Title: Real News — Reality Asserts Itself
Show: Reality Asserts Itself (Paul Jay)
Date: 2023-04-25
URL: https://youtu.be/azE9ZRPJdvk
Duration: 28:00

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[00:01] [Music] welcome back to the real news network uh reality asserts itself and i'm with john kiriakou and he and i were started arguing as we were waiting for the cameras to go back on i said wait a second let's turn them on and let's argue for real in front of the cameras and what we're arguing about is i'm saying i think there's evidence i can't say it's proven or definitive but i think in a normal court of law you could

[00:31] get somebody charged with the amount of evidence there is at least you could get an indictment whether you get a conviction or not i don't know that someone very senior in the white house and from what we know the someone is likely to be vice president richard cheney and please mr cheney please sue me for libel i would love to have this out in court uh so please if if by any chance you're watching um there's there is evidence that the intelligence agencies in the united states were

[01:02] more or less told to stand down when it comes to fighting terrorism richard clark is demoted george tenet tells the the white house in a presidential uh his first bush's first presidential briefing bin laden and uh al qaeda is the number one threat to uh national security and in fact what happens is this terrorism and the security that security threat is demoted fbi is told not to prioritize terrorism john told us in the summer that the head of the countertel

[01:32] terrorism unit the cia told him that they were expecting something massive coming cannot get condoleezza rice to listen um so i'm saying this ain't just not listening and it isn't just an intelligence failure and john says hi john go ahead i'm no fan of dick cheney i never was i think he's a malignant force in the history of our country but i just can't believe that someone who is charged with running our country

[02:02] would be so psychopathic as to encourage a massive attack i mean i it just doesn't make any kind of logical sense to me i can tell you that at the cia we were never told to stand down while we certainly needed a greater counter-terrorism budget we were doing everything humanly possible to try to infiltrate al qaeda in 2001 and to try to disrupt this attack that we knew was coming but you had good information we had some information we're getting it in bits and pieces and the analysts put

[02:34] it together and and decided that that uh bin laden was determined to attack the united states don't you think you had enough to tell immigration to be extra strict don't you think he had enough to maybe take a long a closer look at saudi immigration don't you think get the federal agencies and authorities should have been sure but you're talking about security threat level but you're talking about policy changes and you know it's a fact of life in the united states we're a big lumbering bureaucracy and policy changes can take months or years but this goes back to this

[03:05] belief of yours that you cannot believe that a leader of the united states would allow something like this to happen but i also don't think that he had the power to do something like that the the bureaucracy is just simply too vast and and cheney was powerful but he wasn't powerful enough to single-handedly stop the wheels of the intelligence community and allow uh al-qaeda into the country to launch an attack can you give me another explanation how condoleezza rice doesn't listen when the cia says something

[03:35] massive is coming maybe condoleezza rice was an incompetent boob i mean there's that school of thought too because you can't believe it all goes to a question of faith underlying it sure if you were a cop looking at a murderer and you just had this as straightforward evidence or a cia analyst if it wasn't a leader of the united states i can't believe you would you just can't what i'm suggesting there's evidence of is not a massive conspiracy i agree with you i think a massive

[04:06] conspiracy is impossible to keep covered uh i'm suggesting that someone very senior like vice president cheney understands the way the american bureaucracy works and he knows if you de-prioritize if you don't take any extra measures to make sure the agencies are talking to each other like let's go another way what you could have done osama bin laden plans to attack united states oh oh let's get all the heads of agencies that might have anything to do

[04:37] with us in a meeting and say jesus are we prepared just in case something is coming here oh cia is saying something massive is coming and put that together what the cia just told us that it might be in the united states conde don't you think you better get clark and get tenant in here and get the fbi and maybe who else you need and and make sure you guys are actually talking to each other about stuff i mean if you were running a hamburger stand that's what you would do that's what you would do yes i agree and cheney ain't stupid

[05:10] you know george ain't stupid but he's not as bright as cheney is not to do that suggests perhaps it's a decision not to do that i'll agree with you with you that it's certainly worth investigating and there wasn't an adequate and appropriate investigation let's go back a step let's go back a step you know the story how richard nixon sabotaged lyndon johnson's peace talks with the north shore sure because of nixon perhaps

[05:40] hundreds of thousands of vietnamese and cambodians died because of he sabotaged those talks now maybe they would have fallen apart anyway maybe but we do know and we have it from the johnson library the actual audio tape where lyndon johnson says nixon is acting like a traitor some of our folks including some of the old china lobby are going to the vietnamese embassy and saying please notify the president that he'll hold out to november the 2nd

[06:10] they could get a better deal now i'm reading their hand over i don't want to get this in the campaign and they ought to be doing this this is treason now there's the president of the united states i mean about to be president of the united states acting like a traitor sabotaging what might have been a peace agreement for his own agenda so how is that any different than what i'm suggesting so here's a leader of the united states that was willing to do that but i'm not sure he was willing to do that i'm again i'm not defending dick cheney i'm just not ascribing to him these

[06:42] supernatural powers to to allow a terrorist group into the united states something supernatural just demote richard clark tell writers that was a political decision to demote richard clark maybe then as we said then get rid of richard clark if you don't like richard clark firemen replace him with someone you like don't demote the odds it was my understanding that richard clark asked to stay on the national security council and they created the cyber security czar position for him later immediately he moved directly from one job into the other

[07:14] he moved directly from counter-terrorism into cyber security but when his hair is on fire and condoleezza rice won't listen to their the cia when they say something massive is coming their counter-terrorisms are something's massive is coming this can't just be incompetence at least it should be investigated i know you're gonna get that i agree with i agree it should be this is your underlying faith that uh that a leader of the united states would never do such a thing to not americans no i don't think so i i just i i can't believe it it's too much

[07:47] all right let's move on okay um where are you on 9 11 i was in cia headquarters on 9 11. i was supposed to go downtown with kopha black to see condoleezza rice uh on an issue related to greek uh terrorism and um i i had gotten a call that our car was ready uh to take us downtown so i walked over to cofer's office and just outside his office his secretary was sitting and she was watching tv and one of the towers of the world trade center was burning and i said what happened to the world trade center

[08:18] and she said a plane flew into it and me not really giving it much thought said or i should i should say i'm not giving it much thought said you know that happened in the 1930s a plane flew into the empire state building but it was really foggy then and it's so clear today how can you not see that you're flying into the world trade center and as i said that the second plane flew into tower one and neither one of us reacted and finally she turned to me

[08:49] she was sitting down i was standing behind her and she said did you see that it was as though our brains couldn't even register what we had just seen so i ran back to my office and i told my colleagues guys i think we're under attack two planes just hit both towers of the world trade center we turned on the tv and then the pentagon was hit so everybody gathered in this huge office that is the cia's counter-terrorism center there were tvs mounted from the ceiling

[09:22] hanging down on poles this is like in twenty four the two yeah kind of a room like that kind of yeah great big open we called it a cubicle farm must have had 300 cubicles in it so we're all gathered around watching the towers burn watching the pentagon burn and then finally somebody in the back of the crowd shouts will somebody please lead and that was like it was as though somebody had shaken cover and he snapped out of it and started barking orders you go to the director's office you go to security you

[09:53] go here you go there and then he says everybody else evacuate and we just stood there and i heard a couple people say i'm not going anywhere this is what we've been working for all this time and so it wasn't until individual cia policemen came to the office and said everybody evacuate evacuate or we're going to cuff you and walk you to your cars we all evacuated so

[10:24] i drove to i was driving back to my apartment and the way i got there was on the george washington parkway from the cia parking lot just straight down toward washington and traffic was so bad i just abandoned my car i walked the rest of the way i actually saw a couple of people that i knew one was a former cia officer who were working at the white house at the national security council and they had even abandoned the white house and they were walking back to their own

[10:55] houses and apartments so i met my then girlfriend now wife uh at my apartment uh we went up to the roof and watched the pentagon burn for a little while and then we went out and tried to donate blood but the lines were so long that it was just impossible to donate blood and i said to her this is ridiculous we need to go back to work she was a cia officer too so we walked back to my car on the gw parkway got in the car went back to headquarters and then i didn't leave for four days

[11:26] just slept under my desk i would ball up my jacket and use that as a pillow a couple of officers took some bolt cutters and and cut the chain off the the doors to the cafeteria we went in and stole all the food we cooked it ourselves and just put it on on folding tables out in the hallway so people who were working 24 hours would have something to eat i think we ended up writing a check to the marriott for like 10 or 15 000 to replace all the food that we took but nobody left everybody stayed see

[11:58] when you say the cia was working as hard as it could just to prevent it i'm also sure the cia was working as hard as it could to find capture or kill bin laden i see no reason to think they weren't trying they were um but there was a great debate at the time not in mainstream news because you couldn't get get heard on mainstream news but amongst people who were from the region as well as people here that were critics of going to massive war in afghanistan to

[12:30] start with that this could have been more of a black ops operation there could have been a real laser focus on finding and dealing with al qaeda and bin laden there didn't need to be regime change and all-out war in afghanistan um were you aware of that debate or argument and and why why it wasn't even in retrospect why wasn't the strategy that in in retrospect it's my understanding that for example the navy seals of 2015 are absolutely nothing like the navy seals of 2001.

[13:01] it it's my understanding that that we just didn't have the the wherewithal in 2001 to be able to not just locate uh bin laden i mean we essentially knew he was somewhere in the torah borah area uh he was probably in that camp but we weren't certain um not just that but then to physically go in and get him i'm just not sure that we could have done something like that in 2001. i'm not a military analyst so what were

[13:32] you what were you focused on in those two three weeks after 9 11 what was your assignment it was mostly name traces you know around the world in every every american embassy around the world people began walking in and saying i have information on al qaeda and they would give us these names well there were tens of thousands of names sometimes thousands coming in every day and we needed an army of clerks is what it amounted to

[14:04] to search all of our databases looking at information pertaining to these names i was in kandahar in the spring of 2002 making a film called return to kandahar and told by numerous people and i what i'm about to say i have no idea what the meaning of it is i can't draw any conclusion from it but numerous people in kandahar told me that about something in a week and a half seven eight nine days after 9 11. mula omar and bin laden and everybody

[14:35] knows where they live which is this is another thing which makes no sense to me everybody knew where bin laden's compound was they had you know there's like 30 20 30 white suvs coming in and out all day long that they leave in the middle of daytime omar's big trail of white suvs bin laden's trail of white suvs and they drive to toribura and nothing happens but i'm not trying to suggest i know what that means we didn't have armed drones at the time um and we didn't have i mean you the the intelligence has to

[15:07] be so immediate which really almost never happens in the intelligence world it has to be so immediate and you have to have planes in the sky ready to receive the the intelligence to be able to act that quickly seven days later you don't have somebody on the ground in canada no how do you get into kandahar i mean you have to have a sponsor somebody's got to be there to protect you and to give you cover you can't just you know go rent a hotel room and start looking for bin laden i watch tv somebody you get a woman gets in a burka and she

[15:38] can walk anywhere she wants no and there's no such thing as a live satellite feed either you see that in tv all the time where people are saying i need a i need a live satellite feed now and then they watch the guy walk through the streets of a city that just there's no such thing then or now even now there's no such thing but now it'd be drones now it would be drunk you're saying there's no camera on a satellite that watches everything yes well that's good to know i suppose um all right so you're doing this name search and um what do you make of the strategy in

[16:10] afghanistan you know this i mean it was a very strange moment once the all-out attack starts on the taliban they're bombing the hell out of kabul they run out of things to bomb and they keep bombing because they have to prove they're doing something i guess i don't they think american public opinion demands revenge i don't know what it is but the northern alliance all the old warlords that actually made such a mess in afghanistan that it helped create the conditions for the rise of the taliban in the first place they may have killed me some people think as many as two million people right in the civil war between who's

[16:42] gonna who's gonna be the and now one of them is the vice president of afghanistan yeah we'll get to that i dost them uh and then then they decide you know okay they being the white house the pentagon they decide okay we're gonna make the deal with the warlords and they you know shovel millions and millions of dollars into the pockets of these essentially war criminals and that's and that's the strategy for afghanistan i think you have some of the timing wrong though uh first gary schroen who was a very senior cia

[17:14] officer legendary officer wrote a book called first in and it's about how he and a and a small team of cia special operations officers were the first cia group in afghanistan and they went on something like september 12th so they were they were in the north with uh his name escapes me now the one that was killed in the bombing the day before september with massoud's people uh later on with dustin's people but there was a cia presence in afghanistan from the days immediately

[17:45] following the the uh attacks the september 11th attacks uh there's an old saying about afghan warlords that you can't buy an afghan warlord but you can certainly rent one and that's the cia way the cia way is to throw massive amounts of money uh at a problem and hope that some of it sticks and some of it stuck now was it a success ah probably not in the long run but at least it bought us some time when i say that

[18:16] it wasn't a success what i mean is instead of these warlords capturing senior al-qaeda leaders and turning them over to us we ended up filling guantanamo and other places with you know largely innocent nobodies who had been turned in uh by their neighbors for a bounty or who wanted to settle scores with people they didn't like but it it did buy us some time it put the taliban on the run remember we didn't start bombing

[18:48] afghanistan for almost a month we we wanted to give omar a chance to turn bin laden over to us and i really believe that if he had done that al-qaeda would have imploded as an organization and we would never have had any reason to go to war in afghanistan and there's pretty good evidence that and i i told you off-camera i'll tell the story again quickly i interviewed a former member of the taliban central council at muhammad karzai's brother wally

[19:19] karzai who himself was assassinated just a few years ago in his living room were all on carpets in the living room and he says that there was a there was a meeting of the taliban central council called by mullah omar to debate whether or not to hand over bin laden and they vote that they will hand over bin laden another meeting is called three days later and according to this guy he says it's the pakistani foreign minister that's how it was translated and we have all this on tape came to the

[19:49] meeting and talked them out of handing over bin laden um the the they're still the grounds and i go back to my my original question there's still a place there where the strategy could have been focused on al qaeda bin laden even mullah omar if you have evidence he was connected to it and there's i think there seems to be there seems some it doesn't necessarily call for an awa war in afghanistan and regime change oh i think you're probably right first i

[20:19] i think that the story is probably correct i i i can't imagine what benefit the the taliban central council could possibly have thought there would be to allowing bin laden to remain in in afghanistan that just doesn't make any any sense and from all indications omar although uneducated is very very bright and certainly he's a great political strategist at least he was so i think the story you

[20:52] heard is probably correct i'm not sure that we could have that we could have disrupted destroyed al qaeda without an all-out war without the the cooperation of the taliban i think that we were kind of pushed into it now was there was there a pakistani uh conspiracy it's very possible now we're going to get into that quite a bit the pakistani

[21:22] sites the only reason i'm holding the back on that right now okay because your next stop is pakistan so i'm going to kind of wait to talk about the pakistani part what i'm getting at what i think is even more important though is the the strategy of allying with warlords and essentially handing over the poppy crops of afghanistan as part of the deal because that's really what happens in afghanistan afghanistan poppy production was not nil but next to next one year under the taliban into the taliban for one year

[21:54] they produced 90 percent of the world's uh heroin poppy under the taliban it went down to zero for a year and then back up to 90 percent again i did a long in-depth study on this when i was with the senate foreign relations committee yeah i wouldn't argue with you heroin poppy was was the way the taliban earned its money that's how they could afford all of their weaponry you i can't i don't know anything to disagree with you and i don't know why i would uh but my point was this gets handed over to the warlords oh yeah

[22:25] millions and millions of dollars in suitcases this enormous poppy crop and then some because i think it gets far far bigger once the northern alliance warlord types take over it could be we estimated that that afghanistan now produces 93 of the world's heroin and all of that heroin is produced by people with ties to the various warlords so as a strategy you're handing the country essentially over to war criminals and drug lords over here we're hearing democracy we're

[22:56] invading afghanistan for women and one i'm the only one that seems to remember this and i don't know why because nobody ever talks about this but me president bush went on television and asked every child in america to donate one dollar towards children in afghanistan it was going to be this big program children to children program last week i asked america's children to send a dollar to the white house to help provide food and medicine to the children of afghanistan and i'm still asking

[23:30] where's the money i'm sure some kids sent dollars in and no one ever heard another word about this send a dollar to save an afghan kid jeez i hadn't heard that it was on tv i guess i was focused on work it's just this is a strategy which we now know was really all about the lead up to war in iraq but they didn't they really didn't have much strategy for afghanistan other than do something make a show of it

[24:01] assuming i don't know how they assumed i guess the warlords will take over afghanistan and look after it for us and everything will be fine the taliban will run away and we're going to go and and and tiptoe through the daisies in iraq i don't disagree with that it's insane i think that there was always a plan to attack iraq always from before george w bush even won the presidency i think that there was a that there was a um a movement among

[24:33] prominent neoconservatives in this country to come up with a plan so that when and if george w bush won the presidency they could pitch this plan to attack iraq and they could disguise it in any way they wanted uh 911 i think was the most convenient way to do it and for them the easiest way to try it's it's it's it's so insane it's so delusional like i i know like i've interviewed ray mcgovern and some other you know former cia guys i mean you guys

[25:05] are sitting there trying to do real analysis based on evidence and foreign policy is being made i i don't know what else mr cheney you're a sociopath like please sue me please i want a chance to prove it the foreign policy is being made by sociopaths connected with what military-industrial complex a vision of a pax americana i mean all of the above all of the above yes i think that's right and i always believed too that that the animosity between the bush white house and

[25:36] and saddam hussein was was very personal and that it was because of saddam's attempt to assassinate president george h.w bush in kuwait in 1993. i always believed that was the root and we have another series of interviews we're going to be releasing soon with a historian named happy and he about vietnam and he has a very interesting quota i may have quoted earlier in our interviews here but that vietnam by the last year or two completely became about proving the strength of

[26:06] america oh absolutely and no other real objectives other than that what else was iraq the same thing it's the same thing and look at the damage that iraq has done too uh it's emboldened the iranians we took out the only the only thing that stood between iran and the rest of the arabian gulf saddam hussein was the only bulwark against iranian hegemony

[26:36] and we took him out for personal reasons it made no geopolitical sense at all and then when dick cheney went on tv and tied muhammad atta to saddam hussein specifically to the iraqi uh intelligence service station chief in prague that was just a big lie out in outlaw it was an out and out lie there was absolutely no evidence that muhammad atta ever met with any representative of the iraqi government it was made up and and it their

[27:09] rationale of they didn't care about this buffer of iraq vis-a-vis around because this was all about iran anyway this was all about regime change in iran and it was i always leaved it yes yeah that er that iraq was going to be the first because in iraq once we cross the border into iraq they're going to throw flowers at us i actually heard a senior person on the national security council say that in a video teleconference as soon as we cross the border they're going to throw flowers at us and i remember thinking are these people

[27:40] insane but first it was going to be iraq and then it was going to be syria and then it was going to be iran and we were going to we were going to kick off this democratic human rights loving wave across the middle east beginning with iraq all formed in a sea of blood all formed in a sea of blood and hatched in neoconservative think tanks in washington crazy stuff okay we'll pick it up in the next segment please join us for the continuation of reality asserts itself

[28:10] with john kiriakou on the real news network [Music]

[28:49] you
