Bush Halts 28-point Iraqi Peace Plan Because U. S. Withdrawal Is Key: Bush Lies Re Helping Iraqis! (2006 - Republished) - RI10

Bush Halts 28-point


Iraqi Peace Plan


Because U. S.

Withdrawal


Is Key: Bush Lies 


Re Helping Iraqis!

- RI10

 

Troops Home Fast: Nationwide Hunger 

Strikes Protest Iraq War

Monday, July 10th, 2006
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/10/1356240


Thousands of protestors gathered across the nation over the July 4th holiday to protest the Iraq war. Three thousand people around the world are fasting or have done so for at least one day this past week as part of a national "Troops Home Fast" to end the Iraq war. We speak with CodePink founder, Medea Benjamin. [includes rush transcript]

We begin by looking at the efforts to end the war in Iraq. A recent Gallup poll found that roughly 2 in 3 Americans want the U.S to withdraw troops from Iraq, with 31 percent wanting this to start immediately.

Last week, over the July 4th holiday, thousands of protestors gathered across the nation to protest the war. And 3,000 people around the world are fasting or have done so for at least one day this past week as part of a national "Troops Home Fast" to end the Iraq war. The anti-war organization Code Pink launched the fast last weekend and participants include Cindy Sheehan, Susan Sarandon, Sean Penn Dick Gregory, Willie Nelson, Bonnie Raitt, Alice Walker and Danny Glover. The fasters plan to stay in front of the White House every day until August 14th, when they move the hunger strike next to President Bush's vacation ranch in Crawford, Texas.

    * Medea Benjamin, longtime peace activist and founder of CodePink.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
Donate - $25, $50, $100, more...

AMY GOODMAN: We're joined now in Washington by Medea Benjamin, longtime peace activist, founder of CodePINK one of those engaged in the fast. We welcome you to Democracy Now!, Medea.

MEDEA BENJAMIN: Go thank you, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. First off, yesterday, as the newsmakers were coming out of the studios, particularly Senator Richard Lugar, people who are involved in the fast, who are part of CodePINK, confronted him. Why? And what happened?

MEDEA BENJAMIN: Well, part of this fast is to put pressure on our elected officials, and sometimes we can reach them in their offices, and sometimes we can reach them in other places, like when they're appearing on the talk shows. And so, we were out Sunday morning, early, to try to talk to Richard Lugar -- we also talked to Christopher Dodd -- tell them why we're doing this fast, how determined we are to end this war, ask them to come out and stand with us in front of the White House one day to show their support, but more importantly, ask them what they're going to do to end the violence in Iraq.

And we are -- this morning, we have a team of fasters who are going through the halls of Congress and leaving letters to every single member of the House and of the Senate with several boxes in them, asking them: Do you support the fast and the call for the troops to come home? Will you join us one day in front of the White House? Will you fast for one day? Or do you not support these efforts? And we want it to be clear who in Congress and who in the Senate -- where they stand. So this is one of the major points of doing this fast.

AMY GOODMAN: And what has been the response of the White House, your standing outside of the White House?

MEDEA BENJAMIN: Well, we never get any response directly from the White House, but we are out there every time they're doing a press conference. For example, they just had a press conference with the Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, and we were out there talking about Canada's recent role of being much more supportive of the Bush administration and refusing to give refugee status to the U.S. war resisters who have gone to Canada and managed to get on major Canadian television, in the major Canadian papers. We will be out there when the foreign minister from England is there this week. So when we're outside the White House, we do get a chance to at least interact with some of the visitors who are coming.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about how the fast began, how the gathering took place on Independence Day weekend?

MEDEA BENJAMIN: Well, first I should say that it was many of us talking about what more we could do. We really can't just sit around and watch the violence escalate and felt like there was -- we had to go to a deeper space in our confrontation with these policies. And so, we decided to start this hunger strike.

On July 3, we launched it walking from the Gandhi statue to the White House, and it was a very beautiful ceremony with hundreds of people. We laid out a beautiful pink tablecloth in front of the White House. We had Food Not Bombs there to cook dinner for 200. We called it our fast supper. And we had a very spiritual evening, with people joining us from different faith-based communities. And that evening at midnight, we launched the fast. On July 4, was our first day, Independence Day, we tried to march in the Independence Day parade here in Washington. Unfortunately, we were not allowed. And when two of our members, including a Vietnam veteran, tried to get into the parade, he was arrested, as was a 71-year-old member of CodePINK.

AMY GOODMAN: You have experience with members of your group being arrested, especially when you try to bring speakers from abroad, especially women from Iraq. Can you talk about that past experience?

MEDEA BENJAMIN: Well, unfortunately, when we try to exercise our First Amendment rights, we often do get arrested. We got arrested in New York when we were with the Iraqi women trying to deliver a call for peace to the U.S. mission to the U.N. We had one of our members arrested in a protest yesterday at the National Security Agency. It's part of the territory now in these Bush days.

But I do want to say, Amy, that it is a very positive experience, being in front of the White House, and we have managed to gain back a lot of our rights. We have a permit to be in front of the White House, which took us a long time to get. We have, in many occasions, like the museum that's right next to the White House, when we tried to go in with our signs on, they said we weren't allowed in. We went out and came back in with more people, and they decided that, yes, we did have the right to go in with our buttons and our political shirts. So we feel like we're -- here we are trying to take back some of the rights that we've lost under the Bush administration.

AMY GOODMAN: Medea Benjamin, we're speaking to you today with a new Gallup poll out that finds that roughly two in three Americans are urging a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, with almost a third wanting that to start immediately, and the news of former U.S. soldiers being charged with raping a young Iraqi woman -- she -- now it’s believed -- is 14 years old -- killing her and three members of her family -- her mother, her father, her five-year-old sister -- in March. The military said, in a statement, the charges had been lodged against four soldiers accused of rape and murder. A fifth soldier charged with dereliction of duty in the case, though he didn't participate in the alleged crimes, knew but failed to report about the incident.

I've just come from Eugene, Oregon, the Oregon Country Fair. And this is not far from Madras, Oregon, where Thomas Tucker, one of the two soldiers that recently were kidnapped and beheaded. It now looks like the military is talking about possibly the abduction and beheading of those two soldiers, another from Houston, Texas, may be because they were part of the same unit, and it was revenge for this unit being involved with the rape and killings -- at the time, we didn't know about this -- of this family. Your response?

MEDEA BENJAMIN: Well, my response, that it's time for us to do more, and those third of the people, who in polls say they want the troops to come home right now, need to get more active. And we think this fast is one way that they can do it. We've had people who have read about the fast in the paper, and they're in West Palm Beach, for example, and just jumped on a plane and came and joined us. We have a woman from Vancouver, in Washington state, who heard about the fast and decided that she had to do something more, came and joined us for this week. People who thought they were going to fast for one day have ended up fasting for the entire week and are going into their second week. This can really be a catalyst if people join. Every day we have hundreds more signing up on the troopshomefast.org website and saying they want to participate.

Now we have people coming to us with new ideas. Let's say, ask people to fast for a day without electricity to feel what it feels like in Baghdad. Let's ask people to fast for a day without using gasoline to feel what it would feel like to transform ourselves in a country that's not dependant on other people's oil. So this really could be a catalyst, Amy.

And I know a lot of your listeners are among those people, who are angry with this administration, who are heartbroken when they read the news every day. We really urge them to join us. If you can come to Washington, we're actually going to be here until September 21, which is International Peace Day, when we will be launching, with the Declaration of Peace, a week of actions all over the country. So there's plenty of time between now and September 21 for those of your listeners who are really disgusted with this war to come to Washington, to spend some time with us, and if you can't, to do it from your own home. There's about 25 cities where people are fasting. We want this to be happening all over the country.

AMY GOODMAN: Medea, a question about candidates around this country, around war. There is a hotly contested race in Virginia right now, where a Republican has switched parties -- James Webb -- to the Democratic Party, criticizing the Republicans around the issue of war. He's a veteran, challenging George Allen. In Connecticut, you have Joseph Lieberman, longtime senator, who has been supporting the war, being challenged by Ned Lamont. And now, because he's concerned in the upcoming primary that he could lose, Joseph Lieberman has announced that he will still run as an independent. And then you have Hillary Clinton, who has not expressed her desire for the troops to be brought home immediately, in New York. What about these candidates, whether Republican or Democrat?

MEDEA BENJAMIN: Well, what we have to do, Amy, is form a strong voter bloc of people who say they will only vote for candidates that call for a speedy withdrawal of our troops from Iraq. And there is a vehicle for doing that, and that is Voters for Peace, as part of this hunger strike. Those who can't join us in the fast itself, we're asking them to get 100 people to sign onto the voters’ pledge. They can do it online. They can download a hard copy and take it around to their office, to their neighbors. They can walk the streets. We need to have millions of people say, "only candidates, who are against the war will get our support". And they can go to the Troops Home Fast website or votersforpeace.org website. If we had millions of people already signed up for the November elections and then more for the 2008 elections, we will get more peace candidates.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, of course, I'm sure everyone is saying that they're against the war, that in the end, they want it to end. But what about the whole issue of immediate withdrawal and the issue that is raised, that it will be abandoning Iraq and allowing it to descend into civil war?

So we are saying we support the reconciliation plan put together by the Iraqi government with a number of these different armed groups and that that is essential for ending the violence in Iraq.

And as part of an essential

 
part of that plan is

withdrawal of U.S. troops.

That plan has been sanctioned by the Iraqi government. The Iraqi president, vice president, and national security adviser have all asked for a timeline for a withdrawal of U.S. troops. 87% of the Iraqi people have asked for that. If, indeed, we are trying to support the Iraqi people, we should listen to what they are calling for and demand that our elected officials follow their lead and set a timeline for withdrawal of U.S. troops fast.

AMY GOODMAN: Medea Benjamin, I want to thank you very much for being with us, longtime peace activist, founder of CodePINK, one of the founders of Global Exchange. Your website, one more time.

MEDEA BENJAMIN: Troopshomefast.org.

AMY GOODMAN: Medea Benjamin is speaking to us from Washington, D.C., where she, along with hundreds of other people in D.C. and around the country, are involved in a fast to oppose the war in Iraq.

www.democracynow.org




Monday, July 10th, 2006
Veteran Journalist Robert Scheer on

Playing President: My Close Encounters

with Nixon, Carter, Bush I, Reagan and

Clinton- and How They Did Not Prepare

Me for George W. Bush

Monday, July 10th, 2006
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/10/1356245


We speak with veteran journalist and author Robert Scheer about his new book, "Playing President: My Close Encounters with Nixon, Carter, Bush I, Reagan and Clinton- and How They Did Not Prepare Me for George W. Bush." [includes rush transcript - partial]

The Vietnam, War, North Korea, The Cold War and Presidential Power. These are just a few of the topics that veteran journalist Robert Scheer has reported on in his long career. From 1964 to 1969 he was Vietnam correspondent, and editor in chief of Ramparts magazine. From 1976 to 1993 he served as a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and in 1993 Scheer launched a nationally syndicated column based at the LA Times where he was named a contributing editor.

Robert Scheer's column ran weekly for 12 years until November of last year when he was fired. Scheer said publicly that he believed his firing was due to ideological reasons and his steady criticism of the Bush administration At the time, Scheer wrote on the Huffington Post blog that "The publisher Jeff Johnson, who has offered not a word of explanation to me, has privately told people that he hated every word that I wrote. I assume that mostly refers to my exposing the lies used by President Bush to justify the invasion of Iraq. Fortunately sixty percent of Americans now get the point but only after tens of thousand of Americans and Iraqis have been killed and maimed as the carnage spirals out of control. My only regret is that my pen was not sharper and my words tougher."

Scheer's column is now based at the San Francisco Chronicle. He also recently launched the political blog, "Truthdig.com." His latest book is called "Playing President: "My Close Encounters with Nixon, Carter, Bush I and Clinton--and How They Did Not Prepare Me for George W. Bush."

    * Robert Scheer, journalist and author of several books. His latest is titled "Playing President: My Close Encounters with Nixon, Carter, Bush I, Reagan and Clinton- and How They Did Not Prepare Me for George W. Bush."

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
Donate - $25, $50, $100, more...

AMY GOODMAN: Robert Scheer joins us in our Firehouse studio today in New York. Welcome to Democracy Now! It's good to have you with us. First, the firing, because you're still writing. In fact, you're probably known more now than before. Can you put it into the context of what is happening to the press today?

ROBERT SCHEER: Well, first of all, there's a lot of opportunity. You know, AJ Liebling said, “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” Well, I now own at least half of one, along with Zuade Kaufman, my publisher. So, you know, you can land on your feet, your show, which, you know, a lot of us listen to, as mainstream media now. And my wife, for instance, she’s a deputy editor of the San Francisco Chronicle; she sits in her parking lot listening to your show before she goes into her meetings. So alternative media is no longer really alternative, and we’re no longer that dependant upon newspapers, like the Los Angeles Times, for our information. You know, go to BuzzFlash or The Nation or TruthOut or TruthDig. There are many, many sites, as you're well aware. So, I don't want people to think, “Wow! They were able to silence me.” Nonsense.

Did they try to silence? Yes. The Tribune Company took over the Los Angeles Times. There are issues of media conglomeration. This was a newspaper that I had worked for 30 years. The interviews in this book, with the exception of the Playboy interview with Jimmy Carter, were all done for the Los Angeles Times. I was nominated by the paper some 20 times for Pulitzer Prizes. You know, I was a finalist. So, you know, I had a very good relationship with this paper. Chicago Tribune, the Tribune Company took it over. They're very conservative. The publisher definitely was ideologically opposed to my view. I was attacked by Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, sometimes nightly on O'Reilly. I mean, he called me the most dangerous columnist in the world or something.

And I think that one of the problems is that I got it right. Now, that doesn't give me any satisfaction. I would have been much happier if we could go into Iraq, and democracy would flourish, there would be no casualties, the oil revenue would pay for everything, the country was reborn as a democracy. I mean, I think most people, who are against the war would have been very happy to have been proved wrong. But to have had your column ended after you got it right all those years, it shows where the paper is.

I think there's one other factor that should be mentioned. These are businesses. Tribune Company owns television stations and newspapers in the same market in Los Angeles, in Hartford and other places. They only can do that now, because there's a waiver from the F.C.C., a Bush-dominated outfit, the F.C.C., and the Congress did not pass the bill that they wanted, which would allow them to have that ownership in the same market. So they were defeated by Congress, these big multimedia corporations, and they're very dependant upon favors from the Bush administration. So aside from their own conservative politics at the Tribune Company, they need this administration, and so it doesn't take much to put pressure on them.

AMY GOODMAN: Let's talk about the presidents that you have interviewed and known. But before we do that, on this issue of media conglomeration, on the issue of what the press can say and what the press can't say, the Bush administration lashed out at the New York Times and other media outlets for their reports on the government's secret monitoring of -- well, the latest one, of international bank transactions without court approval. President Bush himself strongly denounced the disclosure of the program by the media.

      PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Congress was briefed. And what we did was fully authorized under the law. And the disclosure of this program is disgraceful. We're at war with a bunch of people who want to hurt the United States of America. And for people to leak that program and for a newspaper to publish it does great harm to the United States of America.

AMY GOODMAN: That's President Bush. Robert Scheer, your response?

ROBERT SCHEER: First of all, if the war on terror is endless, you could forget about democracy. If it's against any target he mentions, if you could spread it -- and you never win it, which is, I guess, clearly what’s involved here, because Iraq, of course, had nothing to do with Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein was an opponent of bin Laden, bin Laden did not have a base in Iraq. So this guy takes us to war in Iraq, which is really the irritant. Now, he doesn’t pursue the situation in Afghanistan. In fact, he coddled the Taliban before 9/11. In my book, I have columns. I wrote a column in May of ‘01, blasting the Bush administration for ignoring the Taliban. I happen to be one of those in the antiwar part of things who actually supported Clinton when he sent the cruise missiles in to take out bin Laden. I had thought we had the right to use Special Forces to go in for bin Laden. He had attacked American embassies. He attacked ships. And so, I didn't see any need to coddle the Taliban.

As a matter of fact, the one group in this country that consistently raised questions about the Taliban was the Foundation for Feminist Majority, Peg Yorkin and those folks. And that's where I learned about it. And for five years they were telling us what's going on in Afghanistan is extremely dangerous, first of all, to women and girls, of course, who were treated in a most horrible way. But this was also a place where terrorism was being sponsored. Also by Pakistan, our other big buddies out there. And so, the pressure to do something about bin Laden was coming more from the left than these so-called great patriots on the right before 9/11.

And, you know, as I say, in the book I had a column I wrote in May, blasting them for giving $44 million through the U.N. to the Taliban, supposedly for suppressing the opium crop, which they didn't even do. They were putting it in sheds to drive the price up. And six weeks before 9/11, Christina Rocha from the State Department met with the Taliban ambassador in Pakistan and congratulated him once again for his great effort in the drug war. So this administration wasn’t interested in terrorism. They were interested in the drug war before 9/11. They ignored all the warnings from Sandy Berger. They ignored the warnings from the N.S.A.

So it’s such garbage for this guy who ignored terrorism and then misdirected the whole fight against terrorism to Iraq, and everything else, has weakened our country, has alienated it. We need our allies. We need France and England and Germany and Spain, you know, and all of these countries. And you routinely attack their citizens. You attack their governments when they agree with their citizens. He's weakened us in that battle. Now, he says, “Well, this was all authorized by law.” Why don't they tell us what they're doing? If they're looking into our personal banking records, if they’re listening to our phone conversations -- we're supposed to live in a democracy -- why don't you tell us you want to do that?

AMY GOODMAN: Well, they say if they tell you, then they're telling terrorists.

ROBERT SCHEER: Look, first of all, the terrorists are going to believe the worst about this society. They think we spy on everything. They think we kill everyone. They think -- they don't believe that we believe in democracy, right? They don’t believe we have limits on our government. I’ve never met any strong critic of the United States anywhere in the world who gave us any credit for having limit on government. So they think the worst, and they're not naive about that, any serious terrorist.

But I think the American public

 
has a right to know to what

degree their privacy is being

 
invaded and then decide
 

whether we want to pay that

price.

That's, after all, what democracy is about.




But the really dangerous thing in what Bush said in that clip you had, if you define the enemy as this vague terrorism thing, because we still know very little about it -- if you read the 9/11 Commission Report, there's a disclaimer, a boxed disclaimer -- I forget what page it is, I think it’s 176 -- which says the whole narrative that we have about al-Qaeda and these people who did this to us comes from so-called key witnesses. The 9/11 Commission was not able to interview those witnesses, nor were they able to interview the people who interviewed the witnesses. So we have people like Cheney basically telling us we have this sort of James Bond marriage with the Mafia, enemy of al-Qaeda out there. We still don't know who the 15 Saudis were. We still have not traced the money to the real sponsors. We still don't know the role of Pakistan in this.

So, yes, there's a problem of terrorism in the world. There's always been terrorism. There will be terrorism. You have to deal with it surgically. You have to deal with it in a serious way. This administration is not serious. So why should we accept that they're invading our privacies and that somehow it’s going to make us stronger? No, it's going to make us weaker.

AMY GOODMAN: You mentioned President Bush supporting the Taliban before attacking Afghanistan. But you go way back. And now I want to talk about the presidents you've interviewed. For example, Jimmy Carter. You're the reporter, who did the famous interview in Playboy magazine, where he talked about lust in his heart, and I want to ask you about that, but also you have been dogged in your pursuit of Carter around the issue of the Taliban and Afghanistan.

ROBERT SCHEER: Yeah, let me just say something about objectivity and whether you're coming from the left or the right. I have blurbs on the back of my book from Richard Nixon, Nancy Reagan and Bill Clinton. Okay, I actually did a profile -- I interviewed Richard Nixon. I did a profile of him. And then after I did that, it was ‘84, I evaluated his administration. I got a very nice letter from Nixon, asking me to come -- offering to talk to me, that he appreciated my analysis. So I think we can be good historians on the left, as well as on the right or the center. I mean, and I like to think I get the stuff straight, you know, that it holds up.

Now, in the case of Jimmy Carter, I was very surprised when this book came back from -- with the galleys and all the new stuff I had written, that I actually am much tougher on Carter than I was on Nixon. And that isn’t because I was a critic of Nixon. He killed a lot of people in Vietnam. It was a horror. But he escalated a democratic war. And when I was interviewing Carter for Playboy, I was very concerned about another hawkish Democrat. After all, Carter came across -- two things. We think the Republicans are the ones who started this fundamentalist religion claptrap, you know? It was Jimmy Carter. He’s the one who talked about, you know, “I’m a born-again Christian. I pray all the time. I do this,” etc.

So the reason I was interested in interviewing him was, you know, what does that mean? Are you going to have a literal interpretation of scripture? Are you going to impose it on the rest of us? So the questions, the Falwell-type questions, the Pat Robertson, really started with Jimmy Carter. And the reason that Carter was willing to be interviewed by Playboy is he was having a lot of trouble with his base in the Democratic Party, so he wanted to assure more liberal people that he wasn't. And, in fact, his answer to the lust question was a very good one, very good interpretation of his Christian views. He’s very tolerant, and he was still pro-choice, and he wasn’t going to impose this on everyone, and so forth.

What was controversial in that interview was, I said, “Well, wait a minute, but the Democrats have created a lot of mischief.” And we now think -- you know, it’s as bad as George W., and he's unquestionably the worst modern president. He’s the perfectly electronically transmitted president. There is no there there. He’s a captive of the neo-con. I accept all that. He’s part of this -- you know, he’s taken over by this cabal of Cheney and Rumsfeld. I think this guy is doing tremendous damage, and he's in a league all his own. That’s why the others didn’t prepare me. At least the others knew a lot about the world, had experience, had brains about this, cared. This guy had the platinum American Express card and didn’t even want to see Paris or London. He stayed in China for three days. So this guy’s indifferent to the world, and now he's going to change the whole world. A very ominous combination.

But going back to the Carter interview, what I thought was very controversial in that interview, ignored by the media, because they have this salacious interest in lust and all that, I said, “Look, the Democrats gave us Vietnam.” And, by the way, you know, looking at those clips from Baghdad, everybody, they say, “Oh, we can never talk about Vietnam. It has nothing to do.” It’s not true. You know, we went into Vietnam as part of a religious division. Everybody forgets Ngo Dinh Diem was a Catholic, that 10% of the country was Catholic, that this was a Catholic-Buddhist issue, quite aside from whether it was an east-west issue, you know? And remember the Buddhist monks were burning themselves and all that sort of stuff. So, you know, religious tension, nationalist tension, there are parallels there.

But with Carter, I say, “Look, Lyndon Johnson gave us this war. It’s true Nixon escalated it.” I said, “But, you know, you're coming on very hawkish here. Why won't you do the same?” And he said, “I will never lie to the American people the way Lyndon Johnson did.” That was Jimmy Carter. Now, he had already gotten the party nomination at that point. Lady Bird Johnson -- I was on the plane with Jimmy Carter as part of the press. When we landed in Dallas, Lady Bird would not meet with him, you know, because he had made that statement. And I thought that was the serious news.

And I still think it's the serious news now about Democrats.

There’s a question I want to

raise about somebody like

Hillary Clinton. It’s why I think

history matters. Democrats

can give us wars, you know?

Democrats can play the false

patriotism card. There's no

assurance that a Democratic

candidate who is elected will

not move to the right of Bush

on intervention,

warmongering,

playing to the

military-industrial complex,

so I am very concerned that

we have a choice in the

congressional elections,

that we have a choice for the

next presidential elections,

and that we have candidates

who at least will recognize

this war for the monstrosity

that it is.




AMY GOODMAN: So you're saying the Republicans escalated Democrats' wars, like Nixon escalating the war from Johnson, from Kennedy. Carter, though, you haven't talked about the Mujahideen.

ROBERT SCHEER: Oh, I’m sorry. By the way, it’s not just escalated. You know, Eisenhower was a pretty peace-oriented president. Truman was a pretty hawkish. I would argue, if we had more time, I would argue Truman had a lot to do with getting the Cold War going. Gore Vidal has a very good essay at the beginning of my book, a forward, where he makes that point. You know, Truman kind of wrapped it up. Eisenhower provided the first break in the Cold War, by bringing Khrushchev to the United States, in humanizing the Soviets; and then Nixon, by making the opening to China; and then Reagan, even meeting in Reykjavik with Gorbachev and acknowledging that nuclear weapons are a horror. So I wont accept that Republicans just escalate. Republicans, at least when they were more moderate, they were maybe even more isolationist, they sometimes brought sanity to the debate. We don't have that now. We have -- all these Republicans have gone off the neoconservative deep end.

But bringing it to the point of Carter, yes. After 9/11, everyone went, “Where did this happen? Where did these people come from, these Muslim fundamentalists?” Now, clearly, we know where they came from. They came from Afghanistan. That's where they were based. How did bin Laden get to Afghanistan? Why isn't that the question that everyone asks? What was the guy doing there? What were these other fanatics doing in Afghanistan? Well, Jimmy Carter is this guy, and in the book I quote Bob Dole back in 1980. I happened to interview Dole, because he was a -- I used to do all these interviews of presidential candidates for the L.A. Times. California is important to presidential aspirants. And also print used to matter a great deal. So, you know, I got a lot of time with him. I spent -- I don't know what, seven hours with Reagan, six hours with Carter, that sort of thing.

And I interviewed Bob Dole and all the guys who didn't make it. And Bob Dole said, “What's this big” -- this was 1980. He said, “What’s this big Afghanistan thing?” He said, “I think they're using it as a ploy to take attention away from the Iranian hostage crisis, which they had not been able to resolve, and from their domestic economic problems and the price of oil, and so forth.” He said, “The Soviets have always had a great deal of influence in Afghanistan. It's right on their border. They got along with the king and everything. They've been there for seven, eight months with this secular guy in Kabul. You know, and why is this suddenly the biggest thing?” This is Bob Dole said that. He said, “I think it's a ploy to take attention away from their problems.”

And sure enough, in 1988, Zbigniew Brzezinski told Nouvel Observateur, he said, “We wanted to give the Soviets their Vietnam.” It was very cynical. It was once again foreign mischief for domestic advantage. And then, that's when Jimmy Carter said, “We're not going to the Olympics in Moscow, and this is the worst thing to ever happen.” It’s all stuff that Zbigniew ignored. Cy Vance, who was really his Secretary of State, favors Zbigniew Brzezinski. And Carter made this big deal about Afghanistan, and then he said, “We have to support these freedom fighters, the Mujahideen.” And they began this process of recruiting them from all over the world. And then Reagan came in, and he accelerated that. He actually had a Freedom Fighter Day.

AMY GOODMAN: And you had Brzezinski famously saying about the Mujahideen, “What's a few riled-up Muslims?”

ROBERT SCHEER: That’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: As they were supporting the Mujahideen.

ROBERT SCHEER: And he said that quite late in the day, also, similar things, quite late in the day. I mean, if you want to go to the origin of 9/11 -- you know, we're recording this, I think, blocks, what, ten blocks away from the World Trade Center -- you know, where does this stuff -- unintended consequences. You know, it's always so easy to throw and say -- what did the New York Times say? -- throw some country against the wall. It’s so easy to intervene. Everybody says, “Oh, you don't have the courage to make war.” Well, it takes no courage to make war, particularly if you're not going to go and your children are not going to go. What courage is that? You know, but the unintended consequences, stuff happening now, you see that bloodshed in the clips you had from Iraq today. 50 years from now, somebody's going to blow up some cafe in Manhattan, and maybe with a primitive nuclear weapon and take out Manhattan, and it’s going to be avenging some dangerous, mischievous thing that we did now.

That’s what happened -- by the way, Iran keeps coming under the radar. Where did Iran come from? There was a guy named Mohammed Mossadegh back in early 1950s, secular in Iran, popular. He dared to nationalize the Italian oil company. He was moving against the English oil companies, started that process.

AMY GOODMAN: British Petroleum

ROBERT SCHEER: Yeah, British Petroleum. The C.I.A. overthrows this guy. I remember, for the L.A. Times, I interviewed Kermit Roosevelt, who actually brought in the money. I did one of the first stories on that. You know, Kermit Roosevelt, he was dying in a hospital in Washington. He told me the whole story. And, you know, did Kermit Roosevelt -- no, it was just fun. He went in there with, what, $28 million, bought a mob in the bazaar and started a riot, and they overthrew this guy. Unintended consequences. You get rid of Mohammed Mossadegh, who was a secular leader; you end up with the Shah. You sell him all this junk he can't use, you know, airplanes and everything. He then has to raise the price of oil. You get rid of him, because he was active in OPEC. And you get the Ayatollahs.

AMY GOODMAN: And Kermit Roosevelt was the grandson of Teddy Roosevelt.

ROBERT SCHEER: Right. And now you go into Iraq. Unintended consequences. You knock out a secular dictator, and you replace him with the proteges of the Ayatollahs in Iran.

AMY GOODMAN: Robert Scheer, we’re going to have to break, but we’ll come back to you. Robert Scheer is the author of Playing President: My Close Encounters with Nixon, Carter, Bush I, Reagan and Clinton, and How They Did Not Prepare Me for George W. Bush. We'll talk more about his encounters with these presidents in a minute.

www.democracynow.org

Tabacco: I consider myself both a funnel and a filter. I funnel information, not readily available on the Mass Media, which is ignored and/or suppressed. I filter out the irrelevancies and trivialities to save both the time and effort of my Readers and bring consternation to the enemies of Truth & Fairness! When you read Tabacco, if you don’t learn something NEW, I’ve wasted your time.


In 1981's 'Body Heat', Kathleen Turner said, "Knowledge is power".



T.A.B.A.C.C.O.  (Truth About Business And Congressional Crimes Organization)

tags: bush  religion  iraq  media  knowledge is power  28pointplan  troopshomefastorg  war on terror  democracy now  sheehan  warpeace  protest  codepink  disinformation  quasicon  msm  mendacity  poll  iraq war  politics  business