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.
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All right, you guys on the line.
I've got Matthew Ho from the Center for International Policy.
And of course, famously, he was a captain in the US Marine Corps during Iraq War Two.
And then while working for the State Department in Afghanistan in 2009, he called it quits and blew the whistle and wrote a public letter to General Eikenberry explaining why he was leaving and in an attempt to stop Obama from approving the David Petraeus surge of really 60,000 more troops, not as many as 90,000 more troops into the country for the giant failed surge of 2010 through 12 there, and has been a great antiwar activist ever since then too.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Matthew?
Good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Really appreciate you joining us on the show here today.
And so we have really important stuff to talk about.
It's a minor point within the major narrative about what's been going on between America and Iran.
And that is the role of Iran in supporting Iraqi militias during Iraq War Two, Shiite militias during Iraq War Two, which militias they were backing and to what ends and when and how, and especially, of course, the narrative of the EFP, explosively formed penetrator copper core roadside bombs that were so effective against American armored vehicles and killing American soldiers who were fighting against the Shia there.
And while this discussion was going on in the last week, you had made a comment about this.
And so I wanted to have you on to talk about what you know about this story.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, you know, this is nothing new in the sense of, you know, waving the bloody shirt, so to speak, to try and rally the cause for war.
You know, I mean, this was certainly done against the Native Americans over and over again, you know, that the claims that the Native Americans were committing atrocities.
So we had to, you know, handle those savages.
You know, it's certainly, you know, Gulf of Tonkin, you know, with Vietnam.
I mean, we could sit here all day and just go back and forth.
But yeah, I mean, the latest thing, of course, with Iraq and Iran is that General Soleimani, who was assassinated by the United States last week, was responsible for the deaths of 600 Americans in the Iraq war because he is Shia and those 600 troops were killed by Shia militias.
It's a simple math for the administration, for the war hawks, for the Pentagon to just conflate the two.
Of course, it's much more complicated than that.
But it's, you know, it's bunk.
I mean, the main thing, the main point about it, you know, I start off on the top of it is, is if you're going to say that Soleimani and the Iranians are responsible for what the Shia militias did in Iraq, then you have to say that the Saudis and the other Gulf countries are responsible for what the Sunni insurgents did in Iraq.
I mean, this has been confirmed by WikiLeaks, but also too, you know, from my time in Iraq and at the State Department, at the Pentagon, funding sources for the Iraqi Sunni insurgents were coming from the Gulf countries.
Were they coming directly from, you know, the Saudi military headquarters in Riyadh?
No, there's no evidence of that.
But just the same as there is no hard evidence, you know, there's no receipt for a transfer of funds between the Iranian military and any of the Shia militias.
Were the Iranians involved?
Yes.
But to what degree?
You know, probably at a significant level less than the Saudis were involved.
And the same thing goes, too, with, you know, to the east of Iran, to the east and north of Iran and Afghanistan, the Iranians were not involved in an insurgency at all, although at various times both the Obama administration and the Trump administration have accused Iran of being involved in the insurgencies there, which is just complete, you know, complete bullshit, you know, I mean, for lack of a better term.
I mean, the obscenity of this administration and a previous administration doesn't earn the respect, I think, of polite words or of, you know, words that are not offensive.
So you know, in Afghanistan, we knew that the Taliban had four or five funding streams.
And one of them, and in some ways it was a chief funding stream, was monies coming in from the Persian Gulf, from the Sunni countries, from Saudi Arabia, from the Qataris, from UAE, from Kuwait, from Bahrain, et cetera, as well as, of course, from the Pakistanis.
And this, too, has been confirmed by WikiLeaks.
So I'm not, you know, I'm not shedding any intelligence that hasn't already been done by Chelsea Manning.
But, you know, it's important to keep that in mind.
If we're going to point the finger at Iran, then, you know, we're being hypocritical, as we seemingly always are, in not looking at who was funding the insurgents that killed the preponderance.
Look, about 4,400, I think it was, 4,400 Americans were killed in Iraq.
You know, so almost 4,000 of them were killed by Sunni insurgents who were, again, backed by the Saudis, the Kuwaitis, the Qataris, et cetera.
And in Afghanistan, all of our soldiers have been killed by Sunni, you know, insurgent groups, by the Taliban, by Hezbi Islami, Gulbuddin, by the Haqqani Network, et cetera.
So you know, I mean, this notion of pointing the finger at Iran is just absolute.
But again, it goes in line with, you know, whether it's the Spanish-American War, the Vietnam War, the Mexican War, the war against the Native Americans.
You know, I mean, there has to be a reason for ...
The first time I remember ever seeing anything like this when I was a kid was in William Shire's book on Nazi Germany, I think it was called The Rise and Fall of Nazi Germany, or whatever it was called.
The Third Reich.
The Third Reich, the Third Reich, that's right.
And what he talked about in there, which I had never heard, was that to start off the invasion of Poland, supposedly the Nazis, whether it was the army or the Gestapo or whoever, took out a bunch of prisoners, shot them, dressed them up in Polish uniforms, put them on the German side of the border, and then brought the German press and international press out and said, look, the Poles attacked us, so we're responding.
You know, I mean, so this is pretty much common for any country who has desires to attack another to try and create some reason for it, some causeus belli, I guess, as you would say if we're talking just war doctrine.
And so going back to 2007 and the height of the surge, the dismissal of Rumsfeld, the rise of Gates and Petraeus, a major part of the surge was the redirection.
Now we're mad that we just fought this whole El Salvador option for the super majority that we put in power that's disregarding us.
So now, you know, blame Sauter, even though, really, in terms of American goals of limiting Iranian influence, seemed kind of counterproductive to prefer the Dabba Party and Skiri to Sauter, but there it is, because he wanted us out and Iran out.
So there was the wrinkle there.
So they targeted him and started back in the Sunnis right at this time.
And there was a huge push.
They even abandoned all the talking points about the nuclear program for like half a year.
It's like they completely forgot about all their nuclear lies so that they could propose strikes inside Iran at IRGC bases, supposedly for their intervention in Iraq and supplying all of these EFP bombs, Matthew.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, quickly with Sauter, a friend of mine, Taran Sims, who was with a cavalry unit that was stationed in Sauter City in 2003, he was at his squadron, you know, was in the area where Sauter lived and where Sauter worked.
And he came in and he came in and talked to the Americans in early 2003, in the summer of 2003.
And Taran will tell you how we treated Sauter, that just like, you know, I mean, again, history repeating itself, whether it be Ho Chi Minh or whoever, we had an opportunity, Castro, I mean, we had an opportunity to work with Castro in 59 and 60 into 61.
You know, I mean, like we've had opportunities to work with people who we then pushed aside because for some reason, like you said, we're favoring Skiri.
And so Sauter was somebody who came in, tried to work with us.
We treated him roughly.
We tore down in the area, because we had no idea what we were doing in Sauter City.
Among many Muslims, but in particular among Shia, there are banners that they hang often in respect to their dead.
We just randomly went through Sauter City and tore these banners down.
These are basically mourning banners, you know, and also banners of other religious significance.
And then we threw Sauter in jail.
And so that's the evolution of how Sauter goes to start to fight us, you know, and start to rebel against the occupation.
He was not right off the bat calling for arms against the United States.
You guys, I'm sorry, just to clarify, you and not you personally, but the Marines arrested him in 2003?
The army arrested him.
The army arrested him.
I guess I had missed that.
I knew that they tried to shut down his paper in 2004 was what led to the riot and the fighting in Najaf and all that.
But I didn't know that he'd already been in and out of jail by then.
God dang it.
Yeah.
We had to, I mean, basically had put him under custody for, I think it was only for an evening, but hey, it's in the, I mean, like it's still, I mean, that's the whole point of it.
For a guy like him, that's like arresting Tony Soprano and treating him like, you know, some vagrant or whatever kind of thing.
You're going to have some hard feelings after that, buddy.
And then, you know, and it shows too, we had no idea who this man was.
We had no idea.
I use we, you know, and I know, I know almost everyone who's listening right now is not supportive of the war is not, you know, I just use we because it's the, the colloquialism that's easy.
You were part of the armed forces at the time.
So it's okay for you to speak we, cause you're, yeah, you're like kind of taking responsibility for your higher ups decisions here and the way you're phrasing it kind of, but we understand what you mean.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And we, and we're going to get to the EFPs in a minute, but I've got a story of my own to share about how this evolves with the Shia militias where, where I was personally involved with the, with the evolution of that.
But yeah, we have no idea who Sadr is.
We really have no idea.
I mean, it's called Sadr City.
This man comes in whose name is Sadr and the connection is not made, let alone the fact that the, the, the importance of his father who was killed by Saddam Hussein.
You know, and then we don't even know what these banners are that are hanging outside of people's homes, outside of people's apartments.
We have no idea what the purposes of them are.
We have no idea what, what their message is.
We have no idea the significance of them.
I mean, it'd be the same as going to somebody's house and smashing, you know, urns with cremated remains in them or kicking over gravestones or doing something like that.
You know what I mean?
And so here we are, we're supposed to again, rely upon American intelligence.
I remember I had a friend of mine, an Iraqi friend of mine who worked with us and we used to have these pamphlets that told us about Iraqi culture and traditions and everything.
And this was about 15 months into, 16 months into the occupation.
And he said, I remember Ammar said to me, he said, I totally understand why you guys are so bad at this.
You have no idea about anything, but you think you know, because this pamphlet that supposedly was meant to tell soldiers about customs and traditions and how to speak and interact with Iraqis and everything, was just full of garbage, full of like basically mythology and, and rumors and innuendos and, and things that like may have been true in 15th century Baghdad, but certainly weren't true in, you know, 2003, 2004 Baghdad, you know what I mean?
And so getting to my little story, which I've shared with you before, Scott, about SCIRI and the Badr Corps, SCIRI, that's the, it stands for the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.
And all throughout Saddam Hussein's time have been based out of, or not all through, but they, they evolved, I think in 1983, 1984 around maybe.
But they've been based out of Iran and have been used as kind of a, an agency of Iran within Iraq.
And it was all Iraqis who were a part of the group to try and, you know, foster dissent to try and, to try and cause problems for Hussein's regime to maybe hopefully one day overthrow and then have a vehicle to insert people into the government that are aligned with Iran.
And we gave them that.
The United States gave them that.
So when I got to Iraq in the spring of 04, and I was a part, I was, I was on a state department team at that time, and I was a part of the very end of the coalition provisional authority, CPA, which was Paul Bremer's organization that had control of Iraq for the first year.
And this was really the colonial administration before we gave Iraq its sovereignty, you know, which was all just, again, just, just, you know, certainly just in name only.
But each of the ministries, each of the parts of the Iraqi government were given out to various sects within Iraq, and Skiri had a dominant role among those sects.
And when I got there to Iraq, I was supposed to be doing reconstruction, specifically I was supposed to be doing work with the Ministry of Youth and Sport.
I was supposed to, I had a $20 million program that was meant to rebuild soccer fields and youth centers and stadiums and, you know, various public works facilities that fall, you know, within the purview of youth and sports.
And one day I came into the office in Baghdad and they said to me, hey, look, you know, that program you're doing, we're no longer doing that.
You've transferred your money directly to the ministry, which is $20 million in cash, $100 bills right out of the Federal Reserve, you know, delivered on pallets like you've all seen photos of or videos of or read stories about, you know, and that money was transferred directly to Skiri.
And that money, of course, then went right to the barter corps, which bought plenty of RPGs and AK-47s and PKMs and whatever else you want to buy.
Now the barter corps didn't fight the U.S. so much.
I know some guys who did fight the barter corps, I've heard from some of them, but primarily the fighting, you know, as guys, you know, was with SADR and some other militias.
But it certainly was giving $20 million in cash to the militia that was under the control or aligned with Iran.
I mean, so, and this was replicated, this type of transfer of funds, this type of ignorance, this type of just, you know, complete stupidity was replicated one step after, one time after another, you know, in Iraq, you know, in Afghanistan, you know, certainly in Libya.
Look at Libya.
The UN the other day just said that Libya is on the brink of becoming another Syria.
And then of course Syria, where like the best example of this, right, is when CIA-backed forces in Libya were fighting with Pentagon-backed forces in, I mean, I'm sorry, in Syria, CIA-backed forces were fighting with Pentagon-backed forces.
You know, I mean, in a sense of that, we just are, forget about the morals, forget about any justification.
We are just so extremely incompetent that anything our government says or does should be doubted.
Hold on just one second.
I'll be right back.
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First of all, let me say that I already have a bunch of footnotes from my book about Saudi financing of the Sunni insurgency there, and the CIA complained about it to the Washington Post at times and stuff like that.
So there's plenty there.
You kind of mentioned personal experience with that, and I was wondering if you could clarify your role at that time and what information that you were seeing about this money that was coming into the Sunni insurgency.
What year were we talking about?
Everything you can, please.
So this would have been 04, 05 in Iraq where I was on a State Department team based in Tikrit.
You're still a Marine, but you're working on a State Department task force type situation?
Yeah.
Well, at that point I was a reservist because I had gotten off active duty because I thought I was going to miss.
I got off active duty in spring of 04, put my resignation in, because you've got to put your resignation in months ahead of time, put my resignation in in the summer of 03 because I thought, like many other guys, that I had missed the war, right?
So I shouldn't be saying how incompetent and how ignorant the government is because I've certainly been that at times, you know?
But- And you were a captain at that point in the reserves?
Yeah, I was a captain.
And so, just kind of like a brief timeline of mine.
But I had a friend of mine, and at this point I was working as a junior Marine Corps officer on the personal staff of the Secretary of the Navy.
And I had a friend, though, who had been shuttled over to the Coalition for Personal Authority to work on human resources.
And Ken said to me, hey, would you like to go over to work on Iraq via CPA and then transfer over to the State Department teams and do reconstruction and political stuff?
And I said, yeah, that'd be great.
And that's how I ended up over there, spent a year based out of Saddam Hussein's hometown in Tikrit, covering Kirkuk, Diyala province, and also one of the Kurdish provinces, Sulmaniyah.
And so after that, I returned back home.
After a year there, I went back to the United States, was a consultant for the State Department on the Iraq desk in an organization called the Iraq Policy and Operations Group.
Did that for about five or six months before I had the opportunity to take command of a reserve Marine Corps company and went back to Iraq for 06, 07.
So I was there during the surge.
I was there for the awakening, there for the Sons of Iraq, saw all of that.
As well then, too, when I came back home from there, while I was waiting for my appointment into the Foreign Service, I worked for a year for the Joint IED Defeat Organization or JIDO, a Pentagon, the main Pentagon task force to try and combat IEDs.
So everything I know about this is based off of the intelligence I read, certainly in my State Department spot and then throughout both in Tikrit and then when I was with the Marine Corps in Anbar, the intelligence on that.
But primarily it comes from 04, 05, and then my time at State in 05, and then again at JIDO in 2008, reading the intelligence on it, reading the known intelligence, as well then, too, everything we've known since then or the absence of information.
One of those things about this idea that the Iranians are behind everything, there's no smoking gum, right?
Where are the documents?
Where are the captured?
Have you ever captured an Iraqi who said, yes, major so-and-so of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps gave us this EFP or gave us the blueprints for us or gave us the machinery to make it?
You know, none of that exists.
And the same way, too, the intelligence regarding the Sunnis was all there.
We knew it, and this extends into my time in Afghanistan as well, where we knew that the funding, and again, the Taliban had, or the Afghan insurgency had four or five funding streams.
You know, if I can call off the top of my head, it was the Gulf states.
It was the Pakistanis.
It was our own contracts, you know, siphoning money off of all the wells and schools and roads we were building.
They took a cut from that, as well, then, too, they also took a cut from the drug trade.
You know, they were not controlling the drug trade.
That was the Afghan government, and it is to a degree still, the Taliban have taken more control of it because they've taken possession of so much of Helmand and Kandahar and other parts.
But, you know, those were kind of the big funding streams for the Taliban.
And again, the chief one, according to the intelligence we had, according to the stuff that I would read that was classified secret and top secret, was that the funding was coming from the Persian Gulf to the Taliban, as well, then, too, in Iraq.
The money that was coming in to the insurgency was coming from the Saudis, the Kuwaitis.
The Syrians were involved, too, and of course, the Libyans sent a lot of guys over to, the Libyans, a lot of young men came from Libya to fight us.
But still, when you talk about the number of foreign fighters that came to Iraq to fight us, you know, as opposed to the entire insurgency, you know, it was such a small, insignificant amount.
One or two percent, I believe, were foreign fighters.
The rest were all Iraqis who were fighting us, you know.
You know, so, but yeah, I mean, but they were coming, you know, a lot were Saudis, a lot were Yemenis.
I mean, so that, too, there was no Iranians coming over to fight us.
They were, the people who were coming over to fight us were from our supposed allies, you know, and that's something that, it's so disturbing to hear this discussion about that the reason for, you know, I don't know if folks remember, in the lead up to 03, and they're playing with, you know, the administration and the media who's going along with it, and all the war hawks are going along with it.
They're playing with the lives of 600 families in the United States.
Right now, there are 600 families that are reliving their loved ones' deaths, that are going through this, that are having all kinds of spates of emotional convulsions because of this, you know.
And it reminds me so much of, in the run up to the invasion, there was an American pilot who had been shot down in the first Iraq war, named Michael Spiker, a Navy pilot.
And the administration, even though we knew, even though the United States knew he was dead, they went along with rumors and half-assed theories and just complete lies to saying that Spiker was alive and being held in an Iraqi prison.
And his family, what his family went through with the hope of that, even though we knew he was dead, even though like a Bedouin tribesman had like pulled his body out of the wreckage of the aircraft, we went along with it.
And the Washington Post went along with it, and the New York Times went along with it, and CNN went along with it.
And the poor Spiker family suffered over and over again, until after the invasion, when we said, oh no, he's dead.
And so they're doing the same thing again now with these 600 families of these 600, you know, young men and women who were killed there, you know, by saying, it was the Iranians and we are going to get justice for them.
It's bullshit.
And they're not going to, and, but they don't care because the men and women we have in power are psychopaths and sociopaths, and none of it matters.
And it was the same under the Obama administration.
The fact that they feel like they got to go back 13 years to come up with an excuse in the first place just goes to show how dishonest the whole enterprise is.
So real quick now, and I'm sorry, because we're already over time, but I got to, I'm going to push back the other guy a minute, because I got to wrap up a couple of things with you.
First of all, we know from out here in the world, Gareth Porter's journalism and a great many others, and I wrote a blog entry about this at antiwar.com, linking to all this stuff from back in 2000.
I started debunking this stuff back in the spring of 2006.
And then, but we have all of the, all the links from all the reporting back then that these EFPs were being made in factories in Iraq, and that these machine shops and such were found over and over and over and over again.
And so quite contrary to what you just said, or not contrary to what you just said, but the thing that you described, where there's no evidence that any of these came from Iran.
There's every evidence that they did not come from Iran.
So, but the important part here is you were working for this, how did you say it, JIDO?
Yeah, it's called JIDO.
Yeah.
The Joint IED Defeat Organization.
And it's got a different name now or whatever, but it was the Prime Pentagon Task Force.
But you're talking about in the spring of 2007, for example, is when you were working there?
Well, I was, well, I was in, I was in 2008, I was there in spring of 2007.
I was still in Iraq with the Marines and I was a combat engineer.
So my Marines did route clearance, which meant we went out.
And in East Baghdad or Najaf or wherever the fight was against the Sadrists and so forth?
We were in Anbar, so we were against the Sunnis.
So I never fought against the Shia.
But thank God, because we didn't have to face the EFPs, because the EFPs, to give a brief description of it is, is it's a concave device and the inner part of that cavity of the concave and you can, people can look this up on Google, just Google EFP or explosively formed projectile or explosively formed penetrator, whichever one you want to call it.
It has the inside of that is, is lined with a, with a metal, preferably copper.
And then the outside of that cavity is packed with explosives.
And so when that device is detonated, what happens is think of a V and think of the V collapsing on itself or collapsing inward.
And then the force of the explosion, because that's what the explosive is doing, then is redirects forward.
And we use these, you will, this is a, this is a, something that's been around for, for more than a hundred years now, at least probably 150 years.
The idea of using what's called a shape charge to try and blast a hole in something.
You know, if you're doing mining or you're doing bridging or tunneling, or, you know, you're trying to get into something, that's what's called a shape charge.
And again, just look, just, just Google shape charge and you'll find out what this all is.
But the idea with an EFP is that you put copper on the inside or some other type of metal, but preferably copper.
And what that does is that then creates this really intensely dense ball.
And that ball is projected at incredibly high speeds.
And when it hits the side of an armored vehicle, the resulting kinetic experience that occurs, one, because it's traveling so fast and so dense, it will go through literally any armor we had at the time.
I don't know about the armor now, but certainly at the time then, it would go through anything we had, including our vehicles that were specially designed to defeat IEDs.
It would go through our tanks.
I mean, it would do whatever it needed to do.
And then when it punched through the, on the other side, think back to your high school physics, the resulting kinetic explosion on the inside of the vehicle, the result of that dense mass traveling at such a dense speed and the energy that it put out when it comes basically in contact with that armor, it destroys everything inside the vehicle.
And so these were incredibly, incredibly capable pieces of warfare that were used against U.S. forces by the Shia militias.
But you're absolutely right, Scott.
All of them were built in Iraq.
All of them were built by Iraqis.
It's not very high technology.
All you need is a basic machine shop.
Well, now, wait a minute.
Clarify for me, if you could.
And I'm sorry, I'm so short on time here to do this to you this way.
But can you just clarify for me exactly what you know about these EFPs or, you know, debunking the narrative as you're just talking about.
But from your personal experience or first or second hand knowledge from your time, either deployed in Iraq or working for this organization back home about it and privy to intelligence about it back then is, in other words, is what you read my blog entry at Antiwar.com or you know this because you were there.
Oh, I know it's because I was there.
But I mean, just now you said you were an ambar.
So I'm just saying clarify as much as you can how you know what you know about this.
So when I was an ambar, though, because we were responsible, I was the the combat engineer officer for the regimental combat team out there.
I was responsible for doing the counter IED work among our responsibilities.
So I was involved with all the IED intelligence for all of Iraq during my time there.
So even though we didn't have these EFPs in ambar, certainly I was reading the intelligence that was coming out of Baghdad, say, that was talking about these that was describing these.
And I was thinking, you know, the times I've prayed in my life, thinking that the Sunnis weren't picking up on this.
Right.
Because they would it would've been really bad for us.
This is bad for those guys in Baghdad.
So but then when I go to Jido, I am sitting there and I didn't work on defeating EFPs.
I worked on counter suicide bombers.
But the guys who worked on the EFPs were literally two chairs away from me.
And we all read the same intelligence.
We all went to the same briefings.
You know, any time, any time, as you described, Scott, one of these workshops was captured.
You know, we had a raid and we found a workshop where they were making the EFPs.
We saw the photos.
We saw the intelligence.
We read the reports, you know.
And again, none of it came from Iran.
It was all built.
None of it.
Quote you, none.
Why would it why would they have it?
You're talking about copper.
You're talking about metal casing and you're talking about explosives, which there is so much explosives in Iraq, as everyone knows, because, you know, Saddam's military was the fifth largest in the world.
You know, thanks to the United States helping to build it up in the 80s and everything else.
And we go in there.
We didn't secure.
I can talk about I mean, Scott, we could be here all day, but I could talk about seeing ammunition supply points, you know, where that were just, you know, literally almost to the horizon full of weapons, munitions, explosives that were unguarded.
You know, got to write a book about the Iraq war, too.
And this is I'm talking about being there after a year.
They're still unguarded.
You and I could have gotten our little Toyota pickup truck driven out there, taking whatever we want, you know.
And so why would they have to bring anything in from Iran?
Everything was right there.
And the material needed to create these.
It's it's like, you know, it's it's simple.
What it drill presses and, you know, I'm not a you know, I'm not that I don't know that type of engineering, but like it's simple stuff.
If you have a just if you have a shop, you can do this.
And once you figure it out, once you have an idea and what we find is that they would, you know, they have facilities to make them more accurate.
They have facilities to counter any of the counters that we put out, anything that we put out to try and defeat these ideas within 30 days, they put out a counter to that.
They found a way to try and defeat it or were.
Yeah, I mean, so like but but again, getting back to the main point, though, yeah, this argument that just as they're saying Soleimani was was was planning an imminent strike, just as they said, you know, Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, just as they said the Taliban was involved with 9-11, just as they said that the Spanish blew up the main, you know, it's it's all garbage.
It's all garbage.
And this idea that the Iranians are personally responsible for the deaths, the people who are the people who are responsible for those 600 people that are dead is George Bush and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and Joe Biden and Joe Biden.
Exactly.
And Hillary Clinton, you know, I mean, that's who's responsible and who's responsible for this mess now is Barack Obama, because he let his CIA and his Pentagon and his people start arming, you know, via the Turks and the Saudis again, everything start arming ISIS in Syria because they thought they could use ISIS against Assad.
And somehow ISIS would not cross the border over to Iraq, that imaginary line in the sand and do anything in Iraq.
So, I mean, the people who are responsible for all this are living very good lives in the United States right now, lives where they are celebrated.
They go on the Ellen DeGeneres show, whatever.
They're the ones who are responsible for 600 people, 600 men and women who are dead for the anguish of those families, for the 7000 killed, for the 9000 who's committed suicide, for the God knows how many contractors have been killed.
And then for literally the millions of people killed from Libya east to Pakistan, you know, those are the men and women responsible, not the government of Tehran, not the government of Iraq, not the government of, you know, wherever.
All right, you guys, that is the great Matthew Ho.
He is from the Center for International Policy.
And I'll urge you guys to go back and Google his name in the year 2009 in Afghanistan and see about his great, courageous whistleblowing and trying to stop Obama from doubling the Afghan war back then.
Really great stuff.
And you can read about him in my book, Fool's Aaron, too.
Thank you very much, Matthew.
Appreciate it.
All right.
Thanks, Scott.
Appreciate it, man.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org and LibertarianInstitute.org.
