AMY GOODMAN: We’re here in the studios of KPFA, Pacifica station out in Berkeley, California, as we are covering the Media and Democracy Congress that is happening today and tomorrow and throughout the weekend. On today’s show, we begin with yesterday’s visit by the Kuwaiti emir with President Clinton in the White House. Today, former President Bush is meeting with the emir. And then we’re going to go to a national student conference that challenges the stereotypes of youth apathy and conservatism, and we’ll be talking about the demonization of youth in the press. That’s all coming up on Democracy Now!

In 1991, Project Censored chose a journalist Dennis Bernstein’s story on casualties in the Gulf War as the number one censored story of the year. Five years later, that story remains underreported, as does much of what’s going on in post-war Kuwait.

We’re joined right now by Dennis Bernstein in the studio. He’s an associate editor with the Pacific News Service here in San Francisco and co-host of Flashpoints, a daily radio news magazine on Pacifica station KPFA.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Dennis.

DENNIS BERNSTEIN: Thanks, Amy. Welcome to the earthquake state.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’ve got a few things to talk about today. We want to begin with a story of what’s going on in Kuwait and what it means for President Clinton, and presidential candidate Bill Clinton, to be meeting with the emir. And then we want to go on with you to a story that you’ve been covering for years. And that’s to the state of Arizona, where they just completed their Republican primary. We want to go to the border with you and another guest to talk about the militarization that is going on there, that we saw not at all in the mainstream press this week, because that is a story of Arizona that you covered in following the sanctuary movement in [inaudible] into the studio, we can just touch on the story of Al D’Amato, Al D’Amato, the senator of New York, who is certainly a kingmaker and will be getting a lot of press in the next few days as we move into the New York primary. So that’s what we’re going to do here on this hour of Democracy Now! Let’s begin with the emir of Kuwait and his visit to the White House yesterday. Dennis, what is happening in Kuwait today?

DENNIS BERNSTEIN: Well, first of all, this is — as you point out, it’s two presidents, and two presidents in a row, that have stood by this extreme authoritarian ruler in which — rules Kuwait, in which women really don’t have any rights. And if you don’t live in Kuwait and you’re not a Kuwaiti with roots back to the 1920s, you have no rights. Now, this is a story that really did not receive much coverage. You have Bill Clinton for the second time standing with the royal family. You’ll remember, back in 1993, Clinton responded to some unverified information from Kuwaiti sources that there was an assassination plot against George Bush. Bill Clinton bombed Baghdad at the time and actually killed the noted international painter, the Iraqi painter Layla Al-Attar, who was known for painting extraordinary portraits of suffering of Palestinians, like at the various al-Sabra and al-Shatila camps. The idea that a Democratic president who prides himself in believing in democracy would be with the emir of Kuwait is unbelievable.

What followed the so-called liberation of Kuwait was nothing short of a slaughter. Now, this sounds extreme, but let me give you some of the documentation from Amnesty International, before we talk about who’s really responsible for what happened. Amnesty International reported that there were 12 kinds of torture going on after the so-called liberation of Kuwait, torture being carried out by Kuwaiti security forces. Let me quote Amnesty International saying — it was saying that this torture included “savage beatings with sticks, hoses, pipes and rifle butts, whippings with electric cables, electric shocks, burning with cigarettes, candles and acid, biting and threats of execution and sexual assault.” And these torturers worked in tag teams. So the torture went on and on. One team would finish, the next team would come in and continue the torture.

Now, this is extraordinary. The London Independent reporter Robert Fisk attempted to get this information out. He interviewed U.S. officials in Kuwait at the time and asked them about this assault that was going on against some 350,000 Palestinians who were in the country before the war. Most of them, by the way, supported the Kuwaiti resistance. Robert Fisk interviewed U.S. officials and said, “What about this torture? What about this slaughter? What about the purging of these Palestinians?” And he could not understand the U.S. officials’ response, which was virtually nil. What the U.S. officials said is, “Yes, we have heard reports that these tortures were going on in police stations and schools around the country, but we didn’t have the authority to intercede, because while we could hear some of it from outside, we didn’t have the right to go in and see what was happening to these people.”

What was happening was based on what was planned by the Kuwaitis and the United States government at the beginning of the war. There was a document that we got at the Pacific News Service, a Pentagon document, prepared by the Pentagon and the Kuwaiti royal family, that talked about the purge of the Palestinians, that they couldn’t be a trusted. They’d be referred to as stay-behind Palestinians, as if they were working with the Iraqi resistance. There would be passes. There would be prison camps. All this came to pass, by the way, and the Palestinians were, in fact, purged from the country. They talked about how they had to purge the Palestinians from the banking system. The Palestinians were in charge, essentially. They were middle-level society in Kuwait. They were the bankers, the teachers, the doctors. This document with the Pentagon talked about how they had to change the currency and purge the Palestinians, because they couldn’t trust them. And what followed was this slaughter. These Palestinians were driven out of the country. First, they were abused. And we are talking about 12 different kinds of torture on the way to the border and no-man’s land.

AMY GOODMAN: I believe most of what we heard at that time was that the Kuwaiti family had returned, and their first act was to install gold fixtures in the bathrooms. We didn’t hear much about torture.

DENNIS BERNSTEIN: Well, now, this — the Pentagon document, now, this is what’s very compelling. The Pentagon document showed how the U.S. government would monitor everything that happens in Kuwait, not only down to the gold toilet seats that would be replaced in the palace, but down to the amount of calories that each Kuwaiti citizen — I underline “Kuwaiti citizen,” because you had to be a Kuwaiti citizen back to 1920 to get this kind of support and help from the U.S. government — they would monitor everything. So, when we talk about torture and this horrific situation and the purge of the Palestinians, we’re talking about it all being monitored by the United States government. This is what we’re talking about. This is what Robert Fisk attempted to report about and what we did at Pacific News Service. There was very little information coming out about this purge.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, Dennis, I know one of the stories you reported on was a family who came to this country, a Kuwaiti Palestinian family, who had aided the Kuwaiti underground resistance during the time of the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, but didn’t fare too well when the Kuwaiti royal family returned.

DENNIS BERNSTEIN: Well, this is a story that crystallizes what the situation and the atmosphere was. Imagine, this is a Palestinian family. Let’s just — this is the Farhat family. And three members stayed in Kuwait during the occupation, and they risked their lives to support the Kuwaiti resistance. The father, in fact, was essentially a member of the Kuwaiti equivalent of the FBI as a Palestinian. He was a middle-level member. So this is somebody who worked for years with the Kuwaiti security forces. After the so-called liberation, Kuwaiti resistance came to the Farhat family house. They found out they were Palestinians. That’s all they needed to know. They came into the house. They had — there was the father, the daughter and the son. They had this — they forced the son to shoot the father. Then they killed the father. Then they had the daughter prepare them coffee. They said, “Don’t worry. You’ll survive.” After they raped her, they shot her in the head and left her for dead. But she survived. She said she survived because she wanted — she was determined to tell this story of what happened.

Now, you can imagine, Amy, if this happened to a family whose — the son literally went out and fought with the Kuwaiti resistance, the daughter went to the bank for hiding Kuwaitis to get money out of the bank, because she was Palestinian, the father worked with the Kuwaiti security forces before the war, and this family was shot, killed and left for dead — you can imagine what happened to your everyday Palestinian family.

AMY GOODMAN: And yesterday, of course, just to repeat one of the top stories, President Clinton met with the Kuwaiti emir in the White House. Now, this is exactly five years after the so-called liberation of Kuwait. And there was this five-year plan. So, in a sense, that’s supposed to be ending right now, isn’t it? Where the U.S. is working as closely as it is with the royal family. So they must be now in the White House making plans for what is going to happen.

DENNIS BERNSTEIN: Well, the only thing that’s going to end is the official U.S. involvement in Kuwait, which was made official, according to this Pentagon document. But according to the document, many of the things that were put in place will be there forever. Now, there was another document that we got at the time, Amy, from the Kuwaiti pro-democracy movement. And they were planning to take this opening with the war to seize some more space for democracy. According to the document, the emir and the U.S. government had something different in mind. This document shows how the Kuwaitis were planning to purge even the minor changes that had happened towards democracy in Kuwait in the last 20 years. And the Pentagon document talks about how they would — this is right in the document. It talks about how there would be the imposition of martial law, total press censorship, the banning of any criticism of the emir of Kuwait. That’s still in place. You cannot write negatively about the emir in the various papers.

AMY GOODMAN: In Indonesia, it’s called expressing enmity toward the state

DENNIS BERNSTEIN: No enmity towards this state. And this went on and on. You could not — it provides for the ethnic cleansing. I mentioned the stay-behind Palestinians. It talks in the document about the ID cards, about the prison camps. This policy, which was purged — put against the Palestinians to purge the Palestinians, is in place, and has been in place, to do it to the next group of people who came in to take the Palestinians’ places. And by 1992, some 190,000 people had come from Pakistan and India to take the place of the Palestinians. In a few months, there was a report from Human Rights Watch about unbelievable abuses of the new population that had just come into Kuwait. We’re talking about women who were being mass raped. When they complained, they would be thrown out of windows. When they went to the police station to report this, the police would call their owners, if you will. They were indentured servants or slaves. And the police would collaborate with the owners to suppress the Palestinians — not the Palestinians, the Kuwait — the — I’m sorry, the Pakistanis and the Indians. They would suppress their information. They would take their passports, so they couldn’t even communicate with the outside world about the abuses.