10/01/14 – Murtaza Hussain – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, Scott Horton Show.
And our first guest on the show today is Murtaza Hussain.
He's a reporter for The Intercept at FirstLook.org slash The Intercept.
And here he's got a piece co-authored with Glenn Greenwald, The Fake Terror Threat Used to Justify Bombing Syria.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm good.
How are you doing?
I'm doing real good.
Appreciate you joining us today.
So, great piece here, and it's funny because it seems like they didn't even need to do this, but it's just kind of the ritual part of the American tradition.
If you're going to launch a war, you have to make up something not true in order to justify it.
Same as Libya.
No one even cared whether they had a fake Caucasus belly for Libya or not, but they came up with one just to make sure.
And so, in this case, it's the Khorasan Group.
And I had Phil Giraldi, the former CIA officer on the show, I forget, what, last Friday or something, saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, don't let them scare you with this.
It's just al-Qaeda.
Same old Al-Nusra Front, as always.
But you and Glenn have this great breakdown of, geez, it really is like the Gulf of Tonkin incident or something like this, where they put out this fake story, although it sure fell apart a lot faster than the Gulf of Tonkin story did.
But you guys just have a great breakdown of how the government leaked this story, who they leaked it to, their pets and sock puppets in the American media who beat us all over the head with us, and then how it all fell apart in just a matter of a couple of days here.
So I guess, first of all, can you start with the AP story and what was behind that?
Right, so on September 13th, AP reported a story to Ken Delaney about this group, the Khorasan Group, which was apparently plotting, or said to be plotting attacks against the U.S. homeland.
That came out on the 13th, and it was the first mention anyone had really heard of the Khorasan Group.
People who followed the issue in Syria very closely had not heard of it, and most Syrians on the ground who were interviewed had never heard of it either.
Well, all Syrians who spoke to the media, actually.
So it was kind of surprising when this narrative came up, and then in the weeks building up to the strike, you saw more official statements saying that there's a specific threat, and details about that threat, which ostensibly involved attacks against airliners, toothpaste bombs, explosive clothing.
And this kind of built up to a crescendo in the media, where you saw mainstream media and NBC talking about this quite a lot, CNN, all building up the hype of this group.
And then the strike happened, and then you saw the results.
There were statements saying the Khorasan Group has been scattered, and so forth.
And then immediately after that, the people who had been leaking these statements, or making them public, immediately walked back all their previous claims about the threat that this group posed.
First they said that, well, you know, there wasn't an imminent threat.
Then they said any plan that we discussed may have just been aspirational, quote-unquote.
And then they said that the Khorasan Group does not really exist in the sense that there's no group of people in Syria who call themselves the Khorasan Group.
It's just a name that we gave them to denote the people we wanted to attack.
So the entire narrative of the threat and the reason for a war which had to be launched without congressional authorization, it just kind of collapsed on its own.
It wasn't even that people picked it apart.
The government just, you know, pulled back their own claims.
Right.
Well, and I guess, you know, the pressure was on in this day and age with Twitter and all this kind of thing, and where someone who's a serious journalist but maybe is a little bit, you know, marginal, like Shane Harris over there at foreignpolicy.com.
Official as can be, but obviously not a big host on CBS.
But then again, once he starts to raise doubts, well, that goes out on Twitter where everybody can see it.
And once people, you know, journalists in Syria start saying no one around here has ever heard of the Khorasan Group, that kind of stuff, you know, it races around the world so quickly now.
You can see why they tried to race to go ahead and back down from it.
But, you know, it's just funny.
It just goes to show, though, they were able to get away with it for, what, two or three days anyway.
And as you say, they really, once the AP story came out, CBS and everyone else really picked it up and really beat everybody over the head with it really hard for a few days there.
All the Today Show, all the morning shows, and all the terrorism experts being paraded across Fox News and everything.
And they really made it sound like, yeah, these guys were going to attack our airplanes, like, remember that one time.
You know, here, not way over there.
Right, exactly.
They brought out all the agitprop that they usually do to, you know, build up the emotional response, like the graphics and the terrorism experts with their hypotheses of what could happen.
And it's very effective in building consensus for these kind of things because, you know, as much as, I think that when you get your news primarily from written sources or even Twitter or publications such as Foreign Policy, you end up having more nuance than other sources.
Like cable news, there's not really any space for debate or questioning it.
It's more just giving you the information right there and you have to kind of absorb it.
So I think that people, you know, the media played a very crucial role, as they have in the past, in building consensus for these strikes and helping build up sufficient hysteria.
But then they didn't do the role of journalists, which is to, you know, express skepticism about the claims before reporting them.
Right.
Yeah, that's the whole thing of it.
They can hide behind the excuse that it's just objective news.
It's a fact that officials say this.
Yeah, but they could just as easy phrase it that, well, officials claim this, but we haven't seen any evidence of it yet, which would be honest and entirely different than the way that they come across.
As you said, the words I was looking for, you nailed it, the graphics, right?
The plane in the background, the new enemy in this square over Brian Williams shoulder and all that.
Yeah, absolutely.
And it's basically, I would not say it's propaganda per se, but it's in a way functions similarly in the sense that the government can launder statements through media who are compliant.
So they can say, like you said, government official statements said this.
And if you don't caveat it with, you know, there's no evidence and there's no just a claim and just report as is, you have government claims essentially which are being reported to the media as functioning as a mouthpiece for certain people in the government.
And that's not what journalism should do.
It's not what it's supposed to do in a democracy.
And now it seems kind of strange that they decided to hit the Al-Nusra Front.
After all this washed out, was there any reason left to believe that whoever these guys were, whether they were friends of Zawahiri or Baghdadi or whoever, that they were actually plotting an attack on the United States or was the whole thing just a hoax?
So today there was some reports from Janan Musa, who's a correspondent in the Middle East, and she visited the site where the actual airstrikes happened, one of the sites that happened.
And she went through some of the debris and they found some documents in that site regarding who these people were.
And they got the full list of people who were hit in the attack, but about 14 names they found, which were part of the Al-Nusra Front and part of a special unit of the Al-Nusra Front called the Wolf Brigade.
So as far as I can determine, the United States probably wanted to target this aspect of this contingent of the Al-Nusra Front, but they didn't want to declare war on the Al-Nusra Front per se because it's very popular among the Syrian opposition because it's a very effective opposition front fighting against Bashar Assad.
So it looks like the people who were killed were Wolf Brigade individuals who may or may not have had traveled from Afghanistan to Pakistan, which is how they got the Khorasan name.
But it looks like they were going after the Al-Nusra Front.
But there was nothing in these documents that pertained to anything related to the United States.
It seemed to all pertain to their activities within Syria against Bashar Assad.
So the claim of what was going on is not to substantiate, but we have more details as to who these people were exactly.
Right, yeah, and again, the Al-Nusra Front.
And of course, Al-Nusra is still sworn loyal to Ayman al-Zawahiri, and though they haven't focused on attempting to attack the United States yet, his theory apparently still is that the U.S., the far enemy, is still a primary target.
So it's still within the realm of possibility.
But as they admitted, well, you know, we're thinking maybe they had talked about it before.
It was aspirational rather than operational.
That's becoming a cliche now.
Oh, that giant lie we told you?
Yeah, it was more aspirational than operational, they say.
And just a quick point of fact, when you say Wolf Brigade, people shouldn't be confused about Donald Rumsfeld's old Wolf Brigade or Abadi's Wolf Brigade, which is a subset of the Shiite Bata Brigade militia, a.k.a. the Iraqi Army, which would be an entirely different force here.
So I wouldn't want people to get that confused.
But please hold the line right there.
Murtaza will be right back after this break.
Everybody, with Murtaza Hussein, writing at The Intercept, firstlook.org, slash The Intercept, the fake terror threat used to justify bombing Syria.
Hey, Al, Scott Horton here.
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Oh my goodness.
Welcome back to the show, y'all.
Joe Cirincione just wrote a thing scaremongering about ISIS getting their hands on nukes.
What?
Yeah, Joe Cirincione, who debunked the lies about Iran's nuclear program for a decade straight now.
Scaremongering about ISIS.
Give me a break.
Bunch of suicide bombers are going to make atom bombs, huh?
All right.
Oh, speaking of suicide attacks, yeah, they attacked a school full of kids this morning in Syria.
I'm on the line with Murtaza Hussein from The Intercept, and he's got this great piece with Glenn Greenwald, The Fake Terror Threat Used to Justify Bombing Syria.
And it's really important that you guys get this article, read it thoroughly, pass it around on your social media, whatever.
Make sure everybody sees this, because it's not just that they debunk the lie, it's that they really go through, point by point, which media sources took these, you know, leaks from the government, published them as though it was gospel, and tried to convince everybody it's true, basically, as a propaganda effort.
And then who, you know, went to work debunking it, and the government officials who admitted that it was overblown and all of that.
It's very well put together, very important.
And one of the things I wanted to ask you about here is what you say about the sources and how they really, I think this really reads in Greenwald's voice here, the way that they spun it was as though this was the result of some hardcore investigative journalism, where they worked really hard to pry these secrets loose from these government officials, when really they're just stenographers for anonymous liars.
Right, absolutely.
And it's kind of funny, because they're acting as though, you know, the name is so secret that we can't even reveal it, but it's because the name is just made up, and they had not done any due diligence or any skepticism by these claims.
They just kind of renerged it and then packaged it as some sort of hard-hitting investigative journalism.
So, you know, when people within the government are leaking information, you have to be cognizant of the fact that they are likely, in many cases, doing it for their own benefit in some sense or to further certain policy ambitions.
It's not that the fact that you have another leaker who's giving an inside scoop on a story, you have to express skepticism, and you have to look at what the possible motives are for releasing some information.
So, you know, it was released, and then it came out, and then, you know, just as quickly as it was released, the whole thing came apart, and then the people involved, you know, if there was accountability, it would look foolish, but I don't think there will be.
So it's just them frankly repeating itself again.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, that's the crazy part here.
There's just absolutely no accountability, even in the media.
I mean, we all know better than to think there'd be accountability in government, but in the media, you would think, for example, this guy, Ken Dilanian, is that how you say it?
The AP reporter here, he was only just, you would have thought, completely and wholly disgraced right out of the business a couple of weeks ago when Ken Silverstein, formerly of Harper's and now with you guys at The Intercept, outed him as being the Western Hemisphere's greatest tool of the CIA when it comes to publishing the news.
Right, absolutely.
Of course, that didn't happen.
It just kind of, you know, things kind of continued rolling on.
Everyone brushed it off, and then, you know, he took part in the story, which was every bit as big, and he repeated the same process again.
So there's just not a meritocracy.
There's not any sort of accountability for journalistic malfeasance, and I don't think any of the mainstream journalists would put this on TV and report it on something in such a hyperbolic way that turned out to not be true.
I would be very skeptical of it and suffer any consequences for it, or even be forced to reflect on it.
There's just no memory, and there's no accountability, as I said, and it's just going to ensure that this will happen again.
Yeah.
You know, Robert Perry, one time on the show, got all philosophical talking about the old days, when there used to be these kind of tough old guys in fedoras and trench coats who would have absolutely laughed and ridiculed somebody like this, Ken Delaney, right out of the business.
He would have not lasted a day.
Certainly not after it being revealed that he checks all of his stories with the CIA before he publishes them, etc., etc., like in that Ken Silverstein piece.
That there would have been, if not from his bosses, just from the peer pressure from the other journalists, he would have been considered lower than a Soviet stooge, and out the door you go.
Your writing career is over.
Go pick up garbage or something.
But no, in America now, post-Iraq War, WMD scam, any reporter can tell any lie as long as it's the one the government wants, and there's no accountability whatsoever.
It's incredible.
Yeah, it's stunning, and it's just become completely the collegiality, quote-unquote, between journalists and between the government.
It's become so great that, yeah, the one thing you can get in trouble for is if you express skepticism about government claims and you appear unpatriotic, but if you just lie, err on the side of lying, or err on the side of believing everything the government says is true, even if you're wrong, it turns out that you've been spun for a lie, there's not really much accountability or criticism for that.
It's just considered part of the business.
Yeah, my friend Shauna said back during the lies about the Iraq War back in 2002 that it seemed like their M.O. really was, they really don't care if Murtaza Hussein or anyone else debunks their lie tomorrow.
All they care about is that they can get away with getting it out there on the nightly news without being challenged tonight.
And as long as they can get you to believe it for a day, they can do that terrible thing they were trying to do, which was why they were lying in the first place, and then everybody already knows they're liars anyway, so the fact that it goes on their reputation that they lied one more time doesn't really matter.
They don't really care.
They just keep on lying as long as they can get you to believe it for a day, even half a day sometimes.
Good enough for them.
Exactly.
In this case, they just needed a few days to conduct their strikes, and then the next time it has to happen again, they'll repeat the cycle again and it probably will work.
And then back to the reason why it was so important that they come up with this separate name for what was in essence just Al-Qaeda in Syria, the Al-Nusra Front, was because according to Roy Gutman, who I think was on the ground in Turkey at the time, writing for McClatchy Newspapers, he was saying, I think you kind of referenced this earlier too, that the Al-Nusra Front is really popular.
And so the American, I guess the Pentagon or the CIA or whoever decided it was important enough, they wanted to hit this target, but they did not want to go to war with Nusra.
They want to keep the war against ISIS and their biggest enemy, Assad.
But leave Nusra alone, even though they're the ones who are loyal to Ayman al-Zawahiri.
And so that was why they made up the name Corazon, even though, what the hell?
It's not like the locals read the AP and would be fooled by a leak to the AP anyway.
They just, you know what I mean?
They know that it was Al-Nusra, the Gabon.
They are there.
They're the Al-Nusra sympathizers we're talking about.
Exactly.
So that just makes the whole thing more puzzling, because I'm sure the American people would not have been so galled by the fact that they were striking Al-Qaeda and they certainly were not going to fool Syrians.
So what was the intention of this obfuscation which happened?
And I think part of it is to do with the fact that we've kind of, quote unquote, declared victory over Al-Qaeda many times over the last several years, because it was politically expedient to do so.
And if we have to announce that we're still attacking Al-Qaeda operatives and there's still a threat to us directly, then it says, well, what the hell have you been doing for the last 13 years?
Why have you made no progress on this issue, or so little progress, that we're still facing a moral danger from this group?
So I think that may have been part of the motivation as well, to simply shape the domestic discussion about us.
Their adversaries cannot say, well, why is the battle against Al-Qaeda, why are you losing it, or why is it still menacing us, if we've committed so much time and resources to it?
Right.
Yeah, well, and Obama actually rightly has said, listen, every time a Sunni with a rifle declares a jihad somewhere and declares that they're loyal to Al-Qaeda somewhere, we're not going to be foolish enough to go racing.
He's learned that lesson.
He's not really changed his policy that much.
Well, kind of.
I mean, look at Libya and Mali.
He didn't go racing headlong into there chasing after his consequences, not yet anyway.
And so he's smart to say that, but then at the same time, he's been helping and America's satellite states have been helping make the Mujahideen war in Syria a much bigger deal than it would have been on its own.
And so it's really hard to, especially at this point, but even for the last couple of years, it's been really pretty much a lie to say, oh, don't worry, this isn't Al-Qaeda, this isn't a big deal, this is just another local little insurgency that we're going to try to ignore, because they've made it humongous.
Right, they have made it humongous.
And the point you made about anyone who just seemingly declares allegiance to Al-Qaeda, it's a bit more complicated in some senses, because a lot of Muslim people, well, some reporters on the ground have suggested, although they're nominally associated with Nusra, it's more so out of Nusra's effectiveness at fighting the government of Bashar Assad and the vast majority of them don't necessarily have contact with Al-Qaeda Central, even though theoretically they've given allegiance to them.
So it's complicated, and I think this is another reason why they wanted to sort of designate this Wolf Brigade slash Khorasan group as their enemy, although no one's going to buy that for many reasons, because they wanted to have some token differentiation.
But again, how effective that will be, it's hard to say.
Right.
Well, we just need to train up the right moderates and everything will be fine, I think.
Yeah, of course, as always.
All right.
Hey, listen, thanks very much for your time on the show today.
I really appreciate it.
Oh, thanks for having me.
All right, Shell, that's Murtaza Hussain.
He's writing for The Intercept at firstlook.org slash theintercept.
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