Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Introducing the great Gareth Porter.
He's good on everything.
Well, he's good at debunking every false thing our government says about all of its foreign policies, with no exceptions.
So that's a lot.
I don't know what he thinks about the business cycle.
But anyway, how are you doing, Gareth?
I'm fine.
Thanks, Scott.
Glad to be back.
Very happy to have you on the show.
Hey, listen, man, you know who I don't like?
David Sanger from the New York Times.
I can't imagine why not.
You know what it is?
Here's the thing of it.
He spent years claiming, as Robert Perry would say, as flat fact, that Iran had an illicit nuclear weapons program when we all, including him, knew that that was not true.
And he kept saying it over and over again.
And he almost helped get us into a war a couple of times there back, say, I don't know, 10 or 11 years ago.
And so I never forgave him for that.
But it was funny because I read this piece by Devin something or other at the National Interest that was otherwise a perfect takedown or virtually perfect takedown of Sanger's latest war propaganda on Korea.
And he said, Sanger, who is otherwise a well-respected and great expert on this and that.
So I sent this guy criticism.
And I said, hey, you know, that's just not true.
He actually is not respected.
He's a liar.
He's Judith Miller and Michael Gordon.
And he spent years lying about Iran.
And he clearly is now trying to lead a parade against the current negotiations with North Korea.
If you've ever seen him on Charlie Rose, you might get the idea that he actually really is just has the point of view of Douglas Feith, that maybe he's actually not a liar as much as he's the stupidest effing guy on the face of the earth.
If he really believes all the false things that he always claims.
And the guy wrote back to me, I don't know.
He's always seemed to be pretty solid on Korea and people respect him.
And I don't know about Iran, but whatever.
Let him slide.
But I just thought, you know, isn't that strange that David Sanger's reputation exists at all, that he knows anything?
When you can't say that Iran had a nuclear weapons program, but that now they don't without explaining where the hell it went.
Well, you know, David Sanger is in a way the canary in the mine in the sense that everything you're saying about him, of course, I absolutely agree with.
Across the last two decades, he has been consistently wrong on the key national security issues of the day.
But there's no doubt that he is believed by the political elites and the media elites of this country.
And so, you know, in a way, that is the telling point that explains how this guy could answer your criticism in the way that he did.
It is typical, I think, of the political and national security elite, which includes those people who are aspiring to be part of the elite, that he responded in that way.
I think he frankly had never heard these criticisms of Sanger before.
There's just some angry crank in his email, you know?
Yeah.
I mean, you know, the truth that people like you and me try to get out is not penetrating through many cracks in the fence, in the wall, I should say.
And therefore, it's not, as I say, it's not surprising that you get that sort of viewpoint from people, even in the national interest, or maybe I shouldn't say even in the national interest, because that publication sometimes gets it right and sometimes doesn't.
It's hit and miss.
Yeah, that's certainly true.
I mean, they have almost a separate site for the skeptics.
Bandau and Pillar, they're kind of in the corner.
They're not the whole, they don't represent the whole take over there, that's for sure.
The other thing I want to say about Dick Sanger as a sort of introduction to our discussion is that he does in fact hold a remarkable place in American journalism because he has been holding forth now for well on two decades.
I mean, he has been the guy who has dominated the coverage of Iran, of course, Iran nuclear issue, and now, you know, the issue of what to do about North Korea from his perch as the senior national security correspondent of The New York Times.
And The Times has obviously given him complete and utter freedom to say whatever or to write whatever he wants without anybody questioning in the slightest the most outrageous statements that he makes.
Right.
In fact, I remember, I think you and I talked about this before, too, where, did you see, Garrett?
I think this was a conversation we had that like, it was the neatest thing.
Apparently, Broad was off on vacation or had a sick day or something.
And so this time, Sanger's byline was shared with Mazzetti.
And I'm not the biggest Mazzetti fan, but whatever.
In context, in the article, you could tell that Mazzetti had done what Broad would never do and go, whoa, whoa, I think we're a little bit over our skis on this one, David.
And so the place where they accused Iran of having a nuclear weapons program, instead of just saying that as flat fact, they quote Netanyahu saying it or something like that.
You could tell that Mazzetti was kind of, I mean, you could really see the comparison between a Broad and Sanger piece and a Mazzetti and Sanger piece about someone was insisting he be more careful about the way he characterized Iran's program.
Yeah, I think you got that right.
And I think some of your listeners may have heard this story before, but I don't think so.
I wanted to just mention my own personal experience with David Sanger, because in the first few years during which I was writing about and really learning about the Iran nuclear issue, I would say this was 2010, I ran into Sanger at a conference about the Obama administration's nuclear policy, and it was during a coffee break.
And I walked up to him and I said, hey, you know, I have information on the Iran nuclear issue that you should know about.
I have discovered a whole series, a whole raft of indications of fraud in the so-called laptop documents.
And, you know, he kind of said, OK, so what did you find out?
And I briefly summarized it.
And then I said, I'd be glad to send you the piece that documents all of these indications of fraud, because, of course, he had embraced the documents first and foremost among U.S.U.S. reporters writing about this issue.
And so he agreed to take a look at what I had found.
Well, I sent them I sent him my detailed takedown of the laptop documents and all the things that indicated that they were fraudulent.
Never heard from him.
So, you know, I wrote to him and said, what about that?
Never heard from him.
So fast forward to Vienna, 2015, when the nuclear negotiations, the JCPOA negotiations were coming to their final round.
And he was there covering that for The Times and I was covering it for an article that I did for Nation magazine.
And so I saw him sitting in the hotel with a lot of other journalists.
I said, Mr. Sanger, I never heard back from you about what I sent you on the the problems that I had discovered with the the documents.
And he said, oh, well, you know, I have too many emails.
I couldn't get to it.
And that was it.
That was all he ever said.
Yeah.
Well, and you know what?
I know that feeling.
And yet when he's leading the parade on, wow, a not forged Iranian laptop, everyone seems like he's kind of got a special obligation to, you know, check when someone's handing him info on a silver platter like this.
Indeed.
Yeah, he does have he does have a special responsibility as the New York Times national security correspondent to do a little bit of checking, fact checking on things that he's touting as the truth and something that should not be questioned.
All right.
Which brings us to your latest at the American Conservative magazine, North Korea.
Deception, quote, unquote, deception.
NYT malpractice or laziness?
It's one or the other there.
So I'm going with malpractice since we've already discussed who this Sanger fella is in the first place and how bad he is at this seemingly deliberately.
But anyway, so please ruthlessly deconstruct his phony propaganda piece from what a week and a half ago.
Yeah, I guess it's been that long by now.
The piece was published immediately after, I think, the same the same day as the publication of a detailed study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, CSIS, which is, of course, a very pro military outfit, very hard line think tank that is funded by the very handsomely by the major arms contractors, at least some of the major arms contractors.
So it's by no means dovish and would not knowingly support a study that would question major features of the hard line policy toward North Korea.
But in any case, they did publish a study by three specialists on North Korea, based on the study of aerial or satellite photographs of a North Korean missile base and detailed analysis of what it all adds up to.
And long story short, what they found was that this missile base had not really been updated in any significant way for years, that, you know, it was a base where they kept the missiles were kept in underground storage places in a mountain area.
And then, you know, there were tunnels whereby they could roll them out, and they would be on wheels and they could be rolled out and prepared for firing and fired and then rolled back into the mountain tunnels.
But the fact is that this was all old hat to the analyst.
There was nothing new about it.
They knew about the tunnels, they knew about the base.
And what they were able to ascertain was that except for sort of routine maintenance and updating of basic infrastructure, there was nothing that had been done on this missile base in several years.
So clearly, this study indicated that there was nothing that showed that North Korea was trying to steal a march on the Trump administration in their missile bases by somehow creating new capabilities.
That was very clearly stated, it was explicitly stated by the authors of the study.
So that was the background of the Sanger and Broad, the newest of all the Sanger and Broad series of articles.
And what Sanger and Broad did was to claim that this represented, this study had uncovered a massive deception by North Korea.
And the deception was that the study had found that there had been updates, there had been improvements, major improvements in the missile base, indicating that they would be able to, I think the term was to boost the capability for launching missiles against U.S. and other allies, including South Korea.
Well, that was, of course, a complete lie, because it was precisely the opposite of what the authors of that study had explicitly stated.
So to my mind, it was one of the more spectacular cases of outright misrepresentation, outright lying by a major figure in U.S. national security journalism.
And that, of course, is the way I covered it in my piece in The American Conservative.
Right.
And, you know, that the article by the guy, Devin, whatever, at the National Interest, I found it here.
And he has a quote that is from something called the Nelson Report, which I don't know if you get that.
I don't get it, but I know him.
I know Chris Nelson.
Okay.
So Chris Nelson has this very important and influential newsletter that's distributed to members only in Washington, D.C., right?
Is that basically the deal?
Yeah, yeah.
There's a quote here is that the New York Times report, in Chris Nelson's words, were unanimously condemned by Asia specialists.
And then this guy, Devin, goes on to quote Harry Kazianis, who I've talked to before and is all right, but is actually pretty hawkish.
And I've been kind of mad at him at some of his career takes lately, but he was happy to pile on against Sanger and Broad.
And apparently, for whatever reason, I know there's intense interest and conversation on this issue going on among wonks, but nobody, it doesn't seem like anybody really tried to fight for this.
Even the hawks were like, yeah, no, this isn't really right.
I guess they didn't feel like they needed it to justify their hawkish stance.
Well, that may be right.
I haven't checked all the potential sources that one would want to check to ascertain what the verdict was.
Yeah, me either.
I'm just going by some other guy quoting some other guy saying it's unanimous that Sanger really blew it this time.
How embarrassing must it be to live your life as William J. Broad, who's nothing but the also ran sidekick byline for a liar?
Yeah, I must say he's a bit of a mystery.
I can't quite figure out who this person is.
If he really exists, I guess he does.
But anyway, I was going to say that, as I reported in my piece, CNN had a companion piece to Sanger, which said virtually the same thing.
It said that there had been improvements in what they call a secret missile base or a hidden missile base, as though there was something, you know, really.
Right.
Hidden.
What a coy little term to use.
Hidden.
So they might mean secret or they might mean, well, it's in a cave or under, you know, in a bunker under some trees or a tarp or.
What it means, what it means, in fact, is that the North Koreans have not put their missiles out in the open so that they can be bombed by anybody who might just happen to have the idea that it would be a good idea.
They don't store their missiles out in the open.
Well, that's obviously very deceptive.
I feel deceived.
Very deceptive.
Yes, indeed.
So so CNN, you know, joined in the in this crime of against the truth by saying the same thing and again, you know, sort of contradicting what was clearly stated in this in this study.
Actually, I did read that NBC and NPR both took the story at face value and just basically repeated it.
Yeah, there was a lot of repeating the story without, you know, getting into the details at all.
CNN went further than the others.
But you're right that basically the corporate news media piled on and simply repeated what David Sanger had reported.
Some people, I think, did report what CNN said.
It basically was the Sanger report that was repeated without any effort to check on it.
That would be too much trouble.
Hey, guys, check out my book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan by me, Scott Horton.
It's about a year old now.
The audio book is out, too, if you're interested in that.
And a lot of people seem to like it.
It's got all good reviews on Amazon.com and that kind of thing.
Check it out.
And guess what?
I'm writing a new book.
I know I told you I didn't want to, but I got away with not doing it.
It's a transcript of a presentation I gave.
So the whole first draft is really done for me.
I just have to edit it 100,000 times until it's good enough to put out as a book.
And it's going to be basically one chapter on each of the terror wars of the 21st century, to get everybody caught up there.
So look forward to that.
And help support the effort, if you like, at scotthorton.org, donate, patreon.com, scotthortonshow, stuff like that.
All right.
So now, did we miss anything or that was it?
There's these claims about the missiles that really don't hold up.
I guess the real context is he's pretending that they're in violation of anything by doing any of this, when they haven't agreed to not do any of the things he's saying that they're doing.
Yeah, there was the there was the idea of the deception.
And that deception was really pitched to the notion that North Korea somehow was hiding its missile bases or hiding the nature of its missile bases.
And that Trump, even more importantly, Trump was claiming that his negotiations had taken care of the threat from North Korean missile bases.
That was the other side of the impact that clearly was intended by this article.
That it was Trump's claim that he was taking care of the threat from the North Korean missiles and the missile bases implicitly, I guess, was the argument that was the target of the idea of the deception.
And of course, that, again, assumes that somehow, as you've just said, the North Koreans had somehow committed themselves to stopping any, you know, having missile bases or having missiles at all.
They had committed themselves to getting rid of their ballistic missile program.
And the fact that they hadn't moved to start dismantling them would be evidence of that.
That's I presume the the assumption underlying would have to be the assumption underlying that claim.
But it was never explained.
It was sort of the starkest interpretation of the word threat to where Trump could not possibly mean anything other than I made those missiles cease to exist in time and space, which is not what he meant.
Obviously, it was that we've broken the ice.
We're friends now.
We're getting along.
And so the threat is over because of me, which is a perfectly Trumpian statement and which is perfectly consistent with the facts.
Well, I would go beyond that, Scott.
I would say that that Trump fundamentally meant that he had succeeded in getting the North Koreans to stop their missile testing, meaning the testing of their ICBM.
They were not going to be in a position to really threaten the United States because the CIA was very clearly of the opinion that they were many or several months short of having done the necessary testing that would allow them to have a reliable missile with a warhead on it.
I think that's, you know, the gap, the gap between being able to set off nukes and being able to set off intercontinental ballistic missiles and the ability to do them both at the same time, miniaturize that warhead and marry it to that missile that you're saying that he actually literally did succeed in stopping those testings, the testing project that was going on and therefore really did prevent them from being able to figure out how to make that final step.
Yeah.
And they had made that concession in order to do the negotiations with the United States, clearly.
And so he was quite correct in saying that by entering into negotiations, he has in fact paused at the very least any threat to the United States.
And it's a fair statement to make.
And, you know, the media know that perfectly well.
This is part of a political game and it's all very much.
Yeah, I think very much out in the open and for anybody who cares to think about it.
But the people who were there broadcasting for and writing for, for the most part, have not thought it through to that extent.
So it basically works to a great extent, I would say.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I'd really like to see some polls and things like that, because it's just so counterintuitive.
I mean, to have, you know, the president himself seeking peace and then the entire basically center establishment and including the departments and all of their organs in the media being so opposed to it.
It just.
And yeah, I know I have this, you know, crazy anti-war bent point of view that I'm coming from here and everything.
But it just seems very kind of unreasonable and weird to have, you know, to just continue to play this.
Oh, Trump is such a fool.
He's going to be tricked by Kim Jong-un, the leader of one of the weakest states on the planet into, you know, carrying all his water and doing whatever he says and all of this.
And where, you know, this this kind of desperation to prevent Trump not from killing people to death like he does all over the world all day long, every day, but to prevent him from making a peace deal, to prevent him from allowing the South Koreans to make a peace deal with the North here.
It's just nuts, isn't it?
Seems crazy to me.
It seems like really bad public relations for the Democrats to me.
I mean, I think that if it were put up to a poll and people are asked a question in any fair way that you would find that people would support this idea.
But of course, we're not seeing that.
And, you know, you know the reason why we're not seeing that, because the people who do the polling tend to be associated with corporate news media.
And that suggests that they're not going to ask the question in any way that would allow the truth to come out.
Yeah, well, and we've seen that time and again with all of these wars too.
The way that they do that, which really is a great segue to our next topic, which is, yeah, is the same topic.
America's Permanent War State.
Permanent War Complex.
That's the article here at TAC again.
The New American.
No, that's the John Birchers.
The American Conservative Magazine is the one I mean here.
The American conservative.com.
America's Permanent War Complex.
Eisenhower's worst nightmare has come true as defense mega contractors climb into the cockpit to ensure we stay overextended.
And now one thing that I've always liked about you, Gareth, is that even though you are progressive and a leftist, that you always have identified the Pentagon and the generals and the power of the government departments here as the black hole at the center of America.
America's militarist galaxy here.
These are the guys who are really calling the shots.
The chiefs, the joint staff, the generals, the admirals and their combatant commands and all of these things.
There's no more powerful interest group in Washington, D.C. than the Pentagon itself.
Rather than just sort of the kind of assumption, sort of the assumed interpretation by liberals and leftists that this is all just about evil capitalism and capitalism causes imperialism and it's the evil capitalists who are the ones who are making all these things this way.
And now I wonder if you're revising your view about that a little bit or what exactly does this new piece represent there?
That's a good question, Scott.
And in fact, I would say that it does represent an important adjustment in the picture that I have had of the permanent war state, of not just the permanent war state, but the national security state writ large.
Because what I have been seeing more and more as I delve into the recent history of U.S. military policy is that and the history of the Pentagon, if you will, is that what we've experienced over the last two decades and more is a remarkable sort of transformation of the Pentagon, as well as the intelligence community.
In which privatization has essentially infiltrated these previously sort of public institutions, institutions that represented at least the interests of the state bureaucracies of both military and intelligence.
They've infiltrated that with the arms contractors and the intelligence contractors.
And I'll set aside the intelligence community situation for this purpose and focus here on the influence of the arms contractors on the Pentagon itself.
Because what that has meant is that you have basically tens of thousands of contractors representing these major arms makers who have gotten jobs, not just carrying out functions that are closely associated with the Pentagon, but actually located right in the Pentagon.
These are people who are working for the contractors, they're paid by the contractors, but are doing jobs that were once being done by civil servants.
Now, that's a very big, important development, because it does mean that there is increasingly, there has been increasingly the potential for a conflict of interest here between the state and in theory, at least the interests of the American people, on one hand, and the interests of the arms contractors on the other.
And there's no doubt that that contradiction, that conflict has become deeper and more serious as time has gone by, because more and more of these people have flooded into positions working for the Department of Defense and have taken on decisions, essentially influence decisions, if not officially made decisions, which have affected not only the spending of money on one kind of system or another, but even decisions that affect what to do about the ongoing wars of the United States.
These are people who are, you know, being paid by self-interested advocates of more and more war in Afghanistan and elsewhere, because they're using up more of the weapons that are, you know, built by these companies and they want that stream of income to continue, obviously.
And so it's very clear to me that there is a fundamental problem here in which the Pentagon is becoming increasingly an institution that represents the interests of the arms contractors.
Now, how to weigh the influence of the two is very difficult, and I don't try to go beyond the fact that they've gained enormous influence compared with more than two decades.
So that's the point that I want to make about the change in the complexion, if you will, of the Pentagon and how that affects the way in which it operates.
And the money quote, if you will, is one that I use in my article in TAC, the American Conservative.
It quotes a senior military official, a senior military officer who was in Afghanistan at one time, who told Washington Post reporters that, in his words, it hits you between the eyes or like a ton of bricks maybe is what he said.
When you think about it, the Pentagon is no longer a warfighting machine, a warfighting organization.
It's a business.
Yeah, well, I mean, this is the libertarian case against the U.S. Constitution, right?
I mean, there's a whole thing is a big self-licking ice cream cone in the first place, an account of revolution against the gains of 1776.
But anyway, here's the thing.
So let's talk about 1960, because that was ancient history, black and white footage.
If you want to watch Dwight D. Eisenhower's military industrial complex speech, and he's almost as famous, I guess, among people who are familiar with that.
They're pretty also pretty much also familiar with his statements a few different times that something to the effect of God help this country when someone who knows less about how to deal with the army than me is the president of the United States.
And, you know, somebody shot his successor in the face, by the way.
And he was a five star general who was the commander of United Nations forces in Europe in the Second World War.
There was no one who had more, you know, political capital, I guess.
And as a Republican president as well, in that Nixon, his then vice president, only Nixon can go to China kind of way, right?
Like he has the ultimate kind of claim on macho and that if anybody can tell the army, no, it would be him.
And he was terrified.
And of course, he had to compromise and say, listen, we're only going to have a million army divisions, not two million, because we're going to rely so heavily on hydrogen bombs as our, you know, war fighting method against the Russians if we do fight them.
And this kind of just insanity.
But so the real history is when you go through and click through JFK and LBJ and all of them since, that there never was a correction on this.
It's not like we ever had another five star president who really put the military industrial congressional complex back in line.
That correction never happened.
In fact, as Jacob Hornberger loves to say, that this national security state that was grafted onto our constitutional republic in 1947 has absolutely taken over and, you know, basically canceled the entire structure of American federalism in favor of this global empire and militarized state and has just completely taken over everything.
And then at this point, I'm kind of with you where, well, I don't know really how to weigh exactly who's in which driver's seat.
I mean, at the end of the day, it's all public choice theory kind of thing, right, where all of these men ultimately are individuals and they're doing what's good for themselves.
And so that's why it makes perfect sense to see that the neoconservatives of the first Bush Jr. administration were virtually to a man directly tied to the Likud party in Israel and to Lockheed, Martin Marietta, the ultimate conglomerate of military equipment.
And there's a great article.
In fact, you know what?
This is funny.
I'm going to play it for you for just a second, as long as I'm wasting everybody's time here.
Check out this voicemail that I got from Daniel Ellsberg a couple of weeks ago.
Scott, it's Dan Ellsberg.
I just, on my trip the last night, listened to your 2007 interview with Richard Cummings of Playboard.com on Lockheed stock and two smoking barrels.
It was one of the most insightful or informative, amazing interviews I've ever heard on any subject, and almost the only one on that subject at all, the connection between the true industrial complex and our actual policy decisions.
I need to be in touch with this guy.
And then that didn't work out, by the way.
We never could find Richard Cummings.
If any libertarians out there still know Richard Cummings, please get me his new email address.
I was unable to connect them.
So that article was Lockheed stock and two smoking barrels by Richard Cummings, published in Playboy.com in, I think, January or February of 2007.
And I interviewed him about it, and I've republished it on my own website.
It's not on Playboy.com anymore, but it is at ScottHorton.org and at CorpWatch.
And it's just incredible.
The nexus between really the main fixer is a guy named Bruce Jackson, who is an executive vice president at Lockheed.
And he was the one who had organized the Committee for NATO Expansion in the 1990s, and then the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which specialized in humanitarian propaganda rather than weapons of mass destruction.
We're going to go save the people from Saddam, the evildoer kind of stuff.
And it just goes to show how literally, name by name, all of the very most powerful neoconservatives in the Bush Jr. administration were connected to Lockheed.
And then also Dick Cheney, the vice president, the right-wing nationalist, his wife was on their board of directors.
But Libby, and Hadley, and Wormser, and Feith, Pearl, Shulsky, and Abrams, and all of them were connected to Lockheed.
And so he goes, eh, Israel schmizeral.
The neocons were really all about selling weapons and cashing in.
I think it's a very important point because, as I'm sure you are as well aware as I am, a lot of people know about the connections between neocons and Israel.
Very few people, relatively speaking, know about the degree to which they were so devoted to their self-interest in terms of cashing in on contracts with the arms contractor, the major one being, of course, Lockheed in this case.
So, yeah, I think that's an extremely important point.
And then so – and now it is important too, the congressional complex.
That was the original phrase.
But he didn't want to – Eisenhower didn't want to sound too much in favor of an imperial presidency in order to check the power of a Congress that had been bought by the arms industrialists.
Because he was the president as he was giving his speech.
So he didn't want to denounce Congress in that way.
He thought it would confuse the issue or make it too complicated or something.
And that's really basically the deal, right, is that we even have – and this should be shocking to people, I don't know if it is – but we really do have a nuclear arms industry lobby in America.
That if they had their way, our government would build back up to 70,000 H-bombs.
The sky's the limit.
100,000, 200,000 H-bombs.
Set them off.
Build some more.
As far as – it's just like any other rent-seeking group in America, right?
If it's the gravel company in your state, they lobby for nonstop roads in all cases, in all places so that they can get the contract.
It's no different when it comes to H-bombs.
And it's no different when it comes to any of the rest of this stuff.
Yeah, to the max.
Absolutely.
The lobby that is behind the nuclear weapons labs.
They even have in the Senate a nuclear weapons caucus.
Yeah, yeah.
They unabashedly just refer to themselves as that.
And then so now we're at the point, though, with the war on terrorism in the 21st century, where really we've kind of doubled everything that existed from World War II up until the 20th century.
The turn of the century, or maybe up until the Cold War or something.
Really, all of this has just been completely doubled.
And now we have the entire homeland security complex involved.
And as you're saying, when it comes to, you didn't mention this part, but what is true when it comes to the homeland, but also with intelligence and in the Pentagon, where you have the privatization of so much of basically contractor organizations carrying out the actual government intelligence and military functions, and then creating a whole new set of incentives.
The government has to buy these services from private companies at the end of the day anyway.
We can't have the government owning all the mines and all of the factories that make everything or something like that.
But to have them actually privatize the entire functioning of the CIA, the NSA, the military itself, that has created a system where, forget Eisenhower, he wouldn't even be able to comprehend the top secret America, as the Washington Post put it when they let Priest and Arkin do that great series.
Absolutely.
It would be unrecognizable to Eisenhower because it has changed so fundamentally, so completely.
And then now part of that series is what you talk about also in your article here, which is the conversion of the CIA basically into a drone dealership and targeted assassination machine.
Yeah.
I mean, what I'm arguing in my piece is that the permanent war problem that the United States has gotten this country into, the Pentagon and CIA have gotten the United States into, really revolves around the function of drones.
The drones are the primary way that the United States is attacking its presumed enemies, its assumed enemies.
And that is the case in Afghanistan as well as in many other countries in the greater Middle East.
But what I report in my piece, which was really quite astounding when I discovered it, is that in 2016, 61 percent of the bombs that are being dropped in that country are being dropped.
They're bombs that are fired by drones, from drones.
And that means that the drones have basically taken over fundamentally the function of attacking the designated enemy.
Well, right.
I mean, and it's not just, right, the selling of the drones.
It's the operating of them, too, where you only have the CIA officer or the military officer give the very final go ahead on the hit.
Maybe that's not exactly right in all cases.
But along those lines, where you really have these private contractor drone pilots are the ones who are flying around looking for people to kill in the first place.
Well, yeah.
And the point here is that, you know, when you get into a drone war, it means that you have to have a very, very long tail behind the actual weapon.
It means that there are, you know, 30 to 60 people who you have to hire in order to take care of all the functions that are necessary to fire a single weapon by a drone.
And that means that the military does not have, did not have and still does not have enough personnel in uniform to carry out all those functions.
So what happens?
They have to hire contractors.
They have to hire Booz Allen, one of the major intelligence contractors, to provide large numbers, hundreds and hundreds of specialists to examine the images that come across, that are being flashed across the screen in Creech, Nevada or Florida, and to reach judgments about what it all means and whether they're close to having a target or whether they've arrived at a target.
And that means that civilians are, in fact, in a position to determine when and how the United States fires weapons to kill people.
And that is a very new development.
And of course, you have the very same companies that are profiting from selling drones are also now involved in some of these functions that have to do with the preparation for firing the drones.
And so they are, as the title of my piece put it, in the cockpit.
Yeah, man.
And as you say to the political incentives against drone warfare hardly exist at all.
And so, you know, I think as you put it, where Donald Trump has shown no interest in scaling back the drone wars, despite openly questioning the stationing of troops across the Middle East.
Not that he's done anything about that either.
But he hasn't even expressed discontent with the idea that we just fly remote control planes around killing people from now on.
Well, yeah.
And his successor, his predecessor, excuse me, was hardly any better.
If he was any better at all, I don't think he was.
Basically, the president...
Well, he's the one who expanded the drone wars to the seven countries that Trump inherited him from.
He expanded and presided over this enormously...
As murderous as Trump is, he hasn't started any new wars.
All seven of his wars he got from the last guy, who only inherited two when he showed up.
That's right.
And the final sort of political point that we're getting to here, and I want to make very clear, is that this problem of drone wars now poses a real political problem here.
Because the drone manufacturers, the drone contractors have enormous political power.
They are spending tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars on lobbying of Congress to make sure that their drone, that the drone supplies to the Pentagon and the CIA continue, that there's no political decision or military decision for that matter, to end the purchasing of these drones.
And there's a particular case here that I go into some detail about, the Global Hawk, which is a plane that the Pentagon was going to use for the missions that the old spy plane that was in the Eisenhower administration...
The U-2.
The U-2 plane for these long missions...
Well, it's a drone, the Global Hawk.
Well, the Global Hawk is a drone, but the U-2 was taking photographs over long...
Yeah, no, I'm sorry.
It's just that you initially described it as a plane.
I just wanted to make sure that we're clear, that people understand.
We're talking about replacing a piloted plane with this new Global Hawk drone.
That's right.
An unpiloted drone was going to replace the U-2.
And it was basically to change their mind because they found out that the Global Hawk didn't work.
Basically, there were too many parts of it that were just defective or just didn't function right.
And the test showed that it was not going to be ready anytime soon.
So they decided that they weren't going to continue the program of purchasing Global Hawks.
Well, the contractor went on the warpath.
It was Lockheed.
General Atomics?
Oh.
No, not General Atomics.
This was Lockheed.
Okay.
They went to Congress and paid off, gave handsome contributions to the key members of the Armed Services Committee and the Defense Subcommittee and the House Appropriations Committee.
And they got those people to oppose the Pentagon, and they changed the position.
The Pentagon backed down because the key members of Congress were in the pockets of the contractors.
Right.
And you know what?
This is such an important point, too, is how little it costs to buy a congressman if you're evil.
I mean, I don't know how...
I've never seen decent people stop Congress from doing stuff like this with small contributions.
But you have the total here where they spent...
Northrop, you say, spent nearly $18 million on lobbying in 2012, $21 million in 2013.
I remember, we covered this at the time, a story from, say, 2014 or something like that, I think it was 2014, where they said that Lockheed, the biggest one of all, had spent $14 million lobbying, and this was what they thought newsworthy, in the first half, or maybe it was the first quarter of 2014.
And there is no other business with a kickback like that, with a profit margin like that, where Lockheed doesn't even have to turn out weapons that work at all.
Right?
And they can buy up a Senate, the U.S. Senate, for a couple of $10 million, which is a remainder on the edge of what they take out of our Treasury every year.
Yeah.
Which is nothing.
You're right.
And it's our money that they're spending on all this lobbying in the first place.
Yeah, yeah.
It's a very cheap buy to take control of Congress in this way.
I was just reading one about a guy who was good on stopping — it was a bill to stop arms sales to Saudi because of the war in Yemen.
And a pro-Saudi lobbyist, the lobbyist himself donated $2,000 to the guy's campaign, and they made a phone call, and then that day, the same day as the phone call, they donated $2,000.
And this congressman flipped and voted against the measure and to continue to sell these weapons to Saudi Arabia.
For $2,000, he'll buy into a genocide.
He will participate in genocide for $2,000.
And now I forget which congressman I'm accusing, but I'm going to find it real quick because it's in my archives.
I interviewed the guy about it.
Yeah.
But think of that, that for $2,000 that you would help people.
Anyway, I don't know.
You heard me already.
It's a stunning fact.
No question about it.
So what this means, basically, I would argue, and I do argue in my piece, is that you have a political dynamic here, which could well make it very difficult, if not impossible, to turn off the spigot on the war in Afghanistan.
As long as they have these drones dropping bombs, firing the missiles in Afghanistan, and the people in Congress are telling them, you can't cut this off, you must continue this, there's going to be a temptation, a very strong temptation for the Pentagon to continue that war indefinitely.
And of course, there are other reasons for them to want to, you know, the army wants to continue to have a presence in Afghanistan.
There is a Pentagon notion that we need to have bases there in order to cope with the Chinese and the Russians and the Pakistanis.
So it all adds up to a case for, you know, the drones adding to, if not compelling, the Pentagon to continue at least the war in Afghanistan, potentially drone wars in the Middle East.
Yeah.
And so by the way, the senator I'm accusing of being a mercenary in a war of genocide is named Tim Scott, Republican from South Carolina.
And this is from a piece by Ben Freeman in TomDispatch.com.
It came out in October, and I interviewed him about it.
And he talked about how the PR agent here, the lobbyist for Saudi is named Lampkin, Mark Lampkin.
And he called this senator said, I want you to change your vote, gave him $2,000.
And he changed his vote on continuing the worst, the absolute worst thing the US government is doing on the face of the earth right now.
And that is the genocide in Yemen.
Yeah, that guy should live in infamy forever.
Yeah.
And I mean, this is just the way business is done.
This is, this is how they do it.
And it does go to show too.
And this is, you know, I talked about this with my libertarian economist friend the other day, that the Reds really do have a point.
And this is actually like a libertarian anarchist's case against having a state at all.
That if you have one, well, guess what?
Industrialists are going to bribe representatives to it in order to make things their way.
The people who are the richest first will have the most ability to control the state to use it against the rest of us.
It's fascism.
And what do you call it when it's mercantilism at war permanently?
You know, it's a fascist state.
Robert Higgs, the great libertarian anarchist economist calls it a participatory fascism.
We don't have a leader for life like Mussolini.
We can still run for office, but it doesn't make any difference.
And the question really is, can you have a capitalist society that does not become a fascist one when the industrialists figure out how much money there is to be made, killing you many babies?
Well, it's very difficult to argue against that.
Absent a popular citizen uprising against this, which is very difficult to organize, especially under present day circumstances.
Not that I've given up totally, but it is very difficult.
You might as well admit it.
You know, this is a very, very difficult case to refute.
That's for sure.
Yeah.
Oh, and by the way, new report just came out.
85,000 Yemeni children under five have died of deprivation in this war so far.
That's the latest number.
It's on antiwar.com today.
That's not the 80 something thousand people who've been bombed to death.
Those are just the children who've been starved and deprived of medicine, et cetera, to death.
That's the headline.
That's a major headline.
And what do you call it when a society, any society, particularly, oh, I don't know, say the most wealthy and powerful one in the history of the planet is picking on the poorest, weakest country full of the people least able to defend themselves anywhere on the planet?
It's already genocide, but what do you call it when it's genocide, but it's the world's biggest bully ever in history versus the very weakest state, very weakest group of people, country that they could possibly pick on?
Yeah, unfortunately, we don't have a word for that, do we?
That's something to work on.
Giving them the old Somalia treatment is what you call it.
Somalia treatment.
I like that.
Yeah, genocide, but nobody cares.
Nobody calls it that because it's our good guy heroes are the ones implementing it all, right?
USAF, aim high and all that.
Yeah, we have to come up with a better way of framing and new terminology to really dramatize this problem.
Crazy.
All right, man, listen, I'm sorry I've kept you over time here, but I love hearing you and talking at you too.
Thank you for being patient with me.
No problem, Scott.
Always happy to be on the show.
Thank you.
All right, you guys, that's the great Gareth Porter.
He's at the American Conservative Magazine, at Truthout, at Truthdig, at all over the place.
And we republish everything that he writes, eventually at least, at Antiwar.com.
His book is called Manufactured Crisis, The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, which is excellent.
I just got an email from a guy yesterday telling me how excellent it was and how much he appreciated my recommendation of that great book by Gareth Porter.
This one is at TAC.
It's called America's Permanent War Complex.
And then also check out North Korea Deception, NYT Malpractice or Laziness Malpractice.
All right, y'all, thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
