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On the line, I got our good friend Trita Parsi.
He is the president of the National Iranian American Council.
The peace between us and them lobby in Washington, D.C.
And he's got this very important article at the Huffington Post.
It's called Much Ado About Nothing.
Politico's Iran deal investigation debunked.
Welcome back to the show, Trita.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well.
Thank you so much for having me.
Very happy to have you back on the show here.
And, well, of course, I can count on you to take up the cudgels when something like this happens.
And, you know, actually, it used to be virtually every day, right?
So it must be getting a little bit easier.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
So we have the Iran deal.
And, you know, they can't really argue that the Iranians have some secret parallel weapons program or any of these kind of rumors of 10, 12 years ago.
Those are all tired.
The inspections regime has been expanded.
The nuclear program and the stockpile of low enriched uranium has been way reduced.
And so all anybody can complain about is, let's see, the administration complains that the Iranians aren't living up to the spirit of the deal because they're doing things that aren't in the deal.
And then, well, there's this.
Politico says there's a big scandal about the lengths that the Obama administration went to to let, what, criminals out of prison?
Or what was it exactly that they did in order to get this Iran nuclear deal through, Trita?
So the investigation, as they call it, claimed that as part of the nuclear deal, the United States essentially ended a couple of investigations against individuals who the U.S. government accused of having been involved in procurement of parts for the nuclear program.
Now, from the outset, however, the investigation commits a significant error because it seems that it deliberately conflates efforts that may have been done in order to release Americans, innocent Americans who were held in prison in Iran with the negotiations over the nuclear issue.
And what I do in the article is that I explain why the two actually are separate.
And I don't accuse them of having deliberately done so, this conflation.
But I think there's a reason to believe why it may be deliberate because if you were to go out and say, oh my God, Obama released, or actually didn't even release because none of these were actually in U.S. custody, stop the investigation against some folks who actually were in Iran at the time that we never could get in order to win the freedom of Jason Rezaian or Amir Hekmati, a former U.S. Marine held in prison in Iran, everyone would be like, what are you talking about?
If that's the price to pay for it, so be it.
You know, we need to get these Americans free.
But instead, it seems like there's a deliberate effort to conflate it with a nuclear issue because it's an embattled issue, it's a controversial issue, and then make the case that, oh my God, there was even more concessions that were given than originally was said.
And what I explain in the article is that that is extremely unlikely, if not outright impossible, to have been the case because of the structure of the deal and the amount of leverage the Iranians had, etc.
And I can go into detail in explaining why this is so unlikely.
Yeah, please do that because, as you're saying there, this is not the first time we've heard this before, secret side deals, just basically trying to corrupt the basis of the deal in the first place.
Since, like I was saying, they can't really attack the deal itself because what a good deal.
They didn't even really need one in the first place.
They already had a deal, the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and the Iranians already weren't making nuclear weapons in the first place.
But now, they've just double-extra-guaranteed that to the nth degree.
So, all they can complain about is try to come up with these scandalous peripheral issues if they can.
So, yeah, go ahead, take us through it.
Exactly.
Yeah, and I get into why that is as well.
So, let me first explain why this couldn't be the case.
First of all, the deal was structured in such a way so that by October 18th of 2015, the Iranians had to essentially make a decision that they were going to dismantle a large number of their centrifuges.
And as soon as they had done so, and they had been certified by the IAEA, then the United States and Europe were binded by law, because they made a decision that moment as well, that they would lift sanctions on Iran once the IAEA had certified it.
So, by the time the Iranians had dismantled the centrifuges that they were supposed to dismantle, the Iranians really didn't have much leverage left to push the U.S. to get anything else.
Neither did the U.S. have any leverage to be able to say, oh no, we're not going to do it, because by law, the U.S. was bound to lift or waive the sanctions as soon as the IAEA had certified that that was the case, which had been happening by January 2016.
So, the idea that there were additional prisoners or charges that were dropped flies in the face of the fact that the Iranians actually didn't have any leverage, and the U.S. was bound to do this.
If there had been no prisoner swap, the nuclear deal would still have gone forward, because the only thing it was contingent upon was the IAEA verifying that the Iranians had done their part of the deal, which they had.
So, you're saying that the negotiations over the prisoners were taking place after the summer, after the deal was already being implemented?
There were parts of it that had started early on, but most of that negotiations actually took place during that fall, and were completely separate and independent from this.
Well, actually, I think there's a connection.
I mean, it sounds to me like the warming up of relations due to the negotiations over the nuclear deal actually probably provided some diplomatic room for them to negotiate on these other issues.
So, if there's a connection, it's a purely positive one, it sounds like.
Well, it's an indirect connection in that case, because it essentially means that the circumstances are more fruitful for prisoner swap negotiations.
Right.
In other words, John Kerry can just hit a button on his cell phone and say, hey, Zarif, there's one more thing I want to talk to you about, and they know each other now, they're getting along a little bit better, they can talk about more issues than just the nuclear deal at that point, since they'd resolved it so well.
Absolutely, but it is still not directly linked, because let's say that John Kerry had called Zarif and said, hey, can we do something, and we'll give you a couple of our prisoners, you give us a couple of your prisoners, and then it turned out that that negotiation didn't end up well, well, guess what?
The nuclear deal would still have gone forward.
Right.
So, in a sense, it's not dependent on any prisoner swap, and certainly not dependent on the U.S. giving more concessions.
And then there's one more interesting thing that happened.
A couple of days before the nuclear deal is supposed to completely go forward with implementation, with the U.S. lifting the sanctions, ten American sailors inadvertently end up in Iranian waters because they have a mechanical error on their ship in the Persian Gulf.
Within 16 hours, that issue is resolved.
And one of the things that the Americans were quite happy about, and I'm going to write about this in the first chapter of my book that will be out in a month, is that the Iranians did not ask for any additional concessions.
They just want to make sure that the U.S. took the blame for it, admitted that it was a mistake, and it didn't make any harsh accusations or statements, and then just both sides could move on.
So if the article in the Politico was correct in the sense that it was saying that the Iranians were constantly just milking the U.S. for more and more concessions, well, they had ten Marines in their custody, or sailors.
They had a lot of leverage, and they could have asked for more things, and they didn't.
Well, and that goes to the question of the spirit of the deal, too.
It certainly does.
The whole controversy last summer was, oh, man, they're going to exploit these loopholes, and they're going to refuse to allow the inspectors to go to the Parchin military base.
They're going to drag it out for two weeks through the loophole, and move their secret uranium enrichment program out the back door, and all these kinds of things.
And yet the whole time, really since long before the deal, the Iranians' policy has been, hey, our hands are up and our books are wide open, guys.
That's been their policy all along.
So in other words, it makes no sense for them to, on one hand, pass the deal, but then cheat and try to get away with having a secret nuclear weapons program anyway.
It also makes no sense that they're willing to concede this much to the Americans and give up this much of the nuclear kind of semi-deterrent that they had in the size of the peaceful nuclear program that they had there, while at the same time wishing to, or even conceiving, that they would come at Obama and Kerry after the deal was done, and then come at them all hard and try to wring these concessions out of them and embarrass them in front of the Republicans and all these kinds of things that would undermine the very basis of the cooperation in the first place.
In other words, it's like trutherism, basically.
You have to accept the conclusion first that the Iranians are always up to no good, and always perfidious, and always manipulating, and always getting away with, I think they even back ISIS and the Muslim Brotherhood, and whatever, this kind of thing.
And then it all makes sense that they would try to blackmail Obama over the sailors, or over the Washington Post reporter, or anyone else.
But when you're looking at the actual state of the situation, it makes no sense whatsoever that the Ayatollah would be taking a hard line like that, at all.
Especially once the deal was already being implemented.
Yeah, and this goes where the political article, in my view, actually is helpful.
Because what it does, it gives us a glimpse as to why there is this obsession with opposing the nuclear deal.
And I think there's two things that stand out more than anything else.
First of all, a mindset in which the very idea of diplomacy, the very idea of deal-making, which means you give something to get something, is something that these people oppose.
What they want is that the United States should just dictate everything it wants, and every other country should just comply with it.
As Richard Perle used to say, the only carrot the United States should offer is to offer not to bomb the country.
But with that type of a bully mentality, yes, if there had been a concession on some procurement investigation, which the article never proved, but even if there had been, that is not worth the price of preventing the Iranians from having a nuclear weapons option.
Because you don't want to give any concessions, period.
You don't want to make any deals, period.
And secondly, what it shows is that if they truly were correct in their own talking points, and truly believed in them, that Iran was on the way to a nuclear weapon, that the heavens would fall because this was an existential threat, they should be really happy about this nuclear deal.
But instead, what we're seeing is that the existential threat to these people seems to be the idea of striking a deal with Iran, any deal with Iran.
That is what they're fearing far, far more than what the Iranians are doing with their centrifuges.
And Iran will constantly have to relitigate this.
Daniel Pletka, the neoconservative leader at the American Enterprise Institute, Ahmed Chalabi's friend, so in a way, Iran's good friend.
She has said, on the record, I have the clip here somewhere, Trita, that even if Iran got a nuclear weapon, their fear wouldn't be a nuclear first strike against Israel or any such thing.
The Iranians aren't crazy or stupid or suicidal like that.
The danger would be that they would sit on their nuclear weapon and act like a responsible nuclear weapon state, just like the rest of them, and that that would prove that they were reasonable, and that they could be dealt with.
And that would be the worst thing, because moderation and understanding and diplomacy is the enemy.
We must stay, not necessarily at war, but on an almost war footing from now on, I guess.
Definitely.
I mean, it's easier to have an approach of saying, look, we're just going to get concessions from all countries without giving anything, if you can point to those countries behaving badly and behaving in a hostile way.
But once they're actually moderate and they're reasonable and they're trying to come to a compromise, it's much more difficult for you to convince the American people to go on a war path.
And again, and that's the point I'm making in the article, and that's actually why my new book is called Losing an Enemy, Obama, Iran, and the Triumph of Diplomacy, because it actually came to the core of it that some people, both in Iran, but also very much in Washington, D.C., don't want to lose an enemy.
Well, yeah, I mean, there were those who always looked at negotiations as simply a checkbox on the road to war to show that negotiations can't work.
And yet, you know, we see right in front of us, I mean, I don't know exactly how serious to take it, but there's some level of increased threat of war on the Korean Peninsula right now.
And due to this exact policy of trying to scotch a deal that we had, a perfectly good deal that we had, in this exact kind of manner in 2002, they have, the North Koreans, have A-bombs now.
And, you know, the rumor is that they're working on H-bombs.
I guess they claim that they're working on H-bombs, or at least, you know, boosted atomic bombs.
And this is all because the hawks said that the enemy here is moderation and diplomacy and understanding.
What we need to do is ratchet up tensions, that way we'll better get what we want.
So they broke the deal, and then what did they get out of it?
I guess they could have had a fake excuse to start a war, if they had wanted to start a war, over it in 2003 or 2004, and yet they were too bogged down in Iraq for that.
So what did they get?
They just got an enemy state that now has nukes, that before it didn't.
And it seems like this is what they're talking about doing with Iran now, that these people must be taught a lesson, that we only understand one thing, force, and that they better not try to deal with us, because we're crazy and can't be dealt with.
Yeah, yeah.
And now we're going forward, and we're going to see how things will unfold with the nuclear deal.
And Trump needs to make a decision within the next 16 or so days that he has to renew the waivers.
If he doesn't, then the U.S. is no longer in compliance with the nuclear deal, will have violated it.
And that will obviously create a significant amount of problems.
Now, in this case, though, unlike the agreed framework, we got the whole U.N. Security Council assigned on to this gigantic international pseudo-treaty here.
So that means it should be much more difficult for Trump to break the deal than it was for Bush Jr. with Korea in 2002, right?
Actually, what I think would be a more correct statement, Scott, is to say that it would be very costly for Trump to do so.
But it's not difficult, because all he needs to do is to do nothing.
There are active decisions that he needs to make in order to continue to be in compliance with this deal.
If he just forgets to do so in time, he has violated the deal, the U.S. is out of compliance, and the rest of the world will rightfully be very, very upset, because the United States, under Trump's leadership, will have proven itself to be a destabilizing force.
Right now, today, Reuters reported that the committee in the British Parliament has drawn the conclusion that the United Kingdom cannot rely on U.S. leadership, and rather points to it as being a potentially destabilizing force in the Middle East.
This is really dangerous.
Yeah.
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Well, now, so, let me be Pollyanna for just a second here.
What if I was the president?
I don't know.
I can't say what if the other guy had won the election last fall, because that wouldn't be much of an improvement.
But what if it was me up there, Trita, and what if I had said, Hey, look, Iranians, I know missiles aren't part of the deal or anything, but I got all these hawks I got to deal with, these Republicans and the Israelis, and they're just freaking out about the missiles, so maybe we could open up some new negotiations about the missiles.
And as long as, you know, we're being cool and signing our waivers and going along on the nuclear deal, maybe that can be the good basis for further negotiation, if only so that I can, to help undermine the hawks trying to undermine the real big deal here, the nuclear deal that we have going on.
Well, do you think that that's a possibility, or at that point the Iranians are going to say, forget it, Polly?
Well, in principle, there's a couple of things.
Some people have called that a renegotiation.
That would not be a renegotiation.
A renegotiation would be to go back and look at what they already negotiated and see what they would do differently.
What you're suggesting, if I understand it correctly, is that they say, Well, we got this deal, good, let's lock that down, and let's see if we can make a deal on some other issues, because we continue to have problems with Iran, and we've already proven that through negotiations we actually can reach some good results, so why don't we try it a little bit more on other issues, and then go to the Iranians and see if there's an openness to be able to negotiate.
Now, in principle, I think actually that would be a fantastic idea.
In practice, there's going to be some difficulties.
First of all, after going out there for so many months and saying that he hates this deal, he's going to walk out of it, and suggesting just last week that he would do so, his vice president calling it the so-called Iran deal, nuclear deal.
The U.S. has credibility to negotiate not just any further deal with Iran, but any deal with any other country in the world now is at an all-time low, because the United States has shown itself to be rather unreliable.
So that's going to be a major problem that the U.S. is going to have to overcome to be able to prove itself trustworthy.
Secondly, if it is on the issue of missiles, we have to remember, when it came to the nuclear issue, there was a legally binding international treaty that Iran was part of that constituted the basis of these negotiations.
The United States could rightfully say that Iran should not have nuclear weapons because the Iranians had signed a nonproliferation treaty, and by signing it they had allowed any nuclear weapons.
There is no treaty that the Iranians have signed that would tell them that they cannot have missiles.
In fact, what the Iranians have in general militarily is a fraction of what the Saudis or the UAE and other countries in the region have, by courtesy of American arms sales.
But nevertheless, that's going to be a challenge.
What is the basis of that negotiation?
What's the legal basis of it?
But there are still, I think, ways that this could be done, and one has to understand, though, that as a result of the Iraq-Iran war, the Iranians have invested heavily into missiles as their defense, because Saddam Hussein was raining scuds over Tehran, and the Iranians did not have any retaliatory capability back then.
So one of the lessons is that they decided they're going to have this in order to prevent any such attacks on Iran in the future.
So I think it would be better if they didn't, but that would necessitate a larger disarmament of the region as a whole.
You cannot go to one country, particularly the country that spends the least on arms in the entire Middle East, and ask it to disarm while not asking the others that we are arming not to disarm.
We sold $80 billion of weapons to Saudi Arabia.
They're using it to starve the people of Yemen right now.
Got that right.
Well, let me ask you this now about those missiles.
I think it's important.
I really want to emphasize it.
I think a disarmament effort would be fantastic, but then we have to ask ourselves, who is the armor in the Middle East right now?
And that is the United States.
So if we want other countries there to start disarming, we need to also start pushing our allies to start disarming, which essentially means us stopping to sell them weapons.
And now, isn't there a question?
I'm trying to go back now.
I'm thinking of the so-called smoking laptop, the Israeli forged laptop, that was full of these claims that the Iranians were developing nuclear capable missiles.
And then part of how that was debunked by Gareth Porter and I guess others as well, was the fact that when the laptop was forged, the forgers, they were making some pretty good educated guesses, but they didn't know that the Iranians were secretly developing a new generation of missile to replace the one that they drew up these schematics for a delivery vehicle for a nuclear warhead to go on the old kind of missile that the Iranians were retiring.
And so then, but that raises the question, I guess, of whether the new ones are even, if it's even possible to fit a nuke on the front if they did have one, if I Dream of Jeannie gave them one or something like that, or whether it would have had to been the old kind of missile to even fit.
I think the discrepancy was about the shape of the nose and whether it was a dolphin nosed missile or whether it was a more cone shape that would allow for a nuclear warhead and delivery vehicle to even fit in there.
So, I mean, that seems like I know I'm sort of in the weeds and it sounds kind of ridiculous, but that's kind of an important point.
If these missiles can only be conventional missiles anyway, then that's half the scare about them.
I mean, not that there's any nuclear weapons in Iran anyway, of course, but anyway, that's half the scare is that these are one day will be nuclear weapons capable missiles.
Yeah, but your point there is important nevertheless, because in order to truly make sure that there is an effective effort here, we need to actually know what is going on there and not work off of fantasies.
And the issue right now is that I've spoken to no expert on missiles who believes that what the Iranians have is the type of missiles that would be valuable for a nuclear weapons delivery.
It doesn't mean that they may not be developing those, but there is a UN Security Council resolution that essentially is stating that the Iranians need to make sure that they are not, it calls on them not to develop nuclear weapons capable missiles.
And so far, there's no evidence that they are.
So even the Trump administration kind of had to grudgingly accept that it was, it had zero support in the Security Council when Michael Flynn gave the Iranians a notice and try to scare them because of that missile test, because there was no basis for the Security Council to step in.
But again, I want to go back and say, look, I think ultimately it's not good for weapons of that kind to be in the region.
I think part of the reason why this region is so unstable is because there's so much weapons there and it would be valuable to have a real disarmament effort.
But there is no such thing as a partial disarmament effort that only focuses on one country, particularly when it focuses on the country that actually spends the least on arms compared to many other countries in the region.
Well, and especially when, I mean, I don't know their main or which, if Israel or Saudi is the bigger presumed enemy of Iran, but Israel we know has hundreds of nuclear weapons.
And according to Daniel Ellsberg, he told me that Mordecai Venunu himself told him.
So for hearsay, that's pretty good hearsay from Venunu to Ellsberg to me that they have H-bombs too.
And of course, we know they have multiple nuclear submarines, second strike capability and all this kind of thing that usually goes unsaid, sort of, I think, because everybody already knows it.
But then again, it's an important part of the discussion, just how well armed with nuclear weapons and even thermonuclear weapons the Israelis are.
While, as we're discussing, the Iranians have nothing like that whatsoever.
But now, let me ask one more scare story about the Iran deal, Trita, before I let you go.
And that is, it's temporary.
And man, 10 years, 15 years, this is a blink of an eye.
And all that's really happening here is that the Ayatollah, the mad, brilliant genius, suckered loser Obama into this deal where he gets to perfect his second, third, fourth, fifth, I don't know, generation centrifuges, experimenting around at the comm facility and so forth under the terms of this deal.
But then once the deal is up, man, they're going to be able to break out so fast because they're going to have these awesome centrifuges, all perfected and ready to go at supersonic speeds.
And they're going to be cranking out nukes just like the North Koreans.
And we won't be able to stop them.
And it's all because Obama's a sucker.
What are we supposed to do about that?
The time limit, the sunset on this deal?
Well, I have to say this is just complete nonsense because, first of all, all these armament trees and nuclear trees and star trees, et cetera, have time limitations.
And the entire purpose of the deal with the Iranians was to find a solution in which the international community's confidence in the Iranian nuclear program being a solely peaceful one could be restored.
And once it's been restored, meaning that there's no fear that they're doing something problematic, then Iran has the right to be able to enjoy all of the different sovereign rights it has that are regulated by the Nonproliferation Treaty.
So over the course of 15 years now, it's going to be an effort to make sure that there's so much transparency in the nuclear program, that there's so much that we know about it, so that the international community can be confident that it is peaceful.
Well, if it's confident that it is peaceful, then there's no problem that the Iranians have a nuclear program.
There's no bigger problem that the Iranians have a nuclear program than that Belgium, Japan, and Sweden have a nuclear program.
So there had to be a pathway for the Iranians to be able to prove that they now are as peaceful in the nuclear program as Sweden and other countries are, and as a result, be able to enjoy the same type of rights that they do.
And then, in order to make sure that this is then upheld even after the deal, there are elements, the most important elements of the deal, that are permanent.
And that is the fact that at year eight, as long as the U.S. doesn't violate the deal, the Iranians are going to ratify the Additional Protocol, which means that all of these massive inspections are going to be permanent.
They're always going to be there.
And as long as those inspections and the transparency measures are permanent, the Iranian ability to cheat and quietly, secretly develop a nuclear weapon is going to be as close to zero as is physically possible.
And that's why this is a deal that has such an overwhelming support by the nonproliferation and by the scientific community, who had a key role in making sure that this worked.
I mean, when the U.S. was negotiating this, they had built a replica of the Iranian nuclear program and whenever there were new proposals made in Geneva, they ran it by the scientists back in Los Alamos and some of these other plants.
They recreated it, tested it to see, is there a way for the Iranians to cheat?
And if there wasn't, they okayed it.
And the President's final decision was very much colored as to what the scientific community has said was okay or was not okay.
And those are scientists that know how to build a nuclear bomb, know how to build a nuclear bomb in their basement.
And they are supposed to be questioned by members of Congress that don't even have a high school education and know nothing about these issues, but read articles on Breitbart News and other places and as a result think that they know something about this issue.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, and that's the whole thing of it, is the Republicans aren't going away and the Israelis aren't going away.
For that matter, the Democrats aren't going away.
You know, Lord knows if it had been President Hillary Clinton instead of Obama, she wouldn't have had a deal at all.
You know, they barely had to pull her teeth to even get her to mildly support the thing, I think.
And I write about that in the book as well, that at the end of the day, had it been Hillary instead of John Kerry as Secretary of State, the type of dedication, the type of political will that is necessary in order to get a deal like this, it's really difficult to see that she would have mustered it.
She wouldn't have taken it.
I mean, it takes courage to take a risk for peace.
And that's not something that she historically had shown.
Well, and see, this is the joke too.
If she had become President, I don't think she would have violated the deal or toyed with the idea of violating the deal the way that Trump is doing right now.
Well, probably not.
Yeah, she would have been mildly better on Iran than him, but worse on some other things.
But, you know, this is the real joke of this whole thing, is, like I was saying sort of at the beginning, they already had a deal.
Iran signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty forever ago.
Mohamed ElBaradei said in the entire 21st century long that there's no evidence, there is no indication that they have diverted any nuclear material to any military or other special purpose.
And that was always true.
And when the CIA finally quit lying about it in 2007, we all knew it was true.
Then, official on the record, even the Mossad came out in harrets and said, yeah, the CIA is right.
They haven't even decided they want to make one.
So even at that point, rumors that there was some secret program, some parallel program under a mountain somewhere, all that was debunked.
We didn't need to do this deal at all.
And all the right-wingers crying about all of Iran's money that they got back and that these sanctions are being lifted and that a couple of guys who were never going to be arrested anyway, because as you say, they're not here and the FBI has no ability to arrest them inside Iran.
All these complaints, it's all the Hawks' fault in the first place.
If they had just accepted the fact that the IAEA already has a safeguards agreement, additional protocol or not, which actually at one time they had one, that's a different story how they unsigned that back in 2005.
But anyway, it's the Hawks.
All their complaints are completely superfluous.
They're the ones who made it this way.
We didn't need to have a problem with Iran this whole time.
They've been trying to get along with us the entire 21st century and really before that.
So here is a very important point because I think there are concerns that could be legitimate about the nuclear program.
But what was really fascinating was that those who wanted the United States and Iran to actually go to war, they focused on the nuclear issue because they assumed that it would be irresolvable.
They needed to make sure that the United States zeroed in on the one issue that was the hardest to resolve.
That's why they were pushing the United States not to talk about regional issues.
They wanted human rights to be off the table when the U.S. and Iran spoke because they wanted to zero in on the one issue they thought the U.S. and Iran could never resolve.
And then when that was resolved, Bibi Netanyahu and the Saudis turned around and started complaining that the nuclear deal does nothing to resolve regional issues, does nothing to address Iran's regional policies, whereas in reality they were the ones who were pushing very hard and got the U.S. and the EU to agree to only focus on the nuclear issue, hoping that it would fail and hoping that it would lead to war.
Yeah, and just like these same people were the ones saying, Oh yeah, sure, you're doing this nuclear issue, but well, where's the linkage with other things?
Like, for example, the American prisoners being held there.
I don't see that as part of the nuclear deal.
So John Kerry and Barack Obama, my God.
And then a couple of weeks later, everybody's free.
Oops.
Exactly.
And then they come out with a political story saying, Oh my God, they gave nuclear concessions to get the American prisoners free.
Exactly.
It's the biggest scandal of the century so far, I guess.
Yeah.
Well, listen, man, I'm glad that you're doing the work you do and writing about it the way you do.
All right, you guys, that is Trita Parsi.
He is the founder and the president of the National Iranian American Council.
And you can find this very important article at the Huffington Post.
Much ado about nothing.
Politico's Iran deal investigation debunked.
Hey, I'll check out the audio book of Lew Rockwell's Fascism vs.
Capitalism, narrated by me, Scott Horton, at audible.com.
It's a great collection of his essays and speeches on the important tradition of liberty.
From medieval history to the Ron Paul revolution, Rockwell blasts our status enemies, profiles our greatest libertarian heroes, and prescribes the path forward in the battle against Leviathan.
Fascism vs.
Capitalism by Lew Rockwell for audio book.
Find it at Audible, Amazon, iTunes, or just click in the right margin of my website at scotthorton.org.
Hey, y'all, Scott here.
First, I want to take a second to thank all the show's listeners, sponsors, and supporters for helping make the show what it is.
I literally couldn't do it without you.
And now I want to tell you about the newest way to help support the show.
Whenever you shop at Amazon.com, stop by scotthorton.org first.
And just click the Amazon logo on the right side of the page.
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