06/05/07 – Larisa Alexandrovna – The Scott Horton Show

All right, my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Radio Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, podcasting all these great interviews at AntiWar.com.
And our guest today is Larissa Alexandrovna.
She's the Managing Investigative News Editor of RawStory.com.
Welcome to the show, Larissa.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
Good to talk to you again.
Wow, so you have this incredible report about America's secret war in Iran up on RawStory.com.
We're also running it in the top headlines at AntiWar.com today.
The headline, CIA running black propaganda operation against Iran, Syria, and Lebanon, officials say.
So tell me, what does this have to do with the finding that Brian Ross reported at ABC News a couple of weeks ago authorizing the CIA to intervene in Iran?
Well, a part of the Ross report was that it got, well, at least according to my own sources, it got some basic things wrong in that there was no single recent presidential finding.
A presidential finding is like a directive, and it's official, and Congress has oversight.
And it applies to covert activities that the CIA engages in.
So the Ross report basically indicated that there was this new presidential finding empowering the CIA to pursue a non-lethal covert operation inside Iran and against Iran.
And part of my article clarifies, at least through my own investigation, some of the issues raised by Ross's article.
One of those issues is that there was no single recent finding.
Rather, there was at least two that my sources are aware of over the last couple of years that empowered the CIA to conduct really kind of a fairly open covert propaganda war, if you will, because it's kind of like the open secret that no one talks about.
It's not so aggressive.
So in terms of covert, it's not as covert as one would think, and they're mainly dealing with mainstream groups, you know, the quote-unquote pro-Iranian democracy groups.
So that's one issue.
The second issue is that it's not as aggressive as the Ross report suggests, and that it's not limited to Iran, rather it's targeting Syria and Lebanon and organizations such as Hezbollah.
And, essentially, it is strictly almost a black propaganda, meaning that it's putting out information that appears to be from other sources that reflects negatively on these various countries and organizations.
Beyond that, I don't have the specifics, so that's one element of the story.
The other issue is that the real covert ops, the hardcore, really aggressive, Iran-Contra kind of activities, are actually running out of the Defense Department, and that is the thing that everyone's ignoring, and that is the thing that has no finding and has no congressional oversight.
So that's the basic gist of the article.
Okay.
Well, let's put off the military end of this for a minute here and stick with the CIA.It sounds like a black propaganda operation, isn't that the kind of thing we'd be expecting them to do every day of the week?
When I hear about a CIA finding, I imagine, you know, guys in trench coats and shadows and cloaks and daggers and assassinations, this sounds pretty tame, as far as the CIA goes.
Exactly.
Actually, the CIA has been largely stripped of a lot of its power in this administration.
So this is all they got left, basically.
Well, yeah, I mean, you know, it's no secret that the neo-conservatives do not like the agency and, you know, with good reason, obviously, I mean, you know, I think wherever there's secrecy, there's concern.
But at the same time, I think that the people from the Iran-Contra days who are now in our government, such as Elliott Abrams and those folks, they learned a valuable lesson about how to run, how to bypass Congress and run their own kind of shop.
What they did was they basically buried everything in the Defense Department, which has, which can claim military, standard military operations, and does not have to report these various things to Congress, because there's a loophole in the law regarding covert activities that kind of, there's a gray area that isn't addressed, and they're exploiting that gray area.
And now, as you said before, if the president signs a finding ordering the CIA to do this kind of stuff, that has to be turned right over to the Senate Intelligence Committee and so forth.
And the House Intelligence Committee, correct.
But if they order the Defense Department to undergo one of these things, there's nothing in the law that mandates that they inform the Intelligence Committees, the Armed Services Committees, or anybody else.
Right.
So technically, it's not illegal, but, you know, technically, non-technically it is illegal because it's a loophole that basically violates the standard operational procedures of how covert information or covert activities are conducted.
And I'm not talking about the standard advanced teams that the military uses or reconnaissance, the things of that nature, because that is standard military ops.
I'm talking about what is traditionally seen as CIA territory, which would require oversight, such as the use of proxy groups, terrorist groups, to, you know, using them as proxies for our own purposes.
That kind of activity is not, is generally CIA type of activity, not DOD.
And so to avoid oversight, it's been put into DOD.
So the CIA really is running, I mean, for all intents and purposes, a fairly, as you know, same operation that isn't new and isn't this aggressive thing.
There is one element to it, though, where there's some confusion, and that has to do with the economic pressure or economic warfare element that is part of this, these findings.
Obviously there's been pressure to disengage Western countries and interests from Iran in order to stifle their economy.
And so part of that could and likely does fall under CIA in terms of, I guess, under the propaganda element or the PSI-OPS element, whatnot.
How successful is that likely to be?
It seems like...
Very successful.
I mean, very successful in terms of, you know, our efforts, but is it going to stifle Iran's economy?
No, because Iran's fairly self-sufficient.
And is it even going to stifle Western investment in their economy?
I remember I talked with Greg Palast a few weeks back and he said, British Petroleum, I think it was, just finished building a massive multi-billion dollar refinery in Iran.
They're not going anywhere and their subsidiary company, the Royal Air Force, is not going to go anywhere near it.
Right.
But on the flip side, you've got Halliburton who's exited, you know, where you've got other interests that need financing and you've got European banks or international banks not providing the financing or the line of credit, things like that.
So that's still fairly tame, but there's a darker element to the economic stuff that nobody knows who's doing.
And my sort of sense of this is, because no one can tell me, because that would be classified, my sense of just from talking to people is that it's not the agency that's doing it, is that there is actually a physical covert, kind of more tangible, you know, some violent activities going on, where supply convoys are being intercepted and there's subterfuge going on in terms of, you know, delivery of machines or supplies needed for a project or so if there's a company that isn't pulling out, they're kind of being pushed out through these various more aggressive methods.
And my understanding is that, at least just my take on it, is that this isn't part of the economic, you know, warfare, I'm not even sure what to call this type of thing, that's part of the CIA finding, that it seems to fall outside of that, excuse me, and, you know, who's running it, we don't know, but, you know, my gut tells me that, you know, it's likely the defense is likely running that off.
So it's complicated, but it's, for some reason, the ABC article sparked a huge wave of concern when the real concern should be about the DOD operations that are going on.
And in fact, you know, Gareth Porter, who's a great reporter, came on this show and said that his sense was that the leak to Brian Ross probably came from Dick Cheney's office in order to thwart Rice's attempted negotiations.
Actually, that's interesting that you say that, because one of my sources, although not saying, you know, not mentioning the Rice element, said that they believed that it was a planted story out of the OVP because of how misleading it is.
I mean, the fact is that if you're already going to get information about covert activity, the basics of that information, that is to say, the key things that you're given that aren't classified, but, or are in the gray area, but are the key pieces of your story are, you know, should be right.
So the fact that there's this new finding, and that it's this aggressive war, and all this stuff, you know, these basic parts of the story that are wrong, and that's really essentially the whole story, would suggest that either someone doesn't know what they're talking about, which I doubt, given the stature of the reporter, or that the reporter was used by, you know, as this administration does often, to launder their talking points and their policy things by, you know, making the public argument through proxies.
It's their own version of propaganda warfare, you know?
Right, well, and as you said, though, this is the one that made all the news, even though for those of us with eyes and ears, Seymour Hersh reported that the, what, more than two years ago in his article, The Coming Wars, that the DoD had taken over, had arrested control of covert operations away from the CIA, and was in Iran, on the ground, killing people.
Well, I mean, I don't know if, he didn't say on the ground, killing people, I think I'd remember that.
Well, at least on the ground, and I remember him saying that there were regular army, not just special forces, but regular army troops on the ground in Iran, too.
I know there are special forces, that I know.
But there are several different groups, just like before the Iraq War, there were like, the real groups, you know, the official covert groups, the joint task forces and all of that, and then the black, black op-op, off-book kind of groups that nobody knew who the hell they were working for, that literally would bump into our official covert groups.
And these guys would be like, who are you, why are you here, you know?
I've simply started calling them the ghost teams.
And if you remember, I did an article a while back, at least one of these teams, it was a four-man team that was running around Iraq, claiming to be with, you know, special forces and such, and claiming to be with a particular task force, even though they weren't, and they were clearly American, and nobody knew who they were working for.
Well, and didn't it turn out that they were working for the policy department at the DOD?
Well, the allegation is, and there's no way to prove this, but the allegation was, the OSP was running their own little, you know, kind of little military ops to bypass all standard channels of, you know, covert ops, even covert ops have their own standard ways of being handled and such, so, I mean, this bypassed everything and kind of was its own operation.
So, yeah, it's really bizarre, and I don't know if they're on the ground killing people, but there are definitely groups on the ground, there are the official covert ops task forces doing things on the ground, that's true, and then there are, there's this ghost team, I don't know if it's the same team that was running around before, as we went into Iraq, but there's also that team, and that secondary team is the team that's running around with training and also training groups like the MEK and others to act as intelligence agents, despite the fact that these groups are, you know, continuing to commit acts of terrorism.
Well, I want to ask you all about those groups, but first I want to ask you what all that background noise is, and is there anything you can do about it?
Well, if you want to call me back, I can try a different phone.
Oh, okay, yeah, it sounds like you're rolling marbles in the background or something, I guess it's not too bad.
Uh, yeah, well, actually you caught me, I'm rolling marbles, and I apologize, it's my phone.
Oh, well, no, don't worry about it, it's really not that bad.
I have another phone I can try, but...
It's not too bad.
Anyway, so let's go on with these groups, the MEK, that's the Mujahideen, Al-Khalq, who are they, and what's their history, and you say they work for the DOD now?
No, I mean, they don't officially work for the DOD, you know, that's a statement that would require hardcore documentation, but they're being run as in used by DOD assets, so that's the best way I can explain it.
They're basically a terrorist organization, they're a separatist group that started off as kind of a communist, kind of pro-communist group, and has come full circle and ended up being an extreme right wing.
Some have described them as a cult, there's a bizarre kind of cult element to them.
In any case, in Saddam's Iraq, he had given them free entry into his country, and they acted as his domestic police, in a lot of instances, and then they continued doing their terrorist activities.
When we came into Iraq, we basically took away all of their big weapons and such, but we left them with the training camp that Saddam had given them, and we left them with all of their munitions and smaller arms, and basically, there are allegations that we have trained some of them to go into Iran and conduct reconnaissance and surveillance, and there are some allegations also saying that we've used them to conduct acts of violence and bombings and such.
And there have been reports of bombings and so forth in Iran.
Is there no hard evidence of who's behind them?
Well, I mean, hard evidence would require an independent investigation, and there's plenty of people on both sides saying yes and no.
On one hand, you've got some European folks, sources both on and off the record, and the Iranian government and others saying yes, it is them, the few people that we've arrested are in fact MEK and others, actually there's other smaller groups.
And then you've got the U.S. saying no, we're not doing this, and we would never do this.
You've got Britain saying we would never support anything like this.
So without a real investigation, it's hard to say, but the evidence does suggest, at least to me and to the people I've spoken with, that it is MEK who at the very least was responsible for the assassination of 22 various kind of lower-level government officials in Iran up until last March, and then it sort of all went radio silence.
And there hasn't been a lot of activity attributed to them in the region.
It seems to have moved to other groups and such.
The other problem with MEK, though, is that aside from being a terrorist group and on the State Department's terrorist list, they have a lobby in D.C.
I know this because they've contacted me in the past to say that I was very wrong about their organization.
Well, Scott Ritter says in his book, Target Iran, that their lobby here in America is basically a front for Israeli intelligence.
I don't know about that.
I'm more likely to—well, he might know better than I.
At least he makes the case that numerous times when they came forward with new information about Iran that they'd really gotten it from Israel, that the information was being washed through them.
I'd be careful to kind of separate what I'm hearing—and this is actually a follow-up piece I'm doing, so I'm going to try to not say too much—but my understanding is that the APEC lobby and groups like APEC, Jensa and all of those groups, have sort of taken their own path away from even the Likudniks in Israel.
And there seems to be a lot of tension because it's almost like there's different agendas here.
So I can, on one hand, understand that there seems to be Israeli intelligence coming in through—or what's claimed to be Israeli intelligence coming out of the MAKDC lobbying.
I don't think it's coming from Israeli intelligence proper.
I think it's likely coming from APEC.
And this is something we've seen kind of over and over, that the neocons are even more warlike than the right wing in Israel.
Last summer, they tried to get Israel to bomb Syria, and they said, go to hell.
Right.
So the APEC lobby and other lobbies like it—they may have started out representing Israeli interests, but just like Cheney doesn't represent Republican interests anymore, or Bush doesn't—anyone who's really a Republican can't possibly look at this administration and call them Republicans.
So you—by the same token, you've got these people who may have started off representing Israel, but they have since, over a period of time, sort of merged with interests in the United States, and there's a lot of friction over that.
Military industrial interests.
Yeah, I think that's a really great way of putting it.
And I think that the MEK intelligence laundry, essentially, is not coming from Israeli intelligence.
Rather, Israeli intelligence is very good about not leaking.
In fact, out of all the intelligence organizations, I would say, on the planet, they are probably the best, most well-organized, most efficient intelligence agency, the Mossad.
And my guess is this is coming from APEC, and not Israel proper, just like the neocons are doing their own thing that has nothing to do with the United States real—you know, the interests of the people in the United States, or even our government.
So, yeah, but anyway, they have a D.C. lobby, and despite being on the terrorist watch list—or the terrorist list at the State Department, they have a lobby, and they can call reporters like me and tell me that I'm wrong about them, you see?
I can only imagine, maybe Al-Qaeda will have a lobby next, you know?
I think they might already have one in the form of the Oval Office, seems to—the Indispensable Ally is what they call it.
Yeah, no, I think they're likely running out of the Saudi embassy, but I'm just joking.
Anyway.
Me too.
Okay, so what about Jundulla?
Am I saying that right?
What kind of terrorist group is this?
Yeah, this is—Sai Hurst reported about this—this is a Pakistani, kind of like an Al-Qaeda offshoot, but it's not just MEK and them, it's also PKK, which is, you know, a lot of Kurdish separatists, Baluchi separatists—basically, they're dissident groups, and normally, the use of these groups in any way, or the—whether using them as eyes and ears on the ground or whatever, all of that stuff generally falls to the agency, and under this administration that's been running out of the Defense Department, I might add, the civilian leadership of the Defense Department, who has no clue what they're dealing with.
And so, I think we're going to have a lot of blowback, that's for sure, but back to—you know, to tie this up back to the article—basically, none of that—these covert ops, the Defense Department—is running, even without the permission of the Defense Department.
I mean, these things are running out of, you know, a cabal's office, you know, a little group of people are running this, and the rest of the DOD doesn't even know about it.
Right, well, and that's what Seymour Hurst said in his last article, that Elliott Abrams had a little party of all the veterans of Iran-Contra, and they decided that— They did all the lessons learned, yeah.
Right, right, and the lessons learned, where you want to keep this thing isolated to the Vice President's office and maybe a couple of people on the National Security Council, and that's it.
Well, I would add to that— Run it all through the military, keep the CIA completely clear.
Exactly, I would add to that, at least the way my sources have explained it to me, is what they learned from—I don't know if—my sources said nothing about this lessons learned, but I wouldn't doubt it, given Elliott Abrams.
My under—you know, but yeah, these guys basically knew that if they used agency resources or officers, then there would have to be some congressional oversight.
And if they tried to bypass Congress, then it would result in massive, you know, investigations and this and that.
And they carried it under DOD in the so-called standard military operations, which they're not.
And I might add that the Congress has tried to look into these issues, but the DOD has said, look, these are, you know, standard military operations, and they're, you know, the president has to make these decisions quickly.
They can't wait for—he can't wait for congressional approval when you've got military—you know, our soldiers are on the ground, military on the ground.
So essentially, they're using that argument to keep, you know, Congress from asking questions of the military.
Now—oh, I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
No, so I—no, I mean, yeah, I think they likely did have a lessons learned party, and then they're running this very well this time around.
It is, in fact, being driven out of the OVP, guided by the NSC, and run out of the small cabal out of DOD.
Oh, and with, you know, a small laundry facility in State Department under Lizzie Cheney's office.
Oh, really?
Which has now been disbanded.
Well, what can you tell me about that?
A laundry running out of there, is that what you said?
Well, I mean, it's a democracy fund that she was handling, you know.
And this is the black ops money, in part?
Well, no, she had her own black ops money.
There's several—there's the $50 million or so that Congress approved that went for the CIA ops, and it was split evenly between a democracy fund and this propaganda kind of outfit.
And then there's money that's at State, and other money that I don't even know how—where we got it, how we got it.
It's not money that is appropriated and on the record, as it were.
But anyway, she had this little fund where she was, you know, helping to spread the message of democracy.
Lizzie Cheney has no experience in anything other than, you know, being the daughter of the vice president.
So she was heading up this thing, this running of this project, and basically, without any congressional oversight either, and nobody knows what went on over there, or what the money was used for, or if State was handling MEK, you know, as a go-between between DOD and whatnot.
I mean, we've got—you know, this has become so corrupt that we really don't know who's doing what, under whose authority, under whose supervision, and it's almost like a little family affair, you know?
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
I'm talking with Larissa Alexandrovna.
She's the Managing Investigative News Editor of RawStory.com, and we're talking about her new article for Raw Story, CIA Running Black Propaganda Operation Against Iran, Syria, Lebanon.
Officials say, now, let's talk about the Syria-Lebanon angle here.
Is this just the CIA propaganda move, or is the DOD involved in covert operations in these countries as well?
I'm sorry, in what country?
In Syria and Lebanon.
Oh, yeah, no, no question.
I mean, but not as—let's just say that—and because I'm doing this in another article, I have to be careful what I say here, but let's say that there are other intermediaries, there are other nations, or representatives of nations that are acting as intermediaries.
The Saudis.
If you could say that.
Prince Bandar.
Well, and we've seen the fruits of this in Lebanon already, I suppose.
Yes.
And in Syria, actually.
And in Syria.
Well, tell me Syria in a second.
I can't, because it's my next article.
Don't go there.
Okay.
Well, I'll tell them Lebanon, then.
America, according to Seymour Hersh, through Saudi Arabia, was supporting the Fatah al-Islam group, and using the puppet Senora government in Lebanon to do so.
And within just a few months, this group that we're funding in order to fight Hezbollah was fighting side by side with Hezbollah against the Lebanese government.
Right.
Talk about blowback.
Well, I wouldn't even call that blowback.
I would call that treason, because this is—that's not the only thing that's going on.
I mean, you have to—and again, I can't—you know, we're talking outside of the realm of this particular article that I just wrote, and getting into one that I'm about to write.
I'm trying to kind of, you know, stay— Okay, well, tell me what you can.
Yeah.
I mean, basically, what I can say is you have to kind of look at another really big issue, and that is the U.S. supplying the Gulf states with weapons.
The Patriot missile batteries and so forth.
Mm-hmm.
And you have—you know, I mean, that, I think, is a good question to ask.
Where are those weapons going?
Well, where are they going, if not just to the Gulf states?
That's a good question.
You'll have to read about it later.
Mm-hmm.
All right.
Well, and that brings up the question of hot war and whether we're going to have a full-scale bombing war.
There's some dichotomies floating around that I'm not certain if they're false ones or not.
But there are some who say that the Black Ops is an alternative to full-scale war, that Bush was told—I forget what's-his-name wrote this on Time magazine's blog—that the chiefs, the Joint Chiefs, had told Bush, you can't invade Iran, you know, do a bombing run from the air without causing major problems.
And so Bush had then decided on Plan B all this covert operation stuff.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
Hang on, hang on, hang on.
Oh, okay.
Go ahead.
And he says that Rice is kind of in a faction fight with Dick Cheney and she wants to negotiate the uranium enrichment away and he wants to bomb it and she's trying to stave it off, although that could easily be seen as just she's creating the path for him later.
Those are a couple of dichotomies that are floating around.
Help set us straight, Larissa.
Well, okay, I'll set you straight.
Set me straight.
Do that.
Okay.
There was no either or in terms of let's do the military strike and if not, let's do then a covert war.
We were already doing the covert war and when I say we, I should really be very specific in terms of who we are and that would be the OVP and the connections at the Defense Department.
Whether or not the president was fully made aware of this or was involved in this or made any decisions around this, you know, I don't know.
Nobody does and that's kind of scary, but then you have the official findings which empowers the CIA to do, you know, like black propaganda and stuff like that, that indicate that the president apparently thinks this is, you know, we're just starting this kind of effort.
So it would support the theory that the OVP is running largely on its own in terms of foreign policy.
There was always a plan for regime change that has nothing to do with the uranium, nothing in terms of the OVP.It was always regime change.
If they didn't, if they weren't enriching uranium, they would, there would be a whole other issue that would be, you know, sold to us as the reason.
So the plan for regime change was always there and the OVP side of things was going forward with that no matter what diplomatic efforts we were taking.
So in that context Cheney and Rice were butting heads, that's true.
Rice, on the other hand, is pursuing basically a resolution of a problem and that is uranium enrichment that has nothing to do with the regime change policy being pursued by the other side.
And we know that, that the uranium is simply an excuse here.
Right, and even if Rice, let's say, succeeds, it doesn't change the policy on the other side.
We're, you know, it's almost like they're working, Rice is trying to resolve an issue that the OVP is essentially exploiting for their own purposes and that is regime change.
In terms of is there going to be an actual, you know, all-out war, you know, there was supposed to be and it kept moving back for various reasons, you know, some of which had to do with journalists exposing some of the stuff that was going on.
So you know, things had to be changed, some of it had to do with other things going on like Iraq falling apart and things of that nature.
So where we are now is there is a sort of a feeling that what the OVP side of things might do is strengthen the covert wars much and conduct them in much the same way like they did with Nicaragua in the 80s where they're literally conducting a full-scale war that isn't declared and isn't acknowledged.
So instead of airstrikes, they would do, you know, more aggressive things but under, you know, not under our own flag and not under our own official resources.
That's the current climate as it were.
And what do you think about Steve Clemons' report that Cheney was basically shopping around, well, he corrected me, he was shopping around in very limited places at AEI basically, sending his lackeys to tell people apparently that if George Bush won't get his act together and bomb Iran that he's going to try to get Israel to start it by shooting some cruise missiles and get Iran to strike our assets in the Gulf and then Bush will have to fight the war?
Well, okay.
First of all, Clemons is very good, he has a lot of connections, he knows what he's talking about, and yes, it's true that the OVP is running its own shop separate from that of the presidency and separate from presidential directives so that essentially you could say that the OVP has, you know, there's been a coup and no one's told the president yet.
Yeah, that's probably a pretty good way to put it.
Right, right.
Exactly.
And so he really should be arrested because no matter what you think of George Bush's policies, the fact is that, you know, under the rule of law, he is the president and if Cheney wants to have his own little thing on the side, that's illegal.
But back to this particular point, I don't, I know that Cheney and the Saudis are working closely but we're, you know, that's no surprise to anyone I would think.
What my understanding is that Israel is not going along with the project and this goes back to what I said before about AIPAC and Israel's almost going a separate way where you've got American corporate political kind of interests becoming more dominant within the lobby than the original reason for its creation, but working counter to its own government and as is the, you know, the OVP counter to our own government.
Well, they say Netanyahu's next.
Netanyahu's next what?
To be prime minister again.
Netanyahu, in fact, is trying to stop a full-scale military op is what I'm told.
Really?
Yeah.
He's saying, okay, you have your covert stuff that you're doing and he knows what's going on over there, let's give that some time because he wants these guys out of office.
He does want regime change in Iran but he doesn't want these guys in charge of it.
So, you know, like I said, there's a lot of different, it's not as cut and dry as, okay, you know, Cheney's going to get Israel to do this and then we're going to do that.
It's not that easy because you're talking about, you know, there's differences now where AIPAC no longer speaks for Israel and Israel no longer, you know, is that fond of AIPAC.
So, you know, he can, Cheney can run around and say everything he wants to but it will be interesting to see how this plays out.
I'm more inclined to think that Saudi assets would perhaps be more helpful and probably more likely used for an operation such as the one you described and, for example, Israeli assets.
The Saudis have much more at stake here.
You know, Israel can wait this out, the Saudis can't because Iran, hmm?
What is it that the Saudis have at stake here?
Their economy.
Iranian domination of Iraqi and Iranian oil resources?
And the lack of their own supplies.
I mean, they have, on top of that, the Iranian market, you know, is partnering up with the biggest markets and, you know, you've got Russia, China, Venezuela, you know, the Saudi oil cartel is literally losing its power and with it, it's money.
And so there's, they're more worried about that element.
And certainly, you know- Well, now there were negotiations taking place too, right?
I remember, not too long ago, maybe six weeks ago or so, Saudis go into Iran to have meetings and talk peace.
Was that just for show on TV?
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know what anybody talked about.
I don't know.
It's possible they were negotiating a cut of the profits.
But the other Saudi concern is that, you know, a strong, theocratic Iran, you know, with a good economy and where the people have money, unlike Saudi Arabia, where the royals have all the money, will topple them, will inspire their own people to topple the royals.
So, you know, I think this is more pressing to Saudi Arabia right now than it is to Israel.
Israel is, what I'm being told, is very nervous.
Well, this whole clean break strategy has been a disaster for Israel.
I mean, it's pretty clear that the neocons were wrong.
But that's not how to get along in the neighborhood by bullying and dominating everybody.
Well, I don't, you know, I'm starting to wonder just who the neocons were representing whose interests in this policy.
It's not U.S. interests.
It's not.
I mean, you could say, sure, it was a really bad idea, but I mean, it would have to be so bad on so many levels that, you know, for it to be so bad, it can't just be a bad idea.
It's like it wasn't meant to serve U.S. interests.
It wasn't meant to serve Israeli interests.
It was meant to serve corporate interests, really.
I sometimes wonder whether Bush and Cheney are KGB.
No, they're not KGB.
Well, that was a joke.
But same principle.
What you're talking about is you're talking about people acting exactly contrary to their country's interests, and you've got to try to figure out some sort of reasonable explanation for it.
Not if you have people who believe their country's corporate interests are the same thing as their country's interests.
Yeah, well, that's a very good point.
Now, let me ask you one more thing.
I'm already over time here, Larissa, but I got an email this morning from a guy who says he watches the websites that track Navy assets and that the USS Eisenhower carrier strike group is back in Norfolk, Virginia, that there are only two now in the Persian Gulf area that apparently Admiral Fallon's decision to refuse to request a third one or something along those lines worked out.
Do you have any information about that, the Ike back in Virginia?
No, I don't actually.
I have been looking for a while on assignment at the story we were just discussing, so I haven't even looked there.
But it'd be interesting, I know that recently there was a lot of activity as we were trying to show off our muscles and strength and all of that, but I don't know how many carrier groups that entailed.
We again, meaning Vice President Cheney and the wimps in his office.
Yeah, people who never went to war or, right, exactly.
Or even ever grew a whisker on their face or been in a fistfight or anything.
Right, exactly.
The overprivileged people who are more than happy to send everyone else's children to die.
Yes.
The desk murderers.
What?
The desk murderers.
Oh, instead of the pencil pushers?
Yeah, well I think, where am I plagiarizing that from?
I think Chalmers Johnson in his new book, Nemesis, calls them the desk murderers, which is actually from the Holocaust where I think it was the Eichmann trial, I forget which, I think it was the Eichmann trial, where they determined that the further away you are from the torture, the more guilty you are, you son of a bitch, assuming you were in on the chain of command and signed a piece of paper or something, that you're just as guilty or even more guilty of the torture than the people who actually did it with their hands, as you said at your desk.
Yeah, but that also goes hand in hand with the further you are, the easier it is to do, because you don't have to witness firsthand the suffering or the losses or anything.
Right.
So when you have people who have never served in the military, who have never been covert other than conducting maybe criminal things, and they're outing CIA officers and they're planting stories about CIA programs that are in comparison to what the DoD is doing, might as well be called Bromper Room, when they're using the very people who attacked us on 9-11 to further their own interests, I mean, we've got a serious problem, and somehow Congress has just abdicated, I don't know where Congress is.
Well, they don't read The New Yorker, I guess.
Oh, I think they read The New Yorker, I just think they haven't read the Constitution.
Maybe they should try reading that for a change.
Yeah, that might be it.
All right, well, we're going to move on.
Thank you very much for your time today, Larissa.
Absolutely, no problem.
Really appreciate it, everybody.
Larissa Alexandrovna, she's the Managing Investigative News Editor at RawStory.com.
The article today, CIA running black propaganda operation against Iran, Syria, and Lebanon.
This is Antiwar Radio on Chaos Radio 95-9 in Austin, Texas, and we'll be right back.