10/14/15 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, guys.
Welcome back.
OK, now on to our first guest.
It's our good friend, Gareth Porter.
And he wrote this thing for Truthdig.
That's different than Truthout.
Truthdig at truthdig.com.
Why the U.S. Owns the Rise of Islamic State and the Syria Disaster.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
Thanks again, as always.
I really appreciate you joining us here.
And I really appreciate that you wrote this article because, as always, you do the best job of making the case you're making, putting together all the most important facts that people need to know as you make your case.
And it's a controversial one.
It's the plain truth.
It's as plain as day.
And yet, basically, you're accusing Barack Obama of high treason.
Oh, and the entire Republican and Democratic and national security establishment of backing America's enemies.
And so I'll let you go ahead and make the case.
Well, I mean, I have a different way of formulating it.
I don't say that.
You didn't use that term.
That's mine.
I said basically.
I know.
I understand.
I mean, you know, from my point of view, what's happening is it's a it's a classic case of the national security state doing one thing because it serves their interest, as always, thinking they're very clever about it and never bothering to really seriously take into account or being willing to acknowledge, let's put it that way, the serious consequences which do indeed give power to people who want to harm the American the United States, the American people.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Well, you know, here's the thing about it, too.
This is a fun little footnote that didn't make it into your piece.
You may be unaware.
There's a libertarian journalist named Ben Swan who is he was a local TV news reporter at one point, and he interviewed Barack Obama in 2012 in the spring of 2012.
He said, Mr. President, you know, we your bomb in Al-Qaeda in Pakistan and in Yemen.
And yet it seems like you sided with Al-Qaeda in Syria.
How do you explain that?
And Obama says, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Well, we agree and acknowledge that there are Al-Qaeda guys and bad guys and extremists, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, on the side of the rebellion in Syria.
And that's why we're only giving nonlethal aid and we're only giving it to very carefully vetted, moderate factions, whatever.
But we know that that's a damn lie.
We know that the CIA was giving very lethal aid in great quantities and was orchestrating, according to The New York Times, was orchestrating our allies doing the very same thing.
And and very much and very obviously deliberately backing, in effect, the Al-Nusra Front, Al-Qaeda in Syria, who absolutely dominated the field at that point.
Well, I mean, I agree in part with what you're with the way you put it, but but there's also a very important distinction here, both in terms of time and in terms of what the CIA was doing covertly.
I mean, you know, one of the pieces in my article that people are probably not familiar with, I think very few people are familiar with, is that in 2011, the CIA, and this is a revelation that Cy Hirsch originally made last year in his article on Syria, the CIA had a very convoluted, deep, covert operation to take the armaments that were acquired from the former Libyan government, the Qaddafi regime, after the overthrow of the regime in 2011, and have it arranged for it to be sent to Syria.
And, you know, we have an accounting of this from the DIA, from a DIA report that has been now declassified and released to Judicial Watch.
So that's that's the document that I linked to in my article.
Now, you know, there are a lot of questions about this that are not answered exactly who the intended recipients were at that point.
But, you know, there's no specific evidence at this point or reason to believe that what the administration thought it was doing was supporting al-Nusra.
However, you know, it became pretty clear very soon, at least by 2012, that many of the arms that were going into Syria, particularly those arms that were being sent by the Saudis, the Qataris, particularly the Saudis and the Qataris, were in fact falling into the hands of al-Nusra.
That's the key point here, that it was known by 2012 that arms that were going to whoever, and we don't know the exact identities of the commands that were being sent, the arms were in fact being eventually falling into the hands of al-Nusra front.
And this was admitted even by Hillary Clinton in her memoirs that, you know, they understood that this was going on and that this was a risk.
So this was a risk of what Petraeus later on proposed, and that started in late 2012.
I don't know the exact date, but, you know, later in 2012, Petraeus was proposing this operation to vet commands and actually weed out those people who were pro-al-Nusra front or pro-ISIS and give arms and train them.
But it was understood that there was a risk involved in this precisely on the basis of that history.
Yeah.
In fact, sorry, everybody, but I've got to play it again.
This is Hillary from, I forget now, Gareth, if it's very late February, very early March 2012.
Hillary on CBS is being confronted, of course, with the standard conventional wisdom question.
Why aren't we doing more to overthrow Assad?
Why the dithering Hillary?
And she's defending the Obama administration.
This is when she's still secretary of state, of course.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
Hamas is now supporting the opposition.
Are we supporting Hamas in Syria?
So I think, Wyatt, you know, despite the great pleas that we hear from those people who are being ruthlessly assaulted by Assad, if you're a military planner or if you're a secretary of state and you're trying to figure out do you have the elements of an opposition that is actually viable, we don't see that.
And we know that all throughout 2012 she tried two or three times, the whole Friends of Syria charade, to create Syrian governments in exile, basically in hotels in Qatar, etc.
And they all immediately endorsed the al-Nusra Front as soon as they were formed because it was their only stab at legitimacy would be to endorse the fighters on the field, the guys who are loyal to Ayman al-Zawahiri, the butcher of New York City.
And so there's, again, on the record, as you say in her memoirs too, admitting she knows better but then doing it anyway, Gareth.
Right, and they even, you know, they were also discussing, because the CIA had done a detailed study at the request of the White House of the experience of supporting the Mujahideen in Afghanistan and what the blowback consequences of that were.
And so that was very much on everybody's mind as this question of trying to create and arm and train a Syrian rebel force was being seriously discussed.
And, of course, we now know that Hillary was joining with Petraeus and pushing for this program that Petraeus had cooked up but which the White House at that point turned down only to agree a few months later to a variant on the same program.
Yeah, and every once in a while the fact that these are the bad guys from Iraq War II.
This is the Zarqawiite fringe of the Sunni-based insurgency that killed 4,000 Americans during Iraq War II.
That's who we're talking about here, whether it's Nusra or ISIS.
They're just the two different divisions of that same group from just 10 years ago less.
Absolutely, and, of course, as you know...
Wait, hold it there, Garrett.
Let's let him hear it on the other side of this break.
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All right, guys.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Like usual, I'm talking with the great Gareth Porter.
The article is at truthdig.com.
Why the U.S. Owns the Rise of Islamic State and the Syria Disaster.
And, you know, I was interviewed for half an hour on this station in Fargo, North Dakota, this morning.
And I explained as best I could, and the guy said, Whoa, whoa, whoa, dude.
I don't know.
You lost me.
So, I don't know, Gareth.
You get back to telling them what you think they need to know.
How you can make them understand what's important about what America is doing in Syria here.
What I was about to say before the break is not part of the story of the article that I did.
We're talking about, but it is one of the implications of this story.
I think is that it's clear that the whole notion that counterterrorism is the thrust, the reason, the rationale for U.S. policy in the Middle East is simply no longer true.
I mean, it's obviously not the case that counterterrorism is what is driving U.S. policy at all.
And I'm sure you've seen the same evidence that I've seen that there is a subtle, unannounced, unofficial trend in U.S. policy to at least cooperate with U.S. Middle Eastern allies in having al-Nusra emerge as the main way of trying to block ISIS.
In other words, al-Qaeda has become a de facto quasi ally of the United States in Syria as a way of trying to defeat or at least to prevent the victory of ISIS.
Now, first, in order to defeat Assad or at least bleed Assad's army.
And then now their secondary excuse is to him in the Islamic State.
Well, I'm not so sure that that the purpose of the Obama administration is to primarily defeat the Assad regime.
I don't think that's the case.
I'm not convinced.
I lean toward the latter explanation there.
Just bleed him.
I mean, that that was what the Israelis said in The New York Times.
We just want to keep both sides hemorrhaging permanently, but not really see one side defeat the other.
Well, all we have to do is nothing in order for that to happen.
That's for sure.
The hemorrhaging is going to continue.
But I think, you know, all I'm saying is that the effective U.S. policy in the Middle East now is to cooperate in an effort to make al-Qaeda in Syria into the chosen mechanism for blocking ISIS.
The ability of ISIS to take power in Syria.
And so that, to my way of thinking, at least, means the end of counterterrorism as the basic thrust of U.S. policy.
I'm not saying that it was ever, you know, sincerely the reason why the United States ever did anything.
As you know very well, my own view is different from that.
I think it's always the rationale for doing things is different from the actual motivation of the national security state.
But that's a separate question.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, the way one could put it like me over and over again would be what George Bush did for al-Qaeda was just unbelievably great.
The best thing he could have ever done giving them all of Western Iraq and Northwestern Iraq to be their training ground for all those years and radicalize all those people to their cause and that kind of thing.
But that was because he was a stupid idiot.
And that was not how it was supposed to happen.
It was supposed to be easy and et cetera, et cetera.
But what, you know, if there's a real end to counterterrorism, it's when they killed bin Laden and then turned right around and started back in al-Qaeda in Libya.
And then, as you say, the red line and the rat line by Hirsch, as he shows in the D.I.
A. reports confirm, started funneling those Mujahideen fighters off to go to war in Syria in 2011.
I mean, at that point, Bill Hodge and Hassidi and others of these Libyan Islamic fighting group guys said, yeah, we fought with Zarqawi against the Americans in Iraq.
What of it?
Thanks for the help, John McCain and Barack Obama.
And let's not forget, as I point out in my article, that the whole notion, the details of how the Islamic State would unfold the strategy was cooked up by the future leaders when they were in Al-Bukha, a U.S. military prison in Iraq.
I mean, it was right there under the noses of the U.S. prison guards that the leaders got together and were able to basically make the plans that they that they carried out beginning in 2011, 2012.
Yeah.
So so, again, you know, one of the points that I make in my piece is that the United States has had an impact on the rise of the Islamic State through not just a single intervention, but a whole series of interventions that powerfully, directly or indirectly gave Islamic State, Al-Qaeda and then Islamic State the opportunity to flourish and to become what they are today.
Right.
Some of it deliberate.
Some of it just blowback.
Whether we're fighting them or fighting for them, we're making them a bigger and bigger problem all the time either way.
Now, so let me ask you this.
I don't have time to play the Biden clip or the Michael Flynn clip here, but are you familiar with obviously you must be familiar with the DIA report.
I think you must link to it in here.
Yeah, the 2012 one from August 2012 here.
But then there's also the interview with Michael Flynn by Al Jazeera, where he very much confirms that this was an important piece of paper.
It wasn't just another snowflake floating around the Pentagon or something.
It was on his desk.
He said he took it with him to the White House to make the case to the president and the rest of them that just so you know, here, these guys want to create an Islamic State.
He didn't say the Islamic State in Baghdad.
He works for the CIA or anything like that.
But he said this is the very likely, very dangerous result of our policy in Syria is a new Islamic State that will include Western Iraq, too.
And he said that they heard him loud and clear and they went ahead and did it anyway, quite deliberately.
Well, of course, what he didn't say is that his pal Petraeus was the primary person who was pushing for that policy.
So, I mean, he's he's I'm sorry to say or not sorry to say, but I think it has to be said that Flynn is somebody whose judgment is inherently questionable, flawed because of his close association with Petraeus and the fact that he has his own personal and institutional interest to defend.
I mean, that's not to say that everything he says is wrong.
I obviously would not want to dismiss everything he says, but we have to be very cautious with with everything that Flynn says as well.
Yeah, well, it is interesting that I guess the DIA, I mean, whoever wrote up that report, they weren't feeling that much pressure from Petraeus since he was over at CIA.
They went ahead and wrote it up.
The report itself, it was perfectly accurate right on the money.
And there's no doubt in my mind that it was, you know, taken seriously throughout the administration.
And in fact, in 2012, as I say, I mean, the White House was rejecting the Petraeus proposal to pour more money and to try to pick winners or not winners, but to pick our favorites among the rebel groups and to make them try to make them our guys in the Syrian war.
Not that they called off the program.
You're just saying that he rejected Petraeus's proposal to escalate the program.
Again, again, it's a multilevel reality here.
On one hand, Petraeus was in in mid 2012 proposing a comprehensive policy of training, vetting and arming our opposition forces.
That was new.
What had already been going on, again, secretly through a CIA, extremely covert operation was that arms had been moving from Libya to Syria since late 2011, since October 2011.
So so so, you know, that was going on.
And again, we don't know exactly who the intended recipients were and exactly who was handing them over to to Syrian rebels.
But it was extremely an extremely complicated situation at that point, is all I'm saying.
Right.
I got you.
Well, there's a funny ABC News story from the last week.
The State Department is really interested in figuring out how ISIS got all those Toyotas.
They got them from the State Department.
The State Department themselves put it in Public Radio International, which is just American government, international propaganda radio.
It's their own report says, yeah, we're doing a great job funneling Toyotas to the Islamists in Syria now.
And in fact, it was even a news story that this plumber in Corpus Christi, Texas, who had sold an old Ford F-250 or something like that, had his truck was seen on TV and on YouTube full of jihadists fighting with his phone number and the name of his company still on the side of his truck.
And so he was getting prank calls and threats and all these things.
And it's obviously it's because the State Department bought the truck and gave it to him.
Where the hell else would they have gotten it from?
State Department didn't give it directly to ISIS.
They gave it to one of.
Well, the FSA who gave it to ISIS is the point he turned it over to ISIS.
Yeah.
Or Al-Nusra, whichever at that point.
But yeah.
But yeah, I mean, that's the whole thing is there.
Oh, we got to solve this mystery.
Oh, yeah.
It's such a mystery where thousands of Toyota trucks come came from.
I wonder, you know, like they couldn't just in their in their little system type in, you know, Saudi Japan exchanges in their little computer system and find out every little one of these arrangements, you know.
Well, the real person who should be feeling the heat at this moment, in my view, is is David Petraeus.
I mean, the role that he's played in this is so extremely irresponsible.
It raises fundamental questions about, you know, his intentions, about what he thinks he's up to and what he has actually done.
And the fact that this has not been covered by the big media in the United States, in my view, is one of its many sins of omission that are extremely serious.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, I guess it is when he's in the Daily Beast saying, you know, hey, yeah, we really ought to be supporting Al-Qaeda right now, everybody.
That kind of reminds me of Dick Cheney going on TV and going, yeah, you're damn right, I'm a torturer.
And I'm proud of it, because at that point, it's like a limited hangout kind of a thing.
It's a get out ahead of the story in a way and say, you know, so that, you know, like that Harrison Ford movie where the president's friend is a drug dealer and gets busted.
And he says, go ahead and say that he's your best friend in the whole world.
That way they have nowhere to go with it.
Yeah.
So the other thing about this mess that we're talking about at the moment is that former Supreme Commander of NATO, Admiral Stavridis, I believe I'm pronouncing it correctly, has also come out not just talking like Petraeus has about, well, you know, we should try to win over some of the people who are supporting al-Nusra in Syria, but saying, yeah, we ought to be supporting Al-Qaeda.
We ought to be supporting al-Nusra and Al-Qaeda in Syria.
You know, they are our allies, de facto allies.
So that's how far things have gone from any profession of real counterterrorism as a policy in the Middle East.
Yeah.
They even did a big front page cover story on foreign affairs in Foreign Affairs Journal in March saying, I forget the title of it now, but, oh, it's accepting al-Qaeda.
And they actually, you know, they don't show Golani or some Syrian jihadists.
The picture on the cover story, the picture is Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.
You know, remember your old Goldstein hate figures, you know, the guilty party.
And so they're not even really trying to whitewash it.
They're just saying here, swallow this.
Yeah.
To me, this is exhibit A in the case for the United States getting out of the Middle East lock, stock and barrel.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
I'll let you go with that one.
Thank you so much, Gareth, as always.
Appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
That's the great Gareth Porter, everybody.
This time he's at Truth Dig.
And here it is.
Why the U.S. owns the rise of Islamic State and the Syria disaster.
He's got all your links and all your context.
And in fact, now that we're over time and I'm still going anyway, I'm going to go ahead and play a couple more soundbites so that you'll have them attached to the end of this interview.
Here's, first of all, Obama's answer to Benjamin Swan or Ben Swan, he goes by.
I share that concern.
And so what we've done is to say we will provide nonlethal assistance to Syrian opposition leadership that are committed to a political transition, committed to a an observance of human rights.
We're not going to just dive in and get involved with a civil war that, in fact, involves some elements of people who are genuinely trying to get a better life, but also involve some folks who would over the long term do the United States harm.
And here's Michael Oren, Benjamin Netanyahu's former ambassador to the United States, explaining why, from Israel's point of view, they prefer Al Qaeda and explicitly including the Islamic State to Hezbollah and Syria.
We have to choose the lesser of evils here.
The lesser evil is the Sunnis over the Shiites.
It's an evil.
Believe me, it's terribly evil.
Again, they've just taken out seven hundred former Iraqi soldiers and shot them in a field.
But who are they fighting against?
They're fighting against a proxy with Iran that's complicit in the murder of 160,000 people in Syria.
You can just do the math.
And again, one side is armed with suicide bombers and rockets.
The other side has access to military nuclear capabilities.
So from Israel's perspective, if there's got to be an evil that's going to prevail, let the Sunni evil prevail.
So again, an explicit reference to ISIS massacring Iraqi soldiers in the field there, not just some Sunni Islamists, the mythical moderates, these directly referring to the Islamic State.
And why?
Because Assad is responsible for everyone who's died on all sides of the civil war, even though a hundred thousand of those casualties are Syrian army casualties.
But never mind that.
And then his other reason, because Iran has nuclear weapons and is going to give them to Assad and Hezbollah.
What a pile of crap.
But hey, good enough for American policy to take the side of Al Qaeda.
And here's one more from Joe Biden on America and our allies role.
Our allies in the region were our largest problem in Syria.
The Turks were great friends, the Saudis, the Emiratis, etc.
They were so determined to take down Assad, they poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens, thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad.
Except that the people who were being, who were being supplied were Al Nusra and Al Qaeda.
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