All right, y'all, welcome back to Anti-War Radio, it's Chaos 92.7 in Austin, streaming live worldwide on the internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org and AntiWar.com slash radio.
And our guest today is Grant F. Smith, from the Institute for Research, Middle Eastern Policy, otherwise known as IRMEP, I think.
And he's the author of the book, America's Defense Line, the Justice Department's Battle to Register the Israel Lobby as Agents of a Foreign Government.
Welcome to the show, Grant.
Hi, Scott, it's great to be here.
Thanks for having me on.
Well, it's good to have you here, and we've run quite a few of your articles at AntiWar.com.
Obviously, the case that we're going to be discussing today, the supposed-to-be trial of Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman from the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee is a story very important to all of us at AntiWar.com.
And yet, it frankly is the kind of thing that's caught up in all these legal maneuverings back and forth, and motions to dismiss this, and motions to appeal that.
I don't think any of us on staff at AntiWar are lawyers.
It's kind of gotten a bit past us, but I know that now, at the federal appeals court level, there's something that's being appealed up there, and I know that you've written an amicus brief for the court to consider while making their decision.
Let's go back, first of all, to 2004, and what happened with the arrest of Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman.
Who are these guys?
Why did they get arrested?
And then, why were they on trial in the first place?
Then, maybe we can fast-forward to where we're at now with the case.
Sure.
Well, first of all, let's not leave out Colonel Lawrence Franklin, who was also arrested and indicted.
And what was happening, basically, was the AIPAC officials, in this case, in charge of policy development and all sorts of initiatives at AIPAC's headquarters here in Washington, had contacted and begun kind of running Colonel Lawrence Franklin to get information that would help them in influencing U.S. policy toward Iran, which AIPAC appears to favor a hard line, including, up to at least a couple of weeks ago, even legislating acts which many observers have considered to be acts of war, blockades, financially blocking Iran and doing all sorts of escalatory activities.
Well, as Pat Buchanan once said, the Congress is Israeli-occupied territory.
Right.
And basically, in this case, they were acting on behalf of AIPAC to funnel that information to Israeli officials.
This was information in presidential directives, which Lawrence Franklin, being part of Doug Feith's team over at the Pentagon, had access to the development of.
Carving out a role for AIPAC to be operating at that executive level, Franklin had said earlier that he wanted a slot on the National Security Council, that he was concerned about U.S.
-Iran policy.
He was trying to present those to AIPAC as a way to increase his own career trajectory.
The AIPAC officials, in this case, made a lot of strange diversionary activities when they're actually receiving briefings orally from Colonel Lawrence Franklin in various restaurants at public locations in D.C.
And so, basically, the government had flipped Franklin, turned him into their asset, and collected all sorts of wiretap information, etc., to then indict the two AIPAC officials.
There was a lot of evidence that they were actually trying to indict the entire organization, which would have led to its immediate collapse if that had gone through, just like Enron or Arthur Anderson or any corporation that suddenly faces a huge blow to their entire credibility and kind of pierces the corporate veil in that case.
All right, wait, wait.
Let me stop you right there.
Who was it that was going after an indictment of the whole place, the FBI or the U.S. Attorney's Office?
The FBI.
There was a notice between some of the defense attorneys saying that the lead prosecutor was putting a leash on the FBI not to go after the entire organization.
This was McNulty, who subsequently rose to become a much higher-level DOJ official after successfully lobbying, petitioning not to expand.
These are the words within the correspondence in the court docket, not to expand but limit the prosecution to Stephen Rosen and Keith Wiseman, as opposed to either more individuals or the entire organization.
All right, so what we have here, we have Larry Franklin.
He's an Iran analyst inside the policy department at the Pentagon.
He's got designs on moving up to the National Security Council.
He wants to go work for Stephen Hadley at the White House, I guess.
And he makes a deal with the Israel lobby that he'll give them information if they can get him a better job in the U.S. government.
That's the basic appearance.
Plus, he also had tons of classified information stored at his home, which I believe was in Virginia, which really compromised him.
So he not only made this ill-fated career move, but also severely compromised himself by having that classified information.
The rare thing, the unusual thing is, although he has subsequently been found guilty or pleaded guilty to do about 12 years and pay a $10,000 fine, he's still out there.
He has not yet gone to prison.
He's not reported to prison.
And observing this entire trial, it looks kind of like special treatment, although of course the government wishes to use him as a witness for the prosecution.
Right.
I guess that was part of the deal, that they had to strike him.
They let him stay out.
Well, let me focus on the Doug Fyfe angle there, because I think it's fair to say, hell, Larry Wilkerson calls him the Cheney Cabal, the neocons that Cheney hired, mostly in the first administration, who were running things.
And Douglas Fyfe was the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy.
Paul Wolfowitz was there.
Scooter Libby in the Vice President's office.
David Wilmser and John Bolton over at State.
And he had the Office of Special Plans, which in fact included Michael Rubin, who might come up later in this interview.
But these are the guys who lied us into war.
These are the guys, they did the end run around the CIA.
I mean, the CIA would lie plenty.
As we discussed with Michael Shoyer yesterday, George Tenet buried their report denying links between Iraq and al-Qaeda.
But apparently the Vice President did not trust the CIA to get the job done.
So they created their own little intelligence branch in the Pentagon to lie us into war.
And this guy, Larry Franklin, was part of that very same Office of Special Plans, right?
That's correct.
This is a Team B operation.
We've seen this repeated throughout history, whether it was Wolfowitz's team that took out responsibility for analyzing the Cold War threat, and subsequently found against all odds that, lo and behold, the Soviet Union, according to him, was developing stealth submarines, which was not true, and all sorts of numerically superior backfire bombers, which we had to then ramp up our defenses against.
So this is a classic neoconservative Team B exercise to influence policy, not on the basis of fact, but core ideology and doctrine.
And so, well, now we know from, well, various sources, I'm sure you probably have this in your book, that Richard Perl and Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feithal III, I believe, have been under investigation for being Israeli spies, or at least passing classified information to Israel at various times since the 1970s, leading up to even before the run-up to war in Iraq.
Well, this is the whole point of our amicus filing with the court.
What we see over a long period of time is, although there are FBI investigations, you know, Perl talking to the Israeli embassy, relaying classified information from the office on Capitol Hill, where he worked, whether it's Wolfowitz, who was also picked up in the same way, etc., etc., there are many, many, many cases, also involving election fraud, also involving economic espionage, where there's a case.
There's an FBI investigation.
There's documented evidence of wrongdoing.
And then nothing happens.
It doesn't even get as far as this current process.
There's simply a diversion and lots of behind-the-scenes activity, some of which we've uncovered and presented in our plea to the court, which short-circuits what I would call justice and what I would call America's defense line, which is rule of law.
And this is a long, long, long pattern of activity.
Well, is there any evidence that, say, Feith or anybody else was involved in this, or this was simply Larry Franklin freelancing?
He just happened to be part of the same group that had all the very same views about a clean break for Israel and America invading Iraq.
I don't have any evidence.
But then again, that's the whole point of a public exercise called a trial.
And so maybe we would find that out, particularly if some of the witnesses for the defendants, such as Douglas Feith and Wilkerson and others, appear and testify under oath.
But I don't think we're going to see that.
You know, here's the point that we made when we filed the only amicus action in the Fourth Circuit, which was just docketed today, this morning, in fact.
Our point was not to support the government or to support the defendants.
Our point is to keep this process going.
Because what we've seen over so many instances is a diversion of any sort of open process and application of rule of law for AIPAC, or in this case, its predecessor.
What happened back in the 1960s, and we've written about this, I think this is the last anti-war article I did, talks about the American Zionist Council, which was an organization that was receiving millions and millions of dollars of Israeli funds and using it to lobby Capitol Hill and Congress.
There were open Senate hearings about this in 1963.
In 1962, secretly, the Justice Department actually ordered this organization to register as the foreign agents of Israel, and then began this long process of behind-the-scenes battle with the American Zionist Council to actually force them to openly disclose all of their activities.
The short story is that basically after a similar three-year period that we're seeing repeated in this trial, that process was shut down and short-circuited, and the ACC was allowed to make a secret filing in which they didn't disclose any of the names or organizations that had been lobbying and doing public relations.
They also didn't have to file for any more than a three-month period, as opposed to the entire two-year period that was investigated in the Senate.
And then the Department of Justice acquiesced to making the entire thing classified so that nobody could even have seen it until it was declassified, and we did that in June 10th of 2008.
So our point with this recent trial is that, again, we're not supporting the government, we're not supporting the defense.
We're simply saying the American people have never had a chance for an open process to actually sort out some of these issues.
And we allege, basically, it's hard to even imagine that AIPAC officials would be under indictment for espionage if they had been properly regulated back in the 60s or earlier.
That's what they essentially are, which is a lobby for a foreign government.
Well, now on the other hand, if you're the judge, you don't go on and continue a trial that ought to not continue because the American people would like to hear about these issues.
I mean, we're talking about two individual men's lives at stake here, right?
Yes, we are.
But let's consider some of the extraordinary bending-over-backward rights that the ruling judge T.S.
Ellis has attempted to inject and which are being appealed.
He's essentially said in this case, and maybe we can hash this out a little bit, that the 1917 Espionage Act, which prohibits any American from relaying classified national defense information that could be used to the injury of the United States or to the aid of a foreign nation, he's saying that the government prosecutors who are attempting to move this to trial now have to, and he added this unilaterally, this is not in the law, that they've got to prove that they actually knew it would be used to the harm of the United States.
They have to now prove some state of mind that they knew the information was classified.
They have to now show some intentions.
They're going to have to basically prove, if this goes through and is not properly challenged, that it could arrive to the point that the U.S. and Israel don't have similar interests.
And so they're going to be now forced to prove some things that are far beyond the Espionage Act guidelines.
The other thing that they're protesting as well is the Classified Information Procedures Act.
The government basically says, we want to prove that they attempted to obtain classified information and then funneled it to all these parties that shouldn't have gotten it.
But the defendants are saying, hey, we've got to spread around this classified information.
Everyone's got to see it because, number one, it wasn't even classified, and number two, we have a right to this information to prepare for our defense.
So this, back in 1982 when this SIPA was actually created, it was created to prevent people like Colonel Oliver North and others from graymailing the government and saying, well, you can't really prosecute me because I've got to see all this classified information that you're desperate to keep secret, which actually is relevant national security information.
You can't have that be secret anymore.
I've got to present all of that in court.
Well, and that is a difficult thing.
I mean, what should happen with that?
I mean, assuming that it's legitimate that any of these things are kept secret.
Well, here's what I think.
I think that there is too much secrecy in Washington, D.C.
But here's where I draw the line.
What were the documents being extracted to do?
Were they being extracted to, in the case of Daniel Ellsberg, show the corruption and lies behind a war like Vietnam?
And were they being done by a person who stood a good chance of going to jail, losing all of his assets and being eternally punished?
Or was the action in question actually being used to get the U.S. into a war by entities which have traditionally enjoyed kind of a prosecutorial immunity and history of wrongdoing that the Justice Department has generally been very hands-off and even investigating?
So, you know, there's a strict legal interpretation that says, hey, let's be sticklers for the law and let's just apply the law, which never seems to be applied in this case.
And there's also another case of what exactly were they trying to do?
And was it even in the interest of the United States?
I guess our argument is it wasn't in the interest of the United States.
It was in the interest, in this case, of what they perceived were their foreign clients.
And it should be all looked into.
We should actually start applying some of these laws.
One of your heroes, in fact, was Thomas Jefferson, I believe, right?
Well, he actually had similar problems with a guy named George Logan who wanted to take U.S.
-French relations into his own hands.
In fact, he had so much trouble with Logan that he successfully lobbied for a 1799 law called the Logan Act, which prohibits American individuals from going out gangbusters in their own entrepreneurial ventures to negotiate binding agreements with foreign governments.
I think that was a pretty good law.
See, I would take it the other way around.
I would say abolish the presidency and let only private people have their own foreign policy, take away their ability to tax others and force them to chip in on what it is that they want to do.
See, this is kind of my problem, too, with registering as a foreign agent.
I don't think anybody should have to register as anything with anyone.
The problem is we have a Congress that has an imperial foreign policy in the Middle East.
But if we had a Congress without the power to do such things, we wouldn't care what the Israel lobby tried to influence them to do.
Well, I think that's a good point, but I would just back up to this argument.
There are stoplights and there are speed limits and all sorts of regulations that have been put in place which are generally only applied at the lowest level.
At the highest level, things like the Logan Act, the Foreign Agents Registration Act, tend to have the consequence of actually improving policy in the ways that you have just illuminated, restricting imperial adventures, because in order to do it, particularly on behalf of a foreign client, you've got to show everybody what you're doing.
You've got to say, hey, I've got this money, I'm doing this propaganda, and I want these things to happen.
So it has kind of the same effect of starving Congress or not letting them launch these ventures by preemptively discouraging them, saying, look, if you do do that, you're going to have to register and show everything that you're doing on behalf of your foreign government client.
So I think the spirit of what they were attempting to do, which was shield the majority of Americans from blowback and fallout from all of these foreign follies, was very solid, and I think it is in the spirit of some of these principles of limited government and at least limiting the most harmful activities of the government.
Well, sure, and to bring it back to this case, what they were getting from this guy, Franklin, apparently what they were most interested in were papers describing the secret negotiations or discussions between the principles about what they wanted their Iran policy to be.
And the Israelis were basically trying to see, what is Bush and Cheney and Rice and Hadley, what are these people saying to each other when they're discussing whether or not to bomb Iran?
They wanted to know so that they could better influence those discussions to get us to bomb Iran.
Well, that's my take on it.
Again, it would be nice to see if that is actually what the intentions were.
Although, again, I seriously doubt we're ever going to get to that point.
Well, I mean, even in the indictment, that's made pretty clear, I mean, assuming it's true.
Sure.
I agree.
All right, well, so the other troubling aspect of this that I've noticed is even from the very beginning, when the story broke, it was pretty clear, I think, at the time that it was a friendly leak.
It was somebody from AIPAC who leaked the story to, was it NBC News, in order to short-circuit the FBI's investigation and basically call it all out in public at the point where they were.
And then since then, there's been virtually no discussion in mass media whatsoever of Larry Franklin, Steve Rosen, Keith Weissman, this trial or these proceedings really at all.
Right.
The media has had a very manipulative role in this, I think.
And the sort of AIPAC-media relationship and cross-pollinization has been known.
I mean, for goodness sake, Wolf Blitzer was an editor of the Near East Report, which is AIPAC's newsletter.
So there's a long history of embedded reporters who are AIPAC sympathizers doing the main reporting on the organization.
And as we look at the mainstream media narrative right now, it's generally this, that all leaks are good, that Washington reporters, think tanks, and lobbyists just have to handle this classified information because it's their job.
And if they get the United States into a very harmful war that has no real pretext or national interest, well, Americans, that's just too bad because that's how Washington works.
And my question is, there's a guy who's a very prominent reporter at the Washington Post, who back in the 60s was part of Fulbright's team that was trying to get the Israel lobby to register.
And yet Walter Pincus is one of the people leading this charge with this PR framework that, hey, everybody does it, we have to do it, hey, are you going to put me into jail if I get a classified document?
And that's not the point.
The point is extracting classified information and then turning it back on the American people against their interests.
Yeah, and leaking something to Walter Pincus and the Post as a whistleblower, or being a Daniel Ellsberg, as you used as an example earlier, is hardly the same thing as stealing documents in order to provide them to lobbyists representing a foreign government trying to get us into a war.
Well, that gets back to your point.
Look how seamlessly this thing entered the media on Greece skids and it immediately short-circuited any further FBI investigation.
Look at Daniel Ellsberg.
He was shopping around the Pentagon Papers.
He couldn't get anybody to print it.
And they prosecuted him to the hilt.
Right.
And so I see these as two separate cases entirely.
The difference between getting the U.S. out of a war or averting a war through the release of relevant information, which is basically covering up government corruption, I see that as an entirely separate case.
I don't see any real government corruption in this case.
I see principals attempting to identify and formulate an Iran strategy, one that all Americans have an interest in because hopefully there won't be any conflict and hopefully there won't be any insertion of bad information from a Team B.
And that's, I think, an interesting point.
It didn't look as though the Office of Special Plans had an oar in that particular matter, and maybe that's what triggered the Franklin involvement.
That they didn't have a what in that particular matter?
An oar, an influence into it.
Oh, I see what you're saying, yeah.
Well, you know, there's been stories by Julian Borger, Robert Dreyfuss, some things that Karen Katowski has said and written would seem to indicate this, although not necessarily prove anything.
And James Bamford also has written about this in his book, A Pretext for War, direct ties between Israeli officers, military officers and intelligence people, to the Cheney Cabal in the Pentagon, the neocons in the Pentagon.
Karen Katowski has talked about how she was supposed to escort some of these men to Douglas Feith's office, and instead she ended up basically chasing them down the hallway and they barged right in and made themselves right at home in Doug Feith's office there.
And, you know, according to Borger and Dreyfuss, Borger or Borger, I forget, and Dreyfuss, Ariel Sharon created his own little intelligence operation funneling information through the stovepipe, they call it, straight through to the Office of Special Plans and to the Vice President's office.
On one hand, I'm sort of going, ah, you know, this whole thing was kind of influenced by this foreign government on behalf of this foreign government.
On the other hand, Bush and Cheney were, you know, more or less technically they were elected and they were the ones who basically were responsible and set all this up, right?
And they both, I guess, Cheney at least claims that Bush gave him the power and clearly Bush has the power to declassify things and cooperate with a foreign government in lying us into war if he wants, right?
No?
I would disagree.
Historical precedent, and this is why we should really talk about the book at some point, historical precedent indicates that this lobby in particular has been capable of inserting people into policy-making positions whose position is the exact opposite of the administration.
Not to let Bush and Cheney off the hook, but look at what happened back in 62 with Kennedy.
He was trying desperately behind the scenes to force Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol to allow U.S. inspections of Dimona.
Kennedy's policy was non-proliferation in the Middle East and around the world.
Well, some of the operatives who were inserted into his administration successfully quashed that and were in fact financing the nuclear program, and this is of course according to Seymour Hersh's book, The Samson Option, financing it behind his back.
And so I think it's not always correct to give this benefit of a doubt of unity of purpose, even at the executive level of government, particularly when you have this very independent, connected, foreign-connected, very powerful organization which is slotting in policy-makers into the administration, whichever party it is.
So I wouldn't assume anything.
Yeah.
All right, that's fair enough.
We see now with the apparent rise to power of Barack Obama, I guess I emphasize apparent because the future is still uncertain, but he's ahead in all the polls according to McClatchy this morning and that kind of thing, and yet he's got basically AIPAC running his foreign policy team too, doesn't he?
I think Americans should be very preoccupied that Dennis Ross is one of the names that's surfacing as someone who's campaigning for him and is going to potentially advise him on Middle East policy, because Dennis Ross, for all intents and purposes, is, as some have described him, Israel's lawyer.
If he's allowed to participate meaningfully in any Barack Obama administration policy toward the Middle East, it will be the same or worse than Clinton's policy toward the Middle East, and will result in even fewer, if that's imaginable, positive results for the American people.
Wow.
Well, could it really be that bad?
Is Dennis Ross, you know, does he side with the Likudniks?
He's a representative of Netanyahu-type foreign policy?
It doesn't matter.
He sides with Labor.
But again, it doesn't matter.
He sides with a foreign government, and our government in this case should not be Israel's lawyer.
Our government, in this case, should be representing the American interests of resolving this with some intelligent, generally accepted principles, which have been advanced by the Quartet, the Saudi plan of territory compensation, etc., and allow that to go forward without all of this constant conflation of American interests and Israeli interests, which are separate.
Well, I admit I was splitting hairs.
Okay.
But I am trying to see the bright side, or whatever, of not exactly having the neocon team in the Obama administration.
Well, you substitute, I think, muscular democracy crusades in the Middle East for limp efforts to destroy or subvert or bog down any sort of quick resolution.
I think that's the only difference.
Instead of getting bombs falling, you get interminable conferences and arguing, and you send a bunch of people over into the Middle East who nobody trusts, and say, yep, this is the American negotiating team.
We're finally going to do it.
Yeah.
Well, and Dennis Ross is, well, I'll ask you, I guess, to flesh out the story.
I'm sure you know it better than I do, but it seemed to me, if I remember right, that somebody who worked directly under him wrote something explaining that basically it's a myth that Yasser Arafat had been offered the whole West Bank and the deal of a lifetime, and he's just such an obstinate commie terrorist that he refused it and turned it down, that really that wasn't true.
That same sentiment appears in Ross's book, which is called A Missing Piece, P-E-A-C-E, I believe.
And that's the preconception.
That's the baggage all of these people bring in.
There is a substantive counterargument that the Palestinians were actually willing to do quite a bit, but they just couldn't accept these bantustans and little islands of occupation that Israel wanted to litter across the West Bank.
There's a narrative, which you get from the U.S. media, which is, yeah, Yasser Arafat, he just blew the thing out of the water.
But a real investigation shows that this was mainly Ross's and his negotiating team's fault, because they, quite frankly, just did not want this agreement.
Yeah, they don't ever show you the map.
They just sell you the narrative.
Well, it's more than that.
They don't even show you what their true interest is.
I mean, when they're confronted, well, hey, aren't you just still really APAC lobbyists?
They kind of look askance, and then the moderator will say, next question.
I've done that.
And you don't get anything out of it.
You said that to who, Wolf Blitzer?
No, I was at the American Enterprise Institute, and I said, isn't it funny that Richard Perle and all of his investments from military companies, that he never comes clean about how any of that affects his policy statements?
And Christopher DeMuth just looked at me and said, well, you know what?
We don't get even enough.
I'm paraphrasing.
We don't get enough funding from military contractors.
He was kind of complaining that although the title of the symposium was The Military Industrial Complex, after kind of putting it to Richard Perle, he was saying, well, I wish we got more money from Lockheed and the others.
You never hear what these people care about most.
They continually mask it.
And that's kind of been the role of the lobby ever since the early 60s, I say.
Well, now, there's this new task force, Meeting the Challenge, U.S. Policy Toward Iranian Nuclear Development.
And so they had this op-ed in The Washington Post from Chuck Robb and Dan Coats, two senators, yesterday.
And yet, apparently, it turns out it's Michael Makovsky and Michael Rubin, both of whom worked in the Office of Special Plans, are the guys running this thing.
This is the bipartisan study group to decide what we've got to do with these people.
Right.
Well, I mean, it's, you know, there's this curious, the American Enterprise Institute kind of had this little handoff ceremony on October 21, which is kind of the same thing.
And you had Martin Indyk and a number of other people, neoconservative ideologues kind of talking about, hey, you know, what's going to happen now?
And it was consensus.
It was a love fest.
It was all about Iran still.
And I didn't detect any real change in policy, although they all admit that they're probably going to be seeing a Barack Obama administration.
So, you know, the labels, neoconservative, American Enterprise, Brookings, Winnip, it doesn't matter.
They all have essentially the same policy.
Well, and that policy specifically, and don't tell McCain's vice presidential candidate.
We wouldn't want her being able to, you know, memorize an answer to a question, getting it right.
It's funnier to watch her go, I have no idea.
But the policy is they must abandon all uranium enrichment, period.
If they can spin a centrifuge, they can make a nuclear weapon.
That's the same thing.
And if they don't stop, we'll bomb them.
That is the policy of the Republicans and the Democrats at this point.
Right.
I don't see any substantive policy differences in any of the issues.
You know, with Iraq, both seem to be now gravitating toward the position of, we need to funnel so many more resources into this lost cause in Afghanistan that that alone is a good reason to get out of Iraq.
Plus it's tying us down, making us incapable of dealing with, you know, between quotation marks, Iran.
So there's a consensus policy, and there's no substantive difference in how it will be implemented, whether it's Barack Obama or John McCain who enters as president.
Well, you know, there hasn't been too much along these lines, but we have read here and there Israeli government officials saying that an American withdrawal from Iraq would be very bad for them.
Of course, just last April, Benjamin Netanyahu said, we are benefiting from the September 11th attacks and the American struggle in Iraq.
Well, there's a lot of sensible people over there as well, though, who are saying, you know, this is not the right thing.
There's so many peace groups over there that have been agitating for concessions, reparations, you know, who want to pull this jagged edge of constant militarism out of the equation.
That you never hear about.
And you're certainly not going to see anybody from J Street or any of the organizations that are trying to present an alternative to AIPAC having any influence over this debate.
So it's kind of sad that there are a lot of eloquent voices that you hear that never seem to get a shoulder against this.
You know, they seem to be relegated to the outskirts of the policymaking.
Well, and that's what's funny, too, is that a lot of this, well, it's not really that funny.
I guess that's what's sad about this, is that it's been obvious all along, and even to people at the very highest levels of the Bush administration from the very beginning, that the solution is not militarism.
I mean, even I think Colin Powell probably speaking out of turn after September 11th said that we're going to renew our emphasis in really trying to work out a two-state peaceful solution to Palestine.
This is a major agitating factor in creating enemies against us and whatever.
I mean, he was the Secretary of State and saying, yeah, this is one of the, we have got to take care of this Israeli-Palestinian problem right now.
That's going to be step one in winning the war on terrorism.
Right.
Instead we were told this slogan that the road to Jerusalem lies through Baghdad.
Well, we've been to Baghdad.
Now where does the road to Jerusalem lie?
And it's a real shame, because at this point this whole rhetoric of we've got to get off foreign oil and the Arabs are using oil money to launch terrorist campaigns against the U.S. is destroying what I think is a real opportunity to the U.S. to stop sending technology and machinery and exports over to the Middle East on the tip of cruise missiles and actually revert to our traditional role of trade.
I mean, this is an energy region.
Comparative advantage says they have a comparative advantage in energy.
Well, we have a comparative advantage in high-tech and service exports.
How come we're not trading anymore?
And the answer to that lies in the office of Stuart Levy, an AIPAC appointee at the Department of Treasury, who's trying to shut down as much trade flow to the region as he possibly can from within the Treasury Department by all sorts of scurrilous allegations.
Including to states that are satellite states like Egypt and Saudi and Qatar and Oman and so forth?
Right.
Well, they've got a real arm on financial flows and are really trying to control and increase visibility in the name of this so-called war on terror.
But in the meantime, actions that are distancing us from Iran, when we should actually, I would say, be getting closer to them and trying to get back to the point where they offer us another grand bargain, like the one that was turned down so many years ago.
Instead of doing that, they continue to put the screws on the Iranians and other governments in the region, giving them every reason to turn away from trading with the U.S.
And now, given the number of jobs that are tied to U.S. exports, it's just, for your average worker, it's just a shame.
Particularly in Texas, which is the biggest exporter to a lot of these countries, particularly pipeline technology and drilling technology.
It's just a shame that you've got this interest group which is shutting down any potential for, I would say, faster economic recovery in this country, because they're so tied to this interest that they never even articulate to the American people.
Yep.
All right.
Well, I'm sorry.
I just realized that we're already a couple of minutes over time here.
I've got to let you go, but I really appreciate your time on the show today.
All right, Scott.
Thanks a lot.
All right.
Everybody, that's Grant F. Smith from the Institute for Research Middle East Policy, IRMEP.
The book is America's Defense Line, the Justice Department's Battle to Register the Israel Lobby as Agents of a Foreign Government.
I'm going to read this and interview him about it here coming up pretty soon.
All right.
That's it.
See you on Monday.
