11/04/13 – Lawrence Wilkerson – The Scott Horton Show

Why does the U.S. support the tortured dictatorship in Egypt?
Because that's what Israel wants.
Why can't America make peace with Iran?
Because that's not what Israel wants.
And why do we veto every attempt to shut down illegal settlements on the West Bank?
Because it's what Israel wants.
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Our first guest on the show today is formerly an aide to Secretary of State Colin Powell and a colonel in, I think, the U.S. Army.
And now he is a distinguished adjunct professor of government and public policy at William and Mary.
And he also hosts the Wilkerson Report, or I guess is interviewed on what's called the Wilkerson Report, a regular spot on The Real News at therealnews.com.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Larry?
I'm doing fine.
I hope you are, too.
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us today.
And what I want to talk with you about mostly, or at least here first to start, is the talks with Iran and just what you think of them.
We've gone through one round now.
And we got the second round is due to start, I believe, this Thursday in Geneva.
And I would just add one little factoid here before I turn it over to you.
And that would be the warning given by the Supreme Ayatollah Khamenei, I guess yesterday, warning the hardline rightists in Iran that they better not undermine the nuclear talks.
What do you make of that?
I think it's just another indicator that the Iranians are truly serious.
They've been serious before.
Unfortunately, we spurned them when they were.
The most recent time was in my period in the administration in the spring of 2003.
They're deadly serious this time, if I may use that phrase.
And I hope we are, too.
I sometimes long for the kind of draconian measures that might be available to one like George W. Bush, for example, to suppress our own hardliners.
That's not putting too fine a point on it, but there are some people in both political parties, Bob Menendez, for example, in the Democratic Party, head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, very important position, and John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and others in my party, who simply don't want to give the president the kind of maneuver room he needs in order to effect a diplomatic solution to this challenge.
And frankly, I think that's extremely sad, and I hope and pray that it doesn't derail what promises to be the first chance at real, substantive negotiations in a long, long time.
Well, I'm happy to hear I'm not the only one who wants to waterboard Lindsey Graham.
I won't crawl over to the opposition and become as low as them.
I refuse to do that.
I think John McCain was right when he made one of his most brilliant statements when he was referring to his opposition to torture in all guises.
He said, it's not about them.
It's about us.
Yeah, well, we wouldn't want to become like Lindsey Graham and John McCain.
And in fact, you know, John McCain, he claims fame for being anti-torture, but he's really not.
He's the guy that took all of the teeth out of the anti-torture legislation in 2005 and 2006.
Well, there's some truth to that.
I have to say that since I was intimately involved in, along with 35 other general officers, former secretaries of the Navy and so forth, in an attempt to help him to get the armed forces out of the torture business, that I think, I think more or less, we achieved our objective.
What you're referring to, I believe, is more his escape clause, if you will, for the CIA, arguably the most egregious, at the end of the day, the most egregious abusers of both the International Convention and U.S. domestic law.
Well, but they also, they did the rewrite of Appendix M to go ahead and legalize all kinds of sleep deprivation and temperature manipulation and things that had been subject to the ban in the first place.
You mean to the Army Field Manual?
Yeah, that was the slide of hand, even more than taking the CIA thing out, I thought, was saying, yeah, they can only, the Army can only treat people the way it's described in the Field Manual.
Let's rewrite the Field Manual.
Well, if you look at it very, very closely, I think you'll find that you don't have the kind of compilation, the kind of composite that you had with Rumsfeld's December memo, for example, you don't have what Alberto Mora called, put these all together and do them over time, you got torture.
And I hope the armed forces have learned a lesson from this, from my talks with some of the leadership they have.
This is not something the armed forces have any business being involved in, period.
Yeah.
Well, you know, JSOC, according to Jeremy Scahill at The Nation, they help run, with the CIA, they help run a torture prison beneath, a dungeon, I guess, beneath Mogadishu, where people are regularly mistreated.
So I don't know if that's just completely covert and therefore outside the law entirely, or if there's a guideline they're pretending to follow there.
What do you think of that?
Well, this is one of the most dangerous developments that has come out of this so-called never ending war on terror.
And that is the way the CIA, and to a certain extent, JSOC is the command headquarters, but certainly one or two of the SEAL teams and the Delta Force have become more or less symbiotic in their relationship.
And what this does is it puts the military at the cutting edge of what are, according to the 1947 Act and amendments thereto, legal only performed by the CIA.
Covert operations is the common jargon.
It puts them at the leading edge of doing direct action and covert actions.
This is a bad development.
It's a dangerous development because, one, it gets those actions out from on the oversight of the two committees, the HPSC and the HPSC in the House and the Senate, the Oversight Committees for Intelligence.
And two, and more serious, it puts the military into these egregious actions that we all know from the history of the CIA, the CIA is constantly involved in.
Now, we can argue all day long about whether or not a power like the United States that pretends to be a democracy and pretends to answer to the people can have something like the covert side of the CIA and still pretend.
But even if you believe it should, it ought to have some oversight and it ought to have some rules it goes by.
And it shouldn't operate in total secrecy all the time.
That's what they've got now with the military being the cutting edge of the CIA's covert operations.
This is a dangerous marriage.
Well, and of course, the scrutiny level is so much different than during the Bush years.
We've got Jeremy Scahill and then Eli Lake, interestingly enough, reported on another torture prison.
I think this one was up in Puntland or in Somaliland, I think up in Puntland, a separate different he wasn't confirming scale story at a separate story, but along the same lines, Americans helping run this prison where people are being mistreated.
But then that's it right after that crickets.
Well, let's look at the whole ballgame here.
And let me back up for a moment and say, I think these revelations that are coming out and these investigative reporters are going to keep digging, the revelations are going to keep coming.
The more draconian the American government becomes, the more whistleblowers we're going to have.
And that's healthy and that's good.
And it may be the only thing that in the end saves us.
But let me say that one of the things that's happening now, I think, is that with this kind of whistleblower revelation, you're getting government acting in a more transparent and a more sane and sober way.
It's slow and it's difficult.
But once you get this light shining on all these activities, especially those that are completely in secret, I think you're going to have a government that has to be more forthcoming about what it's doing.
If it isn't, if it becomes more draconian, more secretive and more clandestine, then I shudder for our republic.
I mean, we're moving swiftly towards what James Madison would have clearly identified as a constant state of war and creeping tyranny.
Yeah.
All right now.
So along those lines, but back to the Iran talks, is it well, how do you call the score on this?
I mean, do you think that Barack Obama, like on a on a one to 10 scale, how serious is he about seeing this thing through?
And then I guess sort of secondarily to that, is there a factional fight within the American establishment?
Does anybody within the military, within the think tanks, within some business interests, oil versus banking, something, anybody, the arms manufacturers, is anybody deciding that?
You know what?
We would rather go ahead and start warming up relations with the Iranians now.
We're tired of the Cold War.
Or is it just this one issue that maybe they want to get past the nuclear issue?
But they you know what I mean?
Is there a change going on here?
Part of the problem, if not a large part of the problem, is that no one wants to be truthful about what's really going on.
What's really going on is not so much the nuclear issue.
That's just the subsurface or surface strata.
What's really going on underneath subterraneously is a power struggle in the Gulf.
And the power struggle is three pronged in essence.
It has on the one prong Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Cooperation Council, and they want to be the hegemon.
It has on the other prong Israel, which is worried about anybody having any kind of hegemony in that region without Israel's blessing.
The second or third prong, if you will, is Iran.
And they're the natural hegemon in the region by demography, by military characteristics, by national characteristics, by economic and financial, you name it.
Iran, for 26 years, we recognized Iran as the hegemon and let them guard the Gulf for us.
Those 26 years, of course, featured the Shah as our tyrant.
So this battle is going on.
Who's going to be boss in the Gulf?
And the Israelis see a rapprochement between Tehran and Washington as being bad for their interest in that respect, as do the Saudis and the GCC.
So this is a situation that is all about power and power struggles regionally and ultimately globally, rather than about who's going to have a nuke or not.
Frankly, I believe that the Iranians have the attitude that if you won't invade me and you'll promise not to invade me, I'll never build a nuclear weapon.
The only reason I want to build a nuclear weapon, if in fact I do, is because you might invade me and cast your eyes over at North Korea and see why they built nuclear weapons essentially for the same purpose.
So if you look at it from the perspective of this power struggle and you try to examine the challenge contained in dealing with that power struggle, it becomes an even more formidable problem in terms of diplomacy.
Why are the Saudis announcing things like they won't take their seat on the UN Security Council?
Why are they giving every signal that they are backing away from their close relationship with the United States, which frankly I could care less about?
It's about time we backed away a little.
Why are they doing this, though?
Because they are looking at us with respect to Syria, where we didn't drop bombs, with respect to Iran, where we're negotiating.
They're looking at us as leaving the power relationship with them and replacing it with a rapprochement with Iran, with a closer relationship with people in the region whom they don't like.
They're even in a tacit alliance with Israel right now to oppose partial Assad in Syria and ultimately Iran.
So you look at all the little pieces of this struggle in the region and of this geostrategic lock-up or lash-up in the region, and it becomes an incredibly difficult thing for President Obama to achieve what he needs to achieve, which is a win-win situation.
And by that I mean at the end of the negotiations, the Iranians have a little bit of what they want, relief from sanctions principally, and we have a little bit of what we want, which is of course a verifiable nuclear program under the very watchful eye of the IAEA and very, very rigorous inspections for however long we need them.
That's a very winnable situation diplomatically.
But when you start talking about all the other things I've just thrown in there, Assad in Syria, the king and the crown prince in Saudi Arabia, Egypt falling apart on Israel's flank, Israel looking more and more as if it's going to be an apartheid state instead of somehow accommodating a two-state solution, you throw all these other features into it and it becomes an extremely diplomatic road to walk down successfully.
Well now, so my thing about it, and obviously I'm no State Department guy or whatever, I look at it from sort of an oversimplified point of view, but it seems to me like if the State Department guys wanted to do a re-redirection or at least split the difference, you know they fought the whole Iraq war for Iran basically and then they did the redirection back towards Saudi Arabia, like they're following through now with the war back in the rebels, so-called rebels in Syria and all of that.
But if the Likud party, if Netanyahu and the Israeli government's obsession is Hezbollah, I mean if you go back to the clean break in all of this, it's we've got to get the Americans to take out Saddam for us because that'll weaken Iran and Syria, which will weaken Hezbollah, right?
That's their whole thing all along, right?
Well, let me just say where I don't disagree with you, but I'd take it even further.
Netanyahu's government, backed extensively by the Russian emigres into Israel, people like Avigdor Lieberman, their policy is, yes, to get rid of Hezbollah, but you have to look at the strategic objective that that is a policy ingredient of, and the strategic objective is a greater Israel.
It's very clear that that's Netanyahu's strategic objective.
What do I mean by that?
Well, but wait a minute, let me get back to that in a second, because I actually want to hear your whole thing about that, and I heard what you said on The Real News the other day, and I had that in my notes to ask you about, but just as far as their problem with the so-called Shiite arc, it seems like even if Netanyahu can't see it, the Democrats have a great argument that, listen, if we can befriend Iran, then that kind of undoes the oops for empowering them with the Iraq war.
It takes their power out from behind Assad, who needs it to help them, and same for Nasrallah.
So you can build your greater Israel even better if we make friends with Iran, rather than continuing this Cold War, which just pushes every Shiite faction in the entire region into their camp, right?
So I'm trying to think like a good imperialist here.
No, no, you just outlined what used to be Israeli policy.
I mean, that used to be Israeli policy, and it was augmented and aided and abetted by the fact that the Persians are Persians and not Arabs.
So there was a natural affinity between the Jews and the Persians, both being not Arab and being opposed to most Arabs.
So you're right, but that dynamic has changed, and it's changed majorly with two essential factors.
One is the isolation of Iran, and the other is the rise to power of what I will call non-1948 Jews in Israel.
And by that I mean the massive Russian immigration and the fixation on that immigration by the Netanyahu types in Israel, who have latched onto those immigrants and onto the more right-wing parties in Israel for their political power.
They couldn't turn loose if they wanted to.
And it's been very politically opportunistic, but it's also been very politically successful.
Look at Netanyahu.
He's been in power for some time now, and no one is threatening to unseat him.
And it's all because of this unholy alliance between all these different people who want a greater Israel and see the strategy for a greater Israel being to put all the Arab countries and ultimately the Persian country that stands against them in disarray all around them, to shatter them, to leave them with no sovereignty, no real borders, as a matter of fact, so they can never muster armies to challenge the conventional might of Israel.
I agree with you.
I think it is a strategy fraught with potential for disaster.
But they're pursuing it.
Yeah.
Well, and then, I mean, if they're really pursuing greater, like, capital G, greater Israel, then that means they're going to have to push all the Palestinians that live in the West Bank into the Jordan River, into Jordan, and maybe even further than that, into the deserts of western Iraq.
They're on the march.
They're going to the Tigris.
I think Jordan is in their scope.
I think parts of Syria beyond the Golan is in their scope.
I think all of Israel proper, including Gaza and the West Bank, is in their scope.
I think the Sinai is in their scope.
But I do not see this divide and conquer, this dissemble the sovereignty of all these countries, as Henry Kissinger suggested the other day.
I do not see that as a very effective strategy.
What I see it as doing is building a nest of vipers all around Israel.
Yeah, well, Michael Oren, I'm sure you saw where Michael Oren, the outgoing Israeli ambassador, said, to paraphrase, yeah, we prefer al-Qaeda in Syria to Hezbollah.
And the obvious answer to that is, you're a madman.
You know, Hezbollah does what Nasrallah says.
Al-Qaeda, they don't do what anybody says.
They do what they want.
You know, they can't possibly prefer that.
Oren is not, his picture is not on my piano.
I mean, that's my whole frustration with, you know, what a hassle Israel is for American policy is the kind of double whammy is that it's a hassle for Israel, too.
What they're doing is so self-defeating in every way.
You mentioned the thing about the apartheid demographics, where even their own defense minister says that here before too long, they'll have, you know, de facto full annexation.
No longer will it be occupation.
The West Bank and Gaza will just be part of Israel.
And then at that point, they will be the apartheid minority, loading it over the majority.
And then at that point, the entire game of Zionism is just, you know, ticking.
The bomb is ready to go off.
The whole thing's ready to fall apart at a moment's notice from that point.
And then they keep doing it anyway.
And Israelis, maybe the greatest manifestation and proof of this, what you've just described, is Israelis are constantly now voting with their feet.
And what I mean by that is Israelis who harken back to the liberal founding, the 1948 founding, the, you know, remember there were kibbutzes and there were communes and so forth.
These Israelis are moving to Europe.
Many of them have moved to Germany.
Yes, of all places, back to Germany, living in Berlin and surrounding areas.
And very happy, very contented.
They have security.
They have prosperity.
They have a future to look forward to, as do their children and grandchildren.
And they didn't have that in Israel, they felt.
So they left.
You're getting Israelis who are voting with their feet and leaving the state of Israel because they sense what you've just described.
Yeah, well, I know how they feel.
I think I read about cops killing unarmed, innocent people all day, every day.
And I think about moving from here.
I don't like having right-wingers in power everywhere I live either.
But anyway, and yeah, the Democrats are right-wingers to me in that sense, as far as militarism and nationalism and the local police state.
Presidents get power and they never turn it loose.
Hey, by the way, I'm not sure if I've ever asked you this, but back in, what, 10 and a half years ago or so during the whole UN speech and all that, did you guys know that the military, did anybody tell you, did you ask, did you wonder, did you know that the military had asked George Bush for permission to go to Kurdistan to hunt down and kill Zarqawi before the invasion numerous times, maybe even a dozen times, and had been told no, just because they needed the talking point so they could pretend that Zarqawi, who Saddam wanted killed, was the link between Saddam and Osama bin Laden, who he had told, no, I don't want to join your movement, which was a primary subject of your boss's UN speech, of course.
I think there's probably a grain of what you just said that we knew at that time, but it was not nearly as clear as you're describing it now, and I'm not sure it's as clear as you're describing it now, because what the military was complaining about was a general tapestry of not being allowed, and when I say the military, it's mostly special forces, not being allowed to do things like go after bin Laden in Afghanistan, like go after other al-Qaeda leaders in other places at other times, or like go after what we were calling then the poison factory in the Kurdish portion of northern Iraq, where Zarqawi and his colleagues were set up.
It was a general criticism that was registered by the military against the political leadership, and this included as far back as H.W. Bush, and then of course Clinton for eight years, and then George W. Bush, because they would never approve the operations, being most often fearful that if we put boots on the ground, no matter how talented those boots might be, we might wind up with a set of those boots being paraded on a television by the post-country, as it were, and shown as a prisoner of war or worse.
So there never was the courage on the part of civilian leadership to say to the military, yeah, we see what you want to do in that particular episode, that particular incident against that piece of intelligence, but we're not going to approve it.
That was the general drift of things with regard to what people wanted to do against terrorists before 9-11.
Well, it's just that, you know, Kurdistan being friendly, autonomous, American, you know, friendly territory there, if Zarqawi was who he was claimed to be in the speech, then man, he really needed killing before the invasion, because, and then look what happened when he wasn't killed before the invasion up in friendly Kurdistan.
I don't disagree with that.
I don't disagree with that.
I would disagree somewhat with your characterization of that portion where he was.
That's pretty rough territory.
Okay, well, yeah, I mean, Saddam couldn't go there.
America could go there easier than Saddam could go there, right, in Kurdistan before the war?
Some places.
Sulaymaniyah, for example.
But other places up in the mountains, you were taking your life in your hands going up there, whether you were Turk, whether you were Arab, or whether you were even Peshmerga and Kurdish.
There were some tough areas up there, which is why Zarqawi was there.
Yeah, makes sense.
I just, I guess the way the story was reported, it wasn't so much the general criticism.
It was the, I think, Jim Michalczewski reported, but it was reported a lot of other places too.
I was surprised about all the different reports about this, where at least the military's version of it was that they had very specifically begged to go and get him, that they really did foresee how bad it was going to be if Baghdad fell, and then this guy's on the loose out there, and we got to get him before the tanks roll in kind of a thing.
But that might have just been patting themselves on the back, I guess.
Well, it's easy to extract these things from the general milieu, and to say this is a specific example, and it looks like it without the other things attached to it.
I will say this too, though.
Many times when we would sit down with counterterrorism people, military people, and civilian oversight policymakers, let's say, decision makers or advisors there too, the military, particularly Delta, would throw up so many requirements that the civilian's eyes would roll back in the back of their heads.
You'd be sitting there, and a Delta operator would be saying, okay, we're going to do this.
We need to know the lock that's on that door.
We need to know the dimensions of the door.
We need to know the depth of the roof, the material that composes the roof.
You would get into all these intelligence requirements, and people's eyes would be rolling around the table.
Well, if you need these 300 items that will take us six weeks to gather, and we'll be lucky if we get 40% of them at 60% reliability, screw this.
We're not going to authorize this.
You've just convinced us that we shouldn't authorize it.
So oftentimes, the military was its own worst enemy.
Yeah.
Well, and it's funny because you're not the first person who's told stories just exactly along those lines, the specific lock and all of that.
I've heard that before, especially when they talk in terms of attempts or operations set up designed for going and getting bin Laden before September 11th, too.
And you also have to—many people don't understand until—they don't have military experience, so they don't understand even when I try to explain this.
One reason that SEAL Team 6, for example, or Delta today is so good is because they have been at war for 10 years.
They have been doing 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, maybe even 100 operations on the ground a year or more.
And you get really good when you do that.
Well, they hadn't done much of anything back pre-911, so the chances of them succeeding were far less than they would be, for example, today.
Right.
All right.
We got to go.
Thank you very much for your time.
It's good to talk to you again, Larry.
Surely.
Take care.
All right, everybody.
That's Lawrence Wilkerson.
He's at William and Mary and at therealnews.com.
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