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All right.
Introducing Daniel Lazare, reintroducing him again, another writer from consortiumnews.com.
Clinton's faulty new scheme to fight ISIS is the title of this one.
Welcome back to the show, Daniel.
How are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
Appreciate you joining us today.
I'm sorry I'm late.
No problem.
Yeah.
So Hillary Clinton, boy, she's got a plan.
She knows what to do.
In fact, I heard a guy on NPR the other day say, you know, I like Trump, but I just don't believe he has a plan.
And what this country needs is a plan.
And I think Hillary Clinton has a plan.
So got to love plans.
So there's there we go.
She's got a plan for the Islamic State.
What's she going to do?
Well, she does have a plan, but, you know, I mean, I mean, there are there are plans and there are plans.
But anyway, Hillary's plan rests on two planks.
One is an intelligence surge.
No one knows what that means, but it sounds good.
And the second is to knock off Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the ISIS's nominal caliph.
So it's so it's it's either kind of meaningless on one hand or never.
On the other hand, it's a replay of her greatest hits, which is the the the killing of Muammar Gaddafi and the assassination of Osama bin Laden.
Hillary seems to think her poll numbers go up whenever she kills an Arab.
So she figures she can't it can't hurt to kill one more.
So that's what she's aiming to do.
But it will not do anything, anything at all to roll back ISIS.
In fact, ISIS and like minded groups have only gone from strength to strength in recent years.
And there's every reason to believe that that trend will continue.
Yeah, well, you know, it's funny that I mean, she has promised I mean, when Donald Trump says, look, we're going to beat ISIS in a month or two.
I can't tell you my secret plan.
It's pretty obvious.
I mean, assuming that he is serious about achieving those ends, he's talking about sending in the 3rd Infantry Division or the U.S. Marine Corps to go in there and sack Mosul and sack Raqqa and announce to these guys, your state does not exist anymore.
Otherwise, there's no other way to do that, really.
Unless Obama's already taking care of it for him by backing the Peshmerga and the Iraqi Shiites by January.
Well, I think that Trump's policy, I mean, assuming I understand it correctly, it's a little bit better than that.
I mean, I think that the root of his policy is the idea of making common cause with with the Russians and pushing, putting aside for the moment the Assad question.
And I think that actually makes the modicum of good sense.
Well, let's talk about Syria in a second.
I guess we're starting off more on the Iraq side of this, but it is one Islamic state between the two now is true.
But in terms of of sacking Mosul, which is, you know, the the that's what really made the caliphate right ruling ruling Raqqa was ruling Raqqa, but ruling Raqqa and Mosul is what made it the Islamic state with a with a real landmass there.
So whatever happens, obviously, the situation in Syria is that much more complicated.
But I was really I mean, that's still just my guess.
And who knows what Trump means about anything as far as that goes.
But it sounds like his secret plan is he's going to and he's actually said before, I'm going to find Patton.
I'm going to find the meanest general who wants to go in there and knock the hell out of these guys.
We're going to go in there and knock the hell out of these guys.
That doesn't sound like any kind of ban on ground troops, whereas Hillary has, of course, ignored the 6000 something SOCOM and JSOC and CIA and Merck's and whoever else are already there and and said she promises, which this kind of scares the hell out of me.
No ground troops ever again, she said, which, boy, she said that it made me think we're going to be up to 200,000, you know, I don't know.
But that's at least her vow for for her plan to tackle the Islamic state.
So if that's really the case, then, you know, kind of as you're saying, really, all she's got is a decapitation strike.
And that's supposed to accomplish what exactly?
It won't accomplish anything.
In fact, in the past, the problem has only grown worse with each such each such murder.
I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, Al-Qaeda really seemed to be on the on the ropes back in 2011.
But since then, they've come back stronger than ever.
And ISIS has also added to the.
You could even argue that killing bin Laden helped lead to the rise of the Islamic state right there, because, well, you couldn't argue that he wouldn't obey Zawahiri, but he still claimed Osama, who was dead and couldn't contradict it.
Right.
And also Osama, by this point, was kind of, you know, out of touch.
He wasn't much use to the movement.
They knocked him off.
They gave him a martyr.
And in the meanwhile, they insured a steady supply of Al-Qaeda recruits via their other policies.
So so it won't do any good.
It might actually make things worse.
I mean, I'm not trying to say I'm not trying to put up a defense of bin Laden or or any of these other guys.
I mean, al-Baghdadi is a really bad guy.
And you know, and no decent person will will shed a tear over his demise.
But the point is, the phenomenon is that not addressing the issue at hand, the issue at hand is how U.S. policies encourage the growth of these forces.
I mean, these forces have mushroomed around the world since 9-11.
I mean, as you're saying, even since 2011.
Right.
2001, but since the start of the war on terror, these forces have grown, you know, have expanded, you know, dramatically.
So you would think that somebody would sit down and say, like, now, well, what are we doing wrong?
But they're not.
And that's just the amazing thing.
They're not.
They're just going on the same course.
They're just they're just minded.
It's astonishing.
Well, you know, we just saw assassination by drone of the leader of the Taliban in the Afghan Taliban hiding out in Pakistan.
This led to the rise of a new guy who apparently he's an older guy, not a young buck, but he commands a lot more respect than his predecessor and has, you know, apparently and I guess apparently in italics decided that any previous talk of peace negotiations with the unity government in Kabul are off and started attacking inside Kabul almost immediately.
So and we just see this over and over again.
Same thing when they killed Zarqawi.
And that's what led to Baghdadi.
They kill Gaddafi.
That leads to the rise of the Islamic State.
Insert.
They wage this kind of half assed, at least regime change against Assad all this time.
That's led to the rise of Jilani and Baghdadi, their al Qaeda and then the break off the Islamic State.
So killing Baghdadi.
I don't know if you saw this one, but Giorgio Caffiero has one at Almonitor from yesterday that is called Meet the Likely Successor of Islamic State's Baghdadi.
And it's about this Turkish guy, Adnani, who is the second in command and chief propagandist who is likely to be that much worse.
Yeah, he's not Turkish.
His first name is Turkey.
Oh, he's actually he's actually a Bahraini.
Yeah, and Bahrain is a really good example of what is wrong here.
Bahrain, I mean, in case you don't know, is a small island kingdom of 1.4 million people located across a 16 mile causeway in the Persian Gulf across from Saudi Arabia.
It's a 60 percent Shiite majority.
But they are all political powers at the hands of an absolute Sunni dictatorship.
The situation there is poisonous.
Arab Spring demonstrations broke out in February 2011.
They were savagely crushed by, you know, with the help of Saudi troops.
The administration, Obama and Clinton, barely raised a peep.
And then whatever protests they made were then grew dimmer and dimmer in ensuing years.
And in point of fact, Bahrain hopped on the anti-ISIS bandwagon, but while at the same time pursuing Sunni extremist policies at home, which have encouraged the growth of pro-ISIS sentiment inside the kingdom.
So Bahrain, you know, claims to fight ISIS abroad while encouraging it at home.
But security forces are riddled with ISIS supporters.
And the U.S. goes along with it.
And it's no wonder why ISIS grows stronger and stronger.
This guy Cafiero made the very good point that if this guy Adnani does take power in ISIS and he's bet that al-Baghdadi is someday knocked off, that it could lead to a redirection of ISIS activities away from Syria and re-concentrating on the Persian Gulf itself, which means that terrorism could explode in the heart of the world's oil region.
It would represent significant escalation in the problem.
It would be just a very bad development.
And yet the U.S. is contributing to this outcome.
It's intentionally stirring the hornet's nest.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, here's the thing, too, is, you know, there's this whole far enemy, near enemy argument that's been taking place inside the, you know, al-Qaeda and proto-al-Qaeda movement for 25 years now.
And the Zawahiri bin Laden angle was, let's focus on the U.S. because after all, how can we be successful in creating our caliphate in the Middle East or even sustaining one in Afghanistan, for that matter, as long as the American superpower is out to get us and is willing to back our local dictatorships that we want to overthrow?
It's too much money and power on our enemy's side, so we've got to focus on the Americans first.
So Baghdadi, this is what Zawahiri argued to Baghdadi.
And Baghdadi said, no, screw you, I want my caliphate right now.
Well, so what happens when we destroy it?
All we do is we prove Zawahiri and bin Laden right, that you have to keep attacking the Americans because they will keep attacking you, and they have to be the center of the effort until they finally are so bankrupt that they have to really withdraw from the Middle East altogether, and only then can we fight our, you know, local jihads and this and that, whatever.
So what does that mean?
It means that basically, just like this whole time, our government is still basically playing from the script that our enemies wrote.
That's why I'm a reverse 9-11 truther.
I think that George Bush and Barack Obama worked for Osama all this time.
Well, I don't know if they worked for Osama, but they certainly played footsie with the guy for a long time.
And 9-11 was a hugely spectacular case of blowback.
You know, these debates that go on inside al-Qaeda and ISIS are kind of like, no, I wouldn't get too hung up on them, because whether you strike at the distant enemy or the near enemy, the event, you know, eventually it all, it's all the same thing.
I mean, al-Qaeda was striking at the inside, Saudi Arabia at the same time was striking at the U.S., and the Saudis' aim was to push al-Qaeda away from the kingdom, so they would cause trouble in someone else's backyard, and the U.S.'s policy was really very similar to push it away from the U.S., so it would cause trouble in some other part of the world where the U.S. didn't mind if a few bombs went off.
But the point is, the real point, the source of these, the real source of the problem are these Sunni sectarian states, these bigoted, backward, absolutist states with way too much oil money on their hands, and which are breeding chaos and trying to export it, essentially, to preserve their own peace and quiet.
And that is what the Saudis are doing, the Bahrainis are doing, the Qataris, etc., etc.
They're trying to push their problems off on somebody else, eventually the strategy breaks down because their problems come back to bite them in the ass, but the point is that's what they're trying to do, and the U.S., by partnering with these countries, is aiding in this process.
So that's why the problem gets worse and worse, because the U.S. has made itself a party to these sectarian countries, which are waging war in Syria and Yemen and any other place they can get their hands on.
All right, now, so the story goes that America's allies are backing, you know, militants of some description in Syria, Arar al-Sham, and then maybe they'll concede that, yeah, okay, Nusra ends up sharing weapons with the Free Syrian Army and Arar al-Sham and these other groups, but, and then maybe you'll even get admissions that, yeah, you know, you can find the Turks really working directly with the al-Nusra Front.
But the story goes that once Baghdadi broke off from Jilani, or especially once his forces sacked Mosul and declared the caliphate, that at that point even Saudi and Turkey and everybody quit backing, you know, that faction of al-Qaeda in Iraq, basically, and we declared war on them.
We started bombing them.
Certainly the U.S. has been bombing them since 2014.
I just saw Joel Wing on Twitter said, today's the anniversary, the two-year anniversary of the start of the U.K.'s bombing of the Islamic State in, especially in Iraq, more than in Syria.
But still, I wonder whether you can tell me whether, oh, and I should add one more thing.
Phil Giraldi, former CIA officer, used to be stationed in Turkey and still vacations there and goes there, told me, I think circa 2013, that he was there and he saw guys raising money for ISIS in the street, right there, clearly with police protection, you know, allowing them to do it.
But I wonder how much you think that's changed, or whether it really has at all, or whether even the more extreme view would be that the Islamic State itself is still basically a project of the Saudi government.
I, I, it's hard to know, but I mean, first of all, first of all, the U.S. was happy to bomb ISIS in Iraq.
It had a very different policy in Syria, where it had, its policy was to actually hold off whenever ISIS engaged in combat with Syrian government forces.
So when ISIS converged on Palmyra in May 2015, I believe it was, the U.S. actually held off bombing, even though they would have been perfect targets if they made their way across miles of open desert.
So the U.S. attitude towards ISIS was hostile in Iraq and tolerant in Syria, where they were happy to see ISIS make life miserable for Assad.
And every other country has adopted, has adopted a similarly ambivalent policy.
I mean, Turkey has been wide open in its tolerance of ISIS.
And even now, strange things are happening, and we get with regard to Turkey's incursion in northern, in northern Syria, where ISIS seems to melt away whenever Turkish forces approach.
Well, why is that, and why did ISIS put up a stiff fight against the white, the Kurdish YPG, but then sort of quietly backs off when the, when the Turks come into view, is because there's some kind of deal going on between ISIS and Turkey?
That's what it appears to be.
And with regard to the, to the Saudis and the other Persian Gulf states, yes, they officially oppose ISIS, but these countries are sort of long-term practitioners of, of hedging their bets.
In other words, they fight ISIS on one hand and then try to buy them off on the other hand.
So, so I think it's reasonable to assume that large amounts of private donations are going from the Persian Gulf states, especially Kuwait, where the scene is really unregulated, are going, are flowing from the Persian Gulf states and finding them, finding their way into ISIS's pockets, and also into al-Nusra as well.
And of course, al-Nusra gets lots of aid from the U.S. via groups like al-Sham, which are, which work hand-in-glove with al-Nusra, coordinate the battlefield, intermingle with them on the battlefield, and share weapons with them on the battlefield.
So in the U.S., so if the U.S. gives al-Sham a, a TOW missile, that TOW missile will wind up in al-Nusra's hands.
Yeah.
So it's just, you know, everyone's playing a double game here, which is another reason why al-Nusra is able to benefit.
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Now, so when Joe Biden, he got up at Harvard and he gave his big talk where he basically conceded nine tenths of what you're saying here, right?
Our allies went crazy back in all these rebels in Syria.
And sometimes they were back in some really bad dudes, which he didn't quite come right out and say Al-Qaeda in Iraq and then eventually what became ISIS.
Oh, yeah, he actually did say Al-Nusra.
OK, but so then my question for you then is, if all our allies are doing that and America saying, oh, well, we're back in the FSA and they're moderate and yeah, they work with Al-Nusra sometimes, but we're definitely not giving guns to Al-Nusra.
But if all our allies are, then, you know, I asked Flint Leverett this back in 2012 or something like, hey, isn't this just plausible deniability?
Like when Reagan had Israel sell missiles to Iran, nobody questions whether that was Reagan selling missiles to Iran just because they use Israel as a cutout.
It's not plausible deniability, right?
It's just deniability.
And we can see right through it because otherwise.
Well, this is, I guess, the real crux of the matter.
Could not Barack Obama, could he not have this whole time inform the Saudis, the Turks, the Qataris, the Kuwaitis, the Bahrainis, whoever, that I know you hate Assad and Iran, but we hate al-Qaeda more and we're the empire, not you.
And you are going to not back al-Qaeda terrorists in Syria because we say so.
And wouldn't that have been effective?
And clearly he hasn't tried that this whole time, right?
Yes, absolutely right.
But it would have been effective, but it would have caused a crisis in the empire.
And Barack Obama doesn't want to do that.
I mean, Barack Obama is, in his own way, a very conservative guy, and he wants to maintain the empire as is.
He doesn't want to rock the boat.
So therefore, I mean, all of America's key allies in the region, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, all want Assad to go.
And so therefore, Obama can't say no to this.
And this is why the fighting has been so confused, because by calling for Assad's overthrow, the U.S. can't help but wind up collaborating with those forces that are most militarily most effective and fighting for that end.
Right.
And so therefore, the U.S. finds itself twisted up in a knot of its own devising.
Right.
Yeah, this is the part that the American people like at large, I guess, are never going to be able to get their head around, that the terrorists who attacked us aren't from the axis of evil enemy states that we're at war with.
They attacked us because we are too close of allies to the evil kings that rule over them.
And that's why they attacked us.
But so we stayed allies with those same states.
And when we use their proxy armies, guess who we're talking about?
We're talking about the same guys who hit our towers.
This is this is this is the whole point.
The point is, the U.S. has used these forces, it's made common cause, these forces, and it can't stop doing it.
It can't stop doing it.
It's like, you know, if I get drunk, I just can't get off the bottle, you know.
And so, so, so, yes.
And so the U.S., you know, relied on al-Qaida or al-Qaida-like forces in the years leading up to 9-11.
And then when the Twin Towers collapsed in a heap of dust and 3,000 people were killed, the U.S. swore off forever and ever.
But the next day, what was it doing?
It was going, you know, it's rummaging through the liquor cabinet looking for another bottle.
It can't stay with these forces.
And that's what it's doing now in Syria.
It finds itself aligned with al-Nusra and even to a degree ISIS, no matter how hard it swears that it will no longer keep doing that.
It really is like, you know, it's just a drunk who can't help drinking.
Well, you know, it's funny, too, when you look at the disaster of George W.
Bush's invasion of Iraq and basically turning the entire western half of that country into Bin Laden-istan, you know, jihadi-stan and battle experience and a whole new generation of radicalized fighters from Iraq War II that just never had to be whatsoever.
But then Obama took their side deliberately.
That's the thing.
You know what George Bush did, he thought it was supposed to be easy because Richard Perle told him it was going to be easy or whatever.
And so what he did, you know, a thousand times, Bin Laden's dream come true with his invasion of Iraq.
Obama outright, right after murdering, right at the same time, he's killing Bin Laden, decapitating him like a Hillary plan.
Boy, she'd take credit for it, right?
I'm the one who made Obama do it.
Right at the same time he's killing Osama, he's siding with all of Zarqawi's men in Libya, all the veterans of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
He sides with them in their uprising against Muammar Gaddafi and where really the Sunni tribes of Iraq, more than anyone else, had put al-Qaeda back on life support.
Obama brought them right back to life again like Frankenstein's monster.
It's it's almost impossible to believe, except I've been following the story so closely this whole time.
Yes, what happened in Libya is that in order to get better street, you know, greater credibility, the US felt it had to enlist a major Arab power in the bombing campaign against Gaddafi.
So Hillary went to work on Qatar, even though Qatar has a longstanding record of support for the Muslim Brotherhood and even of al-Qaeda.
So after about two weeks of negotiations, al-Thani, the emir of Qatar, agreed to join the bombing campaign.
And in fact, Obama welcomed to the White House and fawned all over him.
And what a great thing he was doing.
So what al-Thani did is he sent jet fighters, but he also distributed as much as 400 billion dollars to anti-Gaddafi ground forces in Libya.
And those ground forces were exclusively fundamentalist Salafist Sunni forces.
And so what happened is that al-Thani wound up fueling the same Salafist forces that then proceeded to tear the country apart and reduce it to chaos.
So but he was brought in there at US behest with US encouragement every step of the way.
So Obama wound up sowing the seeds of that destruction.
And Hillary did as well.
And we know from the emails that Sidney Blumenthal, who helped encourage her to do this, also told her very early on in the war when there still could have been a compromise that, hey, there are jihadis and they're rounding up and murdering blacks.
For one thing, we know that he was telling her that.
Yes, yes.
And in fact, but but but but the US didn't even dare remonstrate with with Qatar for years after.
So beholden is it to these regimes?
I mean, I mean, the the the interim government in Libya was was was begging Washington to tell you to tell Qatar to stop fueling these forces.
But the US but the US couldn't say a word until three or four years after.
They couldn't muster the gumption, the courage to do so.
And the same policy has been repeated in Syria, where, you know, where these forces have come in and the US has, you know, is semi-encouraged, semi-discouraged, adopted a very gray, you know, gray zone attitude.
They've come in and they fuel and fuel the most dangerous, vicious, head chopping, you know, fundamentalist forces.
In the name of fighting, you're fighting for democracy and the overthrow of an evil dictator.
And and and these forces and these forces include, you know, al-Qaeda and ISIS.
So once again, the US finds itself on the same side as these as these groups.
So so what is the whole war on terror amount to?
I mean, it's a great smokescreen where the US winds up, you know, winds up in bed with al-Qaeda rather than fighting it.
Yeah, well, it's a hell of a legacy.
You know, you speak you talk about how Obama's is concentrating on his legacy.
I mean, it's high treason.
I mean, Bush's treason was horrible, but mostly accidental.
Right.
I mean, he he fought the Iraq war for Iran mostly, and they're not really an enemy of ours.
So as much as that was really bad move, all the benefit to al-Qaeda was an unintended side effect of his really bad move.
But what Obama has done is directly constitutional definition, provided aid and comfort to the enemy of the United States of America and the American people.
I don't want to let George Bush off the hook too easily.
I mean, I'm not saying he's not a war criminal, but I'm just saying he never I don't think what he did was directly on behalf of Osama.
It just turned out that way.
Right.
Well, yes, but but he but he engaged in a massive cover up of his of the Saudi role, a massive cover up.
That's true.
And and I think the entire Iraq war, the entire invasion was in some sense a conscious diversion, an attempt to distract attention from from the from the Saudi role.
Let me ask you this, Daniel.
Tell me what you know about Saudi support for al-Qaeda in Iraq and or the Sunni based insurgency during Iraq war two, when America, when Bush had the army and Marine Corps fighting on the side of the Iranians and their body brigade.
I think that I think that that is that's clear that that that that Persian Gulf money was flowing to the to to al-Qaeda forces and similar forces.
And that is the biggest and least covered story of the early 2000s.
Right there.
Not just because you just got to walk back from where we are now.
Right.
We see, hey, al-Qaeda in Iraq and Syria sure as hell is a Saudi project.
So now let's rewind 10 years in 2006, when American boys are being blown apart, fighting in the triangle of death.
They were fighting against their Saudi allies.
But you have to understand how Saudi Arabia works.
I mean, first of all, number one is that Saudi Arabia is a huge money machine.
It's got literally it's had literally trillions of dollars in oil revenues over the years.
And even now, in a straitened circumstance, it still has, I think, around five or five billion dollars in foreign reserves.
And and essentially, the Saudis, the Saudi regime lives and dies by the checkbook.
I mean, whenever there's a problem, it tries to solve it by writing a check.
You know how liberals used to be accused of throwing money at problems?
Well, that's what the Saudis do.
A thousand, a thousand times greater scale.
So, you know, so if a if a Mujahideen is causing problems, threatening to set up a bomb in your backyard, you write him a check and tell him to go away.
And, you know, he will go away for a little while.
And, you know, and if if the Sunnis are getting their ass kicked in Syria, well, then everyone knows that fighting for the Sunnis is a good deed, according to Wahhabism, Wahhabist Islam.
And therefore, you know, what you do is you salve your conscience by writing a check for the for the for the Mujahideen, the Sunni Mujahideen in Iraq.
And you do that in Syria, do that in Yemen, you do that all over the place.
So that's how Saudi Arabia works.
That it writes checks.
And and so so, yes, I mean, the Saudis have been funding these activities not only in Syria and Iraq, but, you know, but in Bosnia and Chechnya and and many other places in the world as well.
They are a huge, you know, bankroll for Sunni extremism.
That's what, you know, Hillary wrote in a in a internal State Department memo in Christmas Day, I think it was Christmas Day or was it New Year's Eve in 2009, when she described Saudi Arabia as the greatest source of support for Sunni terrorism throughout the world.
Thanks, you know, to Wikipedia that that to WikiLeaks, that memo is now is now public information.
But but, yes, I mean, I mean, Saudi Arabia is a great big money spigot.
And we know how the money goes to these forces.
And the Financial Times has this great quote of Prince Saud al-Faisal saying directly to John Kerry, as though Kerry's not in on it, Daesh is our response to your support for the Dawa.
And that means the government of Iraq that the U.S. has installed in Iraq war to the last three prime ministers there, all from the Dawa party, Abadi, Maliki and Jafari before him.
Yeah.
Have you ever heard of something called the resource curse?
Yes.
Go ahead.
Well, the resource curse is the idea that when you discover whatever you discover, a resource like gold or oil or whatever, you create a kind of a you sort of create a giant rentier economy where people make money not by working, but by, you know, living off the proceeds and rentier economies are invariably that they encourage laziness.
They encourage corruption and they also encourage violence.
The Nigeria, for example, is a primary victim of the resource curse, one of the most corrupt and internally most violent countries in the face of the earth.
And the Saudis are yet another example.
They have solved their internal violence problem by exporting it to neighboring countries.
But Saudi Arabia is a corrupt anti-labor state where all the work is done by foreign workers who are brought in on virtually slave labor circumstances.
And they breed violence that they then export onto neighboring countries.
And the U.S., of course, is intimately involved in this process.
I mean, this is the this is the great partnership that has grown up over the last 40 years following the first oil shock.
And now, thanks to Jafta and a few other events, it's finally coming undone.
But it's unwinding will be every bit as traumatic as it's building up.
Well, and so let's wrap up with that, because Jafta is huge.
This is important.
It's the only time in Obama's entire administration that his veto has been overridden by a supermajority of both houses of Congress.
But now they're already backing down and they're saying they're going to rewrite the law they just passed, Daniel.
Well, first of all, so tell us what Jafta is and then let us know what you think of what's going to happen.
Jafta is the justice for the justice.
Well, tell me, what does it stand for, Scott, as a justice?
You're allowed to sue the Saudis and we won't sue you out and call it Sovereign Immunity Act.
Right, precisely right.
And so so so Jafta essentially gives nine thousand, I think it's six thousand, nine eleven survivors the right to sue Saudi Arabia for their alleged involvement in the destruction of the World Trade Center.
And it's, of course, it's just elementary justice.
And the suit wouldn't have been necessary if the Washington government had been sincerely interested in obtaining justice for these victims.
But, of course, it wasn't.
I mean, the whole world was transfixed by these these bodies falling out of the World Trade Center.
It was horrible, all these innocent people pledging to their death.
I mean, the the the carnage is almost unimaginable, you know, but the but the the government, which allegedly the the the Democratic government of, you know, of, by and for the people didn't really care.
They were interested, more interested in covering up the reasons for that disaster and going after parties that were completely uninvolved, as Saddam Hussein was saying.
Then they were at, you know, at achieving justice for the victims.
And that's why JASTA is necessary.
You know, but but Obama has only himself to blame.
If he had really pursued justice, this lawsuit wouldn't have been would never have taken place.
But because he didn't, he now has a huge problem on his hands.
And now, so what do you think about Mitch McConnell saying, well, don't worry, we're going to rewrite it.
Trent Lott came to town and he's a lobbyist for Saudi and former GOP majority leader of the Senate.
And he let us know that we're going to have to rewrite this thing because forget that.
Well, hopefully, hopefully they won't get away with it.
It's just it's just really sad, isn't it?
Yeah, I mean, it's amazing to think how amazing it was that they overrode Obama's veto for this thing.
And then it makes you wonder whether that was all just an act so they could go back and rewrite it later or Trent Lott really only found out later.
You know, Mitch McConnell actually said the majority leader of the Senate said, well, you know, Obama didn't make a compelling enough case of what was wrong with the legislation.
Yeah, but he vetoed it, you know, but bear in mind, I mean, JASTA only takes aim at the Saudis and the real problem is here in the US and JASTA won't won't touch that.
Of course, I mean, if the if the real in this partnership is, you know, the U.S.-Saudi partnership, there's no question as to which party was dominant.
That was the U.S.
So, you know, so I'm not saying the U.S. blew up, you know, the the the twin towers by wiring them from within any nonsense like that, but the U.S. deserves primary responsibility for that disaster.
But JASTA will only go after the after the secondary party.
Yeah.
Well, you know what, though, if we can get Bandar all strung up up there and he wants to start accusing Dick Cheney of leaving doors open and eyes blind, then I'll listen.
I agree.
I agree totally, Scott.
I agree totally.
All right.
Hey, listen, I love interviewing you, Daniel.
You did great work, man.
All right.
Thanks so much.
Thanks very much for coming back on the show.
Appreciate it.
Sure.
See you soon.
Bye bye.
All right.
So that's Daniel Lazar.
He wrote The Frozen Republic, How the Constitution is Paralyzing Democracy.
You know what?
I'm for repealing Article one, Section eight, Clause 11.
If we could start there.
That's my proposed amendment.
This one is called Clinton's Faulty New Scheme to Fight ISIS, a really great one at Consortium News and in great company there, of course, as well.
That's Scott Horton Show.
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Hey, I'll Scott Horton here.
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