05/03/07 – Greg Palast – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Introducing Greg Palast.
He's an award-winning investigative reporter for the BBC and the Guardian newspapers in England.
He writes for Harper's sometimes, and he's the author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse.
Welcome back to the show, Greg.
Hey, glad to be back with you, Scott.
Yeah, and the new Armed Madhouse came out last, just this past week.
I saw that.
New paperback, right?
New paperback expanded, updated, thickened up, fattened up, because of the new evils, and it just went out this weekend.
It's just notified it's on the New York Times bestseller list already, so they can't kill everything.
And I got my first review.
Oh, you got your first review, huh?
From Karl Rove.
Oh, and he loved it?
By the way, I'm not kidding.
Oh, you're not kidding.
I'm not.
I kid you not.
And it was the most unusual publication because it was subpoenaed by the House Judiciary Committee.
I'm not kidding.
I couldn't make this one up.
Who's that?
John Conyers?
The Conyers Committee.
They subpoenaed, as you know, thousands of emails by Rove and the Rove-bots in his office.
And they wrote, there were several in there, screeching about that British reporter, Greg Palast.
Oh, yes.
And, by the way, Mr. Rove, I am, Greg Palast is American.
Yeah, you don't sound like you have much of a limey accent.
Right, and Rove is un-American, so let's get the facts straight.
But he did, and what I said in the review of the book, and I kid you not, on February 7th, after a series of screechings about that British reporter, Palast, they said, but no U.S. national media, you know, obviously BBC picks me up, I'm their reporter, but no U.S. media has picked up the investigations of this British reporter, and, you know, and specifically, and they, you know, in arms madhouse, they actually attached, in the subpoenaed email, they attached a PDF of an excerpt of our madhouse, the new stuff.
Great.
And so at least I know that, you know, I was thrilled because, first of all, at least we know they can read.
Yeah, the Judiciary Committee?
Well, no, the Rove-bots.
Oh, okay.
Well, the Judiciary Committee can read or not, we will now, we will find out if they react to that email, because obviously, I mean, it's what, it's not Greg Palast that they give a toss about, as we see in Britain, it's the, it's what was in, what's in the book, that they are thrilled that no one has picked up.
Right, and what we're talking about in this case is the blacks being purged from the voter rolls in Florida before the election of the year 2000, right?
No, no, no, no.
No?
This is about, that was, that was, that's so 2000, Scott.
Yeah, I mean, I did that story about how, you know, black voters were purged from the voter rolls in 2000.
I thought that's what the wrong emails were about.
Oh, the emails, yeah, the emails were, no, but a whole different operation called caging lists, where what they did was they used a vote-challenging scheme, where they, we had 50 emails, let's see if I get the numbers right, I think it was 50 emails with 70,000 names.
We have 500 emails, by the way, 50 of the emails.
And by the way, those are the ones that are missing, that they're looking for.
Now, this is not the, this is not the review.
I actually got other emails from the rove bots, which they're looking for, from the RNC.
Actually, it's from georgewbush.com, is the domain that they were using for their business, monkey business, which the judiciary panel is still looking for, but we do have 500.
And in 50 of them, there were 70,000 names attached on Excel spreadsheets.
They called these caging lists.
Here's a caging list, here's a caging list.
And it turns out these were lists of voters that they intended to challenge on the grounds that they had suspect addresses.
And you know what the number one suspect address was?
Prison?
Baghdad.
Oh, the soldiers.
What they did was that they sent emails, or not emails, they sent first-class letters, in some cases registered letters, to voters, Democrats, mostly minority voters, Hispanics, blacks, students who were on vacation, people registered out of homeless shelters, which you're allowed to do if you don't have a home, and guys in the military.
And so when the letters went to their home addresses from which they were registered, came back, returned to sender, because it said do not forward, returned to sender, they then made lists of these and used those to challenge the vote.
So for example, there was one soldier, a naval airman out of Jacksonville, Florida, where he was registered, named Randall Prowsa.
And Prowsa, I called his house, actually I didn't make a call, it was made by our chief investigator, Lenny Von Eckert.
Von Eckert called the house and said, where is Mr. Prowsa, because we want to check if maybe there's a legitimate reason for challenging these voters.
And the woman said, not here, his wife, presumably, and he said, where is Prowsa?
Lenny asked, and the answer was, well he's been shipped overseas.
So in other words, go to Baghdad, lose your vote.
Mission accomplished.
Now when he sends in his absentee ballot, anyone on the list who sends in their absentee ballot gets challenged when the ballot comes in.
They don't even know they're challenged.
The absentee ballot, once challenged, you don't know it's challenged.
If there's no one there to protect you on that, you lose the vote.
Shouldn't the Republicans be confident that all soldiers would vote Republican, since they're the only ones who support the troops?
Oh!
I'm sorry.
Hey look, you know what?
I'm laughing, because you know, I should be laughing because I have right with me, who's helping me out today, I'm in Washington, D.C. where I'm speaking from and helping and guiding me around Washington, is a gentleman whose son is a career Marine.
And he is being shipped back to Iraq, even though he only has nine months left on his career term.
He's been in the military a long time.
They're still shipping him into Iraq.
And he is definitely a fan of Greg Palast and most decidedly a guy who has no intention, and had no intention of voting for Mr. Bush.
And this is career Marine.
You talk to the guys on the Pentagon.
You talk to the guys in there who've gone in and gone out.
That's the last people that they want to vote.
The last thing they want to do is have some guy sending in his ballot from under a humvee in Fallujah and having a count.
They know what those guys are thinking and what those guys believe.
Well look, I've got the article right here about how they're banning army email and blogs so that we can't get the truth anymore.
Now Greg, I'm sorry, I know I only have at best another fifteen minutes or so with you here, so let me get to Venezuela.
I've read the headlines all week saying that Hugo Chavez has nationalized the last of the oil fields and that he's withdrawn from the IMF and the World Bank.
And now I know that's really just one story.
So why don't you help fill in some gaps and I'll try to interrupt you and ask you questions when I have them.
So be ready for that.
Okay, Hugo Chavez, you know, who tried to steal my hat.
So we're not on great terms because of that.
No, no, he did try to steal my hat.
He calls me Dick Tracy because I wear a fedora.
I wear a fedora because I have a...
Because you have a trench coat that it goes with.
I'm hair deficient.
Anyway, but Chavez, who I have dealt with for a few years now, he's a dissenter from the New World Order.
That's what they can't stand.
He is a guy who's challenging the Washington Consensus.
He's also challenging the hegemony of the House of Saud in control of OPEC.
You know, it all comes out of the oil.
In our manhouse, I've got a section called the Assassination of Hugo Chavez.
In fact, we were joking about the bullet that has his name on it because, you know, that's what they want to do.
They've got to take him out.
Well, and you told me before, I think, that when they launched the coup d'etat against him, the reason they did was because Saddam had called Libya and said, hey, let's overproduce some oil and drop the price.
And they said, move and get rid of Chavez in Venezuela so that we can counteract from our side.
Well, yeah, I mean, what they're really concerned about is a lockup, is very much that Chavez wants to bust the House of Saud.
Now, that he's very cautious about.
Forget all the rhetoric about George Bush.
He's got to control the oil.
But according to the internal documents of the U.S. Department of Energy, Venezuela, not Saudi Arabia, has the largest oil reserve.
That has to do with the fact that once oil stays above, confidently above 30 bucks a barrel, all of his what are called extra heavy crude reserves are now economic to pull out.
I mean, they're gunk, they're horrible, they're, you know, it's not what you want to burn, but it becomes economic to do so.
That gives them massive, massive economic power.
And they are not concerned, you know, despite there was some Republican committee report saying, oh, Chavez could cut off our supply of oil.
Hugo ain't cutting off our supply of oil.
We're his biggest market, man.
What they're concerned about is that he's cutting off our supply of cash.
What I mean by that is that the Saudi Arabians, we spend a quarter trillion dollars a year on Gulf oil.
A third of a trillion comes back from the Gulf to the United States, mostly in the form of buying U.S. Treasury bonds or otherwise buying up our ports or banks like a tenth of Citibank, that type of thing.
Okay, hold it right there, because this is very important.
George Bush once said, I think I blogged about this, that the high gasoline price is a hidden tax.
And then he said, oh, I mean, no, did I say hidden tax?
I didn't mean hidden tax.
I mean, boy, the price sure is high lately or something, isn't it?
Yeah, that's exactly what it is.
The high price of oil, which is deliberate, the high price of oil is basically a tax to fund our deficit.
Rather than taxing us directly, it's run through the gullet of the oil companies.
You fill up that hummer of yours, Scott, then the oil companies suck up and take their slice.
Then it goes through the House of Saud and poops back the other end into the House of Bush deficit.
We are running a massive deficit, and $2 trillion of that is held in foreign hands.
The biggest purchasers, well, now the Chinese are becoming the biggest purchasers, but the core of keeping alive this massive deficit without massive tax hikes is by borrowing it from the Saudis and the other petro states.
What Chavez has said is, I'll sell you all the oil you want.
In fact, I'll sell it to you cheaper than the Saudis are willing to sell it to you, and I'll lock in the price at one level amount.
In fact, he had a handshake deal with Bill Clinton on this, by the way, on just locking in the price of oil.
Not too high, not too low.
Just come up with a set price of oil.
Everyone benefits, and he benefits because he can then sell that heavy oil.
But he said, I'll give you the oil, but I ain't giving you the money.
It's staying down here.
He withdrew $20 billion from the U.S. Federal Reserve.
Yesterday, he just said, enough with the IMF, pulled out of the IMF and the World Bank, and he set up his own, instead of the IMF, he has what he calls the International Humanitarian Fund, the IHF, which I call the International Hugo Fund, which lends money to Argentina, to Ecuador, to Brazil, and of course, mostly into Venezuela itself.
Uruguay, Jamaica, Cuba, and by the way, the Venezuelan government made a pile of money off these investments.
Now, let me stop you here and just sum up to make sure that the audience understands what we're talking about here.
Americans consume imported oil all day long, and when the Saudis get that money, they keep basically enough to keep their people down to have coke and whores for themselves, and then they give the rest of the money back to the U.S. in the form of buying U.S. government debt.
And buying U.S. assets like Citibank, ports, and real estate.
Chavez says, I'll sell you all the oil in the world just like the Saudis, but I'm keeping the money, and not only am I keeping the money, I'm going to withdraw from the IMF and the World Bank, and not only that, I'm going to replace them.
I'm going to be the IMF and the World Bank of South America and cut the New York guys out of the profit stream.
Hey man, that's a lot of easy-squeezy for the New York banks, too, that they've just been cut off.
The supply of the cash, not the supply of oil that they're really worried about, and they're not going to talk about that because a lot of that money came through Miami, out the back door from Venezuela before Chavez was in.
And that's one thing that they're very upset about.
A guy like Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, that's more to their liking.
We get the oil from Kazakhstan, it goes into his bank account in Switzerland and comes back to the U.S.
So it never actually has to get dirty over in some unpronounceable stand in Central Asia.
And the life expectancy, so you have Venezuela where things are booming, life expectancy is rising, education, health care, everything is doing better.
Kazakhstan also a major oil nation where basically the people are in economic free fall.
Life expectancy is plummeting, it's the return of disease, mass epidemic of tuberculosis and things like that.
It is, pensions are worthless, people are eating out of garbage cans, they got more oil than they know what to do with.
Well that's because America is the Soviet Union now and they're one of our stands in South Asia, right?
Yeah, it's Houston's stand.
But we're one of the stands too.
We are an oil republic.
Let's not forget, last year the oil companies earned 120 billion dollars.
That's more than like the entire auto industry earned since the Model T.
These guys earned it in one year.
Now, if they earned it because they made smart investments, they were hunting around looking for oil, no, they made it because they hunted around, looked for the oil and turned off the spigots.
One of the key points of our madhouse in the oil section, in the Iraq section, is to bust down the belief held by many on the left and the right that we went into Iraq to get the oil.
It was not a war for oil, it was a war to stop the flow of oil.
It was very, very important.
The internal documents I have.
In fact, the new oil law that we are imposing on Iraq, which is written in Iraq's capital in Houston there, where you are, was written by the people at the James Baker Institute, by Hesse Oil Company, by Pertamina, the Indonesian oil company, all these oil executives in secret, writing a plan for Iraq's oil fields, the purpose of which was to limit the production of oil in Iraq and support OPEC.In fact, the phrase that they use in their internal documents of the State Department for the oil fields of Iraq is that the goal is to enhance the Iraq government's relationship with OPEC.In other words, support the cartel, support the Saudis, keep the price of oil high.
Very, very important.
Scott, for those of your listeners who have the misimpression that this is a quagmire and a disaster in Iraq, you have to ask, for whom is it a quagmire and a disaster?
Clinton was in the price of oil was 20 bucks a barrel.
By the way, I'm not a Clinton fan, I'm just telling, giving you a chronology here.
Well, that's what I was going to say, was Clinton was...
Clinton was, but just let me finish the one sentence.
Clinton was 20 bucks a barrel since the war hero's mission accomplished.
We've never had the price of oil go below 50 bucks a barrel.
So 20 dollars a barrel to 50 dollars a barrel, that's mission accomplished.
Yeah, it's said that they've empowered this guy Chavez, who they hate so much, in South America.
It just goes to show that all this imperialism doesn't really work.
It all just backfires on the people who were running it in the first place.
Unless they can take him out.
But even then, look, as he told me, he's a very good chess player.
I mean, one of the things that he's done is he's got a vice president who's a really pretty scary guy.
He's got his own, like, Darth Chaney down there.
So, you know, take me out and look who you got, you know?
It's like Bush saying, impeach me, you got Darth as your president, right?
So, you know, he's good at what he does.
He knows exactly what he's doing.
And by the way, the nationalization of the oil companies, I like Hugo, that's big drama and it's a big vote getter, but he didn't nationalize no oil companies yesterday.
Right, I mean, these are all owned jointly with American corporations, right?
Yeah, yeah.
What he did was he did truly and sincerely take voting control of their consortium operations and have nominal increase in his ownership level.
It didn't change, by one single penny, the amount that the oil companies receive for sucking up the crude in Venezuela.
Because Chavez knows he cannot simply take these companies.
The only two companies he actually seized, by the way, in the last year are the French and Italian companies, E&I and Total.
Because they refused, unlike the American Royal Dutch Shell and Phillips and Conoco, they refused to allow Chavez to take control, allow the Venezuelan government to take control of the operation of the field.
Because Venezuela wants to make sure that there's a minimum and maximum production level.
At the moment, they want to raise up the production level because they're coming up from a period of low production.
So they didn't want the oil companies to say, they don't work half in the wells or we're not producing here, it's too expensive, because Venezuelan oil is very expensive to produce.
In other words, he's forcing them to produce.
In other words, it's much more subtle than simply, we took the oil companies.
That's all baloney.
That's all for the consumption of his own voters.
The U.S. papers love that stuff.
He's Fidel Castro now.
You notice that no one brings up the fact that the Saudis actually did take 100% control of U.S. oil company properties back in the 60s.
And now, I asked you about this before and I believe you told me about the Venezuelan oil that it's under land that nobody ever owned.
Not even Indians ever lived on that land.
And now, me, I'm a libertarian and I prefer that everything be privatized to the point that there are no states anywhere.
But I guess if you're going to have a state and you have land that nobody ever owned in the first place is where the resources are, and the quasi-socialist whatever leader of your country is giving up those oil revenues to the people at the bottom rather than just to the top couple percent, then that's really not so bad.
It's not like there's a free market in oil anywhere.
Think of it the way that Venezuela runs.
It's more like the oil companies pay their basis, more like a private corporation in which the public owns all the stock.
It runs as pretty much an independent corporation.
The one thing that Chavez does do is that when now PDVSA, when their oil company goes into an area, they got to have schools and hospitals.
And so, they kind of have a social element.
But even Texaco and the rest are now figuring out that they better do that if they don't want people to just keep blowing up their pipelines anyway.
So, what the Venezuelan oil companies do is now actually being imitated by the other oil companies as well.
Because people in these areas are getting wise when they're sucking up the crude from underneath them saying, wait, where's ours?
Gee, we can punch a hole in this thing.
Yeah, well, Shell Oil would be smart to take a lesson there and start treating the people in the Niger Delta with some justice in Nigeria.
Because that thing's just going to keep heating up there.
Oh, I didn't know you were a real troublemaker.
You're going to start treating people with justice in Nigeria?
Well, these people are getting the oil stolen right out from under their land and they're fighting back.
They haven't killed anybody yet, but they're kidnapping a lot of people and guns and ransoms.
And I can just see President Hillary sending the Delta strike force to go and settle things for Shell Oil in Nigeria now.
I mean, that's one of the problems is that the anti-Chavez...
Look, you have one party in the United States, Hezbollah, the party of the cash.
And both parties, neither party is going to tolerate what Chavez has done, which is to cut off the banks.
And in our madhouse and previously in Best Democracy, you'll see there's Joe Stiglitz, who I interviewed extensively, who was on President Clinton's chief economic advisor, the head of the Council of Economic Advisers.
He was constantly talking about how Robert Rubin and Larry Summers would constantly, no matter what policy they had, they would constantly say, well, how would Goldman feel about this?
Everything was run by Goldman Sachs.
It was like the Goldman Sachs gold standard of policy setting.
And Goldman Sachs is not going to tolerate Hugo Chavez.
They cannot have a system in which any old president in some oil country can suddenly say, we're not turning over the money to Goldman Sachs and Citibank.
Once they start that system, who knows where it'll end?
Vote Republican.
It's a lot easier than competing in a free market.
Exactly.
Well, but there it was Democrats.
So, you know, I mean...
Right, right.
But you see, it's not like it's changed.
I mean, we went from under Clinton, the Secretary of Treasury from Goldman Sachs, to George Bush, where the Secretary of Treasury from Goldman Sachs, and so you get your choice.
Which guy from Goldman do you want?
I know you're a busy man and you're about to have to go, so let me get back real quick, last question here, back to the destruction, failure slash victory that is the current circumstances on the ground in Iraq.
I don't know if you saw Andrew Coburn's recent book, Rumsfeld, His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy, but he talks about Anthony Zinni in there, not having proof, but believing from observation that the neo-conservatives, when they realized they couldn't get their Hashemite king, or they couldn't get their Ahmed Chalabi and their pipeline to Haifa, that then they went for plan B, which was destroy the place.
And I know you've written, and we can't go into every detail of the whole fight back and forth, but I know you've written in our madhouse about the neo-cons versus the oilmen, so I guess I want to know, whose plan B is it to just go ahead and destroy the place?
Is it the neo-cons' plan B, or is this where Houston came in and said, well, we're going to decide, we're the ones who are going to destroy the place?
Well, I think that both of them have no problem with the place being on fire.
It fits the agenda for both to some extent, which is especially the agenda for the oil companies, because remember, Iraq has always been the place where they've suppressed production of oil.
We had, remember this, Saddam wanted to sell us oil.
It's not like he was trying to withdraw it.
He was trying to pump more.
We had a food-for-oil program, which meant that we got very little oil, they got very little food, and the oil companies liked it that way, because the lower the supply, the higher the price.
That's why they kept the sanctions all through the 90s.
They kept the sanctions through.
They had the FICO oil-for-food program, and the Europeans are getting very nervous about maintaining that because of the bad publicity he was getting, and Saddam was going to be let off the hook on that one.
What do you do?
I mean, the only thing left is to, if you want to stop the crude from coming out, blow up the lines.
I mean, I'm surprised that they didn't make Zarqawi, you know, vice chairman of Exxon.
You know, giving Lee Raymond a $400 million bonus, I think that he should have sliced them over to Zarqawi.
Now, what about Iran?
Last time we talked, the interview ended with you saying, well, if Baker wants to talk to him, then we're going to talk to him.
Well, it's simple.
Let's put it this way.
Royal Dutch Shell is just completing a $2 billion refinery in Iran.
The Royal Air Force does not bomb Royal Dutch Shell.
It's a parent company.
You know, I mean, it's just not how it works.
What we have here is a Punch and Judy show between Mad Machmood in Tehran and, you know, George the War Hero in Washington.
And they probably call each other up and say, oh, it's your turn.
They say, oh, I got some Brits out there in the water, floating out and waiting for you in a punch boat.
So this is just a wink-nudge.
They get to escalate the rhetoric and escalate the price of oil, but nobody really means to bomb anything.
They love it.
It serves both their interests.
It keeps the pot boiling.
It keeps the prices up.
And, you know, unfortunately, I'm sorry if I have such a cynical view, but if you read our Mad House, you'll get...
It's not that my view is cynical.
The information makes you cynical.
If you read the book, you get some pretty horrific stories and information, but it's also, like, weirdly funny, because there's almost an evil slapstick to it all.
And I do have things like these conversations with General Jay Garner, who, for a general, he just seemed like one of the most...
Maybe just, you know, like innocent guy or something, because he actually thought, oh, we're going to go in there and liberate people.
And he said, boy, they really messed up.
You know, he announced we were going to go in and be out in 90 days, right?
That was his big announcement.
The day he arrived, he told me, in Baghdad.
The very day he arrived in Baghdad, Rumsfeld calls over and says, you're fired.
You know, we're not in and out in 90 days.
And his view was he'd run the northern zone of Iraq under the Kurds, General Garner, and so he said, you know, it's their country.
And then he said to me, and this he shouldn't have said, he said to me, Greg, it's their oil.
It's like, oh, you know, what have you been smoking there, General?
You know, no wonder they filled out a new resume for you, right?
There's a problem, though, is it's not just George Bush's approval rating is going through the floor, but all the Republican strategists are saying, you know, we're doomed for another, you know, half a generation at least or something.
Are the oil companies not cutting off their nose to spite their face here by, you know, creating this success that looks to everyone else like hell on earth?
Well, here's a question.
Why do you think that the oil companies lose if the Democrats win?
Well, I don't, but I think they're probably better off if the Republicans are in power.
Well, they got what they need.
They got the tax cuts.
They got the they got Iraq on fire.
None of that's going to change.
Now they do need to chill it a bit.
But remember, James Baker, his plan and he was behind the first plan is the Saudi plan.
We cannot pull out the Saudis.
Remember that Dick Cheney was told to drop his drumstick and run to Thanksgiving and run to kiss the Saudi throne.
I mean, Dick Cheney was called like like and he came running like a puppy dog.
Yeah.
And you scoop Seymour Hersh on this, really.
I mean, he had some details you didn't have, but you pointed out that, yeah, we're we're putting that Sunni coalition back together.
Yeah, we're going to put we're going to put you we're going to, you know, rev up the Sunnis if the Americans leave.
So you got to stay.
Now, you know, that that raises the issue like what is wrong?
I know some people may think it's an oxymoron, but it's not.
What's wrong with the Muslim peacekeeping force?
I think the African Union can do it.
Yes.
Yes.
If we just leave right now and everyone's armed to the teeth, there will be a bloodbath.
Not that there isn't a bloodbath right now, by the way.
So what is wrong?
Why is it that that that the Saudi Arabian Army's marching song is Onward, Christian Soldier?
You know, when when exactly do the Saudis have responsibility for keeping the peace instead of funding the mayhem?
And there's also been reports, though, of the Saudis talking to the Syrians and and the Iranians.
I guess one speculation was that they were trying to bring the Syrians back over to the Sunni Arab side against the Iranians.
But then it seems like they're talking to the Iranians to perhaps, you know, they don't need to have a proxy war in Iraq.
They can work out their differences without us.
Well, it has to do again with control.
We go back on the part of our mass is about these wars.
Looking at you have to look at at the war at Iraq as part of a global gang war over oil.
And so there is the strange combinations at the moment.
The Saudis just do cannot stand or stomach the idea of the Iranians having a bigger say in OPEC by by having control of the quota of Iraq.
So to some extent, it's control over Iraq's quota in OPEC and their ability to produce that is really at stake here.
Who's going to control that place?
But didn't the Saudis know that it by toppling Saddam Hussein that George Bush would just be importing the Iranian power structure into the south of Iraq?
That would take over all of Basra's oil resources and all that?
Well, I don't I think that that was what they did not plan for or hope for.
That's why they're saying that the U.S. can't leave.
They cannot turn over the control of that OPEC seat to control the Iranians.
The Iranians are now allied in OPEC with Venezuela.
And so when the king of Saudi Arabia says that the occupation is illegal and we should go, that's just for public consumption back home?
No kidding.
Yeah.
Like, oh, the king of Saudi Arabia would lie?
Oh, my God.
I have faith in nothing now.
Yeah, it's only the things that are taken at face value.
No, that's the most cynical thing I've ever heard.
That the king of Saudi Arabia just wouldn't be straight.
Gee.
Yeah, well, it's funny, you know, when he says that we have to stay, that's one thing, and they go, oh, well, that's interesting.
But then when he says we have to leave, that's taken as though, well, obviously, he's speaking from the heart.
He said the occupation was illegal.
He didn't say he wanted to stop.
Oh, OK.
There's a difference.
Yeah, that's right.
You're the government, illegal's OK.
No, he's still, you know, he's got his mercenary army there, the 101st, you know, the 82nd Airborne, which is Exxon's exploration company.
Oh, that's easy.
So, yeah, it's the global gang war, and that's one of the things I was trying to get into.
I mean, there's a lot of other stuff in our bad house, and, you know, obviously, the new chapters are about how I was busted by Homeland Security.
I know you like that stuff.
I know it's one of your favorite places.
You have one of those little, aren't you a volunteer deputy or something like Sleuth?
The Department of Homeland Security really did bring charges against Greg Palast.
For that documentary?
After five years of hunting for Saddam, excuse me, I'm even doing the trick now, hunting for Osama, they found me.
Yeah, they settled on you.
And this is for, what, going to New Orleans and filming a documentary?
Well, yeah, I mean, as you know, investigative reporting is against the Patriot Act in America, which is what I do for BBC.
I used to say that as a joke, and then I actually got charged by Homeland Security for filming, for filming what was really going down in New Orleans.
What they said was, by the way, was that I was filming, when I was doing this work for our mad house, I was filming critical infrastructure.
I was filming, like, thousands of people living in this kind of tin-can Guantanamo underneath the ExxonMobil refinery in Baton Rouge in a place called Cancer Alley.
I mean, these people are dumped there.
It's more than a year after the flood, more than a year.
And by the way, the official statistic as of yesterday was 89,000 families.
This is a year and a half after the flood, still living in this kind of aluminum gulag, these mobile homes.
Right under the Exxon refinery.
So what I wanted to do is I wanted to, we took shots showing the mobile homes and the refinery.
And they said, well, that's, you're filming critical infrastructure.
I asked them what critical infrastructure was, and they said, any major polluting facility owned by a bush donor.
Oh, yeah.
I made that up.
You should have just told them you were an Israeli art student, they'd let you go.
Well, you know what happened is that they did, the funny thing is, or not funny, I don't know how you put it, but the, you know, it was reported in the Washington Journal that I was arrested, which is not, you know, jailed.
I was not.
They couldn't find me.
Now, remember, Scott, I'm on television.
They couldn't find me, Department of Homeland Security, for two weeks.
I called them finally.
You're the guy with the trench coat and the hat.
Yeah, you know, my picture's on the book cover, man.
You know what I mean?
Well, they can't find Osama bin Laden.
He's the only six and a half foot Arab surrounded by five foot tall Pashtuns, you know, on the roof of the world in the Hindu Kush.
They can't find him.
Right.
Or maybe they're not looking.
It's amazing, as Yogi Berra would say, it's amazing what you can't see when you're not looking.
Anyway, but, and then I was also worried, by the way, you know, because I've written about, you know, like these companies with the database, I was always really worried about the fact that I couldn't fly home because I'm, you know, charged as a terrorist, basically.
And then it was even scarier when I could fly home.
Think about that, man.
You know, I know that you are very concerned and serious about what these guys are doing to our civil liberties.
Well, yeah.
But you also have to understand it's like the Keystone Cops or maybe the Keystone Gestapo.
Yeah, yeah, it is.
I mean, and this is the kind of thing that's going to be happening to more and more people.
We're going to find this isn't just the story of how Homeland Security got Greg Palast, but how this is the story of how Homeland Security got Joe when he was walking down the street to get some breakfast tacos.
Well, you know, I mean, you know, and another, I have, I do have the ability to get out on television and, and screen, you know, that look at these bozos.
And, you know, where I finally got them to back off, by the way, it was scary for them.
This could cost you a lot of money.
They could tie you up and not to, you know, they don't even have to jail you.
They can ruin your career.
They can destroy your finances.
They can work you over.
They can create nasty files that they drop on people.
You know, if I worked for ABC Network in the U.S., I would, I would be toast.
I'd be done since I've been lucky enough to be blackballed on the U.S. media.
And, you know, like as Karl Rove was correctly gloating, no U.S. national media will pick up my reports.
And so, but I have, I do have a TV station.
Therefore, we were able to make the case that Osama no longer watches Greg Palast's programs to target, to pick out his targets because if he wanted to get the refinery, he could go to Google Map.
And in the new edition of Our Madhouse, I don't put in the picture of the smokestack and the mobile homes because I could actually, you know, I could be arrested for that.
They've already told me that that's illegal.
But I did have the Google Map picture of the refinery so you can really target that right down.
And, you know, I mean, forget the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment and all that kind of thing.
Just, this is American tradition, that there's no such thing as too much information.
If error of opinion, error of opinion has to be left free so that reason can be left free to combat it.
And if there's information about a hole in a security plan somewhere, that ought to be publicized so that the security plan can be updated to fix that hole.
This is, this is America.
This is not some, you know, Eastern European dictatorship.
Is it?
You know, I mean, like I say, we have become an oil colony too.
We have, and that's the other thing that we have to remember.
We have, we are getting drained.
We are all in New Orleans.
It's another Baghdad on the Mississippi.
What is going on here is a class war and we're not going to, and neither party is really ready to address it.
I mean, there are differences.
I'm not one of these people who says there's no difference.
But the big issues are not being touched.
And you will not, you know, there may be a different approach to Iraq, but basically the Saudi interests are going to be protected there no matter what.
The oil company interests are going to be protected there.
And same in Venezuela, same in Latin America, same with the banking control of the financial flow out of Latin America.
None of that's going to change by party, just kind of.
Now, you think that the factions in America who are pushing for war with Iran, particularly AIPAC and the American Enterprise Institute and WINEP and those places, that at the end of the day, no matter what, Houston has veto power over what they want?
Yeah, I mean, if Houston says we're taking out Iran, we will.
But at the moment, that does not seem to be gaining any traction with the petroleum club.
I agree.
I think it's pretty clear that the old establishment is against it.
Zbigniew Brzezinski is telling the Senate, you know, it'll be the biggest disaster he can conjure up the words to describe.
And yet it still seems like the third carrier strike force is on its way.
And there are some in the neoconservative circles who are still pushing for this thing.
Barack Obama pushing for it.
As you know, I tried my best to get inside these places.
The one problem of our madhouse is that, you know, sometimes when you publish, you end up burning sources.
And one of the things in our mass is to get the inside information.
And again, I have to thank our chief investigator, Von Eckert, who worked with me for two years or a year and a half to get the secret plans of the oil fields of Iraq.
And even though it's, you know, stamped State Department, State Department, you'll see it right in the book, there's nowhere where it says written by the guys in Houston.
The guys in Houston, like Ed Morse is probably the most, with Baker, the two of them are certainly the most powerful oil industry lobbyists out there.
And I spoke directly to Morris and, or I say I spoke directly to him, got the information from him, from the big man himself, and from James Baker's people themselves.
They called Harper's magazine and said, we are suing you.
We are suing you.
And, you know, Lewis Lapham, the editor, said, did Greg, you know, did Greg Palast misquote you?
And they said, hell, Greg Palast didn't even speak with us.
And then Lewis called me out and I said, well, just ask them which voices on these tape recordings are not them.
And that's what I've been doing.
I've been doing secret taping of these people.
But now it's obviously very hard to go back to those internal sources within the oil industry, because now I'm, I've been kind of outed.
But we will, we'll get inside, but we're still working on it.
So I'd love, one of my problems is that I'm a bit blinded at the moment within the industry.
And I'm an investigative reporter, so I don't report until I've investigated.
So it's hard for me to just make a prognosis on some of this.
I understand.
But now, when James Baker and his Rice University, James Baker Institute Council on Foreign Relations group came up with their plan, which called for Saddam's replacement with the next general in line, and all other things remain the same, I believe.
Now, when the neocons took over after September 11th and pushed for their full-scale invasion, was it your belief that the oil guys kind of said, well, okay, or that they still were opposed to it?
I mean, I remember in the summer of 2002, all of Bush Sr.'s guys, the oil guys, were writing op-eds saying, what are you doing?
This isn't how you do it.
It was, again, it's not, they didn't disagree with the invasion.
They disagreed with the occupation.
And that was, see, Colin Powell has gotten away with murder on this one.
He lets, you know, his kind of trick-typing monkey, Bob Woodward, is happy enough to, you know, first he has Bush at war, right, and the great commander in chief, and then the next thing you know, Bush is no longer at war, or whatever he was, the great general.
Instead, we have Colin Powell, the great general, who knew that Iraq was a disaster.
He just thought he should lie to us about it.
In fact, that's not true, too.
He's even lying about, he's even lying about his lying.
That is, Powell, all my internal State Department NSA sources repeat the same thing.
Powell was never against the invasion, ever.
He was against the occupation.
And the State Department guys wanted just a system where what they called an invasion disguised as a coup d'etat.
You know, you would need U.S. troops, but basically, you have some guy announce, you know, some general within the Ba'ath party announce that Saddam's got to go, maybe put a bullet in his head, call on the 101st Airborne, secure things for 72 hours, they leave, and you got a new strongman.
Then you hold like a FICO election, and it's done.
But the Neocom plan was to fire on the Ba'athists.
The Neocom, they want to remake everything, they want to privatize everything in the site.
But of course, you know, when people don't have money, all they have is Saddam Deaners.
You know, you can't bring shopping bags full of Saddam Deaners to buy a steel plant.
So it was all grabbed or fell apart, some combination thereof, of complete collapse or complete theft.
They sold all the Iraqi industries to foreign investors who basically just liquidated the companies and dropped their empty husks on the ground and walked away.
Yeah.
And remember, a lot of this is about, again, cutting supplies of everything.
But, I mean, you had the Russians take over.
I mean, it was basically the Iraqis, like the whole banking system, for example, Lehman Brothers had a...
Wait, go back to the Russians.
What about the Russians?
The Russians actually were given some, you know, because they were very good at making payoffs, and which is what you needed.
I mean, the privatizing meant putting the money in your private pocket.
Russians grabbed a hunk of industry there.
So did the Chinese.
But when it came to things like banking, an international consortium was put together by Lehman Brothers, which took over all the functioning banks of Iraq.
And that was supposedly to save the Iraqi economy.
Look what a wonderful job they've done.
I know that they've saved, that they do have the money.
Remember, there's a lot of cash still flowing through the oil system of Iraq.
There's not a lot of oil, but there's still a lot of cash.
And, of course, you know, one of the things I point out in the book is that Iraq is one of the only places in the world which didn't have metered oil.
I mean, you didn't have, like, you know, like, it's likely, you know, when the meter and when you fill up your tank and you have a gas pump or your electric meter, you know, they didn't meter it.
Now, Saddam did that for good reason, so he can muck with the embargo as an oil for food program.
It's still not metered.
No, it's still not metered.
Yeah, I talked to an Iraqi named Sami Rasuli who said that this whole time there's been oil pumped and shipped out of Basra that has no meter on it whatsoever.
Yeah.
After four years.
Well, I mean, what happened to the money of the civilian provisional authority?
I mean, as I point out in our madhouse, that money was Iraq's money from the oil for food program, which was held in banks.
So when that money went missing.
You're talking about the pallets of cash.
The pallets of cash, that was Iraqi money.
No one could sue it.
No one can investigate because it is not U.S. government taxpayer money.
It was the Iraqis' money, but it was the civilian provisional authority, not the current government.
Yeah.
So it was like this mystery, this mystery government where money just literally went poof.
In fact, when you ask how much oil did they produce under the civilian provisional authority while Bremmer was our viceroy there.
So under Bremmer, how much oil was pumped?
And one counts as $10 billion.
Another counts as $11.5 billion of oil.
Well, in my neighborhood, that's a billion and a half dollars difference, you know, if you went through, if you survived the George Bush's No Child's Behind Left Education program.
You know, it's a billion and a half dollars that don't square up.
Where did it go, Ahmad?
Where did it go, Mr. Wolf?
Where did it go, guys?
I tend to think it probably went to fund America's backing of Al-Qaeda against Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Yeah.
You know, it's like, you know, unfortunately I couldn't tell you because they didn't send me a slice.
All I can tell you is it ain't there.
Yeah, it's gone now.
You know, and my publishers are very nervous.
They said, you know, a lot of stuff implies that Bremmer might be crooked.
I said, oh, I wouldn't want to imply that.
Oh, no, that couldn't be.
God forbid.
You know, I mean, after all, a man who is managing director of Kissinger's consulting operation, corrupt?
Huh.
Of course not.
How could that be?
He was put in that position by the angels themselves.
Yeah.
All right.
Okay.
Thanks, Greg.
Everybody, go to the bookstore and buy the new paperback of Arm Madhouse.
I know Greg would appreciate it.
Thanks for your time, man.
Throw the book at him, guys.