07/07/15 – Eli Clifton – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, the Scott Horton Show.
First up on the show today is our friend Eli Clifton.
He used to be with the American Independent News Network, ThinkProgress, and Interpress Service.
Now here he is writing at LobeLog, our friend Jim Lobe's blog, LobeLog.
Document reveals billionaire backers behind United Against Nuclear Iran.
Welcome back to the show, Eli.
How you doing?
I'm doing well.
Thanks for having me.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you here.
So what's United Against Nuclear Iran?
Well, United Against Nuclear Iran came into existence several years ago, maybe back in 2008.
And since then, they've managed a number of campaigns designed to pressure the Obama administration and international negotiators regarding the negotiations around Iran's nuclear program.
Now, they've tended to take a pretty hardline position.
They were critical of the joint plan of action.
And right now they're running a multimillion dollar television ad campaign designed, once again, to pressure negotiators, this time in Vienna.
Now that's where we connect the subject matter right to our audience.
Almost everybody, if you watch cable TV news at all, you've seen these ads.
This is going to leave Iran nuclear.
And they don't say what is the alternative to that, or even what they mean by that.
But they're pretty scary sounding commercials, I guess, if you don't already know the details of the Iranian nuclear program and what the negotiations are about.
Are they having much effect?
Can you tell?
Are the polls out?
Well, I mean, the polling so far has generally shown that well over 50 percent of the American public are supportive of, you know, sort of the broad strokes of what a nuclear agreement would look like with Iran.
It's worth noting, though, these advertisements saying that essentially the Obama administration is giving everything away to Iran and letting them have a nuclear program and not standing firm enough in the negotiations are all a little bit odd, considering that none of us, at this point, really know what's going on inside the negotiating room because we don't have an agreement yet.
Yeah, well, and their argument isn't, it's only an emotional one and not really a detailed one.
It's meant to appeal to the fearful when, you know, their criticism is, oh, he's going to allow them to have a nuclear program.
Well, hey, they've got one and they've built it up over all these years, including under Bush years, and there's nothing America could possibly do to get rid of it other than maybe nuke the place and occupy it and tear down every last centrifuge.
And since that's not an option, this is what we're dealing with, is how to safeguard it even more than before.
These kinds of questions, it's impossible and every serious person knows that it's not negotiable whether Iran is going to have a nuclear program at all at this point.
Well, I mean, I think it's also worth noting that, according to certainly to most most respected analysts on this, that the best opportunity to constrain the nuclear program and to prevent its growth in ways that the United States and European allies would like to avoid is actually through an agreement, a negotiated agreement, where inspectors can have regular access.
And that would all be a great improvement over where we are today, where that is not the case.
We have very little oversight.
Inspectors have very little access.
And in all likelihood, the agreement, which there's a good chance we'll be seeing later this week, although, of course, you wouldn't want to place bets on that, is going to put greater restraints on Iran's nuclear program than we've ever really seen before.
And of course, they offered to negotiate back in 2003 with W. Bush, and he probably, at that point, could have negotiated them right out of even beginning an enrichment program at all.
They had no spinning centrifuges whatsoever at that point and told them to go to hell.
Yeah, I mean, this period of pressure and of sanctions, while it sounds good on paper, it's a pretty good and interesting case study in how that type of diplomacy can actually backfire against one's long-term objectives, which certainly the reason that they brought these sanctions was the idea that this was going to pressure Iran to the negotiating table and to get them to constrain their nuclear program.
And perhaps that is true.
But over that decade, Iran did install centrifuges.
They did expand their capacity.
And there's no denying that the situation that we're facing now with Iran's nuclear program is different than where it was a decade ago.
And arguably, it's much further down the road, and we're not going to be able to dial it back to where it was in 2003.
Right.
All right.
Now, there's an article by Joe Cirincione, also at The Low Blog, from the Ploughshares Fund, and he's writing about how most of the experts, seemingly, are behind this deal.
They make the case that you and I just made.
Hey, the most constraints you could ever get on this thing, the most certainty that you could ever have that it's staying a civilian program, would be to do this deal.
No better way around that.
And he goes on and on listing the different groups and experts and former secretaries of state and all these things who are for it.
But so now back to who's again?
Is it just the Israel lobby?
Well, United Against Nuclear Iran previously has tried to portray itself as a wide coalition of groups, or at least a group that could bring together a coalition of partners to bring pressure on Iran.
And to be fair to United Against Nuclear Iran, some of the issues that they've tried to pressure Iran on are ones that do need pressure.
We do need civil society talking about, for instance, human rights violations in Iran.
However, certainly their criticism of the nuclear deal has been only increasing over the past several months.
Now they're spending several million dollars on this ad campaign.
And the short answer is, yeah, it's a couple of Republican mega donors, both of whom have ties back to Israel.
They both are married to Israeli women, to Israeli wives.
And they've both invested a considerable amount of money.
I got their donor rolls from 2013, showing that the two people were Sheldon Adelson, alongside of his wife, Miriam Adelson, and this silver and precious metals investor named Thomas Kaplan.
He's the chairman of the 92nd Street Y here in New York City.
And he, along with his wife, Daphna Rechenati, actually were the biggest donors to United Against Nuclear Iran in 2013.
And so what can you tell us about this Adelson guy?
Well, Adelson is certainly a familiar name.
He's certainly the biggest founder of Republican candidates at this point in time.
He's also very close with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
They are, according to a number of sources, close friends.
Adelson has a newspaper, a free newspaper in Israel, which is very supportive of Netanyahu.
And in the United States, Adelson certainly, if nobody had heard about him before 2000 and 2012, they certainly learned about him then, when he was the biggest funder behind Newt Gingrich's failed candidacy, which may have actually kneecapped Mitt Romney's candidacy.
And Adelson went on to become Mitt Romney's biggest, biggest funder.
And according to a number of sources, he uses a lot of dark money groups.
It's hard to track his money.
But it would seem that in the last midterm election, he was the largest donor on the Republican side once again.
And I should mention, he has quite extreme views about Iran.
He believes that a good negotiating position is to drop a nuclear weapon on Iran and then say that if they don't completely end their nuclear program, the next bomb goes on Tehran.
Wow.
And yeah, you know, anybody who really sees that real talent, that real that there, that they're really looking for in Newt Gingrich is somebody that I am suspicious of, you know, here's a guy who understands me, you know.
We missed our opportunity for moon bases.
Yeah, big problem.
Okay.
And so and you know, we know, too, there's one more anecdote, if I might add about him, is about how Chris Christie, who meant no offense whatsoever, accidentally referred to the occupied territories as the occupied territories.
And they went ahead and put it in the paper about what a huge stink this cause that he would dare use that language in front of Sheldon Adelson, that later he had to go on bended knee back to the private office of the mob boss.
I swear it's like an episode of The Sopranos or something has to go back there and get down on one knee and beg apology and forgiveness.
I meant disputed territories.
I meant, you know, the eternal land of Israel and screw the Palestinians away.
I swear I didn't mean to call him occupied.
And but he was in real trouble for that.
And and they made it known that boss Adelson was not pleased with your indiscretion, Governor.
I mean, this is some, I don't know, pretty newsworthy stuff to me.
It's absolutely I mean, it's really worth noticing that with Adelson, it's Adelson, it's Sheldon Adelson and it's Miriam Adelson.
Whereas when we talk about the Koch brothers, it's very often the network of donors that they bring together.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
That's an important point.
Hey, listen, we're going to pick that up on the other side of this break with the great Eli Clifton right after this.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, Scott Horton Show.
Talking with Eli Clifton from the lobe log like your earlobe and then log like, you know, a tree that fell over.
Lobe log, Jim Loeb's blog.
This piece is called Document Reveals Billionaire Backers Behind United Against Nuclear Iran.
And unsurprisingly, Sheldon Adelson, Republican gangster extraordinaire is and Likud Party gangster extraordinaire is one of them.
And then.
So who's this other guy, a doctor?
Well, he is.
He has a doctorate, I believe, in history from Oxford, if I could be wrong.
And he's he's sort of made a name for himself as an investor in gold and other precious metals.
Kind of his business model is to invest in them when they're still on the ground and then just wait.
The idea being that it's, you know, it's a good investment even while it's still in the ground.
Now, the interesting thing is pretty smart.
Governments don't know how to do anything but print money.
So buying precious metals is probably always the right thing to do.
And he and he and some of the mines he owns, he's openly talked in the prospectus, which are open to investors, about how his investments in these holdings in silver or gold are going to be a good investment in light of political unrest in the Middle East or according to a gold mine he had a decade ago.
He talked about how it would be an asset that would retain value if there was a nuclear confrontation with Iran or North Korea.
Now, all of that seems like a bit of a bizarre conflict of interest for United Against Nuclear Iran when you're being funded by a guy who says that unrest and nuclear conflagration would somehow be profitable or at least be something that were his investments would retain value into those circumstances.
Now, to add a little more intrigue to it, quite a large number of the employees of United Against Nuclear Iran are actually employees of this guy, Tom Kaplan's investment companies.
So there's a lot of overlap there.
Very interesting.
And yeah, I guess if you were not so politically connected, you might get prosecuted for something like that.
It sounds like a kind of a pump and dump sort of scam where you have that much power, I guess, by definition, though, if you have enough power to help create unrest in the Middle East, then you're too powerful to be prosecuted for that kind of thing.
But well, I'm on the same lines, though, right, as some kind of fraud.
Well, I mean, certainly I wouldn't know about that.
But what I can say is that there's something very interesting that happened with United Against Nuclear Iran this past March.
There had been an ongoing lawsuit against United Against Nuclear Iran by this Greek shipping magnate named Victor Restis.
Now, Restis claimed that United Against Nuclear Iran had defamed him when they had said that some of his ships had been doing business with Iran.
Now, in that suit, when they tried to pursue the discovery phase of the lawsuit, the Justice Department actually stepped in and said to move forward with this private law civil suit between two private parties to which the government was not a part.
State secrets would might be revealed were that to move forward.
And they actually persuaded the judge to throw the case out.
So we don't know exactly what those state secrets were.
Certainly one of the things I've been told by Restis's attorney that they were seeking were these documents showing who was funding United Against Nuclear Iran.
But we really don't know what were those state secrets.
How did United Against Nuclear Iran have them?
And was Tom Kaplan somehow connected to that?
It seems like another possibility.
Again, just kind of speculation here.
I don't know if there's actual information really to back this up.
But the group is actually run by a lot of former very high level people, even from the Obama administration, like Gary Samore, right?
That's right.
That's right.
He's the former, what was he, armed controls czar or something for the Obama White House.
So it seems like maybe they got some classified documents there on private property that they're not really supposed to have.
Maybe that's part of it.
And there are a number of former intelligence officials, both from Europe, from Israel, and from the United States on the advisory board.
So certainly a widely speculated thing that I've certainly heard from a number of people is speculating that they came into possession of some classified documents.
That would seem possible.
I think another area that deserves some scrutiny is not just what documents they got, but what path those documents may have taken.
If that's the case, again, this is all sort of rampant speculation, because the judge has said that they can't tell us any more information about what these state secrets might be, or why discovery in this private lawsuit, as I say, between two private parties, the government's not a party to this suit, somehow threatened state secrets.
Amazing.
Yeah.
And as you say, that's unprecedented, right?
That's the first time that's ever happened in a federal court.
I believe it.
I believe certainly with providing so little information about what happened, it is.
It's only in the 21st century that they've used state secrets to throw out entire cases.
Before that, it was only these documents and those documents, please, Your Honor.
But now it's just entire cases get thrown out like this.
Well, and typically, these are cases, though, involving the government.
For instance, you can't go suing the government if the basis of your case is that in discovery, you need access to documents which are classified.
Well, that's going to bring you right up against state secrets, and you're going to get that thrown out.
But the government is a party to that case.
The unique thing about this is that the government wasn't a party to it.
And that's what really has raised the interest of a lot of civil liberties groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, is the fact that the government wasn't a part of this case.
And they certainly could have tried to use a more limited interpretation of state secrets to say that certain documents would be withheld on state secrets grounds.
But they persuaded the judge that simply moving forward and even identifying publicly the types of information at play here would would disclose state secrets.
And tell us more about this actual case, because that helps, you know, because you think of the group as basically, you know, running ads and trying to scotch the nuclear deal that way.
But apparently these guys get real work done.
Well, yeah, I mean, United Against Nuclear Iran over the past several years has expended a lot of their resources on naming and shaming companies which have done business with Iran or in Iran.
And some of these have been, you know, a perfectly decent types of pressure to bring, for instance, on crane companies that were being the cranes for being used for executions in Iran, you know, legitimate human rights type things.
But where it's often sort of veered off into a little more uncharted territories is when they, for instance, they've gone after U.S. and European companies that have gotten treasury waivers to do business in Iran selling medicine and food.
Pharmaceutical companies have been named and shamed by United Against Nuclear Iran.
And these are the types of things where this doesn't fall in line with the existing sanctions.
And it seems to violate United Against Nuclear Iran's own statements, suggesting that they are not condemning sales of humanitarian products and goods to Iran.
Now, obviously, shipping companies become a major point of interest for United Against Nuclear Iran, because that's how these products presumably make their way into Iranian markets.
Well, they specifically targeted pharmaceutical companies, huh?
They have.
They have.
They've gone after a number of pharmaceutical companies on their website.
They've listed them as companies doing business in Iran and encouraged people to write to them, urging them to stop doing this business.
Do you know if that's had a specific effect on any of those particular companies?
I don't know.
And I would be surprised if it did, seeing as how these are companies that went to the effort of actually getting a number of them got actual explicit waivers from the U.S. government because they wanted to make sure that the trade that they were going to do in Iran fell underneath the humanitarian and medical and food waivers.
And of course, we've heard over the past few years that their medicines is something that has taken a real hit because they import much of their medicine.
And even though no medicines are on the banned list of things under the sanctions, that just global corporations don't feel like messing with Iran at all, because who can afford the lawyers to try to tangle with the U.S. Treasury?
Do you want to?
I don't either.
Let's just sell to the Canadians or whoever instead.
And so they've had a real problem with chemotherapy and antibiotics.
And I forget different kinds of drugs.
Oh, medicines to prevent hemophiliacs from bleeding to death that are absolutely necessary for them to have surgery for other problems.
I mean, people are dying of this.
I mean, what's so surprising here is that these were companies that actually went to the, I'm going to guess, probably extended amount of effort to get explicit waivers from Treasury saying that the trade that they were going to engage in was fully legal under existing sanctions law.
Yet United Against Nuclear Iran still had them listed on their website.
This is what they call lawfare, right?
Exactly.
Use every bit of the law, but go to war with it.
Doesn't matter whether you're not seeking justice.
You're just trying to destroy your enemies.
Although this isn't even a legal attack.
This is actually a public diplomacy attack.
Oh, I see.
Yes.
Here's just the name.
Now, how many different lawsuits were they involved in?
Oh, this is only the other guy was suing them as they weren't suing to make him stop.
He's just suing them for naming and shaming him.
Was that it?
Exactly.
Exactly.
Yeah.
He was claiming that it was inaccurate that his ships had been doing business in Iran and he was suing them for defamation.
And he was claiming that arriving rival shipping interests were perhaps behind United Against Nuclear Iran.
And I mean, coincidentally, this guy, Tom Kaplan's wife, her family, I believe, has ties to to a very large rival shipping company.
Oh, really?
Yeah, that's an interesting little coincidence there.
I don't think they know that term conflict of interest in D.C. anymore.
I do.
We still do.
Thanks, Eli.
Great to talk to you again.
Great work.
Thank you very much.
That's Eli Clifton, y'all.
He's at Loblog.com.
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