at three point one billion dollars a year plus extra missile defense spending for the military aid, that must have meant that the intelligence aid was a whole different category of animal in order to be combined with the military aid and equal this algebraically derived unprecedented figure.
So, you know, the fact that the president was speaking about it meant, at least in my mind, it meant that we could file a successful Freedom of Information Act request kind of following along in the footsteps of the Federation of American Scientists, which got the actual CIA budget over years and years and years, basically saying, look, you know, people are talking about this.
They say it's secret, but they're also talking about it.
So give us the numbers.
And Stephen Aftergood was able to get the numbers.
Well, I thought that we would be able to get the numbers from 1990 to 2015 based on the fact that the president was basically disclosing it, not the exact figures, but enough so that you could estimate that if he was adjusting for inflation, it was either 13.2 billion more or probably more likely another two billion a year in intelligence aid.
But as one might expect, the Central Intelligence Agency now, two years later, thinks differently.
They don't think that they even have to admit that there is any such thing as intelligence aid to Israel.
Now, well, let's get back to that in just a second.
But there's a precedent in there in the drones.
I'm trying to remember which way the precedent went, though, where they were saying what drone war.
There's no drone war.
The whole drone war is secret.
The existence of the drone war is secret.
Your Honor, we don't know what the hell you're talking about.
But the sewers were saying, well, actually, Your Honor, that's not true, because here's all kinds of quoted official statements to The Washington Post.
Like when they announced, for example, that they were going to kill Anwar al-Awlaki probably a year or more before they finally did kill him with a drone, this kind of thing.
Where, Your Honor, they say it's secret when it comes to disclosing in this courtroom.
But when it comes to bragging to The Washington Post about all the people they're killing, it's not secret at all.
And they can't have it both ways.
And then didn't the judge say basically sort of what you just said, that, no, I mean, hey, it's not secret if it's not secret.
That's right.
You can't have it both ways.
And if they are going to talk about this stuff in public, then they have to fess up in court too.
Do I have that right?
Exactly.
Yeah, that's from the case ACLU v.
CIA.
And not only did the judge in that case make exactly the point that you're mentioning, but the judge in this case that I'm talking about made a reference to ACLU v.
CIA.
Cited that exact case.
Okay, good.
Yeah, exactly.
So this is the kind of thing, when you're out there boasting as an administration that you're doing this or that, that makes it much more difficult for them to issue what's called a GLOMAR response, referring to the GLOMAR Explorer back in the Howard Hughes days, that they're using trying to find a sunken Soviet nuclear submarine.
You can't just say to people after the secret's out, at least pronounced by officials of the administration, you can't say that it doesn't exist and you're not going to confirm or deny if those same officials are in fact touting this or that.
So they tried to issue a GLOMAR response in the drone case and the court wasn't having any of it.
And they've tried to do the same thing in this case, saying, what?
Intelligence aid?
What intelligence aid?
Because they don't want to admit that there is such a thing, which would require them to produce what's called a Vaughn Index, saying, well, here's why we're invoking Exceptions 1 and 3, citing national security.
We can't release that information because that in itself would be an admission that there is such a budget.
They don't even want to do that.
So Obama can talk up intelligence aid, the CIA, which has to be involved in some way.
It's just no other way for it to happen given their central role in this particular domain.
They have to have budgets.
They have to have this information and yet they don't want to even admit it.
I guess the unfortunate thing is even if we win this tiny baby step, we're only really winning an admission that, OK, there is such data, but we're going to deny it anyway.
So it's really – I think what I was trying to get at the end of the article is this is – the Freedom of Information Act in terms of at least the Central Intelligence Agency is broken because they're allowed to get away with incredible things that you can't really present to the judge at the onset and just say, look.
The Central Intelligence Agency was ordered to release the torture tapes back in 2005 of their harsh interrogations.
A judge told them to release them.
What did they do?
They burned them.
So at the onset of this FOIA case, I would like to say that they are completely untrustworthy and you shouldn't take anything they say at face value in FOIA court.
I mean that's how it should work, but that's not how it actually works.
The record is ignored.
Judges give great deference to all sorts of affidavits which basically apply – the agency submits and they're basically pronouncements of how things should work and how things are legislated, mandated to work and what the agency is supposed to do that have nothing to do with how they actually operate.
But there's this great deference and presumption that whatever they say is true.
And so the job of anybody challenging that is to say, no, here's history.
Here's how it actually worked for decades.
So just ignore that.
But judges are just extremely wary.
I don't know.
Maybe they're gun-shy that they will issue an order and it will just be ignored, that they'll just be shown to be absolutely impotent.
And the Justice Department has never taken – not recently anyway.
It's never taken steps to rein in the agency when they did in fact incinerate the torture tapes.
There was absolutely no prosecution of those responsible because it's the Justice Department defending the CIA in court.
It's the Justice Department that is basically handing love with all of this arrangement not to release information.
Right.
Yeah, that's the thing I like about this so much is it's not just a subject matter.
But the context is, is that Grant Smith is right up at the point where the law doesn't mean nothing because it's in conflict with politics.
And so what are you going to do, Judge?
Really make us tell the truth about our arrangements with the Israelis or are you going to find a reason to say no to this guy?
That's the real question.
It has nothing to do with what Congress said on some piece of paper that Ronald Reagan signed or whatever.
Right.
And there's one thing to read about it.
The other thing is to be sitting in court looking at the judge and then over at a table with five lawyers from the intelligence agencies and the DOJ and all of this is happening and unfolding before your eyes.
It's really fascinating and yet it's such a big waste of money.
They literally have unlimited amounts of tax dollars, including my tax dollars, to sit there in court and do this.
And yet, you know, Americans who want to know whether this is just like during the Iran-Contra affair, whether this relationship, this special relationship between the US and Israel is again being misused, not even allowed an iota of data to examine and try to get what we would call the real figure on USAID to Israel, which is certainly more than the quoted figures.
All right.
Now you say this judge before she's the one who released that information that we talked about a couple of years back about Israel's H-bomb program, right?
Yeah, she is the same judge.
So here's what happened in this particular district court is that if you are prosecuting – well, if you have cases before a judge and they're somewhat related to other cases, new cases that you file, you wind up with the same judge.
So this has been kind of our judge for the past few years.
But she did.
She made in the first case that we filed, which was to get an unclassified report prepared for the defense department about the state of Israel's technological military base, which Israel collaborated with in hopes of getting Star Wars SDI contracts.
We asked for that report and she basically listened to the arguments on both sides and ordered the defense department to release the section that we were after, which was about Israel, and it revealed all sorts of things.
That was her, and we're hoping that she does the same thing in this case and makes the CIA release top-line budget numbers for intelligence aid to Israel from 1990 to 2015.
Yeah.
Well, cool, man.
Good luck.
Yeah.
Hey, thank you.
Thank you.
But yeah, so there are a lot of things that could go wrong.
It's still in play, and we'll see how it goes.
But I do think it's important for people to know that the Freedom of Information Act is broken when it comes to intelligence agencies.
They really have a lot of things they can do to avoid any sort of warranted release of information.
Yeah.
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Well, so now is there some kind of rhyme or reason that you can exploit there?
Because they have to release something sometimes, I guess.
They just really don't, only if it's 70 years old and doesn't matter anymore kind of thing?
Or is there some kind of way where you can twist the knife and make them get it?
They don't have to release things even after 70 years have passed.
I mean, there have been some modifications of Hoya saying there should be no secret after 25 years, but they're still fighting release of information on invisible ink from their very first days.
And there's all sorts of things about the uranium diversion to Israel that we still don't know that they fought because they're saying, basically, we're not going to let our operational files about this out the door.
They've released a lot under pressure of the court, but they have so much more, again, about the head of the CIA warning LBJ that this was going on and all sorts of things, technical analysis from people in Israel verifying the diversion took place that they just will not release and have no intention of ever releasing.
So people should not presume that despite the changes in the law that intelligence agencies in particular are ever going to release huge amounts of their files.
As one of their former directors once said being pressured to release JFK files, their intention is to release the best truth, not necessarily everything.
So it's a very paternalistic view of their so-called information.
Yeah, exactly.
And we see who the real sovereign is around here when it comes down to it.
It gets pretty ugly, yeah, when you face the reality that this person over here is just a federal court judge.
It's not like they're a CIA employee, for God's sake.
Yeah, or maybe it is.
Have you ever read the National Security Act of 1947 where it says from now on Article 3 is under the jurisdiction of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?
I read it once long ago.
You're probably more familiar with it than I am.
Yeah, no, it doesn't really say that.
Just in practice, not in theory.
I don't remember seeing it, that's for sure.
But if you say it's in there, I'll believe you.
No, I'm lying.
I'm paraphrasing, right?
What it does say, actually, is something like, well, the CIA can do other things from time to time, as is deemed necessary.
Something like that, which is pretty much a blank check, a general warrant on all of mankind.
It's pretty expansive and it's a reason, I think, many up-to-presidents have said they'd just like to get rid of it.
It doesn't have a very comfortable role in our particular form of government, I don't think.
The more you learn about it, the worse it is.
I presume you've had Tim Weiner to talk about his book, Legacy of Ashes, but that's a wonderful book about all of these.
I haven't interviewed him before.
He would be great.
His book is phenomenal.
CIA employees, if you ask them about the book, they don't like it, but it's a pretty damning account of even the cross-purposes that happen, where you have DOD on one side of a conflict in some part of the world and the CIA on the other.
It's a real revelation of how your tax dollars are at work in various dark corners of the world.
Not just in Syria.
No, not just in Syria, right.
Although it makes Syria a whole lot more understandable once you see that this has been going on in all sorts of other places.
That's what Hornberger is always saying, Jacob Hornberger from the Future Freedom Foundation.
I didn't even mind that it's the same thing over and over again, because what it is, is he's always trying to – the spin, basically.
I agree with it.
I like it.
What he's trying to do is get people to think of the national security state as this completely extra-constitutional, post-constitutional cancer.
This horrible alien thing that's been grafted onto our constitutional republic that we could just completely do without.
We could get rid of the Pentagon, get rid of Langley altogether, close the whole damn thing down.
But we could still be the USA and still have our Constitution and our Bill of Rights and be a normal country in a normal time and all these things.
And they've got us convinced that all these things are inseparable.
That without the CIA and without the Pentagon, then we can't have our lives and our freedom and that kind of thing.
And that's just not true.
They are the greatest detriment.
They are the greatest threat to our lives and our liberty that we have around here.
And I just – hardly anyone else ever really puts it that way, where this is really separate.
This national security state, the whole thing of it is un-American.
It doesn't belong here.
It's like something that someone else came and stuck us with, Truman.
I can't believe he's making that argument.
I mean, if you don't have these organizations, who's going to be transferring weapons from Libya via the CIA annex to Syria?
I mean, that's work that's got to be done.
Who's going to do it, Scott?
I mean, come on.
Yeah, Hillary's got a bank shot because she's sure that if we overthrow Gaddafi, that's going to really help her get re-elected, get her elected president in 2016.
Well, I think – It would be her big accomplishment.
I think we could have something like – let's just lobby for a year without the intelligence agencies and just put them in the deep freeze for a year and see if the country is still around.
Yeah, that's right.
Try it out.
That's all.
Try it out.
Exactly.
I actually saw someone say, yeah, that sounds good, but then we'll be completely helpless before Mossad.
And I thought, well, I mean that's kind of an argument, but I'm not so sure that the CIA is standing between us and them at this point anyway.
Yeah.
Well, maybe if they respond to my FOIA, I'll be able to tell you whether that's true or not.
But I kind of agree.
There was a really wonderful counterintelligence report that used to be published every single year, and the Israelis always figured prominently alongside the Chinese and the Russians as a major counterintelligence threat.
And then they started referring to other country in the Middle East, and then they stopped publishing the report altogether.
And I contacted the intelligence agency that was responsible for the report, and I said, well, what happened to this thing?
It was such valuable reading, and they just – they didn't explain why it had been cut.
But it was always an embarrassment for our closest ally in the Middle East, I'm sure, to have this counterintelligence report basically listing the huge amount of economics and intelligence gathering that was going on.
So it's gone.
And so I would tend to think that just based on all of the files I've seen where there's always tremendous pressure not to embarrass the Israelis, that they're probably not doing as much as they used to even on the counterintelligence side.
If they are, they're certainly not reporting it to Congress anymore.
Yeah, now I interviewed a former FBI counterintelligence agent named John Coleman who – it's been a few years, but I think his number was 150 different investigations into criminal activity of the Israelis in their lobby.
Maybe it was actually just actual agents of the Israeli state in the country that went nowhere, where the investigation was launched, but no one was prosecuted or even deported or anything.
Yeah, I filed a FOIA based on that interview.
Oh, really?
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
You know more about it than I do probably now.
No, unfortunately not.
It produced absolutely nothing.
So I'm sure he was speaking the truth, but it's just – it's not the kind of thing that – it's not a career-enhancing move.
Let's put it that way.
Not a career-enhancing move to release that kind of information.
And it's just basically – it's very difficult to even get known cases.
I mean we're still trying to get the – Well, you know what?
Details aside, people should know that, for example, Jeff Stein's reporting, formerly at CQ Politics and now at Newsweek I guess, that his reporting confirms what you're saying here in spades and in different years too, not just one time but at various different times.
And he's a very well plugged in.
He was a former intelligence officer during the Vietnam War and has real great intelligence contacts.
Very meticulous.
Absolutely, hands down, no question that they are considered by the American intelligence community, the Israelis, to be at the very top of the list of counterintelligence problems that they have to deal with in this country.
Right, right.
Well, and it's always great to read his reports and see that he's still out there.
Now he's doing Spy Talker, the blog, bounced around from – he was even at the Washington Post for a little while.
Right.
But I guess they don't have room for that kind of reporting, which doesn't surprise me.
Yeah, I mean I think if you try to search for the stuff at CQ Politics that he did on Jane Harman and all that, it's gone.
Right, right.
I'm trying to remember now.
I know I tried but I can't remember now if I succeeded in hunting down a copy of it and putting it on my website under the fair use thing.
I'll have to look at that.
I think I did save those.
He was so humorous because Harman was upset by that reporting and offered kind of cavalierly to race Jeff Stein in a foot race.
And he said, sure, let's – why don't we race from Congress to AIPAC's headquarters or something like that?
And it was – I mean it was hilarious but obviously kind of turning the topic back to the subject at hand and she didn't respond anymore.
But she left office rather quickly when that whole thing blew, and those files have not been released.
We still don't know for certain who the agent on the side of the – other side of the phone who wanted the two AIPAC officials to be just released summarily was.
I mean a lot of people who guess it was Haim Saban or somebody, but nobody really knows and those files are locked up tight.
So I do have sources.
Wiretap recorded Reb Harman promising to intervene for AIPAC by Jeff Stein at CQ.
I do have that at ScottHorton.org under the fair use section.
Now there was a follow-up though.
I'm trying to see.
I guess I don't have the follow-up.
There was a follow-up blog entry that elaborated about Haim Saban and Nancy Pelosi and that end of it.
I'm trying to see if I have both of them.
Anyway, if people want to look at that story, people who aren't familiar, Jeff Stein's great story about the former congresswoman Jane Harman who was busted.
The NSA was listening.
They weren't spying on her.
They were spying on an Israeli spy and she was on the line with an Israeli spy making a corrupt deal.
Right.
Well, it's really interesting.
Oh, I do have the follow-up too.
Harman, AIPAC, NSA.
What did I know and when did I know it?
I think it was the follow-up there and that is – both of those are at ScottHorton.org.
Well, I'm glad you're preserving it because those are extremely important articles.
He was virtually alone out there.
I mean I know Salon and The Nation ultimately picked it up but there's a far bigger story.
Well, The New York Times picked it up too.
The New York Times confirmed the story and in fact developed one part of the question I'm trying to remember.
I think maybe they were the ones who identified Saban by name first or something.
But they did confirm that he was right about it.
They didn't – in their reporting, they didn't dispute a single one of his assertions.
I remember that, right, which I'm pretty sure.
Yeah, right.
But that's not the same as giving the story the coverage it warrants.
No, that's true.
That's true.
The other big story that just hasn't gone anywhere is the fact that Netanyahu lobbied Secretary of State John Kerry to give a long-term visa to Arnon Milchan who's a major Hollywood movie producer and also deeply involved in all sorts of affairs long time ago through his company networks including that infamous smuggling of nuclear triggers to Israel.
And this is how our government works.
Because it was Netanyahu, because Milchan wanted to stay in the US and continue his movie producing business, the State Department gave him the visa.
And this is a person – there's an FBI file, fairly lengthy one about his companies being involved in all of this, a major book that came out about his history working to build the Israeli nuclear program up.
And yet none of this stuff has any impact on reality.
It's all dealt with quietly at these high levels behind the scenes and there's absolutely no curiosity in the mainstream press to follow up.
The No Freedom of Information Act requests into the State Department for details.
Besides ours, of course, but it's virgin territory.
Nobody's out there doing it.
Well, that's the thing.
It's such a sad commentary.
No offense, but that it's left to you.
It should be you in competition with all the other great journalists for these scoops.
But you're just standing around the courthouse by yourself.
Right.
But that means Antiwar.com gets the best stuff about all of these breaking issues when the documents are released.
So I guess there is that at least.
Yeah.
I would rather be reading about it.
Well, you know what?
Yeah.
I don't know.
It's true also we get the straight dope from you.
If we got it all from the Post and the Times, it'd be full of a bunch of junkie spin.
You'd have to change the titles at least.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
Make them more honest.
Or screenshot them before they change them.
Sometimes they get them right the first time.
Yeah, that does happen with alarming frequency.
All right.
Well, listen, man.
I know you got to go, but I appreciate you coming on the show.
And I appreciate all the effort that you put into suing these bastards for the truth.
Hey, Scott.
Always a pleasure.
Great work.
All right, guys.
That's the great Grant Smith.
He's at the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy.
That's IRMEP.org.
Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy.
Page down just a little bit.
Check out the great conference that they had about the Israel lobby's role in American politics there just last month.
And check out his great article at Antiwar.com, CIA Fights Disclosure of Secret Aid to Israel.
Check out my stuff at ScottHorton.org.
Slash interviews for the interviews.
Slash show for the Q&A stuff.
Go to the Libertarian Institute if you want to check out my Libertarian Institute.
And follow me on Twitter at ScottHortonShow.
Thanks, guys.
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