02/26/10 – Allison Kilkenny – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
And our next guest is Alison Kilkenny.
She writes for the Huffington Post, Alternet.org, and The Nation, as well as True Slant, trueslant.com.
Welcome to the show, Alison.
How are you doing?
I'm great.
Thanks for having me.
Well, thanks very much for joining us.
Oh, and I forgot to mention, you are the host of Citizen Radio.
Where can people listen to that?
That's right.
They can subscribe to it for free on iTunes.
They just need to go to WeAreCitizenRadio.com and click the subscribe link at the top of the page.
Okay, cool.
Well, I'll make sure to check that out.
Great.
Yeah, please do.
All right.
I will.
So, your article that you wrote the other day really bothers me.
I kind of want to quit and maybe just go ride my skateboard.
I really don't know why I sit up here at least four days a week, every week for the last three years in a row, weekends before that at least, trying to explain to people that the Iranians don't have a nuclear weapons program at all.
I mean, every day I'm the boy who cried wolf about the Iran war worse than John Bolt at this point.
And now I'm reading majority of Americans think that Iran already has the bomb?
Yeah, I mean, well, first of all, please don't feel discouraged.
I hate being the little storm cloud that makes people feel like all this protest is pointless.
I don't want anyone to come away feeling that, but it's really scary.
71% of Americans believe that Iran has nuclear weapons.
And that's a reason to have a war with them, not a reason to try to make nice.
Well, right.
Yeah.
But it's not true.
That's the only problem.
You know, and I love this latest poll that came out, the CNN Opinion Research Corporation saying that only a quarter of Americans are calling for military action.
Now, I probably would have written something like, oh, my God, can you believe that 25% of this country wants to attack Iran?
But apparently, you know, that's not a big deal.
It's very worrisome, especially when we consider, you know, I had the privilege of having one of the last interviews with Howard Zinn.
And what Mr. Zinn always stressed was that, you know, understanding history is a matter of life and death.
And if we examine what's happening right now with Iran and all of this fear mongering that's happening right now, it's very similar to what was happening during the lead up to the Iraq war.
And, you know, I'm sure all of your listeners remember the whole Nigerian yellow cape thing.
That's happening with Iran right now.
You know, there's all of this so-called intelligence coming forth, most of it from Israel, which has an invested, would have good reason to want to, or not good reason, but obvious reason to want to, you know, start a conflict with Iran.
And there's so-called smoking guns with more evidence that Iran has some kind of nuclear program.
Meanwhile, the CIA is contradicting all of this and saying it's not true.
According to the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, they do not have nuclear weapons.
They have a very small amount of refined uranium, 19.5%, which is just enough that they're allowed to have under the treaty.
That's the level they need for medical facilities and for supplying electricity.
That is all they have.
None of that seems to matter anymore.
Now that the fear-mongering is starting again, you know, it's very worrisome.
There's a lot of war drums being beaten right now.
Right.
Well, you know, even when you talk about the 19.5% thing, this is only a development from the last couple of weeks after the United States made them an offer that they accepted and that we refused, the Obama team refused to accept their acceptance of the deal that we offered them.
And so they said, fine, we have no choice now but to go ahead and enrich up to 20%.
Yeah, and I mean, look, so at no point do I say the IAEA has no right to be frustrated.
You know, certainly Iran could be a little more transparent with the inspections.
I won't argue any of that.
But you also have to look at Iran's motivation right now.
So they have, they're dealing with a psychotic Western power that is invading, occupying, or bombing five neighboring Muslim countries, right?
So there's not a lot of reason we've given them to trust us.
So the fact that they're secretive right now with their program maybe isn't totally acceptable, but you have to at least admit it's a little understandable.
Right.
Well, but even then you have the inspection regime under the, by the IAEA, under the safeguards agreement where they say, yeah, everything's fine.
We continue to verify the non-diversion of any nuclear material to a military or other special purpose from the civilian program.
And then you have a separate, completely illegal, made-up inspection regime mandated by the U.N.
Security Council that goes, that has nothing to do with the treaty on non-proliferation nuclear weapons and continues to just come up with nonsense like, oh, a little bit of residue of highly enriched uranium that was traced directly back to Pakistan or a smoking laptop that everybody in the whole world was manufactured by the Mossad and then funneled through the Mujahedin al-Khalq into the intelligence stream.
I mean, it's nonsense.
They're refusing to be completely transparent about a bunch of documents that we all know the Israelis made.
Yeah, and it's a little maddening, you're right, because we saw this with Iraq, too, that there was the official statement that there was no weapons of mass destruction and then there was almost this kind of shadow, parallel communication where it was, you know, the Nigerian yellow tapes.
Exactly what you said, we have the exact same thing now, where we have the official statements from the National Intelligence Investment, the CIA, saying there are no nuclear weapons, there's very little uranium.
You know, we hear every two years that they're going to build a bomb tomorrow and it never seems to happen, and yet that doesn't seem to matter.
It does not seem to matter, especially when you have the mainstream media putting up these fear-mongering right-wing politicians saying all kinds of really scary things that almost instantly negate the actual intelligence.
You know, it's kind of like, how do you combat this kind of war machine?
Right, well, and, you know, this discussion always comes down to the media, doesn't it?
Because what we have is a narrative that's based on a bunch of vagaries and half-truths and we have the actual facts of the case that, you know what, you're going to have to spend an hour and a half reading about this to actually learn anything about it.
You know, and people just aren't willing to do that.
You know, nuclear sounds scary, good enough for me.
Sure, and it is frustrating.
There is great alternative news out there.
Unfortunately, it doesn't have the scope that the mainstream media has, and they have really, really just been abysmal with the coverage of Iran.
More so, I would say, negating than misinforming this time around, but that can change very, very, very quickly, as we saw with Iraq.
So I would say to your listeners, the important thing is to be preemptive with all this, because we don't remember how fast we went to a war with Iraq, you know?
And for people that are thinking, you know, we could never do it, the U.S. military has already spread so thin, they have made very dumb decisions in the past.
I would not put it past the U.S. military to try to, you know, perhaps start covert operations in Iran, which could in themselves be catastrophic.
Well, and that's in the news this week about this guy, Rigi.
According to Iranian state TV, anyway, he's saying, oh yeah, I got all kinds of aid from the United States for my terrorist group, Jandala, with which to attack the Iranian government.
Sure, yeah, and I have not read about that specific story, but this follows the narrative of the U.S., especially in Iran, you know?
We don't even have to look outside of Iran to see cases of the U.S. military and the CIA trying to subvert the will of the Iranian people.
So, I mean, it's important to remain vigilant and aware that the U.S. military and the government have a history of doing this, and that it needn't be, you know, a blatant invasion of the country for it to so classify as a military operation, you know?
It could be anything from, like, sending small troops in to sending, you know, funding terrorist organizations to even, you know, sending a paramilitary organization like Blackwater into Iran to subvert the will of the people.
Well, and there's been quite a bit of reporting, I guess, especially Andrew Coburn, Seymour Hersh, and Brian Ross talking about millions of dollars, tens of millions of dollars, I believe it was, appropriated not just secretly through JSOC, but through the official channels under the National Security Act of 1947, where they actually went and got approval from the Democratic Senate and from the leaders, I guess, of the intelligence committees of both houses to provide this money for the CIA to use for covert action inside Iran.
Yeah, and I had read Seymour Hersh's report on this.
You know, it's unsurprising.
It's unsurprising now, too, that we have this kind of culture that's starting to accept these extrajudicial assassinations, you know, not just on the U.S.'s part, but also we saw recently with Israel and its cross-border assassinations.
That's really scary, because they're, you know, not to say that this hasn't been going on for years and years, but there's just no accountability with this kind of process.
And it's worrisome, because at least with traditional warfare, there's a process, and it's very public, and the actual event of bombing a country is extremely public and violent, and there's an opportunity to protest it.
But when it's extrajudicial like this, and it's under the radar, and you have a terrible mainstream media that doesn't cover it, and it's small and it's quiet and it's fast, there's almost no opportunity for the public to preempt it or protest it after the fact.
And that's really worrisome, because that's when you just, you know, have people randomly dying because the U.S. military has deemed them enemy combatants.
Well, where does that stop?
You know, it's not necessarily just foreigners.
Not that that's expectable either, but it's like, what about an American that's staying in Iran, you know, that's been accused of aiding and abetting terrorists?
What about domestically if there's protesters?
You know, are they enemy combatants?
Where does it stop?
Right, well, I mean, that's a whole other aspect, which we can focus more on the assassinations here in a sec, but I just wanted to mention that, you know, the phrase blowback was coined by a CIA analyst doing kind of, this is what we just finished in Iran in 1953, and he said we're going to have a lot of blowback from this coming on down the line.
And blowback means, according to Chalmers Johnson, the former CIA analyst, that it doesn't just mean the effect of a cause, it means the effect of a secret cause.
It means consequences for the American people of covert actions that they don't even know have taken place.
So, for example, if we can assume that there's any truth to Jandala's recent attacks being backed by the United States, this makes it very difficult for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and for the so-called supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, to say, okay, Americans, let's work it out.
We'll negotiate.
We're willing to lose some face and back down and agree to your demands.
It makes it that much harder for them to do it, but then the American people are presented with intransigent, crazy religious fundamentalists who just can't be dealt with and only understand one thing, violence.
Yeah, and that's what's so dangerous about that narrative.
It doesn't permit a learning period for the American people.
And not only that, we saw what happened when there was a brave Republican who tried to stand up and present the concept of blowback to the American people, and that was Ron Paul during the Republican debates.
And we saw what happened to poor Ron Paul when Rudy Giuliani stood up, Mayor 9-11, and said, you know, that's outrageous.
This great country has never done anything to warrant us being attacked.
But, I mean, Ron Paul's right.
The concept of blowback is real, but it's amazing how many Republicans I've been contacted by who just outright deny that, who say, you know, there's absolutely no excusing terrorist attacks, that there is no such thing as political terrorism, there's only criminal terrorism, that you can't excuse these things.
What I think they're failing to understand is, as you said, we're not excusing the acts.
It's never right to violently attack civilians for any cause.
But by explaining it, we can circumvent it or we can preempt it in the future.
So, like Iran, you know, if we're funding covert actions there, a very simple way to stop future violence is by permitting people the dignity to live their lives autonomously.
So, by not trying to undercut the will of the people, by not detaining people for no reason, or locking them up for years and years without trial, by not torturing them, by not going to war for no reason, these are very basic concepts that would stop the risk of blowback.
But again, when you have an oppositional force like the Republicans right now, who are just hell-bent on living in a fantasy world, it almost just, not almost, it does prevent this kind of logical discussion from ever occurring in the first place.
If you refuse to even acknowledge that America is doing things right now, that may one day down the road inspire people to take revenge against this country, then it's like you can't even begin to have the conversation.
Right.
Well, and that's exactly what Ron Paul said in that debate.
In fact, we just played a clip of that earlier, Giuliani and Paul on the show.
But that was part of his answer was, listen, if we think we can just go around the world doing whatever we want with no consequences, then we do that at our own peril.
And really, Alison, it's funny, isn't it?
I mean, look, it's the end of February 2010, and we're still arguing.
And it was in Newsweek this week.
It's still a relevant point.
It's not just you and I beating a dead horse here.
It's still a major part of the argument about our foreign policy that we have still not won, which is that they attack us for reasons, as opposed to for virgins in heaven, that they just come out of the clear blue sky like those planes, and so we just have to fight them until they're all dead.
I mean, when Michael Shoyer talks about the blowback of American foreign policy, he says, now, look, you might want to keep troops in Saudi Arabia.
You might want to keep supporting Israel.
You might want to keep supporting India.
Let's just have a real debate about the consequences of our policies.
That's all.
He's not even, I guess, half the time he's recommending a policy, but the other half the time he's just saying, let's just be honest about what are the consequences of our policies.
Sure, yeah, and for a long time I was trying to figure out what the motivation here was for people not wanting to have that conversation, and for a long time I just assumed they were crazy, and I think some of them are, and some of them want to see Jesus come back on his horse, and they want to see the final days with Israel and going to war with Muslim countries, but I think the other half benefits financially from the military-industrial complex, and it's become somewhat of a cliche to say that, but it's very true.
We have these huge defense contractors that make money from war, and Congress is not independent from them.
In fact, they take large donations from defense contractors.
So it's a mix of crazy and greed, and unfortunately we don't regulate crazy or greed in this country, so the cycle just goes on and on, and I think that's really why you have the escalation like we're seeing now with Iran, where every single source of intelligence, minus the intelligence being funneled by Israel, is saying that they don't have nuclear weapons, the uranium they have is for the things they've already publicly stated it for, and that the IAEA is watching them.
So it's a very manageable situation, yet if you watch Fox News, you would think we're going to war tomorrow.
Yeah, you might also think that Iran is some kind of major power, rather than in comparison to the U.S., even as our empire is falling apart in pieces all over the place, we still have a GDP that's 5,000 times theirs or something.
We might as well be talking about going to war with Eritrea or something.
They've got no navy, not really.
No air force that can go beyond their own borders.
Yeah, and not to get off topic, but we have a massive military, and China's not going to invade, we're fine.
Yet if you look domestically at the problems we're having with healthcare, with unemployment, with infrastructure, those concerns far outweigh the minute threat from Iran.
Of course, looking at those situations domestically would demand that our country completely rethink the relationship the citizens have with corporations and privatization and free market capitalism, and that's really too scary.
I think we would see politicians' heads exploding if we started to examine those fundamental questions.
Yeah, well, I'd rather argue about mercantilist crony capitalism, but either way, it's clearly the case that the American people don't care about Iran, really, unless you make them.
They are worried about these things that are closest to home, and this goes back to where you were going earlier with the president's right to assassinate anybody he wants and everything.
That's because he's not the chief executive of a limited constitutional republic of any sort.
He's pinned the tail on the emperor.
We trade off every four years or so, and we've got basically the David Addington theory of law backing him up there, and he claims the right to murder us if he wants to, as you said.
Sure, and as John you just said...
Talk about lullback.
This is where it meets the road for the American people.
Right, and as John you recently just said in one of his wonderful op-eds, he pretty much said, you're welcome to the president, President Obama, because he had invested him with awesome power, unlike anything we've ever seen before.
Yeah, but it's amazing to see, especially Obama supporters, the people that got him elected, defending the same policies that they criticized President Bush for.
Look, this executive branch is completely out of control.
The normal checks and balances that were on the executive branch from the Congress are gone.
They're gone.
And not only that, the Congress is incredibly corrupt as well.
But it's just amazing to see Democrats defending the same behavior they were criticizing during the Bush years.
That is just amazing hypocrisy, in my opinion.
Yeah, well, indeed it is.
Although I think we can thankfully say that they've been much better, the former Obama supporters, at breaking from their great leader than the right wing of, say, right around seven, eight years ago.
I mean, jeez.
If I had to hear the Bible says, Render unto Caesar whatever George Bush wants one more time, my head might have exploded.
At least liberals know how to read.
Sure, and it's that old expression that trying to get liberals to agree on anything is like herding cats.
I think that's why our party is always a little more, knows how to think critically about subject matters, because it's a big party tent.
You have the progressives right now who are actually doing a good job of criticizing Obama, but there's a lot of moderate liberals who are defending him.
I think they're calling them the Obama bots.
Unfortunately, it's sad to see, because certainly during the Bush years there was a plethora of war crimes and other kinds of crimes happening that demanded criticism and vigilance.
But there's many, many terrible things that have been continued under the Obama administration and in some cases escalated under the Obama administration that should also be criticized.
But outside of that small pocket of progressives, like Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com or Jane Hamster at FireDogLake, you really don't see it in the mainstream media.
Yeah, well, it's hard work, but we're making progress, as George Bush used to like to say.
For all you Obama bots, go and check out True Salant.
They'll set you straight.
Alison Kilkenny, thank you very much for your time on the show.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you so much.