The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Scott Horton Interview - Analyzing the Ukraine War - Assessing Reliable Sources and Methods (and some Candace Owens debate)

Episode Date: December 18, 2024

In the second of our 2 sessions with Scott, we get into some of the sources cited in his powerful book "Provoked," and whether they are biased by an extreme worldview. We also argue about Candace Owens and whether her views ought to make her beyond the pale as an accepted member of a political clique (Noam says yes, Scott says no). Also, was Maidan a coup, an organic movement, or a bit of both? Part 1 will be uploaded shortly. Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine Available on Amazon: https://a.co/d/hFaTYPm Some links: https://peakprosperity.com/dave-collum-year-in-review-2021-rise-of-global-authoritarianism/ https://www.jasonhartman.com/2182-trump-assassination-attempt-inside-job-or-incompetence-conspiracy-or-coincidence/ https://news.grabien.com/wire-dave-collum-goes-deep-conspiracy-theories-911-epstein-pizzag https://english.almayadeen.net/articles/analysis/third-911-hijacker-may-have-been-cia-recruit https://quoththeraven.podbean.com/e/quoth-the-raven-131-dave-collum-the-conspiracy-theory-episode/

Hey, Scott. Hi. Are you doing like back-to-back just book interviews on this? So many, yes. Do you burn out? Nah, I don't know. Business is business, you know. I don't worry about it.

You got to do what you got to do. The only thing is I need to stop and record the audio book, but I need to block out a serious chunk of time to do that. And I haven't been able to do that because it's just been helter-skelter, you know, but. You're going to read it yourself? Yeah. I've already done Bush Senior and I'm about a third of the way into Clinton,

I guess. I think I was right about to start Clinton Bosnia was where I left off. I know you got to it. I think it's so much better when the author reads his own book. Oh yeah. And apparently I have. There are places where I know that if it wasn't me, the the reader would have enunciated it wrong. He would have got this wrong. My meaning, it was totally dependent, which actually raises the question of how I wrote it, because I hope people read it in the correct voice. But I know it has to be said this way not that way otherwise it means something

else you know yeah the emotion will come through yeah apparently there's an audiobook of Tracy Morgan you know as a comedian worked at the cell for a while uh where he's reading it and he gets so taken with his own words that he starts riffing and going off on I've been meaning to listen to this for years but apparently it's like the best audiobook ever written all right so look I I I wrote some notes for myself here and i appreciate you um doing this kind of like post interview interview we were at each other's throats on um on in emails but that's not what i want and um uh you said you said something i was gonna like i want to hopefully let our guards down here because there are some things very zoomed out

about the whole kind of crisis of intellectual integrity on all sides of every issue without regard to conclusions that I want to get your take on. It pertains to the book. I'm going to quibble with some things in the book, but it's much deeper than that. Anyway, when we did our interview a few days ago, you said something that stayed with me. You said, the burden of proof is on me. Remember saying that? Yeah. Wait, is this the interview or this is, we're still talking before the interview? No, this is the interview. This is the interview. Okay, good. Go ahead.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I just kind of read with my notes. I have no, like this isn't Israel to me. Israel's like, I'm not proud of it. Like Israel's tough for me sometimes. Like we can talk about a little bit, but like this thing with the U S Liberty and Candace Owens and that this might be true, this really cuts me. And I have to catch myself when Israel comes up. But Ukraine, I have no stake whatsoever in Ukraine. I couldn't care less which way, if it's this, it's that, if it's that, it's that, right? But I've become so obsessed with this kind

of breakdown in standards that I see all around us that it's kind of like people can't even agree with the facts are anymore. And it's as if, in my opinion, the people who have the least defensible methodology about how they get to their facts that are attracting the biggest followings and the most influence. And this is a perverse incentive of the modern era in a way. And we saw it in Russiagate. I mean, Russiagate was just a disaster. I know you agree with me on that. If I could just jump in here, I think it's completely intellectually dishonest of you to bring me on here to talk about what everybody else said rather than what i wrote in my book and i also think as long as we're on the

topic i don't like i don't appreciate it all the way you think it's appropriate i've done 6 000 interviews over 25 years now never have i said to my guest oh i did a bunch more research about a bunch of stuff i wish i'd asked you about but but I didn't. So here now I demand that you answer by email my 15 part query about all of this stuff that I didn't. I've never done that to someone in 25 years of being an interview host. It's completely ridiculous the way you approach that. And and frankly, the way that you, for example, wanted to go on and on. I don't know how much time we spent in the email and on the show last time, quibbling over exactly which kind of coup it was.

No, that's not true. In 2014. That's not true at all. I never quibbled with you about the coup type at all. You were trying to essentially say, you can't call it a coup d'etat. And I'm saying, well, look, there's more than one kind of coup. A coup d'etat typically means the general kills the president or arrests the president.

There are other kinds of overthrows. You can call this one a coup de Newland, call it a coup de Soros or a coup de Omidyar or a coup de Biden. It was that. It was the American empire exhibiting undue influence on small, weak country. And if it was the kind of thing, if they did it in your state or in the state of Texas where I live, where Victoria Nuland was on the line and we had her choosing who was going to be our new lieutenant governor who rules the texas senate

then it would be a scandal beyond any reason for the national government to influence a texas chain of of succession in any way approaching what we're talking about with this country 6 000 miles east of here but you tend to want to like controversialize the language using like here glenn here's a clip of glenn greenwald calling it a coup and then that's supposed to But you tend to want to like controversialize the language using like here. Here's a clip of Glenn Greenwald calling it a coup. And then that's supposed to be controversial. And I'm supposed to say, yes, sister soldier was wrong to go that far. No, you're right about, you know, niggling his language when actually he's right.

But America overthrew the government there and you know it. So how about that for intellectual honesty all right listen first of all as far as the type of coup i don't know where to start this type of crime you sent me this thing and you and you highlighted coup judicia or something like that and i didn't yeah so what happened was you gotta let me talk to you gotta let me talk okay but i want to explain what you're saying there. I asked my chat GPT when we're arguing on email. Hey, chat GPT. But we never are about the type of coups of coups in French. And they name like 10 of them because they've already coined all these different French terms for ways that a government can be illegitimately overthrown.

I don't speak French. I don't know exactly which kind of coup it is it doesn't really matter the point is we know from all of those great details and footnotes in my book that america was involved heavily in influencing the change of uh government in february of 2014 right scott yes scott look look we didn't argue about the type of coup or the coup our emails were about another matter and we can get to that well in that interview we did of coup or the coup. Our emails were about another matter, and we can get to that in another matter. Well, in the interview, we did. But not in the emails. The emails were – I mean, I want to get to it. So let me get to it in my way because you have your dukes up with me,

and I guess I don't blame you, but, you know, whatever it was I said in the email, as we went back and forth, I asked you, well, let's just talk, can we do a little follow-up interview to talk about this issue? So as not to, I didn't quite know how to handle it, so as not to do anything that could be considered below the belt. I said, well, let's just on to talk about how intellectually dishonest I think everyone else is. And I'm going to ask you to comment on the things that they said, which is extremely intellectually dishonest of you, Noam. Come on. No, it's not. No, it's not.

I'm not. I hereby vouch for everything Candace Owens and Glenn Greenwald and Tucker Carlson ever said. All of it. Now what? Now you want to argue with something I said? Or you want to sit here and talk about canada so let me so let me let me let me put it this way there are a lot of people who argue um for israel and i see the ridiculous things that they say even if i agree with their

conclusions and i say to myself shut up you not helping. And I actually on my podcast will call them out because I understand that if I only care about the conclusions and I can't utter a word about an outlandishly ridiculous process to get there, then it undermines the position that i think is right and defensible are we talking about my book or we're talking about somebody else's podcast that you saw that i wasn't on well we're talking about methods because then it gets to gets to the most methods mine or somebody else i want to get to your methods i want to i'm using this as an example i thought let's give me an example as slightly less that would make him are you saying that i'm intellectually dishonest in my book no i think you use sources that are intellectually dishonest yes i don't know i'm not saying i'm not saying i'm not saying okay but i do i do want to say just about this candace owens thing because i know you are a big you wrote about the u.s liberty and let me say um dennis prager has said he wrote a letter to

candace owens where he thinks israel might have done something terrible more likely than not did something terrible in the u.s liberty uss liberty so i have to i have to be ready to deal with that you had a very good tweet where you listed all these quotes or people say whatever it is but then she gets out there yesterday and right a day before yesterday whatever it was three days ago and um and and you retweeted her and big up to her about it now this is and this is where i see it and then we're gonna write to your book this is a woman who says that the first lady of france is a man that stalin was jewish lbj was jewish kamala harris is not black but jewish that the father of

zionism theodore herzl was not jewish but was looking to create israel as a refuge state for pedophiles that apac well that apac was behind the kennedy assassination that zielenski was an evil bolshevik a jew and that we engineered a coup in Ukraine. And she also said that Johnson said, Lyndon Johnson said, I don't care if we lose a bunch of our own sailors, I'm not going to embarrass my ally Israel. So all this is so outlandish. She's not the source for that. I know, but she, but she, and she said, Johnson was Jewish. She said that. She's not the source for it, but she backed up. So I'm so,

so as I'm asking you, this is a heart to heart question. Yeah. When someone who agrees with you i know you believe that and you would never make that case when somebody who agrees with you says all those crazy things and those are fucking crazy things well look i don't accept your characterization of what she said you're not reading the exact quotes you're paraphrasing her and i don't trust you quite frankly well then I'll cut them into the video. The first lady of France is a man. Holy smokes. So the quote unquote conspiracy theory is actually a three year thorough investigation. Their theory is that the first lady, Brigitte Macron,

was actually born Jean Michel. So Brigitte is actually John Michael. John Michael lived as a man for 30 years, fathered five children, okay, and then transitioned at the age of 30 to become Brigitte. There is an overwhelming amount of evidence that Emmanuel Macron is married to a biological male. That Stalin was Jewish. Which then kind of gets into the question of the media who for a very long time tried to convince us that Stalin and Vladimir Lenin were anti-Semitic. And then I learned, wait, Stalin was married to. Yes, they were literally a part of the Jewish cabal that, you know, and credit to you. When I talk about crushing history, or if you even say that, which I'm saying it because I

looked into it and I found a friend who understands Georgian and they're like, everybody knows that Stalin was Jewish. And I'm like, Americans don't know this. LBJ was Jewish. People I don't think knew this, that LBJ was Jewish. Kamala Harris is not black, but Jewish. And the evidence is pointing to, and there's no question, it's not even evidence.

Like nobody can dispute this. Snopes can't dispute this. Kamala Harris is Jewish. That the father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, was not Jewish, but was looking to create Israel as a refuge state for pedophiles. Many moons ago, before they decided to establish Israel as a country, Catholics and Christians were going missing on Passover. Then they would find bodies, okay, across Europe, and they were able to trace them back to Jews. There weren't Jews, okay? These were Frankists. This Frankist cult,

which is masquerading behind Jews, still participates in this shit to this day, okay? Why would you want, as a small nation that is the size of New Jersey, okay, why would you want the pedophiles to flee there? Why would you want the pedophiles to be procreating? Hmm, unless the nation of Israel may have been established by some Frankists. And it's looking like Theodor Herzl's family was from the exact same area in Moravia and in Bohemia where the Frankist cult was founded. Crazy, crazy. When you get into his family, that like maybe Theodore Herzl, who wrote in a book that he didn't care how many Jews had to die for him to get the state of Israel, like maybe

he was not actually a Torah worshiping Jew. Like, I don't know. I'm just throwing out some ideas here. And by throwing out some ideas, I mean, I've read a ton of books and I figured it out. OK. But AIPAC was behind the Kennedy assassination. We know that there was once a president who wanted to make AIPAC register as foreign. And he ended up shot. Coincidentally, ended up shot. Coincidentally, ended up shot. So we've got this friend and ally, and we're not allowed to ask questions about JFK's shooting. Yeah. The massage there on the day that JFK was shot.

The arguments that he was having in the days preceding with their prime minister. And so it's quite shocking to know that information, to realize that JFK got killed, and to also know that the person who allegedly shot him, Lee Oswald Harvey, said he didn't shoot him, didn't kill him, and then he was shot by a guy named Jacob Rubenstein, who Muammar Gaddafi alleges was also an Israeli national. That Zelensky was an evil Bolshevik, a Jew. People think that the greatest mass murderer was Adolf Hitler. And no, actually, if you want to talk about genocide,

the fact that people in America don't know about what the Bolsheviks did to Christians, where did the idea of a concentration camp come from? The Bolsheviks. The reason why we're not allowed to learn about these people, we don't talk about Henrik Agoda, is because he's a Jew. I mean, locking down churches and people tell me to go support Zelensky as he's shutting down churches. You want me to support this Bolshevik? I'm not doing it. And she also said that Johnson said, Lyndon Johnson said, I don't care if we lose a bunch of our own sailors. I'm not going to embarrass my ally

Israel. So all this is so outlandish. She's not the source for that. By a guy named Jacob Rubenstein. Maybe he had dual citizenship. I'm not going to embarrass my ally Israel. So all this is so outlandish. She's not the source for that. By a guy named Jacob Rubenstein. Maybe he had dual citizenship. I'm not sure because, again, we don't have the files. It's kind of shocking that Lyndon Baines Johnson would be such an ally to Israel so much so that he would tell people, I don't care if American sailors die. I'm not going to embarrass Israel, which means he didn't inherit JFK's frustration with the nation.

He did not. Listen, I will tell you this about Candace Owens. I'll tell you this about Candace Owens. I met her a week ago. I did her show. And I think she's great. And I don't know all that much about her. But I think that you know her story, Noam, is that she was a good little shapiro bot

over at daily wire until she said that she cared about a dead baby that she saw and he screamed at her blood libel anti-semite you hate jews and you're a terrible person and she said what all i said was i felt bad i saw a dead baby there's got to be a better way than this and it turned into this giant thing and so i'm not defending i'm just saying i think you know that that's the story of what happened and and i'm not gonna sit here and say that she's right about every single thing that she thinks and says but that's not relevant dude the question honestly is about what's going on with now she ate a big red pill And so now, does that mean that maybe some of the more sensationalist stuff appeals to her and she hasn't finished sorting out

what she believes now as opposed to then since her previous beliefs were shattered by her own people who kicked her out. And so maybe now she's paying too much attention to more sensationalist stuff. I don't know. But is she a good person? I don't say she's a bad person. That makes no sense. I think she's paying too much attention to more sensationalist stuff i don't know but is she a good person yeah that makes i don't think she's a bad person that makes no sense i think she's crazy that makes no sense to me crazy look she's not crazy at all i think oftentimes when people grow

to full adulthood before they realize how deceptive the the current regime is a lot of times they take what's called a big red pill which is an analogy from the matrix you realize the real world is quite a bit different than you thought the leftists have their own way of saying it's called getting woke only what they think is a bunch of ridiculous crap but anyway like it's you know having the scales peeled from your eyes or the wool pulled from your eyes and so a lot of times people then overreact and maybe they get carried away on something so in some way wait a minute god damn it listen to me i met with her a week ago okay and in the middle of our interview i was trashing the neoconservatives for lying us into iraq for

israel 20 years ago and i stopped and i explained to her listen i want to talk about anti-semitism i should have queued up this clip for you anyway you can give it to me and i'll cut it in you can send it okay we'll do that but i'll talk about it here too okay i said listen i want to talk about anti-semitism and she goes like this oh and the thing is it was an honest emotional reaction listen it's an honest emotional reaction not to owe jews saying things it was an honest emotional reaction to being falsely accused of anti-Semitism when in her mind, which is the one that counts, she's not anti-Semitic at all. And so that was her initial reaction. Then, Noam, I said, but wait, Candace, your audience doesn't know me. This is the first time I've ever been on. She has a huge audience

of millions of people. They don't know who I am. And I said, listen, with a decent respect to the opinions of your audience, let me explain where I fall on this. Okay. And I'm a libertarian and I'm an individualist. So I understand this well, and I can explain it very well that the vast majority of American Jews don't have any power at all. And the ones who do oftentimes might agree with you on all kinds of things. And if you look at the Iraq war, where I'm here blaming Richard Perle and David Wormser for lying us into war with Israel. In fact, if you polled, and they did poll ethnic and religious groups in America at the time, Jews opposed the invasion of Iraq more than any other group in this country at the time. And you might say that's because they're liberal Democrats, not Bush Republicans, but fine. They're not Ariel

Sharon Likudniks. They oppose that war more and better than American Protestant Christians and Catholic Christians did. So it's so I wanted to explain to her, as my boss, Eric Garris at antiwar.com, who is Jewish, likes to say, you have to learn to discriminate, not against people, between people. And if David Wormser is guilty of doing a bad thing like lying us into war, then that's one thing. And that has nothing to do with hating Jews or Israel overall or anything. And Candace Owens essentially, proverbially slapped her knee and said, you're damn right about that. And in fact, she said,

she was just watching a giant protest in Israel where there's a bunch of Israelis don't agree with what they're doing either. So if you can't cast a broad brush against Israeli Jews, you sure as hell can't cast a broad brush against millions of American Jews who don't have anything to do with power and influence, whether clean or dirty or any other thing. And that was what she told me to my face one week ago. Okay. Which means that she's not

an anti-Semite. It means that she's probably pretty shocked to find out that Israel blew up the Liberty and that she never heard about it her whole life until she finally did. It's a reaction a lot of people have known. And it's a fair one. OK. Are you going to let me? OK, go ahead. Go ahead.

And quite frankly, I tell the story in my book. with Iraq in great part because of their loyalty, not even to Sharon, but to Netanyahu and his plans for the future of the Middle East 20 years ago is a huge problem and something that should be discussed and exposed. And it should not contribute to anti-Semitism in any way, because it doesn't have anything to do with Jews, broadly speaking, with the Jewish religion or Jewish behavior or Jewish culture, any other thing. It's just the vanguard of the Israel lobby had a job to do and they did it, which is a separate issue. And I think that she sees the world in virtually the same way as I just explained it, because I had this conversation with her. I don't think it's fair for you to just pick on her. She might have said some goofy shit, but you know what? I bet you do, too. And a lot of people have said some goofy things before.

No, I don't. Listen, it's quite a red pill against the Jews to say that Macron's wife is a man. I think she said she's taken her career on him. But to say that LBJ was Jewish, Kamala Harris is Jewish, that Theodore Herzl was a pedophile, that Jewish babies were disappearing. I mean, that Christian babies were disappearing in Europe because Christians were – because Jews were killing them. I don't know what all she said about that or what she's reading about that or what. I mean, I know a lot of people just read Prison Planet for a week, and they'll be off on some crazy rabbit trails of nonsense. Well, here's my question to you. Here's my question here's my question wait here's my question hang on one more thing because i'll forget i got biden brain i'll forget go ahead go ahead go ahead go ahead then

i have a question go ahead but this is a serious thing in the 1990s i used to pal around with right wingers like patriot movement guys militia type guys people who were pissed off about waco the libertarians around me didn't care about Waco, but the right wingers did. And I hung out with like right wing conspiracy guys, and they talked all the time. That's all they ever talked about was the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds and the new world order. But Noam, you know what? They never talked about the Jews. In fact, I bet the vast majority of them didn't even know the Rothschilds were Jewish. They didn't know that the Rothschilds had anything to do with the founding of Israel.

They didn't connect Israel to their New World Order conspiracy at all. It was just that they're going to build a one world government under the United Nations. Now, I'm telling you, dude, I'm telling you, this is true. I was around these guys for years talking about the Rothschilds, but not the Jews. Just not like if when you get around people who are legitimately anti-Semitic, you have gone very far to the right, way past the militia movement. You know what I mean? So I think it's, it's, um, you're too quick to be too nervous about this kind of stuff, man. Well, I, I mean, I, I totally disagree with you. I you and this is a question you know between you and

your maker but if timothy snyder that that poet that anti that pro-ukraine poet i'm sure you can't stand him i don't like him either if he if he if he were coming out with this kind of nonsense you would say as part of your argument listen to this guy he's batshit crazy i wouldn't and i say but he was red pill that's why he's saying facially ridiculous stuff and you wouldn't you wouldn't believe it for a half a second you'd say come on nobody there's no kind of red pill like that that's not true that's a terrible example because in fact i don't pick on timothy snyder who i think is completely full of it but he doesn't say crazy stuff like that he says wrong stuff well sure but look in my book and i think anyone who reads it will admit

that i link to what the war party says and then why they should not think so and whatever and i don't ever do straw man arguments i only link to the very best most credentialed person making the case that i object to throughout the book i don't bring up a bunch of like oh some kook over at salon.com think something or whatever i talk about what they wrote in foreign affairs or what they wrote at the center for science and international security can i answer that can i give you some credit there's a part in your book where you go through a whole list of the things that put could have done rather than invade Ukraine. And I thought that was that's exactly what you're saying. That was a that was good and it was necessary.

And it was one of the reasons that I gave you some credit because I think, well, that's that's exactly he's asking himself the question, because, you know, people are going to ask you, well, what what why did he have to do this? I mean, I think I still man the whole I think I still man the whole book. I think that you'll find links to the Daily Beast and to the American Enterprise Institute and to the Hawks making their case very well. You're defensive here, and I kind of don't blame you, especially given the interaction we had online. long before you were on my radar this bat crazy stuff going on like tucker carlson saying the government is in possession of alien weapon systems and is studying them and that he was mauled by demons and was bloodied in his in his bed and that you know and this kind of alex jones is a supernatural prophet oh these are all these are all real quotes um i'm not

exaggerating or taking any of them out of context um and seeing him with millions of followers candace owns with millions of followers this is very disturbing to me and i feel like the saner voices on the same side of the general issues need to police their own people because come on all right well that's what i feel like okay so let's see your book let me get to your book if i'll tell you what if if all the people that you mentioned read my books yeah maybe they would say hey this seems like he's barking up the right tree here maybe more than that other thing i read that's my job is is being a place where people can go to find the truth the best i can tell it and i think look i i told you before a minute ago

i was a conspiracy kook back in the 90s when i was a kid and i think look i i told you before a minute ago i was a conspiracy kook back in the 90s when i was a kid and really it was the 9-11 truthers that cured me of it because even though i predicted it and i thought it was going to be a cia job all along whatever when it finally happened it was a bunch of raving loons making up a bunch of crap and that was on the the the truth their side in public but that was also the neoconservatives were doing the same thing cherry picking a case trying to frame saddam hussein for it in the same way that the other kooks were framing whoever they wanted to build a case against and that was what really cured me of all that and of course dick cheney wasn't a one-worlder and so all that stuff you know basically

uh i grew out of that back 20 years ago but i think no but you'll still use 9-11 you should be slightly more charitable to people I'll give you one more example let me get a word in edgewise you want to finish your thought I don't ever want to leave you without your thought but also remember I want to talk too

you're my last interview of the day so look the thing is a lot of times especially people who've been involved and either in government or in media and like were really successful and really identified themselves with the machine, then they become a whistleblower or they get fired for saying the wrong thing or doing the wrong thing or some kind of thing happens. They find themselves ejected from the system they believed in. And a lot of times they go grasping, looking for the next coherent worldview to plug into. They're not exactly sure. This happens to whistleblowers a lot. They're under a lot of pressure sometimes and they go really nutso because they don't know what's happening to them. They don't understand why they're being persecuted or who all's behind it or how it works. And they can kind of flip out. There was a guy that worked for Ronald Reagan.

He was a Treasury Secretary named Paul Craig Roberts. No offense, Craig, but whatever. The guy's a nut. But the thing is, he was a Treasury Secretary, and he was a respectable gentleman. But when he realized just how crazy the neocon plans for war in the Middle East were and how badly they were getting away with it, he kind of went full tilt, what you would call like off the deep end, and started believing in crazy stuff too, right? And also now he's suspicious of the contrails in the air or whatever.

And it happens. But the thing is, you should, instead of just being angry at the people who maybe go a little too far flipping out, you should be angry at the people who completely uh sacrificed all of their legitimacy as being our information sources by lying to us about every single thing oh one of your straight that's why i said that's why people don't know where to go anymore okay that's why i brought up russiagate because you're right i am angry at them and i don't want you or me to make the same mistakes r Russiagate had like, he's a spy. There's a meeting here.

There's a rich guy who donates here. Michael Cohen was cited in Prague. He's signaling to the Russians when he says something about Hillary's emails in his speech. This is Koch back. This is Adelson back. Facebook posts are so powerful. But I see these themes again. The 9-11 truth of things.

So this is very important here so you're right for instance the how the maidan protest began in november on november 21st i guess 2013. the maidan protest movie kicked off november 21st after ukrainian activist mustafa nayem the co-founder of the usaid and george soros backed george soros that's kind of thing that bothers me from drdsky TV announced me, announced the onset of protests. And you continue, Mustafa Nayyem, co-founder of Hamradsky TV, explained in an article for Soros' Open Society Foundation that he had kicked off the protests on November 21st with a Facebook post asking people to meet at Maidan. But as journalist Kit Klarenberg explained, Niamh was no ordinary online journalist. In October 2012, he was one of six Ukrainians whisked to Washington, D.C. by Meridian International,

a State Department-connected organization that identifies and grooms future overseas leaders to observe and experience that year's presidential election. The group met with Senator John McCain, among others, while they were there. Now, first of all, Kit Klarenberg is a 9-11 truther. This guy, you just said they're nuts. This guy believes that the CIA allowed 9-11 to happen, at least. He says at least allowed it to happen, maybe more. I've never read him on that, but he's done a ton of great journalism and then a ton of great journalism well that stands the test of time too for years okay but but it's a 9-11 truth so now you say well i'm taking the word of a 9-11 truth you know his standard and let me show you something else and you tell me but look but that's a that's a very

specific claim that he came to town and then went back again or whatever let me let me show you let me show you something different than a conclusion that based on a lot of different evidence uh coming together i guess i think it must have been inside job which is like the last statement not a narrow claim you say met with john mccain and i looked in the meridian it's just like they do thousands of trips a year for journalists. He uses the word a summit with John McCain. You use the word meeting, summit meaning high level. Look, this is the supposed meeting with John McCain. Senator, what is your point on Ukraine? I'm very concerned about the influence of Russia in Ukraine, and I'm very worried about the imprisonment of Mr. Mishinkov.

Howard, you know that that's all there is to it? He linked to it. That's it. And then McCain turns around. Dana Bashan turns around and talks. That's it. That's the meeting. Listen, I'm going to tell you something between me and you, even if i want to win an argument like after we hang up if i got something

wrong any anything you send me that shows that something i've got is wrong i will i will do a mea culpa i will take it out i'll say scott sent me this i was 100 wrong i am not looking to put anything out there that is even a little bit spun so that's that's that guy then you have another source um this guy david column, who you identify is about one of these guys who was supposedly poisoned by Putin. Yeah, he's a good guy. He's a chemistry professor. You identify him only as a Cornell University organic chemistry professor. But actually, if you look at him online, I mean, there's 10,000 other chemists, right? This guy does not stop tweeting about Putin and Ukraine. I mean, he's totally obsessed with it He says the Las Vegas shooting, that mass shooting in Las Vegas, that there were character actors on the news

because it was known before the shooting that this was going to happen. And I'm saying, how can you use these guys as sources? Well, I've read a lot of him. I've never read any of that stuff by him. I'll send it to you. If he's even interested in all this Ukraine stuff, it's after the fact of what we're talking about there. And what he talks about is, we're talking about the Novichok poison.

And he put it on a test for his students in class. And he said every single one of them was able to reverse engineer the molecule. No problem. And tell you a three-step process for how to make it. All except one kid that got the answer wrong. But he also said that the people describing the Las Vegas shooting were character actors so why do you trust him back to the goddamn shootings were people saying that there was a couple walking around the infield saying you're all gonna die but there were helicopters in the air behind behind the mandalay

bay you in theory could have had the shots coming in from the air and Tucker Carlson dedicated most. If you go, if you go on YouTube, you can probably find Tucker Carlson, uh, shows. He, he didn't buy it. He was, I know what a hospital looks like on the inside behind the guy is the pulse ox monitor, the screen, and it's not plugged in. The whole thing is staged. And then the video disappears. Someone must have said, oh, he fucked that one up. Let's get rid of that one. I'm a truther. I think there's problems with 9-11. The laws of physics tell me there's problems. So one of the buildings really obviously shifted off to the side. That thing should have just tipped over. Right. And so I look at that and I go, okay, we're now really kind of breaking the laws of physics here a little bit.

But when I watch two towers come down perfectly and I go, chaos theory alone says they should have gone asymmetric and stopped tumbling. So if I wanted to bring down the empire, if I was from the outside looking in and I wanted to bring down this empire, you're not going to do it from the outside. You're not going to bring battleships to the shores and drop people off and kill us you got to get us to self-destruct that's what i'm saying like he again assuming that that's correct his interpretation what he saw in the news is one thing his ability to uh you know perform chemistry experiments and ask his students in his class to be able to do the math. I mean, dude, I suck to chemistry, but I know it's all just Algebra 2. If you can do Algebra 2, you can do chemistry. It's all just saying if somebody describes somebody describes himself as a full blown 9-11 truther, I would say, let me find another chemistry professor like like.

OK, you know, another guy, Gareth, G chemistry professors who disagree with what he says about the Novichok poisons. Gareth Porter. You know. Fame is another source. Don't you say a word against Gareth Porter, dude. Denied the Khmer Rouge. Denied the Khmer Rouge genocide.

No, but you know what? Actually, I'm glad that you decided to go back to 1976 or 77 there to try to pick on Garrett he's one of the greatest reporters of our entire generation here and you know first of all one half of that criticism is a total bunk lie because it was his co-author who published a book with both of their names on it without him getting a chance to see that part of it the other part of it fair enough fair enough the other the other part of it was him and he took responsibility and apologized for his mistake back then he did not know what was happening and lie about it what happened was the americans had embellished what the north vietnamese communists had done to the south when they got to the south and all the

people that they'd round up and murdered rounded And Gareth thought that was what was happening again, was that they were exaggerating the death toll under Pol Pot. But it became clear within a year or two years of that or something like that, that that was wrong. And he said it then. In an article from July 20th, 1978, entitled An Exchange on Cambodia, here's Gareth Porter in the New York Review. It is true, as Shawcross notes from my May 1977 congressional testimony, that I have changed my view on a number of aspects of the Cambodian situation. I have no interest in defending everything the Khmer Rouge government does, and I believe that the policy of self-reliance has been carried so far that it has imposed

unnecessary costs on the population of Cambodia. Shawcross, however, Shawcross is who he's debating with in this article, Shawcross, however, clearly does have an interest in rejecting our conclusions. It is time, I suggest, for him to examine it carefully because it does not make for intellectual honesty. So the listener can decide for himself to what extent Porter regrets his conclusions. I will add some other interviews here as well. I appeared on the NBC Good Morning American. No, it wasn't Good American. It was the morning show on NBC. Jane Pauley was the hostess, host of that morning news program. And I was on with William F. Buckley. And we were there to discuss the issue of the Khmer Rouge and what to do about them. And it was in the wake of George McGovern having made a statement that he would favor the use of military force to do something about the Khmer Rouge.

So that was the news that precipitated this interview with Bill Buckley and myself. And in that interview, I said, yes, the Khmer Rouge were guilty of these policies, which resulted in massive deaths of their own people. And that was the first time that I went on the public record as, you know, recognizing that reality. And this was how long after you testified before Congress and put out your book and all that? The following year. That was the early summers, I recall, of 78 versus... The reality is, historically, that Sihanouk was powerless, as you indicated, and everybody knew that. He was powerless against the communists, and he was powerless against the United States. Both sides could do whatever they wanted in which was totally feckless had no public had no popular support and which then cleared the way for the

Khmer Rouge to rise to power in Cambodia and so if you want to look at the actual consequences of the US intervention in Cambodia, not just the bombing, but the, the, the regime change, which the U S clearly engineered, uh, it would not have taken place without the CIA's permission. Although this has never been proven. I mean the, the, the, uh, circumstantial evidence is extremely powerful here. Any apologize then. And he apologized then. Okay.

And then people try to pretend to bring that up. Like it's some Jane. Dude, dude, I am sorry to cast ever since then, but that's bullshit. And I'll tell you this, Gareth Porter. No,

stop. Gareth Porter is one of the greatest reporters of our generation. His archive for interpress service and for truth out and truth dig for Middle East side. And we keep the archive and the American conservative magazine. and we keep the archive, and the American Conservative magazine, and we keep the archive of virtually all of it at antiwar.com. And he was absolutely 100% right. Everything that he said about Iraq War II, about Afghanistan,

and the entire terror war era, his book debunking all the lies about Iran's nuclear program, and all this is absolutely top-notch stuff. You can't say a word against gareth porter to me pal i i don't i don't i do not want to cast aspersions on anybody uh incorrectly god damn american hero is what he is okay and and um if if that's correct what you said then i'm sorry gareth porter i will look into it you can send me that too in fact, I interviewed him all about just that one issue one time because I've interviewed him like 500 times. OK, OK.

He's my very best guy, my very favorite guy. And I one time said, all right, so what is the deal with this? So if people want to look at my name, Gareth Porter and Pol Pot, you'll hear all about it. OK, I will. I will look at that. And again, if if if that was wrong, I apologize because I don't want to sully anybody's name unfairly. Um, so then this brings me to like the thing we were arguing about.

So what happens with me is, and by the way, I'm quite satisfied with the first part of your case, which is that we knew our most important theorists and even William Burns' memo that Putin was likely to react very badly if we kept nosing around in Ukraine and over the advice of very smart people, we went ahead and did it anyway. And I've always been open to that part. I've never had a problem with that. Then you get into the details of the coup. And then there's such a blizzard of facts, and that's why I began to look into it, that I do take the word of people who just know, level-headed people who know the subject better

than I do. so that's why this george friedman thing really threw me for a loop because george friedman who is a famed policy analyst you cite him like eight times in your book you vouch for his wisdom and um his quote is and you use it over and over and in every interview by the way can i clarify i don't necessarily vouch for his wisdom. I cite him mostly against interest as a powerful establishmentarian conceding I'm right about things is what I do. As I do with a lot of people in there.

Okay. So you use his quote over and over that this was the most blatant coup in history. No, not over and over. You use it three times in the book. I use it three times in the book. I use it three times in the book? Yeah. Are you serious?

Yeah. That's my recollection, yeah. Three times in the book. And use it in every interview. So when I heard this, it sounded weird to me because I'm like, well, we've had more blatant coups than this must have been. And I say, was this sarcastic? And sure enough, the guy has written two separate articles pointing out that this quote of his is, he's called it, he calls it Russian propaganda and disinformation, that they lopped off part of his sentence.

And I'll just read you the one part. And I'm not accusing you of having known this. He says, reality is tenuous on the Internet, particularly on Twitter. All countries and corporations use the Internet this way, but the Russians are masters of the craft. I told the business journal, Commercent, that if the U.S. were behind a coup in Kiev, it would have been the most blatant coup in history as the U.S. government openly supported the uprising and it provided some funding for the demonstrating groups. In other words, it was no coup, meaning he was sarcastic, like it was so out in the open. How could this be a coup? The Russian news service, Sputnik,

published what I said, cutting out a few odds and ends and quoted me saying that Ukraine was the most blatant coup in history. The neat part is that they didn't make it up. I did say they just left out the words before and after the statement. So in the end, Friedman actually stands for exactly the opposite. Yeah, but that's a bunch of crap look first of all well I should be in the book yeah first of all I cite it twice the first time I cite it as just a part of a longer statement in the introduction in that in that part of the book then I explain it I actually talk about the quote itself and explain it and then i the third time i refer to it i'm just referring to the interview and i say the most

blatant coup interview with commercent so that you know the same interview with commercent that i'm talking about i just did the control f for blatant you can look at it yeah three times in the book yeah yeah okay but um so the thing, oh, is that what you said, three? I'm sorry, I thought you said a bigger number than that. My bad. But anyway, so that's the explanation of citing it. That's why the redundancy is the first time it's sort of introduced. Listen, the truth is, if he said it, I don't blame you for harping on it

because, as you said, it's against interest. So I understand it. It's a very good point if he said it. But the fact is he strenuously denies it, you know? Well, but here's the thing. His strenuous denial stretches credulity here a little bit. And I don't have the dates. I asked you in the email, well, what's the date on that?

And you didn't quite answer. I'm sorry. When was the first time he denied it? I'm interested in when was the first time he denied it. But regardless, what you told me, and I'm sorry because I wasn't listening because I was control effing here when you were just now reading the whole thing. I sent you the same thing. You read it. Okay.

Well, so what you told me in the email was that he said that Sputnik edited him. But my footnote is not Sputnik. My footnote is the Commercent interview. It's the same in both versions. It's the same in both versions. Okay. So if anyone edited it, it was the people who posted it originally.

But that's not his claim, that Commercent edited it. His claim is that someone else truncated it later. But the Commercent edited it. No, no, it's truncated in both versions of it. Commercent and this later version. I don't know which came first. It's the same quote in both versions. Well, we know the interview was with Commercent. So we know which came first. It's the same quote in both versions. Well, we know the interview was with Commercent.

So we know that's first. So in other words, it wasn't that anyone else edited it. If it was unfairly edited, it was by Commercent themselves, not Sputnik, which undermines his claim that it was unfairly edited, at least partially. OK, I'm not saying it cancels it, but it undermines it. The second thing is, I don't know if he speaks Russian or not. He's a worldly enough guy. He very well may speak Russian, but the article is in Russian. So if we assume that he said it in English, then we're dealing with a translation into Russian in the first place, which could be imperfect for-

Scott, I'm not holding you accountable for what he said he wouldn't say i'm i'm i'm holding you accountable for anything but i don't mean this in a bad way is that that you missed it in your research that he had denied it in two articles well i didn't know i i had not noticed that but uh well i'm still getting to that so sorry um the thing is this if you look at the way it is in the Commerce article, and I had my wife translate it from Russian, so I didn't ask Google to do it. I just had her do it. The thing is, his denial there, I don't think makes much sense that he's saying, well, if it was a coup, it was the most blatant coup, as though that means then that it couldn't have been one because we all know that coups are never blatant but that doesn't really make sense and in context the rest of his statement is the russians are right that it was a coup and he says they didn't know how to deal with it because america supported all these humans oh because the question the follow-up question is well what was

the coup the eu agreement that they made him sign or the whole thing and he says the whole thing because meaning the protest movement that had been going on for three months because he said america supported all the human rights groups meaning those soros ngos that were supporting the whole thing and the russians didn't know how to react so now what part of what he claims was edited out of that statement changes all of that and by the way when we know he's right and i have if you've read my book which you were just reading out of it you can see the footnotes where that's evidence and and by the way anyone watching this if you type in uh pardon me i gotta drink some dr pepper here go ahead go ahead if you type in scotthorton.org slash provoked slash notes then there's all of my footnotes with the hyperlinks okay in the book all the urls are removed on the kindle

version all the urls are still there and And in the EPUB version, which if I ever get that thing up on Google Play or whatever, the EPUB version, all the hyperlinks will still work. But on this PDF, I have a separate PDF for you here, scotthorton.org slash provoked slash notes. And it has hot links to everything. I mean, other than the books, of course, but for, for anything online, uh, there are links there where people can follow up my work on that. And I show where they did pour in, in fact, millions of dollars through USAID, the NED, the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, and Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, and George Soros. And I think, Noam, didn't we talk about George Soros last time? I don't remember. And I think, Norm, didn't we talk about George Soros last time? Because I think I think I agreed with you that there is a modern day hate Soros kind of conspiratoid movement on the right.

But I don't subscribe to it. And I think I forget if I do a lot of interviews. I'm sorry. I thought I had said this to you, that I actually read an article that I thought was very smart that said that actually a big part of the hate Soros movement now is actually led by pro Benjamin Netanyahu, Likudniks, like this guy, Josh Hammer, who's best friends with Netanyahu's son. And what they hate about Soros is that he's not a West Bank settler type. He's, I think he supports Israel broadly speaking, but he's not like a right-wing nationalist Israeli type. And And and they really resent him for that.

Well, that sure isn't my beef against him. And I think, you know, although like, you know, I certainly disagree. I have no idea what he's thinking. Financing the the prosecutors across the country that he did that drove the right wing crazy because he didn't just hire prosecutors who wanted to let innocent people go free he hired prosecutors want to let guilty people go free and that kind of thing that freaked people out but there is a and i i document this very carefully in my book and i don't know i know maybe you're jumping around and not reading it all the way through but i have a very very gnome i know you'd really appreciate it a very thoughtful treatment of george soros in my orange revolution section

no pardon me it's in the rose revolution section of the 2003 uh where I talk I go on and on about Soros there for a minute and so that people understand exactly what my stance is about him here and the reality is that of course he's very old and semi-retired now he's basically retired now but in this era that we're talking about, this is a guy who essentially is not just a billionaire but had a foreign policy. A lot of billionaires don't. But this guy, he always was, his entire career long, he was what you would call like a Truman Democrat, a center-left, hardcore anti-communist and interventionist, and including when the Soviet Union still stood, he did everything he could to undermine it then

and support propaganda on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain and all this kind of stuff. And when the Soviet Union fell apart, he moved into that space to try to have influence in the formation of the new governments and systems. And I'm not saying it's because he's evil or because he's greedy or because he's Jewish or because it's all just evil capitalist money making scheme. Of course, he does have interests.

The guy's a billionaire. But at the same time, I believe it's clear he has also ideals as well, what he calls the open society, more or less, you know, American style market democracy, quasi freedom, quasi markets, quasi democracy, the modern American way. And I have all these quotes from government officials in our State Department saying, listen, we consult with the British, the French, the Germans and George Soros. This guy carries a lot of weight. And he did an interview with Connie Bruck in The New Yorker magazine in 2005, where he takes credit for putting Leonid Kuchma in the presidency in Ukraine in 1994. Now, this is a guy who was later known as being the Russian leaning candidate. But at that time, Soros bragged that he chose the guy. He also supports these major, these International Renaissance Foundation

and about 10 more that spend millions and millions and millions of dollars influencing other countries' politics. If the shoe was on the other foot, you would say, oh, I see how, yeah, this is an objectionable objection here, man. No, no, I actually not. One of the reasons that I didn't fall for Russiagate

is because I always found this kind of like Rupert Murdoch-backed, Koch brothers-backed to be very off-putting because I know that these guys spread a lot of money around in a lot of places and any dumb journalist can find himself working for a Soros-backed thing. But to jump from that to the fact that what he's saying a lot of places and any dumb journalist can find himself working for a sorrows back thing but that's to to to to jump from that to the fact that what he's saying can't be trusted is exactly what they did during russiagate and i object to it now i i'm not saying what they're saying can't be trusted

you know but it's but it's your only impeachment of his of his claim is that it's sorrows backed well of of which claim uh we're going back down and what i'm saying is that it's Soros-backed. Well, of which claim? We're going back now. And what I'm saying is that I reject the whole damn revolution because it's Soros-backed. I'm telling you that the Americans in the bulldozer revolution in Serbia in 99, in the

Rose Revolution in 03, the Orange Revolution in 04, the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan in 05, and the Maidan revolution in 14. Let me remind you what I was talking about. That's what makes the difference. Let me say, Russiagate, wait a minute. Hold on a second. I'm glad you bring up Russiagate. I have 75 pages debunking it in the book. I think I do a pretty good job of it. But look, if in the reality of Russiagate,ussians literally had spent tens

of millions of dollars supporting ngos that supported so-called independent media in america like every kind of maga guy was literally really on the russian payroll here and and then you had a giant january 6th type protest movement and it went on for three months in downtown Washington. And you had Chinese or Russian or whoever officials getting up on stage like Chris Murphy and John McCain and declaring, we're with you and America stands with you. And here's more money to keep your carnival going. Then in that case, Russiagate would be true, and it would be an absolute outrage. We would never tolerate that, that we would have foreign governments intervening in our democratic processes to that degree. No way. When Bill Clinton sold our missile technology to China for a couple of hundred thousand dollars in 1996, he was almost impeached and removed for it.

But it was big business was at stake, so instead they impeached him over the shenanigans in the Oval Office instead of his actual horrible policies. But that was a big deal. And it should have been a big deal that he took that money and he licensed technology transfers for three stage rockets. OK, so but this is this is where it was about the Soros pact. There's this guy, Mustafa Nayyem. I looked into him. He seems like a pretty straight shooting journalist he was a co-founder of ham hamrodsky tv and he said he explained in an article for soros's open society's foundation i think that's you know kind of like softening the ground not to believe it that he had kicked off the protest on november 21st with a facebook post i remember how facebook posts figured into russiagate people to meet at nadan i found the facebook post he did i'm not saying that as a reason not to believe but then it says I'm saying that's who he's connected to but he was the rights for but he was no ordinary online journalist he

was one of six Ukrainians whisked to Washington DC by Meridian International I invite everybody to look up Meridian International because it's a pretty anodyne organization that has thousands and thousands of journalists that they bring over state department connected organization that identifies and grooms in other words it's all like rather than any actual refutation of the of his claim which is you know somebody could verify his claim is wrong i'm not saying his claim is wrong i'm saying this is who he is. And a paragraph later or two, I show you how his brother is the lawyer for C-14, the neo-Nazis. No, but it's kind of implying that America was in on it because it's so – Yes, man.

It's called astroturf. So you think – Wait, we're talking about the Koch brothers. We're talking about the Koch brothers. Wait, I don't – Direct question. Every other parent group in America – So you think this Facebook post was engineered by an

american government somehow they told him say that i'm asking you no i quote the guy right there saying he posted it on facebook but who is he posted or guy who takes usa dollars to be a propagandist for the west this is not independent media this is american sock puppet media this is like if the russians were behind whatever alternative media in america the russians were paying candace owens you'd be freaking out dude no no actually so his entire media empire is financed by a foreign ngo you you would be flipping your lid, and properly so. We wouldn't tolerate that. You know, I went to a meeting in Washington one time

where a guy said to me, we've got to start taking money from these governments because, after all, our enemies do. The Middle East Institute is supported by the UAE, and the WNEP is supported by Israel and whatever, so we should take money from these foreign countries and i told that guy you stay the hell away from me fbi informant hey everybody this guy's an fbi informant you stay i don't want any foreign money ever no honest american patriot would nor

would any honest ukrainian patriot take money from a foreign government to set up a big media company to oppose the sitting regime okay that's i don't understand what what are you saying that what is it about his facebook you're saying that it was not a a sincere facebook post that it didn't represent the feeling of many ukrainians dude the book is a chronology of things that happened you don't have to read a bunch of things into the implication of the inference of the thing i'm saying a guy who takes money from the west who has a media organization that is essentially an astroturf organization went and said come on everybody let's not stand for this let's go out there and start a movement and that's how it started that's all i'm saying and then it goes on from there i'm saying this guy was not just some ukrainian

named jimmy he was a guy who was directly connected to american power brokers who had an agenda and that was how the thing got kicked off was by a guy like him. OK, and then and I talk also about Rybichuk, who used to work for the last guy that Bush put in in 04, Yushchenko, and who had coordinated with the British and the Americans and his own government against his sitting president then and who had promised we're getting prepared to do this again. He said it in 2012, two years after they lost a fair and square election. But Scott, they said, well, we got to get ready to do the same thing again. And honestly, man, if you and maybe I don't know if anybody would agree with this. Maybe I don't do a good enough job setting this up for the Maidan because I got lazy after proving that they did the same thing in Albania and in Croatia and in Serbia and in Georgia and in Ukraine already and in Kyrgyzstan. And they tried it in Lebanon and

they tried it in Iran. And it's they're called the color code of revolutions. It's the National Endowment for Democracy. And I think I said this to you last time, too. I quote in there Ray S. Klein, who is the CIA director of operations, talking about the Iranian coup, which is the most famous CIA coup in world history. And he says it's all about providing just enough marginal support to make the difference. Such is the thing now. It's all about making sure that the revolution in the street has hot food to eat tonight. They have entertainment on the stage. They've got electricity. They've got propane. They've got resources that they need to keep the thing going so they can build up enough

pressure to force the government to do what they want one to sign the damn deal and failing that to agree to let in a new prime minister and hold early elections and get out of the way that was what it was all about and there's no point in denying it i have all the sources right there and you know jeffrey sacks told me i interviewed him and he told me he went to Kiev and he's very experienced there since the 1990s. He went to Kiev and immediately the first thing that happened was the NGOs took him around and on like a tour of the Maidan where they bragged and boasted about the effect that they had in helping to support the thing and make it happen. Just as Nuland says in that phone call, she's not describing a situation.

She's calling the shots. And her and Pyatt agree. We have to. We're in play. We have to glue it. We have to stick it. We have to midwife it. We have to make it sail before Putin can can torpedo it they're not speaking ukrainian because they're not ukrainians they're americans they're deciding what's going to happen next in

the country scott i'm trying to stick to one narrow thing here we're going all over the place not that not that what you're saying is not interesting but you know so the article this hamdraski tv first of all i can't find any mention of um um us aid with this hamdraski i don't doubt you but i i can't find it but um the article is anatomy of a coup how the cia front laid foundations for ukraine war and the implication is clearly that this um facebook post is you know in the furtherance of that headline now there was another um guy uh uh yeah yeah sonyuk how do you pronounce his name no 290 right there it's uh it's gordon han page 163 to 64 and tom balfourth out of Ukraine protests. A new media outlet is born in Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, December 13th, 2013. Okay, I'll find it.

I have a footnote for every claim in this book. I know you do. You absolutely do. So Yatsenyuk tweeted, and this guy Nayem wrote a Facebook post, and people by the thousands, and then the tens of thousands, and the hundreds of thousands started turning out to protest this deal that was backed away from. I think the first people to hand out food were actually the government was handing out food to the protesters to try to maybe keep things from spinning out of control. And, you know, this idea of engineering a coup, obviously we were there and obviously we were um involved with the opposition which is

maybe something we shouldn't do and obviously the the russians see this as provocative but i have one last question about this whole engineering coup thing and then we can you know you can talk about whatever you want and we can wrap it up since we agreed in our other interview that the Nuland call regarded, which was January 25th, regarded the answer to Yanukovych's offer to bring in these opposition leaders into the government. How is it that simultaneously she was looking to make this deal with Yanukovych while at the same time trying to engineer a coup against him? Well, as I said, it was, you know, you can call it a coup de Biden if you want.

The actual deal, as I described it before, the deal that the European Union with American help pushed through and Vladimir Putin called Yanukovych and told him to sign it, by the way, if you want to add Putin to one of the conspirators in our coup here, they were trying to force him to sign a deal agreeing to early elections and to let Lavrov and with Tucker expressed that he was that he was if they'd only signed that deal, everything would have been OK. I think that's probably right. And not because it's a Russian talking point, but look at what how it actually played out. What actually happened was the three big leaders that they're talking about on the phone call Klitschko, Yatsenyuk and Tannybach.

Tannybach is the actual Hitler loving Nazi up there. Yatsenyuk is the technocratic. He was probably he was probably red pilled. But go ahead. Go ahead. Well, by his father who served Hitler, right? You know, but that's a pretty red pill, black and red. And then, so Yatsenyuk, he was a bit of a right-wing nationalist. I don't know if you go as far as calling him a Nazi, but he served the fatherland party of Yulia Tymoshenko, who is known as the gas princess,

because she represented this one gas company instead of the other one or whatever. Ukranavta, I think, was hers. And then the other one then is Klitschko, who is the heavyweight boxer who later became the mayor and all that. And in the phone call, they're discussing essentially she wants the first and third there to stay out. They want she wants Yatsenyuk to be the prime minister.

So that's the deal that the EU deal that they were forcing through, the transition of power that they were brokering. That's Barack Obama's words. The transition of power that we were brokering there. And then, but what happened was the leaders of the protest movement went back to the Maidan and they said,

hey, we signed this deal. And Paris Yook, who was the leader, I'm sorry, I forget his first name. It's Paris Yook was his name. And he was the guy who is very credibly reported, um, by, uh, the Germans and a reporter named Graham stack from, um, uh, I forgot what they keep changing it, BNE Intelligence or whatever news. Ben Aris, the former reporter for the Daily Telegraph, is the founder of it, Ben Aris' thing. And it's Graham Stack is the guy's name you can read. And there's numerous reports that this guy, Paris Yoke, is the guy who started the firefight in the morning, I believe.

I'm sorry, off the top of my head, I believe it was the day before or was it two days before? I think it was the day before he had started the sniper fire at the cops from the music conservatory. First thing in the morning with a team of I believe it was two other men with him at that time. And the BBC reported on this as well. Foreignpolicy.com reported on this as well. Foreignpolicy.com reported on this as well. Now, Paris Yook was the same guy who ran up on the stage and said, I don't accept any deal. If the president doesn't leave town by 10 o'clock in the morning tomorrow, I'm going to kill him myself. And this is reported in The New York Times and many other places.

I believe it was Adam. Oh, I always screw up this guy's last name. This is reported in the New York Times and many other places. I believe it was Adam. Oh, I always screw up this guy's last name. It is Adam something or other from the New York Times was right there. And the crowd says, yes, yes, get him, kill him. And then that was it. That was when he fled. So part of the negotiated deal was that he would pull his police back from the Maidan if the protesters would pull their armed men back.

But who was going to enforce that nobody so they weren't going anywhere but the police started to pull back and apparently what happened was and this is difficult I don't think anybody knows exactly every bit of it but apparently some of the senior leaders of the police left town and then the younger guys said well forget this I'm not standing guard out here hanging out by myself with no support. And also part of the deal was to promise to investigate the shootings on the Maidan, which may have been taken as that they were going to be sacrificed and thrown to the wolves for the different shootings that had happened on the Maidan. So the local police and security forces all got on buses and left. And then the Nazis led the push and took the putsch and took over the city. And you could see, you know, that night, one of the first things they did was take over the city hall and start putting up Celtic runes, which are, you know, popular Nazi symbols, Confederate flags and swastikas.

And when finally some cops roused them out the next day, they fled to the Canadian embassy. But it was right sector. And the Svoboda Party toughs were the ones who did the final putsch. So I think I told you last time that I never said, and I don't think anybody ever really says explicitly that Nuland's plan was to use these Nazis to threaten the president to leave. I don't think that was it. The point is sort of like what Friedman says in that quote.

The whole thing was the coup. The entire carnival was supported by all this Western money, and it was supported in the context of pushing through this transfer of power agreement, but that then the Nazis that they'd been supporting out there on the maidan they refused to accept the deal and then they made their own decisions and that was what finally led him to leave town was the threat to his life and and so um is that clear enough then yeah yeah newland played her part and Paris yoke played his part all right I I it seems like if she was trying to get that deal to be signed that obviously she wasn't contemplating a coup but again and as I say in the book well it's a kind of a coup anyway

okay that's a superpower threatening sanctions and all these consequences and forcing you to accept a new prime minister. It's a coup de something. Okay, but let's just wrap up some of the details here so we don't do it in email. Friedman in that interview, he doesn't say the whole thing was a coup, if you look at what it is. The questions are weird because they don't flow but after it says the uh and it was indeed the most blatant coup in history the next question is do you mean the termination of the agreement of february 21st or the entire may don which doesn't reference anything about the changing of the government or the early election and his answer and his answer is what you're referring to wait you're

you misunderstand though you misunderstand the there. Let me read it. Yeah, go ahead. The question, didn't you just say the EU agreement of the 21st? Do you mean the termination of the agreement of the February 21st? Right. Or the entire Maidan, right?

Right. The canceling of the deal was the Nazis saying, we're going to kill the guy if he doesn't leave town. That was the canceling of the deal. Right, but it doesn't really seem to follow that he's talking about a coup. And he says, the U.S. openly supported human rights groups in Ukraine, including with money. But the Russian special services missed these trends.

They did not understand what was happening. And when they did, they were unable to take measures to stabilize the situation. And later they misjudged the mood in the east of Ukraine. He's not talking. He doesn't. There's nothing about that implies a coup. He just says altogether. And that's what that's what he says so i i tend to think that he's being honest when he says that this was diced and chopped up into into bits that don't really

reflect what his position is unless you think he's taking okay you could just wait unless you think he's taking 180 degree opinion from what he believed i mean well i'm sorry i need to pull the whole thing oh it's andrew kramer i always say what did i call him a minute ago it's andrew kramer is the reporter i can never remember now i'm trying to get friedman on my show to ask him about it but he doesn't answer me um and then the the other thing let me hang on just one second here let me see if i can find the the thing here take your time because i can cut out the waiting spaces and i did have my wife translate that one part of it um for you that i had in that email to you

but let me see if i'm just uh should really read the uh the whole interview there's a speech that he gives about this too where he talks about about how America's primary concern is preventing a German-Russian alliance. We'll do anything to prevent that from happening because as though it's Hitler and Stalin and they're just going to freeze out the rest of the world, which is crazy and totally not worth it. But anyway, he says the United States was interested in the formation of a pro-Western government in Ukraine. They saw that Russia was on the rise and sought to prevent it from consolidating its positions in the post-Soviet space. The success of pro-Western forces in Ukraine would allow Russia to deter. That's probably a bad translation, Google translation on the deter there. But you see what he's saying here is not that America was an innocent bystander, but that America had made a decision to form a pro-Western government in Ukraine is what he says. This is, I think, essentially the same thing as what my wife had translated.

Russia calls the events of the beginning of the year an organized U.S. coup, and it really was the most blatant coup in history. Or it could also be translated as naked or obvious is the word that they use there. And then they ask him, do you mean the termination of the agreement of February? In other words, do you mean the failure of the transition agreement and Yanukovych being forced to flee, apparently is what they're implying there, right, in the question? And then he says it's all together, right? So he's not saying that Nuland told the Nazi to threaten to kill the president, but he's saying it's the context. It's all together after all the united states openly supported human rights groups in ukraine including with money so meaning these ngos that i'm talking about here so it if you take the rest of his elaborated statement here

he's saying the russians couldn't tell what was going on and when they realized it was too late for them to react he's saying so yeah it's exactly he's saying america was involved in overthrowing the government there he wants to now say that there could you please read back to me what he now claims is the intro the the prefix and the suffix of that statement which supposedly changes its entire meaning because I don't buy it. I'll read you the part that I had printed out. It says reality is tenuous on the Internet, particularly on Twitter. All countries and corporations use the Internet this way, but the Russians are masters of the craft. I told the business journal Commerce sent that if the U.S. were behind a coup in Kiev, it would have been the most blatant coup in history as U.S.

government openly supported the uprising and had provided some funding for the demonstrating groups. In other words, it was no coup. The Russian news. Wait, wait, stop right there for a second. If you didn't add that, doesn't it just sound like, in other words, it was the most blatant coup in history? No, I read that what you just said. No, I actually I swear to you when I first even hearing even hearing the truncated part, I suspected, that's why I looked it up. You think, why would I go and look this up? Well, there's no such thing as a blatant coup.

There's only super secret ones. There couldn't possibly be a blatant overthrow, even though he says America was supporting the groups that did it. Yeah, there could be. But I got to be honest with you. When I saw that, I checked your source. Your source was legit. And something said to me, no, this just doesn't keep reading.

What else does he say? That's it. That's it. I mean, you can go to the actual thing. I sent you the business insider link and, but, um, and I said, something doesn't sound right. What his point was, whether it's honest or not, his point is that I was saying, well, it says we were all out there in the open, we're giving them food, we're giving them money. That's not how a coup is done. If that was the coup, it was the most blatant coup in history, meaning it was not a coup. We were totally up front about supporting the opposition, not kicking somebody out. Listen, my friend, look, my ass is already completely covered on this point. You must have read in the book, I quote, David Ignatius, who is the CIA spokesman at The Washington Post, even more than any other guy there. Joby Warwick or anybody else.

David Ignatius is known. And that's not me. Like Melvin Goodman, the former CIA officer, says like he is their guy. He's the CIA ombudsman at The Post. Right. He's the CIA ombudsman at the Post, right? And David Ignatius quotes the CIA guys and the NED guys, saying the whole role of the NED is to do in public what the CIA used to do in secret. Because it turns out secrecy doesn't help. Secrecy is a liability because you get caught and the people you're supporting then are discredited.

But if you do it all in the open, then you can get away with it. They say right there that was why they created the NED. What could do CIA regime changes in a much more public relations friendly way? Scott, that's the point. Listen, you apparently didn't know that he denied this. I can't, you know, you didn't know you didn't know. But obviously when a guy has written two articles claiming that's not what i said and he's actually gone further and said it's russian disinformation and propaganda okay keep reading because i look i don't have i

don't have the whole thing if i didn't you you can you can read i kept reading in the interview where he keeps elaborating and in fact the he says, listen, you have two countries. One wants Ukraine to be neutral and the other wants Ukraine to be part of the line of the containment of Russian expansion. What's he saying there? Russia wants them to be neutral. America is trying to use them against Russia. That's what he's saying. This whole thing is about the willfulness of America's regime change there. He says- The United States was interested in the formation of a pro-Western government in Ukraine. They saw that Russia was on the rise and they sought to prevent it from consolidating its

positions in the post-Soviet space. And the success of pro-Western forces in Ukraine would allow Russia, I don't know, bad translation there, but his entire goddamn context here, Noam, is that yes, America did it. Of course they did for reasons. And he goes on to explain the reasons. That's what this- Well, what he says was- We've been out. I mean, we're getting sucked into this rabbit hole, but what he says is- Rabbit hole nothing. He's, look, what does he say?

You're never going to let me get a word in. Okay, first of all, first of all, when he says now that there was some extra thing at the beginning. I don't see what you refresh my memory. What what are the parts that he says he says that they deleted that changed the context of all of this? He says cutting out a few odds and ends and quoted me as saying was the most blatant coup in history. The neat part is that they didn't make it up i did say i just left out the words before and after the statement now he doesn't ever say what the after the statement was okay what did he say before it he says um that if the u.s were behind a coup in kiev it would have been the most blatant

coup in history if if the u.s were behind a coup in kiev meaning would have been the most blatant coup in history. If, if the U.S. were behind a coup in Kiev, meaning that it's not, we weren't, if we were, but he's saying it wasn't. And he wrote, and there's another article I'm only reading from one article. He wrote a second article about it too. And I mean, I'm reading this Commerce Center article. I don't, I'm sure it's because I'm not just quick enough, but I don't see what you read, but I see where he says Americans. It's the paragraph leading into it. It's right there. It's the paragraph above the whole con. You should read the whole interview. The whole interview is about America hitting Russia to keep them off balance, just like he talks about in his speech. What he says, no, what he says

was Americans have had a very consistent foreign policy for the last 100 years. Its main goal is prevent any power from concentrating too much power in Europe at first the u.s tried to prevent germany from dominating europe then it prevented the ussr from strengthening its influence the essence the essence of this policy is to maintain a balance of power blah blah blah blah i don't see where he says it's just right above the coup part just page up one paragraph from the coup part he's saying the whole point here and then he goes on to elaborate the part about one side wants them to be neutral putin wants them to be neutral we want to take them and use them against russia is what he says there okay i'll read the whole thing okay and i just did but go ahead and reread the same thing maybe because you're reading it for translate we don't look

at people can look it up for themselves i i don't see what what you're the entire context of the discussion is america is taking ukraine away from russia because they want to no one you can't deny that and he can't deny that he says the fragmentation of europe is accompanied by the weakening of nato european countries essentially do not even have armies the united states is the only country with a north atlantic alliance that is strong from military point of view against the backdrop of the weakening of Europe, Russia's comparative power has grown significantly. Russia's strategic imperative is to have the deepest possible buffer zone on its western borders. That is why Russia has always had a special attitude towards Belarus, Ukraine, the Baltics, and other Eastern European countries. They are of great importance for Russia's national

security. At the beginning of this year, Ukraine had a slightly pro-Russian but seriously shaky government. It suited Moscow. Russia does not want to fully control or occupy Ukraine. It is enough that Ukraine does not join NATO and the EU. The Russian authorities cannot allow a situation in which the Western armed forces are located 100 kilometers from Kursk or Voronezh. The US was interested in the formation of a pro-Western government in Ukraine. They saw that Russia was on the rise

and sought to prevent it from consolidating its position in the post-Soviet space. The success of pro-Western forces in Ukraine would allow them to contain Russia. Russia calls the events of the beginning of the year a U.S. organized coup. And then he says, and it was indeed the most blatant coup in history. But he claims that's not what he's saying.

What he said was, what I just read to you, that... Okay, but you understand, Noam. If that was a coup, he's being sarcastic. The whole thing leads up to his sarcasm about the fact that a cool that's what he's claiming. I can't defend him. Yeah. But listen, dude, this is like arguing with a drunk woman. We just go around and around and around.

I don't want I want to get off this. I can't. You're being this is why I accuse you being intellectually dishonest. You refuse to accept what he said in the paragraph above and the paragraph below. He's I don't see any. I don't see any country i don't see any contradiction he is clearly talking about america taking ukraine away from russia and using this as an opportunity to do it it was the most naked coup in history because of how open it was it's exactly what it was if he wants to backtrack on that statement, fine. He can backtrack all he wants, but he was right

the first time. Okay. Sputnik edited it. No, this is how it was printed in Commerce Sant all along. This is how it was printed in Commerce Sant all along. We have it right in front of us. And I don't think he ever accused

them of editing him, did he? It's the same in both. You can him did he say it's the same in both you can look it up it's the same yeah exactly because sputnik didn't edit it no one edited it no one edited it certainly he didn't attack commercent which by the way is boris barazovsky's paper it's not like that's a pro-putin rag that's boris barazovsky's newspaper, Kommersant. So don't let the Russian sounding name, you know, throw you. That's a dissenter paper. And look at the entire context of what he's saying. America's trying to take Ukraine away from them.

And yeah, it was the most naked coup in history. And yeah, we're trying to take Ukraine away from them again. It's like a sandwich. It's a coup d'etat sandwich with America's trying to take Ukraine away from Russia in the paragraphs above and below, Noam. But you just pretend you don't remember that part now. I'm not pretending anything. First of all, the Sputnik thing, it just reads like he didn't realize the Congress had also published it. He's not saying I think that's totally relevant. What he's saying in the paragraph, it reads to me like he's saying, yes, we were supporting Ukraine because we wanted to prevent them from falling under the Russian yoke.

Supporting Ukraine? You mean supporting the groups in the street protesting to try to cancel the last election they lost? That's what you mean by supporting Ukraine? He wasn't talking about that. He was talking about our overall foreign policy. Could be. It could be what you're saying. That's not what it says in the paragraph. mean that's what they're discussing was and and

look i urge your entire audience to read the entire interview the whole thing is there and george friedman's given multiple speeches about this too where again he says and i'm sorry i'm almost certain this is the 2015 speech forgive me noam if I got my footnote wrong. But it is Friedman who says, listen, if Iran is doing a little better, we hit them. If China is doing a little better, we hit them. If the Russians are making a little more money, we hit them. We find ways to keep them off balance, to keep them under pressure, to keep them under wrap, to do all these things, to make sure that they can't succeed. We do everything can to hit them hit them hit them so that we are the dominant power in europe that's the background of this whole thing okay this is scott american dominance in that part of the world i

almost feel like we should cut some of this out only because i it was so bogged down and all i'm saying is when a guy says that this was not what I said, this is disinformation, this is propaganda, I don't know about any of the other paragraphs in there either. The guy who seems to be a credible guy is strongly, in an accusing way, disassociating himself. In a completely unconvincing way. convincing because you want to read more from the same article that he says is not what he said. I don't know. I, like I told you, I reached out to him. I'm trying to get him. As a matter of fact, if I do get him, maybe you want to come on with me and you can confront him with these very arguments because yeah, I'm not, I'm not against that as far as the, um, just to look, the fact is too, that it doesn't matter what George Friedman said to Conor Sant. My chapter on this doesn't hinge upon him, doesn't rely upon him. It doesn't rely on any particular type of coup.

There are at least 10 different types of coups. And this was one of them. And if the French hadn't coined a term for it yet, they can coin a brand new one and call it a coup de Biden because he was the one holding the Ukraine brief in the Barack Obama administration. The point the point I was making is that when I see that a bunch of experts are 9-11 deniers, this denier, you know, people I think are quacks. The fact that the Friedman quote, which actually was significant to me because he's a sober mind, a sober expert, that the fact that he was there saying, no, I meant exactly the opposite. I felt that was a very significant point. And that's why I emailed you to give me a comment on it, because you have relied on that quote. And now, you know, you can say he denies it, but I hold him to it. As far as Hromadsky, just to read from this article, maybe I don't know what USAID is,

but it says, Hromadsky's meteoric rise has surprised even his founders who didn't think the station would even be operational by now. The idea was to create a public television online that would operate according to principles of global public mass media like bbc npr in ukraine we don't have any stations like this they are all state-friendly stations here we have brought together journalists who for various reasons were either forced to leave central mass media for political reasons or who left commercial broadcasters who don't provide useful information and who are politically engaged other co--founders include Mustafa Nayyem,

a well-known investigative journalist for the opposition newspaper Ukrainskia, Pravda, and Roman Skrypin, who founded Channel 5 during the Orange Revolution. So from my naive point of view, what I'm seeing is that this is a corrupt country where the press is quasi free and these opposition journalists form a thing to get the opposition point out there and to those those are usually the people whose side we're on right that's exactly the point we being the u.s government no no dollars to create a gigantic you know astroturf media movement it doesn't mean that they had a First Amendment and a wonderful free press and everything was great there before. But look, we don't have a wonderful First Amendment

and completely free press here. Our game is extremely rigged, mostly just by money, right? By big pharma money. It's completely fair. It's completely free. I think it's completely free. Completely free.

We have, look, American journalists don't go to prison for journalism other than that one Fox News reporter that reported on South Korea that Barack regular Americans a chance to break free of what had previously been an absolute stranglehold of The Times, The Post and The Journal. Rather, Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings and NPR and PBS News. And yet, if the Chinese and the Russians came in and poured tens of millions of dollars into all these media organizations, the ones that you hate and fear the most, then you would have an exceptional problem. If Tucker Carlson was actually bankrolled by Russia and Candace Owens was actually bankrolled by russia and all these other people who are creating these you know joe rogan these people with these independent media empires they're actually secretly getting millions of dollars from russia china american adversaries you would not accept that and they would be completely discredited as sock puppets of a foreign power except to the

people who totally agree with them and didn't mind but to everybody else and that's the whole thing right so that's my but but why why are why are these journalists not discredited in ukraine except that the citizens of ukraine believe them and think they're on their side which ones the people that are receiving that you say money from from western sources right but this is the thing they're not discredited we would find them discredited because they don't represent how we feel. But you have to look

at a population map. How do you get a million people? How do you get a million people to turn out in a few weeks for something that they don't deeply believe? I didn't say that. Look, the point is

they don't have the resources to show up and do any of it without the Americans doing it for them. And you're forgetting that there are still tens of millions, a couple of 10 million Ukrainians who didn't show up there, who didn't support the Maidan revolution. And even on the eve of the thing, the Washington Post ran in-depth surveys

showing that the people of the South and the East, which is the majority of the country and the economic base of the country, rejected the Maidan movement. That was why Barack Obama and George W. Bush had to overthrow the government there twice in 10 years in the first place is because the wrong guy kept winning the election. And now it's true that I should stipulate in 04, he may have rigged it. But then again, it was sort of like Ghani versus Abdullah in Afghanistan, where they're both trying to steal it from each other. And America put their thumb on the scale on the side of the people in the West. And then by the way, the people that won in the Orange Revolution of 04, Yushchenko and Timoshenko, they were completely disgraced and discredited

within like a year. She was put in prison and her own partner, Yushchenko, testified against her. And then he was crushed. He got 3% of the vote in the first round in 2010 because his administration had been an absolute catastrophe for the people there. And so, and this is actually, as I say in, in later in the book, maybe you're not here yet. When I describe what I call Russia's Pyrrhic victory, I say that Putin made a big error

by essentially confiscating the entire south and east of the country because that was all the Russian speakers. So now he can protect them fine, but now he's taken them out of Ukraine. And now the kinds of people who did the Maidan revolution will absolutely be dominant in the country from now on. But just because a million people show up doesn't mean that that represents the people of the country. Remember the green revolution in Iran in 2009? That was essentially all of the modern liberals in Tehran showed up for that. But what about everyone else that lives out in the countryside? They supported the conservative old government and didn't want anything like a revolution at all. And so these things, look at the pussy hat protests or the January 6th protests

where you can get people to show up for a thing. It doesn't necessarily mean that their representative, certainly enough of the population to amount to a revolution, a legitimate revolution like George Washington led or something like that. Listen, we'll wrap it up. But listen, in Israel, which is similar, because this went on for

months in israel they had months of protests against uh netanyahu's attempt to change the supreme court there right and it was very very big numbers right it probably wasn't a million because it's a smaller country but but probably as a percentage base is probably similar and that it continued for so long in such large numbers, whether it's a majority or not, I can't say whether, I don't know the numbers, how many Russian speaking people there, but whatever it is, it's a, it is a real and deeply felt and, and profoundly felt movement because they didn't just show up for one day. They showed up every day, November, December, January, February.

And that's where I have trouble feeling that this is, maybe it's just a matter of degree, because I don't disagree with much of what you're saying in terms of the UN, the US being there. But I respect that level of support those numbers and the amount of time they're out there protesting and i feel like these charges about well they were giving them hot food or whatever it is that this really is almost disrespectful to the heart felt uh movement that we were seeing there is that there's not you know they didn't come out

you called it a carnival they didn't come out for cotton candy they disrupted their lives for months to protest this and i don't think the u.s government has whatever you call the things that marionettes hold i don't think we have ones that powerful that's all i feel about it it's just a very poor country look unlike israel they're not getting money unlike unlike israel ukraine is a very poor country and the, unlike Israel. They're not getting money. Unlike Israel, Ukraine is a very poor country. And the same kind of thing is going on in Georgia right now. We're showing up to protests. It's one of the best jobs that you could get. And there are places in America we're showing up to protests might be the best job that you could get in economically depressed places. And if people are paying the transportation to bring people from all over the

country and it obviously you know again we talked about the history behind the thing he canceled a deal this is in the last episode he canceled the deal that was going to push them closer to the european union and further away from russia and when he canceled that deal, the people, especially of the far West of the country who hate Russia and wanted nothing to do with Russia, they came out to support, but someone was paying for all those buses to bring them from Lviv. And someone was paying for all that hot food and all that entertainment, all the electricity and all that they needed to stay out there.

So everybody's an individual. I never said that the people there don't have minds or exist but the fact of the matter is uh well like i i quote the people in the thing saying they couldn't have done it without us all right scott and that's the point as i'm enjoying uh talking to you very much um it's really your, your great sparring partner. I hope we do this again about other subjects in the future. Maybe we'll get a chess clock so we can, but my question to you is this, before you go, it's, we've done like three and a half hours or something crazy.

I want to edit it down. I want to edit it down in good faith. I am at the same time. You should just run the whole thing, man. Well, what I was going to suggest, I'm fine doing it. What I was going to suggest is that I have an edit version and then, and then release the entire thing. By the way, it drives me up a fucking wall that any current media outlet edits down an interview and then doesn't release all the footage. Like I get it.

You have 15 minutes on 60 minutes. You want to cut it down. That's fine. But put the entire footage on the internet. What kind of game are you playing here? There's no, every tv interview just you don't even need two versions man yeah okay okay it's it's you know it's i feel it should be your decision but um you do agree with me right it's fucking outrageous the way they just have cutting room floor footage and everybody's asking but what else did he say oh no we're not going to show you that our editing our curation of this footage is more important than the news that might be out there on the cutting room floor.

It's fucking phonies. Especially when it's like, you know, it's a contentious thing and you could be deleting context that really favors one side or the other. And of course they are. There's no other reason. They're not,

we know they are. Yeah. And, and we're right to, and even if they aren't, we're right to presume that they are because it's supposed to be open you know they they're using as a pretext the fact that in the old days you only had so much you know room on a newspaper and and it was broadcast tv and you couldn't record you had to make tough choices which by the way yeah you know in the in the

1953 coup there were a bunch of protesters out there for months too supporting that. They dressed it up to look just like a revolution. And in fact- I kept you on too long for you to make that point. Go ahead. I know I did. The wisdom of the staircase, but I'm still on it. It's a long staircase. The CIA and the State Department recommended that Jimmy Carter send the Ayatollah back to Iran. Remember, he was in Paris, France. Why would they send him home to Iran? It was because America asked him to. Why? It's because the CIA said, we know this guy.

He helped us overthrow Mossadegh 25 years ago. We like him. Well, what was Ayatollah Khomeini's role against Mossadegh in 53? He was part of a group of religious right-wingers who went out to protest and call him a commie. And they did all kinds of to to frame up the commies and to drive a right-wing protest movement out in the streets to create pressure to overthrow mosadegh now no one would say that the ayatollah khomeini

was nothing but a sock puppet with nothing but a sweaty gym sock for a brain he was an individual human man doing what he wanted which was also exactly what kermit roosevelt and the cia wanted him to do so listen i don't i don't know that's what made the difference there i don't know anything about kermit roosevelt is that the professor right i i don't know anything about uh uh the ayatollah but i will i'll i'm gonna leave you with one um last question okay tell me something just give me one thing that the russians have done that's bad they must have done something i mean we're always in everybody's we're nosing around everybody's business what have they done that's bad as i write in the book they shouldn't have done this invasion no no i mean i

mean in terms of in terms of undermining, trying to destabilize, engineer a coup, something. Well, since the fall of the Soviet Union. Before or after? Well, look, I mean, since the fall of the Soviet Union. Yeah. You know, they played real hardball over the EU agreement. They could have been more agreeable about all of that. But they didn't poison anybody

they didn't they didn't violate the minsk agreements they did they don't they're not up to any no good anywhere um well no they didn't violate the minsk agreements that was ukraine and i don't know i'm asking yeah but like um on the on the assassinations i mean there's really a lot of doubt raised about those i think it clearly clearly was these Russian nationals that poisoned Litvinenko. I think that was proven. I show that in the book that I think that his report that he was a former Russian spy who was poisoned in England in 2005. Order from the top from Putin. No, no one ever demonstrated that.

And in fact, the radioactive substance is very easy to make. And there are a lot of different laboratories in the world that could do it and there is a robust nuclear smuggling uh underground around the world that's not necessarily for nuclear weapons but it's there there and and barazovsky and livinenko and others around him had been involved documented been involved in nuclear smuggling before it looks like it was an assassination against him but it's not clear what the motive was and it's highly doubtful that it was putin that ordered it isn't it strange that this former kgb dictator corrupted with power like every dictator always is plays things so on

the up and up and keeps his nose so clean and respects so much international law and mores i don't buy that but look that's look saying that when when uh george bush and all of his men tell 1 000 lies against saddam hussein it doesn't mean that he's a good person just because 1 000 things that they said against him aren't true there are plenty of things about saddam hussein that are true i asked you about but what's true about putin yeah well i mean one thing, when he came and took over the country, he replaced the previous oligarchs with his own, right? He's clearly a strong man. He stayed in office for 25 years. He stepped down to the prime ministership for a while. He clearly was entertaining the possibility of like more or less semi-retirement and rule from behind the throne at that time.

But Obama and Hillary humiliated his successor, Medvedev, with the Libyan war and helped ruin that and help convince Putin that if it ain't him, it ain't good enough. Everybody at the time always said it was always a plan. He was going to back out because the Constitution at the time said it had to be two terms. You know, the thing is, oh, you're in my good friend Daryl Cooper. He pointed out, and I quote him in the book pointing out, that any time a strongman would dare to step aside for a few years like that, he's really risking bringing in the public mind the idea that they really don't need him, that they're actually okay without him.

He's not the one single man that they need to rely on. And that he clearly, Henry Kissinger had said this back in history too a few years back henry kissinger had said you know that like listen all this talk about putin being a dictator like okay he is a strong man like let's not he's somewhat of an autocrat but he clearly is this is kissinger talking he clearly means to leave something like a republican form of government behind. He has a constitution. But he might have changed over time. He might have changed over time. Yeah, possibly. And a lot of that, I think, is probably because America keeps putting him in the position of reaffirming his conclusion that if it ain't him, no one else is strong enough to

deal with the challenge that America presents. Yeah, that's how Netanyahu thinks too. I'm sure it is. I'm sure it is. But look, I mean, Putin, I think everybody agrees with the history of how he came to power essentially was that he was a low level figure in the Putin mafia family, that he was the secretary for the mayor of St. Petersburg. And he was the guy that got things done for him and helped him get out of the country when he was wanted on corruption charges and ended up helping the entire Yeltsin family clan slither out of the country, as Matt Taibbi

says, as soon as he came to power as president. And in fact, when he came to power as prime minister, he had squashed a prosecutor's investigation into the Yeltsin family. That was one of the first things that he did when he came to power. So that was how he was made. He was Bill Clinton's man's man is how he got the job. And people make a lot of that. He was KGB, like he was some throat slit and spy, but actually he's nothing but a clerk. And so this is kind of what i think is important and is lost on people is that like you say whatever you want about the guy but like ultimately he's a bureaucrat with a very like um kind of functional view of how governments and

systems work he's not a romantic swept away by all these ideals of recreating Russian glory and Peter the Great and all of this crap he's essentially like a guy playing a tough game of pool right like measuring his shots extremely carefully and trying to do the best that he can in the situation that he's in which is he's the ruler of the rump Russian empire what's left of the old great soviet empire that is now you know dead and gone so essentially like he's he's a caretaker right and and and dealing with a bad hand he's dealt so it just puts a whole other spin on the idea of this idea that he just wants to be the greatest czar and rebuild all of russia's imperial greatness and legacy and all that it costs too much to do that and he's much more of a profit and loss of a kind of a guy and he greatness and legacy and all that it costs too much to do that and he's

much more of a profit and loss of a kind of a guy and he always for years and because he's been there for 25 years we know his history he had always tried to prioritize getting along with the united states and our western european allies i keep saying i keep saying we're gonna but i do have one other question because i always wondered this about you libertarian guys. Why are you not, why don't you have more romantic attachment to these movements of people who claim they want to be more free, like the people in Ukraine and other parts of the world? When I hear the Ukrainians speak,

like we want to get out from the government, we want a more free press, we want civil liberties, we want to be associated with Europe where people live more free press. We want civil liberties. We want to be associated with Europe where people live more fulfilling lives. Why does that not tug at your heartstrings more than it apparently does? or I don't know if it's neoliberalism or just liberalism, that essentially insists, like Thomas Paine essentially, we must export the American Revolution to the whole world, like Trotskyites in a way. But the French supported us.

We consider that a good thing they did for us. Well, they saved our ass at Yorktown, yeah, and great. But this was a fight at the time, long before Stalin and Trotsky. This was a fight between Jefferson and Paine. Do we want revolution in one country and then husband our resources and try to do the best with what we've won? Or do we want to go blow our whole wad trying to overthrow all of Europe? Because, of course, Europe was lousy with kings and tyrants. And yet what could America really do about it without extending ourselves too far and costing ourselves what we're trying to preserve in the first place?

The American tradition of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and all of their best advice, John Quincy Adams, was to perfect our union as best as we can and then to lead the world by example. And, Noam, I got to tell you, man, in this particular interview especially, I will not argue with you about Hitler or Stalin, or Tojo for that matter. You declare war on me, I declare war on you. Fine. Okay? And Joseph Stalin, he was a worse, more violent, or before the war anyway, he had already been a more violent dictator than Hitler.

Jewish, by the way, Jewish, according to Candace Owens. Yeah, she said that Stalin is Jewish. Yeah, maybe she said that. But anyway. She did. If you say we got to have a Cold War to face down the communists.

Yeah. Whatever, fine. That was over by the time. I'm not saying that. No, no, but I'm saying for argument's sake but i'm just saying hitler and stalin are gone and even pol pot as crazy as he was he only had a crappy little cambodia to rule and pose no threat to the rest of mankind outside of his own little jurisdiction there and so my point being there is that america doesn't have to have a world empire we don't have to rule the world and we can't afford to do it anymore anyway.

So we can, as Ron Paul, my great hero, always says, we absolutely can lecture the people of the world about freedom and liberty. And we absolutely, as John Quincy Adams says, we can support them with our interests, I mean, with our thoughts and our prayers, but not with our sword because it causes too much problems for us.

It probably wouldn't help them anyway to intervene. And, and that, I think that was right now, especially. I respect it. There is something in me, which feels that, I'm going to sound like Wolfowitz now, that with technology moving along the way it is that 50 years from now, a hundred years from now, 100 years from now, the technology to do tremendous damage to the world, nuclear or otherwise, will be so ubiquitous that unless we can get the globe free and living the fulfilling lives like

we have in the West, that might be the source of the destruction of the planet that's what worries me these dictatorships these strong men what we're seeing in syria this is look how violent the democracies are well righteous the self-righteous violence of the democracies knows no bounds there's some you're there you're right i'm not going to quibble with you that there's been democracy uh violence associated with democracies but they're not but it's a more level-headed i i trust democracies with nuclear weapons i do not trust tin pot dictators with them i just don't i don't really trust any men with them but uh i understand what you're saying yeah and look look and you know what honestly man

there's such a counterfactual here yeah to the libertarians anyway where instead of did i make this joke to you i'm sorry i'm so redundant did i make the joke to you that it's sort of like joe biden won the election of 88 and he's been the president this whole time like that's essentially how i look at it right might as well have been joe biden this whole time is who our leadership has been. And so that's not hating America. That's just hating Joe Biden. That's not disapproving of what America did.

That's disapproving of the shots that Joe Biden called. And frankly, he agreed with every stupid thing that these presidents have done this whole time. He's been there since 73 after all. So he has co-ownership of virtually everything that we talk about. But the counterfactual for me there is obvious. It's Dr. Ron Paul. He ran for president in 1988 as well as the libertarian. And if he had won and had overseen the end of the Cold War, then we would have abolished NATO and come home. And no, Germany would not have run rampage and destroyed all of Europe again. They would have

expanded the EU trade agreement and created their own little us e as they have done only without us and it would have been fine and there's no reason to think that germany i mean pardon me that uh china and japan would have broke out in war or what are any of these things if you look at uh this would be the one time you'll ever catch me giving credit to bill clinton for anything but he sent madeline albright over there to make a deal with north korea that said listen you stay in the non-proliferation treaty and allow the inspectors in your country and don't turn your Soviet era nuclear reactor back on. And we will give you money and fuel oil and light water nuclear reactors that can't produce weapons grade waste.

And that was a good deal. And it was just the beginning of a deal. They could have ended the Korean war. They could have had even reunification. But they definitely could have had peace. And then W. Bush came in and he and John Bolton, they tore up that agreed framework deal. They lied about North Korea, added sanctions on them and threatened them with a nuclear first strike in their defense posture review of December of 2002 and only then did North Korea withdraw from the treaty, kick the inspectors out of the country, turn their nuclear reactor back on, and then months later begin harvesting the plutonium out of it and making nuclear bombs. Now they have nuclear bombs because of poor American leadership.

It's always America. It's always America. I meant to ask- Because we had a deal and then we broke the deal, man. Yeah, I know. We're the only ones who break America. I mean, I meant to ask a deal and then we broke the deal, man. I know we're the only ones who break deals. And I didn't say that. I said that's what happened in the case of North Korea. George Bush and John Bolton pushed Kim Jong Il to nuclear weapons. All right. I you know what? I don't know the details, but I see what this guy does to his country. I forgot to ask you about the Budapest memorandum, whatever it is if putin violated that another time another time another time um he did but we did first america promised not to intervene

in the internal affairs in ukraine in that same budapest memorandum before uh putin ever decided to obviously violate ukrainian sovereignty with his tanks and infantry there but but there's a mechanism for violations invasion is not one of's a mechanism for violations. Invasion is not one of the allowed mechanisms for violations of a treaty, is it? On the other hand, the UN Security Council, which is the mechanism, ratified the Minsk two-piece deal, but then the Western allies refused to implement it and refused to pressure Kiev to implement it. In fact, the Americans pressured them not to not implement it. And we have, I have all the collection of quotes in here with, from Angela Merkel and Holland, Poroshenko and Zelensky and many other ministers and all them saying we never meant to implement Minsk, too.

It doesn't matter that it was the international law rubber stamp by Obama and the UNSC. It only matters that we were biding for time to build up our military forces before the war broke out again. They all say I have a whole collection of quotes, more than I could even believe. I was surprised how many people said that. And quite frankly, I should tell you, Noam, I don't believe Angela Merkel when she says that. I think she's sort of covering her ass now and saying, well, we were just trying to give them time to arm up.

Because in fact, after Minsk was passed, Merkel and her government tried many different times, three or four or five different times to come up with a way to actually implement Minsk. But the Americans wouldn't go along. That was what it came down to. And in fact, here's what it also came down to. For one example, in 2019, the current president of Ukraine, Zelensky, who is a Russian-speaking Jew from Kharkiv, I'm almost certain from Kharkiv,

in the eastern part of the country, although not the very far east, he ran on peace. And he was elected on peace. And he did pretty good even out west, where people wanted to end the war. But what happened was there was something called the Steinmeier formula that was invented by the German foreign minister. I think he was the foreign minister but some kind of bureaucrat steinmeier and the formula said well we'll do the elections and we'll secure the border and whatever and had an order for implementing minsk that would be more

orderly that hopefully they could get people to agree to and zelensky said that he was going to do it he tried to begin to implement it and then you know what happened a bunch of neo-nazis held rallies across the country where they threatened to murder him. They said no to capitulation. If you sign this deal, and I'm not saying that's Victoria Nuland. I'm saying that's a bunch of Hitler loving Nazis. They said, if you do this, we'll hang you from a tree. It'll be the last thing you ever do. And it was a credible threat. Again, it's, this is the name I always forget. Forgive me, Mr. Kramer. It's Andrew Kramer in the New York Times. He was the same one who covered the Maidan, and he was the same one who talked about this then.

That when these men threaten to kill the president, it's a credible threat. It's not like just some goofball threatening Joe Biden and gets rolled up by the FBI or the Secret Service. These men have the ability to carry out these threats, and the president is in danger. and so he can't. That was it. They're the ones who killed the deal was a bunch of neo-Nazis threatening to kill the president. He's there in a sense. They're captive. But they signed a deal to promise to respect Ukraine's territorial integrity. Ukraine gave back those nuclear weapons. I know they probably couldn't launch them, but they were important enough that they were a quid pro quo for the deal. So obviously people were worried about them. And the deal said that in the event of a conflict, there would be a consultation. And, you know,

and, you know, when Saddam Hussein was not obeying his treaties after the first Gulf War and America went into Iraq again, you didn't think that was okay. Anyway, whatever. He wasn't in violation of his treaties? Of course he was. No, he wasn't. All the oil for food smuggling. There was all sorts of violations.

I don't recall it off the top of my head. Well, whatever. Every last canister of mustard gas was destroyed by the end of 1991. He had tried to cheat and hold on to some. Well, Scott Ritter was right. Scott Ritter was right all along. Well, on that particular point, he was correct about that. The UN, it wasn't just him.

The United Nations- By the way, can I stop you? I want to stop you there because I've got to go. But I'll tell you something about Scott Ritter because you might like this. That actually changed my outlook on a lot of things because he was so dragged in the mud and so discredited by everybody who attacked him at the time when he was claiming Iraq didn't have any weapons. And he is a disagreeable person and more so now that I read him and I can't stand him. But he was telling the truth about that at the time,

at least unless it was a coincidence. And ever since then, there's a part of me that always says, don't jump to conclusions. Remember Scott Ritter, maybe this asshole, maybe this person you hate is correct about this. So check it out, you know,

just check it out first. And this is a good credit. He really tried for people not familiar at that time. He really tried hard to stop that war. Yes, he did. And the day that Colin Powell gave his big fake speech to the U.N., Ritter gave a speech in Tokyo explaining how all of this was just completely bogus. And what he said was, and I interviewed him back in the days on my show, that in 1995, what happened was, you'll remember probably, Saddam Hussein's son-in-law had defected to Jordan.

And he had been in charge of the weapons of mass destruction programs. And he brought all the data with him and explained, showed the CIA, the IAEA, and CNN and everybody, everything he had. I remember watching the CNN interview live with the guy. Hussein Kamel was his name. And Hussein panicked, Saddam Hussein panicked because he knew that this guy had given everything and he was afraid that it would prove that he had not given everything somehow. So he ordered his men to take every scrap of paper you possibly can and give it to the UN now. And that is the same, essentially the same 12,000 page dossier

that he gave to the UN in 2002 when he is saying this is all i got it's you guys have it all it's already declared and you have every bit of it and he was telling the truth and in fact it turns out we know from his cia interrogator that he was semi-retired and writing a romance novel at the time of the war far from plotting an attack with al-qaeda against the united states um he was writing a romance novel and sitting in his lonely attic. But he didn't want to let his neighbors know that he had no weapons, right? Not true. He gave a 12,000-page dossier to the U.S. swearing before Allah.

But nobody believed that. Apparently, from what I remember, he would say that, but then nobody believed it because in other ways, he would act like he was winking his eyes and to intimidate the people who were true he didn't want he didn't want examples of that there are no examples he didn't want to know he didn't have it he's everybody knew all the intelligence agencies knew and lied yes yes especially including the cia mi6 and the israeli massad so tony. So Tony Blair knew it wasn't true when he brought the country to war.

Yes, of course. His own head of MI6, Richard Dearlove, wrote the famous memo that said the intelligence is being fixed around the policy. Why did Tony Blair want to go to war? Well, because George Bush asked him very nicely was the main thing, because he decided politically he was never going to sacrifice the partnership with the United States.

And he knew George Bush was determined to do it. But he was the one like Colin Powell. It was the two of them who insisted that Bush at least go to the U.N. first because he was afraid he's going to go to jail for launching an aggressive war without a U.N. Security Council resolution. But Powell believed it. Powell believed it, right? Because he was mad after. No, Powell knew he was lying, too. And his former chief of staff, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, has told this story many times that they knew they were lying. And what they did that was right was they threw out Scooter Libby's speech, which had the most ridiculous claims in it that would have just been laughed right out of court. so instead they went with only cia claims which were also bogus and as wilkerson says they were essentially trying very hard to like can we include this do we really believe that and then still it was a bunch of nonsense but if they're lying

but if they're simply lying all along what do they care what they include? It's only a matter of what they can get away with. Because, for one example, Libby had included that the Iraqi diplomat, Anas Ali, had met with Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker in Prague, Czech Republic, and given him a flask of anthrax. And that was such BS that the CIA

and the FBI had roundly and determinedly debunked it. And so that was the kind of thing that was so ridiculously false, it was going to be embarrassing if they had gone that far. Last question, really last question. If you are going to lie so cynically and bring the entire world to war

on the claim that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, how could you not plan what you were going to do when you got there? How come nobody planted? They had plans, but they fell through. They had plans to do to plant weapons on them that fell through. In fact, my wife wrote about this at the time. She had great. Send me, send me down. We got to. I've never heard that. I bet I could find that. It's unbelievable. There's too many moving parts,

and they couldn't get American soldiers and spies to go along with it. Too many patriots wouldn't tell the lie. That was why it didn't happen. The same patriots, the same Neocons had a plan. The Neocons had a plan. They were going to frame up Saddam and Iran for working together on smuggling some nuclear material. That was one of the lies. The same.

We're trying to push, but they weren't able to put it together. The same patriots who are ready to lie and cover it up for the rest of their lives. That Israel bombed the U.S. liberty knowing. And all the people, Johnson. No, not the same ones. No, I mean, figuratively. But somehow when it came to Iraq. Well, figuratively, he's doing a lot of heavy lifting here. No, it's not.

No, it's not. Point is that you couldn't find one person who was ready to do the United States bidding to plant some vials against, like to frame. Well, I didn't say they couldn't find one person. Police always frame guilty people. They feel good about framing guilty people. I didn't say they couldn't find one person. I said they couldn't get enough people to do it.

They had a plan to do it. That's more than one person. You need one person to sprinkle some uranium. There was a plan to plant weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and that plan fell through. And they didn't do it because they couldn't, because it was too many moving parts. It was too many people would know they were lying

who would not let them get away with it at the time. You're talking about, you know, it's a land invasion, and many people of many jurisdictions overlapping there. It was too much to get away with it at the time. You're talking about, you know, it's a land invasion and many people of many jurisdictions overlapping there. It was too much to get away with, but they did have a plan. That's amazing to me that you believe that. That's amazing to me that you believe that. I mean, it's just not plausible to me that they would go through all this trouble and have no working plan to plant something in Iraq.

I just said the exact opposite of that, but you refused to hear. No, no, I'm sorry. Forgive me. Yes. You're saying that they had a plan, but it didn't work. And so they didn't do it. And there's nobody coming out. I have not seen one year since I read the piece, but I bet I could find it. Yeah. Okay. Later, later. Send it to me. Send it to me. Send it to me. I got to go. I got to go. dude. It's it's a, I hope you're going to come to the Owl tree or the commie song when you get to New York. So we can really have a conversation. Um, I really do like your book and I learned a lot from it and I appreciate the time. I don't want to cut you off if you want to dump this one last thing in there. You know,

I'll have to ask the wife. I think, you know, the website she used to write for may not be keeping their archives very well anymore. I may have this reprinted on my own website. I did save the neocons in the Pentagon that were lying. They bragged that they got 800 bogus stories planted in the news, accusing Saddam's regime of all kinds of things, but especially manufacturing, chemical, biological and attempting to get at least parts to try to develop nuclear weapons. And and they boasted about how many fake stories that they were able to succeed in putting into the news and the rest. And and then remember what happened as soon as they got there. They changed the story from weapons to democracy. Why? I think I want weapons. I remember. Yeah, I do remember. But I think that democracy, in my opinion, democracy had been the actual reason all along. That was part of it. Yeah.

I always felt that the weapons were a more easy thing to sell because everybody kind of understood that. So I said, let's just go with the weapons explanation because everybody will buy that. Because you could justify an aggressive war based on democracy. You can't start a war for that. That's right. They would, well, I don't mean sarcastic, but I think to sell to the American public, especially after 9-11, the claim that they have weapons of mass destruction, because we were all panicking about that, was a much more compelling argument and easier to make than saying, no, this is, don't you understand, this is for the future of the world and spreading democracy. This was much more esoteric. So I felt that at the time,

at the time. That was also cover for, we want to give the power to the Iraqi Shiite supermajority because we've been reassured that we will control them and then they will lord it over Iran and over I'm not going to be a leader. I'm not going to be a leader. I'm not going to be a leader. I'm not going to be a leader. I'm not going to be a leader. I'm not going to be a leader. I'm not going to be a leader. I'm not going to be a leader. I'm not going to be a leader. I'm not going to be a leader. I'm not going to be a leader. I'm not going to be a leader. I'm not going to be a leader. I'm not going to be a leader. I'm not going to be a leader. I'm not going to be a leader. I'm not going to be a leader.

I'm not going to be a leader. I'm not going to be a leader. I'm not going to be a leader. I'm not going to be a leader. I'm not going to be a leader. I'm not going to be a leader. I'm not going to be a leader. I'm not going to be a leader. I'm not going to be a leader. I'm not going to be a leader. it it's at my website i reprinted it they took it down from the israel the original israeli think tank that published it it's called a clean break a new strategy for securing the realm by david wormser and richard pearl and there's a companion piece called coping with crumbling states and then they wrote a book about it pearl did the forward and wormser wrote the book it's called tyranny's ally america's failure to remove saddam hussein from power. And all it is, is a clean

break only in a full length book version. And the whole plan is we've been reassured by Ahmed Chalabi, the Iranian spy, Iraqi exile, that if we overthrow Saddam, that we'll be able to put the king of Jordan or his cousin in power. And being a Hashemite, he'll have with the prophet's blood in his veins, he'll be able to command the allegiance of all the Iraqi Shiite super majority which this is total nonsense they're not going to obey the Hashemites they didn't in the 20s when the British tried to make them and they had a fatwa against cooperating with the king at all but anyway these guys are idiots this is a complete fraud that they fell, that Chalabi had sold them.

And then eventually they replaced King Hussein and his cousin on the list, because I think King Hussein died and the new guy, whatever, the cousin, it wasn't going to work. So then they replaced it with Chalabi himself was going to be the leader. And then the idea was he would force the Shiite clergy in Najaf to force Hezbollah to stop being friends with Syria and Iran and start being nice to Israel. The whole thing is completely nuts. And that was the motive for the New York Times getting us into that war. That's what they meant by democracy. It wasn't high-minded ideals. It was running errands for Benjamin Netanyahu. Well, I think we were actually worried at the time about what the Middle East will become after 9-11.

We had really highfalutin ideas about spreading Western ideas. And I remember at the time, people were talking about Iraq being a more cosmopolitan people, and they were the most likely country to be able to have these kind of institutions. So it all seems ridiculous to even say it out loud after we know how it all played out but that was the kind of thing that was being said at the time you remember well yeah but i think that was just pr for the rubes man what it was really all about was the netanyahu doctrine in fact i'm kicking myself because jeffrey sacks jeffrey sacks pointed this out and i had missed this that netanyahu wrote a book in 96 saying the key to taking out all these terrorists is taking out the states that sponsor them.

Of course, this is the mantra of the neoconservatives, and it's the thinking behind the clean break and the coping with crumbling states, papers and tyrannies ally. And what's funny is you think about the map of the Middle East in your head there, Noam. Imagine thinking that if we get rid of secular Sunni Saddam Hussein. Oh, wait, I forgot to put Palestine. Go ahead. Okay, there you go. Imagine thinking you got Iran, you got Syria, you got Hezbollah, they're the threat to Israel. Now imagine thinking that what we want to do is we want to get rid of secular Sunni Ba'athist Saddam, and we want to put the Shiite supermajority in power in Baghdad. That'll teach those Iranians, huh?

And yet what do they do? They put Iran's best friends in power in Baghdad, the Supreme Islamic Council, the Dawa Party, the Ayatollah Sistani. These are all the Ayatollah Khamenei's best friends. And they did that. Why? Because they're dumb as hell. That's why.

Because the neocons are as stupid as they are premeditated murderers serving the interests of a foreign power. And so instead of creating a compliant new mass of Sunni authority in Iraq that would lord it over Hezbollah and Iran, Tehran lords it over Baghdad. And Baghdad is essentially like a satellite almost. Maybe not much longer. Of Tehranan we don't know where that's going now yeah we'll see and this was why they were so determined to take out Assad in Damascus was because they'd done such a bad job putting Iran up two pegs in Baghdad they had to take them down a peg by doing another regime change in the country next door even to the degree that they're willing to back a bunch of bin Ladenites in order to do it,

which as they did 10 years ago, and as we're seeing take place before our eyes right now. Listen, you're an amazing guy. Your energy and your memory and your command of details, it may be unparalleled in my experience talking with anyone. I mean that as a compliment, not as nothing, there's nothing backhanded about what I just said. I'm jealous. And I wish that I could have that command of subject matter that you do. You just got to read my books a bunch of times in a row. Yeah. Yeah. But anyway, so I really appreciate your time. We'd said about a half an hour interview. It turned into two hours. We started out at each, out at each other's throats, but, um, uh, I think it ended nicely. Uh, and I hope you, I hope you're happy with it. I will put the whole thing up as you ask, uh,

except for the pauses where you're looking stuff up or whatever it is. Sure. All right. And then, yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to practice doing a porch tour comedy with Robbie the fire. And then you're going to give me a spot up on that in front of them bricks one day. Oh, I absolutely will. Oh yeah. That would be great them bricks one day. Oh, I absolutely will. Hell yeah. That would be fun. That would be great.

Okay, dude. Thank you very much. And please let me know when you come to New York, all right? Okay, absolutely. Thank you, Nick. So long, Scott.