Alright y'all welcome back to the show It's anti-war radio on Liberty Radio Network and As you all well know one of my favorite reporters is the heroic Robert Perry Formerly with what I think it was a P and Newsweek.
He now runs consortium news Dot-com you could hire him to come and give a speech to your group Welcome to the show.
How's it going Robert?
Pretty good Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Really appreciate joining us on the show today Well, thanks for having me.
So I just saw this thing that blew my mind.
I Almost can't believe it.
But then again, I guess it's sort of par for the course to Judith Miller scolds Julian Assange for not verifying sources Because he didn't care at all about attempting to verify the information that he was putting out or determine whether or not it hurt anyone And I was thinking well, you know, we could just talk bad about Judith Miller, but what seems most remarkable to me Bob is that Reporters like you who after all, you know We'll get James Bamford or yourself or Eric Margulies.
You're not just alternative media You're all you know, formerly very mainstream media have those kind of New York DC corridor type credentials and what have you and all of you who were the you know, real reporters who were right about Iraq Are still just as excluded in 2010-2011 as you were back in 2002 and 2003 it is in Judith Miller gets to sit here and pose like she's the The benchmark for what defines good journalism and still what do I got to do to see Bob Perry on TV?
Doesn't seem fair.
Well, I'm a trip.
The world isn't fair.
I suppose Scott.
I think that's a Not like that, it's not exactly news but But it is just it is sad.
I think not just for you me it's sad for the American people and folks who would like to know what What is really going on and not just what?some of these pampered inside the beltway reporters Are willing to say and you know, it really has happened.
Is that Is that to keep your job or to keep your career path going in the right direction?reporters understand How far they can go in a certain way and how they have to tailor their stories.
It's not a secret it's not spoken about openly, but it's all understood that that if you go off in in directions that Step on too many important toes.
You're going to be in trouble there There's there's this myth that still sort of prevails about the Washington Press Corps being the Watergate Pentagon Papers Press Corps of the 70s, but that's long long dead and what the reality is is that If you play ball and you have good connections and you keep your skirts clean Then you can have a very nice career.
Thanks and have and make lots of money if you challenge too much, you're probably can expect it at best to have a Sidetracked career if not a dead-ended career.
So I think that's the reality Judith Miller did it was one of the few actually who did suffer some for for helping to lead the u.s people into the war in Iraq She did end up getting sort of finally kicked out of the New York Times but her case was an exceptional one and One was she she became a true mouthpiece for the propagandists and it was so obvious that the New York Times couldn't Couldn't still defend her and so she was sort of pushed out But she you're right she still has a standing as to as to any number of journalists who Who had had many important things wrong from the from a Chris Matthews type who was totally on board with the Iraq War and now Of course, he said he was a critic, but you couldn't convince me back then he was to people like Howard Kurtz who who was made a Career attacking honest journalists who who take on the tough stories and he's now he's moved from the Washington Post to the Daily Beast So now he's a he's an internet guru That's the way it's been and and until until there's a real effort to change that and to create Honest institutions that will tell that that will be committed to tell the truth I'm not sure we're going to see a change much.
Yeah Well, you know, I kind of just want to blame the American people for basic supply and demand reasons But then again the government owns the airwaves and they get to decide who owns those big broadcast stations and They certainly You know Dan Rather in that that Bill Moyer special buying the war talks about the fact that you don't need a memo To remind you that you work for a multi-billion dollar corporation that has tremendous lobbying needs regulatory needs and legislative needs in Washington DC And so, you know supply and demand doesn't really count that the demand is what the government demands That's what's most important to even Dan Rather, you know, he's kind of a hairdo But he was an actual journalist at least once upon a time.
Yeah, he won't go ahead.
Yeah, he wasn't me That's true.
Dan rather did some very good stuff and he was punished For the best things he did right, you know when he stood up to Richard Nixon and said, you know basically challenged Nixon as a liar and when he was a White House correspondent He was trashed for for doing that.
It turned out of course that Nixon was a liar So then then you go to him challenging George HW Bush during the the the 1988 campaign about The Iran-contra scandal and Bush's role in it Again, that's rather was trash for doing that And but he was right Bush was had been lying about his role in that and been trying to cover it up rather successfully so whenever so and then rather ultimately was knocked out of the box because when he when he Pushed ahead on a very important story, which was Bush's George W Bush's lies about Essentially skirting his Vietnam War responsibilities by getting into This champagne unit of the Texas National Guard and then shirking those duties.
So And you know, there was that came under heavy attack and there were some weaknesses in the piece But overall it was accurate It was certainly it got the main point right that the president of the United States had shirked his war duties So but again, that's what that's what caused Dan Rather to be essentially knocked out of the business So so what people get punished and this has been it's not just Dan Rather You can go to Gary Webb and go through a number of journalists who've seen their careers horribly scarred and destroyed Because they were doing the work that supposedly the American people should want Yet, you're right there.
There are powers that be that in the news business That are there have much more of a of an association with the with the power structure And that that's what happened.
It's not it somewhat is that yes general electric owns NBC So therefore you're dealing with a multi-billion dollar corporation that has its own interest beyond newsgathering Similarly with CBS owned by various different corporate entities that have their large interests It makes it very difficult For an honest journalist to go against those interests in any consistent way and expect to keep his job well, you know, I don't know if I Just if I got this from movies like old black-and-white movies or something but I have an idea of a journalist like wearing a trench coat and chewing on a cigar and If he was around a guy like Chuck Todd he would just bully him and make fun of him and make fun of his haircut and make fun of the way that he kisses Up to the politicians and call him a little sissy until he does his job, right?
There would be this kind of peer pressure from the older guys about Doing good journalism, but I that's just complete make-believe in it No, well that did exist that did exist when I arrived in Washington for the AP and by in 77 That was still around there was this attitude of more of the tough hard-bitten journalists who would look with disdain on some of these the journalists who were kind of the Kissy-faced types who were trying to make their careers by by doing what the powerful wanted But that was broken in the 80s.
Basically the the link between that kind of Journalism from your old from your old black-and-white movies to the present what occurred under under President Reagan and through the building up of the right-wing press corps and the attack groups and Just the corporatization of the media it became a point where That those journalists who would sort of look at you and say why are you being such a wimp?
We're either forced out or retired and a new generation came in yeah, they might as well.
I'll be Chuck Todd now I can't even watch the cable TV news anymore.
I try to it's kind of my job, too But I just I don't have a stomach for it Anyway, I like good journalism.
We're talking with Robert Perry from consortium news.com.
We'll be back after this.
It's anti-war radio You It's a proud day for America and by God we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all thank you very very much We're dealing with Hitler revisited But even as planes of the multinational forces attack Iraq I prefer to think of peace not war America does not seek conflict They had kids in incubators and they were thrown out of the incubators so that Kuwait could be systematically Dismantled.
All right, some of my favorite Bush senior clips from the first Gulf War via Norman Solomon's movie war made easy great clips of all kinds of great stuff in that movie for you I'm in the middle of an interview here talking with Robert Perry from consortium news.com He's a real reporter.
So he doesn't write for a major paper.
He writes for consortium news.com He's the author of lost history neck-deep secrecy and privilege and trick-or-treason That one's about the October surprise mystery and Bob you've been on the case of these Republican criminals for a long long time here the Republicans especially and of course one of the most controversial parts of the story of the first Gulf War is the accusation at least that James Baker in a way gave Saddam Hussein a green light and told him yeah, go ahead and take Kuwait's northern oilfields we don't really care about that and that Saddam's problem was he pushed it too far and went all the way to the sea and conquered all of Kuwait resulting in Operation this will be another Vietnam here.
We still are You know 20 years later.
In fact as January 2011 or 20 years into the Iraq war now and WikiLeaks has now released the glass be cable from July 25th 1990 and I wonder if you've had a chance to take a look at it and whether it's everything that you hoped it would be Well, I'm just reading it now.
He sent it to me and it's it's it does fill in some of those blanks It what it shows is that Saddam Hussein, this is prior to the invasion of Kuwait was reaching out to the United States with Trying to get help in in dealing with his dispute with With Kuwait and clearly this is a fairly friendly conversation between the US ambassador and Saddam Over efforts to to avoid a full-scale war And going through it immediately.
I don't I don't see in this one.
Anyway, the specific reference to to to a course of action that Saddam would follow obviously things like green lights tend to be somewhat subtle they're often read into meetings that between two sides without necessarily some explicit instructions Well, you know I'm looking at number 30 here and it says note on the border question Saddam referred to the 1961 agreement and to a line of patrol it had established the Kuwaitis He said had told Mubarak Iraq was 20 kilometers in front of this line The ambassador said that she had served in Kuwait 20 years before then as now we took no position on these Arab affairs Now this is the this is the famous quote right here We're not interested in your border dispute with Kuwait.
Is that is that a green light Robert Perry?well, you know, I think it's a it may be a green light to in terms of settling a fairly modest border dispute Certainly is saying that the US takes no position on these kinds of intra-arab matters, but Yeah, how you know how Saddam read that or how it was intended has always been a bit of a point of confusion It doesn't I don't see anything here that we're worth the Domus specifically given some stern rebuke to To consider no such action.
I mean, that's that's that's the point.
I suppose that the dog that didn't bark in here She goes.
Oh, come on.
We want this all to be resolved peacefully, but that's it, right?
And I think you have to go back of course through this history of what happened and some of this history is still not well known or even documented There was a document that I found was it was a top-secret document that I found in some files and that I was given access to on Capitol Hill and It was a talking point memo that Secretary of State Hague had prepared to brief President Reagan back in 81 About Hague's first trip to the Middle East and in that Hague also talked to talk to Sadat President Sadat of Egypt and and Prince Fahd of Saudi Arabia and was told that That Saddam had been given a quote green light from President Jimmy Carter back in 1979 to to launch his invasion of Iran Mm-hmm, and that's something that Carter has denied but there there is this there.
There is a lot a lot of uncertainty about the way these things work and And clearly there was an interest on the part of the Saudis and others who were very close to the United States as we know To get a sterner response against Iran at that period So Saddam was was the guy with the army and he was he was on the border with Iran.
So he was in a sense Encouraged by places like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait To take the lead they would provide some of the financing He would provide them the the men in them and the and the army to go Punish Iran and to sort of stop this idea of this is the Shiite Islamic fundamentalism spreading into the Persian Gulf.
So so that that then led to an eight-year war Which I'm not I don't think Saddam had expected when it started obviously much or either side did at tremendous costs both in terms of casualties and money and That and after that ended then you get to this other phase that ends in 88 and so Saddam is then being Pressured by Kuwait and others to to pay them back and he's turning around and saying hold it You know, I took we took the brunt of this We lost, you know thousands of men and in individual battles while you guys sat back with your gold your gold-plated fixtures on in your bathroom and And you guys need to give us a break here and that was that was the fight He was having with Kuwait and there were also arguments about oil reserves and so forth But his position wasn't as crazy as it was then presented Obviously, it's wrong to invade another country and he did do that Because the Kuwaitis would not would not reach any kind of accommodation with him He went further than I think Glaspie may have sort of understood he might right But Then of course the United States reaction was was to propagandize And and there was a key phrase that you you included there What we now know is that the Iraq war that that war the so-called Persian Gulf War What did never needed to go to a ground phase?
Basically the the air war the US launch was Devastating against the Iraqis and then it got to the to the question of whether or not u.s Would send troops in and at that point President Gorbachev of the Soviet Union had negotiated a deal Where Saddam would would pull his troops out leave leave behind even their hardware and military hardware But Bush senior did not want that to happen He wanted to have a ground war and in fact He overruled Schwartzkopf general Schwartzkopf and others in the field who said just let this work out We don't need to have people die over this we've killed enough of them We don't need to send the u.s.
Troops on the ground through this through the whatever is going to happen Right as I said even surrendering was too little too late and he shot them all as they retreated from Kuwait, right?
So but it so so basically what happened was Bush with the help of Colin Powell Who was the chief chairman of the Joint Chiefs?
Worked out a way to sort of pretend like they were sort of Responding to Gorbachev make it impossible for the Iraqis to leave So they could have their ground war and so they launched the ground war overruling Schwartzkopf They ordered him to go through this he killed the US forces killed Tens of thousands of Iraqis, maybe hundreds of thousands Americans cook also the Americans also separate casualties, of course Much smaller and then after 100 hours it was stopped And what does Bush do Bush goes down to that to the to the and gives a talk which you concluded that you included this Clip where he says we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all right, and that was the motive The reason we did that as a nation the reason we what we pushed this whole thing as far as we did Was because Bush senior saw this as a way to get the American people Back behind warfare Right.
Here's in fact one more clip along those lines, which is really important.
This will not be another Vietnam That really was at the core of his argument And of course it was just like Vietnam for the people of Iraq a million of them have died Maybe two million of them have died under the blockade regime that Bush senior Implemented and Bill Clinton enforced and then with this current invasion since 2003 It's been a lot like the Vietnam War for 20 years now for the people of Iraq But uh, geez, you know what?
Well a couple of different things.
First of all Palast Greg Palast at the BBC his interpretation of I don't know about this New document coming out but of the situation before was that Kuwait was not so much slant drilling like they say But they were drilling from shared pools of oil and they were as it says in this memo Undercutting even the OPEC price which was way low and They were over producing from this shared well in violation of their agreement with Iraq and so according to Palast the way James Baker looked at it was West Texas rules if three property owners on the surface share a well underneath and one of them goes over producing they break his knees and Fix that outside the law and that that was basically James Baker's You know message to Saddam was go ahead and break their knees.
Go ahead.
Occupy the northern oilfields for a while, etc You know do something little he just went too far.
Is that Consistent do you think is that plausible?
It's plausible I'm not sure you can interpret that entirely from what you see here and in the Glaspie memo But it's but of course Baker was Secretary of State and he was a very hard-bitten kind of character He was he was he was he did not Suffer fools easily and he was one to do that kind of thing a knee-breaking of various sorts Usually not not physically but certainly politically though.
I know it's a it's a feasible argument But the point is I think I think Saddam had this had a legitimate grievance And the memo pretty much makes that clear, right?
And I think But it but after that happened that the bigger thing was that Bush came to Bush seniors thought it as a way to get the American people back in line the big strategic Concern that the Reagan Bush people had and it goes it is you see this in their internal documents that it were now public What they what their their big concern was that the American people had deserted you might say the Empire The American people after Vietnam did not want to go along with that stuff anymore and they had to be re-recruited Back behind the war machine and so the various steps that Reagan took including things small things like invading grenade and having all that great fun about that and The Panama invasion that Bush senior that Bush senior did before the Iraq matter Those things were seen as intermediate steps to pull the American people back into line They were low cost relatively in terms of casualties.
They made the country feel good And then of course the big one was the Persian Gulf War Which is when Bush announces we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all that's a crucial point to understand Yeah James Bamford's work on the Rendon group and all that and how they sold it as operation yellow ribbon and operation American flag and the the The media marketing campaign behind Desert Storm.
I still remember so well as in ninth grade.
I still remember so well the We're number one kind of feeling that they really successfully pushed at the end of the Cold War now There's no one to oppose us.
Let's go when it could have been the other way It could have been let's turn inward and be a normal country in a normal time Right, and there were very very dangerous aspects to this to and that we're still living with it It happened roughly the same period in 89 When the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan There was there were Gorbachev also at that point was offering essentially a coalition government for Afghanistan Basically have the the communist government which was still in power in Kabul work with some of the more moderate Reasonable Mujahideen and set up a coalition government of compromise Bush senior at the bidding of some of the hardliners around him said no, we're not going to do it we're you know, we're gonna rub the Soviet face in this and we are going to just destroy and kill Everyone who got in our way in Afghanistan And the idea was that the that the war would be rapidly finished that with the next round of advances the Mujahideen would take Kabul kill the Najibullah the Soviet back president there and Show that the u.s.
Had prevailed without without any question or doubt.
It was the beginning of the triumphalism and What happened was?
And it goes against the current the conventional wisdom that the US sort of walked away immediately it didn't happen that way right the u.s Actually continued the war continued funding the CIA operation rejected Gorbachev and But there but the Mujahideen failed To make advances the Soviet back government was still strong enough and effective enough to stop them So dragged on for years it dragged on even after the Soviet Union collapsed finally Then a more moderate group of Mujahideen took over Kabul Kept Najibullah more or less in place and that's when Pakistan then organizes the Taliban Which are these?very militant young refugees from Afghanistan who are trained inside Pakistan and then unleashed into into Afghanistan and they take over in 96 so we've had years of warfare tearing apart Afghanistan the the when when the Taliban take over they drive out the more moderate Mujahideen forces they capture Najibullah and they and they They castrate him torture him and string him up by a light pole And well now we're fighting on the side of the communists against our friends in the mood had been the Taliban We don't know so many of these problems were sort of we're sort of kept in place and advanced by this Triumphalism this we're number one triumphalism and and the consequences have been obviously extraordinary In a whole variety of ways including the fact that the Afghan war was pretty much Predicated on these decisions made by Reagan and Bush back in the 80s.
Yep.
All right now I'm sorry that we have to leave it there We're over time and have another guest coming up, but I really appreciate your time on the show and your journalism as always Everybody that's Robert Perry the great Robert Perry from consortium news.com author of lost history neck-deep Secrecy and privilege and trick or treason.
Happy New Year and happy new decade to you Robert.
Thank you Scott appreciate
