All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
We can also sign up for the podcast fee.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
Hey, guys, on the line, I've got Peter Van Buren, and he wrote We Meant Well about the war in Iraq, and he wrote The Ghosts of Tom Jode about the financial crisis and the aftermath for our society and all of that.
And of course, Hooper's War, a novel of post-World War II Japan, or just World War II Japan.
Welcome back to the show, Peter.
How are you doing?
It's a pleasure to be here.
We haven't talked for a while.
In between, we've gone through the COVID crisis, and now we're about, what, six weeks away from an election.
So lots to talk about.
Lots to talk about.
You know what?
I'm really excited to talk with you about this article, too, Election Meddlers Find a Scapegoat.
I'm so glad that you wrote about this story, this weird peacedata.net thing.
Everybody's number one source for anti-war news, views, and activities.
But before that, I wanted to tell you a funny story, which is, I'm pretty sure this is the last time we spoke, and this has nothing to do with the length of time.
It's just I haven't been covering the COVID thing.
I've been leaving that to Tom Woods and them and just doing my foreign policy stuff here.
And you haven't been writing about the wars as much.
So there's no correlation or causation to this thing.
But just the last time we spoke, part of what we were joking about was, I think I had said to you that because of the giant fake Russia hoax, the false accusation that Trump was guilty of high treason with the Kremlin and stealing the election of 2016, that he kind of deserves a second term.
I think I might have even joked, even without an election, just go ahead and let him have a second one, something like that.
And then I got this angry text from an old friend of mine talking about how we're not friends anymore because of your Peter Van Buren interview and how I will fight you to my dying breath to save my country, you know, which I guess means lining up to vote for Joe Biden, something like that.
Good luck with that.
Yeah.
I'm not much of a voter myself.
My last vote was for Ron Paul in the primaries of 2012, and I'm pretty sure I'm happy to leave it at that.
And I'm no Trump supporter.
If you'd have heard my interview with Nasser Arabi about the genocide in Yemen a minute ago, you know.
But anyway, I just thought that that was hilarious, that, you know, somebody who's a corporate lawyer who's never stuck his neck out for anything in his entire life is going to fight me till his dying breath by voting Democrat in the next big election because of the unprecedented danger of this guy who, it turns out, Peter actually was never guilty of high treason with the Kremlin at all, and the whole thing was a giant hoax.
But it ain't over yet.
We were just puzzling over this.
I was talking with Gareth Porter about this DHS hacking piece that he did about this nonsense where this thing was over about a year and a quarter ago, and now it's back again like it never ended.
Russiagate.
No, the media, it's like, you know, when they run up here to the election, they're replaying Trump's greatest hits.
And so we're revisiting Russiagate, and Lieutenant Colonel Vindman is back to try to remind people that we had an impeachment go on over Ukraine, and they're going to drag out, they're dragging out Michael Cohen to utter obscenities and then disappear again.
It's like the media is taking four years worth of terrible reporting and fear-mongering and trying to find little hooks to replay it all before the election runs, because all the people that weren't persuaded by it the first time, you know, maybe somehow turned into ardent Biden supporters when they hear it the second or 23rd time.
I'll tell you what, I don't think so.
I think, you know what I think?
I think the Democrats are really bad at this.
That's what I think.
Yes.
And it has an air of desperation to it that suggests they understand they have a much weaker candidate than they ever expected.
And they're looking at, and I'm talking here just objectively, I mean, if your friend who wants to kill you wants to take me on after this, I am not supporting Donald Trump, but I am trying to stick my nose in the wind and see which way this election may go.
And the Democrats have saddled themselves with a very weak candidate.
Quick Biden supporters, name one signature initiative Joe Biden is going to be working on from day one.
And it can't be being not Trump, because that's the only real talking point he's put forward is I'm not Donald Trump.
And with that, I think they understand they've got a very weak position and you're seeing a lot of desperation trying to dredge up these things that didn't work to take out Trump in the past, really because they've got nothing else to work with here.
They should be talking about what Joe Biden plans to do or all his good stuff.
And instead, we're still talking about the Russians and social media.
And you know, that's the thing, too, is even if they just even if Biden's just Biden and they can't even make anything up plausible at all, they could attack Trump for the actual bad things about Trump.
But no, they don't have the slightest interest in attacking him over the biggest budget deficits in the history of all of mankind, maybe combined.
Right.
They don't attack him because they're for that.
They want to double it.
They don't attack him for the genocide in Yemen because Biden helped start it.
So they go, well, he wants to end it, but they don't make a big deal about that at all.
I think they mentioned that once or something.
And they can't take him on because they're guilty of all of the same things that are the very worst things about him.
Absolutely.
And what this is the problem about running Joe Biden as essentially Obama lite is you inherit the good stuff and the bad stuff.
And, you know, you want to go into the debates and talk about how Trump has done nothing to really improve health care.
And you've got to figure out how can you say that and not end up looping back to why was Obamacare forged in in the incomplete condition that it was.
And the same thing with with with Yemen.
You can't talk about what's happening in Yemen without eventually ending up back with why did the Obama administration create help create the U.S. role in that war on the side of the of the Saudis.
And this is where all of Biden's attempts to talk about things fail is he's got too long a trail behind him that goes back to Obama.
And all you can really do is criticize Trump for not fixing or improving stuff.
Obama screwed up.
Yeah.
Well, and at the bottom line, we position at the bottom line, it just comes down to personalities and and the American public popularity context.
And this is nothing but a replay of 2012 with Trump is Obama and Biden is Romney.
And the difference is no matter how many people hate Donald Trump and a lot of people hate Donald Trump, just as a lot of people hated Barack Obama, a lot of people love him, too.
But nobody loves Romney and nobody loves Biden.
They're just there.
They're the best that the other side settled for, for whatever reason.
But they don't.
If you were going to nominate a Democrat, there was only one Democrat that had a movement of people who supported him and believed in him.
And that's Bernie Sanders.
And I'm no Bernie Sanders supporter.
I disagree with him on a lot of things, but not Yemen.
He's actually sound on that.
But he's the kind of guy who can work up a crowd and can inspire people's faith that, hey, I think this guy might actually care about me, even if he doesn't know what he's talking about.
He at least is not just here to rip me off on behalf of a bunch of arms dealers and and pharmaceutical makers, you know.
And the thing is, is that the Democrats, I believe objectively that the Democrats are going to lose this, this election, that Trump will be reelected.
And if they do lose it, they've they lost it actually four years ago when they didn't run Bernie and they chose Hillary instead.
Totally.
Four years.
Totally agree.
Four years ago, the United States was ready for change.
And Bernie was the person that was in touch with that.
He was an imperfect candidate in many ways, but he understood what was happening in America, that there was a desire for change when the Democrats ran Hillary.
The people who wanted change ended up voting for Trump or staying home.
This election is not about change.
That's not despite what you hear on the on the mainstream media, that we've got to get rid of Trump to save our democracy or all that other stuff.
He's going to keep muddling along.
Don't worry.
It's not an election about change because Joe Biden doesn't represent any change other than perhaps cosmetic.
He's sure he's he's a nicer guy.
He's not rude.
He won't say stupid things on Twitter.
He probably has groped fewer, fewer women overall than Trump, although all those things are there.
But he's not a change candidate.
And I think the Bernie of 2016 would have been too familiar to represent change.
So I think this election was lost with the last one.
I've just come back from one of my regular jaunts.
I like to rent a car and just drive out to the real America, if you will, get out of New York City.
I was just in Pennsylvania for a while and I was in the the middle part.
You know, James Carville described Pennsylvania as Philly on one side, Pittsburgh on the other and Alabama in between.
And I talked to a lot of people there, most of whom were were probably Trump voters last time around.
And the thing that was consistent among everybody I talked to was an utter lack of enthusiasm for this election.
They may vote Trump.
They may vote Biden.
They don't really have.
They're just tired.
And I think it's going to result in a turnout that favors Trump.
The traditional Democratic voters, African-Americans, young people and stuff have miserable turnout rates historically.
And the lack of enthusiasm for Joe Biden is going to have many of them voting for the third guy, which is stay home, the non-person.
I think Trump's base of people are going to show up in enough numbers that he'll probably win this thing.
I don't say that with any great glee, but I think it's an accurate prediction.
We'll see in 40 some days.
I totally agree with you on every bit of that.
And in fact, if you just look at the footage of the people that turn out to cheer for him when he shows up in town to give a speech and they line up on the street corners to wave their flags and this kind of thing, that's dedication.
There's nothing like that on the Democratic side whatsoever.
And for people who are interested in the actual substance of Joe Biden, it's not just that he's sort of a centrist, mediocre Bill Clinton Democrat.
This guy was in on every horrible thing in the world since when he first came to the Senate, he was there in time to oppose a hasty early withdrawal from Vietnam.
And he's been bad on every single thing since then.
There's a great book, Bronco March Teach, yesterday's man, where he talks about how you know, he and Strom Thurmond teamed up, the Dixiecrat teamed up to attack Reagan through the entire 1980s for being weak on crime and drugs and demanded the creation of the drug czar and to double and triple the drug war.
And of course, the crime bill and all these things.
So man, anybody on the receiving end of that, this is not your hero, man.
How could anyone be persuaded that he is, you know?
No.
If you want to go back, one of the things the people I talked to, a lot of these small towns in Pennsylvania are former industrial manufacturing towns.
They haven't had a decent economy and jobs since the 1980s.
And they remember, even though the mainstream media, who's all apparently an average age of 26 and lives in all in the same apartment house in Brooklyn, they remember that it was the Democrats who pushed NAFTA through.
Joe Biden voted for NAFTA, which took away their jobs.
They remember that it was Trump who at least said he was going to, who renegotiated NAFTA.
How much change actually took place is very arguable.
But I heard from so many people a variation on, yeah, not much change, but the Chinese.
And Biden doesn't have any of that.
Even that residual enthusiasm just isn't there.
The other thing, switching over now to our future wars under Joe Biden, is to look at the people he's lining up as his advisers and cabinet people and things like that, should he get elected.
We're going to see a replay of people like Susan Rice in power, Samantha Power, Ann Marie Slaughter, the whole- Michelle Flournoy.
Flournoy, the whole gang that sponsored the wars in Libya, in Yemen, that drove the war of terror of the Obama administration.
Afghan surge.
They're all going to be sitting there telling Joe where to go next.
And I would be difficult to imagine we would not be back at war somewhere, more war somewhere, early in a Biden administration.
Yeah.
I mean, obviously Assad, and these are all the people who were pushing Obama and were disappointed and have done nothing but complain that Obama wouldn't see through the war for Al-Qaeda there.
Right.
And that's going to be a tougher sell because, you know, Al-Qaeda got replaced by COVID as, you know, public enemy number one.
You know, they're going to have to kind of remind Americans, but I mean, they're good at that.
They already know the playbook.
Assad, I don't know if they'd be cynical enough to come up with a new version of Assad gassing his own people, but, you know, there'll be some form of atrocity that will suddenly appear and CNN and all the others will suddenly mobilize America to protect the Yazidis or some other small nomadic tribe.
No one's ever heard of that suddenly requires American blood to be to be spilled.
I mean, they know how to do this.
They've done it well for eight years.
So they'll find something.
It's just to be a matter of whether it's cynical enough to just literally reuse the old stuff or find a new bad guy.
I mean, there's always somebody in Eastern Europe that we don't like that we can, you know, move against.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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You know, it's so interesting that you mentioned the Yezidis there as a reason for war, because in fact, people might not even know that that was actually the red line for the so-called for the launch of Iraq War Three in August of 2014, was that the Yezidis were trapped on the mountain and ISIS was coming to get them.
And of course, just like every single one of these has to be, it turned out to be fake.
And when special operations forces got there, the only Yezidis left on the mountain were perfectly happy to stay there.
The rest had already been rescued by the Syrian Kurdish communists and taken to safety.
These are all fake.
And the creativity of whoever thought that that that older movie Wag the Dog would turn out to be the textbook for American foreign policy.
Isn't it even more remarkable that probably what, like one or two percent of anybody would even know that that was the cause of spelling for Iraq War Three?
It wasn't the it wasn't the threat of that Baghdad was going to fall or even that Yerba was going to fall.
It was to rescue the Yezidis on the mountain.
Put that in your trivial pursuit, you know?
Yeah, exactly.
It's like trying to get people to remember like hit songs from 10 years ago.
It's stunning to me in its in its simplicity, how easy it is to actually fool people.
But yet that's it.
And the people who prove to be extremely good at it are going to be Joe Biden's foreign policy advisers and similar folks on the on the domestic side.
It's really quite cynical of the Democrats at this point in history to to have Joe Biden as their candidate.
But indeed, that's where we have ended up.
Indeed.
So now on the latest of Russiagate here, of course, the Senate report came out.
And it's funny because I keep thinking, oh, I'm in such a hurry.
But that's not true.
We got a full hour scheduled here.
So we got a cushion to talk about these different things.
There's a Senate report that came out that makes some of the same old accusations.
I don't know if you want to comment on that, but definitely feel free to.
And of course, you have Peter Strzok making his accusations in New York Times, new accusations about the supposed counterintelligence investigation against Trump and all of that.
And then also you have this huge story that no one ever heard of this thing until it became a huge story that PeaceData.net was a front for Russian, I guess, military intelligence, the GRU and a huge piece debuted in The New York Times and then a couple others followed up on that.
And so I sure would like to get into that.
But, you know, you're welcome to get into any of these related topics that you feel like.
Honestly, I'm anxious to hear what you have to say.
Sure.
So part of the same basic play, and that is to revive and remind Americans of all the bad things about the last four years and to see if there's any juice left to squeeze out of them.
For example, we're talking about PeaceData.net, rest in peace.
And this was, for those who didn't get their life advice from this website, was a tiny website that had almost no one looking at it.
Some of the articles on it actually had zero views.
So it was basically a small website that was set up probably by this internet research agency, the same for-profit front company that was allegedly used to influence the 2016 election.
And what they did was they hired a bunch of real basement-dwelling loser bloggers in the United States and Britain and had them write cheesy articles that, before the website's down now, before the website went down, or those of you who can use the different tools online to go back and look at it, I mean, these things, these articles read, they were either stolen directly from someplace else, word-for-word just retyped, or they read like bad undergraduate papers.
I mean, nothing personal here, Scott, but you know, like the guy who read the Communist Manifesto for the first time in his freshman class and suddenly became the campus revolutionary?
Yeah, I met a couple of those in junior college.
Yeah, yeah.
Like I said, I didn't want to be too close to the bone here.
Anyway, it read like those- Me?
I've been a libertarian since high school, man.
But anyway, go ahead.
Easy, easy.
These, they just were terrible things.
They would influence nobody.
These people's mothers would tell them, honey, this isn't what you should be doing.
You're embarrassing yourself now.
Go back to Warhammer and leave this to the adults.
It had no engagement.
There was nothing going on.
It left- You might think that the guy from antiwar.com might have heard of peacedata.net, but in fact none of us, me and Eric and Jason and Dave and the whole crew, Margaret, we never heard of this thing.
None of us had.
Well, luckily your government is on the task because a organization called Grafica, which is located here in New York City, which has this vague business statement about helping people.
I'm not good at these big words, like helping organizations achieve value out of digital communications, whatever, or lots of words like that.
For some reason, they happened to figure out that peacedata.net was run by the Internet Research Agency, which apparently involved the GRU in the 2016 campaign.
Grafica, the little snitches, called the FBI, who then went to Facebook and Twitter and forced them or persuaded them to remove all the social media accounts connected with peacedata and the individuals who had been writing articles for them, and thus things had been there.
The fact that it had no impact whatsoever, that you hadn't even heard of it, was actually part of the plan.
Grafica, in fact, in its report on all this, claimed that the Russians were actually trying harder and harder to hide, and so by making themselves hidden, they actually were somehow succeeding in their plan to influence the United States.
Of course, man.
See?
That's how they get you, is by you don't even know that they're getting you at all.
This is it.
I don't know.
Is your audience hip enough to know Boris and Natasha, or do I need a more current cultural reference?
I would say at least a solid 60% of them are with you.
Maybe better.
Okay.
So, here's the Boris and Natasha voice you hear in the background.
Now, the interesting thing about all this is how the pieces do fit together, if you will.
You know, Grafica, this company that uncovered all this, is anonymously funded.
We don't know who gave them $6 million in venture capital.
However, one of their current chief innovation officer used to work for Google before she quit Google to run a project for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and in fact, Grafica was hired in 2018 to help the Democrats prove that the Russians use Facebook and Twitter, and among its other clients, Grafica brags on its website that they've worked with the Pentagon's Advanced Research Project Agency, DARPA, and the Defense Department Minerva Initiative.
Well, that's how you know you can trust them.
Well, you can if you're a spook, because they're obviously, if they're not directly funded by the intelligence community, they are a graft onto the side of the intelligence community, and it's basically a little game now.
Grafica goes out and finds this little speck of dust on the internet without any information or, what do you call it, evidence.
They decide they're connected to the Russians.
They snitch out to the FBI.
The FBI runs over to Facebook and Twitter, who deplatforms everybody, and then the Democrats get to stand alongside their running dogs at the New York Times and say, oh my God, the Russians are interceding in our election once again.
It's like watching a beautifully executed double play in baseball where it's so seamless, and they've got it down to the point where the guy barely has to glance over towards first base to make the throw.
It is really quite amazing to see that in 2020, they think this still is going to work and going to influence us.
I think the only useful thing about this pathetic attempt to tell us the Russians are coming is that it's so transparent that it gives us a look behind the curtain.
It shows us how the magic trick was really done.
If anyone is still thinking about 2016, we just got to glance here at how the game was played.
Do you think that peace data itself might have been set up by the Americans or by one of these contractors or something in the first place?
It's possible, but I think that it doesn't even have to be that complicated because- Which that wouldn't be very complicated.
I saw one of these guys, I quit Twitter, I swear to God, but occasionally I never log in, but occasionally I do still look at Aaron Maté and Glenn Greenwald's and Matt Taibbi's tweets.
They're worth looking at.
They have good stuff on there.
They were suggesting that, one of them, I'm sorry, I forget who, somebody got retweeted or something saying that, geez, this reminds me of the New Knowledge group and how they seeded this whole story about the Russians helping Jeff Sessions with something or another.
Then it turned out that the whole thing was just a loop.
They had set the whole thing up.
That's possible.
But this is such small potatoes.
It seems hardly worth the investment in buying the website.
I mean, they got a pretty big New York Times story out of it and a few- Well, okay.
I'll concede that.
I mean- Ring a couple of bells for some Democrats, I guess, out there, you know?
I'll concede that.
So, I mean, yeah.
For the price of a website, look what you got.
You got a New York Times story out of that and- Well, and it's a revival of the thing is, look, they're still at it.
You know what?
Here's what I think too, man.
I'm just speculating some nonsense here, but I was saying this to Gareth Porter just right before I called you, which is that, look, man, it seems to me that when the sitting FBI director testifies before the Senate, I think it was yesterday, that, yeah, the Russians, they're doing it again.
They're trying to steal the election for Donald Trump, the sitting president, that he's basing it on stuff like this.
He's going, yeah, see?
You got the- Yeah.
Oh, no.
Okay.
I'll play.
I'll play.
Because what- Because it's the revival of the whole scandal is based on just these- It always has been these fake little talking points, zero times a thousand, and here's another couple of zeros, but it's enough to bring the whole thing back to life.
I'll give you, I'll concede the point here, because the way these fact checkers, supposed fact checkers, so what'll happen is, yeah, okay, I'm with you now, because what'll happen is Joe Biden will say the Russians are trying to influence the election, and the fact checkers will say true, and they'll point to the New York Times article as evidence of that, and the game is over.
Ha!
They are influencing the election.
So, yeah.
Well, and even Trump's FBI director says it, so you know it's true.
This isn't Obama's guy.
This is his guy.
It just bounces around, and when I said earlier this is all pieces of the same pie, if you will, I don't know how deep in metaphor we are right now.
That may have just been the final time-space continuum just collapsed.
But the idea is that you've got now Peter, how do you say his name, Peter Stronzak?
I always just say Strock.
He's the former- I think some of those things are silent in there.
All right, I'm just gonna call him dickhead, if that's okay with you.
This guy, Peter, was the FBI agent that was in charge of Crossfire Hurricane, the counter intelligence investigation into Donald Trump, the thing that fueled the Mueller report, and the first three years of the administration.
And of course, it all turned out to be nothing.
You want to talk about looping, the Steele dossier turned out to be the classic intelligence service feedback loop, where you create a source, and then you have other people confirm your source by referencing your source.
I mean, you do that with anonymous things, and you end up proving your own point.
Anyway, this guy was doing that, and he's resurfaced.
He did a long interview in The Atlantic magazine last week, where he basically reiterated the accusation, said that Donald Trump is under the control of a foreign power, comma, Russia and maybe others, presented no information or evidence, and then just dropped the turd and walked away from it.
Now this guy, who's already been proven wrong through one of the longest investigations in political history, is suddenly allowed this level of platform to repeat the exact same accusations that have already been not only proven wrong, but demonstrated to have been created by a combination of an opposing political party, the Democrats, and the intelligence agencies themselves.
Yep.
And of course- Oh, I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
And there he is.
And part of something, and one other thing that's important to remember in that whole crossfire hurricane, is that the FBI has admitted that it altered documents to materially confuse the FISA court and get these wiretaps on Trump's campaign staff members.
You've got the FBI literally admitting to fake paperwork to be used to spy on Americans for partisan political goals.
And that isn't the headline.
The headline is Pete Hed is re-accusing Trump of being a Russian asset.
Yeah.
Well, and on that one particular point, too, about faking that paperwork, the part that they faked was the CIA notified us that this guy works for them.
And so when he's talking to Russians, that's fine, because he's in the service of the American government.
And they deleted that so that they could say to the FISA court, yeah, he's talking to Russians.
See?
And then, by the way, the CIA left him hanging out to dry for three years.
Well, I just found this out for sure recently that this was exactly what they had done there.
Exactly.
Amazing.
And it's absolutely stunning that things like this don't get any more attention, and that these guys who propagated all this are, in fact, put in positions where they're speaking to an international audience on a once-distinguished platform like The Atlantic.
It was a big week for The Atlantic in this department, by the way, and the subject of another article that I have in preparation, and that is the article in The Atlantic based on anonymous sources claiming Trump disrespected the troops three years ago.
Speaking of things we don't remember, apparently, three years ago, Trump was in France.
He was supposed to go visit a World War II cemetery, and the weather canceled his trip.
The Atlantic now has four sources that say Trump didn't want to go because he said the weather was going to mess up his hair, and included in that was a statement that at another visit to Arlington National Cemetery, Trump stood next to John Kelly, who was then his National Security Advisor, decorated Marine General, whose son died, was killed in Afghanistan, that Trump stood next to Kelly at the gravesite and said, I don't understand why people give their lives up for this.
What's in it for them?
Now, where to begin?
So let's go to the gravesite with them.
In fact, we know who was there because there were a lot of pictures.
It was Kelly and two family members, Trump and Pence.
That's it.
Those are the only people on earth who were there who would have heard those remarks.
Having worked on a number of presidential visits overseas during my 24 years in the State Department, I mean, somebody's got to do all the grunt work, right?
You get a chance to see how this all is.
And essentially, when the president is anywhere, he exists inside a series of bubbles, if you'll forgive me, like a nesting Russian doll set.
Oh, no.
I'm sorry.
I apologize.
He exists in a series of security bubbles, and the innermost bubble is no one steps across that line.
It's the president and the people he selects to be next to him.
And that's the only group of people who are going to overhear Trump's make a remark like that at the gravesite.
Now, we're led to believe, then, that Trump, standing next to a grieving father at his son's gravesite, disrespects the dead kid.
No way.
Then we're left to believe that the father, who's a combat Marine, says nothing.
Right.
His chief of staff doesn't say, Mr. President, don't make me put you in a headlock here, sir.
Nothing like that happens.
Doesn't break the president's nose, doesn't say anything like that.
Instead, what he does is he allows his family to be humiliated because they would have heard the remark standing there.
Then he waits three years to hand over this information to a minor journalist at The Atlantic and hide behind anonymity for a minor political point.
Well, I appreciate you diminishing Goldberg, but actually Jeffrey Goldberg is pretty important.
But still, I also don't believe it.
But go ahead.
And that's it.
And then Goldberg comes out, the author Jeffrey Goldberg comes out and says, well, you know, I put my reputation on the line to stand by all this.
Is that what he said?
Oh, I'm sorry I missed that.
I've really got to start watching TV.
My reputation and The Atlantic's is on the line and that's where the credibility comes from.
It's like Jeffrey Goldberg.
I mean, was there a bigger cheerleader for the WMDs?
And well, he wrote a giant feature about Iraq and Al-Qaeda based on total liars from the INC in Kurdistan.
And so he has no credibility, of course.
And that's what makes it more hilarious is that he actually said that this is a guy who literally served in the Israeli army as a prison guard, as a prison guard, and yet claims to be credible on on these these issues.
And that's where we were, where we are with these three years.
Just Ramando called him commissar Goldberg because his job was accusing anyone who said anything correct about the situation, you know, just factual about the situation in Israel, Palestine, an anti-Semite and driving them out of polite society and polite journalism.
There is no other motive for criticizing Israel, obviously, than your secret anti-Semitism, he accuses, and just succeeded in destroying, you know, a whole line of people's careers, you know, certainly hurting them.
You've touched on something very important there.
And that is not only do these people use our precious First Amendment to put out propaganda, they actually use those same rights and tools to destroy dissenting voices.
It's not so much as, well, you know, we agree to disagree or marketplace of ideas.
These folks will actually seek to destroy the careers of people who are telling the truth against their propaganda.
We call them during the Iraq war, we called them unpatriotic and traitors.
Today, the official insult is to label someone a Russian bot or a useful idiot.
And we attempt to make them go away.
We de-platform them.
One of the things with this silly peace data thing, and peace data itself matters, Zip, but the process is what's important here, is that it included the FBI making sure that they and the people who wrote for them, many of whom had no idea who they were writing for, it was probably their first paid writing gig ever, you know, made sure they were removed from Facebook and Twitter as part of this.
It is a terrible thing when journalists not only lie and produce propaganda, but when they use their skills and the tools of their trade to get rid of silence, dissenting voices around them.
Oh, and you know what?
I mean, this all, there's a lot of PC in a lot of ways, but this whole de-platforming thing all started with the 2016 election and the Russian fake news and the Russian interference and everybody who disagrees with this ridiculous conspiracy theory is somehow under the influence of Russia.
And that was the huge kind of watershed event here that opened up all this censorship.
And I was just seeing on Aaron Maté's Twitter, I think yesterday, about, there's a French online magazine that's independent, supported, private organization that wrote a thing about, you know, in praise of the people who were too smart to fall for this Russiagate crap, something like that.
And immediately Twitter labeled them state funded and under the control of the Russian government, which is completely false.
And in fact, Aaron Maté said, you know what?
I think they might have made like a typo error here where these agencies or these groups have similar names, but they're not the same, but there's, you know, it's a computer's decision to make.
There's not even a human in the chain of command on a lot of these things.
And so you have perfectly legitimate journalists, again, being marginalized and accused of being agents, not just of a foreign power, but of Vladimir Putin, you know, who's worse than Joe Stalin, whoever that is.
Well, I have to full disclosure, as many of your listeners know, I am lifetime banned from Twitter for calling out journalists for lying about the Iraq war.
And it was massaged into appearing like a threat.
And I'm off Twitter.
My voice is not allowed there.
It is insidious that in a democracy, we find so many creative ways to silence voices.
It is in the old days, you used to be sort of marginalized.
And it forced people to listen to non mainstream media like antiwar.com and other sources.
But at least the stuff was there, even though you had to look for it.
Now, the effort is made to make sure that you can't find those dissenting voices, even if you start looking a little deeper.
And it's not a very positive thing.
And it allowed propaganda like the Steele dossier to take on importance.
It allows the Atlantic to publish two horrendous propaganda pieces in one week, the Goldberg piece about Trump's alleged disrespect, and then the Peter did headpiece that Trump is a Russian asset under their direct control.
That is just a shameful week in journalism.
But it's two more things about those stories, too, is on the part about refusing to go to the World War One memorial.
At the time when that happened, people were objecting to Trump's disrespect and that kind of faux outrage at the time.
And Jason Leopold, say what you want about him when he reports from his sources, Jason, I love you, but man.
But when he's got a FOIA, and he's got a document and he publishes it, then you can still interpret that however you want.
But a document's a document.
And at the time, he went and got all the documents that said it was the military who said we want to cancel, we are cancelling, you know, it was up to them, the Navy pilot, I think it was for the helicopter, whichever agency it was.
So that was if they had just done their research in the first place, that couldn't have made it.
And this is the editor of the magazine.
Right.
They don't want to know the truth.
I mean, what happens in these presidential visits?
And again, I have firsthand experiences that the president is scheduled minute, literally minute by minute.
And he was scheduled to fly out to this cemetery.
And you were correct.
World War One, not World War Two.
Fly out to the cemetery by helicopter and then fly back to Paris for the next event.
The weather caused the aircraft to be grounded.
The lift was cancelled.
Much has been made of the fact that others went by car out to the cemetery in Trump's place.
And what left out of that is this minute scheduling of the president.
The helicopter trip was going to take whatever, 10 minutes.
The car trip was going to take an hour and a half through Paris traffic, and it would have thrown off the entire schedule.
And this kind of change is done all the time.
The method of transportation changes.
We don't think we can get out because of the weather.
We're going to cancel this and add that.
It's simply a matter of scheduling.
It's a routine part of presidential visits.
And, you know, John Bolton, too, added that and and I hate to cite John Bolton, but it's clearly against interest since he's on, you know, a current jihad against the president.
But he was there and he said, you know, people, I think he said this on Fox News, that people said, well, but the heads of state of other countries were able to be there.
And he said, yeah, but that's not the same as being the president of the United States.
And he has a different set of priorities.
He has way too much power at his command to take the afternoon off for a thing like this in a way like the British prime minister can.
This is it's just different.
That's how it is.
He's in charge of the world empire.
Frankly, you know, you can't he can't be out of touch out there in the countryside.
And this is all part of it.
You know, these are you go.
We had the when APEC used to matter.
APEC was held in Osaka, Japan in sorry, 1995, kids.
And I was assigned to work with the Secret Service liaison.
They needed someone who spoke Japanese, who wasn't a cop to try not to actually destroy all relations with the Japanese police in one afternoon.
And so what happens is like the prime minister of Thailand shows up with like two guys and then the Secret Service comes in and wants the entire city shut down for three days before and after the motorcade goes through.
And the Thais ask, is it possible to have a bottle of water?
And the Secret Service says we want snipers on every rooftop.
You don't just reroute the president.
You don't just say, well, we're changing everything.
We're going to redo the afternoon because it might look bad if he doesn't attend this which, and by the way, all of this is absolutely shameful that the president of the United States, who George Washington, whatever his flaws, said, don't call me your highness and your majesty.
Mr.
President will be enough.
Thank you.
And Lou Rockwell said, oh, no, 10 years ago or something that this is more ostentatious than any Roman emperor traveling anywhere ever.
No one ever thought of this kind of a getup for, you know, an executive, a king or a sultan or anyone traveling around to other people's countries like this is absolutely insane the way they do this.
It's standard operating procedure to rent three full floors of the hotel that the president stays in so that there are only Americans or unoccupied rooms above and below him.
Even when I remember when Bill Clinton came to Austin, Texas, and stated the Driscoll, that was absolutely how it was.
And, you know, as though there was a threat within a million miles.
But wait, one more thing here.
And I'm sorry, because we actually are starting to run low on time.
Eight minutes to check.
But here's another important point about Strzok and the accusations against Trump that proves that Trump, where this guy again is claiming that Trump is obviously compromised by the Russians somehow, is that he didn't do anything to Putin for Putin paying for American scalps in Afghanistan based on this massive fake story by the should be retired by now Charlie Savage, which was debunked again by Ken Danilian for crying out loud, the guy who's revealed in the WikiLeaks to actually be a CIA asset who has all his work checked with them first.
And CIA were the ones making this accusation in the first place.
And Danilian wrote this thing in NBC News again, I guess, day before yesterday, where he's quoting General McKenzie, I guess, at length, saying that, yeah, we just don't have any evidence that this is true.
And we went back and reviewed all the deaths of American soldiers recently, and none of them trace back to any of this.
And the story is essentially dead.
And Savage won't admit it, but he really did.
And in some of his articles later published much deeper into the paper issue of the paper, page A-19 type stuff, they kind of walked the whole story back and said, OK, well, yeah, it's true that we have all this lack of confirmation.
But as Charlie Savage argued to me that it didn't matter whether the story was really true, what mattered was that it was true that the CIA had this report that said it might be true.
And that's plenty good enough to report.
And if every Democrat in America and if all of TV news and every politician, all these people all take it for and all the Republican hawks, too, all take it for granted that if the New York Times says that the CIA says that that really means it's true, then that's their problem.
And that's your problem, because he never said that.
All he said was that the CIA said, and that's not the same as independently reporting it and that I'm actually kind of a kook for insisting that on a story like that, he should have some independent confirmation.
He thinks that that's crazy.
Well, more importantly, he certainly knows better and should, like we just talked about with the president's scheduling and helicopters and motorcades and things, he should be willing to provide context to the readers.
So here's how it works in real life.
So I'm in Iraq and I'm out in the middle of nowhere in some village.
And some villager says to me, do you know that the Iranians are paying a bounty to kill Americans to us?
Now, that villager says it to me for who knows what motivation.
Maybe he wants money from me.
Maybe he's trying to show off.
Maybe he even thinks he talked to an Iranian.
I've got this information.
I can't just like throw that away.
I have to report it forward and it goes to whatever next level.
And the next level says, is there any confirmation?
No.
Has anybody else heard anything about this?
No, no, no, no, no.
And then it just gets kind of tucked away someplace like, hey, if anybody hears anything like this, it's a topic of interest.
And there's I wouldn't say millions, but tens of thousands of little snippets of stuff like this that are kicking around inside the intelligence community any moment in time.
And what happened with the New York Times piece was something like this suddenly got whooshed up into a headline.
And there's enough that the trick is to put enough truth in it, you know, somewhere in the CIA, I'm sure there's a bit of paper that says somebody said this.
And that's kind of the beginning and the end of it.
And instead of explaining how intelligence works and explaining that you don't brief the president on little snippets of unconfirmed nothing that don't even make any sense, we're not even shooting the Taliban these days, nor are they us.
Instead, it just gets manufactured into yet another crisis.
And the clever people who are propagandists then figure out ways to dovetail it in with anything else, such as the president disrespects the military.
There's no question that those articles came out in tandem because they they look good next to each other or they look bad next to each other, depending on it.
Also released that same time in that in that tranche was a survey done by Military Times that shows some nascent growing support for Biden among service members.
I mean, it's nothing, it's insignificant.
But the headline says growing support.
So you've got, you know, here we are trying to chip away at one element of Trump's base in a coordinated effort that involves a faux leak out of the CIA, Charlie Savage and the New York Times who can't make a big enough deal of it.
And then all the secondary providers who kick in to, quote, confirm something.
And it all works together.
This is propaganda.
It's it's information ops.
It's right out of the textbooks how it's done.
And we fall for it nearly every time.
Yeah, well, enough people do.
As George Bush said, you can fool some of the people all of the time.
And those are the ones you want to concentrate on.
It works pretty well, you got to admit.
All right now, so.
I don't know, why don't you tell us a little bit about Hooper's war?
Well, as we start to wrap up here, I know that people may be interested in reading stuff I write.
And if you are, I've written a couple of books.
The one that came out about a year ago is called Hooper's War, and it is an anti-war book through and through.
It is historical fiction.
It imagines without explanation that there was no atomic bomb and the United States invaded Japan at the end of World War Two.
And it looks at what happens to people in war.
The main character, Nate Hooper, is an American soldier, and he and his experiences are drawn directly from my own in Iraq, as well as the stories of a lot of Iraq veterans that I talked to who came back from the war destroyed, even though their bodies were physically in good shape.
The Japanese side is told through two fictional characters, a civilian woman and a Japanese soldier, and is based largely on historical records that I found and read and a series of interviews I did with now elderly people who were children during World War Two.
These were the people that were underneath the bombs that we dropped.
These were the people who starved when we destroyed food sources and froze in the winter when we destroyed ways for them to heat themselves.
These were the people who saw friends and relatives die in front of them when our policy became one of genocide to destroy entire cities whenever we could.
And there's a, as many people know, there was a firebombing of Tokyo before the dropping of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima that killed more people in the first night than die in the first moments of Hiroshima.
It was on scale of the atomic bombing, though, of course, the radiation ultimately took more lives over time.
But there's a firebombing detailed in the book that is based on actual on the ground reports from Tokyo, from Hiroshima and from a young man, he's an old man now, who watched the city of Kobe bombed around him.
He had been sent to relatives and watched from the mountaintop, watched the city destroyed below him and entered the city not long after the bombing ceased and told me what he saw with his eyes that was done by Americans to civilians.
And all of that is wrapped up in a story that hopefully makes sense.
Didn't need it, but there's a sex scene in there, too.
So, you know, you've got a little bit of something for everybody.
Yeah, well, no, it's so important, I think.
Look, we all grow up like this, man, no matter Republican, Democrat or countryside or suburbs or whatever you're from that.
Look, this is back in the days when things were in black and white and it was ancient history since long before we were born.
And so it's just it is you can't there's no no point really in even questioning it or looking at it somehow.
It must have been right or they wouldn't have done it.
And that's about it.
And revisionism, especially on this issue, the end of the war against Japan.
There's that great article by Josiah Lippincott for the American conservative about this that I interviewed him about last week on the same question.
And I think it's so important for people to look at that about how inevitable it all wasn't.
We just take all this stuff for granted so much.
Why?
Because we go to government school where they tell us that the guy's name is true man.
And so that means it's fine.
He was sort of elected, you know, and so it's the democracy did this.
It must have been the right thing to do.
And that's all you need to know.
And it's just not.
And so I think it's really important that I really like the fact that it's in the context.
It's about Iraq, but in the context of Japan, because why not?
Now, as all these things need to be brought to people's attention.
It's so shameful the way that the the story of the last 20 years of war is just buried.
I mean, we all know it's there, but they don't we just don't talk about it at all.
It's crazy.
I find it almost intolerable when I hear people.
Joe Biden, in fact, said it last night in his town hall, how America's prestige overseas has has fallen and we're no longer the shining city on the hill for the people of the world, et cetera, et cetera.
What does he know about that?
Find it intolerable that we know so little about our own history and even less about how our actions are perceived overseas.
We are the only democracy that continues to torture people in the 21st century.
We maintain an over an island penal colony in Guantanamo where we have tortured so-called terrorists to madness to the point where we can't even conclude a show trial because we're so ashamed of what's left of these guys.
We don't even want to produce them long enough for a show trial.
We're just going to kind of drag our feet to these people finally succumb.
We use weapons against civilian targets all the time.
We blow up hospitals.
We conduct ourselves in the worst ways while pretending to be the champions of freedom and democracy all over.
And we tisk tisk other countries for things they do that are our only subsets of what we do using our global reach and our global power.
Our ability to ram a Hellfire missile up anybody's butt on any literally anywhere on the planet at any time.
People forget Barack Obama's bragging about being pretty good at killing people, about the weekly meetings he held every Tuesday where they'd go over the targeting list and choose who was going to die that week, including American citizens.
We just throw that down the memory hole and claim that Trump is the worst president ever or that Trump being nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize means that there should be no more Nobel Peace Prize, which was another article in The Atlantic, by the way.
They are just hitting on every every cylinder.
Well, of course, yeah, Jeffrey Goldberg and they were one of the keys to pushing Russiagate from the very beginning under his rule.
And not that he was regularly writing, but he was, you know, the orchestra conductor there making sure.
And I'm sorry, I'm so late because now we've got to interview Joe Lori about how they're reaching out and touching Julian Assange, trying to lock him up in the Supermax in Florence for the crime of being the best journalist in the world.
And you want to talk about the ultimate deplatforming.
Yeah.
You know, I can sit here and whine about being kicked off Twitter, but Julian Assange is going to die in some prison somewhere in the ultimate act of deplatforming.
And God bless him for what he did with WikiLeaks.
Hey, thanks so much for your time.
It's great to talk to you again, Peter.
Talk to you again anytime, Scott.
Take care.
All right, you guys.
That is Peter Van Buren, formerly with the State Department and again wrote We Meant Well and Hooper's War and We Meant Well is the name of his blog.
And he writes regularly at the American Conservative magazine.
This one is called Election Meddlers Find a Scapegoat about that PeaceData.net story.
The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APSRadio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org and LibertarianInstitute.org.
