Douglas Goldstein, CFP®, Financial Planner & Investment Advisor I'm joined in studio by Scott Horton of www.antiwar.com.
While we get Jeremy Scahill on the line, I'm going to ask Scott Horton about everything under the sun that we can cover before we get Jeremy on the line about U.S. foreign policy right now.
I actually want to start a little bit down this list because I've gotten so many e-mails about what the heck is going on off the coast of Costa Rica with the U.S. military.
What do you know about that, Scott?
Thanks for having me here, Alan.
I really don't know that much other than their pseudo-parliament.
I mean, I think their state is really just a front for the American empire down there, and they passed this kind of blank check allowing the American Navy to show up and force and build a giant marine base there.
It's supposedly all being done in the name of fighting the war on drugs.
Apparently, some cocaine goes in and out of there, but it sort of seems like overkill.
I talked with a guy named Joseph Shansky.
I know a lot of places that cocaine goes in and out of.
We might not have the Marines invade L.A. right now.
Beverly Hills this time.
Well, so I talked to this guy, Joseph Shansky.
He does Democracy Now!
in Espanol and writes at a place called Upside Down World.
I think he'd been down there, and I asked him what was going on.
He said, well, I don't really know either.
I don't think anyone really does.
What he could really report to me as a fact, Alan, was that the people of Costa Rica are a gannet.
They don't want anything to do with another American intervention in their country, which, after all, has a pacifist constitution and wants nothing to do with us.
Famously has no military.
Right.
Now, again, the detail one more time.
A military base in Costa Rica is what they're talking about.
A giant base for the Marine Corps.
I'm not sure exactly how big giant is, but apparently this is going to be ships and ships' worth of equipment unloaded and put together down there.
Right.
No fly-by-night operation here.
So the Obama administration, peace in effect, no?
I really don't know exactly what they're up to.
You know, you look at what happened in Honduras where there was this coup, and Obama came out and said, you know, this will not stand and all this kind of thing.
And then it was Hillary Clinton and her pal Richard Holbrook were up to their eyeballs in business deals with the guys who were responsible for the coup.
I think Holbrook was running their PR and their lobbying efforts in D.C. and whatever.
And, well, she's the Secretary of State, and so the president backed down one more time.
I don't know why he ever bothers to pretend to take a good stance, Alan, because all he ever does is back down from any good stance he takes.
And we are joined right now by Jeremy Scahill, a friend of KPFK and a friend of us all.
Welcome to KPFK, Jeremy Scahill.
It's really good to be back, and I also want to welcome Antiwar Radio.
From one journalist who started his career in journalism at Pacifica to a show just starting there, welcome.
Oh, well, thank you very much.
I really appreciate that, Jeremy.
And so, you know, everybody in the audience is familiar, of course, with Jeremy Scahill.
He writes for The Nation magazine.
He's the author of the book Blackwater, the Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army.
And as many of you know, the biggest story of the week really has been this series in The Washington Post, Top Secret America, it's called, a pretty in-depth profile of the national security state by Dana Priest and William Arkin.
And since neither of them would show up and do the radio show, I figured I'd go ahead and bring on a critic.
And Jeremy wrote this thing at The Nation website.
Corporate media discovers private spying.
And it's only, you know, wrapping up July 2010, huh, Jeremy?
Right.
Well, I mean, first of all, I should give them credit, because both Dana Priest and William Arkin have done a lot of good work over the years.
And there are some important things that have come out in this piece.
I mean, they do a very good job of looking at the financial aspect of it and providing some statistics that are updating work that was done by the great journalists, Tim Shorrock and James Bamford and others.
You know, but what I think was the fatal flaw, and I mean that term, fatal flaw, of this series, is that they left almost entirely untouched the most sensitive contracting that happens on a daily basis by the United States.
And that is contracting out drone bombing campaigns, targeted assassinations, covert operations, domestic spying.
They completely let that part of the program off the hook.
And they also ran defense for a lot of the big companies that do work for the National Security Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office, two of the most clandestine agencies within the U.S. intelligence apparatus.
So I think that this is a clear case where independent journalists were way ahead on this story.
Tim Shorrock wrote a whole book on it three years ago, and no one paid any attention to it.
And, you know, this is basically a Pulitzer campaign by the Washington Post.
Much of the reporting was regurgitated from independent journalists, people like Jim Bamford, Tim Shorrock, P.W.
Singer, and others.
Yeah.
Well, I'll go ahead and say Nick Terse, too.
His book, The Complex, breaks major ground on this.
Of course.
You're absolutely right.
When you talk about the biggest hole in it being the participation of the contractors in the actual drone strikes and that kind of thing, it seemed to me like they sort of indicated, Priest and Arkin did in the article, you know, that this was a direction to go when they said that, look, there are more so-called special access programs at the Pentagon than anyone can count.
And special access program, that means covert operation, right?
And it's covert because it's illegal.
And there are more of these operations than anyone can count.
Jeremy, what are they doing?
Right.
No, you're right.
I mean, in fact, I recently did an event and a public interview with the former top CIA counterterrorism official, Robert Grenier, who was the CIA station chief in Islamabad, Pakistan on 9-11, and then went off to Iraq and then became the head of the CIA's counterterrorism center.
And I really pressed him on these special access programs, and it's something, of course, that they don't want to talk about.
But the reality is that both the military, through the Joint Special Operations Command, and the CIA, through their paramilitary division, have been outsourcing fine, fixed, and finished operations for years now.
And these special access programs oftentimes are not even briefed to the Congress.
So we have a reality, and I wish that this would have been stated clearly in the postpiece, where you have for-profit mercenaries that have higher level of access to sensitive, classified information than members of Congress do, who theoretically are elected in part to oversee these kinds of operations.
And I don't think it's just a matter of the Congress gave them money and the CIA had no choice but to spend it in this manner.
Using contractors is a way of building implausible deniability to your operations.
When you've got a private company doing it, especially one like Blackwater that can bankroll their own operations, you erase the paper trail, and it goes back to the demands we must make for a church commission-type investigation into this, not some puff series in the Washington Post that only regurgitates what I'm sure is very familiar to people who read antiwar.com and listen to antiwar radio.
We've been in the business of killing, and it's been profitable for a long time in this country.
Well, you know, I saw Glick Greenwald's take on this story today, and his take was, nobody even cares.
Apparently there was some PR scandal with some Republican congressman, or something happened this week, and nobody even noticed, really.
What I would think is probably the best reporting that anybody at the Post has been allowed to do since they took down Richard Nixon here.
Right, I mean, look, if one of the establishment papers, and the Post has a long reputation for being a dumping ground for CIA propaganda, if the Washington Post can't even spark any kind of substantive outrage in Washington beyond the usual suspects like Claire McCaskill, then I think that, you know, it's a sad commentary on the state of oversight.
I mean, God knows that people like you and myself and others have been beating the drum trying to get people to pay attention to this even before 9-11, and so if they can't even do it with the establishment corporate-controlled media, then I think that the chances of having an actual shift in policy, not to mention a public debate on these things, is just slim to none.
I'm Scott Horton, I'm talking with Jeremy Scahill, he writes for The Nation magazine, and of course is the author of the book Blackwater, the rise of the world's most powerful mercenary army.
Now, when you say fine, fix, and finish missions that these contractors, these mercenaries are doing, it sounds like you mean killing people.
Yeah, they are.
I mean, they are, they have.
I mean, what we know, for instance, about, just take Blackwater, for example.
You know, Eric Prince, shortly after 9-11, cut a deal with the CIA where he actually trained assassination teams at one of his private residences in Virginia, and these teams didn't just operate in Iraq and Syria, Lebanon, you know, places that you would presume that they would operate, Afghanistan, Pakistan, but they also went into supposed U.S. allies, like Germany, and they actually found and fixed a German citizen.
He was a naturalized German citizen, but a German citizen nonetheless, and at the very last moment, the order was withdrawn to pull the trigger on him.
So we can look at the CIA aspect of it and know that they've been hiring individuals as contractors from the beginning of the agency's founding to the present moment where all these body shops, as they're called, have been created essentially as a way to extort money from the government in return for the services of retired officials or agents, or as a way of just setting up a for-profit entity that is essentially a killing machine.
But I think that people would be remiss in their duties as responsible citizens in this country to just look at it as the CIA.
The military is doing most of the killing in the world today.
The Joint Special Operations, and I mean clandestine killing, I'm not just talking about in war.
The Joint Special Operations Command maintains a hit list that includes U.S. citizens that could be targeted at any moment for assassination, and part of the finding and fixing in those operations is being done by the kinds of contractors that were written about by the Washington Post, but they don't identify them as participating in those roles.
So the whole game here, Scott, is plausible deniability mixed into a cocktail with profits that keeps the war business booming.
Well, yeah, you know, William S. Lynn, the military strategist, one time said that people have to understand that the Pentagon budget represents simply the greatest honeypot in the history of the world, that any company that doesn't want to have to take the risk of the marketplace can just go sign up with the Pentagon and have all the free money they want, and in fact, in the Post series here, they quote people talking about, oh, our goal, we must make at least $500 million in profit within the second year.
That's our goal, and there's no pretense of even pretending to serve the public whatsoever.
Well, that's why people like Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich are considered marginal crackpots by the establishment because they have the audacity to stand up and say we shouldn't be making war a for-profit operation because there's no incentive to end war then and every incentive to keep the next war going.
I mean, look at this entire think tank industry that surround Washington like vultures, the lobbyists, the think tanks, the people paid to think by the makers of tanks.
Their whole duty is figuring out what the next war is, and I'll tell you something, Scott, that no one wants to talk about.
With the military doing these killings, what they do is they classify what would traditionally be known as intelligence operations that would need to be overseen by the Congress.
They use a phrase that was developed by the neocons and Stephen Cambone and Paul Wolfowitz called preparing the battlefield, and if they go to the Congress and say, well, this is an operation that's classified and it's preparing the battlefield, in other words, it's military operations in a country the U.S. may go to war with, Yemen, Somalia, elsewhere, then Congress doesn't have oversight capability, and they've been doing that since the early stages of the Bush administration, and Obama's addicted to the language of preparing the battlefield.
He's just like the neocons when it comes to shielding these operations from the relevant congressional authorities.
Well, and as we know, the Senate and the House Intelligence Committees and the majority and minority leaders have very limited access to really know what the CIA is ever even doing, but it is clear that they have even less oversight over the Joint Special Operations Command, and it seems like this same kind of dynamic is at play when you look at the accountability for even massacres like took place in Iraq where the contractors are caught, the mercenaries are caught, but then the Department of Justice says, oh, I don't know, talk to the State Department or talk to Robert Gates over at the Department of Defense, and then the Department of Defense says, well, you know, the Uniform Code of Military Justice doesn't apply in a situation like this.
I think you'd better go and talk to Alberto Gonzalez or Eric Holder at the Justice Department, and so meanwhile, these guys get away with all kinds of crimes, never mind the ones they're hired to do.
Right.
I mean, you're making what I think is a central point for people to understand here, but I'll take it a step further and say that what's called in sort of inside the Beltway circles that even pay attention to this stuff, what they talk about is a legal gray area.
Well, it's unclear are they civilians or are they military.
That's not an accident, Scott.
I mean, this was a system that was intended to give cover to clandestine operators that were hired out of the private sector to work for the government because they couldn't be held accountable.
That was the whole point of using Blackwater in Iraq and Afghanistan.
That's the whole point of privatizing the national security apparatus.
No one can touch them.
You know, there's been a handful of attempted prosecutions, most of which have been unsuccessful.
When a CIA contractor was prosecuted for killing a detainee in Afghanistan under the Patriot Act, David Passaro, that's the only real case of a prosecution happening for a CIA contractor who's committed what I think is a war crime.
So, no, I mean, this isn't an accident of history or an accident of law.
This is a system that was built to provide for unaccountable, unattributable forces that can serve as small-scale hit squads.
Well, you know, it's nice to be reminded reading the Washington Post-Priest-Arkin series this week where they talk about the National Security Agency scooping up, according to them, 1.7 billion messages per day.
And, you know, all the torture and all the war and all the mass killing and all the stealing of money has really made the surveillance state, the Big Brother surveillance state, kind of pale in comparison.
Nobody even seems to really care anymore that Bush's outrageous, warrantless data mining of we, the American people, continues unabated and has ever since they announced it in the New York Times.
Well, I'm standing here right now talking to you.
I'm in JFK Airport, and at JFK Airport they use what are called behavior detection specialists.
They look at people on screen, and they zero in on faces, and if somebody looks stressed out or looks like they could, quote-unquote, be dangerous, they'll pull that person aside for questioning.
I mean, we are increasingly living in a surveillance state that makes 1984 a reality, and we're starting to look a lot like London, where there are cameras everywhere.
And I think that this is all part of the Big Brother atmosphere, and people can say, well, that's crazy or an exaggeration.
We live in a country where Big Brother is Democrat and Republican.
It doesn't matter.
They're all corporatists.
They're making a killing off this stuff, and we're all being, in one form or another, spied on or having our lives surveilled.
All right, everybody, that is Jeremy Scahill.
He writes for The Nation magazine and, of course, is the author of the book Blackwater, The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army.
Thanks very much for your time on the show.
I appreciate it.
Hey, Scott, thanks for all the work you guys do at Anti-War Radio, and welcome to Pacifica.
Thanks.
And this is Alan Minsky sitting in for Susie Weissman here on Beneath the Surface.
You just heard Scott Horton of AntiWar.com's interview with Jeremy Scahill.
We're going to hear more from Scott Horton later in the hour, but right now we're going to go to a break and come back, and we're going to talk a little bit about health care.
I'm Alan Minsky, and I'm joined by Scott Horton.
And let's now return right back to what we know we provide here at this radio station, which is information about the world as it is that you often cannot get anywhere else, such as with U.S. foreign policy, something in a so-called democracy we should really be on top of.
All of us, but in fact so few people know so many details, but one who does is Scott Horton.
He's in studio with me right here.
I want to start off right now talking about some of the details that really are important for people to know, but they probably don't.
Let's start off in Somalia.
What's your take on what's been going on there recently?
Well, it's absolutely horrible, Alan.
Of course, as people are probably familiar, there's this group, and this was in the headlines anyway, top-of-the-hour news kind of thing you could have picked up if you're not even looking closely, that there was a bombing by a group called Al-Shabaab inside Uganda, where people were gathered to watch the World Cup.
And it was a big soft target, and dozens and dozens of people were killed, I think maybe more than 100.
And all over American media, especially, and I don't know about elsewhere around the world, but all over the American media, the song rang out that, boy, those guys really want their virgins in heaven, and they must really hate soccer.
And what is it about that Islam anyway that just makes people hate freedom so much?
And the same old song they've been singing for 10 years now.
And yet, the fact of the matter is, for anybody with the Google News, is that the Ugandan army has been occupying Somalia as part of the African Union force, and they've been killing people.
In fact, there was an internal report from the African Union that was leaked, where they talked about how, yeah, gee, we need to really maybe tone down the civilian casualties here, because they're just bombing Mogadishu indiscriminately, and including, ironically, just a few weeks ago, or maybe it's not ironic, maybe this is that cause and effect we're looking for there, where a bunch of children in Somalia were killed by Ugandan troops.
And so then, when this group Al-Shabaab in Somalia goes and gets retaliation in Uganda, Barack Obama and the American empire announced that, well, we might have to begin intervening in Somalia because of this group Al-Shabaab.
But the fact of the matter is that history didn't begin with this soccer bombing in Uganda.
What happened, really, was, well, America's been intervening in Somalia for decades and decades, but we pretty much stayed out after the Black Hawk Down episode, as most Americans know it, of 1993, and didn't really intervene again until the George Bush administration, really the second George Bush Jr. administration.
And what had happened was, they didn't really like the statelessness of Somalia, and it was actually probably the golden age of Somalia, at least compared to what they've been dealing with for the last decades.
But they didn't really like this at all, so they started supporting the warlords, including the son of Adid, who was the so-called bad guy from Black Hawk Down.
And in doing so, they ended up solidifying support for their opposition, a group that was known as the Islamic Courts Union, which was basically the old men, the grandpas and the uncles and the elders from the community, particularly in Mogadishu, and they really formed the first monopoly government in Somalia in a long time.
They were pretty strict, but they had very little real power, just really enough to call it a government.
So then America, George Bush and Dick Cheney, put even more weight behind the warlords, who picked an even bigger fight with this Islamic Courts Union, which then threw them out and into Ethiopia.
At this point, the Americans decided this was intolerable, and at Christmas time 2006, the American military and the CIA helped the Ethiopian army invade Somalia and destroy the Islamic Courts Union and attempt to install this central government, the transitional federal government, they call it.
Well, what happened was, the Islamic Courts Union had the popular support, and they beat back the Ethiopian army and beat them back across the border.
But like I said, they were the old men.
They were helped by a brand new group that had never existed before, Alan, that is called Al-Shabaab, the youth, and this is the brand new youth militia that grew up to help the Islamic Courts Union throw the Ethiopians out.
Well, so Condoleezza Rice admitted defeat toward the end of the Bush administration, and she said, OK, Islamic Courts Union, you can be the government after all, as long as you're willing to be the government of Somalia within the form of this transitional federal government we've tried to install here.
So they agreed, and the leaders, the elders who were the Islamic Courts Union are actually now sitting in that transitional federal government, but they only control a few blocks, and they've lost all their legitimacy because they made a deal with the American empire on behalf of the Ethiopians, and now this group that had never existed before, Al-Shabaab, is waging a civil war against their former allies, and they've turned the whole place upside down, and there are more than a million people have been turned out of their homes, there are refugees all over the place, lining up and down the highways, UN food aid can't even get through because of the security situation, and because the UN food aid comes from the United States, and Barack Obama, while being willing to send tons and tons of weapons for the open market in Somalia, will not send food, because that might end up in the hands of the Al-Shabaab fighters.
And in that narrative, Uganda gets involved at what point?
Well, Uganda has been with the African Union force, being a so-called peacekeeping force that took the place of the Ethiopian army when they were forced to leave, and it's just like when Israel invaded Lebanon to go after the PLO in 1982, at the very beginning, the Shiites in southern Lebanon said, oh good, finally somebody is here to get rid of the PLO for us, but then the Israelis stayed, and we ended up with the party of God, Hezbollah, which still had most of the power in southern Lebanon, they never existed before, they were the result of the Israeli intervention, well it's the same thing here in Somalia, where Dick Cheney, beginning Christmas 2006, starts this war, and now when finally there's some blowback that spreads outside Somalia's borders, the American government gets to pretend, with the help of the American media, that wow, I guess history began the week before last, and why do these people hate soccer so much anyway?
So blowback though, blowback is the theme there, and let's talk a little bit about the Netanyahu tape in Israel, just to shift gears here for a second, tell us a little bit about your take on that.
Well, this is the story of blowback too, if you've read The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright, which is a definitive account of the plot for the September 11th attacks, you'll see, and in fact Perfect Soldiers by Terry McDermott makes the same case, that Mohammed Atta and the ringleader hijackers that attacked America on September 11th, were motivated more than anything else by Israeli policy in Palestine and in Lebanon, and people say, oh, cavemen did it, or whatever, no, they were grad students living in Hamburg, Germany, and they would sit around and watch Israel's war crimes on TV all day, and blame it on the United States, and that ended up, as you saw on TV, with the towers falling down and 3,000 Americans killed, and that was their motivation for doing it, Mohammed Atta and Ramzi bin al-Sheib and the lead group of hijackers there, so that's why this ought to matter to Americans, even if they don't care about the people of Palestine, is that this causes problems for us, in fact, going back to the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, Ramzi Yousef, who cooked that bomb, told the judge at his sentencing, that this was all about Israel in Palestine, and so now the video of Netanyahu that you're talking about, is a video of the then, or no, he was the former, and is now again the Prime Minister of Israel, it's a video of him in a living room in 2001, kind of letting his hair down and speaking freely about what's going on, I guess he didn't know they turned the video camera back on, and he's basically talking about how, oh, don't you worry about America, America's a thing that can be moved, Bill Clinton, he'll do whatever I say, the American people, they support us 80%, it's absurd, he says, and what he's talking about is how he got away with pretending to implement the Oslo Peace Agreement, while in fact finding a loophole called military sites, everything is a military site now, and of course they gave up a little bit of Hebron, he's bragging about, oh, we gave up a little tiny bit of Hebron, but we get to pretend like we made this giant concession, and anyway, it was the Likud party under Benjamin Netanyahu that really killed Oslo once and for all, and there he is bragging about it, and there he is calling our support for his country absurd.
This is Alan Minsky, and I'm sitting in for Suzy Weissman on Beneath the Surface, I'm joined in studio by Scott Horton, we have about 30 seconds left, blowback, what about the Islamic Center in New York City, blowback?
Well, look, Islam didn't attack us on September 11th, some individuals who were mad about Israeli policy in Palestine, mad about American policy in Iraq, mad about the occupation of Saudi Arabia, they attacked us, and it was the natural result of the American empire in the Middle East, it was not Islam, there's nothing offensive about a mosque, no matter where you put it, this is America.
This is Scott Horton from AntiWar.com, you can hear his journalism on that website, he'll be back again next week at this hour, as Suzy Weissman will still be on assignment, and I want to thank all of our guests for this hour, I want to thank Mr. Stan Brock from Remote Area Medical, I want to thank Steve Tarzynski, who is a pediatrician in Southern California, with Physicians for a National Health Plan, we want to thank, of course, Jeremy Scahill, who joined Scott and myself at the top of the hour, Tamika in Master Control, and Angela, is it?
Angela Keat, my producer.
Angela Keat, Scott Horton's producer from AntiWar.com, check out more of Scott Horton's material at AntiWar.com, this is Alan Minsky sitting in for Suzy Weissman, remember, send me an email at aminsky at kpfk.org, if you're interested in participating in the Listener Programming Advisory Committee, Tamika, take it away.
