Showing posts with label Weiner. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Weiner. Show all posts

Saturday, June 11, 2011

We are an insane country


I’ve decided not to talk about Alaska Ass, but it is still in the news and Keith Tucker has done an excellent job of commentary with his cartoon.  You can visit his site at WWW.Whatnowtoons.com.


Does anybody know who Dhabi was?  I know the country is named Abu Dhabi, and that “Abu” means father of, but who was this Dhabi character?

Too much stuff about Weiner, but one I did appreciate.  I wondered at the fact that he called Bill Clinton to apologize.  It really puzzled me.  Then I saw Jon Stewart ask the same question “For what?  Copyright infringement?”  I do remember that Bill’s popularity kept rising as the charges continued.  I guess he got the adultery caucus behind him.

Since we are indulging in slime, Arnold Schwartzenegger’s “love child” cost a lot of time.  I’ve heard that while having sex with this “other woman,” he had her dress in Maria Schriver’s clothing first.  As someone said, even Freud wouldn’t want to deal with THAT one.

You will see a lot about some study that says drinking coffee can give you hallucinations.  Aside from conning a bunch of teenagers into drinking coffee, the study will be used by housewives to complain to their husbands about coffee consumption, or someone else will complain, or whatever.  I have never had any hallucinations from drinking coffee in spite of some periods when I would drink a lot of it.  So, I investigated.  One problem with having a graduate school background is that you have a fetish about research.  So, what I was able to find out was that men were tested wearing earphones that emitted a slight hiss, like tape or FM hiss.  People who had just consumed a great deal of coffee, over five cups, were five times more likely to hear Bing Crosby singing White Christmas than those who did not drink coffee (perhaps they fell asleep?).  Anyway, now where did they get this sample?  Who the hell ever thinks of Bing Crosby singing White Christmas?  And this is the hallucination?  No thanks.  Try it yourself.  After reading this, try not to think of Bing Crosby singing White Christmas.  If you can’t do that, try not to think of a rooster crowing while you walk around a barn three times (Sir Thomas More’s point).

Gates, the Secretary of Defense, or to be accurate Offense, has now suggested that NATO is now a dumb idea.  Bush appoints one person who can make sense and now he quits.  He also was against the Mission in Libya.  So far as I can tell, NATO has killed more innocent civilians than has Gaddafi.  Russia, having learned its lesson, will now veto proposals against independent countries that the U.S. just decides to hate.

So, that’s enough of international stuff.  In fact, that’s enough.  Every time I try to compose something for this, somebody or something decides to interrupt me, stop me.  It is only because I am passive-aggressive that I’ve gotten this far with it.

Here is a brief interview about how well our capitalist system works for people:


Guest:
Dale Maharidge, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and professor at Columbia Journalism School. He’s written for Rolling Stone, George Magazine, The Nation, Mother Jones, the New York Times op-ed page, among others. Maharidge’s first book, Journey to Nowhere: The Saga of the New Underclass, inspired Bruce Springsteen to write the songs "Youngstown" and "The New Timer." Maharidge’s most recent book, Someplace Like America: Tales from the New Great Depression, is a reported retrospective on his 30 years of covering working-class issues.

Rush Transcript

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AMY GOODMAN: "Youngstown" by Bruce Springsteen, from his album The Ghost of Tom Joad, the song inspired by, well, our next guest and the book he wrote. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan Gonzalez. This is Democracy Now! Juan?
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, we turn to an issue that usually receives very little media coverage: the working poor and chronically unemployed. A new report released today by the McKinsey Global Institute estimates the U.S. will likely continue facing high unemployment until 2020. It notes the U.S. needs to add 21 million jobs just to reach pre-recession unemployment levels of about five percent. Earlier this week, the government revealed the nation’s official unemployment rate has jumped back up to 9.1 percent. The nation is facing its worst unemployment slump since the 1930s. CBS News reports about 6.2 million Americans—45 percent of the unemployed—have been jobless for more than six months, a higher percentage than during the Great Depression.
To discuss this, we’re joined by Dale Maharidge, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist. His book, Journey to Nowhere: The Saga of the New Underclass, inspired Bruce Springsteen to write the songs "Youngstown" and "The New Timer," which we played just before the segment. In 1996, Springsteen told CBS News he thought the book was so important.
CBS MORNING NEWS: What do you think people should get out of this book?
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: Well, that’s—you know, I guess it’s a portrait of the country that people have a tendency to turn away from, you know, because it’s painful. You know, it’s painful. And it’s painful, and it’s frightening. And I believe it’s frightening because, if you read the book, you will say—you don’t say, "That’s not me." You say, "That’s me." You know, there’s something in all of the people that they’re writing about in the book, you recognize yourself. And to me, that was the power of the book. You know, it just told—it just told people’s stories. But that’s what—that’s what art does. It tries to give everybody a sense of their commonality, you know? And then—and keep people from turning away, you know, from the harsh things. And so, the book is—it’s just a tremendous voice for issues and for people that very often get ignored, you know, or are considered expendable, or whose lives or dreams are in some fashion swept aside. So that was—that was what the book did for me.
AMY GOODMAN: That was singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen. Well, we’re joined now by the journalist whose work inspired Springsteen’s music. Dale Maharidge has written for Rolling Stone, The Nation, Mother Jones, among other publications, also teaches at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. His most recent book is called Someplace Like America: Tales from the New Great Depression. It’s a retrospective on his 30 years of covering the working poor and chronically unemployed. He and photographer Michael Williamson traveled over a half a million miles around America telling the story of how workers’ lives have gotten steadily worse. The book presents a human face to what’s happening to millions of Americans left on the sidelines.
Dale, welcome to Democracy Now!
DALE MAHARIDGE: Great to be here.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s a really beautiful book. Talk about these latest figures and what this means.
DALE MAHARIDGE: Last week they announced that there’s 54,000 new jobs the previous month. And I’m not joking: 25,000 of them were literally McDonald’s jobs. That’s the kind of work we’re seeing coming in. Many of the people in the book aren’t homeless. They’re working. You go to their houses at their suburban-looking cul-de-sacs. You go inside, and you see their refrigerators empty.
A precipitating factor in many, many of the cases is healthcare. There’s a woman in the book, Maggie Fonseca, a single working mom in Austin, Texas, works for the State of Texas. She does part-time work as a waitress. She does tax returns some of the years. She bakes cakes. She has two daughters, and she’s barely making ends meet. And it all began when her first daughter, Mary Frances, was born with a congenital problem, and her health insurance didn’t cover it. Over and over, we see that.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And yet, you have the reality that, in 2008, when the financial collapse occurred, we were told the entire financial system of the world was in danger of falling apart, and the banks and the businesses recovered within a year. Within a year, you have basically companies fresh with cash, banks putting out record bonuses again. But that hasn’t gotten down to the rest of America.
DALE MAHARIDGE: We had welfare for Wall Street. I really think we need a Works Progress Administration, 1930s model job program. Among youths up to age 28, unemployment is 37 percent, and it’s actually 50 or 60 percent in the inner city, in Latino and black neighborhoods. It’s abysmal. It’s horrible. We’re losing a generation. If only a percentage, maybe 10 percent of those trillions, had been put into a jobs program to put these kids to work, learning skills—my uncle was in the Cs, the Civilian Conservation Corps, in the '30s. He built walls and bridges, which we use still today. They're still in use. And it gave him a lifelong skill. He wasn’t lost because of the Great Depression. We’re not acting as we should for these people today.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn now to this forthcoming documentary that’s based on your book. It’s called Finding Someplace Like America. In this clip, you talk to Jim Alexander. Jim had worked in a salt mine in Port Huron, Michigan. After he was laid off, his family lost their home to foreclosure.
JIM ALEXANDER: We found ourselves displaced, out of a house, out of a car, lost my car, lost the apartment. And income stopped. I thought, "Oh, wow! We’re in a world of hurt here." That whole experience toughened us up. My thoughts back then were—you know, I was getting pretty desperate at a couple points in time—that I probably would have used a firearm to secure food, but I’d never shoot anybody. And my whole attitude in the last 30 years has changed about that.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Jim Alexander. Talk about how his life changed over three decades.
DALE MAHARIDGE: The Alexanders, when we found them, had no food. They were in a tent in Texas. He had lost his job yet again, because the layoffs had come to Texas. They had gone there for the good times, and those good times ended. And he was a Vietnam vet, and he was desperate. And he was going to rob a store to feed his kids. And he didn’t. Thank heavens he didn’t have to do that. But the journey from then to now, he feels like he screwed up. And this is very typical among a lot of American workers; 1930s and today, the parallels are similar. It’s like, "What did I do wrong?" And Jim didn’t do anything wrong. He’s a hardworking guy. And his son Matthew ended up getting laid off in 2001, and he joined the Michigan National Guard early in 2001. You hear what’s coming: 9/11 happened, he was called up. And every two years now, he has to go fight in Iraq or Afghanistan. He has four kids. And so, these people are still living with the effects of what happened to them darn near 30 years ago.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, in this clip, you talk to a former steel worker named Ken Platt.
KEN PLATT: We’ve been in a hole so long here, we don’t even know it sometimes. It’s amazing. They want millions. They’re trying to get millions to tear houses down. You know, it’s just like the destruction of the city has become a major industry.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, tell us about Platt and what happened to Youngstown.
DALE MAHARIDGE: Ken is very lucky. He got a job at the Butler Institute of Art. He learned computers. In the early '80s, he went into computers. Most guys weren't like him. He tells me about the guys he knew who committed suicide or ended up homeless. There’s a huge swath of people. Most of his friends are living with their parents in their fifties and sixties, with their elderly parents. And so, he’s a survivor. And his son works in the steel mill now, and he’s worried about getting laid off. The last time I talked to Ken—well, actually, Michael was in Youngstown just about three weeks ago. They raised his healthcare again, and he was going to not be able to afford it. And so, he’s a success story, but yet he’s struggling. His family is still struggling. It really hasn’t changed. The recovery that came out of the '82 recession didn't exist for the people of Youngstown.
AMY GOODMAN: Back to Bruce Springsteen, who was inspired by your work to write "Youngstown" and "New Timer" after reading your 1985 Journey to Nowhere: The Saga of the New Underclass. This is Springsteen introducing "Youngstown" to an audience, how he often introduced the song at his concerts.
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: I was just about finished with songs for most of the Tom Joad record, and I was staying up at night and had a little insomnia, went downstairs into my living room and pulled a book off the shelves. And it was a book called Journey to Nowhere, and text by a fellow named Dale Maharidge and photos by a fellow named Michael Williamson. And what they did was they traveled across the country in the mid-’80s by train, hopping box cars all the way across into California and up into Oregon, and they were sort of chronicling what they were seeing happening out there at the time, you know, as we were kind of all sitting home and hearing about "Morning in America." I was hearing from a lot of folks that I was seeing, people that work in these different food banks, and they report in the book that there were more people coming in that needed those services than ever before, that there were people coming in who had never been in before and were people who had previously, you know, held good jobs, had supported their families.
And all I—you know, I finished the book in one night, and I put it down, and I remember thinking, well, I’m a guy, like I know one thing. I know how to do one thing. And what would happen if you’re doing—you’ve done something for 30 years and something that’s built—built the buildings that we live in, built the bridges that we cross, people who have given their sons to die in the wars for this country, who end up thrown out like yesterday’s newspapers? So, you know, what would I say to my kids if I came home at night, and I couldn’t feed them or I couldn’t—if they were hurt, and I couldn’t help them or I couldn’t make them safe, insure their health, you know? I don’t know. It strikes to such a central part of who you are. This is called "Youngstown."
AMY GOODMAN: Yes, that was Bruce Springsteen, who wrote the foreword to Someplace Like America. How did you meet, after he just picked up your book off of his shelf and read it one night?
DALE MAHARIDGE: I got a phone call, said "Bruce wants to meet you guys." I was teaching at Stanford University then, so went to the Mountain View—Neil Young’s Bridge benefit. And we met Bruce. And the first thing I asked was, "How did you find the book?" He said, "I bought it when it came out in the store." What you just heard about him talking about in Youngstown, we were in Youngstown when Bruce was playing there. And he wanted to see the "Jenny" blast furnace. It was still standing. And I said, "Look, Cargill owns it. They’re arresting everybody." I knew somebody who was arrested a month before, sneaking in. He said, "Let’s go." So we snuck into the Jenny blast furnace, spent an hour and a half in there talking about politics and life. And we made it out without getting arrested. And I talk about this in the book. And I didn’t ask Bruce to write a foreword. I sent him the manuscripts. It was a private conversation. I said, "Bruce, is it cool?" The next thing I know, one of his managers, Barbara Carr, calls and says he wants to do the foreword.
AMY GOODMAN: You inspired a lot of his songs. "New Timer," let’s go to that for a minute.
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: [singing] He rode the rails since the Great Depression
Fifty years out on the skids
He said, "You don’t cross nobody
You’ll be all right out here kid."
Left my family in Pennsylvania
Searchin’ for work I hit the road
I met Frank in East Texas
In a freight yard blown through with snow
From New Mexico to Colorado
California to the sea
Frank he showed me the ropes, sir
Just ’til I could get back on my feet.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Bruce Springsteen singing "New Timer." You spent all those years going around the country, riding the rails, sleeping in homeless encampments. How were you received? Because, obviously, often people feel, when they see journalists or strangers coming into their midst, that someone is out to exploit them one way or another. How you were able to win the confidence of the people you were trying to write about?
DALE MAHARIDGE: I did something that was very rare in America now: I listened. I like listening to people’s stories. And when you listen, and you really care, which I do, people—you can’t fake that. And that’s what I try to do in the book, is I try to show America to Americans, because we’ve got to start a conversation now about what kind of country we want to be, because it’s not going well. We have a war on workers for 30 years. If we listen to their voices, which I do, and Michael does with his photographs—he’s a listener, too—that will get the conversation started. But we’ve got to go there. Otherwise, we’re going to go nowhere.
AMY GOODMAN: The situation today—I wanted to end with Ben Bernanke and his comments, the Federal Reserve chair warning U.S. economic recovery is advancing at a global pace with a full turnaround still years away. He spoke to a conference of bankers Tuesday in Atlanta.
BEN BERNANKE: U.S. economic growth so far this year looks to be somewhat slower than expected. Aggregate output increased at only 1.8 percent annual rate in the first quarter. And supply chain disruptions associated with the earthquake and tsunami in Japan are hampering economic activity this quarter. A number of indicators also suggest some loss of momentum in labor market in recent weeks.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Ben Bernanke. That was Atlanta, following the figures showing U.S. added only 54,000 jobs last month, the fewest since September. The nation’s unofficial unemployment rate has increased to 9.1. End with this comment.
DALE MAHARIDGE: If he’s talking that way, he’s got to be really scared. The best we can hope for now is a Japanese-style stasis. That would be a good outcome at this point in America. So if Bernanke is talking that way, worry.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we will link to your site. Your book is Someplace Like America: Tales from the New Great Depression, photographs by Michael S. Williamson, truly remarkable foreword by Bruce Springsteen. Dale Maharidge is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author, professor at Columbia Journalism School. He’s written for Rolling Stone, George Magazine, The Nation, Mother Jones, the New York Times op-ed page, among others.

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Saturday, June 04, 2011






From Keith Tucker at Whatnowtoons.com

This pretty much sums things up.  The reason we've been given for the last ten years of War and killing people, mainly civilians, was to Get the Evil One, the Darth Vader of Terrorism.  Well?



Israel, mainly, and the U.S. claims it is after Iran because of nuclear weapons.  Hersch has done quite a bit of careful work to document what most thinking people knew all along:  there is no threat.  Below is his interview on Democracy Now.

A lot of pretty stupid things have made the news lately.  Weiner's weiner and Plain's bus tour.  That's about all I have to say about that.

Republicans remain Obama's biggest asset in winning the next election.

About a dozen Syrians and at least four Lebanese were killed by Israel last week as Israel continued to defend itself from people walking in the wrong direction -- towards the UN mandated borders. 

So, here's the documention on the evil Iranian nuclear threat to Israel:

In his latest article for The New Yorker magazine, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh says the United States might attack Iran based on distorted estimates of Iran’s nuclear and military threat—just like it did with Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq. Hersh reveals that despite using Iranian informants and cutting-edge surveillance technology, U.S. officials have been unable to find decisive evidence that Iran has been moving enriched uranium to an underground weapon-making center. [includes rush transcript]
JUAN GONZALEZ: The Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh is back in the news this week with another explosive article that is ruffling some feathers at the White House. During the Bush administration years, Hersh was widely criticized by White House officials for his exposés on the torture at Abu Ghraib, secret U.S. operations overseas, and U.S. policy in Iran. Now it is the Obama White House upset with an article from Hersh.
Earlier this week, The New Yorker magazine published his latest investigation titled "Iran and the Bomb: How Real is the Threat?" Hersh writes, quote, "There is a large body of evidence, however, including some of America’s most highly classified intelligence assessments, suggesting that the United States could be in danger of repeating a mistake similar to the one made with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq eight years ago—allowing anxieties about the policies of a tyrannical regime to distort our estimations of the state’s military capacities and intentions."
AMY GOODMAN: Seymour Hersh reveals that despite using Iranian informants and cutting-edge surveillance technology, U.S. officials have been unable to find decisive evidence that Iran has been moving enriched uranium to an underground weapon-making center.
Hersh quotes Mohamed ElBaradei, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, saying he has not seen, quote, "a shred of evidence" that Iran was—has been weaponizing, in terms of "building nuclear-weapons facilities and using enriched materials."
The Obama White House, meanwhile, has repeatedly cited Iran’s nuclear program as a threat to the world. President Obama raised the issue last month during his speech before AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: So let me be absolutely clear: we remain committed to preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Its illicit nuclear program is just one challenge that Iran poses. As I said on Thursday, the Iranian government has shown its hypocrisy by claiming to support the rights of protesters while treating its own people with brutality.
AMY GOODMAN: Joining us now in Washington is Seymour Hersh, investigative reporter at The New Yorker and author of many books, including Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib, currently working on a book looking at the Dick Cheney vice presidency.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Seymour Hersh. Lay out what you have found.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, very simply, it’s—you know, you could argue it’s 2003 all over again. Remember WMD, mushroom clouds. There’s just no serious evidence inside that Iran is actually doing anything to make a nuclear weapon. You know, making a weapon is a big deal. You have to have fabrication facilities. You have to convert a very toxic gas into a metal and then mold it into a core. It’s big stuff, and there’s no sign of any of it.
We’ve been looking—Cheney was convinced, Dick Cheney, the former vice president, there was a secret facility à la what we probably saw in the movie Bananas. Remember Woody Allen’s movie, the little robots running underground? He was convinced there was an underground facility somewhere. And we had special forces units in there since '04, really, perhaps as late as—early as ’05, maybe, looking. We've been paying off people—the Kurds, the Azeris, the opposition groups. We’ve been giving a lot of money to various defectors. We’ve been looking with satellites for telltale signs, air holes, air vents, somewhere in the desert or somewhere in an arid area. And we’ve found nothing, not for lack of trying. We looked very hard. And there’s just no evidence on the inside.
And it’s not only here, it’s known in Europe. It’s a much easier situation, at least for a journalist, to go to Europe, because the European intelligence officials are much more open about it. "Yes, we are very skeptical," they will say, "but we’ve found nothing." So, the fact is, we have a—the evidence is pretty strong—I mean, very strong—that we have a sanctions program that’s designed to prevent the Iranians from building weapons systems they’re not building.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Sy Hersh, your article details some extraordinary efforts by the United States. You talk about the special forces operations actually replacing street signs in Tehran with radiation detectors and replacing bricks in buildings. Could you talk about some of that? I mean, because that’s enormous risk that they’re taking actually going into the country and doing that.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Oh, it’s amazingly complicated. And I will tell you, obviously, I hate to write about operational stuff, but let me just say that whatever we were doing, we have a new generation now that’s more sophisticated. But in those early days—early days being '05, 2005, 2006—there was a tremendous concern that various buildings, laboratories and academic buildings in the city of Tehran were being used as secret facilities to enrich uranium to a high degree. Right now the Iranians are absolutely within the law. It turns out they're signatories to the NPT, Non-Proliferation Treaty. And there’s no evidence whatsoever that—the IAEA, the group that Mr. ElBaradei headed, International Atomic Energy Agency, which monitors nuclear developments, they consistently report that there’s no evidence of any diversion of any of the enriched materials they now have.
We’re enriching—the Iranians are enriching to about 3.7 or so percent to run civilian power plants. There’s one small pilot project for medical research that gets up to 20 percent. But everything that’s being enriched is under camera, under watch, by the IAEA. There’s just no sign of any diversion. There’s just no evidence. This doesn’t mean we can go to intent. It doesn’t mean that there’s a lot of concern in the United States and appropriate concern about the Iranian intent. It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t watch what they do. But it does mean that we’re sort of beating a dead horse here.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about your sources, Sy Hersh.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Thanks a lot, Amy. Look, there’s been two very secret studies done, called National Intelligence Estimates, NIEs, and these are the most sort of sacrosanct internal studies done by the community. Almost all the time they’re private. There are studies going on, NIEs going on all the time—the situation now in Ecuador, for example, other issues. Venezuela is always looked at. The situation in the war, war-peace stuff, is constantly being looked at by groups of people in the intelligence community. And these documents are promulgated without anybody knowing it.
For some reason, in 2007 there was an NIE put out about the Iranian nuclear weapons program, and the White House wanted a summary made. And I think at that point 16 intelligence agencies were involved in the final conclusions. And internally, the guys running it, to their credit, voted 16 to nothing to say what they said, which is that, in a summary put out about the NIE—as I say, unprecedented summary—saying there’s no evidence they had done any weaponization since 2003.
And there’s a new study that was just done. It was published in February of this year. And it—we knew about it, but nobody has actually—you’re getting me in a tricky area, but I can just say, people that have worked on the study and have read the study will attest—have attested that it doesn’t take us any further. There’s no further evidence of any weaponization.
And what’s even more important that I write is that this, the latest study, was actually supposed to be promulgated—is the word they use in the community—last fall, and it was delayed because the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon intelligence agency, had an assessment that was—knocked everybody’s socks off. Their assessment was, the only reason Iran even looked at weaponization—and we’re not talking about building anything, we’re talking about doing studies, paper studies—was because they were frightened of Iraq. They had had an eight-year war, as many in your audience will remember, between 1980 and 1988, with Iraq, a terrible, brutal war. And when they—their worry was, in the early—in the 2001, 2002 period, that if Iraq went nuclear, they might need some deterrent. So what they even looked at, the papers they did, was aimed not at us or the Israelis, but aimed at the Iraqis. That didn’t get into the final judgment, but it affected the debate in a pretty positive way.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And Sy Hersh, one of the things you say in your article is that these latest intelligence assessments—that a lot of the career intelligence people in the government now have pushed back a lot more against political pressure, after the debacle with Iraq and the pressure on the intelligence community to skew intelligence assessments about weapons of mass destruction, that now the career people are a lot more willing to buck any political pressure.
SEYMOUR HERSH: You know, it really depends on who’s running the agency. The Defense Department, the DIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, has a career general named Burgess who’s been in a lot of tough places. You know, he was in the Joint Special Operations Command. And he really has, all I can say is—again, I’m getting into—the people who work for him will tell you that they’re no longer afraid to go up against the established judgment. And so, what we really have been happening, in an amazing way—and I have to say this about the American government because I’m always very critical—but we do have an enormous number of people in the government and the intelligence community who don’t take—who take an oath of office to the Constitution, and not to the general who’s in charge of them or to the president. And we’re seeing more and more of that kind of attitude coming out inside. I can’t tell you why, but there’s more people really—there’s a lot more concern about where we are in the world right now. And the last decade has been a pretty horrible one for the United States, and I think the future is very, very sort of frightening, too, in terms of what’s been going on in the Middle East, etc. So there’s more integrity in the process. It doesn’t mean the White House likes it.
AMY GOODMAN: Sy, I wanted to ask you about the new International Atomic Energy Agency report that came out Tuesday, just after your article was published. This is what the New York Times reported, quote: "The world’s global nuclear inspection agency, frustrated by Iran’s refusal to answer questions, revealed for the first time [on] Tuesday that it possesses evidence that Tehran has conducted work on a highly sophisticated nuclear triggering technology that experts said could be used for only one purpose: setting off a nuclear weapon."
"The nine-page report raised questions about whether Iran has sought to investigate seven different kinds of technology ranging from atomic triggers and detonators to uranium fuel," the New York Times reporting on the IAEA report. Your response, Seymour Hersh?
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, the word "evidence" was not in what the IAEA said. What the IAEA said is something it’s been saying repeatedly, even under ElBaradei. And I must say, the new director general, Mr. Amano, is, I think, more willing to please us than ElBaradei was, just in terms of speculating more. There was nothing new in that report. They’ve been saying repeatedly that they have concerns about certain information they have. They don’t describe it as evidence.
The new trigger is a very complicated device that was used by us maybe 30 years ago to trigger a hydrogen—a fusion weapon, and it went nowhere. And it’s a, as I say, extremely complicated device that there’s no evidence that anybody in their right mind would want to use that kind of a trigger. It would involve creating a different kind of reactor. The technical problems with that kind of a complicated device are enormous. And anyway, are you really going to be—are you going to make a trigger before you know what kind of gun you have?
I mean, it’s just—the word "evidence" was nowhere in the report. It’s been going on a long time. And what’s been going on is the IAEA has put out—this is even under ElBaradei. For about six, seven, eight years now, they’ve put out report after report that say one thing, that’s the most important thing: no evidence of any diversion of enriched materials, no evidence that they’re squirreling away enriched uranium to make a secret bomb. They have a lot of uranium enriched, the 3.7 percent, yes, but there’s no evidence they’re doing anything more than storing it up to run a civilian nuclear reactor. They have two in the process now. They’re having a lot of technical troubles. But eventually they’re going to need that fuel. It takes an enormous amount of fuel to drive a reactor. And so, it’s the same thing that’s been going on. You can look at the questions raised and lead your story with that, or you can look at the fact they say consistently that there’s been no diversion. There are outstanding questions. The Iranians don’t like being asked a lot of questions about third-party information. They keep on coming back to the IAEA and saying, "Give us some reason to answer a question. We’re not going to answer questions about third-party gossip," that most of which they believe comes from fabrications.
And there’s been some evidence that some of the material—particularly there’s a famous laptop incident, where there was material given to us, the providence of which wasn’t known, that we made a big fuss about, allegedly a laptop belonging to an Iranian scientist, nuclear scientist. There were very crude drawings in it. They weren’t at all near the level of anything serious. And that, for years, back about four or five years ago, fueled all sorts of debate.
There’s just—the word "evidence"—I’ll just say again, the word "evidence" was not in what the IAEA said. Yes, there are outstanding questions. They’ve been—the same questions have been asked and answered for years. This particular trigger device was written about in a London newspaper two or three years ago, a major story. It’s not new. There’s nothing known about it that hasn’t been said before. This is what happens. You know, alas, you know, one thing about a free press is you don’t have to like everything you read.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Sy, I wanted to ask you—you mentioned earlier the uprisings in the Arab world, and I wanted to ask you about the impact of those uprisings both on the theocracy in Iran and also on Israel’s attempts to constantly encircle Iran or portray it as the source of danger to the rest of the world and to the region.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, just to get away from Iran for a second, what you’re having now is you’re having a—you had it in Tunisia, and you had Egypt, spontaneous people’s revolts, if you will. Your former colleague was in Tahrir Square doing great stuff on it, and still in Cairo, I understand.
AMY GOODMAN: Sharif, yes.
SEYMOUR HERSH: And so, you had something amazing—yes, you had something amazing going on. And what you have now—and that of course spread. That spread throughout the Gulf regions. And what you have now is a very, very—it’s sort of unremarked upon by the press here in America—you have a counterrevolution going on, fueled largely by the Saudis and their panic. You see the implication of that in Bahrain, where the unbelievable things are happening to the Shiites, the minority Shiites there. They may be a majority in terms of population, but certainly a minority in terms of power. And you have that regime brutalizing its people in a way that’s beyond, I would argue, anything going on elsewhere, including in Syria. As bad as it is in Syria, it’s much worse in Bahrain. And the United States, of course, for a lot of reasons, is ignoring that.
You have the Gulf states in a state of sort of controlled panic now. They’re all sort of locally owned oil combines, owned by various one-time Bedouin—you know, Bedouin desert livers, now suddenly owners of huge complexes of oil billionaires, all of them, and they want to stay in power in the Gulf—Oman, even Qatar. You can see a lot of problems with Al Jazeera’s coverage, particularly of Bahrain. Al Jazeera, for example, is always calling me, didn’t call me for this story because everybody wants to point fingers at Iran. The United States has essentially equated Iran’s upset and encouragement of some of the—encouragement of the stuff going on with Bahrain as—for the United States, this is as much of a sin as the Al Khalifa family beating the hell out of everybody and doing worse than that—particularly doctors and nurses—in Bahrain. So there’s a huge—
AMY GOODMAN: And it’s the home of the U.S. Navy Fifth Fleet, Sy.
SEYMOUR HERSH:—counterrevolution going on.
Yes, absolutely, it is the home. And, of course, the Fifth Fleet often, wisely, will move a lot of their vehicles offshore when trouble gets going. Yes, it’s the home of our—Bahrain is an important base. It’s an important facility. But we could go other places, too, I’m sure. It’s just we have a lot of things there.
So you have the American response to—you have this GCC, the Gulf Cooperation Community or Committee. It’s probably the only defense organization in the world that’s designed for all the countries getting together to ward against internal dissent, not external threat, but internal threats. And so, we have this amazing institution. Morocco just joined the GCC. So, this is going on before our eyes, and we’re not paying enough attention to it.
And what we do is we focus on Iran as the bad guy: Iran is responsible, they’re shifting gear to the Syrians to help the Syrian Mukhabarat control its society, as if the Baathist Party in Syria needs outside help in doing that. They’re pretty good at it. We’ve made Iran into a bogeyman. And my own guess is, the reason we’re so intent on the sanctions and keeping them going, when there’s no evidence of any weaponization, there’s no real threat at all—even the Israelis—I was in Israel last in June—rather, in April, two months ago now. And I can’t—they have crazy, strange rules, ground rules, on what you can report. But I can tell you right now, the Israelis understand, the more sophisticated ones and serious people in the intelligence community there, they understand that that Iran doesn’t have a bomb now. If it decides to get one and they get a bomb, they’re not going to throw it against Tel Aviv, because they know that’s annihilation. They understand that, despite the fact they say different things and they raise the threat. So we’re making the Iranians sort of the people responsible for what’s going on, in terms of the revolutions, and we’re really on the wrong side of history on that, the United States.
It’s really the Saudis we should be looking at quite a bit. And when you get to that question, you then say, here are the Saudis, who obviously—we know from reports and from everything I’ve been told—are very angry at us. They feel that our support for Mubarak undercut them. You know, they like to keep rigid control over a population that includes, certainly in Saudi Arabia, many Shiites who work the oil fields. And so, you have the Saudis in full panic, refusing—in anger at us, refusing to increase the oil output, so the price of oil stays—gasoline is $4 or more a gallon. And then, here we have a president whose reelection is going to depend not on killing Osama bin Laden—hooray, he did it—but more on what the price of gasoline is going to be next year. And we have the Saudis stiffing us.
And here you have Iran, which is the second-largest producer of natural gas in the world, also has a lot of oil—its fields are diminishing, but it’s got a lot of stuff. The sanctions aren’t working. The Iranians are selling stuff to India, to China, Pakistan. They’re doing a lot of business. You think—I mean, dumb and dumber. You think maybe we would start doing what a lot of people in the article I published—Tom Pickering, the former secretary—under secretary of state, a longtime ambassador, very serious guy, is among those who’s been doing—involved in secret contacts with the Iranians and has been telling us for years, he and his group, "Get off this nuclear business. There’s a lot of other issues you could deal with the Iranians. They want to be respected. You could really get some progress," and maybe even getting to the point where we can—we don’t have to—we’re not interested in changing the regime there. That’s impossible. We do know that. Unlike Bush and Cheney, Obama doesn’t want to. Maybe we can get to the point where you can start getting some of the energy that they have to produce. Instead, we’re trying to keep them from the market. It just doesn’t make sense. And sanctions, you know, go ask Castro how well they work. We’ve been sanctioning Cuba, what, since 1960, ’61, ’62, and, you know—and as far as I know, Cuba is still there, and so is Castro.
AMY GOODMAN: Sy Hersh, very quickly, we haven’t spoken to you in a while, and—
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, I’m sorry, my earphone popped out. Hold on a second.
AMY GOODMAN: OK, we’re talking to—
SEYMOUR HERSH: Say again.
AMY GOODMAN:—the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Seymour Hersh. Sy, we haven’t talked to you in a while. Your assessment of President Obama’s war in Afghanistan and Pakistan?
SEYMOUR HERSH: A disaster. Stupid. I do think that the White House really wanted the bin Laden raid, about which I’ve been doing a lot of work. There’s always—things are always more interesting than they seem. I’m not suggesting he wasn’t killed or anything like that, but just more interesting. And I think the getting of bin Laden will give Obama the freedom to make a serious cut in this war in Afghanistan that everybody on the inside—everybody on the inside, believe me—I don’t know about Petraeus, General Petraeus, who for some reason is going to the CIA, just as for some reason Panetta, who doesn’t really know much about the Pentagon is going to the Pentagon. I don’t quite understand what they’re doing.
But this is a war that has nothing to do with American national security. And the obvious way out is to actually find a way to start talking to Mullah Omar. Instead, we keep on isolating him. And we’re driving Pakistan crazy with this war. We’re increasing the jihadism there. We’re increasing the terrorism there. We’re sticking it to the Paks in very direct ways. It’s a totally counterproductive system. We have our guys going out doing night raids. We always call them NATO, and the press goes along with calling them NATO. But our Joint Special Operations Command is still going out. I don’t fault the guys doing it. Let me make it clear, they’re very, very competent guys. They’re under orders, and they do what they do. They just do it very well. But there’s no way you’re going to make strikes at night and not kill an awful lot of noncombatants—"collateral damage," they call it. And it’s just—we’re hated. We’re outsiders. We don’t have to be doing the bombs to be hated by the Pashtun. That’s been the society all along. The Pakistanis are in terrible fear of what’s going to happen in Afghanistan. They always see Afghanistan as bulwark against India. They’re afraid of our relationship with India.
And I’ll tell you the biggest problem he has, as awful as those things are, as counterproductive, and as much as he’s following, oh, yes, Bush and Cheney in those policies—and I think the President—I’ll be writing about this—I think he was really sandbagged by the Pentagon after he got into office, when he was new and innocent. And I still think—I think right now—I would almost use the word "cult" to describe what’s going on in the White House. Everything is political. He’s isolated. Very good people say they’ve never seen a president this isolated, in terms of being unable to get to him with different opinions, etc. So here’s really captive of a few people there. I know this may sound strange, but I know what I’m talking about. You can’t get to the guy—and even, for example, Pickering, as competent as he is. And Pickering has done some wonderful stuff for the United States intelligence community undercover, and so he’s known as a trusted guy. Those guys who have been involved in talking to Iran off the record, Track II policy talks, for years can’t get to the President. He may not even know they’re looking for him. I just don’t know.
And so, here we have this very bright guy continuing insane policies that are counterproductive, do nothing for the United States, and meanwhile the real crisis is going to be about Iraq, because, whatever you’re hearing, Iraq is going bad. Sunnis are killing Shia. It’s sectarian war. And the big question is going to be whether we pull out or not. And there’s going to be a lot of pressure to keep them—we’ve got 40,000 or 50,000 Americans there—to keep them there. I don’t know how it’s going to play out, but I’ll tell you right now, there are Sunni Baathist groups in Damascus, in various places, in the United Kingdom—Leeds is one place—ready, as soon as we get out, to declare an alternative government, a provisional government, and announce that they’re going to retake Iran from the Shiites and from—Iraq from the Shiites, who they believe are totally tied in to the Iranians, which probably isn’t true, but that’s always been the fiction we have, or the fear we have: Iran controls Iraq. There’s a mutuality of interests, but Maliki is a very tough customer. You know, Maliki worked for 21 years in Syria as a cop for the Mukhabarat, for the secret police. He was working as a sergeant there for 21 years in Syria, before he went back as an exile after we kicked out Saddam. He is nobody’s patsy. But there’s going to be a holy hell there. It’s going to be probably the biggest problem the President has next year, along with gas, along with the crazy Republicans that are running against him. He’s going to—and along with Afghan and along with Iran, it’s going to be Iraq. We’re going to be back looking at Iraq, as that country goes berserk.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Sy Hersh, I want to—
SEYMOUR HERSH: That’s very cheerful. I’m really Mr. Happy News, huh?
JUAN GONZALEZ: I want to get back to the Arab Spring for a moment and ask you, do you think that in Egypt—for example, the uprisings that led to the overthrow of Mubarak and now to the trial, apparently, the trial of Mubarak, it is understandable why the Egyptian people would want to put this ruthless leader on trial. But do you think that the trying of Mubarak has had repercussions throughout the rest of the region, with all these other dictators who say, "Well, I better fight to the end, because if not, I will end up like Mubarak, will be immediately put on trial by my people"?
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, you know, I can’t say that about the trial, because I haven’t actually talked to anybody about whether the trial makes a difference. But before that, I would say what you’re saying is absolutely right. The moment the United States—the waffling that the President did—if you remember, he was with the kids, he was against the kids, and we had the Secretary of State saying the same thing, with, against. There’s no question that the fear—there’s an enormous fear in the Arab world, in the Gulf, in the Gulf region. And right now they’re very angry at us. They’re terrified of Iran. And they’re very worried about internal security.
They’re worried about—what’s going on in Bahrain is, I’m telling you, it’s a sensationally underreported story. The brutality there is beyond—it’s shocking. And again, the Saudis are directly involved, sort of with our OK. Again, if you don’t think Saudi Arabia has enormous control over Saleh in Yemen, you’re not paying attention. He’s got enormous control over him. The Saudis—if the Saudis wanted to, they could play a very positive role there. They’re not. He’s their guy. And so, you have this counterrevolution fed by the Saudi billions. And the Saudis went recently in the—Prince Bandar, my favorite dark prince, was recently in Pakistan, and the Pakistanis are supplying some thuggery, some arms, some muscle, in Bahrain. And I think the Pakistanis are also helping out in internal security inside Saudi Arabia itself. And so, everybody is muscling up now to beat up the kids who want to do something.
And meanwhile, if you look at it, the single biggest blow against al-Qaeda, I would argue—bin Laden, of course, was great, wonderful, I’m glad he’s gone and all that stuff—but the other big blow was the Arab Spring, because once you lose the sense of humiliation among the Arab population and the sense of fear—you’re seeing that in Syria right now, although that’s also complicated, because the Saudis are deeply involved in trying to get rid of—or certainly make it more difficult for Bandar—for Bashar Assad to exist. That’s a more complicated position. But once the fear is gone, al-Qaeda is gone.
So, the one thing we had going for ourselves, in terms of getting rid of these terrorists who prey on the frustrations of the Arab young, wow, instead, we’re going the wrong way. And it’s a horrible mistake. It’s happening right in front of us. It’s not being seen, but it’s right there to be seen. And it’s just this country, this president—traditionally, we’ve been unable to pull the trigger on the Saudis. Even now, when confronted with heinous activity, we still can’t pull the trigger on the Saudis, because of the need for oil. And again, this is a country, Saudi Arabia, that is not lifting—not agreeing to lift two or three more billion barrels a day. They’re at eight-and-a-half billion. We’d love them to go to 11, 10-and-a-half and 11. That would take pressure off the price. And it’s politically useful for the President not to—for the President to have it happen. It’s not going to happen.
So, Arab Spring is being undercut enormously. There’s still some hope in Egypt, because the kids are so strong, the movement there is so strong. But I can tell you, Suleiman, the leader of the intelligence service, is still there. I think an awful lot—I would look at Libya as part coming out of Arab Spring. An awful lot of it comes out of Libyan intervention. There’s been a longstanding American CIA role and opposition to Gaddafi. And one of the things Gaddafi drove everybody crazy with, just to show you how silly the world is, every oil deal he wanted 20 percent on the top of. And so, there was a lot of corporate anger at him, too. He was getting 20 percent kickback. Even Saddam, in the heyday, only wanted 10 percent. It all comes down sometimes to money. And I don’t know what’s going to happen there.
AMY GOODMAN: Sy, we have 30 seconds.
SEYMOUR HERSH: I just don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t quite—
AMY GOODMAN: We have 30 seconds.
SEYMOUR HERSH: OK.
AMY GOODMAN: But I want to ask you a last question. You made headlines a few years ago when you said President Bush operated an executive assassination ring. Has that policy continued under President Obama?
SEYMOUR HERSH: What I said was that in the early days under Cheney, in the first days after—you know, '03, ’04, ’05, yes, there was a direct connection between the vice president's office and individuals getting hit. That got institutionalized later in a more sophisticated way. There’s no question that—look, there’s an enormous military apparatus out there that isn’t seen. That’s what I’m writing about. We’re not seeing it. We don’t know it exists. Cheney built up a world that still exists. And it’s a very ugly, frightening world that has not much to do with what the Constitution calls for.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to leave it there. Thank you very much, Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist. His piece appears in The New Yorker magazine, and we will link to it. It’s called "Iran and the Bomb."

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JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Sy, I wanted to ask you—you mentioned earlier the uprisings in the Arab world, and I wanted to ask you about the impact of those uprisings both on the theocracy in Iran and also on Israel’s attempts to constantly encircle Iran or portray it as the source of danger to the rest of the world and to the region.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, just to get away from Iran for a second, what you’re having now is you’re having a—you had it in Tunisia, and you had Egypt, spontaneous people’s revolts, if you will. Your former colleague was in Tahrir Square doing great stuff on it, and still in Cairo, I understand.
AMY GOODMAN: Sharif, yes.
SEYMOUR HERSH: And so, you had something amazing—yes, you had something amazing going on. And what you have now—and that of course spread. That spread throughout the Gulf regions. And what you have now is a very, very—it’s sort of unremarked upon by the press here in America—you have a counterrevolution going on, fueled largely by the Saudis and their panic. You see the implication of that in Bahrain, where the unbelievable things are happening to the Shiites, the minority Shiites there. They may be a majority in terms of population, but certainly a minority in terms of power. And you have that regime brutalizing its people in a way that’s beyond, I would argue, anything going on elsewhere, including in Syria. As bad as it is in Syria, it’s much worse in Bahrain. And the United States, of course, for a lot of reasons, is ignoring that.
You have the Gulf states in a state of sort of controlled panic now. They’re all sort of locally owned oil combines, owned by various one-time Bedouin—you know, Bedouin desert livers, now suddenly owners of huge complexes of oil billionaires, all of them, and they want to stay in power in the Gulf—Oman, even Qatar. You can see a lot of problems with Al Jazeera’s coverage, particularly of Bahrain. Al Jazeera, for example, is always calling me, didn’t call me for this story because everybody wants to point fingers at Iran. The United States has essentially equated Iran’s upset and encouragement of some of the—encouragement of the stuff going on with Bahrain as—for the United States, this is as much of a sin as the Al Khalifa family beating the hell out of everybody and doing worse than that—particularly doctors and nurses—in Bahrain. So there’s a huge—
AMY GOODMAN: And it’s the home of the U.S. Navy Fifth Fleet, Sy.
SEYMOUR HERSH:—counterrevolution going on.
Yes, absolutely, it is the home. And, of course, the Fifth Fleet often, wisely, will move a lot of their vehicles offshore when trouble gets going. Yes, it’s the home of our—Bahrain is an important base. It’s an important facility. But we could go other places, too, I’m sure. It’s just we have a lot of things there.
So you have the American response to—you have this GCC, the Gulf Cooperation Community or Committee. It’s probably the only defense organization in the world that’s designed for all the countries getting together to ward against internal dissent, not external threat, but internal threats. And so, we have this amazing institution. Morocco just joined the GCC. So, this is going on before our eyes, and we’re not paying enough attention to it.
And what we do is we focus on Iran as the bad guy: Iran is responsible, they’re shifting gear to the Syrians to help the Syrian Mukhabarat control its society, as if the Baathist Party in Syria needs outside help in doing that. They’re pretty good at it. We’ve made Iran into a bogeyman. And my own guess is, the reason we’re so intent on the sanctions and keeping them going, when there’s no evidence of any weaponization, there’s no real threat at all—even the Israelis—I was in Israel last in June—rather, in April, two months ago now. And I can’t—they have crazy, strange rules, ground rules, on what you can report. But I can tell you right now, the Israelis understand, the more sophisticated ones and serious people in the intelligence community there, they understand that that Iran doesn’t have a bomb now. If it decides to get one and they get a bomb, they’re not going to throw it against Tel Aviv, because they know that’s annihilation. They understand that, despite the fact they say different things and they raise the threat. So we’re making the Iranians sort of the people responsible for what’s going on, in terms of the revolutions, and we’re really on the wrong side of history on that, the United States.
It’s really the Saudis we should be looking at quite a bit. And when you get to that question, you then say, here are the Saudis, who obviously—we know from reports and from everything I’ve been told—are very angry at us. They feel that our support for Mubarak undercut them. You know, they like to keep rigid control over a population that includes, certainly in Saudi Arabia, many Shiites who work the oil fields. And so, you have the Saudis in full panic, refusing—in anger at us, refusing to increase the oil output, so the price of oil stays—gasoline is $4 or more a gallon. And then, here we have a president whose reelection is going to depend not on killing Osama bin Laden—hooray, he did it—but more on what the price of gasoline is going to be next year. And we have the Saudis stiffing us.
And here you have Iran, which is the second-largest producer of natural gas in the world, also has a lot of oil—its fields are diminishing, but it’s got a lot of stuff. The sanctions aren’t working. The Iranians are selling stuff to India, to China, Pakistan. They’re doing a lot of business. You think—I mean, dumb and dumber. You think maybe we would start doing what a lot of people in the article I published—Tom Pickering, the former secretary—under secretary of state, a longtime ambassador, very serious guy, is among those who’s been doing—involved in secret contacts with the Iranians and has been telling us for years, he and his group, "Get off this nuclear business. There’s a lot of other issues you could deal with the Iranians. They want to be respected. You could really get some progress," and maybe even getting to the point where we can—we don’t have to—we’re not interested in changing the regime there. That’s impossible. We do know that. Unlike Bush and Cheney, Obama doesn’t want to. Maybe we can get to the point where you can start getting some of the energy that they have to produce. Instead, we’re trying to keep them from the market. It just doesn’t make sense. And sanctions, you know, go ask Castro how well they work. We’ve been sanctioning Cuba, what, since 1960, ’61, ’62, and, you know—and as far as I know, Cuba is still there, and so is Castro.
AMY GOODMAN: Sy Hersh, very quickly, we haven’t spoken to you in a while, and—
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, I’m sorry, my earphone popped out. Hold on a second.
AMY GOODMAN: OK, we’re talking to—
SEYMOUR HERSH: Say again.
AMY GOODMAN:—the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Seymour Hersh. Sy, we haven’t talked to you in a while. Your assessment of President Obama’s war in Afghanistan and Pakistan?
SEYMOUR HERSH: A disaster. Stupid. I do think that the White House really wanted the bin Laden raid, about which I’ve been doing a lot of work. There’s always—things are always more interesting than they seem. I’m not suggesting he wasn’t killed or anything like that, but just more interesting. And I think the getting of bin Laden will give Obama the freedom to make a serious cut in this war in Afghanistan that everybody on the inside—everybody on the inside, believe me—I don’t know about Petraeus, General Petraeus, who for some reason is going to the CIA, just as for some reason Panetta, who doesn’t really know much about the Pentagon is going to the Pentagon. I don’t quite understand what they’re doing.
But this is a war that has nothing to do with American national security. And the obvious way out is to actually find a way to start talking to Mullah Omar. Instead, we keep on isolating him. And we’re driving Pakistan crazy with this war. We’re increasing the jihadism there. We’re increasing the terrorism there. We’re sticking it to the Paks in very direct ways. It’s a totally counterproductive system. We have our guys going out doing night raids. We always call them NATO, and the press goes along with calling them NATO. But our Joint Special Operations Command is still going out. I don’t fault the guys doing it. Let me make it clear, they’re very, very competent guys. They’re under orders, and they do what they do. They just do it very well. But there’s no way you’re going to make strikes at night and not kill an awful lot of noncombatants—"collateral damage," they call it. And it’s just—we’re hated. We’re outsiders. We don’t have to be doing the bombs to be hated by the Pashtun. That’s been the society all along. The Pakistanis are in terrible fear of what’s going to happen in Afghanistan. They always see Afghanistan as bulwark against India. They’re afraid of our relationship with India.
And I’ll tell you the biggest problem he has, as awful as those things are, as counterproductive, and as much as he’s following, oh, yes, Bush and Cheney in those policies—and I think the President—I’ll be writing about this—I think he was really sandbagged by the Pentagon after he got into office, when he was new and innocent. And I still think—I think right now—I would almost use the word "cult" to describe what’s going on in the White House. Everything is political. He’s isolated. Very good people say they’ve never seen a president this isolated, in terms of being unable to get to him with different opinions, etc. So here’s really captive of a few people there. I know this may sound strange, but I know what I’m talking about. You can’t get to the guy—and even, for example, Pickering, as competent as he is. And Pickering has done some wonderful stuff for the United States intelligence community undercover, and so he’s known as a trusted guy. Those guys who have been involved in talking to Iran off the record, Track II policy talks, for years can’t get to the President. He may not even know they’re looking for him. I just don’t know.
And so, here we have this very bright guy continuing insane policies that are counterproductive, do nothing for the United States, and meanwhile the real crisis is going to be about Iraq, because, whatever you’re hearing, Iraq is going bad. Sunnis are killing Shia. It’s sectarian war. And the big question is going to be whether we pull out or not. And there’s going to be a lot of pressure to keep them—we’ve got 40,000 or 50,000 Americans there—to keep them there. I don’t know how it’s going to play out, but I’ll tell you right now, there are Sunni Baathist groups in Damascus, in various places, in the United Kingdom—Leeds is one place—ready, as soon as we get out, to declare an alternative government, a provisional government, and announce that they’re going to retake Iran from the Shiites and from—Iraq from the Shiites, who they believe are totally tied in to the Iranians, which probably isn’t true, but that’s always been the fiction we have, or the fear we have: Iran controls Iraq. There’s a mutuality of interests, but Maliki is a very tough customer. You know, Maliki worked for 21 years in Syria as a cop for the Mukhabarat, for the secret police. He was working as a sergeant there for 21 years in Syria, before he went back as an exile after we kicked out Saddam. He is nobody’s patsy. But there’s going to be a holy hell there. It’s going to be probably the biggest problem the President has next year, along with gas, along with the crazy Republicans that are running against him. He’s going to—and along with Afghan and along with Iran, it’s going to be Iraq. We’re going to be back looking at Iraq, as that country goes berserk.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Sy Hersh, I want to—
SEYMOUR HERSH: That’s very cheerful. I’m really Mr. Happy News, huh?
JUAN GONZALEZ: I want to get back to the Arab Spring for a moment and ask you, do you think that in Egypt—for example, the uprisings that led to the overthrow of Mubarak and now to the trial, apparently, the trial of Mubarak, it is understandable why the Egyptian people would want to put this ruthless leader on trial. But do you think that the trying of Mubarak has had repercussions throughout the rest of the region, with all these other dictators who say, "Well, I better fight to the end, because if not, I will end up like Mubarak, will be immediately put on trial by my people"?
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, you know, I can’t say that about the trial, because I haven’t actually talked to anybody about whether the trial makes a difference. But before that, I would say what you’re saying is absolutely right. The moment the United States—the waffling that the President did—if you remember, he was with the kids, he was against the kids, and we had the Secretary of State saying the same thing, with, against. There’s no question that the fear—there’s an enormous fear in the Arab world, in the Gulf, in the Gulf region. And right now they’re very angry at us. They’re terrified of Iran. And they’re very worried about internal security.
They’re worried about—what’s going on in Bahrain is, I’m telling you, it’s a sensationally underreported story. The brutality there is beyond—it’s shocking. And again, the Saudis are directly involved, sort of with our OK. Again, if you don’t think Saudi Arabia has enormous control over Saleh in Yemen, you’re not paying attention. He’s got enormous control over him. The Saudis—if the Saudis wanted to, they could play a very positive role there. They’re not. He’s their guy. And so, you have this counterrevolution fed by the Saudi billions. And the Saudis went recently in the—Prince Bandar, my favorite dark prince, was recently in Pakistan, and the Pakistanis are supplying some thuggery, some arms, some muscle, in Bahrain. And I think the Pakistanis are also helping out in internal security inside Saudi Arabia itself. And so, everybody is muscling up now to beat up the kids who want to do something.
And meanwhile, if you look at it, the single biggest blow against al-Qaeda, I would argue—bin Laden, of course, was great, wonderful, I’m glad he’s gone and all that stuff—but the other big blow was the Arab Spring, because once you lose the sense of humiliation among the Arab population and the sense of fear—you’re seeing that in Syria right now, although that’s also complicated, because the Saudis are deeply involved in trying to get rid of—or certainly make it more difficult for Bandar—for Bashar Assad to exist. That’s a more complicated position. But once the fear is gone, al-Qaeda is gone.
So, the one thing we had going for ourselves, in terms of getting rid of these terrorists who prey on the frustrations of the Arab young, wow, instead, we’re going the wrong way. And it’s a horrible mistake. It’s happening right in front of us. It’s not being seen, but it’s right there to be seen. And it’s just this country, this president—traditionally, we’ve been unable to pull the trigger on the Saudis. Even now, when confronted with heinous activity, we still can’t pull the trigger on the Saudis, because of the need for oil. And again, this is a country, Saudi Arabia, that is not lifting—not agreeing to lift two or three more billion barrels a day. They’re at eight-and-a-half billion. We’d love them to go to 11, 10-and-a-half and 11. That would take pressure off the price. And it’s politically useful for the President not to—for the President to have it happen. It’s not going to happen.
So, Arab Spring is being undercut enormously. There’s still some hope in Egypt, because the kids are so strong, the movement there is so strong. But I can tell you, Suleiman, the leader of the intelligence service, is still there. I think an awful lot—I would look at Libya as part coming out of Arab Spring. An awful lot of it comes out of Libyan intervention. There’s been a longstanding American CIA role and opposition to Gaddafi. And one of the things Gaddafi drove everybody crazy with, just to show you how silly the world is, every oil deal he wanted 20 percent on the top of. And so, there was a lot of corporate anger at him, too. He was getting 20 percent kickback. Even Saddam, in the heyday, only wanted 10 percent. It all comes down sometimes to money. And I don’t know what’s going to happen there.
AMY GOODMAN: Sy, we have 30 seconds.
SEYMOUR HERSH: I just don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t quite—
AMY GOODMAN: We have 30 seconds.
SEYMOUR HERSH: OK.
AMY GOODMAN: But I want to ask you a last question. You made headlines a few years ago when you said President Bush operated an executive assassination ring. Has that policy continued under President Obama?
SEYMOUR HERSH: What I said was that in the early days under Cheney, in the first days after—you know, '03, ’04, ’05, yes, there was a direct connection between the vice president's office and individuals getting hit. That got institutionalized later in a more sophisticated way. There’s no question that—look, there’s an enormous military apparatus out there that isn’t seen. That’s what I’m writing about. We’re not seeing it. We don’t know it exists. Cheney built up a world that still exists. And it’s a very ugly, frightening world that has not much to do with what the Constitution calls for.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to leave it there. Thank you very much, Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist. His piece appears in The New Yorker magazine, and we will link to it. It’s called "Iran and the Bomb."

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