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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
Joining me now on the phone is Grant F. Smith from the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy.
That's I-R-M-E-P dot org.
And let's see, he's the author of a ton of books.
The latest one is Spy Trade.
I think all of them are about the Israel lobby's influence in the United States of America, its control or its influence over the national government, particularly of the United States.
Welcome back to the show, Grant.
How are you doing?
Hey, Scott.
Thanks for having me back on and thanks for putting that F in my middle name there.
I'm sure the guy, Grant Smith, who writes for Reuters is relieved.
Oh, poor guy's always getting confused for you, huh?
I doubt it.
I doubt it.
I know.
Well, it's the same thing with the other Scott Horton.
I'm constantly getting credit for being him and he's constantly getting blamed for being me.
No, no, that wasn't me.
I didn't say that.
That was that other guy, whereas people are always praising me for stuff he did.
Need a good nickname or something.
Dreams come up.
I'm wary of those.
All right.
Well, look, so I figure Jane Harman left Congress and when the story broke that she was leaving Congress, I took the opportunity to get Jeff Stein back on the show a couple of weeks back.
And now she's actually left Congress.
I thought, great, another opportunity to talk bad about Jane Harman on the radio, which is to say, to have the truth about Jane Harman told.
It is bad.
You know, the bad stands on its own.
So I was wondering if maybe you could tell the people a little bit about Jane Harman.
Maybe you even have a theory as to why she's leaving Congress.
Nobody retires from the House of Representatives if they don't have to, unless they're going to the Senate.
Well, yeah, I'm still wondering whether we aren't going to get some more stories or some declassified documents on the Israeli agent that she was talking to and maneuvering to get the Rosen and Weissman espionage case thrown out, because I don't see any other motivation other than the fact that she didn't get the intelligence job that she wanted.
I listened to your Jeff Stein interview.
That was great.
He's clearly the domain expert in all of this.
But just looking at the fact that anybody who wants to, needs to, should know the fact that she was consorting to obstruct justice knows that.
And I do think that in a lot of these Israel-related subjects, the history just says that there's never any due law enforcement over these cases.
But there is reputational damage, and I think she's suffered some of it.
And whether she goes to Woodrow Wilson Center or this mashup between Newsweek and the Daily Beast that her husband is involved with, I just think that she's damaged goods at this point.
Right.
Well, I mean, that's the whole thing about it.
People, it got downplayed so much.
But, and, you know, I understand I'm an extremist and I sometimes speak in hyperbole or whatever, but the way it seemed to me was, hey, this lady is a burnt asset.
I mean, the situation was, they were the Israeli government.
She made a deal with an Israeli spy that she would do this, that, and the other thing.
If he would do this, that, and the other thing, it doesn't even matter at that point that we're talking about trying to get the charges dropped against Rosen and Weissman Rosen and Weissman intervening to get her made head of the Intelligence Committee and the specifics of the quid pro quo.
The fact is, if the NSA hadn't have been overhearing this and the whole thing hadn't all got scuttled, and whether she'd got that particular job or not, once she had gone along in a corrupt deal with them, now they own her for the rest of her life.
They could use that against her, the fact that they've already turned her.
So then they can assign her any number of roles.
I mean, she was being recruited into the Mossad, basically, as a tool.
I mean, not as an agent, but as an asset in our Congress.
Well, that's, you know, on the other hand, though, she's wealthy.
She wouldn't have taken any money.
You know, the whole thing with recruiting Pollard, they had to give him money so that, you know, he really was their boy.
I don't think she was anybody's asset in that sense.
I think, you know, in her case, she's clearly burned, and she was burned by the public revelation.
But, you know, her reputation, I think her worst crime is the anti-democratic step, the anti-rule of law step of pressuring the New York Times not to go forward with their illegal wiretap stories.
I mean, that alone proved that she's not on the side of the people she claims to represent.
She's on the side of, you know, power generally, and kind of this oligarchy between the two major parties that seeks to preserve it at all costs.
I mean, her anti-democratic maneuvering helped keep any sort of accountability from hitting the Bush administration during their reelection drive.
I think that, in the balance, too, is a major, major step that she took to thwart good governance in this country.
Yeah, well, and apparently Alberto Gonzalez, who was a co-conspirator in that criminal warrantless wiretapping, invoked that, her effort in getting the New York Times to sit on the story, and her support for it, you know, publicly, as even Jane Harmon, the Democrat, says this is a necessary terrorist surveillance program.
He said, we need Jane.
So this is why our prosecution of her for making this deal will not go forward.
But I got to defend my loud hyperbole for a second, though, because my point is this.
If she'd gotten that job, if Nancy Pelosi had said, oh, okay, uh, we'll make her head of the House Intelligence Committee, then anything that they asked of her after that, she would not be able to say no, because they would have over her the fact that she'd already said yes to them once.
Well, I think she's a willing recruit.
I don't think anybody could have really blackmailed her, even though, you know, that is an issue.
You know, it just, it seems to me that if Alberto Gonzalez or Jane Harmon could have their reputations back, that they would do anything they could to change the past.
I think that forever more people who know these people and have even a cursory understanding of their history are going to discount them.
And I bet, you know, more than anything that they've gotten, whether it's an appointment to Woodrow Wilson Center or whatever in the world Gonzalez is doing these days, I bet they would do anything to fix history if they could, because they were on the wrong side of history.
Yeah.
Huh.
I guess I never considered Alberto Gonzalez as having a conscience before, but I guess that wouldn't necessarily be required.
He just probably, as he complained publicly, and at times, I'm having a real hard time getting a job as a lawyer.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I'm not, I don't have, I'm not shedding any tears for either of them, but I really do think that they're damaged goods and they will be damaged goods for a long time coming.
So, but anyway, I was hoping, you know, Jeff Stein did a great job in covering that and forcing other media to cover that.
He also beat me to the punch because I've been writing about the AIPAC defamation lawsuit.
And on February 23rd, he beat me to the punch by writing a great article about how that trial, which was revealing a lot of internal secrets about how that premier lobby was running, how that was successfully thrown out.
So, well, yeah.
And that, of course, ties right into this, as you said, you know, she was trying to, or at least agreed to try to get those charges dropped.
I don't know if that part was, well, didn't the Times or the Post develop that angle a little bit further?
She actually did at least try to get the charges, say something to somebody about getting the charges at least reduced.
Her efforts weren't partially successful because, you know, look what happened.
The Obama administration comes into office and it was pretty apparent.
It gave Rosen the confidence to file a defamation suit before it was even dropped.
But, you know, there were efforts underway, which I think will someday be revealed that the Justice Department didn't want to deal with it anymore.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, hold it right there.
There's so much more to go over here.
It's a wild and convoluted story and includes the invasion of Iraq, too, if you ask me.
So we'll get back to that right after this with Grant F. Smith from the Institute for Research, Middle Eastern Policy, IRMEP.org.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Hey, let me say a little bit about the fund drive, Antiwar.com/donate.
We have a very small staff and we have a very select group of writers.
And Antiwar.com, what can you say about it?
It's the best writing organization in the world.
It's the best resource for people who care about what the hell is going on in the world that you could have.
We used to at least get emails all the time from pro-war people would say, look, we're warmongers, but you guys sure do collect a lot of great articles in one place.
Thanks.
And of course, part of having Antiwar.com is having regular essays by writers like Grant Smith.
And sure is a lucky thing we have him, if you ask me.
So that's Antiwar.com/donate.
Now, so Grant, again, is the director of the center.
What is it?
The IRMEP Institute for Research, Middle East Policy.
And we're talking about this sorted kind of at least partially criminal Israeli operation in America, basically the corruption of Jane Harman, the AIPAC suit, which, of course, her case ties into that because she apparently at least was or maybe was actually part of the influence of what got the charges dropped.
Then their story, of course, ties into Larry Franklin, which ties straight to the Office of Special Plans and Douglas Feith and all the guys that lied us into war there, including Larry Franklin's multiple trips to Rome with Michael Ledeen, where they hooked up all the guys who created the Niger-Iranian forgeries and the rest of it.
So this is a big tawdry mess up there.
And as you said, I think Grant, as we were going out to break, the Justice Department is just over it.
They don't even start cases to close down anymore, I guess.
No, I think there's a real demoralization there.
And, you know, I agree that anti-war becomes one of the few places that really digs into this issue by featuring Glenn Greenwald and all the other writers who are really showing this sort of lack of prosecutorial zeal whenever it comes to any of these sort of third-rail issues.
But, you know, there doesn't seem to be any serious effort.
There never was to resolve the Niger-Iranian forgeries.
You've got Don Rumsfeld now on The Daily Show, and he's got a question put to him about the wisdom of the Office of Special Plans and all the garbage that they were putting together to justify the war, and he just skates over it.
So nobody's being held to account.
Really, Stuart asked him about the Office of Special Plans.
Yeah, he did.
I was surprised.
Right on.
And he wouldn't answer it seriously.
You know, Stuart was ribbing him, saying, oh, was it smart to have Douglas Feith there inventing all of these justifications?
And, you know, again, his reputation, despite the book and the book tour, I don't think it's going anywhere fast either.
And what is certain is that more and more and more will be coming out, you know, speculating that maybe there's more coming out on Harmon, which is facilitating her leaving Congress.
You know, you can only keep a secret for so long, and it eventually will come out.
And, you know, just getting back to the whole AIPAC case, as many people know, there was the related defamation suit, which was just terminated this week on the 23rd.
And within the context of that case, you had a former AIPAC employee divulging all sorts of things in court about how the organization really works.
And in the context of that, he revealed his own flight as soon as the FBI was cracking down on him, his flight to Israeli embassy officials to tell him that there's a crackdown coming, which was very suspicious behavior.
He also filed a bunch of papers talking about how AIPAC was able to essentially blackmail some African American politicians with some classified documents about Libyan funding for some of their organizations.
He filed information about U.S. signals intelligence, which was obtained by AIPAC board members and then used in lobbying, annual classified arms briefings that AIPAC was getting of information about all covert U.S. arms sales, classified information about secret U.S. understandings with Saudi Arabia, that was going to AIPAC, information about Khartoum.
So he sent this laundry list, basically, of a whole, you know, raft of espionage taking place over a 20-year period.
I don't think any of it was as serious as the information they were obtaining in 2004, which clearly was geared to set some tripwires so that the U.S. would be forced to attack Iran.
But it really shows, you know, a whole host of illegal activities.
And that's why the defamation suit was such a circus of the absurd that the judge finally shut it down this week because it was getting so absurd.
All of the underlying activities over which AIPAC was defending itself and Rosen was pressing them were illegal activities.
So, you know, it's too bad it got dismissed.
I kind of like this.
It sounds like he had a case that this I mean, basically, their his case is that they said, oh, well, he wasn't supposed to be doing that.
And that is defamation.
That makes him look bad, like he wasn't obeying the rules and doing like AIPAC does.
And you're saying that all this evidence is that, oh, yeah, they do all the time.
Sounds like he's got his case.
Why did it get dismissed?
He had a very solid case that.
But the problem is there is really no forum and there's no law.
You know, defamation cases by nature in the U.S. are really tough.
And the fact that he had to go with the defamation suit as opposed to something else, you know, wrongful termination or something else just shows how limited it was.
I mean, what he was basically trying to do was get them to give him a large multimillion dollar payoff for keeping quiet.
And he even filed the fact that he's got a book deal as part of the pressure on AIPAC to make them pay up so that he won't sing.
But the judge basically ruled that the organization had to make him look, quote, odious, infamous or ridiculous.
And, you know, that none of this the statements that he wasn't comporting with their standards could be proved false in front of a jury.
And so it looks as though the judge really didn't want to get into putting together a jury to review AIPAC's, you know, decisions before their employees.
And he would never touch anything involving the illegalities underlying the case.
Right.
You know, so.
That's just the fun side effect is all this discovery.
I mean, if you let this thing go forward, his next case would have been the former Pentagon official suing a military contractor over failing to split a kickback.
So, you know, the whole thing was so ridiculous, given the underlying illegal activity that I think he just wanted to get the thing out of his court as soon as possible.
So, you know, Larry Franklin told Haaretz when he finally started talking that the FBI asked him about virtually the entire neocon crew at the Pentagon.
And they had, you know, and it wasn't just, gee, is Ariel Sharon, you know, funneling intelligence to the Americans to use through the stovepipe?
It was specific criminal activity, like, for example, letting Ahmed Chalabi know that the Americans had broken the Iranian codes and how he immediately turned around and gave that information to the Americans, stuff like that.
And apparently, you know, I mean, who were Chalabi's friends in the Pentagon?
We know who they were, Richard Pearl and Douglas Fyfe, Elliott Abrams and all those guys.
Right.
And it would have been wonderful.
I mean, if somehow in our, you know, utterly debased Justice Department, they could have come up with a way to indict for criminal activities at that level, it would have been absolutely amazing.
But Larry Franklin also said something else.
You know, there was also a man who offered to help Franklin disappear.
And that's been done several times before when when U.S. people are under the gun and helpful Israeli lobbyists want to get them out of the country.
And he he was asked, well, who was the person who was going to help you escape the United States, Colonel Franklin?
And he said, basically, quote, it's one of these people who's beyond good and evil.
They're not subject to the laws.
The rest of us are, unquote.
And that's the people you're talking about, the people who, you know, for whatever, well, not whatever reason, because of position, power, blackmail ability, the networks they're involved in, that basically this this uber class of citizens of this country who can't be held to account for anything they do.
And Richard Perle and Douglas Fyfe are clearly part of that.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, I wonder about how criminal it is just funneling in the bogus intelligence, as the Guardian and The Nation reported, Bob Dreyfuss and Julian Borger in reverse order.
You know, Sharon actually was having bogus intelligence manufactured and stove piped in.
It seems like that would be criminal itself.
If it were you or me doing something like that, it'd be wire fraud.
It depends on who you are.
Yeah, exactly.
That's the funny thing about this is, you know, all the prosecutors haven't been over backwards to figure out ways to prosecute these people.
If we're talking about a regular American citizen, they'll get you on, you know, accepting junk mail and call it mail fraud or something.
If they got to, they can pin anything on a regular American.
Dual standard.
Yeah, exactly.
All right.
Well, listen, always appreciate your time on the show, Grant.
It's great to catch up.
And it's it's nice for me to know that people know a little bit more about how the Israel lobby works in Washington, D.C.
So appreciate it.
Thanks a lot, Scott.
See ya.
