therealnews--2020-08-19--Today is the anniversary of the US organizing a coup in Iran

Aaron Maté : It ’ s The Real News , I ’ m Aaron Mate .
In 1953 , the U.S. and Britain overthrew Iran ’ s democratic government .
The reason was oil .
Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh had nationalized the country ’ s oil industry , angering Britain and the oil company that today is known as BP .
The British partnered with the CIA to out Mosaddegh and install the Shah , who ruled until his overthrow in the Iranian Revolution of 1979 .
The 1953 coup shaped modern Iranian history , but it ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ U.S..
The CIA didn ’ t acknowledge it ’ s role until 2013 and the U.S. government has refused to release the full internal documents that show what it did .
Well , that has just changed .
The State Department has just released hundreds of pages of documents , not all of them , that provide new details on the CIA ’ s role in the Iran coup of 1953 .
To discuss these documents , I spoke today with someone who ’ s been waiting to read them for a long @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at the non-governmental National Security Archive based at George Washington University .
He runs the Archive ’ s Iran-U.S. relations project .
Malcolm , welcome .
Malcom Byrne : Thank you very much .
Aaron Maté : Thanks for joining us .
Before we get into what these new documents say , I ’ m wondering if you could set the scene for us in a historical context , talking about what happened in the 1953 coup that the CIA took part in .
Malcom Byrne : Well , it ’ s a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s one with a lot of current political resonance for Iranians , that is .
Most Americans have never heard of the coup and it ’ s ancient history for us , but for the Iranians , the situation started in the early 1950s .
In 1951 , they nationalized their oil industry and this was done by their Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh .
This was an event that really sent shock waves in the British Empire , which relied on their oil facilities in Iran for a lot of income and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , who they called upon to help them in this because we were allies , but the Truman administration was really not anxious to get involved in anything military or even a covert coup , because they were trying to get the British and the French and others to cut back on their colonial attitude .
This is after the war , it ’ s supposed to be the 20th century , we are in a different world .
So the American came across , at first , as kind of heroes , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a number of years of his of helping to get the Russians out of the country and so on .
But then , in 1953 , when President Eisenhower came into office , an entirely different attitude took hold .
The U.S. , along with British Intelligence , we ’ re talking about the CIA now , and British Intelligence go together and worked out a plan to overthrow the same Prime Minister Mossadegh because they couldn ’ t see any other way out of the crisis , which they believed the Americans @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to some sort of Soviet intervention or Soviet-backed coup inside the country , so that ’ s how the coup came about .
Aaron Maté : And Mossadegh , he was elected democratically , right ?
Malcom Byrne : Yeah .
It ’ s a murky story , because a lot of years have gone by and this is such an emotional history and whenever you have that combination you ’ ve got to be really careful how you define your terms , what sources , you use , who you believe so @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was a country that had elections .
There were a lot of times when they were clearly rigged , but the general consensus is that Mossadegh had originally been elected democratically .
Aaron Maté : His move to nationalize the oil industry in 1951 had wide support , if I ’ m not mistaken ?
Malcom Byrne : Inside Iran , definitely .
Not by the British , the British were [ inaudible 00:04:39 ] and the Iranians had to take the case to the International Court to try to adjudicate it .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ the British were pushed back and that ’ s part of what led them to think in terms of a coup d ’ etat or a military strike of some kind .
Aaron Maté : Okay , so the British enlist the U.S. for this operation and the CIA gets involved .
The codename is “ Operation Ajax.
” What happens there ?
Malcom Byrne : Well , it takes a long time to plan this thing .
The British had come originally , during the Truman period , to try to propose @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ No , we ’ re not really interested .
You ’ d better wait until the next group comes in , ” because the main interaction was just after the election and Eisenhower had just been elected .
It even took a little bit of time for Eisenhower to come around , but by springtime , ’ 53 , a couple months after he ’ d taken office , he and his top advisors had pretty much come to the conclusion that they wanted to move in .
They were afraid , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Soviet advantage of some kind .
The British mainly wanted their oil , wanted the revenues from it and so on , but they had a meeting of the minds in terms of their agreement to get rid of Mossadegh .
So they put together a plan , jointly , to get the approval of Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Eisenhower , and that ’ s in July of 1953 , and then by the middle of August , the coup gets underway .
Aaron Maté : Okay , and so these @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the CIA , close to 1,000 pages , reveal some new details of the CIA ’ s involvement .
Can you lay out for us the major disclosures that you ’ ve seen so far ?
Malcom Byrne : Sure .
I haven ’ t gotten through the whole volume yet , but it ’ s fascinating .
I want to say that it may be more interesting for historians than for people who are just coming to the issue for the first time because it fills in a lot of details , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ perspectives , American perspectives , but different agency perspectives .
The CIA versus the State Department versus the White House and so on .
It fleshes out the story a lot .
If I could take just one second , it ’ s important to figure out and understand how we came to know what we know about the coup up to this point , up to last week when the volume was put out .
The very first story about the coup came out just a year afterwards , in 1954 , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Evening Post , ” so clearly somebody at the CIA decided that they were gon na leak this story and they put a lot of detail into that article .
But officially , the CIA and the British refused to discuss it , refused to acknowledge their role for decades .
In the late 1970s , the the leader of the coup on the ground in Iran , a guy with a familiar name , Kermit Roosevelt , he was a relative of two presidents and he was in … Aaron Maté : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , right ?
Malcom Byrne : He was grandson of Theodore and a cousin of Franklin .
A sort of an adventurer and someone who thought about all this as “ The Great Game , ” which was the old expression that they used to use .
He was put in charge of this operation and a couple of decades later , he decided he wanted to write about it , and so he did publish a book and there ’ s an interesting story about how that got past CIA censors but @ @ @ @ @ @ @ gave a lot of detail about what was happening .
The problem is , as with any memoir , it ’ s all about the author , so it ’ s come under some criticism for being not exactly balanced .
It puts Kermit in center stage .
At other times , other people have written books who were involved , some British agents for instance , who [ inaudible 00:08:49 ] might be as there .
But it ’ s all bits and piece .
Then in the year 2000 , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an internal document , a 200 page CIA history , still classified , that they wrote a giant article about , I think two articles , this being a relatively early age with the internet , they did a great thing .
They posted the document on the web .
They took out some names and things like that , which was fine , but there the document was .
In fact , we have it on our website now , at the National Security archive .
That produced a ton of information @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Who did what , what time of day on August 18th so-and-so met with so-and-so , that kind of thing .
We also have interviews from some of the operatives .
I ’ ve done some of those interviews and my colleague , Mark Gasiorowski at Tulane University , is the leader on this .
So from all of these different vantage points , we ’ ve gotten bits and pieces .
Then , in 1989 , the State Department put out a volume of documents just like the one that came out @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
It did not say one word about CIA or British involvement in the coup .
It just portrayed it as , “ Gee whiz , there ’ s this spontaneous uprising that has happened in favor of the Shah .
Isn ’ t it amazing ?
!
” That caused outrage in the historical community and it lead to resignations of people involved because it was just a whitewash of the history .
Aaron Maté : And those portions were redacted ?
Malcom Byrne : Just left out entirely .
Malcom Byrne @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
You get a report from the ambassador the day of the coup going , “ Amazing events are happening , unfolding before our eyes on the streets of Tehran , spontaneous support for the Shah.
” Just nonsense .
So the Department , to their credit , decided that they would produce a new volume that would correct that historical falsehood and it took a long time .
It ’ s been over 25 years , but they finally came out with it last week .
This is a long way to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have , in 1,000 more pages which is a lot of material , a lot more perspective on different parts of the CIA , what they were thinking and doing , how they reacted , parts of the State Department , plus their reporting on other people ’ s reactions and so on .
So it ’ s a Rashomon Effect , where you now get a lot of perspective that was not available before .
There still some material that hasn ’ t been released , but there ’ s a lot @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mix and match and compare notes with what we ’ ve known before .
Aaron Maté : Okay , and so one of the things we ’ ve known before is that Kermit Roosevelt , who you mentioned , that he ignored orders to abort the coup , because apparently it wasn ’ t going well .
But these new documents give detail on exactly how he went about being insubordinate and proceeding with the coup anyway .
Malcom Byrne : Right .
Again , we knew some of this before .
I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was one of the operatives , it was in fact his first posting overseas with the CIA , so he was a 20-something kid getting his feet wet for the first time , and he tells a story of being in the room with Kermit when this cable came in from CIA headquarters saying , “ Drop everything .
This has gone to hell in a hand basket , get your troops together and get out of town.
” According to this witness , Roosevelt crumpled up the cable , threw it in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ never saw that , ” and off they went to try to recoup what had been a disaster up to that point .
In this new volume , what we have is the actual cable that was sent , that says pretty much the same thing .
“ Based on reporting we ’ re getting , this is going nowhere fast and it ’ s gon na be a real problem , so you guys should get out of there.
” We also have some after action minutes of meetings where Roosevelt is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , with the ones who said , “ You got ta wrap this up , ” and he ’ s not got ta explain himself and say , “ Why did I make that call on my own ?
” It ’ s a damn good thing it worked out .
Aaron Maté : Roosevelt proceeds with a plan that involves rented crowds of people , right ?
Aaron Maté : Can you explain that ?
Malcom Byrne : Yeah .
This is a big aspect of Iranian politics .
Anybody who ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or so will be familiar with televised scenes of huge crowds in Iran , whether it ’ s when the Ayatollah Khomeini returns to the country after exile or things of that sort , and crowds are a key element going back decades in Iranian politics .
Things are just generally unstable enough that if you get enough people out there , you can really change things around .
So that was always a key part of the plan .
There were several aspects to it , but one of the keys was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ any way you can and make it look like the Shah has everybody ’ s support and we hope we ’ ll carry the day.
” Aaron Maté : And the Shah is who the U.S. installed until he was forced out in 1979 .
In terms of the consequences of this … First of all , is it safe that actually , if this was about oil , then Western goals failed because the nationalist sentiment of Mosaddegh was so strong that in the end , even with the Shah in power @ @ @ @ @ @ @ British Petroleum especially , were forced to still share the oil profits with Iran ?
Malcom Byrne : Yeah .
I think if you get a little more specific , if you ’ re talking just about the British , I think they got the short end of the stick , not that I ’ m sad about that but they came into this with this conception of privilege and ownership that belongs in that era of colonialism and neo-colonialism .
They just had no qualms about demands their rights and minimizing and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ capabilities and every other aspect of the Iranians , who they resented like hell for taking their resource .
The Americans , I think , had a different attitude and there is disagreement about this .
There are others who think that this was all about oil .
I think it depends on how you define priority with oil .
Was oil considered a commercial commodity that private companies were gon na make a lot of money off of ?
Or was it more important as a strategic component of the calculation of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ based on all the documents that I ’ ve read , is that the people like Truman and even Eisenhower , they really were more interested in the strategic component because for them , job one was to keep the Russians out .
If the Russians got access to the oil , that would be a really terrible thing because we ’ re still talking about not being that many years out of World War II and western Europe is still rebuilding , Japan is still rebuilding and they need natural resources , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t get access to it , then that could lead to really serious political problems and leave an opening for the Russians politically , propaganda-wise and ideologically , and their proxies to come in and gain some real input .
So I believe that it ’ s from that point of view that the American side was worried about oil .
Were the American companies concerned about commercial sides ?
Of course they were , and it ’ s very hard sometimes to separate the commercial and the political in U.S. foreign @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I that the policy makers wanted to make sure that the Russians didn ’ t get it , that was what their concern was .
Aaron Maté : Yeah , and I ’ m sure it wasn ’ t just about the Russians .
The fact is , if you control oil or you control access to oil , then that gives you huge leverage over geopolitics around the globe .
Aaron Maté : So let ’ s end then with the implications today .
We should point out that this was not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of these documents , which has been a big deal for a long time , was announced very quietly .
It was appended to a release about 16 other releases , if I ’ m not mistaken .
Aaron Maté : If you could talk about the significance of this coming out now , in the context of a Trump administration that has been very confrontational towards Iran , recently Rex Tillerson talked about how the Trump administration supports a peaceful transition of government inside Iran , effectively soft regime change .
How @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in Iran today , which has been heavily influenced by this history , and the memories of that coup over 60 years ago still loom large .
Malcom Byrne : Right .
There are no solid facts here , alternative or otherwise , that can confirm this but just from the way this has played out , there clearly seems to be some sort of a political or policy component to it .
As you said , for decades this stuff has been kept secret and usually it ’ s been for reasons @ @ @ @ @ @ @ t want it ’ s secrets about sources ’ methods to come out , doesn ’ t matter if this thing happened 60 years ago .
The British are even worse on this subject .
More recently , specifically since the 2015 Iran nuclear deal that was signed with the P5+1 countries , the State Department under Obama and Kerry has been very reluctant to do anything to stir the political waters in Iran and they specifically have said in the context of State Department historians there that are public sessions that they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that might create problems or give the hardliners in Iran the opportunity to make mischief .
Now , all of a sudden , you have a change of regime in the United States and accord to information that I have , within about a two-month period a decision gets made by the Rex Tillerson State Department to release this stuff .
You can ’ t help but come to the reaction that this attitude is something like , “ Well , if Kerry ’ s State Department wanted it this way , we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ other way.
” They ’ ve given plenty of indication that they , “ they ” being the Trump administration and Tillerson as well , that they don ’ t put much stock in this nuclear deal at all , so it ’ s not hard to imagine that they would not shed tears if something like this came out and caused problems for it .
My first reaction and sense is that it ’ s not gon na cause big problems and I hope it doesn ’ t , frankly .
They @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that they are focusing on right now , but it ’ s hard to imagine that something like this wasn ’ t at play .
Aaron Maté : You know Malcolm , I ’ m gon na say one thing about the issue of Obama and Kerry and their view on this .
I take your point about them not wanting to stir the pot , but could it also be said that they could ’ ve taken the opportunity to apologize for overthrowing a country ’ s sovereign government ?
Obama and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was President , but he had the opportunity to apologize and he made a conscious decision not to .
Malcom Byrne : Well , it ’ s not surprising , and maybe it ’ s in retrospect that I say that , but Clinton mentioned it , Madeleine Albright , the secretary of State , came close to apologizing , as close as she could , Obama , like you say , had made specific mention of it .
The problem that they ’ re facing , and I ’ m not saying @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , but I believe that what they were looking at was a hostile domestic set of opponents and one of the things that is like the proverbial red flag is front of a bull is for a Democratic or Secretary of State to apologize for anything that the United States did .
Republicans would ’ ve made mincemeat out of them for doing that .
That ’ s my sense , is that they didn ’ t want to open themselves up to that kind of attack that would just destroy what they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ place .
Aaron Maté : I understand , but it still raises questions about what could have been done earlier on , but certainly … Malcom Byrne : I ’ m with you on that , on all kinds of fronts .
When you look at these documents just the classification standpoint , I defy you to find anything in them that would justify their being withheld for so long .
This is my own personal opinion on the policy front , I don ’ t see a problem in acknowledging what you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ way and saying , “ Look , that was a different time and place and that ’ s what the attitudes of these people were .
It ’ s not my attitude , but we have to understand and accept it and we understand it ’ s caused real problems .
It ’ s good to get the mists out of the way so you have a clear ascent on both sides , but let ’ s get this over with and move on to something more positive and fruitful.
” Aaron Maté @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of contrition I want to apologize to you for keeping you way longer than we agreed to and I appreciate your extra time on this .
Malcolm Byrne , Deputy Director at the Nongovernmental National Security Archive , based at George Washington University .
He runs the Archives ’ Iran-U.S. relations project .
Malcolm , thank you !
Malcom Byrne : Been a pleasure , thank you .
Aaron Maté : And thank you for joining U.S. on The Real News .

Aaron Maté: It’s The Real News, I’m Aaron Mate. In 1953, the U.S. and Britain overthrew Iran’s democratic government. The reason was oil. Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh had nationalized the country’s oil industry, angering Britain and the oil company that today is known as BP. The British partnered with the CIA to out Mosaddegh and install the Shah, who ruled until his overthrow in the Iranian Revolution of 1979.
The 1953 coup shaped modern Iranian history, but it’s not very well know here in the U.S.. The CIA didn’t acknowledge it’s role until 2013 and the U.S. government has refused to release the full internal documents that show what it did. Well, that has just changed. The State Department has just released hundreds of pages of documents, not all of them, that provide new details on the CIA’s role in the Iran coup of 1953. To discuss these documents, I spoke today with someone who’s been waiting to read them for a long time.
Malcolm Byrne is Deputy Director at the non-governmental National Security Archive based at George Washington University. He runs the Archive’s Iran-U.S. relations project. Malcolm, welcome.
Malcom Byrne: Thank you very much.
Aaron Maté: Thanks for joining us. Before we get into what these new documents say, I’m wondering if you could set the scene for us in a historical context, talking about what happened in the 1953 coup that the CIA took part in.
Malcom Byrne: Well, it’s a really fascinating historical episode, but it’s one with a lot of current political resonance for Iranians, that is. Most Americans have never heard of the coup and it’s ancient history for us, but for the Iranians, the situation started in the early 1950s. In 1951, they nationalized their oil industry and this was done by their Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh.
This was an event that really sent shock waves in the British Empire, which relied on their oil facilities in Iran for a lot of income and they reacted violently. The United States, who they called upon to help them in this because we were allies, but the Truman administration was really not anxious to get involved in anything military or even a covert coup, because they were trying to get the British and the French and others to cut back on their colonial attitude. This is after the war, it’s supposed to be the 20th century, we are in a different world.
So the American came across, at first, as kind of heroes, supports of Iran and this builds on a number of years of his of helping to get the Russians out of the country and so on. But then, in 1953, when President Eisenhower came into office, an entirely different attitude took hold. The U.S., along with British Intelligence, we’re talking about the CIA now, and British Intelligence go together and worked out a plan to overthrow the same Prime Minister Mossadegh because they couldn’t see any other way out of the crisis, which they believed the Americans feared, above all, might lead to some sort of Soviet intervention or Soviet-backed coup inside the country, so that’s how the coup came about.
Aaron Maté: And Mossadegh, he was elected democratically, right?
Malcom Byrne: Yeah. It’s a murky story, because a lot of years have gone by and this is such an emotional history and whenever you have that combination you’ve got to be really careful how you define your terms, what sources, you use, who you believe so on. But generally speaking, this was a country that had elections. There were a lot of times when they were clearly rigged, but the general consensus is that Mossadegh had originally been elected democratically.
Aaron Maté: His move to nationalize the oil industry in 1951 had wide support, if I’m not mistaken?
Malcom Byrne: Inside Iran, definitely. Not by the British, the British were [inaudible 00:04:39] and the Iranians had to take the case to the International Court to try to adjudicate it.
Aaron Maté: What happened there?
Malcom Byrne: They won, so the British were pushed back and that’s part of what led them to think in terms of a coup d’etat or a military strike of some kind.
Aaron Maté: Okay, so the British enlist the U.S. for this operation and the CIA gets involved. The codename is “Operation Ajax.” What happens there?
Malcom Byrne: Well, it takes a long time to plan this thing. The British had come originally, during the Truman period, to try to propose this but the Truman people said, “No, we’re not really interested. You’d better wait until the next group comes in,” because the main interaction was just after the election and Eisenhower had just been elected.
It even took a little bit of time for Eisenhower to come around, but by springtime, ’53, a couple months after he’d taken office, he and his top advisors had pretty much come to the conclusion that they wanted to move in. They were afraid, above all, of Soviet intervention or Soviet advantage of some kind. The British mainly wanted their oil, wanted the revenues from it and so on, but they had a meeting of the minds in terms of their agreement to get rid of Mossadegh.
So they put together a plan, jointly, to get the approval of Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Eisenhower, and that’s in July of 1953, and then by the middle of August, the coup gets underway.
Aaron Maté: Okay, and so these new documents that have come out from the CIA, close to 1,000 pages, reveal some new details of the CIA’s involvement. Can you lay out for us the major disclosures that you’ve seen so far?
Malcom Byrne: Sure. I haven’t gotten through the whole volume yet, but it’s fascinating. I want to say that it may be more interesting for historians than for people who are just coming to the issue for the first time because it fills in a lot of details, it gives you a lot of different perspectives, American perspectives, but different agency perspectives. The CIA versus the State Department versus the White House and so on. It fleshes out the story a lot.
If I could take just one second, it’s important to figure out and understand how we came to know what we know about the coup up to this point, up to last week when the volume was put out. The very first story about the coup came out just a year afterwards, in 1954, in a magazine called “The Saturday Evening Post,” so clearly somebody at the CIA decided that they were gonna leak this story and they put a lot of detail into that article.
But officially, the CIA and the British refused to discuss it, refused to acknowledge their role for decades. In the late 1970s, the the leader of the coup on the ground in Iran, a guy with a familiar name, Kermit Roosevelt, he was a relative of two presidents and he was in …
Aaron Maté: He was the son of Theodore Roosevelt, right?
Malcom Byrne: He was grandson of Theodore and a cousin of Franklin. A sort of an adventurer and someone who thought about all this as “The Great Game,” which was the old expression that they used to use. He was put in charge of this operation and a couple of decades later, he decided he wanted to write about it, and so he did publish a book and there’s an interesting story about how that got past CIA censors but it made it out and it also gave a lot of detail about what was happening.
The problem is, as with any memoir, it’s all about the author, so it’s come under some criticism for being not exactly balanced. It puts Kermit in center stage. At other times, other people have written books who were involved, some British agents for instance, who [inaudible 00:08:49] might be as there. But it’s all bits and piece.
Then in the year 2000, the New York Times got a leak of an internal document, a 200 page CIA history, still classified, that they wrote a giant article about, I think two articles, this being a relatively early age with the internet, they did a great thing. They posted the document on the web. They took out some names and things like that, which was fine, but there the document was. In fact, we have it on our website now, at the National Security archive.
That produced a ton of information about the specifics of the coup. Who did what, what time of day on August 18th so-and-so met with so-and-so, that kind of thing. We also have interviews from some of the operatives. I’ve done some of those interviews and my colleague, Mark Gasiorowski at Tulane University, is the leader on this. So from all of these different vantage points, we’ve gotten bits and pieces.
Then, in 1989, the State Department put out a volume of documents just like the one that came out last week, with one huge problem. It did not say one word about CIA or British involvement in the coup. It just portrayed it as, “Gee whiz, there’s this spontaneous uprising that has happened in favor of the Shah. Isn’t it amazing?!” That caused outrage in the historical community and it lead to resignations of people involved because it was just a whitewash of the history.
Aaron Maté: And those portions were redacted?
Malcom Byrne: Just left out entirely.
Aaron Maté: Just omitted? Okay.
Malcom Byrne: As if it had never happened. You get a report from the ambassador the day of the coup going, “Amazing events are happening, unfolding before our eyes on the streets of Tehran, spontaneous support for the Shah.” Just nonsense. So the Department, to their credit, decided that they would produce a new volume that would correct that historical falsehood and it took a long time. It’s been over 25 years, but they finally came out with it last week.
This is a long way to get to this point but we now have, in 1,000 more pages which is a lot of material, a lot more perspective on different parts of the CIA, what they were thinking and doing, how they reacted, parts of the State Department, plus their reporting on other people’s reactions and so on. So it’s a Rashomon Effect, where you now get a lot of perspective that was not available before. There still some material that hasn’t been released, but there’s a lot of great stuff here for people to mix and match and compare notes with what we’ve known before.
Aaron Maté: Okay, and so one of the things we’ve known before is that Kermit Roosevelt, who you mentioned, that he ignored orders to abort the coup, because apparently it wasn’t going well. But these new documents give detail on exactly how he went about being insubordinate and proceeding with the coup anyway.
Malcom Byrne: Right. Again, we knew some of this before. I did an interview with a guy who was one of the operatives, it was in fact his first posting overseas with the CIA, so he was a 20-something kid getting his feet wet for the first time, and he tells a story of being in the room with Kermit when this cable came in from CIA headquarters saying, “Drop everything. This has gone to hell in a hand basket, get your troops together and get out of town.”
According to this witness, Roosevelt crumpled up the cable, threw it in a trashcan and said, “We never saw that,” and off they went to try to recoup what had been a disaster up to that point. In this new volume, what we have is the actual cable that was sent, that says pretty much the same thing. “Based on reporting we’re getting, this is going nowhere fast and it’s gonna be a real problem, so you guys should get out of there.”
We also have some after action minutes of meetings where Roosevelt is now meeting with all of his superiors, with the ones who said, “You gotta wrap this up,” and he’s not gotta explain himself and say, “Why did I make that call on my own?” It’s a damn good thing it worked out.
Aaron Maté: Roosevelt proceeds with a plan that involves rented crowds of people, right?
Malcom Byrne: Right.
Aaron Maté: Can you explain that?
Malcom Byrne: Yeah. This is a big aspect of Iranian politics. Anybody who’s been around the last 30 years or so will be familiar with televised scenes of huge crowds in Iran, whether it’s when the Ayatollah Khomeini returns to the country after exile or things of that sort, and crowds are a key element going back decades in Iranian politics. Things are just generally unstable enough that if you get enough people out there, you can really change things around.
So that was always a key part of the plan. There were several aspects to it, but one of the keys was, “Get these crowds out there any way you can and make it look like the Shah has everybody’s support and we hope we’ll carry the day.”
Aaron Maté: And the Shah is who the U.S. installed until he was forced out in 1979. In terms of the consequences of this … First of all, is it safe that actually, if this was about oil, then Western goals failed because the nationalist sentiment of Mosaddegh was so strong that in the end, even with the Shah in power, the Western oil companies, like British Petroleum especially, were forced to still share the oil profits with Iran?
Malcom Byrne: Yeah. I think if you get a little more specific, if you’re talking just about the British, I think they got the short end of the stick, not that I’m sad about that but they came into this with this conception of privilege and ownership that belongs in that era of colonialism and neo-colonialism. They just had no qualms about demands their rights and minimizing and vilifying and diminishing the role, the capabilities and every other aspect of the Iranians, who they resented like hell for taking their resource.
The Americans, I think, had a different attitude and there is disagreement about this. There are others who think that this was all about oil. I think it depends on how you define priority with oil. Was oil considered a commercial commodity that private companies were gonna make a lot of money off of? Or was it more important as a strategic component of the calculation of the Cold War?
My view, based on all the documents that I’ve read, is that the people like Truman and even Eisenhower, they really were more interested in the strategic component because for them, job one was to keep the Russians out. If the Russians got access to the oil, that would be a really terrible thing because we’re still talking about not being that many years out of World War II and western Europe is still rebuilding, Japan is still rebuilding and they need natural resources, they need oil. If they don’t get access to it, then that could lead to really serious political problems and leave an opening for the Russians politically, propaganda-wise and ideologically, and their proxies to come in and gain some real input.
So I believe that it’s from that point of view that the American side was worried about oil. Were the American companies concerned about commercial sides? Of course they were, and it’s very hard sometimes to separate the commercial and the political in U.S. foreign policy. But in this case, I that the policy makers wanted to make sure that the Russians didn’t get it, that was what their concern was.
Aaron Maté: Yeah, and I’m sure it wasn’t just about the Russians. The fact is, if you control oil or you control access to oil, then that gives you huge leverage over geopolitics around the globe.
Malcom Byrne: Absolutely.
Aaron Maté: So let’s end then with the implications today. We should point out that this was not a widely-trumpeted release. Announcing the release of these documents, which has been a big deal for a long time, was announced very quietly. It was appended to a release about 16 other releases, if I’m not mistaken.
Malcom Byrne: [inaudible 00:17:47]
Aaron Maté: If you could talk about the significance of this coming out now, in the context of a Trump administration that has been very confrontational towards Iran, recently Rex Tillerson talked about how the Trump administration supports a peaceful transition of government inside Iran, effectively soft regime change. How especially documents like these might be received in Iran today, which has been heavily influenced by this history, and the memories of that coup over 60 years ago still loom large.
Malcom Byrne: Right. There are no solid facts here, alternative or otherwise, that can confirm this but just from the way this has played out, there clearly seems to be some sort of a political or policy component to it. As you said, for decades this stuff has been kept secret and usually it’s been for reasons of spycraft. The CIA doesn’t want it’s secrets about sources’ methods to come out, doesn’t matter if this thing happened 60 years ago. The British are even worse on this subject.
More recently, specifically since the 2015 Iran nuclear deal that was signed with the P5+1 countries, the State Department under Obama and Kerry has been very reluctant to do anything to stir the political waters in Iran and they specifically have said in the context of State Department historians there that are public sessions that they don’t want to do anything that might create problems or give the hardliners in Iran the opportunity to make mischief.
Now, all of a sudden, you have a change of regime in the United States and accord to information that I have, within about a two-month period a decision gets made by the Rex Tillerson State Department to release this stuff. You can’t help but come to the reaction that this attitude is something like, “Well, if Kerry’s State Department wanted it this way, we’re gonna do it the other way.” They’ve given plenty of indication that they, “they” being the Trump administration and Tillerson as well, that they don’t put much stock in this nuclear deal at all, so it’s not hard to imagine that they would not shed tears if something like this came out and caused problems for it.
My first reaction and sense is that it’s not gonna cause big problems and I hope it doesn’t, frankly. They’ve got other things in Iran that they are focusing on right now, but it’s hard to imagine that something like this wasn’t at play.
Aaron Maté: You know Malcolm, I’m gonna say one thing about the issue of Obama and Kerry and their view on this. I take your point about them not wanting to stir the pot, but could it also be said that they could’ve taken the opportunity to apologize for overthrowing a country’s sovereign government? Obama and the CIA did acknowledge it when Obama was President, but he had the opportunity to apologize and he made a conscious decision not to.
Malcom Byrne: Well, it’s not surprising, and maybe it’s in retrospect that I say that, but Clinton mentioned it, Madeleine Albright, the secretary of State, came close to apologizing, as close as she could, Obama, like you say, had made specific mention of it. The problem that they’re facing, and I’m not saying I advocate the stand that they took, but I believe that what they were looking at was a hostile domestic set of opponents and one of the things that is like the proverbial red flag is front of a bull is for a Democratic or Secretary of State to apologize for anything that the United States did. Republicans would’ve made mincemeat out of them for doing that.
That’s my sense, is that they didn’t want to open themselves up to that kind of attack that would just destroy what they were trying to achieve in the first place.
Aaron Maté: I understand, but it still raises questions about what could have been done earlier on, but certainly …
Malcom Byrne: I’m with you on that, on all kinds of fronts. When you look at these documents just the classification standpoint, I defy you to find anything in them that would justify their being withheld for so long. This is my own personal opinion on the policy front, I don’t see a problem in acknowledging what you did and getting it out of the way and saying, “Look, that was a different time and place and that’s what the attitudes of these people were. It’s not my attitude, but we have to understand and accept it and we understand it’s caused real problems. It’s good to get the mists out of the way so you have a clear ascent on both sides, but let’s get this over with and move on to something more positive and fruitful.”
Aaron Maté: Well Malcolm, on that note of contrition I want to apologize to you for keeping you way longer than we agreed to and I appreciate your extra time on this. Malcolm Byrne, Deputy Director at the Nongovernmental National Security Archive, based at George Washington University. He runs the Archives’ Iran-U.S. relations project. Malcolm, thank you!
Malcom Byrne: Been a pleasure, thank you.
Aaron Maté: And thank you for joining U.S. on The Real News.


therealnews--2020-08-19--Will Biden do enough to fight the climate crisis?

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Biden has a climate plan. It’s good—but does it go far enough?
Story Transcript
Speaker 1: This will be the most corrupt election in the history of our country.
Jaisal Noor: Welcome to The Real News, I’m Jaisal Noor. With less than three months to go until the 2020 general election, we’re not hearing much about what is likely the greatest threat to ever face humanity, climate change. The Trump administration’s stance on climate change can be summed up as denial and the dismantling of environmental regulations.
Meanwhile, a new generation of youth climate activists have demanded Democrats break free from the grip of the fossil fuel industry and center climate justice and programs like the Green New Deal in their agenda. Earlier this year, on the campaign trail, climate activists were demanding Joe Biden adopt a bolder plan to tackle climate change.
Speaker 3: For my entire life, Democrats have been failing to address the climate crisis, and we desperately need the Democratic candidate for president to be a climate champion. We’re running out of time.
Jaisal Noor: While there was a little hope for Trump and the Republicans to consider the climate crisis, has the climate movement succeeded in pushing Democrats to take this more seriously or are we doomed? Joining us to discuss this is Earther‘s Dharna Noor, who also happens to be my sister. Thanks so much for joining us.
Dharna Noor : Thanks for having me, Jaisal.
Jaisal Noor: So the Democratic Party platform made a lot of headlines for not adopting progressive stances popular within the party like Medicare for All and fully legalizing weed, but climate groups like the Sunrise Movement, who, as we heard, were challenging Biden during the primary, even handing him a jar of coal and New Hampshire asking him if he’s going to shut down the local coal power plant if elected and asked him for a bolder push for nuclear energy. They’re now backing him and praising some of his platform on climate policy.
Where does Joe Biden stand on the key issues? You argue the Democrats’ climate plan is improved, but it doesn’t go far enough. Can you explain?
Dharna Noor : Yeah. So I say… I think that in the past several months there’s been a lot of really kind of enormous plans from different Democratic Party bodies. The House’s select committee on the climate crisis put forth this massive proposal. We’ve seen the DNC put forth some climate policy proposals for their platform. Joe Biden updated his plan.
I think the kind of overarching theme in all of these is that, while there has clearly been a lot of progress, that progress is so far from the kind of progress on the scale that we need to combat this really urgent crisis. So I think a really good example is, as you mentioned, Joe Biden’s policy platform. Which has been praised, actually, by many climate activists.
And I think, for really good reasons, there are some really good ideas in it. There’s plans to transition the nation’s school buses to zero emissions. There’s plans to move the electricity grid off of fossil fuels by 2035. That’s way more ambitious than previous plans that we’ve seen. But ultimately, I think that the key thing is that there’s not a plan to really phase out of our existing fossil fuel infrastructure, or put a stop to creating more fossil fuel infrastructure in the future.
So my perspective is kind of, while I think that this progress really does show signs of improvement and shows, frankly, how far the climate movement has pushed the party in only just four, even two, years, that progress is really not dealing with the fossil fuel supply, which I think will be key to actually taking on these focuses.
Jaisal Noor: And how much of this, in your assessment, has to do with just how much the Democrats, or many Democrats, are in bed with the fossil fuel industry and sort of rely on them for campaign contributions?
Dharna Noor : Well, I think that, thanks to this climate justice movement, there’s been a lot more emphasis on pushing candidates to stop taking fossil fuel money. And many, many candidates, including most of those who ran for president, actually agreed to take that pledge. But I think that the next frontier for the climate movement will be trying to go even further and attack the adviser platforms to these campaigns.
So, for instance, while Joe Biden has committed to not taking fossil fuel money himself, he’s still being advised by [Theresa Call 00:00:04:24], who was on the board of [inaudible]. So I think that that’s sort of going to be the next frontier. But I do think that there has been more emphasis.
I would also say that there are many, many industries in this country and in others that are huge culprits of these greenhouse gas emissions. It’s not just about coal, oil, and gas companies. Although, of course, those are the biggest culprits. It’s also about big agriculture. It’s also about utility companies. So I think that there’s a long way to go. In fact, we are seeing some progress, but there’ll be a big fight in the future.
Jaisal Noor: And we know that Joe Biden has been, to some degree, endorsed the Green New Deal. How much would the Green New Deal go towards addressing some of the issues you lined out around with lowering emissions and building green infrastructure?
Dharna Noor : It’s tough to say, because I think the phrase Green New Deal, the term Green New Deal has been thrown around so much by so many different kinds of people. Frankly, so many people with so many different interests in recent months.
So again, while there has been more of, and at least purported commitment to environmental justice issues, like ensuring that the energy grid has expanded to meet those who don’t have energy right now, like measures to lower electricity bills for folks of color, low income folks of all kinds across the United States, those have been things that have gotten a lot more attention. But there’s a lot of parts of the Green New Deal that I think are really essential to it at its core that have not gotten as much attention.
So you mentioned earlier that Joe Biden and the DNC at large did not get that much praise from progressive healthcare activists for refusing to back Medicare for All.
And I think that any real climate adaptation plan would need to ensure that all people in this country have health care. Not only because, as there are more climate crises, climate disasters, all over the nation, all over the world, we’ll need to make sure that more people have access to health care that everyone has access to healthcare, but also because, frankly, a lot of people’s work right now is tied up in the fossil fuel industry. Not only people who again worked directly for coal and oil and gas companies, but also folks who work for the utility sector, in transportation and others who I think really need to be able to depend on not having to have their jobs continue in order to have healthcare.
So I think that there are these demands that are taken or thought of as sort of separate from the climate crisis that really should play a key role in anything that should be thought of as an actual brand new deal.
Jaisal Noor: So we’ve talked about the struggle within the Democratic Party. On the other hand, the other major political party, the Republicans have just denied this crisis exists. What would be the consequences of a second term for Donald Trump? We’ve seen his promises of opening up fracking and drilling and rolling back regulations. He’s really carried that out very effectively over the first three and a half years of his first term.
Dharna Noor : Yeah, I think there’s no question that if we had another Trump term, we would see far more devastation. We would see the continued expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure. We would see the continued reliance on fossil fuels for transportation. We’d see more emissions from agriculture. And we’d also see, again, some of these lesser thought-of climate issues that I think are also huge contributors. For instance, the new NAFTA, the trade bill that Trump so proudly stood for just a couple of years ago or even just a year ago.
We know that the first NAFTA was hugely important in uplifting subsidies for energy companies. So I think that’s another really big issue that could play out. And I think that the Democrats could really stand to try to hold themselves in more opposition to the. Poll after poll shows that democratic voters, and even now some Republican voters, are really, really interested in seeing more aggressive climate policy that actually matches the scale and urgency of the crisis that we’re facing.
Jaisal Noor: And finally, the country is gripped by the coronavirus crisis, the devastating economic crisis, record unemployment. Do you expect climate change to be a greater issue going forward? We know that it hardly has come up in the debates, but do you expect that to be even raised in one of the three debates that Joe Biden and Donald Trump will face often?
Dharna Noor : I mean, do I expect it to? No, not really. But should it? Absolutely. Again, there’s polls that show that democratic voters and even some Republican voters want more talk of climate policy. Last year in the first Democratic debate, the top issue that Democratic voters wanted to hear about was the climate crisis.
And also, I think that there’s a tendency amongst some to say that we should push the climate crisis under the rug for right now because we’re facing this massive COVID-19 crisis. Okay, I understand. But it kind of misses the fact that these two crises really intersect in all sorts of ways, and kind of have cascading effects.
For instance, if there’s a hurricane like we’re seeing right now hitting the country, or when there are tornadoes, when there are heat waves, that can really create a lot of issues for many localities’ COVID-19 response plans.
We also know that the fossil fuel industry is responsible for so much pollution that can create so many respiratory issues and cardiovascular issues. And we know that people who have those kinds of issues because they live near a fossil fuel industry actually can see increased rates of COVID-19, increased vulnerability to death from COVID-19.
So I think that if, if the Democratic Party and the country at large or civic leaders at large, I should say, continue to treat all of these issues as so separate. We’ll just continue to see the same kind of crisis that we’ll have today. And also, Democrats will frankly run the risk of not really distinguishing themselves enough from the Republican Party to inspire a real platform of voters.
Jaisal Noor: All right, Dharna Noor with Earther, thank you so much for joining us and talking about climate. What a cheerful topic.
Dharna Noor : Thanks so much. Thanks for having me.
Jaisal Noor: Thank you for watching The Real News Network.
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therealnews--2020-08-19--DSA-backed challenger has a shot at Baltimore’s city council

Educator Franca Muller Paz saw the way COVID-19 impacted her students and that inspired her third party run.
Story Transcript
President Trump: This will be the most corrupt election in the history of our country.
Crowd: [inaudible 00:00:05] and we want it now.
Jaisal Noor: Welcome to The Real News, I’m Jaisal Noor. America’s disastrous response to COVID-19. Over 160,000 dead, more than 30 million unemployed, and one in four children living in households that don’t have enough to eat, could face eviction, or both. All while Trump is pushing to reopen the economy and schools. This crisis has spurred one Baltimore educator to fight for better learning conditions for her students by running for local office. And she’s not running as a Democrat or Republican, she’s running on the Green Party ticket. We’re joined by Franca Muller Paz, a ten-year veteran teacher, a building rep for the Baltimore Teacher’s Union, and a candidate for city council in Baltimore’s 12th District. Thank you so much for joining us.
Franca Muller Paz: It’s good to be here.
Jaisal Noor: So, talk a little bit about why you’re running for city council and why the Green Party ticket in particular.
Franca Muller Paz: Sure. Well, running for office was never really something that I had imagined for myself. I’ve been an organizer for a long time organizing for CASA de Maryland back when I first arrived in Baltimore in 2006. And then organizing with educators, students and families since I became an educator 10 years ago. And so in Baltimore, as you mentioned, I’ve been one of the elected Baltimore Teachers Union Building Representatives, and through that work, I’ve been able to advocate for better funding for the school system, trying to fight for the working and school conditions that we need to keep our kids safe. And also trying to ensure that the opportunities that are in our school system are fair and equitable to all students. And something that we began to realize was just that we were lacking fighters for us in city council. We needed people who were going to really uplift these causes. And there certainly have been city council people who’ve been willing to back up the needs of students, families, and workers across the city. But that was something that I felt was lacking in the council position that I’m vying for.
And so, when the opportunity came and we saw that the progressive Democratic candidates didn’t take away a win this June, it was time to take another shot and see if we could unseat the incumbent that has not been an advocate for us, and try to get a Baltimore Teachers Union organizer and someone who, myself, who have worked to try to uplift the needs of students and to the city council. So I’m really excited to be engaging in this fight and for all the folks that are standing behind our campaigns to really fight for working people.
Jaisal Noor: So the incumbent won by less than 250 votes, but you are seeking to make history running on a third-party ticket for Baltimore City Council, which would be unprecedented in Baltimore as far as far as my research shows. But others, like Kendra Brooks in Philadelphia, have chartered a similar path to office. How do you plan to build a winning coalition?
Franca Muller Paz: I think it’s important to note that this is not an incumbent that the people of the 12th District seem to want to support. Like you mentioned, he lost by 248 votes in the primary. He won that primary with 40% of the vote. Far the majority of people wanted to see different leadership in this district. And even if you go back to 2016 and the general election, 30% voted against the incumbent against the Democratic Party in 2016 and went for Independent or Green Party candidates. So this is clearly a part of the city that’s excited for new leadership, that wants to see politics done a different way. And for myself, I am tired of Democratic leaders who are taking money from corporations and developers.
And I’ll tell you right now, a lot of that money is, there’s a lot of action coming from Comcast. When we look at different politicians within our own state and within our own city, a lot of Democratic candidates taking money from folks like the Atlas Group restaurants, where there was this huge issue earlier this summer of not allowing a young African American boy being able to be served in the restaurant. And these interests are putting thousands of dollars into campaigns. And so, something that I am really excited is to put those old politics aside that are fighting for corporate and profit interests, and to stand with the Green Party who is allied with the power of people. So the Green Party, nor myself, we don’t take any corporate money, no corporate PAC money. We really want to be advocating for the interests of the students, the families, the workers that live in this district. And that’s something that I get to embody by being a Green Party candidate.
Jaisal Noor: And it’s worth mentioning that when The Real News hosted a debate for the Democratic primary for District 12, the incumbent, Robert Stokes, did not show up for that debate. We’ve been talking about the fight for access to broadband. You mentioned Comcast. Comcast holds a monopoly over access for this entire city. And, that’s something that people are really frustrated about. So talk more about the power Comcast wields and what it’s going to take to overcome their power, or to challenge this corporate power.
Franca Muller Paz: Absolutely. And I want to say this company has this much power, again, because they’re buying into our political process. And so when we see that they earn a 10-year franchise agreement, that gives them almost exclusive access to our city. Exclusive access to our residents to become their customers and their means of gaining a profit. We shouldn’t be too surprised if they’re giving money into these political campaigns. And so, Comcast can almost exclusively operate here. They get to control the prices of our city. And something that’s hugely problematic is the quality of the actual internet that they offer.
So they often pride themselves on this program that they have, which is the Internet Essentials program. It’s a program meant for low-income families. And typically it costs $10 a month. But, during COVID, after the advocacy of many organizers around the country, they reduced that price to zero for two months. So there’s two months of free internet you can sign up for. Although there’s a lot of things that can keep you from signing up for that, being, if you’d been a Comcast customer in the past, if you had any old bills, lots of things like this.
But let’s say that you are able to access this temporarily free program. You must sign up for it with your credit card information. And so, once your two free months are up, you’re now on the hook for those $10 to start paying for this program. And what a lot of families are realizing as they get put into this program is that it is not working. And you heard this from one of my students on an interview back in May, that there are students and families that every morning are rationing out their internet because they simply can’t be online at the same time. And so, it’s a really terrible decision that the Internet Essentials’ customers are having to be in, of, are parents going to be using the internet so they can do the jobs that are going to put food on the table? Or are students going to be able to be there so that they can get their education? And this is something that Comcast, again and again in our meetings, has totally been unwilling to hear, saying that, “These are anecdotes. It’s not the reality of most families,” when we know that every time we’re talking to families, the same problem keeps coming up. That the internet can’t sustain multiple people being on video conferences, such as this, at once.
And what’s fascinating to me is that Comcast is really benefiting financially from this crisis. Comcast has had its best increase, its largest increase in new customers, new paying customers, in 13 years. So in their second quarter, they gained an additional 323,000 new customers. And that doesn’t even include the 600,000 people that signed up during that time under Internet Essentials. So pretty soon, they’re going to triple that amount of customers, making tons of profits. And so, it is something where this company is doing so well financially, it really is time for them to be putting their skin in the game to ensure that our kids are going to get connected.
Jaisal Noor: And I wanted to take this back to the national context of this 2020 election. On one hand, a top priority for, especially Democratic voters, voters on the Left, is defeating Donald Trump. I mentioned some of the statistics, the staggering statistics, the COVID-19 death toll and the economic devastation it’s taken, which disproportionately has affected working people and people of color, especially people in African American and Latino communities. So on one hand, voters in the Democratic primary, they went with what they thought was a safe bet, Joe Biden. But more recently, since the Black Lives Matter protest, we’ve seen Cori Bush pull off a stunning victory in Missouri just very recently. And a fellow educator, Jamaal Bowman, beat a 10-term incumbent, very powerful incumbent, in New York as well. Talk about why you think that you can ride this progressive wave into office this year.
Franca Muller Paz: Absolutely. I think our city, like cities and places across the nation, have shown that they’re really tired of how these cities are doing business as usual because it’s destroying Black life. It is targeting the lives and well-being of people of color. And I think people have just had it, and that we need to have a different vision for leadership for how we are going to prioritize the things that we need in our cities to be able to thrive. And so, in our city, there has been plenty of action and mobilizing and organizing around defunding the police. And this is something that is really important to me. I think, as an educator, I have seen a lot of really painful moments happening within our own student body, not just at the school that I teach, but across the city, and I’m just tired. I’m tired of the violence that gets perpetuated by our police department. And I’m also tired of the violence that is perpetuated in our city.
And so what I think we need to reckon with is that our city isn’t prioritizing with the solutions that address the root causes of the crime we’re intending to fight when we bloat our police budget. And so, I think there is a lot of momentum to look at these budgets in our city in particular, our public safety budget, and to bring forward leadership that is going to say, “We’ve been doing the same thing over and over again.” These are band-aids for the kind of suffering that’s been happening in our city. And what we need to do is start to really address what is causing these symptoms of vulnerable people, marginalized people, people that are really being abused by the systems in place today. Whether that be folks who are being infected and foreclosed upon. Whether that be issues around access to mental health. Around issues dealing with drug and alcohol abuse.
And especially making sure that our students have a place that they’re proud to go to for school. We have a tremendously under-funded school system, that’s underfunded to the tune of $342 million every year by the state. But the city is also not putting their part. We look at our budget and we put about 15% of our budget to schools. If you look at the districts around the rest of Maryland, the average is 36% of our budget goes to schools. So I really think there is a deep excitement for trying to imagine what could happen if we really put our money behind the kinds of solutions that take care of our people, as opposed to perpetually punishing them and pushing them through the criminal justice system, which we know has not done Baltimorians any favors.
Jaisal Noor: And before we leave you for this interview, I wanted to ask you, since you are running on the Green Party ticket, talk about your view of the November election, especially in swing states. Do you think voters should vote their conscience and vote third party or not vote, if they don’t necessarily agree with everything that Joe Biden stands for or says even? What is the top priority for you? Is it defeating Donald Trump? Or is it, building a movement as you guys have been talking about?
Franca Muller Paz: Yeah. I think that’s a difficult question to answer, and that every American has to vote for what feels right to them. We have an extraordinarily dangerous man in office right now. We’ve seen how his leadership has led to the deaths of tens of thousands of people when it didn’t need to be that way. Why does our country have one fourth of the coronavirus deaths, when there were so many opportunities to try to treat this crisis with the care of people first? Which is, allowing people and giving people the necessities they needed to stay home and stay safe.
And so, I think it’s a priority to get Trump out of office. I think that people have to make that calculus for themselves over whether they’re going to support Joe Biden, despite the complicated history that he brings to the table. And I’ll tell you that, as an immigrant woman, it’s a hard decision to make because he was associated with an administration where they were called the Deporters in Chiefs. And a lot of people suffered under that administration as well, but I think that Trump is so dangerous and toxic that we have to do everything possible to ensure that he does not have a second term. There are too many things in the balance for that to take place.
Jaisal Noor: All right. Well, Franca Muller Paz, a veteran educator, and you’re also running for Baltimore City Council for the 12th District on the Green Party ticket in November. Thank you so much for joining us and we’ll definitely keep checking in on your campaign.
Franca Muller Paz: Thank you. I appreciate being here.
Jaisal Noor: Thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.
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therealnews--2020-08-20--A new rapid spit test for COVID-19 could be the game changer we need

Are known cases just the tip of the iceberg? A new test holds promise – and peril – for how we fight back against the disease.
Story Transcript
This is a rush transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.
Kim Brown: We’re facing a multipronged problem here in America trying to get a handle on COVID-19. The global pandemic that is affected so many with at least 170,000 dead here in the United States and at least five million infected.
For the purposes of today’s conversation, we’re going to focus on two key areas, the dearth of widespread testing and the potential perils of rushing through a vaccination process. Specifically skipping over phase three clinical trials in order to have a vaccine widely accessible for hundreds of millions of people.
Our guest today says that we would have a much better handle on COVID if we scaled up screening for the virus instead of relying on slower, more costly diagnostic lab tests. Our guest also says that skipping phase three trials is not likely a good idea. Especially when we’re talking about dispensing potentially hundreds of millions of doses of this vaccine in just a few short months.
Zoe McLaren is a PhD and associate professor at the University of Maryland Baltimore County’s School of Policy. She has an extensive background in combating infectious diseases like tuberculosis, HIV, and COVID-19 from a health and policy perspective.
You recently wrote a piece on the conversation.com titled, Rapid Screening Tests That Prioritize Speed Over Accuracy Could Be Key to Ending the Coronavirus Pandemic and she joins us today. Professor thank you so much for making some time to speak with us.
Zoe McLaren: It’s a pleasure to be here.
Kim Brown: Professor, from your pen to researchers ears, August 15th, Yale University researchers announced a new rapid test for COVID-19 called saliva direct, which has been granted FDA emergency approval and speaks directly to the crux of your piece. If you could for us professor explain to us the difference between diagnostic testing for COVID-19 and screening tests for the virus and why the approval of methods like saliva direct could be significant?
Zoe McLaren: Sure. The two types of testing, diagnostic testing and screening testing have a few different important differences. One is that diagnostic testing is generally in medical settings and then we wait for somebody to decide that they’re sick, have some concern about exposure, and come to get tested.
The idea with screening testing, is it supposed to be much more widespread and we’re going to screen a big proportion of the population, including people who have no symptoms or no known exposure, but still could be infected.
When we think about diagnostic testing and screening testing, the type of tests we actually do for those two purposes is also different. In the diagnostic setting, we have someone who maybe has serious health issues going on, have symptoms that are similar to COVID, or they have symptoms that aren’t very similar to COVID, but they want to rule it out. So we need a test that’s going to have very high accuracy because we need to know for sure because somebody’s life is on the line. There’s all of the medical profession available to help them, but only if they know exactly whether it’s COVID or what else it might be.
In terms of screening testing, the idea is we want to screen as many people as possible as frequently as makes sense. So we maybe want to use a test that’s a little bit less accurate that we could still catch an awful lot of cases, but we may need to trade off some of that accuracy in order to be able to scale up quickly, to be able to test that many people, and also to be able to do rapid tests.
The idea is they’re not kind of much less accurate, but we’re going to prioritize that a little bit less because the point of screening testing is broad access to testing. That screening testing is one of the main ways that we can get to people who have no symptoms.
One of the biggest challenges with the coronavirus, that we’re facing right now, is that people can be contagious and spreading COVID, but they have no symptoms and they have no indication that they are infectious or contagious.
Screening testing is basically a way to bring access to testing to as many people as possible to catch those people so that they can find out that they’re contagious and take the appropriate precautions to make sure they don’t spread.
Kim Brown: Hearing someone in public health say that it’s okay for a test to be less accurate is a bit counterintuitive. Why is speed over accuracy okay when it comes to COVID-19 testing?
Zoe McLaren: Remember the idea is there’s diagnostic and there’s screening. With screening, the idea is we’re actually not specifically supposed to be diagnosing, we’re basically trying to catch cases. We may have some issues of false positives, but the idea is that the group of people who have a positive screening test are going to be much more likely to be contagious.
Among that group, they may want to get further diagnostic testing to be sure or they could just take some precautions and make sure that they quarantine themselves for a few days to make sure that they don’t spread the virus.
Kim Brown: It’s been estimated that the true number of people infected with COVID-19 in the U.S. is exponentially higher than what has been reported. Would the screening tests actually helped to reveal the true number of cases that we have currently percolating?
Zoe McLaren: Exactly, so that’s part of what it does. One of the reasons why we have kind of the official numbers of cases that have been confirmed, but then we also know there are a lot more cases out there is that access to diagnostic testing is limited.
In early July there were very long waits to get tested. You saw long lines of cars in Houston and other parts of the South, trying to get access to a test. A lot of people didn’t have that much time to wait. So they just stayed home, didn’t get tested, maybe they developed symptoms and then went to get tested at the emergency room. The idea is that with screening testing, we’ll be able to catch more of these cases and so we’ll have a better sense of how many cases are out there.
I always think about that kind of counting the number of cases is really just a pathway towards reducing the number of cases. Testing is not just a measurement tool. Testing is actually the main engine for reducing the pandemic because people don’t know that they’re contagious unless they’ve been tested.
If we get access to screening tests to a wide proportion of the population, then more people will know that they’re positive. So we have that additional data, but that data helps us because that individual knows their positive, they know that they can take precautions to avoid spreading it, and then we can also try to look for more cases to make sure we’re catching all of them.
Kim Brown: Professor, we have seen this pandemic become wildly politicized from the wearing or not wearing of masks when out in public. To the way that people are even prioritized in getting tested. In many places, you can’t even receive a COVID-19 test unless you are already demonstrating symptoms.
This has been not the best way to handle this, at least from the outside looking in, I’m curious as to what your take on it is as someone who has worked in the public health sector, who has dealt with infectious diseases, and dealt with how states and agencies locally and nationally can control and help affect the spread of this. Over the past five months, what has been your reaction to the way that this has been handled not only federally, but at the state level?
Zoe McLaren: I think, I mean at the state level, there have been kind of a wide range of responses. Here in Maryland, Governor Hogan has been really at the forefront, really been a pretty strong leader on COVID-19 policy. I think that’s the thing about widespread testing is that it’s something that everybody wants, that it shouldn’t be politicized.
Everybody wants to know whether they’re contagious or not because if they know that they’re contagious, they can protect their friends and their family and avoid spreading the disease.
The idea is that widespread testing is not a political thing. That it benefits every individual and in some ways has a greater benefit than masks because masks the benefit is unclear. Masks help slow the spread, but you don’t always see the benefit so you don’t always see the infections that you’re potentially avoiding by wearing a mask.
With widespread testing you see the benefit right away. You can walk in wondering if you are contagious for COVID or not, and walk out knowing whether you are or not, and then make a really good informed decisions based on that information.
Kim Brown: Professor, you had a Twitter thread go viral recently where you detailed and outlined the dangers of skipping phase three clinical trials in the hopes of developing a vaccine for COVID-19.
In recent days, the Russian government has announced that they have a vaccine ready to go this fall, but allegedly they are moving forward before starting or even completing a phase three trial.
Why is this a bad concept not only for what the Russians claim to have achieved and for companies here in the U.S., pharma companies, not just in the U.S., but generally in the West that are working on a vaccination and who might contemplate cutting corners during this process? What are some of the drawbacks to that phase two versus phase three outcomes can sometimes be different?
Zoe McLaren: Sure. I think it’s important to note that my Twitter thread was in response to a couple of people who’d posted in my view quite misguided ideas that we should skip phase three, but it’s very important to note that the FDA and the U.S. government have no intention whatsoever of skipping phase three. They know it’s a terrible idea and they’ve committed very strongly to following through with the full regular phase three process, which I think is very wise.
I can’t comment too much on Russia. It’s hard to know kind of what exactly is going on based on the information that’s coming out of that country, but the idea here is that having a vaccine, for example, in vials sitting on shelves is not what protects us. What protects us is the actual vaccinations and people are going to actually get the shot and that provides the protection.
If Russia says they have a vaccine, well, that’s sitting on the shelf right now until they have a large proportion of their population willing to get the injection, it’s not going to provide any protection to them.
Why is it so important to follow through with the full phase three trials? The idea is phase one and phase two provide preliminary information. They provide preliminary data, a small sample of a few hundred people basically testing the new potential vaccine to make sure that it meets preliminary safety and effectiveness thresholds.
Phase three is when it’s broadened and in this case, phase three looks like it’s going to include 30,000 people, so much larger sample of people. That’s when we’re really going to get the real safety and effectiveness data.
If the vaccine has adverse effects, this is when we might find out about that. Oftentimes the adverse effects might be very rare. So we need a large number of people to have the vaccine, to be able to have good enough data to know that it’s the vaccine that’s producing these adverse effects.
We also need to get a good estimate about the effectiveness. We could potentially have a vaccine that’s totally safe, but is not at all effective. That’s actually can be very dangerous because if people think they have protection from a vaccine, they’re going to go and make decisions that could actually put them at great risk if that vaccine offers no protection. The idea that as long as it’s safe who cares about the effectiveness, doesn’t actually make a lot of sense and can actually lead to some very bad outcomes.
It’s also true that even if the vaccine is safe and effective, we still want to complete all of the phase three trials. That is because we want to make sure that everybody believes that the vaccine is safe and effective.
To do that, well we need to get the medical establishment and the experts on board so that the experts are saying, “Yes, we believe this is safe. I would get the vaccine. I would recommend my friends to get the vaccine and my family to get the vaccine.”
To do that, to kind of get experts like me on board, we really need to complete the phase three trials because I won’t be satisfied that it’s safe and effective until I’ve seen that the full data and chatted with my colleagues, listened to Dr. Fauci for example, if he says it looks good, that’s a pretty good benchmark that it’s safe and effective because that’s part of how we start off by telling everybody that the vaccine is safe and effective. That’s going to get people who want to actually get in line and get the vaccine.
High take-up of the vaccine is really important to because it’s likely that the very first vaccine we get is not going to offer 100% protection. It can offer as low as 50% protection. I think that’s the lowest bar that the FDA is allowing kind of for its approval process.
We may have a vaccine that offers some protection, but not complete protection. With a vaccine like that, we actually get protection not from just getting it ourselves, but from when other people in our community get the vaccine. If we have a 60 or 70% effective vaccination, the higher the proportion of people who take it, the closer we get to vaccine induced herd immunity. Where we get the protection because we’re all protected partially, but between all of that partial protection it kind of adds up to quite a lot of protection.
That’s the important thing with the vaccine is that it’s not just, I want the vaccine now, so I can get it protected. It’s that we want a vaccine that we all know is safe and effective and it’s going to be able to reach high levels of 70, 80, 90% take-up among the population because that high take-up is what’s going to end the pandemic, not the partial take-up of a partially effective vaccine.
Kim Brown: I wanted to circle back to what you mentioned about the efficacy rates. That the FDA hopes that a potential vaccine would at least be 50% effective, but we do know that for the seasonal flu, for example, some vaccines or the flu vaccination specifically, given the season, given the strain, can only effectively immunize about 30% of those who take the vaccination.
Given that humans currently have zero immunity to COVID-19, is any level of efficacy better than what we have now? Will we accept a 30% effective vaccination as opposed to having no vaccination at all?
Zoe McLaren: I think that that’s a question for down the line. Right now the vaccine process looks very promising and it looks like we should have a vaccine that meets that 50% threshold. We have multiple vaccines that are in the pipeline.
If the first one doesn’t meet that threshold, there’ll be another one right behind it that will likely meet that threshold. I think the idea is if we have a vaccine that’s less effective than that, then it’s really difficult for people to make appropriate decisions about what’s safe and what isn’t safe when you just have 10% or 20% effectiveness of the vaccine.
The idea is I really don’t want to talk about a vaccine that’s less effective than that. That’s basically not going to be effective, and it’s going to probably muddy the waters and make it really difficult for people to make decisions. We want a vaccine that’s going to offer us some protection, that’s going to help us get back to normal.
With the flu vaccine, so some of the flu vaccines are not 100% effective, but if you’ve noticed that during flu season, how many reminders you get to get a flu vaccine. That’s the idea that with a less effective vaccine, if we can get take-up rates to be high enough, then that boosts the effectiveness for everybody.
Even for the flu vaccine, which is a much less deadly disease than COVID-19, we still do a big push to make sure take-up as high. So that’s why it’s even more important with COVID-19 that we have really, really high take-up because that is with a less than 100% effective vaccine that’s okay because we can get take-up high enough to kind of end the pandemic and help us get back to normal.
Kim Brown: We know that COVID-19 is particularly deadly to those who have underlying conditions ranging from diabetes, to heart conditions, or breathing conditions and I’ve seen a number of healthcare professionals or people who work in this sector who are working on a vaccine make a specific call out to communities of color, to African Americans, to Latinx people, to participate in these vaccination trials.
I would imagine because the virus is impacting those communities disproportionately in a more deadly way, but do vaccines sometimes work different in other races? Why is it so important to make sure that communities of color participate in these vaccination trials despite historical reasons why they may not want to? Thinking of the Tuskegee Experiment and the story of what happened to Henrietta Lacks in Baltimore? Talk to us about that angle of it. How in a way COVID-19 is a bit of a racialized issue here in the U.S.
Zoe McLaren: Yeah and that’s a really question. We don’t know with this new vaccine whether it will have different side effects or different effectiveness in people of color. That’s part of the process of phase three. That’s one of the important questions that the phase three process is going to answer because if we don’t include people of color in phase three we’ll, then we get safety and effectiveness data that doesn’t apply to communities of color and it could put them at risk.
Involving people of color in the phase three trials is really, really important. I encourage anyone and everyone if they’re willing to participate in that trial and help produce this really important information about the vaccine.
That’s kind of one thing that we don’t know for sure. That’s one of the reasons and completing the phase three trial, historically looking at the Tuskegee Experiment, for example, that was a situation where it was kind of a process where it undermined trust in the medical establishment and medical research that persist to this day.
The Tuskegee and with Henrietta Lacks as well, these violations of trust are not something that just happens in the past. Those violations of trust it takes a lot to kind of rebuild trust after a situation like that. That’s still causing kind of challenges in communities of color who don’t fully trust the medical establishment and to be quite honest, I don’t blame them. The medical establishment is not always designed with those communities fully in mind.
I encourage people to be a part of those vaccine trials so we get good information and that those trials can basically conclude and let communities of color know that the vaccine is safe for them and effective for them as well.
Kim Brown: Lastly professor having worked with different infectious diseases, specifically a disease like tuberculosis, where students attending public school are required to have a tuberculosis vaccination before they are legally allowed to attend.
We see this myriad of other vaccinations for different diseases like meningitis B and the vaccine against human papillomavirus, HPV, being pushed a lot on school aged populations. However, there are colleges, there are some public school systems that do intend to reopen for in-person classes.
As someone who has worked with, again, a disease like TB, that your child has to be vaccinated against in order to attend school, but to see COVID-19 be allowed for students to attend school, either colleges or just grade school while this potentially deadly virus is still very much out in the population. What is your reaction to that?
Does that scare you at all? And as someone who works in higher ed, what is your take about returning for in-person learning during the semester before a vaccination is wildly available?
Zoe McLaren: Given to infants, but what’s usually required for public school is a test to make sure people haven’t been exposed to TB. To make sure that they are having that tuberculosis skin test. It’s a test for exposure that you have TB, but not necessarily a vaccine.
Yes, I’m very concerned about kids going back to school with COVID-19, but I’m also concerned about kids not being in school for a long time because we know that that’s really difficult for them. I think it’s a really difficult question in terms of the trade offs.
I think that’s one of the big reasons why I’ve been focused on testing since March and continue to be focused on that because the testing component and screening testing is a way to catch cases and to help kids and college students to go back to school in a way that’s safe for students, and for staff, and for families, and for the surrounding community. I think that we need to think very carefully about the return to school and incorporating screening testing is a great way to help kids go back to school sooner and allow them to do it safely.
Kim Brown: We’ve been speaking with Zoe McLaren. She is a PhD, also an associate professor at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County.
Her latest piece appears in the conversation.com and it is titled, Rapid Screening Tests That Prioritize Speed Over Accuracy Could Be Key to Ending the Coronavirus Pandemic. We’ve already seen at least some movement on that very shortly after your piece was published Zoe. So very serendipitous there for that new news to come out on the heels of your piece being published.
Thank you very much for making some time to speak with us, we appreciate it.
Zoe McLaren: I will say there is an awful lot of testing technology that’s in the pipeline. That’s not just that one piece of news there will be more news, it’s going to come quick. There’s going to be a lot of it. The technology we basically have it already. We just need to put into practice. Thanks so much for having me.
Kim Brown: Thank you and thank you all for watching The Real News Network.
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