10/22/14 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, and this is my show, Scott Horton Show.
As promised, I'll have more clips from that Bill Kristol interview with Dick Cheney on the show today.
Coming up here in just a little while.
First, we're going to talk with our buddy Eric Margulies on the Skype here.
Hey, Eric, how are you doing?
I'm just fine, Scott.
We're following all kinds of news everywhere.
Yeah, yeah.
It's blowing up all over the place.
So, first of all, let me tell the people about you for a minute.
Eric Margulies, why, he's a war reporter for decades and decades, and he wrote the book on it, War at the Top of the World, and also American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
And he writes a regular column you can find at ericmargulies.com, as well as unz.com and lourockwell.com.
And no, really, he's an expert in just about everything interesting.
Let's start, of course, with what's going on the latest of the breaking news from Ottawa, Canada, where there is some form of attack on the Parliament building there.
I'll let you describe it from there, Eric.
Scott, preliminary reports, which are still confused.
This is an ongoing story right now, is that one or two gunmen came up to the National War Memorial in front of the Parliament building in Ottawa, which is Canada's capital, and opened fire, killed a soldier, then went to the front of Parliament building and fired some shots in there.
One of the suspects is reported to have been killed by police or soldiers, another is supposedly at large.
It's a very confusing situation.
Yep, and then, well, so I don't know.
I mean, they're just playing the same clips on Fox News of the cops standing around in front of a post office or something.
I guess they're not letting the media anywhere near there.
But so, you know, I don't know.
Is there anything left to say?
We could start speculating about who might do it and the new laws that are certain to be passed or whatever, if you want.
Well, it's I'm sorry, Scott.
What we can say is that this follows two days ago.
There was a very bizarre incident where a man, a young man in Quebec who had recently converted to Islam and grown a beard, ran over and killed a Canadian soldier in a parking in a supermarket parking lot and injured another one.
And he was then pursued and shot dead by the police.
Very odd.
Two days later comes this shooting in Parliament Hill.
You know, we Americans are used to this kind of stuff constantly.
But Canada is a very peaceful, calm, quiet country.
And people are really shocked that there's gunplay in their capital.
Yeah.
I mean, back when there was a plot to behead the prime minister, the whole thing was cooked up by the cops and there never was a real threat.
But this sounds like some kind of thing.
I don't know.
And now so it could be coordinate.
I'm assuming it's a political Islamic type attack of any kind to state it maybe clumsily and overly broadly.
It could be coordinated with the thing the other day or it could just be a copycat.
You know, that's what Al-Qaeda keep saying is, hey, lone wolves out there, do something and throw these people into chaos.
It sure doesn't take much.
Well, I don't find this surprising at all.
The conservative Canadian government, Prime Minister Harper, whose core supporters are evangelical Christian fundamentalists out in the West, sort of the mirror image of the US Republican Party, have made it part of their party's platform to antagonize the Muslim world.
The prime minister said he was very sorry that he wasn't able to get Canada into the first Iraq war.
But now he's doing it again because Canada just dispatched six warplanes to go and bomb ISIS or whoever in Syria and Iraq.
And the government has adopted a very, very hostile policy towards Muslims in general appealing to special interests in Canada.
This is for domestic politics.
Special interests mean the Israel lobby and the cops or anybody else?
Yes.
To those who are anti-Arab in nature, that is fundamentalist evangelical groups, Christian Zionists, ardent supporters of Israel.
They're all they all love Prime Minister Harper now.
And meanwhile, Canada, which in not long ago was liked everywhere.
Canada didn't have an enemy in the world, has now put himself into the gun sights of militant extremist terrorists, whatever you want to call them.
And as I've been saying for a long time, it's only a matter of time before angry people attack.
But what we're looking at today and before is not some kind of concerted Al-Qaeda or ISIS attack.
This is obviously amateur expressions of violence.
Right.
Well, and now they have been occupying Afghanistan with us all this time, right?
Just not the Iraq war?
That's correct.
Just not Iraq, but very happy to get into the Afghan war.
Spent twenty billion dollars, lost over a hundred men and achieved absolutely nothing.
Right.
Well, and yeah, again, as you say, amateur type one off attacks, but still doesn't take much.
And I think Fox News said that they were actually in the middle of debating a new anti-terrorism law.
So, you know, the kooks are going to go howling mad about that.
But, you know, false flag this and that.
But it just goes to show that there's certainly no doubt they're going to pass it now.
Maybe even a much worse one.
Canada is a very bad app.
Canada is a wonderful country.
It's the Switzerland of North America.
Sensible, it's moderate, respected around the world.
But it has a bad habit of copying the worst habits of the United States.
And one of them is enjoying the terrorism hysteria.
You know, well, if the Americans are doing it, we've got to do it, too.
And so now they have it.
Too bad.
All right.
Now.
So let me ask you about this.
Oh, man, I meant to have this email pulled up here.
I got an email.
Hell, I won't be able to find it on the fly.
But I got an email from a Swedish listener saying, hey, Scott, man, what is going on with the Russian bombers over Swedish airspace lately?
It's kind of freaking me out.
What does Sweden do?
And, you know, what role what is America gotten us into over here?
And I hadn't even heard about that on the news at all.
But I have heard, you know, there's this controversy over what the Swedes say is a Russian submarine.
And they're even threatening to drop depth charges on it while the Russians are denying that it's even Russian at all.
They blamed it on the Dutch, which said, you got to be kidding us.
And so what in the hell is going on there?
Well, I find it most amusing and enjoyable as a story.
Good.
Well, that makes me feel a little better.
A nice change away from the Middle East.
I'm an old cold warrior.
I even have a certificate on my wall signed by Donald Rumsfeld attesting to my service as a cold warrior.
So this kind of stuff makes me very happy.
I have a breath of youth coming back to me because this is a typical Cold War thing.
You know, the Baltic is a very narrow, shallow sea.
And on one side is Sweden and on the other side is Russia and the Baltic states.
And there's a lot of submarine activity in the area.
Sweden, outside of Stockholm, Sweden, the archipelago.
There is hundreds or thousands of tiny little islands.
Great place to hide.
Very hard to navigate.
So the Russians routinely sent vessels through there and submarines through there.
Just the way we Americans fly over all kinds of countries' borders without permission.
But the Swedes are up in arms because there's a pandemonium in Sweden.
They spend only 1.5% on defense.
Their once pretty good defenses have been worn way, way down.
And they don't even have an anti-submarine helicopter to try and locate this ship.
So as far as the Swedes are concerned, they're lucky if they don't find the submarine.
Because if they do find it, they may have to drop depth charges or something like that.
Try to do something about it, yeah.
The Russians really angry.
All right, well, hold it right there.
We got to take this dang break.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Eric Margulies in just a minute.
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All right, you guys.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Eric Margulies.
And I don't really have any breaking news on the Canadian shooting right now.
Either the others never existed or they got away or they're hiding somewhere and the cops are too afraid to go after them.
Maybe, you know, they're cornered holed up in a room somewhere.
And so everybody's just waiting.
NORAD is ready to go, they say.
DEFCON a million.
All right, we're on the line with Eric Margulies.
And speaking of DEFCON, this and that.
So here's the thing.
This the submarine thing.
I see what you're saying, how this is just sort of, you know, these things happen and doesn't even necessarily mean anything.
I think it's sort of the subtext of what you're getting at there.
Yeah, of course, there's submarines and sometimes they cross little lines where they shouldn't.
And lots of fun islands to to duck and hide in and that kind of thing, which is fun if you're a submarine captain.
Right.
I can dig all that.
But what about these bomber overflights that my emailers telling me about that the Russians are getting right up to the line with their long range bombers or medium, some kind of range bombers to be a bomber?
It's got to be at least medium range, right?
Instead, just a fighter.
So what the hell is that about?
I think it's it's a function that Russia in recent years has gone from no practically no air patrols along its borders to launching a fair amount of sovereignty patrols and patrolling its maritime borders, too.
And now with NATO, suddenly with the whole issue of Ukraine and NATO taking a much more active stance against Russia and a forward stance to NATO is sending fighter aircraft, U.S., Dutch, Canadian to the Baltic states.
And they're flying right next to Russia.
And these are tiny areas, a few millimeters on the wrong side of the map.
And you're in the other country's land.
So it's there's a lot of opportunity for provocations, for clashes.
And the Russians are being more active as a response to the NATO air patrols of the Baltic, all of which are totally unnecessary.
Yeah, I mean, it's not like even the Americans are coming.
But but so now, OK, so, well, there's two ways to spin it, right?
I mean, from the Russian point of view, hey, they're just reemphasizing what their borders are and this kind of thing.
From the Swedish point of view.
Hey, you know what the hell are you guys doing there?
They're I guess what you'd call in Russia's shadow there.
And and from their point of view, it looks like, you know, some level of threat.
Is it meant to be a threat to them or is it meant to just be, well, what the hell is it meant to be?
Well, not a threat, but perhaps a reminder that Russia is not a paper tiger, that it has power.
It's certainly a major Baltic power.
And and who really knows if these Russian bombers were over Swedish or Russian terrorists?
Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, it was just an email comment, but I don't think there was a question about it in his mind.
Although I did fail to find the dang thing and and quote it exactly.
So I hope I'm not getting it wrong here.
Anyway, so listen, let me ask you about your most recent article at Eric Margulies dot com.
The real secret of Iraq's germ weapons.
How is it that I didn't know this about you, that you broke the story of Iraq's germ weapons and Western participation?
Now, not just chemical weapons here.
I don't think you're claiming to be first on chemical weapons, but you're claiming to be first on discovering Western participation in Saddam Hussein's germ weapons program.
Is that right?
That's correct, Scott.
It was 14 years ago when I was covering Iraq.
Twenty four, you mean?
I'm sorry.
Twenty four.
We're in the future now.
Don't make me sound older.
It was in 1990 that I was covering Baghdad.
Operation Desert Shield.
Yeah, well, this was just before George Bush senior launched the massive bombing of you.
It was Bush senior.
Now I can't my so long ago.
My memory is going.
But anyway, the this was the first U.S. major attack on Iraq.
And what happened was that Saddam had rounded up a whole bunch of hostages, Western hostages.
And among them were a group of British scientists who had been working at the Salman Pak biological plant south of Baghdad.
I interviewed.
I found these British scientists.
They talked to me.
They showed documents.
What they said was that they had been sent by Her Majesty's government and by MI6, which is British Foreign Intelligence Service.
They've been seconded, as the British say, to Iraq, sent to Saddam Hussein to manufacture biological weapons for his military, to what we call weaponize them.
And the the actual germs themselves were primarily anthrax, tularemia, botulism and plague.
The four horsemen of the apocalypse.
Plague for crying out loud.
And it sounds horrible.
These the raw the feeder stocks for these bio weapons came from the United States, from a lab in Maryland with the full approval of the U.S. Commerce Department or agriculture, one of the others.
And so we shipped them the feeder stocks.
The British scientists were sent there to turn them into weapons.
And the reason was that this was during the Iran Iraq war that ended in 1988.
It lasted for eight years.
Saddam's Iraq had invaded Iran under urging of the United States and the Saudis and the Gulf Arabs because they were petrified that the Iranian revolution, which occurred in 1979, would spread across the Middle East and overthrow all of our vassal oil producing vassal states like the Saudis and the Kuwaitis.
So we got Saddam to invade Iran and trying to overthrow the Iranian governments, the Islamic government.
Things went awfully wrong.
The Iranians rally.
They were swamping Iraq with human wave attacks.
And at that point, it was decided, we don't know by whom, that this that Iraq should start developing German, German weapons as well as poison gases to break the Iranian, the Iranian attacks, man.
And, you know, it's so interesting that in the middle of all this demonization of the well, in the middle of the unending, we're always in the midst of the unending demonization of the Iranians.
Gareth Porter just published his exclusive the other day in Foreign Policy about how the Ayatollah Khomeini, the mean one, the much meaner one than Khomeini, his successor here, he absolutely forbid and announced that it was a religious edict that nuclear and even chemical weapons, never even mind biological weapons, were completely banned by the religion and banned by law, by supreme law of all Iran, by his religious edict, that these weapons of mass destruction are haram.
And meanwhile, the Reaganites and the Thatcherites are perfectly happy to give germs to Saddam to use against them.
It's a sordid and disgusting story, Scott.
And it was, I published this in the papers that I wrote for in 2000, 2001, but it never made it into, you know, the Washington Post and the New York Times.
The whole story was covered up, as was the story of how the U.S. actively aided Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war.
With intelligence information and money and weapons and all kinds of things.
Cynical, while the U.S. was doing this, it was also allowing Israel, facilitating Israel to sell $5 billion worth of American arms to Iran.
Here's another cynical story.
So the Israelis and the Iranians who were always at scimitars drawn and screaming about each other and everything, Meanwhile, while no one was looking under the table, they were doing this billion, multibillion dollar arms deal.
Real dirty business.
Yeah.
In fact, in that Bill Kristol, Dick Cheney clip, you know, Cheney was in the house then.
He helped cover it up, but it wasn't his thing.
So, you know, he wasn't guilty of it specifically.
And so he gives the little summary of what it was that they had done.
And it's just fun to listen to in Cheney's words, because he gets it pretty much right.
He leaves out Israel for some reason.
This conversation with Bill Kristol there.
Good times.
All right.
Well, we're out of time again.
Thanks very much for your time.
As always, Eric.
My pleasure, Scott.
That's the great Eric Margulies, everybody.
Eric Margulies dot com, unz dot com, unz dot com and Lou Rockwell dot com.
And we'll be right back.
Hey, I'll Scott Horton here.
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