## 22

## INTERVIEW WITH 60 MINUTES

April 20, 2003

> Nasrallah’s appearance on the most widely watched television news program in America, 60 Minutes, seemed to mark a nadir in his interaction with the US media and the Western media in general. Chopped down to a few sound bytes, juxtaposed against arguably exaggerated comments by Democratic Senator Bob Graham of Florida, who was then angling for a run at the presidency, and woven into an overall commentary strongly suggesting that Hezbollah would inevitably directly attack the US just as al-Qaeda had done, the presentation undoubtedly played an important role in ensuring that Nasrallah would never again grant an interview to a US television network. Indeed, with the exception of a small handful of interviews with the Washington Post and the New Yorker over the next three years, Nasrallah himself generally eschewed all US media, print or otherwise, even as Hezbollah faced a substantial challenge to its interests in February 2005, following the assassination of ex-Lebanese premier Rafik Hariri.

> Although 60 Minutes reporter Ed Bradley’s presentation is useful in providing an indication of how the US media was shaping public discourse on the region in the heady, and arguably complacent early days of the Iraq invasion, Nasrallah’s own prediction of how the conflict might play out in the future seems perhaps more prescient in retrospect. “Lots of groups will surface,” he says, “not necessarily al-Qaeda, and they’ll be impossible to bring to justice.”

BRADLEY: Now that the US has gotten rid of Saddam Hussein, one of the Bush administration’s next targets may well be Hezbollah, the Lebanese-based Islamic organization which has very close ties to the governments of Syria and Iran. US intelligence is particularly concerned that Hezbollah, a sworn enemy of the US and Israel, may attack Americans here or in the Middle East in the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq. That’s what Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage had in mind a few months ago when he pinned this label on Hezbollah.

Deputy Secretary Richard Armitage: Hezbollah may be the A-team of terrorists, and maybe al-Qaeda is actually the B-team. And they’re on the list, and their time will come. There is not a question about it. And we’re going to go after these problems just like a high school wrestler goes after a match. We’re going to take them down one at a time.

BRADLEY: What he’s talking about started two decades ago as a ragtag militia group fighting the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon. But there’s no longer anything ragtag about Hezbollah. The Islamic government of Iran reportedly subsidizes Hezbollah to the tune of $100 million a year, providing its several thousand well-trained fighters with sophisticated weapons systems. Iran also sends advisers and, according to US intelligence, issues its marching orders. Senator Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee in the last Congress and is now running for president, says the Bush administration should be more concerned with Hezbollah than they’ve been with Saddam Hussein.

Senator Bob Graham (Democrat, Florida): If the question is, Does Saddam Hussein or Hezbollah represent the greater threat to the people of the United States? In my opinion, there’s no question that Hezbollah is that greater threat.

BRADLEY: Because, he says, Hezbollah has a global network of radical Islamic supporters with enough operatives in the US to pose a terrorist threat here.

Graham: It has a significant presence of its trained operatives inside the United States waiting for the call to action.

BRADLEY: I know that you can’t talk specifically about classified information, but if we were to know that classified information, would we be more concerned, would we be more afraid of Hezbollah than we are today?

Graham: Well, I’m more concerned and more afraid than if I did not know what the scale of their presence was in the United States.

BRADLEY: You say that without any hesitation.

Graham: They are a violent terrorist group. And they have demonstrated throughout their now 25-year history a hatred of the United States and a willingness to kill our people.

BRADLEY: Senator Graham is referring to the 1983 truck bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon, resulting in the death of 241 US Marines. Hezbollah supporters say that attack was a response to shelling by US warships of Islamic factions in the Lebanese Civil War. The US called it terrorism. But Hezbollah’s leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, who we met in Beirut, insists that today his group poses no threat to the US. Unlike the leadership of al-Qaeda, he isn’t hiding from anyone. You may never have heard of Nasrallah before, but he is a hugely popular figure not just in the region, but also among Arabs living in the West.

BRADLEY: You know that the top deputy to the Secretary of State Colin Powell has referred to Hezbollah as “the A-team of terrorism,” in other words, better at terrorism than al-Qaeda.

HN: Secretary Powell can say what he wants. I believe the Americans are just saying what the Israelis want them to say. I consider this to be an Israeli accusation coming out of an American mouth, and nothing more.

BRADLEY: (Voiceover) When he became its leader ten years ago, Nasrallah turned Hezbollah into a formidable fighting force. Few people know more about him than journalist Nick Blanford, who has covered Lebanon for eight years and is now writing a book about Hezbollah and Sheikh Nasrallah.

Blanford: People that know him, I talked to some Hezbollah fighters that speak of him almost as they would a wife or a mother, that they think of him before they go to sleep at night, that he’s always in their thoughts. So he has this tremendous sort of power over the rank and file.

BRADLEY: Enough power to recruit and train skilled commandos who specialized in attacking the Israeli forces which occupied southern Lebanon for 22 years. Their most effective weapon, remote-controlled roadside bombs, which were detonated when Israeli patrols passed by, as in this attack in southern Lebanon. All told, Israel lost more than 900 soldiers in Lebanon. In May 2000, the Israeli army withdrew.

BRADLEY: What did Israel’s withdrawal do for Hezbollah in the eyes of the Arab world?

Blanford: Well, it was an enormous boost for Hezbollah. I mean, this was a small Arab organization that had defeated the mightiest military force the Middle East has ever seen.

BRADLEY: With the Israelis out of Lebanon, Nasrallah encouraged and assisted the Palestinian uprising against Israel. He has acknowledged sending secret agents carrying weapons to the West Bank, where he is considered a hero. Some kids in the Gaza Strip even dress up like him, down to the beard and the glasses. At this event, a boy playing Nasrallah is flanked by one child playing a security guard and another dressed as a suicide bomber. And in Lebanon, where Hezbollah runs a network of schools and hospitals and participates in local elections, Nasrallah, a Muslim, is a hero even to the country’s Christian President Emile Lahoud.

President Lahoud: For us, Lebanese, and I can tell you, a majority of Lebanese, Hezbollah is a national resistance movement. If it weren’t for them, we couldn’t have liberated our land. And because of that, we have big esteem for the Hezbollah movement.

BRADLEY: President Lahoud has such high esteem for Hezbollah, he’s ceded control of the border with Israel to them—a border where Hezbollah and Israeli soldiers now confront each other just a few yards apart.

BRADLEY: This side controlled by Hezbollah; over there is Israel. Hezbollah has already fired rockets across the border, and US officials believe that in the past two years they’ve been stockpiling rockets in this area, hidden in caves and underground bunkers, higher-quality Iranian rockets that could reach Haifa, about 50 miles away.

BRADLEY: Openly calling for terrorism against Israel, Nasrallah, in this speech, is urging suicide operations. ‘In Palestine,’ he’s saying, ‘these operations are the only way to root out the Zionists.’ That’s the kind of material Hezbollah broadcasts daily on its own television station, Al-Manar, which reaches a worldwide audience by satellite. Because of Washington’s support for Israel, Hezbollah is conducting a ferocious propaganda offensive against the United States. This message broadcast on Al-Manar portrays US foreign policy as satanic. The image of the Statue of Liberty, a skull for her face, wearing a gown dripping with the blood of other nations. But even though he’s one of the most powerful anti-American voices in the Middle East, he has no use for Saddam Hussein. In fact, he blames the US for Saddam’s rise.

HN: The US provided political and military support to the Iraqi regime for decades. They created this mess. I don’t believe Saddam alone should be held accountable. We should also go after those who supported him, like the American government.

BRADLEY: Sheikh Nasrallah has described war on Saddam as a satanic American–Zionist plan to dominate the Arab world. What is satanic about removing Saddam from power?

HN: The United States isn’t seeking democracy in Iraq, it’s after the oil in Iraq, and that isn’t exactly a humanitarian pursuit. The US wants to impose its political will on Iraq and wants to impose Israel’s domination in the region. Certainly, these objectives are not moral objectives in my opinion. In fact, we say they are satanic objectives.

BRADLEY: And yet, Nasrallah has spoken out against terrorist attacks on the US, including the attack of September 11.

HN: We reject those methods and believe they contradict Islam and the teachings of the Quran, which do not permit this barbarity.

BRADLEY: But Senator Graham doesn’t buy it.

Graham: There are a number of lessons that we should learn from September 11. One of those lessons is these terrorist groups tend to do what they say they are going to do. If they define the United States as being satanic, and that therefore they want to kill us, they will find ways to carry out that objective.

BRADLEY: And are you convinced that they possess weapons of mass destruction?

Graham: I’m not certain whether they possess them. But I am confident that they could possess them through their close affiliation with Iran, which has a larger warehouse of chemical and biological weapons, and is closer to gaining nuclear capability than Iraq.

BRADLEY: So if Iran wants them to have weapons of mass destruction, they’ll have them?

Graham: They will have them, and they’ll have them in large quantities.

BRADLEY: Iran isn’t the only country that supports Hezbollah. Syria allows them to train fighters in remote camps in Syria, and in territory under their control in Lebanon.

Graham: In recent years, they have been infiltrating into this core in the United States people who have gone through their training camps and have the skills of terrorist activity.

BRADLEY: According to the FBI, Hezbollah has never conducted a terrorist attack in the United States. The FBI says that its members here are raising money for activities overseas, nothing more than that.

Graham: There has to be a first for every organization. The first for al-Qaeda was September 11, 2001. When will be the first attack against an American in America by Hezbollah?

BRADLEY: We asked Lebanon’s President Lahoud, a political ally of Hezbollah, if Americans have anything to fear from them.

Lahoud: America? For sure not.

BRADLEY: But the United States is the strongest backer of Israel. It’s the same kind of thing you see with al-Qaeda, attacking the United States to get at Israel.

Lahoud: Well, believe me, they don’t have anything to attack the US or any US citizen for sure. But Israel is our enemy, that’s something else. It has nothing to do with the US.

BRADLEY: But that’s not what Nasrallah said last month, just days before the war began. ‘We are confident,’ he said, ‘the Iraqi people cannot accept the humiliation of a US occupation government, which,’ he added, ‘would really be a Zionist occupation government.’ Then he warned the Americans they’d meet with rifles, blood, and suicide operations.

HN: American policies in the region encourage this kind of retaliation whether we agree with it or not. I am expressing the reality. I believe the continuation of American policy will make enemies of all Arabs and Muslims, meaning hundreds of millions of Arabs and 1.4 billion Muslims around the world. Lots of groups will surface, not necessarily al-Qaeda, and they’ll be impossible to bring to justice.

BRADLEY: Just this week, Powell threatened Syria with tough new sanctions if it continues to support organizations the US classifies as terrorist.