All right, y'all, welcome back to Antiwar Radio, Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas, streaming at ChaosRadioAustin.org and Antiwar.com slash radio.
And you might remember last Friday toward the end of the show, the Associated Press came out with this article accusing the Iranians and Lebanese Hezbollah of training Iraqi special group criminals in order to send them back to Iraq to murder Iraqi government officials and blow up American soldiers and who knows what.
Well, when the press comes out with a story like this, I always turn to Dr. Gareth Porter because what he likes to do is fact check them and see if they're telling the truth or not, and of course they're not.
And Gareth has a new article for us that'll be on Antiwar.com Monday.
And what's the new title, Gareth?
Well, it's basically, the subtitle, let me put it that way, is Iraq Newsnator, a question mark, which means, you know, we're wondering whether this news story represents a new low for journalism and its coverage of Iraq, and particularly the Iran-U.S. conflict over Iraq.
Oh, come on, it couldn't be that bad?
Well, I think it is, in fact.
You know, you, to your credit, drew my attention to this or said, you know, this really needs to be dealt with, and you were absolutely right.
I read it once, put it aside, thinking, well, this is really serious, and then went back to it later and realized that it does, in fact, in some ways, represent a kind of new low for journalism in terms of covering this set of issues.
Well, one thing that we learned right off the bat is that there's one source for it, a senior U.S. military intelligence officer without a name.
Yes, now the question would be, is he one of the three anonymous briefers who became famous internationally by presenting the briefing of February 11th, I guess it was, 2007, in Baghdad on the EFPs?
Who knows whether this is the same person or not, but certainly he is one of that ilk.
Yeah.
All right, well, now, we might as well start with that.
Go ahead and give him some background, because this is part of that very same story.
Now, as we've talked about on the show before, they got a false start.
Bush, the president, actually debuted the false start in March of 2006, accusing Iran of making the bombs, killing our guys in Iraq, even though they were fighting the Sunni insurgency, not the Shiite insurgency, which didn't exist.
Yeah, they were sort of leaning very hard in the direction of, so hard in the direction of wanting to blame EFPs on the Iranians who were in a very strange position of charging the Iranians with arming the Sunni insurgents who were fighting the Shiites in Iraq, which is really not a very credible position.
I must say that a number of journalists even called them on that one, because it was so outrageous.
Right, and they called them again, and they dropped it then, but then they brought it back up when Bush announced the surge in January of 2007, in that very same speech where he said, OK, all my opponents won, I'm going to double down.
At the same time, he debuted the same propaganda line again, once again, that everything wrong in Iraq is because of Iran working against our interests, and in fact sending in the weapons that are killing our guys.
He elaborated in a press conference a couple of days later, and then was this press briefing, these three anonymous briefers that you refer to, where they laid out all this so-called evidence to say that the new and improved landmines in Iraq were coming from Iraq.
Well, and as I've written about previously, and as we've discussed on your program, the line that they were taking in that briefing was one that had been essentially rejected by the U.S. intelligence community, by the Defense Department, by the State Department, and by the NSC.
And the three sort of high-ranking officials, Gates, Rice, and Hadley, had essentially sent this draft briefing back to the military with the instructions to get it right, to make sure that it conformed with actual, real U.S. intelligence.
Clearly, it had not.
And the key issue there, there were two key issues.
One was whether they could really say that unambiguously they knew that these were being made in Iran, and the other one was that this traffic in the weapons was being sponsored by the Iranian government.
They chose to push that line despite the rejection by the Washington bureaucracy, if you will, because clearly the Vice President's office made a deal with General Petraeus, and that it was one day, 24 hours after he arrived, or not after he arrived, but after he became the top commander in Iraq, that that briefing was given.
So that represented a major shift in the U.S. line in regard to Iran, to a much harder line, which can be fairly called a Cossus Belli.
Certainly, and it's been portrayed that way by many people.
Now, that was a year and a half ago, and we've had a sort of on-and-off experience with this propaganda coming in heavy doses for a few months at a time, and then they lay off.
And, of course, this has to coincide somewhat with Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army going on ceasefire, and not, and back again, and that sort of thing, am I right?
Yes, there is a close relationship between the evolving story with regard to Shiite militias and their alleged relationship to Iran, and the policies of Muqtada al-Sadr, no question about it.
Well, it's those Iranian special groups, right?
Yes, and then, of course, this is a term that the U.S. military created for its own political purpose, which was to essentially suggest that there are Mahdi Army commanders and units which we feel we could get along with or would accept the occupation, essentially.
They're acceptable, they're okay, but anybody who does not accept the occupation, who is suspected, even, of resisting the occupation, is going to be called a special group and linked to Iran, and that's exactly what they did.
And now, it's been proven, though, by circumstances over the time, that there really is no split between the so-called special groups and the rest of the Mahdi Army.
When Sadr tells them to ceasefire, they ceasefire, and when he tells them to fight, they fight, is that right?
Well, exactly, and this was absolutely shown, documented very clearly in 2008, repeatedly, beginning with the rain of rockets on the Green Zone, just as al-Maliki's forces were on their way to start fighting in Basra.
The Mahdi Army obviously had advanced intelligence that this was coming, and they were launching rockets on the Green Zone as a warning to say, hey, wait a minute, you better stop.
And as soon as the order was given, the rockets began, and as soon as Sadr agreed to the ceasefire in early April or the end of March, the rockets ceased.
And this kind of command over the Mahdi Army was shown repeatedly in the events of the spring of 2008.
Well, and if there's not a split, then they all are backed by Iran and the Mahdi Army.
Well, you know, of course, the relationship between Iran and Muqtada al-Sadr, as well as the Mahdi Army, is a matter which is shrouded in ambiguity and mystery.
Nobody really knows exactly what arrangements have been made between Sadr and the Iranians, but I think I've said in the past, and I'll repeat, that I believe that there was an understanding, an agreement between Sadr and Iran that they would provide support to the Mahdi Army, but only as a long-term deterrent to U.S. attack on Iran.
In other words, they were training or providing assistance to, and it's not exactly clear what they have done in the past, but some sort of support to Sadr was apparently promised in return for his basically standing ready to react to any attack on Iran.
This is exactly the kind of arrangements that Iran has had in the past with Hezbollah and I believe has had with other Shiite groups in the Middle East.
There's no doubt in my mind that Iran has never supported an offensive operation by the Sadrists in Iraq.
That is not their policy.
They have not wanted a conflict among the Shiite forces in Iraq for a variety of reasons.
Well, and he has said over the years, although he is supposedly, they say, in Iran right now, over the years he has repeatedly denounced his competition in the Shiite factions, the Supreme Islamic Council and the Dawah Party, their plans for strong federalism and a sort of independent Shiistan in the south that would be allied with Iran.
He would prefer, or has said that he would prefer a coalition government with the Sunni Arabs, a nationalist government of Iraq that would limit the influence of Iraq.
Well, that's correct, and beyond that, of course, he has also criticized very explicitly the Iranian regime and even Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader by name, saying that Iran has made serious mistakes in its policy toward Iraq and by that there's no doubt that he means that they have been entirely too solicitous of his rivals, including the al-Hakim faction and the Dawah Party, which is in power in Baghdad.
And so he has very clearly indicated that he does not agree with the policy that Iran has followed, that they've been entirely too supportive of the wrong people in the Shiite community.
Well, and it would make sense, although I guess I don't have any evidence of this happening even in the last few years, but we do know that for almost 30 years before the invasion, the al-Hakim faction, the Supreme Islamic Council, most of the Dawah Party types were in Iran, and that in fact their military wing, the Badr Corps, was created by the Quds Force.
If the Iranian military is training anybody in Iran, it would seem to be what we call the Iraqi Army, the Badr Brigade.
That's right.
The Badr Brigade obviously represents the primary force that is pro-Iranian and close to the Quds Force and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Iran.
No ambiguity about that.
There never has been any ambiguity about that.
In fact, if you really press American officials, you know, they have to admit that.
There's no way that they can deny it.
All right, well now, so here we have some background.
Now we're back in August 2008, and for the past couple of months, the propaganda about the danger of war with Iran has come thicker, while at the same time, in my mind, and speaking with you, I know that you agree that it seems less and less likely we're going to have a war with Iran, but now we have this major piece of propaganda coming out.
Do you think that this is significant in that, you know, this was ordered, this is another kind of Cheney-Petraeus end run around the official chain of command in order to ratchet up tensions again?
Well, I've thought about that, obviously.
That's a very good question.
I think on balance that I would say no.
It's really, if you look at the explicit intention of this story, which is, as I say, it's made explicitly, reported explicitly in the story, that the reason it's being given out, the reason that they're talking about the alleged training of Shiite hit squads in Iran, is to put pressure primarily on al-Maliki himself to try to get him to confront Iran with this sort of allegation.
And that's really very interesting, because we know that the United States has been unsuccessful in the recent months in trying to get al-Maliki to do precisely that.
I mean, they wanted him to send this delegation to Iran in early June, which was supposedly going to confront Iran with evidence of their export of arms to the Shiites.
And what in fact happened was that when the Shiite delegation was in Iran, they ended up discussing with the Iranians ways in which they could find a modus vivendi between the al-Maliki regime and the Assadists, and to avoid such extreme dependence on the U.S. military.
So already al-Maliki was in a transition to reducing, and in fact ultimately eliminating, his dependence on the U.S. military, something that caught the U.S. government and the U.S. command quite by surprise.
So it does seem like, to a degree, there is some sort of, regardless of the hype about these training camps and so forth, there is sort of an endgame afoot here by the Iranians.
This whole time, at least since the elections in 2005, well really even before that, the creation of the Constitution, the Iranians and the Americans have both been backing the same regime in Baghdad.
And now it seems the Iranians are telling their servant Maliki, okay, it's time to go ahead and break your dependence on the Americans.
You have us, and that's enough.
It's time to go ahead and put the pressure on them to get out.
They feel they've won already.
We've helped them win, and now it's time to get rid of us.
I think that is roughly correct, yes, that the Iranians have upped the ante in 2008.
They have helped to arrange essentially a peace between the Sadrists and Maliki's forces, something that benefits Maliki tremendously, takes the heat off him, gives him a huge degree of additional leverage and power within the society, and really allows him to take a much harder line with the United States.
I think that's exactly what has happened.
And this is in part, of course, in the context of a growing contradiction.
Maybe I shouldn't say growing because it was simply already there all along, but a growing salience of the contradiction between the U.S. alliance with the Sunni regimes in the Middle East who are essentially anti-Maliki, anti-Shiite rule in Iraq, and the Shiite opposition to those regimes and suspicion of the Sunni regimes in the region, and reliance on Iran primarily to help defend them against what they fear will be pressures from those quarters.
Well, we know that the ethnic cleansing battle for Baghdad was basically won.
Sadr and the Badr Brigade together worked to kick almost all of the Sunni Arabs out, and the Sunni insurgency, having lost that battle, basically decided they would ally with the United States, get some money and some guns from us, call themselves the Concerned Local Citizens, engage in Sunni battles and call their enemies Al-Qaeda for a little while, and so forth.
But they're just gearing up for a future battle for Baghdad.
Is that where this thing is headed, a proxy war between Iran and the Sunni Arab states?
And isn't that actually what's kind of been going on this whole time?
I think that essentially is highly likely that at some point in the future, and we don't know when, there will be a renewal of violence involving Sunnis and Shiites.
At this moment, all the evidence is that Maliki is quite confident that he can handle the Sunnis.
As you indicated, he has now a dominant position in Baghdad, in the Baghdad area.
I think the Sunnis obviously still have complete control in Al Anbar and other Sunni-dominant provinces, and there's no way that the Shiites are going to be able to go in and take control of those provinces away from the Sunnis.
Once the Americans are gone, there will be a de facto split between Sunni-dominated provinces and Shiite-dominated provinces, and Baghdad's dominated by the Shiites.
And the Sunnis may indeed try to challenge that, but at this point the Shiites certainly have an upper hand, and they don't need the American troops to maintain control at this point.
Well, I guess there's really a question as to whether, forget the Sunni insurgency-concerned local citizen types, can the Maliki government survive-that is, the Iranian-backed factions, the Dawa and Skiri factions- can they survive the Shia Arabs of Iraq without American protection?
Well, that's a very good question.
I think that what's happening right now is that Maliki is taking a very big gamble, but one which he feels is his best shot at long-term survival, which is to put himself in the position of being the savior of Iraq who kicked the Americans out.
And that's why I think he's very serious about insisting on a timetable for withdrawal.
So that's really recognition of how precarious his position is there in the Green Zone, that if he's going to ever be able to make this thing permanent, it's not a matter of new security gains with the help of the American people, it'll be a matter of gaining the respect of the people of Iraq-I meant the American military there- it's a matter of gaining new respect from the people of Iraq by being the one to kick the soldiers out.
Absolutely, he does understand that.
I mean, he understands that ultimately American military presence is a huge negative in terms of his legitimacy, and that he will not be able to survive in the future if he doesn't get the Americans out of there.
And that is really his best chance to stabilize his regime.
And this is, of course, undoubtedly what the Iranian advisors are telling him, and I think they have succeeded in persuading him in 2008, and probably had begun to make that case in 2006 when he first came to power.
And you remember, I just wrote about this a couple weeks ago, that al-Maliki actually had a paper that proposed negotiating with the Sunni insurgents a peace agreement which would be based on a timetable for U.S. withdrawal, complete U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, whereupon the Bush administration, the White House, found out about it and then put the kibosh on it and said, you can't do that, you have to withdraw it, and he meekly then backed down in 2006.
But I think that that theme has been in the background, and then in 2008 became very much the dominant theme in his administration, and the dominant theme in his relations with Iran.
Well, I think we should just take him up on it.
I do too.
You want an Iraq without an American occupation, huh?
You got it, pal.
Exactly.
I mean, this is, of course, the counter theme to the surge work and that the U.S. military is responsible for all of the good things that have happened in terms of reduced violence in Iraq over the last year and a half, when in fact it's exactly the opposite.
The U.S. military has certainly added to the level of violence in Iraq in the past year and a half, particularly to the fighting in Sadr City just a few months ago, that is, in May, which was entirely a product of the U.S. military's desire to have a big fight with the Sadrists.
And it was al-Maliki who, along with Iran, who stepped in and basically kept the United States from carrying out a long, several-week major offensive with tanks and armored vehicles in the middle of that very heavily, densely populated Shiite area.
Well, and that was a very important story too, and we talked about it at the time.
Maliki was preempting that American full-scale battle against the Mahdi army in preparation for strikes against Iran this summer.
Well, that, of course, that began with Basra in March, and then in Sadr City again in May, al-Sadr and al-Maliki with Iranian mediation came to an agreement which essentially kept the U.S., or got the U.S. out of Sadr City, kept the U.S. out of Basra, and essentially set the stage for the negotiations which have now taken place, or, you know, the next stage of the negotiations over the status of forces in Iraq.
All right, now let's get back to tearing this article by Pamela Hess of the Associated Press to little pieces, because this article deserves being torn to pieces.
Let's get right to it.
We discussed how it was an anonymous senior U.S. military intelligence officer, single source for this story, and in your article you point out that they sort of unwittingly revealed two or three different times in this article that they're merely speculating, and even though they don't say that, it sort of comes out in the way that they claim to know what they know.
Exactly, and, you know, the key thing is here that if you read through the article, it's not really until later in the article that you find out that the only sources that the anonymous military officer claims, the intelligence officer claims, are captured militiamen in Iraq, that is, Iraqi militiamen who have been detained inside Iraq, and then some unnamed and not even characterized other sources.
Now, you know, first of all, one has to realize that Iraqi militiamen who are detained in Iraq simply cannot have the kind of knowledge of what might or might not be happening in Iran that is necessary to put forward this kind of lie.
I mean, they simply do not know, first of all, who is in Iran and what they are doing there, whether they are being trained or simply hiding out, waiting for the coast to clear in Iraq so that they can come back.
I mean, you know, we know that there was a huge influx of Shiite militiamen from Iraq into Iran because of the unilateral ceasefires that Sadr has declared in 2008.
They were subject to obvious detention and, you know, possible death if they stayed in Iraq, in either Sadr City or Basra or Samara in the spring and summer of 2008.
So, you know, in most cases, in many cases, they went across the border into Iran simply to escape detention and possible death.
That, of course, does not mean that they went there to be trained at all.
There's no indication whatsoever that that's the case.
Now, it may well be that you're going to have militiamen who are detained in the south who told them that they believed that some of their fellow Shiites were being trained in Iran, but this is hearsay.
This is rumor.
This is not intelligent.
This is not something they could know.
Well, and even just even going that far with some of them fled there, all that simply shows the perpetual motion machine that is this propaganda where our guys are attacking them because supposedly they work for Iran, and then they run to Iran because there's nowhere else to go without getting shot at, and then we say, ah-ha, look at them, they're in Iran.
You're absolutely right.
It's a circular argument, isn't it?
Yeah.
Oh, and then I like this thing about besides these captured militiamen that have no idea or couldn't know, other sources.
I know that.
That means the communist terrorist cult, the Mujahideen al-Khalk.
Well, certainly one has to be well aware of the fact that the United States military has been highly dependent on the Mujahideen al-Khalk, the terrorist organization which has been a source of intelligence, quote-unquote, for the U.S. military over the past few years on Iran's military role or alleged military role in Iraq, as well as its nuclear program.
And we know for a fact that virtually all of the information that has been passed on by the MEK about the nuclear program has been totally off the wall, denounced by the International Atomic Energy Agency as false and absolutely inaccurate.
And we know that the MEK has been the source of some of the bad decisions that were made with regard to detention of Iranians in the Kurdish area of Iraq, charging them with being involved in various terrorist operations in Iraq when all the evidence indicates that the Kurdish officials had been working with them on something entirely different.
They were there at the invitation of the Kurdish regional government, and they were carrying out functions that the Kurdish government was quite well aware of.
But the MEK had been telling the U.S., oh, these are people involved in supporting terrorists somewhere in southern Iraq.
It still worked, though.
All they need is the headline that day, Iranians arrested in Iraq.
Well, in fact, I think the U.S. military was quite embarrassed by the fact that it launched these raids and came up with really no evidence whatsoever to support the argument that they wanted to make, which was that these are Kurdish force people involved in supporting Shiite militiamen in the south.
They've never been able to produce a scintilla of evidence from all those raids that supported that idea.
Now, wasn't there one of those back in 2006 or something, where it turned out that it was Abdul Aziz al-Hakim's son that they arrested?
Well, exactly.
This is the one that occurred in Baghdad.
This was the U.S. military operation that involved detaining some Iranian officials who were visiting at the invitation of al-Hakim and the Assyrians at that point.
And basically, al-Hakim had either, I can't remember if he had just gone to Washington, I think he'd already just visited Washington and visited with President Bush, and all of a sudden, in his own compound, you find American troops barging in to arrest Iranian officials.
These are the guests of al-Hakim and his group.
Jeez, talk about a bunch of keystone imperialists running this thing, huh?
Yeah, that's a very good way to put it, I think.
All right.
Now, remind me about Daqduq.
He gets a mention in this article.
Yes, I mean, this is an interesting aspect of the AP story.
This Hezbollah operative, alleged operative at least, as far as we know he is, but who knows, in Iraq, Daqduq, who was mentioned prominently in the famous July 2, 2007 briefing by General Kevin Bergner, a briefing which was aimed at showing two things.
One, that the Iranians are using Hezbollah to actually organize these supposedly pro-Iranian militia groups, and secondly, that Iran, through Hezbollah, is actually advising operations of the Shiite militiamen in attacking U.S. troops, as was the case when they killed five U.S. troops in Karbala, or detained in Karbala and then killed later on.
This was a story which was generated by that briefing, and Daqduq was supposedly a major source for all this.
Well, it turns out, now we find that Daqduq is being used as a source, apparently, to show that the Hezbollah people have had to leave Iraq and move into Iran.
Now that's a new twist in the story.
There's no mention, in fact, of Iranian bases being used to train Shiite militiamen before 2008.
I did not go into this in my critique of the story, because it was just getting long and too involved, but it's quite fascinating that Pamela Hess, the author of this AP story, makes it sound like there was no training of Shiite militiamen in Iran until all of these Shiites had to cross the border to escape the offensive by al-Maliki's forces in 2008.
So she doesn't even know her own propaganda line?
Well, I have no idea what's going on here.
It's quite fascinating.
Either they've changed the line, or she is not familiar with it.
I don't know which it is.
And one was left asking the question, well, what was really going on last year?
Was this simply made up?
Was it completely fabricated?
It's possible that they completely fabricated the line that there were Shiites being trained at these bases that Vice President Dick Cheney was saying we should attack in the summer of 2007, because they're training Shiite militiamen.
It could have been that they were torturing some detainees in Baghdad to get them to say this, and then using it as a cossus belli.
There could be some other explanation.
We simply don't know.
Well, I know that at the time, I spoke to Juan Cole, and there was that big article in The Independent, where there were two so-called Shiite militiamen who said that they had been there, and that there were thousands of Iraqi militia guys training in Iran and all this.
And Juan Cole, when I talked with him about it right after that story broke, said, oh yeah, well, how'd they get there, and what road, and who paid their way, and where'd they stay?
And I don't, you know, come on.
Well, I think that that, I now believe that that skepticism was quite justified.
I think I perhaps was overly willing to accept that story as an adequate basis for saying that there probably is some training.being given to the Mahdi army.
I now think that we have to say we just don't know what's really going on there.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, the thing is, too, I think we should have to say that we can conclude that the military's been lying all this time, too.
All these things that they say are clear truths are no such thing.
The military has been lying, the military has been consciously misleading, has been making statements that appear to say one thing, but in fact reflect a much different reality, and they know it perfectly well.
They know that they do not have the evidence to make the claims that they have made about EFPs, about the relationship between the Quds Force and the Shiites in Iraq, the idea that the Hezbollah was actually providing operational advice on behalf of Iran is clearly a story that just doesn't hold up, and they knew that.
There are all kinds of indications that one after another of the features of this narrative were vastly exaggerated, and they knew it from the very beginning.
All right, now, the whole time they've had help from the Associated Press and all their colleagues and all the other major news media sources in this country, and I'm going to go ahead and read this quote that you found from Pamela Hess, the Associated Press reporter, and ask for your comment.
I'll go ahead and tell you now.
I just love this.
I love it so much.
And every once in a while, a government official will call you and say, we'd like you not to be working on that story, and here's why.
And sometimes you agree with it.
You agree to their demands, because sometimes they offer you a better deal.
Well, when we're ready for this to come out, I'll give you the exclusive on it.
Or, here's why we don't want this.
I remember one, there was one story many years ago that I worked on that I had had, that I got from three different sources that were in a closed-door meeting in the tank in the Pentagon.
And one general in there had said, I think this was almost a direct quote, but something along the lines of, America is going to have to get over its fear of casualties.
So this, of course, is a very important story.
A general that outranked the general, who I actually had a very good relationship with, who I could talk to off the record or on background frequently, called me and asked me not to report the story.
And I didn't.
And the reason that I didn't was twofold.
Number one, I needed this second general more than I needed that story.
And number two, I thought he made a great point.
Which is, if they can't speak their minds in these closed-door meetings, then we're really robbing the Pentagon of its ability to do its job.
Yeah, this is a story that indicates just exactly how the system really works.
And I don't want to pick on Pamela Hess and single her out as the only transgressor in regard to this sort of collaboration with the military machine.
No, she's just the most honest and least self-aware when talking like this on television.
Exactly.
I think you've put your finger on it.
I mean, she is perhaps the one who is most willing to tell the truth about how it actually works, because she is such a true believer in the military's mission in Iraq.
She's willing to sort of say, yeah, I'll go along with whatever they want me to do, as long as I can get the stories that they are willing to give me and get the exclusive.
In other words, she's made her compromise.
She's sold out to the military machine.
And she's quite happy with that, and she doesn't care whether people know it or not.
And she doesn't seem to understand the significance, the true significance of what that means.
Well, you know, it's funny, because especially reading it out loud there, it sounds like something that a media critic would be explaining.
It sounds like this is going to end with, so I told that general to go to hell, and I broke that story or something.
And then at the end, she's describing how she loves it.
This is exactly the way the system works, and she fits right within it the way she's supposed to.
Right, and I think the real point of this is that this gives us a perhaps unique insight into the way the system really works, and this is something that I think you will find true of perhaps a majority of certainly Pentagon correspondents and a majority of the journalists who cover the Iraq war, to one degree or another.
I think she's perhaps at the extreme end of the spectrum.
But I think they all make their, to some degree or another, they make their agreements with the military, their tacit understandings with the military, that they will not go too far in return for the ability to get stories, exclusive from their military sources.
Wow, well, it's going to be difficult, I think, to get the truth about American imperialism and its destructive nature to the people when our mass media, in the land of the First Amendment, in the USA, the home of free speech for all, they can't really prosecute you for doing what you're doing, Gareth, but it just doesn't matter, because the AP is going to continue writing this kind of crap.
Well, you put your finger on the problem, that this AP story goes to hundreds of newspapers, it goes to so many outlets that it really blankets this country and the world, and what you and I can do to get the word out is a drop in the ocean compared with that.
We have to realize that that's the reality and start with that as the point of departure for doing something about it.
I mean, I think there has to be, A, a resolve on the part of people who do have an understanding of the truth to be much more aware of the need to be effective in communicating to those people who can be reached so that they can enlarge the scope, the number of people who have an accurate understanding of what's really going on, a core group that has that understanding.
And then beyond that, there really has to be some way of enlarging the ability to communicate that through the means that we don't have yet.
We have to find the money and the will to create some new means of communication, new television outlets, new radio outlets, and so forth.
There has to be a change in the fundamental system of communication in this country.
Well, it is 2008, more than halfway through now, but I guess in a larger sense, it's still the dawn of the 21st century.
We've got a future ahead of us here we can work with, right?
Well, we certainly have a future.
We have years ahead.
Nobody knows exactly what's going to happen, but we have to be honest and say that there is a very long, very steep uphill climb to make change in this country.
That's the least we can say about the problem.
Well, I'm always reminded of the flyer that the hippie gave me on the drag when I was a little kid.
It said, fight back while you still can.
Exactly.
As simple as that.
Let's do it while we still can.
That's right.
All right, everybody, that's Gareth Porter.
He's an investigative journalist and historian.
He writes for IPS News.
You can find all his stuff at antiwar.com slash Porter, as well as over at the Huffington Post.
Thanks very much for your time again today, Dr. Porter.
Always a pleasure.
Thanks, Scott.
