01/16/13 – Justin Elliott – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest is Justin Elliott, used to write for Salon.com.
Now he's at ProPublica.
That's ProPublica.org.
And this piece is revealed, America's arms sales to Bahrain amid bloody crackdown.
Welcome back to the show, Justin.
How are you doing?
Hey, good to be here.
Well, I'm really happy to have you here.
So tell us about these documents.
First of all, how'd you get them?
Yeah, this is actually a FOIA request, a Freedom of Information Act request I filed about almost exactly a year ago.
That's actually a pretty quick turnaround for the government.
So I got these documents that detail U.S. arms sales to Bahrain in the mail a few weeks ago.
I had kind of forgotten that I'd even filed the request because that's how FOIA usually goes, but that's basically the story.
All right.
And then so what exactly was it a request for?
Just what weapons has America transferred to Bahrain one way or the other?
Well, yeah.
I mean, basically in Bahrain, like a lot of other Arab countries, protest movements or pro-democracy protest movement started in early 2011.
And what followed was a pretty quick government crackdown that included killings of a few dozen protesters at first, and later that number grew by government forces.
So throughout 2011 and early 2012, people started looking at the U.S. relationship with Bahrain.
We have a big Navy base there.
It's our Navy base in the Persian Gulf.
We should, yeah, mention it's a little island nation in the Persian Gulf there.
And that's what's so important about it to the U.S.
Empire.
Exactly.
Right next to Saudi Arabia, they're a longtime ally of the U.S.
And really sort of the center of that alliance is this Navy base.
The Navy's fifth fleet is based there.
And that's seen as particularly strategically important right now because of the tensions with Iran between the U.S. and Iran.
So that's kind of the key backdrop here.
Bahrain, as you said, is a tiny country.
I think it's just the population is in the one or two million range.
And it's ruled by the monarchy.
It's actually the Sunni ruling family.
But it's a Shia-majority population.
That's the source of at least some of the tensions there.
You know what?
Let me ask you about that a little bit.
How much do you know about that?
Because I always heard all along, this is not about Sunni versus Shia.
But it sure does look like everybody with power is Sunni, the al-Khalifa clan and all their cousins and everybody like that.
And then it versus everyone else is the Shiites.
Well, yeah, I mean, what I've been told by people who, you know, activists there and, you know, I know less about this than I do about the U.S. relationship.
What I've been told is that when it started, the protests were really about, you know, expansion of political rights and democracy.
But, you know, as the government really hasn't done much in terms of reforms and everyone on the outside seems to like, including, you know, human rights groups and such say that the government really hasn't reformed in response to these protests and the positions have hardened.
And I think a lot of people think it's now taken on a somewhat more sectarian, you know, Shia versus Sunni tenor.
There hasn't been much violence by the opposition side.
There have been like a handful of bombings that at least have been attributed to them.
There was one in November that killed a few people.
So that's basically I mean, I wouldn't want to comment that much about the internal politics of Bahrain because it's extremely complicated.
And I don't know all that much about it, but that's kind of the backdrop.
Right.
Yeah.
And, you know, like you say, at the beginning, I mean, they just wanted some reforms, right?
It wasn't like in Egypt where they're immediately demanding that the, you know, head autocrat leave power.
They were just saying, hey, you know, what would be nice would be if we had a constitution for our monarchy and maybe if we could get something like a fair trial, a little like sometimes that kind of thing, you know, they were just asking for a little bit of reform.
They're all peacefully protesting in their little pearl roundabout, their version of the Tahrir Square.
And then the government just came in and crushed them.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, that's basically what happened.
And also, you know, somewhat famously, it made big news when the Saudis actually sent in their military to assist the, you know, Bahrain's government, which is close to Saudi Arabia.
And there were images of tanks rolling in.
And then there was kind of the symbolic center of the protest was called Pearl Roundabout.
And there was this kind of modern big sculpture there.
And the government actually tore that down pretty early on in the last in the first month or two after the protest started.
That was kind of a big, a big landmark moment since then.
You know, it hasn't been in the news as much, but there actually has been pretty steady, you know, if you want to call them clashes, protests, you know, followed by riot police getting deployed.
You know, there's been a lot of reports about the security forces use of tear gas.
Where they'll shoot tear gas into people's homes and the villages where these demonstrations are happening.
So it's pretty steady.
It hasn't always been in the news, but this thing isn't over.
Yeah.
You know, I saw you mentioned about the Saudis rolling across the bridge there and all that.
I was thinking of that when I was reading your piece where they're all making these excuses that, hey, listen, all these weapons that we're selling to the monarchy here are for defense from foreign attack, not for attacking the people of Bahrain.
And I just thought, yeah, that's what the Saudi army is for, right?
Is attacking the people of Bahrain.
Right.
I mean, this has been, you know, the Obama administration, by the end of 2011, there were a handful of people in Congress, actually from both parties, Ron Wyden from Oregon, and I think Marco Rubio sent a letter on this, who started to complain about these arms sales.
In particular, the administration had announced, I think, like a $50 million package of a bunch of various military equipment.
And that stirred up some opposition in Congress.
And in response to that, the administration said that they were putting at least that one sale on hold.
And then they also started saying, kind of around the beginning of 2012, that they were continuing to sell arms, but that they didn't include things that could be used for crowd control.
Right.
But how could a helicopter be used against a crowd, right?
Right.
I mean, like a lot of people.
I mean, the line that the administration has said, starting around the very beginning of 2012 through the present, through my asking them for comment on the story, is that we are continuing to sell them arms, but it's only for external defense and counterterrorism, nothing that could be used against protesters or crowd control.
But if you look at the documents that the Pentagon released to me, they're listing at least categories of weapons that include things like small arms ammunition, helicopters, Black Hawk and Cobra helicopters.
And we know that there were reports at the beginning of 2011 that the security forces had used helicopters to fire on protesters.
You know, we didn't have tons of detail about that.
And it's been hard to investigate these things, probably because journalists haven't been let in in large numbers.
But so, you know, I had some people look at this list and they said, look, I mean, there's the real gray area here about what can be used against protesters or not.
And some people think helicopters and certainly and combat vehicles and small arms ammunition certainly could be used against protesters.
Right.
Absolutely.
And I think you say in here it wasn't just a Black Hawk, but it was they used the Cobra against them.
Yeah, there was there was a report of that early on.
And again, like it was it's hard to get it's hard to go back and check this stuff.
You know, there was an investigation done by a commission, but it was it was very sort of tied to to the government there.
So I don't think that was like really the fullest investigation.
So basically, we're just going off sort of contemporaneous reports.
There was actually an interesting New York Times story early on in 2011 when when one of these incidents, when helicopters were reportedly firing on people from above happened, where they actually quoted an unnamed executive from Bell Helicopter saying that which is a U.S. company saying that they thought the helicopters and some videos that came out were American made.
So so there were certainly reports of that.
And then, you know, as I mentioned, the documents that I got show that throughout 2011, there were arms sales going forward.
Not totally clear what was what was or was not delivered, but there were arms sales sort of going through the process at the very least.
That included things related to helicopters, either parts or maintenance or new helicopters.
It's not really clear.
And then I think it was Admiral Mullen was on Meet the Press and David Gregory asked him, well, how come we're supporting the rebellion in Libya, but we're not supporting the rebellion in Bahrain?
What's the difference?
And he said, well, Bahrain's our ally.
Right.
I mean, that's, you know, the administration has said they're pretty straightforward about it.
I mean, they say, you know, we have to keep U.S. strategic interests in mind when making these decisions.
If you look at, you know, there's some people who think that we shouldn't be selling Bahrain arms at all.
But then there's also kind of a middle position, which if you talk to people on the Hill, like Senator Wyden and a few others, they're not even coming out and saying the U.S. shouldn't be selling arms to Bahrain.
They just want the administration to use the arms sales for leverage to pressure the ruling family there to make reforms.
And what the people in Congress say, like Senator Wyden, is that we aren't even doing that.
We basically are just continuing the sales and nothing.
We're not getting anything in return for it in terms of reforms.
I mean, what we are getting, you know, is we still have our military installation there.
But, you know, there's not really any evidence that for in the last two years that the Obama administration has really been able to extract any kind of real reform or change from the government there.
Yeah, they're not so much interested in that.
Now, how much of this is so-called missile defense systems?
You know, it's not clear.
There's actually there's a few items on this document that were partially redacted, and it'll say the phrase like missile system.
And then the word in front of that will be or in a couple of cases, there was a redaction in front of that.
So you don't know what type of missile system and that, you know, that could be a wide, wide range of things.
So the answer is we don't really know.
And another thing that's kind of interesting about, you know, I occasionally write about arms sales, but somebody who's a specialist in this made the point to me that the thing that I'm looking at that we published with my story, this Pentagon document that lists the arms sales, this doesn't even include classified arms sales.
And people who follow arms sales believe that there is a whole other pot of arms sales that aren't reported publicly and, you know, obviously wouldn't be released under FOIA.
So across the board or specifically in regards to Bahrain that they've heard of?
Across across the board, across the board.
So that's always something worth keeping in mind.
This is just what this is.
This is the public stuff, even the public stuff they won't tell you that much about.
Right.
And then, well, let's see.
So did I give you a chance to really describe kind of go down the list of what sort of stuff we're talking about other than the particular, you know, small arm stuff that could be used against protesters or more?
Yeah, no, I mean, there's there's there's a long list of items.
I mean, you know, this is another thing that might be worth noting is that this is not a new relationship.
I mean, the State Department says that since I believe the year 2000, we've sold a little bit over one billion dollars worth of arms to Bahrain.
And this is a very small military, a very small country we're talking about.
So we're you know, this is an ongoing relationship that that these documents show has been unbroken since since the crackdown started.
So I think that's really that's really the news here.
Right.
Yeah.
And, you know, again, this is a pretty horrible police state, isn't it?
Or is it you know, they torture people sometimes if they're protesters, but otherwise everybody's happy or what?
I mean, come on.
No, I mean, I don't think I don't I mean, I don't think otherwise everyone's happy.
I mean, there's you know, there are definitely reports of torture of protesters, you know, actually earlier this month they had they had charged and convicted a bunch of the protest leaders with crimes like, you know, trying to overthrow the state and sentenced them to some pretty stiff terms.
I think, I mean, in range, but up to several decades and the highest court there denied their appeals earlier this month.
So that was like a big blow, I think, to a lot of people.
I mean, a lot of people on the protest side, obviously, but also it just doesn't.
And, you know, mainstream human rights organizations like Amnesty and Human Rights Watch put out reports in the last couple of months kind of like reviewing what's going on and what has happened and whether the government has, you know, fulfilled its promises to reform and basically found universally that that there had been no improvement in terms of rights or anything like that.
So it seems like it's a real it's it's it's really just status quo at this point.
And there's no sign that that's changing.
I mean, as I said, there's still very frequent demonstrations and kind of somewhat violent responses to those demonstrations.
So that seems to be kind of what we're stuck in right now.
All right.
And now I'm sorry, I haven't had a chance to read this one, but it sure does have an interesting headline here at ProPublica.org, how a government report spread a questionable claim about Iran.
A study leaked to the media says Iran has 30,000 intelligence operatives.
So what do you say about that?
Can you fill us in here?
Yeah, sure.
So basically, there was a there was a story.
I guess this first broke on a conservative website called the Washington Free Beacon.
And then there was a CNN report about it and then spread a bunch of other places, all attributed to this government report that is looking at Iran's intelligence agency, the Ministry of Intelligence.
And basically, this is a this is a report put out by something called the Federal Research Service, which is like an arm of the Library of Congress that other government agencies can can pay to do research on anything they want.
And the Federal Research Service will then go, well, what they're supposed to do is use the resources of the Library of Congress to look into the topic that they've been paid to look into.
So somebody leaked this report by the Federal Research Service on Iran to this conservative news website, the Washington Free Beacon.
And the big headline that came out of it was that that Iran's intelligence ministry has 30,000 operatives.
Now, some Iran, some people who, you know, are Iran policy experts were looking at this report, one of them, I quote, a guy named Gary Sick, and noticing that it was using some weird sources, it seemed like random blogs, and that there were some flat out errors like it was this this report claims that Iran's constitution lays out the functions of the intelligence ministry.
But it turns out, if you actually look at Iran's constitution, it doesn't mention the intelligence ministry at all, the intelligence ministry was created later under some law.
So this report seems to be seems to have errors.
And so I started looking at it and looking specifically at this 30,000 number.
And basically, the 30,000 number, there's a footnote and it's sourced to basically a random website, which then is just excerpting something else.
And there's kind of a long trail of sourcing that I go through in my piece.
And it goes back to a Christian Science Monitor article from five years ago, 2008.
And they're quoting some terrorism expert.
And I talked to the expert.
He said he couldn't even remember giving them the number.
It seems too high.
So basically, no one knows where this number came from.
And despite that fact, it's been reported as some kind of new U.S. government finding about Iran's intelligence agency having 30,000 employees.
And that's supposed to be a large number.
Well, I'm afraid to even bring it up, because think of all the conservatives hiding under their beds now, and they're not going to come out until after dinnertime.
Right, right.
I mean, it's an example, I think, of how, you know, if people, if journalists and other and read and, you know, and consumers of journalism aren't careful about looking at where things are sourced from, you know, something that's a quote unquote fact, and once it gets into the kind of stream, people, it often will get picked up and repeated and repeated until everyone just believes it's true.
In this case, no one seems to know where this came from.
And in addition, I talked to a lot of I talked to a bunch of Iran, you know, policy specialists who seem who seem like they would know about how big the intelligence ministry was.
And they all said that there wasn't really good information about it and they didn't really know.
Some people thought the 30,000 was too high.
But basically, you know, somewhat unsurprisingly, it's like an intelligence agency.
They don't like publish on their website how, you know, information about who their employees are.
So no one really seems to know.
And this government report seems to be not something that that you should trust, at least without looking into whatever their claims are.
Yeah.
You know, I don't even know how big of an exaggeration that should represent or whatever.
But I guess it makes up for the fact that they don't have an army and they don't have a Navy and they don't have an Air Force and they don't have nothing except some F-14s that America sold them back when their dictator belonged to us.
Right.
They don't even work because we haven't sold them any spare parts in 35 years.
Yeah.
I mean, they better have a big spy service, you know.
Right.
I mean, like, I think it's clear, you know, they have a I mean, as I understand it, this Ministry of Intelligence does kind of domestic domestic intelligence as well as as well as some foreign intelligence.
So, I mean, I'm sure I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if it's fairly large.
But but I mean, my point just what and I'm no expert on Iranian intelligence, but I know the sourcing here.
I mean, my point is just that when you see on CNN a segment that says that that there's a new U.S. government report that finds that Iran's intelligence agency is 30,000 people that really that U.S. government report experts say really doesn't have credibility.
And second of all, the 30,000 number itself is just sourced to a random website, which if you then follow it back, but no, it seems that the sourcing just kind of falls off five years ago.
So it's it's definitely not anything new.
It's not any kind of actual U.S. government intelligence finding or anything like that seems to be just somebody somebody at the Library of Congress searching for things on the Internet and then putting it in a report that somehow got leaked to the press.
Right.
Well, you know, we can make a game out of that.
Right.
If people like to drink or smoke or whatever it is, you take one each time you hear that and then you just yell out loud.
Justin Elliott debunked that back in January 2013.
Right.
If anyone sees that around, you know, send me an email.
Justin at ProPublica dot org.
I'm always interested in seeing how far these things can go.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, great work as always.
I appreciate it, Justin.
Yeah, thanks a lot.
Everybody.
That's Justin Elliott.
He's at ProPublica dot org.
Revealed America's arms sales to Bahrain amid bloody crackdown and how a government report spread a questionable claim about Iran.
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