03/02/10 – Helen Thomas – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
All right, everybody, it's my pleasure to introduce Helen Thomas.
She is the Dean of the White House Press Corps, and she's the author of Listen Up, Mr. President.
This is a columnist for Hearst Newspapers.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
Thank you, fine.
So I wanted to discuss with you this exchange, and I have the audio of it here.
It's just shy of two minutes long, and this is an exchange that you had with the Homeland Security Secretary, well, began with her, and with John Brennan, about why the terrorists attack us.
So let's just play this clip real quick, and then we can talk about it.
Okay.
Security around the world.
Was there an outside contractor used for security in Amsterdam?
And also, what is really lacking always for us is you don't give the motivation of why they want to do us harm.
I'll just ask the first part, and then John, you can address this.
The screening at Schiphol Airport was done by Dutch authorities, and they did the screening that was described to you earlier this afternoon.
The hand luggage was screened.
The passport was checked.
He went through a magnetometer, but it was done by Dutch authorities.
And what is the motivation?
We never hear what you find out about it.
Al-Qaeda is an organization that is dedicated to murder and wanton slaughter of innocents.
What they have done over the past decade and a half, two decades, is to attract individuals like Mr. Abdulmutallab and use them for these types of attacks.
He was motivated by a sense of religious sort of drive.
Unfortunately, Al-Qaeda has perverted Islam and has corrupted the concept of Islam so that he's able to attract these individuals.
But Al-Qaeda has the agenda of destruction and death.
Are you saying it's because of religion?
I'm saying it's because of an Al-Qaeda organization that uses the banner of religion in a very perverse and corrupt way.
Why?
Well, this is a long issue, but Al-Qaeda is just determined to carry out attacks here against the homeland.
Can you explain why?
Can we clear up a couple of things?
The next reporter changes the subject there.
So, again, thank you very much for joining us on the show today, Helen.
Did John O'Brennan's answer satisfy you?
No, no, because there's been a religion around for a long, long time.
I think it's the Western colonial takeover of different parts of the world.
And somehow they don't like it.
Can you imagine that?
Well, you've been around Washington.
I don't believe these people just want to kill.
They're angry at a lot of things, especially U.S. policies, foreign policies.
Well, you know, it's interesting to me that if you go back to even just the very first week after September 11th, Dick Cheney was on Meet the Press with Tim Russert, and he said, basically, the motivation of the terrorists is they want to get our military out of their part of the world.
It seems like there was a bit of honesty there.
Yes, and I think that is the answer, but they somehow glossed over that, and they want to build it into a deep-seated hatred.
Well, you know, I'm not so sure about what the American people think, but I know if you separate the kind of, well, the rest of the press corps on one hand and the official mass media at the high levels from the alternative media in America, it seems like there are a lot of people who have been saying for a long time that American involvement in the Middle East began long before September 11th and that this is part of the consequence of that.
But I wonder, do you think that the rest of your colleagues there really don't understand this?
Do they not ask this question, or they're just that willing to carry the water of the government, which wants to pretend that they hate us only for how good we are, which leaves us obviously no choice but to protect ourselves by killing them?
Well, I can't question their motives either, but I certainly think they ought to think deeper as to why it's happening now and why it didn't happen a long time before.
After World War I, the Arab world all wanted the U.S. to have mandates over them and so forth.
So it wasn't a question of hatred then.
It is a question that we have done so many bad things in the Middle East, tilted toward Israel always.
And, you know, that doesn't go over very well when you have to give up your country and your land like Palestine.
Well, have you ever discussed this with some of these other reporters, like say, I don't know, Chuck Todd or something, and asked him why he thinks?
No, I don't think I have.
I think that would be, you know, presumptuous of me, and I'd be questioning them.
Yeah, I mean, I don't necessarily, I apologize if I put you on the spot as to questioning others' motives, but I wonder whether they have ever really thought about this, you know, after the attack.
My problem is they don't dig.
When President Bush made it very, very clear that he was going to invade Iraq during the whole run-up to the war, nobody asked why.
They bought into all the falsehoods about weapons of mass destruction, ties to Al-Qaeda, a third world country blowing us up.
It's not true.
I mean, some things were true, it's true.
They pulled a lot of stuff now, but what have we done for a century?
Well, I mean, I guess you did have this same sort of conflict with Bush's press people back then, right?
That you've continued here with Obama's national security team.
Do you think you could ever provoke them into giving you a straight answer?
No, they don't dare.
I asked President Obama whether he knew of any country in the Middle East at its first news conference that had nuclear weapons, and he said to me, I don't want to speculate.
Well, you take the presidency, the first thing they do is to tell you what's going on and who's the biggest threat and who is nuclear armed.
Right, well, and everybody in the world knows that only Israel has nuclear weapons in the Middle East, unless you count our ships off the coast of Iran, right?
Nobody in official life will say that from here.
Right.
It's very interesting, the dynamic.
You serve sort of as a bridge.
You sit in the press corps, and yet you seem to discuss the news in actual terms of what's really going on, rather than just going along with the narrative.
But the news and the narrative really seem to be more and more divergent these days, wouldn't you say?
I don't know.
Since I've covered the White House, there have been all kinds of prevarications, and somehow the truth escapes us.
Tell me a little bit about your book, Listen Up, Mr. President.
Is this an open letter to Barack Obama?
It's with a co-author, Craig Crawford, who's a wonderful reporter, and we're very audacious.
We are telling the president, just do the right thing, do the right thing, and you'll never be wrong.
It's very cliche, but I think they should be introduced to some of the pitfalls.
I don't understand, when you reach the top of the mark, why you would want to do anything that would hurt others.
Yeah, you know, that's what always confounds me, too.
I could even see a senator compromising because he wants to get to that spot, but once you're the president, why do anything but the right thing?
Unless you want to be reelected and you think the country isn't with you.
But I don't believe that.
I believe that people can't take the lies.
They can handle the truth.
It kind of reminds me of what George Carlin used to say, that if they really told the truth, the whole system would fall apart.
It's sort of bubblegum and string at this point.
And they also say if you tell the truth, you don't have to remember what you said the last time.
Right, yes, it's always a lot easier that way.
Well, Helen Thomas, can you please do me a favor?
The next time Robert Gibbs or one of these people at these press conferences starts talking about the Iranian nuclear threat, could you please ask them whether the International Atomic Energy Agency exists and whether or not they have continued to verify the non-diversion of Iran's nuclear material to military purposes?
Because that seems like such an important aspect of the current debate about Iran and Washington, D.C., that they just ignore.
You're right.
And the point is that I think they are looking for weapons, myself.
But this isn't a question of thinking, you know.
Every day they're threatened.
What would any dictator or democratic leader do when they know that you are targeted every day by countries that are saying they can't tolerate what they're doing?
Although, even if you think back to the run-up to the Iraq war, you could have said the same thing.
Well, it wouldn't surprise me if Saddam Hussein had a nuclear weapons program, because after all, we threaten him all the time.
And yet, he just didn't have one.
And it seems like they're rerunning the exact same case against Iran without evidence.
Well, President Bush just would not accept letting the U.N. inspectors go back in and give them absolute truth, because he wanted to go to war.
Well, but the U.N. inspectors are in Iran.
Yes, but nobody believes there are no weapons.
And now the Iranians have brought everything and their plants, nuclear plants, on the surface.
We gave them the bomb, the budget, the busters, whatever they call them, dungeon busters.
Yeah, the bunker busters.
Bunker busters, that's what I'm looking for.
That's right.
And now they've brought them to the surface.
I don't know whether it's to taunt the others or what, but it's a very daring move.
You know, the U.S. keeps threatening them.
I thought of another good question, if you'll humor me.
You could ask them whether they still use the Mujahedin al-Khalk as a source of intelligence about Iran's capabilities and intentions.
I could ask them.
I don't know if he'll answer it.
It sure would be a funny one to watch him refuse to answer, though.
We built them up against the Russians, and that was our entree to Afghanistan.
And so many Afghans felt that we let them down.
Oh, yeah, no, I mean the MEK, the guys who are holed out on that base in Iraq that used to work for the Ayatollah, and then they worked for Saddam, and now they work for us.
The source of the smoking laptop.
You've got to make a living.
Yeah, I guess so.
Even cult members have got to make a living somewhere.
There's no such thing as loyalty in these ranks.
Well, Helen, you...
Why should they be loyal to us?
Well, that's a good question.
Yeah, I mean, especially with the dollars becoming worth less and less every day.
Well, I want to thank you very much for being, after all this time, the most aggressive reporter in the Washington Press Corps and continuing to lead the way and set the example for the rest of them to follow.
Congratulations to you for it, and thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
All right, everybody.
That is Helen Thomas from Hearst Newspapers.
She's the author of Listen Up, Mr. President, and is the dean of the Washington Press Corps.
Giving them hell up there.
Hey, everybody, Scott Horton here for LibertyStickers.com.
Admit it, our public debate has been reduced to reading each other's bumper stickers.
So stop by LibertyStickers.com.
We've got more than 1,000 anti-government, anti-war stickers for you to choose from, including The Right is Wrong, The Left is Stupid, Iraq, America's West Bank, Detain Eric Holder, Only Liars and Cowards Want War with Iran, Empire, Welfare for the Rich, War for the Poor.
I wish I could go back in time to murder Woodrow Wilson.
Old Right, New Left, unite against Empire.
And steroids are good when cops take them.
Fight back while you still can.
LibertyStickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.