TruthArchive.ai - Tweets Saved By @martyrmade
Posted - December 19, 2025 at 10:19 PM
Saved - December 20, 2025 at 12:25 AM
reSee.it AI Summary
I defend that every surviving USS Liberty crew member isn’t lying or antisemitic. On a clear day, Israeli planes buzzed the ship; the flag was seen and later raised again after the first attack. The two-hour assault came in waves—communications knocked out, torpedoes, gunships firing at men on deck and lifeboats (one shot-up boat is in Haifa’s naval museum). They were threatened by the Sixth Fleet, slandered as antisemites, and I urge others to remember the Liberty and speak up against Shapiro.
@martyrmade - Martyr Made
Ben wants you to believe that every single surviving member of the USS Liberty is a lying antisemite. All of them, because they’re consistent in their stories of what happened that day. Why is it still relevant all these years later, Ben? It’s still relevant enough for you to keep lying about it and slandering the crew. The facts: It was a completely clear day. Israeli planes buzzed the Liberty all morning, and pilots are drilled over and over throughout their careers to recognize ship platforms. The US flag was flying, but the Israelis for years lied and said it wasn’t. The signalman on watch at the time - the guy literally in charge of raising and lowering the flags - and everyone else on the bridge said it was flying, and after the first Israeli attack burned it up, they raised the holiday ensign, which is much larger than the normal flag, impossible to miss. This wasn’t an errant missile or two, like when the Iraqis hit the USS Stark. The attack lasted two hours, and came in waves. First, Israeli jets took out the ships communications gear. Next, they were hit by torpedo boats. It was a miracle the torpedo that landed didn’t sink the ship. It hit very specific reinforced part of the hull or else it would’ve gone down in minutes. After the torpedoes, gunships came and opened with .50 caliber machines guns from short range, firing at the men on deck trying to put out fires, and shooting up the lifeboats so no one could escape. One of those shot up life boats is on display at the Israeli naval museum in Haifa (I’ve seen it myself). It’s there to mock the dead, insult the survivors, and spit in the face of all Americans. The attack was only called off when a Soviet ship wandered into the area. The crew were threatened by the Sixth Fleet admiral under whose ultimate command they were sailing, that they would be punished with “jail or worse” if they spoke a word of it to anyone, even their wives. When they started speaking out, they were harassed, threatened, intimidated, and slandered as antisemites. To this day, they have to endure being publicly denounced as liars by swine like Shapiro. Remember the Liberty. And don’t let anyone scare or shame you from talking about it. The men on that ship are not all liars, and everyone should speak up for them when people like Shapiro say they are.
@LaurenWitzkeDE - Lauren Witzke
Young campus conservatives asked Ben Shapiro about the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty. Funny enough, Shapiro asked him what his motivation was for bringing up an "irrelevant" six-decade-old attack. https://t.co/RmZcXmkcTS
Video Transcript AI Summary
In this exchange, Speaker 0 raises the issue of the USS Liberty attack in 1967, arguing that if truth matters, the Israeli government must be held accountable because the American flag was flying on that ship. Speaker 0 presses why, in a discussion of modern Israeli–American relations, Speaker 1 would deem the attack “irrelevant” to current ties.
Speaker 1 responds that when assessing today’s relations, citing the 1967 attack as a basis for judgment is irrelevant—comparable to using evidence from World War II or 1776 to define present-day relations with Britain or Germany. He emphasizes that while the attack was horrible and tragic for those involved, and that Israel paid reparations, the actual naval record indicates the incident was a mistaken and tragic event. He notes that those who reference the USS Liberty often do so to suggest Israel deliberately harmed America, and asks if that is Speaker 0’s broader point.
Speaker 0 reiterates that truth requires accountability from the Israeli government, given the American flag on the ship.
Speaker 1 points to the naval investigations, stating that multiple investigations exist and that the Israeli military at the time was flying Mirage planes and the USS Liberty was operating off-grid. He explains that the Israeli forces mistook the ship for an Egyptian vessel and believed it was shelling Al-Arish, which was not true. He describes the sequence: the American flag was knocked down in the initial attack, the engagement lasted about ninety minutes, and once it became clear the vessel was American, the attack was halted and a ship was dispatched to assist the Liberty. He also notes there have been other unfortunate friendly-fire incidents in war, such as during the Gulf War when US forces killed British troops.
Speaker 0 asks about the broader agenda behind raising the incident, suggesting that it is not limited to that specific event. Speaker 1 acknowledges the question but questions the motive and implies that it is not an appropriate basis for evaluating current U.S.–Israel relations.
Speaker 0 asserts that there are ongoing problems in the relationship, but again emphasizes the six-decade-old incident as relevant to the discussion. Speaker 1 maintains that, in the same way that many histories exist, there are many countries and contexts, and reiterates that the question is not answered satisfactorily. The exchange ends with Speaker 1 indicating this will be the last question.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Cited during your speech truth as the most important tenet of American conservatism. Why therefore did you call irrelevant the Israeli attack in 1967 on the USS Liberty, which left dozens of American servicemen dead and hundreds wounded.
Speaker 1: So what I actually said is that if we're looking at modern Israeli relations, looking at an attack that happened mistakenly by multiple Navy reports, multiple Israeli reports and all available evidence and using that attack in order to undermine today's relations between Israel and America, that's irrelevant. As irrelevant as it would be to cite a piece of evidence from World War two or from 1776 to define America's relations with, for example, Great Britain or Germany today. That does not mean that the attack wasn't horrible for the Americans involved, that it wasn't bloody and terrible. The Israeli government paid reparations to the people who were killed. If you look at the actual military record of what happened on the USS Liberty, it was clearly a mistaken and tragic attack.
The people who frequently cite the USS Liberty, however, are not talking about the specifics of the USS Liberty. I suspect that the vast majority of people who bring this up are doing so in order to suggest that Israel deliberately attacked an American ship because Israel deliberately wants to harm America. It's connected generally with a larger point. I wonder if that's your point.
Speaker 0: If the truth matters, then the Israeli government must be held accountable for that attack. The American flag was flying on that ship. You do not mistake an American ship for a foreign one when our flag is flying. So
Speaker 1: and we can spend the rest of the time talking about the specifics of the US liberty attack or you can actually go look at the naval investigations that were done, multiple naval investigations that were done. The reality is that people were flying mirage planes for the Israeli military at the time. The USS Liberty was sailing in an area where it had essentially gone off grid. The Israeli military mistook it for an Egyptian ship. They thought it was shelling Al Aries, which happened not to be true.
In the initial attack, the American flag was knocked down, and then the attack went on for about ninety minutes. And then as soon you can hear this, by the way, on the tapes of the Israeli pilots talking to each other. As soon as they realize that it's an American ship, they call off the attack. They speed a ship to try and help the USS Liberty. There have been multiple unfortunate friendly fire incidents between allied forces including, for example, in the Gulf War where US forces were responsible for killing about nine British troops during the Gulf War.
It's an unfortunate reality of war, but you're not answering my question, which is what is your broader agenda in asking the question? Because I suspect that your question is not limited to your specific ire over an incident that happened in 1967.
Speaker 0: I think we should question any foreign country's relationship with our government.
Speaker 1: That's totally fine, but I'm just wondering why you serve
Speaker 0: American interests. Again, that I'm
Speaker 1: I'm perfectly fine with questioning any country's relationship with The United States. But, again, I'm wondering what your motivation is in bringing up a six decade old attack as though it is the number one issue in assessing the relationship between Israel and The United States today.
Speaker 0: Well, many problems persist to this day, but it's interesting that you say six decade old incident when there are many people in this audience who are alive for that attack as if this is something that's irrelevant. Well,
Speaker 1: no. It's just not particularly relevant to assessing the relationship between The United States and Israel today in the same way that in 1967, there are a wide variety of countries with which The United States had different relations. Okay. It's clear you're not going to actually answer the question, so I'm happy to move to this one. Unfortunately, this will be the last question.
Posted - October 25, 2025 at 2:54 PM
Saved - October 26, 2025 at 11:09 AM
reSee.it AI Summary
I reject the “motive” dodge about the USS Liberty attack. Survivors’ accounts show Israel and the LBJ admin lied, with deliberate action not ignorance. I point to a track record of false-flag acts by Israel (Baghdad synagogues, Egyptian attacks, Sharon’s later covert bombings) to contextualize. I cite crew testimonies, flag handling, and NSA intercepts as corroboration that officials sought to blame enemies.
@martyrmade - Martyr Made
Once USS Liberty-deniers are backed into a corner and can no longer dispute the events that took place that day, they always fall back on saying, “What was the motive?” Don’t fall for that. The surviving crew members have told a consistent story that shows the Israelis (and LBJ admin) lied, and that there is no plausible way the Israelis were unaware of the identity of the ship. By standards of evidence we accept for any other event, the intentionality of the attack is not likely, it’s proven. So don’t let them weasel out of their corner by making you speculate about parts of the story you can’t prove. What was the motive? I don’t know. I know that 19 years earlier, Zionist terrorists are alleged to have bombed synagogues and Jewish community centers in Baghdad to speed the emigration of Iraqi Jews to Israel. The British embassy and the Iraqi Jewish community believed that, and even the Zionists convicted for it have admitted that their group carried out the attacks (though for a different motive). I know that just 13 years before the Liberty attack, Israeli agents bombed British and American theaters and community centers in Egypt in order to blame it on the Egyptians. Both of those incidents are mainstream history now, and the false flag motive is no longer even disputed by Zionists. I know (from Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman and his on-the-record official sources, that a decade after the Liberty attack, Ariel Sharon, as Minister of Defense, carried out a campaign of covert car bombings, killing hundreds, in Southern Lebanon with the explicit intent of Palestinians, Shi’ites, and Christians blaming each other and sparking a civil war. So I don’t know why the Israelis attacked the Liberty, but the very people in charge of the Israeli government at the time had a now-proven track record of attacking “friendly” targets to blame it on their enemies.
@martyrmade - Martyr Made
Anyone who says this calls the entire crew of the USS Liberty liars. The ship was flying the US flag on a perfectly-clear day. After first Israeli strikes torched it, they raised the oversized holiday flag in its place. This is directly from the mouth of the Signalman who did it himself. It wasn’t a whoopsie-daisy errant missile, like the 1983 Iraqi strike on the USS Stark, it was a sustained attack with missiles, torpedoes, and gunfire, that went on for nearly two hours despite the Liberty never returning fire. Israeli gunboats even got close enough shoot up the lifeboats and strafe US sailors on deck with their .50 caliber machine guns. And of course there are the NSA intercepts, reported independently by several US government officials, including the Ambassador to Lebanon at the time, showing the Israeli pilot explicit told his shoreside commanders that it was an American vessel, after which he was ordered to hit the ship anyway. I don’t know about you, but I’ll take the word of all the people who were there over an X poster regurgitating his marching orders.
@GBNT1952 - Green Beret Nap Time
The USS Liberty was fog of war friendly fire incident that Israel apologized for and the US acknowledged was an accident. The nuke nonsense is made up. So is the selling US tech myth… This is what these people bring, misconstrued history and literal lies. https://t.co/olMoUrsjqm
@martyrmade - Martyr Made
Don’t fall for this one, either.
@traveling_truth - Time Traveling for Truth
@martyrmade I guess you guys are going to go on pretending this food fight over Israel is the most important issue to everyday Americans, huh?
@martyrmade - Martyr Made
@CarlBads69 The best source on that incident is a paper by Texan-Jewish Ph.D candidate Louis Gomolak, but it’s unpublished and you have to go to the Holocaust Museum in DC to read (which, fortunately, I did before I was banned from the place).
@martyrmade - Martyr Made
Maybe, but that doesn’t explain why the US government was complicit in the cover-up. The surviving crew were threatened by Admiral McCain (the Senator’s father and chief of US naval forces in Europe and the Med) with “jail or worse” if they over spoke about it “even to your wives.”
Posted - July 31, 2025 at 3:26 PM
Saved - August 1, 2025 at 1:18 AM
@martyrmade - Martyr Made
Stop whatever you’re doing and listen to this from beginning to end. Lt. Col. Aguilar is going to be attacked and slandered from every angle. He is a hero, and one day everyone will know it, but for now we must stand up for him without reservation.
@TuckerCarlson - Tucker Carlson
Part one of our interview with retired Green Beret Lt. Col. Tony Aguilar, who says he witnessed war crimes in Gaza. Next week, his detailed response to the attacks against him. (0:00) What Is the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation? (8:52) Aguilar Details the Atrocities Taking Place in Gaza (12:03) To What Extent Is the US Involved in the Destruction of Gaza? (14:39) Is Israel Providing Any Aid to the Palestinians? (20:34) What Is the Death Toll in Gaza? (24:31) How Are People in Gaza Getting Food? (29:20) Who Is Johnnie Moore? (32:36) Who Is Funding the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation? (38:10) How Is Aguilar Treated by the IDF? (43:17) How Does the IDF Treat Palestinian Civilians? (46:04) The Killing of Palestinians at Aid Distribution Sites (56:47) The Killing of Amir (1:07:12) The Attempts to Discredit Aguilar (1:13:30) What Should the Trump Administration Do About This?
Video Transcript AI Summary
A retired US Army Lieutenant Colonel ("Miss Dragula"), a combat veteran with multiple deployments, describes his experience working in Gaza for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) from May to June 2024. GHF was established to distribute aid, replacing the UN after aid was cut off to Gaza. He was recruited by UG Solutions, a security subcontractor.
He states that Gaza is "post-apocalyptic" with leveled buildings. He compares the destruction to the "Terminator" movies and says it's worse than anything he saw in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Syria. He claims the majority of the 314 contractors are American combat veterans armed with automatic weapons on tourist visas.
He reports that only four aid distribution sites exist, three co-located with IDF combat units in an active combat zone, which he identifies as a war crime. He claims the northern enclave of Gaza is cut off with no aid. He says the IDF treats Palestinians like animals and that the contractors have dehumanized them. He recounts an incident where a boy he met named Amir was later killed by the IDF. He accuses the IDF of shooting at civilians to control crowds near aid sites. He states that the GHF is not delivering enough aid, leading to starvation, and that the US government should stop funding GHF and support the UN process. He suggests the IDF needs better training and leadership.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Miss Dragula, thank you so much for joining us. Before I ask you any questions, I I want to read what I think is your biography or parts of it because I want the audience to understand who you are. And so I'm gonna read this, and you tell me if I've gotten anything wrong. So you're a retired lieutenant colonel in the United States Army. You went to West Point.
You got your commission in the army straight out of West Point. You served for twenty five years in the US Army as a combat infantry officer in a special forces, a Green Beret officer. You were deployed 12 times to Iraq three times, Afghanistan three times. You were deployed to Syria, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Jordan, The Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. You saw combat in many of those venues.
You're highly decorated. You were wounded in combat, received your Purple Heart. You got a bronze star for valor in combat, an army commendation medal for valor in combat. And then earlier this year, you found yourself working in Gaza under GHF, and I'll ask you to explain what that is in a moment. You were in Gaza from the May 17 through 06/26/2025, which was last month.
Is all of that correct?
Speaker 1: That is correct, sir.
Speaker 0: And and the reason that I wanted to establish that before you tell the story that you're gonna tell us is because very, very few Americans have been in Gaza in the last couple of years. And I don't know any others who have the experience in chaotic situations and combat situations that you have who've been there. And I think that really matters. Anyone who's been around combat knows it's enormously confusing, and having twenty five years of experience around violence, I think, gives you greater credibility because it suggests you can interpret what's happening accurately in a way that people who haven't had that experience probably can't. So with with that, I wanna ask you the first and most obvious question.
What is GHF in Gaza?
Speaker 1: So the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation was established to take over the aid distribution, into into Gaza, replacing the former United Nations aid delivery mechanism post blocking or cutting off of the of the Gaza enclave. So there was no aid going in up until May 26 when we started operations, and the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation was established to lead that effort overall. So the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, I'm not sure in terms of their what their their actual status is in terms of a company, or an NGO, or a nonprofit. I don't I don't know what they're classified as, but I know that their GHF is the overall lead for both of the contract mechanisms in Gaza.
Speaker 0: So after twenty five years as a as a US Army officer, West Point graduate, special forces officer, all these combat deployments, all the decorations that you received, how did you wind up distributing aid in Gaza?
Speaker 1: Well, sir, on May 13, I received a phone call from the UG Solutions. UG Solutions is a subcontract for the security portion of this aid distribution method. They're stationed here in Davidson, North Carolina, where where I live. I retired out of Fort Bragg, and they contacted me, basically looking for, experienced recent recently retired or recently gotten out of the military, experienced combat veteran, special forces operations background. So they contacted me and explained the the mission to me.
Up until that point, till I got that phone call, I was not aware of what UG Solutions or the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation was. So I was I was interested, I listened to what they had to say.
Speaker 0: The reason I'm asking you this is I is I know that after this interview airs, there will be a concerted attempt to discredit you as a man. And I'm certain, having seen this happen many times, that one of the criticisms we levied against you is that you were some sort of political activist with a political axe to grind or an ideological axe to grind. Are you? Because it sounds like from the story you're telling now that you were a retired army officer who received a call because of your combat experience. Is that is that correct?
Speaker 1: Prior to that phone call on the thirteenth of Maycer, and to remind you, I did retire on the January 1. I didn't retire years ago. Retired been through the January 1, and my last day in the army was January. I I was very happy and content. My wife also served a career in the military.
She is a retired career military officer. Between the two of us, we have forty five years of service. Between her and I with my son, we've missed almost every birthday, every anniversary, every Christmas from the time that he was born to the majority of our marriage, and we're still married seventeen years later. So I was very much comfortable and established in my retirement lifestyle. No political aspirations.
No aspirations to go into another line of work. I'm starting school in the fall. That was my aspiration. I enjoyed making breakfast for my family, taking my son to school every morning, boy scout meetings, PTO meetings, watching the Golden Girls in the afternoon with a cup of tea, walking the dog. That was my life and I was very content.
When I got the phone call, I felt that initially because I didn't know much about the situation, when they first called me I said, hey, I'd like to take a day to kind of do my own research and just kind of understand what it's all about. My answer's not no, but my answer's not yes. So I took the day. I took the rest of the day. I believe it was a Wednesday.
And I went through the, you know, I started to read about GHF. Not a lot out there. I started to read about SafeReach Solutions, which is the prime contract. Not a lot out there. I read a little bit about UG Solutions.
UG Solutions had been the contract that sent contractors into Gaza in late January through March to control the Netzerim checkpoint once the ceasefire broke, or the ceasefire started, I should say, for the Palestinians that were allowed to then go back into Gaza City. So they had some credibility. They had it it seemed like not many people had done contracts in Gaza. UGS did. So I figured that this would be an opportunity to link up with with a company that that had the had the experience.
But I was more interested in the mission. I I say this again, and I've said it again, you know, I don't know Johnny Moore, the the director or CEO or whatever the title is of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, but there is something that he said that I do agree with, that there's nothing more Christian than feeding people. Yes. And in terms of the sentiment of doing goodwill, feeding starving people. I served for the majority of my career after being an infantry officer and going to special forces.
The special forces motto, as you see in the picture behind me of First Special Forces Group, is de opresso liber, to free the oppressed. That is our motto. I don't just, I just didn't have that on my uniform. I I I lived that. The civilian population in Gaza, politics aside, political views, religious positions aside, they are being oppressed.
Food, water, education, life, dignity. And I wanted to be a part of going in to to help in some way. So I have no political aspirations. I have no political leanings. I have no desire to to to write a book or or before doing these interviews, I I don't even have social media, and I've never really been out on onto the Internet.
This is all very overwhelming for me. But my my wife was a big factor behind me going on the record. My wife being, again, a retired military officer. We understand a lot of the same values. And she explained to me, she said, you know, no one else can tell this story.
No one else was there. Not only were you there, you were on the sites, and no one else saw it through the eyes of your experience. In the places you've been, in the places you've in the things that you've done, the lens you look at this through is different than than most people have. You need to go on the record. The American people need to know this.
My motivations in this are patriotic. I want to inform the American people, my my fellow citizens of what's going on in Gaza, what our taxpayers' dollars are funding, and what American citizens on the ground are being faced with. America needs to know.
Speaker 0: So tell us what you saw, and and I'm grateful to your wife for her encouragement on that. I think she's absolutely right. The United States is paying for this, and there is almost no information coming out of Gaza. The news media, of course, are are are barred. It's been going on for more than a couple years now.
It'll be three years in October, and I the sense is that there's something profound going on, but, of course, there's there's no way to know what's going on. So what did you see when you arrived? What were your perceptions of Gaza?
Speaker 1: So my initial perceptions of Gaza, just in terms of the the physical aspect is that I would just describe it as as post apocalyptic, something from, you know, the akin to to Terminator two when the when the t one hundreds are walking through the destroyed landscape. It's it's it's human depravity. It's the the oppression of dignity. It's the entire area, like in for example, in the South in Rafa. I saw pictures of Rafa prior to the the current war, and there were nice buildings, there were beach resorts, there were, you know, street lights and neighborhoods, and now it is leveled to the ground.
There is not a building that stands, and the rubble is piled up, and the you know, as you go as you drive through, Rafa to one of our one of our points, secure distribution Site Number 3 was in Rafa, so we would have to drive through the old Southern Rafa corridor to get there, and all of the homes just in in in piles and rubble. And you can see, you know, someone's couch that's hanging from a piece of rebar out out of the Second Floor of a building, or a refrigerator smashed, or family photos that were on the wall that are now, you know, shattered and broken. Like, these lives were just destroyed and taken, and that's that's the that's the the the scene of Gaza. As you on the news, we airdrops were conducted over the last forty eight hours, and journalists were prohibited or encouraged not or encouraged not to take video or pictures of the overhead scenery. Because if the world sees that, I think the world would step back and pause to say to say, what are we doing?
What what have we become?
Speaker 0: You've spent your life in combat zones. That's why I think your testimony is so compelling because you have a frame of reference. You've seen a lot of destruction and a lot of killing in your life for twenty five years. How would you compare what you saw in Gaza to what you've seen in say Afghanistan or Iraq?
Speaker 1: Nothing compares. Nothing I have seen in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Baghdad, in Mosul, Sadr City, all throughout Afghanistan, Syria, the Southern Philippines, some places where there's dense populations. I have never witnessed anything as brutal, destructive, violent, and I would say that that that steps far over our international laws of of of how we persecute wars and how we engage in warfare, we've we've long departed from that standard. And America America is a part of it.
Speaker 0: How how is is it obvious that America is a part of it? I I know that we know academically The United States is is paying for this and and has always paid for it. But do you see American weapons? Do you see American military personnel? I mean, to how how enmeshed in this are we?
Speaker 1: So the the 314 government contractors under UG Solutions, The majority, not not all of them, but in the high eightieth high 80 percentile, are are combat veterans from the military, directly from the military combat veterans like myself. You have a mix of law enforcement. You have a mix of people that had experience in various security backgrounds. Within that military portion, there's a good portion of them that are special operations, Marine Corps, Navy SEALs, Green Berets. So all of the contractors on the ground are Americans.
And the, you know, the interesting part of that is that when we first entered Israel, I was I I kinda had to take a pause, and I was like, are we are you kidding? Like, I we we're we were all we were and are. We are in Israel armed with fully automatic weapons and pistols and shotguns and stun grenades and and machine guns going into Gaza on a tourist visa. We are there on a tourist visa. So if my grandmother wanted to go visit Jerusalem, she would be in Israel under the same status that I was.
Speaker 0: Why is that?
Speaker 1: At first, I didn't understand it. But then I went and I did some research as to why why didn't we do a a b one entry visa as subject matter experts invited by the government or under a different authority? There's there's various entry visa options. And it dawned on me that, oh, well, if you wanna submit for a a form of b one or a different form of the b two under a work visa, one, that's expensive, and two, that takes time. You have to coordinate that ahead of time.
And this mission was thrown together, and there's there's no one within SRS or UG Solutions that will that will that will push back against this because we all know it. It was it was thrown together very hastily, and it was just kind of a mix of throwing so many parts together, trying to get it all to come together that I think things were done to be to be fast. Fast and loose, as I would call it. And, one of those was, hey, go online, Fill out your Israeli visa. Get your e visa, tourist visa, $25, and come on over to Israel.
Speaker 0: You said all of the contractors are American. The Israeli military, the IDF, leveled Gaza. Are there any Israelis helping to feed or take care of, sustain the life of the Palestinians, or is it all Americans who were who were helping?
Speaker 1: So this is what was another aspect that was both interesting and concerning to me that that and I raised this issue early on because, you know, when I when I use the term war crimes, people think that, oh, you're just exaggerating. Well, I'm well versed in the protocols of the Geneva Convention, the protocols of the arms of laws of armed conflict, the protocols of international humanitarian law because I had I had to know those things as an officer leading men in combat. I didn't have the option. Ignorance was not an option. So Right.
I some of the things now I don't have it, you know, memorized, but there's some pretty key elements in it that kinda stand out. Like, the I don't know the every word of the constitution, but I can recite the preamble. So I know what some of them are in terms of, like, what, like, what the don'ts are. One thing that struck me as as concerning is that there are only four secure distribution sites in Gaza under the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Four.
Prior to the blockade and prior to the stopping of UN aid going in, there were 400. So out of the four sites that we have, only four, three of them are co located within 150 to 200 meters from each other, all of them in the far Southwest corner of the enclave near the Egyptian border. It's nowhere near the people that need it. North of the Netzerim Corridor, which bisects Central Gaza from the North, in the North you have Gaza City and Djibaila. That is where the population right now is the most vulnerable, where you have death, starvation, they're isolated.
No aid is going into there, and there's no aid sites there. So prior to us deploying, you know, as a a prudent military planner mindset, you know, I'm not in the army anymore, but I didn't, you know, I I still carry the the skills. Did I a little bit what I would call, operational preparation of the environment. I did my research. Looked at Gaza, figured out the population, where the population centers were, what what people ate, where they, you know, where they primarily lived and what they did.
And I saw that, okay, well the entire northern enclave of Gaza is cut off and isolated, and none of the sites that we've put in are in that area. So who are we providing aid to? So the three sites out of the four that are all the way down in the southern tip of the enclave, all of them are co located or co nearly located with an IDF combat unit. In that area is where the IDF is actively conducting, and this is is not an opinion that anybody can refute. This is a fact.
You can look it up. The IDF is currently conducting Operation Gideon's Chariots. It's an offensive operation. It's not a defensive. It's not a security.
It's not an aid operation. It is an offensive combat operation, and they are conducting that in the South where all three out of the three or four sites are located. We established secure distribution sites to deliver and distribute humanitarian aid, not only co located with Israeli combat units, but located in an active combat zone. I I can't make it clearer to to the leadership there and and to the lawyers that I spoke with at at GHF and UG Solutions that that is a war crime verbatim out of the protocols of the Geneva Convention, which last time I checked, The United States was still a signatory to, and the laws of international laws and law international humanitarian law. Clearly, there's no question about it.
So to say that, well, it's it's okay in this one instance, it's not. It's not okay. So just from immediately being there, I realized that that the planning and the coordination for this operation had either been done by people that had no idea, no concept of planning at that level to take into all the considerations that you have to take in into an environment like this. You can't just go into a mission like this and say, oh, we'll just wing it. You have to consider the legal, the political, the environmental, the cultural, the the the military aspects.
You have to consider every aspect when you go into planning something like this. And it was obvious that that had not been done. So in my mind, I was like, this is either complete ignorance or it's intentional. They were intentionally put here. So I don't know the answer to that.
Someday that's gonna come out when when the truth breaks and and the international community looks and opens this box and starts digging into this nasty problem, the truth will come out. So it's my hope that we didn't do that intentionally because that would not only make us war criminals, that would just make us evil. So but the fact still remains, three of the four distribution sites are in an active combat zone. The fourth site up in Central Gaza near the Nesarim Corridor is co located with an Israeli combat unit, a tank unit, mind you. A Marqaba tank company is located adjacent to the distribution site.
So if someone were to look through the annals of history and see how the United States government participated in the distribution of humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza, and they look at the the maps, and they're looking at everything, they're like, what was going on here? Why why are you distributing humanitarian aid in the middle of a combat zone? It's a question that needs to be asked and needs to be answered, I think.
Speaker 0: Do you have any sense of what the current population of Gaza is? Which is another way of asking, how many people have been killed? How many Palestinians have died in Gaza? Do we know?
Speaker 1: Well, we I don't think anyone has a has a firm number that we can all collectively trust. I know that the the Gaza Health Ministry has a has a number. I mean, I can't I haven't been able to validate or verify that, but I know that, one thing I can tell you for a fact is that people have been killed. I've seen it. It's a fact.
People have been killed. What the current population is now, I know that prior to the blockade, kind of the the last census for Gaza that was taken in, I believe, 02/2018, the population was declared to be around 2.2, 2,210,000. What it is now, I don't know, but I would assume that the population has been greatly decreased. What I do know about the population, outside of the demographics of the size, is that the majority, a far majority of the population, is completely isolated from the Central Southern portion of Gaza, and they are completely isolated in the South or excuse me, in the North, North of the Nasserim Corridor in Gaza City. So that would be if you took everybody in New York and crammed them in to this to Southern Manhattan and said that's the only place you can be out of all New York City.
It's it's a nightmare, and I and I don't know why. Well, you know, to be fair, I do know why it's happening. I don't know why we're accepting it. I don't know why we're a part of it because it's it's a war crime to do that. It is a war crime to intentionally displace the civilian population on the battlefield in combat operations.
What is displacement? Well, moving people from where they live to a place that they don't and not letting them go back. It's in the the Fourth Protocol, the Geneva Convention, and we just turn a blind eye to it. It's happening. I mean, Netanyahu himself has said it.
Yesterday, Gaza Humanitarian Foundation did a press conference where they even introduced it as we are feeding the starving and displaced population of Gaza. Okay. Thank you, Chapin Fey. You just admitted to a war crime. You're displacing the population.
I mean, it's these aren't rules that Tony Aguilar wrote. These are rules that the international community wrote and agreed to, and we're not following them. Now what the IDF does, is that on us per se? At the strategic level, I think it would be as one of our allies, but at the ground level, maybe it's not. But we are definitely complicit in this ongoing operation.
And when the world looks, look at look what's happened in the last couple days, France is gonna recognize them. Canada is gonna recognize them. The United Kingdom is about to recognize them. The reasons why and the politics aside, the fact that they're going to do that is a fact. That is a reality.
So the world is gonna become far, far more interested in what's going on, because I think the world has taken the blinders off to now look, okay. Maybe it's not as bad as the far left says, or it's not as good as the far right says, but something's going on here. Like, something stinks in Mudville. Like, we gotta take a look at this. And when they look at it and they open that box, the IDF, the Israeli government, with hands in the air, they're gonna go, wasn't us.
America helped us do it. It's their money. And then the world's gonna say, what say you America? And right now, we do not have a good answer for that. And if we're gonna bank on, oh, well we didn't know, or we just did what the IDF did, shame on us.
Shame on us. That is not the American way. Those aren't American values. We don't kowtow to somebody else's prop to somebody else's standards. We set the standard.
Speaker 0: Thank you, colonel, for doing this interview. How are people eating in the North? If there's one distribution center in the middle of a combat zone and the majority you say you think the majority or certainly a big chunk of the population is in the North or Central Gaza and Northern Gaza. How are they eating?
Speaker 1: Great question. I don't know.
Speaker 0: Is the Israeli government bringing food in?
Speaker 1: I do know that the the Israel so the Israel within the Israeli government, there's an organization called Kogat. It's at the government ministerial level that includes it's, it would be I would compare it to what, like, USAID was if USAID belonged to the Ministry of Defense or the Department of Defense, like militarized aid type of thing, or militarized humanitarian assistance. That's how I would describe it. But it's an organization called COTAG, c o t a g. It's an acronym.
I can't recall it off the top of my head because I didn't have much interaction with them. But I know that COTAG does coordinate for the IDF. So not the UN escorted by the IDF, not the u IDF escorting us, but escorts humanitarian aid trucks that we provide, GHF trucks. The, is we will we will provide some to the Israelis to to drive into certain areas of the Central corridor. In my time there, I until recently, until, like, just the last couple days when the UN trucks were allowed to to go into the North.
So when you see the trucks on the news that are being swarmed with thousands of people, that's not in the South by the the three distribution sites or or Central Gaza. That's North of the Nasserine Corridor. So those trucks aren't coming in from the Egyptian border going all the way up, and they're getting just attacked all the way. They're going directly into the heart of darkness. They're going through the Erez Crossing, which is the Israeli, Gaza crossing to the north, and they're going directly in with aid to a starving population that hasn't had any food for months.
So what they're eating, what they have been eating, I don't know. And I I think that when with the UN going back in there, and with the international community going back in there, we're gonna find some things that it I it's not gonna be pretty. I mean, I it that reckoning is coming. The people in the northern portion alone I know are facing mass starvation. Now I'm not educated in humanitarian assistance or or world food program in terms of what declares a a technical state of famine.
I know there's like a a certain level of not eating for a certain amount of days within a population that equals famine, so I don't know if I could technically call it a famine because I don't know what those rules are, but I would call it starvation. So when and I'm glad. I'm glad that the president of The United States came out last week or, excuse me, yesterday on Politico and other outlets and said that he acknowledges and recognizes the starvation in Gaza. Thank you, mister president. That is exactly what's going on.
The the narrative of there's no starvation and there's no hunger going on in in Gaza, that is negligent. That is shameful that anybody would say that. I not only is it evident to the world, I I've seen it. So if you don't trust doctors and lawyers and aid workers and and NGOs and Europeans and Westerners and Middle Easterners and all these people all over the world, Asians, everybody that's been in there that has seen this problem set. If you don't believe them, you can believe me.
I'm an American. I was there. I have no agenda in this. I witnessed Palestinian parents, men and mothers and fathers, carrying their dead children in their arms, skeletons. I witnessed that.
I've witnessed people that have come on to the sites that you can see that they are just completely emaciated and starving. That's not fake. So if if the deniers wanna think that we got Stanley Kubrick to go into Gaza and take a bunch of crisis actors and shoot a film on to, you know, to fake this starvation, but it's real and people are dying At this point right now, because we, The United States, the Gaza Humanitarian Fund put up our hand and said we'll do it, the starvation at this point has gotten worse than it was before. Because the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation's process is leading to that starvation because it's not delivering enough aid, not even nearly enough, not even nearly to be to be a fraction of enough. And I've got those numbers quick to talk about if you'd like, but it's shocking when you hear the numbers.
Speaker 0: I would. I I would. And I would be interested at some point to learn a lot more about the Gaza about this foundation, Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
Speaker 1: I would too. I think I think the I think the world like to know more about the foundation.
Speaker 0: The man who runs it, who was a prominent Christian Zionist, I don't think he has a background in aid distribution. He strikes me from reading about him as a political figure. So I'd I'd I'm a little bit confused by this, but it sounds like we all have reason to be alarmed by it. So if you could proceed with those numbers. No.
Speaker 1: You should be alarmed by
Speaker 0: it. Grateful.
Speaker 1: I'd I'd feel safer I'd be safer grading a driving test by Ray Charles than listening to Johnny Moore talk about humanitarian assistance. He has no background in there.
Speaker 0: Have you met Johnny I'm sorry to laugh. Have you met Johnny Moore?
Speaker 1: I have not sat down and had coffee with the man. I saw him when he came to the main control center in Gaza to to visit and then go out on a little, photo op to site one. So they brought him in under, you know, heavily armed security. It's like kind of one of the things when the when the in laws visit, you put out the good towels. So, you know, when Johnny Moore visits, you know, you you you roll out the red carpet.
So, of course, when he gets there, everything's great. Everything's stick and span. But the other what's funny is that it it wasn't stick and span because while he was there and another of the supporters that they brought in, a lieutenant colonel, British Army. I I don't know him. I've never met him, but I've seen some of his interviews on-site.
As he's standing there talking, you can hear machine gun fire in the background. I mean, it it it it's akin to Baghdad Bob in 2003 proclaiming on CNN that there are no Americans in Baghdad as an m one Abrams tank rolls right behind him. There are no there are no Americans in Baghdad. And then Abrams tank come from the third ID comes right behind him. And he looks back and he's like, okay.
There are some Americans in Baghdad. Like, that's like what like, that's like what this is right now. It's like, no one's starving in Gaza. Well, that person looks like they're starving. Okay.
There's there's some people starving in Gaza. It's like, when is America gonna wake up to the to the garbage? This is real. Like, people are dying. So this is like yeah.
The I'd I'd love to know more about the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Not a lot of people can figure anything out. I'd love to. And the thing is is that not revealing your sources, not revealing who you are, not revealing where your income comes from, not revealing who your backers are, not revealing what you do, not providing in your reports, not providing reporter not allowing reporters to go in, not providing, transparent looks at your operation. You know who else does things like that?
North Korea, Russia, China. Are those those the people that we wanna say that we're like? No. America is founded on transparency. Our country was founded on calling out other people's bullcrap.
Calling out other people's, you know, like, hey, that don't look right. Tea tax? Nah. Not paying that. Not gonna put up with that.
America is founded on that, and yet we're just sitting by and letting this happen. And going back you know, so I have not met them.
Speaker 0: Let me just ask. Do you know who is funding the Gazi Humanitarian Foundation? Is it it it's a arm of the state department? It's independent NGO? What do you know where the money comes from?
Speaker 1: I I don't who who is funding it from its base and, like, who has funded it from the beginning and who put the, you know, the the seed money into getting it off the ground? I have no idea, but I do know that many, many, many, many people in the United States government and within the, you know, media outlets have been working for quite a long time to try to figure that out. One indicator for me, you know, it's like when you're looking at a problem, I call it like Occam's razor. When you can't figure out what you're trying to find, but you can see the things that are there, it starts to tell you a picture of what the thing is that you can't see. It's like Yes.
The science of a black of a black hole, right? Like you can't see it, but you can see everything that's happening around it to tell you to tell you what's happening. So I would say in this, okay, we have the Gaza Humanitarian Fund living led by a Christian Zionist who has no experience in humanitarian assistance and humanitarian aid that Switzerland Switzerland would not take GHF's accounts. Switzerland. Switzerland would even open an account for Jeffrey Epstein.
Yeah. And they won't open one for GHF. That's that's telling. Like, that's like, woah. That that don't pass the sniff test.
Furthermore, the number one guy in charge of GHF, Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, Jake Wood, who was a former employee in the beginning of, the early, paramilitary contractor Blackwater days. I don't know if he was necessarily attached directly to Blackwater, but I know he was in that contractor realm. Jake Wood, the very first day we began distribution on twenty six May, cutting of the ribbon, the golden shovel, the shotgun start for the marathon. You know what Jake Wood did? I'm out.
Not gonna be a part of it. The guy in charge of the entire Gaza Humanitarian Foundation on the day we started distribution for this mothership project quit. And he quit, and he stepped down citing reasons of unethical practices, not being prepared to execute this mission properly. And that's exactly what it is. So and then a couple weeks later, Boston Consulting Group, they stepped down because they found out that there was things going on that were that weren't initially, conveyed to them in the contract, so so they left.
So when everyone starts jumping ship, you kinda start to look around like, where's the hole? Like, right now, I feel like The United States, that we're just we're just rearranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic. It snapped. It's going down. And instead of, like, trying to figure out how to get to a lifeboat or trying to figure out how to call for help, we're just we're just rearranging the deck chairs, listening to the band as the as the ship goes down, because we we believe what people like Johnny Moore say.
And it's easily I wouldn't say it's discredit discreditable. I'm not out to discredit anyone. I'm just here to present facts, facts that GHF themselves have proclaimed. So yesterday, when Chapin Fey finished the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation press conference, of which they took no questions, When he finished, he said, we're gonna get back to work delivering twenty twenty six no, 96,000,000 meals to date. We should not be celebrating that.
That is not a mark to congratulate. That's, And here's why. We've been delivering aid from he when he announced that yesterday, we've been delivering aid for sixty five days. Sixty five days. Now you don't have to be Copernicus to figure this out.
96,000,000 divided by 2,210,000.00 divided by three meals a day divided by sixty five days. We have provided food for fifteen days out of sixty five into the enclave. What happened to the other fifty days? So to say that people aren't starving and people aren't hungry, I beg to differ. That that what that breaks out to, imagine you're you're home.
I mean, I I I assume you you you prefer to eat a meal at least once a day, maybe two or three, you know, like the standard breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Most Americans think that is the standard. You know, if you're only eating one meal a day, okay. What if I told you that I'm only eating I'm only eating one meal on Thursday and one meal on Monday? That's all I'm eating.
Would you be like, oh man, that's great. You're you're in a good place. No. You would say like, that's stupid. Why are you you're starving yourself.
You know, it's if if my son went to school and the teacher started to notice that he was losing weight and he was emaciated and they came to my house and they said, mister Aguilar, are you is your son eating? Yeah. Feed him every third day. Bowl of cereal every three days. I'll feed him.
Great. They're gonna be like, you should not be a parent, and we're taking your child away from you. Yes. So the Goddess Humanitarian Foundation should not be doing humanitarian aid, and the United States government should say no and take away the child, which is Palestine, Gaza, and take all that money and support the United Nations process. We've been a part of the United Nations for eighty years this year.
Eighty years, 1945, since The United States was one of the signatories to the creation of the United Nations, and we're giving him the finger. Why? Because of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation that is killing people? That's the math. That those numbers that I just gave you, that's using their number.
So if GHF is gonna start politicizing math, then I think we're in a bad place.
Speaker 0: How were you treated, and how were the other American contractors treated by the IDF and the Israeli government?
Speaker 1: That would be a mixed bag depending on what level you were at. I I clearly remember on on the it was the, May 24, a select few of us, a select few of the leaders were taken to the sites, to the secure distribution sites to kind of get eyes on and kind of get a feel for the for what the sites looked like, kind get an assessment. And I went to one of the towers. This is Site 1. Site 1 is really close to the Mediterranean, right in the corner of Egypt and Gaza and the Med.
And I went up to the Western Tower, and I'm just kind of looking out, look you know, assessing the area, and sitting sitting next to the tower kind of at the base of it outside of the of the bury of the berm, was a group of Israeli soldiers, and, they looked up to me and they say, oh, you are you an American? I was like, yeah. Yeah. They're like, oh, you here for the, for the aid? I was like, yeah.
And they asked me, why are you feeding our enemy? Why why is America coming here to feed our enemy? You're not helping. And I was like, oh, like that's, I don't I don't have an answer for you. Can I get back to you later?
Like, I don't have an like, that's how they see it. So the guys on the ground, the grunts on the ground, the fighters, the IDF guys on the ground, their perception is that that the humanitarian aid going into Gaza is feeding the enemy. At the next level, I
Speaker 0: would the and children? I mean, I understand they they don't want you helping Hamas, the leadership of Hamas. That makes sense. But you're but these are civilians you're feeding. Right?
Women and children and elderly elderly people and
Speaker 1: Women, children, the disabled, the elderly, the needy. Yeah. That's who we're feeding. Or that's I should say that that's who we're not feeding. Who we're supposed to be feeding.
Speaker 0: How are those people the enemy in any war? Those are just the the bystanders. Those are the people who didn't choose the war, who weren't fighting in the war, who were just being hurt by the war.
Speaker 1: And that that comment from this, you know, infantry IDF infantry soldier on the ground, you know, I don't That's a perception. And I think we've also heard the perception from the from the highest levels of the Israeli government that that all of Gaza, all is it's all Hamas. Everybody's Hamas. And the reason that's striking to me, because I feel like someone handed Bibi Netanyahu a list of the violations of the Tajiva Convention, but but like took the took the numbers off of it, and he's just checking them off. Like, displacing the population.
Well, do that. It's like, okay, well that that's a war crime. Firing at the civilians to to control the population. Okay. Well, targeting civilians with lethal ammunition to control the population verbatim is a war crime.
So you got that one. Check. What next? What do got next? We're gonna build the humanitarian distribution sites in the middle of combat zones?
Oh, shit. There's there's protocol three. Got it. You just did that one. What's next?
Oh, how about we, we label the entire society as as Hamas and kill them all. Wow. Bingo. You just got us straight across because now you just made another war crime statement because the Geneva Convention specifically inhibits the classification of an entire population as the enemy based on the actions of a few. Is Hamas all of all of Gaza?
No. No. Of course it's not. Are we treating them like they're all Hamas? Yes.
We are. Another war crime. So when I bring up these points about war crimes, it's not this this, politicized, bombastic, you know, like, oh, you stepped on my foot. That's a war crime. Like, the war crimes are verbatim.
The things that they say, not us, they they say it. We're displacing the population to move them to do combat operations. It's a war crime. I mean, I don't know what to tell you. I mean
Speaker 0: Well, you're a professional army officer of twenty five years, West Point graduate. So, I mean, this is your business in a sense. So, like, there are rules.
Speaker 1: It is.
Speaker 0: Yes. Yes. And so I think you have credibility. You're not, you know, some hippie saying it's a war crime. It's, like, literally a war crime because there is an actual definition, and it sounds like they've
Speaker 1: There is an actual definition. There there's a there's a definition of it. And when people call certain things war crimes that look horrific, I'm like, well, that's that's not. But I understand that that is horrific, but that's not. But there are things that by definition violate the protocols of the Geneva Convention, violate the arms of long the laws of armed conflict.
It's they're black and white. It's like reading a driver's ed manual. Like, stop at a red light. That's that's the law. It's not something you can do sometimes unless you wanna get a ticket.
So it's one of those things to where it's like, there there's a book that tells us these things, that the answers to the test are in this book. Someone should read it.
Speaker 0: Well, they also violate the conscience of any any person watching, and that's that's an affront. So okay. So I've I've asked you I've asked around the story. I just wanted this. You've provided a very, very helpful context.
And, again, thank you for for your time in doing this. So now now to the question. How did the Israeli military, the IDF, treat Palestinian civilians?
Speaker 1: I could describe it as as as nothing more than they treated them like animals. Even the the UG Solutions and the SRS personnel on the ground, what was concerning to me, because I witnessed this in years of Iraq when you get down the road and you start describing people in a certain way, you start to dehumanize them. Even The US contractors on the ground called called them the the zombie horde. We the IDF, and in some cases we, don't recognize these people as human beings. And part of my my, you know, why I wanna talk and come out in this is because I I saw these human beings.
I I was there. I I, you know, I you know, this photo here, this is on-site one. That's a human being. I took this photo. This didn't come from some far left journalist or from the Gaza Health Ministry.
I took that picture. You know, these you know, this here. These are these are the people that we're dehumanizing, that we're killing in mass scale, that we're depriving of food and water, that we are torturing in a way because they're not eating at all. And we're calling them we're calling them all Hamas. That's what we're calling them.
So I've seen it with my own eyes. Not everybody is Hamas, and to be fair, I distribute it at every site through distribution windows morning, afternoon, and evening. Most of the contractors there do one site because they're assigned to that site. Because the nature of my job, I went to all the sites. Not once, not once ever, and I'm pretty keen at looking out for things and staying alive, not once ever did I witness a threat, a hostile act, a weapon, anyone from quote unquote Hamas.
I mean how do you do that? They don't show up with a t shirt that says Hamas. So, you know, there's is Hamas amongst the population? Well, of course they are. But it doesn't mean that that the entire population is Hamas.
So that's the type of discipline and understanding and maturity and and wherewithal of an under of an operation like this that's required to do something like this, and it's not there. It's the Wild West. We treat them like animals with with no dignity.
Speaker 0: You say that you saw and again, I just wanna state for the fifth time, I've met few people with more experience in situations like this. Chaos, foreign country, shooting soldiers, confusion. So, you know, I think you have a lot of experience interpreting what you saw. You said you saw no threat at all. You didn't see Palestinians with weapons.
You didn't feel threatened. You know, it doesn't you know, I'm sure there's a threat there, but you didn't experience it. But you said that there was shooting. Who was shooting at what and why?
Speaker 1: The way, so to walk everyone through kind of how a a distribution site works in terms of, like, how are people being shot at? How does this happen? So early in the morning, the Palestinians because mind you, the the Palestinians, to get to the south, they cannot drive. They have to walk one way from where they live because they have to go through the established military corridors, just one way to get to where they have to get to. They they they have to walk, so they can't just walk straight down to the site.
They have to go west to the coastal corridor, down the coastal corridor, into the Morag Corridor, down to the sites. So they're walking anywhere from eight to 12 kilometers one way. One way to get to the site. So when they queue up in the morning at the intersection of the Morag Corridor and the Coastal Road, and the queuing gets into the to the magnitude of thousands, the IDF hold them there with with tanks in place. When the when the UG Solutions personnel call on the radio to the IDF to say the site is ready, the crowd is released in a massive, massive tidal wave tidal wave of people.
It's dehumanizing and rushing towards the site because they're starving. As they're coming to the site, the IDF shoot at them. Machine guns, mortars, tank rounds, artillery. I have all of this on video. Within a matter of minutes, two minutes, fifteen seconds, hundreds of Palestinians are already on the site.
Like, this is not like, it's so compelling when you see it. And I'm like, because I I watched it, and as I'm watching it and feel and being there and you hear early morning hours, you know, predawn, sunrise over the Mediterranean, thousands of of Palestinians rushing down to the site. And over their heads, you just see tracer bullets flying. Tracers, tank rounds, artillery rounds. And they do that to keep the Palestinians on the right path.
My suggestion from the very beginning was, like, have we tried a sign? Put a put a sign out there? Like, I don't know. Like, put a put a sign in the road that says go this way instead of shooting a Markovah tank round? Like, I think that would be like that would be a great way to to kinda to kinda start.
Nope. Cost too much. We're not gonna do it. Oh, okay. Telling.
That's a telling telling proposition. So as they're coming to the site and they're getting shot at, it's dark. The Israeli forces in the South are reserve conscripts. They're not the IDF that that that the that are in the elite active army unit. They're conscript reservists.
They don't train. They don't get a lot of training. Rarely do they get to shoot their weapons. And they don't have night vision capability. So they're shooting into the dark at thousands of people.
To say that when when when the sun rises and bodies are strewn along the road, and the IDF say, oh, we didn't do that. Really? How did that happen then? Like, you did do that. Like, you did do that.
Oh, Hamas did it. Hamas is nowhere here. There's there's this entire area is a militarized controlled zone. There's no Hamas here. I was like, if Hamas got into here, y'all really aren't doing your job.
Like, there's no Hamas. No one with weapons, dead people strewing along the streets. So when you see on the news at Nasser Hospital when patients get brought in and people then say, oh, that's just Hamas propaganda. No, it's not. It is not Hamas propaganda.
It's real. The shooting, the indiscriminate shooting, when they get onto the site in this mass crowd just imagine if you will, if if it was Black Friday at Walmart, and they cleared out the Walmart. They moved everything out. And in the middle of the Walmart, they just put a box of TVs, and they were free. First in gets them.
And at 09:00, the door crashes open, and everybody's squeezing in through this small door into this area, and you've got you've got two security guards there. On every site, there are 22 armed security guards pulling security. So that's one to 409 ratio. One guard to 409 people ratio. There's there's no way that the the armed security can manage or control that safely.
There's no way. It's impossible. So when they get onto the site, I call I called it the eight minutes of mayhem. Within eight minutes, 25,000 boxes of food are stripped through, taken down, and gone. Eight minutes.
It's one of the most chaotic, deprived, dehumanizing things I've ever seen in my life. And I was I was in Baguz Fogoni when ISIS surrendered talking about dehumanization. That is the worst I've seen in my life. At the end, when there's, a few people left to, pick up the remnants of AIDS, some beans, some rice, the UG Solutions personnel then start clearing the crowd with the the procedures that they've adopted from the IDF where we we throw stun grenades, we spray pepper spray. I saw in a recent video last week of a UG Solutions person that I know.
I know who that person is. Like, know it's real. I know he's there. I know it's a real person. It's not fake.
And he's standing on a berm and they have these new devices where it's about the size of a fire extinguisher, with a with a fog hose on it to just spray tear gas. They have those now. And so now that's the that's the standard operating procedure. And as they get to the gate and the gates are closed, the IDF salute the IDF guards then then shoot at them at their feet over their heads in the air just like the IDF do. And, you know, again, like yesterday when when GHF gave their press conference, they even said that.
Like, mister Aguilar has said that shots have been fired at civilians. We only shoot at their feet over their head in the air. Like, that that's exactly what I'm saying you do. You're you're you're correct. But when you're shooting bullets that come out of an automatic rifle at a crowd of thousands of people and you can't see them because there's berms and there's dust and there's and there's inner visibility lines that you can't see and you're just shooting, you're going to kill somebody.
Period. So the you know, our guys don't shoot at them. They shoot at their feet. They shoot over their head. They shoot into the air.
Okay. Well, shooting at them, targeting innocent unarmed civilians on the battlefield with the purpose of controlling them or controlling the crowd, Again, there you go. Another war crime. So when when we're doing these things, it's we're just egregiously violating international standards, the standards that we that we as Americans expect.
Speaker 0: People were hung at Durenberg for things like this, literally things like this, shooting at prisoners?
Speaker 1: Shooting at prisoners. As a as a case in point, in the United States Army, if I were fighting in in Germany and a squad of German soldiers that was just shooting at me puts down their guns and raises their hands, they just became a prisoner. I have to feed them. I have to give them water. I have to take care of them.
I have to give them safe passage to to captivity or to holding. You can't just shoot them. There are rules in combat. There are rules in conflict, and we must abide by those. Now what I find to be incredibly, incredibly concerning for the American people and for my fellow teammates, my guys on the ground, American citizens, is that GHS position is, well, we're not this isn't a war, and we're not abide we don't have to abide by those rules.
Well, you do. Those rules apply to everybody no matter what. But even more so that you should not have the authority to shoot at anybody. We are there as tourists, as I said in the beginning of the show. Tourists.
We should not be pulling the trigger of that gun unless it is absolutely to protect an imminent threat to our life. And a case in point, from all of the days, and all of the times, and all of the sights, I didn't pull the trigger on my rifle one time. I didn't pull the pistol on my rifle one time. Never even took it out of its holster. Stun grenades, tear gas, didn't use it once.
Because I didn't need I'm not not because I'm some like, you know, soft, you know, anti gun, you know, that I didn't need it. Never one time did I ever need to pull my rifle, shoot my gun, or use means to to stun or hurt a civilian, ever. Not once. And I was at more distributions at more sites, more time than than any single person in the UG Solutions architecture, and not once did I ever need to do that. Ever.
And I think I know something about, you know, when it's time to shoot, you know. Done a lot, so never felt that I had to do that ever once. It's it's immature. It's dangerous. It's a violation of our American values.
That is not how America engages on the world stage. We are the ones that do right. We are the ones that choose the harder right over the easier wrong. We don't do it because the IDF say it's okay to do it, and therefore we can do it. Well, we made that bed, and we are in it.
And that bed is about to get flipped over by the international community. And if we don't if we don't stand up and say something now, like today, tomorrow, if we don't stand up and do something about it, we're going down that road, and it's not a good road to be on.
Speaker 0: I hope you can tell your story on Fox News and on every American media outlet as soon as possible. I hope they will have you. I'm not betting on it, but I hope I hope they will. So let let me ask you about the story that you have told that's a really difficult story, awful story, but about the boy who you were in contact with who was who was killed, shot to death. What what what happened?
Speaker 1: So, you know, this little boy is similar in age to to my son, brown eyes. My son has brown eyes. I see my son's face when I look at him. And this little boy, you know, he's not he's not ISIS. He's not a combatant.
This was on Secure Distribution Site Number 2, the May 28, our second day of doing distribution. I'm on that location. I didn't get this second hand. I didn't see it from afar and then and then assume. I saw it.
I touched it, I felt it. Other people saw it. This young little boy, his name is Amir. I know that because when he walked over from the the crowd of people, he walked toward me. There was two there was two of us standing there, two UG Solutions guards standing in that area, and he was walking towards us.
And we thought maybe he was hurt, or maybe he was asking for some more food because all he had in his arms was a small bag of rice, half a bag of flour, some lentils that he had picked up from the ground. He didn't have much. And we thought maybe he was asking for more food, or maybe he was hurt, and he we back we notioned him over, and he came up, and he extends his right hand at us. And so I, you know, kinda walked up to him and waved him over, and the guy standing next to me, this young boy, grabs, holds his hand, and he kisses it. And then he comes to me and he holds my hand and he kisses it.
In in Arab culture, that is a very significant sign of respect. That's not something that that should be taken lightly or something that should be that that's a big sign of respect. And we were we were taken aback by that. The gentleman that was standing next to me was also a military veteran, combat veteran, so he's been to Afghanistan and Iraq, and he understand he was he was moved by it. He was touched.
I was touched. And as he was standing there, we were both looking at him, and he was very emaciated. He had no shoes on. His pants were tattered. He had a a a kind of a rope or string holding his pants up.
Filthy. Probably hasn't bathed in months. Probably hasn't eaten in days. And oh, by the way, when they walk eight to 12 kilometers to get to these sites, the Gazer Humanitarian Foundation mechanism provides no water. Zero.
Not a single bottle, because it's too expensive. Distributing water weighs so much that it breaks down the the the profit per cost per truck. That's a fact. Because I asked why, and I was given a lesson in it. This is why.
It's too expensive. So we give them no water. All of their food, by the way, requires water to cook it. Rice, lentils, beans, flour, you gotta have water. So what we're giving them, I don't know how they're eating it, but he comes he's standing there, and I and I put my arm on his on his right on on his left shoulder, and I look at him, and I can feel the bones in his shoulder.
I can feel the the the weakness in his arm. I can feel the vulnerability. I can feel the desperation. And I look at him, and I looked and I got down on my knees, or I'm looking at him in the eyes, and then I say to him, I said, people care. America cares.
You're not gonna be forgotten. People in the world care. And he doesn't speak English, and I don't speak Arabic, but the connection we had in looking at each other, he felt like, he felt he felt for the first time in a long time that there was someone that cared. And I got down on a knee, and he came in to his level, and the items he had in his hand, he sets them down on the ground, and he his hands, he raises his hands, and they're small, fragile. You can you can see bones, know, just the bones to the skin, and he places his hands on my face, and he kissed me.
And he said he looked at me in the eyes, and he says, thank you. He said it in English. Thank you. Like, people are starving in Gaza. People are dying in Gaza.
These children that are starving and dying, these these children, you know, they look like everyday Americans. This child is picking up noodles off the ground with his bare hands because there was no food left, so he's picking up noodles to put into his backpack. Amir goes back toward back to the main group, and he goes out the exit. We had a very strict protocol that they come in a certain way, get the aid, and then they go out a certain way. From the way they came in, it takes them back to the way they came in.
The the exit takes them back that same way. So they enter from the Morag Corridor, they go south, they go through the station, they exit, and they go north to the Maragh Corridor. So coming in and going out, they're tied right back into the active combat zone. Site Number 2 particularly is a little bit different than the other sites, because it's in between Site 1 And 2, and there's a IDF combat outpost just off the corner of SDS 2. So there's a berm that lines that road going out.
So if people are leaving the exit, and someone is on the the east side of the berm shooting into the crowd over here, you can't see what's on the other side of that berm because of the the the obscuration, the field of fire. So the IDF are shooting at the crowd that's leaving. As the crowd left and they would hit the Moroc Corridor to go west, the IDF would shoot at them. Shoot at their feet, shoot over their head. We would shoot at them.
Shoot at their feet, shoot over their head, shoot into the air, and the bullets start hitting off the ground. There's video of this. It's on the BBC video. Hitting off the ground, seeing dirt flying up, and I I was still on the site. I was I was below the berm.
It was the second time we had done distribution. So when I heard the gunfire kick off, the automatic machine gun fire, I thought we were under attack. I thought something had happened. So I ran up to the southern berm, and I laid down to take cover. You know, I'm observing, and I'm looking, and I see the shooting keep going on by just the rap and Palestinians dropping on the side of the road.
So Amir didn't make it home. He walked 12 kilometers to get some food, picked up scraps off the ground, because that's all that was left because the the eight minute mayhem took all of the food. And by the time he got there, walking with no shoes, hungry and tired, the only thing left for him was to pick up some remnants off the ground. And when he left, he was he was he was killed by the IDF. Why?
Because they lack discipline, they lack standards, and they lack basic human decency. Now do I think that they intentionally shot him or shot the people they were shooting at? No. But when you use machine guns and tank rounds and mortar rounds to control a crowd? What do you think is going to happen?
And The United States stands by and watches it. In in the press conference that GHF gave last night, will the IDF shoot to control the crowd? We only shoot at the crowd in the air around them or or or at their feet. We don't shoot into them. Unacceptable behavior.
That is not how professionals behave when dealing with a civilian population. You use things like signs. What I thought would be another great, great tool would have been a loudspeaker with a microphone with an interpreter. Because no one there speaks Arabic, and they don't speak English. So when you're dealing with a crowd of eight to 9,000 people, and you're trying to to to communicate with them and I was like, how about before we start shooting, how about we do two things?
One, we provide a loudspeaker with a with a translator. Two, we could put signage. We put signs out there that say go this way, go that way, turn left. They don't know where they're going. They don't live here.
It's a war zone. So the only way I could describe the sites is death traps. And they didn't become death traps. They were designed as death traps. And The United States puts aid, we lure them in.
And when they leave, they get shot at coming, they get shot at going. So the reports you hear from from Nasser Hospital, which is about five kilometers from Site Number 2, Nasser Hospital that you hear all the reports of dead dead civilians coming in to get treated, the doctors have said this is grotesque, doctors have testified that every time GHF does a distribution at Site 12, Or 3, which the road from those goes directly to the Nasser hospital, they get a massive influx of patients to what they call mass casualties, an MCI, mass casualty incident, every time.
Speaker 0: Have you ever heard of any other country do it any I've never heard of anything like this, but I haven't spent twenty five years deployed in war zones. I just want
Speaker 1: I've never seen it.
Speaker 0: You've never seen this anywhere.
Speaker 1: Anywhere to this scale. Now in other countries that I've been in with partnered forces, are there sometimes, you know, an errant or undisciplined, you know, bad apple in the group that you discipline and you correct that behavior? I've seen that. At this scale, to where it's widely accepted, but then to also the fact that the UG solutions contractors also do it under the guise of, well, the IDF do it, so we're fine with doing it. Never, never have I seen an American behave this way.
Never have I seen an army. And I, you know, I've I've seen some pretty, ragtag armies in my day. And never have I seen this level of depravity and just disrespect for human dignity. And it's I mean, the word I keep using because it's the only way I can describe it is because America is giving tax dollars to it. It's un American.
Speaker 0: Now there has you came out and told this story, I think, two days ago or a couple of days ago for the first time in public that I'm aware of, and there was immediate pushback, as there always is, and your integrity was called into question. You're a liar. You're a propagandist, and this boy is not dead. This boy is not dead, is is what they is what they said. Can you address that?
Speaker 1: I I directly communicated to the the lawyer in the GHF press conference that I demanded that he retract that and I gave him the facts, and this is why. The picture that they used, that GHF used and has circulated, the picture they have of a small boy with a contractor with his hands on their on his head juxtaposed to the picture of of me that I took with this voice standing next to me. What's ironic is that the picture they have of the man, of the contractor standing there with his hand on on the boy's head, I took that picture too. It's like they're giving them my it's like they're giving me back my own material as proof to the material. It's it's absurd.
So the picture that I have, this picture with me, myself, and Amir, and everybody on-site, that is Distribution Site Number 2 on the May 29. That picture's been geolocated, metadata checked, it's legit. The picture that they provided to say, oh look, here's a picture of this contractor, two days later with a mirror. Disgusting. Disgusting.
That picture that I took, the guy with his hand on the kid's head, is from Site Number 4 on the June 1. There is no way physically possible that the child could have gotten from Site 2. Sites 1, And 3 are all the way in the South, South of the Morag Corridor. Site Number 4 is all the way in the central at the at the Netzarim Corridor. Nobody can cross between those two areas.
So unless he unless he flew there or beamed him up and he transported there, that wouldn't be him. But number two, you put the pictures right next to each other. Not not kind of like here and here, but right next to each other. It's obvious they're not the same person. They don't have the same hair.
They don't have the same teeth. Their ears are a different size. I ran it through an AI generator, and it said that's not the same person because it's not the same person. So why would killed on the May 29.
Speaker 0: Why would this humanitarian foundation whose funding we know nothing about you worked for them, and you still know nothing about them. I'm sure they're taking US tax dollars. Run by this Well, they are. The facts. They're taking US tax dollars, run by this Christian Zionist kind of preacher maybe.
It's not exactly clear who he is. I looked him up online. He's got all kinds of business ventures that don't you know, I'm not gonna pass judgment, but but he also says he's a preacher. Johnny Moore, this Christian leader, why would a Christian leader try to hide the fact that a child was murdered?
Speaker 1: So here's here's my take on it is that and the other thing is that there's there's humanitarian organizations in in Gaza that are currently from that photo looking for the next of kin, and that will come out soon when they confirm that that he is dead. That has also been put out to the to the Nasser hospital to confirm, you know, that that boy was was brought in on the the when he was if he was brought in. So the truth the truth will come out. The truth always wins. I've known that in my entire life.
The truth always wins. And I know it's the truth, because from the picture they provided on-site four and the picture they provided on-site two, I took those pictures. I was standing there. Like, I took those pictures. So the for the concept to say that, oh, look, here's Amir a couple days later at the same site.
First of all, they said, here's Amir a couple days later at the same site. Well, that's not true, because the picture that they have from a couple days later is from Site number 4. I was there. I took the picture. They're not the same child.
Why the cover up, or why the line? So when they say that I have an agenda, political, whatever it may be, there's absolutely no evidence of that. I've never run for office. I don't own a business. I don't write books.
I don't have some kind of platform. I don't have a podcast. I don't even have social media. I mean, they shut down my my MySpace account last month because they took it down from, you know, from the web, so I don't even have Myspace anymore. So I have nothing like that.
I have no skin in the game of this but to tell the truth. What they have in the game is a lot of money to the tune of tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars. So do they care about a Palestinian life or the the the people know about that life over making hundreds of millions of dollars? Well, the American people can judge that. Who do wanna believe?
A twenty five year veteran who went to West Point where our motto is duty, honor, country. A cadet will not lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate those that do. And I lived that motto and graduated from West Point, and lived that motto in my army career, and I have nothing to gain from any of this whatsoever at all? That I was there and I took the pictures and I witnessed it with my own eyes and it brings me to tears? I'm a 43 year old man, 25 in the years in the army as a green beret.
You think I went to acting school for this? It breaks my heart. So who are you gonna believe? The evangelical Zionist who has billions of dollars to gain by this, by everything being just fine? Or the twenty five year veteran Green Beret who went to West Point who's been who's earned a Purple Heart for this country, who's bled on the battlefield for this country, who's earned Valor awards for for combat valor?
Who are you gonna believe? The guy that sits in Washington DC that's been to Gaza once? Or or his lawyer who's never been to Gaza at all? Or are you gonna believe the guy that was there, that took the pictures, that touched the boy, that saw it with my own eyes? So who are you gonna believe?
That's what I offer.
Speaker 0: Yep. Well, I think most people watching will will make up their minds on that pretty quickly. We're we are gonna attempt to to interview Johnny Moore, and I and I hope he agrees to that interview. So my last question is and I just wanna thank you a third time for taking the time for this conversation.
Speaker 1: I'm thankful for you. I'm thankful for your time and your platform. This is a this is an important story, and this this is not my story. I'm simply the vessel to translate the story of the of the the people in Palestine, human beings. Let's just call them human beings.
Human beings that are being treated with with inhumanity. So I thank you for your time. This is this is great.
Speaker 0: What should the Trump administration, what should the United States government do in response? I I hope that every every decision maker, and I'm gonna do everything I can to make sure this happens, sees your testimony, sees this video, listens to what you just said, and you just experienced firsthand. But how should they respond to it?
Speaker 1: Well, I'd also like the the analysis that I had sent to your your producers on the know, you I created a product for them last night with the comparison of the boy they said was him and him and put them together with the, you know, the map data and everything. So sharing that would also be helpful because I think it's shameful, shameful to make a to make a a political position out of something like that. But it's also in a way kind of telling to where, you know, according to Johnny Moore, every Palestinian looks alike. Not a good look, Johnny.
Speaker 0: No. So Not not what your what our religion says that God knows every hair on your head and that each soul is distinct and created by God. I mean, that's a foundational Christian understanding of of humanity.
Speaker 1: That's a great point. That's a great point.
Speaker 0: For a a self described Christian preacher to say something like that is shocking to me. So
Speaker 1: So your question on what should be done. Great question. Because that's that's the you know, the second part of my effort here is to to take action. I don't I don't just throw up problems. I wanna provide solutions.
And there's been thorough analysis done on this. I've done the analysis, and I've got no I've I've already given it to UG Solutions. I was like, here here's the analysis I've done. You know? Here you go.
So the the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation should cease to exist, and here's why. The existence of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and its creation and existence creates a misnomer, a lie, that this mechanism is working and that the UN is not needed. That's a lie. Regardless of what we call the method, whether it's GHF, whether it's the UN, whether it's Greta Thunberg handing out PBJ sandwiches on the Mediterranean Beach, whatever the method is, it has to be able to feed 2,210,000 people a day, three meals a day, every day, and and bring in water, fuel. Remember, the GHF aid brings no water, no Pampers, no diapers, no fuel, no medicine, no hygiene products, just dried food.
Nothing else. Nothing else. So the method, whatever it is, needs to be a method that can handle the capacity of 500 to five fifty trucks a day every day, that can manage 400 to 500 sites throughout the entirety of Gaza. I mean, imagine if in the state of Florida they said, hey, you want food? You gotta come down to Key West.
Everybody. Like, it's absurd. So, you know, the method that needs to be in place has to be able to service four to 500 sites in Gaza, needs to be able to service 500 to five fifty trucks a day. That's the math. That's the math that's been done.
And they need to be do it every day. And they need to have experts in humanitarian assistance, doctors to understand medical assessments, veterinarians to look at the, you know, the the animals to make sure that we're not spreading rabies, you know, all these things you don't think about. That because I've done it so much when you go to places like that, you're like, oh, yeah. Like, if we if we don't assess the animal population, everybody could die of rabies. We don't want that.
All these things that go into that. Well, the UN provides that. That was the UN model. The UN model was taking in 550 to 600 trucks a day, going to 400 sites with doctors, veterans, nurses, teachers, water, fuel, enough food. That was the mechanism.
So when it first came out that, oh, well the UN method just gives it all to Hamas. Well, Israel themselves, the intelligence apparatus within Israel, the American USAID, the American State Department, other nations in the last day or two have all come out to say there is no evidence that the humanitarian aid was going into the hands of Hamas at any rate that that's considerable to make an impact to the feeding. Now was some of it going into the hands of Hamas? Well, sure. Because Hamas is amongst the population.
I mean, again, how do you who's Hamas? I mean, I know who they are politically, but, like, how do you tell? Like, hey. Are you Hamas? Well, if they don't have their Hamas t shirt on that day, I guess you won't know.
So the mechanism in place now with what's being delivered well, there's a cut going to Hamas. So we're delivering this much aid right now, and there's a cut going to Hamas. Where under the UN mechanism, we can deliver this much aid with that much potentially going to Hamas. It's no comparison. It's no question.
The United States should cease funding the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation now today. Demand accountability on where that money went. Because I can tell you, seeing there and being there and the resources that we spent, I don't know where that 30,000,000 went. It didn't go to Gaza. Somebody better check some bank accounts.
Speaker 0: Yes. Immediately. But but should but it wasn't the Gazi Humanitarian Foundation that shot a mirror. So the question is, why would US tax taxpayers
Speaker 1: Fair point.
Speaker 0: Described the IDF as totally without decency, undisciplined people who committed war crimes on a daily basis. Why would the US government be funding that?
Speaker 1: So here here's here's one thing that I will say that I want to make clear on the record. I have worked with the IDF on numerous occasions in in in my military career, not just in this, in this mission. I also I stand with Israel in condemning the violence of Hamas. Yes. When I got into Israel on May 19, the very next day on the twentieth, I had some time in the evening.
I got a rental car, and I went from Beersheba, that's where I was staying, before we started operations, and I drove to Kibbutz Bieri. Kibbutz Bieri is the kibbutz outside of Gate 96 that Hamas hit first when they came through Gate 96. That's the gate they broke. That's the gate they came through, and they slaughtered and murdered 300 plus 300 people in the kibbutz. Then they went to the Nova Film Festival.
I went to those sites. I went there on purpose because I wanted to feel the gravity of of Israel's position. I wanted to understand with my own eyes, not what I heard on the news, what I saw, but to feel it. And did I feel anger? Yes.
Did I feel disgust? Yes. Did I feel sorrow, sadness, and pain, and vengeance? Yes. But there are rules.
If we lose our humanity in saying that, well, we're just gonna do what Hamas did because they did it so we could do it to them, we've lost. Hamas has already won. We've lost our way. So would I plead to the people of Israel and to the Israeli army? Let's not lose our way.
America and Israel, let's not lose our way. Let's stay the course of what's tried and true and what we've known throughout life, and that's dignity and respect for humans. We all demand that. So the relationship with the IDF I don't characterize all of the IDF that way. The forces that are deployed in the South, the IDF reserve conscripts, need to be better trained and better equipped and have better leadership to be in the situation that they're in now.
Imagine, if you will, if The United States went to war and all of the US Army Rangers and all of the US Army Green Berets and all of the US Army eighty second Airborne was gone and deployed and we needed more people, so we we call up, we call up, the Boy Scout Pack nine zero two and say, get your guns, boys. We we who called them up would be doing them a disservice. Israel has done the IDF a disservice, and they're in a position where they're in way over their heads. So the the behavior that I saw is classic. I've seen this throughout my entire career.
It's a matter of discipline. It's a matter of leadership. And the same thing I say that I've said before, my issues with the GHF down, it's not the men on the ground that are trying to do their best in the situation they're in. Now have some made some bad decisions that have done things that are just completely off the field? Yes, they have.
There's always a bad actor. But it's the leadership. The leadership has failed to provide guidance and resources and education and training. Same with the IDF in Gaza. Their leadership has failed them because they've put them into a situation that is untenable and that you cannot avoid.
You can't avoid the civilian deaths because eight to 9,000 people rushing through your imagine if you're a you're an infantry platoon leader, and you have your patrol base, and you're protecting your platoon, and you're you're defending yourself, and eight to 9,000 people rush through your area. What are you what are you supposed to do? There you you there's not much you can do. And the leadership haven't provided them with any guidance on how to control that situation, just like they didn't provide any guidance to the UG Solutions personnel on how to control that situation. This is a leadership problem that touches all the way down to the tactical level.
Now the IDF should be held accountable for that. Regardless of why it happened, when you shoot at civilians with tanks, mortars, rifles, machine guns, when you purposely displace the population, when you purposely use razor wire, again, razor wire banned by the Geneva Convention for the use of civilian purposes for hospitals, water points, and distribution sites, and that's why we're using razor wire. And at UG Solutions asked for that. When they did, I was like, woah. Woah.
Step back, cowboy. That's not a good idea. That violates Geneva Convention. We can't use razor wire. Well, there's no difference.
And I was like, there there is. There's a difference between barbed wire, concertina wire, and razor wire. And razor wire is specifically condemned to the Geneva Convention to use its civilian sites. Don't use it. IDF gave it to us.
They said it was fine. Okay. So let's just rack up another war crime. So the IDF should be held accountable. These things should be investigated.
The the IDF, I think, they've, you know, they've already kind of alluded to this. I don't know if it's happening or not. You know, they they seriously need to go through their army and have a seriously restructuring of discipline and standards and leadership. I'm not prepared to say that the entire IDF is that way, but from what I saw from an entire division, the four hundred third division Israeli reserve in the South, they they need a serious sit down talk amongst themselves to fix themselves, because it's it's going off the rails.
Speaker 0: Colonel, I I'm grateful. God bless you for for doing this. You don't benefit from it. You will be attacked. I think anyone who watches what you just said can make up his own mind about your credibility and your integrity.
But from my perspective, you are absolutely the best that we send. And and so, again, God bless you. Thank you.
Speaker 1: Thank you. I appreciate the time, and and thank you for all you do.
Posted - July 3, 2025 at 6:06 PM
Saved - July 4, 2025 at 3:02 PM
@martyrmade - Martyr Made
Oh hell yeah. Scott was loaded for bear. Settle in for an education on the history of US relations with the Middle East. Don’t miss this one.
@TuckerCarlson - Tucker Carlson
How did we wind up at war with Iran? Scott Horton explains. (0:00) The History of Why Iran Is Such a Global Focal Point (11:16) The Jimmy Carter Doctrine (22:29) The Brutality of the Iraq/Iran War (29:40) The First Iraq War Was a Massive Mistake (41:32) Bill Clinton’s Fatal Mistake That Drove America Into the Middle East (47:44) The Truth About Osama bin Laden’s Motives (50:08) What You Don’t Know About the 1990s Terror Attacks (1:02:15) The History of the Israel/Iran Relationship (1:09:50) Why Osama bin Laden Was Happy When George Bush Was Elected (1:14:53) Why Is There So Much Persecution of Christians in the World? (1:16:22) Scott Horton’s Partnership With Darryl Cooper (1:24:13) Foreknowledge of 9-11 (1:31:02) The Real Meaning of the Word “Neocon” (1:38:47) Israel’s Clean Break Strategy (1:46:46) The Oil Pipeline Between Iraq and Israel and Why Israel Cut It Off (2:01:50) Barack Obama’s Role in Stoking Foreign Wars (2:10:36) Corporate Media’s Sudden Pivot on Assad (2:14:43) How Obama Paved the Way for Islamic Rule of Syria (2:23:11) The Truth About Iran’s Nuclear Program (2:33:32) How Effective Was Trump’s Bombing Campaign on Iran? (2:43:46) What Happens if There Is Regime Change in Iran? (2:50:18) Is Horton Hopeful for America’s Future? Includes paid partnerships.
Video Transcript AI Summary
Scott Horton discusses the history of US-Iran relations, starting with the 1953 coup against Mosaddegh and the reinstallation of the Shah. This action led to blowback, exemplified by the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Nixon pressured the Shah to buy US weapons, undermining his rule. The US initially tried working with Ayatollah Khomeini, viewing him as reasonable.
In 1979, David Rockefeller influenced Carter to allow the Shah into the US for cancer treatment, triggering the hostage crisis. Carter then announced the Carter Doctrine, asserting US dominance in the Persian Gulf. Brzezinski aimed to provoke Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, later feigning concern about Iran.
The US supported Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq War, even enabling his use of chemical weapons. The US also backed the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, leading to the rise of Al Qaeda. The US then intervened in the Gulf War to reinstate the Kuwaiti King.
Clinton adopted a dual containment policy against Iraq and Iran, further fueling anti-American sentiment. Bin Laden cited US support for Israel and military presence in Saudi Arabia as key grievances. The US supported Al Qaeda in Chechnya and the Balkans, even as they attacked US interests.
The neoconservative movement pushed for war in Iraq, aiming to reshape the region to benefit Israel. The US invasion of Iraq empowered Shiite groups and Iran, contrary to neocon plans. The US then backed Sunni extremists in Syria to counter Iranian influence, leading to the rise of ISIS. Obama then sided with Al Qaeda in Libya.
The US has a history of supporting various factions in the Middle East, often with unintended consequences. The US has been fighting a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.
The US has a long history of interventionism, often driven by foreign interests rather than American interests. The US should normalize relations with Iran.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Scott Horton, thank you. So we appear to be in the middle of a war with Iran. It's on pause, thank heaven, at the moment, but we are in some sort of conflict with Iran. And whatever you think of that, I think it's important to know how we got here, and that is that context is wholly missing from most coverage. I mean, is crazy.
It's little bit like assessing a marriage the day the divorce is filed. Like, you can take a side or not, but there's a story there. And the question is where do you get the story? And Wikipedia is not a reliable narrator. Know it's full of historians.
You're someone I think I consider honest and well informed. You've written a book on it enough already. But most important from my perspective is that if you make a mistake, you will admit it. If you were wrong, you will admit it immediately and apologize. And for me, that's the acid test.
Like, is a person honest? I don't know. Does he admit fault? And you do. So people can assess what they think of the story you're about to tell.
This is not a conversation for everyone. This is a conversation for people who are interested in knowing the backstory, how we got here. And so with that, I will just ask you to start wherever you think the story begins. How did we get into a war with Iran?
Speaker 1: Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me here, Tucker. It's truly an honor to be here with you. The story begins as I think a lot of people know back in 1953 with the coup against Mohammed Mosaddegh, who was the democratically elected prime minister of the country, and the reinstallation of the Shah Reza Pahlavi, who was the monarch and the son of the previous dictator. And there's actually a really great CIA history of that, declassified history of that by a guy named Donald Wilbur, where this is where they coined the phrase blowback. And he says, agents should be aware of the danger of blowback coming down the line when we do projects like this.
And so then in CI This
Speaker 0: is an internal history written by CIA for CIA?
Speaker 1: Right. And later published by James Rison at the New York Times. And so as there's a former CIA analyst named Chalmers Johnson, who turned a great opponent of empire in his later years after the cold war. But he explained he had been a professor at USC and a contract analyst for CIA. And he explained that blowback really meant not just consequences, but it meant the long term consequences of secret foreign policies.
So when they come due, the American public at large is unaware of the true causes and are then left open or susceptible to misleading interpretations Exactly. Of what's happening. So then the Iranian revolution in 1979 is the perfect example of that. If you ask people of that generation who were around then, all they remember is Iranians chanting death to America and burning American flags. Exactly.
These people hate us. I knew a guy I just met a guy one day who explained, well, the Bin Ladenites, they have all these complicated reasons for hating us. But the Iranians, they just hate us because I remember them burning our flag. Yes.
Speaker 0: I do too. Do too. It was infuriating.
Speaker 1: Right. That's setting. But that's the beginning of the story for most people there even if they go back. But that was actually twenty six years after America had installed the dictator to rule over those people. And in fact, when Nixon started getting us out of Vietnam, he realized he needed to bribe the military industrial complex in another way.
And so he started putting pressure on the shah to increase weapons purchases from The United States, which he really couldn't afford and helped to undermine his rule. This is where the Iranians got their f fours and f fourteens from, was from Nixon and Ford during that time. And then there's a famous clip
Speaker 0: His military spending, of course, was in decline as we withdrew from Vietnam.
Speaker 1: Right. And so they needed to keep the big companies on the dole. Right? Keep them happy. And so the the military industrial complex firms.
And so this is one of the ways that they did it, but the shah couldn't really afford it, and it really helped to undermine his rule in the country, which is a very poor country. And he's buying all this first world military equipment on the taxpayer's dime there. And there's a clip of Jimmy Carter toasting the shaw at his birthday and calling him your majesty and saying, the stability of your country is a testament to your people's love for your rule over them. And people can find that on YouTube. And this is just months before the revolution breaks out.
And what had happened with the revolution was that the shah's rule was weakened because he had cancer, and he had to leave the country anyway to try to get cancer treatment. And the revolution was breaking out all over the country, and it was a real popular revolution. And now I remembered this, and I actually remembered it wrong. I thought I remembered Ayatollah walking up the stairs. I couldn't find that footage.
But I did find footage of the Ayatollah on the plane on the way back to Iran from Paris, France.
Speaker 0: Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1: And he's being interviewed by Peter Jennings Yeah. Who's asking him, so how do you feel about your triumphant return to Iran right now and this kind of thing? Well, I remember even as a kid wondering, but aren't the French our friends? And why would they send the Ayatollah back to Iran to inherit this deadly anti American revolution if that wasn't what America wanted? But the answer is that is what America wanted.
The CIA and the State Department had advised Jimmy Carter that we know this guy. Khomeini, he's not so bad. He was part of a Shiite group that we helped to agitate against Mohammed Mosaddegh back in '53. We can work with him. And a state department guy named William Sullivan, I believe he was the ambassador, William Sullivan compared him to Mahatma Gandhi.
And so I
Speaker 0: remember this. And in fact, I remember one of the hostages, a state department guy, a CIA guy, but who spent four forty four days in the embassy when he got out saying, wow, I miscalled that one. Because I think it was a pretty conventional view that the Ayatollah was more reasonable than he turned out to be.
Speaker 1: Well, and the thing is too though, is everybody conflates the whole revolution into one big scene with the especially the hostage crisis is what everyone remembers in their pocket imagination. Right? But the revolution was successful by February 1979. America spent the rest of the year between then and November trying to work with the ayatollah's new government and warning him about threats from Saddam Hussein who had just who was a former CIA asset and who had just taken over Iraq in a bloody coup against his predecessor Al Baqar that same year. And people can find video of that coup, by the way, where Saddam takes over and orders all his enemies taken out back and shot in the middle of the thing.
It's crazy footage. And they were warning the Ayatollah's new regime about threats from Saddam and threats from the USSR and the potential that the Soviet Union would invade Iran throughout that year. But then what happened was that in November, David Rockefeller, who was the chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank and the president of the council on foreign relations, an extremely influential guy, sort of the George Soros of his day, very politically influential billionaire type. He intervened with Carter and asked Carter to let the shah into The United States for cancer treatment. And that was what caused the riot because the signal was sent that at least they interpreted it that to mean America was going to nurse the shah backed health and then reinstall him in power in a counter revolution.
And so that was when and it very well may have been the IRGC and the revolutionary guard corps that that started the riot. They say it was spontaneous student uprising thing. Who knows? But that was when they sacked the embassy and seized the hosages. Obviously, not justifying that, but it's just that was obviously the CIA station in the country is in the embassy.
That was where they had waged the counter revolution of fifty three, the coup d'etat fifty three to reinstall the shaw then. And that was what led to the sacking of the embassy.
Speaker 0: Fascinating.
Speaker 1: Why? So that wasn't till November of seventy nine.
Speaker 0: So from February to November, we were in contact with the Ayatollah, the US government was in What what do we know what David Rockefeller's motive would be?
Speaker 1: I think it's the Shah was his friend and he was dying. And they were he's just like Straightforward. Yeah. I believe I believe that was the whole of it.
Speaker 0: He was in Mexico, I think, before he came to United States.
Speaker 1: And so then that was what touched off the crisis. Then there was operation Eagle Claw where they sent in, you know, primordial JSOC, right, to go, and that was a catastrophe where the they were actually leaving. There are enough planes and helicopters have broken down in the desert where they were gonna turn around and leave. But then on turning around and leaving, one of the helicopters crashed into one of the planes. I'm sorry, forget the number of people who were killed, but a few few guys were killed.
Yes. And it was a total embarrassment and a disaster. So then in reaction to that, Carter came in and in his state of the union address in 1980, he announced the Carter doctrine. This was a big new Brzezinski's doctrine really, that said that now the entire Persian Gulf is an American lake. And we essentially are giving a war guarantee to Iran that we just lost control of.
But saying essentially warning that no power read the USSR better consider rolling into the Persian Gulf and trying to establish dominance there. We'll establish it first. And now let me stop for a second because I really should have talked about Afghanistan at the same time. The Soviets
Speaker 0: Same year.
Speaker 1: The same year, 1979, the Soviets had a problem with their sock puppet dictator, Hapizullah Amin. He was basically no good at at being a dictator and the country was falling apart. And so in July of seventy nine, at Brzezinski's insistence, Carter signed a finding authorizing the CIA to begin support for the mujahideen there. It was not all that much at first, but it was working with the Saudis and the Pakistanis to support the mujahideen in Afghanistan. The Soviets did invade in '79, and I don't actually have any direct causation there that they invaded because of the American intervention, but that is why America was trying to intervene there.
Walter Slocum and Zabinubrzynski had this Slocum was a defense department official, a civilian official. Their idea was Vietnam was so bad for us. This it the word itself wasn't even a country anymore. It was a terrible stupid thing that you shouldn't have done that cost too much money and disrupted the society back home in so many ways. It was a disaster, a quagmire for our society as well as the army there.
So let's not do that anymore. We had the Vietnam syndrome. The American people said we don't wanna do that. Right. So if the American people don't have the appetite to contain communism anymore, what if we bait them into over expansion?
Speaker 0: Now we don't want them
Speaker 1: to roll into West Germany, but the Afghans, they're essentially expendable. If we can get to the Soviets to expand their commitments in Africa and in Latin America, good. Because they can't afford it. We know they can. And this is like part of the overall brinksmanship of that era.
So this policy was started by Jimmy Carter. And when the Soviets did invade, Eric Margulies, who's a great war reporter who was around then, and Andrey Sokharov, who's the Soviet nuclear physicist and dissident, I quote in the book both of them saying they don't think that American intervention is what caused the Soviets to intervene. But doesn't matter because that's still what the Americans were trying to do was in Brzezinski's words, give the Soviets their own Vietnam. And that was July 3. I guess tomorrow will be the anniversary.
07/03/1979 was that finding, and you can find it at scotthorton.org/fairuse. I have the finding there. And and then when they invaded in December, Brzezinski did say this could give the Soviets their own Vietnam. In December, he wrote that in his memo there and said, but, you know, causes challenges for us too, including Soviet threats to invade Iran. So that's where the Carter doctrine comes from is, we're trying to get the Soviets to invade Afghanistan.
Then when they did well, we, Brzezinski, was trying to get them to invade Afghanistan. Then when they did, he said, oh, no. Now they might come to Iran. So now we gotta announce this Carter doctrine in The Gulf to warn the Soviets they better not come. And now this is a recent development to me.
My friend Gareth Porter found great journalist and historian found a document in the state department declassified records, where just two weeks after Carter's speech, Brzezinski admitted in a private meeting with Warren Christopher was there, and they were meeting with the Saudi foreign minister. And Brzezinski admitted that we don't really believe that there's a Soviet threat to Iran. We're basically just saying that. But Interesting.
Speaker 0: So that was Why why was he just saying that?
Speaker 1: To justify the buildup, to justify the assertion of American dominance on the in the
Speaker 0: May may I ask you to go back Yeah. Twenty six years to Mosaddegh. So the convention, to the extent that people follow this, the coup was arranged by Teddy Roosevelt's grandson, Kermit, CIA officer in Tehran. This is the popular understanding. And the motive was Mossadegh's insistence that Iran get a bigger slice of its own oil money.
Speaker 1: That was it. And then Is
Speaker 0: John so that's true?
Speaker 1: Yeah. And then John Foster and Alan Dulles, who are brothers. Alan was the director of central intelligence and John Foster was the secretary of state. They said, see, he's a commie, which he wasn't trying to ally with the Soviet Union, but they were, you know and people always say that he was trying to completely nationalize Iranian oil. I think that's an overstatement.
I really should go back and research that better, but I know a guy who's a great energy reporter who says, really, he was just asking for a greater percentage. They use that as an excuse and see the Americans wanted to edge the British out to take the opportunity to get American dominance over Iranian oil instead of them. And so they use the excuse that, oh, Mosaddegh, he's a pinko if not a red, and so we gotta get rid of him.
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Highly recommended. And was the I mean, do we have any way of knowing how popular or unpopular the shah was during the twenty six years he was in power?
Speaker 1: I know that he had a brutal secret police force that was trained by the Israelis that was in charge of keeping him in power. But, you know, all regimes maintain their power through fear, at least fear of if wasn't us, it would be somebody else who's worse. Right? So I think it's very likely that he had probably support in the big cities and less so out in the countryside.
Speaker 0: Yes.
Speaker 1: Right? If you look at like Iranian election results these days out in the countryside, people are much more religious and much more conservative and tend to reject the kind of modernity that the Shah represented and his absolute rule too. I mean, who in the world is comfortable calling anybody your highness and your majesty and all this stuff? That's so bananas and archaic to me. Insane.
I don't know. Maybe some people really do like that, but
Speaker 0: Many do, the evidence suggests.
Speaker 1: I guess so. But now here's another big part of the Carter doctrine, was given the green light to Saddam Hussein to invade Iran in the spring of nineteen eighty. Now we know this because Robert Perry found the document where Alexander Haig, when he became secretary of state under Ronald Reagan, he went and did a tour of the Middle East and he met with then Prince Fod, later King Fod. And prince Fad told him that, yep, I'm the one who gave the green light to Jimmy Carter on behalf I mean, to Saddam Hussein on behalf of Jimmy Carter to invade Iran. So now, why would Saddam Hussein want to invade Iran?
Well, so everybody picture a map of Iraq here. All the land from Baghdad down to Kuwait and East to Iran is predominantly Shiite Arab territory. They're the 60% supermajority population of Iraq. Saddam Hussein was a Sunni Arab sitting on a secular dictatorship Yes. Run the most and he had Christians and Kurds and others inside his government, but it's essentially monopoly minority Sunni regime.
And then lording it also over the Kurds in the North who are Sunnis, but not Arabs. They're their own ethnicity. And so they were essentially on the outs along with the Shiites. So when the Iranian revolution is successful next door, it's not just a revolution. It's a religious fundamentalist revolution, and the Mullahs and the Ayatollah Khomeini take over the country.
So Saddam Hussein is afraid that his super majority Shiite population are now going to choose their religious sect. And after all, Shiite Islam was born in Iraq and then traveled into Iran from there. He's afraid they're going to Wait.
Speaker 0: Shiite Islam was born in Iraq?
Speaker 1: Yes. This is where the split happened after Mohammed died. Right. There was a split where the Sunnis decided that they would just go by consensus and choose their own ministers and Imams basically were
Speaker 0: Right. And the Shiites went with The Shiites. Son-in-law.
Speaker 1: That's right. The son-in-law.
Speaker 0: That was Iraq that happened in?
Speaker 1: Well, that's where the big battle of Karbala was and all that stuff going back.
Speaker 0: So My ignorance astounds me. It's okay. I know that.
Speaker 1: But but so yeah. And like the main holy site holy sites are in Najaf and Yes. And in, I guess, Eastern Baghdad Yeah. And Samarra.
Speaker 0: Been there, but I didn't get I didn't get the significance.
Speaker 1: So but so Saddam Hussein, minority Sunni, secular Saddam Hussein is afraid that his super majority Shiite population is going to choose their religious sect as Shiites over their national sect as Iraqis and their ethnic sect as Arabs, and they're going to join up with the Shiite revolution and march all the way to Baghdad and overthrow him. So and in fact, some Iraqis, Shiite factions were leaving to go to Iran and to join up with Iran and to try to encourage revolution in Iraq. So he had reason to fear. So what he did was he conscripted all those Shiites and sent them to war instead. He asked Jimmy Carter for permission and support, and Jimmy Carter gave it to him, and he launched the war to try to overthrow the Ayatollah.
Speaker 0: This was right around the time that the Grand Mosque in Mecca was taken over as well.
Speaker 1: That was in '79. Right.
Speaker 0: Right. So there was this sense that, I mean, just to kind of defend everyone involved, I guess, on all sides, there was a sense that there's an Islamic revolution that could spread throughout the Islamic world
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 0: And destabilize every regime with a majority Muslim population. People were scared shitless.
Speaker 1: Yep. And in fact, that same crisis at the mosque in Mecca was part of the reason that the Saudis and the CIA and the Pakistanis were together to take all these kooks and ship them off to Afghanistan to go help the local mujahideen to fight against the Soviet Union. Better they go off and get killed there or do the Lord's work killing godless communists there than have them still in Saudi and in The Middle East in The Gulf causing trouble. Right? All these stories are playing out simultaneously.
Speaker 0: I know that to this day, the takeover of the mosque in Mecca is a is a raw subject in in Saudi.
Speaker 1: Yeah. You could see their reason for fear there. You had a credible enough yeah. Like gain this the popular consent of the people to replace their rule with religious rule, like real religious rule rather than these princelings on top, the Saudi family and Solomon family and all that on top.
Speaker 0: Oh, yeah. Well, it's the seat of the religion, that city. I mean, the yeah. Sorry to interrupt. No.
So interesting. Okay. I just think it's important to think through, like, what were people thinking given the time and place in which they lived. Right.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So yeah. So in other words, Saddam Hussein had real reason to fear I think that's right.
Speaker 0: I'm not, you know, defending Saddam or the CIA or the Ayatollah Khomeini, but I mean, like, they're, like, as we all are, products of the moment. Right.
Speaker 1: And so yeah. Just it's an explanation for what was going on.
Speaker 0: Yes.
Speaker 1: Why he did what he did. That's right. So now America and and Ronald Reagan picks up where Carter left off essentially with all this unbroken and on the Afghan policy on and on Iraq. So in Iraq, they supported him for essentially the entire eight years of the Reagan years. And the war didn't end till '89 in a settlement.
It was and and by the way, you know, Randolph Boren said, war is the health of the state, asterisk, unless you lose. Right? Completely. But otherwise, Saddam Hussein's assault on Iran helped solidify support for the Ayatollah's rule, which was actually quite shaky at that time. But people rallied around the new regime because, hey, we're all Shiite fundamentalists now if that's who is in charge of the government that's defending them.
Same thing happened in Yemen more recently. I know a guy, a reporter in Yemen who told me, well, we're all Houthis now. I mean, which he's not. Right? The Houthis are a sect of Shiites from up in the Sadda Province.
But they're the ones in charge and you're attacking us, so now we're all with them. Same way Americans rallied around w Bush or whatever. Right?
Speaker 0: Routed around Trump when he was shot. Right. Exactly. Elon Musk endorsed him that night. Right.
No. There's a of course, it's a very familiar human psychology, and it's understandable. I don't judge it at
Speaker 1: So that's what that's what saved the Ayatollah's regime, which may have toppled. Right? It was very unchanging.
Speaker 0: So let me ask you that war, the Iran Iraq war, which began at the very, I think at the very, the at the top of the Gulf, the marshy area there, that has reputation as one of the most brutal wars of the century. Is that true?
Speaker 1: Yes. My understanding was, in fact, I don't know if you're familiar with a guy named the war nerd, Gary Brecher. He did a really great essay about the Iran Iraq war. That's the best thing I ever read about it, where he just compares it to World War one, kinda like what you're seeing in Ukraine now, just brutal trench warfare, tank, and artillery. And then to the war nerd, it's all very interesting because there's the navies are involved, and the armies are involved, and the air forces are involved, and there's unconventional weapons.
And and America was America that paid for German chemical weapons that Saddam Hussein that they provided to Saddam Hussein that he used not just mustard gas, but including sarin and tape and nerve gas that they used to target Iranians in the field. We know that. For certain. And we know that they supply them with satellite intelligence to use to target.
Speaker 0: Government made it possible for Saddam to use chemical weapons against the Iranians.
Speaker 1: That's right.
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It's that's so crazy. It's like it's like Fauci's work with the Chinese to develop, you know, a global pandemic. It's like
Speaker 1: You know, I'll tell you what, there's there's a many great footnotes about this, but one real great one is by Shane Harris, who's now at the Washington Post, a very official national security beat reporter, did a big special on this at foreignpolicy.com, the establishment journal who is forgive me. I'm forgetting the name of the essay. It was by Shane Harris in foreign policy back ten years ago or something about where did Saddam get all his chemical weapons.
Speaker 0: But that's just absolutely crazy since chemical weapons were part of a big part of the justification for invading Iraq in 02/2003.
Speaker 1: That's right. Well, we'll get there in just a minute.
Speaker 0: No. But I know, but it's just like, so I have heard that, oh, The US paid for the chemical weapons that Saddam used against the Iranians and the Kurds.
Speaker 1: And they even spun it for him when he used them against the Kurds. They blamed it on Iran. The DIA did a big report blaming it on Iran when Saddam gassed Halabja, which, you know, was in Colin Powell's speech of why we have to attack them. And I was like, back then, y'all covered for him. I mean, Colin Powell was Reagan's national security adviser.
Right? He was in the administration at the time when they blamed that on Iran. So crazy. It is. And and just to
Speaker 0: just to linger for one Yeah. One moment. We know that's true.
Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. There's in fact, at at f f f dot org, the future freedom foundation
Speaker 0: Mhmm.
Speaker 1: There's a article by Jacob Hornberger that I believe is called where did Saddam get his WMD? And he has links to, like, 10 very thorough sources all about this. There's no question about it. They admitted over and over. Post Times, Newsweek, Wall Street Journal, whatever.
Speaker 0: Crazy. And then, you know, twenty years later, we're invading Iraq because he might have chemical weapons.
Speaker 1: Right. And it turned out mentions this? Yeah. And it turned out years later, the only ones that they ever found in the country were from the eighties, Stuff that America had helped them purchase from the Europeans then was the only stuff that anyone ever found. And that was why they covered it up was because this is stuff that Ronald Reagan and George Bush's father had helped supply them.
And so we don't really wanna emphasize that so much when the claim had been that there was an ongoing program to develop this stuff circa early two thousands, which of course couldn't have been further from the truth. But now so the same time that the Iran Iraq horrific bloodbath is going on in the Iran Iraq war, America supporting the mujahideen in Afghanistan, and this included, as we were just talking about, the Arab Afghan army, the international Islamist brigades or Islamic brigades. And these were mostly Arabs, but included Americans and Chechens and Filipinos and people from all over the place went and traveled to Afghanistan to fight, to essentially bolster the Afghan mujahideen in their war against the Soviet Union.
Speaker 0: I knew people in who did that.
Speaker 1: Yes. And when I was a kid, this was an open secret. They made Rambo three about it. In fact, the the hero in Rambo three, Rambo's mentor, colonel Trotman, tells the Soviet KGB interrogator, we already had our Vietnam. Now you're gonna have yours.
That's built into the story. That's why we're helping to do this to them is to break them. And which, by the way, I think worked. Right? I I don't really think it's disputable that the Afghan war was one of the straws that broke The US Without without ours back.
Speaker 0: It was their Vietnam actually in the end. Yep. And and just to bolster what you're saying, in July of nineteen eighty six, I went with my dad to a cocktail reception in the US Senate for these guys, for the Mahajiddin and their American supporters who had gone over there wearing their headgear fighting this. I mean, it was totally out in the open. This was not a secret at all.
Speaker 1: Yep. And so Yep. And then the warlords that America backed their favorite warlords were Gubaldin Hekmatyar and Jalaladin Haqqani. I remember. Two of the worst throat slitting murderous warlords in the country and and ended up becoming America's enemies in our Afghan war later on.
But so this is also the birth of what became Al Qaeda. You had a guy named Abdullah Azam, who was a Palestinian refugee raised in Kuwait, who was the leader of this Islamist group that Bin Laden ended up taking over. And then the other kind of half of Al Qaeda was Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which was led by the blind sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and Ayman al Zawahiri.
Speaker 0: Yes.
Speaker 1: And they had all been, you know, buddies together in Afghanistan. And so then alright. Now let's switch back to the other side of Iran again. So then we get to Iraq war one, desert storm Nineteen ninety. Operation Yellow Ribbon.
Right? So what's going on here is the Iraqis have just fought a war on behalf of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia basically to contain the Iranian revolution. Now Saddam owes them billions in war debts, but he can't pay them because oil's trading at, I think, $12 a barrel. He can't rebuild his country and he can't pay off his war debts, and they're calling in their loans and they're being real hard asses about it. And so he's threatening essentially through body language, he's moving his troops toward the Kuwaiti border and threatening to solve it the hard way.
Now I do not believe that this was on purpose. As I as I explained in the book, the best I can tell this is a lot of left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, too many government departments, too many different people calling shots in different places. There's no real one mind running the government. Right? It's a bunch of different guys and different fiefdoms.
So in this case, CENTCOM and CIA were telling which brand new CENTCOM, which is just being established. We're we're telling the Kuwaitis that you don't have to take that stuff from Saddam Hussein, tell him to go to hell, basically. The state department led by James Baker and not just April Glasby in the meeting on July 25, but also a statement by Margaret Tutwiler and another by
Speaker 0: Debbie Jim Baker's assistant spokeswoman.
Speaker 1: Yes. And then I'm sorry. Forget the other guy's name, but it was it was the ambassador, April Glasby, Margaret Tutwiler, this other guy in testimony before the conquerors had all three essentially given a green light to Saddam Hussein or worse like a flashing yellow light to go ahead and proceed. As Glasby told him, I used to be the ambassador to Kuwait and it was the same thing then. This is not our concern.
Your border dispute with Kuwait is not our concern. She said, we don't wanna see a war here, but he's saying when I'm planning a war, he's planning a role right in there, right, could take Kuwait in a day and he did. And so it seemed like what she was saying was, we won't attack you if you attack. And Stephen Walt wrote at foreignpolicy.com. He has a blog there where he addressed the Glasby memo because we always had the Iraqis version of it.
But then thanks to Manning and Assange, we finally got our hands on the state department's version of the same document. And so Stephen Walt gave a thorough treatment on. Boy, sure looks like a flashing yellow light to me. Now, the same time though, secretary of defense Dick Cheney and deputy secretary of defense for policy, Paul Wolffowitz, were alarmed. And they wanted to warn Saddam Hussein not to do it.
And they made a statement telling him not to do it, but then Pete Williams, who later became the NBC reporter, he was the spokesman for the Pentagon, and he walked back their warning and made it seem like actually maybe you can go ahead. And I don't know if that was deliberate or just incompetence on his part. But then so they tried Cheney and Wolffowitz got George Bush to send a letter, but the letter was too softly worded. So they were like, no. We need to send another letter with a more stern warning so Hussein really gets the message.
But by then, it was too late and the troops rolled across the border. So they really, in essence, like figuratively, in the end, they trapped him into it. They basically encouraged the Kuwaitis to give him the stiff arm. Right? And encouraged him to go ahead and get his revenge and take the northern oil fields.
And then their warnings, actually, when they changed their mind and tried to get him to stop, were not enough to dissuade them. And April Glasby, the American ambassador to Kuwait, told the New York Times, we didn't think he was gonna take the whole country. He was supposed to just take the northern oil fields, but instead he went too far and took the whole country. But then Colin Powell was the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff at the time, and I believe he was the one who chaired the National Security Council meeting where they all decided they're just gonna draw the line at Saudi Arabia. They're not even gonna threaten to attack Iraq over Kuwait.
We don't like it, but we're prepared to accept it. And that held for three days until Margaret Thatcher came to town. And Margaret Thatcher essentially called Bush a wimp and said, don't you go wobbly on me now, Bush. And that became a big scandal because she's a woman and she's calling out his manhood and he had already been called a wimp president. That was like the cover news week, it's a famous Bill Hicks joke.
Cover news week, wimp president. And he had to somehow get over that. So that was when he said, oh, this will not stand and all that. Well, the British had investments in Kuwaiti oil and the Kuwaitis had investments in British debt, but what's that got to do with you and me, Tucker Carlson? I mean, we declared independence from the British empire a long time ago, I heard.
Speaker 0: So
Speaker 1: yeah. But no. And so they went to run this errand essentially for the Brits to reinstall. And I remember, and I was very interested in this. I was ninth grade at the time, very interested in the war.
I don't remember the words his royal highness king Al Jabber being mentioned once on the news that that was what the war was for, to reinstall king Al Jabber to his throne. Right? Like most I don't even remember hearing that name a single time during all that. We just must protect the poor Kuwaitis, and of course, they lied. They pretended that Saddam was lining up his tanks on the Saudi border and was prepared to invade Saudi Arabia, which was a total hoax, never happened.
And the Saint Petersburg, Florida times got Soviet satellite pictures that showed nothing but empty desert out there. And I've known guys who were stationed there said, yeah, they came and tested the board a little bit and left, but there never was mechanized divisions lined up prepared to invade on Riyadh. All they had to do was warn Hussein, you better not go to Riyadh, pal. Are you gonna deal with us? He wasn't ever gonna go.
And then they lied about the atrocities and the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to The United States lied before the congress and said that she was a nurse at the hospital in Kuwait City and saw Iraqi soldiers dump premature babies out of the incubators and leave them on the cold floor to die, she said, and steal their incubators. And George Bush and the PR people repeated this senior that is and the PR people repeated this numerous times as example why we absolutely had to intervene for humanitarian reasons to save the poor Kuwaiti's. Total hoax. She was not a nurse and she wasn't even in the country at the time of the invasion. It was all just a made up lie, but it was good enough to create the moral outrage in the country to get people to support the war.
Now the reason I dwell on this is because mostly people look at Iraq war one as this huge success. It's a hundred hour land war. They we got to showcase all our laser guided munitions flying down chimneys and in windows and all of this, like, brand new space age twenty first century technology. And and it was just short and sweet. We lost less than a 100 guys or less than 200 guys depending on how you count them from various accidents and whatever.
And so it was just known as it was just wonderful at the time. It was operation yellow ribbon. And George Bush senior said, by God, we kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all. We're back, baby. Now we can have wars again.
And and in fact, Brent Scowcroft did say specifically that this was one of the reasons that they wanted to have the war, was to beat Vietnam syndrome, to give the American people a cheap and quick and easy win on the Powell doctrine, in and out, kick their butt, and and get out of there quickly, and call it a victory, and get the American people to mix their patriotism with militarism again like the good old days. And it worked as explicitly one of their goals. And yet there's a huge rub, a big wrinkle in the story, which is the Shiite and Kurdish uprising that took place about six weeks later after the end of the war. Bush senior personally in a radio message over voice of America and air force dropped leaflets over the Shiite army divisions in the south of the country, which America occupied the entire South Of Iraq in the aftermath of the war. And they encouraged all of these Shiites to rise up and overthrow Saddam Hussein.
And they did. They took him up on it. People in your audience, I know you're not a big electronic media guy, but people in your audience may have seen the movie Three Kings with Ice Cube and Marky Mark and George Clooney. And in that movie, the setting it's a gold heist movie, but the setting is they're occupying Southern Iraq in the aftermath of the war. And all around them, the Iraqi army is putting down the Shiite insurrection, crushing the insurrection and killing all these poor people and driving the refugees into Iran.
So that's kind of a touchstone for people if that's probably the best way they would ever remember that such a thing ever happened is that movie popularized it a little bit. But so what happened was they were on their way to Baghdad, but George Bush and his national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, secretary of state Baker, secretary of defense Cheney, they changed their mind. They left the Shiites high and dry, they let Saddam Hussein keep his helicopters and tanks to crush the revolution. Why? It was because remember when I said when the Iranian revolution happened, some of these Iraqi Shiites went to Iran and sided with the Iranians and wanted to import the revolution into Iraq.
And that was why Saddam conscripted them all to fight the war. Right? Because that was what he was afraid of. Well, they started coming back across the border from Iran, namely the Badah Brigade, which was the arm militia of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which was a group of Iraqis tied very closely to the Dawah party who were supported by Iran and had been living in Iran for the last ten years and had fought on Iran's side in the Iran Iraq war. Now they're coming across the border to lead the revolution.
So this is the Bush senior administration. These are all the Reaganites. Right? This is George Ronald Reagan's vice president and all of his men. Dick Cheney was the only new guy.
He had come from the house. All of the rest of them had been Reagan administration officials. So they're all saying to themselves, oh my god. We just spent ten years, nine years, supporting Saddam Hussein's war against Iran to contain the Iranian revolution. Now we're importing it.
We're gonna be the ones to put it in power
Speaker 0: in
Speaker 1: Baghdad. Oops. So they called it off, and they let Saddam Hussein massacre a 100,000 people or so in order to crush that insurrection and stay in power. Oof.
Speaker 0: Well, here's a story you probably haven't heard a lot about. The Chinese mafia is exploiting rural America to create a drug empire. This is not available on cable news. The network's not telling you about this, but it's totally real. Communist affiliated drug gangs destroying parts of The United States, the parts that Washington ignores, to sell drugs, laundering money, and building a black market network inside this country's most beautiful but least served areas.
We've got a brand new documentary on this. It's called High Crimes, The Chinese Mafia Takeover of Rural America. It's available now on tuckercarlson.com. It's excellent. The purchase of churches and schools to aid the operation, the jerry rigging of power boxes to steal electricity, foreign pesticides, collusion with the Mexican cartels.
It's it's unbelievable. By the way, one of the drug houses is like walking distance from my house. I didn't know that. It's a layered and fascinating story. Head to tuckercarlson.com to watch now.
We think you'll love it.
Speaker 1: That then became the excuse of why we have to stay at our new basis in Saudi Arabia because we have to contain Saddam Hussein. The pretension was that, what, he's gonna murder every last Shiite in the country until they're all dead? No. I mean, the insurrection was over, but the pretension was we have to protect the Shiites by and the Kurds in the North by having these no fly zones and by maintaining the blockade against Iraq. And so that be that was the principal excuse for the Bush administration to stay.
Now the Clinton administration comes in and by the way, if I ever say anything that sounds like I'm saying anything positive about a president in this, it's probably a misunderstanding. I've convinced Bill Clinton and George w Bush both, for example, are the worst presidents we've ever had, and personally, I despise them. So I don't don't anyone take me wrong like I'm saying anything nice about the guy who burned all the branches of idioms, babies to death. Noted. So but Bill Clinton, idiotically, had said, maybe we can get along with Iraq and bring them back in from the cold.
I forgot his exact words, poor paraphrase. But he had indicated maybe we can normalize relations with Iraq. Well, that set a few different groups into a panic, namely the Kuwaitis. And I'm sure you're familiar with the allegations, at least, that Saddam Hussein tried to kill George h w Bush with a truck bomb attack in Kuwait in 1993. Well, that was a damn lie, and it was invented by the father of the girl who told the Kuwait the incubator's hoax.
It was the same guy whose daughter did that, was the same guy who invented the assassination of Bush senior hoax, which almost everybody still believes. They've never heard it contradicted. But in fact, Seymour Hirsch wrote a piece in the New Yorker completely debunking it before the end of the year called case not closed. And it's about how it was just a whiskey smuggling ring, and they just embellished it into this murder plot against Bush senior, which is never any such thing. It's probably part of the reason that we had the war of o three was that w Bush believed that that story was true.
And I think probably, know, to this day, almost everybody seems to still believe that, but it wasn't true. But it was it was on the occasion of that hoax that Bill Clinton went ahead and gave in to his new foreign policy aid, a guy named Martin Indick, who had been Yitzhak Shamir's guy, who was the former terrorist and Laguud party prime minister of Israel, who Bush senior had tangled with.
Speaker 0: And I don't think Martin Indick was Americanized. I remember he was Australian.
Speaker 1: Right. An Australian and then had lived in Israel and was an adviser to the lagoon.
Speaker 0: So what is he doing in our government?
Speaker 1: Good question. So he he's also the founder of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which you'll see their guys quoted all the time as just bland middle of the road experts on everything Middle East, when it was literally founded by a Likud guy as a spin off of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee who put up the money for it. It was and that's not true of all neocon think tanks. It is the case with WINNEP. There's a direct spin off of APAC, and it was at WINNEP where Indick went and gave his speech inaugurating what was called the dual containment policy.
And that dual containment policy was born in Israel. And the idea was where Bill Clinton is saying, hey, maybe we can normalize with Iraq, maybe we can normalize with Iran. In fact, this is a good place to mention that Svenia Brzezinski who had all this egg on his face from the Iranian revolution. Now it's 1993, and he's saying we ought to try to get along with Iran. We ought to bring them in from the cold, and we could build an oil pipeline from Azerbaijan through Iran and to the Persian Gulf as a way that we can make money together and begin to warm up relations.
And so instead of having a cold war against Iraq and Iran, we can go ahead and normalize relations with both. And in fact, Alexander Haig, who had been Reagan's secretary of state, as previously mentioned, found the green light memo there, or wrote the green light memo that Robert Perry found. He also agreed with Brzezinski. And this is first year of Bill Clinton. And now we can normal begin to normalize relations with Iran.
We ought to build oil pipelines across Iran, and we have those interests in common. You might even remember Dick Cheney caused a minor stir. He was the chairman of Halliburton, and in 1997 and '98, he gave repeated statements condemning Bill Clinton sanctions and saying we should get along with Iran. And because after all, God didn't see fit to only put oil under the ground of countries with western democracies, but we have to do business with them anyway and we can. Who's afraid of the Ayatollah anyway?
We're The USA. Right? We can mess with us. That's what Dick Cheney said and it caused a little scandal because he said it in Australia in 1998. He he said it numerous times, but in '98, he said it in Australia, and that's a big sin to criticize your country from foreign soil.
Right? So it was like a little bit of a scandal. But what was he saying? He was saying we can be reasonable and deal with these guys. But but anyway, in the early nineties, this was a position of Brzezinski and Haig and others that now we can try to get along.
But it was the Israelis who said no. They vetoed it and insisted on this dual containment policy. Iraq, because we just beat them up so bad in Iraq war one, they're too weak to balance against Iran. So America has to stay in Saudi to balance against them both. This then, Tucker, is a main reason why the Arab Afghan mujahideen that we had built up to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan then turned against The United States.
Bin Laden wanted to use his men to repel Iraqis from Kuwait and to protect the Saudi Kingdom and was outraged that the king gave in and let a bunch of white Christian forces from across the ocean come and defend Saudi instead. And then not only that, but they broke their promise. It's so funny. Bill Crystal one time interviewed Dick Cheney for two hour Bill Crystal has a podcast. Interviewed him for, like, two hours, and they talked about everything under the sun except a rap word too.
They just didn't mention it at all. But
Speaker 0: but Is that is that true?
Speaker 1: It's true. It's so funny. It's Can't
Speaker 0: believe you listen to the whole
Speaker 1: Bill Crystal. Well, you can watch it on double speed. You know? I debated Bill Crystal once if you haven't seen that. It's a lot of fun.
But Cheney tells Kristol that it was him, not Baker. Secretary of defense Cheney promised the king, as soon as the war is over, we'll leave. And it was on that condition that he allowed America to come to defend the Saudi Kingdom in Iraq war one in the first place. Then as soon as it was over, they found this reason to stay. We gotta protect the Shiites, and then later under Bill Clinton, you know, adopting the same policy, the sanctions stay until Saddam is gone.
And instead of normalizing relations with Iraq and Iran, we're now gonna keep cold war against them both through the end of the century. And again, this is what really was responsible for turning Al Qaeda against The United States.
Speaker 0: Well, I mean, Osama bin Laden said that in his now suppressed letter. By the way, reading what someone you despise rights is not an endorsement of that person. Right. Of course, but it's essential. Mean
Speaker 1: And that letter, by the way, that was only written in 02/2002, and there's crucial information in there. But more important to me would be his declarations of war from 1996 and 1998
Speaker 0: Well, actually can
Speaker 1: be a real time.
Speaker 0: There's another letter that was found by a Wall Street Journal reporter on Osama's laptop in Oh, yeah. The heart.
Speaker 1: Uh-huh. That's in there.
Speaker 0: It's an amazing amazingly interesting document. And he's like, I'm watching this on TV, I guess I did this, and here's why I did it. And American sport for Israel is the number one reason, obviously. But also on the list is you've got bases in Saudi, which is where Mecca and Medina are. Like, what are you doing?
Speaker 1: Right. And it's by the way, for people interested in this, can read all about it. Guy's name is Alan Cullison. It's the Wall Street Journal reporter, and he wrote a huge write up about this in the Atlantic, which I quoted my previous book is called fool's errand. All about Afghanistan.
Story. The guy
Speaker 0: Yeah. Like, loses his laptop charger.
Speaker 1: And it's a letter to Mullah Omar is what it is. And what he's yeah. And so what he's saying is, listen, I know I got you in a lot of trouble here. Okay? But bear with me because either we're gonna whoop them good and they're gonna turn and flee, in which case they'll be humiliated and their power will be destroyed, or we'll bog them down and we'll plead them to bankruptcy over ten years the same way we did the Soviet Union, and then they'll leave, in which case they'll be humiliated and their power weakened.
And so that's the that's the game we're playing. So sorry for getting the end of this, but that's why I did it. Please
Speaker 0: don't You
Speaker 1: know, it would
Speaker 0: have been nice to have a conversation about that, again, not as an endorsement of Osama bin Laden or the atrocities of nineeleven, but just because it's important to know what your adversaries are thinking. And I try to bring this up in 2002 when the journal finally printed it, I think it was a year lag. The FBI grabbed the laptop, the reporter had a copy on a thumb drive, if I'm recalling this right. It finally comes out and I read it on the air, and just because, hey, this is interesting. I was at CNN, and boy, man, they called me a Nazi, you know?
What? I'm pretty anti Nazi just for the record. But I just thought that was, like, totally suppressed. Yeah. But that turned out to be prescient because it did bankrupt us actually.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And so now let's go back to the beginning of the terror wars here in the nineties. So we have well, first of all, let's just go through the list of the attacks. They started attacks in 1990. They killed rabbi Kahane in New York City in an assassination.
It was a guy named Noser, I believe was the hitman, but this was Egyptian Islamic Jihad, essentially the blind sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman's guys. So proto Al Qaeda, like half of what became Al Qaeda later.
Speaker 0: So they and we know that they did Oh, yeah. Al Qaeda, the precursor to Al Qaeda murdered Khan.
Speaker 1: Right. Now he was a a radical rabbi who advocated the entire expulsion of the entire Arab population just so people know who he was. That was their motive. He he was his party, the Koch party had been banned by the Israeli Supreme Court for being, quote, fascist.
Speaker 0: Yes. Were genocidal. Openly genocidal. But she can't assassinate people.
Speaker 1: No. No. Yeah.
Speaker 0: Of course. Soil.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Mean So that that was what happened. Then the same essentially group Did yeah.
Speaker 0: Yeah. Did people I mean, I remember when he was murdered Mhmm. Outside his speech, I think, in New York City. Was it widely known at the time that that that it was this these radical Muslims just did it?
Speaker 1: So I'd have to go back, but my understanding is essentially the FBI did a terrible job on all these domestic terrorism cases in the nineteen nineties where essentially they had enough information. I forget if they had enough information to stop that one or just from their investigation of that, they should have known enough to wrap all these guys up and prevent the World Trade Center bombing of nineteen ninety three and any of the rest of this stuff. But because each time they were trying to cover up what a bad job they'd done last time, they failed to pursue the leads to prevent the next one. And there's a book called a thousand years for revenge by a journalist named Peter Lance, where he really goes through the FBI's failings all through the nineties as tracing these these terrorists inside, especially in New York City during that time. And so then they're attacking us here and overseas all during that time.
So they hit us in 1992 at the Radisson Hotel in Aden, Yemen. Then in '93 was the first World Trade Center attack, which, you know, context is important here. Bill Clinton had only been the president for a month and a week, and then two days later, the ATF attacked the branch of Indians. So all attention went to Waco and away from the World Trade Center. Six people had died, which was tragic, but it was over essentially.
And it was a bunch of complicated Arab names and stuff and just the news wasn't particularly interested in it, and it did not really capture the attention of the country the way it could have and should have if they hadn't had launched their horrible siege of the branch of Indians just two days later. So it I mean, what would they do? They they set off a truck bomb in the basement of one tower. They're trying to topple it over into the other tower and knock them both over. They coulda it's like four in the afternoon.
They coulda killed twenty, thirty thousand people or something.
Speaker 0: At least.
Speaker 1: And so instead of letting that take a hold of their imagination, they're like, oh my god, we just barely missed that by the skin of our teeth, and we better figure out what to do about this. They essentially blew it off like everybody else did and did, you know, assign the FBI to it, but on a basically low lower level than than should have been their absolute top priority at that time. New York FBI was more interested in John Gotti and whatever other stuff they were doing then. Absurd. Absurd.
And then there was the guy and I don't know if this guy was directly tied to the Bin Laden nights or not, but he shot up the left turn lanes at CIA headquarters in 1993.
Speaker 0: We'll never forget.
Speaker 1: And and he was later it was the the headline, actually, footnote in fool's errand is prosecutors say it was revenge for support for Israel and bases in Saudi Arabia or the or the bombing of Iraq. Same thing. He was a Pakistani. Yeah. And then in '95, they attacked and killed Americans training the Saudi National Guard and and also was the Bojinka plot was busted in The Philippines.
So in the first World Trade Center bombing, the FBI could have stopped it. They had a walk in informant named Ahmad Salem, who was an Egyptian army intelligence officer, and he had volunteered to make the bomb. So he was gonna make a fake bomb, and it was gonna be a great sting. And the agents working the case, Nancy Floyd and John Anticeff were doing their jobs, but their boss Carson Bun Dunbar was his name, wouldn't do his job and provide them with the authority that they needed and the money that they needed to keep their informant working. And he was insisting the guy wear a wire, and he's like, look, I'm sleeping in my pajamas on the floor of the mosque with these guys.
I'm not wearing a wire, you know. So he ended up bugging out and telling the bad guys, look, I think the FBI is onto me and left. Well, then they brought in Ramzi Youssef who cooked the real truck bomb that almost succeeded in topping one tower over into the other. He then wrote letters to all the New York papers saying it was all revenge for American bases and bombing bases in Saudi to bomb Iraq and support for Israel. And then he got on a plane to The Philippines and got out of got out of town.
They didn't know where he went. And then in '95, Philippine police busted him because two of his buddies, Wale Khan, Amin Shah, and Abdul Hakim Marad, they had started a fire at their apartment. They're messing with explosives and they got busted. And Youssef got away, but the other two got caught and they got Youssef's laptop. And on the laptop was what's now commonly referred to as the Bojinka plot, which include a plan to kill Bill Clinton and the pope when they visited The Philippines, a plan to time bomb 12 airliners over the Pacific with Casio watch time bombs, and then the planes operation.
A plan to hijack 10 planes and crash them into major landmarks in The United States. And then at the end, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, I guess was supposed to get on the microphone and demand an end to the Israeli occupation, supposed to be the plan there. So and they got busted on all this, and Youssef fled to Pakistan where he was later caught he's now doing life in Florence, Colorado. But so that was that was another huge one. Then '96, they did the Kobar Towers Yeah.
In Saudi. Now this is 19 American airmen were killed. And to this day, including my debate with Mark Dubowitz last week on the Lex Friedman podcast, they blame Iranian backed Saudi Hezbollah for doing that attack, which makes no sense. The Iranians had no motive to do it whatsoever. You notice Bill Clinton didn't bomb Tehran over it or anything like that, And we know who did it.
It was Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi bin Ramzi bin al Sheeves no. Pardon me. Ramzi Youssef's uncle, his Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. They were the ones who did it, and we know that from the chief of the CIA's Bin Laden unit, Michael Scheuer, has told me that personally. Plus Osama Bin Laden himself took credit for it to the British journalist, Abdelbari Atwan, in his book, the secret history of Al Qaeda and in articles that he wrote for the Guardian.
You can read all about that. And said, yeah, these are our guys and they're our heroes and our martyrs and whatever, and took total credit for it. Well, what was the target? The target was American airmen. It was 19 American airmen who were stationed there to bomb Iraq.
And you might remember, I remember at the time because I used to love listening to the g Gordon Liddy show that the biggest scandal about it was a lady had yelled at Bill Clinton at a campaign rally, you suck, because he hadn't provided good enough security for these guys. They're sleeping in the towers. They ought to have guys with belt fed machine guns out front to prevent a truck from creeping up on them like that. We'd had the same kind of attack in Beirut in 1983, and so how could this happen? Right?
So the lady yelled, you suck at Bill Clinton, and he had the secret service arrest her and hold her for two days. And that was the only scandal. The scandal wasn't why would a bunch of right wing religious kooks in Saudi Arabia blow up our airmen? Is it because they're bombing Iraqis from bases where their white Christian combat forces don't really belong at all in the land of not just their country, but their holy land, the birthplace of their religion where Mecca and Medina, where Mohammed is from and founded the religion of Islam. And so, boy, are we pushing our luck here or what?
And we didn't have that conversation because they blamed it on Iran. And and they're lying their asses off to do so.
Speaker 0: Why did they blame it on Iran?
Speaker 1: Because that was what the Saudi kingdom wanted, basically. I don't know if there was much well, Mark Dubowitz sure likes that version of the story, so it could be that the Israel lobby had their own interest in pushing that part of the story. But But the Saudis wanted that. The Saudis wanted to, yeah, deflect blame from Bin Laden. And there's a a documentary about John O'Neill, who had been the head of the counterterrorism unit for the FBI in New York, and it's called the man who knew.
It was on PBS frontline. I think frontline, but it was the man who
Speaker 0: who was killed.
Speaker 1: He he died on September 11. And there's a story about he told Louis Free, who was at that time the head of the FBI on a that they had both been to Saudi to investigate. And Louis Free was buying the story that Iran did it. And John O'Neill told him, come on, boss. The Saudis, they're just blowing smoke up your ass.
And then according to the story, Louis Free got very offended that John O'Neill had dared to use the a word in front of him. And so, like, put him in the doghouse and refused to listen to him after that and went along with the story essentially. So it it really helped to to blunt an important lesson that the American populace and even the Clinton administration itself might have learned, which is, you know, we could have Tom Cruise just bomb Iraq from aircraft carriers in The Gulf. Do we have to have combat forces stationed on Saudi soil? Really?
You know? And that conversation was not had. Then they hit the Africa embassies in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, Nairobi, Kenya in '98, in the summer ninety eight. And then there was in February, there was an attempted attack on the USS, the Sullivans, but the dinghy sank. And then they did get lucky oh, I'm sorry.
I skipped at the end of ninety nine. They an alert border patrol officer busted a bin Ladenite at the border of Washington state in British Columbia, and he had explosives and a map to LAX and a book of bin Laden sayings or whatever in his trunk and got caught. So that was one thwarted. Then 2000 was the failed attack on the Sullivans, and then the successful attack on the USS Cole.
Speaker 0: And So one thing that every terror attack that you've listed has in common is they were all perpetrated by Sunnis by Sunnis, by Sunni radicals, not by Iranians or Iranian backed proxies.
Speaker 1: Right. And see what's interesting here is well, a couple of things. So first of all so that was first of all. Those are the attacks. Second of all, their real motive, as they said over and over again, was they thought America was already at war with them by hosting the bases in Saudi Arabia, by bombing Iraq from them, by supporting all the Arab dictators the region, particularly king of Saudi and the el presidente of Egypt, Mubarak, and support for Israel and their merciless persecution of the Palestinians and the Lebanese.
And so as Michael Scheuer, the former chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit put it, the Ayatollah spent the eighties railing against American culture and nobody really cared. There's plenty to complain about American libertine culture if you're a conservative Islamist somewhere. But is that enough to get suicide bombers to do kamikaze attacks? Forget it. Right?
Bin Laden, on the other hand, pointed at these concrete American foreign policies and the way that they negatively affected Muslims as his recruitment shtick, and it worked. So for one very important example, Muhammad Ata and Ramzi bin Alsheb, who bin Alsheb is still in Guantanamo to this day, but Muhammad Ata was the lead hijacker on September 11. They were studying they were Egyptian engineering students studying in Hamburg, Germany. And when Shimon Peres launched Operation Grapes of Wrath in 1996, they decided to fill out their last will and testament as like a symbol that they're joining the army to fight against The United States.
Speaker 0: And what was operation grapes of wrath?
Speaker 1: This was in the invasion of Southern Lebanon, which actually I left this out. I guess I should skip back here. Forgive me. When the Clintonites came into power, I did yeah. This this belongs here.
I I it belonged earlier maybe, but whatever. After the Iranian revolution, the Israeli stayed friends with Iran. And you might remember during Iran Contra when the Reaganites skipped
Speaker 0: With the Ayatollah in charge?
Speaker 1: With the Ayatollah in charge. The mean old Ayatollah with the dark circles around his eyes.
Speaker 0: That one. Yeah. He was on every dartboard in my neighborhood. Yeah. Bet.
In 1980. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So but the Israeli state friends with so you might remember during Iran Contra when the Reaganites sold missiles to Iran when they switched sides in the war temporarily in the Iran Iraq war. They used the Israelis as cutouts to do it. You give them your tow missiles, and we'll give you more to repay you, basically. And they had this relationship that they maintained through the '19 early nineteen nineties. And it was in 1993 that Yitzhak Rabin decided to turn Israeli foreign policy upside down.
They had what had been called the strategy of the periphery, which meant they wanted to focus on their alliance with Turkey in the North to divide Syria's attention. They wanted to back Iran in their East to divide Iraq's attention. They wanted to support Ethiopia in their South to divide Egypt's attention. Does that make sense? But then Rabin said, no.
We're gonna turn this around now. And what we're gonna do is we wanna negotiate with the Palestinians, with Arafat, and create not a real Palestinian state, but sort of a pseudo Palestinian state. Best thing that they had on offer, you know, going for sure. And in doing so, then we'll put aside the last major issue. We can negotiate with the closer Arab states.
They already had their peace treaty with Egypt, but they can now make their peace deal with Jordan, which they did complete in 1994, and and negotiate with the the Gulf states as well. But part of that being negotiate with the Palestinians, because the Gulf states, especially, had always promised they would never normalize relations with Israel until the Palestinians either got an independent state or citizenship in a single state. And so what Rabin wanted to do then was he decided to begin to demonize the Iranians as like just politics, right, to keep the right off his back while he's negotiating with Arafat, he's gonna say, yeah, but look at those bad guys over there, essentially, and demonize Iranians as part of that policy. So it's Israel that turned on Iran first and for no particular thing that Iran had done to them. They had kept Iran out of the Madrid peace conference, which was like an insult, but it was not that big of a deal.
And as I believe Trita Parsi shows in his book, Treacherous Alliance and Gareth Porter and his book, Manufactured Crisis, it was the the Iranians only turned on the Israelis after the Israelis had turned on them. And in fact, Trita Parsi in his book talks about how when the Israelis announced, hey, we hate Iran now and we want you to hate Iran now, The Clintonites all started laughing because they were like, what? You loved Iran and wanted us to be friends with Iran last week. Now you've changed your mind? Like, why?
And so it just had caught them by surprise.
Speaker 0: What was the relationship pre '93 between Israel and Iran? Well Was there a commercial relationship?
Speaker 1: Mostly, yeah, weapons and oil. So as Trita shows, the Ayatollah would be raging. I'm gonna destroy Israel. That day, he would be taking a shipment of missiles from Israel. Right?
And so all that bluster was cover for their covert relationship.
Speaker 0: Just to, again, to linger on a point Yeah. Because it's surprising to hear it. Israel was supplying Iran with weapons as late as the nineteen nineties?
Speaker 1: Yes. Confirmed. Yeah. Getting along with them all the way up until the very beginning of
Speaker 0: Bill Clinton. But not just getting along with, but sending them weapons.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, I'm not sure when the last weapon shipment took place, but But certainly through the Iran Iraq war, Israel was backing Iran. And this was a cynical thing by the Reaganites too, that they would give permission to the Israelis to increase support for Iran, and then they would switch and increase support for Iraq and play them back and forth against each other like that through the war. That's pretty dishonorable. Yeah.
It's pretty dishonorable indeed. But it also goes to show though that, like, all this crap about, oh, fundamentalist Shiite Islam. Well, I don't know. The Likud got along with the Ayatollah just fine Or maybe not just fine, but they kept their relationship all through the nineties, and it was the Israelis who decided to turn on them over, you know, politics that were closer to home that really weren't about Iran as much as they needed a bad guy to point their finger at while changing the policy and negotiating with the Palestinians. But then, of course, a Benjamin Netanyahu fan assassinated Rabin in '95.
And it was his successor, Shimon Peres, as part of this same strategy though who launched Operation Grapes of Wrath in 1996. Now, as I said, Muhammad Ata and Ramzi bin Alsheb filled out their last will and testament when they when that began.
Speaker 0: And Because they were upset.
Speaker 1: Because they were upset. And and by the way, their side, it's Lebanese Shiites who are being killed here, but there's the same difference to them. They've still felt shared solidarity with the victims there that they wanted to avenge. And then it was in that summer of ninety six was when bin Laden put out his first declaration of war. Get this.
It's called declaration of war against the Americans occupying the land of the two holy places. Pretty subtle. Right? Yeah. So and then in the beginning of the thing, it starts out with a whole rant about not just scrapes wrath, but the Qana massacre.
It's now known as the first Qana massacre because they did it again in 02/2006. But in 1996, it was actually Naftali Bennett, The, you know, future prime minister of Israel was the artillery officer who called in a strike on a United Nations shelter and killed a 106 women and children. And bin Laden went off about that in his declaration of war against The United States in 1996. So we'll never forget the severed heads and arms and legs of the children in Kana. And when Ramzi bin Al Sheba and Muhammad Ata read that, that was when they decided to join the war.
So here are Egyptian engineering students in Hamburg, Germany, volunteering for a Saudi to kill Americans as revenge for what Israel's doing in Lebanon, which, Tucker, is why they told you that the Taliban did it because they hate our freedom. Because they didn't wanna get into why these Saudis and Egyptians did it. It's because they hate our foreign policy. The Taliban, most of them have probably never even heard of the new world and had no grudge against us at all. In fact, their government had tried to warn The United States of an impending Al Qaeda attack, and and their leader, Mullah Omar, had been trying to negotiate bin Laden away since 1998 after the Africa embassy bombings.
And it was even the the CIA officer Milton Bearden, who ran the or helped to run the Afghan operation in the nineteen eighties, who told the Washington Post the Taliban were trying to give this guy up. They would say, jeez, he's out falconing. We don't know where he is. Meaning, he's outside of our protection. And if you guys were to kill him, it wouldn't be our fault.
And then the Americans would say, we said hand him over and just refuse to listen to that's what they're doing is handing him over. You know? Mullah Omar told oh, I bet you know, Arnaud de Borgrev from the Washington Times. Interviewed him. I knew him well.
Yeah. So Arnaud de Borgrev interviewed Mullah Omar in the February in Pakistan, and he said, listen, Bin Laden is like a chicken bone stuck in my throat. I can neither swallow him nor spit him out. So you gotta help me, you know, or you Americans need to help me find a way to get rid of this guy, essentially. There's no love lost between those two.
But they lied and they pretended that it was the Taliban who had attacked us. So they didn't wanna get into who were these mujahideen. So now one more thing. So first, we did all their attacks and their motives. Now their strategy was to bait us into invading Afghanistan.
And this is, as we talked about, the letter between Bin Laden and Mullah Omar. So we're trying to get the Americans to invade Afghanistan, and then we'll do to them the same thing that we did to the Soviets. Same thing we had helped them do to the Soviets. So that was the strategy. That was why they tried to knock down the World Trade Center in '93.
That was why they hit the Khobar Towers. They didn't think we're gonna run away crying. They were trying to get us to double and triple down, to invade, to spend money. It's asymmetric war. It's a a group of a couple of 100 bandits against the global empire.
How do you get how did they beat us? They get us to beat ourselves. They get as and and this is what's poetically beautiful and horrible here is that bin Laden's son, Omar, gave an interview to Rolling Stone magazine in 2010 where he explains he says, when Bush was elected, my father was so happy. This is the kind of president he needs, one who will attack and spend money and break the country. He says, Bill Clinton fired missiles at my father and didn't get him, but now you've been this is in 02/2010.
Now you've been in Afghanistan for ten years and you still don't have him. America then was very smart, not like the bull that runs after the red scarf. So the point being not that George Bush's stupidity makes him innocent, it's that George Bush's stupidity and cruelty and corruption made him the perfect mark for a guy like Bin Laden. This wimp with the cowboy hat, pretending he's a tough guy, is going to be very easy to provoke into doing what he wants. Right?
To get away with bloody murder on his end, which is what the Al Qaeda guys wanted for our side to do, was to and look at our national debt, you might say it has worked some.
Speaker 0: They're preying upon national character weakness or tick that Americans have that I have, which is you assume all foreigners are kind of dumb. Yeah. And, you know, it's a pretty sophisticated trap that they laid. Yep. You know, it's not higher math or anything, but it's like they're they're they were thoughtful Mhmm.
In their attempt to destroy The United States, and we didn't give them credit for thinking. Yep. Through anything that they did. I didn't anyway.
Speaker 1: And I gotta tell you, man, there's a huge rub here too, which is one of the major reasons they were allowed, and I mean that in the generalist sense of the term allowed, to get away with all these attacks against The United States in this way was because Bill Clinton's government was still supporting them. Took them from Afghanistan to Bosnia, then to Kosovo, and then on to Chechnya. And all through the nineteen nineties, and I have a bit on this in enough already, but I found much more in my latest book provoked because a lot of it has to do with the wars in the Balkans, of course, and wars against the Russians. And so it makes sense to me in a a moral strategic sense why America would support Bin Laden types and fundamentalist is Muslims against the Soviet Union. But once the Soviet Union is gone, seems like leftists are gonna be more reasonable people than Islamist fundamentalists for dealing with and when there's no Soviet threat to keep at bay any longer.
Speaker 0: I never understood the the hatred for the for the Baathists. I mean, they seemed, like, pretty reasonable actually. Guys. Well well, there's that. But also, if it's a choice between Assad and Jelani, I don't and I know that, you know, Israel likes Jelani, so we're all supposed to like him.
And as he murders Christians and Alawites, it's like, oh, no. He's great. We're dropping our sanctions. He's great. He's great.
But it just seems like, you know, the kind of center left atheist ophthalmologist from London is probably gonna be a better negotiating partner than the guy who thinks he's getting the virgins. Right?
Speaker 1: Yeah. Seriously.
Speaker 0: I mean, am missing something?
Speaker 1: Yes. Well, the Bin Ladenites, they might not be reasonable, but they're not the Shiites. So that's what matters to the Israelis.
Speaker 0: So that's thing. It's like this modern And they're not Russians. Yeah. Iran.
Speaker 1: And about Russia too. I mean, why why were they so determined to fight the war on the side of the Muslims in Bosnia? It was to essentially establish American dominance, to reestablish American dominance in Europe.
Speaker 0: To put a NATO base in Kosovo. No. I know.
Speaker 1: And at the expense of the Catholic Croats and the Orthodox Serbs and Russia's friends, the Serbs.
Speaker 0: Well, as always, we take this we, you know, we wind up abetting the murder of Christians. Like, that's not an accident from dropping the atomic bomb on a Catholic church in Nagasaki through the Balkans, through what's happening in Syria, through what's happening in the West Bank. Like, we're always against the Christians, and I I know you probably disagree. I don't think you're a rabid Christian or anything, but from my perspective, none of that's an accident.
Speaker 1: It sure seems to be the regular effect. I mean, at the very least, they don't care what's gonna happen to the Christians when they do these They
Speaker 0: certainly don't. The world's only nonviolent religion, and, you know, they're the ones who wind up killed, like, and then you have to like it, and you're a Nazi if you don't like it or something. It's like, I'm not playing along anymore.
Speaker 1: And the cynicism with which, like, hey, You know what we should do to prevent the Russians from reopening this old Soviet oil pipeline through the Caucasus Mountains? Let's support a bunch of Bin Ladenite suicide bombers against them.
Speaker 0: Exactly right.
Speaker 1: And this is years after the Soviet Union is dead and gone. We have no reason in the world to prefer such a narrow and shortsighted and parochial type policy to our overall the the overall health of our relationship with Moscow. It's insane.
Speaker 0: I agree. And and as you alluded a moment ago, you've just written a, like, a door stopper on this, which I think is the definitive book on the question of the Balkans and our many wars against Russia, etcetera, called provoked, and we just don't have time. I mean, that that's like a five hour conversation.
Speaker 1: That's another interview there.
Speaker 0: Are you doing that? I know just parenthetically here, but are you doing that with with Daryl Cooper?
Speaker 1: Well, so that's our new show. Now the book actually he was going to be my coauthor on the book, but I just ran way out too far ahead, and he couldn't catch up. So and and he's got this great podcast, and as you know, he's the most important historian in America.
Speaker 0: I think that.
Speaker 1: And I I absolutely agree with you. So we just launched a brand new podcast together, and he named it provoked. I wouldn't have, but he named it after the book. But I'm really excited
Speaker 0: about that. And is it on America's policy toward Russia?
Speaker 1: Well, the show we we will be touching on that for sure.
Speaker 0: Yeah. Well, did you pause before partnering with someone who's so reviled on Twitter?
Speaker 1: No. I love Darrell Cooper. I do too. We've been friends for years. And in fact, I'm glad as long as we're talking about this now, I'll go ahead and say, there are people who got this wrong in good faith and many more probably who got it wrong in bad faith.
And it's a tiny bit Darrell's fault in that he was kinda off on a tangent and didn't completely say everything that he was trying to explain. But the bottom line basically is people really misunderstood him. Some people in in good faith misunderstood him as somehow minimizing the Holocaust when what he was actually saying in that episode was even if you were one who would try to minimize the holocaust, even not you, but even if one were
Speaker 0: Yes.
Speaker 1: Even that person would have to admit that when the Nazis took possession of all of these people, they had no plan to feed them and take care of them. Yeah. He wasn't saying that was the extent of the Holocaust. He was saying the worst kind of pro Hitlerite, like, spinning for the Germans there, even they would have to concede. And his point wasn't even about the world war.
His point was actually the Israelis responsibility for feeding the people of Gaza who are not in a neighboring nation, but are a captive population on the Indian reservation there. And they so they have the responsibility to keep them alive
Speaker 0: as such. It was the propaganda campaign that I, you know, I spent my life around propaganda campaigns. Participated in a few, to my great discredit, but I've never really seen anything like what they do with Daryl And they're mad at Daryl Cooper for a bunch of different reasons, questioning the the thematic orthodoxy of the second world war. He's never called into question whether Hitler murdered Jews. I mean, of course, Hitler murdered Jews.
Like, what? Yep. That's he's not a holocaust denier or whatever that is. He is a guy who's trying to understand with precision and honesty what led to World War two and what it has meant for the world Yeah. Over the past eighty years.
Speaker 1: And, look, have you ever read Pappy Cannon's book, Church ill, Hitler, and the Odyssey?
Speaker 0: And I there when they tried to basically send Pat into exile and destroy his life and called him a Nazi, which he it's
Speaker 1: completely crazy. You read that book and you get the idea. Remember when they said that George w Bush was the Winston Churchill of the twenty first century? Yeah. I think that's probably right.
That Winston Churchill was the George w Bush of the twentieth century.
Speaker 0: Yeah. Go ahead and apologize for Gallipoli, then get back to me on whether you get to run a country during another war. Yeah. I would say so whatever. Anyway, but the Darrell Cooper thing is and then add to that, and this is relevant to me as a as a human being.
Darrell Cooper is just a wonderful and humane person.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 0: That's the other thing. So even if like, I don't think his ideas are dangerous or naughty or antisemitic or hateful. They're nothing like that. I mean, that's just a lie. But even but it it is like his ideas aside, he is just a humane person
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 0: Who feels sad over the death of anybody. Right. Friend or foe as we all should.
Speaker 1: And by the way, that campaign didn't hurt him. Right? Every friend of his I know. Took his side
Speaker 0: I know. You're right.
Speaker 1: And had
Speaker 0: his back.
Speaker 1: You're right. And and Substack said, hey. We got you, dude. You're not going anywhere. And and his his podcast went way up on the charts.
Absolutely. And probably, you know, tens or hundreds of thousands more people have heard mister Humane explain.
Speaker 0: It's easy to get my goat. Obviously, I'm falling for it. Sure. Right. Well, look.
Who cares?
Speaker 1: I mean, they they use his appearance on your show to try to destroy him, but, like, yeah. No. It just didn't work. And then in in our first episode that we recorded last week, we're gonna do our second episode tomorrow. But in the first episode of our show is at provoked.show, by the way, if people wanna look that up.
I just interviewed him about him for the the whole first show is all we talked about was, like, his basis for doing these inner doing these history podcasts and all the research that he's put into it and whatever. And he's just the most decent guy in the world.
Speaker 0: Yeah. Total
Speaker 1: stoic. He doesn't get angry about anything. He's like
Speaker 0: Oh, I know.
Speaker 1: The most gentle guy. And and, like, there's just no way in the world that
Speaker 0: any of that stuff can stick. Committed to accuracy and honesty as I think you are. And if he gets again, that's the test. Someone honest? I don't know.
Is he willing to admit when he's wrong? That is that that's my test. I don't know a better test. I think it's better than a lie detector test. Are you willing to say in public, I screwed this up, and, you know, I was wrong, or, you know, I or whatever.
To admit fault Yeah. Is is the measure. And he, unlike any mainstream, quote, historian, the Wikipedia historians, Doris Kearns Goodwin or whoever these absurd figures they trot out Yeah.
Speaker 1: Whatever wrote. Exactly.
Speaker 0: But they're all like that. Michael Beschloss. Can you imagine? He's just a liar.
Speaker 1: And that was what got them so upset is you said this is the most important historian in America, which is, like, obviously, your opinion and mine, but in a way, it's quantifiably the case. Right? That he's teaching history to a hell of a lot more people than any of these kooks at Harvard and Yale, and they're they have reason to be jealous. Right? The narrative is outside of their control.
Speaker 0: Well, that's totally right. They thought that Morning Joe had a monopoly on history. And, you know, I'm not against Morning Joe. I mean, first of all, well, I'm against monopolies in general. I'm certainly against monopolies on ideas and interpretations of the past.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 0: I'm against the gatekeeping of facts. I'm against lying. And they they really, for like seventy years, had that. Yep. You have to believe this.
Speaker 1: And they're in a panic now because no, we don't either, not anymore. Unbelievable.
Speaker 0: Yeah. I mean, the the fact that in a lot of the world, actually, it is a crime. Certain opinions are a crime. No. I probably don't even share those opinions.
It doesn't but it doesn't matter. It's like no opinion should ever be a crime.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Especially in the Western world.
Speaker 0: It's insane. You're not
Speaker 1: man enough to stand up for your own scale? I mean, and
Speaker 0: just like the name calling and the refusal to engage with facts, refusal to make a legitimate rational argument, it's it's a threat to to all of us, actually, because it's a threat to reason and decency and, like, civil discourse. And
Speaker 1: And the censors were really winning there for a while, but they're not anymore. No. They're not. And gotta give credit to Elon Musk for that, for saving x, you know, Twitter.
Speaker 0: I give he's in my daily prayers,
Speaker 1: and I just hope It's an important thing.
Speaker 0: I hope that you know, if there are I pray there aren't, but if there are acts of violence in The United States, whether they're real or they're false flags, there have been so many of those, where people are murdered, someone else is blamed for it for political effect. I, again, I pray that doesn't happen. I hate all violence. However, if it does, it will instantly be used as a pretext to shut down free speech on social media instantly, I fear that that's Yeah. Me too.
Sorry. Wow, did we get far afield? No, that's Last thing I say, for anyone who's interested in the topic of the war that we have been fighting for three years, three and a half years against Russia, why are we doing that? What do we hope to achieve? Where does that come from?
It seems like kind of out of the blue. I think you've written the definitive book on that called provoked, and I would just wanna recommend it to our audience.
Speaker 1: Thank you very much for that. I appreciate that.
Speaker 0: So but anyway, back to back to Iran. Yeah. I'm sorry.
Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. So yeah. We're I I swear we're gonna make this Al Qaeda centric conversation, Iran centric again here in a moment. One last thing though about Bill Clinton's treason in supporting Al Qaeda in Chechnya is that you might remember Colleen Rally. She was Yes.
Time Magazine person of the year in 2002 because she was the lawyer for the FBI office in Minneapolis, Minnesota who could have stopped September 11, her and her team. Because what happened was there's a guy named Zacharias Musawi. They said he was the twentieth hijacker. I said, I don't think that's right. I think Katani was the twentieth hijacker, and this guy was for a different mission later, but whatever.
Point is, he's the guy who famously wanted to learn how to fly a jumbo jet, but wasn't so interested in how to take off or land. Right. And the guy at the flight school went ahead over his boss's wishes and called the FBI and said, I'm really worried about this guy. And the FBI office out in Minneapolis, they did their job immediately, and one of their guys even speculated. This guy says he wants to learn how to fly, like, he's somehow he's particularly interested in the route from Heathrow to JFK.
I think he might wanna crash into the World Trade Center. So they went to FBI headquarters in Washington, and they were denied, no. You cannot even ask the FISA court for a foreign intelligence surveillance act warrant to search this guy's stuff. And the reason why is because even though in Minneapolis, they had contacted the European intelligence agencies, and the French reported back, oh, we know this guy. Him and his brother both are Chechen terrorists.
They fought in the war in Chechnya and are recruiters for the Bin Ladenites in Chechnya, led by Khatab and Basiev, both of whom were Bin Ladenites, both of whom were directly tied to Bin Laden, both of whom would travel to Afghanistan numerous times. People might even remember that there was a detachment of Chechens fighting with the Taliban against the northern alliance at the time that our war started in 2001 because Bin Laden had assigned them to what was called the o five five brigade to go and help the Taliban to fight against the northern alliance. So that's what they were doing there is there's this they absolutely were Bin Ladenite terrorists in in the exact Al Qaeda sense that you would think of them in any other place in Chechnya. But FBI headquarters said, we like the terrorists in Chechnya. They're not terrorists.
They're freedom fighters.
Speaker 0: Because they're fighting Putin.
Speaker 1: Because they're fighting Putin. And so we're not against them. We're for them. And so, no, you can't have your FISA warrant. Now FISA warrant is unlike a Fourth Amendment warrant.
Fourth Amendment, they have to have probable cause, particularly describing the places to be searched and the persons or things to be seized to find evidence of a crime. They have to be able to convince the judge that it's more likely than not they're gonna find evidence of this crime there. Well, for a FISA warrant, nothing like that. For a FISA warrant, all they need is a reasonable belief, which is nothing, that a person is either an agent of a foreign power or of a foreign terrorist group.
Speaker 0: I've been surveilled under a FISA warrant,
Speaker 1: so I'm very aware. I have too. Antiwar.com got surveilled in the same illegal way. And and so, yeah, they can get they can get a FISA warrant for you and me, Tucker, but not for Exactly. Exactly.
Moussawi. So even on September 11, they said, now can we have our warrant? And and now can we talk to the judge? And they still were told no by FBI headquarters. And it wasn't till later that night that the the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, said, I wonder if this has anything to do with that Minneapolis thing.
Then they went to the court, got the warrant, they searched the guy's house, they found papers that had been in his pockets and at his house directly connecting them to the hijackers in Florida. They could have wrapped up, completely rolled up, and prevented the September if they'd just been allowed to do their job, and they weren't because why? Because Bill Clinton was committing high treason, supporting the same Bin Ladenites who had already attacked our towers, who had already killed our guys in Saudi Arabia, who'd already blown up our embassies, already attacked our battleship. And they said, well, whatever. We like these guys when they're killing Russians.
And the same thing in February, Delta Force, that's top tier army special operations forces, Delta Force had been training KLA terrorists, Bin Ladenite terrorists in Kosovo, who then invaded Macedonia in an attempt to create a greater Kosovo. Yeah. And they were wrapped up by Macedonian troops Kill more Christians. And ferried out of the country by the Americans. And this is just one month before the September eleventh attack.
And I know a lot of people just think that these guys are totally controlled by The United States, but my point of view is that, no. What happened is they're essentially motivating them to attack The United States in one place while supporting them in other places. And rather than buying their loyalty, they're just blinding themselves to the danger. And so they kept attacking us and attacking us and attacking us, which was very convenient to notice when you're trying to still support them. And so even though you had people like Michael Shroyer at the CIA's Bin Laden unit, who I think is sincere, all he wanted to do in life was kill Al Qaeda guys.
And, you know, they had the rendition program that was in Clinton. That was before Bush. You might be familiar with the statement by Robert Baer, the former CIA officer. He said, if you want an interrogation, you send them to Jordan. If you want them tortured, you send them to Syria.
If you want them to disappear forever, you send them to Egypt. And he was talking about the Clinton years. So they were wrapping up guys who they considered to be the most dangerous Al Qaeda terrorists and and sending them back home to be taken out and shot. So that was going on during that time. And in fact, there's a huge and hilarious and important and tragic and crazy clip of Michael Scheuer.
Again, the CIA's the chief of the CIA's bin Laden
Speaker 0: I know him.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Testifying before the house. And the congressman asked him about a statement that he had made about John O'Neill, the head of the FBI counterterrorism unit in New York. And he said, the only thing good that happened to America on November is that that tower came down on John O'Neill's head. Because that was how bad the CIA and FBI hated each other in their fight over the intelligence
Speaker 0: no longer does television.
Speaker 1: This is why Shroyer no longer does he went a little nutty in later years. Yeah. His book Imperial Hubris is bar none the best book on terror wars in that era.
Speaker 0: I haven't seen him in many, many years. But he was I think he was like he's now a banned person for some reason. I can't remember why.
Speaker 1: He started saying we ought to help the Sunnis and Shiites all kill each other till they're all dead. And, like, I think when when they did the Russiagate hoax, he said it's time for civil war. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
A little
Speaker 0: less moderate. Yeah. I would say.
Speaker 1: I get a little carried away. But so so that's the importance of of the Bin Ladenite trees in there. And so now here's where Ron kicks back into the story. Because, of course, September 11 and Al Qaeda's war is the excuse for America to go back to The Middle East in full scale once, you know, W Bush is sworn in. But so here's where we get to the neoconservatives.
Who's a neocon and what's a neocon? Well, Tucker, everybody always says that everybody who's a hawk is a neocon. That guy's a neocon and that guy's a neocon. But as you know, that's not true. Neoconservative is a biographical designation, and it applies to, I don't know, a 100 guys in the world, something like that, would you say?
And they're called neoconservatives, not because they're conservatives nowadays, but because they literally had been leftists who moved to the right and were new conservatives. And so there's it's kind of a complicated history, but essentially, of them were Trotskyites and had become kind of cold war democrats, and then eventually Reaganites, and then the second and third generation
Speaker 0: More precisely, most of them seem to have gone to City College of New York.
Speaker 1: Yeah. There's a bunch of them
Speaker 0: In the thirties and forties.
Speaker 1: And people can watch on YouTube. There's a documentary called arguing the world, which is a PBS documentary about Irving Kristol and Nathan Glaser and and all those guys.
Speaker 0: Daniel Bell and
Speaker 1: And and Irving Howe. Yep. Right.
Speaker 0: Or Norman Pajaritz, misjector.
Speaker 1: Yep. And so then there's a guy named Max Schachtman, who was an important Trotskyite, and then there he had he was major wheel in the young people's socialist league, young people socialist league, which included Jean Kirkpatrick, Joshua Moravchik, and Elliot Abrams. Then you had, you know, the national review where William f Buckley had, you know, essentially all the real old right wingers were against the cold war Oh, yeah. They said, you know, why create this giant com pseudo communist government here just to keep them away over there when we ought to just work on keeping our country free here. You know?
So all those people got pushed out and luckily Not
Speaker 0: just pushed out, but maligned. Yeah. Attacked Nazis as hate or when, you know yeah.
Speaker 1: And replaced by a bunch of ex communists. But see, because they were Trotskyites and Americans, they hated Stalin and the Soviet Union. And this is post World War two, so they became the leaders of the Cold War in America, and all the real conservatives had to sit out while a bunch of ex communists took their role.
Speaker 0: It's funny the damage that I mean, National View is a joke now. No one I don't even know if it exists actually, but in some theoretical sense, maybe it does, but it doesn't really exist anymore. But the damage that National Review did to the country kind of it's hard to overstate. Yeah. In a very insidious way.
Absolutely. Took out all the the clear thinkers, the honest people, the people who really love their country, all exiled.
Speaker 1: Replaced with Jonah Goldberg.
Speaker 0: No. No. Like,
Speaker 1: literally in
Speaker 0: which Lowry and these other, like, really weird weird people you wouldn't ask advice from on any topic ever. Yep. Like, just non not wise, unhappy, controlled by god knows whom. You know what I mean? Like, but but and
Speaker 1: that's fine. They're miserable bunch
Speaker 0: of people in the world, but to take out the strong people is unforgivable. Yeah. And that's what they did.
Speaker 1: Right. And then so Leon Wollstetter and Leo Strauss were both also who taught at the University of Chicago. Yep. And Pearl and Libby and Fife and Wolfowitz and a bunch of those guys had studied under him and then went them and then went and worked for Scoop Jackson, who was kind of a cold war democrat, right wing democrat from Washington State. They called him the oh, sorry.
Yeah. Senator. They called him the senator from Boeing. Yep. And and then, you know, they made their break with the new left in the late sixties over Vietnam and over civil rights and stuff like that and started moving to the right.
And then this is essentially the core of the war party in The United States Of America. The great journalist Andrew Coburn says, this is they're the cross between the Israel lobby and the military industrial complex. So, like, oil and banking already had the council on foreign relations, basically. These guys were not so much invited in there. That was more like blue blood wasps in that era and stuff.
So they made their alliance with the military industrial complex, said, we need money. You guys need egg need egg heads, right, to write your studies and justify your policies and your arms sales. So that was kinda where that mob marriage was born. And so this is how the the neocons ended up creating this whole kind of forest of think tanks of their own. I mentioned the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, but they also had like the committee on the present danger and the committee on the free world and the Center for Security Policy, the Project for a New American Century, they had taken over at Heritage and AEI Hudson.
And Hudson. Right? They had made their alliance with the Olin and Scathe foundations. And so they were able to just take the poll position in in leading conservative thought in in the magazines and and on TV and in the newspaper editorials and all that, The Weekly Standard, of course, as you know, in the national review. We had two big flash flagships.
And, yeah, these were your guys back then. And so these were the guys who took us to war. They are the vanguard of the war party, and they're, in many cases, directly tied to Israel. And now I I don't wanna get you in unfair trouble. I'm perfectly happy to get you in trouble that you deserve or Yes.
We want to get in to get together. But I don't want anyone to misunderstand me and especially not on your show. I am not antisemitic, and I'm not saying anything antisemitic about these guys. The neoconservative movement was a largely Jewish movement, is a largely Jewish movement because, hey, Trotskyism was only ever really popular in Brooklyn. Right?
There's just not too many people who were ever whoever were part of these radical politics. And but there are Presbyterians, Jean Kirkpatrick and James Woolsey are two prominent Presbyterian Christians who are part of it. And it was funny because Mark Dubowitz from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies tried to argue with me about whether Jean Kirkpatrick was a neocon or not because she supported dictatorships as long as they were right wing ones instead of supporting democracy uber alis. But ISIS, well, she comes from the young people socialist league with Max Shockman and Joshua Moravczyk and Elliot Abrams, and then moved to the right and became a Reaganite with the rest of them, wrote for Commentary Magazine with Pod Horitz and all of the guys. She's a neocon, and I have all the sources.
I I linked to a bunch of great sources in my book about that. And, of course, there's differences of opinion among the neoconservatives. When the Muslim Brotherhood won elections in Egypt in 02/2012, Robert Kagan said, hey. We've been spouting nonstop about democracy this whole time. These guys won fair and square.
We should give them a chance. And after all, they weren't really suicide bomber types in Egypt at that time. They're a bunch of old guys, conservative old guys. And he said, yeah, they're conservative Islamists, but let's see. Well, old Frank Gaffney at the center for security policy about blew his top.
Absolutely not. We should not do I don't care if they won with 99%. We don't let the Muslim Brotherhood take power. Right? So there are differences of opinion within the neoconservative movement, which is fine.
But Jean Kirkpatrick clearly was one of them. And there are Catholics who are part of the movement as well. Michael Novak was a prominent one, and I'm sorry, there's quite a few others that are escaping my attention. There there are a few other Catholics.
Speaker 0: National Review, I think, is heavily Catholic, and they I mean, you would I don't know
Speaker 1: how many of them were ever leftists. Of course.
Speaker 0: This is a strict definition.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're being straight here. So, like, John Bolton, for example, is not a neoconservative.
He's very close with them, but he's just a Goldwater guy. He's always been a right wing nationalist, conservative, Republican, and never had that move from the left to the right. So he's obviously very close with them, but not a card carrying member kind of a thing. That's the way I like to distinguish the thing. So now this brings us to the clean break.
So David Wormser and Douglas Fife and Richard Pearl well, I should put them in the other. David Wormser is the principal author. Richard Pearl is really the ringleader and his mentor and coauthor. And then Douglas Fife was their fellow traveler who also signed on, Although I think later he repudiated this document and said he didn't agree with it, but whatever. The document is called a clean break, a new strategy for securing the realm.
And it's written by Wormser for Netanyahu when he comes becomes prime minister in 1996. He replaces Shimon Peres. Now he comes in, he also is into demonizing Iran, although he hates Iraq more, I think. But he doesn't wanna negotiate with the Palestinians. He's with the Likud.
They don't get a two state solution. He's going to now demonize Iran and Iraq, not as a way to kinda get away with dealing with the Palestinians like Rabin was trying to do, but as an excuse to never deal with the Palestinians. You want me to deal with the Palestinians? Well, what about Iran? Becomes the Netanyahu doctrine.
And so he wants nothing to do with Oslo in a two state solution. So worms are rice. This is what the clean break is. It's a clean break from Oslo and a two state solution for the Palestinians. And it says, what we're gonna do instead of making nice with the Arab states, we're gonna have peace through strength, and we're gonna be the dominant power in the region by far, and then no one's gonna mess with us and we'll have peace that way.
And what he says is the major threat to Israel is if they wanna continue colonizing Palestine, what's left of it? They have to worry about Hezbollah, the Shiite militia in Southern Lebanon on their northern flank, which grew up in reaction to their invasion of Lebanon in the early nineteen eighties.
Speaker 0: '82.
Speaker 1: '82. Right. And so they say, the problem is Iran backs Hezbollah through Syria. So what we wanna do is focus on getting rid of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, which is crazy. And for anyone listening to this who immediately thinks, wait, that doesn't make sense.
You're right. That doesn't make sense. It only makes sense in, like, a weird Rube Goldberg contraption sort of a way. What had been the lie that they believed had been sold to them by an Iraqi exile named Ahmed Chalabi, a Shiite, who was an embezzler, a a bank convicted bank fraudster from Jordan and a criminal. And he had convinced them that if you put the cousin of the king of Jordan, who's a Sunni, but a Hashemite and claims the blood of the prophet, if you put him in power in Baghdad, then all the Shiites will all line up to obey and do whatever he says because he has the magic blood of the prophet, which they all revere.
Well, that's completely crazy and stupid and wrong. When the British had installed the Hashemite king in the twenties, the Shiites had a fatwa against cooperating with him in any way, which is why his king his kingdom didn't last through the twenties. It fell. And, yes, as we talked about before, this is part of the split that the Shiites went with the with Mohammed's family. But that doesn't mean that they revere anyone with the blood of the prophet as like a magical lord over them with total power to decide every question for them or anything like that.
This is completely overstated by Ahmed Chalabi that this Hashemite king would be able to say, oh, I have royal blood and you all have to, you know, fall under my spell now. It was nonsense. But then it didn't matter because I I believe what happened was the king of Jordan died and his cousin replaced him, and then there was nobody to put in there. So then they changed the plan to Chalabi himself would be the guy. But the whole promise was and this is in a clean break, and the companion piece is called coping with crumbling states.
And the third one is a book. It's called tyranny's ally, America's failure to remove Saddam Hussein, written by Wormzer with a forward by Pearl. And they all basically say the same thing. It's all of this smoke that that Ahmad Chalebi is blowing about how if we get rid of Saddam, Jordan and Turkey will be dominant in Iraq. And then we'll make the Iraqi Shiite clergy who are the highest ranking clergy, like the Ayatollah Sistani, for example, down in Najaf, will make them make Hezbollah to stop being friends with Iran or, yeah, stop being friends with Iran and be friends with Israel instead.
This is completely nuts. But this is what they thought would happen. And so then
Speaker 0: Did it happen?
Speaker 1: No. Because what happened was once they lied us into Iraq, and it was Ahmad Chalabi and his exiles who helped provide a lot of the lies about the weapons of mass destruction, and it was the neoconservatives in the government. They created what Colin Powell called a separate government. He was the secretary of state. He called it a separate government run by the Ginsa crowd, which met David Wormser and Richard Pearl and their friends.
Speaker 0: What does Ginsa mean?
Speaker 1: The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. It's now of America, but it's the same group. They're the ones who send American cops to be trained by Shin Bet ruthless occupation forces in Palestine and come back and treat Americans like that. That's one of their major roles. But it was David Wormser and his friends were the men from Ginsar.
The Ginsar crowd was what Powell called them. They created a separate government. Again, Powell's words working under Dick Cheney, and there was Hannah and Libby and Joseph were in and and Elliot Abram no. No. No.
Eric Edelman were in the vice president's office, Dick Cheney's office.
Speaker 0: Then Victoria Newland as well.
Speaker 1: Victoria Newland, Robert Kagan's wife. Exactly. And then on the national security council was Robert Hadley, Probably Stephen Hadley, Robert Joseph, I think moved from the vice president's office to National Security Council, and Zalmay Khalilzad, who's their pet Muslim, were on the National Security Council. Then at state, you had David and John Bolton, who again was not exactly a neocon, but was clearly part of this group with Cheney. And their role was to keep a leash on Powell and his right hand man, Dick Armitage, and prevent them from doing too much to obstruct the war.
And then at defense, you had on the defense policy board, Richard Pearl, Kenneth Adelman, Jean Kirkpatrick, and Newt Gingrich, again, a fellow traveler, not exactly one of them, but he also, like Libby and Cheney, went to CIA quarters over and over again to berate them and force them to try to come up with more intelligence against Iraq. Played a major role in that. And then you had deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz, and then under him, deputy secretary of defense for policy Douglas Fife, and then under him, Abram Shulsky, who ran the office of special plans. And this is we know all about this especially because of the heroic air force lieutenant colonel whistleblower Karen Kotowski told this story numerous times, but and there's a lot. There's in fact, if you search my name in 28 articles about how the neoconservatives lied us into war, it's actually up to 30 or 35 or something now.
Got all of these all of the best articles about the neoconservatives in the office of special plans. And they focused on digging through the CIA's trash and laundering lies from the exiles to come up with the weapons of mass destruction narrative. Across the hall was the policy counterterrorism evaluation group, and that was run by Wormser and a guy named Michael Malouf. And they were in charge of coming up with lies about Saddam's ties to Al Qaeda. And there's a guy named Harold Road who worked in the office of Net Assessment, which is like the internal Pentagon think tank, and his job was firing all the Arabists who actually knew anything about The Middle East from there and replacing them all with guys from the think tanks.
And so they did like yes. It's true. Bush and Cheney sorta won that election and but they staffed the government in a way that very few, you know, political victors on that level have the ability to do what Dick Cheney did, which was to put his very best guys, most loyal guys from this neoconservative faction in all the most important places in the government to push us into that war.
Speaker 0: And the purpose of that war was to neutralize Iran, actually.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 0: Again, I just wanna ask you to pause. So there was a promise from the neocons or parts of the US government that there would be an oil pipeline after Saddam built from Mosul Kirchuk, Northern Iraq to the Port Of Haifa in Israel?
Speaker 1: Right. And this had been a pipeline under the British in the twenties, and they wanted to reopen it or rebuild the thing. And part of the deal was that when, you know, Israel stayed friends with Iran as we established all the way through the nineteen eighties, and they had a secret pipeline at the Port Of Aqaba, which is you know, they call it the Sinai Peninsula because it sticks out into the Red Sea there. Well, the right side of the Sinai, that's Aqaba, is that port there. And the Iranians had a secret pipeline that was, I guess, was operated by Mark Rich.
I don't know exactly who originally had built it. Mark Rich. Mark Rich, the
Speaker 0: Are you making this up?
Speaker 1: Same guy. And so there was this secret oil pipeline where the the Iranians would drive their tankers up and unload oil and ship it to Israel. But then when Rabin turned on Iran in '93, the Iranians cut that oil supply off. So, like, in a large sense, America's Iraq War two was part of that was so that they could rebuild this pipeline to make up for that loss. Fact, when Donald Rumsfeld the famous meeting of Donald Rumsfeld with the video and the still shot of him shaking hands with Saddam Hussein when he was Reagan's special emissary in 1983, a huge part of that meeting was him badgering Hussein to build a pipeline to the Port Of Aqaba that would then have a separate spur that would go directly to Israel.
Speaker 0: So when people say it was a war for oil, there's some truth in that, but it wasn't oil for us.
Speaker 1: That's right. And Is this real? Yeah. And when I
Speaker 0: But why do we care how much Israel pays for oil? Like, what does that have to with us?
Speaker 1: Oh, Tucker, I don't care. But David Wormser and them are essentially lacud guys. I mean, Douglas Feis law partner, Mark Zell, who's a riot if you follow him on Twitter these days, he's he represents settlers on the West Bank. I mean, these guys are very close to The States. Yeah.
Exactly.
Speaker 0: That was a sincere question. I guess there's no answer.
Speaker 1: Right. Nothing. That's it. Just the lobby and and their control inside America. So when I wrote that book, a guy named Gary Vogler contacted me, and he was the American viceroy over Iraqi oil during that war.
And he wrote a review of enough already on Amazon that says, hey. Let me tell you. This is the only book that gets it right. This is what really happened and what that war was really about. How do I know?
Because I was the oil minister. I was in charge. And he I published his book at the Libertarian Institute. We published his book. It's called Israel, winner of the two thousand three Iraq oil war by Gary Vogler, where he explains that this is exactly right and how Michael Malouf, the same guy from the policy counterterrorism evaluation group, was on the phone with him bugging him about the pipeline.
And and he talks all about it. And and I I wouldn't wanna go into too much detail about what he explains in there and how it all worked, but he was like front row to seeing the role that the promises of that pipeline played in the neocon's thinking. And Netanyahu bought it as well. And Netanyahu mentioned it in a speech that he gave, I believe, in England. Or was it at Ginsa?
No. No. It was Choloby gave a speech at Ginsa. But Netanyahu mentioned it, I believe, in England one time that, yeah, and they promised they're gonna rebuild the oil pipeline to Haifa. So this is a huge part of the neoclassical I remember
Speaker 0: scoffing at the idea it was a war for oil because I couldn't see how Iraqi oil would benefit The United States.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 0: So I was like, how could it be a war for oil? And on the left was all, war for oil, no blood for oil, no blood for oil. But I guess I'm not deranged enough even to imagine it could be a war for oil for somebody else.
Speaker 1: Right? I know. It's completely absurd, and it's completely real. I mean, people can check me. I have, you know, you know, plenty of notes on that and including I'm pretty sure it was the Jerusalem Post that reported on Netanyahu's speech, but this is all very findable and double checkable.
You know? It's a huge part of their thinking. And again, I know it's crazy, but again, if we get rid of secular Sunni Saddam and empower the Shiite super majority, it'll be fine because actually either we will have a sock puppet Hashemite or we will have a sock puppet Shiite in charge to tell them what to do, and then they will tell Hezbollah to leave Israel alone. And that way, Israel can finish colonizing Palestine without having to worry about Hezbollah on their northern flank.
Speaker 0: So even if I thought that the purpose of foreign policy was to help a foreign country, which I don't, and even if I, you know, agree with all the objectives, which I don't think I do, But even if I did, I would say, that's not a very smart plan. And I remember having this exact conversation in Iraq in 02/2003. It's like, wait a second, if this is a majority Shiite country, if it becomes a democracy, it'll become a Shiite country. It'll be aligned in some basic way with Iran. How is that a win?
And you're saying, of course, they knew that. At the time, I was like, don't they know? Don't they know? But they knew, and they thought that that would somehow be good for Israel.
Speaker 1: Yeah. They thought that they would have dominance over the new order there, which, of course, they didn't. And by the way, when w Bush invaded in 02/2003, what did he do? He pick up he picked up exactly where his father had left off when he betrayed the Shiite uprising in 1991, And he took who? The Badah Brigade and the Dawah party, the supreme council for Islamic revolution, the Iraqi traders who had chosen Iran's side in the Iran Iraq war, who had led the uprising in '91 before Bush senior changed his mind and left them high and dry to be crushed.
Now w Bush in o three takes them all the way to Baghdad. And so that's the history of Iraq War two. That bloody eight year horrible war that we fought over there was America fighting for the supermajority Shiite side for their strategic rivals in the region, Iran, in what they call in soccer an own goal, like this giant stupid mistake fought for the other side of the ledger based on the the idiocy and cruelty of these neocons who thought that they were smart and that they would get away with it. And that's what our guys thought there were. Somehow
Speaker 0: help Israel to have a Shiite government in Iraq.
Speaker 1: Right. Because we would have such control over the Shiites. They would force Hezbollah to stop being friends with Iran. They would separate Syria and Iran, and they would it would be, Wormser said, a nightmare for Iran when they when the Iranian people see what a great new democratic Shiite Iraq looks like and how they could be living. It'll surely lead to the fall of the Ayatollah.
Speaker 0: One of my theories for many, many years, and when people are always if you say anything like this, like, you're anti Israel, which I am not and never have been. But one thing I've noticed is that the people who presume to speak for Israel not only kind of shaft The United States, they don't care at all about The United States, obviously, but they also kind of shaft Israel. Like, they're not even good at they're not even good at serving the interests, their own interests,
Speaker 1: or what they think of their own.
Speaker 0: It's like wild. It's so interesting. Yep. I mean, I I I guess I shouldn't be surprised by that because I think a lot of there are actual, you know, anti Semites who are like, oh, the, you know, the Israel people are controlling everything. Okay.
But I don't think it's helping Israel very much. It's definitely not helping us, which is my my concern.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 0: But it's just kinda funny that it's not helping Israel either.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Of course. I mean, the the rabbinic doctrine made a lot more sense. That let's be friends with all our nearby neighboring states. We have a peace treaty with Egypt.
We're working on one with Jordan, which they did get in '94. We That's what I try to
Speaker 0: do with people who live near me. Yeah. I don't wanna be at war with them because
Speaker 1: There was even a time in the w Bush years when the Israelis were talking with Assad and Kanalisa Rai stopped them.
Speaker 0: She's really a sinister person.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And, like, they were and the Israelis are were even negotiating over the Golan Heights or maybe sharing it or some kind of, you know, whatever thing, and she prevented them from making peace then.
Speaker 0: She's the one who prevented Russia from joining NATO.
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, a lot of things.
Speaker 0: In in in 2000 when well, it's what Putin told me. When Putin said to Bush, would like to join NATO, and he's like, okay. And then Condie Rice, I guess 2001 Yeah. Jumps in and it's like, no.
Speaker 1: Oh, okay. That's interesting. So I know that Colin Powell had put him off in July of o one. I'm not familiar with that anecdote, but I I mean, I'm just Sounds right.
Speaker 0: Here I am taking Putin at his word again as a Russian stoop.
Speaker 1: Russian talking point. Tucker Carlson.
Speaker 0: I don't know.
Speaker 1: I bet we can find it. I bet we can find it. No. I know that he asked to join NATO in February and that he was told, yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. You know, noncommittal. That was the tradition.
Speaker 0: Well, he claims Bush Refused
Speaker 1: to answer.
Speaker 0: Was for it. I Yeah. I wasn't there. I can see Bush in it. Yeah.
That's amazing.
Speaker 1: Okay. So the next big step is the redirection because Elliot Abrams, the neocon, and Zalmik Alilzad, they realized how bad they screwed up here. And they come to Bush in o five and o six, and they say, listen, we've really empowered the Shiites and the Iranians at our own expense here. Our side of the ledger is the Sunni kings and Israel and Turkey. And so we have to fix this.
And this is when they launched what's called the redirection. And this is a really important article by Seymour Hirsch from March 2007. And he had a whole series that year in the New Yorker, the coming wars, preparing the battlefield, and I always forget one other one. But the redirection is the most important one. This is where they say, man, we really screwed up by empowering the Shiites.
Now we have to tilt back toward the Sunni kings. Except the Saudis don't have an army. So what do they really mean by that? They mean now it's time to tilt back toward Osama bin Laden and the suicide bomber head chopper enemies of The United States Of America. The fact that Al Qaeda in Iraq was the bleeding edge, the worst vanguard of the Sunni based insurgency resisting American and Shiite rule during that war.
The fact that all the civilians they had killed and all the people at the Pentagon, all the people in those planes and the towers meant nothing. They said, now this is before Obama ever came to town. This is still w Bush. They said, we're gonna start backing Fatah al Islam in Lebanon, which was a Bin Ladenite group there to try to attack Hezbollah. We start backing the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria.
And by the way, this was Elizabeth Cheney who worked at the state department for George Bush, and she was the one who created the first Syrian National Council of the Syrian government in exile to try to replace Assad, which was chock full of members of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Speaker 0: And but big picture, we're doing this because why? Because Israel wants us to
Speaker 1: And the Saudis do. So Khalil Zad goes to Saudi. This is in the WikiLeaks from beginning of o six. And the Saudi king says to Khalil Zad, it used to be us and you and Saddam against Iran. Now you have given Iraq to Iran on a golden platter.
That was my take. Right. Just as an
Speaker 0: observer, that's I'd never understood why would they do that. I never got it.
Speaker 1: So that's the answer is this magical thinking that they would have through through a Hashemite king or through Chalabi that they would have this total control over the Shiites will and bend them to out.
Speaker 0: If the Hashemite king thing works, then how come the Hashemites in Jordan are always on the edge?
Speaker 1: Yeah. It doesn't. It it doesn't. And, of course, had no rule over Shiites at all. The idea that the Hashemites are gonna boss the the Shiites around and say, oh, I got magical blood that you have to obey is total nonsense.
Right? No more than I'm the pope. It's just not right. It's and it's total, you know, the the the con that Chalabi was selling. And if you read A Clean Break, Coping the Crumbling States, Tyranny's Ally, Chalabi's in there over and over and over again.
Our good friend, the Iraqi exile Chalabi assures us over and over again.
Speaker 0: Whatever happened to him? Do you know?
Speaker 1: He died. He ended up in charge of oil industry for a while, and then he died in, I'm gonna say, early Obama years. And in fact, I'll I'll urge your I won't do the direct quote and get you in too much trouble here, Tucker, but I'll urge people to go and read a great article by John Desard at salon dot com. And for people not familiar, an eon ago, salon.com actually published real journalism. I know no one would think that now.
It's such a woke rag, but they did actually publish real journalism back then. And John Desard is a serious guy. He's from the Financial Times, and I am briefly acquainted with him, and he's a serious journalist. The article is called how Chalebi conned the neocons. And in there, they quote Desard quotes a Lebanese businessman friend of Chalebi's.
And he says, I asked Cholaby, what are you doing running around with these j words? And Cholaby said, I just need them to get America to launch the war. And then I promise I'll stab them in the back as soon as it's accomplished. Right? So he was using them and they were his fools.
And there's a great quote Mark Zell I mentioned was Douglas Weiss law partner, and he says, oh, that chalopy, he's a treacherous spineless turncoat. He betrayed us. He promised us an oil pipeline to Haifa, and now he's running around with all these Iranians and has a whole different set of friends, and we'll never forgive him for his treachery and all that. So it's all just as plain as day in there as he was using David Wormser as a mark, Richard Pearl as like a pathetic sock puppet tool of his. And they thought that they were smart, but they were not.
And Danielle Pletka also deserves a hell of a lot of blame and responsibility for this. She was Cholobey's main handler at the American Enterprise Institute And, you know, car carrying member of this neocon faction that pushed this stuff. So once they realized how bad they screwed up, they launched this redirection. They're back in Fatah Islam in Lebanon, Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, and the Iranian Kurds had a group called PJAC, which was whatever it's an acronym for, but it's essentially the Iranian Kurdish version of the PKK, which is the leftist insurgent Kurdish group in Turkey, which is only recently disarmed completely. And then their allies are the YPG in Syria and in but in Iran, they're called PJAK.
And America was supporting them there, and they were also supporting a group of horrible Bin Ladenite suicide bomber headchopper maniacs called Jandala in Baluchistan, which is in Southeastern Iran, that region. And these guys were kidnapping and beheading officers and do army officers and doing truck bombings and all kinds of stuff. And so this is America under W Bush. Again, before Obama ever came to town, this is W Bush saying, oops. I screwed up and I put the Iranians best friends in power in Baghdad.
There's only so much I can do about that.
Speaker 0: At the request of neocons who then changed their mind and decide, oh, we screwed up. Yep. So then all American foreign policy has to pivot to backing the people who did nine eleven.
Speaker 1: That's right. Back back to the bin Laden. Like yeah. So then Barack Obama comes
Speaker 0: to to have sovereignty.
Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. No. We don't have that. It's it's somewhere, but it ain't here. So Barack Obama comes to town, and everybody thought, oh, this guy's a secret Muslim and all of this stuff, but that wasn't it.
He's w Bush. That was what happened, was he was the centrist foreign policy establishment. He was Bill Clinton. It's all he ever was. And he came in, and he picked up right where w Bush left off.
And when the it's actually interesting because he actually did assign I don't think there's any question about this. He assigned the CIA to find and kill Bin Ladenite, real Bin Ladenite terrorists in Yemen and in Pakistan. And in Pakistan, John Kiriakou told me, the former CIA officer, there were only 29 Al Qaeda guys hiding out in Pakistan. And they launched this horrific drone war, and they had to help the Pakistani government launch a even worse war against the Pakistani Taliban in the Swat Valley and the federally administered tribal territories that killed, like, 80,000 people as a favor to let him do the drone war against less than 30 Al Qaeda guys in the country, which was somewhat successful, but it also just created more blowback in driving people away and back to where they were from, places like Libya. And he was also bombing them in in Yemen as well, which was totally counterproductive as I show in my Yemen chapter in the book.
The the CIA and air force war against AQAP only grew them bigger and bigger the whole time and was counterproductive. But so that's like the first couple of years. And and, course, he escalated the war in Afghanistan even though there were no Arab terrorists left in Afghanistan at all by then. But then at the beginning of the Arab Spring, which breaks out in 02/2011, Obama takes Osama's side in Libya. And this is just as he's killing the guy.
He's he he put down on February. Well, at that very moment, we got American planes flying sorties as air cover for the Libyan Islamic fighting group and Ansar al Sharia who are Al Qaeda in Libya. That's all they are. They're the they're the Libyan veterans of Al Qaeda in Iraq. They just got home from fighting with Zarqawi against our guys in Iraq war two.
Now they wanna take on Qaddafi, and Barack Obama takes their side. Yeah. And that's because, of course, Gaddafi was on Israel's list for a long time, the list of seven countries that they wanted to get rid of. I did last December a debate with general Wesley Clark where he reconfirmed that that list of the seven countries in five years, that was Israel's list of countries they wanted overthrown. And Libya was on that list, and the Saudis and Qataris also hated him for, you know, making fun of them for wearing robes and calling them women wearing dresses and stuff, and they had screwed him on oil he had screwed them on oil deals and the same for the British.
And I think Sarkozy in France, Gaddafi had helped bankroll his election campaign, and he wanted to cover that up. So he want that was his motive, was trying to take him out.
Speaker 0: Gaddafi helped to bankroll Sarkozy's presidential campaign?
Speaker 1: Yeah. And that was one of his big motives for wanting to launch the war. And then
Speaker 0: Well, not a very grateful character, is he?
Speaker 1: No. Not at
Speaker 0: all. You pay for my election campaign, I'll send NATO in to kill you? Yeah. And what was NATO doing there anyway? That's not the North Atlantic.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, it's
Speaker 0: This isn't the NATO I was promised, the defensive alliance protecting the North Atlantic from the Soviets?
Speaker 1: I know. Well, you know, help me figure out how Estonia and Lithuania belong in NATO either. As you said, that's another show.
Speaker 0: So Al Qaeda in Libya, all of a sudden becomes an ally of Barack Obama?
Speaker 1: Right. Well, Barack Obama becomes theirs. Becomes theirs. Yeah. And so that's the whole thing.
It's just like with Bill Clinton, we might help them, but that doesn't buy their loyalty to us.
Speaker 0: Noticed.
Speaker 1: In fact, quoted in in my new book provoked, I quote Ali Sufan, the former FBI counterterrorism agent, where he quotes the Bin Ladenites complaining to Bin Laden himself. Why are you targeting The United States? They've been so good to us. They supported us in Afghanistan, in Bosnia, in Kosovo, now here in Chechnya. And then he explained to them, well, you guys just don't understand.
We have this larger agenda based around what's going on in Palestine and in Iraq and the rest of this. So some of them had been bribed, but the loyalty really did
Speaker 0: not come through the Just to I I because I think it well, because he attacked my country. I think it's fair to ask, do you believe based on all the research you've done that his main motive was what's happening in Gaza, the West Bank?
Speaker 1: It's right there. Yes. It's the main motive was, I believe, the bases in Saudi Arabia to bomb and blockade Iraq. And then two on the list was support for the Israelis in Palestine and in Southern Lebanon, and then with support for the dictators of the region, pressure on them to keep oil prices artificially low to subsidize our economy at their expense. And as he put it, turning a blind eye to Russia and China and India and their wars against Muslims, which we know is not true, where America actually supported the Bin Ladenites and two of the three of those.
But those were the grievances for real. And then so Obama takes Al Qaeda's side in Libya, and then on to what Hillary Clinton called her bank shot and move all the Mujahideen and Gaddafi's guns to Syria. And this is where they started the dirty war in Syria. And again, why? Because as David Wormser wrote back so many years ago, Syria is the keystone in the arc of Iranian power in the region.
And since we just moved Baghdad to Iran's column, we just put Iraq put pardon me. We just put Iran up two pegs in Baghdad. Now we gotta take them down a peg in Damascus by getting rid of the Baathists there who are run by the Alawites who
Speaker 0: are This is like Alpolism. Like, you you get drunk, then you feel terrible, so you have to get drunk again. Yeah. And it just gets worse.
Speaker 1: It's a government program. It's unbelievable.
Speaker 0: And just to restate, as I've said many times, but it can't be said enough, the Benghazi tragedy where a US ambassador and a number of American, well, CIA personnel were killed in Benghazi, Libya. The real point of that story, the reason they were there in the first place was moving Qaddafi's arms stockpiles to Al Qaeda linked groups
Speaker 1: Absolutely. In Syria. Yep. And so we're just talking about mentioned the drone war in Pakistan. In July of twenty twelve, the CIA killed an Al Qaeda Libyan Al Qaeda guy named Sheikh Yahya Al Libi.
His brother's the same guy that George Bush and Dick Cheney tortured into falsely claiming that Saddam Hussein supported Al Qaeda and Sheikh Ibn Al Libi and who later Qaddafi murdered in his prison cell in a case of Arkanside, as they call it, supposed suicide, because Gaddafi was cooperative in the terror war.
Speaker 0: Arkanside?
Speaker 1: Yes. When a friend of Bill or Hillary dies under mysterious circumstances. You know what I mean? Sorry. Excuse me.
They say he killed himself, but, boy, it seems like a weird angle. You know? Can't even
Speaker 0: that he stuffed himself. He stuffed his own corpse into the trunk.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And blew himself out the airlock. You know?
Speaker 0: But Arkin side. Sorry. Right over my head.
Speaker 1: Pardon me. I bring some of these things with me from the nineties. But so yeah. So now they killed Yaya Alibi, and then Zawahiri put out a podcast saying, hey. All good mujahideen in Libya.
You know how the Americans are stationed right in the middle of your hornet's nest? Well, time to reach out and touch someone. And he put out that podcast in, like, August. Then on September 11, on the anniversary of the attack, they reached out and got us. Is our guy what was Christopher Stevens doing there?
He was committing high treason on the orders of the president of The United States, not out of loyalty to Al Qaeda, but a loyalty to the Saudi king and to the Likud, that we hate the Shiites more because that's what these foreign client states of ours want. And so we're again, Hillary's bank shot. Her and Petraeus and Leon Panetta were working together. We take all these jihadis and all these weapons and ship them on to Syria for the war. So the war in Syria then was never a revolt.
The war in Syria was not a revolution or an uprising. The war in Syria was a foreign invasion by American, Turkish, Israeli, Saudi, and Qatari backed Al Qaeda mercenary terrorists. That's what it was. That was absolute treason and against. Why?
Because Assad, the secular dictator, as you said, the ophthalmologist who wasn't even supposed to be dictator, his older brother died in a car wreck. He was an eyeball doctor in London when he was summoned to be the dictator of Syria that well, he's friends with Iran, and he helps Iran back Hezbollah. And so that's it. We gotta get rid of him.
Speaker 0: It's just interesting. Okay. So that's a perspective, and whether the US government ought to be following orders from other countries is another question. But, you know, maybe you don't like Assad or or whatever, but the posture of the American media was just it was just crazy. In one day, it went from, you know, Assad's wife on the cover of Vogue to anyone who likes Assad is a bad American.
Mhmm. Tulsi Gabbard got drummed out of the Democratic Party just for talking to the guy. She was never even pro Assad.
Speaker 1: No. I'm glad you brought that up. So what was her problem? She had been stationed at Bilad Air Base during Iraq War two north of Baghdad at a medical unit. So I've never heard her talk about this, but it is fair to presume that she saw young guys screaming for their mama dying in front of her at that base.
Why? Because they were fighting against the Sunnis, fighting against Al Qaeda in Iraq. Now it's two years later, we're in Syria, and they're saying, we're flipping sides. We support the shirts now against the skins. Well, that's could Tulsi Gabbard is like, no.
Because she actually knows what she's talking about.
Speaker 0: Well, that was her that was her, like, obsessive mission Right. Was to get us to stop funding Al Qaeda.
Speaker 1: So she was always for the war on terrorism. She was just against the war for terrorism.
Speaker 0: No. It's so it's so right. And, I mean, she's more hawkish than a lot of people I respect. She's not a dove. That's for sure.
I mean, she's still in the US Army. That's right. So, like Yeah.
Speaker 1: She wants bin Ladenites dead, not empowered. Well, that's
Speaker 0: but what's so interesting is she's in the crosshairs now, and they're gonna try and know, the neocons are gonna try and take her down. I mean, they're trying now. It's it's really beyond belief. But
Speaker 1: her her
Speaker 0: point, so far as you know, you clearly follow this, was not, I love Assad.
Speaker 1: No. Of course not. It never was that. It was that you guys are saying that these so called rebels are good guys, but they're not. I know them.
Speaker 0: They're But what was Mod Nights? I mean, I'm not for Assad either. I'm totally agnostic on Assad. But, like, why does The US media take these positions at the order of whom? I don't know.
Is there a meeting that I missed? Yeah. Where all of a sudden, one day, like, someone is acting in a way that, you know, somebody doesn't like, and everybody has to get on board with it. No one ever explains why. Assad, and then who's that?
That I can't remember her name. The woman who runs the free press. Barry Weiss? Barry Weiss. All of a sudden, she's like, oh, Assad, he's bad.
You know? Assad, You don't know anything about anything.
Speaker 1: Yeah. She called famously on Joe Rogan show, she called Tulsi Gabbard and Assad toady. Well, exactly. And then Rogan says, what's a toady? And she says, I have no idea.
Well, she And didn't know even how to spell it. And
Speaker 0: Of course. And doesn't know anything about Assad other than you're supposed to hate him for some reason. Everyone doesn't hate him vehemently enough as a Nazi or something. I don't I don't really get it, but why obviously, Bareweiss is not a serious person, but there are serious people in the media who go along with this. Why?
Speaker 1: I mean, I it it really is astounding to me. I think mostly it's they don't learn anything and keep it. You know what I mean? They're not reflecting on like, Tulsi Gabbard's going, but these are my enemies from a year and a half ago, or they don't remember a year and a half ago. They don't they don't know that.
So, like, in Libya, before Syria even, it was responsibility to protect. They manufactured this ridiculous hoax that Qaddafi was about to exterminate every last man, woman, and child in the city of Benghazi. Barack Obama said, imagine the city of Charlotte being wiped off the face of the earth. Well, this is a complete hoax. At least Bill Clinton lied that a 100,000 people had already been killed in Kosovo.
Barack Obama's just lying that hundreds of thousands are about to be killed, and this is the responsibility to protect. And even though anyone who's looking critically at the press at the time, especially the British press, but even the American press, knows these are Bin Ladenites. These are radical Sunni fighters who just got home from Iraq, and now we don't care about the war on terrorism at all anymore. Now we're doing a humanitarian mission for Bin Ladenites.
Speaker 0: So how's the city of Benghazi, the ancient port city of Benghazi now?
Speaker 1: Well, it's under the control of a former American sock puppet dictator named Haftar. The city the country of Libya no longer exists. It was only created after World War two, and it's now divided in three in a state of low level civil war. And the leader of Tripoli is actually a guy named Bel Hajj, who was a former Bin Ladenite terrorist, who was actually kidnapped and tortured by the CIA and the Brits and sued the Brits and won for their Wait.
Speaker 0: So you're saying that we didn't successfully protect Benghazi?
Speaker 1: Nope. Not at all. You used a total hoax to launch that war. But now so I know we're running short on time here, but so importantly, now the support bit Obama administration support for the Bin Ladenites in Syria led to the rise of the Islamic State. Now they had renamed Al Qaeda in Iraq the Islamic State of Iraq back in 2006 after they killed Sarkawi, but they had no state.
They didn't even control a single county. It was a joke at the time. But now that Obama took their side in Syria, they ended up controlling all of Eastern Syria and consolidated a state by February right this time, February. Instead of going west and putting pressure on Assad, they just conquered the East of the country. Then six months later, they raised the black flag over Fallujah.
And Barack Obama was asked about this by Vanity Fair magazine, and he said, listen. Just because the junior varsity team puts on a Kobe Bryant doesn't mean that they're in the majors or whatever. So in other words, he he's calling Al Qaeda in Iraq the junior varsity. Not real terrorists, not anybody we need to be worried about. Well, six months later, this is the famous footage that everybody's familiar with of the long line of Toyota Helix pickup trucks with their headlights on roll right into Mosul, full of jihadis, and sack Mosul.
From there, they take over Samarra to Crete, Fallujah, and then about a year later, they took Ramadi. And so the Islamic State this was the creation of the Islamic State Caliphate. And the leader was this guy, Baghdadi, who was just Zarqawi's successor. He was the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, and he had sent his deputy, Jahlani, to go and run what was called Jabot al Nusra in Syria, and then he split with Jahlani and created his state. And so here he's like a cross between
Speaker 0: Whatever happened to Jelani?
Speaker 1: Oh, well, Jelani's actually the president of Syria right now.
Speaker 0: Wait a second, Scott. I don't believe that.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So Jelani
Speaker 0: so No. I'm I'm just joking, but it's like so
Speaker 1: so America fights Iraq War three on the Shiite side again. Right? Because we built the caliphate despite the Shiites because we're mad at them that we fought Iraq War two for them. But now that we built the caliphate, and this guy's like a cross between Bin Laden and Mussolini up on the balcony at the mosque declaring himself the caliph Ibrahim and all this. This is too much.
It's like Bin Laden himself owns a state now. We can't do that. So what do we do? We fight with the Shiites. The Iraqi Shiites we wish we hadn't fought Iraq War two for, all their Iranian backed Shiite militias.
These are the guys who crushed the Islamic State. And in Tikrit, you literally had American airplanes flying air cover for the Iranian Quds force on the ground. And the Americans saying, well, it is the Quds Force, but at least they're helping us kill ISIS. And on the ground, the Quds Force guys saying, well, it is the Americans, but at least they're providing us good air cover as they're liberating Saddam Hussein's hometown from the Bin Ladenites. And so this is Iraq War three to beginning in August of twenty fourteen through the end of twenty seventeen, basically, Trump's first year was the destruction of the caliphate that Obama had built despite the Shiites for Bush giving them Baghdad.
And and then, of course, spreading Bin Ladenite terrorism elsewhere throughout the world even worse. And so then this brings us back to Iran because that war ended with Russia in intervening in Syria and protecting the Assad regime and preventing America from completing his overthrow. So from the end of Obama, basically, through Trump's first term and through Biden's term, you had Jelani and Al Qaeda were hiding up in basically kept safe by the Turks up in the Idlib province, which is this rural province in Northwestern Syria. And in last November, early December of twenty four, they broke out of their pen in a big October 7 style attack, and they sacked Hama, Homs, Aleppo, and Damascus in fourteen days and or ten days, twelve days and took over the
Speaker 0: country. December.
Speaker 1: And, you know, our president said this is a a strong guy with a very strong past. Well, his strong past is murdering American soldiers, fighting and killing American soldiers in Mosul and Ramadi. Why would Iraq drop to
Speaker 0: sanctions against him. Because that's
Speaker 1: what Israel wants. Because Israel hates the Shiites more, and the Alawites were friends with the Shiites. And so they don't mind the Bin Ladenites. Even though the Bin Ladenites targeted us over Israel's crimes, they've never given Israel a problem directly. And in fact, one of the Israeli intelligence or military officials admitted to the press when he was asked, why do you guys give aid and comfort to Al Qaeda in the war?
You give him medical treatment and all these things. And he said, well, you know, it's the humanitarian thing to do. And they said, well, do you give that same kind of support to Hezbollah when they're injured on the battlefield? And he goes, well, of course not. They're our enemies.
And the reporter says, yeah. But Al Qaeda attacked The United States. Says, yeah. What's that got to do with us? So they're worried about their national interests, and our country somehow worried about their national interests instead of ours.
So why in the world would any American prefer a bin Ladenite to Assad, a Baathist? Only because they hate the Shiites more. Only because they put Israel's interest before those of The United States. That's the one and only answer to that.
Speaker 0: Yeah. And again, if you care about the Christian the ancient Christian population of Syria has been there two thousand years. Yeah. You know, they're being massacred now.
Speaker 1: Yeah. My friend Brad Hoff I should have brought you this. I have extra copy of this. My friend Brad Hoff wrote a great book called Syria crucified, which is all stories of Syrian Christians going through the hell of Obama's dirty war there. And they're in danger right now.
There was a suicide bombing by an Al Qaeda tied guy at a church in Syria three days ago.
Speaker 0: I just don't understand. I do repeat myself at the age of 56, but I I don't I can't control it. Where are American churches lecturing us about those who bless Israel or whatever? Again, I'm not against Israel, but shouldn't American churches care about Syrian churches, about their brothers in Christ in Syria? And they they support a government that's like whose policies basically are are killing all the all the Christians in the whole region.
Yep. That's just a fact. I mean, I
Speaker 1: don't completely destroy the Christian the Chaldean Christian communities of Iraq. They don't exist anymore. They're gone.
Speaker 0: Oh, I know.
Speaker 1: They're scattered to the winds. And the the Marianites and the different kinds of Christians in Syria, you know, there there was a village in I don't I think they reconstituted the village later, but for years, there was a village where they speak Aramaic. Because when the last places in the world where they speak Aramaic and the Bin Ladenites took that town over and, you know, tyrannize those people for two or three years during the last war there, now they're in charge. They've been slaughtering Alawites and slaughtering Christians. Oh, I know.
And it's it promises to get nothing but worse from here.
Speaker 0: But where are the Christians in this country when the IDF rolls into an all Christian town in the West Bank?
Speaker 1: They're in their Schofield Bible. It says Israel can do whatever they want.
Speaker 0: Well, I mean, you know, whatever. I'm not I hate theological debates. I'm not qualified to have one, but I do think if you're a Christian and you see other Christians murdered, you can't take the side of the people who are making that possible. I just don't I mean, what you think Jesus is for that? Is that what you're saying to me?
Speaker 1: Well, I think, you know, probably most Americans assume that, like, in in Israel Palestine, that the Christians are Israelis and that they're allies with the Israeli Jews against the evil Muslims. And they just don't know that that's not true. In fact They're persecuted. They're persecuted and occupied along
Speaker 0: ask them. If you ask them, then all these liars in The United States will tell you, well, they're in Al Qaeda. They're in Al Qaeda, really? Yes. Some Christian priest in the West Bank is actually in Al Qaeda.
Okay.
Speaker 1: Right. So you wanna talk about Iran's nuclear program?
Speaker 0: I do. Yeah. Let's let's roll through it.
Speaker 1: This is a
Speaker 0: nuclear program.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So the Ayatollah w Bush puts Iran, Iraq, and North Korea in the axis of evil in 02/2002. And of all the preposterous lies, Saddam and the Ayatollah are allies when no two men in the world hate each other more than these two. Right? And they're allies with Osama bin Laden, who is no friend of the Ayatollah and who Saddam Hussein is obviously deathly afraid of and has nothing to do with whatsoever.
And then Kim in North Korea, which he had sold some missiles to Iran, but they got no tight alliance. And I think it's pretty clear that the only reason that they put North Korea in there is because if they had said the axis of evil is Iran, Iraq, and Syria, you might have wondered whether the speech was written in Tel Aviv or not. So they went ahead and threw North Korea in there. That's a whole other interview. I like talking about that one too.
But so Saddam Hussein's strategy is to say, here's my 12,000 page dossier on all the weapons I ever had. It's the same stuff his son-in-law Hussein Kamal had given up in 1995. There was nothing else to show. They knew by the end of ninety five he'd given up everything. Any weapons left in the country had been declared and had just been left there by the inspectors to rot in the sun.
Shelf life expired anyway. They had no nuclear program or any of that stuff, but they just wasn't good enough. They were able to just buffalo us into that war no matter what. The North Koreans, they were bullied. I'll skip the details, but people can read how Bush pushed North Korea to nukes by Gordon Prather.
It's the last article the great Gordon Prather wrote for us at antiwar.com. It's really great. Explains how they essentially bullied Kim into leaving the treaty and starting to make nukes, which you noticed we don't mess with North Korea anymore. No. Can't.
The Ayatollah in Iran took a different tactic. In fact, I'll go ahead and throw in Libya. Gaddafi didn't have a nuclear program. He just had warehouses full of crates full of junk that he bought from the Pakistanis. He didn't have the men with the know how to build a nuclear program of any description anyway, but that was enough for him to trade away to Bush for normalization.
It was seven years later that Barack Obama stabbed him in the back, started literally lynched him
Speaker 0: to death. Stabbed him in the rectum, I think,
Speaker 1: with a bayonet. And then shot him in the side of the head on the side of the road. But then the Ayatollah said, look, my books are open. I'm part of the nonproliferation treaty. I have a safeguards agreement with the IAEA.
Hands up. Don't shoot. You have no costus belly here. And that has been essentially his strategy this whole time. Now they made facilities at Natanz and later at Fordo.
The war party says that these were top secret facilities that were only revealed by Israel. That's not true. They did buy junk from AQ Khan, the Pakistani nuclear technology supplier distributor, but only because America wouldn't let them buy a light water reactor from China. Bill Clinton had just let the Chinese sell them a light water reactor, which cannot produce weapons fuel as waste, then everything would have been fine then. But they basically drove them to the black market where they got uranium enrichment equipment, and they started enriching uranium at Natanz in 02/2005.
Now they weren't in violation of the deal because the deal says you have to announce within six months before introducing nuclear material in any machines that you're going to do so, and they did that. And they have developed, quite frankly, a latent nuclear deterrent. So that makes them what they call a threshold state, the same as Brazil or Germany or Japan. Meaning, they've proven they've mastered the fuel cycle. They know how to enrich uranium.
They could enrich up to weapons grade, but so let's not fight and we won't have to go that far. So that's essentially what they've had this whole time. The Americans the Washington DC during the w Bush years, they just lied that there's a secret parallel nuclear program that's really a nuclear weapons program that's going on there too. And the IAEA can't find it, but trust us, it's there. And they never explained it because they couldn't because they were lying.
They just heavily implied it all the time. Secret, illicit nuclear weapons program as though the thing existed, which it never did. And we almost went to war over it a couple of times, but it was stopped in 2007 by the commander of CENTCOM, admiral Fallon, and then later the CIA and the n I the National Intelligence Council put out their NIE of November 2007 saying they have not decided to make nuclear weapons. Bush complained in his memoir, w Bush, that, well, how was I supposed to attack them? He said, oh, I'm so sorry, your highness, to the king of Saudi Arabia.
I can't attack them because my own intelligence agencies say they're not making nukes. And if they don't have a military program, I can't do anything. So his hands were tied, he thought. And then this was essentially the status quo until Obama comes in and Netanyahu comes in right before Obama does. It comes back to power.
And he starts threatening like he's going to attack Iran and drag us into it. At this point, Zabinda Brzezinski even said, if Netanyahu flies planes over Iraq to attack Iran, Obama should shoot them down over Iraq. So I know Robert Kennedy says Brzezinski was the founder of the neoconservative movement, but no. He was never a neocon, and they hated each other sometimes. They worked together on Russia issues.
They he was a two state solution guy and definitely not a lacutnik and not on Iran, especially. But so Obama was, I think, really worried. A lot of people were really worried that Netanyahu was going to start the war in his first term and drag him into it. And so the way to prevent that was to create the JCPOA, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the John Kerry nuclear deal.
Speaker 0: That was the point of
Speaker 1: it. That was the point was we already have an NPT, and we already have a safeguards agreement, but essentially, everybody's pretending that they don't exist. The western media is following the Likud party line that there's essentially nothing stopping Iran from making a nuke right now if we don't hit them. So Obama said, fine. We'll just add another layer of deal on top of that.
Speaker 0: So But the but the Iran deal was a way to keep Netanyahu from starting over with Iran and dragging us in.
Speaker 1: Yes. Although
Speaker 0: I feel like
Speaker 1: we're watching bluffing. Don't I don't think Netanyahu really was going to do it back then. I think he did it here because he had Trump's permission. I'm not certain of that. I don't think I don't know if you know, but I don't know that it's really clear exactly.
But I think at that time, he was really just bluffing and was trying to get Obama to to do something at least to roll back their program, if not completely eliminate it. But so what they did was the JCPOA, you know, Trump called it the worst deal that any men ever signed or whatever. It's just not really true. I mean, what it did was it severely rolled back their nuclear program. So they poured concrete in their Iraq, that's a r a k, their Iraq heavy water reactor.
They severely restricted the number of centrifuges spinning at Natanz by two thirds, I believe it was. They turned the Fordo or the comm facility into a research only facility, no uranium production there. And then the deal is that they wanted to the American side wanted for Iran to export any stockpile of enriched nuclear material out of the country so that if they withdrew from the treaty and kicked the inspectors out of the country and started beating their chest and declared, now we're making a bomb, it would take them a year. This is what they call the breakout period. It would take them a year to have enough fissile material to make a single gun type nuke out of.
And so they wanted to make it that difficult. So they would have to ship out all their uranium to France, and the French would turn it into fuel rods and ship it back, and they would burn that in their heavy water reactor. Now there's two routes to the nuclear bomb. Forget the h bomb for a minute. We're just talking about fission bombs, atom bombs.
The plutonium route, like the Nagasaki bomb, was already precluded because even though their heavy water reactor produces plutonium waste, it's heavily polluted with other isotopes, and so you need a reprocessing facility to get all that out to make usable fuel. They don't have that reprocessing facility. The Russians had the right to come and get all their waste and take it back to Russia to be diluted down there. So there was no plutonium route to the bomb. Now the uranium route to the bomb is interesting because and this is something that you may have been referring to about, I make corrections when I'm wrong.
I had overstated this on the Pierce Morgan show and on breaking points last week and two weeks ago, and so I I was trying to fix that with this statement, and and they did let me go back on breaking points to address it. That what I was what I had said wrongly was that you can't really make an implosion bomb that you could miniaturize out of uranium. That's not correct. You can. What you can't do is make a gun type nuke out of plutonium, and I had overstated that.
But my point more or less still stands because my point was that if Iran broke out and raced to a bomb in that one year breakout capability, it's virtually like unanimous among the experts that if they wanted to to race and get a bomb as fast as they could, it would be a simple gun type nuke like the kind America dropped on Hiroshima, which is essentially a uranium slug fired into a uranium target, and it just causes a supercritical mass there. But to do that, it's too big to miniaturize and fit onto Iran's missiles in their nose cones or any of that. So if they had they raced to a nuke, they would have one that they could test in the desert, but they couldn't really deliver other than strapped to the back of a flatbed truck or like put it in an airliner or something Right. Which they couldn't get to Israel and they couldn't use it. If they were to even make an implosion bomb with uranium though, it would take years worth of testing and development to get the implosion system right to make it work.
So they couldn't race toward a bomb if they wanted to make a bomb small enough to marry to a missile to be able to deliver to anyone. So in other words, even if they withdrew from the dreadie, kicked out the inspectors, and started making nukes, it's very likely that their first nuke or two would be simple undeliverable gun type nukes that would be not much more of a deterrent than their latent deterrent. So now Trump gets out of the deal in 2018 at Netanyahu's behest, and there were problems with the deal. It had sunset provisions in it that said, you know, after a certain period of time, you can increase your number of centrifuges again and these other things. Now I believe that if Trump had come in and told Netanyahu to pipe down in his first term, I mean, and had said to the Ayatollah, now listen.
I don't like this deal. It was my predecessor's deal, and I wanna improve it. Let's get along. I'll take it at face value. I came into office with this agreement.
Let's see if we can improve it. Let's see if we can get rid of some of these sunset provisions. Let's see if we can find a way to renegotiate the deal and make it better. He didn't do that. He just withdrew.
And in consequence of that, it's actually part of the deal that Iran is allowed to stop abiding by some of restrictions in the deal and still stay within the deal if America breaks its agreement first. And and so they did. They started enriching after Israel murdered their top weapon scientist, Fakhrizada, or or pardon me, his top nuclear scientist. I don't know that he was a weapon scientist at all. Their top nuclear scientist in December of twenty, they started enriching up to 20% again, which is still legitimate.
They need 20% enriched uranium two thirty five for their medical isotope reactors. But then in April, the Israelis did a sabotage mission at Natanz, and they bragged about it. They were the ones who did it. And in reaction to that, the Iranians then started enriching up to 60% uranium two thirty five. Now you need really above 90% to make an effective uranium atom bomb.
It's technically possible to make one with above 80% enriched uranium two thirty five. Mark Dubowitz says you can make one with 60% enriched uranium two thirty five, but I don't think that's really right. But anyway.
Speaker 0: What's the point of doing it then?
Speaker 1: Typically, to 60%. Right. Good question. Because this is what you'll hear all the hawks say. Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, and all of them say over and over again that, oh, yeah.
Well, what do they need the 60% for? To negotiate away. That was why. They're trying to get America back in the deal. If they had wanted to race toward weapons grade uranium, they could have just raced toward weapons grade uranium and enriched it up to 90%.
They're going up to 60 because it makes them closer. It means their breakout time is shorter, and they're trying to put pressure on the Americans to get back into the deal, which we already had in which they are still officially a part of. And so that was why they were going up to 60%.
Speaker 0: They're still officially a part of
Speaker 1: it. They're still officially part because they signed the JCPOA with France and Britain, The United States, Russia, and China, all the members of the the permanent members of the UN Security Council. So they're still part of the JCPOA. It still is the law, basically. It's still the international law and their agreement.
But as I said, there are there are subsections of the of the agreement itself that say that if America stops abiding by our part of it, they can stop abiding by some of the restrictions even while remaining inside the deal. So they were really just the the purpose of the 60% was to try to force America back to the table. And Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, was so disingenuous. I saw him give a statement on the Sunday morning news show last week where I guess, on this week, where he says, the only countries that have 60% uranium have nuclear weapons. No.
Come on, man. That's just obfuscation. You know, if we're making nuclear weapons out of uranium, it's not at 60%, which all ours are plutonium bombs anyway. But he knows what he's doing when he says that. Right?
He wants you to understand that Iran is racing toward a nuke without actually claiming that because he knows it's really not true. And and then there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for the 60% was it was to negotiate away. But so now Trump gives them their deadline, they pass the deadline, and I'm not exactly certain what happens, but Israel starts the war. Donald Trump comes in, what, a week into it, ten days into it, and bombs Forto, Natanz, and Isfahan. Isfahan is where they have the conversion facility to transform uranium or and metal to gas and then back again.
It has to be uranium hexafluoride gas is what they spin and enrich, and then they turn it back into metal. And they bond all three of those. And I don't know for certain the extent of the damage. Although I did read a report by David Albright, who's a nuclear weapons expert who talked about they got commercial satellite footage, and and he seemed to think that they had done significant damage to Natanz, Fordo, and Isfahan, and all the important nuclear facilities there. So in other words, Donald j Trump called the Ayatollah's Bluff.
You say you have a latent nuclear deterrent, and I better not attack you or else then you might make one, which he never said that outright, but that was clearly the implication of the Iranian program. Alright. Well, I'm bombing your program. So now what are you gonna do? And, you know, their other bluff was that they would shoot their mid range missiles at our bases in the Gulf Region.
In in Qatar, we have CENTCOM headquarters at all the all you did air base there, and our fifth fleet stationed at Bahrain. We have tens of thousands of army soldiers in Kuwait, and they were all essentially hostage to Iranian missiles. But when it came down to it, they didn't dare. They that was their bluff. We called their bluff, and they didn't dare.
What'd do? They shot Trump dropped 14 bombs on them. They fired 14 missiles at Qatar, and they called him in advance and warned him, we're about to fire 14 missiles. Get ready to shoot them down. In other words, a purely symbolic retaliation against The United States.
While they're still firing missiles at Tel Aviv, he didn't dare to hit American forces in The Gulf, not this time at least for probably out of fear of what Donald Trump would do. Now this is the same Ayatollah who they say can't wait to cause the apocalypse and nuke Israel even if every last Iranian gets nuked off the face of the earth. He doesn't care because he wants the end of the world, and yet he doesn't dare pick a fight with Donald Trump and telegraphs, I do not wanna fight you every chance that he gets with the American superpower. So now where does that leave us? Either I've been right for fifteen, twenty years warning that if we bomb them, that is the most likely thing to cause them to then now race for a nuke.
Or Trump is right, and he has just degraded their program so severely that there's no point in even restarting it again. He's got the credible threat that he'll just start bombing it again if they try. And so his position seems to be I think he said, I don't need a new nuclear deal because there's no nuclear there. Now I'm not certain that's true, that he's completely decimated what they have. But it I guess, as as we're recording this, it very much remains to be seen what is the long term reaction of the Iranians, whether they are now going to weaponize their latent program.
They've already kicked the all the inspectors out of the country. And and I saw this headline, and I don't know the entire story here, but a lower cleric, not the supreme leader, but a lower cleric has now issued a for president Trump like they did to Salman Rushdie order on his life, which I know a great journalist named Ken Silva who's really put the lie to and showed and debunked these kind of FBI hoaxes about these Iranian assassination plots against Trump. They're really not true. And Ken Silva is the guy's name. He's excellent reporter from headline USA.
And the institute, we're gonna publish his book about the assassination attempts against Trump that he's working on now. And he's really debunked those, but I don't think there's really much debunk in this other than that this public statement came from a lower level cleric who I guess could be overridden by the Ayatollah if the Ayatollah would be so wise as to say, actually, we didn't mean that and try to find a way to move forward because a death threat against a very credible threat like that against the life of the president of United States is the kind of thing to absolutely solidify American support for even further war against their countries of his Of course. A huge error for
Speaker 0: them to Who's the guy who issued it? Is it meaningful? Does it in any sense?
Speaker 1: Yeah. Can it be walked back?
Speaker 0: Yeah. Does he speak for the religious authorities of Iran or not? You know, I I don't know the answer, but I agree. That's nuts. Don't do that.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And and look back to Brzezinski. He and Alexander Haig said in 1993, you know, we should normalize relations with Iran. We should build an oil pipeline across that country and get along with them. Thyatollah keeps preferring that modernists and reformers win the presidency.
You know, Ahmadinejad was a big counter to that, but Raffinjani and Kutami and Yeah. And these other guys, Rouhani and these other presidents that we've had, they want to get along with The United States. I mean, Tucker, if you're the Ayatollah, what are you gonna do with a problem like The USA? We're the global empire armed to the teeth with h bombs, and we do nothing but dictate to them all day. And they do what they have to to survive, essentially.
And this is why the Israelis and their partisans always have to resort to this propaganda about how, no, the Ayatollah wants the end times. He wants to force the twelfth Amam to come back and blow up the world and all of these things. So they essentially have to resort to those claims in order to, you know, obfuscate or to confuse the issue of just why wouldn't Iran's government act in their national interest as close as they can for their own short term survival, which is the obvious correct way and medium term survival, which is obviously the correct way to look at it.
Speaker 0: Is Iran the last government on the list? Yes. So
Speaker 1: is Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, meaning especially, you know, Hezbollah and Southern Lebanon.
Speaker 0: Israelah.
Speaker 1: Israelah is dead. Libya, Somalia, and Sudan, which they they we've been at war in Somalia since 02/2001. It's the longest war in American history. That's a whole other interview for you. And Sudan, at least the CIA broke off the south from the North, and they've had a regime change there.
Luckily, we didn't go to war against Sudan. And and then last on the list was Iran.
Speaker 0: So let's say there is regime change in Iran, and the point of this is not to stop their nuclear program. That's like absurd. The point is to change the government there by force. Let's say that happens, not a single one of the countries you just listed has been a success, I think we can say. You know, hasn't helped The United States, hasn't helped the people of that country, hasn't helped the region.
It's crazier than it was twenty years ago by a lot. So what happens if Iran gets regime change?
Speaker 1: Well, then Osama bin Laden throws a party in hell, first of all. Right? Again, doing the bin Laden night's dirty work there. You know, the Israelis were posting pictures then piling around with the Shah of Pahlavi's son saying we're just gonna parachute him in there, And his royal majesty will take over because that's the American way is installing royal monarchs over people.
Speaker 0: I think he's in The US. Chalabi's not Chalabi. Sorry. Palavi. Same difference.
Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Is there like a groundswell of popular support for him to come back and establish a monarchy?
Speaker 1: I doubt it. You know, they talk about putting the Mujahideeni cult in there too, which is this crazy communist terrorist cult. They kidnap people's children and, you know, force them to be celibate and all this, like, total heaven's gate cult type stuff was this group that had helped with the Iranian revolution, then they weren't went to work for Saddam Hussein, then and helped Saddam crush the Shiite revolution insurrection in '91. And then Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney took possession of them when America invaded Iraq and then turned them over to the Israelis who use them as Israeli or pardon me, as intelligence cutouts, usually to deliver false claims against Iran and their nuclear program. And they're now kept safe at an American base in Albania.
And they have talked for years about somehow, like, believe in their own BS about how somehow they could use the MEK to do a regime change in Iran, that there would be some groundswell of support for them. I mean, we're talking, like, total kooks here.
Speaker 0: What was the celibacy part?
Speaker 1: Control.
Speaker 0: So they demand celibacy from their followers?
Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. And like any member has to raise their hand to speak like kindergarten. They kidnap their children and take them away to keep them under total control. It's a real sick call.
Speaker 0: Emmy k, I mean, aren't there members of congress and various administration officials who are dealing with them?
Speaker 1: Yep. And you take money from them and speak at their conferences and all of that. Actually? Oh,
Speaker 0: Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1: Including I really like Dana Rohrabacher, but he's one of them. And quite a few of those guys have been toeing the line for
Speaker 0: the Is this the group that Pompeo was
Speaker 1: connected with? I believe so. Yeah. And then most of the time, the the propaganda that they push are total hoaxes. I mean, just a few weeks ago, right, like one week before the bombing started, maybe two weeks, the NCRI, the National Council for Resistance in Iran, which is their front group, put out a thing saying, hey.
Look. Satellite pictures of this new base in Iran, which we swear is a nuclear weapons facility. And that went nowhere. It's just some Israeli propaganda that they funneled through this group, but then the CIA didn't vouch for that, and it wasn't one of the targets that was bombed in the recent campaign or anything.
Speaker 0: This is like a wasteland of, like, deception and shifting alliances and broken promises and shattered dreams. I mean, like, everything you've said for the past two whatever hours it's been is so depressing and also confusing, but more than anything, utterly divorced from America's national interest.
Speaker 1: None
Speaker 0: of this has anything to do with what's happening in New York City. Right. Right. Or Eugene, Oregon or anywhere. And I just wondered, do you since you work on this full time, do you imagine a time in our lifetimes where the attention of the US government has drawn back to The United States?
Some attempt is made to improve life here.
Speaker 1: Or is it their dead bodies, I mean, figuratively speaking, that, like, yeah, it'll have to be a coalition of Americans who just will not stand for it anymore. And we're already at the point, Tucker, where they would much prefer to backbend Lodden night suicide bombers and fly predator and reaper drones around than send the third infantry division anywhere. They know we won't stand for it. Right? Iraq War two, I think, was the last gasp for these large scale
Speaker 0: land invasions. Yeah.
Speaker 1: We got the Vietnam syndrome again, and we don't wanna do that. I mean, there's a huge movement in this country now called defend the guard, which is led by veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. They're trying to get the state law the state legislatures to pass laws forbidding the governor from transferring national guard troops to the president for foreign combat without an official declaration of war from the congress, which they know they'll never get. And these are guys who are just saying enough of this. We're not doing this anymore.
And they saw their boys die over there for
Speaker 0: The guard got screwed. Yeah. I saw it. I mean, people don't remember, but before 02/2001, really 02/2003, the National Guard wasn't a joke exactly, but people did make fun of it. Like weekend warriors, they're not really in the military.
Speaker 1: They're like the secondary reserve.
Speaker 0: Yeah. I mean, exactly. And then the next thing you know, like, they're fighting a real war. Yeah. And I don't think that they signed up for that.
Speaker 1: Yep. No. They didn't. They clearly didn't. You joined the National Guard to Sandbag Rivers during floods
Speaker 0: Totally.
Speaker 1: And put out country in emergencies.
Speaker 0: Yes. But then to get, you know, benefits and all that. I mean Yep. Whether that's a good system or not is another question, but that's that's the deal they signed.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 0: And the next thing you know, these guys from, like, every little town in America are, like, fighting a hot war in Iraq. I mean, I saw it. I was like, wow. The guardsmen are doing that?
Speaker 1: Yep. And getting suicide bombed. Right? Going through the Oh, and dying. Of it.
Speaker 0: Oh, for sure.
Speaker 1: Rest of the guys. Yep.
Speaker 0: Do you know what percentage of Americans killed in Iraq were guardsmen? No. I don't. It was not insignificant.
Speaker 1: Yeah. No. It was it was plenty. It's 4,500 troops overall, marines and soldiers and airmen died, and then, you know, another couple of thousand contractors and then high tens of thousands. A couple
Speaker 0: of thousand contractors? Yeah.
Speaker 1: And many tens of thousands wounded. And there's a study at the cost of war project. This is now many years old, Tucker. This is five, six, seven years old or something. They did a study where they had determined that 30,000 veterans had killed themselves since
Speaker 0: coming home. I know one. Yeah. No. I believe that completely.
Speaker 1: Yeah. It's really messed up.
Speaker 0: So just to close out the second half of my final question, you said I asked, you know, will our leaders ever turn their attention to, like, their actual job, which is in protecting and improving America? And you said over their dead bodies. But are you hopeful at all that changes Yeah.
Speaker 1: Coming? Yeah. Look, I mean, I think my most important mission as director of the Libertarian Institute and editorial director of antiwar dot com and all that is reaching out to the MAGA right, the America First right. You just you can't have a limited republic and a world empire. You can't have a constitutional government and a bill of rights and have your government be the most powerful force on the planet attempting to dominate the entire old world.
There's just completely contrary forms of governmental systems to have. And, you know, we mentioned William f Buckley. Buckley wrote in 1952 in the common wheel magazine that because of the emergency of this Soviet Union, Americans must accept a totalitarian bureaucracy on our shores even with Truman at the reins of it all in order to wage the Cold War and prevent the Soviet Union from taking over the world. Well, Soviet Union is dead and gone. Right?
It was the the red flag came down on Christmas day nineteen ninety one. And somehow we still must accept the totalitarian bureaucracy on our shores even with Obama or Biden at the reins of it all in order to what? To prevent the Ayatollah from threatening Israel? Well, that doesn't sound like the global threat of Soviet Stalinist communism to me. It sounds far dumbed down, especially when you're talking about a power that again we could have normalized relations with a long time ago if the Israelis hadn't stopped us from doing so.
It's it's just intolerable. And look. And I think American right wingers know. Because conservative sons who went and died in these wars, liberals are no good enough fight anyway. They can monger war all they want, but does anybody think they're gonna go and fight?
It's not. No. So if the American right you know, the Colin Powell doctrine said it was the wine Casper Weinberger Colin Powell doctrine said, the American people must be united behind any war before we launch it, And then we better know exactly what the exit strategy is, exactly what the stakes for victory are, so we can go in there and win
Speaker 0: so attacked by the neo
Speaker 1: Oh, they hated him for that. And then so w Bush said, forget the pal doctrine. You know what? We don't need America United. We just need the right.
As long as the right is all hyped up on let's go and kick butt, then we can do what we want. But then Obama showed that when he tried to get the right to line up behind him and go to Syria in 2013 over that fake sarin attack in Gouda, They said no. In fact, there are soldiers these were memes that went around soldiers holding up signs that said, I didn't join the Marine Corps. I didn't join the army to fight I know marines are not soldiers. Troops holding up signs saying, I didn't join the army to fight a civil war for Al Qaeda in Syria.
And they had to stop. And the American right was not willing to follow Barack Obama into battle. Same for Joe Biden. And I would say it should be the same thing here and no matter who the president is. This is the era of the phony wars.
This is America's attempt to maintain a global hegemony that we should not have in the first place, which is essentially murder suicide to our own society anyway.
Speaker 0: Can't maintain it anyway. And we can't. Even if it was a good idea, even if it was helping us, we've reached the the limits of our resources.
Speaker 1: That's right. People are so afraid that China's gonna take over the world if we can't. But we have a $37,000,000,000,000 national debt, and we can't do it. If we can't afford it, they can't either. So we can have a multipolar world where we figure out you know, and Donald Trump himself said in his first few days in power here, he said, you know what?
I don't wanna pivot from the Middle East to great power conflict. I don't wanna have conflict with anyone. We should be able to get along with Russia and with China and with the Middle Eastern powers and just have a century of prosperity ahead of us. That's America first. And I believe, Tucker, that Donald Trump could get on a plane and go to Tehran right now.
He could go from there to Moscow to Beijing and then Pyongyang, and he could come home and be Trump the great and spend the rest of his term overseeing the retrenchment of American power and the building up of peace and prosperity here.
Speaker 0: Yep. I it makes me sad to hear that. I of course, I strongly agree with that. That's why I campaigned for him. But, you know, there are people who don't want that in Washington.
Speaker 1: Yeah. But you know what? That's what the people of the country want. I agree. That's who voted for him.
Speaker 0: I agree.
Speaker 1: You know, they say, well, there are these factions of war hawks who supported him too. That's true, and they have money. But who turned out to vote for him? The people who turned out to vote for him were the people who heard America first. Yeah.
And that means defend America first. That doesn't mean be George Bush, the selfish jerk, and go around do whatever you want. It means leave the world to hell alone. Take care of our problems.
Speaker 0: I couldn't agree more. Scott Horton, author of, among others, Time to End the War on Terrorism. Thank you.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Tucker. I appreciate it.
Posted - September 3, 2024 at 8:40 PM
Saved - September 5, 2024 at 12:24 AM
reSee.it AI Summary
I initiated a thread discussing why I view Churchill as a principal villain of World War II. While he didn’t directly cause the most deaths, his leadership was pivotal in making the war happen. I traced his actions back to World War I, where he implemented a devastating hunger blockade against Germany, leading to countless civilian deaths. Despite various peace overtures from Germany, Churchill escalated the conflict, ignoring opportunities for negotiation. I argue that the war was not inevitable and that Churchill's warmongering significantly contributed to the ensuing atrocities.
@martyrmade - Martyr Made
Time for a Churchill thread? Time for a Churchill thread. Let's do this. Why I think Churchill was a chief villain of World War 2. /0
@martyrmade - Martyr Made
I know that sounds like hyperbole. Churchill didn’t order the most deaths, oversee the most atrocities, or commit the worst crimes. But most of those crimes could not have been committed if the war had not happened, and Churchill was the leader most intent on making it happen. /1
@martyrmade - Martyr Made
You'll think, "But Darryl, everyone knows the war started after Germany invaded Poland, + Austria & Czechoslovakia before that. It could have been prevented if only people had listened to Churchill , and taken a tougher line against Hitler." And you might be right. Sort of. /2
@martyrmade - Martyr Made
Let's rewind the clock to World War 1. Churchill is boss of the British Navy, and in 1915 he implements a hunger blockade of Germany and Austria-Hungary. Over the course of the war, up to three-quarters of a million Germans would die of starvation and hunger-related causes. /3
@martyrmade - Martyr Made
"The blockade," wrote Churchill, "treated the whole of Germany as if it were a beleaguered fortress, and avowedly sought to starve the whole population - men, women, and children, old and young, wounded and sound, into submission." /4
@martyrmade - Martyr Made
"That's awful," you'll say, "but war is hell." But for two-and-a-half centuries, Europeans had refrained from tactics like mass starvation and other means of targeting civilian populations when they fought each other. It was a high point of civilization in that regard. /5
@martyrmade - Martyr Made
Germany agreed to an armistice in 1918, expecting to meet at the table of peace to discuss terms. Instead, Britain maintained the blockade - even after the Kaiser had abdicated and a republic was declared - and starved Germany for eight more months. Some 100k more were killed. /6
@martyrmade - Martyr Made
Who was being killed? Ask Churchill. Remember this is after the war is *over*: "We are enforcing the blockade w/rigour... (regretting that) this weapon of starvation... falls mainly on the women and children, upon the old and weak and poor, after all the fighting has stopped." /7
@martyrmade - Martyr Made
When it was clear that the British were willing to starve all Germany to death, the new gov't signed a treaty that placed responsibility for the war not on the Kaiser’s autocracy, but on the whole German people. The terms would keep Germany in destitution for another decade. /8
@martyrmade - Martyr Made
A young Adolf Hitler's fantasies about lebensraum were born of watching his people starve in the streets. Her enemies could plunder overseas colonies for resources, but Germany find them closer to home, or else every war would end with millions of Germans starving to death. /9
@martyrmade - Martyr Made
Its 1920, and Britain is busy pacifying Iraqi tribes. Churchill insists the RAF must "proceed w/work on gas bombs, especially mustard gas, which would inflict punishment on recalcitrant natives... I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes." /10
@martyrmade - Martyr Made
In 1929, Churchill wrote that although the fighting had temporarily ceased, "Death stands at attention. Obedient, expectant, ready to serve, ready to shear away peoples en masse; ready... to pulverise, without hope of repair, what is left of civilisation." /11
@martyrmade - Martyr Made
As late as 1937, Churchill's opinion of Hitler was not hostile: "Those who have met Hitler face to face... have found a highly competent, cool, well-informed functionary with an agreeable manner, a disarming smile, and few have been unaffected by a subtle personal magnetism." /12
@martyrmade - Martyr Made
On the other hand, he said Trotsky had "the organizing ability of a Carnot, the cold detached intelligence of a Machiavelli, the mob oratory of a Cleon, the ferocity of Jack the Ripper, the toughness of a Titus Oates... (And finally) he is still a Jew. Nothing could get over that." /13
@martyrmade - Martyr Made
Like Hitler, Churchill blamed Jews for communism, and revolutions dating back to 1789, describing the Bolsheviks as a band of underworld Jews "(gripping) the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire." /14
@martyrmade - Martyr Made
During the 1924 election, Churchill circulated a forged letter purporting to be from Soviet leader Zinoviev, plotting revolution on the streets of London. Like Boomercons pointedly saying Barack *Hussein* Obama, Churchill cited "the letter of Zinoviev, alias Apfelbaum..." /15
@martyrmade - Martyr Made
Churchill's public attitude toward Hitler and Germany was openly hostile after 1938. Some have pointed out that he faced bankruptcy and loss of his family estate, when he was bailed out (w/a gift, not a loan) by a wealthy Zionist. If there is any direct evidence that Churchill was bought, though, I am not aware of it, and there are many simpler explanations for his change of heart, given that the war faction of which he was seeking leadership, became more prominent and belligerent after Hitler's annexations of Austria and the Sudetenland. Also, Churchill had been a booster of Zionism for at least 20 years, so there is no need to point to under-the-table payments as the source of his opinions. Finally, while there were many wealthy Zionists (both Jews and converts of the Disraeli type) in the war faction, the war faction would have gotten along fine without them. In other words, from what I know, at least - subject to change, of course, since I have not gone deeply into this aspect of the story as some others have - Churchill's dependency on Zionist/Jewish interests is based on a lot of speculation, and extrapolating a few known facts into a grand narrative. This is the longest post in the thread because I was unclear about it in the Tucker interview. /16
@martyrmade - Martyr Made
When war was declared on Germany, Britain was somber. Chamberlain said, "It is a sad day for all of us, but for none is it sadder than me." Shirer wrote from Berlin of a similar German reaction. But Churchill was ebullient, writing that the prospect of war "thrilled his being."/17
@martyrmade - Martyr Made
Count Ciano, Mussolini's son-in-law and Italy's ambassador to Germany, tried, as early as 10Sep1939, to de-escalate, but Churchill, now in the war cabinet, mocked him, saying he should put aside any hope of mediation and display "a more robust mood." /18
@martyrmade - Martyr Made
In an Oct 6 speech, Hitler said he did not want war. "I have had only in mind the great goal of attaining sincere friendship with the British people." Like Ciano's overture, Hitler's call for peace was met with contempt in the West. He said it would be his last. It wasn't. /19
@martyrmade - Martyr Made
Former British PM David Lloyd George warned the House of Commons: "Let us take heed of what we are doing because we are entering on something which involves the whole life of this empire and the whole future of our people." /20
@martyrmade - Martyr Made
Hitler tried again, going on the radio to broadcast a call for peace directly to the British people. He would give back the parts of Poland that were not majority German, and would work with the other powers to reach an acceptable solution to the Jewish problem. He was ignored. /21
@martyrmade - Martyr Made
In Jan 1940, Nahum Goldmann, of the World Jewish Congress, said that, "If the war in Europe goes on for another year, 1,000,000 of the 2,000,000 Jews in Poland will be dead of starvation or killed by Nazi persecutors." This gets close to the heart of my Churchill criticism. /22
@martyrmade - Martyr Made
My contention is not that the Third Reich was peaceful, or that Germany did not kill Jews. Germany dishonored itself by its conduct on the Eastern Front. My contention is that the war was not inevitable, that, in fact, almost no one but Churchill's faction wanted it, and that the atrocities could not have happened in the absence of a world war. This, I think, is not only supportable, but as close to provable as historical counterfactuals can get. Let's continue. /23
@martyrmade - Martyr Made
Hitler faced calls to commence strikes in retaliation for the hunger blockade, but resisted. In January, Churchill publicly wondered why England had not yet been attacked from the air. "Is it that they are saving up some orgy of frightfulness which will soon come upon us?" /24
@martyrmade - Martyr Made
March 1940. During an attack on docked British warships, a German bomb killed a British civilian. The feeling among British leaders was that it had not been deliberate, but fifty warplanes were sent to retaliate. Some went astray and landed in Denmark. /25
@martyrmade - Martyr Made
Churchill, now Lord of the Admiralty, called for, and commenced, the mining of Norway's harbors - an illegal act of war against a neutral country - to prevent critical exports to Germany. Prior to March 1940, Germany had no plan to invade Norway, but now ones were drawn up. /26
@martyrmade - Martyr Made
As Norway lodged legal complaints against Britain, Germany took more forceful action, and seized Norway with minimal resistance. Churchill, and British leadership, was stunned. British forces attempt to invade Norway, but were easily repulsed by the Germans. /27
@martyrmade - Martyr Made
On April 12, British bombs fell on a German rail line far from any war zone, drawing a German protest. A week later, the British bombed Oslo, the capital of occupied Norway. Again, British planes attacked an undefended town in Germany, and was warned that, although the Luftwaffe was under orders not to attack civilians, "bomb will be repaid with bomb if the British continue bombing nonmilitary targets." /28
@martyrmade - Martyr Made
It was Churchill's actions that had led to the seizure of Norway, and he became obsessed with retaking. General Ironside complained that Churchill wanted to divert troops from every other place, but that, "He is so like a child in many ways. He tires of a thing, and then wants to hear no more of it." /29
@martyrmade - Martyr Made
The following month, Chamberlain tendered his resignation, and Winston Churchill was elevated to Prime Minister. Germans who still hoped to make peace, Hitler among them, were dismayed that the chief proponent of escalation had been put in charge of the British government. /30
@martyrmade - Martyr Made
On Churchill's second night in office, a larger air raid was launched against Germany. Four civilians were killed - one an Englishwoman. British air power theorist James Spaight wrote that England "had only been fooling with air war until then. We began to bomb the German mainland before the Germans began to bomb objectives on the British mainland." /31
@martyrmade - Martyr Made
The next night, more British bombers flew over Germany, flying in the dark and dropping bombs at random targets. When Germany complained, and warned that this would lead to escalation, Churchill's government simply denied the raids had occurred. /32
@martyrmade - Martyr Made
In May 1940 Churchill ordered all German nationals to be rounded up. Thousands, including countless Jewish refugees from those countries, were marched at bayonet point to concentration camps for the duration of the war. /33
@martyrmade - Martyr Made
On May 15, Churchill told his cabinet that now was "the psychological moment to strike Germany in her own country." He ordered strikes on civilian areas in German cities, though he worried it might create a "revulsion of feeling" in the US, whom he was hoping to pull into the war. /34
@martyrmade - Martyr Made
That night, British bombers destroyed a girls' boarding school in Marienberg. The German High Command complained amongst themselves that the British were flying blind at night, killing civilians without targeting any defended military targets. The Germans have, to this point, still not responded with attacks against British cities. /35
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Days later, German tanks were streaking across France, and the Brits were evacuating at Dunkirk. And here I'll quote at length from Nicholson Baker's book Human Smoke, speaking of this moment of German triumph: "Blumentritt, a German military aide, wrote that Hitler said he thought the war would be done in six weeks. 'After that he wished to conclude a reasonable peace with France, and then the way would be free for an agreement with Britain.' Then, according to Blumentritt, Hitler launched into an admiring monologue on the greatness of the British Empire... 'All he wanted from Britain,' wrote Blumentritt, 'was that she should acknowledge Germany's position on the Continent.' Hitler's aim was to 'make peace with Britain on a basis that she would regard as compatible with her honour to accept.'" /36
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On May 24, Hitler issued a general approval for the Luftwaffe to retaliate with attacks against England itself, but still did not authorize specific missions to be carried out. With the surrender of France, the war seemed soon to be at an end. No army opposed Germany in Europe. The British were the only remaining belligerent, and they had no means whatsoever of reinvading the continent. /37
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That week, both Lord Halifax and Neville Chamberlain suggested that it was time to entertain one of Germany's many peace offers. Churchill ruled that there would be no negotiation. Halifax lost his temper, saying there was no way forward, and threatened to resign. /38
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Churchill expanded the detention order for German nationals to include people above 60 years of age. Informed that the detainees were mostly Jewish refugees, he told the House of Commons he was "very sorry for them, but we cannot, at the present time, and under the present stress, draw all the distinctions which we should like to do." /39
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With no way of reaching Europe but by air, British bombers hit targets all over. They bombed neutral Switzerland. They hit Genoa and Milan. They struck Dusseldorff and Munster. The SS reported, "Strong hatred against England becomes heavily concentrated, and calls time and again for revenge." /40
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Now, Churchill ordered an attack on the French navy, fearing it would come under German control. French Admiral Gensoul sent desperate messages: “For God’s sake, stop firing! You’re murdering us!” More than 1,000 French sailors were killed. /41
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On July 4, 1940, the SS reported that indiscriminate British bombing had caused “a general rage against England and the wish for a ‘real’ retaliation by way of bombardment of English cities.’” But Hitler still hesitated increasing pressure to give the order, even as more bombs fell on Hamburg that night. /42
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This next bit says a lot about Churchill’s intentions. He wrote to a minister of his concern that Germany might turn his attention away from England, turning east or south. In that case, support for the war might wane, and this was to be avoided at any cost. “But,” he wrote, “there is one thing that will bring him back and bring him down, and that is an absolutely devastating exterminating attack by heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland.” /43
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On July 19, 1940, Hitler told the Reichstag, “Mr. Churchill has just declared again that he wants the war,” he said, but Germany did not, and conscience compelled him to make a final appeal for peace. “I see no reason that should compel us to continue this war.” Mussolini’s son-in-law and ambassador to Germany, Count Ciano, who had no starry-eyed view of Hitler, reported privately that, “I believe his desire for peace is sincere. They are hoping and praying that this appeal will not be rejected.” /44
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One hour after Hitler’s final call for peace was broadcast, the BBC broadcasted in German what England thought of it: “Let me tell you what we here in Britain think of this appeal of yours to what you are pleased to call our reason and common sense. Herr Fuhrer and Reichskanzler, we hurl it right back at you, right in your evil-smelling teeth.” Ciano wrote, “Late in the evening, when the first cold English reactions to the speech arrive, a sense of ill-concealed disappointment spreads among the Germans.” /45
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The night after Hitler’s speech, Britain’s ambassador to the US sent a cable to London. He said Hitler’s terms deserved consideration, and pled that the government “not… close the door to peace.” The next night, Churchill gave orders to prepare operations to bomb Berlin itself. /46
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In the three nights after Hitler’s speech, the German press bureau wrote that the British had bombed civilian targets in Wismar, Bremen, Hamburg, Pinneburg, Paderborn, Hagen, Bochum, Schwerin, Wilhelmshaven, and Kassel. /47
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German planes dropped copies of Hitler’s speech all over England. Churchill had teams of sweepers on hand to ensure as few people saw them as possible. A German paper wrote: “The British Press is an iron curtain hiding the real opinion and feelings of the British people.” /48
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Muriel Lester, a Christian relief worker, was trying to find ways to feed starving refugees on the continent. Quakers, private relief organizations, and former US President Herbert Hoover warned that the hunger blockade was creating a crisis - not for German soldiers, who would be fed in any case - but for occupied civilians. Britain warned that any attempts to bring food into Europe would be met with force. /49
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On August 11, 1940, Hoover said: “The obvious truth is that there will be wholesale starvation, death and disease in these countries...” He complained that his organization had been feeding 200,000 civilians a day in Poland, but that Churchill ordered it stopped as soon as he took office. “He was a militarist of the extreme school who held that the incidental starvation of women and children was justified… by victory.” /50
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British planes began firebombing the Black Forest. A NYT reporter wrote: “Skirting these blank spots (burned from previous raids), they unloaded hundreds of incendiary bombs on green parts of the forest.” British fighters burned wheat fields, and strafed livestock, farm equipment, and random people. German military leaders accused the British of dropping sacks of potato bugs on their crops. /51
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Finally, on Sep 6, 1940, the Luftwaffe was ordered to commence The Blitz, and England came under attack. Churchill was outraged, or, given his privately-expressed hope for German retaliation to harden British resolve, he at least feigned outrage. He ordered the military to start exploring the use of poison gas in “exterminating attacks against the German civil population.” /52
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The besieged German leadership became convinced that the power of international Jewry was the only possible explanation for England’s refusal to make peace, and her continual drive to escalation. Measures against Jewish became harsher, and internally they spoke of Jews as hostages. /53
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In a speech, Hitler said: “I watched for 8 days. They dropped bombs on the people of the Rhine. They dropped bombs on the people of Westphalia. I watched for another fourteen days. I thought that (Churchill) was crazy. He was waging a war that could only destroy England. I waited over three months, but then I gave the order. I will take up the battle.” It was November 1940. /54
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I’ve been at this a while, so I’m gonna cut it here for now. This is not a complete history of the escalations of the war *obviously*. My intention here is not to defend the actions of the Third Reich or any of its leaders, but only to support a narrow claim: that of all the belligerent leaders, Churchill was the one most intent on prolonging and escalating the conflict into a world war of annihilation. Germany and Italy did not want it - in fact, before the conquest of Western Europe, German leaders including Hitler were skeptical that they’d be able to take on Britain in a fight. We can be skeptical of Hitler’s motives for offering peace again and again, and for holding back against British civilians despite months and months provocations, but the fact is that Germany was offering peace, and by all accounts sincerely wanted it. After the annexation of Poland, Hitler told other party members, “The Reich is now complete.” Would Germany have eventually attack the Soviet Union? Perhaps. But they would not have done so in June 1941 if England had agreed to end a war which had no hope of victory short of expanding it into a much larger conflict, by bringing in the USA, USSR, or both. Like the Turkish massacre of Armenians, the atrocities that took place in the east - for which the German perpetrators are responsible, make no mistake - could not have happened except in the chaos of a world war in which millions were already being killed. Because its so central to our founding ideology, we speak of World War 2 as if it was the best possible outcome, or certainly the least bad outcome, but any objective look shows that it was the worst possible outcome, and that it could have been avoided if not for the warmongers - chief among them Winston Churchill. I’ll expand on this tomorrow.
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Martyr Made is currently the #1 podcast in the world on iTunes, which means a lot of people expecting to hear a rabid Nazi are going to be very confused by my series on the Israel-Palestine conflict. https://www.martyrmade.com/featured-podcasts/fear-loathing-in-the-new-jerusalem
Fear & Loathing in the new jerusalem — Martyr Made Podcast
“We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.”
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Posted - November 2, 2023 at 1:23 PM
Saved - November 3, 2023 at 3:58 AM
reSee.it AI Summary
Israeli settlers in the West Bank employ sophisticated tactics to bypass Israeli law and establish illegal settlements. Antenna Hill is an example where a cell phone tower was constructed, seizing Palestinian-owned land. Families moved in, connecting to utilities meant for construction workers. This strategic selection of locations disrupts Palestinian territory, making compromises impossible. The settlement caused environmental damage and conflicts with Palestinians, leading to their forced relocation. Attempts to shut down the settlement have failed, perpetuating this slow-motion ethnic cleansing.
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How ethnic cleansing works in practice After the ‘93 Oslo Accords made it increasingly difficult to legally establish settlements in the West Bank, settlers began to employ increasingly sophisticated means to work around Israeli law. This is Antenna Hill in the West Bank: https://t.co/aZp9jDGuyf
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Settlements continued to expand, with right wing Israeli politicians helping to to skirt Israel’s own laws. Despite being there illegally, the govt decided it was necessary to construct a cell phone tower on a nearby hilltop to fill a blind spot at a bend on the highway.
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It was determined to be a security need, since it was unacceptable that Israelis might be caught in a bad situation w/o cell service. The hilltop, owned by Palestinian farmers, was seized and connected to the grid and water supply to facilitate construction.
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The building was delayed, so in 2001 settlers erected a fake, non-functional tower, and received permission to station a guard 24/7. The guard moved into a trailer w/his family and installed a security fence around the hilltop.
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Soon, five more families moved in, and, despite the settlement’s plain illegality, all were allowed to connect to the power and water originally meant for construction workers to do their job. Since families lived there, the Israeli govt built a nursery and donors built a synagogue to serve them.
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Locations like Antenna Hill are not chosen at random. They are strategically selected to break up contiguous Palestinian territory to make territorial compromises by the Israeli govt impossible. By 2006, over 150 people lived on Antenna Hill.
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Runoff from the settlement ran down the hillside, killing the fig and olive trees owned by the Palestinians who’d already had their seized for settlement. It ran down into the nearby village, filling gardens and paths with toxic waste.
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Soon, the began getting into fights w/the Palestinians in the village, which included those who owned Antenna Hill. The two sides tried to sabotage the other, and a few minor riots occurred, which gave the IDF an excuse to move in and forcibly remove the Palestinian village to another location.
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In the years since, various Israeli governments have attempted to shut down the settlement. Usually it provokes a riot by the settlers, who are supported by Likud and other right wing parties. The settlement always returns, and each time becomes a little more permanent.
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There are countless hilltops, valleys, and other strategic locations that have been subject to this kind of slow-motion ethnic cleansing, reminiscent of American bushwhakers provoking fights w/Indians in the Black Hills to give the US govt cause to incorporate the Dakota Territories.