All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm very happy to welcome Hillary Mann Leverett back to the show.
She teaches foreign policy at the American university in Washington, DC.
Uh, formerly was a career state department official and, uh, twice worked on the national security council for Bill Clinton and for George W.
Bush.
And she and her now husband, Flint Leverett, uh, both resigned over the, uh, Bush junior, the first Bush junior administration's, uh, handling of Iran policy, and they keep a excellent blog.
If you're interested in, uh, Iran topics at all, I couldn't recommend it more highly it's the race for Iran at race for Ron.com.
And this morning, uh, they have one titled misrepresenting the Iran Al Qaeda connection.
Thank you.
Uh, welcome to the show, Hillary.
How are you?
Good.
Thank you very much for having you back.
Well, I really appreciate you joining us today.
And this is a very important article.
You know, I was trying to get ahold of Michael Shoyer.
I couldn't get him on, but, uh, I saw him say on TV that this guy, um, Al Adel, uh, Seif Al Adel, uh, really is an Al Qaeda guy or something.
And Bill O'Reilly tried to get him to misrepresent the Iran Al Qaeda connection.
And Michael Shoyer said, Oh no, this guy was one of the ones that the Iranians were trying to hand over to the United States in exchange for members of the Mujahideen Al-Khalq that the Americans were keeping in Iraq.
And that the Americans refused to trade them in.
Bill didn't like that, but it was a heck of an assertion from, uh, the former chief of the CIA's Bin Laden unit there on Fox news.
Can you please elaborate about who this guy is and what's, what are the real circumstances of, uh, any Iranian offer to give him up to us?
Yeah, you know, it's quite extraordinary.
And if it's eerily reminiscent of the lead up to the invasion of Iraq back into, you know, the lead up in 2002 and the actual invasion in 2003, where there were these kind of three issue areas that official Washington was trying to promote with little evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that have had ties to Al Qaeda.
And of course it's a horrific human rights situation.
These are the precise three elements that are also that official Washington is trying to, to paint a picture of Iran having today, uh, now in 2011.
And they've been trying, I think for the past few years to do that.
On the one piece of this, um, of the trifecta of concerns that Washington has put on the table about Iran is Al Qaeda.
And this one is, is, is deeply, deeply misleading, at least for Iraq.
The people who are trying to peddle the story of Iraqi connections to Al Qaeda, at least there had been no track record that many people could put forward to say, you know, you've been wrong on this before and what were the official dealings with Iraq to prove that there was, uh, that that relationship with Al Qaeda was, was non-existent.
At least they didn't have that with Iran.
We have that.
We have a record.
We had official talks.
The U S government had official talks with the Iranian government from 2001 to 2003.
And that's because in the wake of nine 11, we were able to work with the Iranians over Afghanistan.
And the Iranians were deeply concerned about Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
Al Qaeda had killed several of their diplomats at their consulate in Mazar Sharif had persecuted and killed many Shia inside Afghanistan.
Of course, Iran is a, is a Shia country.
And Al Qaeda is predominantly, um, a very fundamentalist Sunni organization.
Al Qaeda had gone after these Iranian diplomats in Afghanistan.
Al Qaeda had gone after Shia in Afghanistan and the Iranians were concerned that even though thousands of Al Qaeda and Taliban were fleeing Afghanistan for Pakistan, at least over 200, probably around 300 had tried to flee Afghanistan through Iran through the poorest border between Afghanistan, Iran, and to essentially their lawless in their lawless Sunni province of Balochistan, the Iranians were very concerned and they asked for, um, our assistance in working through the UN to have some sort of neutral mechanism that could help them deal with these people that were fleeing the country, they presented the United Nations with official documentation of Al Qaeda suspects that they had, um, who had tried to enter Iran and what the, um, and what Iran had done with them.
They provided the passport pages, the front picture with the person's picture and biographical information.
They provided the copies of those pages of over 200 suspected Al Qaeda operatives to the United Nations to be passed on to us in Washington to show what they, who they had picked up, what their concerns were and what the disposition was, whether the person was being held inside Iran or whether the person had been deported to their country of origin.
Now, as the Iranians explained it to us, they deported the vast majority of the Al Qaeda suspects they had to their countries of origin, including Afghanistan, um, and including Saudi Arabia and some other places.
The two groups of people that they were having a problem with, which they flagged us clearly and asked for our help with clearly were, um, Al Qaeda suspects, uh, of Egyptian origin and members of the Bin Laden family.
Because Iran just did not and does not have diplomatic relations with Egypt.
It was very difficult for Iran to come to any kind of agreement with Egypt to accept back Egyptian Al Qaeda suspects.
And Egypt wasn't interested in doing so anyway, they didn't want to fuel their own problems.
So on the list of Egyptians that the Iranians couldn't do anything with other than keep them detained in Iran was Saif al-Addo, who we had known in the U.S. government had thought, had suspected deeply to be a very dangerous, seasoned Al Qaeda operative with significant Egyptian military training.
He had actually achieved the level of Colonel.
So we really had an interest in him not being on the street someplace.
And we had an interest in access to him to see what he knew and to help us in our fight against our fight against Al Qaeda.
Just to make this point, uh, really specific here, you're telling me that at the time on the national security council, you guys were talking about this guy.
Yes, he was on a, he was, and he was on a list that we wanted.
Um, eventually we put, we put, we put together a list of the remaining Al Qaeda operatives that we thought were in Iran.
So out of the more than 200 that the Iranians, uh, had documentation themselves for having apprehended and deported or detained.
Um, there were about a handful left that we were concerned about and we wanted them to unconditionally deport them.
But they said to us, look, you know, we've deported or, um, arrested over 200.
The problem that we have remaining is with the Egyptians and with Saudis from the bin Laden family, because Saudi Arabia wouldn't take any of the bin Laden's either, and they wanted us, they wanted our help to come up with some sort of mechanism to dispose of these people in some way.
And I don't mean by that to kill them.
I mean, to get them to some other country or to some other, you know, to some other party.
And in the interim, uh, you know, they would keep them detained.
And so they did, they kept safe a lot of detained because we insisted our comeback to the Iranians was no, you're a terrorist supporting country, terrorist sponsoring country.
You have to now prove your bona fides in the war against terrorism.
You have to prove whether you're with us or against us.
And to prove that you will have to unconditionally deport and deport these people, um, to their country of origin or get them, get them to us somehow.
The Iranians were, you know, wanting to work with us to come up with some mechanism to do that.
But the idea of the Iranians directly, um, deporting, handing someone over to us was a difficult one for them.
And they were asking for our assistance to have some sort of UN or international mechanism that they could hand these remaining people over or through as these negotiations were, were going forward.
And we were down to this last group of people, essentially people of Egyptian origin and, um, and some of the Saudis, the United States unilaterally cut off the talks that we were having, um, with Iran, and this is now may 2003.
And by this point, these people have been basically in jail in Iran for about a year and a half.
We could have had access to them that entire time, but we didn't, we were going back and forth trying to get Iran to unconditionally, um, hand over this last remaining group, even though they had handed, they had deported over 200.
So what happens in 2003, we cut off the dialogue that we were having with the Iranians, the official talks we had with the Iranians, and we designate MEK, the MEK, the Mejahedin Haq, which is also a US designated terrorist organization, but for many, it's also looked at as an Iranian opposition group that could be used at some point down the road to put pressure on and help undermine the Iranian government.
Those people were in Iraq because they had supported Saddam Hussein, fought with Saddam Hussein's military against us, against Iran.
They, we, we had got it.
We had invaded Iraq, of course.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry, Hillary.
I'm going to, I'm going to have to go ahead and interrupt you here.
Uh, music's playing.
We got to go and take this break.
Uh, but, uh, everyone, again, it's a Hillary Mann Leverett, raceforiran.com is the website, uh, former national security council, uh, staffer and, uh, career state department employee.
We're talking about, uh, Iran capturing Al Qaeda, the Mejahedin Haq, the great peace offer 2003 and more.
We'll be back right after this.
Oh, I heard on national public radio.
The Ayatollah's in bed with Osama, even though he's dead.
Zawahiri then, I guess.
All right.
Well, uh, Hillary Mann's on the phone.
Hillary Mann Leverett.
Uh, she is a former national security council, uh, member during the, uh, Bush junior years and, uh, the first part of them.
And, uh, so is her husband as well.
Uh, Flint Leverett, they keep the website raceforiran.com.
And now where we left off, you were just getting into the Mujahedin Al Qaq.
And now, so here's the important part of this, I think in your essay today at raceforiran.com.
Later in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration told the Iranians that the MEK, an Iraqi based Iranian opposition group that the United States had for years identified as a foreign terrorist organization would be targeted as an extension of Saddam's military apparatus.
However, in the immediate aftermath of the invasion, the Pentagon instead granted MEK special protected status.
And then according to many reports, I don't know if you can confirm these or concur with them or what.
Uh, they were used as terrorists blowing up things in Iran there.
And, uh, say for example, 2006, when Larissa Alexandrovna wrote at raw story, the article on Cheney Rumsfeld order us outsourcing special ops intelligence to Iraq terror group intelligence officials say, which you may have read Hillary.
Yes.
I mean, this is really the bottom line is that we, we did tell, you know, I was part of the group of official Americans meeting with the Iranians.
We told the Iranians in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq that the United States government considered the MEK as a designated terrorist organization.
And even more than that, that we viewed the MEK as essentially a wholly owned subsidiary of Saddam Hussein's military in Iraq, because they had fought hand in hand with Saddam Hussein's military for years and years.
We assured the Iranians that they would be on our target list when we invaded Iraq.
Then of course we weren't, but to add, you know, salt to the wound for the Iranians, not only did we not target the MEK, but we gave them this protected person status, which meant that the Iraqi government that was just emerging, of course, at that point, it wasn't sovereign yet, but it was still emerging.
Was it started to have discussions with Iran about repatriating these MEK guys to Iran, not because the Iraqi government, the nascent Iraqi government at the time loved Iran, but they hated the MEK just as much as the Iranians did because the MEK had fought with Saddam Hussein.
The Iranians were of course interested for their own reasons in getting the MEK and they offered all sorts of confessions to their normal legal procedures to take the MEK in.
One of them, which was extraordinarily significant in my view, was that they, they offered to have the MEK, an exchange for the MEK cadres to come into Iran that would be monitored by the international committee of the Red Cross, the ICRC.
That would have been an incredibly valuable precedent for anybody who cares about human rights anywhere, because one of the great things the ICRC does is when they monitor the treatment of prisoners, they're in the prisons, which has a corresponding effect to how people are treated in the prison.
Not just the people that they're monitoring, but everybody in the prison.
But be that as it may, the Bush administration decided it didn't want to trade.
It didn't want to give up the MEK, even though the MEK had American blood on its hand.
They wanted to hold the MEK just as you, as you indicated for future operations to undermine the Iranian government, but even more glaringly astounding in my view was they wanted to hold the MEK, not just to undermine the Iranian government, but they wanted to hold the MEK cadres, despite the fact that Iran was willing to trade them for these remaining Al-Qaeda operatives they had detained for Al-Qaeda people as vicious as someone like Saif al-Adil and as anti-American as someone like Saif al-Adil.
The Bush administration thought much better to have a group like the MEK there just in case we need them or not even just in case, but as part of our plan to undermine the Iranian government as we go forward in the next few years, rather than get access to, to some important people in Al-Qaeda.
The, you know, the funny thing is that the Iranians are, I think they have acted particularly over the past decade, but I would even argue longer, but in many ways they are, they act in some very rational ways in terms of protecting and promoting their own national interest.
We may not agree with everything they decide to do, but they act in a very, a very rational way for their foreign policy.
And so when somebody else came to them to try to get a swap for, for Saif al-Adil, they did it.
And that was Al-Qaeda.
Al-Qaeda took one of their diplomats, kidnapped one of their diplomats in Pakistan a couple of years ago and said to Iran, if you want him back, you'll have to trade.
And the Iranians traded him.
And so now Saif al-Adil is out and, you know, is out and free to do whatever he wants against the United States.
Now, the really, I think, a glaringly bad thing that NPR and some other mainstream media outlets have done is they're portraying what Iran did as somehow collaborating with Saif al-Adil or collaborating with Al-Qaeda to keep them safe in Iran, where nothing is further from the truth.
The Iranians didn't want these guys in Iran.
They tried to do, they tried to work with us to get these guys out of Iran.
They want, they were willing to trade them for, for terrorists, anti-Iranian terrorists.
We weren't interested.
It was our government, the U.S. government, that put a priority on this fanciful idea of regime change in Iran over getting access to, to real Al-Qaeda, you know, potentially dangerous real Al-Qaeda operative.
Well, that's a very important point.
And I urge people to go to raceforiran.com and look at this article, misrepresenting the Iran Al-Qaeda connection.
And it begins with a couple of quotes, extensive quotes from the NPR report.
And it really is amazing the spin just by omission and the way they make it sound like basically the Ayatollah has been harboring these guys, even where they admitted he was detained there.
They don't ever talk any more about that.
They make it sound like they're keeping Al-Qaeda as pets in their palaces or something.
Yeah, I mean, the, and the articles have this idea that the Iranians have nefariously kept Al-Qaeda operatives alive.
Like how dare they not just kill them all?
It's really quite, it's really quite a story.
And unfortunately, I think when you stitch together these, these pieces trying to portray Iran collaborating with Al-Qaeda, Iran pursuing nuclear weapons, which is also without any evidence and foundation, and then all of these, you know, all of, um, I think this myopic view of how Iran deals with its internal situation, you have the same trifecta of concerns, quote unquote concerns from official Washington that we had for Iraq, you know, but for, I think, uh, you know, a few people just trying to, to get the truth out.
We really could be on the war for yet another disastrous invasion.
All right.
Now, uh, one thing real quick here I wanted to throw in was, uh, the, um, propaganda about Iran being behind every bomb that went off in the year 2007 and 2008, I guess two in Iraq, uh, the EFPs, that same line of propaganda has been tried out at least here, there, and the other place about Afghanistan and how look at all the weapons in Afghanistan.
They must be coming from Iran.
And, uh, it's the same kind of argument doesn't ever seem to be, uh, any more proven than the assertions about the EFPs in Iraq.
But I wonder, you know, if you think that that's a very important part of the narrative about Iran, they just get to transfer over to the other war on the other side of Persia, right?
Yeah.
I mean, you've, you've certainly seen this, this narrative without any evidence, uh, any foundation in Iraq, in Afghanistan.
I think that, um, I hope that we may see, um, potentially a little bit less of that argument going forward.
If the president stays true to his commitment to try to draw down troops in Afghanistan.
That's what happened in Iraq.
Otherwise this would have been an incredibly pernicious narrative in Iraq.
If we had maintained troop levels there, because even though there was no evidence that the Iranians were doing this, if we had maintained very high levels of troops, there would have been particularly a Sunni based, Al-Qaeda based, um, backlash against those troops.
Cause that's where the vast majority of the bombs were coming from more from them, not from the Shia, not from any of the groups that Iran has contacts with.
Um, if, if there hadn't been a drawdown in us troops, we would have continued, I think, to see the dramatic bombing against us troops, and it would have been continued to be blamed on Iran, but for, I think we're going to find that out if Obama doesn't get us out at the end of this year, it's going to be Muqtada al-Sadr and his guys we have to fight next, which you think that's still, uh, much of a problem.
You think they're gonna, uh, I mean, McClatchy says Hillary, uh, Clinton is trying to build, not you, but the other one, uh, Hillary Clinton is trying to build her own private army of mercenaries under the state department command there, uh, to the tens of thousands anyway, do you think that's going to stick or do you think they're going to go ahead and, I mean, from here, it doesn't look like Sadr's bluffing.
I don't know.
What do you think?
Yeah.
You know, the one thing that we know that we now know clearly with, with a lot of documented evidence since nine 11 is the one thing that people don't like in the Middle East, whether they're Shia or Sunni, wherever they're from, they don't like either the real or perceived occupation of foreigners.
They just don't like it.
And there's a backlash.
It will come back to haunt us one way or the other.
If it's not an actual nine 11, it will be something else.
And so we can pretend that by pulling out troops, somehow people are not going to experience or think it's, it's an occupation because they're wearing plain clothes.
That I think that that will really come back to bite us as it has come back to bite us, you know, over the past 10 years.
Yeah, absolutely.
All right.
Well, uh, I'm sorry.
We're all out of time.
Cause I could ask you a thousand more questions.
We'll have to do this again soon.
Well, thank you to such important work.
Thank you very much.
Appreciate it.
Everybody that's Hillary Mann Leverett.
She and her husband, Flint Leverett, right at race for Iran.com.
One of the most important websites in the whole wide world.
If you ask me.
