Alright, my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio on Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
Next guest, I'm very happy to have back on the show, one of the best investigative reporters in America, Robert Perry.
Welcome back to the show, Robert.
Thanks for having me.
It's great to have you on.
Always enjoy your articles.
We ran one of them as our spotlight yesterday on Antiwar.com.
Let me give you a brief introduction, or maybe I should let you do it.
I know that you run ConsortiumNews.com, right?
Right.
My background, of course, was with the Associated Press and Newsweek and PBS Frontline.
Oh, you did Frontline too, huh?
Sure.
I did that after I left Newsweek for a few years.
I also worked in other more mainstream operations, but I felt by the mid-1990s that there were so many important stories that were being ignored that were more of an investigative, serious nature.
That is the advice of my oldest son who just got out of college and said, hey Dad, there's this thing called the Internet.
We started ConsortiumNews.com in 1995 as a way to create a home for the kinds of old stories, old-fashioned kinds of stories, investigative pieces that weren't welcome anymore in the mainstream or weren't welcome nearly enough.
So that's where our operation began and we've sort of kept it going for 11 years now.
I would say with some pride that we've done stories that while we also look to the past and we bring that kind of context to the present, we've also been ahead on many important stories or up near the front on many important stories of the past several years where we've written stories that I guess the mainstream press is just not willing to take on.
Stories about the growth of Bush's authoritarianism as it was developing in the early part of his presidency and has of course gotten even more and more serious.
We were reporting serious questions about his war strategies back in 2002 and early 2003 and we took a lot of angry emails and criticism for doubting his ability to pull off what he was claiming to want to pull off.
But I think those stories have stood the test of time and even though it's not like working for the AP I guess or Newsweek, but in some ways the ability to just tell the story and not have to worry about all the political pressures that come down was helpful.
Well you know I was telling the audience before the break there that you were the guy who broke the story of Iran-Contra back in the day and I think it's kind of funny that we're basically dealing with the same group of criminals now as we did then.
What was then a kind of black budget, off the shelf, secret operation is now the Bush administration.
No, I think that's right, but also the theories that were behind Iran-Contra, the theories behind Iran-Contra were essentially the executive did not want the legislative branch to have any say in controversial foreign policies.
So the Reagan administration, with the help of people like Dick Cheney when he was then a Congressman, went around the law, ignored the law, and set up these secret operations off the books.
And that's really what Iran-Contra was, it became a precursor to what we see today with the idea that the executive branch could lie to the American people and lie to Congress and do what it wants.
And then they got caught, but because in the latter part of the 1980s they weren't really held to account, a number of them got pardoned, of course the Democrats did not really press it when the investigation could have gone much further.
So it essentially encouraged these same people when they took power again in George W. Bush's presidency to resume what they had been doing earlier, except in a more aggressive way, especially after 9-11, they felt they had carte blanche to move in those directions and to assert essentially an all-powerful executive, one that didn't have to respond to any law or the Constitution or public pressure, that they were on their own to do what they wanted.
So to understand Iran-Contra is very important in understanding what's happening today.
Wow, there's so many different directions I can go, I guess I'm going to try to go two at once and maybe you can find a way to answer them both at the same time.
Seymour Hersh reported, another great investigative reporter of the very few of you that there are left in this country, reported that Elliott Abrams and the boys held an Iran-Contra alumni meeting where they talked about lessons learned and the lesson was do everything through the vice president's office, don't include the CIA or any but the smallest parts of the military in what you're doing or else you'll get busted.
I guess I'll just let you answer that part first.
Well, if you remember, a big part of Iran-Contra that was missed or did not really get examined thoroughly enough was the role of the vice president's office in the mid-1980s and of course then the vice president was George H.W. Bush and he had been CIA director in the mid-1970s and so he brought a lot of those skills and the connections to that role and because he was able to use the sense that he was a Washington wise man to his advantage, he was never really aggressively pursued by the Iran-Contra investigations even though at the end of that investigation when Lawrence Walsh, the special prosecutor, was pursuing it, the focus was increasingly narrowing in on the vice president's office.
Lawrence Walsh had concluded that Donald Gregg, who was a former CIA man who was the national security adviser to Vice President Bush, that Gregg was a key figure in what was happening behind the scenes, that it wasn't just Ollie North running a little rogue operation, it was a much more systematic, serious operation.
And then you had people like Felix Rodriguez, the Cuban-American anti-communist former CIA who had been close to Bush or dealt with Bush when he was the director of CIA and then continued to work with Gregg and Bush when they were in the vice president's office.
You had a lot of people who were working on the Contra side of the operation who were close to Bush and taking direction from him, but because there had never been this full investigation and because the press lost interest and the Congress lost interest and then President Bush in December of 1992 pardoned six of the defendants to stop the investigation in effect, that pretty much ended it.
An interesting fact that people don't really know is that even after that, Lawrence Walsh who was a Republican by the way, but a very serious guy, was actively considering convening a new grand jury to possibly indict former President George H.W. Bush for obstruction of justice because there had been documents that Bush had withheld from the investigation that were not known until December of 1992.
But the pressure was so enormous on Walsh and his staff at that time being brought by the conservative news media, but also by a lot of people in Washington who wanted to see that story just go away, that Walsh folded his tent and chose not to get to the bottom of these things and wrapped it up.
But the fact that those historical questions were allowed to remain and were papered over or swept under the rug in the early stages of the Clinton administration, that lack of effort has come back to haunt the American people.
That's funny too because when I was in high school in the 1990s, I read Leslie Coburn's book Out of Control about Iran-Contra and part of the story then was that these were the same guys who ran all the covert operations during Vietnam selling drugs and the golden triangle and all that.
And so this is I guess the third generation of this same kind of group of covert operators and Republican scumbags.
Well, it's very hard to penetrate this group and it's not just because they're covert operators, it's also because they're very well connected in Washington.
They have a lot of powerful influential friends, the folks in the news media often are damaged if they pursue this too aggressively, so are members of Congress.
We saw it happen even if you go back to the 1970s when Senator Church and Congressman Pike were trying to get at some of the CIA abuses in the mid-1970s.
They were slapped down and turned into pariahs.
Again, a key figure in doing that was the popular CIA director George H.W. Bush when he was trying to extricate the agency from the scandals of that period.
He did so very effectively, but again with the cost of the American people knowing what the real story was.
So you do have this recurring inability to get to the bottom of things, get to the truth, and then we have to relive the same kind of scandals, the same kind of problems later.
And now the second part of that two-parter was going to be, here are these guys back in the 1980s, this Iran-Contra operation, selling missiles and all sorts of weapons to Iran who are now supposedly so insane that they can't be even met with, or we can't discuss any of the things we're threatening them over because they're crazy.
And yet it's the very same group of people who used to sell these guys weapons all the time and then spend the extra money financing the death squads in Nicaragua.
Well there's no question that this relationship between that group of Republicans and Iran should be thoroughly examined.
Some of those issues go back even to before Ronald Reagan took office, the so-called October surprise issue.
The evidence is actually overwhelming now that the Republicans, the Reagan-Bush campaign in 1980, did make overtures secretly to the Iranians in an effort to undermine Jimmy Carter who was, of course, trying to get 52 American hostages out of Iran.
And the frustration Americans felt toward his failure contributed to the fairly strong showing that Reagan had in November of 1980 and that led to the beginning of the Reagan-Bush era.
We still don't know the full story there, there's been a huge effort to ridicule it and suppress it, but the fact is we've been able to assemble them, and I do this in some detail in my book Secrecy and Privilege, the evidence is now almost incontrovertible that there was this effort.
There can still be debates about certain details of the historical record, but essentially that's been hidden away.
In an odd way, because the Iran-Contra scandal broke in the mid-1980s in 1986 and then was pursued in 1987 and onward, the idea was that that was a sort of short-term timeframe of when this was going on, and initially we thought it was an 1984 to 1986 operation, but it turned out as we were going back further that those dealings did go back further, we knew the shipments of weapons went back to the very first days of the Reagan presidency through Israel, that we were able to confirm, and the evidence does stretch back even further that the Republicans were in these secret dealings with Iran.
Those relationships are extremely twisted and curious at this point, and there is this issue of whether or not the Iranians actually know facts about our history that we don't, and that we should clear the air once and for all on all these issues, and so the American people, the next time they're told we have to go to war over something, at least know what the background is and who did what to whom and when and how.
Wasn't it just last week in the Republican debate that one of the candidates said that those Iranians, boy, they took one look at Ronald Reagan's determination in his eyes and they immediately cowered and released all the hostages?
That was Giuliani, I think, but I think that's the myth, that's the narrative.
And interesting, if you look at this in a historical context, in a way what we've seen in the United States is a separation of the official narrative of our recent history from the actual reality, the base-ground reality of it all.
So the myth is that the Iranians looked Reagan in the eye and they were scared and they turned over the hostages immediately.
There was a joke that was going around in January of 1981, what is two feet deep and glows in the dark, and the punchline was Tehran a minute after Ronald Reagan becomes president.
And that was sort of that tough guy talk that we now of course have grown to know and love even more so, but the reality appears to have been very different.
The reality seems now to have been that there had been a previous arrangement, that American weapons began to flow immediately after Reagan became president, secretly to Iran, that some of that actually was partly known because one of the planes, an Israeli-controlled Argentine plane that was delivering some of the weapons was shot down straight over Soviet territory.
And that came out actually in June of 1981, but was very quickly swept under the rug, was never pursued, and that would have been a window into what was actually occurring.
So we now know that there were these shipments in the documentary record that we've been able to assemble, partly from congressional investigations and partly through what Lawrence Walsh did, and probably through our own work, we can now show people pretty much how this thing took shape.
But all that's very important because we have in a sense a false narrative that's been created as our history, and many, many Americans, because they hear it repeated over and over again, believe in this false narrative, they believe certain facts that aren't facts.
And that's been a real failure of the Washington press corps, and of our media in general.
Well, the average person now, I think, believes that Iran is going to have a nuclear weapon any day now, and that they're responsible for the deaths of the American GIs and Marines fighting in Iraq, and that we might have to have a war against them.
Well, I think there is a lot of disinformation, or at least exaggerated information, that's been developed.
Much as it happened, we saw before the war in Iraq, this idea of cherry-picking the intelligence.
Nothing's really changed.
I mean, there's an interesting point where people in Washington now say, oh, well, of course, we all knew.
We all knew.
Oh, yeah, we all know the intelligence on Iraq was all garbage, was wrong.
But what they haven't dealt with is that the intelligence continues to be abused.
George Bush continues to misstate what the U.S. intelligence community knows.
And much of that remains secret, because it's hidden, there's not an effort to pry it out, and Bush goes ahead and misstates what the facts are, at least what the facts are known to the intelligence community.
For instance, the intelligence community knows, based on captured al-Qaeda documents, that al-Qaeda wants the United States to stay in Iraq, that this is helping al-Qaeda enormously in terms of building itself up as an international force.
But the official narrative is that al-Qaeda wants America to leave and that therefore we have to stay to thwart al-Qaeda, but that isn't what the documentary evidence is.
I have Brian Ross's story from ABC News right here from May 5th in a new video posted today on the internet.
Al-Qaeda's number two man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, mocks the bill passed by Congress, setting a timetable for the pullout of U.S. troops in Iraq.
This bill will deprive us of the opportunity to destroy the American forces which we have caught in a historic trap, Zawahiri says in answer to a question posed to him by an interviewer.
Starting in the same tone, Zawahiri says, we ask Allah that they only get out of it after losing 200,000 to 300,000 killed in order that we give the spillers of blood in Washington and Europe an unforgettable lesson.
Well, it seems for a long time what Bush was saying was that since al-Qaeda wanted us to leave we had to stay, as he said over and over again, we must listen to what the enemy says.
That's what John McCain said in the debate is if Harry Reid says we lost, well then who won, al-Qaeda?
Right.
But the problem becomes that we know from capturing their documents that, and this goes for instance, there was a letter written by a fellow named Atiyah who was a top lieutenant to bin Laden.
He wrote it to Zarqawi back in December of 2005.
It was captured after Zarqawi was killed in June of 2006.
In this letter, Atiyah says, and it's posted on the West Point's counter-terrorism website, Atiyah says, prolonging the war is in our interest.
They're quite clear about this.
There was a previous letter that was intercepted from Zawahiri who is warning and concerned that if the Americans leave prematurely, the forces that al-Qaeda was building in Iraq would disintegrate, that the young jihadists would just go home, drop their guns and go home because they were there to fight the Americans.
That's what drew them to Iraq.
So the al-Qaeda strategy in Iraq has been to have the Americans there as a way then to pull in recruits, strengthen themselves, and then ultimately harden these recruits into really tough terrorists.
In a way, what the United States has been doing is playing exactly into bin Laden's hands.
There was even an interesting point in late October 2004, the Friday before the election, the presidential election in the United States, bin Laden releases for the first time in about a year a videotape in which he denounces Bush and decries Bush, in which Bush's supporters then spun into an endorsement of John Kerry.
And that was an important point.
It showed that Bush was in basically a dead heat with Kerry at the time, according to the polls, he then jumped to about a five or six point lead.
He won in the official tally anyway by about two and a half percent.
So this was a significant factor.
The Friday before the U.S. election, internally, the CIA concluded that bin Laden released the tape knowing that it would help Bush, doing so because he wanted Bush to get re-elected.
It was sort of like the old Brer Rabbit story about, don't throw me into the briar patch when that's exactly where you want it to go.
But that was the point, that the CIA recognized that what Al Qaeda wanted was to continue Bush's policies in Iraq and generally in the war on terror for another four years, because they knew that he was their perfect foil, that he was despised throughout the Middle East, that they could use him to sort of essentially mainstream themselves with many people in the Middle East, that they would be the defenders against the evil Bush.
So in a sense, what has been happening in the United States, and what is known to the U.S. intelligence community, is that these policies have been playing into the hands of Al Qaeda, yet Bush is able to sort of spin it all around and pretend like he's the one who's the guy who really is defending us against Al Qaeda.
So it's a case, again, of a false narrative that's been created, which the U.S. intelligence community knows is false, and Bush surely has conveyed this to the administration, but it doesn't matter, because Bush can simply go to his friends in the news media, obviously Fox News, the Washington Times, yesterday the Washington Times, their headline banner was War Debate Helps Al Qaeda.
And so in other words, the actual opposite of what they're saying is the truth as known to the U.S. intelligence community.
But so this distortion of fact and reality continues to this day.
It did not stop in 2002 and 2003, when we discovered there were no weapons of mass destruction hidden in Iraq, it has continued to the present.
Yeah, and even as the media says, well, you're right, we were all terribly wrong about that back then, they still continue to be wrong, whether it's about Iran, Iraq, Al Qaeda, or any of the rest of this.
And another thing that Bush has pushed, which never gets challenged these days, he says over and over again, I'm the guy who listens to the commanders, he said the other day, I'm a commander guy.
Well, that isn't true.
And the U.S. news media knows it's not true.
What happened in December of 2006, was that Bush overruled the commanders, the commanders Abizaid and Casey were saying we don't we should not escalate the war, we should they would just be counterproductive.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff agreed with them.
According to a Washington Post story, it was unanimous that the Joint Chiefs of Staff opposed the surge.
Bush went ahead with the surge anyway, he basically fired Casey and Abizaid, he put in two new commanders who would do what he wanted, and then he steps back and says, I'm the guy that listens to the commanders.
Now, and that was repeated in the this morning's, I mean, maybe yesterday's New York Times, the same argument, the same claim by Bush, I'm the guy that listens to the commanders, it is almost never challenged.
Right.
It isn't true.
And what he's saying is, as opposed to the Congress, which is trying to micromanage the war, which is, you know, unsaid premise, why we lost Vietnam.
Well, that's also part of the narrative.
The narrative is, and we've seen that now with with Vice President Cheney picking this up, of course, his history goes back to that period quite a bit.
But this idea that if it hadn't been for the Congress losing support or ending support for the war in 1975, the United States would have won the war in Vietnam, that it's simply a false narrative.
The reality is that anyone can sort of go back historically and find is that Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense at the time, and other leading figures in the in the Johnson administration, knew the war was unwinnable.
They concluded that fairly early on.
But they continued the war because they felt they couldn't suffer the political consequences.
There was really no way that war was going to be won.
It was also the conclusion, by the way, of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger when when they took it over.
And in fact, the American participation in that war, in terms of combat troops being used, was phased out by 1972 and 1973.
Then the period followed where the US supported the South Vietnamese military, and eventually that's what was stopped, but that was not going to work either.
It was just extending the killing endlessly.
There was no real hope to win that war.
But we now are living with a narrative, and that we've seen repeated now by Vice President Cheney and alluded to by President Bush, that if it hadn't been for Congress pulling the rug out from under the Vietnam War, the US would have won.
It just isn't true.
It's not historically accurate.
And now back to the distortions about Al Qaeda in Iraq.
I want to quote to you a bit from James Bamford's book, A Pretext for War, when he talked about bin Laden and Zawahiri and what they said even before, or I guess immediately after September 11th, basically explaining why they did it.
He says, Iman al-Zawahiri argued that Al Qaeda should bring the war to the distant enemy in order to provoke the Americans to strike back and personally wage the battle against Muslims.
That was a direct quote.
It was that battle that bin Laden and Zawahiri wanted to spark with the 9-11 attacks as they made clear in their declaration of war against Jews and Crusaders.
They believed that the United States and Israel had been waging wars against Muslims for decades.
Now their hope was to draw Americans into a desert Vietnam with bin Laden and the role of North Vietnamese President Ho Chi Minh.
Right.
Actually, it goes back even before 9-11, bin Laden had believed that the attack on the USS Cole was going to provoke a similar reaction.
And that was, of course, in the fall of 2000.
Bad timing with the election there.
It was also bad timing because the US could not conclude immediately that it was an Al Qaeda operation.
They suspected it, but they didn't have the hard facts.
So Clinton held off, not because he didn't want to hit back, but because they weren't sure.
By the time they concluded that it was an Al Qaeda operation, it was January of 2001, and they passed it on to the incoming Bush administration, thinking they shouldn't start something with a new president coming in.
The Bush administration essentially pooh-poohed the whole thing.
They did not take Al Qaeda seriously.
That was one of those Clinton obsessions, in their view.
They were focused more on China and on the Star Wars missile defense program.
Those were their high priorities.
So that's what happened.
The key point is there, and you're correct, that bin Laden's strategy was to draw the United States in a clumsy reaction to some provocation, and thereby creating more hostility to the West, allowing him to present himself as a defender of Islam, allowing his radical strategies to prevail, ultimately.
And the way you approach this, if you're a counter-insurgency person or a counter-terrorism person, is you approach it very subtly and carefully.
You realize that you don't want to fall into that trap.
Right.
If the action is in the reaction, then you want to give as little reaction as possible.
Or you want your action to be extremely careful, extremely targeted, and you also want to deal with the legitimate concerns and grievances of people in that region.
So you really want to solve or show yourself as an even-handed broker when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or you want to show that you are being more responsible in terms of dealing with some of these authoritarian regimes, like the Saudi Arabians or the Egyptians.
You want to show that you really have a desire to help the people of that region.
That's the key.
It's always been the key to counter-insurgency.
It is to establish the idea that you can appeal to the hearts and minds of any of these populations.
The more you do the opposite, the more you overreact, the more you kill civilians, the more you just drop bombs in a willy-nilly way, as we've been seeing, the more you commit conventional military forces to a situation, the more you play into the hands of the insurgents or whoever you're in conflict with.
It doesn't work.
And that's well known to counter-insurgency people for years and decades.
So basically bin Laden outsmarted Bush.
Bush became his perfect foil.
Or you could argue, as we have at consortiumnews.com in a couple of pieces, that there's a symbiotic relationship that has existed.
Right.
Bush is bin Laden's bin Laden, basically.
Right.
Bin Laden has worked, that Bush has helped bin Laden establish himself more as an historic figure with a much greater reach within the Islamic world than he ever deserved.
On the other hand, Bush has been able to use bin Laden to consolidate his powers as the executive, the unitary executive, as they like to say, the commander-in-chief with plenary powers.
Plenary meaning unlimited, full, total.
And the interesting thing about Bush's theories about plenary powers is that what he is saying is that for the duration of the war on terror, across any geographic territory in which the war on terror applies, Bush, as commander-in-chief, should have ultimate or plenary powers.
Total powers.
And that includes America as the battlefield.
But the difference between this and other wars, people say, well, you know, what happened with FDR in World War II and the Japanese internment camps, or Abraham Lincoln in the Civil War, the difference is that those wars were definable conflicts.
They had beginnings and they had ends.
And there also was generally a territorial limit.
What Bush is saying is that the global war on terror is everywhere, and the battlefield includes the United States, and that he as commander-in-chief in this indefinite war against an indefinite enemy should be allowed to exercise those powers essentially forever.
So everywhere and forever.
That's the difference between what happened in previous points and now.
So what Bush is saying is that the Constitution doesn't apply, the laws don't apply, the treaties don't apply, nothing applies.
It's entirely up to him as this commander-in-chief to decide whether you should be locked up indefinitely, whether you should be tortured, whether the country should go to war, whatever.
And that's a distinctly different situation than this country has ever seen.
And it's an historic event that the American press corps has not described to the American people in those terms.
And it is logically based upon what Bush and his people have said publicly.
It was first done more subtly, or you didn't hear about it back in 2002, it was implicit, but it was not spelled out.
But by the time you get to the 2000s of the disclosures about the warrantless wiretaps that came out in December of 2005, once you get to early 2006, Attorney General Gonzalez and other administration spokesmen are clearly explaining their view that the president has unlimited powers, which means the unalienable rights that Americans define themselves through no longer exist.
If the president decides whether you have them or not, they're no longer unalienable.
As we know from going back to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, those rights don't exist anymore.
Bush may let you have them, he may not take away your rights, maybe just take the other guy's rights, but he is the decider when it comes to who gets rights and who doesn't.
You know, during the recount in Florida in the year 2000, when it was still being law-suited back and forth who was going to be the president, George Bush was interviewed on 60 Minutes 2, and they asked him, and I wish I could get the audio of this, they asked him, Governor Bush, what are your core principles?
For people who don't know you, who want to get to know you a little bit better, you might become the president.
Now, what do you really believe?
What's your center that people need to understand?
And he just blurted, sometimes the individual has to sacrifice for the good of the whole.
That's his core belief.
That's the one thing he knows to be true.
He also said in the same time frame, as sort of a joke, that sometimes it's good to have a dictatorship as long as I'm the dictator, that's a bit of a paraphrase, but it's close to his quote.
I mean, these are strong, there's a strong sense of privilege and egotism that has run through this person, and it's been reinforced by the neoconservatives who have been pushing this idea of an imperial president, going back to the 1970s, was certainly felt by Vice President Cheney, who was the Chief of Staff for Gerald Ford, when he saw the efforts by Congress to reassert its some controls over the executive back in that time frame.
And Cheney's been chasing under those restrictions ever since, and made clear during the Iran-Contra period, when he and David Addington, who's now, of course, his Chief of Staff, but Addington then was working for Cheney, and they put together the so-called Minority Report on Iran-Contra, which came out in 1987.
And the Minority Report essentially argued these points, that the Congress should not intercede with these presidential powers.
So this has been a belief they've had, and it certainly fed the ego of George Bush.
And after 9-11, there was this myth that was created that Bush had these incredible instincts that his gut, as they would say, was the right man, as I think one of the book titles was called at the time.
Even though he fled in cowardly terror and didn't come back to D.C. that night until 7 o'clock.
I was working, I was an editor at Bloomberg News on that day, because we run out of money basically for our operations, and I worked there for four years while we kept the website alive on a part-time basis.
But it was, so that day was of course a very memorable day, but because the attacks were in lower Manhattan, at least most of them, the two major ones, that the stock markets were closed.
And Bloomberg News is essentially aimed at the stock market, it's a business wire service.
But nobody left.
And we knew, after the attack on the Pentagon, we knew there was a fourth plane.
We knew it was headed to Washington.
We didn't know what would happen, and the Bloomberg office was two blocks from the White House.
So it was sort of odd, nobody moved, no one panicked, nobody fled.
And we weren't really doing anything that useful, I mean, we weren't even, the stock markets were closed, we weren't even helping those folks.
And really, there was very little panic in Washington that day, despite the horror of it.
The one guy who seemed to panic was George W. Bush, who went in the opposite direction.
Yeah, who was hundreds and hundreds of miles away and perfectly safe.
Right.
And there was this bizarre fear that somehow Air Force One was going to be struck by some passenger airliner while, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was way over.
They admitted later that that was a lie, that basically Cheney was just trying to keep Bush away probably.
Well, whatever the case was, Bush certainly seemed to be a shaken fellow that day, and he didn't respond even when he was, as the famous scene, and that was, that was basically kept from the American people, by the way, even though it was the film, the scene in that classroom when he's reading the children's book to the kids, was filmed by news organizations.
But it was kept from the American people until Fahrenheit 9-11 came out, in part because there was a sense that there was a desire in the news media not to undermine the president.
Right.
The news media stopped doing its job, its job is to tell the American people the facts.
But instead, this was a case where there was a sense that, oh, if we show this kind of thing in this way, in a critical way, then it will undercut the president and we better buck him up because there's a crisis going on, which I understand the thinking, but it's not journalistic thinking.
Right.
Well, and I think you got it wrong.
I mean, it might be your job to give us the facts at Consortium News.
It's their job to give us the narrative.
Well, you could argue that, I suppose.
I'm just saying that from a journalistic theory, the role of the press is to inform the public, not to disinform the public or spin the public.
But you're right.
Often, as we saw happen during that period, there was a real eagerness, willingness, fear, if you will, on the part of the American press to follow the narrative that President Bush wanted.
And that really actually had begun, if you go back even to that period of the recount and even before that to the election, there was a real animosity in the Washington press corps toward Al Gore, which was expressed in many, many ways, including these apocryphal stories about him saying he invented the internet and that he claimed that he found Love Canal and all.
These were basically false stories that the media loved, and even when they were shown to be false, continued perpetrating, because basically there was a sense of anger and annoyance with the Clinton-Gore crowd, and there was a real eagerness to have the so-called adults come back in charge, and that was the Bush group with the adults.
So there was this bias that existed throughout the press corps at that time and continued on into the pre-9-11 period.
And then if you remember, after 9-11, one thing that happened was that the press recount that had been going on in Florida came out, and what the facts were, based on that recount, the facts were that no matter what kind of chad you used, the punch-through, the half-punch-through, whatever you wanted to use, Al Gore won that election in Florida, based on the legally countable votes, but the press, when that came out in November of 2001, the major news organizations hid that element, you could find it if you read far enough into the story, but they essentially spun it around to say that Bush won this recount, when he didn't.
If the recount was based simply on the legally cast votes in Florida, Al Gore won.
But they didn't want to say that, because that would undermine Bush at that time.
So you had here the major news organizations of the United States willfully misinforming the American people about something as significant as who should have been president.
From their point of view, it made sense, because if they'd come out and said, you know, Gore should have won this election, then that would have first undercut Bush, understandably, and secondly, it would have led to a lot of criticism of the news organizations, you know, why are you saying this now, we're in a crisis, Gore's not going to be president, so why are you even bothering?
So what the decision was inside these New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, the major news organization, was to sort of hide the lead and go with some partial thing that if certain votes hadn't been counted, Bush would still win, that kind of approach.
But the only thing anyone really cared about when that thing was started was, well, if all the legal votes were counted, who would have won?
If that's the question, the answer was Al Gore.
Although, and I understand you're making the point about the media and everything, but Al Gore was basically trying to steal the election as much as Bush was.
He wanted to recount only in the three counties where he was pretty sure he was way ahead instead of a statewide one.
I think that is a bit of a myth.
First of all, Al Gore immediately, and when this thing started, he said, let's have the whole state recounted.
Bush refused.
Then Gore's lawyers felt, well, we have to sort of show there's some problem in some of these places.
So they picked these counties.
Logically speaking, by the way, if you wanted to find areas where Gore might have gained more votes, you would have probably done recounts in Republican counties, because the theory would be that, well, in a Republican county, they're more likely to be able to throw away Democratic votes than they are in a Democratic county.
So what Al Gore wanted initially was a full recount, and that was blocked by Bush.
He then went for something he thought he could get.
At the end of the day, when you get to December, after the state Supreme Court ruling, they gave wide latitude to a circuit judge who was intent upon not just counting the so-called undervotes, which were the ones that didn't show a presidential choice, but the overvotes as well, the ones where someone wrote in Gore's name and punched his name.
Those were legally cast votes.
If those had been counted, and that's where Gore actually gained a lot in those overvotes, if those had been counted, regardless of what kind of standard you used, Gore won.
All right, I'm sorry, we're just all out of time.
But you're right, you do remind me that Gore did initially want a statewide recount and then settled for the three.
You got me on that for sure.
But all right, we're all out of time.
I'm sorry, show's over.
Thank you very much.
Consortiumnews.com is where you can find what Robert Perry writes, and he is indeed one of the top three or four or five investigative reporters in the whole wide world.
So please check it out, consortiumnews.com.
Thanks again, Robert.
Thank you.
This has been Antiwar Radio on Chaos Radio 959 in Austin, Texas.
Thanks for listening.
