All right, y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio on the Liberty Radio Network.
That's libertyradionetwork.com or lrn.fm.
And I'm pleased to introduce my friend Gareth Porter.
He is an independent historian and journalist, author of Perils of Dominance, and writes for Interpress Service, that's ipsnews.net, and we run every single one of them for good reason at original.antiwar.com slash porter.
Welcome to the show, Gareth, how you doing?
I'm good, thanks, Scott.
Well, so this is my first day on the new network with the full show.
I kind of did the third hour on here all last week.
So I'm happy I could have you on for my first day of the new show.
Happy to be around on your new show, too.
I'm really happy to have you here.
All right, so you're telling me that the CIA guys who are drawing the red X's on people's lives that then, you know, four-sided, 350-pound lazy boys sitting goofballs with Nintendo controllers back in Nevada are then killing with Hellfire missiles and robots flying around in the sky, that those CIA guys are against it?
They are, at least according to someone who has been in touch with these CIA operatives involved in the program and who seems to me to have very strong credibility because he was the former senior legal advisor to the Special Operations Forces in the last six years of his Army career, retired as a lieutenant colonel in the year 2000.
He's the one who told me that the people that he's been talking with in the CIA drone program are telling him that this program is harmful to the security of Americans and to the stability of the world, basically, because what it is doing is handing a perfect propaganda victory and, indeed, a way of enhancing the Al-Qaeda Pakistani-Taliban recruitment of militants for their organization.
Nah, you don't say.
Yeah, I would say that's a pretty sound analysis, but of course the real news here is that it's coming from within the organization.
Normally, you expect these people to sort of lower their heads and not really try to figure out what the consequences of their program is and to sort of go ahead and do their job without that sort of analysis, and so that makes this a pretty interesting story.
Yeah, well, you know, there was an NIE from, I guess, 07 or 08 that said, geez, all of our anti-terrorism activities are making more terrorism, but I guess that's higher-level analysts.
That's not the guys who are drawing the red Xs on the people's heads on the video screen there like John Madden doing play-by-play.
Well, I think it does make a difference that you have the actual operatives saying this, in part because, you know, from what I was told by Jeffrey Atticott, the retired Lieutenant Colonel who's now head of the Program on Law and Terrorism at St. Mary's University in San Antonio, Texas, that what they're really saying here is that they are passing up their not just misgivings but real opposition to the continuation of this program to the higher-ups in the agency, and that those people higher up in the agency really don't believe in this program.
They understand that this is a failure as well.
So really, we're talking about yet another national security program that appears now recognized throughout the organization, at least in the lower and middle echelons, and by one removed at the top of the organization, in this case the CIA, to be a failure and essentially a program that makes everyone less secure, not more secure.
Now, you know, if, well, say there's a terrorist attack in America and, I don't know, 2,800 and something civilians are killed, Americans, you know, for at least 11 years after that, it's a proven fact, will continue to kill people based on, supposedly, and all over the world too, based supposedly on revenge for that one thing.
But now what you're telling me is that these CIA guys who are doing the killing in Pakistan with the robots right now, they're starting to think that maybe the Pakistanis react to being blown up the way Americans react to being blown up.
Some of them, at least, percentage-wise or whatever, by default, are going to join up the war against the United States in reaction to the fire and explosions and death in their neighborhoods.
Well, absolutely.
That, at one level, it is that simple.
But, you know, I would say that there's another wrinkle here which people should understand about this program, and that is when you're talking about Pakistanis in the northwest frontier area, that is the tribal area of Pakistan, we're talking about Pashtuns who are, you know, belong to a culture that is strongly tribal, that still holds to very, very traditional Pashtun tribal values.
And one of those values is that they are warriors and that they expect people who make war on them to act like warriors, and that means to show up, show their faces, and take risks if they're going to go out there to kill them.
In this case, they're looking at these drone strikes and they're saying, ha, these Americans, they're more like women, they're like, you know, cowards.
They don't dare to come show their faces.
And so that makes them even angrier, and that makes them want to sign up even more readily than they would otherwise.
So this is, again, according to Geoffrey Atticott, what the people in the program themselves have learned.
And of course, they've learned this from CIA's own intelligence on the northwest frontier region.
The CIA, of course, does collect intelligence from human agents, but also from electronic intercepts.
And apparently, the intelligence from the intercepts and other sources has then been passed to these drone strike operators and the CIA people in charge of the program.
At middle and lower levels, these people are learning about what's really going on in the region where the drone strikes are being carried out, and that's making them realize just how crazy this program really is, because it is exacerbating the hatred of Americans and the contempt towards Americans as well.
And it's not just revenge, it's not just the hatred of Americans, it's also the contempt that it engenders in the male costumes of this region.
Well, it's a tactical and a strategic thing, too.
I mean, this goes back to 9-11 again.
The purpose of terrorism is to get a reaction.
Why else would a very, very weak actor, a tiny little non-state group of a few hundred people, haul off and smack the most powerful superpower in the world in the mouth as hard as they can, the way they did on 9-11?
It's to get us to chase them back to their neighborhood where their friends are waiting with bats for us, basically.
Right.
Well, let's remember that the people who carried out 9-11 were a group of Arabs, basically, headed by bin Laden himself.
They are not Pakistani tribal people.
They're not Pashtuns from this region.
Those tribal people were not involved in 9-11.
That's not their interest.
They have an entirely different take on this.
So I think it's important to keep separate these two things.
Yeah, but I wouldn't make, I wouldn't add my point yet.
My point was, what do you do when you're up against a power that you can't shoot back at?
What do you do when it's such an asymmetric thing?
The low-level guy with an AK versus the superpower killing people that he knows with robots that fly out of range, and even if they were in range and he could shoot them, there's not even a man in it.
There's nothing for them to do except try to come here or try to find someone that they can put on a plane to come here to do something to us.
They can go to Afghanistan.
That's one of the things they are doing, is fighting in Afghanistan, which they identify as a war, obviously, fought because the United States is the power there, imposing the war on them.
So that's another thing they can do, and that's one of the major responses, obviously.
The people are signing up, in part, to support and to carry out war in Afghanistan.
Yeah, and now, never mind for the moment, Kurt Haskell and him witnessing mysterious people helping Abdulmutallab get on the plane, which I think is credible, but that was in the Netherlands.
He was originally put on the plane by somebody in Yemen, and we don't really know who exactly, but Amnesty International has a report out today that says that a drone strike in December of last year killed 54 innocent civilians, guess which date?
The 17th of December.
And then on the 25th, there was an attack that originated in Yemen over our country, and we act like history began on Christmas Eve.
Hang tight one sec, Gareth.
We'll be right back after this.
It's Anti-War Radio on LRN.
FM.
And now, with other listeners, anytime at cam.libertyradionetwork.com.
That's cam.libertyradionetwork.com.
This is really an appropriate moment to step back and really sort of figure out what's going on here in the larger picture.
What's really happening is we've got a very thick policy process, structure and process here, with regard to the so-called global war on terror.
And that is sort of a linkage between the reason that they're continuing this in large part is domestic politics, because the White House thinks that everybody, not everybody, but most Americans, have the idea that the way to get at bin Laden and his people is to try to bomb them into submission to eliminate the leadership.
And so they're claiming that that's what they're doing.
And of course, every once in a while, they'll claim that they've gotten the number three person in al-Qaeda.
I think a week or two ago, they had the 10th number three in al-Qaeda, they claimed.
And I have no reason to doubt that there have been all those number threes killed.
And what difference does it make?
It doesn't make the slightest difference in the world.
The real problem is not the leadership structure of al-Qaeda.
That's not our problem.
Our problem is that over the decade now, nearly, of the global war on terror since 9-11, what has been happening is that the more the United States becomes aggressive in all these different countries, the more we encourage people, we push people to join up with al-Qaeda, not al-Qaeda organization, but with groups that have the same notion that the real problem is the United States and Israel, and that they, in order to get back at the offenses that they see by the United States and Israel, they want to join up with an organization that is doing something about it.
And so, it's really an idea.
Our problem is an idea that is growing rather than fading.
The al-Qaeda organization per se is nothing much.
A few dozen people, that's not our problem.
The problem is the idea that is spreading in large part, I would say, not in large part, but almost completely because of what the United States and Israel are doing.
Right.
I mean, this is the whole thing.
The Bin Ladenites, not just him, but the rest of them, whatever, their whole argument is that America is at war against Islam.
And just coincidentally, we're at war against Islamic countries all over the world.
We support their dictators that torture their citizens to death, and on and on like that.
You know, more than a million dead in Iraq.
Let's not let that go unmentioned.
And so, we just basically keep proving their worst propaganda about us right.
And the reason why is because it has nothing to do with the war on terrorism at all.
It's just like Scooter Libby wrote when he worked for Dick Cheney back in the Department of Defense in 1991.
He said, we will have permanent hegemony on earth.
We will be the unipolar superpower from now on.
No other regional group or combination of nations will ever be able to challenge us.
We'll bomb them first.
Right.
And this, of course, not just Scooter Libby, not just the neocon.
This was an ideology, an idea which had infected the entire U.S. defense establishment, the Pentagon, and the various military services that essentially adopted that idea as their strategy.
Their strategic driving force was to expand U.S. military power throughout the world, to continue to build more bases wherever we could, to have the ability to strike in more places in more ways, and essentially to continue to dominate every part of the world.
And so, you know, this is not just a few so-called neocon extremists.
This is the greatest power that the world has ever known, which is the U.S. military and the Pentagon.
Well, and it's in the news today that a couple of obvious dupes, who even according to the official account had been heavily infiltrated by informants and tricked into saying something stupid into microphones, were arrested for being terrorists on their way to Somalia.
According to the top of the hour Fox News here on the Liberty Radio Network, their plan was to send Americans home in body bags.
I think people might wonder, send Americans home in body bags from Somalia?
Which Americans are there in Somalia to even attempt to shoot at, Garrett?
So what this incident highlights is that we have two things going on at the same time.
On one hand, you have the fact that more and more people in the United States and other Western countries, Islamic people in these countries, are beginning to think that they should do something to get back at the United States for its policies in their own countries or countries in the Middle East.
And this is an example of what's going on.
And this sort of thing is multiplying.
It seems like you're discovering another case every month of plots, individuals who decide that they want to go back to the Middle East or to do something in this country which aligns them with the jihadist ideal.
At the same time, what the United States is doing is sending more U.S. military forces into more countries to prepare for more drone strikes, more military operations in those countries, as though this was the way in which the United States could really sort of tame the problem of jihadism in these Middle Eastern and African and other countries.
So, you know, obviously the reality is telling us one thing, and the U.S. military and the Obama administration are responding in exactly the opposite way.
Well, you know, there's a piece in the New York Times from, I guess it was yesterday, about Ron Paul, and it's basically about how he raised his son, which apparently should have taken him out back and whooped him a few times at least.
But, of course, Ron Paul is a libertarian all the way to the bone, and he let this kid spin out all the way and become a horrible warmonger.
But anyway, one of the paragraphs in there was about how Ron has kind of stayed out of Kentucky because he has some views that, you know, are pretty outside the mainstream, such as, and they quote, that maybe we ought to look at the motives of the people that we're at war with.
You know, they wrote about it.
Yeah.
And this is, apparently, Kentucky voters can't hear that, man.
They might start crying or something, I don't know.
They might realize they gave their son to a bunch of liars and lost his life for nothing.
Yeah, I mean, this is really a message that is not getting out at all.
It's completely suppressed by the national media, except in reporting the facts, which if you have any sort of analytical strength at all, then you begin to put it together.
And obviously, individuals do put it together from even the mainstream media coverage.
But the storyline, the sort of connecting the dots and relating what the US military is doing, you know, the stories about the Petraeus order to send more special operations forces into more countries, including Iran, to gather intelligence for possible future military operations.
Somalia and Sudan and other places, the same thing happening.
You know, relating that to the problems that we're having with homegrown jihadism.
If you put things together, then you come to a very different conclusion.
All right.
Hey, let me keep you one more segment, please.
Yep.
All right.
Hang tight, everybody.
More Gareth Porter after this.
I promise you I'm going to screw that up another 500 times.
But that's the way it is.
Liberty Radio Network, the first day of the new show, three hours, Monday through Friday.
Thanks again to Mark and Ian.
And I'm talking with my buddy, Gareth Porter.
He's my favorite reporter around.
And not just because part of the word reporter is in his name.
He writes for Interpress Service.
That's IPSnews.net.
And you find him at original.antiwar.com slash Porter.
And last week on the chaos show, and you can find this archive at antiwar.com slash radio.
I basically just sat back with my mic off and let Gareth substitute for me as the interviewer.
And the interviewee was Flint Leverett, who he and his wife, Hillary Mann Leverett, both of them worked in the Bush administration.
I think they didn't get married until after, but they both had the same problem and they both resigned over basically the Bush administration's refusal to deal honestly with Iran when they were trying to make peace with us.
And Gareth Porter interviewed Flint Leverett for an hour and it was probably the best hour of radio I've ever produced with the help of Angela Keaton.
And I'm really proud of it.
And now I have Gareth back on the show.
And I want to ask you, my friend, what'd you learn from Flint Leverett?
Well, I think there are a number of things that were certainly useful from my point of view to get out.
And in fact, some of it really was new to me.
And I was thinking particularly of a question that I asked him because he was at one time, in fact, the first, I think, nine years of his career in Washington were as a intelligence analyst on the Middle East, working to at least a significant degree on Iran.
And I was interested in knowing, as he looked back on his years as an intelligence analyst, and was able to compare what he believed then, what he understood then about Iran and its policies, and what he understands now, what his observations are now on, you know, the whole problem of US intelligence on Iran.
And his answer, I think, was very candid and very revealing because he said, you know, I now realize that I didn't really understand very much about Iran.
I mean, this is my sort of paraphrase of what he said, that he was unable to actually have any contact with Iranian officials, and therefore didn't really have an understanding of the calculations, the belief system, the history of the Iranian program from within, that is the nuclear program in particular, from within the context of the Iranian government's own policymaking.
And so he was really not able to have a very clear picture of what Iran is trying to do and why.
And I think that really goes to the essence of the problem of US policy toward Iran, that for a couple of generations now, I mean, going back 30 years, the United States really has been operating in, you know, sort of blindly with regard to its policy toward Iran.
I mean, it started out with this enormous hostility toward Iran from the very beginning.
We didn't really have time to go into this history in the interview with Flint, but, you know, we could have done that.
And I think it's very important that, you know, you start with the hostility on the part of the United States, and really never get out of that.
I mean, it was sort of a spiral that held the United States government in thrall for 30 years.
And as a result of that, you know, you get intelligence that, you know, quote-unquote intelligence that really reflects a combination of hostility combined with ignorance.
And that's what we still have today.
I mean, the intelligence on Iran, although the NIE of 2007 is a huge leap forward for reasons which have to do with technological breakthrough in terms of intercepting communications and sort of having a lucky break in intercepting messages that basically said, we're not working on nuclear weapons anymore.
But apart from that, you know, the intelligence on Iran is hopeless.
So I thought that was really a central insight into the problem.
Yeah, well, certainly.
And so I guess that's funny.
I mean, really, the bottom line there is that the CIA, Naval Intelligence, and the National Reconnaissance Office, and all the rest of these, they basically exist to justify whatever policy the politicians want.
That's what it's really all about.
Well, I mean, I think, you know, they're not consciously doing that.
But I think the way the system works, there are so many ways in which intelligence on a highly politicized issue such as Iran does get skewed in the direction of policy.
I mean, it's an unconscious, but systematic problem.
And I've been studying this for my own writing about US intelligence on and policy toward Iran.
And what I what I found was that over the years, one intelligence estimate after another, was systematically distorted in the direction of suggesting that Iran wants a nuclear weapon, by basically, you know, pitching the intelligence analysis, not to the question of, of trying to understand Iran's intentions, but saying, well, what are their capabilities?
And only really looking at how long it would be if Iran made a decision to have a nuclear weapon, how long would it be before they could possibly have one?
And so that has been, time after time, the basic modus operandi of the intelligence community in regard to Iran.
As one specialist on Iran's nuclear program, who I interviewed some years ago, and who now is in the US government, once said to me, you know, is it okay to use the S word on the air, by the way?
Oh, nope, new rules.
Okay.
Well, I don't give a crap about what Iran's intentions are.
He said, all I care about are his capabilities.
And that is the exact way in which the US intelligence community operated.
And what and the message that was being sent.
It's like Freudian projection, they just assume the worst.
They just assume the worst case, without caring to really analyze the question of what Iran's trying to do.
And that's what passed for intelligence.
And the message that got to the public, of course, as transmitted through, you know, the news media, the political elite, and so forth, is, well, of course, Iran wants nuclear weapons.
And that's really the way the systems work.
Yeah.
Well, now, all the reports are, aren't they, that there's pressure on or maybe even a new national intelligence estimate being written right now?
That's right.
And I would expect that this is going to be partially a reversion to the form that I'm talking about, which is that they will, you know, sort of not even attempt to address Iran's intentions, and will once again focus everybody on their capabilities, and, you know, that it'll be, Iran will be able to have a nuclear weapon within two to five years.
Yeah, yeah, which, of course, their capabilities, as, you know, communicated to the masses in this country by the media, never any details, we've discussed a million times, nothing but sort of blind accusations, and even in print, never mind TV news, which is where most people get it, but even in print, you get things like, oh, well, you know, Iran has enough ore in the ground that they could make a million hydrogen bombs one day if, you know, they had Merlin the magician to do it for them.
Or, on the other hand, they could use it to have actual electric power.
Right.
Should they be strange enough to want that?
Right, and they never, never, I mean, you think, the only time Chris Matthews' show has ever included anything about the IAEA even existing was when old squinty-eyes Buchanan said, now look, there's an IAEA and a safeguards agreement and an E3 negotiation, and he went, you know, chopping his hand in the air, and he explained it, because Pat reads Gordon Prather, and Pat knows better, but he's the only one.
Right.
Good old squinty.
I love that guy, man, I can't help it.
Let me just add, just because we've skirted the question thus far, or I've skirted the question thus far, what Iran's intentions really are with regard to the nuclear program.
And make it quick, because we're about out of time.
There's a lot of stuff on the record that shows what Iran is interested in is, A, having leverage, having low-enriched uranium gives them leverage to negotiate with the United States, and B, or two, it gives them a, sort of an existential deterrent.
Just not by having nuclear weapons, but just having the capability, if they chose to do it, to go and not do it.
Thank you.
