05/13/14 – Brendan O’Neill – The Scott Horton Show

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, but 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.
Let's get started cutting off the NSA support in your state.
Go to offnow.org.
All right, well, good deal.
We've got Brendan O'Neill online.
He's from spikedonline.com.
And he's got this great one.
Quit your crying, Cameron.
You boosted Boko Haram.
Welcome back to the show.
Brendan, how are you doing?
Hi Scott, I'm good, thank you.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you here.
I love any article that begins with, quit your crying.
So, obviously Cameron, that's the Prime Minister of Britain.
He's been crying crocodile tears about the missing girls in Nigeria lately, huh?
Yes, he has, like everyone else.
But you don't take that seriously, is that right?
No, I think this whole bring back our girls thing is a bit weird, actually, because it's kind of, it exists in a vacuum.
No one seems willing to ask the question of where Boko Haram came from or how its fortunes have been boosted over the past three or four years.
And I think if we ask those questions, we might see that the West bears a lot of responsibility for this group in the first place.
Well, I just can't imagine that that could be true.
Okay, no, no, no.
Let me put it this way.
I can imagine that's true, but I don't know it's true, so show me.
Well, Boko Haram, as we all know now, is a group that has been based in Nigeria since 2002.
It was a peaceful organization up until 2009, and that's when it started having some run-ins with the Nigerian authorities, which were largely down, I must say, to the Nigerian authorities' mishandling of this group and its problematic treatment of the group's supporters.
But then what happens in 2011, of course, is that we have the disastrous Western attack on Libya, which really destabilizes huge swathes of Africa, because what it does, it removes one of the rulers of that region who had cohered Libya for a long period of time, for good or ill, and who had kept the regions around Libya relatively stable.
And what you have after the West sweeps Gaddafi aside is the unraveling of large swathes of Africa, the unraveling in particular of Mali, which created a new fighting ground for Islamist groups, and then the spreading of Libyan arms and these Islamist groups through to Nigeria, to Algeria, and into Libya itself.
And Boko Haram is one of those groups.
Boko Haram is one of the groups that benefits from the vacuum created by the Libyan war, and also benefits from the arms that spread out of Libya after the West removed Gaddafi.
All right, now, one of the problems that we face and will face for a long time to come, I think, here, Brendan, is the way that our government characterizes their different enemies and what's an associated force and what's not.
And so they like to, for example, and I've seen this numerous times, say that, well, yeah, I mean, we actually, we've got some links here and some chatter and some intelligence, which seems to suggest that we know that there's a guy in Somalia who once went to Yemen and played on the monkey bars over there with the bad guys in Yemen.
And then he came back where he shook hands with a Libyan who knows a guy who used to be roommates with a dude who had gone down to Mali where he had met someone from Boko Haram who had traveled up to Mali from Nigeria.
And so, therefore, we get to have a drone war in Nigeria now because by the transitive property of this guy, knew a guy, knew a guy, knew a guy who played on the monkey bars in Yemen, then that means we can kill whoever we want.
And so I would hate to see some kind of, you know, thin thread, which means something else in a different context, you know, mount to some kind of costless belly against a group that basically are a bunch of bark-eating crazies from the backwoods of nowhere, Stan, that has nothing to do with me.
So are you sure that you're not accidentally playing into the Rumsfeldians' hands here?
Absolutely not, because my argument is that the West has created failed states in Africa and it has given space for these groups to grow and to gain weapons and to train and to fight.
So the idea that the West then has a responsibility to go and fix those problems is, as you know, completely surreal.
You know, they created these problems to begin with and the only solution, the only start to a solution in these parts of the world is for the West to stop meddling.
I think it's really worth us bearing in mind the extraordinary impact that the attack on Libya had.
I mean, the attack on Libya did not last long.
It was all carried out from the air.
It was what I and others referred to as kind of cowardly colonialism.
You know, they couldn't even be bothered to put boots on the ground.
They just dropped bombs from afar.
And yet it had a terrible impact, particularly in Mali, because what happened is that a lot of ethnic Tureg fighters who had been fighting with Gaddafi for years, once he was removed, they had no choice but to move back to northern Mali.
So what happened in the beginning of 2012?
War breaks out between these fighters in northern Mali and the government in southern Mali.
And so Mali is completely ripped apart as a consequence of the unraveling of the Gaddafi regime.
And we knew that this would happen.
The Mali government said constantly in international circles in 2011, it said, if you attack Libya, it's going to have disastrous consequences for us.
And that's exactly what happened.
And it's that war in Mali, which is the main arena in which Libyan arms are passed around amongst al-Qaeda linked groups, and in which Boko Haram fighters start to learn new skills and to get new weapons.
So my argument is not that there is a kind of tangential link between this guy over here and that guy over there, but rather that there is a systematic effort by the West to dismantle states in Africa.
And that is creating these new vacuums in which stateless groups like Boko Haram can thrive.
So my argument is the West needs to get the hell out of these parts of the world rather than do anything else.
Well, and of course, the reason that al-Qaeda in Yemen is anything more than a house full of al-Hazmi's father-in-law and his friends or whatever tiny little group is because of the American drone war.
And the only reason that al-Shabaab even exists at all is because of the American war in Somalia since 2006.
So in each and every one of these and in general, it's the U.S. government and their European allies that are sowing all these crises and excuses for further intervention.
And just before the break, we were talking about Woodrow Wilson and how if he'd stayed out of World War I, there would have never been Nazism and there never would have been a USSR and there never would have been a World War II or a Cold War or Mao Zedong or any consequences of supporting all the sock puppets in the Middle East during the Cold War and inheriting the British Empire since then and all that.
You can bring that same chain of consequences all the way up to, of course, the modern terror war, which is just blowback from expanding the American Empire into the Middle East after the end of the Cold War.
And on we go now all the way around.
If you just picture Africa all the way around counterclockwise, we're working here and we're going to end up meeting, the group's going to end up meeting back around at Uganda where they're still supposedly hunting Joseph Kony.
Absolutely, and this is the thing that no one in Western government circles wants to talk about, which is that terrorism has got worse and worse in tandem with the war on terror.
I mean, you can measure it, the amount of terrorism there is in different parts of the world, the amount of instability there is has grown with the war on terror, and it's not a coincidence.
And I think what we're seeing now is Western militaries effectively trying to firefight problems that they themselves created.
So we've already seen the French have invaded Mali to try and fight back the Islamists in the north, who are only there because of what France and Britain and America did to Libya.
We now see Western governments wringing their hands over Boko Haram and wondering why it's become so cocky and audacious and well-armed in recent years, which again is a consequence of what they did in Libya.
So we're now seeing wars being launched to try and stem the problems from wars that were launched two or three years ago.
It's this vicious cycle of Western intervention to try and stop a problem that Western intervention itself is actually creating and inflaming.
So we need to really up our game, I think, those of us who are opposed to Western intervention.
David Cameron refers to Libya as his happy place, by which he means it's the place when everything's going wrong for him in politics.
He thinks to himself, at least I did good in Libya.
We need to constantly remind them, actually you destroyed Libya.
You left it as a bloody war zone, and it continues to be a divided war zone.
And not only did you destroy Libya, but you destroyed the surrounding region as well.
I think we really need to remind people of the extremely destructive consequences of Western military intervention.
Well, now, he's from the conservative party or the liberal party over there, Cameron?
I forget.
Conservative.
Yeah, see, that's what I thought.
So, I mean, over here, part of what's going on is we have a Democratic president, and he's a racial minority, which is every Democratic voter's dream come true, and they just can't get over it.
And so they just can't bear to remind themselves to despise America's Libya policy or even know the first thing about it that they might have to despise.
They have such a disincentive for getting caught up in the Libya issue when there's Obamacare to defend or whatever out there.
But so what's the people of Britain's excuse for this?
How can the politics of Britain let him get away with posturing such?
Well, I think politicians themselves have behaved like sheep on the issue of Libya.
I mean, the vast majority of MPs in our parliament voted for the attack on Libya.
They didn't even think about it.
I think it's like something like 550 out of 600 or something like that voted for this attack, didn't think through the consequences, didn't ask if there was a long-term plan, didn't ask who Cameron and Obama and Sarkozy planned to install in Gaddafi's place.
They didn't ask any of these questions.
They didn't ask any awkward questions about the National Transitional Council in Libya, which we now know is made up of a hodgepodge of Islamists and oligarchs and various tribal leaders.
So what we have is a Western interventionism which is worse than the imperialism of the past because at least the imperialism of the old times thought through what it was doing.
It carved lines in the sand in Africa.
It created states, it created governments, it created political parties, all of which was democratic, all of which often ended violently, but at least there was a plan.
What we have now in Africa is Western government basically rubbing those lines out of the sand, leaving states without government, undermining militaries, allowing state arms to spread across borders, and it's turning the whole of the north of Africa and the horn of Africa into this terrible vacuum in which Islamists are thriving.
So I think politicians need to think much more seriously before they take this kind of action.
And in terms of the public and people's response, I think the onus is on those of us like you and I, Scott, who are opposed to Western intervention to keep having the argument with people, to keep saying to them, look, these were the consequences of the Libya war, and that's why we need to be much more skeptical of intervention in the future.
Well, you know, just in the past few weeks I've been talking with Patrick Coburn and with Jonathan Landay about this new State Department terrorism report that's come out, and we've just been covering the Libya intervention and the results, and also Syria, of course, and the spreading of the consequences of the Iraq war and the restarting of the civil war there, and it seems like the part that goes unmentioned most of the time is just how dangerous these guys really are.
You cannot reason with the Bin Ladenite suicide bombers.
I mean, the best thing that you could do is, as Wolfowitz would say, drain the swamp, only do it right by stopping killing people, supporting revolutions, and supporting dictators and whatever else, and try to let that resentment dry up.
But you sure as hell can't fight it the way they're fighting it.
They're just spreading it around, and it reminds me of what William Lynn says about fourth-generation warfare, about how this is the era of the end of the nation-state.
As you're saying, it's like they're racing to create these lawless zones where al-Qaeda can thrive for real, not mythical excuse al-Qaeda, but real future dangers.
And now we've got to take this break.
We'll be right back with the great Brendan O'Neill from spikedonline.com right after this.
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All right, guys.
I'm Scott Horton.
Welcome back to the show.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Brendan O'Neill, editor of spikedonline.com.
Quit your crying, Cameron.
You boosted Boko Haram, he writes, at spikedonline.com.
And so now, I'm sorry.
Where we left off, I brought in William Lynn there.
He has this theory that the current shape of the world is Brave New World, that's us, versus, what do you call it, Brave New World versus Jihadistan or whatever, versus Jihad.
So in other words, the Westphalian nation-state is falling out of favor for the most popular form of human organization, and people are resorting back, they're devolving back, you might say, toward ethno-religious affiliations, which means all the lines are in all the wrong places, but it also means that people are really true believers in the causes that they're fighting for, far more so than conscripts in any government army, although that's balanced out by the fact that they're usually not nearly as well-armed as a taxpayer-funded army.
But anyway, we do have, as Landay kept calling it on the show last week, these lawless zones, these failed state lawless territories.
The primary example would be Anbar province, and then now spreading on into Syria there, where these guys can just train and thrive, and generation after generation of them can be turned out.
And I don't want to sound like I'm supporting the next intervention against them, and certainly not against Boko Haram or some group of crazies from the backwoods in Nigeria, but I do have the feeling that we have a, maybe more now than ever before, we have a real problem with these would-be bin Ladenite suicide bomber types, most of them now ISIS and al-Nusra Front, and their future, our future with them in this world.
I mean, how is this going to be?
What's going to happen?
It is pretty worrying, and as you mentioned, ISIS in Syria and parts of Iraq, I mean, they make al-Qaeda look like a tea party in comparison, not the tea party, but a kind of polite little picnic tea party, because they are a completely unhinged group, and they now control parts of Syria.
And what I think, I think this kind of lawlessness, this kind of creation of new lawless zones in which these groups can thrive, is a consequence of two things.
Firstly, it's a consequence of the era of humanitarian intervention, because we must never forget that throughout the 90s, the whole Western world, academia, journalists, commentators, politicians, UN officials constantly argued against the old idea of the nation-state.
They said the nation-state is dead, state sovereignty doesn't count for much, it's all about the international community, it's all about being post-borders.
You know, you remember Tony Blair's 1999 speech in Chicago, which all the Bush regime waiting in the wings thought was the greatest speech ever given, in which he said the state is over and the onus is on the international community to interfere in states when they're doing bad things.
So the West itself has completely devalued the idea of the state.
And then the second thing is that it's actually acted on that by constantly launching wars over the past 10 to 15 years that have just swept aside governments, swept aside entire state mechanisms that have existed for 40 or 50 years.
We saw it in Iraq, we saw it in Afghanistan, we saw it in Boko Haram, we're seeing it in the Western meddling in Syria, we're seeing it throughout Africa.
We have a new form of Western intervention, which is, when you think about it, pretty terrifying, because it's not about creating new state structures as the old Western intervention was, it's about undermining existing state structures, and it's leaving in its wake this kind of terrible vacuum of lawlessness.
I'm sorry to go back to the beginning here, but could you tell us a little bit more about who Boko Haram is, where they come from, what their grievances are?
I mean, I know that Nigeria is too big of a state, and I'm not the first champion of states, but I prefer them to jihadist and lawless zones in their place, so I'm not saying that.
Anyway, can you tell us a little bit more about where these guys come from, what, if any, legitimate grievances they have?
It sounds like they sort of started as people who were kind of just saying, and then they ended up turning into what we see now, so I don't know.
Yeah, Boko Haram are a very interesting snapshot of what's happening to groups like this in recent years, because they start as a quite localized group in 2002, although under another name they go slightly back further than that.
They start in 2002.
They are initially a peaceful organization.
They do have a lot of grievances with the Nigerian government, who they feel is ignoring the problems in the Borno state, which is in northeast Nigeria where Boko Haram is based.
They argue with it, they campaign against it, and then in 2009 they take up arms and they start executing violent acts.
But what has happened then over the past three or four years is that they've become more globally focused.
So in 2012, I think, they did their first ever kidnapping of foreigners.
They kidnapped a French family and held them hostage and eventually let them go for a very handsome amount of money.
And now, as we can see with the kidnapping of these girls and the release of these kind of bin Laden style videos where the leader is kind of jabbing his finger at the West, we can see that they are emerging into this kind of globalized Islamic group.
And that's a trend I think we see a lot these days, where groups start off as having local grievances, fighting against a particular government or party, but then kind of inevitably become globalized jihadi lunatics.
And I think that is part of the process of the undermining of the state, the way in which when there are no state structures, no ideal state sovereignty or national borders, you inevitably have the rise of these groups that are post-border, which are cross-border, which see themselves as being global entities rather than national liberation campaigns.
Well, and they have a common enemy, us.
That was what bin Laden and Zawahiri were all about that differentiated them in the first place, was the far enemy.
We've got to attack the Americans, draw them in, bankrupt them completely, force them out of the region altogether, and only then will we be able to really take on our local sultan, who after all right now is armed to the teeth and backed up by the Americans.
You kind of give them no choice, but, oh, so you're a jihadist, bark-eating, suicide-bomber crazy, huh?
Well, let's make an enemy out of you then, if we can, for ourselves.
Yeah, and I think the contrast between al-Qaeda and the Taliban, when they were both in Afghanistan in the early 2000s, is really interesting because the Taliban was very locally focused.
It was obsessed with the local, with cohering Afghanistan, because it had become such an unstable state after the Afghan-Soviet war.
So they were just obsessed with making it a stable state.
And then you had al-Qaeda, who were constantly focused on the global, constantly focused on the great Satan and these huge enemies that it wanted to launch spectacular attacks against.
And it was obsessed with media.
The Taliban never did any media at all, but al-Qaeda were constantly giving out press releases and videos and so on.
And what we've seen is that the al-Qaeda mindset has won.
It's the al-Qaeda mindset which has survived the test of time.
The old, localized, fundamentalist Taliban mindset is kind of on the wane, whereas what we're seeing is the growth of more and more of these groups that are obsessed with talking in global terms.
And to me, it's a mirror image of humanitarian intervention, actually, because those so-called humanitarians of the 90s also saw themselves as global warriors against evil, against Serbs or whoever else that got on their nerves.
And now we have the mirror image in these global Islamic groups that see themselves as warriors against the evil West.
It's the flip reversal of the same process of being post-state and post-borders, I think.
I've worn this joke out, but I don't know if I ever used it on you, Brendan.
I'm a reverse truther.
I think that bin Laden was the secret Illuminati master controller of Bush and Cheney all along.
And instead of them having him do 9-11 for them, he had them react exactly the way they wanted.
Take as much advantage as you possibly can, you big, tough cream puffs, you.
And they did.
And Obama's really just followed up on the same disaster policy since.
Yeah, I think there's no question that this Western intervention plays into certain groups' hands.
Firstly, because it entertains their idea that they are in some great cosmological battle with the West, good versus evil.
But also because, as you say, it creates precisely the lawless zones in which these groups can operate, where they can do their own thing, train their guys, smuggle their weapons, and boost their influence.
And Syria is a really interesting place for us to watch because as a result of the kind of Western goading of the Assad regime and Western support for the oppositional forces, we've seen the creation there of vast swathes of land that are now not governed, and where ISIS is really making gains.
And that could have a destabilizing impact across the Middle East, and just as the war in Libya had a destabilizing impact across Africa.
The West is destroying large parts of the world, and I think we need to kick up more of a fuss about that.
Absolutely.
All right.
Well, I'm sorry we're way over time, and I've got to let you go.
But thank you so much for your time.
It's great to talk to you again, Brendan.
Thanks a lot, Scott.
Cheers.
That's the way every interview ends.
I've got more questions.
He's got more answers.
We've got no more time.
We've got to go.
Brendan O'Neill, Spiked Online.
Quit your crying, Cameron.
You boosted Boko Haram.
Hey, y'all.
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