Title: The Real News Network
Show: The Real News Network
Date: 2015-05-07
URL: https://youtu.be/iLYqlR0kP9w
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 Kaku and he and I were started arguing as we uh were waiting for the cameras to go back on I said wait a sec 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 get somebody

[00:32] 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 uh vice president Richard Cheney and please Mr Cheney please sue me for liable I would love to have this out in court uh so please if if if by any chance you're watching um there's there is evidence that the intelligence agent gencies in the United States were more or less told

[01:03] to stand down when it comes to fighting terrorism Richard Clark is demoted George Tennant tells 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 secur that security threat is demoted FBI is told not to prioritize terrorism John told us in the summer that the head of the counter terrorism unit the CIA told him that they were

[01:35] expecting something massive coming cannot get cond Lisa 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 would be so Psychopathic as to encourage a massive

[02:07] 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 uh a greater counterterrorism 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 it together and and decided that that uh Ben Laden was

[02:38] 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 a closer look at Saudi immigration don't you think that the Federal Aviation Authority should have been sure but you're talking about the security threat level 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 belief of yours that you cannot believe that a leader of the

[03:09] 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 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 then you give me another explanation how condalisa rice doesn't listen when the CIA says something massive is coming maybe condalisa rice was an incompetent boob I mean there's

[03:39] that school of thought too because you can't believe it all goes to a question of Faith underlying sure I ad if you were a cop looking at a murderer and you just had this as straightforward evidence or an CIA analyst if it wasn't a leader of the United States I can't believe you would you just can't the most likely what I'm suggesting there's evidence of is not a massive conspiracy I agree with you I think a massive conspiracy is impossible to keep covered uh I'm suggesting that

[04:12] someone very senior like VI president Cheney understands the way the American bureaucracy works and he knows if you deprioritize if you don't take any extra measures to make sure the agencies are talking to each other like let's go another way which it could have done mhm Osama Bin Laden plans to attack United States uhoh let's get all the heads of agencies that might have anything to do with us in a meeting and say Jesus are we prepared just in case something is coming here uh oh CIA is saying

[04:43] something massive is coming and put that together what the CIA just told us that it might be in the United States Ki 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 you know George ain't stupid but he's not as bright as Cheney

[05:13] is not to do that suggests perhaps it's a decision not to do that I 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 let go back and Stu you know the story how Richard Nixon sabotaged Lyndon Johnson's peace talks with the northes sure because of Nixon perhaps hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and cambodians died because

[05:44] 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 lynon Johnson says Nixon is acting like a traitor some of our folks including ining some of the old China Lobby are going to the Vietnamese Embassy and saying please notify the president that if he'll hold out till November the 2nd they could get a better deal uhhuh now I'm reading their hand

[06:14] ever I don't want to get this in the campaign that's right 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's 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 Supernatural powers to to allow a

[06:45] terrorist group into the United States nothing Supernatural just demote Richard Clark tell r 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 fireman replace him with someone you like don't demote the office it was my understanding that Richard Clark asked to stay on the National Security Council and they created the cyber security Zar position for him later immediately he moved directly from one job into the other he moved directly from counterterrorism into cyber security but

[07:17] when his hair is on fire and cond Lisa Rice won't listen to their CIA when they say something massive is coming their counter terrorism are something's massive is coming this can't just be competence at least it should be investigated I know you're going to get that I agree with I agree it should be investig this is your underlying faith that that a leader of the United States would never do such a thing to his own country Americans no I don't think so I I just I I can't believe it it's too much all right let's move on okay um

[07:49] where are you on 9911 I was in CIA headquarters on 911 I was supposed to go downtown with uh kofer black to see condalisa rice uh on issue related to Greek terrorism and um I I had gotten a call that our car was ready uh to 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 uh what happened to the World Trade Center and she said a a plane flew into

[08:20] it and me not really giving it much thought said or I should I should say I 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 uh Tower 1 and neither one of us reacted and finally she turned to me she was sitting down I was standing behind her and she

[08:51] 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 counterterrorism center uh there were TVs mounted uh from the ceiling hanging down on PO like in

[09:23] 24 the TV show kind of a room like that kind kind of yeah great big open we called it a cubicle Farm must 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 go here you go there and

[09:56] 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 I drove to I I was driving

[10:27] back to my apartment and the way I got there was on uh 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 uh 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 houses and apartments so I

[10:58] 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 4 days just slept under my desk I would ball up my

[11:28] jacket use that as a pillow um a couple of officers uh took some bolt cutters and and cut the chain off the uh 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 or1 15,000 to replace all the food that we took uh but nobody left everybody stayed so when when you say

[11:59] 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 start with that this

[12:31] 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 allout war in Afghanistan um were you aware of that debate or argument and and why why 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 Navy Seals of 2001 it it's my

[13:02] 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 we essentially knew he was somewhere in the torab Bora 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 you

[13:33] focused on in those two three weeks after 911 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 to uh

[14:06] search all of our data bases looking in at information uh pertaining to these names I 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 cahart told me that about something in a week and a half seven eight nine days after 9911 Mula Omar and Bin Laden and everybody knows where they live which is this is another thing

[14:37] which makes no sense to me everybody knew where Bin Laden's compound was he had you know there's like 30 20 30 white SUVs coming in and out all day long uh 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 toror MH and nothing happens but I'm not trying to suggest I know what that means we we didn't have armed drones at the time um and we didn't have I mean you the the intelligence has to be so immediate which really almost

[15:10] 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 and S days later you you don't have somebody on the ground in can 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 is I watch TV somebody you go get a woman gets in a burka and she can walk anywhere she wants no and there's no such thing as a

[15:41] 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 drones you're saying there's no on a satellite that watches everything yes well that's good to know I suppose um all right so you're you're doing this name search and um what do you make of the strategy in Afghanistan

[16:11] you this I mean it was it was a very strange moment once the allout attack starts on the Taliban they're bombing the hell out of cabul 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 some people think as many as 2 million people right in the Civil War MH between who's going

[16:42] to who's going to be the and one of them is the vice president of Afghanistan yeah we'll get to that D them uh and then then they decide you know okay then they being the White House the Pentagon they decide okay we're going to make the deal with the Warlords and they you know shovel millions and millions of dollars into the pockets of these War essentially war criminals and that's and that's the strategy for Afghanistan yeah I think you have some of the timing wrong though uh first Gary shron who was

[17:13] a very senior Cia officer legendary officer uh wrote a book called First in and it's about how he and a and a small team of of CIA Special Operations officers were the first CIA group in Afghanistan and they went on some like September 12th so they were they were in the north with u His Name Escapes Me Now the one that was killed in the bombing the day before September 11 with mud's people uh later on with Do's people but there there was a CIA presence in

[17:43] Afghanistan from the days immediately 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 uh probably not in the long run but at

[18:13] least it bought us some time uh when I say that it wasn't a success what I mean is instead of these Warlords capturing uh senior Al-Qaeda leaders and turning them over to us we ended up filling guantan Mo and other places with you know largely innocent nobodies who had been turned in uh by their neighbors for a bounty uh or who wanted to settle scores with people they didn't like uh but it it did buy us some time it put

[18:45] the Taliban On The Run remember we didn't start bombing Afghanistan for almost a month uh we we wanted to um give mul Omar a chance to turn Bin Laden over to us and I really believe that if he had done that uh 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

[19:15] former member of the Taliban Central council at hammed Kai's brother Wally carai who himself was assassinated just a few years ago um in in his living room we're all on carpets in the living room and he says that there was a there was a a meeting of the Taliban Central Council called by Mula 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 the Pakistani foreign minister that's how it was translated

[19:47] and we have all this on tape uh came to the meeting and talked them out of handing over Bin Laden um the the there's still the grounds and I go back back to my my original question there's still a place there where the strategy could have been focus on Al-Qaeda Bin Laden even mulah Omar if you have evidence he was connected to it and there I think there seems to be there seems some it doesn't necessarily call for an allout war in Afghanistan and regime change oh I think you're

[20:18] probably right first I I think that the story is probably correct 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 mul Omar although uneducated is very very bright and certainly he's a great political uh strategist at least he was um so I think

[20:52] the story you heard is probably correct uh I'm not sure that we could have that we could have disrupted uh destroyed Al-Qaeda without an allout 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 well we're going to get into that quite a bit the Pakistani side it's the only reason

[21:23] I'm holding them back on that right now okay cuz your next stop is Pakistan 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 and essentially handing over the poppy crops of Afghanistan as part of the deal because that's really what happens in Afghanistan Afghanistan's poppy production was not nil but next to next to n for one year under the Taliban under the Taliban for one year they produced 90% of the

[21:56] world's uh heroin Poppy under the Taliban it went down to zero for a year and then back up to 90% 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 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 is this gets handed over to the Warlords oh yeah millions and millions of dollars in

[22:27] suitcases this enormous poppy crop and then some because I think it gets far far bigger once the Northern Alliance warlord types take over could become 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 MH over here we're hearing democracy we're invading

[22:57] Afghanistan for Wom and one I'm the only one that seems to remember this and I don't know why cuz nobody ever talks about this but me President Bush went on television and asked every child in America to donate $1 towards children in Afghanistan it was going to be this big program CH 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

[23:29] and I'm still asking where's the money I I'm sure some kid sent dollars in and no one ever heard another word about this send a dollar to save an Afghan kid geez I hadn't heard that it was on TV I guess I was focused on work it it's it's a this is a strategy which we now know was really all about the lead up to war in Iraq that they didn't they really didn't have much strategy for Afghanistan other than do something make a show of it assuming I

[24:02] 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 I think that there was a that there was a um a movement among prominent

[24:34] 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 9911 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 you guys are

[25:05] sitting there trying to do real analysis based on evidence and forign policy is being made I I don't know what else Mr Cheney you're a sociopath like please suum me please I I want a chance to prove it the foreign policy is being made by social pest connected with what military industrial complex a vision of a px 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 and

[25:36] Saddam Hussein was was very personal and that it was because of saddam's attempt to assassinate President George HW Bush in Kuwait in 1993 I always believed that was the route and we have another series of interviews we're going to be releasing soon with a historian named Appy and he about Vietnam and he has a very interesting quote I may have quoted ear earlier in our interviews here but that Vietnam by the last year or two completely became about proving the strength of America oh absolutely and no

[26:07] other real objectives other than that what else was Iraq same thing it's the same thing and look at the damage that Iraq has done too uh it's emboldened the Iranians uh we took out the only uh the only thing that stood between Iran and the rest of the Arabian Gulf uh Saddam Hussein was the only Bull workk against Iranian hijman and uh we took him out for

[26:38] personal reasons it made no geopolitical sense at all and then when Dick Cheney went on TV and tied Muhammad ATA uh to Saddam Hussein specifically to the Iraqi uh intelligence service station Chief in Prague that was just a big lie out and out lie it was was an out andout liee there was absolutely no evidence that Muhammad ATA ever met with any representative of the Iraqi government it was made up and and their rationale

[27:10] of they didn't care about this buffer of Iraq Visa Iran because this was all about Iran anyway this was all about regime change in Iran it was supposed to be Iraq Syria and Iran yeah that 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 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 insane but first it was

[27:42] 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 with John Kaku on the Real News

[28:16] [Music] Network for
