10/26/16 – Max Blumenthal – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
And introducing Max Blumenthal, author of Goliath and the 51-Day War.
And here he is writing for Alternet.org, a two-parter, inside the shadowy PR firm that's lobbying for regime change in Syria and how the White Helmets became international heroes while pushing U.S. military intervention and regime change in Syria.
Welcome back.
Max, how are you, man?
Good to be on with you.
Yeah, good to talk to you again.
So listen, I want to ask you before we get into the heart of these articles here and this great journalism that you've done.
It seems pretty important.
I wanted to ask you about yourself on this issue because it seems like perhaps you've had a change of heart or at least changed your mind about who's who and what is going on in Syria compared to back a few years ago.
Am I right about that?
Somewhat.
Somewhat.
Was there something that happened that made you change your mind or something you read or something?
Well, I haven't changed my mind about the amount of suffering that people who have resisted the Assad regime have endured.
That's something that I think I can't just say never happened.
I can't deny that the civil uprisings that took place in 2011 contained components that I thought were really inspiring.
And another component that I think people who think I did some kind of about-face or leaving out or missing is that in 2013, during the kind of push for military escalation took place where Congress was voting on a U.S. bombing campaign, I came out pretty forcefully against it and I went after some of the same organizations in Washington that are pushing the current round of escalation, mainly the Syrian Emergency Task Force.
And I think my writing played a role in exposing Liz Obagi, this fake expert that John Kerry was citing who faked her PhD, and the Syrian Emergency Task Force as basically neoconservatives who had the worst intentions for Syria and the region.
So all that was out there.
But I do think one of the things that I missed and that I didn't understand was the amount of intervention that was already taking place.
When I resigned al-Akhbar, maybe it was in the works, but by 2013 and early 2014, you had the Timber Sycamore program by the U.S. using Saudi money to arm the rebels and push the opposition towards a total armed insurgency that emboldened the most extremist elements.
And so from my point of view, I didn't quite understand that.
And I think much of the American press corps and even much of the American left doesn't understand that an intervention has already taken place, that the U.S. and the Gulf states have pumped billions of dollars into making that happen.
And that this has been an absolute disaster that's extended the bloodshed.
And by 2014, when I was preparing my work on the Gaza Strip, the assault on the Gaza Strip took place, I had completely tapped out of the Syria discussion, also because it had gotten so ugly.
And the price was so high for anyone who had started to express any dissent or moved away from the escalationist position.
And I realized that it would complicate my work on Palestine dramatically.
So you didn't hear a lot from me.
And there were people who were saying prophetic things at the time that either the West starts focusing on conflict resolution and de-escalation, or it faces more war, more extremism, and more catastrophe.
And so here we are, and basically we're at a point where the public relations failure in 2013 for escalation, I mean it was a miserable failure by the escalationist forces, has gotten much more sophisticated.
And I endeavored to expose it, because I saw it heading once again towards catastrophe, towards a deeper catastrophe.
And you have Hillary Clinton out on the campaign trail pushing for a no-fly zone.
You have Boris Johnson pushing for the same.
You have the French government pushing for it.
And you have, as I said, a much more sophisticated public relations apparatus.
So I've always been against intervention and escalation.
I think what I didn't understand at the time was how much intervention was already taking place, and how disastrous it was.
And the fact is I was being pushed by the kind of narrative that still has a lot of influence on traditionally anti-war elements in the left.
Well, and yeah, again, it's a pretty easy case to make on the face of it that of course Assad is a murderer and a dictator, and of course there's great degrees, huge numbers of what the Americans call collateral damage when Assad's army fights this war.
And that's really what this article is about, right?
Is that if you take a snapshot of this war, it sure is pretty easy to make it look like everything there is the government's fault.
You can't see Prince Bandar in the frame, but here's a bleeding little kid.
How do you like that?
Yeah, and the kid is bleeding.
It's real.
The suffering of people who are stuck in this kill box in East Aleppo is real.
But what does it mean in practice to alleviate their suffering?
Especially for Americans, and especially for people on the left who only have so much leverage.
And I think the only narrative that we're getting, which has been conceived in a very sophisticated fashion by the public relations firms that I outlined in the piece, is pushing us toward more escalation, more war, more bombing.
And it would be a catastrophe from every perspective, whether it's the perspective of human rights, or the perspective of American interests.
I mean, how is it in American interests to provide air cover to the kind of extremist groups that are really holding the front lines of the opposition forces in East Aleppo?
It just doesn't really add up at all.
So, you have the Syria campaign.
That is really the subject of my piece.
Hold on one second.
Let me ask you about that in just a second.
But I think it's worth bringing up that in terms of the politics, Obama really kind of bribed the left into silence about war issues.
But it seems like the Hillary Clinton candidacy is really providing a lot of cognitive dissonance, and a lot of liberals are coming around and deciding that they are all now National Security Democrats too, in order so that they can still support her.
They'd rather adjust their opinion to fit with hers.
I mean, this is the same as in Libya, but I got in an argument with a guy from Amnesty International the other day on Twitter where anti-war forces are pro-war because you are an ally of Assad, the warmonger.
And pro-war forces are the real peaceniks because they want to escalate the war in order to end it so that everything can be peaceful.
And it's the kind of thing that is so absurd on its face only a real smart person could believe it or accept that or figure out a way to make that their slogan and just to turn everything upside down.
But it sure is looking like Hillary Clinton is going to be the president.
As you said, she's the one really above all in the society right now pushing for this further escalation.
And it really raises the question of how many people on the left are really going to come with her and support this thing.
Yeah, I mean, people are being gaslighted into supporting this kind of right to protect Samantha Power doctrine that has never protected anyone and has always served as a cover for very, very cynical Western interests in the Middle East.
And so, you know, you probably got in an argument with this guy, Christian Benedict from Amnesty International UK.
I don't know.
He's a political director there.
Could be, yeah.
Yeah, very well could have been.
Well, he's one of the kind of rogues gallery of people on Twitter who try to suppress any debate on a no-fly zone or on escalation and make you feel like you support, you know, the mass slaughter of children and dictatorship if you raise any questions about this discredited humanitarian intervention right to protect doctrine.
And, you know, Amnesty International recently co-sponsored a rally in London, Amnesty International UK, alongside the Daily Mirror.
You know, the wiretappers at the Daily Mirror, great people there, great humanitarians, and the Syria campaign, the PR group that I wrote about.
And the rally couldn't explicitly call for anything.
Amnesty International put out a call for Theresa May, the British prime minister, to quote-unquote do something.
But they can't say what because what they want her to do violates international law.
And so you would have Amnesty International put in a position where they're calling for the violation of international law while claiming to uphold and protect it as their mission, as their organizational charter.
That's the hypocrisy here.
And that's what's behind the right to protect doctrine.
It's a massive violation of international law.
And what we saw take place in Libya, you look at the British parliamentary report on Libya, the entire premise of the Libyan intervention by NATO was that Gaddafi and his forces were going to march on Benghazi and slaughter 100,000 people.
And the British parliament, the British government, has found that this was completely bogus.
So basically that they followed a bogus humanitarian pretext.
They also found that they ignored all the warnings about who the rebel groups were and who was going to come into power, and that these were extremist groups that had very little interest in freedom and democracy.
And so here we are with Libya in complete shambles.
I think the GDP has been reduced by half.
The economy is in shambles.
The state is divided between 24 warring militias, basically led by one in Benghazi and one in Tripoli, and you have the Islamic State in Syria.
That is basically what we're looking at.
If this kind of doctrine is followed again in Syria, you will likely see state collapse.
And the only thing that the escalationists can't answer is what comes after, not just Assad, but what comes after the collapse of the Syrian government, which any of the policies that they're promoting will compel.
All right.
Okay.
Now, so go ahead and really fill us in and help us understand, what is Avaaz?
What is purpose?
And what is the Syria campaign?
And then we'll get to the actual white helmets on the ground in Syria next.
Okay.
Well, I mean, you know, we've been talking about humanitarian intervention.
Anytime one takes place, you have to have some kind of war crime committed by the government that the interventionist parties, Western countries, NATO, seek to replace.
So we remember the Rendon group and the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador ginned up this story of Kuwaiti children being taken off the incubators by Saddam Hussein's forces in Kuwait.
I mean, this was a false story, unlike the stories out of East Aleppo.
And it provided a humanitarian pretext for the U.S. to invade for Operation Desert Storm.
You had the Srebrenica massacre, a much more complex story than we've been told, but definitely a crime by Milosevic's forces, which provided the humanitarian pretext for NATO intervention against Yugoslavia.
Then you have, you know, the second Gulf War.
You had Iraqi opposition figures like Kanan Makiya gallivanting around the West, talking about how they were tortured in Saddam's torture chambers.
You had the story of Halabja, the Kurds, being gassed.
This provided the humanitarian pretext for the U.S. to unilaterally invade Iraq.
And now we have another situation where East Aleppo has become the set piece.
Of course, West Aleppo, which is under rebel shelling, and there is massive suffering there, it's a government-controlled area, is ignored.
East Aleppo is the set piece.
It's a kill box.
People have been killed daily by Syrian and Russian airstrikes, which are targeting, in a very disproportionate, ham-handed fashion, rebel forces led by the al-Qaeda ancillary known as al-Nusra, as well as the Hara al-Sham, which is another extremist group.
And there have been public relations firms that have been trying to create, trying to establish a humanitarian pretext for intervention for years.
They are led by the Syria campaign, which claims to be a non-political organization representing the voices of ordinary Syrians, all ordinary Syrians, and that it's a solidarity organization that only wants civilian protection.
And so when I just scratched the surface a little bit and looked at this organization, which is pumping out press releases, getting celebrities to support its initiatives, and its press releases will always be written in the language of liberal, appeals to the liberal sensibility with Syrian doctors want this, hospitals being bombed, but usually come with a call for military action.
This organization, which is constantly sending out petitions for a no-fly zone, I found that it was basically a front for another public relations organization called Purpose.
Purpose is based in New York City and London.
It established the Syria campaign as a voices project, a private company, in 2014.
It was established with seed money from the Asfari Foundation, headed by Ayman Asfari, who is a Syrian-British billionaire, spent most of his life in the U.K., a close political ally of former British Prime Minister David Cameron, and a leading member of the Syrian opposition, the Syrian National Council, which has called for regime change in no uncertain terms.
So you have an opposition-funded PR firm founded by Purpose.
Its main staffers, the people who took out its original articles of incorporation, were public relations professionals from Purpose who are not Syrian.
And who founded Purpose?
Purpose was founded by Avaaz.
Avaaz is another kind of global, collectivist, online activist organization which garnered over one million signatures for the no-fly zone in Libya.
And it's got a new petition out for a no-fly zone in Syria, while Purpose is operating the Syria campaign and claiming to represent the voices of ordinary Syrians from New York and London.
And they are having enormous success.
Enormous success.
And it's not just with the White Helmets, which we can talk about in a minute.
They had enormous success in attacking the United Nations, and specifically the U.N. resident coordinator, former resident coordinator, Yaqub El-Hilal, someone who I think should have been nominated for a Nobel Prize.
This is someone who successfully evacuated 1,000 civilians in Old Homs, a city under siege in 2014, under fire from the National Defense Forces, which are allied with the Syrian army.
He's broken something like 17 or 18 sieges to get aid in.
He even escorted fighters out of Old Homs and took them to Northern Homs.
This was a very sophisticated operation where U.N. staffers were put in danger to literally save lives.
And he immediately came under attack by the Syria campaign for coordinating with the government in Damascus.
It was the most cynical attack on the U.N.
The Syria campaign not only painted him as an ally of Assad for doing what every human rights or every humanitarian organization has to do in conflict zones, but they even acclaimed credit for forcing him out of his position.
And they did so falsely.
In fact, he'd been reassigned and even promoted to a position in Liberia.
And The Guardian played along with it all the way.
The British paper promoted every report the Syria campaign churned out about El-Hilal and the United Nations.
The whole point of this was to delegitimize the Syrian government.
The United Nations was collateral damage here, and the Syria campaign could have cared less about the work it was doing.
And to help generate this competition for funding from the humanitarian organizations that are operating in rebel territory, in territory controlled by al-Qaeda and other groups.
And these are the groups that we traditionally hear from and are pushed to celebrate in the West while we're pushed to kind of see the United Nations as problematic and, if not, an Assad apology.
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Now, so, would it be the case then, Max, that outside of the Democratic Party that these guys are the ones pushing the hardest for a no-fly zone in Syria right now?
I'm sorry, outside.
Well, the Syria campaign is, you know, it has an international reach, and so, you know, they have a major role within the U.K.
They've helped organize, I'd say, five days of protests in the U.K. and across Europe in support of a no-fly zone and military escalation.
So I think they're basically the most sophisticated and insidious organization pushing for military escalation, and they're doing it across partisan lines.
In that regard, they're sort of post-political, but what they really represent, I think, is not anything that has anything to do with solidarity.
It's more what you could call the alt-center or the bipartisan foreign policy consensus that, you know, meets in the beltway and calls for these cynical military measures that lead to disaster.
I love that, the alt-center.
I don't know if I'm going to steal it from you and use it, but I do like it.
All right, now— I think Adam Johnson can see— Oh, that, yeah, you know what, yeah, I forgot, but I think that is where I saw that first, too.
Funny guy.
All right, so now let me ask you this, because, you know, you talked about the pretexts for war range between total hoaxes to misrepresentations and this kind of thing.
So I wonder how exactly you characterize the white helmets.
I mean, are these just guys with cameras?
Are they—do you call it 60-40 or 70-30 actually saving people or anything?
Do you know?
Well, let's not get it twisted.
I mean, I never attacked rescue workers, per se, in my piece.
And everybody who says that I did knows that I didn't.
And they're using the same tactic that Zionists use by claiming that I'm attacking Jews when I criticize pro-Israel lobbying campaigns.
It's the same tactic to shut down debate.
What I'm doing is scrutinizing—I guess you could call it the fog machine.
I mean, this isn't just about the fog of war.
This is about a fog machine that seeks to obscure the reality of what's happening in order to push us into supporting policies that we ordinarily wouldn't support, we being the Western public and especially people who are liberal-minded or left-wing.
So the Syria campaign recruited or essentially discovered that their greatest public relations success would come from a group of rescue workers who had been set up by a British mercenary in southern Turkey, a guy named James Lemercier, who previously protected oil fields for the United Arab Emirates.
You know, he's a great humanitarian.
And he had set this group up with massive amounts of funding from EU governments and USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Not for humanitarian purposes, necessarily.
USAID set it up through its Office of Transitional Initiatives.
This is the group that USAID uses to promote political subversion and regime change.
They've done so in Venezuela, in Cuba, through this Zinzineo Twitter scheme.
And what they wanted to do was set up a series of civil and governing measures in rebel-held areas to kind of improve the confidence of people in those areas as they move towards replacing the Syrian government.
And so the rescue workers were going to be needed.
I mean, there would be rescue workers anyway.
There are rescue workers in Yemen.
There are rescue workers in Gaza.
But these rescue workers would be the best equipped, the best trained, and they would also have cameras and a public relations apparatus moving forward from 2014 that would not only convey the destruction on the battlefield and show the Western public the kind of damage that the Syrian army was committing against civilians in their attempt to suppress a violent insurgency, but the White Helmets would be sent around the globe to campaign for military escalation.
So you have two different kind of—I would say there are two wings of the White Helmets.
You have the grassroots members who are paid $150 a month.
They're rescuing people, and to the extent that they're rescuing civilians, there's no debate that that's great humanitarian work.
But then you have the White Helmets operating out of southern Turkey run by May Day Rescue, the organization of Le Mercier, this British mercenary.
And they are going to the French parliament.
They're just there in the most Islamophobic parliament in the world, which has imposed emergency regulations on the French people, receiving a standing applause as they campaign for military escalation, specifically a no-fly zone.
They were just at the Atlantic Council in Washington, and I covered this event, so you can read about this event in the second part of my series.
The Atlantic Council is like the base of the Alt Center.
It's a think tank that pushes for—there's pretty much pressure coming from this think tank for every war.
It's a pro-Israel think tank.
It's funded by Boeing, I think the leading exporter of arms in the world.
It's funded by Chevron and other petroleum industry companies.
And the spokesman of the White Helmets, Raed Saleh, appears on stage next to Frederick Hoff, who is a former Hillary Clinton official who said that he got interested and involved in Syria because he wanted to basically crush Iran and Russia.
He wasn't trying to save people.
He said this in no uncertain terms in Politico.
Frederick Hoff is on stage with the White Helmets.
Raed Saleh of the White Helmets is talking about the humanitarian situation and how terrible it is in eastern Aleppo.
And then every time he pauses, Frederick Hoff interjects with a call for cruise missile strikes on government areas in Syria and criticism of the Obama administration for not doing enough, even though they're sending hundreds of millions in weapons and training to the rebels, which is prolonging the bloodshed.
And finally, I got up and I asked why, when I am directed to the White Helmets website, which is set up and operated by the Syria campaign, am I immediately directed to a petition for a no-fly zone?
And then I criticized the no-fly zone in front of the audience and pointed out that the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon, General Joseph Dunford, said that a no-fly zone would lead the United States into direct conflict with the Syrian government and Russia, which could, whether it's World War III or not, sounds like a catastrophic situation.
And I pointed out that there's never been a no-fly zone that didn't lead to regime change.
And Raed Saleh said, well, you're not in Syria, so you don't see the destruction.
But I see it every day, and it doesn't mean that I'm going to support military escalation.
And that was it.
I was approached by staffers from the Syria campaign after this discussion ended, one of whom, Kinan Rahmani, who's been campaigning for military escalation for years, really sought to chastise me for criticizing the White Helmets.
It's like you can't even challenge them when they're campaigning around the globe for a no-fly zone.
And he was pulled away from me immediately by a woman named Anna Nolan, who is a staffer for the public relations firm that I described, Purpose, which was funded by Avaaz.
So it was kind of like the whole story that I was reporting was unfolding before my eyes.
And if you want to—I just don't understand the criticism of me for pointing out the reality of this public relations campaign when the White Helmets themselves are being exploited by Western public relations firms and their entire staff on the ground is being compelled into a campaign for military escalation.
I think the criticism should be of the Syria campaign and these public relations staffers, which are funded by opposition billionaires who are actually probably not very well liked inside Syria by most people.
All right.
Now, well, so I do want to vouch for you for a minute here, since I've already read the article that you do say, you know, the numbers are hard to pin down, but clearly they do rescue people and to whatever degree they do, that's great.
That's not what's at issue here.
So it's clearly a dishonest criticism if people are going after you on that basis, since you already directly addressed that in the piece in the first place.
I believe it's in the first article, even where you say that.
But then, so I'm curious, though, about who these guys, you know, where they are all the time, because you do cite some stories here, some different evidence and some pictures of these guys basically palling around with, well, I don't know, witch hog groups.
I mean, are they even the rescuers, are they themselves just Al-Qaeda guys only with a camera?
And I mean, Al-Qaeda guys rescue people, too, right?
Or are they something different?
I mean, this is another issue about the White Helmets, and it's another forbidden issue.
You're not allowed to talk about it, even though there's a for-profit contractor in Washington called Chemonix, which has delivered at least $23 million U.S. taxpayer-funded aid to the White Helmets.
And who the hell knows how much of that got to them, because there's no way to monitor this for-profit contractor.
It's been responsible for aid in Brooklyos, in Haiti, in Afghanistan.
It's basically probably one of the worst aid companies on Earth.
And I called up Chemonix and asked, what are your monitoring systems to make sure that the aid is being delivered and used for appropriate purposes and that White Helmets are not involved in rebel activity?
I think it's a legitimate question, especially when it's, you know, basically my taxes are going to that.
And they just turned me over to USAID, who then said, we see no evidence of any impropriety.
They've saved 60,000 or 40,000 people.
The numbers always vary.
And, you know, there's no evidence that they're involved with rebel activity or any human rights crimes.
And, you know, as I said before, the Syria campaign is promoting the White Helmets is completely apolitical, with no agenda at all.
They just want to save lives.
But, I mean, there's ample evidence that in Idlib, which is, you know, the city itself, it has been under the control of al-Qaeda, of the al-Nusra, of the al-Qaeda affiliate al-Nusra and Arar al-Sham.
200 Christian families have been forced to move out.
The Druze population in Idlib has been forced to convert.
And there have been public executions that we saw one such execution on video of a possibly innocent man simply standing there, his death sentence is read out by an extremist.
And that extremist walks up to the man, shoots him in the head with a pistol, then finishes him off on the ground.
And seconds later, two members of the White Helmets rush out, throw him on a stretcher and take him away.
There have been scene after scene of members of the White Helmets in their White Helmets uniform carrying al-Nusra flags, cheering with members of the al-Nusra Brigade.
There's been footage of White Helmets members carrying weapons.
Channel 4 in the UK, actually, the channel did a special on the Noradin al-Zenki battalion or brigade, which is another extremist group operating in eastern Aleppo, which is responsible, by the way, for beheading an adolescent boy on video.
And this group was operating with White Helmets embedded among it.
And scenes of those White Helmets were edited out by Channel 4 in this documentary about moderate rebels.
That's who the documentary was purportedly about.
So I actually went soft.
I mean, I have much more documentation of people operating among the White Helmets who are simultaneously operating with extremist rebel groups.
And, you know, you could maybe say, oh, well, they've been pushed into this situation.
They're under siege.
They're facing massive human rights crimes from, you know, the Syrian army and the Assad regime.
Fine.
That doesn't mean that the United States government has to continue pumping millions of dollars into this operation when USAID cannot provide me with the names of the contractors or subcontractors that do any monitoring or evaluation.
And the last monitoring and evaluation report, which was issued in 2014 by USAID, found that its money was not achieving any of the goals that it wanted to in rebel-held territory.
And they found that extremists were operating in those territories.
And that was spelled out pretty clearly in their own evaluation report.
So, I mean, these are legitimate questions, and I was attacked for it mercilessly.
No reporters are asking what's happening with the money given to humanics.
No reporters are asking these questions.
And when I decided to do it, I mean, not no reporters, but no mainstream reporters are doing it.
When I decided to do it, I received not only threats texted to me before my article even came out.
I received a phoned-in threat from one of the main backers of Escalation, one of the main kind of rogues on Twitter pushing Escalation, who happens to be a journalism professor at Sterling University, Idris Ahmad.
I received just more pressure to shut up than I ever received from the pro-Israel lobby.
And it shows really how fragile the Escalationist narrative is, and how desperate they are to suppress any debate or scrutiny or factual reporting.
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Yeah, well, and that guy particularly, he's been carrying Al Qaeda's water since 2012, and quite stridently, too.
All right, now, so you brought up the U.N. convoy attack, and this is really important because there was a second ceasefire that was reached between Secretary of State John Kerry and the foreign minister of Russia, Sergei Lavrov, and then it quickly fell apart.
This is just earlier this month or late last month, and what had happened was, first, the Americans, they say accidentally, I don't know, really, but they say accidentally hit and killed at least scores somewhere approximately 180 or 100-something Syrian troops, leading to the Islamic State temporarily seizing a base.
And then on the other side, they say the Assad government or the Russians, which they say are the same thing anyway, bombed a humanitarian U.N. convoy bringing food to the victims in East Aleppo.
And, yeah, you seem to think that there's a problem with that story, or possibly.
Well, you know, I didn't really address any problem with the story, though there might be, but I noted that the role of the White Helmets in serving as kind of a surrogate news organization in rebel-held areas where most reporters can't operate.
I mean, most American reporters can't go into eastern Aleppo and operate because they need the permission of al-Qaeda to operate there.
So what the Western media does is they rely on quote-unquote activists, and the activists are basically publicists for the different rebel factions.
In this case, you had an attack on an aid convoy west of Aleppo in rebel-held territory.
This convoy had already unloaded what it was delivering, you know, blankets and food.
It was being monitored by Russian drones.
I mean, the Russians have acknowledged that.
And, you know, it was coordinating.
It had coordinated with Russia and the Syrian government.
It was a Syrian Arab Red Crescent convoy.
The Syrian Arab Red Crescent is a neutral organization which does coordinate with the Syrian government, and it's been involved in breaking sieges or getting aid through sieges.
It's a heroic organization that came under attack by the Syria campaign, and the Syrian Arab Red Crescent is the partner organization of the United Nations.
So they were— I'm sorry, in this context you're talking about they've come under rhetorical attack in the past.
Rhetorical, political attack.
I just want to be clear on what you're saying.
I'm not trying to get it twisted.
I'm talking about political, rhetorical attack by the Syria campaign.
They're the ones accused of collaborating with Assad.
And, you know, I interviewed the head of a—the executive of an NGO operating in Damascus doing the same thing, trying to deliver aid in coordination with the government that controls most territory in Syria, but to help everyone.
And this person said that, you know, these kind of political attacks do put their aid workers in danger.
And convince people in rebel territory that they are government representatives.
So there isn't much evidence about who attacked this convoy.
I mean, I'd love to see more.
I never—and I wouldn't—I wouldn't surprise me if, you know, the Russians attacked it by some mistake, although I can't understand why they would have attacked it intentionally.
It didn't serve their political ends.
What we did see were some flashes, some explosions filmed from a distance.
And immediately after the attack, a member of the White Helmets shows up on the scene speaking English and claims that barrel bombs were dropped on the convoy by the Syrian—by the Syrian Air Force, which is highly implausible because barrel bombs are not very accurate.
I don't know why he made this allegation.
There have been some claims—you know, I saw the U.N. claim that it was an aerial attack, but I've seen no evidence of that.
And the one piece of evidence that, you know, the Washington Post, for example, relied on was a photograph taken by the White Helmets of a tail fin that was supposedly a Russian missile.
The person who pointed to it as a Russian missile tail fin was named Elliot Higgin.
He was at the Atlantic Council, which is also, you know, funded by the Hariri family who made all their money in Saudi Arabia and are pretty much calling for regime change in Syria.
And Higgin said, oh, well, it's a Russian missile, and so that's it.
The Russians did it.
Those are the two pieces of evidence that Russia was responsible in.
I mean, maybe the Russians did it, but I don't think it's enough evidence.
And both pieces of evidence arrived through the White Helmets' media apparatus.
And that really shows you, I mean, regardless of who's responsible for the attack, it shows you another role that the White Helmets play in Syria, which is as a kind of de facto media organization pushing a very clear political agenda, which is pro-opposition, pro-rebel, and pro-escalation.
Yeah, which, as you pointed out, would be horrible for everybody, including all the people they're trying to fight for.
It seems like they haven't really thought this through very much.
You know, I don't know.
They haven't been thought through.
You know, during the Cuban missile crisis, those who were pushing for strikes on Cuba, Kennedy asked them, you know, have you thought of a plan for the day after?
And they had no plan.
I mean, that was really what convinced Kennedy that this was not only a boondoggle, but it could put the lives of millions of people in the nuclear crosshairs.
And there is no plan for the day after Assad falls, for the day after the Syrian government collapses.
And beyond that, there's no plan for a no-fly zone.
That's why you're seeing all of these senior retired U.S. pilots come out in opposition to a no-fly zone, including our friend James Clapper, who defended the NSA, and is not exactly Jill Stein's press secretary.
I mean, they're examining what a no-fly zone means in practice, and they're recognizing how disastrous it will be.
It could either lead to a shooting war with Russia, or it could open up the gates of hell to a substantial rebel takeover of more parts of Syria.
And by the way, we're already seeing people leaving the government-controlled areas, which many of them are relatively safe, because of Western sanctions.
Western sanctions have created a situation where there are no cancer drugs left for children to be treated for cancer at the main children's hospital in Damascus.
Prior to these Western sanctions, which are imposed with the interest of regime change in mind, 90% of cancer drugs were subsidized by the Syrian government.
So, I mean, the question is, do we care about people, or do we care about getting a specific political result from the conflict in Syria?
And, I mean, if you care about people, the interest has to be in harm reduction, in de-escalation, in conflict resolution.
I see no effort put into that at all.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, you bring up Clapper.
For Clapper to be good on this ought to be a real awakening moment for everybody to kind of snap out of it and think again about this.
This is the guy who, he was, I believe he was the head of the National Reconnaissance Office back in 03 and came up with the completely ridiculous claim that the reason we couldn't find Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction is because Vladimir Putin had trucked them all to Syria.
So, this guy is a real hawk.
If he's the one speaking a word of caution at this point, either he grew old or something is really the matter here, you know?
Well, he's quoted today by Spencer Ackerman in The Guardian against a no-fly zone.
And you have something like a dozen former high-ranking, highly decorated pilots from the Air Force, from the Navy, declaring that a no-fly zone will be a disaster in no uncertain terms.
I mean, there's really no argument.
And the most hilarious thing is when Hillary Clinton advanced a no-fly zone, reiterated her call for a no-fly zone in the last debate.
She said that it would be the product of negotiations with Russia.
Basically, the U.S. violating a country's airspace and occupying the air would be negotiated with Russia, and Russia would allow them to do that.
That's absolutely ridiculous.
The reality is that almost the entire airspace of government-controlled areas in Syria, at least the key areas, are protected by Russian S-300 and S-400 anti-aircraft barriers, which are some of the most sophisticated anti-aircraft weapons in the world.
And then another point I want to make about a no-fly zone is that there's the city of Deir ez-Zor.
You mentioned this earlier, Scott.
This is a city where the U.S. attacked the Syrian army during the last ceasefire in September, killed about 80 Syrian soldiers on a hilltop, and ISIS advance took the hilltop and nearly took the city of Deir ez-Zor.
Deir ez-Zor is under siege by ISIS.
250,000 people are in this city trying to maintain their daily lives.
I mean, banks are functioning, and the only way they can get aid is through airdrops.
The airdrops are carried out by a Russian contractor, which weirdly is being criticized in the U.S. media for keeping this city afloat.
And it's protected by the Syrian army.
If the Syrian army goes away, that city, which is just west of Raqqa, will be taken by ISIS.
So a no-fly zone would almost certainly mean that Deir ez-Zor will fall to ISIS.
And not only that, I mean, we're seeing ISIS being pushed away from Iraq, away from Mosul by the Mosul operations, towards a place like Deir ez-Zor, which will reinforce ISIS forces.
And this may be something, I mean, I don't think it's conspiratorial to say that there are elements in Western governments that would like to see this happen because it will weaken Assad, who cares about the actual people in Deir ez-Zor falling under the control of ISIS, if it advances these interests.
The Economist actually called for ISIS to be pushed into Syria.
It called for a path to be left open for ISIS into Syria.
That is the most cynical thing that I can remember reading in months.
I had missed that, that they had openly called for that.
It's shocking.
It's shocking.
I mean, and it's totally consistent with the way that ISIS has been used in many ways.
I mean, why didn't the U.S. attack ISIS around Palmyra?
Why did it take the Russians intervening in support of the Syrian army to retake Palmyra, this area that is home to some of the most important antiquities in the world?
Because that area was under Syrian government control.
And it's the same with Deir ez-Zor.
And that's really worth pointing out, too, right?
That this is after the official split between Nusra and ISIS, and even after the declaration of the actual caliphate under Caliph Ibrahim, so-called Baghdadi.
That was, even then, America was tolerating their expansion into Palmyra.
Right.
I mean, and the U.S. was tolerating their operation within the Free Syrian Army, whatever that is, at the Menegh Air Base in 2013.
I mean, this is one of the most important battles of the Syrian civil war.
The FSA did a terrible job in taking this air base.
It took them, I think, 10 months.
And then Omar the Chechen comes along, who later declared his affiliation with extremist groups and ISIS.
I think Robert Bork praised the taking of the air base, and it opened up the whole northern corridor to Turkey for the rebels.
And so, I mean, ISIS elements were operating freely among the FSA, and they were doing press conferences together, praising each other.
And the U.S. was just fine with it at the time.
You also had Ambassador Robert Ford praising Zahran Alush from Jaysh al-Islam, the Army of Islam, which basically shares the same mentality as ISIS.
Robert Ford called them a moderate rebel organization in, I think, Foreign Policy Magazine back in 2014.
So, I mean, the tolerance that the U.S. has for these groups really speaks to how dangerous the strategy is, and I think it's basically at a dead end right now.
Yeah.
Hey, all.
Scott Horton here.
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Well, and, you know, as long as we're at it, let me throw in that the Al-Farouq Brigade were supposedly secular moderates who wanted to hold elections and get along with Christians, and then it was their leader who was on camera eating the dead soldier's heart or lungs or whatever it was.
And then John McCain's friends from the Northern Storm Brigade, who he visited back in, I believe it was in 2012, with Elizabeth Obagi there, they were already on camera, interviewed by Time magazine.
That was the first result under Google when you searched it, at least back then, the Northern Storm, was their leader saying, yeah, I'm a veteran of Iraq War II where I fought with Zarqawi against the Americans.
And that was before John McCain went and met with him.
And those were the mythical moderates.
So never mind when people make the mistake and say there he is on the porch with Baghdadi.
That's not correct.
But it doesn't matter because same damn difference.
It's Zarqawi's guy that he's hanging out with right there.
So who cares if it's Baghdadi or another Zarqawi guy?
Yeah, yeah.
And, you know, the guy who took McCain into Syria to meet with those moderate rebels, his name was Mustafa.
He's an opposition lobbyist in Washington with the Syrian Emergency Task Force.
And there's a really interesting documentary about Mustafa and his organization called Red Line.
I mean, and it shows how he met McCain and tried to gin up U.S. intervention in Syria in 2013 and failed to do so.
But then Mustafa continually goes into Syria, into rebel-held areas to try to find local councils that his donors, which include the U.S. State Department, can support.
And he meets with the local council in one area, I think in northern Syria, led by Arar al-Sham, which has been supported by Turkey and the Gulf state is a Salafist organization.
And they tell him, you know, we're doing a great job here.
We're keeping order.
We're running a Sharia court.
And we hate democracy.
We are going to set up an Islamic state.
And, you know, anyone who wants to live among us has to basically follow these fundamentalist rules.
And you can see, I mean, Mustafa's there with camera people filming a documentary.
He's embarrassed.
And this is, you know, he basically leaves without finding many local councils to work with and winds up kind of trying to still, you see him on camera trying to smuggle in weapons to the rebel groups from, at one point, a Ukrainian billionaire, apparently.
And the documentarians bleep out the names of these figures and basically cover for Mustafa.
So we don't know exactly what he's doing, but it's being sanctioned by the U.S. government.
And you can just imagine what would happen if this aide was going or he was trying to smuggle weapons into some area where...
Afghanistan.
Yeah.
Yeah, sure.
For the mujahideen to fight the Americans there.
Let's say I try to support aid organizations in the Gaza Strip, just aid organizations.
You have, I think, five men who've been sentenced to life in prison from the largest Muslim charity in the U.S., the Holy Land Foundation, for simply sending aid, humanitarian aid money, charity to Gaza.
So there's just so much hypocrisy to go around and there's very little scrutiny for all of these lobbyists in Washington from the opposition who are effectively supporting extremist groups from afar.
Well, yeah.
And it's really important, too, about Ahrar al-Sham there that they're said to be quite moderate in comparison to al-Nusra, which, of course, is much more moderate than the Islamic State and that kind of thing.
And yet, as you're saying, these guys are really just bin Ladenites, too.
And I believe, I don't know if these guys are still alive or if they were killed in the big truck bombing back a couple of years ago, but it was at least founded originally by original friends of Osama bin Laden from the Azzam group back in the late 80s and early 90s.
Yeah.
So pretty much indistinguishable from Nusra.
Yeah, the founder of Ahrar al-Sham, if I'm not mistaken, was a charter member of al-Qaeda and made no secret of it.
But you have in 2014 in Foreign Affairs, the Journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, Will McCants, who's one of the favorite self-styled terror experts in Washington, who's at Brookings, writing an article with two co-authors calling for friendship with Ahrar al-Sham.
They're rebels we can be friends with, I think was the title, was the headline of this article.
And it was because of the failure of the Free Syrian Army, because of the failure to cultivate some kind of moderate rebels, they had to turn to Ahrar al-Sham, who share pretty much the same ideology as al-Qaeda, which is an extreme Salafi ideology, as the alternative.
Because beyond them were ISIS and the al-Nusra battalions who had sworn loyalty to basically bin Laden chief aide Ayman al-Zawahiri.
So that's the position these figures were put in.
And shamelessly, shamelessly, they lobbied for more support to this monstrous organization.
Well, and you know, we keep calling it Nusra because ain't nobody fooling us.
But there actually is a development here where they renamed themselves Jabhat Fatah al-Sham.
And according, it's funny, if you search this thing in your favorite brand of search engine, which you think will best protect your privacy, what you'll find is all these Western reports saying, oh, they've broken with al-Qaeda, they've broken with al-Qaeda.
But then there's a couple here and there that say, actually, they never really said that.
All they said was that they're changing their name.
Yeah.
I mean, whether or not they have, they've kept their ideology, they've continued the same practices.
Yeah.
I mean, but the fact that they're still sworn loyal to Ayman al-Zawahiri, the butcher of New York City, that's something.
I mean, not that, again, you're right, if they if they renounced him, that wouldn't make too much difference.
But the fact that they haven't bothers me extra.
Well, what bothers me is if you look, you know, if you look at what happened after the rebranding campaign, their spokesman, their Australian spokesman, who I think was a party to one of the biggest criminal embezzlement of Australian government money.
Forty four million dollars was redirected through a charity that he had a role in in Australia to ISIS elements in Syria.
And then he fled.
He was furnished to Western media organizations.
And you look at his interview with Sky News or his interview with The Intercept, and he's basically given softball questions and he's able to provide sort of articulate answers that, you know, cast him in a moderate light.
And he's not challenged.
He's not asked about 9-11, for example.
He's not asked about this, this fraud that he was involved in.
And, you know, that that just speaks to the complete failure of the Western media to scrutinize this whole program, which we've seen before of, you know, funding the moderate rebels to create havoc in a country.
This spokesman has since, by the way, left the organization.
And the United States, even as it has funded groups working hand in glove with al-Qaeda in the field, doesn't even recognize this rebranding campaign as serious.
Yeah.
Well, at least, you know, the right hand doesn't.
The left hand is working with them better than ever, I guess.
Although, well, I don't know about that, right?
Do you know about that?
Is there recent reporting about the degrees?
I know that The Washington Post has Obama refusing to give them heavier weapons, but is there any cessation or escalation in the amount of money, light arms training the CIA are giving these guys?
Do you know?
I mean, all I know is what's reported.
And one of the things that's been reported is that Barack Obama is not interested in this lobbying push, which I mean, you basically see it distilled in the letter of the 51 State Department dissenters, former and current State Department staffers calling for heavier weapons to be given to the rebels, including manpads, which are shoulder mounted anti-aircraft missiles that can down a civilian airliner.
They also called for cruise missile strikes in government areas, basically, which will lead to state collapse.
So let's point out the fact that the Qataris have provided SA-7 Chinese manpads in the past to the rebels.
They've had them.
So this assistance has already come, and it's led to nothing but more bloodshed.
More, you know, tow missiles and more manpads are not going to produce any positive result.
The goal was spelled out in a completely, I mean, it was an absolutely insane paper by Charles Lister, who's another one of the favorite expert escalationist crowd in Washington.
He's now at a Saudi-funded think tank called the Middle East Institute, and he called for a massive surge in weapons shipments to the rebels, which could include al-Qaeda.
He called for the U.S. not to attack, to specifically not attack al-Qaeda elements and to surge weapons to them for 20 days, allow them to rampage against government forces and throughout the country for 20 days.
And then if the government fails to negotiate what he called kind of a robust negotiation, which will, I guess, lead to some kind of transition, I don't know what transition they have in mind, then begin airstrikes, then begin the real military action, which brings the U.S. military in.
So the whole point of all this pressure to amp up the arms to the rebels is to supposedly produce robust negotiations.
And so they can always, you know, whenever you hear the escalationist argument, it's done in the language of negotiations and peace.
But what it really means in practice is providing heavy weapons to insurgents who are led by Ahrar al-Sham and al-Qaeda.
That's all it means.
And to that extent, you know, Charles Lister is making an argument for arming al-Qaeda, and we've seen that story before.
Yeah, but Max, aren't you ignoring the long, successful history of negotiations with al-Qaeda in the past by different groups?
Well, I mean, let's talk about the most recent negotiations with all of the rebel groups.
The U.S. was directly involved.
Sam Heller, who's another escalationist at the Century Foundation, whose research focuses on the rebels and he does interviews with them, reported that they've been negotiating directly with the U.S. State Department, including extremist groups like Noradino Zinke, who I mentioned before.
So during the last ceasefire in September, the rebels refused to observe the ceasefire, and while the U.S. claims that 20 moderate groups did observe the ceasefire, they refused to provide a list or name who those groups are.
It's basically impossible to deal with any of these rebel groups in a negotiating framework unless their leverage is taken away, and that means moving towards de-escalation.
As I said, the only leverage that Americans have is to put pressure on their government to end these kind of timber sycamore programs where Saudi money through Prince Bandar is used to arm extremists.
That's the only leverage there is to get these groups to come to the negotiating table.
I understand that Boris Johnson, you know, really the woke revolutionary peacenik, called for members of the Labor Party to go out and protest in front of the Russian embassy.
I mean, you know, fine, the Russians are committing war crimes in eastern Aleppo.
What leverage do you have over the Russians?
What is that going to do to them except make them laugh at you and encourage them?
You have to exert your leverage where you have it, and where we have it is on the opposition side.
Yeah.
After all, I mean, supposedly America's the empire here, and Turkey, Israel, Qatar, Saudi, these are our satellites.
What we say goes, to quote George Bush Sr.
It just seems like what we say is the same thing that they say.
The real enemy is Iran and the Shiite crescent axis alliance of evil in Assad and Hezbollah, and so keep on.
Whoever heard of Al-Qaeda or 9-11 or any of that, who cares about that?
That's a long time ago.
This is now, and the enemy is Iran, right?
Right.
I mean, you know, and that's another thing is that the U.S. program has very little to do with civilian protection or saving lives.
It never has.
It wasn't in Libya.
It wasn't in Iraq, obviously.
That was just a pretext for doing it.
But the real agenda is, as Mike Morrell, former kind of interim CIA director, who is a close advisor to Hillary Clinton, and just yesterday, I think, was at the Center for American Progress, which has just put out a paper calling for bombing Syria.
Mike Morrell spelled out the agenda.
We need to be in Syria so we can kill lots of Iranians and Russians.
Basically, bleed the geopolitical enemies of the U.S. rather than negotiate with them.
Meanwhile, you have billions being pumped into the country by the Saudis and the Qataris.
And the American taxpayers, too.
We're getting bled, too.
And the American taxpayers.
But what's really troubling has been highlighted, I think, by the relationship between Netanyahu and Obama, which is that domestic politics has made it almost impossible for Obama, if he had wanted to, to apply pressure on Netanyahu to roll back the occupation, to apply a settlement freeze.
And I think that goes for the U.S. relationship with the Saudis and the Qataris, as well, to a substantial degree.
So, I mean, you could be facing a situation, now that the Pandora's box has been opened, and if it's opened any further, where the U.S. pulls back its support, but the Gulf states, the Saudis and the Qataris continue funding an insurgency, and you have an endless insurgency.
What does that mean for Syria?
What does that mean for most Syrian people?
I mean, you know, I'm always told, listen to Syrians.
Okay, ask them about that.
Do they want Saudi-funded and Qatari rebels indefinitely running rampaging across the country?
Or do they want what the Defense Intelligence Agency spelled out in a 2012 memo, which has been suppressed, a Salafi state in eastern Syria?
I know that, you know, Bret Stephens, the ultra-Zionist at the Wall Street Journal op-ed page wants that.
He wants Syria to be partitioned.
I know the neocons would like Syria to be partitioned, according to Bernard Lewis's Lebanonization doctrine, where Arab states are weakened and divided up along sectarian lines to preserve Israel's strategic deterrence.
But I don't know if most Syrians want that, and from the polling that I've seen, it doesn't seem that they do.
Yeah, I mean, we know that the bulk of the Syrian army, I don't know about the officer corps, but the bulk of the enlistment are Sunni Arabs.
They're on the side of the state here against the jihadists, along with every other ethnic and religious minority in the country right now.
And many of the commanders as well.
So this is another trope, that this is a sectarian war of, you know, Alawites and Shia against the Sunni majority.
That's just a complete trope.
Seventy percent of the population lives under government control, and we just, we never hear from them.
West Aleppo doesn't exist in the minds of Americans.
So when, you know, questions at the debate are asked of the candidates by Martha Raddatz, who was clearly pushing for escalation.
We're told that the population of Aleppo, all of Aleppo, Syria's largest city, is 275,000.
In fact, it's 2.1 million.
But the majority of the people in the city aren't in front of Western cameras or under Russian and Syrian bombing.
They're in front of rebel cannons and rockets.
And so they don't exist.
It seems kind of racist to me.
And maybe that's, you know, hyperbolic language.
But to erase all these people just because their suffering doesn't advance U.S. geopolitical design, at the very least, it's cynical.
And we need to be told about everything that's happening across Syria.
This is another one of the huge failures of our mainstream media.
All right, Shaul, that is Max Blumenthal doing good work at Alternet.
This time it's inside the shadowy PR firm that's lobbying for regime change in Syria and how the White Helmets became international heroes while pushing U.S. military intervention and regime change in Syria.
Thanks again, Max.
Thanks for having me.
Oh, yeah, and I should say, too, he wrote Goliath about Israel.
And he also wrote The 51 Day War about the horrible slaughter in Gaza in 2014, both of which are extremely important books that I hope that you guys will look at.
All right, Shaul, thanks again for listening.
That's The Scott Horton Show.
Check out the brand new Big Deal and sign up for the RSS feed at libertarianinstitute.org.
Thanks again.