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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The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got Dave DeCamp, Assistant News Editor at antiwar.com, and man, he's got a bunch of them here, and we're going to talk about some of them.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Dave?
I'm good, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
Well, of course, happy to have you here, and there's so much important stuff to talk about, but just one moment ago, you told me that you just finished writing one.
I'm curious about what that's about.
Well- It'll be up there by the time people hear this.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I just put it up.
The National Security Advisor, Robert O'Brien, said again today on Friday the 16th that the U.S. plan for Afghanistan is to have troops down to 2,500 by early spring next year.
No, I'm sorry, not by the spring, by early 2021, and there's been a lot of confusion about the Afghanistan numbers.
President Trump recently tweeted that he wants all troops to be home by Christmas, which is something I addressed in my recent viewpoint, and it came right after O'Brien said the number was going to be 2,500 by early next year, and he took a little shot at the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, because he said in an NPR interview earlier this week that Robert O'Brien's numbers were speculation.
Trump's people kind of framed this as Milley going against Trump, but he really didn't.
He was asked to comment on Trump's Christmas deadline, and Milley, he really dodged the question.
He said, you know, withdrawals are conditions-based.
We plan to have like 4,000 left by the end of, you know, by the election, which is the plan right now.
And he said any withdrawals up to president, ultimately up to the president.
But yes, so hopefully, you know, Trump's Christmas deadline, that was just, you know, a tweet, an effort to get some, score some points for the election.
But hopefully, you know, this withdrawal does go through eventually.
Well, and I'm sorry, you said down to 2,100 by early next year?
Yeah, 2,500.
2,500.
So, I mean, that's right on schedule for abiding by the deal, which would be to get the last of them out by May, is what it sounds like.
So in other words, nothing's changed at all.
Yeah, exactly.
So it lines up with the plan that's in effect right now.
And then, as you say, it lines up, too, with Trump's tweet being just hot air for electoral purposes rather than any attempt to really speed up the timeline here.
Yeah.
And O'Brien addressed the tweet, too.
He was asked, he said that the troops always want to be home by Christmas, and President Trump wants them home by Christmas, but he just wants to get them out as soon as possible.
So I mean, hopefully that's true.
Well, and by the way, just a minor point, well, not that minor, Milley is not in the chain of command.
He is essentially just a military advisor to the president, but authority does not travel through him.
It goes from the Secretary of Defense to the military chiefs themselves.
And so he could say whatever he wants, doesn't really mean a thing.
He's in no position to belay any order of anyone at any level, really.
So, you know, context for him talking about that.
But then, as you're saying, he wasn't really challenging Trump.
He was just stating the truth, that, yeah, you know, we'll determine our numbers on this kind of fluctuating basis as we see fit between now and the final withdrawal, which is the same as it ever was, right?
Yeah.
And everybody mischaracterized what he said one way or the other.
Like I was reading on CNN, they said, oh, he said, like, he has no idea what Trump's talking about, which isn't what he said.
And then Tucker Carlson said, oh, it's in a direct, you know, directly disobeying the president.
But that's it.
Just it just wasn't the case.
Although, as we talked about, and I guess this was a different piece that you wrote where they came out was AP Reuters and two or three others had anonymous sources saying essentially, yeah, that ain't happening.
And that was in regards to the tweet, right?
Yeah, that's true.
So that we were flooded with like a deluge of stories of anonymous officials, of anonymous U.S. officials and, you know, think tankers saying like, oh, he just gave up what leverage the U.S. and Afghan government have over the Taliban and just saying how reckless it was.
So yeah, I mean, easy mistake to make that what Millie said, you know, could have been characterized with a whole lot of them that were all kind of coming out and, you know, disputing Trump to one degree or another on it.
Yeah.
And that does show what we're up against when, you know, Trump just fires off a tweet and he has this plan.
And then, you know, all the anonymous officials call their stenographers in the media.
Yeah.
So let's go back to that in a second.
That's your recent viewpoint.
Tweets are not enough.
It's time to end some wars already, which is great.
But let's stick with Afghanistan because you have this news piece, too.
And this is really important news to cover, which is the recent, I guess, my understanding is a relatively major offensive.
Was it really an attempt by the Taliban to take Lashkar Gah, the provincial province?
I mean, pardon me, the provincial capital of the Helmand province or, you know, it was something along those lines, right?
They scrambled American A-10s to go over there and blast the hell out of them and turn them Yeah.
Yeah.
It's tough to really know exactly what the Taliban's intention was.
But part of the understanding of the peace deal is that they're not supposed to launch any major offensives or anything like in urban areas from the Taliban.
The Taliban's from their side, they said that they were just retaking areas that were taken from them by the Afghan government like a few months ago.
They attacked a lot of security checkpoints outside that city.
I see.
Yeah.
And then...
And the Taliban, by the way, they control almost all of that province, which was almost entirely a rural province, except for Lashkar Gah and Sanjan and a couple of other small towns.
But...
Yeah.
And then it's so it's tough to really know how big the offensive was, but a lot of there was a lot of fighting.
Thousands were displaced and they say about 70 Taliban fighters were killed.
But that's the number from the Afghan government.
So but then they they they launched a little counteroffensive with the support, air support from the U.S.
So and it was the first time since June that the U.S. directly attacked the Taliban or at least admitted to it.
There could have been other instances.
But the news here is that the Americans talked to the Taliban and said, OK, wait a minute, you guys stop and we'll stop and let's stay on the deal here, because this could ruin the deal.
And they agreed to back down.
Yeah, that's the news from yesterday's Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. envoy for the peace process, said that, yeah, they they reached an agreement with the Taliban to just like kind of reset, as he put it, reduce operations, because, I mean, there's been fighting going on this whole time.
But this this did.
These were some pretty big clashes.
Hey, I'll check it out.
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All right.
All right.
Now, back to tweets are not enough.
The president's been jerking everybody's chain.
He put out another one about Somalia.
Was it a tweet or some other statement he made about he wants to get out of Somalia to.
So the Somalia that came from Bloomberg.
Some anonymous officials said that President Trump is looking to withdraw hundreds of troops from Somalia.
And it reminds me of all those stories all those years about how we're about to find bin Laden and get him.
Yeah.
So listen to me when you do.
You know what I mean?
And Trump does this all the time.
The headline says Trump wants to order the troops out of somewhere.
Oh, he does.
Huh?
All right.
Well, I got some errands to run.
Y'all let me know if something actually happens.
Yeah.
I know.
Yeah.
And this does kind of seem like this leak of information to Bloomberg kind of seems like an effort to tamp it down, because then there's all these stories.
There's one really bad one in The New York Times about how Al Shabab is like the largest major Al Qaeda affiliate and they want to attack the homeland and stuff.
Shaking him on the boots.
And that war is only in the news, I mean, when Trump's thinking about, you know, pulling out of it.
But I haven't seen any official statements about it or anything from Trump.
But I saw him, like, tweet, retweet something about Somalia.
And he said, like, it's in, you know, it's in the works with an exclamation point or something.
So who knows?
Yeah.
So that's what's going on with Somalia.
And according to that Bloomberg story, because the troop numbers are hard to get these days, they said that there's 700 U.S. troops in Somalia now.
And the Trump administration sent most or all of them, according to these officials.
Hmm.
Yeah.
I mean, he did send the infantry.
I mean, it was you had SOCOM there for a long time.
But he did send infantry, I guess, to fight and for some training.
I'm not exactly sure what all they're doing there, but.
And, you know, it is, I guess, part of the record if you consider, you know, the opposition media like The Washington Post, part of the record that they reported that he wanted out of Somalia.
He didn't believe in it.
He didn't understand why we were there.
He didn't want to be there.
And James Mattis threatened him with, oh, well, they could blow up Times Square.
And of course, the Times Square attack, the luckily failed attack of 2010, was direct retaliation for the drone war in Pakistan.
The drone war in Pakistan wasn't preventing it, it caused it.
And it was actually the Pakistani Taliban that had never attacked us before that recruited the guy to do it.
So how do you like that?
And here.
Yeah.
But anyway, and then so he tells Trump, you have no choice.
And that's how the article ends.
You have no choice.
And then Trump, I guess, just shrugs and says, fine, you can have all the troops you want.
Bad dog.
Yep.
And so a few thousand more people dead since then and accomplished, you know, the same as before.
Really.
I don't think the status quo has changed on the ground there at all.
No.
And another thing that I covered a few months ago, it just actually came from your friend, Charlie Savage at The New York Times, that the U.S. is looking to expand the drone war into Kenya.
Now, again, you know, this came from The New York Times anonymous officials, but it was a more believable story.
Yeah.
It hasn't been confirmed because it's really just an area that nobody is covering.
I mean, except for Nick Tursi.
I think he wrote something about it at The Intercept.
And it is believable that the U.S. would want to be able to launch drone strikes in Kenya because there is Al Shabaab there.
And then that goes to my point that I made in my opinion piece.
Even if Trump does withdraw a few hundred troops from Somalia, the war, it's a drone war that is being waged there.
I don't think that that would, like, would that be reduced if Trump does this withdrawal or would it end or what?
These are the questions that need to be answered.
But unfortunately, it's just such an underreported war that nobody's asking them.
Yeah.
Look, I mean, obviously, as your whole article is about here, he understands that it's good politics to be anti-war, but, you know, it's bad politics to really end wars because that would really make the military mad.
Yeah.
So, you know, split the difference, be everything to everybody, and it's good enough for everybody for some reason, just barely has been.
But yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if he does another four years and we still got troops in Afghanistan and Somalia, Iraq, Syria, and more and more throughout, Chad and Niger and all the rest too.
And hell, if we had a war with Iran either.
Yeah.
Yeah, we've been very close a couple of times.
And another point I made was the, he had a chance to end a war, to end probably the worst, the most horrific war going on right now in Yemen.
He, you know, he had the chance falling to his lap to end a war.
Congress.
Yeah.
There was a bipartisan push in Congress to end a war.
I mean, when does that happen?
And he vetoed it, and then he did it again when they tried to ban arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and he vetoed those resolutions.
And you know, there's some good stuff going on with the, well, not really, there's like a peace process kind of being played out between the Houthis and the UN-backed government.
But there's not, I don't think that that war is going to end anytime soon, unless the U.S. really stops supporting it.
Yeah, absolutely right.
Or at least I haven't seen any real indication.
You know, I saw they're doing some prisoner swaps and whatever, but they've had so many opportunities this whole time.
And then, but meanwhile, yeah, president this, that, or the other one on this side could say, that's it, your highness, we're done, you're done.
And it's over.
Yeah.
Simple as that.
And you know what, too, which, by the way, just so nobody gets the wrong impression about the Democrats here, they passed their little resolutions, which was historic, really.
I shouldn't just belittle it, you know, the War Powers Act resolutions.
But they passed them as, whatchacallit, not concurrent, but the other kind, which meant that he can veto it.
But if they pass it as a concurrent resolution, then he can't.
And so they had their out.
And then Pelosi, you know, they passed some resolutions, I think, in the House and the Senate to end the war in the NDAA and to defund it.
But then in the conference committee, they took all that out.
And so that's the Democratic Party leadership that took all that out.
When they could have right then, they could have just said, listen, you know, we can't really stop you, but we can stop you from spending any money on it.
And that's essentially the same thing.
And that's why they put in the Constitution that the House of Representatives has that power specifically for that reason, you know, so they can call an absolute halt to government programs that the people don't want, including wars.
And they didn't do that.
So anyway, by the way, not to pick on Trump too much in that way either, even though he does belong beneath the prison for helping to be an accomplice to this genocide that Obama and Biden started in 2015.
And Biden says he was against it, but he sure wasn't able to stop Obama from doing it.
So why would he be able to stop the Pentagon or anybody else or the Saudis or anybody else?
But then you've been covering this important story in the New York Post.
And I'll just say at the outset here, I don't like Rudy Giuliani and I'm suspicious of the chain of custody here kind of thing.
I'm not really sure.
But I saw the reporter from the New York Post on Tucker Carlson's show and she said, trust me, man, these are real emails and simple as that.
I'm going back to work on them and totally believable to me that she knows what she's got is legit.
And of course, the Bidens have not disputed the authenticity of any of the emails so far, at least.
But there's more than the one big story.
But I guess there's two big stories so far.
And then there's the story of the Twitter and Facebook censorship of them both.
And you've written about all three.
So now talk, please.
Yeah, well, so the story, I mean, I kind of focused on the censorship because it's a very dangerous precedent that's been set.
Because Twitter, I think they started this policy in 2018, they haven't enforced it until now, but I know YouTube added a similar policy this year, that they wouldn't allow data from hacked material to be spread.
So that was the excuse that they used to block the Hunter Biden story, the first New York Post one about the.
That showed an email that alleged Joe Biden met with a Ukrainian gas executive, the company that Hunter got a job for.
But and Twitter, which he is flatly denied repeatedly.
Yeah, yeah, true.
And Twitter just blocked it like you couldn't even tweet.
Now I think tweeting it says it's like a dangerous link.
But and what's dangerous about this is that it's these hacked materials rules.
It's obviously a response to the DNC emails that were published by WikiLeaks in 2016.
That it's the jury's still out if they if it was a hack or not, or if it was the Russians or not.
I mean, not in the liberal mainstream media.
In their minds, they're set that it was a Russian hack, but none of them really reported on the declassified House Intelligence Committee transcripts from 2017 that were declassified this year that the cybersecurity from CrowdStrike were the claim that it was Russian, Russia that hacked the DNC doesn't have proof that it was ever exfiltrated, I think was the term that they use that they used.
And you know, for the Russian for attributing it to Russia, they said, oh, it's what they usually say with the Department of Homeland Security says it's like similar patterns and techniques that they've seen Russia use before.
But anyway, so this is dangerous, because this could prevent WikiLeaks style like dumps date massive data dumps from being shared on the internet.
I mean, imagine if the Manning leaks happened, and everybody, Facebook and Twitter just blocked it.
A lot of that's where a lot of people get their news these days.
And what if the New York Times starts to refuse to, well, I guess they publish Trump's tax returns.
But what if they start following this policy, too, you know, it's just a really slippery slope.
Yeah, I mean, that's the whole thing is obvious picking and choosing here.
I like where Greenwald just says, Well, look here as a thought experiment, what if they censored all criticism of Trump?
But they promoted all criticism of Biden?
How would you feel then?
All right, then?
So yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And you talk about unverified things that are published all the time.
Now, of course, I mean, look, they, and this is, of course, always when the mainstream media tries to shout conspiracy theorist, whether the people they're accusing really are being kooks or not.
There's nobody worse than them.
You know what I mean?
Geez, I don't know.
You guys said Saddam was in on it with Osama and the Ayatollah and Kim Jong Il at the same time coming to get me.
So I'm not sure why I should believe you about anything.
And they can never live that down, of course.
And Russiagate and Syria for what, six, seven, eight years or something pushing to this day that Al Qaeda in Syria are just moderate, good guy, rebel freedom fighters.
I mean, but anyway, yeah, no, you're a conspiracy kook, though, when you don't believe them.
That's what it is.
Yeah.
And with the Hunter Biden stuff, I mean, because to me, the the corruption there is that the U.S. orchestrated a coup, rearranged the government in the country, and then Hunter got his job.
And that's something like the right wing, the conservatives, they don't go back that far.
Right.
Because they don't know anything about it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But so it's just obvious on its face corruption.
But, you know, I guess they have to prove that Biden fired that prosecutor, got the prosecutor fired.
But now it's been debunked.
If you if you go on the Washington Post or New York Times, it'll be like, oh, the debunked conspiracy theory that Joe Biden, it's just it's just ridiculous.
Yeah.
Well, so and you notice, by the way, here, Donald Trump is the third president in American history ever to be impeached.
And he's running for president.
And the Democrats aren't using that against him.
And why not?
It's because he's being impeached for pursuing a criminal investigation into Joe Biden and his son, who are criminals, who broke the law and who obviously are essentially the epitome of Washington, D.C. corruption.
And so, oops.
Yeah.
I wonder if maybe that was not the best thing to make an impeachment case out of.
They should have stuck with obstruction of justice on the Russiagate case or something like that instead of centering it all on their front runners.
Corruption.
Huh?
Yeah.
That really says a lot that they're not even saying they're not even talking about impeachment anymore.
And they did.
Yeah.
And they impeached the president.
It's like and they still call him a Russian agent, but it's all just by innuendo and garbage.
You know, I don't know if you saw where I'm sure you probably did.
I was trolling Greenwald's Twitter.
I'm still not logging in, but occasionally I look at a couple of tweets and he was showing where Jonathan Chait is saying, well, you know, obviously the Russians gave this stuff to Rudy Giuliani.
The Russians, I guess they must have given it to the computer repair man.
And then the computer repair man, they must have suggested to him to give it to Giuliani.
I don't know.
He's just making it up.
So it doesn't matter what his argument is.
Yeah.
I mean, there's a whole story in NBC News that the FBI is investigating if it was a foreign intelligence operation, the whole thing.
Well, sources, two sources said that.
Much more likely to me that crackhead Hunter just forgot what he did with his laptop and went and bought himself a new one, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
If you make 50 grand a month or however much you made, you know.
But to be fair, Giuliani and Steve Bannon was involved, too.
And I don't know if you've been following Steve Bannon, his China crusade that he's been on for the past year.
He's a real hawk on it.
But no, I haven't been following it.
Go ahead.
I mean, it's just like cartoonish.
This Chinese exiled billionaire, his name's Guo Wenwei, I think is how you say his name.
He has been bankrolling Bannon's podcast and or his daily radio show.
And that's nice.
I mean, yeah, yeah.
But when Bannon got arrested for the for the he got arrested for that border wall GoFundMe thing, apparently they skimmed some off the top.
He was on this this billionaire's yacht.
He was like living on his yacht for like months before.
And they they've like declared a new they call it the new federal state of China.
I saw it when I was in New York.
I was where I used to before I just started declaring an official opposition government in exile.
Is that what you just said?
Yeah.
And I saw him do it.
I was working.
I just I just left my old job at the stand on a ferry to work full time for any word I come.
I was on the ferry.
I see banners that say like, oh, new congratulations to the new federal state of China.
And then I go online, I see a live stream, Steve Bannon and this Chinese billionaire and floating on a boat in front of the Statue of Liberty, reading like a new constitution.
You got video of that?
Yeah, yeah, I can find it.
Sweet.
But you should include that in one of your pieces, man.
I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
That's funny.
I did.
I wrote I wrote a piece on it.
OK.
I didn't see the video.
It's just it's just cartoonish stuff.
And they they bankrolled this like supposed coronavirus whistleblower.
She made it on Tucker and stuff.
And like, yeah, it's just all she she like released some report that said the the virus was made in a lab and whatever.
But yeah, I mean, just seeing that they're behind it makes me just think it's fake.
I mean, I could like there we've published some stuff by Sam Husseini about how bio warfare and stuff.
It's a real concern.
And it shouldn't just be dismissed as a conspiracy theory.
But this stuff is just a joke that they're putting out, you know.
And so, yeah, so Steve Bannon, I mean, I used to like kind of respect him.
I thought he was like the mastermind.
I mean, what he did with the Trump campaign, how they capitalized on what was going on was pretty genius.
But it seems like he's just kind of lost it now because he wants regime change.
He says it, you know, he goes after neocons.
It's this kind of this populist right wing thing that they go after the neocons for the war in Iraq and stuff.
But he calls for regime change in Beijing.
He says that the Trump administration, the Trump, the White House should follow this policy.
I mean, that's just like that would make the war in Iraq look like nothing, you know.
Yeah.
Of course, it's completely crazy.
They got H-bombs.
That's already the end of the argument.
Everybody knows that.
What's to even talk about?
You can't pick that kind of fight.
They might use their H-bombs.
So there you go.
But I guess if you got a billionaire friend who, you know, wants to take the government down, they'll just go along with it.
Or at least wants to pay you a lot of money to talk that way.
And you know, regardless of whatever actually happens.
But yeah, as far as how fake this is, I mean, I certainly have to be suspicious of the chain of custody here.
But I mean, it seems like they got access to the guy's email account, whether it's pop or IMAP or what, you know, they seem to have some real stuff here.
And then, I mean, they're, they're pretty bad, right?
I mean, Biden said that he had nothing to do with his son's business dealings in Ukraine.
And then there's a picture of him golfing with one of these guys.
And then now there's an email about him meeting another one.
And they said their denial was, well, it's not on his calendar.
But then they said, but yeah, I mean, he might have met with him.
Which why not lie more and better?
I don't know.
They didn't even really try to deny it.
I guess they presume there's more evidence to be found.
So why lie now?
You'd just get caught later, maybe sooner.
And then, you know, this, I don't know, it could be fake, but so far, they're not disputing the authenticity of it.
And then, can you talk about the China one?
There's a second story, maybe a third by now, I don't know.
Yeah.
The second story was about Hunter Biden.
He was in business with some people in China.
It just looks like he was making some money in China.
And he probably got the opportunity because of his connections and his dad being the vice president and stuff.
But it doesn't really have any, like, there's no proof of corruption in it.
It's just emails talking about doing business in China.
So it's, I don't know.
But it plays on the whole, you know, if Biden wins and we're going to turn into China thing that Trump's going with.
Right.
Yeah, I'm not too concerned about that much.
All right.
I'm sorry, because we didn't get a chance to talk about all of the fighting in the Caucasus and we didn't get to talk about what's going on in Sudan.
And we didn't get to talk about the Democrats trying to stop Trump from pulling out of Germany, which makes me angry, but we got to go.
So everybody go look at news.antiwar.com and you'll find Dave DeCamp there writing with Jason Ditz.
News.antiwar.com.
Thanks, buddy.
All right.
Thanks, Scott.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
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