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.
We can also sign up for the podcast feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, y'all, on the line, I've got Kevin Gostola from thegrayzone.com this time, usually over there at Shadowproof, and gotta love this headline.
Kevin's transition team is filled with war profiteers, beltway chicken hawks, and corporate consultants.
Sorry, I know you guys can hear how tiresome this all is to me and the tone of my voice, and we're just getting started.
Welcome back to the show, Kevin.
How are you doing?
I'm doing good, and yeah, I'm still with Shadowproof, but this was just a nice collaboration with Max Blumenthal over at the Grayzone.
I love the work that they do, and this just seemed like a good fit for their website.
Yeah, absolutely.
Good, and glad to have that clarified here, too.
And that's what I thought.
But yeah.
All right.
Yeah, now, you know, I like the way you organized this.
There's so many hawks on the transition team, and, you know, therefore on their way into the State and Defense Department and National Security Council here, that instead of going in alphabetical order or something, you went by which issue are they worst on?
And of course, starting with the most important issue facing all of mankind, America's relationship with Russia.
And these people really are about as bad as any hawk could be.
Now that the bad guy is gone, and it's back to, you know, the good old days, and the old status quo has been restored, what are we facing here, Kevin?
Yeah, so there's no accident here.
I deliberately start with the issue of Russia because we know that this has been the Democrats' focus for the last four to five years.
It's the way the intelligence agencies and even the military, some of the military leaders worked to discredit President Donald Trump, to make him seem like he was some kind of puppet of Vladimir Putin's regime.
Never produced any iota of evidence.
It was just a way of opposing him, a very feeble way, in my opinion, of opposing Donald Trump.
But the result is that you've got people who truly believe in being aggressive and ramping up tensions against a country that's a nuclear power, by the way, and they want more troops.
So this woman where we're talking about, that I highlight, Lisa Sawyer, is someone who is in both a corporate sense and an imperial sense, a very interventionist-minded person who is looking like she will have a position in the Biden administration.
She's working on the agency review team for the Pentagon, and she used to be in the National Security Council under Barack Obama, working on NATO and European affairs.
She believes in ramping up troop levels to levels that we saw back in 2012.
She's forearming Ukrainian groups, which we know in the past has meant that some of those weapons end up in the hands of neo-Nazi groups or just flat-out extremist groups that we're using to challenge Russia.
And also the fact that she believes in the harshest forms of economic sanctions, which have been absolutely brutal.
We've seen the impact in Iran and Venezuela on the infrastructure in that country.
You're utterly destroying the infrastructure of a country.
You're making it impossible for them to provide health care and sometimes even cutting off food that is needed for people who are in those countries.
And this is the kind of thing she believes should be the way the United States opposes Russia.
Oh, and she also was the foreign policy advisor for JPMorgan Chase, which sounds kind of absurd, but I suppose if you're a big, major global international bank, you want to know exactly where to go so you can make the best dollar.
Yeah.
Well, and especially the commissions that they make on these massive military purchases.
It might be small in terms of the overall percentage, but in total dollars, you're talking billions that these banks make off of just sitting there as all this goes on around them, mostly.
But I really appreciate the way that you've approached this here, Kevin, because you're not just sitting here saying all these people are corrupt because look at the way that they sit on these boards of directors and they have these conflicts of interest.
You do say that, but you don't use the word just.
And in fact, I think you're very accurate when you say she really believes these horrible, terrible things.
That's why she's hired to work for these people in the first place.
So it's a confluence of interests in a way where they're honestly really this bad rather than just being on the take.
Yeah, no, I think these people believe it.
I'll give a couple examples.
I highlight a woman named Dana Stroll who was part of this bipartisan Syria study group.
She truly believes that in that country there should be a U.S. military presence that controls one third of the country for the purpose of, quote, influencing a political outcome, which is regime change.
Believing that there should be forces there.
And of course, that means that the current Syrian government, if they do not change, they will remain there and they will lay claim to oil that belongs to Syria.
They will lay claim to any other resources that might be in the region.
Donald Trump actually said the strategy out loud before I said we're in there to take Syria's oil.
Another moment, a great moment in the Trump administration where the mask was ripped off the empire by Donald Trump just bluntly stating the purpose for war in the first place.
Well, I mean, actually, what was funny about that, right, was that that was obviously just a line of B.S. that his staff had sold him.
The real policy was, as James Jeffrey and the others explained, was keeping the oil out of the hands of Assad to make him more dependent on Iran, which was actually contradictory to the fact that that was why they intervened in Syria in the first place was to try to separate Syria from Iran.
But anyway, in this case, they said, you know, it's really expensive for Iran to pick up the slack for Syria.
And so as part of their maximum pressure campaign against them and Donald Trump's probably, I thought, the only person who thought that this was really about just taking the oil for the money.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, you got it right.
You got the nuances and the complexities right.
But that's what the goal was.
And it was never about fighting ISIS.
That's sort of the excuse for being there.
But you know, we we kind of have wanted those groups to be well, not kind of.
We really have wanted those groups to be able to control a part of Syria so that it would make it difficult for Assad's government to be able to control the country.
Also, you know, don't don't let any of the Samantha Powers or anybody else who gravitates to Biden lead you to believe they care about human rights.
I mean, they really don't.
It's disingenuous for them to claim that as the reason for why they're they're doing any of this.
I mean, a lot of it is just about forcing their own policy on on Syria and deciding that, you know, as far as dictators or brutal leaders may go, Bashar al-Assad is no longer on the side of the United States government and they'd like to discard him and move on to somebody else.
So Dana Stroll is is someone who really embodies this belief in both sanctions.
But then, you know, she even is embracing this part of regime change policy that has been emblematic of of neoconservatism going back to the Bush administration, you know, in my view.
I mean, this is this is this is where she falls.
And then and when you look at Venezuela, there are also people there who, you know, hold that thought for a sec, because there's a lot of Venezuela and I want to hear.
But I want to rewind one back to Sawyer and Russia here, where because, you know, this is it's funny because it goes without saying, obviously, everybody knows that we're both sides are armed to the teeth with H-bombs here.
But because it goes without saying it goes unsaid all the time and they act like you can just play these sort of games like it doesn't matter that they've got H-bombs pointed at us.
And so you have what sounds like insanity.
I guess the fact that it comes out of a female Democratic technocrat from the Center for New American Security or whatever is supposed to somehow make it sound reasonable rather than the ravings of some mad lunatic.
But this statement, just in plain text, this is completely nuts to hear her say, as you quote her telling the Congress, instead of saying we'll lift sanctions when Russia decides to comply with the next agreement, say that we will raise them until they do, instead of kowtowing to Russia's supposed spheres of influence, provide Ukraine the lethal assistance it so desperately needs and increase U.S. support to vulnerable nations in the gray zone, meaning, I guess, Russia's sphere of influence that we are attempting to take away from them.
And this and then, I mean, I don't know what the rest of the quote is, did she say?
And we could reasonably expect them to do this and that in response, but that'll still be their fault, not mine.
Or what?
Yeah, I think you're finishing it well, because the whole point is that we're not supposed to believe whenever Russia does anything that could be considered a good faith measure to comply, whenever there's diplomatic negotiations and they say, all right, we're going to do this.
And again, they're not probably going to get the United States government to do anything.
I don't know that we're meeting them halfway on any of Russia's concerns.
And maybe they're upset with how we're provoking them through Ukraine.
I don't think that they're going to get any concessions from the U.S. government.
And yet Lisa Sawyer would say, don't believe them.
Don't believe that they're being genuine at all when they decide to come to the table and make this agreement.
They're just going to continue.
I mean, you know, in my view, I've always thought that this was a kind of projection on the part of the U.S. government, especially when it comes to Russia, and then I'll extend it to China.
You know, the things that they would tell us that those powerful governments are willing to do to expand their influence and to dominate different regions of the world, it's exactly what the United States government does 24-7 every day in order to expand and maintain its superpower.
And so I just have always found it to be very disingenuous for anyone to take it seriously, because to me, I think, okay, so if we're going to call it great power competition, that's how they treat it.
You know, they truly believe within the military-industrial complex and the national security state that the next decades are going to be defined by making sure that China doesn't eat into the share of control of the world that the U.S. has, that Russia is not allowed to expand its control and dominance in Asia and other parts of Europe.
Fine.
But you know what?
I'm not going to be sucked into believing that there's a good and a bad guy in all of this.
This is about, you know, this is real-world risk being played out on a global, on the planet.
And you're not going to get sympathy from me when Russia retaliates because, you know, they're doing what we would do if Russia engaged in the same actions.
Right.
Well, and this gets right to the president-elect, apparently, himself, Joe Biden, because he played a central role, as we know from the leaked tape of Victoria Nuland and Jeffrey Pyatt on the phone plotting and planning the Ukraine coup of February 2014, that he was right at the center of that.
And she says, you know what?
F the EU.
They're taking too long.
I'm going to get Biden and I'm going to get him to get Robert Sarry from the U.N. and we're going to glue this thing and midwife it and make it sail and put it together and do all these things, she says.
And the vice president, as in fact, I believe Bob Woodward says in his new book, Biden held the Ukraine brief in the Obama administration.
And so when you talk about retaliation, I mean, I think you're pretty much alluding to them seizing the Crimean Peninsula and then helping to support the separatists in the east in direct reaction to the American coup and then the war launched by the coup government against those separatists in the east back in 2014 and 15.
Right.
Well, yeah.
And I don't have much more to add to your description there.
I think it's very, in its essence, you really capture what's been going on.
But a larger point I want to make about all of this goes towards the people who are being invited to be part of this cabinet.
I mean, it's no accident that we're talking about a woman here who is giving voice to this aggressive ideology.
There's a lot of people on this administration, these administrative review teams that have been embraced who come from different demographics.
And the point I want to make here is that I think liberal identity politics is really going to get us all killed because the fact of the matter is, and it might surprise you that someone who has the kind of ideas I have would say this, but they are going to time and time again during a Biden administration make it a kind of thing where they suggest you're misogynist or racist to criticize them because they are involved in warmongering.
And that is just the biggest load of nonsense.
But it almost seems like that's the play now.
That's really what the warfare state feels they need to do to rebrand themselves and get ahead of the discontent.
Because I think that, you know, I didn't see a lot of action on the part of Trump's administration, but what existed beneath the surface of the 2016 campaign between Trump and Hillary Clinton was always this thing that Donald Trump wasn't involved in wars ever.
And people really did and truly cared about that and recognized that Hillary Clinton was connected to Libya and destroying that country and was connected to Iraq and destroying that country.
And Donald Trump represented somebody who hadn't been involved in that and held himself out as not being for getting deeper into entanglements.
And in fact, actually, to his credit, he had an opportunity to escalate in Iran this year back in January, and he chose not to.
And so I think people really, truly recognize that within the military and national security agencies.
And what they're going to do is they're going to put, you know, they're going to put black people in front and they're going to put women in front and they're going to say, these are our warmongers now and good luck trying to criticize them.
And we remember that you had a difficult time criticizing Barack Obama without being accused of being racist.
And we're going to play that same game with you for the next four years under Joe Biden.
And so good luck trying to criticize the direction of this empire project that we have with the United States.
Yeah, I think you're right about that, although I'll be interested to see how much of it backfires.
You know, one thing that Obama had going for him was charisma.
Biden doesn't have that.
And Biden himself is an old white guy, maybe the oldest, whitest guy, the most right wing Democrat since Wallace or whatever, right?
So maybe that won't work.
I don't know.
It could be that this will be actually really good for the left that people will get back to.
Actually, you know what?
There are, you know, gay brown Yemenis who are being exploded to death with American bombs right now.
And that's what really matters here is, you know, not a bunch of name calling and silliness, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I will agree that, you know, Kamala Harris and Susan Rice, they they're they're no charisma compared to Barack Obama, you know, that no kind of influence they can't command.
And also, you know, unlike Obama, I think they truly do see Russia behind every single crisis.
Right.
Yeah.
And I think what's nice about them is if they know they're lying like a neocon, at least that means that probably their feet are grounded in reason somewhere.
But if they really believe all their own nonsense about Russian aggression and how it must be confronted, then we could be in for a real problem here.
You know, that's supposed to just be propaganda to sell planes and boats, you know, not supposed to believe it.
That's true.
It is supposed to be propaganda.
It's supposed to be, you know, the thing that keeps the industry going.
And certainly, you know, as as I know in my article, there are plenty of people who are joining the Pentagon who come from these think tanks that are funded by these war profiteers.
You get the Center for New American Security.
You've got CSIS.
And then there's also the New America Foundation.
I mean, I'll get chunks of dollars from Northrop Grumman and Raytheon and General Dynamics and all of these weapons manufacturers that are fairly well well-known, Lockheed Martin.
So yeah.
Hey, I'll check it out.
The Libertarian Institute, that's me and my friends, have published three great books this year.
First is No Quarter, The Ravings of William Norman Grigg.
He was the best one of us.
Now he's gone.
But this great collection is a truly fitting legacy for his fight for freedom.
I know you'll love it.
Then there's Coming to Palestine by the great Sheldon Richman.
It's a collection of 40 important essays he's written over the years about the truth behind the Israel-Palestine conflict.
You'll learn so much and highly value this definitive libertarian take on the dispossession of the Palestinians and the reality of their brutal occupation.
And last but not least is The Great Ron Paul, The Scott Horton Show Interviews, 2004-2019.
Interview transcripts of all of my interviews of the good doctor over the years on all the wars, money, taxes, the police state, and more.
So how do you like that?
Pretty good, right?
Find them all at libertarianinstitute.org slash books.
Hey guys, here's how to support this show.
You can donate in various amounts at scotthorton.org slash donate.
We've got some great kickbacks for you there.
Shop amazon.com by way of my link at scotthorton.org.
Leave a good review for the show at iTunes and Stitcher.
Tell a friend.
I don't know.
Oh yeah, and buy my books, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and The Great Ron Paul, The Scott Horton Show Interviews, 2004-2019.
And thanks.
I've done too much talking.
Let me let you get back to this list here.
Who's Linda Thomas-Greenfield and what's bad about her?
I mean, how many different wars do we know that she supported?
Well, so the thing that I think is alarming is that she's in there in the State Department team and is basically kind of filling the spot for Susan Rice, who I think is likely to become the Secretary of State, the person who was selected.
We know Susan Rice was a national security advisor under Obama, and she's someone who, as I note in my article, was aggressively pushing for the war in Libya to go even farther than Obama ever went.
I mean, remember, I think he kept it to NATO forces.
There were people around Obama that wanted much more, although it truly devastated the country.
We've heard repeated many, many times how there are now markets where slaves are sold out in the open by groups.
She supported the invasion of Iraq.
I'll also note that for somebody who believes in humanitarian intervention, that in fact when it came to Rwanda, she's implicated in the decision to remove United Nations peacekeepers which then led to and helped fuel the Rwanda genocide.
So this is not somebody who we should be depending upon for any kind of wisdom.
And yet she's a top candidate for becoming Secretary of State.
And Linda Thomas-Greenfield was the Secretary of State for African Affairs.
And so when you look at the African continent now, there's all this focus on how there's these emerging economies.
You look to a lot of the investors are seeing what's going to happen next in different parts of the African continent.
And well, for her, she has been involved in cheering this program, which is very colonial in the way that it exists because it's about trying to, rather than letting corporations or companies grow out of the African continent, it's about importing U.S. businesses or helping U.S. businesses get a foothold in there and to the detriment of people who are in those African countries.
She's also, I think maybe more importantly, from the Albright Stonebridge Group, which is this consulting firm that was founded by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who is a truly horrendous person who believes, again, in economic warfare.
You probably know and recall very vividly the quote from 60 Minutes with Lesley Stahl when she was asked about the impact of economic sanctions on Iraqis as part of the effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power.
She was told there are a half a million children who have been killed.
And do you think that the policy is worth it?
And Madeleine Albright said, yeah, we do think the price is worth it.
And that means that she thought it was okay that half a million children have been killed by U.S. policy.
And there are people who dominate the Democratic Party who are in her orbit, who really believe in the way that she does.
And so I think that's alarming that these are the people in which the brain trust is being formed.
You can see there are multiple individuals in this list who come from this Albright Stonebridge Group that'll be working for Joe Biden.
Two things there.
I only finally realized this in doing research for my current book, that she said that a month or two months, I think one month before the Khobar Towers attack, we think the price is worth it.
And just weeks later, Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed killed 19 American airmen who were stationed in Saudi to, of course, fly sorties to bomb Iraq and enforce the no-fly zones and the blockade there.
And then they blamed it on Iran so that they didn't have to admit that that was the price.
Mm-hmm.
Man.
Anyway, now, what you just said there about Albright is a good segue into Venezuela, right?
Because her people have been intervening there as well.
Those right-wing Republicans, I mean, those liberal Democrats.
I mean, there's really no daylight in between them.
You have, on one hand, you've got Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo and Elliott Abrams, who was the special envoy to Venezuela, who I'll get to in a moment because he pops up here.
But you've got them, and then now you've got Paula Garcia-Tufro, who was on the National Security Council and helped Obama declare Venezuela a national security thrattle.
I don't know.
Anybody here in this country fears that, you know, that the Chavistas are coming to invade America.
I don't think that that's probably going to be happening anytime soon.
And yet they're declaring Venezuela a national security threat.
And then you've got Kelly Magsimen, who worked underneath Elliott Abrams and has called Abrams a fierce advocate for human rights, which is a biggest joke, because he was a huge supporter of arming these death squads in Central America in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan.
Well, he was on the NSC when they lied us into Iraq War II, and he was the author of the Redirection, where now we switch back to back in Al-Qaeda in 2006, too.
Mr. Human Rights Abrams.
Yeah.
But he has actually written a book about human rights, and so he is following, you know, they're very smart, I think, at rebranding.
I classify him as a neoconservative who's seen what people like Samantha Power and Susan Rice are doing with this responsibility to protect language and the way they're using human rights in a way to advance U.S. foreign policy.
And so, yeah.
You mentioned Rwanda there.
They say, you know, this is, at least on the face of it, it amounts to a pathology for the likes of Power and Rice.
And I'm not sure about Rice's understudy here, Greenfield, that you mentioned, who apparently was involved.
We'll never make that mistake again.
The lesson of Rwanda is you always have to intervene everywhere, all the time, to prevent anything bad from happening.
When, of course, it was American intervention in the decades leading up to that, you know, in Rwanda and Uganda and intervention, all that part of Africa that led to that whole thing in the first place.
But the only lesson is, and this is what they invoked for Libya, oh, no, it's going to be just like Rwanda.
So we have to stop them from getting to Benghazi.
This will be their frame of reference from now on.
Right, right.
Yeah.
So, I mean, the other thing that I think I want to make sure I raise here with you, if it's okay if I go on, I wanted to mention this German Marshall Fund, if that- Oh, hell yes.
Please.
Is that right?
Actually connects back to what we started out with, Russia, but we've got two individuals and, you know, individually, they're not notable.
I didn't spend a whole lot of time fleshing out what their records are.
They worked with the Obama administration, but, and they were lower level people, but they're senior staffers on this thing called the German Marshall Fund.
And I actually have a personal connection to this group because they came after my co-host Rania Khalek and very disingenuously tried to label her some kind of a Russian puppet in the media.
But in any case, the German Marshall Fund put together this Hamilton 68 tracker.
It was this information war project that was, they claimed, capable of tracking and identifying Russian influence operations, except they are really terrible at being able to find any people who were working for the Russian government to advance their own propaganda narrative.
And it really was just a way to censor and control the kinds of voices we have out in the world on foreign policy.
And it would target, it would end up sweeping, and it's targeting people like you and me, you know, were potentially people who could find their accounts suspended for any given amount of time, depending on how they were feeling on any given day.
And they also smeared, you know, get this given the liberal bona fides of many of the people coming in.
They also were smearing Black Lives Matter protests as protests that were fueled by Russia.
And so- In fact, you link to a thread by Max Blumenthal in your article where he's saying, oh, look, here's where the geniuses label stars and stripes, Russian propaganda.
And in that same thread, he names when they went after Antiwar.com, which, of course, was founded by Eric Gares, whose life is an absolute open book, who's been a very public political activist since 1971.
But anyway- Yeah.
No, no, exactly.
And also this hysteria around all of this, I've actually, this isn't that connected, but I'll just mention it in the context of what we're having this conversation about, that they, you know, Consortium News found themselves labeled and attacked in Canada because they published an article about Christa Freeland and the fact that her grandfather was a Nazi.
And so then they ended up being put in a dossier or a report that was published by a security agency in Canada that was suggesting that they were some kind of Russian influence operation.
So this became a standard thing for us to live with in the last four years, that any time you don't like what is being said about you, if you're in power, then you just go around IDing people and trying to tie them, even if you can't prove it, just you, basically it's wholesale defamation.
You just say that there must be Russian people who you're working for in order to advance this.
And so, like I said, this impacted my, I co-host a podcast called Unauthorized Disclosure.
This impacted Rania Kalik, whose company was targeted by CNN by the German Marshall Fund who went to them and got Facebook to basically ban their pages for an amount of time.
And then now they have this policy of labeling everything Russia state affiliated media.
But there's so much state media around the world that isn't labeled at all.
If we're talking about European countries or U.S., Voice of America doesn't have to deal with this kind of label.
The BBC doesn't have to deal with this kind of label.
And I think it's truly making us stupid when it comes to media literacy, what they impose.
But obviously this is all about advancing an information war.
Obviously this is about using these big tech Silicon Valley companies to push an agenda.
And then we've seen the massive censorship of people who are actually elected officials or diplomats in these countries that are deemed our adversaries.
And they just are removing them from online as if they no longer should exist.
And so then we don't know what they're saying.
We don't know what they're saying about us.
And I think that even increases the possibility that we could end up in a war where the other side, we don't know what set them off.
We don't know why they retaliated against us because you removed all the people who were running Iran's government from Twitter, or you removed everybody from the Chinese government or the Russian government that you didn't want to be able to speak.
And now we only know our side.
We don't know what set them off and why the bombs are falling in Europe.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, I think there's a pretty good chance that they're going to ban Donald Trump.
The most famous man in the world is about to get kicked off at Twitter as soon as he's not the president anymore.
Yeah.
Better than 50 shot at that 50-50, I think, you know, because, yeah, they can do that.
Now, go ahead.
Well, I was going to say that I just, I think it's so infantile because, you know, whether he's telling the truth or not, whether he's lying or not, whether he's telling falsehoods or not, that should be up to, that should be up to us to figure out if he's, if he's lying.
I don't, I don't want somebody coming in and telling me I can't see something because there are lies in it.
I mean, I want to be able to determine myself if someone's telling the truth or not.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
Right.
I mean, and this goes back to the just absolute bare bones basics of whether this is the United States of America or not, because around here we got the free market of ideas.
Thomas Jefferson said that error of opinion is tolerable as long as reason is left free to combat it.
Are we really giving that up because of some lie about Russia?
Give me a break.
The whole thing is so stupid.
Sorry, I got diverted on how stupid it was.
Tell me about the guy that wrote the thing that said it's OK to murder Anwar al-Awlaki, the American born American citizen that Obama killed in Yemen.
Yeah.
Marty Liederman.
So Marty Liederman is a Georgetown law professor.
Marty Liederman was the deputy assistant attorney general in the office of legal counsel for the justice department.
You know, this is where the torture memos come out of.
It's also where the drone memo came out of, and he helped draft this drone memo that laid out what he and others believe is the legal basis for executing someone abroad who's accused of terrorism, and whether they're an American or not, they believe that they could execute a person without charge or trial.
They drew this up for the purpose of killing Anwar al-Awlaki, who of course nobody's denying was tied to al-Qaeda and terrorist groups, except what they did was they expanded the kind of authority that the U.S. government is able to claim, and now rather than capturing you and bringing you back to the United States for a trial for terrorism charges, they decided, well, anywhere in the world we can just fly a drone, we can find you, and we'll just kill you right there on the spot, and you'll be extra-judicially executed, and Barack Obama is going to sign off on that.
And as he said, I believe in his memoir, A Promised Land, he does a little bit of whitewashing of this.
So I'll just take a moment to remind you that he himself even said aloud that he was killing a lot of people.
That was the way he talked about the increased use of this kill list that was going on in his administration.
And they even called it kill by committee, because you used to have John Brennan, who is an awful toad of a man who was constantly involved in this process, and I also think he's implicated in Russiagate, as far as spreading the leaks that were aimed at discrediting Donald Trump.
And so this was something that Marty Liederman was involved in, creating this new normal in which, I mean, it seems like that's what they're going to go back to with Afghanistan.
I don't know if you're following it closely or not, but as we record this show right now, if the troops are coming out, it seems like they're going to be prepping the ground for the kind of, quote unquote, smart war that Barack Obama favored, where you send in the special operations forces, but you don't maintain an occupation.
You send in the drones to go after people.
It seems like that's what the ground is being prepared for in Afghanistan.
And I don't know that there's any Americans there at all, but point being that we've set up a future here where we don't have to capture people and put them on trial.
We can just execute them, and Marty Liederman made that a possible way of doing things.
And he's not alone on the Justice Department, as he's one of several individuals who represents this new normal that was entrenched by Barack Obama after the Bush administration.
Right.
Importantly, they killed this boy too, Abdulrahman, who everybody knew and everybody knows was there to find his father to bring him home.
He wasn't any kind of terrorist.
He was there to try to save his father from the trouble that he'd gotten himself in.
And then after they killed his father, then a couple of weeks later, they killed him before he had a chance to come home to America, where he was an American born American citizen.
They killed him at 16 years old.
And then I think this was probably just a coincidence that they murdered his eight year old daughter too, or killed his eight year old daughter under the Trump government in a raid in early 2017, where they were going after this guy, and she was there and got shot in the neck and was killed.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, and then you'll remember, I think it was- Perfectly legal.
It was Robert, I think it was Robert Gibbs, yeah, who's blaming, when people were outraged that Abdulrahman was killed, he was saying things like, oh, well, he shouldn't have had a father who was a terrorist.
That's right.
That's exactly what he said.
So yeah, these are the Democrats.
And it's funny because you'd like to think that, all right, well, at least they've learned the lesson as far as Tulsi Gabbard has, that no more regime change wars.
We got to fight the war against Al-Qaeda forever, but not the war for Al-Qaeda.
But these are the very same people who took Al-Qaeda's side in Libya and in Syria and in Yemen.
And they apparently absolutely agree with W. Bush and Donald Trump that the real enemy is Iran and their Shiite friends in Hezbollah and the Alawite faction that rules the Baathist government in Syria and, of course, the Houthis down in Yemen, and that Al-Qaeda, why, they're moderate rebels compared to the Shia, never mind the fact that it wasn't Hezbollah what knocked the towers down.
But anyway, so I don't know, man, I'm betting on the very worst possibilities all coming true here.
I mean, Kamala Harris was already saying in August that, oh, yeah, we're going to go right back to helping the pro-democracy groups in Syria, which means Al-Qaeda in the Idlib province.
Yeah, yeah.
There's no pro-democracy groups in Syria.
They've all been swallowed up by the Islamic fundamentalist extremist Al-Qaeda groups that we've been allowing to rule.
And again, I won't go back over it, but we know its strategy because John Kerry spoke about it very openly about what was happening.
It's documented.
It's part of the savagery.
As Max Blumenthal details, I mean, you know, he's the editor-in-chief of Grayzone.
He hosted my work.
He gave me an opportunity to write this article.
So I plug his book, The Management of Savagery, which is really well laid out in a couple chapters about Syria.
It's all right there.
So if you have a little bit of time, I want to make sure I get in the war on whistleblowers part of this.
So I don't know if you got to this section yet, but Neil McBride used to be the U.S. attorney of the Eastern District of Virginia.
He had me on to talk about the extradition trial against Julian Assange.
In fact, he was the one that oversaw and launched the grand jury into WikiLeaks.
And he's on the Justice Department review team with Joe Biden.
But I learned that he's actually an ally of Joe Biden, goes all the way back to his first presidential campaign.
You know, the one where he had to drop out because he was accused of plagiarism.
And so Neil McBride is actually, in my view, someone who's a frontrunner to be an attorney general for the United States.
So I think we should really have all eyes on what Neil McBride is doing.
He prosecuted CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou, and he went after Jeffrey Sterling.
But he also argued in federal court that you could force a journalist to testify against their confidential sources and went really aggressively against New York Times reporter James Risen, took it all the way through the lower court to the appeals court, was ready to go to the Supreme Court.
You really didn't care about the concerns of any of these oppressed freedom groups.
As I note, you know, he was even asked if he had gone overboard during an Aspen Security Forum event.
He said, no, I don't believe we have.
But he was part of the Justice Department group of people that prosecuted more whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined through the Espionage Act, using that very, very aggressively.
And you know, I also would just throw in that, you know, he destroyed mega upload for people who care about freedom on the Internet.
There was a lot of collateral damage there because there were people who were involved in privacy violations, or piracy, sorry.
They were involved in mass piracy of videos and music.
And at the same time, they saw all of their personal photos, they saw anything they were storing, just completely erased.
Because he went after Kim Dotcom in New Zealand and claimed that because there was a server in Virginia, he could destroy this file sharing company.
And he's a hawk.
He's a very hawkish prosecutor individual.
And I have to say, it doesn't look very good.
You know, he resigned before he got a chance to do anything more with the case against Edward Snowden.
But he was there when Edward Snowden was indicted as an NSA whistleblower.
And I think you say he was administering that grand jury, right?
Until they just ran out of time on the Obama years?
Well, he administered the WikiLeaks one.
They did serve an indictment for Edward, so that was already filed.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Yeah, I thought you were talking about WikiLeaks.
I spaced out, sorry.
Yeah, so he's responsible for, you know, he never issued an indictment against Julian Assange, but that's the open question, right?
I don't know how he's going to feel right now, if he has any regrets.
This is a great time now to take up this case that will likely be coming the Justice Department's way in the next year or two, if all goes well for the US government in London.
Yeah.
Hey, one more real quick here.
I've not specialized in this story, but I read enough to know that it was a very deliberate political decision to change the intake for Flint's water supply from one of the Great Lakes to this filth-filled canal.
I forget which was, you know, the names of whether it was Erie or what, but you know what I mean.
And so this was all very deliberate.
It wasn't like, oh, geez, you know, their pipes just went bad over a number of years or some kind of thing.
But now, so there were crimes committed, allegedly, and you talk in your article about how one of the people on Biden's transition team here was the federal prosecutor in charge of not doing anything about this at all.
Is that correct?
Yeah.
Barbara McQuaid was in the Eastern District of Michigan.
It's a very important part of the country, especially since it's in a swing state.
But also, like, this is where a lot of the population centers are for Michigan.
She oversees Dearborn, Detroit, and like you say, Flint.
And she had an opportunity to bring a case against Governor Rick Snyder and some of these other officials.
But instead, if you go to her Twitter account in September, I believe, when Rick Snyder endorsed Joe Biden, she was sharing it and cheering him for coming out, even though he's someone that probably should be facing federal charges for what happened with that city.
And then if you guys have a quick moment to close out here with Barbara McQuaid, something that I've followed that has flown under the radar completely, and it's a legacy of the Holder Justice Department, is the fact that back in 2010, there were like 23 or so activists that ended up receiving these subpoenas in the Midwest.
I don't know if you ever heard about this, but they were targeted by the FBI for their activism.
Sure.
Yeah.
We covered it at the time.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So they were involved in solidarity against Israel and with Palestinians, and they were involved in ...
They took a couple trips to Columbia, and so they were targeted.
These are people I know.
I mean, I'm based in Chicago.
And so this case never ...
Sorry, this massive investigation never produced anything of any significance.
In order to salvage all the work that had been done, Barbara McQuaid's office was brought in to bring a completely political case against someone called Razmia Odeh, who was a women's rights activist in Chicago who came to the United States.
The State Department knows she entered the United States because the Israeli government tortured her, accused her of political violence, accused her of bombings, actually.
But yet, there was evidence that those could have been coerced confessions, and she was also tortured.
Anyways, she got to the United States in the 90s, and later on in the last five years here, the government made a case against her claiming that she committed immigration fraud, and then had her deported to Jordan, again, even though the government knew they were accepting her into the country to settle here and live.
And she was a completely peaceful individual, and this goes along with the way McQuaid handled her office.
Also, the Arab, Muslim, and Sikh communities in Dearborn were people who were constant victims of the standard way of doing business in the FBI, where you see racial profiling and intrusive surveillance, and then they'll send in those infiltrators that are there to try and cook up entrapment schemes in order to get the next terrorist case that can be prosecuted.
Yep.
They do it to leftists, they do it to Muslims, and they do it to right-wingers, too.
Hey, dumb-dumb, say you love Osama into this tape recorder, you know?
I left the start of the article, but as we conclude here, she was responsible for the Houthi militia case that collapsed.
Oh, there you go.
And that was just a total joke.
And by the way, I wanted to mention, too, Kevin, that on the Rasmia Oda case, you're so right about what a sham that was, what an injustice that was.
Anybody wants to learn about that, I interviewed Charlotte Silver about it three or four times, and she had written a lot of good articles about it as well.
Yeah.
I just want to throw that in there, because that is an important story.
And you know, even when you have a whole war going on and hundreds of thousands of people being killed, sometimes it's the one-off injustices that get people to pay attention, you know?
Oh yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
Yeah, so these are the people, this is who's going to be in the Biden administration, or this is who's plotting the way forward.
Oh, don't leave out Michelle Flournoy.
Yeah, yeah.
Oh no, she's a top pick, although she's not doing any of the agency review teams.
I suppose just for information purposes, I'll say there are people here that we can expect to be nominated to cabinet positions, but they're not actually doing the agency review.
And I suppose that's because they don't want us to pay any attention to them.
So that's why Susan Rice isn't on the list.
That's why Rahm Emanuel, who is my former mayor of Chicago, who I absolutely loathe and despise, is missing and may get thrown in as a transportation secretary, even though he's never done anything.
Power, too, right?
What?
Samantha Power, too, right?
Yeah, Samantha Power is someone who's likely to pop up.
I don't really know what they'll have her do, but yeah.
So the people we're not supposed to see are kind of out in the wings, and they have all these grunts basically working on these agency review planning.
And then we'll hear either in the next month from Biden who he's picking, or maybe they'll wait until January.
Who knows?
Well, you know, we learned in the W. Bush administration that it's very important who's the deputy secretary of defense for policy, and it's very important who is the national security advisor to the vice president of the United States.
And all these positions that you usually wouldn't think about or bother learning these people's names.
So it's good that we're getting familiar with these grunts now, because they're going to be the ones in charge here in just a minute.
Yeah, I agree with you.
Yeah, man.
All right.
Well, listen, I love your journalism.
Thank you so much for coming on the show and talking about it with us.
All right, you guys, and that is Kevin Gastola.
He is at shadowproof.com, and this one is at the gray zone.
It's called Biden's Transition Team is Filled with War Profiteers, Beltway Chicken Hawks, and Corporate Consultants.
