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 us, he died.
We ain't killing they 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.
All right, you guys, introducing the great Dan McAdams.
He runs the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity with the great Dr. Ron Paul over there.
And he also co-hosts the Liberty Report, which the two of them do four days a week, Monday through Thursday there on YouTube and at libertyreport.com.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Dan?
Hey, Scott.
Thanks for having me back.
Very happy to have you here.
Hey, listen.
So first of all, I was hoping we could catch up about this Skipperel poisoning.
Am I pronouncing that right?
Yeah, I think that's close enough.
So there's this Russian spy.
He's living in England.
He's part of a spy swap from back when maybe you can elaborate a little bit about that.
And then him and his daughter both come down sick.
She's doing much better now.
And I just saw a headline this morning that said that he's recovering, too.
But Theresa May, the prime minister of England, said, well, this must have been the Russians because it's Russian kind of poison and this and that.
So anyway, well, I'll get to what little I know in a second, but it's not much.
But could you tell us as much of the story as you need to, you think, to get us caught up to date?
Sure.
Well, you know, he was he was worked as a double agent.
He was turned by the MI6 and worked as double agent.
The Russians arrested him.
He served, I don't know, three years or so in prison.
I forget how many he served.
But then he was, as you point out, he was exchanged for some other spies and ended up living his retirement out in in the UK.
So, you know, basically doing not much, although there are some interesting connections to Christopher Steele.
If someone might want to go and look into some of those, but, you know, the Steele dossier.
However, now all of a sudden out of the blue, he's got this poison that's 10 times worse than VX nerve agent.
It's the worst ever ever created in history.
It's got to be the Russians, as you point out, because nobody else could have done it, that sort of thing.
And lo and behold, well, you know, of course, the first Theresa May and Boris Johnson, the foreign ministers say, we know absolutely certain.
We were told by Porton Down, the British laboratory, absolutely certain that the Russians did it 100 percent.
And then so the most unprecedented expulsion of Russian diplomats probably in history took place.
The US kicked out 60.
Now, then all of a sudden, the British laboratory comes back and says, well, we can't really pinpoint this to Russia.
So it's obvious that Boris Johnson was not telling the truth.
And as you point out, to top it off, not only is she getting quite a bit better and getting ready to leave the hospital, but even her father is improving, which is pretty unheard of, supposedly, when it comes to these agents.
So what happened?
Yeah, I don't know if anybody knows.
I guess nobody really knows, huh?
I don't think well, somebody knows the person who did it.
If it was a person, maybe it was food poisoning.
Who knows?
But it's I mean, I haven't delved into it as much as a lot of people have, but it's pretty odd.
First, it was first it was in the food.
Okay, no, that didn't work out then.
Okay, then it came in through the events of their BMW car.
No, that didn't work out then.
Oh, it must have been on the door handle.
That's it.
No, that wasn't it.
I think someone put it in their cereal.
Oh, yeah, that's it.
That's what it was.
And on and on we go.
They have no idea how they ingest this.
But they're certain the Russians did it.
You know, but the odd thing is, if it was the door handle, the distance of time between them touching that door handle to leave their house, and when they got sick is about four hours.
That's pretty amazing for you know, that some of the deadliest substances on the planet.
And it's also odd, someone else pointed out that a 66 year old man who is not in the best of health with severe diabetes is affected the exact same way as a 33 year old daughter, who obviously appears to be in more robust health than he usually, you know, and I'm not an expert, but an agent like that would act differently, depending on the person's age and health and weight, etc.
So yeah, there are a lot of open questions.
And I think Boris Johnson and Theresa May are in some pretty hot water, maybe even even hotter water.
If the BBC and all the mainstream media wasn't doing its best to try to pull those chestnuts out of the fire.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, now, so as far as that goes, I, I'm not sure if you saw, but I interviewed this guy, David column, who's a professor of organic chemistry at Cornell University.
Oh, yeah, he's great.
Yeah, he's been very good.
Yeah.
So he was writing on Twitter about this.
And I had him on the show.
And he said, look, you know, I don't know, Russian spy from Adam.
That's not my speciality.
But I'm just telling you, anybody could make these poisons with half an education and a decent laboratory.
So that's it.
It's so when they say now that doesn't that doesn't prove that it was made in California or, or Colorado or any other place.
But it goes to show that when they say, well, you know, it's a Russian recipe.
So therefore, that that really just is not good enough and will not stand up.
Exactly.
And I have no interest in defending the Russians.
But if you're bringing us to the verge of nuclear war, you damn well better know what you're talking about or not be BSing us.
It's pretty serious stuff.
Yeah.
Well, all right.
So now, what about the idea?
Because I guess I've heard people completely dismiss this, like, well, that just makes no sense at all.
But I don't know.
What about the idea that Putin wants to send the message that if anybody ever betrays Russia, that sooner or later, we're going to kill you.
But this is interesting, because this is what the Russian ambassador to the UN said yesterday, at this emergency session of the UN Security Council.
He said, why did we wait eight years and then decide to attack to attack them just two weeks before our own election?
And a few weeks before the World Cup?
Why did we release them from the country in the first place?
And why would we do it in an extremely public and dangerous fashion?
You know, that makes pretty good sense.
Yeah, I mean, why would we do it this way?
And I've heard it, you know, mentioned quite a few times to that.
And I don't really know the history of this or anything, but that it's, you know, basically unheard of to have people murdered like this after a prisoner swap, when a spy swap, I guess, as they call it in this circumstance, when, you know, that's a huge disincentive for these things working well in the future, which all sides want to be able to continue to do when it comes down to it.
So yeah, there's sort of a rules among brogues, I guess.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, like this guy's saying, yeah, why would we have given him up in the first place?
If we wanted to kill him, we'd have killed him while he was still here.
Yeah, and if we wanted to actually kill him, we probably would have actually killed him, rather than have the guy he's going to recover.
But the interesting thing is, you know, the daughter, she talked to her cousin in Russia.
And she said, you know, that and her cousin in Russia recorded the call, and it was played over the Russian media.
She said, Yeah, we're okay, we're recovering.
It's not a big deal, we should recover.
The cousin in Russia said, Well, I want to try to get my visa and come out and see you as soon as possible.
And, and, and the daughter said, No one's going to ever give you a visa, you're not going to be able to come out.
And actually turns out today that the UK denied her a visa, which looks pretty suspicious, if you ask me, you know, what's the big deal about letting a family member come out and visit her while she's in the hospital?
And the question I forget who it was who asked it on Twitter?
Are they being held against their will?
Yeah, I don't know.
Seems like she could memorize her lines by then if she needed to, you know.
And now look, I mean, it's, it's a pretty obvious thing to speculate that well, somebody who's interested in ratcheting up tensions between us and Russia's behind this, but it could just be business too, right?
I mean, what all do you know about this guy?
You mentioned the steel case there.
There's a whole other rabbit trail.
Yeah, his MI6 handler apparently was very close to Christopher Steele.
And there's been plenty written about it.
I think probably Moon of Alabama has had some things and a few others have written, maybe Chris, maybe former Ambassador Murray, Craig Murray's written about it too, I think.
But there's plenty, maybe even Phil Giraldi, but there's plenty out there about the relationship between his MI6 handler and Chris Steele.
So, you know, there's something that's interesting.
What about the guy that was taking the picture of them in that picture that we've all seen, the guy in the mirror, who's that guy?
You know, I mean, I've never seen any anyone say who that guy was and what role did he have in it?
Yeah, I'm not sure which picture you mean there.
I hadn't seen that.
Well, the one of them in the restaurant, the father and son in the restaurant, they're both holding up their glasses.
It's probably the most famous picture of the two of them just before they apparently collapsed.
And you can see in the mirror behind them, there's the guy taking that picture.
You know, you can see his face.
So who is it that they were dining with?
I've never seen anyone answer that.
But there are a lot of questions.
We don't know the answers, Scott.
We don't have them.
But we do know that if we're going to do something like this, if we're going to expel a bunch of diplomats and ratchet up the tension and put all of our lives at risk, we should know the answers beforehand.
Yeah.
Well, that's the whole thing, right?
I don't think I've ever heard the women of NPR News so concerned as when they're talking about this Novichok recipe for these Russian poisons.
Get it?
Russian.
And they're just terrified.
And then, of course, they convey that to their audience as well, that this is the most concerning thing that happened since the bubonic plague broke out, you know, whatever it is.
And not a single person died.
The only thing that died were the animals because the stupid cops locked him in the house without water.
Yes, but tell us, Dan, what does this mean for the future?
Horrible poison.
And the post run up to the Iraq War era.
It's just hard to imagine.
It's hard to sit by and see people falling for it all over again.
You know, it's a little bit depressing.
Hey, you guys get the audiobook of Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
Yes, it's me reading it.
I wrote it, didn't I?
That's at foolserrand.us.
Check out the full archive of this show at youtube.com slash scotthorton show as well as scotthorton.org.
And you can subscribe there on YouTube.
And for all the feeds, iTunes, Stitcher, etc.
And help support the show at scotthorton.org slash donate.
For $50 you get a signed copy of the book Fool's Errand.
For $100 you get a QR code silver commodity disc.
You scan it with your phone, you get the instant spot price.
It's the greatest invention in the history of currency.
A little bit of old and a little bit of high tech there for you.
And for any $200 donation to the show, you get a lifetime subscription to listen and think libertarian audiobooks, including my book Fool's Errand as well.
And we accept all kinds of digital currencies and most especially, of course, Zen cash that helps to sponsor this show. patreon.com if you want to donate per interview and YouTube, PayPal, I mean, if you want to do monthly subscription donations or single donations there.
All that's available for you at scotthorton.org slash donate.
And also, hey, give me a good review on iTunes or Stitcher or what have you.
If you read the book and you liked it, amazon.com or audible.com if you got the audiobook and let them know.
And you can invite me to give a speech to your group for a very reasonable price, especially you libertarians out there.
Just let me know scott at scotthorton.org.
Thanks.
I was going to segue to Kosovo, but I'll put that one off.
I'll segue to Syria instead.
So yeah, I'm listening to NPR news.
And the NPR Democrat guy is saying to the Democrat guest, Trump wants to pull out of Syria, which we'll get to that in a second, kind of debatable.
Trump wants to get out of Syria.
Why?
That will only empower Iran and Russia.
Isn't that right, Democrat congressman guest?
And the Democrat congressman guest says, I know, I know.
He's diminishing American power.
And he used that phrase over and over again.
This was the talking point from the Democrat email that morning, I guess.
Diminishing American power, ceding, giving up Syria over to the Syrians, Dan.
We're all neocons now, I guess.
Amazing.
Crazy.
I mean, I get it.
You hate Trump.
Fine.
Get on board with me and Scott on some things that we really have a beef with him about.
Yeah, like staying in Syria this far, you know?
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
But this is just finding any way just because you hate the guy.
Well, be careful what you're going to get next.
If you get rid of him, you're going to get someone who is even more of an ideologue.
Yeah.
Well, what's funny, too, is, you know, I don't know if you saw this clip, but the comic Dave Smith has just been really great on SC Cup show on CNN Headline News.
And she just takes the complete neocon line.
All these groups, they're just bad, bad, bad.
And Dave was saying to her that, well, you know, I mean, there's some of these groups are on the other side.
Right.
So, yeah, ISIS and Al-Qaeda, those are guys who are the enemies of Iran and Hezbollah and the Assad there.
And so she has to interrupt and go, I know, I know they're all bad, bad, bad.
And he's saying, well, you know, when we fight against Assad and Iran and Hezbollah, we help them kind of.
And all she can do is just try to pave over the whole thing and say and basically conflate these enemy groups together.
And of course, she doesn't have a third force that's supposed to take over.
I don't think she was arguing that, well, we'll just have the Kurds rule all of Syria, not that they would want to do that anyway.
But, you know, what's really thick about the whole thing, Scott, is people like her and so many others, not just her, but these armchair experts, they sit there as if they're the masters of the universe, thinking they can decide what should be best for Syria and the Syrians.
But, you know, there are no consequences to SD Cup or anyone like her for these things.
But there are real life consequences for people on the ground in Syria.
You know, hundreds of thousands have died.
The place is controlled by the jihadis.
The women are all covered up.
The churches are all broken down.
It's a disaster.
So they sit back there in their comfortable studios, thinking that they're the masters of the universe, where real people are suffering the consequences of their dabbling in this art.
Can you imagine dabbling in art surgery?
I mean, it's just so sick.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, and of course, it's all dressed up in, you know, they're the most caring of all.
She's a great example of this, too.
The excuse for all of it is Assad's butchery.
When, of course, he didn't have a war to fight, except that America and America's allies brought war to his country.
And so I don't think that's a defense of his tactics at all.
I think, you know, air wars and those guys have proven that the Russians do kill civilians in great numbers, just as the Americans do with their air war there and, you know, in backing the Assad side there.
But why do they have to roust al-Qaeda out of Ghouta and out of East Aleppo and out of Idlib anyway?
Because America put them there.
And so just to blame only Assad and to leave out the part where it was not just foreign intervention, but USA, red, white and blue, Barack Obama, CIA foreign intervention that caused all this is almost criminal at that point in terms of you know, denying the true context of what is going on there.
It always reminds me of a story that Dr. Paul tells, you know, and I remember it very well.
We were sitting in the Foreign Affairs Committee hearing and Dr. Paul said, you know, why are we gearing up for war with the Iraqis?
They have never attacked us.
And one of the members said, oh, yes, they have.
They were shooting at our planes as we were bombing them.
And that's the mentality.
Exactly.
And of course, here they shoot back.
Yeah.
And people go back and check the record and you'll see Ron Paul in 2002 on the House floor on YouTube or read his speeches, his 30 questions that won't be asked that we published at Antiwar.com and the rest of this, where that was one of the points he went back to over and over again was not only does this country not have an air force, they can't shoot down.
They haven't been able to hit a single one of our planes over their country for the last dozen years straight.
And we've been bombing them, too, not just flying around, you know.
Yeah.
What the hell is that?
They got no army.
They got no navy.
They got no air force.
They can't even shoot down our planes over their country.
But they're the world's greatest threat.
And we've got to preempt their attack before they launch it.
What are you talking about?
It's just so absurd.
It's hard to imagine.
And, you know, Assad, like Qaddafi before him, they were tough guys in a tough neighborhood.
And I'm sure they were brutal.
But, you know, they never launched a war based on lies that killed a million people like Bush did.
You know, so you want to talk about brutal dictators.
It's pretty brutal to kill a million people, I think, you know.
So it's all over to drone your own citizens like Obama did.
I don't know.
Saddam was pretty bad.
But then again, when he did the Anfall campaign against the Kurds, he worked for Ronald Reagan.
And when he launched the war against Iran, he asked Jimmy Carter for the green light first.
And Ronald Reagan supported him throughout that whole war.
So, you know, maybe didn't kill a lot of people, but it was only when he was working for America, getting paid with American tax money to do it.
Yeah, that's true.
That's true.
That's true.
It's, you know, they work for us, they think that they get brownie points from it.
I mean, that's what Qaddafi thought.
He thought he was going to get brownie points from us and from the French, and it's the French that conspired to kill him, because he gave all that money to Sarkozy.
You know, he wanted the dead men to tell no tales.
Right.
I mean, I'm sure you saw that this was hardly a story at all.
Sarkozy's been indicted for that Qaddafi money.
And I saw safe Qaddafi's now out of prison, the guy that they should have let negotiated, you know, a peaceful conclusion to that thing in 2011, in the first place.
But he was out and saying, oh, I got all kinds of evidence on Sarkozy.
If you need it, I'll be happy to turn it over to your prosecutors here.
Yeah, he killed my dad.
But he better be careful, because I'm sure the French are pretty brutal.
They've got a pretty brutal Secret Service, you know?
Yeah, well, I don't know if anybody can find him in the chaos that is modern day Libya.
Yeah.
By the way, so speaking of Syria and all this, you know, we talked about this paper thin moral posturing about saving the Syrian people that the American government has put into this problem.
But there's a specific group of people that the Americans have really propped up their power.
And that is the Syrian Kurds, the YPG, that we now call the SDF.
And they were just barely holding on to Kobani and keeping the Islamic State out, and basically holding their own when America came and took their side and really helped them gain a lot of territory and increase their power and influence and training and money and food and weapons and everything.
And then, but now, I don't know if it's now or if it's later, but soon comes the time when America stabs them in the back and leaves them high and dry.
So then I guess my question for you is, we turn them over to the Turks or to Assad?
Well, we stabbed them a few times.
I think Assad would be a lot more gentle with them than the Turks was.
It doesn't say much, but I think it's the case.
And they've never really made enemies with the Damascus government throughout this war, right?
They kind of had their own autonomy, but only because the Assad government was busy with bigger problems than them.
Well, yeah, and I'm not an expert, but it looks to me like they could have made a deal very, very much early on with Assad.
Assad needed their support a lot more early on, and they tried to hold out for more.
I don't know.
But the fact of the matter is, and I don't know if you read Michael Rozef on Lew Rockwell, but he had a really good piece.
I do.
I'm not sure I saw his recent one, but I do read him, yeah.
Yeah, he's very astute.
And he did a piece where he was refuting some of the claims that Lindsey Graham was making for us to stay in Syria.
And Graham was saying, you know, hey, if we leave, the Turkish-Kurdish war is going to get worse.
But Rozef pointed out there was no war before we came in and armed the Kurds to the hilt and made them our proxy army in Syria and terrified the Turks.
And I'm not justifying the Turks invading Syria, but the fact of the matter is there would not have been an invasion if the U.S. hadn't come in there desperate for an army to arm and said, okay, hey, there's these Kurd gods, let's give them everything they want.
You know, it shows the insanity of interventionism.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, that guy Tillerson, everybody thought, well, he's a businessman, so at least that means he's, you know, a little bit more grounded in reality or something.
But nah, that just made him more of a servant of the Saudis, apparently.
And so when it came down to it, you know, and I'm not exactly sure on the timing of this, but I think it was just a couple of days after Trump had said the first time, we're only there to fight ISIS, not we're pulling out soon.
This was a few weeks before.
But just we're only there to fight ISIS.
And then Tillerson gave this speech where he says, like, no, we're there to limit the power and influence of Iran and Assad and Hezbollah and Russia.
And then at that point was when the Turks invaded.
And I forgot who it was that told me that.
Yeah, no, the Turks went, I don't know if it was Erdogan himself or he sent his foreign minister straight to Moscow to ask for permission to go ahead and attack and got it.
Yeah, because that's right at the time where the US announced that they're going to build a 30,000 person border guard for Syria, and it's going to be all Kurds.
And, you know, that was it.
That was the trigger.
It's all over.
So we created the mess there by staying there.
And, you know, I pointed, we did a show yesterday on it, or the other day on the Liberty Report about it.
And I put up a map.
And hold on, if what we're saying is true, that we're only here for ISIS.
Well, there's a convenient pocket of ISIS right in the middle of US controlled territory.
Right.
You know, why don't you turn your turn your focus on this?
It's pretty obvious.
Yeah.
In fact, I went and found that map.
And I use that same map as a graphic for copying and pasting a Patrick Coburn article at the Libertarian Institute site, if people want to look at that, where it's sort of right on the border on the old Sykes-Picot line.
But on the Syrian side of the line, there's this little safe haven for ISIS.
And the Americans are laying off of them there.
Is that it?
Or what?
Not only laying off of them, they won't let the Syrian army go after me.
Right.
So they're actually providing safe haven for ISIS.
And this is according to plenty of newspapers yesterday, including Haaretz, which is pretty reliable.
The US is building a base all the way on the other side of the country, where there is not a single ISIS guy.
So what is that all about?
All right, you all, here's who sponsors this show, the great Mike Swanson and his book, The War State, about the rise of the military industrial complex in this country after World War Two and the Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations.
A very important read, The War State, and also get his great investment advice and market analysis all at wallstreetwindow.com.
The great Mike Swanson, wallstreetwindow.com.
ZenCash at zensystem.io to learn all about this great new digital currency.
It's also an encrypted messaging app and document delivery device and all kinds of great stuff there.
Learn all about it at zensystem.io.
And of course, Roberts and Roberts Brokerage, Inc.
They take care of your gold, silver, platinum, palladium, and any precious metals that you need to get.
And if you buy with Bitcoin, they charge no premium at all.
That's rrbi.co, rrbi.co for Roberts and Roberts Brokerage, Inc.
And libertystickers.com for anti-government propaganda for the back of your truck.
I promise we've got a new website coming any day now here.
I mean, it's done.
It's just got to be plugged in.
And Tom Woods Liberty Classroom.
If you want to learn a bunch of stuff, click the link on my page at scotthorton.org and learn from Tom Woods, and I'll get a kickback.
And check this out.
If you want a new 2018 model website, then go to expanddesigns.com and expanddesigns.com slash Scott, and you'll save 500 bucks.
So did you see this where, I mean, I guess I know you saw this much where the Free Syrian Army and the, and some of the Al-Qaeda guys are joining up with the Turks and their assaults on Afrin.
And then I guess maybe coming up on Manbij here against the Kurds, where, but also did you see this where apparently some of the ISIS guys that just got defeated and rousted out of Raqqa by the SDF and the Americans are now joining the SDF with the Kurds to fight against the Turks and the Al-Qaeda guys?
It's just incredible.
I mean, I tended at one point to dismiss the idea that the U.S. has created and continues to maintain ISIS as its proxy army.
But when things like this happen, it's hard to, it's hard to not embrace that theory.
I mean, they certainly, I mean, I think to, to quote John Kerry, well, we thought we could manage the situation in brackets there, basically, right?
Like not, not that we're directly controlling them, but just, yes, an Islamist emirate in East Afghanistan, in East Syria, that's what we want, all right, kind of thing, you know, for now.
Although as he describes, it sure didn't work out the way they wanted.
They thought it would pressure Assad into giving in when he just ended up calling the Russians in to save his ass, which was predictable enough, I guess it should have been.
He'd already called in help from Hezbollah in Iran a long time before that.
I mean, it's just the arrogance of empire.
We did it with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 70s.
You know, they keep making the same mistakes over and over because they refuse to believe, they refuse to understand that just leaving other countries alone will solve 90% of our problems.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, in fact, you know, when the Russians did first intervene, I think Gates, was it Gates then still?
No, I don't know.
Some of these guys, certainly Obama himself and a couple of these others were saying, yeah, you know, hey, maybe it'll be like Afghanistan and we'll bog the Russians down fighting these guys again.
Yeah, he was Ashton Carter at that time.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, yeah.
I would say that.
Yeah.
And that's what they were hoping that would happen.
They'd hoped it would happen.
They warned it, you know, they were rationalizing it after the fact that like, yeah, we can make, make use of this, even though this is after the, all the attacks of the 90s, this is after September 11th.
This is after 4,000 out of 4,500 of our guys died fighting the Sunni based insurgency in Iraq, which these guys were the worst part of, you know, that they were behind all of that.
But he would think that, yeah, no, Ronald Reagan and William Casey, yeah, they thought they were real cute back in the 80s, but we learned the lesson from that, right guys.
So let's do it again and again and again.
Oh man.
Oh, speaking of which, tell me about Kosovo.
1999, Bill Clinton claims that Slobodan Milosevic is hiding weapons of mass destruction, a secret nuclear pro, wait, I'm sorry, different set of lies.
He says Slobodan Milosevic is hiding the corpses of a hundred thousand civilians, Kosovo Albanians that he's massacred in the Kosovo province.
And so America has to go and break off the Kosovo province to be an independent state there in Eastern Europe.
Where were you at the time?
Tell me everything you know about it real quick.
Well, I was on the border.
I was living in Hungary at the time, and I had spent a lot of time down there with the British Helsinki group, you know, and we knew from being on the ground that, you know, that this was all based on lies.
And, you know, it turns out that it was based on lies, but it was just another example of, I think, the military-industrial complex driving policy.
They were scared to death at the end of the Cold War, would give the rest of us a peace dividend, you know, where we didn't have to give up half our money to maintain the military, global military empire.
And so they stirred it up.
You know, I had gone to several events that Lockheed Martin was throwing in Hungary.
They wanted to get him to buy the F-16s, the F-18s, anything, just buy, buy, buy.
And so they were throwing a lot of money into the area, and lo and behold, you needed to have a conflict, and there you have it.
Yeah.
Well, so who is the Kosovo Liberation Army?
Well, they were thugs and drug traffickers, and actually he started out as a car thief, I think, stealing cars from Germany and reselling them, and then moved up into drugs and human trafficking organs, trafficking in human organs, and all sorts of nasty things.
And, you know, he was our guy.
You know, when you're going to do something so evil, you've got to have an SOB, and he was our SOB, and got the job done.
Madeleine Albright loved him.
You've seen those pictures where they're practically kissing each other.
It's really kind of revolting, but that's who we went with.
You know what's interesting, man?
That guy John Schindler, the raving lunatic national security guy who always says that Snowden is a Russian agent and stuff, so he wrote a book back when about Bill Clinton arming the Mujahedin in Bosnia and in Kosovo.
And in fact, working with the Iranians to arm bin Laden's guys in Bosnia, specifically.
As an Iranian, that doesn't make sense to me.
I do know that I spent a lot of time in Albania in the 90s.
I was probably there at least 30 times.
And I've said this story recently, you know, toward the end of my time there, just before the U.S. started attacking Yugoslavia, I noticed all these mosques in the countryside going up super shiny.
It looked like they were made out of silver, out of the middle of nowhere.
Just dozens of them.
You know, it used to be just a pillbox, kinds of concrete bunkers that Enver Hoxha built in his paranoid 60s.
But no, these were now dotting the landscape.
And I asked the locals, because I know that the Albanians were not religious at all.
So what is going on with these mosques?
Well, you know, the Saudis are building.
We have no idea what the hell they're doing, but the Saudis are building these things everywhere.
Yeah.
So there was a lot going on.
There was a lot of radicalization going on.
But I think it was the Saudis, not the Iranians.
I think it was all of them.
Actually, in that case, I think it was the kind of thing where like, hey, the enemy and my enemy, and I think actually was part of the Iranians sucking up to America, too.
They're like, hey, we'll help the Mujahideen in Bosnia.
And you know what, I may be conflating Bosnia and Kosovo.
This may have been just during, you know, 94, 95.
Rather than the 99 war.
But maybe it may be, but we do know that they were involved, and that they were doing a lot of funny business there.
And a lot of the people that ended up in the Middle East had spent time in Albania.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, certainly Khalid Sheikh Mohammed himself had earned his stripes as you know, something a guy who'd been in battle in fighting in Bosnia in 95.
So yeah, yeah, that was true for some of those guys.
Yeah.
Sort of, you know, the world is the chessboard.
You know, that's the Brzezinski view, isn't it?
That we just we sit, we sit back as Americans and just move the pieces around.
And meanwhile, we leave a trail of misery behind us.
Right?
Well, and of course, I mean, as as he put it, right?
Yeah, some stirred up Muslims, as they used to say at the Pentagon, that terrorism is a small price to pay for being a superpower.
And actually, this long after September 11, from their point of view, it makes sense, doesn't it?
That actually, you know, who cares about suffering in the Middle East here?
Yeah, we got a mass shooting here, there in the name of ISIS or whatever.
But to the Pentagon, or to the nation state itself, and none of that is a threat, really.
So no, they get to continue ruling the world and with what amounts to pinprick attacks against America here and there.
Maybe one big exception every once in a while.
Like you said, no biggie, you're gonna give up your position on the chessboard over, you know, a couple of strikes from a couple of pawns.
You know, and, and in the meantime, you wave the flag, and you tell Americans that militarism equals patriotism.
You know that if you don't support this, you don't love your country.
And, and I hate to say it, you know, despite the best efforts of you and so many people like us, it still works pretty damn good to get people motivated.
They still have this idea that unless we're militaristic, aggressively militaristic, we're not pro American.
And that's, that's the biggest tie up of all, I guess.
Yeah.
Well, and especially, you know, like we're talking about the beginning here with the partisanship involved, where this is a great way for a liberal to prove what a patriot they are, is attacking the Republicans from the right on national security.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And to get some nice campaign contributions in the process, you know, Lockheed Martin and all these companies, they love to, they love to be ecumenical in their giving.
Yeah, exactly.
And they sure are, aren't they?
Yeah.
Boy, if you would just change your tune over at the Ron Paul Institute, I bet you guys can pull in some of those Northrop Grumman dollars.
I wouldn't be sitting here with a 12 year old computer and a Hey, no, man, seriously, you guys are doing the best work.
And, you know, I, I really envy you too, that you get to do all this work every day with the man himself, Ron Paul, who, I mean, to be perfectly honest, I fantasize about like, I mean, regularly, about wow, what if Ron had won in 88, and the Soviet Union had fallen apart on his watch.
And then Harry Brown, his vice president had become president after him, you know, in 96, through 2000.
And all the wars we wouldn't have, all the freedom we would have.
You know, we'd be so sick of hearing Harry Brown sing about, sing his praises of the Statue of Liberty and what freedom really means.
We'd be tired of winning.
We'd be sick and tired of winning by now.
But anyway.
Yeah, no, he really is the greatest American hero ever, Dr. Ron Paul is.
And so it's really great that you get to work with him.
And you do great work with him, too.
And, you know, this is why I always say, I hope, I know they taped it.
So maybe you'll see, I did this speech for the Libertarians in, for the state convention there in New Jersey.
And I talked all about Ron at the beginning and the great example that he sets, that if you watch his show, that you can tell, his show with you, that you can tell he pretty much only cares about the wars and stuff, you know?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, gold and this and that and corruption and the bailouts and, you know, important things, gun rights and whatever.
But no, he cares about the wars, because that's the worst thing.
And he's a real expert in it, too.
He doesn't just have, you know, things to say about it.
He's got really important things to say, but he knows all about it.
And of course, that's because he's got you to work with, too.
So, you know, it's a really important bit of work that you're doing there, Dan.
It's great to work with him.
And he's, I'll tell you what, he works hard at it.
He is on top of these things, like you wouldn't believe it.
You know, I hear him more and more, you know, quoting Rothbard about, you know, the older I get, the more I realize this war thing is the key to the whole libertarian business.
Right.
That was what I was saying in the speech.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And Ron says it more and more.
So I think he's, he really, you know, he's really focused on and he, gosh, he puts in a lot of work.
I'll tell you that.
Oh, yeah.
Passionate work.
Yep.
All right.
Well, good deal, man.
So giving my best and thank you for your best.
You do great work all the time, Dan.
Well, Scott, this is a love fest, but I'm a huge admirer of yours.
You are, you are the King Kong of peace.
At 5'8".
Yeah.
All right.
Hey, yeah.
So thanks again, dude.
Appreciate it.
Thanks, Scott.
All right, you guys, that's Dan McAdams.
He's at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, of course, and co-host of the Liberty Report there.
