For Pacifica Radio, August 23rd, 2020.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all, welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the editorial director of Antiwar.com and author of the book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
You'll find my full interview archive, more than 5,000 of them now, going back to 2003, at scotthorton.org and at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, introducing today's guest.
It's the great Gareth Porter.
He wrote the book on Iran's nuclear program, Manufactured Crisis, and he wrote the book on Trump's horrible Iran policy.
The CIA Insider's Guide to the Iran Crisis with John Kiriakou, the former CIA officer there, not that Gareth is CIA.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Gareth?
I'm fine.
Thanks, Scott.
Glad to be back.
All right, so let's talk a little bit in this here.
Gareth, you know, 99% of the time when I interview you, it's because you wrote an important new article about breaking news that I want to talk with you about.
But today is going to be a little bit different change of pace here.
The primary object to me here is shaming someone and some institution or institutions who really deserve it.
The backstory, it goes like this.
I interviewed the great Matt Taibbi from Rolling Stone Magazine, all about Russiagate and this guy, Stephen Schrage, the new Russiagate whistleblower, who had helped apparently inadvertently set up Carter Page back at the start of the thing.
And then in what happened was for some reason, my computer completely ruined the audio, but we were able to get a transcript out of it from the automatic transcriber.
So people can find that at antiwar.com and at scottwharton.org.
And but as part of that interview, we had talked about the Afghan bounty story, the Russian bounties on American GIs in Afghanistan story from a few weeks back as, you know, kind of a quintessential example of really lousy reporting based on nonsensical claims of anonymous CIA spies and how this kind of stuff is so important and shake the whole world based on ridiculous stories like this.
And that one was a huge one.
And so then I shamed and mocked the head writer on that story for The New York Times, Charlie Savage.
And I said to Matt Taibbi, well, I only pick on him because I used to respect him.
And Taibbi said something like, yeah, I used to think he was one of the better writers at the Times.
Well, that apparently got in Charlie Savage's Google News Fetcher machine there.
And he wrote me an angry email about how ignorant I am about how journalism works.
And we went back and forth essentially all day on Thursday arguing about standards of journalism.
So the things I learned about what, frankly, a man who I think is the best New York Times reporter now, I like Thomas Gibbons Neff better.
But other than that, I think of Charlie Savage's far superior to Scott Shane or Mark Mazzetti or certainly David Sanger, Spit or some of these other just criminals that write for The New York Times.
I've respected Charlie Savage since he wrote for The Boston Globe, and I have considered him less worse than many of our major newspaper writers.
And I am just absolutely just beside myself, flabbergasted and in a state of almost disbelief at the kinds of things that this guy was willing to admit to me.
He thought about how journalism is supposed to be done.
So I'm a little bit torn about how badly I want to rat on this guy about his emails to me.
But it's not like he's a secret source.
It's not like I'm doing what he does and have a source who's asked to be off the record to make a bunch of slanderous claims against somebody or anything like that.
The only person he's slandering is himself, and he's the one who started the conversation with me.
And he's the big cheese at The New York Times.
And so it seems to me like pretty much open season, fair game to go ahead and discuss this.
And I'm happy to admit that I forwarded the email exchange to you to show you what I'm talking about here.
But the reason I think this is important is not just because I think Charlie Savage should have to resign from The New York Times and journalism in general and go get a real job because of his disgrace here, but it's because this is so illustrative of the entire situation of national security reporting in this country where this is one of the very best guys at the most important paper in the country.
And he really believes that if the CIA tells him a thing, that that's absolutely good enough to report.
And that, frankly, I'm some kind of marginal kook for thinking the crazy, insane, nonsensical idea that he should have to have independent cooperation of these claims before he would write it at the top of The New York Times.
In this case, a story that Russia was murdering American GIs in Afghanistan, which aside from the covid and killing Soleimani and a few other things has got to be the story of the year.
And yet there's no real reason to believe it at all.
And Charlie Savage's position to me is it doesn't have to be a true story.
It only has to be true that I'm right, that there is a CIA report that says it might be true and that absolutely is good enough to run.
And I don't know why you think otherwise.
And so I wonder, Gareth, about what you think of that.
I agree with your summation of the problem after having read the exchange between you and Charlie Savage.
That is indeed the essence of his position.
And he was, in fact, quite explicit about it.
You're right that what you're asking for me to do is not something that national security reporters do.
And if you insisted on this, then he said 99 percent of the national security reporting would have to be just tossed out, that you wouldn't see it in print.
And of course, that's not too far from the truth.
I mean, that's that's a reasonable statement to make.
The problem is that 99 percent of the national security reporting should be rubbished because it is not based on careful evaluation of what's being said by self-interested sources within the Pentagon and other national security organs.
And that's the essence of the problem.
And what he's saying here is that we have no, I have no, and we as national security journalists have no responsibility to really track down the accuracy or the honesty of what we're being told by this source.
Or let's give him the benefit of the doubt that he had more than one source.
I don't know if that's the case or not.
He did use plural.
They used plural.
And maybe somebody else had, you know, of the co-authors had some other source.
But let's give him the benefit of the doubt that there is more than one source for the moment.
But it doesn't matter.
I mean, the point is that national security journalists, including, not just including, but especially those at The New York Times, do not interrogate their sources in a way that would give any reader a reasonable sort of confidence that they have ascertained whether they're being lied to or not, whether they're being given a story that really makes sense, that is supported by evidence.
And I see this all the time.
I mean, I can, you know, imagine or I can think about easily several major stories have been along those lines.
So this is the fundamental problem that we're up against, that national security reporters do not believe it's their job to really check.
They do not ask the right questions.
They do not fact check.
And that's that's got to change or we're going to continue to have the same sort of problematic coverage of this sort of story that we've had for many decades now.
Yeah.
So one of the things that I had accused him of was in the discussion with Taibbi was in his Twitter account the day after the big story broke, where he says, aha, see, the Wall Street Journal has the same story as me.
So it's confirmed and they've confirmed our story.
And so he says to me that, look, I wasn't saying that it was confirmed that the Russians paid for bounties to kill Americans in Afghanistan.
Why would you think that you're the only one who thinks that I didn't say that.
All I said was that it was confirmed that I was right, that there's a CIA report that says this might have happened.
And yet the point is, of course, that every other newspaper in America, every TV channel, pro or anti Trump or whatever it is, all of the Democratic politicians and a bunch of Republicans, too.
They all ran with this as though the story said, I, Charlie Savage, know for a fact that the Russians have been paying for bounties of American soldiers in Afghanistan when that's not what the story said.
The story said, I'm reporting the fact that there's a rumor.
And then it was clear in his, you know, as we email back and forth, he thinks that this is just fine.
So my mistake wasn't saying that he doesn't understand somehow.
And yet he makes it clear that he does understand.
And yet if you misunderstand that somehow he was saying that it's true that the Russians did this, well, that's just your problem.
You and every other American journalist and every Democratic politician in the House and the Senate and the entire society, which was told that the Russians paid for bounties for dead American soldiers, which, according to the last New York Times article on the subject that I could find, they admit is not proven at all.
And they still say if confirmed would be could be should be it would indicate that if we knew.
But so far it is uncooperated and we do not have proof that it's true.
But to Charlie Savage, that's fine.
You're absolutely right, Scott, that that is the that's the bottom line for him in his exchange with you.
But let me just point something out.
He you know, he's actually far more dishonest than I think even you are suggesting you have suggested thus far, because I went back to his original story, the one which announced originally the whole alleged Russian bounties to Taliban fighters or people connected to the Taliban to kill American troops in Afghanistan.
And they actually say that American intelligence officials have concluded have concluded not that they reported, not that they suspect, but they've concluded that these bounties were offered by the Russians.
And that's simply, you know, as you've pointed out later on, they had to backtrack on that, but they're not admitting that they had to backtrack.
Right.
He also said, along with his co-writers, the United States concluded months ago and then they concluded, he says, that that the Russians offered these bounties.
But of course, they had to backtrack on that as well.
There was never any conclusion by the United States government or even by the U.S. intelligence community.
There was never an intelligence assessment that was shared by all the intelligence community.
So that was totally wrong.
He was being misled and he's misleading his readers.
And then they say the intelligence finding, meaning the intelligence conclusion, was briefed to President Trump in the White House National Security National Security Council meeting.
So again, they're misleading their readers completely about what the nature of what was actually happening here.
What actually happened was that somebody, I presume the CIA was one of them, one of the authorities that reported this, the CIA and military authorities, the special operations people in Afghanistan sent intelligence reports to Washington to this effect, that this was the information that they'd gotten.
And as I pointed out in my own article about this, they got the information from the intelligence agency of the Afghan government, our client government, which, of course, is completely self-interested.
They're not going to tell the truth.
You know, and so this whole business of what they reported was tainted from the very beginning.
And so this confusion between an intelligence report and an intelligence finding was not made clear.
And the difference between some element or elements of the intelligence community having an opinion that, well, yeah, OK, this was this has some merit.
And the idea that there was a conclusion by the intelligence community completely lost, overlooked or simply ignored by the sources and thus passed on to the public by an extremely, you know, disreputable group of journalists at The New York Times.
Yep.
And, you know, it was so funny.
I saw this originally in a piece by Scott Ritter at Consortium News, where Rumi Kalamachi, his co-author, went on MSNBC.
And I had the quote here, too, that I was showing to him.
His own co-author on the story says the funds were being sent from Russia regardless of whether the Taliban followed through with killing soldiers or not.
There was no report back to the GRU about casualties.
The money continued to flow.
And then as I mocked Savage and as Ritter mocked originally there, well, that's not a bounty then, is it?
And that's in their own reporting.
Yeah, this is one of those additional problems that you can pile on top of the fundamental major discrepancies between the way this was being handled by The New York Times and the reality that we now understand if you look carefully at all the evidence.
And just one more point that people should be aware of just to understand how wrong The New York Times got this story is that they suggest, again, that there was an intelligence conclusion.
They were apparently aware that there was some kind of intelligence assessment of some sort.
But what they did not know and should have insisted on finding out was what was the level of confidence?
And then they should have checked what that level of confidence actually means.
And the highest level of confidence was medium confidence.
That's the term used by the intelligence community.
And what medium confidence means, as opposed to high confidence, is that this information may be plausible, but it could be interpreted in different ways.
And therefore, we cannot give it high level of confidence as a basis for making decisions.
I mean, here's an intelligence assessment with some degree of high confidence, I think the rest of the intelligence agencies in giving it low confidence profoundly disagreed with it.
And one indication of that is that when Warren Strobel wrote the same piece of junk article for The Wall Street Journal, apparently his sources at the NSA immediately called him on his cell phone and said, this is a bunch of garbage.
Print this.
We don't believe it.
How do you like that?
And that was in The Wall Street Journal the next day.
By Warren Strobel, he didn't really mention that he himself was being chastised.
He says, well, my NSA sources say that they didn't believe in this.
And then it turned out after that, that General Miller, in charge of the war, and General McKenzie, the commander of CENTCOM, and General Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Esper, the secretary of defense there, they all said that, yes, we've heard about this and we're very concerned.
But no, we have not seen compelling evidence that this is the case.
And Savage dismissed that to me as, oh, those guys are all just Trump world, as though they're Jared Kushner, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretary of defense.
Well, you know, maybe the secretary of defense.
Even then, he's not really a Trump guy, but he's a civilian appointee and a guy who's pretty lucky to be in a position like that since he's just a Raytheon lobbyist.
Right.
So, OK, I'll give you Esper.
That's what I told him in the email.
I'll give you Esper.
But you're telling me that Miller and Milley and McKenzie are essentially refusing to stand behind this story just because of what Trump lackeys they are?
What a joke is that?
And meanwhile, Mike Pompeo, who is the one who's closest to Trump by all accounts, went and threatened the Russians over it like the hawk that he is.
And in true confirmation bias sense, Charlie Savage brings that up.
It's also an argument from authority.
See, it's true because Pompeo says it's true.
I said, yeah, but if he had denied it, you would have dismissed him as being Trump world.
He's far closer to Trump than any of the generals that we're talking about here.
But any denial?
Oh, yeah.
He even puts scare quotes around the term uncooperated that.
Oh, yeah, sure.
The Trump world slogan is that this is uncooperated as though you need it to be good enough to get a conviction in court.
Something like this.
Again, all he has is some hearsay.
Nothing but rumors.
And in fact, rumors that make no sense.
As his own co-author says, the money was coming from the Russians.
There is it's in no way tied to the deaths of any Americans.
You know, The Times is is really guilty of such an egregious practice of covering here by the way in which it followed up on this story.
You know, it kept changing the story as it began to realize that it had been misled by the source or sources, whatever it might be, because the original story told it one way.
Subsequent stories began to show that the original story, while it wasn't quite right, but they never acknowledged that they've had to change it.
OK, but the worst thing of all is that The Times and of course, Charlie Savage, even in this conversation, especially in this conversation with you, doesn't seem to acknowledge in any real way that that the sources themselves could be part of a move which is politically motivated to try to keep the United States militarily in Afghanistan, which is obviously the case.
I mean, which is the result, right?
That was what happened from the controversy was Nancy Pelosi and Elizabeth Cheney teamed up to pass a resolution for the NDAA forbidding any president from pulling troops out of there until we finished winning the war.
Absolutely.
And it's no accident they were, you know, they were working closely with their allies.
And this is the one place, Garrett, this is the one place where I went out on a limb in our email debate here with Charlie Savage, where I said that, you know, clearly you're the one because he accuses me of having an agenda.
And that's why I refuse to accept his great journalism.
And I said, clearly you're the one being used for an agenda.
They brought up this story last November to stop the deal, which that's not what stopped the deal last November, but still they tried.
And then they brought up the deal again in February, just two days before the signing, in order to try to stop the withdrawal deal.
And now they bring it up again using Charlie Savage, Strobel at Wall Street Journal and who's it's at the Washington Post to create this political controversy to prevent Donald Trump from following through on what he had floated, that he would go ahead and pull the troops out before Election Day instead of waiting until next May.
And that clearly is off the table now.
And so at that point, I admit I was speculating and maybe that's a bad way, a bad take for an argument with a New York Times reporter about how sloppy his journalism is.
And but his response to me was, I know that that is not true, but I can't tell you anything more about it and how I know.
So I guess you'll just dismiss it, which is exactly correct.
That's a huge laugh, because anybody who could say that they totally dismiss the notion that this story was related to the political motivation of trying to keep the United States from withdrawing its troops from Afghanistan is is a fool.
I mean, you know, again, it started with and this is not just, you know, somebody's guess.
It's not my guess or my observation.
This has been reported even by the Times itself later on.
And in fact, if I remember, he acknowledged that in his exchange with you, that the original information came from the NDS, the.
Oh, no, he invokes it.
He invokes it.
And so this proves that I'm a fool, that you're blaming the CIA for this.
But this came from Afghan interrogators in the first place.
And I'm laughing and going, listen, man, first of all, the conflict of interest there.
But second, I guess I didn't bring up torture because we all know that they still use torture.
Amnesty International tell you that, that the Afghan security, the Afghan government that America installed in power there, surprise, surprise, are a bunch of torturers.
And by the way, who even says that the guy they tortured says what they say says?
I mean, this whole thing could be completely made up.
And the fact that he would invoke that, that this comes originally from the Afghan government, as though that makes it seem more true.
I mean, that's completely ridiculous.
And then, in fact, later I asked him, look, if the CIA gave it only medium confidence and NSA and DIA only gave it low confidence and you report that, well, what if the CIA had only given it low confidence, too?
Or what if all three of them had completely dismissed it?
Would you still have run the story based on Afghan interrogators say so?
And he, of course, didn't answer that because the answer is obvious that I'm right.
And he's being ridiculous here.
Well, you know what this really reveals, Scott, is that people at The New York Times, generally speaking, and the rest of the corporate media essentially associate themselves with the U.S. national security state to the degree that's necessary in order to justify what they do.
And I think what that means is that under these circumstances, they have no trouble with the fact that, you know, the military and some elements of the CIA who have their own vested interest in Afghanistan, they have a big covert program going on there, and they had hopes of having it grow over the years, that these people, you know, of course, they want to keep Trump from pulling U.S. troops out.
And they're correct that we shouldn't pull troops out.
I think that's the general response of national security journalists to this sort of issue because they associate themselves with, they identify themselves with their sources and with the institutions that they represent.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
And, of course, there's also the question, Garrett, here of what Russia's real interests in Afghanistan are and why they might do this.
Yeah, I think that the whole idea that the Russians are doing stuff to push the United States around in Afghanistan is utterly wrong in terms of understanding what the Russians' concerns are in that part of the world.
Their concerns are completely different.
I mean, it's not like the United States, which is, you know, wants to stick it to the Russians and, you know, have a victory in the Cold War and so forth.
Their concern is about extremist Islam, Islamic extremism in that part of the world, in the stands, in part of Russia where Islamic extremism has grown over the years.
They may not have handled it very well, but it's clear that that is their primary concern in Afghanistan.
They are essentially, their interest in the Taliban has been that they can see that the Taliban have grown enormously in their sway within the country, and they want to get along with them.
And that's why they promoted these peace talks in Moscow with the Taliban.
And by the way, I mean, I have a very good source who is very familiar with the intelligence situation regarding the whole question of Russian provision of arms to the Taliban.
He says when Nicholson, the commander, the U.S. commander in 2017, if I remember correctly, 2018, was saying that the Russians, they knew that the Russians had provided arms to the Taliban.
There wasn't any such intelligence.
It was phony.
It was more, you know, sort of just claiming stuff that would advance the interests of the bureaucracy.
So, I mean, I think we just have to be careful about the way that whole question of Russian policy in Afghanistan has been handled.
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Yep, absolutely.
All right, and now if this is really going to work to retire Charlie Savage from journalism where he belongs, retired, I have to read this quote.
This is the killer from our entire exchange.
New York Times reporter Charlie Savage to me in the email on Thursday, I think you have over-learned the lessons of the pre-Iraq war reporting failures.
Almost 20 years ago now, and see that dynamic as the norm rather than the aberration it was.
And then he goes on to say, he says, all systems carry risks and trade-offs, and some will not result in a good outcome.
And then he acknowledges, yours would prevent an Iraq WMD debacle or a Richard Jewell.
Well, thank you very much.
That's exactly right.
I would have never allowed what they did to Richard Jewell.
I would have never allowed what they did to the Iraqis.
I was against it at the time.
And, you know, another 150 million Americans knew better at the time than Iraq being a threat to us that we had to preempt.
Give me a break.
What a stupid lie that always was.
But anyway, then he just goes on with some word salad about how, well, you can use a process where you question your sources really carefully and stuff like that, and that also is a good system and a way to do it.
So, and then he accuses me, and this is what you were referring to earlier, of, you want to destroy the village to save it.
This means we would just have no national security reporting at all, which, of course, is such hyperbole.
I never said he shouldn't do national security reporting.
I just said he should do work and shouldn't be a stenographer who just repeats what the CIA tells him to repeat.
And then check out his insistence that the last time the CIA was wrong about something in the New York Times was when they lied us into war in 2003.
We've been at war for 20 years straight, all based on CIA lies in the New York Times, brought to you by Charlie Savage, who says that we need to stop over learning the lesson of what they did to us and to the people of Iraq.
You know what, I'm glad you came back to that language, because I believe that that is so revealing of the ideology that governs the entire national security reporting universe, if you will.
It is exactly the same language that's shared by the entire national security elite, both in the government and outside the government.
The blob, if you will, which, you know, was mercy, mercilessly condemning President Obama for refusing to bomb in Syria.
And I mean, these are the guys behind the entire Russiagate hoax, where whatever you think of Donald Trump, they falsely accused him of high treason with the Kremlin for three years.
Oh, well, oops, I'm sorry.
Did we imply that there was some high treason going on?
You must have misunderstood.
Hey, listen, I didn't say it was true.
All I said is that it's true that the CIA says it might be true, Gareth C., so it's cool.
And I'm sorry.
And with that, we got to go.
We're way over time.
But I'm Scott Horton.
This has been Anti-War Radio, on with the great Gareth Porter.
Thank you so much for your time on the show, Gareth.
Really appreciate you, as always, sir.
My pleasure.
Thanks, Scott.
And you guys can find all of my archives at scotthorton.org, more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003 there for you.
And I'm here every Sunday morning on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
Thanks for listening.
See you next week.
