Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Okay, you guys, I got Max Blumenthal on the line.
He is from the Gray Zone Project.
And of course, he's the author of the book, Goliath and the 51 Day War.
And he co-produced the video, the movie, Killing Gaza, which is so important.
I really hope you guys will look at that.
And he's got this brand new book coming out, The Management of Savagery, which for those of you paying attention, yes, is a reference to an Al Qaeda tract that became popularized in the ISIS war and Iraq War 3.
So anyway, welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Max?
Pretty good.
Good to be on.
Happy to have you here.
Interestingly, you got censored at the debut of your book at the big bookstore there in D.C.
Is that right?
Yeah, I guess it's a testament to the quality of the book because Politics and Prose, which is the main bookstore in D.C. where if you're on a book tour, you're going to do your talk there.
You know, I'd done my last three book launches there, including for those two Israel related books, which should be very controversial that you just mentioned.
And this one was postponed under pressure from basically the Syrian regime change lobby and many of the figures who appear on the pages of my book.
So it would be kind of like if Altria was trying to lobby a bookstore to shut down someone who'd written a really devastating book about the tobacco industry or Tyson Foods was upset that someone had written a book about factory farming that exposed its practices.
A fairly powerful lobby that had been involved in making the sausage in Washington around plans for regime change in Syria and putting pressure on Trump and Obama to bomb.
And many of the kind of pseudo experts backed by the Gulf monarchs at their various think tanks, the Middle East Institute, Atlantic Council, these kind of places, they got together and mobilized and managed to at least momentarily convince or put a question in the minds of the bookstore owners that I might be some kind of Holocaust denier.
The bookstore wound up participating in my alt event, my alternative launch at a different location.
They had serious security concerns.
I actually am not even at liberty to discuss them because of the pressure campaign that was put on.
And they participated.
They promoted my book.
They donated proceeds to a free speech outfit.
And I thought that was nice of them.
And the owners actually read my book and decided that it was indeed a valuable contribution.
So that's what happened.
And I'm proud that these people have come after me because it shows how, I guess, dangerous my factual journalism is to them.
Yeah.
And it's easy to be mad at the bookstore that, man, how could they sell you out and back down like that?
But then I guess it's pretty safe to assume, you kind of have to assume, they felt like they had to.
They've been actually threatened, not just told that you're bad, but that something would happen to them if they allowed you to speak there.
Is that correct?
Yeah.
I mean, that would be all I could say for now except that it's pretty outrageous what took place and that a bookstore was targeted.
It's really outrageous.
And this is about war and peace.
And the people who've been trying to make war on Syria basically failed to get their big war.
So they took their war to a little bookstore.
It's a great postscript to the whole book itself.
It fits right in as its own chapter at the end there, kind of.
Yeah.
You know, and so we wrote—well, I didn't, but my colleague Ben Norton at The Gray Zone has a really great rundown of the Syrian American Council, which is sort of the American branch of the Syrian National Council that helped kind of shape the opposition from Turkey that was supposed to take power, the exiled opposition.
He has a great profile of them and what they tried to do to this bookstore and how they've been lobbying for war and literally celebrating al-Qaeda's takeover of Idlib over the years.
And you have all these other malign figures like Muaz Mustafa, who is the regime change lobbyist who took John McCain on his illegal trip over the Syrian border to meet with some of the quote-unquote moderate rebels who turned out to be basically a bunch of bandits and kidnappers.
And you have James Lemersurier, who founded the White Helmets, one of the most effective influence operations of our lifetime in Turkey.
And he is—I mentioned him at my launch as a former British military intelligence officer and someone put former in air quotes, and I thought that was a pretty good point.
I mean, this is someone who is a foreign intelligence official or someone connected to a foreign military who's lobbying a bookstore in D.C. to shut me down.
And Kinan Rahmani, who is another figure connected to the White Helmets, who's a lobbyist in town.
And the last time I saw him was at the Atlantic Council walking into a private meeting with former CIA director David Petraeus.
So it's not like these are just regular folks going to browse the bookstore aisles and they're horrified to find a book that denies the Syrian genocide in their words.
It's people who are really, as I said, involved in making the sausage in Washington and people who are part of the blob.
And it shows how—what snowflakes they are.
They have this sense of inviolability, like no journalist should dare write about them as a lobby, as corrupted lobbyists or as pro-war lobbyists.
They can only be seen as just Syrian leaders, Syrian freedom leaders or something.
And Lemar Surier, I mean, this is the white guy who created the White Helmets from Turkey who's not a Syrian himself.
He's basically a British mercenary.
I mean, he was helping protect the UAE's oil fields for several years.
This guy doesn't want to be written about at all.
He doesn't want us to talk about his existence at all.
We're just supposed to see the White Helmets as these kind of guys who just happen to find these White Helmets somewhere and start saving children, which is quite different from what they really are.
Yeah, well, it's funny that it's really the people named by name in the book who are the ones leading the protest and that they were able to get away with that.
But you know what?
Maybe the controversy will help sell you a few more books.
One last really funny point while we're on the topic before we get into the book is that one of the figures who was really the most upset about my book launch was Charles Lister, who I'm sure you've talked about before.
And he's from the Middle East Institute, which is funded to the tune of over $20 million by the UAE and Saudi Arabia.
And his job has basically been to vet the so-called moderate rebels and tell people like Petraeus or whoever's in the CIA how many moderates there are and which groups are moderate.
And I confronted him politely at a meeting of the Atlantic Council.
It's on video about some of the groups he vetted as moderate, like Noradine el-Zenki, which sawed the head off a 19-year-old captive boy named Abdullah Issa, or a captive guy.
And then proceeded to enter into a coalition with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which is rebranded al-Qaeda or what I call al-Qaeda.
And part of that coalition was a smaller militia called the Bin Laden Front.
So this is a group that Lister listed as moderate, got U.S. weapons, including U.S. heavy weapons, and was really a favorite in the Beltway think tank world until they wound up entering into this coalition with al-Qaeda.
And the State Department avoided registering them as a terrorist group when they did because they were afraid of facing lawsuits.
So all of this is in the book along with the fact that Lister basically cooked up this list of 70,000 moderate rebels, which turned out to be mostly YPG and Kurdish U.S. proxies and not anti-Assad Sunni militiamen.
And then he got so upset that we had this alternative launch, this guy who was basically advising the intelligence services on behalf of the Gulf monarchs, he got so upset that we had this alternative launch that he went on Twitter and started trying to mock it and claimed that we only had 14 people there, which wasn't true.
And I pointed out that his own research shows that he can't count because he basically fabricated the number of moderate rebels that existed.
So it's been so funny to see it all come full circle, and you're right.
It would be the perfect epilogue or afterword to this book to write about this saga.
Yeah, well, and I don't know what reputation he thinks he has to salvage at this point after carrying water for al-Qaeda for all these years over there in front of everybody.
It's pretty hard to walk that back now, I think, at this late date.
Yeah, I mean, that's kind of one of the major themes of the book is I look at the careers of all of these figures who've just been up to their eyeballs in all of these disastrous covert operations and overt operations like the war in Iraq, and how they continually get kicked upstairs and manage to refurbish their reputations in Washington.
All the way down to David Frum, who was hosted at the same bookstore, Politics and Prose, without any problem.
And he's obviously resuscitated his reputation and image in Washington through Russiagate and his opposition to Trump as a Republican.
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All right, now I want to talk about this book, The Management of Savagery here.
But I want to pick a fight with you first.
We've got to hash this out and settle this now, Blumenthal.
All right, let's do it.
Three times in two pages, you call the occupation of Iraq libertarian, and libertarianism somehow in practice.
And I know that specifically you're referring to the Heritage Foundation plan, the Eliot Cohen plan for, quote-unquote, privatizing everything in Iraq, something like that.
But that's not libertarianism.
Invading and overthrowing a country and redoing any part of their laws or debauthifying this or installing DAWA that.
And even though some fringe kooks like Tom Palmer tried to go over there and advise them on their constitution or something like that, all of the foreign policy guys at Cato opposed the war in Iraq.
Everybody at the Future Freedom Foundation.
Everyone at the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
Everybody at antiwar.com and the Center for Libertarian Studies.
Everybody at the Independent Institute.
The entire Libertarian Party Central Committee or whatever the hell they call them over there.
The entire libertarian movement in America opposed that war, with few individual exceptions.
But the movement as a whole, absolutely.
And meanwhile, instead what we have is a bunch of conservative Republican businessmen and pro-Israel ideologues from places like the Heritage Foundation who, hell, they don't even invoke Milton Friedman.
And Milton Friedman's no libertarian.
I mean, these guys' God is war.
And what the hell has that got to do with me?
Well, we were emailing before the interview and I think I said that you're one of the only people or the only person who might know more about my book than I do.
But this is a political point.
And we could probably argue for the rest of the show on what libertarianism is.
I guess you just killed my sales among my libertarian friends.
Well, I'm going to get to praise in the book in a minute.
Yeah.
Well, in this case, my interpretation of libertarianism there was that you had these figures come in who wanted to basically remove any state protections for the Iraqi population and just allow the wonder working market, wonder working power of the market to work its magic.
Because they just believe in the free market ideology that I associate.
Yeah, but that's not true, right?
Eliot Cohen was – that's not what he believed.
This whole thing – Greg Palast has all his great work on this where this was a pretext to try to put as much Iraqi oil into production as possible, as fast as possible in order to try to bankrupt the Saudis and OPEC.
And that was the scheme until James Baker III came in and said, no, we're going to have a national oil company and we're going to go along with the Saudis in OPEC.
But that was – it had everything to do with ideology but not capitalist private property rights ideology, everything to do with Likud ideology.
It has to do with capitalist ideology as well.
And this is in many ways a jobs program for the Bush administration.
And again, contracting for government, that's not libertarianism, right?
That's – privatization means government gets out of the market of something.
Contracting is when the government hires a bunch of mercenaries to do a bunch of stuff.
That is your enemy and my enemy, fascism.
Well, it's what Marx I guess would call one of the contradictions of capitalism.
Well, and I agree with that.
But capitalism and libertarianism ain't necessarily the same thing.
I guess here's the way you need to understand it, see, is this neoliberalism, this empire, this Bush-Clinton doctrine that you so well describe in this book, this is the horror movie funhouse mirror version of libertarianism.
Libertarianism is actually about freedom.
These guys are about empire and they call it freedom.
But you're smart enough to know the difference, man.
Because look at how much libertarians like you.
I mean why would a bunch of libertarians, if we are what you think we are, why would we like your work so much?
I'm trying to get to the section that you're kind of exercised about just to see how I characterized it all.
I can't really find it.
It's right around the part of the Feith debothified the government section.
I'm basically referring to free market ideology that they teach the interns at the Heritage Foundation who like stay overnight and learn about what it means to be a conservative ideologue and they learn that there is absolutely no role for the state to play in providing public services to people and that the free market just simply works itself out.
Okay, but there's a difference between saying, hey, let's repeal a bunch of laws here and invading a country and knocking off its former government and then leaving people without a functioning water system or the kind of thing that you're – this disaster capitalism that you're talking about, it's a thing.
But it's not libertarianism.
It's state action, right, from beginning to end.
Okay, well … There's cash involved.
There's cash involved.
But that's not all.
Yeah, I'll cede your point so we can just move forward.
But I do have a chapter about the flat tax imposed by L. Paul Bremer who was basically turning the CPA, the Coalition Provisional Authority, into a playpen for republican operatives.
Yeah, absolutely.
That's the heritage plan indeed.
They imposed Order 39 on foreign investment without any Iraqi input.
They privatized 200 companies.
They basically allowed foreign corporations to take over their assets.
They moved all the profits out of Iraq.
And then they hired Faring Point.
So the government is contracting.
I guess you would say that's not a libertarian move to the tune of $250 million.
You're totally right.
Everything you're saying is totally right.
As you know, hey, the neoconservatives went from Trotsky to Ronald Reagan.
They never stopped that libertarianism in between.
And the reason that I … Not that libertarianism is in between.
But it's neither of those things.
Anyway.
Yeah, well, and that's, I mean, I guess the irony of a lot of the Trotskyists who supported this war like Christopher Hitchens is they created this kind of playpen for republican capitalists.
And then you have debathification, which was kind of an idea that the Hitchens types advanced along with the neocons.
And they framed it.
They framed it in terms of denazification.
And it's what led to the rise of ISIS because you had these Saddam officials who were very effective managers of a police state getting together in prison with the ideologues, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and … Well, wait, wait.
We're going to get back to that.
But so now let's zoom out because never mind about me defending my fellow libertarians and myself and that kind of thing.
But to the opposite part of that point or the other side of that point being that, well, what is it that we do have, right?
Like what is – what Clinton called – what Bill Clinton called free markets and democracy.
The American post-Cold War order that you do so well discussing and talking about in this book.
And what that is, that neoliberalism, it's not really progressivism, right?
And it's not – sure as hell ain't conservatism or libertarianism.
It's what Bill Clinton called the third way, right?
It's Newt Gingrichism.
It's fascism.
It's a mixed economy at war, right?
So it's – that's why leftists always hate the Democrats so much because the Democrats have made their peace not really with capitalism in terms of like private property rights.
But with business and businessmen and the current status quo of the power elite in the country.
And so this is why Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush are interchangeable.
And as you show in the book, they did such a bad job, the Clintons and the Bushes, that this is what led to Trump being able to climb into power on their corpses essentially in the campaign there.
Denouncing all that they have wrought with this third way.
Robert Higgs, the great libertarian theorist, he calls it a participatory fascism, right?
It's not exactly Mussolini, the American system.
It's a quasi-free market and that essentially means crony capitalism at war.
Which if you're on the Iraqi receiving end of this, it looks pretty fascist to you probably and feels that way.
And I think – so that's really what we're talking about, right?
We're talking about a bunch of Bill Clinton neoliberal Democrat and Republican types there in the center.
Neoliberals and neoconservatives using the good name of my ideology in order to get away with, to excuse their implementation of this very nationalist imperialist project.
That's the project that you document in this book, The Management of Savagery.
That's who's been in charge here this whole time, right?
The center.
Yeah, I really point the finger at the center here whether it's the Jeb and George Bush center, Mitt Romney center right or the Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama center left.
With Robert Kagan and figures like that really coming into sharp focus because they're advising both sides.
And I really seek to highlight the similarities between the R2P, responsibility to protect doctrine, and what the neocons who poured out of Scoop Jackson's office and into the project for a new American century and the halls of American Enterprise Institute had to offer in the Bush administration.
And how there's this term in Washington, continuity, which is code for constant support for empire in the form of one of those imperial doctrines, whether it's the neocon doctrine or the liberal interventionist R2P doctrine.
That has been finally violated, at least in the form of Trump's 2016 campaign and how that triggered so much panic among the foreign policy and political elites in Washington that it helped drive the Russiagate narrative.
But really what I do is I point the finger at these figures for creating so much instability and for putting their principles into action in the form of regime change wars and covert operations from Afghanistan to Iraq to Libya to Syria and showing how phony their principles are.
How they're claiming every time to sell human rights and democracy and what they call genocide prevention to the liberal public and what you actually get in the end is the mass kidnapping and torture, for example, of homosexual men in Tripoli by the militias that were empowered by Hillary Clinton and Ann Marie Slaughter and Barack Obama and Susan Rice.
You get the slaughter of Christians and Alawites across Syria in this war that Ann Marie Slaughter and these same figures sought to encourage in the name of civilian protection.
You get the rise of ISIS and the fragmentation of Iraq.
In so many ways, they destabilized the Middle East.
And I look at ISIS and Al Qaeda and these figures as what fills the void.
And not only that, but the people that we, the organizations that, as John Kerry said, we watch advance, that benefit our imperial plans because they are helping us break down governments that resist the US fear of influence.
And then I look to Western Europe and to the United States, to the far right, to a lot of these Euroskeptic parties as another force that fills the void because they have a simple message that resonates with a lot of people who see their pensions disappearing and who, for whatever reason, I would say there's a strong element of xenophobia.
You know, are really worried about these refugee flows, outflows from these conflict zones created by the R2P liberals and the center-right neocons.
And the simple message is we will preserve your pensions and keep the migrants out of your community.
And that's why they're winning.
And, you know, me saying that is just so controversial to say in progressive circles.
It's like we have to just avoid acknowledging that the center-left and the center-right have put the far right on overdrive across the West and that the far right is responding to instability created by the very people who position themselves as the resistance to Trump, for example.
So that's kind of, you know, in a nutshell what the narrative of the book is about.
And it's really just I'm hoping to create more space for us to point the finger at and scrutinize the people who constantly get kicked upstairs because they're going to come back into democratic presidential campaigns now that you have this field opening up that's turning into a clown car.
And I'm sure, you know, they're looking for positions on campaigns like Pete Buttigieg.
But we need to, like, see how dangerous they are.
How do you say that?
Yeah, I think so.
I mean I'd always call them buddy gig.
But then I did a speaking tour in Indiana recently and people said it's Buttigieg.
You know, it's funny.
I was traveling over the weekend or one of these weekends.
Yeah.
Last weekend giving a speech and I saw Madeleine Albright's new book Fascism at the airport there.
And I was reminded of a less famous quote of hers, although still somewhat famous, where she said, listen, as a superpower, we stand taller than the other nations.
We see farther into the future and all this, which, of course, is just wrong.
Like you could have essentially grabbed any group of bureaucrats out of any state DMV and put them in charge of the national security state the last 30, 40 years.
And we'd have probably had better results than these guys.
And maybe because these people believe in themselves so much.
And you just look at the I mean, even just think of the hubris of being Madeleine Albright, whose fault half of this is to say that, oh, no, there's a right wing reaction to my absolute failure to hold up the center here.
Well, I better denounce them.
Yeah.
No, it's just fascism.
She never really explains why fascism found fertile or what fascism really is.
She doesn't really explain what it is.
She doesn't explain why it's found fertile soil, and she certainly doesn't accept any responsibility.
And she appears on the pages of my book, The Management of Savagery, as one of the real villains who does bear responsibility.
And her book on fascism, it presents this binary that's so false of authoritarianism versus liberalism, which is kind of the center left's clash of civilizations.
It's analog to Samuel Huntington's clash of civilizations.
And as I show in my book, every time Madeleine Albright has her fingerprints on some foreign policy adventure, some regime change operation, what winds up happening is not the removal of one dictator.
It's the flourishing of thousands of dictators.
And anything but liberalism fills the void of what she considers authoritarianism.
And then she just moves on to her, what is it, Albright and Stonebridge firm where she's cooling her heels now, which is funded by the arms industry, the very companies that have profited from the conflicts that she helped create, starting with Iraq.
So I write early on in my book about Albright appearing at a CNN town hall right after the US had passed the Iraqi Liberation Act.
A lot of people, especially people who were in Democratic Party circles who opposed Bush's war on Iraq, like to forget this saga.
I remember that.
I hadn't thought of that in a long time.
I'm glad you wrote about that because I watched that live.
I remember.
Yeah.
I mean, you were probably really engaged in what was a much more, I think, active anti-war movement then than we might have now.
And the US had just put $97 million in the hands of the Iraqi National Congress of used car salesman Ahmed Chalabi.
It was in 98, right?
98, 1998.
And then the whole idea was spelled out by, I think it was Trent Lott when the bill passed.
And he said, at the height of the Cold War, we supported freedom fighters in Asia, Africa and Latin America willing to fight and die for a democratic future.
We can and should do the same thing now in Iraq.
So basically we need Contras and Mujahideen in Iraq.
And so Ahmed Chalabi was supposed to do that and break down Saddam Hussein's police state.
And you have the Democrats like Bob Kerrey supporting it.
So they start really trying to put pressure on Iraq, these crushing sanctions which lead to so many child deaths that Albright defended.
Then you have the town hall that you remember in, I guess, February 1998.
Albright comes on stage in front of a studio audience, something they don't do anymore because these people never subject themselves to public scrutiny.
And she said that no one has done what Saddam Hussein has done or is thinking of doing.
He's producing weapons of mass destruction and he is qualitatively and quantitatively different from other dictators, meaning he's worse than our friends in Saudi Arabia or anywhere else.
But also there's the WMD lie.
It was put forward by Madeleine Albright in 1998.
And then the calls come in from across the country, from the heartland, from Oklahoma, people wondering how many times are we going to send our children, our children's children to fight Saddam Hussein.
And the anti-war protesters are just bombarding Sandy Berger and Madeleine Albright on stage.
And they really have no justification for what they're doing.
People understood where this was leading and it was leading to the full scale invasion of Iraq.
But there's Albright, you know, and she's the student of Zbigniew Brzezinski at Georgetown University who put that whole mechanism into play in Afghanistan in 1979, where my book starts, when he embarks on what he called the Afghan trap to trap the Red Army by supplying the Mujahideen with heavy weapons.
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So by the way, so this is the part of the interview where I stopped to say you did such a great job on the 1980s Afghan war on certainly wait, I'm skipping one I mean to say, but then also your Libya and Syria chapters are absolutely great as well.
But yeah, I really learned a lot.
Oh, and I was going to say no, not the 80s and the 90s chapters to the way you develop Al Qaeda's turn against the United States in the 90s.
This very unique stuff.
Very well written.
I really, you know, highly recommended.
Sorry if I started the interview out a little bit on the wrong foot there, dude.
But I really think that the book is an important one.
Great title too.
Thank you.
But you have a great treatment.
And so that's really kind of back to the overall theme and the thrust of the book here is, you know, this.
Well, it's a lot like my book that is not done yet about, you know, essentially getting into this mess and then making it worse.
And then now here we are, so to speak.
Right.
Absolutely.
I mean, it's about creating a perfect mess between the best of enemies.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's a good way to put it for sure.
And so, you know, here's the thing that I guess this history, sometimes it goes without saying so much that now goes without saying and nobody knows this, especially young people don't really realize the history of how, as you put it in here.
Beginning in 1979, the U.S. had so much to do with creating these Islamist movements.
It really began long before that.
Bob Dreyfuss's great book, of course, and all that.
But 79 is a great turning point.
That's where my book begins, of course, as well, because you have Afghanistan and Iran in the same year there.
Yeah.
I'm 79.
It's two years after I was born.
And I've been living this, these politics of permanent war my whole life.
I think 79 was the real turning point.
It's when the CIA and Brzezinski and then the Reagan administration basically let the genie of international jihadism out of the bottle.
It's when the special relationship with Saudi Arabia was consolidated.
But it's also when the Saudi royal family, which was truly corrupt and in so many ways, I think the Wahhabi clergy had some legitimate critiques of them being a bunch of frauds who were not qualified to rule over the Islamic holy sites at Mecca.
And you have this siege at Mecca of Wahhabi fanatics led by Juhayman Ghotaby, a figure who really inspired one of the sons of wealth in Saudi Arabia, Osama bin Laden.
And it results basically, to make a long story short, in a deal between the Saudi royal family and the Saudi clergy to project Wahhabi ideology abroad and to basically use the petro wealth of Saudi Arabia to fund it in order for the compliance of the Saudi clergy to not continue internally challenging the Saudi royals.
So Afghanistan was the perfect mechanism for the royal family to ventilate all of the pent up frustration within their borders and to send people like bin Laden to Peshawar in Pakistan to set up the services bureau, which he ran along with a Palestinian figure who'd later be assassinated, Abdullah Azzam, in order to bring foreign fighters to the battlefield.
You had the indigenous Mujahideen who were getting lots of CIA weapons, but their leadership were figures like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who was an extreme Islamist, who, according to Vincent Canestraro, who was a former CIA counterintelligence officer I interviewed, got over $600 million from the CIA because he was just the best fighter and the most vicious, willing to just kill the Red Army in any way possible.
He was also a drug dealer.
He was also deeply anti-American.
He was also accompanied at many points by the blind sheikh, Omar Abdel Rahman, who was sent on a CIA flight to Afghanistan to help recruit more men.
It's really, if you really want to look at it closely, and what I try to do is differentiate between the indigenous Mujahideen and the services bureau, it's really the setting up of the services bureau that lets jihadism out of the bottle.
And bin Laden comes back to Saudi Arabia as a war hero when he was previously seen as just this kind of weak, rich kid from a construction family.
And then he sets out, he goes back with his construction equipment and starts setting up camp in Khartoum and really building an international empire and striking out at the US in order to basically repeat the strategy that Brzezinski put into play against the Soviets, the Afghan trap, and creates the American trap to drag the US into the Middle East.
Meanwhile, in New York City, there is this group that was attached to the services bureau called the Al-Kifa Center, and it was basically an Al-Qaeda cell in the heart of New York City and Jersey City.
I actually lived for a time down the street from its old offices.
And the guys at the services bureau were Afghan war veterans who had been sent over there under the watch of Abdullah Azzam, who'd actually come there to fundraise, completely under the watch of the CIA.
This was all done with the consent of the CIA and the FBI looking the other way.
And they were going out during the 90s to a gun range in Long Island wearing T-shirts that said services bureau with a map of Afghanistan on it.
And their gun instructor was a former army colonel named – not colonel, sorry, a former army sergeant named Ali Abdulsoud Mohammed, who had been sent into the US also with a CIA visa by Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is bin Laden's eminence, Greece.
And he was also working for the FBI and CIA.
And so I follow this saga in the 90s in New York of the disposal problem.
Basically, the guys that had been sent by the CIA to the – and by the services bureau of bin Laden to the Afghan front coming back to New York along with Omar Abdelrahman, the blind sheikh, who re-entered – who entered the US again on a CIA visa.
You have the CIA and its fingerprints all over this al-Qaeda cell in New York.
Prosecutors finally decide to break it up.
Patrick Fitzgerald, he led the first unit to take out al-Qaeda, I-49, which was later led by John O'Neill, who famously died in the World Trade Center.
Anyway, when they try to break up this cell, they contrive a terror plot.
I mean we constantly hear about these manufactured and contrived terror plots by the FBI, and it was called the – I think like the Monuments Plot.
They were supposed – they said that according to a confidential informant who was basically a hustler who was hustling the government for money, the blind sheikh and his men, who were like the keystone cops at that point, they were going to blow up the Statue of Liberty and the Lincoln Tunnel and everything else.
And I interviewed the defense lawyers for that trial, Roger Stavis, who told me that he attempted to call to the trial the triple agent that I just mentioned, Ali Abdulsoud Mohamed, to the stand to demonstrate how much the government had been involved with the defendants.
And he constantly referred to his defendants, El-Sayed Nasser and Rodney Hamptonell, who had actually been gone and fought on the US's side in Bosnia as well.
He referred to them as Team America, and he kept saying – just mentioning Afghanistan, Afghanistan, Afghanistan, really embarrassing the government.
And it got to the point where Patrick Fitzgerald, who was supposed to be taking out al-Qaeda, along with his other prosecutor, his right-hand man, Andrew McCarthy, who's a real right-wing ideologue, going to Mohamed, Ali Mohamed, and advising him – actually ordering him to reject Stavis' subpoena and not appear in court in order to avoid embarrassing the government.
And then you had – I interviewed Abdeen Jabara, who defended Omar Abdel-Rahman.
He was on the blind sheikh's defense team, and he said that it took the government forever to get its case together against him because they were so embarrassed about the CIA letting him in the country and all the work he did for the CIA in Afghanistan.
So if you're my age, you remember the blind sheikh before you remember bin Laden as this person who was presented to you as the face of terror in the US.
And you started hearing about these al-Qaeda cells maybe during the 90s but definitely after 9-11.
But you didn't know that the CIA was essentially wholly responsible for his presence in the country and for the existence of this actual cell.
And it was basically broken up with a contrived terror plot.
And then the whole saga was swept under the rug as we moved closer to the date of September 11, 2001.
So a couple of things there.
I guess you have a bit different take than me on the role of Ahmad Salem.
I certainly agree with you about what a – essentially what a hoax the plot against the Lincoln and Holland Tunnel and all that was.
But that was sort of the makeup for what – as far as I could tell and from Peter Lance's reporting, who you cite on Ali Mohamed here and other issues, that essentially Ahmad Salem really was in the position that he had been chosen to be the one to make the bomb for the first World Trade Center attack.
And that he and his FBI agent handlers had discussed using an inert powder essentially to do it.
But that since he then left the case because they wanted him to wear a wire and all of that, that then they brought in Ramzi Youssef, who was Khalid Sheikh Mohamed's nephew and the guy who made a real bomb and almost succeeded in knocking one tower over into the other there.
And so – but in your book, you seem to really portray Salem as really just sort of a grifter all along, that he tried to portray it that way, but that maybe that wasn't really the case.
Well, I don't know what the case – if that was the case.
I know that after he was – lost his role as an FBI informant that he went to the media to create that impression in order to basically get back in the FBI's good stead.
And so they gave him this undercover assignment and a million dollars after he sort of went to the press and embarrassed them.
It seemed like there may have been some much more embarrassing material that they were trying to prevent from leaking by offering them a million dollars and this apparently pretty easy assignment.
And as you say, because it did come out back then that – well, wait a minute.
Why is the blind Sheikh living in New York anyway?
And the answer was because the State Department was made to let him in by the CIA and that was mainstream news at the time.
Yeah, yeah.
And the Egyptian intelligence attempted to warn the State Department against letting him in and they officially ignored it.
It was mainstream news in that there were some Boston Globe articles that – some newspaper reports.
But it was never the stuff of public scandal.
It's like how the New York Times would report on the US arming Salafi jihadist groups in Syria but it never became – it never rose to the level of scandal.
And then when Tulsi Gabbard would try to introduce a bill, she'd be demonized as an Assadist.
They'll admit the point but it never changes the narrative.
Not quite.
Exactly.
So Salim, anyway, he basically duped a lot of mentally disturbed people who are naturally drawn to extremist groups into another plot where they're mixing fake bombs and they were running – That one was all purely an entrapment job, Robert Mueller style.
We know that score.
All right.
Now I'm jumping around all over the place here but you've done great work in the past and you do again in this book about these Islamophobic – they call it grifters.
I'm not sure if that's the right word for it exactly but – and it's such an industry.
And I think Hate, Inc., was that the one that you did for Tom Dispatch?
Yeah.
For Tom Dispatch, I did The Great Fear.
The Great Fear.
Right, right.
Hate Incorporated sort of tumbled out of the Center for American Progress a few years later.
That's right.
Right.
Eli – Clifton.
Eli Clifton.
Right, right, right.
All of its authors were then soon decapitated by Neera Tanden under Israeli lobby pressure.
So here's the thing.
We're skipping the 90s but everybody listening to this show knows the story, right?
They created all these terrorists.
They let them into the country.
They turned them against the United States for all their continued intervention, especially bombing Iraq from Saudi and supporting Israel and all that and turned these groups against us.
But they couldn't admit that, especially in the Bush years, that it was his father and Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton who had got us into this mess, who had provoked these guys who used to work for us against us.
And so instead they said, well, their problem is – and this much was true – that they're Islamist extremist types.
And so they hate us for our innocence and goodness and Christianity and Judaism and so forth.
And so all we can do is defend ourselves against this irrational, implacable enemy.
And there are a lot of people who have a lot of vested interest in pushing that narrative forward.
And you do a really great job of identifying them and naming their names.
So would you please do some of that for us here?
Yeah.
I mean it is a really convenient narrative after 9-11 to just basically point the finger at Islam.
And the main figure that I write about is Stephen Emerson because he, while having at one point been recognized as a journalist, turned his crusade to paint international jihadism as something that was endemically Islamic into an industry in the 1990s.
And to really spur this widespread fear of al-Qaeda cells all over the country, which created the momentum for all of these bogus prosecutions we saw after 9-11.
But it started in the 90s.
Emerson had a video, VHS, called The Terrorist Next Door as well as a book.
It was shown in Congress after 9-11.
But I think there was a showing even before.
And it does focus on the al-Kifa cell that I just named, starting with Abdullah Azzam and then it falls under the leadership of the blind sheikh.
But he sort of leaves out the inconvenient parts about the CIA overseeing the whole operation and how it benefited American empire and focuses on the Islam part.
And then after 9-11, Emerson, who himself was a pro-Israel ideologue, a Likudnik, he transitions his targets.
He transitions from the old actual al-Qaeda cell in New York that had served CIA and U.S. interests to Palestinian professors and Palestinian relief organizations in the United States.
And starts really advancing the goals of Israel through these terror busts that the Bush administration needed to satisfy the public hunger, to believe that they were being kept safe by John Ashcroft and the Department of Justice.
So now you have the Holy Land Five, basically, who led the largest Muslim American relief organization in jail for life for sending aid to the Gaza Strip to the very same NGOs that USAID and the Red Cross were supporting.
Just because Steve Emerson had written that they said some nasty things about the U.S. and Israel.
Sami Al-Erian, who was a computer science professor at Florida, he was put on trial and held in federal prison for a long time for being vindicated because Emerson had been focusing on him and created the momentum for him to be put on trial.
Let me just chime in real quick about how, at the time, I just had a real job and I was not able to devote attention to that particular story.
But I do remember the narrative from the radio news and the TV news and the general coverage of that was that, boy, they got one.
This terrorist, this Al-Erian guy, he's tied to terrorism.
We're all very excited and yelling at each other at the top of our lungs on the show about this on whichever AM show or whichever Fox News Hannity versus Combs and all this.
Yeah.
It was huge at the time.
It was O'Reilly kind of taking him down on air.
And it was a public prosecution before it was a legal prosecution.
And in the end, he was completely exonerated.
All he had done is said some nasty things about Israel and the US, but there were no connections to international jihadism with any of these characters.
So the FBI then embarks on the program that I'm sure you've discussed like countless times on this podcast or on this show, which is to basically contrive terror plots to target mentally disturbed Muslim men and then have a high-profile bust and create the specter of the terrorists next door, which fuels the Islamophobia industry that Steve Emerson was cashing in onto the tune of TV.
$2.5 million a year and basically paying himself and not, it wasn't some nonprofit entity.
Then you get figures like you have the high-level jihadologists like Rita Katz, who is a Israeli woman of Iraqi descent who would translate al-Qaeda and ISIS videos online.
And then news agencies would essentially pay for subscriptions to view her translations.
And the al-Qaeda and ISIS fanboys would actually say, let's roll with this.
She's translating our stuff and we don't even have to do it.
Let's just use her translations to get our material out.
Then you have the lowbrow characters like Pam Geller and Robert Spencer, no relation to Richard Spencer, who were offering a mixture of really hilarious conspiracism like that Barack Obama was the secret love child of Malcolm X, peppered with genocidal rhetoric about massacring Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan.
This is really the background noise of the war on terror.
And all of these figures helped, I think, sort of create a new sensibility within the Republican base that was much more similar to the European ultra-right or to the European right.
They formed this transatlantic axis with figures like Gert Wilders, who had called for banning the Koran in the Netherlands and became a very popular figure at a time of demographic transformation in that country.
And that inspired Trump's politics in a lot of ways.
Steve Bannon kind of understood.
You can say what you want about Bannon, but he understood what was going on at the grassroots.
And he actually pitched a film, a really – it looked like a pretty crappy screenplay.
I mean he's not going to be the best screenwriter, but it was called The Islamic States of America.
It was going to feature all of the figures I just named, Steve Emerson and company, as experts in a film about an Islamic takeover of the US.
This was 2007.
Around this time, that year, as you remember, George W. Bush was really unpopular.
The conservative movement had basically disowned Bush.
They decided the Iraq war was a disaster.
And you had this new generation of Iraq war veterans coming back and moving into Republican Party politics based on some of them basing their campaigns off of crimes that they were accused of committing in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Figures like Ilario Pantano who had emptied two clips from his M-16 into two Iraqi captives who were completely helpless.
And then he left a note on their bodies that I think read, no worse enemy, no better friend, which was a famous quote from his hero and commander, General James Mattis.
You had Allen West who ran on an explicitly anti-Muslim program to be elected to Congress in a red district in Florida.
And he had campaigned partly on being dishonorably discharged for pistol whipping an Iraqi traffic policeman and firing a shot behind his head in an attempt to extract information about an attack on American troops.
You had Chris Kyle, American sniper.
I don't think he needs much of an introduction here, but he became a grassroots Republican hero.
And Sarah Palin spoke at his funeral, I think, where Sarah Palin would bring his family on stage.
You had Marcus Luttrell who appeared at the 2016 Republican Convention, the ultimate warrior.
And I write in my book about how his story about taking down 50 Taliban fighters was basically bogus and that he was saved by a local Afghan man named Mohammad Gulab, who he later basically kicked to the curb after he became the millionaire ultimate warrior and then embarked on an anti-Muslim campaign of his own.
So you have all of these figures kind of redefining the Republican Party as Islamophobia rises.
And I describe it as kind of the guttural roar of a fallen and wounded empire after the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And Trump, through Bannon or through whatever it was that Trump understood, he brought these figures into the pirate ship that was his campaign.
And the Republican grassroots responded, and I think this contributed strongly to Trump's victory, his willingness to exploit Islamophobic attitudes that have been cultivated as a result of the failures and disastrous adventures of the center.
Exactly.
Yeah.
I mean, this whole thing about, geez, you know, for no reason they attacked us because we never heard of the Carter, Reagan or Bush or Clinton years.
And so, geez, then we tried killing them until they were free and loved us and were grateful for creating democracies for them.
And that didn't work, which was obviously the only thing we could have tried from the point of view of the average news consumer here.
And I guess maybe even the soldiers who went over there and came back that you're talking about here.
And so in their frustration for having lost all the wars that their government got them in, that they had no business fighting, that they can just sort of lash out in frustration and just blame Islam itself.
And of course, the whole time, because they refused to accept that it was American violence that had caused the problem.
And they kept dishing out that violence, as you explain in here so well, especially in Libya and Syria, taking the side of the Bin Laden Knights, not just making them worse by fighting them the way Bush had done in Iraq, but making it that much worse.
And then, after all, turning on ISIS and bombing the hell out of them, too, after building them up so big.
It wasn't just Omar Mateen that you talk about in the book, but there's so many of these we consider lower level, but horrifying if they happen to you, type so-called lone wolf terrorist attacks in the United States.
You talk about Anwar al-Awlaki inspiring a few of them.
But this keeps happening.
And so if all you know is what the mainstream media told you about, they hate us because how Islamic they are and how innocent we are.
And no matter how many of them we kill, they just won't love us and they just keep attacking us anyway.
Then that only kind of leaves one option, right, which is to hate them for who they are and to kill them all.
Turn that region to glass, as the saying goes, because apparently there's nothing we can do to reason with these people.
We tried killing a million and it didn't work.
Yeah.
And I hear that.
You know, I'm actually throwing a friend of mine's mom.
When I was a kid, I knew this guy.
I went and visited him and there's his mom as this little old lady now.
And she's going, this is after Charlie Hebdo.
Well, I guess we just have to kill them all.
We tried everything but killing them all and it only made a matter.
So what are you going to do?
She's out of ideas.
And that's just a little old lady, man.
That's just – because that's the – from all the narratives available to her, that's the only conclusion she can draw.
Well, you know, I remember when the Bush administration was trying to link bin Laden to Saddam Hussein, based on the bogus research of Laurie Milleroy and the neocon office of special plans, stovepiping intelligence.
A lot of people who wanted to support the war in Iraq because they were shocked by 9-11, they didn't understand it, middle American Republican base, they didn't even have time to read the weekly standard.
So they just basically went to their megachurch or to their evangelical pastor and he said that bin Laden and Saddam are connected through Satan.
And so it was that kind of Islamophobic rationalization that was necessary to justify.
Yeah, and it wasn't like Bush did anything to discourage it with his constant reference of evil.
The evil was kind of a tip-off.
These guys are Arab Muslims.
Evil.
They're Satan.
And hey, after all, it was right at the turn of the century and everything.
So if you're really living end times rapture stuff, then this seems like maybe it might play right into it.
Yeah, yeah.
You just turn on Rexella and Jack Van Impey and it sounds a lot like George W. Bush and looks like what's happening.
These dispensations are taking place.
The rapture is nigh.
The cleansing of the earth is coming.
And then all of a sudden your neighbor's son comes back and his legs are blown off and he has to be – he's having night terrors and things go on.
Things continue.
Obama gets elected and you have to kind of form another rationalization for this harsh reality that Bush brought you.
And it's that Obama is Satan.
You know what?
Speaking of which, he's certainly guilty of treason.
And I just think this is so much fun because he's not guilty of treason out of any allegiance to the jihadists or the Muslim Brotherhood or any of that.
He ain't from Kenya.
He's a liberal democrat from Illinois.
That's his problem.
And he's – George W. Bush is the same reason he supports the jihadists.
Don't forget the redirection started in 2006 before Obama ever got in there.
He just – boy, did he double down on that policy of essentially correcting for Iraq War II and all that was done to benefit Iran and the Shiite side by doubling down support for the Saudi side, which means, of course, on the ground al-Qaeda shock troops in Libya.
And then especially in Syria.
And so what's fun is – I want to focus on this part of the Libya thing is that I wonder about your best understanding of this because you really describe a lot of the internal debate and this and that between Samantha Power and Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton and this entire responsibility to protect and humanitarian intervention.
Of course, that was Samantha Power's legacy.
She'd written a book.
And Susan Rice, this was her chance to make up for the fact she hadn't done enough about Rwanda and all this.
Except here's the part I'm curious about.
Didn't anyone say, yeah, but ladies, now we're living in a world after September 11th, after Iraq War II, where our mandate is to keep bin Ladenites down.
I mean, they were just killing Osama in Pakistan that week that they're backing all of Osama's men in Libya.
And so I know that Samantha Power is a nitwit and everything, but my God, man, how could it be?
Is it really the case that they just thought that the al-Qaeda-ness of these guys, many of them Iraq War II veterans, Zarqawi's guys from the previous war that wasn't even all the way over yet?
Our guys were still in Iraq at that point.
Yep.
Yep.
The Libyan Islamic Fighting Group was in al-Qaeda.
Yeah, exactly.
And Ansar al-Sharia and the rest.
But what the hell?
What the hell?
Inside the administration, they really that concern Rice and Power and Clinton with their little R2P that they just were able to block out the existence of the al-Qaeda guys and just rationalize it away or what?
Yeah.
Someone did actually warn them.
It was Robert Gates, the CIA director, someone who kind of represents a more realist perspective, had been around Arabists throughout his career.
Sorry, was he DOD at the time?
Yeah, he was Secretary of Defense at that point.
He was DOD.
Okay.
It was Robert Gates, and he referred to the Obama staffers who wanted to go into Libya as the backbenchers because they were all in their 40s.
And they all wanted to send a message that the Obama administration was on the right side of history in the Arab Spring.
And so Obama, in classic Obama fashion, basically steps aside, refuses to make a hard call, and lets the Samantha Power, Susan Rices, and the R2P crowd and Hillary Clinton kind of have their war and take over policy.
Also, Ben Rhodes, a figure that Obama is identified closely with, was on the side of the backbenchers and was sort of the classic 40-something.
People who don't remember the Cold War that well don't learn these lessons.
And they had their war.
Hillary actually believed that this war would consolidate her as a serious presidential candidate and lead to her coronation.
And this is another point of my book, is to illustrate how Trump became president.
Were it not for Benghazi, I think Hillary Clinton would have stood a stronger chance of defeating Trump.
But the Republicans effectively used Benghazi for two purposes.
The first was the obvious purpose which they said it was for, which was to lower public trust in Hillary Clinton.
Representative Kevin McCarthy, who helped oversee the investigation, the special committee, the select committee, he openly admitted that at the end.
If you look at Hillary Clinton's approval ratings, she was actually the most popular member of the Obama administration until Benghazi started to take form.
And then the second reason is that really the only person in Congress who forcefully opposed Libya was Senator Rand Paul.
And the rest of them all, down to Trey Gowdy, were in support of it.
So basically by focusing in on Benghazi, where like a few Americans were killed, including Chris Stevens, and not talking, they can avoid talking about the whole war and the real scandal of it.
Because they all had a hand in it.
In the UK, I think only 13 members of parliament voted against it.
One of them was Jeremy Corbyn.
And, you know, the national security state and the centrists in the UK won't let him hear the end of it.
So you have the Libya disaster because I think Obama abrogated his authority as he constantly did.
And now he refers to it as, you know, his worst mistake.
Right.
Yeah.
And, you know, I was happy to see you reference the Washington Times series there on all that the – I love this – all that the DOD and the CIA were doing to stop the war that the State Department was insisting on pushing.
Yeah, that was a fantastic series that I actually discovered as I was writing the book and hadn't been aware of at the time.
Yeah, it's really great stuff there.
I talked with the lady.
I forget her name now.
And, of course, Denis Kucinich doing everything he could to try to stop.
And as you point out quite well, that even after the war started, they were saying, wait, stop.
We can still work this out.
And Hillary refused to hear it and was absolutely insisted on pushing through to full regime change there.
Right.
There were negotiations with Saif Qaddafi to even – he was even offering a peaceful transition of power.
There were top DOD officials in dialogue with Qaddafi.
Muammar Qaddafi was offering something similar to Tony Blair.
And at every step of the way, Hillary Clinton and Blair himself basically said no, no, this is about democracy and human rights.
And we know it led to something quite different.
The return of slavery to the African continent being one of them.
What effect?
All right.
Well, I'll tell you what, man.
I'm mad at you for this Libya chapter.
It's just about perfect.
And I hope you're not mad if my Libya chapter reads a lot like yours does when it comes out a few months from now.
But I swear the rough draft has been around for a year.
But great work on this entire book, man.
You really did a great job.
And the people are just going to have to read it to find out all about the bank shot and what started as Hillary.
And then, you know, of course, Obama's war started as Hillary's and became, of course, the rest of the administration's war in Syria.
And all of your great stuff on that.
And, again, how that spurred the refugee crisis and the right-wing reaction, including the rise of Donald Trump and all of the rest of this.
It's a great book, man.
You've got a great theme for the overall thing.
And you really execute, again, the 80s, the 90s, Libya and Syria, the entire hate Muslims industry and all of that.
And lots of stuff about the Israeli role intervening here, there, and the other place where it fits.
And I really liked it.
So congratulations on it.
I wish you great success despite the bookstore problems you've been having.
And I'll talk to you again soon.
Thanks, Max.
Thanks so much, Scott.
And I should tell you that the conversations we've had on your show have really helped me flesh out a lot of the ideas.
So I hope maybe our books could be reviewed together somewhere, maybe at AmCon or somewhere like that.
Cool.
Well, you know, mine isn't going to be done until probably Labor Day if I'm lucky, man, because mine has a few more wars in it than yours.
I'm trying to cover too much probably.
But, you know, absolutely.
Anything we can do.
They certainly have a lot in common.
Definitely.
That's for sure.
I'm looking forward to reading it.
And, you know, you've got to just finish it because the longer it takes to write it, the more wars you have to write about.
I know.
The biggest problem with my book is that they kept bombing Syria as I was finishing it.
So I have this whole long afterword about Russiagate and all of the subsequent Syria deceptions.
So you've just got to end it.
That's how my Afghanistan book was, too, where I was writing it right up until they announced the – in fact, I wrote it right up until they were about to announce it.
And I just gave up waiting and I said, well, this is what Trump is about to do.
He's going to give them 5,000 troops or whatever in August of 2017.
And then, of course, five days after I hit go on it, they went ahead and announced the escalation.
So I had to go and change future tense to past tense real quick.
Oh, man.
Well, here's hoping you get to the end.
Yeah, and here's hoping that we don't carpet bomb Caracas and change the entire subject or, for that matter, Moscow before the book comes due.
Well, I have a story coming out on that.
And so I'll hope to come back on and talk about it when it's out.
It should be out this weekend.
Yeah, I wanted to catch up with you on Venezuela anyway.
So let's do that next week.
All right.
Looking forward to it, man.
Okay.
Thanks again, Max.
Really appreciate it, dude.
Thanks, Scott.
All right, you guys.
That's Max Blumenthal.
And the book is The Management of Savagery, which is a great title for a book.
And it's all about America's terror wars and the consequences.
And it's so, so good.
Please check it out.
And before that, Goliath, which, man, you want to know about Israel and that guy's take on Israel.
You got to read Goliath.
It'll blow your mind.
And the 51-Day War about the 2014 attack on Gaza.
It wasn't really a war.
And also, I have to recommend this, too.
This is a good one to show your mom or your dad or whoever, too.
This is, yeah, man, it's really worth taking a look at.
Okay?
It costs you two, three bucks.
And it's called Killing Gaza.
And it's a film that Max made with Dan Cohen.
And it's really something else.
Okay?
So take a look at that.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
You can find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
