Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 6/8/23 Ben Freeman on the Think Tanks Helping Weapons Companies Make Sales

Episode Date: June 13, 2023

Ben Freeman of the Quincy Institute joins the show to discuss his latest research on cronyism in American foreign policy. Freeman examined the top Think Tanks working to influence lawmakers in Washington and American public opinion through media. He found a lot of undisclosed funding coming from weapons companies. On top of that, many experts at these organizations were publicly for the purchase of the explicit weapons that their funders produced. Freeman lays out what he found and names some of the top organizations and companies taking part in this racket.  Discussed on the show: “How weapons firms influence the Ukraine debate” (Responsible Statecraft) “Lockheed Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” (Corpwatch.com [formerly published at Playboy]) Ben Freeman is a Research Fellow at the Quincy Institute. He previously served as Director of the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative with the Center for International Policy. Read his work at Antiwar.com and Responsible Statecraft. Follow him on Twitter @BenFreemanDC. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and The Brand New, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton.4 you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show all right you guys on the line i've got ben freeman from the quincy institute responsible statecraft is the name of their website responsible statecraft dot org where he writes

great things welcome back how you doing ben I'm doing great, Scott. Always a pleasure to be talking with you. Great. Happy to have you here. What a great piece you wrote. How weapons firms influence the Ukraine debate. Well, come on. Aren't they bound by some sort of honor system to stay out of the argument about whether we should be, you know, shopping for their wares? Right, yeah. Scouts honor. The defense contractors are always going to do the right thing, right? Yeah. Yeah. No, but so you're telling me they would be so cynical as to finance the think tanks that recommend that the U.S. government purchased big ticket items from them. Right, right. I would tell you that. And I know, you know, this is a topic that I'm sure is not going to surprise any of your listeners.

And really, anyone who's been paying attention to the Ukraine debate, you know, knows that most of the talking heads that you see on TV are in the papers or, you know, on most radio stations. you know, not called the Scott Horton show, you know, they're hearing from folks that are on the take of the defense industry. So what we tried to do was to see if our hunch was right. We did a big investigation of it. And what we found was that your hunch is absolutely right. All the talking heads you're hearing are at least in part on or de facto on the payroll of the defense sector. And so the full PDF file is called Defense Contractor, funded think tanks to dominate Ukraine debate. And so, look, I mean, it's just one pretty sharp peek into what President Eisenhower called the military industrial complex.

Of course, the military firms funnel the smallest percentage of their taxpayer revenue back into public relations to keep the whole thing going. Were they going to not do that? Of course they're going to do that. then it turns out that there's not really anybody else on the same ball field with them. So virtually all the foreign policy think tanks, with maybe a very few exceptions, are financed by Lockheed, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, et cetera, correct? I mean, what are the exceptions? I'm sure it'd be a lot shorter list.

That's right. Yeah, I mean, it was overwhelming when we started looking in at the funding of all these think tanks. In fact, the top 10 ranked foreign policy think tanks, every single one of them takes defense sector money. You know, if you go back out a little bit from that, you start looking at the top 25, still most of those. So 78% of those take defense sector money. And you do have a few exceptions, you know, places like the Quincy Institute, of course, we don't take any defense industry or DOD money, places like the independent institute, human rights watch, you know, folks like that. but most of the big players and really most of the folks you hear on these big media outlets their employers are all funded by the defense industry and now the coax they do have interests

but not military ones that's never been their deal so right the whole coctopus is a bit independent from that yeah that's right and you know folks like to point out the quincy institute is partially funded through Coke money. But the Cokes have gotten out of Russia. You know, they've given up all their business interests there. So we at QI, we don't have a dog in the fight when it comes to the Ukraine war. We just want what's best for U.S. foreign policy. We want a lively debate about what's best for U.S. foreign policy.

But what this report reveals is that the supposed public debate that we're having, is a debate that is overwhelmingly biased towards defense industry interests. Now, I mean, I know it would be naive. I understand the current system and everything, but this should be all completely blatant conflict of interest. This isn't just, geez, they sort of, you know, they have a bias. This is unbelievable that Lockheed gets to play this big of a role in setting the entire discussion. of American foreign policy the way that they do. Right, right, right.

Yeah, it's phenomenal. And that was another big thing that we found is, you know, not only is there all this defense sector money flowing to all these think tanks, that these think tanks, when they're producing articles, reports of their own, that have direct financial benefits for those funders,

and they're not disclosing. So they're putting out reports that, for example, recommend sending arms to Ukraine, in specific arms made by specific people who we know specifically fund the think tank they work at. And yet in all these articles, these reports, they're just not disclosing that conflict of interest. And for us, at the very least, that they should be doing that in these articles. And media outlets that they're quoting them, you know, it's incumbent upon them when they're citing these articles and reports. Let your readers know that that expert you're citing who says,

We should send tanks, our F-16s, to Ukraine. Let your readers know that that person works at a place that's funded by the manufacturers of those weapons that recommend sending to Ukraine. Yeah. Or better yet, label it. This is a paid advertisement from this corporation, and we're not even running as an op-ed at all because it would be a conflict of interest. You know, I don't know.

So can you go through, first of all? for the people not familiar which are the top 10 think tanks if you could do that off the top of your head and and who are the top funders of them yeah yeah yeah good good question let's see if i get the top 10 right uh i mean it's an interesting correlation here you know right off the bat or our top foreign policy think tanks are some probably household names for a lot of your your listeners places like the center for strategic and international studies the center for a new american security, the Atlantic Council, the Brookings Institution, the Council on Foreign Relations, RAND as well, which is effectively the DOD's own think tank. You know, it's almost a majority of

its money is funded by DOD itself. So in all of these places are all the top foreign policy think tanks. But every single one of those thing tanks I just mentioned there, they take big, big money from the defense sector. You know, the Atlanta Council and CSIS, for example, they were our sort of, you know, prime examples in the report of think tanks where we're seeing this process go on, where they're heavily funded by the defense sector, defense contractors, and they're heavily quoted in media outlets. In fact, they were the top, too, you know, most quoted media outlets that we found related to the Ukraine war.

And over and over again, we saw scholars at those think tanks recommending that the U.S. provide weapons to Ukraine that would directly financially benefit the funders of their think tank. Yeah, and you watch your mouth of the Atlantic Council will get you kicked off a Twitter for misinformation. They'll have Politifact, fact check your article, and see whether they like every bit of it or not. I welcome them to. You know, at the end of the day, I'm a researcher. And so, you know, we did our due diligence on it. This report was four months in the making.

And so, you know, we painstakingly went through all these articles. We looked at more than a thousand different articles where think tanks have been cited. We looked at the Atlanta Council's publications, you know, droves of them. CSIS, same thing. All these think tanks. You know, we did our due diligence. So, you know, I welcome anybody to take a look at the report. And, you know, if they've got questions, you know, they can bring them to me.

I'm happy to discuss that. No, they'll just accuse you of being a Russian plant and leave it at that. They'll say, this is disinformation and they won't have to demonstrate it. And the Atlantic Council, I mean, really, I'm just making a crack about the role that they've played in the censorship industry since the invention of Russia Gate and COVID in the Ukraine War, that they've been really central to who's allowed to discuss the policies that they demand at the behest of these armed salesmen. That's right. And that's really how this think tank eco-chamber and funding enterprise works. You know, at the end of the day, these are multi-million dollars. They're ostensibly nonprofit organizations, right?

Think tanks are. But some of these think tanks, like the Brookings Institution, for example, they have a budget that's almost $100 million. And so when you're trying to fill those coffers, you at some level, you have to be beholden to your funders. And those funders, they're just not going to keep giving you money if you say things that they don't like. So this whole system then, it becomes sort of Darwinian. And it's the survival of the funded.

So if you don't play ball with these big money funders, with these defense contractors who in some cases are giving millions of dollars to these think tanks, if you as a scholar there keep saying things that they don't like, you will get fired. You will lose your job or that thing tank will stop receiving money from that defense contractor. And that thing tank, in some cases, think tanks go out of business because funders, they pull the money they're providing to them. So all of this helps to create this sort of funding ecosystem that results in an eco chamber that benefits the defense sector. And I love how in your study here you have footnotes to all their crazy hoggish. articles to demonstrating your case. All right, so I have a fun anecdote from a long time ago.

It's Richard Cummings. I think we probably talked about this before because it's one of the few anecdotes I remember. Richard Cummings wrote this great article for Playboy.com in 2007 called Lockheed Stock and two smoking barrels. And it was about, you know, everybody always emphasized the neoconservatives ties to Lekud. And he said, yeah, yeah, but look at their ties. to Lockheed and how so many of, especially the Bush administration, neocons in the vice president's office and the Defense Department, the National Security Council and so forth, that these guys, including Dick Cheney's wife, was on the board of directors of Lockheed. And so many of these guys were directly tied to it. And then he told the history of how, and I can never remember the plane. I know I need to memorize it for my anecdote. But they had developed this plane in the 70s that was supposed to compete with a DC-10 or a 737. I guess. And it didn't. I think Delta bought a few of them and then it was a flop. Nobody wanted the plane and they'd spent a couple of billion dollars developing the thing. And so they said,

well, that's it. We're just not going to compete in the market anymore. We're going to target the Pentagon only as our one and only captive customer. And then we'll just emphasize, you know, put all of our engineering and development into controlling Congress and gerrymandering house districts and financing think tanks and they even held a meeting where they said, you know, even if it's just the one customer, if we don't set the policy, how are we going to know what kind of weapons to build? So we need to come up with what the policy is. That way we know whether we should build tanks for the sand or tanks for the woods or tanks for the what. And so that's just how it goes. It makes perfect sense from their point of view. It's perfectly

rational. It's just as somebody's supposed to be organized to stop them, but they're not. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, because everybody here is incentive, there's a financial incentive to not stop them and just, you know, become part of this complex. And at the end of the day, you know, I think it's very disingenuous to call Lockheed a private company. This is crony capitalism. This is a company that, you know, has the one customer, like you mentioned, the vast, vast majority of their revenue comes from that one customer. And then they spend literally tens of millions, some some cases hundreds of millions of dollars a year trying to influence that customer, to try and influence the foreign policy

debate to benefit their bottom line. And the result of it all is a U.S. foreign policy that is way more militarized than it would otherwise be. Hang on just one second. Hey, y'all, the audiobook of my book, Enough Already. Time to end the War on Terrorism is finally done. Yes, of course, read by me.

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All right, so tell me which are the biggest arms industry brand names that we know besides Lockheed? Are they still the top of the heap when it comes to spending on this kind of thing? Yeah, yeah, Lockheed is still, you know, far and away number one. You know, when it comes to Think Tank funding, though, some of the big players are some of the other top five, you know, folks like Braytheon, Northrop Grumman, general dynamics. They were big, big funders, too, you know, millions of dollars every year going from these folks to think tanks. And so, you know, Lockheed's certainly not the only player here. You know, all these other folks are doing this too. And I think in all these cases, we're able to identify whether, you know, whether it's Lockheed Northrop Grumman,

we're able to identify in this report in forthcoming articles, too, how that, those specific funders and funding think tanks, those think tanks are recommending specific weapons that are made by those specific funders. This is not even like a blanket thing that these think tanks are just, you know, calling for a more militarized foreign policy. Right. In many, many cases that we documented in the report, those think tanks are explicitly calling for the weapons made by these specific firms that fund them.

And so, you know, it's just, it's hard to imagine that all of them. this is just coincidental. And like, oops, you know, I'm sorry. I just keep recommending over and over the product that you make. Yeah, I'll never forget General McCaffrey shilling Bradley fighting vehicles during Iraq War II, even though, you know, they had, I guess, very lightly armored bottoms and were quite susceptible to IEDs. And he's still going, no, we got to get those bradley's over there more bradley's more bradley's right he's on the board of directors of the company that made the bradley's and they never said that speaking of the iraq war too scott one one of my favorite new examples of this process is uh is elliott who was famously one of the uh one of the neocons

back in the bush administration who you know was seemingly clamoring for iraq war too you know wrote articles about you know how it would be you know one article a big study for heritage about how we're going to privatize all their oil for our cronies and get this, bankrupt the Saudis and take over OPEC. Right. Really smart guy. Yeah. And now he's back again talking about the Ukraine war.

You know, he's a scholar at CSIS now. And he's opining now about the Ukraine war and how the U.S. needs to provide him with all these weapons and everything. But you go through what he's recommending. And all the weapons he's recommending the U.S. give to Ukraine are made by firms that fund his employer, CSIS. And none of this is disclosed in the articles he's writing about this. And, you know, I flagged this for the article. He has a piece in the Atlantic.

I flagged it for him on Twitter. He hit a snarky tweet at me that he deleted. But in all these cases, you know, he is, he's recommending these things that could very well lead to an escalation of the war, drag the U.S. into it, without disclosing what I think is a very clear conflict of interest here. You know, I met a leftist one time years ago who said that, you know, America is not even really a place. America is just where foreigners come and hire this giant mercenary army to do their dirty work for them, which makes sense, you know, like there are anecdotes of the Saudis and the Kuwaitis,

talking about forward march, white trash slave, you know, like all of a sudden who's the, you know, Americans can be very racist against Arabs, but it's like, hey, wait a minute. What do you just call me? You know? But then, so it's the same kind of thing with, it's the same kind of thing with these arms manufacturers too, where the idea of any sort of patriotism or sense of, you know, responsibility in this society at all or for its future at all, or just have absolutely nothing to do with any consideration. here. And, you know, they would just rather continue to fight forever until America's destroyed

because it's in it for them in the short-term interest, it makes sense, you know? Right, right, 100%. For them, war is a business. War is literally their business. You know, they make money when wars occur. And they even tell their stockholders this on earnings calls. You know, my colleague Eli Clifton has documented this over and over how they have publicly stated, They're looking at the Ukraine war as a business opportunity. And the problem is that this creates this militarized U.S. response to this war, which is absolutely not what U.S. citizens want. And I'm going to spoil some forthcoming Quincy Institute public opinion work that we have coming out in a couple weeks. But basically what we found in it was that Americans overwhelmingly they want the U.S. to pursue a diplomatic solution.

to this war. They don't want this war to keep going on. They want the U.S. to do more, to try to get all parties to come to the table to end this thing peacefully without keeping it going and keeping the risks of all these other bad things happening out there. So where the American public has a more restrained foreign policy view here, the defense contractors keep pushing this militarized narrative for the Ukraine war. Right. Well, so what do we do about it? Who is organized to stop them other than you and Eli, who I've been relying on for so many years? Yeah. My colleague Bill Hartung, too, all my colleagues at the Institute are wonderful. But Bill Hartung actually has a new report coming out, too, on the waste in the overall Pentagon budget that I think all your

listeners would love too. You know, we're trying, you know, there are a few other good groups. I mentioned the Independent Institute earlier. They're wonderful. You know, we've got Chris Preble and those folks over at the Stimson Center now, you know, our friends at the Cato Institute, you know, in a few other places, too. There are still some good voices here in this space. But I think what we need to do is we've got to get those folks out there. You know, we've got to get where there's folks talking, you know, to folks like you and media outlets. And, you know, we need to find some way to get our voices, you know, wedge the door into some of these mainstream media outlets. So, you know, we can go head to head in these policy debates in places like the New York Times, the post, and, you know, get on CNN, you know, get us on Fox News.

Because if we don't do that, then at the end of the day, we're not having a public debate on the Ukraine war. we're having a public echo chamber. Yeah. Well, you know, it's funny because it sounds kind of utopian, but also completely basic and rational at the same time to me that the way it should work is whatever American firms are required to make tanks and fighting vehicles and armaments for our military, that they would all be required to do that, not at cost plus, but at cost, that's it.

And if they want to make their profits, They're going to have to make their profits in other sectors. That's what made them successful manufacturing firms in the first place. But when it comes to arming up the military, well, that's your patriotic duty. And if we really have a crisis overseas that we have to meet, then I'm sure General Motors won't mind turning out some tanks at cost. I mean, after all, at least at cost is not like the guys, we're not covering the salaries of the guys putting the tanks together.

But no, you don't get to profit from that. And no, you don't get to buy advertisements on TV to make NBC beholden to you, and you don't get to fund the think tanks that hire the Kagan's to dominate the discussion on all of these wars. You know, it's just completely bananas. I mean, I think if you just grabbed any average person anywhere and said, do you think that Northrop Grumman and the Kagan's consensus should always be the choice of the U.S. government and who we kill? and what they do overseas and all these things. It just makes no sense. Robert Kagan runs Pinnak, his wife runs CNAS. Yeah, and she was Dick Cheney's Middle East advisor there for a while,

or national security advisor for a while. Before she went, she's been working for the Democrats ever since then. It's completely bananas. And simply because some arms dealers said, hey, we really like the cut of her jib. You know, there's got to be more to it than that, you know? It should not be this way. Everyone could tell you, anyone could tell you, should not be like this.

Right, right. I mean, it's folks like that that are, they make the job of the defense contractors easy because they, you know, when they're funding folks like that, they don't have to censor them. You know, they don't have to tell them, you know, say this and say that. They've already hired them in the first place because they know they're going to say the things that they want. And so that's why when we think about think tank funding, everybody thinks. things like, oh, well, you know, it's going to, it's going to bias people. It's going to, you know, we're going to have some, you know, salacious censorship scandal. Most of the time, what they're doing

here, they're just controlling who gets a microphone and who doesn't. Yeah. They get to effectively have a veto on who becomes the head of these think tanks, who are the most prominent scholars, who get the most media coverage. And because they have all their people in place to begin with, they don't have to do the outright censorship just because they control the think tank environment so much. Right. Well, yeah, I mean, there's the famous clip. I mean, there's, I'm sure other examples too, but there's the famous clip of Noam Chomsky telling the British interviewer who's saying, oh, you just think that I'm faking it and I don't believe the things I'm saying. And Chomsky's like, no, man, I'm just saying that they hired you because you are who you are and you believe the things that you believe.

and that's why you're the one sitting in the chair asking me these questions in the first place. Don't you get it? And he's like, oh, yeah, I guess that does make sense. I forget exactly what he says, but it's basically like, yeah, okay. So let me ask you this, then. What about George Soros in the Quincy Institute? I think I read a thing that says that the Cokes and Soros were, you know, in fact, it was a bit of a scandal in the first place, I guess,

that the Cokes and Soros were teaming up in what seemed like the best. way to some of us in the way that worried people when you guys, when the Quincy Institute was first founded. But I think I read that George Soros got mad about y'all's stance on Ukraine and said he wasn't going to fund y'all anymore. Is that right? Oh, I'm not familiar with that. I guess that's a, I, I haven't heard that. So I can't really speak to that. But I can tell you, you know, more generally about, you know, working at an organization that does have Soros in Coke funding. And by the way, I was at an organization before Quincy.

I was at the Center for International Policy, which also had money from both receive funding from both Soros and Coke. And I'll tell you in both places, it's the same. I would always get, you know, the Twitter trolls come at you. You know, everybody's, you know, ridiculing that and everything. At the end of the day, I have never once had either of those organizations

censored anything. tell me I couldn't say something or tell me I had to do something, whatever. None of that. They've exerted no control or restraint over the work that I've done. And the reason for that is simple. Those organizations, they're pursuing peace. They're pursuing diplomacy. They're pursuing a more restrained U.S. foreign policy. And that's exactly what those organizations are funding them to do. And so, you know, just like in a sense, you know, how Lockheed Martin is funding some of these think tanks to pursue, advocate for a more militarized U.S. foreign policy, you know, folks like George Soros and the Kochs, you know, they want a more restraint foreign policy. And that's why they fund the work that we do. And so, you know, is there a bias in our work because of that funding? Yes, it's a bias towards restrict. And that's what they want. And that's certainly what we want. And that's certainly what we want. want to and you know from the beginning i stuck up for you guys because all this is is jim lobes blog plus my best friends from the american conservative magazine and so forth the people that we've been

running on antiwar dot com for 20 years and more yeah so you know eli clifton and kelly vlahos and all you great people i mean eli's one of the co-founders of the thing that's right yeah yeah And of course, Andrew Bacevich and Trita Parsi, I've known Trita for 15, 20 years, something like that now. Right, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I really viewed the Quincy Institute when Bill Hartung and I joined together. You know, I felt like it was like we were joining the Avengers late in the game. You know, besides, it was like the Avengers of a peaceful restraint-oriented folks. You know, it's a great collection of people from, you know, across the ideological spectrum, all kinds of backgrounds.

But I think all doing just really kick-up work. Well, you know, I Googled it while you were talking, and I can't find it. So I don't know where the hell I got that. I thought that I had remembered that Soros was complaining about, you know, the little mini scandal when Joe Sorincioni went and turned coat and started complaining about Quincy and the media and so forth. I thought that Soros had made a comment then, but I guess I might have been wrong about that. And yet, you know what, as long as we're at it, go ahead and go ahead and go through. through that list again because there's so many great people

that write for the Quincy Institute including our own Ted Snyder from time to time. Yeah. Yeah, Ted, I mean, you mentioned Bill Hartung there. Yeah, Bill Hartung, Ben Armbruster, my colleagues, Anatole-Levin, and George Beebe, you know, these are guys that, you know, just career folks,

you know, understanding what's going on in Russia and Eastern Europe. You know, the level of expertise, you know, is a astounding that responsible state craft gets. And, you know, they're getting it over and over and over again because it's one of the few places that you can turn to for an objective look at U.S. foreign policy and where you have people that, you know, they're not biased by the defense sector. You know, we don't take any defense industry funding. And so you're going to get analyses at responsible statecraft that you're really, you're not going to see in a lot of other places. got that right good thing too all right and with that

I'll let you go man thank you so much for your time on the show and for all your great work always a pleasure Scott and thank you for this show it's much needed all right thanks man appreciate that all right you guys that's Ben Freeman he's at quincy it's responsible statecraft.org how weapons firms

influence the Ukraine debate and the actual study itself oh no I got to rewind to the top the actual study itself is called defense contractor funded think tanks dominate Ukraine debate. May 23, Quincy Brief number 41. Excellent stuff.

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