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Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda.
Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN, like, say our names, man, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing the great Peter Van Buren.
He used to be a State Department weenie, but now he's an anti-war guy.
He wrote the book, We Meant Well, about his time in Iraq War II and his whistleblowing there.
He also wrote The Ghosts of Tom Joad about the giant crash of 08 and the aftermath.
And his latest is Hooper's War.
And it's a novel of post-World War II Japan, but it's really about you and me right now, isn't it?
Welcome back to the show, Peter.
How are you doing?
Well, I'm doing okay.
I just want to share that I'm on the East Coast and I know you're in Texas and your listeners may be in other time zones.
So I just wanted to share a couple hours ahead of you that the revolution has begun, the zombie apocalypse right now.
Did Putin nuke DC?
No, no, no, no, no, no.
I'm looking out the window here and actually Rachel Maddow is leading a mob of 1 million people.
I'm counting now.
I'm up to about 7 million nose piercings.
She's leading a mob of 1 million people.
What they're doing is they're liberating National Guard recruiting posts and turning them into abortion clinics one by one, block by block.
And they're all speaking Russian.
At least they're turning a massive welfare waste of money into a productive business, you know?
Yeah, no.
And most of them are stopping at Starbucks and buying Honest Tea and stuff like that.
So the economy, I think, is in pretty good shape despite the upheavals that are going on politically.
Abortions for all.
Yay!
We live in troubled times, my friend.
Rachel Maddow is screaming that we do...
This is not the satire part.
This is the true part.
She is screaming that we have to face the worst case scenario, that we have a president of the United States who serves the interests of another country.
Nancy Pelosi has announced, as has Cory Booker today, that the president of the United States is being blackmailed, that they have the only Russian word any of them know, kompromat, on him.
They're certain of that.
John Brennan has accused the president of treason, as has the New York Times in two op-eds and a staff-written editorial.
The word impeachment is trending alongside of summit treason.
We are in a very, very, very unusual place politically for the United States, and I'm glad I have a chance to talk with you about it before I'm sent off for re-education.
Yeah, man, I'll tell you what, it is about as crazy as can be.
I was trying to think back and, you know, compare it to some other things, and boy, have they been just completely full of it about Syria, about Iran, about, well, obviously Israel-Palestine day in and day out.
But this level of nonsense, I don't think has a comparison between now and 2002 and the run-up to the Iraq war, where, you know, we all know that Saddam Hussein is going to attack us and kill us, just like on 9-11.
And the only question is, do you want to give those pansy, baby blue flag, UN weapons inspectors more time, or do you want to go ahead and defend America now before it's too late?
And everybody was in on that.
Like, that was the only argument was, no, give the inspectors more time, was the best anti-war argument that at least anyone with power was allowed to make, where anyone could hear it anyway.
Well, I'm glad you bring up those post-9-11 hysteria days, because I think, joking aside, that that is probably the most useful historical parallel to understand what's happening in America.
For many people who, and it was 17 years ago now, who don't remember or weren't politically awakened at that time, in the days after September 11th, when the United States was attacked, America lost its mind collectively, from the highest levels of government down to the people in the street, if you will.
America lost its mind.
We were absolutely convinced that this was the end of something, and anything that was put forward was acted on, and anything that was proclaimed was believed to be true.
And we essentially went through a period of several years with the entire country suffering from PTSD and acting, making decisions accordingly.
Now, the results of that are very, very obvious.
The Middle East is on fire.
We have thrown away our civil liberties.
We are controlled by the NSA.
We're bugged and spied on from top to bottom.
And we have now watched the media go full circle.
For those who don't recall, in the days after 9-11 and leading up to the Iraq War, the media as a whole, led by the flagship New York Times, was cheerleading the intelligence community's assessments.
Whatever crazy thing they claimed was happening in Iraq, or anything regarding terrorism, was trumpeted as truth.
And anyone who spoke against it was a traitor.
Familiarity of what went on during those days and what is going on now is somewhat frightening, because we are seeing a point where you cannot have a discussion, an argument, an opposing point of view, express skepticism at all.
It is basically that we are guns to the wall.
The President of the United States is under the control and acting on behalf of a foreign government.
And anyone who questions that, even to the point of academic skepticism, never mind supporting him, is abetting treason.
I've got idiots on my Twitter feed and on my Facebook feed, cut and pasting the definition of treason that they googled up a minute ago somewhere, pasting that and retweeting it over and over again with their personal interpretation that Trump saying a bunch of, and there's no defending it, dumb things in Helsinki, in fact, is paramount to counts as treason.
And that what happened yesterday in Helsinki is historically comparable to, I'm going down the list here, Munich, Chamberlain in Munich, Kristallnacht, Pearl Harbor, Vichy France.
I mean, the list goes on and on and on.
What worries me is that while in the past with 9-11, a lot of the craziness was directed toward blowing things up overseas, what we're doing now is a fully domestic operation.
And I worry that people are going to get hurt.
And for the first time, I'm willing to say that I'm worried about the near term future of our country.
And I've tried to keep as level ahead as it's possible throughout this process.
Well, and you know, I mean, I got to tell you, I think we've talked about this before that, there ain't no coming back for these people, man, these liberal Democrats, especially.
It's, you know, honestly, it's a lot like when Obama was the president, and you have this whole part of the right led by Donald Trump and Roger Stone, pushing the theory that this guy's not a center left liberal Democrat from Illinois.
He's a secret Muslim terrorist from Kenya, the usurper of John McCain's rightful throne.
And I mean, it's a lot more of the left are buying into this Russia crap than the right bought into this birther stuff.
But once you buy that, there ain't no coming back from that.
It's just a deeper and deeper pit of, you know, confirmation bias, basically.
And I think we saw, by and large, the American right take two or three steps backwards on race, just because of not just Obama being black, but having an African father, a Kenyan father, right?
He's not descended from West African slaves, like 99% of American blacks, right?
He's something different.
And he has this weird sounding name.
And for whatever percent of the right, they went completely nuts with that.
And they're just like the liberals on this Russia stuff.
They're lost in the dark.
Almost all of it is just completely made up.
And so it's not like they have real kernels of truth to even hang on to, to really make their point.
They're just, it's like a religion.
Once you've bought into this set of beliefs, you know, once you have faith, then you'll know it's true, that kind of thing, you know?
Yeah, you cross a certain line where everything becomes evidence of what you've already agreed is true.
Yeah, exactly.
So in other words, Trump, we know, is an agent of Putin.
So then Trump says something like, meh, I don't know what the FBI says doesn't really impress me very much.
And then that proves that he's the agent of Putin.
But it only proves that he's the agent of Putin, because you're begging the question and you started with your conclusion.
Exactly, exactly.
Now, I think it's important to say that what Trump's did in Helsinki yesterday was stupid.
It was embarrassing.
It was childish.
It was proof that Trump doesn't understand the difference between an international platform and a domestic one.
Because if you look at the actual things Trump said yesterday, they're pretty much the same stuff he's always been saying.
And he acted- What was so bad about it?
Well, what was bad about it is that you transpose the same stuff he's been saying forever into an international forum where he's standing next to Putin.
And it's not the time and the place to do that.
What he needed to do yesterday was to say something- It could be as bland as, look, we just came out of a two and a half hour private session.
You can be certain that I have- President Putin and I have discussed these issues in depth.
I'm not going to share those conversations with you, but we need to focus on what's very important here, blah, blah, blah.
Something deflective would have been the minimum.
If he wanted to wave the flag a little bit, because he's being watched internationally, I think people would have given him a pass on that as well.
But the idea of repeating his domestic talking points in that international forum was not politically- It was not international politically the right move.
So we're not going to give him any plus points.
But on the other hand, I think it's critical to remember that there's nothing particularly new that was said yesterday.
He didn't do anything that he hasn't said or done already.
And other than saying, gee, the guy isn't real good at this, is he?
I don't know that what happened yesterday was the trigger for the next step in outrage that it appears to have been based on what I'm seeing in the media.
Now, what needs to happen next, I think, is very, very important.
Because I don't think- First of all, internationally, it's a rough spot for us.
Our diplomats, our people overseas, the many, many issues that are out there in the world that need to be dealt with cooperatively.
You can't do business when every day the United States is lurching from one crisis to another domestically.
Nobody is going to believe that we're in a position to negotiate with them on a topic when we can't seem to even get the lid back on the pot here at home.
And so there's a real danger in times like this.
I saw it myself when I was in the State Department during the last years of the Bush administration, when the United States' credibility was near zero internationally.
We were torturing people.
We were running Guantanamo.
We were rendering.
We were deep into the mess in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We had no international credibility left.
And so many countries that should be our natural partners and allies just kind of shut down for a year or two at that point internationally.
You know, they understand we're in it for the long run.
The United States is the 500-pound gorilla.
You can't break ties with us.
But you can take some time out.
And what happened during those years is an awful lot of initiatives just kind of were set off to the side with the understanding that in a year and a half or so, Bush is out of office, and somebody new is going to be there, and somebody a little bit more sane is going to be there.
And that's going to be the door opening, and we can kind of get back to business together.
So I'm fearful that internationally, our friends and our allies, and even our adversaries and the people we're negotiating with on tariffs and trade, for example, and say with China, are kind of saying to themselves, wait a minute, we're wasting our time here.
We're not going to make deals because who knows what's going to happen in the United States, who's going to be in charge, and whether the United States, whether the president will be in a position to carry through what he promises and things like that.
And there's a real danger that everybody's just going to say, we may need to wait this out.
Now, that made some sense when you're talking about a year and a half at the end of an eight-year Bush administration.
Right now, it's a very, very bad thing.
We've got...
Especially in the middle of these Korea talks, man.
We've got Korea talks going on.
We've got tariff talks going on in China.
There's a lot of international issues that need international cooperation, and they can't wait two years or possibly six years for this whole Trump thing, quote unquote, to wash itself out.
So what needs to happen now, and if I was king of the world for an afternoon, is it's time for the intelligence community, Mueller, the congressional committees, the whole industry that has developed around, quote unquote, Russiagate, to put up or shut up.
The intelligence agencies have had at least two years investigating what's been going on here.
The NSA and the CIA have incredible technical powers.
They have the ability to reach out and record and analyze.
They have the ability to reach back into stored data and look at things that they didn't notice the first time in real time.
In addition, Mueller has been interviewing and investigating for a year and plus the congressional committees.
The IRS has had Trump's tax financials since 1980-whatever.
The fact that you and I haven't seen his tax documents is irrelevant.
The IRS has.
The New Jersey Gaming Commission has.
The New York real estate people have.
It's time to put up or shut up.
We need a whole-of-government effort to say, yes, we believe there is collusion.
The president of the United States acted with the Russians, and we need to begin impeachment hearings immediately and conclusively, or we need to say there's smoke, but there is no fire.
We cannot go on like this, lurching from crisis to crisis with presidential candidates, with John Brennan, with Rachel Maddow, announcing that a traitor is in the White House.
It is crushing our country internationally, and it is going to tear a hole through us domestically, the results of which I don't know where it will bounce.
So it's time now.
We've got to stop playing politics long enough to put this aside.
After that, we can go back to calling Trump a bully and making fun of his hands and whatever other normal American politics needs to come into play.
But this idea that it's open season to label everyone a traitor has no good, no upside to it whatsoever.
A resolution is needed, and if Helsinki is going to be the turning point where people recognize that, good for us.
If it's not, it will tear a hole in our country.
Alright, hang on just one second.
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Well, you know, at least there's a funny kind of sociological controlled type experiment about how easy it is to control the minds of hundreds of millions of people based on ridiculous partisan incentives.
Like, hey, I want to believe that, so watch me yell it.
You mentioned Kristallnacht there.
That was on CNN yesterday.
This will go down as a day of infamy, like the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, or Kristallnacht, which is, for people who don't know, the Night of the Broken Glass, where 300-something Jews were murdered, and all their shops were vandalized and destroyed.
I think thousands of them were rounded up and arrested in Nazi Germany.
And then, wait, so Trump attacked the FBI?
Or he kind of implied that he didn't really believe in them all that much?
And that's the same as Kristallnacht?
Wow!
These people, I guess there really is no bottom to the depths that they'll sink, man.
Again, reminded of 2002, where, you know, Shepard Smith, who's now, you know, Mr. Resistance, I remember him literally crying, literally tears running down his face, screaming that, but Saddam is in material breach.
He didn't admit all the weapons Bush says he has, and that means he's in material breach, so why is the war taking so long?
This is in January or February of 2003.
What's the holdup, guys?
And that's the level of crazy going on here.
It really is that bad.
It is, and it is amplified.
I think one of the most interesting comments I've seen recently is, can you imagine what Joseph Goebbels would have done with social media in his hands?
You know, Joseph Goebbels managed to do this with 35-millimeter film and printed handbills.
I mean, imagine.
And I think what's happened is, a lot of very bad actors, whether if you want to include the Russians, why not, but I'm speaking specifically about our mainstream media here, have found a way to make money off of people's ignorant outrage, and social media is one of their very effective tools.
One of the things I decry as I get older here, you know, I miss the days, of course, when, you know, cars were a nickel and, you know, the city gave away free pizza and those kind of things, but one of the things I really decry is that once upon a time, at least in quality newspapers, you could read the headlines and get a rough idea what was going on in the world.
You could kind of scan the headlines on your way to work and get a sense of what was going on.
Now, scanning the headlines, whether you scan them online or in print or via things on Twitter, is useless.
It doesn't, they don't really tell you what's being said in the story.
Many times, if you bother to read the details, even in the same story, you realize the headline is false.
Many times, I find it impossible to understand a world event simply by reading any single source anymore.
I have to read four or five and kind of try to mentally piece it all together, what actually happened out there.
And that's a very sad thing, given the state of ignorance among American citizens.
As you pointed out, Kristallnacht had nothing to do with anything connected to this in any way whatsoever.
And the same for Pearl Harbor or anything else.
But we've got to the point now where our ignorance of world events, our willingness to believe what we want to believe, and the confirmation bias that social media has proved to be so effective in, has angered people.
Now, that's bad enough under any circumstances.
When you're talking about a population in the United States that's already so divided economically, racially, politically, and well-armed, the potential for something to go wrong really is quite high.
And as I said a moment earlier, for the very first time in the last two years of panic-mongering and fear-mongering, I myself am starting to feel these little tingles of concern over what's going to happen to us all in the future.
Well, I mean, here's the thing, man.
First of all, in terms of international weakness and all that, I hear you, but that doesn't concern me so much.
I want America to be weak internationally, as weak as possible, immediately.
Like, if you took the entire Pentagon and CIA and sank them in the Atlantic Ocean, I think the whole world, and especially the United States of America, would be better off.
So, that's all fine.
But in terms of the American people turning against each other and that kind of thing, and the danger of that, the danger of, you know, I hate to say it this way, people's belief in the system breaking down and being replaced with nothing, right?
It's not like they're all becoming libertarians and realizing that we could just have a free market and no government at all.
It's more like they want to fight.
And, you know, of course, the thing of it is, too, is that the people who are mostly going crazy here are the left half of the American population, who are, well, let's say, less well-armed than the right, who actually, the right tends to have actual upper body strength and experience shooting guns and know a thing or two about how to fight or anything else.
And these liberals, you know, and I think the right, especially the gun-toting right, like the rifle-toting right, the militia guys or whatever, hey, you know what?
They're liable to overreact, too.
You know, they're not necessarily got their thumb exactly on what's going on.
But you take their president away, you're going to have a real fight.
You impeach and remove their president.
It's all about core strength, Scott.
The yoga is going to be the left's secret weapon.
Look, I, again, and— Brazilian jiu-jitsu.
That's it.
Sacha Baron Cohen is going to save us all.
The idea is that I hate to talk about things like that, and I actually only kind of even broach these topics with people like you that I know have your head relatively centered.
But there are individuals who will try to take advantage of what is going on out there.
There are also enough sort of marginally crazy people that can be triggered by things.
And when you do have a near-constant bleating that the government is run by a traitor, that the decisions that are made in the White House are dictated by Russia, and you basically have a consensus forming among many progressives that they are fighting literal Nazism.
And once you step over that line, then you justify any action.
Because, of course, yes, if you could travel back in time and kill Hitler, of course, everyone would do so.
And no one would say, well, gee, is murder really right?
And things like that.
So once you cross that line and imagine yourself defending civilization at its core, and you truly put yourself in that role, you release a lot of scary, scary thoughts.
And I'm seeing more and more people, and maybe you know who I'm talking about, but I'll spare her name, but a woman who has done some really good work on Intel, she's kind of a freelance slash amateur journalist, I'm not sure the right words, I don't mean to denigrate her skills, who's done some extraordinary work with the Snowden documents and looking into the NSA, is now on Twitter announcing that she fears her life is in danger because she alone possesses hard evidence of collusion between Trump and Russia.
And maybe that's true.
And maybe I'm naive.
But when I see people starting to say things like that, and particularly people I know personally and know well, so that I feel I can sort of get behind their public statements a bit, it worries me because you're starting to edge towards delusion.
And that reminds me again of those dark days after 9-11, where every dark skinned person was a terrorist.
Every garbage bag that was left on a curve was an undetended package that had to be treated by the bomb squad.
And there was a boogeyman behind every door.
And I watched some very, very, very bad actors in the Bush White House exploit those fears to push America into a series of unnecessary conflicts that have literally inflamed the world and will be something that our children will deal with, if not beyond that.
And so when I see good people starting to trend into delusion and paranoia, and when I see smart people saying things that don't seem very smart, then it worries me.
Because we've seen this happen in the past.
If you want to go back and talk about red scares and palmer raids, for those who have gotten through that part of history, we can find parallels there.
But 9-11 is the most immediate one, and the one that took place in the context of modern media.
And I just worry as an individual about where this ball is going to bounce.
Yeah, you know, I always wonder that too, whenever I think about this, you know, Russia scandal, is this how easy it was to start the Cold War back after World War II?
The Soviets just locked 27 million men.
They're completely broken in every way.
And then Senator Vandenberg says to Truman, go out there and scare the hell out of them, Harry.
And so he goes out there and pretends that the Soviet Union is a threat to Western Europe, when it was just a lie.
It was a goddamn lie, and they knew it was a lie.
But hey, we can sell some tanks this way, and we'll get the organized Zionist groups to vote Democrat and donate Democrats.
So, and it really was this level of stupidity, right?
George Bush pretending Saddam Hussein's a threat level of stupidity.
I mean, don't get me wrong, the USSR actually did exist, you know, compared to the Islamo-fascist caliphate, which was only in Bush's imagination.
But it does seem like that same level of unreality, and especially it's fun to see it being all led by the Democrats this time.
Just wait till the Republicans are back in power, and accusing everyone who refuses to go along with them of being Russian agents.
We've seen that one before.
You mentioned the Palmer raids, and McCarthy and the second Red Scare.
And these are people who can never be dissuaded with facts.
Boy, you think liberals are lost right now.
Just wait, you know?
You know, I think if I had a chance to waterboard Dick Cheney, and yes, that is a life goal for me.
It's on my bucket list.
If I had a chance to, yeah, fair enough, we'll share.
You know, if I had a chance to waterboard him, and I think if I asked him, I said, you know, Dick, if I can call you a dick, you know, what's your biggest regret?
And I think what he would eventually get around to saying is, you know, in those days right after 9-11, we didn't think big enough.
We thought it was going to be harder to turn the American people into compliant sheep.
We thought it was going to be harder to take away their civil liberties and to convince them we could make war anywhere in the world we wanted to, and that everything we wanted to do was for their protection.
We thought it was going to be harder, and we thought small, and we moved too slowly.
We didn't realize how easy it was.
And I think that would be what Cheney's greatest regret would be.
The problem is that we're now 17 years post-Cheney and post-9-11, and the people that will continue to manipulate the American population with the current Russian scare, and it'll be something else post-Trump, whenever that is, they learn from history, even if we don't.
And they look back and understand how easy it was.
I think Obama had a sense of this.
I think he looked back and saw how easily the American people were manipulated by the Bush, and so he didn't really spend a lot of time agonizing and trying to convince us his drone killing and his NSA spying was good or legal or fair.
He just kind of did it and told us it was okay and left it at that, and that worked.
And I think the folks who are bad actors out there right now, who are looking for ways to weaponize American ignorance and anger and manipulate it, I think they've learned from those historical lessons as well, and they're going to be thinking bigger than simply, gee, let's invade Iraq.
Why not, let's basically just nail down control over the way things work in the United States.
If you want to call that government, that's kind of a shorthand for it.
Let's just nail that down so that we can create an infinite money-generating machine for ourselves.
We can impoverish more and more people in the United States, whether that's through medical costs or student loans or lack of jobs or poor salaries or whatever we have to do to basically take that 1% and make it into a 0.1% and then continue to refine that into a 0.01% and so forth.
And so basically, we've created the full-on autocracy that the people who really run the country want.
And I think they're smart enough to understand now they can take bigger and bolder steps.
They've got a guy like Trump, who's sort of one of them or on their side, or at least knows what they want in power.
And he's not as articulate about it as Obama, but he's also freed from a lot of the public relations constraints that Obama, quote unquote, suffered from.
Trump truly has run out of fucks to give as far as the media is concerned.
I think that was another takeaway from Helsinki.
That was what I liked about that press conference, was him refusing to give an inch to them despite all their hysteria, where he's just like, I don't care.
And in that case, that's the kind of thing that does worry me.
Look, if you want to turn the blue wave loose, and by blue wave, I'm not talking about a Democrat sweep in November, I'm talking about a full-on militarized police presence in the United States.
Nothing will be a greater incentive than to have a few riots get out of hand, some shootings, a little gunfight between some lefts and rights, you know, something that would allow the bulk of America to say, you know, we can't have anarchy break out.
We better start cracking more heads.
This is so sad.
You know, when I started doing radio 20 years ago in 1998, my whole thing was, look, the best part of the left and the best part of the right, that is the powerless ones of us, we're actually good on war, on spying, on cops, and this and that, and the other thing.
And it really should be the powerless, you know, the people versus the state, versus this, that.
But I knew then that, nah, when it all really finally falls apart and comes down, it's going to be my right-wing militia friends and my left-wing earth-first friends are going to be the ones out there fighting each other while the people with all the power go running off to the bank and the gun shop.
Yep.
And here we are.
That about wraps it up for today.
Basically, anarchy coming up next.
Not the good kind either.
All right, listen, it's been half an hour, but I want to still ask you stuff.
Oh, okay.
Can I ask you stuff still?
Absolutely.
Okay, great.
Yeah, but Peter, what about the indictment that came out last Friday?
You must've been impressed by that.
I was impressed.
It was one of the most naked power plays in public in the US government I've ever seen in my career.
People inside government are always challenging one another for power, for dominance, for control, but typically it's done behind the scenes and it's done in subtle ways.
It's done in ways that preserve enough public amenity that you can move in a different direction if you someday need to.
But the indictment of 12 Russian military officers as Trump was heading to Helsinki by Robert Mueller was a naked power play.
It was a naked attempt by Robert Mueller and the Department of Justice to derail any hopes of a summit meeting in Helsinki.
Now, Trump himself did his share to step in it at this press conference.
So Mueller must've shaken his head and thought, man, all that planning and Trump does it himself.
But nonetheless, the idea of releasing those indictments right as Trump is headed to Helsinki was a power play.
Any other country in the world, any third world country, the people there would have recognized it exactly for what it was, a move by the intelligence agencies against the executive.
Like flying Gary Powers over the USSR right before Ike's summit with Khrushchev.
Exactly.
And it is a naked power play and it is sad to see that those things happen as grossly, obviously, as they do here now in the United States.
Look, first of all, you can't indict foreign soldiers for doing what soldiers do.
In that case, you might as well indict anyone who's ever worn a uniform in conflict against the United States, right down to the North Korean private who changes the printer cartridges in Pyongyang.
What Robert Mueller did is reach into this giant stinky bucket of constant espionage between the United States and the Russians.
And he handpicked out a couple of cases and said, oh, my goodness, look at this, and decided he's going to prosecute those things.
I mean, under those criteria, basically, a Russian prosecutor could indict the entire NSA today under basically that same set of criteria.
I'm not saying what they did was wonderful or right.
Please save your cards and letters.
Don't send them into the- Do you believe it's true?
That the Russians hacked the things?
I have no basis to know if it's true or not true.
It would just be like me just guessing, you know, whether unicorns ever existed.
Nothing, I can no longer, as an allegedly intelligent person, accept what people are saying.
Because what people are saying is so politically motivated, the timing of this tells you that this was politically motivated, that how can I then step back and say, well, they wanted to score some political points, but the underlying information must be true or seems to be true or might be true.
I have no basis to judge.
I'm an agnostic.
You know what's interesting, man?
Did you see the new Scott Ritter piece at Truthdig?
No, no.
It's funny.
You know, he wrote one for the American Conservative, which begins with the trip to Helsinki is obviously timed to disrupt the indictments and the grand jury, which is like, what the hell are you talking about?
And I wonder now whether someone rewrote that first paragraph for him because his article in Truthdig is the exact opposite of that.
It says just what you just said, the most obvious thing, which is the indictment was time to screw up the summit, the other way around.
But then here's what's important too, is he says, go back and look at the reality winner document that she leaked to The Intercept.
If you look at that document, their conclusion that ex-GRU military officer ordered this or that to happen is actually listed there, not as an established fact, but as a conclusion of an analyst, a best guess of an analyst.
And we don't know based on what information at all, but it shows right there in the key that this is not based on NSA intercepts.
This is not based on forensic scientific work and proof.
This is based on, you know, like they say, a high confidence or a medium confidence guess on the part of these intelligence officials.
And so, you know, in that indictment, you read that whole indictment and they don't say how they know any of this.
They just say that it's all true.
But I guess, hey, as long as we're begging questions, maybe that's it.
Maybe they just said, well, look, if we assume that this military commander was involved, like this analyst guesses, then all of these other guys must have been involved too, or whatever.
It could all just be baked in assumptions.
Yeah.
And, you know, not to criticize assumptions, because there are lots of things in the intelligence world that you never will ever know for certain, whatever that truly means.
And you have to operate on your best guesses, analysts, assumptions, assessments, what have you.
And that's simply the fact of life.
There are things you're never going to know for sure.
But in this case, these indictments are absolutely pointless.
None of these people are ever going to show up in an American court.
None of the facts of that indictment are ever going to be adjudicated.
None of them are ever going to be challenged or anything along those lines.
This is simply a press release that Bob Mueller put out, essentially.
And in that sense, what he is doing is he is playing with the ignorance of the American people who either don't understand or don't want to understand how intel works and how analysis works.
They don't care about any of that stuff.
They don't care about the subtleties.
And they're probably too stupid to understand it anyway.
So Mueller indicts 12 people that will never see a court as an excuse to publish his version of what happened.
Is his version true or not?
I doubt any of us in our lifetimes are going to truly know the answer to that.
I think this is going to just be one of those things like your choice of the Kennedy assassination or the ancient alien theories or what happened in Oklahoma City, where you're simply left with these ambiguities that history will never fill in.
It's going to simply disappear.
But the idea would be that Mueller did this for a political basis.
We're never going to know what really happened.
We're all going to be left to decide, quote, what we believe in, like you're picking through a catalog of religions.
Buddhism seems nice.
And that's that.
It's shameful in that sense, because it is so grossly political and grossly manipulative.
Did the GRU do it?
Maybe they did.
Really, did they do it just to kind of turn over the apple cart because it's always fun to screw with the other side?
Maybe.
And maybe they hacked it, but maybe they're not the ones who gave this stuff to WikiLeaks.
I mean, it seems like any competent intelligence agency in the world would have been inside Hillary Clinton's bathroom server.
And they were.
And they were.
We all can pretty much nail that one down.
But who was there and what they did with it, those we don't know.
I wish the Russians would leak the 30,000 missing emails.
If there are any Russians listening, go ahead and hack Hillary Clinton's computer and find us the 30,000 missing emails.
Well, you've heard it here first, people.
Putin's got the Scott Horton pee tape.
And people are saying, oh, Trump didn't ask them to hack.
He just said, can you find them?
Well, I'm specifically asking the Russians to go around and break into whatever computers they need to and publish Hillary Clinton's 30,000 missing emails.
Oh yeah, no.
She assures us these were all personal emails, like emails to Bill about yoga class, except that Bill is on the record saying he's only ever sent two emails in his life and they were on somebody else's account.
So yeah, she's a liar.
And the reason that she destroyed 30,000 emails is because they implicate her in being a felon, obviously.
An extortionist.
That said, comrade, the thing about the indictments, when you read through them, is that they hinge, if you want to say, OK, what suggests that there's a lot of truth in there?
It hinges on your willingness to accept that either the GRU made remarkably amateur operational mistakes, which is what the indictment basically says.
There's one point there where the GRU, somebody from the GRU actually logs on through a computer located in one of their military facilities.
There's another point where their bitcoins are traced right back to a GRU account.
Some real, real amateur stuff, Tradecraft 101 stuff.
So you either have to believe that the GRU are simultaneously international masterminds and amateurs, or you have to believe that there's some science fiction level capacities that the United States has that are way, way beyond science fiction at this point in time.
Well, they're kind of implying that it comes from the Dutch and that the Dutch had control of the Russians' surveillance cameras inside the GRU offices or something.
That raises a lot of questions, too, about just how high quality are these cameras anyway, and how much would you really be able to see on that?
And it, again, requires a belief that we're so much better than them, and they're so, so clumsy and amateurish at the end of the day.
And, again, anything is possible out there.
We're always surprised by information that reveals things that we didn't know somebody could do and things like that.
But when a whole caper hinges on the other side making a pretty basic mistake, I'm always a little skeptical.
Whenever you're moving money around, for example, to do something as nefarious as a foreign government hacking into the United States, you don't just go to your Bitcoin account and do that.
You go through an account of another person to another person to another person through the Cayman Islands, and you bounce it off of a bank in Cyprus, and there's 10 different names, and none of them are Russian.
This is what you do.
This is how you hide things effectively, and it's done all the time.
This is 101 stuff, like I said.
And the idea that the GRU is working this way, maybe they are.
I don't know.
Like I said, I'm kind of an agnostic on this, but it, again, requires us to believe that they are amateurs when it does not seem like the kind of thing amateurs would otherwise pull off.
If I, for example, as a foreign government wanted to get inside of another government's stuff, the last thing I would do would be to use my own nationals.
I would go through a series of cutouts and hire an Israeli hacker who's advertising on the dark web or something like that.
You know what I'm saying.
I would never have a direct line between me and them.
There's never a direct line when you're working at these kind of levels.
Hey, do you suspect at all that this is the CIA marble hacking tool that is made to implicate others in hacking this and that?
I don't think it's a unique tool to the CIA or a unique technique of the CIA.
I think the idea of false flags goes back to the early steam-powered spy days.
The idea is that, geez, Scott, you'd never rat out your country to a Russian, but you'd sure talk openly to a Canadian, eh?
The Russian guy who's talking to you is representing himself as a Canadian or whatever.
This idea of pretending you're somebody else and leaving a trail to be found that's a false trail is nothing new.
It's not unique to electronic espionage.
It's essential tool of how the work gets done.
Again, whenever somebody says, well, we found this direct link and it's so black and white that even dumb ass Americans can get it on Twitter, I always step back and say, maybe.
Yeah.
Hey, let me ask you this.
Is it strange to you at all or entertainingly ironic or anything that the entire crisis here supposedly is that these nefarious Russians liberated Hillary and John Podesta's emails, the DNC and the DCCC emails and revealed to the American people facts that we absolutely have a right to know about how the Democrats run their party and run their election?
Well, obviously this has been you know, firewalled off of this story, which is the discussion of what was revealed.
We're focused a hundred and ten percent on the method by which the corruption of the Democratic Party was revealed.
And that has displaced the fact that the Democratic Party was corrupt and acted in a corrupt way.
And that just isn't something we're ever going to discuss.
I mean, if you liberated all Hillary Clinton's emails, shouldn't they make her look like the greatest secretary of state ever and ready to be inaugurated as our commander in chief and all that?
You know, the last word on this was that it was this kind of neither of these.
Both of these things can't be true.
I mean, the Democrats were crying for a long, long time that there was nothing in these emails.
It was John Podesta's risotto recipe.
And ha ha, there's nothing there.
And at the same time, the contents of these emails disrupted our election and changed our democracy.
And our equivalent to 9-11, Pearl Harbor and Kristallnacht.
Kristallnacht.
Both of those things can't be true.
They're either dramatically important or they're not.
And if they are important, then we deserve a discussion on the contents of those emails, not simply to say, well, the method by which they were acquired totally negates any talking about them.
You know, we've gone such full circle on this kind of stuff.
When Chelsea Manning leaked evidence of American war crimes in Iraq, there were still an awful lot of people on the left side, whatever, I don't care about these words, the left who said, you know, I don't know if I can support her, what she did, but damn it, am I glad to know what the U.S. government really was doing in Iraq?
That's very important.
And that certainly was the mood of the media when they published everything that she leaked.
And now we're having these debates, and I've seen serious journalists debating this on Twitter and in conversations saying, you know, maybe we shouldn't have published all that stuff.
Maybe the fact that it was stolen, whether it was stolen by a, quote, hacktivist or stolen by the Russians, the fact that it was stolen alone means, hey, we're abetting a crime by publishing it.
Maybe we should have just kept it to ourselves.
Those are very, very bad thoughts to be having.
We need to talk about what was in those emails, regardless of where they came from.
Hey, I just want to mention one, the Pied Piper strategy.
We need to get all of our friends in the liberal media to do everything they can to promote Trump, Carson, and Cruz, because they're the wingers, they're the kooks, and they'll be the easiest to beat in the fall.
And so everyone always said, why is CNN showing an hour of Trump's empty podium before he gets a chance to speak, but they'll never cover a Bernie Sanders speech once?
There's your answer, because Hillary Clinton and her team demanded it.
There you go.
Talk about hoisted on your own petard.
And by the way, for those of you unfamiliar, petards are an ancient medieval edged weapon.
I had to look it up.
I did not know that, by the way.
Good times.
Yeah, I acknowledge my foils.
But yeah, that's exactly what I mean here, is that the discussion of the contents of these emails has been totally firewalled away as we argue about who actually hacked them, who passed them to WikiLeaks, things like that.
You know, if honest to goodness, I mean, it's just common sense.
My goodness, if you are the Russian government and you have these things, do you really send them to Julian Assange in a package postmarked Moscow?
I mean, it just doesn't work that way in real life.
The fact that we don't, that you, the public, don't know everything that's going on is because OPSEC really works, that these guys and gals are really, really good at hiding who they are, how they work, and what they do.
And the idea that, gee, you know, we're only going to be meddling in an election.
Why should we bother to worry about operational security at the old GRU headquarters?
Possible.
Likely.
Realistic.
Less so.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I don't know.
I want to follow up with Craig Murray, because he told me that he knows who the leaker is, that he met the leaker.
By the way, the Daily Mail got this wrong.
I see people quote the Daily Mail, claiming that Craig Murray claimed that he personally received the leak and gave it to WikiLeaks.
That's not true.
I interviewed him myself, and that's not what he said.
But he did say that he met the source for the DNC leak in the park in Washington, D.C.
He knows exactly who it is.
It has nothing to do with the Russians whatsoever.
And then, he claimed to know, I guess, implying that Julian Assange had told him that the Podesta leak wasn't the Russians at all.
That was the NSA.
That was American intelligence officers who were getting revenge on Hillary for her lack of ability to keep secrets there.
And he claimed to know that that's true.
So, I don't know.
I don't know.
You know, Scott, maybe I'm just too skeptical at my age, but the number of people out there in the pool who claim that they have these bits of knowledge that are- Well, I know he's very close to Assange, and I know two people who were at the dinner with him that night that he left early.
So, I don't know.
Okay.
Again, I'm not calling anyone a liar.
I can't.
I don't have enough information myself to say that's wrong.
You're making that up.
But what I can say is that the number of people off to the side of global events who claim to understand things or know things or have inside information seems...
I'm skeptical about that.
Look, I worked 24 years in government.
I was on the inside of a lot of dumb stuff.
I was not involved in anything globally earth-shaking.
But I was on the inside of a lot of events that were covered by the media, and I was in an excellent position to know exactly what the media got right and what they got wrong, what they knew and what they never knew.
And their track record was not particularly good over the long run.
And in rare cases, they were rare.
They stand out.
The Daniel Ellsberg Pentagon papers, for example, those are what happened with Watergate, where they had a critical inside source in deep throat.
Those are rare.
That's why we notice them.
That's why we still talk about them.
But the number of events where even something as simple as a secretary of state visits a country overseas, he or she has some meetings with the host government, and you pick up the papers the next day, and what's in the newspaper and what really happened are not the same thing.
It's no big deal because, in fact, what was discussed was fairly routine stuff and not all that newsworthy, really.
And what was in the newspaper was not egregiously wrong or designed to do anything.
It was just wrong.
This is anyone's experience.
If anyone has ever been interviewed by the newspaper about anything and they read the story the next day, even if it's about the chili cook off or whatever, it's always going to be wrong.
Right.
And so when I get when it's somehow the intelligence community doesn't know, but somebody who has been retired for a few years does, or when, I don't know, when the people who do have all this access don't seem to know, but somebody who has no access at all somehow does know, I remain openly skeptical.
History does not treat these people well in the long run.
There are these exceptions.
Somebody always has to know first, and it doesn't always have to be the person you think it is.
People do talk, but my own experience working directly with people who are in the intelligence business is that they are very, very careful people about what they say.
They tend not to accidentally say things.
They tend to value their careers, their lives, their livelihoods to the point where if they do choose to leak things, they are either leaking with permission, or they are leaking with their own political aims in mind, or they're making something up.
I just remain highly skeptical about everybody who thinks they know what's going on and just can't tell you just right now.
Trust me, if anybody ever says to you, yeah, I have a clearance, and I know what's going on, but if I told you, I'd have to kill you, they're lying.
The real way you do it is to say, oh, man, I don't know anything about that stuff.
You know how it is.
You don't dangle it that, hey, I know it.
I'm just not going to tell you.
That's it.
That's what you see on TV.
Yep.
All right.
Well, we'll end with a funny note here.
You were joking around on Twitter earlier and said, did we give up when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?
No, from Animal House, and you got at least two or three people here on Twitter saying, you're stupid.
The Germans didn't attack Hawaii.
For clarification purposes, the most important movie ever made philosophically is Animal House with John Belushi, 1977 or 78, I believe.
It covers anything you need to know about life, and in one of the climactic scenes of the movie, John Belushi, as his character, Bluto, attempts to rally his comrades with an inspiring speech, and in the middle of it, he says, did we give up when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?
And somebody says, don't stop him.
He's on a roll.
The point being that an exaggerated claim made with gusto is always more effective than actual facts.
Right.
Every single time.
You heard it here, everybody, from Peter Van Buren.
Now you know it's true.
And with that, I'm off to my party meeting.
If you know any place where I get a better exchange rate on rubles than I'm getting now, Scott, let me know, please.
And otherwise, do svidaniya, my friend.
Okay.
Thanks very much, Peter.
Great to talk to you again.
Carry on.
All right, you guys, that's Peter Van Buren.
He is the author of We Meant Well, The Ghosts of Tom Joad, and Hooper's War, a novel of World War II Japan.
You can find him all the time writing at the American Conservative magazine.
All right, you guys, and that's the show.
You know me, scotthorton.org, youtube.com slash scotthortonshow, libertarianinstitute.org, and buy my book, and it's now available in audiobook as well, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
Hey, it's endorsed by Ron Paul and Daniel Ellsberg and Stephen Walt and Peter Van Buren and Matthew Ho and Daniel Davis and Anand Gopal and Patrick Coburn and Eric Margulies.
You'll like it.
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