05/28/09 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
First guest on the show today is my good friend, Dr. Gareth Porter.
He's an independent historian and journalist, writes for IPS News.
Welcome to the show, Dr. Porter.
How are you, sir?
I'm good.
Glad to be back.
Thanks, Scott.
Well, thank you very much for joining us on the show today.
Who's this guy?
Was it Stanley McChrystal?
Is he a throat-cutting war criminal or what?
Stanley McChrystal is a very interesting character, even in the annals of modern U.S. military history, because of his being so singularly focused on killing and capturing relatively high-value detainees.
I think the most important characteristic of his career, in terms of his new position as commander in Afghanistan, is that he has been responsible over the years for large-scale programs of targeting really mid-level and low-level local leaders in the Taliban in Afghanistan and across the border, at least briefly in Pakistan.
He was, for five years, the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, which was essentially the Middle East version of the Special Operations Command worldwide.
They were the ones who were located, the headquarters were located in Qatar, and he was basically running the show in Iraq, Afghanistan, and, as I say briefly, in Pakistan.
The Special Operations Command is, I'm not exactly sure how this works, maybe you can fill in the details, but these guys, they're not under the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines.
They have their own separate chain command under the Secretary of Defense, right?
That's correct.
There is a separate Special Operations Command, separate from each of the military services, although each service then has its own special operations groups, which are integrated into the Special Operations Command.
So it is a joint effort by the various military services, but has a separate command.
And now, whenever this guy comes up, the first thing I think of is that article from, I think it was the spring of 2005, What the Pentagon Can Now Do in Secret, by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker magazine.
And the point of the article was that Don Rumsfeld was wrestling away covert action from the CIA, and wanted to do it all under the military, and obviously there's the faction fight for power within the Imperial Court, but there's also an important technicality here, which is that the CIA is mandated by law, not that they always go along with this, but they're mandated to let the Congress, at least the gang of eight, I guess they call them, the leaders of both parties on the intelligence committees, and the leaders of both parties in each house of Congress, and they're supposed to tell them all of their covert action.
The military, on the other hand, is bound by no such law, and anything that they do in secret remains secret, even from the leaders of the Congress.
You are correct, that's a very important point, and of course, Guy Hersh was indeed the only journalist to report that at the time, and it now looms, I think, very large in the storyline of Stanley McChrystal's career, and how he ended up as commander in Afghanistan.
The point is exactly as you stated it, that Rumsfeld really saw the Special Operations Command as a means of basically getting around two things.
One, the power of the CIA over covert operations, and you have to remember that Rumsfeld hated the CIA, distrusted the CIA, and wanted to build a counterpoise, or basically a counter to the CIA's ability to carry out covert operations, which he would control.
In other words, the Pentagon and the military would be the ones to carry out covert operations in the future, rather than the CIA.
But the other thing, as you stated, is that there was no legal requirement to report on all the operations of the Special Operations Command, and so Rumsfeld gained freedom of action, which in the Bush administration, of course, was a key consideration for them.
And now, this guy McChrystal, there's an article from Esquire in 2006 that talks about him being, at least by hearsay, he's the guy who made the call that the Red Cross is never allowed in here, and in here meant a prison where Captain Fishback and others were being made to torture people, as Fishback later went to the press and explained.
Well, he is very much involved, was involved, in detainee abuse.
The command was, of course, responsible for all of the treatment of detainees at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, and essentially they were the ones who were carrying out some of the most egregious beatings, torture, and in many cases, killings of Afghan prisoners.
He was somehow spared from being brought to account or held to account for his role in detainee abuse, particularly in Afghanistan, particularly the fact that he was involved in such secret operations that there was an excuse.
It was not a very good excuse, not a good excuse at all, but an excuse that was used by military brass and the Bush administration to protect him.
There were dozens, I believe the figure is 64, military personnel under his command who were found to have been guilty of detainee abuse, but somehow the trial never led back to Stanley McChrystal, who was their commander.
Well, and that's been the story of the torture thing.
Again, Seymour Hersh, we've known since 2004, his articles in the New Yorker, that there was a special access program, it was called Copper Green, how they took the torture methods from the Geneva Convention-less Guantanamo prison and they Gitmo-ized Iraq and sent General Miller there to do it, and it was all on purpose, and it was all Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld's idea, and we've all known this whole time, and yet the program has been to prosecute Lindy England and teach those torturers a lesson.
That's correct, but I would simply add that there is strong reason to believe that McChrystal had his own guidelines for treatment of detainees, which were equally implicating him in guilt in the violation of the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners and basically constitute a war crime, and that therefore this is not simply a matter of going along with administration policy made at a higher level, but that he personally had a role in shaping the detainee abuse policy that took place under his command.
So we don't have the direct evidence, but there is some strong circumstantial evidence to support that.
Strong circumstantial evidence to say that he had his own separate guidelines on a piece of paper somewhere?
That is certainly my interpretation of a statement made by Captain Carolyn Wood, who was the operations officer for the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, who gave investigators a sworn statement back in 2004, again during the period when McChrystal was commander of JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command.
She said that she had drawn the guidance for interrogation from a directive which she called TF-121 IROE, and this was given specifically to members of Task Force 121, which is directly under the JSOC command.
So that is the basis for suggesting that there was a very specific document which was conveyed to that specific task force, and that McChrystal not only knew about it, but certainly cleared it and was responsible for it.
And now is anybody suing to get a copy of this thing?
The American Civil Liberties Union did make a suit to try to get the document, to make it public, but this was blocked by the military, again on the basis, supposedly, of the necessity for secrecy.
And I guess we can just expect the Obama administration to continue along those lines?
That's right.
Now let me think.
Iraq, Special Operations Command, 2004, 2005, 2006 era.
Is this guy, was he running the El Salvador option to bring the death squads of the Badr Corps and the Mahdi Army to murder the leaders of the Sunni insurgency, which precipitated the civil war that cost a million lives in that country?
I don't know the answer to that for sure.
I have not seen anything specifically relating McChrystal to that episode in Iraq.
I tend to doubt it because I think that that was a CIA operation.
As far as I know, it was a CIA operation.
I think McChrystal was involved in directly, basically, detaining military people and trying to get information from them that would lead them to the capture, particularly of Saddam Hussein himself, and then later on to Al-Qaeda leaders in Iraq.
So he was in a somewhat different operation from the one you're describing.
All right, well, so now what does it mean that he's been taken from the Special Operations Command and has been made the general in charge of AFPAC?
Well, this is a very interesting question, particularly in light of the fact that both Secretary of Defense Gates and the major news media essentially made the argument when his nomination was announced that this guy McChrystal is the right person for the job of commander in Afghanistan because he is so well-versed and so experienced in counterinsurgency.
From my point of view, both the decision itself and then the way it was presented are very clear indications that the whole notion that there's going to be a counterinsurgency policy carried out in Afghanistan that is somehow going to be different from knocking down doors of people's homes, carrying people off in the middle of the night, basically threatening them with mistreatment or actually mistreating them, forcing them to give names of suspected Taliban and then targeting the Taliban either through ground operations or airstrikes.
That's simply not going to happen because it's very clear that he's being chosen, not because he knows anything about trying to appeal for the support of the Pashtun population and other groups in Afghanistan, but because he's a specialist in targeted killing.
I mean, that's all he knows.
He spent five years doing that.
Then he was head of the Joint Staff for some eight months after he came back from that position as commander of JSOC.
But that is his only expertise, really.
There's a whole narrative here, Gareth, about how it used to be a fiasco, but then the surge worked and all this.
Search and destroy, you're familiar, I'm sure, with the book Collateral Damage by Chris Hedges and Leila Al-Aryan about just the untold wanton suffering of the people of Iraq under the search and destroyed General Pace and General Casey model of killing Iraqis and taking over their country.
But then the heroic, in fact, some would say perfect and sinless, General Petraeus has come and given us this wonderful new rewritten counterinsurgency strategy that says, no, not seek and destroy, clear, hold, build.
And so it seems like what you're saying is that as they announce that they're doing an Afghan surge, a clear, hold, build Petraeus counterinsurgency strategy, they've hired a seek and destroy assassin to be the head of the damn thing.
Am I confused or is there even a difference here?
Are these all just euphemisms for murdering Afghans anyway or what?
Well, there is obviously primarily a sort of pasting a nicer label on what is essentially an operation involved in massive killing.
That is the primary reality, no question about that.
And I think that behind that reality is the fact that they have no idea what they are doing in Afghanistan, apart from sort of conventional search and destroy operations, along with special operations variant of search and destroy, which is snatching people out of their homes, forcing them to give names, then going after the people that they've named and thinking that that is somehow going to bring them closer to success against the Taliban.
I mean, I think that that is clearly going to be a major part of the operation.
It's going to be given, if anything, more emphasis under McChrystal.
One cannot come to any other conclusion than that.
But I think that the airstrikes will not only continue, they will multiply.
There will be far more airstrikes than there have been over the last two or three years under McChrystal.
I think it's very important to understand that some of the, if not most of the major atrocities involving dozens of civilians being killed in airstrikes in Afghanistan were called in by special operations forces teams.
This is well documented by Carlotta Gall and David Sanger, Carlotta Gall in particular in her coverage in the New York Times in Afghanistan starting in 2007.
The special operations forces operating in Afghanistan are notorious for basically getting the wrong targets at the wrong time, killing large numbers of civilians.
This is such a stunningly irrational policy in terms of any sort of human approach to Afghanistan that one has to believe that the military and the Pentagon have completely turned off their thinking apparatus and are simply determined to go straight ahead and continue with what they've done because they simply don't know what else to do.
Wonderful, yeah, that sounds about right.
Well, alright, I've got a theory here.
Go ahead and tell me that I'm full of hyperbole and don't know what the hell I'm talking about.
I'd prefer that.
It seems to me Barack Obama is deliberately trying to destroy Pakistan so he has an excuse to invade it with American troops, build permanent bases, build a super embassy, as reported in McClatchy newspapers this morning, and take over their nuclear weapons and, you know, whatever, expand the war into Pakistan for real.
I frankly don't think that Obama or the people around him think that that's even a remote possibility.
Well, that's good, because I don't think so either.
It seems like it would be an absolute suicide mission, so I guess I'm glad to hear that they agree with that.
On the other hand, you know, what I do believe is that when the U.S. government first went into South Vietnam, you know, the president certainly and his leading advisors I think almost certainly would have regarded an invasion with U.S. ground troops of South Vietnam as crazy, irrational, and something that would never happen.
And, of course, we all know that that is exactly what happened.
Yeah, a little bit out of time.
It's partly a little bit out of time, and then, you know, the sort of restraints come off completely when you are so deeply committed that you find that it's sort of too late to turn back, that that's the way the apparatus operates.
But, I mean, I'm not saying that this is inevitable, but I do believe that this is not something that can be dismissed by any means as sort of a logic of war, regardless of who the president is and which country it is.
Well, and Kagan and O'Hanlon wrote a thing in the New York Times in October of 07, I think, that said, well, let's do it.
Yes, and there is this cast of mind, this notion within the military, obviously, supporting the idea that if the Taliban are at the gates of the cities or, shall we say, you know, on the verge of being able to close in on areas where we know the Pakistani nuclear weapons are located, that we have no choice but to send ground troops in, at the very least special operations forces, to try to, quote, secure, unquote, those weapons.
Now, again, I mean, this is a stunningly irrational idea.
No one that I've ever talked to who's given serious thought to the idea of sending ground forces, whether special operations or otherwise, into Pakistan regards it as anything but irrational and a formula for getting the United States into the ultimate war with Islam in the Middle East.
And that includes, you know, some people who I think are quite conservative in their basic viewpoint.
It includes also a former deputy chairman of the National Intelligence Council, who I spoke to about this.
But I think you cannot blink the fact that this has become a kind of mantra within the Obama administration, even.
That is to say, the idea that the one thing that we absolutely cannot allow to happen is that the Pakistani nuclear weapons could fall into the hands of the Taliban.
And again, you know, the idea of preemption is on everyone's, not on everyone's lips, but in everyone's mind, that we cannot wait for this to happen.
We must act first.
And that means putting in ground forces to try to prevent it.
Well, everything I hear from Eric Margulies and from a lot of other things I've read, say that there's no chance that that's going to happen, that the vast majority of the people of Pakistan are not Islamic radicals at all.
Most of them are Sufi mystic types, you know, unitarian Muslims, basically.
And that the military is an extremely nationalist and extremely controlled by the CIA organization anyway.
And those nukes aren't anything like in danger of falling into the hands of, you know, tribal kooks who live off in the Hindu Kush mountains there.
Well, I'm prepared to say that this seems like a very distant threat, a threat that is extremely far from reality at this point.
And I think that invoking that threat, as we have seen in recent months, from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton down to the National Security Advisor, General James Jones, this kind of rhetoric is wild, irresponsible, and presumably being used in order to put greater pressure on Pakistan, and in effect to raise the stakes, generally speaking, in Pakistan.
And that is always an extremely dangerous thing to do, regardless of, you know, how realistic or unrealistic the circumstances that are being invoked.
This is something that should be avoided, because it does...
It's useful only to get the United States more deeply involved and to justify things that are very difficult to justify otherwise.
All right, well, now let me spin some crazy hyperbole the other way, and you can set me straight.
Barack Obama is a peacenik and a hero, and what he really wants to do is send McChrystal the assassin in there to finally cut Ayman al-Zawahiri's throat.
No more podcasts from him, and then we can call the whole thing off and come home and be a peace-loving constitutional republic again.
You know, it's very possible that Obama was sold a bill of goods by General Petraeus, and by the way, there's every reason to believe that Petraeus was the single biggest influence on the White House in getting them to approve, getting the President to approve the McChrystal nomination.
And undoubtedly also on Secretary Gates for making the nomination.
So really the question is, why is Petraeus pushing McChrystal?
And it's certainly plausible to me that the argument was being made, look, McChrystal can be sent in there in the hope that he can sort of decapitate the Taliban, decapitate Al-Qaeda to the extent that they're there, which of course is not at all.
And that whether or not this is going to be an effective counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan, we'll always be able to say that we've effectively weakened the Taliban by decapitation, and if all goes as badly as it might go, then we could sort of announce victory and get out.
That's not an impossible or totally implausible scenario, given the reality that the cards are so strongly stacked against the U.S. military in Afghanistan that the chances of prevailing in that war, or even making progress in the next three and a half years of the Obama administration, is such a dim possibility that one has to believe that Obama was certainly looking for some kind of plausible way out after four years.
Certainly not before four years, that would be much too fast.
Looking for that magic bullet that might save him from a second term of war in Afghanistan.
So I would say that that's, again, simply plausible.
Beyond that, I couldn't say how much truth there is to that idea.
Well, I forget if it was the last interview or the one before that or something, we talked a lot about the various engines of American empire and the various interests that keep it going like this.
And it's your thesis, I guess, that the Pentagon itself, the national security state itself, is such a filthy snowball rolling downhill that nothing can stop it until, I guess, the dollar completely breaks and America falls apart.
You have admirably summarized a very complicated notion.
Yes, that's pretty much it.
And by the way, there's a perfect illustration, I think, of that thesis, which just was publicized this week.
Army Chief of Staff and, of course, former top commander in Iraq, General George Casey, the Army Chief of Staff, he gave a briefing for a select group of journalists and bloggers, according to the report this week, in which he made the argument that the Army is going to have to remain in Iraq and Afghanistan for at least ten years and, by implication, even much longer than that, regardless of the agreement in Iraq, regardless of the policy of the Obama administration.
He didn't use those words, but that's obviously the implication that none of that matters.
What matters is that the Army is going to have to stay.
And he went into some great detail about why this is the case, why the world is trending in the wrong direction, everything is going wrong, the threats are mounting, and the only answer, of course, to all this is for Army ground troops to remain on the scene indefinitely.
And this, of course, is not a new argument.
This is an argument that the U.S. Army has been embracing now for the last few years, and it just happens to be the one argument that they would have to be able to put forward in order to justify continuing to get the present level of budgetary resources and to avoid the inevitable sort of budgetary crackdown on the Army as the financial situation dries up.
So basically the Army is doing what it always does, what all the military services do, which is to make that argument that most strongly supports the continuation and growth of the military missions assigned to that service, the military roles that are assigned to the service, the budget and manpower that are assigned to the service under the current military budget.
That's the game that General Casey is now stepping up, if you will, trying to get more news coverage of it to give it a higher profile.
Well, do you still agree with yourself a few months ago that you agree with Patrick Coburn that America has installed the Dawah Party and Supreme Islamic Council's factions in power so solidly in Iraq that they don't need us anymore, that their alliance with Iran is enough that they can, at least they believe, maintain their power without us, and that we have to leave by 2012 whether Obama and Odierno and Emperor Petraeus want us to or not?
Well, I would agree with that with a slight or perhaps more than slight amendment, and that is that I no longer would say that it's the Dawah Party or the Supreme Islamic Council which are the keys organizationally to the power of the regime, of the al-Maliki regime in Iraq.
I think now al-Maliki has centralized power using intelligence, military, as well as a political machine to buttress his personal and institutional control over politics and society in that country.
I think certainly you're right that close relations with Iran, including very clear-cut commitments by Iran to provide economic support and, if necessary, military support for as long as necessary, are part of the power position of that regime.
But I think that 2006 and the intense sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shia in the capital area of Baghdad was really the key to a weak regime being turned into a relatively strong regime there, because it reinforced the Shia's sectarian identity and basically gave a much broader incentive for the Shia population to support a Shia regime in Baghdad, and I think he's capitalized on that very effectively.
Well, you know, I thought it was hilarious the other day.
Apparently a blogger had a chance to ask Tom Ricks, Pentagon spokesman, pardon me, a Washington Post reporter, something like that, and referred to your reporting, and his answer was, oh, well, if Gareth Porter said it, it's wrong, because he's wrong about everything.
And I was trying to think back, because I've interviewed you more than anyone through the years doing this radio show.
I think we're up to, you know, 50-something or more than that by now, and I was trying to figure out where you were wrong, other than perhaps being a little too optimistic about Barack Obama's bloodthirst.
But other than that, you know, when it came to debunking the Iranian bombs, being responsible for killing all our guys in Iraq, you debunked the hell out of that, which it wasn't true, and you were right about that, clearly.
You've explained all along the dynamics of the different parties in power, from the Mahdi Army and the Supreme Islamic Council and Dawah Party and other Shiite factions, to the relationship between the Sunni insurgency and Al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Maliki government and the American military attempting to negotiate or, you know, refusing to negotiate with these factions at certain times and whatever.
And the reason I keep having you on the show is because, as far as I can tell, your analysis bears out pretty much every time.
Of course, the whole fight, Admiral Fallon and Petraeus, about Cheney's trying to get us into a war with Iran, and on and on it goes.
I think I've gotten better as time has gone by.
I think I've seen things more clearly, and I think, yeah, I mean, when we came to the Al-Maliki demand for the withdrawal of U.S. troops, then a lot of things began to become, I think, even clearer.
And I think that since then it's been easier, frankly, to get a handle on what's really going on.
I think before that there was a lot of confusion in my mind as well as everybody else's.
And so it's a constantly shifting situation where I think you need perhaps certain indicators to kind of help snap the analysis into place.
So I appreciate your review, and I take credit for those things where I think I have gotten it right, and I think the record is better over time.
Well, I think if anybody goes back and checks, you'll find me in MP3 format asking you, or they would find, one would find, me asking you, so what do you think about this awakening movement of concerned local citizens, the sons of Iraq and the recently bought-off former Sunni insurgency?
Do you think Maliki is going to make them captains in the army and work everything out with them, or has the surge been simply a giant hoax against the American people mostly to get us to prolong this war and stay in Iraq longer, when in fact they all wanted out years ago?
And of course, even more relevant, I think, if you go back far enough, I hope if we could turn the clock back, perhaps we did an interview, I hope we did an interview on the possibilities for even negotiating with the Sunnis as early as 2005.
Right, Zalmay Khalilzad.
We could have, in fact, ended the Sunni insurgency, avoided the sectarian violence, and the storyline in Iraq would have been very different.
Right, and in fact, this is a story that's been developed, I'm still kicking myself, because when I talked with David Rose the other day about his article in Vanity Fair about how Wolfowitz refused to allow some kind of negotiation with the Sunnis back in 2003, no, pardon me, 2004, that was also in conjunction with Charles Doolford talking about how Cheney wanted him to torture that Iraqi intelligence agent, and he said on the Rachel Maddow show, just kind of as an aside, that this is in the summer of 2003 when every Ba'athist was kissing our ass and trying to nip the insurgency in the bud and make a deal with us, and we refused in 2003, then again David Rose's article and Paul Wolfowitz's obstruction in 2004, and then as you just mentioned, Zalmay Khalilzad's effort in 2005, and it wasn't until when, after Sauder laid down his weapons in August of 2007 that America finally decided to go ahead and pay these guys off?
Well, I think it started in late 2006, early 2007, before Petraeus even got there.
There was this beginning of that policy, there's no doubt about that.
Well, and the Sunni insurgent Iraqis from there had been fighting against al-Qaeda guys since late 2005.
Had the United States reached a peace with them, of course, they would have been able to do it more effectively and more completely, no question about that.
But even then, you still have the problem of overthrowing the minority rule and installing the majority, and they didn't really have a choice about that, did they?
But to de-Ba'athify and turn their country over to the Shiites once they overthrew Saddam Hussein, Gareth?
Well, you know, you have lots of options other than doing that, that's for sure.
The sort of punitive policy toward the Ba'athists was, of course, a policy that was pushed very hard by the most hardline pro-Israeli neoconservatives in the administration.
You have to come back to the idea of ideology actually influencing the policy at that point.
It was an irrational policy to carry out a kind of de-Nazification in their mind in Iraq, completely at odds with everyone's interests, except, as you've suggested, for the Shia in the end.
That was what they wanted, because it was helping them to consolidate power.
Well, now at this point, we see what's happened, and I think, as far as I can tell, post, I don't know, at least since 2005 or something like that, and the election where the Shiite parties came into power, supposedly with the Purple Finger legitimacy and all that, the idea of buying off the insurgency and arming them up and giving them security service authority in their own neighborhoods and towns and that kind of thing could only be a temporary thing, because the Shiite parties are not making these men captains in the army.
The surge did not work.
Maybe there was a little bit of an eye of a storm there, but basically what it was was a bribe to stop fighting for a while, but as long as they're not going to be brought into the government, and as long as really the Shiite government can't extend full authority over those Sunni parts of the country where the awakening is still strong, then we're simply waiting for war to break out again, right?
If you trace this basic dilemma back far enough, what you see is the obvious conclusion that everyone who doesn't have a vested interest in war recognizes very clearly, which is that we don't have any real enemies in Iraq.
They're all enemies that we simply created for the purpose of justifying a war.
Ouch.
Well, there you go.
Gareth Porter, IPS News.
You can find all of your rights at original.antiwar.com slash porter.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today, Scott.
Thanks for having me again, Scott.