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Alright, y'all.
Scott Horton's show.
I am him.
Check out the archives at libertarianinstitute.org slash scotthortonshow.
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Introducing the great Gareth Porter.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How are you, sir?
Hi, Scott.
I'm fine.
Thanks.
Glad to be back.
Very happy to have you here.
Turn your mic up here.
Hey, so you wrote the book, the book on Iran's nuclear program.
Someone's questioned me the other day.
Are you sure they're not making nukes, man?
I said, no, really, I'm sure.
He says, OK, I trust you, I guess, man, because you know what you're talking about.
I know you do, but everybody else says they are, and I'm really worried about it.
Well, hey, man, read Gareth Porter.
The book is called Manufactured Crisis.
The truth behind the Iran nuclear scare.
And then you will see.
You will know.
It is the book on Iran's nuclear program.
Manufactured Crisis by the great Gareth Porter, historian and investigative reporter.
He writes for Middle East Eye and for Truthout.
And we republish all of it at antiwar.com and at libertarianinstitute.org.
And here he is.
First of all, we have two important ones to talk about today.
The first one is Trump's national security adviser facilitated the murder of civilians in Afghanistan.
Trump's new national security adviser pick.
You must mean Lieutenant General Mike Flynn.
That's the guy.
All right.
So what did he have to do with the war in Afghanistan?
Gareth, as if I don't know.
Well, he was the intelligence director, the intelligence chief for both General McChrystal and General Petraeus when they were commanders in Afghanistan.
And, of course, even before that, he was the intelligence chief for McChrystal in Iraq.
And both McChrystal and Petraeus in Iraq when they were going after al-Qaeda and the Shia militias, the Mahdi army in 2006, 2007.
And so the story really begins in Iraq when he comes up with a new way of targeting to facilitate this effort to really wipe out or to decimate, let's put it that way, the leadership organs of the command structure of these two adversaries of the United States in Iraq.
All right.
Now, let me throw in here that when you're talking about Stanley McChrystal, it goes without saying between us.
But the audience needs to be caught up.
He wasn't running the whole Iraq war.
He was the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, which is the highest tier.
The first tier special forces, the SEALs and the Delta Force, not even the Rangers and Force Recon, their second tier.
This is the top tier special forces guys, JSOC.
Precisely.
And this is the outfit that was given the task of focusing in on the leadership structures of both al-Qaeda and the Mahdi army in Iraq during those years.
And so what he did was to rely extremely heavily on overhead aerial surveillance, essentially drones in the air over targets that they suspected were connected with al-Qaeda or Mahdi army.
And then with that overhead aerial surveillance, they linked that to the cell phones that were somehow linked to the location that they were focusing on.
And they came up with this system for essentially assembling a target list on the basis of the intelligence that they gathered from full motion videos from the aerial surveillance, plus the linkage between any telephones within that structure, within that location and outside it.
And then they would geolocate, figure out physically where the cell phones are that linked to that place.
And that would be the way that they would assemble their target list.
Now, that system was apparently regarded as a great success.
We don't have, as far as I know, actual figures for how many people they killed or captured in Iraq.
But when they transferred that system to Afghanistan, when McChrystal was sent to Afghanistan as commander of U.S. troops there in 2009, then the system that they had created was scaled up, as McChrystal liked to put it.
And it became much larger, much faster, and much more dangerous.
And that's really where my story comes in.
And this, by the way, this is a story that is really drawing on the longer piece that I published in 2011, which was not really about Flynn, but it was about McChrystal and Petraeus.
So now that Flynn has been named national security adviser to Trump, you know, I went back and looked at the role that he played.
And he was absolutely crucial, but I mean, because he was the one who dreamed up the intelligence system that was the basis for the targeting.
Right.
But the importance of this is, of course, that this resulted in a system of night raids in Afghanistan, which were absolutely disastrous in every sense of the word.
But I detail the way in which this went off the rails so completely in Afghanistan in my piece in Truthout.
All right.
Now, and yeah, and I'm glad you mentioned the previous work, because, of course, as everybody should know, that you won the Gellhorn Award, the Martha Gellhorn Award for your series.
It was two or three part series that you did back in 2011 about this at truthout.org.
It was actually just a single piece.
Oh, was it?
Yeah.
It wasn't the only piece, but, you know, it was the biggest.
The one that got the award for you.
I mean, I think I think it was the most important thing.
Yes.
All right.
So now.
So basically what we're talking about here, we talked about it then.
And we've seen, you know, with the drone papers that were leaked to the intercept.
I don't know if they mentioned you or not, but really all they were doing was confirming your earlier journalism and how they do this stuff.
And there's there's more and more reports coming out now about Flynn trying to give him credit and saying, you know, this was the intel revolution.
Mike Flynn had written this big paper about how our intelligence in Afghanistan sucks.
We don't know who's who or who we're fighting or why or what.
And so we really need better intelligence.
But then, as you're describing here, basically what they came up with is a computerized conspiracy theory machine where you put in a bunch of phone numbers and then it tells you kill these people.
But it's pure garbage in garbage out.
And they even they go, yeah.
And what we'll do is we'll have whoever we kill.
We take whatever pieces of paper in their pockets, whatever information, whatever name or phone number might be on a piece of paper in their pocket.
We put that in there, too.
We put in other words, like they're taking all this data, which isn't even information.
It's just data.
And they're putting it into the computer.
And then they're letting the computer do all the deciding about who's connected to who and in what ways.
But they don't really know anything to teach the computer how to figure out anything either.
So it's basically just coming up.
It's basically a computerized truther going.
Oh, yeah.
Ahmed is tied to this guy who's linked to that guy who got some money from George Soros.
Let's bomb.
It's that's a nice that's a nice way of depicting the problem.
Scott, I agree.
You know, this this is really at the center of this of this whole story.
This system of of creating a target list from it's really called link analysis.
It's a technique or a statistical program called link analysis.
And it was very popular after 9-11.
It became all the rage within the counterterrorism community.
It wasn't just Flynn who used it.
It was being used by a number of places.
So I want to make it clear that this was a much broader phenomenon within the U.S. government.
But of course, it was Flynn and JSOC who turned it into the biggest story of all.
And what they did, what this what this link analysis program did was to turn all this metadata from cell phones and data from that was gathered from the full motion videos and turn it into a picture of a network.
That you could see on the screen.
And of course, you can imagine these targeters, you know, using this software and seeing the network pop up like magic on their screen.
And the impact that it has on assuring them that they've got something here that's really valid.
I'm really glad that you mentioned that because, you know, there used to be that website.
Was it Sourcewatch that used to have the page where it had lines through and connecting all the different corporations, the media and the different think tanks?
I'm glad you recalled that to mind.
Yeah.
So that's exactly like what we're talking about.
Like, oh, this guy is tied to this, is tied to that, is tied to this.
That kind of thing.
So, in other words, wait, there could be real truth in there.
Right.
But not necessarily.
I'm not saying I want to make it clear.
I'm not saying that, you know, none of the people that they had on their on their chart of the network were, in fact, Taliban people.
I mean, of course, a lot of them were.
There's no no question about that.
But there's also no question that there was a huge amount of of of innocent of sort of scouring up, scarfing up innocent people in the process.
And and the key thing to know is that most of these people apparently excuse me, most of the targets.
I want to make it clear.
I'm talking about most of the targets.
They didn't even know who they were.
They were simply phone numbers.
Right.
Well, and listen, they told Dana Priest in the series Top Secret America for The Washington Post, Dana Priest and William Arkin that, yeah, we got it was about 50 percent of the houses that we rated were even anybody we were looking for at all.
And they were bragging about that.
That's a very good indicator.
In fact, I you know, my own estimate, not just based on that, but on the data that I got from the human rights organization, the independent human rights organization in in Afghanistan, which was was doing the best job that they could.
I'm quite convinced that they were under very difficult conditions trying to gather information from the Taliban controlled zone of about incidents of night raids.
And they could only investigate a small percentage of the total.
But based on the number of complaints that they had from that minority of incidents of night raids where people were killed, I estimate that that probably a half the number of people who JSOC killed in night raids were innocent.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, the thing of it, too, is in context, they were supposed to be clear holding and building and counterinsurgency and winning over the Pashtun population of Afghanistan to our side by being such sweethearts and providing such good security for them that they would prefer us to their own sons.
And yet you got Americans falling out of the sky from Blackhawk helicopters in the middle of the night raiding people's houses like the boogeyman, like pardon me, like I grew up hearing stories about the Nazis and the communists, the NKVD of the Soviet Union who had come for people in the middle of the night.
And, you know, how the exiles said if only the neighbors had stood up for them, you know, or whatever.
And this kind of this is the definition of totalitarianism of the worst kind of way that you can treat people.
If you if you came up with a plan for how can we make the people of Pashtunistan hate us as much as possible, this would be it.
Night raids, killing them and and humiliating them in front of their women and their children in their own bedrooms at three o'clock in the morning.
And there's a quote from my research here.
I forgot where it was, maybe from a non Gopal, where the guy is one of the police chiefs says, you know, the Soviet Union, they came in here, they killed a million of us.
They never came in our homes at night.
Right.
This is this is, of course, the reason that McChrystal himself acknowledged publicly in a directive that was made public in a redacted form in 2010.
He said publicly that the night raids have enraged.
I don't know if he used that word specifically, but he made it clear that it has made everyone in Afghanistan angry at us.
Now, I mean, that is the most astonishing admission on the part of the person who was actually carrying out the policy.
He sponsored it.
He he made the decision to increase the level of those raids fivefold during a period of six, six or seven months.
Well, and then once he was cashiered because Hastings Great Journalism and they brought Petraeus in, he even what double, triple, quadruple the night raids after that.
That's right.
Petraeus, Petraeus made it much worse.
And every time you scale up, you increase the tempo.
That means that you are forcing your targeters to add targets to the list at a rate that means that the rate of innocent people being added to the list is bound to be increased.
Right.
In other words, just the same as quotas for the NYPD.
Go out there and find some black people to bring in here.
Yeah, yeah.
Or quotas in a communist country, you know, for production.
I mean, you know, some of that production is going to be phony.
Some of it's going to be, you know, shoddy goods, et cetera, et cetera.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, exactly.
I mean, it's interesting about just the economics of how that works, where he's not saying, guys, do your best in really trying to find, you know, the really isolating the networks of the Taliban leadership and marginalize this, that.
Forget any pretense of that.
Even bring me numbers, man.
I want I want a body count like this is Vietnam.
Yeah.
Now, the thing is, Scott, I mean, both I think it's very clear that McChrystal knew that this was a bad idea.
Treyas knew that it was a bad idea and Flynn knew that was a bad idea.
We know that Flynn's gone on record saying, yeah, well, night raids actually were not a good idea.
So so these people were doing things that they knew were not in the national interest.
OK.
And they did it anyway.
Why did they do it?
Because this was regarded as being good publicity for McChrystal, but particularly for Petraeus.
It was generating activity that they could say was showing that we were laying it on the enemy.
And so it was PR.
It was PR, despite the fact that they knew it wasn't working.
It was having the opposite effect in the long run.
And that to me is the most telling point about the whole story.
Well, you know, they're just now finally getting the technology together where you can search MP3s for certain text words.
Right.
So that we'll be able to go back soon, within maybe a couple of years, maybe even sooner.
We'll be able to search for you and me predicting and joking and talking about how.
Oh, hilarious.
Now that Petraeus is moving to CIA, I wonder how long it'll be before he tries to put out a report about how the war in Afghanistan is going great or whatever.
And then that's exactly what happened was he tried.
And apparently the CIA analysts rebelled.
But he tried to basically embed his former pet officers inside the CIA analyst group to to report on the progress of the war.
He obviously did that.
I mean, he couldn't help himself.
That was second nature to Petraeus by then, of course.
This is so funny.
But yeah, I mean, you know, I don't know.
I guess I might have suspected that he would have done it in a little bit less ham handed of a way and not get caught so easily.
But it was just right there in the post for everyone to read.
But you know, Scott, the real significance of this story.
It's the tens and thousands of dead people, right?
Of course, tens of thousands of dead people.
And we have a guy who's got blood on his hands, who who is promoted to national security advisor.
In theory, the guy who sits, you know, he sits right next to the president next to the Oval Office and has the the president's ear every day.
And and the news media, you know, doesn't like Michael Flynn for reasons that have nothing to do with this because he's an Islamophobe and and says crazy things.
But nobody ever seems to think that there's anything wrong with what he did in Afghanistan.
In fact, it's the opposite.
He's regarded as the the the most notable or one of the leading intelligence figures of his generation.
So, I mean, it's it's really a story of the utter failure of the news media to have any idea of of what's going on with regard to this key figure in the new administration.
Yeah, same as ever.
I mean, Petraeus is only real successes were in controlling the minds of the media in New York and D.C.
And, you know, they just hey, look, everybody, the surge is working.
Don't ask me what that means, because I couldn't explain it.
But I'm here to tell you it's working all right.
And well, of course, he he he used the figures for the number of Taliban that he supposedly captured.
I think it was twelve hundred or thirteen hundred over a period of a couple of months.
And I found out and this is one of the pieces that I did in 2010, I guess it was that I think it was 2011, actually, that these were totally phony numbers.
I mean, they were just, you know, the vast majority, 85, 90 percent of them were innocent civilians, as was documented in a document that I got on the U.S. prison population in in Afghanistan.
And every single person who was captured by U.S. forces had to be ultimately either freed or put in that prison.
So it was dispositive evidence that he was lying.
Right.
Yeah.
This is later in the war after so many torture scandals that they had come up with a process for reviewing the captured there.
That was a little bit more efficient than in previous years.
In case anyone out there is confused what they had a review and we're letting people out of jail.
Yeah, not in the Bush years.
They weren't or maybe not, not in the early ones anyway.
But, yes, they did end up with a process like that.
And and I'm sorry.
And the name of that article is actually on the tip of my tongue right now.
I was going to drop it for a footnote here, but I can't recall it.
But Petraeus's PR person even admitted to me on the record that, yeah, well, these were just suspects.
These were these were not actual Taliban.
Well, now, listen back to, you know, Mike Flynn being the right hand and I mean, national security advisers, everything right.
And especially in the incoming administration.
I mean, we don't know who's going to be secretary of defense or state yet, but there's a 99 percent chance that the national security adviser is going to be the closest person to the president on these issues.
And the thing is, is Flynn's reputation is entirely wrapped up in the Afghan war, which, as we know now, in the end of November 2016, as we're talking here, is completely lost.
And that, in fact, the ten thousand American soldiers, airmen, mercs and spies that are in Kabul now are basically holding the government up.
The Taliban rules more of the country than at any time since 2001.
They control virtually the entire Helmand province and in the daytime.
And they control, I mean, virtually all of Pashtunistan in the south, at least at night.
And we hardly have force, you know, force protection for our own guys there at this point.
So then that means that the big question for the new president is, what are you going to do?
Declare victory and leave or declare failure and double down and do a Barack Obama and do another surge?
And so then the question is, what's Flynn going to tell Trump that?
Yeah, we tried and it was totally not worth it.
So forget it.
Or we did great, but then Obama sold us out.
So all you got to do is give us another chance, boss.
It's a very interesting question indeed.
And I have no idea what the answer would be.
I mean, you know, here's a guy, as we've just been talking about, who who knows that that what he his handiwork in Afghanistan really went off the rails and the night raids were a terrible idea and and that it hurt.
It hurt the overall effort.
And yet, you know, he was part of the team that continued this for years.
Um, you know, who knows what he's going to tell the president?
And and it's it's going to be really one of the most interesting questions to watch.
I agree.
I mean, it's it's a very it's a very unknowable thing to to ask what what Trump is going to decide about Afghanistan.
If I had to guess, I would say he's not going to persist on this.
I mean, there's just too much.
It's too much cost and effort for any return.
And as a if nothing else, as just a businessman, his first his first instinct would be, what the hell are we doing this for?
Yeah, maybe.
I sure hope you're right about that.
But I hope so, too.
You know, it's not his money to invest.
It's the taxpayers.
So well, that's true.
It's like Halliburton could have never invaded Iraq.
But boy, you make their CEO or vice president and they can.
All right.
It turns into a presidential albatross.
So in a sense, it is his money.
I don't think we're going to be able I don't think they're going to be able to claim victory.
You know, they're not going to be able to do a Vietnam kind of thing where, yeah, we won, but Congress took it away from us.
No, that's not going to happen in Afghanistan.
It's too clear.
It's too clear.
Well, maybe they won't have an argument.
Maybe they'll just stick with the Trump line that we won and it was great.
It was it was the classiest, most fabulous and fantastic.
Yeah, I think it's just very well.
Our lives were too weak.
We couldn't do anything.
We did our best.
Yeah, that's right.
And that came just a day or two days.
I'm sure you'll correct me where I went off the story.
After John Kerry and Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister and the American secretary of state and the Russian foreign minister had worked out another ceasefire deal.
And it was the American bombing of the Syrian military base and then the presumed Syrian military or Russian military bombing of this humanitarian convoy that led to the final breakdown of that second ceasefire.
So this is an extremely important event that you're covering here.
Extremely important event.
And the more important event, as you just laid out, was two days before that, when the U.S. Air Force and its allies in this in this coalition in the Middle East bombed Syrian army forces in Deir ez-Zor.
And that's that's now a big story because the investigation report has just come out.
And I will be writing about that in the coming days.
So I don't want to get into that right now.
But so it was two days after that, that the the aid convoy was attacked.
And these white helmets just happened to be right on the spot in this little town called Umrah al-Kubra.
And it's about 15 kilometers west of the city of Aleppo.
So, you know, I don't know.
There's never any explanation as to why they just happened to be there ahead of time.
Obviously, they'd been tipped off that something was going to happen.
They were supposed to be there.
Tipped off by the al-Qaeda authorities in Aleppo, because the white helmets work only in opposition held territory in Aleppo, which means that they work under the authority of al-Qaeda, because al-Qaeda is the overweening political military authority in that part of Syria.
So my story is really about the statements that the head of the white helmets in Aleppo, Ammar al-Salmo, made to Time magazine, Washington Post and others, but primarily to those two outlets.
And in a video that was widely distributed, the night of the convoy attack, later that night, with fire still burning.
And what I found was that he basically misrepresented, lied repeatedly about what he witnessed and what actually happened.
Clearly conveying a line which was preconceived that this was a Russian-Syrian air attack and putting forward a series of statements that were supposed to support that and statements which I was able, by looking at all of the records having to do with this incident, it was able to show definitively were simply untrue.
I mean, beginning with his claim that he was an eyewitness to the first part of the, the first, very first attack, which he says he saw, originally he says he saw a Syrian government helicopter dropping barrel bombs, a barrel bomb, or I can't remember if he said a barrel, but I think he said a barrel bomb.
It turns out that, of course, it was already late.
It was already past the time when you could see anything.
It was dark.
He couldn't have possibly seen it.
He wasn't up close.
He was, he was far enough away that he couldn't possibly see it.
And then he changed his story the second time when he was interviewed by the Washington Post and said he heard it.
And so that that's just the beginning of a whole series of such misrepresentations.
The other part of it that I chronicle or go ahead and take us through some of that, please, if you could.
Yeah, yeah.
He he basically suggested that there was a series of air attacks which involved OFAB, Russian OFAB bombs because he circulated a picture that showed a crumpled tail fin of one of these Russian OFAB 250 pound bombs.
Under some refuse of under under some of the the stuff that was in the in the aid convoy that fell out of the truck.
But that makes no sense, because if there was an OFAB bomb, this is a 250 pound bomb.
It makes a huge crater, a crater that would be 10 foot deep and 25-30 feet wide and would have cracked the wall, if not blown through it, which was just a few feet away.
In this in this the big warehouse or part of the warehouse that was hit.
So so that was the first indication.
And then the second indication, it couldn't have been a dud.
If it were a dud, there wouldn't have been the fine tears in the sacks or boxes, I should say, that were right nearby the the the bomb that they show in the picture.
Those shrapnel holes, the shrapnel tears indicate a smaller weapon, such as an S-5, which actually El Salmo, Amar El Salmo mentioned specifically in the video as one of the weapons that was fired by aircraft, the Russian aircraft that supposedly carried out the attack.
Well, it also turns out, as I was able to document, that S-5s are part of the arsenal that the opposition has controlled ever since 2012.
And they've been using them for ground to ground attacks with their own improvised apparatus to fire them.
So this the story really is, you know, very, very fishy and leaves open the obvious possibility.
And I would say at this point, more probable, a greater probability that this was an attack, a ground attack by somebody who would have the reason for carrying out a ground attack at that point against the convoy?
Well, it would be the opposition to have it be blamed, of course, on the Russians and the Syrian government.
And of course, they were totally successful in large part because of the white helmets.
Yeah.
Well, and so and this is where we go to other reporting at Alternet here and specifically by Max Blumenthal about who's behind these white helmets anyway.
And it's basically it's the CIA and Al Qaeda, more or less.
Well, I mean, I don't know that the CIA is involved.
I don't think the CIA ever had.
Well, USAID.
I lump in NED and USAID with the CIA, but I shouldn't.
You're right.
Yeah.
The State Department has publicly said that we give them something like 30 million dollars a year.
The UK has publicly said that they give them like 50 million dollars a year.
I can't remember the exact amount.
So, yeah, I mean, the Western Western governments are openly supporting them.
But I think the key thing is that they are clearly working under the authority of Al Qaeda and they reflect Al Qaeda's political line.
And this guy, Ammar al-Selmo, it also turns out that he was seen.
He was photographed in a picture with other armed men.
He was part of an armed group in 2012.
Now, we don't know which armed group it was.
It was never identified, but he admitted it when it was documented by a Der Spiegel correspondent.
He admitted, yeah, he'd been in an armed group, but he claimed he never fired a shot.
Well, and there's plenty of photographic video and still picture evidence of white helmets piling around with all those four guys.
And not just like, oh, hey, I'm just the ambulance driver, but clearly part of their same militia.
Yeah, I mean, you know, I don't know that they're that they're integrated into the militia, but they're integrated into the larger system.
That's clear.
And I'm not saying that they don't rescue people.
I'm sure they have done some rescues, but but they do have very clearly a a political PR function for the for the Al Qaeda controlled opposition.
Yeah.
Whoever heard of an ambulance driver whose top priority is filming himself rescue somebody, you know, instead of just getting a rescue done.
It's kind of an emergency.
Would you put the camera down for a minute, please?
Right, right.
And by the way, despite the fact that that he that Selma had a team of supposedly 10 people with him, all of whom had cell phones, not a single one of them ever did a video of this supposed air attack.
Oh, yeah.
There's the dog that didn't bark here.
There's the dog that didn't bark.
Exactly.
These guys who video everything.
They don't have video of that biggest event.
And, you know, it's I don't know if it's 100 percent proven fact, but sure is, you know, far beyond just simple probability or something that Seymour Hersh's reporting stands up that the Al Nusra Front has tried to false flag the United States into war there in Damascus.
So the idea that they would do a false flag in order to just sabotage a ceasefire is not much of a stretch.
If you want to go back to the Syrian attack of 2013.
Look, I'm going to admit that initially immediately in the two or three, four days after that attack, I assumed that it was probably a Russian Syrian attack, Russian and or Syrian attack, because they were so angry with the United States over the attack two days earlier in Deir ez-Zor.
But and so so when I really began this, that was my assumption.
But I, you know, I realize now I was totally wrong.
I mean, I think that it's pretty clear at this point that this was, in fact, an al Qaeda opposition attack.
And by the way, John McCreary, who I think some of your listeners are familiar with, who does Nightwatch, a daily account of what's happening in national security issues around the world, has chronicled what the Russian command has put out about this attack.
And he points out, and I missed this, I have to admit, I wasn't looking at that angle on this.
The Russians have very specific documentation or claims of documentation showing that they could trace the the rockets, the ground based rockets, ground fired rockets, back to al-Nusra controlled territory.
And so this guy, John McCreary, who was a former high ranking DIA analyst, in fact, does believe that this was a an opposition ground attack on the convoy.
Yeah, well, so then what about the attack at Deir ez-Zor?
Do you know if anybody has ever really tried to nail down for sure whether that was an accident or whether that was a deliberate insubordination and sabotage by the DOD of the president's policy and the Secretary of State's ceasefire here?
Well, I mean, I said in my earlier story about this, that the the overall, you know, timeline and statements that were indicating the Department of Defense and the the overall commander of the the Air Force part of of Central Command, who runs the entire show of airstrikes in both Syria and Iraq, were very skeptical about this.
About, you know, collaborating with the Russians and that this attack on Deir ez-Zor clearly was a precipitating, the precipitating factor more than anything else in the decision by the Russians and the Syrians to say, OK, this ceasefire is over.
Clearly, on the on the assumption that the U.S. government was was not going to support a ceasefire, they had other other interests.
So so that's the that's the sort of overall picture.
I'm now working on a piece that will basically attack this very flimsy so-called investigation report that was issued yesterday.
It is it reminds me very much of the case of the investigation that McChrystal ordered after the February 2010 JSOC night raid on Gardez, which killed the three three women, two of whom were pregnant and two two guys who worked for the the Afghan government.
And then then they covered it up and McChrystal decided to cover up the cover up.
And part of that cover up of the cover up was to call for a second investigation.
And that investigation, of course, said, oh, nothing, nothing to see here.
Move on.
And and and in order to do that, he named as the investigator somebody who he knew would be under his command shortly.
Well, guess what?
The person who investigated this, I'm giving away my best lines, OK?
But for your listeners, I'm going to tell them that the investigator who announced his findings yesterday was actually working for the Air Force commander whose responsibility this was to making this decision to carry out the strike.
Well, there you go.
Heard it here first, everybody.
Hey, listen, let me ask you one more thing.
I'm sorry.
I know I've already kept you 40 minutes here, but I need to ask you about Aleppo now, because yesterday, Madeline, yes, we think the price is worth it.
Albright and Stephen, here's those Niger uranium forgeries you wanted, sir.
Hadley put out a new report saying that we got a bomb Damascus in order to save Al Qaeda in eastern Aleppo.
But then The Washington Post story about it lamented the fact that, jeez, by the time Trump takes power, the Russians and the Syrian government will have already taken all of Aleppo from Al Qaeda.
And so what a sad story.
I wonder what you think about that.
Well, I think you've you've correctly given an appreciation of what's really going on in Washington right now.
I mean, this is this is an expression of the sorrow and sadness of the the Democratic.
Well, the Democratic and Republican national security elite who are who have been behind the the U.S. policy of of arming and training people who are allied with Al Qaeda and, in fact, providing cover for Al Qaeda in northern Iraq, in northern Syria for the last several years, who really are committed to this idea now.
In the way that only the national security elite can become committed to something that is totally disastrous for U.S. interests.
And and I think they are genuinely afraid that this is all going to go down the drain under the Trump administration for good reason, because I think Trump has this is one of the few things that he seems to be pretty clear on.
Yeah, he's enthusiastic about this at all.
All right.
Well, so, dang it.
Now I can't let you go anymore because I got to ask you another thing, too, which is about.
So where does this really leave us with Iran?
Because here we have a president and a cabinet national security cabinet forming around him who, you know, clearly this is part of the job application is you got to agree with him about Syria and Russia that we're backing off of both.
You know, meaning not backing off bombing Syria, but backing off bombing Damascus.
They're still bombing the Islamic State in the east.
And and maybe we'll be picking up more bombing of Al Nusra.
So I don't mean to imply any kind of peaceful policy, but he's surrounded by people who hate Iran.
He wants to get along with Russia, but they hate Iran.
And so, you know, I don't know if Trump even understands that it's America, Israel, Turkey and the Sunnis versus Russia, Iran, Iraq and the Shiites, Syria and Hezbollah in this in this split at all.
Like, is Donald Trump as confused as Mike Flynn?
I would not be confident at all that that Donald Trump understands fully the alignments.
Certainly, he doesn't he doesn't understand the sequence of developments that has brought us to where we are.
I mean, we can count on that.
However, I think that there there has been a a false picture of what Trump's thinking is about the nuclear agreement with Iran.
Virtually every big media piece that I've seen on this subject says, oh, you know, he wants to tear up the agreement and start over again.
Well, that's not true.
I mean, he did.
He did, in fact, write an op ed piece in 2015 saying that.
But during the campaign, he was pretty careful not to get himself committed to that position.
And when he spoke to AIPAC, you know, his big thing was, I'm going to enforce this agreement to the hilt.
And he also said, look, we've got a contract.
He's used the term we've got a contract.
So this is one of the things in which it's very interesting.
And Trump appears to to have an elementary grasp of the reality that the United States is committed.
And it's not going to be a very good idea to tear this up.
So that is one of the points.
You know, I'm not saying we don't know who he's going to name as secretary of defense, the secretary of state.
And that's going to be very important, because if he names people who are committed, really personally, strongly committed to tearing up that agreement, then it's a different ballgame.
And we just don't know exactly how it's going to play out.
And, you know, as I've said many times, I mean, you know.
Well, if it's Corker for state, I think we can rest assure a little bit because Corker at least was the guy who pretended to try to kill the deal when actually he was shepherding it through.
Absolutely.
That would be a good sign for sure in that regard.
But but, you know, if if he had people in both positions who were committed to, you know, doing damage, serious damage to the agreement, plus Flynn, who is on the record as falling for that, although he might change his mind, too.
That's that would be a bad set of dynamics based on the history of how these things play out.
A president with his own views coming to office, fairly convinced about things and then being pushed very hard by his national security team.
So that there is a degree of uncertainty about that.
Yeah.
Well, you know, back to the beginning, you mentioned that the JSOC war, McChrystal and Mike Flynn killing people in Iraq.
They weren't just fighting on the Shiite side of the civil war against the Sunni based insurgency and their al Qaeda allies.
They were also fighting against the Shiites at the same time, at least the third major leg on the Shiite alliance of Skiri Dawa and and the Mahdi army.
They're attacking the Mahdi army.
And that raises the question to me.
I don't know.
Maybe there are already published anecdotes about this, but doesn't it make sense that Saudis guys would have killed some of McChrystal's guys?
And some of Mike Flynn's men were were shot dead at the hands of Mahdi army types.
And everybody knows those special groups are trained by Iran.
Gareth, remember 2007?
So there's a real personal grudge here possibly against Iran.
And even though this idiot was fighting a war for Iran in Iraq that whole time, you could see why he'd be pissed off maybe if some of his friends are dead at the hands of what they would blame on an Iranian EFP or whatever.
Right.
If I'm not mistaken, Scott, in his book with Michael Ledeen, Flynn actually talks about how many Americans American troops were killed by Russia, by by Iranian IEDs or EFPs, excuse me, EFPs.
And of course, his figures were totally wrong.
But nevertheless, I think it makes the point that you've just documents the point you've just made, which is that he has a personal grudge against Iran, in part because of that.
Yeah.
And you can see how, I mean, if that was you, then never mind the big picture that the whole war was for Iran and that Sadr is still part of the force that backs, you know, the consensus that backs the current government in Iraqi Shiite stand that now includes all of Baghdad because of him.
Right.
Never mind any of that.
If Johnny's dead because he got shot by one of Sadr's men, then that's personal.
And the fact that he actually, McChrystal and Flynn themselves were actually Sadr's little sock puppets the whole time is sort of beside the point.
Yeah, I mean, and of course, the the bigger point here is, I think that people like Flynn and even McChrystal, you know, exist within a system that never fully grasps the larger picture of things.
I mean, they they they have their focus straight ahead on what their missions are, and they can't afford to really have a wide range of information.
Yeah, you had me at co-authored with Michael Ledeen.
All right.
Yeah, it's the great Gareth Porter, everybody.
Thank you so much for joining us.
And we'll see you next time.
Everybody, independent historian and journalist.
He's at Middle East Eye and at Truthout.org.
And the book is Manufactured Crisis, the truth behind the Iran nuclear scare.
These two articles, Trump's national security adviser facilitated the murder of civilians in Afghanistan at Truthout and how a Syrian white helmets leader played Western media.
That one is at Alternet, the Grayzone project there.
Thank you so much again, Gareth.
Appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
And thank you all very much.
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