Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 2/24/23 Seymour Hersh: How and Why America Blew Up Nord Stream

Episode Date: February 26, 2023

Scott is joined by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh to discuss his recent story about the American operation to sabotage the Nord Stream pipelines last September. Scott and Hersh talk about the ...relevant history behind the operation as well as the strategic context around these pipelines between Germany and Russia. They also run through a number of Hersh’s other stories such as the fake assassination attempt on George H.W. Bush and the 2013 sarin attacks in Syria.  Discussed on the show: “How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline” (Substack) SeymourHersh.Substack.com “Whose sarin?” (London Review of Books) “The Redirection” (The New Yorker) Seymour Hersh is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist famous for breaking the story of the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam. Since then, Hersh has broken many major stories on topics such as the Syrian Civil War and the raid on Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound. In February of 2023, Hersh began writing on Substack with a story about the US operation to sabotage the Nord Stream pipelines.  This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:00 All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and The Brand New, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton dot for you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show all right you guys on the line i've got seymour hirsch now writing at substack and of course the big exclusive is how america took out the nordstream pipelines and that's at seymourherstuh
Starting point is 00:01:00 substack.com. Welcome back to the show. So how you doing? Yeah, you know, hanging in there. Good. All right. So look, when they blew up the pipeline, whoever it was, TV said the Russians obviously blew up their own pipeline. Everyone knows that, but now you're reporting otherwise. You say that America had the means, motive, and the opportunity to blow up the Nord Stream pipelines. That's three out of four of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines. So do tell your story, please, sir. Well, I can tell it quickly. I don't think what the media did was follow the lead of the White House. There were some briefings. The White House effort was blown up. There was a news conference and with Jake Sullivan, National Security Advisor. And he then, somebody asked if we thought the
Starting point is 00:01:46 Russians did it. He did all the usual stuff. Well, it sounds like the Russians, looks like the Russians. That's about all they did. Look, Scott, I would guess a lot of people knew all of my know the next couple of sentences, but I'm going to say anyway, which is that beginning in about a year and a half ago, two years ago, in late 2001, it looked clear like Russia was that Putin was going to come and evade. He'd been talking about it, been threatening because of the, not without some cause, but of course, I don't think there's ever enough cause to start the bloodiest war since the end of World War II in Europe. But that's a separate issue. He certainly was, not without cause. We've certainly been expanding NATO when we promised
Starting point is 00:02:29 him in 1970 after Germany moved. And we put the new, New Germany, they're both East and West together. We put him, we allowed Gorbachev allowed East and West to join NATO, which is a defense treaty against Russia, really, the Warsaw Pact. And the deal was that we wouldn't expand further east. And what became, NATO was a Western European people. Protection Society. And now it's, you know, it's expanded all over Spain, countries in the caucuses, you know, you name it. It's just expanded way beyond the original border original idea. More than that, it also expanded more closer, more to the east to Russia. Everything we said we went to, but that's, you know, whether that's enough to justify bombing and killing, I don't know,
Starting point is 00:03:16 but you can certainly, it wasn't without some justification. Plus, we also put missiles that we call defensive but everybody in the community knows that in overnight overnight you can turn them into offensive weapons and you're a they were eight they were in poland about 80 miles from the border or 80 kilometers and they were 800 miles or so uh from downtown moscow which means that um you know i don't eight nine seven eight nine minutes you know to wipe out moscow to with you know the kind of power our new nuclear weapons it's just you know you can't you can't imagine it 100 times more than Hiroshima, et cetera, et cetera, you know the story. And so all of this was going on, and the problem we always had is Biden, through hard,
Starting point is 00:04:06 through all the dice in on supporting Ukraine, when Russia finally decided they'd have enough of Ukraine and Ukraine aggressiveness, and they were just, they Russians always treated Ukraine, like second-class citizens, if you remember in the 1930s, of course you don't remember, but we read about it. In the 1930s, there was a famine there. Stalin took control of Russia. Stalin took control of all of the grain and two million Ukrainians starved the death in the great fields of the Caucasus.
Starting point is 00:04:40 Believe me, and there's a lot of justification for a lot of bad blood, but we're not talking about, we're talking about somebody that goes beyond bad blood. But we're right now in a situation where it's getting close to, if you read the New York Times of Washington Post, you wouldn't know how bad it is. I can tell you, you know, I know people who know things, and I always have. And their view of the war is so much worse than that you read in the newspapers. We're in real trouble in Ukraine. And one of the issues that underlies the whole pipe thing is the fact that Biden, you know,
Starting point is 00:05:12 is getting a great deal of money. We spent, I think it's really about $100 billion is what I hear. going in there. God knows how much got to the original place because of corruption. There quite a bit was, I guarantee, filtered off. Actually, I know it was, and I know our community knows about it and doesn't like it. And I assume Biden does know it too, but that doesn't matter. It keeps him pumping. And you've got a Democratic Congress, this is now for the war. When I was doing stuff about war in the Vietnam days, the Democrats were against it, there were some great chunk of moderate Republicans, which don't exist very much anymore, that were
Starting point is 00:05:47 also supporting the 1973 War Powers Act that ordered the president, that basically kept the president from spending troops in there without congressional authority, hard and fast, was written by a Republican, moderate Republican senator, was pushed by him in from, I think, Kentucky. And so it's a different world now. And the fear is that Biden and his gaggle, you know, Sullivan and the Secretary of State Blinken and Undersecretary Victoria Nuland, just a, they just, it's a constant barrage against Russia, constant barrage against China. And it's gotten at a point where it may not be, well, it doesn't matter.
Starting point is 00:06:32 It's gotten to the point where there's a lot of concern about it. A lot of people I know who know more history than I do think of 1914. They think we could trigger something really bad. But that's only background. So in 2021, before Christmas, and the Russians are definitely moving troops up there. They haven't, you know, and we're still thinking we can do something. And so anyway, back in those days, Jake Sullivan convened a little, you know, a group of experts. He called for a little panel.
Starting point is 00:07:04 They met in the secret room over in the executive office building, which was right next to the White House. And it was the CIA, NSA, State Department, Treasury Department, Joint Chiefs, all those various services, perhaps, not that many services, but the Joint Chiefs. And the issue was, and I used the language of the meeting, because that should convince people I actually did have something. The issue was, we want something to do. Jake says the president wants some recommendations. What we can do to convince the Russians not to go, and they should basically be issues that we can rescind or options that are not rescindable.
Starting point is 00:07:43 In other words, something you can rescind would be a sanction. Something that's not rescindable would be kinetic. And eventually it got to, maybe the pipelines is an option, and they liked it. The White House liked it. And this is a very secret, you know, basically covert operation was set up. And we went right away to Norway. And I have to tell you, I didn't know that much about Norway.
Starting point is 00:08:12 But I did the story that you mentioned three weeks ago, and I've been following it with a couple of different stories. And a couple of days ago, I published another story on my little subtract thing, which is amazing. I never thought of, by the way, of going into New York Times or Washington Post, So my old magazine, The New Yorker with this, it's just a different time. It wouldn't have gone anywhere. Yeah, leave them in the dust. Well, they are in the dust, really, right now on this stuff.
Starting point is 00:08:36 They still haven't figured it out that they better get going on the story. And what I wrote a couple of days ago was that the Norwegians had been with us early in the Gulf, in the Vietnam War. They've been helping us run COVID operations in 1964, before there was a declared war before we'd bomb North Vietnam. It was just the South. We knew the North was helping, but the North hadn't committed yet. They hadn't started sending troops down to Hocci Man Trail. But we were just doing all kinds of stuff that had seals going in and not trying to knock out raider facilities. None of that was known.
Starting point is 00:09:12 And so there's a, the Norwegians have been there for us down and dirty. And actually, I now know from getting a lot of letters from people, the Norwegian work with us undercover to provoke the North. idea was to provoke the North Carolina North or visa. They would respond and we could bomb them. They didn't respond, but we lied about some, we lie. I mean, Johnson told the lie and said we'd been attacked at when we hadn't been on television. It's just horrible stuff. Got us into a war that killed, what, two and three million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans with untold, wounded and untold guys walking around with brain damage, you know, half crazy because of the war. Who knows? But just the point being, there was a premise for practice.
Starting point is 00:09:56 maybe a Democratic president's acting irrationally when they want it war. They really want it war. Maybe for re-election purposes, I just don't know. I don't know what's in his head, Biden said. Anyway, so they convened this group, and the group said, we can do it. We can do it. We have the people. We know some guys that can get in the water, very good guys.
Starting point is 00:10:16 I began my story writing about a place in Florida where we train deep sea miners. The Navy does. It's a great place. the miners that come out of the guys who go down the divers are just a mate not these they're not minors they're divers the guys that go down are just the best and the brightest in a funny way uh they they never talk i mean you don't see you don't see you don't see you see navy seals in movies they're jumping in the water these guys these guys call seals uh like they call them flipper like flipper the seal you know they they make fun of the seals because they said among other
Starting point is 00:10:50 things they're just swimmers who always talk on television after they do a secret mission But anyway, so we had it going. And so, flash forward, the team's able to do it. They find a time where they can do it covertly. The Norwegians are helping to find the Baltic Sea. The targets are these two huge pipes that sending the German, Germany is an industrial powerhouse. It has the largest BASF, the largest chemical company in the world, 100,000 employees, Mercedes, BMWs, all these fancy cars, it's a powerhouse, and they need a lot of fuel.
Starting point is 00:11:30 So in 2011, Nord Stream 1, the first main pipeline directly from Russia, 750 miles down, or whatever it is down, east, west. I always got to confuse the maps to Germany, to report in Germany. No stops. This goes, and that began producing from 2011 on until it was shut down. by Putin a couple of years ago, a year and a half ago, in anger at us for all the language and all the provocation, this is before the war actually began. And that produced incredible amounts of the Germans actually had so much gas on that one pipeline. They were retailing it.
Starting point is 00:12:12 They had a company that resold it for a profit. And the first pipeline was owned by gas prom, which is the big oil company and gas company owned by oligarchs. And of course, tons of money when flowing back. Not to Putin, it went to the Russian, I guess, treasury. And one year was $45 billion just from half interest. The other half interests were stockholders, four different companies from Europe, who took the cheap gas and retail it, what they call downstream, sold it to other gas companies all over Europe. So the whole, everybody, the European continent, was just floating. They have no resources there. You have to say, and Europe is all always looked to us for leadership after World War II in NATO, in financing, and all military
Starting point is 00:13:00 stuff. They've looked to us. And so one pipeline is gone. Another one, Nord Stream 2, was brand new. It was ready to go in late in 2001, and under our pressure, it was going directly to Germany, and the German government headed by, I guess Chancellor Schultz was there, the one who was Chancellor now, who's going to be coming, I think, this week, next week to Washington, and to show what a good little one-trick pony he is and sit with the president and say, I'm wonderful things on. Of course, we're happy with everything that happened.
Starting point is 00:13:32 And they had the right to open it. It was just sitting there. And in the fall, in late fall, September the 26th, nine months. So these guys make the pipeline go and their purpose in doing it, the covert group, was to give the president more assets to use and to try and convince Putin not to attack. That's what they thought was the relevant person. We have the capability
Starting point is 00:13:58 to do it. And Putin actually, I don't know if he heard it or not, but it was certainly out there. Biden, in February, two weeks before the war began, February the 7th, and a press conference said, if they start this war, we can take out Nord Stream 1, and we have the means to do it. We know how to do it, which really irritated the guys in the covert world. You know, they're in Norway trying to figure out what the, you know, trying to figure out how to do it. They knew they could do it, but they needed the right time. You can't jump sailor ship and have miners. Guys, and they're not deep sea, but guys that, it's only 260 feet of water.
Starting point is 00:14:31 They could do it, they can go down and come up if there's a decompression chamber without stopping. Otherwise, they'd have to stop every 90 feet. But they know what they're doing. But, you know, there's no oil in the Baltic Sea. So you just can't have a bunch of miners show up. You needed a cover. And that summer, there was a NATO, exercise and with some adroit thinking, the boys doing the operation somehow persuaded somebody
Starting point is 00:15:00 there to have a research and development exercise in mine hunting. So there was a two-week exercise, NATO exercise, every summer it's been going on in the Baltic Sea, run by the Sixth Fleet, which controls NATO there, and all the NATO sea there. And in the midst of all these guys dropping mines are trying to blow them up and all that crap these guys went and they planted the mines and they planted timers on it so the president could call when he wanted to well not really mines right you just mean i beg your pardon well they're not mines they were they're they're c4 dynamite i just want to make sure that nobody criticized you that over a little over a little over a little flub like that later or whatever go ahead let me take you when you do what i've done i do so much talking
Starting point is 00:15:45 now you know so many requests for interview you don't i i understand i just want to make sure everybody clear what happened you're saying they went and planted explosives on the pipes there no it was actually c4 a big dose enough to knock down a building in new york i've got to tell you hey can you tell me why they blow up three out of four was that because there was a failure no because i was just going to say one of the problems you have when you leave it under water for a long time um salinity etc things can go wrong and initially uh Biden uh wanted to blow him up in june that was the plan that so they understood but he changed his mind at the last minute. And so they had to figure out a way to keep the, the explosive viable and not
Starting point is 00:16:27 have them trigger. You know, it's all done by low frequency singles. And it's very primitive, even though it's not as primitive as I'm going to tell you. But when you were a kid, you had all these games. I'm just going to get a book here. You had all these games where they'd go to one room and another. You had to go knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock. You know that? Do you ever play that game as a kid? No, but go ahead. Did you have brothers and sisters? I do have a sister, yeah. I had a sister in order, I had to go knock, knock, knock. She was older, which means that she wanted nothing to do with me, but you have to knock, knock, knock, knock, you know what I mean. And anyway, that's what the signal is.
Starting point is 00:16:59 And the more you keep it in the water, there's heavy boats. It's a lot of commercial commerce in that, in that Baltic Sea. And they all do, well, they frequently talk by low frequency. You can trigger the mind inadvertently the more it's in the water, plus it can get corroded. So three of the four worked. One didn't blow up because obviously the water got to it in some way, even though they tried their best not to. President finally authorizes in late September. And at that point, the guys can't figure out what the hell is going on.
Starting point is 00:17:27 It wasn't there to scare the Russians and talk about it. Why do you want to do it then? And then it turns out, I mean, I can tell you, it was much anger about it because he did it because, as he knew, as he'd been told, the war in Ukraine, despite what the newspapers have been saying about the great offense of that summer, at the best, was going to be a complete, it was going to be just no man it's going to be no win no lose it's going to be stalemated at the very best and the odds are as Putin got to he did the draft and it was protest but he got over 100,000 more people in there and they have much more don't forget in America we if we want to get weapons into into a fast way into the Ukraine as a we put
Starting point is 00:18:18 100 billion dollars in there. We have to go to our contract with outside contractors and, you know, business people and get a contract and have it negotiated when to start, when they end, the kind of fees. In Russia, it's the state owned. He can get arms a lot faster. It was, you know, a little bit like we did in World War II when we just converted the Ford factory and everything into defense factories and we produced, you know, a ship a week and all sorts of planes every day.
Starting point is 00:18:45 So he can produce more. It's going to be over. It's going to be very bad and it's going to be very over. And it's going to be very bad for Biden politically and his little gang of boys. Nuland, well, she's not a boy. Robert Kagan's wife. So, yeah. Well, you know who he is.
Starting point is 00:19:05 He's one of those geniuses that the thought after 9-11, the way to get after Al-Qaeda was to go and destroy Iraq, which was led by an awfully bad man. But the one he hated, well, she worked for Dick Cheney at that time. But he couldn't stand Muslim radicals. He was, you know, that's not as bit. Like, anyway, we did. It doesn't matter what we did then because we, that was his dumb.
Starting point is 00:19:32 And I know somebody named Biden that supported that war very much when a lot of people did not. Yeah, you did. So did. Hillary Clinton. Hang on just one second. Hey, y'all, the audio book of my book, enough already. Time to End the War on Terrorism is finally done. done. Yes, of course, read by me. It's available at Audible, Amazon, Apple Books, and soon
Starting point is 00:19:52 on Google Play and whatever other options there are out there. It's my history of America's war on terrorism from 1979 through today. Give it a listen and see if you agree. It's time to just come home. Enough already. Time to end the war on terrorism, the audiobook. Hey guys, I've had a lot of great webmasters over the years, but the team at Expanddesigns.com have by far been the most competent and reliable. Harley Abbott and his team have made great sites for the show and the institute, and they keep them running well, suggesting and making improvements all along. Make a deal with Expandesigns.com for your new business or news site. They will take care of you. Use the promo code Scott and save $500. That's expanddesigns.com.
Starting point is 00:20:41 Man, I wish I was in school so I could drop out and sign up for Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom instead. Tom has done such a great job on putting together a classical curriculum for everyone from junior high schoolers on up through the postgraduate level, and it's all very reasonably priced. Just make sure you click through from the link in the right margin at Scott Horton.org. Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom, Real history, real economics, real education. Searchlight Pictures presents The Roses, only in theaters August 29th, from the director of Meet the parents and the writer of poor things comes the roses starring academy award winner olivia coleman academy award nominee benedic cumberbatch andy sandberg kate mckenon and alison janny a hilarious
Starting point is 00:21:26 new comedy filled with drama excitement and a little bit of hatred proving that marriage isn't always a bed of roses see the roses only in theaters august 29th get tickets now uh and so here's the issue and here's why this story it has a shelf life that was predictable because once you get past the original lies and no lies and all about it the fact that the matter is
Starting point is 00:21:51 that what he did in late September and I think I've done the best I can I think at that time it's pretty clear there were briefings talking about stalemate and he was also very worried that fall was coming and that the Germans controlled they had censored, Germany had censored
Starting point is 00:22:07 that new pipeline. The other one was gone Putin had shut it down in rage. He claimed there was one of the pumps didn't work and all that, but the truth is he shut it down. So they needed that pipeline. They had some reserves in Germany and Western Europe, but basically that pipeline kept people, kept the factories humming and people warm at a cheap price. Right now, I have to tell you, it's five times as much to get electricity, which is created by gas-driven turbines. you had, I think it's four times as much in Italy, three to four times, and it's getting up there in Germany.
Starting point is 00:22:44 You know, three, it's getting up every, the prices are just going sky high, even though there's still winter there, but it'll be better in a couple of months. There'll be spring. It's still cold. And, and people are increasingly angry because if the Chancellor Schultz had decided, Germany because of this, still because of World War II, and, you know, the fact that spent a decade, you know, burning rape. and destroying Europe, and they were very cheery there about having a military re-arming. And they were under pressure, a lot of pressure from Biden to put money in arms. Now they want more tanks. Remember, he was reluctant about that because there's a lot of feeling in Germany. No, we don't do that. We're not re-arming anybody.
Starting point is 00:23:26 And so I think Biden's fear, it's a thought, but it's also sort of an inelectable thought. Biden's fear and decision to do it then was he was afraid that West Germany and NATO, Some NATO countries might back off, pumping more money and stuff with the pipeline closed and being cold and might decide that isn't worth it. And the Germans would open up the pipeline and stay warm and happy. That was his fear. So he blows it up to keep that option away from Germans and from Western Europe. And if that's so, and that's what's being debated now. I say I've never spoken.
Starting point is 00:24:05 I speak to them. I know congressmen. I'll talk to them privately. but I've never testified. And I've been asked a lot to go to the Bundestag, the Parliament of Germany and go to conferences and stuff like that. They're meeting a lot. I mean, it's not going to go well for Biden.
Starting point is 00:24:19 Germany, the Western Europe always thought America had us back. We had the arms. As I said again, they have no natural gas and no oil. They have some coal, but basically there's some nuclear stuff that they're shutting down because of the, after Three Mile Island, the famous mess we had here in America. and the one in Chernoble. I mean, it's nuclear power
Starting point is 00:24:41 unless it's really controlled by good people. You know, things happen anyway. And so it's clear that as time goes by, I get asked a lot of questions by American people. I get asked questions about what will happen. I mean, will some NATO countries quit NATO? Would Germany turn its back on us? And how the people are going to be increasingly angry.
Starting point is 00:25:07 agree. We might get to this spring because there's still enough gas. They have a little bit left in reserve. They managed to get up to 73% before the winter set, and it was a very mild winter if you saw the photographs of no ski over Christmas at the ski areas. But next winter is not going to be so mild, and there's no reserves. And we did sell some liquidified national gas to them after we blew up the pipelines for two or three times. I think it was three times at a normal price, good old American, you know, capitalism at work. And because of COVID, China was not as productive and they sold this liquid fight. They sold Germany and Western Europe some gas. But China's going to get online and we're getting back online. And it's not going to be,
Starting point is 00:25:49 you know, what can I tell you? It's going to be hell to pay and it's going to be a real mess for this Joe Biden. So what's their solution to the story I broke? They can't say yes. They can't say, mama, you got me. They're never going to acknowledge it. Never, never, never. They can't. Among other things, there's also under the law. There's laws dating back to 1884, by the way, when we put, after we put down the first telegraph lines between us and Europe, the Atlantic coast in Europe, the telegraph just got going there. There was an international treaty. We signed that anybody to inadvertently or advertently cut across the line was liable for damages. And it was renewed in 1898, and we signed it again.
Starting point is 00:26:34 So we have signed legislation that would make us eligible, eligible to pay criminal charges. We're talking about billions of dollars. But of course, we put $100 billion into the war. I mean, it's just amazing what's going on. And so he's probably done, one of the dumbest things you can do, panicked about Europeans, staying loyal. And they understand, and they're right, the guess would have been very in the fall, popularity for the war is not going to stay high, and it's not. It's going, you know, more than half the country.
Starting point is 00:27:05 I think it was some over 50, 60, 62 or 52 percent, I think it was 62, are worried about the more commitments, 100 billion dollars, a lot of money to put somewhere. When you've got people starving and, you know, and not paying medical bills, it's just a massive miscalculation he's made. huge mistake. So I believe, but I'm just writing my stories. And I don't know, you know, we're going to have a 1914 again. We're going to have somebody, you know, somebody, I don't know what the upshot's going to be, but it's, it's very dicey. And now you can ask me questions. Okay, good. Yeah, that was my plan, was to hear you out and then try and get some follow-ups here.
Starting point is 00:27:44 I was hoping you just asked me questions and, you know, do an intro, so I'd have to talk so much. Oh, yeah. You were not hoping that. I know that. I've interviewed you a lot of time, Cy, and I know how you like to do it. And so I set it up this way on purpose. I thought that was great. And so now I wanted to point out that... The devil incarnate. That's what you are right now. Me? All right. But we've made our deal and you're getting your end. So it's all right. No, so I just wanted to point out that the Post and the Times
Starting point is 00:28:10 boasts were in stories in December saying, yeah, probably Russia didn't do it. Well, that narrows the list of suspects to America's allies, or I don't know if you saw this, but Fiona Hill recently floated. Maybe Ukraine did it. Well, I'll tell you something. The thing about that story, that was so wonderful. But neither the post of the Times wrote, they didn't quote what Biden said in February
Starting point is 00:28:35 and what the Undersecretary, Newland said at the same time right before Biden, that we could have the means to knock out North Stream 2 by any means or something like that, by all means necessary. And Biden said directly, we're going to take it out of if they start to work. And in front of Schultz, too, out of press conference. conference with Schultz standing right there. He said that. Well, but the problem is, I looked at the Schultz quote. It was, I support America and everything. And so I, with this story, I didn't, actually had a very good editor who helped me. I didn't.
Starting point is 00:29:07 We had a fight about it, and I agree. He didn't quite say what Biden said. But I'll tell you, Schultz's problem now, he's being asked and he's not answering so far. Was he told? Did he know they're going to take out the pipeline? What did he think about that? In other words, could he have Could he was, was he part of the process that's going to leave Europe in real bad shape next winter? All right. Now, so get into this part of the mechanics of your story here, because it's confusing. Because you say that when Biden and Newellyn made these statements, that changed the nature of the classification from covert clandestine or some kind of thing that includes or excludes now military and or instead of CIA in the planning and it affects whether they have to report to. Congress on any of these things and it's really a mess so please uh can you explain all that well it's very simple to explain uh as set up it was a covert operation and under the the law the law that
Starting point is 00:30:07 you know that if you think the laws you know the law says they have to get a finding if the c a is involved they have to get a finding and they have to present it to congress to a select committee a subcommittee of one of the one of the one of you know it's a subcommittee of the finance appropriations committee has a little four man group and there's a clerk there the findings have to go there and they have to brief the eight members the the they have to brief the the the house and senate majority and minority leaders there's four and the four members the four leaders of the house and senate and tell committee but I I I I I I I would propose to you this incredibly daring thought
Starting point is 00:30:54 that they often do not. And I would think with McCarthy there as the House guy, I would think the Democrats would be, they'd find a way. But what happened is once Biden said it, the guy's running and said, well, now it's no longer COVID up. Now he said it. So it's no longer covert. So it's classified.
Starting point is 00:31:18 It was unilaterally changed. by the guys in the field. So it's classified, I mean, if it was a covert op, it would still be classified, but you're saying now it's secret but not covert? Oh, it's just top secret.
Starting point is 00:31:30 We don't have to tell Congress all that. If it's all military, top secret. And by the way, if there were people from one of the services here... Oh, in other words, once they said that the CIA then took a lesser role and the military took the major role?
Starting point is 00:31:43 No. No. They just changed it. Okay. Just a matter of semantics was enough. No, it's a matter of keeping it away from God damn Congress. Yeah, but I'm just saying by changing it
Starting point is 00:31:53 from one categorization from another, that was enough to do it. The fact that the matter is, it turns out that there is a provision that the CIA can have an operation. I'd be doing a classified operation. Not everything is covert. And if they call in a military unit,
Starting point is 00:32:11 that doesn't change it. If they called it, that's why if they were going to use the seals to go set the mines, which they were not going through anyway. The SEALs are the Special Operations Command, and that command automatically calls for a finding under the law. But I wrote in 2005, when I was working for the New Yorker
Starting point is 00:32:35 and doing a lot of stuff, by the way, based totally of anonymous sources, as all the stuff I did in the New York Times was. So the whole thing about anonymous sources is just a way of saying, we don't want to do this story. It's awkward for us. You know, maybe because we got a Democratic president. I'm talking about it at the New York Times of Washington Post. Come on, give me a break.
Starting point is 00:32:53 That's just to avoid doing it. And maybe they actually don't believe it. And, you know, I'm sure there's no love loss for me, but I couldn't care less. Because in 2005, I began writing about missions that were standard CIA missions inside Iran, that by every definition involving seals that had to be briefed, and not being briefed to the Congress okay and so there were a couple of senators there were I can say who it was at that time Richard Obie of of Wisconsin who had been chairman of the House Appropriations Committees for at least a dozen years one of the most eminent members he retired and he quit
Starting point is 00:33:37 the last time he did his after Obama got election he's been retired for 10 years they're kind of guy that you know one day his office called me and they wanted to see me because I had I written in the New York Times about it and he said well that stuff I went to see him and he's one of the people that gets the findings. And there was another guy, there was another congressman that is still around. So it doesn't matter who. There were just four guys who got it. And it's a very select sort of inside group.
Starting point is 00:34:06 And he said, what the hell is going on? Who's doing this? And so I told them. You know, I didn't mention names. I didn't tell them how I learned, but I told them what was going on. And so he went on the floor. and the floor speech he said there's something going on but these guys are not telling the congress everything and at this point i'm stopping the funding for the special operations command
Starting point is 00:34:25 that afternoon he got a call from a senior guy close to president bush and the guy came to see him it was Andrew card the one-time car dealer that was a car deal literally it was one of bush's inside pals and i'm sure very very competent i'm not saying because he's the car deal he's incompetent but i would say that he's not that experience in government and his you know the chief of staff right well I don't know what the side it was, but the chief, you understand the trick is for me, after I did mili, the mili reporting on the massacre, which was for a lot of people in that war, military, I was in the army, and I could believe army guys would do that. I couldn't believe that. I mean, I was a, I was a SS, I was a one-one, you know, basic infantry man carried a rifle, that kind of crap.
Starting point is 00:35:11 And M-16, whatever it was, could do it at night, blindfolded. So, when card comes and he promises don't stop the money we'll start briefing you and a couple months later um obi comes back to me and he said they're lying to me i'm i'm writing this stuff i'm not maybe mentioning all the names i'm mentioning because um i didn't um and finally it's cat mouse for a little while and he knows there's all these stuff going on he knows to define the law and so he goes to see Cheney, and Cheney's lawyer, what was his name, the tough lawyer he had? Addington. Yeah, Addington is there, and he goes to see him.
Starting point is 00:35:55 This is now 2006, and he says, what are you guys doing? The Constitution, it's clear you've got an obligation to do it. And Cheney, of course, just stares in him. Cheney's interesting because he's really smart. I mean, he was Islamophascist. He really hated the Islam. I don't know why. He was smarter than that.
Starting point is 00:36:17 But anyway, he's not dumb. Like his daughter isn't dumb. And so Addington says to him, I don't know if I wrote this or not. I don't remember. Adidine says to him, I'll tell you what, Congressman. He says, if you don't like it, go in federal court, didn't sue me. And so what they knew is that a Democrat, a couple of years in the war, going in the court and saying, we're not getting all the secrets is political suicide.
Starting point is 00:36:42 So he couldn't do anything. Talk to me about it. Couldn't do anything. So what I'm telling you is if you think the system is orderly and wonderful, all these people saying, you know, what's the difference? There's a construct where, and all the military people involved were TDY. You know, if you're there, if you're in a bright guy that they needed from one of the services, says, he's just there, TDIY, and the service doesn't know what he's doing.
Starting point is 00:37:11 I'm not kidding you. This is a secret operation in Norway. And so there you are. And so, you know, you can quibble about it all the way. The way it was, if the CA is doing an operation that's just classified or highly classified, they can bring in a military unit. And that's why the miners in Panama City, you don't ever want, or maybe you do want to be in Panama City, but it's 10 years ago,
Starting point is 00:37:36 was a town of 11,000 on the Gulf. There's very good fishing there on the Gulf. And it's, what is it, 70 miles from Alabama, 100 miles from Tallahassee. It's full of mosquitoes and hot, you know, but might now is flourishing. It's tripled. It's a big tourist town now for the fishing, I guess.
Starting point is 00:37:55 I don't know what else. Maybe the people like to be hot all the time, full of butts. But anyway, and so, I mean, that's just, you know, the reality is the reality, you know, that you could do it. But in this case, there was an. understanding that the military, a military unit, and the divers are strictly military, they're not special ops, they won't have any, they don't like the seals. They make fun of the seals. Because, you know, as I said, they said this for days on television. The seals, you know,
Starting point is 00:38:23 they're swimmers, not divers, and they go on TV every time they do something. They're talking about the fact that so many of them, I don't know how many members who were on the raid to kill Osama Bidlton claimed to have fired the first shot. You remember all that? At least two. Yeah, claimed to have caught him, yeah. Well, it's comical. And others wrote books.
Starting point is 00:38:43 All right, so where we are? Well, yeah. So, man, there's so much stuff here. First of all, well, you brought up the sources. So we've got to talk about that for a second. In the story, say, I have one source. And everybody says, well, the rule is you have to have at least two. But you've written.
Starting point is 00:38:58 I'm sorry? Why don't you know what I said? Go ahead. What? I didn't say I have one source. I said one source who. Okay, well, that's an important point. So that's actually what I'm just trying to set you up to answer.
Starting point is 00:39:11 That's the point. I said a source who had firsthand knowledge. That's the only way I described it. Okay. But in other words, that doesn't preclude the fact that... All right, all right, all right, all right, Scott, come on. Why did it construct it that way? We're talking about secret meetings.
Starting point is 00:39:30 Why would I construct it that way? because everybody, a lot of people, despite, you know, classification, despite all the classification, if they go back to an office where they have equally people of equal clearance, they could talk, they could say what happened. There's a lot of people could have direct information of it. And there's no sign in that story that the person I was talking to was ever at a meeting. There's not one quote that has them in a meeting, which means they may not have been in the meeting. It means whatever you want. But certainly if you're trying to find who, sources, you have to start with a
Starting point is 00:40:05 group of an awful big group. And it's going to be almost impossible to find a source because who knows everybody's going to deny not telling, they're all going to say they didn't tell their wives with brother-in-laws or their best friend. Well, what I'm getting at, side there is, did you talk to anybody
Starting point is 00:40:20 else who confirmed what the one source is saying? Why would you ask me that question? If I'm not talking about it, what do you think I'm going to talk about it to you? Well, I figure I'd give you a chance as all, because as you know that's the big criticism that yeah what do i care i don't know it was when i did milan there was criticism when i said that this that the c a was when i wrote that the cia had been spying on american citizens for six or seven years under johnson and hundreds of thousands of dossiers
Starting point is 00:40:49 the washington post day in and day out for three months wrote how how stupid i was that could be it was fbi files and the guy wrote it was a friend of mine and a great reporter named very and who I adored. It was just, maybe I didn't know him that well later, but I certainly didn't hold it against him. But day in and day out, they made fun of me.
Starting point is 00:41:11 Oh my God, he's wrong. And then finally the CIA, before Congress, a committee was the church committee, they announced that, yeah, you know,
Starting point is 00:41:19 and well, there were a lot of files, but I had written my, then they attacked me because I used the adjective massive files, massive numbers. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:41:28 And they said, well, they're not massive numbers, you know. Well, you understand, I'm not trying to bust your chops. I'm just trying to give you an opportunity.
Starting point is 00:41:34 I'm mostly on your chops vicariously on behalf of the others so that you have a chance to answer so. I understand. It's a question I get from a lot of people. Sure. But the answer is, you know, I'm in business because I don't say anything about the people I don't need to. That story I wrote for the New York Times and domestic spying
Starting point is 00:41:54 had seven unnamed sources in it. And you know something? Not one editor asked me a word about it. I've been at the New York Times then for two or three, three years, they've written a lot of stories with anonymous sources, and they knew I have people. The first time, A. Rosenthal asked me who they were, and I told them, he said, no kidding. Okay. Hey.
Starting point is 00:42:14 Okay. No kidding. There are people, Scott, listen to me. There are people in the government. And there's, in every place, there's always people in the intelligence service and even in the electronic intelligence business. There are people, and certainly in the military, and certainly in the state department, certainly in other places where they take the oath of office.
Starting point is 00:42:36 It's not to their boss or the general or the admiral or to the president. It's to the Constitution. And there's so many more of those people than you think, okay, who will come to, you know, they have to be sure it's going to be okay, but we'll come and talk. It's full of people. And they were able to, even on that mission, you know, I would guess, you know, I don't know. You know, I don't know any, you know, you can see from the quotes that my friend learned to understand that a lot of the people thought it was a very dumb thing that the president had done and far more than dumb. And what it is, he has told Western Europe and Germany, our great allies, that if he was so worried that they would not go all out to support him in a war in the Ukraine, which I think he had reasonably.
Starting point is 00:43:29 then. We're talking about late September 26th, he had reason to believe would not go well. It was going to be much tougher than they thought. That great victory, remember when the Russians fell back, they had a frontline unit that wasn't frontline and it wasn't as powerful as it should be that collapsed and ran away, reorganized, they reconstituted himself. It was a reserve unit. And when the Ukrainians just came at him, they ran. And there were pictures galore of Russian, Ukrainian trucks and tanks rolling in open planes. Well, I got to tell you, even though that was a great victory for them, they took back a lot of property, there was a lot of counterattack in terms of missiles and bombs.
Starting point is 00:44:12 There was a lot of, they didn't get away without getting hurt. But that didn't mean they didn't reclaim the land, but it just, it was clear that was in the summer that the Russians had held and they were going to fight back. They were going to augment people. he did the draft. And I know there was terrible complaining about the draft in Russia. Absolutely. A lot of people ran. But, you know, I don't know how you are, but I'm old enough to remember when John Hershey was General John Hershey was chairman of the, in America of the draft board. When Johnson authorized the first big draft, I think, in 066, there was a huge outcry protest. They prosecuted more than
Starting point is 00:44:55 3,000 people for bringing the draft cards, but it was a, you know, maybe 20, 30, 40 times that many just ignored it and didn't go to a draft and weren't prosecuted. A lot of guys ran to Canada and there were a lot of people running from the war too. We don't want to talk about these things. A lot of soldiers went to, ended up in Sweden, even in Norway and in the Baltic States. I remember doing a story for the New York Times about that in the 70s. So, you know, It's, it's, it's the whole, you know, are we back to, is it going to be 1914 again? Are we going to blunder into something stupid with nuclear bombs all over the place? And a lot of, you know, total angry and anger in America towards Putin.
Starting point is 00:45:40 Yeah. You know, I don't know. Yeah, it sure looks like it. Well, folks, sad to say, they lied us into war. All of them. World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq War I, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq War I, Serbia, Afghanistan, at Rock War II, Libya, Syria, Yemen, all of them. But now you can get the e-book, All the War Lies, by me, for free.
Starting point is 00:46:03 Just sign up the email list at the bottom of the page at Scott Horton.org, or go to Scotthorton.org slash subscribe. Get all the war lies by me for free. And then you'll never have to believe them again. Hey, y'all, Scott here. Let me tell you about Roberts & Roberts Brokerage, Inc. Who knew? Artificial bank credit expansion leads to price inflate.
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Starting point is 00:46:46 they're there for you, too. Call Tim Fry and the guys at 800-874-9760. that's 800-874-9760 or check them out at rrbi.co that's rrbi.co you'll be glad you did i want to ask you back about the motive again about this pipeline now from one point of view this is a peace pipeline right this guarantees this economic interdependence between germany and russia which is in the interest of all of mankind to keep those two from fighting If you look at the last two times they fought, we definitely want to keep that from happening again. But then, you know, a lot of people portray this as blackmail and leverage, and now Germany is going to completely be owned by Putin and Russia.
Starting point is 00:47:37 And, you know, we'll have them by the short hairs and that kind of thing and that kind of control. But then it also seems like, and I wonder, my question really is, if you hear this in Washington, that this is really as George, Friedman from Stratford put it, this is America's primordial fear, and I guess Britain's too, that you would have this permanent and deep alliance between Germany and Russia. We'd rather have them fight than be best friends because that really freezes us out of influence in Eastern Europe. And from there, as Prasinski would say, all the pivot points all the way into Central Asia and ruling the world and all of that. And so it seems like, maybe nipping this thing in the bud before that interdependence gets too deep,
Starting point is 00:48:27 maybe has a big role in that. But I wonder if you hear people talk like that about it very much. Well, you put it in, you put it accurately, but the language that's been used, four days after the, they announced that the, it was announced that the pipelines had been blown up. Tony Blinkin, Anthony Blink and the Secretary of State I don't remember I wrote about it, but I think it was
Starting point is 00:48:55 in a press conference said Ed Hock at a meeting at a public meeting at Hock just said it all. He talked about the destruction and he said no longer can Russia
Starting point is 00:49:07 weaponize gas. This goes back to the Kennedy days when Russia began to sell a lot of natural, they had loaded with national gas way up there somewhere And somewhere in the east, you know, somewhere in the caspice, above the caspian sea, some way out there, there are tons of gas, I shouldn't say tons, zillion of tons.
Starting point is 00:49:25 And so the notion, the Kennedy administration had a concern about weaponization of gas. Condoleezza Rice talked about this a lot in the Bush administration, that it's, we have to find a solution to Russia being able to have influence with Germany because of gas. and also all of Western Europe because their gas was cheap and cleaner. Norway produces gas, but it's not as clean. The gas they're producing, the Russians produce is quite clean. Just like the crude oil from Libya, it was the best cruel oil of the world. That's been, you know, Libya's down been up in smoke.
Starting point is 00:50:04 But their crude oil, you didn't have to do much to refine it, which saved the people, E&I and other companies in Italy, which take much of it from a lot of the, a lot of cost. And that oil is disappearing, cut back from the market, too. So that was the issue. You use different language, but the word was weaponizing. We didn't want Russia to have influence. And Joe Biden chaired a committee when he was vice president on that issue.
Starting point is 00:50:30 So he was aware of that issue. And I'm sure that was the thought he had when he bombed it. But that didn't put much confidence in Germany and much confidence in Western Europe, or in NATO even, that he didn't think he would be able to persuade him, even with using the gas. He just wanted to keep him from the option of having it. He destroyed something. Was it an act of war?
Starting point is 00:50:55 He's not war with Germany. Can the stockholders of the company sue? I don't know, not unless there's a real finding. And as I said, I got to go soon. Scott, my voice is failing. I understand. I can say without any question, there's not a chance in hell this White House
Starting point is 00:51:13 is going to acknowledge it. And I'll tell you how I know. Well, how I think I know, because who knows what I know. The president, I do know what I'm telling you now. This hasn't happened. Maybe they'll say it has it. I don't know it, but I'm pretty, I have reason to know. So, four days after the investigation,
Starting point is 00:51:33 four days after the bomb gets off, Jake Sullivan has a press conference and he's asked about it. And he, you know, there's somebody asked about Russia. And he said, well, Russia is behaving as if he did. You have to understand Jake was ran the committee that did the planning for this. So Jake is saying, yes, it sounds like Russia. That's the way Russia behaves, but we don't know for sure. It's sure they're sure talking like that's the way they behave and you have to look at it.
Starting point is 00:51:56 But he said, but our allies, Sweden and Denmark, are doing an investigation. We have to wait for that. And so a month later, Sweden and Denmark, who border countries, who were definitely knew what was going on. I'll leave it to them to decide how deeply they were. involved. I left that a bit opaque because I was asked to. But certainly, come on, give me a break. But anyway, they announced that after a month-long investigation, their conclusion was, yes, something was exploded under the ground. It looks like sabotage. That was their conclusion.
Starting point is 00:52:28 So he didn't promise an investigation, but the question is, you can ask, so you're the president of United States, and the verb I'm using is the right word for the in-house word. He can task If he wanted to know who did it, he can test the intelligence community. There's something called the Office of National Intelligence, which runs everything. That's the big home of the system. There's his director of intelligence, his first rate, and they have access to everything. They can do a study of it. And he could have also asked the D.I.
Starting point is 00:53:01 The intelligence division of the CIA, there's a deal for operations, D.I. for Intel, full of smart guys who do really good analysis. In fact, great analysis. They're all very interesting stuff. I haven't seen much in, but in past years, I've seen an awful lot. It gets declassified. It's in histories. And it's solid stuff.
Starting point is 00:53:21 You could have asked the DI to do it. There's all sorts stuff too. And elsewhere in the CIA, if you've got a covert field in the team, I think it used to be called the C group of Intel, C-intel group. When you have a guys in the field, you know, going risking their lives, you know, maybe crawling through some field in Russia to get a picture of something, you really have to have tremendous amount of localized uh intel to make sure nobody's on them you know even local radio stations i don't know how it works you have to really protect the those guys are very good at tactical
Starting point is 00:53:48 intelligence and um uh and given what happened and so the question asked the white house did you do it did you ever task anybody and you want to know why did it in task i can tell you know in three words, you know, well, four was they knew who did it. It's five words, isn't it? They knew who did it, five words. So, you know, they never asked for an investigation. Whoever heard of a country that says, maybe Russia did it. And the first thing you do is order an all-source investigation. My God, we can go back and find out stuff. We can go back and recreate what happened. We copy everything. Right. If you don't think we can recopy a lot of Russian traffic, come on, give me a break we copy a lot of everything they copy a lot of ours yeah all right on that
Starting point is 00:54:37 wonderful cheery note scott pleasure great talking to you you know what let me uh ask you to indulge me one more question real quick before i let you go is that all right yeah all right good i heard you uh bring up bill clinton bomb and bagdad in 1993 on the wait wait hear me out now on the loria show there over there at consortium news and how that was good for his uh credit rating and everything. Who did I go on with? Joe Lori at Consortium News. And you talked about how Bill Clinton
Starting point is 00:55:09 bombed bagged at in 93. I'm sorry? Consortium News is, I always thought it was somebody else. It used to be Bob Perry, but he died. But Joe Lori is the... Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, I told that. Yeah, I did it the other day. You brought that up to him the other day. Bob Perry, I think you'll agree, was a really good guy.
Starting point is 00:55:26 He really was. Yeah, I interviewed him in a moment. He seems like an okay guy. Yeah, Gloria is great. I did that. I would always talk to Bob Perry because he broke the, he broke the original Watergate story. Did he network? Oh, yeah. Oh, and he was absolutely great on, he broke a Ron Contra.
Starting point is 00:55:41 He did a Ron Contra. He took the Ron Contra and he got fired for it. Oh, yeah, uh-huh. And he was absolutely great on Iraq War II and on Syria and Ukraine. But wait, there's a point here, which is in my book that I wrote, you were a major source. You broke the story. A lot of people don't know this. You broke the story about how the assassination attempt.
Starting point is 00:56:01 against H.W. Bush in Kuwait was a giant hoax perpetrated by the Kuwaites. And that's such an huge and important story. And I was just wondering if you could give us a comment on that. Well, I mean, what happened is we, when Bush went, what Bush did, after you got out of office, if you remember, the first Gulf War. Yeah, Desert Storm. Yeah. Desert Storm, I think we called it.
Starting point is 00:56:28 If you remember, we ended the war in about three days because the Iraqi army was in complete disarray. And they were running, they were on a highway and we were strafing him. And Colin Powell, to his everlasting credit, said, we can't do this America, we can't have American pilots going gunning down, soldiers running away, shooting on the back. So we stopped it. And we had a peace treaty. And so, and so it was a big. victory for Bush won. So when he got out of office when Clinton won, about three months later,
Starting point is 00:57:04 he organized the Kuwaitis won a victory trip. And so they loaded a plane, Bush and his people, loaded a plane full of people, including Jim Baker, who was a decent secretary, say, very good. He was then working for Exxon. And his two sons were there. And they landed in Kuwait City, and the boys go out, they're looking for Coca-Cola contracts. And Jim Baker represented Exxon, and he did get an $800 million contract for Exxon for do some work for the oil fields in Kuwait. And everybody got a gold Rolex watcher, solid gold one from everybody. Norm Schwarzenkoff said to me, I like Norm. He ran the Gulf War. I knew when he was a three-star out in California. I spent time with him once. He's a very straight guy. I called him up,
Starting point is 00:57:52 initially I called him up about doing that story. And he said, hell no. He said, we lost eight boys there, and I'm not going to go get some gold in the back of the boys. He said, I thought that was a dumbest thing to do. About two weeks later, he calls me back, and he said, oh, man, sigh, I don't know how they know about it, but they know I talk to you. And I know what I said, can you, can you forget about it? Or just say, I didn't want to go because I thought it was, you know, something like, so I sure I did that. I remember that vividly. You know, he's just saying, I, what are these guys doing, you know? We lost guys in that war, going for a victory dance. And so you get there, and then they claimed that there was a, that Saddam Hussein had a team
Starting point is 00:58:30 that was going to try and assassinate him. They were there with a bomb. And so I, about a, I learned from somebody what Hocom that was. So I went out there and I went to Kuwait and they, and people talked to me about it. It was all just, just to take the edge off the story about the money. That's so funny. I like Baker. I thought Baker, I have to say this. Baker was when he was Secretary of State, he came the closest to doing something serious about the Middle East at the Middle Conference in 1991. No American Secretary of State has done anything, anything close to that. We got a disaster there now because of our lack of policy. But Jim Baker, I can, I can give to that. I want to tell you some, Jim Baker did the gutsiest thing. It probably cost Bush the election.
Starting point is 00:59:15 Who knows? But yeah, he was there, and he was mad at me because I wrote about him. Yeah. Or I wasn't going to write about him. Bush Sr. actually thought that cost him the election that they had done the good thing at Madrid there. That's true. I also want to point out, you say in that story, in that New Yorker story, that it was the same guy whose daughter had pretended to be the nurse at the hospital who saw the babies thrown out of their incubators. He was the same guy who announced this bomb plot in 93, two years later. Is that right? Oh, my God. It was such a bad story, so poorly covered up. And it was bought by the Western Press. I just did the forensics on it, even in terms of a DEA guy looking at the bomb they claimed.
Starting point is 00:59:57 They claimed they found a special bomb. And I found somebody who from somebody in the bomb business who said, yeah, it's special. There were 500 made of this particular bomb. 500,000 made of the standard bomb. And they were claiming this is a special bomb and nobody checks anything. You know, what can I tell you? Look, I get yelled at because they claim I was soft on Bashar in, And I wrote a story for the London Review that was softer Bashar because he was accused of using nerve gas against his people.
Starting point is 01:00:28 And so since I know nobody reads anything, it was a big long London Review piece in which I went back and looked at the other day because I was sure I was right that it began with this. It was a story I said. I said, Obama, we got to admit Obama who memoir is, has the stuff I know about is about 1% accurately. But that's all right. He sold out of copies. I thought Obama, I gave him a pass the first term. I saw it jumping out of his bone the second term because he did do a thing. He was very, from day one, he didn't stop Guantanamo and he said he would, and he was all in on the Afghan war.
Starting point is 01:01:04 By the way, Biden wasn't. I just want to tell you, so I looked at the story the other day in London Review, and it begins with this. It says in the first paragraph, hey, no question Syria was a suspect because they have chemical and biological warfare. nerve gas was used and killed the press at 1,500, but the U.N. said later 140, but one would be too many. The point is you can't say only. And so there was a lot of problems with it. And my story said this. The White House says that, but it says that Syria was responsible if they had nerve gas and they did it. But what they didn't tell you was that three months earlier, there was a top secret finding that I had and I mentioned and I wrote stuff out, even though it included some signal, NSA stuff. and stuff from Mossad.
Starting point is 01:01:50 It was a Mossad joint NSA, an incredibly brilliant report. But three months earlier, they were panic in the city because Saudi Arabia and Turkey were shipping what they call the chemical and the organophosphate, the chemical, an alcohol and organic, like a souped up stuff you use for fertilizer, organophosphates. But if you mix those two in the right way,
Starting point is 01:02:17 you get a very, called Kitchen Serran. If you don't know what you're doing, you're dead right away. But they were shoving, we discovered that the opposition, El Nusa then, the follow-on to Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Al-Nusah, but they were there fighting Bashar. It was a civil war, basically, between Bashar was, even though he was, he got more than 50% of the Muslim vote in every election he had it. But I don't know what that means in the Middle East. He was, of course, not whatever, he was a different sect, but he wasn't Muslim, and he wasn't year. I've forgotten the name for the
Starting point is 01:02:49 Alawites. Yeah, that's right, 15% of the population. And he was his father's son. And he was interesting. He got smart. He was tough. He got tough. But anyway, the point is that there was so much of it in the enemy's hands. And I had this report.
Starting point is 01:03:07 I got it before I wrote the story. And that the dorm Dempsey, I was chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He did a study in order to clean out the stuff, we figured as many 60,000 troops. That's where it was when the attack took place that was immediately credited to Bashar. So my story in the London Review a year later said, in the first paragraph, hey, folks, I'm not saying who did it, but I'm telling the White House, the Obama White House, only told you about one suspect when they had two. And if that's kissing the butt of Bashar Assad, I don't know
Starting point is 01:03:40 what is. That's not true. So the story that they keep on saying, well, he screwed up on stories. it was the love for Osama that, you know, a love for him. You know, just there was a love for him in the press. Just as there's, on this war, there seems to be a love for him in my old newspapers and the magazines.
Starting point is 01:04:00 And I don't know why. But, you know. All right. Well, listen, I know you've got to go, and I got to go, but I have to say, by now my plane's left and it's landed off in Florida. Good. Well, listen, I have to say this on the record,
Starting point is 01:04:13 just so people know. I still think it's the most important piece that you wrote in the last 20 years, the redirection about switching back to al-Qaeda after fighting for Iran in Iraq. It's such a good piece. I think it's the key to American foreign policy in the Middle East post-Iraq War II. Let me say something, Scott. Okay. That piece was written in 07 for the New Yorker was syndicated more and repurchase
Starting point is 01:04:41 than anything I did in my career, even Milan. Oh, that's great to hear. Because I really think it's so foundational. It's just... But it was about the decision we made that it's still in existence. We're supporting the Sunnis. We're going after the Shia. Right.
Starting point is 01:04:53 And that's all it said. And it was right there black and white. But it was... I hope you're not mad at how lengthily I blocked quoted it in my book. Because I told people this is the key to understanding American foreign policy in the Middle East after Iraq War II. How to make up for that big blunder. Now, listen, we got another key. It's called the pipeline.
Starting point is 01:05:12 And what he did, I think it's going to be a crucial. point. I don't know what's going to happen. I've been, I don't talk to politicians. The Bundestag, the parliament there, five, six people have talked to me. The Max Plaque Institute is going to do something. I'm not doing anything. I just writing. But I'm writing another piece that's not going to help anybody soon in another week. Great. Great. No more than area. Goodbye, buddy. All right. Thank you, Cy. Good talk to you. Bye. Bye. The Scott Horton show, anti-war radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA. radio.com, antiwar.com,
Starting point is 01:05:48 Scott Horton.org, and libertarian institute.org.

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