The Same Old Same Old in New Packages-Presidential Candidates Advisors

    Looks like the old guards and big money = no real change

        January 03, 2008
        Vote for Change? Atrocity-Linked U.S. Officials Advising Democratic,
        GOP Presidential Frontrunners

        Independent journalist Allan Nairn and American Conservative
        correspondent Kelley Beaucar Vlahos discuss a little-addressed facet of
        the 2008 campaign: many of the top advisers to leading presidential
        candidates are ex-U.S. officials involved in atrocities around the
        world. [includes rush transcript]

        Guests:

        Allan Nairn, Independent journalist. Runs the web-blog “News and
        Comment.” http://newsc.blogspot.com

        Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, Freelance journalist in Washington. Her article
        on presidential advisers titled “War Whisperers” appeared in the
        American Conservative.

        AMY GOODMAN: Presidential candidates are scrambling to win last-minute
        support in Iowa ahead of tonight’s caucus. Thousands of reporters have
        also descended on Iowa this week, covering everything from Mike
        Huckabee’s haircut to John Edwards’s rally with singer John Mellencamp.

        But little attention has been paid to perhaps one of the most important
        aspects of the candidates: their advisers, the men and women who likely
        form the backbone of the candidate’s future cabinet if elected
        president. Many of the names will be familiar.

        Advisers to Hillary Rodham Clinton include many former top officials in
        President Clinton’s administration: former Secretary of State Madeleine
        Albright, former National Security Adviser Samuel Berger, former UN
        Ambassador Richard Holbrooke. Senator Barack Obama’s list includes
        President Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski,
        former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, former Middle East
        negotiator Dennis Ross.

        Rudolph Giuliani’s advisers include Norman Podhoretz, one of the
        fathers of the neoconservative movement. John McCain’s list of official
        and formal policy advisers includes former Secretary of State Henry
        Kissinger, General Colin Powell, William Kristol of The Weekly
        Standard, and former CIA Director James Woolsey. One of Mitt Romney’s
        top advisers is Cofer Black, the former CIA official who now serves as
        vice chair of Blackwater Worldwide. Vice President Dick Cheney’s
        daughter Elizabeth is advising Fred Thompson.

        As for Mike Huckabee, it’s not clear. In December, Huckabee listed
        former UN Ambassador John Bolton as someone with whom he either has
        “spoken or will continue to speak,” but Bolton then revealed the two
        had never spoken. Huckabee also named Richard Allen, but the former
        National Security Adviser also admitted he had never spoken to
        Huckabee.

        To talk more about the advisers behind the presidential campaigns, I’m
        joined by two guests. Kelley Vlahos is a freelance journalist in
        Washington. Her article on presidential advisers called “War
        Whisperers” appeared in The American Conservative in October.
        Investigative journalist Allan Nairn joins us here in the firehouse
        studio. We welcome you both to Democracy Now!

        I want to begin by going to Washington, D.C., to our guest there, to
        the author of “War Whisperers.” Talk about why you focused, Kelley, on
        the advisers of the presidential candidates.

        KELLEY BEAUCAR VLAHOS: Well, it was becoming clear to me and to others
        here in Washington in certain circles that the advisers that were
        emerging for the campaigns, whether it be Democratic or Republican,
        were part of some seriously pro-establishment cliques. And I say
        “cliques,” because there is really no other way to describe it. But
        these cliques generally can be categorized as not only
        pro-establishment, but more pro-interventionist, whether it be the
        so-called liberal interventionists on the Democratic side or your war
        hawks on the Republican side.

        But what became clear is that the candidates weren’t reaching outside
        of these establishment cliques and that they were getting no fresh
        ideas, no vision outside of these pretty standard parameters. And we
        thought—me and the editors thought it might be a good idea to explore a
        little bit under the surface about where these of advisers were coming
        from, in hopes of maybe deciphering where foreign policy might be going
        in the future.

        AMY GOODMAN: Let’s begin with Hillary Clinton, Kelley Vlahos.

        KELLEY BEAUCAR VLAHOS: OK. Well, Hillary Clinton’s—her foreign policy
        team can be best described as—and I hate to use this word so casually,
        but—“throwbacks” of her husband’s administration. We have, you know,
        Richard Holbrooke, Madeleine Albright, you have Sandy Berger as your
        sort of top-tier advisers, your key advisers, the most recognized
        faces. And then, beyond that, as I say in the article, you have this
        newer generation—I want to say newer generation, but a generation of
        former Clinton types who you might not recognize their names, but
        they’ve been around for a long time and are seriously scrambling for
        position in what they see as a new Clinton administration. So you’re
        seeing a lot of old faces, old names, who haven’t really changed their
        ideas from, you know, what I and others can see, in terms of doing the
        research, haven’t changed their real vision of the world and foreign
        policy since the 1990s.

        AMY GOODMAN: Let me bring Allan Nairn into this conversation. You have
        just written about the advisers, as well, on your blog,
        newsc.blogspot.com. Elaborate further on Hillary Clinton’s advisers.

        ALLAN NAIRN: Well, I think one thing you could say about the advisers
        for all the candidates who have a chance is that the presence of these
        advisers makes it clear that these candidates aren’t serious about
        enforcing the murder laws and that they’re willing to kill civilians,
        foreign civilians, en masse in order to advance US policy. And they’re
        not serious about law and order. They’re soft on crime.

        And start with Clinton. Madeleine Albright, she was the main force
        behind the Iraq sanctions that killed more than 400,000 Iraqi
        civilians. General Wesley Clark, he was the one who ran the bombing of
        Serbia in the former Yugoslavia, came out and publicly said that he was
        going after civilian targets, like electrical plants, like the TV
        station there. Richard Holbrooke, in the Carter administration he was
        the one who oversaw the shipment of weapons to the Indonesian military
        as they were invading—illegally invading East Timor and killing a third
        of the population there, and he was the one who kept the UN Security
        Council from enforcing its resolution against that invasion. Strobe
        Talbott, he was the one who, during the Clinton administration, oversaw
        Russia policy, a backing of Yeltsin, which resulted in turning over the
        national wealth to the oligarchs and a drop in life expectancy in much
        of Russia of about fifteen years—massive, massive death. And you have
        various backers of the Iraq invasion and occupation and the recent
        escalation, people like General Jack Keane, Michael O’Hanlon and
        others. That’s just Clinton.

        AMY GOODMAN: Barack Obama?

        ALLAN NAIRN: Well, Obama’s top adviser is Zbigniew Brzezinski.
        Brzezinski gave an interview to the French press a number of years ago
        where he boasted about the fact that it was he who created the whole
        Afghan jihadi movement, the movement that produced Osama bin Laden. And
        he was asked by the interviewer, “Well, don’t you think this might have
        had some bad consequences?” And Brzezinski replied, “Absolutely not. It
        was definitely worth it, because we were going after the Soviets. We
        were getting the Soviets.” Another top Obama person—

        AMY GOODMAN: I think his comment actually was, “What’s a few riled-up
        Muslims?” And this, that whole idea of blowback, the idea of arming,
        financing, training the Mujahideen in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets,
        including Osama bin Laden, and then when they’re done with the Soviets,
        they set their sights, well, on the United States.

        ALLAN NAIRN: Right. And later, during Bill Clinton’s administration,
        during the Bosnia killing, the US actually flew some of the Afghan
        Mujahideen, the early al-Qaeda people—the US actually arranged for them
        to be flown from there to Bosnia to fight on the Muslim/NATO side.

        Another key Obama adviser, Anthony Lake, he was the main force behind
        the US invasion of Haiti in the mid-Clinton years during which they
        brought back Aristide essentially in political chains, pledged to
        support a World Bank/IMF overhaul of the economy, which resulted in an
        increase in malnutrition deaths among Haitians and set the stage for
        the current ongoing political disaster in Haiti.

        Another Obama adviser, General Merrill McPeak, an Air Force man, who
        not long after the Dili massacre in East Timor in ’91 that you and I
        survived, he was—I happened to see on Indonesian TV shortly after
        that—there was General McPeak overseeing the delivery to Indonesia of
        US fighter planes.

        Another key Obama adviser, Dennis Ross. Ross, for many years under both
        Clinton and Bush 2, a key—he has advised Clinton and both Bushes. He
        oversaw US policy toward Israel/Palestine. He pushed the principle that
        the legal rights of the Palestinians, the rights recognized under
        international law, must be subordinated to the needs of the Israeli
        government—in other words, their desires, their desires to expand to do
        whatever they want in the Occupied Territories. And Ross was one of the
        people who, interestingly, led the political assault on former
        Democratic President Jimmy Carter. Carter, no peacenik—I mean, Carter
        is the one who bears ultimate responsibility for that Timor terror that
        Holbrooke was involved in. But Ross led an assault on him, because,
        regarding Palestine, Carter was so bold as to agree with Bishop Desmond
        Tutu of South Africa that what Israel was doing in the Occupied
        Territories was tantamount to apartheid. And so, Ross was one of those
        who fiercely attacked him.

        Another Obama adviser, Sarah Sewall, who heads a human rights center at
        Harvard and is a former Defense official, she wrote the introduction to
        General Petraeus’s Marine Corps/Army counterinsurgency handbook, the
        handbook that is now being used worldwide by US troops in various
        killing operations. That’s the Obama team.

        AMY GOODMAN: John Edwards?

        ALLAN NAIRN: Well, Edwards is a little different. The list of his
        foreign advisers is not as complete, so it’s not as clear exactly where
        they may be coming from, but it’s interesting. Last night on TV, one of
        the top Edwards advisers, “Mudcat” Saunders, was complaining about the
        fact that there are 35,000 lobbyists in Washington. And it appears,
        from the Edwards list, that many of the military lobbyists are working
        on the Edwards foreign policy team, because the names that—the Edwards
        names that are out there mainly come from the Army and the Air Force
        and the Navy Material Command. Those are the portions of the Pentagon
        that do the Defense contracts, that do the deals with the big companies
        like Raytheon and Boeing, etc. One of those listed on the Edwards team
        is the lobbyist for the big military contractor EADS. So, although
        Edwards talks about going after lobbyists, if he tries to go after the
        military lobbyists, he may get a little blowback from his own advisers.

        AMY GOODMAN: Are you saying that there’s no difference between these
        candidates?

        ALLAN NAIRN: Well, fundamentally, there’s no difference on the basic
        principle of, are you against the killing of civilians and are you
        willing to enforce the murder laws. If we were willing to enforce the
        murder laws, the headquarters of each of these candidates could be
        raided, and various advisers and many candidates could be hauled away
        by the cops, because they have backed various actions that, under
        established principles like the Nuremberg Principles, like the
        principles set up in the Rwanda tribunals, the Bosnia tribunals, things
        that are unacceptable, like aggressive war, like the killing of
        civilians for political purposes. So, in a basic sense, there is no
        choice.

        But there is a difference in this sense: the US is so vastly powerful,
        the US influences and has the potential to end so many millions of
        lives around the world, that if, let’s say, you have two candidates
        that are 99% the same—there’s only 1% difference between them—if you’re
        talking about decisions that affect a million lives—1% of a million is
        10,000—that’s 10,000 lives. So, even though it’s a bitter choice, if
        you choose the one who is going to kill 10,000 fewer people, well, then
        you’ve saved 10,000 lives. We shouldn’t be limited to that choice. It’s
        unacceptable. And Americans should start to realize that it’s
        unacceptable.

        But that’s the choice we have at the moment. In Iowa, I think there are
        steps people could take to start to challenge that system, if they
        wanted to.

        AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’ll talk about that in a minute, and we’ll
        continue to talk about the advisers. Our guests are Allan Nairn and
        Kelley Beaucar Vlahos. We’ll be back with them both in a minute.

        [break]

        AMY GOODMAN: We continue this discussion about the advisers to the
        presidential candidates, the men and women behind the men and women who
        are running today. Our guests are Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, a freelance
        journalist in Washington, wrote a piece in The American Conservative
        called “War Whisperers: The 2008 Hopefuls Promised a Change in Foreign
        Policy Then Hired the Old Guard.” We are also joined by independent
        investigative journalist Allan Nairn. He writes a blog called
        newsc.blogspot.com. His piece today on this issue is called “The US
        Election is Already Over. Murder and Preventable Death Have Won.”

        Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, would you like to add to any of the advisers
        Allan just talked about? And then we’ll move on to the Republicans.

        KELLEY BEAUCAR VLAHOS: Well, I think Allan has covered most of it and
        pretty thoroughly. I agree with him that there is very little
        difference among these people, and I think what he said really speaks
        to the idea and the challenge that there is no incentive for these
        candidates to reach out beyond any of this orbit or galaxy of foreign
        policy advisers who have been linked in, you know, we’re talking
        decades of war and events and actions and operations. And there seems,
        whether it be John Edwards reaching out to the Defense contracting
        community or Hillary Clinton reaching out to her husband’s former
        security advisers and operatives or whether it’s Obama reaching out to
        former Clinton types, there doesn’t seem to be any incentive to reach
        out beyond that. It seems like there is a stranglehold in this town on
        the kind of advisers that one is supposed to be linked with.

        And I think a lot of that is linked to money, where, you know, the
        candidates have big names, big lobbyists; that in turn brings them in
        more funders, more bundlers. And it’s sort of like this hand-in-glove
        symbiotic relationship, where the bigger names you have, the more
        familiar names, the more entrenched you have in these cliques I spoke
        to previously, the more money you’re bringing into your campaign. So
        there’s no incentive to go beyond that, unless you’re ready for some
        amount of rebuke and some of the spigot being turned off.

        AMY GOODMAN: I mean, actually, in terms of money, Allan Nairn, someone
        like Obama raises an enormous amount of money from just the grassroots.

        ALLAN NAIRN: Yeah, Obama—that’s a very telling example. Like Dean in
        the last campaign, Obama has the ability to get all the money he needs
        from the middle class through the internet, through $50, $80, $100
        contributions. He actually doesn’t need to finance his campaign, to go
        to the hedge funds, to go to Wall Street. But he does anyway. And he
        does, I think, because if he doesn’t, they wouldn’t trust him. They
        might think that he’s on the wrong team, and they might start attacking
        him. He is someone who, in terms of the money he needs for his
        campaign, he could afford to come out for single-payer healthcare, for
        example, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t need money from the health
        insurance industry, that’s wasting several percentage points of the
        American GDP in a way that no other industrial rich country in the
        world does, yet he chooses not to do that, because he doesn’t want to
        be attacked by those corporations.

        AMY GOODMAN: And is Edwards and Clinton any different on those issues?

        ALLAN NAIRN: Not as far as I can tell. None of them have come out for
        single payer. The only one who came out for single payer was Kucinich.
        Campaign contributions is just one of many tools that rich people have
        to get their way. There are basically two parallel factors in any
        democracy. One is one person, one vote. The other is one dollar, one
        vote. And those two are mixed together. So, although the people do have
        some say, there are usually a lot more dollars out there than people,
        and they find ways of prevailing in the end, unless the people become
        aggressive and disruptive and demanding and threaten to shake the
        system so that big concessions are made.

        AMY GOODMAN: Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, let’s go to the Republicans:
        Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, Mike Huckabee, John McCain. Give
        us a few of their advisers.

        KELLEY BEAUCAR VLAHOS: Well, Giuliani, as you had mentioned, and you
        had a pretty thorough list of people, but Giuliani is probably
        strikingly—strikingly is reaching out to the most strident
        neoconservatives on the scene today. He has familiar neoconservatives
        on his team, like you said: Norman Podhoretz, also Daniel Pipes,
        who—and I don’t remember if you had mentioned, but—has been leading the
        charge against “Islamofascism” on college campuses, has put out his
        Campus Watch, in terms of going after professors that he deems are not
        pro-Israel enough. He has other less familiar names, like Martin
        Kramer, Stephen Rosen, Peter Berkowitz of the Hoover Institution. He
        has basically a small galaxy of neoconservatives from familiar think
        tanks as the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation,
        Hoover, the Hudson.

        And basically, I mean, just to start, you know, with Giuliani, because
        I think he has the most poignant list of people in terms of where you
        would think that his foreign policy strategy is moving, he has
        basically—and I said this in my article—has taken the Bush Doctrine,
        has just pumped it up with steroids. He is fully on board—he always has
        been—with the Bush Doctrine. His people behind him are. We’re talking
        about no-holds-barred forward with the war on terror, the war against
        “Islamofascism.” He believes that the war on terror is a grand war
        versus good and evil. He is not shy to say that, his people aren’t shy
        to say that. He’s fully in grip of these people and the Bush Doctrine.

        And, you know, if you want to see where the Rudy Giuliani—President
        Rudy Giuliani will take us, you just look at the Bush Doctrine as if
        the Iraq war never happened or, better yet, the problems that have
        arisen from the Iraq war have never happened, because Rudy Giuliani
        doesn’t seem to acknowledge any of that. Any issues before the surge
        are incidental. You know, everything is moving forward, and his policy
        team is right there backing him.

        AMY GOODMAN: Allan Nairn, more on Rudolph Giuliani, and then to Mitt
        Romney.

        ALLAN NAIRN: Giuliani, as was mentioned, his big adviser is Norman
        Podhoretz. Podhoretz’s new book is World War IV, which he seems to
        like. Podhoretz says, bomb the Iranians. And he’s not just talking
        about pinpoint Iranian nuclear installations; he’s saying bomb the
        Iranians. And he says he prays that this will happen. Ex-Senator Robert
        Kasten, an old major backer of the Pakistani military dictatorships and
        the Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia, he’s another key Giuliani
        adviser.

        McCain has General Alexander Haig, who oversaw the US policy of mass
        terror killings of civilians in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua and
        Honduras, when American nuns and religious workers were abducted, raped
        and murdered by the Salvadoran National Guard. General Haig said those
        nuns died in an exchange of gunfire, the pistol-packing nuns. He has a
        younger—McCain has a younger adviser, Max Boot, who now points to El
        Salvador, where 70,000 civilians were killed by American-backed death
        squads, as a model counterinsurgency, a model for what the US should be
        doing today. Henry Kissinger advises McCain, as he advises many others.
        And Kissinger, of course, was responsible for mass death in Cambodia,
        Vietnam, Chile, countless other places. Bud McFarlane from the Reagan
        administration, who was a key backer of the Contras. Brent Scowcroft,
        who these days is popular with some liberals because he opposes—he
        opposed the Iraq invasion, who is a leader of the realist school—the
        realist school basically says, yes, kill civilians, but make sure you
        win the war, as opposed to the Bush-Cheney school, which has been
        killing civilians but losing the war, as the US has been doing until
        recently in Iraq and is now starting to do in Afghanistan—Scowcroft was
        the one who, during the Bush 1 administration, went to China right
        after the Tiananmen Square massacre and reassured the Chinese
        leadership, “Don’t worry about it, we’re still behind you.”

        Romney, as you mentioned, Romney has Cofer Black, a longtime CIA
        operative who was one of the key people behind the invasion of
        Afghanistan. During the course of that, according to Bob Woodward, he
        went in and said, “We’re going to go into Afghanistan. We’re going to
        cut their heads off.” He’s the one who organized Detachment 88 in
        Indonesia just recently, the supposed antiterrorist outfit that
        recently went after a Papuan human rights lawyer. Two key figures in
        backing the old US policy in Central America, Mark Falcoff and Roger
        Noriega, are also on the Romney team. And Dan Senor, who viewers
        probably remember as the voice of the early invasion and occupation of
        Iraq, he’s one of the Romney guys. Now, as you mentioned—

        AMY GOODMAN: Dan Senor is one of the spokespeople in Iraq, is married
        to, I think it is, Campbell Brown, who’s just been hired by CNN to
        replace Paula Zahn.

        ALLAN NAIRN: Huckabee, who you mentioned, it’s not clear who his
        advisers are. Huckabee recently was attacked by Romney for being soft
        on crime. So Huckabee responded, “Soft on crime? I executed sixteen
        people in Arkansas. How many people did you execute in Massachusetts?”
        Well, Massachusetts didn’t have the death penalty. But if Huckabee were
        really tough on crime, he would have used his post as governor of
        Arkansas to extradite Bill Clinton to Arkansas to stand trial before
        the courts there, as is permissible under international law, for the
        hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths brought on by the Iraqi
        sanctions during the Clinton administration. But that’s unthinkable in
        American politics. It probably didn’t even occur to Huckabee. But if we
        had a civilized political order and we defined crime and murder
        objectively, something like that would have been on the table, and
        Huckabee would have been challenged on it.

        Bloomberg, who may step in as the independent, using his money, he’s an
        interesting example of another aspect.

        AMY GOODMAN: The current mayor of New York.

        ALLAN NAIRN: Yes. One is, we ought to be enforcing the murder laws
        evenhandedly, so that anyone who facilitates the killing of civilians
        faces trial and jail, just like any street criminal, even if they’re a
        CIA operative, even if they’re an American general, even if they’re
        American president.

        Two, we ought to be preventing preventable death if we can. Kids who
        are defecating to death, kids who are dying from malnutrition for the
        lack of a couple of dollars, we should be stopping that every single
        time it can be stopped in the world. Last year in the world, there were
        anywhere from three to five million deaths of children under the age of
        five, children who were suffering from malnutrition. If he had so
        chosen—and he chose not to—Bloomberg could have personally prevented
        those deaths, because according to Forbes magazine, he’s worth $11.5
        billion, and that’s more than enough money, if distributed properly, to
        prevent that many deaths, millions of one year’s deaths of entirely
        preventable, entirely inexcusable malnutrition deaths. But it probably
        never even occurred to him, and he was certainly never challenged on it
        politically.

        But we can start to challenge people on this politically. For example,
        in the Iowa caucuses, we’re now in a situation where, you know, we have
        very bitter choices. So what are you going to do? I mean, Kucinich, who
        has good positions on many of these issues, he’s decided to throw in
        his lot with Obama. Ralph Nader, who has good positions, he’s implying
        support for Edwards. OK, these are tactical choices. But one thing that
        people can do in the Iowa caucuses tonight, they can go in there and
        say, OK, I’m caucusing for whomever, but I am making my support
        conditional on you renouncing support for the murder of civilians, on
        you firing all of your advisers who have been involved in the killing
        of civilians in the past, you turning them over to the International
        Criminal Court if you can get the International Criminal Court to
        accept it, you signing a pledge that says no more killing of civilians,
        you signing a pledge that says we will prevent preventable death.

        You know, the right wing has been doing this for years on the issue of
        taxes. They make—they go around, they make all the Republican
        candidates sign a no-tax pledge. That’s been somewhat effective. A very
        similar thing could be done, and I think it could have appeal, left and
        right, to anyone who is decent to have candidates pledge no more
        support for killing civilians, tough on crime, enforce the murder laws,
        prevent preventable deaths. Let’s not have kids dying of diarrhea. If
        we have spare dollars floating around that people only want, give them
        to people whose bodies need them.

        AMY GOODMAN: You know, it’s interesting, there is an Occupation
        Project, and a group of people were just arrested in Huckabee’s
        offices, among them the longtime peace activist, Nobel Peace Prize
        nominee several times over, Kathy Kelly, who founded Voices in the
        Wilderness.

        ALLAN NAIRN: Right. That’s a good tactic. I think we have to try many
        tactics from many directions. And one possible one is, you know,
        getting inside things like the Iowa caucus, getting inside things like
        the conventions of both parties and threaten to create a disturbance on
        the floor, ruckus on the floor, if the candidate for whom you are there
        as a delegate doesn’t back these simple things that should be the basis
        of any civilization: no murder, save someone if you can save them.

        AMY GOODMAN: Final question, this is on a totally different issue,
        Allan Nairn, our top headline, the Justice Department launching a
        formal criminal investigation to the destruction of the videotapes
        documenting the interrogation of two prisoners. You have long been
        writing about investigating the CIA and US policy, whether it’s in
        Central America or Asia. What are your thoughts on the destruction of
        these videotapes?

        ALLAN NAIRN: Well, one—and who knows?—I’m skeptical that they’ve
        actually been destroyed. I mean, anyone, you know, who works with
        computers knows that it’s almost impossible to truly eliminate
        something from a hard disk and also that when there’s a document, there
        are always multiple copies made, especially when you’re in a network
        system. So I’d be surprised if this thing was really destroyed.

        But, anyway, it’s unfortunate that the issue of torture—I mean, it’s
        good that the issue of torture has finally been put on the table of
        American politics and people talk about it to some extent, but it’s
        unfortunate that it’s been put on the table in the context of the
        torture of these al-Qaeda people, these people who were openly proud
        killers, mass murderers of civilians. In that context, a lot of people
        look at it and say, “Well, yeah, look at these lowlifes. Maybe they
        should be tortured.”

        But the fact of the matter is, 90% , at least, worldwide of cases of
        torture are not of people like this who are open mass murderers. They
        are usually of dissidents, of rebels, or of common criminals. And
        often, it is done by regimes that are armed, trained or financed by the
        United States. This was the case in El Salvador. In El Salvador, I
        interviewed Salvadoran military people who told of torture training
        classes they got from CIA officials, and they talked about how the CIA
        people would be in the room as the torture sessions were going on. And
        these were not al-Qaeda types that they were torturing; these were
        labor organizers, these were people who were speaking for justice,
        these were peasants.

        That’s what most torture is in the world, and it should be completely
        banned and abolished, not in the soft rhetorical way that McCain is
        talking about it, but actually stopping it by stopping support for all
        the forces that make a practice of torture. And that would involve
        completely rewriting the Foreign Operations Appropriations Bill, the
        Defense Appropriations Bill, and it would also involve calling in the
        authorities and carrying out many US officials in chains, because
        they’ve been backing this illegal stuff for years.

        AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to leave it there. In talking about, by
        the way, the occupation of offices, it was not only Huckabee’s office,
        it was also Barack Obama’s Iowa office, as well as Mitt Romney’s Iowa
        office, people occupied yesterday. Allan Nairn, I want to thank you for
        being with us. Your blog at “newsc” for “News and Comment,”
        newsc.blogspot.com. And Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, thank you for joining us
        from Washington, D.C. Her article appeared in The American
        Conservative. The piece was called “War Whisperers.”

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    Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it now.Vote for Change? Atrocity-Linked U.S. Officials Advising Democratic,
    GOP Presidential Frontrunners

    Independent journalist Allan Nairn and American Conservative
    correspondent Kelley Beaucar Vlahos discuss a little-addressed facet of
    the 2008 campaign: many of the top advisers to leading presidential
    candidates are ex-U.S. officials involved in atrocities around the
    world. [includes rush transcript]

    Guests:

    Allan Nairn, Independent journalist. Runs the web-blog “News and
    Comment.” http://newsc.blogspot.com

    Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, Freelance journalist in Washington. Her article
    on presidential advisers titled “War Whisperers” appeared in the
    American Conservative.

    AMY GOODMAN: Presidential candidates are scrambling to win last-minute
    support in Iowa ahead of tonight’s caucus. Thousands of reporters have
    also descended on Iowa this week, covering everything from Mike
    Huckabee’s haircut to John Edwards’s rally with singer John Mellencamp.

    But little attention has been paid to perhaps one of the most important
    aspects of the candidates: their advisers, the men and women who likely
    form the backbone of the candidate’s future cabinet if elected
    president. Many of the names will be familiar.

    Advisers to Hillary Rodham Clinton include many former top officials in
    President Clinton’s administration: former Secretary of State Madeleine
    Albright, former National Security Adviser Samuel Berger, former UN
    Ambassador Richard Holbrooke. Senator Barack Obama’s list includes
    President Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski,
    former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, former Middle East
    negotiator Dennis Ross.

    Rudolph Giuliani’s advisers include Norman Podhoretz, one of the
    fathers of the neoconservative movement. John McCain’s list of official
    and formal policy advisers includes former Secretary of State Henry
    Kissinger, General Colin Powell, William Kristol of The Weekly
    Standard, and former CIA Director James Woolsey. One of Mitt Romney’s
    top advisers is Cofer Black, the former CIA official who now serves as
    vice chair of Blackwater Worldwide. Vice President Dick Cheney’s
    daughter Elizabeth is advising Fred Thompson.

    As for Mike Huckabee, it’s not clear. In December, Huckabee listed
    former UN Ambassador John Bolton as someone with whom he either has
    “spoken or will continue to speak,” but Bolton then revealed the two
    had never spoken. Huckabee also named Richard Allen, but the former
    National Security Adviser also admitted he had never spoken to
    Huckabee.

    To talk more about the advisers behind the presidential campaigns, I’m
    joined by two guests. Kelley Vlahos is a freelance journalist in
    Washington. Her article on presidential advisers called “War
    Whisperers” appeared in The American Conservative in October.
    Investigative journalist Allan Nairn joins us here in the firehouse
    studio. We welcome you both to Democracy Now!

    I want to begin by going to Washington, D.C., to our guest there, to
    the author of “War Whisperers.” Talk about why you focused, Kelley, on
    the advisers of the presidential candidates.

    KELLEY BEAUCAR VLAHOS: Well, it was becoming clear to me and to others
    here in Washington in certain circles that the advisers that were
    emerging for the campaigns, whether it be Democratic or Republican,
    were part of some seriously pro-establishment cliques. And I say
    “cliques,” because there is really no other way to describe it. But
    these cliques generally can be categorized as not only
    pro-establishment, but more pro-interventionist, whether it be the
    so-called liberal interventionists on the Democratic side or your war
    hawks on the Republican side.

    But what became clear is that the candidates weren’t reaching outside
    of these establishment cliques and that they were getting no fresh
    ideas, no vision outside of these pretty standard parameters. And we
    thought—me and the editors thought it might be a good idea to explore a
    little bit under the surface about where these of advisers were coming
    from, in hopes of maybe deciphering where foreign policy might be going
    in the future.

    AMY GOODMAN: Let’s begin with Hillary Clinton, Kelley Vlahos.

    KELLEY BEAUCAR VLAHOS: OK. Well, Hillary Clinton’s—her foreign policy
    team can be best described as—and I hate to use this word so casually,
    but—“throwbacks” of her husband’s administration. We have, you know,
    Richard Holbrooke, Madeleine Albright, you have Sandy Berger as your
    sort of top-tier advisers, your key advisers, the most recognized
    faces. And then, beyond that, as I say in the article, you have this
    newer generation—I want to say newer generation, but a generation of
    former Clinton types who you might not recognize their names, but
    they’ve been around for a long time and are seriously scrambling for
    position in what they see as a new Clinton administration. So you’re
    seeing a lot of old faces, old names, who haven’t really changed their
    ideas from, you know, what I and others can see, in terms of doing the
    research, haven’t changed their real vision of the world and foreign
    policy since the 1990s.

    AMY GOODMAN: Let me bring Allan Nairn into this conversation. You have
    just written about the advisers, as well, on your blog,
    newsc.blogspot.com. Elaborate further on Hillary Clinton’s advisers.

    ALLAN NAIRN: Well, I think one thing you could say about the advisers
    for all the candidates who have a chance is that the presence of these
    advisers makes it clear that these candidates aren’t serious about
    enforcing the murder laws and that they’re willing to kill civilians,
    foreign civilians, en masse in order to advance US policy. And they’re
    not serious about law and order. They’re soft on crime.

    And start with Clinton. Madeleine Albright, she was the main force
    behind the Iraq sanctions that killed more than 400,000 Iraqi
    civilians. General Wesley Clark, he was the one who ran the bombing of
    Serbia in the former Yugoslavia, came out and publicly said that he was
    going after civilian targets, like electrical plants, like the TV
    station there. Richard Holbrooke, in the Carter administration he was
    the one who oversaw the shipment of weapons to the Indonesian military
    as they were invading—illegally invading East Timor and killing a third
    of the population there, and he was the one who kept the UN Security
    Council from enforcing its resolution against that invasion. Strobe
    Talbott, he was the one who, during the Clinton administration, oversaw
    Russia policy, a backing of Yeltsin, which resulted in turning over the
    national wealth to the oligarchs and a drop in life expectancy in much
    of Russia of about fifteen years—massive, massive death. And you have
    various backers of the Iraq invasion and occupation and the recent
    escalation, people like General Jack Keane, Michael O’Hanlon and
    others. That’s just Clinton.

    AMY GOODMAN: Barack Obama?

    ALLAN NAIRN: Well, Obama’s top adviser is Zbigniew Brzezinski.
    Brzezinski gave an interview to the French press a number of years ago
    where he boasted about the fact that it was he who created the whole
    Afghan jihadi movement, the movement that produced Osama bin Laden. And
    he was asked by the interviewer, “Well, don’t you think this might have
    had some bad consequences?” And Brzezinski replied, “Absolutely not. It
    was definitely worth it, because we were going after the Soviets. We
    were getting the Soviets.” Another top Obama person—

    AMY GOODMAN: I think his comment actually was, “What’s a few riled-up
    Muslims?” And this, that whole idea of blowback, the idea of arming,
    financing, training the Mujahideen in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets,
    including Osama bin Laden, and then when they’re done with the Soviets,
    they set their sights, well, on the United States.

    ALLAN NAIRN: Right. And later, during Bill Clinton’s administration,
    during the Bosnia killing, the US actually flew some of the Afghan
    Mujahideen, the early al-Qaeda people—the US actually arranged for them
    to be flown from there to Bosnia to fight on the Muslim/NATO side.

    Another key Obama adviser, Anthony Lake, he was the main force behind
    the US invasion of Haiti in the mid-Clinton years during which they
    brought back Aristide essentially in political chains, pledged to
    support a World Bank/IMF overhaul of the economy, which resulted in an
    increase in malnutrition deaths among Haitians and set the stage for
    the current ongoing political disaster in Haiti.

    Another Obama adviser, General Merrill McPeak, an Air Force man, who
    not long after the Dili massacre in East Timor in ’91 that you and I
    survived, he was—I happened to see on Indonesian TV shortly after
    that—there was General McPeak overseeing the delivery to Indonesia of
    US fighter planes.

    Another key Obama adviser, Dennis Ross. Ross, for many years under both
    Clinton and Bush 2, a key—he has advised Clinton and both Bushes. He
    oversaw US policy toward Israel/Palestine. He pushed the principle that
    the legal rights of the Palestinians, the rights recognized under
    international law, must be subordinated to the needs of the Israeli
    government—in other words, their desires, their desires to expand to do
    whatever they want in the Occupied Territories. And Ross was one of the
    people who, interestingly, led the political assault on former
    Democratic President Jimmy Carter. Carter, no peacenik—I mean, Carter
    is the one who bears ultimate responsibility for that Timor terror that
    Holbrooke was involved in. But Ross led an assault on him, because,
    regarding Palestine, Carter was so bold as to agree with Bishop Desmond
    Tutu of South Africa that what Israel was doing in the Occupied
    Territories was tantamount to apartheid. And so, Ross was one of those
    who fiercely attacked him.

    Another Obama adviser, Sarah Sewall, who heads a human rights center at
    Harvard and is a former Defense official, she wrote the introduction to
    General Petraeus’s Marine Corps/Army counterinsurgency handbook, the
    handbook that is now being used worldwide by US troops in various
    killing operations. That’s the Obama team.

    AMY GOODMAN: John Edwards?

    ALLAN NAIRN: Well, Edwards is a little different. The list of his
    foreign advisers is not as complete, so it’s not as clear exactly where
    they may be coming from, but it’s interesting. Last night on TV, one of
    the top Edwards advisers, “Mudcat” Saunders, was complaining about the
    fact that there are 35,000 lobbyists in Washington. And it appears,
    from the Edwards list, that many of the military lobbyists are working
    on the Edwards foreign policy team, because the names that—the Edwards
    names that are out there mainly come from the Army and the Air Force
    and the Navy Material Command. Those are the portions of the Pentagon
    that do the Defense contracts, that do the deals with the big companies
    like Raytheon and Boeing, etc. One of those listed on the Edwards team
    is the lobbyist for the big military contractor EADS. So, although
    Edwards talks about going after lobbyists, if he tries to go after the
    military lobbyists, he may get a little blowback from his own advisers.

    AMY GOODMAN: Are you saying that there’s no difference between these
    candidates?

    ALLAN NAIRN: Well, fundamentally, there’s no difference on the basic
    principle of, are you against the killing of civilians and are you
    willing to enforce the murder laws. If we were willing to enforce the
    murder laws, the headquarters of each of these candidates could be
    raided, and various advisers and many candidates could be hauled away
    by the cops, because they have backed various actions that, under
    established principles like the Nuremberg Principles, like the
    principles set up in the Rwanda tribunals, the Bosnia tribunals, things
    that are unacceptable, like aggressive war, like the killing of
    civilians for political purposes. So, in a basic sense, there is no
    choice.

    But there is a difference in this sense: the US is so vastly powerful,
    the US influences and has the potential to end so many millions of
    lives around the world, that if, let’s say, you have two candidates
    that are 99% the same—there’s only 1% difference between them—if you’re
    talking about decisions that affect a million lives—1% of a million is
    10,000—that’s 10,000 lives. So, even though it’s a bitter choice, if
    you choose the one who is going to kill 10,000 fewer people, well, then
    you’ve saved 10,000 lives. We shouldn’t be limited to that choice. It’s
    unacceptable. And Americans should start to realize that it’s
    unacceptable.

    But that’s the choice we have at the moment. In Iowa, I think there are
    steps people could take to start to challenge that system, if they
    wanted to.

    AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’ll talk about that in a minute, and we’ll
    continue to talk about the advisers. Our guests are Allan Nairn and
    Kelley Beaucar Vlahos. We’ll be back with them both in a minute.

    [break]

    AMY GOODMAN: We continue this discussion about the advisers to the
    presidential candidates, the men and women behind the men and women who
    are running today. Our guests are Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, a freelance
    journalist in Washington, wrote a piece in The American Conservative
    called “War Whisperers: The 2008 Hopefuls Promised a Change in Foreign
    Policy Then Hired the Old Guard.” We are also joined by independent
    investigative journalist Allan Nairn. He writes a blog called
    newsc.blogspot.com. His piece today on this issue is called “The US
    Election is Already Over. Murder and Preventable Death Have Won.”

    Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, would you like to add to any of the advisers
    Allan just talked about? And then we’ll move on to the Republicans.

    KELLEY BEAUCAR VLAHOS: Well, I think Allan has covered most of it and
    pretty thoroughly. I agree with him that there is very little
    difference among these people, and I think what he said really speaks
    to the idea and the challenge that there is no incentive for these
    candidates to reach out beyond any of this orbit or galaxy of foreign
    policy advisers who have been linked in, you know, we’re talking
    decades of war and events and actions and operations. And there seems,
    whether it be John Edwards reaching out to the Defense contracting
    community or Hillary Clinton reaching out to her husband’s former
    security advisers and operatives or whether it’s Obama reaching out to
    former Clinton types, there doesn’t seem to be any incentive to reach
    out beyond that. It seems like there is a stranglehold in this town on
    the kind of advisers that one is supposed to be linked with.

    And I think a lot of that is linked to money, where, you know, the
    candidates have big names, big lobbyists; that in turn brings them in
    more funders, more bundlers. And it’s sort of like this hand-in-glove
    symbiotic relationship, where the bigger names you have, the more
    familiar names, the more entrenched you have in these cliques I spoke
    to previously, the more money you’re bringing into your campaign. So
    there’s no incentive to go beyond that, unless you’re ready for some
    amount of rebuke and some of the spigot being turned off.

    AMY GOODMAN: I mean, actually, in terms of money, Allan Nairn, someone
    like Obama raises an enormous amount of money from just the grassroots.

    ALLAN NAIRN: Yeah, Obama—that’s a very telling example. Like Dean in
    the last campaign, Obama has the ability to get all the money he needs
    from the middle class through the internet, through $50, $80, $100
    contributions. He actually doesn’t need to finance his campaign, to go
    to the hedge funds, to go to Wall Street. But he does anyway. And he
    does, I think, because if he doesn’t, they wouldn’t trust him. They
    might think that he’s on the wrong team, and they might start attacking
    him. He is someone who, in terms of the money he needs for his
    campaign, he could afford to come out for single-payer healthcare, for
    example, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t need money from the health
    insurance industry, that’s wasting several percentage points of the
    American GDP in a way that no other industrial rich country in the
    world does, yet he chooses not to do that, because he doesn’t want to
    be attacked by those corporations.

    AMY GOODMAN: And is Edwards and Clinton any different on those issues?

    ALLAN NAIRN: Not as far as I can tell. None of them have come out for
    single payer. The only one who came out for single payer was Kucinich.
    Campaign contributions is just one of many tools that rich people have
    to get their way. There are basically two parallel factors in any
    democracy. One is one person, one vote. The other is one dollar, one
    vote. And those two are mixed together. So, although the people do have
    some say, there are usually a lot more dollars out there than people,
    and they find ways of prevailing in the end, unless the people become
    aggressive and disruptive and demanding and threaten to shake the
    system so that big concessions are made.

    AMY GOODMAN: Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, let’s go to the Republicans:
    Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, Mike Huckabee, John McCain. Give
    us a few of their advisers.

    KELLEY BEAUCAR VLAHOS: Well, Giuliani, as you had mentioned, and you
    had a pretty thorough list of people, but Giuliani is probably
    strikingly—strikingly is reaching out to the most strident
    neoconservatives on the scene today. He has familiar neoconservatives
    on his team, like you said: Norman Podhoretz, also Daniel Pipes,
    who—and I don’t remember if you had mentioned, but—has been leading the
    charge against “Islamofascism” on college campuses, has put out his
    Campus Watch, in terms of going after professors that he deems are not
    pro-Israel enough. He has other less familiar names, like Martin
    Kramer, Stephen Rosen, Peter Berkowitz of the Hoover Institution. He
    has basically a small galaxy of neoconservatives from familiar think
    tanks as the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation,
    Hoover, the Hudson.

    And basically, I mean, just to start, you know, with Giuliani, because
    I think he has the most poignant list of people in terms of where you
    would think that his foreign policy strategy is moving, he has
    basically—and I said this in my article—has taken the Bush Doctrine,
    has just pumped it up with steroids. He is fully on board—he always has
    been—with the Bush Doctrine. His people behind him are. We’re talking
    about no-holds-barred forward with the war on terror, the war against
    “Islamofascism.” He believes that the war on terror is a grand war
    versus good and evil. He is not shy to say that, his people aren’t shy
    to say that. He’s fully in grip of these people and the Bush Doctrine.

    And, you know, if you want to see where the Rudy Giuliani—President
    Rudy Giuliani will take us, you just look at the Bush Doctrine as if
    the Iraq war never happened or, better yet, the problems that have
    arisen from the Iraq war have never happened, because Rudy Giuliani
    doesn’t seem to acknowledge any of that. Any issues before the surge
    are incidental. You know, everything is moving forward, and his policy
    team is right there backing him.

    AMY GOODMAN: Allan Nairn, more on Rudolph Giuliani, and then to Mitt
    Romney.

    ALLAN NAIRN: Giuliani, as was mentioned, his big adviser is Norman
    Podhoretz. Podhoretz’s new book is World War IV, which he seems to
    like. Podhoretz says, bomb the Iranians. And he’s not just talking
    about pinpoint Iranian nuclear installations; he’s saying bomb the
    Iranians. And he says he prays that this will happen. Ex-Senator Robert
    Kasten, an old major backer of the Pakistani military dictatorships and
    the Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia, he’s another key Giuliani
    adviser.

    McCain has General Alexander Haig, who oversaw the US policy of mass
    terror killings of civilians in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua and
    Honduras, when American nuns and religious workers were abducted, raped
    and murdered by the Salvadoran National Guard. General Haig said those
    nuns died in an exchange of gunfire, the pistol-packing nuns. He has a
    younger—McCain has a younger adviser, Max Boot, who now points to El
    Salvador, where 70,000 civilians were killed by American-backed death
    squads, as a model counterinsurgency, a model for what the US should be
    doing today. Henry Kissinger advises McCain, as he advises many others.
    And Kissinger, of course, was responsible for mass death in Cambodia,
    Vietnam, Chile, countless other places. Bud McFarlane from the Reagan
    administration, who was a key backer of the Contras. Brent Scowcroft,
    who these days is popular with some liberals because he opposes—he
    opposed the Iraq invasion, who is a leader of the realist school—the
    realist school basically says, yes, kill civilians, but make sure you
    win the war, as opposed to the Bush-Cheney school, which has been
    killing civilians but losing the war, as the US has been doing until
    recently in Iraq and is now starting to do in Afghanistan—Scowcroft was
    the one who, during the Bush 1 administration, went to China right
    after the Tiananmen Square massacre and reassured the Chinese
    leadership, “Don’t worry about it, we’re still behind you.”

    Romney, as you mentioned, Romney has Cofer Black, a longtime CIA
    operative who was one of the key people behind the invasion of
    Afghanistan. During the course of that, according to Bob Woodward, he
    went in and said, “We’re going to go into Afghanistan. We’re going to
    cut their heads off.” He’s the one who organized Detachment 88 in
    Indonesia just recently, the supposed antiterrorist outfit that
    recently went after a Papuan human rights lawyer. Two key figures in
    backing the old US policy in Central America, Mark Falcoff and Roger
    Noriega, are also on the Romney team. And Dan Senor, who viewers
    probably remember as the voice of the early invasion and occupation of
    Iraq, he’s one of the Romney guys. Now, as you mentioned—

    AMY GOODMAN: Dan Senor is one of the spokespeople in Iraq, is married
    to, I think it is, Campbell Brown, who’s just been hired by CNN to
    replace Paula Zahn.

    ALLAN NAIRN: Huckabee, who you mentioned, it’s not clear who his
    advisers are. Huckabee recently was attacked by Romney for being soft
    on crime. So Huckabee responded, “Soft on crime? I executed sixteen
    people in Arkansas. How many people did you execute in Massachusetts?”
    Well, Massachusetts didn’t have the death penalty. But if Huckabee were
    really tough on crime, he would have used his post as governor of
    Arkansas to extradite Bill Clinton to Arkansas to stand trial before
    the courts there, as is permissible under international law, for the
    hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths brought on by the Iraqi
    sanctions during the Clinton administration. But that’s unthinkable in
    American politics. It probably didn’t even occur to Huckabee. But if we
    had a civilized political order and we defined crime and murder
    objectively, something like that would have been on the table, and
    Huckabee would have been challenged on it.

    Bloomberg, who may step in as the independent, using his money, he’s an
    interesting example of another aspect.

    AMY GOODMAN: The current mayor of New York.

    ALLAN NAIRN: Yes. One is, we ought to be enforcing the murder laws
    evenhandedly, so that anyone who facilitates the killing of civilians
    faces trial and jail, just like any street criminal, even if they’re a
    CIA operative, even if they’re an American general, even if they’re
    American president.

    Two, we ought to be preventing preventable death if we can. Kids who
    are defecating to death, kids who are dying from malnutrition for the
    lack of a couple of dollars, we should be stopping that every single
    time it can be stopped in the world. Last year in the world, there were
    anywhere from three to five million deaths of children under the age of
    five, children who were suffering from malnutrition. If he had so
    chosen—and he chose not to—Bloomberg could have personally prevented
    those deaths, because according to Forbes magazine, he’s worth $11.5
    billion, and that’s more than enough money, if distributed properly, to
    prevent that many deaths, millions of one year’s deaths of entirely
    preventable, entirely inexcusable malnutrition deaths. But it probably
    never even occurred to him, and he was certainly never challenged on it
    politically.

    But we can start to challenge people on this politically. For example,
    in the Iowa caucuses, we’re now in a situation where, you know, we have
    very bitter choices. So what are you going to do? I mean, Kucinich, who
    has good positions on many of these issues, he’s decided to throw in
    his lot with Obama. Ralph Nader, who has good positions, he’s implying
    support for Edwards. OK, these are tactical choices. But one thing that
    people can do in the Iowa caucuses tonight, they can go in there and
    say, OK, I’m caucusing for whomever, but I am making my support
    conditional on you renouncing support for the murder of civilians, on
    you firing all of your advisers who have been involved in the killing
    of civilians in the past, you turning them over to the International
    Criminal Court if you can get the International Criminal Court to
    accept it, you signing a pledge that says no more killing of civilians,
    you signing a pledge that says we will prevent preventable death.

    You know, the right wing has been doing this for years on the issue of
    taxes. They make—they go around, they make all the Republican
    candidates sign a no-tax pledge. That’s been somewhat effective. A very
    similar thing could be done, and I think it could have appeal, left and
    right, to anyone who is decent to have candidates pledge no more
    support for killing civilians, tough on crime, enforce the murder laws,
    prevent preventable deaths. Let’s not have kids dying of diarrhea. If
    we have spare dollars floating around that people only want, give them
    to people whose bodies need them.

    AMY GOODMAN: You know, it’s interesting, there is an Occupation
    Project, and a group of people were just arrested in Huckabee’s
    offices, among them the longtime peace activist, Nobel Peace Prize
    nominee several times over, Kathy Kelly, who founded Voices in the
    Wilderness.

    ALLAN NAIRN: Right. That’s a good tactic. I think we have to try many
    tactics from many directions. And one possible one is, you know,
    getting inside things like the Iowa caucus, getting inside things like
    the conventions of both parties and threaten to create a disturbance on
    the floor, ruckus on the floor, if the candidate for whom you are there
    as a delegate doesn’t back these simple things that should be the basis
    of any civilization: no murder, save someone if you can save them.

    AMY GOODMAN: Final question, this is on a totally different issue,
    Allan Nairn, our top headline, the Justice Department launching a
    formal criminal investigation to the destruction of the videotapes
    documenting the interrogation of two prisoners. You have long been
    writing about investigating the CIA and US policy, whether it’s in
    Central America or Asia. What are your thoughts on the destruction of
    these videotapes?

    ALLAN NAIRN: Well, one—and who knows?—I’m skeptical that they’ve
    actually been destroyed. I mean, anyone, you know, who works with
    computers knows that it’s almost impossible to truly eliminate
    something from a hard disk and also that when there’s a document, there
    are always multiple copies made, especially when you’re in a network
    system. So I’d be surprised if this thing was really destroyed.

    But, anyway, it’s unfortunate that the issue of torture—I mean, it’s
    good that the issue of torture has finally been put on the table of
    American politics and people talk about it to some extent, but it’s
    unfortunate that it’s been put on the table in the context of the
    torture of these al-Qaeda people, these people who were openly proud
    killers, mass murderers of civilians. In that context, a lot of people
    look at it and say, “Well, yeah, look at these lowlifes. Maybe they
    should be tortured.”

    But the fact of the matter is, 90% , at least, worldwide of cases of
    torture are not of people like this who are open mass murderers. They
    are usually of dissidents, of rebels, or of common criminals. And
    often, it is done by regimes that are armed, trained or financed by the
    United States. This was the case in El Salvador. In El Salvador, I
    interviewed Salvadoran military people who told of torture training
    classes they got from CIA officials, and they talked about how the CIA
    people would be in the room as the torture sessions were going on. And
    these were not al-Qaeda types that they were torturing; these were
    labor organizers, these were people who were speaking for justice,
    these were peasants.

    That’s what most torture is in the world, and it should be completely
    banned and abolished, not in the soft rhetorical way that McCain is
    talking about it, but actually stopping it by stopping support for all
    the forces that make a practice of torture. And that would involve
    completely rewriting the Foreign Operations Appropriations Bill, the
    Defense Appropriations Bill, and it would also involve calling in the
    authorities and carrying out many US officials in chains, because
    they’ve been backing this illegal stuff for years.

    AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to leave it there. In talking about, by
    the way, the occupation of offices, it was not only Huckabee’s office,
    it was also Barack Obama’s Iowa office, as well as Mitt Romney’s Iowa
    office, people occupied yesterday. Allan Nairn, I want to thank you for
    being with us. Your blog at “newsc” for “News and Comment,”
    newsc.blogspot.com. And Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, thank you for joining us
    from Washington, D.C. Her article appeared in The American
    Conservative. The piece was called “War Whisperers.”

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