05/09/14 – John Glaser – The Scott Horton Show

I'm Scott Horton.
I was successful in getting the guests switched around.
So right now we go to John Glazer from Antiwar.com and the Huffington Post and the Washington Times.
Left, right and libertarian.
Ain't that cool?
Realignment in practice there.
And he's on the phone from somewhere near Washington, D.C.
How are you doing, John?
I'm well.
Thanks for having me on again.
Well, good, good.
Very happy to have you here and happy to see you writing about Boko Haram because that's going to make their day and make them that much stronger and all that.
And we would rather try to keep them as marginal as we can rather than trying to make a bigger deal out of them than they are for our own reasons, kind of stuff like you people are interested in.
And so I guess it's news to me that she had backed down and she really did back down.
Then this is all that the Republicans can think of to criticize, not the possibility of opening up a jungle warfare front for the special operations guys.
But maybe we should have started this war a year ago, damn Democrats.
Right.
Backing up a little bit, I mean, it's difficult to tell precisely where, like if Hillary Clinton was dictator of the world, if she would have done it, if she would have declared Boko Haram an officially designated terrorist group and so forth.
What's clear, what we know is that there was back and forth among people in the State Department and the Obama administration and the Nigerian government, like you said.
The New York Times reported that they took MEK off of it.
So this is a completely arbitrary list.
It means nothing beyond a demonstration of how illegitimate the U.S. government's foreign policy is.
So the fact that Republicans are making it an issue is kind of silly.
Yeah.
Well, although it would mean technically, right, open up more weapons transfers to other states and more jurisdiction for JSOC to invoke the AUMF to go take their swift boats around and whatever like that too, right?
Well, yeah.
So I don't think – so that makes the State Department's list even more obsolete because the government has their own secret list that they're already pushing.
Right.
Well, and you know, again, and this always happens.
It's the same thing with the IRS tapping into the license plate scanner networks and all the rest of it.
I'm always making my predictions so far out that no one remembers I made them anymore.
So nobody ever says, wow, it's just like Scott said because nobody even knew me back then.
But in 2007, this was a big thing of mine is that, oh, you just wait.
In fact, in Egypt and Uganda and Kenya, a lot of these places have jungle areas, especially Kenya and Nigeria and others.
So yeah, I mean we're in a lot of places that most people don't know about, and that's kind of the point.
Well, the part I left out was there are huge oil resources in the Niger Delta.
So that makes the perfect excuse for securing things that are so necessary to be secured.
That's true, and AFRICOM, the Pentagon's unit for designating Africa under the auspices of a U.S. military plan is only a few years old.
They started in 2007, and the U.S. has been assembling the rudiments of imperial infrastructure throughout Africa, and hardly anybody knows about it.
And hardly anybody knows about it because the U.S. government doesn't think it's any of our business, so they keep it quiet.
I'm sorry to you all.
We've got to take this break from John, but we'll be right back.
When we get back, it's John Glazer on American intervention in Nigeria.
Got to go save the little girls from Boko Haram, don't you know?
And the rest of the war on Africa.
And then Ray McGovern on Ukraine coming up too, so hang tight.
Today's show is brought to you in part by Audible.com.
You can get a free audiobook download at audibletrial.com.
Audible has over 100,000 titles to choose from for your iPhone, Android, Kindle, or MP3 player.
For Scott Horton Show listeners, Audible is offering a free audiobook download with their free thirds.
It has a lot to do with what's going on here at all or not.
They may be from an entirely different region of Nigeria for all I know.
Do you know what started this group?
What made their recruitment credible?
Who wants to go and join a fighting force if they don't feel like they have to?
You know what?
I don't know a ton about the initial startup of Boko Haram.
I know that they're an Islamist group.
I know that they have extreme rhetoric.
I know that their name means something like Western states to send its military over to Nigeria.
Why in the world was there this absurd and hysterical fear-mongering on CNN?
I was watching.
I went to the gym.
I was running on a treadmill.
I was hooked up to the headphones that they have there.
I almost puked all over the treadmill.
CNN's Erin Burnett was having the most explicit war propaganda you could possibly imagine.
She's saying Boko Haram is brutal violence.
They burn people and stop them from striking, quote-unquote.
This is the jump that has been made.
They kidnapped girls half a world away because they're horrible people.
And then the jump is made to them being an existential threat to the United States.
It was the kind of hysteria that you saw right after 9-11 when nobody knew how to deal with these non-state actors and everyone was just so frightened that they were calling for war every four seconds.
Well, hell, I mean, the thing is, it's almost honest of her compared to where Obama's coming from.
The high-end estimate number of children by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism killed in Obama's drone war?
247.
Now, if we see the abduction of 200-some-odd girls half a world away as a casus belli that needs U.S. military intervention, despite it being meaningless in a geopolitical sense and having no effect on Americans, then we have to put it in context.
It was just breaking through all over that Uncle Sam is the bad guy behind Mubarak and all the rest of them, too.
And even Americans were catching on.
And so they had to just confuse the issue, just like accusing the people in eastern Ukraine of handing out the anti-Semitic leaflets, just to confuse the pretty plain black-and-white situation with a little bit of confusion.
Look, we're on the side of the rebels in Libya, because Gaddafi was their sock puppet, but he was expendable and he was no Mubarak in terms of loyalty, so they can make an example out of him by throwing him overboard.
And that's what's led to the current crisis, which you can characterize however you want in the last minute and a half here.
Well, yeah, no, I agree.
The list of brutal regimes in the Arab world that the United States was aiding and supporting as they crushed democratic movements in the Arab Spring was very long.
So they had to pick one that they could say, look, we're on the right side of history.
And they wanted to – they intended to give the impression that they were obedient to our interests.
And that was essentially what I was saying, and I think that part of it has plagiarized straight from you.
But I also, in the last minute here, just read it, a reiteration of that kind of analysis in Barry Posen's new book called The Restraint.
He's one of these very offshore balancing type of realists from MIT.
And he mentions the same thing in there, that the point was to show the world, hey, we're on the right side of history, and have the Arab world not hate us so much.
It was a failed attempt, and it didn't work, but that was the – that seems to be the whole point.
Right, because it was really – you know what it was?
It was a giant lie.
It was like sending Karen Hughes over there to say, oh, yeah, no, we only kill you because we love you so much.
Well, no wonder people didn't buy it.
Right.
It wasn't true at all.
It wasn't even plausible.
Anyway, so great work as always.
Thank you very much for your time, John.
All right, bye-bye.
I appreciate it.
That's John Glaser, everybody.
He's at The Huffington Post, The Washington Times, and at Antiwar.com.
Why do we really bomb Libya?
And everything is a threat.
The fear-mongering and hysteria over Boko Haram.
And anyone who donates $100 or more to the Scott Horton Show at scotthorton.org slash donate gets one.
That's scotthorton.org slash donate.
And if you'd like to learn and order more, send them a message at commoditydiscs.com or check them out on Facebook at slash commodity discs.
And thanks.
You hate government?
One of them libertarian types?
Or maybe you just can't stand the president, gun grabbers, or war mongers.
Me too.
That's why I invented libertystickers.com.
Well, Rick owns it now, and I didn't make up all of them.
But still, if you're driving around and want to tell everyone else how wrong their politics are, there's only one place to go.
Libertystickers.com has got your bumper covered.
Left, right, libertarian, empire, police, state, founders, quotes, central banking.
Yes, bumper stickers about central banking.
Lots of them.
And, well, everything that matters.
Libertystickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
Oh, John Kerry's Mideast peace talks have gone nowhere.
Hey, y'all.
Scott Horton here for the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
U.S. military and financial support for Israel's permanent occupations of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is immoral, and it threatens national security by helping generate terrorist attacks against our country.
And face it.
It's bad for Israel, too.
Without our unlimited support, they would have much more incentive to reach a lasting peace with their neighbors.
It's past time for us to make our government stop making matters worse.
Help support CNI at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
Phone records, financial and location data, PRISM, Tempora, X-Key Score, Boundless Informant.
Hey, y'all.
Scott Horton here for offnow.org.
Now, here's the deal.
Due to the Snowden revelations, we have a great opportunity for a short period of time to get some real rollback of the national surveillance state.
Now, they're already trying to tire us by introducing fake reforms in the Congress.
And the courts, they betrayed their sworn oaths to the Constitution and Bill of Rights again and again and can in no way be trusted to stop the abuses for us.
We've got to do it ourselves.
How?
We nullify it at the state level.
It's still not easy.
The offnow project of the Tenth Amendment Center has gotten off to a great start.
I mean it.
There's real reason to be optimistic here.
They've gotten their model legislation introduced all over the place.
In state after state, I've lost count, more than a dozen.
You're always wondering, yeah, but what can we do?
Here's something, something important, something that can work if we do the work.
Get started cutting off the NSA support in your state.
Go to offnow.org.
Offnow.org.