All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest on the show is Ali Gharib.
He blogs over at the Loeb blog.
The best neocon hunters in our entire society.
They're over at the Loeb blog, and of course, all of it is included at the blog at antiwar.com, and standalone articles under Jim Loeb's name, Eli Clifton, and of course, Ali Gharib, Daniel Lubon.
Welcome back to the show.
How's it going?
It's going good, Scott.
Thanks for having me on again.
I really appreciate you joining us, and now I'm looking at your new piece at the Columbia Journalism Review.
What did WikiLeaks really tell us about Iran?
Use caution in reading the Iraq war logs and news coverage of them.
What's your point?
Well, I did a follow-up article on this, too, at Tehran Bureau, which is a project of PBS's Frontline.
The basic idea is that a lot of the people covering the WikiLeaks thing, especially in the mainstream media, you know that in the New York Times, they had a big front-page story on WikiLeaks generally, and then another front-page story on what WikiLeaks said about Iran's involvement in Iraq.
And the point is that basically, these are the same accusations that we've been hearing for about three or four years now.
And in the New York Times especially, they all pretty much come from the same journalist who was fed this information by anonymous military sources in 2007 and 2008.
And now, they're coming to us again, and he's acting like these WikiLeaks documents are a confirmation of something he reported before, when really, it's likely that these were the documents that these military officials who were speaking anonymously before to the Times were reading.
So really, it's just reporting the same thing twice and acting as if now it's been proven.
And more troubling, maybe, is that a lot of these documents were based on anonymous single-source accounts.
So these are from people on the street, and they're unnamed.
And then you see a pattern of them, and people say, oh, look, this is a pattern.
It must be true, even though it's all single-source and anonymous.
But the fact is that we've seen that movie before, and that was with Curveball's allegations in the run-up to the Iraq war about the famous mobile biological weapon labs.
And Curveball's reports that were given to German intelligence and then passed on to US intelligence ended up in 112 separate reports by the Defense Intelligence Agency.
So you know, there was the same thing there.
They said, this guy Curveball's an anonymous source, but look, here's a pattern.
And really, there's just not much to it.
And of course, Iran's supposed nefarious activities with the anti-American Shia-Iraqi insurgency is trumpeted as many Iran hawks as a justification for more aggressive and escalating actions against Iran.
Yeah.
Well, that about sums it up.
Yeah.
I think I said, all right, I'll talk to you later, Scott.
No, no, I'm just kidding.
So yeah, no, I mean, the thing is, what you're talking about more than anything is the journalism of a guy named Michael Gordon.
And for people who were listening to anti-war radio back then, this was something that we covered virtually every day, Jim Loeb, of course, and antiwar.com and the whole group.
This is something that Gareth Porter, especially, also IPS News, Philip Giraldi, so many good journalists covered this at the time.
And that was at the dawn of the surge, they said, not only are we not adopting the Baker plan and getting out of Iraq, we're going to replace Rumsfeld with Gates, the so-called realist, while we double down the neocon plan and the Pentagon's plan to double down the war.
And as Bush just announced in his speech in January of 2007, and from now on, we're blaming everything wrong in Iraq on Iran.
And so we're going to try to pin a bunch of lies on them.
Everybody get ready.
And then there it came.
And it was that, I guess an Arab is just incapable of making a homemade landmine with a copper core.
And so these must be coming from Iran.
And they never proved it.
And Michael Gordon was the number one conveyor of this propaganda back in 2007.
And they even had a big press release thing where they gathered a bunch of reporters.
And they displayed out these weapons.
And then it was a big joke.
And they canceled it.
David Petraeus was supposed to come and debut the weapons.
And he canceled.
And meanwhile, there were, I don't know, 25 different reports that there were factories in Iraq that were found where, yeah, here's where they press these copper core made EFPs in Iraq.
Yeah, there's a link to a great version of that story about the canceled press conference in my Tehran Bureau piece.
Tina Sussman, when she was in Baghdad, covered it for the LA Times.
And she's a great conflict correspondent.
She wrote it up.
And yeah, it's pretty funny.
There was no proof that any of this stuff came to Iran.
So they had to cancel the press conference.
Yeah, and there was actually, because we made such a big deal about this over at antiwar.com, I remember somebody sent me a link.
I had always thought that Patrick Coburn, writing in Counterpunch, was the first to say, yeah, I went to this bomb factory.
And these guys were making these EFPs with copper cores in them.
Or maybe the military found it.
And he went there with them or something or after them.
But then someone sent me a link to, I think it must have been Time, but it could have been Newsweek.
But it was one of the two.
And it was like this PDF file of this kind of really in-depth, almost like RAND Corporation or military-type document examining these new armor-penetrating EFPs that were new and improved, and how they work, and where they come from.
And there was no indication then, because it wasn't the political spin, that these must be Persian weapons or something.
Of course, Gareth showed that, actually, these came from Hezbollah.
And I think they learned it from the IRA who learned it from the SAS or something like that.
I mean, it had nothing to do with Iran at all.
And in fact, the whole war, as you know, Ali, was to install Muqtada al-Sadr and the Supreme Islamic Council and Ayatollah Sistani and all of their puppets in power in Baghdad.
How could they be the enemy?
Yeah, and Michael Gordon, especially, is troubling to watch him write these sort of articles with weak caveats and weak explainers.
Because he was Judith Miller's writing partner in 2002 and 2003, when they were writing all these hugely influential stories about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the famous aluminum tubes one that I think was on September 8, 2002, and then a follow-up on September 13, where, in between those two stories, a nuclear expert at a DC think tank had told Judith Miller.
He'd been feeding Judith Miller information.
This was the guy who was hostile to Saddam.
And he had been feeding her information.
And he told her at the time that there was some doubt, even coming out of analysts at the State Department and the Energy Department, that these aluminum tubes were for centrifuges for making nuclear fuel for weapons.
And nonetheless, when the September 13 follow-up came out, between which David Albright had spoken to her, this dissent was dismissed as a footnote by an anonymous administration official.
Now, Michael Gordon was co-author on both these articles.
She lost her job at the Times, but Gordon is still there.
And he's turned his attention to Iran, apparently.
Well, and she was such a lightning rod, too, because she was the face on all this and the one doing the TV interviews.
And most of the articles were written about her.
And I think it's been fairly suspected that she's not a journalist, that she is an agent of somebody, either Scooter Libby or an intelligence agency of some kind, that she's there as a propagandist, a war propagandist, not a journalist.
And I wonder if you think that's fair to speculate about Michael Gordon.
After all, nothing he says is true.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know if he's a propagandist or if he's working for someone.
I mean, I wouldn't make accusations like that, because when I make accusations, I like to have evidence to back them up.
Yeah, I know, I just like to be suspicious of people out loud like that.
I'm not making any assertions, either.
But I think it's fair to be suspicious.
Who are these people, anyway?
And David Sanger, too, with all his Iran's nuclear weapons program, that he just drops in there like it's proven to exist somehow and then keeps writing on.
Yeah, you know, I talk about in my Tehran Bureau piece how Glenn Greenwald has framed a lot of this issue about, who's the record of past journalist matter?
And he sort of ended on the Obama doctrine of looking forward and not backward.
But, you know, I think it goes deeper than that into a kind of total lack of accountability.
And I say in the article that it's more not looking at all.
It's kind of collective aversion of the eyes.
Yeah, all right, well, less of me rant and more of your substance when we get back.
It's Ollie Garib on Anti-War Radio, loblog.com.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Scott Horton, I'm on the line with Ollie Garib.
He's got a new piece at the Columbia Journalism Review and another one follow up at the PBS Iran Bureau Center.
They're their frontline site.
Mohammed Sahimi writes some great stuff for them as well.
I urge y'all to look at that.
I should probably spend more time there myself.
This one is called, what did WikiLeaks really tell us about Iran?
Again, it's the Columbia Journalism Review.
It's not so much about, you know, Mactado Al-Sadr and who's making EFPs.
It's about how does the media treat subjects like accusations about foreign powers killing our soldiers?
And I guess really the point here, Ollie, is that the Post and the Times say what the government would have them say.
And then everybody else just picks up on that and says, see, just like in 2003, 2002 and 2003.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's really amazing to watch.
You know, in 2007, when the EFP stories started to come out, the Times then public editor came out with a piece about how there were some caveats and there was a piece dedicated to dissenting on this, but none of those things were written by Michael Gordon.
And you know, who reads the public editor, really?
You don't get links to those pieces.
And then what you end up seeing still to this day is these stories on A1 cover these things in a sort of explosive way.
And any corrections or caveats will always come in pages that are further back.
And we saw from the Iraq example that those things, you know, there was, I forget who wrote it, but there was a Washington Post story that noted some of the dissent about those aluminum tubes I was talking about before.
Right, in September of 2002, right?
I remember being the top headline on antiwar.com at the time.
Yeah, that story ran on page A17, you know?
And I should note, I've got a post up at Woblog as of yesterday called About That Iranian Influence in Iraq.
And if you check it out, you see that I think a lot of this, a lot of this kind of braying about the nefarious influence of Iran has really been proven false by some of the events that you see with the wrangling for the Iraqi coalition, as well as, you know, the deputy commander of U.S. forces in Iraq said on a video conference with reporters in Washington the other day, that, I mean, and here I'll quote it for you, he says, in the last couple of months in this period of government formation, I think that the Iranian influence has diminished somewhat.
And he goes on to say that there's all kinds of Iranian influence, some of it's positive, and we believe some of it is negative, although it's very difficult to attribute that to the Iranian government.
And so you see that there just is no proof for these allegations, and the way they're stated as if they're facts, with, you know, sometimes weak caveats.
You know, I was thinking about this, and when, you know, I wrote under Jim Lowe that Interpress, for two years, I was just strictly writing for the wire service.
And when you're writing for wire services, you know, attribution is paramount.
I had a friend who was writing for Bloomberg, and he would go out to events, and he'd have some bit of color, like the blue sky was chilly that day, and they said, where are you attributing that?
You know, you gotta have some witness to back that up, other than the reporter yourself.
And when you read these WikiLeaks reports about the Iranian weapons from 2007, you see that a lot, and not even the weapons, other stuff like the so-and-so guy was trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in Iran, you see that these things all have these kind of wire service-esque words that are qualifiers, things like reportedly, and, you know, allegedly, and these sorts of things that you say, because the truth is that you can't state these things as facts without saying that this was reported by someone, or that this is alleged by someone.
And I think that there just wasn't enough emphasis on that fact in a lot of these stories about the WikiLeaks documents, though.
Right, and you know, it's interesting, too.
I haven't had a chance to read your piece about Iranian influence there, but I think it's worthy to note, as Gareth Porter, also at IPS News, has written, that they brought in a Iranian Revolutionary Guard leader secretly to the Green Zone in 2005 to broker the deal to replace Jafari with Maliki, and to make the agreement between the al-Hakim faction and the Sadr faction, that since you each have a private army, we'll go with a Dawah Party guy.
And with the assent of both of you, and everybody shake hands, and this will be the Iraqi National Alliance, and we'll have this guy Maliki as our prime minister.
Now, this is America's guy, Maliki.
And it was the Iranians who arranged for him to be the prime minister in the first place.
And apparently, it's the Iranians who've just arranged to keep him prime minister.
He just took a trip to Tehran, and had a meeting with Muqtada al-Sadr under the auspices of the Iranian ayatollahs over there, who are training Muqtada al-Sadr so he can be an outright ayatollah.
Whereas now he's, you know, has a more minor status.
And this is the agreement that's just, you know, kept the Iraqi National Alliance together, and kept Maliki with his presumed majority in the parliament.
Not quite yet, Scott.
I mean, the time story on the potential deal that actually looks like it might be going south, because Ayatollah Ali bailed on the meetings today to finalize the deal.
But the final deal that was gonna be put in place, it wasn't clear at all that the Sadrists would have any role in it whatsoever.
Moreover, Sadr is trading in Qom, because this is a holy Shia city, and it's where he went when he left when he was being attacked by Maliki's forces.
Wait, so you're saying the deal is supposed to be between Maliki and Alawi, and not Maliki and Sadr?
Then it changed in the last week or something.
I lost track somewhere.
Yeah, this deal, this report just came out yesterday.
I mean, it came out yesterday.
Well, I saw where Alawi walked, but I didn't, I guess I didn't read all about it.
But I had thought that the pending deal was between the Sadrists and the former Dala guys, the Maliki's guys, rather than with Alawi, the Shia guy.
Yeah, that was the deal as of a few weeks ago.
But as of yesterday, it wasn't clear that the Sadrists would have any role in it anymore.
And you know, I would even question the level of Iranian influence on Muqtada al-Sadr.
There's no doubt that he is in Iran, and therefore beholden to them for some of his security needs.
But you know, this is a guy who's been known for nothing but his nativist streak.
While guys like Maliki and his Dawa party were based in Iran during the reign of Saddam Hussein, the al-Sadr stuck it out in the slums of Baghdad.
Right.
And that's part of what gave him their enormous street power.
Well, it was America that drove him into Iran in the first place.
It was the only place he was safe.
Yeah, it was Maliki and America's assault on his Mahdi army during the end of the civil war there.
Yeah, well, so now you're saying, I don't know, I don't see a government form in there without Muqtada al-Sadr, without there being a war.
I mean, he's got the most natural power, the most natural constituency among the majority population that now dominates the land between Baghdad and Basra.
How could he be out?
He's the kingmaker of the whole deal.
Well, what they were trying to do, and it's funny, Eli Lake, who's a neoconservative reporter at the Washington Times, but actually is actually a very good reporter.
He had a nice article yesterday that really portrayed Obama's efforts to help form the government in Iraq as a failure.
And indeed they were, Obama had put in calls to try and ask Talibani, the Kurdish president, to get out of his seat so that Ayatollah could be president while Maliki was prime minister.
And Talibani basically said, no, the deal that was floated yesterday, the negotiations for hammering out the details over, which is what Alawi walked out on over the past few days, but reported early yesterday was a deal that would put Alawi as the head of a national security council and would establish him as speaker of the parliament and, or his Iraqi coalition, not just him.
And would leave Talibani in the presidency and Maliki as prime minister.
But yeah, it's a continually morphing story and the more and more it comes out about it, the more and more apparent it seems that these coalition wranglings are based on the individual interest of the Iraqi parties.
That doesn't mean that they don't go places.
I noted too that Maliki took a trip to Rome to talk to Muqtada al-Sadr, but he also went to Lebanon and he also went to Syria.
And you know, that's what you do when you're trying to build, when you're trying to build some regional support for a coalition to show that your coalition can have regional support.
You go around and talk to these guys and that's not anything, you know, that's not any nefarious influence or Iran pulling strings or anything like that.
I think these guys are just acting like Iraqis and they're vying for power amongst themselves.
And I'm not sure what the influence of either Iraq, or sorry, what the influence of either Iran or the U.S. is on these wranglings.
That might just be a good sign.
Yeah, well, you know, you're certainly right that Sadr's history was of the nationalist variety.
He wanted to be Iraqi first and that was always his problem with al-Hakim and the Supreme Islamic Council, which is now dominated by him now that al-Hakim is dead.
It was that they were more interested in sort of a federalized Iraq and a Shia-Stanian sort of alliance with Iran, which he never wanted.
And then America the whole time said he was Iran's puppet, not al-Hakim and the ones we were actually working with and made an enemy out of him and drove him into Iran, I guess, just because he was not so pliable.
But it still seems to me now that al-Hakim is dead, and as you said, the Dahl party guys weren't in Iraq, they didn't slug it out.
Seems like as long as Sadr's alive, he's gonna be the natural power there one way or the other.
Sounds about right to me.
Yeah.
Well, anyway, I guess we'll see, too.
And I had a brand new Patrick Coburn piece here, but I hadn't had a chance to read it yet either, so I think he was saying Maliki's gonna stay, but diminished.
That sounds like it could very well be the case.
All right, well, listen, everybody, that's Oli Grebe, loblog.com.
It's not .org, is it?
Yeah, it is .com.
It's right in front of me.
Loblog.com and antiwar.com/blog, of course, and I really appreciate your time on the show and all the work you do.
All you guys.
Hey, my pleasure, of course, Scott.
Thanks very much.
All right, peace.
