01/09/17 – Daniel McAdams on Russian election hacking claims, Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence, and the Syria war – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, introducing our friend Dan McAdams.
For many years, he was Ron Paul's foreign policy advisor in his congressional office in Washington, and now he runs the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.
And he is the co-host with Dr. Paul of the Liberty Report Daily on YouTube.
And he's a writer, and he publishes a lot of other great writers at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity as well.
Welcome back to the show.
Dan, how are you, sir?
Hey, Scott, it's great to be back with you.
Really happy to have you here.
And so your latest, we're rerunning it today at antiwar.com.
In fact, it's called, is that all there is?
Intel Community releases its Russia hacking report.
And I don't want to dwell too long on this, but I got to at least let you have your say here for a minute.
Were you a little bit surprised about what you found in that report at all, Dan?
Well, to be honest, I mean, I was worried they would concoct some really cockamamie, you know, very technical thing that would be very hard to refute.
You know, remember back when Colin Powell did his thing before the UN, you know, some of that they tried to make sound very, very technical, and it was difficult for those not of a technical background to refute.
But I didn't even have to worry about that because it was just a big nothing sandwich.
You know, there was just nothing in there, you know, and it was amazing how, and I'm sure you saw this too, the New York Times in the same article said, you know, amazing conclusive evidence.
And then later in the article said, well, nothing new really came out of this report.
So yeah, I was, I was surprised that they thought they could get away with putting out something with, you know, such, such little information in it.
Yeah.
You know, it seems kind of, I'm not exactly sure what to make of it.
It seems like pretty unprecedented sort of interference by especially the CIA here in the presidential election.
I mean, Michael Morell basically, well, not basically, literally called Trump a puppet of Vladimir Putin back last summer before the election didn't work.
They came at the king and missed.
Oops.
But so, I mean, this is a real strike against him, isn't it?
By the CIA saying to the incoming president, putting out this report just a week or two before the inauguration, really claiming that you wouldn't even be the president if it wasn't for the government of Russia.
It's tremendous.
And I think, you know, on the one side, we did a show about this last week.
It would be nice if this spurned Trump on to really gut the CIA, really gut out especially the bad parts, which would be most of the CIA, you know, under the guise of reform.
Sadly, I think when you put someone like Pompeo in charge, unless he gives them some pretty strict marching orders, I mean, Pompeo's background is extremely pro-CIA, extremely pro-surveillance state, pro-regime change.
He wants, you know, war on Syria.
So, you know, we can't hope for that much.
But you're right, it is an obvious declaration of war against Trump by the CIA.
People like Morrell, you know, there's a sort of, and it's strange to see the left doing this now, of all groups.
But there's always been sort of a lionization of these brave warriors, you know, the secret shadow warriors.
But Morrell really gives you a real glimpse into what they're really like, an incredibly political person, very concerned about his career, very concerned about kissing up to those in power.
And I think that's probably more the rule than the exception.
Yeah, very invested in one candidate over another.
You'd like to think unprecedented way, but maybe not, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
All right.
So now tell me, what do you make of Dan Coats for Director of National Intelligence there, the former Republican senator?
Well there again, you have it.
I mean, if Trump wants to drain the swamp, and we all want to hope for the best, you know, I wish that December 1st speech that he gave was, you know, carved in stone, you know, above his desk, where he said, we don't want regime change, and we don't want to bother other people.
But when you have someone like Dan Coats, he's been in favor of every war we've been in.
He was in favor of Libya, he was in favor of going after Syria, he's in favor of Iraq, you know, he's in favor of regime change.
He wants to regime change Iran.
He said it explicitly.
When you put someone like that in charge, it's hard to not believe it'll be business as usual, except with Trump's people in the driver's seat, you know.
So, you know, you want to be optimistic, but that's not a very encouraging ...
I thought he was going to get rid of the Office of National Intelligence, which should have been done anyway.
The whole reason they created the CIA in 47 was to coordinate the other agencies.
They screwed that up, and so what do they do?
It's typical government.
They add another layer on top of it.
Yeah, and putting a senator in there?
It seems like kind of a mismatch.
Now he was, in Andrew Coburn's book, Rumsfeld, he was the first choice for Secretary of Defense by George W. Bush.
But then he was against the missile defense system boondoggle, because it meant withdrawing from the ABM Treaty, which he thought was a bridge too far.
So they said, yeah, well, don't call us, we'll call you, and they gave it to Rumsfeld instead.
But so, I mean, he was actually Cheney's first choice before Rumsfeld.
I was going to say, yeah, he's always been very close to Cheney, and you know, I thought people were ...
I guess eight years is enough for people to be pining away for the Bushians again.
That's too bad.
That's unfortunate.
It seems strange, too.
I guess Trump's already throwing in the towel here, that that's who, you know, he put in that position.
And Director of National Intelligence, it seems like maybe if he wants to prevent rapprochement with Russia, he could.
In fact, I'm about to interview Gareth Porter here in a minute about how it's now even more clear than ever that it was deliberate sabotage and subversion when the Pentagon bombed Syrian troops in the middle of a battle with the Islamic State last September.
Yeah.
Gareth has been great on this.
We've run a couple of his articles, and he absolutely nailed it.
You know, this was not an accident.
Nobody believes it was an accident.
The only people who believe it was an accident are the people that read the Washington Post and think that they're not fake news.
Yeah, there are different definitions.
I think there's this first on the list if you check out the new speech dictionary here.
Yeah.
So yeah, let's talk more about the war in Syria here, Dan.
I guess in the words of the Washington Post, Eastern Aleppo has fallen to government forces there.
And so that means that whatever assorted so-called rebel groups, maybe you'd like to try to parse them a little bit for us, have been driven out of Eastern Aleppo.
But how many have survived?
Where did they go?
How many towns does the Al-Nusra Front still control?
Never even mind the Islamic State in the east.
If you want to get back to that, we could do that too.
But what's the deal with Al-Nusra after the battle of Aleppo has ended here?
Well, you know what struck me the most, Scott, is not only has Eastern Aleppo, quote, fallen, but the entire Aleppo has fallen off the radar screen of the mainstream media.
Isn't that funny?
We were bombarded a couple of weeks ago constantly about the horrors of the government takeover of all of Aleppo and these terrible things that are happening.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't see a doggone thing coming out from the media about Aleppo now.
The only thing I see is when I go on Twitter and I see pictures of people celebrating Orthodox Christmas, which they haven't done in four years.
So it's amazing how the press will turn on a dime and simply just ignore something.
It's not what they report, but also what they choose not to report.
And if there was wholesale slaughter there, you'd think that we would hear about it, but we're not hearing about it.
As a matter of fact, I see a lot of pictures of reconstruction going on, people clearing the streets.
It reminds you of Europe after World War II and people out there moving bricks around everything.
So very, very curious as to what's happening.
As to the extremist groups, I mean, a lot of them were bussed up to the Idlib province, weren't they?
And from there, outside the negotiated peace talks that I think was the 30th that they took effect, outside the realm of those, and so when they're bombed, they can claim, hold on, there's a ceasefire.
Why are we getting bombed?
Well, you're not part of it.
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Well, and now, you know, it's interesting, too.
Let's go back to Aleppo for just a second there and all the atrocity stories and stuff.
I mean, it doesn't seem like there's any doubt that civilians were being killed in what, you know, amounted to a pretty massive aerial bombardment by the Syrian Air Force and the Russians and that, you know, all kinds of people were killed.
And yet, instead, and, you know, I guess PR is as PR does, instead, they overreached with all these stories of people just being lined up and shot and being burned to death.
And they had these kind of coordinated little weird Twitter last wills and testaments that these people were putting out and all of this, you know, it seemed like quite a bit of it was being dreamt up at Foggy Bottom or its equivalent in Britain or something somewhere.
Yeah.
And all those people that did those videos, they were put out as just average citizens of Aleppo.
It turns out they were all activists with the some of what the extremist groups, if not directly involved with them, certainly affiliated with them.
You know, a person after person, you know, was shown to be part of those groups.
So this just wasn't a spontaneous.
This was a coordinated effort.
Makes you wonder who coordinated it.
And you know, again, there are tens of thousands of people who were under siege and being bombed and at least thousands were killed.
Right.
But instead they said, no, there's 250,000 people there under siege and tens of thousands of them are being killed.
And they're being targeted and killed simply because they are people.
And the government of Syria is at war against the people of Syria.
So you see right there, that's the costus belli for the Syrian and the Russian militaries to be doing what they're doing.
And so I guess, as you say, I think, you know, we found the reason why, as you say, the story dropped off the face of the earth, because none of those claims could hold up.
They'd made such claims that better we just ignore this for a minute.
Let people forget until we change the subject back again.
Exactly.
And you're right.
I mean, it is tragic.
A lot of innocent people were killed, you know, in in the siege of Aleppo, just like a lot of innocent people are being killed in Mosul.
We don't hear about that, do we?
Because we're on the side of the people doing the bombing, you know, trying to, which in fact is the same side as the Syrian government in Syria.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Exactly.
You know, we've always been at war with East Asia.
You know, it's it's very Orwellian, the whole thing.
But but, you know, the idea that if Assad just wanted to kill his own people, why would he go through all the effort of weakening his army by attacking Aleppo?
Surely there are defenseless villages, even even opposition supporting villages closer to home that he could just bomb at will, if that's what he had in mind.
Why would he use all the resources that he needs to take over Aleppo?
It doesn't make any sense.
All right.
So now, is there any kind of good estimate somewhere or is there a way for you to try to, you know, categorize what you think, you know, the degree of of loss that al-Nusra has suffered here, the degree of power and influence that they have lost?
I mean, I know you can't really quantify it with numbers, but it's you know, it was back a couple of years ago, I guess, when they lost Homs and people thought, well, they're pretty much lit now.
But that didn't happen.
I guess the CIA keeps sending in the money and the guns.
So yeah.
But I wonder even if that pipeline has been diminished, you know, these are the winning days of the of the Obama regime.
I wonder if there's been any signals in back channels that have come from Trump's people to say, we're not going to we're not going to continue this.
You know, it does make me wonder what what might happen.
But if if Trump comes in and continues the CIA's war against Assad, then, you know, it will it will it will show him to be, you know, pretty repulsive because he campaigned on the opposite.
And it's hard to believe that he'd be able to get away with it.
I guess they can say, well, we're actually now we're fighting the Iranians.
And there are some I don't know what it would be, but it would be hard to imagine him him keeping things up as they are right now.
So maybe their biggest loss is their loss of their greatest sponsor, really, which is the U.S.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I see, you know, there's one strong indication of that, but it's still missing a big step.
And as you know, The Washington Post stories that came out right after the election, I guess two of them that said that Obama has now decided there's a counterterrorism mission against al-Qaeda in Syria, if not against the the the entirety of the al-Nusra Front, at least their, you know, leadership that were old friends with Osama and this kind of thing.
What they said, though, was that he had ordered the military to start targeting them.
But there's no mention of whether he had ordered the CIA to stop backing him.
So we don't really know.
But it sort of seemed like maybe Obama was, you know, saying, OK, well, I'm going to prepare the battlefield for the way Trump wants it rather than get everything set up for the no fly zone that Hillary wanted.
Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, that would be the probably the most charitable interpretation.
You know, I'm not I'm not I'm not sure that was the case.
But, you know, there have been several almost comical, if it wasn't so tragic, times in the past couple of years where you've had CIA backed troops literally fighting Pentagon backed troops in Syria.
So it's you know, it would be nothing new if that were the case.
Yeah, they even had there was one where it was a three sided battle, where it was the bottom brigade militia from Iraq was there helping Hezbollah fighting against the fighting sort on the same side as the Syrian Kurds against the CIA back bin Laden night suicide bomber guys.
And just think this whole thing really was was started and I don't want to lay the blame on one person.
But but I would say if I had to point my finger at one person, it would be that absolute monster Robert Ford, who was the US ambassador to Syria at the time, who at the very beginning met with the rebels, supported the rebels, recognized the rebels, and egged on the rebels to become more violent.
You know, he's the one who really and maybe he had orders from Washington to do what he did.
But he really has got a lot of blood on his hands.
You know, I hope he has some time to think over how many hundreds of thousands were killed because he he and his masters wanted regime change in Syria.
Yeah.
And you know, it's not just you.
It's Robert Ford, who agrees with you that Yeah, you know, some of these guys really are Al Qaeda guys are the best friends of Al Qaeda guys giving our money and our guns to Al Qaeda guys in this sort of thing.
In times past when he was confronted, at least on Twitter, he is seated this kind of thing in the past.
Yes, here's Omar the Chechen, the formerly US trained Georgian soldier who joined the Islamic State here.
And here he is fighting with the so called FSA moderates, you know, against the Assad forces and Ford has been he wasn't really forced.
He didn't have to answer but he he has answered that Yeah, you got me there.
It's true.
Yeah.
But you know, like all neocons, his answer to that, though, is, well, it's because we didn't go in full bore in the beginning, we tried to go in and tiptoe into it, you know, just like what the neocons say about Iraq, oh, it'd be hunky dory right now, if we just stayed there with 8000 800,000 troops or whatever.
And that's what that's what Ford says, if we had just dedicated ourselves to regime change, gone in there, taking this guy out, and, you know, it would have been fantastic.
You know, he's full of crap, like, like, like all the neocons are all the time.
Yeah.
So they also that's what Obama said about Libya, too.
And I love seeing, and I even got the quote wrong at first, I guess, when it was, I was reading a quote of it, the first thing that I saw was a quote of it without the original source.
And it was saying that Obama concedes that Libya was his greatest mistake.
What he conceded was, yeah, we should have built a giant permanent garrison there to train up their army and nation build a new democracy and on the Iraq War Two model.
That was what we neglected to do.
So unfortunately, because of our lack of follow through, because I thought the French were going to take care of it.
It's their fault, I guess.
But we if only we had done more, just the same as I guess, any conservative or any liberal any government functionary assigned to any government project says about their failures, we just need more of your money, Dan, and it would have been fine.
Afghanistan after 15 years, it didn't need to take 15 years if we had dedicated the resources, it would be like Switzerland.
It's always the case.
It's never about their policy.
It's a bankrupt policy because it involves going to places that you don't understand and telling people you don't know and who don't know you how they should live their lives.
And that's just the most basic thing about interventionism.
We hate it when our neighbors would try to do that.
So it gives us the right to do that to people overseas, especially people that couldn't threaten us if they wanted to.
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
And speaking of Afghanistan, nobody asked Hillary or Trump about Afghanistan the entire campaign long.
I don't think other than Trump answered once, I think in the summer of 2015, that, oh, yeah, Afghanistan, you got to stay there because Pakistan has nuclear weapons.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So nobody knows what he meant by that.
But we heard him loud and clear.
But then nobody asked him another thing about it for another year.
And then now he's the president.
He's in charge of, you know, sure ain't Congress.
It's the president who decides what happens in Afghanistan.
If anything, Congress is worse than him on it, led by the likes of McCain.
And so, yeah, I don't know, man, predictions for Dr. Paul had to call him out.
I don't know if you saw it this week.
And he's talking about the great failure in Afghanistan.
He was kind of wondering, too, and I don't know exactly what he said, but something in the end about I wouldn't be surprised if a year from now he has even more troops in Afghanistan.
You know, we're going to win it once and for all.
The problem with this, the philosophy of interventionism is you can never concede defeat.
And resources are unlimited, of course, until the big crash comes.
But it is unlimited.
So why would you step back and say it was a mistake?
I would be very impressed if he said, look, this is not working out well.
We need to step back.
But you know, everything we've seen from him so far does not indicate that's very likely.
Yeah.
Well, and you know what, too?
I mean, I think you could be a military veteran and a real Taliban hating hard ass and say, look, sending Marines back to Helmand province at this point.
I mean, never even mind, you know, Kandahar, whatever.
But Helmand is just it's all just countryside full of people who want to kill you that you can never possibly, quote unquote, pacify ever.
Right.
That's just a fact.
That's just science.
You can't pacify Helmand province short of dropping H-bombs on it.
And yeah, we're against that, too.
So what?
Seriously, what is the point of sending somebody who was a toddler at the time of the 9-11 attack to go and fight so-called Taliban Pashtuns who were toddlers at the time of the 9-11 attack in the Helmand province in 2017?
It just ain't right, man.
How could anybody think that this is what's right?
Yeah.
I mean, it's, you know, trying to search for some comparisons, but it's the shoes on the other foot.
And the Chinese had been trying to to pacify us for all these years.
And they sent maybe 300 guys into Montana where all the gun toting Montanans do.
Good luck with that.
And then, yeah, we're just defending ourselves from these terrorists, you know, who happen to live there.
But I mean, does it really matter?
I think the Taliban control something like eighty five percent of Helmand.
I think that's what they said.
You know, does it matter if our beef was never with the Taliban?
The Taliban did not do 9-11.
I don't think most Americans understand that.
They allowed Al Qaeda to stay in their country.
And for that, we've been at war with them for 15 years.
We've already gotten rid of Al Qaeda.
You know, we've already killed Bin Laden.
So why are we still there trying to remake their country?
Yeah.
Well, you know, I was just talking to Peter Van Buren and he was saying, come on, the Taliban have learned the lesson that they don't even want to try to take Kabul at this point or, you know, not anytime soon.
They kind of have their own, as you said, they they rule Pashtunistan down there south of the mountains.
And that'll be good enough for them right now.
Ten thousand American troops are enough to keep them out of Kabul and keep the status quo basically for another eight years and then another eight after that.
You know.
Yeah, absolutely.
And there's just, you know, why why would they why would they risk it now?
There's no point just slowly advancing the countryside.
They have every advantage on their side.
They're fighting against foreign invaders and a foreign propped up government.
We feel the exact same way in our country, if that were the case.
Yeah.
But so, yeah, I guess the best case we could hope for, then, is the horrifying status quo.
And and then worse, as you say, paraphrasing Dr. Paul here, that, you know, he might decide we've got to win this thing once and for all.
And look, Mike Flynn is his national security adviser.
James Mattis is his secretary of defense.
These are the guys who lost the Afghan war.
Now they're going to admit it and bring them and bring the troops home from there.
Man, I think Dr. Paul is going to be proven right again.
I hate that when that happens.
All right.
Listen, thank you so much for coming back on the show, Dan.
I sure appreciate it, bud.
Thanks, Scott.
Great being with you again.
All right, so that is the great Dan McAdams.
You can see why he was such a great addition to Ron Paul's team when he was in the Congress there.
And now he runs the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.
It's at RonPaulInstitute.org.
And Ron's new one is Will Obama's Good War in Afghanistan Continue?
And Dan's new one is also reprinted at Antiwar.com, which Ron's will be tomorrow.
But Dan's latest is Is That All There Is?
And the Intel community releases its Russia hacking report with appropriate scare quotes.
Thanks guys.
That's the show.
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