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I say it, I say it again.
You been had.
You been took.
You 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 they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like say our name, been saying 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, it's Grant F.
Smith on the line, our good friend from the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy.
Welcome to the show.
How you doing?
Very well, Scott.
Very well.
Thanks for having me on.
Good to have you on.
Hey, you wrote Big Israel about the Israel lobby, and also you wrote Divert about them stealing weapons-grade uranium from the United States, the Israeli government, that is, their spies, and all about the trade wars.
It's, what, six, eight books about the Israel lobby and their legal and illegal antics in the United States, correct?
That is correct.
If I could write another one just in like a week, it would be called Project Pinto, which was the Arnon Milchan, Benjamin Netanyahu smuggling ring that got ahold of a bunch of nuclear triggers back in the day.
What a great story that is.
Isn't it funny, the ratio between what a big story that is and what a big story it wasn't?
Yeah, yeah.
I sent a tweet to Ann Applebaum of the Washington Post, because she was saying something about, well, it's certain that North Korea is spinning up their centrifuges.
I said, by the way, have you ever heard of Netanyahu and the Krytron heist, and why is it the Washington Post has never written word number one about that?
Still waiting, still waiting.
You mean she didn't immediately give you the due respect to give you an honest answer about what was going on?
That's what I expected, of course.
I expected the leading newspaper here in Washington would leap all over that, because it's such a great story.
I think it went up on antiwar.com in 2012.
I guess I have to credit National Public Radio, of all places, for at least mentioning it a couple of months ago, but it didn't get any traction there either.
Well, that's interesting, though, that they would.
Right, right.
That's the kind of thing where it only comes out if they don't really realize the politics.
Whatever news editors work in that day is a little bit not up to date on what you're never supposed to let through and kind of accidentally does.
It was a throwaway line about Milchand and the Netanyahu pink champagne controversies, if that was even important.
It was a throwaway line, so you're right about that.
Alright, so let's talk about this.
I had no idea about this, and when I first read about this, I said to myself, no way, really?
Huh, okay.
Yeah, geez, the Israelis make the American presidents or their national security staff put it in writing that they will not talk about Israeli nuclear weapons?
I've got to put it to The New Yorker and Anton Mentos.
He is an amazing writer, and not only is the article linked in that four presidents conspired to give $100 billion to Israel right at the top that said antiwar.com, but he links his own articles, and they're absolutely astounding about the secret commitments and all of the antics that have been taking place.
And then, of course, he goes all the way back to Bill Clinton, which is even better.
Yeah, apparently these letters don't actually have bullet point number one, I hereby swear never to mention Israel's nuclear weapons program.
Number two, I hereby swear that I will never investigate seriously the ongoing diversions of technology from the US.
They don't say that.
They simply make it very clear that the US, speaking in euphemisms, will not do anything to jeopardize Israel's deterrent, strategic deterrent capabilities, which are a lot of really weaselly words for saying, we're not going to mention your nuclear weapons.
You know what, man?
There's this old anecdote that I'm sure you remember about Bill Clinton, who had already been the president for four years at this point, or three and a half years or something at this point, when Netanyahu first came into the prime ministership in 1996, and may have even been before that, but it was the first time he ever met Netanyahu.
I forget whether he was prime minister.
I think he was prime minister, the incoming prime minister at the time.
And that Bill Clinton reportedly after the meeting said, who in the F does this guy think he is?
Jesus Christ.
I can't believe what just happened here.
You know, where he just came in and started reading Bill Clinton, the riot act, like here are your marching orders, punk.
And Bill was like, hey, I'm the emperor of the world, dude.
You're just the prime minister of a little Maryland size, nothing.
So let me tell you about the way things are for a minute.
He just couldn't believe it.
And now I think, I wonder if that's what this was about.
It is.
It's amazing because that same reaction came from Trump's staff who said to Ron Dermer, this is our effing house.
What do you think you're doing here?
You can't demand this.
And he was making all of these.
Tell that story in a little more detail there as he reports it here, if you could please, about what happened with that.
Right.
Well, I mean, the Israelis came in in a very sensitive time when they're just about to dispatch Michael Flynn, the national security advisor.
He was going to hand in his resignation letter and Ron Dermer, former American, now current Israeli ambassador to the U.S. basically came in and he said, I need to have Flynn in the room.
I need this guy, I need that guy.
And he obviously didn't know that Flynn was on his way out.
Otherwise he probably wouldn't have made that demand.
And that just made everyone snap saying, look, you don't come in here with a letter or a set of points you want to make us sign and demand the people you want in the room.
That's not how it works here.
But he got the letter signed anyway.
And of course, I knew this from doing Freedom of Information Act requests.
There's virtually no handoff of National Security Council information from one administration to the other.
And all of the presidential libraries are like locked boxes where the National Security Council stuff is under lock and key, never to be released.
So Americans think that there's a lot of continuity on the NSC where there's not.
And nobody knew about these letters except the Israelis who had all four of them.
And that's so funny too, because we're talking about Jared Kushner here, right?
Ron Dermer and Jared Kushner, they don't get along.
Like Dermer couldn't have said, oh, hey, Jared, there's this thing when you get to it, we'd like to talk to you about.
In other words, if you're the Israeli side in this, why the need for the imperious attitude?
Dude, these are your friends here.
Obviously, they're going to sign whatever you need them to sign, but they can't even be cool about it.
They have to be so demanding that they get pushback even from Benjamin Netanyahu's godson, Jared Kushner, for God's sake.
The guy who gave up his bedroom, as we all have heard, ad nauseam so that BB could sleep there.
Well, it's just, I think it's a matter of trajectory and a doctrine within the Israeli side, which is, and the lobby here, there's never enough that you can do.
And so the attitude is, you can never do enough for us.
And so why aren't you jumping higher or moving faster when we come in to bestow our latest request upon you?
So it's terrible.
And I think the great piece that he wrote, which is a little bit longer, this is Adam Anthos in the New Yorker, Donald Trump's new world order, really goes into detail about all these requests and that there is contention, you know, from the outside, because they've returned to this horrible policy of no daylight, something that Michael Oren, another former American, former ambassador back to the U.S. from Israel, always insisted upon that the U.S. has always got to present this public face, that there's never any disagreement with the Israelis, that the U.S. and Israel have these inherent interests that are exactly the same.
And so there should never be any daylight between the two.
But what Anthos reveals is that there's a lot of daylight and he's exposing that daylight.
Yeah.
Well, and again, and I'm sorry, I meant to say this at the beginning, but I said so many things that this wasn't one of them.
Four presidents conspired to give $100 billion to Israel, secret White House letters, buttress, ongoing U.S. Arms Control Act violations.
This isn't actually the, is this the same one I was looking for?
Yeah, it is.
It's about the adamant.
Yeah, that's the one.
That's the one.
And I don't think the word conspires too much, because basically the dictionary definition is make secret plans jointly to commit an unlawful or harmful act.
And this is the real rub here about why the pseudo-secrecy over Israel's nukes.
I got tweets of me and Mordecai Venunu on Twitter talking about they got 200 nukes.
It's not a secret grant.
Seriously, that happened.
And so everybody knows.
But so the reason that they have to pretend though that, oh yeah, no, nobody knows if Israel has nukes or not, is because they're breaking the law if they admit that Israel has nukes and they're outside the NPT and this and that.
And how's that exactly?
The Export Control Act, is that what it is?
Yeah, it's the U.S. Arms Export Control Act.
It's the Symington and Glenn amendments that make it unlawful to keep giving U.S. foreign aid to any country that's outside the NPT and found to be trafficking in nuclear weapons technology, not to mention building an arsenal and deploying the weapons.
So, and, you know, also mentioned things like testing these, the test, the Vela incident, which took place.
Most of the people who are honest about it within governments, like Victor Galinsky, the former head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, say just flat outright that was an Israeli nuclear test.
But anyway, these amendments, which are now found in the U.S. Arms Export Control Act, require the president to at very least issue public waivers to Congress saying, I recognize that this is a nuclear weapons country outside the NPT.
However, we must continue foreign aid because it's in the strategic or the national interests of the United States.
I think they'd have an extremely hard time making that argument.
And I think anybody who had serious, you know, sort of a realist foreign policy experience, put a John Mearsheimer or Stephen Waltz up in front of that argument, and they would shred it to little pieces.
But, you know, the real reason that Entaus does not go into why is this happening is exactly that.
You can't keep violating this piece of the Arms Export Control Act, which I believe they'd have a very hard time, you know, adding some sort of modification to it that would somehow exclude Israel.
They haven't done it.
I doubt they will do it.
So what do you do?
What do you do if it's on the book?
And you have to, you know, appear to be giving aid in a lawful way.
You just don't admit the obvious, the thing that everybody knows.
And that is no president has ever come out and said while in office that they have a nuclear weapons program.
All right.
Hang on just one second.
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Yeah, it's just like sending Special Operations Forces to Mali after the coup.
Well, that's against the law, but that's why it's a clandestine operation, so it doesn't matter.
Right, right.
So, the coup that was caused by the results of the war in Libya.
I didn't mean to give that short shrift.
Hey, so, but now let me ask you this.
Because, I mean, what you just said is a pretty obvious answer to it, but I wonder if there's something more.
The way the Israelis say, listen, okay, yeah, we got nukes out of the side of their mouth, but we will not be the first country in the region to introduce nuclear weapons into the region.
That's the way that they say it.
I don't know what the word is in Hebrew or whatever, but that's how they say it here.
That, in other words, maybe, I don't know what you think of this, that what they're saying is they don't want to outright threaten their enemies, that we have nukes.
They want to leave it a more subtle threat.
I wonder if you think that that's a distinction without a difference, or if it maybe even really just comes down to this Arms Export Control Act and nothing else, you know?
Well, that didn't exist when they first came up with that formulation.
That formulation is the standard response, and it doesn't really mean anything, because all they have to do to meet that extremely high bar is to simply say, well, the U.S. has sailed nuclear-armed aircraft carriers with bombs and missiles through the region several times, so they were the first to introduce all sorts of- Yeah, and what difference does that make anyway when, again, Mordecai Vanunu came out to the Sunday Times in what year, 1981 or something?
Yeah, yeah.
Well, 86, I believe, but it was- He was the nuclear weapons whistleblower, but if you've never read that, it's in the Sunday Times.
They still have it online.
Right, exactly, and so it really, it doesn't mean anything.
It's just something to say whenever they're asked, and I believe Netanyahu even said that recently when he was buttonholed by a reporter on CNN, no less, asking about Israel's own nuclear weapons, and it's just, you know, after saying that, which means nothing, as he did, he'll just say, and I'm not going to give you anything else on that, so it's very- Wasn't that an amazing interview, by the way?
It was pretty amazing, yeah.
This is just what Phil Weiss is saying, that Trump has so come to own the Israel issue and make it such a partisan Trumpian issue that it's really pushing liberal Americans, including liberal American Jews, away from Israel.
If that's what Trump's into, that's what they're against, so CNN's party line is now so anti-Trump that it's even anti-Netanyahu in a way, where I could, I mean, somebody was telling him in his earpiece, yeah, go ahead and go after him, right, which is just impossible.
Right, right, well- What an awesome time to be alive, man.
Well, I don't think so, because, you know, the thing that Entaz doesn't go into, and which is extremely important, is why can Dermer come in, upset everybody, but still get his letter signed?
Why can Netanyahu, again, be involved in nuclear technology smuggling?
It's in FBI documents, and just never have him called on it.
It's this huge distortion, which, of course, goes back to the lobby, which, as I mentioned in the piece, if you add up the revenues of every single U.S. non-profit organization, this is not even counting campaign contributions in pro-Israel PACs, it's a gigantic industry that's always pushing a very proactive agenda, which is exactly what I said before, you can never do enough for us, meaning Israel in this case, and so they can't, Trump can't stand up to that, Obama couldn't stand up to it either, and I spent a particular amount of time on the folding of Obama, who came in as Mr. Counter-proliferation, and who was going to Prague to talk about shoring up the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, there were talks of a Middle East nuclear free zone, and then suddenly, he gets handed the letter, and immediately collapses in May of 2009.
Now, I didn't have that date before, but that's Entaus' report saying it was in May of 2009, after the Prague speech about nuclear non-proliferation, that he yielded and signed his letter to the Israelis, and even worse, and we're currently involved in litigation over this, on September 6, 2012, his Department of Energy and Department of State issued a secret directive, and we've only got the title of it, called Guidance on Release of Information Relating to the Potential for an Israeli Nuclear Capability, which itself is secret, but it's basically a gag order that, you mentioned this, you're even quoting public domain stuff as a contractor or federal employee, you're going to get fired, your computer's going to be searched, people are going to look at how they can charge you criminally with leaking classified information, even if you quote Venuna, as you said, or read the Sunday London Times, and just quote from that, you'll still be fired.
Or even quote Colin Powell, or the current minority leader of the Senate, Charles Schumer.
Right, exactly, who's not a federal agency employee, because if he were, and Sam Husseini had debriefed him so thoroughly at the National Press Club, getting him to admit that yes, they have nuclear weapons, he would be subject to WNP-136, he would have been fired.
If you were a high agency official, say at the Department of Energy, you had said that, he would have been out, he probably would have been prosecuted.
Yeah, man.
You know what, I think we talked about this before, man, I'm sorry I got holes in my brain, but have you done polls?
I think you have done polls on how many Americans know that Israel has nukes, right?
Yeah, we did.
Those are some of the first polls right after we found out that we could even do statistically significant polls.
It was back in 2014.
We asked two questions on the 26th of September.
One question was, do you believe Israel has nuclear weapons?
And it was 64% of Americans said, yeah, of course we believe they do.
Unfortunately, at the same time, if you ask the same question about Iran, 58, almost 59% also thought Iran had nuclear weapons in late 2014, which I think if you were the Washington Institute for Near East Policy or Broad and Sanger, you would have said, yes, victory.
We've successfully brainwashed Americans into believing something that's not true.
What a tragedy, man.
That is just unreal.
Public opinion polling is fascinating to see either what people know or what they absolutely don't know.
Yeah.
You know, it seems like, I mean, come on, if somebody has a Manhattan project or not is something that you could know.
I mean, to just settle for like your impression is there seems to be something there because people talk about it a lot or something and to settle for that.
And when it comes to, you know, basically what serves as a phony costus belli, people, grown adults need to be more responsible than that.
There's such a thing as the IAEA, guys, they publish a thing every couple of weeks, you know.
Right.
And it's, you know, it's very solid work.
But, you know, the propaganda campaign around this, just as far as disparaging weapons inspectors.
And then you've got this whole counter-proliferation think tank universe that's in Washington that is about as feckless as can be because they never really, I mean, they'll go ad nauseum into suspected Iranian sites, you know, suspected explosion and implosion tests.
I think you've gone over that with Gareth Porter.
But, you know, whenever anything comes up on the Israeli nuclear weapons program, they're not the ones bringing it out.
They don't do any analysis.
They're basically configured to be against North Korea and Iran.
And then by errors of omission, don't do any work on this at all.
Yeah.
Man, that's just incredible.
So, Grant, what's this $100 billion in the title?
Yeah, it's a suspiciously round number, I admit.
But that is the number you get if you add up all of the U.S. foreign aid that the U.S. has given to Israel since Clinton signed his first letter or his administration agreed to ignore Israel's nuclear weapons in violation of the Arms Export Control Act.
So if you add up every year and adjust it for inflation, it comes out to $99.9 billion.
And if you really go back a little further to 1976, when these amendments to the Foreign Assistance Act went into effect, banning U.S. aid to proliferators and demanding public waivers if aid was to be given, then you find that the sum of U.S. aid was $222.8 billion adjusted for inflation, which is a lot of money.
And it makes this a major conspiracy.
This is Teapot Dome.
This is Tammany Hall.
This is an extremely big bipartisan corruption scandal that's been involving U.S. administrations and federal agencies that are complicit in this since 1976.
Hey, let me ask you this.
Do you think Trump is qualitatively more committed to Zionism or at least to Netanyahu and Sheldon Adelson and their policies than previous presidents?
I do.
I mean Bush and Sharon for the most worst recent example.
I think if you add up all of the giveaways and all of the damage that's been done to U.S. commitments to international law, U.S. commitments to the United Nations, if you believe that it is important to have a United Nations, and if you believe that this founding principle that there be a negotiated settlement before you did anything like open embassies or recognize Jerusalem as a capital, yeah, he's basically blown up the United Nations.
And so, yes, I do believe that he is.
Now you're convincing me to really like the guy after all.
I mean, well, yeah, because I hate the U.N. and I don't want any part of it.
But yeah, as a silver lining, it's not good enough to justify what's going on in Palestine, not by a long shot to me.
Yeah.
I mean, if you also look at it from the side of what about fairness, what about at least trying to have some sort of settlement looking at the original division?
Yeah, I look at it like the individual rights of the Palestinians as human beings.
You know, that's what's really the question here, you know?
Absolutely.
So, and in terms of U.S. interests, I mean, obviously this article says they've been bad since Clinton, you know, passing through Bush.
I mean, they've all basically undermined the United States.
And maybe you can make the argument there as well that we obviously shouldn't have been giving this foreign aid.
And if we hadn't, the U.S. would have a lot more leverage and probably a lot more peace in the region.
But instead, we continue to fund one side by violating our own laws.
So there you have it.
All right.
Well, thanks very much.
Come back on the show and talking about this very important subject with us.
I know it gets through to people, man.
People tell me straight to my face.
I did an event over the weekend and they say to me, hey, I'm in this Israel-Palestine stuff.
I get it now from listening to you.
And I know that that means listening to me interview you.
So thanks.
No, no.
Hey, thank you, Scott.
Glad to be on.
Have a good one, brother.
You too.
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