08/28/09 – Eugene Bird – The Scott Horton Show

Alright, welcome back to the show, it's Antiwar Radio, Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide on the internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org and at Antiwar.com slash radio.
And I'm going to put my cynicism on hold, at least for the first few minutes here and try to keep an open mind.
I got an email from a friend forwarded on from the Council for the National Interest Foundation, you know, Pete McCloskey and those guys, and it's about a leaked copy of Barack Obama's plan for a Palestinian state.
And here to talk with us all about it, explain what it means and what he thinks of it, is Eugene Berg from the Council for the National Interest Foundation.
Welcome to the show.
Thank you.
How are you doing today?
Yeah, we're doing fine up here in Washington, in spite of everybody who's out of town.
Oh yeah, well, that's probably better.
Yeah.
Okay, so what do we have here?
I guess the origin first.
This was leaked to the press by a member of the Palestinian parliament, is that right?
Yes, and no one knows for sure whether this is for real or not, but it sounds real to me and to a couple of other ambassadors, former ambassadors that I've tried it out on.
I think it is possibly a leak to inspire some reaction, which Abbas and Netanyahu would have to react to.
So far, there's been no reaction to this leak, except by Crowley at the White House, who denied parts of it, but that would be expected, I suppose.
Denied parts of it, but did not deny the whole thing?
Or did they have an opportunity to deny the whole thing?
Well, he wasn't asked about the whole thing.
He was asked on one specific part of it that the United States would be agreeable to a freeze on a part of Jerusalem rather than all of East Jerusalem.
He denied that.
But he didn't deny it in the sense of saying, we're not going to have any restrictions on East Jerusalem at all, or it's going to apply to all of East Jerusalem too, just whatever the reporter asked him wasn't right.
Right.
It's the old neighborhood idea, but it is much more harsh, shall we say, with regard to the neighborhoods.
What it really seems to say is that Jewish settlers, or whatever you want to call them, people moving across from West Jerusalem to East Jerusalem will be allowed, and that the one area that they have said is off limits is called E1, east of Baal Adumim, down towards Jericho in that direction.
And that's been a contentious point for a very long time, but really that's not as important as what's happening in Sheikh Jarrah, where I used to live, on the Mount of Olives.
That's a neighborhood in East Jerusalem, or that's a city in the West Bank somewhere?
That's a neighborhood in East Jerusalem, yeah.
Well, I really don't know all that much about it.
I guess we see headlines from time to time.
But I guess it's pretty much a slow but ongoing process of ethnically cleansing East Jerusalem in the name of zoning codes and all kinds of sort of technicalities, it seems like, to purge the Palestinians out of there.
Is that a fair characterization?
Yes, I think you're right, and it's an accelerating process with regard to East Jerusalem.
Inside the old city of East Jerusalem, 90% of the people are not Jewish who are resident there.
But there is a Jewish quarter, there's an Armenian quarter, and a Christian quarter separate from that, and a Muslim quarter, a lot of which has been torn down by the Israelis.
And, of course, the great spot that the temple is supposed to have been built on, which is occupied by the third most important Muslim shrine in the world, the Dome of the Rock and the Mosque of Al-Aqsa.
And that's going to be the real point of contention.
All right, well, assuming that this is at least an authentic portrayal of what they're starting with, not that this would necessarily be the final product of anything, but assuming that it's authentic in its origin at least, let's go through and explain what are the parts of the West Bank and Gaza, what are the problems being negotiated, and what does it look like they're aiming to do here?
Well, the problems that are not being negotiated, according to this, are probably more important in some respects.
They haven't mentioned Gaza or opening up Gaza to traffic back and forth.
One and a half million people are still in outdoor prison.
They have mentioned the prisoners in the Israeli jails, but they say that they'll have to remain there for another three years after negotiations are completed.
Well, you know, this is way down the road, and I think completely inadequate.
It's holding hostage a lot of people that were just picked up in the night without any reason.
So there are a lot of things in it that will make Palestinians angry and will make Arabs angry, and it doesn't really advance the peace process very much, in the opinion of most of the people that have actually lived on the ground.
Well, is there anything in there about taking down the settlements in the West Bank?
Or, I guess, first of all, to what extent is the West Bank colonized by these so-called Israeli settlements?
I mean, some people portray it as though nobody can get from here to anywhere in the West Bank without having to go around all these giant walls, and that basically it would be impossible to even make a Palestinian state in the West Bank, since there's colonies and giant concrete walls everywhere in there.
Is it really that colonized, I guess?
Well, yes, I think it is.
There are special roads that Israelis only can travel on, yellow plates.
The green plates are not allowed on them.
If a Palestinian is found on one of those roads, which leads to one of the settlements, even if he's a passenger in an Israeli vehicle, he is now subject to five years in prison.
You know, this is kind of nonsensical in terms of any real peace between the two peoples.
But the drive is on for taking as much of the West Bank.
My expression of it is very simple.
The Israelis want to take all of the West Bank, except the actual ground that a Palestinian may be standing on.
And that's pretty much what the United States is allowing to happen at this point.
The smaller settlements will be discussed after the negotiations are completed.
They have agreed to discuss them.
Well, that doesn't mean anything, of course.
And there are 140 settlements with, well, some people say 300,000, but it's actually over 400,000, including East Jerusalem.
So we have a situation which is heading down the road to another disaster, another, if not intifada, maybe not an intifada, but a massive movement like Gandhi did, in which it became intolerable for the British to stay in India, and maybe it will become intolerable for the Israelis.
There are now five million Palestinians west of the Jordan River.
One and a half million of them are Israeli citizens, Palestinian.
Among those are about 50,000 American Palestinians, who are also Israeli citizens.
It becomes very complicated, doesn't it?
And so this doesn't deal with the realities on the ground.
Now, the elders, Desmond Tutu and Mary Robertson and Carter, are there now, and there's just been released a very interesting interview with Desmond Tutu, in which he, in one way or another, strongly suggests that sanctions are going to be necessary on Israel.
Who says that?
Desmond Tutu.
Oh, really?
Well, you know, I'm sure you saw this video that came out.
I believe it was just a very recent thing.
Certainly it's Obama administration era.
I think it was just a couple of weeks ago it came out.
And it's about 20 minutes long, and it's interviews of Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Brent Scowcroft, who I guess can be presumed to be speaking for George Bush Sr., and James Baker III, who also is, of course, closely identified with George Bush Sr.
And these are the so-called Council on Foreign Relations wise men, just like, you know, a few generations ago, only for our times.
And they're saying, no, something really has to be done here.
No more screwing around.
And Barack Obama's doing the right thing, and we are going to really get somewhere.
We have to, and that kind of thing.
Is that spirit not going to carry the day when it's coming from such elite quarters?
Well, I know Landrum Bowling, who did that very, very well, and he did the interview with these four men.
And I don't know whether they have much, shall we say, clout with this administration.
Certainly Carter probably doesn't.
Brent Scowcroft might.
Baker, to some extent, but not really.
He's a Republican.
He's highly regarded in the Republican Party for the most part.
I think this is a very interesting movie to watch as what should have happened, but what will happen is now coming out in the various leaks that we see, including the one we started talking about.
Well, and of course all the other leaks are saying if Israel will bend and let Obama do what you seem to describe as hardly anything, then we can go ahead and, as a tradeoff, be much tougher on Iran and blockade them and threaten them with sustained bombing campaigns and the rest of this.
Well, of course, the whole Iran thing is designed to take the attention of the United States off of Israel-Palestine.
The average Israeli is saying Tehran is where we ought to be focusing or the United States should be focusing, not Jerusalem.
In fact, the president has said, well, you know, if we got somewhere on the Israel-Palestine problem, that would help on the other.
And, of course, what we at the Council for the National Interest have said for the last year is that Obama ought to follow through on his promise during the campaign to call a new non-proliferation treaty conference that would include everyone, including all nations, and set up a really international system of control, which was suggested during the Truman administration and was never followed through on.
I think the proliferation problem will only grow if we let it become a matter between the United States and Iran, with the Europeans involved.
But Israel is trying to incite this, to take the attention of the world and of the United States off of their own nuclear program, which is, of course, one that has the highest number of atomic weapons in the world.
I know Panunu, who is the one who was the whistleblower on the Israeli nuclear weapons.
Really?
Eric Cohn is here, and he's the sort of official biographer of the Israeli nuclear program.
And, of course, it's not recognized by the United States that both Iran and North Korea have said if we had an international system of control that started to get rid of all nuclear weapons instead of giving to the five powers the right to hold nuclear weapons and the rest of you can't have them, which is the sense of the NPT at this point, we would stop our programs, any programs you might have.
Well, it must seem strange, I think, to the average citizen of some completely neutral country that has nothing to do with this, like Brazil or Argentina or something, who's looking at the situation where you have Iran, which is a member of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and which has safeguards by the IAEA and is verified to have not diverted any of their nuclear material to any military purpose at all.
And then you have Israel, who everybody knows is armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons, and is not a member of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, screaming bloody murder about a nuclear weapons program that doesn't exist.
And then this goes on for years.
Well, if you want to talk about that, I was talking with Anunu a couple of years ago in Jerusalem, and he spent 18 years in jail for publishing the secrets of the Israeli nuclear program.
He was the first one to do it.
And he said to me, these nuclear weapons that Israel has, and probably your nuclear weapons, are never going to be used, and they're useless, and we're spending money on things that really are not usable in war.
And it's true that the Israelis considered in 1973 using their first nuclear bomb on the Egyptian army, and the Prime Minister finally decided not to do it.
But that would have been the only other time in which nuclear weapons were used.
My son's book, Kai Berger's book on the American Prometheus, if you know that book, which won a Pulitzer Prize, describes this whole problem very, very well, right from 1947 through until the Israeli nuclear program.
And it doesn't describe just the Israeli nuclear program.
It describes proliferation as being one of the great problems, and we haven't done anything about it in the last 59 years.
Yeah, well, it's true, and it's funny, because I know Dr. Gordon Prather, who's our in-house nuclear expert at Antiwar.com, he says that inside the DoD, if you're in the nuclear weapons division, that's a career dead end.
That's like the kiss of death to be assigned to nuclear weapons, because they're only designed to, I guess, suck all of our wealth away and collect dust.
Well, that's a pretty good expression of it.
In fact, on The Simpsons, Mr. Bernstein calls them do-nothing nuclear weapons that they're wasting all our money on.
They just sit there.
Well, I prefer that they sit there and collect dust, don't get me wrong.
I don't want them used instead or anything.
So, if I understand you correct here, Eugene, what you're saying is that Obama and his team are basically crafting another offer that the Palestinians can't possibly accept, and they'll call it another one of these offers they can't refuse, and then, oh my God, can you believe they refused it anyway?
And then it's all their fault that they continue to lose the West Bank and continue to starve to death in Gaza.
Well, we haven't given up on this only because Mitchell is there, and Mitchell has a persistence and so on and so forth.
But, as you know, the situation in Ireland is very, very different from the situation between Israel and her neighbor Palestine.
Frankly, our feeling is that the United States should join the over 100 nations who have recognized Palestine as a state and go ahead and recognize Palestine as a state without specifying boundaries, which is what we did with Israel 60 years ago.
Oh, there you go, because then you can just work from there, and you got the hard part accomplished, basically.
Well, not the hard part, but diplomatically the hard part out of the way.
Yeah, and then it leaves it up to the parties to decide what the boundaries are going to be, which is what we did in 1940-49.
Ralph Bunch got the Nobel Prize for finally defining the green line, the armistice line.
And you know, one of the stories that I like very much has just come out from Israel about a year ago, because their archives are beginning to be revealed, you know, opened.
And Ben-Gurion is sitting there with his cabinet, and he receives Ralph Bunch's proposal for an armistice on the green line, and the West Bank, and Gaza, and so on and so forth.
And the cabinet says, let's not agree to this.
We can get more.
And he said, no, let's agree to it.
We'll get the rest later.
Well, so...
Father of his country.
You know, it seems like this thing has gone on for so long, and it seems like the two parties each have such an interest in pleasing pro-Israel forces.
And, you know, that's not code for Jews either, because that means a lot of evangelical Christians in the Republican Party, of course, as well.
And so this thing just seems to go on and on and on.
And if Barack Obama can't deliver a Palestinian state, when he at least is, you know, like Carter, taking this on at the beginning of his term, rather than waiting until the very end like Clinton and Bush Jr. did, it still seems like the uphill battle here is beyond what anybody can muster.
I mean, the pressure in the United States for a fair deal exists where exactly, other than the, you know, Antiwar.com and the Council for the National Interest Foundation?
Well, there are about 30 members of Congress who refuse to sign on to an AIPAC resolution concerning Gaza.
We think that the first thing the president should do is call for an NPT treaty to douse the flames that are arising from the relations with Iran.
And then go on from there to say that Gaza must be opened.
It's a humanitarian problem.
It's an embarrassment to the United States, or it should be.
It's not being reported well.
It's terrible.
We've been in there four times in the last four or three years.
And I can tell you that there's probably no place on earth that has been beaten up so badly as Gaza has without the world saying anything about it.
I mean, it's incredible.
The American university in Gaza was bombed after the Israelis captured it.
I mean, they came up very close to capturing it.
And they bombed it without any... it wasn't a military object at all.
Well, other than the... which, you know, I don't want to minimize it, but I think it's kind of not the whole point.
Besides Operation Cast Lead and the invasion of December and January last, what are the long-term conditions there?
Because, of course, a lot of the propaganda says that Ariel Sharon, without even making a deal with the Palestinians, he was so generous.
He said, you know what, we're going to go ahead and get out of the Gaza Strip and let you have it.
And yet, you know, you referred to it as a prison.
So it seems like they can't have it both ways.
Which way is it exactly?
And for the people, as you say, who don't get a chance to hear this very often in the general public, what is it exactly about the living conditions of the people of Gaza that you blame the Israelis for?
What's so bad about it?
Well, it's not just the Israelis.
It's the Americans, because we're putting, you know, terrific financial sanctions on...
You can't transfer money from here to Gaza, even if you wanted to give money to some refugee relief work in Gaza.
The only operative organization is the UNRWA, and it's hampered severely by the fact that they can't bring in...
You know, they used to get 800 truckloads a day, somewhere between 700 and 800 truckloads a day into Gaza to supply the 1.5 million people.
And they used to take out maybe 100, 150 trucks of oranges and flowers and various other things that were produced in Gaza.
Gaza was beginning to be a success in a way.
And then came last January, and, well, it happened much earlier.
It happened almost as soon as Hamas won the election.
The head of the Israeli public television told us on screen, we have it on film, the day after the election three years ago that Israel was going to have to talk to Hamas.
Well, they haven't, and we haven't.
And we have talked with Hamas leaders in Damascus and Gaza, and, of course, Carter has talked with them in Cairo, and Pickering has talked with them in Zurich, Switzerland, just very recently.
It's time for us to realize that we're responsible, not just the Israelis.
And all we have to do is tell the Egyptians, open the Rafah crossing and close the tunnels.
And if the Rafah crossings were opened into Egypt, the tunnels would become economically unnecessary and too high-priced and so on.
But Israel really needs to open the two other crossings, the people crossing and the truck crossing, so that at least five, six hundred trucks a day go back and forth.
Well, if Benjamin Netanyahu had his way, what would it be?
They'd just steal all of Gaza and either push all the Palestinians there into the Mediterranean or into Egypt and just take it?
What about the West Bank?
If the U.S. had nothing to say about it and they just did what they wanted, what's the goal from the Likud's point of view?
Well, Netanyahu would leave Gaza in prison with the American help, because it's the Americans that are really helping them.
Israel couldn't sustain the situation in Gaza if the Americans really decided to make a demarche to them and to tell the Egyptians to open up so that at least the people, where 1,500 people a day were going across when we were last there three years ago, now there's hardly any.
Three, four, five, something like that.
You know, you can't sustain this.
They're keeping the fishing fleet from going out beyond a kilometer and a half or two kilometers.
I don't know what it is now.
They change it all the time.
And they fire at the boats if the boats go further than that.
And they're stealing a lot of the gas, the natural gas that belongs to the Palestinians offshore.
Well, you know, I was going to ask you about that, because I'd read reports, I think, that they'd even at least speculated if not struck oil down there.
And that's going to be a real problem for the Gazans if they have resources to be stolen right off their coast.
Well, it's one of the larger gas fields, and the Israelis have ownership of half of it.
But in a gas field, if you drill 14 to 15 wells, which they've done already, and they're pulling the gas out and very quietly sending it over to Israel, and they're not allowing anyone to drill south of there in the main Palestinian part of there, the gas migrates very easily to those 14 wells.
So they're really stealing the Palestinian gas.
The pressure will go down and so on and so forth.
But it's the only resource that the Palestinians have, the only natural resource, really, that they have.
And so when Sharon got out of Gaza, they were just beginning to drill offshore.
And so he obviously knew that he was going to create a situation in which the Gazans would revolt against the prison conditions.
And it really is a prison.
We've been there several times.
Cynthia McKinney has been there recently.
And everyone who goes there says that it's a humanitarian crisis, and we're responsible for it.
So let's start with Gaza, and then we go on.
I don't think there will ever be any sanctions against Israel.
But I think if the administration really wants peace, they're going to have to come up with a step-by-step practical approach to peace that recognizes that Israel wants it all, but they're going to have to tell Israel, you can't have it all.
And you can't have all of the West Bank.
You can't have all of Jerusalem.
You can't prevent the Palestinian refugees from coming back home, at least to the West Bank, at least to the Palestinian area.
None of this is really specified in the so-called peace plan that's been leaked, which may or may not be true.
It sounds true to us here.
So I think we've got a rough 90 days ahead of us here.
Well, how can people help?
Because I think the Council for the National Interest Foundation, actually, you guys do educating congressional members and pressuring them, letter-writing campaigns and stuff like that, right?
Yeah, oh yeah.
We follow pretty closely whatever...
You know, AIPAC just drafted a recent resolution that was really awful.
It was not a resolution.
It was a letter to the president that 71 senators signed on to.
But it's interesting that out of the 13 Jewish senators, only six of them signed on to the plea to Barack Obama to go easy on Israel.
That's essentially what the letter said.
And it didn't deal with any of the substance that we've been talking about here.
Until you deal with the realities and the substance and recognize it, you've got to free up Gaza.
You've got to deal with Jerusalem so that it's a city that is an international city.
And it can't be held by one side or the other at this point.
There must be involvement of both Christians and Muslims, as well as Jews, in the city.
And for them to claim that they want a Jewish state, I presume it means a Jewish majority state, because one out of five Israelis is not Jewish at this point.
And that's an increasing proportion.
It'll probably be two out of five in about 30 years will not be Jewish.
But it is a Jewish state in the sense that the permits and the licenses and the approvals of where you build and how are much, much easier for Jewish people than they are for the Palestinians who are citizens.
Someone pointed out to me that Israelis can hold two passports and come here.
There are about 500,000 Israelis here in the United States with Israeli citizenship and passports.
They still have American citizenship and American passports.
But in Israel, I can't go to Israel and become an Israeli citizen, because I'm not Jewish.
Even though I have a member of the Holocaust in my family, the Orthodox Jewish people would not recognize any immigration, any citizenship for anyone.
And they're reducing the time in which foreigners can spend in Israel around the West Bank pretty drastically and hassling American citizens in East Jerusalem a great deal by saying you've got to either take your American passport and be here for only three months before you have to go out and get another visa and come back in, or you have to take the permits that are given to Palestinians living in East Jerusalem.
They're resident permits.
And there are at least about 100 Palestinian Americans that are now threatened with the loss of their passport.
Well, this is ridiculous.
It doesn't happen anywhere else in the world.
And they shouldn't have to trade their passports for permits to live in East Jerusalem.
Well, now, with this whole sanctions bill against Iran coming up and the supposed deadline regarding that, are you guys making a specific push to talk with members of Congress and get them to not sign on to a blockade of Iran?
And they're trying to ban them from importing refined petroleum, which is basically a declaration of war.
Yeah, and there are a lot of other parts of that bill that are really going to cause enormous problems for the United States and for the world economy at this point.
And it's all done on behalf of a small group in Israel who are claiming that Iran is a now and current threat to Israel.
Now, of course, Iran has supplied rockets to Hezbollah.
But the Hezbollah people say, we only want to defend our homeland.
We don't want to attack Israel unless Israel attacks us.
And that's been true pretty much.
There have been a few rockets over, but there have been a lot more provocations by the Israelis than by Hezbollah.
This is important to me, and this comes up on the show pretty often, but I kind of think it should.
I read the biography of the 9-11 hijackers, or at least the ringleaders, the actual pilots, and Mohammed Atta and those guys.
It was by Terry McDermott.
It's called Perfect Soldiers.
And he said that among the pilots on September 11th, their primary grievance was Israel in Lebanon and in Palestine.
And they would talk about, can you believe what Israel did today?
We need to attack Americans.
And that was the motivation of the guys who did it.
And, you know, as Michael Scheuer, the former chief of the CIA's Bin Laden News, pointed out, that going back to Bin Laden's first declaration of war against the United States in 1996, it came just a month or two after the Kwana massacre, basically, when he got to Afghanistan.
And he went on and on at length about Israel's crimes and why he held America responsible for them.
And how's that for something that's important but not part of the discussion about, you know, why it even matters?
There was the thing the other day in These Times where there was a quote from an Israeli Defense Force soldier saying, they're like ants.
It's like burning ants with a magnifying glass.
And the result of that kind of thing is things like September 11th against American civilians.
And it seems like a pretty important part of the discussion that's not usually part of the discussion.
And even worse than 9-11 being partly, very much as you've described, the reason behind it being our mistreatment of the Palestinians and Israeli treatment of the Palestinians, frankly, the American effort should be on reaching an agreement with Iran and with North Korea and with Israel and Pakistan and India on tapping off their nuclear weapons program and reducing them just like we have.
We've reduced to 2,500 online, which is too damn many.
But I think we're going to be working very hard with our 6,000, 7,000 people across the country to try and stop this Iran bill.
But the making of enemies for the United States seems to be a specialty of the Israeli strategic forces, Mossad and others.
And they don't want us to be friends.
Well, and that's not just hyperbole either.
I mean, there's, of course, the Clean Break document that the American neocons wrote for Netanyahu in 1996 saying their first priority was getting rid of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
Yeah, Richard Burrow and the others.
Yeah, and that certainly influenced, because he was here at the time.
He was head of the policy.
Richard Burrow was head of the policy committee for the Defense Department at the time.
And they made the decision to go into Iraq.
Bush probably was also influenced by his father's experience in Kuwait being almost assassinated by Saddam Hussein's people.
But still, it wasn't the personal.
It was the strategic.
I had an Israeli Mossad official tell me one time, we're very good at tactical policy, policy that is today, tomorrow, and next week.
But we're not very good at strategic policy.
And the problem is that they're in their own time warp.
They want everybody to leave and give them all of Palestine west of the Jordan River.
And, of course, that's not going to happen.
There are five million Palestinians west of the Jordan River.
There are five million Jewish people.
We have to deal with the realities of that.
Yeah, well, it's like Hillary Clinton says, when you're in a hole, grab a shovel.
Keep digging, I guess.
All right, now, if I can keep you just one more minute here.
First of all, I want to apologize for, I just got you on the phone, arranged this interview, of course, right before the show.
I didn't have time to pull up your biographical information, so I started off the whole thing with getting your name wrong.
It's Eugene Berg, not Berg, and so I apologize for that.
I didn't even notice it.
I'm sorry?
I didn't even notice it.
Oh, that's good.
Well, that's how I got it wrong over the phone, too, is I couldn't tell the difference.
I knew it would come back from the Chinese laundry that way, too.
Oh, yeah, that's good.
Well, I'm glad we didn't really have a problem until I brought it up.
Can I make one pitch for our political pilgrimage, which goes off on October 30th, our 17th time in the Middle East?
We decided years ago that the way to look at the Middle East was to see it on the ground.
We drive people in buses and taxis and whatever and introduce them to high-level and low-level officials and men in the street.
We have a camera with us from Cairo to Beirut, or this time it's going from Beirut to Cairo.
A very famous American ambassador is going to head this group.
It leaves on October 30th.
If there's anybody out there that wants to apply to join, we have a system on our website of applying.
You can get to me on 1-800-296-6958, extension 310, and we'd be happy to consider you.
It does cost a bit, $8,500, but maybe you can raise it from friends if you don't have it yourself.
We'd enjoy having some of your listeners.
Again, the website there is CNI Foundation, Council for the National Interest Foundation.
I'm looking here at your bio.
You're the president of the Council for the National Interest Foundation.
It says you worked for the State Department for 23 years.
You were counselor of the U.S. Embassy in Saudi Arabia and embassy warden of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo.
This is how you refer offhandedly to discussions you had with Mossad agents and Mordecai Venunu and things like this.
Can you tell us about Mordecai Venunu, how well you know him, and what you know about him?
We have a half-hour film on him, as a matter of fact, that we did with me and another person on one of the political pilgrimages, interviewing him in the Episcopal Anglican garden in East Jerusalem.
That's reasonably interesting, but that's five years back.
Maybe I can tell you that right now Mordecai is living in East Jerusalem under the provision that he not talk with any BBC or any media.
He told me, if you can get me on any program, I'll be glad to come, regardless of that ban.
Every year or two, they pick him up again and put him before the court and then give him a probation for six months.
They're a little afraid of putting him back in jail.
He's been in jail for 18 years, 11 of those in solitary confinement.
He was kidnapped in Rome by the Mossad and brought to Israel.
I've got to tell you, on one hand, I'm thinking, wow, you could get him on my show.
On the other hand, I'm thinking, jeez, I'm scared of those guys.
Oh no, don't be scared.
Can you get him on my show?
Yeah, sure.
I think he'd be happy to come on.
I can give you the contact information.
We can do that by email.
Oh jeez, well I've got to do it now.
All right, well listen, I want to thank you very much for your time on the show today.
This has been fascinating.
Nice talking to you.
Bye-bye.
Really appreciate it.
Okay everybody, that's Eugene Byrd, President of the Council for the National Interest Foundation, again at cnifoundation.org.