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

**

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.

In a system that puts profits over everything, small gangs of billionaires are given free rein to plunder the planet. One of the richest power cliques in the Empire’s inner circle is also imperiling all life on earth at an alarming rate, only to make their pockets fatter.

All life on Earth is threatened by catastrophic climate change–the main culprit is so powerful that the US government is set up to serve it, rather than regulate it.

In this episode of The Empire Files, Abby Martin uncovers Big Oil’s strong-arm reach–its growth, its crimes, its power and its impunity.

Featuring interviews with two investigative journalists who have covered oil disasters on-the-ground, Antonia Juhasz, author of “Black Tide: The Devastating Impact of the Gulf Oil Spill”, and Greg Palast, author of “Vulture’s Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates, and High-Finance Carnivores”.

Untouchable Big Oil Threatens All Life on Earth

**

FOLLOW // @EmpireFiles and @AbbyMartin

WATCH // YouTube.com/EmpireFiles

Lawrence Wilkerson, retired US Army Colonel and former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, has some surprising things to say about the US government.

Wilkerson doesn’t hold back when he explains how US foreign policy has always been about the expansion of sheer power. After WWII, the US expanded “imperial dots”, or military impressions in order to generate a financial apparatus that would expand Empire, allowing for the rich to continue to grow their capital.

While many parts of the world are forced to live in abject poverty, there are generations of families that have a concentration of wealth that surpasses the GDP of most countries. According to the latest Oxfam study, only 62 people now own as much wealth as the bottom half of humanity.

Wilkerson decided to come forward and blow the whistle about US crimes after learning about how torture had been authorized and encouraged by the highest levels, violating the Geneva Conventions, the law of war, and the manuals that they operated under. “I can’t stay silent anymore. I’m going to speak out.”

Wilkerson joins Abby Martin for a must-watch interview exposing the dark underbelly of DC bribery, intelligence hoaxes as war pretexts and the ruthless nature of US corporate Empire.

Former Bush Official: “The Ship Is Sinking”

**

ABBY MARTIN: I’m sitting here in Washington, D.C. with the rare opportunity to speak with someone who served in the innermost circles of the US war machine. Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson is a former US Army Airborne Ranger who flew over 1,000 combat missions in Vietnam. He was national security adviser to the Reagan administration and later served as chief of staff to Colin Powell during the Bush administration. You’re a retired Army officer. You’re a Republican. Given your inside experience in the government and military, how would you explain the purpose of US foreign policy?

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Today? Today the purpose of US foreign policy is to support the complex that we’ve created in the national security state that is fueled, funded and powered by interminable war, and the ramifications thereof. That’s a sad commentary on what America has become, but it’s a realistic and I think honest appraisal of what America has become.

AM: Has it ever been about altruism?

LW: You could say there were even altruistic aspects to the slaughter and ethnic cleansing of Native Americans from the Mississippi to the Pacific coast by Phil Sheridan’s Army of the West. If you wanted to really dip into the bag and find something, but I don’t think overall and comprehensively it’s been altruistic. It’s been about sheer power, and lately it’s not even been about realistic application of that sheer power, or realistic attempts to expand it. It’s been more or less so failed in its overall general aspects that it has diminished our real power in the world. And this is what concerns me most seriously because history demonstrates, I think, that this is what empires do when they’re getting ready to collapse. They began to be so zealous of their own power and its expansion that they actually decrease their power until it becomes inevitable that they cease to exist, or they don’t exist in the same form they did when they were an empire.

AM: And you’ve talked about the capital interests that are behind pretty much every US military intervention in the last decade if not century. What sort of economy are we waging war in today and what capital interest would you say are behind the war on terror?

LW: After WWII, the United States engaged in a monstrous twilight conflict, if you will, that it calls the Cold War. It’s probably a pretty apt term. In that process it built up what are the appurtenances now of a national security state: the military-industrial-congressional complex, all the armaments industry that goes into that, the far-flung basing structure we have all over the world which now is eight or nine hundred places that we have little colonial dots, if you will, imperial dots, and to the wars there we’re fighting now almost interminably.

All of this is the leftover of what we did during that Cold War, which could include physical expenditures beyond the scope even of human imagination. We’ve spent so much money on maintenance of our empire that is becoming a critical part of it too. Our debt now is something like eighteen trillion dollars, unparalleled debt in my mind in the in the history of empire, in constant dollars or in current dollars. So this is a situation that’s unsustainable, but it has come to a point where the power structure, which I would define as both the financial apparatus that this empire has generated, and the economic aspects of it which are less and less industrialized and productive, therefor [less] a real economy, in other words, and more and more playing with money and the interest on money and capital in general, as Thomas Piketty has pointed out in his book Capitalism in the 21st Century so eloquently. We now have more capital awash in the world than we have earned income. Earned income is a very second place in the world. Capital is the real driving force in the world and this capital is passed on from family to family, from generation to generation and therefore corruptive and poisonous.

We’re in real trouble right now because of what this empire has generated, because of the incentives and motivations of it, and because it’s basically run by about 1 percent of the people, if not fewer, in this country constituting essentially a plutocracy. There are 400 families, 400 wealth centers, private wealth centers in the United States constituted around a family structure that equal the gross domestic product of Brazil. Today I read a percentage which I can’t even recall—it had so many zeros in front of it—but it was much less than one percent of the country that has the approximate wealth of the GDP of India. So we’re talking about a concentration of wealth, and a concentration of capital, which is not productive wealth unless it is actually going back into the real economy to generate industry that produces something. It’s unconscionable. It’s reprehensible in many ways because what you’ve got is the rest of the country, and in many respects the rest of the world, living off the rest of the scraps.

AM: And it’s totally unsustainable, as you were mentioning, this is not a trajectory that is going to last. Behind the belligerents waging a war there are certain industries that are in play that continue to garner interest, extract resources.

LW: Look at what’s happening in Syria right now, for example, just a microcosmic example. The Air Force is about to run out of ordnance. It has dropped so many bombs and shot so many cruise missiles that it’s about to run out of ordnance. Well, I will guarantee you that companies like Raytheon and Lockheed and others who make these armaments are salivating because they are going to be making another round of these are armaments, and into the interminable unknown future they’re going to be making these armaments. It’s incredible what we are doing.

AM: And in fact they are salivating at that. At Lockheed, Boeing, all these different institutions, defense institutions, are openly talking about what a great benefit this is to them—this Syria war, all of these escalations. I wanted to read you a quick fact. In 2008, the Government Accountability Office found that over 2,400 former generals were employed at 52 of the biggest defense contractors as senior executives and acquisition officers. A high percentage of retired general officers retire, go straight into jobs in the defense industry making well over six figures, often with the corporations they dealt with while serving. How does this revolving door function? I mean, how close is this relationship in terms of actual foreign policy creation.

LW: It’s so close that you actually had during the Iraq war, and as far as my history lessons go, it’s the first time it’s occurred this way and now is going on continuously, general officers who not only go out into the armaments industry and its associated paraphernalia and make money based on their influence gained while in service, you actually have them going out and joining the media and making the media more conversant with and attuned to and want war. So you actually have general officers who will go to CNN, go to MSNBC, go to Fox News, and they will get again your six-figure salaries for being the security experts on those news shows, and they will report to the American people the dire need for this continued conflict, the dire need for soldiers on the ground in Syria, the dire need for more war. It’s incredible what has happened in that respect. That’s not a direct contribution to the armaments industry, but it’s certainly a very vivid contribution to the war mongering and to the interminable state of war.

AM: Is it the interlocking board of directors in these companies, or is it just advertising injected straight into the corporate media?

LW: I wish it were something that you could put your finger on like that. It’s so many different things, including what you just said, but not necessarily consciously or coherently except in some cases, I think. It’s all of these things contributing and it’s not any one of them. As Eisenhower said in his farewell address, it’s not something you put your finger on and say, “Aha! That’s malicious. That’s intent. It’s not only complicit. It’s intent.” It’s not that. It’s this accumulation of vast power that’s oriented towards what first increases its power, and second what makes it rich that comes together and causes this. If it were something that you could root out and you could hand over to the FBI or to the Supreme Court or someone to adjudicate, it would be a different matter, I think, not that it would get done very easily, but it would be a different matter. It’s not something like that. It’s pernicious. As Eisenhower said, it’s in every state house in every federal office building. It’s even in every home in America. It is this unconscious sometimes power-driven aspect of it that makes it so difficult to combat. In fact, I’ll sit here and be a pessimist, a cynic, and I’ll say we aren’t going to correct this until something truly serious happens to right the ship of state, which might also sink the ship of state. Now we have every other general officer, admiral, walking out and signing up with glee to work for armaments.

AM: Well, other than the egregious unethical nature of how this functions… I mean, what is the legal caveat to how this is actually working? Is it just a machine that’s working on its own and just continues to become more pernicious as time goes on?

LW: They’re not the most competent people in the world. They’re not the most capable people in the world, and they’re not the most, shall we say, professional people in the world. That’s a part of it, but a second part of it is it’s become the thing to do. It’s become de rigueur. I mean, it’s what you do if you serve 30-35 years. You expect to have a six-figure salary with someone like Raytheon or Halliburton or Booz Allen Hamilton. We haven’t talked about the Beltway bandits that do more intelligence than the CIA. Now I use that term very loosely there—intelligence, but it is a corporate complex that is growing, and its surrounds everything else, including what I call fateful decision making, which is the decision-making to send young men and women to die for state purposes.

AM: And speaking of the young men and women who go to die, you know there seems to be a huge class stratification between the people who are making the policy and the people who are actually giving their lives on the battlefield. I mean, if you join the military in today’s age, whose interests are you serving when you do put your life on the line?

LW: You’re serving what one veteran in my seminar at William and Mary [University] said to me not too long ago, about three weeks ago, an Army veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan: You’re serving the ulterior purposes of the leadership of the country, and I said, “What do you mean by that?” And he said, “You’re serving corporate and commercial interests. You’re serving the interests of people who bureaucratically are seeking power within the structure, and you’re serving the interest of what is basically an incompetent governing process.” Wow. That was a pretty powerful statement, I told him, and he said, “Yep, and I’ll never go back again. I guarantee you that because I didn’t realize that until I was about halfway through my last tour in Afghanistan.”

AM: Let’s talk about the draft. It hasn’t been in place for some time. On one hand, you have the military so desperate that they’re paying NFL and sports stadiums for pro-military propaganda. On the other hand, you have women that are now being pushed to enlist. What do these measures of desperation mean and what do you think about the draft?

LW: It really isn’t an all-volunteer force. It’s an all recruited force because we’re spending billions of dollars to entice these people, who feel that they don’t have many other prospects, into the armed forces. We’re bringing them into a service that is supposed to be professional, disciplined and altruistic. We’re bringing them in with the most heinous of selfish, greedy purpose. We’re paying them what they couldn’t make otherwise. We’re giving them bonuses. It is so bad now that the cost for personnel in my army and to certain extent in the marine corps is coming close to being fifty percent of the cost of that service on an annual basis. If for no other reason the all-volunteer force is going to bankrupt the defense department, so they’re going to have to look at some other options.

AM: Let’s talk about your role in the Bush administration during the lead-up to one of the most devastating wars ever perpetrated by the empire—the Iraq war. You not only served as Colin Powell’s chief of staff, but you prepared his infamous speech to the UN about Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction. How did you miss the faulty nature of the intelligence, given your weeks-long analysis, given the stakes?

LW: I’ve looked at it from a much more, shall we say, soul-piercing way. Not only was the intelligence picture a failure on the part of the intelligence agencies for various reasons, it was also cherry-picked by the vice president. It was put together to a certain extent by the Office of Special Plans, in Doug Feith’s shop in the Pentagon, and it was largely orchestrated, as the MI6, the British memo said, it was orchestrated, shaped around the policy or the policy was essentially fed with intelligence that would shape it, that would feed it. So there were a number of reasons for the failure. There were a number of reasons for my own personal failure. I lament those reasons. I will never forget the occasion. I’ll go to my grave remembering it, but I can certainly, from an academic point of view, see how this this is sad, and it frightens me to a certain extent how this happened in the past, has happened in the past or whether it’s something in the future.

For example, let me give you a vivid example. I’ll tell you how I looked at the immediate reports that Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons in Syria a year or so ago. I said bullshit. I’ll believe it when I see evidence that it actually happened. And I went to every person I knew in the intelligence community, and every person outside the United States I knew to include two people who were in Syria at the time, and I knew what was going on and I respected their vision and their knowledge. None of them could confirm for me, not a single one, that Bashar al-Assad used those chemical weapons. Instead there were possibilities they were used by other parties in Syria as well as by Assad, and frankly, the evidence looked more strongly for other parties than the president. So I still think there is high potential for this kind of manipulation of intelligence, this kind of fabrication of intelligence, and this kind of refusal to take dissent in the leadership in this country right now today. And I’ll tell you very seriously I’m very skeptical of the intelligence establishment and what it says.

AM: Right, I mean, I always thought it was weird that the UN weapons inspectors were there on the ground and that’s when Assad decided to use the chemical weapons—when he already knew that was the red line. This whole red line mantra is really interesting because why should weapons of mass destruction of any sort of be that red line to actually legitimize the invasion and occupation of a sovereign nation? I wanted to say one more thing about the case. One of the biggest resonating factors, I think, in the speech was Saddam’s anthrax stockpiles and bio-weapons labs. Considering the fact that America had just been traumatized by its own anthrax attacks where five people tragically lost their lives, why did you choose to hinge so much on anthrax in the speech?

LW: No, as a matter of fact, we winnowed that thing to death. We threw tons of stuff out that we simply looked at and said, “All this is is an extrapolation from 1991 or 92. In other words, we looked at it and said the CIA has no evidence that Saddam has done what they’re saying he’s done. All they’ve done is made a linear projection. If he was producing six ounces in 1991, and we knew that positively from the inspectors after the war, then he’s now got 46 ounces because he could do two a year, or whatever. That’s what they’ve done.

AM: Of course, it came out that the anthrax came from our own bio-weapons lab. The final report from the FBI found no hard evidence linking Bruce Ivins to the attack.

LW: Well, I don’t know that, and I can’t tell you why don’t know that, but I don’t know that. I don’t know it with the clarity with which you just expressed it.

AM: That’s what the FBI said.

LW: Well, the FBI is as incompetent as any other bureaucratic entity within the federal structure.

AM: Right, but I think it is pretty much conclusive that it came from within… I mean, the bio-grade of the anthrax came from within the US establishment.

LW: It wouldn’t surprise me.

AM: Well, let’s talk about what was your kind of deciding factor to speak out and be so vocal…

LW: Torture. When Powell came through my door in May, I guess it was, of 2004, and told me about some photographs that we’re going to come out, may be made public, about a place called Abu Ghraib in Iraq… By the time I walked out of the State Department, I was ready to go find somebody and cut his throat because I knew that the United States had been involved in heinous activities in Vietnam. I knew they’d been involved in heinous activities in the Philippines. Indeed, a brigadier general, as I recall it, machine-gunned a thousand people in a ditch in the Philippines, and Teddy Roosevelt had sent him a telegram congratulating him. When people found out what he’d really done, Teddy had to kind of withdraw that approval, but I knew we had done some really bad things in the past, particularly in war, but I never, never knew any time in our history where those bad things had not only been authorized at the highest levels in the land but encouraged by the highest levels in the land. And I mean the president and the vice president of the United States and some of the cabinet officers. They were complicit in this. They gave instructions that they damn well knew we’re going to cause the Armed Forces of the United States to involve themselves in violations of the Geneva Conventions, the law of war and the manuals that they operated under. That just threw me. I said I can’t stay silent anymore. I’m going to speak out.

AM: And looking back at the horrors of the administration, as you mentioned, the torture, wanton detention, and of course, the illegal war that was based on false pretenses that cost the lives of a million Iraqis. Do you think that any members of the Bush administration should be charged with war crimes?

LW: I’ve said so in the past. I do think they should be charged. I think six lawyers in particular ought to be disbarred immediately. They should have been disbarred immediately. I think they should probably also be tried.

AM: Soldiers have been continuously dying in Afghanistan in America’s longest war. Today they’re still facing death, horrific injuries, for essentially no purpose it seems. I mean…

LW: Be careful.

AM: How do you think they should understand the war in Afghanistan?

LW: Be careful.

AM: What do you think their purpose should be?

LW: The war in Afghanistan has morphed. It’s not about Al-Qaida anymore, and it’s not about the Taliban anymore. It’s about China, Russia, the soft underbelly of Russia, which is mostly Muslim, about Pakistan, about Iran, about Syria, about Iraq, about whether Kurdistan is stood up or not, and ultimately about oil, water and energy in general. And the US presence in Afghanistan, I’ll predict right now, will not go away for another half century.

AM: My God. That’s a horrible thought.

LW: And it will grow. It will not decrease. It will grow.

AM: And let’s talk about strategic influence especially. We see this Cold War resurrection going on right now. As someone who lived throughout the Cold War… the schism within the establishment when it comes to Russia and this new posturing with Russia… After the reunification of Germany there was a promise on behalf of NATO that it would not continue to build up.

LW: Not one inch further east is what Jim Baker, Secretary of State, said to Edward Shevardnadze.

AM: What interests are behind the build-up?

LW: Why do we want more countries in NATO? Because then Lockheed Martin and Raytheon and Boeing and others can sell to them. Then the Soviets, now the Russians, won’t be selling to them. Why did we want Ukraine?

AM: Don’t we have enough?

LW: Empire never has enough. That’s the nature of imperial power. It never has enough. Have you ever watched Battlestar Galactica or Star Wars, or Game of Thrones? Empire never has enough power. It never has enough wealth. It never has a more stable status quo. It has an increasingly unstable status quo, and so its efforts are ever more frenetic to protect that status quo, its power and its wealth, and even expand them. That’s the nature of Empire, and that’s what we are now. That’s what we are. Everyone’s protestations to the contrary, that’s what we are. Depending on whose reports you read, about a third, 20% I’ll say, to 30 percent of Russia’s heavy armaments industry is in Ukraine. What do they do for tanks? What do they do for their heavy armaments in their military if Ukraine goes? The idea that we could do something in Ukraine, covert or otherwise, and have Putin not respond is just laughable.

AM: I feel like a lot of people of course feel helpless, especially those of us living within the Empire, paying and sponsoring all these atrocities with our tax dollars. What can we do to prevent this government, the military industrial complex from crushing us?

LW: The people, the American people, or at least a substantial powerful minority of them, hopefully a powerful majority of them, are going to have to get sick and tired of this. They’re going to have to get angry about it, and they’re going to have to take action. That’s the only thing that I see as a way to salvage this republic before it sinks completely. We are going to have to have a very powerful minority, or hopefully, as I said a majority, 51%, 52%, who actually stand up on their hind legs and say, “I’ve had it. This isn’t going to happen anymore. You’re not getting…” Does that mean revolution? It might. It might indeed.

***

FOLLOW // @EmpireFiles and @AbbyMartin

WATCH // YouTube.com/EmpireFiles

Transcript by Dennis Riches

Recently I was directed to a compelling Buzzfeed article (a first) that outlined the legal predicament of former drone intelligence analyst Matt Dehart, who claims he had been given a set of leaked documents which held very sensitive information. Allegedly, these files contain explosive allegations about the CIA being behind the 2001 anthrax letter attacks in some way. The article also claimed the documents cite the anthrax attacks were committed in order to further fear-monger the public and help sell the Iraq War.


According to Matt, he was sitting at his computer at home in September 2009 when he received an urgent message from a friend. A suspicious unencrypted folder of files had just been uploaded anonymously to the Shell. When Matt opened the folder, he was startled to find documents detailing the CIA’s role in assigning strike targets for drones at the 181st…..

….As Matt read through the file, he says, he discovered even more incendiary material among the 300-odd pages of slides, documents, and handwritten notes. One folder contained what appeared to be internal documents from an agrochemical company expressing culpability for more than 13,000 deaths related to genetically modified organisms. There was also what appeared to be internal documents from the FBI, field notes on the bureau’s investigation into the worst biological attack in U.S. history: the anthrax-laced letters that killed five Americans and sickened 17 others shortly after Sept. 11.

Though the attacks were officially blamed on a government scientist who committed suicide after he was identified as a suspect, Matt says the documents on the Shell tell a far different story…. the report built the case that the CIA was behind the attacks as part of an operation to fuel public terror and build support for the Iraq War.

[Excerpt from Buzzfeed]

Although many had previously written about DeHart’s legal predicament (the Courage Foundation has officially supported him), virtually no one followed up on this new claim that was revealed by DeHart in Buzzfeed, except for Marcy Wheeler.

Soon after reading this, I was approached by people close to Dehart who said American Anthrax ‘got everything right’. After a few months passed with many parties involved, I spoke with Matt directly from jail. Our time was limited to only 15 minutes, so I focused on the one document and asked him to recall as many details as he could. Since I have not personally seen the document, I cannot verify any of the details. 

As it turned out, the Buzzfeed article oversimplified the details, which made it hard to discern certain aspects about why Matt thinks the document is real, and why it’s a zip containing many different documents related to Amerithrax. In our conversation he revealed some compelling new details, such as:

– An alleged FBI whistleblower compiled this archive, including a compilation of ‘hundreds of pages’ of files relating to the 2001 anthrax letter attacks, some of them dating from before 9/11. In the text primer, this whistleblower explained that inside the series of documents is evidence of CIA involvement.

– One of the alleged proposed targets was the Port of Newark in New Jersey.

– The alleged contents of a Nuclear Regulatory Commission document was tracing cobalt radiation emissions (cobalt radiation can be used to render weaponized anthrax inert).

– Allegations against the ‘Vice President Himself’ quashing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s radiation investigation.

The following interview was conducted from the Warren County Regional Jail with inmate Matt Dehart.

He began by reminding me that the contents of our conversation would be recorded and shared with federal investigators.

**

MATT DEHART: The most helpful thing at the moment would to be to get my thumb drives back, both my Ironkey D100 which i had back in 2010 in Canada, and probably more recently my Kanguru Defender Elite which was handed over to the department of justice following my removal from Canada. That was never the government’s to begin with, that was my personal property. I still don’t know what the legality is of them holding it. They’re not saying they’re using it as evidence, they’re just kind of taunting me with it. The assistant US attorney told my lawyer ‘we have these drives’  and it was an off-handed remark to him almost like yeah we really know what’s going on but we’re not going to come out and say it. I guess to give you a background here, if you know my background and what I did in the guard was with drones. I was an all source intelligence analyst. We had seen some illegal activity involving the ‘signature strikes’. I’m not going to say who ‘we’ are, but uh that’s basically what sparked our interest to basically collect more evidence of wrongdoing by a specific agency, namely the CIA.

By 2009 someone had uploaded a file to the shell, which is a server that I had operated the front-end of. Can’t really tell you the size of it. It had a text intro from an individual claiming to be a special agent for the FBI, he was explaining how the included documents pointed to CIA involvement in the Amerithrax case. It had an index, a file index which i skimmed through, it had PDFs, powerpoint files. The PDFs included scanned hand-written notes. Specifics which stood out to me, i mean I jotted some notes down before were technical nature of stuff like degraded Anthrax VS Brucellosis, degraded Anthrax VS Tularemia. There was nuclear regulatory commission paperwork tracking a radioactive cobalt source. From the handwritten notes, they thought that source was used to degrade or render inert weaponized anthrax. What else stood out to me.. it was the Ames strain of anthrax, and they said it was weaponized ‘electro-statically charged silicon nano particles’. That’s been burned into my memory

ROBBIE MARTIN: Do you remember the date of the document, when it was from?

MD: The specific 7zip that was uploaded, or?

RM: Just the Amerithrax.

MD: That was September of 2009, the document was compressed. This was an archive file with a lot more files inside of it. There were scanned documents predating the official investigation, the scanned documents were back to mid 2001, is the earliest I remember. There is before and after the actual attacks. This file was compiled sometime in 2009.

RM: and you’re talking about the entire archive?

MD: The entire 7zip archive, yes.

RM: The most explosive part of what I read was that the charges being leveled from the FBI at the CIA essentially suggesting involvement of some kind. Was that the general gist of this document or was that just one part of a larger document about Amerithrax?

MD: That was in the introduction that was written as a text file that was the first named file in the document once it was extracted. That was what the claimed special agent was saying that the documents illustrated. That it was CIA involvement in the attacks, not just CIA involvement in the investigation.

RM: So the actual document, it probably had potentially some details in it that would suggest something like that, are you able to talk about anything you saw in that document beyond the text primer of what suggested that?

MD: Yes I skimmed through it, like I said that’s what stood out the actual degraded anthrax VS brucellosis, degraded anthrax vs tularemia. There were maps of Newark, the city of Newark and the port of Newark specifically. And during the txt intro, the alleged special agent said that was a potential target. The port of Newark, that’s what he asserted. This stuff looked like… I’m not going to say whether I’ve seen classified documents but from what I know these were real documents. They were, some of them seemed to be JWICS sourced, JWICS is a classified network that US agencies use. I know for a fact that several people that had been involved with me had access to JWICS. I’m not going to say any names or who I think might have uploaded that or knew someone that had access to that but it all lead me to believe this was all real information. It’s not something you could have faked is what I’m saying.

RM: In this allegation, were there any FBI officials or CIA officials that were named or implicated in any way?

MD: There’s a few names in the document, they look like they had been redacted probably by the person who assembled this file. Yes to an extent. All the NRC, the nuclear regulatory stuff didn’t seem redacted to me at all.

That’s what stuck out to me the most, the tracking of this cobalt source, this radioactive source. That’s a pretty unique avenue of the investigation.  They’re basically saying thats how the weaponized anthrax was rendered inert or least less lethal.

RM: That’s very interesting, I don’t know if I’ve actually heard that before, I’ll have to look into that.

Now as far as the idea the allegation was, the CIA was doing this to help sell the Iraq war. Was this person suggesting that the White House was involved in this, or that it was somehow being done independently?  I guess what I’m asking is how far up the chain of command was this person suggesting that it went. Was he suggesting some kind of rogue CIA action or something different?

MD: He didn’t make too many assertions in that regard as to how it was called for initially, but he did assert that the FBI investigation which was following this NRC paperwork that it be quashed and that came from the Vice President himself. That’s basically what his assertion was, again I wish I had the full file.

RM: Did you have a chance to read the Buzzfeed article about your story?

MD: No I never did.

RM: I was just curious how you felt about the portrayal of your story in there

Marcy Wheeler, I don’t know if you were aware, she runs a blog called Empty Wheel. She was writing specifically about this one document and speculating that it was some kind of honey trap because a document had been leaked a long time ago suggesting to try to setup Wikileaks, I’m just wondering what your opinion was on that theory.

MD: I mean, that’s a possibility. The specific nature, and I guess the unique angle of some of the things, I don’t see why they would go through that much effort and trying just to set up Wikileaks, and why it was uploaded to the shell and… the timing was off. There weren’t that many people that used our file hosting part of the shell, much less so than use storage, to mention storage which I find fascinating. When the information was recompiled to bring up to Canada the 2nd time, when I sought asylum. That was actually placed in the FBenemy directory on storage and the storage was moved to freedom hosting after we stopped hosting and the individual who hosted freedom hosting was arrested on child-porn or something charges. So that’s gone now, but I do have, we have screenshots of that directory still and that’s what I used in my motions to dismiss. So I’m just saying the effort the government has gone through just to crush this belies something else entirely.

RM: Yeah, no I hear you there.

MD: These are real f-, I mean they’re..

[phone drops out]

..files, there’s handwritten notes, there’s hundreds of pages. I could see maybe like a powerpoint slide a slideshow maybe, that that would be fake, no this took a lot of time.

RM:  In this document was the name Bruce Ivins or Stephen Hatfill ever mentioned?

MD: Not that I noticed, no.

RM: I’d really like to get you a copy of American Anthrax, would you be able to watch a DVD if I sent you one?

MD: Unless it was part of discovery in the case, no I don’t really have the ability to..

[ unintelligible message telling us the call is about to end ]

RM: I think they’re about to cut off the call, a weird message just came on.

So is there anything else that you wanted to say just in general, what’s going on with your case right now. Any updates?

MD: — to get these drives back, I would like people to kind of put some more pressure out there to get them back, cause the effort ..

[phone drops out]

..authorities to keep us from getting them for use in the asylum case, it was ridiculous, I mean..

[phone drops out]

..requests that we gave to their government, which is like a FOIA in Canada, they..

[phone drops out]

..other law, they had secret

[call cuts off]

These discussions with Matt Dehart will be part of a continuing series about the 2001 anthrax attacks. 


Watch American Anthrax 

written and transcribed by: Robbie Martin

contact Robbie on Twitter @FluorescentGrey

contact the ‘Free Matt Dehart’ campaign @FreeMattDehart

A VERY HEAVY AGENDA follows the trajectory of neoconservative ideologues behind George W. Bush’s foreign policy and who continue to influence the Obama presidency.

The documentary will be released in three parts, starting with Part 1: A Catalyzing Event which comes out Thursday October 15th on DVD & Video on Demand

Post-9/11, the War on Terror had outlived its usefulness.

          
the U.S. needed a new enemy, so they chose an old one – Russia.

Part 1: A Catalyzing Event  10.15.15

Cheney, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld were ubiquitous in the news media as they took every opportunity to market an aggressive preemptive war policy to America. But from where did their ideas originate? A tightly knit and eminently well placed group of neoconservative thought leaders, chief among them Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan.

Part 1 begins in the panicked weeks after 9/11, as Kagan et al. seized upon the hysteria surrounding the anthrax letter attacks to further shape America’s perception of reality, planting the seeds for endless future military engagements. George W. Bush may have been understandably perceived as an idiot, but watching these wonks and academics drive the ideological engine for his administration belies a much more sophisticated strategy.

Part 2: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The New Neocons  11.1.15


After the Cold War, the US-NATO reach expanded significantly to take in most of the old Soviet Union clients in the Warsaw pact. Neoconservative darling Robert Kagan and his diplomat wife Victoria Nuland played key roles inside and out of various administrations and think tanks as they greased the skids for a US-sponsored coup in Ukraine.

Part 2 shows the resurrection of old cold warriors from beltway depths to deliver blatant propaganda with techniques reminiscent of a Red Scare era that had only just faded from memory. US-funded outfits like Radio Free Liberty are pitted against Russia Today as each nation accuses the other of waging an ever more desperate and transparent “Information War.”

Part 3: Maintaining the World Order 11.15.15

“When the Berlin wall fell, our work wasn’t finished.” – Victoria Nuland, November 2013

“Fuck the EU.” – Victoria Nuland, February 2014

While stage managing the American empire has undoubtedly proved to be a more difficult task now than in the bipolar world of the Cold War, it is not for lack of greed or hubris that the Kagans and others continue to sell their vision. Did they create these ideas because they truly believe in America’s right to be the dominant force in the world? Or, do these ideas help sell weapons and control resources like oil and rare minerals?

Part 3 shows footage of an obscure PNAC member (Thomas Donnelly) taking credit for the ominous “New Pearl Harbor” phrasing in the notorious ‘Rebuilding America’s Defenses’ document. But the evidence shows the genesis of the concept to be patriarch Don Kagan, in conjunction with his son Fred, in prior writings that call for ‘a catalyzing event’. Other newly sourced footage shows the pair advocating for a US military ground invasion of Palestine on September 12th, 2001 and displaying an unnerving prescience about the 9/11 attacks and subsequent anthrax letter attacks.

“We’re an empire now and when we act we create our own reality, and while you’re studying that reality—we’ll act again, creating other new realities which you can study too. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do” – Karl Rove

When you take stock of the mindset of people who not only have access to the nexuses of power, but who trade in forming and widely disseminating arguments that justify bringing America closer to a potential nuclear confrontation with Russia, it shows something more plainly Machiavellian at work, with an aim ultimately much more sinister than simply spin.

Produced/Edited/Created by: Robbie Martin
Scored by Empire Files theme song composer: Fluorescent Grey 

A Very Heavy Agenda is a joint production between Media Roots & RecordLabelRecords
More information, Video On Demand/DVDs of A Very Heavy Agenda here

Follow Robbie Martin on Twitter @FluorescentGrey