Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and get the fingered at 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 hacked.
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 they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, bitch, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys look here.
You already know that this is the fact that Gareth Porter is my favorite reporter.
I've interviewed him a couple of hundred something times now.
And he's the author of the book, Perils of Dominance, about America's tragic war in Vietnam.
And of course, he wrote the book, Manufactured Crisis, the truth behind the Iran nuclear scare.
And he writes all over the place, truthout.org, most often also the American conservative magazine.
And if I could just find the tab here, here it is.
It's consortiumnews.com, another dodgy British dossier.
The Skripal case, Skripal case, Skripal.
Hey, welcome back to the show.
How's it going?
It's fine.
Thanks very much, Scott.
Good to be back.
Good deal, man.
Happy to have you here.
So what's a Skripal?
Yeah, Sergei Skripal and Yulia Skripal.
The Salisbury poisoning is a short way to put it, obviously, in the UK.
Yeah.
Is this the one where it was definitely the Russians and they use the most deadly poison known to mankind.
And this former Russian spy and his daughter both survived.
And now everything's fine and never mind and nobody cares anymore.
Well, I think that's that's an accurate depiction of it, except for I wouldn't quite put it that nobody cares anymore because it obviously has had huge ripples, you know, in global politics, especially with regard to the EU lining up with the UK government, the May government in symbolically, but importantly, expelling Russian diplomats and basically saying, yeah, we're with you in this new Cold War, which, you know, now it's a it's essentially being built as a disinformation war or an information war, as the case may be.
And I think that's that's really the crucial significance of this whole case.
Yeah, well, you know, I'm sure you must have seen this thing in The Washington Post where Donald Trump, they said there are three foreign policies.
There's what Congress wants, what the president wants.
And maybe they meant the Pentagon, not the Congress.
I don't know what the what the president wants.
And then what the executive branch wants.
And basically the way they have it is, especially on Russia issues, the National Security Council, which is the principles, right, that they are just outright insubordinate.
Just like we saw Rex Tillerson contradicting Trump on whether we're what you know, what even the mission is in in Syria and this kind of thing.
But in this case, according to The Post anyway, Trump thought he was agreeing to kick out a few ambassadors.
If, you know, the British and the French were going to kick out a few or not ambassadors, but, you know, diplomatic staff and whatever.
If they were going to kick out a few, he would kick out a few.
And so basically they tricked him into kicking out 56, which was equivalent to those kicked out by the entire European Union.
When all he ever wanted to do was match England or France, who kicked out four each.
And so Trump did this huge thing where he kicked out 56 Russians in this huge thing that was like the biggest one ever, including during the battle days of the Cold War with the Soviet Union.
And this huge escalation that was over the president's explicit orders, apparently, or, you know, they basically fooled him into it in a way.
Yeah, I think that's totally plausible.
It's of a piece with the entire history of Trump's sort of relationship of sort of dueling with the national security machinery.
And this, of course, has particularly to do with Afghanistan and Syria, where, you know, the differences between them have become matters of public record over and over again.
And it's really one of the most fascinating exercises or, you know, case studies, if you will, in the whole history of what I've always regarded as the inherent conflict between any president, between the interests of any president and the interests of the national security state.
And Trump, I think, is a particularly dramatic case because he comes out of this background of not really being beholden to the national security state or either of the two parties.
And so he, you know, he's a he's a wildcard.
And that that is really the reason for this series of issues that have come up, including Russia, no doubt about it.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, in that same article, they basically announced that they've canceled or they're delaying indefinitely his direct invitation to Putin to come to D.C.
That, oh, yeah, that's not happening anytime soon, they said.
I mean, I don't know.
I'm not naive.
But at the same time, he is the president.
He can continue firing people until he finds somebody who's going to follow their orders.
Right.
I said I wanted to invite the president of Russia.
Your job is scheduling it, not getting in my way.
You're fired.
Right.
Until you get to the guy who will do his job.
But that's true.
And we're in for more drama.
There's no question in my mind about that.
Absolutely.
Now, you know that I don't want to get into North Korea, but it's going to be very interesting to see how that plays out for sure in the next in the next weeks.
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Thanks.
All right.
So now you agreed with me when I summarized the narrative here, but you don't seem to agree with the narrative at all in terms of what happened to this former Russian spy and his daughter here.
So tell us in detail, I guess, or not too much, but give us in brief exactly what's the accusations beyond whatever it is I said that you think you need to mention and then tell us why you ain't having it.
Well, I did two pieces, of course, on this on this subject at Consortium News, the first one being an examination of the or an analysis, I should say, of the May government's argument that there is no alternative to what they say is what happened.
That is that this has to be a Russian government aggressive action on British soil using a chemical weapon for the first time since World War Two.
It's a very dramatic, obviously, presentation of what they claim is is Russian aggression against against the UK.
And what I mean, I think the main point that I made, if I can try to sort of boil it down here, is that there is a history here which shows very clearly that that's not the only possible explanation for assuming for the moment.
Like maybe they just got some food poisoning or if the people making the claims that it must be the Russians behind it are the same ones making the claims it must be a nerve agent.
And yet they both survived.
Then it wasn't very good at blocking X enzyme, was it?
Right.
Right.
So.
So I'll get to that point in a few moments.
Just just to give the simplest answer.
I mean, I'm suggesting that it could have been nerve agent, which was 25, 30 years old and had lost its potency.
Was this stuff that Ronald Reagan had sold to Saddam Hussein?
Go ahead.
Sorry.
Well, let me let me put that subject off for a moment and come back to the to the key point that I'm prepared to accept that the portent down the British military laboratory was, in this case, reasonably honest.
Simply for the simple reason that they did, in fact, resist pressure from the from Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary of the UK, to to to agree that this was, in fact, something that was produced in Russia and that they knew it.
And they refused to do that.
And they would only agree to a vague formula that it's of a it's a a chemical agent or a nerve agent of a type that was developed in Russia, which means that structurally it's similar to it.
So so I was prepared to accept that because I doubt that portent down would have sort of lied about the fact that they found something there that was indicative of of a kind of a nerve agent in a general sense of a generic sort.
But but even given that, the key point that I want to make is that I presented the evidence from a source which is not a pro-Putin source, but rather one could argue an anti-Putin Russian source, Novaya Gazeta, a newspaper in Russia, that that there was a murder of a Russian banker in 1995, which used the nerve agent.
That was known.
In fact, it was known that it was nerve agent that had been developed during the Soviet period and that in short, the storyline was that the guy who was the chief scientist in the development of what was then called the Novichok line of of nerve agents had at the end of the Soviet period.
When things were breaking down, actually, you know, at the beginning, I should say, of the post-Soviet period when the the Russian economy was imploding and people were not being paid and everyone was scared to death of their economic future.
He had stored some of this nerve agent in vials in glass vials in his garage and he began selling it off to people who were who had organized crime connections in Russia.
And some of that then turned up in the telephone.
It was it was what was used to to kill this Russian banker.
So what I'm suggesting is that there was plenty.
There are plenty of explanations that did not have to involve the Russian government carrying out a an aggression against the UK, against Sergei Skripal, former, of course, a Russian spy who had become a double agent for the British starting, if I remember, in 1999 or 2000, perhaps.
And had been discovered and was then arrested, put in jail, served six years in jail and then was swapped by the Russian government for 10 under undercover Russian agents in 2016.
So the thesis that I'm presenting here is that that, you know, we have to consider a wider range of possibilities here, including, you know, I suggested at the end of the first article that that this could be something that was done by former colleagues of Skripal, including, you know, friends, neighbors, people who were associated with.
Both the former friend of Skripal who whose daughter married Skripal and the family of the young man who was about to get married to Skripal's daughter, Yulia.
So so there are a lot of connections here with people who are reported in tabloid articles in the UK to be very upset about Skripal and the approaching marriage or the proposed marriage of the daughter to this young man whose family was was very upset about Skripal.
Well, that makes a lot more sense than Putin did it, frankly.
Yeah, I agree.
I mean, I don't I just don't see the logic of Putin engineering a poisoning with nerve agent that would easily be linked to to Russia obviously would be linked to Russia.
Yeah.
On the on the eve practically of his election and before Russia was to host an important sporting event, the world, you know, FIFA football event in in Russia.
So you know what your problem is, Gareth, is you're just not begging the question.
You're supposed to start with everything bad in the world is because of the devil Putin until it's finally disproved 100 percent.
In fact, I saw on Twitter this morning where the resistance is saying that Vladimir Putin has engineered this dastardly piece in Korea in order to boost Trump's prospects in the midterms.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
Right.
This is the kind of this is the kind of conspiracy thinking that I reject.
Absolutely.
You know, I think that let me tell you other actually that's serious real quick.
And then you say your thing.
I interviewed a professor of organic chemistry from Cornell University and he said anybody can make this stuff.
Anybody with a lab who knows about organic chemistry can make these poisons.
There's nothing fancy or scientific or extraterrestrial about them at all.
And then this is a question for you.
Isn't it the case that this guy published in his book.
Did you did you already mention that that he published.
How do you make it.
This is the compound.
This is the recipe.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, there's no doubt that it can be manufactured by by any state and a lot of non-state actors.
I wouldn't doubt that.
I was just pointing to a much more close connection here between the poisoning of the screep holes and a very highly plausible alternative to the official government government action against them.
And, you know, I mean, some of the people responding commenting on my article said, well, you're you're not taking into account the possibility that that Putin could have used organized crime figures to to do it on his behalf.
And it wouldn't be directly connected with them.
But that doesn't really solve the problem that, you know, it simply wasn't in Putin's interest.
I mean, the the only explanations that have been offered by the British and their supporters has been that, well, this was really a signal by Putin that he is ready to, you know, to heighten tensions with Britain and and have a basically have a new Cold War with Britain.
Well, why?
What's the point?
Why would he want to do that?
You know, supposedly it's because he's so aggressive that he is signaling the British that he's ready to go on the offensive all over the world.
And this is this is a signal to them that they better watch out.
I got a real problem here, man.
This really is almost like Iraq War Two in 2002 and three, where, you know, Pat Buchanan says he ain't buying it.
But basically, everyone in D.C., but you and him are in on this.
You know, nobody doubts at all that Putin is on his way somewhere and that somebody better stop him.
I mean, this narrative is absolutely just as embedded as it could be.
I agree.
This is this is highly dangerous.
It takes us into uncharted territory.
The resistance to this is so feeble, so small that the people who are behind it, the people who are supporting it 100 percent have a great a great deal of power to to move things toward a disastrous set of consequences.
And that that to me, to my mind, is indeed the the most serious problem that we face and something that requires the most careful thought and and, you know, really concerted effort among people who are smart enough to see through this, to try to do the best that we can to try to resist.
I mean, it just seems like people would abandon their partisanship for a moment and then just try to learn what they can and sort of be objective about this.
I mean, it seems like that's the biggest part of it at all that that obscures everything is whose side are you on in terms of American politics?
Partisanship certainly is is part of this.
No doubt about it.
I mean, you know, certainly anybody who's been reading antiwar.com for the last 10 or 15 years knows that America started the Cold War with Russia.
I mean, why in the hell would Pat Buchanan be on our side on this when he's such a cold warrior that to this day he justifies the Vietnam War 100 percent?
Right.
But that was communism.
That was Soviet communism.
That was the USSR that occupied Eastern Europe.
That's gone.
And you listen to him now.
He sounds just like you did.
Hey, hey, hey.
There's no reason we need to be picking this fight.
And it is us picking this fight.
Right.
And just just to come back to the to the points you were making, that partisanship is a problem.
I agree with that.
That's it.
That's a key element of the of this entire problem.
But on the other hand, I continue to come back to the fact that that there are bureaucratic, powerful bureaucratic economic interests who who are clearly involved in pushing this line.
And and, you know, it's both the the military industrial complex and the intelligence element of the the war state whose whose interests are very seriously engaged in pushing the idea of a new Cold War, the necessity of a new Cold War with Russia, because supposedly the Russians are so much on the warpath, so much so aggressive that that this is even worse, as some argue.
Even worse than the Soviet Union.
Yeah.
And of course, this, you know, the the CNN, MSNBC people, I mean, they've all hired these former CIA officials all the way from, you know, the head of it, the former head of it, to acting head of it, to basically low-level officials.
Basically, low-level analysts who who have wormed their way into into television.
And and these people guarantee that we're going to get a steady diet of the official line on the new Cold War for the foreseeable future.
Right.
Well, for regular people, I mean, you just have to ask yourself, is a foreign government the target of all of these accusations?
If the answer is yes, then you could pretty much chalk up all your, you know, pretty much go with skepticism right there.
America is the world empire, not Russia or China or India or the Taliban.
You know, this is global hegemony here, people, and the Russians stand in the way of that.
To pretend it's the other way around is to just admit, you know, nothing in the last 25 years or 50.
As you as you know, and very few other people do know, my book on Vietnam basically made the point that there was no balance of power during the early period of the Cold War from the early 50s into the mid 60s.
The Soviets did not have a second strike capability.
They they were unable to deter the United States effectively.
And even though the United States government was not ready to go to nuclear war, they believed that they had the ability to push themselves forward anywhere in the world.
And of course, Vietnam presented the opportunity to do that.
But ultimately, as I document in my book, the premise of the Vietnam War in 1964-65 was that the North Vietnamese and their Chinese allies would not dare to resist the United States putting troops in and trying to put down the rebellion because of the U.S. supremacy in terms of nuclear weapons primarily and supremacy in conventional weapons secondarily.
So I just want to make the key point here that the balance of power does make a difference.
And today, you know, it's true that Russia has a much more capable military.
And compared to the Soviet Union, it is indeed.
So you mean during that early Cold War period, it is indeed more powerful.
There is more of a balance of power today than there was during the Cold War.
But you are correct.
The United States still is the only place, the only power in the world that can project its military power anywhere and and somehow believes that it can still be in a position to wage war everywhere on Earth.
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Well, you know, I guess I've felt like this for a long time, but I'm kind of out of patience for the American people.
You know, after Manuel Noriega and David Koresh and Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi and Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin, who's buying this?
That, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, the world is just chock full of Hitlers.
And if, boy, just think if the USA wasn't here, we'd all be under their tyranny right now.
America's the aggressor.
And this is a bunch of bullshit.
Seriously, snap out of it.
Whether you're left or right or young or old or black or white or town and country or anything.
This is crazy.
How could anybody still believe?
Hey, did you hear that there's a bad guy and we're going to go save the people from him?
Really?
In 2018?
Come on.
Well, you know what?
You know, I think the reality is there's a lot of data that suggests or shows, I think I should say, that that the political reality in the United States today in 2018 and the last few years really has been that the majority of the American people don't buy it.
They do not buy the these myths for the most part.
Now, there's a lot of people who do.
I mean, there's a big percentage of the American people who do buy it, no doubt about it.
And they include people all the way from the left to the right.
But and from nobodies to the powerful, too.
That's right.
Exactly.
But there is now a arguably a majority of Americans who do not buy into the notion that we are threatened by, you know, everybody who the people that are selling this myth are arguing are threatening us and that we must maintain our military in the Middle East, throughout the Middle East and so on.
And so we're continuing these wars endlessly.
Most people now want this to to come to an end, although they're, you know, they're uncertain about how to do it, how it can be done, and perhaps easily manipulated into saying, well, give us a little bit more time.
But but I think the patience, the patience of the American people is, you know, now coming to an end.
I think that we are entering an era where a political figure coming forward with a very strong message to the effect that it's time to end this could very well, you know, sort of run the table.
Yeah, could have been Ron.
All right, listen, I'm sorry, I'm late.
And I bet you're late, too.
But I gotta ask you to say one thing.
What do you think about Kim Jong Un?
And I forgot J. Moon.
What's his name?
Yeah, I mean, I think that this is a very significant development.
I've seen it coming, as you probably know, I've written about this, that President Moon, when he was elected, immediately went to work to promote both a peace agreement with Kim Jong Un on the Korean Peninsula, which we now see, basically, in the form of the North-South text that has been released.
And Moon worked very hard on converting Trump to the position that he could and should have a peace with Kim Jong Un, he could reach an agreement with Kim Jong Un on denuclearization.
And that's, I believe, an important part of how and why this has happened, this Trump-Kim summit meeting is going to take place.
That doesn't mean that we're out of the woods, by any means, believe me.
With John Bolton in there, he is already trying to undermine the summit, to make sure it doesn't result in any real progress toward denuclearization agreement.
And he could succeed, that could still happen.
Absolutely.
But there is a chance at this moment still that that could happen.
Yeah.
Well, I sure hope so.
I don't know, it sure looks like at this point, at least they have a lot of face to lose if they don't come to some pretty good agreements somewhere.
So whatever progress they make, I think, you know, our attitude definitely should be, even if it's almost nothing, that it's great.
And let's build on that.
Because this is certainly ice broken at the very least, you know.
Scott, I will reveal to you and your listeners that I am working on a piece on how John Bolton is trying to undermine Trump's agreement, reaching agreement with Kim Jong Un by leaks that are parallel or a leak that is parallel to the leak that he did in 2004 to try to ensure that no international agreement would be reached by the EU or anybody else.
That could prevent the United States from having the military option against Iran.
And so I see some history repeating itself here with John Bolton in the White House.
I don't think he's doing this, of course, with Trump's approval.
I think he's trying to do it on the sly.
And I hope maybe I can cause a little bit of problem to that strategy.
Yeah.
Well, I also hope that.
All right.
I'll let you go, man.
Thank you.
Thanks, Scott.
Appreciate it.
All right, you guys.
That's the great Gareth Porter.
Perils of Dominance about Vietnam and Manufactured Crisis about Iran's Civilian Safeguarded Nuclear Program.
And read all he writes at antiwar.com.
Original.antiwar.com slash Gareth dash Porter.
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