For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
And our next guest on the show is the great Eric Margulies.
His website is ericmargulies.com.
If you just spell it like Margolis, it'll lead you to the right place there.
He's the author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj.
He is foreign correspondent for Sun National Media, based out of Toronto, Canada, and is a regular expert guest on this show.
Welcome back, Eric.
How are you?
Great to be back with you, Scott, as always.
Well, I sure appreciate having you here, because, well, tell the people a little bit about your experience reporting in, I guess, what's really the Middle East, but we now call Central Asia, since we now call the Near East the Middle East.
Well, I started, first I went to Central Asia during the 1980s, when it was still Soviet Central Asia, run by the Soviets.
I don't know how I got there.
To this day, foreigners were not allowed outside of the area of Red Square in Moscow, but I somehow managed to travel extensively through this area.
It's fascinating.
Eric Margulies, KGB, finally figured it out.
I did have some doors opened by the KGB, it's true.
But a faction of the KGB, a liberalizing faction of the KGB, that was fighting the old guard faction of the KGB.
In any event, Central Asia is very little known.
It's an interesting place.
It's not as interesting culturally or politically as the Middle East, and not as lively, and it's a very economically depressed area, except for its oil and gas resources.
But it's coming into play now because it affects the American war, the lead war in Afghanistan.
We have turbulence in neighboring Kyrgyzstan just today as we speak.
There's a revolt against the government there.
In fact, the whole region is run by what I call red sultans.
In other words, it's the left, the old guard communists, who are running the place.
They're all dictatorships.
Some are worse than the others, like Uzbekistan is a very ugly place, where they boil people alive who oppose the government.
Close U.S. ally, I might add.
But it's an area that's become a cockpit of rivalry between Russia, which wants to reassert itself in the region, between the United States, which is rapidly moving into the region, and China and India.
All right, now, you're no pink Okami.
Am I right about that?
That's quite right.
Well, where do you come from politically?
You're an Army veteran, right?
I'm a U.S. Army veteran.
I was a lifelong Republican, but I hasten to add I'm an...
You fought in Vietnam, I forget.
No, I didn't fight in Vietnam.
I was six days away from going when my orders were changed, and I was kept stateside.
But nevertheless, I did serve during the war, and I have always been a Republican, but an Eisenhower Republican.
That is, an East Coast Republican.
I'm a native New Yorker, and I have nothing in common with today's Republican Party, which to me is as far from General Eisenhower's party as are anybody, socialists or whatever.
So I'm a fallen away Republican, Scott.
Well, now, in the 1980s, when you were reporting on the Mujahideen's war against the Russians, were you full into this like Dana Rohrabacher and, oh, what's his name, Charlie Wilson, and having a time of your life over there?
Well, I knew both.
I know Dana Rohrabacher, and I knew Charlie Wilson.
Well, I know you weren't a congressman, but you were over there covering the thing pretty closely for years and years, right?
I was in the field, yes, on a very dangerous assignment.
And I didn't just go over there sort of grandstanding like some media types and the politicians did, but I stayed there.
I was in Pakistan for a long time, in Peshawar.
Actually, I was right there from the beginning of the resistance against the Soviets.
So I stayed with it for almost a decade, and I followed it ever since.
I was there at the birth of Taliban as well.
It's my beat.
All right.
So I could actually sit here and just interview you about your biography for the rest of the show, but I ought to ask you about what's going on in the world.
Let's talk about America's democratically elected leader of Afghanistan, our friend Hamid Karzai.
According to the New York Times here, it sure seems like Karzai is bucking.
Why don't you tell me?
It's very interesting what's going on.
The U.S.
Karzai was a CIA asset.
He was put in power by the CIA and the U.S. military to run Afghanistan as an American overseer or democratically elected president.
Take your choice.
What's happened, though, is that Washington is not happy with Karzai.
I wrote a column about him called Bad Puppet, Bad Puppet, because that's what happened.
The Washingtons got very angry.
The puppet, who's powerless by nature, is not producing for Washington.
The war is turning against the U.S.
Taliban and its allies are on the march, and so they blame Karzai for all of this.
There was a movement in Washington to unseat Karzai and replace him with former U.S.
Ambassador Khalilzad or some other figure.
Anyway, blood got very bad, and in the last month, ever since the last rigged Afghan election, which was rigged, by the way, by the Karzai forces, but also by the U.S. and the U.N.
Right, Holbrook was trying to replace Karzai with this guy, Abdullah Abdullah.
That's correct.
They were both trying to fake it, and neither one of them pulled it off convincingly, I guess.
The U.S. was in the curious position of trying to kick out Karzai, a loyal CIA asset, and replace him with Abdullah Abdullah and his Northern Alliance guys, who were the rump of the old Afghan Communist Party.
Wait a minute.
Of all the different Northern Alliance guys who fought against the Russians, America is trying to put the Communists back in power, Eric?
Well, the Northern Alliance is principally made, not entirely, but largely made up of the old Afghan Communist Party.
Well, I mean, that guy Massoud that they killed the day before September 11th, he was, and Hekmatyar, they fought on the American side, right?
Hekmatyar, I knew, he's an old friend of mine.
He was not in the Northern Alliance.
He was the head of the Hizb-e-Islami party.
He's still around.
He was a bitter enemy of Massoud.
Now, Massoud, it turns out, from revelations made by former KGB officers, was actually a Soviet asset during the Afghan war.
I knew this.
I didn't know it for sure when I was there, but we kept seeing Massoud's people sabotaging the anti-Soviet Mujahideen groups, like the Hizb-e-Islami, who were backed by the Pakistani intelligence service.
And, in fact, what happened was Massoud and his Northern Alliance pretended to fight the Soviets, but in fact were helping them, and he was expecting that the Soviets would eventually make him the next ruler of Afghanistan.
So he was playing a very devious role, but his image as a hero in the West is completely bogus.
Wow.
So, you know, and this is a complicated thing, because, of course, people always, as George Bush used to say, shorthand it and say, well, Osama bin Laden was a CIA agent and whatever.
But the thing is, during that war, there were all different factions fighting, and it's hard for me to keep track of who was on which side.
What about Dostum?
He fought against the Soviets, didn't he?
No, no, he fought with them mostly, General Dostum.
So wait a minute.
You're telling me that this, well, OK, break down the Karzai government for me.
Is this all the commies that were put in power?
No, no.
The Reds?
No, they're not all commies.
They're a bunch of warlords, local warlords.
Former commie allies?
Former Moscow allies?
Yes.
Yeah, many of them were former communist allies.
The Afghan National Army, which we support and arm, is made up very largely of former officers of the Afghan Communist Army.
The Afghan secret police and national police are entirely dominated by the Communist Party, and the real power behind this around there is Marshal Mohammad Fahim, who was the head of the Afghan Communist KGB up until the fall of the communist regime.
So all these communists are coming out of the woodwork.
They're war criminals.
They're horrible people, and those are our new allies.
So we were trying to shoehorn these guys into power to replace Karzai, but Karzai hung on, and now he's mad as a hornet.
This is one angry puppet who's turning on Washington and saying, you know, well, I even thought of joining the Taliban the other day.
He said it jokingly, but it caused enormous consternation in Washington, and then he accused Washington of rigging the elections there after Washington accused him of rigging elections.
It's a wonderful spat, but it does show some seismic changes in Afghanistan because it means that Karzai and his backers are edging themselves away from the Afghan Communist Party and away from American support.
Okay, now, so okay, I'm even more confused.
So this guy Karzai, who is, you know, the American puppet this whole time, of course, everybody remembers the BBC report from 2004 where the American-backed warlords were going around telling people, you vote Karzai or we'll burn your house down.
We'll destroy your whole village.
This whole village is voting Karzai.
You got me?
With AKs pointed at their heads, and that's how he got in power in the first place and everything, you know, the hat and the cape and everything.
He reminds me of an American politician, in fact, a lot.
But now, and I'm sorry for always analyzing this through a somewhat ethnic lens or whatever.
I mean, hell, what do I even know about it?
And I'm the last person who thinks that this is the way conflicts ought to be based, you know, is on these kinds of divisions.
And yet it seems like this is the sickness of the old world, is we're the Tajiks and you're the Hazaras and they're the Uzbeks and you're the Pashtuns, and this is how we and they are kind of divided.
But Karzai is a Pashtun, but he's a city boy.
He's not one of the rural Pashtun tribesmen, and yet he's fighting on the American side against the Taliban, which is not necessarily, you know, a grassroots Pashtun movement in its entirety or anything, but is basically the only political representation that they have other than them.
And anyway, you can see where I'm lost.
It's very confusing.
I mean, when he jokes about joining the Taliban, would they have him?
Would he actually, if we left yesterday because I got my magic wish, would he actually work a deal with Mullah Omar and then couldn't he?
I think if there were a peace accord in Afghanistan, actually the Karzai might emerge as a president.
He'd make a very good figurehead president, and he would probably be supported by the Taliban since he's a Pashtun, as you rightly note.
But you know what's going on now is that Karzai and his people have been putting up peace feelers to the Taliban and its allies for over a year.
There have been secret talks held in Saudi Arabia under Saudi auspices, and the two sides were getting fairly close.
And what happened recently is that Washington, the Obama, the peace, you know, the Nobel Peace Prize winning Obama administration decided to thwart these peace efforts in Afghanistan because it didn't want to see the Afghan government conclude a peace with Taliban.
So they started arresting everybody that he was dealing with.
They got their paid for Pakistanis, rent-a-Pakistanis, as I call them, and they arrested the so-called moderate Taliban who were negotiating with Karzai to round them all up and shut down the negotiations.
And meanwhile the CIA is launching this scorched earth policy in the parts along the border, shooting up with its predators everything that moves, and trying to diminish or oust Karzai.
We see just in the last few days, Scott, that a violent anti-Karzai propaganda campaign is coming from Washington.
Look at today's New York Times.
Yeah, they're saying he's a drug addict.
He's a drug addict.
That's the latest one I saw.
That awful publicity seeker, I think it's Peter Galbraith.
Right, exactly, yes.
Yeah, Peter Galbraith.
He was the one who accused Karzai of being a drug addict and being mentally unstable.
Well, obviously that's part of Washington's psychological warfare against Karzai.
But what an awful mess this is.
Here we are trying to bring down our puppet.
Maybe we have to go back to the days of Diem in Vietnam, who Kennedy had assassinated when he wasn't a useful puppet.
Now they're trying to destroy him by character assassination.
And Washington clearly is probably looking around for a coup.
There's another article in today's New York Times, an op-ed piece, which were all manufactured to suit the New York Times' political views, originally calling for a military coup in Afghanistan and for a military ruler like in Pakistan.
So that's what's happening.
And the U.S. claims that they're trying to achieve a peace agreement in Afghanistan without becoming less and less credible.
Well, you know, what was not credible, what actually became, well, it didn't really become a laughing stock because nobody really paid attention, but, well, it was a laughing stock on this show, which was the attempt to put Abdullah Abdullah in there last November.
I mean, Karzai rigged the election far beyond what they could do anything about.
And then they immediately, it was so obvious, it was like the CIA told us to report to you in the New York Times here that Karzai's brother is a drug dealer, like he hadn't been this whole time and whatever.
It was the most obvious attempt where they just immediately turned on Karzai the way that they did.
And then the CIA put out all these stories about how they were going to have a new election, and this time they were going to put Abdullah Abdullah in there.
And then it became so apparent that they could not possibly, you know, logistically set up another whole election and print all the ballots and rig it their own way.
They just dropped the idea after all this fanfare about how they were going to.
I mean, this really is, as always, keystone imperialism here.
These guys have no ability to control even what ought to be their most loyal quizlings, Eric.
That's a good line, Scott.
Keystone imperialism indeed it is.
And it's also really stupid because the electoral arithmetic in Afghanistan is totally against the idea of putting Abdullah Abdullah, who was a Tajik from the north, into power there because the majority of Afghans, about 55 percent, are Pashtuns.
And Pashtuns hate the Tajiks and vice versa.
There's no way a Tajik minority government would rule.
So they were stupid.
But, you know, this is long range micromanagement from Washington by people who would have trouble running the post office adequately.
And it's bungling, it's stupidity, it's enormous arrogance.
I'm talking with Eric Margulies from Sun National Media in Canada.
He's the author of most recently American Raj.
So tell me about your old friend Hekmatyar.
This is the guy that bragged a couple of years ago that he accepted a stack of American taxpayer dollars from the CIA and then turned around and helped Osama bin Laden escape from Tora Bora.
Well, Gulbadin's group, the Hizb Islami, was the most effective of the seven Mujahideen guerrilla groups who were fighting the Soviets.
Absolutely.
The people did about 75 percent of the actual fighting.
They got the lion's share of money from CIA, from the Saudis and support, logistic support from Pakistani intelligence, ISI.
He was an engineer.
He was a nationalist figure, not a religious leader, but very mysterious.
He was hated right away by the neocons and the right wing in the States because they saw him as a threat for some reason.
Anyway, he opposed the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.
He was declared a terrorist.
He was put on the U.S. terrorist list.
And there have been at least two assassination attempts by predators to kill him.
But now he's up to something mysterious because there were reports that his Hizbi men fought against Taliban in northern Afghanistan.
And his people just had meetings with the government, again, part of Karzai's national conciliation movement.
So something's happening there, but still officially Hikmatyar is still allied to Taliban, is the most important non-religious nationalist ally.
Who are the Haqqanis?
The Haqqanis were amongst the most redoubtable fighters during the 1980s war against the Soviets.
They were the darling of the CIA.
They were great fighters.
I knew them.
And old man Jalal ad-Din Haqqani is a real lion of a fighter.
But they also are fighting a U.S. occupation, and very effectively.
They're based in northern Pakistan now, but their men are operating in Afghanistan.
And there have been many attempts to kill the Haqqanis.
We've adopted Israel's policy of simply assassinating our enemies.
Including American citizens, as we'll be talking about a little bit later in the show.
Yes, shockingly.
But this is what happened.
These men, Haqqani's men, were the closest of American allies.
And now the U.S. is trying to kill them.
And because they oppose American takeover of Afghanistan.
You know, all this reminds me, in my next column, I'm going to use a wonderful quote by Henry Kissinger, who knows what he was talking about when he said, you know, the only thing more dangerous than being America's enemy is being its ally.
Yeah, exactly.
In fact, I just got in a discussion with an Iraq veteran the other day, and basically I think I won him over, and that was part of what I said.
I used Indonesia as the example, Suharto, where he just hooked up too many of his own relatives with car dealerships and, you know, whatever, control over natural resources.
And when America wanted their cut and IMF wanted their cut, which, same difference, I guess, I don't mean to be redundant, he said, I'm sorry, I already promised too many extended family members, you know, too much money, and I don't have enough to pay you.
And off with his head, bread riots in the street, out he goes, replaced with the next puppet in line.
Well, it's true.
There's probably a hundred examples around the world like that.
There's not much honor in Washington, I must say.
I've always found this one of the least attractive parts of American foreign policy.
We don't defend the people who worked for us.
It's shameful.
You can go all the way back to Laos with that.
But now we'll see it in Iraq when the U.S. finally pulls out.
We'll see it in Afghanistan.
How do we expect people to be loyal to our cause if we're not loyal to theirs?
Yeah, well, and the point is, I think, that we shouldn't be.
Because, I mean, after all, every time our government makes a foreign policy decision, it's counter to our interests.
Of course they have to go back on it, but then they just screw up in a different way and make things worse.
I mean, right now they want regime change in Iran.
Well, who are they going to put in there?
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's old group, the Jandala?
Or maybe they'll install the PJAK, the Kurdish communists, to run the place.
And then we'll have to regime change them, support the Afghan army to invade Iran, or who knows what, bomb Azerbaijan next, or just pick one out of a hat.
At some point it seems to me like we've just got to call it off.
Oh, we won't, because you've got this imperialist circle in Washington.
I can't think of no other way of describing them.
You know, imperialists, like the British imperialists were in London before World War II, who were damned and determined to maintain the world empire, and they're going to just over-stomp on anybody who gets in the way.
And look, even the Obama administration is following the same policy line.
All right, now, so let's talk about the whole double game here, too.
Because, of course, America cannot fund Iraq's war against Iran without also arming up Iran to fight against Iraq.
That's how we do it.
And here we are in what, in a sense, amounts to some kind of civil war in Afghanistan.
And, of course, our best ally, Pakistan, is financing our enemy in Afghanistan and controlling or working with the enemy in Afghanistan, the Taliban.
And so, I mean, I guess on one hand you could just say this whole thing's a joke, that we're paying the Pakistanis to finance the Taliban, so we've got an enemy to keep fighting there.
But then again, I guess, as you pointed out before, the Pakistanis have interests in Afghanistan that no alliance with America outweighs.
We're way over our heads in this part of the world.
We don't understand it.
We don't know what the hell's going on.
And we've now resorted to just brute violence, CIA assassinations, bombing.
You know, there's terrible tape that came out of WikiLeaks this week showing these two journalists, Reuters, being gunned down in the street of Baghdad by American helicopters.
That's typical of what goes on.
You never see this in our media because they hide the truth.
But the U.S. has been shooting down practically everything that moves in Afghanistan and Iraq.
And it's a draconian policy.
And in Pakistan.
In Pakistan.
And it works only as long as you keep the bullets flying.
The minute you stop to reload, they're going to be up and at you again.
And it's brute force.
It's worthy of the Soviet Union.
When they've occupied Afghanistan, and as Soviet officers keep telling us, it's not going to work.
All right.
Now, when the Pakistani ISI and the generals, and I don't know if the prime minister's invited or how exactly it works over there, what are they saying about Afghanistan?
What is their policy in Afghanistan?
Because they are financing the Taliban there, aren't they?
Or, well, I don't know.
That's what everybody says.
I don't think the Pakistanis are directly financing the Taliban.
I think the Taliban, whatever outside finance is getting, is probably coming from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf.
From private individuals.
But the Taliban doesn't need much finance.
Most of the Taliban are local farmers.
They just live there.
They're like the Viet Cong used to be.
They fight part time and then they go back to farming.
And so they don't need much.
They can buy or steal their weapons and ammo from the Afghan army paid for by the U.S.
So that's not the main problem.
But the Pakistanis, of course, are playing this double game.
They help create Taliban.
The Taliban are their friends.
They need Taliban once the U.S. pulls out of Afghanistan.
Because the Indians are moving in there very fast and they need Taliban to resist the Indians.
So on one hand, the Pakistanis are quietly helping or at least maintaining open contacts with Taliban.
On the other hand, they're pretending to fight the pro-Taliban Pashtun tribes on the Pakistani side of the border.
Bombing, shooting, killing.
And they're being paid to do so by the U.S.
Seven billion dollars in one of the poorest countries in the world with another seven billion to come.
Buys or rents a lot of Pakistani soldiers.
All right.
Now, I'm sure you're familiar with the thing where, you know, somebody wins an election and then they do the opinion poll.
All of a sudden, a much higher percentage of people claim to have voted for the guy than actually the votes he got.
Because everybody wants to be on the winning side and go back and kind of revise history to fit their, you know, what they want you to think now about them or whatever.
Right.
So there's some of that.
But I wonder if you think this is an example of that or whether this makes sense to you.
If anybody looks at Justin Raimondo's article today, Just Another Atrocity, you'll find toward the end a link to Rolling Stone article, which is all about Osama bin Laden's son.
And in this article, Osama bin Laden's son, which it's a really kind of funny article in a way, but this part isn't.
He says, I never thought the attack would be against civilian buildings.
I thought it would be a ship like the USS Cole.
My father's dream was to bring the Americans to Afghanistan.
He would do the same thing he did to the Russians.
I was surprised the Americans took the bait.
I so much respected the mentality of Bill Clinton.
He was the one who was smart.
When my father attacked his places, he sent a few cruise missiles to my father's training camp.
He didn't get my father.
But after all the war in Afghanistan, they still don't have my father.
They have spent hundreds of billions.
Better for America to keep the money for its economy.
In Clinton's time, America was smart, not like a bull that runs after the red scarf.
Now, you're an expert for more than a generation now in the politics of Afghanistan and all these Mujahideen warriors, etc., etc.
What does this mean to you, Eric Margulies?
Well, it means that the stupidest president in American history, at least that I'm aware of, George Bush, and his bloodthirsty Dick Cheney fell right into Bin Laden's trap.
I have no doubt about that.
How deeply Bin Laden was involved in 9-11 is still a mystery.
We don't know.
Contrary to what everybody in Washington says, we really don't know.
But that issue aside, Bin Laden enunciated his strategy in the 1990s, which was to lure the United States into a series of small but debilitating and hugely expensive wars in the Muslim world.
And he said that the ultimate war would be fought in Pakistan, and this is exactly what's happening now.
It would be Afghanistan, Pakistan, throw in Somalia and Djibouti and Yemen and some other West Africa, Mali, some other places like that.
And he said eventually, he said, this is the way to bleed America.
And bleed it he has, because when you start adding up the costs of everything since 9-11, the Washington just announced they'd spent, I think it's $48 billion just in Afghanistan, a trillion dollars in Iraq.
Even the rich United States is staggering under these things.
So yes, we stupidly blundered into the trap.
He waved the red flag, the bullheaded George Bush charged.
And Bin Laden is doing extremely well, contrary to claims by U.S. intelligence that, you know, we got him on the run.
We heard that before.
Well, tell them about the Azzam story.
You've told it a few times on the show about your meeting with Osama Bin Laden's mentor.
In fact, at the same time, if you could address the question of whether Osama Bin Laden was a CIA agent back then in the 80s, whether he was part of the same Haqqani factions or whatever that the CIA was closest to then, or how that worked.
But then also tell them about the Azzam thing, because I think that's so important.
Okay, Bin Laden first.
I have not one shred of evidence that I've ever seen or heard that Bin Laden was a CIA agent.
He was not a CIA.
He didn't work for the CIA.
He wasn't funded by the CIA.
He came over to Afghanistan with his own money and financed his work for the Mujahideen, building shelters and caves and things with his own money.
And he had no liaison with the CIA that I know of.
Sheikh Azzam was a Palestinian who I met in, I think it was 1986 or 85, in Peshawar, Pakistan.
He was running a tiny little thing called the Afghan Information Center, and he was trying to send out information to the outside world about the struggle of the Afghans against Soviet imperial rule.
And nobody knew or cared in those days.
But Azzam said to me, shocked me, he was the spiritual mentor and the teacher of Osama Bin Laden, because Bin Laden met him when he came to Afghanistan and became his disciple.
And Azzam said to me, he said, you know, he said, we will defeat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
I said, how?
It's the world's biggest land power.
They've got a hundred divisions.
He said, we will defeat them.
He said, and when we finish defeating the Soviet imperialists in Afghanistan, we are going to go and drive the American colonialists out of Saudi Arabia and liberate Palestine.
And this was in 1985 or 86.
And I was shocked, because I'd never heard anybody call my country a colonialist power.
Yeah, I've heard the Soviets call it the communists, but who believed them?
But to have somebody who was not a communist referred to the U.S. as a colonial power shocked me.
It was the first time I ever heard it.
Now I've come to see it, and in fact, my book American Raj, the title is a play on the British imperial Raj, the British rule in India.
But that's what Azzam said, and Bin Laden and his supporters are following up on Azzam's philosophy.
And even when Bin Laden is killed or dies in hiding, this movement, it has become a movement.
It's no longer an organization.
This movement will continue.
All right, now on the question of 9-11, honestly, I've never even read the 9-11 commission report.
Like Ron Paul said about when asked whether he was going to the Bush administration briefings on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction before the war, he said, no, I don't want to be confused by their propaganda.
And that's basically my take on the 9-11 commission report.
The only part that's worthwhile to me is where the FBI explains their motivation, and apparently they reported that.
But what I have read about 9-11, of course, you know, whatever articles, and believe me, e-mailers and commenters, I've read the conspiracy theory stuff, too.
But what I put most stock in, Eric, is James Bamford and Lawrence Wright and Peter Lance and their story of what al-Qaeda is, where it came from, who they are, and how they did it.
And it seems to me as simple as a chain between Osama bin Laden, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi bin al-Sheikh, and Mohammed Atta, and these were the guys.
Now, others who helped get the Saudis on their visas to get to the United States, 15 of them at a time or whatever like that, and all kinds of other questions that people have, all those are still out there.
But what I'm getting at is this.
You're Eric Margulies, man.
You're the one.
Why don't you report the story about whether or not Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was in fact partners with Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, whether or not in fact Ramzi bin al-Sheikh and he were the ones who organized the attack on the United States?
And then, you know, I can just cite my Eric Margulies for whatever truth you find, and I can rely on that.
It's a story that needs to be told, Scott.
I don't have six months to go and practice in Pakistan.
Yeah, you do.
You're Eric Margulies.
Thank you.
Eric covers the whole world.
But it's a very good point.
I don't believe the official version of the story.
I'm not sure Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the mastermind behind 9-11.
The man has been tortured so much he would admit to trying to assassinate the czar of Russia.
He has, actually.
I mean, at Guantanamo, his confession included everything bad that ever happened, including that time that this guy fell on Chicken Little's head, I think.
Well, you're quite right.
But I never heard of this man.
And the whole chain of events, from what I know, does not make sense to me.
Or it has not been documented.
And the U.S. government has never really issued...
Have you ever read Peter Lance's stuff?
No.
Because Peter Lance has it pretty good that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was standing right there when they arrested Ramzi Youssef, his nephew, in Pakistan.
And he even gave a comment to the Newsweek reporter.
Oh, he always seemed like a nice kid to me, said Mr. Mohammed, who was standing there.
And apparently, you know, the planes operation was dreamt up by Youssef and Abdul Hakim Murad in the Philippines when they came up with the Bojinka and the plan to kill the Pope and Bill Clinton and all that in 1995.
Was Ramzi Youssef not the First World Trade Center bomber?
I don't know.
You tell me.
Scott, I don't know either, and I follow this stuff day and night.
There are so many lies.
There's so much disinformation and confusion.
Government commissions are, by nature, BS, because they're designed to cover up facts, not get at the truth.
And this is very true of the 9-11 commission.
It was a tremendous cover-up.
And we don't know these guys who did it, but, you know, that's not the main question of who did 9-11.
Obviously, there were these hijackers.
The point is that this is just a phenomenon, a manifestation of the growing hatred of the Muslim world for the United States and the view, which is not true, but unfortunately it's thought so in the Muslim world, that the United States has become a bitter enemy of Muslims everywhere and a persecutor.
Well, but that's why it's important who did it, because, you know, I think the default of millions of Americans at this point is, if it wasn't Osama bin Laden-Khalid Sheikh Mohammed-Ramzi bin al-Shibh-Mohammed Ata, then it was Tig Cheney, or it was the Mossad, or it was the Saudis and the Pakistanis working for the CIA, or it was somebody, you know, put bombs on every column in the tower, you know, and all this stuff.
I hope I live long enough to get at the truth, but I'm still waiting to find out who shot Kennedy and why.
And, you know, so it was a monstrous crime.
It's hard to cover it up.
I do not believe the official version, but, you know, I get tons of mail every day on melting metal and the heat and this and that.
And I, as Omar Khayyam the poet said, I came out the same door I went in.
I just don't know.
Well, you know, if I was the billionaire foundation guy, I guess I would just put together the team, right?
It'd be you and Bamford and Lance and some Gareth Porter thrown in there for good measure, and then I'd give you all the resources it took to figure out exactly what happened and give the American public the real 9-11 commission report.
I mean, damn, what is the good of being me if I can't get Eric Margulies, the best damn reporter, best American reporter about that part of the world that exists, to tell us the truth about what happened here?
You not knowing is not good enough for me.
Well, it's not good enough for me either.
I'll testify to the Horton commission when you get the whole thing sorted out.
By the way, Bamford, to me, is a very, very credible writer on the subject.
Yeah, well, and he has two books on the subject, too.
Pretext for War and The Shadow Factory both cover the Al-Qaeda angle in depth there.
And I've talked with him about this numerous times, and he said, you know, he's done all this investigating.
I agree with you about his credibility, and my estimation of his judgment and discrimination is that it's far superior to mine or a hell of a lot of other journalists out there.
And he says, oh, no, it was Al-Qaeda.
What did it?
But, boy, did I ever tell you the story about how much the NSA knew was going on and didn't pass on to the rest of the agencies?
There's one that there's a three-letter phrase that's not in the 9-11 commission report anywhere.
NSA, it's all in The Shadow Factory.
Well, and on it goes.
There were there were many, many clues and things that were never followed up.
But the point is, we're still locked in two wars.
We have a president who seems reluctant to get us out of both of them.
We're supposed to be withdrawing from Iraq, but now we're starting to hear things about special forces being left behind and Air Force units, and the U.S. has control of the airspace over Iraq, even after it pulls out, and so on.
So we're stuck in the sands of the Middle East by this brilliant attack on 9-11, which, by the way, the Bush administration was planning possibly to attack Afghanistan before 9-11, as well as Iraq, or the powers that be in Washington.
So it wasn't just the 9-11 attacks, but certainly that was a catalyst.
Well, yeah, I don't think that's too much of a secret anymore.
You know, we'll bring you a carpet of gold or a carpet of bombs was the running gag in the summer of 2001, I guess.
Scott, you know, Karzai just made a very interesting statement the other day.
He said the U.S. is in Afghanistan for strategic regions, to control the strategic region, not to fight al-Qaeda or terrorism or bring democracy.
Yeah, bad puppet, indeed.
So one last thing before I let you go here, and I'm sorry for keeping you so long, but this is the most important point of all, and you have spent as much time over there as any white man around, I suppose.
Is it necessary, seriously, I mean, hundreds of years in the future, humanity in general, you're floating out in space, you've got the widest view you can here now, Eric, are we necessarily going to have a permanent clash of civilizations between the West and the Muslim world to the death?
Well, not to the death, it's not a clash of civilizations, it's a clash of imperial powers looking for resources.
And it will continue for the rest of this generation, for sure, because the United States cannot give up its imperial impulses.
It wants to dominate energy everywhere on Earth, it wants to be in Central Asia, it wants the Caspian Basin.
Yeah, but you know how them Islams are, they just don't live right, they're just not like us.
Well, that's right, I mean, there's a huge sewer of hatred of Muslims coursing in the United States underground, and Islamophobia and all that, but that's part of the propaganda war and the general ignorance we have of overseas places.
But we are still committed and we will remain committed on an imperial attack.
I thought Obama might change it, but obviously he is not calling all the shots in Washington.
And we are going to be facing the Chinese and the Indians at some point soon, possibly the Russians.
So we're entering in a dangerous phase of rivalry, the world is not going to be a safer place.
Well, then again, a dollar could break, and then if you can't pay the soldiers, I guess they'll have to find their own right home or something.
Bankruptcy might do us a favor, because it would force us to pull in our horns and not get involved in all these places, as the Founding Fathers warned us not to, and let America come back to Earth for a while and lose some of its imperial pretensions and pay more attention to fixing roads and bridges in Cleveland instead of bombing every Muslim that moves in South Asia.
Everybody, that is the great Eric Margulies.
The website is ericmargulies.com, spell it like Margolis.
And the books are American Raj and the War at the Top of the World.
You can find him writing for Sun National Media in Canada.
Thanks again, Eric.
Cheers, Scott.
You're the best, man.
