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From: Democracy Now!
Re: Rundown 8-01-03
PRSS Channel: A67.7
8:00-8:01 Billboard:
Ex-CIA Agent Robert Baer: How Washington Sold Its Soul for
Saudi Crude
Treasury Dept. Fines Voices in the Wilderness Thousands
for Delivering Medical Supplies to Iraq
Kathleen Cleaver on the Black Panther Film Fest, Her Life
& Activism Today
8:01-8:06 Headlines
8:06-8:07 One Minute Music Break
8:07-8:25 Ex-CIA Agent Robert Baer: How Washington Sold
Its Soul for Saudi Crude
The U.S. will send a team of senior FBI, Treasury and State
Department officials to Saudi Arabia next week to press the
kingdom for further actions to cut off funding for so-called
³terrorist² organizations.
Meanwhile, Muslim charities with close ties to the Saudi
royal family were the main focus of a senate hearing yesterday.
The hearing explored Saudi connections to the Sept. 11 attacks.
Sources told The New York Times that the charities were cited
in classified sections of the nearly 900-page investigation
on the 9/11 released by Congress last week.
Large sections of the report explaining how the Saudis did
not cooperate with U.S. intelligence agencies remain classified.
An entire 28-page section detailing whether Saudi Arabia was
somehow implicated in 9/11 is missing.
President Bush continues to refuse to declassify the report.
The report did find that the Saudi government thwarted efforts
to prevent the rise of al-Qaeda and stop attacks as well as
provide financial and logistical support to the Saudi-born
Sept. 11 hijackers. 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi Arabian.
The Times reported yesterday that a prominent Saudi figure
also mentioned in the report is Prince Nayef bin Abdel Aziz.
Prince Nayef, who is the longtime overseer of Saudi's
security forces, is Saudi Arabia's powerful interior minister
and a brother of King Fahd.
A new book by former CIA agent Robert Baer claims that Nayef
had twice sought to murder a leading Saudi dissident. In his
book Sleeping With the Devil: How Washington Sold Its Soul
for Saudi Crude, Baer alleges that Nayef's aborted political
assassination of Muhammed al-Massari helped drive the Saudi
dissident to extremism.
The CIA is demanding that Baer remove the passages from
the book that implicate Nayef as well as another section claiming
that other high-ranking members of the Saudi royal family
were involved in the training of Chechen rebels with apparent
ties to al-Qaeda.
Robert Baer joins us on the phone today from Washington.
Before we go to him we are going to play a clip of President
George Bush speaking at his ninth press conference at the
White House on Wednesday. A reporter asks Bush about Saudi
Arabia and the 9/11 report.
- President George Bush, speaking at a press conference
on July 29, 2003. It was only the ninth press conference
since he took office.
- Robert Baer, former CIA officer who served for years
as an undercover operative in the Middle East. He is the
author of the new book Sleeping With the Devil: How Washington
Sold Its Soul for Saudi Crude.
8:20-8:21 One Minute Music Break
8:21-8:40 Treasury Dept. Fines Voices in the Wilderness
Thousands for Delivering Medical Supplies to Iraq
The Chicago-based humanitarian group is fined tens of thousands
of dollars for violating sanctions against Iraq. We speak
with Voices in the Wilderness co-founder and two-time Nobel
Peace Prize nominee Kathy Kelly.
The Treasury Department notified the humanitarian group Voices
in the Wilderness three days ago that they have twenty days
to pay tens of thousands of dollars in fines for violating
sanctions against Iraq.
Since its founding in 1996, Voices in the Wilderness has
campaigned to end economic and military warfare against the
Iraqi people. They have done this mostly by organizing delegations
to Iraq in deliberate violation of U.N. economic sanctions
and U.S. law, to publicly deliver small amounts of medical
supplies to children and families in need.
Many of the group's members refuse to pay taxes for
war.
- Kathy Kelly, co-founder of Voices in the Wilderness.
Link: www.vitw.org
8:40-8:41 One Minute Music Break
8:41-8:58 Kathleen Cleaver on the Black Panther Film Fest,
Her Life & Activism Today
Last night the third annual International Black Panther
Film Festival opened in New York.
The festival was founded by Kathleen Cleaver, one of the
major voices in the Black liberation movements of the 1960s
and 1970s.
In 1966 she joined the Student Non-Violent Coordinating
Committee. A year later she joined Black Panther Party. She
became the Communications Secretary of the Black Panther Party
and was the first woman on the Party's Central Committee.
In the early 1970s, she spent years in exile with her then
husband, Eldridge Cleaver. She returned to the U.S. and eventually
graduated from Yale Law School in 1987. She is now a professor
at Emory Univeristy.
In 1999 she started the International Black Panther Film
Festival. I talked with her recently and asked about her inspiration
in starting the festival.
8:58-8:59 Outro and Credits
For a copy of today’s program, call 1 (800) 881 2359.
Our website is www.democracynow.org.
Our email address is mail@democracynow.org.
Democracy Now! is produced by Kris Abrams, Mike Burke, Angie
Karran, Sharif Abdul Kouddous, Ana Nogueira, Elizabeth Press,
Noah Reibel and Vilka Tzouras. Mike Di Filippo is our music
maestro and engineer. Thanks also to Uri Galed, Angela Alston,
Orlando Richards, Simba Rousseau, Rafael delaUz, Gabriel Weiss,
Johnny Sender, Rich Kim, Chris Zucker, Karen Ranucci, Denis
Moynihan, Jenny Filipazzo and Ionnis Mookas.
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