4/30/17 Gareth Porter on the Deep State’s real priorities in the war on terror

For Pacifica Radio, April 30th, 2017.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
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All right, introducing our good friend, Gareth Porter, the best reporter, my very favorite, and good friend of me and of the show.
Welcome back, how are you doing, Gareth?
I'm fine, thanks, Scott.
Glad to be back again.
Very happy to have you back here on the show with us.
You are the author of the book, Manufactured Crisis, which, as you know, is the book about Iran's nuclear program.
You don't need to read any other books about Iran's nuclear program, just Manufactured Crisis, the truth behind the Iran nuclear scare by the great debunker, Gareth Porter.
Okay, now, you've got this important piece here.
It ran at Consortium News, at Middle East Eye, at antiwar.com, and a few other places.
The Bait and Switch War on Terror, is what Bob Perry called it, at ConsortiumNews.com.
And this is about, I think the other title at Middle East Eye was something about the American national security state sells out counter-terrorism in order to pursue other agendas, something along those lines.
And what's funny about the article is that all you're doing is telling us all things we already know, and yet at the same time, it's kind of unbelievable.
It's actually unbelievable on the level of almost conspiracy kookery.
Because if you were to just assert to people that, yeah, you could have this massive slaughter, 3,000 Americans, or almost, very, very close, you know, 2,970-something American civilians slaughtered by these terrorists, and that our governments, Democrats and Republicans, all different administrations, for more than a decade and a half in a row, would basically act as though they might as well have done it themselves.
They would just exploit it as cynically as they possibly could to pursue whatever other agendas had nothing to do with the attacks on this country.
It sounds crazy, it sounds absolutely unbelievable, and yet we're living in 2017, and look at the devastation before our eyes.
A million people killed, millions and millions run out of their homes, chaos spread in all directions, and all over an attack by one group of bandits, a few hundred strong, back in 2001.
Yeah, you know, I'm glad you raised that question, that, you know, this does, in effect, or, you know, one can imagine this as a kind of conspiracy theory, because it is so vast, it is so unbelievable, in the sense that you've posed it.
And in fact, I think it's extremely important to focus on this distinction between a conspiracy theory and the truth that we are facing in regard to US policy in the Middle East.
And the difference is that what I'm talking about in my article, the exploitation of the rubric of the war, the global war against terrorism, or on terrorism, I think, to be more precise, the difference between the two is that what I'm talking about is hidden in plain sight.
In other words, it is not based on any necessity to look for a hidden truth, but rather simply looking at the publicly known facts of the matter, that is that these, the Pentagon and the CIA, what I call the permanent war complex, I was calling it the permanent war state, but I think the permanent war complex connects it with the military industrial complex and makes it more understandable.
The permanent war complex, since 2001, has carried out an endless series of military operations, which are permanent in character, and it has relied on the rubric of the global war on terrorism, but it has done things that have had the opposite effect, that is to say that it has actually strengthened Al-Qaeda and its Syrian and Yemeni and Iraqi franchises.
It has strengthened them in ways that have been really quite incredible.
It has turned these Al-Qaeda franchises into major players in their respective countries, in Iraq and Syria and Yemen, and it has done so despite the fact that there were warnings from the professional counterterrorism, the professional counterterrorist specialist, who said in advance of the Iraq war that it would have that effect, that it would strengthen Al-Qaeda.
The CIA put out a series of national intelligence estimates and assessments that made that point very powerfully, very strongly.
And so the people who were making these wars were perfectly aware of what they were doing.
They knew that they were having that effect.
They didn't care.
And so what I'm pointing to is really not a conspiracy, but rather a phenomenon that is out of there on the public record, and it's a contradiction in the war policies that have been carried out that is something that every American citizen needs to understand and respond to.
Okay, now hold on a second, because I'm gonna defend the national security state for a minute here, Gareth.
It occurs to me that the Iraq war plot originated in the president's brain.
That, of course, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, and for that matter, Ariel Sharon, and the entire neoconservative movement wanted to do it.
Rumsfeld wanted to do it.
Cheney wanted to do it.
But Bush Jr., he's the one who said, this is what we're doing.
Right, everybody?
And it was his bandwagon they all got on board.
Point being that the national security state may have warned him, or they may not.
I mean, their warnings may not have even reached him by way of George Tenet, that if we do this, we're gonna turn all of Western Iraq into Bin Laden-istan there, buddy.
He may not have known that.
In other words, what George W. Bush did by invading Iraq was absolutely 1,000 times Osama Bin Laden's dream come true.
But it was because it was a big stupid mistake.
It was because Paul Wolfowitz believed Ahmed Chalabi that this was gonna be good for Israel, and Wolfowitz told Rumsfeld to tell Bush, yeah, this is a really smart idea, let's go ahead.
And it was just, not that they're innocent, it was a premeditated murder plot, but it was a mistake in the sense that the results were nothing like what they were going for.
This was supposed to be easy, right?
Or not?
Well, I mean, I think you are correct.
Oh, and then it wasn't the Pentagon and the CIA.
They were basically dragged along on this plan, just like the rest of the country was dragged along on it.
Not exactly true, no, I'm sorry.
This is where I differ with you, Scott.
I mean, I understand the fundamental point that the president made the decision, supported this, was not someone who resisted it.
I agree with that.
But it is not true that the Pentagon and the CIA were dragged along unwillingly.
You know, let's have, first of all, distinguish between the CIA's analysts on one hand and the covert operations people on the other.
They are two fundamentally different parts of the CIA and the power lies in the CIA in the hands of the covert operations people.
Why?
Because they're the ones who require huge amounts of money to support their operations.
And traditionally, they're the ones who have had the biggest say on what the CIA is gonna do.
The analysts have traditionally, not always, obviously there've been exceptions to this, but the analysts have been independent of that, but they have not had the say over what the CIA does.
And so the CIA operations people were not dragged along into the Iraq war because they had huge amounts of new money to support their operations in Iraq.
And it's true that the army was reluctant to go into Iraq because the war plan minimized, initially at least, the footprint of the army.
And it was the Air Force that was the big player here that had the major role in the initial war plan that Rumsfeld presented to the White House.
But the Air Force was extremely supportive and they were lobbying for it very hard.
And the rest of the Pentagon, the rest of the armed services went along with this with some reluctance.
But the Air Force was a huge player in it and they were extremely enthusiastic.
So it's not true that the Pentagon in general, of course, Rumsfeld was the one who was the biggest supporter of this, the biggest advocate of it.
And even after Rumsfeld was gone, his successor, Robert M. Gates, continued to support the war in Iraq, even though it was having the effects that we've talked about.
All right, now let me ask you this, though, about the- Much more, what I wanna say, it's much more ambiguous here.
You can't say that this was being resisted by the Pentagon and the armed services.
Well, not so much resisted, it's just that it wasn't their idea in the first place so much as they were willing to go along with it.
Well, it was Rumsfeld's idea for sure.
Absolutely, Rumsfeld's idea.
This was Rumsfeld's war from the beginning.
Well, yeah, I mean, that's certainly true.
On the very record, there's even, according to Bob Woodward, there was even a moment, I guess on September the 15th, when Dick Cheney told Rumsfeld to shut up about Iraq for a minute.
We're talking about Afghanistan here, buddy.
Just wait.
That's right, that's a very good point.
No, this was Rumsfeld's war and it was not, Rumsfeld was not an original neocon.
He was doing this not because it was a neoconservative idea, but because it fit into his interests as Secretary of Defense.
Right, he had his whole plan for transformation of the military.
We're gonna make it light and fast and reorganized and this and that.
And also, very importantly, and this is not in my piece, but I'm gonna write about this in my book when I get to it, it was part of his scheme to take money away from the Army and put it into the Air Force so that he and the Pentagon could fund missile defense and other high-tech weaponry at the expense of the Army.
That was his scheme for transforming the military budget.
It fit into that scheme.
Right, those big ticket items.
That's where it's at.
Selling M4s all day, that's nothing.
Okay, but now, so let's talk about making terrorism worse here, because I still would argue that they basically thought correctly that Al-Qaeda was about 400 guys on 9-11.
By the time they were done letting them escape from Tora Bora in the middle of December 2001, there was only about 150 of them left, 180, something like that total.
And so by the time you're rolling into Iraq in 2003, it's pretty easy to imagine that their idea was, who cares about Al-Qaeda?
I mean, they're basically nothing.
You couldn't fill a pirate ship with them.
So yeah, they got lucky that one time and everything, but I mean, isn't it right that basically at that point, they weren't much of a concern?
If anything, I guess the military was saying, hey, Bush, let us kill Zarqawi up in Kurdistan before the rest of the war starts.
That was, you know, I guess they were a little bit concerned about what would happen with Zarqawi.
But mostly, they all had the same attitude as Bush, right?
Bring them on.
We have the absolutely invulnerable U.S. Army, and we're definitely not scared of a few dozen Sunni suicide bomber types.
Why would we be?
Well, I think you're absolutely right that they regarded Al-Qaeda as not a very serious challenge to U.S. security in the larger picture of things.
It had always been the case.
In the 1990s through 2000, up to 2001, the Pentagon and the U.S. military did not regard terrorism as a serious issue.
It was only state opponents, state adversaries that they cared about.
And so it was natural for them to continue to believe that they could take care of Al-Qaeda.
This was not gonna be a serious problem in the future.
And it was, you know, Rumsfeld knew very well that the military had no capability to do anything about terrorism.
He said so in his snowflakes.
We know this.
He knew that there was no military capability to deal with the issue of terrorism.
And so he was looking to the CIA and he was looking to special operations forces to do the job.
But look, I mean, we come back to Iraq.
It started with the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
And almost immediately, I mean, before the war even began, the CIA was warning, and the counterterrorism people were warning, this is going to be giving Al-Qaeda a huge boost.
And it's true, of course, they refused to believe them.
But when it became obvious that the CIA analysts and the counterterrorism specialists were right, then the military didn't say, okay, well, this is a bad idea.
We better turn around and reverse this.
Neither the CIA covert operations people with the operations department, nor the military said to Bush, okay, we now know that this was a mistake.
Nobody was willing to come forward because they had vested interests in continuing to carry out the war.
Well, and also in inflating the role of Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Once Zarqawi came, they said, look, everybody, here's what's going on here.
It's the American military and the people of Iraq versus the terrorists.
And so any resistance that you see, it's not a Sunni based resistance because we have taken the side of the Shiite majority in the civil war.
That has nothing to do with it.
What it is, is terrorists, Al-Qaeda terrorists.
And they're opposing us.
They're the only ones opposing us.
So every bomb that goes off and every roadside landmine, every gunshot, that is all Zarqawi, whether it's in Mosul, whether it's in Fallujah, Ramadi, or anywhere in the Sunni triangle.
Right, but first of all, don't forget that it was the idea of the flypaper strategy.
Remember, that was the brilliant idea of Wolfowitz.
The post-hoc excuse, you mean, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
The rationalization that they came up with.
It was a thinly veiled excuse that we would, that the Iraq war would serve as a flypaper and we would gather them all together in one place and we'd kill them all.
And that was, of course, the stupidest idea in the history of U.S. foreign and military policy.
And everybody knew it, but they used it as an excuse.
And that, then you're right.
The further application of the bait and switch, or perhaps the first major application of the bait and switch strategy, was to claim that we were simply killing Al-Qaeda when in fact Al-Qaeda was still a relatively small proportion of the Sunni resistance fighters against the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
So the lies began right there, okay?
That was when it began.
But then the bait and switch strategy then was applied by the CIA as well, not just in Iraq, but with regard to Pakistan.
Well, this is what I want to ask you.
So now we're talking Obama years.
I mean, they did sort of kind of get started at the very end of the Bush years there.
No, no, it began under Bush.
Yeah.
Talking about the CIA under Bush as well, 2005, 2006, 2007, the CIA, particularly 2007, the CIA was lobbying very hard to get Bush to remove all the constraints, the restraints, if you will, that had been imposed on drone strikes in Pakistan.
Very tight constraints had been imposed, and the CIA had carried out only a very small number of drone strikes up to 2007.
But the CIA had very strongly lobbied the president to remove those constraints, and he agreed, and then the number of drone strikes multiplied.
Okay, but now, so Obama comes in, and Obama clearly really means it, that he wants the CIA to focus on al-Qaeda, actual friends of Osama in Pakistan, however many friends of his there still were hiding out there, and he wanted to go after, not secular states like Saddam's Iraq, but he wanted to go after al-Qaeda, wrap this thing up.
He wanted to be able to declare victory in the terror war by reelection time in 2012.
And then coinciding with that, it happened to work out that they got Osama in the spring of 2011, so this was great PR.
In fact, they were so intent on using this PR for Obama's reelection that when Hassan shot up Fort Hood, they said, oh, he went postal.
It was workplace violence.
It has nothing to do with al-Qaeda or anything like that, because that doesn't exist anymore.
That's over now, and now, obviously, they were overplaying the degree of their success, but I'm just trying to illustrate the degree to which Obama and his government really did focus on killing the last of the real al-Qaeda guys, not capturing them, but drone striking them.
I'd have to say that you're right, that they were focusing, in a way, on al-Qaeda in Pakistan in the drone war, but at the same time, again, the bait and switch was underway, because what started during the Bush administration with a focus on high-value al-Qaeda targets quickly dissipated or morphed into a drone war in Pakistan that was low-level, supposed or suspected al-Qaeda, and ultimately then morphed into a drone war that wasn't even focused on al-Qaeda primarily at all.
First of all, with regard to the way it started and then morphed into low-level, supposed or suspected al-Qaeda people, the fact that the CIA persuaded Bush to agree to the pattern of life strikes meant that whenever a group of military agent males gathered together, the CIA was going to start thinking about a drone strike against them, and that meant that there was a huge number of drone strikes that were killing innocent people, not even al-Qaeda at all, and they were not high-value al-Qaeda people, hardly ever at all.
I mean, you know, there were a few, but the vast majority were low-level al-Qaeda people.
And a big part of it was targeting the Pakistani Taliban, the Tariki Taliban, as a favor, as a payoff to the Pakistani government for letting us target the guys we wanna target, basically.
That's what I was gonna get to.
Very quickly, it dissipated into, essentially, an adjunct of the war in Afghanistan, and it wasn't really against al-Qaeda at all, because, of course, the Taliban are not al-Qaeda.
The Taliban are not even jihadists.
So, in other words, what you're saying is, and even when, never even mind the bait-and-switch, never even mind when the leadership, when the president, for example, like with the Iraq War, is using a bait-and-switch on the American people to have a bonus war, that when the president of the United States says, "'All right, CIA, I want you guys to really focus "'on real al-Qaeda now,' it's still a matter "'of him giving them an inch and them taking a mile, "'even when it comes to that.'" But now we get to the worst part, which is, Obama actually took the side of veterans of al-Qaeda in Iraq, in Libya and in Syria, and now in Yemen, too.
I don't know if we'll have time to get to Yemen here.
You do a great bit of it in the article here.
But, you know, when the guys came home from Ronald Reagan's holy war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, they became al-Qaeda, and that was a problem for us all through the 1990s and leading up to September 11th, and the terror war since then, al-Qaeda in Iraq, under Zarqawi in Iraq War II.
And then, when the guys came home from Iraq War II, America sided with them against two more secular dictators who shaved their chin every morning, Muammar Gaddafi and Bashar al-Assad.
That's high treason, and I don't mean it that, oh, Obama's a Muslim and Obama's a Kenyan and all of this stuff.
I accuse Obama of being Ronald Reagan.
He thought that he could just go ahead and use these guys in the very same way again, even though we're living in a time after September 11th, when that should have been, hell, for that matter, after the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, when this should be absolutely outside of the realm of possibility of a policy to pursue.
But as we know, Seymour Hersh reported this back in 07.
This is the redirection, right, from the Iraq War.
Oops, we fought the Iraq War II for Iran.
Now we have to tilt back toward the Saudis and their jihadi shock troops in Syria, et cetera.
Yeah, I mean, let's face it.
The U.S. government knew from the beginning in its operation, its covert operation in support of the Saudis, Qataris, and Turks in Syria in 2011, 2012, that the arms that the U.S. was helping to get into Syria through a covert logistics operation that Petraeus devised, that they were going to end up supporting Al-Qaeda because they knew that the, very quickly, they knew that the Qataris in particular were funneling arms into Salafists and even arguably jihadist organizations that were playing games with Al-Qaeda's franchise in Syria, with Al-Nusra Front.
So they were not innocent of this.
They knew the high risk that they were taking, that they were going to be strengthening Al-Qaeda.
And by the middle of 2012, there was no question.
I mean, U.S. DI, Defense Intelligence Agency, was saying already that Al-Qaeda was a major player and was clearly in a position to contend for control over the entire armed opposition to the Assad regime.
So basically, I agree with your assessment that the Obama administration was going way, way beyond the mistake that Reagan made.
And it was, in effect, it was treasonous.
I mean, they were selling out what was supposed to be a commitment to minimizing as much as possible the threat of terrorism to the United States from Al-Qaeda.
They were allowing Al-Qaeda to contend for essentially having a caliphate in Syria.
In fact, the DIA was talking already in 2012 about the possibility of a caliphate.
And what they meant by that was that Al-Qaeda could have their own zone of control where they could have their own little government.
Yeah, right now it's called the Idlib province.
But yeah, so now here's the thing.
I brought up the T word and then you used it too.
So I wanna be specific.
This is the only crime defined in the constitution.
And I don't like it when people go throwing around accusations of treason for anybody who disagrees with them about any national policy.
However, the leader of al-Nusra in Syria, the prime beneficiary of Obama and now Trump's foreign policy there.
Well, you can get into that if you want.
But the leader of the al-Nusra front, this guy, Mohammed Jolani, he has sworn by it.
That is loyalty.
He signed his oath to Ayman al-Zawahiri, the butcher of New York City.
Full stop, that's treason.
To support his group is treason.
Dictionary, constitutional definition treason.
Yeah, I can't disagree with this.
And the reason is that in my view, the US government, the American people have only one real fundamental national, vital national security interest in the world.
And that is to avoid being attacked.
That means that terrorism is the number one problem that the United States, genuine problem the United States faces.
Really the only genuine national interest that would require even the possibility of military force.
Although the fact is that military force has made it worse and is bound to do that.
So the fact that the Obama administration, like the Bush administration, has carried out policies knowing that they were continuing to give al-Qaeda much more power, much more capability to make them a major player in more than one country in the Middle East.
You know, how can you say that that's not treasonous?
I mean, that should be treated as treason.
Well, and look, I mean- Politically by the American people.
This is six years of this Syria policy.
So we've already seen the rise of ISIS as the result of this policy.
Now they're on their way back out again.
I mean, yeah, I mean that DIA report that you mentioned, that's from the summer of 2012, saying they're gonna create this Islamic state.
And then it was, what, about nine months later or so that ISIS and al-Nusra broke apart and they went and created their caliphate in the East.
So, and there's just no denying what this policy has gotten us.
And now real quick, we really gotta go, Gareth, but one more thing.
Yeah, I mean, let's face it.
I mean, the culmination of this whole process of essentially giving al-Qaeda a huge boost through US military programs, military operations in the Middle East was US support for the Saudi war in Yemen, which could have, anyone could have predicted that the result would be that al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, AQAP, which was in fact the biggest threat to, of terrorism to the homeland of the United States at the time that this war began, that they would be given the opportunity to expand enormously their military capabilities, their control over territory, and their general political position within Yemen.
And that's exactly what has happened.
Thank you so much for coming back on the show, Gareth.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks, Scott.
All right, Shaw, that is the heroic Gareth Porter.
He won the Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in 2012 for his coverage of the war in Afghanistan.
He wrote the book, Manufactured Crisis, The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.
I thought it was The Truth Behind the Iran Nuclear Scare.
Well, these things change.
And you can find his article at ConsortiumNews.com, Bait and Switch, War on Terror.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Check out the full archives at ScottHorton.org.
Follow me on Twitter, at ScottHortonShow.
See you next week.