07/22/16 – Daniel Lazare – The Scott Horton Show

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Introducing Daniel Lazare, writing for ConsortiumNews.com, and the author of The Frozen Republic, How the Constitution is Paralyzing Democracy, which the wife actually has and is on the shelf, but I've never read.
I've got to say the idea of a more effective government terrifies me.
But anyway, welcome to the show, Daniel.
How are you, sir?
I'm fine.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
I appreciate you joining us again here.
So the article is US-backed Syrian moderate behead 12-year-old.
So anyone unfortunate enough to be on Twitter in the last few days has seen this.
Anybody who gets their news from CNN, of course, has no idea what we're talking about here.
But go ahead and tell the grim story, Daniel, if you could.
It's just horrible beyond words.
I mean, what happened is that some fighters for a group, a US-backed group in Aleppo, captured a small boy.
And it's not clear why.
The boy seems to have been sick or ill or seems to be dazed.
He had a bandage on his arm indicating he was possibly receiving an IV drip.
In any case, the video, it's very short, shows two fighters holding the boy.
One grabs him by the hair.
The other playfully strokes and pats his cheek.
Then they turn the boy on his stomach, bind his hands behind his back and draw a knife across his throat.
And the final frame shows one of the fighters holding the severed head aloft in triumph.
Now, the problem is that this group is backed by the CIA and has been a recipient of US-made high-tech TOW missiles.
The group's name, by the way, is Nour al-Din al-Zinki.
It's closely allied with al-Nusra, but the US tries to maintain the fiction that it is not part of al-Nusra, which is the local name for al-Qaeda.
But it's a separate group which is untainted by any such association.
It's obviously nonsense.
This is really sick, disgusting stuff.
And the CIA should be put on trial for murder as far as I'm concerned.
Well, and, you know, the reaction to this was really incredible to see.
To see the BBC put out a story that quoted his sister and said, oh, yeah, she said he was a fighter.
So there you go.
You know, the fact that he's a 12-year-old who looks like he's maybe 9 or 10, you know, hey, but no, he was guilty, says right there in the BBC.
And then Charles Lister and, you know, the so-called al-Qaeda expert and Robert Ford, the former ambassador to Syria, immediately on Twitter with the apologetics.
Oh, well, Robert Ford said, you know, if they can't control themselves, well, you know, gee, they're not going to be any good to us.
If there's not going to be accountability for this on the part of the lower level fighters who actually did it.
But, wow, all the presumptions and assumptions baked into that about how it ought to be perfectly fine to continue to use the group as long as these four men in the video are punished somehow.
And, of course, the al-Zinki blamed it all on Assad.
It's all Assad's fault.
Assad made them do it.
So this is just amazing stuff.
Amazing stuff.
Your tax dollars at work.
Yeah, it really is crazy.
Now, so is this group, and I know it's hard to keep track because a lot of them are make-believe.
A lot of them are just, you know, it's almost like all the think tanks in Bill Kristol's desk drawer.
You know, they're just pieces of paper that have the names of all these different groups on.
It's sort of the same thing with the FSA.
They call themselves this, that, the other thing.
But what are they really other than basically al-Nusra's, you know, arms procurement branch who goes by different names so that it's okay for the CIA to give them guns?
It's like Coke Light or Coke Classic or Coke Zero or whatever.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
It's all still the same thing.
It's just a new brand name that's being spun off for the purpose of maintaining deniability.
That's all that's going on here.
The U.S. is playing the most cynical game but the most self-defeating game because they're just like they're fooling themselves into backing al-Nusra as al-Nusra gladly spins these groups off so they can get weapons from the CIA which they will then share with al-Nusra.
Well, you know, this goes to at least what they claim, I guess credibly, about the papers in bin Laden's hideout there back in 2011.
Just in 2011, only four years ago when the caliphate was one room on the third floor in this guy's attic where he's hiding from his wife or whatever.
And they found the documents which state that, yeah, you know what we ought to do guys is come up with some new names for our groups because al-Zarqawi, never mind bin Laden himself what with the mass murder and everything, but Zarqawi really gave us a bad name and so we ought to change our name to something else.
And so that's what they've done and it works perfectly.
Good enough for us, Christ Langley.
It's called rebranding.
Corporate America does it all the time.
So Al-Qaeda is its following suit.
Amazing.
All right, now, and so this statement from Mark Toner, I went and put the screenshot of this out of your article on Twitter there to say look everyone at what I'm outraged about.
Well, go ahead, tell us, word games you call it.
Mark C. Toner, the State Department spokesman, what did he have to say about these CIA back guys cutting this boy's head off?
He said, he said, he said, quote, We're very concerned, certainly, if it's accurate.
If we can prove that this was indeed what happened and this group was involved in it, I think it would certainly give us pause, serious pause.
And we'll look at it, frankly, we'll look at, frankly, any affiliation or cooperation with this group we may have going forward if these allegations are proven.
Well, in any case, first of all, it's raw footage, it's undoctored footage.
Al Zinke confirmed that his fighters were involved.
And, you know, and Toner is not saying he'll cut ties with this group.
He's not saying he'll look at this entire policy and see why it leads to such horrors.
He is simply just trying to put off action until everybody forgets about the story and moves on.
It's the same thing with the 28 pages.
They haven't tried to rebut the 28 pages.
They haven't put out any kind of detailed crises.
All they are hoping is the public will grow tired, will move on and business as usual can continue.
This is just what's going on here.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, the real problem here is it's kind of like the the big lie where the true story of what's going on here is so outrageous that it makes you, Daniel, is there sound like you're worse than some ridiculous, illiterate birther who thinks that Obama is a secret Muslim Kenyan secret agent sent here by Osama to usurp McCain's rightful throne and reduce us all under Sharia law or whatever, because the truth is, yeah, he is guilty of high treason.
And he has been for four years straight now.
America's on the side of the butchers of New York City, Obama and his entire administration going back to the first term, including Hillary Clinton, the current nominee, basically de facto nominee for the Democratic Party nomination for the presidency this year.
That's what it is.
They've been knowingly backing the American people's sworn enemies.
I quite agree.
I mean, three thousand people died in 2000 on 9-11.
And the U.S. responded by trying to patch up relations with with Saudi Arabia, trying to cover up who was really responsible.
Two days later, George Bush was photographed smoking cigars on the White House balcony with Bandar bin Sultan, who is actually named in the 28 pages, who was the Saudi ambassador at the time and was so close to the Bush family that he was nicknamed Bandar Bush.
The contacts are numerous and there's no question the U.S. was providing Saudi's high level protection at the time.
And their instinct was not to get to the bottom of the crime, not to try to figure out why 3000 Americans were killed, but to protect their relations with the Saudi with the Saudis.
That was their first goal, their highest goal.
And that's been it ever since through a Republican and Democratic administrations.
And if Hillary is elected, it'll be the same thing.
Believe me.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, so now we've got to take a big tangent over here onto the 28 pages for a minute.
Daniel, you actually hold the world record for my favorite article about the Saudis in 9-11, at least up until the last couple of weeks, or in fact, the last week, because my wife just published her analysis of the 28 pages.
So the article was excellent.
Excellent article.
Yeah.
And yeah, I hope everyone will read that.
It's called The 28 Pages Explained.
It's at Antiwar.com.
It's also on my site.
And yeah, she really breaks it down.
And she helped produce the documentary Press for Truth back when with Ray Nowaleski and, you know, really knows her stuff there.
But you have this article about Moussaoui, or at least that's kind of how it starts, I guess.
And he was supposedly the 20th hijacker, although that was really Qatani, right?
But he was here.
Al-Qaeda had him here for something.
And he was prosecuted.
He was the guy who was learning how to fly but didn't want to know how to take off or land in Minneapolis.
And Colleen Rowley and her FBI crew could have traced him directly to the 9-11 hijackers if only their FBI supervisors had allowed them to pursue the case and go to court for a FISA warrant, etc.
And Colleen Rowley has talked about that on this show.
But anyway, he gave a deposition in a lawsuit about, you know, accusing the Saudis, you know, over their role in this.
Now the 28 pages have finally been released.
And we've even got Larissa's, you know, thorough take on every bit of it.
And so – but what does it mean?
We know.
We know for a fact that the guys who were handling at least some of the hijackers in the country, the Flight 77 cell basically, the San Diego cell, that they were Saudi intelligence officers who were handling these hijackers.
Now it doesn't really prove – the 28 pages don't really prove that the Saudi embassy or Saudi intelligence or Bandar, these guys, were actually running the operation itself, I don't think.
But with all the other context that you have from your other work and now with the 28 pages, just what – oh, well, let me add one more thing.
Richard Clark, ever since the second Rich Blea podcast and now in a new article that he's written for ABC News, he says what he thinks was going on was CIA was using Saudi to recruit these guys as double agents.
But then the operation fell apart, never did happen, but then they still didn't tell the FBI about the guys in the country.
And that was until August anyway.
And Ali Soufan and them say that the reason for that is because the San Diego cell were present, two of the three of them anyway, were present at the Malaysia meeting where the coal attack was also planned.
So if CIA had fessed up to the FBI that these guys are in the country but we didn't tell you anything about it, at that point they would have been kind of admitting their own culpability and not forwarding on this information sooner in a way where maybe it could have prevented the coal from being bombed.
So they just quashed it, sat on it, whatever.
But that doesn't satisfy me, Daniel Lazarus.
So now that I've asked you a 10 minute long question, I want you to give me a 20 minute long answer about why was Saudi intelligence doing what they were doing in the run up to 9-11?
Why were they allowed to get away with it?
Is it as simple as some inside job or was some kind of recruitment attempt that failed or what?
Well, first of all, Scott, I have no secret information.
I have not privy to what's going on there.
I just know a few general ideas as to what happens in Saudi Arabia and how the country works.
There's two things to keep in mind.
One is the country is immensely rich.
It's got lots and lots of money sloshing around.
Number two, when we talk about the Saudi government, you have to be very careful what we mean by that term.
The Saudi government consists of a royal family with something like 7,000 princes.
Now, the princes don't all rule.
Rather, a very small knot of very high level princes conducts policy.
But the system is extremely porous.
Each high ranking prince has his own little network of supporters and favorites and clients, etc.
Money flows through a thousand different channels.
There's no central accounting and no clear demarcation between public and private funds.
That's very important.
So I would call the whole system corrupt, except that corruption, the word corrupt implies there are some rules as to how money should be dispersed.
But there really are no rules.
It's all a great big inside family.
And money just sort of moves along, you know, a multitude of channels.
And the Saudis also practice what on Wall Street is called a hedge.
That is, they'll do one thing, but they'll channel money off into the opposite policy in case the first strategy goes awry.
So therefore, no, they don't.
They had their relations with bin Laden had gone downhill.
They weren't getting along.
Bin Laden had left the country.
But they didn't want to break relations entirely.
So they made deals with bin Laden.
They funneled him money to keep him quiet.
And they also funneled him money, telling him that, you know, sure, go off and make trouble.
Just don't make trouble at home.
So for a while, that seemed to work.
Bin Laden did go off and make trouble.
In fact, he made trouble in the United States, in which point all hell broke loose.
But the point is that they have a lot of money going in a lot of different directions.
They have a lot of people doing a lot of things.
Many of them are tied up with the Wahhabist religious ulema or mullahs who are deeply devoted to a modern ideology of jihad, who view the West in extremely hostile terms.
So there are some jihadis on the royal payroll.
Some of them were in the U.S.
Some were out to do sort of really bad things.
And the royal family just didn't want to know about it.
Because as long as these people didn't make trouble in their own backyard, they figured it would be OK.
So I think that's kind of the framework in which we should try to understand what the 28 pages is about.
They describe a multitude of contact between various high-level Saudi officials, many of them intelligence agents.
That does not mean they were necessarily directed, all directed by something called the Saudi government.
But it does mean that they were all beneficiaries of various factions in the Saudi royal family who were anxious to keep the pot boiling, who told these people to go off and do various operations, just don't do them at home.
And if you want to strike a blow for jihad, that would be very good.
But just don't get us in trouble, et cetera.
But, of course, they did get them in trouble.
All hell broke loose when the Twin Towers were destroyed and U.S.-Saudi relations went into extreme crisis.
But people on both sides then struggled mightily to repair the damage.
And the U.S. did its best to make sure that the old Saudi-U.S. relationship would continue undisturbed.
Now, you know, I talked with Greg Pallast way back in, I don't know, 2003 or something about the FBI agents who were told back off the Saudis when Bush came in.
They already had been told basically back off the Saudis, but now they were told ever even more than before to back off the Saudis.
And the simple explanation was along the lines of what you just said, you know, half of it anyway.
The Republicans' friends and business associates were the ones, Turkey and Bandar, were the ones who were paying this protection money to al-Qaeda to just don't do attacks inside the kingdom and leave us alone.
And here's your protection money and how that would be an embarrassing relationship.
And so they didn't want that exposed.
And so at the risk of a terrorist attack, I guess, they told the FBI, don't try so hard when it comes to these matters and all that.
And that makes a lot of sense.
And I believe the story of Turkey bringing them protection money even predates the 9-11 attacks themselves.
I think, you know, that was already actually even known before that.
Pallast talks about a briefcase full of cash back in 96 or something.
You were going to say?
Yeah, I think one really important incident is the is the Cobar Tower bombing in 1996 when someone drove a truck bomb into a into a building that was that was housing a U.S. military personnel and exploded it and killed 19 U.S. soldiers and wounded something like like 500 people.
When the U.S. tried to figure out what happened, they were stonewalled by the Saudis.
And eventually the Saudis told them that Iran had done it.
Shiites had done it.
To me, that makes no sense.
But it was what the U.S. wanted to hear.
So the U.S. went off and said, OK, well, now we know the Saudis are are innocent.
Al-Qaeda had nothing to do with it.
It's all the fault of those terrible Iranians.
But I think that was like that itself was a very important cover up, because I believe that it's really quite clear that that was an Al-Qaeda operation, which the U.S. was really content to ignore.
So that, I think, is kind of the original sin in this entire relationship.
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Yeah, well, that certainly makes a lot of sense.
And Gareth Porter has done great work on that.
Michael Sawyer himself has said that.
Yeah, it was.
In fact, there's a great piece in The Village Voice by.
I forget the guy's name now off the top of my head for some reason, but it's called Rudy's Ties to a Terror Sheik.
And it's about the Qatari Sheikh Al-Thani, Rudy Giuliani's buddy, and how he let Osama and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed stay at his place on the other side of the fence from where the Khobar Towers attack took place.
Actually, yeah, they were there just in the weeks before it, et cetera.
So pretty clear.
This is a really important angle.
I think it's just really this is really sort of marks the start of what a great U.S. cover up of the of the CIA Al-Qaeda linkage.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so back to the 28 pages in the San Diego cell, though, for a minute.
Larissa says in the article, and I can't help but agree with her there that, well, geez, this doesn't look like it's just protection money for Al-Qaeda guys.
This look like this looks like it's money for a specific operation.
She doesn't leap to conclusion and say the 9-11 hijacking kamikaze attack.
But she says when these guys show up and, you know, get fake government jobs and get all this money, whatever, it doesn't seem it seems like if you're talking about protection money for the movement, then wouldn't that money just go through from Saudi through the Taliban to Osama and friends in Afghanistan?
That's going to go actually to San Diego, California, USA, into the pockets and into the of the hijackers and the flight school people who are training them how to fly.
I mean, that seems pretty damn specific for just turkeys.
Here's a bag full of money.
Don't attack inside, you know, Riyadh.
I don't know.
It certainly does sound sounds pretty damning, I must say.
I mean, I mean, I don't know.
It's hard.
The Saudis or the Saudis or royal family is extremely opaque.
I don't know what's going on.
It certainly doesn't look good.
I mean, I kind of go with Richard Clark's theory here a little bit because I just can't imagine that Prince Bandar is going to stab Bush Jr. right in the chest.
I mean, if it comes down to he he kind of ran this thing and it really was a Saudi op to do the attack run by, you know, the people at the top, not just some private princes with a pocketbook.
But Bandar and Turkey and Bandar's father, I think, too, was or was it Turkey's father was running the highest little thing.
If they really did it, then that would certainly imply truth or land now where they had some kind of handshake promise deal with Bush and Rumsfeld that you promise not to nuke us if we do this for you.
It's hard to believe it is.
But, yeah, geez, I mean, they're smoking cigars hanging out on the Truman balcony two days later, three days later.
So I'm living in the twilight zone here, man.
What did Bandar say?
Bush, I'm really sorry that I financed the hijackers who did this to you.
I didn't mean to.
We were trying to recruit them, but it didn't work out or what.
And what did the FBI tell Bush about it?
You know, I'm pissed off.
I mean, I just I just wouldn't want to I wouldn't want to underestimate the possibility of this gross incompetence.
I mean, these guys have rogue agents.
They have money flying all around or all kinds of operations that they know that they that they just don't want to hear about.
OK, you know, it's like, you know, it's like it's like a Mario.
It's like the Mafioso, the Mafia, the Mafia.
You know, don't tell me what you're going to do.
Just go off and do it.
And so everyone wants deniability.
Everyone has these these.
Things, these operations happening, and in this case, one of them blew spectacularly out of hand.
But I think it was what's clear is that the Saudi government, you know, was was implicated deeply in this.
Not that it wanted the the the twin towers to be destroyed, but it was funneling money to people who were who were who were out, who were clearly working towards this end.
And the Saudis didn't want to know what they were up to.
Yeah.
This is.
But I agree.
I'm with you.
I mean, that's.
Listen, I always want to go for the simplest and least alarmist and most Occam's razor explanation first.
Absolutely.
You know, there's no point in getting carried away.
But at the same time, you know, we got to do a little bit of thought experiments here.
You know, there's either this explanation or that winner.
I'm afraid yours is sort of there is no explanation because no one's really watching what they're doing with this.
But I'm not so sure that, you know, by whom he wasn't telling Bandar what he was doing.
I don't you know, I don't know.
It is.
It's a lot of it's a lot of questions still.
It's not it's not a bunch.
I'm open to all to all ideas.
But, you know, but it's just a change of subject slightly.
You know, did you watch Trump's speech last night?
I'm afraid so.
Yes.
That was a that was a pretty dynamic performance.
And this guy and the the Obama Clinton administration is just, you know.
So monumentally incompetent, you know, they have really just that just screwed up so royally.
They created such a goddamn mess that, you know, that that that that Trump, you know, was was in certain perverse ways.
And by the way, I'm not trying to in any way apologize for the guy or endorse him.
But the guy, you know, really put his finger on the problem, which is just gross, gross incompetence on the top of the at the time in the top ruling circles in this country.
Yeah.
You know, he really did.
He screwed up his characterization of the Iran deal and the Egypt revolution.
But then as far as Iraq, Libya and Syria.
Yeah, that sure sounds right.
And, you know, my thing is to I've always hoped this, that he would understand that it's good politics to hit Hillary from the left on the wars, man.
Just keep doing it.
And then the more he does it, the more hopefully he'll realize that it's good politics to keep taking these positions.
And he's such a damn liar.
It doesn't matter that he demanded the Libya war back at the time.
He doesn't care.
He'll just go ahead and accuse her of it anyway.
And after all, what did he do to actually make the war happen compared to her?
Right.
Nothing.
So and and, you know, my thing is, and of course, every time he does this, the whole establishment, the media and everyone freaks out and attacks him as though he's the crazy one.
When it's the conventional wisdom that, as we're discussing here, is completely nuts.
And so, you know, they're attacking him all day now about he doesn't want to pick a fight with Russia.
Well, that's crazy.
Well, keep it up and see whether the American people agree that it's crazy to not want to fight with Russia when Hillary is so determined to prove what a tough guy she is by picking more fights and escalating the, you know, pseudo cease fire war in Ukraine as it stands.
And they really think that's the best position is to attack him from the right.
And I think they're just going to swing themselves right off the edge of the cliff there.
No, it's a it's a gigantic mess.
And I think that's where the significance of the story has been some some poor 12 year old kid is dead.
It's heartbreaking.
I mean, you know, I've got kids.
I don't know if you've got kids, but, you know, a poor, innocent 12 year old kid has his throat slit by people on the CIA payroll.
We're actually, you know, it's your it's your and my tax dollars at work.
It's astonishing.
But it just betrays the most.
It just reveals the most fantastic incompetence and and lack of direction, lack of intelligence at the very top rungs of the US government.
I mean, we have amateurs in control.
They're doing dreadful things.
They are they are in alliances with the most dangerous people, and they are really causing disaster throughout the world.
Now, of course, if Trump gets in, it'll only get worse.
But if Hillary gets in, it'll get worse, too.
So it'll be it'll be neck and neck as to who who will be the greatest disaster.
But the point is that the the leadership of the US is out of control and they are wreaking havoc and they have no idea what they're doing.
All right.
Now, I want to get back a little bit more before I let you go.
Or do you got to go now?
Fine.
I'm cool.
Okay.
We'll go.
We'll go over time a little bit here because I want to get back to what you wrote here.
By the way, I hope when my book comes out, you don't find I plagiarized you too much here, Dan.
I'm trying to just I'm I'm I'm I'm stealing your source quotes and stuff.
You know, I'm trying not to steal your exact words, but I am.
But, yeah, no, this Kerry quote is just great.
So somebody says New York Times reporter Gardner Harris says to Kerry, yeah, but if you start working with the Russians on attacking al-Qaeda in Syria and not just ISIS, won't that help Assad?
And then what did Kerry say?
He said, first of all, before I said it to me, it's it just shows where papers like the New York Times are at.
I mean, these people are unbelievable.
They are there.
They're so far to the right.
They're they're so Hillary ist.
It's just astonishing.
But anyway, what Kerry said, Kerry got very indignant.
And what he said is if some critic is criticized in the United States or Russia for going after al-Nusra, which is a terrorist organization because they're good fighters against Assad, they have their priorities completely screwed up.
The fact is that that Nusra is plotting against countries in the world.
What happened in Nice could just as well have come from Nusra or wherever it came from as any other entity, because that's what they do.
Now, the point is, is a few weeks earlier, Kerry was appealing to Foreign Secretary Sergei Lavrov to steep the cease bombing al-Nusra because U.S. fighters were so closely intermingled with their allies.
Their forces that he would risk bombing them.
You know, it's just it's just amazing.
And and they play games with groups like Al-Zinki, which are just, you know, just just al-Nusra with a different brand name, you know, Coke Light or Coke Classic.
And and they're just playing games.
But they're fooling themselves.
I mean, as I said before, as you know, even even Kerry can't keep the name straight.
At a conference in Aspen, Colorado, last month, he called for defeating ISIS and al-Nusra along with a couple of subgroups named Jaish al-Islam and Arar al-Sham.
Well, it turns out that Jaish al-Islam and Arar al-Sham are actually favored by the CIA.
So even he got his rebels mixed up.
Even he can't take them apart.
Right.
It's the it's a welter of confusion.
And they have confused themselves.
It's I really think that the the I word is appropriate here.
Incompetence.
These people don't know what they're doing.
They're being played by Middle Eastern allies like the Saudis.
And they just don't know which way is up.
Yeah.
You know, I have to say that I hate to agree with that because it sort of sounds like it diminishes their responsibility somehow or something like that.
But I mean, it really doesn't.
But it I you know, on this show in 2011, the question for Patrick Coburn was, yeah, but couldn't this help ISIS or, you know, al-Qaeda?
And his thing was, yeah.
And so that was a question we were asking here.
But apparently, Daniel, it really is true that in D.C. or at least in the Obama administration, the political decision had been made that now that Osama is dead, we're going to pretend that al-Qaeda is completely a thing of the past.
We don't have to take into account what, you know, their role in any future thing happening is.
And so when it came to Libya, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, who are not just members, you know, veterans of al-Qaeda in Iraq, but were even veterans of original al-Qaeda and friends of Osama and some veterans of the old Afghan war.
And they just oh, well, I don't want to hear that.
This is a this is a responsibility to protect humanitarian mission.
And I don't want to hear your minority report about who it is we're protecting here.
And they just made the policy based on having their fingers in their ears.
And then it seems like the same kind of thing with Syria, where, you know, I don't know.
Kerry even is it Kerry?
Who's the quote in here where?
Yeah, it's in the Kerry quote where he even says some people even said this about ISIS, never mind Nusra, who supposedly play well with others.
But even ISIS, there were those who said, go ahead and let them grow.
They're just going to hurt Assad and they won't be a big danger.
But look how that turned out.
You know, that's really the conversation going on in the halls of power.
Not yes, we're dangerously cynically playing with these dangerous terrorist groups.
But now don't worry about it.
Yeah, they're sworn loyal to Ayman al-Zawahiri, the butcher in New York City.
But, you know, Assad Netanyahu told us he wants Assad gone.
So look, Scott, I'm not trying to get the administration off the hook.
I mean, I think the way to understand this thing is that back in the 1980s, the U.S. entered into a very deep alliance with the Saudis.
It was during the time of the Iran-Contra scandals, and the U.S. was seeking to offshore its intelligence operations.
It was very similar to offshoring in the certain financial operations that Wall Street was doing at the time.
So the U.S. offshored its intelligence operations.
It let the Saudis carry out its most distasteful operations, funneling arms to the Nicaraguan Contras or to UNITA in Angola.
And was very grateful.
And that relationship carried on from Afghanistan into Central America and Central Africa and then into Syria, Libya, etc., etc.
So the U.S. is really bound hand and foot to the Saudis.
And it's a marriage that really can't break.
So that's what's going on here.
So the U.S. has to protect the Saudis.
It's got to cover up for what they do.
It's got to make apologies for their various mistakes and errors and misadventures.
And when something really dreadful happens like 9-11, it's got to cover it up as best it can, make sure that nobody implicates the Saudis in the operation.
And to the point where Bush launched an invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq in order to draw attention away from the Saudis.
It's just it's monstrous.
But this is why the Middle East is in such a disaster these days, not because of what the Arab masses are doing or what terrible Islam is up to, but because of these high-level machinations between Washington and Riyadh.
Well, we know it's the plain old black and white New York Times version of the current Yemen war is that it's to placate Saudi after the Iran deal.
They feel like their position is threatened.
But I wonder if you think that, I mean, really, if you go back to Obama's interview with Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic in 2012, where they're really talking about, in a way, they're saying that, you know, the war in Syria and getting rid of Assad is a way to kind of placate Israel and placate Saudi, you know, because of the Iran deal.
We're doing the Iran deal, which they oppose.
And so we'll kind of do this as a sop to them.
I wonder how much of a role you think that played in the thinking back in 2011 and 2012.
Now, he talked about the importance of a Shiite being free to worship in Cairo or in North Africa or this country or that.
But he said not one word about Saudi Arabia.
This is a blank spot as far as the U.S. is concerned.
I mean, Saudi Arabia is beyond criticism.
And by the way, this is a disastrous regime, which is one of the most illiberal governments in the face of the earth.
They pump out, along with the oil, they pump out religious fanaticism, bigotry and terrorism.
And the U.S. goes along.
Now, and why do they go along?
That's the question of the hour.
And the reason they go along is what their ultimate nightmare.
And this is quite real.
Their ultimate nightmare is the royal family will fall.
And who will replace them?
ISIS.
Yeah, their own Frankenstein monster that they've created all this time serving them.
Yep.
They are terrified that ISIS will march into Riyadh, will hang the royal family from the nearest streetlight and will then gain control of roughly a quarter of the world's fossil fuel reserves.
And believe me, it is hardly a far-fetched scenario.
Well, yeah, not at this point.
But even then, economically speaking, it doesn't mean a thing.
I mean, hell, even ISIS that exists now does everything they can to pump every drop of oil they can and put it on the market and sell it to Erdogan if they can.
But if the Saudis get a hold of ISIS, get a hold of those oil fields, they'll have a lot of money at their disposal.
A lot of money.
Yeah, but the point is, who cares?
The oil will still be for sale.
So what does America care?
The only reason America cares is if in the event of some future war with China, they want to be able to make sure to shut off all the global spigots so that we have access and they don't.
But that's just strategy.
That doesn't have anything to do with a gallon at the pump.
Right, right.
So, yeah, it sure seems, in other words, as I hate to say it, as Trump might put it, a lot more expensive of a policy overall than it's worth.
We pay a trillion dollars a year for this empire and yet we lose on every deal that we forge with our empire.
So how's that worth it?
No, it's a disaster.
But this is what happens.
Empires march off to war.
They get themselves in big trouble.
In 1914, four or five of the world's greatest empires marched into war.
And inside of four years, 11 million soldiers were dead.
And four or five of the royal families were overthrown.
I mean, imperialism is just an extreme crisis.
It's self-destructing right now as we speak.
And hell is going to break loose very shortly.
And believe me, I'm a very sober person.
I'm not drunk.
I'm not stoned.
I'm sitting here drinking a bottle of cool water.
And I'm trying to be as sober as I can.
But they are really faced a staring disaster straight in the face.
All right.
Thanks very much for your time again on the show, Daniel.
I appreciate it.
Thanks a lot, Scott.
It was great.
All right, y'all.
That is Daniel Lazar.
And he's got this great new piece, a horrible new piece, but you've got to read it anyway.
It's at ConsortiumNews.com.
U.S.-backed Syrian moderates, in scare quotes properly, behead 12-year-old.
Very important piece.
It's not just that, the news, but the rest of the piece, too.
Very quotable.
Very important.
Lots of great footnotes.
His book is called The Frozen Republic, How the Constitution is Paralyzing Democracy.
All right, y'all.
Scott Horton Show.
And check out the archive, more than 4,000 of them, at ScottHorton.org.
Sign up for the podcast feed there.
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And follow me on Twitter, at ScottHortonShow.
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