05/26/14 – Paul Gottinger and Ken Klippenstein – The Scott Horton Show

The military-industrial complex, the disastrous rise of misplaced power...
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We should take nothing for granted.
Alright, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, this is my show.
Now, we're going to, I'm not sure yet, is this Paul or Ken here?
This is Ken.
Ken, oh, welcome to the show, how are you?
Paul's here as well.
Paul, are you in here?
Yes, I'm here.
Oh, okay, both of y'all are there.
Okay, great.
So, everybody, Paul Gottinger and Ken, is it Kippenstein or Steen?
Kippenstein, like Frankenstein.
Okay, that was my guess, but who knows, I don't know.
So, Paul Gottinger and Ken Kippenstein, they have this thing in Truthout.org, a very important piece here.
It's called, U.S. Continues to Surreptitiously Supply Arms to the Unelected Regime in Egypt.
And they've got some docs and links right to them for you to look at here.
Basically, they look like the receipts to me straight out of a Bill Hicks joke or something.
But so, maybe first of all, could one or the other of you just give us the very kind of nutshell version of 2011 through right now and the various regime changes over there in Egypt and what's led us up to this point.
Why it should even be a scandal that the U.S. is arming the Egyptians when after all, we've been arming them since the days of Anwar Sadat.
Well, written in the U.S. law is a rule wherein the U.S. is supposed to cut off military aid to regimes that initiate coup d'etats.
And obviously, the Egyptian regime initiated a coup d'etat when they overthrew their first elected leader, Mohamed Morsi.
Keep in mind that this is the first formal election that Egypt has ever had.
The U.S. smashed those hubs, the U.S. government.
And what they ended up doing was actually supporting the dictatorship as of today because of the so-called election.
And so, just because they have that law in place that they have to cut off aid to a regime that undergoes a coup doesn't mean that they've ever respected that, but it does mean that it's in the rules.
And so, what John Kerry has to do right now, which is going to be very controversial, he's going to have to state that Egypt is pursuing a democratic path, which is a bad joke, because they've labeled the Muslim Brotherhood, which got 51% of the vote in the last election, the new regime has labeled the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization.
And so, they've imprisoned a bunch of people, they've sentenced a thousand people to death.
This is being condemned by all sorts of human rights organizations.
And so, when something like that happens, none of that dominant party is going to vote, obviously.
I mean, that's completely obvious.
And so, anyone that's going to vote is just going to vote for the dictator.
Yeah, I mean, and the election is taking place today and tomorrow, correct?
Yep, that's correct.
And then, do you have any information about, there's one guy I think that was approved to run against Field Marshal Sisi here, right?
Hamdeen Sabahi, can you tell us about him at all?
Well, the election is such a farce that even other former military brass from the Egyptian military are saying that, quote, the ballots are going to be rigged, their whole thing is going to be a sham.
This isn't even me saying this, these are the Egyptian generals themselves saying it.
And it's their sham.
So, were they bragging about it, or this is just some disaffected generals who would prefer to see some different puppets in charge?
Yeah, exactly.
I think it's sort of partisan opportunism of the same sort that we see here in the U.S.
Certain people chewing their mouths off because they'd rather be the dictator in charge, but what they happen to be saying corresponds with the truth.
And now, so if this was a country that was not America's pet and strategic interest for the last generations going back like this, but it was just some other country, and it was being backed by another major power in the world, you know, say a so-called adversary like Russia or China, I think the Americans would probably have a lot different take on an elected government being overthrown by the military and a thousand plus people being massacred in the streets.
These, as you said, a thousand people being sentenced to death with only, you know, the most ridiculous modicum of a star chamber type trial, all being, you know, basically found guilty of association and that kind of thing.
This would be absolutely huge, but to hear John Kerry tell, this is the restoration of democracy, saving it from the people who won the last election.
And he was one of the very few leaders to actually not label the overthrow of the elected leader, Morsi, a coup.
It was a huge international controversy.
Everyone's saying, come on, this is obviously a coup.
You have even the Washington Post labeling it a coup.
And the Washington Post is the most established and beltway journalism that you could possibly imagine.
And here we have the Secretary of State who refuses to agree with what even the establishment thinks.
Right, even Robert Kagan has split with Bill Kristol on this.
Right, right.
I mean, that's a big deal because he's saying, hey, in our doctrine, democracy, are you sure we want to completely discredit ourselves forever by taking the dictator's side here?
Right.
And I think you're exactly right when you point to the hypocrisy of the U.S. federal government.
Because, I mean, look at the glaring condemnations of when Russia occupied Crimea.
And in terms of deaths, it doesn't even come close to what the Egyptian regime has done.
And so, you know, they label this as aggression and all these different things.
Which, I mean, I think there's something to all of that.
But you lose your credibility when you say that.
And then you refuse to call a spade a spade.
Or you refuse to label a coup a coup.
When it happens in one of your own client states.
And this is something governments always do.
You condemn the crimes of enemies and you ignore the ones that you have the most control over.
So I'm sure that in Russia, there's not a whole lot of criticism going around about their occupation of Crimea.
The same way there's not a whole lot of criticism going around about the crucial U.S. aid support to the Egyptian military on death.
Right.
Well, even an honest, you know, objective accounting of that, you'd be hard pressed to find a thousand dead Crimeans.
You know, at this point anyway, I don't know, maybe the Tatars will rise up or something and be crushed.
I don't know, but certainly nothing compared to the brutality of the coup.
But, you know, it is, of course, Will Grigg on this show is always paraphrasing Vladimir Lenin.
About, you know, it's all about who does what to who.
It's not about the what.
It's all about the who.
And so military coup d'etat for American interests.
That is democracy.
That's what democracy means.
What we said, you know, doing as told by our government.
If it's a coup we like, then it's not a coup.
That's democracy.
Right.
And so if you actually look at what John Kerry said, this is the most, I mean, you couldn't find this in Orwell.
When the military coup was under way in Egypt, Kerry actually said that the coup was, quote, restoring democracy.
That was the direct quote.
Right.
But here in a moment we're going to have to take this break.
But we'll be right back, everybody, with Paul Gottinger and Ken Kippenstein.
They've written this really important piece for Truthout.org.
U.S. continues to surreptitiously supply arms to the unelected regime in Egypt.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
It's Memorial Day.
Talking with Ken Kippenstein.
I guess we've lost Paul.
Paul Gottinger, his co-author here.
But Ken Kippenstein, we have on the phone.
He's from Truthout.org.
And they wrote this article, The U.S. continues to surreptitiously supply arms to the unelected coup d'etat regime in Egypt.
So, please take us through some of the numbers here.
First of all, you've already established that the law says that if America's government gives foreign aid to a government, and then they have a military coup d'etat, or whatever kind of coup d'etat, overthrowing an elected government, then the U.S. government won't give them aid anymore.
And in violation of that, they have been doing what, exactly?
Giving what, exactly?
So, in October, after a lot of the human rights violations were coming to the fore from the unelected military regime, the State Department said that they were going to withhold, let's see here, M1 Abram tanks, F-16 fighter jets, and Apaches.
These were all explicitly said to be suspended from a State Department cable in October.
And so, we looked at the weapons invoices.
In industry parlance, it's called bills of ladding.
And so, what we determined from these was that the U.S. has, in fact, sent $44 million worth of guided missiles, $25 million worth of armored fighting vehicles.
This includes the cannons and gun mounts for the M1 Abrams tanks that were explicitly suspended.
And then, they gave $5 million worth of parts for Apache helicopters and F-16 fighter jets parts, which also is in violation of the armistice.
And what's particularly amazing here is how narrow the armistice was.
If you really want to stop Egyptian human rights violations, you want to target what are called crowd suppressants, what are used specifically against protesters, things like tear gas, pepper spray, those kinds of things.
And the U.S. made no statement of freezing any of those.
But what's particularly amazing is even the things that they did say, the narrow things that they did say they were going to freeze, tanks, F-16s, Apaches, they didn't end up freezing those.
About a month or two later, they even ended up reversing their statement on the Apache helicopters so they could continue to send those out.
And, you know, I saw the magic word Lockheed in here.
You know, I don't know if it even matters at this point whether Israel is the country next door or not.
Lockheed has got some product they need to get rid of, and that's what Uncle Sam exists for.
I think you're exactly right.
I mean, if you look at these weapons contracts, this is $7 million in Hawks surface-to-air missiles coming from Aerojet Rocketdyne, and then $7 million coming from Lockheed Martin, and then $400,000 for Boeing.
This is big business for these companies.
And so at a time, at perhaps the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, we're continuing to spend tens of millions of dollars on a regime that is specifically prosecuting some of the worst human rights violations.
And this is according to fairly conservative human rights organizations like Human Rights Watch.
I mean, it just doesn't make any sense.
We're trying to dig ourselves out of the hole, and we're spending tens of millions on a totally abusive regime.
Well, and you know, the thing is, too, if they meant what they said at all about, like, hey, you know, we need some, you know, a reformation in modern Islam, and we need, you know, free markets and democracy for the Middle East and all that, and they're back in the hype that they push, pretending to back the Arab Spring that they opposed, and all that kind of thing.
But if they meant what they said, then the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood won the election, the elections, the parliament and the presidency, it seems to me they would see that as a good thing.
This would be the number one greatest incentive ever, ever, for them to cool out.
And, you know, it's not a guarantee necessarily, but if they have a real, you know, and especially if they're kind of divided with the, you know, more so-called secularist types and whatever in a democratic framework, then they've got to move toward the center.
And, you know, maybe their Islamism, you know, could be implemented in a way that is less threatening to those who would oppose them, and then maybe turn on them and side with the military against them, like is what happened, you know.
But the Americans, you know, could have encouraged this and saw this as a really good thing and encouraged the military that they own lock, stock and barrel to back off here for a minute.
Egyptian society actually has a chance.
It's not that democracy is a panacea for everything.
Hell, sometimes it leads right to civil war.
But, you know, it could be the start of something good there in the most important Arab country, the trendsetter and doctrine center for the whole region, but they don't believe in their own so-called new world order at all.
They just as soon have a military dictator that'll do exactly what he's told and keep the people of Egypt in the darkest of dark ages and with inflationary currency destroying their ability to even feed their families on the basic level and this kind of thing.
From now on, they don't care about any of the things that they pretend to care about that they invoke as their excuses for their intervention over there.
I completely agree.
And further evidence of the fact that they don't care about the, you know, high-flown ideals of democracy that you can hear Obama and John Kerry always holding forth about.
Further proof of that is the fact that in the October weapons-free statement, they made those remarks to the New York Times and Reuters picked it up.
And if you look at the remarks they made, they made them all off the record.
Well, there's a reason for that because they knew they were lying through their teeth.
Someone doesn't want to go on the record when they say that if they know that it's soon going to be contradicted.
And so the New York Times obediently ran the story off the record without specific citations and not asking why they want it to be off the record because that's what the establishment press does.
And then, well, a couple months later, we found that they contradicted what they said and that's why they wanted to remain on deep background when they said it.
Well, it really goes to show the cynicism of the regime change in Libya, which was mostly nothing but a publicity stunt because they came out looking so bad for backing Mubarak to the bitter end and then trying to get Omar Suleiman, the head of the secret torture police, to replace him that they realized belatedly that, man, they came out looking really like the bad guy in the Egypt thing.
So let's go ahead and overthrow expendable Gaddafi in the name of taking the side of the little guy here and, you know, never mind all the consequences from what they did in Libya.
But it just goes to show that it's not even plausible that they learned a lesson from Egypt, that they really better take the right side in the Arab Spring.
No, they didn't mean that at all.
It was simply a publicity stunt.
They're perfectly happy to go back to backing the next Mubarak.
Since Mubarak Jr. wasn't up for the task, they found Field Marshal Sisi to be the new dictator instead.
Exactly.
And they're happy with Mubarak.
I don't know if you saw in the news very recently, but Mubarak got a prison sentence and it kind of shows what the beliefs of the new military regime are.
His prison sentence was something like three years.
So they obviously don't take these horrible human rights violations seriously.
I mean, that's a slap on the wrist compared to what he should have gotten, you know.
And he's probably not going to serve half of it.
They might even let him out because he's so old.
And in addition to that, you brought up Libya.
If you look at Libya, Gaddafi, he was a horrible monster.
But you look at the state now, it's practically a failed state, just like Iraq.
There are different factions, there's different extremist factions vying for power.
They don't even know who's in charge.
The U.S. tries to import oil from them.
They can't even get it out of the state because there's so many different terror factions trying to fight for the oil.
Thank you very much for your time.
We have a whole other interview coming up about Libya and the whole civil war going on there here in just a few minutes.
But I really appreciate having you on here.
It's a great piece.
And tell your co-author, Paul, thank you very much for us.
The piece is, U.S. continues to surreptitiously supply arms to unelected regime in Egypt.
At truthout.org.
By Paul Gottinger and Ken Klippenstein.
Thanks again.
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