Welcome back to the show, Santi War Radio, I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest is Grant F. Smith, he's from the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy, that's IRMEP, I-R-M-E-P dot org, and he's the author of a great many books, I think all of them, about the Israel lobby and their power in the United States, the most recently Spy Trade, how Israel's lobby undermines America's economy.
Welcome back to the show, Grant, happy new year, man.
Hey, Scott, good to be back, happy new year to you.
Very happy to have you here.
So look, big picture, bottom line, kind of, sort of thing, they say that in terms of power in Washington, D.C., there's the NRA, there's the American Association of Retired People, and then there's the Israel lobby.
Is that right?
I think by the criteria of power, I might advance the Israel lobby to after the AARP and probably ahead of the NRA.
But yeah, those are the top three, and I think the most fascinating thing about comparing the three is, first, by nationality, two of those attempt to advance American interests in terms of either retirees or gun rights, instead of interests of a foreign government, which is AARP.
Well, now, here's the thing.
What's the big deal?
I mean, Americans like Israel all right, so they have a powerful lobby in D.C.
Oh, yeah, okay.
Well, so here's the difference.
All three claim to be social welfare organizations.
Two of them are fairly open and transparent.
One of them is almost completely intransparent and tougher to get information out of in terms of proprietary stuff than the U.S. government.
Or actually, yeah, it is, it's harder.
And the real difference between all three is that one constantly engages in illegal activities to advance its purposes, which, number one, aren't clearly stated, and number two, are often executed secretly, and never is held to account by our Justice Department or other regulatory authorities that would be happy to crack down on you or me if we committed even a fraction of the violation.
So those are important distinctions, and I'm hoping to talk about some of the secrets, because through some civil court actions, there's another one on the way.
AIPAC has opened itself up, or been opened up, in this case, the former employees taking a rib spreader and jacked it open and exposed quite a bit of its inner workings.
The American people don't really know what this organization does.
They don't know where it's come from.
They don't know about all the breaks it's gotten from the Justice Department, and it's really important for people to know that, especially coming into 2011, as we advance down this greased skid toward an unnecessary war with Iran.
All right, so original.antiwar.com/smith dash grant.
And anyway, it's in the highlights section right now at antiwar.com.
AIPAC protests disclosure of secret files, and looks like two articles ago was your last one on the same subject, AIPAC bears all to quash lawsuit.
And that's why I wanted to ask you about the power and the sort of big picture understanding of AIPAC before getting into this, because, jeez, I think there was a time when I never heard of AIPAC.
I think there's probably a lot of people who really don't know much about the story or wouldn't know about the history of the neoconservatives in the Iraq war and whatever.
After all, that was in the last decade.
It is a brand-new year, a brand-new decade now, and plenty of newbies around, and so I figure I set you up to give the big picture, and then here's how you can prove it, is by telling the most ridiculous and entertaining and hilarious story of Stephen Rosen and his lawsuit against his former employers at the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee.
Go right ahead.
Yeah, well, thanks.
You know, the fascinating thing, again, the reason people don't have a lot of information is that the organization and constituent organizations have been very good at intimidating members of the press and news organizations not to publish anything critical about them.
So, you know, in the big scheme of things, they may not be the most corrupt and they may not be the most transparent, but it's important to do reporting about them, because they probably are the most corrupt, intransparent organization in D.C. and have a huge impact on U.S. Middle East policy and other policies that Americans probably aren't aware of.
But we truly are in the theater of the absurd, because one of AIPAC's former employees filed a civil suit.
He was angered, because back in 2004-2005, when two AIPAC employees were swept up in a counter-espionage thing, soliciting and receiving classified national defense information, they were indicted.
A joint defense agreement between AIPAC and their employees collapsed, and AIPAC threw them under the bus, saying that they did not represent, quote, the conduct that AIPAC expects from its employees, unquote, terminated them, although it did continue paying for their legal defense, up to $5 million by some account.
And so this former employee in 2009, before the statute of limitations expired, filed a defamation suit against AIPAC, seeking $20 million from its board of directors and outside PR firm for defamation.
And what's happened over the past few months, although it's been totally ignored by mainstream news outlets, is that Rosen began filing some very curious internal documents showing he thought that he should not have been punished by AIPAC for circulating classified information, because he had received bonuses for doing so, because AIPAC itself, back in 1984-1987, when it was being invested by the FBI for theft of government property and espionage, had circulated successfully classified U.S. government information, and as he noted, its employees didn't suffer any consequences for that.
He's also filed depositions from the director, Howard Korr, and other people in which he claims they didn't think it was a big deal for the organization to be soliciting classified information, and he outlines in his suit that this organization, AIPAC, has essentially a de facto declassification unit that it's built up through its expertise in foreign policy that allows it to do declassification of U.S. government documents that serve as sort of a back channel to the Israelis.
And so the interesting thing is that, as AntiWar.com has covered, the original U.S.
2005 criminal indictments against AIPAC employees, Rosen and Weissman, were kicked out by the Obama administration shortly after it took office, and there was never any question that AIPAC was soliciting and moving around classified information.
What's going to happen if AIPAC prevails in the civil suit is that it will have essentially won the argument that while U.S. government information that it may choose to solicit for its own motives, whether that's touching off a war with Iran or affecting U.S. relations with other countries in the Middle East, while that might be untouchable because the government's unwilling to defend it, that AIPAC's own confidential information, whether it's briefing papers or media narrative development documents or documents about meeting with the National Security Council, their lawyers will go after you if you would ever try and disclose that publicly.
So it's a really interesting development that will be decided today in court.
All right, now we'll get back to that when we come back from this break, but I just want to say about the Rosen thing, this is the same espionage act they want to use against Julian Assange, who's linking it to all of us, who's a journalist.
And yet these guys were giving it to Israeli spies, Mossad at the embassy, to take back for the Likud party in power.
All right, everybody, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm talking with Grant F. Smith from Antiwar.com and the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy.
That's IRMEP.org.
And boy, there are tons of documents there for you to look through.
Number one historian of and critic of the Israel lobby's power and influence in America.
And I'm sorry for yelling at you going right out to the break there, but I wanted to work that in and save a little bit of time and mention how it didn't work for the time-saving purposes.
And mention how they're going after Julian Assange, who is turning over secret, not even top secret, secret-level documents to the people of the world at large online, http://wikileaks.ch, for anyone.
And here at Rosen & Weissman, we're getting this classified information from a confessed agent, Gary Franklin, who I guess confessed not to being an agent, but to spying, to breaking the law and doing so.
He took classified information the same way Bradley Manning did, only he gave it to these guys at the Israel lobby, who turned it over then to Neorgian and Danny Ilon at the Israeli embassy, Mossad, who went back.
And my understanding, Grant, was that this was information about what Connolly Zerais and Stephen Hadley and Dick Cheney and George Bush were saying about whether or not to bomb Iran and what they were taking into consideration in order that the Israelis may be better positioned to pressure us into war with Iran, as you mentioned.
Basically, that's correct.
There's a huge difference between a whistleblowing activity, even if it involves tens of thousands of documents, and this very direct campaign by the two AIPAC operatives to solicit, develop, and basically run Franklin as an asset, a purpose-driven asset, in order to solicit all sorts of classified information that would help Israel front-run and make a case for war with Iran, which was the big drive when they were caught up in this thing operation.
It's really disappointing to hear expert commentators in the media, whether it's Walter Pincus in the Washington Post or others, constantly misrepresenting what the Espionage Act says, which is, quote, whoever with the intent or reason to believe that it is to be used for the injury of the United States or to the advantage of a foreign nation communicates, unquote, basically classified national defense information.
A lot of people leave out that or to the advantage of a foreign nation because they want to make the argument that by giving Israel information that has not been delivered to it officially, somehow that could never injure the United States, which is not the case.
So what you have here is an instance where the U.S. Department of Justice, probably under pressure of the Obama administration, threw out a perfectly valid and warranted espionage prosecution, which was never allowed to go to trial, in favor of today going after a whistleblower who did not exhibit any of the classic attributes or behaviors of espionage.
And it's kind of ridiculous.
Yeah, it is.
It really is amazing, the contrast there.
So now anyway, now get back to the last thing you were saying before the break, which was that there was a hearing in court today about this defamation lawsuit.
As you said, when Steve Rosen was busted by the FBI, AIPAC threw him under the bus and said, well, whatever he was doing, that's not our policy.
And so now he's suing them and saying, you can't say that about me.
And all these documents are coming out.
Right, all these documents are coming out.
And Rosen has made the mistake of filing some documents from, for example, when he and AIPAC had a joint defense agreement.
They were going to accuse FBI officials of anti-Semitism and go on a media campaign saying this was just a witch hunt for anybody in law enforcement who disliked Israel policy.
And that was going to be the plan.
Well, Rosen took that document and disclosed it to help his case.
He took other documents, such as policy documents, classified depositions and other things, and began filing them openly in court to try and push his case that, thread the needle, saying, well, none of this was wrong, but everybody was doing it.
And so because he signed a comprehensive protective order not to do that, AIPAC's very high-quality corporate lawyer, who's been trying to position this entire thing as just a matter of a disgruntled employee not liking his treatment, has been able to file some pretty pointed motions telling the judge, look, Rosen is violating your court's procedures for proceeding to trial.
This thing has not gone to trial yet.
All these are pretrial motions.
And so you should throw out the entire defamation suit because Rosen, by this behavior, is proving what we've said all along, which is that he doesn't engage in good conduct.
So Rosen's kind of shooting himself in the foot.
But meanwhile, there's another case that's just been filed over election law violations.
So AIPAC is finding itself increasingly in civil court over a lot of behaviors that, you know, there's a well-documented record of theft of government property and handling classified information.
You know, the alarming thing, I think, for Americans, is that all of this is being handled in a civil court, you know, in a way to see whether AIPAC has to or doesn't have to pay off a former employee rather than the appropriate form, which would be a criminal court.
Because, again, this organization is not engaged in news gathering.
It's not engaged in whistleblowing.
It's not a civic organization in the sense of U.S. social welfare.
It really always has been since its founder emerged from the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1951, operating as a stealth arm of the Israeli government.
And so, you know, this suit is as disturbing as it is revelatory to observers.
Well, and it's not like it's pango-pango and they want to negotiate some kind of trade agreement or something.
They're trying to get us into a war with Iran, which would be the worst thing in the whole world we could do aside from starting one with Europe.
Well, yeah, that's true.
And, you know, the 2011 AIPAC initiative seemed to be, again, keeping the U.S. on track.
Dennis Ross has a whole set of milestones.
Our Treasury Department, which has an official revealed by WikiLeaks to essentially have been making statements about what Obama policy would be even before Obama took office in Jerusalem, is engaged in outright economic warfare against Iran.
And there's a whole host of covert operations, which hopefully we'll find out whether there is support for some of these attacks that have been going on within Iran.
But it certainly seems like it.
But there are other initiatives that are, you know, keeping up just unprecedented amounts of aid to Israel.
There are proposals floating to transfer the entire question of foreign aid to the Pentagon or Treasury, where it would be less transparent and harder to regulate, as some of the candidates have been bravely saying it should perhaps not be delivered at all.
You know, thwarting U.S.
-Islamic ties with propaganda and maintaining strictly U.S. to military elite ties in the region and solidifying AIPAC's own power, they're very concerned about campaign finance.
You know, if you look at AIPAC as an organization, it's power-based as a group of about 1,700 donors who contribute between 5,000 and 650,000 per year.
And that's really the entire basis of your organization's heavy-hitter power-base.
The rest of their 50,000 donors only give about $500 each, and that's from their 2007 tax filing.
So, you know, you've got this very relatively thin organization that wants to punch far above the weight of any U.S. interest group, you know, putting America on this deadly path.
And yet again, nobody in any sort of broadcast media can touch on any of these important issues because they've been intimidated and stifled all of these years.
Well, you know, I read somewhere that those same donors are the ones who financed the Likud party in Israel.
Yeah, that's been disclosed recently.
Exactly.
You've got some of these high-flying casino owners who are funding the parties and, you know, other high-profile donors.
And it's incredible.
I mean, it's as though there is no separation between the two political systems.
Yeah.
Well, I guess at least the more obvious that becomes, the more we could someday be able to do something about it.
Anyway, thanks very much.
It's Grant F. Smith, everybody.
I-R-M-E-P.org.
Thanks very much.
Thanks, Scott.
Antowar.com today, too.
