Welcome back to Antiwar Radio Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas.
Our next guest is Robert Perry from ConsortiumNews.com.
He's the author of Secrecy and Privilege and Neck Deep, and one of America's great investigative reporters.
Welcome to the show, Robert.
Thanks, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
It's good to have you back here on the show.
Many people may not be too familiar with your history.
You were one of the sharpest reporters on the story of the Iran-Contra scandal and the secret government basically operating somewhat under the auspices of the Reagan administration back in the 1980s.
And I think you've told me before on this show that the funny thing about Iran-Contra is when you start peeling the layers of the onion, boy, is it sure hard to find the origin of this thing.
It just seems to keep going back further, further, further.
And then now in our new century, it seems like we're living the Iran-Contra scandal again in the way this government, well, in the way the vice president's office has basically made so many end runs around the rest of the permanent government in order to get their policies through in that same sort of fashion.
But now you've gone through and found in the archives somewhere the missing chapter of, is it the Walsh Report, the Iran-Contra commission report, Bob?
No, this was a chapter that was supposed to be in the congressional Iran-Contra report.
It came out in October of 1987.
And what was interesting about this chapter was that it dealt with how the Reagan administration had instituted a domestic propaganda operation using people assigned from the Central Intelligence Agency, experts in propaganda and disinformation, who then oversaw ways of trying to manipulate public opinion, intimidate the Washington press corps, and also in various ways punish members of Congress who were getting in the way of President Reagan's desire to support the Nicaraguan Contras who were fighting then against the leftist Sandinista government.
It's a remarkable chapter because it actually makes these conclusions that under the Reagan administration, the CIA, in effect, was turned against the American people and was performing functions like it would do in an enemy state where the CIA goes abroad and tries to spread black propaganda, disinformation, undermine political opponents, and so forth.
Essentially, what happened under President Reagan was the same approach was taken, but domestically.
And that is not what the CIA is, of course, supposed to do.
In fact, there have always been rules against the CIA operating domestically.
But the way this was structured was that they took one of their top propaganda experts, a guy named Walter Raymond, Jr., from the CIA and moved him over to the National Security Council to essentially externalize him from the CIA.
And then he oversaw this operation from there, similar to what they did when they had Oliver North out of the NSC staff running the Contra War and claiming that it wasn't really a CIA operation.
It wasn't a Pentagon operation.
It was something else.
It was something actually being run out of the White House.
So this idea of playing games with the law and the technicalities was part of this.
But the more significant point was that the American people were targeted by what they called a perception management campaign, which was designed to change how they saw the threat or the enhanced threat, as the Reagan administration tried to make it, of the Nicaraguan government and thus justify the kinds of attacks that were being supported by the United States against the Nicaraguans.
And then the other important point is that much of this that was sort of suppressed at the time, this chapter was dropped from the final report as part of a compromise.
Some of the Democrats on the Iran-Contra investigation, people like Congressman Lee Hamilton, who was the chairman of the House side, wanted to have some bipartisanship.
He wanted to have some Republicans sign the majority report.
And there were three moderate senators, Rudman, Tribble, and Cohen, who agreed to sign on to the majority report.
Part of the price that they asked for was the deletion of this very sensitive section.
And a few parts of it were stuck into the executive summary, but the real conclusions and the evidence behind it were essentially lost on the cutting room floor.
And so this chapter sort of ended up just disappearing into the files.
And as I was going through some historical records just a couple weeks ago, I stumbled upon it.
Now, back then in the 1980s when you were writing, I think, for the Associated Press, right?
Right.
Well, in 1987, I'd gone to Newsweek.
I was with the AP up through early 1987, and then I went to Newsweek.
Did you suspect then that the CIA was involved in the American media on this issue then?
Well, sure.
I mean, we thought of it differently because we were among the targets of this operation because we were digging up information that did not fit with the propaganda themes.
We were describing what was actually happening with the Contras, some of the unsavory aspects of their operations.
Some of them engaged in terrorism.
Some of them engaged in drug trafficking.
They were just taking out in certain villages.
They'd go in and kill a lot of people.
So the Contras were quite an unsavory lot.
There were some good people in the movement, but a lot of them were not.
And that was not what the American people were supposed to know.
So there was this effort to contain these damaging disclosures.
One of them was the fact that many of the Contra units were engaged in drug trafficking.
And we broke that story at AP in December of 1985.
So we were kind of targeted by what we saw was what was called a public diplomacy team, which was based at the State Department.
And it was under a guy named Otto Reich, who was sort of a right-wing Cuban-American, very aggressive.
And he was sending his teams of people around to bureaus in Washington to lobby editors and bureau chiefs to silence, remove, fire reporters who were not towing the line.
And they were having a remarkable success at this.
So a number of reporters were finding their careers being damaged for basically telling the truth and doing their jobs.
And so I was seeing – we were seeing it from that point of view.
And we knew many of the players involved because you'd also talk to them.
Even when they were trying to attack you, you'd still be – they'd be people you would check in with once in a while.
They were – because they had information and they would sometimes share information.
A lot of it turned out to be propaganda, as we found out.
But you would get to know these people.
So we were aware of this.
What we were not aware of at the time, which came out – which actually I found out in some of the documents that were released during the Iran-Contra investigation in 1987, was that there was this other level to it, that it went back to the White House, back to the National Security Council, and back to this CIA officer who was the expert in these areas and who was overseeing the entire operation.
And that's what we were not aware of.
Also, we were not fully aware that William Casey, who was director of CIA, had a direct hand in these operations to try to change how Americans perceived events.
Right.
In fact, you quote in your article, Iran-Contra's Lost Chapter at ConsortiumNews.com, you quote from the report where the guy is talking about a phone conversation, or maybe multiple phone conversations, with Casey, the director of the Central Intelligence.
And he's saying that he was trying to change the subject because, apparently, he was really worried that the director himself was getting this far involved in the process of lying the American people into supporting the Contras.
Right.
Walter Raymond was a fairly sharp guy.
And he did try to take some steps to insulate himself from what he knew to be a legal problem, because the agency is forbidden to be involved in this sort of thing.
So after he went to the NSC, he does resign from the CIA.
And he tries to sort of get Casey to be a little bit more low-key in his efforts to sort of manage this operation, because this is improper.
So Raymond was playing kind of a middle role.
The key point, though, whether Raymond was still in the agency or had externalized himself from the agency, the key point was they were using the techniques that the CIA had perfected in going after governments in places like Chile or Iran or Guatemala.
And they were just using those same kinds of concepts against the American public.
So whether you are officially working at the CIA or not, the more significant point is that the government's applying propaganda tricks to get the American people to fall into line.
But anyway, Raymond was sensitive to that point, as you say.
And he did have conversations with Casey, but he never was able to get Casey really to back off.
Casey saw this as a very important element of what he wanted to do.
So Casey was not someone, as those who followed him knew, who cared a lot about the fine points of law.
He was more interested in getting his way and doing what he thought was necessary.
And now, I'm sorry, because we've already sort of gotten a few minutes into this, but I'd like to give a little bit of background for the youngsters in the audience and people who aren't too familiar with the background, the story of what was happening in Nicaragua at this time.
The American puppet dictator Somoza was overthrown by the leftist Sandinistas.
And then the Contras basically, if I understand correctly, were basically a private army of machete-wielding butchers who went after women and children and never really even had the slightest chance of becoming the government of Nicaragua.
They were basically just terrorists, for killing people's sake and making money.
Well, obviously the Contras were somewhat of a mixed bag.
There were certainly people like you're describing.
There was one guy who went by the codename Suicida, and he went on rampages in northern Nicaragua from bases in Honduras.
And he did exactly that.
They would slaughter a number of civilians.
They'd rape women.
They'd execute people who were professionals who might have some kind of government job with the central government.
They'd line them up and shoot them.
They'd torture people.
This was a pretty bad operation in many ways.
Much of the reality was seeping back to Washington, despite efforts by the Reagan administration to keep it under wraps.
So Congress got increasingly concerned that the U.S. government was backing this kind of activity.
And the Congress stepped in in the early part of the 1980s, going through the middle of the 1980s, and said, first of all, this has to be contained, and then later they cut off the funding altogether, the so-called Boland Amendment.
And what we saw was important then because it really was – now it has been replayed in the present sense that President Reagan and Vice President George H.W. Bush, as well as CIA Director William Casey, did not want to accept what the law said.
So they simply took it all underground.
Much as we've seen President George W. Bush do when he's facing legal restrictions these days, where he's under – there are some – there are laws saying you can't be involved in torture, you can't be involved in some of the violent activities that have been going on in the last several years.
Basically, the key has been always to sort of put those under wraps, keep the American people blinded to these realities, so they can be sold more effectively to the public and to Congress.
And the precursor to what we've seen today was Iran-Contra.
And Iran-Contra ultimately was – the Reagan administration decided it was going to continue to arm the Contras, regardless of what the law said, and they decided to violate other laws relating to Iran.
They wanted to ship missiles to the Iranian mullahs as part of another scheme they were engaged in.
And that violated the Arms Export Control Act, which was – in which the government – the administration has to notify Congress of these kinds of shipments.
And two, it violated the rules against terrorism, since the Iranian government was on the terrorism list at the time.
So instead of trying to justify what seemed like a rather crazy scheme, the Reagan administration simply lied about it.
And they did it sub rosa and kept the Congress completely in the dark, until it ultimately got exposed by a magazine article in Beirut in November of 86.
A month earlier, even though we've been writing about Oliver North's activities at the AP, and there are a few other stories here and there, those stories were mostly not taken very seriously until one of North's planes was shot down in Nicaragua in October of 86.
The Hassenfuss plane, right?
Right.
It was the one – and it was a guy who survived the plane.
The plane was shot down by some – there was a Sandinista draftee, a teenager, who had a – they gave him a Russian-made SAM missile, service-to-air missile, and he fired it at the plane, and he was amazed that it went in the right direction.
And in fact, it hit the plane, and Hassenfuss, who was about to kick a load of guns out for the Contras, was near the door, the door was open, and he was able, with his parachute, to get out the door and was able to parachute to safety.
Everyone else on the plane – there were several other people on board – they died.
But Hassenfuss was captured and began pretty much immediately saying that he was working not only for the CIA, but for the Vice President's office, the Vice President George H.W. Bush.
Oh, now, but wait a minute, because I've heard a million times that poor H.W.
Bush was just out of the loop in the Reagan administration in the Vice President's office over there, Bob.
Well, I think in many ways, George H.W. Bush was kind of Reagan's Cheney, if you will.
He was very much the guy that Reagan used to carry out many of these foreign policy functions and adventures.
Remember, George H.W. Bush had been Director of Central Intelligence in 1976, so he was equipped in these areas and knew many of the key players to work with.
And in fact, one of his national security advisors was a guy named Donald Gregg, who was, first of all, not only a career CIA guy, but he was also the person who recruited Walter Raymond from the CIA to come over to the White House to begin to perform this propaganda function.
What we saw was almost a test run for what we're actually experiencing these days.
And the fact that they got away with so much of it – yes, we did catch them a bit.
Yes, some people actually were convicted.
Of course, President Bush, before he left office, pardoned half a dozen of them.
Including Elliott Abrams, who's on the National Security Council right now.
Right.
But the point was that since they mostly got away with it, they didn't really – the American public never got a full sense of what had happened or why it was such a problem.
And the Democrats played their role that they've gotten very accustomed to, which is to not want to have too much hard feeling and not want to really dig too hard.
And can they just sort of get past this and move on?
That was sort of what happened then.
And as we've seen, it's recurring.
The same pattern keeps recurring.
The Republicans behave very aggressively from the executive branch.
They do do what they want.
They sort of use propaganda.
They deceive the American people.
They push the limits.
And the Democratic role has often been to maybe make a few mild protests, and then essentially cave in.
I think it may have been the last time we spoke.
We talked about the Seymour Hersh article where they had this meeting celebrating some anniversary or another, I guess, of Iran-Contra and discussing the lessons learned.
And they were cut out the CIA, cut out as many people as you possibly can, run the whole thing out of the vice president's office because, you know, there's so few statutes that control his behavior, that kind of thing.
Right.
I mean, obviously they've even developed this new theory that the vice president is not part of the executive branch, and he's not part of the legislative branch either.
There was a line in a hearing last week when David Addington, who was Cheney's counsel and now he's the chief of staff, Addington was asked about this theory that the vice president doesn't really fall under either section since he does preside over the Senate technically.
And one of the congressmen asked if the suggestion was that the vice presidency was kind of a barnacle on the Constitution.
With this group, what they've been very good at is finding sort of semantical arguments and tying people up with them.
What is torture?
And they sort of play various word games with torture.
You know, what are the laws?
And not that they're very good arguments.
And we've certainly seen recently when these things reach even something like the appeals court.
The U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington just the other day dismissed one of the designations of a Chinese Muslim who had been at Guantanamo for six years.
They dismissed the allegation that he was an enemy combatant.
And the judges, including two Republican judges, in their opinion, they said they compared the arguments that the Bush administration was making to Lewis Carroll and one of the characters in one of his poems who said, If I repeat something three times, it's true.
And that's kind of what they were doing.
They were simply repeating something that had no basis in fact, but the Bush administration kept repeating it.
So the argument was, well, if we have enough government reports and give it to you, then you must believe it.
So when these things reach even people who are relatively conservative and some of them really sympathetic to the Bush administration, the arguments are often so transparently bogus that they don't sustain even in those kind of environments.
But the game has been always to come up with arguments, come up with word games.
By the time people figure them out and poke holes in them and knock them down, you're years into the process and there's not a tremendous amount of patience and stick-to-itiveness in Washington.
It's mostly move on to the next thing.
So if you stall, you generally win.
Well, one development over the last really, I guess, just the last decade or so that's really been a major change in American culture is the advent of Fox News.
And the effect of Fox News has gone far beyond just whatever bull is coming out over Channel 48.
Every other network, particularly in the run-up to the war, but even to this day, they apparently feel all this pressure to Fox News-itize themselves as much as they can.
And the flag-waving and the anonymous sourcing straight out of the Vice President's office and over the airwaves straight into our eyes and ears, this is a major thing.
And you talk about how in this last chapter of this congressional report on Iran-Contra that Rupert Murdoch was in on this CIA plot to lie to the American people about what was going on in Nicaragua way back in the early and mid-'80s.
Well, I think what's important about this report, its focus is this idea that there was this public and private collaboration to achieve these ends.
And essentially the Reagan administration decided that they needed to reach out to various entities that existed outside the government and coordinate with them so they could carry out functions that the government really couldn't.
So when they did this, they reached out to wealthy people and well-connected people who could assist in putting pressure on members of Congress or people in the media and in some ways the public more generally.
So this marriage of public and private money was central to this idea.
And so you had these various people who were showing up at that time, in that time frame, including Reverend Sung Myung Moon, the South Korean theocrat, who shows up with virtually unlimited amounts of money from his overseas operations, and he sets up the Washington Times in 1982.
The Washington Times was an avowedly right-wing publication that would plant stories against people who were causing trouble for the Reagan administration.
His paper would put stories in against journalists.
I was on the front page once being attacked for digging into some of the Contra abuses.
The story was against me, not about what the Contras were doing.
John Kerry, when he was digging into the Contra drug problem, he came under heavy attack, as did his investigators.
Lawrence Walsh, who was the special prosecutor on Iran-Contra, would come under regular attack from the Washington Times.
And when there would be campaigns, when you get to 1988, for instance, when George H.W. Bush is running for the presidency, he was trailing Michael Dukakis, who was considered at that time a kind of a serious technocrat who could make the government work and had done pretty well in Massachusetts.
But the Washington Times planted a story about him having psychiatric care, and it became one of the first real dents in Dukakis' reputation, even though it turned out to be untrue.
And so there were these kinds of almost – these are, again, very similar to what the CIA does in other countries, having entities like a newspaper, or in the case of some of Murdoch's operations that went on into also broadcast, but have these sort of private entities which are coordinated with the government planting stories about enemies, people that are supposed to be discredited and destroyed.
And so we saw that.
And then when Murdoch – Murdoch sort of shows up in actually the document that I obtained elsewhere, but it was a document from Walter Raymond's files, which showed him discussing with then-USIA director Charlie Wick this idea that there'd be money that Murdoch was making available that could be drawn down for some of these public diplomacy operations.
At that time in the early 80s, early to mid-80s, Murdoch was an Australian media baron.
News Corp was based in Australia.
And so he was, again, not an American, but he was helping out through money and through his banding media empire the cause of helping Reagan achieve his foreign policy.
And so you had – and of course Murdoch later on develops – sets up Fox News in the mid-1990s and continues on with this sort of approach, which is to attack enemies of the Republicans, to try to discredit them, ridicule them, do very much like what you would see happen in a propaganda operation overseas.
That's what's so extraordinary is that we've seen now the American people and people in the media and people in government be subjected to the same kinds of covert action, if you will, that the United States through the CIA has often inflicted on enemy states.
So now you're seeing people who are Democrats or liberals or journalists who won't play ball.
They're the ones being attacked and discredited.
So it's been a remarkable development.
But this chapter that was depressed in 1987 as part of this compromise lays it out, shows how this thing was created, draws these conclusions.
And the conclusions were extremely sensitive at that time.
And because it might have alerted the American people if it had been included in the final report, it might have alerted the American people to what was up.
But instead, Lee Hamilton, who was the House chairman, decided he'd rather have this veneer of bipartisanship.
So he agreed to, in exchange for the signatures of these three Republicans, that he would essentially throw this overboard.
Now, you mentioned the drug trafficking a couple of times, and I want to try to follow up on that a little bit.
When you were reporting that for the Associated Press and or Newsweek, whichever, back in the 1980s, is this the same story that Gary Webb reported for the San Jose Mercury News and then in his book Dark Alliance?
Well, in a sense, yes.
We reported in December of 1985 at AP that a number of the Contras on both the northern and southern front, that is in Honduras and Costa Rica, had become involved with various kinds of drug trafficking.
We didn't have the full story at the time, but we had a lot.
We had documents from Costa Rica.
We had interviews with key people in the Contra movement.
We even had some information out of the White House confirming our story.
So that's what we had then.
John Kerry then followed up on it and did a pretty good investigation under a lot of pressure and published a report in 1989 which took it further and showed that the U.S. government was even sending supplies to the Contras using airlines that were also caught up in drug trafficking.
But then the story, because it was essentially attacked and ridiculed in this process we've gotten used to, essentially died.
It was considered a big joke by many of the successful journalists in Washington as well as by the Republicans, and it was discredited in a sense, even though the facts were solid.
And then Gary Webb has the audacity in 1996 to revive it with his series for the San Jose Mercury News.
What Webb had that was different from us was, one, he focused, I thought, too much on one Contra drug supply operation, which was the one that went into Los Angeles.
He did, however, show that the consequences of some of the Contra drug trafficking was to help fuel the crack epidemic that damaged so much of America's inner cities during that period.
He, of course, also came under fierce attack, often by the mainstream journalists, who had survived this winnowing process that we saw in the 1980s.
So the people that survived were the ones who were playing ball with the conservatives and the Republicans.
So the New York Times and the Washington Post and the L.A.
Times, they dumped on Gary Webb for daring to revive this important story.
One thing Webb did do, however, is he got, and the Black Caucus as well and Congress, they got the CIA to investigate.
And the CIA, under Inspector General Frederick Hitz, did a very serious job.
And they ultimately produced two volumes of a report.
And the second volume was the most damning.
And what the CIA admitted to was that, yes, the Contras were deeply involved in drug trafficking.
They had become involved at the very beginning, by about 1980, when they were first taking shape, and they remained active in the drug trade right through to the end in about 1990.
That the CIA and the Reagan administration knew this, that evidence was hidden from not just from Congress, not just from John Kerry and the press, but also hidden from CIA analysts who might have blown the whistle.
It was hidden from DEA investigators who might have blown the whistle.
There was a conscious effort by the Reagan administration and its operatives in the CIA to make sure this information did not reach the American people.
So, again, this was, in a sense, part of this propaganda apparatus that you not only want to put out information that hurts your opponents, but you also want to protect information or hide information that undermines your propaganda themes.
And if your propaganda theme is that the Contras were freedom fighters, as Reagan called them, the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers, the moral equals of the French Resistance, these were the kind of hyperbolic claims that Reagan was making about the Contras.
If you want to sustain that, you can't allow information to get into the public domain that's taken seriously, which recognizes that these Contras are terrorists and drug traffickers.
So as part of the propaganda effort, you have to suppress that.
And that's what was part of this.
And so the battle was fought in the 1980s.
Oddly gets revived by his efforts in 1996.
Ultimately, the CIA admits to the crimes in 1998, but the CIA admissions almost go unreported.
There is a front-page piece in the New York Times which sort of says, yeah, well, I guess there was more to it than we originally thought, but kind of a grudging piece.
The LA Times never reported on volume two and its content, despite the fact that much of the story affected LA directly.
The Washington Post did a kiss-off story several weeks after this remarkable report came out.
That's one reason at Consortium News, I was writing about this, and I included the details in my book Lost History, which follows what the U.S. government ultimately admitted to.
It's an extraordinary development, but one that has never really penetrated the American consciousness the way it should have, in part because of the successful propaganda apparatus that this chapter addresses.
And they actually successfully destroyed the career and ultimately the life of Gary Webb for his efforts, too.
Right.
But you talked earlier about how in the 1980s, too, they went about destroying the careers of journalists who were actually doing their job.
These aren't just abstractions.
These are real people.
In the case of Gary Webb, he was driven to suicide over this.
Right.
Gary Webb, after he did his piece series in 1996, and actually my own criticism of Gary's piece, and I actually told him this myself, was he didn't go nearly far enough.
He was being attacked, obviously, for going too far, but the truth was it was much worse than what he described.
It wasn't just one channel of drugs into the Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area.
There were lines of drugs going to Miami, into Texas, around the country.
Hey, what about Arkansas?
Well, I've always thought that was a sidelight, that people focused on way too much.
The MENA stuff is kind of a sideshow, which got more attention than it deserved.
But it did happen.
There was the cocaine going in, Dan Lasseter and all that.
Well, I mean, no, I don't agree with that part.
I think there was an operation at MENA, but it was really a minor thing, and it was not.
This idea that Bill Clinton was involved is a lot of nonsense.
It's just a conspiracy theory, which was pushed very heavily by this propaganda operation, but it was not real.
But there was some element of truth there, but it didn't involve Clinton, which has always been the problem.
People want to throw Clinton into this, and that was a made-up story.
But as far as airplanes landing at the airstrip?
Yes, there was a small operation in MENA.
It was being used in part to help train some of the contra pilots.
As part of the propaganda operation, the Reagan administration tried to frame the Sandinistas, ironically, on drug trafficking.
And one of the great ironies here is that there really were no drugs going through Nicaragua at the time, at least to speak of, because the U.S. government had Nicaragua really under heavy surveillance, because there were suspicions they were running guns to other guerrilla groups and so forth.
So there was no real reason why, if you were a drug lord in South America, you'd want to send your stuff through Nicaragua, which had almost no trade relations with the United States and was under heavy surveillance.
It made much more sense to go through Costa Rica, through Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, any place but Nicaragua.
But the Reagan administration wanted to, as part of the propaganda, pin this thing on the Nicaraguans, on the Sandinistas.
There was only one captured shipment of cocaine during this entire period that went through Nicaragua, and that was flown in by the United States as part of one of these sting operations.
It landed in Nicaragua.
The plane was shot down.
A second plane had to go in and pick up the supply of cocaine to fly it back out.
And then they released some big public relations stunt saying the Sandinistas were responsible, but they weren't.
This was this operation out of MENA, the U.S. government's sting operation that was meant as a propaganda ploy.
So while the Contras really were doing the drugs, and we really couldn't talk about that in Washington without getting our heads handed to us, we were supposed to talk about how the Sandinistas were doing the drugs when they really weren't.
And not that they were nice people, but it made no financial sense for the drug lords to use them.
And secondly, the simple fact is, except for that one shipment that was the U.S. government shipment, there were never any drugs captured coming through Nicaragua.
Robert, would you say the story in the 1990s, pushed by Laurie Milroy and Judy Miller, that Ramzi Youssef, the guy who cooked the bomb for the First World Trade Center, was actually secretly an Iraqi intelligence agent and so forth, would that be this very same propaganda network that you're talking about?
Well, obviously things tend to morph and change, and it becomes sometimes not as clear-cut.
And even what we're talking about with the Contra operation, if you read this chapter and you see how it was done, there's a lot of misdirection that's put into it.
Since you're using a lot of private individuals, Oliver North might give a speech to one of them, they might be encouraged to give money to some private group, which then goes out and attacks, say, Congressman Michael Barnes, who was one of the problem congressmen at the time.
So things are often, you know, it's hard to sort of track it all precisely through.
And things, as I say, evolve over time.
And I don't know if there were certainly efforts to create other hysterias.
And the key point of why this is relevant to today is what we saw in 2002 and 2003, which was the same kind of program, to exaggerate the danger facing the American people from an external threat.
In the 1980s, we were supposed to think that the Sandinistas were going to take Texas, or they were going to capture the Panama Canal.
Those were two themes that were thrown out.
I remember people repeating what Reagan had said.
I never heard Reagan saying it.
I was a little kid.
But I remember people repeating him saying that, whatever, I forget.
It was only a one-day drive from Harlingen, Texas.
Yeah, there you go.
They're closer to Texas than we are here in D.C., something like that, yeah.
Right.
So we're supposed to be very fearful.
And if anyone visited Nicaragua during that time, and I did as a journalist, it was a very poor third-world country.
We used to talk about how they had maybe one working elevator in the entire country.
The idea that they were going to do any of these things was absurd.
I was at one sort of briefing at the Pentagon where they were telling us on this idea that there was nothing to stop the Sandinista army from marching down and capturing the Panama Canal.
And I asked somewhat puckishly, you know, might the 82nd Airborne show up?
You know, the idea that some peasant army was going to just, you know, march through countries and go take the Panama Canal was absurd.
But we were supposed to be very afraid of this.
And if you remember, there was even fear being ginned up about the Grenadians, you know, the little island of Grenada, that they were going to spread terrorism all around the hemisphere.
These were like the – what we were seeing was what was then refined and perfected in 2002 when we were then pitched the dangers from Iraq.
And you even had cases on the Iraqi side, if you remember some of this.
They were going to use these unmanned aircraft, these so-called UAVs, and they were going to fly over the United States and spray us with deadly chemical weapons.
Now, of course, these UAVs, which are almost like model airplanes, could not get anywhere even to the Mediterranean Sea, let alone across the Atlantic to the United States.
That was one of my favorites, too.
So some of these things are really absurd, but they're presented very seriously by this media we have.
Fox News will get all worked up about it.
And if Fox News gets worked up about it, MSNBC and CNN, you better believe that they're going to be more worked up about it.
And so the American people are constantly being misled through these propaganda techniques.
And since the whistle wasn't blown in 1987 when this was discovered, a lot has happened since then.
It should have – in my view, the full story should have been told then.
It wasn't.
We've made an effort to sort of correct some of that by publishing not just a story about this lost chapter, but we have a PDF file of the chapter itself, so if people want to read the whole thing, they can.
Right, and that's at ConsortiumNews.com.
And listen, I think I can get away with staying over if I can get another couple of answers out of you.
Sure.
First of all, I'd like to mention that you have this fundraiser going on at ConsortiumNews.com, and I've got to say, for whatever it's worth, that it's an invaluable resource to me, and you guys do really great work over there, and I'd like to see you make your money.
So I'll ask people to head on over to ConsortiumNews.com and help chip in.
This is always really great stuff.
I wanted to add something about the propaganda thing, how we've seen just in the last couple of months, Bob, how the New York Times came out with this, what, 8,000-word story or something?
The New York Times obtained 8,000 documents.
It was a really long article, though, too, wasn't it?
7,000 words.
It was a long article, too, but it was based on 8,000 documents that they obtained, and it was related to, again, the same idea, that the White House and the Pentagon were secretly using these retired military analysts who were showing up on Fox and MSNBC and CNN and, for that matter, the major networks, NBC, CBS, and so forth.
And they were speaking to many of the print journalists.
First of all, they were encoached by the Pentagon to put out warnings about Iraq and also positive spin on how the war was going in its early months and years.
And we now know that some of these analysts were working through contracts for the Pentagon, or they were directors on boards of military contractors.
And so they had a financial stake in maintaining their access to these top officials at the Pentagon and in the Bush administration.
So, again, the American people were being fed propaganda with the help, in this case, of the major news organizations in Washington to mislead them about the real dangers that were facing the United States and how severe they actually were or weren't.
And they were being told that the war in Iraq was going very well and that anyone who said otherwise was probably some kind of disloyal American.
So, again, it's the same concept.
The phrase that the neoconservatives developed in the 1980s was called perception management.
They saw their job as managing the perceptions of the American people, and they felt if they could scare the American people enough, they could get the American people to stampede in whatever direction they wanted.
And it worked.
Yeah, there was even a quote from Henry Kissinger one time, I think, about how he always watches the network news with the volume off because he doesn't care what they're saying.
He just cares about what order they're covering things in.
He knows what they're going to say, but he does still want to know what it is the American people are getting to look at each night.
Right, we're just here to be manipulated.
Yeah, and now what was really funny about this to me was how it was, what, six weeks later, or maybe eight weeks later, that Scott McClellan came out and accused the media of being a bunch of tools, and they said, what, who, us?
And as though this New York Times story had never come out, as though none of us have a long-term memory that stretches back to the beginning of this decade.
Well, that's true.
I mean, McClellan, I think he obviously should be faulted for not having protested in a more timely fashion.
But I think his complaint is well taken.
What he's saying is that the, first of all, that the Bush administration manipulated the facts to exaggerate the dangers, and two, that the, I think he called the Washington press corps enablers of all this.
And I think that's true as well because, and I worked for AP Newsweek, PBS.
I worked for Bloomberg News.
I worked for a lot of the mainstream news organizations.
And I have many friends at New York Times, Washington Post, and other places.
If you want to make your career, if you want to have a career that brings in the kind of money that people would like to have, a well-paying career, you better not cross these folks because they will destroy you.
There was a phrase they liked to use in the 80s.
They'd say, and they would say it to your face.
They'd say, if you keep this up, we will controversialize you.
Oh, nice.
What that meant was they would make you the issue, and they would plant stories about you, or they'd spread rumors about you.
In the case of some of the women reporters in Central America, some of these public diplomacy guys would whisper cocktail parties about how the women were sleeping with Sandinistas.
And so you'd get these kind of dirty tricks to discredit journalists.
And once the journalist has made part of the story, then the argument comes, well, the jury's gotten too close, or she's gotten too close to the story.
He or she has to be removed because they can't be objective.
And so they controversialize you, and then they push to have you removed.
And if your editors are weak, and many of them are weak, and their career is too in many cases, they will start saying, well, yeah, you know, they've got a point.
You know, you've been on the front page of the Washington Times being criticized for your coverage of something.
Maybe we can't really take that heat.
And before you know it, people are gone.
And there's one account that I recount in Lost History where Otto Reich and his public diplomacy guys went over to NPR, and they were mad that NPR had run a story about a Contra massacre.
The Contras had massacred a bunch of farm workers in a village, and actually NPR covered their funerals and sort of had a radio story about the suffering of this little village in Nicaragua.
And that infuriated the public diplomacy people because it obviously went against the propaganda themes.
So they went over and had a brown bag lunch at NPR with the NPR executives, and they complained, and they said, listen, we have a service that's timing you.
We're keeping track of how many minutes you have pro-Contra and anti-Contra stories, and you have too many anti-Contra minutes.
So NPR, after this complaint, when it came around to the next round of job evaluations, they essentially fired their foreign editor, a guy named Paul Allen, nice guy, I happen to know him, and he was told that it was because of this complaint.
So a lot of people you know and some people you don't know have had their careers ruined or badly damaged because they were telling the truth.
And you cannot always count on your editor or your news executive to be a brave person.
As I say, often they're not.
All right, now one more topic I wanted to get to here, and this is something you addressed in a recent article at ConsortiumNews.com as well, and you sort of brought it up earlier in the sense of the testimony of David Addington and John Yoo about the unlimited power of the presidency.
I was wondering if you've had a chance to watch the video of Christopher Hitchens being waterboarded yet.
No, I haven't.
Oh, well, it's up at VanityFair.com, and I watched it today, and they gave him a neat little way to tap out.
He held some metal objects in his hand, and all he had to do was let go of them, and they would bounce with lots of rackets off the garage floor.
Sort of a safe word?
Well, they gave him a safe word, too, but he said later he thought he was saying it, but no, apparently he wasn't, and it was a good thing that he had the other method to tap out because, anyway, the point is he lasted, I don't know, no more than 10 or 15 seconds, and, you know, I'm not making fun of him for it.
It looks like a pretty horrible thing to go through, but we all know what a tough guy Christopher Hitchens is, and he said, man, this is torture.
This ain't simulated drowning.
This is drowning.
Of course, he didn't say ain't because he's way better than that.
Right.
Well, I know Christopher, and he's a very mixed character in many ways.
He did some good, honest journalism and then, for various reasons, decided to sort of go with the flow, I think.
This is, again, word games, and we saw this around something as cynical as whether or not the U.S. government engages in torture.
Things that are obviously torture are being redefined as not torture, and then the president on down, the administration officials get up and they'll say, we never torture, but that's only because they've changed the definition of torture.
Right.
And so one of the hard things about all this is that Americans aren't used to really being lied to with this level of consistency.
They might expect to be lied to once in a while.
That's what they experience in their own lives.
You might get lied to by someone you know or care about, but it's not something that you deal with constantly.
If you deal with someone who's lying to you all the time or is a large portion of the time, that person usually has a psychiatric problem that needs to be dealt with.
But here you've got the government routinely misstating things, exaggerating things, saying things which sound good in some ways, but aren't what they actually mean.
For instance, when many of them say the president is obeying the law, following the law, what they're saying is really under their theory the president is above all the laws, that under their theories of commander in chief power, the president can do whatever he wants, and that's legal.
So when they say he's obeying the law, it means one thing to you and me that, well, the law says he's not supposed to wiretap people without a warrant, but they're saying something else.
They're saying that the president can actually wiretap you without a warrant because he's the president.
These are the games they play with words and semantics, and we saw when John Yoo and David Addington were before the House Judiciary Committee a week or so ago how blatant that can get, where they even had questions when they'd be asked about was a policy implemented, and John Yoo said, well, what do you mean by implement?
And there went on for 30, 40 seconds a discussion of what implement meant, and so this is the kind of gamesmanship that works.
Yeah, I mean, when confronted with a question, does the president have the authority to bury someone alive, John Yoo said a bunch of gobbledygook and refused to answer the question.
Right, the question really came down to could you torture someone's child to get them to talk?
Does the president have that authority?
Does the president have the authority to bury somebody alive?
And neither John Yoo nor David Addington said no, and the reason they didn't say no is because they think yes.
Their view of the presidential powers is that it's unlimited.
They talk about plenary powers, and when I first heard it, I had to go back and look in the dictionary for what this actually meant.
Right, yeah, plenary, what exactly does that mean?
Plenary power means total, full, unlimited, and so when they talk about the president having plenary powers, what that means for the average citizen is that your idea of unalienable rights that we're all supposed to possess, according to the founders, according to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, they are now inoperative because the president has all power, and while he's not going to probably throw everybody in jail, obviously, but he can pick out someone, as he did with Jose Padilla, an American citizen on U.S. soil, who wasn't armed, who wasn't doing anything.
They were thinking that maybe he was going to do something, but no one was sure, but they just simply grabbed him and stuck him in the brig in South Carolina, denied him a lawyer, denied him the basic rights under the Constitution, and the president said, I can do that.
Yeah, well, they gave him the full MKUltra torture program, too.
They basically turned him into somewhat of a vegetable by leaving him in solitary and all the rest of the things they can do, and then we've seen this now repeated in Guantanamo, where we now are getting more and more of the evidence about how that's been done, and these are coercive procedures that are certainly, any reasonable person would say this is torture.
If they were done to American soldiers, we would call them torture without even a hesitation, but when it's done to someone else, we sort of make reasons why it might not be.
And what's, of course, ironic here, especially today, is the cover, the front page of the New York Times today is that they copied some of these techniques, at least recopied them or whatever, from Chinese communist torture manuals or a report about Chinese torture of Americans during the Korean War, and these were things that, at the time, they called torture on the record over and over again.
But the gamesmanship is, if you continue to confuse the American people, if you continue to play games with words, it's hard for people to sort of get hold of something and act in a meaningful fashion.
So much of the whole idea of propaganda, if you go through CIA, their textbooks and how they approach these things, a lot of what you're doing with propaganda is not trying to convince everybody of your lies, but you're trying to sow enough confusion among a population so it can't act effectively.
You're raising doubts about people.
I remember I had an interview once with an old CIA guy.
His name is Miles Copeland.
He's now dead, but he was living outside of Oxford, England, and I interviewed him for PBS.
And he was talking about how they did the propaganda against Mosaddegh back in 1953 in Iran and how they would say that he was walking around in a bathrobe.
They tried to pretend that he was senile.
They put out these kinds of stories through their media assets, and it was just the kind of hard thing for any population to know what to make of.
So you make someone the object of ridicule.
You plant funny stories about them.
You discredit them in various ways.
And the point of this chapter that we're talking about, the chapter that should have been in the Iran-Contra report but wasn't, is that that's what they were doing domestically against Americans, against the press, against the Congress, and against citizens in the 1980s.
And when they were not called on it, they just expanded it.
That's right, and that's what we're suffering through right now.
I'm sorry, last complaint, and I'll let you comment on this, and then I'll let you go.
But yesterday, this was really incredible to me.
Yesterday in abcnews.com, it was our top headline on antiwar.com, they said in there that the CIA said that the Iranians will have enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb as early as next year and maybe even by the end of this year.
And that was just a statement of fact, supposedly one paragraph, out of the rest of the context about, well, the Israelis might start a war or something like that.
It seems like the success that they had in Iran-Contra and have built on since then has just really played out to perfection.
I mean, when any reporter can just Google the NIE and read for themselves what it actually says.
Well, you're basically rewarded or punished based on your willingness to play ball.
And there are a lot of ways they can reward or punish you.
It's not just the kinds of nasty things that we've talked about.
But they can reward you, too.
I mean, they can make sure that you get the next little scooplet that they want to get out.
They give you something a little before your competitor.
When I was at Newsweek, I got whacked by my superiors because one of the propaganda themes that was being put out was given to Time magazine and I was specifically excluded from getting even the information, in part because I would have checked it out and probably written that it was bogus.
But my editors at Newsweek were furious with me.
They said, because of you, we've been beaten by Time magazine.
It was a story that turned out to be false, by the way, but it had a good run for a couple of weeks.
It came out actually in late 87, so-called.
It was related to this idea that the Sandinistas were going to march down and take the Panama Canal.
But I was basically upbraided by my senior editors at Newsweek for causing them trouble.
Because of me, they weren't being given a story that Time magazine was given.
So there are lots of ways they can help or hurt you that are subtle and not so subtle.
And journals are very attuned to that because we're in a very competitive environment and you don't like to get beaten, even if it's a handout story.
That's how it works.
All right, everybody, that's Robert Perry.
He's the author of Lost History, Secrecy and Privilege, and Neck Deep.
The website is ConsortiumNews.com.
And again, they're doing their fun drive right now, I urge you to participate in it.
And I thank you very much for your time today.
Thank you.
