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July 31, 2004 - Art Bell
02:51:43
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - James Bamford - A Pretext for War (with Iraq)
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♪♪♪ ♪♪♪
♪♪♪ From the high desert and the great American Southwest,
I bid you all good evening, good morning, good afternoon, whatever, wherever,
in all the 25 time zones we have, each and every one covered one way or the other
by this program, Coast to Coast AM.
It is my honor and privilege to be here for the weekend with you.
A lot to talk about, a lot to do, to say the least.
We've got a controversial weekend, a very, very controversial weekend coming up.
for you.
James Bamford is tonight, and he's going to shake you right to the ground with what he's got to say about the whole 9-11 business and the state of our security and all the rest of it.
That's one you're not going to want to miss.
And then, by the way, tomorrow night, oh yes, tomorrow night, Bonnie Crystal will be here in the first hour.
They don't know about that at the website yet.
She is a friend of mine, a ham radio operator, and a spelunker, and, you know, a person who goes down into caves.
And when I say she goes into caves, I mean, baby, she really goes.
She goes into, she seeks out the world's deepest caves, places where you can barely fit, and goes down as deep as you can get into the earth.
Right now, she is in Peru.
And she's been in Peru for about a month.
She's on a break back to Lima, Peru, and we're going to get to interview her tomorrow night.
And with it will come a raft of photographs of what she's been doing thus far, and some of it is incredible.
She has found Chinese writing way the hell down in caves.
Now, how could that possibly be?
Covered by something that's got to be many thousands of years old.
There's some pretty weird stuff to report on tomorrow night, and then following that, Dr. Klatz will be here.
He'll be talking about... Well, actually, he is the spearhead in America of the anti-aging movement, and that means staying alive for longer periods of time.
He's not talking about something far-fetched in the future.
He's talking about something during your lifetime.
So, that'll be a hot show, too.
We'll catch up on the latest.
In the meantime, if you get the opportunity, you might want to check out my webcam.
Now, my webcam tonight is kind of cool, not because I'm in it.
I had Ramona snap the photograph a little while ago, earlier.
But because... Well, little story for you.
Ramona and I, as you know, love Paris.
And last time we were in Paris, we went to Radio France International.
That is the shortwave arm of Radio France that broadcasts to the United States, you know, on shortwave.
Big deal.
And in there, in the main control room, they had this clock.
Oh, God, was it a clock.
You know, I'm a clock guy.
I don't know how many of you are freaks on clocks, but I am.
And they had this clock, and it was so cool, I damn near ripped it right off their wall.
I wanted it so badly.
You know, it was so different.
And naturally, I didn't get to rip it off their wall, nor did I get to find out who made it.
And ten years later, a friend of mine sends me this thing with a company that makes it.
There's only two companies, one in the U.S.
and one in Great Britain.
Obviously, Radio France had theirs built in Great Britain.
Anyway, I contacted the American company, and I got this clock.
And is it cool or what?
It has LEDs that go around.
It'll sum and then it'll detract.
And, let's see, what can I tell you about this clock?
It's got an internet connection on the back.
So what you do is you plug this clock into the internet.
It has its own IP address, subnet mask, all the rest of it.
And the clock then goes out to the atomic time servers on the internet and makes damn sure it's set with the atomic standard.
So this clock is way cool and you can see it, a little bit of it anyway, In the webcam shot that I've got up tonight.
the news of the world and more in a moment
has that ever happened to you You see something and you want it so badly.
like this clock and they were they weren't about to you know he did say at the time well you know I think it's
made in Great Britain somewhere and I'll see if I can get you the address because
it never happened so I
10 years later I finally stumble into it Well, this is the clockman's clock, I'll tell you what.
Now watch it, I'll miss a break or something.
Anyway, you can see it in the webcam.
And by the way, when you go to coasttocoastam.com, it's in the upper left-hand side, it'll say Arts Webcam.
That's it.
Okay.
With dueling economic messages, President Bush and rival John Kerry campaigned head-to-head in the Rust Belt Saturday.
Getting so close at one point that their bus caravans were rolling toward each other on a 35-mile stretch of Interstate 70.
They just averted passing each other.
When the Bush motorcade turned north toward an event in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Kerry turned west into Ohio, a state with 20 electoral votes, where Bush had spent the day trolling for support.
Now, I wonder what would have happened had they met In the highway, you know, on the highway there somewhere.
Do you think, uh, they would have stopped?
You know, both caravans would have stopped and maybe they could have gotten out and yelled at each other, You're not gonna make a president!
You know, that kind of thing?
You wouldn't make a president on the test!
Anyway.
Iraqi militants said Saturday they kidnapped two Turks and threatened to behead them within 48 hours It's the latest in the country's unrelenting wave of abductions, even as efforts intensified to free seven truck drivers taken captive by other insurgents continue.
So it just goes on and on and on in Iraq.
By all accounts, Mark Hacking was fun to be around, a loving husband, wanted to be respected and like his father become a doctor, but years of deceptions are now catching up to the former night shift hospital orderly.
And he has become now the focus of the investigation into the disappearance of his wife.
As the search for Lori Hacking enters a third week, without a trace of the 27-year-old woman, her friends and co-workers are recalling moments when they believed she discovered her husband's propensity for lying.
So he just really told them all kinds of stories, I guess.
Now, on the same day that she disappeared, here in Fronton, Nevada, we had a lady disappear.
She just walked off.
It was on a Monday.
She just walked off, and she too has not been heard from.
There's nothing at this time, you know, foul play I don't think is particularly suspected, but it sure as hell is a mystery, and she's just gone.
Gone!
The Vatican on Saturday denounced feminism.
For trying to blur differences between men and women, and threatening the institution of families based on a mother and a father.
The drive for equality makes homosexuality and heterosexuality virtually equivalent, they say.
Again, Baghdad, this is something.
Cancer and birth defects have been spreading like wildfire in Iraq since the 91 U.S.-led Gulf War, prompting doctors to describe them as the Iraqi version of flu.
Flu.
Depleted uranium used by the U.S.
and its allies against Iraq has taken a toll on around 120,000 to 140,000 Iraqis According to the latest estimates released by the Iraqi Health Ministry, with Iraq becoming an almost radioactive toxic wasteland, the number of birth defects in cancer-infected Iraqis is on the rise day in and day out due to the lingering effects of the deadly nuclear substance.
That came, by the way, from the London-based newspaper.
Once lodged in the soil, it seems, the munitions can pollute the environment and create up to a hundred-fold increase in uranium levels in groundwater, according to the UNEP.
De- or depleted uranium is said to be radioactive for a mere 4,000 years.
4000 years. 4000 years.
End this headline. Disaster at sea. Global warming hits the UK.
Listen to this, hundreds of thousands of Scottish seabirds apparently have failed to breed this summer in a wildlife catastrophe which is being linked by scientists directly to global warming.
The massive unprecedented collapse of nesting attempts by several seabird species in Orkney and Shetland is likely to prove the first major impact of climate change on Britain In what could be called a subplot from the recent disaster movie, The Day After Tomorrow, a rise in sea temperature is believed to have led to the mysterious disappearance of a key part of the marine food chain.
That would be the sand eel, a small fish whose great teeming shoals have hitherto sustained larger fish, marine mammals, and seabirds in the millions.
In Orkney and Shetland the sand eel stocks have been shrinking for years and this summer they disappeared.
The result for seabirds has been mass starvation.
So it's moving up the chain.
The figures for breeding failure for Shetland in particular almost actually defy belief.
Weird weather.
Weird weather in Juneau, Alaska too.
A bolt of lightning has flashed through the state office building.
That's in Juneau during a rare and what's described as a terrific Juneau thunderstorm on Saturday last.
It missed workers by just feet and has knocked out the voicemail for most of the state offices.
Thunders shook houses, mudslides tumbled down mountainsides, and reported 1.85 inches of rain fell in a single hour Oh my God, almost two inches of rain.
Just north of downtown, National Weather Service forecasters in Juneau said it might be an all-time rainfall record for Alaska.
All time!
Mike Hawkins, the state systems programming manager, was sitting around installing software on the fifth floor of the state office building when lightning hit at about 1250.
He said he just glanced up from the keyboard and WHAM!
A large red flash and a boom at the same time.
He said he was less than 10 feet away, lost his hearing for about a minute or so, and was in brief shock.
He compared it to a bomb blast.
You know, like he said, quote, the last thing a person might see.
I don't get freaked out much, Hawkins said, but I don't want to go through that again.
Thank you very much.
The electromagnetic force changed colors on the computer screens, he said.
Reds turned to yellow, yellow to orange, but there was no fire.
And the computer systems apparently turned out fine, but pretty weird, weird weather all over the world, including Alaska.
And I try to get this news to you because the mainstream networks don't.
By the way, Peter Jennings has a team that's going to be out here at my house August, I think, 8th while I'm doing the program.
And they're doing a two-hour documentary that'll be shown on ABC News, I think, in 2005, February or something of 2005.
We'll find out.
But they're going to be here the 8th, the invasion of television.
If Alaska was not having enough trouble due to global warming, well, look out Alaska, here comes a volcano, but you probably already know about it, right?
Threatening to erupt.
Mount Spur, 80 miles from Anchorage, last erupted 12 years ago, and now it seems to be a rumbling Seismologist Jackie Kaplan-Aubach says, when we see an eruption, it commonly will start off just about this way.
In 1992, Mount Spurs eruption sent ash 65,000 feet into the air, disrupting air traffic.
Seismologists are concerned about two other Alaska volcanoes as well.
So, stand by Alaska.
Here it comes!
And then tonight is the night, you know!
This, of course, is Saturday night, and ladies and gentlemen, it is a blue moon!
What is a blue moon?
And, is it really blue?
Well, we are having a blue moon right now, so you can go outside and look for yourself.
Tell me, do you think it's blue?
Uh, blue moon, actually, is the second full moon in any calendar month.
Usually months only have one full moon, but occasionally there's two, and when there is, we call it a blue moon.
Why?
It may have begun in 1883 because of, guess what, a volcano, the Krakatoa in this case, and it exploded in Indonesia.
So much ash rose into the atmosphere that the moon looked blue.
It was pretty weird, and ever since then, the second moon in the month has been called a blue moon.
Nevertheless, if you want to see for yourself, then go take a look, and you tell me, is it blue?
So, with that in mind, I think we're going to go ahead and do some open lines between now and the top of the hour and see what's out there in the world of opinion.
And I know there's a very great deal, so if you know the special weekend numbers, then pick up the phone and call one of them.
East of the Rockies, you are on the air.
Hi.
Mark.
Hello there.
How you doing?
I'm doing all right.
Turn your radio off, please.
That's excellent.
Where are you?
I'm in Texas.
Texas.
Okay.
Yeah, I got an idea for this thing with the Iranians, especially with the, you know, the fanatical sect that's doing all the terroristic acts.
Well, it's not just the Iranians, sir.
There are terrorists in Iraq now from all over the world.
Right, well, the Muslim fanatics.
Yeah.
What if we were to have a A terrorist group of our own that would be insurgents to pick targets of theirs.
We do have them.
They're called the Special Forces.
Okay, but then we would send our own television deal out dressed as those people stating that we took our own mosque out because we're mad at our people for not supporting them.
And if we did that, maybe it would get the ire up of the good Muslim people in the world to turn against them.
Let me see if I've got your plan down, Pat, here.
You want us to dress up Special Forces guys, maybe, as Muslims, and then build a mosque, and then blow up our own mosque.
Well, blow up their mosque.
Well, it would be our mosque if we... Yeah, just pick the target.
Oh, I see.
In other words, you want our guys, then, to blow up one of their mosques?
Correct.
Yes.
Okay.
And then?
Claim responsibility on the Algier network, stating that we are doing this because we are tired of the Muslim people not getting behind our fight, our jihad.
Yes, well, you see, this is the kind of thing, though, that almost always backfires on you and gets, you know, discovered and is considered a horrid, dirty trick.
And then, you know, you get a bunch more people beheaded and terrible things happen.
But it's a thought, sort of.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hello.
Oh my goodness, thank God.
Hello, Art.
I am a first-time caller.
I'm calling from Washington State.
Uh-huh.
And I have a question for you.
So do I. For any general listener.
We see something in the sky that rises up about 4 a.m.
in the eastern sky, and it's like 20 times the size of Venus.
20 times the size?
I was about to say it's probably Venus, you know.
It's huge.
You're saying it's 20 times bigger than Venus.
I'm saying it is very huge, and I have looked and That's correct!
And our neighbor is, too.
and everybody I can and nobody can possibly figure out what it is.
Huh.
And when the sun comes up behind it...
Who's that in the background?
That's my mother.
Your mother is contributing to this and moreover she's a witness, right?
That's correct. And our neighbor is too.
All of us are wondering. And I know it's not Venus.
There's no way it's Venus.
It's huge and it's silver.
Alright, slow up now.
Venus would be described by most as a very bright pinpoint of light.
How would you describe this in size compared to a pinpoint?
I would call it like a baseball.
Oh.
Like a softball.
A softball?
Yeah, I'm talking that big.
A softball?
Yes.
A softball is rising in the skies over... And it's silver.
And it's very bright.
And even when the sun comes up behind it, you can still see it in the sky.
It's very bright.
Well, this should be available, you know, seen by millions.
That's what I'm thinking.
But we even called our local meteorologist and he has no clue as to what it is.
You mean he walked outside and looked at it and said, oh my God, look at that softball.
And another thing too... Wait a minute, does it glow as bright as a star?
Brighter?
Brighter.
I mean, it's like the moon with the sun hitting it.
I mean, it is very bright.
It is times three.
Maybe it's Planet X. And that's a good question.
That's what I was thinking.
And another thing here is that we've seen this for the past three and a half to four weeks and it has not changed position whatsoever.
It rises at the same time every morning and sits in the same position.
And then stays there, what, all night long?
Until the sun comes up and overtakes it, you know, the light from it.
Well, let's see what the rest of the audience has to say.
This is something you would think that astronomers would be noticing.
Something the size of a softball.
Not much bigger than Venus.
That should be getting talked about all over the place.
Or, it's a local phenomena.
Who knows?
From the high desert, in the middle of the night, which is where we do our best work, this is Coast to Coast AM.
mark well mom mom mom mom mom mom mom mom mom mom mom mom mom mom mom
mom mom mom mom mom the
the the
the the Well, have you looked yet?
Is it blue?
Alright, now listen carefully, because these are the numbers we play with on the weekend.
No, not those numbers.
The numbers are here.
To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
The first time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
The first time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll free at 800-825-5033.
From west of the Rockies, call 800-618-8255.
International callers may reach Art by calling your in-country Sprint Access number,
pressing option 5 and dialing toll free, 800-893-0903.
From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
And you can only play this once in a...
Ha ha ha ha.
Good morning, everybody.
It should be an interesting night.
Open lines between now and the top of the hour.
Open lines mean unscreened.
Rip them, tear them.
You never know what's coming next.
type talk radio you know once again considering bonnie crystal who will be
here tomorrow night god's willing you know telephone system to peru is a little
difficult so we'll see but
you know climbing down into the deepest caverns and places where human feet have not gone before
into the middle of the earth is not my idea of something that i would wish
to do to.
Bye.
I get claustrophobic long before that, but I have watched Bonnie crawl through... I mean, you're talking already about, you know, thousands of feet, maybe.
Thousands of feet underground and then and then crawling through something that is barely big enough for you to squeeze through going in the horizontal plane Way under the earth just no way and I and I wonder I understand the fascination with what's below us in the earth I have it too not enough to crawl down there, but I Definitely have a we all I think have a fascination with what's below the earth and so stories like Mel's hole are And stories of that genre always attract a great deal of attention, because we actually know, it seems like, less about what's below us than we do with what's above us, including in outer space.
Though, this morning, we seem to have a bit of a mystery.
Wild Card Line, you are on the air.
Hello.
Hello.
Hello, Eric.
Yes.
This is Pat from Ambi, New York.
We're just outside of Rochester.
Hi Pat.
I just wanted to welcome you back to the airwaves here in Rochester.
You were gone for a while, and thankfully you're back.
You make the overnights worth it again.
You mean WHAM has returned our vibrant tones to the airwaves?
Thank God.
The nights were not the same.
I was going to bed early.
They were running something, you know, some special thing for the truckers, but I'll tell you something.
We've got more truckers listening here than Than any other program on the air.
Not to say anything about the trucking show, but... No, they're fine.
But we got the truckers anyway, so if there's trouble, we'll tend to it.
This is a whole other level.
Anyway, anything else?
Well, I just wanted to express my concern.
I know there's been some speculation of Possible terrorist attacks around the election time in November.
Of course.
And I can't get that off my mind.
I got a bad feeling about it.
Yeah, they've tried to influence elections and countries' international policy all over the world, whether it would be through kidnapping or wrecking railroads or whatever, so I would think it's a good bet they'll take a shot.
I think we really need to pay attention.
But don't postpone, I just hope they don't postpone the elections.
I think that'd be a real big mistake.
Even the talk of that sent cold little shivers up my spine.
It does make you wonder.
In America you would expect that thank you very much elections would go on no matter what.
Being the shining beacon of democracy that we are.
I know that'll generate emails, that alone.
There's nothing you can say on the air That will not engender somebody's responding.
What do you mean democracy?
We're not, we're a republic!
Well, loosely folks, allow me a little dramatic license here.
We are the shining beacon of freedom and democracy, you know that thing at the polls and all the rest of it, and to postpone an election in America, it just, a national election, it just, No matter what.
Almost.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hello.
Hello, Art.
Yes.
How are you this evening?
Quite well, sir, and where are you?
I'm in, currently, Road Forks, New Mexico, on my way back eastbound.
Ah, in an 18-wheeler.
Yes, sir, absolutely.
All right.
Anyway, that woman kind of talking about the thing in the sky, that grabbed my attention, because I've noticed that this morning.
Well, he's coming out of California, running 58 there.
Yes, sir.
On top of Tehachapi, I noticed it, and at first I thought, well, it was a radar, an antenna light.
See, I noticed the other antenna lights lay flashed, and then I realized, wait a minute, that's way too far up on the horizon to be on any hilltop around here.
And as we came off, falling into Mojave, I saw it, and I mean, Art, this thing is huge!
I mean, I thought it was a plane coming in, you know, because there's Edwards out there.
Now, is that roughly the way she described it?
She said, kind of like about a softball to my eye.
I mean, that's big.
Yeah.
This thing, this thing was definitely larger than Venus.
But the odd thing was, like, when she said it never moved, I tested that because the whole time it stayed almost the exact same spot in my window as the sun was coming up.
It never did budge.
So you're backing her up.
Yes, sir.
I don't have a clue, and I'm not trying to make any speculation what it was, but it is something that's very big, and it's very stationary.
Uh-huh.
All right.
All right.
Thank you very much.
Yes, sir.
All right.
Take care, and thanks for calling.
Well, there's two... Hmm.
Hmm.
Well, of course, now the moon has been coming up in the east, right?
More or less.
And traversing the sky, ending up in the western sky by morning.
But they say it doesn't move.
Not from when they first see it until daylight erases it.
What the hell could that be?
West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hi.
Good evening, good morning.
Well, whatever.
Yeah, hey.
West of the Rockies.
Yes, sir.
Anyway, two things real quick.
Number one, blue moon.
Ah, yes.
Very interesting.
I've heard two stories on that, and one claims that the older definition of a blue moon was the fourth moon in a quarter, which would give us then our, what?
I think the classic definition is two moons in one month.
Right, and I've heard that all along, and then I read somewhere where the original definition was the fourth in a quarter.
So I would just slip it off to, you know, a month or two from now.
Have you checked?
Is it blue?
Well, I enjoyed your bumper music.
But what I really called about was the bright object in the morning sky.
You too, yes.
Oh, I would give you 101 odds that it is Venus.
I have no doubt that it's Venus.
But they're saying Venus rarely is seen as a basket or as a, you know, a softball.
Yeah, and I mean, It's strictly a personal thing.
I think, well, the sun's no bigger than a nickel.
So if I held a nickel up, it would probably cover the sun.
Well, depending on where you held it.
Yeah, exactly.
But I mean, we're just using general observation on size.
I mean, softball is way off the mark for Venus.
It is.
It's way off the mark for the sun, as far as I'm concerned.
I'm a pilot, and I have a lot of pilot friends, and air traffic And one of my air traffic controller friends saw this airplane on final coming into land, and he wasn't in any contact with it.
And he thought, well, maybe they got a radio failure.
So he kept clearing it to land, only to realize it was Venus.
He was trying to give Venus landing instructions?
Yeah.
He thought it was an airliner, you know, four or five miles out with all its lights on.
Venus can be extremely bright.
It's the second brightest Natural object in the night sky.
Yeah, surely.
There's no question about it.
It's very bright.
Thank you.
But again, it's still nothing more than a bright pinpoint of light is the best way you could describe it.
Now, I suppose if you had very blurry vision, it could perhaps balloon out a little bit.
But something the size of a softball.
Come on now.
International Line, you are on the air.
Where are you calling from, please?
I'm calling from Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Halifax, okay, welcome.
Thank you.
Yeah, I have a very interesting theory as to what that light that she's been, what people have been talking about.
You don't think it's Venus?
No, in fact, this is going to sound very strange, but I actually have the ability If you create small lights in the sky.
Ah, so then what you're giving me is more than a theory.
You're claiming you have created what she is seeing.
Well, I'm not... Why have you done this?
Um, well, actually, I didn't originally intend to do this.
But you nevertheless did it.
So why?
Well, I'm not saying that I necessarily created the lights that she saw.
I'm saying that I have the ability to do this.
I know it sounds out there.
Oh yes, it's out there, but that's what this program is for.
So, how and why do you do this?
Well, originally, I'm quite spiritual, and I'm kind of nervous talking on the line, but basically I did it to clear energy and stuff like that, so I went through a really big cleansing and clearing experience of like two years, and So then what, this light then was the horrid cast off of whatever you cleansed with the energy?
That's what it is?
Yes.
Yeah, I mean I know it sounds strange, but now I have the ability to basically, I can create basically like stars.
And I've shown them to other people.
That would be creation.
That would be very god-like actually.
Well, yes, but not usually to that degree.
Well, I don't know.
The human body and human soul or energy is pretty powerful.
I mean, do you have something that you say when you do it, like, let there be light?
No.
No, I can just basically do it.
And I can actually move them around sometimes.
Well, you should realize it upsets people.
When you create lights in the sky, if you really can do that, I mean, people get upset.
It's their way.
They go, oh, what's that?
So, be careful what you create out there.
First time caller line, you're on the air.
Hello.
Hello, Art.
Yes.
Yeah, this is Fred and Ford Myers, and I'm calling about that light.
You too, huh?
Yeah, it's very bright and it comes up to the exact time she says it is.
Alright, now let's try something on you since you're yet another witness.
Is it as big as she said?
Well, to me it looks like an airplane coming in for landing, but it doesn't move.
Alright, now stop.
We have Venus, and people are saying, no, people are seeing Venus.
Are you able to see Venus in the sky and differentiate that from whatever we're talking about here?
Yeah, this appears a lot brighter and a lot closer.
And so you can look over, you've looked over and you've seen Venus, and then you've looked and seen this object.
Yeah.
And it's definitely not the moon, because the moon's further south from where I am and where this object is.
Okay.
Well, I appreciate your... And the moon is white down here.
Okay.
Thank you very much.
Yes, it is.
I went out and looked, just to make sure, and it appears like any other, but it is indeed a full moon.
Bringing on who-knows-what tonight, right?
Wildcard Line, you're on the air.
Hello.
Hello.
Yes, hello.
Hi, this is Chuck from Florida.
Of course, I'm currently driving through Texas.
Okay.
All right, I was just calling to see if anybody had ever seen, I've seen this one thing twice now, and it's back when the Leonid meteor showers were taking place.
Yes.
It was like two rods of A woven red light, about as high as a semi-truck, and I saw it out of the corner of my eye, and about the time I looked at it, as soon as I looked at it, it blinked off.
Well, yes, okay, I've seen lots of things like that.
For example, here in the desert, many, many times when I used to drive on a daily basis, you know, from here and from to Las Vegas for work to do the program, I did that for many years, I had an opportunity to You know, get a lot of sky time.
You know, going up and down the mountain.
And I saw a number of fireballs re-enter.
Really special, large, green, flaming fireballs.
And so that may well have been what you saw, especially during a meteor shower.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hi.
Hi Art.
Hello.
Art, I kind of want to change the subject for a second.
Sure.
I will say that I want to tell you a little story about my experience in the military, because I think that our government's kind of trying to control us with this fear and intimidation business about terrorism, because I really don't think that the terrorists are as out there as they say they are.
You don't, huh?
Well, when I was in the Army, I'll tell you, I was in the big red one and we were parked up on Fort Riley, Kansas, waiting for the Russians to come through the Folder Gap with thousands and thousands of tanks and helicopters and Yes.
We were supposed to just kind of go over there and get blown up.
But anyway, when the Berlin Wall came down, that kind of became a moot point.
And it became so moot that the Army actually did a little exchange program.
I know a lot of the Big Red One was certainly exchanged to Iraq in the first war.
They took a bunch of them over there, in fact.
The Russians became such friends of ours that they sent our Chief Warrant Officer of our motor pool over to Russia, and they exchanged like a First Sergeant guy to us.
And he would walk around in his Russian uniform and we'd take him to the EM club and we'd talk to him.
He actually had a translator.
And one night we were sitting there, some First Sergeant, Sergeant First Class, we were all sitting there hanging out, and we started talking about what our missions were.
And we said, well, you know, we're supposed to go over there and stop you guys from Invading Europe.
And he just started laughing and laughing and laughing.
I think you were technically a tripwire.
Well, yeah.
And he told us that there was no way that they had the gasoline or the parts to ever be able to do anything like that.
And we just kind of sat there and looked at him and we were like, are you serious?
You know, and we believed him, you know, and it turned out that, you know, I got the impression that our government was just really trying to Well, there was a vast overestimation of Russian or Soviet capabilities, sir, but on the other hand, they really did have all those nuclear weapons, and still do, perched atop ICBMs, multiple reentry things that could destroy America's stem to stern, so... That's very scary, right?
Well, that was... it's very real.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, I don't doubt that.
However, I don't doubt that the government does like to kind of scare us into, you know, being in control of us.
And because that's the way they like to do things, don't you think?
There was a vast exaggeration of Intel then and now.
In fact, that's kind of the subject, you know, we're going to be talking about tonight.
Is the whole 9-11 business and the intelligence failures and, you know, what happened?
Well, ever since the FBI has been saying after 9-11 all these terrorists are coming and they're going to blow stuff up and Wall Street's next on the list, nothing's happened.
And it just makes me wonder, is that for real?
I don't know.
Some people might contend that we've killed the vast majority of them.
You know, that in Afghanistan, for example, following 9-11, we pretty well bombed, strafed, and otherwise Took care of an awful lot of the people that had acted against us.
How many of them?
What percentage?
How many are left?
And what force capabilities they have?
I don't know.
You think it's being overestimated?
Well, I think that the threat to our shores is overestimated.
And I certainly hope that we go and kill all of them that need it.
But I wish that the government would just kind of not try to overestimate and frighten Our civilians, and especially frighten us with, well, we're going to postpone the election and all this other stuff.
That is frightening.
That's really frightening.
Just to hear them talk about that is frightening, isn't it?
That's certainly some sort of civil liberty there that they're trying to do away with, it seems like to me.
I mean, election voting is kind of our right.
Are we going to go and protest?
Well, it is the job of our government to Estimate what might happen, and if something awful happened, I suppose it's their job to have some sort of plan, because we always expect it of them, with regard to what they would do about it.
So if there was a major terrorist action, even as big or bigger than 9-11, I guess they were forced to talk about the possibility of delaying the elections if it really crippled the country.
But I think it would be like last on my list, I mean really last on my list of things I would do if there was a terrible terrorist incident.
It would be, I don't know, it would be like they won.
Right, right.
It seems like they would want to do that despite the terrorists.
They would say we're going to have this election anyway, regardless of what the terrorists have done.
Well, we have this grand policy of not allowing terrorism, supposedly, to affect our national policy in any way, right?
Whether they behead people or whatever they... Hey, I gotta go!
Alright, top of the hour is coming.
We do have a very strong policy about that, right?
So, postponing the elections would seem to be... Oh, I don't know what the right word for it is.
I can only think of scary.
We'll be back.
A boom boom bah A boom boom bah
A boom boom bah A boom boom bah
In the class of 1990 A boom boom bah
In your dream I'll be in this one In this one
In the shadow In the shadow
Baby when you need a smile In the shadow
In the In the shadow
The way you do, you come to me Baby, you see
Who loves you pretty, baby?
Who's gonna help you through the night?
Who loves you pretty, mama?
Who's always there to make it?
Who loves you?
Who's gonna love you, love you?
Who's gonna love you?
Who's gonna love you, love you?
Who's gonna love you?
The first time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
To talk with Art Bell from east to the Rockies, call toll free at 800-825-5033.
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775-727-1222. To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll free at 800-825-5033.
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by calling your in-country Sprint Access number, pressing option 5, and dialing toll-free 800-893-0903.
From coast to coast, and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art
Bell.
It is.
Good evening, everybody.
We're going to talk a little 9-11 tonight, and a lot about security, and what happened.
My guest is James Bamford.
He spent three years in the Navy before attending law school in Boston on the GI Bill.
James is the author of The Bestsellers, Body of Secrets, and The Puzzle Palace.
So I'm sure a lot of you know him.
Very popular books, very much bestsellers.
Has written extensively on national security issues, including investigative cover stories for the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, in addition, formally the Washington investigative reporter for ABC's World News Tonight with Peter Jennings!
And a, I laugh because he'll be out here, and a distinguished visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Bamford continues to champion congressional oversight and public scrutiny of the U.S.
intelligence community.
so we're going to rock and roll with uh... mister bamford in a moment
you know i wonder what it's like writing about uh...
in our nation's uh... most secret agencies uh...
That really is what you've been doing, right, James?
That's right, Art.
When you write continuously, the book, The Puzzle Palace, I know, was, what, a million bestseller?
It had to have been way up there.
Well, it sold a lot.
I'm not sure, I don't think it reached a million, but it sold quite a few and it went A lot of printings and hardbacks.
I think about 10 printings and about 30 printings and paperbacks.
Is it a somewhat dangerous thing to write of these things?
Well, it certainly was with the Puzzle Palace because even though I never worked for NSA, I was just a writer, the agency twice threatened me with prosecution for writing the Puzzle Palace.
They did?
Yeah, they threatened me for prosecution the first time because I wouldn't give a document back that the Justice Department had originally released to me under the Freedom of Information Act, and then they demanded it back.
Now, wait a minute.
If you get something under the Freedom of Information Act, it's yours.
You requested it.
It was sent to you willingly by the government, right?
That's my view of the situation.
And they demanded the document back.
Well, they insisted I give it back.
They said they had reclassified it.
They had declassified it from Top Secret Umbra, which is a covert of Top Secret, and released it to me.
And then about a year later, the Reagan administration came in.
It was originally released to me by the Carter administration.
And then when the Reagan administration came in, they demanded I give it back because they said they reclassified it as top secret.
So I refused to give it back and they threatened prosecution.
Are you able to discuss the contents of it?
Sure, because I quoted from it in the book and I still have it and I never gave it back.
But it was a document that was from the Justice Department that was basically a summary of what was A criminal investigation of the entire National Security Agency, looking into illegal spying, eavesdropping, and so forth.
They actually, it was I think the first and maybe the only time that the Justice Department conducted a secret investigation, criminal investigation, into an entire agency where senior officials were read their Miranda rights, and they came up with about 20 different Uh, areas where they could prosecute NSA, but then they decided, uh, not to because it would have revealed too many secrets at the trial.
I had heard about the, um, um, investigation and I submitted a Free Information Act request for it.
And they redacted some of the, uh, information, but then they sent me, um, about 300 pages worth of material on, on the investigation.
What were the high points of what you did get?
Well, the NSA had done a lot of illegal spying during the 1960s and early 70s.
Among the things they did was, without getting any kind of a warrant, which is in violation of the law, they eavesdropped on pay telephones and Grand Central Station.
All this was without touching the phones.
It was just by eavesdropping the communications as they went through the air.
I thought this was kind of an ongoing thing anyway, that we had this colossal program with a giant computer listening for key words and all the rest of that?
Well, we do.
We do have it now.
The difference is, in 1978 they passed a new law called the FISA Act, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, where they sort of codified what NSA can do and what it can't do.
And that was a period of time when they can't?
Or shouldn't?
Well, now it says what they can do and what they can't do, and they can eavesdrop on certain domestic U.S.
communications, and they can't eavesdrop on others.
Before 1975, NSA believed that its activities were illegal.
In other words, they didn't have to comply with the regular U.S.
law, which is kind of amazing.
Well, there may be other areas in which they don't have to comply with regular U.S.
law.
Have you ever been concerned for your life?
No, I'm not.
I've just not sort of built that way.
I don't think I'm not really paranoid.
And it worked out well that the NSA and the Justice Department decided to not prosecute me because my attorney and I kept sending a letter back to the Justice Department saying, under the executive order on secrecy, it says that once a document's been declassified, it can't be reclassified.
But then President Reagan changed that executive order on secrecy to say once a document has been declassified, it can be reclassified.
But there's a legal principle known as ex post facto.
In other words, you can't prosecute somebody for doing something that wasn't a crime when the person did it.
Left me alone after that.
I see.
Alright.
So you've done a lot of investigation into the whole 9-11 affair.
I take it are general intelligence failures, and that's been the track you've been on.
Why?
Well, I just finished a new book.
It came out last month.
It's called A Pretext for War.
Yes.
9-1-1, Iraq, and the abuse of U.S.
intelligence agencies.
So I spent quite a bit of time, about a year and a half, Two years working on that and looking into the whole picture of the U.S.
intelligence community from just before September 11th to the whole war in Iraq.
So I spent a lot of time just seeing how the intelligence community was working during that period of time and the influence that the Bush administration had on the U.S.
intelligence community.
I suppose the concept being that the Bush administration was looking, fishing, doing anything it could to get a pretext for war.
Well, it went into, the Bush administration came into office with a predetermined attitude, basically, to attack Iraq one way or another.
Why?
For several reasons.
First of all, George W. Bush himself had a enormous amount of anger and hatred for Saddam Hussein, largely because of a report from the Justice Department that he was given that said that Saddam Hussein not only planned to kill his father, which was widely reported, but the report actually said that he had planned to kill virtually his entire family, including his
His mother, his father, his wife, his two brothers, and their wives.
Because all those people were on the trip, the same trip to Kuwait.
They were all going to be on the stage where the bomb was supposed to go off.
And they caught the, according to the Justice Department, there is some doubt among many people that this was a real threat.
But the Justice Department report said that the bomber was caught before he got to the stage where he's going to blow everybody up, and the only person really that didn't go on the trip was George W. Bush, who was busy with his baseball activities in Texas.
So he had this, and he said numerous times that he was going to, that he had an enormous amount of anger for Saddam Hussein.
His senior officials, who ended up going to the Defense Department Had numerous times suggested that the U.S.
take out Saddam Hussein or go to war with Iraq as far back as 1996.
Alright, well their reasons had to be considerably less personal.
Oh, they were ideological.
These were the neoconservatives who had all along wanted to get rid of Saddam Hussein and overthrow The governor of Iraq for their own ideological purposes, which had little to do with weapons of mass destruction and a lot to do with personal reasons and ideological reasons for... Wait, wait, wait.
Personal reasons and what?
And ideological reasons.
Ideological reasons.
Well, then why not attack North Korea?
Why not Cuba?
I mean, there are many, many, many countries around the world we have ideological great disagreement with, right?
Well, these people had fixated on Iraq from the very beginning.
They were less concerned with North Korea and Iran.
I mean, the very first, this came out in the book written by the former Secretary of the Treasury under Bush, Paul O'Neill.
In his book, he writes about the very first National Security Council meeting in the Bush administration, which took place on January 30th, 2001.
And there were only two items on the agenda during that first meeting, and number one was to become closer to Ariel Sharon and Israel, and to Look for ways to basically attack Iraq.
They laid out a map of Iraq and they had the director of the CIA, George Tenet, come in with the overhead imagery of Iraq.
That was their two fixations from the very beginning, Israel and Iraq.
Why in the moments after 9-11?
You're saying the entire country was protected by just a very few jet fighters in locations that were very far indeed from New York and Washington.
Is that true?
That's true.
The closest planes that... First of all, there were only 14 jets in the entire United States that were on alert on the morning of September 11th.
And they were at seven different bases around the United States.
How unusual would that be from September 10th?
9th, 8th, any other day?
It was exactly the same.
After the end of the Cold War, the U.S.
deactivated much of NORAD, which was responsible for those aircraft, and they had this sort of token amount, just 14 aircraft around the country at seven different bases.
And ironically, of those seven bases, None of them were near either Washington or New York City.
Both of them were, the two closest, were 200 miles away from each city.
So it's very ironic that the two, the largest city in the U.S.
and the most important city in the U.S., were left largely undefended.
But you're telling me that was the norm, right?
That's right.
That's the way it was after the Cold War.
The threat from the Soviet Union decreased enormously, and the threat that bombers are going to be heading towards the United States from the Soviet Union was a very remote possibility, and that's the principal reason that the fighters were... Alright, but the conspiratorialists out there who are saying that the United States was particularly standing down on that day are wrong.
Is that correct?
Well, as far as my research goes, they're wrong.
I mean, the information that I've seen and the people I've talked to was that the decrease in the amount of protection that the U.S.
had predated September 11th by a considerable amount of months or years anyway, and was predicated on the A belief that the U.S.
is no longer really in much danger of a bomber attack from the Soviet Union or from Russia or any other country.
As a matter of curiosity, James, how many jets might we have found on duty near those cities, say, today?
Today, I think there's 3,000 around the country that are capable of taking off on a very short notice.
And I think they're considerably closer, such as Andrews Air Force Base near Washington and other bases near New York City, such as Atlantic City.
There were aircraft ready to go at those bases on September 11th, and in actuality they did take off and were in the air at the time.
The problem was, those aircraft had no armaments on it.
No armaments?
No, because these aircraft, the ones that were at the bases very near Washington, D.C.
and New York City, were just doing routine exercises that morning.
And is it true that some volunteered to commit suicide by crashing into one of these jetliners?
Is that true?
Yes, as a matter of fact, several pilots um... volunteer to do that they they would have done that at the very last resort a number of the pilots were discussing uh... how they could bring down the aircraft without committing suicide one had some uh... target ammunition which is basically just blank uh... bullets and they were thinking of firing some of those another one was thinking of trying to uh... uh...
Break part of the wing of the passenger jet off with his fighter without seriously damaging his fighter.
So there was a number of discussions of how to do this without committing suicide.
But in the end, if it came to it, a number of pilots did say that they would commit the final.
That's incredible.
Where did you glean this information?
Did this come from military sources or radio traffic?
Or how did you find out about this?
No, these were interviews that, well I did several interviews and they were interviews by other people with a number of pilots and there were statements that the pilots gave to the different investigating bodies that looked into September 11th.
So the information is there and it's on the official record.
Alright.
I want to address this again.
There are a lot of conspiratorialists, of course, about 9-11, as there probably will be beyond our lifetimes.
You know, it's going to be conspiracy material from now until doomsday, probably.
But there's a group out there that are so angry at me because I have merely said that I do not believe With all that's in me, that the United States government attacked itself, which is what they believe.
And then they have little websites up that say, Art Bell, burn in hell.
And then, you know, the story of how I'm not willing to accept their point of view that we did ourselves in.
I'm sure we're going to find lax security and other problems that occurred.
But in fact, you do not believe, do you, that we did this to ourselves?
No, I'm not a conspiracy believer.
I don't write about conspiracies if I don't find the information out, and I'm not convinced the information is true.
I don't put it down on paper.
I haven't found anything to support any of those conspiracy theories, but I've found a great deal of information that goes counter to those conspiracy theories.
And basically says what?
That we just had very bad security?
We had relaxed too much?
When you get to the bottom line, what do you say?
Well, the bottom line was we had very poor security.
All our NORAD forces were looking outward and not looking inward.
It was based on a traditional concept of how the United States would be attacked by foreign Bombers or foreign aircraft heading into the United States, not planes taking off from Boston or Washington, D.C.
or Newark Airport.
It was simply that the terrorists outsmarted the U.S.
people who weren't very far forward thinking.
We simply hadn't planned for an attack from within, as it were, right?
No, we never planned for it.
Very poor thinking on the U.S.
part.
All right.
Hold it right there.
It don't come easy.
You know it don't come easy.
It don't come easy.
You know it don't come easy.
Got to pay your dues if you want to see the blues.
Don't come easy You don't have to shout
You can even play Romeo and Juliet
All together in eternity Romeo and Juliet
40,000 men are waving every day Romeo and Juliet
40,000 men are waving every day Repeat my name
Every 40,000 coming every day It can be like they are
Come on baby Don't fear the reaper
Baby take my hand Don't fear the reaper
We'll be able to fly Don't fear the reaper
you To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
The first time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll free at 800-825-5033.
line is area code 775-727-1222. To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll-free
at 800-825-5033. From west of the Rockies, call 800-618-8255.
International callers may reach Art by calling your in-country Sprint Access number,
pressing option 5 and dialing toll-free 800-893-0903.
From coast to coast and worldwide on the Internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
Top of the darkness from the high deserts, I'm Art Bell.
My guest is James Bamford.
And we're talking about what the U.S.
did and did not know prior to and then following 9-11.
This should be a very interesting program, so... The old saying?
touches, not that dial.
We are crawling up very quickly on an election.
Politics is hot stuff right now.
What James is saying is hot stuff, and it's going to get hotter as the program goes on.
So I suppose it might be important for us to understand if he has an agenda.
James, are you a Bush basher?
Are you radically anti-Bush administration?
What are your politics like?
Well, I don't particularly like the Bush administration after having spent two years working on this book and finding all the things that went on behind the scenes.
So, no, I'm not crazy about the Bush administration, but I've written three books and worked for a number of news organizations, and I don't put my politics into my writing.
If you read the Puzzle Palace or Body of Secrets, they're critical about Democrats as well as Republicans, and they're favorable about certain Republicans and certain Democrats, so it's fairly apolitical.
You don't think a pretext for war, then, is colored with your own personal politics?
No, it's really very objective.
There's not an awful lot of opinion in there.
There's a lot of facts in there about Whether a document was real or not, or whether what the President alleged Iraq had was true or not, and so forth.
So it's basically a lot of facts, which is basically what I write.
Alright, let's go back for a second to the President's version, for example, of how he found out the attacks cannot possibly be true.
The way he found out, you're saying, can't be true.
What about the way the President found out about 9-11 cannot be true?
Well, the President has given a particular version of how he found out about September 11th, the actual attacks that morning.
He's given a number of addresses, public addresses, and actually was on his webpage, the White House webpage, this version which was all the same.
The version is that as soon as his limousine arrived at the school in Sarasota, Florida, address the uh... second graders uh... his uh... handlers took him into this room and uh... game of uh... basically a little bit of a update on what what it taken place at the same time he said that there was a television on in that room and he said he saw a uh... a plane hit the uh... world trade center replay i guess of the of the uh... plane hitting the world trade center and he said that was a uh...
A terrible bit of flying by the pilot, basically.
In other words, assuming it was an accident.
Well, of course, a lot of people assumed it was an accident when they first saw it, until the second plane hit.
Sure, but the problem was he couldn't possibly have seen the first plane hit the World Trade Center because that was never on television until at least that night.
The only image of a plane hitting the World Trade Center was the second plane hitting the World Trade Center.
There was no video of the first plane hitting the World Trade Center available at that time, because it was only taken by a French camera crew that was working on the streets below, and they took that video, and that video was not available, certainly.
Why do you think the White House would misrepresent how the President found out about 9-11?
You know, that's curious.
I've never figured out why they would say that.
There's a couple explanations here.
The president could have been telling the truth that he was in the room and he did see a plane hit the World Trade Center, which would have coincided to about the same time he would have been in that room.
The only problem was it would have had to be the second plane hitting the second tower.
And you would think the President of the United States would have been aware of it far before that?
Well, the second plane hit shortly after 9 o'clock, which is around the time he went into the classroom.
The problem is he couldn't possibly have seen the first plane hit the World Trade Center, which is what he said, because he went into the classroom shortly after 9 o'clock and that video was not available until at least that night.
Gotcha.
But again, that begs the question of why they would attempt to deceive us about how we found out.
I have no idea.
That's a question that somebody should ask the President.
I certainly know everything that happened that morning from my own perspective, and I know most people that remember that morning just like they remember the morning or the afternoon that John F. Kennedy was killed.
Actually, that's exactly how I recall it, and I'm sure most others.
Which would make a person wonder why the President couldn't remember exactly the order of events that took place that morning.
So I have no idea, but I'm just saying that the events that he had on his website, I don't know if it's still there, and the events that he told a number of audiences afterwards just doesn't fit with the facts.
You're able to tell us what actually happened in the White House as it appeared the White House was about to get hit by a plane?
Sure, there were a lot of eyewitnesses to that and there was a lot of public record in terms of what happened that morning inside the White House.
There was extreme chaos.
Nobody knew exactly what was happening and there were a lot of reports that the White House was going to be Hit next and then there were reports that a plane was heading towards the White House and it was getting very very close.
They were measuring the distance of 100 miles, 50 miles, 30 miles, 20 miles and so forth and there was an alarm that went off in the White House, an audio alarm that was a voice actually, that was a repetitive voice saying evacuate the White House immediately, evacuate the White House immediately, people from the White House Came charging out, the Secret Service grabbed the Vice President, rushed him down into the White House bomb shelter, and that's the same place that Conway Rice ran down into.
So there was a lot of chaos that took place right around that same time.
Alright, I had a caller, James, just to change gears for a second, in the first hour, who said, look, it's pretty well, I think, known that we overestimated, intelligence-wise, the capability of the Soviet Union.
He's one of the soldiers who was over there as a trip-warrant near the Fulda Gap.
And he said, why shouldn't we imagine that they're overestimating the strength and the capability of our enemy right now?
And that we pretty well decimated them in Afghanistan, and that we're currently overestimating the threat to the United States.
How do you feel about that?
Well, I agree.
I think that there's an enormous amount of hype, enormous amount of fear-mongering by the press, by virtually everybody.
And the threat is far less than most other threats.
I mean, the odds of contracting Lung cancer or colon cancer or getting hit by a car or being shot by a handgun are far greater than any threat from terrorists.
So we're putting enormous amounts of money, enormous amounts of manpower to protect ourselves from a threat that is really relatively small.
On the entire planet last year.
The total number of people killed in terrorist incidents, according to the State Department, was a little more than 600 people.
And prior to September 11th, the average number of Americans killed in international terrorist incidents, I think, was nine or something like that.
Nine people.
And after September 11th, it hasn't been virtually none in terms of in the United States.
We've got an enormous amount of money that's draining our treasury that could be going to helping people who are going to be dying of things that are really going to affect the American public.
Cancer, heart disease, AIDS, you name it.
Car accidents, gun, handguns, whatever.
So those are where Most people are really going to die.
Terrorist incidents are far down the list in terms of dangers to the United States.
There are many talking about a chemical or possible biological, even a nuclear attack on the U.S.
You don't rate those chances as particularly high, huh?
No, I don't.
And we went through this during the 1950s with this hype and this fear-mongering over a Soviet attack and people building Bomb shelters and all that, and duck and cover in school and so forth.
Look, our foreign policy is driving the terrorists.
If you want to prevent terrorists, we're not going to do it through the intelligence community.
Our intelligence community is not designed for this kind of war.
It never has been, and I'll guarantee you it's not going to be in the future.
Anybody that thinks that the intelligence community is going to prevent terrorism doesn't know much about the intelligence community.
Not very useful.
Speaking of the intelligence community, during 9-11, as it went on, you're saying that our top spy agencies virtually shut the doors and evacuated their buildings.
Is that true?
Well, it's absolutely true.
I was amazed to find that out.
I was actually shocked, having written about the intelligence community since at least the late 70s and continually from that period.
This is one of the most Amazing things that I have heard.
It's not that I necessarily blame them, but I do think that it was extremely surprising to find out that soon after the attacks, both the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, the two largest and most important intelligence agencies, both had a mass evacuation, sent their people home.
Now, you couldn't imagine that taking place after Pearl Harbor.
Pearl Harbor gets attacked and the first thing the intelligence community does is send everybody home.
Again, do you have any motive for that?
I mean, you would think the exact opposite.
So why did they send them home?
Well, they were afraid of being the next target on the list.
So both NSA, well, CIA sent their people home and they kept a skeleton crew of core employees But everybody else was sent home.
And at NSA, it was the same thing.
They completely evacuated the buildings, sent most people home.
They kept, I think, a core group of people that they put in some of the lower buildings.
And even the next day, they didn't have people come in the next day.
So it was amazing to me that the first response of the intelligence community was to evacuate.
There was recent news, which we also talked about in the first hour, of a plan, I'm sure you've heard about it, one in which U.S.
elections would be called off or postponed should a terrorist attack occur.
Have you heard about that?
Oh, sure, yeah.
That was one of the contingency plans that was dreamed up.
Pretty scary stuff.
And you've got another one.
You're telling us, are you not, that There was some sort of secret program to have some civilians and a cabinet secretary or something take over our entire government in case of massive destruction of some sort?
What was that?
Well, this is what's among the most amazing things that I found that I put in the book, which was the contingency plans in case of emergency in the United States, and they go way back to the Eisenhower administration.
One of the most amazing things that I found was that the Eisenhower administration had come up with this plan where, in case of massive nuclear attack on the United States, the Eisenhower administration had this contingency plan where there were various people around the country, civilians, who were going to be designated as heads of major government offices.
Secretly.
And they had this secret letter from the President.
And so in case Washington was attacked, they were supposed to, according to the letter that they received, supposed to find their way somehow to Washington or the place, wherever the alternate government was going to be set up, and take control of one of the major offices.
Well, I guess, though, even though there is a constitutional plan laid out, I take it the plan you're describing right now would only take effect if the constitutional secession didn't occur as it should, or those who would have taken part in that would be dead.
Is that correct?
That's right.
That was the plan.
It was assumed that on a massive nuclear attack, there was a good chance that neither the President or Vice President Or any of the other members of the, uh, on the chain of command of President Pro Tem of the Senate and so forth, uh, would not get away in time or their alternative headquarters would also be, uh, blown up.
And this was the alternative plan.
What was very ironic about this, uh, Eisenhower plan was that, uh, for some reason, I guess just by oversight, they forgot to tell the incoming Kennedy administration about this.
And so the Kennedy administration for a number of months, After they took office, had no idea that there were these people out there with these letters from the White House designating them to take over agencies, and they just found out about it by accident.
I see.
Did they request the letters back?
You know, ironically, anything that happened from that point on is still classified.
And I have no idea.
I assume that they requested the letters back.
Maybe designated their own people, but it's, again, among the many secrets that the government has right now.
Well, yes, but hard as it is to contemplate, one does have to imagine that such a plan really, amazing as it is to think about, such a plan should be there because that's a contingency that could occur, couldn't it?
Right, I'm not criticizing it so much as just saying I was amazed to find that it did exist.
I think it's debatable whether that's efficient or whether that's useful or whatever.
I'm not sure which side I'd come down on.
I'm just kind of amazed that it's out there and that these plans were devised.
Well, if a nuclear attack occurred in Washington or a biological attack, it's conceivable that most of our leaders could be killed, right?
That's true.
That's one of the things we faced on September 11th.
The fact that a number of the contingency places that were set up during the Cold War, such as a place for Congress to go and hide out during a nuclear emergency, during the 1990s have been turned into tourist attractions.
One of them was at the Greenbrier Hotel in, I think it was in West Virginia or the southern part of Virginia, really out in the Rural part of the state, and there was a large facility built underneath that hotel with huge bomb-proof doors.
I think they were like 30-ton doors or something like that, and a place for all of Congress to evacuate to.
But during the early 1990s, it was discovered by the press and written about, and then eventually sort of deactivated.
Since then, it had become a tourist attraction for people that went to the hotel.
So when the September 11th attacks occurred, Congress had no place to go to hide out.
And what happened was the leaders, a handful of the senior leaders of Congress, were sent to another location, a place called Mount Weather, to hide out.
Yes, I am familiar with Mount Weather, and it sounded like this other program you described was kind of a continuation of the Mount Weather psychology.
That's right, exactly.
And these plans are out there now.
They've probably been changed since September 11th.
It's just one of those curiosities, the fact that the government has these very bizarre but very necessary plans to have a continuation of the government during a national emergency.
Okay.
If there's no indication to you that our own government did it to itself, as the major conspiracy people want to say, then I don't know.
What about the possibility that the U.S.
government knew it was going to happen?
Is there any indication, any evidence that you've gleaned that you can name that indicates the U.S.
government knew the attacks were coming?
Well, I mean, there's a lot of...
Evidence from the summer of 2001 and before that the government should have had an indication that something like this was going to be coming at some point.
Not exactly this specific event on this specific day.
But that is a very important point, though, because that's what's said.
Hold on.
James Bamford, author of A Pretext for War, and surely we're going to talk about that pretext if there was one.
Body of Secrets, also The Puzzle Palace, he's a very prolific author writing about the, the no such agency guys.
You know the guys, right?
Or maybe you don't, and you don't want to.
It's too late now, and you're here at all hours.
It's too late now, and the gods still want you.
And I'm here, trying to take a chance.
That's not us.
Be it sight, sound, smell, or touch, there's something inside that we need so much.
The sight of a touch, or the scent of a sound, or the strength of an oak when roots deep in the ground.
The wonder of flowers to be covered and then to burst up through tarmac to the sun again.
Or to fly to the sun without burning a wing.
To lie in a meadow and hear the grass sing.
To have all these things in our memories.
And they used her to count us to five!
Yeah!
Five!
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From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
Top of the darkness there, everybody.
I'm Art Bell.
My guest is James Bamford.
This is interesting stuff.
In a moment we're going to ask him exactly what we knew, who knew, who knew what, before 9-11 happened.
Once again, James Bamford.
So, James, simply, in your opinion, or with facts you care to cite, who knew what, when, before 9-11?
Well, the U.S.
government had a number of indications that something like this was going to happen.
I thought it was very disingenuous that Condoleezza Rice said that there was no idea that the That we could be attacked by the air this way because there were a number of incidents before that that should have shed light on this was a possibility anyway.
If you go back to 1972 for example, there was a guy named Samuel Beck who was very angry at President Nixon and he went to Baltimore Washington International Airport And with a handgun, boarded one of the commercial jet, I think it was American Airlines plane, and with the intention of hijacking the plane and then crashing it into the White House.
Before it took off, he actually got into a gunfight with a number of, I think, FBI or whoever, police force, and he was killed.
But you're saying just based on the possibility that this had already been attempted, it should have been considered?
Well, sure.
The Secret Service knew that this person was going to hijack a commercial plane and crash it into the White House.
All right.
What about hard intelligence, though, about the bin Laden organization?
Did we know they were planning this?
Yeah.
One of the things that was discovered in the late 90s was a plan that was on a computer owned by Ramsey Youssef, who was the person who actually blew up the first World Trade Center, was one of the key people behind the first bombing for the World Trade Center.
And one of the things on his computer that they found was this Project Bojinka, which was a plan to blow up simultaneously over the Pacific 11 different commercial airliners.
At the same time, they found out that he also had a plan that involved, again, hijacking a commercial airliner and crashing it into the Uh, into the CIA building in Washington.
Um, at another point, uh, somebody had hijacked a, um, not hijacked, but had, uh, uh, stolen a private plane, um, back in the mid 1990s.
And, uh, in the middle of the night, I think it was like 2 in the morning, had crashed it into the White House.
Uh, so the idea that somebody could take a plane Uh, and crash it into the White House or hijack a commercial airliner and crash it into the White House or another building in Washington.
Should not have been a surprise to anybody.
Okay, that, that being said, it's sort of anecdotal after the fact kind of stuff.
Um, a lot has happened around aircraft to be sure.
Um, what I'm asking is, did they have specific knowledge about, uh, September 11th?
Specific knowledge that that attack was coming?
As far as I know, nobody in the U.S.
government had any knowledge whatsoever that this was going to take place.
If you look at September 11th on that morning, everybody was totally caught by surprise.
The Director of Central Intelligence was having a leisurely breakfast at the St.
Regis Hotel in downtown Washington with an old friend.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was on a plane headed for Europe.
The number two person who was in charge of the military was completely oblivious to what was going on.
He was in a meeting on Capitol Hill and didn't know what was going on until long after the fact.
So everybody, President Bush was sitting in a second-grade classroom in Sarasota, Florida, and even after he was told, he sat there for seven minutes and did nothing.
No, nobody, as far as I know, nobody in the U.S.
government had any idea of what was going to take place on September 11th.
You know something about how the terrorists set up their base camp?
Yeah, it's very ironic that the largest intelligence agency in the United States and the most expensive and most sophisticated intelligence agency in the entire world, the National Security Agency, agency that specializes in eavesdropping on terrorists around the world and Looking for indications of terrorism around the world.
It's located in Laurel, Maryland on the Fort Meade, which is a military base.
And one of the major ironies here was that one of the places that the terrorists decided to set up their base was just a couple miles away in the same town in Laurel, Maryland.
Well, that's odd all by itself that they would choose to get that close to the enemy.
Well, if they even knew it was there, I mean... That's a good point.
It could have been just a coincidence that they picked that town.
They wanted a town away from downtown Washington where they weren't near any of the police or intelligence, and whether they knew it or not, they were only two miles away from the largest intelligence agency in the country.
So, there's this strange irony that while they were there, they probably passed numerous times on the street, In their car, NSA people that were on their way to headquarters looking for the terrorists, and lo and behold, they were within virtual feet of them.
They shopped in the same supermarket, they went to the same gymnasiums or health clubs or whatever, and on the morning of, actually it was the day before, September 11th, on September 10th, they left The motel they were staying in, the Valencia Motel in downtown Laurel, and drove to another motel very near the Dulles Airport, where they went to catch the plane that morning that ended up taking off from Dulles Airport and crashing into the Pentagon.
There are many who say that a plane never crashed into the Pentagon.
Again, the same conspiracy people say that, and sure enough, I've looked at pictures of the Pentagon impact point, and I've never seen pieces of what I would call an airplane, and they try to say why there weren't.
Have you investigated this at all, this claim?
Well, everything that I've been able to find from interviewing people, from looking at records and documents and so forth, especially talking to people.
Um, I quote a number of people in the book that are just average everyday people.
One of them happens to have been, I think, a Catholic priest who was in his car and saw the plane crash, I'm sorry, cross the highway and crash into the building.
And why would he lie about it?
Okay, all right.
I mean, but, you know, one thing about the conspiracy theories is that I think to some degree they are healthy because I think people should be very skeptical about what the government says.
You need a degree of skepticism because a lot of the things the government says turns out not to be true.
And so I think skepticism is very healthy in people.
Well, there's a very large, sometimes not so large, but some element of truth in most lies.
That's what makes them very good lies, right?
Oh, that's right.
There's an element of truth in a lot of lies and an element of Untruth and a lot of things that we think are true.
Still in all, I would think such outlandish claims as we bombed ourself or an airplane didn't hit the Pentagon or whatever it is of that category would sort of hurt the kind of work that you've been doing, wouldn't it?
Well, that's why I don't put it in my books.
I don't put supposition or Hypotheticals in there.
If I don't have the facts that back it up, I don't put it in the book.
That's why in three books that I've written, I've never had any really major errors.
I mean, there may be one little error here, a little error there, but certainly not a major error like a plane that, as I said, crashed into a building that didn't crash into a building.
Gotcha.
Gotcha.
All right.
Your book is called A Pretext for War, and prior to the war, I think clearly, most people would agree, the main pretext being forwarded was weapons of mass destruction.
That was the pre-war pretext, right?
That and the close connection between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda.
Let's stick with that one for a second.
How much indication is there that there was a close connection at this point?
Virtually none.
Every single source that the government relied on for that has turned out to be phony.
And the most recent one, as a matter of fact, was in the New York Times yesterday and it's in the Washington Post today, today being Sunday, is the fact that One of the people that the government relied on very heavily was this person, supposedly high-level Al-Qaeda person, that was captured in December of 2001.
Yes.
And he was interrogated, and he said that there was this close connection.
Well, turns out he made it all up.
So the government found that out later, that he made all this up.
There were numerous people that the government relied on.
These were other people, such as defectors, that were provided to the government by this fellow by the name of Ahmed Chalabi, who was a very close associate of many of the Republicans in the White House and the Pentagon.
At one point, he was the odds-on favorite to be installed as president of Iraq, wasn't he?
Well, for a decade, the core Republicans, the neoconservatives, Running the Pentagon and have major policy positions in the Bush administration had two plans.
One was to get rid of Saddam Hussein, and the second part of the plan was to replace him with Ahmed Chalabi, who's going to be friendly to the United States and recognize Israel also.
So that was one of the key reasons they wanted him in there.
The only problem was, nobody in Iraq had ever heard of him, and nobody in Iraq wanted any part of him.
Is there any indication that he might have headed a disinformation campaign of that scale?
I mean, having defectors and that sort of thing, telling false stories, that would have been quite a plan, and get the U.S.
to believe there was a connection between Al-Qaeda and And Iraq and Saddam, was that a massed effort to get us to believe that, or was it just one of those comedy of error things?
No, it was looking like it was deliberate.
Ahmed Chalabi had one goal, and that was to become president of Iraq.
And there was very little that he would let get in his way to stop that, and it's looking more and more like All along, he had been doing anything he could to get the U.S.
to attack Iraq, to tell the United States officials anything that they wanted to hear, in order to get them to have this war, which he was very successful at.
But I mean, was he also orchestrating disinformation at the defector level, injecting that kind of information, is that what you believe?
That's what it looks like.
Right now, the problem is that the There hasn't been a really good investigation of this.
There's this Senate Intelligence Committee that came out with a report on the WMD issue, and there's two parts to that.
The parts they came out with didn't examine this whole issue of Bachman-Chalabi, and they're supposed to be examining it now.
It's very political because they don't want this, the Republicans don't want this to come out before the election.
Because it's going to be very damaging.
But that's really a critical part of this investigation.
What did Chalabi know, and what was it that he told the U.S.
government, and how much of it was true?
Well, I've always been a little confused about the WMD thing, because after all, they did demonstrate the use of weapons of mass destruction against the Kurds.
The world well understood and knew that.
It would be natural to imagine they still had these kinds of weapons, wouldn't it?
Or would it not?
Well, I don't think... I wrote actually three op-ed pieces in August, September, and October of 2002, six months or more before the war, saying that from all the intelligence people I've talked to, and that's kind of what I've been doing for a long time, Intelligence, writing about intelligence.
None of the people I talked to said there were any indications that they still had any weapons of mass destruction.
And I was talking to sort of middle-level people, the working-level people at the agency.
There was a big difference between what they did with the Kurds in the 1980s and what took place during the 1990s after the Gulf War.
The UN went in there and destroyed, spent years and years destroying virtually everything that they could find in terms of any kind of weapons of mass destruction.
So that there was really no indication that Iraq still had a lot of weapons of mass destruction.
The key thing was that prior to the war, Iraq had agreed to allow all these inspectors to go into Iraq.
And we had more intelligence agents on the ground in Iraq prior to the war than we've ever had anywhere else on Earth.
We had inspectors crawling all over Iraq.
Every suspicious site that the United States had, the inspectors could go and take a look at.
We had U-2s flying overhead, taking very close imagery of Iraq.
We had more intelligence collection there than ever.
It's insane.
To me, it was insane that you would actually Pull those people out.
You have a country that you feel is an enemy country, and the country's crawling with spies.
That's what you'd want.
You don't want them pulled out.
So we pull all these people out, and now all these American soldiers are getting killed, and we find out that there never was anything there.
There are some who claim that they were there and they were secretly transported into Syria.
Have you looked into that?
There's no indication of that.
We have very good high-level imagery from satellites, from planes, from U-2s, from all kinds of aircraft, as well as signals intelligence.
And there's not one indication, not one picture, not one intercept, not one human source, Who can ever verify that any of those weapons were taken?
Now, if you're taking all that weaponry into Syria, at the same time the United States is crawling all over the place with people on the ground and spy planes in the air and satellites and so forth, you're going to get an indication of that taking place.
There's got to be one picture of some place of that.
One signal intercept.
And the U.S.
hasn't been able to come up with one, so no, I don't believe that's possible.
So you think then that Iraq's experimentation with weapons of mass destruction ended with the destruction of those weapons with the U.N.
after the Kurd thing, right?
After the Kurds, that took place in the 1980s.
Yes.
Gulf War, Iraq obviously lost the Gulf War and the U.N.
went in there to dismantle all the weapons of mass destruction and there was all kinds of imagery, I mean not imagery, all kinds of photography and video of them blowing up all these things.
I covered a lot of that for ABC in the 1990s.
How much did they find?
Well, they found lots of it, but they blew it all up.
There's all kinds of video of them blowing all these things up.
And after that, it was very clear that Saddam Hussein was far more interested in palaces of mass luxury than weapons of mass destruction.
Yes.
Suppose the President had come out and said, We're going to war with Iraq, and we're doing it because we need strategic bases there, because there's oil there, and because this is a brutal dictator.
Would that have been a pretext for war?
No, that would have been the truth.
Oh, it would have been the truth?
Well, if that's what he said.
Using the WMD as a Well, if he had said what I just repeated, do you think that would have been the truth?
If that's what he believed at the time, that's why they were sending that in, then that would have been the truth.
The problem is, he never would have gotten the vote from Congress by saying that.
I mean, people are... Most people in Congress right now are saying that if they had simply had the President say, They wanted to go in there to stop him from, you know, to have a regime change.
Alright, hold it right there.
That wouldn't have been enough.
I got you.
Hold it right there.
We'll be right back.
I'm Art Bell.
Say it again!
What is it good for?
Absolutely!
Listen to me!
I despise!
Cause it means destruction!
Of innocent lives!
War means tears!
To thousands of mothers left!
When their sons go off to fight!
And who's there to lose?
I said, war!
Good God, y'all!
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing!
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A Pretext for War.
I like that title.
That's the title of James Bam... James Bamford's book, A Pretext for War.
I like the whole phrase, because I've wondered about what our pretext for war was, as you know, for a very long time.
we'll get back into it hot and heavy in a moment i'm sure that all of you
certainly listening tonight can remember back to the iraq war as our tanks in our
armor Dashed across the Iraqi desert toward Baghdad.
An incredible affair.
It was absolutely an incredible affair.
But I remember that a bunch of us got together talking and we were discussing weapons of mass destruction at that time.
It was quite plainly thought that if they did have them, and we were certainly led to believe they did, they were going to use them.
If they faced probable extinction, and of course that is the way it turned out, that with their backs up against the wall they would use whatever in the hell they had against us, and of course we were at that point, you remember, kind of surprised that they had not done so.
And then people began to speculate there might not be weapons of mass destruction at all, and some of my friends and others, you know, the conversation around the table was, well, hey, you know what?
If we don't find any weapons of mass destruction, we damn well better put some there.
A lot of people said that, James, but it wouldn't seem that we did that.
Tempting as it must have been for, you know, the top security echelons in our country to prove themselves right, they didn't plant anything.
No, I think that would have been very difficult for them to do and get away with it.
There would have been far too many people who would have had to know what was going on.
It wasn't exactly like a police officer planting a pistol on a defendant or something.
You have to get all kinds of weapons over to Iraq and hide it someplace without anybody knowing we're doing it, which would have Involved a great number of people and would have been virtually impossible.
So the UN was about to be back or back.
I mean, they really did or were about to get access.
And of course, there was last minute access as they saw the war coming without question.
There was access, you know, come on in, look at it all.
I remember that.
And we didn't take advantage of that either.
I mean, clearly, we wanted to have This war, and since the title of your book is a pretext for war, what do you think the real pretext for war was?
Not the one that they fumbled around with trying to get us to understand, and we still can't, but I mean the real one.
Why did we do this?
Well, there are several reasons.
One of them, as I mentioned before, George Bush had his own personal reasons for going after Saddam Hussein.
The fact that the Justice Department came up with a report indicating that Saddam had ordered an assassin into Kuwait to kill the entire family on a visit.
That's one reason.
I know, but that's not anywhere near a sufficient reason to send young men and women to die.
Of course not.
Of course not, no.
And one of the other reasons was that A number of the key people who were the architects for this war, back in 1996, actually planned the same war for Benjamin Netanyahu.
They were working as consultants for Benjamin Netanyahu, who had just become Prime Minister of Israel.
And they came up with this plan called a Clean Break, which involved replacing Saddam Hussein with a ruler who would be friendly to both the United States and Israel, and recognize Israel.
The person would have been Ahmed Chalabi.
And the planners were a number of officials, neoconservatives, who became senior officials in the Bush Pentagon.
One of them was Douglas Fyfe, who was the number three person in the Pentagon and one of the key planners for the war.
Another one was Richard Perle, who was head of the Defense Policy Board, which was a very powerful group in the Pentagon, and a third person was David Wilmser, who later became head of a small intelligence unit focusing on Iraq and the Pentagon, and later became Vice President Cheney's Middle East advisor, which is what he is today.
which is what he is today. They planned this war back in 1996 and recommended that Benjamin
Netanyahu follow through with it and Netanyahu had the wise sense not to pay any attention
to it.
Pearl actually hand-delivered this plan called a clean break to Netanyahu, and Netanyahu, again, I think, put it basically in the bottom drawer and never paid any attention to it, so it sort of sat idle for a number of years until these people became senior officials in the Pentagon.
So you're contending it was a collaboration with Israel?
No, no, I'm saying that the... The war itself.
No, no, not at all.
What I'm saying is that the planners of the war originally planned this war for Israel.
Israel rejected the idea and these officials decided to go ahead On their own with this war?
Well, that would mean that we would have our own motivations, and they surely have to go far beyond the fact that there were some hit people out on, you know, the President's family.
It has to go beyond that, obviously.
So where's it really going, James?
Oil?
I mean, let's talk about what people talk about.
Is it oil?
I'm not one of the people who feel that the war was for oil.
I hadn't seen much Real indication of that beforehand.
The two major reasons was, like I said, in 1996 they had planned a similar overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and the reason was to help Israel make a nicer neighborhood, get rid of some of the... That might be a reason for Israel to go to war, but not for us to go to war.
Well, these neoconservatives felt that they... these neoconservatives want the Middle East rearranged.
They've continually talked about this.
Even President Bush has talked about this numerous times since the invasion, that they want the Middle East changed.
They want to change the face of the Middle East so that it's friendly to the United States and friendly to Israel.
A key factor involved in this whole thing.
Well, it's not working.
Well, of course it's not.
It was a fallacy from the very beginning by people who had really no... I mean, if that really was it, if that really was it, it sure as hell isn't working.
We're not making sense.
Exactly.
These people had no sense when it came to what was going on in the world.
They spent their entire lives either in the Republican administrations during the Reagan years Or in think tanks on K Street.
None of these people ever served in the military or saw any combat.
Not one of them.
The only person was Colin Powell, and he was on the other side.
He was one of the people that was against this preemptive war.
So you have these chicken hawks, these people in the Pentagon that spent their entire life sort of sitting in think tanks, coming up with these crazy ideas, and once they finally They've gotten to a position of power, they decided to put it into effect.
One of those people, David Wilmser, as a matter of fact, in January 2001, wrote a paper in which he suggested that the United States and Israel get together to launch a war in the Middle East.
And one of the things he put in his paper was this comment saying, crisises equal opportunities, or crisises are opportunities.
Yes.
A lot of people looked at September 11th as it was a crisis that turned into an opportunity to launch the war that they've always wanted to launch.
Again, this is exactly what they talked about on their very first National Security Council meeting in January 30, 2001.
They didn't talk about Korea.
They didn't talk about Iran.
They didn't talk about the Soviet Union.
Yes, but James, you're suggesting an influence or a motivation That does have to do with Israel.
You said making it a safer neighborhood for Israel.
Well, if that's not... That just doesn't seem to me to be a sufficient reason for young American men and women to die.
Maybe Israeli men and women, but not American.
Well, I agree 100%.
As I said, Israel rejected the plan, but the people who were pushing it were neoconservatives, who one of their top The priorities of the whole neoconservative movement is rearranging the dominoes in the Middle East to make the region safe for Israel and safe for the United States.
It has been one of the highest, if not the highest, item on their agenda from the very beginning.
And again, if you read or listen to what was said after it was sort of discovered that there were no weapons of mass destruction, that became one of the key points that they Then, and even now, we're talking about the fact that, well, we've made the Middle East a safer place by getting rid of Saddam Hussein, and I think that's total nonsense.
We've made the Middle East a far more dangerous place.
We didn't have these people getting killed before the war with Iraq.
We're getting them killed today.
Do you have any idea at all what our exit strategy from this is going to be, or could be?
There's only one exit strategy from this.
That's the United States pulling its troops out.
I don't see any other exit strategy except for the United States disengaging.
And I think once the United States sets a schedule for leaving, like saying we're going to pull out 20,000 troops a month until we're totally out of there, I think that's the only incentive that's going to have other people agreeing to come in.
I don't think any of these other countries are going to come in
while the united states is maintaining a hundred forty thousand right okay well i would say we did
that let's say we started uh... withdrawing twenty thousand troops a month
announced that and then began in actuality doing it what do you think
would happen with iraq
well i i think that uh... one of the first thing that would happen with the
i think there'd be more serious discussion among
allies and other countries so far people in there knowing that it's the US
presence in Iraq that's causing so much of the hatred and so much of the violence in there.
Getting the occupiers out, or the occupiers.
Yes, but might that not be true, or would that not be true for any occupiers?
Hell, they're kidnapping people from all the Philippines to get companies out of there, countries out of there.
I agree, and that's the problem.
We broke Iraq, and we're in the same situation we were in Vietnam right now.
We pulled out of Vietnam, and North Vietnam invaded the South.
It was a total chaos, total mess.
A lot of people died that shouldn't have died.
Well, then there's also Iran.
If Iraq was left in a defenseless, basically a defenseless position at some point, that's going to be totally irresistible for Iran, is it not?
At some point, this is going to happen no matter what.
The only alternative is to keep U.S.
troops, 140,000 U.S.
troops, with a dozen being killed a week or more.
uh... just american troops not counting uh...
raki there forever i mean you've got a
what the alternative we there is no easy answer to this there is no good answer
so i don't think that it is so you're you're saying that right now uh... for
the foreseeable future as far as you can see we're going to have to keep troops
now i'm saying what we should do it What we should do, but in fact what we will have to do is to keep them there for what, years and years?
Well, that's the only alternative I see, yeah, is to keep them there for years and years because it's certainly not going to get any better over there.
Since the handover, it's gotten worse.
There's been more Americans died, and there's been a hundred more Iraqis died this month than died the previous month.
So, no, things are not getting better, and the more we're over there, the more they hate us.
I mean, anybody just wants to look at it.
The problem with occupation, take a look at Israel.
Israel has occupied the West Bank and Gaza for decades and decades and decades, and hasn't gotten any better.
When you listen to Bush administration spokespeople, they talk about all the gains that are made, and how much water and electricity is now flowing, and how many children are in school, and they claim that the picture being painted at home is a false picture of how incredibly dangerous it is.
Then on the other hand, we see the UN pulling out and others, many in fact, pulling out because it is so damn dangerous.
So you're saying the truth is?
The truth is that it's going the opposite direction.
It's going to hell at this point.
You've got all these countries that are pulling out.
Spain pulled out.
You've got a number of other countries that have pulled out.
Now you're getting this technique that they're using of kidnapping.
Truck drivers and kidnapping foreign nationals and so forth is working.
They've got the Philippines to pull out.
To some degree, and it certainly has worked.
But others might say, well, you know what?
That indicates a very desperate opposition.
If they're not hitting hardened positions, which they really can't do because we're too hard, then they resort to this.
And the fact that they have resorted to this indicates A real weakening on their part.
But it's not a weakening.
Who's winning?
We're trying to get foreign countries to send troops there, and the opposite is happening.
Their tactics are succeeding in getting these countries to leave.
Even Secretary of State Powell acknowledged that, I think, yesterday or the day before, saying that it's certainly a problem that we're facing right now.
But here's one other scenario I'd like to run by you.
People say, and it's very common, well look, yes, it's awful over there right now, and in fact, what you're saying is true.
It's actually escalating right now, and terrorists are flowing into Iraq a mile a minute from all over the world.
These terrorists are rushing into Iraq to cause as much murder and mayhem As they can manage, but on the good side, we seem to be killing them there, and a lot of people contend better we should kill them there than here, as they attempt to do some awful thing to millions of people.
That's a theory.
That's a silly theory.
Is it?
Bin Laden has been targeting the United States for years, and what he does is he waits until the right time.
He chooses the time and the place.
There's no indication he's given up planning.
It's just that they usually wait a year, two years, whatever, to do it.
You just noticed in the last few weeks there was suicide bombers that tried to blow up the U.S.
Embassy and the Israeli Embassy in Uzbekistan just in the last few days.
So there's terrorist activities that are taking place around the world.
I don't think anybody should be grateful that two dozen Americans a week are being killed in Iraq.
of course not so i have a lot but i mean i really i think that
we're dying here interact before we invaded the country
Yes, but we are also taking care of massive numbers of enemy terrorists that are flooding into that country.
That's probably accurate, wouldn't you think?
Exactly.
I think there's a lot of them pulling into that country, and I think there's a lot of them that would be willing to attack the United States anywhere in the world.
There's certainly not any rule saying that they're going to be Limited only to Iraq.
I think, as I just mentioned, there were suicide bombings in Uzbekistan at the U.S.
and Israeli Embassy there in the last few weeks.
Indeed.
But there's a pretty good gathering of the fellows there in Iraq.
I mean, they have come in from all over, have they not?
Yeah, that's true.
And that's the problem.
There weren't these terrorists there before.
Now they are there.
Right.
But what I was trying to get at was there is this argument that, well, they are there and so we can take care of them there, as expensive in life as that is right now, rather than having to take care of them, say, here.
Well, I think that argument is just absurd.
Why is it better that we have all these terrorists over there killing Americans every single day?
Yeah, but you just admitted they would attack us anywhere in the world.
That includes here, right?
That's right.
All right, hold it right there.
We'll be right back.
Stop the hour.
We're going to go to the phones, and I'm sure a lot of you have questions.
I know I have more.
this is Coast to Coast AM operating in the nighttime.
Oh oh oh oh oh oh oh, you don't have to go.
Oh oh oh oh oh oh, you don't have to go.
Oh oh oh oh oh, you don't have to go.
Oh oh oh oh oh oh, all those tears I cry.
Oh oh oh oh oh, all those tears I cry.
Just tell me things, that we've grown up differently.
Don't seem the same Seems you've lost your feel for me So let's leave it alone Cause we can't see eye to eye There ain't no good guy.
There ain't no bad guy.
It's only you and me and we just disagree Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh
To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 7.
The first time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
The first time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
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Indeed so.
Good morning, everybody.
I am Art Bell and this is an interesting program.
And while I may not agree with James, uh, on a great deal, I am dedicated to presenting every single point of view, uh, without hindrance, if possible, and that's what you're hearing this morning.
He's written Body of Secrets, The Puzzle Palace, and of course now, A Pretext for War.
and in a moment he's all yours
uh... james if the uh... bush administration loses the president bush
is not reinstalled for another four years uh... and we get carried what's going to happen in iraq
Thank you.
Well, Kerry's been very sort of evasive when it comes to what he's going to do.
He's sort of implied that he's going to somehow magically get all the European allies and coalition partners to Come in, such as France and Germany and so forth, to come in and supply a lot of troops.
And these countries have indicated that just because Kerry gets elected doesn't mean that they're going to reverse their policy and put a lot of troops in there.
So Kerry's been fairly cagey on exactly what exactly he's going to do in there.
I'd be very curious as to what his The plan is, except for the fact that he says he has a better way of ending the war than Bush says he has.
All right.
Here comes the audience.
We'll see what they've got to say.
Should be interesting.
First time caller on the air with James Bamford.
Hello.
Hello.
Yes, hi.
Hi, Eric.
Thank you for taking my call.
You're welcome.
I'm calling from Los Angeles.
OK.
And I want to challenge James.
OK.
Uh, he said that, uh, the President could have not seen the video of the first plane hitting until the evening.
That's right.
Okay, he's wrong.
He's absolutely wrong.
I saw the video, uh, played before the second plane hit on Fox News.
Well, I'm sorry, it isn't there.
Okay, hold on.
Even the 9-1-1 Commission agrees that there was no video before, uh, He couldn't possibly have seen that video before he went in to talk to the second grade class.
Yes, he could have because I saw it and I'm out in California.
You know what?
You know what?
I was up at five o'clock and I got a phone call from the East Coast to put the television on.
Yeah, I think that could be right.
I saw the video before the second plane hit.
I saw it.
Well, you know, talk to the 9-1-1 Commission.
They did a video.
Yeah, I guess they should, but I think Fox would have that.
Yeah, that shouldn't be very hard.
who took a look at what box at a a camera on the now that i have a little bit of a new york
about how to get the picture of talking with a policeman on the corner
and the man to camera went up and caught the plane
hitting first felt that's right that was a man standing on the street
a parent or whatever that camera that i'm telling you that Hold on.
Okay, we got that.
Hold on.
Yeah, we could debate this all day.
I'm just saying, the facts aren't there.
The facts are that... Okay, all right, ma'am.
Thank you very much.
I'm happy you saw that, but the facts aren't there.
Well, she's got to pause and allow you to at least answer.
This would be very easy to prove, to research.
Very easy, it seems to me.
Fox or whoever could be asked what time they aired the plane going into the building.
That simple.
Yeah, sure.
I mean, they showed the building on fire with all the smoke coming out, but they did not show the actual first plane Hitting the first tower before 9 o'clock.
That might be right.
Maybe that's right.
I don't know.
We're going to have to check.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with James Bamford.
Hi.
Hello.
I'm on?
You're on.
Okay, I just have a quick thing to tell you, Art, that what the ham radio operator said when he fell off the big antenna he was building, he said, oh, it megahertz.
Now I'll go on to something more serious.
Yes, please.
The Office of Special Plans was in the Pentagon, and that's what the White House was listening to, as I understand it, and there were two pieces of information that they were listening to.
One is Chalabi, which they've made a lot of to-do over, and talked about him on the news.
And I got all this, by the way, out of my Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, which talks about stuff that's not in our regular news.
Excellent magazine by the ambassador that runs it.
Anyway, the other piece of information from the Office of Special Plans It was right from Mr. Chiron's office, and I wondered if you had any comment on that, James, and the second question about all these Mossad that were all over the place prior to 9-11 in Florida, around New York, and, you know, keeping watch on things, or what?
Okay.
Yeah, there's a number of questions there.
Excuse me.
On the Office of Special Plans, there were two offices within the Pentagon that were working on this issue.
One of them was a very small office that was run by David Wilmser, and it was set up to sort of cherry-pick intelligence.
The Pentagon people didn't trust the CIA because the CIA, at least at the beginning, was coming up with information contrary to what the Pentagon wanted.
The CIA was actually coming up with information indicating that There wasn't any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
There was very little evidence of that.
And the Pentagon people were very upset over that.
So they set up their own little unit to pick out the intelligence that they wanted.
And it was this little intelligence unit, as well as the Office of Plans.
And you're right that that was one of the key areas that they got information from.
Was Ahmed Chalabi, which obviously now everybody knows was bogus information, largely.
And it was the White House that was listening largely to that information rather than the information from the CIA at that stage.
Is there any indication that the White House was putting undue pressure on intelligence organizations to make it happen?
Oh, there was a lot of indications that there were There was a great deal of pressure on the CIA to come up with this information.
When the Senate Intelligence Committee recently came out with its report, the Vice Chairman, Senator Rockefeller, said there was tremendous pressure.
One of the things he cited was the ombudsman in the CIA, and he said that the ombudsman had testified to them, that in his over 30 years within the CIA, he had never seen An instance where there was more people coming to him complaining about the pressure.
And one of the people I interviewed in the CIA said that the supervisor told this person's group that gathered everybody together and said, look, the president wants a war.
It's your job to come up with a reason for him to go to war.
So the Republicans are arguing that there wasn't pressure, but what they're saying was nobody was forced to actually change their report.
Which is true.
But on the other hand, there was a tremendous amount of pressure to come up with one answer to this, and that was the answer that there were weapons of mass destruction, and that's what Senator Rockefeller and the Ombudsman CIA had to say.
On the other part of the question, Mossad's connection There were a number of reports.
The Guardian in London, for example, had a report that the Israeli government set up a separate little unit, also similar to the sort of little cherry-picking unit that was set up in the Pentagon to come up with just the type of information that they were looking for, and then there was a number of people that were It indicated that there was a great deal of visits by people from the Israeli military to the Pentagon at that time.
And also from Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's office, there was a number of press releases in August of 2002 indicating that they were pushing for the United States to not delay and to go into Iraq as soon as possible.
So there were those indications at that time.
I'm curious, James, since you do a lot of research for the books you write on these subjects, whether you find that the foreign press, particularly Great Britain and others, are frequently better fields to mine for actually what's going on in the world than the press in this country?
Well, I think there is a very big difference between the press in the United States and the press, especially in England.
In the United States you have the New York Times and you have the Washington Post, which did less than fantastic work in the lead-up to the war.
The New York Times, as a matter of fact, has been enormously criticized and has made its own sort of mea culpa by saying that they went with Shalaby and all these people and they Swallowed it all up and spit it all out.
So they were as suckered as the government branch.
Exactly.
And they had every opportunity to be skeptical, like a number of other publications, but they weren't.
In England, you have the sort of standard publications, these sort of establishment publications, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal.
And you have some of that in England, too, but then you have also some sort of less-leaning publications, like The Observer and The Guardian and so forth, which are highly respected over there, but do have a... They're tougher on the government than the establishment papers, like The Times of London, for example, or The Telegraph.
And over here, you don't really have that alternative.
You don't really have a...
A really aggressive paper going after the government.
They shouldn't in the lead up to the war in Iraq.
I think the press did a terrible job in the lead up to the war in Iraq.
And same with the television journalists.
They were all so anxious to run over there and jump on the back of a tank.
You think they were basically just reprinting press releases?
What they were doing was reprinting press releases and also using the The defectors that the government was basically handing them on silver platters and not going after... They certainly weren't talking the same people I was talking to in the Central Intelligence Agency and other places.
And they were getting it wrong.
The people who were... The Guardian, The Observer, a number of other newspapers and so forth were getting it more right.
Well, I find it a finger of hope that the Times apologized, essentially, for that.
Well, it's funny.
They've had to apologize a number of times recently.
They apologized a couple years earlier for this whole massive campaign they had against Wynn-Holley that turned out to be wrong.
Yeah, but this is really big.
And this is big, too.
They made a very bad mistake.
Even in their apology, though, they were only half It's amazing, because they go out there criticizing the Pentagon for not naming the CIA, for not naming who's to blame, and they refuse to name the actual reporters and editors who were to blame for the mistakes they made.
So, I think the New York Times still has some ways to go.
Yeah.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with James Bamford.
Hello.
Hi.
Were you asking for East of the Rockies?
That's you.
Okay, yes.
Yes, I wanted to ask you about Zacharias Mastowi.
Now, let me tell you, no one in the press has ever brought this up or mentioned it.
This is complete black hole.
I was watching the 9-11 hearings, and I guess it was April, and to my complete shock, George Tenet casually admitted, just like he was admitted that he smoked a cigarette, he casually admitted that the Bush administration, in fact, had lied to us for 900 days and said that The Zacarias Mustaoui information was bottled up in the lower to middle levels of the FBI that it never got to any high-level official in the United States.
He casually admitted that he was told on August 23rd about Zacarias Mustaoui who wanted to fly planes into buildings.
A local FBI agent in Minneapolis specifically said, I want to prevent something like taking a plane and crashing into the World Trade Center.
He knew about that, and yet the next question he was asked was, did he tell President Bush.
Now, he had 19 days before 9-11 when he was told that.
And then, next, he claimed he did not tell Bush.
And then, later, we find out that on September 5th, there was a meeting in Paris with CIA representatives and FBI representatives, and the French intelligence handed a file on Zakaria's missile.
It was six days before 9-11.
That file said he had connections to the Islamic group that successfully hijacked a plane But in Marseilles, the French paratroopers took over the plane and stopped the attack, but they were going to fly into the Eiffel Tower in the 1990s.
So there's your planes into buildings.
And the 9-11 Commission failed to ask Tenet what he told about that on September 5th.
So we don't know.
But my question is, James, your response?
is allowed to one of the few people that can pick up a phone at any time and call
president bush unit three a m why he had nineteen days about that and with all that
summer of warnings and we're supposed to believe he never spoke to bush never
spoke to write all right james your response
well that uh...
uh... you've had a really important issue there and uh...
the problem is that
when the president and the vice president testified before the commission
that was in total secrecy So we don't know what he was asked, and we don't know what their answers were.
I mean, I think it's absurd that the highest leaders in the country were allowed to testify in absolute secrecy.
So we don't know those answers to those questions.
But you're right in that the Tenet knew that Macelli was a very dangerous character and was involved in Terrorist planning before September 11th.
As a matter of fact, while he was having breakfast that morning, after he heard about the attack on September 11th, that morning, September 11th, while he was having breakfast and after he was notified of the plane going into the World Trade Center, he allegedly said, according to Bob Woolward's book, I bet it's Masalli.
He obviously had Masalli on his mind, and whether he at one point told President Bush about his worries about Masalli, nobody knows, because whatever President Bush knew or didn't know, or Cheney knew or didn't know, Nobody will tell, because... But at no point do you imagine, James, that at one of these classified hunks, in one of these classified hunks of testimony, there would be information indicating that they were given specific information about airplanes into buildings and didn't act.
You don't expect to find anything like that.
Not airplanes in the buildings, but the fact that Zachary Massali was incarcerated because he was...
At a flight school, trying to take flight lessons, and at the same time, he's a suspected member of Al-Qaeda.
So, that was known.
And the question is whether George Tenet, and George Tenet obviously knew it, and George Tenet obviously suspected that immediately when he heard about the attack.
So, the question is whether George Tenet passed those suspicions on to the President.
Before September 11th.
And again, we don't know that because not only was it secret, but nobody was allowed to even take a stenographic record or a recording of that interview.
But if anything of that magnitude had actually been in there, it would be out anyway, wouldn't it?
Because that would be... Well, technically, they're not allowed to... They weren't allowed to reveal anything that took place during that interview.
I mean, maybe it would have leaked.
Maybe it wouldn't have.
I don't know, because...
Nobody has access to that information.
Okay.
Very quickly, West of the Rockies, you're on the air with James Bamford.
Hi.
Hey, how you doing there, Mr. Arbell?
This is Joe.
I'm calling from the mean streets of East Los Angeles.
Okay, Joe.
You know, your counterpart Monday through Friday show, he screens out your calls.
I mean, he screens out his calls, and you don't.
And I have great respect for you for the fact that you don't do that.
Old habit.
Anyway, what's up?
The reason that I called is because Iraq was practicing economic warfare against the United States.
I don't know if you remember, the Iraqis were no longer dealing in dollars, they were dealing in Euros, and also the French oil firms were flowing in there, you know, with lots of deals on with the Germans, and it was a huge The United States was about to have not only Iraq, but maybe possibly Iran and a few other OPEC nations go into the euros versus the dollars.
And that was going to create a huge, huge disruption in our economy.
Hold it right there.
You're going to have to hold it there.
So he thinks that we did it for economic-type reasons, that we went to war for economic-type reasons.
Chew that one over, James.
We'll come back and ask you about it.
From the high desert, raging into the nighttime, this is Coast to Coast AM.
I'm Art Bell.
To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
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From coast to coast and worldwide on the Internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
A pretext for war.
Fascinating title.
Absolutely fascinating.
James Bamford wrote it.
And that is a question that was for me before the war.
What pretext did we have to sacrifice the lives of our young people?
And I still have that very same question.
Still unanswered.
we'll be right back when you're looking at a piece of news is big as what
happened to us on nine eleven
and that would be you know what's happened since in the war on terrorism
the war in iraq and all the rest of it when you look at all of that
you've got you've got to try and look at all angles James Bamford has now written three books on one sort of look back and at these current events.
James, welcome back.
Well, thank you.
I appreciate it.
Okay, here they come.
First time caller line, you're on the air with James Bamford.
Hi.
Good morning, Art.
Good morning.
It's Michael calling from Calgary, Alberta, and I'd like to join the legions of your fans to say it's nice to hear your voice back on the air regularly again.
Thank you, good to be here.
Hope your back is doing well.
Mine's not doing very well.
It's much better, thank you.
Listen, what I'm a little confused with, it's interesting being in Canada because by our cable television station we get almost all the American news networks as well as things like the BBC, And so we have a different kind of perspective.
We get to see what the world's seeing as well as what Americans are being told.
And it really is fascinating at times as to what is not being discussed.
I'm not much of a conspiracy fan.
I think there's a whole lot more in the world that just happens by happenstance than conspiracy, but it is interesting what doesn't get mentioned.
We've had all of these people, politicians and political groups, And books coming out, and magazine articles, and investigations, and the news media itself, all saying everybody wants to be open, we want to talk about this, we want to find out what happened, we want to cure it.
I'm still curious about the fact that polls continue to come out that indicate up to 70% or more of Americans still believe that Iraqis were directly involved in the attacks on the United States on September 11th.
And what I'd like to Ask your guest is, why this mythology continues to have such weight in the United States, if everyone is actually, honestly, trying to get rid of the mythology and trying to dig to the truth?
Well, that's a great question, and I think one of the key answers is the fact that from September 11th on, especially from 2002 on, When they, during the lead up to the war in Iraq, both President Bush and Vice President Cheney and other members of the administration continually talked about September 11th and Iraq in the same context.
They never, they were very careful in not actually saying that Saddam Hussein was actually responsible for September 11th, but they would say things like, because of September 11th, that's why we have to Go into places like Iraq.
So I think people began doing exactly what the administration wanted them to do.
They began associating Iraq with September 11th, and again, one more pretext for going into war, September 11th.
And I think it's outrageous that people still, 70%, I knew that was the figure at one point, if 70% of the Americans still think that, It doesn't say a lot for the American public.
Well, I'm wondering what it says.
The press, before it became the electronic press, used to tout itself as being the counterpoint in a democracy.
The people that put the politicians' feet to the fire, and make them scream, uncle, and keep it all honest and above board.
And I guess my question would be, is that if that's the myth, and that's where it comes from, that's where it came from, ...was simply a juxtaposition, putting the two events together without actually connecting them.
Why has the supposedly objective news media done very little about actually clarifying the problem?
Well, I think the media was part of the problem during the lead-up to the war.
You had all these major media stars on television and media organizations.
Doing everything they could to find flak jackets and helmets and find their way to Iraq to jump on the back of a tank.
I don't think we needed so many people jumping on the back of a tank, and far more people should have been here in the United States asking the tough questions of why are we going over there in the first place.
I mean, a lot of these news organizations are beginning to ask these questions now, a year after we got into the quagmire that we're into.
I think the press has a lot to blame for this and they should have done exactly what you said.
They should have been far tougher on the administration instead of basically abetting the administration on a lot of this nonsense about what the defectors were saying and the aluminum tubes and weapons of mass destruction and so forth.
At best, inadvertent collaborators with the administration on this war, rather than objective, hard journalists.
And I agree that I think people in Canada, people in England, people in other places around the world get a far better picture of what was going on than we do in the United States.
Alright, well, you know, it seems to me that, again, the supreme sacrifice of our young people demands two things.
That we know why we're getting into a war, and two, how we're going to get out.
Win and get out.
Did we know either one of those things when we launched ourselves into Iraq?
Well, it was such a rush to get into this war.
It was... I was one of those people that never thought we should have gotten in in the first place, and I was astonished to tell little the news organizations were Actually, I was astonished at how much the news organizations were jumping on the bandwagon.
We had a situation where we had all these inspectors on the ground and virtually everybody else in the world, except for the United States and the leadership in the United States and the leadership in Britain, were saying, wait a minute, hold on, let's see what the inspectors come up with.
The U.N.
inspectors finally are in there and we They put many of them in there.
There were quite a few people, plus they were using U-2 aircraft to fly back and forth over the country.
The whole idea was there was no way that they were an immediate threat.
In order to be an immediate threat, they would have had to not only have whatever they had in a warhead, they would have had to have a delivery system, and a delivery system would have required a three-stage intercontinental ballistic missile.
Which is something that is very easily observable from satellites and aircraft above Iraq, and there was never any indication of that.
Got it.
Alright.
Wildcard Line, you're on the air with James Bamford.
Hello.
Oh, Art, thank you for keeping the Fourth Estate alive and well.
You're welcome.
Appreciate that very much.
And one of the few places we can get, you know, hear the full story.
I wanted to go back to the issue both of you discussed earlier about Iraq being kind of a magnet for all these various groups coming in.
Yes, I postulated that, yes.
And I also want, because it sounded like you may be feeling that if they weren't coming in there, they would all be over here.
And I, I mean, I just wonder, is there any relationship to the fact that they view us as occupying and invading their land?
You know, they're Muslims and we're infidels.
That if we left, they wouldn't necessarily, all those same people, come over here.
Because, you know, if we would leave, I don't necessarily... No, what I was saying was that there's a line of thinking that all these terrorists, the really bad guys, are rushing into Iraq to be part of the party.
You know, having at the U.S.
And so we do have them there in one spot, more or less, where we can go after them.
And there is that line of thinking.
I mean, I too was against this war.
But, you know, it's a fact of life now.
I mean, we're there.
And so the question is now what do we do?
But then also we're creating more people because of us being there.
They're able to recruit people that wouldn't have been recruited probably otherwise.
Yeah, there's no question about it.
And I wonder if I can ask your guest about, if we did pull out, what's going to happen to all the people that are making money over there now?
All these contracts with people that are affiliated with the White House.
I think there's a real conflict of interest with them making all these, Halliburton, all these contractors making money.
And would those contracts be voided if we did pull out?
Well, first of all, I do want to agree.
I think Bell has a terrific show, and it's one of the few shows you can actually listen to people for more than two or three sound bites and really get into a topic in depth.
I really appreciate being on your show.
That's what it's all about.
Thank you.
And in response to the other question on the companies making money over there, I think that's extremely a big conflict of interest.
We have Companies that are, some of these companies are heavy contributors to the Republican Party or Democratic Party, whatever.
But you have people there that are trying whatever, using whatever kind of political pull they have to get over there, and there have been a number of stories both on television and also in the print press about this, and Michael Moore's movie focused on this, Fahrenheit 9-11.
The fact that you've got so many companies over there with vested interests in keeping the U.S.
over there so they can make a lot of money, and I think that's a very dangerous conflict of interest.
Although that certainly has been said about every war we've fought, right?
That's true, it has.
But this war becomes a far bigger issue because it's the only war that we've ever launched that's been preemptive, and it's the only war I know of that It has been launched on false pretexts.
Well, unless you want to count Vietnam.
I mean, have you done a lot of reading of the history of how that began?
Oh, I agree.
As a matter of fact, one of the op-ed pieces I wrote compared this with the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
That's very true.
So I think it's very dangerous when you have not only the The company's over there, but then the people who are running the company are very close to the political power bases in the United States.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with James Bamford.
Hello.
Hi, good morning.
Good morning.
I have two issues to raise just quickly with your guest, Mr. Samford.
One on the subject... James Bamford.
Bamford, not...
On the subject of the U.S.
being hated for our presence in Iraq by the terrorists and others, which came first, the chicken or the egg?
What were we to do after the 1993 World Trade Center attack and then the senior Bush's The attack with the invasion of Kuwait.
Excuse me, Colin, I believe that he'd say that it didn't hatch that egg, that 9-11 egg.
It wasn't hatched from Iraq.
That's right.
I mean, Iraq had nothing to do with the first World Trade Center bombing.
Nobody even alleges that, except for really far out conspiracy people.
So there was no... Iraq was not a threat to the United States.
Before, during, or after September 11th.
Okay, my other issue, if I might, my other issue, what the heck is wrong with the Americans taking it personal, like the Bushes did, when the President and his family are threatened?
This President is the stabilizing force of our very government.
Oh yes, but the fact that a threat is made on their lives, or even a plan is made to kill them, Is not a reason for nations to go to war.
It just isn't, sir.
I don't see how you could make that into a reason to go to war.
No, not only that.
After that plan was revealed, that's when President Clinton launched a number of cruise missiles attacking Baghdad for a number of days.
So there was a retaliation for that.
Yeah, but not full-scale war.
No, right, exactly.
Well, it shouldn't have been.
Well, for the Rockies, you're on the air with James Bamford.
Hello.
Good morning, Art.
Good morning.
Hi.
Well, I have a couple of questions.
In the aftermath of September 11th, well, let me start again.
In the aftermath of September 11th, the NSA started going through transcripts of telephone conversations, and one of the conversations they came across was Mohammed Atta calling Ramzi bin al-Shaib in Germany to Inform him of the date that he had selected for the attack.
And he passed the date through a riddle, saying, you know, I'm working on this riddle.
Okay, but this was discovered afterwards.
So your point is?
Well, my point is that that transcript hadn't actually been examined before 9-11.
It was looked at afterwards.
Obviously, there's this gap in time between When something is recorded and when something is analyzed.
Well, of course there is, and they record billions of things, literally billions of things.
What about that?
Is there anything to be said for the fact that the contents of that riddle weren't deciphered before the fact, James?
Well, that's the problem.
I think you've put your finger on the problem facing the National Security Agency in the war against terrorism.
It performed It's job a lot more efficiently when it was focused simply on the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
In trying to go after terrorists, it's a far more difficult job.
You can't use a Cray-1 computer to try to decrypt some word code like that that somebody just makes up.
So, if you intercept the phone call and it says something like, Uncle Harry's birthday is next week, I mean, what does that mean?
And that's the problem NSA faces, is that some of these things, nobody knows what they mean.
They're sort of these handmade codes, and that was what the problem was prior to September 11th.
On September 10th, NSA intercepted two messages.
One of them was something like, the game begins tomorrow, and something else was similar to that.
It intercepted those calls on September 10th.
But it didn't even translate them until September 12th.
And at that point, obviously, they would have great meaning and impact, but that's hindsight.
It's 2020.
But even then, you wouldn't have known that planes are going to hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Right.
Exactly right.
Only after the fact, does it... International Line, you're on the air with James Bamford.
Hello.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Hi, how are you guys doing?
Just fine, sir.
Cool.
I'm calling from Canada up here.
And, okay, I'm not trying to be crazy or anything like that, but, you know, you, like, your guest, there is a conspiracy going on, and it involves, like, the United States government, big business, and everything.
Like, I sit up here, I'm 25 years old, and my whole life I've sat here looking at the United States cause wars all around the world, and it's just for big business.
And to say, That someone who believes in a conspiracy is crazy or wrong is ludicrous in my eyes.
Anything that the United States gets their hands into is crooked.
I don't hate Americans, but their foreign policy is wrong.
Why aren't you guys being charged with crimes against humanity?
Why can you guys go into a country under false pretenses?
There's no weapons of mass destruction.
Why aren't you guys going in front of a An international tribunal.
Where are you?
Are you in Canada?
Yeah, I'm in Ontario.
Oh, okay.
You guys, now I've got it.
I'm sorry, like, why isn't the American, like, government, not the people of America, but why isn't your government being held responsible for going in and starting a war under false pretenses?
You know?
James, I think that's a good question.
I think it's a good question, and I compare it to some degree to If you're living in a neighborhood and you think that your neighbor has a shotgun and he's going to come over and blow your head off, then you call the police and the police go over there and they search his house and they don't find anything, which is like the inspectors going over to Iraq.
And then they leave and then you decide to go over there and blow your neighbor's head off preemptively.
And then the police come, and they search the house, and they still don't find any weapons.
You go to jail.
I mean, you go to jail for manslaughter.
Now, while that happens to individuals, to be sure, James, that doesn't happen to countries, does it?
Particularly if they win.
Well, that's the question the caller brings up, and I think it's a valid question to ask.
It is.
But my answer is also valid.
Countries don't get charged like that.
Particularly, at least, the winners, right?
Well, it doesn't happen very often, but no, it doesn't.
It doesn't, but maybe it should.
Okay.
How long has your book been out?
It came out June 8th.
June 8th.
And how's it being greeted?
Well, it's gotten excellent reviews, and it's been selling very well.
It's been on the bestseller list, and it's also been doing very good.
Bestseller list.
Got it.
And congratulations, James.
Thank you very much for being on the program.
Well, you've got a terrific show, Art, and I appreciate you having me on.
Okay, buddy, take care.
It's part of the, you know, I think you should hear all sides of everything story, folks.
Because that's what we're here for.
Even if the others are not, that's what we're here for.
Tomorrow night, Bonnie Crystal in the first hour.
Don't forget about that, Bonnie Crystal.
The Cave Diver.
I'll tell you, that lady's something else.
Good night!
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