{"id":849,"date":"2005-11-22T12:21:19","date_gmt":"2005-11-22T20:21:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/?p=849"},"modified":"2005-11-22T12:21:19","modified_gmt":"2005-11-22T20:21:19","slug":"interview-robert-baer-syriana","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/2005\/11\/22\/interview-robert-baer-syriana\/","title":{"rendered":"INTERVIEW: ROBERT BAER (SYRIANA)"},"content":{"rendered":"

CHUD.com<\/a> (courtesy Fred Badlisi<\/a>) :<\/p>\n

Q: My impression \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and a lot of people share this \u00e2\u20ac\u201c is that the CIA is a dangerous and possibly evil organization. At least that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the emotional reaction.<\/p>\n

Baer: That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s because you watch too many movies.<\/p>\n

Q: Yeah, I was going to say, is there anything you can say to dissuade me from that?<\/p>\n

Baer: It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a bureaucracy. But the movie is looking at the evil side, which is that they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve taken bad information to target someone overseas and kill him. The CIA does kill people, you have what is called lethal findings, in spite of 12333 Executive Order. You have the case of Khaddafi, you have the case in Yemen where they fired a missile into a car with 6 people and killed them all, they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re trying to kill bin Laden with Predators. It does happen.<\/p>\n

My experience has been that the CIA gets into a bad position and does the wrong thing when it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s politicized. Look at the Bay of Pigs. If you look at the history of that, it wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t the CIA\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s idea, it was Kennedy\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s idea. It started with Eisenhower, he did it, he forced it through. It was done against the advice of the analysts on Cuba. Iraq \u00e2\u20ac\u201c I know the name of every source they had on Iraq, and I know what they said. I knew before going into this war that that information was crap. They were using the National Intelligence Estimate from October 2002 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c I knew it. I knew that Chalabi and his sources were lying and making this stuff up. I knew that the Germans didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know, the French didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know. It was a supposition that he had weapons of mass destruction. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s what should have been in the National Intelligence Estimate. You should have had some psychiatrist saying, \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcWell, knowing as much as we know about how Saddam thinks, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll bet he kept some weapons.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s all it should have said, because we had no evidence. But the fact is that Cheny went to the CIA until he got what he wanted. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the politicization of the CIA.<\/p>\n

Inside the CIA you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve got basically liberal people \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Democrats or moderate Republicans \u00e2\u20ac\u201c that don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t like torture, they don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t putting lies on reports, and they don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t like subverting governments. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s called action but neither is it covert nor is it action. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s just a way to fill up space in the newspaper because it always gets leaked.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

CHUD.com (courtesy Fred Badlisi) : Q: My impression \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and a lot of people share this \u00e2\u20ac\u201c is that the CIA is a dangerous and possibly evil organization. At least that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the emotional reaction. Baer: That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s because you watch too many movies. Q: Yeah, I was going to say, is there anything you can say to dissuade me from that? Baer: It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a bureaucracy. But the movie is looking at the evil side, which is that they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve taken bad information…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"aside","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[71],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-849","post","type-post","status-publish","format-aside","hentry","category-general","post_format-post-format-aside"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4uks-dH","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/849","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=849"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/849\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}