06/09/14 – J.P. Sottile – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright you guys, welcome back to the thing here.
I'm Scott Wharton.
This is my show, The Scott Wharton Show.
Our first guest today is J.P. Sotilli.
He made a movie called The Warning.
And he keeps a great website called NewsVandal.com.
We run them all the time over at AntiWar.com.
And you should sign up for his morning email.
He's got a great morning email newsletter that you can sign up for at NewsVandal.com called The NewsVandal.
And he does vandalize the hell out of it with his blue graffiti hyperlinks everywhere.
Welcome back to the show, J.P.
How are you doing?
Oh, I'm doing well.
Thanks for the plugs.
And I'm just bracing for the Uber plug which we are now getting into the Hillary rollout, Scott.
Are you ready for the rollout of Hillary, Inc.?
Oh, man.
Well, you know.
Yeah, I guess I am.
I'm the guy with the boulder and she's the mountain, I guess.
You know what I'm prepared for?
I'm prepared for a bunch of ridiculous, minor, red herring, straw man accusations that have nothing to do with the real monster and danger that she represents in my life.
Well, that's how it's run, right?
You release the minor scandal, the small scandal.
Whitewater!
Whitewater!
Yeah, exactly.
Whitewater.
Meanwhile, Bill Clinton is running on his economic legacy.
She's going to try and leverage off of that economic legacy herself.
That economic legacy, to me, I look back, seems quite bogus.
It was just another economic bubble factory with Alan Greenspan running it, giving away free money with public trades.
And now she's going to truck to the right on defense policy, supposedly to the right of Obama, and here we are talking about it.
She says she went to the mat to try and arm Syrian rebels.
Obama said no, although she did finally say that she regrets her vote on Iraq, although the quote in the book is that she regrets not saying sooner that she regretted her vote on Iraq, which makes sense since the conventional wisdom is she lost the primary to Obama because she did not regret her vote on Iraq.
Right, just like Madeleine Albright said that I shouldn't have said it like that when I said I was happy to kill 500,000 children as long as I can keep the sanctions on Saddam.
She was not sorry for keeping the sanctions on 500,000 dead kids, not in the slightest bit.
Well, and by the way, we have this revisionist view of the Clinton administration because it does seem to me, Scott, that essentially Saddam was in compliance with the U.N. resolutions around 1998 when the inspectors were pulled out, the continual bombing of Iraq was ramped up right around the time of the Monica Lewinsky to-do, and because the inspectors were pulled out, we could never verify that he was in compliance when we find out later after Iraq was destroyed by Bush the Younger that he was actually in compliance.
Well, and in fact, Andrew Coburn reported that Ralph Eckius from UNSCOM was prepared to certify Iraq as weapons of mass destruction free in 1997, and as soon as the Americans found out about it, Madeleine Albright rushed out to declare that no matter if he's in compliance or not, no matter what, we will never lift the sanctions as long as Saddam is in power.
So at that point, he ratcheted back his cooperation with the inspectors just enough to give the Clintonites a talking point that he wasn't cooperating, but they were the ones who provoked him by saying that nothing that he could possibly do would ever be good enough for them.
Well, and at that time, one has to wonder if the fact that oil was hovering around $13 to $17 a barrel, had Saddam been deemed in compliance and Iraq been able to sell its growing share of the world's oil reserves, because as that oil stayed in the ground year after year after year, his percentage of the world's oil reserves grew.
If he had flooded the market with oil, maybe oil collapses down to $9 a barrel, but we don't want to get into that kind of world.
Well, actually, as long as you bring it up, I think from the Glaspie memos and the good reporting about it by Robert Perry and Greg Pallast and others, that what was really going on with the invasion of Kuwait was, it wasn't just that they were overproducing from shared wells, it was that they were working, the Kuwaitis were working with the Saudis to keep oil at $10 a barrel or less, and he therefore could not afford to pay them back the money that he had borrowed from them to fight the Iran-Iraq war for them.
And so, and then Kuwaitis just kept screwing them over, and the Americans had told the Kuwaitis and encouraged the Kuwaitis to keep not showing up at their promised meetings and all these kinds of things, and just stiff-arming them.
And so he was telling April Glaspie, well, this is the last straw.
If they will not let me make enough money to even pay them back, and they won't even give me the dignity of telling me to, you know, go screw myself, then I'm just going to take the damn northern oil fields myself, and that'll teach them.
At which point, April Glaspie says, oh, not like we'd care.
I'm under explicit instructions from Secretary Baker to tell you that, go right ahead, pal.
What he said was, we have claims on our 19th province, because they called Kuwait the 19th province.
He always considered it the 19th province of Iraq, and I believe April Glaspie said, we have no opinion on that matter.
Right.
An order dispute with Kuwait.
We have no interest in inter-Arab affairs.
Ha, really.
No opinion.
No opinion.
And she even says, I'm under explicit instructions from Secretary Baker to emphasize to you the fact that we really don't care about this.
That's pretty plain.
And one wonders if he thought that that was his reward for conducting the war against Iraq, which we now have a lot of evidence that it was, if not coordinated, it was certainly at the behest of the incoming Reagan administration, because they wanted to open up a front, which, by the way, allowed the Reagan administration to sell weapons to both sides of that conflict.
That's what Iran-Contra, or part of what Iran-Contra is at.
But now we're going far afield.
Do you want to get back to Hillary?
Yeah, well, I mean, it's all one regime this whole damn time.
She was on the Armed Services Committee endorsing and voting for the entire Bush policy.
She was, according to her, she was co-pilot with Bill while he was in power, and so now she's running to replace Obama, who she was the Secretary of State for.
It's like one giant Hillary Clinton administration since George H.W. Bush left power to me.
At least in a way, you know.
Well, sure.
It's one big bloody Iraq war, that's for sure.
Well, it's spreading.
And that's why I wrote the piece about Hillary Clinton's weaponization of the State Department, because we have this appearance, I think Obama's in his legacy building stage, right?
He's talking about, you know, I will have ended two wars.
He issued the EPA coal rules, which if you dig deep into the EPA coal rules, it's only going to, you know, right now 39% of America's power comes from coal.
By 2030, 30% of America's power is going to come from coal.
It's being called a war on coal.
He's trying to gloss over his legacy with his environmentalists and his, the environmentalist faction, Democrats, blah, blah, blah.
Here, though, I think he would like it if Hillary is seen as the hawk, and he is not seen as a hawk, when really Hillary and Robert Gates together were implementing this new policy, this whole of government policy way of dealing with the war on terror, which was not to end the war on terror or really to curtail it significantly.
It was about shifting the war on terror from having these hard-to-sustain invasions to more of a Cold War model of the war on terror, where you develop a network of client states, you fund them, you train them, and you have counterterrorism operations going on all around the world, and you have technology, you have special operations forces, and you have this thing that Hillary created at the State Department, which is the Conflict Bureau, the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, which operates as a passkey for special operations forces and military trainers, and, by the way, the salesmen of military hardware in countries particularly in Africa but all around the world.
So that's the real development here, is not that the State Department is really just a front for the CIA and big business and whatever, like always, but here they're a front for the military, for the Joint Special Operations Command, which is outside of the chain of command, which works directly for the president and does the assassinations and has authority over much of the drone war in different parts of the world, and you're saying that they've been now integrated to a great degree into the State Department.
And now, so then, is that really the Pentagon taking over the State Department with her help, or that's her trying to influence the Pentagon more, or that's her just trying to score up some points so she looks like a tough guy for 2016, or what do you think?
Well, I mean, it could be none of the above or all of the above.
It's hard to know.
Well, now I've got to interrupt you because the damn music's playing and we've got to go out to this break, J.P., but when we get back, everybody, it's J.P. Sotili, the news vandal, and we're talking about Hillary Clinton, what she did to the State Department, what kind of president she's likely to be, if Jeb don't beat her to it.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
Hey, is it just me, or is the timing on those breaks kind of off?
Something's wrong.
Anyway, no big deal.
We got J.P. Sotili.
He's the news vandal on the phone here, and he wrote this very important article.
I really do hope that you'll look at it.
We ran it at antiwar.com as well.
It's at newsvandal.com.
Hillary Clinton and the weaponization of the State Department.
So then, where we were so rudely interrupted by the commercial break there, the question was about the relative power between these different bureaucracies and what kind of power play is going on, who's taking over who and why, and these kinds of things, and you were going to go on from there, I think, J.P.
Well, this issue came up during the Bush administration, and then-Secretary of State Colin Powell and then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice actually fought efforts by Special Operations Command to insert their troops into countries and areas without the approval of the State Department, and it was a bit of an issue.
So when Hillary comes in, she has this sort of quadrennial diplomacy and defense review, which is patterned on the quadrennial defense review, and as a result of this, she creates the Conflict and Stabilization Bureau, the Conflict Bureau.
It's the shorthand for it.
And I think what she decided to do was to merge those two functions together.
It was something that she did with Robert Gates, who was proposing a whole-of-government reform of the War on Terror, and I think what she did is she eliminated that conflict with the Conflict Bureau, ironically, between the Pentagon and Special Operations Command and the State Department by asserting a role for the State Department over Special Operations Command, but not in competition with it as a merger, as a partnership, as a cooperation, which is why when she went to the Special Operations Forces Industry Conference, yes, folks, there is such a thing as a trade show for the Special Operations Forces Industry.
It happens every May in Tampa, outside MacDill Air Force Base, where U.S. Special Operations Command is located, and in 2012 she went there, she gave the keynote address at the big gala dinner.
They have a gala dinner, and Admiral William McRaven, after the speech, was glowing in his praise of Hillary Clinton and talked willingly and openly about the subservient role that Special Operations Command now plays to the State Department.
So the State Department is really this sort of primary mover in these areas, and the question is, as you asked, is it because the State Department is fronting it now and it's easier, it's the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down, is Special Operations Command really at work behind it?
I kind of think differently about this.
I actually think that Hillary Clinton is not somebody who's willing to play a subservient role when it comes to a lot of policy matters, and I think really what she wanted to do was update the State Department so it was a willing and functional part of overseas contingency operations, which, by the way, is what the Obama administration rebranded the War on Terror in 2009.
Yeah, there you go.
Well, smart power, as they call it.
And I like the way you make the parallel with the Cold War, too.
I remember people used to argue about whether Iraq was like Vietnam, and so it always seemed like it to me that, yeah, because you have this overarching kind of umbrella excuse of the Cold War or the War on Terrorism, kind of the construct, but beneath that you have proxy wars here, you have proxy wars there, you have rent-a-torture-dictator-here or rent-a-revolution-there or whatever it is, but all in the name basically under the rubric of that larger theory that whatever it is we're doing here, we promise you it's to counter terrorism, whether we're backing them or bombing them or whatever it is at any given time.
But then so what's funny about it is the way that they call it, her version is smart power.
We don't want to do another Afghanistan or Iraq right now.
We'd rather outsource, do more like an Indonesia massacre if we're going to make the Cold War parallel, and we want to hire more local dictators to do it.
We want to have our special forces train their special forces and have them put down any dissent against our policy in their countries in the most brutal way, and then otherwise we want to fly remote-control planes around, maybe use some special forces guys to point some lasers for the Air Force here and there, but otherwise try to do it on the cheap, which makes sense, right?
You compare that to marching into Iraq, you idiots, right?
But look at what they call smart, overthrowing Gaddafi in Libya, backing al-Qaeda types, loyalty to Zawahiri in Syria.
This is, to be completely cold and analytical and realpolitik about it, this is exactly the way to conduct this 21st century empire.
There is no need to march into a country like George W. Bush did in Iraq, not anymore, with technology and full-spectrum dominance, and then you merge that with this whole-of-government idea where every part of the government, this is including this whole-of-government idea of conducting the war on terror, actually includes the Department of Commerce, the Department of Treasury.
You take all these departments and you create this system, as you say, much like the switchover from Sukarno to Suharto in Indonesia, that famous massacre where people were killed and the United States supported that takeover.
And by the way, Indonesia had a lot of oil and a lot of rubber and a lot of strategic resources, and so the United States was very, very happy to have General Suharto take over and back him for decades.
This is what's happening particularly now all around Africa, places like South Sudan.
Kenya now has a lot of oil.
Uganda has a lot of oil.
The United States is active in Chad and in Mali.
Guess what?
There is oil in Chad.
Also, you have the Niger River Delta.
There's a lot of oil in that area, so the United States is active there.
And what you do is you create these, they're called host country partners now.
They're not client states, Scott.
They're host country partners, and with these host country partners, the Conflict Bureau goes in, does things like anti-violence campaigns and democracy-building campaigns, but also, according to some testimony in 2011 by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Don Yamamoto, the State Department and this Conflict Bureau is also handing out money to local regimes to help them modernize their military, to help them kick counterterrorism efforts, to help them update their counterterrorism capabilities.
And the beauty of this system versus the Cold War is that the Cold War was fighting an ideology and a system, communism.
Now this system is fighting a tactic, terrorism.
And so it really doesn't, terrorism is never going away.
It's never gone away.
It's a tactic.
It's been around since before the Roman Empire, and it's going to continue because if you're in an asymmetrical conflict and you're an insurgent or you're a dissident and you're trying to fight a regime, often the only thing that you can do to fight the regime is terrorism.
So now you have these regimes who could say, hey, we're just battling terrorism.
Oh, and here we are, the State Department, to dole out some money and help you in your counterterrorism efforts.
Oh, and by the way, we have people from Special Operations Command piggyback backing off of us who will come right in.
And as Don Yamamoto said in his testimony, he said, unlike any time before, there are more DOD personnel embedded into State Department facilities around Africa than ever.
Right.
Yeah, and of course, Nick Terse is also great on this and writes about how, and it's all a secret.
And he's got to waterboard these guys to get the truth out of them, any documents out of them at all about what they're really up to.
But we know that it's a lot bigger than we have any details for.
I'm sorry we're out of time.
Thank you for your time, everybody.
Please go look at this very important article.
It's by J.P. Sotili at NewsVandal.com.
Hillary Clinton and the Weaponization of the State Department.
Thanks, J.P.
Take care.
Hey, y'all.
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