11/12/12 – Jeffrey Kaye – The Scott Horton Show

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Our next guest on the show today is Jeffrey K. writesfortruthout.org.
And FireDogLake, you can find him at FireDogLake as well.
This one is called The Forgotten History of David Petraeus.
Indeed.
Welcome back.
How are you doing?
Fine, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
I really appreciate you joining us on the show today.
So here's the thing of mine.
Everyone on TV agrees that David Petraeus is the greatest American hero and general since George Washington.
And we all love him dearly.
And isn't it so sad, like Andrew Mitchell almost started crying, that he accidentally did something wrong and got in trouble for it.
But before that, he was the greatest general ever.
And the greatest figure in contemporary America, for sure.
The greatest American since Mark Twain, at least.
So what do you say about that?
Well, it is quite amazing to see the groupie phenomena that Petraeus himself, of course, helped encourage over the years.
But actually, David Petraeus was one of a group of neocon war criminals who had been in charge of this country's military and involved in its national security apparatus for some time.
And in particular, all of these accolades typically ignore the fact that, as well, he was involved in helping set up what were, in a sense, death squads and terror groups and torture in Iraq while he was head of the Multinational Security Transition Command there, which was, of course, training Iraqi police, military, and commando units.
All right.
Now, I want all that forgotten history.
But first, I want to stay on the ridiculousness of the media that won't report any of this.
My theory is it's because they don't know any of this, because they spend the entire Iraq war years saying, well, you know, it's the good guys versus the terrorists without doing the slightest bit of study, without reading Bob Dreyfuss once to try to figure out who the hell was who over there.
And so all they know is, yeah, Petraeus, he was a general over there, and then he was a general over there some more, and then he got promoted to greatest general ever and won it for us.
But they don't know anything about it at all, do they?
No.
They know very little.
They read the press releases, and they rewrite that, and they report the news, and that's it.
It's astounding, the laziness, the corruption, really, of the United States Press Corps to a large, luckily not complete extent, after I am talking to someone right now who's trying to get information out.
But it boggles my mind.
Of course, just on General Petraeus, on everything from the run-up to the war in Iraq, the lies, the torture, the war in Afghanistan, Petraeus is just one instance, and the lack of curiosity and the follow-through by the press on the true history of David Petraeus and his career is just one example of how awful the U.S. press has been.
All right.
Now, I think he's famous.
He really came to prominence as the leader of the surge, Fred Kagan and the rest of the neocon crew.
People might remember, right, it was after the midterm election in the fall of 2006.
The Democrats won both houses of Congress.
It was seen as a widespread repudiation of the Bush policy, and they had the James Baker commission that recommended wrapping this thing up by 2008, if you can, please.
And Bush decided to double down and go with the surge and put Petraeus in charge.
Actually, I've said too much already, though, because really what I wanted to say was, before we get to that kind of history that begins in, I don't know, January of 2007 or whatever, the part of Petraeus' story that people are more familiar with, I want you to tell us about the couple of years before that and some of what was revealed in the WikiLeaks about his role in the death squads and at least the outsourcing of torture in the Iraq war.
Right.
Well, we don't have a smoking gun that says I order torture or I order Petraeus' signature on anything that says that he wanted death squads.
They, of course, don't work that way.
But, you know, it's pretty simple to put the pieces together.
Now, before Petraeus was the savior for the Bush administration and the surge in Iraq, which, yes, we should get to and realize was really just a public relations stunt that cost at least 1,000 American lives and untold number of Iraqi deaths, way, way back, not long after Abu Ghraib revelations had taken place in 2004, it would appear that the U.S.
And, by the way, at the same time revelations were taking place about the publication of the Ubaydi, the torture memos, were also coming out at that time in the Washington Post.
So some kind of change had to take place where they could hide the torture.
And what they did is they created a policy which WikiLeaks exposed, Fragmentary Order 242, in June of 2004, the same month that David Petraeus was put in charge of the training of all Iraqi security forces from the coalition side.
And this Fragmentary Order 242 stated that if U.S. or coalition forces were to discover instances of abuse of prisoners, torture of prisoners by Iraqi forces, they were to ignore that.
Right, and now this, if I remember right, this led to a confrontation between Donald Rumsfeld and...
Right, right.
I'm trying to remember, it was Tommy Franks at the time, right?
Because Rumsfeld, someone asked at a press conference, and Rumsfeld said that, well, you know, for Iraqi, the Iraqi government's soldiers are torturing people, that's none of our business.
And Franks said, no, I'm sorry, Mr. Secretary, that is not correct.
We are obligated to intervene and not allow that.
And it was right there in front of everybody, and they kind of went back and forth, right?
Yes, I'm sorry I don't remember the exact date of that.
I wish I had that in my head.
But either Franks was not read in, or he was just...
Rumsfeld hadn't realized that the cover story was to be that of course they wouldn't, you know, it was just a lie, in other words.
Yeah, hey, we're on TV, man.
Yeah, Rumsfeld, you know, way back in D.C., we didn't get the telegram perhaps telling him that he should lie, which is of course what the U.S. did all along, including Petraeus himself, of course, who claimed he never found any instances of abuse in detention centers in Iraq.
Oddly enough, a New York Times journalist, or at least he was writing at that time for the New York Times magazine, Peter Moss, was under Petraeus' regime of training of the security forces, which included the setting up of the notorious Wolf Brigade and other Shia-backed terror squads that executed a reign of terror in Iraq at the time, was present when one of Petraeus' primary deputies, a man by the name of James Steele, was in the room with the head of all the police commando units, Admin General Fabbitt, and while they're sitting there interviewing General Fabbitt and James Steele, there's screams from the other room of torture.
James Steele has to get up and go into the other room.
Whatever he said or did, the screams stop, and then they go on with the interview.
Of course, after the court calls.
I'm sorry, Jeff, your phone went a little silly on us right there.
Can you rewind just one thing?
They were in the room, they heard the sounds of torture outside, and this guy Steele had to go out there and shut them up?
Apparently that's what he did, because they shut up, and then he came back in the room to continue the interview.
James Steele, who Petraeus is one of his primary advisors on this, counterinsurgency experts, actually, who was also working with him and the Ministry of the Interior, Iraq's Ministry of the Interior, had some years ago kind of burnished his credentials on this kind of stuff when he was working with special forces units in El Salvador.
And, of course, what Petraeus and the U.S. military in general came to implement in Iraq, which was the use of domestic forces, terror forces, the organization of death squads, mass arrests, terror and torture, came to be known, in fact, as the Salvador option, because that is what the U.S. has done before, and they certainly did that in El Salvador.
In fact, we now know some of the same personnel showed up in Iraq as part of Petraeus' team, but you'd never know this.
That was mostly reported in the British press, although Robert Carey may have reported that.
I think the first time I saw the published term, El Salvador option for Iraq, I believe was a Newsweek story from early 2005, if I have that right.
And the whole theory was that, well, these local Iraqis know who to kill.
We need to decapitate the different Sunni-based militia resistance groups, and so if we hire the Wolf Brigade to do it, they'll know who are the right guys to get for us.
And then the Wolf Brigade being, I guess, the special forces of the Badr Brigade, the Badr Corps of the Supreme Islamic Council that basically became the army.
And then these are the guys who were putting drills through people's eyeballs to death, is how they were so-called cleansing Baghdad of Sunni Arabs.
And then this is where the surge kicks in, right, is that was already winding down, and Petraeus just came in to help finish giving the Sunnis the double-tap in 2007.
Well, a number of things were happening before the surge, but even prior to that, the U.S. Army was already starting to pay off Sunni leaders.
Of course, the Sunnis who had been subjected to this terror regime, starting back in 2004 in their neighborhoods in Baghdad and other cities, Mosul, Samarra, they turned or found themselves turning to their own version of counterterror, so-called al-Qaeda elements or Mujahideen, or they developed their own terror squads, and there was sectarian violence on both sides.
And this is where the al-Qaeda elements, we don't know, it's kind of shadowy exactly who they are.
We're also involved in terror, but the U.S. started giving money to the Sunni elders and the tribal leaders, et cetera, in the different towns to pay them off not to use these guys and to turn them in, and they called this the Sunni awakening, you know, in Anbar province.
But really it was they were paying out tons of money, billions of dollars, were poured into Iraq that no one can account for, that was often used to pay off different elements.
And so that was one thing that was happening.
Another thing was that the Mahdi army, Muqtar al-Badr, who ran that, had decided for his own reasons to call a ceasefire at that time.
So there were a number of elements that was already in place when the surge happened, you know, so that Petraeus had nothing to do with it.
And then he claimed the mantle of some kind of success for this, and then later, of course, tried to implement the same strategy in Afghanistan with disastrous results.
Right.
Yeah, that was the whole thing, right, is because the surge working was really, and I think they admitted this at one point anyway, that this is really all about buying time for the Washington clock, never mind the Iraq clock.
But we just want to somehow convince, you know, relieve the pressure, the political pressure in D.C. to wrap this thing up and figure out a way to stay a little longer.
So the surge worked was really all just a PR stunt for Madison Avenue, rather than anything that was really happening, I don't know, Madison Avenue specifically, but you know what I mean, rather than anything that was really happening on the ground in Iraq.
In fact, before they even started paying off the Sunnis to turn on the al-Qaeda in Iraq fires, they already were turning on them anyway, because they're a bunch of suicide bombing crazies.
And they were conscripting people and cutting people's hands off and outlawing women buying cucumbers at the market, because we all know what that's shaped like and whatever.
And the local Iraqi Sunnis were like, no, we're in charge of this thing, not you.
You're here to help, if anything, and since you're abusing your privileges, your privileges are revoked.
And that was going on.
We were covering that at Antiwar.com from the beginning of 2006, almost a full year, like 10 months or something, before the surge even began in the beginning of 2007, and Petraeus came in and started paying them off.
So the Iraqi Sunnis were already sick and tired of al-Qaeda guys.
They were already marginalizing themselves, and also they'd already pretty much lost Baghdad.
So it was sort of like, hey, let's regroup and not all just die, since we just lost the civil war basically already.
That was the way Patrick Coburn explained it.
The thing had just burnt itself out by then anyway.
Yeah, a lot of it by then, people had already been thousands of murders and decapitated corpses, and war fatigue was setting in.
And the Bush people and the neocons, they wanted to go out looking like winners, right?
Yes, we have a surge, we pour in the troops, it's a big battle, we win.
One remembers way back, what was it, 2003, when Bush went to the battleship and said, you know, mission accomplished.
Well, they wanted to say it again, mission accomplished, Iraq was a good war.
Of course, Iraq was a total war criminal, it was an aggressive war.
Everyone implicated in it, in pushing it at high levels anyway, is a war criminal.
You know, whether it was the international military tribunals in Tokyo after the war, where Tojo was put on, in fact executed.
You know, high military officials, certainly during Nuremberg, high military officials were put on trial for prosecuting an aggressive war, and they were executed, or sent to long, long prison terms.
That, of course, doesn't happen in America.
In America, you know, generals like Petraeus are lauded, as you were saying earlier, as someone really special, and their crimes are covered up, and instead, when they fall, they fall for, you know, some kind of sex scandal.
Yeah, well, and what's funny is, you know, aggressive war in all considered, they don't even face the shame at all.
He's still a hero anyway, right, never mind the current scandal.
They never had to report the truth that they lost.
I mean, they had, they themselves, it wasn't me, they were the ones that made up the benchmarks, where they were going to get all these different groups to compromise and start working together in the parliament, and they were going to pass a pro-American oil law, and they were going to have 56 bases, and be invited to stay in preparation for whatever next war we wanted, and whatever.
And they didn't get any of that.
And the government that they fought for, just like we told them all along, was much better friends with the Iranians next door than with us, and they kicked our asses right out of there.
Now, who's our friend in Iraq?
Al-Qaeda in Iraq, who David Petraeus, at the head of the CIA, I'm sorry, I'm skipping Afghanistan here, Petraeus of the CIA was funneling these guys into Syria to fight against Assad up until last Friday.
Right, right, yes.
Well, I mean, the U.S. has turned to Al-Qaeda or Al-Qaeda predecessors, going back to Jimmy Carter, in fact, and Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1979, when they began funding these types of individuals in Afghanistan to fight, even before, by the way, before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, but to bring down the, at that time, pro-Soviet Afghan regime.
There were no, this would be prior to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
So, you know, and they've certainly used Islamic fundamentalist forces at various times, you know, over the decades.
And so the fact they're doing this now is not surprising.
The American foreign policy is extremely cynical, very much rooted in real politics, and, you know, divide-and-conquer policies.
And so you use what's at hand.
Today you're my enemy, tomorrow you're a freedom fighter.
Right.
Well, and again, there's a lot of stupidity that goes into it, too.
Like, they all believe this guy's hype about the surge working in Iraq, where they're like, let's pretend, give him an extra year in time to do it, and let's pretend that he really did help the Shiite majority win the civil war and kick all the Sunnis out of Baghdad, and that was all to his credit or whatever.
Well, still, there's nothing like that situation waiting to replicate itself in Afghanistan.
Still isn't.
But in Afghanistan, we're fighting for the minority coalition that was on the eve of complete and total defeat when we intervened on their side.
And everybody knows that no matter what surge accomplishes this, that, or the other battle, you know, against the Taliban, that when we leave, the Northern Alliance torturers that we put in power are all going to have to flee, because everyone in Afghanistan hates their guts, and most especially the Pashtuns.
Right, yes, because, you know, a lot of the politics in that area still is sectarian, ethnic, tribal politics, and they don't like, you know, the Pashtun majority, or plurality, anyway, doesn't like being ruled by Tajiks and others from the North.
You know, one thing I wanted to point out here, by the way, is that after Petraeus left, his job is training the police commandos and the torturers in Iraq.
His position was taken by a guy who today is Barack Obama's chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, who took over the same policy of turning people over to be tortured.
You know, in the period of time between 2004-2009, that includes both Petraeus and General Dempsey's stints as being in charge of this multinational security command, almost 200,000 Iraqis were detained in Iraq, right?
Which was actually as much as 2% of the male population.
And the army eventually admitted that 90% plus of them were wholly innocent.
The army said that, not just the Red Cross.
Right, so whether you're innocent or not, you're not supposed to be tortured.
And yet, thousands of these people also were tortured, and the U.S. knew about it, and it's a war crime to turn people over to forces when you know that they will be tortured.
That's a war crime.
In fact, it's a war crime that the U.S. itself signed off on when it signed the U.N. Convention Against Torture back in the very early days.
They signed it under Reagan and ratified it in the very early days of the Clinton administration.
And by the way, this wasn't just something in Iraq.
Petraeus at that time, certainly in 2005, was not in Afghanistan.
But in Afghanistan, also the same policy was put in place, that U.S.
-NATO forces were to begin turning prisoners over to the Afghan National Security Directorate despite the fact they were known to be torturing prisoners.
This caused a lot of scandal among coalition allies like the Canadians, the Dutch, and the British.
But of course, in the U.S. press, you almost never read anything about it.
And this continued up through the Obama administration.
Under the Obama administration, in figures I was able to find, at least in 2010, almost 10,000, at least 9,000, I don't know the exact figure beyond it, but I know that at least it was reported over 9,000 prisoners were returned by the U.S. military and turned over to the torturers in the Iraq prison, even though their own State Department and news accounts were reporting the torture was taking place.
But nobody hardly reported that.
That was a fact I found as a little footnote in a Bureau of Investigative Journalism report.
So it's just astounding.
The crimes just continue.
They continue under the Obama administration.
Petraeus is a particularly egregious example.
And his fall certainly will not upset the Obama administration probably very much after the initial scandal blows over, because he's a leftover of the Bush years.
But, you know, it's hard to know.
Maybe Obama identifies so much at this point with the military goals and worldwide goals of the U.S. military industrial security establishment that this will blow over and Petraeus will be seeing him on Fox News as a commentator.
Oh, yeah.
In the near future.
Oh, yeah, no, there will never be any accountability on TV for who did what.
And by the way, I got bad news for you here.
You know, the Obama administration has, of course, been fighting in court and they just won in the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in a torture case where these guys were American citizens, whistleblowers on a military contractor during the Iraq war, who then, as they tried to escape the country to come home to America in order to blow the whistle, they were captured by the military and tortured.
And the judge just ruled that, hey, you know, Donald Rumsfeld and everyone under him and including the men who did the torturing, they all have complete immunity and after all, it's unfortunate, but torture is part of human nature.
Something like that.
The articles at news.antiwar.com, these men have complete and total immunity and impunity for anyone that they feel like torturing, because they are who they are.
And that's Obama's position and he's winning in court with that position right now.
Yes, he certainly committed himself with his work against whistleblowers in general.
I guess one of the ironies, I believe Marcy Wheeler, who you had on earlier in the show, if she pointed that out, I apologize for repeating it, but, you know, whereas Petraeus just only weeks ago was crowing about the prosecution of John Kiriakou.
Oh, no, we didn't talk about that.
Go ahead about that.
No, no, no, just a piece of irony there that, of course, just to point out the Obama administration's war against whistleblowers and to come to the defense of those who have tortured is...
By the way, there's one other thing I wanted to say about Petraeus.
He also was intimately involved in this case that I did write an article about on a slightly different note.
I didn't mention him, but this was the case of the U.S. resident, Romanian used car salesman Mansour Arbabciar, right?
Right.
Who was recently pled guilty to supposedly an assassination plot against a Saudi Arabian diplomat.
And, of course, Petraeus was reported, and this is in a story I just read today by Robert Perry.
I think it's Consortium News.
I'm not sure where he published it.
You know, noting, but I guess it had been published before, it was Petraeus who was pushing this assassination plot by Iran.
Right.
And I recommend people go read Ray McGovern about that at the time, too.
He wrote about the Petraeus angle big time on that.
And he's also a Consortium News guy.
Yes.
The problem with that plot, of course, despite the fact that Arbabciar has now pleaded guilty and this is going to be sentenced, is that the guy had been examined by some of the top psychologists and psychiatrists in this country.
The guy who actually was in charge of the DSM, for your listeners out there, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual 4 that is used by all the psychiatrists and psychologists in the country, said that Arbabciar had a severe psychiatric disorder.
In fact, he was bipolar and that he was mentally ill and that his testimony and his statements to police while in custody without a personal attorney and his supposed waivers of that were invalid.
And the government went and brought in its own experts, so-called experts, including a guy who had done a hit piece on the Amtrak case.
And also one of the top DIA, CIA, it's hard to know, psychologists, whoever she is, Susan Brandon, who was actually covertly researching this case, who was watching the entire interrogation of Arbabciar by closed circuit TV, submitted a report to the court that was then sealed.
No one has seen this.
This supposedly, within days, helped lead to the case being shut down and Arbabciar pleading guilty.
We don't know what that was about.
All we can say is that Atreus was not alone in some kind of strange covert behind-the-scenes workings along with DOJ and the Justice Fund, maneuvering towards war with their own.
I keep mentioning all this.
These are very dangerous individuals, and I too am not sorry to see Atreus go, but I am sorry because he is a dangerous man.
But I'm sorry still, though, that your show, of course, accepted, and some other commentators and writers that for the vast majority of Americans who listen to the mainstream media will have no idea of the kind of crimes that are being done in their name and the kind of people who are running the U.S. military.
It's really a shame.
Yeah, you're certainly right about that.
I don't know.
It's really just like anything else.
If anybody's ever been interviewed for an article about their local bake sale or anything, you know that reporters get it wrong.
If you ever met a reporter, they might have even impressed you as someone who was really ambitious but not necessarily that well-versed on what the hell's going on in the world.
I mean, come on.
Why should they be right?
Why should anybody give them the benefit of the doubt?
Why should anyone think that a general is, you know, perfectly clean at, oh, it's at that one time that, you know, the human heart, what are you going to do?
That kind of thing.
But other than that, this is the most exemplary individual in America.
I just hate to think that that myth will stand.
I've got to do my little part to chip at it, you know, whatever I can.
Right.
There's one more thing, by the way, we didn't touch on, which is, at least according to The Washington Post, almost the entire analyst side, intelligence side of the CIA has just been turned into a drone targeting system.
And, you know, this guy wants to do nothing but add more and more and more drones.
And I don't know if you saw this, but at the American Conservative blog today, Phil Giraldi is saying there's rumors.
He's saying it's just speculation.
But there are rumors going around that it was guys in the CIA that helped push him out the door because they don't like him, despite what you might have heard.
They don't like him and they don't like the way he's militarizing the whole place.
And he says something like they just, yeah, it's pro forma to not like a former military guy coming to run their agency.
You know, they just don't like that sort of thing.
They never did take too kindly to him.
So I guess we'll see how that angle plays out.
He calls it a CIA coup.
Right?
Question mark.
Right?
Not for sure.
Well, it is true that I'm not sure we really know.
I know Marcy's on this and other people trying to figure out how this all came about.
And a narrative is forming around these emails to, you know, another woman.
It went to the FBI.
But actually the Daily Mail reported in the U.K. that it was another intelligence, American intelligence agency that brought this problem or this issue to the head of, to the FBI rather.
And, you know, I don't know if that's true.
And I don't know.
It's possible that a clique within the CIA perhaps utilizing counterintelligence functions to protect its own agency discovered this and got the ammo on which to bring down Petraeus.
I don't know.
Jamali writes here he's seen it happen before from inside the agency where the staff of the place decided they didn't like the new guy and they succeeded in getting rid of him.
Well, they did that to John Deutch some years ago.
That's one of them that he cites.
And then Max Hugel back in 1981 was going to be the director of operations under Casey.
And they bucked apparently and it didn't work.
Yeah.
It's, you know, behind the public persona or image of the CIA and the military as well, these institutions are really wracked by clique infighting.
But it's not that I think it would be a mistake to think that behind some kind of principled politics or principled positions such as drone killings are wrong, you know, we're going to bring down Petraeus.
No, it's right there in Federalist No.
10.
The best you can hope for under a system of government like this is that ambition can be made to check ambition and that all these guys will fight among each other for their own personal gain so much that the rest of us will be able to hopefully skate by unnoticed.
Yes, that's a great quote, Scott.
That's a great quote.
Yeah, that really expresses what's going on here.
What I'd like to see, and I'm glad that you're doing this show, is because we want to look beyond this kind of circus.
It's put out there as political discussion in the mainstream press about, you know, oh, who said what, oh, how many women, how many emails, did you love her, where did they have sex, under the desk, all this kind of shit.
Oh, pardon me.
No, go ahead, it's fine.
And get to the underlying issues.
Why should that be more important than the fact that thousands of people were tortured under a program that was implemented by David Petraeus?
Why is that never mentioned?
Spencer Ackerman put out a huge mea culpa article at WIRED saying how he was duped by Petraeus.
You know, it was kind of nice that at least somebody in the press took back and realized that he had allowed himself to become too close to his material.
But never in that article is there really a discussion of Petraeus' war crimes.
And in the end, he still takes on the, you know, kind of, oh, what a shame that a great man was brought down this way kind of, you know.
So the idol had clay feet, but we shouldn't criticize him too much.
He did do good things too kind of attitude.
Totally not a word from Spencer, who also used to write for Fire Dog Lake, but now is over at WIRED.
And, of course, he was at the Washington Independent.
I'm sorry.
But anyway, not a word from him about Argo 242, about Petraeus' role in helping organize the Wolf Brigade, et cetera.
Nothing.
So this is the way of the world now.
And it doesn't appear to be getting better in terms of the fight, the political fight in this country.
Apparently this also means taking on the mainstream media.
I hate to say.
Well, yeah, see, and you're killing me because when you said, yeah, we'll see him soon on Fox.
And, boy, I just have too visual and imagination for that.
Of course we will.
Of course you're absolutely right.
And we'll be stuck with him forever, right?
The guy's still only, what, 60?
So forever we're going to still have to deal with these guys.
And, you know, like only the good die young and the evil live forever.
He won't be off TV until he's older than Kissinger or something, this guy.
Or Oliver North is really a key example of a guy who, you know, did America's dirty work for it and got caught.
Of course, Petraeus really wasn't caught for this in the sense of there being Senate hearings.
You know, when he was up to be, as I point out in my story, The Forgotten History of David Petraeus, voted on as CIA director, the vote was 94 to nothing.
94, not one person raised the kind of issues that we've talked about here today.
That's amazing.
That is the sign.
I mean, when the same kind of thing would happen in Stalinist Russia or today, you know, Politburo in China, you know, the U.S. does apeshit, you know, talking about how there's no democracy.
But really, if you look in the mirror here in this own country, you see that, in fact, the same kind of stuff happens.
And no one, by the way, has ever.
The same thing happened when Martin was ratified as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Not a word about what had happened in Iraq with him, nothing.
Right.
And when I dare write something about it myself, I had e-mails back from some military types who claimed to be critics within the military, you know, trying to defend Dempster and trying to get me to be quiet about this kind of stuff.
So, you know, it really is.
I mean, no harsh pressure was put on me.
I don't want to put that out there.
But definitely there was some pushback about even any critique, no matter how remote, about, you know, the people in power now.
Well, maybe instead of the dean of Princeton or whatever, he should go and open up a firm on Madison Avenue.
But, you know, your repeated use of the term shit reminds me to make sure and take a moment to personally attack this son of a bitch's character because he doesn't have much of one at all.
Obviously, here he is stabbing his wife in the back right in front of everybody and maybe with two chicks.
I guess we'll see how that worked out.
But the thing I wanted to point out was just what a craven suck-up he was, as revealed by this accidental e-mail exchange.
There's an anti-Israel activist named James Morris who people might remember.
Petraeus went to give some testimony.
Part of his written testimony, I don't know if he wrote it or his staff wrote it or whatever, but it said, you know, Israel and their perpetual occupation and abuse of the Palestinians is hurting us and it's making our interests in the Middle East harder to deal with, etc., like that.
And then so James Morris wrote an e-mail to Petraeus saying, hey, congratulations for finally telling the truth about that, you know, kind of snarky way, I guess.
And Petraeus responded by sending a link to a Max Boot article saying, don't be mad at Petraeus, at Commentary Magazine, by the way.
Don't be mad at Petraeus.
He didn't mean that.
He didn't write that and he didn't say it.
It was only in the written thing and he's okay and don't be mad at him, everybody.
But what he didn't realize was he accidentally forwarded on his e-mail exchange with Max Boot, which all had him sucking up in the most craven way to Max Boot, who, if people don't know, he's a weekly standard guy, a neo, you know, one of the, I guess the head neocon at the Council on Foreign Relations now.
And he's saying, please don't be mad at me.
Please, Max Boot, tell everybody, not the Israel lobby and the neoconservatives, please don't be mad at me for saying that.
I didn't mean it.
Someone else wrote it and little cute smiley faces and everything.
It's the most contemptible thing and people can read about that at theamericanconservative.com today as well.
Yes, yes, and Petraeus definitely tried to fall, I believe, on that whole, oh, I didn't really say this, you know.
Oh, and I see, I ruined, I spaced out, Jeffrey, and I ruined my whole joke, was your use of the word shit, reminded me, first of all, of Gareth Porter's reporting about Patrick Lange, a former CIA guy, said that General, or pardon me, Admiral Fallon, who was the head of CENTCOM when Petraeus was running Iraq, called him an ass-kissing little chicken shit, the kind of guy that David Hackworth would have called a perfumed prince, a political general who never got his hands dirty himself in his whole life but knows just how to suck up to a Democrat, that kind of thing.
And then on top of that, you have the Kraven sucking up to Max Boot.
That's what I meant to say, but I screwed it all up, sorry.
No, that's fine.
By the way, Petraeus obviously had his enemies within the Pentagon as well, and it's not without possibility, for those who are looking at such things, to wonder whether or not the intelligence agency, as the UK press put it, that sent this to the FBI, didn't originate within the Pentagon itself, say the DIA, or the NSA, the NSA who scoops up every single email that's sent by anybody, and maybe he has some enemies over there.
It's hard to say.
It's hard to say.
To really peek into the deep heart, the dark heart, really, of American politics is to look at some of the most sordid ways of interacting that you could possibly imagine.
And so I don't know that we'll ever know the truth about Petraeus, in terms of what brought him down now.
Was it the people who hated him for being a chicken shit?
I can tell you this, though.
It was not.
Somebody who had a principled position that the kind of war crimes this guy was involved in meant that he should be brought down.
In fact, people who are very well aware of the kind of crimes he did, such as Dianne Feinstein, who's the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said she felt really sorry that Obama had accepted his resignation.
Well, he should have been made to stay on.
So these are the kind of people who are running.
This is the Democrats.
These are the kind of people who are running, politically, our society.
It's really quite frightening when you think about it, because they have a massive amount of money and weaponry, and they can pretty much do whatever they want, with the only limitation being, of course, reality.
And that's what they found in Iraq, where they essentially lost the war in Iraq, or at least were stalemated, might be a more proper way to put it, and had to withdraw, as you were pointing out, without winning all their objectives, or many of their objectives.
So the story is not over in the Middle East yet, by any means.
Obviously now they've switched to trying to destabilize Syria and clean up the mess they made in Libya.
Well, I'm sure that'll work just fine.
All we need to do is surge on in there, and whoever's running the CIA next, they'll do a brilliant job of picking out who are the good guys to arm and who are the bad guys not to, and it'll be great, just like all the rest of them.
Right, right, exactly.
In many ways, the rise of al-Qaeda was a blowback from their massive support to an arming of Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, really, in Afghanistan, to fight, and of course they labeled them freedom fighters then.
Then later to turn them into the people to replace the dark empire of Ronald Reagan, the evil empire of Ronald Reagan, to now be the cause for which America's turning itself into bankruptcy to carry a bloated military and CIA and intelligence apparatus.
I don't know how many intelligence agents we've got now.
13, 14?
But still, only in Afghanistan and Yemen and Somalia, because in Libya and Syria they're our friends.
In fact, and people can just do the Googling too, there are Afghan fighters who've said, you know what, we'd rather fight on the side of the Americans in Syria than against them in Afghanistan, and so they're going to Syria.
Our enemies in Afghanistan are leaving and going to Syria to fight on our side against the Ba'athists.
That's what's going on there right now.
Well, for the Syrian people, for the Afghanis, the sad truth is that their leaders like this, the al-Qaeda types or others, are just as cynical and as prone to political maneuvering for their own gain as anyone else.
The only difference between them and the U.S. is that they don't have a world empire, and they don't have nuclear weapons.
But if they did, they would operate just like the U.S.
They're just as cynical.
They're not really there to help people.
You can see it's not like the Taliban is an enlightened alternative to the United States.
It's a very sad, sad, extremely sad fact that there's almost no one over there for these people.
And the U.S., you know, all we can do over here is point out the role of the U.S. in making this all worse, far worse than it would have been otherwise.
And it, of course, muddies the water so that whatever progressive forces could come to the fore in countries like Syria or Afghanistan are neutralized by the fact you have imperialist intervention against those countries.
And they always make sure, by the way, that the first groups to be neutralized are on the left.
Or even anybody with glasses, you know, or anybody who not only read a book but was considering writing one, something like that.
That's who the CIA gave a list of all the literate to Saddam Hussein to kill back in the days.
That's right, yes.
Back in the 60s.
And they were certainly applauded if, in fact, they didn't assist on some level when Hussein rounded up all the members of the Soviet-allied Iraqi Communist Party and jailed or executed them all.
Which is why they got along so well with Pol Pot, was because they're just like him.
Yeah.
Yes, exactly.
Right.
So, you know, they have, well, their primary goal is always eliminate the left, destroy the secular types, you know, like Mosaddegh, destroy the secular nationalists.
And so they know that, well, they can cut a deal just as they have with al-Sadr.
They can cut a deal with these other types, too, and that's what they do.
And the others, they eliminate.
All right, everybody, that's Jeffrey Kaye.
You can find what he writes at truthout.org and at FireDogLake, where the latest is The Forgotten History of David Petraeus.
Thanks so much for writing this and all your great work, Jeff, and your time on the show.
And thanks to you, and the same for all your great work, Scott.
Appreciate it.of American national policy.
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