Michael Klare, professor and author of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet, discusses his article “Is Barack Obama Morphing Into Dick Cheney;” the Bush and Obama administrations’ striking policy similarities on oil geopolitics; peak oil theory and the disappearance of “easy” oil; Cheney’s National Energy Policy of 2001, which adivsed more oil imports from Africa; and Obama’s expansion of AFRICOM to pursue terrorist threats on the continent (of course limited to the oil-producing regions).
Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, a TomDispatch regular, and the author, most recently, of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet. A documentary movie version of his previous book, Blood and Oil, is available from the Media Education Foundation. His newest book, The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources, is due out in March.
Francis A. Boyle, Professor at the University of Illinois College of Law, discusses the conviction of former President Bush, Dick Cheney and six members of the administration for war crimes (in absentia, in a Malaysian court); why the “torture memos,” concocted by John Yoo and Jay Bybee, amount to criminal conspiracy and can’t be excused as legal counsel; the Ninth Circuit Court’s questionable rejection of Jose Padilla’s torture suit against Yoo; evidence that the Obama administration hasn’t closed the secret prisons or stopped torture; and Boyle’s pending case in the International Criminal Court against the Bush administration’s primary actors.
Professor Boyle received a J.D. degree magna cum laude and A.M. and Ph.D. degrees in political science from Harvard University. Prior to joining the faculty at the College of Law, he was a teaching fellow at Harvard and an associate at its Center for International Affairs. He also practiced tax and international tax with Bingham, Dana & Gould in Boston.
He has written and lectured extensively in the United States and abroad on the relationship between international law and politics. His Protesting Power: War, Resistance and Law (Rowman & Littlefield Inc. 2007) has been used successfully in anti-war protest trials. In the September 2000 issue of the prestigious The International History Review, Professor Boyle’s Foundations of World Order: The Legalist Approach to International Relations (1898-1922) was proclaimed as “a major contribution to this reinterrogation of the past” and “required reading for historians, political scientists, international relations specialists, and policy-makers.” That book was translated into Korean and published in Korea in 2003 by Pakyoungsa Press.
As an internationally recognized expert, Professor Boyle serves as counsel to Bosnia and Herzegovina and to the Provisional Government of the State of Palestine. He also represents two associations of citizens within Bosnia and has been instrumental in developing the indictment against Slobodan Milosevic for committing genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Professor Boyle is Attorney of Record for the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, conducting its legal affairs on a worldwide basis. Over his career, he has represented national and international bodies including the Blackfoot Nation (Canada), the Nation of Hawaii, and the Lakota Nation, as well as numerous individual death penalty and human rights cases. He has advised numerous international bodies in the areas of human rights, war crimes and genocide, nuclear policy, and bio-warfare.
From 1991-92, Professor Boyle served as Legal Advisor to the Palestinian Delegation to the Middle East Peace Negotiations. He also has served on the Board of Directors of Amnesty International, as well as a consultant to the American Friends Services Committee, and on the Advisory Board for the Council for Responsible Genetics. He drafted the U.S. domestic implementing legislation for the Biological Weapons Convention, known as the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, that was approved unanimously by both Houses of the U.S. Congress and signed into law by President George H.W. Bush. That story is told in his book Biowarfare and Terrorism (Clarity Press: 2005).
In 2001 he was selected to be the Dr. Irma M. Parhad Lecturer by the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Calgary in Canada. In 2007 he became the Bertrand Russell Peace Lecturer at McMaster University in Canada. Professor Boyle is listed in the current edition of Marquis’ Who’s Who in America.
The Other Scott Horton (no relation), international human rights lawyer, professor and contributing editor at Harper’s magazine, discusses how the “Cheney doctrine” continues to dominate US policy ten years after 9/11; Cheney’s aggressive pro-torture propaganda book tour, meant to be a preemptive strike against his possible prosecution; why many Americans trust the government to torture and kill wisely and judiciously; and the double standard of US torture prosecutions, whereby the son of Liberia’s Charles Taylor gets 97 years while Cheney remains a free man.
The other Scott Horton is a Contributing Editor for Harper’s magazine where he writes the No Comment blog. A New York attorney known for his work in emerging markets and international law, especially human rights law and the law of armed conflict, Horton lectures at Columbia Law School. A life-long human rights advocate, Scott served as counsel to Andrei Sakharov and Elena Bonner, among other activists in the former Soviet Union.
He is a co-founder of the American University in Central Asia, and has been involved in some of the most significant foreign investment projects in the Central Eurasian region. Scott recently led a number of studies of abuse issues associated with the conduct of the war on terror for the New York City Bar Association, where he has chaired several committees, including, most recently, the Committee on International Law. He is also a member of the board of the National Institute of Military Justice, the Andrei Sakharov Foundation, the EurasiaGroup and the American Branch of the International Law Association.
Jason Leopold, investigative reporter and Deputy Managing Editor of Truthout, discusses how a new $35 million bribe convinced Nigeria to forget about extraditing former Halliburton CEO and vice president Dick Cheney on bribery charges; new developments in the previously-discussed Malaria drug-experimentation on Guantanamo prisoners; the numerous government agencies that signed off on the controversial treatment; and how the medical records of Guantanamo prisoners are being withheld out of “privacy concerns.”
Jason Leopold is an investigative reporter and the Deputy Managing Editor of Truthout. His in-depth coverage includes the US Attorney firing scandal, the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilsion and the Bush administration’s torture program. He is a two-time winner of the Project Censored award for his investigative work on Halliburton and Enron, and in March 2008, was awarded the Thomas Jefferson award by The Military Religious Freedom Foundation for a series of stories on the rise of Christian fundamentalism in the US military.
Leopold also received the Dow Jones Newswires Journalist of the Year Award in 2001 for his reporting on Enron and the California energy crisis. He has worked as an editor and reporter at the Los Angeles Times and was Los Angeles bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires. He is the author of the Los Angeles Times bestseller, News Junkie, a memoir.
The Other Scott Horton (no relation), international human rights lawyer, professor and contributing editor at Harper’s magazine, discusses the extraordinary effort by the US State Department to scuttle the indictments of American government and military officials in Spanish courts; how the US embassy in Madrid effectively manipulated Spanish prosecutors, judges and the judicial system at large; the leaked diplomatic cable addressed to Condi Rice about German rendition victim Khaled El-Masri and the successful US effort to stop the indictment of 13 CIA officers in a German court; the appearance that subsequent DOJ investigations were initiated only to provide an excuse for European governments to quash their own investigations; how the vigorous government cover-ups of Bush administration crimes shows Obama wasn’t kidding about not “looking back;” and the pending Nigerian indictment of Dick Cheney in connection with the huge bribery scandal during his tenure as Halliburton CEO.
The other Scott Horton is a Contributing Editor for Harper’s magazine where he writes the No Comment blog. A New York attorney known for his work in emerging markets and international law, especially human rights law and the law of armed conflict, Horton lectures at Columbia Law School. A life-long human rights advocate, Scott served as counsel to Andrei Sakharov and Elena Bonner, among other activists in the former Soviet Union.
He is a co-founder of the American University in Central Asia, and has been involved in some of the most significant foreign investment projects in the Central Eurasian region. Scott recently led a number of studies of abuse issues associated with the conduct of the war on terror for the New York City Bar Association, where he has chaired several committees, including, most recently, the Committee on International Law. He is also a member of the board of the National Institute of Military Justice, the Andrei Sakharov Foundation, the EurasiaGroup and the American Branch of the International Law Association.
Karen Kwiatkowski, columnist at LewRockwell.com and retired USAF lieutenant colonel, discusses the neocon infiltration of the formerly decent Hudson Institute, her firsthand account of how the Office of Special Plans lied us into the Iraq War, Col. David Hackworth’s pushback against OSP propaganda and why the Iraq War instigators are now directing their war cries toward Iran.
Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D., is a retired USAF Lieutenant Colonel, who spent her final years in uniform working at the Pentagon’s Near East/South Asia bureau (NESA). Her assignment was to work on policy papers for the Secretary of Defense and other top brass at the Pentagon. Shortly thereafter, she was assigned to a newly-formed bureau inside the Pentagon called the Office of Special Plans, which was created to help the Pentagon deal with issues in Iraq.
Deeply frustrated and alarmed, Kwiatkowski, still on active duty, took the unusual step of penning an anonymous column of internal Pentagon dissent that was posted on the Internet by former Colonel David Hackworth, America’s most decorated veteran. She lives with her freedom-loving family in the Shenandoah Valley, and among other things, writes for lewrockwell.com.
Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, discusses why Bush and Cheney must have known most Guantanamo prisoners were innocent, the US military’s inability to do battlefield vetting of Afghan war prisoners, Cheney’s reversal of the Blackstone formulation on the wrongful imprisonment of innocents, how Colin Powell and others were kept out of the loop about intelligence based on tortured confessions, how the intelligence failures on Iraq WMD were in part due to compensating for missing Saddam’s real program in 1990-91 and why Douglas Feith and Richard Perle are essentially representatives of Israel’s Likud party.
Larry Wilkerson is a retired United States Army Colonel and former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell.
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Scott Horton interviews Col. Lawrence Wilkerson July 2, 2010
Scott Horton: All right, y’all, welcome back to the show. It’s Antiwar Radio, I’m Scott Horton, and our next guest on the show today is retired Col. Larry Wilkerson. He helped lie us into war with Iraq and he’s regretted it ever since. Now he’s at the New America Foundation. Was an aide to Secretary of State Colin Powell. Welcome to the show. How are you doing, Larry?
Lawrence Wilkerson: Doing fine.
Horton: Appreciate your joining us here. Now, this is kind of old news, but what’s so old about it? It’s all still going on. From April 9, of this year, 2010, “George W. Bush ‘Knew Guantanamo Prisoners Were Innocent’,” in the Sunday Times, which normally I would think if it’s in the Sunday Times, it’s not true, but here they’re quoting you, and you seem like an honest guy, so why don’t you tell us about it?
Wilkerson: I believe that as soon as we got the 740 or so prisoners out of Afghanistan to Guantanamo, that we knew there had been improper battlefield vetting; that is to say, there were too few troops in Afghanistan, U.S. troops, to do the kind of combat status review tribunals, the other things under the Geneva Conventions that are normally done, that indeed we’ve done in every war since World War I, even before that, and so what happened was that no U.S. soldiers were involved really significantly in their capture. There were Pakistanis, there were warlords, there were Northern Alliance troops and so forth involved, but there really weren’t any U.S. personnel involved. So this complement of prisoners came to Guantanamo having been swept up on the battlefield by all manner of people other than the U.S. and having had no battlefield vetting whatsoever.
So when we got them there, it was clear that there were people there who didn’t belong there. We had people who were over 90 years old. We had 12-year-olds, 13-year-olds, 14-year-olds, 16-year-olds. We had British citizens. We had Australian citizens and so forth. We had foreign ministers like Jack Straw from London, for example, a good friend of Colin’s, asking us immediately to repatriate these people because they were our allies – the UK, arguably our special relationship ally – and yet we wouldn’t do that.
So it became clear, I think, to the highest levels in the U.S. government quite swiftly in 2002 that we had people at Guantanamo we didn’t know much about at all. Some of them might be hardcore terrorists, some of them might be nothing more than soldiers, drivers and that sort of thing, and a whole bunch of them, maybe even the majority of them, might be nothing more than people who had been swept up on a battlefield that was quite chaotic, and incidentally swept up at times for bonuses that we were paying. We paid $5000 to a Pakistani, for example, for capturing someone, so what’d he do, he goes out and he captures his enemy and makes $5000 off of it. If he’s Taliban, that’s great. If he’s al Qaeda, that’s even better. But normally they weren’t. They were just people that the Pakistani made $5000 off because he didn’t like him very much.
Horton: Well now, on one hand, Secretary Powell, and the vice president, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, and everyone must have known this because I think quite a bit of this was in the media, at least, if you’re reading The Guardian or something, this wasn’t, you know, it was pretty apparent that they were sort of just sweeping up people and paying bounties and that kind of thing early on. But, here you are, you’re a former high-level official in the government and you’re saying you know for a fact that these men knew. How do you know for a fact that these men knew? Did you all see the same papers and you know they saw the same papers, or you were in the room when Colin Powell and Dick Cheney discussed this, or what?
Wilkerson: No, a lot of this is my surmise with regard to the vice president and the president. I mean it’s very difficult for me to see what I saw and know what I knew, listening to deliberations that Secretary Powell went through with, for example, his Ambassador for War Crimes, Pierre Prosper, and others and not believe that my president and my vice president knew how screwed up they were at Guantanamo. Furthermore, I know what the philosophy was, and the philosophy was that if you’ve got one terrorist in jail, who cares if you’ve got 500 innocent people in jail? It’s worth it. It’s worth it for two reasons: One, because you may be able, because the people you’ve got who are innocent came from the same region, the same country, the same area, often the same province as the terrorist, you may be able to get information out of them that may be helpful. So that’s the first reason. The second reason is, who cares if you sweep innocent people up as long as you get the bad guy? I mean, if you read Ron Suskind’s book, you understand that that was pretty much the philosophy that Vice President Cheney exercised all the time.
On the other side of the coin, I heard the discussions that took place every morning at 8:30 in the conference room when we met with the assistant secretary and the under secretaries and office heads and so forth, and people like Pierre who were dealing with this issue of trying to repatriate people, trying to get people who weren’t guilty of anything other than having been swept up on the battlefield, like the teenagers and the 90-year-old man and so forth, out of Guantanamo and back to their country. Or in the case of people we didn’t know anything about, which I think was the majority of them, back to a country where the same kind of process could be pursued, perhaps even better pursued, as in the UK – after all they had experience with Northern Ireland and so forth and a lot more terrorist experience than we did – and getting them back to them so that they could do it. All this conversation went on day after day after day, but nothing ever happened.
The Uighers were another case in point. I think everyone early on knew that the Uighers were guilty of nothing but having been swept up on the battlefield. Now we have U.S. courts having corroborated that fact. There were about 16 or 17 of these Uighers. They were from the far province, the western province of China, Xinjiang province of China. And yet we hadn’t at the end of the Bush administration repatriated them yet because we couldn’t find anybody in the world that wanted to take them. We didn’t want to give them back to the Chinese. We were fearful that the Chinese would take draconian, drastic action about them because the Chinese had declared that that group of people were terrorists in their own right. So, I mean, this went on daily, this discussion, and is today, and it was clear to me that the highest-level people knew how screwed up the situation was in Guantanamo. Now, the fact that I saw the Secretary of State aware of it, knew that he talked to Dr. Rice every day, knew that he talked to Secretary Rumsfeld quite frequently, that leads me to believe that the highest people over there in the White House knew about it too. And if I conclude otherwise, then I have to conclude they were all idiots. And though I’ve said some disparaging things about the vice president and others, I don’t think I’ve ever called them an idiot. I don’t think they were idiots.
Horton: Well, did Scooter Libby sit in on these deputies’ meetings?
Wilkerson: No, these were meetings in the State Department where Secretary Powell meets with his people.
Horton: Oh, I see. But they have the deputies’ meetings where the Deputy Secretary of Defense and State and all the different departments come together and then the vice president surely would have somebody representing him there, right?
Wilkerson: Oh, the vice president had people representing him everywhere. There were people at the lowest level coordination meetings within the interagency group from the vice president’s office. For example, when I sat in on discussions of the six-party talks or issues in Asia in general with Jim Kelly, who was the Secretary of State for East Asia and the Pacific, who was in the chair – when I sat in those low-level coordination meetings, the first level, if you will, of the interagency process, there was always a person from the vice president’s office there.
Horton: Now, you know, pardon me, but, it seems to me like if you guys were having these meetings where you talk about how there’s all these innocent people there, on such a regular basis, was everybody not agreeing that “We know we’re liars but this is part of our PR for the war on terrorism, is we got to pretend that there’s more than 100 of these guys in the whole world”?
Wilkerson: Well, look at the problem they had. Look at the challenge they had. And when I say they, I mean the entire interagency, including my boss, Secretary Powell. The challenge had a number of dimensions to it. The first dimension was, “Wow, we don’t know about these people. They were not vetted properly on the battlefield. They were not taken by U.S. soldiers. We don’t know. All we have in some cases is a card with an expected name, maybe the time and date of capture, and maybe who captured. That’s the extent of the trail of evidence that we have. Wow. We don’t want to release these guys because they might really be terrorists. Better to keep them in jail and be wrong about their guilt or innocence than to release them and let them resume the war.” That’s the first dimension. Second dimension…
Horton: All right, well, we’ll have to hold it right there. We’ll get back to the second dimension of it after this break. It’s Larry Wilkerson from the New America Foundation. Antiwar Radio.
Horton: All right, y’all, welcome back to the show. It’s Antiwar Radio. I’m Scott Horton, and I’m talking with retired Col. Larry Wilkerson, former aide to Secretary of State Colin Powell, now at the New America Foundation, and we’re talking about how the government, the Bush government, knew that the men at Guantanamo Bay were innocent. And you were saying, sir, about the second dimension, or maybe you want to recap the first, the two points about what y’all knew, and I guess I was suggesting that it seems like it must have been a cynical conversation, that we have this PR stunt to try to prove that there are lots of terrorists out to get us, you know, 700-something innocent people at Guantanamo originally, while there were never more than a couple hundred al Qaeda in the whole world in the first place.
Wilkerson: Well, the first dimension that I mentioned was of course that we didn’t want to let a terrorist go. And that’s a legitimate dimension, in my view. The second one was, how on earth could you possibly admit to the American people how screwed up Guantanamo was? If you’re Secretary Rumsfeld and you admit that, you’ve just admitted that you don’t know what you’re doing. And you certainly open yourself up to firing by the President of the United States, and you’ve made yourself look like a total fool. So you’ve got this very understandably human dimension to it that no one wants to admit that they’ve made such a colossal error. You’ve got another dimension to it, too, and you hinted at it there. It’s what I call the “Karl Rove dimension.” You want to exploit this as much as you possibly can, so you put them in shackles, you put hoods on them, you put them in orange jumpsuits, and you show a little TV footage every now and then. You want the American people to believe that these are heinous, despicable, deadly criminals.
Horton: Yeah, goes good with an orange alert in the run-up to the Iraq war.
Wilkerson: Yeah. And it doesn’t hurt that you’re doing that. And you’re also, if you’re the vice president, who’s been saying from one end of the country to the other that there are contacts between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein and Baghdad, which the intelligence community was saying, “No there aren’t, no there aren’t, no there aren’t” repeatedly, then you want these people to be, shall we say, subjected to the most extreme interrogation methods possible in order to get out of them corroborating proof that there are contacts between al Qaeda and Baghdad.
Horton: Now, now, let me stop you right there, because any journalist – in fact, let’s go ahead and point at McClatchy Newspapers – they went through and they said, “Look, all the torture coincides with Iraq lies, Iraq al Qaeda lies, Iraq weapons of mass destruction lies, but you were there. Were there discussions that you overheard, Col. Wilkerson, where they were deliberately talking about “We need to torture these guys into lying about Saddam Hussein’s connections to Osama bin Laden”?
Wilkerson: No, I was not. And I would not have been privy to those kinds of conversations anyway.
Horton: You ever talk with Colin Powell about that, in the elevator or when you were walking to the car?
Wilkerson: I don’t even believe, in my study of past national security decision-making situations, I don’t even corroborate this, I don’t even believe Colin Powell knew about it. I think this was a very, very closely held, vice president, perhaps the president – I’m not even sure the president was fully versed on it – George Tenet group that worked the problem aside from everyone else. And that’s not – historically that’s not unusual. When the president issues a finding to do something like this, whether it’s Eisenhower issuing a finding to overfly the Soviet Union with U-2s, or whether it’s Eisenhower, for example, issuing a finding to overthrow the first democratically elected prime minister in Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953, the community that knows about that finding, that decision, is very small. It usually doesn’t include anyone without a need to know, and that means people who are actually going to have to execute the decision. So, I have no problem understanding that my boss didn’t even know about some of this stuff.
Horton: Well, but when you guys were the recipients of the information, such as, we have this guy, I don’t know if they told you the name, al-Libi, but he says that Saddam taught the al Qaeda guys how to make chemical weapons and so forth, did you believe that, or did you know that had anything to do with people being, you know, crucified from the ceiling until they “admitted it,” or worse?
Wilkerson: I didn’t know that until much later. I found it out through my own research, and in the case of Shaykh al-Libi, I found it out because this intelligence individual revealed to me that he had had been tortured in Egypt.
Horton: But I mean the CIA brought you his lies and said, “Use this,” right?
Wilkerson: But the CIA did not bring us any identification of sources, and that’s their normal modus operandi. We did not know, for example, that Curveball existed until well after his UN presentation. We did not know that. What the term of art that the CIA used with the Secretary of State and with me and others was “a high-level al Qaeda operative” has revealed so and so and so and so. We didn’t know names. We didn’t know places. We didn’t know interrogation methods and so forth until well after the presentation.
Horton: Well, formalities aside, did you know that they were BS-ing?
Wilkerson: I’ll be very honest with you and tell you that I suspected at the time that we weren’t getting the full truth.
Horton: Well, now there’s so much ground to cover on Guantanamo, but there are so many other things I want to ask you about as well. Is there anything important about Guantanamo I might have missed – to give you a chance to address here?
Wilkerson: Well I think, you see, one other thing, when President Bush makes a decision to send, if I remember right, it was 14, the 14 high-value detainees that were fairly – we were fairly certain about were very instrumental either in 9/11 or in other activities that al Qaeda was planning or had accomplished, when he decided to pull them out of the secret prisons, which as you know were distributed across the globe, and put them in Guantanamo, there were statements at that time, and some of us made with some derision in our voice, that, “Hey, for the first time since Guantanamo was opened, we really have some hardcore al Qaeda there.”
Horton: Right, yeah, it puts the lie to the whole Guantanamo situation when anybody who was actually, you know, Ramzi bin al-Shibh or Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, were in a former Soviet torture dungeon in Eastern Europe or in Morocco or in an underground dungeon in Thailand or something like that.
Wilkerson: And frankly I think that was one of the president’s reasons for putting them at Guantanamo. Because we knew the situation at Guantanamo was untenable in the long term and we needed to get some people down there who really counted.
Horton: All right, now, I have a bunch of questions. I don’t know how many I can fit before the next break – do you think there’s any chance I can keep you one more segment after the bottom of the hour?
Wilkerson: Um, yeah. I can stay for another 15 minutes or so.
Horton: Okay, great, I know you’re busy, and I appreciate it. So I want to talk about the aluminum tubes. I want to ask you about the aluminum tubes. Because so much hinged on the idea, as you know, anybody who knew anything about nuclear anything would have been able to just laugh at it, but, you know, the idea that Hussein had some sort of advanced uranium enrichment program or something was laughable to anybody who knew anything about it – or to the IAEA, for example – but the case for war hinged on these tubes. And it was not just the neocons. I believe the story was, it was somebody at the CIA insisted on it. And yet you were working with Colin Powell over at the State Department, and I know that it was the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, which I guess is sort of the State Department’s own little CIA there, that they and the Energy Department said, “This is nonsense.” And that was leaked to, or not leaked but discussed at least off the record with Knight Ridder Newspapers, and even with the Washington Post – in September of 2002 the Post ran a story saying, “The lower people don’t believe this.” And yet they kept using it all the way up until the invasion in 2003, including, of course, in Colin Powell’s famous speech – and now I’m sorry because the bumper music’s playing, we’ll have to go out to break, but I’ll try to get your answer on the other side of it. Everybody, it’s Col. Larry Wilkerson, who used to work for Colin Powell when he was Secretary of State in the first Bush administration. We’ll be right back.
Horton: All right, y’all, welcome back to the show. It’s Antiwar Radio on the Liberty Radio Network, LRN.fm, and KAOSRadioAustin.org, talking with retired Col. Larry Wilkerson. He’s now at the New America Foundation. And the question before the break was about the aluminum tubes and who believed this nonsense about the aluminum tubes other than the American people?
Wilkerson: Well, you have to look at the entire panoply of intelligence that was brought to bear on Iraq. There are 16 intelligence entities in the United States, 17 if you count the Foreign Intelligence board. Fourteen of the 16 agreed on the nuclear program. I&R at State and DoE’s intelligence outfit were the only two that dissented, and their dissent was duly noted in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate. But, more important than that consensus in the intelligence community that was wrong, obviously, was the fact that it wasn’t just aluminum tubes. There were seven items that the other 14 entities brought out to demonstrate that they thought he had a program. They ranged from everything from the tubes and magnets and rotors and all the things necessary for a centrifuge complex, to scientists that Saddam was trying to recruit who were nuclear scientists, to software that he was purchasing around the world through his what we called “spider front” of companies that purchased in Germany and Russia and elsewhere for him, and so there were other reasons to believe, not the least of which, and I didn’t even include it in the seven, was the fact that we had been very wrong in 1990 and 1991 about his nuclear program. He was much further along than the intelligence community had estimated at the time. So you might say they were trying to make up for their failure in ’90 and ’91 by assessing that he was further along then. So it wasn’t just the aluminum tubes, though admittedly they were a part of it. And I’m not one to defend this at all, because it was dead wrong, but there were other aspects to it than just the two dissenters and the aluminum tubes.
Horton: Yeah. Well, the guys at the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, they bought everything but the tubes, or they were –
Wilkerson: Yeah, they bought the chemical and they bought the biological. And then one of the things Tom does in his book now –
Horton: Well, I meant in terms of the other pieces of the nuclear story there. Because you know, Mohamed ElBaradei said, “Come on, this is not right. I’ve been there.”
Wilkerson: Well, you have to remember that ElBaradei had motives of his own, and even if he didn’t have motives of his own, the president, the vice president, even the Secretary of State and others thought he did. So, you know, you’re dealing with politics here and you’re dealing with international politics.
Horton: Right.
Wilkerson: That’s sometimes hard to deal with.
Horton: But at the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research, how much of the nuclear story were they buying? – You said there were the 14 different pieces…
Wilkerson: They didn’t buy any of it. To Tom Fingar’s credit, to Carl Ford’s credit and other analysts in INR, they stood up against the rest of the intelligence community, except for the small element in the Department of Energy, and they said, “We dissent. We do not believe he has an active nuclear program. We do think he wants nuclear weapons, we do think that he will eventually try, but we don’t think he’s got an active program right now.” And they were right.
Horton: All right, now, I guess we can keep going down that path, but there’s so many other things. Let me ask you about the role of David Wurmser and John Bolton in the State Department in the first Bush Jr. administration. It sort of seemed from the outside – there was a piece in Salon.com by Anonymous called “The State Department’s Extreme Makeover,” that came out, I think in 2002, maybe early 2003, saying “Boy, these guys that work for Cheney came in, turned the place upside down, marginalized or fired all the old CFR member types and you know if we put aside Iraq for the moment there’s the story of how America broke the agreed framework with the North Koreans, put new sanctions on them, and now it’s the Proliferation Security Initiative which said we’re going to seize your ships at sea and all this, in what seemed like deliberate plan to provoke the North Koreans into withdrawing from the Nonproliferation Treaty, as John Bolton has been caught on tape saying, what’s his plan with Iran as we’ll, to so frustrate them that they would just go ahead and quit their international agreement. And I wonder if you can kind of tell me about your view from inside the State Department of these two men and how the Cheney network operated under Colin Powell and Dick Armitage and you over there at the State Department?
Wilkerson: There’s no question that John Bolton was operating off a different sheet of music than the rest of us on more than one occasion. I would go in to see the Deputy Secretary of State and we would both lament the fact that we didn’t seem to be able to control him because he was covered by the vice president’s office. Very difficult to control an under secretary who ultimately has access to the vice president and, in this case, ultimately to what I believe was the real power in the first Bush administration. We tried. Obviously, we didn’t do that good a job. He made some very egregious speeches about North Korea, about Syria, about Cuba having an active biological weapons program, of all things, tried to intimidate one of our I&R analysts, a young man, Christian Westermann. The secretary had to bring the young man in and tell him no one in the State Department would intimidate him and give him access to his own office were it to happen again. So, yeah, it was a contest.
Now to go to those two specific individuals in your statement earlier, I think there’s a very clear-cut case that Wurmser was not only working for Rumsfeld and Feith and the Pentagon, but he was also working for Israel. I think Feith was working for Israel too. Cheney, on the other hand, I think was working for Cheney. And so you had this confluence of motivations and confluence of unholy alliance, if you will, of strange characters. You had Feith and Wurmser, who as far as I was concerned, were card-carrying members of the Likud Party. And they had different motivations from people like Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld. And they had different motivations than people like Cheney and Libby and Addington and the vice president’s office. So you had this alliance of these people who were all after one thing, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, but in many cases, for very different reasons.
Horton: Wow, so, please elaborate about what exactly you mean there. I guess people sort of differentiate between who’s an actual spy or who’s an agent of influence, and I guess the Israelis have a thing called a “sayanim” who’s like, “Eh, a friend of Israel who does things for us sometimes,” that kind of thing. Just how much agents of Israel, these guys, do you think they were? Wurmser and Feith, particularly.
Wilkerson: I’ll put it this way. I think Douglas Feith thought that Israel’s interests and the U.S. interests were 100% complementary 100% of the time. So if he was looking out for Israel’s interests, it was not any, by any way, stretch of the imagination, being unfaithful or traitorous with regard to the United States because our interests were the same, all the time, every day, day in and day out. That’s of course nonsense, but I think that’s really the way he believed.
I didn’t know Wurmser that well so I can’t tell you how he believed, but I do know that there were people in the Pentagon and elsewhere in the government, as there are right now this minute, and as there will be tomorrow, who were working as much for Israel as they are for the United States, and I know that with AIPAC and the Jewish Lobby, as John Mearsheimer has called it, in general operating the way it normally operates in this country, this special relationship that we have with Israel overlooks a lot of this a lot of the time. I mean you can throw out Jonathan Pollard and you can throw out an occasional attempt to do something about the more egregious spying, especially when it brings clear damage to us, but by and large it happens all the time. Look at what happened with Franklin and Rosen and AIPAC and that business. It’s pretty much been swept under the rug now. We share classified data with the Israelis all the time, both through official conduits and through unofficial ones too, and people get away with it all the time.
Horton: Well, no doubt about that. So, I wonder what you have to say about Richard Perle? Is that a general enough question for you?
Wilkerson: Richard Perle was so much on our minds – and he would love to hear me say that – in 2001 and 2002 that the secretary actually asked me to build a dossier on him and to see what he was saying, because he was going all over the world, Europe principally but elsewhere too, and he was talking, and he was being perceived, as an official member of the government. Of course he was a semiofficial member, he was on the Defense Policy Board, and he was pushing the war with Iraq, and we at the State Department in particular didn’t like what he was doing.
Horton: I tell you what, I’m starting to hate these hard breaks, but that’s it. Thank you very much for your time on the show. I hope we can do this again soon, because I’ve got more questions.
Wilkerson: Okay.
Horton: And you apparently have a lot of answers.
Wilkerson: Thanks so much for having me.
Horton: All right, everybody, that’s Larry Wilkerson. He’s at the New America Foundation.
Andy Worthington, author of The Guantanamo Files, discusses his website’s Guantanamo Habeas Week event that seeks to draw attention to government torture and lawlessness, the difficult-to-determine ratio of evil/incompetence at work in the Bush administration, the arbitrary roundup of “terrorists” in Afghanistan and Pakistan following the embarrassing bin Laden Tora Bora escape, the current score card of Guantanamo Habeas hearings, scaremongering Republican politicians and the end of Congressional oversight and checks and balances.
Andy Worthington writes for Counterpunch, the Future of Freedom Foundation and Antiwar.com. He is the author of The Guantanamo Files and blogs at AndyWorthington.co.uk. His documentary movie Outside the Law: Stories From Guantanamo is available on DVD.
Nat Hentoff, senior fellow at the CATO Institute, discusses the Elizabeth Cheney and William Kristol-backed Keep America Safe ad that implies Attorney General Eric Holder is a jihadist, widespread contempt and ignorance of protections guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, Obama’s “looking forward not backward” anti-prosecution policy that validates Richard Nixon’s thoughts on presidential impunity and why the Constitution can’t be preserved without an active and informed citizenry.
Nat Hentoff is a senior fellow at the CATO Institute and one of the foremost authorities on the First Amendment. His column, Sweet Land of Liberty, has been distributed by the United Feature Syndicate since 1992.
Hentoff has earned numerous awards and is a widely acknowledged defender of civil liberties. In 1980, he was awarded an American Bar Association Silver Gavel Award for his coverage of the law and criminal justice in his columns. In 1983, the American Library Association awarded him the Imroth Award for Intellectual Freedom. In 1995, he received the National Press Foundation Award for Distinguished Contributions to Journalism, and in 1999, he was a Pulitzer finalist for commentary.
Hentoff was a columnist and staff writer with The Village Voice for 51 years, from 1957 until 2008. A jazz expert, Hentoff writes on music for The Wall Street Journal and Jazz Times. He has lectured at many colleges, universities, law schools, elementary, middle and high schools, and has taught courses in journalism and the Constitution at Princeton University and New York University. Hentoff serves on the Board of Advisors of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (F.I.R.E.) and is on the steering committee of the Reporters’ Committee for the Freedom of the Press.
Daphne Eviatar, Senior Associate in Law and Security for Human Rights First, discusses the preemptive legal defenses trotted out by John Yoo and Dick Cheney, information missing or withheld from the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility’s torture memo investigation, the incompatibility of Yoo’s extralegal commander-in-chief theory with any semblance of Constitutional rule of law and why a post-apartheid South Africa-style truth commission may be the best resolution of Bush administration crimes we can hope for.
Daphne Eviatar is a lawyer and freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, Legal Affairs, Mother Jones, the Washington Independent and many others. She is a Senior Reporter at The American Lawyer and was an Alicia Patterson Foundation fellow in 2005 and a Pew International Journalism fellow in 2002.
Francis Boyle, Professor at the University of Illinois College of Law, discusses his legal Complaint demanding the prosecution of Bush administration officials for crimes against humanity, the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) jurisdiction over crimes committed by the US in ICC-member countries, the “Marty” report that catalogs the US practice of “extraordinary rendition” and how a less-desirable international prosecution is the result of the Obama administration’s failure to uphold the rule of law.
Professor Boyle received a J.D. degree magna cum laude and A.M. and Ph.D. degrees in political science from Harvard University. Prior to joining the faculty at the College of Law, he was a teaching fellow at Harvard and an associate at its Center for International Affairs. He also practiced tax and international tax with Bingham, Dana & Gould in Boston.
He has written and lectured extensively in the United States and abroad on the relationship between international law and politics. His Protesting Power: War, Resistance and Law (Rowman & Littlefield Inc. 2007) has been used successfully in anti-war protest trials. In the September 2000 issue of the prestigious The International History Review, Professor Boyle’s Foundations of World Order: The Legalist Approach to International Relations (1898-1922) was proclaimed as “a major contribution to this reinterrogation of the past” and “required reading for historians, political scientists, international relations specialists, and policy-makers.” That book was translated into Korean and published in Korea in 2003 by Pakyoungsa Press.
As an internationally recognized expert, Professor Boyle serves as counsel to Bosnia and Herzegovina and to the Provisional Government of the State of Palestine. He also represents two associations of citizens within Bosnia and has been instrumental in developing the indictment against Slobodan Milosevic for committing genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Professor Boyle is Attorney of Record for the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, conducting its legal affairs on a worldwide basis. Over his career, he has represented national and international bodies including the Blackfoot Nation (Canada), the Nation of Hawaii, and the Lakota Nation, as well as numerous individual death penalty and human rights cases. He has advised numerous international bodies in the areas of human rights, war crimes and genocide, nuclear policy, and bio-warfare.
From 1991-92, Professor Boyle served as Legal Advisor to the Palestinian Delegation to the Middle East Peace Negotiations. He also has served on the Board of Directors of Amnesty International, as well as a consultant to the American Friends Services Committee, and on the Advisory Board for the Council for Responsible Genetics. He drafted the U.S. domestic implementing legislation for the Biological Weapons Convention, known as the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, that was approved unanimously by both Houses of the U.S. Congress and signed into law by President George H.W. Bush. That story is told in his book Biowarfare and Terrorism (Clarity Press: 2005).
In 2001 he was selected to be the Dr. Irma M. Parhad Lecturer by the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Calgary in Canada. In 2007 he became the Bertrand Russell Peace Lecturer at McMaster University in Canada. Professor Boyle is listed in the current edition of Marquis’ Who’s Who in America.
The Other Scott Horton (no relation), international human rights lawyer, professor and contributing editor at Harper’s magazine, discusses the partly released CIA Inspector General’s report, how any serious torture investigation will lead to Dick Cheney, the OLC’s issuance of get-out-of-jail-free cards instead of legal advice and the debunking of Cheney’s claim that torture saves American lives.
The other Scott Horton is a Contributing Editor for Harper’s magazine and writes the blog No Comment. A New York attorney known for his work in emerging markets and international law, especially human rights law and the law of armed conflict, Horton lectures at Columbia Law School. A life-long human rights advocate, Scott served as counsel to Andrei Sakharov and Elena Bonner, among other activists in the former Soviet Union. He is a co-founder of the American University in Central Asia, and has been involved in some of the most significant foreign investment projects in the Central Eurasian region. Scott recently led a number of studies of abuse issues associated with the conduct of the war on terror for the New York City Bar Association, where he has chaired several committees, including, most recently, the Committee on International Law. He is also a member of the board of the National Institute of Military Justice, the Andrei Sakharov Foundation, the EurasiaGroup and the American Branch of the International Law Association.
Larisa Alexandrovna, managing investigative news editor for Rawstory.com, discusses the possible treason in Valerie Plame’s outing, the subsequent loss of CIA covert contacts with the A.Q. Kahn network (that may have supplied al-Qaeda with weapons), evidence of the U.S. scheming to start a war with Iran as early as December 2001 and what living in a police state really looks like.
Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell during his tenure as Secretary of State, discusses how the Bush administration ignored the perfectly adequate Geneva Conventions guidelines for classifying war-zone detainees, the ethical and practical considerations of detaining and interrogating innocent civilians to “fight terror,” the counterclaim to Dick Cheney’s assertion that torture prevents terrorism and the end of an Israel/Palestine two state solution. Wilkerson also says he would cooperate with the prosecution of Dick Cheney for war crimes – not that that would ever happen.
Larry Wilkerson is a retired United States Army Colonel and former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell. He is chairman of the New America Foundation/U.S.-Cuba 21st Century Policy Initiative and wrote “Some Truths About Guantanamo” as a guest post on The Washington Note.
On the sixth anniversary of the war in Iraq, Pratap Chatterjee, managing editor of Corpwatch.org, discusses the ideology of the Bush administration’s Iraq War brain trust, the pervasive culture of corruption engendered by throwing money into Iraq’s reconstruction without oversight and Ahmed Chalabi’s role in lying the American people into war.
Noam Chomsky, author of Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, discusses the roots of U.S. imperialism, the often overlooked opportunity costs of empire, the exaggerated strength of U.S. economic rivals, the continuation of the Great Game into the 21st century, how the Western World’s observance of the Durand Line exacerbates problems in Afghanistan, the empire’s loss in Iraq, the U.S. doctrine of punishing Iran just to make an example out of them and the Israeli policy of incremental displacement of the Palestinian population in the occupied territories.
The Other Scott Horton, international human rights lawyer and contributing editor at Harper’s magazine, discusses the Justice Department’s release of post-9/11 Bush administration legal opinion memos, the assertion of executive supremacy over the first and fourth amendments to the U.S. Constitution, the possible scope of unknown Bush legal shenanigans and why blue-ribbon investigative committees aren’t always bipartisan cover-ups.
The Other Scott Horton (no relation) is a New York attorney known for his work in emerging markets and international law, especially human rights law and the law of armed conflict. He lectures at Columbia Law School.
Andy Worthington, author of the January 24th article “For Detainees, Obama Off to Good Start”, discusses Barack Obama’s initial executive orders regarding the closure of Gitmo and secret CIA prisons, the lengthy year-long review process for detainee trials, how the Bush administration’s torture policy ruined any opportunity to prosecute the few legitimate terrorism cases, the propaganda potential in the Pentagon’s loaded phrase “returned to the battlefield” and the relatively low recidivism rate of detainees released from Guantanamo compared to ordinary American civilian prisons.
Andy Worthington is a London-based historian and the author of The Guantanamo Files. His writing frequently appears on Counterpunch.org, rawstory.com, fff.org and antiwar.com/worthington.
Former CIA counter-terrorism agent Philip Giraldi discusses his Antiwar.com article “Israel’s ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ Card” on Antiwar.com, discusses the degradation of law and order when Dick Cheney can admit that he authorized torture and not fear prosecution, the long delayed Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman espionage trial, rumors of a Bush pardon for Jonathan Pollard, the disconnect between federal agents who aggressively pursue espionage cases and their department heads who don’t follow through, Steven Rosen’s new day-job blogging for Daniel Pipes’ Middle East Forum and the disappearance of indicted spy-for-Israel Ben-Ami Kadish.
Robert Parry, author of Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, discusses the just-released tapes of Lyndon Johnson suspecting the 1968 Nixon campaign of treason, the history of Republican dirty tricks initiated or inspired by Nixon from 1968 to the present, the longevity of establishment political players like Henry Kissinger despite their repeated involvement in scandals, the background of the 1980 October surprise and the possible complicity of George H.W. Bush and current Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in delaying the release of American hostages in Iran to aid the Reagan campaign.
Robert Parry is an investigative journalist who won the George Polk Award in 1984 for reporting on the Iran-Contra affair and uncovering Oliver North’s involvement in it. He is the founder and editor of ConsortiumNews.com and author of Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, Trick or Treason: The October Surprise Mystery and Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq.
Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst and co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, discusses the prospect of a proper presidential intelligence briefing in an Obama administration, what questions Obama should ask his foreign policy gurus about Iran, how the NYT finally got the Georgia story right, how Russia’s recent show of force helped put the kibosh on an Iran attack, Cheney’s false flag operation fantasies and why Robert Gates is a greater threat to peace than Rumsfeld.
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, (US Army Ret.), former chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell, discusses the coalition of Oil and Israeli interests in pushing the invasion of Iraq, all the reasons that everyone should have known that the WMD and terrorism pretexts were just that, the disgrace he felt during Powell’s UN speech and his surprise at the positive coverage, the status of Anar al-Islam in Kurdistan before the war, the after the fact creation of al Qaeda in Iraq by Zarqawi and his allies, how he came to understand how the Cheney-Neocon cabal operated – too late, the continued polarization of American politics, the responsibility of David Addington, Jim Haynes, Doug Feith, Jay Bybee, John Yoo, Timothy Flanigan and Alberto Gonzales for the torture policy adopted after 9/11, its consequences, John McCain’s pro-torture Detainee Treatment Act, how the administration killed the Iranian peace offer of 2003 and how the administration let Osama bin Laden escape from Afghanistan in 2001.
Colonel Lawrence B. Wilkerson, U.S. Army (Ret.), was chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005. He is now the Pamela Harriman Visiting Professor of Government and Public Policy at the College of William and Mary.
Gareth Porter discusses his recent article “How Tenet Betrayed the CIA on WMD in Iraq,” the revelations in Ron Suskind’s book, the systemic cherry-picking of intelligence to justify the decision to invade Iraq, George Tenet’s priorities, Doug Feith’s possible involvement in the forgeries and the schism between America’s imperial intentions and outcomes.
Dr. Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist on U.S. national security policy who has been independent since a brief period of university teaching in the 1980s. Dr. Porter is the author of four books, the latest of which is Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam (University of California Press, 2005). He has written regularly for Inter Press Service on U.S. policy toward Iraq and Iran since 2005.
Larry Velvel, dean of the Massachusetts School of Law and sponsor of the upcoming Justice Robert Jackson Conference On The Planning For Prosecution Of High Level American War Criminals, featuring Francis Boyle, Vincent Bugliosi, Philippe Sands and others, discusses the many crimes of the Bush administration, the history of unaccountability of our leaders, the legal gymnastics perpetrated by the Bush regime lawyers, the immunity clauses of the Military Commission Act and how they might effect potential foreign prosecutions of American war criminals.
Lawrence R. Velvel is the Dean of Massachusetts School of Law and a professor of law. Mr. Velvel is a 1960 graduate of the University of Michigan and a 1963 graduate of the University of Michigan Law School, where he served on the law review and was elected to the Order of the Coif. He was a law professor from 1966-1978, first at the University of Kansas and then at Catholic University . He has been a partner in major law firms in Washington , D.C. , and was the first chief counsel of an organization established to write United States Supreme Court briefs in support of state and local governments. He has been active in Supreme Court litigation, constitutional law, antitrust law and complex litigation. He is the author of a book dealing with constitutional aspects of the Vietnam war, of seventeen law review articles and of twenty-three articles for legal and daily newspapers. He has written thirty-three United States Supreme Court briefs and is editor of the MSLAW journal called The Long Term View.
Philip Giraldi, former CIA counter-terrorism officer and columnist for Antiwar.com, discusses the possibility of and precedents for an Israeli “False Flag” operation in Iraq to frame Iran and draw the U.S. into attacking, the conflicts within the administration over Iran policy, the likely catastrophic consequences of any attack, U.S. covert operations within Iran, America’s support of the Iranian Islamic Revolution back in 1979, how real conservative principles apply to foreign policy, the extensive databases of “dangerous” Americans kept by the government, total lack of accountability in Washington, provocative stance toward Russia and demented neocon view of the world.
Philip Giraldi is a former DIA and CIA officer, partner at Cannistraro Associates, Francis Walsingham Fellow for the American Conservative Defense Alliance, contributing editor at the American Conservative magazine and columnist at Antiwar.com.
Gareth Porter, reporter for IPS News, discusses the fight between the “realists” and hawks in the Bush administration, the routine where Rice gets what she wants, but then Cheney makes her efforts meaningless – as in the case of William Burns’ trip to Geneva, George Bush Jr.’s complete inability to lead – thank goodness, crying wolf, the public’s distracted impotence to stop a war they oppose, the relative influence of the Israeli Lobby on Middle East policy in Congress and the White House, Ariel Sharon’s preference for the order of future regime changes, speculation that Cheney may have “learned” a bunch of nonsense about a necessary clash of civilizations from Prinston historian Bernard Lewis after 9/11, the War Party’s former(?) belief in regime change from the air.
Dr. Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist on U.S. national security policy who has been independent since a brief period of university teaching in the 1980s. Dr. Porter is the author of four books, the latest of which is Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam (University of California Press, 2005). He has written regularly for Inter Press Service on U.S. policy toward Iraq and Iran since 2005.
Dr. Gordon Prather, Antiwar.com’s in-house nuclear physicist, discusses the chaos of the Bush regime’s policies against the “Axis of Evil” and global non-proliferation regime, from trying to frame North Korea with the same bogus intel as they used on Iraq to trying to connect Iran and North Korea with the Israeli-bombed facility in Syria, the U.S.’s nuclear deals with India, how A.Q. Kahn’s stolen intel scheme was falsely claimed by George Tenet to be a CIA success story, the vague credentials of nuke “expert” David Albright Ph.D and how the Bush team has put us in far more danger from nuclear proliferation.
Physicist James Gordon Prather has served as a policy implementing official for national security-related technical matters in the Federal Energy Agency, the Energy Research and Development Administration, the Department of Energy, the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Department of the Army. Dr. Prather also served as legislative assistant for national security affairs to U.S. Sen. Henry Bellmon, R-Okla. – ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee and member of the Senate Energy Committee and Appropriations Committee. Dr. Prather had earlier worked as a nuclear weapons physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico.
The Other Scott Horton, heroic international human rights lawyer, journalist for Harper’s magazine and steadfast opponent of torture, discusses his new article for The New Republic, “Travel Advisory,” the Supreme Court’s reversal of the War Party’s end-run around habeas corpus, how Bush continually ignores Supreme Court decisions, the many war crimes committed by the Bush administration principals and their lawyers, how prosecution might proceed in foreign states, how “the war council” plotted the whole torture regime, the many people who have been killed under U.S. custody, the charade of the military tribunal system, how our policy of torture is the terrorists best recruiting tool and the danger of a total police state.
The Other Scott Horton is a contributing editor at Harper’s magazine and pens the blog No Comment. A New York attorney known for his work in emerging markets and international law, especially human rights law and the law of armed conflict, Horton lectures at Columbia Law School. A life-long human rights advocate, Scott served as counsel to Andrei Sakharov and Elena Bonner, among other activists in the former Soviet Union. He is a co-founder of the American University in Central Asia, and has been involved in some of the most significant foreign investment projects in the Central Eurasian region. Scott recently led a number of studies of abuse issues associated with the conduct of the war on terror for the New York City Bar Association, where he has chaired several committees, including, most recently, the Committee on International Law. He is also a member of the board of the National Institute of Military Justice, the Andrei Sakharov Foundation, the EurasiaGroup and the American Branch of the International Law Association.
Gareth Porter discusses his recent article “Fearing Escalation, Pentagon Fought Cheney Iran Plan,” about how the military leadership foiled Cheney’s plan of bombing Iran last summer by shifting the debate to the escalation factor, the rabid madness of Dick Cheney, how the Air Force’s over-confidence is encouraging his desire to bomb Iran, the media black-out of the questions surrounding probable Israeli origins of the “smoking laptop,” and what you can do to help avoid another war.
Dr. Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist on U.S. national security policy who has been independent since a brief period of university teaching in the 1980s. Dr. Porter is the author of four books, the latest of which is Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam (University of California Press, 2005). He has written regularly for Inter Press Service on U.S. policy toward Iraq and Iran since 2005.
Pentagon whistleblower and libertarian writer Karen Kwiatkowski discusses the importance of radicalism and principle in American life as the empire collapses, the modern American secession movements in the Lakota Nation, Hawaii and Vermont, the costs of empire, the growing police state, how the neoconservative cabal in the Pentagon lied this country into war in 2002 and 2003 and the sickness of Dick Cheney.
LRC columnist Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D., a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, has written on defense issues with a libertarian perspective for MilitaryWeek.com, hosted the call-in radio show American Forum, and blogs occasionally for Huffingtonpost.com and Liberty and Power. To receive automatic announcements of new articles, click here.
Actor, writer and producer John Cusack discusses his new satire War Inc., which opens Friday, May 23rd, in New York and Los Angeles, his outrage at the criminality of modern American war profiteers, the need for a grassroots bumrush of the first showings to guarantee national distribution, some critics’ complaints that the movie “hits too close to home,” the great journalists whose work has inspired him, the socialization of the costs of all these private armies onto the American tax payer, the outsourcing of interrogation, the betrayals of the Democrats, the banality of evil, the short-changing of the troops while private mercenaries cash in and militarism in the movies. (Watch out! A few bad words.)
Dr. Gareth Porter discusses his article: “Where are those Iranian weapons in Iraq?” and how the U.S. war party has had to de-emphasize their assertions that EFP’s in Iraq are coming from Iran, he exposes as total lies the U.S. claims of Iran arming the Shi’ite militias in Iraq, how the White House continues to divulge preposterous propaganda reports, the role of the compliant media in continuing these false allegations, how the Sunni resistance in Iraq is patiently waiting for the opportune moment to re-emerge, and how Iran would not try to destabilize the Maliki government since he is their servant.
Dr. Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist on U.S. national security policy who has been independent since a brief period of university teaching in the 1980s. Dr. Porter is the author of four books, the latest of which is Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam (University of California Press, 2005). He has written regularly for Inter Press Service on U.S. policy toward Iraq and Iran since 2005.
Dr. Porter was both a Vietnam specialist and an anti-war activist during the Vietnam War and was Co-Director of Indochina Resource Center in Washington. Dr. Porter taught international studies at City College of New York and American University. He was the first Academic Director for Peace and Conflict Resolution in the Washington Semester program at American University.
Former CIA analyst and antiwar activist Ray McGovern discusses his open letter to Adm. Fallon and the probability of a U.S. attack on Iran, the history of Robert Gates and his weak influence on Bush, the corporate media’s corrupt relationship with the state, the Pentagon’s bogus Iranian arms expose and the near total indifference of the press, Adm. Fallon’s firing for speaking out against attacking Iran, the Air Force’s role, the insanity of John McCain, the unconstitutionality and illegality of our aggressive wars, Congress’s impotence in deterring the White House from attacking Iran, Bush’s life-long lack of accountability, how The Project For The New American Century blueprint for world domination and neocon “Israel first” foreign policy has made the U.S. and Israel less secure, the role of Elliot Abrams and Dick Cheney in fomenting the next war, possible disastrous consequences, the Israeli government’s attack on the U.S.S. Liberty to hide their war crimes in 1967 and the U.S. government’s role in the cover-up.
Ray McGovern was a CIA analyst for 27 years – from the John F. Kennedy administration to that of George H. W. Bush and is a co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
Philip Giraldi, former DIA and CIA officer and columnist for Antiwar.com, discusses his scoop for the American Conservative magazine that the information leading the FBI to Ben Ami Kadish came from inside the Israeli government, speculation that it may have been an attempt by antiwar factions in Israel to thwart scheduled testimony by Israeli intelligence agents in favor of the bogus story of the North Korea/Syria nuclear weapons program, the promotion of Gen. Petraeus to commander of Centcom, the remaining danger of war with Iran given a suitable pretext, the detriment of the narrative of the indivisibility of Israeli and American interests, the natural divisions between groups like Hezbollah, al Qaeda, the Iranian Mullahs, the War Party’s claims about their cooperation, the FBI’s bogus terrorism prosecutions since 9/11, America’s regime change in Somalia, the case for immediate withdrawal from Iraq and the McCain prescription for confrontation with Russia and China.
Philip Giraldi is a former DIA and CIA officer, partner at Cannistraro Associates, Francis Walsingham Fellow for the American Conservative Defense Alliance, contributing editor at the American Conservative magazine and columnist at Antiwar.com.
Michael Scheuer, former chief of the CIA’s bin Laden unit and author of Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq, discusses his view that the U.S. betrayal of loyal dictator Musharraf is terrible for Pakistan and U.S. interests in the region, the rising hatred of U.S. foreign policy in the Muslim World, the detrimental effect of the U.S. government’s Israel-centric foreign policy, Ron Paul’s effort to explain to the American people why al Qaeda attacked us on 9/11, why a Ron Paul-style foreign policy would be the worst thing for them, energy independence, future war for oil in Nigeria, Cheney’s argument that al Qaeda in Iraq could ever take over that land, the failure of the media to challenge politicians on this point, his view that Obama, McCain and Clinton – due to their Israel-first stances – will stay in Iraq for at least the next four years, the danger to Israel posed by the neocons’ stupid policies, the extraordinary rendition program and his role in creating it, the necessity of figuring out a way to apply the rule of law to those detained in the terror war, torture, al Libbi’s tortured accusations of ties between Saddam and Osama, his CIA team’s proving that there were no such ties before the war, the strategy behind the September 11th attacks, the fact that Osama has explained exactly what that strategy is for 10 years, and a brief sketch of his new book.
Ray McGovern, veteran intelligence analyst for the CIA, joins Charles in studio to discuss George Bush’s criminal “authorization” of the torture of human beings, the arrogance of those who hold unlimited power, the details of the conspiracy between Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, Condoleezza Rice, and George Tenet to get it done, the Democrats’ refusal to do a thing about it, how the retroactive immunity in and the Military Commissions Act of 2006 makes it easier for foreign courts to indict these war criminals, the difference between the analytical and “Gestapo” side of the CIA, the recent ABC News torture conspiracy revelations, the question of retroactive immunity in the torture and NSA domestic spying cases, the supreme war crime and “accumulated evils” of aggressive war, the urgency of impeachment as a preventive measure against war with Iran, John McCain’s insane neocon crew and their desire for war with Iran, Elliot Abrams dangerous role in Iran policy and the centrality of Israel to the neocon agenda, the lies about Iran’s role in Iraq and his giving back of his commendation medal given to him by George H.W. Bush.
Ray McGovern was a CIA analyst for 27 years – from the John F. Kennedy administration to that of George H. W. Bush. He is a co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
Philip Giraldi, former DIA and CIA officer and columnist for Antiwar.com, discusses the administration’s renewed line that Iranian-controlled “special groups” of the Mahdi Army are at war with the U.S. in Iraq, Sadr and Badr’s relative ties to Iran, Iranian objectives in Iraq, indications that Cheney ordered Maliki to attack Sadr’s forces last week and his again waxing influence in the administration, the continuing influence of the neconservatives at AEI on Iran policy and danger that they may still start a war before the current presidential term is up, former CentCom commander Fallon’s thwarted attempt to set up a “red phone”-type hotline with the Iranians to diffuse any tensions, the danger to U.S. troops in Iraq in the event of war with Iran and Ayman al-Zawahiri’s stated goal of provoking such a war and the case for immediate withdrawal from Iraq.
Philip Giraldi is a former DIA and CIA officer, partner at Cannistraro Associates, Francis Walsingham Fellow for the American Conservative Defense Alliance, contributing editor at the American Conservative magazine and columnist at Antiwar.com.
