All right, my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Chaos Radio 959 in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest is one of my favorite reporters, Greg Palast, author of Armed Madhouse.
Welcome back to the show, Greg.
Hey, Scott.
Glad to be with you.
Yeah, good to have you back on the show today.
And I really like this article that you wrote, The Surge and the Al-Qaeda Bunny.
Yeah.
What the hell is an Al-Qaeda Bunny, Greg?
Well, I guess like the Easter Bunny.
Oh, I see.
You know, they're good, they're bad.
You know what the thing about the Easter Bunny?
That's always, to me, that the most important thing about the Easter Bunny is that there ain't none, Scott.
I know, man, I remember I was about, I was either four or five, I forget.
It's your mom and dad who put down those little sugar eggs, okay?
Yeah, you know, I remember my sister saying, look, and opening the blinds, and I peed out the blinds, and there's my mom out in the backyard stashing eggs.
Yeah, that cheap plastic green confetti and crap.
I'm sorry, guys, for your listeners who think that the Easter Bunny and Al-Qaeda are in Iraq.
This is a tough moment, but you can all ask your older sisters, I ain't kidding, it ain't fair.
So what happened was, in the week of September 11th commemoration, I'm sure it was just a coincidence that they had General Petraeus go before Congress on September 11th to sell us his surge, but the whole point of, the whole sales pitch that they've been using is that in Anbar province, the locus of the berserkers, the Sunni insurgency, we are suddenly aligned with something called the, with now Sunni sheikhs, something called the Iraqi Awakening Council, and the number one sheikh that we were dealing with who is leading what one soldier portrayed called like the Lawrence of Arabia of Anbar province, with a guy named Sheikh Abu Risha.
Now this is all the redirection, right, betraying the Shiites and realigning with the Sunnis in Iraq.
Well, yeah, this is, we're cuddling up to the guys in Anbar, so we had Sheikh Abu Risha.
There was one problem with Sheikh Abu Risha, well, there's two.
Problem one is that he wasn't no sheikh.
He was a fake sheikh.
He's, you know, like the Easter Bunny, our great sheikh ally, I mean, he really existed, but he was only a sheikh because, you know, he kind of wore the white, the little white bathrobe thing, and said he was.
And now, and as it turns out, he was, he wasn't the sheikh of nothing in Anbar province.
But now, how do we know this?
Well, because you put on your courage hat and you went to Baghdad and found all this out yourself, right?
Are you kidding me?
No, rather, against my direct wishes and pleading and begging by our network, the filmmaker who does my shooting for BBC, a total crazy man named Rick Rowley, insisted on going to Iraq unembedded to find the sheikhs that are on our side and see what they're, supposedly now on our side, see what they're up to.
So he did encounter Sheikh Abu Risha, interestingly, not in Anbar province.
He was on his way to Anbar when he encountered the sheikh who was in Jordan, while the sheikh, the supposed sheikh, was on his way to Dubai, which is a very interesting place for an Anbar sheikh to be suddenly showing up, because that happens to be the money laundering center of the Middle East.
What was he doing?
He was there for a couple days suddenly, a little unannounced trip.
Then he, then he decided he was going to go sheikh Abu Risha to Ramadi.
There is no denying by the U.S. government that sheikh Abu Risha got at least $2 million in cold cash from the U.S. government for something called rebuilding contracts.
I guess he intended to blow something up so he could rebuild it.
So whatever, he, he wanted to make sure the cash was in a safe place, obviously.
And what could be safer than a Swiss bank account, right?
So then he went back to Ramadi and Rick was in, showed up in Anbar province, my camera.
And again, I would not do this.
I do not encourage anyone to do this.
I'm not happy that Rick did this, but it was very important because he then met with the other sheikhs.
A couple days, oh, by the way, let's not forget that George Bush shook the sheikh's hand.
He did the little sheikh sheikh with the, with when he did his drop in, in Iraq.
You know what I said?
That Bush was even too afraid to go into the green zone and meet with the president.
So he met with sheikh, the so-called sheikh Abu Risha.
Right out of base, way out in the middle of nowhere.
Right, the base in the middle of nowhere with a 14, 14 mile deep zone of protection around them both.
So the problem for his little sheikh is that when he got back to Ramadi, I mean, Bush can still shake his hand, but not the rest of them because he's been blown away.
Now, we should also mention that your cameraman, Rick Rowley, brought with him the unembedded reporter David Enders as well, right?
That's right.
Brilliant.
His brilliant partner.
Yeah, I've actually interviewed David Enders once, I guess a couple of years ago.
Makes me want to get back in touch with him so we can find out.
Yeah, these are the serious guys.
Again, I don't encourage anyone to do this, but on the other hand, it's important to report what was out there.
And I could be a little bit more direct than Rick or Dave because they have to go back there and try to survive it.
So what we have is they spoke to the other sheikhs who said very directly, Abu Risha, where is this guy?
The other leading sheikh in Anbar, one leading sheikh, said to Rick and Dave, look, Americans love Disney cartoon heroes, and that's what Sheikh Risha was.
Who is this guy?
He doesn't, you know, where's his tribe if he's a tribal leader?
Now, these guys were tribal leaders, did join up, by the way, to supposedly defeat al-Qaeda, okay?
And they took their millions too.
Sheikh Abu Risha was blown away in Ramadi.
Now, nothing moves in Ramadi, al-Qaeda, anyone.
No one moved there without the approval of these tribal leaders.
In other words, either the tribal leaders whacked him or they allowed him to be taken out.
And whacked is the right term and the term I use advisedly because we have to think of these new sheikhs we've cuddled up to in Anbar as the Sopranos of Arabia.
They didn't feel like sharing a slice with Abu Risha who was claiming to be the kind of copy of the group.
They wanted it all for themselves.
Even more important to note, as Rick noted in his little film, which you can see by connecting through to GregPalace.com, immediately after we dropped off bricks of cold cash in the millions to these other sheikhs, suddenly al-Qaeda disappeared.
Now, remember that there is something called al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia.
Which actually, Greg, if I can interrupt you for a second, just last week I interviewed a reporter from Stars and Stripes who talked about al-Qaeda in Iraq, so-called, wrote an article called The Myth of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, in fact.
Yeah, I mean, Stars and Stripes, by the way, is one of the best newspapers in America, which is why it isn't in America.
The truth though is going on.
It's a good thing we still have the internet for now.
And by the way, to go back, and it's a sideways thing, but it's very important.
The My Lai massacre story was not broken by Seymour Hersh in the New York Times.
It was broken by Ron Ridenour, a soldier in Stars and Stripes.
It was re-reported by Hersh.
Now, Hersh is the bud and I like him, but even he acknowledges that it was a story that was broken by Stars and Stripes, the My Lai massacre.
This is continuing.
The soldiers can't be, aren't being fooled, very few of them.
There ain't no Al-Qaeda in Iraq, there's something called Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, which as I noted, has about as much to do with bin Laden's Al-Qaeda as a Rolling Stones tribute band has to do with Mick Jagger.
It's just, you know, anyone could, any guy in Kids in Garage can play Satisfaction and call themselves Rolling Stones in Akron.
Yeah, well, and to get to the point of what Tildman said was that by his best information, there were actually about 850 guys, which is a pretty low number compared to the total insurgency.
It's not even a percentage point, but he said there were about 850 guys who were foreign fighters who were under this group, the Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia.
And you're right.
Yeah, they kind of exist, but if you go back to Bush's speech that he gave a week and a half ago on the insurgency, he didn't talk about Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, he kept saying Al-Qaeda, he kept talking about Al-Qaeda and fighting Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
And first of all, Al-Qaeda ain't in Iraq, and second, Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia is pretty much insignificant in the order of things.
Most interesting is that after we dropped off the bricks of cash with these sheikhs, Al-Qaeda in Iraq, in Mesopotamia and the insurgency disappeared within minutes, which, as Rick confirmed to me off camera, I said, that's quite a military miracle to eliminate the enemy in minutes unless, guess what, you are Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia.
In other words, basically, like I say, these are the sopranos of Arabia, they were taking protection money, just the way the mob in New Jersey goes to you and says, pay us protection money, and you say, what do I need protection from?
He said, because someone could burn down your building.
And you say, well, who would burn down my building?
We would.
So pay us to protect it.
So we're paying these guys protection money.
Now, frankly, if we could just write checks in Iraq, you know, basically send our check books instead of our kids, it's hard to say that that's not a bad strategy by itself.
I mean, you know, it's not exactly bringing democracy, but it's a strategy.
The problem with these guys is, number one, you stop paying them and they suddenly find their guns.
Number two, we were giving them, we were allowing them to rearm themselves and giving them cash.
What they were doing was they were turning their guns on the Shia that are left in Anbar.
And what the most courageous thing that Rick did, besides being next to Abu Risha, a guy was obviously going to get blown away and leaving our cameraman with collateral damage and enders, is that they went to see the victims of the ethnic cleansing conducted by the sheikhs who are our new buddies, which, of course, you will not see on any American television station.
And for two reasons.
One, our guys sit in the green zone at the Intercontinental Bar or in Washington and report the baloney that they're fed, or two, the last thing they're going to do is do what Rick and Dave did, which is to go right into the Shia refugee camps in Baghdad, which are under the control of the Maqdi Army.
Now, the Maqdi Army, of course, you know, makes Attila the Hun look like, you know, a girl scout.
Yeah, well, and they're the Iraqi army that we're now financing, the Sunni kappos, you call them, to fight against.
Yes.
In other words, we're, we are, we've asked, we've got the Iraqi army.
It's the Iran, Iraq, Iran, or the Ritz.
The Sadr, the Sadr in the government and in the army and infiltrated throughout the army and police force in Baghdad and in Basra.
And we are now paying, these are supposedly our allies, and we're paying our other new allies, the new sheikhs of Anbar, the Sopranos of Arabia, to, who are now getting them.
And basically, what's worse is that it's not like these guys fight each other.
And yet, let's keep it clear, that's pretty darn rare.
What they mainly do is shoot women and children and burn people out of their homes.
Right.
And the point I'm trying to make also is that, does the US Army, does our military know that the sheikhs we've cuddled up to are engaged in massive ethnic cleansing?
When I say massive, we have 15,000 families from just one zone of Anbar who've been pushed into the Sadr Brigade, excuse me, the Makhdi Army zone, into their zone.
I said Sadr Brigade, that's another group of maniacs, we've got to keep our maniacs apart.
Right, that's the shirts and the skins among the sheikhs, the water and the Sadr.
Right, right, exactly.
They're two gangs, two different gangs, to keep them apart.
The blood encrypts of Baghdad.
And so what we have to do, does the military know?
Well, let's put it this way, our military headquarters are in the homes of abandoned Shia in Anbar.
So do we know how they think those houses got emptied out?
So ethnic cleansing, Baghdad basically belongs almost entirely to the Shiites now, and now that we're switching sides back to the Sunnis in Anbar, now they're ethnically cleansing all the Shiites out of their territory.
Right.
And Joe Biden's dream come true.
There are, and one of the so-called solutions is to balkanize and slice up Iraq.
And that was very successful in India, Pakistan, Lebanon, Palestine, Burundi, Rwanda.
Ethnic dividing of nations has a very long history of basically creating two armies who can make the genocide official under flags.
Which means that, which is very difficult, therefore, which means that there ain't no hope from either party.
Well, so where are we in a larger context?
Let's step back to the bigger picture here.
You reported actually, I'll go ahead and give you credit, I noticed, Greg, that you reported the redirection shortly before Seymour Hersh did, that America had made the promise to the Saudis and the Egyptians, etc.
Right.
That we are now going to stab the Shiites in the back, our sudden but inevitable betrayal, and start backing the Sunnis again.
However, it seems to me like this is not really working.
I mean, they were floating the idea of trying to coup d'etat Maliki and replace him with Alaweet.
Wait, wait, wait.
Ska!
I mean, it seems like- You said, wait, you just said it's not working.
What is the price of crude oil today, $83 a barrel, the highest it's been in- So it's working great, as long as people are killing each other and the oil prices continue to rise.
It's the highest price we've had, in novel terms ever, in real terms, for those fancy types, the highest price of oil in three decades.
That's mission accomplished.
I don't see, I mean, it ain't Bush's kids that are there.
We're still closing the bars in Austin.
The question is, you know, so I'm not sure that it's a disaster for whom, it's a disaster for the Shia of Anbar, it's a disaster for the Turkmen of Kirkuk and the so-called successful story that we have in Kurdistan.
Thomas Friedman is now selling us the great success of Kurdistan.
And of course, the Kurds are the worst ethnic cleansers on the planet, by the way.
Why do you think we have a Kurdistan?
Because they killed everyone else.
You know, what we call the Turkish massacre of Armenia, the Kurdish massacre of Armenia.
And so we've now created a new terror state in Kurdistan.
We're creating a Shia terror state in Basra, a Sunni terror state in Anbar, and I guess we're just going to let them fight it out in Baghdad while, you know, we sit in the green zone and speculate on oil futures.
I know that sounds pretty grim, but let's try to rewind that and do the Disney version.
Yeah, see, I want to ask you, are you sure that you're not just some left-winger with anti-capitalism colored glasses who views everything to the lens of oil?
You've done your time.
We're about to taser you for that one.
Oh, yeah.
I'm real scared of you.
Yeah.
So what's happened is, yeah, I'm very concerned.
Now, again, I don't have, you know, I wasn't there.
Raleigh was there.
I'm getting the information from as many directions as I can.
But we do, you know, again, I just think that we have to be careful about taking the focus off Operation Iraqi Liberation, OIL, the oil.
Ultimately, oil is still what drives this whole story, whether we're there or not, is driving the story of oil.
And you know, even, you know, my bud Chavez, he's playing games with Iran just because he's trying to create a new, you know, he's an oligarch, too.
He's just popularly elected, so he's playing games with Iran, not because he's joining up forces to fight the great imperial America, but because he needs to create a counterforce to the Saudis within OPEC.
Oil is still the driving political force of international realpolitik.
So the question is, who controls, who sits at the top of OPEC?
And I guess you've tried to explain to me before that the way things are, the Saudis sit at the top of it, but if the Iranians inherit southern Iraq, perhaps they'll sit at the top of OPEC.
You have to imagine the new Shia power crescent running from Bahrain, which is majority Shia, that has, again, Sunni leaders.
Lebanon, if the Shia take control through Hezbollah, then through Syria, Alawites are a sect of Shiism.
You tie up Iran and Iraq as a new, under the Shia sphere of influence, and you add in a kind of strategic oil alliance with Chavez, and you now have the power to face the Saudis.
So I think that this is what the new lineup and tussle is ultimately about.
Well, now, Russia is a gigantic exporter of oil as well.
Are they part of OPEC?
Do they go along with those schemes?
They are thrilled to, basically, what Russia does is they are a free rider on OPEC.
They will not join OPEC, because that would mean that they have quotas set by OPEC, and the hell if they're going to get some shakes to tell Russia what they're pumping and not.
However, Putin understands very well how to play the game, and he's been very good at keeping enough oil off the market to keep that thing bumping up at $80 a barrel.
So when they say, oh, he's destroyed you costs, wait a minute, take a look at what Russia is gaining from the high price of oil.
If they put you costs back online, they really had full pumping out of Russia, what would the price of oil be?
About $18 a barrel would be, I guess.
So you put Iraq back online, you put Russia back online, and you will have $18 a barrel oil.
But, you know, if Putin ain't going to let that happen, he's not going to pump himself into bankruptcy.
Well, now, what do you think about prospects of war with Iran?
You told me before that ultimately, and I know that, you know, a lot of this has to do with point of view, and I know in your point of view, Houston rules, and it doesn't really matter what a neocon wants.
At the end of the day, James Baker decides.
Do you still believe that that's true?
Yeah.
Where's Paul Wolfowitz?
Last time I heard, he was getting it on with an Islamic chick, and while he was handing out loans at the World Bank to chicken farmers in Bangladesh, that doesn't sound like a power center guy to me, okay?
The neocons, where is their great light before it's Ledin?
Where is the, Rumsfeld is now at the Hoover Institute, which is, you know, like the old age home for dying right-wing pinheads, you know?
But there's still Dick Cheney, and I think wolves are still in there for another few days at least, you got Stephen Hadley, Abrams Scholsky, Eric Edelman, the Neil Kompowal is still in power.
Not in power, they're in jobs.
They're getting paychecks.
Okay.
I mean, Elliott Abrams, I mean, what does he do anymore?
I mean, yeah, in fact Hadley tried to speak to me, he's like ducking, you know, so that what's happening is that these guys have just been smothered pretty well.
Now, you know, look, they're not dumb guys in one sense.
I mean, there's always going to be a new surge by the neocons, and let's not forget that Dick Cheney, as I point out in our madhouse, I have a little chart so you can keep the tribes apart, you know, the neocons and the Sunnis and get them all properly lined up.
But Dick Cheney is seen as the leader and arbiter of both groups, both big oil group and the neocon group.
They both claim him as their leader.
He's kind of the, been the guy who's kind of arbitrated and decided, you know, with the wink of his, you know, that weird tick he has.
Well, doesn't it seem like he keeps siding with the neocons, like he sided with Frederick Kagan's surge over the Baker panel's report?
Yeah, and I think that what was seen there, and I could be wrong, was that the surge was a way to make sure that they, that, see, James Baker is not looking at the political calendar, despite being the chief counsel for the Republican Party, or he doesn't care so much, they don't care if, they're comfortable with Hillary and some of those characters, you know.
What Cheney has to look at is the political calendar.
He needs a withdrawal, a big drawdown in the middle of 2008, and if you draw down to half your numbers.
Now, and be careful, also, when James Baker talked about knocking down the troop strength to half level, he said that would be done, that had to be done in about a year, begin in about a year.
So I think you're still going to see the Baker plan in effect, it's just that they needed to build up the troops so they can bring them back down.
The thing is, is that the guys in the green zone were first going along with the idea, oh, there's more security in Baghdad, you know, some of the, because from the intercom they could see a few of the, in fact, they literally talk about cafes opening, which just shows you where the reporters are hanging out, they're like stepping out two blocks outside the green zone and going to, they're talking about malls and cafes, so where are these reporters going?
How many malls and cafes are there?
And so that was the con first, then they got the Ambar shakedown, and they could sell that.
But the surge will end, and there will be a drawdown for 2008 in time for the election.
There will be a drawdown.
The Baker plan is going into effect.
Don't discount that guy.
Yeah, well, and you pointed out among, I guess, a lot of other people at the time as well, that the Baker plan, you could call it withdrawing half the troops, but what it really says is we're going to leave half the troops there, and aren't green bases.
Yeah, we're going to leave half the troops, because, I mean, look, we are, you know, the Saudi Arabian army marching song is Onward Christian Soldiers.
We're not going to get out of here until, you know, King Abdullah says, we can.
Yeah, but you still think that James Baker is, at the end of the day, Cheney's going to side with him, and that Baker does not want war with Iran?
Big oil views are going to tend to prevail.
Look, I could be wrong.
I don't have, I mean, these guys don't call me up, and I have, well, actually, I call them up.
They don't necessarily know what they're talking to, and I do record them secretly, but, I mean, that's my shtick, but at this point, it's very hard for me.
The truth is it's getting harder and harder for me to call in and con these guys into, you know, spilling the latest from their little meat, so I don't have the inside.
It's not going to be straight up about it, but I go from what the information I have, and you never discount the power of big oil, and I can't help but note that Shell Oil is putting together a $2 million, $2 billion refinery project in Iran.
And they're going to not want that bond.
Well, the Royal Air Force does not bomb Royal Dutch Shell.
It's just not how it works, you know, and, you know, I mean, there's things which are beyond all our control, but nevertheless, I just don't see that happen.
I think that they're happy with the situation.
Oil's high.
There will be a troop let down and a de-surge, de-tumefant there, but, you know, again, now, I'm better at investigative reporting and telling you what I felt like about Chez Capriche and other things, but, you know, prognosting to the future has never been where I feel safe or comfortable.
Well, I understand, but, you know, I still appreciate your point of view and your analysis so much as you'll get it, at least.
But yeah, so what's the future, do you think, of America's relationship with these Sunni Arab sopranos, as you call them?
Well, you know, I mean, once the camera lights go off, I think it's over with, and we're going to keep juicing them with bricks of cash, and as soon as we, once they've cleaned the place out, it'll be very interesting because they'll be reporting a massive decreased number of killings in Anbar, that is, when these guys stop killing their Shia neighbors, as, you know, as I guess was Human Rights Watch said without a smirk, that the number of killings has decreased in a lot of areas of Baghdad because there's no one left to kill.
Right.
They've ethnically cleansed the area, so there's like, there's just no one left to kill.
The surge is working.
Yeah, so, you know, but I, you know, that is, what I'm very concerned about, of course, is as soon as the cameras go, and of course the cameras do go off because, as they say, Rick Rowley and others, you know, literally taking their life in their hands, they just, I still don't, I don't find his move wise, but I do think it's worth reporting the information.
But I just think that it's so hard to get the information out of there.
They know that.
You're not going to get the reports, you're not going to find out what's going on, and that will be that.
You know, I mean, we don't, you know, how many people know if Anbar is in flames right now?
There's almost no way to tell.
Yeah, you know, the recent British report, which claims by their numbers 1,200,000 dead Iraqis excluded Anbar province and Delia province, I believe, because it says it's just too violent to even go there to do any research.
Yeah, it is.
It's unbelievably dangerous.
And, you know, I mean, that's the other thing, when we get these reports, these reports, or you can get them, Anbar is unbelievably, and now it's only about 5% of the population is gigantic.
It's mostly a big, giant, empty desert, but let's not forget something else.
Anbar is also the center of the unpumped oil, and, you know, and it's going to stay that way as far as the Saudis are concerned, and that's one of the big issues that will always be, will, you know, again, you know, for those who haven't read our madhouse, part of the discovery, not a thesis, because it kind of was a surprising discovery to me in dealing with you oil guys, is that it's not that we wanted Iraqs oil, it's that we want to make sure we never got Iraqs oil to keep the price up.
It was a place to suppress supplies, always has been since 1925, and interestingly, and I think it was done as a bargaining chip, one of the most interesting things is that the government in Baghdad paid several oil companies tens of millions of dollars to get the seismic maps of Anbar, and said, in reviewing the geology and the seismic mapping of Anbar, that there's tremendous oil reserves there, and there's virtually zero pumping.
So what is that telling you?
That's telling you that they're holding out Anbar, like, if we don't get what we want, we're going to start pumping oil, a very interesting threat.
See, whereas what people think of as the threat of, we're going to stop the flow of oil, that's the threat, that's never the threat, the threat is we will start pumping oil and bring down its price.
Have you heard George Bush say one negative thing about the fact that oil is higher than under Jimmy Carter?
I mean, the Republicans used that to beat Carter to death, and no one's saying anything at all.
Well, actually, I did see George Bush say, well, the problem, see, with the gas price, what you have to understand is it's a hidden tax.
I mean, it's not a hidden tax, it's, you know, it's a high price.
It's a high price.
So the answer to your question is yes, I have seen the president say something bad about the oil prices, and in fact, he told the blatant, honest truth to the American people, it's a hidden tax.
Yeah, but he doesn't explain it's a hidden war tax.
If it wasn't for the war, we wouldn't have $83 a barrel of oil.
And however, you know, the thing is, is that it's not the government which is collecting the tax, it's the big oil which is collecting the tax, it's the OPEC nation's treasuries which are collecting the tax, and, you know, America is being drained dry of its cash.
Well, and a lot of that money is coming back in the form of U.S. treasuries being bought up, right?
Yeah.
I mean, we did see, in fact, today that the cover story of the Wall Street Journal is the spending spree out of the Gulf.
You know, a big hunk of NASDAQ was bought by the Gulf states, you know, the stock exchange.
Two hundred billion dollars in assets were bought last year from the Mideast in England.
I mean, you're talking nearly a quarter trillion dollars worth of assets bought up, and, you know, it's absolutely, utterly massive.
Now, it's got to be that way, because, God forbid, they stopped investing in the U.S.
I mean, people were, you know, up in arms about Dubai buying our port system.
They did buy the British port system, but, you know, God forbid that money doesn't recycle, you know?
I'm talking about bridges falling into the Mississippi, man.
We would be destitute if, you know, if Uncle Abdullah didn't kick back the cash.
God forbid, Abdullah started investing in Muslim nations and, you know, and helping Egypt out of poverty or Pakistan out of poverty, because that ain't going to happen.
They're going to invest in Citibank, in hotel chains, in America and in Europe, etc.
And that's what keeps the West going.
The money comes back.
Well, and this is, it reminds me of that movie, Network, where...
No, it's what reminds you of the chapter in the book called Network.
Oh, yeah, is that whatever it is, you know?
Yeah.
I know, yeah, everybody, that whole great speech, Mr. Beale, listen up, was paraphrased from Greg's first book when he was in his early 20s.
Congratulations for that.
But, wait, what's the guy's name, the actor's name, who does all the yelling in that scene?
It was Beady, Ned Beady.
Ned Beady, right.
I never can remember that guy's name.
However, if you want to, and go to the Greg Palast doc, if you want to hear a fabulous reading of the speech, the money, you know, Mr. Beale, the Arabs have taken billions of dollars from us, and now we must get it back.
That speech, that tremendous soliloquy is read by the incomparable Ed Asner, because it contained, Patty Chesky's family let me put it in my book, and Ed Asner reads it on the audio version, but you don't have to go out and blow for the audio version, you can just download it for free from the GregPalast.com, Ed Asner reading.
And not only can you get Ed Asner reading it, but there's several versions of it put to some pretty cool dance tracks, too, that you can download.
Yeah, yeah.
How about that?
And I'm sorry, I went this whole interview without saying armed madhouse 15 times, but so, armed madhouse, armed madhouse, armed madhouse, hey, when the police tasered that kid the other day, he had this mysterious yellow book, I think the Washington Post called it in his hand, that couldn't have been armed madhouse, did it?
That's a mystery to me, yeah, I noticed that while it was an international story, they cut out two things, one, the plug, after all I paid to those cops, they cut out the plug, Andrew Meyer was, for those who didn't see the YouTube version, he was holding up to John Kerry, a mysterious yellow book, as the Washington Post called it, or brandishing a yellow book, as Fox said, the yellow book, they said, this is armed madhouse by Greg Powell to recommend it to you, and John Kerry, by the way, said, I have it, I've read it.
Right, he did say that.
And later, the Boston Globe, which did ask about it, he said, there's a very important chapter in the book about the election, which is, of course, very funny, because the chapter's called Kerry won, and he was asking Kerry, of course, the evidence in Greg Powell's book is that gazillions of black voters were disenfranchised, a very fancy ass word for not allowed to vote, blocked from voting, or their votes were tossed in the garbage, so why did you concede with all this evidence in your face, why did you concede on that day?
Well, and a better question, I thought, and I'm sorry, because I know this one isn't straight out of our madhouse, now available in paperback, but the best question was, if you're someone so opposed to the war with Iran, why don't you remove him from power then?
That was the real question.
Why not impeach, right, and, but they all go together, and everything goes, he was asking Kerry, why he stood there stiff and silent during the votes on the war, why he stood there stiff and silent during the count of the vote, why he stood there stiff and silent during the debate, and why, and then, of course, now I ask why he was standing there stiff and silent while a kid asked him a question was zap with 50,000 volts of electricity, and you know, by the way, very seriously, the kid was on the floor, I mean, I have people grab the microphone, someone timed it, he went for 82 seconds, he was allowed 60 seconds, right?
If I could get people out of microphone when I give a talk to hold themselves to a mere 22 seconds over the time limit, I'd give them all a free copy of the mysterious yellow book, I mean, I had a guy take the mic for 22 minutes, and I'd never called down the cops, there's one exception, I did call down the cops once, but that was with a guy who actually picked up a chair and rushed the stage, and even though I wouldn't mind anything, 12 other guys picked up chairs and decided they were going to, they were going to all divide the audience into shirts and skins and have it out, so I called, I did a 911 from the podium, so I saw where you offered the kid a job, and I think that's it.
Yes, I have, for good reason, and it came out because of Dan Rather's lawsuit, no kidding, when Dan Rather filed his suit on Thursday for $70 million saying, you know, complaining that he was jobbed on, over his report that George Bush is a yellow-bellied coward lying draft-dodging freak, how could he say such a thing about the president?
Yeah, especially on a night when they were supposed to be running a story about the Niger uranium forgeries that got thrown in the garbage can so that he could run his old story about the National Guard, I'm sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, so he ran the story of the National Guard, which of course is a repeat of the story I'd done for BBC television, and what upset me and disturbed me about Rather, and I wrote it at the time, one, I thought he was, in the Mysterious Yellow Book, I won't mention its name, there's a chapter called The Necklacing of Dan Rather about this, but one of the things that, and so he was, Rather was screwed, but that's not the point, Rather himself didn't ask the tough questions, instead of saying, he was constantly fielding questions, where's your proof, which he had, but no one listened, where's your proof?
He should have said, ask the president, no one, no one, not one single reporter at any press conference at any opportune moment, not one would ask the president, did your daddy make the call to get you out of the war?
Did you or did you not disappear when you were supposed to be on active duty in the Air Guard?
Answer the question.
And so Dan Rather, Mr. Four Million Dollar a Year Man, would not ask the question, and here was this journalism student who would ask the question, and so, you know, I have to tell you that Rather's people have asked me when I do some work with him, I'd rather work with the kid who would ask the questions at any cost.
Ah, good for you.
Now, Greg, before I hang up on you, everybody listen to this, Greg wrote this back in the day.
There are no nations, there are no peoples, there are no Russians, there are no Arabs, there are no third worlds, there is no West, there is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and imminient, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars.
Electro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, rank marks, rings, rubles, pounds and seconds.
It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet.
Okay, hang on one more.
There is no America, there is no democracy.
There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon.
Those are the nations of today.
