Progressive Radio Network
November 1, 2013
Stephen Lendman interviews Rick Rozoff
Transcription and links at bottom are courtesy of Kathleen Welch, for which deepest gratitude
AUDIO
Lendman: Welcome to PRN’s Progressive Radio News Hour. I’m Steve Lendman. My guest today is Rick Rozoff. Rick has been on a number of times before. I think regular listeners know that he is the editor of the Stop NATO website. It’s a very important project with vital information about NATO that Rick I think would agree in calling NATO nothing less than a killing machine.
I’ll get to Rick in just a moment but I wanted to begin the program by paying tribute to and honoring a true hero who too few people know about. His name was Michael Mandel. He taught law at Osgood Hall Law School, York University and University of Toronto. He did it for 39 years and was the longest serving full time professor. He was ill for many months. He taught through last spring’s semester because he felt he owed it to his students to do as much as he can, go as long as he could to give them as much good education as he could provide them. So even though he was ill, he stayed until last spring. He was on this program several times. The last few times I asked him to come on, he was too ill to come back. He didn’t say exactly what the problem was, but I knew he meant exactly what he said. He simply was too ill. On October 27 he died peacefully at home. He died of a rare cardiac, a rare heart disease. It is one I’m frankly unfamiliar with, but I guess when the heart stops working the way it should, the rest of the body goes with it. It is very sad. Michael truly was a true hero. His passion I think most of all was his students. He also had a great love for music. He was an activist in the best sense of its meaning. He was passionately anti-war. That was a vital issue for him.
Let me back up just a moment. He wanted NATO leaders indicted for war crimes for attacking Yugoslavia in 1999. They did it without Security Council authorization. No nation, (this is international law, briefly summarized) no nation may attack another except in self defense. It can only do it if the Security Council acts. It has final say. The US Congress has nothing to say about it. The Congress has to vote on whether America will go to war provided the Security Council has authorized it. Otherwise, the Congress has no authority whatsoever. Well, the Congress hasn’t authorized a war since, dare I say, December 8, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor. America has fought heaven knows how many direct and proxy wars, so many going on now. Michael wanted the war criminals indicted.
Two days after the Bush administration attacked Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, Michael wrote an article he entitled “This War is Illegal” and he made a very prescient statement among many others in his article. He said, first, “We are all at risk.” He understood that right up to his last breath. He called attacking Afghanistan, “the beginning of a headlong plunge into a violent, lawless world.” Did he ever get it right. I wonder if even he had realized just how bad things would get, because they certainly are that bad with one war of aggression raging after another, others in the queue waiting to be waged.
Rick, I want to segue right into you, because either on Wednesday…I’ll just say this…I’ll say a little more about Michael on my program tomorrow. I am on at 1 pm Eastern time live and archived. This program is archived and I encourage listeners to tune in. I wrote about Michael and I titled my article “Remembering Michael Mandel”. It is easily googled and you can find it and get more information about him. I try to explain who he is, what he has done, most of all what he stands for. I’ll repeat again, he was a true hero, not many like Michael and he is sorely missed. I personally lost a good friend.
Rick, it was either Wednesday or Thursday that supposedly Israel attacked Syria twice, in Damascus and their main port city of Latakia. One report by Russia Today quoted somebody from their Arabic service saying that somebody in Latakia or close enough to know what was going on heard nothing to signify the sounds and sights and whatever that exploding munitions have. I imagine the attack took place. Who was there and how close they were to it, why they didn’t notice anything, I don’t know, but that is what Russia Today said and I addressed it in an article this morning and I quoted from that in my article.
Israel attacked by my count, attacked Syria this year alone, five times including Wednesday or Thursday. My feeling is this, Rick and I’ll let you jump in. The pretext, as it was at least once before was to target missiles supposedly heading for Hezbollah. I think that is a bunch of malarkey. I mean they may have targeted missiles, but why would the Assad government be shipping missiles or any other munitions to another state or another body or another organization when it needs these munitions to fight a war against an invasion, Obama’s war? So they are not going to ship off what they have. They need to get more to replenish themselves. I think what is going on is Israel committed its fifth provocation this year. I think the idea, Rick, is to get Syria to respond. In other words, to get Washington, Israel and key NATO partners and rogue regional allies a pretext to escalate a proxy war into a full scale one. That’s my feeling.
Rozoff: I think you’re probably safe in all of those assumptions. By the way, thanks for having me back and I am in full concordance with you on Michael Mandel’s decease. I think it’s a loss not only for the Canadian progressive and anti-war movement of which he was an integral part but for that of the world. He came to my attention for the first time as he may have with yours during the war against Yugoslavia in 1999 as you mentioned and discussed.
It is something that we might have taken for granted forty or fifty years ago that any decent human being was opposed to war but unfortunately in the post Cold War period, that is not to be assumed any longer as we know. We have seen an intensive focused concerted propaganda effort meant to portray war as somewhat more palatable waged under supposed humanitarian auspices. He was all the braver and more valiant a man for having stood up against a torrent of such propaganda.
On the question of the reported Israeli airstrikes on the Syrian port city, I am looking at the RT report right now and I want to thank you for reading it more attentively than I did in terms of reports on the ground or rather, lack of report on the ground about explosions and so forth. However, the Russian press agency Novosti, (Russian information agency Novosti) has run an Associated Press article this morning stating that Israeli warplanes indeed attacked a shipment of Russian missiles inside a Syrian government post. The Russian missiles are described as SA-125 air defense missiles, anti aircraft missiles. If so this is a double act of international brigandage and provocation, not only towards the Syrian government, actually triple, not only towards the Syrian government but that of Russia and ultimately against of course the international community and the international law that is to be upheld by that community.
The question you raise Stephen about whether this is not in some way a coordinated US Israeli attempt to yet again provoke Syria into a reaction that can be portrayed as a bellicose one and thereby being used as a pretext for direct military strikes, more extensive military strikes against Syria, that’s a distinct possibility of course. What I think we do have to realize is, the beast may have retreated to its lair, but it still has its fangs and its claws and it is still dangerous. I am talking about US and Israeli militarism and aggression.
Lendman: Well, I go back, Rick, to General Wesley Clark who has written about and spoken about (not recently, I think he has laid low for a number of years now) but he wrote a book called “Winning Modern Wars”. He mentioned going back to the Pentagon shortly after 911, the Afghan war was still on I believe, and he was told by the commanders that he spoke to there, that America planned wars against multiple Middle East countries, including Iraq, including Syria, Iran, Libya, I think Sudan was on the list and the Afghan war was already going on. He asked them, (here a four star general as you well know, he was the guy in charge of the atrocity against Yugoslavia, he committed all those war crimes, he should be in the dock himself), he said in his words, he expressed to surprise to hear this quote and he asked the question, a pretty stupid question from a four star general, “Are these countries threatening us?” The answer he got back was more or less…I mean the same reason why he attacked Yugoslavia, attacked a sovereign independent country to make it a pro western puppet state. I mean that is the whole idea behind these things.
So Clark understood it very well. He didn’t explain it in what he said publicly, or I guess wrote in his book. I didn’t read the book but I quoted from written material I saw on a couple of things he said. He had one war after another, aggressive wars, Bush wars. Now we have Obama wars. The war against Syria I call “Obama’s war”. You know, it may have been planned long ago, I think Paul Wolfowitz may have been the evil genius behind…genius…the Machiavellian spirit behind this war. Bush picked up after 911 and Obama picked up where Bush left off and has done more than Bush did. Bush had two wars and Obama has all these proxy ones going on as well as the Iraq War which is still raging because it is daily violence. You can call it anything you want. And the Afghan War, that thing can go on for another decade.
Rozoff: Yes, it is actually in its thirteenth year, I think we have to recognize right now in Afghanistan so it is most assuredly the longest war in America’s history. It is also the longest war that the unfortunate Afghan people have been subjected to. But you are correct on Mr. Wesley Clark who, incidentally, I am not proud to note at one time had been a fellow Chicago resident in his youth. The book you quote from, “Winning Modern Wars” (2003) (I suppose the title alone tells you what to think of Mr. Clark) is a sequel to “Waging Modern War” (2001). I suppose he takes credit for winning the lopsided the 78 day air war against Yugoslavia in 1999.
We have to keep in mind he also served in Indochina and Vietnam and prior to becoming the Supreme Allied Commander Europe for NATO he was the Commander of US Southern Command so he oversaw US military activities in Central and South America and the Caribbean including, no doubt, arming and supplying and training death squads as well as military juntas. So this is somebody literally dripping with blood and you’re correct, if anyone belongs in the war crimes dock it is Mr. Clark. I would say sometimes it is good to hear from inside the citadel of the adversary and the quote you are alluding to is an example of that.
On the hand, I think it was evident to a lot of us, yourself I am certain and most of your listeners that immediately after September 11, 2001 statements emanating from the White House and the Pentagon, in the latter case Donald Rumsfeld and company clearly targeted countries and I think we could have perhaps all named them ourselves at that time. What Clark has simply done is confirm what we suspected with good reason. The creation of a Broader or Greater Middle East Initiative, later the New Middle East Initiative program or project was something long in the works as you indicate. It was passed on from one administration to another dutifully because as we know, political differences end at the shoreline in the United States and that is what is to be expected.
Lendman: It is a pretty dismal situation, Rick, and I don’t see any signs of it ending. These things drop off the radar of the US media, the media I call the scoundrel media. You don’t see reports about Syria unless they want to beat up on President Assad. They will do that whenever they are ordered to do it. They basically march in lock step with official government policy. If they say “Beat up on Assad” then they’ll go ahead and beat up on Assad. He was wrongfully blamed with one chemical weapons attack after another that he had nothing whatsoever to do with including the big one last August in a suburb of Damascus, Ghouta.
There has been another one, Rick, I just looked at a little blurb and I did not read it carefully and I want to go back and look at it. There was another one in recent days in a Syrian city committed by these so called “rebels” who aren’t rebels. They are death squads. It is the same thing that went on in Central America in the 1980s. They are recruited death squads except they happen to come from different countries, mostly different countries but they are imported. The violent ones aren’t the native Syrians except the ones who were forced to join these people at the point of a gun otherwise be shot or tortured or whatever, or have their family members killed. So they enlist the native Syrians to join them literally on the threat of death if they turn them down. They are mostly foreign invaders. They committed another chemical weapons attack and it got zero coverage, zero not a word about it in the major media.
Rozoff: Yes, as you imply or as you state, that unless it serves geopolitical and ultimately military purposes of the US and its allies then it is not a story. Incidentally the graphic and accurate description you have rendered of events on the ground in Syria right now is something I think you and I may have mentioned in passing but it has struck me more and more that in the entire post Cold War period, which is maybe a quarter of a century old now, but certainly since the formal collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact 22 years ago that what we have seen emerge is international lawlessness and anarchy as we have described it. The image I get, for those of your listeners familiar with it, is the 30 Years War in the German states in the seventeenth century from 1618 to 1648 and the fact that some 60 percent of the total population was killed or died as a result of groups of a little bit better than bandits flying military pennants sacking cities and exterminating the inhabitants.
What we are seeing is a global equivalent of that. It started in 1991 with the bombing campaign in the war against Iraq and has never really ceased. It has continued in Somalia, in the Balkans in Afghanistan and Libya. We also have to look at other countries that have been torn apart perhaps destroyed irrevocably. Not only nations like Serbia, Afghanistan and Iraq, but lest your listeners forget, nations like Macedonia, Ivory Coast, Syria now, perhaps even Pakistan and larger countries that have been pulled into the vortex, into the maelstrom of this international militarism and lawlessness. It is one country after another like that. When we talk about the upsetting of the post-WWII order, particularly the legal order, it is not simply (as Mr. Clark alludes to) going to war without a UN mandate, (which he was perfectly content with in the case of Yugoslavia of course) but it is the fact that entire countries and regions have been thrown into turmoil,
into anarchy, into pandemonium and may never recover. I am not overstated the case, it is really that severe. You mentioned Mr. Wolfowitz and other creatures with the Project for the New American Century and other alleged think tanks, planning bodies, who have painstakingly, patiently and cold bloodedly charted out exactly such developments. We are now seeing the full implication of that, the full realization of that in countries like Syria.
Lendman: It is so true, Rick, and to happen on a global scale the way it is now, it is beyond imagination to me. Nobody knows exactly how many people died just in the post 911 era but it has been millions. It is not just a direct result of war as it raged full blown. But it happened it Afghanistan, I know after the attack in October 2001 poverty was extreme, hunger was extreme, exposure to the elements was extreme. People died from things other than a bullet or a bomb. Nobody really knows how many. I think many die from exposure and starvation. Disease took some of these people. These people had absolutely nothing. I remember writing (it’s been so long) about Afghans in the aftermath a year or two after the Afghan attack in 2001 where people had no shelters. They would hovel anywhere they could to get out of the elements. How could you keep warm during the frigid Afghan winters? They simply couldn’t. Anybody frail would certainly expire and if you didn’t have enough to eat and if you couldn’t get any medical care, which these people couldn’t get, you could see them dying like flies and that is what happens.
It never gets discussed. There are no reports about this and nobody knows the numbers. This all happens below the radar. It is all America’s fault because these wars were planned. They were imperial wars and they continue. They continue and when will these things ever end?
The American people are distracted from these things to think about other things. And they sure have them to think about, Rick, with the economic misery that is affecting so many millions of Americans at home. Today is a very notorious day because today a 5 billion dollar cut in food stamps takes place. What recipients get is so meager it amounts to something like a dollar and change per meal for less than enough to get through a month, less than enough for a month and they are cutting 5 billion out of this. It is only the first whack before more whacks come. If you doubled the amount given in food stamps benefits, it wouldn’t be enough to help. People are blamed for the misery that the government causes, Rick. You have increasing poverty and unemployment and so on because the economic policies have caused this deliberately. They are blaming the victims for the crimes of the state. I could go on and on.
Rozoff: No, you are correct on that and I have friends here in Chicago where we both are who are on public aid, on disability usually for the most part for work related injuries and they are getting something in the neighborhood of 600 dollars a month on disability and they are paying 500 dollars for some little rat hole apartment. They have 100 dollars left for co-payments on medication for food outside of what they can purchase with the food stamps which as you mention are minimal and are curtailed, constricted in terms of what you can purchase. So it is not that the people of the imperial metropolis are benefitting in any manner from the imperial drive too, it’s true.
We also have to remember in the last two and a half years refugees from nations attacked by the US and its NATO allies, Libya and Syria are drowning en masse in the Mediterranean as they are fleeing their countries. You are looking at a horrific picture that on a global scale I don’t think we have seen since WWII that is for certain with mass displacement of people, impoverishment, entire peoples uprooted and displaced permanently. Look at Kosovo, where General Clark and his NATO troops came in with their KLA allies in June 1999 that literally hundreds of thousands of ethnic Serbs and Roma, so called gypsies and other minorities have been displaced never to return. So we are seeing mass scale ethnic cleansing, mass scale displacement, depopulation, immiseration of the sort you describe. There was a story perhaps in the last decade in Afghanistan, (I think it was on American television if I am not mistaken), of famish, of starving Afghan villagers literally digging up graves looking for bones. This is the twenty-first century. It conjures up something so horrific and so primitive and so intolerable. Anyone that can go to bed at night, frankly, and sleep soundly in the midst of all of this is really an indictment of the human conscience.
Lendman: Yes, this is by a country that has the audacity to call itself a democracy, Rick. This is the kind of democracy it brings to people around the world and does it on the pretext of humanitarian intervention or responsibility to protect. Oh, my goodness Orwell must be turning in his grave.
Rozoff: Well, I mean he is turning green with envy, isn’t he? He wasn’t able to conjure up anything this good. His model is unimaginative and limited compared to what has actually transpired. One need only look at the universal police surveillance state that the US has set up around the globe where even the concordat, the conclave of cardinals in the Vatican and private phone conversations from diehard American allies like German chancellor Angela Merkel are being monitored and logged. This is the sort of brave new world people anticipated after the end of the Cold War. Here it is. This is what a unipolar world looks like. This is what a world where a commander in chief, currently President Obama refers to (thumping his chest at the time) as “the world’s sole military superpower”. The world, I don’t think, was properly prepared for the emergence of an uncontested world superpower. Here it is, and this is what it entails: wars abroad, destabilization around the world, international as well as domestic surveillance police state. I don’t know how many of your listeners [heard] General Keith Alexander (he is the head of the NSA but is also the head of the Pentagon’s Cyber Command simultaneously, let’s remember), talking about the fact that spying is universal and we just “live with it” and it is better to be subjected to an almost unimaginable degree of surveillance and monitoring and manipulation and cyber warfare in fact against other nations. It is better that than to be caught off guard because somebody in a cave in south Asia someplace is thinking bad thoughts about the United States.
Lendman: Oh indeed Rick. It is easy to forget that Alexander is the head of Cyber Command. I wrote about it a few times, but it’s been so long, much earlier in the year, and it is so easy to forget that, but literally to wage cyber war against key US allies and maybe blame them for waging cyber war against America. Maybe they are only defending themselves like China. This is the way America operates. Alexander when he testifies is a liar. The head of National Intelligence, James Clapper is, very unusual, Rick, he is an admitted perjurer before Congress. You think he is getting [indicted] for that? No! He admitted that he lied to Congress on whether America spies. Well America spies on anybody they want to. One of the two articles I put out this morning Rick, I titled “NSA Spies on the Pope”. My question is, “How many popes?”
Rozoff: Yes, you don’t have to wait for the smoke to come up the chimney. The NSA and the CIA and the White house know the results beforehand.
Lendman: Apparently they bugged the Sistine Chapel.
Rozoff: The old saw, that “is nothing holy?” I guess is really applicable in this case, is it not? They would pry into anything and that people are comfortable with that. They tolerate it. The recent demonstration against police surveillance, government surveillance, garnered the participation of several thousand people and it should have been several million.
Lendman: Oh, there should be a world uprising against this. I kind of wonder when people will reach a threshold beyond which they simply won’t take it anymore. We really need it on a global basis. The countries that are so affected certainly in America, in Canada, my goodness Mexico in terms of its complicity with America, although we know that the NSA spies on its president Enrique Peña Nieto Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff. It goes on, they probably spy…we know of 35 that I have written about. I didn’t name them all, Merkel of course, France’s Holland, you can just bet I think there are more than 35. They can go after anyone they want, and of course they spy on you and me easily, Rick, because of what you do and because of what I do I assume we have very growing NSA files and CIA files.
Rozoff: It leads the average sensible person to suspect when communications go wrong or computer problems develop, these may not simply be, accidents may not be entirely fortuitous. But we have to keep in mind cyber warfare of this sort or communication warfare is a lot more insidious than simply spying. It is not a passive activity. It is a very active one. This means passing on inaccurate information to people, sowing divisions amongst members of the same government or between governments by passing on false information. Any number of propaganda tricks that have been learned over the centuries are now magnified to a degree hitherto unimaginable with the use of modern telecommunications particularly the internet. Their ability to muddy the waters and then fish in them has been multiplied almost immeasurably.
Lendman: Oh, indeed Rick, I have to cut in because I’m just about near the point where they’ll cut me off. Rick, I thank you so much. I look forward to having you back. The clock is relentless, worse than NSA.
Rozoff: I’ll quote you on that Stephen.
~
Stop NATO website
Remembering Michael Mandel
Israeli planes strike Syrian military base to destroy Russia-made missiles – reports
Russia Today October 31, 2013
Israel Strikes Russian Weapons Shipment in Syria
RIA Novosti October 31, 2013
7 countries in 5 years quote (and more quotes from the Pentagon)
Wesley Clark
Oct 3 2007 at the commonwealth club of California.
How Food Stamp Cuts Will Affect Your State
Photos of the Sistine Chapel showing installation of communications shield to block electronic communications during the conclave.
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