He is someone who broke one of the most important stories in this country's history. The Iran Contra story broke it for the Associated Press in Newsweek in the 80s. He's a long-time investigative reporter. In 1995, he started the first web-based investigative magazine, ConsortiumNews.com. Seymour Hirsch described Parry as not even so much as a critic of US mainstream media as a critic of lousy reporting. My job was to get the stories, so I went out to get the story. And the more obstacles they put in my way, the more I sort of got determined to get it. But you pay prices and in the real world you don't always get the story quite as easily as you like to. People knew that if they wrote those stories, that the White House didn't want done, that they ran the risk of having their careers seriously damaged and possibly ended in some case. The core responsibility of a journalist is to have an open mind toward any information you might find, to have no agenda, and to have no preferred outcome.  That's the deal you make with your readers. You have to follow the leads wherever they go. That was a brief look back at the career of Robert Parry in a film by Douglas Spiro. And we now welcome you to a CN Live special, a celebration of the 25th anniversary of Consortium News. I'm Joe Laurier, the editor-in-chief of Consortium News. And I'm Elizabeth Loss. On this day in 1995, Robert Parry, one of the country's leading investigative reporters, started a website on something called the Internet. That was like no other that had existed before, a quarter of a century later, it is still going. For the Associated Press and Newsweek, Bob had uncovered major stories. He blew the cover on Iran-Contra, one of the greatest scandals in U.S. history. He first reported on the CIA's relationship with the Nicaraguan Contras and their narcotics shipments to the United States. And he put the spotlight on the first October surprise in the 1980 presidential election. By revealing crimes and malfeasance by the U.S. government, that did not sit well with his mainstream editors. They tried spiking his stories. They set up absurd demands like asking Oliver North to confess. And at one point told him to stop asking too many questions for the good of the country. After working on an October surprise documentary for PBS's frontline, Bob left establishment journalism behind so that he could simply do his job unhindered. He found a like-minded consortium of journalists whose stories had also been suppressed to begin consortium news. It started on paper as a newsletter mailed to subscribers' homes. But on November 15, 1995, 25 years ago today, Bob launched the world's first independent news site. He beat salon.com online by five days and established outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal by several weeks. More importantly, though, Bob Parry was at the forefront of alternative online news that questioned establishment narratives and Washington congressional wisdom. He covered stories the mainstream media wouldn't and took angles on stories that were being ignored. With virtually no staff besides the help of his sons and longtime assistant Chelsea Gilmore, Bob built a following and enough readers to fund the operation. Thousands came to depend on Bob's take from the news. A TV presenter once told Joe that he would wait to see what Bob had written that day before deciding what his show should be about. While consortium news has never come close to being mass media, its audience attracted influential people in Washington and elsewhere. Bob wrote, quote, the point of consortium news which I founded in 1995 was to use the new medium for the modern internet, of the modern internet, to allow the old principles of journalism to have a new home, i.e. a place to pursue important facts and give everyone a fair shake. But he added, more and more, I would encounter policy makers, activists, and yes, journalists who cared less about a careful evaluation of the facts and logic and more about achieving a preordained geopolitical result. And this loss of objective standards reached deeply into the most prestigious halls of American media. This perversion of principles, twisting information to fit a desired conclusion he went on, became the modus vivendi of American politics and journalism. And those of us who insisted on defending the journalistic principles of skepticism and even-handedness were increasingly shunned by our colleagues, a hostility that first emerged on the right and among near conservatives, but eventually sucked in the progressive world as well. Everything became information warfare. Bob continued to break stories about the Reagan era into the 1990s, including the existence of a secret perception management program run by the CIA from within the White House. With the 2003 invasion of Iraq, consortium news became the home of the veteran intelligence professionals for sanity, a consortium of former intel officers who exposed the faulty intelligence leading to the war. Like honest reporters just trying to do their jobs, Bob said. There were also honest intelligence officers trying to do the same. Bob wrote that Republicans started this downward trend in politics and in journalism by first weaponizing information to delegitimize their opponents. He wrote, quote, rather than accept the reality of Nixon's guilt, many Republicans simply built up their capability to wage informational warfare. He continued, the idea had developed that the way to defeat your political opponent was not just to make a better argument or rouse popular support, but to dredge up some crime that could be pinned on him or her. Soon the Democrats would be using the same tactics, he wrote. The trend of using journalism as just another front, and no holds barred political warfare continued with Democrats and liberals adapting to the successful techniques pioneered mostly by Republicans. Thus, Bob in just trying to do his job as a reporter became increasingly critical of the Democrats too. He wrote groundbreaking stories on the Obama administration's wars in Syria and Libya, and especially on the U.S. engineered coup in Ukraine. He was especially fierce about Democrats who lost their skepticism and embraced the intelligence agencies. He wrote, quote, ironically, many liberals who cut their teeth on skepticism about the Cold War and the bogus justifications to the Vietnam War now insist that we must all accept whatever the U.S. intelligence community feeds us, even if we're told to accept the assertions on faith. Perhaps Consortium News and Bob's biggest story in 25 years was being in the forefront of skepticism on the now thoroughly debunked Russia Gate story, which was taken on faith from unnamed intelligence sources. Bob also defended Julian Assange's earliest 2010 against government designs to arrest and imprison him, which did not please many Democrats, especially after the 2016 election. For taking an independent stand based on where the facts led him, Bob upset both Republican and Democratic partisans. That's because he left a legacy of strict, nonpartisan journalism, really the only kind of journalism that there is, which this site has endeavored to continue. It led to personal attacks on Bob from Republicans and Democrats oblivious to the fact he was critiquing their political enemies, too. The attacks on this site for the same reasons have continued. So joining us today to help celebrate Bob Perry's and Consortium News's 25 years of achievement are Diane Dustin, Bob's wife who lived through it all, filmmaker and journalist John Pilger, Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst, a close associate of Bob and an important contributor to the website, Nat Perry, one of Bob's sons who made major contributions to the development of the site, spent all over one of Bob's anonymous sources on the Iran Contra story, and Gareth Porter, a longtime contributor to Consortium News. Bob's son, Sam, who was integral to the launching of Consortium News is not with us today, but we have a video of Sam telling the story of how the site got started, which we will play at the conclusion of this discussion to end the program. We urge you to stick around and watch it. We were originally planning to hold this commemoration of the National Press Club in Washington, but the pandemic has forced us onto Zoom as it has much of the world. To start the program, we will hear from a supporter and friend of Consortium News and to Bob, film director, Oliver Stone. Oliver literally needs to leave for an airport right after this, so we only have a few minutes and we'll have Oliver chat about Consortium News with his co-author of the Untold History of the United States American University historian, Peter Koznik. Oliver and Peter, welcome. Hey, Jerry. Oliver, before we drill down to the questions, why don't you just briefly say how you met, how you met Bob and how you first got introduced to Consortium News? Yeah, I meant your dinner party, Peter, when we hadn't started Untold History was just as a guest. And we talked about what was going on in Washington in the 90s, which seems like such ancient history now, but I got to know Bob basically through Consortium News because I started to read it. And the stories were, I heard of him with Newsweek and I knew Maynard Parker, who was his boss. He criticized Maynard Parker, among others, at Newsweek for being chicken and not going with his stories. And I know those people. I know, I sense what kind of propriety exists around them. So I know where this Washington sense of, you don't cross this line. And I felt that my whole life and all my work, it's gotten worse. As you know, I went through the JFK case and it's impossible sometimes to argue with these people. Bob, I never discussed JFK with him, but it was clear that he was onto something with this Iran Contra because we were talking to some of the same people. And it's a dirty, dirty story. It went deeper than ever got out. And Bob knew that. And I mean, obviously it seems to me that Reagan was impeachable for treason at that point. And certainly George H.W. Bush, the father, should have gone down that road and been prosecuted or at least accused and brought into this thing because Bob makes a big deal about how he found evidence later after the case was closed and they weren't let off. But he made the point that the CIA brought out a IG report and it was clear that the Russian documents had not been examined and the Russians knew quite a bit about the case. So it gets very complicated but Bob was always with that case. He never gave it up. He was like a Sherlock Holmes. And nothing could stop him. I admired that tenacity and that's when I got involved with him and I contributed to the organization, continued to love this, love the writers for this consortium news. He started something that should continue in the tradition of, from my, from one of my knowledges of I.F. Stone, I'd say early in the fifties. And although I was a conservative, I certainly read some of his stuff and was shocked. And later Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson who that you may criticize them for certain things but they did a hell of a job of waking me up. And we need those journalists without the John Pilger who's sitting here today is another one. We need these people to wake up, to go in, to go in. And people don't do that. And it's stunning to me that that's, well, I guess I have to understand why it's scary. I mean, we know a lot of investigative reporters who do get lost, who really get lost. I mean, I know a guy, and I respect him, Tom O'Neill. Some people say he's crazy, but he's been going after the Manson case since the 1980s, 90s. And he's still, he's still in there. It's a rabbit hole. And that happens. Bob, thank God, got out of the rabbit hole. And as angry as he was, he was he, he never gave up insisting that he had the truth. And I like, even he went back to Iran Contra as late as a few weeks before he died. That's what I have to say. Oliver, you started with talking about Bob's work in Central America and exposing what was happening with the Contras and the drug running. It's interesting to me that in so many of your films, you also are very critical of mainstream media. Beginning with your first major feature film, Salvador, the Valerie Wildman character. You really pillory there. But we go through some of your other movies like Wall Street, JFK, Talk Radio, Natural Born Killers, and especially Snowden. And you've got this ongoing critique of the media and the lives that the media keeps foisting upon us. On the other hand, you've got a, you talk about the truth tellers. And you and I both consider Bob in the tradition of the truth tellers. And so, and that also runs throughout all of your movies, whether it's Garrison or maybe we can go through all these characters who ended with Snowden. And you and I talk about Henry Wallace and others who speak truth to power. And, but, and it's interesting to me that you began that critique of the mainstream media before JFK came out, because you got attacked viciously for JFK, but you were going after these folks as early as Salvador and movies before JFK came out, also to some extent in Born on the Fourth of July. So how do you see Bob in that tradition of truth tellers, people who stand up to the power establishment and are willing to risk and actually pay a huge price often as you did for speaking truth to power? That's a big question. I mean, Bob was at the forefront. He's one of the best I would consider him right up there with, you know, with Pearson, as I said, Stone Anderson. I mean, he sacrificed a lot. He was never into the money. He never was into the position when I met him in Washington. He was quite, he was quite content to have a subscription service supporting his work and his a base of people who read his stuff. There was no bigger ambition than to tell the truth is what I think of Bob. And in that regard, you have to respect him enormously. He's a treasure. He was a national treasure. The bear in mind that I was against the establishment with Salvador, what I saw in Central America, in those countries was, I felt very strongly that Ronald Reagan's was intending to go into Nicaragua and actually get rid of him. I mean, destabilize a place completely, try to, but if necessary, send troops because I saw a lot of troops in Honduras and in Salvador, they were devoting themselves to the Honduras, to the Nicaragua situation. So it was clear that I thought that we were into another early Vietnam. It felt like, it just felt like the best thing that ever happened for that cause, of course, was the crash. The CIA as usual screwed up, screwed up in a big way because this fellow, the contractor who got shot down over Nicaragua spilled the beans and he was working for the CIA. And that was somehow, that snap, that was enough. And Bob covered that case too. And the thing unraveled and Reagan's last two years from 86 to 88 were lame and he couldn't get things, he couldn't get legislation through. Very important that that happened. So truth tellers do work, even if they don't understand their position in the big picture. Certainly, we know that case is so crucial now. I mean, what's going on with whistle, with not only Snowden, but more importantly, Assange. Assange is at the key of this, all this mess that's been going on for two years, it seems to me, and he's never been allowed to, he doesn't wanna talk or whatever. I don't know the details like maybe John Pilger could tell us, but he knows things that are invaluable about this. And I'm surprised that one or more candidates hasn't taken advantage of it by seeking to pardon him. But that would cause a furor. I understand, but it's an interesting, crucial case. I wish Bob were around to explain it in great detail like he would. I'm not anti-media, I was anti-establishment. And then when I did the JFK case, I did it out of anti, very strong feelings that we had been assassinated for political purposes. And he was a very dangerous man to them because he would be re-elected. And after him came Bobby and after him, possibly Teddy. It was a dynasty in the making. It was serious, they had to end this thing. When that came out, that is what brought the press down on me. It was not before that, they were not attacking me. Yeah, Salvador, they ignored, but still it got out. And then the other films did well, Wall Street was respected, so it was born on the 4th of July. But then, and the doors too, but then JFK was the end of that honeymoon or whatever, the parole that I had, it never changed after 1992. It was really ugly. And I was always discounted as a lone nut. I know what that feels like, but thank God, people like you and many others have supported me all the way down to Snowden, which was my last film. Oliver, Bob spent much of the last five years of his life exposing the demonization of Russia and Putin talking about Russophobia and Russiagate and a different perspective on what happened in Ukraine. And he saw that as so crucial. You've also been very much involved in that. You got attacked again for your four-part interview with Putin. One of the things that Bob understood was the importance of seeing how the world looks, explain how the world looks through the eyes of our adversaries, which you've made an attempt to do also. But now, beginning in January, 2018, Secretary of Defense Mattis said that international terrorism is no longer the main threat to American national security. It's Russia and China. I was hearing on the television today for Ezekaria talking again about Russia's effort to discredit American democracy. That's what they're trying to do, to sow seeds of dissent in America. Talk about a little bit about Russia and how that played such an important part in your thinking every few years. Well, first of all, I just want to say Bob got it right away. He saw the Nazi, the neo-Nazi influence in Ukraine. And he filled in the history of Ukraine back to World War II, which is you have to go there. You have to understand the tensions in Ukrainian society that came out in 2014. And it's heartbreaking story. It's a heartbreaking story because I've never seen the new, it feels like 1946 Cold War again. It's just the Russians never did anything good in their life. They didn't even talk about the space shuttle anymore, but nothing. And I'm talking mainstream, like New York Times to me has completely lost its credibility. I never, maybe I was wrong to believe in them anyway. Yeah, a lot of people say that because they did support the Vietnam War for a long time. But what they said about Ukraine was always, it wasn't even journalism. It was editorial writing in the first paragraph that the Russians being described in an objective story as sinister or it's always about Putin is always Russia. I don't know how you can conflate it to, but they never used to call Khrushchev Russia. They'd say Russia, I mean, with Putin, it's Putin's Russia. Putin's Russia, like he has complete control of this gigantic place. It's not that simple. And I'm glad I was able to go to the source several times and get my four hours with Mr. Putin. I had four hours, about 20 hours with Mr. Putin. And you just gotta watch, nobody watches it, except you can see it on Amazon, thank God. Thank God for Amazon, even though much criticized, but you can at least see what he is saying. And he speaks in his own voice, not with some dubbed thug translator, which the American News Networks always put on his case. The Putin speaks for himself. He's a quiet, brilliant thinking man. He's not at all the picture that is presented to the American public. I've been attacked by that for that interview as a stooge, as an apologist, as a commie and all that. It goes on and on and on and it'll never go away. It's just a stigma. I love dictators. I bow down to dictators, Chavez, Castro. You know, all these three people I admire because they stood up to a sovereign empire of our own, our American empire, which is trying to end their sovereignty. And they just won't go along with it. And they're independent, very independent. They bristle when you talk to them about would you have observers look at this, because they feel the observers will never be straight. They're gonna be crooked, but it's just, the reason I admire them is they were rebels and they're all strong men. And Castro was perhaps one of the strongest men I've ever met in my life. Chavez was too. You have, it's a lonely road to travel and some of you know that road. And I guess I've always looked rooted for the underdog as a movie maker. And that's what the movies used to be. That it was used to be the underdog, right? The guy you never expected would come through. And Nat Perry wrote, quote, ultimately Bob was motivated by a concern over the future of life on earth. As someone who grew up at the height of the Cold War, he understood the dangers of allowing tensions in hysteria to spiral out of control, especially in a world such as ours with enough nuclear weapons to wipe out all life on the planet many times over. I think those powerful words apply to you or me. And I just, would you reflect on that and talk about how Bob saw his purpose in life and how you see yours in that same vein? Well, Bob was very upset I think of it because this Cold War that we've created is even more dangerous and it's useless. It's unnecessary because there's been no significant threat from any other source than us. Most of the conflict and the tension in the world comes from us because we like to create things to a boil, it's to our advantage. We take advantage of color revolutions that we often are very deeply involved with to change governments regimes that we don't like all around the world. The power of the United States is extraordinary. I'm still amazed that we're able to finance this thing although we're in debt and all that, but it seems like an impossible grasp that we have to keep our fingers everywhere, everywhere literally, whether it's Burkina Faso or Ukraine, the North Pole, all the countries, all the space surrounding China and Russia. It's an enormous empire and it's without precedent in the world because of communications and because of cyber warfare, which we've wholly used again. We've used cyber warfare on the offensive again and again starting as far as I know with the Israelis back in 2007, eight and nine when we were attacking Israel, I mean, attacking Iran. So cyber warfare plus all the money, all the propaganda, the advertising, it's a huge proposition Peter. It's a monster beyond belief. It surprised, I think the best summation of it was given actually by Harold Tinter back in his Nobel Peace Prize, his Nobel Writers Prize in 2007 or so just before he died. He said, it's a miracle, it's a miracle this thing happened. It's an act of hypnotism that has never been seen in the world before, that you have convinced the world, America has convinced the world that they are the good guys. Tinter and a lot of people see it, but not enough. So the job of journalism is to spread that truth like the ancient Christian missionaries spread the truth about their religion. Among the things that you and I go after in our untold history books and documentaries is this notion of American exceptionalism. Now, Bob, when you reread his articles, he always understood the importance of putting things in historical context. It made him present to the historical background over and over again for the different topics that he was writing about. And you and I appreciate that importance of history and you probably more than anybody else in Hollywood have done historical films on historical topics and realizing that Americans have very little understanding of history and much of what they do think they know is wrong. So if we look at that, well, let me ask you a little different way, because I know you've got to catch a plane. So much of what you've done in terms of truth telling what Bob did in terms of truth telling is based on a certain faith that the public will appreciate the truth and see the light, understand and act differently to change things and make a better world, which is what our goal has been. But there's some things that have happened recently that make that more questionable. The fact that half of Trump's supporters believe the QAnon conspiracy theory, half of them, the fact that where 35% of Republican voters before the election believe the election was fixed, 70% after the election believe the election was fixed, we've run into this problem with the public having no critical analytical capabilities or at least part of the public having that. And we're in a situation now where you look at the Republican Party, this is a multi-part question, but Gorvidal was asked a few years back why Obama, when he was being so viciously attacked by the Republicans did not respond in kind with an equal outrage. And Gorvidal said Obama believes the Republican Party is a political party when in fact it's a mindset like Hitler Youth based on hatred, religious hatred, racial hatred. When you foreigners hear the word conservative, you think of kindly old men hunting foxes, they're not, they're fascists. So we're up against the Republican Party that's turned into a fascist death cult of sorts with a public that goes along with some of this. And so how do you see our role collectively, all of us, John and Ray and Joe and everybody as truth tellers up against a world in which people are not really, and some people at least that aren't open to or capable of understanding differentiating between truth and falsehood. This is a question I also would like you to take up after I leave because I think I would love to hear the recorded answers of all these gentlemen and participants. I don't quite agree with you, Peter, you know that I came from a Republican background, strong one, and you have come from the FDR side and you converted me in many ways to your thinking. I understand it.  I think that's going a little bit too far. Sure, there's people like that in it and they make themselves very loud and generally speaking, they can't spell and they write horrible letters to people and all make a lot of noise, but there's a lot of intelligent people and I think they can be reached. And I think you're barking after the wrong issue to suddenly declare that the election count is absolutely correct because all the mainstream media says it is. It doesn't work that way. I think it's very strange that the 2016 election is so quickly forgotten and where the Russians manipulated the vote. Always will, so what happened to the Russians? Didn't they manipulate some voting? I mean, it's apparently despised as an issue right away. It's very convenient for them. And I think a lot of Republicans doubt that and they doubt the, they wonder about the mail-in balloting because it's an old technique that's been used for a century. I mean, people would do that. They stuffed the ballot box back in the 1870s in New York and who knows what's there? I mean, I believe that Biden won because of the numerics, but again, I was surprised that Trump came so close, you see? So I think that's not an issue that you can easily pinpoint. Don't forget that in Bob's case, one of the beautiful things you've, no one's mentioned it, but unless you did, Joe, but one of the great things Bob did was he, for me, he revised the 1968 election completely. I had to rethink it because when I did my Nixon movie, I was thinking that the Bay of Pigs had something. I really was what Nixon was hiding in those tapes that 19 and a half minute missing gap. I do believe after reading Bob and seriously thinking about how Nixon pulled off that Vietnamese withdrawal from the peace process was because, that was very effective. And I think that might have made the difference against Hubert Humphrey. So in that case, I do think that was what was Nixon may well have been hiding during Watergate was his involvement in that, call it conspiracy or call it, it was really a pernicious, it was treason. It was what Reagan did in the 1980 election, if indeed, I do believe the October surprise that was reported on. I think Bob did too, that Reagan held the hostages back by talking directly to the Iranians and then paying them off with arms to fight the Iraqi war and the Iranians paying them in cash of half of which he gave to the Contras. So I think there's a dirty deal around the 1980 election and the 1968 election. I think our country has been back and forth. I think the 2000 election was stolen, I do. I think that's the Supreme Court did a very bad thing, said a terrible precedent and we're in a hole ever since that moment, certainly because of the policies of George W. Bush. So there's been a lot of chicanery through all these elections, except maybe I think Obama was pretty clean in 2008, I think so, and so forth and so on. Let me just follow up a little. We talked about all of those incidents in untold history in some depth, as Bob did in a lot of his writings. Well, when you look at this election, Oliver, you probably spend more time with Vladimir Putin than any other American. Yeah. And we looked at this election and there's been very little discussion about Russian interference. There's a lot of warning in the beginning that it was gonna happen and then there's been nothing about that. Yeah, that's right. And I, but I saw opportunities where Putin really wanted to help Trump, he could have done so. He could have accepted American terms on the New START Treaty, which Putin rejected and that would have given Trump his ability to brag about a big foreign policy victory. He could have supported Putin when it came to, it could have swear to Trump when it came to Hunter Biden, but he didn't contradict the Trump on Hunter Biden. I mean, I just look at the fact that I was on mainstream Russian television a couple of times a day for the past several weeks during the election and they knew that I was so strongly anti-Trump and accepting of Biden, even though he's not my kind of guy. But so how do you see Russia positioning itself now, these in terms of the United States and the possibility of a Biden presidency or the reality of a Biden presidency and the kind of tense world we have in which US-Russian relations are at a very, very dangerous point now with the hands of the doomsday clock at a hundred seconds before midnight?  They're used to it. What do they call it? Usefully, I know I'm a useful idiot, but I will repeat what Mr. Putin said in his interview, very clearly, time and again. And I asked him, time and again, it is not in Russia's interest to go into the American presidential election. First of all, it would be a disaster if something were found out and it would be a major issue, which it didn't become, thank God, but almost. But he said, our problem with the United States, we try to deal with every president, but Democrat or Republican, we're willing to negotiate. And, but we have a problem. There's a system in America that is heavier than any president. And whether it's Obama in the White House or Trump or Bush or Clinton, it doesn't matter to the Russians at this point. They see where the, they see the writing on the wall, as they say. And Clinton, who had no beef with Russia, suddenly he loves Yeltsin and of course he helps him, he helps him fraudulently to win that election in 96, but even Clinton, I mean, it doesn't make a difference. So they have to deal with, they know the United States is hostile. They know there's, now they have 13 NATO countries around in the proximity to Russia against them. And probably, and who knows what's coming up in Belarus? Who knows what's gonna happen in Ukraine? It's not easy, but they're on their guard and they keep, for a very little amount of money, they build a huge nuclear force that is equivalent to our trillion dollar, our trillion dollar effort every year if you prepare for war, the Russians have a what, $60 billion budget. I mean, think about, they're very smart. And thank God, because if not, there'd be even more problems. If we could run over them as we think, some people think we'd really be into a hot spot, I think. I would never underestimate the Russians. I never, never, never, there's strong against the Nazis, they were strong against the French and they're gonna be strong against anybody trying to take over or to beat them or to take something from them. I think we're very lucky that Mr. Putin is a very sensible man and he listens.  I guess he thinks every American president has to trash us. He once said to me, I probably sound outrageous, but we feel like Jews in World War II. Always Russia. Yeah, you would think that Biden is making such an effort to reach out to the Republicans who have been so, this is toward him. He could make an effort to reach out to Putin now and try to have a real reset and ease some of these problems and work together on some of the problems that confront us. He's offered again and again. Listen, I do have to run now, but please, I'd love to get the rest of this tape. I'd love to see what the panel has. We'll make it available to you, Oliver. Thank you so much. I'm sure everyone else has a question for you, but you don't have time. If like John Pilger wants to ask you something. Thank you, John. Thank you, Ray. Thank you, Oliver. Thank you. And Gary. Thank you. I'm gonna miss me. Enough, I can't, I'll learn enough there's a badge of honor. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Cavill. Bye-bye. Thank you, Peter. I'd love again for stopping by and thank you, Peter, for that stimulating, extremely interesting conversation. Obviously, let us go to Diane. Diane, you've seen it all. Tell me something. Did you think when Bob started this that it was gonna last 25 years? Oh, the consortium, 25 years. Well, yeah, I think it's hard to say, but I did know that the mechanism that he was using to do the consortium was viable. It wasn't, he wasn't spending a lot of money. He wasn't going beyond what was affordable. And he had a platform. He had a following. He had a way of reporting that was outstanding and to be much admired. And frankly, he had me there to help him support the family. So yeah, I think that I thought that it would continue, yeah. Now, he made a lot of sacrifices. He had to take a job at a pretty awful place because I worked there for a year or two. The worst job in journalism I ever had and that's Bloomberg News. It was really a personality cult and a gulag and that's what people told me before I went to work there. I said, now it can't be that bad and it was worse. So it was touch and go. There were no moments when you thought he'd give it up. Never got that frustrated about not being able to raise money or having a big enough impact. No, I never thought he would give it up because he just wasn't like that. I mean, the work that he was doing was so important to him. But I wanna say that Bob had a good sense of humor. He was very grounded. And so he didn't suffer from some of the things that do happen to investigative reporters who they do get attacked and he got attacked. But he had a good support system around him. His family was very important to him and that created a stability that allowed for him to maintain his outlook and mental health while pursuing some really hard stories and being very, very driven in that. So I think that a lot of times people just don't realize how important it is to be able to step back with a sense of humor about things that are going on so that you can continue. You can continue to do the good work because he was very, he hated liars. And I asked him once, I said, and this was, we were married 31 years and this was when we had been together, probably 28 years, when I asked him this question, I said, what drives you? How can you keep at it? And he just said, I don't like liars. And he saw the lying that was going on and different levels of the federal government and he just wanted to expose it. Yeah. Well, the thing was when you, of course, were an associated press reporter as well, that's how you met Bob when he was at the AP where you both were there. When I left the Wall Street Journal, started working for conservative news and now being the editor, the only thing I miss is I can't call the Pentagon up and say I'm from the Wall Street Journal because I always got a call back. Did Bob ever mention that to you that A, he's not gonna be able to get the call back so he did when he called for AP or Newsweek and B, of course, conservative doesn't have the reach that those news organizations have. He had to do what he had to do and that's what we're celebrating here. But I just wanted to know if you ever mentioned those two issues to him. Well, he was well known in Washington when he was doing the conservative. He'd already made a name for himself through the work at the associated press and then at Newsweek and so and PBS and so he had a lot of good sources. People knew him. And the other thing about Bob was, and I admired this so much because as a reporter I never was this kind of reporter. He was so good at documents research. I mean, he just, he had such a energy for going through the documents and finding the documents. He had an instinct for how Washington worked based on his long time here and he knew where to go and I think Spencer will talk about that when it gets to be his turn. So it was- We have sources here, that's right. Yeah, yeah. Diane, I'll leave you for a second. We're gonna come back. Let me go to John Pilter's been waiting patiently listening to everything on every word. Oliver Stone, I imagine. John, when did you, I've never asked you this. I don't know the answer to this. When did you first meet Bob Perry? Well, I first met Bob Perry in quite late really in the early 2000s and I was interested in Gary Webb and Gary Webb, I knew of Bob's fame and I knew of his distinction but I knew also that he was the only journalist, it seemed to me, who had back Gary Webb. And I mean, Gary Webb, when Diane was talking about Bob's support system, basically his family that's the very thing that Gary Webb didn't have but he did have Bob. And I think Gary was, perhaps his life was extended a little longer than it was with Bob's support but it seemed to me that, I mean, Bob wrote and we discussed the very thing we're talking about now and that Oliver was talking about. What happens when you're attacked? What happens when you are regarded as Oliver described it as a lone nut? Now, I know what he went through with JFK. I wrote about it at the time and I also knew a lot of his sources. I knew Jim Garrison quite well and I knew the hatred that this other view of the JFK assassination, the hatred, the depth of the hatred. So, but that was an extension of the kind of the animosity directed against frankly all of us. I think all the journalists here, I certainly have. I'm sure Gareth has and it's that when Bob wrote and I thought he wrote that those of us in journalism who had exposed the national security crimes of the 1980s, saw our careers mostly sink or go sideways. That's happened to everybody. Julian Assange is the exemplar of that. It's almost a kind of something that you have to experience. If it doesn't happen to you, you're doing something wrong. You're not getting the story. And Bob saw that in his slide from the AP and from Newsweek. And of course, he picked up his career in such an innovative and imaginative way, extraordinary way by starting consortium news as early as he did. But that's happened to me with the Guardian four or five years ago, finally. It's as if we kid ourselves that there is a great journalism culture in which we fit because we do our job well. In my view, there isn't. There's a system and those who go against the system, like Bob Perry, like Gareth, like others who are Oliver Stone in filmmaking, find ourselves the honorable exceptions. And I say that honorable exceptions. We are to a system that is embedded and a continuing faith that this system should come round to practicing journalism in the way that we think it should be practiced is a kind of terminal naivety. We are the exceptions. I have Stone, as Oliver mentioned, was the exception. Many others on this side of the Atlantic, James Cameron, Robert Fisk has just died. Robert Fisk, a friend of mine, Robert has had some of the most smearing obituaries even described by his own newspaper, The Independent as controversial. This weasel of weasel words and whereas Bob Fisk was an extraordinary reporter, utterly eccentric, wonderfully eccentric man and a wonderful reporter and a historian as well. But in a way, as I read these and particularly this awful obituary in The Guardian full of a kind of envy, and trying to minimize Bob Fisk's legacy. When I read this, I knew that this was the highest compliment. He was exceptional. And of course, again, we come back to Julian with whom I've had a great deal to do, as you know. He is perhaps the ultimate exception. But let's say that one of the pioneering exceptions was Bob Parry. And when I first got to know Bob, not very well in the beginning, I got to know Bob much better only because we were living on different sides of the Atlantic. When I began to write for him, and I enjoyed that very much as I enjoy it, writing for you, Joe, but writing for Bob, it was almost like writing, like writing for newspaper again, it was fun. And it, you know, there was a to and fro and there was an understanding of what the words were about. The man was a real journalist. You know, it comes often with old-fashioned journalists, but not old-fashioned. He was a real journalist. There are so many fake journalists now. And they've always been fake journalists, of course. Let's not demonize a younger generation, please. John, you've described journalism today as Vichy journalism. Yes. Just explain that and what roles there's a website like Consortium News and other alternative sites have to come as a remedy for this, if it is. Well, Vichy journalism is my little insult for those who are the echoes, as they're often called the stenographers of governments. And during the Vichy years in France, there were plenty of them. They misreported the war. They lied about what the Germans were doing. They collaborated. Collaboration is probably the key word, if not collusion. And when you look at the Assange case, there's been so much collaboration and collusion. I was reading a report by the excellent fair organization about its headline, Farsical Coverage of Julian Assange's Farsical Hearing. There you have collaboration. That's Vichy journalism. I mean, if journalism is anything, you are an agent of people, not power. You can be all those things. You can be, I'm not sure you can be entirely impartial. I don't agree with all that, but I think you can do everything you possibly can to find out the truth as much as you can and do it honestly and do it in good faith. These people don't. The BBC reporter came to the Old Bailey during the Julian Assange trial. And when he was asked, well, what are you doing? You're coming back tomorrow. And he said, no, it's repetitive. This is the major broadcaster in this country. And he described what has rightly been called the trial of the century as repetitive. And they didn't come back. And every day, this extraordinary, as you know, Joe, consortium news was one of the few to have reported at live to given to provided that public service to people wanting to know about the trial of the century, but you wouldn't know looking at the so-called mainstream. Having said that, I do think it's a waste of breath to keep on and on about the mainstream. They are part of the problem. I grew up in the mainstream. I've reported in the mainstream. All my career has been in the mainstream. And unfortunately, that's what it has taught me to come to a point where perhaps Bob Parry came to 25 years ago where there wasn't a space for him. There wasn't a space for an honest reporter without fear or favor reporter. When I started here in Fleet Street, as they used to call the British press, yes, of course it was owned by all these moguls and it was conservative, but there were spaces and they allowed in Mavericks. In fact, Mavericks brought them distinction, awards and prizes and scoops. That's gone. That's gone completely. And that's why Bob's setting up consortium news was so important and that Bob's family, Diane and Matt and Sam and kept him help to keep him going and why going back, the story of Gary Webb is such a chilling, important story for all of us to understand because basically what Bob was writing about was yes, a Ryan Contra, but it was cocaine Contra and that was Webb's story. It was cocaine, the story was of course, the CIA was shoving cocaine into the United States. It was a huge story. And when Webb was vindicated by the CIA's inspector general which only, as far as I know, only Bob reported and made sense of and wrote about and kept an eye on. And as Diana suggested, went through the documents, whereas the press at the time reported a CIA press release which was meant to be, which was of course meant to be a decoy because the real story was buried in the actual report, the inspector general's report that vindicated, Webb vindicated everything that Bob had done on that particular story. So I think we should celebrate Bob Parry and celebrate those who aspire to be the Bob Parrys but we should never think that there is a, there was a nice Columbia School of Journalism media out there just waiting for clean-cut, nice people, honest journalists to arrive and get their jobs. When I spoke with Sai Hirsch and Bob Fisk at Columbia a few years ago, I felt an absolute atmosphere of hostility and that's particularly to Fisk and me. We were going too far. We were going much too far. Bob Parry went too far, I salute him. Thank you, John. Thank you very much for that, Nat Parry and Denmark. Nat, you had a, you're unmuted, are you? Okay. Yeah.  Give us some idea of the early years, some of the big stories that your father covered and what was your role on that? Well, my introduction was actually, I was a student, a freshman down at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. So I wasn't actually involved with the initial launching in 1995, but what I remember is getting a call from my dad, I guess about 25 years ago today, Ish, where he said, he told me, hey, you should check out this website that we just launched. And at the time I had never been on the internet and so I was not really even sure how to do that. And so he said, well, write down this address. And so I wrote it down and went to the computer lab the next day and got some help from the lab assistant at the computer lab at the university and went on. And that was the first time I had ever gone on the internet because I mean, it does sort of recall how at the time there was very little there on the internet. I mean, I think that maybe some UFO enthusiasts had websites out there and but there was no real journalism being done and you set up the table very well for the sort of his motivations for launching it in 95. But so I sort of got involved about a year later when I transferred up to George Mason University in the DC area and started working part-time with my dad. And so at the time that we had, it wasn't just the website of course, we had the newsletter and a magazine published IF Magazine and that was five monthly. So it came out every two months and the newsletter came out every two weeks I think. And we were publishing books. So I got involved very much with editing and handling the administration. And at the time, so he was doing a lot, it started of course with the October Surprise series and I think Spencer will talk more about that and what that was all about. But what happened in 96, of course, as John Pilger mentioned, the Gary Webb series, the CIA Contra-Cocaine story was published by the San Jose Mercury News and it's hard to, the significance of it was huge. I mean, the African-American community was very outraged and it really felt at the time that there was a movement. I mean, I remember going to the Washington Post and joining a demonstration there. We sort of covered these demonstrations that were going on at media outlets. And so, but my dad having... It looks like Matt is frozen on us. So when he comes out of that pose or maybe he has to dial back in. We covered the Contra-Cocaine story 10 years earlier. He was, okay. Well, yeah, just to wrap up. So the Contra-Cocaine story was huge at that time and I think that really boosted our subscriptions and at the time all the media just basically were piling on Gary Webb and attacking the San Jose Mercury News for publishing the series. And, my dad was one of the only people out there really telling the truth about it and giving the background, giving the full context of Gary Webb's stories. And so that was kind of from there, just grew and then as things progressed into the Bush years, I mean, he did a lot of really good reporting on the stolen election in 2000. And that's when I started writing more around that time, especially about the Iraq war. And then we collaborated on this book, Neck Deep, which was also a bit of a story of the website itself and how we were covering things in real time that much of the media was getting wrong and that we were getting right. And so, yeah, that's sort of my role. Thank you. Now that's a very good segue into our next speaker, but I just want to make one point about Gary Webb's story was the follow-up to Bob's story. Bob reported how the cocaine left or the drugs left Nicaragua and Gary 10 years later, so what the consequences were of that. But I want to bring in Ray McGovern now because Nat just mentioned the Iraq war and the invasion. And I think that's about the time you, Ray, if you could unmute yourself so you can respond. That's about the time that you got to know Bob, is that right? I'm not quite sure of that. I asked John, how are you met him? How did you get involved with Bob and tell us about the Iraq war and the creation of Vips and its publication on consortium news is continuous until today. I'm unmuted. You are. We're all happy about that. First, hello to all friends. Yeah, well, Bob knew my record or the record of veteran intelligence professionals for sanity and trying to warn George W. Bush that it was really a bad idea to attack Iraq, not only illegal and international war crime, but really bad idea. And so Bob asked me to write for him and I said, well, Bob, this other website that I'm writing for, you know, they pay me and I need the money and sorry, no, we'd pay all right. As we pay our writers. So he matched what I was paying and I was very happy to leave the other one because the other one had real problems with me saying the word Israel. And so I could say whatever I wanted with Bob. Now, my Irish grandmother used to always tell me, be truthful and honest.  Now, the corollary these days is then you don't have to remember anything. Okay. Well, she was right. And that's how Bob was, you know?  I just care just what the truth is. And that was unusual. And you know what? That could get you controversialized. John talked before about being named controversial. Well, Bob was actually warned by high administration officials to know if you publish that, you're gonna, we're gonna controversialize you and that will be the end of it. Now, I'm from the Bronx as some of you know and we do for instances there. So I'm gonna give you a, for instance, one of my favorite stories about Bob and I had a little bit of trouble getting him to tell it was a meeting convened by the Muckity Mucks from Newsweek. Maynard was mentioned before. He was Bob's immediate boss and the head of Newsweek was there and the corporate people from down from up in New York and a couple of the reporters besides Bob were all just sitting around the table. It was right after it was clear what had happened in Iran Contra, namely that as all of us said, our president should have been impeached for what happened. So what was happened? There were two key guests there. One was General Scowcroft who had just stepped down from being the National Security Advisor. The other one was a obscure congressman from Wyoming. What's it called? Cheney, Cheney is his name, okay? So they're all sitting around this table, all of them men of course. And so Scowcroft says apropos of nothing, quote, I mean, I probably shouldn't say this, but point extra, my successor is gonna testify before Congress on Tuesday. And if I were advising him, I'd tell him that we never told Ronald Reagan anything. Now Bob, as he tells it, dropped his fork and without thinking said General Scowcroft, do I understand you would advise your successor to commit perjury before Congress? That's how quiet it was. Bob says for maybe 20 seconds and then Maynard puts his arm around Bob. And now Bob, sometimes you have to do what's best for the country.  Now, I was just pleased as punch. And I had been a journalist. I had been writing for a publication called The President's Daily Brief. I'd done that under Nixon, Ford and Reagan and actually under Reagan, I delivered it as well as shaping it and sometimes editing it. So I knew what I thought journalism was about. But you know what, the standards that Bob said were far more strict than we had to observe in the intelligence community. If we only had 50% of the evidence, we could say probably or we think this and well, Bob wouldn't buy that kind of stuff. Why wouldn't Bob insist on evidence? And every time we hear John Brennan, the former CIA guy say, we don't do evidence. I said, we're used to do evidence. And that's what I was trained to do at least about Perry. So what am I saying here? I'm saying that as we struggle through these more recent revelations, having to do with not only Iran Contra, but the Russia Gate, Bob was very supportive of the kinds of techniques we used in the intelligence community and he welcomed veteran intelligence professionals for sanity under his aegis, put on the top of his banner there. And he was willing to listen to what we did. So when it became very, very dubious that the Russians had hacked into the Democratic National Committee and there was no real evidence. Now we know there really was no real evidence. It became a forensic sort of thing for me because I looked at our roster and I said, my God, we have two former technical directors of the National Security Agency here. Let's ask them what they think. Long story short, they probed the evidence. They went over to Europe to compare notes with real forensic cater people and they came back and they said, look, it couldn't have been a hack. It had to be a copy onto a thumb drive. And now we know because the cyber firm that James Comey and his wisdom decided to defer to to do the forensics testified in December of 2017, mind you that there is no forensic evidence. There is no evidence that any DNC emails of that generation were exfiltrated fancy word for hacked. Now that was not revealed until May 7th, 2020, that's May, now through the math, I think that's about, that's more than six months ago. For those of you who don't know that, that's because it hasn't been in the New York Times or the Washington Post or anything else. So there's another kind of prime example of even though Adam Schiff was able to keep that information under wraps, formal testimony to him by the head of CrowdStrike saying, no exfiltration, no hacking, okay? Even though he was able to keep that secret from December 5th, 2017. And so May 7th, 2020, New York Times has risen to the occasion and kept it secret for six more months. Now, what am I saying on all that? I'm saying that because sometimes you can do forensics, sometimes you can do the principles of physics and figure things out. And Bob was not such a liberal arts guy or such a journalist that he would dismiss that kind of thing. He would listen and say, my God, Benny, does he know what he's talking about?  He created the systems. So I just wanna finish up by saying that as we went through all this, Bob was very supportive, why? Well, because we had the expertise. We had the evidence and now of course we're being vindicated and we are taking no victory laps because editor-in-chief, Gloria, has warned us against taking victory laps and VIPS does not want to do that anyway. But, you know, toward the end, it got really toward Bob's that before Bob died. The last piece he wrote was on December 13th, 2017. Now, what had happened the day before was that the text exchanges between this fellow Peter Struck and his and Lisa Page were publicized. Now, they showed, of course, there was a kebab in the FBI working against the election of Trump and then trying to hide their tracks by doing Russian gate after the election. So Bob, never, almost never, maybe twice or three times called me to compare notes. You know, pretty much when it went all right, didn't need my governor to help him, but this time he called me and says, right, have you seen this? And I said, yeah, what do you think? So I said, I think this is a bombshell, man. This shows that the Russian gate has become FBI gate, become deep state gate. I said, yeah, I think that's what it is. Next, I was going to volunteer to write but I knew Bob wanted to do it himself. Next day, beautiful article saying, yeah, these two people were plotting. Now it's clear it's evidence that won't quit. It's from text messages. And so Russia gate, be advised folks has sort of evolved into FBI gate, FBI gate helped by CIA and of course, that's what we know happened now, whether it ever come to complete light has to do with who won the election. So all I'm saying here is that, well, I'll say one more thing. And you know, I have stone was mentioned here and I have a favorite thing from Stone. This is what he said, quote, the only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you're gonna lose because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday somebody who believes as you do and seeks the truth as you do wins, end quote. So as I see it, the challenge is to accept that and to find some joy in trying and losing. And when people say, well, don't you get tired? As I'm sure lots of people involved here have been asked, don't you get tired? Well, my favorite thing is to remember when this question was asked by George Schultz for whom I have a great deal of admiration having briefed him every other morning for four years, he was testifying on Iran Contra. And it was when things were becoming very clear that Bob Curry was right.  And Schultz made the mistake of saying, now congressman Obey, don't you get tired? The American people are tired of all this. And Obey looked at him straight in the eye, he said, Mr. Schultz, I didn't take a solemn oath to protect and defend the constitution against all enemies far and the domestic until I got tired. And I'm just pleased as punch to be with these journalists today because I know they're not gonna get tired. I know they're kind of aware in some way of what IF Stone says, we're gonna lose, we're gonna lose but then someday we're gonna win. The truth wins in the interim and thanks very much Joe for setting this thing up and for being such a good, a good successor to Bob Curry. Well, thank you Ray, that's right kind of you. You know, when Bob took on the FBI gate as you called it, or when he started being skeptical of Russia gate, I think a lot of people misunderstood that he was somehow a Trump supporter that she never was, a supporter of either party and I make that clear because of the thinking in the country that if you're for someone you must be against, at least I think people to be confused about what Bob created and what I'm attempting to continue as a new source that looks critically at all people in power no matter what party. And as you mentioned, Ray, the New York Times never published that Sean Henry thing. Although they did have a banner headline that Robert Mueller found no evidence of conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia. And those are really the two key and core parts of the Russian gate story. Mueller has debunked that himself by saying there was no conspiracy and Sean Henry, the CEO of CrowdStrike said there was no hack. So you can't have Russia gate anymore after that.  I was gonna bring you in, but because we're talking about Russia now I'm gonna move to Gareth Porter because Russia gate was a key story that he covered for consortium news. Gareth, if you, this is the phrase of the new century unmute yourself, please. You could have a musical interlude while we're waiting for. Gareth, are you there? If you can see the microphone at the bottom left of your screen, if you click that, you should be unmuted. Maybe he's speechless after hearing Ray and John and all of us talk. Well, we do have a question from Ray from the audience and that is, what does Ray think should be done with the media monopolies like Facebook, Twitter and Google? Should we bust them up into smaller organizations, nationalize them, dissolve them? And my question to add onto that is, I mean, will antitrust type laws ever be used against these giant tech monopolies? Well, I think I'll take a leaf out of John Pilger's book here and say, look, let's not be Don Quixote. They exist, they're there. What I like is kind of the inventive enterprising attitude that Bob Perry had 25 years ago. There's this new mechanism, let's use it. And now it's becoming abused, it's being controlled even though it was set up so it never could be controlled, right? Well, let's figure out how to uncontroll it. You know, it's like Sami's Dot in Russia. They did memory graph machines, but they got the word around. It's kind of up to us, it seems to me. And, you know, I've been wrestling with this as my VIPs colleagues have been. How to get the truth around? Well, they have to be smart enough people like Julian Assange who can now deal with this new situation and find out some way to reach people and say, hey, look, you've been sold a bill of goods here, here's the truth. I don't know what that is, but I do know that a lot of young people around like Sam and like people who helped Bob set this thing up, I have enough confidence that we will prevail. It's just that I'm also aware of IF Stone saying we're gonna lose for a little while longer, probably. I'm unmuted now. Good. Yes, Gareth, please. I'm sorry about that technical difficulty for a moment or two or three weeks. Well, that's right, you remember to collect your thoughts even further now. We were moving on to the Russiagate topic and... Yeah, right. I heard Bob and... So I'm glad that, first of all, I just wanna thank everybody who's spoken. It's been very inspirational. I'm not easily inspired and this has done the trick. So I mean, it's a really, really important experience. And I'm glad that we are coming to the topic of Russiagate and to begin with, I would slightly disagree with the statement that Russiagate has ended because from my point of view, the part of the story that is most poisonous, that's most subversive of democracy in some ways was the part of Russiagate that has to do with the fiction that the Russians tried to get into our state electoral websites so that they could somehow rather steal information that they would somehow rather use at some future point, but which the FBI could never explain how they would possibly use it because it was such a stupid story. And yet it has continued to have enormous impact politically in this country to the point where, the discussion up until at least the last few days about the problem of elections has been, how do we prevent the Russians and perhaps the Iranians from interfering with our elections by getting into our election machinery as well as propagandizing us? Whereas in fact, we know that the real problem is the American political system itself, which has been gone so far haywire for so long that it has created a disturbance that is going to be with us for a very, very long time. So this is all by way of preface to my recollecting the time when I began to write for Consortium News when Bob was still alive. And the first article I believe that I did publish at Consortium News, apart from things that Bob picked up from elsewhere that I'd written and republished at Consortium News was indeed about Russiagate. It was about, it was February 2017 and it was about the series of events that had begun to unfold around the visits of various people working for the Trump campaign to Russia and the suggestion by CNN and the New York Times primarily that these indicated, they must indicate that there was real collusion going on between the Trump campaign and the Russians. And that was the beginning of it. But then you had a second round which had to do with Flynn and the leveraging of the FBI to essentially make it look like Flynn was guilty of some sort of serious collusion with the Russian ambassador which was, of course, everyone knew who was aware of what was going on there that that was not true. It was simply a political ploy to put pressure on Trump over the whole question of Russia policy. And my article was essentially aimed at making the point that this series of events, really all about the national security state and particularly, of course, the CIA in the lead role, essentially warning Trump not to change the policy that has been chosen toward Russia. And so that was really my sort of introduction to writing specifically for Consortium News. And then that was followed with Joe being the editor following Bob's death by the first piece that I did on the fiction of the Russian hacking into or attempt to hack into American websites. And that's a theme that, as I say, I think has continued to have legs. It's not dead yet by any means. The Senate Intelligence Committee, of course, revived it last year and the New York Times proclaimed that the Russians had hacked into all 50 states based on the completely made up idea by a Obama administration, NSC worker who had that opinion of his own that was turned into fact by the New York Times. So this is, I think, one of those issues that will be around for quite a while, despite all of the evidence that it is completely false, which thanks to Consortium News, I think we've been able to put on the record, not just once, but repeatedly. And then, of course, there was the story of the internet news agency, internet research agency, excuse me, and it's emails, but Facebook posts and Twitter posts, which as Joe knows very well, suffered, the New York Times story on that suffered from a statistical error, which I suggested was perhaps the largest and worst statistical error in the history of U.S. journalism. It increased the relative size of the presence of these posts by billions of times. So this is a noteworthy failing of the New York Times that I'm glad the Consortium News was able to get out. And so that's sort of the starting point for my contribution to Consortium News, specifically on Russiagate. Well, you made a great contribution, Gareth, as did Ray and who's holding his hand up. Yeah, I just want to, if I may, say that out of those two articles that Gareth wrote and you, Joe, edited, I use very often the ratio or the figures that came out with respect to what percentage of the Facebook postings did the internet research agency in St. Petersburg, Russia. What percentage was it of the total stuff that the people were exposed to before and after the election? And if you do the math, if you got a pencil, it turned out to be, got it? Point zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, four percent. And as I say, a lot of that was after the election. So if you did do the math, you saw that Gareth was quite right in pointing this out as probably the king of all statistical errors that the New York Times made. But as we all know, it still lives. It's sort of like a vampire area. Won't die until somebody puts this stake into it. That's right. And Ray, I didn't mean Gareth to imply that the use of Russia as a tactic to deflect blame, to, as we know, the intelligence agency has been doing to deflect America's own failings by our own leaders to blame Russia for, as I think all of us are applying, to blame Russia for the breakdown of American democracy is ridiculous. So the Russia is not over in that sense, but the core stories have been demolished. And unfortunately, there are a lot of sore loses in this story.  I think a lot of Russia gators are sore losers. And partly because the New York Times is rape, when I didn't publish what Sean Henry said. So they don't even know that the guy who was hired by the Democratic Party, by the DNC and by the Clinton campaign to look at the service said there was no evidence of an exfiltration or a hack. And I've always maintained that even if the Russians had hacked that the information, they poured out news because the emails that WikiLeaks published about the Clinton campaign were true. They four, I believe four, even five members of the DNC had, including the chairwoman of the party had to resign because these revelations, no one ever contested the truth. So Russia, if it was Russia, and I accept now for sure there was no hack because Sean Henry told me, they put out information, not disinformation. They put out news that was damaging, but it was news.  But I think Bob's made this point over and over again that you get stuff, if it's documents, you don't, it doesn't matter who the source is and what their motive is if the documents are true. Hence the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal all have anonymous drop boxes now where anybody could send a document in and if the checks out, they'll publish it and the newspaper doesn't even know who gave it to them. Doesn't matter. So even Russia could put something in CNN's drop box and CNN might put out a big scoop and they didn't know that Russia was the source. Yes, Ray? No, I was just gonna point out that as Julian Assange has emphasized, if he had equivalent derogatory information from the RNC, they would've been vetted, they would've been verified and they would've been put out. I was with Julian three days before the election. I had been at Oxford doing the Oxford forum thing and I came down and he was, John Pilcher knows this story, Julian, it looked like he hadn't slept in several days, he was getting things out, the final things and he had just asked John Pilcher to go out and sell a really good video to BBC or wherever. And John, you could tell the story about how receptive they were to this video. Well, it wasn't receptive, it was an interview that I did with Julian and you're right, just around the time of the election. And much of it was actually quite moving because he talked for the first time about the personal cost of doing what he was doing. And he was also, but if that was mixed with a category denial that Russia was the source of the leak and he explained, he put into context the Podesta emails and so on. It was, I think it was a very good interview actually. No one would show it. And it was shown eventually, ironically, on RT, which has a very effective YouTube channel, goes out to a lot of people. I offered it to the television company, I make documentaries for, ITV here. I received a long agonized letter, which said, no, I offered it all over the world. Julian wanted me to offer it to Fox and I wouldn't do that. I said, no, you can offer it to Fox, not me. And the point was, it was just making underlying the truth that we've been talking about here tonight, that in this sense that no one wanted the truth, the truth about WikiLeaks and Russia, the truth about Julian, the truth about whistleblowing, no one wanted it, that was rejected. So all credit to RT who put it out. I insisted they put it was actually made by the production company that I make my films for Dartmouth films here in London. And we insisted on putting across the screen a Dartmouth films production in order to keep our distance from these terrible russkies. I wish I hadn't done that now to hell with it. But they did a good job with it, but no one would take it. Yeah. John, the point I wanted to make about that is that we didn't have a big dinner that as we usually did, Julian and I, we had a couple of beers, but he was totally erschoped, is the German word. He was totally drained, okay? And there was not one iota of indication that he was feeling exhilarated at having done in Hillary Clinton. He was exhilarated to be sure, but he was exhilarated because he had gotten the truth out because he had done his job as a publisher to get the truth out after it had been verified, of course it was authentic. And it was too bad that BBC or Channel 4 it was too bad they all rejected it. I imagine you, John, even offering them some money if they take it, you know? I was on my 50s, I was on my 50s. So, you know, they were meant to pay for it, that's the other way around. Yeah. Well, yeah, I made a joke, but the thing was, you know, when you have this picture of Julian trying to get Hillary, well, you know, it wasn't that at all. And here we were, just the two of us. And this was before all the microphones as well as the cameras were installed, okay? It was early November, 2016. And that once that I get any sense from Julian, now we're gonna get Hillary or anything like that. It was getting the truth out. That's what he was concerned about. And that's why I admired him so much and treasured him as a friend. No, if I could just add to what's been said already by my friends here. I think it's worth thinking even more deeply about the point that I think John Pilger was making that he has experienced a time in his career when there was quality journalism being practiced that there was not the prohibition on telling the truth that is so completely pervasive in the scene today that we've all experienced. And that matches with my own sense of the shift that has taken place in the US press. As bad as it was during the Cold War. And it was bad. I mean, there's no doubt about that. What has been described as manufacturing consent and all that did happen during the Cold War. But, and yet there was even in a place like the Washington Post during the Vietnam War, the opportunity, the opening, the space for a journalist who was covering the Pentagon to cite my work in 1972 debunking Richard Nixon's theory about the bloodbath, not theory, the charge that the North Vietnamese and the communists in Vietnam would carry out a bloodbath if the United States did not keep its troops there. And the Washington Post did a two page spread on the work that I'd done when I was at Cornell University as a graduate student debunking that notion of, you know, based on the North Vietnamese land reform program. That could not happen today. It's just impossible. It's unthinkable. So something fundamentally has changed here. It had already happened around the time it had begun to happen around the time that consortium news was established in the late 1990s in the second half of the 1990s and it's gotten worse. And so I think that it's worthwhile for us to think about the implications of all this. Something very fundamental is happening in terms of the sort of centralization of power over room, affecting everything about the news business to such a degree as to have never been experienced before in the history of any country, it seems to me. And so the challenge I think is one that is even greater than we may assume without looking at it in this historical perspective. And I'm not trying to be to frighten anybody but I do think that it does present a challenge of such a fundamental nature that we need to think more systematically about that. I think that's what I think. And I believe that consortium news is one of the things that holds out hope that that can happen. And that's why we really can honor Bob in a way that is truly important in this regard. Of course, Bob was smeared for being right. And one thing makes me sad is that Bob wasn't around to seem vindicated. On the Russia Gate story, since he's been credited as being one of the most important by even by Aaron Mate who gets a lot of credit now. But he's at least credits Bob for being ahead of him on that story. One other thing, I'll get to you Ray in a second but I just wanted to make this point. And then we got to move to Spencer and then we can come back to this again. But these smears get to the point where real indigenous criticism by American journalists of the American government is not allowed to exist. It has to be somehow linked to Russia that we're doing this because of Russia's directings. And this is extremely, I think, damaging as Gareth was saying here that we can just smear someone. It's a very much a Cold War tactic as well. The Vietnam protesters were directed by foreign powers and every government that's under some kind of pressure, any establishment that when there's protest of some sort or critical journalism, they will blame outside infiltrators, outside actors. No one could act on their own to be critical. And that's what I think the real essence of journalism is. Ray, when you go, I'll let you say the last word on this but Spencer has been waiting very patiently because I want to move from a fake scandal, Russiagate to a real one, Iran Contra, which he could talk to us about but make your final point, Ray. And then if you want to stick around, you can come back and have an open. I know it can wait. I was just pointing to the Martha Gellhorn Prize. Yes. One by a couple of people here. And Bob's extemporaneous remarks when he received it the year or two, three years ago now in London, John Pilger has a wonderful, wonderful explanation of that but it's up to you, Joe, as to whether that can wait or we go right to Spencer. I'm eager to see here Spencer as well. Well, I think we better hear from John now and finish that. If you don't mind, Spencer, waiting another minute. If you unmute yourself. Well, yeah, I mean, that was a, I've been the chairman of judges of the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism now for 20 odd years. And of course, the prize has gone to very distinguished people such as Gareth Porter and it went to Bob Parry. Bob the Knight with Bob Parry was a very memorable one. Our guest of honor was Bob who made, as Ray said, as I think Bob probably spoke for an hour. Now, usually when people speak for an hour, there's a dip, there's a shuffle, there's a need to leave in the extreme, it was riveting. And I realized Bob's, one of Bob's books, America's Stolen Narrative about, he was talking about Americanism and how, I mean, we've been talking about how the, the fakery of Russiagate and the pressure that is on journalists now. But Bob took us back to the beginning to the so-called founding fathers and the lovely Georgian gentlemen and their tablets that they handed down and stripped it apart, it was wonderful. If he took, it should happen in every imperial country, it desperately needs to happen here and occasionally does happen from time to time. But I won't go into all the detail, but Bob delivered a kind of, he, a history tutorial on, that let's say Howard Zinn would have been absolutely proud of to call his own, I'm sure, about the other history of the United States. And by the time he'd got up to the 80s, everything made sense. It was a brilliant exposition and Vanessa Redgrave, who was at the dinner, stood and clapped Bob's extraordinary performance as it was. He was so eloquent, so knowledgeable. And as I say, I won't begin to tell you of everything he said, but he worked through all those, those grave-looking Georgian crooks who are so called the founding fathers with such gravitas over and over again until I don't know about Americans, but those of us outside America are bored into the ground and they're deeply flawed conventions and constitutions and just, and inventing the various election system because they couldn't think of anything else. Through he went the whole lot. It was an intellectual exercise that was just a tour de force. So that's my memory. I was so pleased to give Bob a prize in memory of somebody I knew and regard as one of the great war reporters of the 20th century, Martha Gellhorn, he deserved it. Well, Busting Myths was one of the things that Bob did about the founding fathers and our rulers today. So I want to move on to go back to the beginning now to the Iran Contra scandal, which in my view was maybe the greatest scandal in recent memory in the United States. Why? Because people died. Nobody died in Watergate, but a lot of people died because of the Iran Contra. It continued to fund the award in Central America, Nicaragua, that the Congress had cut off funds for. That was the real scandal there, that the executive branch was not to appropriate money. Congress said no more money and they found a scheme to fund it anyway and people died and Bob was with Brian Barger, his partner at AP, broke the biggest stories there and particularly Oliver North's role. So Spencer, I hope you could hear me and I hope I don't have to say I'm mute yourself. You're on mute. I think I'm, am I on mute now? Yes, you are. Can you hear me? Thank you for your patience pulling on. Well, thank you, Joe. Tell us your story. It's been very interesting. All right. I don't want to get into commenting on many of the things that have been said, many of which I would profoundly disagree, but I think one thing that we can all agree on is that Bob Perry was a jewel. He was a, he was a journalist par excellence and I'd never met anyone as courageous or as thorough or as effective as he was. I didn't know Bob when the Ron Contra started. I was chief counsel of the foreign affairs committee and as such, I was also an associate counsel of the Ron Contra committee. And I told this story at Memorial, Bob's Memorial, but I received a call in the middle of the investigation from Haughton Carter, who was a close friend of mine and asking me why I wouldn't speak to Bob Perry. And I said, because Haughton, I don't know Bob Perry and Dick Cheney and the Republicans have this thing locked down so much that if you so much as breathe something to a reporter and they catch you on it, you're dead. So he said, well, you can trust Bob, you know, talk to him. So I did talk to him and he, I ran to meet with him. He came to my, to the anti-room of the foreign affairs committee and just the two of us were there and he started asking me questions. And of course, most of the questions I didn't answer, I just nodded. But I realized as he went on with his questions that he knew a lot about what I had been trying to distribute to the press corps at the hearings. Whenever there was a hearing, each member of the committee, everything that came into the committee was declassified, was classified immediately. I don't care, it was yesterday's newspaper, they stamped classified on it so it couldn't be distributed anywhere. We had a lot of documents, they're all classified and at least classified from the investigation's point of view, but we were allowed to have documents that our member might wish to speak about or question declassified so they would be put in a pile of papers that were distributed to the press at the hearing. All right, and so I tried to get every piece of paper that I could possibly think might be in any way related to the subject that day and put them out. And of course, Lee Hamilton, Dick Cheney and some others really objected to it and wanted to know whether Congressman Fasell could really address all those subjects. And I always said, well, look, I don't know what he's gonna talk about, but he's interested in all these things so I'm gonna put it there just in case he decides to go down that path. They reluctantly agreed, put it out. And we put it out and put it out and I had got very little response from anybody about it. And Fasell, of course, only talked about one or two documents in each session and never got to the bulk of all the things that had been distributed. So Bob started asking me questions about these documents. It became clear to me very quickly that he had read all these documents and he had connected all the dots. He knew so much, I thought he might've been going through my desk. I couldn't believe that anyone had been so thorough and had put all the pieces together over these many weeks of all these documents. There are hundreds of them. He had read them all. He understood the significance of all of them and he asked all the right questions. So he and I became great friends. He never, of course, violated our agreement about off the record or background, but he wrote some of the stuff about Iran Contra that nobody else wrote. Because what we uncovered was that the CIA was involved in a domestic operation to try to influence American public opinion. They set up the CIA funding and direction, a domestic propaganda campaign to try to put pressure on the American public and American members of Congress to support the Contras. And that, of course, was certainly in violation of the law. But Bob got a lot of that stuff out and we became great friends and we cooperated on just about everything else that came down the pike that I might be involved in. October surprise being one of the memorable things as well as a number of other things. And for many years we became very, very good friends, fast friends. I'm in Denmark now and I was here for about 25 years. But every time I came to Washington, Bob and I would have lunch or dinner or whatever and talk about what was going on. But what I admired about him was the courage he had to continue to pursue the truth even at the cost of losing his job on several occasions. On two or three stories about Iran Contra that Newsweek would not let him publish, led to his leaving Newsweek. And it was the kind of thing where Bob was almost blackballed by the mainstream press. They, because of the things that he wrote and because of the truth that he put out there that was inconvenient for a lot of people who were in the high councils of power. So when he started consortium news, I thought at the time it was a great idea but I really wondered whether he'd ever get it off the ground. And of course in the first years it was a struggle but with Diane and Sam and Nat and his family, he was able to keep it going. And even though he went to Bloomberg for a little while, Joe, like you and didn't like it very much. But eventually the truth that Bob kept printing and the truth that he kept putting out there led him to develop a following of people who really were interested in what he had to say. They regarded him as a source of truth about wrongdoing in government and he was a jewel. I miss him a lot. I'm sure America misses him. I wish we'd had him around here the last couple of years. He would have feasted on all the things that have been going on in the Trump administration. But he was a great journalist, a great guy and he pursued the truth like nobody I've ever met and relentlessly and fearlessly. And we need more journalists like him. That's very good Spencer. Who were some of the readers that you know of that were following Bob's work? I mean, were there people of influence in Washington who wanted to know what Bob was writing about? Do they agree with him or not? Well, of course, there were a lot of journalists that people of the National Security Archive particularly followed it very closely. And I can't remember specifically which others but I know that there were a lot of members of Congress who began to follow him because of the stories he'd written about Iran-Contra. Some of them were not very happy of course with what he had written about Iran-Contra because one of the things that I learned at that time was that how powerful people really were in the upper echelons of power. They were, we had a devil of a time trying to publish one section of the Iran-Contra report which referred to the domestic propaganda campaign that the Republicans somehow Dick Cheney had convinced Lee Hamilton that they would have some kind of a bipartisan report. And he led him to believe that right up until the very end. And the paragraphs that I wrote about the domestic influence campaign were ones that the Republicans wouldn't agree to. And Cheney told Hamilton that if that was in there that they would have to have a minority report that they wouldn't go along with a bipartisan report. So it got to be a real fight in the top levels. Fortunately for me, all the majority of the Democrats on the House side supported our version despite the fact that Lee wanted to take it out. And eventually there was a compromise where we got about 80% of it of it in and it was published but the Republicans went in published a minority report anyway where they took a shot at me. But Bob was on that and anything else that I mean that I thought was of note or of interest or anything that I think some good reporter ought to take a look at I'd call Bob and say, why don't you take a look at this or whatever? And I would know that it would be in the hands of somebody who would pursue the truth and would do it relentlessly and thoroughly. So I miss him and I never met a reporter like him. I never met a journalist like him. He was one of a kind and I don't think he'll ever be a replacement.  Tell us a little bit about the probe of surprise and what it was and what your role was in helping Bob on public display. Well, Bob came to me with Martin Killian who was working for, who was their Spiegel correspondent in Washington and said that they had a source who said that George Bush had gone to Paris in October of 1980 to try to talk to the Iranians about keeping the hostages in until after the election. And there was a whole other story about how Casey had done some things and there was an effort to try to influence the Iranians to keep them in. It had begun actually in the summer of 1980 and it had taken various turns but that this was the one thing that they said that I thought, well, I said to Bob and Martin, I said, well, look, if George Bush went to Paris in October, we can find that out because as the vice presidential candidate, he would be under secret service protection so we can find out whether he went there. So I went to the chairman, Donnie Fossell and we also went to Jack Brooks who chaired the government operations committee and we talked about it and so we agreed to try to figure it out and there was enough information about October surprise that Bob dug up and that we dug up and that resulted in the creation of the October surprise committee which Lee Hamilton once again chaired. Donnie Fossell was chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee. He did not want to be on the committee himself because he had one experience with Lee and he didn't want to, he really, he didn't want, he thought that was a little something that it was a little bit too extreme or too farfetched for him to spend his time on. So Lee put in there and he hired Larry Barcella to be the chief counsel and most of the members on the democratic side wanted me to be involved in, I didn't care. And they all went to Fossell and said that they needed to have me involved in it because I was the only one who really knew all the details. So Fossell told me, so look, I'm not gonna be involved but if you wanna be involved, you can do that. So I told Sam Gaineson and Howard Berman, others who were there that I'd be happy to participate. So they had a meeting of the committee. I mean, it was just a member's only meeting and staff and I walked into the room and the Republicans were there too. So the Republicans saw me coming and they actually moved off to the side to have a caucus. And then Henry Hyde was chairing, was a Republican ranking member. He went over and crossed the room, took Lee Hamilton aside and talked to him and Lee came over to me and said, Spencer, the Republicans will not go any further with this meeting as long as you're in the room. I said, well, Lee, I don't care, one way or the other, but it was you guys who wanted me in here. And he said, well, Henry said that if you're in this, we're not gonna cooperate at all in any way. So would you mind stepping out of the room for now? And then we'll talk with Chairman Fassell about it later. So, absolutely, I mean, basically what Hamilton wanted me to do was to step aside. We did have a meeting with Fassell. Fassell said it was up to me and Lee said, Spencer, is a favor to me, please stay out of it. So I had to stay out of the actual investigation itself, but I had already been involved enough to know that I knew a lot about what they needed. And so I continued to brief and consult with various staff people. We never did find out whether George Bush was in Paris. I actually believe he was. And I think Bob eventually came to believe he was too, but we could never prove it. And there were a lot of people who just didn't wanna go that far. But I firmly believe that Casey had these various meetings. There are a lot of stories. I went off to Hong Kong to secretly meet with a guy who met with Casey in London in early 1980. And nobody ever knew that I went there. The Republicans kept trying to find out where I'd been, but I didn't tell it. So I'm convinced it was true. We couldn't prove it. We couldn't prove it and probably will never be proved. I think probably most of the secret service guys who either or died or never actually talked or never told the truth are probably dead by now. But they're Bob pursued it assiduously. And he actually, one of the excuses that the Bush people gave Bob for a particular weekend in October, which was the weekend that we actually thought he would have been in Paris. They said he had lunch at the Chevy Chase Club with Justice Potter Stewart and his wife, they were good friends of the Bushes. And so Bob tried to pursue that and he never could, they said he'd been playing tennis out there one day and had lunch with Potter Stewart and his wife the other day. And he went to the tennis pro out there and the others and they had no recollection of Bush being there on that day. When he tried, by that time Potter Stewart was dead. So Bob tried to reach his wife and was unable to do so. So during the investigation, we also had government investigators from the general accounting office was available on to the October surprise committee. Somebody was asked to go and talk to Potter Stewart's wife to find out whether they had had lunch there. And then a few days later, I wasn't really on the committee, but I was consulting with. They said that the person from the general accounting office came back and said that Justice Stewart's wife is senile and is in frail health and can't be interviewed. Well, so that was that. And a few weeks later, I was in Austria and I was talking to the head of the Salzburg seminar on the Robinson who was a friend of mine. And I sort of told him this story and he says, Spencer. He said, Justice Stewart's wife was here last week. She was dancing with some of the guys. She's in great shape. She was never seen out. So actually somebody from the GAO had been compromised and they had lied to us. So, but it was too late at that point. But, you know, Bob pursued those things. And I mean, as Nat and Diane know, I think that I was, I'm convinced that Bush was there. Bob tried to prove it and never could. But, you know, he was a dogged reporter who never gave up and he pursued that in so many ways that I'm sure no other reporter I've ever seen would have been as relentless or as creative as he was in trying to get to the truth. And that's what we really need in journalism is the truth. We need the press that tells the truth and honors the truth. And Bob Perry, the loss of Bob Perry is a great loss for that cause. Anybody have a question for Spencer about your uncontra days? I think John's speaking, but you're muted, John. John, do you have a question you want to unmute yourself? I'm saying I've got a family dinner waiting. Okay. I'll need to leave. We're going to wrap up. Thank you, John, for the time. Appreciate it very much. Okay. It was a lot longer than he anticipated. So, appreciate you hanging out with me. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. So, Spencer, I just had, so you never could get the Secret Service records then. And what did the committee finally, obviously they came to the conclusion that there was no proof that Bush had been in Paris meeting with Iranians to get them to keep the hostages. And the funny thing is, when were those hostages? These, the hostages were released exact moment that Bush, sorry, that Reagan had his hand on the Bible, didn't, on the Capitol, getting inaugurated. I always found that highly, stage-managed and suspicious. Well, we don't have time, but I was involved in a lot of things that made me believe that Bush was there. People who saw him there, people who dealt with Casey and, and, you know, it was, there was no doubt in my mind that the Republicans made a major effort to keep the hostages in, in a variety of ways. And one of the ways was sending Bush to Paris to give bona fides to the Iranians that they really would keep their promise that if they kept the hostages in till after the election that the Bush organization, the Bush presidency would reward them. And of course they did. But I'm convinced they were there. And the secret service guys, we never, we never got them under oath. I mean, we tried and tried and tried and they just, we just couldn't get them under oath. And- You subpoenaed them? You subpoenaed them, they wouldn't come? Hamilton wouldn't pursue it that far. I mean, Hamilton was, Hamilton just believed, he believed in bipartisanship and he, and, you know, he, there were some things he thought were just, just that the American people couldn't take. He once told a friend of mine over at dinner party when they were discussing it. And he told her, he said, well, you know, there's some things that the American people just can't take. We can't have another water gate. I have a question. Spencer, thanks so much for your insights here. What an education. Let me ask you this. I have an old friend named Robert M. Gates. He actually worked for me at a time and then he became Secretary of Defense eventually. Bob was pursuing his potential role in this. And Bobby too was a little bit elusive in terms of where he was at certain points of time. Can you, do you have any recollection of Bob Gates in his potential role? Well, as you know, Ray, Harry Beninasi said that Bob Gates was involved in. Harry said that Bob Gates was in Paris with Bush. We were trying to find out, Bob was trying to find out where Gates was on certain occasions. And I think Gates produced a calendar that showed that he was in New Jersey on this particular day, but it turned out the calendar that he gave him had Bob Gates in New Jersey on the wrong day. And so we never, we never, we're never able to, never able to prove it, but I think Gates was involved in trying to help, trying to help them do what they were doing. You probably know better than I. Spencer, do you think that this reality played into George H.W. Bush's determination to make sure that Robert M. Gates became CIA director? Well, I think he probably did that at the behest of his father.  I mean, I saw him when, you know, when he was on the Hill on a number of occasions. He couldn't have been more friendly and more nice and more condescending. I mean, you know, so he had a real network of people who thought he was just a nice guy and they just couldn't believe he would do these nefarious things. With the first President Bush, I needed somebody to cover the tracks of Iran gate. And were he not to have been able to get Bob Gates in after the first try did not succeed in as head of the CIA, then it would have been a little bit harder to keep all this stuff under wraps. That's what I was sort of getting at. There were a lot of motivations for him to try so hard. And as you know, Gates got an unprecedented amount of no votes on his nomination at this point. But still there was the anomaly.  I don't really know, Ray. By that time I was already living in Europe running the OSCE Parliament. So I didn't, you know, I talked to Bob Bacchese but I wasn't aware of that. I mean, I wasn't aware that George W. was doing anything in that regard. I was aware what I thought the truth about Bob Gates was. And I was not terribly happy that he was where he was but that's the way of the world.  We are all friends and exchange views but what you really realize that in some parts of this government in this world that very powerful people have a lot more influence than they should have on the way things happen and the way things go. And of course I think that all goes back to the electoral system we have where money plays such a big role. And I'm optimistic about America. I'm so happy about Joe Biden's election and I hope that we win those two seats in Georgia but the only remedy is as Obama says often is to vote and to keep your people voting and you know, I'm discouraged about the press. I mean, how some outlet like Fox News can survive with telling so many lies and putting out so much propaganda and be such a popular venue, a popular source of information for so many Americans is almost disbelieving here in Europe and that knows here in Denmark. I mean, I would say that the Trump Biden election was held here. Biden would get about 97% of the vote. I mean, they have no confidence whatsoever in Donald Trump and their Europeans are very concerned about what's happened to America. Well there in Spencer you've got free education, a national health insurance, a lead for mothers and you've got a social system that doesn't make desperate people go after a demagogue like Donald Trump and everything. That's one of the reasons. I wanna ask you this, you may not know the answer is who coined the term October surprise, you know? You know, I think it was a term that had been used on a number of occasions about in elections that people would think that there would be a surprise event of some kind or another that would affect the outcome of the elections and it was not, I think it was a term that people used periodically, I think it had been used for years by different people and different races. It didn't start. But it was raised up to a different level, of course, in this event, but. Well, Elizabeth, can we ask? Yes, sorry. Nothing, I'm nothing Joe, fine, thank you. We have some questions from, if you guys wanna stick around a little longer from our viewers. Elizabeth, do you have a couple that you might wanna ask? Yeah, I have one and it's not really aimed at any guests in particular. It was just asking whether you all think that Trump might attack Iran in the next, you know, 65 days or so before the inauguration of Joe Biden. That's for Garrett, he's the Iran expert here. Garrett. Okay, I still unmuted or not? Yes, we can do you. My view is very strongly in the negative on that, that there's no chance that Trump is going to make a decision to attack Iran. I think he's moving generally in the other direction in the Middle East more broadly, particularly, of course, on Afghanistan and Syria, but I think it applies as well to his view of what to do about Iran. He was not happy with what had happened under Bolton and I think Pompeo as well. So that bodes fairly well for the prognosis of no war with Iran over the next 60 days or so. Well, I might say, Elizabeth, I've been worried about that for some time because throughout these past few months, anybody would talk about interference in our elections and they would talk about Russia. The Trump administration would always shift it too well. We think Iran is trying to do it, maybe Russia too, but they kept trying to focus on Iran. I had no indication that Iran was doing that kind of cyber war. Maybe they were, but it wasn't on the scale that the Russians were doing it, but the administration kept deflecting it to Iran. And I think, I mean, we know that Bolton wanted to bomb Iran, of course, but that doesn't mean that Trump wasn't sympathetic. I'm worried about what happened. I always thought that if Trump was gonna lose that he would do almost anything to try to prevent that from happening, including starting a war if he could find a convenient place to do it. And of course, probably the only convenient place that he could do it would probably be Iran and of course he would probably think he was doing that because the Israelis would like him to do it and that's what Netanyahu that always wanted to use some kind of force against Iran. But when he fired the lady, the woman civil servant who was in charge of the Nuclear Armed Safety Commission who where the nuclear arm restored in the basement of the Department of Energy. And then he takes out the Secretary of Defense and a lot of his top people. And then he hints about firing the head of the FBI and the head of the CIA begin to worry that these are the ingredients that he would need if he was gonna do that. So I agree that I think it may be, it looks less probable now than it did before and more improbable, but I wouldn't write it off. I think he'll do almost anything to stay in power if he can. You do. Be interested to hear about his views of whether he's gonna leave or not. I suggested that he, a good time for him to concede would be during the second half of today's 1 p.m. NFL games. Masters going on as well. In the Oval Office are no reporters and then he can slip out the back door. You know, you talked about Russian interference there. Facebook ads were so minimal and Garrett, there's an expert on that and Ray knows a lot. And people never talk about Cambridge Analytica, which really helped Trump win last time. They had micro-targeting of over 300 million Americans, hundreds of millions of Americans, right? 240 million Americans, where the Facebook ads for $100,000 by the Russians, by IRA, it's a joke. But nobody talks about Cambridge Analytica. In fact, of course that company doesn't exist anymore and I'm starting to research the role of that kind of micro-targeting in this last election. Apparently both the Democrats and the Republicans use these companies and this is to harvest data about target ads for individual voters, right down to one person in Iowa, another person in New Hampshire to manipulate them to vote for them. It's a very, very dangerous development and it's done without any participation by Russia. Not to say, you know, Russia, you don't have to love Russia, but I think it's, anyway, any other questions? Yes, can I just answer that one point or the point that was being made about the idea that Trump is still following or influenced by Netanyahu. I think that's a key difference now with a year ago or more. Now that the election is over and he's no longer infu-dated to Sheldon Adelson and other pro-Israeli donors to his campaign, I think he is free. And I've heard from people who were knowledgeable about his thinking from people who are in the White House, he feels free to completely differ from the Israelis now for the first time really in his presidency. And the Saudis who wanted to bomb this, cut off the head of the snake as well in Iran. Possibly, but I don't know if that's as dramatic as the case with Israel. Right. Well, Ray's written a piece for us saying that he might do something else in these last 65 days, which is to be forced to declassification of documents that might point to the origin of a resurgate. Maybe we're talking too much about resurgate. Any other questions, Elizabeth? Yeah, there was one more. And that was whether Biden will order regime change in Venezuela, in your opinions. Let's take that one. You, Joe. I don't think Biden is gonna order regime change. I don't think Biden's gonna order regime change anywhere. That's great news, if that's true. Oh, really? Well, if you're right. What was, we gotta get rid of the, we have to complete the regime change in Washington first. Before anything happens. There was a question for Oliver that we couldn't ask him and that was whether he would make a film about Julian Sange. But he probably wouldn't have revealed that even if he were, but he has that idea I don't think he's gonna talk about it. Well, I wanna thank everybody unless, yes, Diane. I just wanted to congratulate you Joe for continuing Bob's work. It was a crisis for us when Bob died. So suddenly in January of 2018 and we contemplated what to do whether we should just let the consortium die with him or keep the work going and that's decision was made to keep it going. And we did an extensive search for an editor and I wanted to say thank you for keeping his memory alive and his work going and the philosophy that he had for what journalism should be. So on this 25th anniversary, I just want everyone to know that it would not be continuing if not for you. So thank you very much for that. We're here. Thank you, Joe. I'm not muted, but I'm speechless to any of this. Thank you. Yes, Ray. Yeah, I just want to raise out on here. Thank Diane for what should be the last words here, but I wanna add that not enough has been said about the support and understanding in the patients that was rendered to Bob by his family by those closest to him who knew about his passion. I know my wife suffers from my passion and I know in a kind of indirect way that Bob could not have done this without the full support of Diane and his sons especially, not only the technical support and setting the thing up, but the ongoing drudgery of trying to fight to tell the truth. And I'm reminded last of all by, well, I was in the hospital with Bob and he had just been doped up pretty much and he was sort of in a jocular mood apparently and he kept saying, hey, Ray, it's too much, right? It's just too much, it's just too much. Remember that, Diane? Yes, it's too much. And it does get to be too much and I just hope that you, Joe and the rest of us, I keep some kind of balance. Hopefully we have the kind of support from our families that Bob enjoyed. Well, I think Ray is trying to do Bob's work as inadequately as I am. I certainly understand the concept of too much. Maybe our program has been too much for our viewers as well. We've been going for more than two hours, although there's still 185 people watching, I believe. So we haven't burned them all out yet. I wanna thank everybody from coming on, Oliver Stone and Peter Koznik and Spencer Oliver. And that's how I made Spencer Oliver into Oliver Spencer because all of us, plus I did it at five a.m. in the morning. I wrote the headline as well, so I apologize for that. Maybe I looked up your name on the phone book and that's why I named you Oliver Spencer. It's been happening to me all my life, Joe. You don't need to apologize. Yeah, but when have you been on a marquee with Oliver Stone? Yeah, that's why I wanted to correct it. So it's Oliver Stone and Spencer Oliver, Garrett Porter, Ray McGovern, Elizabeth Voss, Kathy Bogan, our executive producer, did a great job with the introduction film and setting up the background that people are seeing this in. With a nice picture of Bob on the side, it's really excellent. And who did I miss? Diane, Nat, are you still there? No, Nat had to go. Nat had to go, okay. So for all of you, thank you so much to our viewers and I'm really glad we did this even if it wasn't at the press club. But I think this might have been a lot more easy thing to do since people are in different places. So we'll see you again in the year 2045, the 50th. So for CN Live, we are, oh yes, we are not ending here. I have my producer in my ear. We're gonna end the program with a very, very important 10 minute film or so of Sam Perry describing how consortium news started. Because as Nat pointed out, he wasn't there really at the birth of this thing, but Sam was and Sam has a stern. He also talks about how, as what Ray was saying, Bob took these attacks on him, took their toll. And Bob didn't just brush the marks. And that's another thing I can understand too, just the attacks and not cease. So about everyone I'm asking the viewers to stay with us as we now play this 10 minute video of Sam Perry, Bob's son explaining how consortium news came about. The weight of this incredible crowd and the weight of my father here and the legacy that he created with consortium news. And I'm just so grateful to have you all here and to be part of this event and to do my part to represent the family, to represent dad here. I know dad was a very humble man in many ways. He never wanted the limelight or the attention shown too brightly on him. He wanted the work to speak for itself. So I know part of him would be a little embarrassed by this great turnout. But another part of him I know is smiling. I can feel the smile on his face right now as I look out onto you all. So thank you all very much for coming out. Dad chose a very difficult profession. Journalism is hard work. You all know it. Many of you are journalists or have done journalism, done reporting. It's a lot of work. You're fighting to get the stories. You're fighting to get the truth. You have to write it down. You have to edit it. You have to make sure you're correct all the time. Dad always felt that he couldn't make a single mistake because if he did, he'd come after him even harder. So he worked really hard to get it all right and he took a difficult path with his profession. He took on the mainstream as so many of you all have done with your careers as well. But he took on the mainstream. He was part of the mainstream and then he sort of had to confront them and fight for all the stories that he was able to bring forward. And in doing so, he made himself sort of a target of retribution and attacks. And so he was attacked all the time, every day by big powerful institutions and big powerful people. And he took it. But he took it because he had a community of supporters and people like-minded individuals, people who understood the importance of telling the truth and speaking truth to power.  You are his community. You are his, in many ways, his family, like-minded travelers in this world. And so I especially wanna thank you all for being supporters of his website, consortiumnews.com and for coming out today. This is just so beautiful. So thank you. Rick has asked me to tell a little bit about how we sort of launched Consortium News. I wanted to start by saying first and foremost that we didn't know what the heck we were doing in large, in a lot of ways. We had Dad's great journalism, of course, but the rest of it we had to figure out as we went along. And Dad had been doing reporting on the October surprise story. And it's a story that he kept coming back to throughout his career. He wrote a book called Trick or Treason and then did a special with PBS's front line talking about the October surprise story of the original sins or the original dirty trick of the Reagan Bush years. And he, around 94, 93, 94, sometime in there, the Congress put out a report, an official report on the findings of whether October surprise happened. This is the trick, I'm assuming you all know what October surprise is, but if not, this is where the Reagan and Bush campaign reached out to the Iranians in the 1980 campaign to try to delay the release of the 52 American hostages who had been taken. And Jimmy Carter at the time was working very hard to try to get the hostages released. And what happened was the Iranians were sort of working the Carter people off against, pitting them off against the Reagan Bush people to see who would offer them the better deal. And in fact, it turns out that a lot of those deals ended up sort of coming back and becoming part of the Iran Contra story some years later, some of those connections and some of those deals. So the Reagan and Bush team had negotiated with Iranians to delay the release of the hostages. This was very controversial, obviously. And by 1990s, 1992, 93, but some of this story was starting to really creep out. There had been suspicions for a long time, but some of this story was starting to creep out. Dad wrote his book, did this piece for Frontline, and then Lee Hamilton, who was the moderate democratic committee head of the investigative committee, put out a report basically whitewashing the whole deal that basically said there's nothing to see here, folks, move along. And Dad said, I know that's not true. And so he kept digging, kept reporting, and he ended up going into the basement of the garage of the House-Rabern office building. And in that basement, like in the bowels of our Congress, there were boxes hidden away in this converted ladies' room down in the basement in this garage. And there's Dad, you can almost picture him. In my mind, it's like he's got rats scurrying around, but that's not true. It's like, here he is just working his way in, and he finds the boxes of documents, he pulls them out, and he realizes where the treasure trove he's found, and he start, viciously starts to photocopia while the person who's supposed to be watching him was sort of distracted. So he was like, no, no, no, it's okay, I'm here, that's legit, he kept photocopying the documents. So he had all this evidence now. And he wondered what the heck should we do with this evidence? He knew that he couldn't get a lot of the mainstream press who want to just move on and forget his story ever happened. He couldn't get the mainstream press to pick it up. So he decided, as you would, I guess, to cash out a significant portion of his retirement savings and launch a newsletter called the Media Consortium. And we, for a while, there was a bi-weekly newsletter he had done some work for the Nation magazine and in lieu of payment for that work, he negotiated the rights to mail their subscriber list to get subscribers to our newsletter. And so we had maybe a couple thousand subscribers for the newsletter. And so every Friday, every other Friday, we would go pick up these boxes of this print newsletter, and these heavy boxes, like put them in the car, bring them home, go into the basement of our house, start to collate, fold them, label them, sand them, paper cuts all over the place. Everything was sticky glue on the letter. We had gluey fingers all the time. But we were getting the story out, and that was so important to that. So he asked, he wondered for the next issue at one point, whether we could just do an issue with just the documents that he had found, but we just photocopied that and put that into the newsletter. And I was finishing our college at the time and had sort of was tinkering around with something called the internet. And I said, you know what you can do is you can sand this, these documents, and actually just post them on this internet thing. And maybe people would read them there. And he was like, oh, that's an interesting idea. And you have to keep in mind this is 1994, 95, in that time frame, in 95. And the internet existed, but there really were no websites. There was nothing to teach you how to do any of this work, right? So you had to kind of just figure it out as you went. And so we kind of figured it out. So a little bit shortly, I dabbled with some HTML coding to try to line things up properly. We used to take the stories, copy them into this code. I take a floppy drive. I don't know if people still remember what floppy this drives were, but we take a floppy drive and I would drive down to Springfield where they had the one server that we could post the stories on, right? So Springfield, Virginia is like 10 miles south of our house and 10 miles in DC, it's like, you know, it's an all day trip with the traffic.  And after three or four trips like that, the guys who were posting the server said, you know, it's really kind of a security violation for you to be coming around here every couple of weeks to post this stuff live onto our servers. You really have to think about or figure out how to do file transfer protocol or FTP. And I was like, what the heck is that? And nobody knew what you're talking about. There's a totally different language, but we figured that out too. And that was the birth of Consortium News, the website. It all came from this digging around in the basement of this congressional office and taking the stories and then folding them in the basement of our house and then taking the blocky drive down to Springfield and loading it up. But it's, and from there, we've now been online for almost a quarter century now, which is hard to believe. We've all been a little bit like that, worked in this website all those 23 years, whatever it is now. Every single day, he was tinkering away at it. He was gathering stories from many of you all here in the room and editing the stories, working with contributors to keep our truth alive. And he felt just so passionately about that. I said in the BC event that a word that may not resonate about when you think of dad, it's something I wanted to share today, which is that I think dad was a patriot. I think that he really loved America. He loved our ideals. He loved the people. He loved the idea of holding the institutions that govern us accountable. And that's what really drove him and propelled him through his life. If you are a consumer of independent news, then the first place you should be going to is Consolidate News. And please do try to support them when you can. It doesn't have its articles behind a paywall. It's free for everyone. It's one of the best news sites out there and it's been in the business of independent journalism and adversarial independent journalism for over two decades. I hope that with the public's continuing support of Consolidate News, it will continue for a very long time to come. Thank you so much.