For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
So the big news is that Karl Rove is putting out a book, or has put out a book, saying, yeah, we lied you into war, but it was an accident.
It was bad intelligence.
We never would have done a war if we didn't think that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.
And so rather than letting him get away with that extra lie piled on top of the previous pile of lies, I figured I would bring Larissa Alexandrovna, the managing editor of InvestigativeNews at RawStory.com on the show to help me with a little bit of revisionist history here.
Welcome back to the show, Larissa.
How have you been?
I've been good.
Thanks for having me.
Well, I really appreciate you joining me here.
You tell me, is Karl Rove right that they accidentally lied us into war?
No, he's a liar.
Karl Rove was the chairman of the White House Iraq Group.
The acronym is WIG.
Their sole purpose was to propel the war to the public.
All right.
Well, so what indications do you have?
I guess let's start in chronological order.
Who wanted regime change and when did they get started on pushing regime change in Iraq?
They wanted Iraq even before Bush got in the office.
And we know from Bush's treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill, that day one in office they were looking for a way to go after Iraq.
I mean, they already had the policy.
This was not something new.
They were trying to find ways, even on 9-11, the first thing was not to determine who actually attacked us, but how to tie this to Iraq.
We know that from Richard Clark.
We know that Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld were busy trying to implicate Iraq in this.
So they already were adamant about going to Iraq.
But we also know from the Downing Street memos, which were notes of a meeting that the Bush administration had with then-Tony Blair administration, that they were going to, quote, fix the facts around the policy.
So if you have a policy and you're determined to somehow use what happened to us in order to initiate that policy, and we further know that you're willing to fix information around that policy, that is to say find intelligence, cook it, whatever, that's not an accident.
I mean, it's impossible to call that an accident.
And so many ways that they messed up.
I mean, how many ways can you take the wrong intelligence over and over and over before it starts to look suspicious?
All right.
Well, so now let's get into some of this.
Because, you know, despite what...
Well, I'll tell you a story, actually, to set up the rest of this.
I know a guy who...
I hadn't known him in a long time, and I knew him again, and I had a talk with him.
And this guy was like...
It was like reading Glenn Reynolds' blog for four years straight or something.
It was like every single lie and every single bit of mis- and disinformation put out by the Bush government about what they were doing with Iraq, this guy had completely memorized and knew it as well as you know the truth, Larissa, and had this whole thing where, well, the weapons are in Syria, and just every little bit of it.
So it occurs to me that that's kind of strange in the age of the Internet and for years and years in a row now we've known the truth.
There's been tons of reporting about the Office of Special Plans, for example, and the neocon cabal inside the vice president's office in the Pentagon, etc., like that.
But there are still people who believe that George Bush was basically right, but the Syrians got the mustard gas now or something.
Well, I mean, there's people who believe that Iraq attacked us on 9-11.
I mean, you're never going to correct all the misconceptions, especially when Fox News and those kinds of outlets are working so hard to make sure that that misconception stays.
So let's go through in detail about what these different accusations were.
Let's start with what Bush was ending with in that clip from his Cincinnati speech from I think it's October, November 2002 about the unmanned aerial vehicles.
What intelligence did they have about that?
Did they know they were lying about that?
You know, I don't know if they know they were lying about that.
That's a hard thing to answer.
I mean, there are plenty of people who would say yes.
That's not something that I have direct sources on that I could say without doubt that yes, they knew they were lying.
It wasn't accurate, but they were lying.
Also remember that in I think February 2001 it was, we started massive bombings of Iraq already.
Right, three weeks after Bush took the oath.
That's right, that's right.
If there were these unmanned drones and this and that and the other thing, why wasn't that brought up then?
Well, in fact, in the spring and early summer of 2001, Conor Lisa Rice and Colin Powell both gave statements on the record that anybody can find on YouTube, maybe I'll try to cue those up here, saying that, well, we have Saddam Hussein in a box and we've degraded his military far below what it was in 1991 and he doesn't threaten his neighbors and we're just going to keep containing him basically.
Well, it's not just him either.
Everybody knew.
It's not like there was doubt.
There was no doubt.
Every reputable intelligence agency had warned us.
Our own intelligence agencies had debunked every one of the pieces of so-called evidence we had, whether it was the drones or the aluminum tubes, the uranium forgeries, you name it.
Our own people shot it down.
And yet the Bush administration at every turn would look for that one not-remotely-credible source they could use to say, aha, but see, this is the intelligence we're going to go with.
Right.
And, you know, while the American people were telling each other, basically, you know, doing their mine-a-bird thing from watching TV news and saying to each other, well, you know, the president has secret information that we don't know about, but we're sure he wouldn't just bluff and he must be telling the truth and whatever.
In fact, it wasn't just the CIA who debunked the aluminum tubes.
For one example, it was Knight Ridder.
It was Jonathan S. Landay and Warren Strobel and the guys of the Knight Ridder newspapers.
And, in fact, even in the Washington Post.
And this is something where, you know, if it runs on page 834 in the Washington Post, that's one thing.
If it's the top headline that day on antiwar.com, that's not up to their discretion.
And so I remember in September of 2002, there was a whole run of stories, including even the Washington Post, that said that every expert at the Department of Energy, at the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, which is the State Department CIA intelligence agency, basically, and most of everybody at the CIA say that these aluminum tubes could not possibly be for centrifuges.
Well, wait a minute.
It's not just even that.
It's the IAEA.
It's British intelligence.
It's MI6, British intelligence.
It's German intelligence.
I mean, it's really very simple.
I mean, you have, let's say, you have 20 people telling you that the Earth is round.
And you've got one person telling you, well, you know, the Earth is really flat.
And that one person has a financial interest, let's say, like the curveball.
And at every turn, in every instance where you have 20 to 1, you always pick the one.
It's really that simple.
You know what I mean?
It doesn't matter what, how many agencies told them.
It doesn't matter how many people knew.
It doesn't matter.
None of that matters.
The fact is that at every turn they chose to go with, you know, for lack of a better term, the minority report.
In this case, you know, the one.
Twenty agencies versus international versus the one questionable source.
And they did this over and over and over.
And that's deliberate.
You may mess up once.
But when you do something over and over and over, and it's clear that you're constantly trying to choose something that will fix the facts around your policy, then it's clear that this is an accident, that you're deliberately manipulating things in order to write the narrative you need to go to war.
Sure.
Yeah, especially when you're talking about things like the aluminum tubes that had been publicly debunked in the press around the world for months.
What?
Six months, seven months before the invasion even started on the premise that, well, these aluminum tubes must mean that they have a nuclear program.
I mean, that to me is especially outrageous when their bluff has already been called and they still use the same bluff.
Well, I mean, hello, the IAEA basically laughs at the Niger forgeries because they're such obvious forgeries, and yet the same month we attack Iraq.
I mean, the IAEA very publicly said, oh, my God, this is what you're using?
You know?
And they pointed out just how absolutely ridiculously and floppily fabricated it was.
And our response?
We go to war.
Everybody, it's Anti-War Radio.
I'm talking with Larissa Alexandrovna from Raw Story.
Tell me, who's Ahmed Chalabi?
Oh, God.
He's a con man.
He's an Iraqi con man.
There's a lot of speculation that he's likely a double agent for Iran.
And basically, he's the one, you know, where I was saying you have 20 agencies and then there's one less than credible source.
We used him at every turn.
He was head of this American right-wing fabricated Iraqi National Congress.
Isn't it the case that the CIA had basically given up on him and cut him off, and so then he went to go work for the DOD?
And this is where we start getting into the neocon faction here.
Let's talk about who these American Enterprise Institute and Washington Institute for Near East Policy guys that ran this thing.
Well, I mean, essentially, during the Bush years, the CIA, in my opinion, served the role of looking, you know, basically taking the fall for everything.
That was their only purpose.
Whereas the DOD actually engaged in what are usually CIA activities and running that little show of extracurricular sort of illegal activities.
You had Paul Wolfowitz.
You had Donald Rumsfeld and Douglas Spice.
And above them calling the shots was Dick Cheney and David Addington and their cohorts in the oil industry and such.
You also had Wumser and Bolton over there at the State Department in the first administration.
That's right.
And then later Dick Cheney's daughter Liz was sent over to play their role.
Well, Liz was sent over to play with the money that was being billed out to terrorists on our behalf.
But nobody ever wants to talk about that.
I do.
Are you talking about Jandala and MEK?
Oh, yeah.
She was running a little budget out of state for that.
Awesome.
We should try to publicize that angle more.
She's seeking political power, you know?
Maybe I'll make a bumper sticker.
Liz Cheney funds terrorists.
But think about this.
What qualifies Liz Cheney to run this type of operation?
What?
Nothing other than being the daughter of Dick Cheney.
It's almost like a crime family.
All right.
Wait, wait, wait.
This is a whole other interview we're working on.
Tell me about this.
This is what Justin Romano calls the transmission belt of treason.
Colin Powell, in fact, and of course he's trying to protect himself, war criminal that he is.
But he told Bob Woodward that the Office of Special Plans, the euphemism for the Iraq desk over at the Pentagon, that this is Doug Feith's Gestapo office.
They've gone over there and they've created a separate government.
And that's what he was talking about, right?
He's Neo-Con Cabal ensconced inside all the different departments.
Well, right.
That's exactly right.
And later it would be transformed into the Iranian directorate, from which they were trying to find a way to, you know.
I think it was supposed to be Iraq and then it was supposed to be Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran, like boom, boom, boom.
But we got so badly, these guys got Iraq so bad and they were so exposed by their lives and all that stuff, they were unable to complete the Iran element of it.
But they had already started working the Iran angle, you know, trying to tie Iran to uranium smuggling, trying to tie Iran to terrorism in Iraq against our soldiers, even trying to tie Iran, in some cases, in some plot with al-Qaeda against the United States.
So it's this one little cabal.
And it's mainly a policy office, but they're using DOD resources to conduct operations that are not legitimately DOD territory and not legal for the DOD to be involved in, because there are certain requirements.
Like, for example, the CIA requires presidential findings on some things, whereas the DOD does not.
So they were running black ops that's usually CIA territory, and they were answering only to the office of the vice president, that is, to Dick Cheney.
So there was no oversight.
Nobody knew what anybody was doing except for this small group of people.
And, you know, some of these people are graduates of the Iran-Contra scandal.
So, I mean, they've already, you know, we forgot another player.
Elliot Abrams over at the National Security Council.
Ah, good call.
I'll never forget him.
Yeah.
So, you know, you have essentially a very tightly controlled mechanism that's conducting illegal activities, reporting to Dick Cheney, and working for a budget that nobody has oversight of, and, you know, actually cutting out every other agency that should be legitimately involved.
Well, I was going to ask you about Ariel Sharon's influence here, because Julian Borger, James Bamford, and Robert Dreyfuss have all reported that they had their own little office of special plans over there in Ariel Sharon's office.
I guess they sort of had the same problem with the Mossad that the Americans had with the CIA, which was the lie but not quite good enough for our purposes.
And according, I think, to Dreyfuss' reporting, actually all three of their reporting there, they say that they were actually manufacturing bogus intelligence in English for funneling into the same stovepipe here.
Yeah, well, I mean, they're not the only ones.
The Russians were also fabricating God knows what.
Everyone's fabricating intelligence.
The Russians were fabricating intelligence to help the Americans start a war with Iraq?
No, no, no, no.
No, their focus was to make sure that whatever happens in Iran, they had complete control over it.
But I'm going off on a tangent.
What I'm trying to say is that you've got essentially what I call an intelligence laundering market.
And, you know, that's why you have experts review the intelligence coming in, because you don't know if it's questionable, who it's coming from.
And in all cases, most cases, you know, and yes, you know, Ariel Sharon and his little cabal is very similar to our structure here.
But it's not unusual, because you find that in a lot of administrations, look at Tony Blair, same thing.
You've got MI6 saying no, no, no, and Tony Blair saying, and his little cabal saying yes, yes, yes.
And then when it all comes out, he blames MI6.
Cheney and Bush blame CIA.
Sharon blames Mossad, you know?
Well, in fact, I guess Sharon didn't even need to blame Mossad, because his role was never really that publicized.
But Anders in the chat room points out that it's come out of this Chilcot Inquiry over there in England, that there were Israelis at those infamous Crawford meetings where the memos about, the Downing Street memos about fixing the intelligence around the policy came down.
Well, and there were also Saudis.
And the various meetings in Rome and in Paris that involved the Niger forgeries had the Saudis, they had, I think, Pakistani intelligence, the ISI, and Italian intelligence.
That in and of itself, I don't know if that means anything per se.
And remember, Israel is an ally of the United States.
So Britain and Israel are both allies, so it makes sense that they're at the meeting.
I think it's not as damning as it can sound.
You know what I mean?
When you take into account that we were talking about allies, it's like Britain and the US had meetings with Polish intelligence, you know?
Yeah, except there was no clean break paper written for the polls about how our first effort needs to be getting rid of Saddam Hussein.
Yeah, but Israel didn't want Iraq.
Israel always wanted Iran.
They don't care about Iraq.
Iraq was not a problem.
Iraq was America's baby, not Israel's.
Well, it does sort of seem like Sharon said, we'll help you lie to people into war with Iraq if you promise to hit Iran next.
Well, that's why I keep saying that my opinion is that it was supposed to be a three, like a drive-by shooting kind of thing, one, two, three, you know?
You hit Afghanistan, you don't finish it, you go to Iraq, you don't finish it, you have to reach stage two to call it victory, and then you go right to Iran.
And, you know, they were able to leave Afghanistan in an entire disarray because Afghanistan is already in disarray, and so nobody was really going to expose that as much as they were with Iraq, you know, mission accomplished.
What mission accomplished?
You've got sectarian violence, you have all this stuff going on, you know, whereas in Afghanistan it's much more like the Wild West, so it's hard to say who's fighting who, what's going on.
Do you think that Dick Cheney and Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz ultimately were the Ayatollah Khomeini's useful idiots?
There was a CIA and a DIA report that came out that said that they went back over all the evidence, and looking back over ten years or something, they convinced themselves that not only did Ahmed Chalabi tell the Iranians, it must have been Feith or somebody who told him, that the Americans had broken all their codes, but actually they think, as I think you said, a possible double agent, that he was a possible double agent, that maybe lying the American people into war with Iraq was all about Khomeini trying to get back at his arch enemy Saddam Hussein, and that America's war was really all about what the Iranians wanted.
Never mind Ariel Sharon or Dick Cheney or anybody else.
They're just puppets on his string.
Well, this is what I've been saying for years.
You're talking about a chess player and a checkers player.
You're talking about guys with a lot of hubris and very little understanding of strategy and a complete disregard for international laws and such.
So by the very nature of what they're trying to achieve, they have to rely on really shady characters.
And they're not very good strategists, but they're very arrogant.
So they're the checkers crowd.
And that's Dick Cheney and his gang.
And then you've got Iran.
And they play chess.
And they're very patient.
And they're very careful.
And regardless of their insane leadership out in public, the reality is he doesn't run the country.
So they're very patient.
They're very careful.
And from day one, I kept saying, if you attack Iraq, you are giving Iran a gift.
And I think Israel was very much concerned about this as well, which is why they likely agreed to join forces on Iraq, provided that there would be no threat to them from the Iran side.
So it's funny.
I remember when people thought that Kissinger was a double agent for the Soviets.
And it's funny now when you think that, wouldn't it be interesting if Cheney and those guys really, knowingly or unknowingly, agents for Iran or the Saudis or any number of, I mean, look at all the people who benefit.
It's not us.
Right, yeah.
Well, it's everybody but the American people and the Iraqi people who benefit, it looks like.
And maybe the Turks.
And it's not Israel either.
Israel's put in more danger and is under more scrutiny now because there's a misconception that it was Israel that drove the United States policy in Iraq, which isn't true.
They were always interested in Iran.
So you've got Israel that fails.
You've got Britain that loses.
You've got the United States that loses.
But look at Iran and Russia.
Iran, Russia and China.
Well, I think, wouldn't you agree that the Israelis actually did benefit from a stupid point of view, that is to say a lacunic point of view, in that the largest single Arab state and would-be most powerful Arab state has been smashed.
And even if the Iranian-aligned Shiites end up dominating the country, they still mostly only dominate their part of the country, and I guess including Baghdad.
But they don't control Anbar, really.
And Iraq has kind of ceased to exist, wouldn't you say?
Yeah, but that's the thing.
Iraq was keeping Iran in check in some ways, you know.
And by eliminating Iraq or...
Yeah, but you're being smart.
I'm asking you to be a lacunic for the purpose of the...
Because I think anybody would agree that all of this policy is bad for Israel.
Every single bit of it is bad for Israel.
But that's not what Richard Perle thinks is what I'm getting at.
Yeah, but Richard Perle doesn't work for the Israeli government in terms of decision-making.
I think what you're talking about is you have to remember that as powerful as Israel is, it is still a client state of the United States.
And it doesn't have a lot of choices.
If the United States says, look, we're going to war in Iraq, then Israel's going to have to be on board.
But Israel can demand, and likely did, that if they do that, they have to ensure that they take out Iran, too, because then Iran's left standing is a serious threat.
So I don't think they have much choice.
They are a client state, so they're doing what they're told by the colonial master, in essence.
In terms of Iraq, not Iran.
We were driving...
I mean, America was driving the Iraq train, and Israel was driving the Iran train.
But you know what I've always thought would be interesting is, you know, really the biggest winner out of all of this is Russia.
And it's beautiful irony if you think about it, the way it works out.
We defeated the Russians by getting them stuck in Afghanistan.
Yeah, well, I mean, I've always argued that it would make perfect sense if our entire political class were a bunch of KGB agents.
I just, I don't really see the proof of the connection, but I guess I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that they were all a bunch of traitors.
Well, I mean, you know, I'm vehemently anti-Putin and his gang.
I mean, violently, vehemently, you know.
And the thing is, if you look at what's happened, it's remarkable.
You've got a totalitarian government in Russia that's looking like the most beautiful democracy it's got.
The world respects Putin is the sane one.
And here you have what would legitimately a democracy look like.
The Soviet Union.
Yeah, and we have lost all the money.
Our military has been incredibly degraded.
Our country is falling apart.
People are in poverty.
We're becoming the Soviet Union.
And to me, like, if I was Russia and China and I wanted to create a new bloc and destroy the United States, I would create a trap in the Middle East to do it.
You know?
And this is part of why I've always said, you know, I almost wonder if the Russians aren't involved in some of this really elaborate, you know, siphoning of, you know, funneling of intelligence and such.
Well, they could be.
But, you know, I mean, if I was Vladimir Putin, I'd probably just be sitting back and laughing and keeping my hands out of it.
Really?
But you're certainly right that, you know, America's losing, and that's good for any potential adversary.
And you're also right that Russia looks good in comparison only to the United States right now because of what our country's been doing around the world.
Well, and more importantly, Russia controls oil now more so than it's ever controlled in Europe.
All right, wait a minute.
Now, I want to wrap up this interview with a couple of more points about how Bush knew he was lying.
And these are the names, Naji Sabri and something-something Habush.
Wait, wait, wait.
Let's be careful.
We don't know if Bush knew he was lying.
We know Cheney knew that he was lying.
Whether or not Bush knew anything is not something we have any, you know, one way or another any proof of.
Well, we have what seem to be at least credible stories about George Tenet explaining to George Bush that he had flipped and turned Iraq's foreign minister, Naji Sabri, and that he had verified that they had absolutely nothing and that the CIA had vetted, Tyler Drumheller told this story, that they had vetted the hell out of everything he said, and this was credible information.
They don't have anything, Mr. Bush.
And then it turned out that they also had flipped this guy Habush, or the Brits had flipped this guy Habush, who was their George Tenet, was Iraq's head of intelligence, who told the Brits the very same thing.
Right, but okay, now you have to remember who we're talking about.
You've got George Bush, who is inherently not going to...
He's already, like, entering office knowing that he's going to distrust the agency.
So George Tenet, and he's a Clinton layover.
So Tenet tells Bush this, and what do you think Bush does?
Bush meets with who?
Who do you think he likely meets with?
He meets with...
Cheney.
Rumsfeld.
He's not someone that's going to...
Like, if you try to pull this stunt with, let's say, with an Obama administration, or with Obama, you brief him, chances are the guy's going to know something about what you're talking about, especially if you consider the Biden factor.
Biden was able to very clearly know what was B.S. and what wasn't.
Bush, on the other hand, he was not remotely qualified to be president.
And so my guess is, no matter what was told to him, I guarantee you he went and discussed it with Cheney and his National Security Council, which were all Cheney's game.
And who knows what they said.
So we don't know if Bush lied, knowingly lied.
We do know that Cheney knowingly lied, but we don't know if Bush knowingly lied.
And I think we need to be very careful there.
I mean, yes, he's an idiot, but did he actually knowingly lie us into war?
I don't know.
Well, yeah, I think it's clear just from going back to all the statements that he made, as you pointed out, long before September 11th, saying, we are doing this.
And then when September 11th happened, then they said, oh, well, in fact, here's a lie where he knew he was lying, was they would ask him, this is what Colonel Sam Gardner called the excluded middle, where they would ask George Bush, why Iraq?
And he would say, because of September 11th.
Right, but you've got Cheney telling them.
Because it changed the way we view the world and now we see.
But he would give you that giant pregnant pause where you would just fill in, oh, because Saddam did September 11th.
And he knew that that was manipulative and that he was trying to buffalo the American people into believing that Saddam had brought those towers down.
Look, I'm no George Bush fan.
I mean, that would be hilarious if somebody actually suggested that.
But let's be very careful here.
The reality is he's parroting, just like he's too stupid to understand that when he's told, you've got to repeat something to catapult the propaganda, he actually repeats catapult the propaganda.
Right.
Look, I'm not going to sit here and argue that he's too smart to be innocent in the way you describe.
I concede your point.
Okay.
The guy's clearly dumber than dirt.
Yeah.
And that's why maybe that's why.
And clearly he didn't care if it was true or not.
He was getting his thing done.
That's right.
I would agree with you on that.
He was busy praying to God, and so he thought he was in the right because Jesus was on his side.
Of course.
Everybody knows that.
Right.
All right.
I want to get to one more lie, which is that it turns out he was right.
It's the cover of Newsweek this week.
Yay, victory.
Purple ink on fingers, just like 2005.
And George Bush was right after all.
As Thomas Friedman wrote in the New York Times yesterday, it's a good thing we liberated those people.
You're kidding, right?
I didn't see that, but you're kidding.
Are you kidding?
Oh, no.
Yeah.
Never mind the deaths.
We'll let historians worry about the deaths.
No, no.
They voted in the Soviet Union, too.
That didn't make them a democracy.
Yeah.
It's not who votes.
We vote here.
As Solomon said, it's not who votes.
It's who counts the votes.
Okay.
Yeah, exactly.
I don't need a purple finger to tell me that somehow we've delivered a democracy when that's entirely untrue.
Well, if you haven't seen the cover of Newsweek this week, it's Bush walking off stage.
Off set is really more like it from the deck of the USS Lincoln in his mission accomplished speech.
And it's saying mission finally accomplished.
It all worked out in the end.
Yeah.
And what was the mission?
Can somebody tell me?
They're looking for something that looks successful, and they'll say, okay, that was the mission.
Because as this was happening, nobody knew what the mission was.
I'm pretty sure the mission was just taking those pallets of cash from the Federal Reserve and running.
Okay.
I tend to agree with you on that.
And also, you know.
I'm just jealous, though, because I wish I had a pallet of cash.
I wish I had a bailout.
But that's, you know.
No, but what I'm saying is, think about this.
For the entire presidency, nobody knew what the mission was, right?
And yet they see something positive, and they go, aha, that was the mission.
It's accomplished.
Well, why couldn't they tell us that was the mission all along?
Yeah.
Well, it makes perfect sense.
And maybe we ought to just follow the Tom Friedman model ourselves and leave all the bad parts of the historians to worry about.
And maybe we should just declare victory and go.
The problem is we don't have the luxury of allowing the historians to fight over it, because there is so much propaganda that it's impossible to – everything's become opinion.
Like, facts are debated as though they're opinion.
No, the earth is round.
No, the earth is flat.
Yeah.
After all, Bush, in his exit interview, said, look, we had to invade because Saddam would not let the Iraqi inspectors in.
And Charlie Gibson said, wow, yeah, I guess you're right.
I don't remember what 2003 was like.
So if you say so, and then that was it.
Even though they were there.
I mean, look what I'm saying.
As long as you can – you're talking about a very lazy, in some cases more sinister type of media.
You're talking about an attention span for the public that American Idol is basically the longest thing they'll watch.
And you're talking – so it's very easy to sort of change things now so historians have a different perspective.
Have you seen these billboards people are talking about where it says, do you miss him yet?
And it's Bush.
Yeah.
And nobody knows who put that up, but suddenly people are using those billboards as, see, we do miss him.
It's like me saying, okay, take a photo of me, put it up, and then have someone go point to it as proof that people miss me even though I'm the one who put up the photo.
Yeah, of course.
Yeah, I'm sure it was his friends at Clear Channel who, of course, are the ones who made him a millionaire in the first place when they bought the Texas Rangers from him.
Well, in any case, what I'm saying is I don't think in this day and age where everything is being allowed to stand, where all you have to do is apologize, but the record isn't corrected to the point where people still think that Saddam Hussein attacked us on 9-11.
To the point where even I've got to sit here and scramble and send emails and make phone calls to try to remember the names Sabri and Habush.
Well, even if you don't remember the names, you do remember the facts.
You know, you don't have to remember what number President Abraham Lincoln was to know that he gave the Gettysburg Address.
You know what I'm saying?
You don't have to remember every detail.
I do, but you're right.
As you just pointed out, the whole Gibson interview, the fact that Bush is allowed to say that as though it were fact.
Yeah, well, we were talking about the Jon Stewart thing and the torture interview the other day.
Even Jon Stewart, who I really like, he gets all his news from TV.
He's really smart and he remembers the things that he saw on TV that are important, but he doesn't read Antiwar.com.
If he did, he would have kicked that guy's ass.
I bet he kicked his ass anyway, though.
He did, but man, if he was a regular reader of Glenn Greenwald's blog, it would have been an entirely different interview, if you know what I mean.
Yes, yes, I agree with you, but he is a comedian.
He's really not.
You've got to cut the guy some slack.
I will say this, though.
What I find remarkable is that nobody seems to remember that Cheney openly lied that we ever waterboarded anybody for years.
Now he's very publicly saying, well, they're terrorists, it doesn't count, or they're enemy commandants and we were trying to save American lives.
It's almost like it's a given that the whole legal question is irrelevant to everybody.
In fact, I was going to say, what about al-Libi?
I think McClatchy showed that the torture went up in frequency.
Right around the time they were trying to get al-Libi and a few others to point the finger at Saddam Hussein for training al-Qaeda in chemical weapons.
Then right after the Iraq war, when they were trying again to get al-Qaeda detainees to point the finger at Saddam Hussein, I think McClatchy's headline even was like, hey, it's pretty clear the correlation here.
That they were torturing people to get incriminating information about Saddam Hussein.
Right, but I think the biggest problem here is that everything is being presented as somehow fair and balanced when things aren't fair and balanced.
Facts are facts.
They don't take a side.
The earth is round.
I'm sorry.
It's not flat.
You can have your whole flat camp, but that doesn't make it facts.
We are signatories to the Geneva Conventions and various other United Nations covenants against torture and human rights abuses.
What was done is illegal.
There's no debating that, and yet the debate is not about whether it's illegal or not, but if it saved American lives.
It's a war crime to invade a country, a sovereign nation, without provocation.
No one's talking about that, right?
They're talking about, well, but Saddam Hussein may have attacked us on 9-11, and there's no evidence for this.
Okay, well, it's not that.
Okay, well, we wanted to bring democracy, but it's illegal.
Everything's become as though you have one expert and another, and they each have an opinion, and there's no facts.
That everything is equal, and it's not.
Yeah, especially on the torture debate.
I mean, I think that's a very important part of this, where they can just basically, you know.
In fact, that Jon Stewart interview, the guy said.
Mark Thiessen.
Yeah, Mark Thiessen, exactly.
Jon Stewart asked him, well, wait a minute.
If Al-Qaeda captured one of our guys and waterboarded him, you're saying that would be okay?
And he said, no, because they're not signatories to the Geneva Conventions.
It's okay for us to torture them, but not for them to torture us.
And, of course, according to the other Scott Horton, who's an actual human rights lawyer and knows all about this stuff.
For a fact, he says the way the Geneva Conventions are written, it has nothing to do with the captives.
It's all about you.
If the U.S. government is a signatory, then it binds our behavior in the way we treat detainees.
It doesn't matter whether they're signatories or not.
That's right.
And, in fact, even the Bush administration had abandoned the argument that it was all about whether they were irregulars and all that years ago.
This is what I'm saying.
No one is interested.
And I'm talking about legitimate news outlets.
And pointing out and calling things by their proper name, torture is torture.
You can call it really pretty things like enhanced interrogation, but it doesn't change what it is.
So, A, not calling things by their proper names, and B, putting everything on equal footing, fact and opinion on equal footing.
And, as a result, if you want to talk about who lied or who's the most responsible for the Iraq war and all of the stuff that's going on, the blame falls squarely on the shoulders of the Fourth Estate, because they are the ones who are responsible for telling us the truth.
Or, I should say, we are responsible for telling the people the truth.
You know, you expect politicians to lie.
Well, you know, the problem is here, though, is, especially when it's the Iraq war, is this was a lie that so many people in the media were in on, that really, unless you're from Anti-War or Raw Story or Knight Ridder, now McClatchy Newspapers, you have to admit that it's your fault that those million people are dead.
If you were a New York Times reporter or a Washington Post or a Dallas Morning News or an LA Times or a Chicago Tribune reporter, and you pretended like, well, gee, we know he's making nuclear weapons, we've got to do something, then how are you supposed to call the administration out when you were the one?
So they all just pat each other on the back and continue on.
Well, it's like it's mutual blackmail.
They all lie to each other.
Or, you know, look at Judith Miller.
She gets fired.
You know, she goes to jail and people cry for her.
How many people are dead because of her articles?
Because they were lies, and everyone knew they were lies, including her own editors, the staff at the New York Times that I talked to.
People knew.
And, you know, but it gave access to the Bush White House, and that was enough.
Access was enough to justify this.
So, you know, I think we've gone off on 10 million tangents, but...
No, I think that's good to put some tough media criticism at the end of this whole thing, because after all, I mean, like you say, let's go back to remember the feeling, how it was.
What was the common zeitgeist in the society or whatever in 2002?
You know, something's got to be done about this Saddam.
Let's all pretend that we all believe in this.
And, you know, this is something that Charles Goyette says is that, you know, and he got fired.
He lost his job as a radio show host at the time for standing by his principles.
And he said, you know, the reason that there's really no comeuppance and no responsibility and the law is not being enforced and whatever is because the American people are just as guilty as David Gregory and Scooter Libby.
The American people wanted blood, and bombing Afghanistan was not enough.
We wanted to bomb something that had actually been built before, instead of just rocks.
We wanted to kill more people.
Really, I think that's simplistic.
I think the American public, the majority of the, you know, I'm not talking about the teabaggers and their crazy notion that, you know, there's some socialist conspiracy and all Muslims are terrorists and all liberals are with the terrorists and all this other garbage.
I'm talking about most reasonable people believed what they were being told on the news, that Saddam Hussein was involved in the attacks on this country.
So, yes, they wanted blood, but it seemed justified.
I mean, you know, revenge is never justified, but the point I'm making is you're making it very simplistic.
The public was misled.
I don't know if you can actively blame the public.
Now, with everything out and so many people know enough now, the fact that there's pressure to prosecute them is where the public should be held accountable.
But in the buildup to the Iraq war, I don't think the public can be held accountable for believing not only in the government, but let's put that aside, believing in the press, that the press would tell us the truth.
I just think it's very simplistic to put it on the shoulders of the public in the buildup to the war.
What about when 71 percent believe that Iran has the bomb right now and it's the same bogus lie seven years later?
Are we responsible?
Are the American 71 percent responsible for believing bogus lies about Iran this moment?
Well, you know, Iran is more complicated than Iraq.
Iraq, as simple as it was, it was still the factors so convoluted.
And we rely to such an extent that when you look at Iran, Iran is far more complicated, because you in fact do have an energy program there.
So there's some smoke where they claim there's fire.
The public isn't, you know, the majority of the public isn't capable of this kind of nuanced thinking.
You know, for them it's, oh, they have an energy program equals they have the bomb.
So it's more complicated with Iran, and I don't expect the majority of the public to understand.
Well, you know, I'm not trying to...
That's what the news media is supposed to tell us.
This is what the facts are.
And opinion writers are supposed to, in fact, be able to support their opinions, not just write propaganda.
You know, it used to be that if you wrote your opinion but it was an outright lie, you know, you didn't write again.
Yeah, no, I'm with you, and I'm not trying to acquit the people who did wrong with their authority.
And that goes from, you know, the Sunday morning news shows to the vice president's office and everywhere in between.
But the cool thing about responsibility to me is I can divide up massive portions of it way beyond adding up to 100 percent, because it's just kind of a make-believe concept anyway.
Wait, what's a make-believe concept?
You're way ahead of me.
Well, responsibility, it's sort of an abstract thing.
So I think I can blame the people who wanted to believe in the lies about Iraq just as much as the people who were lying to them and give them all 100 percent responsibility.
I don't think that blaming one side acquits the other is what I'm trying to say.
No, if one side relies on the other for information, then you can't blame the people for getting faulty information.
As I said, you can hold the public accountable after the fact, because now we know.
We know that they tortured, okay?
And Dick Cheney, and he's doing this on Fox News, so the Fox News viewers know.
He's going around saying, yeah, okay, we waterboarded, blah, blah, we were saving American lives.
So we now know that we violated the law, that he committed war crimes.
This is now known.
And people choosing to still say, well, that's okay, because we're Americans and so we're special in some way, and we're allowed to do these things.
Now you can say, okay, now the public can be held accountable, because they know and they're still standing behind this.
But as there's a buildup to the war, and it's not like the public is seeing classified information firsthand.
They're relying on media accounts.
And you also have to remember that the Bush administration was absolutely, aggressively engaging in fear-mongering.
There were orange alerts and red alerts and blue alerts, you name it.
Every other day there was an alert, there was a terrorist attack coming, they were about to kill us all.
I don't know if you remember the level of panic they were trying to instill in the public.
I absolutely do.
And the thing is, well, I'm glad we're talking about this.
I'm not sure how useful it is to other people, but it's very interesting to me.
Because, see, my thing was I was driving a cab at the time.
So I was able to talk with people who just weren't interested in the facts at all.
They wanted to kill those people.
They would bend over backwards to say, well, the president knows, and we'll just go in there and get Saddam and get out.
And the U.N. sucks because they're not proactive enough.
We have to do this.
And at the same time, 10,000-something people came out to protest in Austin, Texas.
You know, they knew better.
And the news didn't cover it.
They knew better.
And the news didn't cover it.
Well, I know the news didn't, but I'm just saying if that many people knew better, then no one else has an excuse.
That's not true.
You're talking about people of different access to information, different intelligence, different education.
And what I'm saying is, what do you think, that these people you talked to woke up one morning and latched on to Saddam on their own?
No.
That was put into their heads.
I agree.
I mean, hey, I mean, obviously this whole thing is Dick Cheney's responsibility.
If it's got to go on one person, it's him.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And I would thank George Bush for having the hubris to think that he could be president and then being president and refusing to acknowledge that he made mistakes.
He deserves the blame, too, whether he lied or not is irrelevant.
What is important here is that he knows now.
He's out of that bubble.
And to not come forward and say, you know, I made mistakes, I listened to the wrong people, blah, blah, blah.
He has yet to do that.
He has yet to apologize.
And as far as I'm concerned, he now is as guilty as though, you know, as if he didn't willfully and knowingly lie.
So, yeah, it rests with them.
But, you know, you expect politicians to be crooked, but you don't expect the press to be crooked.
You expect them to take risks, to protect sources, to go to jail for their sources in order to tell you the truth.
You know.
Well, and as we've talked about, there was enough good reporting to contrast against the bad reporting from from back then.
I mean, again, I'll mention the guys that at what was then Knight Ritter.
They all worked for McClatchy, but especially Landay and Strobel.
I mean, these guys debunked every bit of this before the war.
And they're reporters.
They weren't debunkers.
They weren't opinion writers.
They were reporters.
And they were just saying, look, we're talking to our CIA contacts and they're saying this is all a bunch of bunk.
And they were called liars because, well, if the Washington Post and the New York Times don't have it, these guys are lying.
You know, they're not credible.
And the fact that they were able to stay on the story, I think, is credit to the editors at McClatchy or Knight Ritter or whatever.
Because anywhere else they would have been pulled off the story because nobody else was able to verify or unwilling to verify what they were writing about.
Everybody, that's Larissa Alexandrovna, Managing Editor of Investigative News at rawstory.com.
Appreciate it.
Uh-huh.
Bye.
Oh, yeah, and everybody check out the Path of War timeline at rawstory.com as well.
