Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 7/15/22 Patrick MacFarlane on Adrian Zenz and the 'Xinjiang Police Files'

Episode Date: July 17, 2022

This week on Antiwar Radio, Scott is joined by Patrick MacFarlane to discuss the narrative that China is conducting a genocide against the Uyghurs of Xinjiang, its westernmost region. The narrative has become prominent over the past few years, especially with anti-China hawks. But MacFarlane shows that most of the “evidence” of genocide can be traced back to a German anthropologist named Adrian Zenz. Scott and MacFarlane dig into some of the obvious problems with Zenz’s work and put the U.S. Government’s connection to the Uyghurs in context.  Discussed on the show: “Credibility and the ‘Xinjiang Police Files’” (Libertarian Institute) “The Red Line and the Rat Line” (London Review of Books) Patrick MacFarlane is the Justin Raimondo Fellow at the Libertarian Institute where he advocates a noninterventionist foreign policy. He is a Wisconsin attorney in private practice. His work has appeared on antiwar.com and Zerohedge. Follow him on Twitter @liberty_weekly This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; EasyShip; Free Range Feeder; Thc Hemp Spot; Green Mill Supercritical; Bug-A-Salt and Listen and Think Audio. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For Pacifica Radio, July 17th, 2022. I'm Scott Horton. This is Anti-War Radio. All right, y'all welcome the show. It is Anti-War Radio. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm the editorial director of anti-war.com, and I'm the editor of the new book,

Hotter Than the Sun. Time to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,700 of them now, going back to 2003 at Scott Horton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton Show. And you can follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show. All right, very happy to introduce my guest this week

live in the studio, my colleague Patrick McFarlane, from the Libertarian Institute. Welcome to show, Patrick. How are you doing, sir? Doing good, man. Thanks, Scott. I'm very happy to have you here. Now, one of the hottest controversies on this planet is the Chinese regime in Beijing's treatment of the Uyghurs,

the Turkic, ethnic Turkic Muslim sect or population in the Xinjiang province in western China. And, of course, these people are caught in, Great game politics between America and China and so forth, and the accusations against the regime there are of genocide, quite frankly, and there's a brand new report out about different modes of oppression inside the Chinese state. And, of course, Warhawks of all descriptions love to glom on to these testimonies, and they get passed around as sort of received knowledge. but we never really get too much of the real background to what's going on in the Xinjiang province. And this is something that you've done a lot of work on in the past. So I guess let me first ask you what it was about this story that caught your attention in the first place.

Well, this happened back during when the beginning of COVID was going on. And I was watching Tim Poole a whole lot. And there was an episode where Tim Poole had Luke Rukkowski on. and he had this other group called China Uncensored On, and some of the craziest accusations were being lobbed around like organ harvesting, like systematized rape, and all these things going on in Xinjiang. And some of it just seemed too outlandish to me. So I really wanted to look into it and kind of figure out for myself what was real and what wasn't or what could be supported by evidence because it was really just being stated as fact.

So what did you find? Well, I looked through and I found a lot of credibility issues and I found United States NGOs. I found State Department members just lobbying these accusations back and forth. So in looking through that, there were a lot of neoconservatives, mainly Adrian Zenz, someone who's been published at the New Lines Institute and the Jamestown Foundation. And he's a senior fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. And so I also read the work of Max Blumenthal and Gareth Porter at the Grey Zone. And Jit Singh did a lot of work over there, too, really uncovering these connections. Okay, so this character, Adrian Zenz, comes up over and over in discussions of Chinese oppression of the Uyghurs.

And in fact, I'm not aware of any of these stories that don't somehow originate with him. And I've had people, you know, when I say, geez, find me something that's not by him. They go, oh, yeah, well, here, how about this and this and this? I go, well, actually, those are all by him too. They all are exclusively based on his work or whatever it is. So this guy, Adrian Zenz, he must live in Xinjiang province or be a professor of anthropology down at the University of Science or something and knows a special thing or two about this subject, right, or not? Well, to my knowledge, he's never been to Xinjiang, to my knowledge.

I know he does speak, or, well, he's a German anthropologist, but to my knowledge, he does speak Chinese, but he's never really been there. And in a lot of this, there's other work done, like there's certain Australian defense think tanks who have come out with pieces saying. Yeah, no, that's him too. Yeah, well, yeah. There are people he cites, too. Oh, but it's all, it's all open source intelligence peering at satellite photos.

and allegedly they have these folks coming forward on the ground who have visited these places and saw what these facilities are. But that's just kind of put forward as fact. I guess let's get to the recent news here. There's a recent report out, and I guess I wonder to what degree you've examined it and what you've figured out so far. Yeah, so I have a new piece out at the Libertarian Institute called Credibility in the Xinjiang Police Files. And the Xinjiang police files was this blockbuster hack that Adrian Zenz published in the last week of May of this year. And what it purports to show is he says there's 2,800 prisoner photos of individual prisoners who were detained in Xinjiang, that there's 300,000 personal files on people that were under

some kind of surveillance or had been through the system in Xinjiang, 23,000 detainee records, and 10-plus camp police instructions. And so ostensibly what this is, is it's a hacker that anonymously provided these files to Adrian Zenz. And it was the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation that published them in the last week of May. And then, so what do these files indicate? Well, what I really tried to do, and I have more pieces forthcoming where I really want to take a look at the files themselves. But in this piece that I published, I really took a look at the origin of the files and some credibility issues with what was put forward. And so some of those credibility issues, one, I mean itself, is the role of the victims of communism Memorial Foundation.

Two is Zenz's own background and credibility issues that have been pointed out with that, most notably by Max Blumenthal and Gareth Porter. But the other thing is that specifically with these files, there are some claims that they have been edited. And there were certain people on on Twitter, the public, I think these are Chinese expats. So they take a look at these files and found metadata edits. So some of them were provided in Word document or RTF form. And if you go through the metadata, you can see who last edited the document and how long they were on that document page.

And they looked through that and saw that Adrian Zenz had edited some of the documents. And there was another person named Ilshad Koch Bor who had edited. the documents. So, and later on, when some people started to point out that there were edits to these documents, it was confirmed by the VOC, the victims of communism. In Adrian Zenz, a footnote was added saying, explaining it away, basically, oh, well, we didn't edit the actual contents of the documents. It's just, you know, we went through and tweaked a few things. But I think one of the most important things that came about was realizing that this ill shot coke bore is he's a senior consultant at booze allen hamilton which is a national security contractor that's where

edward snowdon worked yes yeah when he liberated the snowdon documents there so in and so he was employed there but the other thing about ilshot coke bore but he's currently still employed at booze allen hamilton but the other thing about him is that he has connections he's the director of China Affairs at the World Uyghur Congress, which is a national endowment for democracy funded and connected institution. So like Elizabeth Cheney's Syrian National Council that they tried to set up before the Syrian War there. And the other thing is that he's the former president of the Uyghur American Association. And all of these foundations are involved in, they're involved in these escapees from Xinjiang, these alleged escapees. And so these,

these escape defectors, if you will, they go, they're caught up with these organizations. And the more stories that they tell, the more extreme their treatment was in Xinjiang. Yeah. And I remember reading an article by Bernard at Moon of Alabama blog about this one Uyghur expat lady who went from, I worked at the jail. And it wasn't that bad, but yeah, it was a jail to, I was incarcerated in that jail. to and then changed from and all they ever fed us was rice and we almost all died and then changed that to

and they forced fed us pork even though we were Muslims and all and it's the same lady who just thinks that Bernard isn't keeping track but he is yeah and I believe that was Sarah Grill South Bay and there was another

individual named Trensenay Ziyawudun and she had other allegations of forced rape at the camp that later retracted that and said, well, we were never beaten or treated violently at the at the facilities. So there's a lot of credibility issues with it. And we don't get a chance to cross-examine them in some kind of forum.

Well, and look, ex-patriots who are talking about their own government back home to a government that has an interest in them doing so are to be presumed liars, just the same as, you know, that could be considered one of the major lessons of a Rock War II if we didn't already know it, that you just can't believe what they say unless they can prove it. Yeah, and that really touches on what the broader context of all this is

because these allegations of terrible treatment of the Uyghurs are maybe one of the biggest facets of the new Cold War against China. Right, and so let's get into that aspect, but let me back up with a little bit of history here. I don't know if you remember this part. I'm sure you read Fools Aaron, my book about Afghanistan.

And I have it on very good authority from Eric Margulies, the reporter who was the expert who covered the Afghan war in the 1980s, who in the 1990s also covered the Taliban's rise to power. And he told me that in the year 2001, in the summer of 2001, he was at CIA-sponsored training camps in Afghanistan under Taliban control, not bin Laden's control, but Taliban training camps where they were training Uyghurs for use against China. Then there's every reason to believe that some of those very same individual men were the ones who were rounded up by the George W. Bush government and sent to Guantanamo Bay where they were tortured within an inch of their lives. Then we know from various reporting, including Seymour Hirsch in his important article, the red line and the rat line about the weapons transfers from Libya to Syria during the Obama years there. about, I believe the number that he quoted there from his sources was 20,000 Uyghurs had been transferred through, essentially like this Turkic pipeline across Central Asia through Turkey and into Syria to fight the jihad there in that dirty war.

And at one point, apparently, they even had their own little town of their own that had been designated for them in the Idlib province, by the Turkish government, in the Idlib province that they had taken over after kicking the old inhabitants out, I guess. And then one more footnote there is Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief of staff to Colin Powell and his prominent anti-war voice ever since then has indicated that, in fact, I talked to him about this on the show myself, about that, yes, these we are still are under the control of America and our Turkic allies, which I'm not sure. I believe at the time we were talking about Kazakhstan and how they were keeping these guys safe there for us. not being used now but for potential use in the event of a war with china now that also means for potential use the day after tomorrow if they just want to attack a subway station or whatever kind of thing and this is not to say that CIA lock stock and barrel owns every single thing that these guys do and say but just like expats should be presumed liars CIA looks like they should be presumed guilty here for being involved in stoking you know whatever

kind of conflict is happening there. Not that that would absolve the Beijing government of whatever they had previously done or whatever they've done in reaction for it. But as Americans saw a responsibility and we know from history enough, it's incumbent on us to always begin the question with what do the Americans have to do with this. And sorry, I'm rambling, but one more. In 2018, our government, our military targeted E-T-I-M, the East Turkestan Islamic movement of these radical Uyghurs, essentially Taliban-types, if not bin Ladenites, training in the Wukan corridor there with the Taliban in Afghanistan. And the Trump military, I don't know if Trump's government had anything to do with them,

the military targeted them and bombed them. Well, shortly after that, the Trump government, meaning Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State, took them off the terrorist list which you know you gotta wonder why even bother it's not like they would go to jail for breaking the law on you know on a level of political power like that and by taking

them off the terrorist list it just sends a signal loud and clear to the Chinese and to the whole world of what's going on here you're not even trying to be secret about it you're blowing your own whistle to start that here are these guys who are the Chinese Taliban if not the Chinese al-Qaeda

sometimes they seem to be a lot like the Chinese he's al Qaeda at various times with some of their attacks and the Trump government says yeah they're with us and so we're you know just like we're going back to the 80s or 90s and or even going back to the later Bush and Obama years where our government is just pretending like September 11th never happened and like our soldiers war against al Qaeda in Iraq in Iraq war two never happened and that the real enemy is either the Shiites in Iran or the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing or it's Vladimir Putin in Moscow, but it ain't the bin Ladenites. They're still useful, even after everything we've been through with these guys' violence all this time.

So, you know, it's not to say that the Chinese, again, you know, would be justifying whatever it is they're doing, but it might give us cause to, you know, at least consider the position that our government is putting them in. Guys, I had some wasps in my house, so I shot them to death with my trusty bug assault 3.0 model with the improved salt reservoir and bar safety. I don't have a deal with them, but the show does earn a kickback every time you get a bug assault or anything else you buy from Amazon.com by way of the link in the right-hand margin on the front page at Scott Horton.org, so keep that in mind. And don't worry about the mess.

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competitors in the keith. That's greenmill supercritical.com. 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 and the right margin at scott horton dot org tom woods this liberty classroom real history real economics real education then so that's to set you up to ask and so what is the chinese government doing to these people whether in reaction to terrorism or beyond that beyond adrian zen's retracted uh embellishments what's the reality the situation the best that you know yeah i mean it's really hard to say and you've got

to be really careful when you talk about this too. And it is admitted by the Chinese Communist Party that there are facilities. And they place this all in the context of fighting ETIM. And so it does seem that how they phrase it is that they have some kind of institutional control over the Uyghurs in Xinjiang. And they're bringing them in for vocational training, but also a form of de-radicalization. And they have them at these facilities for a period of time, maybe a year or two, where they have them work, learn job skills, and then they release them. It's like a catch-and-release kind of situation. And again, that's not to justify what's going on or to say that it's all right. But this also happens in the context of the leaks from Adrian Zenz.

it also happens in the context that the release happened at the same time that Michelle Bachelet from the U.S. She's the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights is doing a visit to Xinjiang when these files are released. So you have to know that the release was calculated for the maximum geopolitical pressure. And while she's there, we know that the United States has condemned her visit. There have been different Uyghur groups and the United States saying that essentially was a six-day communist rally that Michelle Batchley engaged in. But for her part, she says that she had access to these, she went to two different locations in Xinjiang, but she says that she had access to whatever she wanted, that she wasn't being, like, followed and surveilled.

And she, I think she had said to some of the representatives there that they should, be better on human rights, but she didn't go there making any condemnations or doing a severe inquest. Well, no, that can mean a lot of things. You know, United Nations representatives of this and that sort can be very biased in one way or the other are blind to. But still interesting that the U.S. didn't even want her there and kind of condemn the whole thing as a Potemkin tour before she has a chance to really see what's going on. But so she's verifying, as you say, Beijing also concedes that like, yeah, we got work. camps? What about it, right? So, but now they're forcibly rounding up not just convicts who commit

crimes, but they're just basically putting fighting age males in these camps for reeducation. Is that essentially the deal? Well, it's not only fighting age males, it is, it is females, too. And it seems like these are people that are accused of being involved somehow with ETIM or, or something like that. At least, I mean, from the CCP's perspective. I mean, yeah, but I mean, what are the numbers that we're talking about. Do you have any idea? Hundreds of thousands a year? No. I mean, tens of thousands. Well, Zen says over a million plus. So I, and it's, I mean, it's unclear. That sounds pretty big for the ETIM movement, if you ask me. You know what I mean? And look, I guess, you know, and I know your belief system. We're friends. And I know how you look at the world. There's

are no apologists for the CCP here, only just for the reality. We end up, sometimes arguing, you know, in what might seem like in the interest of David Koresh or Saddam Hussein or Omar Gaddafi or Bashar Assad or Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping or whatever. But that's not the point. The point is just that America is the world empire. And that means that in the name of security, we're picking fights with everybody all the time. And as Americans, we just got to be honest about that and recognize that. And that, again, it doesn't acquit the people that were up against, especially when you're talking about extremely powerful states like China, which, what do you say?

It was a totalitarian state, and now it's just an authoritarian one, but it still has an extreme, I mean, if, imagine the United States them having a one, a two, or a three child policy, no way. It's just not up to you. We're free. We don't tolerate that kind of thing. They have a policy like that, not just for the Uyghurs, but for everyone in China. China is essentially subject to that. And I guess just like in the United States and everywhere else, when you have an industrial revolution, then you have a massive and painful move from town to country by people,

you know, farmers who, you know, are essentially uprooted by one level of coercion or another from their farms and forced to go to the city and be reeducated and whatever. And so that's the central government's program there, right? is trying to make good Chinese citizens out of these country bumpkins, whether they're Uyghurs or whether they're Han, you focus on what they're doing to the Uighers. It looks like they're picking on the Uyghurs, but then you just got to zoom out and recognize Beijing picks on everybody.

That's the nature of their state. You think California is bad. Yeah, and I wanted to touch on, too, while we have time, the, we have to ask the question, right, Scott. What can Americans do about this? if it is true, because it does appear that some of these documents are true, although there are credibility issues with some of it. And other things were, like, the presence of traditional Chinese characters

and some of the documents, which mainland Chinese, they use standard Chinese characters. And so there were some issues there, and some of the detainee images appear that they could be computer generated because there's anomalies. Like, there's things in the pictures that just don't seem. right. Now, that doesn't prove anything. It's speculation. But at the same time, and again, though, we have to ask, even if they were true, what are we as Americans going to do that would make the situation better and not make it drastically worse? And one of the ways that it's making it

worse. Sending the CIA, right? In that what you were going to say? No, I'm sorry, go. Give them bombs. One of the concrete ways that it's making it worse is the Uighur-Forced Labor Prevention Act. And you mentioned Mike Pompeo earlier, on his way out the door, the 11th hour, as they turn over to the new Biden administration, he declares that China's committing genocide against the Uyghurs and crimes against humanity. Well, this accusation is endorsed by Anthony Blinken as he comes in in the Biden administration. On December 23rd, 2021, Biden signs into law the Uyghur-Forced Labor Prevention Act, and it's supposed to kick in, and it did kick in June 20, of 2022. And what that does is it creates a rebuttable presumption that any good made wholly or in part in Xinjiang is illegal in the United States. And you can't import it. And again, let me emphasize this is this is a rebuttable presumption, meaning that it is on whoever wants to import

these goods to prove that they weren't made with forced labor. And so how is this supposed to help the inhabitants of Xinjiang? These people need to sell goods whether, I mean, again of course i'm against forced labor but at the same time this is going to destroy industry in that country yeah and the labor yeah the labor of everybody who's not being forced exactly you know yeah and m2 collateral damage with them all clear and convincing evidence they have to show by which i'm i'm an attorney and so clear and convincing is it's not beyond a reasonable doubt right but it's a lot more than probable cause yeah and look people have to understand that if just everything else was mr rogers neighborhood here, and America was simply saying, geez, we're really in a hurry to drop every

sanction against you. We can as soon as we can. As soon as you guys start shaping up and flying right, then that would be one thing, I guess. But what we're talking about here is an excuse to level new sanctions that they'll never lift, no matter what happens in Xinjiang province. And now, there's one thing that you say about this guy, Adrian sends in the thing that I wish we'd brought up earlier in the show, but it's really worth bearing out. Correct me if I remember these numbers wrong, Patrick. But this was, and I think from Gareth Porter and Max Blumenthal's work at the Gray Zone is just Gareth, the Great, went through and checked the numbers and said, I think it was Max. Oh, was it? I think it was. Okay. I'd listening to you. Credit words to. You

interviewed Gareth about this. Oh, okay. And he gave credit to Max. Okay. So, and then it's just, look, and I could have made this mistake, too, although. I guess I wouldn't have made the claim until I knew I was sure, but you're saying that he simply misplaced a decimal point, but to a fatal degree here. Is that right? Well, the specific measure was net IUD insertions, and he was claiming that on net in Xinjiang province, it was that I think he said 87% of all net IUD insertions in China took place in Xinjiang, when in reality, the number was 8.7. So he exaggerated it by a factor of 10. Right. And so the first one, well, the second one sounds completely benign, right? It is a tad higher. I mean, I will admit that, but what does

net IUD insertions even really mean? Yeah, who knows? But it is government health care. So if you're getting IUD, then you're getting it from the government. Now, who knows whether they're making you We're not after the fact we're looking at statistics. Yeah. Something for people to think about making a cop your doctor. If you really are sure, that's a great idea. Yeah. But 87% of IUD insertions in China going, being implanted in women in Xinjiang.

Well, that tells a whole other story. And that's where you get these claims of genocide. But then it turns out that that's completely bogus. And, you know, I remember seeing Josh Rogan from the Washington, Post the neocon hawk on the joe rogan show and he's talking about zins and he's talking about this stuff the forced birth control and i swear to god he says rogan says to rogan i people quibble about the numbers but anyway yeah they quibble about the numbers whether they're forced sterilizing 87% of the population of shinginginging province or whether they are in fact not doing anything

of the sort at all. But Josh Rogan is a liar. People quibble about the numbers. I quibble about whether Josh Rogan is a liar. And poor Joe Rogan didn't know what to say. So he's like, wow, that sounds pretty bad. Yeah, it does sound pretty bad, but it's not true, you know? And anyway.

I believe that Josh Rogan was the individual who came up with this open source investigation of all the camps in Xinjiang with satellite images and try to, but I think he's a part of this Australian defense, you know, think tank. I wouldn't be surprised about that, yeah. But, yeah, to hear him dismiss this absolute devastating refutation of this fraud's claims as quibbling about the numbers a little bit in the way that he did is a fraud itself.

It's just a damn fraud. Anyway, so it's Patrick McFarlane writing at the Libertarian Institute. And again, remind me the name of the article? it's credibility and the shingang police files credibility in the shinging police files and you have a series of articles uh what four five or six going back uh taking a revisionist look at this story right i i do i have this one and then i think there was another blog post i wrote but there was another piece i put out in april of 2021 um calling independent media parrids questionable weager genocide claims it's kind of a wordy title but um so i was just examining the place that this story has had in the independent media because on some level people watch the independent media and they think they're getting something other than the mainstream media but that's not necessarily the case right and by the way credit here to to the land destroyer you know the guy's real name you remember what it is Nathan rich Nathan rich okay that's

the land destroyer blog guy and I don't know him but I've read his blog many times and he's you know deserves a lot of credit for raising questions about this stuff as well he did he really linked up ntd in the epic times with falun gong which it's far too long to get into in this it's a flying saucer cult like the heaven's gate yeah yeah and and so you link them up and then showed that china uncensored is uh they're following gong members the cast is and they're a part of new tongue dynasty ntd so uh definitely were if you want to read about that i i talked all about it in that independent media periods, you know, Uyghur claims. Major conflict of interest there.

Definitely. The Epic Times, now that they fired my friend Ken Silva, I don't mind blasting that part of, you know, they're role in this as well. Certainly, they're not just a right-wing paper. They come very much hell-bent on this issue and many other surrounding relations with China and the rest. All right. Well, everybody, that is Patrick McFarlane. He is at the Libertarian Institute.

That's Libertarian Institute.org. And that is the show for this morning. Again, I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm the editorial director of anti-war.com and editor of the new book, Hatter Than the Sun. Time to abolish nuclear weapons. I'm here every Sunday morning from 9 to 9.30 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. See you next week.

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