The release of the report, submitted by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, that offered details to support U.S. officials’ claims that Russian interference had tainted the recent American presidential election was treated by many news sources as a major development and further justification for treating the Kremlin, not to mention the incoming Donald Trump administration, with suspicion.

Several alternative media sources, including this one, have also wound up on the receiving end of censure and what Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges considers a kind of McCarthyism for questioning prevailing media and government narratives and for continuing to demand concrete proof of Russian intervention.

On this week’s episode of “On Contact With Chris Hedges,” journalists Abby Martin and Ben Norton join Hedges for a wide-ranging discussion about troubling shifts away from fact-based reporting and governance—as well as the potential costs of insisting that, as Norton put it, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

The long awaited intelligence report on Russian ‘interference’ in the 2016 presidential election contains a lengthy and detailed attack on RT’s programming as evidence of a Kremlin plot to subvert U.S. democracy.

The DNI report specifically cited Breaking the Set, a popular RT America show hosted by Abby Martin, as promoting “radical discontent.” Martin gives an impassioned response to former BTS producer, Anya Parampil, about the DNI accusing their two year old show as somehow having an influence on the election.

Abby Martin Blasts DNI Report, New Cold War

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– The US intelligence agencies’ unclassified report on Russia’s involvement in the election didn’t provide any evidence of hacking, instead choosing to focus on media such as RT. Brian Becker speaks with Abby Martin about why her show was included and the way the mainstream media has slandered her.

– Almost half of the US intelligence report is dedicated to describing RT’s alleged efforts to “fuel discontent in the US.” It goes on to accuse some former programs of being overwhelmingly critical of American and Western governments for years. RT International talks with Abby Martin, who was the host of one of the shows cited in the report, Breaking the Set.

– Abby and Robbie Martin immediately respond to the news of the intelligence report blaming Russia Today, and specifically Breaking the Set, for Trump’s win after it broke in a special edition of Media Roots Radio.

– Journalists Abby Martin and Ben Norton join Chris Hedges for a wide-ranging discussion about troubling shifts away from fact-based reporting and governance—as well as the potential costs of insisting that, as Norton put it, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

– Abby Martin joins journalists Rania Khalek and Kevin Gosztola on their podcast Unauthorized Disclosure to discuss the DNI report, the deep state attempting to undermine POTUS Trump and the rotting Empire.

 

Paul Jay and Abby Martin discuss Trump’s cabinet appointments, the Green Party effort to recount the vote, and who’s really producing the fake news.

Abby Martin & Paul Jay on Trump’s Appointees & “Fake News”

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PAUL JAY: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Paul Jay. Well, Thanksgiving is over, and for those of you who may have thought that after Thanksgiving it all would have been over and it would’ve turned out the world had moved into an episode of The Twilight Zone that actually had come to an end, in fact, no. Donald Trump is the President-Elect, and now to discuss all of that and the consequences with me are Abby Martin. Abby joins me from New York. Abby’s the creator and host of The Empire Files on teleSUR English, and a show that I was Executive Producer of. Thanks for joining us, Abby.

ABBY MARTIN: Hey, Paul. Nice to be on.

PAUL JAY: So, I guess it’s a little bizarre. I’ve said to some people that it almost feels like a 9/11 moment to me, and not not quite the disaster of 9/11, but the day after 9/11, if you didn’t live in the shadows of what were the Twin Towers, you kind of went back to kind of normal life, but knowing that everything had changed to a large extent. And I feel somewhat the same with the Trump presidency. This is not to in any way idealize the Obama presidency. Anybody that watches The Real News knows that we were mostly scathingly critical of the Obama Administration. On the other hand, as you and I have talked about before, this is… it looks like with Pence, the return of Cheneyesque politics. What do you make of it?

ABBY MARTIN: Oh, yeah. I mean, Mike Pence himself said that his… the person that he idealizes the most is Dick Cheney. He says that he wants his vice-presidency to be, quote, “very active”. We’re talking about a person who received the most funds from Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, and we’re looking at the administration now. It’s shaping up quite nicely for these billionaire Christian evangelicals, Betsy DeVos, Erik Prince’s sister, pioneer of charter schools, undermining of public education, and now she’s running the Education Department in the US.

So, Mike Pence is a very scary figure. Not only did he support the Iraq War, vote for it, he also was one of the main pioneers of the conspiracy theory that Saddam was involved in the anthrax attacks, and going out there selling that, not to mention his vehement anti-gay policies, public push for conversion therapy in Indiana. He is a pretty scary figure, Paul, especially when you consider that Trump asked him to run, quote, “foreign and domestic policy”, as we know from John Kasich, who was told and asked if he wanted to be VP, and he was told, “You’re going to run foreign and domestic policy.” That’s how insane the situation is.

So people who are telling me, “Oh, Trump is this mastermind. He’s just pulling together all these people. He’s really going to change things.” He is a puppet. He knows nothing. He has no insight on global affairs or policy plans at all. He didn’t even know the difference between Hezbollah and Hamas. He said, “I’ll worry about that when I’m in.” So, he is just getting sidelined. I mean, it is a fire sale right now in the White House of people who are the craziest outliers of the GOP that hitched their wagons on him — that were smart enough to do that, right? — that have been completely castigated and ostracized from mainstream establishment. They’ve hitched their wagons to Trump, and they are getting lavishly rewarded as we speak.

PAUL JAY: We’ve talked about before on The Real News, but I think one should keep repeating, the power that helped elect Donald Trump, in the final analysis, was the billionaire Robert Mercer. Working for Mercer was Steve Bannon, who Breitbart News Mercer’s the primary owner of, Kellyanne Conway ran Mercer’s super PAC for Ted Cruz. So, two of the critical people, one who now is going to be Chief Strategist in the White House, Steve Bannon, described by Jared Kushner, the son-in-law, as being a very good Zionist, and I think that’s part of what’s not being touched on enough by people commenting on all this, the extent to which all of the people in foreign policy are very, very strong — not supporters of Israel — supporters of Likud, supporters of the most right-wing politics in Israel.

ABBY MARTIN: Yeah. I think the mainstream media is missing the point when they’re focusing on anti-Semitism when it comes to Breitbart. Breitbart is a hardcore Zionist. Everyone on that platform supports Zionism, like you said, the Likud Party, extreme, extreme ideological, right-wing party in Israel. You know, just like Theodor Herzl said, the founder of Zionism, “Anti-Semitism is our greatest friend.” I mean, they know that that works hand-in-hand to legitimize the State of Israel.

Look, I wanted to talk about Mike Pence again really quickly, because he said something insane, Paul. He said that right now we’ll have a President that will no longer tell the American people what he won’t do in regards to torture. Someone asked him if torture was off the table. And that was his bizarre, opaque response to that. As we know, Trump has already said that he would waterboard not only terrorists but their innocent family members. You know, Mike Pompeo. You look at all of these people, and I think there’s one common theme is that they’re all hardcore Islamophobes, which is very scary at a time when we are essentially bombing seven countries. Obama just increased the role of the drone campaign to al-Shabaab, I think, in Somalia, and he’s handing this over to a reality star game show host that knows absolutely nothing — he’s handing over the most vast, unprecedented executive power apparatus to Donald Trump.

And, so, yes, we have every right to be scared of what Trump is doing and everyone he’s appointing, and we should be on alert. But, like you said, no one should be apologizing for the Obama Administration and all the things that he failed to do that now Trump will be overseeing. Guantanamo Bay. I mean, are you kidding me? Bannon — you talked about Bannon — here, we’re talking about fake news all over the media, here’s the real pioneer of fake news. This is going to be de facto state media. Breitbart is now going to be the chair… you know, in the ear of the Commander-in-Chief, Breitbart. You know when you’re looking at Donald Trump tweeting and everyone thinks oh, he’s this… he’s this genius, right? He’s trying to, oh, he’s challenging safe spaces by saying that Hamilton should be a safe space. No, he is a moron. What you see on Twitter IS the real Donald Trump. Okay? These people are throwing him for a loop. I mean, they are getting in there and really running the show.

PAUL JAY: And Breitbart News was apparently created while Breitbart, the founder, was in Israel, and his idea, his vision was a Huffington Post that was an unmitigatedly pro-Israel. The slogan they had as the guiding line was “pro-Israel, pro-freedom”. The whole origins of Breitbart are in this ultra-ultra-right wing Zionism, and Steve Bannon, after Breitbart dies, Mercer comes in and becomes the main financier, brings in Bannon, and carry on that mission, and that’s one of the common threads that runs through all the people around Trump is bringing to Cabinet. Then there’s one other common thread: they all want to target Iran.

ABBY MARTIN: Look, there is one good thing: we’ve staved off war with Russia, potentially, for a couple of months. What no one is talking about is the insane fear-mongering and war-mongering against Iran. Donald Trump brought this up multiple times during his candidacy, which was all the Obama Administration was too soft on Iran. The deal was bad. He wanted to eradicate the deal. What is that going to do? And then you have people like John Bolton who’s obsessed with bombing Iran. I mean, all of these people are. So, yeah. This wasn’t a loss for the neo-cons, okay? This wasn’t a loss for the war hawks or defense contractors. Iran is as scary to me as the build-up in Syria. So, this is not a joke. These people are serious, and they are obsessed with Iran. So, yes, on one hand, we’ve staved off an escalation of the Cold War; on the other hand, Iran is right around the corner, Paul, and no one’s really talking about that.

PAUL JAY: Other than The Real News. But, yeah, you’re right. There’s very little talk about it. In fact, I see on some of the sites that are alternative, progressive, left, a kind of idea that maybe in Trump there might be some hope that there wasn’t in Clinton, that he’ll be more accommodating with Russia and such. And while there might be some short-term accommodation with Russia — and I think it will be in order to advance the targeting of Iran — the people that are around Trump that are really going to run the foreign policy are every bit as aggressive in their rhetoric about Russia as Clinton, and then some. In fact, when Pence was running with Trump — and he would speak, not Trump, but Pence — he was attacking Clinton for not being aggressive enough towards Russia. That was one of his main critiques of her at the State Department.

ABBY MARTIN: Yeah, and Pence also said that he wanted a no-fly zone in Syria, and when Trump was asked, he said, “Oh, I didn’t know that Mike Pence said that. I disagree with him.” Well, too bad. Mike Pence is going to be running foreign and domestic policy, so if he wants a no-fly zone, well, I guess that’s not off the table, either. And then you look at Jeff Sessions, it’s a complete disaster. I mean, here you have the NAACP coming out and saying, “This is the man who has, literally his entire career, lobbied against civil liberties and equality.” That’s not a good mark on your record, Sessions, to be denied as a federal judge because you were too racist, and now you’re Attorney General? Wow. And he’s horrible on criminal reform and drugs. He thinks that Obama’s biggest problem was being too lackadaisical on marijuana reform. I mean… It just gets better and better, Paul.

PAUL JAY: Yeah. I think one of the things — and a tell of where the Trump Administration is going — is that there’s virtually not a single appointment that’s a sop, a giveaway, to half of America, or more than half, that voted, that didn’t vote for him. There’s not even something symbolic, okay, the odd meeting here, like with Tulsi Gabbard. But no attempt at, quote-unquote, “compromise”. If this had been the Democrats in the Obama Administration, they would’ve made sure they threw in some hard-right Republican here and there just to appease that camp, because they were always about appeasing that camp. But no. This is unmitigated hard right from beginning to end.

ABBY MARTIN: And a lot of people I’ve heard will apologize for Trump saying, “Look, he said whatever he…” because they acknowledge that he’s a con artist, right? And they’re, like, “Look, he just said whatever he needed to to get elected.” Well, that may be true, but I think the one constant factor about Trump is his unpredictability, because he can blow wherever the wind blows. And that’s actually scary, because we have no reason to believe that he doesn’t mean the things that he said. We have no reason to believe, especially when you’re looking at the first hundred days of his agenda, and the people that he’s appointing, we have every reason to believe that he is meaning to go through with the most extreme, hawkish, anti-immigrant policies, anti-Muslim policies. I don’t see why people are continuing to apologize for him and saying, “Let’s wait and see.” I don’t think that we need to wait and see. We’re seeing right now with his agenda online and also his appointees. It’s very crystal clear. So I don’t see this whole, you know, “Trump is really a liberal. He’s a secret Democrat.” No, he…

PAUL JAY: Yeah. Give him a chance. Let’s see what… give him a chance. Let’s see what he does. Some people have called this normalizing the Trump presidency, and I agree with that, that you can’t normalize this presidency. Yes. All the presidents from World War II on are essentially… I don’t think there’s an exception that couldn’t be charged with war crimes, but this is a step in the Cheneyesque direction. This is an aggressive US foreign policy on steroids, and a policy that is already aggressive. But let’s move on a little bit. What do you make of this attempt by the Green Party to have a recount in some of the close swing states?

ABBY MARTIN: Well, I know that a couple of people, Green Party representatives, Chris Hedges, came out yesterday to publicly disagree with Jill Stein’s approach. Look, I thought it was bizarre. I didn’t really know what to make of it. I had no idea why Jill Stein was doing this on behalf of the Democratic Party, especially when you’re looking at 2000, completely stolen election, 2004, there were also discrepancies with the exit polls. That was never recounted. And we just got Bush again. So, I find it odd now to do this. However, I do support it, and I’ll tell you why. A, we don’t live in a democracy. We all know that. We live in an oligarchy. There’s a two-party dictatorship. We have the worst electoral system in the developed world — literally. Like, the Electoral College is so frickin’ archaic, it’s insane that we haven’t repealed that yet.

So, you know, that all aside, I take Greg Palast’s approach, where he’s saying, look, forget about the Russian hacking — that’s what I disagree with him, the statement kind of alludes like, gives legitimacy to that, that theory that Russia had something to do with hacking the election. I agree with Greg Palast where he’s saying there were millions of people not that voted illegally, like Donald Trump says based on Infowars as fake news, but he’s saying, yes, millions of people weren’t counted. Millions of provisional ballots, millions of absentee ballots, millions of people who were purged from the GOP scam Crosscheck. That is a fact. That happened.

So, at the very least, maybe we can start a conversation about how screwed up our electoral system is. And maybe at the very least we could talk about how there is massive election fraud on behalf of the establishment to squelch out minority voices in this country. And I, for one, would like to see the discrepancy with the paper ballots and hand-counting with the voting machines. Because I voted with a provisional ballot and I would like to see, hey, was that counted, or not? Like, this is a huge problem here. The Crosscheck is an insane thing. Everyone should watch Greg Palast’s documentary on that.

But, yeah, I mean, in that respect, I do agree with it. And let’s see what happens. But it is odd that, on one hand, you could see it as giving legitimacy to the Democratic Party, and we know that the millions of dollars to fund this is really coming from the Democrats, and I think it really speaks to their spinelessness that they refuse to lead the charge on any of the elections when there was clear, either election fraud or whatever, and now you have Jill Stein taking it upon herself. It’s an odd situation, but, at the end of the day, I do think our elections are horrible, and I agree with paying attention to them.

PAUL JAY: I don’t see how that helps the Green Party, to have this kind of critique. I mean, it is, it’s done, and she’s doing it, and I don’t know what the internal decision-making processes are. I mean, frankly, it’s… if you’re asking me, I don’t think there’s any much chance that this recount will change things.

ABBY MARTIN: It’s a pipe dream.

PAUL JAY: On the other hand, if there’s a wildest odds that it might, I mean, I’ve said all along, as aggressive and militarist as Clinton is, I think this is going to be worse in the same way Cheney-Bush was worse. So, we’ll see. But it’s not a good thing to wage this kind of fight publicly like this. I’m not sure it’s good for the future fortunes of the Green Party. But that’s not up to me. Let’s go on to fake news. A lot of big hubbub about fake news and some website came out with a whole list of websites that are supposedly echoing Russian propaganda, including some sites like Truthdig and Truthout, and some others that in my opinion are journalistic sites, and do not do that. The Real News is not on that list. I guess — I don’t know — if someone watches our coverage, they’ll see that, in fact, we have no… we’re not shy about critiquing the Russian oligarchy or Putin, although we always make sure we talk about American war crimes first, which make Russian crimes pale in scale, but at any rate, what do you make of this whole fake news thing?

ABBY MARTIN: I agree that fake news is a problem. Right? We have Breitbart de facto state media, we have Infowars basically in the ear of the President and he’s tweeting out insane, preposterous, outlandish, false, blatantly… things. Right? But on the other hand, you have Establishment media like The Washington Post and you have this anonymous propaganda finder account called Prop or Not, which is publishing this hit list — it’s essentially McCarthyism, right? — in the new era. It’s including very credible sites like Truthdig, Counterpunch, Black Agenda Report, Naked Capitalism, conflating it with fake news sites that you can say are legitimately fake or skewed or biased extremely, right? Like Infowars or Breitbart. And, of course, Breitbart, I don’t think is on there, which speaks to a lot.

So, I think it says a lot when we’re focusing and trying to conflate actual investigative journalism and journalism that goes against the grain with Russian provocateurs and the whole main thing that this account is trying to do: the premise of their argument is that these, quote-unquote, “fake news” sites actually shaped the election in favor of Trump. That they purposefully muddy the waters, poison the well, to make people believe all this fake stuff, and basically that’s how Trump won. I don’t think that’s the case at all. I think that they’re completely missing the point here. The point is — back to this Infowars thing — Trump tapped into this kind of conspiracy culture like no one else has ever, and I think that not enough people are talking about… everyone’s so shocked at all these white working class voters who came out to vote for him. No one’s really talking about the Alex Jones audience that came out in droves, that probably were never politically active before. And it stems back from the fake news thing.

Trump tweeted out that the protesters were paid. That they were professional. There is a serious problem on the Internet right now where people are either not fact-checking anything and they believe everything they read, and they conflate every alternative news site with these crazy blogs that are totally unfounded and have no credibility. And I think that that just comes back to media literacy. Don’t read a list on Washington Post, and take it with a grain of salt: fact-find for yourself. It’s not that hard. I mean, it took me five seconds even not knowing how to have any journalistic skills whatsoever, someone who is involved in canvass organizing in college, I knew immediately that that paid protester thing on Craigslist was just a canvassing job position. I mean, the bus picture where people said the protesters were bused in. Once again, it was debunked by the original tweeter. He took down the tweet.

So, these things, I think it comes back to media literacy, understanding what the truth is, and not just taking any website with a grain of salt, and understanding the agenda that places like Infowars has. Look, they hitched their wagon to Pamela Geller gravy train, long ago, when they knew that Islamophobia made money, and it’s basically a Fear Inc. operation. So, you look at credible sites like Truthdig and Real News, which has no corporate state funding at all, those are the sites that I think people should be looking at, and not sites like Infowars that sells penis pills in between their insane fear-mongering broadcasts. And, unfortunately, that’s who’s in the ear of Trump.

PAUL JAY: And if you want to talk about why Trump won, and then you want to connect that to fake news, you need look no further than all — almost all — of the corporate-owned news, which is the biggest fake news that helped elect Trump. And I’ll give you on three points: first and most important, why aren’t there screaming headlines every single day, both on corporate TV news and newspapers about climate change? If they had been dealing with the climate change crisis with the urgency it requires and what all scientists say, including recent reports that say we could pass the 2 degree threshold by 2050 — that’s 34 years away. And that model was before Trump was elected — who knows what that does to that model now, in terms of when we hit 2 degrees, given it just exploded most climate change policy around the globe, Trump’s election.

So, if people had been really educated and given the urgency that objective facts call out for, how the hell would so many people vote for a climate denier? Number two. Even now the coverage of the Cabinet, and the people, there’s almost no conversation about what we were talking about, that they’re all focusing and targeting on Iran, and they all have a strategy of regime change, weakening Iran — in other words, they’re talking about another war in the region. No talk about that. Yes, they talk about how crazy some of these people are and so on, but that issue, and certainly leading up to the election, that’s no surprise that that’s where this Trump Administration was going.

You look at Rudy Giuliani’s speech at the Republican Convention, he was crediting Iran with supporting terrorist attacks on the United States. Which is clearly there’s no evidence of, and if he’s going to talk about anybody doing that, it’d be the Saudis, but, no, Giuliani targets Iran, as did others that spoke at the Republican convention. And then, of course, the whole way corporate media has dealt with the economic crisis. And not dealing with the issue of who really is responsible for that crisis, and how the whole bailout of ’07-’08 made massive more money for the billionaire class, and so on. They treated Sanders as some kind of marginal outlier. So, yeah, of course, they can point to some small sites that supposedly are manipulated by the Russians, most of whom that accusation’s ridiculous. But it’s corporate news elected Donald Trump.

ABBY MARTIN: You just hit it right on the head. Here’s why people even believe this fake news, because mainstream media is completely distrusted. There’s an all-time distrust in corporate media. And we’ve known that for a long, long time, right? And I think that’s, to your point, that’s why Trump became president, is because the entire media Establishment lined up behind Hillary, and that was as clear as day, even during the debates, other than the Fox News debate, it was just every single question was for Trump, hammering Trump. And people saw that, and people absorbed that, and people already think the media is lying to them, and so when they think Trump is an ally to them, and that the media is lying to them, that sows a dangerous, dangerous sentiment where you have them kind of believing, and then you have it validated by the Commander-in-Chief, saying that there are millions of people voting illegally, the protesters are paid.

So, I understand why people are completely shutting out all of the establishment press and going to these sites. The problem is these establishment press is blaming the only solution, which is the credible, independent, grassroots journalism that is telling the truth, that isn’t fake news. So it’s a really, really dangerous conflation on behalf of the establishment media, instead, of course, look in the mirror, having some introspection. Why did we lose? Why don’t people trust us? Instead, they have to punch down to the people who are doing the real work.

PAUL JAY: All right. Thanks very much, Abby.

ABBY MARTIN: Thanks so much, Paul. Great to talk to you.

PAUL JAY: Thanks for joining us on The Real News Network.

Filmmaker Robbie Martin and Paul Jay discuss Trump and Pence’s foreign policy appointments and advisors which include many of the neocons who created The Project for the New American Century and are now targeting Iran.

Robbie Martin on Trump’s Web of Militarists Who Want to Attack Iran

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PAUL JAY: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Paul Jay. Well, various balloons, trial balloons are coming out of Trump Tower in New York. Donald Trump met with Tulsi Gabbard, a congresswoman from Hawaii, who’s known as very non-interventionist, was against the war in Iraq and thinks the war to overthrow Assad in Syria is illegal. And apparently, they both had a nice meeting and came to some conclusion. They had some foreign policy ideas in common. Donald Trump met with The New York Times and sounded as reasonable as one might hope someone might sound talking to The New York Times. Telling The New York Times, more or less what they would like to hear, and various other balloons making Donald sound like he’s not the crazy person in the campaign. Apparently, he’s willing to accept a fence rather than a wall in certain places. He isn’t planning, apparently, to deport 11 or 12 million people, just go after some of the very bad actors. In fact, his immigration deportation policy sounds like it might almost be more modest than Barack Obama, who’s been coined at times the “Deporter in Chief.”

But the real Donald Trump, the proof of the Donald Trump pudding is in his appointments, not in who he meets and what he happens to say, ’cause he will say anything on any given day that seems to suit his purposes. Whereas, the appointments to his cabinet and other agencies, those are people who will exercise some real power. And now joining us to talk about just who some of those appointments are, and some of the roots of those people, is Robbie Martin. He’s a journalist, filmmaker and musician. He writes for the magazine White Fungus, the website MintPress News and Oakland-based Media Roots. As a filmmaker, he’s the mind behind the documentary shorts, American Bisque, American Anthrax and now the full-length documentary trilogy, A Very Heavy Agenda. Thanks for joining us, Robbie.

ROBBIE MARTIN: Thanks for having me, Paul.

PAUL JAY: So, Donald Trump, in spite of his anti-interventionist rhetoric has not appointed anybody that even smells slightly of someone who’s anti-interventionist. Let’s go back a little bit into the roots of all this, though. In your film, you spend some time talking about a document that came out in the late 1990s called “The Project for the New American Century.” And, anyone who doesn’t know this document really should go find it, it’s still easy to find on the Internet. And some very senior people signed it who later became the major foreign policy team around George Bush, including Rumsfeld and Cheney and Wolfowitz, Kagan and others, Richard Perle, and essentially asserted itself, the document said, that America should now use its single super-power status to reshape the world in the image it pleases. Talk a bit about PNAC and how they envisioned US foreign policy.

ROBBIE MARTIN: Well, PNAC, or The Project for the New American Century, was started in the 1990s under Bill Clinton. And the reason why Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan and Gary Schmitt said that they started this think tank was because they wanted to encourage the Clinton Administration’s interventionist foreign policy. Because at the time, a sort of Pat Buchanan-esque anti-interventionist attitude was becoming quite trendy in the Republic Party. So Bill Kristol’s the Weekly Standard and along with this think tank The Project for the New American Century, they wanted to start the trend that, even though Clinton was a Democrat, that hawkish Republicans like them should encourage and cheer on Bill Clinton for his military interventions. And this attitude, of course, carried over to the Bush Administration and many, many members of Project for the New American Century, I believe, 17 signatories of their papers, actually got into the Bush Administration.

And now what’s happened is you’ve seen sort of this neocon consensus that formed around The Project for the New American Century, there’s been almost a split where, when the GOP imploded because of Trump’s rise in the primaries, that’s where it really started, you also have sort of a split in the neoconservative consensus in DC. So you have people like Robert Kagan, Max Boot, Eliot Cohen, all openly advocating for Hillary Clinton, similarly to how they were advocating for Bill Clinton in the ’90s, at least his foreign policy. But, while that was happening, which I think took most of the focus away from the other neocons, there were people like Michael Ledeen, James Woolsey, John Bolton, who are all part of Project for the New American Century, it caused them to actually split off and go towards Trump. And that’s… I think that got a little bit overshadowed by just how much focus there was towards the neocons going towards Hillary.

PAUL JAY: Because they all thought Hillary would win. Most of the ones that went to Hillary were pretty sure she was going to emerge the winner of this.

ROBBIE MARTIN: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, as did I. And we’ve already actually seen Eliot Cohen, for example, reach out to the Trump campaign after he won, to try to get some kind of advisory position. And he was told, “You lost.” And he didn’t say who told him that but it might have been, you know, Bannon or someone else from inside the Trump campaign.

PAUL JAY: Let’s go back into this group and the document, the PNAC group. The Project for the New American Century, its basic thesis, if I understand it correctly, is that because this is now a single super-power world, things like international law are no longer necessary — that it’s time to assert raw American military might because there’s no reason not to. And the plan, I think, it’s laid out rather explicitly, that it starts with regime change in Iraq, regime change in Syria, and the real prize is regime change in Iran, and that’s the way to assure the American Century in the Middle East and then some. Those were just the places to begin. Talk a little bit about some of the things those people were saying around the time of the lead-up to the Iraq War, including the idea in this document that in order to pull off these regime changes and use such American military force — which means troops on the ground, it’s not just bombing campaigns — you need the American people onside. And it says explicitly in the document that you can’t do that without a new Pearl Harbor.

ROBBIE MARTIN: Yeah. I mean, back to what you said about the whole notion of international law does not exist. John Bolton specifically has been key to that sort of premise. In the Bush Administration, he was UN Ambassador and made a point to be defiant continuously against the UN, and this is, of course, after the Bush Administration defied the UN in invading Iraq. But, going before that, when The Project for the New American Century wrote the document, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” the thesis from that document actually came from a document written by Richard Perle and Douglas Feith for the incoming Netanyahu administration in the ’90s and this document was called “A Clean Break: Securing the Realm.”

Now, the reason why this document and “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” is different than what’s come before it is because, even though US foreign policy has always had a sort of pre-emptive philosophy behind it, it was never stated this, I would say, arrogantly or this candidly in a document, where the core principle behind the document is a philosophy of pre-emption– that we should invade countries that pose no immediate threat to us because at some point in the future they might pose a threat to us. And that whole mindset defined the Bush Administration and also largely defines our foreign policy outlook today, even continuing into the Obama Administration.

PAUL JAY: Part of the message of the document is that naked use of force, overt use of force, does not have to be apologized for. Again, they got their Pearl Harbor, which was 9/11, which gave them the American public opinion and, of course, they did everything they could to link Saddam Hussein to 9/11, even though there was no evidence at all that there was such a thing. I know the story of Greg Thielmann, who dealt with proliferation of weapons of mass destruction for the State Department, and at that time Bolton was Under Secretary of that department responsible for that. And Thielmann would go week after week to Bolton saying “Well, we don’t have any link between Iraq and weapons of mass destruction. We don’t think there are any.” And Bolton would say, “Well, you come back when you’ve got it. You come back when you’ve got it.” And, eventually, Thielmann didn’t have it, ’cause it wasn’t there and he told Thielmann, “Well, you can stop coming to our meetings now.” You have a similar thing happening at the level of Richard Clarke, the anti-terrorism czar, Cheney keeps saying to him, “If you don’t have terrorist attacks linked to Iraq, we’re not interested.” They had an agenda from day one and it’s part of this PNAC vision.

ROBBIE MARTIN: Oh, absolutely. And that’s part of what’s so troubling about Trump supporters — they have a blind spot for these Bush Era neocons creeping back into what will become his administration. I mean, John Bolton specifically actually helped Trump get elected. First, he ran a PAC against Rand Paul early in the Republican primaries, painting Rand Paul as a pacifist on Iran and there’s actually footage of nuclear bombs going off. I think the commercial actually starts with a family eating dinner and just a mushroom cloud exploding in the background.

PAUL JAY: And just quickly for people who don’t know, Rand Paul is the son of Ron Paul, you know, more or less is a fairly consistent Libertarian anti-interventionist. In fact, he said that if John Bolton, who’s been rumored to be getting Secretary of State, Paul has said if it is Bolton he’ll filibuster to try to stop him from being confirmed in the Senate.

ROBBIE MARTIN: Yeah, and I hope that he actually follows through on that because it seems like it’s a pretty sure bet that John Bolton’s going to have some kind of position. I mean, now that Bannon from Breitbart is part of the administration, Breitbart is now running articles trying to tell their audience that Bolton isn’t a neocon, that he wasn’t instrumental in the Iraq war. And I find that amusing because Breitbart has sort of carried this tradition of being different from sort of the neoconservative, more establishment GOP consensus in DC; now that they’re part of the establishment, they’re going to run cover and sort of deflect away these criticisms that are, I think, going to be amplified over time with Trump, just between him and his supporters.

PAUL JAY: Right. There’s a very interesting network of connections here. Breitbart News, the primary owner of Breitbart News is a billionaire named Robert Mercer. Mercer backed Ted Cruz, and his daughter Rebecca Mercer, were real players in the Cruz campaign. Breitbart News, as I said, Mercer is the major owner of that, which means Steve Bannon from Breitbart essentially worked for Mercer. Kellyanne Conway, that became the campaign manager, of course, Bannon became what they call the CEO of the Trump campaign, Kellyanne Conway became the manager. She worked for Mercer as head of the PAC that Mercer put something like 11 or 12 million dollars into backing Ted Cruz and now look at the transition team. Rebecca Mercer is on the transition team. And, of course, Kellyanne Conway seems to be continuing to run the campaign.

Pence, who they recruited, Bannon and Kellyanne Conway got on the Trump campaign prior to the Republican Convention and they’re the ones that recruited Vice President Pence who’s on the same page. And just to add another little wrinkle to this circle, this rogues’ gallery, another John Bolton type who’s being rumored as having, or will have a role in the Trump campaign, is a guy named Frank Gaffney. And Gaffney advised Cruz while Cruz’s campaign was being run by Mercer and now Mercer’s people are now running Trump and perhaps running the White House. And so, it’s likely to see Frank Gaffney back into the picture. Tell us a bit about what you know about Gaffney.

ROBBIE MARTIN: Well, Gaffney’s an interesting character in all this because he was one of the only PNAC neocons who managed to build a bridge to the alt-right movement very early on. He actually has a column at Breitbart and most of his writings revolve around how Sharia Law is apparently going to take over the United States and the White House. He’s written pamphlets on how the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated the White House. But most notably, Frank Gaffney is the originator of the ban Muslims immigration policy that was part of Trump’s campaign. And, as you said, he was also an advisor for Ted Cruz, but it recently got announced that he may be in charge of the foreign policy end of Trump’s transition team, even though he publicly denies it. What’s interesting about that is he actually has Trump’s whole transition team, including Pence, as regular recurring guests of his talk radio show. A year previous to Trump winning the primary–

PAUL JAY: This is Gaffney’s radio show. Pence is a regular on Gaffney’s radio show.

ROBBIE MARTIN: Correct, yeah. Newt Gingrich, John Bolton, even James Woolsey were regular guests. And these aren’t just guests out of dozens and dozens of guests, these were a handful of people that he would regularly have on. So, I believe that Frank Gaffney is probably someone that everybody should be taking a closer look at during this whole process, ‘because he seemed to have known who Trump was going to bring into office once he got elected.

PAUL JAY: Yeah, one of the things most of these guys have in common is they consider Islam and the Arab world the enemy of Western civilization and I think you quote in your film, maybe it’s Ledeen quoting Machiavelli saying, “When the country’s interests are being asserted, evil is acceptable,” something along those lines.

ROBBIE MARTIN: Yeah, that we are permitted to do evil in the act of protecting our nation. So, of course, you know, to a neoconservative that essentially means a pre-emptive strike or who knows what that means? It could be something even worse than that.

PAUL JAY: The most important appointment, of course, of all of these people is Pence. Some people have considered him to be, or will be, the new Cheney and it’s gotten some play that when he was asked who his role model for Vice President would be, he said Dick Cheney. And that’s a rather telling thing. Everyone knows how powerful Cheney was in the White House. Everyone knows Cheney helped create the entire false intelligence about weapons in Iraq. So, he’s saying a guy who lied through his teeth, and lied the United States into war, is his role model and has no problem saying that on 60 Minutes or national television. That tells us a lot. Tell us more about Pence and his own views and his relationships to these guys.

ROBBIE MARTIN: Well, Pence himself actually comes from right wing talk radio culture, as well. He used to host his own show, even set up a makeshift studio in his offices once he was elected. And as a freshman Senator, Mike Pence was actually one of the only government officials to keep trying to go out to the media, writing letters to John Ashcroft, using time on the House floor to convince people that Saddam Hussein was behind the 2001 anthrax attacks. And he continued to do this for about a year after anthrax was sent to Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy.

Now, he says that his office was infected with anthrax, which may have actually happened, but Patrick Leahy and Daschle were not trying to play politics at all with that event; in fact, they still doubt the official conclusions of that investigation that it was from a lone scientist named Bruce Ivins from Fort Detrick, Maryland. Mike Pence, even against the instructions of Ari Fleischer who told the press that Saddam had nothing to do with it, that bentonite wasn’t found in the anthrax, Mike Pence continued to assert this connection which I think is a very strange thing to do for any freshman Senator to be making such a strong declaration of something during an emotional hysteria like that.

PAUL JAY: Again, this cast of characters has various other players, we can’t get through them all now, but it’s important, I think, to talk about James Woolsey who was under Clinton and then under Bush. Woolsey was CIA, right?

ROBBIE MARTIN: Woolsey was a CIA Director under Bill Clinton, for a very brief amount of time.

PAUL JAY: And Woolsey at the time of the Israeli-Lebanon War was saying, “We should take advantage of this opportunity to bomb Syria and try to get rid of Assad.” I guess the point here, and I must say, let me throw Giuliani in the mix here, too, because, at the Republican Convention, Giuliani says that it’s Iran waging terrorist threats and attacks against the United States. Iran is the source of terrorism against the United States, which everybody knows is not the case. Of course, Israel doesn’t like Iran’s support for Hezbollah but it’s clear from any number of sources, not the least of which the Joint Congressional Investigation to 9/11 that it’s, in fact, Saudi Arabia that’s allied with terrorist threats and actual terrorist attacks against the United States. But talk a little bit about Woolsey and then a little bit about Giuliani.

ROBBIE MARTIN: Well, one common thread that links all these people together — and I call them “The Craziers” which is a reference to Ray McGovern calling the old neoconservatives in the Reagan Administration “The Crazies” — I would describe these people as crazier: Gaffney, Ledeen, Bolton, Woolsey, they all actually prefer not to overthrow Assad. And I’m sure that Woolsey has said some things in the past about overthrowing Assad but, make no mistake, it’s not because they are pacifists on Syria or they don’t want a regime change in Syria, that’s actually not the case; they prefer that we overthrow the regime of Iran first. Because, in their mindset, that would cut off the head of the snake, which is Assad in Syria.

PAUL JAY: Which was the terminology that the King of Saudi Arabia used trying to goad the Americans into bombing Iran.

ROBBIE MARTIN: Yeah. So, this is a very troubling development that the Trump Administration appears to be a cabal of neoconservatives who are very fixated on militarily invading or attacking Iran. Which is something that the Bush Administration did have – you know, there was a neoconservative consensus within it that wanted to do that but it ended up not winning out in the end. So, hopefully, it doesn’t this time either, but I’m not so hopeful. But, in terms of Giuliani, who’s also said things about Iran, Giuliani is probably the dirtiest character in this whole lineup of people. He has connections, time and time again, to just various aspects of the deep state. Even when he was running as Mayor, in 1989, he lost pretty badly because Ed Koch and other opponents pointed out that he actually represented General Manuel Noriega, a Panamanian drug lord.

PAUL JAY: And a CIA asset for quite awhile.

ROBBIE MARTIN: Of course, yeah. And Rudy has supported MEK, which is another terrorist organization. But there’s also just strange, convenient circumstances that Rudy has found himself in. For example, his company Bio-One, made millions of dollars off the 2001 anthrax attacks. He had a company before 9/11 that specialized in bio terror contamination clean up. And his company ended up cleaning out the Florida Sun building where the first anthrax victim was located. Rudy also invests in border technology. He has a company called SkyWatch that specializes in digital surveillance grid technology for Mexican border security in collaboration with Raytheon. So, I mean, in my mind, it’s possible Rudy contacted Trump and said, “Hey, you want to build a wall, here’s what we can do,” and sort of connected those business appendages together.

PAUL JAY: Right. I think what drives all US foreign policy, certainly President Obama and Clinton and you can go back, the underlying driving force is American corporate interests, the need to control raw materials, control overseas markets, control cheap labor, to be able to export and loan money and skin cats twice through interest rates, all of that drives all American foreign policy, but this particular group, the group that was around Cheney and now the group that President-Elect Trump is gathering around him, it’s all of that and almost a vulgar direct criminality, a kind of corruption. I think by the time this regime is done its course, four years from now or eight years from now, the number of scandals and the amount of pure pillaging of the public trough in the name of fighting terrorism is going to be unparalleled.

ROBBIE MARTIN: Yeah, I mean, I hope that a lot of the people really study these characters because they’re going to be back in power again. I mean, the idea of James Woolsey being back in power again terrifies the crap out of me. And I think it should terrify many of Trump supporters, as well, who are hoping that he’d be this sort of anti-war, drain the swamp, anti-establish candidate. I mean, Woolsey himself, he doesn’t even have a problem admitting that the CIA itself was used as a tool of corporate espionage. He brags in a Wall Street Journal editorial about how we spy on Europe, the CIA spies on Europe because Europe bribes a lot. So, and he’s talking about European businesses to get American businesses, an advantage over them. So these people that are openly corrupt and have no problem bragging about their corruption.

PAUL JAY: Well, I’ll say it again, it doesn’t matter what anti-interventionist or somewhat slightly reasonable words come out of the Donald’s mouth, the proof is in the appointments and you look at the people around Trump and you can see what direction his foreign policy is going. Thanks very much for joining us, Robbie. We’ll pick this up again.

ROBBIE MARTIN: Thank you very much, Paul.

PAUL JAY: Thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.