10/07/14 – Mitchell Prothero – The Scott Horton Show

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Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
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Our first guest today is Mitchell Prothero, reporting for McClatchy Newspapers.
McClatchyDC.com out of Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm doing okay.
How are you doing, Scott?
I'm doing real good.
Appreciate you joining us on the show again.
A lot of great journalism from you lately, and I guess let's start with your big scoop.
It's not the biggest one in the scheme of things in the war, but it sure is a big story for you.
French agent who defected to Al-Qaeda was a target of that initial round of airstrikes in Syria.
So two big things there.
Do tell.
Yeah, it was kind of a crazy story, and it came from a roundabout way.
Basically, we were talking to Syrian rebels that had been vetted and trained by, we assume the Americans, but we'd say the western-backed rebel groups.
These guys started complaining that they'd been tracking this Frenchman, who was a kind of guy who'd been running a sellout of a mosque in Idlib, and that they were preparing a snatch operation to kidnap him when the bombing happened.
They were all irritated that nobody had warned them the bombing was going to happen, and they said the guy got away.
So I started looking into it, and basically it came out that at least at some point, he had received significant training from the French, either through the military or through their external security service, basically intel, and that at some point, he'd gone rogue and had joined Al-Qaeda.
According to U.S. officials yesterday confirmed to ABC News that he's a high-ranking member of Al-Qaeda and that he's got extensive tradecraft experience and probably had a pretty high rank in either the French military or the French secret services.
Wow.
Did anybody tell you how long this guy worked for the French government before he defected?
This thing is so, honestly, it's so crazy.
We've really only got the tip of the story at this point.
I'll be the first to admit it, and I'm working on it 24 hours a day at this stage to try to dig out more on him.
No, we don't know that.
We don't exactly know what he did for the French either.
The range could go from, let's say, he was just doing his national service and was a conscript, essentially, who'd been assigned to military intelligence and just made coffee, in which case it's still kind of a big deal because a guy like that's very familiar with the capabilities and practices and tradecraft of Western intelligence.
So he'd be considered an invaluable asset to Al-Qaeda.
And that's best-case scenario.
That's the best-case scenario.
The worst-case scenario is you go up the ladder.
I've heard conflicting reports, and some people have explained that it may very well be that all of these things are true.
That we even see this in the American or British intelligence and special forces.
You get a guy, let's say, who's in Delta or the British SAS.
He'll get assigned to work with the CIA or MI5 or MI6 for a while.
Then he'll bounce to another unit.
We jokingly call them the secret squirrels.
And they sort of move around a lot depending on their expertise and what the missions are and what are needed and sort of slapped together as task forces.
You know, in Iraq, maybe not today, but we're probably headed in that direction.
But back in like 2003 to 2010, there'd be these task force units, which would be a mix of CIA, SEAL Team 6, Delta Force, you know, guys who know how to fly.
And even like Ranger Regiment guys who would be providing, you know, what we'd say trigger-puller security, you know, actual straight-up normal soldiers that are pretty well trained.
All in a mix as a task force out there looking for high-value targets.
So it's a possibility that he is one of these types of guys.
And that's why we have so many different reports on his background.
But we're in the middle of determining that.
I'm working on it.
And from what I can tell, I took a lot of my French colleagues by surprise.
And they all appear to be working overtime on it as well at this stage.
Right.
Yeah.
And again, it's worth mentioning, as you already did, that this was confirmed very quickly by James Gordon Meek over there at ABC News.
So if anybody wanted to doubt it, they can forget it.
Right.
Well, it was even funny because early on, you know, obviously, you know, Europe's ahead of the U.S.
So, you know, we dropped the story on Sunday night for the Monday newspapers.
And so I had all day listening to France denounce it and claim it wasn't true.
But their claims became increasingly bizarre.
It started off as a flat denial.
Absolutely no way.
I think a spokesman for the defense ministry even called me wacky at one point, which I am kind of wacky, so that's fair.
But then it devolved into this hilarious parsing of exactly what it means to be a French intelligence agent.
One guy was trying to feed the idea that this was just a guy who used to lift weights with special forces soldiers and had inflated his resume when he went and joined al-Qaeda, which, you know, I'm willing to actually entertain that as a possibility.
I mean, it wouldn't be the first time that American intelligence has puffed somebody up to be bigger than they really are as a threat, you know, whether by accident or to sort of gin up, you know, enthusiasm for the war on terror.
But they just started parsing everything so completely that even French journalists were calling me up laughing, saying, you know, we're trying to match or beat your story, and all the French government's doing is convincing us that you're right.
Like with their denials, it becomes somewhat black comedy.
But then, you know, yeah, Meek came out with, you know, obviously he and I are colleagues and know each other, have a lot of respect for his work, but we are a little bit of competitors.
So when he dropped it, it was kind of funny.
And at that point, the French just sort of went quiet.
Two American officials did tell him that this is absolutely true.
They went further than my guys.
Keep in mind, I did not get this from the American government at all.
Some people have speculated that this had been a slap at Hollandaise, French President Hollandaise, for, you know, refusing to bomb Syria from the Americans.
I can promise that was not the case at all.
My reporting came strictly, at least initially, from Syrian rebels and then European intelligence agencies who were not French, who had been basically warned about this guy and were familiar with it.
And, you know, nobody really wanted to talk.
The French are acting a little embarrassed right now.
And honestly, I understand why, but they shouldn't be.
You know, when you're talking about a huge country like, you know, France, they've got a very large intelligence service that's very well known for its professionalism and aggressiveness.
You know, any country can lose a guy.
You know, the United States had Nidal Hussein shoot up Fort Hood, you know, input output center, killing, I think, 13 people.
You know, that doesn't reflect on the U.S. military any more than this reflects on the French intelligence services.
Sometimes guys just go rogue.
Yeah.
Now, and it's from your Syrian rebel sources that tell you that they were targeted.
He was targeted that night and that he survived.
Is that right?
Everybody's agreed he survived.
And now these are the strikes against the Al-Nusra Front where they came up with the name Corazon Group to try to differentiate and all that.
Right.
The Corazon Group.
Exactly.
He's a member of what U.S. intelligence.
Now we've cleared all that up.
There was some confusion the first week there.
I think CENTCOM didn't do a very good job in their press releases.
And I actually don't even think there's anything nefarious to it.
But what had come out was, you know, U.S. intelligence guys had nicknamed a group of guys who were what we call core al-Qaeda operatives, dudes who'd been, you know, run around the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan, who were close to the central commander, even part of it, of Zawahiri and back when he was alive, Osama bin Laden.
Some of these guys had, you know, in the past year or so, relocated to Syria, which is fairly logical that they would.
Pakistan and Afghanistan have U.S. troops and drones flying all over the place.
And let's face it, it's in kind of the middle of nowhere.
It's a little bit harder to run operations from a place like that compared to Syria, where, you know, it's a wide open battlefield.
Bunch of groups are running all over the place.
And there's a large influx of new possible recruits for them to take advantage of.
So some of these guys had relocated.
And as U.S. intelligence was tracking them, they nicknamed them the core al-Qaeda group.
All right.
You know what?
I'm just going to blow this break and keep recording you, because I got at least a half hour worth of stuff to talk about with you.
Hey, everybody.
Sorry, I know it sounds bad for the live show, but you'll be able to hear the archive of the whole thing later if you want.
And we'll be right back with the end of the interview anyway.
It's Mitchell Prothero, McClatchyDC.com.
And now, but these strikes when they were targeting the Khorasan group, these core guys who you were saying, you know, friends of Zawahiri and so forth who had relocated west, that the Frenchman was running around with them.
And maybe he was the reason that they were targeted.
I haven't been told that he was the expressed reason, that he was the absolute only reason.
I think that this, you know, let's call him a cell of al-Qaeda guys, just to simplify things.
You know, al-Qaeda's at war with the West.
They've attacked the West a bunch.
And America's made it clear that where they would find al-Qaeda guys, they're going to try to kill or capture them.
So these are al-Qaeda guys that are operating in Syria.
They've been operating under the protection of Nusra, who by their own admission is the Syrian wing of al-Qaeda, even if they have said that they will not target Western interests.
At least that's what they'd said before the bombing, that they were just going to focus on getting rid of Assad.
But he's definitely in a high leadership position in this group.
The Syrian rebels told me that he commanded at least five or six guys that were working together.
They clearly appeared to be specialists.
U.S. intelligence says he's a pretty high-ranking guy.
And even today, I'm seeing leaks in the French press where they're still trying to claim that this guy is not a former official agent of the DGSE, which is equivalent of the CIA for the French government, that he's not officially an agent of that group, which I actually never said.
In the story, I said that some people had speculated he might have been or that he'd been assigned to them.
But they are even admitting that there's a guy who is French who might have some sort of tie to the French government at some point, who is also a high-ranking leader within al-Qaeda.
So, you can't parse it down too much.
There's a cell of al-Qaeda guys, and he's a prominent, apparently quite skilled commander in that group.
And now, after all the big hype, they told the New York Times that, oh, yeah, and the plot was basically just aspirational rather than operational, which is becoming a cliche now.
We hear that so much on the backpedaling from some of the orange alerts we've had to suffer over the years here.
And it seems like that really was just to put on, or, you know, I guess they were taking advantage of the situation to go ahead and hit these guys that they wanted to hit.
But was there any indication of an imminent threat that somehow these guys were going to leapfrog over Turkey and land in Western Europe?
Well, you know, I wrote a story about this about a week and a half ago where, you know, European allies weren't briefed on an imminent threat.
So, I kind of wonder why the U.S. is making a big deal about that, or why they were, or even why anybody's making a big deal about it at all.
The simple fact is America's at war with al-Qaeda, and al-Qaeda has tried to kill Americans and has successfully done so on several big occasions.
And America's made it clear that they're going to kill or capture al-Qaeda guys whenever they get the chance.
Well, you know, it was Roy, I think, who explained it better than anybody.
Roy Gutman at McClatchy, your colleague there, who said, well, the reason they called it Khorasan was because, as though this was going to fool the Nusra people on the ground, I don't know, but I could see this being the American government decision.
They didn't want to outright declare war on al-Nusra.
They're trying to differentiate al-Nusra from al-Qaeda.
So they're saying, well, no, we're just killing these few guys who are associated with al-Nusra, but they're the Khorasan group because they're not at war with al-Qaeda.
They'd rather fight the Islamic State that hasn't ever attacked the United States.
Ignore the al-Nusra front that is openly loyal to Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Well, I mean, look, at the end of the day, Nusra works with a lot of rebels that we work with, and they're really pissed off that Nusra was attacked.
But I'd also say James Foley's parents would disagree with you that the Islamic State's never attacked America.
Oh, well, I mean, no, that's a good point.
That's a good point.
They didn't kill American hostages.
And they're going to.
And the simple fact is these guys have declared war on America.
So, you know, the fact is you've got two different groups of jihadis, both who have total aspirations to kill Americans.
They just might be busy right now.
Well, see, my point wasn't really acquitting the Islamic State as much as implicating al-Nusra and the idea that somehow the al-Nusra are the warm, cuddly, somewhat moderate, if not completely moderate FSA guys.
Well, the thing is, I mean, I just I don't know about that, really.
I think that the U.S. has to walk a bit of a line in order not to alienate some of their Syrian allies.
But keep in mind, the United States put out a specially designated terrorist hit notice on Nusra the second they were formed.
From the second Nusra's announced its existence, America has described them as al-Qaeda in Iraq, which has now split into Nusra or the Islamic State and called them essentially they're just al-Qaeda just because they're not targeting U.S. interests right now.
They're focusing on Bashar al-Assad.
These guys follow Ayman Zawahiri.
They follow bin Laden's ideology.
They're Salafi jihadists, and they do not mean well to the West.
They've just simply focused as a group on Assad.
So, you know, a good counter argument is, well, who cares if they're not attacking us now?
I mean, they're guys that are going to.
They've literally announced if you ask a Nusra guy, are you al-Qaeda?
He will say yes.
Do you follow Ayman Zawahiri and bin Laden?
Did you support 9-11?
Yes.
Would you like to see another 9-11?
Absolutely.
Are you going to do it yourself?
No, I'm busy fighting Bashar al-Assad.
The U.S. has been very clear on that.
And in fact, I was one of the people early on who criticized them because I felt like if Nusra wasn't going to be causing international jihadist aspirational problems and they were working quite well with the other rebel groups, why not leave them alone?
But the minute they dropped that designation on them, it became essentially impossible for the U.S. to support the rebels because now you can't work with a guy who works with Nusra.
It's material support for terrorism.
Sure.
Well, it's really complicated the U.S. effort in order to support the rebels.
So, you know, this is something that I don't know whether they regret it, but in walking it back, I really felt like they walked it back in order to appease guys that they're trying to work with on the ground who will tell you flat out, we don't have a problem with Nusra.
You know, like most of America's Syria rebel allies don't have a problem with Nusra.
But at the same time, it's just kind of weird because if you talk to a Nusra guy, as I have, they'll tell you flat out they love bin Laden and think 9-11 was great and hope another one happens.
Right.
Yeah.
The mystery is why America's allies with people who are allies with Nusra at all.
And before there's no other choice, there's nobody else to be aligned with.
And the other thing I point out is, America's not really aligned with these guys in the sense that they're not helping them.
When everybody, I mean, the amount of help that America's given to the Syrian rebels has come down to like, what?
Less than a thousand guys and 150,000 men, roughly, battle space.
This is why America is not intervening in the Syrian civil war.
It's why they're not bombing Assad.
It's because they don't want Nusra to win.
And they've made that absolutely clear.
Like, the simple fact is America is not going to bomb unless something radically changes on the ground.
They're not going to target the Assad regime because as much as they despise it, they really do not want to see Nusra or ISIS win.
And they think that'll be worse.
Well, now, but on the other hand, going back, I mean, when Joe Biden says, hey, Turkey and Qatar and UAE and Saudi have been doing this all along.
What he's really trying to say is, hey, don't look at who's the empire that they are all satellite states of.
That even the New York Times has been saying for now, count them, three years straight, the CIA is coordinating this effort and working to bring all their money and guns.
And that's what makes it supposedly deniable, even though everybody knows that Uncle Sam's been behind it all along since 2011.
I do this for a living, and I don't know that even remotely.
I mean, from what I can tell, the CIA and the US government has been holding its nose, hoping that this thing doesn't get any worse.
To call Qatar or Saudi satellite American states to me is almost preposterous because they do whatever the hell they want and have their own money.
They don't listen to us.
Well, did the Americans try to stop them at all?
I mean, come on, you've lived through the same three years as me, where the entire narrative has been, why aren't we doing more to support the rebellion against Assad?
No one, no one has been saying, Jesus, Assad is the only guy standing between these Shia and Christians and a good beheading, other than maybe Rand Paul or something.
Everyone has been saying backing the rebels is the good fight, even though that in essence means backing Nusra.
But America hasn't backed the rebels.
That's the that's the whole thing is maybe a little bit in rhetoric.
Look, but I mean, have they told the Saudis to knock it off?
Absolutely.
Yeah, but when?
OK, they did a year ago, but not three years.
Well, I mean, I'm not in those rooms.
I mean, but my impression has been the reason why the United States will not involve itself more in the Syrian civil war is because we simply do not trust the Qataris, Emiratis and Saudis.
Because they've been running and throw in the worst of all of them is Turkey.
Like right now, like this alliance that they've got to bomb ISIS is the most narrow thing in the entire world, because of the every conversation I've ever had with a U.S. official comes down to we know these guys are fun and all kinds of guys that are just not going to be on our side.
We just can't until it gets better regulated and controlled.
We can't get involved.
I mean, right now, the United States and Europe have been begging Turkey for three years to close the border to foreign fighters, and the Turks have refused.
The Turks won't even turn over the list.
And I know this firsthand.
It might have changed in the last couple of months, but about three months ago, I was talking to a European intelligence official who told me the Turks will not produce a list of people who flew from a European country or flew from anywhere to Istanbul to the airport in Hatay, which is the one closest to the border, and didn't fly back out.
They won't even give that list to the Americans or to the French or to the British so that people can at least start with a list of 10 or 15,000 people that they can start narrowing down to try to figure out who went and joined.
The Turks go, well, you didn't let us into the EU because of human rights.
Well, now we're not going to violate these poor tourists' human rights.
And you go, but yeah, okay, so a 19-year-old, you know, kid of Pakistani descent from Birmingham, you know, took a one-way trip to the Syrian border and has never been seen again.
Could you give us his name?
No.
So, no, I really disagree on that.
The fact is, these countries do not do what the United States wants all the time.
America can pressure them.
It's influential in some cases.
But what does America have that the Saudis need other than protecting the oil fields we're going to do anyway?
Well, at this point, we can help them keep the Islamic State out of Saudi.
Well, except that, yeah, exactly.
And we will, but we will anyway.
That's the point.
Basically, Saudi funds al-Qaeda.
This has been known since day one.
They've created, it's practically a wing of Saudi intelligence.
Of course, there are members of the Saudi royal family who want to fight al-Qaeda because they know they're going to get their heads chopped off if the country ever falls.
But inherently, the people of Saudi Arabia support the Islamic State.
It's so much closer to their ideology and morals and values than anything that you see in the West.
So, I mean, on some level, there's, you know, it's like saying, you know, if you're a drug addict, are you friends with your drug dealer?
I mean, that's basically the relationship that goes both ways.
You know, the Saudis are addicted to American protection and the Americans are addicted to the oil and to the arms sales that fund, you know, Boeing and all of these companies that sell billions of dollars of weapons to the Gulf every year that are bought with the money that America sends them for the oil that we buy from them every year.
So it's this symbiotic, you know, completely crazy relationship.
And at the end of the day, I mean, a country like Qatar doesn't really care what America thinks.
They sit on the, I mean, they care to a certain extent in terms of their own security.
But you see them, they openly have diplomatic relations with Iran, despite our protests.
They openly funded the Nusra Front and to a large extent, probably fund ISIS or at least did early on before ISIS was self-funding.
So you can't really argue like that America is turning a blind eye to it.
It's just what the hell is America going to do?
You can tell them don't do it, but you're not going to bomb Riyadh.
And that's basically what it's come down to.
Sure.
I guess I just haven't seen much complaining and attempting to tell them to stop.
But I guess if you're reporting to me that they have been, I believe you.
But well, no, they look at what happened with Joe Biden.
Joe Biden told the truth.
And then they made him and he had to apologize because they were going to lose what little support they were getting from those guys to begin with.
Yeah.
But when Joe Biden came out the other day and basically blamed Turkey, Saudi and UAE for ISIS, he wasn't lying.
Yeah, he was just three years after the fact is all.
No, but I mean, you saw the reaction, though, because it's the carrot and the stick is these guys.
I mean, if you come out and say it, you know, you keep hoping that Turkey will eventually do the right thing there.
But they're a NATO partner.
I mean, we can't go to war with the Turks, although I know a lot of Kurdish people that wish we would.
But the simple fact is, I mean, like, look at what's happening in Kobani right now.
You know, the Turks are sitting there watching Kurdish fighters get beaten by ISIS.
They've got tanks less than a kilometer away.
They can roll in at any time and save them.
They've got a NATO army and a NATO Air Force, and they're sitting there watching the Kurds get crushed and basically saying, well, we're probably going to intervene.
And what it's clear is they're going to intervene as soon as ISIS is done killing all the Kurds for them.
Then they'll go in and probably get rid of, you know, push ISIS off the border.
But right now, ISIS is doing Turkey's dirty work for them.
So they're perfectly content to let it go.
Well, they're completely crazy, too, though, because they've got all these refugees now and their negotiations with the PKK obviously are now off.
So it's going to blow up right in their face still, right?
The PKK rank and file want to go to war with Turkey immediately.
I talk to them every day.
They're ready.
They're ready to restart the revolution.
The peace deal that was started in 2012 and then signed last year, chances are I cannot imagine that's going to survive.
But from what I can tell right now, the PKK has its hands full with ISIS.
But, you know, they are livid at the Turks at this stage.
I mean, you almost can't imagine like on what planet is Turkey not aligned with ISIS militarily in northern Syria right now?
I mean, I hate to say it.
Turkey might throw me out, you know, never let me in again for saying it.
But they are sitting there.
Well, basic coordinating military operations with the Islamic State.
Let me ask you this.
Where the hell are the Americans?
They're bombing inside Syria, but they're just barely.
It's not like they're trying to kill all those tanks, are they?
Well, they've been bombing.
They've been trying to help a little in Kobani.
But, you know, keep in mind, it's not that easy to bomb individual stuff if you don't have people on the ground.
It's easy to blow up strategic targets.
Like if you want to take out, you know, Ukraine's oil or, you know, natural gas transmission facilities that you can bomb without guys on the ground.
You can do it from satellites and reconnaissance.
Just type in the numbers, right?
But in order to bomb, like, which tanks which, that's not easy from an F-16.
Do you know what I'm saying?
Like, what if you accidentally drop that bomb, which happens all the time?
You know, on a school.
They're not trying to hit the school.
It's just that, you know, combination of things.
Unless you have eyes on, as accurate as these bombings are, you're talking about the close air support, which means you'd have to basically put Delta guys in or SF guys on the ground with the YPG to call in airstrikes, which is what we saw in 2001 when the U.S. basically managed to take over Afghanistan with 100 special forces guys.
They did it because they were able to ride with the Northern Alliance and go, bomb that tank now, bomb that tank now, bomb that one.
They can't do that right now because they don't have guys on the ground and Turkey will not help them.
Turkey is sitting on their tanks 500 meters away watching the Kurds get massacred because they like dead Kurds.
And are they, are the Americans asking the Turks to come on, at least point lasers for us?
They're not even, or, and the Turks are refusing, or do you know?
I can be pretty cynical about American foreign policy, but I can't imagine that the administration is thrilled with this development.
But if the Turks say no, what's your next step?
You're going to need them later anyway.
That's just something, you know, one of my big theories is that people sometimes greatly overestimate the American government's ability to control the world.
I think the right has a tendency to overestimate American influence and what they can accomplish.
Well, why don't we just go in and fix it?
You know, that tends to be a right-wing thing.
Well, the world is pretty hard.
As you've noticed, we spent a trillion dollars and thousands of lives trying to fix Afghanistan and Iraq, and it didn't really go very well.
I was there.
And the left has a tendency to think that the, you know, American government's responsible for everything everybody does that's evil in the world.
That's simply not the facts.
You've got to deal with governments, and governments are always going to act in their own self-interest.
It's not in America's interest.
That's what I think.
You know, but governments are going to act in their self-interest.
It's simply what they do.
Right now, America probably hates Turkish policy towards Syria, but it's not quite in their interest to burn the relationship down completely with Turkey, and Turkey knows it.
And so they're going to keep getting away with whatever they can get away with that's in their self-interest, which right now strongly appears to be lots of dead Kurds.
The same thing with Saudi.
You know, I mean, you can only influence people to a certain extent.
They're going to do what they want unless you threaten them with violence.
It's just, it's a harsh way to look at the world, but it is kind of how it works.
All right, and listen, we're already over time, but let me ask one more thing here real quick.
You got this report with Landay about sending in the Apache helicopters, which seems like a pretty big escalation in terms of commitment, and certainly those things are a lot easier to shoot down than an F-16.
So that means, you know, perhaps rescue missions and all kinds of more force protection and all this kind of thing.
And then you guys also write in there, and we talked about this with Landay yesterday on the show, but you guys write about how this is kind of an admission that the strikes with the high-speed fighter jets is not working, that, you know, they're just not driving their giant convoys of Toyotas down the highway anymore now that that's a problem, and they're still making plenty of ground.
That's another one of your reports here, how they're moving into the Sunni neighborhoods in the southwest of Baghdad there, right up to Baghdad's western border.
So anyway, I guess just talk to me a little bit about what this all means.
Well, it's what I was going back to saying, the limits to American air power in Syria.
Yeah, you can, and they do have a little bit better accuracy in the north.
They've got an operations room in Erbil, and the Peshmerga are pretty well trained and used to working with the Americans.
So you've seen that the strikes have been pretty good and pretty effective, you know, around Mosul Dam, Sinjar, stuff like that.
Chances are even we consistently hear rumors that there might even be U.S. Special Forces guys embedded with the Peshmerga, who are close American allies, actually bringing those strikes down.
In Anbar, yeah, again, it's really hard.
If you don't have guys looking at what you're trying to blow up in the middle of the battle, who know how to direct air coming from an F-16, it's going to be really hard to, you know, properly kill stuff.
So to an extent, it's an admission that that's not working, because it is easier to do it from an Apache at a lot higher risk.
But my takeaway from the story was something a little bit different.
When they first sent those Apaches, now the mission has changed.
They have said that they're going to use assets to attack ISIS.
They didn't say that initially.
Those Apaches were put at Baghdad International Airport to protect the airport and to make sure that that route stayed open in case the U.S. had to evacuate the embassy in Baghdad.
Basically, keep that place open at all costs.
If they're flying Apaches, basically what my takeaway, because I first noticed it on the CENTCOM release Sunday evening, my feeling was, what did they tell Obama?
On Saturday morning or Sunday morning, I think the strike started overnight.
So let's assume that his national security briefing on Saturday morning, whatever they told the President of the United States about the situation in Anbar was so bad that he authorized putting U.S. troops in harm's way and taking the risk, as you said, of shootdowns and rescue missions and possibly like beheadings of U.S. pilots by ISIS guys, because those choppers can be shot down.
So that was my takeaway.
The situation in Anbar is so bad that the President was willing to take the political risk to try to stem it.
So I'm still trying to figure out what's happening in Anbar, but it really sounds like it's a disaster.
Yeah.
And man, I wanted to ask you about Muqtada Sadr and his group and all that, but I'm just so over time.
I got to go.
But thanks so much for coming back on the show.
Plus, I don't know anything about, I mean, I know those guys pretty well, but I'm not up to speed on what he's been up to.
Oh God, maybe I should go check the wires.
I'll be looking forward to your next report.
Thanks very much, Mitch.
It's always a pleasure, Scott.
Take it easy.
That's Mitch Prother, everybody.
He's at McClatchyDC.com.
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