03/09/11 – Kelley B. Vlahos – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
We're on the Liberty Radio Network and Chaos Radio, Austin.
I'm Scott Horton.
Our next guest is Kelly Vallejos.
Kelly has spent over a decade as a political reporter in Washington, DC.
Currently, she is a contributing editor for the American Conservative Magazine and its daily blog, ATT&CK.
She's also a Washington correspondent for the DC-based Homeland Security Magazine, Homeland Security Today, a longtime political writer for foxnews.com, a regular columnist for antiwar.com, and a contributor to criminaljustice.change.org.
Her website is kellyvallejos.com.
Wow.
I don't think I've ever been there.
Welcome back to the show, Kelly.
How are you doing?
Thank you.
Thanks for having me.
Cool.
You have a flying saucer on your blog.
What's that about?
That's from the movie.
That's a still from the movie.
Uh, the day that the earth stood still.
When, uh, a, a alien came down to, to teach us something about war.
Um, and he arrived in Washington and gave us a message and from a great science fiction film that could still teach us things today, if we just kind of stood back and started watching some of the old films that they're really, they really have some great messages.
Well, I really like messages, but I would have preferred to be just gotten rid of DC for us, you know, it would have been worth the collateral damage.
All right.
Well, maybe not.
Maybe just the white part on the inside of the beltway, you know?
Yeah.
Right.
Apart with all the statues, these politicians have built about themselves.
Yeah.
Monuments to themselves.
Hey, let's talk about criminaljustice.change.org for a sec.
What's that?
Well, criminaljustice.change.org is a website that is particularly now is a mostly, mostly petition driven website.
I've, I've done some writing for them.
I haven't done any lately.
They've sort of, to be honest, it's kind of strayed away from the original content, which is too bad, but basically they, that particular website was concentrating on civil liberties issues and mostly here, but also on an international scale as well.
Mostly issues relating to false, false imprisonment, prison injustice, the drug war, Islamophobia, other issues relating to, you know, law enforcement and its abuses in America right now.
Right on.
Well, that sounds very interesting.
And of course there's, there's a million different directions where we could go from that.
Just connect that to the news in terms of Islamophobia and prison reform and, and all these things.
But I want to talk about Iraq and mostly, I especially want to talk about Iraq because apparently, and maybe this is just my hyperbole, you know, I'm kind of an extremist, but I, the way I, best I can tell the rest of America has decided that the Iraq invasion happened sometime back a hundred years ago before world war one, and nobody cares at all about Iraq anymore.
And just forget it.
That was George Bush's thing.
And it might as well have been Korea or something, you know, back when TV was still in black and white.
And so it seems to me that since the consequences, even just the short term consequences of America's invasion of Iraq back in 2003, and the occupation that's lasted this whole time are still playing out there, then we ought to pay extra attention to what's going on.
So you have this great article.
It's at antiwar.com right now.
Iraq protests make Washington squirm and you have a very detailed write-up of the very recent history of the state of Iraq and the protest movement, Tunisian and Egyptian inspired protest movement there as it has existed over the past few weeks.
Why don't you give us a brief rundown here and then maybe we'll save the politics till the second half.
Yeah, sure.
I, you know, I, before I even get started on that, I was Googling around, you know, on Iraq a little while ago and the story popped up about members of a Buffalo based National Guard unit headed to Iraq.
And it just, it sort of like took me back into some sort of tailspin.
News-wise, you know, here, like you said, this is like ancient history to most Americans.
We still have units of soldiers going over to Iraq.
Meanwhile, the mixed message is that we're, that this war is over, that our guys and gals are home, that we're, that somehow we're not even stationed there anymore.
We don't hear about the troops over there.
Where are they?
What are they doing?
And here I just Google Iraq and here's a, here's a unit going over there.
Most of the guys in this particular unit have had, this is their first deployment.
Some of them, they've been on deployment before.
But it just, it kind of gives me kind of a funky feeling, you know, of deja vu, but also of sadness because I realized that these deployments are still occurring and nobody cares anymore.
And like you said, with my, with my article, I tried to explore, you know, what's been going on in Iraq because I haven't, it's been really difficult to took a look at the mainstream media and kind of discern what's been going on there in the context of these revolutions in the Middle East right now, Iraq is having its own revolution, but in, in a very ironic way that they are revolting against us.
I mean, we have been the chief puppet masters over there for the last eight years.
Um, the, the, the prime minister that they are railing against, uh, all throughout the country, cross ethnic lines.
This isn't a Sunni Shia thing.
This is Sunni Shia and Kurds are all, uh, revolting over there.
And, uh, prime minister Maliki is, is the key reason his government has failed to bring basic services, uh, things that we take for granted, electricity, food, water, sewage, uh, in the last several years that he's been in, in power since 2006, he's failed to, to, to make good on all of his pledges to help reconstruct that country.
Um, we have failed on our promises to help reconstruct that country.
Um, but he, he is basically our man in Baghdad.
And so they are in effect fighting us.
And when I say it's making Washington squirm, it is, it's very awkward.
It's embarrassing.
And official Washington has basically reacted to that by silence is what I say.
So I tried to fill in the void by, uh, providing some of the, you know, easily, you know, accessible information that's out there on the web right now about what's, what's going on on the ground because our mainstream news is just ignoring it.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's especially ironic.
I mean, here, America backs every dictatorship in the region.
And so the irony there where we're supposed to have the legacy of the declaration of independence on our side and all that is really harsh, but in the case of Iraq here, they did this whole aggressive invasion in the name of liberating the people of Iraq and providing them a democracy so that they wouldn't have to suffer under an American backed military dictatorship anymore like the rest of the Middle East.
And this is the government that these people are rebelling against.
Right.
And, and when you think about it, it really isn't too much of a surprise.
The military took over the military was responsible obviously for the invasion, but it also took over the reconstruction.
It marginalized the state department and marginalized the civilians in our government from going in and having a hand in there.
It politicized the reconstruction so that what you have left is a military led post invasion Iraq.
And at some point, the charade over the whole democracy and liberation was ripped off.
And basically we did, or the military did everything it could just to get out there, get out of there with some semblance of a face left.
And what it did is, is they installed Maliki.
They, they, you know, they, uh, you know, they committed the surge.
They committed to the surge.
They pummeled Iraq and Maliki's enemies so they could get out of there.
It became less about establishing a democracy and reconstructing that country and more about us saving face and saving Petraeus' face and in putting a veneer of success on it all.
And this is what you're seeing.
You're seeing that veneer ripped off, the Potemkin village exploded.
And you're seeing what, what are, what basically the, the, the chickens come home to roost is so they say.
Yeah.
Well, and, uh, you know, you're, you're certainly right.
I mean, one of the first headlines I saw about the protests was from Mosul to Basra that virtually, I guess every population center in Iraq had a giant protest on the day of rage there.
And that was what, last Friday?
Right.
Last Friday.
And they, uh, upwards of 29 protesters were killed.
I've seen varying numbers, but that's the highest number I've seen.
Um, and not only protesters killed, but demonstrators beaten, journalists detained and beaten and tortured in, in the jails there too.
Well, and that's where we're going to pick this up when we get back as the persecution of the journalists and the intellectuals as a result of this, uh, Maliki's post protest crackdown.
It's Kelly B.
Vallejos from antiwar.com and the American conservative magazine.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's antiwar radio.
I'm Scott Horton on the line is Kelly B.
Vallejos from antiwar.com.
And we're talking about Iraq's day of rage, massive protests across that country against the American installed government of Nouri al-Maliki.
And, um, when we went out to the break, we were just about to get into the crackdown that came as the result last weekend.
Kelly, tell us about that.
Well, people might be surprised that a democracy that we, we supposedly helped flourish in Iraq has responded to, um, largely peaceful protests by sending out, uh, uh, storm troopers in essence out to round up journalists, round up protesters hunt them down as one person had described to bringing them to detention centers, torturing them, beating them, releasing them after, uh, signing affidavits that they haven't been tortured, um, all in attempt to, um, stifle, uh, this peaceful protest in Iraq, something that we had bragged and boasted that we helped create.
Remember with the, you know, the purple finger, uh, elections, you know, starting of, you know, in 2005 and now, uh, we are seeing the sort of outgrowth of that.
We're seeing that we have helped bring in an authoritarian government that is responding to people, um, trying to exercise their rights with, uh, with lethal force, really.
Well, and it's just like, you know, Brent Scowcroft tried to tell George Bush that, look, man, this is what's going to happen.
You're going to topple the minority dictatorship there.
And the majority is going to take power.
And that's what happened.
I told Sistani, he said, Hey, if you believe in God, go out there and demand one man, one vote and demand it and say you want it really soon.
And they had no choice after that.
Once you overthrow Saddam Hussein, now your job is installing whoever Sistani and Soder can agree on.
Yeah.
And so that was that whole war was just fighting for those guys.
Right.
Exactly.
And like I mentioned earlier, I mean, we helped Maliki basically destroy his, his political enemies through systematic sort of, uh, ethnic cleansing and superior firepower.
I mean, I remember going and seeing David Petraeus talk about how we won the search.
And basically it was basically unleashing the mighty forces of, uh, superior, uh, us firepower on Baghdad, like unlike anything that those people have ever seen.
And so basically we just pummeled the crap out of Iraq, out of the Sunnis, out of, uh, Sader city and basically brought all of Maliki's enemies to heal so that he could basically create a central government, uh, with all the powers that came with.
And he's become an authoritarian, um, strong man there.
And now, now we're seeing his real true colors, uh, come to be through these protests.
Um, and, and one way, this is actually a good thing and that it basically tears the veneer off of everything that we've been saying about what we've done over there and what we've been trying to do.
You know, it basically shows them, shows Maliki for who he really is and, and, and what's been going on there with the, while the media has been ignoring it these past two years.
Right.
And, you know, you think about it too, uh, what a giant waste all that surge was because really by the time it started, the Sunni based insurgency had more or less lost the civil war.
Maybe they helped put the finishing touches on the ethnic cleanse or, you know, sectarian cleansing of Baghdad.
But really that had already taken place and the Sunni insurgency had already agreed to take on Al Qaeda and become the sons of Iraq and the concern local citizens and no longer our enemies.
They picked a fight in, as you said, in Sadr city.
And that was, you know, the major part of the surge there, other than finishing, uh, you know, the mopping up exercise of the civil war, they'd been fighting on the side of that whole time.
They turned on Sadr and all his guys.
And as we can see right now, he's in the Catbird seat.
Basically they were fighting for Sadr that whole time that they were fighting against his militia and against the people of, uh, you know, his part of Baghdad.
The whole thing was for nothing.
Right.
And it really, I mean, it just, like I said before, it just put a Band-Aid on this gaping wound long enough for portray us to come back and say, look, we were successful.
The surge worked, you know, um, on, you know, then we have the presidential election.
Obama takes over.
Bush is gone.
You know, it was all for domestic consumption.
Well, meanwhile, you know, the, the, the sons of Iraq have been given, you know, basically given the kick in the pants from the Maliki government, you know, they don't have jobs.
So they're festering with unemployment there in like places like Fallujah, where this, this anger at the Maliki government is just growing and growing and growing.
You have unemployment there.
I mean, they, they, they were basically given the back of the hand after we left.
They're not being paid.
They haven't been able to, they, they haven't been absorbed into the police forces like they had been promised.
So you have all these places, all this festering anger, you know, and, and, and then the lack of services.
I mean, this is a country that was under Saddam Hussein in really bad shape, mostly because of the sanctions, as you remember, are imposed sanctions.
Saddam Hussein was, was, was a tyrant and a dictator and a bad man.
But at this point, eight years in the electricity, the, the, the education system, the water, the sewage, they're worse off than they were before.
Plus we introduced this, I mean, just this massive pollution, you know, we scarred their earth with all of the weapons that we rained down on, on their cities and the depleted uranium and the birth defects that are occurring in Fallujah that I just wrote about.
I mean, to, to, to look at that and say, somehow these people are better off.
You've got to be totally, you've got to be totally whacked out of your mind.
Well, you know, I really don't like, you know, doomsaying and predicting the bad soon, because then I'll just be a fool because it's never going to work out like I predict or whatever, but I can't help but believe that in the long term, there are going to be, you know, especially talk about the depleted uranium and whatever, there's going to be blow back from this coming for generations.
This is history that time that the middle of North America came to Mesopotamia and killed everything.
That's never going away.
That's going to be the history of the world from now on what has been done there.
And, uh, boy, talk about some of the birth defects and whatever, especially in Fallujah, uh, places like that.
It's just, uh, it's maddening.
It reminds me of that, uh, Thomas Jefferson quote about slavery, where he says, you know, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just and that his justice cannot sleep forever.
And when it wakes up, we are going to be in real deep trouble here.
What have we done?
And we have not taken responsibility for any of it.
And then you have people like Charles Krauthammer, who is arguably a, a mainstream voice that is, is given, um, a, a, a greater soap box than most Americans to spout his, his point of view is out there saying, look at this great democracy that we created in Iraq.
You know, they have free elections.
They have a free press.
Meanwhile, journalists are being rounded up and beaten.
They're the inspiration for all the pro all the rest of the protests in the middle East.
They want to be just like Iraq.
It's delusional.
It's delusional, but I think this is, this is how Americans deal with the fact that they, when, when they look at things, at the messes they've created, they don't want to take responsibility for it.
They might say it in private, but for some reason we just can't seem to muster the humility to get up there and say, we made a mistake.
Let's fix it.
Yeah.
Or at least just stop it.
Yeah.
Uh, of course, every leak out of the Pentagon is they want to stay and they want to be invited to stay.
And they're going to try to work out a way to stay.
And if only they could figure out a way to put a bullet on McDonnell solder, you know, and, and on and on it's Kelly B.
Vallejo.
She writes for antiwar.com is a contributing editor at the American conservative magazine.
That's am con mag.com.
And we'll be right back after this.
All right, Sean, it's anti-war doc.
Uh, no, it's not.
It's anti-war radio.
Well, we're streaming from antiwar.com as well as LRN.fm and chaos radio, Austin.org talking with Kelly Vallejo.
She writes for antiwar.com.
Her latest piece is called Iraqi protests, make Washington squirm.
And boy, talk about putting two and two together.
You ever drive through a neighborhood somewhere and then you go, Oh, wow.
This leads to that.
Oh, okay.
I didn't realize.
Well here, I didn't even make the connection whatsoever until I read it in your article here after what?
Almost, uh, you know, uh, two years later, year and a half later, this guy, Shane Bauer that you write about in your article, Kelly, uh, the hiker imprisoned in Iran, I've interviewed him.
Yeah.
I interviewed him about this article that you write about Iraq's new death squad.
I was Googling around and I found your interview with him.
I had no idea.
He was one of the hikers that was being held over there.
Isn't that creepy?
Yeah.
Well, that just goes to show my negligence on my, you know, researching that issue and, you know, figuring that out.
Well, it's not something you would expect somebody you interview.
I mean, I interviewed him a month before it happened.
I mean, that is just, it just bizarre.
I just, I just went, I mean, this is an aside, but I just kind of Google to see where that whole thing is at.
And they're on trial right now.
I think their, their lawyer gets to see them for like, you know, a half an hour every day or something.
Um, uh, if that's, you know, it's, it's, it doesn't look good at all.
Oh man.
Well, and you can see why, uh, they don't like him.
Uh, because what he wrote about was not the, uh, Sunni insurgency.
What he wrote about was the American/Iranian installed, uh, barter core, uh, the wolf brigades and barter brigades of the Supreme Islamic council, working with the Dawa party, Nouriel Maliki's party there.
Yeah.
It's a, you know, I did press TV and I mentioned the barter brigade and all the torture and whatever, and somehow that one got, that part of it got cut out, even though I don't think I explicitly mentioned Iran or anything.
We don't talk about the Supreme Islamic council that way on press TV, Scott.
Right.
Oh boy.
But, uh, wow.
So yeah.
And now they're accusing him of what being CIA.
I think just being a spy, you know, I don't, I think CIA, I think that's been thrown out there, but I, it's the, the, the, the charges against him are espionage and, uh, yeah, it's, it doesn't look good.
You know, they let his, his fiance go a few months ago cause she was, she had cancer, uh, but, and she was, is being tried in absentia now and she didn't show up obviously her court date.
So they postponed it for a few more months.
So yeah, it's been going on almost, uh, two years now.
It'll be two years in July.
Insane.
And now, uh, now he hasn't claimed journalism, right?
He's claimed hiking.
Yeah.
I mean, basically, I mean, this is what, this is my gut on this one.
And I did write about this and antiwar.com for a blog post.
And I got some commenters were kind of angry with me.
Like somehow, you know, I was, uh, I, you know, it is funny because they, they, they, they felt like these guys deserve that they were hiking or it's something sounded weird about it, but it just, it just sounds like these are some, you know, they're, they're sort of like liberal hiking hippies who really love the landscape.
They really want to know Muslim culture better.
They found some groovy areas.
I guess they are in Northern Iraq and they stumbled right onto the border.
And from what Shane has said is that an Iranian soldier said, come here.
And they said, what?
And they said, do you realize you're on Iraq?
That's or you're in Iran.
That's Iraq.
And he pointed to where he, they just had been.
So they're claiming that they had been sort of blurred over the border and then captured that they were just hiking and they just kind of wandered in.
And that's, that's where it stands now.
Um, they weren't doing a story or anything.
They were, there's some, some scenic, some scenic, uh, places there that they were visiting, like a waterfall or something.
I don't know.
Has there been any journalism that says maybe they really were spying?
I haven't heard anything like that.
Yeah.
I guess I haven't either.
Yeah.
I mean, it seems like, um, they don't seem to fit, you know, a typical cover story maybe, or something.
I don't know, not typical, but a plausible cover story for spying.
But also it sounds like the kind of thing that somebody would do also.
And I guess, uh, you know, if they're made friends with, they must've made friends with somebody in Kurdistan to go up there, huh?
Yeah, exactly.
And it, you know, it sounded like, okay, these kids seem, I always call them kids, but I mean, they seem very idealistic.
I mean, obviously Shane has his point of view.
I mean, he did this whole story about how, you know, we have created this sort of, um, uh, special forces in Iraq to look just like U.S. special forces.
He made the point that we've also done this in South America.
So he has a point of view that about American intervention.
Uh, they had gone, each of these three people that were, that were, uh, captured have been doing some sort of outreach in Muslim countries and learning Arabic.
And, you know, it just seems like they're not, they don't seem like the type of people that would get like, um, sucked into some CIA spying scheme at all.
They're, they're, they're very, um, sort of, uh, sensitive.
Yeah, well, I'll tell you that piece in the nation doesn't seem like the kind of thing a CIA agent would write.
Maybe a former CIA agent, but not a current one.
Well, and if you read the article too, um, which I, you know, fully, uh, you know, um, endorsed it, you know, it sounds like it was kind of a coup for Shane to get inside the military to interview, uh, these commanders that were training these Iraqi special forces in the first place.
Because, you know, um, it's sort of like the Hastings thing.
They, they brought in a guy, they, you know, they were very candid about what they were doing.
And then he writes this spectacular piece for the nation with all of their candid quotes about how, yeah, we're training these guys.
They walk like us, they talk like us, they shoot like us.
You know, and it, it kind of made these generals or commander that in, you know, the Lieutenant commander, uh, look kind of swaggering and not, and not a very good light.
And so it's kind of, it was kind of a coup for him to get in there and do this interview and get the word out.
Cause I haven't heard anything about it since you Google these special forces.
It's really hard to find much more, any additional information since Shane's story about who they are, what they are, how they operate.
Except for recently when we see these quote unquote, you know, uh, guys in black and tracks that shoes rolling up in SUVs and yanking journalists and protesters off the street during the recent protesters protest.
And you get a sense, okay.
Yeah.
Maliki's private army.
Maliki's private army.
And, and it all goes back to us, this swaggering commander saying, they look like us, they act like us, they shoot like us.
You know, well now back to Shane Bauer for a second here, what's Hillary Clinton doing for him?
You know, it sounds like that there is an active effort and, and, and by the, by the state department, I don't want to say they're doing nothing.
And then you have the moms, the mothers of, of Shane and the other guy, fatale, uh, who have been very actively lobbying.
And, um, I mean, they've made a full-time job and they all live together and they travel and, you know, um, raise money.
So, I mean, I, I don't think it's been ignored, but how, how much effort?
I don't know, you know, in comparison to say maybe other, uh, you know, other detentions that have happened in Iran over the years.
I'm not sure.
Yeah.
Well, this Justin on, uh, Andrew Mitchell Greenspan's show, uh, the Israeli foreign minister says the lesson of Libya is to get tough with Iran.
So maybe, maybe like, uh, you know, the down pilot, Scott Speicher, they'll have a regime change in Iran just to go rescue Shane Bauer.
It would be great.
Well, I mean, the whole thing about they're making nuclear weapons never panned out.
They gotta have some reason, you know, they fought a war in Iraq for Iran.
It's hard to blame what's happened there on them, you know?
So, uh, maybe they could use a new excuse.
Exactly.
Well, I was, it was interesting when I was at, uh, the CPAC, you know, the big word was, you know, uh, Iran, you know, we need to get tougher on Iran and American people know this and they produce polls to say that people who have no problem with, you know, getting tough with Iran.
I'm thinking, okay, so look for that in the upcoming presidential campaign.
Yeah.
Well, thank goodness.
We're going to have Ron Paul up there.
He read Gordon Prather.
He knows the deal.
All right.
It's Kelly B.
Vallejo, Iraqi protest, make Washington squirm, antiwar.com.
Thanks, Kelly.
Thank you.