03/05/08 – Greg Palast – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, check it out everybody, it's my old friend Greg Palast on the show.
Hey Greg, how are you doing?
Hey, what can I tell you?
Well, I'll ask you a bunch of questions and then, you know, we'll get to that part, but let me tell the people that you're the author of Armed Madhouse and they ought to run out and buy it, am I right?
Yeah, right, or shoplift, I get the same royalty.
Yeah, either way, they got insurance, you know.
I got it, right, exactly.
All right, now, so I called you up this morning, I know I only have you for a few minutes here, but I want to know what the heck is going on down there in South America, troops on borders and all these things, what's happening down there?
Well, I just came back from there, in fact, if you go to gregpalast.com, you will see the only English language interview that the President of Ecuador has ever given.
I just came back from Ecuador a couple of weeks ago.
Really?
And we're going to put out more of it.
Rafael Correa is the President of Ecuador and he was just invaded by Colombia.
Uribe is a big ally of George Bush.
Correa is an ally of Hugo Chavez, and now Colombia invaded Ecuador and killed a couple of the leaders of the FARC, which is the guerrilla insurgency, for which, by the way, I don't have, and not many people have much sympathy either way.
Uribe has been implicated, the President of Colombia, the guy that was attacking the terrorists.
Let's remember, he himself has been accused of terrorism by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, everyone else.
And, of course, this is a nation that has two great resources, which is drugs and oil.
Let me ask you real quick, not that it would justify whatever is happening here or anything, but is it the case that Ecuador is protecting leaders of the FARC rebels?
Not at all, actually.
Ecuador is very unhappy about the war in Colombia on its border and certainly does not want the FARC using its turf, because basically the FARC sets itself up as a sovereign nation.
Ecuadorans themselves feel that they've been invaded by FARC.
They don't need to have the FARC's invasion duplicated and amplified and a new war created on their territory by Colombia.
There is an old rule of international law.
You don't invade your neighbors, okay?
You don't covet your neighbor's wife, nor their property, nor their land, nor their borders.
It is not part of Colombia.
This is how wars start.
Think of it this way.
Even George Bush, who basically never found a nation he doesn't want to invade in some way, has not invaded, for example, Pakistan.
And, in fact, Obama was criticized roundly for saying he might cross the border to knock out al-Qaeda in Pakistan and how dangerous and out of control he was for even suggesting it.
You're talking about al-Qaeda just across the border in Pakistan from Afghanistan, and we don't dare cross that border.
Well, we bomb them from the air.
You don't block borders because you don't like someone on the other side of it.
What you do do is do your best to try to get the nation that is where people are hiding out to take action.
The thing is you have to remember that Ecuador has virtually no army.
It is a small nation with very few defenses.
There's a giant U.S. military base there, which seems to be unable to do anything of value.
Except act as a kind of, what appears to Ecuador as a kind of instrument of occupation.
All right, well, what does Venezuela have to do with this?
Well, Venezuela is on the border with Colombia, and so an attack on Chavez's allies on the other border is an immediate, of course, provocation against any member of the Organization of American States, including Venezuela, which is on its other border.
And if Colombia could get away with an invasion of a neighboring state, obviously their next target would be to invade across the Venezuelan border.
Now, Chavez is moving tanks in.
Ecuador is moving troops to its border.
To a great extent, both while Venezuela has a good reason to be nervous and harden its border against the possible Colombian attacks, there is also, everyone has their local politics, and Hugo Chavez, at the moment, after coming off of an electoral defeat, an attempt to change the Constitution, is, of course, beating the nationalistic, jingoistic drums.
He has good reason to, but I suppose that he's saying a silent prayer of thanks to Uribe, who is the president of Colombia.
One of the great ironies here is that the president of Colombia, Uribe, is threatening to take Chavez to the International Criminal Court for supposedly sending money to the drug lord, the Flash Gorillas, the FARC.
Well, now, is that true?
Oh, well, of course it's true.
We know this because they found documents.
Apparently, before they shot this guy, he said, Listen, here's the password to my laptop.
And that, supposedly, the guy has documents that he left on his computer saying that Hugo Chavez sent him $300 million.
By the way, Venezuela may have a lot of oil, but Chavez doesn't have $300 million to give anyone.
Supposedly, he left a document saying he gave this guy $300 million, but the guy, just by getting $300 million, just couldn't spend the $45 to have his computer encrypted.
Yeah, it seems like we would know if the FARC had come in to $300 million.
They would have spent it somehow, right?
I mean, it's like the result of the FARC is actually more loose money than Chavez because they are a drug runner.
But the irony of Uribe saying he's going to take Chavez to the International Criminal Court, I think that Uribe isn't going to show up himself there in person unless he brings his toothbrush, because he is facing charges of backing death squads in his own country and giving the wink and nod to drug dealers very much.
He's kind of the Noriega of South America, this guy Uribe.
So he's the last guy who should be talking about the International Criminal Court.
Okay, now I read in the papers this morning that Brazil and the rest of the Organization of American States are basically lining up behind, or not necessarily behind Ecuador and Venezuela, but at least against Colombia and trying to cool things off and all that.
Is that going to work?
We're not going to have a war here, are we?
There's two reasons why we're not going to have a war.
Number one, the U.S. military has armed Colombia to the teeth, and they are a powerful, brutal military force.
And despite all of Chavez's bluster, there's no way he's going to go to war with Colombia, because a military base they would lose.
Ecuador would be crushed.
They've already been banged, in fact, they're at a border war with their southern neighbor, with Peru.
And every time that happens, Ecuador gets littler.
So there ain't going to be no war, mainly because Colombia is the big bully of South America, and no one is going to really, in the end, take a swing at them.
That's number one.
Number two, the Organization of American States is real clear.
You don't invade your neighbors.
It's not even a question of lining up with Chavez or Correa of Ecuador.
It is a matter of saying, we don't cross each other's borders.
They start that business, then Chavez has every right to go after people.
There have been a death squad of assassins coming out of Colombia to try to get Chavez.
Cuban exiles have come out.
That would allow Chavez, by Colombia's own rule, to invade Colombia, to go get those guys.
The U.S. has given shelter to hijackers, the guys that blew up a Venezuelan airline in 1976.
A Cuban airline, actually, that was leaving from Caracas, Venezuela.
That gives Chavez the right to invade Miami.
You cannot go around saying that there's people we don't like hiding in other countries, and that gives a reason for a military invasion across a border.
Otherwise, like I say, Chavez would have the right to invade Miami and Colombia.
Everyone would be invading everywhere, and the world would be more in flames than it is.
I have to say, and I do want to point out, that despite this insane invasion and violation of the rules of international law in the Organization of American States, there are two candidates for president to immediately endorse the invasion, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
I hate to say it, but the charge that they aren't ready to, that they are amateurs of foreign policy, they seem to be giving some ammunition to that argument.
Yeah, well, we're down to three.
The last thing you're going to be doing is promoting war.
Too late to do anything about that, Greg.
Too late to do anything about that.
We're down to three, it looks like.
We're down to, well, I think of it as kind of two and a half.
Yeah, okay, that's fair enough.
Two and a third, maybe.
That's why I agree that all of them are up to full scale on this one.
Okay, but now we're not going to see George Bush encourage the Colombians to escalate this or anything crazy like that, are we here?
Things are, I mean, you say Venezuela is not stupid enough to take a swing at Colombia.
What about the other way around?
I don't think, I don't think that, I think that Colombia really does have to worry that even a winning war against Chavez ultimately will not be very popular.
There is a lot of posturing.
Chavez will get a lot of political push within his country for standing up to the Colombian invasion.
It's like, he's going, whoo, I got saved on that one.
Correa, who is wildly popular in his country, in Ecuador, will, of course, be standing up for his national sovereignty.
And he's the one who's going to come out now as the hero of Latin America for, number one, for not striking back at Colombia.
He was whacked.
They invaded his country.
He will not go back across that border.
He's doing the right thing of going to the international agencies, of raising hell.
I think that this means that the U.S. military base in Ecuador may soon find itself shoved into the water.
Was it the government of Ecuador recently that said, yeah, you can keep your military base as long as we can put one in Miami?
That's right.
The president, in fact, in my, if you can hear the president mention that in my interview with him, where he says, you know, I'm just going to let, you know, you keep your military base, you just give me one in Miami.
I suggested Orlando because it's such a Mickey Mouse foreign policy we're running.
I just thought it would be more appropriate.
Sounds good.
You know, and the idea that he, that also the U.S. is now, is now, and on top of everything else, supposedly the documents that they obtained from the laptop in the jungle, besides the hundreds of millions of dollars from Chavez, is an attempt to purchase uranium.
No.
So in other words, we're back to...
Are you kidding me?
Attempting to obtain uranium for weapons of mass destruction.
No.
We're back to that line again.
And why an Obama, and why Hillary at this point, would fall for the weapons of mass destruction they're hunting, they're trying to buy uranium lines.
Excuse me, haven't you...
Guys, hello, have you heard that line before?
No, they haven't.
And especially not, especially not just in the last week when Gareth Porter reported that, in fact, it was the National Council for Resistance in Iran, the political branch of the Mujahedin Al-Khalq who came up with the phony stolen laptop that supposedly implicates the Iranians.
Yeah, well, it's the, you know, the laptop, the weapon of mass destruction, the attempt to purchase uranium.
You know, I mean, come on, Obama.
Do us a favor.
Everybody, that's Greg Pallas.
The website is gregpallas.com.
You can read all about it, including his recent interview with the president of Ecuador.
And the book is Armed Madhouse.
Thanks a lot for your time today, Greg.
You got it, buddy.