10/17/14 – Jonathan Landay – The Scott Horton Show

Hey y'all, Scott Horton here.
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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
All right, y'all, so I got Jonathan Landay on the line.
He does the national security beat for McClatchy Newspapers.
That's McClatchyDC.com.
And actually, before we get to your big story here, which is big and important, Jonathan, let me ask you about yesterday's stupidity here.
Someone on Twitter is asking if I've had an expert commentary on this subject, and you certainly are expert, as probably the reporter most famous for doing the best work debunking the so-called weapons of mass destruction program in Iraq before the war for Knight Ridder Newspapers.
The report is that some soldiers found some chemical weapons warheads in Iraq during the Iraq War II occupation there and were exposed and that it was covered up, et cetera, in The New York Times, a big piece by, I think, C.J. Chivers.
Great.
It's a great piece, Scott.
Really fine piece of investigative journalism.
Yeah, it sure seemed like it to me.
And now if but apparently if you only read the headline, what it says is George Bush was right all along.
Landay was wrong.
All the critics were wrong.
And Bush was right to invade and overthrow Saddam and his sons and the Ba'athists because, look, mustard gas.
So what do you say to that?
I say horse is what I say.
If you read the story, you will then come to understand that these shells were pretty old.
They had been basically abandoned and buried in pits.
They were basically useless because a lot of them were leaking and they were shells that the United States knew about that had been left over from the Iran-Iraq War.
This is not what President George W. Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, and the rest of that administration was talking about when they were talking about Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction.
What they were saying is he's got them now.
He's got active programs.
He has revived his nuclear weapons program.
He has got a biological program.
He has got a chemical weapons program.
And all of that is horse, as I said.
He had no such programs.
They had all been basically detected by the U.N. weapons inspectors who had blown up his facilities and exposed the stockpiles.
Those programs were not existent, did not exist.
Let's just review some of the nonsense that we heard from the Bush administration.
Now one of the ones I remember is he had mobile biological weapons labs disguised as milk and yogurt trucks.
That's the kind of thing.
He had a facility outside of Baghdad where they were training al-Qaeda to take over, to hijack aircraft.
They had biological and chemical weapons facilities buried underneath his palaces and private homes and water wells and this kind of thing in Iraq.
And all of that was just, remember the nonsense about the aluminum tubes that he'd been porting, thousands of aluminum tubes to turn them into centrifuges, which are those machines that spin at supersonic speed to purify uranium into weapons-grade uranium.
We know that was nonsense, too.
So anyone who looks at C.J. Chivers' really outstanding journalism as being proof that Bush knew what he was talking about don't know what they're talking about and obviously haven't read the piece themselves.
Yeah, well, and don't be too charitable now because, well, and I don't want to put words in your mouth, but he knew what he was talking about.
He was lying.
They were all lying.
They announced it in the fall of 2001, just after September 11th, that this is, as William Sapphire called it, the big mo, the big momentum.
Something bad happened to us.
That means we can do whatever we want for a while.
Let's go get Saddam.
And they announced from there on, it was an open conspiracy in every sense of that term, that we are just going to lie you into war for the next year and a half.
Sit back and take it.
I'm not so sure.
You and I have a basic disagreement there.
And my disagreement with you would be that I don't know that some of them, or maybe all of them, were deliberately lying about the nature of the intelligence.
What they believed is that they had intelligence from very questionable sources, Ahmad Jalabi and company, that said one thing, whereas the intelligence they were getting from other, well, from the CIA, at least as far as the al-Qaeda connection went, was nonsense.
And I think they just chose to believe it.
Don't forget they had that cockamamie effort that went on under Doug Fyfe at the Office of Special Plans, where they basically sought to discredit the CIA reporting on the connections between Saddam and al-Qaeda, to say the CIA doesn't even know its own intelligence, and here's all of this proof that he's working with al-Qaeda, whereas in fact we know that that was nonsense.
So were they lying?
Let's not forget, the CIA produced this, the U.S. intelligence community, led by the CIA, produced the National Intelligence Estimate in 2002 that said he did have a weapon, he had reconstituted his weapons of mass destruction program, he was trying to reconstitute his nuclear weapons program.
So they were being told that by the CIA and accepting that from the CIA, but were rejecting the CIA's analysis on the fact that there was no connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda.
Well, and also rejecting the conclusion in that same NIE that he would never use chemical weapons on us, unless maybe if we were invaded.
That they judged that there was a very high degree of improbability that he would ever turn his crown jewels, i.e. his weapons of mass destruction, over to an Islamic terrorist group, because they could end up using them against him.
And now, but isn't it true though that at the very waning years, maybe even the last year of the Bush presidency, weren't there two big stories that came out about very high level people in Saddam's government, who were actively talking to the United States in the run up to the war, and were really and very credibly saying, no, really, we don't have anything.
I mean, that's not something that would have just been only the CIA knew that, but didn't tell the White House.
The White House knew about that, right?
Well, you know, you're forcing my tired, addled brain to go back and try to remember.
I'll Google it during the break.
But you can, but here's what I remember.
I remember Vice President Dick Cheney, when they kicked off the whole propaganda move to try and gin up public support for the war, with his speech he made to the veterans of foreign wars in the summer of 2002, where he says something along the lines, we know that they have reconstituted their weapons of mass destruction program because we're being told that by defectors, including Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, Hussein Kamal.
Well, the fact is that I don't know if he was consciously lying, but he was totally misrepresenting the facts because you can, if you want to go on Google now, you can find the transcript of the interview that was done or the interrogation that was done by the then head of the UN weapons inspectors, Hans Blitz, with Hussein Kamal in Jordan after Hussein Kamal defected, in which Hussein Kamal says, we got rid of it all.
And so I don't know what the vice, where the vice president, former vice president got his information from, but it, and I found this.
Well, and you know what, Jonathan?
Look, listen, you're a hard news reporter.
I'm not asking you to read his mind or whatever, but I would point out that he deliberately constructed his sentences there.
I'll have the exact quote.
Oh, I won't disagree with you on that.
Won't disagree with you on that.
Because what he said was actually true, that Hussein Kamal admitted that he kept some stuff after the first Gulf War.
Yeah, exactly.
But it was still all destroyed by December 91.
That's the part of the story he didn't say.
Because Hussein Kamal, in that same interview, gave up the biological weapons program.
Right.
So that's what makes it seem to me pretty obvious that it was a deliberate lie, that he told a very specific half-truth that Matlock would have busted his ass for, you know.
But anyway, I'm sorry, music's playing.
We got to take this break.
When we get back, we're going to talk all about the new torture report.
Not that Dick Cheney has anything to do with that.
With the great Jonathan Landay.
Oh, we're going to find out where they got that info about that so-called terrorist training camp outside of Baghdad in just a minute.
McClatchyDC.com.
Hey y'all, Scott Horton here for WallStreetWindow.com.
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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, Scott Horton Show.
I'm online with Jonathan Landay from McClatchy Newspapers, McClatchyDC.com.
And so McClatchy Newspapers bought Knight Ridder and then they had their web guy do a wonderful thing, which was take every last bit of Landay and most of that includes Warren Strobel and good old, what's his name, the columnist too.
They got all these archives under the Iraq intelligence section and check out the URL McClatchyDC.com slash 128.
That's all you got to do.
McClatchyDC.com slash and the numbers 128.
There you go, 128.
And that is the full archive of from the fall of 2002 on Landay's journalism, talking with rank and file CIA guys, telling him what Cheney says isn't true.
They don't have weapons.
They don't have anything new.
We don't have anything that says what they say is right.
And Doug Fyfe has set up a live factory over in the Pentagon and it's all there, I swear to you.
McClatchyDC.com slash 128.
What could have stopped the war right there, if enough had been paying attention at the time, as if truth could have stopped the war back then.
But anyway, so Landay, he's on the line and that's where you can find that archive there.
But if you have anything more to say about the weapons of mass destruction, I'll let you.
Otherwise, I'd like to switch over now to your latest piece there at McClatchyDC.com, which is about your sources who are reporting to you about the still classified, but soon to be declassified summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee's torture report.
So please tell us the latest there, if you could.
So according to people familiar with this report, it basically sidesteps the issue of the responsibility of the CIA's political masters, i.e. the President of the United States, George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and others, for the abuses that took place in the so-called RDI program, the Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation program, which we know used methods like water boarding and others that most people believe, including the current President of the United States, constituted torture.
And so that whole aspect of the deliberations within the White House, the orders that came out of it, well, we know eventually what order came out of the White House, the authorization to go ahead and do this, but we don't know sort of the deliberations that went on.
We don't know, at least officially, the roles that were played by various actors within the Bush administration.
We don't know, we won't know kind of the back and forth that was going on between the legal beagles at the White House and the Justice Department over what eventually became these Office of Legal Counsel legal opinions that effectively legalized torture.
Yeah, well, and which is just a catastrophe, especially considering how much of that is already open source and how, you know, even I got all the names of the lawyers memorized.
It's easy as pie, all the guys who helped justify all this stuff, not just to the CIA and the White House level, but for the Pentagon guys who also were under instructions, that doesn't matter whether we've signed the Geneva Conventions, if the Taliban hasn't, and if the average civilian resistance fighter in Iraq hasn't, then it doesn't protect them.
So go ahead and do whatever you feel like.
Well, not just that.
I mean, here's the bottom line, is that this was the last official government investigation into this whole sorry chapter of American history.
At least, there's nothing on the books, either pending or in the future, that will go back and examine the role that the top officials of the United States played in this whole thing.
And so, therefore, this was the last opportunity to get on the record from an official body, the roles that were played by these various actors within the White House.
I mean, there's been a lot written on this.
I've done a lot of writing.
You've got some great books out there, like Jane Mayer's The Dark Side and various others.
But those are unofficial accounts.
There's been no official accountability of how any of this transpired within the White House itself.
And so, yes, I mean, there needs to be accountability at the CIA, for sure, because look, no one at the agency and no one at the Pentagon, no one stood up and said, I'm going to refuse to do this because it's against the law.
And I'm going to expose this in the press.
Nobody did that.
So, you know, there needs to be official accountability.
And the CIA certainly needs to be scrutinized for that, which is what is happening in this report.
But it ends up leaving them holding the bag.
You know, being thrown under the bus is kind of like the sacrificial lamb.
And it makes it sound as if the CIA was doing all of this in a vacuum, whereas this program was a covert executive level program.
It could only have been ordered by the president of the United States.
And even if the report goes into that aspect of it, we won't know kind of the process by which it was all arrived at, who was doing what, who was saying what, you know, and that's what we're not going to get.
Yeah.
Well, you know, if there was such a thing as the rule of law around here at all, then it would have been in Nancy Pelosi's impeachment trial of George Bush or hearings in the House and and his impeachment trial in the Senate that would have resolved all of this.
And then, you know, whatever details would be left up to the federal prosecutors after that, because, I mean, it was as clear as day, as you said, from all the unofficial accounts, he certainly illegally decided that it was OK for him to order other people to break the law.
And to the extent that people were murdered and people were tortured quite in violation of the law by the tens of thousands, if you include all the people in Iraq and Afghanistan who were treated without mercy during, you know, that whole era to, you know, like the way it filtered down to the night shift level wasn't explicit instructions necessarily, but it's what everybody's doing, like Tony Lugaranis explained to the front line that we tortured everybody all day long.
That was kind of our orders.
Well, here's when I step back and look at this in the grand scheme of things, there's a couple of things that that occur to me.
The first is that Republican controlled House of Representatives wanted to impeach a president of the United States for his sexual piccadillas, whereas there's been absolute resistance of any kind on the Hill to looking at the question of the illegality of the program that was used to effectively torture detainees held by the United States.
None whatsoever.
And so, on the one hand, yeah, let's indict a president for his sexual piccadillas, let's impeach him for his sexual piccadillas, but when it comes to torture, nah, we're not going to do anything there.
The second thing that occurs to me is that I don't know that this would have occurred, you know, 20, 30 years ago here, because the United States did have congressional committees, bipartisan committees that conducted some pretty intense, thorough, controversial investigations of presidents and the intelligence community, you know, where there was bipartisan agreement to expose this stuff.
I talk about the Church Committee that looked at the CIA's conduct during part of the Cold War.
We had the Watergate Committee under Sam Ervin, where there was bipartisan agreement to investigate the Nixon White House and the break-in at Watergate, as well as some of the other things that were going on, like the CIA opening mail, you know, and listening to phone calls, and the military getting involved in all of that, and there was no doubt that there was going to be a bipartisan agreement that was going to lead to the impeachment of Richard Nixon, and that's why he resigned.
So, fast forward to what we have today, none of that.
Yeah, it's a tragedy, and the precedent set, too, and Cheney and Addington, they really did succeed, especially in having Obama just ratify it all, the idea that, no, really, presidents, as Richard Nixon claimed and was disproven back then, if the president does it, that means it's not illegal, and they really have gotten away with blue-bloody murder, literally, and so, oh, and that's my last question, and we have almost no time here, just a minute, but they claim only two were murdered by the CIA, never mind the military for this part of the thing, but then the other Scott Horton, heroic anti-torture international human rights lawyer and journalist for Harper's Magazine, he says that three more were murdered, probably by CIA employees at Penny Lane, aka Camp No, down there at Guantanamo Bay, and that he thinks that's probably in this Senate torture report, too, and do you know about that?
What do you say?
No, I don't.
Okay, I wish I could find out.
I know you've got a good source or two here, so maybe you could ask around and find out if there are any higher numbers of murdered, because their little pseudo-investigation to see whether they would have an investigation was only on the two murdered, but if there are more than that, then that's, you know, maybe grounds to get another investigation to see whether to have an investigation over there at the Department of Justice for what that's worth.
Well, yeah, it's a good question, Scott.
Unfortunately, I'm not going to be able to pursue it.
I'm leaving for Iraq on a three-week reporting assignment on Monday.
Oh, okay, great.
Well, I hope I can interview you from there, too.
I'll be in your email box.
You know how to get in touch with me.
All right.
Thanks very much, Jonathan.
Appreciate it.
Sure.
Take care.
That's the great Jonathan Landay, everybody.
Thanks for listening.
We'll see you Monday.
Hey, I'm Scott Horton here.
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