All right, my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio, it's Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas.
We're streaming live worldwide on the internet, ChaosRadioAustin.org and Antiwar.com slash radio and introducing our guest today, it's Joe Lauria.
He writes for the Sunday Times, the Boston Globe, Bloomberg News, the Huffington Post and he's the co-author of the new book, A Political Odyssey, The Rise of American Militarism and One Man's Fight to Stop It with former Senator Mike Gravel.
Very interesting.
Welcome to the show, Joe.
Thank you, Scott.
Happy.
It's good to have you here.
You came to my attention early this year when this three part, I guess it turned into a four part series in the London Times came out about at least part of the case of Sabel Edmonds, the former FBI translator turned whistleblower, and she's raised allegations kind of in all different directions, drug smuggling and all kinds of different corruption, prior knowledge of impending attacks before 9-11, etc.
And yet you guys focused really on the nuclear black market angle of her story.
So I guess if we could start here, Joe, perhaps you could just share with the audience a bit of the background of who Sabel is and her case, why she's a credible witness, and then what you guys began to find when you started looking into verifying her story.
Sure.
Sabel Edmonds is a Turkish and Farsi speaker who was hired by the FBI shortly after 9-11, I think it was September 20, 2001, when there was suddenly a need to listen to a backlog of tapes that had been gathered by the FBI and wiretaps of the principal at the Turkish embassy in Washington, traffic in and out of that, that had gone on from 1995 until 2001.
So Sabel went over six years of tapes over a period of six months.
And she started to make complaints about various things going on at the FBI.
And she caused a lot of problems there because she was complaining about particularly one of her co-workers who she found worked also was a member of the American Turkish Council, which Sabel began to hear on these tapes was a crucial element in this nuclear procurement ring that she heard on the tapes.
Now, as you know, she was fired in March of 2002.
She tried to sue to get her job back.
This was all stopped and Ashcroft, who was the attorney general at the time, put a state secret privilege gag order on her.
After Sabel had gone to Senator Grassley and Representative Waxman, they had listened to her several times.
They took down her information.
They promised hearings if the Democrats took over the House, which they did in 2006.
And that seemed to be progressing until Ashcroft put this gag order on and the congressmen removed information from their website that Sabel had given them.
And they never spoke about this again, even though we know this is related to Gravel's case, too, if we could talk about that later.
No congressman can be gagged by Congress on the article 6 of the Constitution.
They can't be questioned about anything they say in a legislative act on the House floor, Senate floor, anywhere where there's a legislative act.
So the congressmen, they wimped out basically, Waxman and Grassley.
Sabel lost her case and she was gagged.
She got ACLU to be her attorney, and they claimed that she was the most, is the most gagged person in the history of the United States.
So she pretty much held to that gag until December of last year, when she put out on her website and through various other people that she knew on the web, she was willing to talk now to the media and tell them everything that she knew.
And because we had, the press did not know what the real essence of what she had learned in listening to these tapes, aside from some small complaints about the irregularities at the FBI in Washington office where she worked, nobody in the US media took her up on that offer, which is interesting and I think I'd like to get into later.
But the Sunday Times, we contacted her, one of my colleagues, Chris Gorley in London in December, and Sabel eventually called back and we began discussing with her the story.
And then we ran, as you said, three stories about Sabel and a fourth one on a related issue.
And what Sabel revealed to us, and has been revealing little by little over the last, since January, is that she had heard that there was a nuclear procurement ring operating inside the United States to procure nuclear designs and parts for the AQ Khan network.
And it was done not through Pakistani intelligence directly, but through the Turkish embassy, Turkish businessmen, who got the information and gave it to Turkish military attachés who then turned it over to the ISI and from there went on to the nuclear black market.
To procure these parts and designs, high government US officials helped facilitate Turkish-Israeli PhD students to get into nuclear facilities in the US.
They worked with the RAND Corporation as well, some moles within RAND, to help get this information.
There was at least one American company, Giza Technologies, that was helping with parts.
Probably were others.
And this went on from 1995 at least, until 2002, and it could still be going on, when this operation was shut down by the Department of Defense and the State Department.
Now Sabel tells us that high government officials inside those two departments, the Defense and State, were involved in this ring.
She's named them on her website, or at least she has not named them.
She has photographs of people.
Other bloggers have named them.
We have not named them for legal reasons.
We have not been able to completely confirm their involvement, so I won't be able to speak about who they are.
But we believe Sabel, obviously, and our job has been to corroborate what she has told us.
We've gotten lots of corroboration on the edges, but the main details and some of the hard facts have been difficult to get, for the main reason is that people who are in the know could go to jail for speaking about it, as Sabel can, and she has risked that going to jail.
I know you've had Daniel Ellsberg on your show, and he's talked about Sabel, and Daniel has written the foreword to the book I did with Gravel as well.
And there aren't many Sabel Edmonds around, there aren't many Daniel Ellsbergs around, who will risk their careers and perhaps Sabel imprisonment to speak about these things.
So what Sabel has given us is quite a fascinating and disturbing picture of what's going on.
And what I did last month, in June, rather, was to find the people immediately above her in the FBI who had worked with her on this case, and I spoke with three of them at length, and they have just by virtue of them speaking to me corroborated in general terms that this story is true.
They cannot and would not go into the details, unfortunately, because that could land them in a lot of trouble, including imprisonment, since this has been completely classified.
These were FBI agents you talked to?
Yes.
And you said three different ones?
Yes.
One lives in Maryland, another one lived in Virginia.
When I went out to see him, I learned that he'd moved out west somewhere.
He, we know, from Sabel, was very angry when they shut down this investigation.
You know, the FBI gets a bum rap a lot of times, and there's a lot to be answered for in this case, but we have to understand that they're a good agent, good in the sense of wanting to do their job, which is to investigate crimes.
And the political appointees at the top, when they get the pressure from larger forces, like from the White House or the State Department or Defense Department, are stopped.
And they're very angry, a lot of these guys, that they couldn't pursue this no matter where it led.
And this is what we saw in the case with Sabel.
We saw it in this case with the tinners in Switzerland, where suddenly the U.S. put pressure on the prosecutor, and that prosecution has been dropped and evidence destroyed.
And in the fourth story in our series about Peter Griffin, a very close associate of A.Q.
Khan since the 70s, who had an investigation going on with evidence gathered by the British Customs Department, and that was squashed as well, and without explanation.
Yes, we've got plenty of time here.
So I'm going to put off the tenors and Peter Griffin stuff for a little while here, and go back over a few things that you've already mentioned.
First of all, I understand British libel law and all that kind of thing, but you're not going to have to hang up on me if I say the names of the people she's talking about.
No, I won't.
I'm not going to confirm what you're saying, though.
You can say whatever you want.
And there is a whole list of her rogues gallery and so forth there at JusticeCitizen.com, but particularly when we're talking about the State Department, the accusations, and this is obviously the guy that your article centered around is Mark Grossman, and then she says Pearl and Fyfe at the Defense Department, right?
Well, I can't comment on the names.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, anyway, so anybody can Google that and look it right up.
Okay.
Secondly, as far as her credibility goes, because there is a state secrets privilege, and she has only been able to say so much, you said you've talked to these three FBI agents just last June, or just a couple months ago in June, who confirmed some of this story for you.
Obviously, you had other sources besides Sabel for the series in the Sunday Times.
I wonder just if you can elaborate on that, maybe the Inspector General's report, statements of various senators, that kind of thing, so that people understand that when you're talking about, you know, we're talking about American moles and Turkish moles and Pakistani moles in America's nuclear program.
This is some pretty kind of out there sort of stuff, so I want people to understand that what they're hearing is not some comic book.
This is actually real.
Well, I mean, a lot of, you know, journalism is a credibility game.
So we have to believe, first of all, our sources.
And we do believe Sabel.
The issue then becomes corroborating what she says, because we need facts.
You can't just go on to belief of whether we believe so or not.
And then the people we speak to, we have to be able to believe them.
And as I pointed out, there are not that many people who are aware of what's going on.
There are the participants, who are never going to speak, of course, in the ring.
And there are the investigators in the FBI and in the CIA.
I didn't bring that up.
We could talk about the Valerie Plam connection, what we've uncovered in this story, too.
And then there are the investigators, and then there are analysts like Philip DeGirali, the former CIA station chief in Istanbul, I believe, who knows a lot about Sabel, knows a lot about this case, who can provide, on the record, points of view that allow the reader to understand that this is not a comic book, as you said, that this is very, very possible and totally within reason that this story that Sabel is telling us could happen, that high-level government officials could be involved in facilitating this.
You go back to the IKRICONS network in the 70s, and the Reagan administration, we can go earlier than that to the Carter administration, when they tried to go after Pakistanis to try to stop them from developing a nuclear weapon.
When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, they needed Pakistan to help arrange the payment and the training of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, so they suddenly turned a blind eye to Pakistan's nuclear program, and the Reagan administration almost actively helped them do this, because the Chinese were giving information to Pakistan, and they wanted a Chinese nuclear business for the Westinghouse.
It's obvious that the administration, starting from Carter all the way through, has helped the IKRICON network, at least by either protecting it or even actively helping it.
So this is just another phase of this.
This story is not off the wall.
If it started from the 70s, you could find a direct line.
The Bell just came in and heard what was going on from 95 to at least 2002, possibly still today.
So as I was saying, we have the three types of sources.
There's the Bell, who has gone on the record and at great risk to herself, although I don't think they want to move on her, because that would create the U.S. media attention that our stories have not been able to create.
There are those who are directly involved in the investigation, the FBI and the CIA, and there are the analysts.
So we've got analysts on the record saying things, but we needed really the FBI and the CIA people to corroborate the details of what she's telling us, which we believe.
We believed enough to write it in our stories without a lot of direct corroboration, because we believe that we should put our claims out there.
And those FBI agents that I spoke to at length, and I got into the home of one for an hour and a half, and I spoke several times in front of the home of another one.
The FBI made a formal complaint to the Sunday Times to keep me away from his house.
I mean, why would they do that?
Why was Sabel gagged if it's not what she's saying is true?
But the fact that these FBI agents spoke in general terms to me about her, made claims that she's not crazy, that she was not a fantasist, but they could not go into the details for the reasons I described, makes falls short, perhaps, of where we'd like to be, because we have a lot more stuff that she's given us, but we have not run the stories.
I'm happy that a lot of the bloggers in the U.S. and the foreign press has picked up on these stories.
It's been total silence in the U.S., and there are people eager maybe to see more stories coming on our series, and we're eager to get them out there, but we need some more corroboration on the slew of new details that Sabel's given us, names, states, places, which, again, we believe, but we cannot confirm yet because we can't get sources in the FBI to go on, off the record.
We don't need them on the record.
We just need to know they're giving us what they know, and I believe they know this.
I believe they want to talk.
They would like to.
They're afraid, and it's hard to blame them.
You have to put sometimes, this may sound corny, the good of the country and real national security, not the phony stuff the Bush administration is talking about and all the false fears that cover up various operations just like this, then they cannot go on the record for the reasons that I'm saying.
That's where we are right now in terms of corroboration.
Okay.
Now, this has come up, the tenors you brought up, and there, in talking about the corroboration, the people who kind of shared with you the history of America's relationship with the Pakistani nuclear program.
Please provide me some clarity.
The AQCOM network, well, as you said, they sort of at least turned a blind eye to it in the 1980s because they needed Pakistan's help for the war against the Russians in Afghanistan, that kind of thing.
Does that last all the way through?
Was Cybele overhearing people who were actually part of a secret mission to cooperate with the AQCOM network and she mistakenly thinks they were being criminals when actually perhaps it was just officially sanctioned criminality?
Well, no, we've never seen this, any of what you've told us, as official U.S. policy, but more of high-ranking U.S. officials acting in an individual capacity, sort of in a rogue way.
We don't have any evidence, nor has she provided any evidence, that this has been official U.S. policy.
But we do know that the Turkish and Israeli students getting this information, turning it over to Turkish businessmen who then sold it to, everybody's getting paid along the way here, don't forget, this is about money, including some of the higher-ranking U.S. officials, that they turned it over to ISI.
One of the reasons they used the Turks is because it would not look good for the Pakistan intelligence to be working inside the U.S.
You know, it's interesting, another point that the Bush administration is certainly turning against the ISI for some reason in the last few weeks, but certainly they have worked closely with the CIA through Afghanistan and also inside the U.S. here in getting this information into the hands of the ISI, and AQ Khan worked obviously very closely together.
So once he got this new designs, new parts, new information, it was sold, Iran, Libya, North Korea, perhaps with the help of U.S. government officials.
Now, if this were a sting operation, as we understand, I've heard secondhand that some correspondents in Washington have been told by their intelligence sources, stay away from this Sunday Times series, because this is a big sting going on, and if you publish it, you'll ruin the thing.
Well, I mean, as Dan Ellsberg pointed out to me, and I think he's probably said on your show earlier, if that were the case, well, they did a bad job, because Iran, North Korea, Libya, so-called enemies of the United States got the bomb or got information about the bomb, and so they didn't move early enough to do that.
And if, you know, this is obviously not true.
I don't believe this, that it was a sting.
I think that's not true.
I think that these officials were facilitating this.
There's a sort of an assumption there that if the CIA was working with this AQ Khan network, that it would have to have been in order to try to stop them.
But like you said, they've been helping these guys since the 1970s.
What indicates that they would want to stop them?
Well, who in the FBI?
Like I said, sorry, within the CIA and with the FBI, not every rank-and-file FBI agent or CIA agent is told, okay, we're protecting these guys because we want them to have the weapons to enrich ourselves or for other strategic reasons.
But only top officials who were implicated will put a stop on the investigation.
So we saw Valerie Plam working, investigating, just as the FBI agents I spoke to were investigating this same nuclear ring that Sabel has laid out for all of us.
And when Valerie Plam got too close at the American-Turkish Council, again, a nexus of this operation in the U.S. where she met her husband, Joe Wilson, she was there and this high-ranking government U.S. official, in an anonymous letter that we got through a think tank in Washington, said that this high-ranking, and it names the government official, he alerted a front company, a Turkish front company called White Energy, that was part of the nuclear procurement inside the U.S., to stay away from Brewster Jennings, which was a CIA front company, that this Turkish front company wanted to hire.
Ah, and this is long before Robert Novak said anything about it on TV.
Novak, look, there's two parts of the Valerie Plam thing, we believe.
First part is, this is in August of 2001, that the high-ranking U.S. official told the Turkish company, stay away from Brewster Jennings because they're actually investigating this ring.
Don't have anything to do with them.
That blew the cover of Brewster Jennings, and it happened to be that Valerie Plam was an important agent in, with her cover of Brewster Jennings, that was in the ATC.
So, in effect, it blew Valerie Plam's cover amongst the people she was investigating, not publicly.
Without where Valerie, with Novak, with that, it became public knowledge when he wrote it in his column, and that very much may have been motivated, it seems, by Cheney's office to punish her husband because he tried to reveal that the evidence for the war in Iraq was phony.
But that was a separate angle.
The mainstream press is very, very happy about the Novak story, they think they've got it, and they're not interested in going back to when Valerie's identity was first revealed more seriously than by Robert Novak.
Right.
That's something that is basically not of interest to anyone, I don't think.
You guys reported about it in the London Times, but that's the only place I've ever heard that.
Yeah, well, you know, the FBI was asked in a Freedom of Information Act request to reveal the files of the Bells case.
They claim the files don't exist.
I saw an FBI document which shows that the files do exist.
It could be that they were destroyed, so they could be telling the truth there.
So, obviously, there's a lot of what appears to be cover-up going on, and they shut down investigations.
So you're saying why the CIA, and on one hand, they seem to be working with this network, and on the other hand, they seem to be shutting it down.
So I don't think Valerie Plam was in on wanting this network to succeed.
I think she was trying to do her job, just like the FBI agent I spoke to were trying to do their job, just like the customs officials in Britain were trying to do their job.
And then when they get too close to uncovering official involvement, it's got to be stopped.
Right.
And there's no explanation.
This is what happened.
There's no explanation, and the press doesn't probe it that deeply, unfortunately, in the U.S. in particular.
I mean, it's just horrendous.
I'll tell you, I mean, I have not revealed this.
It's not a big deal, but I went to the Boston Globe, because I've worked seven years for them as a correspondent, mostly at the U.N., and I laid out the story to them.
I wanted some American media attention, and I talked to a correspondent that I've worked with for years at the Washington Bureau, and I could not convince her in an hour to even look into this story, let alone, you know, to buy any of what I was telling her.
Really?
Yep.
They didn't think that there was anything to it, that Sebel, obviously, was not credible without even checking it out.
And I think that this is, you know, having worked for mainstream media since 1990, always as a freelancer, for years as a staffer at Bloomberg, and I fled from that place, is that, you know, these are, these are centrists.
Centrism is the philosophy of the American media, and that essentially backs the status quo when you're a centrist.
And the scheme of objectivity they play is really limited by parameters that you're allowed to ask questions and to investigate in.
And those, in a sense, then you're transmitting these assumptions and reinforcing every day that the U.S. is really a functioning democracy, not even a representative democracy.
And we know, of course, that they're oligarchic interests that buy off Congress, that put the person in the White House they need to put forward, and this gets me into the Booker Crevelle, that gets the defense contract that's served, pump the American people with fear so that we allow our taxpayers money to go and pay for defense outlays that are absolutely unnecessary, and then fight wars that enhance America's power and wealth.
Yep.
And, um...
I'm really interested in that scene, though, the, uh, the, uh, bureau chief who just, in an hour, you can't even get him to be interested.
It wasn't the bureau chief.
It was not the bureau chief.
It was a reporter there.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
But, but still, I just like that.
No, no, no, just talk to the hand.
I'm sorry, I don't want to hear it.
Fingers in the ears.
I don't think that they were capable.
Honestly, they're not capable.
The mindset of the American mainstream press does not allow certain ideas to easily filter through.
The idea that high-level government officials may actually be facilitating this.
I mean, you know, it's entertainment all the time.
The presidential campaign is entertainment, and to actually think that these guys are going to go in there and make changes, whoever wins, when behind this wall of entertainment put forward by news media and the entertainment industry is a murky world of terrorism, of nuclear procurement rings, of CIA, of the FBI working, and this rarely gets breakthrough to the mainstream press.
And the idea that the American officials, look, it's the rotten apple theory, which I, as opposed to the rotten orchard, the American, the mainstream press will always once in a while bring down a government official or a corporate executive who had his hand in the till or did some kind of corruption.
And that's just, look, we're doing our job.
We're defending the American people by doing our job as journalists.
We really are questioning government authority.
Well, that's baloney.
I mean, once in a while you get a guy who falls through, but they rarely look at the entire system being rotten, not just one official here or there being rotten.
And they pat themselves on the back.
And when I say the entire system being rotten, I mean a Congress that's enthralled corporate backers and approving their aggressive foreign policy that enriches themselves.
And does nothing to secure the American people or the interests of most American people.
That is never, that's not even in the discussion in the mainstream press.
So this Boston Globe reporter was unable to conceive easily that a government official could have been involved.
They do have higher standards maybe than the British press.
I've worked for both the British and the American press.
And I find British papers maybe are too quick to go with the story without corroboration.
And the American papers need four or five sources for something that a reporter, even a witness directly sometimes.
So, you know, there are two, I do agree that I didn't ask the Globe to run the story straight away.
I just wanted to start an investigation and I wanted to be part of it, obviously.
And if we didn't find anything that met the Globe standards, I'll be fine.
But they wouldn't even begin to look into it.
Now, why didn't any other papers look into this story?
I mean, Chicago Public Radio has done a series on it.
They interviewed me on that.
They've interviewed Sebel.
There was an attempt there.
But it just doesn't fit in to the mindset of the American reporter.
And they're doing their job.
But it's also a lot of careerism, I think, going, feeling the power of vicarious or being close to government officials, rather than challenging them, wanting to be close to them and part of the official scene.
And of course, we saw the cheerleading for all the military adventures, essentially the contracts that come back to defense contractors.
It's self-censorship.
And if you've got to get a memo from your editor about how to cover the thing, then you're not going to be working there too long.
You just know what you've got to do.
I've worked for them, so I know what I can write and what I can't write.
And this story is just outside the imagination of the American press.
And I don't know how we're going to get it in.
I really appreciate you having me on and Daniel Ellsberg and Sebel several times and Luke Ryland recently to talk about this case, because it needs to be spoken about.
And we need more papers to look into this story.
More pressure put on by the press when the FBI could not do its job anymore because it stopped.
And this is one of the arguments I gave to these agents.
This is the role of journalism to step in and do our own investigation.
Unfortunately, we don't have subpoena power and we are very limited in what we could do to get people to talk to us.
But at least we've got the story out there.
Well, two questions.
First of all, do you think that the Internet is changing that at all?
Is there more pressure on mainstream media to kind of think a little bit more broadly?
And secondly, are there any other major outlets in America that are mainstream enough that it's worth doing the work to publish it for them, but who might be willing to let you write this story?
Well, frankly, right now, second question, since we're still working on the Sunday Times, I'm going to stick with them.
I don't want to write it for anybody else.
I mean, I'm a blogger at the Huffington Post and I could write about it there, but I want to continue to investigate the Sunday Times and I hope we can break it and then other papers will pick it up.
That hasn't happened yet, but we're going to stick with the story right there.
Your first question about the Internet and its role, there's only one thing that will move the mainstream media and that's business, whether it starts to hurt their business.
And it has.
They're terrified of the bloggers and they're terrified of the Internet because they realize that it's taking business away from them.
People are reading them.
Of course, on a basic level, classified ads are going online.
That's really hurting the press.
But in terms of journalism, they're very much aware of that.
They're playing around with having their own reporters do blogs to try to co-opt the thing.
And it's not working very well.
And there's a lot of crap on the Internet, but a large percentage of what bloggers write is absolutely nonsense, opinion without any fact.
They're not trained journalists.
But the fact is, that's very much the way it was at the beginning of the country with the pamphleteers, too.
And a lot of it is anonymous, but there are a lot of important bloggers who are doing better work than mainstream journalists.
They're doing it without pay.
They're doing it because they want it filling in where the press is not doing its job.
And they are feeling that pressure.
And I hope that eventually, as the newspaper business continues to die, they hire millions of dollars.
They pay consultants to find ways of advertising the paper, television to get young people to read the paper.
All this crap where they rather should pay investigative journalists to go out and get stories.
That's what sells newspapers.
That's what always did.
They seem to have forgotten this.
They want just puzzles and horoscopes and comics and whatever they can do to lure people to buy the paper.
And the blogosphere is showing that there are people like Luke and others who are really starting to lead the way.
And they're not professionals in the same sense of the training, but they're filling in where the mainstream press is failing.
We've seen government run amok because of that, as you know, eight years of Bush administration.
Yeah.
Well, one thing that we have going for us on the Internet, too, is the hyperlink.
If we choose, every assertion that we make can be a link to the footnote and the proof of it.
And then in a situation like that, anyone who writes something that does not link to the proof for their assertions is automatically suspect in the marketplace of ideas.
Well, if this is so true, where's all your links?
Although that's a very good point.
I mean, of course, in a printed newspaper, you do.
You're supposed to name your source if you can on the record.
And if not, at least allude to someone whose identity is being withheld.
But on the Internet, yes, you can.
You can.
The links can go on and on.
You can keep investigating the story as much as you want as they keep leading to different links.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry.
Let's get back to this whole nuclear black market thing.
Tell me about this tenor case, I guess, for the audience.
Give the background.
German guys arrested in Switzerland.
Computers destroyed.
Worked for the CIA.
Something like that.
What is the story?
What does it mean?
We have not done a story on the tenors yet.
Just briefly mention them, I think, in the Griffin story.
The tenors were with I believe they met AQ Khan when he was working in Europe in the 70s when he started to steal the designs there.
So they've been very close associates with AQ Khan.
And, you know, as AQ Khan was made, was put under house arrest a couple of years ago, and he's only he's recently started to speak out again.
And what he's saying, by the way, is what what Sappel was saying in a way, which is that he got all this help from European companies and from the US.
And they all knew what he was doing.
So the tenors were after AQ Khan was put on house arrest.
They started to prosecute people related to his procurement network, going back to Griffin in Britain and the tenors in Switzerland.
And this was suddenly shut down.
And the US prosecutor had the files destroyed at the behest of the United States.
And there is now David Albright, I'm trying to remember, because I interviewed him briefly about this a month ago, was saying that he believed that China was the source, of course, of AQ Khan, not from the US at the time, but that the tenors were helping with parts.
And this was shut down.
They just destroyed the evidence.
And we don't know why.
It's obvious why, I think, to us, because they it was close.
The tenors were involved with the CIA, according to Albright and others, and exactly why how that happened.
In other words, were they being used as a double agent?
Were they being used to help facilitate this?
This is not clear to me.
I can't give an answer that not having investigated the tennis case or written anything about that.
I'm just telling you what I've read.
But they have they did work for the CIA, according to David Albright.
He told me that it was a big expert, of course, on nuclear weapons and the Khan case.
Well, and it should be noted here that the AQ Khan network, for all their nuclear proliferation, the terrible results on it that we know of, as far as I can tell, is that the North Koreans got some equipment they never used.
The Libyans got some equipment they never used.
The Iranians got some equipment that they're using to enrich uranium to a measly 3.6 percent in the presence of IAEA inspectors.
So for all the crisis, we don't have any rogue state making nuclear weapons because of this other than Pakistan, right?
Oh, that's true.
Well, the North Koreans did explode a device, didn't they?
A couple of years ago.
Oh, yeah.
But that was made out of plutonium harvested from their Soviet era reactors.
There's never been any evidence that they enriched uranium at all.
They just bought the equipment.
Well, I'll tell you about enrichment.
Khan and his number got enriched monetarily.
I mean, that's a big part of this, obviously, you know, the business side of it.
Yeah, that reminds me.
One of the theories is that they were actually selling phony parts to these companies.
Yeah, or at least garbage.
Yeah.
First generation Urenko centrifuges are, I think, Gordon Pray, they're our nuclear physicist at antiwar.com, says he thinks they're on generation 10 now or something, where they all spin on air instead of ball bearings and they're supersonic and all this stuff.
And the Iranians got what was left over at the Pakistani's garage sale.
Yeah.
And then I even heard, and this can't be confirmed, that they were sold defective goods, purposely sabotaged.
I mean, some of these centrifuges, they're off, you know, a microscopic amount of space, much less than an eighth of an inch, something like that, or they won't work.
So.
Right.
So that could be possible, too, if it was just to make money.
And the CIA could have been involved in this to try to divert these countries and to believing they were making a bomb and also getting enriched.
I don't profess to have the answers at all to these major questions.
I only wish that more people were asking questions about it.
That sure is interesting, the sabotage.
I know that the Iranians had a lot of problems with their nuclear program.
In one case, the centrifuge blew apart.
Right.
And at least the story was that it was the fingerprints left, the microbes and the fingerprints left on one of the parts of the centrifuge, threw it off balance enough.
But now you got me curious as to whether the CIA had the Pakistanis selling them deliberately sabotaged stuff.
I wonder, is there somewhere I can read about that?
Or that's just one of your sources told you he thinks that?
I don't know.
To be honest with you, I'm not sure where I read.
I think I just read that somewhere myself.
You'd have to just search on the Internet.
You know, whose fingerprint was that?
I guess would be the way to find out.
But it could also be that that was an inadvertent mistake.
These things happen.
Who knows?
Right.
I mean, that's what they said.
It was one of the Iranian scientists left a fingerprint on there.
Yeah, that was enough.
Yeah.
Very interesting stuff there.
OK, now let's get back into your book with Mike Revelle called A Political Odyssey.
The rise of American militarism and one man's fight to stop it.
And Mike Revelle, of course, is the man who read at least most of the Pentagon papers into the congressional record, proving, as you said, that the president can't do anything to a congressman who does that.
It's right there in the Constitution.
They're protected from arrest, except for breach of the peace and that kind of thing.
And also part of this is what you mentioned about how we don't have a bad apple here or there.
We have a systemic crisis in this country where the people who make the weapons, the companies that make the weapons and service the warfare state, Halliburton, who builds the bases, Lockheed, who builds the bombs, Raytheon, these guys, they have taken over our Congress.
They control our state.
This is what Mike Revelle is so angry about.
This is why he just ran for president.
That's correct.
A major part of the book is the history of this military-industrial relationship, how it began.
What I want to point out is that this is not a candidate campaign buyer that came out too late, even though it may be being portrayed that way.
It is, in fact, Mike's life is a part of the story, but it is a vehicle to tell this larger story of American militarism.
Let me trace three aspects of history that are related to one another.
The rise of the military industry, the growth of American territory, and the expansion of presidential power.
We go all the way back to Springfield, Massachusetts, where Mike Revelle was born and where George Washington set up the first U.S. government armory, Springfield Armory.
That was really the embryo of the military-industrial relationship.
And we find that after every war, and the book says, the U.S. demobilized.
First of all, every war until the First World War had enemies, or they openly, like in the Mexican War, the American government said, we were just expanding, we want a territory to grab manifest destiny, etc.
But we found after every war, there was a demobilization back to a civilian economy.
I'll give you an example.
Civil War, there was a $1 billion defense budget in 1865.
In 1870, that went down to $57 million.
There were a million men in arms at the end of the Civil War.
And one year later, there were 57,000 men.
Everyone went home.
Companies that made weapons for the Civil War, cannons, rifles, they suddenly were out of business, or they made bicycles and typewriters.
And this continued until the First World War, when we see the introduction now of false threats, because there was no threat to the United States over European war.
And Wilson wanted desperately to get into that war.
And he created the Creole Committee, which was a ministry of propaganda to sell the war to the American people.
It did very well.
They got into the war.
And after the war, Creole got involved and helped create the civilian public relations business.
They saw how well it did.
Militarists, that's another thing the militarists have given us, the scourge of PR, you know, institutionalized lying and misrepresentation, sell things.
Even after the First World War, there was demobilization.
And there were committees in Congress in the mid-30s about war profiteering, about how defense companies actually helped create war.
And the government and the military industries became more closely aligned in the First World War because the weapons were very sophisticated now, and they needed close cooperation between the two.
And we saw then in the Second World War, which the only war we really feel was justified in this book, in American history, after that war ended, there was a fear that the U.S. would go into a depression again.
We believe firmly that the war ended the depression.
And right after the war, there was demobilization.
And the aircraft industry in particular was about to be destroyed.
It had no more contracts.
So there was engineered in 1948 a war scare by Truman and by Symington, the head of the Air Force.
They falsely testified to Congress that there were Soviet subs off the coast and that there were imminent attacks coming from the Soviet Union in Europe.
And all this was lies because the first three national intelligence estimates ever produced by the brand new CIA that Truman started in 1947 when he created the National Security State said that the Soviet Union was no threat to the U.S. or to Western Europe.
Truman himself in his memoir said that the tragedy and shame of our time was that the demagogues, crackpots, and professional pages had a field day pumping fear into the American people that there was actual fear of imminent danger being taken over by communists.
Our government in Washington was riddled by communists.
And he said there was such a widespread fear that no one felt they were safe and it was all a lie.
So this was done to try to get the American economy going again.
And the profits and the power that the Second World War had accrued to defense industry was so great they could not give it up.
And we've lived under the shadow of that militarism ever since.
And it was only in the 1970s when the military was lost in the jungles of Vietnam that we had a rare period in American history and in Congress where we began a self-examination, a national self-examination.
What had America done with this military power and wealth that we accrued in the Second World War?
Do we use that power for human progress at home or abroad?
Did we use it to just multiply wealth and power?
I think it's clear American history has shown that that's what they did.
But even the most powerful nation ever lost.
They lost the war in Vietnam.
And we saw then right after that CIA, FBI investigated by the Church Committee, by the House Assassination Committee, with all the dirty linen, all the rocks were removed and the horrible things, the assassinations, the coups.
We're talking about in Iran, Guatemala, and elsewhere where the United States secretly with this new CIA pursued this power and wealth around the world.
And that was all laid out on the table in the Senate.
Mike Revell was in the Senate at that time.
He took part.
A matter of a man and the times.
And he was there at the right time.
And he took part by reading the Pentagon Papers into the record and trying to end the bombing in the North with legislation.
He worked very hard against the war and against secrecy.
And as you know, Dan Ellsberg gave him the papers and he read them on the floor.
And Dan has written the forward to the book because of that.
But what happened in 1980, the militarists were just on the defensive for seven years.
And this was also the period of detente that Nixon gave us.
That period ended in 1980 with the restoration of the military to power under Ronald Reagan.
Mike Revell and a bunch of other Democrats were thrown out.
Republicans took over the Senate.
And we have lived under that ever since.
And at first, they were afraid because the American people had demonstrated they were angry.
They didn't want militarism.
They wanted our money to be spent on domestic problems like education and health care and transportation and alternative energy.
Instead of pumping up false fears and false wars to enrich only a small section of our society.
And in 1980, we saw a small invasion, Grenada and then Bush's father in Panama until they worked themselves up and they felt the so-called Vietnam syndrome was defeated in the Gulf War.
Bush's father said that in the first Gulf War, where we saw those bombs going into people's houses and powerless Americans at home may have felt a vicarious thrill.
Look what we're doing to them.
By the time Bush's son got in 23 years after Reagan came to power, they were ready to pull off a full scale Vietnam-sized invasion in Iraq.
Now, are we going to enter a period like the 70s again with a defeat in Iraq where we will begin to examine what we've done without power?
This is the big question that the book asks.
Well, and that is the question.
Republic or empire, you can't have it both ways.
It's as simple as that.
It's one or the other, just like in Star Wars.
Well, you know, I don't know where we're going to go, obviously, but we point out, by the way, Sabel's stuff is in the book as well, briefly, because we're examining post-war American power and the role of the secret private networks.
I don't know if you know Joe Trento, but he's done a lot of good work on the revealing Safari Club in the 70s.
As a result of those investigations I was telling you about by the church committee, Jimmy Carter fired a lot of CIA agents, cut the budget.
So because they didn't have the power they had earlier, Bush's father, who was CIA director, right before that, while the church committee was going on, that was full of Republican administration, Gerald Ford, Bush's father got together with Saudis and the Iranians under the Shah and French and British intelligence.
They created the Safari Club, which was a private network where they lived off of drug dealing and then front companies to continue pursuing their power games.
And I think that that kind of environment that was created in the 70s is linked to what happened in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets and the Pakistani nuclear program.
Now, I'm not purporting at all to have all the answers, so I've raised more questions and give answers in the book, but it was out of that machinations of the intelligence in Pakistan and Afghanistan that we got 9-11.
There's no question about that.
We don't know what that connection might be, but it's not being reported on in a widespread systematic way.
And that is the failure of American journalism, not to pick up the Bell story, not to look at these other aspects that I'm bringing up.
Well, and I think the problem is, especially when you're talking about the average reporter, is you're talking about things that go back for decades and all this history and context that they're going to have to learn.
And they just simply don't want to have to do that.
Can you tell me what role, if anything, BCCI has to do with all this?
Yeah, BCCI was the clearinghouse.
I mean, they funded all of this.
Well, not all of it, but they funded, certainly they helped the Pakistani, the AQ Khan Network procurement, and they funded other intelligence operations.
We're drawing a blank here because I did write about this in the book.
But BCCI was central to funding these things.
And we know Bush's son, George W. Bush, was close.
Some people there may have gotten loans.
They had their hands everywhere.
This was to run this private intelligence network, stuff that never gets in the papers.
And the BCCI Bank was central to that, to funding.
There's just no question about that.
The drugs, the drug dealing, and the nuclear procurement ring, and to help fund private intelligence operations.
Well, so I guess ultimately you're asking, you really are asking for a complete shift in the way people perceive their governments, that basically our empire is run by mobsters.
Well, a lot of them are there to enrich themselves, and enough of them.
Let's say there are good, very decent people in government, and they're trying to do their job, and they believe what we were taught in school, in civics class, about how the government works, and they're there to protect us, et cetera, et cetera.
But the fact is, there are enough, especially in the eight years of this administration, but going back years, there are enough corrupt people in government that are working to enrich themselves with their friends, and companies that back them.
And that is the thing that, without a doubt, has to be broken, and I don't see how it can be.
How Congress is bought, and the White House is filled with men who are selling war, or pitchmen for the defense industries, and sell war through a corrupt media, as we saw leading up to the Gulf War, all the phony reporting about the WMD, and, you know, if I could just pat myself here, I just said that in Arianna Huffington's new book, she has a list of reporters who did not buy Bush's lies, and I'm in there, because, but there aren't enough reporters who question this evidence, and I didn't even do anything special.
I simply pointed out that, being a reporter at the UN, we brought in Ant Blix's viewpoint, and ElBaradei, and the French, and German, and Russian ambassadors, and into the reporting, and we saw that there was not a lot of evidence to support what the U.S. was saying about the WMD in Iraq.
But when you're only listening to Washington sources, and sitting at their knee, and trying to be close, and in on the game, and being somebody in the inner circle in Washington, this is where you're going to get Judy Miller reporting.
Absolute nonsense, with devastating consequences.
Well, I didn't make the list, because pirate radio doesn't count, I guess, in Arianna Huffington's world, but we got it right here on Chaos, too.
I only did because I was interviewing Arianna on a story, and she turned that into an interview of me, and Judy Miller, I just made this statement the day before, I believe, that we all got it wrong in Iraq, and I said, rubbish, we all didn't get it wrong, and I didn't do anything special, it wasn't any investigating I did, simply reporting other points of view.
It's that simple sometimes.
You know, I actually, I don't know why, but I'm hijacking your interview to tell this anecdote.
I was painting a house on the day that Colin Powell gave his speech before the UN, I had the doors of the truck open, I was listening to the speech on NPR, and I was sitting there quite angrily, out loud, debunking everything he said that I already could prove was a lie, in real time, even the Zarqawi stuff, we already knew, Zarqawi's up in Kurdistan.
I mean, everything he said, I was debunking it while painting a house outside, and these media people pretend that they, you know, have all these excuses and couldn't have known.
Well, they're a good example, Scott, because I was at the UN that day, I went to the public gallery of the Security Council, it was like an arena before a bullfight or a big boxing match, it was an incredible atmosphere there, and Powell made his performance, and afterward, ElBaradei and Blick spoke, and they ripped apart what he said, in diplomatic terms, they ripped apart what he said, but the next day, you wouldn't know that reading, the Washington Post and other American papers, they thought it was a convincing performance.
I gotta tell you, Joe, I had no idea until just now that ElBaradei and Blick both testified after Powell that day, that day, I didn't even know, I'm only just learning that for the first time right now.
Well, it was a Security Council meeting, and everybody got to speak, and they got to speak, and then about a week, a couple, a month or so later, they made a comment about a forged letter from Niger about Saddam buying nuclear material from Niger, that this was broken in the security, and I remember going up to the CNN correspondent and a British mission spokeswoman and said, did you just hear what ElBaradei just said?
He said that that was a forged letter, and they said, that's hardly going to make the headlines tomorrow, and then, of course, we know what happened when Joe Wilson finally wrote about that.
So there's so much stuff at the UN, and having been a reporter at the UN for almost 20 years now, I know how hard it is to get editors, especially in the US, to be interested in what the UN is saying.
It's just the dismissive view of the place.
Well, what's funny, too, is I think back to 2003, when the Joe Wilson thing came out, it was old news to me, because when ElBaradei had mentioned that he and his team had debunked the Niger uranium forgeries in three minutes using the Google search engine, that was, I don't know if it was the very top headline, but that made big headlines at antiwar.com, which is where I go for my news every day, and so this was a big part of the narrative to me, that that had already been debunked, even though apparently it had passed everybody else by almost.
Yeah, it did, because it didn't fit the narrative.
The narrative is, we're going to war, and let's get with the program.
That's what the press is supposed to do, and careerist journalists go along with it, because they just want to be close to officialdom, they want to keep their job, and they know what they have to write.
Well, let's hope that you can keep being a careerist journalist by writing good stories and proving that you actually are doing what it really takes, and not just posing up there with your hairdo like the rest of these goofballs.
I'm trying, and it's tough, I'll tell you, in terms of making a living trying to do it, but I appreciate what you say.
Well, and I appreciate your effort.
Everybody, that's Joe Lauria from the Sunday Times, formerly from the Boston Globe, Bloomberg News.
You can find him at the Huffington Post.
He's the co-author of Senator Mike Gravel's new book, A Political Odyssey, The Rise of American Militarism, and I urge you to check out the series, co-written with Chris Gourlay and Jonathan Calvert, at the London Times.
That's For Sale West's Deadly Nuclear Secrets, FBI Denies File Exposing Nuclear Secrets Theft, Tip-Off Thwarted Nuclear Spy Ring Probe, and Inquiry into Nuclear Mr. Fix-It Dropped.
Thank you very much for your time today, Joe.
Thank you, Scott.
