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All right, y'all, welcome to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Check out the archives at ScottHorton.org and LibertarianInstitute.org slash ScottHortonShow.
Follow me on Twitter at ScottHortonShow.
Introducing Rick Sterling.
He's got a great article, a very important article, at ConsortiumNews.com.
It's called Amnesty International Stokes-Syrian War.
Welcome back to the show, Rick.
How are you doing?
I'm doing fine, Scott.
Good, good.
Appreciate you joining us on the show again here.
Man, this is a big deal.
You know, it's funny the way things work.
I was watching on Twitter when the Amnesty report—well, I'm always on Twitter.
I think I'm going to go ahead and get a Twitter chip implanted in my skull.
So then Amnesty put out this report, and Liz Sly and Ann Bernard and whatever, all their names, all the national security, you know, Middle East-type correspondents for all the most major papers immediately just hit retweet that, yeah, look, oh my god, look, see?
On this report where they didn't—I mean, maybe they did have time to read it.
I don't know when the damn thing posted, but it sure seemed like they hadn't even really read it.
And they didn't even—you know, they just believed, that's all.
I don't think they were really, like, just being evil-lying propagandists as much as this is just what they want to believe.
And so it's just as true as can be.
And, you know, I know about Liz Sly that Patrick Coburn told me that, hey, she's got experience over there at least.
She didn't write about everything, maybe, but she's, you know, a really experienced journalist.
It's not like she's just some TV anchor.
But this story hits, and she's like, oh my god, look.
And then—but anyone who didn't want to believe who looked at it, I think, came to the same conclusion as you.
Maybe not as thorough as you, Rick, but come on, man.
The whole thing—I mean, tell us.
Well, they—basically, it was released early last week on either Monday or Tuesday, and it was immediately picked up and broadcast.
It was all over the news.
It was AP's story.
It was on CNN.
It was on NPR.
It was on Democracy Now!
Huge coverage.
And because these media outlets like the conclusions, they run with it, and they don't look and see, well, what's the investigation of this?
You've got some big accusations here.
They're claiming that 5,000 to 13,000 mostly innocent civilians were executed in mass hangings.
What's the evidence of that?
It turns out there's almost none—there's almost no evidence.
It's all based on the testimonies of anonymous people who are telling them these stories from southern Turkey.
Usually when you go to court and you make a big—somebody is being tried, an individual is named, and the individual makes certain claims.
In this case, there are no specific names.
There are no specific—we don't hear what one witness said exactly.
It's just all compiled, and it's anonymous reporting, and it's put forward by amnesty, and people are just accepting it at face value.
So they don't even pretend to name the judge.
They don't even have the transcript of the different people's testimony so that you could compare and go, well, yeah, they sound like they really do cooperate each other.
There's a pattern here, Scott, where Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, they base their big accusations on the statements of people in southern Turkey, of course, where the war on Syria is being coordinated by the US and Qatar and Saudi Arabia and so forth.
And these individuals are gathered in collaboration with the groups that are funded by the West as part of the campaign to overthrow the Syrian government.
So they're all coming from one side.
All right, well, so speaking of which, you must be a Baathist.
Right, well, that's their accusation.
If you question them, you're an Assad apologist.
It actually – they don't – the amnesty report does not comply with their own purported standards.
The secretary general of Amnesty International is on record as saying they're very careful.
They're very fact-based.
They have their own people reporting on the ground, and they gather information from all sides so that they can cross-check the information.
Now that is a great thing to do.
That's what should be done.
Unfortunately, they are not doing what they claim to do.
They only gathered information from one side, which is the side seeking to overthrow the government.
And within 48 hours of the release of the report, there was testimony by a Syrian dissident who had been imprisoned at Sidnaya prison who contradicted all sorts of things in the report.
He even said they got all sorts of things wrong.
And then just earlier today, actually, I listened to an interview with a former UK ambassador to Syria, and he said he'd been to Sidnaya.
He hadn't been in the prison, but he had been to the town, and he knew about the prison.
And he also said they had basic information wrong in the report, which just goes to underscore the fact that they did not gather information from different sides, and it's very biased.
Yeah.
And now, I'm sorry with the whole flippant, oh, you must be a Baathist thing, but, you know, let me try to put it a little bit better.
To someone who is on the other side of this, when you say, well, jeez, I haven't seen the evidence, what they hear is, don't you accuse my Assad, whether that's really what you're saying or not.
So in your article, you address what you think of Assad and his regime and how you assess it, the reality of it in this war.
And it doesn't sound like the kind of thing his PR team probably would have put out.
But do you want to go ahead just by way of disclaimer so that we can get back to just what ain't in this report by Amnesty International here?
Well, my starting point is it's for the Syrian people to determine their government.
It doesn't really matter what I think.
What matters is what the Syrian people say.
I've been to Syria twice.
I've talked with a lot of people.
I've studied it for many years now.
I spent a lot of time.
I've got friends there.
I've done on-the-street interviews with people randomly.
And what I know from my own experience is that the big majority of Syrian people actually support the government.
And whether they're Baathists or members of opposition parties in Syria, and many of your listeners will not be aware of the fact that, yes, there are opposition parties in Syria.
But the point is that the people support the government there.
They hugely support the Syrian army, which represents the country, not the government.
And they hate the terrorists who have invaded their country and who have basically been funded and supplied and given weapons by outside powers, especially Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, the U.S., and the West.
But it's not – basically, I support international law, and I support the right of government – of the people of any country to determine their own government.
All right, but so does that mean that you think Assad is an angel and that his police are run by Andy Griffith and Don Knotts or what?
Well, no.
I mean, I know stories of people who have been arrested there, and then they were interrogated and so forth.
The fact is they have a very active security service there.
They obviously need it, but I think it's the case that it goes to extremes.
There is public criticism of the security services in some area.
But the other side of the reality is that Syria has been under threat and under attack.
I mean, they have – so do they have people in prison?
Yes, obviously they do.
They're in a state of war.
There's over 100,000 trained fanatics who are paid by various other governments and who are killing people.
Most Americans don't know that over 100,000 Syrians have died in the Syrian army and in the national defense forces defending their own country.
So twice as many Syrians have died defending their own country as Americans died halfway around the world in Vietnam.
So this is from a small country.
Yeah, in fact, in the article you point out that Amnesty shows this grave of martyrs and says, well, look, I mean, here's the mass grave.
And then you say, oh, yeah, really?
They name the people that they lynch in the prison and they bury them in the martyrs' grave, huh?
Is that right?
Right, right.
You're saying clearly that means those are soldiers are buried there.
Right.
Well, and that was what the Syrian dissident who had been in the prison, he pointed that out amongst his many – the many good points he made.
And he wrote this.
And you link to that in your article.
Let me say it again real quick here.
It's Amnesty International Stokes Syrian War at ConsortiumNews.com.
And page down a little and you'll see the link to Angry Arab.
And that's the link you're looking for.
Right.
And so Angry Arab website or blog is run by a very good academic, Asad Abu Khalil.
And so he basically published the letter that he received from this person.
And he just lists all of the contradictions and the basic factual things that are wrong in the amnesty report.
And now just so listeners can be clear on this, one of the photographs in this amnesty report shows a cemetery and how it doubled in size over four years.
They identify it as a martyr's cemetery.
And the person, Nizar Nayef, the person that we're speaking of, the Syrian dissident who spent time in there, he said, this is silly beyond silly.
They don't bury people who have been executed in a prison in a martyr's cemetery.
Martyrs are the Syrian soldiers who have been killed defending their country.
They don't bury people who have been executed for crimes in the martyr's cemetery.
So this is just one example of the idiocy and the lack of cross-checking and the lack of attention to facts and detail that amnesty has engaged in.
Hey, let me ask you something.
You know, in 2011, I even had one of these loons on my show to talk about how we got to do a regime change in Tripoli.
I couldn't believe it.
I mean, I thought I was having them on to oppose the war because amnesty, they're like a human rights group.
They want to prevent civilian deaths.
They want to prevent wars at all costs.
Right, guys?
They come on the show to promote the war.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, and a bunch of nonsense, too, to support it.
But tell me this, Rick.
You write about this, and I know about this now from the historical record and everything.
But it seems like maybe you remember this from how it happened at the time, that when the Bush senior administration and their PR team, Hill and Knowlton, and the Kuwaiti embassy put together their stunt about the babies being left to die on the cold floor after the Iraqi soldiers stole their incubators away.
That amnesty confirmed that that was true.
And I just wonder if there – do you happen to – I'm sorry to put you on the spot, but do you happen to have like an anecdote about how they claimed to confirm it?
Do you know that much about the story about what was the nature of the BS exactly?
The essence of it is that amnesty consulted with somebody who purported to be a Red Crescent doctor.
And so here again we have them relying on the testimony of one individual, and he said that, oh, yes, it definitely happened.
And he was put up by the same PR firm?
Pardon me?
He was put up to it by the same PR firm?
I don't know if he was involved there or not.
This could have been in – this was in cahoots with Kuwait, which was hiring the marketing firm.
So it was probably through Kuwait that that took place.
But the sad thing here is that the marketing company, and I think it was Hill & Knowlton, they paid no price for that.
There was no consequence to them.
Or the senators, because some of the senators also knew about this, knew that it was a fraud.
And it almost sounds quaint.
It sounds like a minor point from a long time ago, but no, that was the start of the Iraq War that has raged ever since.
Yeah, that's right.
And it came at a very critical time because the public was very averse to sending U.S. troops into Iraq.
And it helped to persuade Congress and the public to support that initial U.S. intervention.
All right.
Now, so it really is kind of almost shocking, I guess.
I guess I wonder, couldn't they have done a better job even with this kind of ham-handed premise of what they're going for here?
It seems like they could have done better than some computer-animated – You mean the Amnesty report?
Yeah, I mean it reminds me of when the CIA put out the cartoon of Flight 800 breaking in half and all this stuff and flying the tail end, flew straight up.
And everybody's like, what?
And it's the same kind of thing here where they're like, look at this cartoon.
You show me a cartoon, Colin Powell and his mobile biological weapons labs, right?
Why is this a cartoon?
If it's real, then why are you showing me a cartoon?
Well, this is an example of the demise and the decline of Amnesty International.
Because at one time they were well-known for doing good research and good solid reports.
This is almost like a parody.
It's sensational.
It's like tabloid research from the title Human Slaughterhouse to the fact that they associate it with a three-minute cartoon, which is really a preposterous joke.
And it's basically fact-free.
The whole thing rests on the statements of these 84 people.
And they don't identify so-and-so said such-and-such.
There's none of that.
I mean how do we know the – they claim that there were four guards from the prison that testified.
Well, how do we know that?
How did they authenticate the names and the identities of those guards?
They claim that there were three judges.
But there's all sorts of contradictions.
Like one of the judges says they convicted all people there.
Nobody was acquitted.
Well, right again within 48 hours we have testimony from somebody who was interviewed from Sweden, somebody who's emigrated to Sweden who was in the prison.
And he said he went before the judge.
The judge asked him how many Syrian soldiers he killed.
And he said none.
And the judge acquitted him.
So you've got all these contradictions that have immediately risen up.
Yet the mainstream media and sadly some of the alternative media has accepted this at face value.
It's really necessary for critical media, for good journalists, and for the public to understand, well, what's the evidence behind these accusations?
And in this case, there's almost none.
Well, and the part where – I saw a guy on Twitter just screenshotted the paragraph where they explain how they did the math to come up with 13,000.
And they basically just say it's ridiculous.
Well, you know what we did was we just multiplied one fantasy by another times two divided by three and then came up with this bullshit.
Like what are they talking about?
Exactly.
Yeah, so it's a measure of the decline of amnesty.
Now, one of the co-authors of the report was interviewed on Democracy Now!
very uncritically.
She was interviewed, Nicolette Waldman is her name.
And so I was curious about her background.
Her background comes from – she was previously with an organization that's directly connected to – or it's directed by a leading member of George Soros Open Institute by Human Rights Watch, and most interestingly by this Washington think tank that's run by Michelle Flournoy, who is part of the regime change, definitely part of the group in Washington that's pushing for so-called no-fly zone and direct US aggression against Syria.
So the co-author of the report, that's her background.
So I don't know if she's ever even been to Syria.
What I do know is that there's no evidence of understanding of the position of the Syrian people or the conflict in this report.
The report effectively disguises and hides the reality of Syria, which is that a huge – an array of reactionary countries from the West and from the Gulf, from Turkey, have funded and supplied and armed tens of thousands, over 100,000 fanatics from around the world to invade the sovereign state of Syria with the goal of overthrowing the government.
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Yeah, well, that's a whole other interview.
In fact, I'm about to interview Brad Hoff.
Did you see the latest?
It's the CIA document that he found from 1986 about how they could do a regime change there, and it reads just like a blueprint from 2011.
It's at the Libertarian Institute.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, okay.
Well, that should be very interesting.
Yeah, I like Brad Hoff's work a lot.
Yeah, they go, you know what we could do?
We could support the moderates, the moderate Sunni business interests, and then, you know, yeah, they'll marginalize the religious kooks and the Alawites.
Maybe we could provoke the Alawites into overreacting against the Sunnis and see if we can create a war that way.
And, you know, honestly, I shouldn't say it so flippantly like that, because to read it, it's, I mean, you know, even knowing what you know, it's pretty jaw-dropping just how cynical these CIA guys are.
And this is a weenie analyst who wrote this thing.
This isn't even one of the actual killers, right?
This is just the guy back at the office just talking about how he could start a war that would be bound, of course, to kill hundreds and hundreds of thousands of innocent people, as it has.
I mean, well, yeah, that's exactly one element of the conflict in Syria is that is between a secular state that believes in, you know, different religions getting along fine and a kind of a reactionary sectarian state, which is as exemplified and promoted by Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia has been a huge force, and both Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda branch in Syria, and ISIS, their religion basically is Wahhabism coming straight from Saudi Arabia.
Whereas the Syrian government is very proud of the fact that they – religions, it's a multi-religion country, and it's a multi-ethnic country, and they're very proud of that.
So Christians of different types of Christians get along very well with Sunni, get along very well with Alawi.
There's a lot of collaboration and mutual respect, and that's one of the things that's under attack.
So the conflict in Syria is hugely important for the whole world right now, because we're seeing an assault on international law.
We're seeing an assault on the last remaining nationalist, semi-socialist country that promotes interfaith collaboration and coordination, different ethnic groups and different religions getting along.
So it's under attack, and this is a crucial struggle for the whole world right now.
Let me ask you this.
There have been obviously quite a few hoaxes here.
The Hula hoax was one, and then of course the Sarin hoax of 2013 that almost led to a bombing campaign.
But there's one that you mentioned here, the Caesar photographs.
And I remember when these came out, and I guess I remember reading somewhere about how they had another explanation than the way that they were originally put forward.
But I don't think I've ever interviewed anybody about that before, so I'd like to have that for the record here for the audience, they get to hear it.
Can you explain what that was about?
Well, very briefly, literally the day before 2014 Geneva negotiations were about to take place, a report was released to the world.
And once again, like this amnesty report, this report called the Caesar torture photos received huge publicity.
It was all over CNN, it was picked up, it was on Democracy Now!
, it was on PBS, it was all over the media.
And the story was that a Syrian military photographer had defected and taken with him 55,000 photographs supposedly showing the torture and deaths and the bodies of 11,000 victims of people who had been tortured and killed in Syrian prisons and intelligence centers.
It was all paid for by Qatar.
They had some lawyers for hire who said they had authenticated the photographs.
They said they couldn't name the photographer, so they codenamed him Caesar to supposedly protect his identity.
And it was accepted uncritically by the media that I just mentioned.
Well, I did an investigation of it subsequently, and it turns out that the CIA was involved in this whole operation.
That it was not, I mean on the face of it, it's not credible to think that the Syrian government, if this person really was a military photographer at this military base, I mean there aren't that many of them, they would be easily able to find out who he was.
So it was very questionable why he had to be anonymous.
But most significantly, it then later turned out that while only a few of the photographs were released to the public, the whole photographic set was turned over to the FBI and the Human Rights Watch.
Well, Human Rights Watch came out with a subsequent report, and kind of buried in the report was the very significant fact that about 46%, almost half of the photographs showed the opposite of what was claimed.
They showed dead Syrian soldiers and civilians who had been killed in car bombs and terrorist attacks.
So the credibility of the whole story collapses when half of the photographs, almost half of the photographs, show the opposite of what was claimed.
Well, as you put it though, in a manner of speaking, what matters is that the lie counts for a day.
You could disprove it tomorrow, who cares about that?
Right, right, it gets buried.
So what happened actually with the talks?
Did this succeed in destroying the talks?
Absolutely, yes it did.
And that's another kind of curious thing about these reports.
The report from Amnesty last week, and then this week Human Rights Watch has come out with their own new accusations about chlorine gas usage by the Syrian government in Aleppo.
It's just coming out, there's supposed to be new negotiations in Geneva next week.
So it's funny how these reports from these organizations tend to come out just in time to kind of poison the atmosphere before negotiations.
I just read a bit at the Moon of Alabama blog this morning where he talked about how Erdogan had a friend in Mike Flynn.
And so now that Flynn's gone, he said what happened was, and I just can't keep track of damn Turks these days.
I'm writing a book about Afghanistan, what do I know about Turkey?
So what happened was that, I guess as we remember, that Erdogan had kind of flip-flopped and had started leaning toward the Russians.
But then with the rise of Trump and Flynn, he had basically tilted back toward doing what he wanted in Syria over Putin's dead body and claiming, going ahead and trying to make gains anyway and declaring that he's going to go to Raqqa and all these things.
But now that he's lost Flynn, now he's screwed and he's going to have to come begging on his knees to Putin to ask if Putin will take him back again.
I mean, he's still part of NATO.
It's not like the whole thing is that binary, but I'd be interested to see what happens with that.
Well, yeah, I'll be interested to check that because the Moon of Alabama does some good work and they do some breakthrough stories.
Yeah, no doubt about it.
And as far as the current stage of the talks and all of that, are you very familiar with what happened at the last ones?
And is it still Nusra and ISIS, but everybody else is part of the talks at this point or not?
Well, they've got somebody, they've got Alush, who was the head of one of the main Saudi funded groups that's put his name there and has made an appearance.
The major forces, Nusra and ISIS, are not part of the talks.
It could be a positive step if the opposition negotiated seriously, but it's questionable whether they will.
Saudi Arabia may still be angling to continue the conflict.
And certainly Israel and the neocons in the US, they want to do whatever it takes to stop the Syrian army and their allies from achieving victory.
So I think the Syrian army is advancing on the ground.
90% of the Syrian people are in government held areas and there is huge hatred and opposition to the war and the terrorists who have come in.
But a lot of damage can still be done.
You still have billions of dollars flowing from a vast array of governments and the lies.
The information war is really significant here.
Patrick Colburn has talked about that.
He is the international journalist.
He said this may be the worst case of misinformation and disinformation since World War One.
So basically lies are being told to support one side.
Well, I'm proud to say that the reason I'm right about all this stuff is because of Patrick.
Simple as that.
I read everything he writes.
I interview him all the time and that's why I'm good on everything.
He gets all the credit.
I'm just the idiot sitting here in Texas, you know, playing it back basically, asking a couple follow-up questions.
Right, right.
Yeah, well, when he says it's been the worst in almost 100 years, that says something.
And Stephen Kinzer, who's an outstanding journalist and author, he has said something very similar.
He said the media should be ashamed of what's the disinformation and misinformation on Syria.
I mean, it's certainly at least on the level of Iraq 2002, which was amazing after all.
I mean, they said in January 2002, well, we want a regime change.
And so between now and a year and three months from now, we're going to tell you whatever lie we can come up with that we think you need to get you to finally give in and let us do this.
Are you ready, everybody?
All right, go.
And they were lying the whole damn time and everybody knew it in aluminum tubes.
And what are we talking about?
And they did it anyway.
They got away with that.
But I don't know.
I didn't live through World War One or Vietnam for that matter.
So I don't know exactly how to compare, but certainly I can compare the lies about Syria the last five years to Iraq in 2002 and three.
I mean, absolutely.
And the sad thing is that people are not people are not not held to account.
Journalists who who led the disinformation campaign in 2002, like Michael Gordon from The New York Times.
Right.
He published a lie about Russia yesterday.
Exactly.
And he was on the PBS NewsHour talking some some more stuff, which I need to check into.
But given his past record, we need to we need to find out the facts of the situation.
Yesterday, he accused Russia of breaking a nuclear missile treaty.
It was totally unfounded and completely debunked at Antiwar.com by Jason Ditz that these are missiles they developed a decade ago.
And all that happened was the Americans changed the name of them, how they designate them.
And that meant that they were speculating that possibly they could have been deployed somewhere, but they don't know that.
And that was even in the article.
There's nothing to this, by the way.
Oh, OK, thanks.
Yeah, I know.
And Judy Woodruff was was, you know, looking at Michael Gordon with awe at his supposed new information, how how dangerous Russia, the aggressive Russia is violating this important treaty because because there's disarray in the White House.
It's really sad.
And they need to be, you know, directly criticized.
And we need a lot better from, you know, from PBS, that's for sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's amazing how Judith Miller was hung out to dry.
But her co-author, Michael Gordon, was not.
And then he lived to tell another whole season of lies in 2007, blaming Iran for every roadside bomb that went off in Iraq, which was a complete crock, by the way, and completely debunked in real time by the likes of Patrick Coburn, first and foremost.
And all those bombs were being made inside Iraq, not Iran.
Right.
And then.
Yeah.
And then here still, no accountability leads to the very same actors getting away with the very same crimes.
I saw on Twitter.
Did you see Dan Rather said that Flingate is the worst thing that happened since Watergate?
And one guy said, she's really worse than Linus into the Iraq war that killed a million people.
Yeah.
But Dan Rather was in on that.
Dan Rather retailed all of those lies.
We can pull up the YouTube's of him going on about the aluminum tubes right now, you know.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
Well, yeah, the Flingate.
So.
So Michael Flynn talked with the Russian ambassador about, you know, in the you know, when he was going to be coming into the administration in just a matter of weeks, he talked with him about different issues.
What's the problem with that?
I don't even I don't even see the big issue and including sanctions.
What's the problem with that?
The sanctions are actually a lot of European countries want to drop the sanctions.
And the sanctions were illegally placed on Russia after, you know, after the coup that was sponsored by the West in the Ukraine.
I mean, I think the only I think what happened here was that, you know, people are saying, well, the CIA is leaking on him to the post and that, you know, is generating these bad headlines.
So it was like this intelligence interference in the system and the politics where I guess there may be a little bit to that.
But I think really, I mean, and yeah, it was the headlines that Trump is reacting to.
But I think mostly Trump just didn't like him anymore.
Trump kind of owed him a job because he was the first general to support him and give him that kind of credibility that he had a general and all that.
But the guy's a complete idiot, you know.
And I think that I mean, there's a story in The New York Times about how Bannon didn't like him anymore.
And Priebus didn't like him.
And Trump didn't like him.
And Pence didn't like.
And it was just they're the ones who turned on him because he's a piece of crap.
He's he's well, whatever Michael Ledeen tells him to think is what he thinks, for God's sake.
How reliable a guy is that?
Well, I'm just I'm just looking at the facts.
John McCain goes over to Turkey and meets with terrorists who are connected with Al-Qaeda.
And who's Northern Storm, yeah.
And and nobody says a peep.
Some of us did, but yeah, no, you're right.
Exactly.
So so they're so that that gets that gets no no criticism at all.
But Michael Flynn talks with the Soviet or the Russian ambassador.
Yeah.
And and suddenly it's a big it's a big crime.
I don't get it.
It goes to Syria, you know.
Right.
Everybody out with the pitchforks and torches.
But meanwhile, McCain and Lindsey Graham are back in Ukraine.
I don't know if Graham had been there before, but McCain was back in Ukraine at the very end of the year.
Being photographed, telling the Ukrainian soldiers, go get him, Tiger.
Right.
Right.
You know, and how much scrutiny of Victoria Nuland, you know, after after she basically coordinated the the the coup.
Well, her bad language was roundly criticized, I'll have you know.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
After, you know, the after you.
But the really important stuff there was ignored.
The fact that she was hand she was designating who was going to become the prime minister in the following week.
Simple as that.
I mean, yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Is the guy.
It was it was great the way that they got away with it.
You got to admit the way that they just said, oh, my word.
The fact that she said a bad word.
You know what that you better really say you're sorry for that.
Oh, no, I am very, very sorry.
And by the way, I'm very offended that the Russians were tapping my phone.
And he talked about the coup plot at all.
Right.
Right.
Well, back back to the the amnesty report.
There's I would recommend listeners check out what Peter Ford had to say.
He was interviewed on Sputnik News, I think.
But Peter Ford is the former U.K. ambassador to Syria.
He knows Syria very well.
And and he's got a lot.
He's he also dissects this amnesty report and he doesn't mince his words.
He says amnesty is part of the liberal elite interventionist group that that basically has been promoting wars for the last, you know, 10 or 15 years.
Well, I just Googled that right up.
So, yeah.
Yeah, it's good.
It's a good interview.
And he has previously had very insight, insightful comments to make about what's going on there.
And it comes from, you know, his own experience in the country, as opposed to like the authors of this report, who might never have even been to Syria, even though Nicolette Waldman was based in Beirut and was living in Lebanon for some years.
I don't know if she's ever, ever actually been to Syria.
But the report, Human Slaughterhouse, it's got a tabloid type title and it's tabloid type content.
Sensationalism without facts.
And I see there are two pieces here, actually.
Fake News, Amnesty International Report on Torture in Syria Full of Holes and the Problems with the Amnesty International Report.
I clicked on Peter Ford's name there at Sputnik.
So I'll check that out.
And I'm not a big fan of Sputnik, but Peter Ford sounds like he's his own source.
So I'll take that for what it's worth.
And now I want to make sure that people look at your article.
Very important debunking here, y'all.
Amnesty International, Stokes, Syrian War.
That's at ConsortiumNews.com by Rick Sterling.
Thanks very much again for your time.
I'll let you go so you can watch the great Trump, Netanyahu press conference, which is about to begin.
Okay, thanks, Scott.
You take care.
Have a good one.
Bye bye.
All right, y'all.
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