Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 9/5/25 William Van Wagenen on the Origins of the Arab Spring and Syrian Civil War

Episode Date: September 7, 2025

Scott brings William Van Wagenen back on the show to continue their deep dive on the CIA’s covert operations to remake the Middle East. This time, they discuss the origins of the Arab Spring uprisings and look closely at how the so-called Syrian Civil War began.   Discussed on the show: Creative Chaos: Inside the CIA's Covert War to Topple the Syrian Government by William Van Wagenen William Van Wagenen is the author of Creative Chaos: Inside the CIA’s Covert War to Topple the Syrian Government. He has a BA in German literature From Brigham Young University and an MA in Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School. You can read his other writings on Syria for the Libertarian Institute here. Follow him on Twitter @wvanwagenen For more on Scott's work: Check out The Libertarian Institute: https://www.libertarianinstitute.org Check out Scott's other show, Provoked, with Darryl Cooper https://youtube.com/@Provoked_Show Read Scott's books: Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine https://amzn.to/47jMtg7 (The audiobook of Provoked is being published in sections at https://scotthortonshow.com) Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism: https://amzn.to/3tgMCdw Fool's Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan https://amzn.to/3HRufs0 Follow Scott on X @scotthortonshow And check out Scott's full interview archives: https://scotthorton.org/all-interviews This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Incorporated https://rrbi.co Moon Does Artisan Coffee https://scotthorton.org/coffee; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom https://www.libertyclassroom.com/dap/a/?a=1616 and Dissident Media https://dissidentmedia.com You can also support Scott's work by making a one-time or recurring donation at https://scotthorton.org/donate/ https://scotthortonshow.com or https://patreon.com/scotthortonshow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, and author of Provote, how Washington started the new Cold War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine. Sign up for the podcast feed at Scotthorton.org or Scott Horton Show.com. I've got more than 6,000 interviews in the archive. for you there going back to 2003 and follow me on all the video sites and x at scott horton show all right you guys welcoming back to the show this is not a rerun from a couple of weeks ago this is a part two in a way of our interview with william van wagon and he is an investigative

journalist and when i say investigative i mean on the ground he goes to the war zones and risks his own neck and i'm so proud that the libertarian institute can claim a quite credibly that his book is our 17th publication, Creative Chaos, Inside the CIA's Covert War to topple the Syrian government just out last month at the Libertarian Institute and of course on Amazon.com. And this is by far the best book on Obama's dirty war in Syria and related topics. And I know that because I've read at least a whole bunch of them, though not all of them but i can still say this is by far the best one welcome back to the show william how are you doing man hey scott i'm good thanks for having me back yeah absolutely happy to have you here so um

now the last time you were here we just talked about at rock war two the whole time because i know a lot about that and so do you and it's very interesting and we kind of got lost there there's a little bit of a rock war two in here for context but this book is mostly about obama's dirty war that and you know I open up the file this afternoon to remind myself and look at this thing and just scrolling through the table of contents it is really something else what you've done here it's been a little while since I reread the book a few months anyway but just scrolling through here and reminding myself of the scope of this thing it is really incredible what you've done here so I hope it's okay with you I guess it just kind of makes sense to me that

Maybe I would start by asking you, who is Farid Godry? Well, he was a Syrian activist that lived in the United States, and he was basically recruited by the neo-conservatives, Richard Pearl, and that crowd during the Bush administration years to basically be like the Ahmed Chalabi. of Syria, you know, like a Syrian that they could basically use as, like, the face, you know, to say that he's speaking on behalf of Syrians, that the Syrians want to overthrow Bashar. And this guy, you know, they had this idea that they were going to put him in overthrow the Syrian government and put him in power. And he was clearly just on the Zionist neo-conservative payroll. And anyways, it's just like an early example from like the 2005, 2006 period of how they were making plans to overthrow the Syrian government. You know, when we all saw the Arab Spring erupt, it seemed like this, did it came out of nowhere that was spontaneous, that was grassroots.

But it turns out that there was years of planning that went into sparking that not only in Syria but in Tunisia and Libya. in yemen uh in all the places uh where in egypt all the places were interrupted and so this guy uh he was one of these early guys that the neo conservatives were trying to recruit to basically uh potentially take power in uh syria if they were able to overthrow the government just like that was kind of the plan for uh ahme chalabi in iraq okay so for the 2003 invasion now when you bring up richard pearl obviously and you say the neoconsor is in the vice president's office. That means Robert Kagan's wife, Victoria Newland, Scooter Libby, and David Wormser, the author of The Clean Break, which you also cite here.

And I'm sorry, audience, to beat this dead horse constantly, but this seems to be at the center of a hell of a lot of American policy in this era. That's not just about we need to get rid of Saddam Hussein, although that was part of it. But the motive was because Iran helps Syria, help Hezbollah and so and Hezbollah is a problem for the Israelis so they said that worms are said Syria was the keystone in the arch or the arc of power um it's the arch of power between you know Beirut and or at least southern Lebanon and Tehran and so um that was as we've discussed a million times part of their hairbrain thinking about why to get rid of Saddam Hussein because that would give them power over the Iraqi Shia

and the Iraqi Shia would then lord it over the Iranians and Hezbollah and everybody else. But then as worms erote in coping with crumbling states, the companion piece, we want to expedite the chaotic collapse to Syria. And so I only state all that to ask you, am I overstating it then? or am I being too simplistic to say that, yeah, that's what we're talking about here is this is the same old neo-conservative doctrine based on essentially Lakud doctrine saying that Iran and their Shiite alliance in the region is too powerful and particularly in regards, as I'm saying here, in regards to Iran backing Hezbollah by way of Syria.

And so is that what this all boils down to? was the same old cranks with their same old ridiculous schemes? Yeah, basically, so the motivation to topple the Syrian government in 2011 was basically the same motivation to topple Saddam in 2003. And as you mentioned, David Wormsor, he talked about dividing up Iraq and Syria into these like ethnic tribal clan-based states. You know, again, in Syria, you'd have an al-a-white, small al-Alawite state, a Sunni state, a Druze state in Iraq. You'd have a Sunni state in the west, Kurdish state in the north, Shia state in the south.

And the Israelis, they feared large Arab armies. So that's what Saddam had. So that was one reason he had to go. And that's what the Syrians had. That's what Hafez al-Assad had. And then later, Bashar, they had, you know, pretty large armies. Bashar al-Assad and Hafez al-Assad had chemical weapons. So it was a part of this process that the neoconservatives spearheaded on behalf of Israel to remake the Middle East.

And, you know, again, it also goes back to the same things. Again, your listeners are I'm sure aware of where Wesley Clark said, you know, there was this plan in the Pentagon driven by the Israelis to topple seven governments in five years. this was this plan to remake the middle east and all of the iraq war in 2003 plus the syria operation was was was all a part of that and uh again you know it took them a few extra years to do syria but the planning to do it you know went back to this period of like uh two thousand well right after nine eleven again as we mentioned with that a plan that wesley clark uh revealed and then also um you know the planning they did in

in subsequent years as the Iraq war operation was going on. So they were trying to do Syria earlier like 2007, 2008, but it just took them a few extra years to pull it off is what it appears like. Yeah. All right. So now can you just, this is kind of a parenthesis, but can you talk a little bit about the relationship between the Alawites and the Shiites and exactly how that works?

I mean, we don't have to get deep into the religious context, but at least a little bit, and then also the relationship between these sects inside the country. Yeah, so al-O-whites are an offshoot of Shia Islam, I guess you would say. And Bashar al-Assad, the former Syrian president, was al-Awaite, Hafiz al-Assad was al-A-Wite. And they're a minority in Syria, and this has created a weakness that the U.S. Israel were able to exploit because there's an intense hostility against al-a-whites, also against Druze, the Druze, the majority of whom live in southern Syria. There's intense hostility towards them on the part of like extremist

Salafi Muslims of the sort that Saudi Arabia supports of the sort that stock the ranks of al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and groups like this, where They view Alawites as apostates who should be killed and their women enslaved and their property taken. And the Salafists go back to religious edicts or fatwas that were issued by a medieval Islamic scholar named Ibn Taymiya. The Salafists, they always say, oh, we're trying to follow exactly what the Prophet Muhammad did and what his companions did. We're trying to emulate them. But in reality, they just listened to everything that Ibn Timea says, and he lived a couple hundred years later in Damascus.

And he was issuing these religious rulings saying that al-Oyates should be killed because they're apostates. So when the U.S. and Israel wanted to try to destroy Syria, one way to do that, again, is just to play on these sectarian differences and to create hatred between the different religious group. And as I mentioned, David Wormser, this was his idea, was to divide up Iraq and Syria into these ethnic or religious-based mini-statelets. So there just wouldn't be powerful Arab armies that could challenge Israel. So having sponsoring groups like al-Qaeda, full of the Salafist religious extremists who have this hatred for al-Alawites, funding those groups, giving them weapons, that was, you know, the method in trying to, you know, trigger a sectarian war.

That was the method to do that. And it was the method in Iraq as well, in my opinion, at least, because in my view, Abu Masabazakawi was being supported by the U.S. and Israel, as we talked about in the last interview. And that was the way to create problems in Iraq, as you have these extremist Sunnis who were saying that the Shia are apostates and the Shias should all be killed. And, yeah, again, that was the big weakness that Syria has is this ethnic or religious diversity.

It's easy to create cleavages and create sectarian wars by, you know, encouraging that type of ideology, like Ibn Tamiya's solifist ideology, and then also giving those people weapons and guns and having them go kill people and then doing false flag-type killings, blaming them on the alawite quote unquote government even though there are many Sunnis in the Syrian government in the army

and the security forces too but those are the ways to really destroy a country you know so now I mean obviously the Baathist regime there was a police state

I don't know you know how you rank it on the gray scale of authoritarianism but I wonder is it fair to say do you think that it really did represent and because the all the whites i believe are 10% of the population not that every ala white was part of the ruling regime of course but just there it's a

small minority of the population sitting on top of this police state so then but is it i mean obviously it's not just completely top down power because that's not how power works saddam hussein was ruthless but still he had to balance all kinds of relationships in order to maintain his grip you know so um is it fair then to say that the al-a-white regime before the intervention represented at least something like a consensus between the obviously the al-a-whites themselves but then the Shiites the Druze the Kurds and even the majority Sunni Arabs I know that for example Pepe Escobar who I don't really put a lot of stock in what he says I'm sorry to say no offense but I do believe him about this though that he said look man

in Aleppo this was at the time it was here in Aleppo the Sunni middle class has no interest in a bin Ladenite revolution whatsoever right there stuck in the middle of this whole thing and so but that doesn't necessarily translate to everybody liked it the way it was or whatever but I just wonder if you can give us you know basically the temperature on the degree of support for the regime before Obama came to town Yeah. So, you know, this Syrian government under Bashar, like in 2010, and Bashar himself, from everyone I've talked to in Syria, which is a lot of people, they all say that Bashar was pretty popular and that life was actually quite good here in Syria. You know, the average person who had a job could buy a car, could get an apartment, had the money to get married. Syria didn't have a huge population, but it's a very rich country there, given the size of the population, it has a lot of oil, a lot of really good land for growing wheat up in the northeast, which is now under U.S. and Kurdish occupation. And then in Latakia, there's a lot of agriculture there. And Latakia on the coast and the mountains on the coast is where most of the Alawites live, and a lot of them are extremely poor. So if you go to these villages up in the mountains, in Latakia, all the whites are very poor. And the only opportunities they really had to make any money was farming,

which provided some income, and then also to go into the Army and into the security forces. So they did have outsized influences, influence in the security forces. But at the same time, like you said, both Hafez and Bashar, they had to balance that with the, you know, the Sunni population because their numbers were very big. They had to keep the Sunnis happy. And most of the people in Syria that had money were Sunnis. Like, again, the merchant class in Aleppo, the merchant class in Damascus.

These are the people that really had the money. And they even viewed going into the Army and the security forces as like something that wouldn't be a respectable thing to do, kind of like liberals in New York City now would never join the U.S. military is kind of the same thing. So the Sunnis in Damascus and Aleppo, they have the most money in the country. And so they had power from that. And then that was balanced out with Al-Wites having more influence in the army and security forces. But again, a lot of the ministers, including when the war broke out and throughout the war, a lot of them were Sunnis.

So this is a big lie. William, that the majority of the actual Syrian Arab army were obviously, I mean, not obviously, but maybe not surprisingly, because of the makeup of the country, they were Sunni Arabs, right? And even the whole time throughout the war, even as they're fighting against this Salafi-based, you know, the radical edge of the Sunni-based insurgency, right? Yeah, exactly. And there were times when, you know, some of the opposition activists would acknowledge that.

I can't remember the exact reference, but there's quite a few articles of interviews I've come across with opposition activists where they would say, well, this is kind of, you know, what no one admits, but the thing keeping Bashar's regime intact or float, you know, in the middle of the war was all the Sunni support for it. And as you mentioned in Aleppo, the merchant class, like Aleppo was one of the last cities where they were starting to have protests. And when the quote-unquote rebels, the Free Syrian Army and also the Nistra front, the Al-Qaeda offshoot, when they actually took over parts of Aleppo in the summer of 2012, the majority Sunni population did not welcome them at all. And even the FSA and Nusra commanders acknowledged that. They would say things like they, in various interviews, even in mainstream papers, I remember there's one interview with The Guardian where they were basically saying, look, 75% or 70% of people in Aleppo are against us.

And all the rebels, so-called rebels, most of them were from the countryside. And the people in the cities were like, we don't like these people. In addition to that, you know, these rebel groups were being controlled by, in Aleppo, for example, they were mostly being controlled by Turkish intelligence, and these rebel groups would come into Aleppo and come into the old markets, which are really, really famous, like around the citadel in Aleppo, and they burned all the markets, and they put a bunch of explosives in the markets and detonated them and destroyed these famous markets, in Aleppo looted a bunch of the shops and basically from people I've talked to, they feel like Turkish intelligence was trying to destroy like the economic base in Aleppo on purpose,

again, just to create chaos in the country and to weaken Bashar's rule. And, you know, they were really bitter about that. A lot of the old city of Aleppo was destroyed by these rebels, by doing these huge digging tunnels or being in the tunnels underneath the old city and detonating these huge explosives and destroying a bunch of these you know areas that were you know a thousand two thousand years old in addition to that all the factories were looted by nistra and the free army and all the equipment were was hauled off to turkey so it was kind of like a big massive looting operation that these so-called rebels undertook in aleppo and you know that the people who lost all of their their income and their business

and the economy was destroyed. These were all Sunnis in Aleppo who hated the rebels. Of course, there were some Sunnis that did support them in the more conservative areas, again, where Salafism is stronger, and there's areas of Aleppo like that, there's certain neighborhoods. So it wasn't 100%.

But as these rebel commanders themselves acknowledged, maybe 70% of people in Aleppo, which is majority Sunni, did not like them and didn't welcome them into the city. Okay, now, so I want to get back to God I brought him up for a reason.

We're going to get back to, you know, Obama years and all of this. It's such a complicated story. But I wanted to go back and ask you about Hama in 82 because you write about this. And this is when Bashar al-Assad, I guess, was still an ophthalmologist in England or training to be one. And his father, Hafez al-Assad, was the dictator then. And there was a giant uprising in Hama. And Eric Margulies and Patrick Coburn were both there and reported on the thing. I don't know what the official casualty numbers were,

but it was something like 10,000 or more people were killed when the government put down this insurrection by the Muslim Brotherhood, or at least that's the very simple version of the story for set up question purposes anyway. Feel free to talk all about that. But then also, if you could please explain in your estimation what it all means and how important it is and I'm just reminded of doing the show

way back talking with Eric Margulies probably 20 years ago and him telling that story and me asking him so then if the neocons get what they want and they overthrow the government in Damascus then other than the Baothis who in Syria is organized and prepared

to inherit the power and take over the country and whether it was his words or mine I don't remember probably it was Margulies that said, yeah, the Muslim Brotherhood, if you're lucky, maybe bin Ladenites, right? Maybe far worse than that. So, yeah, these neocons would be crazy to pursue this now. And I'm sorry, this is a long, complicated question, but you're smart and know about this stuff. So then part of that gets to the nature of the Muslim Brotherhood, where, you know, in Qatar they sit in the parliament. And in Egypt, they're basically rich old men, not young radicals,

or at least they were back before, you know, the Arab Spring and the aftermath of that, et cetera. But I guess my understanding was that in Syria, they really were a lot closer to the bin Ladenites and maybe their leaders had fought in Afghanistan in the 80s and that kind of thing or not. If you could address that. But then I just want to say one more, you know, launch one more dig. at David Wormser here, where he wrote in the clean break that, and this is right in the aftermath of the Cobar Towers attack, and he's saying, well, you know, fundamentalist terrorism in the region is a problem, but America will just have to find better allies against fundamentalism than

the botfists, which is just like, I guess, a moral condemnation of Saddam Hussein and Bashar al-Assad or whatever, but the point being that at the time that they're carrying out this policy in Syria now, when we bring it back up to contemporary times in your book, this is after September 11th, and this is after, even if the entire, you know, bin Ladenite insurgency was an inside job, as you say, run through the Kurds and all that, as you have concluded here, that still they were the bleeding edge of the Sunni insurgency that killed 4,000 out of the 400 guys of American soldiers that died in Iraq. as soldiers and Marines died in Iraq. So you would think that the logic that, well, yeah, bin Laden night terrorism is bad,

but the botists are worse, would have been made null and void by 2009 and 2011 when Barack Obama is coming into power and launching this policy. So I know that's a lot to handle, but I'm now going to turn off my microphone and listen to you talk for a while. Okay, well, I guess the important thing to remember is that the Muslim Brotherhood, from its earliest days, was like a creation of British intelligence. And, you know, for that reason, it's not surprising that in the 1980s, which Mark Curtis writes about a lot, in the 1980s, the center of like the Islamic fundamentalist world was London. They used to call it London-Astam. And even bin Laden had an office there, almost bought a house in London. So the Muslim Brotherhood is, again, need to see it as a creation of Western intelligence, specifically British. And so, for example, when you move ahead to the Arab Spring, which again seemed like this grassroots revolution, peaceful approach,

test, et cetera, against these Arab dictators, it was actually the result, again, of a policy of the Obama administration because in September 2010, the Obama administration brought to the other officials from the CIA, from the National Security Council, from the State Department, from the tech companies like Facebook, and they had a series of meetings. to do with these aging Arab dictators both ones that were you know maybe not us and ones that were and they talked about they developed a strategy for they called democratic initiating democratic transitions and they issued a document called presidential study directive 11 and it was later reported on in the washington post and in the new york times basically presidential study

Directive 11 said the U.S. policy was to help topple these governments, including governments friendly to the U.S., like in Egypt, in order to control the transitions to more democratic or popular regimes or governments. But specifically, the goal was to put the Muslim Brotherhood in power in all those different countries where the so-called Arab Spring broke out. So it was the policy to topple bin Ali in Tunisia, replace him with the Anahda party. It was the policy to topple Ali Abdelah Saleh in Yemen and replace him with the Islaq Party, which was Muslim Brotherhood. And the Anahda party in Tunisia was Muslim Brotherhood.

And then it was the policy to depose Mubarak and replace him with the Muslim Brotherhood Party in Egypt. And then it was the policy again to topple Bashal Assad and tried to replace him with the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria and you know all of these exiled opposition groups like the Syrian National Council they have this kind of secular veneer but all of the that organization was basically full of Muslim Brotherhood guys so anyways that's the point is that the Muslim Brotherhood are agents of the US Britain Israel so So if you go all the way back to what happened in Hama in 1982, it was basically the same thing

that the U.S. and Israel were trying to do to Hafez al-Assad that they tried to do to Bashar many decades later. So basically, the U.S., Jordan, Israel, they were giving weapons to the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria in the 1970s and encouraging them to launch an insurgency against Hafez al-Assad. So this began in 1979. There was a famous case of the officer school in Aleppo, where the Muslim Brotherhood carried out a massacre of these al-a-white officer cadets in the Aleppo Artillery School, if I remember the name right. And then there was this series of assassinations

against Syrian government officials. There was an attempt to assassinate Hafez al-Assad himself. And the people behind it were from a group called the fighting vanguard, which was just an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. And the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood at the time was a guy named Saeed Hawa. And he very strongly advocated the ideas of Ibn Taymiya

that I mentioned earlier saying that that Alawites are apostates and they should be killed. So the Muslim Brotherhood and then they're basically like armed wing, the fighting vanguard, they launched this insurgency against the Syrian government in 1979. And then that's what led to the events in Hama three years later in 1982, where the Muslim Brotherhood and the fighting vanguard had collected a ton of weapons in Hama and they launched like an insurrection, took over a bunch of police stations, carried out a bunch of assassinations, and we're trying to basically take over

Hama. And then that's when Hafez al-Assad, you know, came with the army and tried to crush the insurgency. And regarding the casualties, it's just unknown. The Muslim Brotherhood, they say like 20,000 people were killed and they say they were all civilians. But there was this armed insurgency going on and they had weapons from the U.S. and from Israel and they're the ones that launched the attack and launched the insurgency to take over Hama and then

Hafez Lassad sent the army in in response. There was I believe it was a defense intelligence agency document that was written shortly after that claimed that the number of casualties was 2,000. So I don't know exactly how

many people were killed. I have been to Hama and I've talked to people that were there during that time. And they said the bombing from this Syrian army was really bad. So it's not to say, anyway, so it was definitely a very bloody affair. But the things that happened in Haman, what led to that, regardless of whether you feel like, maybe there's only 2,000 people who died, mostly Muslim Brotherhood militants, or whether it was 20,000 people and they were all civilians,

It was the result of this U.S.-Israeli U.K. effort to use the Muslim Brotherhood to overthrow the Syrian government way back in the late 70s and early 80s. And it's just like they just did the exact same playbook, however many 30-ish years later. And there's even a CIA document that I mentioned in the book that describes a plan to try to topple the Syrian government at that time. And it even says that the CIA would establish committees of free Syrians and that they would launch an insurrection from a city called Dera in southern Syria just across the border from Jordan, you know, with help from Jordan. And I believe I have to, I can't remember when that document was issued, but I think it was like back in the 70s.

And it just describes like the exact same thing they did. 2010, you know, the so-called protest movement started in Dera, in just across the Jordanian border in 2011, and they established the free Syrian army. I mean, they even used the exact same language. So, again, this is all evidence that what happened in 2011 was not a grassroots uprising, peaceful uprising, against a dictator. But this was all engineered by the CIA, again, for the purpose of benefiting the Israelis, using the Muslim Brotherhood as their tool to do it. And back in the days, I'm sure you remember this, but like there was constantly any time you would bring up, you know, when I first started writing for you at the Libertarian Institute, and, you know, you'd get in these arguments with these people on Twitter. that were big Syrian activists and things like that or Westerners that became activists

for the opposition basically they were mostly getting paid but they were to constantly say oh that's a conspiracy theory that the CIA is involved in these protests and you're just denying the agency of Syrians and you think that they're just not capable of having any agency

and doing anything on their own and on and on it was just but if you just look at it. There's so much evidence that this was a plan. And, you know, again, they took that playbook from the 70s and the 80s that culminated in what happened in Hama. And again, there's the Presidential Study Directive 11 from the Obama administration that's openly said, look, we're trying to put the Muslim Brotherhood in power in all these countries. And then these people would come out and just say that, oh, you know, you need to listen to Syrians because

and say, oh, well, which Syrians are you listening to? You know, you're listening to the Syrians who were being paid by the U.S. government who were saying these are peaceful protests that the CIA or any foreign intelligence agencies had nothing to do with. And Obama and the U.S. only got involved later, you know, because Bashar was killing all these people for no reason. And that's when the U.S. finally reluctantly intervened, you know, and then these activists were blaming the Obama administration for its inaction and all this stuff. And the whole thing was just orchestrated by the U.S., Israel, Britain, et cetera, from the beginning. And anyways, that's what the book is about. If people want the evidence of all this, you know, it's in the book. Yeah, all right.

So a few things there. First of all, when I talk about the Muslim Brotherhood there and even bringing up the old stuff and bringing up Iraq War II and the role of al-Qaeda and Iraq there and this and that, I don't mean to sound naive. and apologies for the experienced in the audience but then again there are new people in the audience all the time who maybe don't have a background in this thing and so it's worth pointing out that when david worms or says no way i prefer fundamentalist to botists that only a trader could still say that in 2011 these people knew exactly what they were doing there's no question that oh somehow in 2014 or 17, they looked back

and went, geez, I guess those guys were jihadists after all or something like that. They knew exactly what they were doing, because we knew exactly what they were doing at the time. And so that's the point of going back over all of that stuff. And I guess

the biggest, maybe the final thing, the biggest evidence of that is that you know, throughout the war, again, the U.S., Israel, Britain, Turkey, Qatar, South, they were supporting Jephātunisra, the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, and they were supporting ISIS, but they constantly claimed they weren't. They constantly claimed, oh, these people are terrorists and there are enemies.

But they were supporting them. Again, you can read the book to see the documentation of that. But when Jolani, the leader of the Nusra front, took over Syria back in December, and the whole CIA operation to topple the Bashar al-Assad's government was finally successful. You know, the name of the CIA operation is Timber Sycamore. When the Timber-Sikamor operation was finally successful last December, toppled the Bashar al-Assad and Abu Mohameda Jolani, a former al-Qaeda in Iraq, Islamic State in Iraq commander,

and then Nusra-front commander, which was the official al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria. when he came to power in December, nobody missed a beat. Nobody even raised an eyebrow. The Brits immediately recognized him. The Americans immediately recognized him. The Israelis kind of acted like they weren't that happy about it so they could still kind of use his terrorist passed against him if they need to to get some concessions,

like maybe having him give up the goal on heights, et cetera. But they just, you know, they didn't even, like, bother to even acknowledge, oh, yeah, we launched this whole huge war because terrorism was so bad, and terrorism and ISIS and al-Qaeda was such a threat to our civilization. And then they just stick a former ISIS commander in as the president of Syria immediately get rid of the $10 million bounty within a couple months. You know, he's meeting President Trump in Saudi Arabia and they're just shaking hands. again after Trump went on those those tirades during the 2006 election you know

blaming Hillary Clinton for supporting ISIS and all these things which is true and then he just turned around and you know has this nice meeting with them and says oh this guy Shera you know they changed his name to rebrand him the British did and and Trump is is there shaking his hand and giving interviews afterwards saying like yeah this is a tough guy nice guy good looking guy You know, I mean, that's the indication that this whole thing going back, you know, decades about al-Qaeda claiming there's a war on terror. I mean, to me, that's like there's many evidences of it. But that's a big evidence to me that they could have a former ISIS commander take power in Syria and they just act like nothing even happened, you know, and they just welcome them with open arms.

That's just a big sign to me. All right. Well, now, so let's go back to the Arab Spring there for a second because, um, First of all, Liz Cheney was part of this. I remember Sean Hannity ranting at her during the Arab Spring when, I guess kind of in the aftermath when the Muslim Brotherhood won the elections in Egypt.

And he has Liz Cheney as a guest and he's ranting. Who's responsible for this? And he doesn't understand that she is. When she was working at the State Department, this was her big deal, was creating sort of the next step for what are we going to do because they knew that Hosni Mubarak's son. was sort of an ineffectual type and would not be capable of inheriting the power.

I guess they were having trouble deciding on a military dictator to succeed him. And so they were essentially experimenting with the idea of having free elections or at least rigged elections and some kind of transformation toward democracy in Egypt. And you could say like, you know, there's a little bit of Robert Kaganism that like, yeah, let's try it in there that like they actually believe in democracy a little bit or something is part of their weird ideology. But I guess my take at the time, it seemed pretty clear going back from covering it at the time, was that the whole thing had gotten out of hand that I'm not exactly sure what happened in Tunisia. that was also America's guy that got overthrown. But once the protests broke out in Egypt, it didn't seem like just a put-on because it seemed like you had the entire population of Alexandria, Giza, and Cairo all just out in the street

and right-wing and left-wing, all the students and all the government workers and all the, you know, so-called liberals from the big cities and then also the Muslim Brotherhood with the encouragement of Qatar and Al Jazeera, admittedly, of course. But actually, but not at first, though. And then they just barely won the elections. Oh, and I should say that during the thing, it was very clear the Obama people said they were doing everything they could to keep Mubarak in there and they wanted to even ease him out if they had to

and replace him with Omar Suleiman, the head of the secret police, that they were terrified about elections in this revolution. They want to keep them as long as possible. so then I guess what I'm saying is I'm questioning how certain it is that what happened in Egypt was exactly what they had planned because then even once the Muslim Brotherhood did take power they just barely won the elections and then the entire government refused to work with them basically like they just did like work slowdowns essentially and refused to you know like Donald Trump trying to run DC you know back at years ago. And then Saudi Arabia and America and Israel sponsored a military coup to overthrow the Muslim Brotherhood and put the military dictator back in power after only a year and a half and a fake little protest movement to justify it. And it seemed to me like, I don't know, and I guess this goes to the question overall what you say to about al-Qaeda. And there's just

no question that U.S., UK, and Saudi backed these jihadis all over the place. I guess at this point, I'm the kook for saying, I'm the conspiracy theorist for saying maybe there's some wiggle room in there where these people do things that they're not made to do by MI6, but maybe I'm the nut at this point for that. Well, going back to, yeah, the question about Egypt and Tunisia, it was the same. Again, that was a big thing. People would say, well, why would the, how could the U.S. be behind the protests in Tunisia and Egypt? because these are U.S. allies, and we all know from reading Domchomsky that the U.S. loves supporting dictators. So, of course,

the U.S. couldn't be behind these protests, right? Well, let's say, I know from... But hang on one second, because I know that what happened in Tunisia was that it was a huge scandal from the WikiLeaks that detailed the corruption of the government there that was put out and that one inside job. That was Bradley Manning and Julian Assange who did that. And it just showed State Department flunkies

talking to each other about, Ali's especially his wife's family's total kleptocracy in the country and then right on the heels of that scandal that was you know boiling all through the end of 2010 was then that guy bulazizi set himself on fire in protest of the cops confiscating his vegetable cart and then the riots broke out so if the nED kicked into gear then i don't know about it and i'm perfectly willing to listen but that part of it wasn't rigged by the cia you know what i mean that part of it was like oh shit things are breaking out in tunisia you know what i mean well i think it was rigged by the cia let me try to explain why um the first thing again if you

know about those meetings of the national security council state department cia in september 2010 where they issue a document stating that it's u.s policy to overthrow all these arab governments and replace them with Muslim Brotherhood political parties. Then you have to say, okay, that was a few months before everything broke out in Tunisia. So all of a sudden, WikiLeaks released these cables about, you know, the corruption of the president, bin Ali. And what's weird is that when those cables got released, you know, WikiLeaks is all in English, right? So how quickly is that going to really filter into like Tunisian society potentially and like cause all these big problems? And like did people in Tunisia not really know he was corrupt?

I mean, they probably did. But there was also a Tunisian, a group of Tunisians based in France, Tunisian activists that were prepared. Like within one hour of WikiLeaks releasing the cables about bin Ali and his corruption, there was a, group of Tunisians based in France who had their own website translated they sifted they had already sifted through the cables

they translated them they summarized them and they disseminated the cables in Arabic so they were like provided all this information by WikiLeaks in advance and did all the work of curating them again translating them into

Arabic and then disseminating them within online for Tunisians to actually be upset about. But the fact that that seems very, very organized, and it seems like, you know, potentially- You're saying Assange gave it to them in advance of publishing it on the site? You're saying Assange gave it to them early compared to the public? Yeah. So there was this whole group of Tunisian activists, but they were based in France,

who got the cables early and were able to release them, basically one hour, after WikiLeaks publicly released them on their website. So we're going to read about that? Is that the book? I'll send you the references. Okay. And then, but then the crazy thing too is that, as you mentioned, there was this young vegetable seller, Mohamed Bouazizi, who lit himself on fire, and people say this was the reason, you know, that then the protests snowballed and got very big. But in addition to that, there were, and this doesn't barely get talked about, but there's an Al Jazeera journalist who wrote about this that there were snipers who were executing protesters, shooting them in the back of the head in some of these early protests.

And no one knew who these snipers were. Bin Ali and the government, of course, you know, denied that they. They were from the government side, but everyone assumed that, oh, it must be snipers from the government. And they were killing all these protesters. And then as soon as all these protesters started getting killed, Obama immediately came out publicly and said, oh, well, Ben Ali has lost legitimacy, so he needs to go. It's like, okay, well, that might sound a little bit crazy that the U.S. might have deployed false flag snipers to kill protesters and make sure that, you know, and make sure that, the protests snowballed and that the hatred against the government grew. But we all know what happened in Ukraine at the Maidan in 2014. That's exactly what happened.

And on top of that, the same sniper phenomenon migrated like clockwork, also to Egypt. There were false flagged snipers in Egypt. There were false flag snipers in Yemen. There were false flag snipers in early protests in Libya. And there were false flag snipers killing protesters and members of the security. forces in Syria in the early protests. So knowing that there's this presidential study directive 11 that the policy was to overthrow these governments and replace them with the Muslim Brotherhood indicates that this was an

operation, including in Tunisia. And, you know, that's why here, I'm the kook, I'm the crazy one. That's why I think, to be honest, WikiLeaks is, you know, an operation of the Israelis. And there's even a quote in, maybe it's the time of Israel, I'd have to dig it up, but there's a quote where in an Israeli newspaper, they say, if WikiLeaks didn't exist, Israel would have to create it. And in the Israeli press, there's lots of articles where they talk about WikiLeaks never released anything that harmed Israeli national security. In other cases, it actually helped them in a few cases. And there's other things about Julian Assange that I need to research it better to properly make the case because probably your listeners now already think I'm crazy.

But the whole thing in Tunisia, there's all these clear indications from, again, Obama administration setting this policy to the WikiLeaks cables coming out, to them being already ready to go translated and disseminated by this group of Tunisians that are based in the West and then having these false flagged snipers come. kill protesters to make sure that the hatred for the government would grow and would give Obama the excuse to immediately come out and say that Bin Ali had lost legitimacy. And again, the same thing happened in Egypt. You know, the Obama administration said they're constantly acting like, oh, we want to keep Mubarak, he's our friend. But they have to act that way. If they were to come out and say, we support, you know, the Arab Spring, or we spark the Arab Spring, that would immediately blow the cover on the whole.

thing, it would lose legitimacy, you know. So they had to kind of play it off like, oh, we're not involved in this. You know, we're supporting Mubarak. But again, a couple days after a bunch of snipers killed some protesters near the Ministry of Interior in Cairo in January, just after in the first couple of days of the protests, Obama sent like a special envoy to Cairo

and he told Mubarak to step down. This guy, this, I can't, I fill back I can't remember the name, but Obama sent him, like a special envoy, flew him to Cairo, and they privately told him a Mubarak in a meeting, hey, you need to step down. And there's some other indications, again, that in Egypt, this was all planned as well. So, for example, in 2009, 2010, the State Department, under the guidance of a guy named Jared Cohen, who initially started working for Condoleezza Rice, and then stayed on when Hillary Clinton became Secretary. area of state.

Jared Cohen and the State Department, along with Facebook, Google, et cetera, they were organizing conferences for activists from all these different Arab countries and from Iran. They were having conferences in Beirut. They were having conferences in New York. They would fly these Arab activists and human rights people to these conferences, teach them how to use Facebook, teach them how to use Twitter in order to spark protests. This is color revolution stuff, right, that we see in all the former Soviet places, including in Serbia. These guys are actually being trained by Otepur, the Serbian activist group that sparked the demonstrations against Milosevic.

So Oatpore was training these different people. They're learning how to use all this technology. They're also learning how to use Tor, this, you know, private this way to keep your internet searches and communication secret, which Edward Snowden always promotes, and that's how WikiLeaks supposedly were able to get their earliest documents and then release them was through this software called Tor. But that was, tour was funded by the U.S. government. This was a U.S. military project to create this technology tour.

So anyways, Jared Cohen in the State Department, he was organizing all these activists training them. And then what they would do is they would, find ways again find grievances that they could lock on to in a particular country promote those grievances and then try to again create anger against the government so in the case of egypt the way they did it was there was this guy named a young guy named the Khalid who was beaten to death by the Egyptian police for being like the low level drug dealer so some of these activists again with heavy involvement from a guy named

who worked for Google, he's the one, this guy at Google employee, he's the one that created the We Are All Khalid Saeed Facebook page. And from that Facebook page, which was created in, I'd have to double check the date again, but it was like early, late 2010 or like beginning of January, they promoted the case of Khalid Saeed who had been killed probably nine months before. And they got a bunch of, you know, followers on Facebook. I'm sure they got a got some help being promoted by the algorithm, and then they were able to start the initial protests. And when the first protest broke out, this guy, he was working for Google, but in an office in Dubai, he was in Egypt at the time the protests broke out, just by chance, of course.

And guess who he met in Egypt, in Cairo, when the protests were going? He had a meeting with Jared Cohen. Jared Cohen showed up. Again, the guy from the State Department and this guy, Jared Cohn, he later went on to work for Google. And anyway, so through these different things, you can see that all this stuff was orchestrated. So the average Egyptian that's maybe going down to Tahrir Square in Cairo and is angry, you know, for good reasons, in many cases, corruption, poverty, lack of democracy, all this stuff. But what the average person does know is who actually organized these protests, who are these technology companies helping facilitate them,

who are the activists, and who are they being paid by? And what is the purpose of these demonstrations? Is it really to help Egyptians, or is there some broader outside agenda at work here? So anyways, that sniper phenomenon, too, again, it started in Tunisia, and the exact same thing happened in Cairo, the exact same thing happened in Libya,

the exact same thing happened in Yemen, sorry, and then the exact same thing happened in Egypt. And I wrote a paper about it that I need to send to you to publish. I haven't published anything on it, but I've written it. So I'll send that to you if you want to know about the sniper stuff. But again, it's just the exact same playbook that we later saw in 2014 in Ukraine, which again sounds kind of crazy maybe that a bunch of protesters were actually killed by people from their own side.

But in the Ukraine case, it's documented so clearly by Ivan Kachinovsky, the Ukrainian professor that teaches in Ottawa and Canada. And a lot of people are familiar with what happened in the Maidan. But that was the exact same tactics, the exact same stuff happened in all the Arab Spring countries. And so, again, this all indicates that these were intelligence operations from the beginning to basically create protests and help them, you know, snowball and create anger against the government to topple these leaders. And then when it, you know, migrated finally to Syria in March of 2011, the U.S. intelligence, Israelis, etc., they not only sparked protests in that way like they had in Tunisia and Egypt, etc., but they also, as we talked about in the last interview, they also released a bunch of guys. Islamic State guys from prison in Iraq and sent them to Syria.

Those guys were there in Syria waiting to launch the insurgency in late 2010. We know that from an American journalist Theo Padnos, who was abducted by the Nusra front and held prisoner by them for two years. So he had tons of chances to talk with Nistra fighters, with ISIS guys. And they all told him, like, look, we all came from Iraq and we were, you know, in eastern Syria and ready to launch this insurgency to topple Bashar because he was an al-a-white. And we were, you know, preparing for that even before these, you know, protests broke out in Dera in March. Anyway, sorry, that's a very long answer, but hope that all makes sense.

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to protect yourself from monetary inflation. That's rrbi. see oh hey listen so uh a few things there i guess it's possible that i have to reassess my my take on the arab spring which was mostly that they had begun to do this color-coded type project and then had tried to call it off in order to save their guy in egypt too late and that of course they exploited it in libya and syria to the absolute nth degree they didn't really know what to do in Yemen and eventually ended up just trying to ease the guy out

and put the vice president in there which of course blew up in their face but then in Saudi Arabia they clamped down hard on the Shiites in and I guess gave increased welfare payments to everybody else which they did the same thing you know basically with bribes in Kuwait in Iraq they had kind of day of rage protests but they didn't really go anywhere. I don't know. I guess the Sunnis didn't have any real power in Baghdad and everybody else was settling for good enough by then. But it seemed like kind of a phenomenon that went beyond what the National Endowment for Democracy was capable of even trying to rig. And it seemed to

me like, well, yeah, they exploit it where they can and clamp down on it. Oh, in Bahrain, the Americans sat silent and even approvingly, avowedly approvingly as the Saudis sent forces across the causeway there to help the king clamp down on the Shiite majority there for their peaceful protests. And so, but you make a compelling argument about, essentially about a lot of things that I didn't know about the background. It was funny because I looked up the presidential study directive 11 that you were talking about. And I got purple links here, man. I got a New York Times article. I've got a thing from the, from Frank Gaffney, the neocon, from the Center for Security Policy, demanding that the thing be declassified.

He was always a hawk on the Muslim Brotherhood. He was not a Kaganite on the issue of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood whatsoever. I was on red alert about all this stuff at the time. and then um there was a thing from the federation of american scientists that apparently i clicked on before but doesn't have a hot link to thing i guess the thing has never been to classified but so and this goes to what i was saying about um liz cheney and i remember this about liz cheney was kind of pushing for this sort of thing and i remember them talking about how Gamel, I think, was his name, Mubarak, the son.

Like, well, we don't know what to do with him. He's not good enough. So we're going to have to figure out something else. And maybe we will go ahead and support democracy. I didn't remember them being so specific about the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. I know they were talking about that in Syria and including in the New York Times from the very beginning. From the Bush years, you can read it where Elizabeth Cheney, as they called her then, had a big fancy title. I document in the book.

They changed her title two or three times. I think she stopped to have a baby for a minute and came back and changed her title again. But the whole time she's working on creating a Syrian government in exile, the Syrian National Council, which you previously mentioned here, which would inherit the power. And even though it was made up of the Muslim Brotherhood primarily at the time. So that much is certainly true there. No question about that there. That was their avowed policy then. Yeah, and there was one guy, I think it was in the New York Times article about it.

And again, these articles didn't come out like in September 2010 when all the meetings did. And when the policy was set, the articles about this didn't come out until like March 2011. Right. Yeah, this one's late February or mid-February 2011 is the New York Times article about it. Yeah. And they didn't get much attention. And in one of those articles, there's a U.S. government official. Again, I apologize.

I forget who. but basically he was responding to the accusation that, hey, isn't this just a policy to put the Muslim Brotherhood in power? And he basically said, well, you know, if we can't, as the American government distinguish between Al-Qaeda on the one hand and the Muslim Brotherhood on the other, then, you know, we've got big problems, you know. So he just came out and said, look, we are putting the Muslim Brotherhood in power. and again that just changes that changes everything when you know about that you know about that policy then you start looking back on events in tunisia and uh Libya Syria all these places um it just changes everything and again i feel bad i haven't sent me that article about the snipers yet but i'll i'll double check over it uh you know in the next days and send it to you to publish

but that should hopefully you know make the the case much more clearly than me trying to describe it, you know, from memory. Yeah. You know, because I covered all this at the time, of course, on the show, and I was talking with people in Egypt who were even sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood, and they were terrified about the Americans. They said the Americans were doing everything they could to undermine them. And, of course, the Saudis, and the Americans absolutely were behind the military coup

to cancel the results of the Arab Spring there, just a year and a half later, and put, you know, Fata Al-Sisi might as well be Mubarak's son in there. So if they, maybe they tried their little experiment and it didn't work, but at least there had to have been, you know, for example, as I just said, between the neo-conservatives, between Gaffney and Kagan, it seems like there were also differences of opinion throughout the U.S. government and foreign policy establishment. And, you know, one of the things they did was increased trade. into the Gaza Strip and stuff like that

and drove the Israelis mad that was not what they wanted but that doesn't mean that just because they do these things that they really know what they're doing or have a coherent policy or a consensus among all the different players involved

about what they're doing you know and I think regarding Sisi like in Syria for example the Qataris originally had were given kind of tasked by the U.S., the Israelis, and the Saudis to do the initial legwork of funding the al-Qaeda-led insurgency in Syria.

And so they were taking the lead with the permission of the bigger countries for the first two years. And basically in early 2013, the Saudis pretty much decided that the Qatari's were messing everything up that they were mishandling the file and that's when a really important city in syria fell was kosher in like may of 2013 it was right by the lebanese border and that was like how the free syrian army industry would get their weapons from the lebanese side was through this city called kosher near homes but so that's the point when um prince bandar took a bigger role and again, I hope I'm getting my dates right, but they started to be, like, basically the Saudis kind of said, hey, the Qatari's, you guys are not, or you guys are messing it up, we're not, you're not getting us the results.

And now, I'm sorry, just pause, just one's, just one's say that Prince Bandar, you're talking about, that's Prince Bandar, Bin Salton, the former head of intelligence and then former ambassador to the United States for Saudi Arabia, right? Exactly. I'm sorry to interrupt. Please go back and complete your thought. Forgive me for that. I just want to make sure people know who you're talking about. Yeah, Bandar Bush, so basically he was made ahead of Saudi intelligence, and then he ended up basically taking over the file of, you know, running the insurgency, the al-Qaeda-led insurgency against Bashar al-Assad. That was Prince Bandar who was basically behind all that.

So there started to be problems at that time between the Saudis and the Qataris. And then later, again, I forget the exact dates, but maybe a year or two later, I mean, the Saudis actually. put an embargo on Qatar and then the Saudis who had long supported the Muslim Brotherhood all of a sudden the Saudis turned and called the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization and banned them so when with with with Muhammad Morsi who took over the Muslim Brotherhood leader who took over as president of Egypt from Mubarak I think I haven't studied this so close so I could be wrong but my hunch is that because of this the Qataris the Saudis kind of

like the Qataris are getting too powerful here. And, you know, we need to cut them down down to size. And so they went in and took out Morsi and put Sisi in his place. And then again, the Saudis took over the control of the insurgency in Syria. And that's, you know, when the false flag happened in Huta in Damascus in 2013 with the whole chemical attack, supposedly Bashar al-Assad's army launched the sarin-filled rockets and killed more than 1,000 people in the suburbs of Damascus, and that almost triggered the Western intervention. Hey, that was right after the coup in Egypt. That was all band-arbed and sultan was behind the false flag in Ghouta in 2013.

Well, you're right that that was right after the coup, now that you mention it in Egypt. And that was also meant the false flag in Anguda, which was meant to bring the United States into the war on al-Qaeda's side at that point. That was Bandar, what, working with Erdogan to do that, because I already think Erdogan was in on it, but maybe not. But you're saying that was Bandar doing that to bring America in on Nusir's side, but to spite the Muslim Brotherhood in what way? I'm confused. Well, sorry. So regarding Egypt, when the Saudis started feeling like the Qataris were becoming too powerful. Right.

I understand that part. I haven't studied it that close, so I could be wrong. But that's my guess as to why the Saudis went into Egypt and got rid of the Muslim Brotherhood guy, Morsi, who was backed so strongly by Qatar. They got rid of them and put Sisi in. And I believe it's because, again, the Saudis, that's when they started having trouble with the Qataris and felt like Qatar was becoming too powerful. So that happens to be roughly the time that also the Saudis, specifically Prince Bandar, took over the file of guiding the insurgency in Syria, took over from the Qataris and took like a much bigger role. And so the Saudis started having more influence over the direct influence over the insurgency at that point. And that's, too, when this false flag happened in the suburbs of Damascus in 2013,

which, as you mentioned, the idea was to trigger Obama's red line, where Obama said if Bashar al-Assad uses chemical weapons against his own people, that would be a red line that would trigger me to launch, like, you know, a big bombing campaign or invasion of Syria. So Prince Bandar is the one who, on the ground, specifically, was working with a group called Jay Shal. Islam, one of the so-called rebel groups. They're the ones that, from the best evidence we have, pulled off the false flag of that chemical

attack. Obama later got cold feet and called off the bombing campaign, but, you know, the false flag did happen, and that was, again, to help with this effort of overthrowing Bashar al-Assad. So the point is, I guess, again, that just Prince Bandar, he's, you know, became very powerful in Syria at that same time that, you know, at the expense of the Qataris, at roughly the same time that the Saudis overthrew Morsi, the Qatari backed Morsi and put Sisi in his place. Well, if I remember right from 2011, I'm almost certain it was Alistair Crook wrote in The Observer, which is just the Guardian on the weekend, I guess, that Prince Bandar has opened his jails and is letting all the marks out.

That would have been, I'm going to guess March or April of 2011. Does that sound right to you? Yeah. Yeah. Man, okay, so. But again, I guess with, well, anyway, sorry, go ahead. No, you. I was going to say there was a New York Times article that came out.

I think about that same time. I think in the summer of 2013, written by Mark Mazetti, he's like a veteran Middle East journalist for the New York Times. And he wrote an article talking about, again, the U.S., launching this operation, Timber Sycamore, to overthrow Bashar al-Assad, and relying on funding and expertise of Saudi and Texas. specifically directed by Prince Bandar bin Sultan and Mark Mazzetti used the phrase the safari club

Which was you know this old kind of like Network of Intelligence agencies that dated back to I think like the 70s and the 80s that did you know probably some of that you're on-contra stuff etc and so Mark Mazzetti wrote an article about this saying like this is kind of reminiscent of the old Safari Club days or we have this like several different intelligence agencies that all seem to kind of work together and the Saudis were like a key key player in that basically doing things for the U.S. the U.S. says, hey, and I guess by extension Israel is saying, hey, you know, we need this Al-Qaeda-led insurgency in Syria doing this, that, or whatever. And, you know, Prince Bandar bin Sultan was the guy with like the connections on the ground and the money, you know, to get

job done. So that whole false flag, there's heavy Israeli involvement in it, like creating a bunch of the fake intelligence to blame Assad. The Israelis actually themselves were the ones that planted within the White House the idea of the red line that everyone later attributed to Obama because he said in a speech if Bashar, you know, uses chemical weapons, that will be a red line. But that was actually the Israelis that introduced that concept and got Obama and Hillary Clinton to use it. So there was heavy Israeli involvement in that false flag. There was heavy British involvement. There was heavy French intelligence involvement. And there was heavy CIA involvement. So again, all these intelligence agencies,

sometimes we think of like, well, there's this country, the US does this, and Britain does that, and France does that, as if they're like separate. And Israelis, you know, as if they're separate, they're separate, or Israel and the U.S. are separate, but, you know, these, it's, uh, thinking about it in terms of nation states is almost like not very helpful. It's more of thinking about, hey, there's this like group of gangsters that all run these intelligence agencies together, which again, you could call the safari club, which Mark Mizetti, uh, the phrase he used. Whether it's Prince Bandar, working with the Israelis, or it's John Brennan in the CIA, or it's Michael Morel, the deputy director, all these people.

you know work together to get these type of operations done yeah and um that was the case with the insurgency as a whole and then also with the gutta false flag uh specifically yeah i mean the original reports from those who knew about what was going on in syria where nato is doing this you know eric margaly's came home from france where he knows all their uh you know foreign ministry officials from way back and their spies and everything and he told me by like fall of 2011 that oh yeah the french are on the ground over there coordinating the war it's their old colony so they were taking the lead at that point anyway um and whatever people can go back and check the archives we covered all this in real time out as it was unfolding the whole time that um you know some of their

propaganda about the brutality of Assad's war is true and some of it only may be true but boy are they leaving out the reality of the other side and listen I mean this again we did another entire interview on just the background to the thing but let's end with the beginning here what is the reality of the innocence and the peaceful nature of the protest movement in Syria How legitimate was it? How widespread was it? How corrupted was it by snipers killing cops from the very beginning and all of those things? Because, look, it makes sense on just the face value thing here, to play devil's advocate here, that, yeah, dictators don't like it when people protest and their stupid clumsy cops tend to clamp down.

And that can oftentimes really backfire where what you really need to do is if you're a dictator. or just a regime is let people protest. That's how you let, you know, steam out of the valve to take the pressure off. And instead he clamped down and clamp down and clamp down. And that's what created the insurgency. And then so is all his fault. And then the insurgents then were protecting the country from their evil dictator that was attacking them. And so that's the way they address the whole thing.

That's the way the war party frames the whole issue. Now I know you're going to differ with that. But I bring all that up to try to give you an opportunity to differ with that in some detail here. Well, it's kind of all those things. And again, this guy, Jared Cohen, who orchestrated a lot of this stuff from the State Department and then later Google in a speech he gave, I think at Stanford a couple of years later, he described this as the dictator's dilemma. And he gave the speech was regarding like Facebook and the role that Facebook played in the Arab Spring. And he said, look, when you have, it doesn't necessarily have to be a dictatorship. It could be any government, but especially in a dictatorship, if you can get people protesting,

if you can light the spark or get the snowball rolling, then the government has a dilemma on their hands, which is like, yeah, do we crack down on these protesters? Do we let them protest? And in the case of the Syrian government, they in some cases, you know, did what they should have done, which is just let people protest and stayed hands off. But then there's the case of the kids in Dera that wrote on the wall, graffiti saying that Bashar al-Assad should go. And there was the local security chief, Atif Najib, who detained these young men. And there was the rumor that the active Najib security guys tortured the kids and pulled their fingernails out and threatened to rape their moms. But that was those turned out to be exaggerations and were false stories that spread.

But he did arrest the kids for a couple weeks. And so that made people in Dera angry. And that, you know, kind of started the spark. And then, again, if you introduce the false flag snipers and start killing protesters, then it snowballs from there. And, you know, the actual people coming out to protest, well, you know, they're all kinds of people. Some are people who, yeah, just want a democracy or they're angry because they think they see that the government is killing all these people, you know, blowing their brains out at protests. And that makes them angry. And so they come out and they protest.

So there were some people, of course, who protested for very legitimate reasons, but also many of the protesters were not protesting for democracy and, you know, liberal, the Western-style freedoms. A lot of the protesters were Salafis, and they were supporters of two different Syrian clerics who were based in Saudi Arabia. One was Adnan al-Arur, and another guy was Muhammad Surorazain al-Aabedin. And Muhammad Surorazain al-Aidin was from Dera originally, but he had spent like 20 years, guess where, of his life in the UK, living in London, like most of the Islamist guys do. And then later he moved to Saudi Arabia, but it was a lot of his followers in Dera, and of this other guy, Adnan al-Arur, who was very famous for calling him.

for the killing of Alawites and in some of his speeches because he had a satellite TV show. But it was supporters of these guys who were made up like the backbone of the early protests. So there are some secular liberal people, some communists, some leftists, but a lot of them were Salafists and calling for an Islamic state and calling to send the Christians all to Beirut and to massacre and kill all the Alawites, send the Alawites to their graves. So it was just a mix of all this stuff, but again, at the beginning of it was people like Jared Cohen from the State Department and the CIA orchestrating these protests, understanding that there is this dilemma that any government faces. Like if you've got a foreign intelligence agency trying to stir up trouble, it is really hard to, you know, it is really hard to deal with it properly. another thing to mention is that there were these internal documents that ended up getting

by this NATO-funded NGO that there were these internal Syrian government documents that ended up getting stolen and brought out of the country and this NGO claimed that they had all this evidence that like that Syrian leaders Bashar and all of his people in this like emergency council that they set up to deal with the protests this NGO claims that oh we have all we have more evidence than you can that there ever has been about you know these war crimes and these direct orders that you know Bashar and his guys gave to kill the

protesters but if you actually read the documents which i've done which kit karenberg has done wrote some amazing articles about this those documents actually show that the the opposite that these Most of the people in the top levels of the Syrian government were saying things like, hey, do not fire on protesters unless they fire on you. Be careful. Don't agitate the protesters. They also talked about how they were worried about being assassinated because there were attacks taking place against government officials. So, you know, it doesn't mean, again, the Syrian government never did anything wrong or there weren't any crimes committed on that side. but the point is all this was orchestrated, you know, externally. And if you're a Syrian and you're just living in a place like Duma, like in the suburbs of Damascus,

and you go, there are these protests taking place. And all of a sudden, again, people keep getting shot in the head. Of course, that makes you angry. I remember even talking to a guy who's now a member of HTS and the new security forces here in Syria. And he's from Duma, that city where there was some early protests in the suburbs and where there were some false flag snipers. And I asked him, hey, what was your thoughts, you know, early on in the protest? He's like, oh, well, first I was with the government and, you know, I didn't go out and protest, but then I, you know, started seeing these people getting shot and killed and that changed my mind. And then I ended up going to the protest and then he joined the free army.

And then, you know, he fought throughout the war and ended up getting on the buses and being sent to Idlib at the end and spent four years in Idlib and then returned to Damascus when Bashar's government fell in, you know, last December. So you can see this is how these intelligence operations have effects on, you know, people on the ground. And how, you know, like you said, when I was reading about the Arab Spring when it first came out, I could have never imagined that this was really. what was happening. You know, I just thought, yeah, Mubarak's a dictator. We got protests in Egypt. My brother even went and was in a bunch of the protests to make a documentary about it. So he was there and saw a bunch of the street battles between Mubarak's security forces and the protesters. And at that time, when I was just, you know, reading about it in the news,

how could I have ever imagined or thought that all of this stuff was actually behind it? We know, we were debating it. years later that i was of course through studying it and then reading interviews and people talking about after the fact that you can actually put the picture together so if you're a syrian on the ground and you're just seeing the protests outside your window and people getting shot like how could how could you imagine that there's this huge external conspiracy going on to spark these protests and to destroy the country there's no way you'll just see the protests you see people getting killed and you're like oh you know what this government is bad i'm going to the

protests i'm joining the free army etc etc you know right well a little a distance will help you and by yeah i don't mean me i mean for example i'm virtually certain that daniam mcadams uh knew from the beginning that what was going on in egypt was a put on essentially more than any other thing and you know ryan dawson who's more conspiratorial than me on virtually everything he was not on that he was like dude this is way too many people from way too many parts of Egypt to be just the NEDs do-ins and whatever which I'm still pretty partial to that argument too but there were people at the time who said no this whole thing is a put on from the beginning people who like you are even suspicious of WikiLeaks even being

you know the whole thing being essentially orchestrated not even in part but in whole whereas I was very much from that point of view as far as it went in Libya and Syria. But as I was saying before, my idea was, well, the Arab Spring broke out as kind of this popular movement and they exploited the hell out of it against their enemies, but clamped down in favor of their friends where they could and did what they could to manage the situation, which I think maybe was overly complicated and that you're right, that it's actually more simple even than that, but I'm pretty sure McAdams was right all along and others who were more skeptical about it were right all along during that time. Yeah, again, it was just hard when you see the images, all these people going out in protesting.

And, you know, I don't really have an ideology now, but I, for most of my adult life, was an anarchist. And so I've been to a lot of protests, you know what I mean? Anti-war protests for all kinds of things. And so in my mind, when I see these people in Egypt or else who are protesting, my first reaction at the time was like, yeah, hell yeah, you know, go for it, protesters, and the government is evil, right? Well, in America did look really bad because everybody knew that Hosni Mubarak was America's guy. He'd been in there for 30 years.

And on CNN and everything, it was embarrassing. It wasn't just to put on it. It was like, geez, this is kind of the entire. country is making it clear apparently that we were his only constituency not them damn and then the tear gas canisters said

made in the USA on them and it was a disgrace and I quote in the book I have numerous people talking about this is part of and including Hillary Clinton herself this is part of why we needed to do Libya was because we looked so bad from Egypt that he was so obviously our puppet

that apparently they all hated and wanted rid of. So now we have to try to look like heroes on the side of the revolutionaries by really taking their side in Libya next door. And I have like two or three or four different quotes like that. Amory Slaughter, who was a close advisor to Hillary and Sarah Lee Whitson from a human rights watch, who she's pretty hardcore for a human rights watch type.

I've liked her on some things. And she was saying, oh, that was definitely the thinking, dude. That's what they were all telling me at the time was we look. bad for Egypt so now we have to make up for it by going to Libya which I don't know man these people are dim-witted enough that I could see that kind of thinking playing into them you know in fact I think I think Matthew Hastings reported Mike oh geez I think Michael Hastings reported that in Rolling Stone in his Libya piece as well the same one where Samantha power is stuck doing do-gooder rinky dink stuff and she wants like helping Iraqi Christians and so she wants to start a

war. Yeah, so, I mean, again, it's just hard to, it's extremely hard to wrap your brain around the idea that, like, Mubarak is our friend, and we support him for a long time, and also we're orchestrating his overthrow. I mean, that's what happened, but it's not intuitive. It's, like, hard to imagine that. And we need to start another war for PR to make up for how bad we look for the last thing we did here.

Yeah. And I didn't figure out any of this stuff early. You know, if Daniel McAddames, maybe I do recall him making some statements like that, I didn't figure out any of this stuff early. You know, I was like, yeah, like at the time, you know, just seeing it on the news, I was like, yeah, protesters, like I said, you know, go for it. This is amazing, you know. Well, I don't even remember who.

But there's only much, much later when you really dig in. And again, just more information comes out over time. Like in the moment, you just can't know. all you can do is kind of guess you can be suspicious and you can guess but you can't really know but only later you know do you can you really know for sure where the information really is there but then when you know once you kind of learn the playbook again these color revolutions and this and that then of course when a new one comes up you can be like okay well now i've seen this now i've read this book before you know by the time it was happening in ukraine you know

I'm sure that was easier to like understand than it would have been, say, in 2011 with the Arab Spring. But again, I wasn't early on any of this stuff. I was late on a lot of it because, I mean, yeah, it just took me well to figure it out because it was not. The propaganda is very sophisticated. It's extremely sophisticated. And it's not hard to, or it's not easy to wade through it all the, all the bullshit, I guess you'd say. Yeah. Well, you know, you talk about the playbook of the.

snipers this goes back to the Kosovo War II and you know there's this guy I'd like to really get the inside story about this kook he clearly must have been some sort of Israeli plant Yosef Bodansky do you know about him he was a investigator for the Republicans in Congress in the 90s for their counterterrorism committee in the house and he wrote a book about Chechnya which is not that good he wrote a bunch articles about it that are very good and about the u.s and uk and saudi supporting the chechen uh the second chichin war at least in at the end of the century there and and way ahead on the danger of bin laden and and bill clinton you know working with him and all of that stuff really good and then also i found

where just after the kosovo pardon me just after the bosnia war was over in 1990 I mean, it ended in 95, but, you know, he wrote this in early 96, I believe it was. In early 96, he says, so here's what's going to happen next. Three years from now, the Saudis are going to launch a war in Kosovo, and they're going to use the Kosovo Liberation Army there to launch a war against the Serbs, and it'll have to be a terrorist war and provoke a reaction from most. and the Serbs, and that reaction will then be used to justify American intervention on their behalf. And he wrote that like in early 1996, and then this is exactly what happened.

And the first thing that they did was they started sniping cops. And when you start sniping cops, next come soldiers. And when they send in soldiers, next comes NATO, crying that we're just lying. Did I say crying? I meant cry lying their asses off. The Serbs had murdered 100,000 Kosovo Albanians, and we're going to kill the rest if we didn't get in there. And that was how they jinned up the whole thing, was shooting cops from a distance. Wow.

And creating the backlash. Yeah, I didn't know about that. That's okay. Yosef Bodanski is his book? Yeah, and I have the quote in, I have the quote in Provote, where he's predicting the Kosovo war three years before. And not predicting it. He's like, it sure reads like he's relating a conversation he had with people who have decided this. You know what I mean?

For real, you know? Yeah, it may not be a prediction. It might just be reporting. Yeah. What is he got a crystal ball? No, he's got sources, man. He's telling you, this is what the Saudis are going to do. You know, there doesn't seem to be much mystery to it.

Anyway, I'm off track. There's so much here. You know what? I want to keep interviewing you because we barely scratched the surface of this. And I know that we've wedded everybody's, appetite and they're going to run out and buy creative chaos right now. It's right there on the Amazon. And I'm trying to get a hold of my guy and turn this thing into a Kindle for you as soon as possible. I know he has it. But he's a very busy guy, but I'm going to figure

that part out. But I want to take time. I'm in between, well, I always have a lot going on, but I really want to try to find some time to re-breeze through this book so that I can ask more informed questions and maybe cover some of the later sections in the book and really inspire people to get it. It's some of the most important and interesting stuff. And what can I say? William, I'm just living in the past. It's always the Obama's dirty war in Syria years to me. Just like it's always Iraq War II and it's always 1993 and all of these things. I'm, you know, I'm not getting over it yet. So I want to read more of your book. I want to interview you about more of your book and I want to insist please everybody go out and get this

thing creative chaos where is it how am I going to read the subtitle when I don't have it oh here it is creative chaos inside the CIA's covert war to topple the Syrian government by the best guy on this William van wagon and also find his great archive at the libertarian institute as well reporting from Syria thank you William hey thanks Scott and again I'll send you that sniper article Again, to give you a little bit more detail about the Arab Spring part. But again, appreciate you having me on the show. And I love just having the conversations. It's really so nice to talk about it.

It's really fun talking with you about all this stuff. Since, of course, you know, you lived through all this stuff and know all about it. So it's really a pleasure to talk to you about it. So I appreciate it. Okay, cool. Well, I look forward to doing it again soon. And thanks for being part of the Institute and letting us publish this masterpiece. piece. It's really another feather in my cap, even though you did all the work here.

Well, no, thank you for publishing it. I feel very lucky. I appreciate it, man. Thanks for listening to Scott Horton Show, which can be heard on APS Radio News at Scotthorton.org, Scott Horton's show.com, and the Libertarian Institute at libertarian institute.org.