04/04/14 – Nick Giambruno – The Scott Horton Show

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Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And our next guest is Nick Jambruno.
And he writes for The International Man.
That's Doug Casey's website.
They go traveling the world and writing about things that they know.
Advising investors and great stuff like that.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Nick?
I'm doing great, Scott.
Thanks for having me back.
Very happy to have you here and happy to see you writing for Antiwar.com as well.
This one is called, Why Turkey Was Planning a False Flag Operation in Syria.
Why, indeed?
So, okay.
Well, no, wait.
Before the why, first the what?
Somebody recorded somebody's phone call and said, Somebody recorded somebody's phone call and posts online, I hear.
Something like that?
What?
Yeah, it's something like that.
Yeah, and we should go over some context first to understand exactly what this discussion was referring to.
But in case some of your listeners or anybody else doesn't know what a false flag is, I often explain it by telling people about this scene in a popular movie.
It's Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
It's a little bit of an older movie.
But in this movie, there is a character who has a little brother.
And this character has a very fancy sports car he plays on the football team.
And anyways, one day his little brother takes his sports car out with his friend and he trashes it on accident, obviously.
So they're all freaked out about how the big brother is going to respond since they totaled his car.
And they come up with this clever plan to make it look like the rival football team vandalized his car.
So they decorate his car with the rival team's logos and colors.
And so when his brother finds out about the car, he thinks it's the rival football team that's been messing around with it, not his little brother.
And that in a nutshell is kind of the essence of what a false flag is.
It's where you create an incident, you make it look like somebody else did it, essentially.
So why was Turkey thinking about doing something?
And, you know, this usually has nefarious effects in the sense that militaries and intelligence services use this to create pretexts for war.
One of the most popular instances of a false flag, many people believe, is the Reichstag fire that allowed Hitler to really ramp up his power in the early 30s.
So why was, you know, the big question is why was Turkey plotting something like this in Syria?
Now, to understand that, you kind of have to understand a little bit of the dynamics, which I'm sure your listeners do, of the situation in Syria right now, where Turkey's favored rebels have been faltering, not just recently, but for a while now.
And this false flag incident that Turkey was discussing, mind you, these are the most highest level Turkish officials.
This is the foreign minister, this is the head of the Turkish intelligence, the equivalent of the Turkish CIA, that are discussing this.
And they're talking about provoking some sort of attack on this shrine that's located inside Syria.
It's actually sovereign Turkish territory within the territory of Syria.
It's about 15 or so miles inside Syrian territory.
There's this little tiny area that is sovereign Turkish territory.
And this territory dates back to the Ottoman times.
It's actually a tomb.
It's called the Tomb of Suleyman Shah.
And he is a relative of one of the founders of the Ottoman Empire.
So this goes back a long time.
It's not controversial that this is a piece of Turkey that's inside the territory of Syria.
It's long been agreed to by the Syrian government.
Before that, the French, the colonial rulers of Syria.
So this is nothing new or particularly controversial.
So what has happened is, this is in the northern part of Syria, and this is a part where central government of Syria does not control this area, and it has not for many months.
And what has happened recently is that you have had the hardcore Islamic State in Syria and the Levant, the ISIL folks, move into the area and threaten the Turkish troops that are stationed there.
There's only about 24 or so Turkish troops, so it's not a very large contingent, but they are guarding this little shrine.
So you have these hardcore ISIL militants in the area, and they're telling the Turks to pack up and leave.
And the Turks have refused, and that's why the Turkish government has gotten a little bit nervous about the situation, since they've refused to leave, and they have these ISIL militants that have basically surrounded the area.
Now, on the conversation, they're discussing this, and like I said, this is not controversial.
And in fact, even if the Turkish military intervened to protect this shrine, this piece of sovereign Turkish territory inside Syria, I doubt the Syrian government would really care that much at first, because this is an area where, one, they've already lost control, and they have lost control for many months now.
Two, they would be fighting the ISIL militants who would otherwise be fighting the Syrian government.
So I don't think the Syrian government would really care about that, and it wouldn't really be controversial, because the Turks are protecting what is internationally agreed upon as their sovereign territory.
But that's not the end of the conversation.
The really nefarious part is where they discuss using a potential pretext, and not, we should specify who these people are.
This is the foreign minister, Davutoglu, and the head of Turkish intelligence, Hakan Fidan.
And they're talking about how they can use this as, quote, an opportunity to not only protect their troops and their territory, but to use it as kind of a foot in the door to a wider military intervention in Syria, which they would use to help their favored rebels, which have been seeing massive battlefield setbacks and so forth.
So you also have to understand that the Turkish government, the Erdogan government, has staked a ton of political capital and a lot of its political legitimacy on this whole Syrian uprising enterprise.
So since that hasn't really gone the way that they planned it would, they're using this as an opportunity to, you know, they're looking to use this as an opportunity to double down and turn things around.
Now that's kind of a long-winded answer, but that's what happened, you know, in a nutshell, sort of.
Yeah, well, you know, as so often is the case with these things, it doesn't have to sound like these guys are very smart to believe that the story is what it is, you know what I mean?
Here they, like you said, they made this bad bet on regime change in Syria back three years ago.
Oh, yeah, this will be easy.
Obama came out and said, oh, yeah, Assad, he better step aside.
When, you know, Patrick Coburn was saying on this show back then, man, Assad's regime is not in danger of falling, not now, not soon.
It wasn't at that time, but they had convinced themselves that this was a smart thing to do.
And so, okay, they got a perfect pretext, and I'd like you to explain what it was that they were saying, because I think it's kind of funny as false flags go, like how kind of clumsy it is what they're talking about.
But using this shrine or protecting, you know, this tiny piece of sovereign Turkish territory in Syria as a foothold to go ahead and cross the border and get in there, it seems like it couldn't be anything but a disaster.
You talk about doubling down.
Yeah, doubling down on complete folly.
And that's why I believe it so much, right?
If they were saying something really clever, I'd be suspicious.
But no, this is, yeah, exactly, probably what they think they're going to do.
They're going to get in there, and they're going to arm up the Islamic Front, and they're going to, you know, reconstitute the FSA, and they're really going to bring the fight to the Al-Nusra Front or to the ISIL or whichever group they are afraid of the most for now.
And then maybe they'll get back to work on regime change, and, you know, I guess these intelligence officials and military men, they can sell the politicians on anything, you know?
It doesn't matter.
It's, again, it's more plausible to me, the more fanciful it is.
It's more plausible to me that they believe it and that this is their plan.
Yeah, no, that's true.
And it's also, like I mentioned, important to emphasize that the Erdogan government has taken a huge amount of its political capital on this uprising in Syria.
And, you know, they just had these elections.
I think they're municipal elections, but there are going to be more elections in Turkey.
And there are a growing number of Turks who are questioning whether, you know, this whole Syria gambit was worth it.
You know, Turkey has been experiencing some blowback.
It's not very highly publicized in the news, but there was a shooting, I think, last week by some Syrian militants.
I believe it was ISIL.
Killed a couple of Turkish cops, not in a border area, just like in the middle of Turkey, near Ankara.
I know south of Ankara.
But, so Turkey has been experiencing blowback and it's becoming, the Turkish voters are becoming increasingly skeptical about this policy.
So in order to save the future of his political party and his political career, it's really essential for Erdogan to turn things around in Syria for, you know, from his perspective.
But yeah, so here's some quotes.
Now, again, I don't speak Turkish.
Hold on, we're about to have to go out to this break.
So I'm sorry, it's a hard break.
Going to interrupt us here when we get back to these quotes.
But yeah, I mean, just imagine everybody, Ronald Reagan and the Saudis backing a Mujahideen war right there next to the Mediterranean Sea, instead of way safe on the other side of Iran from here kind of thing.
You know what I mean?
This is ridiculous what they've done.
Now the Mujahideen are their enemy?
Well, they're the ones who made them in the first place.
The Turks and their friends, the Saudis and the Americans.
It's crazy.
It is crazy.
It's stupid.
And that's why it's so plausible to me.
We'll be right back.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show.
Scott Horton show this Sunday on the KPFK show anti-war radio 90.7 FM Sunday morning in Los Angeles.
I'll be talking with Todd Pierce.
He was supposed to be on the show yesterday, but we had phone problems, but so he's going to do KPFK.
We're going to be talking all about the Cheney Doctrine, the Wolfowitz Doctrine, and all of that.
Same thing.
And also he was a defense lawyer at Guantanamo Bay, so I'm going to have some Guantanamo questions for him, too.
Anyway, so right now we're talking with Nick Giambruno, and he writes for the International Man over there with Doug Casey, and he's got this one at anti-war.com.
It's called Why Turkey Was Planning a False Flag Operation in Syria.
And by the way, Nick, well, you say whatever you want as far as where we left off, but also if you could actually tell the story of what's in the transcript.
Not necessarily word for word, but go ahead and paint the picture of what this phone call really revealed, and then that way it makes it better for the Turkish government's response when the call was leaked.
Oh, yeah, well, the Turkish government response was to try to ban YouTube and Twitter, which of course is an obsolete response.
You can't really ban YouTube and Twitter anymore with people who have VPNs and so forth, so it was really kind of a childish fit, in my opinion, rather than any sort of serious response.
But anyways, here are a couple of the most damning quotes from this conversation.
Now, I should tell you up front, I don't speak Turkish, but I did find these translations in the international media and multiple sources, so I believe them to be accurate.
So, first you have the foreign minister, Davutoglu, who says that Erdogan, the prime minister, believes that any attack on this shrine should be viewed as, quote, an opportunity.
And then you have Hakan Fidan, who is the head of Turkish intelligence, says, in quote, I'll send four men from Syria if that's what it takes.
I'll make up a cause of war by ordering a missile attack on Turkey.
We can also prepare an attack on the Suleyman Shah tomb if necessary.
Now, those are, unquote, those are the two really most damning quotes out of the whole transcript, and if your readers want to look, you can easily find it.
Just Google Turkish leak, telephone leak, and it'll come up.
Now, like I said, I don't speak Turkish, so I don't know 100% for sure if those translations are accurate, but I did see it in multiple mainstream international media outlets, so I'm pretty sure they are.
But I have heard from Sibel Edmonds, who is a very smart woman, and of course you know she's a native Turk.
She speaks Turkish and understands the situation well.
She says that it's possible that the tapes have been spliced together and have been taken out of context, which is, you know, obviously another possibility, but it's pretty hard to see how just those two quotes that I gave you could be taken in any other context than Turks are looking to use this as an opportunity to double down on an already filled policy.
Well, you know what?
I just like this whole political world shaping up where everybody's leaking each other's phone calls.
You know, the people in power, as has been the trend in Eastern Europe lately and all that kind of thing.
I wish that, you know, the Russians would publish everything they got on every Western power and vice versa, too.
Go ahead.
You know, let's see the war of the recorded phone calls.
And then, you know what?
If people want to complain, no, you took us out of context and here's the real version and all that.
You know, what a brave new world.
I would love to see it.
It looks like it's already shaping up that way.
Yeah, it does, and I think the Russians, again, I can't say I'm 100% certain on this, but it does look like the Russians could have done this, you know, given what they did in Ukraine with those two other really dramatic leaks that they presumably published, and then this one coming right before the Turkish elections.
And in any case, even if this was taken out of context, I think there is a benefit to leaking this, because it really takes the wind out of the sails of using this as a strategy in the future.
So if the Turks are looking for a pretext to get into Syria, they better, you know, think of a different excuse than this.
Right.
Well, and you know, like we're saying, well, yeah, I was saying, I think you were agreeing, that it would be absolutely stupid for the Turks.
I mean, what are they going to do?
How many troops are they going to put in there?
And then they're going to supply them for how long?
How far into Syrian territory is this place anyway?
Oh, it's about 15 to 20 miles.
But the scary part is, no, it's not.
But it's a foot in the door.
And Turkey is NATO.
So that's the real scary part.
It's not just Turkey.
When Turkey gets involved, then you've got all of NATO involved.
And that's a game changer.
So that's the real worrisome point here.
Well, and the other thing is about the Turks, the Saudis, the Qataris, the Americans attempting, and I don't know exactly which all sheikhs from the Gulf are sending, you know, Western Union, to which all jihadis on the front over there or whatever.
I don't know if anybody really has all that sorted out.
But they keep seeming to talk like, wow, you know, we sure do like the free Syrian army of expats that sits on the Turkish side of the border and does nothing all day.
And we sure are terrified of the actual mujahideen who are out there doing the fighting and the killing and the dying in this war against Assad.
Because the ones who are the volunteers out there fighting, I mean, it's not like they're in a state professional army following the orders of officers or whatever.
They're all basically volunteers out there.
And the only ones who are the ones who are not controllable because, you know, they're so determined to, you know, by definition, they're the extremists who are not going to do what they're told later.
But this is the game they've been playing for three years straight.
You know, it's like the Israelis shooting and crying or something.
Oh, no, look, everybody, we're accidentally backing and funding a bunch of prisoner beheading suicide bombers in Syria.
Yeah, well, a couple of things there.
Yeah, no, I think that's totally true.
It's been a losing bet for Turkey and the Saudis and the Americans for, you know, the past three years.
And it's a tragedy.
Also, yeah, the main power on the ground is the Free Syrian Army is essentially irrelevant now.
The real power on the ground are these Salafi Islamist militant groups, of which only one is really acceptable sort of to Western powers, and that's the Islamic Front.
And really, the Islamic Front coordinates a lot of their activities with the Nusra Front.
The Nusra Front, as you and your listeners know, is the official al-Qaeda franchise in Syria.
It's been blessed by Ayman al-Zawahiri.
So it's really the distinction between the Nusra Front and the Islamic Front, I think, is imaginary.
I think they just use this fake distinction to make the Islamic Front, you know, it's kind of like window dressing.
So they can point to this group and say, hey, it's not al-Qaeda.
It's a mainstream group that we can support.
When really on the ground, there is no difference.
Well, I'm sure you probably saw, did you see that Patrick Coburn five-part series on the new rise of the next generation of al-Qaeda?
I saw part of it, yeah.
It was very good.
Yeah, and, you know, of course, this is really what he chalks it up to, of course, is the war in Iraq.
And then with the American, you know, with this chapter of it, the American-Saudi support for the jihad in Syria all this time, this is what's really reignited the Iraq war.
Because it's got the Mujahideen of the Sunni areas of Iraq looking at it like, well, hey, forget these borders.
And if you do forget these borders, look, we're the majority in the region.
Why should we let the Shiite Arabs backed by Iran have Baghdad and tell us what to do?
And so even though they just lost, they lost the civil war over there just, you know, five, six years ago.
They got the idea that, you know what, we are pretty good at fighting.
Let's go back to war.
Yeah, no, that's true.
And you mentioned earlier about how, you know, Israel is supporting this to kind of take Iran down a notch on the strategic level.
And this is a clear instance, in my opinion, where Israeli and American interests clearly are divergent.
You have the Israelis who see this as supporting the jihadis as a tactical threat versus Iran, which is a strategic threat.
So they're favoring a tactical nuisance over a strategic problem.
And, you know, that's understandable from anybody that anybody would prefer to have a tactical problem than a strategic problem.
But for the Americans, it's the other way around.
It's where al-Qaeda is the strategic problem.
So really, you have the situation where clearly the interests are not aligned there.
Yeah.
And, you know, in fact, Michael Oren, who's now is it CNN has hired him?
Yes, CNN has hired him to be, you know, a foreign policy analyst there.
He was the last Israeli ambassador to America.
And he was just explaining that.
Oh, yeah, of course, I prefer these bad guys to those bad guys.
Those bad guys being Hezbollah, because, yeah, those bad guys are backed by Iran.
And so for him, he's like, what are you kidding me?
Of course, we prefer and he doesn't outright say Zawahiri's men, but that's who he's talking about.
And as you're saying, that makes perfect sense if you're the Israeli ambassador, but not if you're an American, you know, they didn't knock down towers and kill 3000 Israelis.
Those were Americans who died in that al-Qaeda attack.
Yeah, precisely.
So from the Israeli perspective, al-Qaeda is a tactical nuisance.
Iran is a strategic problem for them.
It's the reverse for the US.
So it's clearly, you know, an area where the views are divergent.
So that's why they would.
And yeah, Michael Oren is the guy who really enunciated this in public.
So that that is I think you can put that's an issue where you can point to a clear cut divergence of interest.
And it's not just a minor issue.
It's a huge, a huge issue.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, I should say, too, that the president himself really in his conversation, a conversation before last, I guess, with Jeffrey Goldberg at the Atlantic, they talked about, you know, Goldberg asked him what more can be done in Syria.
And he said, well, you know, there are things that we're doing and I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you.
Ha ha.
Wink, wink, whatever.
And they and they agree that this would be a good way to weaken Iran a little bit by taking their friend Syria down a peg.
And there's no pretense for a minute that.
Oh, and yeah, you know, save the people or whatever.
They don't even pretend that they care about the week at all.
It's simply as a strategic matter.
Why support the Mujahideen in Syria?
The president agrees with Goldberg because it helps weaken Iran.
So it's divergent to you and me and the national interest, but not to the president of the United States and his government's interest, apparently.
Yeah, well, that's unfortunate that he's seeing things so not clearly in the sense that that thinking that supporting these guys, the rebels is somehow in the U.S. strategic interest when it's you know, these are essentially al Qaeda connected folks.
Well, and of course, he's been really at the forefront of leak and that.
Oh, I don't want to back the Mujahideen in Syria.
No, I'm against it.
Hillary wants to back the Mujahideen in Syria, but I'm reluctant, says the president.
Whatever.
Meanwhile, he's shipping them guns the whole time.
Meanwhile, his CIA is helping the Saudis and the Qataris and the Turks coordinate all their support across the Turkish border.
And and on and on this for years now, you know, it's ridiculous.
And it's treason because, as you're saying, these guys are sworn loyal to Ayman al-Zawahiri.
And that makes them the enemy, even officially and legally, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, that's that's an interesting point.
And now, you know, it's not that Obama's a secret Muslim in Zawahiri's employ.
Obama thinks Zawahiri and his men are they're useful idiots this time.
But who's zooming who, you know?
You know, is anybody think the Americans or the French or any of our friends are going to end up really controlling the future of Syria?
I don't think it's going to be like this for decades.
Yeah, no, and I think that's kind of the point, too, is that they're the Israelis would prefer to have a tactical problem than a strategic problem.
And that's why they'd rather have a fragmented, you know, disorganized state than one that's united and has backing of a strong regional power.
Right.
You know what?
I just realized I'm over time.
Thanks, Nick.
Very much.
I appreciate it.
That's Nick Giambruno, everybody.
He's at the International Man over there with Doug Casey.
And you can read him at Antiwar.com, too.
Why Turkey was planning a false flag operation in Syria.
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