07/01/16 – Zaid Jilani – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright, introducing Zaid Jilani, now at The Intercept, and co-author of this brand new breaking news piece with Lee Fang, hacked emails reveal NATO general plotting against Obama on Russia policy.
Welcome to the show, Zaid, how are you doing?
Great, Scott, it's great to be here.
Very good to have you here.
Hey, well, attempted plotting at least.
First of all, I guess, a little bit of background.
We're talking about Philip Breedlove, General Breedlove of the U.S. Air Force, who's Supreme Allied Commander of NATO until very recently, as you say here.
And his Gmail account was hacked by somebody, and they were posted on a new website called DC Leaks.
First of all, I guess, tell us about DC Leaks, what you know about them.
Sure, we don't necessarily know a whole lot about the site.
It just booted up very recently, within the last week or two.
And basically, they describe themselves as a collection of hacktivists, meaning that they're folks who are basically siphoning leaks or soliciting leaks from people through various methods, one of them which would be email phishing or hacking.
And basically, what they're doing is they're trying to collect leaks based on various stakeholders and decision makers.
So that ranges from people in political parties or campaigns to sitting politicians and government agencies to, as in this case, generals and military folks.
Well, and of course, Breedlove, at least, was extremely important in the last couple of years' events in Eastern Europe there.
And then now, I guess, importantly, as you write in your article here, you guys confirm that at least some of these emails absolutely are legitimate because you talked to the recipients of them, and they even told you that Breedlove had told them that, oh, man, my Gmail got hacked.
Is that correct?
Yeah, I mean, actually, this is something I guess your listeners should be wary of, is that it's great to turn on two-step authentication and take a number of other steps to protect your information because in the day and age that we live today, it's very easy, actually, for people to hack into your personal data and your information.
And as you can see, it even happens to someone who's head of the European command of NATO.
Right.
Well, I was just talking on Twitter with China Hand.
I was saying, what is the deal with these people using Gmail?
And I guess it's just, you know, they got that big of a head.
When you're the supreme allied commander of anything, you think you're invulnerable, right?
Well, I think part of the reason also is that I guess the logic is a similar logic to why did Hillary Clinton use a private email address and a private server, right?
I think part of their logic was that, you know, it does give you at least vis-a-vis the government an open records request and Freedom of Information Act.
It gives you more sort of secrecy from them, right?
You know, you can say you're doing this on your own time, private.
It's not subject to any kind of open records law or any kind of FOIA law.
But the problem is, is that private email addresses and private servers and private addresses that have much, much more of a much more of an ability to be hacked by other people.
Right.
You know, the government has very tough security on its own email communications, but Gmail certainly doesn't.
Right.
And it really is pretty amusing to see a general not realize that.
And then how he's doing his communications.
I mean, maybe that itself should start to make people question some of some of the folks in power and sort of their practices.
And their and their other lack of knowledge of what actually is a good idea to do here.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, it makes sense if he's going to be insubordinate to use some kind of different email.
But Gmail, really?
I mean, they even sell that as yes, we do scan the text of everything you write in order to pitch proper ads to you and everything like that.
I mean, anyway, there's just not even the slightest presumption of privacy there.
A homebrew server in your bathroom.
At least there's a little bit of false sense of security in that, I guess.
But anyway.
All right.
So now these emails start with he's writing to Colin Powell saying, help me do what now?
Exactly.
So basically, Breedlove was head of the European Command of NATO over the past few years.
He actually just his official day of retirement actually is today.
But he had handed I believe he had handed over powers over the last month, a month and a half.
And basically what he was doing is when when we had the situation in Crimea and we had Russians start to use military force, they are following the coup in Ukraine.
Breedlove immediate reaction was that we need to start sending lethal arms to Ukraine, is that we need to start basically helping them prep for like a full on war against Russia.
And what these emails that were hacked and posts on D.C. show that we reported on it.
And we just and we also, by the way, verify that they were true by emailing the people who were involved.
We know what they show is that he was meeting at least in his.
Stop there for a second.
You got you got confirmation from everybody involved.
Wesley Clark and Colin Powell and the rest.
Not you know, we didn't directly talk to Breedlove.
Powell did confirm one of the gentlemen that he was talking to did confirm.
I didn't realize Powell had confirmed as well.
I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
And actually, by the way, I believe one of the gentlemen involved actually even said he had already contacted the U.S. federal government to start investigating the hack because he was so upset by the hack.
But again, like, you know, if you don't follow if you don't follow basic email security practices, you know, you're very vulnerable to these things.
And unfortunately, even heavy decision makers don't realize that.
But, yeah, basically, Breedlove was seeking the counsel of high level sort of foreign policy people, including former secretary of state Colin Powell, former NATO supreme commander Wesley Clark, and basically asking them, hey, how do I overcome this resistance in the White House?
The White House is telling us we shouldn't be starting another war.
You know, they view us as a threat to that.
They're deemphasizing all this.
And, you know, how do I do that?
And basically he was soliciting advice from all these people about what sort of weapons should be brought to Ukraine.
As you may know, your listeners may know, there has been sort of a de facto ban on lethal aid to the Ukrainian government.
Not really a ban, but like they weren't they were very hesitant to give lethal aid.
There are many in Congress who wanted to give lethal aid to Ukraine in sort of the conflict with Russia.
But primarily our aid to Ukraine has been, you know, I don't know, sleeping bags or surveillance equipment or intelligence and things like that.
Trucks, yeah.
Trucks, but not tanks, missiles and tanks and bombers.
But Wesley Clark, you can please I encourage your listeners to go and read the story.
But Wesley Clark was telling me, you know, was drawing up a Christmas list of weapons that they need to be getting out there.
And you'll see that, you know, the various people involved have been to Ukraine and talk to Ukraine.
You know, it sounded almost as if they had sort of embedded with the Ukrainian government and were being like their their lawyers.
Right.
For their case for war.
And they were just you know, they were sitting there.
They were complaining that the administration was not as eager to do that.
Well, not all of the administration.
I should say they were complaining about the White House.
But they also had sent emails to Victoria Nuland, you know, State Department and talking about how they were finding some friendly ears in the State Department, which I think is one of the paradoxes of the Obama years, is that the State Department has become more militaristic than than the secretary of defense and Defense Department or the White House, which, you know, also it bodes ill for it for the next president, given that, you know, Hillary Clinton has, of course, has a coterie of folks at the State Department who I think she inculcated to have that point of view.
So, yeah, I mean, I encourage everyone to go on to go on our site and read the story, because I think is it what is essentially what it presents is how how you see a sort of an intergovernmental dispute, you know, take place and how you see somebody who does have a case for, you know, wanting to basically ramp up a war with Russia, how they organize that case, how they compile evidence.
I mean, there were there were points where the general was like finding things on social media.
Right.
And sending them around and saying, hey, we could use this.
Right.
You know, as part of our case, he was it was incredibly unsophisticated.
Maybe what you would imagine someone of his position.
Right.
Do it.
But the goal was clear.
The goal was that he wanted the United States to be militarily involved in boosting up and supplying Ukraine so it can fight Russia, which is something that some in the White House and the president were not very eager to be doing and which frustrated this group of folks.
Well, I mean, I know you can't answer this, but it raises the question.
It should be an obvious absolutely.
Yes.
Although I kind of doubt it.
But did the NSA or the FBI warn the president that he had this level of insubordination going on over at NATO command in Europe?
And again, we're not talking about picking a fight with whatever Pago Pago or whatever.
We're talking about picking a fight with Russia who actually have even more H-bombs than we do.
Right.
Well, you know, obviously I don't I don't know the extent to which they would have known.
But I do know that obviously he used personal communications to do all this.
And everyone he was talking to was also in there using personal communications, personal capacity.
So it's impossible sort of to say like what at least from the information that we had, like what the administration or what like the Obama White House understood that he was doing this, that he was sort of basically recruiting Democratic and Republican foreign policy leads to try to do this.
But it is interesting.
He has Breedlove has actually made some public remarks recently, and he has, you know, it's beating a lot of the same drum talking about, you know, quote unquote Russian aggression and talking about the need for a stronger NATO, saying the Russians represent, you know, respect and represent strength and unity.
He did make some remarks, say something like we have to communicate more to Russia, like we should start opening up more lines of communication, which maybe represents somewhat of a shift in his thinking.
But essentially, he's been being the same job.
And I think that, you know, there are a lot of folks, particularly in Congress.
I mean, over the years, Breedlove had also testified before Congress.
And there's like, you know, the John McCain's and Lindsey Graham's of the world who really did want us to see like, you know, potentially get into a hot war with Ukraine, with Russia.
And I think, you know, this this was a guy who who had these people's ears.
And I doubt that, you know, even even after this, that we would see him sort of like not try to stay in the game and influence things, especially as, you know, there will be another administration composed and they will need advisers and people at various levels.
And in the administration, the NSC State Department Pentagon.
And, you know, I think that folks like this do do tend to stick around because they believe in what they're doing.
I mean, where it's very clear from here is that in his view, he was fighting an uphill battle against the White House on this.
And he was working very hard to make his case and recruit allies to do that.
And I think that level of sort of infighting within people who really are supposed to work for us.
I mean, in theory, the president is supposed to control, you know, the government.
People will have their dissent, you know, so on and so forth.
But they don't you don't really you don't really expect to see them like organizing almost like a sort of campaign.
Right.
To bring folks together like this, to to change the policy.
And I think that the level of detail you see here in doing that, I think, is what's what's remarkable.
Yeah.
Well, it's interesting, too, to see, you know, the same weakness that has Obama letting these people get away with this.
The fact that Victoria Nuland ever even worked for him in the first place, much less survived being caught red handed, plotting a coup that led to this war in the first place.
And all of the rest of that is sort of, thankfully, the same weakness that keeps him from doing something really horrible and stupid here.
If Hillary Clinton was in this position, she would be her first priority would be how to look and act tough, tough, how to make Breedlove respect me for being just as tough as him would be her entire mindset.
And we'd all be dead.
Well, there's a Mark Landler who's a reporter at New York Times.
He actually has a book about this called Alter Egos, and he actually has a lot of good information and scoops on sort of Hillary Clinton's decision making at the State Department.
And, you know, obviously he's painting a picture with incomplete facts.
He doesn't have the whole story and everything.
But the basic picture that he paints is that generally Hillary Clinton's State Department was offering that posture.
And I think it's something that you've seen maintained under Kerry State Department in that you saw very recently many, many people at the State Department basically advocating through a dissent channel for more or less a no fly zone or at least some sort of military escalation against serious government.
And what's the name of that thing?
Oh, the book is called Alter Egos.
It's basically about the foreign policy discord between the Obama folks and the Hillary folks while she was in the government and while they're both in government.
Very good.
Yeah.
And he's actually he's written a couple of adaptations of that book in terms of long form articles in The New York Times, which is what I read.
I haven't read the full book, but it has good information.
And I think that it's much more thorough.
You know, for example, any time that there was sort of a foreign policy crossroads to be reached, she would tend to be the one siding towards more military engagement and more military ramp up.
I mean, it was almost unfailing.
I don't I don't know if there was a counterexample to that, you know, where Obama was for more military engagement and she was for less.
I mean, every at least every detail that I know shows the reverse.
And then now, can you elaborate to me a little bit about this Pakistani deal that at least supposedly hopefully never happened?
Yeah, I mean, it's sort of it's bizarre.
You know, it's the sort of thing that, you know, you imagine you'd read in like a spy novel or something is, oh, a bunch of folks want to start arming some friendly country, but they don't have a direct way to do it.
So they reach out to another country to access a go between, which is basically that, you know, Breedlove had been in contact with someone.
Yeah, Phil Carber, who through the years had has had various positions in sort of like the defense community.
Today, he's president of the Potomac Foundation, which is basically like national security consulting.
If there's a way to describe it, he was an advisor to Thatcher and advised various other people in NATO.
And he also worked in the defense industry.
Of course, you know, he had that for over 20 years.
And basically, yeah, I mean, he had floated a deal that they had made with Pakistan.
He is saying that, hey, Pakistan can act as a go between to deliver weapons.
You know, it's a it's a well-armed country, a country that spends considerable amount of money on its military, primarily due to a rift with India.
And, you know, that included like portable, like basically rocket launchers, anti-tank weapons.
But even he noted that, hey, this deal that that we're sort of that we're sort of uncovering, you know, Pakistan doesn't want to do it unless the actual U.S. government, not, you know, a bunch of not a general and some, you know, academics and some other lackeys that he's sort of, you know, organized.
You know, they didn't want to do it without Obama's approval.
And we actually, you know, we had reached out to Carver and Carver told us that, yeah, this deal never happened.
But it's fascinating.
It's absolutely fascinating.
The level to which these folks tried to sort of organize the arming of Ukraine behind Obama's back.
Right.
To go to this level of things, even if it didn't end up working out, the fact that they would just be even feel like it's OK to consider these things and talk about doing these things is pretty amazing.
Right.
Is it Powell that says, well, you know, considering Obama, given Obama's instruction to you to not start a war, this may be a tough sell.
Oh, that's all.
Well, I mean, if you remember, obviously, Powell played a very, very bad role in the Iraq war.
And I think that's going to be a stay on him forever.
Both Iraq wars.
No.
Yeah, definitely.
It's definitely.
I mean, two out of four of them.
But anyway.
Yeah, go ahead.
And but but at the same time, you have to remember, I think it was around the time of the Russia deal.
The Georgia war.
Powell was actually somewhat cautious.
You know, he was saying, like, yeah, why exactly do we have NATO, you know, in that area?
You know why?
You know, he he he takes a more pragmatic view towards Russia generally, I think, is a good way to describe it.
And I'm sure, you know, his former chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, tends to be definitely in the realist camp of things and generally does is not favor these military rampants and escalations.
And I think that, you know, Powell probably had the same approach here, although Powell did end up connecting it with a few other folks.
They didn't have that approach.
But, you know, I mean.
Yeah, I mean, I don't I don't think that someone of Powell's Powell's ideology would be too eager, actually, to get involved militarily here.
It's funny.
You saw an entirely different approach from Wesley Clark, who he also.
And you saw Clark started, you know, putting up, like I said, a Christmas wish list of basically all the sort of different armaments they should be offering to Ukraine.
And a lot of people don't know this, but there's actually they might actually be on any war dot com or, you know, a few websites like that.
But Clark actually almost started a war with Russia during the Kosovo conflict.
I believe there was like some Russian units that had taken a building or something like that.
The pristine airport.
Yeah, right.
Right.
The airport.
Right.
And Clark basically wanted to go in there and kick him out with like U.S. military power, which I correct me if I'm wrong.
I don't recall that ever happening, even like throughout the Cold War was like, you know, direct intentional military engagement between Russia and the United States.
But, you know, between ground troops anyway.
Yeah.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, there may have been like air interdictions or something.
Right.
But it wasn't like, you know, what you imagine, like a ground war would be.
But that would have that would have basically started that.
Right.
And so this is the man.
Obviously, the good general wants that wants to tap for advice on how to do this.
And he seems very, very eager.
I mean, it's.
Well, in that anecdote, it was actually he was the supreme commander of NATO himself at the time.
And it was the British general below him who was insubordinate in the good way and said, I refuse to carry out your order.
No, sir.
I'm not going to start World War Three for you.
Screw you, Clark.
They just didn't do it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No.
Clark is Clark is an incredible person.
And by the way, Clark had also called.
Apparently he hadn't checked with Bill Clinton to say, hey, is it OK if I start a ground war with Russia and Kosovo right now?
He was just going to go ahead and do it himself.
No, I mean, it's absolutely amazing.
And the other thing is that Clark has been in the news more recently sort of talking about, you know, something up to the level of like internment camps for radicalized American Muslims.
And like, you know, the idea just seems like, you know, it seems like Clark is really going off the deep end.
I mean, I think for a long time he had a level of respect.
You know, he ran for president.
He was viewed sort of as a pragmatic military person.
It's not not terribly.
But, you know, at the end of the day, I think that his pattern of actual behavior, whether it be that his conduct, obviously Serbia, Kosovo or his conduct, you know, here in these emails that were released, the man doesn't seem to have a whole lot of restraint or appreciation for the idea of what war entails or what, you know.
Well, I remember that New York Times piece won the Pulitzer, I don't know, eight, 10 years ago now about all of Rumsfeld's generals in the media.
Remember that by.
I'm sorry, I can't remember the.
Yeah, I don't remember.
But anyway, he's in there and he's the worst one.
He's the one who always sold himself, you know, and say, oh, five or six dissent against Iraq or two years as being, you know, anti-war and anti-Bush for the way this war is being carried out.
But his answer was always we need more armored personnel carriers.
We need a bigger escalation.
And it turned out he was just an armored personnel carrier salesman working directly for I forget if it was Raytheon or whoever it was that was cranking out the the new MRAPs and whatever other Bradley.
Oh, I guess it was the Bradleys especially.
And he was just getting rid of product.
Cash, yeah, I mean, I mean, I that and that's and actually, you know, that that's I think, you know, one of the most important things.
I mean, there's also there's incidences like this pop up all the time.
Like, for example, you might remember last year there was this blimp, this gigantic blimp the Pentagon had created.
And it's not really dangerous.
It's just ridiculous that they made this gigantic blimp that's supposed to be like for missile defense and like, you know, for detecting that sort of threat to the United States, like on the Atlantic Coast and so on and so forth.
And we saw that, you know, one of those giant blimps tear loose from Maryland and go across the entire country, like tearing stuff up with its tethering.
And I think it landed in rural Pennsylvania.
The general who had pushed for that project and gotten that project, you know, saved it actually from from removal by the military.
The military wanted to kill the project.
The general who did that, he waited about five months before he joined the board of Raytheon, which was like the primary contractor, which subcontracted out the work for that blimp.
And like, you know, it's incredibly shameless in many respects.
And it's almost become like a routine thing.
Like maybe 50 or 60 years ago, this would have been viewed as very uncouth, like, you know, you're not you shouldn't be doing that kind of thing.
It's just it looks terrible.
But now, unfortunately, now, I think, to a large extent, it's become the norm.
All right.
Well, that Zay Jelani writing at the Intercept hacked emails reveal NATO general plotting against Obama on Russia policy.
Appreciate it.
Yeah.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, John.
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