Saturday, December 26, 2015

BEFORE ISLAMOPHOBIA THERE WAS THE RED SCARE ~~ THE HIDDEN STORY


-


@honestcharlie posted: "This seems particularly relevant today. Not only does it related to our modern day McCarthyism (Trump), but it also let's us know why both the Kennedy brothers were deemed "disposable". It may seem a stretch, but things did seem to go downhill f"
Respond to this post by replying above this line

New post on THE ABSURD TIMES -- STILL

New post BEFORE ISLAMOPHOBIA THERE WAS THE RED SCARE ~~ THE HIDDEN STORY

by @honestcharlie
This seems particularly relevant today. Not only does it related to our modern day McCarthyism (Trump), but it also let's us know why both the Kennedy brothers were deemed "disposable". It may seem a stretch, but things did seem to go downhill fast after they were eliminated.
desertpeace posted: "As the Red Scare spread, about 300 workers in the entertainment industry were blacklisted.
'Trumbo' and the Hidden Story of the Red Scare James DiEugenio The post-World War II years could have shaped America into a very different country by building "
Respond to this post by replying above this line

New post on Desertpeace

BEFORE ISLAMOPHOBIA THERE WAS THE RED SCARE ~~ THE HIDDEN STORY

As the Red Scare spread, about 300 workers in the entertainment industry were blacklisted.
redscare-H
'Trumbo' and the Hidden Story of the Red Scare
The post-World War II years could have shaped America into a very different country by building on the foundations the New Deal and moving more along the lines of European allies with publicly financed health care and other social protections.
Instead, reactionary forces that never made peace with President Franklin Roosevelt's Depression-era reforms generated a new Red Scare, wildly exaggerating the threat from a small number of mild-mannered communists and leftists in Hollywood to steer the nation in a right-wing direction favored by big business.
A new movie, Trumbo, recounts one early chapter in that saga, the persecution of screenwriter Dalton Trumbo and other leftists in the movie industry who became known as the Hollywood Ten, subjected to jail and "blacklisting" for their political views.
The film tells Trumbo's personal story as a victim of ambitious congressmen, a zealous columnist and intimidated movie executives, but also how this talented screenwriter ultimately prevailed with the help of actor Kirk Douglas and a few other Hollywood luminaries who appreciated Trumbo's skills and saw the blacklisting as a hysterical witch hunt.
But what the movie fails to explain is how the scars from the Red Scare permanently changed America, making it a place of fearful conformity with a relatively narrow band of acceptable political thought. The era killed off a vibrant Left that could have challenged the Right's hostility to government social programs fulfilling the constitutional mandate to "provide for the … general Welfare."
Yet, as a tale of one man's struggle against a fearsome combination of government pressure and industry complicity to control his freedom of thought, Trumbo is a worthy – and even rare – historical drama.
An Exceptional Talent
Dalton Trumbo was one of the most colorful, fascinating and prolific writers that the Hollywood film colony ever produced. Trumbo wrote, or co-wrote, well over 50 produced screenplays. In addition, he wrote numerous plays, novels and non-fiction books. Some of his most famous scripts were A Bill of Divorcement, A Guy Named Joe and Kitty Foyle.
Unfortunately for Trumbo, he was never allowed to walk up on stage to receive an Academy Award. Not because he did not win any. He actually won two: one for The Brave One and one for Roman Holiday. But at the time he won those Oscars — in the 1950s — he was on what became known as the Hollywood blacklist.
This was an unofficial assemblage of the names of persons working in the motion picture industry who were not allowed to be employed by any of the major studios or television networks. Therefore, when Trumbo won those two awards, his Oscars were given to people who either did not actually exist or who worked as a "front" for Trumbo.
A "front" was someone who had an acceptable name to the studios and who was deemed employable. This person did either little or no work on the completed script, but was allowed a percentage of the fees accrued for the screenplay. Trumbo was finally given his Oscar for The Brave One in 1975, the year before he died. It was not until 2011 that his name was restored to prints of Roman Holiday.
Trumbo was born in Colorado in 1905. He began writing in high school for his local newspaper. When he attended college at the University of Colorado, he worked as a reporter for the Boulder Daily Camera. After working for a number of years at a bakery and after years of having his stories and novels rejected, he finally began to have some success when his essays were accepted in some major magazines. He then became a script reader for Warner Brothers.
From about 1937 to 1947, Dalton Trumbo was one of the highest-paid writers in Hollywood. Some sources state that he was the highest paid writer in the film colony. Trumbo had two qualities that producers craved: he was versatile and he was fast. He could write in a variety of film genres, from comedy to fantasy to personal drama to the epic structure. And since he was a workaholic, he could produce completed screenplays and rewrites at a rate that was exceptional.
Actor Kirk Douglas was astonished at how fast Trumbo wrote the script for Spartacus. In Douglas's book, I am Spartacus, the actor said Trumbo worked at least twice as fast as any writer with whom he worked. Those qualities, plus a gift for finding a story arc and creating credible characters and dialogue, helped Trumbo ascend to the highest peak of Hollywood success before the age of 40.
Hunting 'Subversives'
Trumbo's career all but collapsed when he ran headlong into the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). This infamous committee first became prominent under Texas Congressman Martin Dies in 1938 when it was initially supposed to investigate Nazi espionage in America. But since it was largely composed of Republicans and conservative Democrats (like Dies), it quickly turned to inquiring into one of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal programs, the Federal Theater Project. (Robert F. Vaughn, Only Victims, p. 36)
The Federal Theater Project was a part of the Works Progress Administration, which became the largest single employment program of the New Deal. The Federal Theater Project was meant to employ out-of-work actors, directors and stage managers in federally funded stage productions; both in New York and several regional outlets.
It was a smashing success in that it produced nearly 1,000 plays in four years. These were seen by hundreds of thousands of spectators. Some of the plays were directed by Orson Welles and have become legendary in stage history, e.g., The Cradle Will Rock.
HUAC did not like the spectacular success of this program. Dies once said that the WPA was the greatest boon the communists ever had in the United States. (ibid) Dies called several people to testify about supposed communist influences in certain productions. The committee was so unsophisticated in its understanding that it criticized the director of the project for going to Russia to see new experimental plays by theater innovators like Konstantin Stanislavsky. (ibid, p. 61)
Congressman Joe Starnes famously asked project director Hallie Flanigan if playwright Christopher Marlowe was a communist, though Marlowe had died in 1593. Yet, these clownish blunderings became popular with newspapers and magazines. And, at first, HUAC gained a large amount of public support. Dies unsuccessfully called for the resignation of New Deal officers such as Harry Hopkins and Harold Ickes. (ibid, p. 70). But Dies did kill the Federal Theater Project.
After World War II, HUAC became a standing committee and – under new chairman Parnell Thomas – the panel decided to hold hearings into the Hollywood film industry. The committee investigators, led by Harry Stripling, assembled dossiers which were largely created from information delivered by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. HUAC then held open hearings, calling a series of prominent players in the entertainment field.
Contempt of Congress
The first panel consisted of "friendly witnesses" who essentially agreed with the committee's judgments and aims – that Hollywood was filled with communist agents who were assembling works of propaganda in order to weaken the foundations of American life. Then, HUAC called "unfriendly witnesses" who did not agree with these judgments, refused to cooperate with the committee and were then indicted for contempt of Congress.
The "friendly witnesses" included three heads of major studios: Jack Warner, Louis B. Mayer and Walt Disney, all extremely powerful, wealthy and politically connected. Warner volunteered the names of suspected communists, e.g. writers Alvah Bessie, Howard Koch and Ring Lardner Jr. (Vaughn, p. 81)
Disney testified that a strike his studio endured a year before was caused by communist infiltration of trade unions, and he named union leader Herbert K. Sorrell as a communist agent. Disney also named an animator at his studio, David Hilberman, as a communist. (ibid, p. 85)
Mayer testified that HUAC should write legislation that would regulate the employment of communists in private industry.
With Republicans in control of the committee, it enlisted novelist Ayn Rand as a witness who watched the film Song of Russia and evaluated whether or not it was propaganda. Rand declared that since the film did not depict normal life in Russia as a gulag, it was propaganda.
As author Victor Navasky has written, the parading of these friendly witnesses was little more than the scaffolding for a sideshow. Famous actors such as Robert Taylor, Adolphe Menjou, Robert Montgomery, Gary Cooper and Ronald Reagan joined the studio executives. (Reagan continued defending HUAC into the 1970s even after it was formally disbanded.)
There was a tactical aim in all of this. By presenting these witnesses first and urging them to deliver speeches and name suspected subversives, the 10 "unfriendly witnesses" who followed were set up in the public eye as being antagonistic toward the earlier star-spangled cavalcade.
Trumbo was in this second group. He had been a member of the Communist Party from about 1943, an isolationist and anti-war, an attitude conveyed by his famous novel Johnny Got His Gun, published in 1939. In the rapidly ascending spiral of Cold War demagoguery, these qualities made him a perfect target of HUAC and one of its ambitious young members, Richard Nixon.
Pleading the First
Trumbo and his group of fellow writers – Albert Maltz, Ring Lardner Jr., Lester Cole, Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, John H. Lawson, Sam Ornitz, Adrian Scott and Edward Dmytryk (who was a writer-director) – decided to do battle with HUAC. They knew that the question the committee would ask was, if they were now or had ever been a member of the Communist Party, which would not be officially outlawed until 1954.
But the witnesses knew that if they admitted this, the next question would be: Who else do you know who is or was a member? Or the committee would ask, did you attend any meetings, and if so who did you see there?
Since they had already seen what men like Mayer, Warner and Disney did in getting rid of suspected leftists, the witnesses knew that not only would their careers be endangered but anyone else they named would be put at risk.
Therefore, Trumbo and other witnesses decided not to plead the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination but instead refused to directly answer the committee's questions, citing their First Amendment rights of choice and privacy. For their stance, Trumbo and nine other witnesses, who became known as the Hollywood Ten, were prosecuted for contempt of Congress.
Their main attorney, Bartley Crum advised them that the Supreme Court would not uphold such a conviction. But after Trumbo was convicted in the lower court, the Supreme Court refused to hear his case. Trumbo went to prison for about 11 months in Ashland, Kentucky.
Besides prison terms, the Hollywood Ten case led to a blacklist by movie executives who "deplored the action of the 10 Hollywood men who have been cited for contempt by the House of Representatives." All business ties and contracts with them were "suspended without compensation" and none would be re-employed until they were acquitted or purged themselves of contempt and declared under oath he is not a communist.
As the Red Scare spread, about 300 workers in the entertainment industry were blacklisted. Some, like actor Philip Loeb, were pushed to the edge. As Douglas notes in his book, Loeb could not care for his emotionally troubled son and committed suicide, a particularly painful experience for Douglas who knew Loeb when they were both up-and-coming actors in New York.
Eking Out a Living
When Trumbo emerged from prison, he first moved to Mexico for a couple of years. He tried to eke out a living writing scripts, but the man who once commanded $75,000 per screenplay could make only a fraction of that sum. So, he moved back to Los Angeles where he lived in a small house in Highland Park. For the next several years, he employed phony names and hired fronts to produce his scripts, even when he was dealing with small, independent production companies like the King Brothers.
Even though Trumbo was making much less money and working much harder and longer, he could not claim credit for his work. As Jay Roach's Trumbo shows, this put a tremendous strain on Trumbo's home life.
Beyond the movie executives, other powerful Hollywood figures piled on the Hollywood Ten and went after their support group, the Committee for the First Amendment. Actor John Wayne and gossip columnist Hedda Hopper formed the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservations of American Ideals.
When a performer or writer wanted to recant and purge himself, he got in contact with this group. As Reagan said in an interview for the film Hollywood on Trial, they would tell this person that the Alliance really could not help you unless you decided to help yourself. Once the person did so, he would get permission from studio executives to work again.
Roach's film shows actor Edward G. Robinson, who had supported Trumbo with monetary contributions and didn't work for a year, going through this penance under the approving eye of Wayne.
Some Hollywood Ten defendants, like director Edward Dmytryk, could not handle the pressures and made arrangements with the powers that be to recant and name names. As result, actress Lee Grant was added to the blacklist while the rehabilitated Dmytryk went on to direct films, including The Caine Mutiny, shot in 1954 at the high tide of the blacklist.
As the film shows, however, there were some brave souls who finally cracked the blacklist.
When Kirk Douglas came to Hollywood in 1945, he was hired to work on a film called The Strange Love of Martha Ivers. There was a strike going on, the one which Disney referred to in his testimony before HUAC. The striking union, largely representing set dressers, had asked the Screen Actor's Guild to honor their picket line.
Under the influence of Guild leaders — such as George Murphy, Ronald Reagan and George Montgomery — SAG refused to do so. But the writer and the director of Douglas's film, respectively Robert Rossen and Lewis Milestone, did support the strikers. They would not cross the picket line. Fearing a lockout, producer Hal Wallis had the actor sleep in his dressing room.
As Douglas related in his book, two years later, both Milestone and Rossen were called before HUAC. Milestone escaped to France. Rossen admitted membership in the Communist Party. Both men were blacklisted.
Another Douglas friend and colleague, Carl Foreman, producer of the film High Noon, was called to testify but fled to England. Foreman was targeted because some took High Noon as an allegory for what HUAC was doing to America.
A Disgusted Douglas
All this shocked Douglas, who knew that none of these men posed any threat to the security of the United States. He realized how absurd the practices of the HUAC actually were.
For instance, the committee called baseball player Jackie Robinson to testify against actor Paul Robeson, but Robinson could offer little or no information about the actor. Douglas concluded that the only reason Robinson was called was because, like Robeson, he was a famous African-American.
Douglas was also distressed by the fact that six of the Hollywood Ten were Jewish as was he and as were many of the executives who capitulated so completely before HUAC. Douglas could not understand why people of the Jewish faith, who fully understood the price and pain of being persecuted, would go along with the HUAC circus, led by a clown like Thomas.
As Douglas wrote and as the film shows, much of this stemmed from fear. Men such as Warner, Mayer and Harry Cohn were "terrified their great power would be taken away from them if their loyalty to America was called into question."
Roach's film shows a scene with columnist Hedda Hopper going into Mayer's office, calling him a kike, and threatening to vilify him in her columns unless he cooperated with the committee.
But Douglas rejected such pressure, agreeing with actor Fredric March who said: "They're after more than Hollywood. This reaches into every American city and town."
Ironically, HUAC's aggressive witch hunt against leftists in Hollywood contributed, indirectly, to the undoing of Trumbo's isolation. In 1950, author Howard Fast was called before HUAC and grilled about his colleagues in a group opposing Spain's fascist dictator Francisco Franco. When Fast refused to answer, he also was imprisoned.
In prison, Fast used the library to research the life of Spartacus, a slave who turned gladiator and finally became a rebel leader against Imperial Rome. After getting released from prison, Fast wrote a historical novel about the man who almost undid the Roman Empire.
But Fast's life was not the same as it had been before. He was banned from speaking on college campuses. He was under surveillance by the FBI. And he was denied a passport, which deprived him of his right to do research on Spartacus in Europe.
When Fast finished his book, he tried to sell it to his old publisher, Little, Brown and Company, but was turned down after the FBI visited the publisher. Six other publishing houses also turned it down. With no other alternative, Fast published it himself. In four months, it sold 48,000 copies with Fast and his wife shipping out copies from their basement.
Finding Spartacus
By the 1950s, Kirk Douglas had built a very successful career as an actor. He also despised the fact that MGM made him sign a loyalty oath to play painter Vincent Van Gogh in Lust for Life. So, Douglas created his own production company with partner Ed Lewis, who dropped off a copy of Fast's Spartacus on Douglas's desk.
Douglas loved the book and decided to produce the film (and star in it). Fast insisted on writing the first draft of the script but it was quite poor, prompting Douglas to enlist Trumbo to do the re-write. But Douglas told Universal Studio chiefs Ed Muhl and Lew Wasserman that Lewis was writing the script.
About halfway through the film's production, Trumbo stopped working, complaining that he had written about 250,000 words on the project so far and did not want to do that much work if his name was not on the film.
Douglas drove to Trumbo's house and told him that when the film was finished, he would insist that Trumbo get screen credit, which is what Douglas wanted to do all along. Douglas invited Trumbo to a meeting at the Universal commissary with himself and director Stanley Kubrick, something Trumbo had not done for almost 13 years.
After columnist Hedda Hopper exposed the fact that Trumbo was secretly writing Spartacus, producer-director Otto Preminger approached Trumbo to write a movie from the Leon Uris book Exodus. Preminger announced this in the movie trade papers, joining Douglas in helping Trumbo crack the blacklist.
After Douglas and Preminger made their announcements, singer/actor Frank Sinatra also decided to employ a blacklisted writer, Albert Maltz, except Sinatra wanted to make this into a big event. But Trumbo advised Douglas to tell Sinatra to drop his crusade, since it would probably hurt Sen. John Kennedy in his presidential race against former HUAC member Richard Nixon. Joseph Kennedy, the candidate's father, also advised Sinatra not to go that route.
A President Weighs In
But after Kennedy got elected in 1960, he and longtime friend, Paul Fay, attended a public screening of Spartacus. The American Legion was picketing and Kennedy could have asked for a private screening of the film. Wasserman and Muhl would have been glad to oblige.
But on the advice of his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the President made the deliberate public appearance.
Roach closes the film with a nice strophe. Hopper is in her living room watching television when a segment depicting Kennedy's attendance at the film comes on the screen. The camera rotates around her face slowly, as she begins to realize that her reign of terror is now ending.
The scene dissolves to black. Out of the darkness, we see Trumbo in the wings about to go on stage in 1970 to collect his Laurel Award, the annual distinguished career award given out by the Writers' Guild of America. Eloquently, Trumbo addresses the issue of the whole blacklist period and the film closes.
Director Jay Roach began his career in comedy, directing Michael Myers in the Austin Powers films. He also directed the Robert DeNiro comedy Meet the Parents before going to the small screen to direct works closer to his heart. For HBO, he directed the political dramas Recount about the Republican heist of the 2000 presidential election in Florida, and Game Change about Sen. John McCain's decision to pick Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate in 2008.
Roach has now made Trumbo, a political drama for the large screen. Overall, he does fairly well. Dalton Trumbo did several interviews that were captured on film and can be seen by almost anyone. Actor Bryan Cranston has obviously watched them at length as he does a nice job portraying Trumbo's feisty character.
The English actress Helen Mirren plays Hedda Hopper. From the first time I saw Mirren in The Long Good Friday, I was struck by her intelligence, subtlety and technical proficiency. She furthers that tradition here with a nicely understated performance. In an easy part, John Goodman is strong and vivid as low-budget producer John King.
Roach likes to begin a scene low key and then build it to a powerful explosion or aria. For example, he does this with Goodman wielding a baseball bat at a representative of the producers' alliance sent to intimidate him from employing blacklisted writers.
The one disappointment in the cast is Diane Lane as Trumbo's wife Cleo. Either she could not find the center of her character, or Roach could not help her. It's a completely blasé performance in a major role.
A Bigger Picture
In my opinion, some of the film's shortcomings originate in the script by John McNamara. The film tries to make the opening of Spartacus into a crowning historical moment, which is not true. Because of the power of Douglas, Wasserman and Muhl, this achievement ended the blacklist for Trumbo but not for many others who did not have that kind of torque behind them. For them, it lingered on into the mid-1960s.
Another problem with the script is that it misses the core motivation for HUAC and the careers of some of its members, like Dies, Thomas and Nixon. For political reasons, they bitterly resented the scope and the goals of Roosevelt's New Deal. They did not want government to be the solution to the Great Depression. So, they decided to poison the New Deal's legacy with the taint of communism.
To a degree, they were successful. HUAC managed to drastically limit the American political spectrum by attacking, smearing, prosecuting and demonizing any political orientation left of the Democratic Party.
HUAC, Joe McCarthy and the Red Scare tilted the politics of the country decidedly to the right, meaning that – unlike many European industrialized countries – there is no serious left-leaning American political party.
Though HUAC Chairman Thomas went to prison on fraud charges, Sen. Joe McCarthy took up the anti-communist cause, expanding the Red Scare into the U.S. government and other aspects of American life. As with HUAC, FBI Director Hoover supplied information to McCarthy.
When Robert Kennedy became Attorney General, he looked at the information that Hoover had. There were maybe 50,000 members of the Communist Party in the United States and many of them were FBI informants. In other words, there was no real communist threat to fear. It was more a creation of men like Hoover who recognized that an exaggerated fear of communism was an effective weapon for gaining political advantage and personal power.
It was this subterranean agenda that the American public was never made to understand. Therefore the consequences went unabated.
Even today, prominent right-wingers decry government programs to create jobs or alleviate suffering – including President Barack Obama's private-insurance-based health care program – as "socialism" or "communism."
The value of scaring the American people has not been lost. Today, we live with another excessive threat, the War on Terror, which has led to the Patriot Act, torture, drone strikes and racial profiling.
The ability of Americans to resist these current excesses is crippled by the failure of politicians, the courts and the media to stop the Red Scare that started in Hollywood in 1947.
Trumbo is a decent enough picture. And Roach should be praised for his good intentions in filming it. There are few directors and producers making politically relevant films in America today.
But in my opinion, this subject would have been better served if Roach had made a mini-series on the subject. That would have given him the opportunity to depict a much wider American canvas and a much larger subject.
Dalton Trumbo was part of an epic struggle. In the end, he personally won, but the country lost.
*
See the following from What Really Happened
(Click on link)
desertpeace | December 26, 2015 at 18:08 | Categories: Cold War, Corrupt Politics, History | URL: http://wp.me/pahWK-c1z
Comment See all comments Like
Unsubscribe to no longer receive posts from Desertpeace.
Change your email settings at Manage Subscriptions.
Thanks for flying with WordPress.com
@honestcharlie | December 26, 2015 at 12:47 pm | Categories: Uncategorized | URL: http://wp.me/pt2r1-SL
Comment    See all comments    Like
Unsubscribe to no longer receive posts from THE ABSURD TIMES -- STILL.
Change your email settings at Manage Subscriptions.
Thanks for flying with WordPress.com


Tuesday, December 22, 2015

Assad v. Isis



THE ABSURD TIMES



Illustration: The six corporations that own over 98% of all media in the U.S.  You can see the numbers.  Pacifica is one exception that now owns an amazing 7 stations and it was under attack by corporations.  Free Speech TV and Amy Goodman on Democracy are amazing exceptions, and if you are looking for the truth, that is the place to start.



Assad v. Isis



Just to summarize, Assad in Syria is secular.  He does not interfere with freedom of religion or dress.  The so-called "free Syrian Army" supplies weapons to the Wahabbi of purveyors of Isilanity.   Assad has protected the Christians and other minorities. 



Putin was invited in by Assad to Syria.  Thus, Russia is the only country carrying out military activity legally.  All other forces are there illegally according to international law and a slew of Geneva Convention regulations. 



I don't see any reason to say any more.  Below is a full discussion of all the issues:



A new report by the Pulitzer-winning veteran journalist Seymour Hersh says the Joint Chiefs of Staff has indirectly supported Bashar al-Assad in an effort to help him defeat jihadist groups. Hersh reports the Joint Chiefs sent intelligence via Russia, Germany and Israel on the understanding it would be transmitted to help Assad push back Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State. Hersh also claims the military even undermined a U.S. effort to arm Syrian rebels in a bid to prove it was serious about helping Assad fight their common enemies. Hersh says the Joint Chiefs' maneuvering was rooted in several concerns, including the U.S. arming of unvetted Syrian rebels with jihadist ties, a belief the administration was overly focused on confronting Assad's ally in Moscow, and anger the White House was unwilling to challenge Turkey and Saudi Arabia over their support of extremist groups in Syria. Hersh joins us to detail his claims and respond to his critics.




TRANSCRIPT


This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: The United Nations Security Council's passage of a peace plan for Syria has been called perhaps the best chance yet to end the country's civil war. The measure, approved Friday, calls for a ceasefire, talks between the government and opposition, and a roughly two-year timeline to form a unity government and hold elections. Secretary of State John Kerry outlined the terms.

SECRETARY OF STATE JOHN KERRY: Under the resolution approved today, the purpose of those negotiations between the responsible opposition and the government is to facilitate a transition within Syria to a credible, inclusive, nonsectarian governance within six months. The process would lead to the drafting of a new constitution and arrangements for internationally supervised election within 18 months.

AMY GOODMAN: The resolution is silent on the fate of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The U.S. has insisted on excluding Assad from a political transition, pointing to the mass killings of his own people throughout the more than four-year war. But Russia and China have staunchly backed Assad. The world powers' impasse has fueled U.N. inaction amidst a death toll of more than 250,000 and the world's worst refugee crisis. Although the U.S. remains opposed to Assad, his omission from the Security Council resolution signals a softening stance and a potential diplomatic turning point. The Obama administration has quietly backed off its public insistence that Assad must go, claiming it's no longer seeking regime change in Syria.

Now an explosive new report says U.S. military leadership in the Joint Chiefs of Staff has held that view all along and has taken secret steps to move U.S. policy in that direction. According to award-winning veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, the Joint of Chiefs of Staff has tacitly aided the Assad regime to help it defeat radical jihadists. Hersh reports the Joint Chiefs sent intelligence via Russia, Germany and Israel, on the understanding it would be transmitted to help Assad push back Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State. Hersh also claims the military even undermined a U.S. effort to arm Syrian rebels in a bid to prove to Assad it was serious about helping him fight their common enemies. At the Joint Chiefs' behest, aCIA weapons shipment to the Syrian opposition was allegedly downgraded to include obsolete weapons. Hersh says the Joint Chiefs' maneuvering was rooted in several concerns, including the U.S. arming of unvetted Syrian rebels with jihadist ties, a belief the administration was overly focused on confronting Assad's ally in Moscow, and anger the White House was unwilling to confront Turkey and Saudi Arabia over their support of extremist groups in Syria.

Hersh's report in the London Review of Books follows his controversial story in May challenging the Obama administration's account of the killing of Osama bin Laden. Like that story, his latest piece relies heavily on a single source, described as a "former senior adviser to the Joint Chiefs." And while critics have dismissed both stories as conspiracy theories, it turns out that key aspects of the bin Laden report have since been corroborated. After the bin Laden story came out, U.S. and Pakistani intelligence sources confirmed Hersh's reporting that the U.S. discovered bin Laden's location when a Pakistani officer told the CIA, and that the Pakistani government knew all along where bin Laden was hiding.

For more, we're joined by Seymour Hersh. He won the Pulitzer Prize for exposing the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam, when U.S. forces killed hundreds of civilians. In 2004, Sy Hersh broke the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal. His latest piece in theLondon Review of Books is headlined "Military to Military: US Intelligence Sharing in the Syrian War." Hersh is working on a study of Dick Cheney's vice presidency.

We welcome you back to Democracy Now!, Sy Hersh. Why don't you lay out this very controversial report that you have just published in the London Review of Books. What did you find?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, it began, actually, as I wrote, with a very serious, extensive assessment of our policy, that was completed by June—let's say by middle of 2013, two-and-a-half years ago. It was a study done by the Joint Chiefs and the Defense Intelligence Agency that came to three sort of conclusions, that may seem obvious now but were pretty interesting then.

One is that they said Assad must stay, at least through—through the resolution of the war, because, as we saw in Libya, once you get rid of a leader, like Gaddafi—same, you can argue, in Iraq with the demise of Saddam Hussein—chaos ensues. The second—so that was an issue, that there—the point being, elections at some point, certainly, but for the short term, while we're still fighting, he has to stay. And that wasn't the American position then. And, I would argue with you, I still think the American position is very muddled, although they have seemed to soften it.

Secondly, the other point they made is that their investigation showed this notion of a moderate force just was a fiction, was just a fantasy, that most of the Free Syrian Army, by the summer, by mid-2013, were in some sort of an understanding with al-Nusra, or, as you put it, ISIL, the Islamic State. There was a lot of back-and-forth going—arms going into the Free Syrian Army and other moderates were being peddled, sold, or transferred to the more extremist groups.

And the third major finding was about Turkey. It said we simply have to deal with the problem. The Turkish government, led by Erdogan, was—had opened—basically, his borders were open, arms were flying. I had written about that earlier for the London Review, the rat line. There were arms flying since 2012, covertly, with the CIA's support and the support of the American government. Arms were coming from Tripoli and other places in Benghazi, in Libya, going into Turkey and then being moved across the line. And another interesting point is that a lot of Chinese dissidents, the Uyghurs, the Muslim Chinese that are being pretty much hounded by the Chinese, were also—another rat line existed. They were coming from China into Kazakhstan, into Turkey and into Syria. So, this was a serious finding.

It was not the first time some of these points had been raised. And there was simply no echo. Once you pass this stuff on to the White House or into the other agencies—the Defense Department does this routinely. These are very highly secret. This study was composed of overhead satellite intelligence, human intelligence, etc., very compartmentalized stuff. But it did go to the State Department and to a lot of offices in the White House and National Security Council. No response, no change in policy.

So, at this point, as I wrote, the Joint Chiefs, then headed by an Army general named Dempsey, Martin Dempsey, who has since retired, decided that they had—that there was a chance to do something about it without directly contravening the policy. And that was simply that we were aware that Germany, the German intelligence service, the German General Staff, had been involved pretty closely with Bashar in terms of funneling intelligence. Russia—and it's— a lot of people will find this surprising, but the United States military, the military has had a very solid relationship with the leadership of the Russian military since the fall of the Soviet Union in '91. And General Dempsey, in particular, had a one-on-one relationship with the general who now runs the military for the Soviet Union. And so, we knew the Russians and the Israelis were also involved in some back-channel conversation with Syria, with the idea being Israel, sort of very on the margin on this, understood that if Bashar went, what comes next would not be healthy for Israel. They share a border with Syria, and you don't want Islamic State or al-Nusra or any of those groups to be that close to the Israelis. It would be a national security threat for them.

So there was a lot of people, a lot of other services communicating, and so what the Joint Chiefs did is they began to pass along some of this very good strategic intelligence and technical intelligence we have—where the bad guys are, you can put it; what they might be thinking; what information we had. That was passed not directly to Assad, but it was passed to the Germans, to the Russians, through the Israelis, etc. The exact process is, of course, way beyond my ken, but there was no question that was a transmission point. The point being that there was no direct contact, but the information certainly got to him, and it certainly had an impact on Saddam's—the Syrian army's ability to improve its position by the end of the year, 2013.

AMY GOODMAN: And talk—

SEYMOUR HERSH: Period. That's the story. Go ahead.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the source that you used for this story and the criticism of your single-source method.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Oh, my god. Well, you know, as you know, it's usually anonymous sources you get criticized for. That's always been traditionally, although any day inThe New York Times and Washington Post, they're full of anonymous sources. That's an easy way out. I wish I could tell you that I haven't been relying on this particular person for since 9/11, but I have been. And many of the stories I wrote for The New Yorker about what was going on inside Iran, what was going—there was no bombs inside Iraq, part of those early stories I was writing, all came from one particularly well-informed person, who, as—you know, who, for a lot of reasons, I can't make public. One is them is this government would prosecute him.

So the idea that there's one source, that's—I've done that—I worked for The New York Times, as you know, for eight or nine years, all during Watergate and the Vietnam War years, and won many, many prizes based on stories based on one source. I don't know what the public think goes on, but, you know, if you get a very good source who over many years has been totally reliable, I'm not troubled by it at all. And neither—you know, the London Review, as many in America know, is a very, very seriously edited magazine, who did the same amount of very intense fact checking as happened when I worked at The New Yorker, which is famous for its fact checking, and the editing was certainly as competent and as good as you get in The New Yorker. I'm very happy working for them. And so, it's not as if I'm not put to the same question that you're putting, that critics may put, by the editors of the magazine. And they get—they have direct contact. They know who the person is. They have discussions with him, and with me not present. All of these standards are met.

AMY GOODMAN: Well—

SEYMOUR HERSH: Yes, go ahead.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me share with you some of the criticism of your piece—

SEYMOUR HERSH: Oh, oh, spare me.

AMY GOODMAN: —like Max Fisher's writing in Vox—but let me share it with our audience, as well—who, you know, talks about your relying entirely on one unnamed source for your principal allegation that U.S. defense officials bypassed the Obama administration and shared intelligence with allies, who subsequently shared it with the Assad regime. Fisher goes on to conclude, quote, "We are required to believe that the senior-most leaders of our military one day in 2013 decided to completely transform how they behave and transgress every norm they have in a mass act of treason, despite never having done so before, and then promptly went back to normal this September when Dempsey retired." Can you respond to that?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, there's—it's so many instances where the military disagree with a president. We've seen this in World War II, MacArthur. I mean, the idea that the Joint Chiefs of Staff—let me just say, in general, when you're at that level, at the Joint Chiefs of Staff, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, you make an oath of office not to the president of the United States, but to the Constitution. And there's been many times the military objects. There were times just in the last couple of years, in congressional testimony, that General Dempsey has made it clear he disagrees with the policy.

Specifically about some of the matters that were raised in that article—and I did look at it, of course—is that, for example, Dempsey agreed in testimony that we should arm the moderates—the opposition, rather. And, in fact, what he agreed to—this is with the head of the CIA, Leon Panetta, at the time—when this discussion came up of arming dissident groups, opposition groups inside Syria, Panetta and the chairman both made a point of saying "vetted groups." They said only those groups we really know are reliable, and not wackos and not jihadist groups that want to exclude anybody except those who share their particular beliefs in the future state, if they were to take it over. So there's a lot of—there's a lot of contradictory evidence about it. And there are—there certainly can be more sophisticated arguments to make than this has never happened before. This is certainly unusual that, in a time like this, the military would give information to allies, our allies, at their request, that differ from the official policy. Sure, that's a very complicated thing, and it was a tough thing to do, but it happened.

AMY GOODMAN: Was there direct communication between the United States and Syria?

SEYMOUR HERSH: I'm going to stand by what I wrote in the article.

AMY GOODMAN: Which was?

SEYMOUR HERSH: I wrote in the article that there was no direct contact, that the whole purpose was to use the cutouts, that there was no attempt to directly engage with Bashar al-Assad or his regime.

AMY GOODMAN: And what—

SEYMOUR HERSH: But there—yes?

AMY GOODMAN: What did the U.S. get in return?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, there was an understanding, obviously, conveyed by our allies. And the understanding was that we were going to give this stuff, and if Bashar would, among other things, agree to an election, a monitored election, once the war was over, and presumably he had re-established—you know, Bashar—there's a lot of talk about the success of the Islamic groups, but Bashar right now, although he doesn't control 100 percent—much less, 60—I'm not sure of the number, but it was more than 50 percent, less than—the opposition groups controlled large swaths, 30 percent, 40 percent. But he does control as much as—I've seen estimates of 86 percent of the population. And the notion that everybody in Syria despises him, etc., all these things you hear, that's not true. He has a lot of native support, and even from Muslims, because every Muslim in Syria is not a Wahhabi or a Salafist, an extremist. Many are very moderate people who believe they would be in trouble if the Islamic force, the Islamic groups, came into power, because they would go and seek out those fellow Muslims that don't agree with their extreme views. So he does have an awful lot of support, more than most people think. This is not to say he's a good guy or bad guy. We're just talking about reality.

And don't forget, we are a country that, in World War II, a year after the Russians had done—were in a pact with Hitler, we joined with the Russians against Hitler. So, you know, you sometimes overlook—one of the points also made by—in this article is this incredible hostility towards Russia and these allegations, time and time again, that Russia is not really serious about going after the Islamic State. And there—even just in the debate over at the U.N., a statistic suggesting that 80 percent of the Russian attacks have nothing to do with ISIS, but they're attacking the ISISopposition, the moderates. And you just have to say to yourself, "Well, why then didISIS bomb, as we all believe and the Russians believe, destroy a Russian airliner? Why was ISIS upset with Russia, if Russia was basically bombing their enemy, the moderates?" It doesn't—it just—the logic in some of the American thinking and the thinking around the world on this, it doesn't make much sense to me.

AMY GOODMAN: We're going to break and then come back to this discussion. Sy Hersh is our guest, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. His latest piece is in theLondon Review of Books; it's headlined "Military to Military: US Intelligence Sharing in the Syrian War." This is Democracy Now! Back in a minute.

At Saturday's Democratic presidential debate, front-runner Hillary Clinton rejected what she called a "false choice" between defeating the Islamic State and overthrowing Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. "We will not get the support on the ground in Syria to dislodge ISIS if the fighters there who are not associated withISIS, but whose principal goal is getting rid of Assad, don't believe there is a political, diplomatic channel that is ongoing," Clinton said. Rivals Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley disagreed, saying it is not for the U.S. to decide Assad's fate. "I think there should be learning curves for people with that kind of power," Hersh says of Clinton. "I think what happened in Libya should have instructed anybody in the government, including the president, that when you depose a dictator, you have to be aware of what's going to come next, and you have to think long and hard about what you're doing. I think, by any standard, getting rid of Gaddafi has proven to be a horrible event. It was a terrible decision, and we seem not to have learned enough from it."




TRANSCRIPT


This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. Our guest is Seymour Hersh, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. Well, during Saturday's Democratic debate, ABC host David Muir asked former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about Senator Bernie Sanders' plan for Syria.

DAVID MUIR: We heard from the senator just this week that we must put aside the issue of how quickly we get rid of Assad, and come together with countries, including Russia and Iran, to destroyISIS first. Is he wrong?

HILLARY CLINTON: I think we're missing the point here. We are doing both at the same time.

DAVID MUIR: But that's what he's saying: We should put that aside for now and go after ISIS.

HILLARY CLINTON: Well, I don't agree with that, because we will not get the support on the ground in Syria to dislodge ISIS if the fighters there who are not associated with ISIS, but whose principal goal is getting rid of Assad, don't believe there is a political, diplomatic channel that is ongoing. We now have that.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Secretary Clinton is right. This is a complicated issue. I don't think anyone has a magical solution. But this is what I do believe. Yes, of course, Assad is a terrible dictator. But I think we have got to get our foreign policies and our priorities right. The immediate—it is not Assad who is attacking the United States. It is ISIS. And ISIS is attacking France and attacking Russian airliners. The major priority right now, in terms of our foreign and military policy, should be the destruction of ISIS.

DAVID MUIR: Governor O'Malley?

MARTIN O'MALLEY: We shouldn't be the ones declaring that Assad must go. Where did it ever say in the Constitution, where is it written that it's the job of the United States of America or its secretary of state to determine when dictators have to go? We have a role to play in this world, but it is not the world—the role of traveling the world looking for new monsters to destroy.

AMY GOODMAN: That's former Governor Martin O'Malley, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, all vying for the presidency. Seymour Hersh, your response, and how these different views ally with either President Obama or the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as you've laid out in your piece, "Military to Military"?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Look, clearly what Mr. O'Malley and Bernie Sanders said would be—would ring very solidly with the Joint Chiefs. They would be in great distress about what Hillary Clinton said, because I think—you know, the fact is that if you really want to look at it, Bashar is still the president of Syria. The Russians are bombing in Syria at his invitation. We are bombing in Syria without his invitation. And so it's hard sometimes for Americans to think that we're not always on the side of the angels on legal issues, but we're certainly, by any normal standard of—you know, if there was a normal standard of international conduct, we would be the bad guys in that, just in terms of legalities. We're not invited in. We're doing it.

Obviously, there's a lot of agreement, and there's a lot of coordination going on with all the bombing, much more than we know. The Syrians are certainly coordinating with the Russians, and we're certainly coordinating with everybody. No pilot—no pilot from any country is going to fly into a combat zone without knowing exactly who's there and whether it's safe or not. So, there's much more cooperation going on, even now, than you can see. But the idea—you know, and in your opening, you mentioned that we seem to have moderated our view. And I think those are words that are being said, but the reality is, we still always say, "Well, we don't—we're not saying—we're not talking about regime change now." You'd think that maybe—

AMY GOODMAN: Well, didn't Kerry meet with Putin and then completely reverse the position?

SEYMOUR HERSH: No, not quite, because the position was—if you read the transcripts, there was a—he had a news conference or briefing after the meeting with Lavrov, the foreign minister of Russia, in which Kerry said—it's always this. The caveat is always: "But we don't think he can be in power while these negotiations can go on. He won't be able to preside over the negotiations." In other words, he's such a dissident force in this that we can't have a legitimate negotiation with various groups, some of which we believe are moderate, against all—most of the intelligence that's available. We still—the United States, the president still believes there are moderates there to work with. And there's just not much—you know, the Joint Chiefs certainly don't think there's any intelligence for it, nor does the DIA.

In fact, one of the things I did in this article is I ended up talking to Michael Flynn, who had been director of the DIA from 2012 to 2014, at the time the assessment I wrote about came out. And Flynn was careful not to talk about a highly classified paper. But he did say, "I can just tell you that if the American public saw all the papers that were going into the government, in from us, the DIA, the intelligence into the Pentagon, into the White House, they would be very upset." And he also said, in an interview with Der Spiegel a week or so ago, maybe about two or three weeks ago now—it was published last week—he also just didn't understand why we were fighting the Russians. Why not let the Russians come in? What was the concern? The Russians' concern is not about establishing a new world order; their concern is terrorism, primarily. They have a big terrorism problem. There's no question the leadership—many of the leadership modes or groups inside the ISIL, or the Islamic State, originated from the Chechnyan war. They had two wars with Chechnya—one of them went 10 years—brutal wars, in which Russia did horrible things, the same sort of stuff that Bashar al-Assad did, and one could argue that—same things we did to Japan at the end of World War II, when you see your country is at stake. People do very rough things in all-out war.

And so, all of these issues seem to me to be not fully understood by Mrs. Clinton. But, you know, it's early in—I think it's—my guess is she's obviously going to be the candidate. And obviously, she's a very—you know, she's as smart as they come, and I would think she maybe will be—I hope she'll get to change her views as time goes on.

AMY GOODMAN: What is your assessment of her as secretary of state in dealing with Syria? I mean, she's laid out what her views are. She wants Assad out.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, I think—my only thing is I think there should be learning curves for people with that kind of power. And I think what happened in Libya should have instructed anybody in the government, including the president, that when you depose a dictator, you have to be aware of what's going to come next, and you have to think long and hard about what you're doing. And I think, by any standard, the getting rid of Gaddafi has proven to be a horrible event. It's increased the spread of the Islamic State in Africa, North Africa, increased their access to weapons and to money, etc. And it's been a terrible—it was a terrible decision.

And we don't—we seem not to have learned enough from it, because—you know, if I'm Putin, and I'm worried sick about—and forget about what happened in Ukraine. It's terrible. I'm not defending Putin. I'm just saying, from his point of view about international terrorism, he's seen the United States attack one secular leader, Gaddafi, destroy another secular leader, Saddam Hussein—no question that he was—he was not interested in the spread of international terrorism. Bashar, the same way, was always a secular state. There was a tremendous amount of freedom for all sorts of minorities and sects, and people don't appreciate—all the minorities can only look to him for safety. They certainly can't look to the international Islamic State for any sort of solace, in case they win out and take over the country. And so, if I'm Russia, I'm watching the destruction of three Syrian—or attempted destruction in Syria of three secular states and wondering what the hell is America up to.

They join with us in the worry about international terrorism. And I can't tell you how many people I know inside the military and the intelligence community, as loyal to America as you want to be, think our first move after 9/11 probably should have been to Moscow and to say, "What can you tell us about terrorism? We've got it right here, and you've had it for a long time. Let's talk about it." You have to separate some issues. But we don't seem to be very good. We seem to live in a world of propaganda and likes and dislikes above our own national interests.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go back to your—the key point that you make in this piece. It's a kind of coup policy, the Joint Chiefs of Staff conducting a very different policy than President Obama was espousing. What has the White House—how have they responded to your piece, if they have?

SEYMOUR HERSH: I don't think they want to hear about it. He's in Hawaii. The mainstream press is sort of like, you know, "What? This can't be. It's an anonymous source." And you know the drill. We've been—you and I have been talking since 9/11. Every time I do a story, one of the things we talk about is—one of the reason I'm delighted to go on your show is, at least here I can have more than three or four sentences.

AMY GOODMAN: And General Dempsey, him leaving, what this means for their policy? Or has, overall, the policy shifted to what the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Dempsey wanted, to begin with?

SEYMOUR HERSH: There's a new leadership in the Pentagon. And both General—the new chairman, Dunford, has testified a couple of times—I write about this at the end of my piece—and following the party line totally, which is that Russia doesn't—is not bombing any Islamic States, and that there are moderates, and we can pull it out with the moderates. The new secretary of defense is on the same point. Ash Carter has said a few times, in testimony, and he gave a speech at Harvard the other week, in which he basically said—followed the party line—or followed the president's line dutifully. And I guess that's—you know, if you want to be in that job, you have to do so. And it's sort of interesting to me that at some point some other military leaders decided that they couldn't follow the policy, because it was nonsensical, and did something about it. I don't think there was any attempt here to undermine the government. I think the attempt of everything that was done by the Joint Chiefs and other members in the military, in terms of trying to do something to—it was really an attempt to change—make a midcourse correction in a policy they saw that was deadly wrong.

AMY GOODMAN: Last question about Turkey: The role it has played?

SEYMOUR HERSH: This is a national disgrace that we're not able—and this president—I think it—I just don't know why he—he just, in the last—after the climate summit, he literally has had a private meeting with Erdogan—

AMY GOODMAN: Erdogan.

SEYMOUR HERSH: —the head of Turkey, Erdogan, yes, in France, and came out and said, "I'm with him all the way," etc., etc., etc., when in fact all of the intelligence for a long time has been that he has, particularly in Hatay province, which is a contested province Syria controls, those—the border has been open for the Islamic groups, and he has not only been funneling—he's been funneling arms and money to the most extreme groups for years. We know about it. There's been a lot of intelligence reporting on it. His planes, once he began to join—allegedly join—with us in flying out combat missions, one of the first targets was, of course, the opposition Kurds, who are the best fighters inside Syria against the Islamic State, but he also bombed some of the Syrian army's own specific units—exactly the contrary, opposite of what was what he said to do and what was being reported in the press. He wasn't helping us.

AMY GOODMAN: And Saudi Arabia's role, a U.S. other ally here in the region?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, this is part of, you know, the great farce of our all time, you know, that this U.N. meeting is going to take the views of Saudi Arabia and Qatar very seriously, when both of those countries have been the leading exporters of money—and, in the case of Qatar, people—into the war in Syria on the behalf of the Islamic groups. There's just no question that they're both Wahhabi states and Salafist states, and so are the Islamic State, which is very extreme radicals. If there's going to be a new Syria under these states, there will be no Christians allowed, no Alawites, no Muslims that disagree with their point of view. It's going to be quite a state that we're supporting.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you for being with us, Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, joining us from Washington, D.C. We'll link to your latestpiece in the London Review of Books, headlined "Military to Military: US Intelligence Sharing in the Syrian War." Sy Hersh is currently working on a book on Dick Cheney's vice presidency.