05/20/09 – David Rose – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Our next guest on the show today is David Rose.
He is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair Magazine and has this week's most important story, or pretty close to it, Heads in the Sand, about the Sunni awakening and how it could have happened much sooner.
Welcome to the show, David.
How are you doing?
I'm fine, great to be here.
Well, thank you very much for joining us today.
Now, before we get to the Sunni awakening, I saw on Andy Worthington's blog a most puzzling thing.
Daily Mail pulls story about Binyam Mohamed and British spy.
And here is this Daily Mail story.
MI5 used Muslim 007 to turn British torture victim in Moroccan prison.
This is about the famous Binyam Mohamed, who was tortured into pointing his finger at Jose Padilla, of course, and is now in England and is the center of so much controversy.
And yet, this article isn't by you.
It's by Vanessa Allen.
Apparently, your article was pulled from the Daily Mail and replaced by one, I guess, missing a bunch of paragraphs.
What happened here?
Actually, I don't think it's anything very sinister.
I did a piece for the Mail on Sunday, which is the paper of the Daily Mail.
It's in the same building, owned by the same company.
I did a much longer article, which broke this story, and then the Daily Mail followed it up.
And I think all that happened was that whoever it is that runs the website, by mistake, when the Daily Mail did their follow-up story on Monday, put her story on the website and forgot to leave mine on, too.
So I think it's just the technical error which is going to be addressed, actually.
Because, I mean, to be fair to the Mail on Sunday, they have supported me very strongly in investigating Binyam Mohamed's case, and I've been able to write a great deal of stuff about what happened to him, including, of course, the 5,000-word interview when he was released from Guantanamo.
Well, I'm glad I was able to give you an opportunity to clear that up.
So tell us about this story here, who's the Muslim 007, and what's the importance of this to the Binyam Mohamed story?
Well, Binyam Mohamed, to me, is maybe the most important single case of all the many cases which exemplify what the Bush administration did with detainees and its use of torture.
In fact, I wrote another piece in Vanity Fair which really tied all the threads together, which came out around January.
Basically, what you have in Binyam's case is one person being tortured, and as a result, someone else being tortured, and then somebody else being tortured.
It all starts with Abu Zubaydah, who was arrested in Pakistan, we now know, waterboarded 83 times.
And he comes up with this crazy story that Binyam Mohamed was going to build a dirty bomb.
He'd never actually heard of Binyam Mohamed or met him, but his name was fed to him.
Binyam Mohamed had been arrested because he had the wrong passport trying to leave Pakistan.
And they then tortured Binyam Mohamed.
He starts making admissions about dirty bombs too, and then they finally arrest Jose Padilla, and of course they lock him up in the brig in South Carolina, and they torture him as well.
So you have this kind of cycle of torture, and at the end of it, there's no evidence that there was ever such a plot at all.
But what happened with Binyam Mohamed's case now is, I mean, first of all, I mean, his experience was as bad as anybody's.
He's arrested in Pakistan.
He's tortured in Pakistan at the behest of the CIA.
He's then interrogated by the British, by the British Security Service, MI5, after being tortured in Pakistan.
Then he's sent on an extraordinary rendition flight to Morocco, and he spends 18 months in Morocco undergoing the most awful torture.
They cut his scalpel and they cut his genitals and this kind of thing.
They pour boiling liquids on him.
I mean, it's really extreme.
And I may say, you know, he is bearing the scars, mental and physical, very heavily now.
Finally, he goes back to Afghanistan.
He's in the CIA dark prison there for a while.
Finally, back to Guantanamo, and, of course, he's released this year.
But the thing is, the focus of the activity on Binyam's case now is this.
When he was still in Guantanamo, his lawyers were trying to get discovery of documents which showed what had happened to him.
There's a whole bunch of documents, at least 53 or 54 CIA documents, which have been now disclosed to the British court, which are frank statements of exactly what happened to him.
Now, these documents are classified.
But what happened when the action to try and get these documents, or discovery of these documents, was in progress before his release?
Of course, his release medal was moot.
The British High Court wrote a seven-paragraph summary of the CIA's admission as to what happened to Binyam Muhammad.
And then the British Foreign Secretary, the equivalent of the Secretary of State, made an application to the court saying this stuff has to stay classified.
If you release this material, it will jeopardize, even end, the special relationship in sharing intelligence between the United States and Great Britain.
Well, at this point, the judges invited submissions from the media as to whether they should keep these paragraphs secret.
And, in fact, I made a submission, and I said in my submission, well, whatever the Bush administration might have done, this is early in January, the Obama administration is going to be different because it's going to have an avowed different policy on torture.
The president, or the president-elect at that time, said he will close Guantanamo.
So he's going to have a much greater attitude to openness.
Now, I should also say, by the way, that the judges have made it clear that they did not consider any of the information that they had written about, nor, indeed, their own summary of that information, to constitute, in any sense, the disclosure of sensitive intelligence.
It did not involve, you know, to use that classic intelligence officer's phrase, sources and methods.
Well, and, in fact, isn't it right that their excuse is something along the lines of they don't want it to come out about Pakistan's role in this?
The other scholar, the human rights lawyer, on this show last week said, okay, here's the big classified secret.
It was Pakistan.
Okay, so now let's get on with it.
Yeah, and you'll know, I mean, he was tortured in three countries.
He was tortured in Pakistan, he was tortured in Morocco, he was tortured in Afghanistan.
Pakistan was just the first in line.
And, of course, all on the orders of the CIA.
Anyway, the crazy thing now is that the British government's lawyers have presented this document, a letter, which they say is from the Obama administration, which repeats this threat, saying that if this court, despite the fact it's an independent court in a sovereign ally country, if the court discloses this stuff, then it will terminate its intelligence-sharing relationship with the British government, which, of course, is crazy.
I mean, you know, Britain supplies a huge amount of intelligence to the U.S., including all its signals, intelligence, listening capability in the Middle East, with, you know, Britain has this listening post in Cyprus.
This is fantasy politics.
But here's the thing.
The focus this week, in fact, on Friday, is a hearing, because what has happened is that the letter from the Obama administration is redacted, and we don't know which part of the administration it comes from.
We don't know who signed it.
And there are huge missing paragraphs.
So myself and other media organizations who are represented by lawyers and Binyam's own lawyers are going to court on Friday, and we're going to stay to the court.
You have to at least tell us who has signed this letter.
This is crazy.
We don't know if this has any status.
Has this come from the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton?
Has it come from the attorney general?
Who signed this letter?
Who's making this threat?
And, of course, there are other people on the Hill.
We have, for example, Congressman Bill Delahunt, the chairman of the Subcommittee on Human Rights, who's extremely concerned about this and has already written to the secretary of state saying that the American government should drop its objection to the release of this material immediately because it's very important that it sees the light of day.
Now, the Muslim Air 07, just to go back to your original question, this is the latest development.
Well, hang on right there.
Actually, let me stop you there, David.
We'll get back to the 007 thing in a second.
I want to emphasize, if I understand you right, and what I've read about this in the last couple of weeks correctly, and Glenn Greenwald, I think, posted some of the unredacted portions of this letter, the pictures of them on his blog at Salon.com, America, the American government, the Obama government, is telling the government of the U.K., our closest ally, the mother country and all these things, our closest NATO partner and all those, that if they go ahead and release information that they claim is classified, even though everybody already knows it already anyway, about this Binyam Mohamed case, that America will then cut Britain off from any intelligence that we have about, for example, any terrorist threats to civilians in England.
Are they really making that threat?
That's got to be a bluff, right?
I'll tell you very frankly what I think is going on here.
I think this whole thing is a concoction, and I think it is being done at the behest not of the Americans, but the British government.
And I think, although we all know that basically this section is going to say that Binyam Mohamed was tortured, and it's going to describe how he was tortured in Pakistan, and presumably, you know, who in the CIA gave the orders for this, I think it's going to reveal something else.
And I think this is, I mean, it's quite interesting to look at the courts.
It's very unusual that the court will invite arguments from journalists as to whether they should publish this.
And, you know, they've said there are huge public interest arguments in favour of disclosure.
My belief is this.
We know that Tony Blair's government in Britain really was led by the Bush administration into Iraq, and, you know, we just rolled over and let Bush do whatever he wanted.
I think, to a degree which has not fully come out in this country, the British intelligence and security services, at the behest of cabinet-level ministers in Britain, followed Dick Cheney and the Bush administration into the dark side on torture, as Jane Mayer describes it in her book.
And I think that's the kind of secret.
Now, why do I say that?
Because we know from earlier on in this that when the Bush administration made a complaint to the government saying that they wanted this stuff kept secret, a letter was signed by John Ballinger, who was Condi Rice's general counsel, the general counsel of the State Department.
He had subsequently given an interview to the Mail on Sunday, the paper I work for in England, because I work for them and for Vanity Fair, saying that he wrote that letter at the request of the British government.
He basically has said that the Bush administration really didn't give, you know, a piece of, to put it delicately, caca, whether or not this stuff came out, the Brits were the people who wanted to keep it secret.
I think something similar has been going on here.
We know that David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, has met Hillary Clinton and discussed this matter with her at least twice.
And I think there's something very murky going on, and it's to protect British personnel and British agencies that they are so concerned to keep it secret now.
Well, and this is the importance of the 007 thing, because it directly contradicts the UK government's assertions that they didn't even know he was in Morocco being sliced with a razor blade.
Exactly.
What I was able to publish at the weekend is that there was a man who, I won't say his name in public, because I guess he's entitled to some protection, but I know who he is and I know where he is, or at least I know where he was.
There was a man who knew Binyam Mohamed from London, who had in fact helped him when he first planned his fateful journey that took him to Pakistan in 2001, who was at the same mosque as him.
And when he was in Morocco, he'd already been undergoing torture in Morocco for about six weeks.
This man is suddenly brought to see him by the Moroccans, but he's clearly been brought there by the British, and he says to Binyam, just cooperate, become an agent, come and work for the British security service like I am now, and this torture will stop.
If you want your agony to end, just let yourself get flipped.
Now, if that was just Binyam Mohamed's word, we would be somewhat leery of relying on it, although I have to say that everything Binyam Mohamed has said over going back to 2005 when he was first able to meet a lawyer, as far as it's been possible, it has checked out completely, down to the date when he was flown to Morocco.
No one knew he'd been to Morocco.
There was no proof until we found the flight logs that showed there was a CIA plane that had taken him to Morocco on that date, and then another one on the date he said that took him to Afghanistan.
So I think he's a very truthful man.
But there are now three more witnesses who have come across this same guy in detention in Afghanistan, and they're all saying the same thing, that this guy is being interrogated, and he was far more involved with al-Qaeda or terrorism than any of these other detainees.
Binyam Mohamed, he had a heroin addict.
The idea that Binyam Mohamed was some kind of master terrorist is ludicrous.
But this guy was actually fighting with Osama bin Laden and the last remnants of al-Qaeda's last stand in the Tora Bora caves, and then fled across the Afghan-Pakistan border at the end of 2001.
And then he's captured, and these three different witnesses come across him in different places in Afghanistan, and then suddenly they say the Brits come along and they take him away.
And when others go to Guantanamo, he disappears somewhere else.
And then other people have found him, have come across him again in Britain.
And here's the thing.
He's behaving in a very strange way.
And, I mean, there's one occasion, which in fact I didn't write about in my story, so this is the first time I've told this.
There's one guy who was Moroccan, or he's of Moroccan origin, and his wife was going back to Morocco to pay a family visit.
And suddenly this guy shows up and starts pumping his wife with questions.
Who are you going to see?
Is this just a family visit?
Are you going to see any people involved in politics?
And the man, the husband, gets really angry, saying, who the hell are you?
You can't ask my wife questions like this.
The two get into a fight.
And, you know, basically the guy is now, we say, working for MI5, ends up, you know, getting flogged.
And so, you know, there are some very serious questions.
Well, if MI5 had an agent in Morocco, clearly they knew Binia Mohammed was there.
And this claim that they'd been making for many months now that they didn't know, it's just not true.
The important part as far as Americans, or one important part that they can focus on here, is that Jose Padilla, who is an American citizen, who was arrested on American soil by civilian police, was turned over to the Navy and tortured in the name of his Al-Qaeda plot to set off a radioactive, dirty bomb in this country.
Accusations made by John Ashcroft from Moscow.
And it wasn't true.
It came from what they had sliced out of this Binia Mohammed character, who himself, as you say, was no terrorist.
Absolutely right.
That's what happened.
It's a shocking episode.
And, you know, when you think of the thousands upon thousands of person hours that have been poured into chasing this completely, you know, non-existent plot, the millions of dollars spent on legal fees, and the gruesome abuses of the Constitution and human rights that have ensued, and you see what has come out of it.
Absolutely nothing.
Padilla was eventually convicted of very minor charges of material support for terrorism through an Islamic charity.
He was never convicted or even charged eventually with any serious terrorist plot.
Well, you know, you might think that there were better ways of employing those resources in trying to defend Britain, America, and other Western nations against the obviously real threat of Islamic terrorism than this.
Well, now, in England, the discussion, as far as I can tell from reading y'all's papers all the time, I don't see much, oh, let's just look forward, not back, and let's not criminalize policy differences.
There seems to be some kind of actual criminal investigation.
Do you expect that that will go anywhere?
Yeah, it might.
I think, I mean, there's certainly a division in the British press and among British politicians.
I mean, some people take the view that you just expressed, but I think there is some very real concern and anger in other circles that people must be held accountable for this.
I don't know whether it will go anywhere.
I think there is certainly a possibility that it could do.
I mean, what we also do know is that one of these MI5 officers who's deeply involved in this case, his credibility is already shot to pieces, because very humiliatingly, just about three weeks ago, the government's lawyers had to write to the judges who'd been involved in all this, who had to make the decision whether to release this material, saying that the witness statement that this guy gave on oath last summer was inaccurate, and when he claimed that MI5 had no contact with the CIA over Binyam Mohamed's case after February 2003, this was simply wrong, that in fact they'd found documents which showed that his testimony was, well, to put it at its most generous, inaccurate.
So, you know, I think awkward questions are being asked here, and, you know, will there be prosecutions?
Maybe, maybe not.
Will there be convictions?
A tougher one still, but I wouldn't say it's impossible.
Well, I guess basically the general theory, though, is, in the UK, that there is such a thing as the rule of law, and at least you're supposed to pretend to apply it, right, a little bit?
We try.
I'm sorry, we just don't have that here.
It's an alien, foreign concept from across the ocean to me.
Well, you know, I mean, there are many flaws in our system.
There are flaws in your system.
I think, you know, they're not necessarily always identical flaws.
I mean, state secrets privilege is pretty terrible, and, you know, both the Bush and Obama administrations attempt to use that, of course, a dreadful, but...
But you guys have your official secrets act, so...
Not as bad as it used to be.
They changed it a few years ago.
Oh, really?
Yeah, I mean, it's got a lot less draconian, and in some ways, you know, it's easier to get stuff, but in other ways, it can be harder.
I mean, it's...
I mean, one of the great things about America is that, you know, once officials retire from these agencies, they can speak quite freely or relatively freely.
I mean, they can't divulge classified information, but, you know, they can talk with considerable freedom about what happened.
British officials are basically bound by a kind of lifelong duty of confidentiality, and it's much, much more difficult to talk to retired officials, and that's a big impediment.
Let's get into this Vanity Fair article, Heads in the Sand.
And I guess I can't really help myself.
I have to start off this part of the interview with this short clip of Charles Duelfer on the Rachel Maddow Show.
Now, last Thursday, Keith Olbermann brought up your article, A Possibility for a Sunni Awakening in the Summer of 2004.
Very interesting stuff.
And then next came Rachel Maddow, and she was discussing the Robert Windrum story with Robert Windrum and Charles Duelfer about the vice president's office requesting that, or at least bringing up the idea of waterboarding an Iraqi intelligence official into pointing the finger at connections with Osama bin Laden, which Duelfer refused to do and said was ridiculous.
But he also, I think, made a great scoop for Rachel Maddow on her show Thursday, which she apparently failed to recognize, that not only was there a chance at a Sunni awakening in the summer of 2004, but in the summer of 2003.
Let's listen to Charles Duelfer here for just a moment.
Yes, it was.
And Rachel, it's important to remember the context of the time.
We had just gone into Baghdad.
This was April 2003.
Saddam was gone.
What was different about this than other circumstances where the United States is dealing with enemies, all the Iraqis, the senior Iraqis at that point in time, they wanted to be on our side.
The senior Muqabirat, the senior military officers, they were dealing with the occupying United States Army and other officials at that time as potential allies.
Bear in mind, this is before we made the disastrous decisions that informed the Iraqis that we were going to treat their army as an enemy and that all Ba'athists were going to be treated as Nazis.
So at this point in time, they wanted to be on our side.
They wanted to be helpful, including this security officer.
So there you go.
This is part of your same story, the massive war that killed a million people in Iraq.
That just didn't have to be.
Even taking into account the actual invasion and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, this war never really had to be this bad at all, did it, David?
No, it didn't, and Charles is quite right.
I know Charles Dilfer.
I have enormous respect for the man.
Indeed, one of the people that I went to see for my article, in Amman, Jordan, General Ra'd al-Andani, who was the senior commander of the Republican Guard, trying to defend Baghdad.
He had six divisions trying to defend Baghdad in 2003 as the American army advanced.
He told me, very frankly, that yes, there could certainly have been a deal done in 2003, and it was worse than that.
He personally participated in a series of secret talks that were held at one of the Baghdad, I think it was at the Republican Guard Club in Baghdad, where one of the senior U.S. military officers, Colonel Paul Hughes, who worked out the U.S. Institute for Peace in Washington, he was negotiating with a group of senior army officers about how to reconstitute the Iraqi army, the old Iraqi army.
Now, Hughes was an expert in this.
He had worked in Bosnia, in the Balkans, and the whole thing about reconstituting defeated armies, how to vet them for elements who were guilty of war crimes, but how to basically preserve their structures.
So this was his stock in trade, and not only that.
I mean, call commanders in the 2003 war were literally getting calls on their cell phones from American military officers and from, I guess, CIA agents, saying, listen, get your friend to surrender, and don't worry.
We're going to keep the army going, and if you haven't got blood on your hands, if you haven't committed war crimes, you're going to be just fine.
You'll continue in your position.
Your pension will be safe.
Your family will be fed, and your men will still have a job, too.
Well, that was what Hamdani expected.
That's what everybody expected is what usually happens to defeated armies.
Instead, of course, what we had in May 2003 was Paul Bremer coming in, and I mean, the first that Colonel Hughes knew that these negotiations, which had pretty much got to a conclusion, were just null and void.
The first he knew was from the news media that the Iraqi army was being disbanded.
And, of course, I mean, you know, there's been a great deal of word spoken and ink spilt on the iniquity of that decision.
But what's interesting is that there was a direct continuity between the people who were involved in that potential aversion of an insurgency, if you like, avoidance of an insurgency, the people who could have put together a security plan that would have stopped looting, prevented an insurgency in 2003, and then the people who made desperate attempts to try and get a deal in 2004, which is the main focus of my new piece.
Well, now, I guess there's been some accusations, although I can't remember if anybody ever really showed.
Do you know whether it was the neocons who basically decided, with Bremer, to debothify completely and fire the army?
Because I know that when they asked George Bush about it, he said, huh, yeah, I always kind of wondered about that, too, but I have no idea.
Well, you know, it does seem to have been Bremer acting on his own volition more than anything else.
He did have one or two advisors on this, but he had this idea that the army had gone home and, therefore, the army no longer existed.
Well, the army had gone home because they weren't getting paid and they weren't getting fed, and it was the only way they could continue to survive.
As General Hamdani has told me, all it would have taken was a few phone calls and visits, and these units could have been reassembled very easily.
So, yeah, I don't think it was the neocons principally, or at least it wasn't an ideological decision to disband the Iraqi army.
Then the ideology comes in.
Of course, the people who were very close to the administration, particularly the Pentagon at that time, principally Ahmad Chalabi, who became the chairman of the De-Basification Commission.
Well, now, what about Sistani and the Supreme Islamic Council and the Dawa Party?
I mean, it seems like they were kind of in the position, weren't they, the U.S. Army, or the occupation in general, of basically having to follow through with what they said and let the majority take power and throw the Sunni minority out of power in Baghdad, or else they were going to have to start the war all over again against the Shiites in the south, who had basically stood by as the invasion rolled past.
Well, I mean, this is the problem with might-have-beens in history.
You can never be sure.
Well, I mean, wasn't that part of the calculation at the time?
Personally, I don't believe that the Dawa Party or the people around Sistani would have taken up arms against America or the British.
I find that difficult to believe.
And, of course, at that stage, the degree of Iranian penetration in the south was much lower than it became subsequently.
But was there a way to keep the Sunni, as it were, in the loop?
Was there a way to work through Sunni power structures that didn't involve reconstituting a Ba'athist government?
I think there was.
I mean, the secret to Saddam Hussein's rule, the reason that Saddam Hussein, in terms of other than at times, as in 1991, when he resorted to brutal oppression, the reason why most of the time he was able to stay in power with a degree of consent was that he knew how to work the tribal structure, how to work through the Sheikhs, both Sunni and Shia.
And he had it all worked out.
In fact, as a leading neocon once told me, not living in the green zone, but in the so-called red zone in 2003-2004, he once put it to me, he doesn't speak to me now, by the way, but he said, you know, Saddam knew how many SUVs this tribe got, how many dollars a year this Sheikh needed.
Well, that's, you know, in Scott Ritter's first book, Endgame, that he wrote about the UN inspections back in the 1990s.
He described Saddam Hussein's rule very much like Tony Soprano trying to run North Jersey and that it's all about making sure, OK, you get this much of a cut of that guy's business and your daughter marries this guy's nephew and all very, you know, like George Bush would say, it's hard work, but we're making progress.
Saddam Hussein spent his whole day trying to keep everybody happy enough to let him still be the boss.
Yes, I think Scott Ritter got that exactly right in that book.
So what he said happened was all the tribal leaders, especially in their land bar and in other parts of the Sunni-majority areas, Al-Hilal and so forth, parts of Baghdad, I mean, they were suddenly completely excluded.
They were excluded from power.
They were excluded from influence.
They were regarded as Nazis, as Paul Wolfowitz said on a number of occasions in public, and as he scrawled on memos which advocated reaching out to the Sunnis from the autumn of 2003 onwards.
He would not entertain this kind of outreach effort.
The idea of something such as became eventually, you know, in 2007, the Sunni awakening, was completely anathema to that neocon view.
You only have to read Doug Price's book to see that, I mean, they regarded ending Sunni influence in Iraq as one of the most desirable objectives of the whole invasion.
And, you know, they did have, I think, this extraordinarily strange view that, you know, Shia was the way to have a kind of Muslim renaissance, to lead Muslim nations through to a kind of reformed religion, which would be more democratic and more akin to Western values was through encouraging the Shia, Well, and that's what Chalabi told them, right?
That's what Chalabi told them.
We'll get Ashmy King and build a pipeline to Haifa and it'll be brilliant.
That's right, that's right.
Yep, the stakeholder salesman, he was very convincing.
Well, now, what about the role of Israel in this?
I think it's not too much of a stretch, depending on how you ask and depending on how you take it, to consider the neoconservatives as basically a fifth column for the Likud party in Israel.
Many of their leaders, three or four of their most influential ones anyway, signed on to the clean break proposal to Netanyahu in 1996, which said our first order of business is removing Saddam Hussein in power.
Do you think that this is, you know, part of what Feith and Wolfowitz were considering, that they didn't want any possibility of the Ba'athists, a strong secular nationalist government, being able to come back to power in Baghdad?
They wanted to make sure that, you know, I guess if they couldn't get a Chalabi-style enlightened Shia renaissance, they could at least get Shiite reactionary crazies who would prevent there from ever being a real unified Iraqi state, which they would, you know, tend to consider a threat to Israel.
I think that's too Machiavellian for me.
I mean, all I can say is I've not come across any real evidence, but, you know, in the huge mistakes that they made 2003 through, you know, 2004, 2005, when they basically all left office, I can't see a hand of Israel in there.
I mean, apart from anything else, I mean, I know from Israeli sources, a lot of senior Israeli officials told them, don't invade Iraq, you must be crazy, you're going to have a terrible hornet's nest.
I don't honestly believe that that was the main consideration in their policy at this stage.
I think, you know, I think they saw maybe that, you know, the possibility of an Iraq that was more favorable to Israel might be a byproduct, but I don't think it was ever more than that.
Well, why was it that, I mean, in your story, you talk about how this Texas businessman who was brought into the loop and these Sunnis asked him if he could help, he made the mistake, because he didn't realize the ideological position.
He went to Mark Zell, Doug Fythe's law partner, and this was the route to power, the route to negotiations that he went through, and this was the logjam, was Wolfowitz and Fythe, right?
Oh, no, absolutely.
I mean, and of course, at this point, Zell was running a law firm which was largely based in Tel Aviv.
I mean, the thing was that Wischamper, Wischamper is this Texan businessman, lives near Amarillo, and he's got a huge agricultural business exporting very high-quality seeds and agricultural equipment all over the world, and because of that business, he comes into contact with this remarkable man, Talal Al-Goud, who's a leading Al-Anbar sheik, who approaches him in late 2003 when he comes to Oman and invites him to dinner and says, you've got to help us.
You've got to get us contacts in the Pentagon.
You've got to get us some influence.
You know, we're being completely cut out, and I can tell you that this is going to be a bloodbath, because what's happening is that because they're excluded, the tribal sheiks of Al-Anbar in places like Fallujah and Ramadi are making common cause with Al-Qaeda.
They don't really have common interests with Al-Qaeda, but they are now so full of hatred for America that they are prepared to work with Al-Qaeda.
And, of course, at this point, Wischamper is relatively naive, and he has some way into Mark Zell, and he knows that Mark Zell is Doug Feith's old partner, and he has very little idea of the ideology that's driving Doug Feith, you know, what neocon ideology in the Pentagon meant at that time.
So he approaches Zell, and, of course, the last thing on earth that Zell wants to do is get in a meeting with Feith or Wolfowitz to discuss outreach to the Sunni.
So he actually, I mean, it's a shocking little subplot to this.
He actually paid Zell some money to try and get meetings, and then Zell, of course, completely failed to do anything.
So he then managed to make contact with a much more productive official, namely Jerry Jones, Special Assistant to Ronald Rumsfeld, the Defense Secretary.
Well, and you say in your article that as Rumsfeld was going on TV and saying, well, these guys are all terrorists and dead-enders and Saddam Hussein lovers and all this, he was actually sending out memos saying, hey, let's work out a deal with these Sunni insurgent types.
But he had outsourced the war to Wolfowitz at that point?
Well, I mean, James Clabb, who's another on-the-record source in the story, he played a personal role in these events and later became the Deputy Assistant Secretary for South Asia in the Pentagon.
The way he puts it is that Rumsfeld saw himself as this kind of historic, reforming Defense Secretary, this full-spectrum Defense Secretary who wasn't just about fighting one war here or one war there, but about completely reforming the entire American fighting machine.
And so the details of what was going on in Iraq he did, to a degree, outsource.
There is, as you say, this contradiction that while he was in public decrying the insurgency and implying that he regarded them as indelible terrorists who could not be spoken to under any circumstances, he was in fact responding quite favorably to memos coming up through the chain of command to him, recommending just that kind of outreach.
What seems to have happened is although he did entertain these negotiations very favorably and although he personally knew exactly what Jerry Jones was up to and approved and authorized it, I think he also made a quick political judgment.
When it really came to a head in the late summer of 2004, when there had been this very direct approach from the leaders of the insurgency to this group of Americans who were leading this outreach effort, and it attracted the support of very significant figures such as Lieutenant General James T. Conway, the Marine Expeditionary Force General, not the overall commanding general, Ron Fell realized that higher-ups in the administration regarded this with implacable loathing and he was in this position where he was kind of caught in the middle.
Seif and Wolfowitz were basically running the war and regarded it as an asthma, and then so did Cheney and Bush and indeed Condi Rice, and he just felt, well, you know, there are some battles you can't win.
And so he withdrew and the thing got nixed.
He let it get nixed.
Well, and apparently the Powell faction of the State Department agreed and Dick Armitage came out against this also.
Yes, he did.
I mean, you know, it does seem to have been a tragic misjudgment by Dick Armitage here.
I mean, how much did he really know about it?
How much did he approve?
But yeah, he seems to have been implacably opposed to it.
I mean, maybe, I mean, Ron Fell was very close to Armitage.
I think he probably saw Armitage as a potential ally, and he wrote to Armitage saying, you know, can you come on board here?
Can you use what influence you have?
And Armitage, you know, read what was being suggested and said, you know, under no circumstances I want nothing to do with this.
I regard this as a dreadful mistake.
And you quote the special assistant to Donald Rumsfeld, Jerry H. Jones, saying that the delay, because of course this is the so-called concerned local citizen awakening movement that they ended up going along with eventually anyway, the delay cost 2,000 American lives and uncounted tens of thousands of Iraqis died.
Shortly after this thing broke down was the re-election of Bush and then his triumphant attack on Fallujah, which there's a great movie that just came out actually called The Road to Fallujah, which features Nir Rosen and Dar Jamal both explaining how all the refugees from Fallujah went and displaced a bunch of Shia, and then they were refugees to Shia neighborhoods and displaced a bunch of Sunnis.
And all of a sudden this, and you had Rumsfeld go instead with this El Salvador option to use the Shiite death squads to hunt down the Sunni leaders and so forth, all of which precipitated this massive civil war.
Yes.
I mean, again, it might have been in history always, by definition, you could never prove how great the missed opportunity was.
But as James Cloud puts it, you know, there were some critical turning points in Iraq where the road not taken really might have produced a very different outcome.
One of course was letting the looting happen, another was the disbanding of the army, and this offer in 2004 was the second.
I mean, let's just look at what was being proposed here because, you know, this is not some kind of casual approach.
This was a conference that took place in July 2004, a secret conference in the Sheraton Hotel in Amman with some very senior American military and civilian representation, including James Cloud, including Jerry H. Jones, Donald Rumsfeld's special assistant, including the chief of staff of the Marine Corps in Iraq and the chief of civil affairs in Iraq.
And, you know, this all happening with the express approval and encouragement of James T. Conway, the lieutenant general.
So, you know, there they are meeting with the cream of the Sunni Shiites in Iraq, and these guys are saying to them, you know, we are not your enemy.
You should not be fighting us.
We should not be fighting you.
And they introduce them to a man called Dr. Ismail, who is from Fallujah, who has credible claims to represent all the principal Sunni insurgency groups and presents a list of demands that are really at that time very benign.
I mean, they are about, you know, stopping aggressive American patrols in Sunni neighborhoods and, you know, rounding up detainees willy-nilly and encouraging economic development.
I mean, there are things that, you know, should have happened anyway as part of the reconstruction policy.
So that's the first part of the offer.
And then a couple of weeks later, there's a second meeting with very senior military officers with General Hamdani, the guy who had been a Republican Guard commander, and he's got this fully worked out and budgeted proposal for actually something that was far more formal than the eventual, you know, Sunni with Iraq awakening militias that did get set up in 2007.
And he's saying we're going to have a force.
It's going to be initially 5,000 strong.
It will be led by former Sunni military officers up to the rank of general.
It will be fully accountable to the Iraqi Ministry of Defense.
It will eventually be absorbed into the regular Iraqi army.
It will be supplied with American weapons, and then it will be trained by American trainers.
And it will go after terrorists.
It will promote stability.
It will impose security, and it will drive out al-Qaeda.
I mean, I think there are two levels of tragedy here in the fact that this was never tried.
The first is what you have already said, that, you know, because it got so bad, it wasn't just that, you know, the insurgency carried on and they carried on attacking Americans.
I mean, Iraq descended into a sectarian bloodbath and, you know, ethnic cleansing of entire neighborhoods and religious killings on a truly horrifying scale.
None of that might have happened, and the fact that it did happen, of course, has made it all the more difficult to reach any kind of lasting settlement.
The second thing is that potentially what was being proposed then in 2004, before all that violence had happened, might have been a lot more stable than what did happen finally in 2007.
I mean, we're seeing signs now of that Sunni awakening breaking down.
The government of Nouri al-Maliki has not been paying the militias.
There have been people defecting.
There are reports, especially in the New York Times, of leaders of the Sunni awakening defecting back to the insurgency, making common cause with al-Qaeda again.
If this force that Ra'd al-Handani had proposed in 2004 had been stood up, and if it had, you know, done the job it could have done then, arguably it would have been a much more stable solution, much less prone to the kind of gangsterism that the Sunni awakening, when it finally did happen, had been characterized by.
Well, you know, right now, as you say, it's not really happening, the reabsorbing of these armed fighters back into the Iraqi government, because Maliki basically has no incentive to let them back in, whereas before he might have had much more.
As Patrick Coburn says, the Sunni insurgency, they lost the civil war, and that's why they finally, you know, basically came begging, listen, please, just let us fight al-Qaeda and stop bombing us, and whatever, because they had too many enemies.
They had lost Baghdad.
It's 85% Shia Arabs now.
Yeah, that's right.
And, in fact, it was in the news just the other day, two days ago, that Maliki was saying he wants to undo some of the power sharing that has been established with the Sunnis in the country.
I don't know if you know this, but there is a subplot to this.
The royal Handani, having failed in this attempt to get this force put up in 2004, he left Iraq.
I mean, he was being harried by Sunni militia.
His family became targets for death squads several times.
He was very lucky to escape with his life.
He finally took refuge in Oman.
And, you know, he was there not doing a whole lot through 2005, 2006.
And then, in 2008, suddenly, the American and the British military reached out to Ra'd al-Handani.
And, of course, they were fully aware of the role he'd played both under Saddam as a very straight military officer, someone who, you know, had never been accused of war crimes or anything like that, and of his attempt to get this thing going in 2004.
And they reached out to him, and they said, They advised us on how to get Sunni officers back into the Iraqi army because we are desperately short of experienced officers.
We need your people back.
And he was flown on an American military plane from Oman back to Baghdad about at least four times in 2008 for multi-day conferences that were held in both the British and in the American embassies with high-ranking officials of the al-Maliki government and chaired by Ryan Crockett, the American ambassador.
And the amazing thing is that there was actually a written agreement, of which I have a copy, between Handani and two other generals who negotiated with him and the al-Maliki government, which set out the terms for allowing Sunni officers back into the Iraqi army for repaying the years of lost pay, which they, of course, never got, and for restoring their full pension rights.
And this agreement has simply not been honored.
The al-Maliki government has now made it clear that it doesn't want these people after all.
And despite the pressure from both the U.S. and the British, they're making clear that they don't consider there is a place for people like Handani in the Iraqi army anymore.
So, again, what might have been quite a promising initiative in terms of restoring stability appears to be running very rapidly into the Mesopotamian sands.
You know, what's interesting about this, too, all the emphasis by me on the neocons and their role in this, a lot of this story, in a sense, would seem to fit, wouldn't it, with the more James Baker, Richard Haass kind of old foreign policy establishment view that what ought to happen is Iraq ought to be split into thirds.
Really, I guess from that point of view, the so-called cleansing of Baghdad is progress toward having a weak central government and autonomy.
And even if you assume their best intentions that this will keep things more peaceful over the long term, it seems like it would kind of make sense to think that, well, maybe the neocons really started losing influence and the old school foreign policy establishment took over and said, you know, let's go ahead and let them all be divided up by this violence and then we'll build some walls and pacify the place a different way for the long term.
I guess that could be right.
I mean, I suppose, you know, American influence is now waning in Baghdad.
But, you know, it doesn't seem good for the immediate future or the medium term future.
It looks like, you know, the kind of violence that we saw in 2006, maybe on the way back.
Right.
I mean, that's really the bottom line here is that the awakening thing, as you say, which would have had a better chance of working if they'd gone ahead and done it back before all this terrible violence and cleansing is it's in a much worse position.
The so-called surge didn't really work at all.
It just maybe they bought a little time.
They helped the Shiites win the last of the Civil War in 2006 and 2007.
But basically, they never solved any of the benchmarks.
They never really created the single state that they claim they're trying to create there.
Well, you know, the other thing here is that it could have been done the way that it was being suggested in 2004.
I mean, the people who would have been putting this thing together at a sort of semi-national level, as it were, were the people who really understood the tribal structures.
There were people who were very high up in the tribal structures.
They knew who was a real sheikh and who wasn't.
What you have now is some people who genuinely had that kind of influence.
And, of course, the first of them, the late Abarisha, was a good example.
You have people who, as it were, had that credibility.
But then you also have people who are really just street thugs.
I mean, you do, earlier on, the Tony Soprano analogy.
And there were people who really were.
There are people who are part of the Karim family, as it were.
I'm not saying they're all criminals, but there are people who are just intellectuals.
There are people who don't have the bona fides.
And, of course, that means that when they stand up a militia and start getting money from Americans or the Iraqi government, instead of supporting them, the people who actually do represent the real tribal structures resent them hugely.
They regard them as impostors, as frauds.
Now, one thing that I think all of my favorite, or not all, but pretty much it seems to be a consensus among my favorite Iraq war analysts, that the Maliki government, as demonstrated by their standing by their guns all through last year and demanding a withdrawal agreement by 2012 instead of allowing 58 bases and all that, like in the first place, has basically shown, I think as Patrick Coburn really says, that America has installed a government that really no longer needs us.
Their alliance with Iran is quite enough.
They control Baghdad, thanks in part to all this mess that we've been discussing here.
And that, you know, this is not how to be an imperialist, right?
You're supposed to prop up the minority, because the majority doesn't need you, especially if they're allies with the giant state next door.
And so Maliki is really kicking us out, and we have to go, whether Barack Obama and his administration want to or not.
What do you think of that?
Well, you know, the old Irish saying, you know, how do you get to such and such a place?
Well, I wouldn't start from here.
I don't honestly know.
I read an interview yesterday on BanalityFair.com with Congressman Alan Grayson from Orlando, who is somebody who, a year or two ago now, spent quite a lot of time working on a big article about contractual fraud in Iraq.
He, as an attorney, had done a great deal to bring false claims out lawsuits against KBR and Alibaba and so forth.
And he was saying in this interview that, you know, we've just got to get out.
You know, the idea that we are in any way defending ourselves against terrorism by being in Iraq now has become simply ludicrous.
And I must say, I think it's getting to that stage.
It's beginning to seem difficult to see what possible purpose is being served by remaining in that, as you say, propping up a majority that is in alliance with this giant state next door, which may quite soon have nuclear weapons.
It doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.
Well, that's a whole new interview right there.
We'll go ahead and leave it there.
Everyone, that's David Rose.
He's a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and writes for the Daily Mail over there in England.
I hope that perhaps we can do this interview, a different interview, again soon on this show and discuss your 2005 article about the Sabel Edmonds story and Dennis Hastert.
That would be a pleasure.
Great.
Thank you very much for your time on the show today.
Okay.
Thanks for having me.
Take care.
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