For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton, and this is Antiwar Radio.
Our next guest on the show today is Kelly B. Bleos.
She regularly writes for Antiwar.com and is a longtime freelance writer, reporter for FoxNews.com, contributing editor at the American Conservative Magazine, and is also a Washington correspondent for Homeland Security.
Today, you can find what she writes for Antiwar.com at original.antiwar.com slash bleos.
V-L-A-H-O-S.
Welcome back to the show, Kelly.
How are you?
Great.
Thanks for having me on.
Well, I love this article.
It's so funny.
You say Far-Qaeda, I say Al-Qaeda.
I guess it's a gigantic Semitic conspiracy all around the world.
These terrible Arabs are planning our destruction, right?
Yeah, and I guess what we're seeing here is the latest leap, the latest attempt to bring Al-Qaeda even closer to our shores, up through the hemisphere, and it's part of a massive conflation that's been occurring ever since 9-11.
It's just the latest attempt, basically.
Well, let's see.
So back then it was Al-Qaeda is the Taliban, is Saddam Hussein, and then that became is the Islamic Courts Union in Somalia, and became, I guess, little leis in Switzerland who donate to Hezbollah and anything.
But now, I mean, I guess there's always been a lot of hype against Hugo Chavez from the American government, but now they're conflating the, I can't even say adversaries, I guess, the people in power in Latin America that our government doesn't like are now being conflated with Osama Bin Laden and the international terrorist groups.
Correct.
I mean, there is an attempt by members of our Congress.
And I mentioned specifically Ileana Ross-Lehtinen, a Congresswoman from Florida, and Congressman Connie Mack, also from Florida, who have proposed that Venezuela be put on the list of states that sponsor terrorism.
They've done this before, and they've failed.
There's just not support for it.
They believe, like other members of Congress, Republican members, mostly, that Hugo Chavez is a threat.
He's a threat economically, he's a threat socially, and he's also a threat militarily.
And they've conflated all of this, and they've used specific instances of, whether it be private businessmen in or around Venezuela, or members of his own corrupt cabinet who have had sort of dirty dealings with members of Hezbollah in the past, as evidence that he himself and his government as a whole is a state sponsor of terror.
So there are these little dots, and I point this out in my article, that they have used, these little dots that they tie into, all to make this big brief against Hugo Chavez.
So far it hasn't caught fire, but their latest attempt is an arrest of two members, two al-Qaeda members, supposed al-Qaeda members, who had been approached by an agent who was, he was posing as a FARC member, and who was suggesting to these supposed al-Qaeda members that he could launder some money for them, and get the drugs into Africa, and basically do a deal to get their drugs out, get money for al-Qaeda, and cement their relationship.
Now these guys were basically busted from the get-go, and that is supposedly the FARC-al-Qaeda link that Ross Layton and others have been looking for, for years.
I mean, there has been much written on the terrorist, quote-unquote, infestation of South America, and I point this out in my article.
There so far has been no direct link to al-Qaeda, though there's been a lot of insinuations, there's been plenty of arrests and frozen assets, but there has been no established al-Qaeda cells in South America, although there seems to be a wish that there was, so there would be this sort of need to spread the global war on terror even more forcefully in the southern hemisphere, but so far there has been none, so this single arrest that I talk about in the article has become the newest sort of call to arms, let's say, by Ross Layton and others in the Congress.
Well, okay, I've got to try to parse this, because it's pretty confusing to me.
Well, and you know, the propaganda, it's not really supposed to make sense, it's just supposed to sound good, or make you feel good hearing it, or something, or scared, or I don't know what, but it seems like, first of all, al-Qaeda is not Hezbollah, and Hezbollah is not al-Qaeda.
One is led by Nasrallah, a Shiite militant in southern Lebanon, and the other is run by his avowed enemy Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, who spare no opportunity to bash Hezbollah as a front for Iran, and Zawahiri even blamed them for being behind all the 9-11 conspiracy theories, trying to steal their sunshine and whatever.
But so there's that, and then there's the question of whether FARC, which is this separatist group basically in Colombia, is actually the same thing as the Chavez administration in Venezuela, and whether some ministers in his government, who in the past have been connected to Hezbollah in some way, means that he is connected to Hezbollah.
And then there's the question of the arrest of these guys, who I believe you point out in your article, basically were never al-Qaeda guys until they were entrapped and tricked into it by the informant.
They were wannabes.
They were wannabes, yeah.
And so there is no even al-Qaeda, you can strike that out.
I mean, what a confusing mess.
Right, and they have these three alleged al-Qaeda members.
They're approached by a Lebanese guy who is a quote-unquote supposed fixer for FARC in Ghana.
So we've got three angles here.
What the DEA, and I failed to mention at the beginning here, it was a DEA agent posing as a FARC guy, a Lebanese FARC guy.
I mean, it's really crazy.
But he's in Ghana.
So it's alleged here by the DEA and now Ross Layton and others, that there is this not only FARC-al-Qaeda connection, but a FARC-al-Qaeda-African connection.
So that brings in this whole sort of, it's this global thing, the African-al-Qaeda connection.
You get all the great juicy subplots here within one sad arrest event.
What part of Africa are we talking about here?
I'm sorry?
What part of Africa are we talking about here?
Ghana.
So it's not Somalia, which you and I have talked about before.
I'm looking at the map on the wall of the studio here.
That's on the west coast over there by Nigeria somewhere?
Yeah, west Africa, yeah.
I can't read it from here.
It's too far.
Yeah, it is west Africa, yeah.
Well, that's what we need is a war in west Africa.
Right, exactly.
Or in Venezuela.
And here's the thing that gets me, too.
This guy Chavez, all he ever does all day is nationalize things and lob zeros off his dollars.
He's no hero of mine.
But the idea that somehow he's supposed to be...
I mean, they really are trying to push the idea, right?
That this guy is a threat to America that we may just have to take military action against at some point.
Right.
And like I said earlier, this is a long-standing effort on the part of Ross Layton and others.
About a year ago or so, there was the whole business of portraying or at least supposedly finding a smoking gun linking Venezuela or Hugo Chavez's government with the FARC.
So that's a whole other question whether his government is in league with the FARC to begin with.
So what Ross Layton and others are doing now is they're just supposing or they're presupposing that he is connected with the FARC.
And that the FARC is making entreaties to Al-Qaeda in Africa and helping Al-Qaeda raise money by basically smuggling drugs out of Colombia, through Africa, through wherever, and then the proceeds going to Al-Qaeda.
So there's a lot of presupposition here and conflation.
So in order to take what Ross Layton and others are saying, you have to just swallow a few things.
You have to swallow that the FARC and Hugo Chavez are working together, that the FARC is working with Al-Qaeda in smuggling drugs out through the world and helping Al-Qaeda raise money for its terrorist entreaties and attacks across the globe.
You have to also swallow the fact that Hugo Chavez is also working with Iran and establishing and helping fund Hezbollah.
And according to Connie Mack and Ross Layton, he's also helping to facilitate Hamas in South America and its fundraising.
So basically you put Hugo Chavez at the center of a lot of dastardly dealing and cozy terrorist relationships.
I mean we haven't even gotten to the whole relationship with Iran.
But there are a lot of people out there who really do believe that Iran, through Hugo Chavez and others, is establishing a presence in South America with the sole purpose of attacking us here in the United States.
And I think that's what it comes down to.
And there are plenty of books written, reports, white papers, military reports and testimony to sort of bolster that.
But when you start parsing it out, you realize that the evidence is juicy but it's thin when you want to make the grand accusation at the end.
Well and this has been going on since September 11th.
People like David Horowitz and his associates have pushed this whole thing where all terrorist groups in the world are the same thing.
Al-Qaeda and Hamas and Hezbollah and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade and I guess the IRA and everybody in the whole world are this one big terrorist network that there's thousands of sleeper agents ready to bring destruction across the United States.
At all times, I guess, we never see the thousands of them actually set anything on fire or do anything.
But they're always here and everything is connected to everything.
And it really is kind of the inverse of the conspiracy theories that people have about them.
Like for example, I've got to assume that there's a neoconservative think tank behind this because these idiot Congress people couldn't possibly come up with this nonsense themselves.
Right.
And I talked about in my piece that back in 2002, not very long after the terrorist attacks in 9-11, basically there was a big focus on that tri-border region where Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay meet, the Ciudad del Este region where it was supposedly crawling with Hamas, Hezbollah, not Al-Qaeda.
That was never established.
But Hamas, Hezbollah, every ne'er-do-well terrorist, creepazoidal guy in the world was headed down to this region raising money for terrorist opportunities.
And I think a lot of this intelligence information that was being fed to CNN, to Jeffrey Goldberg, who wrote a huge article for The New Yorker on this, and others, was basically coming from the Mossad.
Because they were convinced, Israel was convinced that all of Hezbollah and the Hamas fundraisers were there and terrorists that they had been after.
And so there was a big media blitz at the time.
And just doing a few Google searches, I found that there was a number of stories.
It was funny.
And they were all concentrated around the same time CNN did a big piece on this tri-border region.
And then, quiet.
It's still mentioned.
It's not as though that our military and intelligence aren't still looking at Hezbollah and Hamas and their fundraisers in that region.
But there seemed to have been a big push there.
And I really think that they were being fed.
It just didn't pan out.
I mean, obviously our focus as a nation went elsewhere.
To Iraq.
To war.
But yeah, there's a lot of feeding going on.
And their interests aren't necessarily with our interests.
With American interests.
You know, in the American Conservative Magazine, which you write for as well, there's a new piece by Mark Ames where he reminds us that it's in the 9-11 Commission Report that there was this memo by Douglas Feith recommending to Donald Rumsfeld that we should be hitting targets outside the Middle East in the initial offensive, including Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil.
The author suggested since the U.S. attacks were expected in Afghanistan, an American attack in South America or Southeast Asia might be a surprise to the terrorists.
And so this wasn't just a blitz.
This was Douglas Feith's proposal to do this.
Exactly.
And now, wait a minute, when you say it didn't pan out, are you saying that there's just really no evidence at all that there are Hamas and Hezbollah in this tri-state area or whatever down there?
I think from my, you know, and I obviously am not a terror expert.
If anything, I like to look at things from a media angle and how things are spun and how we are spun by officials and other media and interests.
But from the little research that I've done, it seems like there is plenty of evidence that there are so-called quote-unquote bad guys who are raising money for nefarious interests, whether it be terrorism, whether it be supporting terrorism.
I'm just going to take a purely sort of try to look at this objectively.
I think that there are people raising money for Hezbollah and Hamas in these areas, or have.
And, you know, the U.S. Treasury has moved to freeze those assets.
But I think where the stumbling is, is that trying to connect these people, these players, you know, who are basically going to sovereign nations and sovereign places outside of our realm, and they're raising money and they're doing their deeds, and those governments got to deal with them.
To connect those individual players to Hugo Chavez, to actual government, to Ahmadinejad, and to say that somehow this is part of a state-sponsored conspiracy to attack the U.S., I think is a major stretch.
And I think when I say not pan out, I mean that, yeah, sure, you can go all day.
You send Jeffrey Goldberg down to the tri-border region.
Sure.
He's got, you read his piece, it's like 5,000 words, and it's a mind-bender, because he basically has been fed all this intelligence information from the Mossad.
It's so obvious.
And he's got names, he's rattling off names of terrorists, people they're looking for, people who are sending money to Hezbollah, Hamas.
There seems to be a, and then you back that up with reports for our military up until this year, who basically say, yeah, there's money that's leaving South America and it's going to these interests across in the Middle East.
That's fine.
But what my problem is, is that, A, they have not yet connected that to al-Qaeda.
They have not yet connected that to any terrorist attack or even threat to the United States.
So there's a lot of conflation between point A and point B.
And so I think when I say not pan out, I mean that, yeah, there's a lot of bad guys down there.
There's a lot of shady characters, but you can't take it to the next step where Douglas Bice and others are saying, we might have to go and attack.
Are there terrorist cells?
We still don't even know that.
So you're going from fundraising to terrorist cell, and I don't think that they can make that leap.
And what they want to do is to say that there's all these sleeper cells in South America.
And that was a big thing around the time that you're talking about, where Douglas Bice and then the Rand Corporation came out with a report where they indicated that maybe we needed to strike Hezbollah first because at any time Iran could activate its sleeper cells that are supposedly in South America and other places to attack American interests.
You might even remember that buzz back then.
I don't think that they've ever proven that those terrorist cells actually exist.
Well, and I don't want to say anything especially nice about Hezbollah or Hamas or anything, but it seems like they have a policy of trying to not directly piss off America.
They're certainly not part of al-Qaeda's war against the United States whatsoever, and they don't seem to have one of their own.
In Lebanon, Hezbollah is a problem because they keep Israel from occupying Lebanon, and I guess that's a problem for Israel.
And Hamas is a pain in the neck that they wish they'd never created in the Gaza Strip, but what does that have to do with me?
Right.
Yeah, and that's my point.
When the Treasury shut down a couple Venezuelans who were raising money for Hezbollah, in one case the guy had hosted a Hezbollah parliamentarian in Caracas, and it was helping him establish a Muslim charity there.
Well, we saw that as a terrorist exchange or raising money for terrorists or whatever the metrics are for freezing assets, but we saw that exchange, that visit, that attempt to set up a fundraising apparatus in Caracas as a potential terrorist fundraising scheme, and we shut that guy down.
That was our evidence that the Chavez government was connected to Hezbollah.
Okay, well, you look at that on the face.
It doesn't sound exactly like, you know, we need to start putting water bottles down in our basins because an attack is imminent.
You know, we're talking about a Hezbollah parliamentarian, and we often forget that they are part of the government in Lebanon.
You know, so there's all of these shadings and interesting angles that get lost when Ross Layton and Congressman Connie Mack are up there saying, you know, who goes to Chavez?
He's in bed with Hamas and Hezbollah and now Al-Qaeda.
You know, and it's like, you know, and that's why they haven't gotten that far themselves, because I think for the most part the Congress knows they're full of it.
But, you know, there is a whole world out there who are writing books and really believe that we, I mean, I did a story a few years ago about this access of unity.
You know, Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez are best buddies.
They're just doing it to stick it in our eye, and it was particularly George Bush's eye, by meeting and cutting all these deals.
And, you know, now they're pursuing a gas deal.
So if we do slap some sanctions on Iran, which Ross Layton is fully behind, crippling that country so they have no fuel.
You know, so they're in the middle of making a deal where Venezuela will be able to export, you know, gasoline to Iran.
You know, we see this as a military threat.
Is it?
I don't think so.
Well, and it's the same thing with China now is building, or at least have a contract to build some refineries in Iran in, you know, the run-up to coming sanctions, more sanctions along those lines.
So here American policy just pushes our adversaries together, and then we blame them for being together, even in the most minimal sense.
And also, you know, I think it's worthy of note that just like with all the rest of every other part of this war, the war party's version of events is always based on trying to confuse you rather than trying to explain to you what's really going on here.
It seems like a pretty common thread throughout their, you know, propaganda.
Right.
Exactly.
And, you know, and I know I'm sure your guests have reminded in the past that, you know, Iran was completely willing to help us in those brief days after 9-11 to go after al-Qaeda.
Yeah, until the axis of evil speech.
Yeah, until the axis of evil speech, and we forget that.
So I look at these reports from back in 2002 where they're talking about, you know, oh, you know, they're just waiting for us to trigger something so they can activate all these cells.
You know, they're just waiting, and I'm thinking, you know, we push them and push them and push them away to the point where, yeah, they're running into the arms of the, you know, Hugo Chavez and talking about axis of unity.
You know, and you have Ross Layton, and basically I'm looking at an editorial or op-ed that she had in the Los Angeles Times back in just December where she said, hit Iran where it hurts, you know.
The U.S. must be prepared to use every weapon in its political and economic arsenal.
I mean, they're ready to just squeeze these people.
And on the other side of the mouth they're talking about supporting the, you know, the freedom fighters in the streets there.
But, you know, they are ready for action in terms of a war with Iran, and this whole jazz about Hugo Chavez and them coming to our shores and having to, you know, basically go after, quote-unquote, terror cells is just one, you know, step towards that, you know, to stoke the fear, to stoke the fear.
Well, and, you know, the Israelis have had an agenda to try to pin everything that blows up on Iran for a long time, and you can go back to Osama bin Laden's bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, and I think even the embassy there, which they tried to blame on supposed Saudi Hezbollah, which Louis Freeh went along with.
And then you had the Buenos Aires bombing in 1994, which the great Gareth Porter has shown was much more likely the work of right-wing white guys rather than Hezbollah agents.
But, you know, there certainly is an agenda from the Israel First part of the foreign policy community in this country and on the part of the Israeli government to try to make their adversaries, the Iranians and their friends in Gaza and Lebanon, into our enemies.
And it's been going on from the very beginning.
Right, exactly.
And that's where all that business with the tri-border region came from.
I mean, that was the conflation right there, right after 9-11.
Let's concentrate on this tri-border region, which is infested supposedly with Middle Easterners who are proselytizing and raising money for Hamas and Hezbollah, and conflating that with our interest in going after, you know, al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.
And, you know, I suggest if you have about a half an hour to kill what you don't, to go back and read the Jeffrey Goldberg piece in the New Yorker.
The headline is enough to grab you.
It's called, In the Party of God, Hezbollah Sets Up Operations in South America and the United States.
So he goes through about 3,000 words until he gets to North Carolina and starts talking about a supposed cell that was establishing itself here in the United States.
And it's like, whoa, where did that come from?
Well, and you never read anything else about that from any other sources.
Exactly, exactly.
But he spends, and then, you know, you go into, if you're really in a hurry, then you just go to your find option and you look, you know, okay, so when is he going to talk about al-Qaeda here?
You know, and it's like, oh, it's only mentioned a couple times.
And it's only in a couple paragraphs where he's sort of like introducing it, but he never really goes so far as to say, you know, he says, al-Qaeda does considerable fundraising in Ciudad del Este.
Oh, really?
And then so you go and you look, okay, well, you know, and then you find that he has these really tenuous, you know, very tenuous links in terms of who these fundraisers are.
And then he goes right back into the Hezbollah guys.
You know, so it's like this really sort of… Typical Jeffrey Goldberg work.
Yeah, of going, you get all excited.
You're like, oh, my God, al-Qaeda?
Raising money to realize, oh, yeah, you know, these are really tenuous links here.
Yeah.
And we're used to that.
I mean, we got into a war over it, you know?
Right, exactly.
Yeah, and then as soon as you're done reading that, you can read something by him that says that anybody who accuses him or anybody else of trying to lie America into war against Israel's enemies is an evil, vile racist who should be disregarded.
Same author.
Yeah, exactly.
So, you know, I guess that includes us right now.
Clearly.
As Dick Cheney would say, clearly.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, and it's just about as true as when he said it.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today, Kelly.
It's been great.
Oh, thank you so much.
Everybody, that's Kelly Vlahos.
The article is You Say Far-Qaeda, I Say Al-Qaeda, and it's at original.antiwar.com.
Vlahos, you can also find her in the American Conservative Magazine at amconmag.com.
