09/26/16 – Grant F. Smith – The Scott Horton Show

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Scott Horton Show.
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All right, introducing our good friend Grant F. Smith.
He is the director of the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy.
That's IRMEP, I-R-M-E-P dot org.
Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy.
And basically, well, he's like Jason Leopold, the FOIA ninja, only just on Israel.
And he writes a bunch of really great books, has written a bunch of really great books.
The latest is called Big Israel, all about the Israel lobby in America.
And all of them before that, Divert is about them stealing weapons-grade uranium from the United States.
And before that, stealing trade secrets and everything else.
A whole series of books.
So check out Grant Smith's great Amazon page there for Israel's legal and illegal lobbying and other activities inside the United States of America.
Welcome back to the show, Grant.
How are you, sir?
Hey, Scott.
Thanks for having me back.
We're doing really well, thanks.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you here.
Well, so $38 billion Obama has pledged of our money.
Not that I got a billion to give away, but anyway, to the Israelis.
And the American people think, well, good, because they are our Western allies and the only democracy in the Middle East.
And they're Fort Apache out there protecting us from the Muslims, right?
Not so fast there, cowboy.
I think you're aware we've done some previous polls that were published by Antiwar.com and others which show that most Americans, if you tell them how much it is and the fact that it's about 9% of the total foreign aid budget, most of them say it's either too much or much too much.
And now it's not just IRMEP polls, but Shibley Telhami had a poll that was done earlier this year, only recently published in Newsweek, which, guess what, shows that most Americans think that it's either way too much or much too much.
And he split his between Republicans and Democrats, but you had about 59% of Democrats saying too much and about 57% of Independents with about 40% of Republicans saying much too much.
So actually, if you do a little bit of information in your poll, and Telhami certainly did as well, his question was the Obama administration is reportedly offering Israel a 10-year military aid package worth totally approximately $40 billion.
What do you think?
And he even put in Israel is reportedly balking that it feels it needs to maintain its qualitative edge in the Middle East.
Do you believe that the Obama administration is offering?
And then asked, too little, just about right, too much.
People think it's too much.
People think it's too much, Scott.
Yeah.
Well, geez, I wonder if somebody showed them pictures of Tel Aviv at night or something like that, because I think if anyone, you know, just, well, I think that's probably the best kind of bit of information you can need.
Here is an extremely modern American, you know, Western-style metropolis.
How could anyone who could afford that skyline need our money at all?
Or maybe that's how they can afford that skyline.
Well, it used to be that previous MOUs, and we've got to talk about the fact that these things are secret.
You can't even see what they say.
All you can get are the talking points, but we'll pause on that for a second.
Previous MOUs allowed the Israelis to spend a significant amount of these dollars in their own military-industrial projects.
And so economically, they provided a huge boost to the Israeli military-industrial complex and allowed them to build up all sorts of industries geared at the export market.
So a certain group of skeptical thinkers has always looked beyond the PR in these about, you know, defending the state from being pushed into the sea, which is not what it's about at all, and correctly assessed that it was economic aid and actually producing, you know, an export-driven market for Israel in purely military hardware.
So there's that.
But then the bigger argument is, yes, why is the U.S. providing so much aid, the majority of all foreign aid since 1948, to a relatively rich country, not always relatively rich but certainly now, when you have other possible priorities and when you also have, you know, public opinion saying this is not a good allocation of resources.
And you can tell a lot about the politics involved here by just looking at all of the surrounding elements, whether it's the signing ceremony, the sudden flap in Congress about this new MOU is not enough, about the State Department spokesperson who's being questioned about whether the aid is even legal, about our lawsuit, which is saying, no, it's not legal.
So there are a lot of problems with this and more challenges than ever this year than ever before, I would say.
All right.
Well, so, man, there's just so much to follow up on.
There's so many different directions this interview could take.
I want to go to the Constitution and how the part of Article 1, I believe it's Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11, that empowers the Congress to appropriate money for the military.
But they're forbidden right there in the text of the Constitution from ever appropriating money to the military for more than two years at a time.
No 10-year plans allowed because we're Americans.
And that means we hate and distrust standing armies.
Right, everybody?
And so we would never let our Congress appropriate money for our army to even keep existing beyond two years from now.
And yet for the Israelis, no problem, no such restriction.
We can go ahead and make a 10-year deal to finance their military grant.
Yeah, it's one of those constitutional interpretative dances you have to do here.
I mean, technically, this is not a treaty.
Technically, this doesn't have anything to do with Congress.
Obviously, you know, we're all bound by the Constitution.
But the president would argue that this is an executive agreement that he's making.
And if you look in the section of the Constitution about executive agreements, you know, maybe there's a conflict there or maybe there's some sort of issue about, you know, what exactly he's doing in this foreign area.
But, you know, I agree.
Wow.
What if we were actually following the Constitution in principle?
Wouldn't the world be different?
Yeah.
Well, yeah, much different.
In fact, if we were following the Constitution, we wouldn't have a world empire for them to be worried about bribing so bad anyway.
Right.
Well, and that gets into a lot of very interesting things.
I mean, I know you're a big fan of Chalmers Johnson.
And if you go in and look at the justifications and his critique of, in particular, this part of the empire, he has said things in his books which I haven't seen elsewhere, which is that the U.S. has secret bases in Israel, that it really is or was at one point this unseekable aircraft carrier.
I don't think that's true anymore.
And one of the interesting things, and I do want to turn to my own poll data, but one of the interesting things Shibley Talhami is going to try to do is poll Americans on the strategic benefits of Israel to the United States.
You know, part of this empire we're talking about.
And how does that justify the aid?
He says he's going to probe that in upcoming polls.
I can't imagine a more difficult thing to do.
Americans aren't in this conversation and the types of questions he's going to have to ask, I would think would be readily challenged since so much of this is secret.
But, you know, that's a really interesting thing.
But just just to turn back to the poll.
Sure.
The wording of the question, and there are over 500 comments on Reddit saying this, the positioning of this poll was not very well done.
So we can jump into that as well.
But the question just basically says the U.S. just agreed to provide 38 billion in military aid to Israel over the next 10 years.
In your opinion, how could this money be better spent?
And the statistically significant results.
This is fielded through consumer Google consumer research.
The results that people could pick from were it could be spent caring for veterans and 20.7 percent chose that.
It could be spent on education.
20.1 said that would be a good choice.
It could pay down the U.S. national debt.
19.3 percent said that would be good.
It could be spent rebuilding infrastructure.
14.9 said that would be good.
It could fund a Mideast peace plan.
5.8 percent.
That would be good.
People had 2.4 percent had other ideas and submitted the questions.
16.8 said no, no, no.
It should be spent on Israel in that way.
So criticisms of the poll are, well, isn't it just a little much saying that just because they chose other options or had other preferences that they opposed aid to Israel?
I would agree with that if this were the only poll that had been fielded.
But I think combined with our other work, with Shibley Telhami's poll, there is actually opposition.
So maybe the headline went a little further than this particular poll.
But I think if you look at the universe of polling that's been done, and there's not much, I can tell you that.
This just doesn't get polled by Gallup in what I would say a bona fide way.
No, there is opposition to the aid.
And thanks, y'all.
Yeah, I see what you're saying.
I see their complaint about, well, the headline.
Maybe the headline goes a little further that people could think of other things they'd rather spend the money on.
But I see what you're saying.
And, you know, I mean, again, we're talking about a first world country here that doesn't need one dime of American aid whatsoever.
Maybe they have to charge their customers to go to college or for health care instead of having us pay their way.
Well, that's the argument is this is a way.
I'd like to see that in your poll, too.
Yeah, especially once I let you know that in Israel everybody can get a PhD for free if they want.
And everybody gets free, you know, any health care they want for free on your dime.
How do you like that?
And then see what they say.
Yeah.
They have a socialist economy that we pay for and subsidize.
The subsidy part is important because our argument is, you know, a lot of these MOUs have provided things like aviation fuel and diesel fuel, you know, billions of dollars worth of it.
And that's a commodity.
So the argument has been, OK, so you're getting all this stuff for free, commodities, and that allows you to really resource other parts of your government budget.
And we would argue some of that resourcing is for nuclear weapons.
Some of that resourcing is for a lot of other things.
So this is basically, you know, money's fungible.
We're providing a lot of commodities.
And one thing that's come out, and I don't know if you've seen these headlines, but a lot of people say this is all about the military industrial complex.
This is, you know, military contractors pushing for this.
And I think that's really a myth because if you look at the top five military contractors for 2015, they had about $221 billion in revenue.
You know, a yearly aid package of this size is only about 1.72 percent of that.
You could be cynical and say, well, you know, if they manage to start a lot of wars in the region, then that'll be good for the big bad military industrial complex.
But I just don't buy the argument and haven't really seen a lot of big defense contractors as the primary motivators of this.
However, I do have a lot of copies of AIPAC petitions and donation drives to their members.
And what they won't say publicly is that, yeah, this is all about lobbying, and we're doing the lobbying.
And what you can see is that they publicly try to talk about things like the only democracy in the Middle East, shared values, and, you know, a partner in the war on terrorism to justify this.
But it's really about politics.
It's really about – Yeah, even the stuff about the military industrial complex makes it seem like at least someone in America is benefiting from this, even if not America in general.
Yeah.
Oh, well, of course.
I mean, $3.8 billion, $3.4 billion is nothing to sneeze at.
But there's a real dichotomy, and that's what makes this so interesting, real dichotomy between what AIPAC says in public about why this is so important and what they tell their own donors about, you know, their role in getting this.
You know, it's really a lobby-driven initiative.
That's why a developed country gets the majority of this particular segment of the budget.
It's because of this constant lobbying, this constant jockeying for more.
But they did lose this time.
I mean, there's news that Benjamin Netanyahu wanted $4.5 to $5 billion.
He wanted a large segment to go into Israeli industry, and they didn't get it.
And now you've got Lindsey Graham and some other people in Congress who are saying, we're not going to honor the MOU.
We're going to give them more than is in this executive agreement.
So that's shaping up to be very interesting.
And what people probably don't know, unless you're following this stuff, is that just because they signed an MOU doesn't mean that the money is automatically there.
Congress still has to, as you were mentioning before, it has to pass some legislation to actually fund this thing.
And so there seems to be that push when they finally get that legislation passed, whether or not it will be $5 billion or just what the president said.
That's the Foreign Operations Appropriations Act for this year that they're probably going to pass in October.
How much money is going to be in there?
And what will Democrats do if there's a Republican drive to say this is pushing the Israelis into the sea?
They're certainly not going to be – they'll probably back down.
So it's very interesting what's going on behind the scenes.
All right.
Now, when you mention the military-industrial complex, I wonder about the think tanks and whether they just use those as a cutout.
So you don't see Lockheed putting out press releases about the greatness of Israel that much.
But they don't really need to because don't they finance JINSA and WINEP and AEI and the CSP and all the very worst of the think tanks that they can rely on to always push this same kind of thing?
I mean, yes.
I mean I know they fund those think tanks, but that information just dribbles out, as you know.
I was just thinking that might be a good research project for you, Grant, is who's financing all these think tanks.
I specialize in the possible.
I asked Christopher DeMuth in 2004, I said, how much is Lockheed Martin giving the American Enterprise Institute?
This was on C-SPAN too, live television.
How much are you getting from them?
You know what his response was to me?
And he had Ron Sugarman of Lockheed Martin sitting right in front of him.
He said, haha, not enough.
But can you actually look up on an IRS Form 990 and see how much they give to these think tanks?
No.
Do they have to disclose it?
No.
Do they disclose it?
Generally not.
I just personally think that if you're talking about such a large industry and such a small percentage of their revenue, that they're not the biggest factor.
Most places, I mean, some things I do know is that Daniel Pipes' think tank and Frank Gaffney's think tank, they're getting a lot of money from foundations that appear to be mainly sort of Israel affinity type foundations, federations and things like that, which have to disclose how much money they're giving them.
They have a large percentage of, you know, sort of purely foundations, 501C3 foundations giving them funds that you can actually track.
But there's really, you know, unless they disclose it, you're never going to know.
Yeah.
All right.
So one last thing.
You mentioned that this whole entire memorandum of understanding here and the rest of it might be illegal.
How so?
Right.
And this is just a great thing that happened recently.
John Kirby, U.S. Department spokesperson, was just grilled by someone who said, look, isn't this aid illegal because, you know, they have a nuclear weapons program and the Symington and Glenn Amendment make aid illegal under that act, which was passed back in the mid-70s?
He would not answer the question.
There's like two minutes of John Kirby saying, I'm not going to get into intelligence matters.
I'm not going to get into that area.
Blah, blah, blah.
And you simultaneously have Colin Powell in the State Department of the State Department disclosing, yeah, the Israelis have got 200 nukes.
So, yes, it seems as though it is illegal.
And I filed a lawsuit.
You know, this is one of the only ways you can get answers in a press conference.
Maybe you can get them in a lawsuit.
The lawsuit basically is claiming that the public is being harmed by the secrecy that's surrounding this, the denials, and it's asking that Symington and Glenn be enforced.
So we've got to obviously we're going to have to do something in October, have a lot of options with the lawsuit.
It's already been filed.
The government has to respond by the 10th.
There's obviously this aid package that will be going to Congress making this lawsuit.
You know, it'll be moot if they simply pass that and then disperse the funds.
So there's a lot of excitement that's going to be coming up in October.
And, again, if you want to specialize in the art of the possible, a federal lawsuit is a good way to do it.
It really takes a question out of two branches of government and throws it right into that remaining.
You can really get a good hearing.
And sometimes, you know, if you can get the information out, people really take notice.
Yeah.
Well, you sure do great work, man.
And, you know, like I said before, you know, we have Jason Leopold, who he sues them all day on everything.
But, you know, if we didn't have you, Grant, we'd have to invent you.
Well, on the U.S. government's case, literally on their case in court, getting the truth out to the people that the journalism that you do is just it's.
Well, you don't have any competition, which is a tragedy, but you blow them all away if you did.
So I appreciate that, Scott.
You know, we do it because this or this opposition is so strong.
They've really intimidated a lot of others.
So someone's got to do it and we're happy to do it.
Yeah.
Hell yeah.
You're doing great work there.
All right, y'all.
That is the great Grant F. Smith.
His latest book is Big Israel.
Get it?
Like Big Agra or Big Pharma or Big, you know, whatever.
Yeah.
Big Israel.
The Israel Lobby in Washington, D.C.
It's such a great book.
I haven't read it yet, but I know it is.
And he's written a bunch of great books before that, too.
The one before last is Divert, New Meck, Zalman Shapiro and the Diversion of U.S. Weapons Grade Uranium into the Israeli Nuclear Weapons Program.
The website is IRMEP.org.
That's IRMEP, the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy in Washington, D.C.
Thank you again, sir.
Thanks, Scott.
Always a pleasure.
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Trying to get these wars ended.
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