Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio on Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
We're also streaming live worldwide on the internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org and at Antiwar.com slash radio.
And it's time to talk again with Eric Margulies.
He is the foreign correspondent for Sun National Media.
His website is EricMargulies.com, spelt like Margolis, EricMargolis.com is how it's spelled if you just sound that out, if they taught you how to sound things out depending on your generation in government school here, I guess.
Also I'll tell you about his books.
One of them is called War at the Top of the World, and then most recently is American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
Happy New Year, Eric.
Welcome back to my show.
Happy New Year.
Happy New Year to you, Scott, and all our listeners.
I'm so happy to have you here, especially on a day like today.
Maybe we can even stop and review a little bit of, you know, a larger context of where we are as we plow through this conversation here.
That's good.
This is a time of review and introspection and figuring out what we did wrong over the last 12 months.
Yeah, well, and there's plenty.
We shouldn't have any problem, you know, if anything, we'll have a problem getting to it all and not forgetting something major.
But I want to start here, and I appreciate you entertaining my kookery, but I just interviewed this lawyer.
His name, Kurt Haskell.
Jeez, listen, man, I talk like a Fox News guy now, leaving out words like that.
His name is Kurt Haskell, and he says that he saw a well-dressed, Indian-looking guy, although when I asked him, he generalized further and said, well, somebody from Southern Asia somewhere, anyway, I guess, could have been Pakistani, he said, helped the young Nigerian get on the plane, the underpants bomber of Christmas Day 2009, Eric, and that then he sat there and watched, and we have cooperation from two other seemingly credible witnesses.
One of them went on MSNBC.
The other wrote an article himself at the Huffington Post, all three of them saying that they saw another South Asian-looking gentleman, not an Arab, not a West African, that this guy got arrested, and that the implication was that they had found a bomb in his back.
And none of this apparently is making it into the official narrative.
I mean, this guy's told his story in official media, but it's not part of what the FBI spokesman says when he's briefing the stenography pool, and apparently this is turning very quickly into a there-is-no-John-Doe-too, Eric, and I just wonder, you know, how far outside the realm of possibility do you think it is that this whole thing is some kind of put-on?
Well, I find it's a stretch to say that the whole thing is a put-on, but I'm not completely convinced that this so-called underpants bomb that this guy had would have brought down an airliner.
Well, you know, I talked with Becky Akers the other day, and I guess she'd been doing a bit of research about this.
I don't know anything about it.
I don't know.
Well, hell, you spent time covering wars in Central Asia.
Maybe you do know the answer to this, but she said, listen, bombs don't go off all easy-peasy like on TV, like in Hollywood.
In fact, it's really difficult to get something like this to work, no matter who you are.
That's quite right.
As an old war correspondent, I couldn't give you the technical side of it, but my gut just tells me that this did not look like the kind of bomb that would blow a hole in the side of an airplane.
And if somebody wanted to bring down an airplane, you'd do it at high altitude, where the cabin was under pressurization, then you would have catastrophic structural failure from even a small hole in the wall.
But, you know, being at low altitude this way, I don't know why he would do it that way.
Well, and I don't even know about that.
I mean, the Mythbusters on Learn Channel did a test of pressurization and shooting out windows and stuff like that, and they didn't seem to think that it would tear a plane apart.
It would have to be a pretty big bomb, or it would have to be, you know, over the fuel tank or where the wing connects.
It would have to not just be a hole in the wall of the plane to really bring it down.
Well, it may have been designed just to give everybody a big scare, if that's the case.
It certainly worked brilliantly.
There's pandemonium now everywhere.
I had a vision just yesterday of a bunch of Yemenis sitting around a cafe in Sana'a, Yemen, smoking their water pipes, watching CNN on TV, watching all the hysteria at American airports and having a great big laugh, because that was just what the whole objective of this operation was, was to put the fear of God in Americans and just keep the psychological pressure up.
Yeah.
Well, that's so funny.
I mean, they've pretended this whole time, because the American empire has their own agenda, obviously, and so they need to have a small enemy that's not really too big of a threat, you know, that obviously couldn't do the kind of damage to us that the Russians could do or something like that.
But they need the American people to be scared enough of that threat that they can further justify these small wars.
So, you know, I was hanging out at a place last night where CNN was just on mute in the background, you know, watching it like Henry Kissinger would with the sound off, just to see what the images are that they push over the thing.
And it is like this continual panic.
Here we are days out, New Year's Eve 2009.
And it's still these, especially on CNN, these breathless women anchors, they all kind of are going along with the narrative that like any of us could be struck dead by these monsters at any time.
And really pretending as though, you know, when when I'm in Ozawa here, he calls a conference in his cave that this is like when the Kremlin had their big Politburo meeting to decide their hydrogen bomb posture policy or something like that.
They have done such a good job, haven't they?
For years now of pretending that this this movement of disparate individuals, basically a band of pirates, somehow has the ability to not just, you know, bring down our country, but kill each and every one of us, apparently, you know, if we don't stop them somehow.
Well, yes, that's true.
You know, the Republican strategist, Kevin Phillips, did a study where he said that he thought the biggest supporters of President Bush's so-called war on terror were soccer moms out in the X suburbs or outer suburbs in the Midwest, you know, in Indiana and places like that, because all these soccer moms were convinced that Osama bin Laden was coming to get their little Johnny in their van.
And they were panicked.
But this is the you know, ignorant people are frightening.
You're quite right.
The American media are really in the state predicted by George Orwell in 1984, where you have this constant drumbeat of propaganda.
You've got, you know, America and England, which was Orwell's construction fighting against Eurasia, in a state of constant war and warning, constant propaganda warnings.
So we have reached exactly the point that Orwell foretold, and the American media is on instructions, keeping everybody in a state of intense, nervous agitation.
Well, and, you know, also like in Orwell, the regular people go, I don't know, man.
And but the people who are part of the party, the people who are members of the state as a knock described them, you know, not the government, but the actual people that make up the government and then the various most powerful private factions that are intertwined with the government that that they're the ones really who the propaganda is for.
It doesn't really matter if I'm buying it or my listeners are buying it.
What matters is that the goofballs on the TV are actually buying it, which means, you know, enough of the people who actually have power, they're the ones who go along the most.
They're the ones who can't imagine things being different than they are.
They're the ones who can't imagine the truth being much different than the official narrative that they get on a regular basis.
You know, like the Lair News Channel, right?
It's just as much or the Lair News Hour on PBS.
It's just as much B.S., but it's much smarter, more sober, sweater wearing B.S. for serious people, you know?
A higher class B.S.
Right, right.
If you don't have Martha Raddatz ABC, for example, hyperventilating on TV with a look of horror on her face, and I've just come from the Pentagon and sources tell me it's so predictable and it's lame.
You know, I've taken, Scott, I've taken on my television, I can get the new Russian television channel.
Oh, yeah.
RT, I got that, too.
RT.
It's a scream.
It's the only channel these days where they spend all their time taking nasty potshots of the U.S.
Yeah, it's really funny, too.
I don't agree with them, but it's so interesting to hear something that is not the U.S. party line for a change.
Yeah, well, and it is really sad when, like, you know, to see the Max Keiser show, you actually have to watch Russian or Iranian state TV, man.
That ain't right.
No, it isn't.
It isn't.
All right.
Well, I don't think I'd do a show if they offered one to me on the state TV of a foreign government.
But anyway, I got chaos radio, so I don't need that.
That's right.
All right.
So, geez, let's talk about this whole war on terrorism thing in general.
Well, I guess let's start with this.
Phil Giraldi says he thinks bin Laden is dead, and now I guess he's just wondering, thinking back, how long ago must it have been that he died?
How many of these podcasts, audio and video, have been fake?
What do you think?
Some of the broadcasts, first of all, I think he's alive.
Not that I know, personally, but my very reliable Pakistani military and intelligence contacts, who I've known for many years, who I trust.
Well, and how many years for a generation?
For a generation, yes.
Well, almost certainly since the mid-1980s.
Okay, so more than a generation, just to make sure that that's clear.
That I've known are telling me that he is still alive.
One of the current Interior Minister of Pakistan, who had been tracking him for a long time, and who was just on the verge of capturing Ramzi Youssef, the original bomber, insisted that bin Laden was alive, but he was being held in some other ...
He was being guarded by some other country.
I think he was hinting that bin Laden might be in Iran, but my evidence says that bin Laden is alive.
However, there have been false broadcasts.
Now, I'm on record as saying that one of the videos where we saw a picture of a man, supposedly bin Laden, showing how the airplane dove into the World Trade Center and laughing about it is a fake, because I've seen bin Laden.
Now, that wasn't bin Laden in the tape.
It was a crude fake.
It may have been made by the Russians.
It may have been made by the Communist-backed Northern Alliance in Afghanistan.
Even I hope the Americans didn't do it, but it's not impossible.
There have been fake things ascribed to Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.
It might even be 9-11.
We're not 100% sure.
Lots of lies floating around there.
Well, you know, and that was what Giraldi said, too, was, you know, we don't even know who's faking them.
I mean, if they are fake and he's dead, then still it could be Ayman al-Zawahiri and his buddies who are, you know, putting together the montage.
I told Phil that, I guess, and maybe I got this from you, Erica, it's certainly plausible, that it seemed to me like if he died, they would say, blam, ha ha, and it would be all over the Pakistani press.
Our hero died and you never got him, and yeah, he's a martyr, but you didn't get a chance to kill him.
He's in heaven now, and screw you.
Wouldn't they do that?
Well, I mean, that's an assumption.
I got nothing behind that, really, except that's what I would do if I was them, you know?
No, it's a good assumption, Scott.
You know, bin Laden has now become a cult figure.
He's an ideology.
You don't need him alive anymore, because he has no actual organizational influence on anything.
Al-Qaeda is probably down to less than 20 people in Pakistan, the real, original Al-Qaeda.
It's no longer in Afghanistan, even though President Obama has been fit to send 106,000 American troops to supposedly fight the wicked Al-Qaeda, wicked but invisible Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
But his thinking, his philosophy of ejecting U.S. domination of the Muslim world and overthrowing the tyrants and dictators that the Western powers have imposed on the Muslim world, his philosophy is getting stronger and stronger, because we see so-called Al-Qaeda, which are not really the original ones, popping up all over now, most recently in Nigeria, Yemen, etc.
Well, and of course, you know, every jerk who wants to kill anybody with a bomb or a gun who lives in that part of the world, you know, as long as America keeps making it the trendy thing to do, why not call yourself Al-Qaeda?
What are you going to do, call yourself Hezbollah?
Not if you're Sunni, you're not, you know?
Well, that's right.
And also, the U.S. government and media keep calling anybody who opposes the Western domination in the Muslim world is immediately now called Al-Qaeda.
Look at Iraq, where there are 22 resistance groups fighting U.S. occupation, and yet every attack that happens in Iraq is ascribed to Al-Qaeda, even though Al-Qaeda never existed in Iraq under Saddam, and today is probably no more than a handful of men.
But it's convenient.
It's an easy story for the media to tell.
It's a label.
You know, we journalists love labels, Al-Qaeda, wicked, terrorist, evil, bad guys.
And the American government can't begin to explain to voters the difference between Shiites and Sunnis and Druzes and Kurds and all this kind of stuff.
So it's just easier to say Al-Qaeda, which is a synonym for bad guys.
Yeah, exactly.
Anyone who dares oppose us and actually doesn't control a state anywhere.
Yeah, right.
Yeah.
All right, everybody.
It's Eric Margulies from Sun National Media, ericmargulies.com is his website.
Let me ask you about what this really means in context, this new, you know, Barack Obama's been threatening not just Yemen, which I pray at the most means airstrikes and special forces and not some kind of beachhead there at the southern tip of the southwest tip of the Arabian Peninsula there.
But he's also threatening to double down Dick Cheney's war in Somalia as well.
More and more, there's trial balloons about the peace deal breaking apart in Sudan, in the south of Sudan.
And maybe we need to intervene there.
I mean, these these long war world empire, full spectrum dominance Pentagon types are really just getting started here, huh?
They sure are.
And Obama is simply facilitating the the as I wrote it recently, I could be the military industrial juggernaut, the national security juggernaut just keeps rolling on.
And Obama's just sort of holding on and trying to put a nice face on it.
Okay.
But Yemen is very interesting.
I know this country quite well.
And I call it the Afghanistan of the Arabian Peninsula.
No, no, no, no, no.
Don't say that.
Okay, go ahead.
Explain.
Shiites fighting Sunnis.
It's got wild and crazy tribesmen everywhere.
The south is fighting the north.
The Denny's are fighting the the chaps on the north.
The Saudis are trying to overthrow the or they're fighting on the northern border.
It's a real complicated mess.
And that's why these militant jihadists have gotten established in Yemen.
But, you know, this we have to remember that the U.S. has been militarily involved in Yemen for ever since the USS Cole, the destroyer, was bombed in Aden Harbor in the year 2000.
And we have been, by the Pentagon, CIA, have been using killer drones to assassinate militants, tribal leaders, more or less anyone that we don't like.
Special forces have been involved.
There were backing and financing of the Yemeni security forces, an army of a terrible human rights record, like most of our other Arab allies.
So we've been up to our ears in Yemen for for a long time.
And we've seen what everybody's acting.
Oh, Yemen.
Well, they're attacking us.
Well, you know, we've been kicking this particular hornet's nest now for years.
And we should not be surprised that we're hornets are coming out, stinging us.
Well, and I guess this latest round started last month, right, toward the end of November is when these new, I guess, wink wink Saudi airstrikes on behalf of the Yemeni government against some southern rebels.
Is that it?
Northern rebels.
But it was the southern the southern ones are the ones who are actually hanging out with Al Qaeda dudes.
Right.
Because I think I was reading that the was at the Jamestown Foundation website or one of these, you know, terrorism websites where they were quoting Al Qaeda dudes.
It seemed like credible reporting to had a lot of, you know, built in caveats and and, you know, seemingly reasonable analysis in it.
But it was talking about how the Al Qaeda guys were saying to the southern Yemenis, the secessionists that, yeah, we're with you.
But remember, you know, Marxism failed you and you need to turn to Islam and what have you.
But that basically that's who they're throwing in with is the the socialistic or the used to be the friends with the Russian types and that are the southern secessionists in Yemen.
Is that do I have any idea what I'm talking about here?
Yes, you certainly do.
And I'm that impresses me greatly because hardly anybody knows about about Yemen.
And that's real obscure stuff.
I was just writing, in fact, about the Flossie, which used to be the the South Yemeni left wingers who are fighting the British in Oman, which is a little country that's run entirely by British intelligence.
Am I six?
To this day, Oman, to this day, is is correct, is run by British intelligence.
And there was a very, you know, wonderful post-late colonial action in the deserts of Dhofar there, where the British S.A.
S. were fighting these Yemeni back rebels known as the Red Wolves of Radfan, really great sort of kipling-esque stuff.
I've read on this.
But there is support for al-Qaeda, for Arab nationalism, if you want, all over Yemen and amongst the northern tribes, too, who are Shiites.
And you're quite right.
The the Saudi so-called Saudi air attack was clearly done by U.S. warplanes.
And between 50 and 100 Yemeni tribesmen were killed.
That's the biggest body count so far.
But as I said, for the last almost 10 years now or nine years, there have been regular strikes, predator strikes and discreet airstrikes.
It's just been kept under the covers.
And the Martha Raddatz's of the media simply have been told to ignore it.
Right.
Well, and there you go.
They are all a whole gaggle of Martha Raddatz's, too.
What a great what a great way to call them to the Martha Raddatz's.
I wonder if she knows that her name has become a synonym for the worst of American media and what it means to have so-called journalists who just lay prone and repeat whatever lies they're told by the state.
They were like the Soviet media hacks.
Exactly.
They did the same thing.
You know, that's our problem, Eric Margulies, is that we don't have a Soviet Union to compare ourselves to anymore.
It used to be a time where we could be proud that at least we're not as bad as them.
But we could also say, whoa, we're kind of becoming like them in a way.
We need to, you know, head back toward, you know, our way instead.
But now that we don't have them to compare ourselves to anymore, who can tell Martha Raddatz from a good journalist, you know, I couldn't agree more.
I miss the Soviets every day because you're right.
They were a measure.
They made us look good.
And since those tricky communists went and collapsed, they left us holding the bag.
Now we don't look so good anymore.
And I must say, we have begun acting more and more like, certainly under Bush, certainly acting more and more like the aggressive union in its very late stages.
And we've become, the Taoists say in China, that you become what you hate.
And in a way we've done this, we've inherited many of the worst qualities of the Soviet Union.
Well, now let's talk about Pakistan.
I guess the danger is, according, as it's been defined by the State Department, I guess, by the think tankers, is that Pakistan could fall apart.
I think you explained on this show before, Eric, that Pakistan's really kind of four pretty big sub-states.
And they're held together with consensus on a few issues, such as there ought to be one secular military and some form of parliamentary democracy, hopefully.
But other than that, not too much holding these four states together.
And it looks like America's war, obviously, is the number one catalyst in helping to tear Pakistan apart.
But to hear Hillary Clinton and them tell it, we cannot let that happen.
Or if it does happen, we have to take responsibility for those nuclear weapons there.
Is that really the path that we're headed down?
Some situation where we have combat forces, not under the cover of darkness, under JSOC, creeping into the Waziristan territory or whatever, but I'm talking actual American army on the ground in Pakistan, taking nukes, perhaps fighting against their military or factions of it or whatever.
I'm imagining some pretty nightmare Hollywood scenarios here.
You know, Scott, this has been under active discussion by the Pentagon for a couple of years now.
And the neocons have been really behind this issue because they see Pakistan's nuclear forces as a potential threat to Israel.
In fact, Israel's foreign minister, Lieberman, you know, he warned, he said that Pakistan is now the number one, and Pakistan and Afghanistan are now a leading threat to Israel.
So all the neocons heard this and they're now on tiptoes, tingling with excitement and ready to get Pakistan's nukes.
The feeling in Pakistan is that the U.S. is definitely determined to tear Pakistan apart and to grab its nuclear weapons.
And it may do this either, as you just said, by military intervention or by using blackwater, because there are more and more of these blackwater exiles now called mercenaries coming into Pakistan.
And the Pakistanis are preparing themselves for attacks on their nuclear installations either by air or ground.
So I mean, is it really a danger that the Pakistani state is going to fall apart here?
I mean, obviously, if it does, we know who to blame.
The Democrats and the Republicans who've killed all these people and done all this horrible stuff.
Is it really coming to that?
Well, we destroyed Iraq and we destroyed Afghanistan.
Well, wait a minute.
I mean, it took a full scale invasion of Iraq.
And even then it took, what, three weeks or something to really take Baghdad.
I mean, is Pakistan in danger of falling apart from American airstrikes and attacks from on to the tribal, ungovernable areas from across the border in Afghanistan?
No, I don't think.
I don't think the risk is extremely high.
There is a risk, because the Pakistanis themselves, with all their political convulsions and backstabbing and infighting, could tear their own country apart.
But there are two governments in Pakistan.
There's a bunch of crooked politicians in Islamabad who are called the government.
And then there's the real government, which happens to be the army and the 650,000 man armed forces, has ruled Pakistan for half of its years of independence, so of life.
So the army is there, and the army will make sure that the government doesn't, or that the country doesn't disintegrate, or it will try.
But it's going to be very difficult even for the army, because Pakistan is bankrupt, it's under tremendous pressure from the Americans and the Indians, America's new ally, and it's in convulsions.
Now we hear even the American ambassador in Islamabad, who's going to, by the way, have a new $750 million embassy built there, what the local people call modern crusader castles, she openly called for attacks on Balochistan province in Pakistan, where there are believed to be a lot of Taliban there.
So it could happen.
It's really a volatile situation.
All right, let's talk about Iran.
One of the two countries in the Middle East that's not run by an American-backed dictator, but by an Iranian-backed dictator, the Ayatollah Khamenei there.
Just this last week, there were three very kind of strange stories.
One of them said that the Iranians tried to buy some incredibly large proportion, like a million tons or something, of uranium from Kazakhstan, which they laughed at as they were trying to deny it, the Kazakhs there, Iran being behind the abduction of a Brit from Iraq, and I think there was one other one, I forget, but they, oh, and this is obviously on the heels of the big story in the London Times about the so-called nuclear trigger.
All of these stories are falling apart at the slightest bit of scrutiny, but it sure does seem like somebody's got an agenda to, you know, make sure to beat the drum at least, you know, once per day about Iran.
You know, slow and steady, everybody knows what a terrible threat they are.
It's simply a question of whether we're going to let them have nukes or whether we're going to stop them before it's too late, Eric.
Scott, I come back to our beloved Martha Raddatz.
I saw her a couple of months ago looking at us with great anguish in her eyes, saying, quote, the threat of Iranian nuclear weapons.
Well, that's a big lie.
Iran has no nuclear weapons, it has no means of delivering them at long range, and it really has no reason to fire nuclear weapons at anybody.
So you're right, there's a steady drumbeat of propaganda, and we're seeing another wave of faked information, most interestingly, the famous computer file on a computer that was apparently stolen about how the Iranians are designing a warhead to be carried on top of missiles for nuclear weapons, and now a nuclear trigger device.
I believe they're all frauds and forgeries, just as we were talking about before with bin Laden.
You know, the Russians and Soviets weren't the only people who did forgeries, though they were the past masters.
The CIA has been known to do that, too.
The Israelis are very, very busy.
They're in overdrive, churning out as much bad stuff as they can against Iran in a very well-organized international campaign.
This uranium thing, where have we heard that before?
You remember the uranium from West Africa that was supposed to be going to Saddam?
The metal tubes that were supposed to be used in centrifuges but were actually for rockets?
You know where I heard all this stuff first?
Where?
Waco, Texas, 1993.
Really?
The guy's crazy.
He can't be dealt with.
He's bad to his own people, and he's got illegal weapons, and he won't give them up.
And something's got to be done about it, and so we'll burn them all to death.
It's just like Iraq.
The Iraq and Iran wars that we're talking about here, the Iraq war that's still going on and the Iran war to come, are based exactly on that model of, look everybody, there's David Koresh, if you can get the people of Texas to rally behind burning their own neighbors to death, believe me, it's no problem to sick them against a bunch of foreign cartoon characters that don't even really exist to them.
Well, you're right, and I make the point that everybody's calling Ahmadinejad in Iran a dreadful dictator, and all poor Iranian people, well, a lot of them are protesting, particularly the young people in Tehran, but we don't see any single street protest in any Arab country aligned with the United States.
Every time people stick their heads up in Egypt, or Jordan, or Morocco, or Libya, or Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, and so on, to protest a government policy, they're immediately arrested and tortured or disappear.
This has not happened, it has happened a little in Iran, but not to the extent it's happened in our own American allies, so we should be very cautious about who we accuse.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, the London Times today, and I do hope that Justin Raimondo fights back against this jerk, but there's this guy at the London Times who, believe this or not, puts out his argument, because of course, I'm sure you saw where Gareth Porter wrote this article citing Phil Giraldi, saying he has, as he said on this radio show yesterday, or was it the day before, that he has sources in the intelligence community who tell him that they don't believe in the documents cited in the recent London Times series.
That's why it wasn't in the New York Times, or the CIA would have put it in there.
The CIA didn't put it in the New York Times because they didn't believe it, they didn't want to put their credibility on the line for another set of such obvious forgeries, apparently.
And the London Times has decided to fight back by saying, well, Philip Giraldi hates Jews, and Gareth Porter's a communist, and also Ron Paul is a terrible guy too, and that's it.
And I just thought, you know, I guess here's another opportunity for me to mention that my friend, Dr. Gordon Prather, used to make nuclear bombs for a living, and he was the chief scientist of the Army, and he worked at Lawrence Livermore and Sandia National Laboratories, and I speak to him on the phone about these things, and he laughs his ass off at the bogus, ridiculous, unscientific, not even plausible lies in the London Times, such as the one that came out last August, saying that they had worked out a way, get this, to set off a uranium implosion bomb by cutting grooves in it, and then setting like some sort of prima cord, like you would use for regular TNT or something, you know, they're going to set off their nuke with regular old blasting caps there, Eric.
And you know, Gordon Prather just laughed and laughed at that, and then he looks at this one, where they're talking about, oh yes, they have an Iranian neutron initiator trigger made of uranium deuteride.
Well, Prather says, and Prather knows, unlike these idiots who forged these documents, obviously, that uranium deuteride would inhibit fission, and you want, of course in a nuclear bomb, you want a supercritical mass, and to detonate, to split as many of those atoms as you possibly can in as short amount of time as possible.
You would use uranium deuteride in a nuclear reactor, maybe, to slow down a reaction, but anyway, no, you know what, the answer probably is, is that Philip Giroldi hates Jews, and Gareth Porter's a communist, because meanwhile, the actual arguments in the London Times don't hold up.
There's no dates on it.
Oh, and by the way, Jesus Christ, as long as I'm sitting here going off on it, you might have heard of a FBI former contract translator by the name of Sabelle Edmonds?
You ever heard of her?
Anyway, so I wrote her, and said, hey, let me ask you a couple of things about this.
She answers back, there are no markings or stamps on these documents published by the London Times indicating secret or sensitive or even official material.
Alright, that's the quote from Sabelle Edmonds, right here, there are no markings, stamps, indicating secret, sensitive, or even official on the documents.
So, anyway, the London Times is full of crap, or, I guess, I'm a Klansman, Eric, which is it?
I would say the first.
You know, the London Times used to be a very reputable paper, it was one of the world's most authoritative newspapers, in fact, I am reading the London Times war correspondence account of the 1904 Russo-Japanese War, and it is brilliant, brilliant stuff.
Today, the London Times is owned by Murdoch, and the paper has become very ideological, and I'm afraid, like some of the right-wing British press today, is peddling opinion and rumors and ideology rather than fact.
The British press is not very reputable anymore, I would say the independents is, but certainly the right-wing papers like the Telegraph and the Times, they always have an axe to grind, and I would not trust them for a minute on these stories about nuclear weapons, they're clearly a plant designed to provoke war with Iran.
Yeah, well, and you know, that's the thing too, is like these reporters, the latest London Times story has this video and interview with one of their reporters, I forget the lady's name, but wow, no shame whatsoever, I mean, you know, I guess I probably screw things up on this show and get my facts wrong at times, but I'm never mongering mass murder, and if I was going to sit up here and monger a war, I think I would at least try to have my facts straight at all, I mean, if a bunch of Iranians die, then these individual journalists at the London Times have to bear responsibility for that, I mean, I'm not saying they don't have the right to write what they want, I'm just saying that, you know, on a personal level, well, it's pure evil to pass on a bunch of dubious crap that is supposed to amount to a costus belli, that could get untold thousands of people killed.
Look, we're, unfortunately, the media sees too much of that, look at the New York Times publishing outright lies about Iraq, and about Iraq's nuclear weapons, the Judith Miller scare stories, all that, and I was looking at the Augusta New York Times, which is wrong, and had to come down and apologize for printing all these lies, so the British press is notorious for that, as I said, particularly the right-wing press, well, maybe the left-wing press in England too, but their papers have lost a great deal of credibility, and this to me as an old journalist, this just reeked of a planted story for ideological purposes, the story of the latest Iranian missile threat, and it's about as silly or crazy as the member under President Bush warning us about Saddam Hussein's drones of death, they were going to fly off freighters lurking in the North Atlantic, and they were going to fly over sleeping American Christian homes, and spread some kind of purple death particles over Americans and poison them, and it was something straight out of one of the Flash Gordon 1930s serials with Ming the Merciless, which I used to watch with great delight, but it's propaganda, it's war propaganda.
Well, you know what's fun about that one too, is I believe it's a CBS story, where you can see a picture of the actual drones in Iraq that they finally found after the invasion and the deaths of all the innocent people, and they're made out of balsa wood and held together with string, and you can find the picture online, I think it's CBS, it's either CBS or ABC, I'm pretty sure it's CBS.
I saw it, I saw it, it's really, it's preposterous, it's ludicrous.
Anybody who was involved in a story like that should have been fired, right, either in the news organizations or in the White House, and unfortunately they weren't, we bought these lies, they were just as egregious as Soviet or Nazi propaganda in many cases, but you know, when people want to go to war, old pretense of truth ends.
Well, and that goes to kind of the larger thing, you know, we're not just wrapping up the year here, we're wrapping up the decade.
You know, George Bush used to talk about, well, you know, this is the first war of the 21st century, and you know, just promising more and more from here on out, but you know, so I guess I'm sort of interested in your larger perspective of like the sort of eras as they go by here, I guess a lot of times when people go back in history, they think like the Eisenhower era or something, they'll break things into four and eight year pieces as to who was president at the time, that kind of thing.
The 60s were the Lyndon Johnson years, that kind of deal, you know what I mean?
But so what do you think, you know, just tell us something wise, damn it, about, you know, the Soviet Union fell apart and then here we are, and then what happened?
And it seems like everything is really, you know, 20 years out from the fall of the Soviet Union.
Things don't seem to be going well here, man.
And I just, it occurs to me, Eric, that it doesn't have to be this way.
And I was just wondering, you know, if maybe you have something to say along those lines, you know, I guess.
I do.
I was just summing up my year in thoughts, and I keep a picture of President Eisenhower above my desk to remind me of what honest, good, and decent America, the America of my youth, used to be like.
And this is not the case anymore.
We have an outrageously lying media.
We have a sort of modern-day imperialist agenda in certain circles in Washington.
And we have, our financial community has turned into a pack of gamblers who are now government-supported gamblers.
We have the big banks now that caused the biggest crisis in history since the Depression, are now controlled, thanks to government help, now control 40% of all bank deposits in the United States.
In other words, they gained power, and they gained oligopoly in America.
So we are being run by a financial oligarchy.
We have these military-industrial complexes, in spite of President Obama still promoting, as we were saying, a worldwide full-spectrum dominance agenda of oil security and terrorism and all this.
America has gone off the deep end, and you can see it's bankrupt.
We're doing all this with borrowed money from China.
We have lost our credibility and reputation around the world in spite of Obama's popularity.
And I never thought I would live to see America imitating the Soviet Union and acting as a raw imperial power.
But this is exactly what we're doing.
And we're heading into wars in Yemen and South Somalia, as we were saying, and West Africa.
We're engaged in the Philippines and Thailand and Central Asia.
You name it, we're just running out of money and soldiers to do it.
This is imperial overreach in spades.
And I'm sorry to see it.
I think we've lost a lot of what we stand for in the United States.
And some of our media and political parties have been encouraging the least educated elements in our society and the most low-minded become dominant political forces.
This is not the America that I used to call my own.
Well, do you see any way out of this other than Soviet-style collapse?
Because, you know, from what I understand, you know, it isn't like there was anything great about the Soviet system.
But having it dissolve meant that there was no system at all.
And goods and services did not get traded around even within the terribly inefficient style of totalitarianism that they had there.
And people starved by the incredibly large numbers of individuals, right?
And they're still not even recovered from that, right?
You know, there's got to be something other than wait around for the whole damn country to commit suicide, you know?
Well, we're very resourceful Americans.
We'll find a way, I think, of pulling ourselves out of this hole that we dug for ourselves.
But, you know, while we're doing this, we have to see that there are two important developments.
I think, and I've been saying for a long time, that the Soviet Union, or part of it, is slowly being reconstituted.
And we'll come back as an important challenge to the United States.
Secondly, I see Maoism returning in full force to China.
Really?
Yes, becoming very, very militant.
It's not 100% sure it's going to happen, because there are two factions in China.
One is more pragmatic.
One is more very strongly Maoist.
But Mao is again becoming a cult deity in China.
And we're going to have to contend with that.
So while we're trying to clean up the financial mess and unemployment that we made, we're going to be dealing with outside powers who are going to be leaning on our territory.
A very, very difficult situation.
Wow.
So, you know, here I thought Russia was basically falling apart.
I mean, their death rate is high.
Their birth rate is low.
They've got vast tracts of unpopulated land there.
They say China's looking like they're going to be encroaching more and more into the Siberian territory in the coming years.
Some people have predicted Russia basically falling apart.
Even the Russian Federation, as it exists, is being a completely overstretched empire.
You see it going the other way, huh?
I do.
It's not impossible that Russia could go the way you're describing.
But from my long knowledge of the Russians, the Russians have an incredible ability to muddle through messes.
And they are very resourceful.
They're very patient, very courageous people.
And they can put up with a lot that we wouldn't normally do.
And Russia has very capable leaders now.
Medvedev, it's got Putin.
They are strong men.
They're not Democrats, but they seem to know exactly what they're doing.
Whereas we have wavering leadership confusion in the U.S.
And we've lost our political drive to move forward.
It's a mess.
Well, at least this will give the guys at Lockheed some talking points for their next promotional video for the latest wave of new fighter jets they've designed and their new submarines and all that.
Should be some good money for Lockheed investors, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, people like that.
Well, I'm wondering if we in the United States are going to go the way of the Soviet Union.
Of course, that's the big question.
It's too soon to tell whether we permanently bankrupted ourselves.
So, quick, take whatever money you have and invest in the war machine now while you can before the whole thing falls apart.
I'm overly cynical here.
I quit smoking cigarettes, so I'm kind of extra cranky.
When, today?
No, like two weeks ago.
It really sucks.
Well, courage, as the French say.
Courage.
Thank you.
I've done it many times.
I know how tough it is.
Yeah.
You've quit many times?
Yes.
Have you ever succeeded at it?
I have.
Actually, I finally stopped.
Oh, really?
Right on.
Well, maybe you can live to be old now.
No, my doctor told me that I'm going to die if I don't lose some weight.
So, start smoking again, right?
My best friend is with me.
He's in perfect health.
He smokes a pack a day and drinks 18 cups of coffee.
So, there you are.
Good luck for the new year.
Yeah, you know, Bill Hicks quit smoking.
He was dead within a year.
I mean, what's the point?
That's right.
Be brave.
All right.
Well, listen, as always, I really appreciate your time on the show today.
I learned a lot, and I'm sure I'll come up with a bunch more questions as soon as you hang up, but I'll let you go for now.
I wish you a happy new year, and thank you again, and hope we can talk plenty in the new year.
Scott, I'm happy to spend these last fleeting moments of this year with you on your great show, and I look forward to being back in the new year.
Thank you.
Right on.
Happy New Year, Eric.
Take care.
Cheers.
Happy New Year.
Bye-bye.
All right, y'all.
That's Eric Margulies, Sun National Media.
He's their foreign correspondent.and American Raj, Liberation or Domination, are the books, and the website ericmargulies.com, which is spelled like Margolis, ericmargolis.com, and you'll find all his great articles there.
