05/02/07 – Jonathan Schwarz – The Scott Horton Show

Alright, my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio.
Hopefully we got our technical problems worked out a little bit better.
Jonathan Schwartz, are you there?
I'm here.
Alright, and yeah, I don't hear that terrible noise anymore, so I think this is going to work a little better.
So, yeah, Jonathan Schwartz, he writes the blog A Tiny Revolution, and he wrote a book called Our Conf?
That's right.
Our Conf is a collection of humor pieces by my friend Michael Gerber and me.
And, you know, it's just stuff like if people ever see, you know, the humor pieces that the New Yorker runs, some of them are from there, some of them are from other places like the Atlantic, some of it's stuff that we wrote for Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live, stuff like that.
Oh, that's cool.
Yeah, I'm trying to remember, I think I saw something that was by you, a video on YouTube or something.
I don't remember the rest.
Some kind of satire.
Yeah, that's right.
Mike and I did a little parody of the show Intervention.
Right, right.
That was the one.
And it was an intervention that was staged by everybody who knows George Bush because of his long-standing addiction to invading countries.
Yeah, aggressive warfare.
He's got to break that, you know, 12 steps.
Yeah, they're trying to get him to break the habit.
Yeah, that was funny.
And that's one of the main reasons, really, that I like your blog is you kind of share my sense of humor.
I'm not really that funny, but I like funny things, so that's one of the things I like about your blog.
Yeah, we live in a funny, funny world.
Yeah, well, there's at least plenty of hypocrisy that you can try to make a joke out of somehow.
And now, I've noticed from your blog here that you've been keeping track, reading through George Tenet's book for the rest of us, I guess, and making note of the most important parts.
I guess I'll start with asking you if you saw Philip Giraldi, the former CIA officer on Keith Olbermann's show, what, day before yesterday?
You know, I did not.
And in fact, while people have told me about it, I don't even know the details.
What is it that he said?
Well, the most important part, I thought, was that George Tenet is a war criminal.
That it's a war crime by American law and international treaty, etc., to lie a country into war, to start an aggressive war, and lie and call it a defense from some imminent threat.
That is a war crime, and that George Tenet is a war criminal.
I don't know why it takes, I guess, only somebody from the American Conservative magazine can say that, or else they'll just be dismissed, but there it is.
I can't think of an argument against it.
Yeah, I think even people from the American Conservative will be dismissed when they say that, even though, you know, there's a very strong argument that it's true.
You know, when you read through Tenet's book, and I say that not really recommending that anybody bother to do so, what you see is this guy who was, first of all, in way over his head, and secondly, basically doesn't understand at all all of the events that he was involved in.
He just didn't do this.
It's really embarrassing that a guy like this was ever in a position of power in the United States, and he says a whole bunch of very silly things about a whole bunch of stuff, and gets all kinds of facts wrong, has no idea what he's talking about, like, misspells the names of various important people.
So he may well be a war criminal, but the thing about war criminals is that they're just like you and me.
The fact that he's a war criminal doesn't make him a very interesting person.
Yeah, well, I can see that.
So I guess basically what you're saying there is, as you read through his retelling of some of these different events, it's kind of like you know a story better than he does, and here he is trying to tell it from the inside, and he doesn't even really understand his own story.
Yeah, it is amazing that when you look at this, you're not necessarily that maybe he got some stuff wrong in the first draft, but that, particularly given his history regarding Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, that he didn't think to himself, you know, I really want to make sure that I double-check everything.
And he didn't.
And he did not.
Well, you think maybe that was on purpose, so that he can, you know, the bumbling idiot defense from prosecution?
I do not get the sense that he is bright enough to carry off the bumbling idiot defense.
Genuine bumbling idiot.
Either that, or he's really pulling it off well, it sounds like.
Yeah, I mean, if he really is pulling this off, he is a gigantic talent, someone that we really have to respect for what he's been able to do.
But I don't think that that's the case.
Let me just give you one example here.
Okay.
First, in the run-up to war with Iraq, one of the very most important pieces of evidence purportedly about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs was the aluminum tubes, and they became notorious afterwards when it turned out that they were not meant for a nuclear program at all, but just what the Iraqis said they were for, for rockets.
So Tenet retells this story, and it's a gigantic piece of his law.
He claims that the tubes were tested by people from the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge Laboratories, which I guess is in Tennessee.
It's sort of one of the places where people had, you know, designed and used centrifuges before, and it's the center of most of the talented knowledge about centrifuges in the U.S. government.
So Tenet says that they were tested there, and they said, oh, yeah, these are for centrifuges.
Well, in fact, as you can read in the various government reports about what happened, they were tested at Oak Ridge, and the people at Oak Ridge said, no, no, no, no, these are not for centrifuges.
These are much more likely to be used for something else, and it would be almost impossible to modify these so that they would be useful.
And it's not that Tenet is lying that he's just making it up.
It's clear when you're reading it that he's just completely mixing it up with something else that happened, you know, like a year and a half later, and it wasn't people from Oak Ridge, and they said something sort of different.
So he got paid $4 million for this book.
You'd think that he'd be able to afford some accuracy.
And so what, do you know what it was that he was confusing it with that involved Oak Ridge?
Well, it's difficult to say, because what he's confusing it with is something that happened in September 2002, when they were putting together the National Intelligence Estimate.
And there was still disagreement about what these tubes were for, so the CIA asked some government contractor to look at data that they had from the tubes and give them an opinion about it.
And we don't know who the government contractor was, because it's been censored in all the reports that the government has put out about it.
And they were the ones, people who never actually took possession of these tubes, or actually physically tested them in any way, who just got this data from the CIA and looked at it and said, oh, yeah, it seems like these are much more likely to be used for a nuclear program than anything else.
So we have no idea who these people are.
And Tenet just seems to have, in his bumbling, idiot way, mixed up these two things.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, it's interesting about that aluminum tubes.
I guess it was Gordon Prather, whose mind is like a steel trap for these kind of details, reminded me that the aluminum tubes information originally came from Italy.
The same sources, the same cutout, at least, anyway, for the Niger uranium documents, that the nuclear program was based on these two, you know, big so-called pieces of evidence.
And both of them came from the Italians.
Well, correct me if I'm wrong.
I mean, my understanding is that there were several shipments of tubes that were used in various places along the way.
And it may have been that the Italians had an opinion on it.
I think what...
Wasn't it an Italian company that they were buying them from?
You know, that's possible.
I would want to go and double check.
I mean, I see pictures of them.
They say, four rockets or whatever, really big, written on the side of them.
Not four nuclear programs.
Right.
And of course, you know, when we look at the Niger uranium stuff, we can see the dates of, you know, all these documents turning up as just right in time for Congress to vote on, given Bush the authority and all that kind of thing.
And in fact, I guess you probably saw the clip of Ray McGovern on Tucker Carlson, where he doesn't imply, and it has been implied, that it may have been Michael Ledeen and some of his friends who were behind the Niger forgeries.
But he asserts that he knows it.
He's got the evidence to prove it.
He didn't, you know, lay it all out on Tucker Carlson.
But Ray McGovern claimed to know who was behind the Niger forgeries.
And he said, we could trace it back to Cheney's office.
Yeah, I mean, obviously, I respect Ray McGovern, and I think he's done great stuff.
He's really given an important perspective on all of this.
I mean, I guess we'll just have to wait and see and find out what it is that he has discovered about this.
Well, what does George Tenet say about the Niger forgeries in the book?
You know, exactly what you've read before, or you've heard about before from the previous government reports on this, you know, Rocco did it.
That's right.
We blame this Italian guy Rocco.
You know, it kind of just says, well, we weren't sure, the evidence didn't look very good.
We made efforts to keep the government from using it.
And then they screwed us by going ahead and using it anyway.
And, you know, he actually tells a story about how before the Powell presentation at the U.N., John Hannah, who was one of the guys, I think he was on the National Security Council staff, was asking the CIA, you know, why is the uranium stuff not the Powell presentation?
And the CIA person told him, well, because we don't believe it.
And so Tenet, you know, he sticks close to the story that we've already heard, tries to make the CIA and himself look as good as possible.
Well, you know, that's the important thing to say about it.
Yeah.
Well, and the CIA had, I wish I had my footnote off the top of my brain here, but I think I remember reading that there was 14 different times that the CIA tried to get rid of the Niger evidence and yet it kept resurfacing.
Yeah.
So I'd give him, at least his agency, a little bit of credit for that, if not Tenet himself.
But what I'm really interested in is the story.
And I may be oversimplifying this, but I think basically the CIA had mentioned to Cheney, or maybe Cheney had brought it up to the CIA brief, or, hey, what's this about the Niger uranium deal?
What do you know about it?
Find out more.
And that was the genesis of Joe Wilson's trip to investigate.
And what Chris Matthews actually once asked Tenet was, okay, so when Joe Wilson came back and said that this wasn't true, did you send somebody to brief the vice president and basically update him on this mission that he had, you know, basically requested?
I mean, he didn't specifically request a mission, but he requested the more information.
So did you go back and tell him?
And George Tenet said, well, you'll have to ask Dick Cheney at that time.
So I guess as far as I know, that question has never been answered.
Does he come anywhere near that in the book?
He really does not.
You know, I don't think there's ever been a whole bunch of clarity about what precisely happened after Wilson got back.
I mean, Q's report was just sort of stuck into the file with a whole bunch of other crap they had about the uranium stuff.
And whether anything was specifically sent to Cheney saying, you know, we have this guy and he went out there and looked around and didn't find anything, or whether it was just packaged up with a whole bunch of other stuff that was told to Cheney later on.
I don't actually know.
There may be an answer buried, you know, in the footnotes of all the various different government reports.
And, you know, there's the phase two report the Senate Intelligence Committee is supposedly going to finish up sometime this summer.
So maybe we'll finally get an answer there.
But I actually do not know.
Yeah, we'll see if the Democrat controlled committees in the House and the Senate going to get to the bottom of this.
Of course, Henry Waxman is trying to subpoena Condoleezza Rice and she's resisting it, citing executive privilege, which I think is just great.
You know, make a fight out of it.
She probably could have just gone up there, testified real quick, perjured herself and left and gotten away with it.
But now she wants to make a fight out of it.
I just think that's wonderful.
You know, I'm certain that her concern is that she would be forced to perjure herself, given what actually happened and given the fact that she lies so enthusiastically and so consistently about everything.
It's almost certain that she would end up committing perjury and she would have to be one of the people that Bush would pardon on his way out the door in 2009.
Yeah.
Now, I guess you could impeach him and remove him before he has the chance to pardon everybody.
Maybe.
So this is the big revelation, I guess.
I'm sorry I'm drowning us both in minutiae here and kind of skipping the overall theme that's finally broken through on the TV news.
And that is that they were not wrong about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
They were lying about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
They wanted their war and they realized that if you just say we want to have a regime change, that that's not good enough.
You have to scare the soccer moms in America into believing that their little kiddos are going to get nuked in their jammies in the middle of the night.
And that's why we have to have a war.
And so they set out to deliberately lie us into war.
Does George Tenet not make that abundantly clear in this book?
I think if you were to ask Tenet himself, that's not quite how he would put it, of course.
But that is clear when you read the book.
This is how I would express it.
They came into office wanting to invade Iraq.
At this point, there's simply no one on earth who denies that anymore.
Tenet makes that clear.
Many people have before.
And the weapons of mass destruction issue was not necessarily something that they were lying about.
I think the stupider ones believed what they were saying.
The smarter ones, I'm sure, had some idea that a lot of it was completely bogus.
But it wasn't a matter of...
Let me stop you right there for just one second.
I'm sorry to interrupt you.
But I was on these airwaves in 2002, and I knew it was lies.
So you're telling me there were people in the White House who didn't know that they were lying?
You know, the terrifying truth is that I believe that is the case.
I mean, in the summer, Cheney came on TV and said, look, we want to have a regime change.
We want to have a regime change.
It was obvious that all the intelligence was being fixed around the policy.
It was upfront, you know?
And maybe it's only because I had a policy in 2002 that all I would do was watch Fox News.
So it was so abrupt and overwhelming in my face, it was impossible to get around that this was just purely salesmanship.
Yeah, but, you know, salesmen first tend to sell themselves.
And as I say, the smarter ones knew that it was crap and understood that, I believe.
But, oh, I think a lot of the stupider ones really had convinced themselves of that.
And I don't say this to defend them because it's not like, you know, after World War II, you would talk to the high level Nazis and they would say, oh, you know, we had all this intelligence that was demonstrating that Jews were subhumans who were trying to destroy the master race.
And, you know, in retrospect, I guess our intelligence was.
And I guess a fair criticism is we did some cherry picking, you know?
I'm not defending myself that they believe this nonsense.
I'm just saying that people who wage aggressive wars think all kinds of crazy things are true.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, George Tenet seems so detached from reality.
I guess this goes to speak to that bubble that he's in, you know, too far on the inside.
He can't see himself from the outside at all.
But his defense, he I mean, the reason he says apparently the reason he wrote this book is because he saw Dick Cheney saying, hey, yeah, we went to war, but, you know, George Tenet told us it was a slam dunk.
And he said, oh, U.S.O.
B., that's not fair.
I'm going to go and and, you know, I'm sure he assumes that it was Cheney who leaked it in the first place to then cite the quote.
I'm going to write this book and I'm going to set the record straight.
And his excuse is that when he said slam dunk, he was saying, yes, Mr. President, you will be able to bullshit the American people with this.
It's a slam dunk.
That's his defense.
You're exactly right.
And it's one of the reasons why I say George Tenet is a world class doofus is that he does not understand that when he makes this claim, he is saying exactly what it is, as you put it.
I mean, he thought it was such a good idea to set that record straight that he wrote a book around it.
Basically, that was his impetus to write this book was the American people have to know that when I said slam dunk, what I meant was, yes, Mr. President, you will successfully be able to lie the American people into this war based on the crap in your hand right now.
Well, as I say, that's exactly right.
You're the shocking thing is that he said that straight out in the chapter where he goes over the slam dunk.
He actually says, no, if that hadn't ended up in Woodward's book, or if I had just said, you know, I believe that the case is strong, Mr. President, then I would never have written this chapter and probably not this book.
The whole point of this book is just for him to justify himself.
And in fact, when you read through it, it really is kind of pathetic.
It's like a point by point attempt by him for 550 pages to defend himself against specific claims in other books and other articles and so forth.
And he doesn't even mention the articles and books themselves.
He'll just say, some people have claimed and then point by point through, you know, book by this guy who ran the European division of the CIA, Drumheller.
If you follow this kind of stuff, you'll see, you'll know exactly like, oh, this is some article from an Australian paper that he's responding to point by point, but he doesn't even have the guts to bring that up and say, you know, this was said, some people say.
So it's really, it's just a sad piece of work.
It's a sad, sad man.
Well, I don't know if you saw Justin Raimondo's article this morning.
It's called In Defense of George Tenet.
And, you know, he's not really championing the guy or anything, but he's saying that, you know, we should, we should not be so intent on pointing our fingers at him that we miss the, the important truth that he reveals in terms of the neoconservative Cheney cabal and in terms of, well, the fact that they never even had a discussion about whether Iraq was a threat to the United States in any sense whatsoever.
I mean, that kind of thing, that goes to show, and I think that Justin's right about this, this guy was a holdover from the Clinton years.
Wouldn't he have former democratic aid on the Senate Intelligence Committee or something is how it came to head.
So he was an outsider.
He was really trying to kiss up to George Bush as best he could.
And he, he really did get steamrollered in really in the same sense that George Bush's guys got steamrollered by steamrolled, I don't know how you say that, by Dick Cheney's guys.
I mean, when Dick Cheney came to power, he brought in, you know, Richard Perle and, and you mentioned, Hannah, Wumser, Fife, these guys who, you know, are Washington operators who are already a tight network, lines of communication and, and substantial agreement on what is to be done and how, and here Bush comes in with Karen Hughes and Condoleezza, the dumb ass, you know, oil tanker girl, and, and there are no match for, for Cheney's guys.
And I could see Tenet also being just, you know, obviously he could have resigned in protest, but, um, I could definitely see him being an outsider trying his, trying to do his best rather than, you know, one of them in on the plot to do this to us and to the people of Iraq.
Yeah, I mean, I would not shed any tears for George Tenet, but that's, I think, pretty much right.
He, he was just somebody who liked being the head of the CIA, he liked traveling around the world, seeing lots of people and being important.
And one thing I would say in his defense is that, you know, in 2002, in the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, he had a lot on his plate.
You know, when you're the head of the CIA, there's a great deal of stuff to think about.
And when you did have this group of people, Cheney's guys, who were completely obsessed with invading Iraq, you know, there is not much you can do short of resigning.
And the story that he tells, although it is a story that has been told many, many times before, he had an important one that they came into office determined to invade Iraq.
They were not going to let anything stop them.
And they did it.
And so, you know, you're absolutely right.
That's, that's the big story in Tenet's book.
Even though it's been told before, it's important to hear it from somebody like him.
And, you know, it is a gigantic scandal that everyone in the United States should be outraged about.
All right.
Now I want you to listen to this soundbite real quick.
By the way, if you're just tuning in, this is Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Jonathan Schwartz of A Tiny Revolution, the great blog.
And now, yeah, listen here, Jonathan.
The image that's been portrayed is, is we sat around the campfire and said, oh boy, now we're going to get to torture people.
Well, we don't torture people.
Let me say that again to you.
We don't torture people.
Okay.
Come on, George.
We don't torture people.
We don't torture people.
Waterboarding.
We do not.
I don't talk about techniques and we don't torture people.
Now listen to, now listen to me.
I want you to listen to me.
So the context is, it's post 9-11.
I've got reports of nuclear weapons in New York City, apartment buildings that are going to be blown up, planes that are going to fly into airports all over again, plot lines that I don't know.
I don't know what's going on inside the United States and I'm struggling to find out where the next disaster is going to occur.
Everybody forgets one central context of what we live through.
The palpable fear that we felt on the basis of the fact that there was so much we did not know.
Okay.
Now, so my question for you, Jonathan Schwartz, is did he just say we don't torture, we don't torture five times and then explain why in fact he tortures people?
Yes, that's exactly right.
Look, look, you have to understand the context for what I did, which was not torturing people.
We were terrified.
We thought anything could happen at any moment.
And that is why we didn't torture people.
I mean, you know, as I said, he's a sad guy.
That's a pathetic presentation.
Yeah.
You know, they talk about Alberto Gonzalez practicing his testimony for a week.
It seems like George Tenet could have given this a rehearsal or two.
I mean, he's got 60 minutes throwing softballs at him, refusing to follow up on any of this.
He shouldn't have had to do that bad, I don't think.
Well, I agree with you.
I'm always startled by how badly these people lie and how little effort they put into their lives.
But that's really, that's our fault.
I mean, we're to blame and, you know, if we worked harder, they would have to lie better.
Yeah.
See, that's true.
Although, see, I don't know.
My friend Shawna made this point a long time ago, and I like repeating it as often as I can because I thought it was such a great insight.
They only care if their lie works for a day or two.
And, you know, after that, it's okay.
They tell their lie for a specific reason to buffalo you into accepting this or that policy or this or that action.
And then when we bust them later for being liars, they don't care.
It doesn't really matter.
It never seems to matter when they have to admit that they lied the first time.
It only matters that they can get away with it for a day.
And I'm not sure if all the anti-war.coms and tiny revolution blogs in the world can debunk their lies to a wide enough audience in real time to ever be able to prevent that much.
You know, that's an important insight that they know that their lies only have to work for a brief period of time.
But I would also say this, that all of the little opusions of the world, our little websites, sending angry emails to the Washington Post, ABC, to our congressmen, and so forth, have had an important effect.
And if you look at the difference between the run-up to this war and the run-up to the Gulf War, it's really very striking, because in the run-up to the Gulf War, they came up with one or two very big lies.
And it was stuff like, you know, the babies in the incubators and their Iraqi troops on the border of Saudi Arabia poised to attack.
And that was more than enough.
They may not have even needed to use those lies.
That got them to war.
Now, with this war, they had to come up with dozens and dozens of lies, lie after lie after lie, because each one kept on being knocked down.
And I think that, as I say, all of us little people, all pulling together, can take some credit for that, that at least we made them work a little bit harder and have to tell a lot more lies than they would have in the past.
Right, which, in the end, even though they got their war, the indictment waiting for them is really long.
It wasn't just babies in incubators and troops on the border.
This is a 75-count thing here.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, it is a very different thing, politically speaking and historically speaking, to be in a position where, you know, still with the Gulf War, people remember it like, oh, yeah, well, you know, there were a couple of things they said that weren't right.
But, you know, it's a different thing.
There's a list of 128 instances where they came up with stuff that was, you know, obviously crap.
And so that is some real progress.
And it's something that I think we should keep in mind.
Hey, by the way, do you have a good footnote for that, that people can look up?
128, you said?
Well, that's my own count.
I've gone through, you know, like Powell's speech and enumerated the, I think there's like 26 different lies in that speech.
But, you know, eventually, hopefully, someone will do a real history of this.
And that's a, I'm really lowballing it there, 128.
Yeah, yeah, I said 75.
And I knew that wasn't right.
Yeah, if you just go to George Bush's Cincinnati speech, that's the one where he's got, Saddam's gonna fly remote control planes 5,000 miles and spray the eastern seaboard with germs.
Looking back on it now, it was just a period where America went completely insane.
Yeah, well, and, you know, no offense to anybody, you know, little sisters got an illness or anything like that.
But I don't know how else to say it completely retarded, just completely willingly just taking the key and turning the brain off.
You know, all the people who hated the United Nations because it got us into war after war after war, all of a sudden hated the United Nations because it was standing in the way of a war.
And without even blinking.
Yeah, well, fear, fear makes people stupid.
And that's why governments always, always, always use it.
It's a sad thing about people.
But if you let, you know, your government make you afraid, there's no telling what you'll fall for.
Yeah.
Hey, let me ask you this.
Does he talk about the Rome meetings?
Michael Ledeen and Larry Franklin and Harold Rode and Manatoura Gorbanifar and Polari from SISME and all these guys meeting in Rome?
He does.
Yes, he does refer to it.
He refers to it in an extremely boring way.
But he does talk about how he was at a meeting.
And someone from Italy brought up how, you know, there are these people from the United States who just been in Rome, and we're discussing various things.
And Tenet says, like, what the hell is this about?
And, you know, learned what was going on, and spent a lot of time trying to stop these guys from going back for more.
And sometimes he was successful, and sometimes he wasn't.
Now, that's interesting.
In fact, I think Larissa Alexandrovna wrote on her blog at largely, she went back and quoted other sources saying that George Tenet had been briefed and given his approval before the meetings had started.
I wonder who's lying there.
That's a good question.
And hopefully she will cover that at some point.
She's somebody, you know, of course, who's followed this stuff very closely.
And I would love to read something where she would go through and compare the different versions.
Yeah, I'd hate to have the legacy, but I sure would like to have the subpoena power of John Rockefeller IV right now.
That'd be fun.
Yeah, well, it would be fun if you had any interest in using it.
I don't know if you saw this on my site, but there's a recent interview with Rockefeller where someone from Public Radio International caught him as he was coming out of a meeting and said, you know, look, there are all of these reports in the media about covert action going on inside Iran being done in various ways so as to avoid congressional oversight, you know, using money that hasn't been appropriated by the government.
Maybe it's coming from Saudi Arabia, all kinds of stuff referring to the Hirsch article, the redirection.
Yes, that.
And there was also an ABC story about this recently about how we're organizing a group of Pakistani militants who are going into Iran and capturing Iranians, and then hilariously enough, executing them on video tape, which sounds like something that we've heard of before, but not with us doing it.
So anyway, there have been various stories about this, and you ask Rockefeller, well, where are you guys investigating this?
What do you know about it?
And Rockefeller said, what do you think?
Because I'm the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee that I just say, I want this, and they give it to me.
They control all of it all the time.
I can't get anything from them unless they want to give it to me.
And it was really kind of startling, both that the power of Congress is such that Rockefeller would feel that way, and also that he's so incredibly passive, because it's not actually the case that there's nothing that he could do.
Right.
Well, he could do something, but I guess overall, I think that's pretty much right.
Well, he would have to, you know, the things that he would, that he could do, but he would be viewed as insane by all of official Washington.
I mean, he would have to go on television.
He would have to take some of his $100 million fortune and give a big chunk of it to places like antiwar.com.
Yeah, well, I don't think we'd want his money.
That'd make us look really bad running on Rockefeller funds.
But I mean, that really ought to say something that John Rockefeller IV, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, at least feels, because I think that's probably, you know, an honest answer anyway, the way or, you know, what he meant when he said it, that he's basically impotent to have the CIA tell them anything about what they're doing, never mind all the covert actions that have been turned over to the military now and now have no Senate oversight whatsoever.
And I guess with that, I need to ask you if I can keep you over for another couple minutes, or if you got to go?
You know, I can stay for just a few more minutes.
If I could, if you could just talk for me the next five or 10 minutes, that'd be great.
Yeah, cool.
Okay, so I wanted to ask you about what's not in the book, because obviously 500 something pages, I think he said, and you said he goes point by point through pretty much everything anybody bad ever said about him without citing them.
But what's noticeably missing from George Tenet's new book, Jonathan?
Well, the thing that I looked for first, the thing that I was really curious about was what he was going to say about Hussein Kamal.
And that's a subject that I think, you know, you know a great deal about, but I'll just explain quickly for people who don't.
Hussein Kamal was Saddam's son-in-law.
And more than that, he was the guy that Saddam entrusted with running all of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs in the 1980s, when they were, you know, pumping out tremendous amounts of chemical weapons and biological weapons.
And what happened was that in 1991, Iraq was required to give everything up after the Gulf Wars, the condition was to be spot.
So Iraq said, okay, you know, we produced all of these chemical weapons, and everybody knew that.
There's no way they could deny it.
But we didn't ever have an offensive biological weapons program, and we didn't really do all that much with nuclear weapons, and that's it.
Well, the United Nations pushed and pushed for years, got Iraq to admit to more and more and more that they had, in fact, had an offensive biological weapons program, that they'd done a ton of stuff trying to get nuclear weapons, that they produced more and more deadly chemical weapons than they had initially said.
And after all that pushing, in 1995, Hussein Kamal, Saddam's son-in-law, the guy who'd run all the programs before 1991, defected to Jordan.
And what he said when he defected was this.
Number one, Iraq is hiding something.
They're hiding gigantic amounts of documentation about their weapons of mass destruction programs.
Number two, they don't have any weapons at all left anymore.
They produced a lot more than they admitted in 1991, but what they did not admit to producing then, they secretly destroyed.
So what that meant was, Iraq was essentially disarmed.
All they had left was a lot of paper.
And Iraq then, when Hussein Kamal defected, panicked, and turned all of that paper over to the U.N.
So at that point, in 1995, Iraq had nothing.
Right, and the government of America and the United Nations and the rest of them knew it.
And in fact, he even went on CNN and gave an interview to CNN explaining the whole thing back then.
Yes.
That's the most amazing thing about all this is that, keep that in mind when you hear the rest of the story.
Hussein Kamal went on CNN and said, Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction.
And by the way, just so I can underline this point real quick, Scott Ritter has told me personally on this show that the only reason that they had inspections after 1996 was because Bill Clinton was looking for a way to kill Saddam Hussein.
The United Nations and the inspectors had concluded, basically concretely, that there were no weapons of mass destruction or programs in Iraq by the mid-1990s.
Yes.
Well, that's interesting, and I would highly recommend to anybody who really wants to know a lot about the details of this kind of stuff, to read Scott Ritter's book called Iraq Confidential, which really gets into the nitty-gritty of it.
You know, more so than some people might be interested in, but it's really fascinating for people who have been following this and want to know more.
So that's 1995.
Hussein Kamal goes on CNN and says that.
Then in 2002, we know this from the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission, the report that they did in 2005.
The beginning of 2002, the White House or someone in the executive branch asked the CIA to produce a document about Hussein Kamal, and that document is referred to in the Commission's report, but nobody knows exactly what it says.
People have filed Freedom of Information Act requests and it has not been declassified.
So they're interested in Hussein Kamal.
What did he say in 1995?
We know that for a fact.
They specifically asked.
Later in 2002, Dick Cheney gives a big speech.
This is the kickoff for the campaign to invade Iraq.
And he says, And it was a speech to the veterans of foreign wars, the guys who'd fought in the last war and were going to be the ones sending their sons to this one.
And Cheney said this.
We know Iraq is furiously seeking nuclear weapons.
We've learned this in part from Saddam's son-in-law, meaning Hussein Kamal.
Now, was that what Hussein Kamal had said seven years before?
No.
He had said precisely the opposite.
As I mentioned, he said Iraq didn't have any more chemical or biological weapons, and he also said the nuclear program was dead.
So Cheney was portraying the situation as being precisely 180 degrees the opposite of the truth.
It's not even that Hussein Kamal hadn't mentioned the nuclear program.
He specifically said, no, the program is dead.
It's been dead since 1991.
And to his credit, Scott Ritter, with no one in America listening to him, wrote about that, I think for the Chicago Tribune, soon afterwards, pointing this out.
No one, of course, at that time cared at all.
And as 2002 went on and 2003 began, references were made constantly to Hussein Kamal by Donald Rumsfeld, by George Bush himself, by Colin Powell, all of them were dead.
We know that inspections really can't work that well because we didn't find out all this stuff about Saddam's terrifying programs for weapons of mass destruction until Hussein Kamal defected.
So we really need defectors, just the inspections by themselves aren't going to work.
What they left out of these stories was what Hussein Kamal had said, which was, we don't have anything.
Hussein Kamal also said the inspections in Iraq were very, very effective.
Hussein Kamal also mentioned these, speaking of Italy, these 81-millimeter rockets that they were making based on Italian design using these aluminum tubes.
The amazing thing is the aluminum tubes were actually mentioned by him in 1995.
Oh, wow.
I hadn't even realized that.
And of course, we know, looking back at the spring of 2002, that Condoleezza Rice, the national security advisor at the time, and Colin Powell at that time, the secretary of state, both were on the record as saying that Saddam Hussein is contained.
He has no active weapons programs.
We have him in a diplomatic box and he's not able to get out.
So we're not worried about him at all.
All right.
If I remember correctly, I think at least one of them was a little bit earlier.
It may have been 2001 when they were talking about that.
But in any case.
Oh, you're right.
You're right.
I'm sorry.
Yeah.
It was spring of 2001 is what I meant to say there.
You're right.
But here we come to the, you know, where sort of George Tenet walked on the scene.
In February 2003, you know, tension is a fever pitch.
Colin Powell has just done his presentation to the U.N.
Newsweek publishes a story breaking the news about what specifically Hussein Kamal had said in 1995.
And Newsweek reports that Hussein Kamal said Iraq had nothing then, that that had been covered up by the United States and by England, and that he told the same story to British intelligence, to the CIA, and also to the United Nations.
Now, there was no reaction from the CIA in that story itself.
But the next day Reuters published a story in which they went to the CIA spokesman, whose name is Bill Harlow, and asked him about what Newsweek had reported about Kamal.
And Bill Harlow replied, you know, it is absurd.
It's preposterous.
It's absolutely untrue.
You know, those are not the exact words in the article, but something very close.
And he just, you know, as strongly as he possibly could have put it, said, like, there's nothing to this.
And so that was basically it for the Kamal story.
Nobody paid any attention to it from then until, you know, fall of the year, when it became clear that...
Wait, wait, wait.
To be clear, Harlow, the tenant's deputy, was debunking the Newsweek story, or he was debunking the idea that Hussein Kamal had said there were still weapons there?
He was debunking the Newsweek story.
He was saying that the Newsweek, when it claimed that Hussein Kamal had said Iraq had nothing, was completely wrong.
And he was, he was Tenet's, this is Tenet's right-hand man who came out and said this?
Not only is this Tenet's right-hand man, he's the guy who wrote Tenet's book for him.
Oh, wonderful.
And so what does he say about himself and Tenet's ghostwritten book?
He mentions himself a couple of times, and he comes off very well.
Really great guy, that Harlow, huh?
Yeah.
I could never have done any of this without the extraordinary assistance of my dear friend Bill Harlow.
He's the man who really should have robbed the CIA, in retrospect.
What a great guy he was.
You know, he told me that if I ever wrote a book, I should be sure to form it out to him.
Okay, but wait, so what does he say in the book about this particular episode?
Okay, so what happened, and this is the amazing thing, is this.
If you look at the book, you will see in the index that Sane Kamal is mentioned.
He is at the very front in a list of principal characters that Tenet gives you so you can keep everybody straight.
Sane Kamal appears nowhere else.
Apparently a principal character is what happened with Iraq, but there is no reason to actually bring him up and say what he's done.
Now, it's funny.
I wonder if they had originally tried to write something in there that got cut out and they just forgot to cut him out of the cast of characters.
That's some false advertising.
I'd be pissed off.
How much money did you spend on that thing?
You know, I'm sorry to say that I spent $20 on this book.
Well, see, that's not too bad.
I was thinking it was probably going to be $35 or something.
I just didn't want to do it, but maybe I will if it's just $20.
Well, thanks to the boarders that I got it at.
But this is just an extraordinary thing.
You may well be right that they had something about him and they cut it out, but the story that Tenet and Harlow himself are up to their eyeballs in, and in fact, they mentioned Cheney's speech as being an example of something that was not cleared by the CIA and that they knew was wrong, but they never bring this up.
It's an incredible indictment of them, and I think this is actually one of the very strongest instances where it's clear that these people said something that they absolutely knew for sure was false.
It's a pretty grim story, and hopefully at some point George Tenet will be asked about this under oath.
Yeah, we'll see about that.
Let me ask you one more thing here real quick.
This is Karen Katowski's question from her article on LewRockwell.com today, and that is, why did we have this war anyway?
Everybody knows that everybody wanted to have the war, and I guess it depends on who you are, but she lists a few of the reasons, and I guess a couple of these are my own, but Bush wanted to either vindicate his dad or outdo him.
The neocons obviously wanted to smash, or at least install a friendly dictatorship, or plan B smash an enemy Arab state, and also make a lot of money selling Lockheed products.
Certain segments of born-again Christendom want to force Jesus to come back.
Congress and the GOP obviously just got on board for the money.
You have Houston.
I think, like Palace says, Baker wanted a coup d'etat, not a full-scale invasion, but they more or less went along because it helps drive up the price of oil, the bankers make money off the interest, and I guess because the sanctions were going to have to be lifted at some point, the sanctions had basically run their course, they were going to have to do something, and so they decided, well, let's do a regime change.
I don't know, these are all the ones I can think of.
None of them, obviously, are good enough for a reason to kill 600,000 people.
What do you think?
Well, what I think is that when wars start, there's never just one reason, and probably all of those things that you just mentioned played some kind of role in it.
I would say that one of the most important aspects of the motivation for war is something that, as you may know, the journalist Russ Baker has written about, when he spoke to a guy who is close to the Bush family and actually wrote a draft autobiography for Bush before the 2000 campaign.
I believe his name was Mickey Hershkowitz, and what he said was that they had come to believe during the Reagan administration that, I guess during the presidency of the first Bush, that if you're president, wars are really great for you, and that you should try to have some wars, because you whip up all of this sort of domestic, patriotic fervor, and then you can pass the other things that you care about.
They liked the invasion of Grenada, they were really taken with what Margaret Thatcher had been able to do with the Falklands.
I think it's just pretty straightforward.
A certain kind of president likes war, and Hershkowitz said something like, they would say, look for some country where there's some justification that you can jump on and go ahead and invade, and that was the plan.
They were going to have a really short, happy war, and George Bush was going to land on the aircraft carrier, and they were going to say, mission accomplished, and that was going to be it.
They really didn't think past that point.
It was just a matter of getting it done, and then we'll see how it works out, don't worry.
Yeah, and you know, whatever happens, it probably won't get on TV, so who cares?
Beyond that, I suspect that a very big motivation was the idea that Saddam was always supposed to be out of power somehow.
The first President Bush always believed that some big, Sunni strongman was going to kick out Saddam after the Gulf War.
They never expected him to survive, and when it became clear that he was surviving, this was a real problem, because he was supposedly defying the United States.
In what way?
Making a lot of angry speeches.
So he's defying the United States, and if you're running a worldwide empire, you cannot allow people to see someone defying you, and so Saddam had to go.
Right, he was the whipping boy.
In the 1990s, he served as the whipping boy for the United Nations, and I guess for Bush-Cheney, they just wanted, screw the UN Security Council, we have our own National Security Council, and we'll make them the whipping boy for it.
And so it was a whole bunch of things that all converged on Iraq, and when they got the opportunity to do it, they took advantage of it, and now here we are.
One thing I wanted to bring up, which is completely out of place at this section of the interview, but I remember Tenet testifying I think in November, maybe October or November of 2002, and telling the Congress that yes, we think he does have some chemical weapons, but we don't think that he would use them unless he's attacked.
The guy's not suicidal, he doesn't want to pass this stuff to terrorists.
If we attack him, it's possible he might deploy some chemical weapons against our guys, but other than that, I don't think we should worry about it.
Remember that?
Yeah, and in fact, Tenet talks about that specifically in the book, and what happened is that he had said that in closed session to Congress.
He had said that in the part that normally you and I would never get to hear, and what had happened was that he had been closely questioned by some Democratic senators, and he had given that answer, that we don't believe that Saddam would just attack the United States for no reason.
We don't believe that he would give weapons of mass destruction to terrorists, and as I say, that had been something that was not supposed to be publicly available, and the senators pressed him very hard to declassify that, and he went ahead and did it, and it became a story just as the senators had intended.
But Tenet himself did not think that was going to be public when he said it.
He surely proved with his behavior the rest of that year and the beginning of the next one, and I guess really ever since, the idea that the American people might need to know that as much as a particular Democratic senator might never cross his mind.
No, I don't think so.
This is something, that's what men of honor do.
Men of honor keep their mouths shut while their bosses lie a country into war.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
You're referencing Tenet talking about how dishonorably he's been treated by the Bush administration.
When you can't trust Dick Cheney, what's the world coming to?
Oh, man.
Well, that just reminds me of the Pelosi thing when they introduced their recently vetoed timetable benchmark redeployment loophole machine thing that it came down to.
Well, the president decides whether they've met the benchmarks or not, and a reporter said, so there's no way really to quantify this?
And Pelosi said, well, I'm sure we can trust the White House to correctly characterize whether the benchmarks are being met or not.
So yeah, I guess you can still trust Dick Cheney, can't you, Nancy?
I don't know.
That's funny.
You know, I have not actually read that.
I'd like to dig that up.
Oh, yeah.
They did a great bid on the Daily Show about it, where they're trying to explain the bill.
They can't even get the dates right or make any sense of it, her or David Obey.
And then a reporter starts asking her, well, so wait a minute, this benchmark thing, who decides whether they've lived up to the benchmark or didn't or not or what?
And she said, oh, well, the president does.
And they went, well, so wait a minute.
Are you saying?
And, you know, yeah, it's ridiculous.
I think they have the video on crooks and liars.
I know there is one other great question that I was going to ask you.
Oh, I know what it was.
I'm sorry.
I'll let you go right after this.
Jonathan Schwartz from A Tiny Revolution.
What does he say about Iran and prospects for war with Iran in this book?
You know, there's a little bit about Iran, but not a gigantic amount.
You know, you remember that he left in 2004.
So the war drums for Iran had really not started to beat by that time.
You know, he does, and if I remember correctly, he talks about how, you know, there was talk that he came across, and of course, he could also just find this in the newspaper, after the fall of the Taliban, where they're kind of looking up and saying, what's next?
Where people are starting to talk about Iraq, but some other people within the administration are starting to talk about Iran.
But beyond that, there's not a whole lot.
All right.
Well, I sure appreciate you reading this thing, so I don't have to.
I guess I probably will anyway.
Well, my advice to you and to anybody listening is get it out of the library.
Yeah.
Nobody wants George Tenet making extra money off of this thing.
He certainly does.
I'm embarrassed that he's getting some of my money.
All right.
Well, I appreciate your time very much, and especially for staying on Extra with us here.
Jonathan Schwartz, he writes A Tiny Revolution.
You can find it at tinyrevolution.com.
Thanks.