All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
We can also sign up for the podcast fee.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got the Executive Editor of the American Conservative Magazine, TAC, as we call it, Kelly Villejos.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you, Kelly?
Great, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
Hey, really happy to have you here, and especially happy to see you writing on this very important subject and breaking news here, Chelsea Manning's attempted suicide and then release from prison.
Can you please tell us everything you know about what's going on here?
So as your listeners probably know that Chelsea Manning has been in an Alexandria federal jail for exactly a year.
I think it was exactly a year on March 8th.
She's been there for a failure to comply with a subpoena to testify against, well, in the grand jury that had been convened on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange.
As we know, there's a litany of charges, U.S. charges against Julian Assange and WikiLeaks at this moment, but she was asked to testify in that investigation, and she said no for a myriad of very good reason last year, where she said, listen, this is coercion.
This is predatory.
It's secret.
I could testify.
No one's going to be able to hear what I'm saying.
I'm making myself vulnerable.
I already testified on all of this stuff during my own court-martial.
There's nothing that I can tell you that I haven't told you already, and of course she's concerned.
She sees how the federal government, the DOJ, has operated in some of these cases where they wait till somebody says something that they didn't say before or doesn't line up with other testimony, and then next thing you know, they're back in jail on lying to Congress or lying to the FBI.
So I think she was protecting herself, but she was also standing up for the truth.
She was basically saying, I think this is all a sham, and I'm not going to participate.
I've already done that.
So she made the stand.
They threw her in jail.
She said, I'm still not going to testify.
They started slapping fines on her.
It was $1,000 a day after the 60 days of noncompliance.
So she's accrued about $250,000 worth of fines at this point, and I'm sure that's not all.
If you know our justice system at all, there's probably tons of other fees and fines that she's accrued by just being there.
Apparently, from her lawyers the other day, she had tried to commit suicide ahead of yet another hearing about her noncompliance, and there was a flurry of commentary on this, including myself, about why is she still there?
Are they trying to systematically kill her mentally and physically?
And last night, we got news that the judge ordered her released, saying that she wasn't needed anymore, but that she was still responsible for the $250,000 in fines.
So I mean, there's a question of like, well, at what point was she not needed?
Was this coercion or this attempt at coercion even necessary, considering that they have this built case on Assange already?
They've already announced the indictments.
What did they need her there?
Were they doing it out of spite?
Were they doing it out of just crushing her?
We don't know.
Those are the open questions, but it's just a really sad situation.
You want to be happy that she was released, but the idea that they let her languish in jail for a year because she wouldn't testify seems so unbelievably punitive and torturous, and they could do this to anybody, and I wish the mainstream media would wake up.
They don't like her because she's connected with WikiLeaks, which is connected to Julian Assange, which is connected to Russia in everybody's minds.
But the fact is, this could be happening to anybody in America, and if we don't stand up for our own here when we see injustice, nobody's going to be standing up for us, Scott, and so I think there's just so much wrong here on so many levels, and it's very disturbing.
Yeah.
Well, and not least of which, as you say, the partisanship there where the right-wingers didn't like Manning because Manning made Bush look so bad with the leak back in 2010 of the Iraq and Afghan war logs, the collateral murder video, the Guantanamo files, and the State Department cables, and then the left-wingers hate Manning by association with Assange over the Russiagate hoax, as you say, and so the only people left in Manning's corner are the real kind of leftist activist journalist types like Glenn Greenwald and so forth, and people like yourself and us over at Antiwar.com doing this kind of thing.
But broadly speaking, there's no constituency to rally around Manning, right?
That's the thing.
Well, you know, exactly, and you brought up a host of people like ourselves and Glenn Greenwald and others, and what screams out to me is that this isn't a political group.
We are not politicized, and whether it be John Kiriakou, Julian Assange, Jeffrey Sterling, any number of these people have been screwed by the federal government.
We have maintained our core principles of trying to tell the truth and trying to stand up for what was right.
We're living in a world where everything is so politicized, so if you support Julian Assange, that means you support Trump, because Trump benefited from some WikiLeaks on Hillary Clinton.
I mean, it just really makes you want to puke.
Yeah, it's just completely ridiculous, isn't it?
There has been a core group of people who have been standing up for these victims of federal overreach and abuse, but we're always in the minority.
Even though we're coming from different places, we're always the sort of like the misfits are outside trying to raise alarms, and you have this massive corporate elite media that decides who gets their favor, who's granted attention, and who's not.
This is what hurts people like Chelsea Manning, because she was indeed a sympathetic figure by the mainstream media.
They just forgot her for a whole year.
If she had been sort of an anti-Trumper, maybe it would have been a whole different situation for Chelsea Manning.
I like all the hypocrisy in the identity politics, where modern leftist politics, the only thing that matters is who you are, what your race is, what your sex is, what your gender is, and all these things, and then you have people like, say, for example, Tulsi Gabbard, who's intersectional in six ways, and Chelsea Manning, who's intersectional in at least one or two, and is supposed to be the kind of person that they would rally around, the most famous of the intersectionals, and yet, oh, you crossed me on my partisan politics, all of a sudden, I don't know you.
Tulsi Gabbard's just another white man.
We hate her.
And Manning, tied to Assange, tied to Russia, well, never mind.
The absolutely heroic Pentagon Papers-level heroism of the Iraq and Afghan war logs and State Department cables leak, and the fact that nine-tenths of it was about the Bush administration and all of the horrors of those wars, and yes, one year worth of Obama.
Oh, well, forget that.
Forget that there's been, no lie, there must have been 10,000, maybe 20,000 or 50,000 stories that have been written by journalists around the world that include the phrase, in there somewhere, if not as the lead, somewhere in there, as verified by the WikiLeaks documents, the State Department cables from 2008 detail how, etc., etc., etc., is the most important thing for journalism in this century.
And Manning, there ought to be, somewhere there is, I actually saw somewhere in Europe, there's statues of Snowden, Manning, and Assange together.
There ought to be one of those in every town.
You kidding me?
And then to see regular people parroting TV, that I am outraged.
I had no right to know these things.
And my government's job is to keep secrets from me so that I don't have to worry about stuff like which innocent people are being tortured in Guantanamo Bay prison.
Yeah.
Well, what bothers me is that this is not, the partisanship isn't equally effective because in the case of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, for example, the left has just turned on them and we hear nothing or there is hostility.
There's hostility against these two on the right, too, because the sort of conservative Inc., which dwarfs our right, still hates Assange for who he is and for his leaks and WikiLeaks.
They never liked him and they don't care if he might have had something to do with the Hillary thing, which he denies anyway, the Hillary DNC leaks.
That's not really winning them over either.
And they certainly don't like Chelsea Manning because they see her as someone who had betrayed the military, betrayed her, whatever, oath, in quotes, to whatever duty, following orders, yada, yada, in the military.
So there's no sort of balancing here.
So the entire left-leaning corporate media has turned against them and there's nobody balancing out on the right to say, no, we should pay attention to what's going on to Assange in his glass box during his extradition hearings.
We should be paying attention to Chelsea Manning language.
They don't care either.
So when I write these stories for American Conservative, yeah, there's a lot of comments that will come out in support, but then I get equal number of tweets and comments saying, why are you sticking up?
This person is a traitor.
This person betrayed our country, yada, yada.
And these are usually people who are coming from your sort of Fox News, Conservative Inc.world.
So you just can't win and it's too bad because you do need a champion who will take whatever their media vehicle is.
And on the right, it's Fox News to really shine on this.
And they won't.
Look what Fox News did for Eddie Gallagher.
I mean, here's a guy who actually is a war criminal and they hammered away at this, at this, at this issue, making him out to be a saint until Trump being Trump and wanting to please his base, pardoned him.
You know, that's what Fox News is good for when they really want to get on the side of somebody.
That's how it works.
That's how you see it work on the right, unfortunately, a guy who sniped a little girl on a bridge for fun.
Right.
According to all of his Navy SEAL teammates who turned him in.
So who had every reason to tell the truth and not lie about Fox News turned against all of those Navy SEALs.
You know, all the people that had testified against Gallagher and in Fox News's eyes, they're all traitors, too.
They're not they're not real SEALs.
I mean, it's amazing the power of the corporate media and it doesn't matter left or right.
It's so powerful.
It really is amazing.
And in fact, you know, I just the Tulsi Gabbard thing, I'm not even that big of a fan because I have my problems.
But just seeing the way that they've marginalized her in the last half a year like this is just incredible.
I mean, the way they did the same kind of thing to Ron Paul and they're trying to do the same kind of thing to Sanders.
Not that I'm very sympathetic to him, but just to see the way these decisions come down from on high that just, you know, Ron Paul will not be taken seriously ever.
Wolf Blitzer is the only one who didn't get those marching orders that you may not ask this guy a question that doesn't start with, what's your problem, you crazy old man or whatever.
That's how they did it.
With Tulsi, they just erased her altogether.
It really is almost like you hear leftists complain about sexism and racism and whatever, although I don't think that's what it is.
But that's what they would call it if they weren't the ones guilty of it right now.
But what it really is, is she's less worse on the wars and especially on Russia policy.
And that makes her absolutely beyond the pale.
And so the orders have come down that she is absolutely never to be treated as a legitimate candidate, even though she's a sitting Congresswoman.
She's on the Armed Forces Committee in the House of Representatives, where she has the highest top-secret clearance.
And she's an active duty major.
She's a currently serving officer in the Army National Guard.
Oh yeah, no, I heard she's a pro-Russia traitor, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And they just refuse to even mention her.
They pretend, yep, the race is down to just two now.
Just these two old white men, blah, blah, blah, their narratives.
And they don't even mention that she's still in the race.
You know, it's crazy.
You remember just a few years ago, during the Obama administration, you know, before Crimea in Ukraine, I mean, they were talking about resets with Russia, building new relationships with Russia.
I mean, if Tulsi Gabbard had been transported in a time machine back to 2008 and was talking like this, nobody would even blink an eye.
But unfortunately, her very thoughtful approach to global relationships just flew in the face of the political BS that was happening with the Mueller investigation and Russia meddling in elections.
And that was, you know, she went off the talking points of the Democratic Party.
I mean, we love her for that because she is a truth teller, but in terms of her positioning as a Democrat, she blew it.
It was bad timing.
Nothing she has said was radical or inappropriate, you know, firing offenses, nothing.
Everything she said was just standard, pragmatic international relations approaches, you know, and the stuff about the wars is the same as everybody's talk.
People around the country don't want to be in these wars anymore.
She was saying nothing that would contradict any of that.
It's just, it's the party.
It's all about the politics.
Yeah.
Well, and in 2016, she quit the DNC to go and endorse Sanders.
So they put a full FOTWA on her head right then.
That was it.
So, you know, she's toast at that point.
You know, that's an egregious sin to, you know, call out Hillary Clinton on the carpet publicly too.
So.
Yep.
I mean, yes, it's her and Comey and Putin.
They were the ones who ruined it.
Otherwise, Hillary would be the president right now.
Everybody knows that if Gabbard hadn't cheated by publicly dissenting.
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And thanks.
So let's talk more about this.
The crazy Manning situation, why Manning was in jail for a year here anyway.
As you said, Manning was already convicted by the military and did what, seven years total, including the time before the trial, and then had the sentence commuted by Obama, as you said.
But so time served there.
And then they're trying to get her to testify against Assange in front of this grand jury, which now they've decided never mind after a year of this.
And trying to get her to implicate Assange, when we already know the story about how Manning did the hack, didn't even hack, just clicked on folders, right, had the access, and uploaded this stuff to WikiLeaks.
And you know, essentially, we know what they're trying to say was his crossing the line from journalism into Assange's, crossing the line from journalism as a publisher into conspiring with Manning was in helping Manning crack a password.
But we just heard from court from Assange, I'm going to hear more about this later in the day.
I'm talking with Joe Lori about this, Assange in the UK, where that was to hack a password for a video game.
There was a previous story that said that the password, there was a thing they were trying to break a password to log into the computer from another guy's account, same level of clearance, but just to throw investigators off the trail, which is still journalism and just tradecraft of doing journalism and protecting sources, even if Assange was behind all that.
And they're trying to completely twist all of this into espionage charges against a guy who wasn't even in America when he did any of these things in the first place.
Once they put their hands on him, then he's a U.S. person.
And at that point, he's supposed to be protected by the Bill of Rights.
And the Bill of Rights thus far, there's certainly no precedent otherwise, has protected journalists from publishing classified information.
The leaker can get in trouble.
The leaky is just a reporter.
In the Obama government, which they prosecuted people under the Espionage Act, they investigated journalists, they were the harshest prosecutors of leakers in American history.
But they looked at this and they said, there's really no way that we can prosecute Assange without also prosecuting David Sanger over at the New York Times, or Michael Gordon at the Wall Street Journal or something.
So we can't do it.
The New York Times test, we can't do it.
And the Trump government picked this up.
And they're trying to essentially prosecute with the Espionage Act in a way that it's never been used before, going far beyond any previous precedent to target a publisher.
And they're trying to pretend like, what, if Assange had written an introductory paragraph to each document, then that would have been journalism.
But since he's just posting documents up there, that means it's not.
These are just made up distinctions.
This whole thing is a crock and a farce.
And their case against Assange is completely paper thin.
They're trying to prosecute him for espionage, for doing something that's really no different than you writing at TAC, and based on his leaks, based on Manning's leaks that you read at WikiLeaks.
And so that's the background of this whole thing, where they drove Manning almost into the grave.
And they knew, just as we talked about on the show a year ago, that Manning had already tried to kill herself twice before, and they're putting her in solitary confinement for refusing to go along with this, and risking another suicide attempt here, which apparently has happened now.
And all for a case that, I mean, I guess probably could be prosecuted in Virginia, but only at the expense of the American First Amendment tradition going back 240 years.
Yeah.
And I think what is happening here is they're trying to avoid that whole conversation that you just had, or we're having, about the free speech, the free press, the Bill of Rights.
They're making this about theft.
And so they feel like if they can make this about Assange working hand in hand with Manning to hack, break into servers, or files, or whatever, to get the documents that he eventually wrote about, that they can steer the conversation and public opinion away from whether or not this is about a journalist and free press, and more about actual theft.
And I don't think that's going to work in the court, but I think that's what they're banking on.
And they wanted Chelsea Manning to come in and testify to try to slip her up, I believe, into saying something that would build on that part of the case.
And what she was worried about, and rightly so, is that they would find a way to either punish her again, because they probably don't like the fact that she was commuted, or find a way that she will implicate Assange on that one area.
And then they can turn around to the American public, because when Assange comes here, it's going to be big, and there's going to be a lot of protests, and there's going to be a moment in time where the press, the media, will either side with Assange because they just hate Trump and whoever works for him in the Justice Department, or they might be persuaded to be a little more hands off.
And if they start convincing the press that the narrative is about theft and not about freedom of the press and the First Amendment, that will be the turning point.
And I think that'll be a turning point, particularly when you've got Fox News on the scent, and they're bullhorning out to their people that this is all about Assange helping Manning break in to military servers.
And then the left says, well, this is all about theft, and he's not a real journalist anyway.
I think that that will allow them to do whatever they got to do without a lot of pressure from public opinion.
Whether that works, I don't know, but I think that's where we're going with this.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, let's change the subject to some of this other great journalism you've been doing lately about the Special Operations Command and AFRICOM on the continent of Africa.
I don't know how many nations are in now over there, but you've got two great ones here.
One is called Why Are Americans Being Killed in Africa?
And then this one, the latest, Out of Africa.
Two cheers for Secretary of Defense Esper.
Oh, no.
And then here's the third one.
Sorry.
This is the latest.
Lawmakers take a stand.
We don't want out of Africa.
So the military is trying to withdraw, and the Congress is trying to stop them, is that right?
Yeah.
So I don't know if maybe your listeners will get this irony, but the fact is when these lawmakers start making a stand, and I'm taking Bernie Sanders and Rand Paul out of this because they have been making a stand against war, but some of these lawmakers only get agitated about their war powers authority when the president wants to take troops out of these hotspots and bring them home out of harm's way.
And the perfect case is this Africa issue where the Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper, said in late December that he was thinking of revamping our overseas strategy, yada yada.
He wants to get troops out of Africa.
We have about 5,200 troops scattered very thinly across the continent.
And most likely it's so he can sort of refocus on what he believes is the greater threats of Russia and China.
That's a whole other story.
But the fact is he made some remarks in late December about getting our troops out of Africa.
And now we have lawmakers who are trying to pass a bill that would tie with the government's hands, wouldn't give them any money for any withdrawal efforts.
So they're using the power of the purse to keep troops overseas as opposed to bringing them home.
And they're saying things like, you know, this is our authority, war powers, yada yada.
And it's just an irony to me because they relinquished all of their powers and their war authority by letting these overseas wars happen, but also all sorts of operations in different countries that most of us don't even know about.
And then all of a sudden they get on their high horse when Trump wants to actually bring some troops home.
And I think what is at foot here is there's probably people in the military, obviously AFRICOM, who don't feel threatened that these operations are going to be, you know, reassigned and get less money.
So they've probably started some sort of campaign on the Hill through their, you know, apparatchiks, you know, convincing lawmakers that this would be an absolute catastrophe taking these troops out of there because, you know, ISIS is going to come back and, you know, all sorts of bad things are going to happen and there's going to be, you know, another caliphate, who knows what they've convinced them.
But that's the kind of language that's coming out of both Democrats and Republicans, like your reliable Senator Lindsey Graham on the Senate side.
So you know, I think this is probably one of the smarter things that the Defense Department has been pursuing.
They might be doing it for not smart ends because they want to use those troops and those resources to, you know, redirect somewhere else, you know, on the globe.
But I think any time that they acknowledge that things aren't working where they are and let's bring the troops home out of harm's way, we should support that.
And obviously there are members of Congress who disagree.
Yeah.
Wouldn't that be great?
You know, five, ten years from now, we're looking back thinking we should have really been pro-war.com and done everything we could to keep our troops bogged down in the Middle East because at least that would have kept us from starting a war with Russia.
Now here we are all dead.
As you're saying, that's all they want to do.
They want to wind down these extraneous missions patrolling Afghans in their neighborhood.
You know what?
Turns out Kelly Vlahos was right about that all along.
Let's fight China instead.
Oh, great.
Yeah.
Poor Nick Turse.
Now, Nick Turse has done unbelievable reporting on the U.S. operations in Africa, and he knows more about it than anybody that I know, and mostly because he's been such a pain in the ass to the people at the Pentagon, you know, getting information and FOIAs and all that.
On one hand, he's probably like, wow, that's a good thing.
I want to take those 5,200 troops home.
But on the other hand, he knows, having covered the military all these years, that there's something else going on here.
They just want to redirect all their resources over in another direction where they're starting all sorts of trouble on some other continent.
And then you have people in Washington say, well, I want my money for Africa.
And so they're inciting all of these members of Congress to sort of, you know, do their dirty work by making a ruckus about it.
And it's just so swampy.
This is the swamp, and we, you know, you and I obviously, you know, make part of our living trying to bring the light to all of these murky areas.
But it's just so disgusting.
And I think if we keep writing about it, you know, one of the things in my article was that when I say that troops are in harm's way, I'm not saying that facetiously.
There was an incident where our troops were overrun in early January by a bunch of ragtag militants who just ran across a tarmac and started lobbing, you know, I don't know how to say grenades, but basically causing all sorts of mayhem and shooting people, leaving, you know, Americans dead and contractors dead.
And then the rest of the Americans had to huddle, you know, in safety and wait for some Marines to come in an hour away.
And then there was a big battle, and the militants just sort of like, you know, they sort of just sort of blended into they just left and blended into the jungle or wherever they are.
And and we're left going, wow, we're Americans.
We're the most powerful military on Earth.
But yet we couldn't handle this, this, this ambush.
And this is this isn't the first time that this happened.
But you got these guys spread so thin, they're doing training.
And, you know, you saw what happened in Niger.
They do these little, you know, expeditions and they're they're very vulnerable.
And I think Americans should know we're spending billions of dollars on military operations in Africa, what they're getting out of it.
It doesn't look like much.
Yeah.
Well, you know, one of the best anecdotes of the entire Trump years, I think, is from The Washington Post.
I mean, assuming this reporting is legitimate at all.
But it's about Trump's argument with then Secretary of Defense Mattis about sending troops to Somalia.
And we had special operations and CIA there, of course.
But then they want to send in the infantry for training and for fighting against al-Shabaab.
And Trump is saying, Somalia, I don't know, they didn't include this part of the quote, but I bet he asked, where the hell is that?
Why would we even want to be there at all?
We should just pull our troops out of there altogether.
And Mattis says to him, no, see, we're trying to prevent someone from blowing up Times Square, which is the thinnest excuse in the world, because everybody knows that the attempted Times Square attack was waged by a naturalized American citizen who was living the good life, happily adjusted with a professional degree and a house and a job and a wife and a car.
And then he went home on vacation to Pakistan and saw the results of an American drone strike there.
And it was only then that he signed up with the Pakistani Taliban, who had never attempted to attack America before, of course, and was trained by them how to set off a bomb, which luckily failed.
But that was direct blowback from America's terror war in Pakistan, preventing Times Square, as though Somalia has ever threatened Times Square.
So Trump grumbles, and then the Washington Post article ends with Mattis telling Trump, you have no choice.
And then Trump, I guess, clicked his heels and saluted, sir, yes, sir, whatever the Pentagon says goes.
Who am I?
I'm just the lousy, stinking president sitting behind the desk here.
And so he went ahead and escalated the troops.
You know, he's like, why do they even print this?
Except just to prove that he knows better before he does the wrong thing.
Well, this is, you know, I you know, you mentioned the drones, you know, if Trump might not want troops there, but he's he's escalated the drone attacks in Africa since he's taken office.
And there was 63 drone strikes in Somalia alone in 2019.
So and it mostly against Al-Shabaab.
So the idea that somehow, if we leave, if we leave our little outpost there, that's going to like there's going to be some power vacuum and all these militants are going to be coming in.
I mean, there's smarter people than me on this issue.
But I'm thinking it's the drone strikes and the constant attacks, the lethal attacks that are causing, you know, like we've seen this before, a you know, it's a symbiotic relationship in which these these terrorists, they're they're they're proliferating because of the attacks.
And I know that people will say, well, those are weasel words.
But I mean, 63 drone strikes in 2019, maybe that's what's what's keeping this the sort of terror element and growing and growing in these areas.
Us leaving.
There's no question about that is not going to just all of a sudden create a terror problem.
What's creating the terror problem is that are the drone strikes and the constant killing of civilians that are involved in these strikes.
Believe me, they are.
So I don't know.
The government admits that, you know, that Leon Panetta was on Meet the Press back in the Obama times.
I forget if he was secretary of defense or CIA chief at the time, one or the other.
I think he was secretary of defense at the time.
And Chuck Todd says, well, geez, you know, we keep hearing that the more we use these drones to attack Al-Qaeda in Yemen, that the bigger Al-Qaeda gets.
This is before Obama changed his mind and took Al-Qaeda's side against the Houthis.
This is just the war against AQAP before the war for them.
And and yet it's all very counterproductive.
Every report we hear says that there's more and more Al-Qaeda there because we're bombing them, not in spite of the fact that we're bombing them.
And Panetta says, well, look, these are the tools that we have.
And so what are you going to do, not bomb them?
They admit that, you know, they, of course, it's counterproductive, but we've run out of better ideas.
So we're just going to keep this going.
And that was, of course, probably just a couple of years before Obama turned around and took Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula side anyway.
So what difference?
Well, I would keep an eye out and an ear out because we are going to hear more and more about this from your neocon remnants and your hawks in Washington.
I was at a, I was at an event this week.
We're talking about what's going on in Idlib.
And there was a woman there representing the Institute for the Study of War, which is Kim Kagan's group that was that was started in the years following 9-11 and was, you know, one step up from your Frank Gaffney, you know, pro war outfit.
And that's Fred Kagan's wife.
Exactly.
And so I kind of knew, you know, where she was coming from before she opened her mouth.
But I had forgotten how aggressively hawkish these people are.
And her whole line was that we need to get back into Syria.
We have to put more troops into Syria.
We have to put more resources into Syria, that we have to realign ourselves with Turkey.
We have to take over the negotiation process.
And why?
Because ISIS is gathering in the desert.
And if we don't do something, they are going to reinvigorate the caliphate.
They're not gone.
We're creating a power.
I mean, it was like.
That's why the side with Turkey is to spite ISIS, huh?
And I was just and I think because I've been in somewhat of a bubble of my own, which is a comfort zone of being around people like you, Scott, and my magazine.
And you know, there's a lot of people talking about, you know, regime change wars and getting out of them and realism and restraint.
And I forgot, you know, not only how aggressive their language is, but how arrogant they are in that this is the right thing to do and how influential they still are in Washington.
You know, people didn't want to countermand her.
I couldn't tell from the audience if they agreed or just being polite.
But I feel like, you know, people like that are insinuated in the State Department now.
They are insinuated in, obviously, the Pentagon and and on the Capitol Hill and in different power centers here.
They haven't gone away.
And they will continue to pressure the president to do things like this by bringing up this ISIS bugaboo.
And we and your listeners are probably laughing right now.
And I'm kind of laughing, but I wasn't laughing when I was hearing her talk, because I feel like they haven't gone away.
And this is too familiar and a really sick way, because we've heard it all before.
But guess what?
The military loves to hear this because it means they're getting money.
So they're not going to stand up and go, you know what, ISIS is it's pretty much gone.
We don't need to be there.
They want to be in Syria.
They want a reason to be there and get the funding.
They want a reason to be in Africa.
You know, so I think we need to be on our toes at this.
The American public is against these wars and they want to come home.
There's a whole America first feeling out there.
I get that.
But unfortunately, all the power is down here and it's all connected to money, you know, and so we I think we still have a lot of a lot of work to do.
Right.
Well, it goes to show, though, I mean, as you say, though, it goes to show just, you know, aside from all the other things that you say about them that haven't changed.
They also have to lie about everything.
They have to give you this big bait and switch.
Saddam Hussein, the guy with the clean shaven chin and the beret.
Yeah, he works for Osama bin Laden.
Oh, yeah.
Bashar al-Assad and Hezbollah and Iran and Russia.
We've got to crack down on them in order to stop ISIS.
What?
They're lying because they have to lie because what they're doing is wrong.
It's as simple as that.
It's sad that you use the right words, bait and switch.
At one point, this woman was talking about how beleaguered Iran was because of the coronavirus and all the sanctions and they were weakened.
And then 10 minutes later, she was pointing to a map showing how how Iran had taken off all these huge swaths of southern Iran backed proxies have taken over huge swaths of southern Syria.
And I'm thinking, OK, which is it?
There was literally a contradiction in the narrative about one minute week, one minute we got to watch out and Iran has all the control and Assad can't control Iran.
And I'm thinking, hmm, you know, why the need for this sort of misdirection?
I don't know.
Yeah.
Well, it's just totally not true.
Right.
I mean, ever since the Russians got there, the Iranians started pulling out whatever presence they have there.
The Russians have insisted they stay far away from Israel's borders and not cause that kind of trouble and what have you.
Israel bombs Shiite forces inside Syria all the time.
They never get back ever.
So, you know, that whole narrative is completely bankrupt.
And again, they're just counting on your mom not understanding, right?
Like they're not even they're not even trying to lie to us.
They're trying to lie to our old confused parents to think that Hezbollah and ISIS are allies, not enemies.
Right.
To think that Iran and Russia somehow are empowering ISIS rather than being, of course, the most powerful force against them in the country of Syria, where the government is run by the Alawites who are a break off of the Shiites or very closely allied with the Shiites.
So, yeah.
But anyway, as long as you don't understand all that stuff, let us just pretend that, you know what?
They're all terrorists.
OK.
The secular fascist government of Syria, terrorist, Russia, terrorist, ISIS, definitely terrorist and everybody who's fighting against them.
Yeah, they're all a bunch of terrorists.
Yeah.
And we're on the side of Jabhat al-Nusra, which, oh, that's OK.
Don't call it that anymore.
Now it's Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which is just Syrian al-Qaeda.
And they're the guys that our government is defending right now when they say back Turkey.
They're saying help Turkey back Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.
Their leader, Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, who's sworn blood oath loyal to Ayman al-Zawahiri, the butcher of New York City, still.
They got us fighting on the side of al-Qaeda, even though Trump called off CIA support for them back in 2017.
In the current Idlib conflict, he and Pompeo have us again on the side of the suicide bombers.
Well, this is the thing, you know, and the more they're talking about this at this event I was in, all these different sides that you've just stated, the more the question is burning.
Well, why are we there?
How does this affect us?
And when you start introducing all these different groups and switching sides and loyalties and everybody sounds like they're nefarious, but we're just choosing a horse, it sounds more like let's get the hell out of there because we have not gotten a clear explanation why we need to be there.
Now, these neocon types will say it's all about ISIS and all about Iran, but it's thin gruel at this point, I think, as to why we need to be in Syria.
And until the president can articulate that, and I don't think he really wants to, when I say we get out and we stay out, what they're arguing for is not only to stay in, but put even more people in there.
And I don't know what kind of planet they're living on.
Yeah.
Unfortunately, this same one with us, too.
Oh, man.
All right.
Well, thank you so much for your time, Kelly.
It's great to talk to you again.
Thanks, Scott.
All right, you guys, that is Kelly Vlahos, executive editor of the American Conservative Magazine, theamericanconservative.com.
And check out Lawmakers Take a Stand.
We don't want out of Africa.
Why are Americans being killed in Africa and also breaking Chelsea Manning ordered released from prison at theamericanconservative.com?
The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
