06/18/10 – Edward Peck – The Scott Horton Show

Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio on the Liberty Radio Network, I'm your host Scott Horton.
And our next guest on the show today is former Ambassador Edward Peck.
He was part of the Gaza Peace Flotilla, he's the former Chief of Mission in Baghdad from 1977 through 1980, and has served as a Foreign Service Officer in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt, and as Ambassador in Mauritania.
Welcome to the show sir, how are you doing?
Well I'm doing okay so far sir.
Alright, well I sure appreciate you joining us on the show, obviously there's this huge story and so many aspects of it to cover, but I guess my first question for you is, why were you part of this Gaza Peace Flotilla?
Well I decided that after all the years of talking about the Middle East, and explaining about the Middle East, and getting people together, and heading political pilgrimages and all of that, that I would try to do something a little more, if you'll excuse the expression, concrete.
Something that was measurable, that was discernible.
And it seemed like, humanitarian, you know, it looked like something to do as I near the end of my activity time, you know, and say let's do this, because it may get people to pay attention to a serious problem, and indeed, at some cost, it did.
Yeah, at some great cost, at least nine killed, including one American citizen, and I say at least, because I saw a woman, I'm sorry I can't remember her name, interviewed on Democracy Now, explain that there are some missing, there are some unaccounted for people, and nobody knows whether they were killed, and it was covered up, or whether they were actually Mossad spies, or what exactly is the deal with that, do you have any more information about the total list there?
No, it's interesting, because the ship that I was on was one of the smaller ones, we had no bloodshed, we had some injuries, but the big ships, I mean, I don't know what happened.
Some people have disappeared, I'm told, but no one seems to know who they are or where they are, and certainly there isn't a great deal of attention being paid to it now.
Very strange, it seems like that would be a big part of the story to have clarification on who walls who, who's accounted for, who's not, I mean, how can we even go on at all without knowing that?
Well, you know, America has a tendency, like many other countries, I guess, to have a lot of interest generated, and then things go away, and you watch, you know, the World Cup or the basketball championships or something.
We, as a nation, we are justifiably not famous for the depth and breadth of our interest in and understanding of the rest of the world, so that what happened with the flotilla was the result of Israel's decision, made at whatever level, not to try to look like nice guys, but to play hard noses, which is what they usually do, and it is not in their interests.
They even seem to have gathered some understanding of that as the world reacted to what it was that they did.
Okay, now, so I guess, tell us the story of what happened.
What ship were you on?
I was on a ship called the Svendony, a little, small inter-island Greek ship, with 54 people on board.
It was not really designed for an ocean-going trip.
There were no showers, no bathtubs, there were bunks for about one-third of the people on board.
The rest of the folks slept on the floor.
Because it was a small ship, when the commandos came at night, at 4.30, they stepped off of the deck of their boat right onto the deck of ours.
I looked up, and there they were, masked, though they wore balaclava masks the whole time they were on board, so you only saw their eyes.
The people on the deck above me, the upper deck, tried to provide passive resistance by linking arms and trying to keep them out of the wheelhouse.
And the Israeli commandos roughed up a number of people.
When the ship docked in Ashdod afterwards, the first people down the gangplank were the injured.
One guy on crutches, a man with a neck brace, people with arms, we had two doctors on board, bandages, arms in a sling, people limping, this kind of stuff.
But there were no murders.
Some people got hurt seriously, but not critically, if you follow me.
Well, you know, it really is interesting.
Jason Ditz, our news editor at Antiwar.com, has done a great job of cataloging how the stories change just in the language used.
I'm sure George Carlin would be pleased how this changed from a raid to a battle to a defensive strike against a terrorist attack.
Yeah, and it is to me incredible that armed men boarding a ship in international waters, heavily armed, were accused of being attacked by the passengers.
And there is a twist that's almost unbelievable.
I mean, if somebody, if a masked armed man appears at the door of your house and you fight him off, that's called defending the house because these guys were attacking the ship.
But the media, always subservient, you know, said, yes, yes, these guys were defending themselves.
Well, God damn it, they have no right to be there to begin with.
But the press doesn't take it that way because, well, for whatever reason.
Well, you know, it seems so strange to me that just the next week after this happened, I guess it was the night of May 31st, right, was the raid.
It was just the week, the next week that an American border guard shot a kid on the Mexican side of the border and some North Korean border guards shot some Chinese on the other side of the border.
And the Mexican and Chinese governments both filed formal complaints and said, hey, we demand justice, prosecution, investigation.
Your government employees can't just shoot our citizens on our border like this.
And here we have an American citizen killed by the Israeli government on the high seas.
And the only statement I got out of the government that I heard was, what's the big deal about all this from the vice president of the United States?
He cares.
The American government cares less for their citizens than the Chinese Politburo dictatorship cares about theirs.
Scott, we had a man on our ship who was a wounded veteran of the USS Liberty.
When the Israelis attacked that ship in 1967, an American naval ship, they killed and wounded 206 American servicemen.
And nothing ever happened.
Now, that's the kind of power, you know, that it is not right for any other country to have over ours.
By the way, Mr.
Biden, whom you mentioned, his commentary was so obsequious, so cringing that I have been I can't validate this because my intelligence sources tell me that he has been authorized by the Israeli government in gratitude that from now on, whenever he meets the prime minister, he only has to kiss his ring.
So that's progress.
Yeah, yeah.
We're really getting somewhere.
You know, of course, this is a guy who said and maybe this is only for the YouTube aficionados.
I'm not sure whether this ever made the news, but before the election in 2008, he made clear in an interview that he's as much of a Zionist as anyone in the world and that he would never leave his spot as chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the Senate, the Foreign Relations Committee in the Senate, if he thought that it would cost Israel the support of the U.S. government one iota and that he was sure that if anything from his vice president's chair, he could be even better for Israel.
Well, he certainly has proven it, and he may even believe that that's good for the United States.
I certainly do not.
It may be great for Israel, if you're listening, Joe, maybe great for Israel, but it is not helping the United States one bit.
In fact, Mr.
Petraeus, General Petraeus, I should say, has added to the knowledge that I've had for a decade that our support for Israel, blind and unstinting, which has cost us prestige and credibility and stature and respect, is costing the lives of American servicemen and women.
But that doesn't seem to deter Mr.
Biden one whit.
No, apparently not.
And by the way, you know, there were people who said, well, Petraeus took that back.
But no, he didn't.
I mean, the headline said he took it back, but then he further explained his exact position again.
Yeah.
Well, having having said it, you can't take it back.
He's supposed to be a guy who knows where he speaks when it comes to military matters.
Yeah, well, he's the ruler of a third of the world.
You would think so.
All right.
Hang, hang on there, Ambassador Peck.
I really appreciate you joining us on the show today.
It's Edward Peck, everybody.
We'll be right back on antiwar radio after this.
You can help the Liberty Radio Network launch your favorite shows on our own.
24 seven free satellite channel via the chip in at LRN dot FM.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's antiwar radio on the Liberty Radio Network.
Simon Cassin, the chaos radio, Austin, Doug, 95, nine in Austin, Texas.
Hi, Austin, Texas.
I haven't seen you in a while, but it makes me feel good knowing my voice is there.
Even when you're not listening, my voice is coursing through your body in FM radio wave format.
All right.
We're talking with Ambassador Edward Peck about the Gaza flotilla raid and well, the situation with Israel in general.
You're talking about Israel as a strategic liability as opposed to an asset of ours.
And yet everybody knows that Israel is part of the West and their greatest ally in the Middle East and they're the only democracy in the Middle East.
And and refrain and slogan on like that so that we have to marry our policy with theirs forever and ever, sir.
Well, I think it's important.
I think it's important to remember this, Scott, that no one in their right mind.
And I recognize that not everybody qualifies for inclusion, but no one might not.
No one in their right mind wants anything bad to happen to one person in the Middle East, not one Israeli, not one Palestinian and by extension, not one American.
But the horror of it is that bad things have happened, are happening and are going to happen because of what Israel is doing in Israel, in the West Bank and in Gaza.
And what Israel isn't doing in Israel, West Bank and Gaza.
I mean, that's that is so easily seen that nobody can argue with it.
And the other part of this that depresses me is that if Israel wants to live in peace and security in the Middle East, which is its objective, of course, along with some other things.
But it's important to remember that you can't have one country living in peace and security if nobody else is.
Because then you don't have it.
So that the objective that some of the extremists in Israel want is not going to lead to peace and security.
It's going to lead to future horrors.
And that's that's what upsets me.
Well, you know, I guess my problem is with this is just that I tend to agree with you so much.
I'm not sure exactly how to play devil's advocate.
I mean, it seems to me that the people who pretend that a reasonable withdrawal by Israel to the 1967 borders and and giving back the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to be a Palestinian state, the other side of that are the people who say that that that would somehow endanger the the existence of Israel or whatever.
They seem to have only lies to back these things up.
Lies like God, like Hamas will never, ever accept the existence of Israel, even though they've said over and over and over again that they would accept them at sixty seven borders.
Lies like Edward Peck and Anne Wright are al Qaeda mercenaries trying to attempt a terrorist attack when really you're trying to deliver medicine and wheelchairs to children.
I mean, does the war party have a point at all about the you know, I don't know that they give up the West Bank and Gaza as a Palestinian state and that Hamas would simply just use their newfound power, state power to prepare for the next war?
Well, you know, there are people who who perhaps feel the way that you just described it.
But that's on both sides of the question.
It's awfully hard to have a moderate success with extremists, whoever they are.
But the fact remains that, as you point out, the American public, justifiably not famous for its understanding of these things, looks at the media and listens to the media.
And the loudest voices that they hear are the ones who support the idea that Ahmadinejad said what he's accused of saying, but he never did.
But it comes out and it's told so many times that everybody accepts it as being the truth.
Hamas has said, yeah, anybody, if the Palestinians, you know, if the other other group of Palestinians in the West Bank accept a deal, we'll agree with them.
I got no problem with that.
But when you get wrapped up in I was an election observer in Gaza in 2006 with an arm band and Fatah, the other group of Palestinians ran the election and lost.
Now, how often does that happen in other parts of the world?
They ran a free and fair democratic election.
They lost.
And America said, no, no, no, Hamas, you people in Gaza, you elected the wrong folks.
You did not elect the ones we wanted.
And they said, well, wait, now you wanted a democratic.
I forget that, forget that you did not elect the guys that we wanted.
So you're going to have to pay a price for that.
Well, I find this difficult to accept or deal with in any logical, reasonable way, because the people there have been we insist they must recognize Israel.
But, Scott, I've spoken several times with Hamas leaders and they say, what are we recognizing?
You recognize a state, where are its borders, where Israel's borders, all of Palestine, some of Palestine, all of this, all of that.
They don't we can't recognize a place we don't we can't recognize, if you'll forgive the expression.
And secondly, recognition is I'm a retired diplomat.
Remember, it's always reciprocal.
I recognize you.
You recognize me.
But no one has even suggested that Israel should recognize Palestine.
And thirdly, groups of people, Hamas, do not recognize states.
States recognize states.
But the Palestinians don't have one.
So all of this, you know, it's so compellingly obvious to me that I find it awe inspiring, fear inspiring.
I find it absolutely devastating to realize that most Americans haven't got enough sense to realize this and that what you're doing is perpetuating a racist, hostile regime whose activities not only are in gross conflict with everything that we always bellow we stand for, but they're doing it with our money, our weapons and our political support.
And that is neither in Israel's interest, in my view, and it certainly isn't in ours.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry I don't have time to really ask you about the situation on the West Bank.
I want to focus on Gaza here.
The International Committee of the Red Cross just said for the 10th time that somebody official said this, that the blockade of Gaza is illegal.
And, you know, you're willing to obviously here risk your life to join this flotilla to try to bring food aid to these people, medicine and so forth.
And so I was wondering if you could just take this last minute and a half or two to describe what life is like for the people of Gaza to the American people who happen to get a chance to listen to this.
It is equivalent.
It is equivalent in its own way to Katrina, in the sense that so many people died and were rendering homeless and buildings were destroyed and systems and operations were failed.
And if we had then put a chain link fence all around Orleans in that area and said, you know, nobody can go in or out, that's what's happened in Gaza, except the damage done there is not a natural disaster.
It's a man-made disaster.
And far more attention, infinitely more attention has been paid to Haiti, another natural disaster than to Gaza, where it's being done by a government that we arm and finance, support and protect.
And that is that's just an atrocity in my mind.
And if the ICRC comes out with some strong language and they never do that, you know, they always play the diplomat and leave out the active words.
But not this time, because of what's happening.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry, Ambassador Peck, there's no chance I can keep you for another segment, is there?
You got to go.
No, it's OK.
You can have me for one more.
Oh, really?
Great.
Thank you so much.
Great.
Hang tight right there, everybody.
It's Ambassador Edward Peck on anti-war radio.
We'll be right back.
You can put the Liberty Radio Network on the air in your area.
Visit affiliates.lrn.fm to learn how.
That's affiliates.lrn.fm.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
Talking with former Ambassador Edward Peck about the situation in the Gaza Strip.
I really appreciate you staying over this extra segment with us here.
OK, I'll send you an invoice.
OK, good.
Yeah, check's in the mail.
OK, so now.
All right.
So the war party, basically, they've constructed this whole big lie, which, you know, there was somebody in the comments section on anti-war.com saying, wow, the Israelis using the big lie technique like this.
I guess I'll have to sit back and ponder for a little while this afternoon.
But they have this thing where this was a group of apparently, I guess, might as well have been Turkish Navy ships full of al Qaeda and Hamas terrorists who were attempting to break a perfectly legal blockade, which is there to prevent Hamas from getting weapons to kill innocent Israelis with.
And that, thank God, the IDF went and saved the day from this horrible attack.
This is the narrative that is apparently dominating the media in Israel.
And certainly, like if you listen to AM right wing talk radio in Los Angeles, for example, there's just no question about any of this.
And, you know, Barack Obama may actually be the antichrist for being so anti-Israel to hear the right wing talk radio tell it and whatever.
And then but here's where the rubber meets the road.
There are Democratic congresspeople who, on the basis of all these phony assertions about you and your al Qaeda mercenary friends, ambassador, that you should be prosecuted for terrorism, for attempting to deliver medicine and wheelchairs to kids through an illegal blockade.
Well, you know, when I had the misfortune in a way of being the first American to come back from this, just so you know, when we finally got to Ashdod and they took off the wounded people first and then they marched me in and the man said, you know, you're going to be expelled, deported.
And I said, why?
He said, you have broken an Israeli law, speaking in excellent English, I might say, of course.
And so I said, well, wait a minute, which which Israeli law have I broken?
And he looked up and he said, you have entered the country illegally.
I said, now hold it, a group of armed men from your country boarded our ship in international waters, brought us here under armed guard, and I am literally being forced at gunpoint to walk into your country.
And you call that illegal entry?
He said, yes.
And I said, we're not speaking the same language.
That's an illegal entry.
Would you compel me to come in here?
Well, anyway, the point is that I got back here and people were saying, well, what about the accusation of Israelis that they're all Al Qaeda terror?
And I said, well, what would you have expected Tel Aviv to say?
The ship was filled with tree hugging pacifists.
They were sitting around, you know, drinking steaming mugs of cocoa and singing Kumbaya while your armed mask soldiers took over the ship in international waters where they didn't want you to do it.
It's, you know, the whole thing gets twisted rather badly.
And for the people, you know, I reiterate, I don't I don't want a bad thing to happen to one single Israeli, but I sure as hell don't want it to happen to a single American.
And the Palestinians are caught right in the middle.
We we look we look so to the rest of the world, we look so incredibly misinformed, uninformed and disinterested for those two reasons that it is imperiling our country.
And I don't like that, don't wish anything bad for Israel, but even more, I don't want bad things to happen to us, as Petraeus points out are happening.
Well, now, thank goodness, I guess that legislators aren't law enforcers and these congressmen can spout off, but there's no real threat of the Justice Department coming after you guys for this, is there?
Well, you know, stranger things have happened.
I have to say this, I know I had two tours of wartime active duty in the Army, World War Two and Korea, and I've worn the uniform with pride and I've served my nation overseas through wars and riots and diseases and all kinds of stuff.
I don't think a backseat to anybody in terms of patriotism.
But if if you accept President Bush's never ending theme that they hate us because we have freedom, they certainly have less reason to hate us now because we have far less freedom than we had before.
Are you listening, Mr. Cheney?
I doubt it.
But, you know, they don't like us because of what we are facilitating being done to their co-ethnic, co-religious, religion types.
You know, they don't like that any more than the Mexican government, like somebody being shot at the border by an American.
And now that we are engaged in finishing the total destruction of Iraq, not to mention perpetrating the ongoing horror facing the Palestinians and now blasting Afghanistan even farther back into the Stone Age, I fail to see how anything that I'm interested in or concerned about is being helped.
That's a long answer to a short question, Scott, and I'm sorry.
No, I thought it was a good one.
All right.
Now, if it's OK with you, I'd like to ask you about a little bit of history here.
I have no particular reason to believe that, you know, about any of this.
And in fact, I guess what I think I know about it would exclude you being in on it.
Maybe you learned about it later, but it says here on your Wikipedia page that you were the chief of mission in Baghdad from 1977 to 1980.
And I'm not sure when.
I'm not sure whether you would have been in this loop anyway.
But there's this incredible story by Robert Perry at Consortium News, who is a regular guest on this show, a very trusted journalist by yours truly.
And he has here a top secret document authored by Alexander Haig in 1981 for Ronald Reagan about his recent tour of the Middle East.
And he says that one of the things that happened was he was told by King Fahd that in September 1980, Jimmy Carter, through King Fahd, gave Saddam Hussein the green light to invade Iran.
And I was wondering if you could shed any light on that question, sir.
Invade Iran, you said?
Yes.
No, you know, Saddam Hussein, any more than anybody else, would certainly not have felt compelled to ask for permission.
Does such a document exist?
I have no idea, but I doubt it.
But even if it existed, Saddam Hussein wasn't going to turn to anybody else and say, hey, is it OK?
The border fighting had already started.
They had cross-border incursions and all kinds of people harassing each other along that border, even back in 79.
And so when the war broke out in 1980, Saddam Hussein had decided, oh, the hell with this.
Let's let's go in and put a stop to it, which eventually he did, as you recall.
And he did it with our support because we, as a nation, thought that Iran was a bigger threat to our interests than Iraq was.
And at that same time, think Irangate.
Israel saw Iraq as a bigger threat than Iran.
So the Israelis were cooperating with the Iranians and we were cooperating with the Iraqis.
Right.
The Israelis attacked the the Iraqis nuclear reactor at Osirak and drove it underground.
By the way, I do have I could send you the link to it's at Consortium News dot com, the actual picture scan of this document, which purports to be Alexander Haig's notes.
And it says, quote, It was also interesting to confirm that President Carter gave the Iraqis a green light to launch the war against Iran through Fahd.
And this is Haig reporting to Ronald Reagan.
Well, you know, that's that's entirely you know, I have seen forgive me when I was serving in the government any number of times that people floated alleged U.S. top secret documents destroyed before reading level, you know, which which we always said were fake.
It's not hard to do if you can produce a passport, you know, you can certainly produce a typewritten document or a computer written document.
But my point is that I know poor April Glaspie was accused of having given Saddam Assad the green light to invade Kuwait.
Oh, crap.
You know why?
She was probably one of the sharpest, most competent people we ever had working in the government.
And she doesn't have to give Saddam governments like people, Scott, only do what they perceive to be in their best interest.
They could be wrong.
They could be dead wrong.
But if they don't think it's going to benefit them, they don't do it.
And just by the same context, they they they never do things that they don't think are going to advance their interests, which is the problem of being a diplomat, because you're supposed to run out there and tell them that we think it's good for you, you know, which is what Hillary Clinton does for a living.
Well, wouldn't Saddam Hussein, wouldn't Saddam Hussein think it would be good for him to get a green light from America since we're the dominant power on Earth?
No.
He didn't mean it, he was quite sure of what he was doing.
All right.
Folks, we're going to have to leave it there.
But but listen, I really appreciate this.
I hope I can bring you back on.
OK.
The boys in the chat room sure love that.
I know that.
OK.
Thank you very much, everybody.
Ambassador Edward Peck.
And we'll be right back after this.