02/19/16 – Jon Schwarz – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, Scott Horton Show.
Up next, it's John Schwartz.
Now writing at The Intercept.
Before that, he had this great blog, Tiny Revolution.
It's still there.
Man, that's good.
Tiny Revolution.
Now, here he is writing with Greenwald and them over at The Intercept.
This one is called Trump is Right.
Bush lied, a little-known part of the bogus case for war.
Welcome back.
John, it's been way too long since we've spoken, sir.
I agree.
It's been a long, long time.
And the funniest part of it to me is that we are still talking about exactly the same thing.
I know.
Isn't that funny?
Well, here's the thing of it, though.
I recommend you all the time, actually.
You come up in context because in the not very thick catalog of people who are really good on this issue, you're right up there at the top, especially like if I knew somebody had to be able to answer the questions right off the top of their head on CNN or anything like that.
I would turn to you first.
I know you know this case as well as anyone about, well, as you say here, no, really, they lied.
They weren't just wrong.
They lied.
So I guess I would I would turn the floor over to you with one qualification, which is try to pretend or assume that everyone listening is somebody's Republican uncle and that you really got to make this case to people who mean well.
But boy, are they still caught up in the deception from back 13 years ago?
Yeah, I'll do that for sure.
And I should also say that this is a complicated story, which is why it was so easy for the Bush administration to lie about it.
And if anybody believes that I am not explaining it clearly, feel free to email me.
I'm happy to answer any questions that anybody has about this.
So for Republican uncles, the first thing I would say is this.
Everyone is right to be suspicious of claims that the Bush administration lies because the Bush administration didn't say stuff that was too much different from the Clinton administration.
And so there's like chain emails that go around all the time where they list all the quotes from members of the Clinton administration, other Democrats and stuff like that, talking about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and everyone says like, well, so obviously everybody was mistaken.
It wasn't that Bush was lying.
It was that everybody was mistaken.
What I would say is that Republican uncles and everybody should understand that there's another possibility, which is that everyone was lying, the Democrats and the Republicans.
Now it is the case that the Republicans lied a little bit more enthusiastically.
They told some lies that were more egregious and most significantly, they started an entire war based on those lies.
Like I would say for sure that Bill Clinton lied about Iraq, but in his defense, which comes very hard for me because I'm not a big Bill Clinton fan, in Bill Clinton's defense, he didn't start a war.
He just lied.
So that's a smaller offense.
Well, he did bomb the hell out of them and including Desert Fox, and he did support the war in 2003 and told David Letterman, oh, it'll be easy.
It'll take two weeks.
So let's not let him too much off the hook.
But go ahead.
And I'm with you completely on that, as I say, not a big Bill Clinton fan.
So with that preamble, I would encourage everyone who has even a little bit of an open mind about this to look at the story of Hussein Kamal, who was Saddam Hussein's son-in-law.
And Hussein Kamal was one of the most important people after Saddam in the Iraqi government.
He had in fact been in charge of the very, very real nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs that Iraq had in the 1980s, when Saddam having all that stuff was totally cool with us, because he was using it on Iran, and he was using it on Iraqi Kurds in the north.
That was perfectly fine with us.
And then when he invaded Kuwait, and we ejected him in 1991, it became part of the terms of their surrender that Iraq would give up all of its unconventional weapons of mass destruction programs.
So that's 1991.
And Iraq clearly was not coming completely clean in 1991.
When the UN inspectors arrived, they had a lot of standoff.
They were not telling the whole truth by any means.
But the UN inspectors worked very, very hard.
And over the next couple of years, they uncovered pretty much everything.
They thought at the time that Iraq had done during the 1980s.
And in 1995, Hussein Kamal defected to Jordan.
And he did that because really, he hoped that the United States would stage a coup, invade again and put him in charge of Iraq instead of Saddam.
So he was not a good guy.
But what he did in 1995 was tell the UN and the IAEA, the people who are in charge of nuclear weapons, and the US and British intelligence what he knew about Saddam Hussein's WOD program.
And nobody knew it better than Hussein Kamal.
Now in 1995, we did not have the debriefing notes.
What we did know was that he went on CNN and said, Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction.
So he said that in 1995.
Okay, so fast forward to 2002, the Bush administration has decided it wants to invade Iraq.
Dick Cheney, in the first speech about why we were going to war in August of 2002, brings up the same Kamal.
And this is what Dick Cheney said about what Kamal had claimed in 1995.
We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.
We've gotten this from the first-hand testimony of defectors, including Saddam's own son-in-law.
All right, so in 1995, Hussein Kamal has said, Iraq has nothing.
It has no nuclear weapons program.
By 2002, Dick Cheney had stood that truth completely on its head and said, we know they have a nuclear weapons program because Hussein Kamal told us that they did.
And the most extraordinary thing about that is that that didn't even make any sense.
Like it happened in 1995, there were still inspectors in the country.
If Hussein Kamal had revealed that in 1995, then the inspectors would have gone and dismantled the nuclear weapons program.
So it didn't make any sense.
But the US media didn't notice that.
It also was completely transparently false because the IAEA itself had public documents on its website saying that Hussein Kamal had told them all nuclear weapons-related activity had effectively ceased in 1991.
So this was just a blatant, brazen lie by Cheney.
And again, the question was not, was Hussein Kamal telling the truth or had Iraq restarted WMD programs after 1995?
Neither of those were the question.
The question was simply, what did Hussein Kamal say in 1995?
That's something Dick Cheney knew.
That's something the US government knew with 100% certainty.
It wasn't a question of hazy intelligence and different conflicting opinions.
Everybody knew the answer to that question, and Dick Cheney lied about it.
And then the rest of the US government, including Bush, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, they went on to lie about it too.
All right, well, we're going to get to that on the other side of this break.
And I'm saying this not for bragging, but just to bolster your testimony, because it's just true that I watched Dick Cheney's VFW speech in August of 2002 live.
And when he got to the Hussein Kamal part, I started cursing and throwing stuff at the TV, because I had seen Hussein Kamal on CNN myself in 1995.
I knew what he said myself before Dick Cheney even told that lie.
I'm sure you did as well, and I know a lot of other people did as well.
It was on CNN.
But I'm just saying, this is not that underground of information or anything.
This was for people who didn't want to buy into this narrative and had a bit of skepticism.
It was pretty easy to see through what was going on at the time.
I think that's important.
Yes, that is true.
Yeah, absolutely.
If you've been paying attention, you could tell.
But apparently no one in the US government or the US media pays attention.
Yeah.
Well, very few anyway.
And of course, there's the legend of Landay and Strobel at Knight Ridder.
And now, you know, they published all their stuff in, you know, the Kansas City Star and the Miami Herald and everywhere that people in New York and D.C. couldn't see it and wouldn't have cared anyway.
They debunked this all for Knight Ridder newspapers.
Aluminum tubes and more with John Schwartz on the other side of this break.
Check him out at The Intercept.
Trump is right.
Bush lied.
Hey, Al Scott Horton here.
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Alright, y'all, welcome back.
It's my show and things.
I checked during the break.
The only audio that CNN has for their Hussein Kamel story is him saying, oh yeah, we had daydreams about making nuclear bombs and ICBMs and all this stuff.
And then the next question is, can you state here and now, does Iraq have any weapons of mass destruction left?
Answer.
No.
Iraq does not possess any weapons of mass destruction.
I'm being completely honest about this.
And then the next question is about torture, and then they got the audio for the torture question too.
Does Saddam Hussein torture people?
Yeah, of course.
So anyway, but no audio of, I'm telling you, man, I was in charge of destroying it all, and by the way, the disgraced Scott Ritter, let it be said, still, he wasn't lying when he pointed out, a UN inspector at the time, and he explained on this show years ago, that Saddam Hussein completely panicked when Hussein Kamel defected to Jordan and that he handed over to the UN every scrap of paper.
He ordered his government, you take every scrap of paper you could possibly find because he was so afraid that Hussein Kamel would have turned over papers, or he had hidden them on his farm, I guess, but told the inspectors where to find them, that maybe he had turned over papers that Saddam hadn't already turned over.
So he said, re-turn over everything again, because he didn't want to get caught at all.
It was a complete panic on his part, and he was just fessing up, he had his hands up.
You already got everything, it was all destroyed by the end of 91.
Yeah, that's true.
And by the end of 95, after Hussein Kamel had defected, and the UN had gotten all of these documents, Iraq really had come completely clean, it had nothing left, and nothing changed between 1995 and the US invasion, as we know now.
And by the way, tell us about the dossier that Saddam gave to the United Nations in the end of 2002 there, that was basically the same thing again, right, where he was just saying, look, here's everything I got?
Yeah, if you go back and look at the news coverage in the United States, when Iraq made its final full declaration of its WMD program, everybody was like, how preposterous, Iraq is saying exactly the same thing that it said back in 1997 and 1998, that they don't have anything at all.
Yeah, and Bush said, we know what disarmament looks like, bring all your weapons that we know you got to the parking lot, and then we'll blow it up, or something like that.
So if they're not doing that, they're not telling the truth.
Yeah.
Well, now, tell me this, John, though, I'm sorry to interrupt, but what about, and there's a whole giant narrative here, I know you've heard of it and grappled with it before, that, well, he was trying to scare Iran.
So he was pretending that he was making nukes, and that he did have chemical and germ weapons still.
And unfortunately, he bluffed Iran into an American invasion.
Yeah, that's right.
That is a story which is just as made up as the idea that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
If you go back and you look at the final CIA report, which is like a thousand pages long, they spent literally a billion dollars on this, to report in the end that Iraq had nothing.
There is no evidence for that.
There was no strategy of Saddam Hussein to bluff us.
And if you ever talk to anybody about that, ask them, what exactly is it that Saddam was doing?
Like, what precisely were the actions that he took in order to bluff Iran?
And there is no answer, because he didn't do anything to bluff Iran.
Iraq wanted the sanctions removed.
It wanted to prove to the world that it had no weapons of mass destruction.
They said it over and over and over again.
It was not a bluff.
It was just them telling the truth.
Yeah.
Well, you know, one of the things that got me back then, which I think is still a big deal.
I think, you know, you could call it the soundtrack to a very important broken relationship in my life, was me saying, look, they're talking about the aluminum tubes again, when they'd already been debunked.
And yet I had to say this virtually every day because they just kept talking about the aluminum tubes.
And it's driving me out of my mind for literally five, six months in the run up to the war, because the Washington Post had done the debunking.
It was the top headline on antiwar.com.
But in September, you could even find it on the Wayback Machine.
In September of 2002, the Washington Post did a story that was probably published on page 43 or something like that in the paper version that explained how there's one guy in a weird offshoot office of the CIA who believes in the aluminum tubes are for nuclear weapons story.
But no one else at CIA and no one at the Department of Energy and none of the private think tanks.
I don't even think they got David Albright to pitch in.
I think even David Albright debunked the aluminum tubes and they just pushed on anyway, pretending that these tubes that were for artillery rockets must be for some massive uranium enrichment program hidden somewhere in Iraq, John.
Yeah, that's right.
And they were debunked over and over again.
But as you say, it was like on page 27.
And back then, that really mattered.
It's much, much harder to hide things than it used to be.
I guarantee you that there was some kind of fight within the Washington Post.
And the reporter on that story was like, look, I think this should be on page one.
Like this is incredibly important.
And then the people who really run the Washington Post are like, yeah.
I don't really see it as a page one story.
I think we'll put it back here.
And because of that, it was possible for that lie to last up until Colin Powell's presentation at the U.N.
He talked about the aluminum tubes at the U.N.
And not only did he talk about them, we know for a fact that Colin Powell himself personally, knowingly lied about them.
Colin Powell said, you know, like, I think it's pretty strange.
They claim that these are for rockets.
I think it's pretty strange that these are manufactured to a higher tolerance than any rockets that the United States makes.
Well, Colin Powell's own intelligence staff had told him that this is completely public now.
You can look it up on the Internet.
I told him, look, no, no, no, that's not true.
Like the U.S. actually has rockets very much like this.
Colin Powell completely ignored that, went on to say it in front of the entire world and got his war.
And weren't they buying them from our allies, the Italians, in the first place?
If I remember correctly, I think they were.
So it was not like a super secret, fantastic plan on the Iraqis' part if they had wanted to use the aluminum tubes for a nuclear weapon.
This is me.
Well, and here's one of the most important ones.
Saddam kicked the inspectors out.
We don't know what's going on there.
That's right.
What actually happened, you mentioned Operation Desert Fox in 1998.
Clinton had bombed Iraq and before bombings like that, the U.N. understandably would take their inspectors out because they didn't want their inspectors to be bombed.
And after this really large scale bombing of Iraq, Saddam Hussein said, look, we're not going to let the inspectors back in unless there's some clear path to a declaration that Iraq has, in fact, been disarmed, which we now know was not an unreasonable request to make because Iraq was disarmed.
So Saddam did not kick out the inspectors.
The U.N. removed the inspectors because America was bombing Iraq.
I think Clinton even actually gave, his government even gave a warning that you better get your inspectors out of there because the bombs are about to drop.
I think there's a good chance that Clinton himself, that may be the case.
There's a very good case that that Clinton wanted the inspectors out of there permanently because they were scared that they were going to say Iraq is disarmed, which the United States did not want to have happen.
Well, as Andrew Coburn has reported, I believe for the first time on this show, actually, that Rolf Eckeus from the United Nations, UNSCOM, what have you, in 1997, they were actually prepared to issue an official statement or official report certifying Iraq as weapons of mass destruction free.
And then Albright preempted it with her statement that, oh, yeah, the sanctions aren't about weapons of mass destruction anymore.
The sanctions are about regime change and they will stay in place until Saddam Hussein is gone.
And then, you know, that had thrown a big wrench in the works at the U.N., I guess, bureaucratically.
And so the official statement never came, but they were prepared to give it in 97.
That's right.
And in case like who was who was the head of UNSCOM for most of his life, the people who are in charge of the inspection, he said that now.
He also said in 2000, after the inspectors were no longer in Iraq, that they felt that they had fundamentally disarmed the country and that there were a few question marks left.
But it was not anything that was particularly significant.
So the people who knew the best, the people who were in charge of UNSCOM doing the inspections, they knew that Iraq was disarmed.
Well, Rice and Colin Powell had said the same thing in the spring of 2001.
Right.
I mean, specifically to the weapons of mass destruction, but they they said, oh, yeah, don't worry about Saddam.
We got him all contained.
Yeah, both both Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice were saying, like, listen, don't worry about Iraq in the beginning of 2001.
And just something I should say, if in case we're running out of time, is that what everybody should understand Iraq war.
The reason why the Bush administration was willing to lie so much about it is, as everybody has figured out now, it never had anything to do with weapons of mass destruction.
The United States didn't care what Iraq had.
We wanted to invade for other reasons and nothing was going to stop us.
That's the whole thing about it.
It was the legal technicality.
And they even explain, you know, Tony Blair's got a real problem with his lawyers around here.
We just ignore him or we just have Alberto Gonzalez or John, you write up something.
But over there, his lawyers are saying we have to make this some kind of violation of a U.N. resolution or something or else we're afraid we'll go to prison.
So they have something like a rule of law over there on low Tony Blair is free right now.
So it seems ridiculous to us here in the United States that they care about following the law.
But they did.
That's why the weapons of mass destruction issue was important to them.
And in fact, one of the top lawyers in the Tony Blair government resigned before the war because they did not believe it was legal and were concerned about their own reputation and perhaps their own freedom.
If they were to participate in the war.
Yeah.
All right.
Listen, we are over time.
Thank you so much for coming back on the show, John.
It's great to talk to you again.
Yeah, it's great to talk to you, too.
And hopefully we'll talk again sometime about something else.
Yeah.
Hey, I got your new email address.
So that's going to happen.
OK, right.
All right.
Cool.
Thanks very much.
But I saw that's John Schwartz.
He's at the intercept.
There's a lot more to this article, of course, a lot more to the story, of course, that we were unable to discuss in the short amount of time we have.
But this is really worth a look.
Trump is right.
Bush lied.
A little known part of the bogus case for war.
And we'll be right back with John Pfeffer in a sec.
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