Alright, my friends, welcome back to Anti-Wart Radio on Radio Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott.
Thanks for listening.
Next guest is Greg Palace.
He writes for Harper's, does TV news for BBC Newsnight, he's the author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, and Armed Madhouse.
Welcome back to the show, Greg.
Scott, great to be here.
It's good to have you on.
Now, every time we speak on the show here, we end up talking about Iraq and the oil law and all that, but we only have a limited amount of time here.
It's something we've got to cover, but I don't want to just duplicate an old interview.
So let me try to sum up my understanding as best as I can, and then we can move on from the oil law, where it stands now, and what the point is, and et cetera like that.
So here's my best shot at telling your story about the oil thing.
Okay, do me.
Alright, I'll do my best, and I'll try to do it faster than you do.
Are you bald?
That's what you got to do.
Okay.
Alright, so here's the deal.
The Houston oil guys and the New York Rockefeller Council on Foreign Relations types, Colin Powell and them, they wanted a war with Iraq too.
The sanctions were going to be lifted at some point in the Bush administration.
Something had to be done.
But what they wanted to do was a decapitation type situation, an invasion disguised as a coup d'etat, you call it, replace Saddam Hussein with the next Baathist general in line, and keep everything else as is, and get a compliant Baathist in there.
The neocons, on the other hand, in their vision of American empire, includes a lot of benefit to Israel as well.
And what they were more interested in, in this case, was rapidly privatizing every little bit of Iraqi oil in order to lower the price so low that it would weaken the Saudi regime, and they would be overthrown, lose their dominance in OPEC, and the new American client regime in Iraq would be the new leader of OPEC, and maybe an alliance with Iran after we regime changed them, and they would destroy Saudi Arabia, which they saw as a big threat to Israel.
And the neocons got a lot of what they wanted in the war, but the oil men pulled out their trump cards when it came to what was to happen to the oil.
And they said, no, you're not going to privatize Iraqi oil and dump the price of a barrel down to 10 bucks and bankrupt the Saudis.
The Saudis are our friends, and they do what we want and vice versa, and that's not going to happen.
We're going to have a national government oil company in Iraq that's going to abide by the quotas as set by the Saudis and be a good little Arab client state under the direction of our longest ally there, the Saudis.
Is that basically right?
Sounds pretty good.
I'd buy that book.
Okay, yeah, it's good.
It's called Armed Madhouse, everybody.
Run out and get it.
You've got to say that four times, per great Palestinian of you.
So the question is, here's the benchmark for the phony timeline with the giant loopholes that you could drive a war through and everything, but the so-called timeline and benchmarks and all that mandates that the Iraqis get their act together and pass an oil law that they say the purpose of it is to divide up the spoils in a fair way to the different ethnicities, the different tribes, the different geographical sectors of the country, since the majority of the oil revenue or the oil resources are up near Kirkuk in the north and down near Basra in the south and not so much where the Sunni Arabs live.
And so they say that, listen, this is part of creating a coalition government so that the civil war will end so that we can leave, so that we got to have this oil law to divide up the oil fairly.
Okay, so now, Greg, tell me why that's wrong.
So let's see now.
One oil company, U.S. General, remnants of the neocons have all gotten together and decided to be fair.
That's right.
They want everything to be fair in Iraq.
That's what it says in the Times.
And that's why we're staying there.
And well, let's just remember this, right?
They originally called it Operation Iraqi Liberation, OIL.
That may be a little bit droll, but let's not forget that that really was the name that they gave to it.
So the liberation ain't there, but the oil still is.
What's going on here?
First of all, we tell the world this has nothing to do with oil, but we say we will only keep our troops in if you pass an oil law that we want.
And by the way that we wrote, just so you know, for those who haven't, God forbid, red arm bent out.
We have in there the actual the information that the oil, what is today the oil law of Iraq being proposed, was written by James Baker and his crew in Houston by big oil executives and big oil consultants, and it was jammed down the Iraqi's throat, or they're trying to jam it down the Iraqi's throat right now.
And in other words, we're not there for the oil.
Let's put it this way.
We didn't go in for the oil, okay, that's the claim, but we sure as hell ain't leaving without it.
Now, that's the benchmark.
We're saying we will only keep our troops in if you give us the oil law we want, and yet this isn't about the oil.
How did oil become a benchmark?
Like you say, the phony cover is having to do with some type of fairness, like, yeah, suddenly we really care about being fair to the Sunnis, all right, I don't think so.
What it is about is enforcing this plan of the big oil company.
When they talk about a fair division, it's not between the Sunnis and the Shia and the West, it's between, it's dividing the Iraq oil between Shell and British Petroleum and ExxonMobil and Chevron, it's that division that they're talking about.
Now, why do they need this oil law to do that?
The answer is, is that contracts have already been let by the Kurdish warlord, oh, excuse me, the Taliban, the president of Iraq, otherwise known as the bloodthirsty, cold-blooded warlord of Kurdistan, and Barzani, his other fellow warlordship.
They have already cut deals with these thinking oil companies, Ivanhoe, Crescent, and others.
Now, did they take kickbacks to go with these little biters?
I'm not saying that.
Does anyone take kickbacks in oil in Iraq?
No.
Marvy it for me to suggest that.
Obviously not.
On the Shia side, you've got a short-fingered swindler named Ahmed Chalabi, convicted bank swindler, who was oil minister, named himself oil minister, and God knows what deals have been cut there.
The problem is, is that big oil guys told me, when you have Chalabi, who's a crook, and you've got warlords in the north, and they are going off and cutting deals on their own, big oil gets cut out, or big oil has to buy their way in and give extra slices.
They have to basically, Ivanhoe ain't drilling any oil, Crescent ain't drilling any oil.
They will then go back and resell to the big oil majors.
But that cuts the take of Texas boys.
So what's happening here is the big boys are saying, we expect the central government to rip up these contracts that are already in existence.
Happy Saddam, now the new warlord of north and south, and now centralize it and cut what are called profit sharing agreements, PSAs, sometimes they're called production sharing agreements, with us.
And the new oil law basically requires approval of all contracts by the central government.
It sets up a system of production sharing agreements, the old PSAs, so that the big boys can have a slice.
And it will all be controlled centrally through a central oil, state-owned oil company, which will be able to use force, police power of the state, to enforce its will over all the areas, to make sure that Exxon, Chevron, Shell, et cetera, get their slice.
And I didn't get this one, this isn't like a fantasy deal, this isn't Noam Chomsky thinking it through and undoing the puzzle from a distance.
This is from talking to people like the former CEO Shell, who was sent there by Bush to set up the oil regime.
Right.
And it's all in the book, Armed Madhouse, that's three.
So I want to dwell on this point just a little bit, if you'll let me.
I just think it's so much fun that a bunch of former communist radicals wanted to privatize all the oil in Iraq, treat the land which the oil is under as private property, and turn it over to the free market, let Ivanhoe or whoever come in and produce that oil.
And big business, the actual capitalists, the actual oilmen from Houston wanted no such part of that whatsoever and instead want a nationalized government tyranny over that oil to then cut them in on gigantic contracts so that they do the pumping and the transporting and make the majority of the profits off of all of the oil.
Right.
And that whole split is sixteen eighty-four, eighty-four percent of the oil company, but that's the kind of general number that you're looking at.
Absolutely criminal.
And well, they would say that it's absolutely efficient.
Now the problem is that what it isn't is a way for us, you know, for those of the pro-invasion freaks like Thomas Friedman, who were there to admit that we were there for the oil, like Friedman said, well, why?
Yeah, we're there for the oil.
Isn't it better that the land of the free and the home of the brave have control of the oil as opposed to like, you know, a mustache maniac like Saddam?
You know, there's a point to that.
The problem is we're not getting the oil.
The oil companies are not interested in, you know, finding oil.
They're interested in finding profit.
And the point of the whole set up in Iraq is yet to give them the big slice, but not necessarily actually produce the oil.
They're happy to keep the oil limited, you know, and before the tanks rolled, well, when Clinton was in office, oil was about eighteen to twenty dollars a barrel.
Now you're at what, seventy-three bucks a barrel this week?
Yeah.
You're going from eighteen to seventy-three dollars a barrel.
That's mission accomplished.
Yeah.
Very important point there.
Very important point there for people who lean left in the audience to understand.
Oil is a big part of this, but it's not going to steal the oil for cheap for our greedy SUVs and so forth.
It's as Greg Palast just explained, to redline that oil, to keep it off the market so they make, you know, the oil resources that they already control all of a sudden are now worth so much more sitting, you know, on the asset side of their ledger by using government force in an oil cartel system to keep oil off the market and prices artificially high.
Make more money for doing less work.
That's what you'd do with police power if you had it too, right?
Yeah.
Well, and there's one other thing, by the way.
When you talk about, you know, everyone says, well, there's not any real oil in the Sunni area.
That's not true.
That's just not developed.
When Churchill created Iraq, he combined what he thought were three oil fields.
Basra, Kirkuk of the north Kurdish areas, and then the Sunni areas around Baghdad, which have huge tar sands, but are known to have huge oil deposits.
In fact, a little known fact for you, but you love the little known and now will reveal it, rip away the veil.
The Iraqi government just paid the oil majors millions and millions of dollars for their oil map of Anbar province, where apparently there are huge deposits of untapped oil.
Huge, monstrous, gigantic.
When they're talking about Anbar province and they're saying, well, that's the poor Sunni area.
No, that's the untapped oil area.
And when they're fighting over Anbar, they're fighting over the next big field there.
Not that they want to drill it.
They want to make sure no one drills it.
I think that these guys are crying about seventy four dollars a barrel oil.
Well, let me ask you the last thing you want to do is start flooding the market.
That's what they're afraid of.
They were remember they were afraid not that Saddam would remove oil from the market.
After all, we had something called the Oil for Food Program, which kept the lid on things.
They got very little food.
We got very little oil and the oil majors were very happy.
They're not there to get the oil.
They're there to control and limit the output of it.
And whatever there is, they want the biggest slice, but they want to make sure that the pie ain't too big because the more oil out of Iraq, the less the value of the oil out of Louisiana.
That's how it works.
Oh, wow.
OK, that's here comes number four.
Armed Madhouse is the name of the book.
It's by Greg Paulus.
You can go.
It's even in paperback now.
Yeah.
We'll see if we can push it and maybe get five in here for you, but let's switch gears here from the oil.
That's overdoing it.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah, it might be.
And by the way, anybody can go to the anti-war radio section at antiwar.com and find the transcript of a previous interview, also the audio archive, which the entire interview was on this subject in much greater detail.
Anybody wants to get further into that.
But I also want to know about this U.S. attorney thing.
It's something I've paid as little attention to as possible, but I know that it has a lot to do.
Well, I don't know this.
I've heard that it has a lot to do with Republicans in the White House, the political operative types like Karl Rove, trying to get U.S. attorneys around the country to maliciously prosecute Democrats for voter fraud.
And basically, I guess at least some of the people who got fired were the ones who stood up against this pressure.
Is that right, Greg?
You got it.
I mean, one of the things that I was investigating for a book I won't mention for the BBC was something called Cageless.
We discovered that that the Republican Party had this whole scheme to send out letters to poor voters, black voters, basically Democratic concentrated areas.
When people weren't there, the letters would come back and then they had a grounds for challenging their vote.
Now, all together through this and many, many other methods, three million votes were challenged in the 2004 election.
That's a heck of a lot.
Three million votes.
And that's from the data of the Elections Assistance Commission of the U.S.
So you got three million votes that were challenged, cast, not counted.
Now, to do this, they used this phony method of tagging voters as fraudulent.
Now, was there a big crime wave of millions of fraudulent voters?
No, because if there were, they would have arrested them.
It's against the law as a felony in every single state to vote illegally, to vote when you have the right to vote.
But you're now blocking people by the thousands and thousands and thousands from voting.
You've got to justify this stuff and they're cranking up the system.
They're creating a new system of ID cards, et cetera, to do this.
So what they wanted to do, what Karl Rove was very intent on, and I'm not guessing about Rove, Rove was extremely intent upon getting some prosecutions of people on these lists.
And what happened was, is that his own appointed U.S. attorneys, you have to understand, the U.S. attorneys that were fired were good Republicans, loyal.
Like David Iglesias, whom I spoke to from New Mexico, U.S. Attorney for New Mexico.
He said they gave him 150 names of so-called fraudulent voters and he said it was bogus.
He was an, you have to understand, Iglesias is an Ashcroft Republican protege.
And he said this stuff was bogus and he wouldn't bring the cases.
And here's the other trick.
Not only did he find the cases bogus, but even if he found them, the U.S. rules of conduct for U.S. attorneys barred him from bringing those cases because they would affect elections.
You can't bring cases before an election that would affect an election.
You can't bring case against individual voters unless there's a large conspiracy to manipulate the election.
These are, you know.
Otherwise, that would be a state matter, right?
Yeah.
It would be a violation of the state.
But he said there were no cases to even turn back to the state.
He was the FBI.
He said he really looked at these things.
It was bogus.
They just wanted to bring phony cases, bust anyone, and hope that someone would be intimidated into pleading guilty.
You know, brought up on federal charges, this is big stuff.
This is baloney to justify this attack on voters.
And he got fired for it.
He got fired for it.
And no question about that's what was up.
And by the way, yesterday we found out something else from the hearing.
When I just said it was against the rules of conduct, in May of this year, the rules of conduct were changed.
There's a little rule book for U.S. attorneys that they have to follow.
Without any notice, Gonzalez's people rewrote the rule book.
Someone rewrote the rule book.
And Gonzalez was asked about that.
They took out the stuff that says you cannot, it says there's all these rules that say U.S. attorneys cannot use their office to manipulate elections, use voter fraud cases to manipulate elections.
All that was removed.
It was like 1984, they just removed it from the rule book.
And no one, and Gonzalez was asked, why did you make these changes?
He says, I don't know.
Now, of course, everyone loved that because he just looked like a complete dummy.
His own rule book was changed, but understand, but I understood why they changed it.
They wanted to take their, they wanted to use these U.S. attorneys as hitmen to manipulate the election.
They wanted to take out anything that stopped them from manipulating elections and using the federal office to do so.
Now, what the follow-up question that was missing, I was disappointed, was if you didn't make these changes, Mr. Gonzalez, who did?
And is Mr. Rove going to explain why he did it?
Okay, now, one other thing to add in here.
It's not just who they fired, it's who they hired.
In the state of Arkansas, after firing Bud Cummins for refusing to bring these phony cases, they hired and put in his place a guy named Tim Griffin.
Remember I mentioned the caging list?
It was the guy who sent out the caging list, Tim Griffin.
So the guy that was involved in this election manipulation, this trick of challenging innocent voters, and they lost their vote, which is, by the way, a crime.
You can't do that.
It was a violation of the Voting Rights Act, and using mail, it's voter fraud.
The perpetrator became the prosecutor.
They named him U.S. prosecutor for Arkansas.
Now, what happened was is that John Conyers asked BBC for its information about Griffin, the new U.S. attorney, about his involvement in caging.
We announced that on the air in London, and Griffin resigned by the next morning in tears, blaming a reporter he won't name, but you may.
No, congratulations, Greg.
I like it when government employees lose their jobs because of you.
That's always good.
Pat yourself on the back there, bro.
Yeah, but you know what?
First of all, there was complete silence here in the U.S.A. on that.
Yeah, I mean, listen, the only reason that I know that this has anything to do with elections is because I read your blog, and I read the blog of the other Scott Horton, the heroic anti-torture lawyer, and because I'm good friends with your assistant, and I talk with her on the phone all the time, and she fills me in on all these gaps.
But I'll tell you what, I could tell you from watching The Daily Show every night and watching cable TV news, I know that some U.S. attorneys were fired, but I don't know why.
Yeah, well, and yesterday, by the way, there was no coverage at all on national petroleum radio, et cetera, of the hearings yesterday, which were shocking.
And today, the New York Times, as usual, they concentrate on the one thing, the Ashcroft, you know, that Gonzalez.
Now, these are, by the way, for those who did miss it, Attorney General Gonzalez was questioned yesterday for like eight hours by the Judiciary Committee of the Senate.
Was it that long?
Yeah, I mean, they just, I was stunned, they just wouldn't let him go.
I've never seen someone take such a pounding, ever.
But that's what I'm worried about.
He, first of all, and I don't say this lightly, I've never seen a witness like that just lie and lie and lie as number one.
I mean, he just, it was like, it was like the perjury dance of the seven veils.
I've never seen anything like it.
And in addition, you know, just acting like a complete fool, he was barely covering up its prevarication.
And all I kept thinking of is what the committee is doing is showing that, telling us that Pinocchio's head is wooden and he's got a long nose.
And that they are, they were doing, both Republicans and Democrats, are doing an excellent job of kicking Pinocchio around, around the room.
And I kept saying, why are they kicking the puppet?
Where's the puppeteer here?
Right.
You know, where is the puppeteer?
Where is?
We know, for example, that Gonzalez's, Gonzalez went to Ashcroft, who may have been, you know, like, sedated, maybe dying, who knows what, in his hospital bed and practically wanted to, like, grab his hand, have him sign some papers to allow the continuation of the U.S.KGB operation, spying on U.S. citizens.
The phone tapping, yeah.
Yeah.
Now, if he wanted that, you know, and so they're making, you know, they're attacking him on that.
But what do you think?
Gonzalez just decided on his own, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to do a Brezhnev on my own?
No, I mean.
Even with Andrew Card, one of the creepiest chiefs of staff ever.
And that's saying a lot, given that Dick Cheney was a chief of staff, OK?
I mean, you know, you're talking, you're talking about a guy who makes Cheney look like, you know, Mary Poppins, Card.
And he was with Gonzalez.
They're not asking about the fact that the, you know, Gonzalez kept saying, I have nothing to do with the firing of U.S. attorneys.
First of all, that's shameful.
He is the United States Attorney General.
If you're going to fire U.S. attorneys, he's supposed to be the guy doing it.
They said, I don't know anything about it.
Well, then, let's talk to the guy who did it.
He was handed the list by Karl Rove.
Tim Griffin, who did this caging operation, was the assistant to Karl Rove.
Tim Griffin says, and I actually don't doubt him, he didn't know what caging was.
That's one of the things he said when he was asked, unfortunately by a Swiss reporter, not an American reporter, when he resigned, what about the caging list?
He said, I don't know about what caging is.
Well, the answer is, he says that's a term used in direct mail.
Well, guess what?
Who owned a direct mail firm before he went to work in the White House?
Karl Rove.
Karl Rove.
Yeah.
So, was Karl Rove behind the caging of voters, which is an illegal activity?
So, again, you're right on and correct in bringing it down to this point.
The whole point of the prosecutor firing was to set up to manipulate, to cover up what they did in 2004 and prepare to steal 2008.
And remember, and while you're correct in saying it's partisan, that is, it's by Republicans, for Republicans, I look at this more as an elite, a class elite within one party that is trying to maintain the control by this elite.
I'm not even sure, in a way it's coup d'etat that they've engineered an electoral coup d'etat in 2000, 2004, they're ready to do it in 2008.
I'm not sure it's doing it for Republicans, per se, but, you know, when you're talking about go back, you know, it all connects up.
You know, if you're going to have James Baker and Klan, the oil companies writing the oil laws for Iraq, you know, then you have to ask yourself for whose benefit is this being done?
And I think it is something worse than partisan political manipulation.
I think it's a manipulation by a very dangerous elite, which does not intend to give up power, and I'm not sure it's necessarily completely partisan.
And now, when you say that, can you narrow that down?
I mean, you're talking about the oil men in Houston, or who else?
Well, you know, I mean, they don't exactly invite me into the club, or I don't know their special handshake, you know, I'm not one of these people who think that just everyone that still has a skull and bones ring, you know, in their closet.
But there's no question that there is special control of our political structure by the oil and extractive industry.
We now have finance capital deeply involved in the direction of our nation, everything from our tax codes, our budgets, and where we send our tanks.
You know, that's a big wider issue that's probably beyond anything I can intelligently handle in a very short time, or I'm not even sure I can intelligently handle it all, probably you're better at that stuff than me, I just, you know, tend to be a toiler, a fact farmer, so to speak, you know, a fact miner, you know, digging out my bits that I can from these guys.
Missed, you know, in the case of the caging list, it was missed sent email, email sent to a joke website.
And it was redirected to me with our BBC team, and we, you know, investigated, you know, Lenny Von Eckert is a chief investigator, has done tremendous follow-up work on this stuff, and, you know, we're, that's all we can do, and then, you know, we tend to find a dot and you can connect them up, so I'm not sure I'm even qualified to make a grand statement.
I'm not any better really at connecting them up than you, but I like to wonder about it, you know, there's a lot of places where I would wish to be a fly on the wall, I know what these people are really talking about, but, you know.
Let me ask you about Hillary Clinton, I want to give you a chance here, Greg Paulus, to prove that you're not some Democratic party, you know, liberal hack or something who just spends his life hating George Bush as his motivation for all his reporting, which of course would be, you know, just about the best criticism somebody could probably try to come up with for you.
Well, I just asked this for your, I just asked by PBS reporter, aren't you, like, anti, aren't you just anti the Bush administration?
I said, well, yes, I'm anti every administration, that's what it's supposed to do if you're an investigative reporter.
Oh, that's what I'm saying, I was reading through your blog, and I said, oh, good, here he is attacking Hillary Clinton, and wow, it was substantive, too.
Yeah, well, you know, I mean, and that's, it's a difficult thing, and by the way, just on this issue of attacking, you know, and of generally investigating the whole crew, there is a very powerful political feminist organization that when I first did my investigation of Hillary Clinton, back in 2000, back in 2000, and when she was first running for Senate, I was viciously attacked.
How could I dare go after this progressive democratic woman?
And I said, well, how about corruption?
Let's start there.
Let's start with the C's, we work our way through the alphabet.
And just last year, the very same group, and I love them, I won't say who they are, but the very same group took the very same article that they had attacked me on, and they reprinted it, and sent it out all over the place, because by this time, they decided that Hillary, being a warmonger and toady to the military industrial machine, had to be outed.
So basically, I'm not going to, you know, I try to annoy everyone, and let everyone else catch up.
So yeah, in the case of Hillary, there are tremendous problems, and in fact, one thing I didn't have in the article that you read, and I don't think we can dismiss it, I mean, we do have the very big problem of, you know, when people are screaming about the pardon of Louis Libby, which is, in my opinion, itself an impeachable act, okay?
And do understand, and I thank reporter Linda Starr for making note of this to me, that, you know, when the power of impeachment was created within the Constitution, one of the reasons it was created was to prevent the President from handing out pardons to cronies involved in crimes of which he was a part.
That's exactly right.
Hamilton, in the Federalist Papers, wrote exactly that.
There was no Hamilton yet.
Madison, he had several, I mean, that was one of the reasons for the power of impeachment, because he said, look, a chief executive must have the power of pardon, because you have to have temper justice with mercy, it's basic.
You have to have the power of pardon.
But you can't let someone pardon themselves.
No man can be their own judge, and that means you can't pardon your cronies and your co-conspirators.
And here he did it.
But then, you know, I'm sorry, Democrats, but, you know, the Bill Clinton pardons-are-us operation at the end of his term was one of the most sickening sale of indulgences I have ever seen.
When he pardoned the arch-criminal, Swiss criminal, Mark Rich, I was ready to vomit.
And then, how does it get back to Hillary?
Who is Hillary's big crony funder?
Mark Rich's supposed ex-wife, she is every, you know, technically they're divorced.
So her condos and mansions in the U.S., and her socialite, you know, party plates can't be confiscated by the Fed.
This guy is wanted, this is a master international financial criminal.
And Bush pardoned, excuse me, there you go, it's not worthwhile, Bill Clinton pardoned him for his crimes in the U.S.
And this guy was a serious criminal too, like, wasn't he involved in the rape of Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union?
Oh my God, he's still taking his hunk.
I mean, the guy controlled, you know, controlled the metals trade out of Russia after the fall of the wall.
He immediately moved in.
And it wasn't done because he was a smart businessman, I can't go into the details, but stories I know personally of some pretty heavy muscle work there.
But this guy is no sweetheart, there's a reason why he is wanted all over the planet, and Clinton pardoned him.
You also have the crazy thing where Hillary running for U.S. Senate got a pardon for some Hasidic rabbis who were involved in some, who were convicted involved in some type of financial manipulation, got them pardoned so she could, you know, so they would line up their troops behind her for the senatorial vote.
I mean, it was ill-making.
You must be an anti-Semite.
I mention that because I want, you know, I'm not even mentioning the stuff that I have in my, as you said, the blog, which by the way was originally printed in the Guardian's Sunday paper, the Observer.
Well, I think you're probably just an anti-Semite is why you're picking on her for the Mark Roach and the rabbi, right, Rick?
Of course.
I mean, of course you're going to be accused of everything, it's always so.
That was, you know, but, but, you know, that, that, you know, just here, that's in town drill time.
Yeah.
To make everyone mad house again.
You know, George Galloway now finally failed it.
I mean, that was another one.
The left hated me because I unfortunately found myself in the position.
I, I was, I was going to be writing a defense of, of George Galloway, a member of parliament being accused of all these evil things, taking money from Saddam's associates, being on the payroll of, of a dictatorial regime, self-dealing misusing funds from a charity that was supposed to help Iraqi kids.
I mean, they accused this guy of every under the sun and just cause he was appeared just cause he was a leader of the anti-war movement in Britain and our very good investigator, Lenny Von Eckert.
I was going to write a defense of this guy and then.
So there.
Oh yeah.
I'm here.
Can you hear me?
Can you hear me?
Can you hear me?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
National security agency.
So, uh, you know, uh, that's the gate tricks.
The Von Eckert went in and, um, and sure enough, it turned out the guy was in the, he was, he was true and worse.
And so I was stuck now with this information that an anti-war leader was in fact a corrupt, nasty, evil toady of a dictator.
And so I had to write it that way.
And boy, did I get banged by the left on that, that how could I do that?
And, and, um, and he was the one who started bringing me up, you know, that it was the Jewish conspiracy that, that put me up to death.
Of course.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like, so, you know, what can you do, man?
I'm not saying I'm a man for all seasons.
I'm just saying that I'm in a very special position where I, I have been allowed to write and do reports that other reporters can't do.
It's not that I'm such a genius and, uh, but I do have to say that our investigating, even certainly Lenny's genius, but, uh, but I would say that this is stuff you ain't going to get on the national petroleum radio broadcast, but certainly not on your Foxified network.
Yeah.
Well, the real difference is you're actually trying.
So I guess, you know, that puts you light years ahead of the rest of them.
Uh, I'm sorry that I'm not going to give you a chance to, uh, tell us what you know about Al Gore.
We'll have to save that for another time, but look, you're really setting me up for trouble.
I know I'm working on a piece right now called Gore No More.
Oh good.
Wait, wait.
But we don't have time for that.
And in fact, we're already over time, but this is pirate radio, so I can just barely get away with it, but I got a really quick get you to rehearse for me the anecdote from your book, the best democracy money can buy about the deal that the Democrats and the Republicans and the Senate made that we will not include any of Bill and Hillary Clinton's corruption in their relationship with the Lippo group based out of Indonesia and, uh, and Beijing and the Reati family, uh, as long as, uh, you guys promise not to bring up our corrupt, uh, law breaking in financing the election of 1994 with, uh, Koch family money.
That's right.
So basically the two parties traded billionaires.
Those who say that, that Clinton wasn't committed, no impeachable crime, I'm sorry, guys.
I hate to disappoint you, but very much so, uh, it is completely illegal to take foreign money or money arranged by foreigners to run a U S campaign.
Um, the, uh, the plus there was payoffs clearly, um, there, um, Hillary's former law partner was paid off to be silent.
I'm sorry.
The evidence stone cold indicate and Bill Clinton lied through his teeth, except by the way, when the FBI put him under oath, which is why I know that his public statements are lies because he said different things.
The FBI under oath, I won't go into all the details, but let's put it this way.
The Clintons were guilty, but they had a couple of cards in their own deck to play the Koch brothers.
The Koch brothers are billionaires who were secretly financing Newt Gingrich and his push to take over his successful push to take over contract Congress with 25 million in the old days, it was cheap to buy Congress $25 million in illegal last minute campaign, uh, contribution running smear campaigns.
The last days of the campaign, which wiped out the re the, uh, the marginal Democrat.
Now what they did was a crime and they had several other crimes including environmental crimes, including stealing oil from Indian reservation.
I mean, these guys piece of work and, but it was a trade of billionaires, the reality, the Indonesian billionaires of the Clinton for the Republican billionaires.
It was a drop hands operation.
Fred Thompson, by the way, was the guy who actually wanted to investigate all of it, but Trent lock stepped in and said, look, you know, mr love boat.
Remember that was his last claim to fame, not law and order.
And this dear mr love boat, that ain't how it's done here in Congress.
And um, frankly, while I give Thompson some point for beginning the investigation, you know, followed through the fact that he backed down right away, uh, as far as I'm concerned, makes him a co-conspirator, conspirator, not a contender.
Absolutely.
Yep.
All right.
Have we, have we dissed enough candidates?
Uh, man, actually, my list is getting long here and no, we, we only had an hour and we already pushed it by five minutes.
Uh, I'm sorry, Greg, let's do this again sometime and, and, uh, you can, and tell us about facts that you have investigated and uncovered about politicians that I don't like and want dirt on.
Okay.
Even the ones you do like, unfortunately, if you have any, well, there's palace.com if people want to follow up and see the leader, well, I'll tell you this, uh, there's one politician that I like, uh, Ron Paul and the guy's middle name is Ernest and he's been married to the same lady for 50 years and, uh, I, I can't imagine it's in his character to commit a single act of perfidy.
I'd love to see an investigative reporter actually try to find some dirt on Ron Paul.
I don't think it exists.
When he gets more than 5% of the vote, it's worth the investigation.
All right.
Yeah.
Okay.
There you go.
As soon as he gets 5% in the polls, Greg, you launch your investigation and tell me what you come up with there.
Okay.
All right.
You got it.
Thanks very much for your time today.
Greg Palast, everybody.
Author of a number six here, armed mad house.
Okay.
Great to see you.
