All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys on the line from Australia, I've got the great Joe Lauria, Editor-in-Chief of consortiumnews.com, and get a load of this headline.
Consortium News sends libel notices to Canadian Signals Intelligence Agency and major television network.
What?
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Joe?
I'm doing fine, Scott.
How are you doing?
I'm doing really good.
Happy to have you on the show here.
So it says here that some Canadian says some bad things about you.
Yes, I would say so.
Not just some Canadians.
The powerful Five Eyes Signals Intelligence Electronic Agency, the Communications Security Establishment, very awkward name, but that's what it is, CSE.
That's the National Security Agency of Canada, the NSA of Canada.
So the Canadians.
Well, the Canadian powerful arm of the Canadian government working with a powerful television network.
There was a report that was done, presumably before the October 2019 federal elections in Canada.
That's what one of the reporters of Global News says in this broadcast and web page that they created.
And in that report, which was obtained by this TV station for apparently a FOIA, it says that Consortium News led this cyber influence campaign that attacked Canadian politicians.
This is really what the bottom of this thing is, that we have been smeared, of course, many times, as so many others have been, by trolls, by readers, by commenters, by people on Twitter, who knows who's saying it.
And you know, we put up with it.
You're a Russian.
Bob Perry, who created Consortium News, of course, was always called a Russian stooge or a Kremlin asset or a Putin puppet, this type of thing, and he kind of put up with it.
But this is a little step too far, I would think.
So when a powerful agency of a Canadian government and a big TV station name you, name you as being part of a cyber influence campaign directed by Russia.
That's the quote.
Directed is the key, was the word that really got me.
Not influenced or anything like that, but directed by Russia.
That implies that we're taking orders from someone, of course, nothing further from the truth.
Well, and Russia, by saying Russia, they're playing the Russian state, right?
I was just joking, the Canadians, they're saying the Russians are controlling, not just a Russian, some Russians, someone who'd been to Russia one time.
Yes, that's right.
And they quote us saying the first attack was a February 2017 report in the online Consortium News, followed in quick succession by pro-Russian English language and Russian language online media.
In other words, we started this campaign against a particular Canadian politician.
It's pretty lazy, isn't it, Joe?
Because it doesn't seem like they have a sidebar where they say, well, and look, Consortium News really is a Russian plant and here's how we know this or anything like that.
It's just sort of insinuated in this thing, right?
Yeah, well, it's directly said.
In fact, the presenter on the broadcast asked the reporter who did this story, both on the website and on the broadcast, Sam Cooper, she says, you know, this thing looks, it looks so real the way they made it, you know?
Oh, really?
Yeah, it looks like, they make it look like a legitimate news site, is what she says.
Wow.
And we have links to the broadcast and the story that I wrote about this.
So I said, yeah, it looks like this.
It is a legitimate broadcast, and this is key for many of your listeners who probably know about Consortium News, and many may not, to know who they're going after here.
Bob Perry was an AP and Newsweek reporter that won awards, like a Polk Award, for his reporting on the Iran-Contra scandal.
He gave the world the name Oliver North.
He and his partner, Brian Barger, wrote many, many stories during that period, and it became well known about that.
But he got fed up with his editors spiking stories that were critical of U.S. foreign policy.
In fact, that story about Oliver North was spiked by the AP.
They wouldn't publish this story.
They were protecting Reagan and the White House.
But the Spanish wire of AP inadvertently put out a translated copy of this story.
So once it went out on the Spanish wire, the AP English couldn't, I couldn't deny that the story was true anymore.
That's how bad it was for Bob Perry.
And he started this consortium of independent journalists who had their stories likewise suppressed by their editors.
In 1995, we're celebrating our 25th year.
It's maybe the oldest investigative independent website on the Internet.
1995 is ancient history in the Internet.
In fact, the New York Times started their website pretty much around the same time.
Yeah, that's as old as antiwar.com.
You're one of the oldest ones, too, though.
That's right.
So 95 wasn't, you know, in other words, we've been around for this meant 25 years and people have to understand that now the consortium of people that put together consortium today, Consortium News Today, Bob Perry having died two years ago.
I took over April 2018.
We are a collection of people who've been on the inside.
We have our establishment backgrounds at high level.
Some of us like Ray McGovern, who's one of our regular columnists, used to brief Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush every day in the Oval Office with the CIA Daily Brief.
We have Patrick Lawrence, who was the Asia editor of the International Herald Tribune.
He's a regular columnist for us.
Our deputy editor is Corinna Barnard.
She's a former Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswire and Yale graduate can get much more establishment than that.
And you've got myself.
I'm a Wall Street Journal reporter for six and a half years.
Boston Globe, Sunday Times of London, 10 years investigative reporter.
And interestingly enough, on our board, we have Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg is on our board of directors.
Of course, he worked at RAND and the Pentagon.
That's inside the establishment.
He certainly came outside.
John Pilger, who used to work for the New Statesman and the Daily Mirror, of course, has become a great, well-known, world-renowned filmmaker and journalist.
And really interestingly, Mike Gravel.
Senator Mike Gravel is on our board.
Senator Mike Gravel was a very close friend of Pierre Trudeau.
And I included a picture in this article that came from the book that Mike and I wrote back in 2009, and is a picture of Pierre Trudeau and Mike Gravel in 1977 at Snowmass, Colorado, at Christmastime on a ski holiday.
So the Signals Intelligence Agency of the government of Justin Trudeau has accused a news organization of being directed by Russia, a news organization on whose board sits a close personal friend of his late father.
I also have a connection with Canada, too.
For nine years, I was the correspondent at the U.N. for a group called Southern News.
They published the Montreal Gazette and the Ottawa Citizen and Vancouver Sun, a bunch of papers.
And that group was owned at one time by a corporation called Canwest.
And they also own this global news TV station.
At the same time, I was working for the TV, for the company that actually is now smearing our website.
My point in laying all this out is that we are establishment, but we've broken out to give the public a very different point of view from the inside, people who are dissidents.
And by smearing us and others as being directed by Russia, it's as if domestic, indigenous, critical journalism and dissent is not possible on its own.
It has to be directed by a foreign power and that we have no agency.
And that's what really galls me when any troll says that.
But when we have the powerful communications security establishment of Canada, one of the Five Eyes Electronic Signals Intelligence Agency and this global news that has a billion dollars in revenue, apparently huge television network, then it was a step too far.
So we sent to a Toronto lawyer that we hired a libel notices to both of them.
And those are simply what we call in the U.S. demand letters.
We have not sued the CSE or the Global News Network as it's been misreported everywhere.
We sent libel notices.
We got an answer back from Global News within a few days, which our lawyers told us was very unusual.
He didn't expect them to answer at all, necessarily, because they do not have to answer by law.
And they had a very feeble attempt.
I would prefer you speak to my lawyer if you want all the legal stuff.
But generally, I could say that they argued that there was a fair use doctrine in Canada and they could publish any government document they wanted and not have to approach us for comment.
This is key to the story, Scott.
We were not contacted by Global News, by the reporter Sam Cooper, before he did his story.
Not an email, not a phone call, not a Twitter message, did not care about our point of view.
It could be because, as that presenter says, we look like legitimate, like the Russians made up a site that looked like a real news site.
So maybe they didn't think we really existed or not.
But on that broadcast, the presenter says to Sam Cooper, did you contact the Russians for comment?
And he said, no, no, we didn't.
We didn't bother because we know what they were going to say.
I mean, that's about as amateur and unprofessional as you can be as a reporter to say, well, I know what they're going to say, so I won't try.
You've got to, even if you do know what they're going to say, you have to contact people in a story like this, especially to get their side of the story.
So they never did contact us.
And the fact that fair doctrine that they're talking about applies, according to our attorney, only to publicly released documents, not to a secret document, which this clearly was.
Yeah, and I don't know about the law, but it seems like there'd be some kind of guideline at their company or something that if you're going to accuse somebody of being an agent of a foreign power, that you have to come with some sort of evidence, not just a claim.
Evidence and have to contact them and get their point, their side of the story and their their reaction.
Also, you know, I mean, how about Google?
Just look at Consortium News on Google and there's 25 years worth of articles on there.
You know, it couldn't possibly be some fly by night fake news, you know, scam type of a thing here.
I look at the masthead on the right side here where you have all of the the publisher and the board of directors and everything right there published in the margin on the front page.
They they didn't contact us.
We're obviously a real news organization.
Oh, yes.
And corporate journalism is this is a fine example of how corporate reporters listen to anything the especially intelligence agencies say to them.
Right.
They just buy it 100 percent.
So this is the way intelligence agencies launder disinformation by putting it through big news organizations like this, global news in Canada, like The New York Times here in the US.
Oh, I'm sorry, I'm an Australian now, but in the US, The Washington Post, etc., CNN.
So you launder this stuff and the reporters never say, well, wait a minute, where's the evidence for making this claim?
No, they don't need it.
They just put it out there and smear someone.
And it's about time that we stood up to this, because, as I said, we've been trolled for years as anyone who's questioned the Russiagate narrative was.
But this is a step too far.
So we had to take this legal action against both of these powerful organizations in Canada.
And that was because we cannot accept being smeared at this level by a media that does not question what an intelligence report says.
And you're right, too, about how their perception is, well, geez, the government said something.
Of course, it's true.
Or it doesn't matter if it's true.
You just report that they said a thing.
That's the truth we're all going off of anyway.
And that's just the way they look at it.
That's the definition of stenography.
Yeah.
You know, I just read a funny thing doing some research for my book.
I read a funny story by Daphna Linzer from 2002 about how in Saddam Hussein's dossier that he turned over to the U.N., it's 12,000 pages of declaration of his innocence.
And she remarks in there that this is especially the nuclear part, which explains that when he did have a nuclear program, it was all Western companies that helped him build it all in the Reagan years.
And then but the the point is, oh, and so she says this 2002 dossier is essentially a carbon copy of the same thing that he turned over, at least the nuclear part is the exact same thing as he turned over in 1996.
And then it ends with, of course, this is because if there was any change in there, it would be an admission that he's lying.
And so, of course, he can be expected to just continue to lie instead.
You know, that's essentially the frame of it.
There was no possibility that nothing has changed since 1996.
This is the same record of the same nuclear program that hasn't existed since 1991.
Lady, I don't know what to tell you, you know, but instead it's, hey, George Bush says he has weapons.
So this declaration not being updated is proof of his dishonesty.
Simple as that.
The premise has come from on high.
We don't need evidence for that.
Listen, I knew Daphne Lindsay, she was based at the U.N. then as I was, and I was writing for this Canadian chain in the Montreal Gazette, etc.
And I covered that story when the dossier came out and we put it on the I also did it for the Boston Globe.
I'm on the front page of the Boston Globe that day with that story with Ann Kornblut was the other byline on my story.
And I recently was talking to Scott Ritter on our webcast and about this.
And he said, oh, I know about that.
I wrote it.
Well, he helped the Iraqi government, you know, assemble what they had, what they had documented to have destroyed already.
So there was U.N. input that he, of course, got rid of was at that time the chief U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq.
And it was totally dismissed then as being a lie.
And it turned out, of course, to be the truth.
He didn't have the WMD, but so what?
You know, let's kill a million people.
Oops.
And, you know, too, I got to bring this up.
Every regular Joe that I knew in Austin, Texas, at that time, and all of us, in fact, we're very regular.
Joe's all knew better.
You had to have been Daphna Linzer to think, oh, yes, Saddam Hussein has been doing nothing but work on his giant Manhattan project since 1998, even though no one can demonstrate that that's true to me whatsoever.
You know, how could I not believe it?
But ask any cab driver, any bartender, any nobody in Austin, Texas who didn't feel like they had a vested interest in believing whatever George W.
Bush said.
And they all knew better.
We all knew better.
Yes, cab drivers knew it, but not the reporters at the AP or any other big media.
It is just like in Orwell, where the propaganda is really for the party members.
The proles can see through it, but they don't have any power.
So it doesn't matter anyway.
But all the Daphna Linzer's at the Ministry of Truth, they don't have to be convinced.
They already are convinced.
Yes, yes.
And not to speak about her specifically, but in general, career takes precedent over finding out the truth.
Bob Perry is a good example of that.
His mainstream media career was destroyed because he continued to pursue the truth and he started this website.
And that's who make up Consortium News.
A whole bunch of us who have been on the inside and said, this is B.S. and we are going to continue to do our work as journalists and we are going to make less money at it, but we don't care.
And that's the very essence of independence.
And yet if we attack what they call attacking a Canadian politician, in this case, Chrystia Freeland, I think we should probably I was going to say, who's a Nazi?
Go ahead and tell us the truth about her, if you want.
Look, Chrystia Freeland.
For years, covered up a background of her grandfather, her grandfather, Chrystia Freeland is Ukrainian.
Well, first of all, who is she?
She's right now the deputy prime minister of Canada.
She's not only that, but she's now been put by Justin Trudeau as the head of a new committee that was created that makes her the most powerful person in his cabinet.
And she overlooks all the implementation of all legislation.
And a Canadian website called iPolitics quoted an analyst as saying that she's now the functional prime minister of Canada.
So this is understand how powerful this woman is.
At the time in February 2017, she was the foreign minister.
Now, I've been looking at the provenance of this story, and it apparently first appeared in a Polish history magazine in the January, February edition of 2017.
What did that say?
That said that her grandfather was actually the editor in chief of a Nazi newspaper published out of Krakow in occupied Poland during the Second World War.
And then when the Soviet Union started to approach and liberate Poland, he relocated with the Nazi army to Vienna, where he continued to publish this Ukrainian language newspapers for Ukrainians.
So he was certainly, you know, publishing Nazi propaganda.
She hid this by saying what wonderful parents she had.
She made up a story that they were just normal refugees and they wound up in a refugee camp.
And that's where they met her parents and etc.
And how she loves her parents, her grandparents, rather.
Right.
And how they've been fighting for democracy ever since.
Right.
Well, yeah, I forgot to add that.
Thank you.
Yes, that's right.
In Ukraine, yes.
Ukrainian independence and democracy.
That's their whole thing.
Well, then this Polish magazine came out and it was repeated first by this blogger in Moscow, John Helmer.
And then we got tipped off by someone in Canada, actually, who just recently told me he was the one who told Bob Perry about it.
He's willing to testify if we go further with this, which we're keeping our options open.
He would testify that he's the one who told Bob Perry about it because he'd seen it somewhere.
He doesn't know where.
But apparently he was published some afterward from this Polish history magazine.
So we got a freelance correspondent who gave us a version of that story, which we published on February 2017.
And it's it lays out how her grandfather was, in fact, the editor of this Nazi newspaper.
Now, the next day she was asked, this was like a couple of days later in early March 2017, she was asked at a press conference with Freeland, was it true or not?
And she's kind of dissembled and gave a non-denial denial and said this blamed Russian propaganda and Russian interference in the American election.
That was, you know, we know what Russia does.
That was her side side handed remark about that.
Now, the next day, the Globe and Mail, which is the largest newspaper in Canada, had a headline and said Chrissie Freeland knew her grandfather was a Nazi, the editor of a Nazi newspaper.
So she had to they had to confess.
So the Globe and Mail are in on it with the Russians, too.
No, I guess so.
I guess so.
My God, that Vladimir Putin, his reach is unlimited.
Yeah.
And then Bob Perry wrote a piece about that, saying that he personally fact checked and edited the story.
So they admitted that basically it was true.
And I don't know why, Scott, this has been dredged up, this three year old story from Consortium News.
And now, by the way, that's that intelligence agency report that's being quoted from this secret report that the Global News got doesn't mention the Polish, as far as I know, anybody else but us.
I don't know why we're singled out and why three years later they're dredging up this old Consortium News story.
It doesn't make any sense.
I think it would hurt her to remind the public that she lied, that she covered this up all these years.
But we are supposedly attacking her.
And this is the way they spin this.
If you write an article that's true, they call that an attack directed by Russia.
You know, let's say Russia did, let's say Vladimir Putin faxed it over to Bob Perry directly.
It's still a true story.
So it really doesn't matter what the source is, if the story is true.
In other words, Russia is not inserting disinformation into Canadian politics.
They didn't insert, if they were the hackers of the DNC and they, in fact, gave it to Wikileaks, which is not at all clear.
But let's say that Russia was behind all that.
They inserted information into the political campaign.
It's journalism.
It's not disinformation.
If there was fabricated emails that they gave to the DNC or if this grandfather story was fabricated, then they could clearly say that a foreign power, a hostile foreign power had sabotaged the career, tried to sabotage the career of Chrystia Freeland or tried to sabotage the 2016 U.S. election.
But that's not the allegation.
It's true.
And this putting attention on Russia, those two things, it diverts from the truth of the Freeland story and of the emails and the corruption that it unveiled about the DNC and Clinton.
And it smears people like us, marginalizing anyone who is doing legitimate journalism, who are stepping outside of the corporate herd and saying, telling a different tale from our own volition for without being directed by anybody to our own agency.
They want to also smear anybody who could do that as being purely a puppet of Russia.
So they get a twofer with this Russia stuff.
And it's not going to go away.
Scott, I'm sure you know that this 2020 election is going to be full of that stuff again.
Oh, yeah.
And I mean, the Democratic, the liberal Democratic section of America, I mean, the people who are left to the Democratic Party and not so beholden to it tend to do a little better on this.
But for the for the liberal Democrats of America, I mean, they're never getting over this.
This is Saddam's, oh, he did, too, have weapons of mass destruction type of thing.
They're never going to get over.
And, you know, when the Mueller report came out and we were all saying, ha ha, told you so, big flop.
They were saying, no, see, it says right there, the Papadopoulos and the obstruction and the thing.
And there was enough people on that side of it pretending that they'd been vindicated, that for the people who wanted to go along with that, then, yeah.
In fact, I just was talking with Michael Tracy earlier on the show about how in the Democrats 658 page report impeachment report, they bring up Papadopoulos and they bring up, you know, a couple of other things trying to essentially revive Russiagate and make it seen that, look, Donald Trump, he withheld this aid to Ukraine because he is an agent of Russia, that this was a treasonous act on behalf of a foreign power, because as everybody knows, I guess, as the Robert Mueller report proved, Donald Trump is a Manchurian candidate, agent of Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin.
That's still the case, they think.
Absolutely.
The whole thing has been reviving this thing.
I could not listen to half of these speeches, particularly Adam Schiff and the others.
I mean, they're just repeating this over and over again and using this line that we have to fight the Russians there so we don't have to fight them here.
That is the most absurd and insane thing for an American leader to say, because even during the height of the Cold War, there was never any idea that Russian troops were going to come on American shores to fight.
I mean, it's so absurd.
That's how deluded they are.
And in a totally different universe where I heard one of the house managers say in the trial that it's Russia interfered, not Ukraine.
They're trying to make us think Ukraine interfered because that's a whole other show.
And I'm sure you've covered that already.
But they are in a completely different universe, both sides.
That's what's so frightening about this partisanship now, because it's completely insane.
And if you talk to one of these liberal Democrats, as you say, and you say, well, there was no collusion or conspiracy.
As Mueller put it, he made that very clear.
And I think the reason why he had to make that clear is because unlike the GRU agents who will never show up in an American courtroom, he doesn't have to prove what he's saying in that indictment.
You can just say it because it's not going to be tested in court.
Whereas if he accused Americans as part of the Trump campaign of being in collusion with Russia, they would have to show up in a court.
So he has to have had the evidence.
And he didn't have it.
It didn't happen.
And yet they tell me to my face, oh, no, collusion was never really part of this thing.
It was the obstruction of justice.
Are you kidding me?
It was the core of the allegation.
Yeah.
And then they still believe he's a Russian agent anyway.
So I know somehow they colluded without colluding.
But it would be it would be funny if it weren't so dangerous.
Yeah.
Well, and so here's my problem, too, is and back to the smearing everybody who knows better people, you know, regular people, journalists and, you know, regular folks out here in the world.
I kind of play down the importance of this because it's so stupid to me.
But that's a mistake.
You know, I think I really should ask you just how dangerous this really is in the sense of some significant portion of the American people, say people who are, you know, teenagers and 20 somethings right now in school growing up during this whole political period.
And not only them, but they're going to be entire segments of the American population who really are polluted with the idea that you wouldn't possibly say something that explains the Russians point of view on the situation in Ukraine, for example, unless you somehow were an agent of Russia.
I mean, if they I think thinking back on it, they did smear like this a lot, but it didn't seem to really stick that, oh, you're how come you speak for Saddam Hussein and you're objectively pro Saddam Hussein because they're just not enough Arabs in America and there never was enough Iraqi money and influence in this country for that to sound even slightly plausible.
But old Vladimir Putin and the Russians, they're all powerful, apparently.
And it's believable enough, I guess, that their intelligence agencies do that good of a job running a bunch of journalists and Twitter accounts and what have you.
So that, I mean, it really does mean that there's really no way to challenge the narrative to these people when it's all such a perfectly circular argument for them.
You make a very good point about a whole new generation that's being indoctrinated.
People today in their 60s, 70s or 80s, you know, live through McCarthyism and the Cold War, the first Cold War.
And they have just this instinctive hatred of Russia and or distrust, I should say.
And that's being built upon in this second Cold War and bringing in a whole new generation out to distrust Russia, to blame Russia for everything that goes wrong in your own situation.
It has to have been a Russian plot.
And to hate and fear their neighbors or good journalistic sites like Consortium News, who have a better point of view on it, to be so suspicious of that, that the only question is, how did they get to you, Luria?
You know?
Well, we not only took a stand, but by coincidence, the very next day that we published this article, January 21st, because that was the day that the libel notices were served, hand-delivered in Ottawa and in Toronto to the newspaper, to the TV station and the intelligence agency.
The next day, Tulsi Gabbard sued Hillary Clinton for her smear that she was the favorite of Russia.
So maybe people are starting to stand up now.
And I think that's why what we've done, I think, is much bigger than just Consortium News, because we're not the only victims of this.
And it's about time that this nonsense is called out.
And it's very hard for them to defend themselves.
They cannot prove that we're directed by Russia.
It's absurd.
Are we in favor of detente?
Are our writers, excuse me, our editorial position in favor of detente with Russia?
Absolutely.
Does that make us directed by Russia?
Of course not.
I mean, as Stephen Cohen, Professor Cohen said, during the first Cold War, there was an actual debate in the U.S. in academia and journalism among citizens of whether we should have detente with the Soviet Union or not.
But now there's no debate.
It's not even, you can't even mention it because you are immediately smeared as being controlled.
So it's not, in other words, during the first Cold War, some of it was, this is worse.
This is worse this time around, where you are completely shut down if you have any, what they consider an association with Russia.
If you just want detente with Russia, then you have to be a steward of the Kremlin.
It can't get worse than this, or I hope not anyway.
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Well, and you know what?
So here's the most important point.
We should bring this up in every discussion about Russia is that as you were talking about when you were laughing off the, or pointing out the insanity of the threat that the Russians were coming here and referring back to in the cold war, the threat was that they would come into West Germany and then from there threatened France and I guess Spain and whoever, England, the Netherlands.
And so the idea was if you cross the Elbe River, we will go to war with you and nuclear war if we have to.
And that was the line.
But now they have moved the line.
I should really measure this out on the map.
I think it's about 2000 miles to the east, all the way to the Russian border itself.
So that I don't think anybody would say like, yeah, it would be just wonderful for Russia to conquer Latvia.
But the only thing is, what if they really did feel like it?
Are we really going to go to nuclear war over the Baltic states or God forbid they succeed in bringing Ukraine into NATO?
And then the Russians decide that actually, no, we're going to march on Kiev instead.
How do you like that?
We're going to go ahead and trade our hometowns for these cities in Eastern Europe that most Americans have never even heard of in their lives.
I mean, this is pretty far out of control here.
And it's the kind of thing where, you know, looking back on it, man, it was kind of nice when they had that giant buffer zone that they had already conquered and didn't really feel the need at all to go.
There was no threat.
They were coming west into West Germany.
You know what I mean?
But now I don't know what might happen there.
And especially with American troops on the ground in the Baltic states and on the ground, in fact, not equipped, but, you know, trainers there on the ground in Ukraine, things could get ugly really quickly.
And then there's no, you know, margin of error.
No, and there were three hot spots on the on the border, the 30,000 NATO troops that marched there a couple of years ago that even then Foreign Minister Frank Walter Steinmeier said that this was a saber rattling, basically propaganda against Russia.
He didn't accept this, which is extraordinary mission then.
And you had Syria as a hot point, of course, Ukraine.
And now the military aid was given by Trump eventually to Ukraine, which Obama refused to give.
So they're heating this up.
The whole narrative that this was a Russian invasion and they invaded and annexed Crimea when it is, and they invaded Eastern Europe, Eastern Ukraine, has been debunked by the German intelligence agencies when they revealed that General Breedlove, the head of NATO at the time, was lying about this.
It was pure propaganda.
Now, Russia has helped the Donbass with weapons, with money, with training.
They're volunteers.
But was there ever a Russian full scale invasion?
Of course not.
Russians were already in Crimea and they were allowed to leave the base if they were given permission by the president.
That was part of the deal that they had.
They have a hundred year lease there on a base in Crimea.
So then there was a referendum there and people chose to join Russia.
There wasn't a shot fired in this invasion of Crimea.
What kind of an invasion and occupation is there?
And yet Hillary Clinton called Putin Hitler because she compared it to the Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia, like the Nazis.
Excuse me, moving in.
Propaganda after propaganda after propaganda, Russia is defending itself, in my opinion, from aggressive American foreign policy against them, to encircle them, to try to overthrow and undermine Putin to get somebody back like Yeltsin.
And they very well aware of that in Russia.
And we should just leave them the hell alone because they're not a threat to anybody.
In fact, when they went into Syria, they asked Obama to join him to gather Russia and the U.S. to join together like they did against the Nazis in the Second World War to destroy ISIS and other groups like that.
Of course, the Americans refused.
So Russia went in.
It wasn't like some secret in the night invasion of Syria.
It was they were invited by the Syrian government and he announced it from the podium of the U.N.
General Assembly.
I was in the building that day, Vladimir Putin.
So the whole story about Russia and the whole U.S.-backed Ukraine coup to overthrow Yanukovych that we know from Victoria Nuland's discussion online on a telephone call with Geoffrey Piazza, then ambassador to the Ukraine, is totally missing from this whole impeachment fiasco.
Right.
Because that is the opening drama in this whole story.
And also because none of them know the first thing about this stuff, really.
Because the corporate media didn't report it.
They focused on the F word because in that conversation, she says F to EU, but she says the whole word.
So they made a lot of fun about that.
That was the important word was the M word, midwife.
How do we midwife the overthrow of this government?
Yeah.
And the B word, Biden.
I'm going to get the vice president to come in here and glue this thing together.
That's why I wanted witnesses, you see.
But it would never happen because I think Trump should be impeached on war crimes allegations for saying that the West Bank settlement's illegal.
That's against the Geneva Convention.
For this assassination of Soleimani, for pardoning a convicted war criminal, one could argue that that's after the fact an accessory to a war crime and other things Trump has done.
But he'll never be indicted or he'll never be impeached for war crimes because other presidents want to be able to do that.
So there's a bipartisan cover up about America's aggressive foreign policy in the past.
You know, I want to add in here, too, because I know there's a lot of people who are just so anti-Trump and just blinded by it.
But to me, the analogy here would be if George W.
Bush had decided to listen to Colin Powell and not invade Iraq.
And so then Cheney and the guys on the National Security Council and the CIA came up with some dirt on him to run him out of power, impeach him and weaken him for not doing the horrible thing that they want to do, for standing in the way of it.
And that that would be, you know, you could sit here and say, yeah, but he really did do some corrupt thing with Enron in 1998 that we should impeach him for.
But yeah, you'd be really missing the forest for the trees about who's really zooming who here and who's grabbing the power and what they're doing.
Pelosi was asked a couple of months ago on CNN by a guy in the audience, one of these town hall things.
Why didn't you favor the impeachment of George W.
Bush for the invasion of Iraq, which we now know is based on a lie?
She actually said she didn't think it rose to an impeachable offense.
Whereas the whole impeachment problem with the Constitution is not very clear.
It's a political thing.
It's not legal and it could be used any way it wants.
It's a complete political weapon.
That's how we see it.
It's been used.
Fortunately, it's only been used this way now three times.
But Trump certainly did worse things than this.
And we don't hear about the involvement of Joe Biden.
He became the viceroy of Ukraine.
He went in there, controlled things and put his own people like his son got this board position.
Now, this is like 19th century colonialism.
Take over the country.
You put your own people in there to run it.
You put your own puppets in there and you get your own benefits.
They went in there.
John Kerry's family friend went on that board and Monsanto got a contract.
And, you know, so clearly this is a this is not the way it was reported.
Nobody knows about this.
This is what I would like to have seen in this trial, where we had real witnesses and we got all this out up in the open and the American people could know.
And that's why they won't they won't it won't happen.
They don't want the American people to know.
Well, listen, I want to bring this back to Bob Perry, because, well, I'll just say for the record here and some people knows, but I had interviewed him, I don't know, 100 times or something, not quite, but 50 or something.
He was really great.
But then we had a big falling out because he wrote this terrible article about how horrible and evil libertarians are and how we all just want our own slaves.
And this crap is the stupidest thing.
So I wrote him this email about what a stupid ass he was.
And then we never talked after that.
But the problem with that is that then the whole time when he was the world's greatest source on what was going on in Ukraine and Syria, you know, I didn't get to interview him during any of that time.
I burnt that bridge.
And you know what?
All y'all leftists are completely wrong about libertarianism.
But I know that.
And I don't care about that.
So I should have just not said anything and ignored it.
And then everything would have been fine.
But because he never wrote about that again, I don't think it was all straight back to business after that.
And and then he really was, if people want to know and people do ask me, you know, how do I learn about this stuff?
I tell them site calling Consortium News dot com Perry with an A, Perry, Ukraine, and then spend yourself a Saturday catching up.
This was the guy who saw through every single bit of this and covered every aspect of it.
And that goes for Syria as well.
From 2011 on, here's who's who and who's on whose side and why.
And guess what?
That's why maybe that intelligence agency went after Consortium News because he was so effective, especially on the Ukraine issue.
And Freeland being a very strong supporter of the Ukrainian nationalists during this whole period when you're on a covert overthrow.
You know, the Consortium News was considered perhaps, as you just said, one of the best sources, if not the best source to counter the official narrative about what was going on in Ukraine.
So maybe that was behind the speculation.
By the way, I didn't know this story about you and Bob at all.
I never heard this before.
I didn't even know about the article you referred to.
And you and I have disagreed privately on some things, but.
Yeah, well, it's a completely stupid fight, but I mean, it was a completely stupid article, but it was an even dumber fight on my behalf.
I should have just ignored it.
And instead, I, you know, cussed him out.
And so, you know, ruin that friendship and ruin that opportunity for I could have interviewed him another 50 times before he died, you know, so I really always regretted that.
But and it was such a stupid article.
It was like libertarians like Jefferson.
Jefferson had slaves.
Libertarians all want slaves.
It was the dumbest crap.
I don't know who he got to write it for or what kind of kindergarten, you know, garbage he was reading that made him think that that was a thing or something.
So.
But anyway, that was under his byline.
That story.
Yeah.
And you know what?
I mean, he wrote a book about how this was supposed to be FDR's America and the right wingers took us off that track and whatever.
That's his point of view.
That's fine.
I understand that to him, a libertarian is to the right of Dick Cheney.
Even more free market than the Republicans, which to him is, you know, the curse, the kiss of death.
And I guess it didn't occur to him that I wonder why the guys from antiwar.com like me so much if they're all such Nazis.
But anyway.
Well, he had to understand the non-interventionist point that libertarians have.
And that's where we meet in many ways on foreign policy.
I mean, that was kind of what I told him was like, if we're all such bad people, how come we're friends?
I thought we were friends.
So you're a pretty bad person, Bob, if you're palling around with the pro-slavery faction, you know?
Well, I mean, yeah, the Russiagate thing, he was one of the big critics and skeptics, but so were many libertarians, right?
True.
Absolutely.
We're good on everything.
I mean, I was interviewed on Ron Paul's show.
I had no problem doing that when we agree on somebody, especially on hugely important issues like foreign affairs and military matters and intervention.
And this is a good ally to have.
And I'm glad you mentioned Ron.
I mean, Ron and Dan and look at the guys over at the Cato Institute, too, in their foreign policy department.
I mean, these are the best foreign policy people in America.
Ron Paul's been good on every single thing since 1980 or, you know, 75.
When I was at the Wall Street Journal, I interviewed Ted Carpenter.
Yeah, Ted Carpenter's fantastic.
I interviewed him all the time.
He was excellent.
Yep.
Him and Doug Bandow, too.
I mean, it's Bondo.
I always say it wrong.
Doug Bondo knows everything in the world and he's been everywhere in the world, including North Korea twice and all this stuff.
I mean, some of the absolutely some of the greatest antiwar people in America are libertarians.
No question about it.
And leftists and a lot of good paleo conservatives, too.
I mean, the thing is about it, and this should really be the bottom line, right, is that you'd have to be a fool to support this stuff anymore.
A fool or in on it.
And all people from all factions, black and white in town and country, East and West and Midwest and whatever you got ought to know better than all of this by now, for God's sake, man.
Yeah, you'd think so, wouldn't you?
Yeah.
But they're still drumming all up again in the impeachment process.
We're hearing the same old Russia stuff.
It's very sad, very frightening.
Yeah.
You know what, too, though, is every time that the lie is this big, that's an opportunity for people to lead and do the right thing.
And that's the problem right now is we just don't have enough leadership of people who are willing to throw down the gauntlet and fight about what's true and what's not when it comes to these questions.
I agree.
You know, and so we always end up fighting within their guidelines.
We all know Saddam's got these weapons.
The only question is whether we're going to do the right thing now or wait around like some kind of wimp, you know, and then once they have it framed their way and and we're stuck in it.
You need someone like Ron Paul or whatever to just say that's garbage.
This is what's right.
And and be that stark about it and start a new narrative.
Even better would be an alliance between, let's say, a liberal left somebody like Sanders and Ron Paul.
Well, we are seeing that more and more in the Congress.
You know, I'm sure you saw the numbers here on the AUMF.
As long as we're talking about this, let's go on this diversion for a second.
They voted yesterday on amendments and it was something to give medals to war heroes or something.
And they attached this AUMF to it.
It's the Merchant Mariner Gold Medal Act.
Merchant Mariner Gold Medal Act.
Oh, World War Two Merchant Mariner Gold Medal Act.
And they passed this thing.
And check it out.
So on the on the one to repeal the on the on the one to forbid Trump from military action against Iran.
This is in the House.
Four Republicans voted for it.
Twenty one abstained.
And then there was another one, another amendment was to repeal the Iraq AUMF of 2002 and 11 Republicans voted for that one and 22 abstained.
And of course, in the Senate, there's Mike Lee, Rand Paul, and maybe that's it.
But there's more and more in the House.
This guy, Matt Goetz or Goetz, I guess, is is getting better seemingly lately.
So and there's the Defend the Guard legislation that's being introduced by Republican state congressmen all across the country, about 20 states this season, too.
So more and more, it's that way where there's good right wingers, good conservatives to ally with on this, too.
And and then, yeah, this should always be the coalition.
It should be the real people versus the powerful people.
That should always be it shouldn't be left and right.
It should be.
And that's not, you know, libertarian class.
That's libertarian class theory, not just, you know, Marxist class theory or something like that.
And it's all it's not all just about wealth, but it's about the access to the power.
It's the war party versus the people.
That's what it should be.
And, yeah, you know, caucus together.
These this group created create a permanent group where they oppose this kind of militarism.
Yeah.
And, you know, and the other issues are also real simple to forbid all bank bailouts and that kind of thing.
That's totally completely transpartisan among the American people.
Do a survey of the American people.
What do you think of bank bailouts?
I bet you get 90 percent opposition to that, you know, these kind of things.
Yeah.
Well, that's doing the people's business.
And that's not what most people Congress do.
They do their backers business.
So, you know, if you need more of that for sure.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, man, I'm glad that you're not a Russian spy.
I imagine that your work would be nearly as productive.
Huh?
I'm glad I convinced you of that in this conversation.
You know, I was actually not worried.
I was trying to pretend to be worried for a moment there, but it wasn't going to go.
But, no, I've always admired your great journalism and I've always admired Consortium News dot com.
Even when I was mad at Bob Perry, I still ran him every day at anti-war dot com.
I just didn't have them on the show anymore.
Right.
But, you know, of course, we're big fans and run y'all all the time for very good reason.
And so happy to have you back here.
Thank you, Scott.
It was really good to talk to you again.
All right, you guys.
That is the great Joe Lauria, editor in chief of Consortium News dot com.
And read up this one.
Consortium News sends libel notices to Canadian signals intelligence agency and major television network.
And then also, I want to mention this, too.
We didn't have time to talk about this, but he's got this great one about Trump's so-called peace plan.
Trump gives away the store and Israel will now officially become an apartheid state.
That is also at Consortium News dot com.
The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APS Radio dot com, anti-war dot com, Scott Horton dot org and Libertarian Institute dot org.
