Hey y'all, Scott Horton here for the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
CNI stands against America's negative role in the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the war party's relentless push to bomb Iran, and the roles played by twisted Christian Zionism and neocon-engineered Islamophobia in justifying it all.
The Council for the National Interest works tirelessly to expose and oppose our government's most destructive policies, but they can't do it without you.
Support CNI's push to straighten out America's crooked course.
Check out the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org and click donate under About Us at the top of the page.
That's councilforthenationalinterest.org.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, the Scott Horton Show.
Pretty original, huh?scotthorton.org.
You know, I should do better at saying that.
Chatroom guys, you have to remind me from now on.
To say all the time, scotthorton.org.
That's my website where I keep all my interview archives and the whole show archives too, actually.
But the interview archives can all be found there.
Almost 2,800 now.
Just a few shy of 2,800 interviews there at scotthorton.org.
You can find me on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube at scotthortonshow.
All right, our next guest on the show today is our good friend Pepe Escobar, the globe-trotting investigative reporter for the Asia Times and Al Jazeera and a bunch of other places that rip off and repaste his stuff all over the place.
Welcome back to the show, Pepe.
How are you?
Hey, Scott.
How are you doing?
Greetings from North London.
North London, huh?
Okay, good.
Well, that was going to be my first question.
Where in the world are you today?
Now you got it.
You sound far away, man.
Are you sure you're only in London?
No, mentally I am in Boston.
Okay, well, yeah, that makes sense.
Basically in London, but mentally in Boston because I have been working on this thing since, you know, for the past four or five days, non-stop practically.
All right, well, you know, I really wanted to ask you about this article, The Islamic Emirate of Syriastan, but I got plenty of time if you do, so why don't we go ahead and start with what are your thoughts on the Boston thing, Pepe?
Well, look, I already wrote three pieces about it.
I'm going to stop because I've already asked a lot of questions and pointed to so many discrepancies in the official story.
So let's wait and see what comes up.
All right, well, I haven't read any of your pieces on it.
Another piece here came up, something came up.
You know, if I could have foreseen this thing, I would be a millionaire.
Well, I knew it would happen, but not like this.
Now they're saying that in his deathbed confession or hospital bed confession, the heavily sedated and practically dying Zohar Zarmaev said that he got the info to build the famous pressure cooker bombs from Inspire magazine online, the magazine online published by al-Qaeda.
So, no, this is so completely absurd.
I wrote about that a few days ago already saying that all those armchair analysts in the West, think tanks where they get paid a bloody fortune to just, you know, masturbate about the Islamic world.
They're already saying that these terrorists, they got their information from Inspire magazine.
And a few days later, the Chechen terrorists that managed to survive this whole thing says exactly the same thing.
How bloody stupid and ridiculous is that?
This is just one example, Scott.
There are so many.
The discrepancies between the, you know, the Mercedes that was left by Tamerlan in a mechanic over there in Cambridge and was recovered the day after the bombing, which is probably the same Mercedes that was involved in what the police says was this crazy car chasing, and then a Mercedes loaded with bombs that they got from where, you know, that they threw at the police cars on a given chase.
You know, it's so much stuff that you get dizzy in the middle of all this.
And we're not even talking about who profits from this whole thing.
Certainly not jihadists anywhere.
Certainly not anything remotely connected to these al-Qaeda franchises.
You know, it's absolutely ridiculous to try to pull off this inside the U.S.
They're not going to advance their agenda or recruit new people if they pull off something like this.
Who's profiting for the moment explicitly?
Well, we already heard from Israel.
This is going to be very good for Israel's image in the West, because we suffered the same kind of terrorism via Hamas.
So more than predictable, of course.
And of course, what we saw...
Hey, wait, hang on one second, Pepe.
Let me interrupt you there for just a second, because I want to make sure that...
No problem.
I want to make sure that people have the footnote for that part, because talk about chutzpah.
I had that here.
It's a what?
A vice president of Israel or something?
Who said this?
Oh, look.
No, it's somebody from the government.
Oh, here it is.
I have it right here.
I have it right here.
Okay.
The Netanyahu aide, a top Netanyahu aide, Ron Dermer.
Netanyahu, the usual Netanyahu aide.
Yeah, a Netanyahu aide.
He basically came out and cited 9-11 and how that was really good for Israel and said, yeah, this will be the same thing.
Hooray for us.
I wonder if he...
I don't see in the quote here, the story by Jason Ditz at Antiwar.com, if he stopped to wipe away a crocodile tear or not, or what?
Well, I would say a swamp of Komodo dragons, not only one crocodile.
And now, as far as all the discrepancies in what's gone down in the streets of Boston in the last week, I'm not so sure about all that.
I do know that I posted a thing today of a bunch of pictures a guy took out his window of the firefight that took place the other day.
You can find it on my Facebook page if you want.
But we don't know if it's this firefight or some other firefight.
Well, no, that's true.
That's true.
Although it seems to be an independent source.
But you're right, it could be BS.
But it seems to be a pretty credible thing.
I think a lot of these discrepancies and so-called discrepancies are already kind of ironing themselves out.
Like everybody's making a big deal of the guys with the khaki pants and the black jackets and the big backpacks.
But then there's video of the two most suspicious of those guys.
There's video of the two most suspicious of those guys with their backpacks still after the bombing.
Exactly.
But this was a real drill going on.
And if you go through mainstream media, any reference to the craft organized drill disappeared completely.
If it was not for independent, alternative internet media in the U.S., nobody would never know that this drill was taking place.
It was just like that drill during 9-11.
You remember?
There was some information about it in the first few minutes and hours, and then it disappeared completely as well.
It's the same thing.
There's always a drill going on when something happens.
Isn't that partly confirmation bias?
They do drills where there's not a real attack all the time, too.
There's a drill probably every day in this country somewhere.
It's also true.
But we cannot discount the possibility that this drill is intimately connected to what happened.
No, I agree with that.
I agree with that.
I'm not trying to completely dismiss it.
All of us, independent journalists, we are exploring scenarios and exploring possibilities.
We are not conspiracy theorists.
My problem is, Pepe, is I'm so jaded because there are a lot of quite ridiculous conspiracy memes going around this week about it.
I agree with you completely.
It's less credible than the government's version, even.
It bothers me.
We are trying not to fall into this trap, of course.
But considering the discrepancies of the official story and considering some of the assertions that are beyond ridiculous, you have to explore other possibilities.
First of all, there is a very, very strong possibility that these were either FBI patsies or some kind of double agents, or that they were played.
The fact that the FBI, remember, in the beginning they said, we don't know who these people are.
You, the citizen, you have to tell us.
Then they had to admit that they met him once, which is not true.
The mother, the best interview of the Tsarnaev mother, she gave it not to CNN, she gave it to RT.
It was an interview in Russian.
Then they translated into English.
She said that Tamerlan was being monitored for five years when he was in the U.S.
So they knew that he went to Russia for six months, 2011.
Yeah, they only admit to two years.
They knew everything.
They were tracking him.
They knew it.
And if, okay, this proves two things.
One, either they were tracking me and he was an operative for the FBI or a double agent, or if they didn't know anything, they couldn't even identify this guy and that he was trying to plan something and he was trying to build a bomb, the whole thing.
And even photographing him before the fact at the marathon site, it was so easy to identify him.
You know, I would say at least hours before the bomb.
This is completely absurd.
You know, none of this makes sense, in fact.
First of all, you have to explain what goes on in Chechnya.
And nobody in the U.S. is doing this, at least in mainstream media.
What happened in Chechnya from the beginning was a secular push towards independence after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Then their insurgency was basically taken over by the Islamists.
The Islamists start to be helped by who?
The CIA, still in the 90s, Osama Bin Laden, Al-Zawiri, and, you know, what, Al-Qaeda in the mid-90s.
They sent people to fight in Chechnya, you know, in the first phase, way before the second Chechnya war.
So the contact between the CIA and Islamists has been very strong for years.
Hey, wait, wait, wait, talk more about the extent of American involvement in backing the rebels in Chechnya.
Okay, I'll try to be very brief about that.
Still in the 90s, the Clinton administration, they said, okay, this is very good because this could destabilize Russia even further.
And we can use these guys just like we used the so-called freedom fighters in Afghanistan in the jihad in the 1980s.
So there were contacts between the CIA and the Islamist hardcore body of the insurgency, and not with the secular ones.
In fact, the secular ones, they were trying to, the Russians were trying to talk to them.
Okay, let's say, but Moscow would never talk to jihadists.
It was the CIA who was in contact with jihadists.
So later on, after the second Chechen war, when Putin went there and, well, basically they killed almost everybody in Grozny and in the environs, in fact.
I didn't go over there because I would never get a visa.
I have a very good friend, a Swiss journalist.
She used to go there in a way that nobody would in the West.
She would go as a Chechen woman.
She crossed the border at least 10, 12 times as a Chechen.
She stayed there with both sides of the insurgency, the jihadists and the seculars.
And then she would tell amazing stories of what really happened over there.
And she explained about the division between people who wanted some kind of deal with Russia and the jihadists.
She explained about the contacts between the jihadists and the pan-Islamic jihad all over the world, fighters that came from parts of the Middle East or from Uyghurs from Xinjiang, for instance, who were fighting alongside them.
And the fact that the Americans were just looking at that and say, okay, no problem.
After 9-11 was another story.
Because obviously the contact between the CIA and these jihadists ceased completely.
But still, the fact that these jihadists in their website, in one of their official websites, they said, look, these two guys, they have nothing to do with us.
Of course, they never had anything to do, because they were already, they were seculars to begin with.
They were not radicalized from the beginning.
They lived in Kyrgyzstan, where the jihad in Kyrgyzstan is practically non-existent, apart from some Uzbeks in the south of Kyrgyzstan.
They were completely secularized and lived an American way of life.
In fact, they never manifested any jihadi impulses according to everybody that knew them in the U.S.
So when you read what they were saying at the website, they were saying, no, these guys have nothing to do with us.
And it's practically proven, because three weeks before the Boston bombing, Dukhar Umarov, which is the current leader of the jihadists in Chechnya, he issued a proclamation calling the Chechen diaspora all over the world to come back to Chechnya from wherever they are to wage jihad over there in their own soil against the Russians once again.
So if these guys were in jihad, they would not be in the U.S.
They would be back to Chechnya.
They're not trying to plant a bomb in Boston.
And for what objective, what motive?
Myself and others, we cannot come up with a single good motive for this bombing coming from these two guys.
Even if it's just devil's advocate, look at Faisal Shahzad, who's living in America, had a professional salary job with a house and a wife and a car.
And he went home to Pakistan, and he saw a drone strike, and he joined the army on the other side.
Simple as that.
And he tried to blow up Times Square.
And the judge said to him, how could you do this?
Did you even look around to see if there were women and children around?
And he said, I did this because I joined up the war on the other side against you, who use drones to blow up women and children in Pakistan all the time.
And you don't look around and make sure there's no women and children around.
You do it all the time.
And so how in the world are you going to sit there like a hypocrite and criticize me for the very same thing?
In fact, I was just talking with Jacob Hornberger about how there's always going to be somebody who wants to join up as a soldier on the other side, as long as America's fighting a war, honestly, against.
If you were a Muslim, you would be able to be convinced, possibly, right, that the war is against Islam.
And all Muslims in all Islamic lands will either control your dictator or will bomb you until we do.
Right.
And so there's your motive right there.
In fact, if he went to Chechnya and he saw what the Russians were doing to the Chechens and saw their resistance there, why wouldn't he think, well, hey, I got an American passport.
I ought to be like my Chechen idols here, only take it back to the US.
Right.
But the thing is, Scott, he was in Chechnya recently, from 2011, 2012.
And Chechnya is much different now than it was during the height of the second Chechen war unleashed by Putin, more or less 10 years ago.
Now it's more or less, of course, it's a horrible thing to say, normalized compared to the massacre and the carnage 10 years ago.
But he saw, for instance, parts of Grozny rebuilt.
He saw, you know, some sort of economy, working economy in Chechnya.
He didn't see, for instance, Westerners doing drone strikes against the tribal Chechens or Chechen peasants, for instance, which is something that we have seen in Yemen, Somalia or the Pakistani tribal areas.
Well, sure, but he has seen America at war with Muslims all these years.
The family, exactly.
And what the family said about them, these families are close knit.
If they saw that one of theirs was becoming a closet jihadist, you know, they would do everything to stop it.
There is a very interesting element in all this, which has not been explored so far.
Their father, probably, it's not confirmed, he probably worked with the Russians against the Chechen jihadists.
Yeah, I read that on Juan Cole's blog.
So, you know, it was even in the family, you know, this thing.
This is why this guy left Kyrgyzstan and then Dagestan and sought to wreak political asylum in the U.S., because he couldn't live in the region any longer, because he was being targeted by Chechen jihadists.
This makes perfect sense in terms of getting his visa to the U.S., perfect sense.
You know, he was a political refugee, in fact, and he was being targeted.
So this was already in the family.
We are not jihadists, we don't deal with jihadists.
On the contrary, we are on the side of secularists and basically on the side of Moscow, actually.
So this is an extra point to demonstrate that within the family, there was absolutely no reason for any one of those to become a jihadist.
Well, unless it's like a Rand-Ron thing, where the son is a terrorist, rebelling against his awesome father.
Oh my God, if we go into this, we can get into Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Russian literature.
Yeah, we might be, yeah.
I don't need ten hours to explore this angle.
Yeah.
No, I don't know.
Hey, look, I'm the number one champion in the world of Trevor Aronson's work for Mother Jones Magazine and his great book, The Terror Factory, where he documents 50 sting operations set up entrapment jobs by the FBI since September 11th in this country.
But I would note that the ones that actually were attacks that went off at all, like Fort Hood and Faisal Shahzad in Times Square, those were not FBI put up jobs.
Those were, you know, guys that did those things because they wanted to do them.
All the put up jobs.
They've gone as far as doing dummy bombs, but I haven't seen a single put up job by the FBI out of 50 yet where something actually blew up.
I mean, even the first World Trade Center attack, the reason it happened was because they called off the sting.
And so the bomb maker informant was replaced by Ramzi Youssef, who was not an informant and made a real bomb on six people.
Look, but there's another possibility that we should at least consider, that this whole thing went wrong, that actually it was not meant to explode.
That's the Oklahoma City model there, I think.
So we have to consider this possibility.
It was a dry run.
They were asked to drop the bags over there.
Nothing was meant to explode, but it did.
So this would explain at least their behavior the day after.
Everything was normal.
They recovered the car.
They went to school, went to the gym, Twitter, socialized like nothing had happened.
I can't believe these guys were so...
One thing is for certain, they're not professionals.
Only cold-blooded killers are capable of such a behavior the day after a major bombing like this, Scott.
Really.
I get the impression that they learned they were the perpetrators by watching TV, actually.
When they saw their photos, they said, shit, it's us.
What do we do now?
They had no escape plan.
They had nothing.
No passports, no plane tickets, no getting out of town.
Nothing.
Well, if it wasn't then, they should have gone straight to the local news station and turned themselves in to the camera right then and there and started talking to it.
That's what I would have done.
Maybe they start saying, look, if we do this, we're going to be shot at the lobby.
Hey, listen, I saw an interview with their mechanic friend who, you know, they've known forever on CNN.
And it was an extended interview with this guy.
And he said the younger one came in on Tuesday and he's biting his thumbnail and he's walking in circles and he's acting crazy.
And I thought he must have been on drugs or something, man.
And he was saying, I need the car.
Give me the car.
I need the car.
Give me the car.
And he's saying, look, these things take time.
You know how it is.
I'll get around to it.
It'll be a few days.
And he's going, give me the car.
I don't care if it's done.
And it was a problem because I think the bumper was off it.
And so maybe the back license plate or something like that.
We're like, it's going to be a problem for you to leave now with the car.
It's not ready.
No, give me the car.
Give me the car.
And how he is, he thought he must be on drugs or something.
He was acting really crazy that the next day.
So, yeah, I don't know, man.
I'm I'm I'm holding I'm withholding my judgment on this.
Look, Scott, me too.
Not it's not because I wrote three pieces exploring the discrepancy.
I'm sorry.
I didn't find those articles before this interview.
I'm sorry.
I didn't I didn't see those articles and read them before this interview.
I just invite you on talk about Syria, which I still kind of want to do.
But yeah, it's unfortunate that I haven't read on what you wrote before this.
We can always talk about Syria.
You know, I'm sure many of the listeners will be interested, especially don't forget, especially because guess who?
Who's Obama is meeting today?
The emir of Qatar.
Oh, really?
In the White House.
This is this is absolutely crucial.
Guess what they're going to discuss?
Number one item is it has to be Syria, obviously.
And the emir is not very happy with the latest developments because he wants to keep weaponizing and weaponizing even more of all the rebels.
After all, what he plans for Syria is an extended, in fact, an extended Qatar.
He wants the Muslim Brotherhood in power and running it like some fucking sort of emirate, just like one of the GCC Gulf Council Revolution Club, you know.
So I wonder what they're going to talk about it.
And the fact that this Syrian National Council keep disbanding and the guy keeps resigning every day is not a very good sign for Doha.
And that's very interesting.
I was in Doha like two weeks ago before coming to Europe from Asia to Europe.
I usually stop in the Middle East.
So I stopped in Doha.
Never.
I can never find anybody, any official to talk about, OK, what do you really want for Syria?
It's absolutely impossible.
The best information I always get is from people on the margin, like Egyptian documentary filmmakers, you know, people who work in small positions in some of the ministries.
These are the guys who start saying, look, and it's complicated because there's a lot of money.
The weaponizing is really hardcore.
They are competing with Saudi Arabia because they are different factions than the Saudi Arabians within the Syrian rebels.
At the same time, they have to coordinate with Washington.
Everything that they ask from Washington, they usually get except weapons.
And obviously the official organization position now is that, no, we are only giving known lethal weapon, which is what the hell is known lethal weapon?
What is it for?
You know, the only thing that the rebels have been asking for, for two years now is we want guns.
We want to shoot at their air force, basically.
That's what they want.
They want finger-style missiles.
That's the only thing that they care about.
And obviously, the administration looks at the Jabhat al-Nura.
They are looking now at the connection between Jabhat al-Nura and guess what?
The Chechen jihadi.
This is something that I put it somewhere in one of these pieces.
It's very close to go from Chechnya to Aleppo.
It's, you know, it's less than a day drive.
And obviously, there is a back and forth of Chechen jihadis going to Syria and back.
This explains one of the main preoccupations of the Russians.
They want to control what's going on in Syria because they know there's going to be later on an influx of jihadis in Syria, not only Syrian Iraqis who fought with insurgency in the past decade, but non-Islamic going then to Chechnya to ask for the call that I referred a few minutes ago by Doku Umarov, come back to Chechnya because the jihadis here against the Russians.
So, you know, this whole thing is once again, it's completely interconnected.
So, I'm very curious to see what Qatar is going to do next to sum it all up, you know.
Well, so now where does the revolution stand?
Because I saw that the rebels, I guess, had, quote unquote, taken some small towns near Damascus and then the government took them back, that sort of thing.
Do they even have a chance of overthrowing the regime at this point?
Or is this just a stalemate forever?
No, look, this is what everybody knows for, I would say, for almost two years.
They have no chance to overthrow anything.
They don't have inside intel in Damascus.
They don't have powerful generals that defected and are helping them.
Once in a while, we have some minor character who defects from Damascus.
They don't control, they control what?
They control a few suburbs of Aleppo.
Aleppo is very big, it's a sprawling city.
In percentage terms, I would say that they control less than 30% of Aleppo, but in the suburbs, you know, the parts that don't matter.
It's almost countryside.
There's nothing over there, you know.
And Damascus, forget it, out of the question.
Plus, there is the Syrian army, they are trying to cut off this corridor that they use in northwest Syria up to the Turkish-Syrian border as well, and they have been very effective these past two or three weeks as well.
There was a Syrian army counteroffensive these past three or four weeks.
So, you know, in fact, the so-called rebels, including Jabhat al-Nura, which is the real hardcore fighting force, they're going nowhere.
They're pinning down the same suburbs in the northwest that they controlled for the past few months, these suburbs of Aleppo, and that's it.
The rest is desert.
What's the point of controlling a basin of desert?
Nothing, you know.
So, they're not going anywhere.
The problem now is they always believe that in the end, Washington would relent and would start weaponizing them.
This is what the Brits and the French are pushing for inside the European Union and inside NATO.
Every week, there's a meeting of NATO ministers, and the Brits and the French are saying the same thing.
We want it, we want it, we want it.
And the Germans and some Scandinavians, not Denmark, because the Danish, they're always pointing for a war, for a fight.
They say no, no way, because there's going to be a jihadist blowback, and they're absolutely correct.
But the Brits and the French, they're still in favor.
And obviously, the Obama administration, looking at the jihadist connection, Middle East, the Caucasus and all that, and possible blowback, which is because this is, they will never admit it, but this is one of the top interpretations in Washington of what happened, that this is jihadist blowback inside the United States.
They only see the fact that these guys are Chechens, no matter their background, no matter their education, but they are Chechens, so they are Chechen terrorists.
So, if Chechen terrorists do that in the US, this means if these Chechen terrorists are connected to Middle East terrorists, we are in trouble.
So, obviously, what we have from now on is aversion, total aversion, I would say, by the part of the Obama administration to weaponize Syrian jihadists, especially, or Syrian rebels of any kind, because the back and forth between the rebels and the jihadists, it's ongoing.
Well, I mean, look, what you're saying is, what you're saying is they're afraid to, but they keep doing it anyway.
They know better, but that's their policy.
I mean, they're not arming them with the stingers, I guess, but they're still giving them machine guns and RPGs and everything else like that, right?
Exactly, but they want anti-aircraft artillery, especially.
They're not going to get this unless somebody sells them or gives it to them from the black market, and I would say my best bet would be that sooner or later, the Saudis and the Qataris are going to start doing exactly that, you know, by themselves.
Without Washington's approval.
That's why I'm so interested to see what Qatar is going to do in the next few weeks, or the next month or so, you know, because they're getting patient with the whole thing.
So you're saying, basically, that Obama, he doesn't want them to do it, but he just doesn't have the wherewithal to tell them, no, I mean, we're the empire and they're the satellites, right, Qatar?
I mean, come on.
Exactly, because, you know, don't forget that Qatar nowadays is the real gendarme of the Gulf, remember?
Right, so wait a minute, wait, wait, wait, so doesn't that just mean, isn't that just like, you know, kind of plausible deniability, Barack Obama saying, oh, I really don't want to do it, but Qatar, you guys go ahead and do it for me, like having the Israelis sell missiles to Iran in the 1980s.
Exactly.
So this is a very strong possibility and a likely scenario for the next few weeks, is that Obama's going to say, no, we cannot do it, but it's going to happen anyway.
The thing is, it has to be untraceable back to the US.
So it's going to be traceable back to Saudi Arabia and Qatari money.
Maybe if the Turks are involved, it could be traceable to Turkish, you know, deploying these weapons, or at least getting these weapons from somewhere in Central Asia, for instance, from the Ukrainians, could be, you know, easily.
But the US has to be protected.
Well, now, Pepe, what's all this about training non-jihadi rebels, moderate rebels in Turkey and Jordan this whole time, especially more and more leaks about Jordan?
Is that your answer?
Do you remember, do you remember the moderate Taliban?
Yeah.
Five, six years ago.
The moderate al Qaeda.
It's the same shit.
There are no more.
I never saw moderate Taliban in my life.
So in other words, when the same thing.
So when the army trains, right?
So when the army trains the guys in in Jordan, if they're moderate enough that they can get along with the Americans for a day, they're really just taking their weapons and going back and giving them to the guys who are doing the fighting in Syria anyway, right?
You're absolutely right.
Just like the Sunnis in the Sunni triangle did with the Americans.
They they they trained.
They they got three hundred dollars a month.
They learned a few techniques and they're going to use the techniques for their own purposes, which from now on is to fight the Al-Maliki government in Baghdad.
That's the only thing that matters to them.
Well, so it was great because from their point of view, they were even paid to do that.
Yeah, well, you know, bin Laden used to talk about this phony Islamo fascist caliphate that at the time of his death apparently was the attic of his house where he's up there hiding even from his wives.
But anyway, so now it looks like George Bush actually created the Islamo fascist caliphate for him or sort of kind of the start of it.
Right.
Because if the if the rebels can't take Damascus, they're just going to take what they can and erase the line between Syria and Iraq as much as they can and form an alliance with the Islamic State of Iraq.
Now, I know just because they call themselves a state doesn't mean they're really the monopoly power in Sunni Iraq.
But then again, Nouri al-Maliki isn't the monopoly power in Sunni Iraq either, is he?
I mean, am I going am I being way too hyperbolic here with the the end of Iraq and Syria as we know it and the foundation of a new thing?
In fact, yeah, you're talking basically about some sort of a no border, free floating Middle East caliphate, Qom Emirate.
Yeah, we could call it George W. Bush land.
They would settle for that easily.
It could have, you know, parts of the eastern Syrian desert could have certainly a lot of province as well, depending on the local alliances with the local sheikhs.
There are sheikhs who would say, no, no way.
I don't want to hear about any jihadis.
And some other sheikhs will say, OK, this is good business.
Why not?
And if they help me fight Baghdad, why not use them?
So, you know, it's absolutely it's extremely possible, extremely possible.
And this Chechen connection now, which we're going to see how this call by Umarov for jihadis to go back to Chechnya again, how it's going to work.
I think the Russians are seriously worried about things because this could be the preamble for the third Chechen war.
Hey, could it be that could it be that that the Russian secret services put these kids up to what they may have done here in order to buy a bit of a blank check from the Americans so that the Americans don't side with the jihadis in Chechnya this time?
I love this possibility, Scott.
I haven't gone into it because it's so juicy.
The thing is, we have no evidence from anywhere.
No, no, no, that's just speculation.
I'm just my Russian contact.
Sure.
But it's an extremely juicy possibility.
And it would suit the Russians perfectly at this juncture.
There's no question.
There's no question at all.
In fact, your scenario would explain those six months that Tamerlan spent in Dagestan, mostly.
Yeah, I mean, it could have been instructed by the Russians and not by the jihadis.
This makes sense as well.
Yeah, it could have been Russians posing as jihadis.
As we've seen with these FBI states, it's really not hard for a government official to say, you know, either your life in a cage or you entrap this guy for us.
So go out there and be a radical imam, you know.
I mean, that's happened over and over.
We're like, wow, my new best friend sure does want to do something about American foreign policy.
Exactly.
So once again, just to show you, Scott, that there's so many unexplored scenarios in this whole story.
It's an extremely complex story.
I think we have, as journalists, we have to explore all possibilities.
Usually the official story is full of holes.
We already know that.
So we have to try to explore on the margins, underground, do a little bit of guerrilla journalism, in fact.
Because in all of these scenarios, most of these scenarios, at least they make perfect sense.
And they explain a lot of stuff that for the moment is, you know, it's unexplainable if we follow the official story.
Well, and look, I mean, at this point, the official story has it that this was revenge for what America has done.
I mean, that's the Washington Post headline that the U.S. wars were the motivation for this thing.
So that immediately, you know, is looks pretty bad for the empire.
People asking if it was worth it.
You know, I thought we had to fight him over there.
So we didn't have to fight him over here.
Whatever happened to that.
And the other official story is that the FBI and the CIA completely and totally dropped the ball on this guy who they would have, could have, should have known would do something like this.
That's their best spin that they've got is that this is all their fault.
Pride is a disaster.
Yeah, dude.
So, I mean, Robert Mueller should absolutely have to resign right now.
The entire counterterrorism division off with their heads.
How could this have happened on their watch?
Blam!
Scandal!
Immediately.
That's the best spin they possibly have.
But in absurd terms, Scott, nothing still beats the Iranian-cum-Mexican cartel plot to kill the Saudi ambassador in D.C.
Hey, you know what?
They cannot come up with something more absurd than that, you know?
Yeah, now, people might remember that one was from a year ago or so, and it was obvious that it was the informants who made up all the juicy parts of the plot.
The whole thing's kind of ridiculous.
But now, so let me ask you this about the allegations.
I don't know if you've had time to investigate this one yet.
The so-called al-Qaeda plot in Canada.
I actually know very little about it other than that they were being monitored very closely for a long time, which raises questions of the timing of this announcement to me.
And then, of course, there's the supposed tie to al-Qaeda in Iran.
What do you think about that?
Look, in itself, the headline says it all.
These are people who don't even talk.
Well, first of all, they've never been to the area.
They've never been to the Middle East.
They've never been to Iran.
So they don't know how the whole thing works.
They don't know much about Sunni and Shiite, just like Bush 10 years ago.
You remember that.
So obviously, and they all know there is an alliance of circumstance between al-Qaeda and the government in Tehran.
This is completely absurd.
They hate each other's guts, not only in political and geopolitical terms, but religiously.
Any Shiite is considered by these hardcore Wahhabi jihadists as worse than an apostate.
They have to be killed, period.
With no questions asked.
So Iran would never harbor al-Qaeda operatives and let them do anything, especially in a third country.
What did happen over 10 years ago, in fact, was that they apprehended al-Qaeda operatives who were transiting into Iran.
So they kept these people as bargaining chips.
And then, if something very good was offered, they would release them or give them to a third party, or let them go as long as there were some favors involved.
But a collaboration, the way it's being sold by those mainstream media headlines between Iran or even Iranian agencies or some Iranian intel agencies and al-Qaeda is completely, completely, completely absurd.
Well, now, there was a case, let's see, I think it was two years ago.
I'm sure you know the story better than me.
They say al-Qaeda guys, which I guess means Arabs hiding in Pakistan.
Maybe once upon a time, friends with Osama or something, who kidnapped an Iranian ambassador.
And then the Iranians traded a guy named al-Adl, something like that.
But Flint Levert and Michael Scheuer both told me that he was a real guy.
Saif al-Adl, Saif al-Adl, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
And so then that was kind of a big deal.
And then they just indicted the son-in-law who went to Turkey and then to Jordan, where they nabbed him in Jordan, at least they say, and brought him back to the US and indicted him in New York.
Isn't that strange?
Look, when they have somebody from al-Qaeda, they trade when something like this happens.
So they kept a few, I would say, high-quality prisoners for a few years.
Of course, the bottom line, though, is, as you say, it's all about the headline.
The headline says al-Qaeda and Iran in the same sentence.
And that's just one more.
The headlines make a direct connection, exactly.
So if you read the headline, the first thing that an average reader will think, the Iranians sent two al-Qaeda people to blow up the New York-Toronto rail line.
That's it.
That's all you need to know from the point of view of mainstream media.
So try to debunk this whole thing.
It's very complicated.
Once you're installed in the collective psyche, how are you going to tell people, no, the Iran-al-Qaeda is not exactly how it works?
First of all, you need, what, five, a thousand words at least to explain the rudiments of this war and how they do not match.
You cannot do it in another counter-attacking headline, for instance.
It's impossible.
Well, lucky for us.
If you win the PR war, Scott, we all know that.
All of us work in the media.
If you win the PR war with a five, six-word headline, that's it.
You're immune to anything.
It's very easy nowadays to manipulate people.
You don't need all that oral part of Farnalia, in fact.
You just need a good headline, in English, obviously.
If you have your headline in Arabic or Persian, it's not going to work.
Right.
Well, look, I mean, the truth of what you say is in the numbers.
It's a scientific fact that the American people believe the Iranians either are making nukes, or they already have nukes, even though you can read in the papers from time to time that all American intelligence professionals agree that, nuh-uh, all of them, and the IAEA, too.
It doesn't matter.
You're right.
It doesn't matter because they're not going to read the conclusions of the NIEs.
They're not going to read those very long, extremely long pieces by, you know, Paul Piller or the Leverets, you know, or Trita Parsi.
They're not going to read that kind of stuff.
They're going to read the headline.
Iran is working towards a nuclear weapon.
And anything that Netanyahu says, it's very simple.
In fact, I don't even do a test.
You know, my Google News page, I set it to U.S. and not to other countries where I'm in.
So the first thing that I always see is U.S. headline.
Anything that any Israeli aid says, five minutes later, there's a huge headline on top of Google News, you know, all the time.
So they can get away with anything.
Anything, in fact.
And then when we start looking at all the headlines regarding Iran is always out.
Iran is sneaking out of whatever.
Iran is suspiciously working on this and so and so.
In fact, to tell you the truth, one of my, I'll tell you a secret.
In fact, to all of you who are listening, if I was younger and I spoke fluent Farsi, I would offer my services as a PR agent to the Iranian government.
Just for the fun of it, for the exercise.
You would certainly be busy at that job.
There's no doubt about that.
I feel sometimes like, you know, I am almost in a way like an official spokesman for them or whatever.
You know, I hate all governments and especially any theocracy controlling jurisdiction over people's consciences and stuff.
Man, I'm, you know, nuts to them.
It just so happens, though, that everything my government says about their government is a damn lie.
All of it.
In fact, I'm surprised my government even admits the correct position of Iran on the map.
I mean, for all you know, why not put it over there in East Asia or something?
I don't know.
Nothing stopping them.
They have no connection to reality at all.
And they got Joby Warwick and David Sanger at the Post and the Times to make all their lies sound true.
Hey, look, independent confirmation in the Post and the Times.
Oh, then we're just screwed for years on end.
It's insane.
It's brainwashing.
And whatever, whatever happens, you know, people will always be saying, no, it's in the New York Times or in the Washington Post.
So it must be true.
The best information available anywhere in the world is on the net.
It's not on papers or it's not on networks.
And people still believe what they hear in the network and what they read in the paper.
This hasn't changed yet.
Well, you know, at least in the case of the Boston thing, you know, to try to change it.
I think we're all going to die for it.
You know, no matter what the spin is, they can't possibly get us into a war in Chechnya because, man, that's on the Russian side of the mountain.
I don't know.
War in Chechnya, no.
War in Chechnya, it's out of it.
At least that is out of the question.
The Russians are worried about their next possible war in Chechnya.
But this is a Russian Chechen affair and nothing to do with the West.
They put troops in Georgia right after 9-11, said it was a counterterrorism thing in this valley.
Trust us and put some troops in there, although I guess it didn't last too long.
Oh, yes.
Look, a lot of Western intelligence agencies, they would use Georgia again to help the jihadists against the Russians in Chechnya if there is a third Chechen war.
There's absolutely no question about this.
And so then now we got six minutes left.
So what's it all about?
It's got something to do with these pipelines sticking out of the Caspian Basin and making their way toward the ocean.
You got this great piece at Al Jazeera that I hope people will look at, all about the peace pipeline, which out of all of these pipelines, this is a very specific and particular one.
Could you please describe it and what's the big deal?
Yeah, the big deal is that the Iranians are going to finish the Pakistani stretch of the IP pipeline.
The IP pipeline, I think most of our listeners already know at least a little bit of the story.
It started as the IPI, Iran, Pakistan, India.
Ten years ago, was the original planning, was supposed to link the gas field in South part, the biggest one in the world, shared by Iran and Qatar, through southern Pakistan and going all the way to India.
And then the pressure by the Bush administration was so relentless, so overwhelming that India dropped out.
And this opened the possibility that the Chinese would join.
And now, from now on, the possibility that the Chinese will at least be part of a great deal of the operations is enormous.
It's practically sealed.
I'll explain why.
So Pakistan didn't have the money to finish their stretch.
So Iran is lending the money to Pakistan under one condition.
Don't pull an India on us.
This means whatever the US says, we are going to finish this pipeline.
And the Pakistanis said, yes, let's do it.
So it's going to be ready in 2014.
Starting in 2015, Pakistan will get all the gas that they need from Iran, which is extremely important in terms of Pakistan is a very poor country.
There are energy blackouts every day, everywhere.
Assembly lines stop, that kind of stuff.
It's going to end.
In terms of Pakistan infrastructure and even national security, it's a major plus.
So this is a strategic thing, this umbilical cord.
It's very important.
It's not only a pipeline.
It's a geostrategical power play.
It's very important and good for Iran in terms of revenue as well and diversifying their customers, of course.
But there's an extra element to it that is even more interesting.
This pipeline goes through Gwadar port.
Gwadar port is in the Arabian Sea.
It's not very far from the Iranian border.
The Iranians, they have their own port not very far from the border, Shabahar.
But in this port, the Iranians are, they need to deal with India.
And India is going to use a lot of Shabahar as well to do business with Iran.
And Afghanistan is going to use Shabahar as well.
So Afghanistan is going to have a direct gateway to the Arabian Sea.
So this is an Indian, Irani, Afghani project, Shabahar.
And Gwadar is going to be an Irani, Pakistani, Chinese project.
Because the Chinese, they built the port of Gwadar, in fact.
Then the exploration of the port was by a Singaporean company.
They, for a number of reasons, very complicated, they stopped that thing last year.
So a Chinese company is going to manage the port from now on.
And the Chinese are considering two possibilities.
One, if the Indians don't want an extension of the IP pipeline, we do.
So it's going to become IPC, Iran, Pakistan, China.
And they can use Gwadar as one of their ports in the, their, I mean, their expansion.
Wait, wait, we're almost out of time.
Wait, wait, Pepe, we're almost out of time.
So the question is, what are the Americans going to do about it?
They can use Gwadar as a port for, you know, for Chinese needs.
And they can also build an extension of the pipeline from Gwadar to Xinjiang in western China.
So in the next few years, the big thing is strategic energy collaboration between Iran, Pakistan, and China.
So guess the reaction in Washington about all this, right?
They're mad as hell and they're not going to take it anymore.
Or they can't do anything about it.
They're not going to take it anymore.
Who are they going to bomb?
Pakistan.
No.
Oh, I hope not.
Pakistan, yeah, that's the weakest link, is that.
Well, they want to bomb Iran anyway, so maybe there'll be a twofer.
Anyway, we're out of time.
Listen, Chuck Hagel said it's OK, Scott.
Hey, and if he says it's OK, then we, you know, it's true.
All right.
Hey, listen, thanks so much for coming on the show again.
I appreciate it, Pepe.
Thank you, Scott.
Always a huge pleasure.
All right.
Always sends his best regards.
Oh, thank you very much.
All right.
So that's Pepe Escobar from the Asia Times, atimes.com.
And you can also find him at aljazeera.com.
We'll be back here at 11 to 1 Texas time to run knowagendastream.com.
And Mike's got a great new book coming out.
So also keep your eye on writermichaelswanson.com for more details.
Man, you need some Liberty stickers for the back of your truck.
At libertystickers.com, they've got great state hate, like Pearl Harbor was an inside job.
The Democrats want your guns.
U.S. Army, die for Israel.
Police brutality, not just for black people anymore.
And government school, why you and your kids are so stupid.
Check out these and a thousand other great ones at libertystickers.com.
And of course, they'll take care of all your custom printing for your band or your business at thebumpersticker.com.
That's libertystickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
Hey, everybody.
Scott Horton here.
Ever think maybe your group should hire me to give a speech?
Well, maybe you should.
I've got a few good ones to choose from, including How to End the War on Terror, The Case Against War with Iran, Central Banking and War, Uncle Sam and the Arab Spring, The Ongoing War on Civil Liberties, and of course, Why Everything in the World is Woodrow Wilson's Fault.
But I'm happy to talk about just about anything else you've ever heard me cover on the show as well.
So check out youtube.com/scotthortonshow for some examples and email scott at scotthorton.org for more details.
See you there.
Hey, y'all.
Scott here.
Like I told you before, the Future Freedom Foundation at fff.org represents the best of the libertarian movement.
Led by the fearless Jacob Hornberger, FFF writers, James Bovard, Sheldon Richman, Wendy McElroy, Anthony Gregory and many more.
Write the op-eds and the books, host the events and give the speeches that are changing our world for the better.
Help support the Future Freedom Foundation.
Subscribe to their magazine, The Future of Freedom.
Or to contribute, just look for the big red donate button at the top of fff.org.
Peace and freedom.
Thank you.
