02/26/10 – Ryan Dawson – The Scott Horton Show

All right y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio on Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
We're streaming live worldwide on the internet at chaosradioaustin.org and at antiwar.com slash radio.
And our next guest on the show today is Ryan Dawson, he keeps the websites rise2sense, that's number two, rise2sense.com, and sense is spelled like in your brain, not in your pocket there.
And he also keeps Anti-Neocons, that's rise2sense.com slash anti-neocons.
And I'm reading here that Anti-Neocons has declared February 26th the official Hate Richard Pearl Day.
Welcome back to the show, Ryan, how are you doing?
It's good to be back on the show, I also got my two cents in the other day on the Jon Stewart Daily Show.
Yeah, that was cool, I saw that, in fact they played a whole little montage of people talking bad about Bank of America and you had the harshest one of all, so congratulations, man, that was cool.
I was glad to get my two cents there, the second time I was on the Daily Show, the first time I wasn't even aware of it because I was in Japan and I missed the whole thing, but yeah.
Did you ever get to see the video of it?
The first one?
Yeah, and I was actually bashing Richard Pearl in that one.
Oh, awesome.
Well, so answer me this, why is today official Hate Richard Pearl Day?
Because of course everybody hates Richard Pearl every day.
I don't know anybody that, well, I'm going to continue to hate him every day, I just thought I'd make a holiday out of it.
I was getting some news that there was a voice vote in California about a no cursing week, they weren't allowed to cuss for a week, something we shouldn't cuss anyway, and apparently their government had nothing better to do, and I decided, hey, we're anti-neocons, we used to be anti-neocons.com, someone grabbed their domain, that's why it's right, two cents now, but why don't we make our own holiday, and I was thinking about all the neocons, can't stand any of them, and it took me a while, but I determined that Richard Pearl, in my opinion, and you can debate about this or not, but he's the very worst one, I can't think of any redeeming quality about that guy, so we decided to have a Hate Richard Pearl Day, so on this day people can blog and make videos and say all the nasty things they want about Richard Pearl.
Alright, well that's why you're here, to say all the nasty things you want about Richard Pearl, and just so everybody's got their head on straight, Richard Pearl is the guy with the dark circles around his eyes and the big fat neck to rival Fred Kagan, he's one of the fattest, most slovenly of the neocons, and, well, I don't know, let's start with how many times to your knowledge, Rye, from Anti-Neocons, has Richard Pearl been under investigation by the FBI for espionage on behalf of the Israeli government?
Seven, I think, at least, I mean, if you want to go all the way back to the 70s, I think there's at least seven times, I mean, some of it's all from the same cases, but I mean, it's not just for the Israelis and for the Israeli lobby, it's also for his financial profiteering through Trireme and Hollinger, also Boeing and Global Crossing, and the Israeli lobby, and arms to Israel, so, I don't know how many I just named there, five or six.
This is the guy that had, well, played a major role in having America attack Iraq for their own good?
Sounds like a lot of interest, why don't you be a little bit more specific about Trireme and the arms manufacturers and what you know about this guy, go ahead.
Sure, I'll get into that first.
First of all, at this time, Trireme is a private equity firm, they collected money from venture capitalists and they mainly invested that money into techs and weapons stocks, etc., and he was on the board of directors for Trireme with some other wonderful guys like Henry Kissinger and James Thompson from the 9-11 Convention, and what they did there was a couple different things.
The ones that he got in trouble for, for Seymour Hirsch, or Cy Hirsch, was he was basically bribing some Saudi businessmen to invest in Trireme, and in return, they would give him influence in U.S. politics.
The article there is, in question, is Lunch with the Chairman, by Cy Hirsch, right?
That's right.
And then, of course, Pearl goes on CNN with former AIPAC employee Wolf Blitzer and said that Cy Hirsch was the closest thing America had to a terrorist.
And this is a man who spilt the story about Abu Ghraib and the Miley Massacre in Vietnam.
I mean, he is not a terrorist.
He is a superb journalist.
And, of course, Richard Pearl talked about protection.
You want to talk about the closest thing America has to a terrorist outside of our own CIA, which is a terrorist organization, it would be Richard Pearl.
But the other thing with Trireme, which was bigger than the Lunch with the Chairman story that I thought was a scandal that Jeremy Scahill got into in his book, Blackwater, and that was when they acquired all these tanker planes from the Boeing Corporation, which is the second largest aerospace company, second largest business contract after Lockheed Martin.
Lockheed Martin, of course, former president was Len Cheney, Dick Cheney's wife, big revolving door.
These tanker planes were completely unnecessary, costing up to $30 billion.
Richard Pearl.
This was that complicated lease agreement, right, where they paid ten times the purchase price of the planes to lease them indefinitely.
Right.
And they went from 35 planes to 100 planes all of a sudden after they had several officers in the Air Force Acquisition Office to comply with Boeing.
A couple of senior Boeing officials get fired.
The head secretary, James Roach, had to resign over it.
And one of the Air Force Acquisition officers, her name was Darlene Durian, got actually sent to jail for nine months for her part in the deal.
But Pearl was involved as well.
He's on the Defense Policy Committee as well.
He was the chairman of it.
He ended up resigning from that position after the scandal, but he stayed on the board and he stayed in the Defense Department for another year.
But he wrote op-eds and he was always pushing for no big contracts for Boeing anyway in general.
And you could go down the list of all the defense contractors.
But this one, he made a pretty big mistake because they really dropped the ball.
So you had one secretary resigning.
He had resigned from his policy board.
Three other people get fired and one person sent to jail.
And yet somehow he always worms his way out of it and he never gets in too much legal trouble.
All right.
Now, if people have their thinking caps on and they remember 2002, 2003, right around then, Richard Pearl was all over the place on TV talking about how we must go after Saddam Hussein, etc.
But then again, that doesn't make him any different, really, than Charles Krauthammer over at the Washington Post.
So what was it that Richard Pearl actually did to push America toward war with Iraq, right?
Well, first of all, he'd been saying he wanted war with Saddam Hussein a lot longer than before 2002.
You could go back to 1996 in his clean break papers for the Israeli strategy when Benjamin Netanyahu was coming in for the first time into Israel, Prime Minister there, where he basically outlined, say, let's invade Syria and kick out Saddam Hussein.
He also wrote a book called An End to Evil, How to Win the War on Terror, where he suggested that we just abandon all the Israeli-Palestinian peace processes, invade Syria, and then issue strict domestic surveillance with a biometric ID card, etc.
And of course, he wanted to bomb Iraq.
He wrote five papers under the Project of a New American Century, and he signed his name on other papers from the American Enterprise Institute advocating war with Iraq.
This is all before September 11th.
This is all before 2002.
If I can try to focus on one of those papers for the Project for a New American Century, I believe this is the one that got the most attention inside policymaking circles, probably got the most attention from people like you and me as well, and that was rebuilding America's defenses.
And that was really the, here's the plan from the Project for a New American Century.
Is that correct?
That would probably be their magnum opus.
That was more Louis Libby.
Pearl signed off on it, but Pearl wrote one called Why Bombing Iraq Isn't Enough.
That doesn't make it clear.
He was part of all that.
But yeah, that paper has got a lot of attention, I think just because of the couple lines in there that said that we needed a new Pearl Harbor-like attack in order to justify war, because that went beyond just saying we need to invade these people and giving the conventional BS reasons about WMDs.
It actually was like saying, wouldn't it be beneficial if something happened and then we had an excuse to go to war?
It's also the one that says, you know, maybe we could engineer some viruses that'll just target certain races of people.
Right, well, then there's...
And they wrote that.
People, you don't even need a conspiracy theory.
It's all at PNAC.org.
It's right there in front of your face.
Right, and some of the individuals from the Astins Institute, which Pearl was a trustee of and Libby was part of as well, wrote the original Operation Northwoods papers, which also advocated a false flag with the Cubans, saying that we ought to just take an airliner full of Americans and blow it up and blame it on someone else.
So there are some crazies like that.
I mean, George Bush Sr. used to call these neocons the crazies in the basement.
But to get to your...to answer your question from 2002, how did he personally advocate war in Iraq?
After that, from 2001, on September 16th, so this is just, you know, about five days after 9-11, he got on air and said that Saddam Hussein had ties to Osama Bin Laden.
No proof for that.
No evidence for that.
He just sort of declared it, said, we know it.
By saying we, he made it collective, like, I guess him in the Defense Department or he in the government, they knew there were ties there.
And of course, that was a lie.
But after 9-11, there was so much emotional smoke and a lot of people just willing to bomb somebody.
You know, they had all the stickers on the cars and the flags waving that when they did that, coupled with two days later with the Israelis saying that Israeli security forces claimed that Mohammed Atta met in Prague and received anthrax from Iraqis, which was a myth built upon a myth.
The original myth came from the Czechs themselves and Cheney quoted it.
And then the Israelis added in that myth that, oh, by the way, they also got anthrax there.
That connected Iraq to 9-11.
And Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11 or the anthrax attack.
But with the neocons, a lot of people continue to believe that because the mass media never really cleared it up that, oh, actually, the al-Qaeda hijackers did not send the anthrax and there was no VX gas and mobile weapons labs in Iraq, no matter what Judith Miller said, who was dating Louis Libby at the time.
I mean, they just flat out lied.
And now over a million people are dead.
So this is why I hate the guy.
Well, he was also the number one promoter of Ahmed Chalabi, the Iranian slash Defense Department spy who provided all the defectors that talked about Saddam Hussein's secret nuclear weapons program and his secret storehouses of VX, sarin and mustard gas, etc., etc., mobile weapons, mobile germ weapon labs.
Chemical weapons under the palaces, William Safire said about...
And this really was Pearl.
I mean, Pearl was the guy along, I mean, obviously, with working with Fythe and Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld, etc.
But he was really the one who'd been dragging Chalabi around from place to place for years and years trying to get people to accept what he was saying.
He did, and he criticized the CIA because the CIA looked at the INC and just kind of said, that's a joke.
I mean, they're completely not credible.
These men are these defectors from Iraq.
I mean, you can't listen to what they said.
But what I found interesting is that the lies, the pre-war hype in Iraq about all the different kinds of WMDs and the mushroom clouds, the anthrax, VX gas, chemical weapons, blah, blah, blah, the vintage air forgeries and so on, that all came from the cabal in the Office of the Special Plan.
But the lies that they said had already been said in the 90s by the PNAC group.
You go and read Richard Pearl's papers, the same lies, and Wolfowitz and Fythe as well, but the same exact lies, some of the same sentences, saying, like, the lid's about to blow off and things were totally regurgitated by the INC.
And when I read it, I said, I've read this before somewhere, and lo and behold, it was in those papers.
But at that time, I had a hard time trying to tell people what a conservative think tank even was, nobody knew what PNAC meant or anything, but I happened to be studying that anyway, because what I was doing in college was Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
It was just serendipity.
But it was weird that how could they say, you know, he's six months away from a bomb, when they'd already said that four years ago, he's six months away from a bomb, and that, you know, these labs are in these locations.
The things that had already been debunked is what they, it's almost as if they just told the defectors, look, this is what you're going to say.
Then we're going to have a couple of these people in the New York Times quote you on it.
And then we'll have the Defense Department, which is essentially quoting itself, go and quote those journalists from basically our own lives that we fed through this medium of the Iraqi National Congress.
Well, I think it's very interesting, what you bring up about the CIA cutting Chalabi off there.
I remember there was an article from, I believe, before the war, I think it was from late 2002, that ran at Salon by Anonymous.
And it was called the State Department's Extreme Makeover.
And it was about how John Bolton and David Wumser, two men who were part of this neocon cabal, though, to be fair, Bolton is a lifelong nationalist right winger, not a neocon.
But anyway, he's one of them in their, in their crew there.
And these two really came in and purged the State Department of what they saw as the old kind of, I guess, WASP-y establishment appeasers and UN lovers and that kind of thing, right?
Right.
And Pearl's always had a hard time with the UN, more so because the UN's passed resolutions against Israel, which is a complete apartheid police state.
But Pearl supports that.
I mean, I was writing this tirade about Richard Pearl and the nasty things he did yesterday, and I was exaggerating things, saying it was like a colorful thing, but I couldn't even make up stuff worse than what has actually happened in Israel.
I mean, we could talk about poisoning babies with radiation poison, depleting uranium from Yom Kippur to now, or mutilating children with rubber bullets and shooting people at will, or ethnically cleansing people and building walls around them.
I mean, that stuff, I couldn't even think of anything worse than that, without getting mythical, like the demons or something.
I mean, and this is something that Richard Pearl is a hard, hard-line Zionist.
And he's advocated invading Syria, invading Lebanon, Iraq.
He's pushed all through the 80s when he worked for Reagan as an assistant deputy defense.
And for Carter, too.
He disagreed with the SALT agreements, and SALT, too, as well.
If you remember, SALT was the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks with the Soviet Union.
And it was a good thing.
But he said, no way are we going to get rid of our cruise missiles.
And so even was part of the IDA, International Grain Agreement from 72, I believe it was, where it was basically grain for juice sort of deal.
It was the first trade agreement ever where they said, okay, you're going to have status to buy these grains, so the Union really needed wheat and rice for their livestock.
But we're going to put a little amendment there that you're going to have to allow immigrants to Israel.
I mean, why was that even relevant to it?
But he got it attached on there.
So he's just been a career Zionist his whole life.
Yeah, I'm trying to remember the name of the article that he wrote for The Guardian when he was kind of riding high on the Iraq War.
I guess it was maybe April or May 2003.
And they were still pretending that it was anything but a complete disaster.
And it was, oh, it was thank God for the death of the United Nations by Richard Perle and The Guardian where he mocks the liberal conceit of collective security and a new world order based on United Nations based international law.
And that you see, we don't need your UN Security Council.
We got the National Security Council and we got the Marine Corps and the Air Force.
And that's all we care about.
It was kind of a contradictory thing because technically the legal reason that the U.S. got to invade Iraq was saying that they broke the UN Resolution 1441, which said after the first Gulf War that they weren't allowed to make weapons of mass destruction.
Of course, they weren't breaking that resolution.
They didn't have any and they were forced to prove a negative.
But technically, that is the legal reason that the U.S. got to invade.
So he hates the U.N. but when the U.N. does, if the U.N. can be used in such a way to get what he wants, then he'll let it slide.
Yeah, that really kind of angers me, too, because I've always been for getting us out of the U.N. and for, of course, the exact opposite reason as Richard Perle.
And I sat there and watched, you know, conservative Texan Americans change their hatred of the U.N. from we hate them because they want to do things to literally this is a direct quote.
They're just not proactive enough.
And it was people like Richard Perle who flipped the script on them and they went for it.
That, you know, now their opposition to the U.N. is based on we want more wars and sometimes it stands in our way and slows us down rather than this idea of collective security commits us to, for example, war with Russia if Estonia and Latvia go out, go at it or, you know, some ridiculous thing.
Well, I'm not a fan of the U.N., I think, for the same reasons as you.
But Richard Perle, it's like the U.N. to me is hawkish.
But Richard Perle is such a hawk that the U.N.'s not hawkish enough for him.
He doesn't like it because they're not warmongering enough.
Yeah, then you got Ron Paul.
He says, I want us to be unilaterally at peace.
How about that?
Oh, I wish we had more Ron Pauls.
That's what I wanted to bring up with your last guest.
All right.
Now, listen, we're already over time here.
I'm sorry for cutting you short, but let me give you a chance real quick here to tell us, well, where are they now?
Is Richard Perle just chilling out in his mansion, cooking with his copper pots, or is he working on pushing us into war with Iran still or what?
He's still toting the propaganda about Iran with the whole smoking laptop Mossad B.S. and the...
The Mujahideen Al-Qaeda's good friends.
...
Quandino.
But the last thing I saw him doing, he was actually embezzled in another scandal in Iraq, procuring oil for himself.
And also with the American-Turkish Council, he and Feith set up the IAI, the International Advisors Incorporated, which is Feith's sole shareholder.
And I mean, it's a dummy.
It's a shell corp.
But they're just acting, same thing they did in Bosnia, same thing they did in Israel and also Iraq.
They're kind of acting as the go-between between a little who's-who list of the MIC of different countries and using their political contacts to procure them more contracts and no-bid contracts.
The no-bid contract thing is ridiculous.
They went from the normal five- to six-month window to five- and six-year-long contracts.
So that's the...
He's still being a little Prince of Darkness.
Yeah.
Well, there you go.
All right.
Now, I'm going to name a couple of footnotes, and I'll give you a chance.
Obviously, people can go to Rise2Cents.
That's R-Y-S, the number two, and then cents, like the kind in your head, not in your pocket there.
Rise2Cents.com.
And people can just search anti-neocons, Richard Perl, and they can find all kinds of things.
I want to mention, of course, Justin Raimondo at Antiwar.com has written a ton about it.
Jim Loeb as well.
Pentagon Home Office to Neocon Network is one by Jim Loeb.
There's The Lie Factory by Robert Dreyfus.
Quite a few by Hirsch.
The Stovepipe, I know, is one of them.
The Grayzone.
A couple of others.
Go ahead.
You got some footnotes where people can go and read about the neocons.
Oh, The Man Who Sold the War by James Bamford and Rolling Stone was a good one.
I think Charlie Reese had some on Antiwar.com as well.
Yeah, Charlie Reese.
Good call.
All right.
Well, listen.
Thanks very much, first of all, for your time on the show today, but especially for making today the official Hate Richard Perl Day.
Everybody, we're all going to go out and read a clean break, a new strategy for securing the realm.
It's going to be awesome.
I love when people go up on YouTube, and regardless of whatever topic they're talking about, just slide in there, PS, I hate Richard Perl.
Right on.
All right.
Well, thanks very much, Ryan.
Appreciate it, man.
Thanks.
All right, everybody.
That's Ryan Dawson from Rise2Cents.
That's R-Y-S, the number two, cents, S-E-N-S-E dot com.