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December 2013
Stories:
Seymour Hersh: Obama
"Cherry-Picked" Intelligence on Syrian Chemical Attack to Justify
U.S. Strike
Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh
joins us to discuss his new article casting doubt on the veracity of the Obama
administration’s claims that only the Assad regime could have carried out the
chemical attacks in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta earlier this year. Writing in
the London Review of Books, Hersh argues that the Obama administration
"cherry-picked intelligence to justify a strike against Assad." The
administration failed to disclose it knew Syrian rebels in the al-Nusra Front
had the ability to produce chemical weapons. Evidence obtained in the days
after the attack was also allegedly distorted to make it appear it was gathered
in real time.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not
be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: On Tuesday, the Organization
for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons will receive the Nobel Peace Prize in
Oslo as its staff prepare to destroy Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal.
According to a U.S.-Russia deal that stopped possible U.S. military strikes
against President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, Syria is to disperse—Syria will be
dispersing its arsenal of almost 1,300 tons of chemical weapons by mid-2014.
The head of the mission overseeing the destruction of the country’s chemical
arms said last week fighting on the ground poses a major obstacle to
implementing the agreement. This is Sigrid Kaag.
SIGRID KAAG: Despite the significant
progress achieved to date in a very short span of time, the most complex and
challenging work lies ahead. The removal of the Syrian Arab Republic’s chemical
agents for destruction outside of its territory will require tremendous
coordination and collective effort. Security remains a key challenge for all of
us. As you know, the destruction of a chemical weapons program has never taken
place under such challenging and dangerous conditions.
AMY GOODMAN: That was the head of the
OPCW mission to Syria, Sigrid Kaag.
This comes as a major new article casts
doubts on the veracity of the Obama administration’s claims that only the Assad
regime could have carried out the attacks in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta
earlier this year. Writing in the London Review of Books, investigative
reporter Seymour Hersh argues the Obama administration, quote,
"cherry-picked intelligence to justify a strike against Assad." He
reports U.S. was also aware that al-Nusra, a militant group fighting in Syria’s
civil war, had, quote, "mastered the mechanics of creating sarin and was
capable of manufacturing it in quantity."
To find out more about the piece, we go
to Washington, D.C., to speak with Seymour Hersh himself, the Pulitzer
Prize-winning investigative journalist. His latest piece in the London Review
of Books is headlined "Whose Sarin?" Over the decades, Hersh has
broken numerous landmark pieces, including the Abu Ghraib prison abuses and the
My Lai massacre in Vietnam.
Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Sy. Lay
out your case for what it is that the Obama administration did or didn’t tell
us.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Actually, Amy, it’s really
not my case; it’s the case of people in the administration who believe when
they—when they take the oath, they take the oath of office to the Constitution
and not to their immediate general or admiral or not to the—or not to the
president even. It’s about truth. And there are an awful lot of people in the
government who just were really very, very upset with the way the information
about the gas attack took place. And that’s not to say that I have—I certainly
don’t know who did what, but there’s no question my government does not. And
there’s also no question that the American president that we now have—a guy I
voted for, who has a lot of good things about him—was willing to go to war,
wanted to throw missiles at Syria, without really having a case and knowing he
didn’t have much of a case. And that, to me, is very troubling. We’re talking
about a major war crime here, because certainly hundreds, if not more, of
innocent civilians—and some bad guys, too, rebels and others—were killed by
sarin, which is a gross violation.
The case is simple. We had—in the spring,
there were a number of chemical warfare attacks in various parts of Syria that
were investigated by everybody. The U.N. looked at it. They determined there were
four instances of small cases of maybe 10—I shouldn’t say small; one dead is
more than enough—but maybe 15 to 20 people killed by sarin and others
incapacitated. And eventually they concluded, like they always do, the U.N., no
decision on who did what. So we began looking at it. The Israelis, of course,
they’re a neighboring country; they’re very concerned about Syrian chemical—the
arsenal. It’s a strategic threat for Israel. And we got some sarin, and we got
some evidence. And the thing that surprised us the most is there was a lot of
reporting in—known to the American community and to our allies, that al-Nusra,
one of the more jihadi groups in—more radical, if you will, Islamist groups
fighting against Bashar, and other groups, too, to a lesser degree, AQI,
al-Qaeda of Iraq—sometimes we call it al-Qaeda of Mesopotamia—had not only the
capacity and potential and the know-how, how to produce sarin, but also had
done some production of sarin. And these are reports that were very highly
classified that went up the chain of command. In some cases, they were so
secret that not many people in the government knew about it. They went to
senior officials in the Defense Intelligence Agency. The CIA certainly was
forwarding many of these reports.
It got to the point where the American
government, the military, the Pentagon, looked into the whole prospect of let’s
go in and clean out all the—all the nerve gas on both sides. And they did what
they call an ops study, operations study. It’s an ops order, really, it’s called.
It’s a major, major study, 60 or 70 various sub-parts to it. You’re going to
send—they concluded 70,000 American soldiers would have to go into Syria to
clean out the chemical weapons on both sides. And that’s a big deal. You know,
you’ve got to feed them. You’ve got to protect them. You’ve got to find out how
much toilet paper you’re going to need. A major, major study was done over this
summer. I think—I’ve been told it was supposed to—there was supposed to be what
they call an NIE, a National Intelligence Estimate, on the capability of the
opposition, the rebels, to manufacture sarin, but that never happened. And
there we are. These reports were there. They were certainly known to the
community. I can’t tell you that the president himself read those documents; I
don’t know. But clearly, whether or not—if he didn’t, he should have.
And when he went public after the
incident, right away—you know, it was just this. The narrative was—the real
issue was the narrative was Bashar, who we don’t like, who’s done terrible
things—you know, certainly he’s—in order to defend his regime and his
government, he has killed a lot of people, and also, we have to acknowledge,
had an awful lot of his soldiers killed. There’s—it’s a real rebel war there,
civil war. And the point was that at no time did the United States ever
consider al-Nusra to be a potential target of investigation. They were simply
excluded from the conversation. And the narrative was Bashar did it. And it was
bought by the mainstream press, as we all know, and by most people in the
world. And this is why, you know, creepy troublemakers like me stay in
business.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s turn to White House
Press Secretary Jay Carney. He was being questioned in late August about the
Syrian chemical weapons attack.
REPORTER: Jay, you were very firm in
saying just now that there’s little doubt that the Syrian regime was in fact
responsible for this chemical attack. So, in that context, what is the purpose
of this intelligence report? Is it to legitimize—to get rid of any remaining
doubt and therefore legitimize a response in the eyes of the international
community?
PRESS SECRETARY JAY CARNEY: I’m not aware
of any doubt that exists. Again, it’s undeniable that chemical weapons were
used on a large scale. We know that the regime maintains custody of the
chemical weapons in Syria and uses the types of rockets that were used to
deliver chemical weapons on August 21st. The opposition does not. We also know
that the opposition does not have the capabilities that the Syrian regime has.
And as I mentioned earlier, we have already had an assessment by the
intelligence community, with a high degree of confidence that the Syrian regime
has used, on a smaller scale, chemical weapons in this conflict already. So,
suggestions that there’s any doubt about who is responsible for this are as
preposterous as suggestions that the attack itself didn’t occur.
AMY GOODMAN: Seymour Hersh, your response
to what Jay Carney said at the end of August?
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, my mother would have
said that he should wash his mouth out with soap.
AMY GOODMAN: Because?
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, because—look, he’s
not lying; he’s being told what to say, and he does it. He’s being told. But
four days earlier, the State Department spokesman said—a woman spokesperson
said for the State Department, "We’re looking at"—on the 23rd,
"We have no information about what’s going on. We’re looking at it."
The fact is that the United States has a
very, very sophisticated sensor system that we’ve put up, just as we also had
in Iran, which helped us to conclude — I wrote about this for years at The New
Yorker — that we pretty much were pretty sure there was no secret underground
facility in Iran, even though the press still talks about that possibility. We
looked at it hard. We have sensors that were very, very good. America has great
technical capability. And the same thing happened inside Syria. We have
sensors. And the problem with talking about it is, once—I had no choice,
because you have to mention it, but people start asking questions about what do
they look like, where are they, and that’s too bad, because they’re very
useful. We have passive sensors that not only tell us when the Syrian—at every
Syrian depot, chemical warfare depot—and sarin isn’t stored. Nobody keeps
sarin. It’s a very volatile, acidic poison that degrades quickly. You keep the
chemicals that make sarin. They’re what are called precursors. There’s two
chemicals, when mixed, poof, alacadabra, you have sarin. So, the Syrian
arsenal, the reason you can get rid of it pretty easily, as the report heard
they’re doing it, is because there’s two inert substances that could be
disposed independently. One is even an alcohol. You could just flush it. But
the point being that the sensors monitor not only when the—when sarin or the
chemicals are moved; more importantly, they’re capable of monitoring when the
Syrian army begins to mix the stuff. And once they mix the stuff, it’s—as I
wrote, it’s a use-it-or-lose-it process. You have to use it quickly, because it
degrades quickly. It doesn’t stay long in the shells; it erodes the shells. And
not only that, the Israelis are right there with us on this sensor system. And
so, it’s like a fire alarm, early warning system. You know, it’s—an alarm goes
off, and the Israelis know about it, as we know about it, right away. And we
are not going to let the Syrian military or army get—take—create weapons, pour
this stuff into warheads, move it and be ready to fire. That’s not going to
happen. The Israelis will attack before that happens.
So, this system said nada, nothing, on
the 21st, the 22nd. I write about the fact there’s internal reports. It wasn’t
until the 23rd, when the American internal—the secret government and, you know,
the secret intelligence community began writing internal reports for the
secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, saying that we’ve
got a problem here in Syria. For days, we didn’t know, because—and what does
that mean? What that means is that if—if chemical warfare was used on the 21st,
it didn’t come from that arsenal, because there was no warning of any mixing.
That doesn’t mean something else could have happened, that some renegade group
got some and did something. But the main warning system we had was quiet.
That’s a clue. That’s a big clue that at least you should consider something
other than the Syrian army when you begin an investigation. And so, what the
press secretary said is silly. It’s just wrong. I don’t blame him. He happens
to be a very nice guy, Jay Carney. He’s just doing what he’s told.
AMY GOODMAN: Seymour Hersh, we’re going
to break and then come back to this discussion and talk about, well, what your
reputation is based on, the people, whether you name them or not, in your
article, the high-level intelligence officials and analysts who were raising
very serious questions behind the scenes, why weren’t their warnings being
heeded. We’re talking to Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. His
latest piece headlined "Whose Sarin?" is appearing in the London
Review of Books. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: In our next segment, we’re
going to be speaking with the Reverend Jesse Jackson about Nelson Mandela, the
myth and the facts, but first we continue with Pulitzer Prize-winning
journalist Seymour Hersh, whose piece, "Whose Sarin?" has just come
out in the London Review of Books. We’ll also find out why it didn’t come out
in his traditional place of publication, The New Yorker, also The Washington
Post.
But first, in a written statement to
BuzzFeed, Shawn Turner, spokesman for the director of national intelligence,
denied the claims in Seymour Hersh’s article. He wrote, quote, "We were
clear with The Washington Post and Mr. Hersh that the intelligence gathered
about the 21 August chemical weapons attack indicated [that] the Assad regime
and only the Assad regime could have been responsible. Any suggestion that
there was an effort to suppress intelligence about a nonexistent alternative
explanation is simply false." Turner also said no American intelligence
agency, quote, "assesses that the al-Nusra Front has succeeded in
developing a capacity to manufacture sarin." If you would respond, Seymour
Hersh?
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, what’s to say? I
mean, he said what he said, and I write what I did. You know, when I did—you
mentioned Abu Ghraib. The senior spokesman for the Pentagon at the time, when I
first began to write about Abu Ghraib, said that—literally—he literally said
that, "Oh, Hersh is just throwing crap against this wall to see what
sticks." I mean, a spokesman’s job is to carry out what the administration
wants him to say.
The fact is that I think the
administration should just take the high road here and put out what it knows. I
have every reason to believe they know more than they’ve indicated about who
did what and what the sarin looked like. And, you know, as I wrote in the
article, here you have a president of the United States that one day is telling
us he’s going to bomb Syria, and the next day he suddenly cuts a deal. He’s
suddenly a great constitutionalist, and he’s now going to go to the Congress,
because the War Powers Act, that every president has ignored, and this
president ignored when he attacked Libya, suddenly is very paramount to him. So
he’s going to go—he’s not going to bomb, despite he was—despite saying, with
great braggadocio, how tough he’s going to be. They crossed the red line, which
was a very big phrase for him, and he’s going to show that nobody can cross a
red line and get away with it. And then, not only—then he decides overnight to
go to Congress, and then he accepts a very rational deal—and I’m glad he
did—that the Russians put forward, with the Syrians, to dispose of the chemical
arsenal or the chemicals that are in Syria.
Why? Why the turnaround? Is it because
they had no information that anybody else had any—there’s no other alternative?
I mean, just what the—just what the—the statement you read by the press
secretary—or the spokesman for the Office of National Intelligence, would raise
just profound questions. If you have no information that contradicts the notion
that Bashar did it, why are you walking away? And so, you know, there’s more to
this story, I assure you. I don’t have it all. I’ve heard things, and—
AMY GOODMAN: So, who were the
intelligence officials, the analysts, who you talked to, whether you name them
or not?
SEYMOUR HERSH: Oh, you’ve got to be—
AMY GOODMAN: But tell us what they said
to you and which agencies they were with.
SEYMOUR HERSH: I can’t—look, you know
what? You can go up and down, back and forth, and raise questions about
anonymous sources, but believe me, if these guys—you know, they’d all be living
like Snowden in Russia for the rest of their lives, if they were lucky.
Nobody’s going to talk for the record. These are—
AMY GOODMAN: Well, let me turn to David
Shedd, who you do quote, the deputy director of the U.S. Defense Intelligence
Agency.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, I quote a document.
No, I don’t quote—I quote a document that was sent to him.
AMY GOODMAN: But let me go directly to
him—
SEYMOUR HERSH: Sure.
AMY GOODMAN: —who spoke in July at the
Aspen Security Forum about the Syrian opposition.
DAVID SHEDD: I count no less than 1,200
disparate groups in the opposition. And so, to a large extent, the conditions
of Syria benefit those who have a tendency toward or are actually in the far
extreme, because what happens is, they go for the space and organization and
certainly what they view as their mission vis-à-vis the Bashar Assad regime and
its proxy fighters with Hezbollah and so forth. They are the most effective end
of that spectrum of those 1,200 groups. They are increasingly stronger within
the opposition in their relative capabilities against the regime. That is not a
statement on the flow and the ebb that pertains to how the regime is doing
against the opposition. But within the opposition, I think, to your question, I
think the al-Nusra Front is gaining in strength and is a case of serious
concern for us.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s David Shedd, the
deputy director of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, the DIA, speaking in
July. The significance of what Shedd said, and what he also couldn’t say,
Seymour Hersh?
SEYMOUR HERSH: I don’t know what he could
or could not say. I’m not in—I can’t get into his mindset. I just know that by
then he had received one major report, and also the ops order was being
conducted. And Shedd, by—Shedd’s been around a long time. He was in the CIA.
And I haven’t talked to him, and I didn’t discuss this with him. But he’s a
fine intelligence officer. And I—he’s reflecting on what—look, by the time he’s
talking, inside the community, for the last year, it’s been known that the only
game in town, whether you like it or don’t like it, was Bashar, because
otherwise the—what we call the secular anti—the opposition to Bashar, the
legitimate, non-radical, if you will, dissenters, people from within the army,
people—civilians who didn’t like the lack of more social progress, etc., etc.,
they were overrun, even by—we know that beginning in early in the year. We knew
they were being overrun by jihadists. And so, the only solution, it seemed to
me, for—it seems for the government at the time, the people I know—and I’ve
talked to people about this for years; it’s been more than a year of talk—is,
the only solution for stability was Bashar. You have to just like it or don’t
like it.
Israel, which—don’t forget, Damascus is,
what, 40 miles, 45 miles from the Golan Heights and 130 miles south of—north
of—northeast of Tel Aviv, easily within range of any missiles. The Israelis are
not going to tolerate a jihadist government inside Syria, or even any area that
the jihadists will claim as an area of sharia law. They’ll hit it. The only
potential for stability was to keep Bashar there, or at least to get him in a
position where maybe he’d be willing to negotiate some sort of collaborative
government, which seems to be the only sensible theme right now.
And so, Shedd could well have been
talking just about that. The reason I wrote about it, mentioned what he said,
is because he got—he said what he said after getting a lot of very tough
intelligence about al-Nusra and its capability. And I will also tell you there
was a very scary incident in May in Turkey, in which some al-Nusra groups were
found, initially reported, to have more than four pounds of sarin, and they
were going to use it to hit an American air base in a place called Adana. We
have a big air base there, and it caused some trouble there. I didn’t write
about it because by the time that case got to a trial, a further-along
indictment, the government, the Turkish government, no longer claimed that they
had sarin, but they were looking for it. And as we—as many in the audience in
the audience may not know, Erdogan, the head of—the prime minister of Turkey,
and his intelligence—chief intelligence officer, a gentleman named Fidan, are
very pro-Islamist, and there’s a lot of tension there about that in the region.
So you have Turkey in one side that really wants Bashar to go down, but it’s
also an ally of ours, and it also tries to maintain good relationships with
Iran. It’s a very complicated, messy thing.
AMY GOODMAN: Seymour—
SEYMOUR HERSH: And the nerve gas—
AMY GOODMAN: Go ahead.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Yes, go ahead. I’m sorry.
No, go ahead. I’m fine.
AMY GOODMAN: Why did the piece appear in
the London Review of Books and not in your traditional place where you publish,
in The New Yorker or, as it was expected to appear, in The Washington Post,
with Executive Editor Marty Baron saying the sourcing in the article didn’t
meet the _Post_’s standards?
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, that’s what he told
me in an—or one of his editors said in an email, after the story, when it had
been, I thought, scheduled to run for a few weeks, was—and, you know,
he’s—look, he’s the boss. He’s a rational, good editor, and he’s entitled to
say it didn’t meet—the information I got is that it didn’t meet the standards
of The Washington Post. And I respect that. He’s no fool, you know, and I don’t
know the guy, but everything I heard about him is that he’s a very competent
editor. I know people that worked with him when he was that the L.A. Times,
which he was. And so, I don’t begrudge an editor to say what he wants. You
know, look, people like me, we really wear out welcomes very quickly. You know,
sometimes you get tired of reporters coming in and saying, you know, the sky is
always black, and it’s not sunny. And that’s what we do. So, investigative
reporters, we have a very short shelf life. You know, we’re the Bad News Bears.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the information
that came out of the documents that NSA contractor Edward Snowden released and
how they bear on this, Sy.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, that’s why I went to
the Post. Snowden gave—you know, Snowden—by the way, the Post, you’ve got to
admire the Post for publishing Snowden, too, a mainstream press newspaper doing
it, obviously getting heat from the White House. One of the documents Snowden
gave that ended up being in The Washington Post's hands was sort of an annual
budget request by the intelligence community, and it included information about
the National Security Agency, a much, very much higher document than
top-secret, etc., etc. And there was a section of it—the Post ran only a dozen
or two—less than that, maybe 17, 18 pages of the document. The rest they
withheld at the request of the government, which is their right. And—but in the
story, a summary story, they mentioned two things that made me think—that
really woke me up. They mentioned the sensor system. And I had known about the
sensor system from people inside. And as I mentioned earlier, it's difficult,
because passive sensors are something that, as a journalist, I’m glad we have.
Passive, nobody’s hurt. We collect information that we can make judgments on.
AMY GOODMAN: These are run by the National
Reconnaissance Office.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Yes, and the National
Security Agency, too, runs a lot of them. And presumably, they’re not to be
tampered with, the findings. This administration tampered, is one of the points
of the article in the London Review of Books, was that they tampered with
something they shouldn’t tamper with, a system that should be taken very
seriously. But that article in The Washington Post mentioned the sensor system.
And it also mentioned something else,
that from the day the opposition, the rebel war, began in Syria years ago—it’s
been a couple years now—we lost the ability to monitor Bashar and his senior
persons. The NSA was no longer able to capture them. They changed the way they
communicate. And, you know, one of the—one of the caveats about this whole
notion of being able to intercept is an awful lot of stuff in—we have—America,
we have couriers flying all day all the time, all over the world, with documents
for CIA station chiefs, for ambassadors, that aren’t put into communication
devices, so they can’t be intercepted. And we lost Bashar when the rebel war
began. And I don’t think—I’ve talked to people. We still don’t have him, and
there’s no question we would have picked up some clue if Bashar had been
actively involved in ordering the nerve gas attack. And one thing the
government, to its credit, has not said in this whole thing since August the
21st, this White House has never claimed to know a thing about Bashar. We use
his name all the time. We say, "Oh, Bashar did this and that." But
we’ve never claimed to know anything about what he did or did not say, because
we don’t have it.
And so, that led me, to be honest, to the
Post. And, you know, the problem was, it’s not the _Post_’s problem; it’s my
problem. You know, why did I think a mainstream press paper would want to go so
hard against—you know, from a freelancer. It was silly of me. I should have
just gone to the London Review very quickly. My mistake.
AMY GOODMAN: And why this is significant
today? In the end, President Obama chose not to strike Syria because the
American people just overwhelmingly said no. But what this means for what’s
happening in Syria today? And also, why then did the Syrian—
SEYMOUR HERSH: Let me interrupt you, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: Yes.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Amy, let me interrupt you.
He didn’t—I’m telling you, he didn’t do it because the American people said no.
He knew it because he didn’t have a case. And there was incredible opposition
that will be, one of these days, written about, maybe in history books. There
was incredible operation from some very, very strong-minded, constitutionally
minded people in the Pentagon. That’s the real story. I don’t have it; I could
just tell you I know it.
And so, it wasn’t just a case—you know,
from the military’s point of view, this was a president who many respected in
many ways. There’s many good things about Obama. There’s a lot of things—as I
said, I voted for him twice. And he’s probably going to be the brightest
president we’re ever going to have, and maybe the best president we’re ever
going to have. The system is—doesn’t produce always the very best, our system.
But the fact of the matter is that this president was going to go to a war
because he felt he had to protect what he said about a red line. That’s what it
was about, in the military’s point of view. And that’s not acceptable. You
don’t go to war, you don’t throw missiles at a country, when there’s no
immediate national security to the United States. And you don’t even talk about
it in public. That’s wrong, and that was a terrible thing to do.
And that’s what this story is really
about. It’s about a president choosing to make political use of a war crime and
not do the right thing. And I think that’s—to me, Amy, that’s a lot more
important than where it was published and who told me no and who told me yes. I
know the press likes to focus on that stuff, but that’s not the story. The
story is what he was going to do, and what it says maybe about him, what it
says about that office, what it says about the power, that you can simply—you
can create a narrative, which he did, and you know the mainstream press is going
to carry out that narrative.
I mean, it’s almost impossible for some
of the mainstream newspapers, who have consistently supported the
administration. This is after we had the WMD scandal, when everybody wanted to
be on the team. It turns out our job, as newspaper people, is not to be on the
team. You know, we’ve got a world run by a lot of yahoos and wackos, and it’s
our job as reporters to do the kind of work and make it hard for the
nincompoops that run the world to get away with some of the stuff we’re doing.
That’s what we should be doing more and more of. And that’s just—you know, I
don’t think there’s any virtue in it; it’s just the job we have. And there’s
heroism—you know, there’s nothing heroic about what we do. It’s heroic for some
of the people, reporters in Africa, to do some of that work when they’re at
personal risk. We’re not at personal risk. It’s just not so hard to hold the
people in office to the highest standard. And the press should be doing it more
and more.
AMY GOODMAN: Seymour—
SEYMOUR HERSH: So he didn’t do it—and one
thing, last thing. He didn’t do it because of public opinion. He was willing to
flout it, I think.
AMY GOODMAN: Seymour Hersh, I want to
thank you for being with us, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, speaking
to us from Washington, D.C. We will link to your latest piece in the London
Review of Books, headlined "Whose Sarin?" at democracynow.org. When
we come back, Reverend Jesse Jackson joins us before he heads to South Africa.
Nelson Mandela will be laid to rest this week. He died last week at the age of
95. Stay with us.
---
Rev. Jesse Jackson on the Life of Nelson
Mandela & the Movement that Backed His Anti-Apartheid Fight
South Africa has begun a week of
remembrance for Nelson Mandela, who died last week at the age of 95.
International leaders, global figures and celebrities will join 95,000 ordinary
South Africans for a memorial service at FNB Stadium in Soweto, where Mandela
made his final major public appearance during the 2010 soccer World Cup.
President Obama is among 60 heads of state planning to attend. On Sunday, South
Africans held a day of prayer for Mandela in congregations across the country.
The commemorations will end with Mandela’s burial Sunday in his home village of
Qunu. We look back on Mandela’s life with Rev. Jesse Jackson, the civil rights
leader who was at the head of the American anti-apartheid solidarity movement
and was among the first to greet Mandela when he was freed from prison.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not
be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: "Asimbonanga,"
sung by Johnny Clegg and joined on stage by South African President Nelson
Mandela. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report.
I’m Amy Goodman, as the world continues to mourn the death of the former South
African president and freedom fighter, Nelson Mandela. He died Thursday at the
age of 95 of a lung infection he contracted when he was in prison. In South
Africa, millions of mourners have visited places of worship and community halls
to pay their respects to South Africa’s first black and first democratically
elected leader. President Jacob Zuma designated Sunday as a day of prayer and
reflection on Mandela’s life.
PRESIDENT JACOB ZUMA: We thought it was
absolutely important that as we as a nation and in the world are mourning and
remembering Udada, that we should have a day where all of us, the nation and
the friends of South Africa, of Madiba in particular, come together to pray for
him.
AMY GOODMAN: The day of prayers comes
ahead of the funeral for Nelson Mandela, who became South Africa’s first
post-apartheid president in 1994, after 27 years in prison. South Africa has
announced some 60 heads of state and government plan to attend the memorial
service or state funeral of Mandela. President Barack Obama, François Hollande
of France, Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain will all be among those
attending Tuesday’s memorial service at the Soweto soccer stadium. Three former
U.S. presidents—George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter—also plan to
attend. International leaders, global figures, celebrities will join 95,000
South Africans at the memorial service at FNB Stadium in Soweto, where Nelson
Mandela made his final major public appearance during the 2010 football World
Cup.
Well, for more right now, we go to
Chicago, Illinois, where we’re joined by a civil rights leader who was at the
head of the American anti-apartheid solidarity movement, among the first to greet
Nelson Mandela when he was freed from prison, the first African American to
greet him. We’re joined by the Reverend Jesse Jackson, founder and president of
the Rainbow PUSH Coalition.
Reverend Jackson, welcome back to
Democracy Now! Talk about that moment—
REV. JESSE JACKSON: Thank you for
allowing us to share today.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s great to be with you.
Talk about that moment in 1990 when Nelson Mandela was released from jail. Talk
about where you were.
REV. JESSE JACKSON: You know, we were in Cape
Town. I had met with Mrs. Thatcher earlier in the week, making one last appeal
for her to—for Britain to break with apartheid, and she had not even known
America had done so finally. I went and spoke for Reverend Allan Boesak that
Sunday morning. We then left, thinking that his release was imminent, went
straight to the city hall at Cape Town. And after he was released from Robben
Island and came down the road with Winnie by his side, holding hands, he came
in the back door of the city hall. And there, I was able to greet him. And he
said, "Jesse Jackson, freedom fighter," and we embraced.
He was following our struggle all along.
He saw the ’84, ’88 campaigns, for example. He had a very sense of appreciation
of the freedom fighters versus our government policy. People like Roger Wilkins
and Randall Robinson and Marion Barry and people like Bill Lucy and Eleanor
Holmes Norton, who had led the struggle in our own country, and Harry
Belafonte, he was acutely aware. And so he just began to talk about those persons
because he had a sense that the impact of the American anti-apartheid struggle,
as we fought apartheid in our own country, was a big factor in his release.
AMY GOODMAN: That was 1990. And he left
jail, and he immediately made a world tour, thanking people for supporting the
sanctions against the apartheid regime. But this wasn’t a victory tour. He was
trying to intensify the pressure. Talk about Mandela in America in 1990.
REV. JESSE JACKSON: You know, Mr.
Mandela, Madiba, was graceful because he was winning. He was not speaking of
forgiveness and the like while he was in jail. But as coming out, he was the
one that said, "Lest the whites fear retribution and revenge, we choose
reconciliation. They want retaliation; we want democracy." He was able to
ride that wave to a new level. And he came in really as the guest of the
anti-apartheid host, people like Randall Robinson in TransAfrica, people like
Maxine Waters and people like Barbara Lee and the students who had led the
divestment campaigns, because it was not 'til 1994 ’til he had the right to
vote. That's when he voted for the first time. And Gail was right by citing
when he voted for the first time. I think it’s fair to say that the American
anti-apartheid or anti-segregation movement in the South, led by Dr. King,
triggered the movement in a big way in South Africa. We got the right to vote
in ’65. They got the right to vote in 1994, almost 30 years later. Our strength
in America was maybe the biggest factor in the strength of that movement succeeding
in South Africa.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the myths
about Nelson Mandela and why it’s important to understand who he was and what
he stood for to the end of his life, Reverend Jackson?
REV. JESSE JACKSON: Well, he had been a
persecuted political prisoner, in effect, fighting U.S. foreign policy and
fighting British foreign policy. And in the end, his side of history, Dr.
King’s side of history, is prevailing, however more difficult, and for him to
emerge from that situation choosing to go forward by hope and not backwards by
fear, saying that our future lies in non-racist, inclusive, democratic South
Africa; our future lies in all of us having the right to vote, having the right
to an education, or having the right to be advocates for peace in the world.
And, to me, as I look at people celebrating him today, there are those who
fought gallantly against him who now celebrate him as a martyr in death. One
distinction between him and [inaudible] Dr. King, him and Dr. King, was that
Dr. King died a very hated man, became a resistant martyr, but a [inaudible]
martyr. Mandela became really a martyr for 51 years. He was a martyr—martyred
in jail 27 years, and 24 more years after jail. He was a walking, living
martyr. So he had 51 years of martyrdom, which gives him, in today’s media, a
global impact like no other person ever in American and world history.
AMY GOODMAN: It was the U.S. Central
Intelligence Agency that picked up, or, I should say, that provided the
information to the South African apartheid forces, where Mandela was, what he
would be wearing, that he was going to be dressed as a chauffeur in a car. This
was 1962 when they finally picked him up. The U.S. was devoting more resources
to finding Mandela than even the apartheid regime was. What about the
significance of that?
REV. JESSE JACKSON: You know, it’s
interesting to me. In our last conversation about two years, I asked him about
his being picked up. In some sense—in some senses, he said, he was glad. I
didn’t understand that. He said that when—they tried the legal route, and they
were rejected. They tried mass marches, they met Sharpeville massacre, and that
was rejected. And they tried internal propaganda; that didn’t work. He finally
became commander, along with Oliver Tambo, of the military forces. And they had
been blowing up some railroads and some strategic infrastructure targets. They
were about to escalate, move toward the hospitals and schools and the like. It
was a really bloody warfare. And they caught him just a week before that was
about to happen. He said he would rather have spent 27 years in jail than to
have blown up those innocent people and have that blood on his hand. He was—he
gave all that he had—his mind, his body and soul. But he is—in some sense, was
glad he did not have on his hands the blood of those who would have been blown
up had he not been stopped at that time. So, in some sense, maybe the implement
of evil, but God meant it for good.
AMY GOODMAN: But with the Sharpeville
massacre that killed, what, 69 people, while Nelson Mandela had talked about
nonviolent struggle before, he was one of the founders of Umkhonto we Sizwe.
Can you talk about the significance of this armed movement against the violent
apartheid regime?
REV. JESSE JACKSON: You know, America had
a constitutional foundation and some history of change to a legal process.
South Africa did not have that. It was the most heinous government that
actually was a minority white government propped up by the U.S. and British
interests, and some other European interests, and it was overwhelmingly brutal
and murderous. When I went there in 1979, Amy, blacks had to walk down the
street with pass books on other side of the street. It was Southern
segregation-plus. No white flight—no black flight attendants or pilots are
working at the airport. Blacks only had the most menial jobs. Illegal to go to
school for them, or schools that were so inferior until they really could not
learn. It was a very complex system, very much like the South of our own
country. But it seems to me that the spirit to fight that system and to gain
world opinion—and that’s where we kind of came in, I think, Amy, against our
own foreign policy, because people like Kissinger were saying the British, South
Africa and Israel arc of security was too great to lose to, quote-unquote,
"communists and radicals," like black South Africans, because at the
end you have the Pacific, Indian—the Atlantic, Pacific—the Atlantic, Indian
Oceans kissing maybe the greatest trade route in the world. We could not lose
that to them. Well, we did lose that to them, and we’re the better off for it.
I think with people like yourself, progressives, it’s a great victory to the
civil rights, human rights struggle that, no matter what the odds are, that if
you’re pursue international law and human rights and self-determination and
transparency, that’s the best foreign policy.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s turn to Nelson Mandela
in his own words, speaking at his inauguration. It was May 10th, 1994.
PRESIDENT NELSON MANDELA: The for the
healing of the wounds has come. The moment to bridge the chasms that divides us
has come. The time to build is upon us. We have at last achieved our political
emancipation. We pledge ourselves to liberate all our people from the continued
bondage of poverty, deprivation, suffering, gender and other discrimination. We
succeeded to take our last steps to freedom in conditions of relative peace. We
commit ourselves to the construction of a complete, just and lasting peace. We
have triumphed in the effort to implant hope in the breasts of the millions of
our people. We enter into a covenant that we shall build a society in which all
South Africans, both black and white, will be able to walk tall, without any
fear in their hearts, assured of their inalienable right to human dignity, a
rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Nelson Mandela
giving his inauguration address. Reverend Jackson, you attended that address,
May 10, 1994, that transformative moment in South African history. But I want
to turn to an exchange between Georgetown University Professor Michael Eric
Dyson and conservative strategist, one of George H.W. Bush’s major advisers and
a former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney. They were speaking on ABC’s This
Week. Dyson criticized Dick Cheney for branding Nelson Mandela a
"terrorist" in the ’80s. Matalin defended her one-time boss.
MICHAEL ERIC DYSON: I think conservatives
get a little bit of amnesia here when they forget that Dick Cheney wanted to
put him on the terrorist list and insisted he stay there, that Ronald Reagan
resisted. He said, on the one hand, Nelson Mandela should be released, but he
depended upon a white supremacist government to reform itself from within. I think
Nelson Mandela challenged that. Also, though, he challenged people on the left,
as well. He was a man who was—yeah.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Amnesia, Mary?
MARY MATALIN: When will you ever get
tired of beating up on Darth Vader, who said Nelson Mandela is a good man. As
we’ve seen in your earlier segment, it was a complicated situation. The ANC was
a terrorist organization at one point. He has since said wonderful things about
Nelson Mandela. What I want to say about Nelson Mandela is that it’s not—I like
that his—what’s been said about him was said in the same way that the pope said
what he did. It’s forgiveness and redemption—the pope’s widely misinterpreted
and mischaracterized statements. But it’s active engagement. It’s taking care
of each other in a—
MICHAEL ERIC DYSON: But [inaudible]—
MARY MATALIN: —with solidarity and
subsidiarity.
MICHAEL ERIC DYSON: But, look, when you
say about excusing Darth Vader, so to speak, this is not just about rhetoric;
this is about public policy that prevented the flourishing of ANC, and, look,
when they had their feet on the neck of Nelson Mandela and millions of black
people in South Africa.
AMY GOODMAN: Georgetown University
Professor Michael Eric Dyson debating Mary Matalin, who’s a former aide to Vice
President Dick Cheney. If you could comment on both—of course, Nelson Mandela
not taken off the terrorist watch list until 2008, 14 years after he was
president of South Africa.
REV. JESSE JACKSON: I might add, Barbara
Lee talked with Archbishop Tutu in South Africa, and he reminded her that
Mandela was still on the terrorist list, and she came back and initiated
legislation with people like Maxine Waters, and that was—George Bush signed the
legislation put forth by Barbara Lee, and, of course, urged on by Condoleezza Rice.
But don’t be—you would not call Jewish people fighting against Nazi terror
"terrorists." They were freedom fighters, fighting against terror.
Mandela was a freedom fighter fighting against state-sponsored terrorism. He
then—when he came out, there was a fear because the South African government
had been so mean and so violent that he might engage in retribution. He might
do to them what they had done to him. He might engage in revenge. He said,
"No, it’s time for us now to go to a higher plane. We won that battle. Now
it’s time for redemption and reconciliation over retaliation and revenge."
Winners can speak with grace. He spoke gracefully. He’s about to govern the
nation. You can’t govern a nation there if you’re going to engage in terror or
going to engage in bloodshed. He was on the step now about to govern. I was
there sitting. It was just such a joy to hear and to watch people respond,
because many whites were relieved of their fears. Millions of blacks had a
sense of celebration, but with all that reason to feel that they were winners.
AMY GOODMAN: Reverend Jackson, you’ve
talked about how people focus on Mandela’s forgiveness rather than those who
persecuted him. And you also talk about apartheid as not so foreign to what we
and other countries experience, which is separateness.
REV. JESSE JACKSON: Yes, Sister. Well,
the 1896 law here, the post-slavery legislation here, Supreme Court decision
was separate but equal, which was apartheid or segregation. We did it in 1896;
apartheid in South Africa, 1948. We moved faster. We had the ’54 Supreme Court
decision to outlaw it, as they were just coming into it. Dr. King was
successful leading our coalition to a public accommodations bill.
AMY GOODMAN: We have 10 seconds.
REV. JESSE JACKSON: And then, so, by
1965, our right to vote in 1965; they got it in '94. Our struggle here led to
the freedom there. So it's a cogenerative struggle. We can all celebrate a new
day in South Africa, hopefully a new day in America, as well.
AMY GOODMAN: Reverend Jesse Jackson,
civil rights leader, founder and president of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, first
African American to greet President Mandela when he came out of jail in l990,
now headed to South Africa for the funeral.
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HEADLINES:
South Africa Begins Week of Mourning for
Mandela
South Africa has begun a week of
remembrance for Nelson Mandela, who died last week at the age of 95. President
Obama is among the foreign dignitaries attending a memorial on Tuesday at a
soccer stadium in Soweto. On Sunday, South Africans held a day of prayer for
Mandela in congregations across the country. The Archbishop Desmond Tutu paid
tribute in Cape Town.
Desmond Tutu: "We are relieved that
his suffering is over, but our relief is drowned in our grief. We pray that he
will rest in peace and rise in glory. People cared about Madiba, loved him
because of his courage, convictions."
The commemorations will end with
Mandela’s burial Sunday in his home village of Qunu. We’ll have more on Nelson
Mandela’s life and legacy later in the broadcast when we speak with Rev. Jesse
Jackson.
---
Report: Obama Admin
"Cherry-Picked" Intel on Syria Chemical Strike
A new report says the Obama
administration may have misled the public on the chemical attack in Ghouta,
Syria, earlier this year. Writing in the London Review of Books, investigative
reporter Seymour Hersh says the Obama administration "cherry-picked
intelligence" to justify its threatened attack on the Assad regime, which
it ultimately never carried out. Hersh says the administration failed to
disclose it knew Syrian rebels in the al-Nusra Front had the ability to produce
chemical weapons. Evidence obtained in the days after the attack was also
allegedly distorted to make it appear it was gathered in real time. We’ll have
more on this story with Seymour Hersh after headlines.
---
11 Dead in U.S. Winter Storm
At least 11 people have died in a massive
winter storm across the Southwest and Southeast. Thousands of people in Texas
and Arkansas were left without power as a cold front moved across the country.
---
Jobless Rate Hits 5-Year Low; Obama Seeks
Extension of Jobless Benefits
New figures show the official U.S.
unemployment rate has hit a five-year low of 7 percent. Employers added 203,000
jobs in November, higher than expected. In his weekly address, President Obama
urged Republican lawmakers to back an extension of unemployment benefits for
those seeking work.
President Obama: "Extending
unemployment insurance isn’t just the right thing to do for our families; it’s
the smart thing to do for our economy. And it shouldn’t be a partisan issue.
For decades, Congress has voted to offer relief to job seekers, including when
the unemployment rate was lower than it is today. But now that economic lifeline
is in jeopardy, all because Republicans in this Congress, which is on track to
be the most unproductive in history, have so far refused to extend it. So this
holiday season, let’s give our fellow Americans who are desperately looking for
work the help they need to keep on looking."
An extension of jobless benefits would
come as part of a new budget bill, which faces a deadline of mid-January.
---
WTO Reaches New Trade Pact; Hundreds
Protest in Bali
The World Trade Organization has reached
the first global trade agreement in 20 years. The pact centers around reducing
trade barriers such as import duties and customs rules. Addressing delegates
gathered on the Indonesian island of Bali, WTO president Roberto Azevedo
praised it as historic.
Roberto Azevedo: "For the first time
in our history, the WTO has truly delivered. We have achieved something very
significant. People all around the world will benefit from the package we have
delivered here today."
Criticizing the WTO deal, the World
Development Movement called it "an agreement for transnational
corporations, not the world’s poor." In a statement, the British group War
on Want said: "The negotiations have failed to secure permanent protection
for countries to safeguard the food rights of their peoples, exposing hundreds
of millions to the prospect of hunger and starvation simply in order to satisfy
the dogma of free trade." As the talks continued over the weekend,
hundreds of protesters marched against the WTO in Bali.
Vencer Crisostomo: "There should be
no deal in Bali, and we should junk WTO with finality. And we should stop the
exploitation, stop the injustice, stop the abuse being done to the poor
nations. And we should end monopoly, capitalism, and we should end imperialism
of the United States and the big countries."
---
Report: U.S. Faces Opposition on
Pro-Corporate Agenda in TPP Talks
As the World Trade Organization meets in
Indonesia, negotiators and lobbyists from the United States and 11 other
countries are also in Singapore for secretive talks on the proposed
Trans-Pacific Partnership. The TPP would establish a free trade zone stretching
from Vietnam to Chile to Japan, encompassing nearly 40 percent of the global
economy. The Huffington Post reports the United States has received almost no
support for a series of proposals that would grant "radical new powers to
corporations." Internal memos from an unnamed government involved in the
talks show the Obama administration has tried to push through guarantees for
corporations to sue governments for lost profits in a private court. The
administration has also called for new intellectual property regulations that
would give pharmaceutical giants long-term monopolies over medications,
freezing out cheaper generic alternatives. Another U.S. proposal facing
resistance would limit governments from negotiating lower prices with
pharmaceutical companies. On bank regulation, the United States has faced opposition
for seeking restrict "banking controls," a series of measures that
can help a government respond to financial crises. Activists observing the
talks, meanwhile, say the United States has been trying to push through an
agreement by January 1, hosting secretive invite-only sessions with key
delegates.
---
Hundreds of Thousands Protest in Ukraine
Massive protests are continuing in
Ukraine over the government’s rejection of closer ties with the European Union
in favor of Russia. On Sunday, hundreds of thousands of people took to the
streets in the country’s largest demonstrations since the Orange Revolution of
2004.
---
Thai PM Dissolves Parliament Amid Unrest
Thailand Prime Minister Yingluck
Shinawatra has dissolved Parliament and called for new elections amidst the
country’s worst political crisis in three years. Yingluck has faced protests
over an amnesty bill that would have eliminated a corruption conviction against
her brother, who himself led Thailand until his ouster in 2006. Anti-government
protesters are seeking to replace the Thai government with an unelected
so-called "people’s council."
---
Dozens Killed in Iraq Violence
At least eight people have been killed
and 22 have been wounded in a bombing today in Iraq. The attack comes one day
after violence around Baghdad left at least 39 dead. Iraq is facing its worst
violence since 2008, with more than 6,300 killed this year.
---
Venezuelan Gov’t Bests Opposition in
Local Races
In Venezuela, the government of President
Nicolás Maduro has won a majority of victories in local elections nationwide.
Maduro’s coalition won 196 of 337 mayoral races, although it lost in
Venezuela’s two largest cities. Maduro’s opponent, Henrique Capriles, had
billed the local races as a referendum on Maduro’s government, but received
just 42 percent of the overall vote compared to Maduro’s 49 percent. Maduro
beat Capriles in presidential elections earlier this year shortly after the
death of Hugo Chávez. Venezuela is facing major economic challenges with high
inflation, power cuts and shortages of basic goods. Maduro has vowed to deepen
a government campaign to force major retailers to cut prices on essential goods
after accusing them of price fixing.
---
Chevron Halts Gas Drilling in Romanian
Village Following Protests
The oil giant Chevron has suspended gas
drilling in a Romanian village following protests by local residents. Hundreds
of people have been staging anti-fracking rallies near the Romanian town of Pungesti
for several months, and clashes erupted with riot police last week.
---
North Korea Frees U.S. Veteran
An 85-year-old veteran has returned to
the United States after being freed by North Korea. Merrill Newman was detained
for over a month after visiting North Korea as a tourist. The North Korean
government accused him of war crimes for serving in the Korean War 60 years
ago. Newman addressed reporters after arriving in San Francisco.
Merrill Newman: "Good morning. I’m
delighted to be home. I want to thank the Swedish embassy in Pyongyang and the
American embassy in Beijing for all their help. It’s been a great, great
homecoming, and I’m tired but ready to be with my family now. And thank you all
for the support we got, and very much appreciate it."
At least one other U.S. citizen is
detained in North Korea, the Christian missionary Kenneth Brae, serving a
15-year sentence of hard labor for "crimes against the state."
---
Charges Dropped for Black Teens Arrested
While Waiting for School Bus
Prosecutors in upstate New York have
dropped charges against three black teenagers who were arrested for waiting for
their school bus. The three were standing on a sidewalk where they were to be
picked up and taken to their team’s basketball game. When they refused a police
order to disperse, they were arrested for disorderly conduct. One of the
students and their coach spoke out last week.
Wan’Tauhjs Weathers: "We tried to
tell them that we was waiting for the bus, but we wasn’t catching a city bus,
we was catching a yellow bus. And he didn’t care. He arrested us anyways."
Jacob Scott: "These young men were
doing nothing wrong, nothing wrong. They did exactly what they were supposed to
do, and still and yet they get arrested."
After reviewing the case, the Monroe
County district attorney said she is dropping the charges. The Rochester Police
Department has refused to apologize for the teens’ arrest, saying it was
justified.
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