For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Alright, so now we've got to change the subject to Ronald Reagan torturing people to death.
Our guest is the great Robert Perry from ConsortiumNews.com.
Welcome back to the show, Bob.
How are you doing?
Good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
I appreciate you coming on the show today.
Well, thanks for having me.
Okay, so it is ConsortiumNews.com is the website.
And the top article there today and a couple days ago from September 8th is called Ronald Reagan's Torture.
Now, I think it's kind of interesting that great civil libertarians like Glenn Greenwald like to quote Ronald Reagan's impassioned speech when signing the Convention Against Torture and saying that there will be no exceptions for necessity.
There will be no exceptions for anything because we're America and we don't torture and we feel perfectly comfortable signing a torture convention like this because we know it will only be for us to use against others because it could never apply to us because we're great and we don't torture people because we're the shiny city on the hill and all that.
And it's fun to use that against pro-torture right-wingers when you say, hey, look, you can beat them over the head with Ronald Reagan saying that they're wrong.
And yet he was, of course, only talking out of one side of his mouth at the same time because he had his private army, the CIA, down there in Latin America torturing people all day long.
Well, he certainly was hypocritical about it.
I think what he understood was that the United States would never realistically be called on it on questions like torture because of the power the United States has in the world.
And so there was kind of a double standard, one set of standards for the United States and its allies and another for other people that are disliked by Washington or by the powers that be.
So, yeah, the idea of using these kinds of abuse, these prohibitions are usually just against countries that can be demonized, whereas countries that fall under the umbrella of being the good guys, they're allowed to get away with things.
And the United States is the perfect example of all that.
But Reagan was a person who clearly now, the evidence is overwhelming, unleashed horrible forces of repression, violence, torture, mass murder, even genocide on the people of Central America in the 1980s.
Reagan was determined in his view to, quote-unquote, win the Cold War.
And so what he did in that pursuit was essentially to, he took the gloves off before people like Dick Cheney took the gloves off.
He went to his own dark side with the idea that to stop the spread of leftist movements in Central America in particular, but also other parts of the world, Africa, even sections of Asia, but Latin America in particular, Ronald Reagan sanctioned some of the most horrible acts imaginable.
The people of Guatemala, the people of Honduras, the people of Nicaragua and El Salvador, for the brunt.
Well now, they were going red though, and Ronald Reagan explained that they were what, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, they were closer to Harlingen, Texas than Washington, D.C. was.
Which meant, I guess, that they could come marching in and take over Harlingen, Texas if we didn't stop them.
Bob?
Well, if you look at the Reagan-Bush 1 era and compare it to the Bush 2 period, what you see is that essentially what George W. Bush did in his eight years had really been, the trail had been marked by the Reagan people years earlier.
The idea of exaggerating threats was of course a big deal, to try to frighten the American people with what was called then perception management techniques, that if you could scare the American people with this idea that there would be this surge of communist, dark-skinned people charging across the Texas border, you could basically get the American people to allow you to send weapons and provide money and support for some of the most brutal forces this hemisphere has ever seen.
And that was the name of the game.
And then a lot was hidden and lied about, in terms of the details.
Everything was classified.
And when things did pop up, as they did sometimes in that era, the journalists or the activist groups or whatever, human rights groups, would be denounced and accused of being Sandinista sympathizers or apologists for these various forces that the U.S. didn't like.
So the basic techniques of carrying out these kinds of policies were set in the 80s and then just reprised under George W. Bush.
Well, it's funny you say that in the Reagan era they kind of paved the way.
It's the very same guys, right?
I mean, we're talking about Dick Cheney and all them.
And your friend Ray McGovern, who writes for you there at ConsortiumNews.com, he's explained on this show that the whole theory that George Bush Sr.and I guess Ronald Reagan also operated under was keep the crazies in the basement, meaning don't let the neoconservatives have influence over Middle Eastern policy.
We'll leave that to the old wasps or what have you.
But the compromise was unleash the neocons on South America instead.
And that's who we're talking about here.
Some of these very same, you know, Project for a New American Century, American Enterprise Institute types here, right?
Well, that's correct.
Reagan credentialed many of the neocons, the people like Elliott Abrams.
And he credentialed them but did not really give them the Middle East.
The Middle East was for Jim Baker, Philip Habib, what people might be considered the adults.
These are people who were not as ideologically focused on the Middle East.
So by letting the neocons have Central America as a playground, it was a very bloody playground.
The slaughter was extraordinary, especially in places like Guatemala, where probably around 100,000 people died during the 1980s.
Where some entire Indian tribes were wiped out.
Later on, a truth commission in Guatemala termed what happened there genocide.
Supported and defended and excused and lied about by the Reagan people.
Was that also a blowback from the original coup d'etat in 1953 or 54?
Well, I mean, you can follow all these things somewhat chronologically.
But if you look at the history, and much of that history has now been declassified, one of the things that Bill Clinton did belatedly, in my view, and not very effectively, but he did do it, was to release many of the Guatemala documents.
And so we can now go back.
And in the piece that's at consortiumnews.com, I reprise that.
So a lot of this can go back really to the, I would take it back more to the 1960s.
Although clearly the course was set when the Democratic government in Guatemala was overthrown in a CIA-sponsored coup in 54.
But when we really get into the movement toward torture and assassinations and the mass slaughter, that really picks up in the 60s.
And there's evidence about, there was a U.S. official named Longan who provided this sort of, who got the ball rolling in helping to train and coordinate some of these assassination squads.
One was called the Arquivos, which was a unit that was inside the presidency in Guatemala and was sort of the key for the targeted assassination of political rivals and dissidents.
So it really gets moving in a very nasty way in the 60s.
It goes through periods of lull.
And of course in the 70s, in the late 70s, you had Jimmy Carter with his emphasis on human rights.
And that put a damper on some of the worst brutality.
And the Guatemalans were denied, were put under an embargo.
They were denied weapons and other military equipment.
And then when Reagan came in, he began to try to whitewash the slaughter.
He unleashed the Guatemala military to go after peasants and other groups that were organizing to fight for what they considered their rights.
And the slaughter was on.
And in 82, a fundamentalist Christian named Riaz Mont took over Guatemala.
And it got even worse.
And during that period, Reagan would claim that Riaz Mont was getting what he called a bum rap, that the human rights groups that were detailing some of the atrocities were essentially red-baited and discredited.
The Washington Press Corps played the role that it had played during this decade, pretty much, of sort of looking the other way, not digging very hard.
And the handful of journalists who did were largely treated as pariahs by many of their colleagues.
And so the slaughters went on, the torture went on, the genocide went on, with Ronald Reagan's smiling face providing a kind of a protection for it.
And you had also people like Elliott Abrams.
Elliott Abrams, remember, was initially the human rights coordinator at the State Department.
It may seem rather remarkable, but that's what he was.
And that was during the period when there was also mass slaughter going on in El Salvador.
And Abrams' position was that the real human rights violators were the Sandinistas in Nicaragua because he argued they might try to limit what La Prensa, the newspaper that the CIA was secretly funding, was publishing.
That that was a far worse human rights violation than the mass murders going on in El Salvador and Guatemala.
That was sort of the position.
And if you were on the U.S. side, even something like censorship was a horrible human rights violation.
But if you were opposed to the United States in some way, or you were trying to fight forces that the United States was aligned with, anything went.
They could do anything to you and it was all justified.
And that was the view.
And there was even a phrase that the neocons came up with called moral equivalence.
That they would object if someone like myself or some journalist would say, well, hold it, we've got to have single standards here.
If the United States is going to denounce torture and extrajudicial killings when it's done by the Soviets or done by people the United States doesn't like, we have to apply those same standards to U.S. allies.
And that position was denounced by the neocons who came up with this framework called political equivalence.
And if you argued for equal standards, that is to denounce all forms of human rights violation, you were condemned essentially as an apologist for the bad guys because common standards were not the right answer.
The right answer was we get to do whatever we want and we get to complain about anything they do.
Well, you know, I kind of admire all the double speak and double think of the imperial age.
These are the exact same people who will go on a rant about how people like you are moral relativists and you think that if the Mayans or some Indian tribe that you wish hadn't been massacred off the face of the earth by Ronald Reagan ought to live the way they want even if it's a way that we don't approve of.
So you're a moral relativist at the same time that they demand moral relativism so as to justify killing, torturing to death anyone they feel like.
Right.
It was kind of a double think approach.
And I was with the Associated Press at the time and we had kind of a just the facts, ma'am kind of approach to journalism.
And it was very difficult to sort of to work around the sort of these constant double standards as deep and as profound as they could possibly be, these double standards.
But many journalists figured out how to do it.
To succeed in Washington journalism during that period you had to be very flexible.
Essentially you put blinders on when the U.S. side was doing something and take them off when the other side was doing something.
So you would condemn the same action that the United States was doing.
You wouldn't condemn it when we were doing it but you condemn it when the other guy was.
And it had to be that kind of – it became something that journalists learned to do.
Applying these constant double standards and getting morally outraged over certain actions that were exactly the same as what the American side was doing.
When the American side did it, you had to ignore it or play it down.
And if you had the audacity to try to condemn it or condemn it equally to what the other side was doing, you were accused of, as you say, of sort of a moral relativism and moral equivalence.
And it sounds silly at this point but it worked.
And many journalists in Washington simply learned to adapt.
And the ones who learned to adapt are now the ones you see on the cable news shows.
They're the Wolf Blitzers of the world.
Page and Glenn Greenwald, they learned to adapt.
I like that.
That's good.
I remember seeing a thing about what Sam Donaldson and them had a thing they called truth squatting where they would have four or five guys gang up on Ronald Reagan during the press conference and ask him the same question over and over again and force him to admit to the true part of the premise of their question or whatever it was.
And then their bosses got on them and said, hey, listen, you just can't do that anymore.
So they said, okay.
And so then that was the end of that.
And now you get to ask Ronald Reagan one tough question and no follow-up or maybe one follow-up, but all the other reporters are now mandated to ask him about something else and not to follow up on what the last question was.
Well, we had the same situation at the Associated Press.
After his first presidential news conference, there were so many falsehoods or make-up things or just distortions or whatever you want to call them that the AP actually put together a sort of a fact-checking article about what Reagan had said, pointing out that there was no basis for this, that this thing was not correct.
And we actually published that.
We sent it on the wires.
And many of the newspapers, of course, were owned by people who liked Ronald Reagan and supported him.
And many of the top executives at the Associated Press also were strong Reagan supporters.
So the next time he had a news conference and he continued to sort of make things up and have his little fantasies that he would do, we tried to put together another fact-checking piece.
And the hammer came down on us.
And we were told in no uncertain terms by the New York top brass of the AP that we were never supposed to do that again.
And that story was killed and we never did it again.
There were times some of us would try to point out some particularly egregious falsehood that he made up, but you're always doing that against the interests of what the top brass wanted.
You're always putting your career on the line, in other words, when you do that.
So most journalists, like most people, want to keep their jobs and keep their health insurance and want to pay their mortgages.
So people tend to do what they're told.
And if it's made clear that one thing is not going to be accepted, you stop doing it.
Yeah.
Well, and when you say learn to adapt, too, it's kind of an evolutionary thing since then, where now you have nothing but journalists like Chuck Todd who didn't have to learn to adapt.
They're already adapted.
I mean, they really think, and not just him, but almost all these reporters like on TV news, they really think that the news is which states read in blue and by what count and which Republican and which Democrat said what foolish thing about nothing.
And they really think that's all there is to cover.
I mean, that guy doesn't even understand, as one example, none of them understand the shame they're put to by people like Democracy Now, by the work you guys do over there at Consortium News, and real reporting.
They don't even know what it is.
They don't even know that they've been made to adapt.
That's how they got the job in the first place, because they're dim-witted little weasels.
Well, it's now a couple of generations into this.
There was a point, and not to sort of glorify the journalists of the 60s and 70s, because there were a lot of weaknesses, no question, and a lot of people went along with the Vietnam War for many years when they should have known better.
But there was also a sense that the older journalists would kind of almost haze you if you were seen as being too much of a brown nose, if you were playing ball too much with the powers that be.
You'd be looked down on.
But the generational change occurred in that period of Ronald Reagan when there was a weeding out, retiring in some cases of some of the older journalists, but a weeding out of those who wouldn't play ball.
And so what you were left with was essentially an entire Washington press corps that played ball.
And now you've got this next generation, which was hired by the people that were playing ball.
So you have to expect that the people who have come up now, and that's the only world they've known, that they would consider that world normal.
If you look back on George W. Bush's presidency and see how many journalists went along with the Iraq War, and how many of them were punished.
Well, and how many of them went along with the entire administration?
I mean, in my view, it was...
Go back to Florida.
Go back to the Florida recap.
Yeah, sure.
And it lasted until Hurricane Katrina.
Hurricane Katrina destroyed the...
Well, pretty much put a real damper on the Cindy Sheehan anti-war movement as it was.
But at the same time, as all those people were drowning in New Orleans, I think that was when it finally...
You know, Shepard Smith crying on live TV and all these things, or whoever it was.
One of those hairdos.
And that was when it finally became kind of acceptable in mass media to now think that George Bush and them are a bunch of jerks, rather than you're a jerk for thinking that they are.
I mean, hey, that was the late summer of 2005.
They got away with blue-bloody murder.
Hundreds of thousands of people in that time.
Well, you know, also by the time you get to the summer of 2005, the Iraq War is clearly going badly.
All their promises of another easy victory and on to the next one were shown to be false.
It was hard then for even the rather limited quality journalists that we have to continue to ignore the reality, which they did.
But if you go back, if you went back even to early 2005, look at how George Bush's ridiculous second inaugural was treated.
When he said freedom and liberty over and over again in every possible formulation you could think of.
And even from a balcony and said, I had my accountability moment, I am democracy, and all this stuff.
Look at the way the Washington Post and others, almost unanimously, shoulder-to-shoulder and lockstep, the op-ed pages of major papers marched in great awe of the brilliant Bush's inaugural address.
It was extraordinary.
And it did take, it was really Katrina and the continuation of the collapse in Iraq.
I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I screwed up.
I screwed up.
The balcony thing was the day of the re-election, not the inaugural itself.
That's what I was thinking of.
That was his accountability moment, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Different speech.
And that everything that he therefore did had been centrally sanctioned by the American people, even though the American people didn't even know what he had done in many cases, because it was still classified at that point.
Yeah.
Well, now I know that you broke many of these stories about Iran-Contra, maybe even Iran-Contra in general, back in the day.
And I wonder, how much did you study on the Iran angle of the Iran-Contra?
Everybody knows America was backing Saddam Hussein during that time, but of course, you know, Iran-Contra is a pretty famous scandal, I guess.
It's common knowledge.
We were backing both sides in that thing.
How much weapons, how many weapons, or how many tons, or however you measure it, what was really sold to the Iranians there?
And does that, as kind of a second part of that question, if we can sell all these missiles to the Iranians through Israel and so forth, long after the Iranian revolution, and deal with the Ayatollah Khomeini, would that tend to indicate to you that we ought to be able to deal just fine with the government that's there now, rather than take such provocative stances against them all the time?
Well, that's a bit of a complicated question.
Basically, the Reagan administration had a kind of peculiar look at the world, and one really has to go back and view it somewhat as it was seen at the time.
At the point in the mid-to-late 70s, there was a sense among many in the CIA analytical division, people like the Mel Goodman, that the Soviets were in rapid decline, and that was sort of the basis of detente that was actually embraced by people like Nixon and Ford and Kissinger.
Detente was that you can deal with the Russians, in part because they're falling so far behind the West that they're really not the kind of threat they were.
You can certainly try to deal with some of the most dangerous aspects.
The neocons and the right-wingers then really sort of emerge in that period, and their desire is to pretend that the Soviet Union is on the march, is about to take over the world, everything's falling into place for their world conquest, et cetera, et cetera.
It's ludicrous, as we now know.
The truth was, as people like Mel Goodman sort of had it, that the Soviets were in rapid decline, but that was not the right answer, because if you're part of the military-industrial complex, you certainly don't want to have the Soviet Union just become too weak, because that would mean less money for you.
So there were a lot of reasons why that was built up in that period, and people like Ronald Reagan may have somewhat believed in the propaganda.
He sort of mixed on it.
I think he had a much more realistic view.
He was more cynical than people understand, but he also may have believed in some of it.
So he was determined to continue this Cold War, even if the Russians didn't want to play anymore.
And so that became...that was sort of... that colored everything.
So dealing with many of these unsavory people like Khomeini and Iran, and providing weaponry in secret, and actually collaborating with them on various things behind the scenes, working with the Israelis, who were working with the Iranians very closely, hoping to counterweight against the Iraqis.
The Israelis had their own strategic interest.
But the United States proceeded to not only work with the Iranians and with the Iraqis, but with the Pakistanis and with the Mujahideen and the Islamic extremists who were fighting the Russians in Afghanistan.
Essentially, the United States set in motion, or at least energized, the Islamic extremism.
When I was covering the CIA back in the 80s, one of Bill Casey's plans was not only to print a lot of Bibles and send the Bibles to Eastern Europe and try to stir up trouble for the Russians in their backyard there, but the CIA was also printing Korans and sending them into Afghanistan and into what were then the southern Soviet republics, which had strong Islamic and Muslim populations.
They're now the Stan countries.
So the idea was to stir up religious extremism as a way to counter the Soviets.
So a lot of what was generated to sort of fight the Soviets, even when the Soviets were really on the verge of collapse already and certainly not the kind of threat they may have been years earlier, was to generate the problems we have today.
And if you look at a situation like Afghanistan, even after the Russians left in 89, the decision by the then Bush 1 administration and the CIA was to continue this covert operation, which wasn't very covert at that point, to topple the government and put in place these warlords who were Islamic fundamentalists who were going to put women back into the 6th century AD.
It had been the left, the communists, and people who had taken over Afghanistan in the late 70s, for all their faults, and they had many, they were trying to bring equality for women.
And that was a big sticking point because it went against some of the extreme Islamic views.
So what the Reagan people did was they set in motion, in a whole variety of ways, accelerated what became the crisis we face today.
Tomorrow is the 9-11 anniversary.
Much of that really goes back to this short-sighted and self-interested view of the Reagan administration.
Well, how's the Iran-Iraq war and the funding and arming both sides of that play into the Cold War there?
Well, because basically at that point the United States was, well, there was a sense that they could play both sides there, the United States could maintain better control in that region because, as Casey used to say, let them kill each other off.
A million or so Iraqis and Iranians...
Casey, that's William Casey, the head of the CIA at the time.
Right, yeah.
His idea was to let the two sides slaughter each other, and that was sort of a cynical, kind of funny, elbow-in-the-ribs kind of approach that was kind of the swaggering approach of Casey's CIA in the 80s.
Now, what it set in motion, though, and it also, by the way, raised money for people, arms dealers did very well, thanks, there were other factors in terms of helping the Israelis sort of deal with their geopolitical interests by weakening possible adversaries by having them kill each other off, too.
So there were other aspects of that strategy, but what it did, in effect, was destabilize that region.
It created essentially the circumstances for Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait.
If you look at what happened in 1990, it was that Saddam was actually defending the Kuwaitis and the Saudis against the push from the Shiites, Iranian radicalism, because they were essentially Sunni countries.
And so the idea was to protect the Persian Gulf oil states from this radical advance of Islam from Tehran.
Saddam felt that the Kuwaitis should have helped him more.
They'd given him loans, and they were trying to make him pay back the loans, plus they were slant drilling his oil fields.
So he goes after them, and that sets off another part of this problem, which is the United States then intervenes to liberate Kuwait and put the Kuwaiti royal family back in charge.
But that, in turn, also leads to massive bloodshed in Iraq.
It also puts them under the kinds of economic constraints that produces a great deal of war repression in Iraq and turns them into more of a third-world country and creates this instability throughout that region that sets the stage for other problems later.
He signed it September 11th there.
I mean, it's pretty clear that Osama bin Laden was mad because he wanted to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, and the Saudis said, no, we hired George Bush to do it instead.
And then George Bush and Bill Clinton kept the American forces in Saudi Arabia that whole time.
And it's funny because people will list these two separate things as though they're separate things, but it's one thing.
His base is in Saudi Arabia to bomb Iraq on the average of every other day, or every third day, I guess, if you take Jeremy Scahill's conservative estimate over the New York Times' every-other-day estimate, for eight years all through the Clinton administration.
They continued to bomb Iraq, and that was what Osama bin Laden said was his motive, was bombing Iraq from bases in Saudi Arabia.
You going to do that to me?
I'm going to recruit some guys to fly planes into your buildings.
How do you like that?
And we'd already had brought those guys together in Afghanistan and created the platform for what became al-Qaeda.
And also, by the way, the determination by the CIA and by the Bush 1 presidency to continue the war in Afghanistan after the Russians left, and they leave in 1989.
So the goal of the United States to sort of get the Russians out has been, actually was successful.
In a messy way, it was successful.
Then they could have tried, as Gorbachev wanted, who was then the head of the Soviet Union.
Gorbachev wanted to then have a negotiated peace, bring the parties in Afghanistan together as much as possible, and try to resolve their differences with the least violence and have some kind of coalition government.
The Bush 1 presidency and the CIA then said no.
I was told this.
I was at Newsweek then.
I was dealing with CIA people, and they kept saying no, we want to string up Najibullah.
Najibullah was the Soviet-backed leader of Afghanistan at that time.
But he survived until 1992.
His government stays in place.
It's not until 1994, into the Clinton years, that Najibullah is finally dragged from his office and literally hanged from a tree or hanged from a light pole.
And so the CIA got what it wanted.
But in the meantime, Afghanistan has been even further wrecked.
The fundamentalist extremists have become more powerful.
The warlords are now dominant.
Any idea of any progressive approach toward treating women more sanely and reasonably has been wiped out.
And the stage is set for the Pakistani ISI to put in place their next group of puppets called the Taliban.
And you already have a warm heart.
Which is funny because just the last couple of sentences there, you could have been talking about today rather than the mid-'90s at that point.
It all follows.
I mean, this was the continuum.
And to some degree, it went out to fall Bill Clinton for failing, as he did in so many things, to chart a different, a substantively different course in these foreign policy areas.
He didn't want to be called weak.
He didn't want to be attacked by the neocons.
He didn't want all that stuff, which would have happened to him, obviously.
So he sort of kept a lot of these policies more or less in place.
And they did not serve the United States very well.
Ultimately, they set the stage for the situation that the Bush II administration then exploited to change the whole shape of how the United States government functions and this idea of even making a more aggressive U.S. foreign policy, if that was possible.
But he certainly did it.
And in invading countries and trying to establish this sort of U.S. hegemony in that region.
So I think a lot of the players deserve a lot of criticism and condemnation on all sides because it was very difficult to try to bring about any sort of sane approach.
And frankly, some even movies, even Hollywood's treatment of some of this, like Charlie Wilson's War, was a deception and a lie.
Well, yeah, and especially I think you'd probably agree with the whole lesson at the end, which is that we should have stayed and built a nation then, and now we're learning that lesson.
That's what Robert Gates said, your old buddy.
Robert Gates said just yesterday, right?
Well, I would disagree with that point because I think what happened is the United States did stay.
The Charlie Wilson War argument is that the United States, once the Soviets, left lost interest and should have stayed and helped things along.
What really happened was the United States did stay.
The CIA continued to funnel weapons and military support into the warlords and the Islamic fundamentalists.
They were determined to string up Najibullah.
And so that took longer than they thought, and by the time it did occur, the situation in Afghanistan was far worse and far bloodier, far more divided than could be repaired.
And it was the Taliban who then intervened with this sort of moral righteousness in their pure Islamic fundamentalism that tries to bring stability and order to Afghanistan because of the mess that was left behind.
Now, if the United States had approached, if the United States had actually done what they pretend the US did in Charlie Wilson's war, which is to sort of just hands off, let the Afghans take care of the thing, the situation probably would have been much better.
It was the United States' insistence on not just getting rid of the Soviets, but in then putting in a government that was acceptable to the United States, that became the real reason that the situation in Afghanistan continued to spiral down.
So I think the Charlie Wilson war account is essentially a lie.
You could say, well, there should have been more money spent for schools and so forth.
Okay, but the truth was that once you put in these fundamentalist Islamic warlords in power, I'm not sure what good the schools were going to do.
I'm interested in the Robert Gates angle on this, because, of course, he was what, William Casey's right-hand man at the CIA during the 1980s period that we talked about, the war in South America, and now in reference to the old jihad in Afghanistan against Russia.
Now he's the Secretary of Defense in charge of the war in Afghanistan, at the same time that the generals are saying that we would need hundreds of thousands of troops to do the mission that they apparently have been set, which is to fulfill this myth and do right by the Afghan people by building them a real democratic state and all this nonsense.
Well, Gates was a key culprit in what happened in this whole era.
It's pretty remarkable.
It shows his bureaucratic skills that he is still around and survived into the Obama administration.
But if you look back at what happened in the key period of the early 1980s, it was Bob Gates who was the hatchet man for Bill Casey in destroying the integrity of the CIA's analytical division.
What Gates did was he essentially gutted the so-called criminologists who were the experts on the Soviet Union and who were detecting, quite understandably, the growing weakness of the Soviet Union and its crumbling nature.
Those findings led to certain policy shifts, especially what's called detente.
But it was in the 1980s when the decision was made by the Reagan administration to hype the Soviet threat, to sort of rekindle the Cold War.
People forget that in the 1970s people had basically considered the Cold War over.
But the decision by Reagan was to rekindle it.
Now, see, just as an interesting side note, I was born in 1976.
So by the time I knew there was such a thing as the present, I think the first day I knew there was a present was the day Reagan was inaugurated.
And my whole childhood was Cold War, I guess, just the same way as it felt during the 50s or 60s.
I didn't get to experience that 70s where people thought the Cold War was over, Bob, at all.
Well, no, but there was this idea of detente, and basically it was Reagan, it was even Reagan in 76 when he ran against Ford from the right that compelled Ford to drop the word detente from his lexicon.
Ford was trying to, again, piece the right-wingers in the Republican Party.
But the point always was how do you exaggerate the size and effectiveness and power of the Soviet Union?
And that really fell to Bob Gates.
So Bob Gates essentially purges the analytical division of the CIA.
They put in people who will say whatever the policymakers want.
Instead of giving the policymakers objective information, it became tell them what they want to hear.
So you had a whole generation.
And it sort of parallels what was happening in the press corps, interestingly, in Washington.
There was what was happening in the Washington press corps, the purging of skeptics and people who were challenging the Reagan version of reality.
Simultaneous to that, there was at the CIA this purging of the analytical division.
You could argue that the neocons were sort of seizing control of the flow of information.
If they could control the information and falsify it at their will, then they could control the policies and the American public more broadly.
So that was sort of the game that was being played out in the 80s.
But Bob Gates was this apparatchik who did the work.
He went in and basically wiped out this objectivity in the CIA's analytical division.
And that did come back to haunt him briefly in 1991 when he was late 90 or 91.
It was that period when he was appointed to be CIA director by George H.W. Bush.
There was an effort by the old analysts to go before the Senate Intelligence Committee and oppose Gates's nomination on the basis of politicization.
The whole point of that was that Gates had been the guy who implemented these false exaggerations of Soviet power and motives.
And it was interesting that the guys who then protected Gates and got his nomination through, the key senator was David Boren, who was a Democrat from Oklahoma.
But David Boren's top aide who handled this matter was a guy named George Tenet.
And George Tenet earned his spurs with the Bush people by making sure that Gates got through and that questions that should have been asked weren't asked.
There was going to be investigations about Gates's role in Iran and Iraq and more about his deceptions during the Iran-Contra period.
But it was Tenet who prevented that investigation from going forward.
And so they just shoved Gates's nomination through and made him director of Central Intelligence.
And that basically cleared Gates.
So when he was brought back by Bush in 2006 to be a defense secretary, he sort of moved from being this guy who had been involved in this very questionable behavior at CIA, this gutting of the intelligence directorate, to being kind of a wise man.
Because in the nature of how Washington works, he was seen, the Washington Post loved him, and everyone sort of loved him.
And so a lot of his history was lost during that time.
It was never revisited in any serious way.
And so he became Bush's guy.
And also it's interesting, he was considered in 2006 to be the guy who was being brought in as the moderating, wiser-talking politician who really knew how to do things, as opposed to Rumsfeld.
Rumsfeld was being pushed out.
He was supposedly the wild-eyed crazy.
But what we were reporting then and what's now been confirmed and documentary evidence is now quite strong on this, it was Rumsfeld who was actually the moderating influence in 2006.
It was Rumsfeld who wanted to pull back U.S. troops in Iraq and make the U.S. footprint smaller.
It was Gates who wanted to go ahead with the surge and expand U.S. military forces in Iraq.
So it was Gates who actually was the hawk, and Rumsfeld who was more the dove, amazing as that may sound.
Well, it was because of his ideological fixation on this transformation.
The American government's role is to go in there with a few thousand troops, as few as possible, hire as many locals as possible, knock off and decapitate whatever regime needs changing, and then move on to the next one, not stay there with hundreds of thousands of troops forever.
In Rumsfeld's position.
Right.
I'm not trying to say Rumsfeld was a nice guy.
Me either.
I'm just saying it was his ideological commitment to that transformation that made him averse to the permanent occupation.
As you say, he was the one who was saying it's time to take the training wheels off of this thing.
If we keep doing it for them, they won't do it themselves and all that.
It was Rumsfeld who was supporting the commanders in the field who were saying the same thing.
General Casey, for instance, wanted to keep the American footprint as small as possible, make the Iraqis do the work as much as possible, and get the American troops out as fast as possible.
And Rumsfeld backed that.
But Gates, being this careerist, knew that if he was going to make his, to reestablish his career, which had been sort of in a bit of hiatus since 1993 when he left with the Bush 1 presidency, he was going to have to play ball with Bush 2.
And George W. Bush wanted the surge.
He wanted to escalate the war in Iraq.
So Gates became the guy who did it.
So I think the real danger that Gates presents to Obama is that Gates really, he has his own personal interests at heart.
If he thinks it will make him look better with the people that he sees as his future, he would be very willing to position himself in ways that would be harmful to Obama.
Unless he thinks Obama could help him more.
Gates is quite a careerist, and he's quite an opportunist.
And there's a danger in putting that kind of person in that kind of position.
Yeah, well, certainly.
There's a danger of putting anyone in the position of commander of this Pentagon.
But Jeff Huber was on the show yesterday, and he says, it's pretty apparent, Bob Dole has said this to the Politico, that General Petraeus wants to be president.
And that he's got, and I guess my question is whether you would say that he and Gates together have Obama in this box, or whether you agree with this, that he has to continue to escalate the war and add troops more and more, 20,000 at a time, I guess, add infinitum to Afghanistan, because that's what the generals want.
And if at any point he tries to call it quits, well, then it's the whole Walter Cronkite stab in the back, liberal week on terrorism thing, and then Petraeus gets to run as the right-wing militarist hero in 2012 against his former boss, and so he has to either do what Petraeus wants, or face him.
What do you think of that?
That is the danger of having people like Gates, and Petraeus too, who's a very political general.
And for that matter, Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State.
There is a danger that if Obama took this risk on, I thought rather unnecessarily, immediately after being elected, and that was to surround himself in those key positions with people who really weren't loyal to him, and they weren't even loyal to his vision of a more peaceful world where there's more negotiation, less warfare.
And what that meant was that while maybe it was clever to get them into the tent, there was always going to be the danger.
When that moment came, when Obama was going to have to go in a different way, and we may be facing that moment today with Afghanistan, if Obama were to decide that this is a losing strategy, we have to essentially pull back and try to bring this war to a conclusion.
Then he's going to run into backbiting from people like Gates, possibly people like Secretary Clinton, and clearly some of the political generals who will then, as you say, accuse him of being weak on national defense.
And then they'll have the inside story too, because he's kept them inside.
So instead of getting people who are more politically loyal to him or to his vision, he made this other choice, and people praised it, they called it the team of rivals, etc., etc.
But there's a risk to that, and that is that you've now empowered people who can become your worst enemy.
And it may make it harder for him if he decides to begin a withdrawal from Afghanistan.
It could make it a lot more difficult for him, because he's going to have people either resigning, or giving background briefings to the Washington Post, showing how disorganized and weak Obama is.
That sort of headline is almost guaranteed with this crowd.
And in a sense, Obama brought that on himself.
Well now, let me get your take on this before I let you go here.
It's Robert Perry from Consortium News.
I'm looking at the Jerusalem Post, and they say that hundreds of Israel lobby types are descending, I guess led by AIPAC, are descending on Capitol Hill to push for sanctions, a brand new round of sanctions against Iran based on the bogus threat of their nuclear weapons capability, etc., and their so-called nuclear weapons capability.
I wonder how much of a role does the Israel lobby that seem to have so much influence in the Bush administration, and seem to have, even to this day at least, so much influence in Congress, or at least they want it, what role do you think they're going to actually play here?
Would they be able to pick a fight with Iran in the middle of a brand new expanded war into AFPAC, doubling down there?
It seems pretty serious when they're talking about a blockade of all refined petroleum products and all these things.
It's not games.
The Israelis are now led by some real extremists themselves.
I was talking to an Israeli intelligence officer just the other day, he's a former intelligence officer, and he was remarking about how Israel seems to be almost making itself a parallel to some of the Islamic states by now having it be a Jewish state and elevating the religious component in a dangerous way.
And I think what you're seeing is when you have ideologues of whatever sort running a country, dangerous things can happen, because it's no longer simply a rational equation anymore of sort of evaluating risk against reward and so forth.
It becomes something where extremists act bizarrely, and we've seen that often on the Islamic side, where there's been some very self-defeating and dangerous behavior, and you're seeing it on the Israeli side to an extent.
Now how capable they would be in terms of that kind of attack, I think it really has to do with almost military capabilities rather than a desire.
The desire I think is bare.
Whether they can then force a more or less crippled Obama administration, assuming say Obama loses on health care and he's met his Waterloo, as Senator DeMint described it, would a weakened Obama administration then be able to say no to the Israel lobby, or the Likud lobby if you might more accurately describe it?
Would the neocons be able to use their media influence to push him in a more dangerous direction than he's even taken?
I think that's very possible.
Obviously a lot of factors are at play, and if Obama is more successful or seen as more successful domestically, it also might redound to his ability to set a different course internationally.
So a lot of these things are moving parts, and the way the neocons look at this, and I always understand them, they're extremely strategic, and they have an agenda, they have a goal in mind.
They often won't tell you what it is.
In some cases it is to protect or advance the cause of Israel in the Middle East.
They won't really speak to that directly, at least most often, but they understand how they're going to do it, and they understand the need to weaken their political opponents in a variety of ways.
So they see this as really much a chess game to somehow defeat what they see as some of Obama's more dangerous efforts at bringing some resolution to these conflicts in the Middle East.
They don't want that.
They'd rather bring about regime change, they still believe in that stuff.
So I think you've got a very dangerous mix of forces, and the real question is, can Obama and people on his side effectively counter them?
Well, I guess we can wrap this up with back to the media again.
I'm sure that you had the same experience as me in 2002 and 2003, watching the run-up to the Iraq War in such slow motion, but they announced so long in advance, the policy is regime change, we're going to make up whatever we have to between now and then before the invasion starts, and then they did that in such slow motion, it's absolutely incredible to behold.
And yet, if we're really talking about airstrikes on Iran and whatever consequences flow after that, the run-up to this thing has got to be the most long-term, steady stream of BS to justify war imaginable.
And it seems like you particularly like picking on the Washington Post.
Well, me too.
They got an article today where even the New York Times version admits that they're not making their low-enriched uranium into super-duper highly enriched weapons-grade uranium.
They're not.
It's just sitting there at industrial grade, and it's safeguarded by the IAEA, and they're safe within their nonproliferation treaty, and that all the sanctions against them beyond that by the UN are illegal and in violation of the NPT.
You can't get a journalist to tell the straight truth about this.
I mean, the New York Times makes slight mention that, oh yeah, by the way, they're not making a bomb.
But anyway, here's a bunch more scaremongering.
The Washington Post doesn't even mention that they're not making a bomb.
The whole thing implies that these guys are going to nuke Tel Aviv the day after tomorrow.
It's an emergency if we don't stop them, and nobody's calling them on it, Bob.
Nobody's calling them on it.
Well, there's also the other factor in these different stories.
There are key facts always left out.
One of the key facts is that Israel has the most sophisticated nuclear arsenal in the region.
There's no doubt about that.
The Israelis won't fully admit to it, but the evidence is overwhelming, and even senior U.S. officials have blurted it out from time to time.
Pakistan, because, again, this goes back to the Reagan era when Pakistanis, as part of their help in coordinating with the Afghan rebels, the Reagan administration turned a blind eye to their developing a nuclear bomb.
India has a nuclear bomb.
That's such an important point.
Say that one more time for the people.
During the 1980s, you say, while America was using the Pakistanis to help finance the Mujahideen War in Afghanistan against the Russians, they were turning a blind eye to the Pakistanis' development of nuclear weapons.
Is that it?
Right, and again, a key figure in that was Bob Gates, because the CIA's analytical division was on top of it, and they were trying to blow the whistle on the Pakistani nuclear program.
I'm sorry I interrupted you, because you were going somewhere else there.
No, but basically, it's a very important point, because as part of this exaggeration of the Soviet threat, the need to go into Afghanistan, supposedly, because the Soviets had some dream about some warm water ports, in some sense, that was being pushed by Reagan in the 1980s.
The Soviets actually were in an advanced stage of collapse.
Their thing in Afghanistan was essentially defensive.
They were trying to protect some of their proxies.
It was not some bold move to the warm water ports of the Indian Ocean.
So because of that false, exaggerated threat, the Reagan administration had to use, or wanted to use, the Pakistani intelligence services to funnel money to these Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan.
Part of the price of that was to look the other way as the Pakistanis developed a nuclear bomb, and it was an Islamic bomb.
President Zia, who was the dictator of Pakistan, made Pakistan an Islamic state.
So when they got their bomb, when they developed their bomb in the 1980s, finishing it up in, I guess, the latter part of the 1980s, they were able to have a bomb which they considered important, because it belonged to Islam.
It is now one of the great threats to world stability, because the Pakistani government is at best considered a weak state, if not a failed state.
The chances of those bombs falling into the wrong hands are far greater in many ways than any other threat we might face.
But that was allowed so people like Osama Bin Laden could organize their operations in Afghanistan.
So in other words, part of the deals that the Reagan administration struck were so dangerous, because they created this huge threat of the Soviet Union, even when the Soviets were no longer that much of a threat, all these other threats were then energized and expanded.
And now we're dealing with those threats, but we don't know this history.
This history is sort of hidden from us, or you find it segmented.
You can find it in certain books, but it's hard to locate.
So the American people don't understand how they got to this dangerous point.
They're always being given a new narrative, that sort of a short-term narrative, that doesn't bring in this history.
So I think you really are facing this kind of problem.
But as far as Iran is concerned, one always should write a story about this problem, pointing out that the Israelis have nuclear weapons, have a lot of them, and other neighbors of Iran also have nuclear weapons, and in part because the United States sanctioned those developments of nuclear weapons.
And even with India, the US and the Bush administration essentially helped the Indians along on their nuclear program without trying to use the various means to pressure them to disarm.
So it's sort of, again, a selective choice of who to get outraged about.
And it happens to be the Iranians right now, just as it used to be the Iraqis.
Well, you know, this whole time, all this is, you're the master of connecting all these dots for us, all the policies, the events, and the people that made it all happen, and all these things.
And it makes perfect sense to me that the average American foreign policy expert, we call them, the imperialists up there who decide these policies, that ultimately they don't really care that each stupid thing that they do leads to consequences because they like the fact that it justifies their next intervention, and they don't mind the next stupid evil consequences from that either because that will justify their next intervention.
And they figure ultimately at the end of the day or end of the century or whatever, we are still safe here over here in North America, and none of these countries can really do anything about what we do to them and that kind of thing.
But it does seem very strange to me that the Israelis would adopt that same mindset, that they can act just like America in the Middle East when presumably they have to live there with their neighbors for centuries from here on out, supposedly, right?
Well, I consider myself a friend of Israel, and I've spent a good deal of time there as a journalist.
But I also consider myself a friend of the Palestinians and any people.
But I think the point is that the way for the Israelis to have probably the most secure future is to take some risks for peace.
They could become an important engine for the region.
They have great schools.
They have a very talented population.
They could be a financial center.
They could be a scientific center.
They could do a lot of things that would make them a much more successful country than they are today.
They've instead opted for this warlike mentality.
And one can understand it to some degree.
They feel threatened.
They feel endangered.
And maybe that is the politically smart play, if you're a politician in Israel, to be a tough guy, much as we've seen it work in the United States.
But it does lead you to a very dark corner eventually.
You simply can't make it all work the way they want over the long term.
The Likud strategies, which are essentially a racist strategy of expanding into Palestinian territories, and using ethnic cleansing and ethnic concentrations of populations to isolate and damage the Palestinians as a people.
All that may make short-term sense, but in the long term it's a cancer.
So I think you're right.
The Israelis are putting themselves in a position where they have helped.
They have not been alone in this.
There have been stupid things done by some of the Muslims in the region and the Arabs.
But the Israelis certainly have contributed a great deal to this animosity, hatred, bitterness.
And it becomes harder and harder as you go down that road to figure out a way back.
I hate to even think this, but at some point, somehow, there's going to be some weapon of mass destruction brought into Israel.
I don't care how good they are in terms of their security.
At some point over the next decade, it's going to probably happen.
And I think most of them understand that.
Most of the leaders you talk to worry about this.
But instead of going a more peaceful route, making compromises that might integrate Israel into the region in a much more sustainable way, the different approach has been taken.
The short-term, politically smart, clever, tough-guy approach.
And you sort of fear for the future of not only Israel, but the whole region.
All right, everybody.
That is Robert Perry.
The website is ConsortiumNews.com.
His book is Neck Deep, The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush.
I really appreciate you going through all this history for us and analysis of our current position in all these countries as well, Bob.
Appreciate it.
Thanks, Scott.
