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April 7, 2007 - Art Bell
02:38:13
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Iraq War and 9-11 - Michael Shrimpton
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From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be in the world's time zones, each and every one covered by this program, the largest program of its kind in the world.
That's quite a claim, huh?
Coast to Coast AM, I'm Art Bell.
Great to be here with you, an honor and a privilege to be guiding you through the weekend.
And it's going to be a very interesting one indeed.
The webcam shot tonight, as I promised, and it won't be the last, is a seven-month, one-week pregnant Erin.
Baby due June 1st, right around noontime.
And that's what seven months in a week looks like.
That's beginning to tote quite a load, to be sure.
It'll be a C-section June 1st.
And boy, I'll tell you what.
She is moving around!
Asia Rainbell is just kicking and kicking and kicking.
As it should be, I guess.
So if you wanted to know what it looks like in about seven months, there you go.
Seven months and a bit.
Now, when we go to her obstetrician, her OB-GYN person, They have, and because of my comments last time on the air, I got this wonderful present of a little circle that shows conceived date and then another little arrow points to the date of birth, you know, the date of expected birth, plus or minus, whatever.
I'm never going to agree with that circle.
I know she'll be here June 1st and the doctor wins the bet because he does it when he wants to do it, you know, 12 noon on the 1st, that'll be it.
But I maintain, I maintain, That if nature took its course, which in the case of her 4 foot 8 inch body probably can't, so I have to agree, it would be around my birthday on June 17th, I think.
Or it could be stretched that far.
However, the man with the degree certainly makes the decision, so June 1st around noon it shall be.
Oh, um, Pizza Punch, after years and years and years, pizza, the amazing Pizza Punch, Art Bell's Pizza Punch is here, and I'm very, it's gonna ship in the next couple of days or so, and I really, really, really want feedback from the pizza fans out there, and what you think of it.
Now, there are a lot of other uses for it, but, uh, boy, I'll tell you on pizza.
Punch.
It definitely provides lots of punch, lots of flavor.
So, I'm looking for reviews, and if you want to see it, it's at ArtbellsPizzaPunch.com.
That should be easy.
ArtbellsPizzaPunch.com.
All strung together.
Most of all, though, for those of you who get the early orders, I really want some reviews.
Alright, let's look first at the depressing world news.
Iran did a France.
They refused to allow the Iraqi Prime Minister to fly across their airspace while he was on his way to Tokyo, so they had to rearrange the whole thing.
The plane had to divert to Dubai, and he had about a three-hour layover while they re-planned the trip.
Captain of a cruise ship that's now sunk is charged.
The captain of a cruise ship that sank off the Aegean Sea on Monday, sending more than 1,500 passengers and crew onto rescue boats, was charged Saturday with causing a shipwreck through negligence.
The 469-foot diamond sank into the sea after hitting a very well-marked and charted reef on Thursday.
Now, I was talking to Erin about a cruise, and she said, and of course in the Philippines, you know, a lot of those smaller boats on occasion sink very sadly, and with a lot of people on them.
I'm sure you've read about it in the Philippines, Indonesia, and that area.
And so, I talked to her about a cruise and I said, Han, those big cruise ships, they never sink.
They're like floating cities, they don't sink and... It sank.
Thousands of people marched through downtown Los Angeles on Saturday, demanding a way for the country's estimated 12 million illegal immigrants to become citizens, and condemning the president's latest proposal, carrying signs saying, Amnesty Now and Love Thy Neighbor.
Don't deport them.
About 15,000 people danced to Mexican music and chanted, It Can Be Done.
I don't think the question is whether it can be done, because it's been done many times before.
How many times have we had amnesty for illegal aliens, followed always by promises of strict law enforcement, employers getting in trouble, and all the rest of it?
Doesn't work.
Hasn't worked in the past, and I doubt it will work in the future.
I certainly have empathy for those who want to get to America, a better place to live to be sure.
But that's not the way to get here.
And at some point it's got to end.
You cannot keep holding out the promise of citizenship if you don't get caught long enough.
You just can't keep doing that.
That's all there is to it.
You can't.
U.S.
warplanes blasted a militia team firing rocket-propelled grenades Saturday.
It would be the second day of heavy fighting in a major offensive to drive Shiites and the militiamen out of a farm belt city south of Baghdad.
Hey, we've got a billionaire in orbit!
A rocket carrying the American billionaire who helped develop Microsoft Word Roared into the night skies over Kazakhstan Saturday, sending Charles Siminal and two cosmonauts soaring into orbit on a two-day journey to the International Space Station.
Looks like one of my own is in trouble here.
Unimpressed by his on-air apology or corporate promises of a tighter leash, angry critics of nationally syndicated talk radio host Don Imus called Saturday for his dismissal over his racially charged comments about Mostly black Rutgers women's basketball team.
I accept his apology just as is.
I want his bosses to accept his resignation.
That's Al Shrepton promising that if he doesn't get it, they will be out Monday picketing the radio station.
In a moment, we're going to look at a story that I haven't had a lot to say about until now.
You know, the pet food problem.
I'll have comments via an article I've got in just a moment.
First of all, let me tell you, this is an article, because she certainly deserves credit, by Christy Keith.
It was a special to, I guess, SF Gate, which is San Francisco Gate, I guess.
The March 16th recall of 91 pet food products manufactured by Menu Foods wasn't big news at first, was it?
Early coverage reported only 10 to 15 cats and dogs dying after eating canned And pouched foods manufactured by menu.
The foods were recalled.
Among them, some of the country's best known and biggest selling brands.
And while it was certainly a sad story, maybe even a bit of a wake-up call about some aspects of pet food manufacturing, that was about it.
At first, that was it for me too.
But I'm a contributing editor for a nationally syndicated pet feature, Universal Press Syndicate Pet Connection.
And all of us here have close ties to the veterinary profession.
Two of our contributors are vets themselves, including Dr. Marty Becker, the vet on Good Morning America.
How about that?
And what we were hearing from veterinarians simply was not matching what we were hearing on the news.
When we began digging into the story, it quickly became clear that the implications of the recall were much larger than they first appeared.
Most critically, it turned out that the initially reported tally of dead animals only included the cats and dogs who died in Menu's test lab, and not the much larger number of affected pets.
Second, the timeline of the recall raised a number of concerns.
Although there have been some media reports that Menu Foods started getting complaints as early as December of 2006, FDA records State the company received their first report of a food-related pet death on February 20th.
One week later, on February 27th, menus started testing the suspect foods.
Three days later, on March 3rd, the first cat in the trial died of acute kidney failure.
Three days after that, menus switched wheat gluten suppliers, and ten days later, on March 16th, recalled the 91 products that contained gluten from their previous source.
Nearly a month passed from the date that Menu got its first report of a death to the date it issued the recall.
During that time, no veterinarians were warned to be on the lookout for unusual numbers of kidney failures in their patients.
No pet owners were warned to watch their pets for its symptoms.
And thousands and thousands of pet owners kept buying those foods and giving them to their dogs and cats.
At that point, Menyoo had seen a 35% death rate in their test lab cats, with another 45% suffering kidney damage.
The overall death rate for animals in Menyoo's tests was around 20%.
How many pets eating those recalled foods had died?
Perhaps become ill or suffered kidney damage in the time leading up to the recall and in the days since.
The answer to that still hasn't changed since the day the recall was issued.
We don't know.
We at Pet Connection knew the 10 to 15 deaths being reported by the media did not reflect an accurate count.
We wanted to get an idea of the real scope of the problem, so we began a database for people to report their dead or sick pets on March 21, two days after the opening of the database.
We had over 600 reported cases, more than 200 reported deaths.
As of March 31, the number of deaths alone now was at 2,797.
There are all kinds of problems with self-reported cases.
While we did correct for a couple of them, our numbers are not considered confirmed.
But USA Today reported March 25th that data from Banfield, a nationwide chain of over 600 veterinary hospitals, suggests the number of cases of kidney failure is as high as hundreds a week during the three months the food was on the market.
On March 28, NBC News featured California veterinarian Paul Pion, who surveyed the 30,000 members of the National Veterinary Information Network and told anchor Tom Costello, quote, if what veterinarians are suspecting are cases, then it's much larger than anything we've seen before, end quote.
Costello commented that it amounted to potentially thousands of sick or dead pets.
The FDA was asked about the numbers at a press conference that it held on Friday morning to announce that Melamine had been found in the urine and tissues of some of the affected animals as well as in foods they tested.
Dr. Steven Sundoff, Director of the Center for Veterinary Medicine, told reporters that the FDA couldn't confirm any cases beyond the first few, even though they had received over 8,800 additional reports because, quote, we've not had the luxury of confirming these reports, end quote.
They would work on that, he said, after they make sure the product's off the shelves.
He pointed out that in human medicine, the job of defining what constitutes a confirmed case would fall for the Centers for Disease Control.
But there is no CDC for animals.
Instead, pet owners were encouraged to report deaths and illnesses to the FDA.
But when they tried to file reports, there was no place on the agency's website to do so.
And nothing but endlessly busy signals when people tried to call.
Veterinarians didn't fare very much better themselves.
They were asked to report cases to the state's veterinarian's office.
But one feline veterinary blog, which surveyed all official state veterinarian websites, found that only 8 had any independent information about the recall, and only 24 even mentioned it at all.
Only one state, Vermont, had a request on their site for veterinarians to report pets whose illnesses or deaths they suspect are related to the recall.
And as of today, there is no longer a notice that veterinarians should report suspected cases to their state veterinarians on the website or the American Veterinary Medical Association.
The lack of any notification system was extremely hard on veterinarians, many of whom first heard about the problem on the news Or from their clients.
Professional groups such as the Veterinary Information Network were crucial in disseminating information about the recall to their members.
But not all vets belong to VIN, and not all vets log on to VIN on the weekend.
The menu press release, like most corporate or government bad news, was issued on a Friday.
But however difficult this recall has been for veterinarians, no one's felt its impact more than the owners of affected dogs and cats.
While the pet media and bloggers continued to push the story, the most powerful force driving it was grief of pet owners, many of them fueled by anger because they felt that their pet's death or illness wasn't being counted.
Many of them were also driven by a feeling of guilt at Pet Connection.
We received a flood of stories from owners whose pets became ill with kidney failure and who took them to the vet.
The dogs or cats were hospitalized and treated, often at great expense, sometimes into the thousands of dollars, and then, when they were finally well enough, sent home.
For some, the story ended there, but for others, there was one more horrifying chapter.
Because kidney failure causes nausea, it's often hard to get a recovering pet to eat anything at all.
So a lot of these owners got down on their hands and knees and coaxed and begged and eventually hand-fed their pets the very same food that had made them sick.
Those animals ended right back up in the hospital and died because their loving owners didn't know the food was tainted.
To many pet owners, the pet food recall story is a personal tragedy about the potentially avoidable loss of a beloved dog or cat, others I've had a hard time seeing the story as anything more than that, with implications beyond the feelings of those grieving pet owners, which brings us to the bigger picture and questions, not about what happened, but about the system.
How did this problem, involving almost every large pet food company in the U.S., including some of the most trusted and expensive brands, get so out of hand?
How come pet owners weren't informed more rapidly about the contaminated pet food?
Why is it so hard to get accurate numbers of affected animals?
Why didn't veterinarians get any notification?
And where did the whole system break down?
The issue may not be that the system broke down, but that there really isn't any system at all.
There is, as the FDA pointed out, no veterinary version of the CDC.
This meant the FDA kept confirming a number it had to have known was only the tip of the iceberg.
It prevented veterinarians from having the information they needed to treat their patients and advise pet owners.
It allowed the media to repeat misleadingly low numbers, creating a false sense of security in pet owners, and preventing a lot of people from really grasping the scope and implication of the problem.
And it was why Rosie O'Donnell felt free to comment last week on the view, 15 cats and one dog have died, and it's been all over the news.
And as you know, since that day, 29 soldiers have died and we haven't heard much about them.
No, I think we have the wrong focus in the country.
That when pets are killed in America from some horrific poisoning accident, 16 of them, it's all over the news, and people are like, the kitty, it's so sad.
29 sons and daughters killed since that day, not newsworthy, I don't understand.
At any rate, what it boils down to, without going through the very end of this, is that there is no system in place for reporting this, and I, too, was, I guess, a victim of that numbers trap.
You know, if you think it was 16 dogs and cats, well, anybody with common sense can do the math.
If that's really all it was, there's not a hell of a lot to worry about, is there?
Because that's not many.
But you just know it's not true.
Cats were, because of the physiology of a cat, much more affected and sensitive to this whole thing.
And the final numbers of cats who have died because of this just simply can't be known.
There's no system in place to allow it to track.
Now cats are very sensitive and when they have problems like this, generally they don't recover.
Now I got that straight from a cat that I spent about $7,000 on with the same problem.
That was years ago unrelated to this.
But what I suspect is true, I know in my heart is true, that so many of your pets died as a result of this and it was simply not reported.
So we will never ever know the final toll.
Now that said, I certainly agree that pets dying does not rise to the bar of our young men and women being killed in Iraq or anywhere else for that matter, but my pets are like members, not like members, my pets are members of my family.
And when one passes, It is a time of great grief indeed, and I know that all the other pet owners out there can sympathize with that.
Anybody who's ever lost a pet, and that would include many of you, not all, but many, understand completely what I'm saying.
I didn't know how to talk about this before.
I just had no idea how to talk about it, but the bottom line is that there's no agency Charged with collecting and disseminating information about bad food, you know, as we would get the courtesy of, since we're human beings, then dammit, let's put one in place.
Lots of lawmakers, congressmen, and senators listening out there right now.
And I'm sure most of them understand how we all feel about our pets, and if you don't, You don't want to begin hearing from all of the pet owners out there, so my suggestion would be get something like the CDC for pets, some national clearinghouse for information in place, so that if something of this magnitude ever occurs again in this nation, we'll know about it.
The pet owners will not be in the dark like we were, well, let's go all the way back to the accident at Three Mile Island.
Sometimes not giving information is lying to the American public.
At any rate, something needs to be put in place.
Let's do it.
From the high desert, I'm Art Bell.
I've got an awful lot of news about the honeybees tonight, but I'm going to hold it for tomorrow night.
And I'm no Einstein, but I know That if the honeybees go, we're in deep crap.
I mean, that's all there is to it.
The whole world is in deep crap.
Now, actually, Einstein did say, quote, if honeybees should disappear from the Earth, so would plant, animal, and human life disappear within four years.
Now, I'm not sure how Einstein computed we would have four years to live after the honeybees are gone.
But I'm sure, relatively sure, he knew what he was talking about.
Four years, huh?
Alright, we're going to do unscreened, open lines coming up.
The numbers were just recited.
If you would like to jump in one of the portals and you've got something important to say and can remember to turn your radio down when I answer instantly, when I answer the phone, then we'll do all that in just a moment.
The Russians thought that we were going to invade Iran, although we would have already done it, frankly.
But we are amassing some forces there.
Tonight's guest, Michael Shrimpton, is going to talk to us about the whole Middle East mess and what's really going on.
He'll touch even, for that matter, on 9-11, so if you're wondering what A securities expert has to say about 9-11.
We'll both find out together in the next hour.
Right now, to the lines, wildcard line, you are... Let's try that again.
You're on the air.
You would have been on the air.
Let's reconnect and see if we can get this done.
No, we can't.
Hi there.
Hi, this is Blair in Sedona.
Hey, hey Blair, how you doing?
Hey, Easter greetings.
Why, thank you.
Yeah, I was wondering if people realize there's different meanings to, you know, 666, that number, in Revelations, when it said, the Beast of Revelation, and here is wisdom.
Well, if that was written 2,000 years ago, that was a first century mind that wrote that.
But now, with mainstream science, we know that six protons, six neutrons, and the six electrons describe the carbon atom that makes up our animal bodies.
Okay, so do you think that it still is the number of the beast?
Well, I think there's a general term there.
It could be a godless technological society or an evolutionary process that we have to go through when we stumble and bumble in our three-dimensional bodies until we allow the Spirit to guide us again.
This is a big school room, probably.
Well, I kind of look at it the same way, Blair.
I think we're in some kind of big school room, and I'm not at all sure that I'm ready to graduate.
How about yourself?
No, I sort of think there's some really good lessons down here, because, you know, there was this guy by the name of Alan Watts.
He used to live on a houseboat in Sausalito.
He used to be an Anglican priest, and he became a Zen Buddhist.
And he used to talk about how the preservation of the planet and life is not a frantic duty art, but he said it's a pleasure.
He said, you won't convince everybody it's a pleasure if you go out and scream and yell in the streets.
So I think there's something there about, you know, relaxing into it and just going with the flow.
Boy, I hear that.
All right, buddy.
Thank you very, very much for the call and take care.
Let's move to West of the Rockies and say hi, you're on the air.
Hello there.
West of the Rockies, going once, going twice, gone.
First time caller line, you're on the air.
He says.
Well, this is interesting.
Let's try yet another wildcard line and say you're on the air.
Good evening, Art.
It's been a long time since I spoke with you, sir.
How you doing?
I'm fine.
Where are you?
I'm in Columbus, Georgia, sir.
This is Steve with your fireworks buddy.
How you doing?
I'm well.
Look here, somebody has brought this up.
You know, you were mentioning the bees.
I've kept excellent records for the past 23 years on the hummingbird return every spring.
The hummingbird should be here every new moon in March without fail.
And they have yet to show up yet.
Nowhere here in Columbus, Georgia or the Chattahoochee Valley.
Nowhere.
You're kidding.
Nobody has said a word about humming bees until you... No, the hummingbirds.
Hummingbirds, I'm sorry, until you just mentioned.
I've got bees on the mind here.
We also have hummingbirds.
We also have hummingbirds here in Nevada.
I've seen them every year, but now that you mention it, I haven't seen one yet this year.
That's interesting.
We were kind of worried.
It's cold for us now.
We had a tornado here, an F3 tornado on March the 1st.
A lot of folks said they'd seen one or two prior to that, but I don't think they had much to do with it.
But look here, I've got one of the sick cats, but my cat's going to make it.
My cat got sick way before this recall, you know, was announced.
I'm so sorry.
She had complete kidney failure.
Yeah.
And my best friend, one of my best friends, I got one friend that's a lawyer and one friend that's my vet.
And we really took care of this cat.
And this cat wouldn't eat nothing but iron since she was a small kitten.
And, you know, that stuff's pretty expensive.
You know, IM's is not cheap food by no sense of the imagination.
Okay, well, listen, I want to be careful about what we promote and don't promote here, and we're not in the business really of promoting one thing or another, or dissing one thing or another, but I will say this.
It is, I think, critically important, I'll say it again, that we have some sort of national reporting agency so that we understand the truth of what's going on, how serious it is.
Now, I'm sure that many of you out there, very much like me, if you're hearing it's 15 or 16 animals, and you know that we're a nation of 350 million people, whatever it is now, 500 million, I don't even know what our current population figures are, and that many more cats and dogs, that that's an insignificantly small number, well, it's obviously not a true number.
And we need to get the truth.
I mean, the American public really needs to get the truth.
In America, we have a much closer, I've done a lot of world travel, and we have a much closer alliance with domestic animals than most of the people in the rest of the world.
I can't answer why that is offhand, but I can tell you it's true.
They're members of the family, and to have something that important and not have any national organization Where you can get real numbers and real information on the degree of danger that you're facing.
And what you personally can do about it to ensure the safety of your own pets is just horrendous.
So I would suggest that our lawmakers get off their butts and put something together real quickly.
First time caller line, you're on the air.
Hello.
Art?
Yes.
My name is Gail.
I'm calling you from Sacramento, California.
Yes.
And I want to tell you, I had a cat.
My cat died just a few months ago.
And listening to you, I just broke out into tears.
And I just thought, Art, the reason your audience loves you and George is the fact that you're such basically decent, caring people.
And that comes across on the air.
And we love you.
I listen to you.
You're about to kill me.
I stay up till 2, 3, 4 o'clock in the morning on California time listening to your program because I love you guys.
And I totally, I just, I wish you the best in all the world for everything, for you and your new baby and your wife and your family.
Oh, thank you.
It's a very, very exciting time.
We're looking forward to Asia's appearance, as you can only imagine.
Very exciting.
Yes, well, I don't think that I'm all that different than other people, and that's why I spent so much time on this pet story tonight.
I didn't really want to start to say a whole lot about this until we really knew what the story was, and not that we fully understand the totality of the story yet, but what we do understand is that there's no national reporting center for this.
And so people cannot obviously understand the extent of the danger to their own pet.
If they keep reporting 15 or 16 animal deaths in a nation our size, people are going to do the obvious thing and they're not going to panic because the math is well on their side.
I'll tell you cats are particularly sensitive and generally when they go into kidney failure they don't revive.
Abby one had kidney failure, completely shut down.
And after spending about $7,000, Abby did live several more years.
Very good years.
But they're particularly sensitive to liver failure.
And anything that would cause it would cause many, many more sicknesses and deaths than obviously were reported.
So... Some kind of national reporting center and quick.
West of the Rockies, you are on the air.
Hi.
Hi Art, it's great to hear you back home again.
This is Roxanne.
I'm in Montana.
Well, hi.
How are you doing?
Just spiffy.
Good.
I wanted to mention about the cat food.
Yes.
What you came up with is, we don't have anywhere to go.
We need someone in agriculture.
To take notice because we don't even know if this has gone into the mainstream of human food.
Oh, well, they're beginning to suggest that might even be the case.
What we need is a national reporting center like the CDC or the FDA for animals.
It's as simple as that.
We need the truth.
We need it quickly.
And if this doesn't do it, I can't imagine what would.
And we really need some good news, you know.
If you start mentioning the quickening And you start looking around at what's going on with our government, our world, our people, our children, everything.
We really got to get our nose to the grindstone and start giving out more of our time and start protesting whatever we're going to do to get ourselves involved.
Get off the couch.
We need to do it because we're going to go down if we don't, Art.
Well, I agree with that.
And one way to begin would be to contact your representative, meaning your congressman, your senator.
And urge them to immediately put together some sort of reporting center, some sort of CDC, FDA-like organization for pet food, for pet medicines.
In other words, it takes a period of time for a medicine, for example, to be approved for human use.
Well, maybe it should take some time, and maybe it does for all I know, but I certainly don't know much about any organization of that sort.
All of this developed too slowly.
The information was inaccurate.
It was reported in sort of a catch-as-catch-can way.
A lot of people had to go onto the net.
They found incomplete lists of food manufacturers or people who were selling this food.
We needed to know exactly who, exactly what lot numbers, all the rest of it.
That's still expanding.
Hell, it even went into dry food.
The information did not come out appropriately.
It did not come out accurately.
And the only way we're going to get that, if we can hope to even get it, is to have some kind of organization that puts it all together.
Then you can assess the risk to your animals.
Wildcard Line, you're on the air.
Hi.
How you doing, Mark?
I'm okay, sir.
Okay.
I've been listening to the conversation about the Pet Reporting Agency and stuff like this.
Yeah.
It seems to me, and I mean, I'm a dog guy, I have three of them myself, I love pets, this and that, but it seems to me that we have more important matters for the government to be concerned with than that.
I mean, if a private, if a consortium of private people want to do it, I'm all for that, I would contribute.
Sir, our government is perfectly capable of chewing gum and walking at the same time.
It can prosecute any number of wars simultaneously.
We can certainly afford to take a few people and put them in charge of some kind of reporting agency so we know when our pets are in danger.
I just disagree with you.
I think that it would do better, as most things do, if interested people got together and did it on their own.
Well, unfortunately, interested people don't have access to the kind of information that would be required from the companies involved.
That's a regulatory matter, and it can only really be handled by government.
That's what governments are there for, to regulate the health and welfare of, well, people, citizens, and even their family members, which, for many of us, sir, include our pets.
Well, again, I think government's a little bit too intrusive as it is, and I don't really want another regulatory agency telling me anything having to do with my dogs.
Well, remember, sir, you don't have to listen.
That's true.
It's true.
They can issue warnings and say, look, if your pet eats this, they're liable to have liver failure and die, and you're perfectly welcome to not listen and feed your pet whatever you want.
Well, Cardline, you're on the air.
Art, this is Matt from St.
Petersburg.
How are you?
I'm fine, Matt.
Good.
It's an honor to speak to you again.
First off, two things.
I want to tell you why everybody is saying that they feel that the universe is right once again since you're back in the States.
Yeah, I'd like to know that myself.
Thousands of emails.
Okay, whether you want to admit it or not, you are an icon.
And you being in the Philippines would be like Taking, I don't know, Mount Rushmore and sticking it down in Brazil somewhere.
Oh, please.
I'm not Mount Rushmore, nor a face carved into it or anything else.
Come on.
I'm just a talk show host, sir.
That's it.
You're the talk show host.
No, I'm not.
Yeah, but anyway, what I really wanted to talk about was the weather.
Okay.
Okay.
I'm in Florida.
It's supposed to be like 44 degrees tomorrow.
We've got freeze warnings a little bit north of here.
I just talked to my mom in Central Texas.
She's got an inch and a half of snow on the ground.
Let's hear it for global warming.
Well, listen, the weather is berserk, and I'm sure you well understand that global warming doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to be hot.
I know.
It does mean that from a global perspective, but what it really means between now and when it gets damn hot, that the ocean levels begin to rise, is that we're going to have weird, unpredictable weather.
And we're certainly getting it.
Yep.
Bart, you have a good one.
You too, sir, and take care.
The other thing is those agencies which do exist to report the weather are being hobbled.
They're being hobbled.
Let's see, there's a new, the Commerce Department posted a new administrative order giving public communications Governing Public Communications, this new order covers the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, which includes the National Weather Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service.
Commerce's new order will become effective in 45 days and would repeal a more liberal open science policy adopted by NOAA February 14, 2006.
Although couched in rhetoric about the need for broad and open dissemination of research results, and open exchange of scientific data and ideas the new order forbids agency scientists from communicating any relevant information even if prepared and delivered on their own time as private citizens which has not been approved by the official chain of command
Any fundamental research communication must, before the communication occurs, be submitted to and approved by the designated head of the operating unit.
While the directive states that approval may not be withheld based on policy, budget, or management implications of the research, it does not define these terms and limits any appeal to within commerce.
National Weather Service employees are only allowed, as part of their routine responsibilities, to communicate information about the weather to the public, and scientists must give the Commerce Department at least two weeks' advance notice of any written, oral, or audio-visual presentation prepared on their own time if it is a matter of official interest to the Department because it relates to Department programs, policies, or operations.
Basically, this means we want to have a look at anything you say before you say it.
And of course, if it is anything that might alarm the public about changes in weather or climate, we want the opportunity to modify it before it goes out.
West of the Rockies, you are on the air.
Yes, hi Art.
How you doing?
I'm okay, sir.
This is Jim.
I'm calling on the XM radio.
I just thought I'd Boy, I had to make an interesting note there about the honey bees there.
I've been driving a truck for about 15 years now.
And last May, I hit two swarms of bees with my truck.
First time I've ever done that within a week's period of time.
And I've also noticed that I've been hitting a lot more bats lately.
So, you know, I think that You know, maybe this galactic cycle that our solar system is, you know, that's affecting our sun, causing our sun to, you know, to respond and to act up and also affect the poles not only here on Earth, but Mars, but I think it's probably affecting life as well.
And insects, birds, and mammals of that sort, it's affecting their navigation systems, so.
Alright, well that may well be.
Try not to get any more swarms with your truck.
In the meantime, nobody really knows why the bees are gone, where they've gone, where the little bee bodies are, and why all this is happening.
But if you believe Einstein, we've got three years and counting.
I'm Art Bell.
Here I am, and we're going to take a sort of a side step here a little bit, away from the paranormal this night, tomorrow night, back to it.
Michael Shrimpton coming up.
He's a specialist in national security.
is a strategic intelligence and counterterrorism consultant.
He has represented U.S.
and Israeli intelligence officers, brief staffers on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9-11.
Michael came within 50 yards of operational Hezbollah terrorists in June of 2003 on the Israeli-Lebanon frontier and addressed panels on terrorism in Washington, D.C.
and Los Angeles following 9-11.
He also actively assisted intelligence and law enforcement agencies in the global war on terror, was instrumental in exposing the notorious Hood Abu Ghraib photograph as a fake.
In addition, Michael is represented by two bureaus, the American Program Bureau and the Washington Speakers Bureau.
And so, on a variety of topics in a moment, Michael Shrimpton.
Before we get into this evening's topic with Michael, I want to ask him, on coastcoastam.com right now, we've got a photograph of a plane landing on a carrier, and Michael was actually in that plane that landed on a carrier.
It's one of the scariest things I think you can do in life, is land on an aircraft carrier.
And, you know, it's you and a hook, and that's it.
Michael, what was it like?
Great fun, Art.
It's a pleasure to be on the show.
Good evening to you, listeners in California, and good morning to listeners elsewhere across the state.
It was great fun.
I recommend landing on an aircraft carrier.
There's a great big crash and the plane comes to a halt very, very quickly, but I wouldn't have missed it for the world.
What led to the opportunity for you to do that?
Well, I was a guest of the United States Navy on their Distinguished Visitor Program, and it so happened a very nice US Admiral extended the invitation in London that I just about bit his arm off.
There was a Royal Navy One Star standing next to me when the invitation was extended, and he nearly dropped his cup of coffee.
As you said, that was a big-ticket invitation.
I was very grateful to the United States Navy.
It was very, very kind of them.
The take-off was even better.
Oh, really?
Oh, that's right.
So you left the same way, huh?
Absolutely.
Yeah, we left in a C-2A Greyhound back to Norfolk, and they looked after us very, very well.
It's a wonderful ship, the Enterprise, and America can take great pride in our Navy, and the U.S.' 's Enterprise in particular.
All right.
You briefed the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9-11, Michael, and as you know, worldwide, I guess, but certainly here in the U.S., and I would suspect in Britain as well, there are many people Who believe that the United States government was behind the 9-11 attack that brought down the trade towers and hit the Pentagon and of course the plane that came down in Pennsylvania.
So you would have some knowledge that perhaps the rest of us would not have who indeed was responsible For 9-11.
And let me extend that question.
Is there any official U.S.
involvement that you're aware of at all?
Absolutely none.
It is quite clear that neither President Bush nor Vice President Cheney had any prior warning whatsoever.
They were clearly taken by surprise.
Indeed, the U.S.
government, the Bush administration, was clearly taken by surprise, if not shock, on the morning of 9-11.
Anyone visiting, looking at the video footage of President Bush when he was first briefed in can see that there was chaos, there was an initially delayed response.
It is perfectly clear no one in the White House knew who was attacking America or initially why, although the early suspicions that Iraq was involved in the attack were fully justified.
But there's absolutely no indication of any official US involvement whatsoever.
Do you have any thoughts, Michael, on why, and it is a substantial number of people now, who believe that the U.S.
was involved in the attack on itself, and there just are so many people, some of them credentialed people, to be sure, who believe this is true.
Any idea why this has grown to these proportions?
I think there are several reasons.
The administration has done a very poor job of countering the various conspiracy theories that have grown up over 9-11.
You've only got to look at that idea that the towers could not have collapsed because the flashpoint or burning point of kerosene is lower than the melting point of steel, to see how flat-footed the administration's public response was.
As the Popular Mechanics books make very, very clear, and there is some excellent material put out by Popular Mechanics on this, The steel loses about 50% of its structural strength at about 600 degrees centigrade.
That completely deals with the flashpoint of kerosene issue.
But that has been allowed to grow and grow and grow, and nobody's got out there, apart from popular mechanics, and got to grips with it.
Well, why should it be left out to popular mechanics?
The White House should have been making this point and should have been making it from the time these theories circulated.
Quite easy to see how, in the light of the impact from two Boeing 767s, each tower of the World Trade Center collapsed.
And the same goes for WTC7, and the same for the Pentagon.
It is not difficult to explain to everybody how those attacks achieved the destruction of the buildings that we saw on 9-11.
It's simple.
Do you believe that in view of the size of this 9-11 movement, so-called, that the government should formulate some kind of official response to it?
Or do you think that it would just cause a greater furor to develop?
I think the administration needs to get to grips with it.
You can't just let these stories grow and grow and grow.
And if you do, then that's exactly what will happen.
They will grow and grow and grow.
The administration should have been getting to grips with this from the time it was being said that there were controlled demolitions of WTC1 and WTC2 and WTC7 could not possibly have fallen down.
This is all nonsense.
But because there is such a lack of official response, there is a danger that people will believe these theories when there is no foundation to them.
Well, the government does not have a good record, Michael, of trying to knock down conspiracy theories.
It just doesn't.
They actually did attempt that with respect to, for example, Roswell.
You probably, or may not, know a great deal about that, but what the government did to try to knock that down was laughable and really added to the entire aura of Roswell, rather than detracting from it.
So if they cannot do a better job than they did with Roswell, perhaps they ought not try.
But honestly, Michael, I agree with you, and they really should do something to stop this, because it's hurting our country.
I absolutely agree.
Now, the administration has several major problems that most people are not aware of.
One is the huge internal conflict between those who are loyal to first president Bush, 41 as we refer to him, and the current president.
Now, not all of the administration are loyal to President Bush.
As we say in the intelligence community, everybody in the U.S.
administration is loyal to President Bush.
The problem is working out which President Bush won.
Now, this civil war between father and son paralyzed the administration in its first term and is doing significant damage even in the second term.
State Department, for example, very much closer to first President Bush than to the elected president.
Same goes for CIA.
There are major, major problems with the CIA.
Remember, first President Bush was a director of the CIA in 1977, and he has quite long-term bureaucratic influence at Langley, and you've always got this problem with Langley, that there are many there who think it's more important to wage war against the Bush administration, with respect, than to wage war against America's enemies.
Now, that creates major problems for the administration.
It has been almost impossible for the administration to get its point over about the links between Iraq and 9-11.
Now, Vice President Cheney was right when he concluded within hours of the attacks that Iraq was most likely involved.
The President's instinct was to assume that Iraq was involved as well.
That is correct.
There's no question that the Iraqi Muqabirat Intelligence Organization was heavily involved in the planning and execution of 9-11.
But trying to get that point across is almost impossible if you have an intelligence community which is split, and if you have, even at director level, people whose first loyalties lie elsewhere than to the elected president.
Alright Michael, I certainly was not aware that Iraq was a major player in 9-11, so perhaps you could fill me in.
What is it you know that points to Iraq?
Well, the first meeting between Saddam Hussein and Bin Laden took place as early as 1989.
Bin Laden was in the back of a Saudi-owned Boeing 707.
This was a... Excuse me for coughing, I've got a... As you can... Listeners can probably tell, I'm just recovering from a head cold.
Oh, that's quite all right.
By the way, in the interest of being honest with everybody here, you are coming to us from, I think, Great Britain, somewhere in Great Britain, right?
It is good morning and great.
It's a lovely Easter Sunday morning in Great Britain.
Yeah, absolutely.
Now, the first meeting I'm aware of between Saddam Hussein and bin Laden took place at Baghdad International Airport towards the end of 1989.
Bin Laden and Saddam did not meet directly.
What happened was that bin Laden was in the back of a Saudi-owned Boeing 707, which had been converted for Executive use.
That flew from Riyadh, is my understanding, to Baghdad.
Bin Laden stayed at the back of the plane and messages were then carried back and forth between him in the plane and Saddam Hussein, who was in the terminal.
They were both anxious to avoid a direct meeting.
That is the first indication we have of Bin Laden working together with Saddam.
Now, it makes strategic sense.
The Iran-Iraq war was over and the Soviet Union had withdrawn from Afghanistan.
Both Saddam and Bin Laden had similar strategic interests.
The next document that is of significance in this story is, I think, the documents linking Bin Laden to Iraqi intelligence as far back as 1992, which the Iraqi National Congress produced, Ahmed Shalabi.
Now, Ahmed Shalabi is a very Controversial figure, but I have no reason whatsoever to doubt the INC, that's the Iraqi National Congress, claims that the documents they provided, which were authenticated,
Link Bin Laden to Iraqi Muqabirat Intelligence Agency as far back as 1992.
I thought a lot of the documents that he provided that were the underpinning for the beginning of the war itself were proven to be totally baloney.
No.
What's happened is that people have tried to discredit the documents but without success.
Now this is quite a standard intelligence tactic.
It was followed very successfully in the Val Plame affair, when somebody forged some documents, slipped them through to the Italian media, saying what the original real documents had stated, which was that Iraq had an interest in acquiring uranium from Niger.
Now that intelligence was accurate.
What somebody did was to knock up a set of false documents saying the same thing, leak them to the media, expose the second set of documents as a forgery, and having forged them in the first place, and then undermine the original documents.
It's a standard intel tactic.
There's been a group within Langley which has been briefing the media vigorously about these INC documents for several years now, but the briefings are all phony.
Those INC documents were real, and we have no reason to doubt whatsoever that the Muqabirat and Bin Laden had a relationship at least as early as 1992.
Again, it makes sense.
We know there were subsequent meetings between Iraqi intelligence and Osama Bin Laden, and we know the first meeting between Bin Laden and Saddam took place, as said, towards the end of 1989.
Now, there are a consistent series of meetings, both in Khartoum, in Uh, Kandahar in Afghanistan, or near Kandahar in Afghanistan, uh, in Ankara, Turkey, uh, all the way through the 1990s, uh, Iraqi intelligence officers were going down to Khartoum, uh, when Bin Laden was based in the Sudan.
We know that Iraqi intelligence officers went to, uh, Khartoum, for example, uh, in 1996, before, um, Bin Laden's departure from the Sudan.
Uh, we know that, The senior Iraqi intelligence officer in Turkey met with Bin Laden.
We know that Al Zawahiri, Bin Laden's deputy, met with senior officials in Iraqi intelligence.
We know that there was an extensive meeting in February-March 1998.
Prior to the attacks on the U.S.
embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, between Iraqi intelligence and Bin Laden, we even know where Bin Laden stayed.
He stayed at the Al Rashid Hotel.
Indeed, Saddam Hussein's, one of his legal team, a guy by the name of Giovanni De Stefano, briefed the media at one point that he had seen Bin Laden in the Al Rashid Hotel back in March of 1998.
So the whole documented series Of Al-Qaeda Iraqi intelligence meetings in the run up to 9-11.
We know that the Iraqi Consul General in Karachi was one of the key link men.
He was going up into Afghanistan when Al-Qaeda were based in Afghanistan.
We know he was one of the key link men between Bin Laden and Baghdad.
I certainly have no problem at all imagining and understanding that these contacts took place.
Do we have any hard evidence to indicate that 9-11 was the subject of any of these meetings?
Yes.
We have the Boeing 767 simulator which was used to train the pilots for 9-11.
Now this is one of the reasons why I have come into contact with the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9-11.
Indeed, I even had a quiet meeting in Washington with one of the members of the 9-11 Commission who was interested in this, and I have had meetings with U.S.
intelligence officials on this subject for some years now.
In August 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, they acquired two Kuwaiti Boeing 767 from recollection.
They were Dash 200s.
Now, we know those planes, one of them was, both of them in fact, destroyed.
We know the 767s did not stay with the Iraqi Air Force, but we also know that for a period of some month, the Iraqis were operating two Boeing 767s.
What was not initially appreciated, and I had an input into this research, is that the Iraqis also seized a Boeing 767 simulator.
Now, as you know, in order to keep airline pilots current, in order to train them, most airlines will have a simulator.
Of course.
Now, the Iraqi Kuwaitis had a simulator at Kuwait Airport.
Makes complete sense.
And that simulator was taken to Salman Pak, the Iraqi terrorist training facility, where we have reason to believe most of the 9-11 hijackers went through.
There was an old 707 fuselage at Salman Pak, which is used to train terrorists in aircraft hijack, but they also had this simulator.
Now, Kuwait Airways actually sued Iraqi Airways for the simulator.
This is where I came in.
Some of the evidence for that was sitting on legal files in London.
There was a very lengthy schedule of something like one million items that had been seized from Kuwait Airport.
And in that very lengthy schedule, there was the simulator.
Now, that simulator was never recovered.
I confirm that with the Kuwaitis.
And, as I say, all the intelligence indicates that that simulator was taken to Salman Pak.
Now, my understanding is that the 9-11 pilots were trained on that simulator.
Now, that would make sense.
The official version of events which the 9-11 Commission puts forward in its report is that all four pilots on 9-11 were trained on mostly light aircraft, In Florida, Hoffman School of Aviation and so forth and so on.
But this is all nonsense.
Anybody who knows anything about aviation will appreciate that there is a huge difference between a Cessna and a Boeing 767.
Alright, here Michael is one aspect of what you're saying that I just don't understand.
If this is true, certainly the administration, particularly wanting to prosecute the war, in Iraq would have made all of this as public as possible and in fact the current administration has actually downplayed officially any connection between Iraq and 9-11.
Why wouldn't they instead play that up to the hilt in partial or even complete justification for most Americans in the current war?
Would you like the boring answer or the real answer?
Oh, always the real answer, Michael.
That's what I guessed at.
Your listeners are a very sophisticated audience, I know.
The politics of this are very, very deep indeed, and you cannot, I think, get to the answer to that question, which is a very good question, with respect, without looking at the states which lie behind, or lay behind, Saddam's Iraq, and also al-Qaeda.
And then we're going to get into some very, very deep intelligence history.
You would think that the Bush administration would be all out to make the link between Iraq and 9-11.
Of course.
The obvious response to 9-11, and it's a terrible tragedy that it wasn't done, the obvious response to 9-11 was to make that link, which was made by intelligence officials very, very early on.
Remember, Shek Intelligence reported, the Shek Internal Intelligence Service, the BIS, reported on the meeting between Samir al-Arni, the Iraqi intelligence chief in Prague, and Mohammed Atta on April 8, 2001.
Sorry, Michael, you're going to have to hold it right there.
We're at a break point in the program.
We'll pick, believe me, we'll pick right back up on this when we come back from break.
From the High Desert, I'm Art Bell with Michael Shrimpton.
Here I am.
My guest is Michael Shrimpton.
And we're investigating now the roots of 9-11.
The roots of our enemies, really.
And I've got a couple of very... Listen, when I interview somebody, folks...
And they say something.
If I don't nail them to the wall because of it, that doesn't indicate that I agree with them necessarily.
This is a forum where people are allowed to present what information they have, come what may.
That's what we're all about.
And I've got a couple of very serious questions.
In other words, if Iraq was involved, intimately involved, in 9-11, Then it seems to me our government, and for that matter the British government, would be all over it as a justification for the war that they've had a very hard time justifying.
And speaking of that, if you go back to the original intelligence that got us into the Iraq War, there's been an awful lot of consternation both in this country and certainly in Great Britain, where many called for a resignation because the intelligence was so flawed.
We're going to cover all of that with Michael Shrimpton in a moment.
Once again, Michael Shrimpton.
Michael, let's go right back and cover this.
In other words, if Iraq was intimately involved in the pre-planning of 9-11 and the attack against the United States, it seems to me the Bush administration would play that up to the hilt in trying to justify a war that they're having a very difficult time justifying right now.
So let's stick with that one for a moment, if you can, in plain English.
Why would we not play that up?
The internal dynamics of the Bush administration make it almost impossible.
I mentioned the Iraqi intelligence links.
A couple of names for you.
Salah Suleiman was one Iraqi intelligence officer who was actually stopped by Pakistan intelligence, I think, on the frontier going from Pakistan into Afghanistan when bin Laden was there.
Khalid al-Janabi Was the Iraqi intelligence head of station in Karachi, and he was a key link man between Bin Laden and Baghdad in the run-up to 9-11.
And Farooq Jazi was a senior Iraqi intelligence officer, at one point was the Iraqi ambassador and anchor at Turkey, a very important country, and he met with Bin Laden in December 1998 at Kandahar in Afghanistan.
Those are just some of the Iraqi intelligence officers we know were in regular contact with uh... al-qaeda
dot the problem the bush administration has in the problem the british
government have is the the huge
split within the intelligence community and this huge split in the bush
administration uh... between supporters of the first president bush and uh...
supporters of the president
uh... the state department has a very strong institutional bias against any link
between iraq and nine eleven
and the cia was a very strong institutional bias against those
links Now, if you talk to these guys privately, they will concede that, yes, they're aware of the links, but... Wait a minute.
Why do they have an institutional bias against the truth?
Ah, you've got to go back a long, long way.
In the 1930s, The German intelligence penetration of the State Department and the U.S.
intelligence community and also the Foreign Office and MI6 in the U.K.
was quite deep and went quite high.
It's much easier to understand the problems at CIA and State if you know that Alan Welsh Dulles and John Foster Dulles both reported to Admiral Canaris.
In World War II, for example, in 1943, the Dulles brothers were involved in negotiations to try and take the United States out of World War II.
Now there are similar contacts with Stuart Menzies, the head of MI6.
If you think of Alan Walsh Dulles and John Foster Dulles as working for Germany rather
than the United States, then it all becomes much easier to understand.
Once you get someone working for you high up in an organization, they bring forward
protégés, they bring forward their own people, and the damage they do lasts for decades.
Remember the State Department in the 90s, it was Franklin Roosevelt who said that the
most you can expect of the State Department in a war is that it remains neutral.
The State Department really...
It has never pushed the interests of the Bush administration or in my view the American interest in the war on terror.
Yeah, but the Bush administration could push it itself if it understood that Iraq was behind 9-11.
I don't think there's anybody that could stand between them and a president standing in front of the seal and telling the country that Iraq was behind it.
Yeah, that makes sense.
But you've then got to factor in China and $1 trillion worth of T-bills and the enormous economic pressure that China has been bringing to bear on the Bush administration, particularly in the second term.
Now, behind the scenes, there has been tremendous pressure on the dollar.
In practice, with the first President Bush getting very, very close to the Chinese, you can track his meetings going into China.
He had a very important meeting in Shanghai, for example, towards the end of last year.
You've got, with the Chinese aligning themselves with First President Bush, with powerful bureaucratic interests in Washington, allied with China, the economic pressure that can be brought to bear on the Bush administration is enormous.
The pressures on the President and the Vice President have been intense, and in practice it simply has not been possible for them to get the message out on Iraq and 9-11.
Take the example of the simulator that we discussed.
Getting that intelligence through, I had meetings with Ambassador John Bolton in London.
I was at John's.
He was kind enough to invite me to his swearing-in ceremony in the State Department in June 2001.
I gave intelligence to John that was passed back to the CIA at the London Embassy, documentary evidence from, in book form, from a senior Iraqi intelligence officer with the new Iraqi government, who's now with the Iraqi delegation in New York.
That intelligence just went walkies.
It was diverted.
I tried to get it through to Vice President Cheney.
It was diverted on its way to Vice President Cheney.
It is much more difficult for the United States President to get out there and tell the truth than the U.S.
voters would suppose.
And you've got to look behind the enormously powerful interests behind Saddam Hussein's Iraq and behind Al Qaeda.
Al Qaeda did not just happen In the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Al-Qaeda didn't exist.
It grew out of the Afghan Service Bureau.
That was based in Pakistan, not Afghanistan.
Bin Laden did hardly any fighting against the Soviet Union.
The people who fought the Soviet Union were our allies after 9-11.
They were the Northern Alliance.
People like Ahmed Shah Massoud, who was assassinated by Al-Qaeda in the run-up to 9-11, which was an indicator that 9-11 was about to happen, which was missed, and also Abdul Haq, who was also assassinated.
Now, these are the good guys.
These are the guys who were putting their lives on the line, fighting the Soviet Union.
Bin Laden was nowhere near Afghanistan for most of the 1980s.
He was normally based in Pakistan, where he still is.
Now, when The Soviets are kicked out of Afghanistan and the Cold War collapses.
Powerful interests in German intelligence see Al-Qaeda as a means of waging asymmetric warfare against, particularly the United States, but also the UK.
The Cold War is gone.
Behind the Cold War, right throughout, you had a very, very interesting little section of German intelligence called the Deutsche Beteiligungsteam, which operates out of Dachau near Munich, sitting behind the KGB.
You've got to go all the way back to 1917.
The Bolshevik Revolution was funded by the Germans in order to get Russia out of World War I. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was basically bankrolled and created by German intelligence and in 1945 German intelligence was not broken up.
This is the key to understanding the Middle East.
It's the key to understanding terrorism.
The Germans had a very powerful network in the Middle East which they'd created from the 1920s.
The Muslim Brotherhood Which is essentially a terrorist organization, was created in 1928 by German intelligence, by a German intelligence asset called Samuel Banner.
Now, Banner was working for Admiral Canaris.
Al-Qaeda actually grows out of the Muslim Brotherhood.
You can trace back Al-Qaeda to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden's deputy, for example, was an Egyptian Islamic jihad, which essentially grew out of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Hamas, Hezbollah, all of the Islamic terrorist organizations, whether they're Shiite or Sunni, you can usually trace a link, institutional or personal or financial, back to the Muslim Brotherhood.
And that organization worked very, very closely with the Germans in World War II.
Now in 1945, German intelligence carried on as before.
What happened was that when Canaris appreciated Germany was losing, he moved all the key files and personnel out of Berlin, down to Dachau, And set up towards the end of 1943, under the directorship of General Lieutenant Erwin von Laarhusen, who then cut a deal with the Dulles Brothers and Donovan, and emerged as a witness for the Allies at the Nuremberg War Trials.
Von Laarhusen had set up this office in Munich, and the whole purpose of that office was to ensure continuity.
The German networks in the Middle East were not broken up.
If you think about it, how many German spies did we discover in Cairo or Baghdad?
Saddam Hussein grew out of that network.
Saddam Hussein was the protege of Khairullah Talfa, who was an Abwehr, then DVD, asset in Baghdad.
He was actually imprisoned by the British in 1941 for participating in the Nazi-backed coup, which sought to remove the king of Iraq and install a pro-Nazi regime so the Germans could get access to Iraqi oil.
Now, the Germans eventually succeeded in taking over Baghdad when they got the Ba'ath Party into power.
You had the coup in 1958 which removed the king, and then eventually you have the Ba'ath Party itself coming into power in Iraq.
Now the Ba'ath Party is an offshoot, or was an offshoot, of the Nazi Party.
If you look at it, it's a sort of Arab version of the Nazi Party.
All this very interesting history, Michael, but it still doesn't explain to me, nor did you explain to me, the pressure you talked about that would prevent our administration from connecting Iraq to the 9-11 attacks.
Factor in the Trilateral Commission, The Trilateral Commission was created by German intelligence in 1918.
It wasn't set up in 1973.
It emerged semi-into-the-open in 1973, but it actually is a much older organization.
If you factor in the media links the Trilateral Commission has in Washington and with the US liberal media, if you factor in the political connections the Trilateral Commission has in Washington, it becomes a lot easier.
The President, at times, has been almost isolated in the White House.
He's had a State Department working against him for most of the last seven years.
He's had the CIA working against him for most of the time, except when Porter Goss was in charge.
And then, of course, he lost Porter Goss from the agency.
When Ambassador Negroponte, no offense intended, but Ambassador Negroponte was very much involved in that removal of Porter Goss, you've got uh... administration that had no
effective intelligence agency since nine eleven no effective foreign ministry
and which is now largely lost control of the pentagon that the the attacking of
donald rumsfeld wasn't at the president's decision it was something dictated to
him behind
the people in the administration working against the president
you've got these enormous enormously powerful deep-seated institutional links back to the Trilateral Commission to
the Chinese.
The pressures on the President have been stupendous since 9-11.
He's done extremely well in the circumstances.
He managed to get the U.S.
to go to war with Iraq, but he was never able To explain why, effectively, why the United States is going to war with Iraq.
It's not the only one, Michael.
Your own government has been under intense pressure and actually has come right out and said that, look, the intelligence that got us into the war in Iraq was flawed, was wrong.
Your own government said that.
Yeah, that itself is interesting.
The intelligence on WMDs Was not wrong.
What happened was that in the fall of 2002, the French and Germans who had supplied most of the nuclear, biological and chemical material to Iraq started shipping that material out.
Now we know there were two freighters that went out of the port of Umm Qazir.
Some of the stuff was Russian.
The Russian stuff was shipped out of Umm Qazir and a couple of freighters in early 2003.
The rest of the stuff went out over a reopened railway line between Baghdad and Damascus, and some of it went out in trucks.
And British and American intelligence were aware of these movements for six months prior to the Iraq War.
You have a major shift of WMDs out of Iraq.
The result is that when we went into Iraq, it was pretty much clean.
I mean, there's some small amounts of material were actually found, but that, you know, there's some agents for nerve gas and so on.
But the Virtually a whole of Iraq's WMD capability was taken out of Iraq between September 2002 and March 2003.
And so you're telling me none of that intelligence that you just talked about, about the movement of WMDs out of the country, made it to the top of your government or ours?
Oh yes, the British government is well aware and so is the US government.
But Tony Blair is always portrayed in the United States as an ally.
This is always very frustrating for us over here because we know that he's actually quite close to France and Germany.
There was heavy French and German political pressure on Blair in the run-up to the Iraq war to stall the war.
That was what that whole Second Resolution of the United Nations was all about.
It was nothing to do with seeking UN authority.
We didn't need UN authority to go to war with Iraq.
Nobody needs UN authority to launch a war if they've been attacked.
The British government, under heavy pressure from the French and the Germans, to stall the war in order to allow the WMDs to go out.
The WMDs were not Uh, Iraqi programs, they were essentially French and German programs.
And the WMDs, you don't look at the state that is developing the WMDs, you always look at the state which is providing the technological assistance and the material.
Pakistan's nuclear weapons are supplied by China.
Iraq's WMDs were supplied mostly by France and Germany, some by Russia.
And behind Germany, behind Baghdad, you had Paris and Berlin.
And as I said, these links are very, very deep.
The Saddam Hussein-Nazi links go all the way back to virtually when he was a teenager.
So then you're saying we were aware of the fact that the WMDs already were out of Iraq.
But that was a stated goal for going in in the first place.
The first, number one, major stated goal was WMDs.
I know, crazy.
I'm not just saying this now, Art.
I had a letter published in the London Times just after the war had started, pointing out that WMDs as the basis for going to war was crazy.
I knew before the war started, I was in the United States when the war broke out, but I knew before the war started that the WMDs had gone.
Just about everybody in the Intelligence Committee knew.
They were going, you guys had birds overhead.
I mean, you were watching all this on satellite.
And the administration, Must have been aware, at least the U.S.
intelligence community must have been aware, but then you have to draw a careful distinction between what U.S.
intelligence chiefs knew and what the president was briefed in.
The president is very much dependent on what he is told by his intelligence advisors.
Now, to what extent President Bush was briefed in on these shipments, That is an open question.
I very much doubt that he was shown satellite footage of this material going out of Iraq.
Tony Blair, well, did he or did he not know that most of the WMDs had gone?
My guess is he may well have done.
The MI6 was certainly well aware.
And if you talk to these guys, I'll say off the record, and I do, then, yeah, of course we knew this stuff was going out, Michael.
There was no way, politically, either the Bush administration or the British government could tell the truth about Iraq's involvement in 9-11, and they were unable to make the case for political and intelligence reasons linking Iraq to 9-11.
You have not yet explained to me, Michael, why we couldn't tell the truth about Iraq's involvement in 9-11.
You go all the way back to World War II and the Germans, but I...
Give me a reason that I can understand why we couldn't say aloud that the country we're going to war with was responsible for an attack on America, which would make perfect sense.
Exactly.
You've got huge problems with the intelligence community.
If the administration had gone public with what you guys knew about Iraq and 9-11, almost certainly the CIA would have been fighting a media war as they fought over the Valerie Plame case.
Briefing against the administration, making it almost impossible for the administration to get its case out.
Practically, it would, I think, have been very, very difficult.
Now, I agree with you.
Had it been me taking the decisions, I'd have said, guys, we go with the Iraq 9-11 link.
We've got solid intelligence linking Iraq to 9-11.
We've got solid intelligence linking Iraq to al-Qaeda.
My advice would have been to declare war on Iraq.
Making the case of Spelli, Iraq's involvement in 9-11, as early as October 2001.
And had we done that, then all of these problems over Iraq would have been avoided, the British and American publics would have been told the truth, and there would have been overwhelming public support for the war.
Very, very, very hard to understand why they did not do so.
Like the President has actually said, that as far as he knows, there was no connection.
Ah, but what has the President been told?
Has the President been told, for example, about the pilots being trained on the 767 simulators?
Now, the President was a very good pilot.
You didn't fly F-106s unless you were a good pilot.
If you were a bad pilot, you didn't survive.
Simple as that.
They were very hot ships.
He understands aviation.
He's flown subsonic fighters.
He knows aviation.
He himself instinctively understood that the guys on 9-11 were trained and he understood that this could not have been on a Cessna at Hoffman School of Aviation.
The attack on the Pentagon in particular required a fairly high degree of piloting skill.
That was no easy attack to execute.
The attacks on the World Trade Center 1 and 2 That required a fairly high degree of flying skill to line up on the target and take those targets down.
Okay, well there we agree.
We certainly agree.
Michael, hold it right there.
Michael Shrimpton is my guest, and he has knocked down one widely thought about conspiracy, but it seems to me He's substituting another one.
We'll delve into this.
We'll delve into whether Iran has nuclear weapons, what knowledge he has of that as well.
From the High Desert and the Great American Southwest, I'm Art Bell.
As many of you may know, I have a visceral sense that we did not attack ourselves, that we did not plan and execute an attack killing our own citizens.
And I very nearly just as strongly believe that what's being presented to me right now is completely flawed.
I just, I refuse to believe on the one hand that we would not tell our people, that our president would not tell our people about concrete evidence, if it was in trainers or where they were trained or anything else that connected Iraq to 9-11, that we wouldn't tell the country about that.
Indeed, along with that, I have a more than difficult time believing that the two leaders of the free world in this country and Great Britain, where my guest is from, would use WMDs, weapons of mass destruction, as the excuse for going into Iraq Not using 9-11, which he claims should have been used, but instead use WMDs, which he claims we had intelligence that had already been moved out.
In other words, they would be ending up immediately, and they would know they'd end up with eggs on their faces.
It just, none of it makes any sense to me, but we'll try again with Michael Shrimpton in a moment.
Alright, Michael, let's try one more time here.
Again, as I mentioned, I have a visceral feeling that we did not attack ourselves.
However, what you're telling me is every bit, if not more difficult, to buy because of the fact that we really, really needed a good reason to attack Iraq.
And you're saying we had one And didn't use it.
And you cannot explain to me why we didn't use it.
I know it's difficult to buy, but that is what happened.
A lot of things which are true are difficult to buy.
Just because it's not easy to buy doesn't mean to say it isn't true.
In good simple English, without going back to the Germans in World War II, try and tell me what pressure could have been brought to bear on our President not to use the truth?
Financial pressure.
You've got China with $1 trillion worth of T-bills.
So enormous pressure from China.
All right, you're suggesting China was blackmailing the President of the USA?
Absolutely.
Over the last three to four years, there has been heavy economic pressure by China applied behind the scenes on the US dollar.
And you can track senior U.S.
officials, Treasury Secretary Paulson, Alan Greenspan, Minister of the Federal Reserve, going over to China.
The Clinton administration really set you guys up.
This whole business of giving China virtually unfettered access to U.S.
markets, China's building up a massive U.S.
foreign exchange as surpluses uh... u s dollar uh... surpluses
concluded a massive brought for the administration's back is very very difficult for the united states to move
uh... unless and until that one trillion dollars worth of t bills
sitting in china's reserves is
taken out or somehow dealt with until you guys can uh... uh... park that one t
and lift the threat to the dollar it is very very difficult for america to act with complete
freedom that we have the same problem
uh... when the pound was under tremendous attack uh...
during the sewers crisis
and what is the reason why why why would the chinese care Whether or not we blame 9-11 on Iraq or not.
At one point, Bin Laden was in China.
In November 2001, Bin Laden goes into China, and the Chinese are very, very close to the Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, which in turn is very, very close to al-Qaeda.
People's Republic of China is a strategic competitor for the United States.
The Chinese knew about 9-11 in advance.
The Pakistan nuclear weapons are supplied by China, that's Chinese technology, and we know that there were Chinese nuclear technicians servicing Pakistan's nukes, bringing them up to full operational status in the months running up to 9-11.
There were Chinese technicians crawling all over.
Okay, let's say I bought that.
Let's say I bought that, Michael, at face values.
You've yet to answer why China Would particularly care enough to essentially blackmail the US administration into not blaming Iraq for its involvement in 9-11?
Well, China would absolutely not want the US... China certainly did not want President Bush to win in 2004.
China has been working against British and American interests in the Middle East right from 9-11, indeed from before.
If you think about Bin Laden, Bin Laden goes over the Khunjerab Pass.
About November 2001, Bin Laden goes across the Khunjerab Pass between Pakistan and China in a convoy of Toyota Land Cruisers.
They were playing a show game, switching him from one Land Cruiser to another, just in case you guys picked him up.
Now China actually sheltered Bin Laden, and it's only after Some months, early 2002, that we have Bin Laden moving back into Pakistan.
So you've got the Chinese working against you and against us.
You've got the Chinese working very closely with the French and the Germans.
Okay, okay, but Michael, you still are not answering my question.
Why would China use economic blackmail to prevent the U.S.
administration from putting the blame where it should be?
Why?
Because China wants the West to fail, and China particularly wants the West to fail in Iraq at the moment.
Now, the minute Britain and America get the truth about Iraqi involvement in 9-11, and get the intelligence about Iraq's connections to Al-Qaeda out into the open, public support for the war in Iraq Surges, inevitably.
That is why we went to war.
Which would be a goal of the administration, yours and ours.
Exactly, but think about the politics of it.
The politics of that mean almost certainly a Republican victory in 2008,
and that is not what the Chinese want.
In the United Kingdom terms, the Chinese are much happier with Blair where he is at the moment.
They do not want Gordon Brown to come in to take over from Tony Blair.
The Chinese most certainly do not want the UK moving further away from the EU, which is what a Brown government would mean.
So China's strategic interest is best served by tying Britain and America up in knots over Iraq, by making sure that public support, insofar as they can do it, public support for US and UK involvement in Iraq drains away.
And this has happened before.
Look at Vietnam.
Think back to how difficult it was for the Johnson administration and then the Nixon administration to make the case for war in Vietnam, to explain to the American people why you guys were there, what you were doing, to actually carry out an effective military strategy.
You guys knew how to win the Vietnam War.
You guys, I mean, American military leaders are not stupid.
I've never met an American four-star or three-star general or admiral who I thought was even remotely stupid.
You guys, General Westmoreland was a very fine general.
You guys knew how to win, but you couldn't do it.
We're having the same difficulties.
It is much more difficult than you might suppose with respect for the Bush administration to follow a policy which is in its own interests and which is in America's interests.
the pressures on the administration are far greater than the US public would understand.
One trillion dollars worth of T-bills is one factor, it's not the only factor, but it is
an enormously powerful factor because in practice if the administration started doing what the
People's Republic of China did not see was in its strategic interest, then the dollar
could go. I mean, the one trillion dollars worth of T-bills gives the Chinese enormous
economic leverage and that is not the bush administration's fault
That is the fault of letting China into the WTO and giving China favoured nation access to US markets and allowing a huge trade imbalance to build up between the United States and China.
And where your country's currency is at risk, the practical constraints on policy makers are considerable.
We have had that problem in the UK.
We had to abandon our Middle East policy in the mid 1950s because of constraints on the currency.
And we had Harold Macmillan, the Chancellor, working closely with the Dulles brothers in Washington, and the British government collapsed.
And we pulled out of sewers.
That was deeply in our strategic interest to carry on with the sewers invasion in 1956.
Michael, so you're telling me, the Chinese essentially blackmailed us, told us that, look, if you tell the truth about Iraq's involvement in 9-11, we're going to pull these bills, we're going to drive the dollar into the ground and economically ruin you.
Is that correct?
That is, in summary, yeah, it doesn't happen exactly like that.
Somebody in China, somebody in Beijing doesn't get on the phone to Washington and say, if you do that, then we will do this.
Pressure is applied internationally a little more subtly than that.
But that's the long and short of it.
Take, for example, towards the end of 2006, the Chinese suddenly started dumping large numbers of T-bills.
And that was done in an attempt to apply pressure to the administration.
And what happens is that you then get Federal Reserve officials getting across to Beijing, you get carve-ups, and there is then effectively a Chinese input into policy.
Now we have the same problem with the French and the Germans.
As we're in the EU, we have been under enormous political pressure from the French and the Germans.
There's no way Tony Blair was ever going to make the case linking Iraq to 9-11 whilst Britain was in the European Union, whilst he was close to the French and the Germans, and whilst French and German strategic interests were allied with China against the UK and the US.
The geopolitics of 9-11 are such that it has been very, very difficult for either the administration or the British government to get out there, tell the truth, and explain to the British and American public who have a need to know Why we are in Iraq?
If you think about WMDs, WMDs cannot have been the reason.
We know there were WMDs in Iraq.
I mean, everybody agreed there were WMD programs in Iraq.
The UN agreed, the French, the Germans agreed.
Nobody disputed in the 1990s, seriously disputed, that Iraq had WMD programs.
The Iraqis actually used WMDs.
I mean, it's not that these were test or research programs.
The Iraqis used WMDs on their own people.
Talabja, for example.
Now, where did all those weapons go?
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
But you're telling me at the same time we had intelligence that they were already gone at the time we were saying we're going to war because of the WMDs?
Yeah, you guys are watching them.
You guys have satellites over there.
That railroad line between Baghdad and Damascus wasn't open for the Syria-Iraq tourist traffic.
No politician, Michael, would voluntarily toss that much egg on their own faces.
Well, yeah, good question.
But then you've got to come back to this huge split in the Bush administration between supporters
of the elected president and supporters of his father.
President Bush Sr.
carries far more bureaucratic weight in Washington than the American people would suppose.
He carries enormous clout and the president has been struggling from the whole of his to terms to emerge from behind his father's head
that his father made the mistake in nineteen ninety of not get a ninety
ninety one of what gang into bag that we could have sorted this whole mess out
in and should have sorted this whole mess out in uh... march of ninety ninety one and gone straight on
into uh... bang that uh... it is a good president bush the current president
bush is at the deal with a mess that was handed down to him by his father
and uh... i have had to deal with that against the background
of this enormous chinese
at u s dollar surplus built up thanks to the princeton administration
uh... trade policies but think about the u s media
the u s media has been working the mainstream media to be working against
the administration uh... almost solidly since nine eleven There was a honeymoon period immediately after 9-11.
But the President's got the media working against him.
He's got enormous economic pressures from China.
He's got enormous bureaucratic pressures from his old man, with respect.
He's got huge problems with his intelligence community.
He's got huge problems with the State Department.
And he has to carry allies with him.
Now the British have been a break on this.
It's enormously frustrating for those of us over here in the UK to see Tony Blair acting effectively as a break on the administration.
In practice, the administration would not have gone it alone in using 9-11 as the casus belli for war with Iraq.
The administration wanted to form a common policy with allies, the most important ally was the UK, and for political reasons Tony Blair was absolutely insistent that we go with WMDs.
And Blair must have known the political problems he was creating for himself, but nevertheless the pressures on him from France and Germany were so strong that He's had to go with WMDs as the case for war.
And I have no doubt that Blair knew what he was doing to his own government.
President Bush, I think that President Bush had much less access to the intelligence on WMD shipments out of Iraq than you might suppose.
I doubt very much whether anybody went to President Bush and said in the run-up to the Iraq war, Mr. President, here are the satellite photographs of trucks and railroad cars leaving Iraq, going into Syria, and we think the Iraqis are shipping out their WMDs.
Look at, look at, to prove my point, look at the plane case and the difficulty the President had is making the case for Iraq's attempt to purchase yellow cake in Niger.
Now, we know over here that Iraq definitely wanted to acquire uranium yellow cake from Niger.
It makes sense.
Niger is very close to France.
Saddam Hussein is very close to Jacques Chirac and France and Germany.
France and Germany sit behind Iraq, or did, when Saddam Hussein was in power.
Nigeria is very close to France.
It's effectively a French client state.
It's the major French-controlled source of uranium.
It is the obvious place for Iraq to go to acquire uranium.
So the Iraqis make soundings in Niger.
We want Uranium Yellow Cake.
British intelligence picked that up.
There is an accurate report from MI6.
It's shared with you guys.
The President puts it in his State of the Union address.
And what happens?
We have Italian intelligence working with Italian media, slipping out these bogus documents, saying the same thing as the real intelligence did.
That real intelligence is thereby discredited, and the whole of the US media, virtually across the spectrum, the US and UK media, jump on President Bush, Make it absolutely clear that this intelligence was wrong when it wasn't.
Don't pause for a moment.
I don't think any Western journalist has paused for even five minutes to ask him or herself a basic question.
Hang on a minute.
If these second set of documents are forged, why are we saying the first set of documents are forged?
It doesn't necessarily follow.
Once it's forged, it doesn't mean to say other documents have been forged.
And then you have the Valerie Plame Nonsense in Washington.
Everybody in the intelligence community who's got any serious connections whatsoever knows that Valerie Plame was not covert.
She was never protected by the Intelligence Identities Protection Act from about 1992.
I haven't spoken to anybody in the intelligence community who worked with Valerie Plame or knew of her doing covert activity any time after about 1992.
The whole case has been a joke.
But have the administration been able to get their case across?
No chance.
That whole trial has proceeded on a completely false basis.
An entirely unfair conviction against Libby.
Lewis Libby, I've never met him, I have no brief for Lewis Libby, but as far as I'm concerned he's probably a good man.
Certainly innocent of the charges brought against him.
And the administration, absolutely powerless spectators.
And they know this.
I mean, I have been to the White House, I've been to Washington.
I've sat down with senior administration officials.
It's so difficult.
That if you go to the White House to talk about the Valerie Plame case, what will normally happen is you go out of the building, you go down, you head for the nearest Starbucks, and you have the serious discussion in Starbucks, because inside the building there are too many people working against the President.
I've had the experience of passing vital intelligence onto the White House and it gets diverted.
I tried to brief in Karl Rove's office, for example, to take a practical example of how difficult it is for the President.
I had intelligence supplied to me by the UK from a senior intelligence source about Valerie Plame not being covert, and intelligence about links between certain prosecutors on the case.
I won't mention names on a public radio broadcast in the States, but intelligence Causing major concern in London about links between some of the prosecutors working on that case and some bad guys inside the US intelligence community who it is known were not working for Uncle Sam, who it is known were reporting to the German DVD and DACA.
And that fairly critical intelligence was taken by me to Washington on a back-channel basis.
I had tried to get it via an encrypted email into Karl Rove, And it took weeks and weeks and weeks and every message was diverted.
And I found I would bring up or send an email to somebody in Karl Rove's office whose name I had and say please pass this on to Mr Rove and I'd follow up and find it had been diverted to the National Security Council and it gets diverted back down to Langley and the intelligence just goes walkies.
It is formidably difficult.
Tony, Michael, we're not going to agree on how we got there and the politics that got us in and all the rest of it, but we are there now.
We have to be to differ on that one, huh?
I'm afraid so.
Where are we?
Well, that's fine.
Where are we with the Iraq War now?
I mean, we look at the headlines and the daily news and know what's going on, so what I'd like to do is get your assessment of where we are now.
With Iraq, whether we're winning or losing, and there really are two giant, giantly different schools on that thought.
And also I'd like to know what knowledge you have of Iran possessing nuclear weapons.
So when we get back from the break, if you'll consider those two questions, we'll delve into them.
And as you pointed out, we're going to have to agree to disagree on the rest of it because it crosses every Every boundary of common sense that I can construct, even when I want to think about conspiracies, the one that holds our president back from saying Iraq was connected intimately with 9-11, I just can't make that work.
We'll be right back.
All right, so in a moment we'll ask Michael Shrimpton how the war with Iraq is proceeding, where it's going.
Whether we're winning, losing, or whether there's some kind of eternal deadly draw going on, and these days to go to Iraq you've got to certainly not be in fear of the Reaper.
And also, what about Iran?
The Russians said we were massing on the borders.
We were getting ready to invade Iran, to take out their infrastructure, to What's the expression to decapitate the leadership, that sort of thing, all in one giant strike?
Those questions coming up in a moment.
All right, Michael, since we declared victory, since that period of time until the present moment, what is your assessment of where we are in the war with Iraq?
Where are we now?
Let's begin there.
Well, we are in a mess and we're heading for a Vietnam-style Stalemate.
The problem is that we're in a war with a US administration split, as it was during NARM.
We have a British government that is not fully committed and with a lack of clear political direction at the top, we are in trouble.
The President, God bless him, and I have a great admiration for your President, he has tried to address this and the surge policy is the right policy.
But just coming back to the point I was making earlier, look how difficult it has been in practice for the President to get that policy implemented.
He's the President of the United States, he announces the policy, he has Congress jumping all over him, and Secretary Gates, no offence intended, Secretary Gates has actually been holding this policy back.
The troop increase levels that the President announced have not actually taken place.
So we have the right policy from the administration, but they're not allowed to implement it any more than President Johnson or President Nixon were effectively able to implement a sensible strategy over Vietnam.
Now we have to address the problems that there are in Washington.
Somebody has to win that civil war in the administration between supporters of President Bush and supporters of his father.
Somebody has to get the Chinese off the Americans' back, and we have to get the French and Germans off our back.
We have to identify who the good guys are and who the bad guys are.
The French, the Germans, and the Chinese are working against us, and you guys.
We need to get the British government fully committed to what we're doing in Iraq.
At some point, at some time, Art, it would be extremely helpful if somebody in London or Washington could go on television, as you suggest, and actually explain to the British and American people why our sons and daughters are dying in Iraq.
In a democracy, this is a basic failure of intelligence here, in a democracy, the people have a right to know why we are going to war.
It's basic first principle of intelligence, the need for that.
Michael, it's a failure of common sense if somebody bought into what you're saying.
So where we're going from here, you say the current policy is alright, but the British aren't committed to it.
So we're losing?
Would you say we're losing?
Would you say it's a draw currently?
Ultimately we can win if we stay committed?
What are you saying?
We can win if we stay committed.
At the moment, it's a draw.
At the moment, we're losing casualties.
There is a lack of clear political direction.
The new U.S.
commander, General Petraeus, seems to me to be very, very able.
And I think if he gets the troop levels that he needs, and the resources that he needs, then we will win.
But we have to address the states which are sponsoring the terrorist insurgency inside Iraq.
We have to get to grips with Syria, and we have to get to grips with Iran.
All right, let's talk about Iran for a moment.
There were recent reports from Russia that the U.S.
was massing forces and about to attack Iran.
You're aware of those reports, I take it?
Yes, I've read them, and I don't agree with them.
I'm not sure where the Russians are getting this from.
It looks to me like someone has fed some false intelligence to the Russians, and that I think is coming out of the East Coast, and the Russians are circulating that.
I think the Russians are circulating in good faith, but I think somebody is feeding some disinformation into the Russians.
I checked those reports out.
There is absolutely no American plan to attack Iran at the moment.
I think you should.
I think we should.
Should have stood up much more strongly to Iran over the hostage crisis that has just ended.
Thank you.
Oh yes, I'm glad you mentioned that.
I'm glad you mentioned it, Michael.
The initial reaction to the hostages being taken by Iran, I thought was...
Very muted.
Correct.
And I expected a much, much bigger reaction.
I expected perhaps even military action.
So, would it be your opinion that indeed they were in Iranian waters when they were picked up?
What do you think about that?
No, I think the captain made it quite clear at the press conference yesterday that there are 1.7 nautical miles inside Iraqi territorial waters.
I have absolutely no problem with that whatsoever.
It's perfectly clear the Iranians came inside Iraqi territorial waters, seized our guys, and it's perfectly clear that that was planned.
All right, then the muted reaction to it?
Political problems again.
The Blair government is not going to stand up to Iran.
Tony Blair has been humiliated over this and as with Iraq, he has allowed himself to be humiliated.
He's allowed himself to be humiliated because of the mess he's got himself into with the EU, France and Germany.
And that's why we need to get out of there and we need to get a A more serious figure in as Prime Minister.
So you want the UK out of the EU?
Absolutely.
Well, what's the point of dealing with your enemies?
The French and Germans are not on our side.
They're not on our side.
They're for Iraq.
France and Germany are behind Saddam Hussein.
France and Germany are very close to Iran.
Iran is almost a Franco-German client state.
Another basic intelligence principle is follow the money.
Now, if you follow the money for the Iranian revolution in 1979, it goes all the way back to Paris, and I suspect some of it goes further on from Paris into Munich and Dachau.
That is why the October surprise meeting was cut, that deal was cut in Paris by First President Bush, not in Tehran.
That is why the first meetings in the Iran-Contra affair, which as it happens was set up by a friend of mine, didn't know him at the time, got to know him many years later, that is why those negotiations were not initially conducted with the Iranians at all, but with the Germans.
France takes its oil out of Iran at $12 a barrel.
The oil price that we pay in Britain and you guys pay in the United States is basically a phony.
Well, most oil, or a large chunk of the world's oil, is actually supplied in sweet deals to the French, the Chinese, and also the Germans at way below the so-called market rate.
Now, the French get their oil out of Iran at $12 a barrel because they helped pay for the Iranian Revolution.
Iran is not an independent state in the way that it likes to pretend that it is.
Iran is very much dependent on France and Germany, and Iran's nuclear material is supplied mostly by the French, also to some extent by the Germans, and to some extent by the Chinese.
Do they already have the bomb?
Absolutely.
What they have, the CIA and the IAEA, and I've been at a meeting addressed by Mohamed ElBaradei, no offense intended, but he is useless, he's as much use as a I'll refrain from using the expression, but he's not a lot of use.
Sounds like there's offense intended.
Yeah, he's useless.
The UN are useless.
The UN are certainly not on side.
The concentration on Iran's enriched uranium program is an intelligence blind.
Everybody's obsessing on enriched uranium weapons, whereas we all know that a plutonium warhead is more compact And if you want to put a warhead on top of a fairly small German-supplied, Chinese-supplied rocket, and there are German rocket scientists in Iran as we speak, a lot of German technical assistance covertly to Iran.
New Torpedo, for example, German technical assistance on their submarines.
I understand there are even German officers, German naval officers, helping to crew, i.e.
command, Iranian submarines.
You know, the technical assistance getting to that level, down to the tactical as well as the strategic, But we have plutonium warheads intended to go on the Iranian IRBMs, and the plutonium, the weapons-grade plutonium, is being supplied by France.
Now this is crazy.
Absolute madness for the French to be supplying weapons-grade plutonium to the Iranians, but that is what they're doing.
Now, the French have a covert stockpile of plutonium.
The French have a very large domestic nuclear power program, and they have a thing called the Fast Breeder Reactor, which is just perfect for plutonium.
Now, the French have a lot of hot plutonium.
They have a stockpile of it, Art.
And this is covert.
Now, how many kilos or how much hot plutonium has gone into Tehran, that's a matter for discussion.
I understand the Iranians have between four and five plutonium Warheads operational at this time.
Now the reasoning behind that was, and I had a recent discussion with a member of the Council of Foreign Relations.
Now you've heard of those guys.
Very close to the Trilateral Commission.
Turned very close to Germany and France.
And this guy was just grinning at me innately when I was making the point.
He wasn't even bothering to deny that France has supplied Iran with weapons-grade plutonium.
He knew it was true, I knew it was true, and we both knew the other knew it was true.
Are you sure he wasn't simply humored by the promise?
No.
The French strategy, the French and German strategy after 2003 was to equip Iran with nuclear weapons in the hope it would deter a British and American response against Iran in the same way that we attacked Iraq.
Now the French and Germans know that Iran is responsible for sponsoring a lot of the terrorism that is going down inside Iran.
Terrorism does not just happen.
Terrorism is almost always state-sponsored, and the Bush administration were right after 9-11 to look for which states were sponsoring that attack.
It is almost impossible for a terrorist organization to mount a major attack without assistance from a state, and in particular that state's intelligence apparatus.
Terrorism I define as state-sponsored, asymmetric warfare.
And the terrorist insurgency inside Iraq is being sponsored by Syria and Iran.
Now, behind Syria and Iran, you have France, you have Germany, and you have China.
You can trace this on the ground.
I mean, the nuclear material is coming in from France, some of it's coming from Germany, you've got Chinese technical assistance on Iran's IRBM program.
Yeah, none of this is too hard to buy.
Now, until we can deal with Iran and Syria, then we're not going to be able to stabilize Iraq.
The Iranians have been inside Iraq, well, they've obviously had intelligence network inside Iraq for a long, long time, particularly in the south.
But the first major Iranian terrorist attack inside Iraq was the assassination of a moderate Shiite spiritual leader.
Um, Ayatollah al-Khoi in, I think, June of 2003, and I have been saying since June of 2003 that that attack, which was set up by the Iranian VIVAC intelligence agency, um, indicated that Iran was pursuing a covert program of sponsoring terrorism inside Iraq.
Until and unless we deal with Iran, and until and unless we deal with Syria, then we're not going to stabilize Iraq.
Now, with the surge in troops, we are, we are clearly going to at least hold the fort in Iraq.
Until that surge we were losing ground. With that surge, albeit it's not been fully implemented, with that surge
partially implemented, we are holding ground in Iraq but we will not start winning.
We will not start, you know, the tipping point will not be reached until we get the Iranians and the Syrians out of there.
All right, Michael, we're up to you.
If you were in power, if you had some sort of ability to dictate a policy, how would you deal with Syria and Iran?
I would go to war with both.
I would stop messing around.
I would say, look, either we're going to win this war on terror or we're going to lose it.
We haven't got an option of not fighting it, because the bad guys came to us.
Let's go win it, and let's stop dragging it out for year after year.
I would go big, and I would go quick, and I would go messy and dirty in the short term, with a view to a much quicker victory than we're going to obtain by pursuing the current strategy.
And bear in mind, everything you've said about what you believe is behind this, how would you then deal with China?
Now, I would recognize Taiwan.
Now, it's going to be a lot easier for Brits to do this than the Americans.
If I had power as opposed to influence, then it's frustrating just having influence because you give the advice, it's not followed, and you just have to pick up the pieces after the advice is not followed.
It's very frustrating.
I would deal with China this way.
I would pull the UK out of the EU.
I'd pull the UK out of the WTO.
We don't need to be in the WTO.
We can cut our own free trade deal with you guys.
We can rejoin the European Free Trade Area and we have the Commonwealth.
Those are the only people, frankly, we need to deal with in terms of trade, plus the Russians and the Israelis and the Taiwanese.
I would recognize Taiwan, which we can do, taking a lead.
You guys cannot recognize Taiwan at the moment because the Chinese have too many US dollar foreign exchange reserves.
They have very few sterling reserves.
So we recognize Taiwan and we start to dismantle the WTO and start to attack China's economic growth.
We try and slow it down.
What do you think the repercussions of Great Britain recognizing Taiwan?
What would the repercussions be?
Well, the repercussions would be nothing but good.
It'd be great for the Taiwanese.
It's something I've discussed with the Taiwanese.
They would welcome it.
It'd be great for UK balance of payments because we'd stop importing stuff from China.
The Taiwanese are much more ready to buy British goods than the Chinese will be.
We'd have a much fairer trading relationship.
Chinese political pressure on the UK would be lifted almost at a stroke.
We get Chinese intelligence, their intelligence station out of London.
We get Chinese out of London.
And we clear the way for the U.S.
administration, maybe in 12-18 months time, to recognize Taiwan.
At the same time, the U.K.
needs to massively boost its defense spending.
The membership of the EU costs us around three billion pounds, five to six billion U.S.
dollars a week.
That's the total cost of the U.K.
economy.
It's massive.
And these are the sums that come out of the British Treasury and the US Treasury if you talk to them very, very quietly.
Now, by pulling out of the EU, the UK is suddenly able, without increasing taxation, suddenly able to put our forces on a serious war-fighting level.
At the moment, Britain and America are trying to fight a war with peacetime force levels.
That is a nonsense.
We saw that in the Iranian hostage crisis.
The only ship we had supporting our guys in the Shatt al-Arab waterway was a Type 22 frigate, HMS Cornwall, that was laid down in 1983 and went into service in 1988.
She's nearly 20 years old.
There's the wrong warship in the wrong place.
She draws nearly 17 and a half feet.
And the ships that would have been used supporting our Marines and sailors are sitting up tired in a dockyard in Plymouth or Portsmouth because we haven't got the money to put them into commission.
That is just a nonsense art.
We need to massively increase British defence spending.
We need to get serious in the war on terror.
We've got people on the ground who are very serious, but they're not enough of them.
And pulling out of the EU is one means of giving us the resources that we need.
Okay, so you're saying you didn't respond to the kidnappings because you couldn't?
Exactly.
We were too weak.
What we should have done is issued an ultimatum to Tehran saying you return our people within 24 hours or we are at war.
That's certainly what I would have expected.
Exactly.
That is the proper British response.
What we got was a weak response from Tony Blair who allowed himself to be humiliated just as he allowed himself to be humiliated over Iraq and WMDs and we need to get that weak leader out of Downing Street.
I know he has a reputation in America as a strong leader but that's based on rhetoric.
Blair is great when it comes to strong rhetoric.
But he's all talk, no action.
And we saw that over Iran.
Now he's been completely humiliated and the latest word is that he'll be on his way within weeks.
And frankly for us Brits, it just cannot come too soon.
Osama bin Laden, where is he now?
Do you know?
And how do we get him?
Osama bin Laden, so far as I know, is still in an ISI safe house.
It's an air-conditioned, quite comfortable safe house.
And although I don't know his precise whereabouts at this time, and I wouldn't say so on an open broadcast if I did, to my understanding he's around about 25 miles southeast of Peshawar in the northwest frontier area of Pakistan.
Probably somewhere between the towns of Noshera and Sherat.
Noshera, N-O-W-S-H-E-R-A, and Sherat, P-H-E-R-A-T.
Now, you guys know where he is, because you guys have got a bird overhead, and you guys have been tracking his movements for some considerable time.
So have we.
The problem with going after Bin Laden is that he is surrounded by a regularly rotated battalion of Pakistani infantry.
Well that virtually, well it doesn't virtually, it rules out a Special Forces attack.
Neither your Special Forces nor ours can just go in and pick him up.
Special Forces are lightly equipped, highly mobile, and are in no way set up to deal with a well-trained battalion of infantry protecting a high-value target like Bin Laden.
So essentially, we do know where he is.
You just essentially told us.
All right, Michael Shrimpton, in a moment we're going to open the lines, which I think is going to be a very, very interesting exercise.
No telling what may come up.
If you have a question or a comment for Michael Shrimpton, the next hour will allow you to place it.
I'm Art Bell.
Well, alright, I've had a couple of hours now with Michael Shrimpton.
Your turn is coming up.
Anything you'd like to say, any questions you've got about what he has said, what he believes, whether you agree or disagree, is welcome.
So, that said, in a moment, it's all of you and Michael Shrimpton.
Well, all right.
We're about to go to the phones with Michael Shrimpton.
Now, whether you agree or disagree, that's just fine.
My expectation, however, is that you will, either way, be polite.
Michael, you ready for some calls?
Absolutely.
All right, then here they come.
Jamie in California, you're on with Michael Shrimpton.
Good evening, gentlemen.
Good evening.
I got a question.
What's your... Is it not true that When after 9-11, when the planes were grounded, all planes, flights, planes were grounded here in the United States, that we let, or not, but the Bush administration let the Bin Laden, some of the Bin Laden family fly out of this country.
Jamie, that is right.
Some of the Bin Laden family were allowed to fly out of the United States.
That decision was taken from memory by Richard Clarke, who was the Democrat appointee.
He was a hangover from the Clinton administration, and my understanding is that those flights were essentially authorized by the first President Bush, not the President.
I don't think the reporting lines went to the White House on that decision.
I may be wrong, but that's my understanding.
All right, first time caller on the line, you're on the air with Michael Shrimpton.
Hi.
Hi.
I have a question for your caller.
I just was wondering on his view about how 9-11 was an inside job, calling from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
I'm with Edmonton for 9-11 Truth.
And just like all the overwhelming evidence from Building 7 to the Norad stand down, I just wanted to get his take on that.
Hi, it was a pleasure to hear from Edmonton, great city.
There is absolutely no doubt that the senior administration officials were not, I repeat, not in the loop on 9-11.
President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary Rumsfeld had no forewarning of the attack whatsoever.
However, there may have been, or there certainly were, penetration assets reporting outside the United States, high up in the U.S.
intelligence community, but those assets were Well entrenched before the Bush administration took office.
There are undoubted indications of some inside assistance from within the intelligence community, diverting reports, for example, from FBI agents about Islamic terrorists training.
And there must have been some inside assistance in order to get the terrorists into the U.S.
in the first place.
He was a well-known terrorist, he'd been in prison in Israel, he'd been released under pressure from the Clinton administration, and as part of the Oslo so-called peace process, and he could not have gone into the United States in his real name without some intelligence assistance somewhere.
But of course, much of this was done, the planning for 9-11 was done before the Bush administration took office.
Alright, let's go to Wild Card Line 4, it's Erica in Mesa, Arizona with Michael Shrimpton.
Hi, Erica.
I'm sorry, they've got Erica on the screen.
Michael, two questions.
You would know this first one for sure.
Are our UCAVs, Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles, capable of launching cruise missiles?
Not at the moment, but I know the Americans are working on some slightly better UCAVs, but I will give a slightly guarded answer to that.
I'm well aware of some very good work being done by some very nice people, Lockheed Martin and elsewhere.
Is it secret?
Is it secret?
It's not secret, but I wouldn't want to discuss on an open program what I know about latest developments in UCAVs, but we are headed towards giving UCAVs, unmanned combat aerial vehicles, considerably greater... The reason I ask this first question is because a lot of people, myself included, believe it was a cruise missile that hit the Pentagon.
You can't take a loaded 757 down from altitude And be six feet off the grass of the Pentagon for hundreds of feet and then hit between the first and second floor.
You can.
You know, explain away with Chinese T-bills why they went around taking all the videotapes from all the surrounding area.
If you want, I'll get to the second question.
There's no doubt the Pentagon was hit by a Boeing 757.
It was identified by pilots on the way in.
The video footage is not 100% clear, but it's pretty clear that that was a plane going in.
Wreckage from the plane was found inside the building, apart from the engines, for example, and it is absolutely clear that the Pentagon was struck by a Boeing 757 being flown at a low altitude.
There was a part of an aircraft that was foreign to a 757 that was found and confirmed By Honeywell here in Phoenix, of not being part of a 757, but I'll go to the second question.
We'll agree to disagree.
Yeah, we'll have to agree to disagree on that.
Definitely a 757.
Alright, next question.
Where was the plane in Shanksville, Pennsylvania?
We saw a crater, CNN showed up with a camera crew, and they said, not a piece of luggage, shrapnel, a body was found.
It's being told now that debris was found eight miles away.
This sounds to me like the plane was shot down, be it by a Hornet or a UCAV, and then another projectile was put into the ground where our cameras went to.
No, no, with respect to that, that's a conspiracy theory that just won't wash.
Wreckage was not found 8 miles away, 8 miles by road, yeah, more like a mile and a half in terms of downstream of the accident site.
That was a high-speed impact by the 757 going into the ground, there's no question that that was united 93 and the Shanksville is the resting place of the good folks on 93 included some very brave passengers who took control of that plane and gave their lives in the process.
There is no doubt whatsoever that the United 93 happened pretty much as the 9-11 Commission described it.
That part of the 9-11 Commission report is 110% accurate.
I think a lot of people get confused with respect by Uh, airline accident sites would usually happen, most airline accidents happen on approach, on takeoff, at fairly low speeds.
This was a high speed impact into the ground and that crater, that very very small crater, is pretty much what we would expect to find given the speed and the probable angle of impact.
All right, this is interesting.
On the international line from Kiev in Ukraine, here's Chris for Michael Shrimpton.
Good afternoon.
Thank God for the Sea Crane Wi-Fi radio.
You'll remember me.
We've spoken about the Philippines before.
I hope your wife is doing well.
I have a question for the guest.
The Ukrainian parliament has been disbanded.
For the last couple days, I've been trying to get to the counselor office at the embassy and have not been able to because of all the demonstrations.
And the Russians, there's a strong Russian presence here.
Do you have any idea?
I mean, it's not really on topic, but we're talking about Russians and stuff.
What's going on here?
I've never been to Kiev, I've been to Minsk, that's about the closest I've been to Kiev.
Let's be slightly careful about Ukraine.
here.
It's all so special here.
I've never been to Kiev.
I've been to Minsk.
That's about as close as I've been to Kiev.
One has to be slightly careful about Ukraine.
The Germans and the Russians are strategic competitors and Ukraine is very much a political
battleground.
I think the Russians are particularly concerned about some German influence with the current president.
There's a lot of politics behind the Ukraine.
It's not just what it appears on the surface.
And I have a little bit of sympathy for President Putin.
I share President Bush's view of President Putin.
I think he's a man we can do business with.
I think he's basically a good man.
And I see Russia as more of a strategic partner with the United States and the UK, as she was in World War II.
We could not have won World War II without the Russians.
But is this going to blow up?
Because right now you can feel the tension in this city, and my friend is from Lviv, I don't know how to pronounce it, it's L-V-I-V, which is on the western side of Ukraine, and over there it's peaceful, but over here, it's getting pretty crazy here.
Oh yeah, I believe that.
There's a lot of tension in Kiev at the moment.
I don't think it'll blow up.
I think that what we're seeing in the Ukraine is a political battle.
I doubt very much it's going to hit the streets, but I may be wrong.
I think your plan of getting out of town, to get out of Dodge, would be my advice.
Well, I'm trying, but I have paperwork.
You know, they tell us not to walk through these massive demonstrations, and the embassy is in the central part of the city.
And it's, I mean, it's everywhere, and there are actually Russian flags, and this, almost like a Communist Party type group of people, and you can tell that I should not be there.
Anyways, Art, I'm sorry.
Well, if that advice, listen to me, if that advice is coming from our embassy there, you should probably follow it.
They generally know what they're talking about.
Yeah, I am.
But anyways, have a great night, you guys, and just keep me in your thoughts, Art.
I will, Chris.
You take care.
Alright, to Sabrina in Mississippi.
You're on with Michael Shrimpton.
Good morning.
Hi.
It's nice to talk to you, Art.
Good morning, Sabrina.
Hi.
What concerns me is all the mass duplicity in our intelligence agencies.
And, Michael, you said that your information was redirected continuously, correct?
Correct.
Right.
Well, how do we know how much other information has fallen through the cracks?
And apparently our president doesn't know any more than we do.
He probably gets more information watching CNN than he gets from intelligence.
Do you deny that some faction of our own intelligence could have been even working independently toward the events at 9-11?
Oh, there's no question that there were bad guy assets way up in the U.S.
intelligence community.
That has also been a problem with British intelligence, and it's a long, long-standing problem.
If you think about Alan Welsh-Dulles, he worked for the Germans in World War II, and he carried on working for the German DVD, Deutsche Verteidigungsdienst, based at Dachau, Munich, after 1945, and he was head of the CIA.
Richard Helms was working for the Germans in World War II.
And there are some very, very heavy-duty bad-guy assets high up at Langley, Most of them have been identified and isolated, but boy, it's been a problem.
And the President of the United States is far more isolated than the voters would think.
The President is dependent very much on advice and what the intelligence chiefs bring to him, and they have been sitting on a whole lot of stuff.
It's very frustrating.
I can imagine.
It's great to hear from you.
Well, thank you.
I appreciate it.
Thank you, Sabrina.
And let's go to Jesse in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
You're on with Michael Shrimpton.
Good evening, gentlemen.
How are we doing today?
We're doing fine.
I have two questions for you, Michael.
Okay.
One, is it true that Bush Jr.
did have an oil dealing company with Osama himself?
No.
Okay.
Let's be slightly careful with the Bin Laden family.
Most of the Bin Laden family are fairly straight business people.
Very few of the Bin Laden family are involved in terrorism.
The mere fact that one's surname is Bin Laden does not mean to say that one is a terrorist.
And also, I was also under the impression that inside our nation, a few national leaders were contacted to not fly over New York during 9-11 by our own government.
Is that also true?
To my knowledge, no.
I'm not aware of that.
So far as I know, no major figure was kept out of New York.
There is a problem in Washington.
93 in my judgment was headed for the White House, not the Congress, which is listed as a possible target.
I think the target there was the White House, not the Congress.
There is one major player in the Pentagon, I won't give a name on a broadcast, but there is one major player who goes to Congress who is not in the Pentagon building, and I'd be a lot happier, I'm not putting it any higher than this, I would be a lot happier, Jesse, if he had been at his post in the Pentagon that morning.
There are definite signs of some people high up in the U.S.
military and intelligence communities working against the U.S.
in advance of 9-11.
Common sense says that.
There's no way those guys pulled off that attack.
Those terrorists pulled off that attack without a little bit of inside help, and that came from within the U.S.
intelligence community.
And maybe, maybe at the Pentagon we have some slight counterintelligence problems, but I know the U.S.
counterintelligence community are working on that.
Rob in North Hollywood, California.
Your turn with Michael.
Hi Rob, that's a great place to live, North Hollywood.
And I was just wondering, first of all, why, when the President walked into that school on September 11th, And he walked in and he saw the very first airplane after it hit the tower.
He was advised of that.
Then he went in the classroom, sat down, and then he was advised of the second aircraft that said we're under attack.
Now, why would the President of the United States sit in a chair for nine minutes, knowing the country's under attack, that he is a personal target of terrorism, that there's airplanes hijacked, that in fact, where he's sitting, there may be an airplane aiming right for the school he's sitting in.
Why would he sit for nine whole minutes While people are burning to death in buildings and jumping out on fire, while the country and people are being killed sitting there for nine minutes, why isn't he running to one of those phones?
The President of the United States used to go into my facility at an FBO, fixed base operation in an airport.
He used to come into my facility where I worked.
Okay, caller, hold it, hold it.
First of all, I had to just eliminate some of your language.
So, I'm sure you can present this question without taking the Lord's name in vain or whatever, right?
Yes, yes.
A fixed base operation is at general airports for private jets and stuff.
The President would come by and stop by and they'd bring an enormous phone network system.
They'd mess with all our phone wires and they'd be able to have a phone system where he could communicate with all levels of the government in case of any emergency.
The President of the United States was in that We've got it.
Michael, go ahead and respond to that if you can.
It makes the point, Rob, that I was making earlier.
The President was out of the loop.
under attack or at war, he gets up off his butt, he runs over there and he starts making
commands and he gets the hell out of there because he knows he's a target.
But no, he sat there for nine minutes.
All right, we've got it.
We've got it.
Michael, go ahead and respond to that if you can.
It makes the point, Rob, that I was making earlier.
The president was out of the loop.
He had no forewarning, no inclination that the United States was going to be attacked
that morning.
Now, the initial report he got was an airliner hitting a building.
I do not blame the President for not panicking.
He was live on TV.
He was in the presence of young kids.
His initial response, which I thought showed leadership, actually, was not to panic, not to take rush decisions, not to run around like a headless chicken, But to just wait and get some further intel as to exactly what was happening.
You see, the first report was not America is under attack.
It wasn't absolutely clear that America was under attack until the second plane goes into the World Trade Center.
The initial report I got, I was working at my desk, the same desk I'm speaking to you now, I was working on my computer, and the initial report I got was a plane has hit the World Trade Center.
And my initial thoughts were, gee, I mean, what are we talking about?
A Cessna here?
A light plane?
Some clown who doesn't understand air traffic control regulations?
It was only when I got down, switched on the fair and balanced coverage from Fox and realized, oh boy, we've got the terrorist attack.
But the initial response, the initial intelligence to the president was a plane has hit the World Trade Center.
I'm not even sure the President was told in that initial first response from shocked people who were dealing with an unimaginable crisis for which they had no previous experience.
I'm not even sure the President was told an airliner had hit the World Trade Center.
My guess is he was told in those first few whispered words, a plane has hit the World Trade Center.
Now we had a similar situation.
I do advise informally, I often get consulted if there's a terrorist attack or possible terrorist attack in progress.
When we had a plane go into a building in New York City, there were conversations from within the U.S.
counter-terrorist, counter-intelligence community, and my opinion was canvassed.
And I said, in terms, this does not look like a terrorist attack within minutes of that plane hitting.
I do not blame anybody for not immediately assuming that it was a terrorist attack.
Once it was clear that it was a terrorist attack, then the President did take, in my view, firm and decisive Michael, certainly the air traffic controllers in Boston, New York and elsewhere understood that there was something much larger going on prior or
At least even with that first building being hit.
I'm not sure how and what kind of failures there were in communication.
Major failures in communication.
You can't watch a recreation of those events without wanting to throw something at the television set.
That's right.
It is very, very frustrating.
But we are speaking with the benefit of hindsight.
I don't think anybody had a very clear picture as to exactly what was going on until the second plane hit.
Yeah, I think that's fair, and as far as the President is concerned, those communication failures in mind, I suppose that could well have been his mindset when he saw that first plane go in.
Alright, Michael Shrimpton is my guest, and any questions really are fair game.
We've laid a lot out on the table, not all certainly that I agree with, and I'm sure many of you disagree, and some of you may agree.
At any rate, it's yours to ask.
I'm Art Bell from the High Desert and the Great American Southwest.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
Indeed, my guest, Michael Shrimpton.
Very, very controversial stuff on the airwaves tonight.
You want to join in?
They just gave you the numbers.
In a moment, we will continue.
Alright, Michael, is there anything you wanted to get into the program tonight that you did not get in before we proceed here?
Apart from the fact that I'm more than happy to go out and talk to people face-to-face, and they're represented by Washington Speakers Bureau and American Program Bureau.
Now, you've asked a lot of serious questions, Art, and I've enjoyed answering them.
I know we don't actually agree on everything I've said, but I've greatly enjoyed appearing on the program.
Well, that's quite all right.
Laurie in Boston, Massachusetts.
You're on with me.
That's a great city.
Been there?
Oh, hello, Art.
So nice to talk with you.
I have four quickies.
One is, first of all, does Mr. Shrimpton have a website or a book coming out?
I'd like to ask these in succession in case we get cut off because I don't trust my cell phone at this juncture.
And secondly, you were mystified, as was I, last summer prior to the elections.
I read, I think it was in Newsmax or some such news source.
It said that Bill Clinton ordered President Bush not to link Saddam Hussein with 9-11.
And I was stunned when I read this.
I said, how could he order him not to do this?
And thirdly, George Tenet, as you know, Mr. Shrumpton, was Clinton's CIA director, whom President Bush kept on.
Correct.
And I think I remember his saying at the hearings, seeking authorization for invasion, that it's
a slam dunk, that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction.
Now, I don't know the timeframe between when that statement was uttered and your statement
that they were taken out prior to the invasion.
And then lastly, in the 9-11 report, is it true?
And if so, where can I find it?
It's on my list of to-dos, but like, number 50?
I recall having read that in the report it says, we have found substantial credible evidence
of ongoing collaboration between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, or al-Qaeda, but we have not
found substantial credible evidence of a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
I would...
Okay, I'm sorry.
I cut her off there by mistake.
Anyway, a lot of questions there.
Yep, all the pleasure to hear from Boston.
I'm on the advisory board of Girard Group International, which is based near Boston.
It's a very beautiful city.
I was there last year.
Now, I am working on a book on strategic intelligence, working on a book on the Destruction of the De Havilland Comets, but they won't be ready probably till next year, maybe 2009, but I'm able to get out to the States through Washington Speakers Bureau and American Program Bureau, who are in Massachusetts.
They're off the Mass Pike there at Newton.
So if Laurie wants to give them a call, I'd be more than happy to come and speak to a group near her.
Laurie makes a good point about the Democrats.
It is absolutely clear there are some good people in the Democratic Party, of course, but it is absolutely clear that Democratic support for the President in the war on terror has been, in terms, conditional on the administration not making the link between Iraq and 9-11.
And that is odd, because George Tenet was a Clinton appointee.
He himself made the link between Iraq and Al-Qaeda to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
And prior to 9-11, it wasn't that controversial to say that Iraq and Al-Qaeda were working together.
Many in the Intelligence Committee took that view.
There were those in the Clinton administration taking that view and saying so.
For example, around 1998, When Iraqi possible involvement in the attack on the U.S.
embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, Kenya was raised.
This link between Iraq and Al-Qaeda has become hugely controversial, as we've seen this morning, only since 9-11.
Now, George Tenet did say it was a slam dunk on WMDs.
He was right.
It was a slam dunk.
There's no doubt Iraq had substantial WMDs.
Look at the Army Day Parade in Baghdad in January 2003, when some of their weapons were on display.
Iraq had huge WMD programs.
That's why we had the United Nations inspections.
The question is, where did those WMDs go?
Clearly, they had gone.
Clearly, they were there.
Clearly, they went somewhere.
They did not just disappear.
And the answer is two Russian freighters out of Al-Qazir, and now those railroad lines into Damascus, Syria.
And the roads linking Iraq and Syria.
Now, we actually know where a lot of the Iraqi WMDs are stored.
There's a storage facility in the Beqaa Valley.
There's a disused airbase fairly close to the Syria-Iraq frontier.
And there's an underground facility, again, fairly close to the Syria-Iraq frontier.
Intelligence sources have identified at least three major storage sites for Iraqi WMDs in Syria.
So Syria now has control of those?
Not necessarily.
Syria is storing them, but again Syria is very, as always with client states.
Remember out Iraq, Syria, Iran are all client states.
And the links go back to France and Germany in every case.
And it's the states which supply the WMDs which control their disposition and use.
The reason WMDs went out of Iraq in the six months prior to March 2003 Is because France and Germany took a strategic decision not to use WMDs against British and American forces.
They supplied the WMDs.
They told the Iraqis we need our WMDs back.
We want to embarrass President Bush and Prime Minister Blair.
We want to make the British and Americans look stupid and they've succeeded in doing that.
And we do not give you permission to use our WMDs.
Now I happen to know one of the reasons why that strategic decision was taken It's because it was made clear to the bad guys, including the French and the Germans, that if WMDs were used against our forces in Iraq, the response would be nuclear, not with chemical or biological.
And the Iraqis were very concerned about a possible nuclear response during the Iraq war, if they made offensive use of WMDs against British and American forces.
Similar concerns were expressed during the Gulf War.
The Iraqis did not use their WMDs in the Gulf War because they were concerned about our own WMD capability.
Our capability being nuclear was a whole lot more effective than theirs, which was mainly, at that stage, chemical and biological.
There was a B-52 airborne out of Diego Garcia during the Gulf War.
The U.S.
airborne out of Diego Garcia during the Gulf War, US Air Force had nuclear-equipped aircraft.
That makes sense.
All of that makes sense.
and that was a correct strategic decision there was a nuclear deterrent force available for use
uh... should the iraqis get mad and attack our forces with wmds and then
uh... in gulf war one that makes sense all of them make sense what what doesn't
make sense is as saddam hussein
of the guy they caught in a little hole in the ground of blustering away about
what he would do and what he would use allowing the wmds to be taken away as he was facing of
course that was massing and closing in on him
That doesn't make sense.
Ah, but he couldn't use them, Art.
He couldn't use them because he knew the response would be nuclear.
So, that is the trouble with WMDs.
You can only use them against, in his case, his own people, because they could not fight back.
They were of no use whatsoever against Britain and America, because we have the ability to fight back, if need be, with nuclear weapons.
No question about it.
Alright, Mitch in Mays Landing, New Jersey.
You're on with Michael Shrimpton.
Hi there.
Hi Art.
I just wanted to say to Mike, you said that the Chinese would tank our economy.
If we blamed Iraq for the reason to go in.
We buy so much of their goods and we're such a big part of their economy.
If they turn around and tank our economy, they would just be tanking their own economy.
They would hurt themselves as much as they would hurt us.
I don't know how they could use that against us.
Mitch, that's a fair point.
The Chinese undoubtedly would be taking a huge risk.
If they used their leverage, but that has not stopped them threatening it.
And at the moment, the huge imbalance in trade between China and the United States is such that the balance of economic power favors the Chinese at this time.
You're right.
Yes, America does have leverage back the other direction.
But the balance of power favors the Chinese because of the enormous holdings of U.S.
dollar instruments that they have.
Those T-bills are an enormous threat.
They are a major problem facing Ben Bernanke in the Federal Reserve, the Treasury Secretary.
It is a constant problem.
And it's not something... When I have met the U.S.
Treasury, and I have been to the U.S.
Treasury in Washington, and I have been on the Treasury Secretary's corridor, And this is something they do not like to acknowledge, but they most certainly do not deny that that Chinese economic threat is real.
Now, of course, the Chinese say the Chinese are not crudely picking up the phone in Beijing and saying to the U.S.
President, you do this or otherwise we will drop our T-bills on the market and we will take the dollar down.
But that is a factor in U.S.
strategic thinking.
We have to deal with that problem in China.
They would never take our dollar down because they would just hurt their economy the same way.
Not necessarily.
The Chinese economy, one of the problems with China is that it's buying raw materials and oil very, very cheap.
It's getting a lot of oil out of Brunei, for example, at a seriously discounted price.
It's getting copper out of Zambia.
It's getting chrome and raw materials out of Zimbabwe, which is a Chinese client state at a hugely discounted rate.
And a lot of American corporations have built up a fairly big presence in China.
It's not that easy for the US to stand up to China at the moment.
The answer is to reduce the trade imbalance.
And that means at the end of the day, recognizing Taiwan, we have got to stop dealing with China.
And until we do that, they are going to use whatever leverage they've got against us.
That's only one factor, Mitch.
I'm not saying it's the sole factor.
I'm not even saying it's the most important factor.
But it is a factor.
Now, Laurie from Boston made a very good point with respect about the Democratic Party.
There are political factors here.
There has been an attempt by the administration, quite seriously and sensibly, to build a political
bipartisan consensus in Washington for the war on terror.
And part of those negotiations have been, for very clear insistence by the Democratic Party, that the link to Saddam and the link to 9-11 is not made.
And the 9-11 Commission, the 9-11 report, was a very carefully, politically balanced report.
And it was reduced to the lowest common denominator, and any A reference to Iraqi involvement in 9-11 was excised from that report for political reasons.
Okay, alright.
On the international line, you're on the air with Michael Shrimpton.
Where are you, please?
I'm in Paris.
I'm sorry?
Paris.
Oh, Paris?
Okay.
Yes, go right ahead.
I wanted to ask you, what is your military background?
Any service, actual service?
Where are you ringing from?
I'm calling from Paris.
From Paris!
Good afternoon in Paris.
I've never served, I'm not being commissioned in the UK Armed Forces, I've served in the Royal Air Force Voluntary Reserve and I was trained to fly aircraft by the Royal Air Force a long time ago.
But my background is a lawyer and intelligence expert rather than military.
Yes, with all due respect to your intelligence, it sounds like you spew quite a bit of dogma to promote war against the Arabs and the Middle Eastern people.
For greed and genocide, for oil grab, land grab, to take military positioning, and with very little evidence.
That's rich with respect coming from Paris, bearing in mind that you guys are getting oil out of Iran at $12 a barrel.
Britain and America, I'll have you know, pay top dollar for oil.
America doesn't go into countries.
America did not go into Iraq for oil any more than Britain.
America pays top dollar, as far as I know, for every barrel of oil coming out of Iraq.
France does not pay top dollar for barrels of oil coming out of Iran.
It's France and Germany and also the Chinese who are interested in securing client states willing to supply them with oil at way below the so-called market rate.
And that applies to oil coming out of Iran, it applies to oil coming out of Saudi, it applies to oil coming out of Brunei.
So for the French to take that point with respect is a little disingenuous.
And for the French to talk about genocide, well why don't we talk about the French-backed genocide in Rwanda, and the role of French intelligence in bringing down the plane carrying President Obama.
Alright, hold tight Michael, we don't have a lot of time.
Maria in Manhattan, you're on with Michael Shribneton.
Hi, good morning.
Well, I just wanted to get your opinion about something that I'm going to say.
The reason that people think that certain elements within the government were involved through cooperation and collusion, if not instigation, is because so many of these official explanations are proven to be just absolute lies.
And I think I have a new one that I've never really heard talked about that I'd like to get your opinion about.
I worked down at Ground Zero right after, you know, until December.
I was doing physical therapy.
One of my patients was a National Guardsman, and this young man injured his knee running away from Building 7, almost falling on his head.
In other words, the military personnel that were stationed around Building 7, you know, stationed to guard it, were not told, were not given any warning that this building was going to come down.
So the official story that it was brought down in some kind of controlled demolition just doesn't make sense.
Additionally, if it was brought down in a controlled demolition, then who exactly did the planning?
Who exactly placed the dynamite or whatever?
Show some paperwork to back that story up.
I agree, Maria.
There's no doubt that WTC7 collapsed as a follow-on to the collapse of WTCs 1 and 2.
Just the shockwave, the enormous shock of those immensely heavy buildings crashing to the ground, imposed tremendous strain on surrounding buildings, including WTC7, which already had problems with impact damage from the original impacts and fire and, as we know, was an emergency facility and had large diesel generators with diesel storage that caught
fire that building was in trouble from the moment those planes
hit WTC1 and 2. Michael you are right. There seems to have been
an appreciation the building was about to collapse and that's probably why your National Guard was getting out of
dodge but there wasn't very much warning of its collapse.
There was some warning and people were evacuated from the building, but not much warning.
Michael, you're aware there was a statement made about that building being pulled, right?
And you know what that phrase means?
Yeah, my understanding of that is that that was getting everybody out of the building.
Not pulling the building down, but getting everybody out of the building.
Mark in Florence, Oregon.
You're on with Michael Shrimpton.
Well, good evening to you, Art and Michael.
Michael, I'll tell you, and I'd like to make a statement here and give you a couple of well-documented facts very quickly.
And I am glad, for one thing, that you will go as high as there was collusion at the high levels of the intelligence communities to pull off 9-11, which is the whole basis for the agenda of terrorism, which is all about not just the control of the people in this country, but all over this world.
And it's an issue that'll never go away unless 9-11 is exposed.
I disagree with 90% plus of what you said.
Untruths in the form of disinformation and misinformation, Michael.
George Bush signed, for instance, an intelligence directive, punishable by law if not obeyed, to all members of the intelligence community of the United States of America, that they were to stay off Al Qaeda's trail, that they were to stay off Bin Laden's trail.
This is on the BBC online website.
It has also been written up in The Guardian in London.
You cannot deny the fact that you are supporting an illusion.
You sound like you're actually a neoconservative.
You sound like you've never heard of the Project for a New American Century before, because everything you've ticked off, including the invasion, the proposed invasion of Syria and one other country that you named there, it's all in the Project for a New American Century.
I see it for what it is, because this is one of my main hobbies, and I've been studying this for many years before 9-11 happened.
I would suggest, Art, that you have on Alex Jones with Michael so that Alex could historically cut his case to ribbons, because it can be done with well-documented facts.
And I thank you for the time you gave me.
You're very welcome.
Well, I'm always happy to go back on the Alex Jones Show.
I've been on his show before, but today we're with Art Bell.
I'm very pleased to be on the show.
Never been to Florence, Oregon.
Been to Florence, Georgia.
No, I have to disagree with you, caller.
The BBC and The Guardian are hardly reliable, qualitative sources.
I probably am a neoconservative.
I don't take any... I used to be liberal in my youth.
I've just got more sensible as I get older and that really is the definition of a neoconservative.
A conservative who is basically a liberal with intelligence that grows up and sees the world for what it is.
All right, Michael, on that note, we're going to have to say good night.
Time is up.
Show is over and all of that, so I appreciate your being here.
Thank you so very much, and you have a good balance of the day.
Thank you, Art.
I'm about to go and have an Easter egg.
Been a pleasure to be on the show.
Take care, my friend, and that's it for this program.
I'll be back tomorrow night.
I have a lot to say about the bees and a lot more.
From the high desert, I'm Art Bell.
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