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 us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, saying it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
On the line, I got my buddy Grant F. Smith.
He is the founder and the director of the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy.
That's IRMEP, I-R-M-E-P dot org, IRMEP.
And he wrote all of these books about the Israel lobby, like eight, ten of them, something like that.
The most recent is Big Israel.
Get it?
Like Big Tobacco or Big Pharma or Big J-Damn Bombs or this kind of thing.
And boy, he's got a doozy of a new piece here.
Oh, did I mention?
So here's what you find at IRMEP.
You find PDF files of documents that Grant sued the government for and got and posted.
So like if you were to do Google site colon IRMEP dot org space dot PDF.
I don't know how many results you'd get, but I know that it would be a very high quantity and all a very high quality of things that Grant has discovered and reported over the years there, including this doozy.
640 pages of FBI investigatory records obtained by IRMEP under FOIA about the FBI's investigation into the Niger uranium forgeries of 2001 through 2003.
Welcome back to the show, my friend.
How are you doing?
What a setup, Scott.
Thank you so much for having me again.
Hell yeah.
So tell us all.
Wait.
Hey, kids, back in 2001, America got attacked by al-Qaeda.
So then immediately after that, the Bush government decided that they were going to lie us into war with Iraq by making your mom afraid that Saddam might give some chemical weapons to Osama bin Laden since they were buddies and Saddam had all these weapons.
And that was kind of the deal.
And of course, the linchpin or the major part of it all was that the Iraqis had a nuclear weapons program.
As the vice president said numerous times, they are reconstituting their nuclear weapons, which, of course, they never had in the first place, but still.
And a big part of that was the story that Iraq had imported a bunch of yellow cake, semi-refined uranium ore from the African country of Niger.
And George Bush mentioned this, the famous 16 words in the State of the Union address of 2002.
And this became, of course, mustard gas is mustard gas, but nuclear bombs are nuclear bombs.
And this became, you know, really the linchpin of the case for starting the war against Iraq in 2003.
So that's what we're talking about is the Niger uranium forgeries that all sides now agree were forgeries that were the basis of the so-called intelligence, that were the basis for that accusation by the president in the State of the Union.
So that's my setup for the conversation today.
A lot of young people listening.
They were kids when this happened.
They don't know the story, but it's a big story.
And now you got a lot more of it, if not the whole story.
So do tell.
Well, I think it's important to remember that for a long time, there was a lot of mystery surrounding the allegations of uranium sales direct from Niger with no participation in the consortium that's kind of running it with the Niger government from the French who use fuel for their nuclear energy production.
There was a lot of speculation swirling, particularly after George W. Bush made that allegation in his State of the Union address about whether these allegations were true, whether they were completely derived from something somewhat true, but then with added false information or whether they were just outright false.
And getting these FBI files has been a longtime pursuit of ours.
We've gone through multiple appeals, really started going hard after these in 2012, if you can believe that.
And it was all to find out what the FBI discovered because they were charged as part of this controversy with investigating a number of things.
And one of the things I think it's good to start with was that on March 14, on behalf of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Senator John D. Rockefeller sent a letter saying, we want a broad investigation of the documents, who created these documents.
And we want to know for sure that the U.S. Intelligence Committee or other elements of the U.S. government didn't actually create these forgeries in order to build support for the administration's policies.
Now, this letter was tucked into the FBI file and it was addressed to Robert S. Mueller III, the director at the time from Rockefeller.
So I think this shows the level of skepticism and suspicion.
He was obviously the minority guy on this committee.
But right after Bush made that allegation and right after the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, finally, after multiple delays by the U.S. government got their hands on this dossier of forgeries, they almost immediately were able to debunk it as a fraud.
And so what the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence thought at the time was that in addition to using these documents to justify an invasion of Iraq, that the U.S. government or some of its tentacles may have been involved in creating the forgeries.
And so it's always been obviously difficult for the FBI to investigate Washington officials, although they've done it successfully.
And I just want to note that they didn't seem to have any problems investigating other types of fraud committed by high levels of government and even going after powerful entities that seem like government agencies like AIPAC, which they did just a few years later.
But they had a great deal of trouble in this investigation doing anything but scuffling around in Europe, particularly the Rome embassy, where some reporters or a reporter brought these forgeries to the attention of the U.S. embassy and asked whether they were authentic or not.
And kind of reintroduced them into the stream of intelligence in the U.S. inadvertently because they were sent to the State Department.
So the FBI, just to cut short the story, which is called Lesson from FBI's Niger uranium forgeries file, the FBI spent most of their time and resources investigating the forgeries, getting information from Elisabetta Berba, who was the magazine writer who was trying to authenticate these forgeries and not having much luck doing that.
She also traveled to Niger.
But the FBI spent its time looking at her, looking at this Rocco Martino guy who had connections to Italian intelligence and quickly concluding that these were forgeries by June of 2003.
But what I think the key points of this whole file release is that the FBI spent 551 days on its investigation, being essentially limited to the provenance of the forgeries, but not until they asked for and received the full letter from Senator Rockefeller from FBI headquarters.
Robert Mueller's office.
They had no idea that the mandate to investigate was broad.
It wasn't just about finding out who forged the documents and why, but they were also supposed to find out whether the U.S. intelligence community had a hands in either creating or amplifying the reaction to these documents and the misuse of these documents.
And that never happens.
Never happens.
The Senate did some of its own investigating.
So it's not redacted.
It's not redacted.
Just you have all these files and none of them are about the neocons in the Pentagon or Stephen Hadley working for Rice in the White House.
Correct.
Or any of them even looking at the fact that the administration desperately wanted these sorts of documents to fit their preconceived narrative.
And do they talk at all about Michael Ledeen and all the Iran-Contra 2?
Back in the day, Josh Marshall wasn't such a hack and he wrote this piece, Iran-Contra 2, about all those meetings in Rome with Ledeen and Ghorbanifar and all them.
Is that in there anywhere?
Yeah, it is.
It is in the investigation by the Senate that Ledeen and Iran-Contra figures were trying to turn attention toward Iran and that they were, you know, Ledeen's connection to Panorama magazine and all sorts of things were investigated by the Senate.
By the time they got around to that, 2007, it was far, far too late.
I think there are still major questions about the provenance of the documents and anyone who looks at the FBI file isn't going to come away if they know anything about it like you do and many others aren't going to come away from it satisfied that there was a complete investigation and that everything is known about who created these documents and why.
This investigation, technically, legally, how it works is it's at the behest of the Senate so it's not necessarily a criminal investigation or a counterintelligence investigation.
It's just sort of kind of a custom-made investigation at the request of a powerful senator.
Is that something or how does that work?
Well, it was never a criminal investigation.
Correct.
It was an investigation at the behest of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Whenever they're interviewing anybody, they always made it clear it was not a criminal investigation.
But the directive and the investigatory scope did flow through the counterintelligence division and FBI headquarters.
Right.
So they were conducting it kind of like a counterintelligence investigation and yet not really because they were able to release the FBI file.
And I can tell you from experience that they wouldn't have released a complete counterintelligence investigation if it had in fact actually been that.
So they were more doing light information gathering and the FBI's abilities to investigate anything in Europe are extremely limited.
And as mentioned, the scope was supposed to be really broad.
I mean, ideally they would have.
There would have been interviews with Ledeen tucked into this file in these special forms that they used to later charge and prosecute people.
They probably could have followed up with the Office of Special Plans.
But they left that until later in the investigation because there was disagreement in the Senate Intelligence Committee.
They didn't really want to handle the part of why was the Bush administration so easily allegedly misled by the documents.
That was too hot for them.
And although they did investigate Ledeen and crew, it was a very light investigation in 2007, which was very damning to the extent that this American enterprise figure and his cohorts really could move the government and get a lot of cooperation, even though he's really not a government official.
But they never did anything about that.
And they never did anything in the Senate investigation what the administration was saying and what the available intelligence could support.
But if they had done that, you know, I think we might be in a different world.
Yeah.
Well, so here's the thing, too, is, OK, this is old news now, but back then it was a big deal.
And I still remember that the CIA had rejected this intelligence, I think, 14 times.
And it was not in the Cincinnati speech, which is full of absolute insanity.
How anything in the Cincinnati speech got into the Cincinnati speech is just forget about it.
The scandal itself.
But this wasn't in that.
And the administration for a long time, the different government actors were sort of forbidden from bringing this up.
The CIA had said, take this off all the talking points.
Take this out of the speeches.
We're not using this.
This is not true.
And then, like, on the 14th time, the neocons were successful in getting it into the speech.
And it was the State of the Union.
And for whatever reason, George Tenet rolled over.
He says, I think, man, if I remember right, he claims it all.
Well, I was asleep and it was late at night and someone else decided not my fault or something like that kind of excuse.
Yeah.
But that's a big deal, right?
The CIA says no, no, no, over and over again.
And the agenda is somehow we've got to get it past them and into the speech.
That's all that counts.
Tell your mom she might get nuked in her jammies in the middle of the night if she doesn't let us do this.
Right, exactly.
And, you know, the CIA did change its national intelligence estimate under, I think, you know, pressure from the administration to include this idea that this dodgy allegation might possibly be true.
So they're at fault there.
But you're right.
They managed to keep it out of the speeches.
Oh, it was in the NIE, huh?
I had forgotten that.
OK.
Yeah.
So so they were complicit.
But to your point, they did manage to keep it out of various speeches and allegations.
But you had, again, people like John Bolton, Dick Cheney and others constantly trying to push this into the top official speeches.
And so you had Condoleezza Rice talking about it.
You had Bolton rejecting Iraq's claims of innocence by citing Niger specifically.
John Hanna and Harold Rode in the vice president's office, too.
Right.
So, you know, it's it's basically I you know, my opinion based on what I've read is that they knew it was garbage and they didn't care.
And, you know, now we know from Richard Clarke's book that President Bush on September 12, 2001, was already asking for links between Iraq and the 9-11 attacks.
So, you know, the more time that passes, the more evidence there is that the administration from the get go really wanted to include Iraq in their so-called response to 9-11 and the facts be damned.
So, you know, I my personal assessment after reading all of this is that they knew it was garbage and they pushed it through the system anyway.
Because, as you say, and others have said this from within the administration, it was something they could all agree on would be compelling to the American people as a justification for war.
Right.
That's Paul Wolfowitz's own words.
Right.
So, you know, it's what they went with.
It's like it's like they were being bringing a bad product to market.
You know, like this was a flawed pharmaceutical, but they were going to push it through to accomplish some quarterly earnings target that they had.
Yeah, that's a good analogy.
So you like supporting anti-war radio hosts.
That makes sense.
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Go to scotthorton.org slash donate.
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And thanks.
Now, OK, so this is probably a silly question, but could you ever get the CIA documents where they discuss why they don't like these forgeries and why they shouldn't be in the president's speeches?
The CIA is extremely difficult to FOIA and they have, you know, a million exemptions that they can apply.
And basically their response to anything at that level is is usually, you know, no response or that if they did exist, they wouldn't be releasable.
The so-called Glomar response.
Right.
So I don't think so.
And then the other exemption that they would cite would be, you know, deliberative or they're not going to show any sort of internal dissent, because, of course, the plebs out there in the hinterland couldn't take the fact that government isn't unified on any given issue.
So they they really are difficult to FOIA.
I don't think that the actual twisting that went on inside the CIA is ever going to come out.
They managed to keep a lot of stuff under wraps by citing accurately or, you know, falsely a bunch of FOIA exemption.
So I don't think we're going to get that.
And this is one of the older FOIA files that we've been nagging the FBI for.
So it's, you know, it's it's kind of it's kind of disappointing that it takes seven or eight years to get something as basic as, well, you know, the FBI investigated, what did they find?
And here we finally have some information that not much.
Why?
Because the scope was so limited and they're not very good at going up against high political appointees in any environment, but especially not this kind of environment.
So, you know, I think the conclusion that we could very easily repeat this with Iran right now is a valid one.
And I think that the lesson learned for administration officials who like twisting intelligence is don't ever let any source files leak out, especially stuff that's easily as debunked as these Niger uranium forgeries.
And so, you know, we could very well be in a situation of going to war with Iran where they keep everything as foreign source, but compelling and never present a solid case.
In fact, that's what it looks like is happening right now.
Yeah.
Hey, that's why Assange is in prison.
We can't be having all this truth getting in the way of our agenda.
It could be a problem.
Hey, here's some stuff I'd like to see leaked or FOIAed or something, which is perfectly in line with all of this, is the investigation into Ahmed Chalabi.
And how did Ahmed Chalabi know that America had broken Iran's codes in order that he might commit the treason of letting them know that?
Which then led to the investigation, which is, I think, a joint CIA-DIA investigation on one side and an FBI, I don't know if it was criminal, I think it was a criminal investigation on the FBI side, where the CIA and the DIA later decided that the Iranians had really helped Chalabi to lie us into war against Saddam and that the neocons were his dupes, just as everybody else was on the right anyway, were the neocons dupes in that war.
But the real point is that the FBI side of that investigation, which maybe is easier to FOIA, they did interview the Pentagon neocons.
Because I remember reading Douglas Feith complaining severely about how, oh, it was just the worst Gestapo kind of activity, the way they came and persecuted us all.
And I think his quote was, I'm almost positive it was Douglas Feith who said this, that, oh, sure, they just investigated every Jew at the Pentagon, or questioned everyone, and framed it in that way.
Which I'm not saying I agree that that was the way that the FBI characterized their mission over there, just those happened to be the neocon people in those positions who had worked with Chalabi, and who obviously had told them that kind of thing.
And so, let's see those, Grant.
Well, okay, Scott, I'll put that into the old FOIA docket.
But I do think that's an interesting defense.
Because one of the people who was meeting with Ledeen and some other figures, Ghorbanifar, etc., trying to turn the whole attention toward Iran in the context of this investigation, was Lawrence Franklin.
And Lawrence Franklin was working at the Pentagon, leaking information to Israel and Israel's lobby here in the US, AIPAC.
And when he was finally indicted, that's the sort of thing that, with the aid of mainstream media, he was charging the Pentagon with, or the FBI with, which was an anti-Semitic investigation.
And it's a very powerful charge.
And in looking through FBI files, whenever they were looking into things like the activities of Jonathan Pollard, and two previous incidents about AIPAC in armed smuggling cases, that's the charge that always comes up.
And they really don't like facing that sort of charge.
It's a lot easier to just let the investigation go away, because it's an extremely toxic charge.
Yeah.
I mean, although at the time, it wasn't getting that much attention just because everyone else was doing them the favor of ignoring the issue.
So, the smear part of it didn't get very far either.
To me, what was the only part that was important about it was that apparently the FBI was doing a pretty thorough interview of the members of the Office of Special Plans about what they may or may not have told Chalambi about America's access to Iranian secrets, which is a big deal.
And I guess that must have just been a counterintelligence investigation rather than a criminal one.
I don't know.
Well, they were dealing with a known fraudster in that case.
The real interesting thing is Chalambi had a record of criminal behavior that it's just amazing that anyone would have been able to get government funds flowing to such a character.
And the fact that he turned out to be even worse than was known is so predictable.
But yeah, that would be an excellent thing to come out.
I just think that as we keep hearing of dented oil tankers and 10,000 troops being sent to Iran, it's really worth revisiting all of the fabrications that came out of the White House in this previous era where there was such a disdain for any sort of truthfulness toward the American people about what had actually happened.
That it's really valuable to revisit in detail every single one of these incidents because people have forgotten.
I mean, most people, this is ancient history.
This is like the Pentagon Papers and Daniel Ellsberg.
This happened, this investigation started back in 2003.
I mean, that was forever ago.
So why does it matter?
Yeah.
Well, it matters, of course, because of all of the dead people and all the time created by the actions taken based on these lives and the fact that this is just one example of how badly we know they knew they were lying.
Manipulating the American people to believe Saddam was an ally of Osama bin Laden and that he was making nuclear bombs and of course he would attack North America somehow at his first opportunity with them.
He's a ridiculous lies.
They're really ridiculous allegations.
Yeah.
And anybody who knew anything about the logistics of moving this stuff, about the oversight of such things, the fact that Iraq already had that much yellow cake in their possession.
Exactly.
The ridiculousness of the argument and the fact that the New York Times, the Washington Post and all of these so-called credible newspapers were just all over this stuff, just spinning out yarn after speculative yarn.
And nothing has changed.
Absolutely nothing has changed in the intervening decade.
Hang on just one second.
Hey, man, here's a book you guys got to read.
It's called No Dev, No Ops, No IT by Hussain Badakhshani.
No Dev, No Ops, No IT.
It's a book about how a libertarian ought to run his tech company.
I think you'll really get a kick out of it.
No Dev, No Ops, No IT.
Hey, did you ever see that Chappelle show skit where it's Black Bush and it's where Dave Chappelle is George W. Bush lying us into war?
Of course.
Yeah.
Who hasn't seen that?
Well, everyone should where he's got the yellow cake.
Oh, don't drop that shit.
Of course, also the aluminum tube.
He's got aluminum tubes.
Aluminum tube.
You're supposed to use your imagination about how that tube is supposed to be a threat to you.
The funny part is, well, all of it's funny, but the reality of it from even back then was, you're missing a real big couple of steps between yellow cake and your centrifuges.
That Netanyahu says were the size of washing machines hidden all over Iraq enriching this uranium.
You don't just put yellow cake in a centrifuge and spin it.
That's not how it works.
You've got to refine that and transform it into uranium hexafluoride gas first, which takes a giant conversion facility that obviously Iraq could not have.
What they did have, though, was a big storage locker full of yellow cake uranium from back when they did have a nuclear program in the 1980s.
It was just sitting there.
Even if they wanted to take some yellow cake and begin to try to do something with it, they didn't need to go to Niger for that.
Right.
All you have to do is look at a picture of the Oak Ridge facility to see that.
It's a lot more complicated getting from yellow cake to highly enriched uranium.
And the funny thing about the Dave Chappelle skit is to add the ridiculousness to the whole thing.
They actually had some yellow cake, like edible yellow cake that they were saying, watch out for this stuff.
And it was brilliant humor.
But, you know, we've become so deferential as a nation that you would never see a skit like that on Saturday Night Live or someplace that had a broader audience because they know they'll get into trouble.
I mean, questioning authority like that, ridiculing some of these basically fraudsters who put this out with such a straight face, you still can't do that.
I mean, look at the the esteem with which George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are held in many circles.
I mean, whatever they did is just irrelevant to most of the mainstream who doesn't see it as their job to debunk this sort of thing or even follow up.
I mean, why is it that we're the ones to get the FBI nurse here?
Uranium investigation.
It's very simple.
Nobody else cares.
Yeah, certainly not in the mainstream media.
They don't.
And yeah, you're right.
They don't even if I guess all of D.C., their whole bubble of the consensus is like, oh, yeah, Iraq, I guess probably shouldn't have done that.
But we don't like to talk about that anyway.
So, well, that's that's what you get when someone says faulty intelligence.
Yeah, it's not a case of faulty intelligence.
Certainly not anybody's fault.
And it's certainly not mine.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'll say, you know, though, seeing this is the benefit of being this old is I remember back then when MSNBC trying so hard to keep up with Fox had counters full of toy airplanes that they had gotten from Toys R Us.
And this one sort of looks like a F-15.
And this one sort of looks like some kind of long range bomber.
And then the hosts of the show are actually flying them around in the air like a little kid with their hand as the generals are explaining for, you know, 40 minutes or something.
This is all the cool high tech gear that we'll be deploying with and all of these things.
All the major questions already, you know, presumably answered about how necessary this all is.
We're only waiting for it to begin and for the excitement to start.
And this is essentially a Lockheed promo video for your people to watch.
And boy, were they into it, every one of them.
And anyone who was involved in that, there's hardly enough sorries for that.
The only one I could think of was Peter Beinart, who wrote two different books about how sorry he was for mongering that war.
But the rest of them, I don't know.
I can't think of many who've even tried to say they're sorry for being that bad and helping to mislead so many good people, too.
I mean, think about how many fathers and daughters decided they hated each other's guts because George Bush attacked Iraq and they couldn't get along over that issue.
That kind of thing.
I mean, that hurt.
Never mind all the dead Iraqis.
That hurt American society so deeply, launching that war for no reason.
You know, the reverberations, you can't even, you know, begin to somehow add them up and all the opportunity costs and all the broken relationships and all the everything.
But just think of what should have happened.
I mean, there should have been an entire generation of reporters and government officials drummed out of office and drummed out of their so-called media organizations.
And the fact that it never happens and the fact that we're beginning to repeat history and that there's no indication that it'll be any different.
I mean, that's the problem and that's the issue.
It wouldn't have been worth it, but it would have been redeemable if we had learned anything from it and if there had been any consequences.
But to this date, other than who?
Lawrence Wilkerson?
Who's the highest ranking official who's contrite and doing some form of absolution for the fraud that they perpetrated on this country?
I can't think of anyone.
Certainly none of the neocons.
No, no, there's a whole never say you're sorry mentality with them.
And I think that guarantees their survivability.
And although I've heard on your show that John Bolton is not a neocon and I accept the argument that he's just an ardent hyper nationalist, he should be paying a price for the Niger uranium hoax.
And he's not.
He's, in fact, got an incredible amount of credibility and power now, thanks to his patronage network.
And, you know, there's a lot of bad press that he's generated, but nowhere near enough, in my view, revisiting some of the things he did to perpetrate the last major war.
Yeah.
And like you say, it's because there never was accountability for any of these goons and especially on TV, too.
So they can't point a finger at him when they regurgitated all of his lies and all of that's on tape somewhere.
And so since we're all guilty, let's just let it all slide, which is kind of funny because Bolton does have a reputation of being crazy old John Bolton.
He doesn't represent the consensus.
He's to the right of even Robert Kagan sometimes and things like this.
And yet, boy, when he says who needs to get killed down in Venezuela or Iran or whatever, the entire media establishment line up and salute, click their heels and declare in unison that finally Donald Trump is acting presidential.
In other words, instead of being a TV goofball, he's taking control of the U.S. government and thinking of big, horrible things that he can do with it, like a good leader should.
And so they're the most grateful for Bolton and they're willing to repeat any lie he would have them believe.
Oh, apparently the whole government and military in Venezuela is ready to switch sides this morning, everybody, because John Bolton says so, according to MSNBC and CNN and the rest of them.
And then they're completely surprised when it doesn't work out, even though it's John Bolton, who might as well, as you say, be a neocon.
He never was a communist.
He's a lifelong Barry Goldwater right wing nationalist type, but same difference.
He's so close to the neocons and all of their policies and all their groups all this time.
But yeah, no big deal, right?
Why not go ahead and make Paul Wolfowitz the president then?
I don't know.
Yeah, I mean, wait a few more years.
Who knows?
That's what happens when there's sort of this national inability to maintain any of this relevant history.
So we're stuck.
We're very stuck.
And of course, it's not just, you know, now they're doing Russiagate and this kind of thing.
It's that this whole time they did why we have to stay in Iraq and we can never, ever leave or else you're a traitor who loves terrorists.
And why we have to double and triple and quadruple the war in Afghanistan and surge in and save the people from themselves over there.
And why we have to go and save the people of Libya from their horrible dictator Gaddafi and give them a nice, you know, permanent civil war instead.
Why we need to go back is the Wahiri suicide bombers in Syria because somehow Assad, the guy in the three piece suit, is worse than al-Qaeda.
In fact, al-Qaeda are moderate in heroes compared to him because he's friends with the Iranians.
Not that they ever did anything to us.
And all of these just and then, of course, the secret plot between Vladimir Putin and his spy secret compromised agent Donald Trump to usurp Hillary Clinton's rightful throne and seize in this treacherous, traitorous act, seize power from the rightful rulers of our society.
I mean, my God, man, these people are so lost.
They're so upside down in all of what they really think is true.
You know, sorry I'm still going on about this, but I've seen this interview with Donald Trump from Sunday, you may have seen, where he talks about, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, anti-war I am and everything except Iran, Iran, Iran.
The generals tell me Iran, Iran, Iran.
He didn't say, but he meant the Israelis also tell me Iran, Iran, Iran.
They're going to make a nuclear weapon.
They're going to take over the Middle East.
I have to do this because they tell me there's a good reason because of this.
Which, meanwhile, I mean, it's true that everyone that Donald Trump talks to tells him that that's right.
And nobody, certainly not Rand Paul, who's probably the best guy he ever talks to, will tell him that this is all a bunch of crap, man.
The whole narrative is a lie, just like what George Bush would tell you, dude.
It's not true.
None of it.
You know, the Ayatollah, he ain't so bad.
Get it straight, dude.
Our enemies are the guys that knocked our towers down, the suicide bombers, the bin Laden knights.
And the best way to kill them, by the way, is to ignore them to death, mostly.
Certainly don't back them.
But to blame all that on the Ayatollah is just crazy.
But there's no one available, other than, I guess, Colonel McGregor on the Tucker Carlson show, in the whole country, to tell Trump a different point of view on any of this stuff.
And again, because of this same lack of accountability from the last time and the time before that.
Right.
This is our system, and it's not going to produce any other results.
And I really do think that you're completely right about him existing in this bubble of people who really aren't able to give him any information that isn't predetermined.
And there's, you know, the complete lack of any sort of alternative view or assessment that's being put out is, it's just terrifying, I think.
And the position of people who are against this, they're marginalized because they're going to be, once again, sort of positioned as Iran, Iranian government lovers and people who hate the will of the people over there.
The Ayatollah supporters.
And it's just a rock redux where everyone at that point was positioned as supporting Saddam Hussein and who can support him.
So, very little nuance, absolutely almost no unique opinions allowed in the media.
So, you know, I guess the job at hand is to continue putting out some research and information so that people can at least get it from somewhere.
And I do hope people read lessons from FBI's Nigerian uranium forgeries file because I think it pretty much brings things up to date, drawing in some other insights as well.
In particular, there's a pretty good book from a couple of reporters called The Italian Letter, how the Bush administration used a fake letter to build the case for war in Iraq, which was a book I wasn't aware of until recently.
But it's just extremely thorough and damning and never got the attention it merited in terms of doing all of the groundwork to show that they knew that the timeline of admissions and reports to the press and what they were gathering and discrediting until they revitalized it.
It should be required reading in every foreign policy or international relations course, but of course it won't be.
No, it won't, but thanks for recommending it.
And by the way, so to get back to this, are you in a hurry?
You got to go or what?
No, no, no, no.
I just put in another plug for the article.
Yeah, that's good.
Yeah, lessons from FBI's Nigerian uranium forgeries files on antiwar.com today.
We've got a bunch of great originals on the site today.
But so what I was going to ask you was whether in that book does he, because apparently the FBI investigation doesn't get to this, but you say in here that Martino, Rocco Martino, was recruited, was a former cop recruited by Italian intelligence SISME to come up with this.
But so did anybody ask the question or answer the question with certainty of whether Americans had been meeting with them recently and that this was either definitely or apparently at the Americans behest in the first place that find us somebody to cook up some of this stuff.
We're shopping for a bill of goods and we need your help.
No.
And again, if the FBI had been doing its job, it would have thrown Michael Ledeen up against the wall who had connections with both SISME and Panorama, the outlet that he was trying to get these documents published in and interviewed him under some bright lights.
But they never did that.
And as far as I could tell, they never actually interviewed Rocco Martino either.
But he's a guy who changed his stories multiple times.
But as far as why.
When was the first Rome meeting?
Do you remember that?
Yeah.
You talk about the first Rome meeting between Martino.
Yeah.
When Ledeen went down there and met with them.
Or are you talking about the Ledeen meeting?
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, that meeting.
That was in a one, right?
Or was that going on as early as 2000?
I believe that was 2000.
I'm sorry, man.
It's been so many years.
I'm trying to call up all my timelines and details, but it's not quite so solid as it used to be.
Right.
The whole purpose of that meeting.
And it's only one meeting.
And again, it was Ghorbanifar and Ledeen and some SISME intelligence officials.
And Lawrence Franklin, again, the convicted spy for Israel.
So that meeting was the subject, finally, of one of the last Senate investigations.
But it didn't benefit from any participation of hardened, lantern-jawed FBI officials who were actually doing a criminal investigation.
It was merely based on some interviews in which he denied anything or everything.
So that meeting, Justin Raimondo wrote about it.
A lot of other people wrote about it as being the possible genesis of the forgeries.
Like that was the point of the meeting.
But they were pretty much exonerated in the Senate investigation of that particular meeting.
And there's a 60-page document from the Senate Select Committee honing in on that.
So I'm sorry.
It was December 2001 is when that happened.
Right.
And they're really interested in – Ledeen, of course, has always wanted to hit Iran much more than Iraq.
Correct.
And he was more on the Sharon side of the argument, whereas Netanyahu's guys preferred to hit Iraq first, I guess.
Right.
But so that was part of – and the wife did this report where this was one of the plots that Ghorbanifar was in on, was they were trying to frame up Iran and Iraq both for having some uranium, although the thing fell apart, I guess.
Right.
It was one of the things that they were working on was to try to frame Iran for selling some uranium to Iraq or something like that.
Yep.
And they had, again, Pentagon heady hitter Harold Rode from the Office of Net Assessment.
And that was an extremely suspicious meeting because they were there to take advantage of the 9-11 attack.
But it didn't precede the actual base event that was used to gin up this idea that Iraq was shopping for uranium in Niger.
That was already happening shortly after this Wissam al-Zahawi meeting in Niger in February 1 of 1999.
They were starting to spin that in the year 2000, even before 9-11.
And so that sort of work was not going on as far as the investigations have determined as a result of trying to spin the 9-11 attacks.
That was occurring and being built.
But it did get a major kicker.
Yeah.
It became something that they could really try to use after 9-11.
And this book that you mentioned, what's it called again?
The book that I used for some of the background because it was very up-to-date was The Italian Letter, How the Bush Administration Used a Fake Letter to Build the Case for War in Iraq.
And when they talk about The Italian Letter, they talk about a completely fabricated letter between the president of Niger and Iraq talking about a numbered bill of sale and ensuing shipments of uranium.
And it was completely fake.
And yet it was the single piece of so-called hard intelligence that the Bush administration and the Brits were saying was indisputable proof that the nuclear program was being reactivated.
Right.
So that came out in 2007, came out from a minor publisher called Rodale Books that generates magazines like Men's Health and Gardening Today.
And I mean it was – I think it was the kind of book that you couldn't get a mainstream publisher to go with, which is an entire tale in and of itself.
And these are two reporters who were mainstream reporters and they just wanted to get to the bottom of it, Newt Royce and Pete Eisner.
And it's just a fascinating book.
I think – I don't think it ever received the attention it deserved.
But in that book where he goes up the chain of cause and effect – or they go up the chain of cause and effect there, they are stumped or they're satisfied when they stop at the SISMI agent who recruited Martino.
They don't have any indication either way whether the Israelis put them up to it, the Americans or Amit Chalabi's group or anybody else.
They didn't get higher up than that.
They didn't actually interview the SISMI agent.
They didn't – no.
And so – Even chronologically speaking, there's essentially – as far as anybody knows, there's nothing really to report from further up the chain just in the timeline.
Yeah, not from their timeline.
And their timeline in the appendix of the book is extremely lengthy and detailed.
And their story essentially is that SISMI was setting up Martino to spin this sort of connection, and there's no motive given whatsoever.
Martino was always in it for the money.
Their plant at the Niger embassy was in it for the money as well and could fax things back and forth and get letterhead.
And then they reported a burglary, which you'll remember.
But there's nothing in there saying – and here's the case for why Italian intelligence, which by the way, no Western intelligence agencies really rely on because they're so, I would say, inept and incompetent and compromised.
No one explains why they were the generator of this operation.
And I know you've interviewed Philip Giraldi and he said, no, it was actually CIA operators who wanted to – operatives who wanted to plant some garbage intelligence to get back at the Bush administration and other theories.
But there's nothing satisfying that I've been able to find that sort of connected the Senate investigation, the FBI investigation, and this book from two investigated reporters plus everything that's in Wikipedia and everything that's been written on credible websites.
So, you know, I would – Does Dewey Claridge's name come up anywhere else?
Who's?
Dewey Claridge.
That was one of the guys that Phil suspected.
Oh, right, Phil.
No, he doesn't come up.
Which Giraldi never claimed that he did it, but he said it may have been – seems like these guys may have sort of some former CIA.
And I think Claridge was one of them.
Right.
Well, it's very unsatisfying because you would think that a bona fide high priority investigation would have left no doubts.
But I still have doubts, and I don't think anyone who has examined everything wouldn't still have doubts about, again, why a third-rate intelligence agency would, before 9-11, be rushing to inject intelligence that's based on truth.
The kernel of truth is the visit by the Iraqi to Niger and then continuing to spin it up into this credible evidence of reconstituting a nuclear program.
That's – there's no satisfaction to be had.
Yeah.
Wow, what a crazy thing.
To think the American people were somehow convinced that we had to attack Iraq before they attacked us first, maybe with nukes.
It is.
Especially in hindsight, which, you know, count me among those who knew it was a giant lie at the time and opposed it as hard as I could at the time, including on the radio and marching and all these things.
But just looking back on it, you almost got to be kidding me that this worked.
That they said, look, our policy is regime change, and we're going to lie to you and your family for the next year and a half until you're afraid enough to let us start a war.
And then that worked instead of not working.
Yeah, it was something like 90% of Americans believed that Iran was developing nuclear weapons.
Iraq.
Iraq.
I'm sorry, Iraq.
Yeah, Ron, that too, but later.
No, Iraq.
Same lie, a few miles to the right.
And even after the inspectors didn't find anything, they still – a significant number still believed it.
That's the problem.
Once you've made all these connections and it's coming from everywhere, the government and media, it really has an impact, and it just only slowly dissipates.
Well, reliably on the side of the terrorists, as always, Grant.
Good to talk to you again.
Yeah, all right.
Hey, listen, EarMap.org, how long has that been around?
Started at the very end of 2002, and so it's getting kind of old, and I think our FOIA log has hundreds of still outstanding requests, and I think you've given me a couple more.
But one of the core programs that we're doing – You know what?
I want WACO documents too, man.
I'm sorry.
I'm not going to do that.
I want everything.
It's FOIA about the Middle East.
Oh, the Middle East.
It's policy.
Sorry.
I got to say no.
You know what?
It's the Combat Applications Group.
That's sort of an Israeli front.
Yeah.
American Special Operations Forces, they work for Israel.
That's – no?
Too broad?
There were Israeli – you know what?
Here's an angle.
There were Israeli Special Operations Forces at WACO, palling around with the UK guys and everybody else.
There is an Israeli angle on that.
All these Special Forces guys are friends, and the FBI Hostage Rescue Team is essentially a Special Operations Group trained at Fort Bragg with the rest of these guys.
And the Israelis were there at WACO.
Grant, how do you like that?
That's a thing for the Israel lobby to study.
I mean the earmap thing to look at.
I think I've listened to all your interviews about Jesse Trinidou and the WACO massacre.
Trinidou's in Oklahoma City, but yeah.
Oh, it was in Oklahoma City?
Okay.
All right.
And the Oklahoma City and the – yeah.
And so I think it's an amazing story.
You're going to have to convince me that there's a Middle East policy connection though.
Well, like I say, there were Israelis there at WACO as advisors or what have you.
And you know what?
There – you know what?
Andre Strassmeier, who was quite probably an agent provocateur in the case of the Oklahoma City bombing, he was a German Army intelligence officer who did have very strong ties to Israel.
And Israel and Germany and America had all been cooperating in their giant investigation of right-wing extremists essentially.
And that there actually may be at least some angle – I think people jump to conclusions.
I don't have conclusions.
I don't know yet, but I would like to know more about that.
But there is – so there's a FOIA for you right there.
Anything about Israel and Andre Karl Strassmeier.
Interesting.
Yeah.
So, yeah, I don't like that stuff.
This thing came up a minute ago with Andrew Bacevich about when the Israelis attacked the USS Liberty in 1967.
There's another one that is just huge, that gets no attention because if it did get attention, it would change a lot of things, a lot of people's understanding about the way things really are around here.
Yeah, I think one of the problems with the whole Johnson administration is that none of LBJ's papers are accessible through the Presidential Records Act or even FOIA.
And I have to tell you that my interactions with the LBJ Presidential Library have been – I mean it's just as though these archivists are on a personal mission to polish his image and not let any of the truth get out.
Because LBJ was a very complicated guy, very beholden to his close associates and people lobbying him.
And I have a feeling that if historians were willing to dig deeper and put pressure on that particular part of the National Archives, we'd know a lot more about the Liberty, a lot more about the uranium diversion, and a lot more about how National Archives Presidential Libraries are little fiefdoms in many cases that will not allow people to access documents that they paid to produce.
And so that's getting into another subject area, but one of the reasons we don't know much about it are these little fiefdoms called Presidential Libraries run by the National Archives and Records Administration.
Yeah.
Well, someday the democracy will elect a leader that's going to change all of this and make everything fine.
Let the people have access to government records.
Yes, someday.
Yeah, all of the old ones.
All of the records.
In real time.
On the UFOs and everything.
Whatever.
Yeah, hey, as long as we're believing in stuff, I figure go for broke.
Okay.
All right.
I'll let you go.
Have a great afternoon, Grant.
Thanks, Scott.
All right, you guys.
That's our friend Grant Smith.
He runs the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy.
As you heard there, what was it, 17 years worth of FOIA lawsuits and the resulting PDF files all there for you to read.
And really, he wrote about eight or ten books about the Israel lobby in the U.S.
The latest is Big Israel.
Before that, Divert, about stolen weapons-grade uranium from the Numec plant in Pennsylvania and the aftermath and all of that.
Before that, Spy Trade, about how they cheated on all the trade agreements and this and that kind of thing.
And yeah, you'll really like it.
I'll check out his Amazon page, etc.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
