07/13/07 – Ken Silverstein – The Scott Horton Show

Alright my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio on Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
Introducing our guest today, Ken Silverstein.
He is the founder of Counterpunch, I just found out, and is the Washington editor of Harper's Magazine.
His blog at harpers.org is called Washington Ballet.
Welcome to the show, Ken.
Thanks.
Good to talk to you, and I guess the first thing I should do is offer my congratulations on taking the email newsletter of the other Scott Horton, and taking what must have been, as far as I know, the best email list that one could possibly hope to be on, and turning it into its own blog there at harpers.org.
Yeah, we are thrilled to have Scott blogging for us, although the credit really must go to Paul Ford, the web editor, whose brilliant idea it was to invite Scott on.
I can take credit for bringing Scott Horton's no-comment blog to Paul's attention, but I just said you should be reading this, this is great.
His brilliant idea was, hey, we should try to get this guy for our site, which we succeeded in doing, and we're really happy about that.
He really is an amazing guy, you know, literally one of a very small number of people who can legitimately be termed anti-torture heroes in this country, people who have stood up against Donald Rumsfeld and the rest of these thugs who think it's okay to turn the symbol of America from the Statue of Liberty to some guy on a leash laying on the floor covered in blood.
Yeah, no, Scott's been there from the very, very beginning, I mean, starting with executive renditions and going through Abu Ghraib and all these other abuses that have taken place.
He's been really solid, and he's been, as you say, standing up and very loudly letting it be known that he finds it abhorrent.
So, yeah, he's to be congratulated for that.
I also have to admit that when I saw that he's going to be turning this email list into a blog at Harper's, I said, well, so much for me, I'm going to have to change my name now or something.
The other Scott Worden's got a list of credentials after his name I probably couldn't even read to the end of and writes, what, a dozen blog entries a day on all the most important subjects?
I can't keep up with that.
I don't know how he does it.
I really don't.
I'm in awe.
All right.
Well, you know, your blog there at harpers.org, Washington Babylon, you have the better name for your blog, for starters, but it's nothing to snicker at.
You got a really good blog going yourself here.
It's harpers.org for those not familiar with the Washington Babylon blog.
And you have all kinds of interesting stuff here to talk about.
But let's start with this undercover investigative journalism that you did in regards to the process for what it takes to lobby for a third world Stalinist dictatorship.
And this is the kind of journalism that we don't get to see anymore.
And apparently you were attacked for doing it when this is exactly what I like to see is a reporter pretending he's somebody else and getting in there and finding the real scoop.
Well, this was, I do want to note right off that this is, there's a small excerpt of the story on our website on my blog, Washington Babylon.
But to get the full story, unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your point of view, you have to get the July issue of Harper's.
The full story is there.
Yeah, what I did was I basically dummied up a fake company that was allegedly based in London, said to have a stake in the Turkmen natural gas sector, and then approached a number of the big lobbyists in Washington and said, Gee, you know, we were looking for a firm that can put together a strategic communications plan to convey to the American public and policymakers all the exciting changes underway in Turkmenistan.
Of course, there are no exciting changes underway in Turkmenistan.
The place remains a Stalinist dungeon.
However, I said that we wanted to improve our, you know, we had a stake there, and the government would be very grateful to us, my company, if we hired a lobbyist, you know, would enhance our own business position in Turkmenistan.
So we wanted a firm that could basically I mean, I didn't use the term whitewash, but it was pretty well understood that what I was looking for was a company that could a lobbying firm that could whitewash the image of the regime and seek to improve the relationships between the US government and Turkmenistan.
And needless to say, a number of the firms bit and bit strong and really went after the account.
And what was it that they offered to do for you to improve the image of Turkmenistan?
Well, you know, they I talked to two firms, I went in for face to face meetings with two firms after having had conference calls and email exchanges, I, you know, I claimed I was coming into town from London, when in fact, I was in Washington the whole time.
And I met them.
And I told them that, you know, I, what can you do for me, I asked them, what could you do for me, and they laid out their game plans after was going to charge me roughly $600,000.
For the first year, they were going to arrange congressional trips to Turkmenistan.
They said it would be tough in the post Jack Abramoff climate, you know, there'd be a lot of scrutiny.
So it might have to be at first a group of staffers, but they thought that they could put together a delegation of real live members of Congress.
And they said that, you know, they were basically suggesting that they could use a loophole because they're in the law, it says that, although lobbyists aren't allowed to sponsor trips.
A university can sponsor a trip.
And so they said, well, we can recruit a Turkmen University.
And you know, if we do that, then they can be basically the cover for the trip.
So we'll be able to send members of Congress over as well.
So A, they said they'd send a junket of members of Congress.
B, they said, they do a lot of work on the media.
They could, you know, they would have a, there's a lobbyist on staff who writes op ed.
And then they go out and recruit signatories, somebody either from the government or from the government.
And then they go out and recruit signatories, somebody either friendly within a think tank or a university, and get them to put their name on it.
And then they plant it in the newspaper.
They told me they had planted thousands of op eds in this manner.
They said that they could create bogus events around town where it would look independent, it would look like maybe a think tank was sponsoring it or roll call the Capitol Hill newspaper was sponsoring it.
But in fact, they would pretty much control the agenda and the speaker so that we would get the message across about the new and improved Turkmenistan.
And they also said they could easily arrange trips to foreign officials, visiting officials from Turkmenistan, say the foreign minister, or maybe the president comes to Washington.
They would open doors and get him in to see administration officials and members of Congress.
And again, you know, they would get across the message that my phony company wanted to get across, which was that Turkmenistan was a wonderful place, basically, and things were improving, and it was time to take a fresh look at the situation there.
So they were only eager, too eager to help.
Then Cassidy and Associates, which really is probably the biggest lobby shop in Washington, they said with Turkmenistan, you know, there are image problems here, so there are no quick, easy solutions, will need three years, and it will cost $1.2 to $1.5 million a year.
So that basically when you factored in fees and other costs, it was clearly going to be a $5 million-plus contract.
And they proposed sort of similar arrangements.
You know, they would send over members of Congress.
I mean, there were variations on the same sorts of themes.
I mean, they were both – both the firms were going to influence the media and influence politicians.
I mean, Cassidy had an idea where – excuse me, one of the people who worked for Cassidy had previously helped set up something called the Valdai Discussion Group, which sends journalists and think tankers and academics over to Russia on all expense-paid trips.
They are wined and dined and heavily pampered.
They get, you know, top access to Russian officials, including in some cases Vladimir Putin, and then they come back and write about their trip.
Now, some of the people who came back and wrote articles, they weren't completely, overwhelmingly fawning.
But the stories I would say ranged from critical but sympathetic to flat-out falling all over yourself and praising the situation in Russia.
So they said we could try to do something like that in Turkmenistan as well, this sort of, you know, something similar to the Valdai Discussion Group.
So again, you know, they were going to manipulate the media.
They were going to use think tank – friendly think tankers, friendly academics.
They had ties all over Capitol Hill in the administration they bragged about.
And basically, they said that they could get the job done.
They would be able to help Turkmenistan rehabilitate its image in the United States and improve ties with the United States government.
And so really, the essence of this story is not so much illegality, but what's legal for them to do.
This is how the system works.
I guess the part that really, you know, got the hairs standing up on the back of my neck there was they bragged that they've planted thousands of op-eds in this manner.
That's really the lesson of this story, right, is listen everybody, this is the information you're getting.
This is where it comes from, really.
Well, the lesson for me was, there were a couple of messages, but yeah, that's one of them, is that, you know, as a reader of a newspaper or even somebody who follows events in Washington and attends, you know, think tank events around town, it seems that we don't really know what the source of the op-eds are or what the source of the events are.
Was it something that someone spontaneously decided to write about and felt passionately about, or is it simply that a lobbyist contacted them and asked him or her to put their name on an op-ed?
And, you know, are these think tanks allowing themselves to be used by lobbying firms?
I mean, I don't think every event in Washington that takes place clearly is sponsored in this fashion by a lobbying group.
Obviously, that's not the case, but it seems pretty clear, based on what the firm told me, that they are able to set up those events, and so it's hard to know, really, what's going on and what, you know, what's for real and what's just pure PR BS.
The other lesson is just that the law that regulates lobbyists is obviously insufficient, and it's, you know, it dates to 1938 when the Nazi regime hired a lobbyist, a PR man named Ivy Lee.
They used to cut out for him to do it so it wouldn't look like he was working for the Nazis.
Yeah, he was Rockefeller's PR guy, Ivy Lee.
I didn't realize that, but that wouldn't make sense.
I mean, he was the prominent PR guy of his day.
So they put into effect the Foreign Agents Registration Act back in 1938, and it's just obviously not sufficient.
I mean, these firms boasted about how little they would have to disclose, how, you know, I didn't have, because I said, you know, discretion is the very lifeblood of our operation.
We don't want any questions.
We don't want any exposure, and they said, don't worry about it.
We have to expose very, very little.
There aren't going to be any questions for you, and if there are questions, we'll handle them and shield you from any serious inquiry.
And that's for a company that is signed up as representing a foreign power.
Exactly, and a lot of clients, a lot of lobby firms apparently do not sign up at all.
Now, these firms didn't say they wouldn't sign up.
I mean, they did say that they would have to register with the Justice Department, but they said that there would be such little required of them from the disclosure standpoint that I needn't worry about any unwanted publicity.
So the whole, you know, they repeatedly talked about how they could operate under the radar screen, and we could get our agenda met without worrying about getting any heat from journalists or the public, because nobody would know.
Yeah, that's really interesting, because, you know, a lot of people talk about that APAC should have to register as representing a foreign power, but you're saying that probably wouldn't really make much difference.
Well, I mean, you wouldn't, I'm all in favor of transparency, and so any sort of disclosure is better than nothing at all.
But, you know, disclosure alone doesn't solve the problem.
I mean, it's also a question of the rules regulating lobbyists being tightened so that they can't do the sorts of things that they openly boasted to me that they would be able to accomplish.
This is Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Ken Silverstein.
He's the Washington editor of Harper's Magazine.
He's telling me the story of going undercover as an investigative journalist to find out about what it takes to hire a lobbying firm to represent your Stalinist tyranny back home.
Now, tell me this.
How long were you undercover as this pretend character representing Turk Business doing business with Turkmenistan?
Well, basically, I approached the firms in mid-, I mean, I sort of started creating the cover story in January.
You know, I had business cards made up, and I bought a London cellphone so I could make and receive phone calls from London while I was in Washington, D.C., so that the number that popped up would be a London phone number.
We, with the help of someone at Harper's, created a website, which was really just a homepage.
So we did a little bit of preparation and constructed the cover story beginning in January.
I started calling these firms in mid-February, right after the new president of Turkmenistan was elected in this complete sham election in which he won 90% of the vote, ran against five members of the ruling party since all opposition to the government is considered treason under the Turkmen constitution.
There are no opposition parties.
So after that vote, I contacted the firms.
This was in mid-February and said, well, gee, there's a newly elected government in Turkmenistan, and that's who we want you to help out.
So then I went in for the meetings in late February, but then for months afterwards I had additional phone calls.
You know, I had email exchanges.
The firms both were very eager to get the contract, and Cassidy sent me a 12-page proposal afterwards, you know, to further press their case, and APCO was pestering me with emails, and one of their officials was coming to London and said, could I meet with you and express a keen interest in trying to further sell me on his firm.
And so, frankly, I kept this pretense up until, I guess, mid-June, and that was when the Washington Post, we sent an advance copy to the Washington Post, and the Washington Post called the firms, and that's when they found out that basically, I guess to put it bluntly, they'd been punk.
We did not offer them an opportunity to comment, and I tell you why.
I mean, two, several reasons here.
One, it just seemed completely bogus.
I mean, we set out to answer a series of questions.
You know, how low would these firms think?
What would they do on behalf of a dictatorship?
How would they cover their tracks?
This sort of thing.
We had the answers to the questions we wanted.
You know, I guess the only real question I had left to them was, you know, how do you look yourself in the mirror?
But it really didn't seem an appropriate question to ask them prior to publication.
The other reason, and really the main reason, was that they are professional liars and professional spinners, and I didn't want to give them, given our publication, you know, the time between when a piece goes to the printer and when it actually is on the newsstand, I didn't want to give them six weeks to start lying and spinning their way out of the story, which had happened to me in the past with a lobbying firm.
I mean, their whole business is misrepresentation and obfuscation.
And, you know, I was just not going to give them six weeks to lie their way out of the story and use their friends at the big newspapers or the big media outlets to shoot down the story before it came out.
And I'm glad I didn't give them the opportunity.
They've complained about it since, and I've gotten some heat about it since from people like Howard Kirsch at the Washington Post, whose paper, incidentally, some eight or nine years ago when I did a story for Mother Jones about a lobbying firm, completely did the bidding of the lobbying firm in sort of misrepresenting my story.
So I just wasn't going to give them another opportunity to do it.
I thought that six weeks' lead time was just too much, and I, you know what, I think that they exposed exactly who they are and what they are, and I gave them the opportunity to not represent the government of Turkmenistan, and they shouldn't have done it, and if they had enough, I wouldn't have had a story and they'd have nothing to answer for now.
Right.
Well, I have to say, I really wish I had one of those buttons like radio hosts have, where they push the button and the applause breaks out, you know, the laugh track applause meter thing, because I think that's just great, going undercover for six months and lying to these liars.
That's what they deserve.
And secondly, I want to say I have no problem with you not giving them a chance to respond in the article.
They're a lobbying firm.
They're big boys, and they can take care of themselves, and obviously, as we've seen, they can launch their own spin, and they can launch their own spin from the pages of the Washington Post through the mouth of Howard Kurtz.
And, you know, I have a problem with him anyway, because he's one of the guys who said that Ron Paul ought to be excluded from the debates.
So I already have a chip on my shoulder about Howard Kurtz, and then I read what he wrote about your article here, where he says, you know, this is why the American people don't have faith in American journalists anymore.
It's because people like Ken Silverstein will go undercover to get a story.
Pardon me, Mr. Kurtz, but actually, the reason we don't trust American journalism anymore is because of, well, what passes for journalism at the Washington Post most days, for example.
Well, I did a story yesterday on Harper's website.
It's actually the first story up under my blog where I discuss the sort of ridiculous charge by Kurtz that somehow undercover journalism has tarnished the reputation of the press.
And what I said was that, you know, the press abandoned undercover reporting 20 years ago, and during those 20 years, the reputation of the press has tanked.
So it's very hard to see how there might be a possible connection between the press's use of undercover reporting and the rotten reputation that the public holds us in.
And I then said that, you know, I would look elsewhere, Mr. Kurtz.
There are other things that I think you might want to look at.
For example, you know, maybe the public is cynical about the press because the Beltway press corps in particular is so unseemly, unseemingly close to the political establishment that they're supposed to be covering, that the Beltway reporters are often social equals and friends of people who really, they need to be scrutinizing and not having cocktails with.
And I pointed to and linked to, in fact, the revolting YouTube of M.C.
Rove, you know, doing his, Karl Rove doing his rap routine at the White House Correspondents' Center and all the journalists sitting there and cheering for him.
I mean, that, to me, I have to believe that that probably has a whole lot more to do with why the public doesn't trust journalists than anything I did in duping a bunch of rotten lobbyists who wanted to, you know, go to bed for Stalinist government.
Well, and you point out that Howard Kurtz is married to a Republican strategist.
He doesn't like to talk about that much in his column, but it is a relevant fact, I think.
Well, and I think we all know, don't we?
Hopefully most people know that Andrea Mitchell is married to Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve System.
I mean, it's one big incestuous thing.
This is really, I think, the lesson of this whole article, this whole conversation, is you have this combination of private and public interest in such a way that, you know, the average guy out here in Austin, Texas, you know, looking from here, it's impossible to even tell the difference.
Where does Howard Kurtz end and the GOP begin?
I don't know.
The Conrad Black was just convicted, by the way.
Yeah, I saw that.
I noted that that was pretty interesting.
No, I mean, you know, the reporters are literally in bed with the people they're supposed to be scrutinizing.
It really doesn't heighten confidence in their aggressiveness and their willingness to go after power brokers in this town.
I mean, when you go to bed with them at night, it really becomes, I think, rather difficult to seriously scrutinize what they're doing during daytime hours.
Yeah, and now, you know, another example of this was really right after September 11th.
We haven't really heard too much about this, I don't think, since 2002, but remember how the War on Terror is going to go to 60 countries, including the Philippines and former Soviet Georgia, and that one just kind of, huh, wait, what?
They say they're putting American soldiers in former Soviet Georgia, what, Al-Qaeda's in former Soviet, and then that just kind of went away again.
But they used the War on Terror as the excuse to get America involved, and I think that, well, even including myself, I have a vague idea of somewhere around the Caspian and the Black Sea or something somewhere is where former Soviet Georgia is.
I bet most Americans don't even know where former Soviet Georgia is, couldn't find it on a map for you if it didn't have the name on it, maybe even if it did, and yet this is a very important part of America's foreign policy right now.
This is Georgia, FS, Georgia, or whatever you want to call it, it's really one of these states that's right on the bridge and is being fought over back and forth by America and Russia, right?
Yeah, it is, and the current government is much more pro-Western than the prior government, and hence gets a free ride from the administration and pretty much a free ride from the press as well.
I mean, the old regime was certainly not a wonderful government.
It was headed by Edward Shevardnadze, the former Soviet official, but the new government has got its own problems.
This is what we've seen time and time again in Eastern Europe, like the so-called Orange Revolution in the Ukraine and the Rose Revolution in Georgia and on and on and on.
In a lot of cases, it's just shifting one set of crooks for the prior set of crooks, and it's not going to make a huge difference in the lives of the people, because people who've come to power have been pro-Western or espoused pro-Western viewpoints and are closer to the United States.
Then they get much friendlier treatment in the press, and that's certainly been the case in Georgia.
One of the things I noted in the story, this is another story on my blog, Washington and Babylon, which people can find at harpers.org, is that Georgia, this surprised me, it's soon to have the third largest number of foreign troops in Iraq after the UK and the United States, which really shocked me.
They have 850 currently, but they recently said that they would more than double that to about 2,000.
Meanwhile, South Korea, which has about 2,000, has announced that it's going to pull out its soldiers.
Georgia is soon to have the third largest force in Iraq.
I think that's something that really is very helpful to them in terms of their reputation with the U.S. government, with the Bush administration.
It's very helpful to them in maintaining a friendly relationship.
It's also true that they're very pro-NATO and want to join NATO, and that also has helped Georgia a lot with the Bush administration.
But meanwhile, it's a government that has a whole lot of problems.
One of the things I pointed out in my story was that there's currently a trial going on there.
There are 13 defendants, including a woman named Maya Topuria, who is a 41-year-old mother of three, and they're all accused of attempting to overthrow the government.
The trial that's underway is something out of the Soviet era.
The judge has closed the courtroom to the public, to the media, to foreign observers.
The defendants, they're all members of the political opposition.
Incidentally, they may not be angels, but as far as I can tell, there's nothing really awful in their background.
They are opponents of the government, but they don't have blood on their hands, as far as I can tell.
You know what, though?
Actually, let me step back for a second, because even if they did, they're entitled to a fair trial.
I mean, if they can't get a fair trial, no matter what their crimes, then no one is guaranteed a fair trial.
So the issue really is that these people should be getting a trial that is fair by international standards, and they're not.
So in any case, I'm sorry, I digressed a little bit there, but I wanted to make that point.
The judge has closed the courtroom.
Nobody's allowed in, in terms of observers or media.
The defendants are being held in cages, and the evidence is just extraordinarily bogus and weak.
I mean, it really looks like a kangaroo court.
Initially, the government charged that the defendants were plotting a coup to overthrow the government on May 24, 2006.
There was supposed to be a meeting that day.
Well, one of the defendants subsequently pulled out his passport to show that he was out of the country on that day.
It was impossible that he was there, at which point the government changed the date of the meeting to May 4.
At that point, another defendant says he was at a heart clinic, a cardiac clinic, on that day.
And the government says, oh, well, you snuck out and attended the coup meeting.
Meanwhile, you've got four doctors at the clinic who've said it would have been impossible for anyone to sneak out on notice from the clinic, so that this also seems utterly preposterous.
The other thing that's really interesting is that the government's offered, as evidence, a handwritten statement by a man who implicated the defendants.
He claimed that he overheard tale of the plot, and he provided a statement to the government on September, or to prosecutors, in September of 2006.
Recently, he was cross-examined by a defense attorney in court, and he couldn't even define many of the words that he allegedly wrote out in his own handwriting in his original statement.
He was asked to define the word dispute, which was in his original statement, and he said that that meant a TV debate.
He said that the word imitation, another word in his statement, he defined as an attempt.
And he said, when asked to define the word spontaneous, which he'd allegedly written out in his own handwriting, he said he didn't know what it meant, but he did know at the time that he wrote the statement.
But apparently, about some months later, he'd forgotten the meaning of spontaneity.
So I talked to a woman who's representing Maia Tuporia, Melinda Serafa, she's an American lawyer, and she said to me, and if I can just quote from her statement to me, she said, Every day I'm in court, I wish the media were there because the situation is so preposterous.
She said that Georgia is moving to what she called a super executive style of government, there's no meaningful checks and balances.
And she says that the Bush administration, other than documenting human rights abuses in the annual State Department report, has, and I'm here again quoting, has done, she found, quote, No other affirmative efforts by the Bush administration to express concerns about identifiable instances of human rights violations.
So I just find it a really interesting situation there.
You know, we have a government that really has some very serious problems, but it's just not getting any scrutiny from the administration.
And because it gets no scrutiny from the administration, the press doesn't take a look either.
You know, I wrote an article, God, it must have been 15 years ago, called Follow the Leader, about the way the media follows public or foreign affairs.
And really, you know, what happens is, and I'm sure you and some of your listeners are no doubt familiar with this, but, you know, if the President, whether it's a Democrat or Republican, doesn't matter, but if the President of the United States makes a big foreign policy issue out of a country overseas and starts criticizing that country, let's say Venezuela now or Zimbabwe, or, you know, take your pick, Iran, then the press will really, really carefully scrutinize that country and really, really look things over and look at the charges.
And I think, you know, I'm not saying that those countries have no human rights problems, because they certainly do.
In Zimbabwe, the situation there, as far as I can tell, is absolutely awful.
In Iran, obviously, there's very serious human rights violations there.
And Venezuela, I think, not as serious as those places.
But still, I mean, you know, I find the coverage of the Chavez government in Venezuela a little troubling, because no one cared about human rights in Venezuela in the American media or the American government until a leftist populist took power.
Prior to that, there were terrible abuses and nobody cared at all about it.
But I'm not trying to say that, you know, there aren't problems in those countries.
But it's just that why do we look at Zimbabwe but not Georgia?
Why do we look at Venezuela but not Equatorial Guinea?
Why do we look at Iran but not Angola?
Well, it's because the President of the United States has complained about Iran and Venezuela and Zimbabwe, but hasn't complained about the others.
So if Bush would start saying, hey, you know, Equatorial Guinea, that's a horrible place, I guarantee you we would see stories in the press about what's going on in Equatorial Guinea.
But since Equatorial Guinea has become the third largest oil producer in Sub-Saharan Africa, and U.S. oil companies have at least $5 billion invested there, the President won't say anything and hence the press, for the most part, doesn't take a look.
Right.
And on the ones that the President names that they do take a look at, they're almost entirely, you know, as a mass, the American media willing to repeat any lie uncritically.
You know, what, Americans are getting blown up in Iraq and the government says Iran must be behind it all?
Okay.
And the fact that we've all known for four years that the insurgency is a Sunni insurgency and that actually Iran is backing the same factions that we're backing, the Badr Corps and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution?
Oh, well, just forget all that.
No, no, Iran's behind the insurgency.
Fine.
I mean, that's their critical look when they're pointed in a direction by the administration.
Yeah, I do think that, you know, it's very easy for the administration to scapegoat Iran for all of the problems in Iraq and to explain away their own feelings by blaming it all on a foreign power.
Let me ask you before we get too far into Iraq and Iran here.
On Georgia, you mentioned that they're willing to send now up to 2,000 troops there.
That can't really make a difference, I mean, in terms of the coalition of the willing on the ground there and what have you.
So what is the real interest that America has with Georgia?
I mean, it makes perfect sense that they would want to join NATO, but why would we want them to join NATO?
What is America's interest in that land?
Well, I mean, I think in part, first off, I would say that, well, of course it's not going to change the military situation on the ground.
It's useful for the administration to have foreign troops there, any foreign troops that reduces the need for American troops, even if it's a few thousand from Georgia.
And it also allows the administration to claim that there's a coalition of the willing and that we're not in it alone.
But beyond that, I think clearly that the administration and Russia are in something like a new Cold War and there's a lot of conflict between the two countries.
And that Georgia has become closely allied with the United States in that conflict between the U.S. and Russia.
And Georgia has sided with the United States and the Bush administration on a number of issues.
And Georgia's looking to the west, it's not looking to the east.
And so that is important to the United States as well.
I mean, I think you cannot look at the U.S. relationship with Georgia without examining Georgia's position vis-a-vis Russia.
And isn't there a pipeline going through there?
You know what?
You're going to have to refresh my memory there.
I leave track of all the Caspian Basin pipelines that have been proposed and built.
And it's hard to remember which ones were proposed and which ones were actually built.
But I know that it's a big energy region.
And as I recall, there is that pipeline.
I think I can't remember where it originates, but I think it goes through Georgia to Turkey.
Is that the one?
I think so, yeah.
I'm trying to remember the name of it.
The Baku-Ceyenne?
The Baku-Ceyenne Pipeline, I think.
What was the name of it?
Is it Baku-Ceyenne?
It starts in Azerbaijan.
You know what?
There are so many of them, it is really hard to keep track.
But I'm sure you're right.
There is a pipeline running through the region.
And it's a big, you know, that's a region with intense energy resources, extensive energy resources.
And certainly, I suspect that the administration, in planning all policy towards that part of the world, is certainly looking at the issue of energy.
And again, that goes back to that combination of the private interests with the government interests.
I mean, I have no problem with oil companies building pipelines wherever they want, but I don't see why the American taxpayers should have to pay for the costs of their security.
Right.
Anyway, so you also point out in your blog entry that there's this DC lobbyist, Randy Schuenemann.
And I know I've heard that name before.
He's involved in this.
Who's this guy again?
And what's his role in America's relationship with Georgia?
Well, I mean, he's been a lobbyist for Georgia, and he is, I believe he's still registered.
I checked that with the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and it appears that he's still registered.
He registered, I think, a couple of years ago.
He is a lobbyist here in town.
He was one of the leading architects and champions of the invasion of Iraq.
He was a former advisor to Rumsfeld, and he helped draft the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, which led to aid to some of the Iraqi exile groups, including Chalabi's organization.
And a week after 9-11, he and a number of other conservatives sent a letter to President Bush calling for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
Oh, so he was in on that original PNAC letter, huh?
Exactly.
And then later, in 2002, he became the founding president of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.
After the invasion, he started signing up clients, mostly former Soviet bloc states, to help them win business in Iraq and to help them with NATO-related issues for countries that wanted to join NATO.
So he profited rather nicely off the war.
Now, that group that you say that he founded in the run-up to war, was that the same group that was founded with the...
I'm trying to remember the guy's name now.
I'm sorry, it makes a bad question when I can't remember his name.
The guy from Lockheed?
Bruce Jackson.
Bruce Jackson.
Yeah, I'm 95% sure that Jackson was in on the founding of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.
When you bring up NATO there, in Richard Cummings' article for Playboy, he talks about Jackson had set up a committee to try to come up with excuses to expand NATO.
Really, it was nothing but a welfare program for Lockheed, but they needed to come up with excuses to bring all the former Warsaw Pact states in.
That was in the 1990s, and that they followed that exact same model in the run-up to the war in Iraq.
Right, that's right.
Very interesting, and so this guy Randy Schuenemann was part of that same group, and now he's a lobbyist for former Soviet Georgia.
Exactly.
Very interesting stuff.
And also you point out that Human Rights Watch has criticized not just the bogus nature of the so-called criminal justice system in that country, and its 99.999% conviction rate, which is even better than down here in Texas, but also routine use of torture, prison overcrowding in serious ways.
Not LA prison overcrowding, but Georgia prison overcrowding.
Pretty serious stuff.
Yeah, I mean, Human Rights Watch, if you go to their website, HRW.org, you can find a variety of reports criticizing the government, and we're criticizing the situation there, primarily issues involving the legal system, the criminal justice system, treatment of prisoners, as you mentioned, use of torture.
Yeah, I mean, this is a government where there are a lot of problems, and the new government has pledged to make things better.
They don't seem to be making much progress.
Well, I guess real quick in the last few minutes here, can I ask you about Michael Ledeen and the Congo?
I saw the blog entry here, but I'm afraid I only got to just kind of scan it.
What's going on with that?
Well, there's an interesting situation in the Congo where the son of the president, a longtime crook, the son of the president is 24 years old, and he was given the job of heading up the state oil company's marketing arm.
And a group called Global Witness, which, again, you can find easily using a Google search, they obtained his credit card bills racked up by this 24-year-old kid who has this important post at the state oil company.
And they posted his credit card receipts online, and they showed that he was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars at hotels in Paris, at the Louis Vuitton shop in Paris, the Bristol Hotel in Dubai, where he shopped at the local Rodeo Drive store.
And then they also uncovered evidence that there's money flowing into this, that the credit card bills are being paid by an offshore account, which appears to be receiving Congo state oil revenues.
So they posted all this information online, and I just simply noted in discussing the situation that the Congo, to give you an idea of how bad things are there, it's an oil-rich country which even the Bush administration, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund haven't had a lot to do with and have been very critical of, which gives you an idea of just how rotten the situation is.
So I simply noted, but Congo does seem to have one powerful friend in Washington, and that's Michael Ledeen, another one of the architects of the war, who's now the Freedom Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
And he has been an advisor to the president of Congo as a representative.
He's been lobbying for Congo as an associate at a law firm called Trout to Cherus.
And that firm has been paid $1.5 million by the Congolese government through 2006.
So simply noted that it was somewhat ironic that the Freedom Scholar of the American Enterprise Institute is going to bat for a really, really crooked, nasty African regime that appears to be stealing vast oil revenues from its own people.
Well, yeah, it's funny.
You take the dark heart of Babylon, Washington, and the neocons are always just a little bit worse than everybody else, aren't they?
It's a pretty nasty situation.
All right, everybody.
Ken Silverstein, aka Kenneth Case, undercover investigative journalist.
He's the Washington editor of Harper's magazine.
His blog at harpers.org is called Washington Babylon.
Thanks a lot for your time today, Ken.
Appreciate it.
Thank you.