All right, y'all, welcome to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I hope everybody had a good weekend.
Got a good show lined up for you today.
The other Scott Horton will be here.
So will Lou Rockwell and Jason Ditz.
We're going to start right now with our first guest, Robert Baer.
He's an author and former CIA case officer assigned to the Middle East.
He's Time.com's intelligence columnist.
He has contributed to Vanity Fair, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.
He's a frequent commentator and author about issues related to international relations, espionage, and U.S. foreign policy.
He's the author of See No Evil, Sleeping with the Devil, The Devil We Know, and the novel Blow the House Down.
Welcome to the show, Bob.
How are you doing?
It's great to be here.
I appreciate you joining us.
So I was hoping I could get some perspective from you about the revolution, really, in the Middle East, I guess particularly in Egypt.
Let's see, I guess hopefully we can just catch up from last week.
I guess it was Wednesday and Thursday the military allowed the secret police to clamp down or attempt to clamp down on the protesters in Tahrir Square.
On Friday, and apparently all weekend long, the people have been allowed to gather.
Millions have been out there, which I guess looks really bad for the regime.
On the other hand, parts of the protest movement have been in talks with the government.
So I just wonder if we can start with where you think things stand right now.
I think it's starting to die down.
The fact is that we've turned to the head of intelligence, Omar Suleiman, who is also a military officer, and in Egypt he's notorious for being a torturer and an all-around bad guy.
He did the original CIA renditions in 1995, and he was responsible for Sheikh Omar, who was kidnapped in Milan.
He's another Middle East strongman.
My big question is, when this started a week and a half ago, what was the military going to do?
Was it going to join the protesters, or was it going to support the regime?
I think what we're seeing today is it's supporting the regime.
The Egyptians fear chaos.
There's no political party that can assume power.
Even the Muslim Brotherhood is a relatively small party, disorganized, outlawed for years.
I'm not very optimistic.
We're going to see democracy break out in Egypt any time soon.
We also have to consider that this largely wasn't a Twitter revolution.
It was a bread riot in a large sense, because commodity prices have shot through the roof.
Egyptians have been living on the edge.
Unemployment is enormous.
It keeps on going up in Egypt.
And Egypt is not Tunisia, which Tunisia always had a weak military that couldn't take control of the streets like the Egyptians do.
Right.
Well, a few things there.
I guess when you say it looks like the military is taking the side of the regime, that's the headline at antiwar.com right now, Egyptian military's neutrality, quote-unquote, waivers, crackdown begins.
Of course, it said in the New York Times, what, last Thursday, that it's Obama's plan, and obviously Hillary Clinton, their plan is to promote this guy Suleiman to replace Mubarak.
But I can't help but guess that that's not going to mollify the protesters, right?
I mean, obviously the military has the power to defeat them if it comes down to it.
I wonder if it will come down to it.
And are they likely to protest any less against Suleiman than against Hosni Mubarak?
I think that Suleiman is more effective in the sense that he's less senile.
Mubarak, his mind is gone in a lot of ways, as you would at 82 years old.
And I think Suleiman has got a good grasp of the military and would be quickly able to move against any officers who would join the protests.
So we will get some stability.
But remember, Egypt's a big country.
It's a third of the Arab world.
It's actually more than that.
Napoleon's time was 2 million people.
What is it, 80 now?
And they just can't feed the population indefinitely.
If global warming continues to go on the trend it is, we're going to see the prices.
There's a great article in the New York Times today by Krugman about this.
We're going to see the prices of bread in Egypt going up and up and up.
And I don't see that Suleiman is going to cut back on the corruption or make the Egyptian economy more efficient than it is.
It's a horribly corrupt place, a horribly violent regime.
And I think this Bush fantasy of democracy, a Western-style democracy breaking out in the Middle East, isn't going to happen anytime soon.
I mean, I hate to compare Egypt with Lebanon, but there's been a military coup in a sense in Lebanon with Hezbollah running the country.
I think we're seeing what more and more in the Middle East is militarization rather than democracy.
So, in other words, when it comes down to it, the states here do have the militaries and the will to clamp down on their citizens and maintain their power.
In other words, the worse the prices get, the more the riots are, just the worse the police states will be.
Yeah, I think that we'll see in a couple of weeks, if it indeed dies down, we'll see a lot of arrests, preventive arrests.
We'll see a huge amount of money dumped into wheat to bring prices down temporarily, to mollify people, as you say.
But I don't see the system changing in any large sense.
And I don't see Washington.
This all came as a surprise to Washington.
And I don't see us changing policy from supporting strongmen in the Middle East.
But, you know, we have seen some members of the Egyptian army saying, yeah, you're our brothers, to the protesters and stuff, and seemingly recognizing, at least publicly, their leadership, even recognizing the legitimacy of the protests.
I wonder if Mubarak is gone and Suleiman orders a big crackdown by the military to say clear Tahrir Square permanently, something like that, is it a sure bet that the military would go along?
The guys with the actual rifles?
We don't know.
That's a question that nobody knows.
The military in Egypt is a closed society.
I've heard speculation that the senior officers, the generals, are Nasserist.
They're secular officers.
The majors and captains and colonels are, you know, they're more Muslim, in the sense that they're closer to the Muslim Brotherhood.
But I wouldn't say at all that they're Muslim Brothers, simply because in 1981 when Sadat was killed, he was killed by a Muslim Brother.
You know, it had a different name, the organization.
It was the Military Wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, in effect.
So ever since then, the military has gone after these people and eviscerated the military.
You know, if you're a single conversation with a friend on the telephone, or, you know, an inadvised comment will get you thrown out of the military or sent off to logistics on the Upper Nile.
So, you know, I don't see a strong military or a part of the military siding with the people.
I mean, it truly is.
It's not an independent organization as it was in 1952 when there was the original military coup d'état of Egypt.
I could be wrong, because, you know, and I will say, and I'm quite sure nobody understands the military, including the State Department and the CIA.
They can't get inside to figure out what these guys are thinking.
And the Minister of Defense is a eunuch, effectively, and so are the other senior officers.
He's a eunuch, effectively?
Well, I mean, he will do whatever Mubarak or Suleiman tell him to do.
He will not think on his own.
He's a political eunuch.
I mean, you see much more independents in the American military than you do among officers.
Oh, yeah.
They do whatever they want over there at the Pentagon.
Yeah, well, I mean, you know, you see the Christian movement inside the military is unchecked.
Yeah, for one example.
But you will not see the Islamic groupings in the military expressing their opinions, ever.
All right, everybody, we're talking with Bob Baer.
He writes intelligence issues for Time Magazine, former CIA officer and author.
Check him out at Barnes & Noble, not Amazon.
And when we get back, we'll talk a little bit about Muhammad al-Baradai and some more about the Muslim Brotherhood and the revolution in Egypt.
It's Antiwar Radio.
Stay tuned.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Robert Baer.
He wrote See No Evil and a bunch of other books, too.
He's a former CIA officer.
George Clooney played him in the movie Syriana.
And we're talking about the revolution in Egypt.
But I wanted to ask you, Bob, if you can confirm for me what Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff wrote in Newsweek that the Egyptians tortured Sheikh Ibn al-Libi for the United States and only after the Egyptians locked him in a tiny box and then threw him on the floor and beat him with their fists did he finally say, yes, Saddam Hussein was teaching us al-Qaeda guys how to use chemical weapons and so forth, part of the lies that led us to war with Iraq.
Do you know about that?
Yeah, I know about it.
I mean, this is what the Bush administration wanted.
I mean, it was clear that Omar Suleiman, who was in charge of this, understood we want to go to war and we need a justification.
So he sent him to Egypt.
Egypt is not...
Look, Egypt and torture has nothing to do with collecting facts or the truth.
It has to do with intimidating people like Stalinist Russia.
And so they intimidated this guy, and he, of course, knew nothing about it.
But, you know, most of the people in the renditions that were tortured later on had nothing to do with terrorism.
Abu Zubaydah and the rest of them, the one that was waterboarded for 83 days.
You had people that didn't know what they were doing running this program, and the whole idea was to give the impression that we were making, you know, progress against terrorism.
It was purely Washington-driven political lie.
Well, but now Sheikh Al-Libi and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin Al-Shid, these guys are real terrorists, right?
Well, I mean, they're part of Al-Qaeda, but, I mean, they were not in any sense, you know, a trigger man, and they certainly didn't know about the plans of Zawahiri, the number two in Al-Qaeda, or bin Laden himself.
They were insignificant people.
But at that point, this dossier that Bush was building on Saddam Hussein, that's all he cared about, and George Tenet, the CIA director, he didn't care.
You know, he wanted to keep his fancy car and his bodyguards and get a big important job out.
He got out of the CIA, and he got it all.
Well, would I be right to interpret what you're saying as diminishing the role of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in the 9-11 attack?
That maybe that's overblown?
Well, look, we don't know.
We don't know.
I don't know.
I'm not confident about any of the evidence.
I mean, I think Al-Qaeda did 9-11, but the point is, all this information in the 9-11 commission was tortured.
Right.
There's never been a country ever in history that we're aware of that used torture effectively to get intelligence.
It just doesn't work.
End of story.
Right.
They don't want it.
True.
Torture's good for getting lies, like in the case of al-Libya and Saddam Hussein.
Absolutely.
Yeah, that's exactly.
So this is the regime that the Obama administration is now propping up, a regime of torture, which doesn't give me a whole lot.
I'm not saying they can do much better than that, but it doesn't give me a whole lot of confidence of the way this is going.
We are just postponing the reality that these countries one day are going to turn very nasty and turn against the United States, but all people care about in this country is get elected for four years and then whatever.
Well, you know, the neocons are saying, well, I guess they're kind of divided.
Some of the neocons are saying hooray for a democratic revolution, and then there's the Frank Gaffney set that are saying this is going to be the rise of the Egyptian Islamo-fascist caliphate of terrorism coming to get us, and, of course, they're pointing at the Muslim Brotherhood, which has the word Muslim right in the title.
So I was wondering if you could maybe educate us a little bit about just how dangerous the Muslim Brotherhood is to America or American interests.
Well, I mean, you know, I can paint you the worst-case scenario.
I mean, at the end of the day, Osama Bin Laden was the Muslim Brother.
He just took the ideas to an extreme.
You know, he was the student of a guy named Saeed Qutb, who died in an Egyptian jail, was hanged, tortured there.
This whole Al-Qaeda movement was invented inside Egyptian jails.
Now, the question is, do extremists speak for the rest of the Muslim world?
No, they don't.
You know, you've got the crackpots.
But I'll say this, that if we allow Egypt, or not allow, there's nothing we can do about it, but if Egypt goes down the drain, people tend to turn to religion.
It's inevitable, whether it's Christianity or Islam.
They just turn to it.
It's sort of a last hope.
And so in this very black scenario, I'm not sure, you know, fascism is the wrong word, of course.
That's a neocon invention.
It's people that are desperate, pick up the Koran, just as they do the Bible.
You see it over and over again.
Is it going to get that bad?
Well, you know, I go back to global warming.
You add another 5 billion people and something untoward is going to happen.
Well, it's the worldwide inflation in concert by all the central banks, too, trying to make up for the last recession that they caused, and that's certainly driving up prices as well.
You've got all the corn subsidies and who knows what kind of interventions.
Well, you know, you have to look at family planning, because this new Congress, Republican Congress, is going to pull the money on that.
I mean, family planning is what we need.
And nuclear power desalinization plants, too.
Lots of those.
Yeah, I mean, the dialogue is not good in Washington for solving any of these problems.
So what does it mean for the American empire when, I mean, I guess, okay, so they assume the best case scenario for Hillary here, Suleiman becomes the new dictator and everything more or less stays in line under his control there.
As you're saying, you've got these food riots, and across the Middle East, even in Saudi Arabia, they're protesting.
Do you think that this portends a real kind of world, you know, region-wide movement, or it's just not going to go?
I think it's going to be a region-wide movement, but not this week, or not next year.
It's going to happen eventually.
And the question is, what are we going to do?
Like Afghanistan, we're going to put troops there, policemen?
What would it even cost us to just give up the Middle East?
If we just said, who cares, and just got out of there?
Like Afghanistan, get out.
We're not doing any good, and Petraeus is a liar.
There is no progress in Afghanistan.
He can't measure progress.
He's a liar.
Get out.
Leave.
And if Bin Laden shows up in Kabul, that's what you have predators for.
One man, one missile, you know?
That's sort of the minimum, in which we can live with the minimum.
But look, we're doing no good in Afghanistan.
And look at Iraq.
I mean, it was just what a waste of money.
And then you look at the Pentagon's contracts.
You know, this is what the Pentagon has said.
So who knows what the truth is?
You have billions upon billions of dollars were given to people, the contractors, who had felonies, or whatever was the matter with them.
It is a huge money grab, these wars.
Right.
And I don't consider myself particularly liberal.
I'm just telling you what I see, because I've seen it from the inside.
Sure.
I was hoping you could elaborate a little bit on what you said about Afghanistan and how hopeless it is.
Petraeus is a liar, very strong words.
I'd just like to give you a chance to back him up a little stronger.
Well, I mean, look, they're naming villages we've never heard, saying, oh God, the Taliban has retreated.
But this is a typical guerrilla war, where the guerrillas do retreat.
They go north, they go someplace where they're not being fought, and they just get up and leave.
And that, when you say that you've taken a small piece of Afghanistan back as progress, it's the same thing we heard in Vietnam.
You know, we took this province, we took the northern part of the province, we're winning the war.
Would you say, then, that Petraeus knows good and well that he's not making progress when he tells us that he is?
Absolutely he doesn't know.
He knows we're not making progress.
He knows that we can't define what victory is, what the Taliban is.
We can't identify the leadership.
You know, could we kill Jalal ad-Din Haqqani today and say we won?
Yeah, I suppose you could.
But they're never going to pacify, and that's a big word, Afghanistan.
And he knows that.
There's just not enough American troops, not enough American money, and he can take a sliver of the country and say, look, we're making progress.
But in his heart, I hope he knows that this war is unwinnable, because it is.
All right, everybody, that's Robert Baer, former CIA officer, writer for Time magazine, of course, as written in every other publication in the world, author of a bunch of books, including See No Evil, Sleeping with the Devil, The Devil We Know, and Blow the House Down, the last of which there is a novel.
Thanks very much for your time on the show.
Appreciate it.
Thanks.
