All right, y'all welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our first guest on the show today is Saul Landau, internationally known scholar, author, commentator, and filmmaker on foreign and domestic policy issues.
His most widely praised achievements are the over 40 films he has produced on social, political, and historical issues, worldwide human rights, for which he won the Lightlier Moffitt Human Rights Award and the George Polk Award for investigative reporting.
His personal website is saullandau.com and he's got a piece at Counterpunch again here called Scooter Libby versus Bradley Manning, Malice versus Nobility.
Welcome back to the show, Saul.
How are you?
Well, thank you for calling.
I'm good.
I'm good.
Thank you, Scott.
Good, good.
I'm happy to have you here.
Well, thanks for bringing up Scooter Libby.
This is a note to all the writers in the audience who want to be interviewed on this show.
Just pick on Scooter Libby and you will be invited because I like picking on Scooter Libby.
Okay, so remind us, especially for the young who may not even know, it doesn't seem like very long ago to me, but for some people 2002 and 2003 may be quite a long time ago, maybe way back before they started paying attention to such things.
So maybe you could give us a briefing on who's this Scooter Libby fella and why she might care about anybody named Scooter.
Well, well, Scooter, whose real name was I, Louis Libby, and people call him Scooter because, well, he was speedy, I guess, when he was a kid.
A lot of nervous energy, maybe a little hyper.
Anyway, Scooter served as special assistant to the vice president.
He had national security.
He was one of the top guys under Dick Cheney and in the national security elite.
And he was part of a group of people who became known as neocons, as a neoconservative, whose idea essentially was the United States is the overwhelming military and economic power in the world and ought to act like it and essentially just get our way and do what we need to do anywhere where we need to do it and use military force, of course, to get it done.
And they were arguing, therefore, for this really way back in the 1990s.
Right.
Wasn't it Libby and Khalilzad and Wolfowitz wrote that defense planning guidance that caused such a scandal when it came out in 1991 after Operation Yellow Ribbon?
Yes, exactly.
This was the proclamation after the Soviet Union disappeared.
The United States became the power in the world.
And they said, well, we ought to act like the power in the world and just push everybody around.
If they don't like it too bad, there's nothing they can do about it.
This is our time.
Everybody who was, how should I say it, a little bit more prudent said, oh, God, we've gone into war after war.
And, you know, especially the generals understood from our experiences in Korea and our experiences in Vietnam that we shouldn't really fight anybody who could fight back, that this wasn't a good idea, that the only time we should use military force is when nobody fought back, you know, like Grenada or Panama, things that were easy.
But no, these guys said, ah, these other countries, they'll all be pushovers.
We'll walk over them like a piece of cake and spread democracy as we're doing it.
Well, and they used that model in the first Iraq war where they refused to make, the president at least, refused to make a full scale insurgency out of it and stop the war as soon as they withdrew from Kuwait.
Well, he did a whole massacre in the desert, the highway of death and all that, but he didn't go all the way to Baghdad.
And so they sort of, I remember Bill Hicks used to say, you know, it was 70,000 people dead on their side, on our side, 79.
So maybe we could have sent 80 guys over there and still won the war.
Well, won the war, but then you got to occupy the country.
And when you occupy the country, you're going to make enemies.
So how do you, how do you occupy a country when the American public really has no stomach for this kind of stuff long-term?
When we keep, well, it's better than when we had the draft.
That was one thing that was learned.
As long as you have the draft, you're going to have protests and students aren't going to want to serve.
And there's going to be a lot of demonstrations and problems.
So let's not do that.
And it was Colin Powell, the joint chief of staff who said, wait a minute, if you're going to go all the way into Iraq, you're going to commit yourself to a long-term occupation, probably guerrilla war.
You don't know what's going to happen.
And you have to be prepared.
And George H. W. Bush, a more prudent man who had actually served as a combat, in combat in World War II, understood something about war and said, okay, it is more prudent just to stop right where we are.
Saddam has learned his lesson and that's it.
And that's where it lay.
Well, after 9-11, the neocons had their second opportunity and boy, did they strike fast.
And they immediately started a false rumor and with distorted intelligence, aided by the prestigious press, namely the New York Times, that Saddam Hussein, in the ensuing 10 years, had collected weapons of mass destruction.
It was a planning to build a nuclear weapon and had links with Al-Qaeda, all of which later proved to be totally false.
And indeed, some of these people knew it was false because American intelligence was saying it at all logic showed it was false.
In September of 2002, which was almost six months before the invasion of Iraq, Saddam Hussein invited the United Nations weapons inspectors to come back in to Iraq and look around.
Now, this was a statement that he had no weapons of mass destruction.
These were the best forensic experts in the world with the most sophisticated equipment and they would have access everywhere and to everyone they wanted access to.
So it was an admission by Saddam Hussein that he didn't have them because why else would he invite them to come inspect?
Everybody could figure this out logically, but of course, nobody did.
Well, in fact, in September 2002, even the Washington Post had it that those aluminum tubes, yeah, those are really everybody who's actually a scientist thinks they're for rockets, not centrifuges.
And the story, I mean, especially if you're reading Knight Ritter, all of the war propaganda was already falling apart before Christmas that year, really.
But they just went on ahead.
I mean, I remember being astounded.
They're like, wait a minute.
This is the 150th time I've heard the aluminum tubes brought up since they were debunked in the post.
They're just going to keep going with this and really make people afraid of aluminum tubes somehow and push it.
And it really was Libby who was coordinating it all from the vice president's office.
Karen Katowski talked about all the guys at the Office of Special Plans at the Pentagon.
They're digging through the CIA's trash and seeing what kind of things they could cherry pick out of there, try to make a case that they would talk about.
I think it was Bill Lutie said, oh, this is great stuff.
I'm going to go and get this straight to Scooter.
And she didn't know who Scooter was then, but she come to find out he was the right hand Smithers to Dick Cheney in the vice president's office.
Yes.
Karen Katowski was a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force assigned to the Special Plans unit.
And she was the literal fly on the wall who watched this absolute distortion of intelligence take place in her office, whereby information that would contradict the weapons of mass destruction and Al Qaeda links were absolutely verboten.
They were not allowed to be transmitted so that the intelligence that was arriving was twisted intelligence.
It was cooked intelligence.
And she later on went on a speaking tour and told all about it.
And by the way, her credibility was absolute.
She was a staunch Republican for life.
So there was no question about this liberal media or liberal critics.
Karen Katowski, who I met and interviewed, was a very, very loyal Republican.
And her family were Republicans.
In fact, while she was at the Pentagon, she was writing anonymously while she was still there for David Hackworth site soldiers for the truth.
That's right.
And yeah, that's not a bastion.
That's no counterpunch over there.
No, no, no.
She thought that this was a government that was selling out our own forces, our own forces needed to have truth.
Intelligence requires accuracy.
Right.
OK, now I've got to hold it right here.
When we get back, we'll talk a little bit more about Libby and his criminality, his trial and what all happened there.
And then the contrast with the American hero, Bradley Manning, who liberated the Afghan and Iraq war logs in the State Department documents.
It's all Landau counterpunch dot org.
He's got a new piece there.
We'll be right back after this.
All right, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Wharton and I'm talking with the legendary documentary filmmaker Saul Landau.
He's got a piece at counterpunch dot org, Scooter Libby versus Bradley Manning.
And but actually, I wanted to ask you real quick.
I don't see it in the bio that I have for you here, but are you still with Pacifica up there in the Bay Area, Saul?
Well, no, I occasionally do shows for them, but no, I'm not with them.
I'm with the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C.
I'm still a fellow, although I'm not in attendance there.
And they are, of course, helping distribute my latest film, Will the Real Terrorist Please Stand Up?
Is he wearing a red, white and blue top hat?
Well, oftentimes, oftentimes they're draped in Cuban flags.
This is really a story of 50 years of U.S.
-Cuban relations and how the right wing Cuban exiles have used South Florida essentially as a base to carry on a terrorist war against Cuba for 50 years.
Well, that's perfectly fine.
As long as you're working for the U.S. government, you can kill whoever you want.
That's the rules of morality in the world.
Everybody knows that.
Well, because Scooter Libby, he'll tell you.
Yeah.
And this is the thing, too.
This is pretty much the point you're making in your counterpunch piece.
And this is what Chris Floyd said over the weekend was, you know, Bradley Manning had committed war crimes in Iraq.
He'd be free to go right now.
Yes.
I mean, if he just killed a bunch of Iraqis or a bunch of Afghans, well, he would have been let off.
Yeah.
These mistakes happened at this war.
Yeah.
And then you look at Libby.
Libby actually lied us into the whole thing.
He was like the bad actor at the very highest level.
And he gets he gets to you know what he did a couple of months on a on a perjury charge.
Well, he actually you know, excuse me, I made a mistake in that article.
He actually didn't serve any time because he was still appealing when Bush commuted his sentence.
Oh, so it was my error.
He actually never, never set foot inside a prison.
You know, I wondered if I remembered that right.
Anyway.
Anyway, I remembered it wrong.
That's OK.
That's OK.
It shows you don't rely on your own memory.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, look, if he if he served a couple of months, that's still a slap on the wrist for killing hundreds of thousands of people, lying a nation into war.
And then his part in exposing a covert CIA operator.
In other words, and the exposure, by the way, was after the invasion of Iraq.
That is where the neocons had achieved their purpose.
They had gotten us into war under false pretenses.
Then they turned around to punish their enemies.
I mean, these people are they will stop at nothing.
They're very, very they're scooters, all of them.
They're a little hyper, especially when it comes to hurting people.
They like to hurt people, although it's hard to picture any of them.
I mean, when you look at Paul Wolfowitz or Scooter Libby or Richard Pearl or Joe Lieberman, who's really one of them, it's hard to picture any of these guys ever having even a schoolyard fight.
But they do love other people to go to war.
Yeah, most of them can't even seem to grow any facial hair.
Well, they're all just.
Well, and this is their whole smear against the hero Bradley Manning is that, oh, well, he's a sissy.
They actually had nothing.
They could they could not come up with a single smear against him, except to attack him for being feminine.
And yet look who's talking neocons.
Yes.
And they revealed a state secret.
You know, it was it was Lydia and Richard Armitage, who was one of them in the State Department.
And they and they together leaked to the to the silly or super silliest Robert Novak, the supposed journalist, the name of Valerie Plame, who was running a covert operation.
And so they blew her career and, of course, risked her agent who, you know, were all around the world and a supposedly important U.S. government program to stop nuclear proliferation.
And in the photo and they did this all to punish her husband, Joe Wilson, who was a former ambassador in Africa, U.S. ambassador in Africa, who was sent to investigate the claims that Saddam Hussein was trying to buy yellow cake uranium from the Republic of Niger.
And, of course, Joe Wilson went over there and said this was preposterous.
And he wrote an op ed in The New York Times saying that this was a totally fake story and was part of the whole game that the neocons were playing to present false evidence to justify the invasion of Iraq.
Well, he got punished via his wife who got out and lost her career.
And, you know, they went through some suffering anyway.
So this is what Libby and his gang did.
They were they lied the country in a war and then they revealed a covert CIA operator.
Now, what did Bradley Manning do?
He essentially revealed crimes and Malby by the United States government.
That was his sin.
He revealed, for example, a video in which you see U.S. helicopter gunship crew massacring a group of civilians on the ground that it looks like one of them has a weapon.
The weapon, of course, turned out to be a camera and the camera belonged to the Reuters news guy who was stationed in Iraq.
So they shot them from a distance from the helicopter gunship.
And then when people came to help the wounded on the street, they shot a van full of people who were trying to help the wounded.
And inside the van, of course, was a was a child.
And that child was shot as well.
Now, this one and by the way, and it's and it's all presented as a video game because the camera is attached to the gun on on the on the helicopter.
So it presents it literally as a video game.
And this is the video game that U.S. troops were playing in Iraq as they were killing, of course, real people.
Now, this presentation to the American public, which went quite viral, was embarrassing.
It showed that the United States troops were committing massacres of civilians.
And this was not an isolated incident.
This was not a revelation of a state security secret.
In other words, all of the Iraqis were quite aware that the United States was behaving this way in Fallujah.
Lots of civilians were killed in the two sieges of Fallujah.
So this was a revelation not to whom it was to the American public who deserve to know this and all of the other documents about diplomatic faux pas, stupidities, little vanities and so on, all of which are going on in the name of the U.S. public and national interest.
These were revealed.
Now, if Bradley Manning actually submitted these, as he is accused of doing, he did the right thing.
He helped to make an informed public.
And the key thing was that he that he gave these documents to WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, who then made them available.
And the New York Times indeed published some of these documents.
Now, if Bradley Manning is indicted, why is the New York Times not indicted or the other newspapers that also revealed this or the radio stations and the television stations that use the material?
The answer is don't ask.
We're not telling.
That's what the Justice Department said.
So they have made the case against one private first class who was given somehow security clearance to see all of these documents and allegedly then distributed them.
Well, it's a weak case and it's a case that should never have been brought.
And the way that Manning was treated, compare that to, say, Scooter Libby, who, as I said, never set foot in prison.
Manning was held in isolation.
The lights were kept on.
He was stripped naked.
He was not allowed to sleep.
In other words, he was tortured.
And this is a definition, not my own, but of Amnesty International.
Well, and the UN torture reporter just complained this last week, that he wasn't allowed access to him, but from everything that he understood, the isolation, sleep deprivation, temperature manipulation, that this was torture.
Exactly.
So this is what happens to essentially, if the charges are correct, to a guy who's a whistleblower.
He's calling, he's revealing crimes and malfeasance of office.
Well, you know, they say that, oh, WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning, they have blood on their hands.
And I think a lot of people believe that just because they said it so many times.
And, you know, it's a nice short slogan for people to memorize and whatever.
But even the secretary of defense said, actually, no, that's not true.
Not a single, you know, Afghan trader ever got exposed and then killed because they were exposed in the WikiLeaks.
It just didn't happen.
There were no examples of it.
And he even said in the chat logs that he was asked by the guy who was snitching on him, well, why don't you sell it to the Russians or something and make some money?
He says, no, no, no, I want worldwide reforms.
You know, the truth will make you free and all that.
The purest of whistleblower motives.
Transparency.
That is supposedly what we are looking for in the U.S. government.
And anyone who tries to bring transparency gets punished.
And the people who sell out the U.S. government, Scooter Libby and the neocons, they get commuted and they get good jobs afterwards.
Yeah, most of them anyway.
Yeah.
All right.
I'm sorry we got to leave it there, but thank you so much for your time.
It's great to talk to you again, Saul.
Thank you, Scott.
Everybody, that's Saul Landau, saullandau.com, counterpunch.org, Scooter Libby versus Bradley Manning.
