Hey y'all, Scott Horton here inviting you to check out WallStreetWindow.com.
It's a financial blog written by former hedge fund manager Mike Swanson, who's investing in commodities, mining stocks, and European markets.
WallStreetWindow is unique in that Mike shows people what he's really investing in and updates you when he buys or sells in his main account.
Mike thinks his positions are going to go up because of all the money the Federal Reserve is printing to finance the deficit.
See what happens at WallStreetWindow.com.
And Mike's got a great new book coming out, so also keep your eye on writermichelswanson.com for more details.
All right, y'all, introducing Jonathan Landay, reporter for McClatchy Newspapers, formerly with Knight Ridder.
Welcome back to the show, Jonathan.
How are you doing?
I'm fine.
Thanks for having me.
Well, you're welcome.
Very happy to have you here.
Appreciate you joining us today.
And now, whenever I introduce you, usually we're talking about Pakistan or whatever when I interview you on the show, but when I introduce you, I always like to remind people that you get credit for being one of the mainstream reporters, high-level stature, big newspaper chain reporters who got it right.
And unfortunately, they weren't publishing what you were writing in Washington, D.C. at the time, I guess.
But you, and particularly with your partner, Warren P. Strobel, you guys broke the story of not just the discrepancy between what the leaders of the government were saying and what the mid-level CIA officers were saying about Iraq in 2002, but also you broke the story on what was called the Office of Special Plans, and I think your first article on it, the Office of Special Projects, you called it, based on your sources, being run by Doug Feith in the Pentagon.
And if I remember correctly, we could start here.
Was it the backlash from Cheney's Veterans of Foreign Wars speech in August that really kicked off your reporting here, or were you guys already good on this all summer long?
No, we were good on it beginning a couple of days after 9-11, when Warren did a story, I think it was a couple of days after, where Warren did a story on how the administration, the Bush administration, was inexplicably trying to link 9-11 to Saddam Hussein, which to us seemed absolutely illogical and silly because here was a secular dictator who was the target of Islamic extremists, allegedly in league with the leading Sunni Muslim extremist, Osama bin Laden, and that just didn't sound right to us.
And that's kind of what got us going.
Because you guys already have been covering this beat for a long time.
You've been talking to these guys, and you knew the difference between the guy with the olive green and the mustache and the guy with the beard and the robes over 3,000 miles to the east of there.
Indeed.
In fact, Warren had done a couple of assignments in Baghdad, so he was pretty familiar with Saddam Hussein.
I'd been covering Islamic extremism for a very long time, and our boss at the time, John Walcott, was a veteran of Middle Eastern coverage.
And to all three of us, this just sounded absolutely ridiculous.
Unfortunately, it's where the Bush administration took the country.
And now, I guess the most recent or the first article that I was aware of was the reaction from the veterans of foreign wars.
And I think you could probably encapsulate a lot of y'all's work from the summer and fall of 2002, especially as the analysts sure don't agree with what the politicians are saying the analysts say, right?
That's correct.
And there was stuff in the open sources that could be used to show that, and that we did.
But the idea—I mean, yes, Cheney's speech to the veterans of foreign war was a turning point in all of this, in that there was so much BS in what he had to say that it was astounding.
And in particular, one of the things he said that stands out in my mind—well, there were a couple of things.
He said that there's no doubt that Saddam Hussein has reconstituted his nuclear weapons program, and some of us believe he'll have a nuclear weapon soon, something along those lines.
So I made a couple phone calls, and one of them resulted in someone who followed the issue very closely for the United States government saying to me, the vice president is lying.
That was one of the bigger lies that he told in that speech.
Another was where he said, how do we know this?
Well, we've been told by defectors, including Saddam Hussein's brother-in-law.
Well, his brother-in-law was a very, very senior guy who had, in fact, been deeply involved in overseeing the WMD program that had existed before the Gulf War and that the UN inspectors did a pretty good job in destroying—rooting out and destroying.
Well, anybody who bothered could go on the Internet and find the text or the transcript, I should say, of Hussein Kamal's first interview with Rolf Akeas, who was the head of the UN inspectors, in which Hussein Kamal said exactly the opposite of what Vice President Cheney said he said.
In this, if anybody had bothered to look, Hussein Kamal says, we got rid of it all.
Now, one could ask the question, well, here's a top-ranking Iraqi defector who wants to save his skin.
He might be lying, but the point is, if you know anything about the way defectors operate, they try and make themselves as valuable as possible by stringing along the people that are interrogating them in return for trying to get the best possible treatment.
And yet here is a top-ranking Iraqi who actually, in his very first interview, blurts out, we got rid of it all.
That kind of eliminated any value he might have had to other people in trying to save his own skin.
But here he was saying this on the record in the very first interview.
So to me, that indicated that he was telling the truth.
And in fact, we know that he was telling the truth, because later in the same interview, he disclosed to the U.N. inspectors the location of all the records of what they had expected was a biological weapons program, but had never actually found the materials.
Well, it turns out that it was all stashed on a chicken farm that was owned by Hussein Kamal.
And they, in fact, found all of the materials or most of the records that he had stashed on the biological weapons program on his chicken farm.
So those were two of the more notable bloopers that the vice president dropped in that speech.
All right, Scott Horton, I'm talking with Jonathan Landay.
And here's what you do.
You Google buying the war, the Bill Moyers special, and you can watch that documentary.
It talks about how Landay, and especially with his partner Strobel, got it right.
And you can also, you have to click around a little bit, but you can find the citations, the article library.
It's called Under Buying the War.
And there are links, and they still work.
They redirect to McClatchy, D.C., and they still work.
And there's a good dozen articles here from 2001, 2002, and 2003 of just straight journalism telling you this weapons of mass destruction thing is not true.
And, you know, originally our archive was about 80 stories long, over a period of about four or five years.
Is there one page where we can find the links to all of that Iraq stuff?
You know, we don't do a very good job displaying that stuff on our website.
But I think if you were to go to McClatchy, D.C., dot com, www.
McClatchy, D.C., dot com, and then go to the search function and put in Iraq intelligence, you'll come up with much of the archive.
Okay, great.
All right, and now, so what was the Office of Special Projects, as you wrote it, called it in 2002?
Or the, as it was actually called once we got it straight, the Office of Special Plans.
This was an office that was set up by then Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feif, specifically to oversee and orchestrate the run-up policy to the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, run by a man by the name of William Lootie, who had been sent over by the White House, told people in the Pentagon, I'm here to oversee the war against Saddam when he first got to the Pentagon, at least, it's my understanding.
And this is where kind of what I like to call, we like to call the alternative intelligence system that the Bush administration set up to circumvent the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community in terms of ginning up a case for war.
And we know the outcome.
They went back and they got their own quote-unquote analysts to go back and look at the material that the CIA had accumulated over a long period of time.
And they came to exactly the opposite conclusion, of course, that the CIA had come up with.
And that was that, oh, there's all this intelligence that shows that Saddam Hussein indeed has continued to acquire weapons of mass destruction and maintain these alleged links to Al-Qaeda.
A finding that he was escortiated, that this office was escortiated for by a Senate committee report, which talked about their inappropriate role in handling intelligence.
It's an office that should never have existed.
And now the other thing, of course, that they did was that they were also recipients of the garbage that was being fed to the United States by the Iraqi National Congress, the opposition group that was led at the time by Ahmad Chalabi.
That material that they fed into the Bush administration went into the Office of Special Plans to Mr. Luti and went directly into the Vice President's office to his then-National Security Advisor, John Hanna.
And this material also, unbeknownst to those gentlemen, was also being given by the Iraqi National Congress to the New York Times.
And the Times of London, the Sunday Times of London, and a couple of other publications.
I think also PBS's Frontline was being given this stuff.
And this was material from, quote-unquote, alleged – from, quote-unquote, Iraqi defectors who allegedly had first-hand knowledge of the WMD programs and the terrorism training and links with Al-Qaeda.
And so this was self-reinforcing garbage in that the administration would see it in the New York Times or the New York Times would hear it, what they were being told by the INC.
They would get the same stuff from the administration, not knowing that it was all coming from the same garbage pile.
And so in the Defense Department, the recipients of this material were the Office of Special Plans.
Well, and in many cases they did know, right?
But they just went right ahead.
I don't know.
You know, that's something that I'm not sure about.
That's never been – I've never answered to myself satisfactorily.
Did they know that this was material or were they – that this was garbage?
Or were they leaning so far over in their desire to get rid of or to come up with, gin up, a case for convincing the American public that we had to go to war in Iraq that they just accepted this stuff blindly?
I don't know.
That's never been fully explained.
There are a lot of people who believe they did this deliberately, that they knew this stuff was garbage and yet they put it out deliberately.
That, by the way, is a crime.
That's a federal offense.
You are not allowed to deliberately – it's a federal offense to deliberately mislead the Congress and the public of the United States to do it deliberately.
And, of course, the successor administration has never bothered to try and poke further into or to try and get some accountability.
There's been no accountability in any of this.
Many of the same characters who were involved in taking this country into this disastrous debacle of a war are very much retaining their credibility and very much present today.
You can see a lot of them on CNN as expert commentators or in newspapers and op-eds.
These men have not really paid the price, men and women, because Condoleezza Rice was part of this.
None of them have paid the price in terms of their lost credibility.
And the amazing thing is that some of these people, like Stephen Hadley, the former national security advisor, and other people who were involved in this, continue to blame bad intelligence for the decision to take this country into that disastrous war.
And that's just complete nonsense.
The fact is that when the CIA erroneously came up with these findings that Saddam had maintained his weapons of mass destruction, reconstituted his weapons of mass destruction program, there were dissents from within the intelligence community that these people ignored, particularly on the nuclear account.
But beyond that, the CIA was right in one very important regard, and that was that they kept repeatedly telling the administration that there is no connection, there is no cooperation between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda.
And they were right about that, but that was an inconvenient finding for the administration, which they summarily rejected.
And this is what's known as cherry-picking the intelligence.
So they took the stuff they liked from the CIA, oh, he's got weapons of mass destruction because it supported their case for war, but rejected the findings of the CIA that undermine their case for war.
So the idea that today that they're still blaming bad intelligence is complete nonsense.
All right, now, of course, Cheney and Scooter Libby, his chief of staff, made at least 14 visits, right, to CIA to ask, so what have you got for me in 2002?
And you reported that at the time, correct?
Yes.
And that was a big deal, right, to have the vice president tell an analyst, hey.
It's very unusual for a senior policymaker, particularly the vice president of the United States, to go over to an intelligence agency for any length of time and question the raw intelligence that's being analyzed by intelligence analysts.
I mean, if you worked for Citibank and you're a mid-level economist, and the CEO or CFO of Citibank, of this huge corporation, is standing over at your desk questioning your analysis, I mean, I think that's a little bit intimidating.
There's no doubt that that's what was happening inside the U.S. intelligence community when these gentlemen would show up and question analysts about what they were telling them.
I mean, that has a deleterious effect on an analyst who has a job and a family and they want to keep their job and they want to feed their family.
I mean, the question is, do you continue to disagree with the vice president of the United States, or do you fall in line?
Right.
And now, Julian Borger – or Borger, I'm not sure how to pronounce it.
Borger.
Julian Borger.
Borger.
Okay.
Finally, I know for a fact it's a soft G.
Yep.
He's a good friend.
Okay, good.
Well, now, he wrote a piece called The Spies Who Push for War, which he's not talking about real spies.
He's talking about the Office of Special Plans.
And Robert Dreyfuss has a piece called Agents of Influence, both of which indicate that Ariel Sharon had set up his own little Office of Special Plans.
In fact, I think Borger says that he had the same kind of problem with Mossad, that they wouldn't lie good enough.
And so he was helping to manufacture intelligence in English and funnel it straight into this very same stovepipe through the OSP, probably through Hadley and into the vice president's office, that kind of thing.
And I was wondering if you could verify their reporting on that.
Yeah, we did a similar story where we talked about visits that they would have from top-level Israeli military and civilian officials to the Office of Special Plans.
But they'd go in on the weekends so that there was less people to notice their presence.
And we know that in one instance, they went in during what's known as a security alert, where there's extra attention paid to security in the Pentagon, and where they're kind of doing security audits.
And these guys were not required to sign in, to sign the sign-in logs, despite the fact that there was a security audit going on.
So yes, there was enormous interaction between the Office of Special Plans.
There was a gentleman in the Office of Special Plans who was eventually indicted for allegedly giving top-secret information to two staffers of AIPAC, the American-Israel Public Affairs Council, the Israeli lobby group here in Washington, D.C.
There was a considerable interaction between the Office of Special Plans and Israeli intelligence and military people from Sharon.
But the question is whether or not all of Sharon's people went along with this.
We don't know that.
But we do know that there was a considerable amount of interaction.
All right.
And now, I'm sorry I don't have the piece in front of me, but I believe that you were the one who did the final citation, the real footnote on the work of the torture and the connection between torture and the lies that led to war.
Everyone always argues about whether it works or whether it doesn't.
But according to your journalism, Jonathan, if I understand it correctly, it does work if you're trying to get an al-Qaeda guy to say that he's friends with Saddam, even if he's not.
In fact, I wrote a story in 2009.
The story basically said somewhere along the lines that the interrogators of detainees were under enormous pressure from Washington to confirm the information that they were getting from the Iraqi National Congress, which all turned out to be BS.
And so, yes, I mean, here you had a situation where an administration is trying to confirm garbage, is using what a lot of experts consider to be torture to get the garbage confirmed.
And if you're under – in the case we know of Abu Zubaydah, he gave them what they were looking for, only it was all wrong, and he was simply trying to get them to stop waterboarding him.
Well, and this guy Sheik al-Libi was all important, too, wasn't he?
Let me get – you know, you're testing my memory, and I think is he not the guy who eventually committed suicide in Libya?
Yeah, so they said, yeah.
Yeah, I'm not sure what happened with his interrogation.
It was either him or Abu Zubaydah, and I don't remember which one, who gave them this information that they had received, that al-Qaeda had received chemical weapons training from Iraqi intelligence.
And, of course, they gave that.
It came out later.
They gave that information simply to stop the torture.
Right.
Yeah, I think that was al-Libi, and I think he was the same guy that, you know, they had, I guess, satellite pictures or whatever of a fuselage at a military police training.
Yeah, they had pictures of an airplane fuselage at a military installation south of Baghdad, the name of which escapes me for the time being, where they claimed that it was used for training terrorists to hijack aircraft.
And I think we did the story saying, no, absolutely not.
That's not true.
They used that fuselage to train their own commandos in stopping the hijacking of aircraft by terrorists.
This was not a terrorist training.
At Salman Pak, it was a place called Salman Pak, which, by the way, was also allegedly, according to I believe it was an article in the New York Times, the location of a secret WMD facility, which, of course, turned out not to be there.
And now, did you and or Strobel write about CIA and other expert predictions about just what a disaster the war would be?
Because if people want to remember back to 2002, there really was this attitude that we'll worry about after, after.
Right now, we're in a real hurry.
Just before anyone calls our bluff, we've got to get this thing started.
I think that there was a story that we did at one point that talked about a stack of documents, 18 inches high, analyses from the intelligence community, a warning about the potential disastrous consequences of a U.S. invasion of Iraq that, of course, these guys didn't read.
And had they done so, they would have rejected out of hand anyway, because let's not forget what they were telling the American people.
They were telling the American people that the road to a Palestinian-Israeli settlement and peace in the Middle East leads through Baghdad.
Well, 10 years later, that part of the world is in greater turmoil than it was when the Americans invaded Iraq.
Well, let me ask you this, too.
The CIA and the DIA reported, or at least they did a report, that said that they concluded that Ahmed Chalabi actually was working for Iran all along.
Not only had he leaked the fact that America had broken the Iranian codes and things like that, but maybe they had sent him to lie us into war.
And that would include these new revelations about Chalabi promising Dick Cheney all the oil in David Frum's new book, but then also, I think it's his new book, but then also all his promises to the Israelis, I mean, to the neocons, Freudian slip, that they would become, that the new Shiite democratic Iraq would become best allies with Israel and build an oil and water pipeline to Haifa, and that they would then put all this pressure on Iran to reform and become more like them, etc.
Yeah, I mean, we, I don't know that they ever concluded that he was working on behalf of the Iranians, vis-a-vis getting the United States to invade Iraq.
But there was definitely, the United States definitely came up with information that he and his security chief had passed American intelligence, had passed to the Iranians that the Americans had broken their ciphers, had broken their communications codes, and there was a raid on Chalabi's headquarters at the Mansour Hunt Club after he got there following the invasion, where, that was connected to this alleged leak by him and his security chief of this information to the Iranians.
They went there to arrest his security chief, who in fact had already fled, where?
To Tehran, where I believe he spent two years before going back, or a considerable amount of time anyway, before going back to Baghdad.
This was the same guy who was intricately involved in the passing of the information from the quote-unquote defectors, the Iraqi defectors, to Western publications like the New York Times, the Sunday Times of London, and these guys were all bogus, every single one of them.
So yes, I mean, it's always been our operational theory that he, I don't think you could call him an Iranian, quote-unquote Iranian agent, I think Mr. Chalabi was probably on everyone's payroll, was taking money from whoever was willing to pay him.
I mean, the United States funded his headquarters in Tehran.
I mean, American taxpayers funded an INC office in Tehran.
You know, what more do you need?
Now, you know what, there's so many different ways this thing can go, and it's almost over, we're almost out of time, but there's that famous clip now of Dick Cheney from 1994, under questioning, basically stating the Bush senior case for not going all the way to Baghdad.
The Iranians will run off with the south, the Syrians will run off with the Sunni areas, or at least that will cause major problems there.
We'd have to occupy Iraq for years and years, and it would be a total disaster.
Why would you do that?
Who convinced him otherwise from that?
Was it Chalabi that convinced him otherwise from that?
Because he stated the case against going to Baghdad as well as anyone could have.
I think Chalabi played a major role, because Chalabi was telling anyone who wanted to listen, or his underlings were telling anyone who wanted to listen, including me, that they had the Iraqi government seeded with their opposition people, activists, and that as soon as the first American troop crossed the border into Iraq, all of these guys would go into action and take over the Iraqi government.
And the idea was that the Americans would just sort of scoop off the top layer of Iraqi leadership, and Mr. Chalabi would be put at the top of the government, and all his people would come out of the woodwork and take over the offices from which Saddam's people were pushed out, and Iraq would just continue functioning smoothly.
That was the plan.
Unfortunately, reality intervened.
Reality in the form of resistance from the Iraqis, and reality in the form of a sectarian civil war, and the insurgency against the United States occupation.
This was stuff that had been predicted and warned about by intelligence analysts in all of those analyses that the Bush administration officials decided they didn't need to read because they knew more about the place than everyone else.
I never forget, I think it was Cheney or Wolfowitz, Cheney who talked about American troops being welcomed with chocolates and roses, which didn't happen.
Yeah, no.
All right.
With that, we'll let you go.
I know you've got to go.
Thank you so much for your time, John, and great work as always.
I appreciate it.
Absolutely.
Everybody, that is Jonathan S. Landay.
He is national security and intelligence correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers.
He and his colleagues, particularly Warren Strobel, got it right about Iraq for Knight Ritter, back in, as you just heard, 2001 through 2003, on virtually every question in the run-up to the war that did not have to be.
And we'll be right back after this.
So you're a libertarian, and you don't believe the propaganda about government awesomeness you were subjected to in fourth grade.
You want real history and economics.
Well, learn in your car from professors you can trust with Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom.
And if you join through the Liberty Classroom link at ScottHorton.org, we'll make a donation to support The Scott Horton Show.
Liberty Classroom, the history and economics they didn't teach you.
Man, you need some Liberty Stickers for the back of your truck.
At LibertyStickers.com, they've got great state hate, like Pearl Harbor was an inside job.
The Democrats want your guns.
U.S. Army, die for Israel.
Police brutality, not just for black people anymore.
And government school, why you and your kids are so stupid.
Check out these and a thousand other great ones at LibertyStickers.com.
And of course they'll take care of all your custom printing for your band or your business at TheBumperSticker.com.
That's LibertyStickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
Hey y'all, Scott here.
Like I told you before, the Future Freedom Foundation at FFF.org represents the best of the libertarian movement.
Led by the fearless Jacob Hornberger, FFF writers James Bovard, Sheldon Richman, Wendy McElroy, Anthony Gregory, and many more.
Write the op-eds and the books, host the events, and give the speeches that are changing our world for the better.
Help support the Future Freedom Foundation.
Subscribe to their magazine, The Future of Freedom.
Or to contribute, just look for the big red donate button at the top of FFF.org.
Peace and freedom.
Thank you.
Hey y'all, Scott Horton here for the Council for the National Interest at CouncilForTheNationalInterest.org.
CNI stands against America's negative role in the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the war party's relentless push to bomb Iran, and the roles played by twisted Christian Zionism and neocon-engineered Islamophobia in justifying it all.
The Council for the National Interest works tirelessly to expose and oppose our government's most destructive policies.
But they can't do it without you.
Support CNI's push to straighten out America's crooked course.
Check out the Council for the National Interest at CouncilForTheNationalInterest.org.
And click donate under About Us at the top of the page.
That's CouncilForTheNationalInterest.org.
